Notes from the edge of civilization: July 6, 2025

Meet the new boss — same lab coat, different syringe; WHO wants to tax your sweet tooth; USDA plays Screwworm roulette.

Bear with us for a second while we stitch together a few threads from the MAHA agenda (that’s Medical-AI-Human-Experimentation-Accelerator, for those keeping score). Because what looks like "medical freedom" from 50 yards out is starting to resemble a Big-Pharma-backed biometric prison up close.

Let’s start with this zinger from Mr. Medical Freedom himself, none other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

“We're accelerating drug approvals so that you don't need to use primates or even animal models. You can do the drug approvals very, very quickly with AI.”
— RFK Jr., June 2025 on The Tucker Carlson Show

Cool, cool. Totally reliable, unbiased, and fully transparent AI with no censorship fetish or corporate handlers will now be deciding which experimental drugs are “safe and effective.” No primates needed — just you, your kids, and your “wearables” monitoring adverse reactions.

“We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda… My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.”
— RFK Jr., June 2025 Congressional testimony

Translation: YOU ARE the clinical trial. Who needs animal testing when we can go straight to human testing? Your heartbeat is the dataset. Your side effects are the control group. Hope you like being a node in a synthetic feedback loop, because the FDA sure does. Instead of beagles and monkeys, they’re proposing:

“…the use of lab-grown human “organoids” and organ-on-a-chip systems that mimic human organs – such as liver, heart, and immune organs – to test drug safety.”
— FDA press release, April 2025 (headed by Dr. Marty Makary)

Just another day in the dystopia — collecting research data from wearables and testing toxicity on lab-grown or chip-based pseudo-humans to fast-track novel compounds that carry patents and therefore big profits into your very real, non-chip based (for now) body.

“C’mon,” you might be thinking, “these MAHA guys aren’t so bad. Didn’t they just announce they’re banning thimerosol in flu shots to make them a lot safer?” Sure, yes. Maybe you’d prefer a flu shot grown in caterpillar cells?

“Regarding the Flublok product, this is truly an innovative technology. It involves the use of insect cells to rapidly manufacture the product. This is a cell-based influenza vaccine that represents, really, a great example of innovative biotechnology.”
— Dr. Robert Malone, June 2025 CDC Advisory Committee meeting

Because nothing says “safe” and “natural” like vaccines brewed in bug larvae. Advocates say even the World Health Organization (that beacon of health safety) has warned insect cells often carry viruses that are “hard to detect and difficult to eliminate.” But hey — at least there’s no thimerosal!

This is the bait-and-switch of the post-COVID era: replace one form of toxicity with another. Trade one revolving door for another. Out with the mercury, in with the silicon.

Medical freedom isn’t medical if it’s governed by AI, bio-surveillance, and synthetic sensors. And it sure as hell isn’t freedom.

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In its infinite wisdom the WHO is now urging every country on Earth to improve public health (and public coffers) by increasing “the real prices of any or all of three unhealthy products – tobacco, alcohol, and sugary drinks by at least 50% by 2035.”

We’re not here to argue that those things are good for you. And yes, there’s historical precedent for taxation curbing harmful behavior — cigarette taxes in many countries have led to fewer smokers. But what the World Health Organization is pushing under its new 3 by 35 Initiative isn’t really a public health move. It’s a sweeping revenue scheme wrapped in moral language and globalist ambition.

Your first clue is that the announcement came at the recent UN Finance for Development conference in Spain. Seems an odd place for an initiative on curbing non-communicable diseases, no? WHO claims the new taxes will not just improve health, but also — most revealingly — raise $1 trillion in public revenue over the next decade. As official development assistance dries up, countries are being told to make up the difference by squeezing more money out of their own people — specifically, by taxing their addictions. Austerity now comes under the banner of sustainable development.

Nowhere in this grand vision do we see meaningful steps to hold multinational corporations accountable for manufacturing, marketing, and chemically altering the very products now being taxed to maximize their addictive qualities. All we see is a coordinated push to milk the end users — the ones at the bottom of the food chain — while keeping the profit pipelines flowing at the top. Nestlé can go on draining aquifers, Monsanto can keep on chemically nuking our soil, Cargill can continue making obscene profits off high-fructose corn syrup.

This tax won’t make people instantly healthier or erase the fact that fresh vegetables may still end up costing more than a liter of soda in most cities. What it will do is let policymakers pat themselves on the back and signal something is being done while the same sick system continues to grind on.

So yes, cut the sugar, booze, and smokes if you want to get healthier or curb excessive spending. But don’t mistake regressive taxation and empty gestures for progress towards public health.

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Since we’re on the topic of health, apparently flesh-eating parasites are no longer the risk they were a few months ago. Starting Monday, the US will begin a phased reopening of livestock import stations on the Mexican border, closed in May after an outbreak of a devastating pest, New World Screwworm. When these flies burrow into the flesh of a living animal and lay eggs, they devour the animal from the inside out.

Family ranchers aren’t thrilled about the USDA’s decision. Groups like R-CALF USA¹ warn that the move is premature and risks introducing the parasite into the US national herd, which could decimate small ranchers and trigger a food security nightmare. But Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins seems unfazed, brushing off critics with “we’ve beaten it before, we’ll beat it again.”

Her swagger might have something to do with her alleged track record of cozying up to Big Ag. Earlier this year, she faced criticism for prioritizing corporate consolidation over independent producers — and this border reopening feels like it could be more of the same, prioritizing export pipelines and corporate convenience over the needs of small producers.

Rollins’ official containment plan includes dumping billions of sterile flies out of airplanes in the hopes they can outcompete the wild, flesh-eating kind. Yes, we’re now air-dropping insects over sovereign territory and calling it a strategy, because in 2025, policy-making is basically a B-movie plot. Except this time the stakes (or the steaks?) are real.

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1. R-CALF USA is an acronym for the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America. https://www.r-calfusa.com/