Newsletter, 6/25/25

Biomedical, War Update, 4IR

[“Small” modular reactor, “mini-nuke.” Image via NNC dot com dot cn]

Biomedical. Got this item and the tweet which follows it via my friend and colleague Michael Bryant. Using the guise of promoting public health, RFK Jr. is pushing mass public usage of “wearables,” electronic devices which monitor one’s physical status and transmit these data As my friend and colleague Steve Falconer said, "A monitor or implant doesn't cure obesity, diabetes or anything else. It just tells the gubba to put you on the kill list or tell your smart fridge to lock you out 4 days a week or ban your credit card from buying a Snickers bar. What, they going to spend tons of gubba money sending you a personal trainer, treadmill, dietician and psychologist because your fatso monitor went off eating ice cream at 3 a.m.? “ I am gonna had responsible for this every single individual who supported RFK Jr and later Trump out of loyalty to RFK Jr who doesn’t at least admit mea culpa. You should also hold such people responsible.

RFK Jr. wants a wearable on your wrist. Key Hooper and Carmen Paun, 6/24/25.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants all Americans wearing a wearable within the next four years, he told House members Tuesday. Kennedy promised “one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history” to reach that goal during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee.

Wearable devices can include smartwatches and fitness trackers — like Apple Watches and Oura rings — and medical devices that monitor health metrics like heart rate, blood pressure and glucose levels. Kennedy said the devices are key to his Make America Healthy Again agenda, which is largely focused on combating the rise of chronic disease.

“It’s a way people can take control of their own health. They can take responsibility,” he said. “They can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates and a number of other metrics as they eat it, and they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives.”

Kennedy said he has friends who’ve “changed their lives” from wearing glucose monitors — losing weight and freeing themselves from diabetes. The continuous glucose monitors can be costly, from $100 to $300 a month, but Kennedy said the agency is “exploring ways of making sure that those costs can be paid for.” He noted that Ozempic — the blockbuster weight-loss drug that can treat diabetes and obesity — costs more than $1,000 a month. “If you can achieve the same thing with an $80 wearable, it’s a lot better for the American people,” he said.

Even so: The wearable devices have raised ethics concerns, particularly over how the technology tracks and monitors personal health data. This data is often stored in the cloud and could be sold to companies, advertisers or researchers without an individual’s knowledge or consent, according to the Brown University Center for Digital Health. The health information the devices can store is also associated with a high risk of data breaches and identity theft.

And doctors and health experts have mixed views on the potential health benefits of using wearable technology. While some see benefits in monitoring health and empowering patients to take control of their health, some practitioners are concerned about the devices fueling medical anxiety, self-diagnosis and self-medication.

A tweet about this subject. The first line is badly worded, makes it seem as if RFK Jr isn’t pushing this technology, when the intended meaning is that he didn’t originate the idea, he’s just a salesman for it. He’s in fact been selling it for a while, including a year ago this month while he and his running ,mate Nicole Shanahan were still running for office.

Sense Receptor@SenseReceptor, 1:39PM, 6/24/25.

"Wearables" isn't coming from RFK Jr; it's coming from acting CDC Dir. Susan Monarez—i.e. Nat'l Sec. Council (1/2) [RFK Jr fully supported her appointment by Trump, with her record widely known]

"If you can...integrate the patient...[w/] electronic health records...[&] wearables...your clinician can [diagnose you] in...minutes through a generative AI..." This clip of Monarez, currently the acting Director of the CDC, is from a video posted to The Hill Events YouTube channel on December 8, 2023. Monarez previously served as Deputy Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).{The clip is at the end of the tweet[

From Wikipedia: "The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission is to "make pivotal investments in break-through technologies and broadly applicable platforms, capabilities, resources, and solutions that have the potential to transform important areas of medicine and health for the benefit of all patients and that cannot readily be accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity.” Regarding ARPA-H's creation, Wikipedia notes that "the...new federal agency [was] modeled on DARPA, but focused on health. [Its] proposal was adopted by President Biden's campaign…."

Partial transcription of clip-

"If you can actually integrate the patient, individual patient information, integrate it into the larger understanding of patients or individuals with symptomology similar to them that is extracted from electronic health records or from other sources of information, whether it's wearables or community health, information related to various health related social needs, social determinants of health, all those.

"Imagine all of that integrated and so that when you go into a clinical care setting and you have X, Y or Z symptomology, your clinician can, can understand in five to 10 minutes through a generative AI, through it, through a modeling capability. You know, we actually don't think Bob has the flu. We think Bob has something else and it is incredibly well informed. And so Bob walks out of there knowing that his best course of treatment is going to be the next 10 things and how he's going to get those things. Because you've actually introduced him into the clinical care pathway that is most meaningful for him.

"Bob is going to have a much better health outcome than he would have had he had to go to a serial number of engagements in a clinical care setting and not having the right diagnosis month over month over month, potentially year over year over year, which we know happens. And so, in this particular case, Bob is going to be much healthier, much more quickly than he had delayed diagnosis, in a not optimal treatment regiment.”

War Update.The cease fire between the US/Israel and Irani is holding. At the NATO Summit in The Hague today, Trump was with Defense Sec Hegseth and State Sec Rubio, all insisting that the leaked intelligence report which i discussed in my Special Edition yesterday is not what the media which posted it say it is. Rubio did make an interesting point: all the enriched uranium the Iraniian regime has is useless without a processing center which converts it from fas form to metal form, a stop necessary to make it into a weapon. :“Here’s a fact: The conversion facility, which you can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on a map. You can’t even find where it used to be,” Rubio told reporters during a NATO summit meeting alongside President Trump.It’s wiped out. Then we dropped 12 of the strongest bombs on the planet right down the hole in two places. Everything underneath that mountain is in bad shape,” Rubio continued, referring to Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility that was located under a mountainside”.

And, my friend Sane Francisco puts forth an interesting perspective on the war, and modern war in general. I have SERIOUS disagreements with the analysis of a piece she used as a source. You will find my comments at the end of the piece.

Forever Wars™️

No matter who you vote for… Sane Francisco, 6/25/25.

Ever since I became aware of mass deceptions 5 years ago, one of the first things I quickly came to understand, the lens through which I better understood the Scamdemic and many other con tricks is this: that all of humanity is being herded irrevocably into a digital prison.And that’s just the fun stuff! Wait 'til you see what else is in store for you…

I’ve wanted to talk about Forever Wars™️ for a long time… ooh, for at least 2.5 years, say, and now this latest one also has me taking notes and screen-recording salient speech, blatant contradictions and the most ridiculous lies, all the better to furnish my snappy 5-minute video with accompanying commentary. I keep saying to myself that it will happen once I have 3 days of nothing ahead of me, but I don’t see when that gap will appear in my schedule unless I get to go on a beach vacation and stupidly take my laptop. This small Sane person so badly wants to weigh in on the insanity that is war, the strategies TBTB create for humans to destroy each other (inciting some to even rejoice in it… WTF), and for them to get even richer. But my multiple gig schedule always has me busy, juggling to keep many balls in the air. It’s hard for me to believe, considering how I liked to kick back 5+ years ago, but my light relief these days is to go on long walks, clean my pad or (delight of delights) make jewelry, whilst listening to commentators from all across the spectrum discuss the disastrous events and their implications. Fun stuff! I balance that out by watching documentaries about super heavy topics, all in a bid to inch closer to understanding the — or is it a? — truth. I keep thinking I’ll have time one of these days to make that cute lil’ punchy video to explain things as I see it (and then everyone who watches it will say “oh yeah, MPX is right… no more wars!”), but that’s not for right now (and no, I’m not really that arrogant to think I have all the answers). The irony is I’m currently working on a video which tells a story written by a peace activist friend, one who also prays for no more killing. In fact this is a beautiful project and I’m honoured to have been hired to make it for her.

I think about war
I think about peace
I think about war
I think about peace

I feel incredibly fortunate that I am required to focus on peace in the midst of a war.

In truth, right now, as we watch the endless and escalating madness, after a long time of struggling just to pay my rent, life is actually pretty good for me as I do work that I find creative and meaningful. (Yikes, I hope I’m not jinxing myself by saying that out loud!). But this isn’t about me, it’s about all of us

All that to say, the article I share below is long but worth reading for all who want to understand the strategy (ha, I’m not going to call it 5-D chess!) behind the insanity we are constantly being subjected to.

Thank you, Thumbnail Green of Oxymoron’s Substack, fellow musician and most excellent songwriter, for sharing it with me. (TNG, I look forward to our collaborating musically one day. Now, that is one nice dream for me down the road, to have the time and headspace to write songs again…).
A line from its last paragraph first Via The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.[Link]

"The Iran–Israel conflict will end, but the machine it builds will not."

And here are the subheadings to further pique your interest:

• The Logic of Escalation

• Emergency as Architecture

• The Financial Panic

• The Surveillance Imperative

• The Information War

• The Efficiency Imperative

• The Space Layer

• The $500 Billion Oracle

• The Logic of Never Again

• The Permanent Emergency

• The Mirror's Completion

• The War That Ends War

My comments, per section.

Logic of Escalation

"America enters1 — not as a sovereign nation defending its own interests, but as the executive arm of a global stability system that no longer has room for chaos. This isn’t about defending Israel, and it isn’t about containing Iran. It’s about defending the algorithmic order that’s quietly supplanted human judgement — an order that cannot afford disruption, and will do whatever it takes to prevent it.”

There has never been such a thing as “a sovereign state protecting its own interests.” Every state exists to protect, promote and expand the capitalist intests with which it is intertwined. And ALL states are promoting the “algorithmic order which is herding us into the 4IR digital prison.

Financial Panic

"Into this manufactured volatility steps the solution — Central Bank Digital Currencies, presented as the obvious next step. We’re told we need efficient, programmable money to manage emergency resource allocation, to stop hoarding, price gouging, and war profiteering before they start.What begins as crisis response quietly hardens into permanent infrastructure. Money becomes conditional, spending becomes monitored, and economic behaviour is steered in real time through a web of continuous micro-incentives and algorithmic penalties for non-compliance. The market miraculously doesn’t collapse — it’s replaced. And as this new system reboots, the media hails it not as a coup, but as a triumph of order, efficiency, and care for the common good.”

This is the delusion which the capitalist media, especially the hi tech ones, believe in. They think that capitalism operates via market exchange, which in fact it is a system of production relations of which the market and its phenomena such as money are simply reflections of, increasingly inaccurate reflections at that. Once again, profit does not result because of the revenue an enterprise attains by selling its products exceeds its costs. That’s an illusion economists believe in, a bookkeeper mentality. It ignores the discovery of the classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Recardo made, that selling cannot explain profit on a society wide scale. What one gains as a seller they lose as a buyer. See here, again, by ny “underground twin bropther” https://dailybattle.pairsite.com/2012/occupy_target_destroy_ruling_money_fetish.shtml

In fact, this article discusses why the idea that you can replace alll money with arbitrary electronic blips is untenable.

Surveillance Imperative

"The surveillance systems built for war are never rolled back. Instead, they quietly become the default operating system of peacetime—normalised, integrated, and largely invisible.”

Does the writer understand the amount of energy and scarce raw materials needed for this? Does the writer understand that both of those are increasingly scarce?

Information War

"Algorithmic content moderation shifts from blocking spam to engineering consensus. Tweets relating to the war are ‘cleared’ in the name of public safety. Speech becomes programmable. Posts that fit the desired narrative are quietly amplified; dissenting voices vanish without notice. Public opinion is no longer shaped — it’s sculpted. Democracy becomes a curated user experience, where each individual receives the version of reality deemed the ‘best fit’ for their behavioural profile. And those whose presence disappears? The hope is that they keep posting — unwittingly training the next-gen AI to filter them out even more effectively.”

Again, where from the energy and raw mateirals? AI by itself is gonna requiter more energy than currently available for all tasks.

Mirror’s Completion

"The price of permanent peace is permanent surveillance11; the price of perfect security is programmable humanity; and the price of optimal efficiency is the quiet elimination of choice.”

The writer also doers not understand that the world’s elites are in a duel to the death. Sure, they will all implement 4IR. But their very system insures that they need to fight for top positions, for dominance, because they who are not dominators will be slaves. There is room only for one number one, only one number two,…. Especially as the global economy undergoes a meltdown, energy and raw materials disappear, and the global ecosystem is shredded.

War That Ends War

"What emerges from this crisis won’t be victory or defeat in any traditional sense — though the mainstream media will certainly present it that way. What emerges is the completion of a cybernetic state: one that governs not through law or consent, but through logistics, surveillance ‘indicators’, forward prediction, and optimisation.

The war teaches us that human governance is too slow, too chaotic, too unreliable to manage existential risk. The machine, by contrast, shows that algorithmic governance is faster, more stable, more efficient — and, increasingly, non-negotiable. And Grok, of course, will be only too happy to confirm. Decades ago, Arnold J. Toynbee warned that the Western-backed creation of Israel risked igniting a civilisational conflict with the Islamic world12. He believed it was a grave but avoidable mistake, one with the potential for global catastrophe. That warning has now matured into prophecy. The war he feared has become the proving ground — not just for weapons, but for systems.

And once the machine shows it can prevent war by predicting and pre-empting the conditions that lead to war, who will argue for going back to the old chaos? The mirror that cannot reflect consciousness will finally be complete. And the final war won’t be won by any nation, ideology, or belief.It will be won by a system that makes the very idea of sides obsolete.”

Where are the energy and raw materials for this coming from? Do you plan on 3D printing them? This is so much like Alison McDowell’s nightmare fantasies, which result from her believing that everything she sees on corporate seminars and forums is not only feasible but being already done, without an inkling of understanding by her what it really takes. She NOT SO FAST.

Small Modular Hallucinations

I will have more to say about this entire matter in the future, it is a delusion which needs to be taken by the horns and confronted.

4IR. The latest two videos by Jeff Snider about the deflation H=Bomb.

First, some eye popping data about housing.

Signs of a 2008-Style Crash Are Back (This City Proves It), Jeff Snider/Eurodollar University, 6/23/25, 21 minutes.

"Florida has long been the housing canary in the national real estate coalmine. The situation in the Sunshine State is anything but sunny with prices even outright declining in six key areas. That's just where the downturn is most pronounced right now. The excuses for an increasingly ugly housing market have worn out as the real story is finally being revealed.”

And the second, about shadow banks once again becoming a global risk.

The Last Time This Happened, the System Almost Collapsed, , 6/24/25, 21 minutes,

"Swiss francs are soaring again. This isn't a "sell America" trade (which doesn't exist), or the crashing dollar (also doesn't exist). The monetary system remains on edge and now we know why. The shocking full story of what really happened in April and how close we were to the shadow's edge."

Ending this segment and this edition, my friend Vincent Kelly, has re-posted of an item he wrote back in 2015 about NGOs. I have one major disagreement, see my comment at the end.

The Useful Altruists

The Useful Altruists. How NGOs serve capitalism and imperialism. Vincent Kelly, 6/24/25.

I wrote this article with artist, cartoonist, and organizer Stephanie McMillan in 2015. Despite being written 10 years ago, I believe that it is deeply relevant today. We mention, for example, the role of USAID, which has only emerged as a major topic of national debate this year in the United States. We also discuss the work of Bangladeshi banker, Muhammad Yunus, who became the leader of Bangladesh’s new government in 2024. In addition, we analyze the role of NGOs in student movements, an important topic given the recent wave of campus Palestine solidarity protests which, like the Palestinian resistance itself, are threatened by NGO co-option. Beyond these especially pertinent points, the broader critique of NGOs, foreign “aid,” and paid activism strikes me as important to revisit a decade later when the crises of the ruling order and its “civil society” boosters has increased and intensified.

I wrote this when I was much more of a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist than I am now. I don’t agree with every aspect of the analysis now, but I republish it here as a historical document of what I was thinking a decade ago on the eve of the drastic changes of the past 10 years. While much has changed, returning to this piece also made me realize how much has remained the same. The fundamental importance of NGOs in maintaining the global status quo has continued in the face of political and economic realignments. Understanding and combating this phenomenon is just as important today as it was a decade ago.

I should also note that this piece was originally solicited by Jacobin Magazine in 2015. However, the editors at Jacobin insisted on a number of edits that Stephanie and I believed undermined our core argument, so we eventually had it published at Counterpunch. I re-publish it here today on Handful of Earth. -Vincent

October 20, 2015

About 20 years ago, in a conversation with a Bangladeshi organizer, the topic of non-government organizations (NGOs), or non-profits as they’re often called, came up. He said bluntly: “I hate NGOs.” His vehemence was surprising. NGOs are far from revolutionary organizations, but their work still seemed more helpful than not. Political differences with them aside, it seemed dogmatic to denounce free health care and anti-poverty programs. Short of more radical measures, NGOs seemed to serve an important interim function.

Since that conversation, NGOs have proliferated across the globe. First deployed in dominated countries, they have now become a staple of the political landscape in the imperial core as well. Today, the reasons for the organizer’s hatred of NGOs are clear. NGOs are destructive, both in their current work and in their preclusion of an alternative future beyond the capitalist present.

Here are four reasons why:

1. NGOs undermine, divert, and replace autonomous mass organizing.

NGOs have come to occupy a central role in social movements and political activism in the US and elsewhere—what Arundhati Roy calls the “NGO-ization of resistance.”

Sincere people often believe that they will be able to “get paid to do good,” but this is a fantasy. Nina Power writes that “there is no longer any separation between the private realm and the working day,” contending that “the personal is no longer just political, it’s economic through and through.” While she does not explicitly make this connection herself, the mushrooming of “social justice” and political NGOs is a good example of the erosion of this separation.

For those of us involved in organizing, there is an eerily familiar pattern: Some atrocity happens, outraged people pour into the streets, and once together, someone announces a meeting to follow up and continue the struggle. At this meeting, several experienced organizers seem to be in charge. These activists open with radical language and offer to provide training and a regular meeting space. They seem to already have a plan figured out, whereas everyone else has barely had time to think about the next step. The activists exude competence, explaining—with diagrams—how to map out potential allies, as they craft a list of specific politicians to target with protests…..

2. NGOs are a tool of imperialism.

Military invasions, or the threat of invasion, still play an indispensable role in aiding imperialist1 countries in their quest to extract and exploit resources and labor in the global periphery. But the “boots on the ground” tactic has more and more become a measure of last resort in a broader, more comprehensive strategy of control that today also includes less costly and socially disruptive methods…..

3. NGOs replace what the state should be doing.

“Aid” agencies funded by capitalist/imperialist institutions—corporations, foundations, and the G8—have taken over key functions of states in dominated countries. Ironically, the need for aid has come from draconian loan conditions demanded by these same imperialist social formations……

4. NGOs support capitalism by erasing working class struggle.

Part of the reason NGOs are reproducing so rapidly, in both the imperial core and periphery, is that they’ve become the survival option du jour for unemployed graduates with progressive inclinations navigating a global economy in crisis….

A Note to NGO Employees:

This list is not meant to question the sincerity of people who work for NGOs—many are smart, well-intentioned people who genuinely want to make a difference. Jobs are scarce, and it is supremely tempting to believe that these two imperatives—serving humanity while ensuring your own survival—can be combined into one neat, unproblematic package.

This is unfortunately not the case. A Haitian proverb goes: “The unity of the chicken and the roach happens in the belly of the chicken”—you can’t change the system from the inside.But quitting is not the answer, either. We are all trapped in the economy of capitalism, and the vast majority of us are compelled to work for a living. We cannot simply decide to exit on an individual basis. The only way out is to organize together to defeat capitalism—either we all get free, or none of us will.

In the meantime, however, we must avoid confusing NGO employment with real autonomous organizing. Capitalism will not assist us in destroying it—should we actually become effective in building an anti-capitalist mass movement, capitalists will do everything possible to discredit, neutralize, imprison, and even kill us. They will certainly not issue us a paycheck.

My comment at the page.

Jeffrey Strahl
Lockdown Times
just now
Re-publishing most of this in my Substack newsletter today, with one BIG DISSENT!

"3. NGOs replace what the state should be doing."

The state should be doing nothing. The state is NOT our friend. It should be destroyed together with the social relation known as capital, which it was born along with, joined at the hip, and remains so. Marx completely turned against the state after the Paris Commune of 1871, which he wrote about in The Civil War in France, and became even more outspoken about this afterwards, as per his numerous comments in his Ethnographic Notebooks. See this. by Maximilien Rubel 1973,Marx, theoretician of anarchism,