In hosting its third Belt and Road Initiative Forum on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, China is welcoming representatives from around 130 countries for a diplomatic event focused on Xi Jinping’s now ten-year-old signature policy.
Figures from the Green Finance & Development Center show that BRI investment in 2021 (and all previous years) was centered largely on the energy sector, which received a total of $22.3 billion.
Transport closely followed as a key focus in 2021, with $16.4 billion. The sectors with the largest annual growth though were ‘health’ (246 percent) and ‘utilities’ (192 percent).
Norway’s government decided on Monday to rename the current Petroleum and Energy Ministry to Energy Ministry, effective January 2024, dropping ‘petroleum’ as Western Europe’s top oil and gas producer aims to advance all energy sources in the energy transition.
Consequently, as of January 1, 2024, the Petroleum and Energy Minister will be known as Energy Minister, the cabinet said, adding that the ministry’s responsibilities do not change and it will be overseeing and drafting a coordinated holistic energy policy.
The energy crisis has shown how interconnected all forms of energy are, Petroleum and Energy Minister Terje Aasland said in a statement.
“We need renewable energy, we need oil and gas and we need new low-emission technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. There are no longer different sectors, but one energy sector,” Aasland added.
The change in the name of the energy ministry comes weeks after the government announced name changes in the authorities overseeing the industry.
The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate will become Norwegian Offshore Directorate, and the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) will be renamed to the Norwegian Ocean Industry Authority, effective January 1, 2024.
“We have a shelf that is enormously rich in resources. Not only do we have oil and gas for a long time to come, we also have significant capacity to store CO2, as well as good wind resources,” the Petroleum Directorate’s Director General Torgeir Stordal said.
“Not to mention that we’ve also identified a potential for considerable mineral resources,” Stordal added.
Norway continues to bet on all energy sources, including oil and gas, to boost Europe’s energy security and lower the emissions from energy production.
Earlier this year, the Norwegian government approved the development of 19 offshore oil and gas projects worth more than $18.3 billion (200 billion Norwegian crowns) in investments. The projects include new developments, additional development of producing oil and gas fields, and investments to increase resource recovery in producing fields.
The channel island of Jersey has been crowned as Europe’s broadband champion of 2023, with an average download speed of 265 megabits per second (Mbps).
As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, this is according to an annual study by cable.co.uk, based on the network connection speeds found in 220 countries and territories around the world. Jersey is officially a part of the British Islands as a ‘Crown Dependency’, but it is self-governing and not a part of the United Kingdom.
Liechtenstein, Iceland, Gibraltar and Andorra complete the top five in the European roundup, with average download speeds of between 190 and 250 megabits per second.
These five places are also among the top ten locations in the world in 2023. At the lower end of the scale among the European countries and territories are Croatia and Albania, where the average download speed is less than 30 megabits per second.
The size of a service area has an impact on its internet speed.
For instance, countries or territories like Luxembourg, Liechtenstein or Jersey have the advantage of having to provide service over a smaller area to that of larger countries such as Germany or Italy.
According to cable.co.uk, the overall average speed for the globe is speeding up.
Where the world had an average download speed of just 7.41Mbps in 2017, it has risen to 46.79Mbps this year.
The European Union plans to set up a fund called the Ukraine Facility, under which a new credit line for Ukraine would be opened in the amount of €50 billion for the period 2024-2027, but there are growing concerns about corruption.
EU budget commissioner Johannes Hahn.
The facility would provide assistance to Ukraine in three pillars. The first pillar would provide financial assistance to Ukraine, the second would support and finance investment, and under the third pillar, Brussels would help Ukraine plan the reforms needed to join the European Union. A specific feature of the Ukraine Facility is that frozen Russian assets would be confiscated and incorporated into the assistance model.
However, support for Ukraine remains a divisive issue in Brussels. Although the EU is keen to continue providing aid to a country at war, it is undeniable that Ukraine features sky-high levels of corruption and the “rule of law” fell far short of EU standards even before the war broke out, let alone during it. This came to the fore in Strasbourg during Monday’s plenary session when the Ukraine Facility was debated.
MEPs Michael Gahler and Eider Gardiazabal Rubial, the proponents of the report, said that the €50 billion credit line is a significant commitment by the European Union. They argued that Ukraine needs to improve corruption rates, the independence of its judiciary, the fight against oligarchs, and the fight against organized crime, but these efforts can be successful if complemented by the private sector.
Two pillars of the #MFFReview received strong support in the #EPlenary today:
Due to the corruption situation, several MEPs also expressed concerns about whether EU funds will go where they are supposed to. Roman Haider of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) complained that while sanctions are not working and the European economy has failed, it is worth considering whether it is worth investing another €50 billion in Ukraine, a country that is corrupt at all levels.
At the end of the agenda point, Johannes Hahn, commissioner for budget and administrative affairs of the European Commission, spoke on behalf of the commission, reminding the critical voices that “we Europeans must clearly support Ukraine.”
The politician also said that so far €80 billion in aid had been made available to Ukraine in various forms, including military assistance, and that the EU would support Ukraine as long as it needed it.
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor
For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.
The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.
Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.
Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.
Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.
Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.
Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.
War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.
News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.
If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.
Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.
Dark thunderstorm clouds parted and a double rainbow appeared just as a family pulled up at Heroes Ridge at Raven Rock, home of Operation Second Chance, a nonprofit retreat that benefits wounded veterans and their families.
“We thought we were entering heaven,” a family member said upon arrival, according to Cindy McGrew, the founder and CEO of Operation Second Chance.
The picturesque mountaintop on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania in the Blue Ridge Mountains really is a slice of heaven, Ms. McGrew told The Epoch Times; it’s meant to help heal spirits broken by trauma experienced during military service.
Operation Second Chance hosts battle buddies, caregivers, families, groups, and individuals from around the United States in cabins accessible for amputees and wheelchair users.
The experience is free for guests, including travel expenses, activities, and food. The organization also provides grants to wounded veterans facing financial struggles, helping with house and car payments, medical supplies, and emergency assistance.
The Mason-Dixon line runs through the property, a former church camp, and nearby Camp David, the presidential retreat, can be seen in one direction. From a wooded peak in another direction, veterans can sit by a bonfire overlooking the iconic Gettysburg battlegrounds, watch the sun go down, and talk with others who understand what they have seen, what they face, and how they feel.
But, since Operation Second Chance bought the property in 2020, more dark clouds have loomed over Heroes Ridge. Two years after the organization bought the property, an unexpected tax bill arrived from Adams County, Pennsylvania.
The bill, for more than $92,000, is the sum of a seven-year claw-back of a property tax discount through Pennsylvania’s Clean and Green Environmental tax break program.
Heroes Ridge is a 275-acre, mostly wooded property with 25 acres in Frederick County, Maryland and the rest in Adams County. The Frederick County portion is tax-exempt because Operation Second Chance is a nonprofit. But Adams County hasn’t granted the same exemption.
“We purchased this property in October of 2020, cleaned up the buildings that were already here, made them livable again and brought life back to them,” Ms. McGrew said.
“Then last year, 2022, just a few days before Thanksgiving, I received a call saying it was a courtesy call because we were going to get a tax bill for just over $92,000.
“I said ‘well, that’s impossible because we did a title search, and there was no money owed on the property, and we’re paid up on our taxes.’ And they said ‘No, the property came out of Clean and Green when you purchased it.’ And I had no idea what that meant.”
The Pennsylvania Farmland and Forest Land Assessment Act is a state law that allows qualifying land devoted to agricultural or forest use to be assessed at lower than fair market value through the Clean and Green land preservation program. It’s intended to encourage property owners to keep most of their land in agricultural, open space, or forest, and not develop it. The program provides real estate tax relief and is favored by owners of large tracts of land.
The previous owner put the land in the Clean and Green program for forest preservation in 2011 and paid a lower tax rate, according to records from the Adams County Register and Recorder’s Office. Ms. McGrew continued to pay at that rate until she received that phone call.
The tax bill came with a fine for non-payment of $588 a day, Ms. McGrew said, which came to about $17,600 a month. Attorney Joseph Erb of Hanover, Pennsylvania, advised her to pay the bill to avoid racking up more fines and to then ask the county to return the money.
By then, Operation Second Chance owed more than $93,000, so Ms. McGrew wrote a check to Adams County and paid the bill.
“I told them, you have just prevented me from providing emergency assistance to 50 to 70 families. Most donations are intended to go to the veterans, not to pay back taxes.”
Ms. McGrew is now asking for the money to be given back to the nonprofit. The Adams County Commissioners recently held a hearing on the matter and are expected to give their decision in mid-November.
“We just feel like it’s the right thing to do, to give the money back,” Ms. McGrew said. “I’m praying. I’ve lost so much sleep over this, and I’ve cried. I woke up in the night crying. And finally, one day, I looked at the tax bill, and I put it in my Bible, and I said Lord, I’m giving this to you because I can’t worry about this anymore. I know things happen in his time. I’m praying that we get that tax money back so we can help other veterans.”
Operation Second Chance tightened its budget and cut some programs this year to account for the tax bill.
Normally, it gives $35,000 in scholarship money to high school seniors who have an injured family member, but this year it gave $10,000 in scholarship money. It also paid less in emergency financial assistance this year.
“It takes a lot to run this retreat center. We pay for everything for the veterans to come here. We pay for their flights—they’re coming from all over the country. There’s no cost to the veterans to come here. We want them to come here and be relaxed and just spend time bonding together, enjoying themselves.”
Tax Dispute
When a buyer purchases a property already enrolled in Clean and Green, they must update the program’s application with their information, which usually triggers an additional review of the status, Adams County Solicitor Sean Mott told The Epoch Times. The review determines if the property has had a change of use that could take the land out of the program and trigger a seven-year rollback of the amount of taxes that weren’t paid due to the discount.
“In this case, it appears that the Tax Service Department sent a letter to Operation Second Chance on December 8th, 2020, indicating that they would need to file an amended application to determine whether the land continued to be used in accordance with Clean and Green,” Mr. Mott said. “That letter went unanswered, and so a second letter was sent on May 25, 2022, which also went unanswered.”
Ms. McGrew said she never received those letters, but in August of 2022, someone from the county tax office visited Operation Second Chance with a letter in hand regarding Clean and Green. That letter did not have the right address, she said, and was not addressed to the right person. She asked him to check his records, address them properly, and mail them to Operation Second Chance.
In Pennsylvania, exemption from taxation is allowed under two categories of landowners: religious organizations that use property for worship and “purely public charities,” so long as the land is actually used in furtherance of their charitable mission.
Operation Second Chance applied in 2022 for a tax exemption under the Institution of Purely Public Charity Act, Mr. Mott said, “Which was only granted in part, as they were only able to provide evidence of charitable use (i.e., the veterans retreat) for 26.95 acres of the roughly 250 acres (most of which is undeveloped). So, 26.95 acres of the total property are completely exempt from property taxes.”
Now, Adams County considers the land on which the buildings are located as a nonprofit and exempt from taxes, but the undeveloped land—which Clean and Green seeks to preserve as forested land—is not being used enough by Operation Second Chance to qualify for the nonprofit tax exemption.
“Essentially, the activity that qualified Operation Second Chance for tax exemption under the Institutions of Purely Public Charity Act was an ineligible use under the Clean & Green Law,” Mr. Mott said.
“However, even though a rollback was assessed for ineligible use under Clean and Green, Operation Second Chance was able to re-enroll that portion of the property that did not qualify for full exemption (about 220 acres), beginning in 2024. So, roughly 27 acres are fully exempt from taxation for charitable purposes, and 220 acres will receive preferential tax treatment under Clean and Green.”
The Veterans
In 2004, Ms. McGrew started visiting wounded veterans in Bethesda, Maryland, at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Her brothers had served in Vietnam, and she vowed that she would always care for veterans.
At Walter Reed, she stood in for parents and spouses of the wounded when they could not be there, holding hands, listening to their concerns, and filling various needs that came up, such as purchasing a playpen for a visiting baby. Her coworkers handed her money and said, “Give this to your veterans.”
This morphed into Operation Second Chance, allowing Ms. McGrew to help more veterans. Since its start, Operation Second Chance has provided more than $9 million in assistance to veterans and their families through public donations.
“We’ve got guys and gals that are surviving catastrophic injuries that they would not have survived in previous wars,” Ms. McGrew said.
“Some are from rural America, they want to get out of a bad situation by joining the military, or they are very patriotic and wanted to take a stand and fight for our country. If they’re wounded, they only get a percentage of that pay for life. If you saw their paycheck, for many of them, it’s not enough to live on. If you’re in Montgomery County, Maryland, for instance, you could not live on $1,700 a month, and that’s what some will make. It depends on their rank. I don’t have all the answers for that, but I know if [the nation] were doing our job, you wouldn’t need nonprofits.”
Many veterans wait until the last minute to ask for help, she said, hoping something in their circumstances will change.
Visitors to Heroes Ridge enter a gravel lane through an electronic security gate and drive about a mile uphill before cresting at the mountaintop where the main activities are located. There are several cabins for families, a recreation building, a chow hall, a main house and pool, and an outdoor arena for horses. An indoor horse-riding arena is planned where the outdoor arena is located so they can continue their horse program in all weather.
When it comes to the federal government and responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, it is so commonplace for federal agencies to drag their feet and not provide fully responsive documentation that it is not even newsworthy when those agencies do not comply with the law. Instead, they miss deadlines and redact perfectly responsive and unprivileged information. This runs contrary to the purpose of FOIA, which is to allow citizens access to the activities of their government.
Numerous examples abound, as evidenced by the fact that the number of FOIA cases being taken to court has ballooned over the past decade. Perhaps this is because, in this era of mistrust in our government, the number of requests has also increased dramatically. Agencies have responded in kind by demanding more from requesters. They are expected to know, and say, the correct combination of buzzwords (even officials’ email addresses at times!). This requires fluency with the agency’s inner workings, which all but the most sophisticated requesters do not have.
While FOIA has seen several reform efforts over the years, and several agencies have made small regulatory changes, few if any of these changes tend to make a dent. For instance, in 2016 Congress amended FOIA to establish an enhanced harm standard for agency redactions that was intended to limit abuse of the nine exemptions available to protect particularly sensitive, private, or deliberative information.
The amendment required agencies to conduct the harm analysis down to the sentence and even further. A few agencies took the reforms to heart, but for the stat, requesters still overwhelmingly receive large swaths of documents completely blacked out with conclusory statements citing one of the nine exemptions (i.e., virtually no attempt to segregate and produce all responsive parts of records).
From an agency’s perspective, the increased FOIA burden is often seen as a pointless distraction that devours scarce resources and whose noncompliance presents little to no consequences. The 2016 amendment – hailed as one of the most robust in the law’s history – bears this out. Reforms that don’t recognize and address agency incentives are doomed to fail. While requesters want greater transparency, federal bureaucrats typically just desire less work.
To this effect, we have identified a series of reforms that attempt to change agency incentives at the individual level, reduce backlogs for the most frequently requested records, and impose uniformity where there is arbitrary decision-making.
One such mechanism is a dramatic expansion of proactive disclosure obligations to include the administrative record (which provides the rationale for government decisions), senior officials’ calendars and external communications (which shows outside influences on their actions), ethics records (which show potential conflicts of interest), and settlement agreements (which show the details of settlements between government and public interest groups). All of these records are vital to transparency and are a source of burden for the agencies (both in the search and production phases, as well as in the often unavoidable litigation phase). To be successful, agency compliance must be automatic and not subject to record custodians’ whims or bureaucrats’ prioritization with other incoming requests or duties.
Forcing agencies to take ownership over FOIA request backlogs, including consequences for noncompliance, would incentivize compliance. Reform could include limiting non-essential travel, such as conference attendance, unless FOIA request backlogs are caught up. Also, forcing the agencies to participate more actively in FOIA noncompliance litigation, rather than passing off the litigation to the Department of Justice, would force the agencies to take ownership of FOIA compliance.
Another problem is inconsistency among agencies, which lends credence to concerns of arbitrary hurdles being erected that reduce transparency. The same request can be sent to two different agencies. One response may be forthcoming, while the other restricts access to the same types of records. A simple solution could be an estoppel system whereby when one agency responds to a particular record, precedent is set for that type of record for all federal agencies. Finally, several categories of records unique to certain agencies, such as immigration or social security records, constitute a disproportionate amount of FOIA requests and could benefit from a separate process.
These changes are both significant and common sense. They would both reduce the workload of federal agencies and increase access to government records for the people. They are neither ideological nor controversial. Liberals and conservatives alike would benefit from these policies. In environment where the need for transparency is at an all-time high, now is the time to fundamentally reform FOIA and restore the law’s original intention: transparency.
Curtis Schube is the executive director for the Council to Modernize Governance, a think tank committed to making the administration of government more efficient, representative, and restrained. He is formerly a constitutional and administrative law attorney.
Gary Lawkowski is a lawyer with the Dhillon Law Group, where he advises and represents clients on legal issues including matters concerning the Freedom of Information Act. He previously served in government as counselor to the secretary of the interior, senior advisor to the Domestic Policy Council, and counsel to three commissioners on the Federal Election Commission.
The New Hoovervilles? RV Villages And Make-Shift Tribes On The Rise As Inflation Bites
From 2020 to 2023, the median purchase price of homes in the US rose from $320,000 to over $420,000 – That’s a 33% increase in only 3 years. In 2011, the average price of a home was around $200,000, meaning prices have doubled in a single decade. The average apartment rental price in the US is now $1300 per month, compared to $1000 in 2020, and home rentals have risen to over $2000 per month on average. The spike in the market is a reflection of inflation across the board, as well as increased demand due to more Americans being priced out of home ownership.
Another interesting development during the pandemic years was a considerable rush to buy RVs, vans and tiny homes. This may have been a symptom of the authoritarian lockdowns that became a standard in blue states, leading people to relocate. However, there is also the economic factor. The average tiny home runs $30,000 to $60,000, with used RVs available for even less. RV space rentals can be found for as low as $500 per month. For those willing to sacrifice living space, the savings are alluring.
Inflationary crisis is pushing low income and fixed income Americans into tighter living conditions, and people are trying to adapt as best they can. The underlying difference between economic disasters of the past like the Great Depression and the stagflation crisis of today is not the severity of the decline but the visibility of the decline.
In the Great Depression, the proliferation of “Hooverville” shanty towns and charity soup lines became an iconic symbol of the scale of financial calamity. These kids of signals of collapse are not as prevalent or obvious in our era. Soup lines have been replaced by EBT benefits and food banks, while Hoovervilles are being replaced by “Squatter Towns” made up of RV villages on the outskirts of highways and Walmart parking lots.
Another factor which has perhaps improved the conditions of falling home affordability is the remote work option and the “gig economy.” A person living out of an RV or van has the ability to connect to the internet and raise funds through digital work, they can become contract workers for delivery services, or they can work a regular 9-5 job while saving money on rent and utilities. This is not to say that the trend is ideal or that this should be the new western standard; it still represents the decline of western civilization. But, the ugliness of economic uncertainty is far more hidden from view.
During the Great Depression, many people became nomadic, traveling across the country by rail or by caravan looking for better living conditions and better employment. But the life of these nomads focused on less than ideal camp conditions, poor sanitation and poor security. They were often the targets of criminals. We have a version of this today in the form of “tent cities” in places like Los Angeles, but for now the RV option appears to be the dominant one.
Even in places as cold as Canada with limited populations, RV communities are popping up everywhere. The following video gives some insight into the lives of people who are involved in such communities, either by choice or by necessity.
One issue that stands out as paramount is the return of a kind of tribal organization. Neighbors knowing each other and helping each other through difficult times. The isolation of the modern world has created a kind of anti-community; a world in which no one knows anyone and mutual aid is seen as unsavory. Economic crisis has a tendency to force societies back to their origins and tribalism might be making a comeback as a fundamental of survival.
While gut problems are often written off as caused by poor diet and lifestyle habits, they may also be a sign of damage from infections such as COVID-19 and from COVID vaccination.
Internal medicine physician Dr. Keith Berkowitz, who has treated 200 COVID-vaccine-injured patients, told The Epoch Times that he found gut problems widespread among long-COVID and post-vaccine patients. However, patients often fail to bring up these issues.
Also, people may not be aware that symptoms such as fatigue and brain fog could be driven by gut problems, internist Dr. Yusuf Saleeby told The Epoch Times.
The Gut Is Linked to Everything
Poor gut health is associated with a vast range of diseases, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, dementia, cancer, infections, autoimmune diseases, and even reproductive diseases.
The gut’s health often depends on its microbiome, comprised of 100 trillion microbes inside the large intestine.
A healthy microbiome has a diverse population of microbes with many beneficial bacteria. These microbes produce chemicals necessary for metabolism, nutrition, immunity, and communication within organs. They also help maintain the mucous layer in the gut, preventing infections from entering through the gut cells.
Poor diet, poor sleep, environmental toxins, alcohol and drugs, infections, and chronic diseases can damage the microbiome by depleting it of beneficial bacteria, leaving pathological bacteria in its place.
Loss of Bifidobacteria in Gut After COVID Vaccination
Infections with the COVID-19 virus have been shown to damage the gut microbiome and are associated with compromised integrity of the gut’s mucous layer, causing gut dysbiosis—a microbiome imbalance.
Reports have also shown that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine is linked to reduced biodiversity in the microbiome.
A gastroenterologist and the CEO of genetic research lab ProgenaBiome, Dr. Sabine Hazan has found that test results of many vaccine-injured patients a month after vaccination show a lack of the probiotic Bifidobacteria. Dr. Hazan’s laboratory was the first to report the whole genome sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus using patient fecal samples.
Bifidobacteria are a group of bacteria under the Bifidobacterium genus and are among the first microbes to colonize the gut. They are believed to benefit their host’s health and are among the most common probiotics.
“Right now, we’re seeing a persistence [of Bifidobacteria loss] in some patients, not a lot of patients,” Dr. Hazan said. “But if people are suffering after the vaccine, they need to be looked at. They can enter a clinical trial right now … We have markers that we’re developing to identify those patients that are vaccine-injured, and we’re trying to find a signature microbiome in vaccine injuries.”
Her research team has since been following 200 vaccine-injured patients. She has observed drastic losses of Bifidobacteria and other species in some patients. However, there have also been rare cases where Bifidobacteria increased.
Dr. Hazan believes that the spike proteins coating the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, made in human cells after vaccination, kill Bifidobacteria, much like the virus can infect and kill good bacteria.
Like the COVID-19 virus, loss of beneficial microbes like Bifidobacteria may cause gut dysbiosis, directly linked to poor gut health and associated diseases.
However, gut dysbiosis is poorly defined in clinical diagnosis.
“In the clinical research looking at patients, we don’t have that definition yet,” Dr. Hazan said. “There is no guidelines to say gut dysbiosis is equal to this (specific thing).”
Dr. Hazan’s earlier works in COVID patients showed that Bifidobacteria abundance is linked to the severity of COVID-19 disease. Patients with more Bifidobacteria in their gut tended to have mild or asymptomatic disease, whereas patients with low or no Bifidobacteria developed severe disease.
Treating COVID-19 Injuries Could Start in the Gut
Many factors must be considered when restoring the microbiome. Doctors must ensure the right microbes are cultivated, that this happens in the right place, that it will not disturb other microbes, and that the gut can support the new microbes being colonized, Dr. Hazan said.
Restoring microbes in an unhealthy gut environment could be like growing an apple tree in the sand.
“It’s forensics of the gut microbiome,” she said.
For Dr. Saleeby, helping patients with COVID-19 injuries often starts with the gut since the gut is what allows patients to absorb prescribed drugs and nutraceuticals.
He gave the example of low-dose naltrexone, a common staple used among doctors treating long COVID and vaccine injuries.
“Low-dose naltrexone (LDN) will help the inflamed bowel and will help with Crohn’s disease and/or ulcerative colitis, and in exchange, when you start repairing the gut, you’ll find out that the LDN is absorbed better. So it may change the dose of LDN,” he said.
In gut dysbiosis, a person may develop small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), which can interfere with treatment. Patients may also feel worse after starting therapy. This is because many of the first-line therapies used in treating COVID-19-vaccine injuries work by clearing spike protein and increasing the body’s ability to flush pathogens, Dr. Saleeby said. This can lead the immune system also to attack the overgrowth of bacteria in the gut, resulting in a sudden and massive accumulation of dead microbes in the body.
The body sees these dead pathogens as a threat, which triggers a sudden inflammatory reaction, causing more symptoms to flare up.
Reducing the treatment dosage and supplementing with anti-inflammatory therapies like hydration therapy, saunas, and Epsom salt baths can make these reactions more tolerable, said Dr. Saleeby.
Dr. Berkowitz also has patients who cannot tolerate typical postvaccine therapies. His patients, however, tend to exhibit signs of an overactive nervous system, which he suspects is linked to neurotransmitter depletion from the loss of beneficial bacteria.
These patients also become much more tolerant of postvaccine treatments once they are given hydration therapy and nutraceuticals that help calm the nervous system and rebuild the gut microbiome.
Damaged Gut: Neurological Problems
Research has shown that the gut and the brain are linked through their nervous system, and Drs. Saleeby and Berkowitz believe that the damaged gut could contribute to the brain fog, fatigue, and other problems seen in their patients.
Gut problems have long been linked to neurocognitive impairments.
For instance, some people develop severe brain fog “within 30 minutes” of eating a piece of bread because they’re gluten-sensitive or have celiac disease, Dr. Saleeby said.
Neuroinflammation driven by the gut could explain why patients with gut problems often develop neurocognitive problems. The brain and the gut are extensively linked through the gut-brain axis. When patients suffering from gut problems eat particular foods or chemicals that trigger disease, the gut may produce inflammatory chemicals that can penetrate the brain.
Another reason cause of neurocognitive impairment is the depletion of neurotransmitters. Many microbes in the gut use dietary nutrients to make neurotransmitters. Some of these microbes are lost in dysbiosis, and the gut becomes less capable of absorbing nutrients for use.
Therefore, neurological and cognitive problems may manifest. The neurotransmitters used in the brain are also made in the gut. Ninety-five percent and 50 percent of serotonin and dopamine are made in the gut, respectively.
Most neurotransmitters made outside the brain cannot cross the blood-brain barrier or be utilized by the brain. Yet research suggests a direct link between mental and cognitive health and microbiome health.
Dr. Berkowitz has noticed what he considers a depletion of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which can be made by bacteria in the gut, including Bifidobacteria. He believes the lack of GABA in the brain—an inhibitor to calm the nervous system—is why many patients display signs of an overactive nervous system.
He treats these patients with magnesium and melatonin, both of which stimulate GABA, and bovine colostrum, a milky fluid that seeps from cow udders the first few days after they give birth. Bovine colostrum has had promising results in repairing gastrointestinal damage in both animals and humans. Using these therapeutics, Dr. Berkowitz found that patients’ overactive nervous systems seemed to calm down, improving their symptoms.
“People describe their system going 100 miles an hour,” he said, and when you calm that down, the body can then repair itself. “Repair doesn’t happen when the body’s in a stress state … [since all the body’s] resources are focused on just survival.”
Damaged Gut: Autoimmune Conditions
Gut problems have also long been associated with autoimmune diseases, and doctors treating vaccine-injured patients have reported similar findings.
Autoimmune problems typically manifest in leaky gut, often medically referred to as increased intestinal permeability. In a leaky gut, the mucous layer protecting the gut from microbes is broken down, and microbes can then infect the gut lining and nearby blood vessels.
“If [the gut lining] is disrupted, it’s kind of like [breaking down] a castle wall,” Dr. Saleeby said. “If it gets breached, then the enemy can get in.”
During this stressful time of invasion, if a virus or bacteria makes it in, infection occurs. If the invader is harmless, like a piece of peanut or a benign chemical, an allergic reaction manifests instead. The body starts attacking these foreign yet benign antigens and, in doing so, may harm itself, leading to autoimmune disease.
Dr. Berkowitz has found that many of his patients with overactive nervous systems and gut problems also test positive for autoantibodies, signaling a potential autoimmune disease.
“Nerve pain, fatigue, muscle and joint issues are probably the most common issues [with these patients],” he said. Many also report skin problems such as rashes.
However, once prescribed treatment for their guts and nervous systems, the patients’ symptoms improve, and their antibody levels decline.
The next day, on Oct. 12, as news of pro-Palestinian “Day of Resistance” rallies spread across the United States, the woman, who is of Jewish heritage and asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, broke the tragic news: Her friend’s son had been murdered by the terrorists.
The same evening, a group of activists in south Los Angeles staged a protest in solidarity with Palestinians. Two days later, demonstrators again rallied—this time thousands gathering near the Israeli Consulate, at one point shutting down the on- and off-ramps to Wilshire Boulevard from the 405 Freeway.
At the Thursday protest, activists equated the plight of Palestinians to those of “indigenous peoples.” They called the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip an “occupation” steeped in racism. They blamed the “capitalist” Jews and white Europeans for the loss of their “indigenous lands” and called for a socialist revolution.
“All resistance to colonial occupation is justified!” shouted one speaker at the event.
Protesters chanted, “From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” among other slogans. They blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for children killed in retaliatory attacks on Palestine and condemned Zionism, equating it with South African apartheid, fascism, and Nazism.
The protest, at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Figueroa Street, was organized by Unión del Barrio and the Association of La Raza Educators and other left-wing activist groups known for their support of critical race theory, or CRT, and the state-imposed ethnic studies program.
Julia Wallace of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) spoke out against Zionism. She called for defunding police as “enforcers of capitalism,” saying they should be ousted from the labor union.
Another speaker called for a protest outside the south Los Angeles Police Department station on Oct. 22.
“Let’s take over the police station,” he told the crowd of about 30 supporters.
Meanwhile, an Oct. 16 Reuters/Ipsos poll shows most Americans see Hamas as a terrorist organization, while they view Israel favorably. An Oct. 13 Rasmussen poll found most U.S. voters blame Palestinians for the conflict and agree with calls for the “eradication” of Hamas.
On Oct. 15, thousands of people showing support for Israel rallied in Los Angeles, walking down Pico Boulevard to the Museum of Tolerance.
Ric Grenell, a Californian and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany who also served as Acting Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, condemned the recent attacks on Israeli civilians.
He stated on Twitter on Oct. 13, the Democratic Socialists of America and student groups that support Hamas “are a real threat to America.”
“Voting for Democrats who support Socialists like @DemSocialists and ‘Sanctuary Cities’ policies will absolutely lead to people entering our country freely who haven’t been vetted by U.S. immigration services. … We must have laws that protect us against people entering the U.S. who support terrorists like Hamas.”
Michael Shellenberger, an author and San-Francisco-based political activist who co-founded the California Peace Coalition and other groups, condemned the terrorist attacks on the Israeli people.
“We unreservedly condemn the atrocities carried out by Hamas and support the right of Israel to defend itself and protect its citizens,” he wrote. “The stories and images of the attack shock the conscience. Nothing on earth could justify such crimes. We condemn those on the radical left who have defended the actions of Hamas terrorists.”
“We are pro-Israel, by which we mean we defend its right to exist and its right to defend itself,” he continued. “At the same time, we urge Israel and its supporters, including the United States, to, in their response, abide by international law in general and the Geneva Convention in particular. That means doing everything possible to avoid killing or injuring civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Kelly Schenkoske, an independent researcher and education advocate, and a critic of critical race theory being taught in California classrooms, denounced the protests pushing critical ideologies.
“We’re seeing protests at college campuses nationwide in support of Palestine, but this issue does not just reside on our college campuses, it resides in the K-12 sector, especially within ethnic studies,” Ms. Schenkoske said.
The state-imposed ethnic studies curriculum in California is “filled with radical ideology,” she said.
“The same activists demanding safe schools promote antisemitic ethnic studies content aimed at decolonizing education [and] promoting critical consciousness and training in neo-Marxism. We need to defund antisemitism in schools entirely,” she said.
Deborah Fillman, a former teacher and education analyst based in North Carolina, told The Epoch Times that California schools are teaching “lies” as historical information through its ethnic studies programs.
“They’re doing it under the guise of social justice, which is false. There’s no justice that can come from murder. There is no legitimate resistance that comes from the wanton slaughter of innocent civilians,” she said.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is a Hamas slogan that means “all the Jews have to go—the eradication of Israel,” said Ms. Fillman, who is Jewish.
The pro-Palestinian protestors aren’t calling for a two-state solution but are instead supporting Hamas when they chant those words, she said.
“It is literally a war crime—every single thing [Hamas] did—including using their own people as human shields,” Ms. Fillman said.
Colonizer Versus Oppressed
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a co-founder and director of the AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that combats antisemitism, told The Epoch Times that proponents of ethnic studies have used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “as a way to essentially beat up their political enemies.”
The pro-Palestinian protestors are using the tenets of critical race theory to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of the colonizer and the oppressed, she said.
“It’s the whole binary oppressed-oppressor [concept] at the heart of ethnic studies that they’ve expanded to talk about politics and international politics,” she said. “In this case, their political agenda aligns up with Hamas’s political agenda which is to destroy Israel.”
Hamas doesn’t talk about colonialism, she said.
“It talks about Holy War, it talks about jihad,” and it calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from what it considers Muslim lands, Ms. Rossman-Benjamin said.
The recent “beheading of babies, rape, kidnapping, and massacres” represent the worst and largest number of atrocities committed against Jews since the World War II Holocaust, she said.
“For Jews, this is really unprecedented in two generations,” she said.
The AMCHA Initiative issued a statement saying it is “shocked and horrified at the gruesome massacre of over 900 Israelis—children, mothers, grandmothers, fathers, entire families—hundreds of them gunned downed at a music festival … reports of rape and torture, and an estimated over 100 Israelis kidnapped, including children, the elderly, a Holocaust survivor, young women, teenagers, and families.”
The Jewish community in the U.S. is now bracing for more pro-Palestinian protestors across dozens of university campuses expressing support for “this genocidal campaign,” AMCHA stated.
The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and more than 30 other student groups recently signed a statement arguing that Israel’s “apartheid regime” is entirely to blame for the attacks. However, following public backlash, at least five organizations that initially signed the letter withdrew their support.
“We will work hard to expose and combat on-campus supporters and apologists for terror, especially the faculty and departments who provide academic legitimacy for the murder of Jews while disingenuously wrapping themselves in the mantle of academic freedom,” AMCHA stated. “Our hearts are broken, but our resolve is not. We stand united with the Jewish people in Israel and around the world.”
At the University of California—Santa Cruz (UCSC), the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department, which studies “race intersectionality in the context of power,” put out a statement Oct. 11 in support of the Palestinian people.
“In this moment—when we are grieving lives lost, fearing the many more to come, and witnessing Israel once again retaliate against a trapped Palestinian population in Gaza—we want to underscore the need for study,” CRES stated. “What we are witnessing needs to be understood in the context of 75 years of settler colonial displacement, military occupation, and enclosure. As in the past, racialized media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians, delegitimizing their aspirations for freedom from militarism, colonial rule, and incarceration.”
The department claims the world is witnessing “the circulation of technologies that are weaponized against Palestinians first, and, subsequently, our most vulnerable populations in the United States, on our borders and globally,” and cites this as the reason why it supports “the critical study of Zionism.”
The university has received pushback from at least seven members of the faculty, including Ms. Rossman-Benjamin’s husband, Ilan Benjamin, a chemistry professor. On Oct. 4, the group sent a letter to UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive expressing “grave concerns” ahead of the inaugural conference of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, held on Oct. 13–14.
Although the conference has been condemned in the Jewish community “for its deeply offensive, antisemitic content and goals,” the letter focuses on the fact the conference is co-sponsored by three academic units at UCSC: the CRES department, the Center for Racial Justice, and the Center for Creative Ecologies, the faculty members wrote.
“While these three units may justify their co-sponsorship as a legitimate expression of academic freedom, we vehemently disagree,” they wrote. “It is an outrage that three departments at a publicly funded university are not only sponsoring a politically motivated and directed conference that limits participation to those who agree with the conference’s antisemitic goals, they are committing their department to embracing these goals, thereby threatening their own faculty and students, and members of the entire campus community. This is not a legitimate expression of academic freedom, but rather an egregious abuse of it.”
