Etienne Note: This article is from Aug 13^th, 2025 but important to understand the dynamic of how Israel is infiltrating their technology specialists into key positions in global tech companies especially where they can be used to algorithmically censor, surveil, or gain network access with firewall security traversal. We have syndicated other articles showing their density at Google and Facebook especially and exposing one of the programs names: Talpiot.

Murtaza Hussain, Drop Site

In late July, the U.S. cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks (PANW) announced that it had acquired the Israeli identity management and information security firm CyberArk, paying a staggering $25 billion dollars worth of cash and stock to purchase the firm. In addition to potentially injecting billions of dollars into the Israeli economy, Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of CyberArk further strengthens the relationship between Silicon Valley and Israel’s security-intelligence apparatus.

Palo Alto is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms, and provides infrastructure protection, firewalls, and cloud security services to tens of thousands of companies internationally. Udi Mokady, CyberArk’s founder and executive chairman, is an alum of Unit 8200, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate’s elite signals intelligence division. So are the four co-founders of Wiz: the Israeli cloud computing firm recently bought by Google for $32 billion. So, too, is Palo Alto’s Founder and Chief Technology Officer Nir Zuk.

Palo Alto has expanded through a spree of high-profile acquisitions over the past decade, paying sometimes up to billions of dollars for startups aimed at expanding its cybersecurity offerings. Nearly half of these have involved companies with origins in Israeli intelligence, raising concerns about access to the vast amounts of data around the world that the company is charged with protecting. Palo Alto Networks did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

Some of these purchased firms—LightCyber, Dig Security, Talon Cybersecurity, Secdo, and Bridgecrew—were founded and led by publicly identified Unit 8200 veterans. Other major acquisitions include Cyvera, Twistlock, and Puresec, whose founders also come from the Israeli Defense Forces’s “cyber, intelligence, and commando units.”

“These acquisitions are a way to take people from Unit 8200 in Israel, and bring them into influential positions in the U.S. tech industry,” said Paul Biggar, founder of the tech startups CircleCI and Darklang and head of the activist group Tech for Palestine. “These companies handle their customers’ customer data. If you are a bank, and you are using Palo Alto Networks, the data about all your customers, and their transactions, are passing through servers that are controlled by spies, or former spies.”

As of June 2025, over 1,400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are now working in U.S. tech—with 900 of those coming from Unit 8200 alone. That number comes from a database of people who publicly identify themselves as being both former Israeli intelligence officers and holding a job in U.S. tech on their LinkedIn profiles.

The database was assembled by an independent researcher, who is remaining anonymous for personal security and has dubbed the database the “Eagle Mission” influence network. The 1,400 people are self-identified veterans or active reserve members of Unit 8200, Israeli military intelligence, and the IDF Cyber Defense Directorate working in senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at major U.S. tech firms with offices in Israel, the U.S., and Europe. Drop Site crosschecked many of the records in the database for accuracy.

“This does not mean that every person who served in Unit 8200 is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv,” the researcher emphasized. “But it does create a serious vulnerability. No other country has this kind of access to the American tech sector. We obsess over Chinese involvement in the tech industry and worry about corporate espionage, but Israeli penetration rarely gets mentioned.”

The global tech giant Microsoft is one of the most prominent employers of Unit 8200 alumni, employing roughly 250 veterans of the unit, alongside other major multinational companies including Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel, and Apple, many of whom employ dozens of individuals drawn from the unit. Microsoft was recently revealed to have closely collaborated with Unit 8200 leadership on the creation of cloud services intended to store millions of private communications of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Microsoft declined to comment.

While the CyberArk acquisition deal drew criticism from some investment analysts due to the seemingly disproportionate price tag—with shares of Palo Alto Networks declining in the immediate aftermath—the intelligence ties were not mentioned in public statements about the acquisition.

A History of Spying

The presence of current or former intelligence agents from foreign countries in key industries in the U.S. is generally considered a source of concern due to counterintelligence and industrial espionage threats. For decades, Israel has been identified as a major counterintelligence threat in the U.S., particularly for the targeting of industrial and technical secrets.

In 2015, former American intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was released from prison after serving 30 years of a life sentence for spying and providing top-secret classified U.S. intelligence to Israel. After the end of his parole restrictions in 2020, Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship in prison, and whose cause had long been supported by pro-Israel groups and Israeli politicians, moved to Israel. Weeks after his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, where Pollard was personally greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, the Israeli spy and military officer who had been charged with working as Pollard’s handler.

The Pollard case strained U.S.-Israeli relations. But accusations of spying and industrial espionage have continued. Last year, U.S. defense company Conflict Kinetics filed a lawsuit accusing an Israeli Ministry of Defense official of stealing trade secrets to create a shooting simulator tool for training of its soldiers. The Israeli official, Daniel Goldfus, was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and allegedly promised the company that it could get contracts with the Israeli military. Goldfus has been serving as a commander in the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.

“Its unlikely that we would let any country, even an ally, have this level of access to our most sensitive industries. It’s also important to remember that both the CIA and FBI openly rank Israel among our top counterintelligence threats, alongside Russia, China, and Iran,” said the researcher, who added that many individuals formerly affiliated with Unit 8200 or other Israeli security agencies had begun scrubbing information about their affiliation from their public social media profiles since October 7, 2023. “It’s remarkable how many people openly are willing to identify as having worked for a foreign intelligence agency, and that is only the ones who have shared information about their connections publicly.”

Instead, the connections between Israeli intelligence and American tech have largely been celebrated. A story in the Wall Street Journal from August 2024 lauded the fact of the unit’s expanding influence in Silicon Valley, stating that “there are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni publicly traded in the U.S., together worth around $160 billion,” and praising veterans of the specialized unit for their “high-pressure culture and on-the-spot thinking.”

The article noted that major Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital were hiring partners and buying companies built by founders with backgrounds in Unit 8200. Sequoia recently came under scrutiny for political statements made by a prominent partner, Shawn Maguire, regarding Israel and related subjects in U.S. domestic politics, including vociferous, public defenses of Israel’s war on Gaza and denunciations of its critics, including New York mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, as “Islamists.”

Biggar characterized the actions of Sequoia, Greylock, Palo Alto Networks, and other Silicon Valley firms as part of a political shift driven by an influence network of closely connected individuals that have worked to reshape the ideological character of the industry.

“U.S. tech has gone political. Once upon a time they made great search engines and email, and now they sell AI to genocidal countries,” Biggar said. “There is a very tight network of people who believe the same things, and use their influence to import more people who share their views. It affects very much how these companies now behave.”

“Similar Values, Strong Cultures”

Unit 8200 has been an integral part of the Israeli military apparatus, including during the current genocide in the Gaza Strip. In addition to conducting electronic surveillance of communications, the unit has been involved in the creation of AI-generated targeting programs for use in Gaza, feeding targets to human operators to create what one former Israeli intelligence officer referred to as a “mass assassination factory,” sometimes approving the killing of hundreds of civilians in order to target a single individual alleged to be a Hamas commander.

In addition to its collaboration with tech giants to help carry out the current genocide in the Gaza Strip, Unit 8200 has also been developing surveillance technologies to monitor and control the population of the West Bank, including, most recently, the creation of AI-driven large language models trained on millions of conversations of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the territory.

In its press release announcing the acquisition, Palo Alto highlighted the expected role that CyberArk would play in developing its own AI-driven cybersecurity and identity-management platforms, stating the acquisition would, “unite two security leaders with similar values, strong cultures, and talented teams.”

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By Sean O'Kane - TechCrunch

Imagine you’re Guy Fieri. (Stay with me.)

It’s late 2024 and the president of your company calls to tell you that 24,000 bottles of your tequila have vanished. You’d presumably have a number of questions, but chief among them is likely: How did this happen?

The answer is that global cargo theft is becoming increasingly sophisticated, all while the shipping and logistics industries are struggling to keep up. Unfortunately for the industry, much of the world’s cargo essentially goes dark between checkpoints at ports or distribution centers.

On Wednesday, fleet management company Samsara is announcing its own solution to this problem in the form of a business-card sized sticky tracking label. Simply called the Samsara Tracking Label, it resembles any number of shipping labels that might be affixed to cargo big and small. But that label is hiding a small zinc battery and Bluetooth low energy tech that can be picked up by Samsara’s millions of other devices, offering real-time location in a disposable package.

It’s not Samsara’s first tracker. The company has been helping customers track “assets” for years now, and in different ways, David Gal, Samsara’s vice president of connected equipment, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. But those solutions could be bulky and expensive, he said.

“Customers basically said: ‘We need something that’s real time, and we need something that can be small enough to mount on any piece of equipment’,” Gal said. That led to Samsara developing a wine cork-sized product called the “Asset Tag.”

The Asset Tag solved real-time visibility for some customers, but the tag itself still protruded from whatever it was fixed to, and was not cheap enough to be put on anything but precious cargo. It’s also something customers wanted back at the end of a shipment, meaning it wasn’t as useful for one-way shipping.

This feedback pushed Gal’s team to iterate further, resulting in the Tracking Label.

The real differentiator to other tracking solutions, Gal said, is Samsara’s existing network of devices. The company has spent the last few years equipping customer fleets with cameras and other sensors to guard and optimize their operations. The Tracking Label leverages that existing infrastructure as a Bluetooth network in order to provide customers with a precise location at any time.

Samsara has already found other ways to use that network to generate new lines of business. In May, it announced a suite of tools called “Ground Intelligence” that uses AI to spot hazards like potholes in real time.

But that project involves working with cities and local governments. The Tracking Label could be a much bigger business, as the shipping and logistics industries are seemingly constantly in chaos. Companies want certainty about shipments, whether they are trying to get a product to someone on time or waiting for a crucial component.

Customers will receive the Samsara Tracking Labels in a sort of sleep mode, which Gal said could last for as long as nine months. Once a customer activates a label, that zinc battery will power the Bluetooth radio for around 45 days. Once the label is no longer needed, Samsara designed it to be disposable. (A lithium battery, Gal said, would have complicated this goal.)

Gal said he expects Samsara’s label to stay in the the world of “critical shipments,” meaning this will mostly help large companies — perhaps even Guy Fieri’s. And it’s not just about cargo theft, he said. Real-time tracking allows companies to make quicker decisions if a shipment is delayed, or re-routed.

“It shifts the paradigm from reactive to proactive. If you know something’s delayed, you can get ahead of it,” he said.

Samsara isn’t the only one trying to create better visibility in shipping; UPS just announced a plan in April to use RFID sensors to track packages in real time.

But as Gal points out, RFID only helps if a shipment stays close to an RFID scanner. If a package falls off a truck — literally or figuratively — he thinks Samsara’s Tracking Label will be far more effective thanks to the company’s constantly-moving network of sensors.

And while it’s not the only consideration, Gal was not shy about the impact he thinks the Tracking Label can have on cargo theft.

“I have a feeling that we’ll bust some crime rings with this,” he said.

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Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Fox News, USA Today and California Post - Need To Know

More than 450 people, including doctors and nurse practitioners across 45 states, have been charged in connection with global health care fraud schemes totaling a record $6.5 billion, the Department of Justice announced.

The federal agency, in a news release on June 23, wrote the alleged fraud and opioid abuse schemes involved 455 people who submitted false claims to Medicare, Medicaid and other health care programs and “caused significant patient harm, including death.”

Of the group charged in the schemes, prosecutors said at least 90 were doctors and other licensed medical professionals.

In all, 56 federal districts and 50 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units participated in the investigation, the release continues.

“This year’s National Health Care Fraud Takedown represents the greatest whole-of-government effort to combat health care fraud in our Nation’s history,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in the release.

“While today’s announcement is one of the largest on record – every arrest is a continued message to criminal actors who rob American taxpayers that you will not get away with your crimes,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in the release.

Luxury cars, a funeral home and a hotel in the Philippines

Since June 8, hundreds of defendants have been arrested in connection with the schemes, in what the DOJ is calling the 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown.

In one case in Arizona, Blanche said a corporate executive allegedly took $1 billion in taxpayer funds after billing for wound grafts, charging more than $1 million per patient. The money was later allegedly used to buy million-dollar homes, luxury cars and even build a hotel in the Philippines, Blanche said.

In another case in Virginia, Blanche said the co-owner of a mental health company was charged with a $49 million Medicaid fraud scheme that targeted the homeless “by offering them illegal bribes in the form of hotel stays in exchange for using their Medicaid numbers to bill for crisis stabilization services that they did not need or receive.”

In California, charges were brought against a hospice owner and two other defendants for a $27.7 million Medicare fraud scheme in which the hospice owner allegedly tried to avoid detection through a plot to purchase information about deceased people from a funeral home employee.

The hospice owner, prosecutors said, fraudulently enrolled patients who were not terminally ill and allegedly paid illegal kickbacks of up to $3,000 per person to a funeral home employee in exchange for dead Medicare beneficiaries’ information. The owner then allegedly billed Medicare for several days of hospice services for the deceased people who had not received hospice care “and created fake, back-dated medical records,” prosecutors said, claiming the beneficiaries had been seen by a doctor.

“Prosecuting criminals who steal from American patients is necessary − but stopping them before a single dollar leaves the building is smarter,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in the release.

Read full article here…

From California Post:

Trump crackdown uncovers $6.5B in fraud — and your taxes were wasted on diamonds, Ferraris and a boat named ‘Butt Nekkid’

More than 450 alleged fraudsters — including 90 doctors and medical professionals — were busted for bilking at least $6.5 billion in fake Medicare and Medicaid claims, with one greedy nurse splashing her ill-gotten gains on an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, $594,000 Ferrari and a $4.6 million Philippines beach resort, authorities said.

The colossal crackdown, which spanned 45 US states and territories, was announced Tuesday by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who called it “the greatest combined federal and state effort combating health care fraud in history.”

In total, 455 people were netted — including alleged con artists who blew the taxpayer funds meant to help the poorest Americans on luxury cars, jewelry, mansions, fine art, an NFL box and a yacht cheekily named “Butt Nekkid.”

In one of the most egregious cases, a student athlete in Florida died during basketball practice — after the doctor who was part of an $89 million fraud scheme signed off on his cardiovascular test after giving it only a cursory glance, the Department of Justice charged.

Texas nurse claims $906 million, buys Bulgari necklace and builds Philippines resort

A nurse in Texas was charged with billing Medicare for $1 million for each patient she applied unnecessary tissue grafts to, the feds alleged.

Marizel Yukee, 49, of Las Vegas, was charged with fraudulently billing $906 million in claims for which she was paid $297 million.

She allegedly funneled the stolen funds to buy posh cars, real estate, jewelry and even built a $4.6 million beach resort in the Philippines, prosecutors claimed.

When she was arrested, the feds seized $30 million from her bank accounts, $467,000 in cash, a $594,000 Ferrari 296 GTS, seven other luxury vehicles, an $865,000 custom Bulgari necklace and another million worth of jewelry, officials claimed.

Separately, three Florida nurses were busted for an $118 million tissue graft scheme. Leigh Tesar allegedly spent $215,000 on a luxury box suite at the Raymond James Stadium, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play, according to a criminal indictment.

She also allegedly spent $400,000 on fine art, according to the court papers.

Medical sales honcho allegedly pockets $24M, buys Maserati

The vice president of sales at a company that sold bioengineered skin substitutes allegedly carried out an illegal kickback scheme from 2021 to 2024, paying medical providers to push their product, prosecutors claim.

Brian Rowan, 47, of Las Vegas, made over $24 million at the company and bought multi-million dollar homes, million-dollar life insurance policies, and high-end watches and cars, including a $135,000 Maserati, the feds alleged.

The Arizona-based company was pedaling amniotic wound grafts, which they purchased from a tissue banks and then sold at a 2,000% markup — or $1,450 per square centimeter, the feds said.

Rowan and other execs used 40% of their profits to payout kickbacks, officials alleged.

The scheme targeted hospice patients for the skin grafts, which would be applied without the consultation of their doctors, without protecting against infections — and sometimes applying them to superficial wounds that didn’t require the grafts or to larger areas than needed, prosecutors claimed.

In total, he and his co-conspirators billed $1.2 billion for unnecessary allografts and were ultimately paid out $614 million, the feds allege.

Two others, Jeffrey King and Alexandra Gehrke, have previously been sentenced to 15.5 years and 14 years behind bars for their roles in this scheme, which netted them $97 million in cash, $21 million in life insurance policies and four luxury cars, including a Ferrari 488 Spider convertible and three top-end Mercedes vehicles, the feds alleged.

Mental health ‘fraudster’ sets up luxury car dealership, buys yacht named Butt Nekkid

One alleged fraudster in Illinois billed Medicaid for behavioral health services for hundreds of hours a day — despite the fact he didn’t have enough staff to justify it, the feds alleged.

Daniel Robinson, 51, of Palos Park, Illinois, allegedly billed for $67 million for counseling and therapy services that wouldn’t have been realistic even if all of the providers at his company, ODA Solutions, Inc., worked 24 hours a day, according to a complaint.

His total claims were $92 million, and he received $75 million, according to docs.

The money was diverted toward $44 million in investment accounts, $10 million to open up a luxury car dealership, $4 million to buy real estate and fund home renovations, court papers allege.

He also allegedly owned a yacht named “Butt Nekkid” that was docked in Chicago, court papers show.

Student died as result of doc’s $89M scheme: feds

A Texas doctor allegedly carried out an $89 million medical fraud scheme that ended with a student athlete’s death, the feds alleged.

Dr. Jason Finkelstein, 53, of Fort Worth, Texas, allegedly tested the hearts of student athletes at campuses around the country, submitting $89 million in claims under his two companies, Cardiovascular Testing Services PA and Cardiovascular Healthcare Associates PA, the feds claimed.

Yet Finkelstein made up bogus conditions to justify the cardiac testing of the students and signing off on the results after only reviewing them for seconds, prosecutors claimed.

In October 2024, he allegedly claimed one student’s results were “normal” even though the tests showed the student potentially had heart problems.

The student died 24 days later of cardiac arrest during practice with his basketball team, the feds alleged.

Even after Finkelstein was told of the student’s death, he continued to rubber-stamp test results, prosecutors claimed.

Alleged Florida fraudster billed $3.76 billion, sends cash to Hong Kong, Indonesia

A Florida man allegedly ran two bogus medical supply companies and fraudulently billed Medicaid and Medicare for $3.76 billion, court papers allege.

Ibrahim Hilmi, 58, of Miami, billed for medical equipment and wound dressing that his companies, ABRH Car, Inc., and Sunshine Senior Solutions LLC, never provided, court papers alleged.

Most of the money he billed for was never paid out to him, but he did receive $5.7 million in his companies’ accounts, according to a criminal indictment.

And within weeks, that money was transferred abroad to Hong Kong and to Indonesia, the court papers allege.

When Hilmi started getting negative reviews accusing him of health care fraud, he fled abroad and kept the racket going by getting others to run his business accounts, the indictment alleges.

He was arrested in Kyrenia, Cyprus, and brought to Florida for his first court appearance in the case Monday, prosecutors said.

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By Jennifer Kings - MintPress News

As Israel intensifies attacks on Lebanon and seeks to entrench its occupation of southern Lebanese territory despite repeated ceasefire violations, another front of the war is coming into focus: psychological operations conducted through some of the world’s most popular technology platforms.

In August 2024, the United States military ran ads on Tinder in Lebanon to discourage users from joining the resistance against the continued Israeli genocidal assault on the country – demonstrating the full spectrum of the Zionist military strategy.

Backed financially, politically and militarily by the United States – Israel has long aimed to engulf Lebanon with desires to reoccupy the South along with regular bombardments on civilian areas.

And despite there being a “ceasefire” between Lebanon and Israel since April 17th, Israel has bombed Lebanon over 3,500 times all the while pushing for normalization.

US CENTCOM ads on Tinder represent another front in the Zionist military strategy: psychological operations with militarized “dating” platforms.

Tinder, the most popular “dating” app in the world, boasts over 75 million active users in more than 190 countries. It is owned by Match Group – a multi billion dollar conglomerate that owns the largest market share of dating platforms – Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid. Plenty of Fish, Salams, and others.

Largest market share also means one of the largest data gold mines – personal and intimate user data, messages, video calls, facial recognition and location data on potentially hundreds of millions of users across Match Group’s dozens of dating applications. Tinder’s user data was found in a breach at Gravy Analytics – a data broker company who sells data to governmental agencies to be used for police and military location tracking.

But Match Group’s strategy and their technologies became fully militarized after Zionist billionaire investor and trump donor Paul Singer and his Elliot Management group built a $1 billion stake in the company in January 2024.

Paul Singer has long worked to integrate Israeli military tech into global markets – co-founding Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC), a Tel Aviv based nonprofit started to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. SUNC works to promote Israeli tech and get Unit 8200 officers – Israel’s elite military intelligence unit – hired at all major US tech firms like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Palantir.

In February 2024, Match Group announced their new partnership with OpenAI – in a press release written by ChatGPT. OpenAI’s technology has been instrumental in powering the AI genocide in Gaza. In February 2026, the company struck a deal with the United States Department of Defense – CEO Sam Altman sharing that the deal was made due to the Department of Defense’s “deep respect for safety.”

In March 2024, Zillow co-founder and Palantir board member Spencer Rascoff joined Match Group’s board. Palantir’s technology is used by the Israeli military to surveil, target and genocide in Gaza. Rascoff was then named CEO, replacing Bernard Kim in February 2025.

“Do not take up arms against the United States of its partners,” the Tinder ad read in Arabic, along with pictures of warplanes and the CENTCOM logo in August 2024.

Match Group was sued in February 2024 over allegations that the platforms are designed to turn users into compulsive addicts who never find love but are turned into “gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards.”

Yet despite partnering with Paul Singer and OpenAI, installing a former Palantir board member as CEO and running US military ads in Lebanon – Match Group says that they are just on a mission “to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide.”

Jennifer Kings is a MintPress contributor, psychiatric nurse practitioner, sexual assault forensic examiner and former emergency medicine registered nurse with a graduate degree in global public health. She produces short and long-form content for her social media platforms and written work on substack. She is also a contributor at Vocal Politics.

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By John Stossel - Reason

Not long ago, new kinds of jobs appeared: app-based gig work.

They include jobs like dog walking on Rover, Taskrabbit work, DoorDash food delivery, Uber and Lyft driving.

Lots of people like gig work. It’s flexible. You work when you want to work.

But “workers’ rights” activists and governing socialists don’t like that. Gig workers rarely join unions. They don’t get a minimum wage.

“Uber and Lyft exploit their workers” is a headline at MS NOW. “We can’t ignore it.”

The Democratic Socialists said they had a solution. Seattle’s city council imposed a $26 delivery driver minimum wage.

What could go wrong?

Two years later, we know the answer: Gig workers make no more money, but prices went up.

Apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats added a $5 fee for consumers “to help cover the costs of these…regulations.”

Now Seattle residents complain about prices. “I ordered a $12 sandwich…$12 grew to $32!” complains one in my new video. “I just deleted the app.”

“[Work] has become slow because of the new law,” an app driver complains. DoorDash says it got 1.7 million fewer Seattle orders in 2024.

This is what happens when politicians dictate wages.

“Obviously, when you’re increasing cost to businesses, you’re going to increase costs to customers,” says economics professor Judge Glock. “These are unimaginably complicated markets where the company’s main job is interfacing between restaurants and delivery workers and customers. Then you have an economically illiterate city council or mayor who thinks, basically by looking at an industry through reading the news, they can appropriately regulate the exact wage.”

Former Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson admits that the politicians made a mistake: “We created a problem and it’s our responsibility to fix it.”

They repealed the harmful law?

No.

Nelson said they just needed to adjust their numbers: “If we had gotten the minimum pay standard right, we would not see the decline in the revenue.”

Such conceit! Somehow, the political class knows exactly what every worker should be paid.

Price controls never work.

Flexible pricing does.

Competition forces businesses to constantly adjust pay and prices to attract workers and customers.

When smug politicians think they can set a price that’s “right,” “it’s just patently absurd,” says Glock. “You’re not going to have any improved well-being for people, and you’re not going to have increased wages for those workers.”

A similar minimum wage increase failed in New York City, after politicians guaranteed app-based drivers an hourly minimum of about $20.

“The decrease in tips and increased competition for jobs offset all of the gains from that imposed minimum wage,” says Glock. “It’s this continual whack-a-mole tendency. The market responds, [so politicians] pass a new regulation to try to prevent that response. They think the next regulation will somehow squelch the greed out of the system, but there’s simply no way to do that.”

Competition is the only good way to decide what people get paid.

“A lot of politicians believe there’s a free lunch or a fixed pot of money that they can give out to the neediest people.” says Glock. “The actual effect was not to improve the well-being of workers, but to increase costs for customers and sabotage one of the most successful businesses in the city.”

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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A five-minute “exercise snack” every hour can offset the damage of sitting down for long periods, researchers have said.

Walking or moving for five minutes at regular intervals boosted mood, reduced fatigue, and did not affect work performance, a large study revealed.

The health benefits of getting up from an office desk every so often were already known, but this was the first study to test how often five-minute walking breaks should be taken and the respective effect.

Authors, led by Columbia University in New York, said that adults in high-income countries now spend 11 to 12 hours per day sitting down or “sedentary”, which equates to “three-quarters of the waking day”.

“Excessive sedentariness has emerged as a significant public health concern that incurs increased risk of many chronic conditions, poorer mental health and mortality and poses a substantive economic burden to healthcare systems,” they wrote.

Sitting for prolonged periods is thought to have a negative effect on the lower limbs because of the reduced activity in the skeletal muscles and arteries.

However, moving at regular periods can undo or prevent these damaging effects by improving blood flow and reactivating the body’s metabolic processes, such as using fat and glucose for energy.

‘Improve psychosocial well-being’

The researchers said their results suggested “that brief, regular movement breaks (i.e., interruptions to prolonged sitting achieved by walking, such as a five-minute walk every half-hour) can counteract the harmful cardiometabolic effects of prolonged sedentary behaviour and improve psychosocial well-being”.

To test the theory, they examined data from 11,484 people taking part in a US nationwide challenge aimed at moving more by undertaking little movement breaks.

People followed their usual routine for seven days, then chose five-minute walking breaks either every 30 minutes, every 60 minutes, or every two hours for 14 consecutive days.

During the 21 days in total, people filled in questionnaires on their fatigue, mood and work performance.

A random sample of 1,200 full-time employees received five text messages every day at 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm to assess the immediate effect of movement breaks.

Analysis of the results suggested that all three break times were seen by people as doable, acceptable and appropriate, although fewer breaks were seen as more obtainable.

People were more likely to report good mood from taking breaks, with every 30-minute break leading to the highest improvement, while fatigue and low mood scores fell across all break times.

Overall, taking a five-minute break every hour offered the best balance between what people thought was achievable day-to-day and effectiveness for health, researchers said.

Taking short breaks also did not affect work performance, the survey results suggested.

“Concerns that movement breaks might disrupt work productivity have been documented as a perceived barrier to implementation/adoption. However, our findings counter this perception,” the experts said.

Emily McGrath, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This study looked at how movement breaks affect mood and fatigue, but we also know that sitting for long periods increases the risk of heart and circulatory disease and early death.

“Taking regular ‘energy snacks’, like a five‑minute walk each hour, can boost mood and support heart health.

“While busy schedules can make this challenging, the findings suggest that simple additions of movement can improve overall health.

“However, the study relied on self-reported data and was short-term, so longer research is needed to confirm its impact on heart health.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

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Etienne Note: For anyone thinking that “Planned Obsolescence” is an internet hoax, I am embedding the documentary The Lightbulb Conspiracy, which breaks down how the lightbulb industry agreed to limit and engineer lightbulbs to only last 10,000 hours. The Livermore Centennial Lightbulb featured in the documentary is still burning in the Livermore, California firehouse and earlier this month on June 6th celebrated its 125th anniversary. It has been burning continuously since 1901. You can see a video of its 125th Birthday Party on the website celebrating the bulb HERE. The documentary also features the story of the Epson Stylus C42UX inkjet printer which quits working after a certain number of printed pages but can be brought back to life by removing the specific chip in the printer which limits its life.

By Agent131711 via Agent131711’s Substack

Here’s how a covert operation to upend traditional American lives was released on the unknowing public and how that operation changed everything…

THIS IS A SERIES; BE SURE TO READ PART 1 FIRST! (Click here to read Part 1) Wanna listen instead of read? Here you go:

THE PAY TWO MORE TIMES SCHEME

While we were being shafted by manufacturers intentionally creating products designed to break, thus forcing us to have to buy every item an average of three times, another scheme was brewing: a scheme designed to get us to voluntarily turn over double the cost—yes, double, meaning pay twice over for every item we were already forced to buy three times over….

This story begins where you would least expect: carpet. Yep, carpet, meaning the floor covering. It started with Home Furnishings Daily publishing that there were three ways to increase rug sales. The first was to convince people they needed wall-to-wall carpet. The second was to convince people that more rooms in the home required carpet; no longer was it just the family room; it could now be the kitchen, even the bathroom, hallways, bedrooms, etc. And the third was to get people to “trade up,” meaning they only intended on having budget carpeting installed, but they ended up being convinced to purchase higher-priced carpeting. The Carpet Institute advertised that “Home means more carpet on the floors.” If you wanted your house to be a home filled with cherished memories, there was only one way to achieve it: plush flooring in every room.

Deodorant makers then began promoting a new concept that there was a need for couples to purchase men’s deodorant as well as women’s deodorant; this meant a wife no longer needed to share with her husband because that was now disgusting. A single bathing suit doesn’t cut it anymore; you need an assortment. Even the world’s largest wedding ring manufacturer upped the ante by popularizing the double ring. Now, not only did people need one ring, they needed two: one for the engagement and a second for the wedding. In no time, the idea of buying doubles was pushed across all industries; lipstick needed to match nail polish, so it was important to buy both items in matching shades; eyeglasses needed to match attire, so a single pair of spectacles would no longer do; and even Kleenex jumped on board, advertising that, if you wanted to have a proper house, the color of the box of tissues should match the room it was placed in. American Telegraph and Telephone got on the bandwagon, claiming that it was important to have a phone in multiple rooms.

Then, home goods manufacturers began promoting that no home is complete unless it has two of everything. The president of Servel, Inc. [appliances] announced that the American standard of living now called for two refrigerators in every home. Of course, now that you have two fridges, you need two ketchups, two mustards, two milks, and so on.

The chief of the washer division of the American Home Laundry Manufacturers Association declared that a well-equipped home should have two washers and two matching dryers. This led to the concept that each room in the home needed its own personal bathroom. And, of course, each member of the household needed his own radio. Radio manufacturers boasted that when the personal radio campaign was underway, they increased sales from one to three radios per household.

Soon, home builders began promoting two houses for every family: your traditional home and a second home in the country. J Walter Thompson, a leading advertising agency, wrote in business journals that the “two-house families” are the individuals who can be sold three to four bathrooms, two to four television sets, and four to twelve beds—think of the possibilities because these people can be convinced to buy anything. Thompson then began the two-car campaign, an “aggressive advertising and selling campaign” designed to overcome the public’s habit of sharing a vehicle. The advertising executives realized that, in order to get people to purchase multiple vehicles, they would need to “re-educate” them—those are their exact words; re-educate them. For this, they partnered with Chevrolet. The advertisements informed the public that they are currently victims of “one-car captivity.” Television critics, including John Crosby, said things like, “You peasants who own only one car are chained to the land like serfs in the Middle Ages.” The good news was that the solution was available—buy a second vehicle—and it worked. By the 1960s, one family out of every six owned a second car.

Now that the public was willing to purchase two or more of every item, it was time to roll out the second phase of the plan: the trade-up. The lawn mower industry convinced men that a push mower wasn’t just bad; it was actually shameful. The solution, no matter how small your yard was, was to purchase a high-priced power mower. The shame campaign worked, and before the 1950s had ended, 90 percent of people owned a power mower. But it didn’t stop there. The next campaign was to shame the power mower owners because their lawn mowers didn’t have seats. An additional marketing campaign was run, which implied that should you choose to use a lawnmower without seats, you risk having a heart attack due to bodily stress from all the exertion required to push along the power mower. To avoid embarrassment and a heart attack, hundreds of thousands of American males and families began investing in seated mowers, which cost ten times the amount of the push mower.

This was when manufacturers began tying retail promotions into completely irrelevant holidays, such as half-off beds to celebrate Memorial Day. Easter became a great time to shop. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day became days when tangible gifts needed to be purchased because you can’t tell your parents you love them without shelling out at least $20.

Before the 1960s, General Foods reported that a typical American family was being exposed to 1,518 advertisements per day. They noted this does not include all of the junk mail stuffed into mailboxes across the nation, which, at the time, was totaling 16 billion pieces of mail per year, which was four times higher than what was being mailed a decade prior. While you might assume the cost of junk mail was strictly the financial burden of the companies sending the garbage, which everyone walks from the mailbox to the trash, it was not and is not. Back then the American taxpayers were ponying up nearly 200 million dollars each year to cover the debt incurred by the post office to deliver the trash.

Simultaneously, stoves were becoming bigger and bigger, with more and more buttons being added. In the early 1960s, stoves were being released that had 28 push buttons and dials. A technical expert from the British Standards Institution examined a new model of stove and was confused as to why there was 18 inches of space between burners. It was explained to him that the Americans were on a buying frenzy for bigger-sized items. By spacing out the burners, they could make the stove larger, despite the larger size serving no actual function other than taking up space in a home.

To create the need for the purchase of larger refrigerators, ordinary pantry items began suddenly requiring refrigeration.

The furniture industry then realized too many people were handing down furniture, and this act was putting a major dent in their prospective earnings, so they created a campaign of humiliation aimed at both the gifter and the recipient of the furniture.

Now that families were completely sold on buying two cars, it was time to get them to trade up too. In a 34-year period, Chevy vehicles grew four feet in length! The Bel Air was the most expensive vehicle the company offered, so there was little interest in it; families felt they didn’t need all of the added features.

But, through marketing, Chevrolet convinced the public that their most expensive model was a necessity, and, by 1958, it was their best-selling vehicle. No sooner than it was the most popular, Chevy released the Impala, which became the vehicle everyone needed.

While the public was entranced by advertising campaigns, what wasn’t realized was that the basic items were being dropped entirely from product lines. Come the 1960s, the only options to choose from were expensive and really expensive. The average consumer never did the math; otherwise, he would have figured out that he now has to work an average of 53 more hours to afford the cheapest model offered. These vehicles not only cost substantially more upfront, but the upkeep was also higher. Because these vehicles were bigger, heavier, faster, and had more features, it could no longer be expected that parts in them would last a lifetime. Now buyers should plan that they will have to replace everything at least once, in some cases, many times over. These larger vehicles also consumed more gasoline.

And while that was going on, another new concept had hit the market: installment charges. Since these upgrades were no longer affordable, the only way to purchase them was by paying in installments, and that came at an added cost, above and beyond interest on loans. This cost was not factored into the 53 additional hours of labor required to purchase the cheapest make, nor does it consider the added cost of upkeep or gasoline.

Skipping ahead in time: When I purchased my first car, it was $700. The minimum wage at the time was $4.25, so I had to work 165 hours to afford it. 30 years later, my son is looking for his first vehicle, and the market is so terrifying that most of his friends are buying salvage titles because that is all a teen working an entry-level job can afford. Outside of salvage titles, you can either buy a new vehicle, which, after all associated costs, is going to put you around $30,000, or you can buy a used vehicle, typically with a lot of miles on it and often in need of immediate repair, for $12,000 and up.

My son makes $20 an hour, which is nearly double the minimum wage in our home state, Michigan, and is five times what I earned back in the 1990s, yet for him to purchase a $12,000 vehicle, he would have to work 600 hours! Even if he was able to find a rare gem, a $7,000 vehicle that is not a salvage title, he would still have to work 350 hours to pay for it; that is nearly double what I had to work to afford my first car! Additionally, he wants to be an engineer, so he is in his second year of college. On top of the cost of the classes, at his school, there is no longer a college bookstore where you can purchase used books for cheap and then sell them when you are done. He is required to lease eBooks for $100 to $250 per piece—and he doesn’t even get to keep the books! They auto-return after so many weeks. Now you may be thinking, as I was, that there has to be a better way, but there is not, because the colleges have figured out that by attaching a unique pin code to the virtual book purchase, you are forced to buy the book to access the pin to get your homework assignments and other required materials! It’s robbery! And he’s in community college! I can’t imagine what will happen when he transfers to a university for his final years.

These days, as a student, unless you can get scholarships to fund college, the only options are for the parents to go into debt, borrowing against their assets, draining their retirement funds, savings, and so on, or for the young student to plunge himself into lifelong debt. These have become the only two options because, unlike when I went to college, it is now so unaffordable that the student cannot work a part-time job to pay for it. What a scam! Fortunately, my son received huge scholarships. My other child did not and had to choose a different path in life. So, how did we get here?

Americans, prior to the 1950s, prided themselves on being hard-working and frugal. We were a nation of “waste not, want not,” in which you ate every last scrap on your plate, and if there ever were leftovers, Mom would make them into a stew the following evening. When I was growing up, we had so much stew that to this day, it is one of the few things I dislike. Because we wasted nothing, not even the apple or orange peels, we didn’t need a garbage disposal. Potato peel scraps weren’t scraps. They were wrapped in newspaper to prevent dampness and allowed to sprout. People knew how to store vegetables to make them last as long as eight months.

We saw our sturdy, solid wood dining room table set as an heirloom because it once belonged to our great-great-grandparents and was handed down generation to generation, often when a couple wed. Housewives would boast that they only paid a few cents for their wonderful linens. But the advertisers cursed our simple, happy lives, which they referred to as “puritanism.” They wanted to destroy and replace them. So the psychological operation was never truly about the color of a box of Kleenex or the style of lawn mower in your garage; it was about selling hedonism—seeing our personal pleasure as the most important thing.

Through the advertisers re-education campaign, we were taught what once was a treasured heirloom is now embarrassing, outdated junk. They schooled us to believe that being wasteful was a sign of success, being frugal was for the poor, and being poor was shameful. Root cellars became closets to store junk and a good life was not determined by happiness or the amount of love and laughter in your home; it was determined by the logo on your automobile and the square footage of your house. Gratification became tied to self-indulgence, and the advertisers pushed it hard. The idea that you deserve something became more important than if you could afford something and more important than if you needed it in the first place. Acting on a whim became acceptable as long as you felt pleasure, and people who did not abandon the traditional puritan ways were called “penny pinchers” and other condescending terms, while sayings like “pamper yourself” became actively used to justify overindulgence. And all of this comes with a price tag that is so high that, come 1998, both parents needed to work. The mother could no longer stay home and raise the children. Bringing up the kids was now a daycare’s job, and, of course, daycare costs money. Because of this, the parents looked forward to when the children would begin school, because school, unlike daycare, is free, but little did they know, school is exactly where the overseers of the psychological operation want the children to be…

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By Adam Sharp - Daily Reckoning

Uh-Oh, Silver!

One year ago, silver was trading at around $36 per ounce.

Today the price is around $66. Normally, that’d be considered a win.

But over those 12 months, we silver bugs have been on a wild ride.

Simply incredible price action. From $36 to $119 in about 8 months. And now back down to $66.

I believe the silver bull market still has years to run. Maybe even another decade. Today, let’s explore why.

+$16 Since 1980?

Silver first reached $50 way back in 1980.

Of course, silver’s miraculous 1971-1980 run wasn’t totally natural. The famous Hunt brothers had cornered a big chunk of the silver market, controlling roughly 9% of investable silver through physical ownership and futures contracts.

But silver would have done well during the 1970s even without the Hunt Brothers. That year inflation peaked at around 14.8%.

Investors sought refuge from stagflation in precious metals. And gold and silver were the star sector of the 1970s.

It’s wild that silver is still only $16 above the 1980 peak.

This Isn’t 1980

1980 represented a peak for gold and silver that would last decades.

Some precious metal investors may be concerned that we’re seeing a similar peak today.

But what caused the 1980 peak? Two factors dominated.

In 1971, Nixon ended the last remnants of the gold standard. The U.S. dollar was no longer bound by a fixed relationship to gold.

The 1970s gold and silver bull market was primarily driven by this massive shift to purely fiat money. It was a classic devaluation of hard money into fiat.

By 1980, the Petrodollar arrangement, in which oil producers agreed to only sell oil in dollars, had restored demand for U.S. dollars on the global stage.

Additionally, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker finally resolved to kill persistent inflation by hiking interest rates to nearly 20%. These sky-high rates finally tamed inflation.

By 1980, the U.S. had eliminated the inflationary threat, and set itself up for a period of strong growth.

In 1980, stocks were dirt cheap and poised to outperform precious metals for some time to come.

A Different World

Looking back at the 1970s can be helpful at times. It was one of the greatest hard asset bull markets in history.

But it was a different kind of crisis compared to the issues we face today.

For decades the world has been on an unprecedented debt binge. Governments, corporations, and individuals have all run up huge tabs.

The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio today is over 125%. From 1970-1980, it never surpassed 40%.

Having so much debt limits the policy options of central banks like the Federal Reserve. You can’t exactly jack rates up much higher than they are today, or soon we’ll be spending a majority of tax revenue just paying the interest on our debt. Much of the world is in a similar situation.

So I continue to believe that eventually the Fed and Treasury Department will be forced to use extreme measures. Money printing and debt monetization on a scale never seen before.

That’s a primary reason I believe the precious metals bull isn’t over. Not even close.

Finding Its New Range

Silver has fallen significantly from its 2026 highs. But the long-term trend remains up.

Silver only broke through the historic $50/oz resistance wall late last year.

Breaking the $50 level, and staying above it, was a huge milestone. And silver continues to find its new range.

Silver demand remains strong, with 2026 deficits estimated to be significantly above the 2025 shortfall.

Silver being in “deficit” simply means that more is being consumed than produced. And as you can tell, we’ve been in a serious silver deficit since 2021.

Now, it’s important to note that earlier estimates had predicted a significantly smaller silver deficit in 2026. But strong demand for coins and bars, especially in Asia, made the difference.

Inventories at major exchanges like the COMEX have fallen below 100 million ounces, from a high of 300 million in 2020.

Industrial and investment demand for silver remain strong. I expect both to stay robust for years to come.

Silver production from mines remains essentially flat. Recycling is up, which is one of the reasons for this correction. Millions took advantage of the price spike to sell the family silver.

But the global debt bubble is still inflating. Massive amounts of money will need to be printed to patch holes in it.

So I’m holding. Silver is destined to hit $200 within the next few years. We’ve never had this much industrial demand, and savvy investors will buy the dip. I even expect that more global governments will begin stockpiling the metal, as both the U.S. and China have recognized silver as a critical strategic metal.

Silver remains an excellent way to hedge against inflation. It’s also a critical metal for bleeding-edge tech.

“Poor man’s gold” will remain highly volatile, but as long as you can stomach that, I say buy the dip. Cautious investors may want to consider spreading their buys out over time (dollar-cost averaging), in case we haven’t bottomed quite yet.

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AFP - Yahoo News

Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children in what has become a key factor in an ongoing “genocide” in Gaza, United Nations investigators charged on Tuesday, in a report slammed by Israel.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry said it had found evidence that “Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli security forces”.

This, it said, was a key factor in establishing “the genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the larger Palestinian group in Gaza”.

The three-member investigative team, which does not speak for the UN itself, first determined in a report last September that Israel had committed “genocide” in the war in Gaza -- a finding Israel flatly rejected.

In Tuesday’s follow-up report, they said the intense scale and systematic nature of Israeli military operations had continued, resulting in the “unprecedented” death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children.

There were “reasonable grounds” to conclude that Israel’s authorities and security forces “have continued to commit the crime of genocide” in Gaza, they said.

Israel, which has long been harshly critical of the commission, slammed the report as “defamatory” and a “libellous sham”.

It accused the investigators of ignoring “the brutal tactics of Hamas, which ruthlessly attacks Israeli children and uses Palestinian children as human shields”.

- Childhood ‘erased’ in Gaza -

The commission, which was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, examined for its latest report crimes affecting Palestinian children, and how living conditions imposed by Israel in Gaza were “resulting in preventable mortality of children”.

“Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and war crimes in the West Bank,” the team said in a statement.

The commission said that severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare had “erased childhood” in Gaza and would continue to affect the children throughout their lives.

“By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future,” said Indian judge Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chairs the inquiry.

As for documenting crimes, Muralidhar added: “Israeli soldiers have themselves put in the public domain so much incriminating evidence about what they’ve been doing.”

- ‘Strategy to destroy’ -

The report comes days after the UN children’s agency UNICEF said at least 265 children had been killed and hundreds more wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect.

The Hamas October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory response in Gaza has killed more than 72,800 people, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry,

The UN inquiry said that during the first two years of the war at least 20,179 children were killed and 44,143 injured “as a direct result of the hostilities in Gaza”.

The killing and maiming of Palestinian children “was part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group”, it said.

- Disability a ‘demographic reality’ -

Israel was responsible for causing a “severe orphan crisis”, while wounded youngsters “face a lifetime of disability”, the report said.

The siege of Gaza “directly undermined reproductive and newborn health”, while the collapse of public health programmes “eroded the conditions necessary for a healthy next generation”.

The report listed Israeli divisions, brigades and units that may be responsible for killing children, in specific incidents in Gaza and the West Bank.

“We know who they are,” commissioner Chris Sidoti told a press conference.

“Every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children -- and they need to be held accountable.”

Addressing Israeli citizens directly, he said: “What kind of people are your leaders when they give orders, they make statements, that encourage this kind of conduct: not merely permit it, but encourage it?”

Besides Gaza, the commission also documented a sharp increase in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian children in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.

The commission urged all UN member states, including Israel, to ensure accountability for crimes committed.

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Etienne Note: In case there was any doubt that Elon Musk and SpaceX is a DARPA military front privatizing the profits of military technologies developed on the tax payer dime and/or developing tech for the intelligence agencies, military and NASA and THEN privatizing the profits.

By David Szondy - New Atlas

SpaceX is preparing to test Starfall, its new orbital cargo capsule that could one day be used for automated orbital labs or as depots to store military equipment in space, ready for immediate deployment anywhere on the globe.

On Tuesday, June 23, after 6:43 am EDT, SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Since the company launches so many rockets these days, making a comment on it is hardly necessary, but this one is different because the payload is the experimental Starfall capsule.

According to documents released by the FAA, Starfall resembles a giant hockey puck. Measuring 10 ft (3 m) in diameter and 2.5 ft (75 cm) thick, the 2.1-tonne capsule is designed to carry one tonne of cargo. The top part of the capsule is made of aluminum and special thermal protection materials, while the bottom half is made of carbon fiber wrapped in a high-performance thermal protective layer.

There’s no propulsion system, though there are attitude control thrusters using compressed nitrogen gas and a parachute system for reentry. To protect the cargo, the capsule is pressurized with nitrogen or some other inert gas. Since there is no onboard propulsion, Starfall remains attached to a frame while in orbit that gives it a huge boost when it’s time to return to Earth.

The purpose of Starfall is two-fold.

The first is to act as a robotic orbital laboratory aimed at private businesses in the post-International Space Station era. Though nowhere near as large or versatile as the space lab, Starfall is claimed to be able to give customers access to weightlessness and vacuum for science or orbital manufacturing of precision products like crystals or drugs.

However, the second potential role is more intriguing. SpaceX sees Starfall as a way to store cargo in orbit for rapid point-to-point delivery almost anywhere in the world at very short notice. The idea is that a fleet of such capsules and their motherships could be stationed in various orbits and then deorbited on command.

Such a system would be very attractive for disaster relief and even more so for the US and allied militaries, which currently spend a great deal of time and effort maintaining supply depots around the world to prepare for future contingencies. By placing these in space, fewer such depots would be required, security problems would be all but eliminated, and dealing with host nations would not be an issue.

This is not a new idea. The US Air Force has looked at using cargo rockets, and aerospace and defense company Inversion has put forward the idea of orbital cargo transports, but SpaceX’s advanced launch capabilities, including Starship with its 100-tonne capacity, mean that the company could carry Starfall capsules into space almost as an afterthought during routine missions.

If all goes according to schedule, the demonstration flight will send the Starfall capsule on a suborbital trajectory to a recovery area 700 nautical miles (805 miles, 1,300 km) off the west coast of North America. After splashdown, SpaceX will attempt to recover the capsule, if possible.

Source: SpaceX

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The Charlie Kirk Show is now distributed by a federally registered agent of Israel tasked with seeding American media with Zionist propaganda. It is part of a whopping $46 million dollar annual contract between the Israeli government and Brad Parscale, the former chief of staff for Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. This may be the largest lobbying contract in the history of foreign influence operations in the US.

On September 10, 2025, Kirk was assassinated during the first stop on his American Comeback Tour at Utah Valley State University. Eight days later, Parscale registered as a foreign agent of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assuming responsibility for a propaganda blitz “tailored to Gen Z audiences across platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, and other relevant digital and broadcast outlets.”

The deal meant that the Charlie Kirk Show, which had been distributed by the Salem Media Network since 2020, was placed under the control of a foreign agent for Israel, with Parscale assuming a role as Salem’s Chief Strategy Officer. According to the terms of the contract, Parscale’s Clock Tower would “integrate its pro-Israel messaging into Salem Media Network properties.”

According to a December 2025 report by Radio Ink, The Charlie Kirk Show “will continue as a podcast on the Salem Podcast Network, as Salem Media ‘will maintain its close professional and personal relationship with Turning Point USA.’”

Since Kirk’s killing, his successors have done their best to bury his vehement opposition to war on Iran, as well as his public fits of disgust with Netanyahu and his army of lobbyists in the US. Kirk’s widow and replacement as TPUSA CEO, Erika Kirk, now insists that she and her husband never wavered in their support for Israel. She has also been unwilling to state what her late husband would have thought about the war the US and Israel waged on Iran this year.

“My husband isn’t here to say whether or not we should be at war with Iran,” Erika Kirk said in response to a question at a May 2026 TPUSA event. “I would love for him to be here right now and tell us if we should or should not.”

However, in the months before his killing, Kirk left little mystery about where he stood on the US imposing war on Iran. In one of many tirades against attacking Iran, he slammed Sen. Lindsey Graham and other cheerleaders for war as “pathologically insane.” He went on to warn that a regime change war inevitably “creates a quagmire. And then there is civil war.”

Kirk’s replacement dishonestly denies Israel connection

Since Kirk’s killing, TPUSA’s longtime communications director, Andrew Kolvet, has filled his anchor chair on The Charlie Kirk Show. During an episode of the show this May, Kolvet took aim at antiwar Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who had just been defeated by a Trump-endorsed primary challenger backed with a record $15 million in donations from Israel lobby organizations. While acknowledging that Kirk had been a “big fan” of Massie, Kolvet claimed that his late colleague had become “really frustrated” in private with the congressman’s obstruction of Trump’s agenda.

The curiously sourced comments prompted Massie to ask Grok, the AI chatbot of Twitter/X, “is it true that the Charlie Kirk Show is now distributed by a registered foreign agent of Israel?”

After sustained nudging by fellow X users, Grok finally coughed up a reply confirming that, “Yes, there’s a substantive connection here worth noting.” Grok went on to explain that “the distributor (Salem Media) has direct high-level overlap and active collaboration with a registered Israeli foreign agent.”

Grok’s reply directly contradicted Kolvet’s attempt to deny Massie’s allegation. According to Kolvet, The Charlie Kirk Show The CK Show “is distributed on [Steve Bannon’s Real America’s Voice], not Salem. I’ve been here for the entire journey. Booked all the guests.. Developed all of the editorial. We follow Bannon’s War Room.”

In the wake of Kirk’s killing, however, Kolvet explicitly thanked the Israel-controlled Salem Media for continuing to distribute The Charlie Kirk Show. “Salem has been so gracious through this process and even encouraged us to continue broadcasting the show on the Salem Radio Network,” Kolvet told Radio Ink.

To this day, The Charlie Kirk Show is hosted on the website of the Salem Podcast Network.

Kolvet’s attempt at damage control had failed, deepening the public backlash against TPUSA for betraying its founder’s evolving positions on Israel and Iran.

Bringing TPUSA back into line with Israel

As The Grayzone reported, in the weeks leading up to Kirk’s killing, the TPUSA founder agonized over the growing pressure he felt from Israel’s cutouts, and from Netanyahu himself, to preside over a blitzkreig of youth-oriented Zionist propaganda. On August 6, 2025, just over a month before his death, Kirk openly raged against Jewish “leaders” and “stakeholders” harassing him for his criticism of Israeli policies. “It’s all of the sudden: ‘oh, Charlie: he’s no longer with us.’ Wait a second—what does ‘with us’ mean, exactly? I’m an American, okay? I represent this country,” he fulminated to podcast host Megyn Kelly.

Days before Kirk’s public rant, he attended a private retreat convened in the Hamptons by Zionist billionaire Bill Ackman. There, as The Grayzone revealed, an Israel lobby operative named Natasha Hausdorff unloaded on Kirk for complaining about “moral blackmail” from Tel Aviv. By this point, Kirk had rejected a massive infusion of Israel-directed donations to TPUSA, and was on his way to refusing a personal offer from Netanyahu to visit Jerusalem. He was also providing space on stage at TPUSA events for some of the most outspoken right-wing critics of Israel, from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly to the anti-Zionist Jewish comedian Dave Smith.

On September 6, 2025, an arch-Zionist centi-millionaire named Robert Shillman denounced Kirk from the dais at a private gala in Los Angeles, expressing regret for showering his fortune on TPUSA now that its founder had turned against Israel. As The Grayzone revealed, Shillman had just withdrawn a $2 million donation to TPUSA as punishment for Kirk’s heresy.

Four days later, Kirk was shot through the neck by a sniper in front of thousands of attendees of his so-called American Comeback Tour.

Just over a week after the shocking assassination, the Israeli Foreign Ministry effectively took control over the Charlie Kirk Show through its lobbying contract with Parscale’s Clock Tower X. Given the statements Kirk made both publicly and in private to confidants about Israel in the weeks before his killing, it seems unlikely he would have consented to any agreement that gave a registered lobbyist for Israel responsibility for distributing his show.

Days later, on September 15, one of the most visible propagandists of Netanyahu’s political network in the US, Ben Shapiro, appeared in TPUSA studios to make a dramatic announcement. Seated beside Kirk’s former co-hosts, Shapiro declared that his Daily Wire outlet was donating $1 million to TPUSA to supposedly “bring people back to Christ, and bring people back to church, and back to biblical values.”

Given that the Daily Wire was bleeding money, laying off staff and losing viewers at a rapid rate by this point, the whopping donation raised questions about whether Shapiro was serving as a pass-through for Israel lobbyists exploiting Kirk’s unexpected death to restore control over TPUSA.

To date, there is no evidence that the state of Israel was responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Yet it is undeniable that Kirk’s killing removed one of the greatest obstacles to Israel’s plans to compel Trump to launch a massive regime change war on Iran.

As The Grayzone reported, Kirk was the only figure in Trump’s inner circle to personally appeal to the president against committing US forces to Israel’s 12-day-long assault on Iran in June 2025. Trump “barked” at Kirk for his disobedience, according to a source, and angrily dispatched him. Days later, Trump ordered US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, setting the stage for Operation Epic Fury the following year. This account has since been confirmed by Vice President J.D. Vance.

Burying Charlie Kirk’s evolution

When Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, he initiated an imbroglio that would fulfill Kirk’s most dire warnings about the consequences of waging a regime change war on Tehran. Four days after the war began, TPUSA posted a video on X implying that he would have supported the assault on Iran. The post ignited another yet angry backlash, with hundreds of angry commenters denouncing the organization for misrepresenting Kirk’s vehemently stated opposition to the war.

By this point, Erika Kirk had been working to bring TPUSA back into line with the Israeli agenda which her martyred husband had defied.

On December 13, 2025, Kirk’s widow starred in a televised town hall hosted by self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss and broadcast by CBS News, which had been purchased by the billionaire Israeli asset David Ellison four months prior. During the carefully stage-managed and cringeworthy spectacle, Weiss nudged Kirk on her late husband’s views on Israel.

“Charlie used to say: Jew hate is brain rot,” Erika Kirk insisted before wistfully recounting a junket to Jerusalem in which she “saw the Bible come alive in Technicolor.”

“How could you hate that place?” she wondered, referring to the state of Israel.

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Etienne Note: For anyone thinking that “Planned Obsolescence” is an internet hoax, I am embedding the documentary The Lightbulb Conspiracy, which breaks down how the lightbulb industry agreed to limit and engineer lightbulbs to only last 10,000 hours. The Livermore Centennial Lightbulb featured in the documentary is still burning in the Livermore, California firehouse and earlier this month on June 6th celebrated its 125th anniversary. It has been burning continuously since 1901. You can see a video of its 125th Birthday Party on the website celebrating the bulb HERE. The documentary also features the story of the Epson Stylus C42UX inkjet printer which quits working after a certain number of printed pages but can be brought back to life by removing the specific chip in the printer which limits its life.

By Agent131711 via Agent131711's Substack

What if I told you there was a massive conspiracy to make us pay three times over for every item? What if I told you there was another conspiracy to make volunteers pay additional times? You’d say I’m crazy, right? After all, it sounds pretty ridiculous when you hear it, yet this conspiracy is the truest definition of the word conspiracy, and these conspiracies, combined with some well-schemed psychological operations, have driven up the cost of living to the point where most Americans now live paycheck to paycheck—all by design. Let’s begin…

Wanna listen instead of read? Here you go:

NEXT READ: The PSYOP (Part 2)

Before we can get to those conspiracies regarding our products, we have to discuss the products that make it to market in the first place because there is outright suppression of information and technology, which I would call yet another conspiracy. If you try to research suppression of technology, the internet will tell you there is no such thing; it’s all tinfoil hat nonsense. “The government would never do such a thing,” they say.

However, factually, technology is silenced through the Inventions Secrecy Act. The Invention Secrecy Act allows the United States government to classify ideas and patents under “secrecy orders,” which indefinitely block the public from ever learning of them. The way this act was written, anything that could disrupt society can be forever gagged. When someone invents something of greatness that could actually help us, it is slapped with secrecy orders or sabotaged.

Back in 2010, the Federation of American Scientists expressed their concern regarding the suppression of technology, stating that in this year alone, 5,135 inventions had secrecy orders. What was being silenced? According to the internet, they’re super dangerous things, like weapons of war, but according to the Federation of American Scientists, most of the suppressed inventions had to do with clean energy and methods of propulsion.

As of 2022, there were said to be around 6,500 silenced inventions—and this is what we know of. I remember writing an article on the topic and showing the government documents in which they ordered that high-output solar panels and other useful inventions be gagged because, should someone invent a vehicle that doesn’t require gasoline, a free electricity generator, or a solar oven that is capable of providing heat for an entire town at no cost, it would indeed disrupt society because it would harm the monopolies on these commodities…

… and this is why we have shitty solar panels and are stuck paying for expensive gasoline and utilities. So, how is history altered? By withholding technology, thus making it appear that no such tech exists because it hasn’t been invented yet. Then, whenever the overlords of society decide we are allowed to own a device that heats our homes for free, the silenced patent will be given to one of their patent pools or CIA affiliates, like General Electric. GE will then produce it and sell it to us at a high cost, or better yet, lease it to us so that we can never own it and get out from under payments. History will then broadcast that GE invented the cutting-edge tech when, in reality, it has been suppressed for over 120 years.

That said, we have no way of knowing if the products we are allowed to have are the best version of the items because nobody knows what specifically is being gagged, but, out of the products we are allowed access to comes the first conspiracy…

THE PLOT

A worldwide plot to downgrade products began on December 23rd, 1924, when a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, for a meeting that would forever alter the world. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers. Together they founded the Phoebus Cartel. Phoebus, meaning “the bright” or “radiant,” is the most famous epithet for the Greek god Apollo. The Phoebus Cartel was a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market. [Note: the actual incorporation date of the cartel was January 15th, 1925.]

While a lightbulb cartel may sound like a sketch comedy bit, this is no laughing matter. This mafia’s goal was to reduce the efficiency of lightbulbs. Yes, they wanted to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. At the time, the bulbs were averaging a whopping 2,500 hours each. The goal was to reduce their lifespan down to only 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb while increasing prices. And, to ensure compliance, any company that deviated from the plan was to suffer hefty penalties. This scheme was “planned obsolescence,” also referred to as “hidden quality debasement” by Colston Warne, who was the president of the Consumers Union.

This information about the secret meeting only came to light (pun intended) later in time because of a United States government lawsuit involving General Electric’s international agreements. It happened that GE was the key player in the cartel. And yes, it is indeed GE again. It seems every time I investigate anything, General Electric is a part of it.

In memorandums produced for the lawsuit, it was discovered that GE engineers did indeed increase sales by intentionally shortening the lifespan of their products. In one instance, the debased bulb was in a flashlight. The memo stated great progress had been made because the original flashlight outlasted three batteries, but after the engineers downgraded it, it could only last through two. The engineer was writing to say that he believed, with more effort, the lifespan could be again decreased down to lasting only a single battery. He wrote, “If this is done, we estimate that it would result in increasing our flashlight business approximately 60 per cent.”

Remember how the original plan back in the 1920s was to make the lightbulb only last 1,000 hours? Another memo that surfaced during the lawsuit stated GE had degraded their light bulbs so drastically that what once lasted 2,500 hours now only lasted 750 hours. The document noted that no mention of the reduction should be made to the public. I just checked the lightbulbs in my storage area. Guess how many hours they last? 750.

Now, if you ask Google why light bulbs don’t last long, you are told it’s your fault because the light bulbs likely suffered from electrical issues or physical damage. There is no mention of a diabolical plot 102 years ago that shortened the lifespan down to as little as 93 days of use (8 hours a day of use for a 750-hour bulb.)

The same year the cartel rolled out their scheme, planned obsolescence began being implemented by automobile manufacturers to supposedly “help control over-saturation of the vehicle market.” Basically, “There are too many cars in production, so let’s make them fail so people have to buy another one sooner.” In The Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers, 1934, downgrading the quality of vehicles was referred to as “controllable wear.”

A decade after the cartel was formed, the concept had become so common that it wasn’t even a secret anymore. In 1936, in the magazine Printers’ Ink, an article called “Outmoded Durability” appeared. This article bluntly stated, “If merchandise does not wear out faster, factories will be idle, people unemployed.” So, in only a decade, what was a scheme to maximize profits had now found justification: they are doing this to help us; it is their patriotic duty to shorten the lifespan of our products to ensure factory workers can clock in every day.

Before 1940, the plan was in full effect across the nation and gaining steam around the world. Manufacturers were downgrading their goods to force us to buy them over and over because they stopped functioning. The other day I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, I don’t recall my mother ever replacing our garden hose. It was one of those heavy-duty green hoses, and it lasted my whole childhood. Fast forward to current times: my spouse and I buy a new hose nearly every year! They all split, leak at the connectors, or otherwise become unusable within 12 months. No matter which style or brand you buy, they all fail. If that’s not an example of planned obsolescence, I don’t know what is.

(By the way, we ended up finding an “old school” green hose at Costco, but it is nowhere near the quality hoses used to be, and it constantly kinks. It’s as if it was designed to kink with no way to make it stop.)

As planned obsolescence began permeating all industries, companies stopped standing behind their craftsmanship. “Lifetime guarantees” vanished entirely or became something customers now needed to pay extra to purchase, like an insurance policy, and people needed to purchase these because, by 1960, if you owned a washing machine, dishwasher, and refrigerator, chances are you needed at least one service call within the first year after purchase, and the manufacturers knew that the more features they added, the more things that could go wrong, thus ultimately leading to replacement. Parts and accessory dealers loved it, and the purchase of replacement parts ultimately enriched the manufacturers, so it was a win for everyone except the consumer. And it was these same manufacturers that controlled when they would choose to make the replacement parts scarce or unavailable entirely, and when the parts were no longer available, the only option was to buy a new unit. How genius is this? Sell a fantastic-looking item that you know is guaranteed to break after a summer of use. Ensure the part that breaks is a proprietary spring that has been designed to be just a millimeter shorter and fatter than any other spring. Then, when the calls come flooding in from buyers who need to order a replacement spring, tell them they are on backorder with no specific ETA. Meanwhile, release the new version of the item, the new version that is just a hair more stylish than last year’s model, and refer the people who need springs to it. It’s horrible, but it’s nonetheless brilliant.

Additionally, proprietary screws and other parts were designed to only be removed using proprietary tools. Although Henry Ford I intentionally manufactured vehicles so that they were easy to repair, by the late 1950s, a Ford dealer complained to a US Senate subcommittee that he often had to purchase up to three hundred dollars worth of special tools every time a new model vehicle came out—all by design, meaning a design that makes it so you cannot fix it at home. Fast forward to today, and every new vehicle is nonstop recalls and problems, often with no way to fix anything in your garage. Ford Motor has been so overwhelmed with recalls that they now send a mobile repairman to customers to fix the recall at their house instead of having the customers fill up Ford’s service centers.

In addition to proprietary parts, there’s the inability to DIY fix things. It was back in the 1950s that a new trend came to be: products that were not designed to be serviced. Irons, toasters, and other electronics that were manufactured so that if you wanted to fix them, you would have to, quite literally, break them more. They accomplished this through carefully choosing where to place rivets, screws, and welds.

“Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you’ve finally paid for them, they’re used up.” - Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman.

Now here’s one you’re going to laugh at because I guarantee you can relate to it: planned obsolescence through the user manual! Did you know that making the manual difficult to understand is not by accident? Whether it’s written in a different language, in microscopic print, completely confusing, the wrong directions entirely, or not even included with the product, it is all by design, and this has been going on for over 70 years! Additionally, companies intentionally hide or otherwise obscure the model number so that replacement parts, even if they are available, cannot be ordered. Then, through releasing lots of similar model numbers with very minor visual changes, the only difference being the parts that are designed to break, the purchaser becomes uncertain of specifically which parts he needs to order and instead buys a new unit.

Another method of planned obsolescence along those lines is rapidly changing technology, thus forcing everyone to have to purchase the newer version. When I was in elementary school, everyone listened to tapes, then it became CDs, then MP3s, all very rapidly. This forced most people to have to purchase a tape player, a CD player, and then an MP3 player, not to mention rebuying their favorite music for each because an MP3 player doesn’t take tapes. And before my time, it was 45s, and before that, it was records. Imagine the windfall for electronics manufacturers. Speaking of this, did you know manufacturers intentionally hold back releasing the better model? They do this on purpose so that there is always a reason to buy another. So let’s say they have an MP3 player that they know the main button will break on. That product is pushed to market. The next version, which will be released a year or so later, has a button that won’t break right away, but instead the headphone jack will only work for six months, and so on.

Another example of planned obsolescence is expiration dates, which are intentionally set to a short lifespan—much shorter than the actual usability of the item. One phenomenal example of this is toothpaste. The tube will tell you it expires in a year, but if you dig deep on the manufacturer’s website, you will see the stuff, which is all chemicals, lasts many, many years. The reality is, there is no reason to throw out the gallon of milk unless it smells or tastes off. If you take a second to reflect on this, although it sounds relatively harmless, it is senselessly filling landfills and driving up the cost of living because people see the sour cream expired three days ago and pitch it immediately.

And if that’s not bad enough, there are products designed to go bad as soon as possible because once opened, there is no way to actually reseal them, such as in the case of potato chips. Would it kill them to put a Ziploc-style top on the bag? Answer: Yes, it actually would. They need them to become stale as soon as possible. Another example of this was when Lipton tea removed the individual gold foil wrappers that kept tea fresh.

Product developers soon found another brilliant trick: creating product containers designed to be impossible to use 25% or more of the product: the brush isn’t long enough to reach the paint in the lower quarter of the container; the jar is too narrow to fit your hand in and it is too difficult to scoop the remaining portion of the product out; squeeze tubes that are impossible to squeeze the bottom portion up, and so on. It was soon discovered that each year millions of tubes of lipstick were being thrown away with a half inch of lipstick in the bottom of the tube because the mechanism will not lift it up, so unless you jam your finger inside the product, there is no way to access it. I should mention that there are no legal regulations mandating that containers be designed for complete emptying.

In 1958 an article appeared in Design News (a journal for product designers and engineers). It was called “Product Death Dates—A Desirable Concept?” It asked, “Is purposeful design for product failure unethical?” It concluded that, before the 1960s had arrived, consumers were spending three times the amount they would on products had they been able to obtain a product that wasn’t designed to fail. It also concluded that planned obsolescence is a good thing because it forces people to buy over and over. The author went on to rally his readers (the engineers of our products) to do the economy a favor by downgrading the products they develop to ensure they do not last forever and instead work properly, but only for a short time.

Now think about this, folks: we are paying at least three times over for damn near every tangible item! This is in addition to inflation and manipulation of currency. People scream minimum wage is too low, but the reality is that the cost of living is too high because of bullshit like having to rebuy every item thrice over, and each time we purchase it, we are also paying for it to be certified kosher, which, as of the 1960s, was increasing the cost of meat by 7%—and that’s just meat! The kosher certification extends to electronics, appliances, dish soap, toiletries, everything! And it’s not just kosher certification driving up costs, although nearly all products in America, including the steel and screws used to make appliances, have been stamped kosher; it is all of the certifications—organic, halal, the NSF racket—there are so many of these things, each adding more and more cost. [Learn more in my eBook The Kosher Mafia]. So, in addition to manufacturing products to fail so we have to purchase them an average of three times each, we are also greatly overpaying for each of those purchases!

The same year, Design News tossed out the suggestion that engineers downgrade their creations; furniture quality had become so poor that new items were arriving to dealers with defects, but instead of taking measures to produce better products, the industry found ways to hide the problems. Beautiful hardwood was replaced by knotty scraps, and, for the first time ever, issues like broken bedframes and chair legs that snap or split became a thing. Outdoor aluminum furniture manufacturers lowered the gauge of aluminum by 50% and narrowed the tubes, yet the price did not decrease. Fabric factories began producing material that had printing defects, and the fabric itself was blended to create a low-end synthetic. These new blends were so poor that they often couldn’t withstand being laundered.

Of course, sites like Reddit (which are fully controlled) will tell you there is no such thing as planned obsolescence.

Even my spelling and grammar computer program is urging me to change the sentence I wrote, which said, “There has been a worldwide plot to downgrade the products we are allowed to have.” According to the grammar program, the correct sentence should read as, “There is no evidence of a worldwide plot to downgrade the products we are allowed to have…”

Perhaps the Reddit author and the grammar program, before making such claims, should have taken the time to read Vance Packard’s book called The Waste Makers.

Being that this book was published in 1960, they have had ample time to read it. Isn’t it interesting when the ones calling you a conspiracy theorist are actually the theorist espousing lies?

Tragically, this scheme was not the only one being pulled on consumers; it was run in conjunction with a mass psychological operation, compliments of worldwide advertising agents and the industries they represent colluding to drive their profits up. The second part of this massive conspiracy was getting us to volunteer to pay for every item even more times…

NEXT READ: The Real Reasons We Live Paycheck-to-Paycheck and the Psychological Operation that Made it Happen [Part 2]

Do you appreciate my journalism? If so, please keep me hydrated by buying me a coffee or making a Ko-Fi donation. Alternatively, you can grab some of my eBooks over at Shadowbanned Library. Your support is what allows me to do deep dives into important topics that nobody else is talking about. It is my belief that articles like this one are incredibly important untold history because it sheds light on why we have collectively found ourselves in the situation we are in. Be sure to read Parts 2 and 3. They are both critically important. Thank you for supporting me!

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Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

by Greg Reese - The Reese Report

The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first direct tax levied by Parliament on the colonies, which had no elected representatives in Parliament to approve or debate it. British Parliament later stated in the Declaratory Act that they had “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever.” According to the story, the American Revolution wasn’t about the size of the tax, it was about the right of Britain to impose taxes on the colonists without their consent.

From 1868 to 1913, 90 percent of federal tax revenue came from alcohol and tobacco taxes. In 1909, President Taft recommended that Congress propose a constitutional amendment to give the government power to tax incomes without apportioning the burden.

In 1913, the Federal Reserve Bank was established. Along with it came the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave what many court cases show to be undue power to the Internal Revenue Service. This includes case law that was withheld from IRS employee training, such as Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co. Bill Benson’s findings, published in “The Law That Never Was,” make a case that the 16th Amendment was not legally ratified and that the Secretary of State committed fraud when he declared it so in 1913.

The 1913 Form 1040 shows that only those with annual incomes of at least $3,000 were instructed to file an income tax return — the equivalent to approximately $98,000 in 2025. And only about three percent of the population was subject to the income tax. In the years following the Great Depression taxes were raised from about a tenth of a person’s income to a third. And during WWII the taxpayer base was expanded from 4 million people to 42 million. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 required employers to withhold federal income tax from an employee’s paycheck each pay period and send the payment directly to the IRS.

There is no statute in the Internal Revenue Code that clearly makes the average American wage earner liable to file a 1040 or pay income tax on their labor. And the Code of Federal Regulations, 26 CFR § 601.602, states explicitly: “The tax system is based on voluntary compliance.” The IRS counters that Congress gave the Secretary of the Treasury power to enforce these laws through involuntary collection if voluntary compliance fails.

In 2026, while many Americans struggle to make ends meet, and argue that the IRS is unconstitutional, the White House is targeting a July 4 deadline for the CLARITY Act to become law, which will be the legal framework for the agentic crypto economy, and comprehensive oversight by the IRS. Changes to Internal Revenue Code §6045 require brokers — “any person who is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person.” — to report digital asset transactions to the IRS.

This is happening on the international level as well, by the time the agentic AI commerce is fully running, every wallet, every broker, and every cross-border data-sharing agreement will already be wired directly into the IRS and its international counterparts.

The US has explicitly rejected the CBDC model in favor of privately issued, dollar-backed stablecoins regulated under the GENIUS Act and soon the CLARITY Act. But the surveillance and programmability concerns associated with CBDCs are still being achieved through state-mandated reporting wrapped around privately issued tokens that are functionally just as traceable.

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin which handles 98% of AI agent payments, is positioning itself as infrastructure for tokenized carbon credits. And so if a future carbon tax were ever implemented, the infrastructure will already be in place for it.

continue reading...

The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

Dear Subscribers,

The #1 story this week is the replay of our livestream on Finding (OR Creating!) The Freedom Movement in Your Community. If you don’t already have some “Freedom Friends” in your town then we have some tips on how to find them (Tip#1: Check the Liberty Groups page on the Art of Liberty Foundation website at: ArtOfLiberty.org/Liberty-Groups/.

If you have a Liberty Group (OR know of a Liberty Group) that is not on our list, then please e-mail me at Etienne(at) ArtOfLiberty.org and we will add it!I threw some pictures and videos into the article from when we were fighting the scam of “The Covid” in Santa Cruz, California exposing empty hospitals, reopening businesses and parks, supporting restaurants trying to reopen, and forcing the city to abandon its policy of closing the beaches with beach parties and liberty bonfires until they caved in and told the LA Times that “The people refuse to be governed in this manner.”

I also included a video from Peggy Hall, The Healthy American where she covered our mask-less cash drops that generated MILLIONS of views and helped other communities to say: NO! to the slave mask! This is why it is so important to have a freedom group in your town to rally with when the organized crime “government” tries to pull some tyranny!

I stumbled across this meme today on the North American Voluntaryists Telegram Group today and have desperately been looking for the Father’s Day version!

Finally, I did a quick story about the 5th anniversary of the death of my friend Johnny “Hero” Hurley who risked his life to engage and neutralize an active shooter only to be shot in the back and killed by an idiot cop who shot first without properly understanding the situation and wasn’t charged with murder.

Finally, the Free State Project’s Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) kicks off this week in New Hampshire.

Read my article: New Hampshire’s Free State Project – How Freeing a Single State from “Government” Could Free Us All, to understand the “Big Idea” behind the Free State Project.

Read my article: What is the Deal with the Free State PARTY in New Hampshire? To understand how it is being attempted to be divided and conquered…

If you have ever wanted to go and visit New Hampshire, then this is the opportunity!

If you are enjoying our original journalism and Five Meme Friday, please consider becoming an Art of Liberty Foundation Sponsor. Freedom isn’t Free and we are having to spend $20,000 this month to create our own uncensorable infrastructure to combat the censorship of Substack.

We have some AMAZING perks to say: THANK YOU!

ArtOfLiberty.org/Sponsorship-Program/

Top Stories of the Week

From Isolation to Action: Finding (OR Creating!) The Freedom Movement In Your Community

The Replay of our June 14th Live Stream on Finding (OR Creating!) The Freedom Movement in YOUR Community!

Here is the replay from our June 14th LiveStream: From Isolation to Action - Finding (OR Creating!) The Freedom Movement in Your Area!

Liberty Group List at: ArtOfLiberty.org/Liberty-Groups/

Etienne: Hi, this is Etienne De La Boétie2 with the Art of Liberty Foundation. Welcome to our Sunday night live stream, which is something I think we’re going to begin doing more and more of. For those that aren’t familiar with the Art of Liberty Foundation, we are a startup public policy organization exposing the illegitimacy and the criminality of government. Essentially, our thesis is that government was never intended to protect life, liberty, and property. Government is best thought of as a technique for robbing and controlling society. And as voluntarists, we don’t believe that government is legitimate, desirable, or necessary. So we are advocates of something called real freedom, and there is a real freedom movement all around the world. In some cities and towns it is much stronger than others, but there are voluntarists and libertarian and freedom-oriented groups all around the United States.

Continue reading...

Videos of the Week

Cars are becoming CONTROLLED ACCESS. Keep your old car. New cars are a trap to UNOWNERSHIP. Welcome to Cuba.

Three Disturbing Trends in Car Ownership

By LawyerLisa

Three Disturbing Trends in Car Ownership:

1. The Subscription Model (0:44 - 4:21): Automakers like BMW, GM, Ford, and Tesla are increasingly locking hardware features (such as heated seats, remote start, or self-driving capabilities) behind monthly or annual subscription fees, even though the physical hardware is already installed in the vehicle at the factory.2. The Right to Repair Lockout (4:22 - 9:12): Manufacturers are utilizing proprietary software and complex diagnostic systems to prevent independent mechanics and owners from performing basic repairs. By requiring dealer-only tools and software authorization, they effectively create a monopoly on vehicle service.3. Mandated Remote Control (9:13 - 13:06): Federal mandates (such as the Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act) require new vehicles to include passive monitoring systems and “kill switches” intended for impaired driver prevention. The video warns that this infrastructure, which can track biometrics and disable engines, creates a massive potential for surveillance and misuse.

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LowKey Exposes Israel’s $14B Plot to Control TikTok to Algorithmically Suppress Evidence of Genocide

CIA Contractor Larry Ellison’s Oracle is the Lead Funder / Algorithmic Censor

Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Lowkey - Double Down News, adapted by Etienne de la Boetie2

Transcript

The landscape of digital expression experienced a fundamental shift following a critical realization by the Western ruling class and the Zionist lobby: they were losing the information war. As millions of young people used TikTok to witness and share the raw, unfiltered realities of apartheid and violence in real time—completely unburdened by the editorial filters of traditional legacy media—the organic solidarity of an entire generation became viewed as an ideological national security threat. Despite public claims by U.S. lawmakers feigning concern over data privacy and Chinese surveillance, internal anxieties were driven entirely by the viral prevalence of pro-Palestinian content. This ideological battle was explicitly highlighted in late 2025 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly declared to a room of social media influencers that social media is the most vital battlefield in modern warfare.

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“Government”, Media and Academia

Criminality Exposed

Trump’s Family Crypto Firm Is Expected to Get Federal Banking Privileges

Trump-appointed bank regulators’ crypto-friendly approach is likely to extend to World Liberty Financial, despite ethics concerns.

Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Jeff Stein, NOTUS

President Donald Trump’s family crypto business is expected to soon be allowed to operate like a bank — a decision that would give U.S. companies a new route to steer money to the president.

World Liberty Financial, the stablecoin and trading platform co-founded by Trump and his three sons, applied for a national trust bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, on Jan. 5. The Trump-appointed head of the OCC, Jonathan Gould, is due to announce his decision soon, and industry experts and congressional aides expect it to go in the Trump family’s favor.

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How Deep Are The Newsoms In It?

It seems impossible — or just too revolting — to keep up with the financial hanky-panky of California Gov.

Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Tyler Durden for ZeroHedge

Authored by Stephen Green via PJMedia.com,

This deep...

It seems impossible — or just too revolting — to keep up with the financial hanky-panky of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and First Partner (gag) Jennifer Siebel Newsom. But thanks to a couple of investigative reporters with stronger stomachs than I have, let’s see if I can’t put everything you need to know into one easily digestible column.

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The Art of Liberty Foundation... in Spanish!

We are adding a new section to Five Meme Friday to promote our new Substack, Telegram group, Instagram, and translations of To See the Cage is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many in Spanish. Please tell your Spanish speaking friends! “Go Paid” on our Spanish Substack to support getting voluntaryist ideas, books, and memes translated into Spanish AND get a free paperback copy of To See the Cage is To Leave It in Latin American Spanish.

Nuestro tributo a F.A. Hayek: el economista ganador del Premio Nobel que destruyó [¡intelectualmente!] el socialismo

La Fundación Art of Liberty rinde homenaje al ganador del Premio Nobel F.A. Hayek, uno de los economistas más importantes que jamás haya existido, con una campaña que distribuirá simultáneamente el nuevo libro: Hayek para el siglo XXI - Ensayos de economía política y ofrecerá copias impresas gratuitas del libro a cualquiera que se suscriba de forma paga a nuestro Substack como miembro anual y/o realice cualquier pedido en ArtOfLiberty.org/store.

Esta introducción a F.A. Hayek incluye su biografía, memes, frases, las “Batallas de rap” con el economista Lord John Maynard Keynes, y la primera entrega de nuestra distribución de Hayek para el siglo XXI - Ensayos de economía política: la introducción del libro escrita por Thomas J. DiLorenzo, presidente del Instituto Mises y editor de Hayek para el siglo XXI.

También estamos agregando el PDF completo de Hayek para el siglo XXI a nuestra memoria USB incensurable de la libertad: The Liberator (El Liberador).

Continuar leyendo...

“Daily News of The Week”

Fed Up With Food Delivery App Fees & Tips? Barclays Has Terrific News

Whether consumers are ordering from Uber Eats or DoorDash, delivery costs before tips now average roughly $8 to $10 per order.

By Tyler Durden — ZeroHedge

Whether consumers are ordering from Uber Eats or DoorDash, delivery costs before tips now average roughly $8 to $10 per order. Add in the tip, and the basic meal for one at Chipotle, such as a burrito bowl, moves into unaffordable territory for many working-class folks. The result is that food delivery, once pitched as a mass-market convenience, is increasingly looking like a discretionary luxury.

Barclays internet equity analyst Ross Sandler penned a note on Wednesday titled “Autonomous Food Delivery Likely Hits Critical Mass By 2030,” covering how automation in last-mile delivery could push delivery costs down to as little as $1 per order.

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VP Vance Confirms Hormuz Strait To Reopen ‘Toll Free’, Says ‘Israel Has Seat At Table’

Vice President JD Vance Begins Optics Roadshow to Boost Investor Confidence On Deal

By Tyler Durden-ZeroHedge

Summary:

Vice President JD Vance Begins Optics Roadshow to Boost Investor Confidence On Deal

Vice President JD Vance Begins Optics Roadshow to Boost Investor Confidence On Deal

Iran Offers 60-Day Toll-Free Hormuz Transit As 100s Of Ships Await Reopening

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Fox Buys Roku In $22 Billion Deal To Build “Next-Gen Media” Giant

Fox agreed to acquire Roku for $160 per share in a cash-and-stock deal, valuing Roku at around $22 billion.

Etienne Note: Even more media consolidation. See my article: The Propaganda Matrix to understand how easy it is for organized crime that creates money out of thin air to buy up and consolidate the media into a small handful of companies to control every screen and deceive the world.

By Tyler Durden-ZeroHedge

Fox agreed to acquire Roku for $160 per share in a cash-and-stock deal, valuing Roku at around $22 billion. The deal marks a major push by Fox into connected TV, streaming advertising, and direct-to-consumer distribution.

On Friday, Roku shares jumped 20% to a four-year high on Bloomberg news that the company was in talks to be acquired by an unnamed media company. That created a wave of suspense over the weekend among Wall Street research desks, which published several notes speculating on potential acquirers.

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US military begins construction of ‘huge base’ outside Gaza to oversee Trump’s colonization plan

While talks in Cairo center on disarming Hamas, Israel has kept killing hundreds of Palestinians without accountability and is expanding its control over the strip despite an alleged ‘ceasefire’ Israe

By News Desk- The Cradle

The US military has begun constructing a “huge base” on the Gaza envelope to implement US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the strip, Israel Hayom reported on 13 June.

The US base, being built near the Israeli military base at Reim settlement, will function as both a military and civilian headquarters for the organizations and forces arriving in the area to implement the Trump plan.

Israelconflict reports

In February 2025, Trump proposed a US “takeover” of the Gaza Strip.

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Sasha Latypova’s 3-Part Told-You-So: She Predicted RFK Jr. Resignation + Covid was Chemical Aerosol + Ukraine Bio-Labs

Latypova Had Predicted RFK Jr. Would Quit Before Liability Immunity for Covid Countermeasures Expires on July 18th

By Sasha Latypova, Due Diligence and Art

Dear Readers, this is a quick “told you so” post in 3 parts. I am not gloating, and I don’t have a crystal ball or any special super powers.

The HHS account on X currently denies this rumor, but nothing has been posted by RFK Jr himself so far.

My serious interpretation of this ridiculous nonsense - Malone posting “rumors” is the same old deep state tactic of proactive information gathering. The puppeteers want to run the Kennedy Muppet for President in 2028, but the current HHS Scy Muppet has been chewed a lot and has became quite stinky. It needs to get laundered and aired out a bit. Maybe it needs to sit outside of the government and run some “truth bombs” podcast for 12 mo or so in hopes of recovering some lost credibility. I don’t know, nor do I care. It’s beyond tragic and really funny at this point.

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Israeli Ministers Say Israel Isn’t Bound by US-Iran Deal, Won’t Withdraw From Lebanon

Iran reaffirmed that any deal with the US hinges on an end to Israel’s war in Lebanon

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com

In the wake of the US and Iran announcing a Memorandum of Understanding to end the conflict between the two nations that includes a ceasefire in Lebanon, Israeli ministers have said Israel isn’t bound by the agreement.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed that the IDF will not withdraw from its so-called “security zones” in southern Lebanon, which include a major swathe of Lebanese territory, and will also continue the occupation in southwest Syria and Gaza.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I are leading a clear policy that determines that the IDF will remain in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, without any time limit, to protect, from there, the border and Israeli communities against jihadist elements,” Katz said.

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The Army bought 10,000 IVAS headsets. Soldiers won’t use them.

Soldiers said the headsets caused neck strains and headaches during use in the field. The Army spent close to $2 billion on the systems, which will be put in storage.

Etienne Note: Another $2B wasted on weapons we don’t need for wars based on lies and manufactured evidence.

By Patty Nieberg, Task & Purpose

The Army spent close to $2 billion developing the now-shelved IVAS headset since 2018, a federal watchdog found. Army photo by Courtney Bacon.

The Army spent over a billion dollars on nearly 10,000 augmented-reality headsets for soldiers to wear in combat. A federal watchdog reported this week that they won’t end up being used.

The Government Accountability Office looked at programs across the Department of Defense that “exceeded cost estimates and delivery schedules — wasting billions of dollars and decades of time,” according to a report released Tuesday. One of the programs highlighted in the report is the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS headset program.

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The Cause Behind ‘Ozempic Face’ and What You Can Do About It

Fast weight loss often feels like a success — until you look in the mirror and realize something else has changed.

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola

Fast weight loss often feels like a success — until you look in the mirror and realize something else has changed. Many people using drugs like Ozempic to drop weight quickly are noticing their faces look older, thinner, and more tired. The cheeks that once gave definition start to hollow, skin loses its firmness, and wrinkles seem to deepen overnight.

What’s happening isn’t just surface-level. When fat disappears too quickly, your skin loses the very structure that keeps it supported, while your metabolism strains to adapt to the sudden energy drop. This combination leaves you not only depleted but visibly aged. The trend has become so widespread that experts have given it a name — “Ozempic face.”

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Gun Safety: Violent Crime Drops as More Americans Pack Heat

Alessandra Coote was walking on a trail with her 2-year-old daughter and dog two-and-a-half years ago when a man began yelling at her and threatened to kill her dog.

by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClearWire

Alessandra Coote was walking on a trail with her 2-year-old daughter and dog two-and-a-half years ago when a man began yelling at her and threatened to kill her dog. When the petite single mom made it back to her Utah home, she decided she needed a firearm for protection.

A few months later, while living in what she described as a “shady part of town,” a homeless man threatened her. After that encounter, she began regularly carrying a firearm under Utah’s Constitutional Carry law.

Coote, who just graduated this spring from the University of Utah, says carrying the gun has given her the confidence to feel safe in public. “It’s been life-changing,” she told RealClearInvestigations. Although she has never had to draw or fire the weapon, she has faced a threatening individual when she was armed, but stopped the attack by merely letting the man know she was carrying.

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Irreversible: The Rise of Sex Change from Fringe Subculture to Multibillion-Dollar Industry

When I interviewed Patrick Hahn in April of 2024, I already knew the shape of his work.

By Patrick D Hahn, Lies are Unbecoming

When I interviewed Patrick Hahn in April of 2024, I already knew the shape of his work. Across four books in four years — on psychiatric genetics, antidepressants, the ADHD industry, and the COVID shots — he had built a method I had come to trust: go back to the primary literature, follow the money, and refuse to mistake institutional consensus for evidence. He is a biologist and a university teacher by training, not a physician, and he has always been candid that his outsider’s vantage is the point. He reads the studies the experts cite and notices what those studies actually say, as opposed to what we are told they say. Irreversible is the latest and boldest application of that method, and it is, I think, his most important book.

Hahn announces his hand on the first page: this is “a work of advocacy,” and he refuses to pretend otherwise, arguing that what the subject needs is not a balanced book but a balanced debate — one he says has been ruthlessly foreclosed. From there he does something few of the subject’s commentators have bothered to do: he goes back to the beginning. The book traces medicalized sex reassignment from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research in 1920s Berlin, where the first such surgeries were performed, through Harry Benjamin, the rise and fall of the Johns Hopkins gender clinic, John Money and the David Reimer catastrophe, and on to the modern battles over pediatric care, the collapse of London’s Tavistock service, and the Cass Review. It is genuine history, carefully sourced, and it reframes the present by showing how recent and how contingent the whole enterprise really is.

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12 Simple Sustainable Productivity Habits That Actually Work

Building sustainable productivity habits is one of the smartest investments you can make in your career, well-being, and long-term happiness.

By LifeDev, LifeDev

Building sustainable productivity habits is one of the smartest investments you can make in your career, well-being, and long-term happiness. We live in a culture that often glorifies hustle, all-nighters, and squeezing every last drop of energy out of our days, but the truth is that this approach simply does not work over time.

People burn out, lose motivation, and eventually accomplish less than those who pace themselves wisely. The good news is that there are simple, science-backed strategies that allow you to be consistently productive without sacrificing your physical or mental health.

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David Friedman: Eugenics and Evolution

Does the Welfare State Make It Easier for the Undesirable to Survive?

Etienne Note: If you are interested in the history of Eugenics, then see my article: Solving Covid - The Covid 19 Eugenics, Vaccine/Drug Scam Timeline

By David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack

A claim I have seen in discussions of eugenics is that modern institutions, in particular those of the welfare state, prevent evolution from working, make it easier for the unfit to survive and reproduce, and that humans should intervene. There is a legitimate point in that claim but putting it in terms of fitness is misleading; in the evolutionary context fitness is defined by the ability to get copies of your genes into future generations. The complaint is not that a welfare state lets the unfit survive and so makes the population less fit but that the characteristics that lead to fitness in a welfare state are by other criteria less desirable, lead to less economic growth, less scientific progress, a population less able to defend itself against aggression, less of something else the person making the argument views as more important than evolutionary fitness. Sometimes the implicit background to the argument is the worry that at some point in the future civilization will collapse on a population no longer able to deal with that environment.

What characteristics are selected for, hence what characteristics make you fit, are different in a welfare state than under laissez-faire, in a society with reliable birth control than in one without, in a polygamous society than in a monogamous one, in a rich society than a poor one. A rich society with reliable birth control produces very nearly the same selective pressures as a welfare state, since in both how many children you produce and bring to adulthood depends mostly on how many you want not on how many you can afford.

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AI Data Centers: The Real Reason They’re Going Up Everywhere

Who’s paying for them. Why it’s happening this fast. What the buildout is actually for. Why you should care.

By The Golden Order, The Golden Order

AI Data Centers: The Real Reason They’re Going Up Everywhere Who’s paying for them. Why it’s happening this fast. What the buildout is for. Why you should care.

I live in Montana but I am from Pennsylvania so I follow a Facebook page called I live In Pa. I kept seeing AI data centers on this channel split-screened against the farmland and covered bridges they’re replacing. Larry Fink’s picture and shareholder letter, where he said the quiet part out loud about how they get paid for. So I sat down and pulled the threads.

This is what came out of it. It’s longer than I usually publish. Every cut lost something the rest needed, so here it is at full length. By the time everyone agrees on what this buildout is for, the concrete will already be poured. Right now is the window — the language is still being decided, the legal challenges are still possible, and the public memory of similar buildouts is still warm.

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Merck Ignored Gardasil Safety Warnings From Its Own Trial Investigator, Court Documents Reveal

A Danish physician who led Merck-sponsored Gardasil clinical trials concluded the HPV vaccine was the probable cause of POTS

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., The Defender

A Danish physician who led Merck-sponsored Gardasil clinical trials and later ran a government clinic for injured patients concluded the HPV vaccine was the probable cause of POTS and chronic fatigue-like conditions in some recipients. In a report submitted as evidence in a lawsuit against Merck, Dr. Jesper Mehlsen said Merck ignored the safety warnings.

Merck rejected adverse event reports from a clinician working under one of the drugmaker’s own Gardasil trial investigators — and later dismissed the investigator’s analysis linking the HPV vaccine to rare autoimmune and autonomic conditions in some patients, according to a recently released expert report.

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US Finally Capitulates with ‘Memorandum’ of Surrender

Etienne Note: Was the US forced into a war by the Mossad / Epstein “Brownstone Operation” that installed a compromised President to do the bidding of Israel?

Etienne Note: Was the US forced into a war by the Mossad / Epstein “Brownstone Operation” that installed a compromised President to do the bidding of Israel? Did the Iranians play along with a war where both sides pulled their punches to crank the oil price through the roof to enrich certain companies (and “governments”) over others while waging economic warfare against the tax slaves? Did the “war” provide cover for the Israelis to commit war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon? Are American tax slaves about to pay more for the reconstruction of Iran after paying more at the pump?

By Simplicius, Simplicius

The US has finally capitulated in its disastrously failed war against Iran, reportedly drafting a memorandum of understanding which is highly favorable to the Islamic Republic, and gains as concession nothing more than the promise that “Iran will not obtain nuclear weapons”—a position Iran had already long held.

The most explosive detail is the alleged $300 billion “reconstruction fund” that Iran will be entitled to once the deal is sealed.

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Goldman Sach’s List of Top 20 College Majors Most (and Least!) Exposed to AI Job Disruptions

Goldman analysts led by Pierfrancesco Mei told clients that early signals are emerging, showing how college students are adapting to AI-driven labor market disruption.

By Tyler Durden — ZeroHedge

The rapid adoption of AI across corporate America is stoking anxiety among recent and upcoming college graduates, many of whom fear that the entry-level white-collar labor market is shrinking just as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Goldman analysts led by Pierfrancesco Mei told clients that early signals are emerging, showing how college students are adapting to AI-driven labor market disruption. Students are shifting away from majors tied to high automation risk and weak job growth, and toward fields where AI and automation are less likely to have an impact.

The labor market for recent college graduates has softened more sharply than that of the broader U.S. workforce ever since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022.

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Chinese lab Z AI released GLM-5.2 - a free open model going toe-to-toe with GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8.

Giving away top-tier AI for free is a flex that lowkey terrifies every paid model on Earth.

By Z.ai, Z.ai

We’re introducing GLM-5.2, our latest flagship model for long-horizon tasks. It marks a substantial leap in long-horizon task capability over its predecessor GLM-5.1 and, for the first time, delivers that capability on a solid 1M-token context. GLM-5.2’s new capabilities include:

Solid 1M Context: A solid 1M-token context that stably sustains long-horizon work

Solid 1M Context: A solid 1M-token context that stably sustains long-horizon work

Advanced Coding with Flexible Effort: Stronger coding capabilities with multiple thinking effort levels to balance performance and latency

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Let’s Talk About [The]Tetanus [Shot] - Do you need a booster?

Is the Tdap in pregnancy safe?

By Marcella Piper-Terry

Note: This article is about tetanus. There is no such thing as a “tetanus shot” anymore. The manufacturers stopped making the single tetanus shot in 2012. Since that time, getting a “tetanus shot” means getting either a DTaP or Tdap, depending on the person’s age, with DTaP being the option for infants and children up to age 7 years. Tdap is the version that is given to adults and children aged 7 and up. Tdap is also the one given to pregnant women. Because we cannot talk about the “tetanus shot” without discussing DTaP and Tdap, this article presents information about the childhood and adult vaccines, focusing more on the Tdap, particularly with regard to “tetanus boosters” and Tdap given to pregnant women.

“Help! My child cut herself on a piece of broken glass while washing dishes and she needs stitches. We are in the Emergency Room. They want to give her a tetanus shot. I’m scared. We don’t vaccinate, but the thought of tetanus is terrifying! What should I do???”

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A New Era of Super-Hybrid Cars Is Coming

Extended-range electric vehicles promise to reduce costs and appeal to America’s appetite for adventure. And they’re coming to showrooms soon.

By Tom Voelk, The New York Times

The future is always on its way, even if, in the automotive world lately, not especially punctual. Some predictions had it that the American fleet would be mostly electric by 2035. That aggressive timetable has been delayed by a triple whammy of pricing, misinformation and political whiplash.

Years of planning by automakers have been scrapped, with tens of billions of dollars briskly written off by accountants. Yet most automakers still believe electrification is inevitable. The next era is likely to include extended-range electric vehicles, or, inelegantly, EREVs.

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Why Dividend Stocks, Bonds, and Real Estate No Longer Solve the Income Problem

Ideally, a portfolio of high-quality dividend-paying stocks grows large enough to provide meaningful investment income.

By Nick Giambruno, Doug Casey’s International Man

Ideally, a portfolio of high-quality dividend-paying stocks grows large enough to provide meaningful investment income.

The ultimate goal is to generate enough after-tax dividend income to cover your monthly living expenses, keep pace with—or exceed—inflation, and continue growing over time.

For planning purposes, use 6.8% as the inflation hurdle rate, reflecting the long-term average growth of the money supply.

In practical terms, your after-tax dividend income should grow by at least 6.8% per year just to preserve purchasing power and offset average currency debasement.

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“The Situation Has Become Unsustainable”: Apple To Hike Prices To Offset Soaring Memory Costs

A New Reason to Hate Data Centers: Surging Inflation and Ravenous Memory Demand

Etienne Note: It looks like Data Centers are being blamed on the soaring cost of everything from electricity to iPhones while the excessive monetary creation from fractional reserve banking and government is being given a pass.

By Tyler Durden— ZeroHedge

Up until now, Americans primarily hated the flood of data centers popping up around the country like mushrooms (at least those that haven’t been canceled or delayed due to regulatory pushback, lack of electricity or outright hostility) because of surging electricity prices and the rising tide of unemployment as chabots gradually make America’s white collar workers obsolete. Now they can add surging consumer price inflation to the list of reasons to hate data centers, whose ravenous demand for memory has sent prices to record highs.

According to the WSJ, Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

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The UK’s Rape Gang Report Released- Evidence That 250,000 White British Girls Have Been Raped by Primarily Muslims Since 1950s

16-month investigation that resulted in the 200-page report was privately funded by 20,000 concerned citizens

Etienne Note: I thought the British “government” was supposed to protect the British people from exactly this?

By MP Rupert Lowe and The Expose News—G. Edward Griffin’s Need To Know

UK MP Rupert Lowe initiated the Raper Gang Inquiry because the British establishment refused to acknowledge the rape and torture of 250,000 white British girls. Rupert Lowe said the 16-month investigation that resulted in the 200-page report was privately funded by 20,000 concerned citizens and was spearheaded by attorney Graham Smith. Lowe said that private prosecutions will be pursued and that authorities who failed the young girls will be publicly named.

Mr. Lowe blamed the failure to protect the girls on government ministers, the civil service, local government, police, social services, judges, the National Health Services (NHS), and the media.

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Scared, Idiots Cops Cost Their City $2.5M by Shooting “Hero Hurley” in the Back

A Tribute to Killing of Hero Johnny Hurley by Unaccountable Police

There has been a picture of Johnny Hurley in my book “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! since the 3rd edition in 2019. Johnny was a friend and ally. On June 21st, 2021 he risked his life to engage an active shooter in Arvada, Colorado. He neutralized a mentally ill gunman who had already killed a police officer and was shooting up the town.

Johnny was shot in the back and killed by responding Arvada, CO officer Kraig Brownlow who was, for some reason not afforded to mere mortals, was not charged with murder for the crime.

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Modern Wars Cannot Be Won Without Kamikaze Drones, Paris Defense Show Makes Clear

Ukraine Drone Production: 2m last year and was expected to reach 4m this year, is actually on track to reach 7m by the end of the year!

By Tyler Durden-ZeroHedge

One of the world’s largest defense and security trade shows is wrapping up this week near Paris at the Paris Nord Villepinte exhibition center, where equity analysts from Paris-based Kepler Cheuvreux attended the event.

Eurosatory focuses mostly on land and air-to-land warfare, including tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, drones, counter-drone systems, missiles, air defense, communications, battlefield software, logistics, robotics, military medicine, and homeland security systems.

Fire Point updates their Eurosatory stand this morning. #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/2RwlJlh8fW

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Upcoming Liberty Events

Derrick Broze – The 2026 Activation Tour, Multiple Cities, US, May 1st – July 26th, 2026

Honoring Hero Johnny Hurley, Arvada, CO, US, June 21st, 2026

Porcupine Freedom Festival, June 21st – 28th, 2026

Man Camp, Henniker, New Hampshire, US, June 21st – 28th, 2026

Weare Fair, Weare, NH, US, June 23rd – 24th, 2026

Why Is The Healthcare System Broken?, Windham, New Hampshire, US, June 27th, 2026

54th Annual Rainbow Gathering, Northern California, US, July 1st – 7th, 2026

FreedomPalooza 2026, Northumberland, NH, US, July 8th – 13th, 2026

The End of Tyranny, New Britain, CT, US & Online, July 11th, 2026

Approaching Humanity, Phoenix Area, AZ, US, July 17th – 18th, 2026

Midwest Peace & Liberty Fest, Lake Satoshi, MI, US, August 6th – 9th, 2026

Liberty International World Conference, Kathmandu, Nepal, August 7th – 9th, 2026

Northeast Unschooling Conference, Pittsfield, MA, US, August 15th – 18th, 2026

International Conference for Anarchist Studies, Manchester, UK, August 26th – 28th, 2026

Free Cities Conference, Roatan, Honduras, September 3rd – 6th, 2026

VonuFest, Illinois, US, September 21st – 28th, 2026

AnarCon, Gore, VA, US, September 25th – 27th, 2026

The Natural Freedom Summit – Reclaim Your Health. Reignite Your Purpose. Reconnect with Nature, Online Event, Dates TBA, 2026

The 2026 Christians for Liberty Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, Saturday, October 17th, 2026

Approaching Humanity - Phoenix Area, AZ - Join Larken and Amanda Rose for a live event and book launch focused on truth, freedom, and responsibility. Tickets and info at TheRoseChannel.com/humanity.

Memes Bonanza

Truth Music of the Week

Alais Clay – The Legend of Johnny Hurley

This weekend marks the 5^th anniversary of the death of Johnny “Hero” Hurley who was shot from behind and killed by the government’s monopoly police after neutralizing an active shooter. I tell the story of Johnny’s death in the article: Scared, Idiots Cops Cost Their City $2.5M by Shooting “Hero Hurley” in the Back. There will be a tribute to Johnny this Sunday, June 21^st from 1-4 PM in Old Towne Arvada where he was killed. This is Alais Clay’s moving tribute to Johnny.

libertarian Intentional Community Roundup

libertarian Intentional Community Roundup is where we cover libertarian and voluntaryist intentional communities and free private cities including Prospera (Honduras), The Free State Project (New Hampshire), Liberstad (Norway), Montelibero (Montenegro), Los Propietarios, (Argentina), Liberland (Croatia/Serbia border), Network States in general and Sea Steading (The Oceans). I am also covering secession movements including Greater Idaho, Please send details of any new happenings, projects or projects I am missing!

The Next Generation’s Fight Over New Hampshire’s Libertarian Project

Twenty-five years after libertarians began migrating to New Hampshire to consolidate power, young politicians are deciding whether to embrace their vision—or resist it.

Etienne Note: Check out my article on the Free State Project to understand what this article from The Nation is missing: Somewhere around half of Free State Project members are self-described voluntaryists, anarcho-capitalists and/or peaceful anarchists. One of the running jokes in the FSP is: What is the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist in the Free State Project? About six months! The reason is that, unlike many parts of the country, where you might never hear the well-reasoned, logical and moral arguments of voluntaryism, anarcho-capitalism and/or anarchism at a political get together, you start talking indoctrinated statism at an FSP gathering and you will face multiple, intelligent, articulate voices that will give you an intellectual curb stomping. We are happy that our statist brethren are kicking ass in state-level politics, but the bigger and more important revolution brewing is the largest population of voluntaryists in the world is helping roll back “government” and slowly and surely exposing the scam of “government,” of easily rigged elections, the illegitimacy and immorality of “democracy,” and the state stands ready to be our “Laboratory of Liberty” to prove you can have prosperity and abundance without organized crime “government.” THIS is why anonymous interests are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to divide and conquer the Free State Project and make it look like a Republican, Nationalist and/or white supremist thing.

By Genevieve Morrison — The Nation

In the summer of 2022, 13-year-old Anthony Henry often pedaled 25 minutes on his bike through the leafy streets of Derry, New Hampshire. It was a tiring effort for an unlikely destination: his local school board meetings. There, he was determined to rail against mask mandates at his middle school.

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Free State Project’s PorcFest Will Be Scattered Across New Hampshire This Year

The Free State Project’s summer staple event, PorcFest, is returning in the form of 10 mini festivals across New Hampshire

Etienne Note: Read my article: New Hampshire’s Free State Project – How Freeing a Single State from “Government” Could Free Us All, to understand the “Big Idea” behind the Free State Project. Read my article: What is the Deal with the Free State PARTY in New Hampshire? To understand how it is being attempted to be divided and conquered…

by ZACH LAIRD - InDepthNH.org

After 25 years of working to create a concentrated community of like-minded libertarians in the state, the Free State Project’s summer staple event, PorcFest, is returning in the form of 10 mini festivals across New Hampshire versus a central gathering, according to Executive Director Eric Brakey.

“Porcfest XXIII: Spontaneous Order” is the 23rd festival hosted by the Free State Project and will run from June 21-28 with 10 mini festivals scattered throughout the state for people to choose from. PorcFest is short for Porcupine Freedom Festival.

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Distributed PorcFest Starts Next Weekend

Etienne at a Previous ManCamp working some Iron!

PorcFest, the annual festival of the Free State Project kicks off next week in New Hampshire. Usually the event is held at Rogers Campground in Lancaster, NH. Here is a summary I did from 2023, this year it is distributed with events all over New Hampshire. Here are some of the ones that look the most interesting. If you ever wanted to check out New Hampshire then drive up and kick around for a weekend or two. You definitely want to check out: The Quill, the oldest Porcupine clubhouse in the State. ManCamp is great for teaching your kids the basics of blacksmithing, butchering, and other things every man should know + they are hosting a Bardo Farms Pig Roast. Visit the beach, spend a day at a lake, have a blast. The complete schedule is at : https://community.fsp.org/porcfest/

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The Facebook Group Jeremy Kauffman is a fed sent to destroy the liberty movement is now up to 157 207 225 249 257 269, members

How to Support the Art of Liberty Foundation

If you are enjoying our original journalism and Five Meme Friday, please consider becoming an Art of Liberty Foundation Sponsor. Freedom isn’t Free and we are having to spend $20,000 this month to create our own uncensorable infrastructure to combat the censorship of Substack.

We have some AMAZING perks to say: THANK YOU!

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Sincerely,

Etienne de la Boetie2

Executive Director,

The Art of Liberty Foundation

Author of: To See the Cage is to Leave It & “Government” The Biggest Scam in History ... Exposed!!

Watch:

The real question is not—or ought not be—why government was allowed to do something this bad. The real question is

Why allow any entity to have any nonconsensual power at all?

Do you see the difference?

We can envision it in terms of an imaginary “we are not the same” meme on taxation:

Bitching about the government doing this or that is rearranging deck chairs on a moral titanic. ALL involuntary governance is morally impermissible.

As long as you continue to grant that such entities have any legitimacy whatsoever, this crap will keep happening.

Please see it for what it is!

PS: Substack does not allow for Facebook videos to be linked in the same way as YouTube videos. So, here are links to the original video, the author’s Facebook page, and her business website.

She may or may not understand that government itself is the problem, rather than just “bad” government. But either way, she is as much its victim as the rest of us are. And in the case of her family’s and village’s need for firewood, all the more so.

As such, we support them in their plight.

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The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

by Dr. Joseph Mercola - The Defender

Independent testing of 51 popular toothpaste brands revealed 90% contained lead, 65% arsenic, 47% mercury and 35% cadmium. Only six toothpastes tested clean. Heavy metals enter toothpaste through contaminated raw materials like hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate and bentonite clay used in manufacturing.

Story at a glance:

• Independent testing of 51 popular toothpaste brands revealed 90% contained lead, 65% arsenic, 47% mercury and 35% cadmium. Only six toothpastes tested clean.

• Heavy metals enter toothpaste through contaminated raw materials like hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate and bentonite clay used in manufacturing.

• Lead and cadmium disrupt cellular functions, causing kidney damage, osteoporosis, anemia and various other health complications.

• Despite evidence, toothpaste companies refuse to remove heavy metals. Some even use legal means to intimidate whistleblowers.

• Switching to a homemade toothpaste made from coconut oil, baking soda and essential oils offers safer protection compared to mass-produced alternatives.

One product that’s an essential part of oral care is toothpaste. Sold in different colors and flavors, almost everyone has a preferred brand they regularly buy.

However, most people take toothpaste for granted and don’t think twice about what’s in it. As it turns out, the minty flavor you’ve been enjoying reveals a dark side — heavy metals.

Independent testing reveals heavy metal contamination in popular toothpaste brands

In an investigative report published by Lead Safe Mama, or LSM, an organization advocating for safety in consumer goods and lead poisoning prevention, they released an updated list of 51 popular toothpaste brands containing common heavy metals.

Spearheaded by Tamara Rubin, a filmmaker and environmental activist, their work has already resulted in six product recalls, showing their commitment to protecting public health.

• Heavy metals are in your toothpaste — In a summary of LSM’s report, 90% of samples had lead, 65% had arsenic, 47% had mercury and 35% had cadmium.

• The movement started many years ago — According to a report from The Guardian, Rubin’s campaign against heavy metals in toothpaste began 12 years ago. While working with children who had been exposed to heavy metals, she noticed that their families had a common toothpaste brand, which contained lead.

• Toothpaste will put your health at risk — The highest limits of the samples have been found to violate the state of Washington’s highest set limits, but not federal limits. Still, the federal government acknowledges the dangers of lead, saying that no level of exposure is safe.

• Manufacturers are not willing to change — Despite the shocking exposé by LSM, toothpaste manufacturers are turning a blind eye. In fact, many have attacked her, according to The Guardian:

  • “So far, none of the companies Lead Safe Mama checked have said they will work to get lead out of their product, Rubin said. Several sent her cease-and-desist letters, which she said she ignored, but also posted on her blog.

  • Some companies have defended themselves, often claiming that lead is found in trace levels throughout the environment and is impossible to avoid. Others have said the levels Rubin found are not concerning.”

• The root of exposure — According to Rubin’s research, many ingredients used in mass-produced toothpaste are the source of heavy metal exposure:

  • “Rubin said the contamination seems to lie in some ingredients added to toothpaste, including hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate and bentonite clay. Hydroxyapatite is extracted from cow bone and added because it allegedly helps teeth absorb calcium, though Rubin said she doubts it does. Calcium carbonate is added to help remove stains from teeth. Bentonite clay is a cleaning agent,” The Guardian reported.

  • “Those with the highest levels all had bentonite clay. Meanwhile, Rubin’s testing of hydroxyapatite and calcium carbonate as individual ingredients showed concerning levels of lead and other metals, suggesting those are the source.”

• Few toothpastes are safe to use — Rubin noted that so far, LSM has only found six toothpastes that have nondetectable levels for lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium.

For the full list of the toothpastes LSM has tested, refer to the image here (image credit: Lead Safe Mama, LCC). If you find your toothpaste in this list, get rid of it right away.

The presence of heavy metals in toothpaste is everywhere

LSM isn’t the only one shining a light on the dangers of heavy metals in mass-produced toothpaste. In a systematic review published in Frontiers in Dental Medicine, researchers are also aware of the growing dangers of these products.

The team analyzed 11 studies from around the world to gauge how widespread heavy metal contamination is in over-the-counter toothpastes. The sample size reviewed toothpastes from regions including Asia, Europe and Africa.

• Heavy metals in toothpaste are common — Overall, researchers consistently found concerning levels of heavy metals, notably lead, cadmium and chromium, across the tested products. The review highlighted that these heavy metals appeared frequently enough to pose genuine public health concerns.

• Lead was among the most troubling metals — It showed up in varying quantities, sometimes negligible, but in certain studies, levels soared as high as 6,313 parts per billion. For reference, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sets the limitations of lead at 20 parts per million, showing how much people are at risk when using these products.

• Cadmium appeared almost as frequently — Most of the toothpastes in the cited studies contained this metal. Research shows that even low levels of exposure to this heavy metal increase your risk for osteoporosis, as well as kidney and liver disease. It does this by causing mitochondrial dysfunction after exposure.

• Chromium is another dangerous heavy metal — Prevalent in most of the tested toothpastes, chromium has no reason to appear in these products. In fact, one of the cited studies in the review noted that this element was not supposed to be in toothpaste at all.

• Reckless manufacturing allows heavy metals to seep in — The researchers emphasized that the primary route these heavy metals use to get into toothpaste products is through the raw ingredients, often in areas where the soil naturally contains heavy metals. Unsurprisingly, when manufacturers do not thoroughly test these raw materials for contaminants, heavy metals easily slip into your toothpaste unnoticed.

• The effects of heavy metals on your health — From a biological standpoint, the reason these metals are so harmful revolves around how they disrupt key bodily functions at a cellular level. For instance, cadmium interferes directly with your kidneys’ filtration systems. In addition, it’s been found to affect the lungs and pancreas.

• Lead, meanwhile, targets multiple vital functions throughout your body. Exposure is linked to a wide range of issues, such as appetite loss, weight loss, vomiting, constipation, anemia, kidney failure, black gum deposits and irritability.

These findings reinforce the urgent need for better testing and monitoring for toothpaste.

As noted by the researchers:

“There is a need for specific guidelines on the limits for heavy metals in toothpastes, with a clear distinction between essential and nonessential metals.

“Toothpastes should not exceed the acceptable safety limits prescribed by regulatory agencies. Stringent quality assurance processes need to be developed and put into place by manufacturers and strictly assessed and evaluated by regulators.”

While regulatory bodies debate stricter guidelines, you can immediately protect yourself by carefully choosing oral care products that transparently disclose their ingredients and testing standards. Better yet, you can make your own toothpaste at home.

Dental floss is also filled with toxic chemicals

On a similar note, dental floss — another crucial part of optimal oral health — has been found to contain “forever” chemicals that affect your overall well-being. Specifically, one study showed an association between Oral-B Glide dental floss (as well as other household items) and higher exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

• PFAS are found in fluorinated floss — Out of 18 dental floss products, six of them (including three Glide products) contain polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a forever chemical commonly known as Teflon — the same material found in nonstick cookware. Conversely, floss that does not have detectable levels of fluorine is considered non-fluorinated and thus, unlikely to contain forever chemicals.

• Forever chemicals are found in the filament — Further analysis showed that the six flosses positive for forever chemicals contained “typical” values between 1,000 and 3,000 counts/µC (microcoulomb), a unit of electricity. However, the exact figures are hard to quantify because of how thin floss can get. Despite this roadblock, the researchers are convinced that flossing is one way many people are exposed to these toxins:

  • “This is the first evidence that flossing with PTFE-based dental floss could contribute to an individual’s body burden of PFASs, but additional data are required to verify this finding, for example, demonstrating the potential for PFASs in floss to migrate into saliva or onto hands.”

• Personal care products are also linked to elevated PFAS levels — Many of these products, including cosmetics, fragrances and lotions, incorporate PFAS to enhance texture, durability, or water resistance. This makes you unknowingly add to your chemical load each day.

• Consumer habits influence toxic load — The study revealed some differences between African-American and non-Hispanic white women. While both groups experienced elevated PFAS levels from product use, African-American women generally had higher concentrations, possibly due to different product preferences or socioeconomic factors influencing exposure levels.

• The consequences of exposure to your health — PFAS disrupt your health by interfering with hormone systems, which control nearly every bodily function, such as metabolism, immune function and reproduction. Once these chemicals enter your bloodstream, they mimic natural hormones, binding to receptors and altering normal hormone balance.

  • Another key mechanism involves PFAS affecting your liver, the primary organ responsible for detoxifying harmful substances. These chemicals overwhelm your liver, impairing its ability to filter toxins from your blood effectively. Over time, this impairment increases your risk of liver disease and even certain types of cancers.

• PFAS are highly persistent — This means they don’t easily break down. Once inside your body, these chemicals linger, continuing to disrupt your health long after initial exposure, hence the “forever” in their name.

  • Forever chemicals accumulate steadily, building up harmful concentrations that heighten your risk of chronic illness, particularly affecting organs and systems essential for maintaining good health. According to a report from The Conversation, they have the ability to remain in your body for decades.

Top tips to reduce exposure to heavy metals in oral health products

Now that you’re aware of the dangers lurking in many commercial toothpastes and dental floss, it’s important to take steps to reduce your exposure. Here are practical recommendations:

1. Choose toothpaste with verified ingredients — If making toothpaste at home isn’t practical for you, carefully look for companies that clearly state they test their toothpaste for heavy metals.

Look for products labeled “third-party tested” or “heavy metal-free,” and always read ingredient lists thoroughly. Transparency from brands helps you make healthier choices easily. LSM also has recommendations for toothpaste with nondetectable levels of heavy metals and fluoride. Again, I recommend reviewing the list to give you an idea of which products you should avoid and buy.

2. Choose safe dental floss alternatives — On a similar note, look for floss that is verified to not contain forever chemicals and other additives, such as fluoride. For example, there are vegan vegetable waxes that are smoother and glide between your teeth more easily compared to regular floss.

3. Adopt oil pulling as part of your daily routine — Oil pulling is a traditional oral hygiene practice that involves swishing organic coconut oil around your mouth for 10 to 15 minutes daily.

This practice effectively binds and removes toxins and pathogens from your mouth before they damage your oral health. Thus, oil pulling is also a great adjunct to brushing your teeth compared to commercial mouthwashes. For an in-depth guide, read “Why Is Oil Pulling Suddenly All the Rage?”

4. Work up a sweat regularly — If you’ve been using popular toothpaste brands, especially the ones mentioned by LSM, it’s highly likely you’ve been exposed to heavy metals. While switching to homemade toothpaste minimizes your exposure, it’s just one part of the equation — you should also work toward detoxifying yourself.

I recommend you start exercising regularly, as sweating has been shown to be one of the best ways to remove heavy metals from your body. Specifically, high-intensity exercise up to 75 minutes a week is effective.

But don’t go any higher than that, because you start to lose the longevity benefits associated with exercise. For more information, read “Unleash the Detoxifying Power of Sweating to Eliminate Heavy Metals.”

5. Make your own toothpaste at home — Creating your own toothpaste gives you full control over every ingredient. In the next section, I’ll share my recipe.

Here’s a healthy homemade toothpaste recipe you can try

While there are plenty of high-quality toothpastes on the market, I recommend making your own at home. It’ll be far cheaper and healthier for your oral health. Here’s a DIY recipe that I’ve been using for years now to great effect:

Directions:

1. Collect and rinse the eggshells — Scrape out the membranes from the eggshells and give them a quick water rinse.

2. Sterilize eggshells in two stages to kill salmonella — Boil in plain water for 10 minutes (skim off foam), then drain. Afterward, bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit (205 Celsius) for 15 to 20 minutes until bone-dry.

3. Grind eggshells to talc — Grind the shells in a coffee mill or spice grinder, then pass through a fine sieve. The powder should feel like cornstarch between your fingers. Any grit can scratch your tooth enamel.

4. Mix the paste — In a small bowl, combine baking soda, xylitol and eggshell powder. Mash in softened coconut oil until you hit a frosting-like texture. Stir in essential oil (and soap or clay if using).

5. Jar and store — Spoon into a clean glass jar. Cap tightly. This toothpaste keeps for two to three months in a cool cupboard, but stores longer in the fridge (coconut oil solidifies below 76 degrees Fahrenheit/24 degrees Celsius).

6. Brush — Use a pea-sized dab. Dip a dry brush or use a tiny spatula to avoid contaminating the jar. Apply in gentle circles for two minutes, then rinse. If you find the toothpaste to be too runny, add extra baking soda and/or eggshell powder. If it’s too stiff, add more coconut oil.

Making your own eggshell toothpaste certainly has its advantages, but remember that it’s not a miracle oral solution. Remember to maintain regular checkups with your dentist, floss and eat a healthy diet.

FAQs about heavy metals in toothpaste

Q: Are heavy metals commonly found in toothpaste?

A: Yes. Tests show heavy metals like lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury appear frequently in popular toothpaste brands, with some containing extremely high levels that damage your health.

Q: What health problems are linked to heavy metals in toothpaste?

A: Exposure to heavy metals from toothpaste is connected to serious health issues, including cognitive impairment, hormonal disruption, kidney and liver damage, anemia, osteoporosis and even behavioral problems in children.

Q: Why do toothpaste manufacturers allow heavy metals in their products?

A: Heavy metals enter toothpaste primarily through untested or poorly sourced ingredients like calcium carbonate, hydroxyapatite and bentonite clay. Manufacturers often neglect thorough testing and dismiss concerns by claiming these metals naturally occur in the environment.

Q: How can I reduce my exposure to heavy metals from toothpaste?

A: You can reduce your exposure immediately by making your own toothpaste at home with natural ingredients, choosing brands that clearly test and label their products as heavy metal-free and incorporating daily detoxifying practices like oil pulling.

Q: Is it enough to just switch toothpaste?

A: Switching to safer toothpaste significantly cuts your exposure, but to detoxify accumulated metals already in your body, you should regularly engage in activities like vigorous exercise and sweating, which effectively help remove toxins from your system.

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The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

A newly published registry-based cohort study has reported higher rates of certain congenital anomalies among babies born to mothers who received a COVID-19 vaccine during the first trimester of pregnancy.

They analyzed 1,352 pregnancies and compared women vaccinated during the critical organogenesis period (conception through 11 weeks and 6 days) with women who were either unvaccinated or vaccinated later in pregnancy.

The study found that atrioventricular septal defects (AVSD)—a serious congenital heart defect involving holes between the heart’s chambers—were observed in 2.3% of babies whose mothers were vaccinated during the first trimester, compared with 0% among babies of unvaccinated mothers.

They also found cleft palate in 0.8% of babies exposed during the first trimester, compared with 0% among babies of unvaccinated mothers.

The vaccines used in this study consisted of inactivated whole-virus and viral-vector platforms. Had the mRNA platform been analyzed here, we probably would have seen even worse birth defect rates.

These findings arrive as major public health organizations—including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many national health agencies—continue to recommend COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.

These organizations must be held accountable for their reckless actions that have resulted in grave harm to unborn children.

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by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. - The Defender

Scientists at the U.S. Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) revised the autopsy results of children who died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, reducing the number of children the agency classified as having likely died as a result of their vaccination, according to documents released last week by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

The documents show that in November 2025, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) identified 10 child deaths related to the COVID-19 shots. But in December 2025, it reduced the number to seven and downgraded the probability that those deaths were connected to the children’s vaccination.

The Daily Caller, which first reported, quoted two former FDA officials and a forensic pathologist who performed two of the children’s autopsies. One of the FDA officials told the outlet the emails reveal “a coverup” by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Johnson included the documents in a letter sent last week to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CDC Acting Director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas.

Even the reduced number of deaths was enough to trigger concern among some FDA scientists about the safety of the COVID-19 shots, Johnson’s letter stated.

“Although what drove the decision to change these three cases remains to be seen, what is clear is that these officials appear to have determined that the seven cases warranted warning about the risks,” Johnson wrote. These risks “should have raised serious concerns at HHS and CDC about the mRNA COVID-19 Injections.”

Even after the downgrade, the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance recommended revising the label of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to include a warning about the risk of “myocarditis with fatal outcomes.”

The change was never made, for reasons that are not clear.

Myocarditis is widely associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and, with reports of deaths connected to the vaccines, particularly among teenage and young adult males.

Sen. Johnson: ‘The biggest government scandal’ of his lifetime

Johnson, who chairs the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is investigating a potential federal cover-up of COVID-19 vaccine risks.

In a post on X earlier this month, Johnson called the cover-up “way bigger than Watergate.” In a follow-up post, he called it “the biggest government scandal” of his lifetime.

According to the Daily Caller, the children’s deaths occurred in 2021 and 2022, but were not revealed until 2025.

One of the unnamed FDA officials who spoke to the outlet said, “One wonders if there was internal pressure at the FDA during that time not to report these pediatric deaths in a timely manner.”

Attorney Greg Glaser said the FDA’s “maneuvering to obscure the true devastation of these vaccines is the definition of a fraudulent act” to protect Big Pharma.

Johnson is asking the CDC to provide him with all records relating to its decision to award Pfizer new contracts for its COVID-19 shots, and all CDC and FDA records about child deaths related to COVID-19 vaccination and any deliberations that occurred over whether to change the labels of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the number of child deaths linked to the COVID-19 shots is likely much higher, citing reports from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). He said:

“VAERS reports (for U.S. only) show 84 child deaths (17 and under) from the COVID shot. We know that because of the gross underreporting of VAERS and the consistent efforts by the medical profession to mask vaccine deaths, 84 child deaths are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mortality associated with the COVID shot.

“In light of this, it seems ridiculous to quibble over the HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] trying to reduce the number of deaths from 10 to 7. However, it belies the fact that when it comes to vaccines, the deep state within HHS, past and present, will lie through their teeth about a death or injury related to vaccines.”

Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., said the deaths are the outcome of a government cover-up of the “reckless” gain-of-function research “that caused COVID” and “killed 20 million and cost $25 trillion.”

HHS did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment by press time.

FDA officials who studied child deaths linked to COVID shots later ousted

The Daily Caller published a Dec. 5, 2025, email by Dr. Meghna Alimchandani, deputy director of the FDA Division of Pharmacovigilance, to then-CBER Director Vinay Prasad, informing him of the downgrade from 10 to seven deaths.

Of the seven deaths, two were deemed “probable” and five were classified as “possible.” Five of the seven deaths involved myocarditis, with two of those considered “probable” and three “possible.” That email also contained the recommendation to change the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine labels.

A week earlier, on Nov. 28, 2025, Prasad sent a memo to CBER staff informing them that he had evidence that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination.” In that memo, Prasad linked those children’s deaths to the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

“For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children. Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death,” Prasad wrote.

According to the Daily Caller, the memo leaked to the press “within hours,” resulting in “a media firestorm.” In her email to Prasad, Alimchandani wrote that the FDA’s review of the children’s deaths was a “MONUMENTAL effort … while being bombarded with media articles on the subject.”

Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., who at the time was acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and who was investigating VAERS reports of children who died after receiving a COVID-19 shot, noted that Prasad’s memo contained indications that a cover-up was underway. The memo stated:

“Dr. Hoeg organized a small meeting to discuss these deaths with OVRR [Office of Vaccines Research and Review] … stakeholders. The slides she presented, emails she sent, and distorted firsthand reports was shared with media outlets. The general narrative was that OVRR staff disagreed with Dr. Hoeg’s assessment that the deaths were due to vaccine receipt.

“Some staff present who leaked portrayed the incident as Dr. Hoeg attempting to create a false fear regarding vaccines.”

In April, Prasad resigned from the leadership of CBER — for the second time in less than a year. Last month, the FDA fired Høeg for unknown reasons. Her ouster came a week after Dr. Marty Makary resigned his FDA commissioner post following rumors that he would be fired.

Høeg had previously authored a report recommending that the number of diseases sccovered by the childhood vaccination schedule be reduced from 17 to 11.

Writing on Substack, Høeg questioned whether “any of these 10 cases have come to light if I had not given that presentation and Vinay had not asked for a ‘detailed analysis’ of the cases” or if Johnson “had not pursued getting the information.”

Claims children died due to parvovirus a ‘red herring’

The documents Johnson released show that two of the deaths were downgraded in part because of the presence of parvovirus B19 — a commonly occurring virus that causes mild symptoms in most people.

But in remarks shared with the Daily Caller, Dr. James Gill, a Yale School of Medicine pathologist who conducted the autopsies of two of the children who died postvaccination and published his findings in 2022, said the FDA and CDC’s parvovirus explanation is a “red herring.”

“Essentially, they could exclude about half of the potential complications because of this finding,” Gill said. He noted that parvovirus is found in the tissues of approximately half the population.

Gill said that while parvovirus infection can lead to heart problems, it would result in a different pattern of injury than what he observed in the two children. In his 2022 paper, Gill noted that the two children demonstrated symptoms of atypical myocarditis instead of “the alterations seen with typical myocarditis.”

Gill’s published study of the two cases “provoked an urgent rebuttal from the FDA and CDC,” the Daily Caller reported, citing documents the Epoch Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The FDA documents Johnson released confirmed that the cases were downgraded in part due to the presence of parvovirus.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for CHD, said the CDC “muddied the waters” and “deliberately obscured” the evidence. Jablonowski referred to his analysis of the VAERS reports of two of the seven children listed in the documents Johnson released, noting that the FDA and CDC reached different conclusions.

One of the children, 16-year-old Micah Williamson, died a few days after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 shot. His death certificate attributed his death to “stress cardiomyopathy” related to his vaccination, and his VAERS report indicated myocarditis.

Yet, “The CDC claimed the presence of parvovirus B19 made the myocarditis of viral origins and not the vaccine,” Jablonowski said.

The FDA classified Williamson’s death as “possibly related to COVID-19 vaccination,” noting that “parvovirus B19 likely has long-term persistence in heart tissues and is frequently detected in heart tissues from autopsies of patients with no clinical or histopathologic evidence of myocarditis.”

Another of the children cited in Johnson’s documents, Jacob Clynick, died on June 16, 2021, three days after receiving his second Pfizer dose. His VAERS report referred to flu-like illness, but the report was later updated to include cardiac conditions including myocarditis, pericardial effusion and cardiomegaly.

This updated report was deleted in May 2025, Jablonowski said. Yet, “the CDC found a bacterial growth, and overstepping its purview, concluded that the death was attributable to C. septicum sepsis.”

The FDA overruled the CDC, finding that COVID-19 vaccination was the “probable” cause of Clynick’s death.

Jablonowski said Clynick received a vaccine from Pfizer lot number EW0217, “which consisted of 2,857,140 doses and resulted in 28 deaths reported to VAERS.”

“VAERS captures the smallest sliver of actual adverse events. Jacob and Micah represent the smallest sliver of actual adverse events from a time when every living generation jeopardized their heart health with an unsafe vaccine,” Jablonowski said.

Gill said he “tried to engage” the FDA in a dialogue, but “they shut it down.”

‘We must move immediately from investigation to indictment’

Experts said the cover-up warrants legal and regulatory action, especially in light of the FDA’s likely forthcoming approval of an mRNA flu vaccine and the liability shield COVID-19 vaccine makers continue to enjoy under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act).

“With the approval of the mRNA flu jab, the carnage will continue, and federal officials will ‘smile and wave’ as they knowingly send precious children to their demise,” Hooker said.

“We most definitely should be talking about subpoenas, arrests and prosecutions,” Ebright said. “We also most definitely should be talking about debarment and clawbacks of federal pensions and benefits.”

Glaser agreed. “We must move immediately from investigation to indictment. The era of polite ‘oversight hearings’ is over. We need the full force of subpoena power followed by grand jury proceedings.”

“There is no need to debate seven versus 10,” said former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova. “The mRNA shots killed hundreds and possibly thousands of children. … However, even seven acknowledged children’s deaths are sufficient to remove the product from the market immediately.”

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by Abhimanyu Ghoshal - New Atlas

Combining metals to produce alloys that are stronger or tougher requires extremely high temperatures as part of the process. Researchers in Australia recently found that a radically different approach could yield even better alloys with a lot less heat.

Engineers at Monash University have created the first ever large piece of Refractory High-Entropy Alloy (RHEA). This alloy is not only twice as strong as steel with a compressive yield strength of more than 2 gigapascals, but it’s also the result of a method that uses lower temperatures, and that could be easier and cheaper to scale.

The RHEA is composed of titanium, hafnium, tantalum, niobium and zirconium. Thanks to a slower heating process at a lower temperature than what you’d apply to melt metals in conventional alloy production, the atoms of these elements organized themselves into a strongly connected structure comprising three distinct components with nanocrystals in different periodic arrangements.

Professor Jian-Feng Nie, one of the authors of the RHEA paper that appeared in Science this month, said that last bit is the major discovery here: "... atoms can self-organize into defect-free structures in a bulk metallic material, meaning a large, continuous piece of metal, not a thin coating, film or microscopic sample."

This is wholly different from the way alloys have been developed in the past, where composition has been the primary focus. The “atomic architecture” that resulted from the team’s controlled heating process made for a defect-free product; the alloy is also ductile, which means it can be stretched, drawn, or deformed without breaking.

Beyond this one RHEA, the scientists’ work could help pave the way for “more efficient, sustainable and cost-effective alloy production,” as well as the development of more novel materials with specific capabilities enhanced to far greater degrees than before.

“The implications could be felt for decades to come, from aerospace and energy systems to advanced manufacturing and technologies that have yet to be imagined,” said Professor Yiannis Ventikos from Monash.

As you’d expect, there’s plenty of work ahead on this for the researchers. The current focus is on the atomic-scale interactions that cause these nanostructures to form the way they do, so they can understand how the materials evolve and perform throughout the heating process.

Source: Monash University

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By John Mauldin, Mauldin Economics

The Public Downside to You Living Longer

How to Fix Social Security

AI Playbook

Parkinson’s, Longevity and More

The Social Security Administration recently gave us their annual report with a few blockbuster footnotes. We all know that Social Security as it is currently constructed will run out of money in the early 2030s. Social Security’s cost has exceeded its non-interest income since 2010. Since then, payments have been made out of the so-called trust fund. Except the trust fund does not hold cash. The money was borrowed by the rest of the federal government to cover other spending, and the government now owes it back.

In 2025, the US government borrowed roughly $180+ billion to make up the deficiency. That number of course increases every year, as more boomers retire. In 2010, when Social Security began to run a deficit, the Social Security Administration stated that the “trust fund” would be able to make payments until 2037. A few years ago, the year was brought forward to 2034. This latest report now tells us it will be 2032. See the trend here? The reasons we will discuss below, reasonable people can conclude it will be 2031 due to people living longer.

Further, buried in Table VI.F1 in the footnotes, we find that there is a $71.9 trillion unfunded liability. You would never know it from reading statements in the report. From my friend and Social Security expert Dr. Larry Kotlikoff Substack:

First, that is not $71.9 trillion of future money. What the report reveals is that we need $71.9 trillion of capital invested today earning interest and/or growth if we invest in the stock market, which can’t be touched by the government, and will produce future income in order to make the payments. Since we know that is not going to happen, that means the actual taxpayer money we are going to spend on Social Security over the next 75 years will be significantly higher than $72 trillion.

The current law was written in 1983, the last time Congress dealt with Social Security in any meaningful manner. The law states that Congress cannot borrow money to make up the shortfall in Social Security revenue. Thus, we have the fiction of the trust fund lockbox. When that theoretical trust fund is paid back, Social Security payments will have to be made from current Social Security revenue. That means a mandatory 22-23% cut in all Social Security payments in 2032 or earlier.

Source: CRFB

But it’s worse. If we wait until 2032 or 2034 to fix the problem, it will actually be a 26% cut. Or a 34% across the board Social Security tax increase. (Roughly a 4% SS tax increase.)

But it won’t stop there. That gap will get bigger every year, and so every year will see a decrease in Social Security payments.

That’s under current law. But we all know that Congress is never going to allow Social Security not to be paid. This begs a number of questions. Will the shortfall be addressed by tax increases, benefit reductions, increasing the retirement age, changing the inflation measures, means testing or some combination of these and other solutions?

To know the answers to these questions we have to ask the next question: who will be in charge of making the new law that will “fix” Social Security? Will it be a Republican Congress and White House, a Democratic Congress and White House, or a divided government? Because the problem will get fixed. And no matter what solution is finally chosen, there will be a significant portion of the country that will not be happy. The group that should be the unhappiest, our children and grandchildren who will bear the cost, will for the most part not even realize it. They might see their taxes go up, future benefits change, but it won’t be as immediate as it would be for current Social Security recipients to see.

So, the situation is dire, but it is not hopeless. But let’s first explore why it’s even more dire than the Social Security Administration tells us.

The Public Downside to You Living Longer

When Social Security was established, the average lifespan was 58 years for men and 60 years for women. But that was largely because of infant mortality. The majority of Americans who made it to adulthood (21) could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So, we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).

If today you reach the age of 65 in the US, you can expect to live an additional 19.5 years on average, which means you would live into your 80s. Specifically, men aged 65 can expect to live 18.2 more years, while women can expect to live around 20.7 more years.

The average life expectancy for someone reaching 65 is only about 7 years better than in the 1930s. That is a big difference in actuarial accounting. But the even bigger difference was the sheer number of people who were surviving 65. And with the sad exception of white middle-aged Midwest male Americans, age and survivability have improved every decade.

Good news for you: advances in medicine are going to allow Americans on average to live longer. According to Dr. Mike Roizen, GLPs will increase average age by four years and another 2 ½ years every decade after that. GLPs will become increasingly less expensive and more ubiquitous. When there is a pill (and there will be one), I will be taking a microdose because of the clear longevity and health benefits, even though I don’t need to lose weight. And there are numerous other treatments that will have health span and lifespan benefits that will allow the Boomer generation to keep drawing on Social Security.

Ironically, I get emails and conversations that talk about the problems of people living longer because of the cost of the government. So far, none of these people have offered to die on whatever their theoretical time limit is.

Mike has identified 12 scientific pathways that will allow us to live significantly longer. All are being researched. Three and possibly more of those pathways have been successful. He believes most of them will be available within 10 years. We have a lot of shots on goal. And while that is good for you as individuals, that will make the Social Security and Medicare and pension problems worse.

It’s the Social Security equivalent of the paradox of thrift: the more you save individually the better off you will be in the future, but too much savings will reduce consumer spending and thus the economy.

So, as we talk about solutions below, just keep in the back of your mind that it’s going to be worse than current projections. I’m not talking about immortality here; I’m talking about how an increase of just four years of longevity is a statistical disaster for the Social Security fund.

How to Fix Social Security

“Little did Ida May Fuller know she would find a piece of history inside her mailbox when she opened it on a February day in 1940. When the 65-year-old retiree and lifelong Republican lifted the lid of the mailbox outside the front door of her Ludlow, Vermont, house, she found a check for $22.54 from the U.S. government.

“That check dated January 31, 1940, was the first payout from the Social Security program that had been enacted five years earlier by the federal government during the Great Depression.”

Social Security retirement benefits are calculated based on your highest 35 years of earnings, adjusted for inflation, and then run through a progressive formula called the Primary Insurance Amount (PIA). The PIA is the benefit you would receive at full retirement age, before any early or delayed claiming adjustments. Starting benefits before full retirement age generally lowers your monthly amount; waiting beyond full retirement age, up to age 70, increases it. Working additional years can also raise your future benefit if those years replace lower-earning years in your covered work history.

In 1981, the maximum amount of coverage you were taxed on was $29,700 at a rate of 10.4%. In 2026, the maximum amount of earnings on which you must pay Social Security tax is $184,500. That means between the employee and the employer Social Security taxes will be $22,878 (12.4% of salary) or in the case of the self-employed they would be paying the full amount.

Full disclosure: when I first started taking Social Security in 2019 at 70 years of age I was getting $36,000 a year. Then we had high inflation. Today I receive $59,000 a year from Social Security with $2,420 deducted for Medicare. (I literally get 200 times what Ida May Fuller got back in 1940.) However, I will pay roughly $23,000 in Social Security taxes this year as I am still working, plus 85% of my benefits are taxed. That easily adds up to another $20,000. Not quite as good on a net-net basis.

It gets even worse when you realize how poorly Social Security grows. I asked Claude the following question:

Starting in 1981, let’s assume contributions to a retirement account of $3000 a year, and contributions increased by $450 a year for the next 45 years. Those contributions will earn a blended 9% return on investments, 50% from the S&P 500 (11% annualized) and 50% long bonds (7.5-8% annualized). What will the final amount be in 2026?

Claude tells me roughly $4.63 million at the end of 2025.

The key numbers:

• Total out-of-pocket contributions over 45 years: $630,000 (starting at $3K/year, ending at $25K/year) with the final annual contribution in 2026 being $23,500 or close enough for government work.

• Investment growth: $4,001,425

• That’s roughly 6.4x your money from compounding alone

$4.6 million and 4% would yield me an annual income of $184,000 and the principal would still be growing. That is roughly 3 times what I get from Social Security today and it allows my children to inherit a rather substantial sum in the future. And the government wouldn’t have to pay for my retirement. Of course, your mileage will likely vary.

George W. Bush tried to reform Social Security, allowing for investments in the stock market and bonds, and there was almost zero support in Congress to touch the third rail. Hopefully when we decide to deal with Social Security private accounts will be on the table for future retirees and our children.

With that, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget just released their comments on Social Security here and for our purposes we have a handy interactive software package that allows you to see how much of an impact any potential Social Security reform would be. All graphs below come from that source:

For instance, a simple 4% tax hike to 16.4% starting today would solve 100% of the current funding problems up until 2050, and thereafter if there was actually a physical trust fund as opposed to just more debt.

Wait, John, I don’t want to pay 4% more taxes. Can’t we raise revenue another way? Yes, we could eliminate the maximum amount of salary under Social Security that would solve 68% of the problem. If you make $1 million, you will end up paying another $120,000 in Social Security. On top of your regular taxes. Which is generally 40% except in high tax states it would be 53%. Or more. Your effective tax rate would be 52% or 65%.

Taxing all benefits for retirees making over $100,000 would only stop 4% of the problem. If we applied the payroll tax to health insurance contributions, that would solve 23% of the problem.

What about dealing with the benefit side? If we raise the retirement age from 67 to 68, that would only solve 12% of the problem. Considering that we are living substantially longer and that is likely to continue, if we index the retirement age to life expectancy, that would partially solve the problem. If we raise the retirement age to 69 and then index retirement age to life expectancy that would get us 36% of the way there.

If you change the formula for the cost of living adjustment from using CPI to PCE that would get 17% of the needed funds. If you cap the cost-of-living adjustments for the top 50% of beneficiaries, that would get you 25% of the needed funds.

Means testing benefits for high earners would get you 18% of the way. If you calculate the benefits based on the highest 40 years instead of the highest 35, that gets you 16% of the way.

There are a lot of “what ifs” so I will just choose one. You can do your own if you would like.

Let’s assume we raise Social Security taxes by 1.6%. We also raise the maximum salary to cover 90% of wages which is about $330,000 in 2026. That’s a big tax increase on higher earners, especially the self-employed. Let’s raise the retirement age to 69, then index to life expectancy. Then we calculate the benefits based on the highest 40 years of earnings. That does it.

You can reduce the taxes needed by means testing benefits for higher earners, tightening the disability insurance eligibility criteria for 6% (a good idea), change the cost of living increases to PCE or Chained CPI (17%).

The trade-offs are endless. The point is that it can be done in one shape, form, or fashion. But every one of those simple adjustments comes with paying higher taxes or lower benefits. I think it’s safe to say your taxes are going to go up and the benefits for higher earners will go down.

Professor Larry Kotlikoff of Boston University has his ideas on how to fix the system. He favors a combination of high retirement age and higher taxes. This is from his recent Substack.

“My guess is they will gradually raise the full retirement age from 67 to 70 and raise the ceiling on Social Security-taxable earnings so that the same share of total labor earnings is subject to Social Security’s FICA tax. These reforms will close perhaps 20 percent of the System’s fiscal gap but roughly half of the 75-year liability. The rest of the 75-year liability will likely be covered by an increase in corporate income taxes or, perhaps, the introduction of a business cash-flow tax whose structure would replicate that of a value added tax. Again, such a “fix” will leave us with a very large and growing financial tumor.”

What would I do? I would phase in a value-added tax to cover current Social Security outlays, reduce and then eliminate Social Security taxes over time and (again over time) require a 10% investment in a retirement account each year from total income starting with everyone under 45, and making it optional for those over 45. That allows the younger generation to accumulate assets and to have enough income to more than make up for getting no Social Security. Retirement age would be immediately moved for those over 45 to 68 and then indexed every four years for longevity.

This only solves the Social Security problem, and so we would still need to deal with Medicare which could be done with some of the value-added tax (VAT) revenues. Combine the pain of a VAT (and I hate it but…) with no Social Security taxes on our children and grandchildren (which would give them a substantial income increase), reduce income taxes to get Republicans to go along with a VAT, together with reforms on spending that would require all budgets to grow less than CPI, etc., and you can actually come together with a system that would over time first get the deficit below nominal GDP and then balance the budget. Yes, we would be paying higher taxes but that’s going to happen. We just need to choose what format we want to pay higher taxes in.

AI Playbook

Which raises a question I keep circling. Social Security is funded by a tax on human paychecks. So what becomes of it in a world where AI is busy rearranging what human work is even worth?

A few weeks ago, I summarized Tyler Cowen’s seven steps for protecting your career from AI, as shared at SIC. The third was simple but not easy: be proficient with the tools. Sound advice. The trouble is almost nobody tells you how.

So my team has spent the better part of a year building something to help with exactly that. It is called the AI Playbook, and it is the most comprehensive thing we have ever produced on a single subject. We asked nearly 5,000 of you last September what you wanted from us on this topic, and the answer was: stop telling us AI matters and start showing us how to use it.

This is not about letting AI run your life. Instead, it’s about using it well enough that it saves you time, sharpens your decisions, and gives you a real edge. In your portfolio, your business, or your life.

The course covers what the technology is actually doing, how to separate the real investment opportunities from the bubble froth, how to put these tools to work for you, and how to talk about all of this with the people you care about. We worked with — and you’ll hear from — some of the brightest minds in the field along the way, including Jacob Shapiro, Mikhail Voloshin, and Stephen McBride.

If there was ever an excuse to invest in yourself, this is it. We’re offering a steep $200 discount until July 1. You can get all the details here.

Parkinson’s, Longevity and More

I remember in the 80s studying Social Security and of course Ross Perot. We all “knew” that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme, and I doubted that I would ever see a penny. Things do change.

Last week I mentioned that four people have been cured of Parkinson’s disease. I had a lot of response, mostly looking for help for themselves or family. I asked Mike Roizen to give me some details. The problem is there are not many. It is a current phase 1 trial study which is still in process. There will eventually be 12 people in the trial. I will give you more details next week.

An update on Lifespan Edge. We have officially opened clinics in West Palm Beach and Columbia, Maryland (essentially DC). Dallas and Dorado Beach are open as well. We are booking patients in all of these locations. We are in significant discussions with well over a few dozen doctors and locations throughout the country to expand our services.

The reason for the interest? More and more, longevity experts are telling their clients the first part of their journey should begin with Therapeutic Plasma Exchange, which deals with inflammation, Alzheimer’s and dementia, and other symptoms of aging as well as long Covid.

My partner in this endeavor is Dr. Mike Roizen, one of the truly leading longevity experts in the world. You can learn more at Lifespan-Edge.com. If you haven’t, you really need to read our main research report. The research and other information (plus our fabulous documentary on the website) can make a real difference in your life. You can set up a discovery call to talk with our doctors about the procedure, as well as look at a lot more research.

And with that, I will hit the send button. You have a great week and I trust you’re enjoying your summer, at least if you are in the northern hemisphere.

Your amazed that I’m getting Social Security analyst,

John Mauldin

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