Africa Dominates The World’s Child Poverty Hotspots
Child poverty continues to be most prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa, as the region accounted for more than 70 percent of the world’s children in extreme poverty in 2022.
As Statista’s Felix Richter details below, a joint paper from the World Bank and UNICEF estimates that the share of children living on less than $2.15 per day stood at 40 percent in the region in 2022, which is four times as high as it is for South Asia, the region home to the second highest number of children in extremely poor households.
According to the paper, extreme child poverty is increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, as the share of affected children living in the region has increased from 55 percent in 2013 to 71 percent in 2022.
This is due to the fact that other regions have seen faster improvements over the past decade compared to Sub-Saharan Africa.
For example the share of children living in extreme poverty in South Asia has decreased from 22 to 10 percent between 2013 and 2022, whereas the child poverty rate only dropped from 45 to 40 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Within the region, differences in the prevalence of child poverty are quite substantial, however, with poverty rates ranging from above 70 percent in countries like Burundi, South Sudan and Somalia to less than 20 percent in countries like Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Botswana.
Several factors contribute to the high prevalence of child poverty in Africa, including ongoing economic challenges, political instability and the impact of armed conflicts in many countries.
High birth rates, coupled with insufficient healthcare, education and social services, exacerbate the situation, leaving many families unable to meet their children’s basic needs.
Turkey conducted several airstrikes and artillery shelling across US-controlled north and east Syria late on Wednesday, targeting positions held by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The attacks targeted several villages and sites in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Raqqa, and Hasakah. One of the attacks hit an SDF military outpost in the countryside of the city of Al-Malikiyah, at the Syrian–Turkish–Iraqi tri-border region. Turkish artillery also hit SDF sites in the village of Umm al-Kaif in the countryside of the town of Tal Tamr, northwest of Hasakah.
According to field sources who spoke with Sputnik, Turkish artillery shelling hit the villages of Al-Sayyada, Aoun Al-Dadat, Al-Tukhar, and Al-Daraj.
On Thursday, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that the attacks killed at least “27 members of military formations operating in SDF-controlled areas,” three soldiers from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), and at least four civilians.
For its part, Turkiye’s Ministry of National Defense said 32 targets in Syria and Iraq were “destroyed” in the aerial offensive without providing details on the locations that were hit. Officials added that “all kinds of precautions” were taken to prevent harm to civilians.
The intense attacks were launched hours after armed assailantsset off explosives and opened fire at the headquarters of the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) in Ankara, which designs, manufactures, and assembles civilian and military aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and other defense industry and space systems.
Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya and Defense Minister Yasar Guler accused the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of being behind the attack.
“We give these PKK scoundrels the punishment they deserve every time. But they never come to their senses,” Guler said. “We will pursue them until the last terrorist is eliminated.”
At least five people were killed and 22 injured in the Ankara attack. Two attackers – a man and a woman – were also killed.
Terrorist attack in Ankara Turkiye, numerous dead and injured.
At least one female attacker, amongst several carrying automatic weapons, struck a military aerospace company. pic.twitter.com/ykAJgEpTrk
Turkey regularly conducts air strikes against the PKK in Iraq and against the SDF in Syria. In 2014, the US military began partnering with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), an offshoot of the PKK. The YPG later changed its name to the SDF.
Together, the US and its Kurdish proxies occupy Syria’s northeast, including Hasakah, Raqqa, and parts of Deir Ezzor, denying Syria access to its oil resources and wheat-producing agricultural land.
Wednesday’s attack in Ankara came as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in the Russian city of Kazan to attend the annual BRICS summit. He condemned the “hateful attack” alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin is using the BRICS summit to project strength and counter Western isolation, while also pushing for initiatives like an alternative payment system and grain exchange.
BRICS members are divided on their approach to the West, with some seeking to reform the current international order and others aiming to dismantle it.
Despite its growing economic influence, BRICS faces internal challenges and a mixed track record in achieving its goals.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts leaders for the 16th annual BRICS summit, he’s determined to show the West that he still has important allies by his side after nearly three years of attempts to isolate Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But while Putin is getting the optics he wants, what kind of an organization is BRICS actually growing into?
Finding Perspective:
The summit in Kazan, which began on October 22 and will run until October 24, is the first meeting for the group since Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates joined past members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Putin is looking to use BRICS, or BRICS+ as the expanded format is sometimes termed, to signal that Russia has plenty of influential friends, despite its pariah status in the West.
The summit is intended to showcase the group’s collective economic might and also entice new countries into a coalition that Moscow and Beijing hope will help form a new world order not dominated by the West.
In Kazan, Putin is expected to push negotiations to build an alternative platform for international payments that would be immune to Western sanctions.
Russia, the world’s top wheat exporter, will also propose the creation of a BRICS grain-trading exchange as an alternative to Western markets where international prices for agricultural commodities are set.
But not all BRICS members completely align with the anti-Western stance coming from Beijing and Moscow and this divide could come out in Kazan.
The Balancing Act:
While all BRICS members may be united in the “belief that the current structures that govern the international order and the global economy are unfairly weighted toward the Western world,” Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me, there is a division between China, Iran, and Russia, which want to unseat the current order, and others who want to reform it.
Many BRICS members, like Brazil and India, still work closely with the United States and other countries in the West, even as they seek to gain more global leverage.
For many of the new members, with the exception of Iran — and also for many that have applied to join recently — BRICS holds mostly economic appeal.
Members and would-be members alike are also looking for alternative sources of financing than available from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and are looking to gain better access to burgeoning markets that could better define the global economy in the coming decades.
Why It Matters:
Beyond the financial appeal of the bloc, many countries also view BRICS as a form of geopolitical insurance.
And that hedge is even more relevant given added unpredictability brought to the United States in recent years.
Still, the divisions within BRICS — and the bloc’s so far thin track record in delivering on its initiatives — could continue to hold it back.
China, Iran, and Russia represent a group within BRICS that are grappling to varying degrees with U.S. sanctions and fighting different types of proxy battles with the United States around the world.
Others, like Egypt, are leading recipients of U.S. military aid or like the United Arab Emirates, host U.S. military bases.
Adding to those difficulties in articulating what a shared vision for the BRICS would look like, China and India have difficult relations, while there is little warmth to be found between Arab states and Iran.
Visualizing The Cost Of The American Dream In 2024
Today, the rising cost of living is making the American dream increasingly difficult to achieve.
While pandemic-led wage growth boosted real incomes, it followed five decades of stagnant wage increases. At the same time, housing prices have soared. Pushing up prices are a limited supply of homes, with home construction plummeting 55% compared to 2006. Together, these broad economic forces have made it harder to get ahead, even with a competitive salary.
Below, we breakdown each aspect of the American dream by their lifetime cost as of 2024:
The total cost of the American dream is no small sum—$4.4 million—exceeding the average lifetime salaries of both men ($3.3 million) and women ($2.4 million) with a Bachelor’s degree.
Overall, the largest cost is paying for a comfortable retirement. Here, it takes $1.6 million in savings, assuming a 4% annual withdrawal rate and inflation averaging 2.5% per year to retire for 20 years. Notably, the decline in private pension schemes has played a large role in making financial security in later years harder to achieve compared to previous generations.
Unsurprisingly, owning a home was the second-biggest expense, at $930,000 for an existing single-family home. Given the surging cost of home prices, 77% of U.S. households are unable to afford a median-priced home in 2024.
As fertility rates in America hit historic lows, raising two children and sending them to college would cost $832,000 overall. Today, 36% of Americans under 50 who don’t have children cite affordability concerns as a major reason for not having kids. Moreover, average college tuition costs have climbed a remarkable 748% since 1963, after adjusting for inflation.
Following a similar trend, wedding costs, too, have skyrocketed. Between 2019 and 2023, average costs increased by $4,000 alone amid inflationary pressures and pandemic backlogs. Today, it costs over $44,000, including the ceremony, reception, and engagement ring to say “I do”.
To learn more about this topic from a home ownership perspective, check out this graphic on the salary needed to buy a home in 50 U.S. cities.
In order to defend its ships and defeat its enemies, our Navy needs to employ inexpensive, highly effective missiles such as those Israel is now making standard on its ships. It also needs to take advantage of the great strides in gun technology to provide its ships with a big boost in air defense capabilities.
As it stands, the Navy is paying far too much for missiles, but getting more value for our defense dollar has gained in urgency as we have seen the proliferation of cheap drones costing well under $20,000 that can severely damage a ship. While one of these cheap drones is highly unlikely to sink one of our destroyers, a single drone of this ilk is perfectly capable of damaging or destroying critical communications systems, radars, etc. And a large swarm of these drones is very much a threat to any ship in our fleet.
The problem is that, currently, the main weapons we can deploy to defend against these cheap drones are expensive missiles that range in cost from more than $900,000 to more than $4 million each. Even if we can count on these missiles to be 100 percent effective, using them to defend against an opponent that can direct hundreds of drones at one of our ships, or even thousands over an extended period, makes relying on these expensive missiles unsustainable.
Fortunately, there is a solution to the problem of our missiles costing many times what they should—and its name is Tamir. The Tamir missile is the toothy part of Israel’s C-Dome system, which itself is the marinized version of Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defense system. At only $50,000 each, Tamir missiles are more than a match for any drone and can also be used to destroy both cruise and ballistic missiles. And with 43 miles of range, they can destroy drones and missiles that our ships in the Red Sea have been forced to destroy using multi-million-dollar missiles because they have nothing less expensive they can use.
But cheaper, far more cost-effective missiles are only one element of what our Navy needs to face the dangerous new world of cheap lethal drone swarms.
Another key element is to take advantage of advanced guns that can easily destroy dozens of incoming drones for a fraction of the cost of a missile.
A great example of such a gun is Oto Melara’s 76-mm Super Rapid. While the Super Rapid can fire unguided rounds, its real strength comes from its ability to fire both GPS-guided rounds and radar-guided rounds.
In particular, its semi-active radar-guided round, the DART, was designed to kill both missiles and small boats, and is very capable of destroying much slower, more fragile drones. Indeed, the Italian Navy has already been using the Oto Melara 76 mm guns on its destroyers to shoot down Houthi drones threatening shipping in the Red Sea.
While there is no formal figure published, with the cheap drones being quite slow, typically well under 200 miles per hour, as well as being more fragile than a typical cruise missile, it seems likely, given its reported capabilities, that a single Super Rapid could engage and destroy over a dozen at a time. Couple this with a full magazine of C-Dome Tamir missiles, and you have a ship capable of not only defending itself but also of defending other ships within at least a 30-mile radius and up to 40 miles in some cases.
In terms of cost, the Super Rapid is a bargain, with the 17,000-pound system coming in at an estimated $3 million: less than it costs to buy one of the $4.3 million SM-6 missiles that have been used in the Red Sea. While there is no published price list for the DART ammo, purchasing them by the hundreds of thousands of rounds should enable volume pricing of less than a few thousand dollars per round, potentially allowing a ship equipped with these guns to destroy cheap drones for less than what it cost the enemy to acquire them.
Of course, along with hard-kill solutions like guns and missiles, our military needs to be working to develop and deploy electronic warfare solutions that will jam, disable, or even gain control over enemy drones. However, such soft-kill systems do not negate the need for guns and missiles capable of killing drones; instead, they are complementary.
Finally, while integrating C-Domes and Super Rapid gun systems into our warships will cost a lot of money, given the exorbitant cost of the missiles our ships are currently using to destroy $5,000 drones, the payback period of such an investment would be short, resulting in a Navy better able to defend itself and other ships for less money.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
North Korean Troops In Ukraine Are ‘Fair Game’ To Attack, White House Warns
The White House and Pentagon have put Russia and North Korea on notice, following several international reports alleging that North Korea has sent troops to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
“If they are co-belligerents, if their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf, that is a very, very serious issue,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said while returning from his fourth visit to Kiev, where he announced the latest $400 million arms package.
Starting last week, South Korean intelligence backed claims by President Zelensky which said at least 10,000 North Korean troops are mustering in Russia to deploy in Ukraine. Seoul also claimed that 1,500 DPRK are already in Ukraine’s east.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Wednesday described that the US assesses that at least 3,000 North Korean soldiers arrived at Russia’s Pacific port of Vladivostok. They reportedly arrived by boat earlier this month.
“These soldiers then travelled onward to multiple Russian military training sites in eastern Russia, where they are currently undergoing training,” Kirby said.
“We do not yet know whether these soldiers will enter into combat alongside the Russian military, but this is certainly a highly concerning probability,” he continued. And that’s when he added the warning and threat:
…should they deploy to fight against Ukraine, “they’re fair game”.
Yonhap News Agency had previously reported that the country’s main intelligence agency, NIS, assessed that Pyongyang has made the decision to deploy four brigades to Ukraine, which amounts to an estimated 12,000 troops.
In a Tuesday evening address, President Zelensky echoed this figure, saying: “We have information that two units of military personnel from North Korea are being trained – potentially even two brigades of 6,000 people each.”
Zelensky has further commented that this is a sign of the war’s growing internationalization in Moscow’s favor. He has demanded that his Western backers respond.
In an interview Alexander Lukashenko, leader of Belarus, tells me that North Korean troops fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine “would be a step towards an escalation of the conflict.” Producer @LizaShuvalova@BBCNewspic.twitter.com/dNYrUo1KSl
People have always been fascinated with immortality. While great gains in medical care have enabled lifespan extension, this has often come with the price of co-existing with chronic diseases associated with aging, such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), hypertension, and dementias such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
The true “aim of the game” is to have a long healthspan with negligible senescence. This means the absence of biological aging, such as reducing functional decline in organs and whole-body fitness, delaying loss of reproductive capabilities, and delaying death risk with age progression. What we really want is to extend youth, not aging. In achieving that, we may begin to push the envelope on increasing healthy lifespan.
Aging at the cellular level is determined by the cellular rate of damage versus rate of repair. Accumulation of aging-associated damage manifests as cells no longer “behaving correctly” as part of a collective that make up tissues of an organ, like cancer cells.
In healthy individuals, damage accumulation is managed through apoptosis, which is controlled cell death, and refined cellular housekeeping including autophagy and mitophagy; the “eating up, breaking down, and recycling” of damaged inner-cell (intracellular) components (organelles). The nutrient glucose and the hormone insulin govern cellular quality control. Intracellular housekeeping enables the culling of inefficient and toxic cells from the herd. Over time a cell’s ability to trigger apoptosis becomes impaired, enabling gradual dysfunction to sneak by under the radar. Over time, the accumulation of these dysfunctional cells within an organ promotes development of disease.
Humans are multicellular organisms within which our healthy cells operate collectively. In order to have a long healthy lifespan, our cells must not only live longer, but they must also function correctly. Cancer cells are long-lived and capable of unlimited replication; however, they evade apoptosis, and become selfishly primordial, regressing back to single-cell organism behaviour. Our goal is to maintain optimal organ function, ensuring ourselves a long healthspan with negligible senescence and perhaps a touch of immortality.
Mitochondria are intracellular organelles; these organelles are remnant symbiotic protobacteria, originating from proteobacterium that came to live within an archaeal-derived host cell which was most closely related to Asgard archaea (a recently identified group of ancient single-celled organisms). Put simply, a foreign single-celled ancient bacteria came to live inside the cells that eventually evolved into us. The Asgardian endocytosed proteobacteria evolved into mitochondria; through a process called endosymbiosis the two became interdependent. They now support us and we support them. Our cells, with mitochondria and other organelles within them, are called ‘eukaryotic’ cells.
Mitochondria have their own genome; polycistronic circular DNA, whilst their inner matrix membranes are rich in a phospholipid cardiolipin. Both of these features are common to bacteria and not to the eukaryotic nuclear DNA and other organelles of multicellular animals, other than those digesting mitochondria. Mitochondria produce the majority of our life-sustaining energy whilst also acting as a source of destruction for most of our cells. This occurs due to their use of oxygen to break down nutrients, in order to capture energy and store it in the energy carrier molecule ATP. Their (and so our) need and use of oxygen is both life-giving and corrosive; complete oxidation of glucose produces more oxidative damage than oxidising fatty acids, and in the process produces excess superoxide, a form of oxygen with an added electron which is termed a free radical.
Mitochondria also produce hydrogen peroxide, the same found in your household drain cleaner, albeit at a much lower concentration. Chronic low-grade elevated levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) harm our cells. Achieving balance between “burning” glucose or fatty acids requiring oxygen to provide energy for our body (good) and producing corrosive substances (bad), is hormesis, like the “Goldilocks zone.” ROS toxicity is a key player in aging, as too much of it will decrease healthspan and lifespan.
The majority of ROS in cells is produced by mitochondria. Some amount is necessary for health, while excess causes damage; again, this requires balance or hormesis. ROS are also mitochondrial-signalling molecules, communicating to the nucleus and altering gene expression. This begs the question; what drives cellular behaviour, genes in the nucleus, or mitochondrial signals? The right amount of ROS causes production of new healthier mitochondria, excessive ROS increases damage over repair, accumulating toxic wayward mitochondria. Cancer cells consistently have damaged mitochondria; the same is also found in cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease, and many of the diseases that we have just accepted as part of aging.
As mentioned above, we can produce energy from fat or from glucose (a sugar) through our cooperative mitochondria. The amount of glucose exposure (predominantly from dietary sources and also made and secreted into the bloodstream by the liver) is critical in achieving this balance between our mitochondria helping or harming us. Insulin is produced in response to carbohydrate intake (sugars such as glucose, starch, and sucrose), increasing absorption (and use) of glucose by our cells and mitochondria and reducing fat-burning (beta-oxidation and subsequent ketosis).
To simplify, we mostly use either glucose from carbohydrates to produce energy with our mitochondria, or fatty acids from food or our fat cells, or ketones from breakdown of fat, to produce energy through an alternative metabolic pathway, called ketosis.
Calorie restriction (carbohydrate restriction) in yeast, nematode worms, and mice to primates increases lifespan with healthspan by inducing ketosis. It causes insulin to become low enough to allow ketogenesis (a product from beta-oxidation, the burning of fat) to occur. Upregulated fat-burning results in the production of molecules called ketone bodies, mainly by the liver (endogenous synthesis).
One of these ketone bodies is beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), derived from fatty acids that come either from our fat cells or from a meal. The ketone BHB is a fuel and signalling molecule, causing mitochondria and nuclei to adapt to metabolic changes. Fasting-mimicking diets such as time-restricted feeding, and very low carbohydrate/healthy fat diets (also known as ketogenic diets) also induce ketosis without the conscious effort of calorie restriction.
These diets high in healthy fats (such as animal fats) and low in sugars/starchy carbohydrates lead to decreased insulin and glucose and increased ketones (BHB) in the bloodstream. Over time this induces intracellular machinery changes, shifting the body’s metabolism to fuelling itself mainly off fat and ketones instead of sugar (glucose). Ketosis increases intracellular housekeeping activity, enabling cells to remove and replace damaged organelles. It also allows more time for DNA to be checked by DNA housekeeping proteins that are able to prevent propagation of DNA duplication errors into daughter cells, thus reducing cancer and other age-related disease development. Ketosis has been shown to hold a hint of an elixir to a healthier if not longer life.
In contrast, high carbohydrate diets, providing glucose through starchy carbohydrates like bread, pasta, rice, corn, and sucrose found in cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, coconut sugar, fruit, and honey, all stimulate insulin secretion. Prolonged hyperinsulinaemia increases the risk of development of Alzheimer’s disease, malignancies, cardiovascular disease, and T2DM. While insulin is essential to life, excess insulin (due to these high carbohydrate diets) leads to hyperinsulinaemia, which is implicated in chronic diseases and aging. Decreased insulin demand is shown to increase healthspan and lifespan. Insulin also causes cells to replicate faster, decreasing the pauses to check DNA copy quality, telling cells that food is abundant and therefore “there is no need to keep a tight ship.”
Insulin is the aging hormone, and a dietary pattern that regularly triggers too much insulin secretion prevents our ability to produce ketones, including BHB. Insulin suppresses ketogenesis (ketone production), depriving us of BHB’s anti-aging properties. The endogenous production of BHB, a powerful antioxidant that directly neutralises free radicals and ROS, has been shown to improve and prevent chronic diseases associated with aging conditions. So, we can control much of our aging by our dietary choices. Ketones such as BHB are produced when we are not overstimulating insulin secretion and requirement through our dietary choices.
We are often advised to eat to keep up our energy and health. However, perhaps a little less results in a little more with regards to healthspan and lifespan, and instead of calorie restriction, we can bio-hack through either eating as much as we want once a day, or eating non-insulin-stimulating foods. Doing both will further enhance their effects. The results are the same as fasting and calorie restriction, less insulin, and more ketones, in turn translating into healthier cells, a healthy you, and a chance to realise your maximal lifespan potential.
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Link to donate to support Isabella D. Cooper’s research in Ageing Biology, Age-Related Diseases, and Longevity at the University of Westminster, UK. This is one of few academic research groups in the diet and metabolism area free from food industry sponsorship. One hundred percent of donation funds go towards active laboratory-based research, with zero funds lost to administrative costs.
NextEra “Evaluating” Restart Of Iowa’s Only Nuclear Plant As ‘Next AI Trade’ Gains Steam
Following the news of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the Biden administration supplying a $1.5 billion loan to resurrect Holtec’s Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, along with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all jumping on the nuclear trade via the “next AI trade,” the atomic era continues blasting off with news that another dormant nuclear plant, this time in Iowa, is slated for a possible restart.
On a Wednesday earnings call, NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum told investors that the company may restart the shuttered 600-megawatt Duane Arnold Energy Center (DAEC), Iowa’s only nuclear power plant. It’s located on the west bank of the Cedar River, about eight miles northwest of Cedar Rapids.
Earnings call…
“As a top operator of all forms of power generation, we often get asked about nuclear and gas,” Ketchum told investors.
He explained, “Let me start with nuclear. Nuclear will play a role, but there are some practical limitations. Remember, on a national level, we expect we are going to need to add 900 gigawatts of new generation to the grid by 2040,” adding, “There are only a few nuclear plants that can be recommissioned in an economic way. We are currently evaluating the recommissioning of our Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa as one example.”
DAEC began operations in early 1975 and operated for decades. In August 2020, the facility’s cooling towers were damaged in a weather-related event, and repairs were deemed uneconomical. NextEra owns about a 70% stake in DAEC.
Jefferies analyst Dumoulin Smith told clients in a note that DAEC would be costly to restart…
“We believe a Duane Arnold restart is challenging, given the plant damage and robust regional wind generation.”
Bloomberg quoted NextEra Energy President Rebecca Kujawa as saying that DAEC’s potential customers could include two Fortune 50 customers:
“This is a robust sign of a significant, broad-based demand,” Kujawa said on the call. “They have big, important and urgent energy needs.”
The latest news from big tech firms diving into nuclear and reviving the industry provides a substantial tailwind for our “Next AI Trade” which we laid out in April as our long-term favorite trade, and where we outlined various investment opportunities for powering up America, playing out.
Here’s our latest coverage of the big atomic revival:
Twice accused, twice vindicated, and twice insistent on the sanctity of the Fourth Amendment. After Tim Thomas’ property was entered and searched on multiple occasions by state officials without warrant or consent in 2023, he filed a federal lawsuit challenging the power of water conservation officers to access private property.
“All other law enforcement officials at every level must have a warrant to do what a water conservation officer did around my house,” says 62-year-old Thomas. “I’m suing to get a law changed because this should never happen to anyone else. I want people to know what’s gone on at my property, and to my family, and how our rights were trampled.”
Wherever and Whenever?
On May 13, 2023, Thomas’ wife, Stephanie, was alone inside the couple’s single-story lakeside cottage at the end of a gravel road on the shoreline of 80-acre Butler Lake in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna County. Their property encompassed less than 1 acre of ground, including a dock and 300’ of shoreline.
Together, the couple owned Thomas’ Chimneys & Stoves in nearby Kingsley. “We had the business for 42 years,” Thomas says. “I’ve always respected the law and done my best to serve the community as a deacon and citizen. People are blown away when they hear what happened on our quiet property.”
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022, Stephanie was non-ambulatory during a period of recovery following a round of stage 4 treatment. According to the complaint filed in Thomas’ subsequent lawsuit via representation by Institute for Justice (IJ), Stephanie heard someone loudly knocking on the front door of the cottage. The individual then went around the side of the house, past no-trespassing signs, entered the back yard, walked onto the back porch, and began “pounding” on the back door. Stephanie did not know the individual at her doorstep was Water Conservation Officer (WCO) Ty Moon of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC).
Alarmed, Stephanie used a walker to retreat to a bedroom. Per the complaint: “While pounding on the front and back doors of the cabin, WCO Moon yelled, ‘I know you’re in there,’ and ‘I’m going to call the police.’”
(Citing open litigation, PFBC declined comment related to Tim Thomas’ lawsuit.)
“She peeked through the drapes and saw a man she didn’t know in dark clothes yelling, and she managed to get into our room,” Thomas describes.
While Stephanie hid, Moon peered in the windows and then moved about the property, according to Thomas, taking pictures of the home, motor vehicle, and pontoon boat.
The ball began rolling on a steady chain of glaring constitutional violations, contends IJ attorney Kirby West: “The government cannot go wherever and whenever it wants—that’s the very reason for the Fourth Amendment in the first place. We see a lot of cases where government goes overboard, but this statute is the plainest example I’ve seen that contradicts the Fourth Amendment on its face.”
Search, Seizure, Citation
On Mother’s Day, May 14, a day after WCO Moon entered their property, the Thomas duo stopped roadside, roughly 1 mile from home. “We were on our way back from church and I pulled over to pick Stephanie her favorite flowers—lilacs,” Thomas recalls.
“As I was picking, a white truck pulled in front of us, and a tall man I didn’t know came angrily towards me, shouting that he’d seen me fishing the day before and claiming I had refused to talk to him. He got up close and started yelling in my face that he’d ‘get to the bottom of things,’ but I had done nothing wrong and had no idea what he was talking about. Other than the knocks on the door the day prior, this was the first time either Stephanie or myself had met or even heard of Ty Moon.”
Four days later, a PFBC citation arrived in the mail, accusing Thomas of fishing without a license and fleeing on May 13: Def. did willfully refuse to bring boat to a stop, flee after given an audible signal. Thereafter, attempted to elude a WCO.
“We were accused of trying to get away from Ty Moon while fishing. It was preposterous,” Thomas says. “My wife with stage 4 cancer fleeing from the law on the water? Supposedly Moon was onshore, and we fled by boat. We never saw him, don’t know where he was standing, and certainly didn’t run away. Bottom line, the charges were bogus, but that’s why he came knocking later at our house.”
Since age 12, Thomas had obtained Pennsylvania hunting and fishing licenses. He had never been ticketed for a wildlife violation in his life—until May 2023.
In response to the citation and a fine nearing $462, Thomas telephoned Moon’s superiors and sent a letter of complaint to Captain Tom Edwards, manager of PFBC’s northwest region. Edwards personally called Thomas; all charges were dropped.
“I considered it over,” Thomas says. “My wife didn’t. She told me, ‘Whatever is going on, I don’t think he (Moon) is through with you.’”
Several months later, Moon was back on Thomas’ property for another search, seizure, and citation.
Vendetta?
At roughly 9 a.m., on Aug. 12, 2023, Thomas piloted his pontoon boat home after fishing on Lake Butler.
As Thomas pulled to his dock, WCO Moon approached Thomas’ property on foot, walked along the driveway to the side of the cabin, entered the back yard via a gap between bushes and structure, and passed by a bathroom window—ignoring a total of four no-trespassing signs, according to the complaint.
Arriving at the dock, Moon accused Thomas of exceeding regulation by fishing with eight rods/lines. “Untrue charges,” Thomas says. “But in that moment, Ty Moon’s charges weren’t my main concern. I was worried about Stephanie.”
In accessing the back yard, Moon had walked by a window where Thomas’ wife was bathing. “The house was our sanctuary after Stephanie was diagnosed, and because of the way we set up the bushes and landscaping, the bathroom provided her with a place to soak and look out at the scenery in total privacy with the curtains open, just inside the window in a clawfoot tub—the same window where a state water officer had just come within an arm’s length.”
“I wanted him off our property and away from the window where my wife—a cancer patient—was exposed.”
Thomas informed Moon he was trespassing, and insisted on continuing the conversation on the public road. Once the men were out of the back yard and on the edge of the driveway, Moon asked for Thomas’ fishing license and boat registration. Thomas provided the license. However, the registration was inside the boat.
Thomas offered to get the registration. Moon declined, announcing his intention to reenter the back yard to obtain the paperwork and perform a safety inspection on the boat. Despite Thomas’ protests, Moon walked back to the dock and boat. Moon returned—and then announced he need to return to the dock a third time to confiscate Thomas’ fishing rods.
“Three times,” Thomas says, “with me telling him no, over and over. Three violations of our private space while my wife was dying. Officer Moon knew my wife was a cancer patient because I told him. It’s hard to describe the frustration and needless abuse of power.”
After confiscating Thomas’ rods, Moon ended the encounter with a $354 citation for fishing with eight rods/lines: Def. did fish with more than the maximum amount of devices while in Commonwealth waters.
Thomas says the charges are false. “Officer Moon said he’d been watching me with binoculars since around 8 a.m. from a boat ramp several hundred yards away and could see eight lines in the water. No way, period. I had three lines in the water and no more. And who believes he just happened to be on the shore, just passing by the area, on tiny Butler Lake? I suspect he had a vendetta against me; that’s my opinion.”
29 Hours
In November 2023, several months after the second citation, Thomas appeared in Magisterial court. The PFBC citation stated Thomas had eight lines in the water—therefore Thomas owed $354. Case closed.
“The evidence didn’t matter,” Thomas says. “I was supposed to accept the fine and shut up. No. I place the highest value on individual liberty and there are tremendous repercussion effects when the government abuses power.”
Beyond his main vocation as a chimney business owner, Thomas often drove for Lyft and Uber. After the criminal citation was filed, he automatically lost both driving jobs—banned by both companies due to the legal violation.
Thomas appealed the PFBC citation to a Commonwealth court. On June 5, 2024, Thomas’ case was heard. “The judge actually was interested to know all the evidence, and when he heard what Moon claimed to have seen and what Moon did, he knew things weren’t adding up. We won—for the second time.”
However, Thomas’ court victory was bookended by the heaviest blow of his life: 29 hours after the judge’s decision, Stephanie lost her cancer battle and passed away.
“In memory of my wife, and to ensure no other families are dealt with by the state like this, I’m making a stand,” Thomas says. “In open court, out loud, Officer Moon said he wasn’t bound by no-trespassing signs, and said he had a mandate to go anywhere. He is wrong because private property is sacred. The Fourth Amendment and its protection from search and seizure is the only thing standing between us and tyranny.”
No Monetary Gain
According to 12 words of Pennsylvania state code, PFBC officials have authority to “enter upon any land or water in the performance of their duties.” The statue provides wide latitude for PFBC to enter onto any property without consent, probable cause, or warrant—with no limits on duration, frequency, or scope.
Represented by Institute for Justice (IJ), Thomas sued PFBC in September 2024.
The PFBC statute provides water conservation officers with more latitude than all other types of law enforcement, says IJ attorney West. Even the wide-ranging Open Fields doctrine (currently under legal challenge in multiple states) denies government representatives the power to enter curtilage—the greater yard area surrounding a home. Yet, PFBC asserts power beyond Open Fields.
“The Commission believes these types of invasions, such as happened at Tim Thomas’, are within their law enforcement powers,” West adds, “but when people first hear about Tim’s case, it doesn’t make sense to them because they know it’s an obvious violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
Thomas and Institute for Justice await an answer from PFBC to the initial lawsuit filing.
“There is no monetary gain for me to fight this, I only want this statute declared unconstitutional, so the next landowner or homeowner is protected,” Thomas concludes. “Our framers would roll in their graves to see this case, and I’m willing to invest whatever time it takes so nobody else has to go through the loss of basic constitutional rights.”
The word deregulation is back, thanks mostly to Elon Musk’s strong emphasis on this as essential to restoring America’s prosperity. There are too many regulations, too many laws, too many rules. Of that there is surely universal agreement. No one approves of the unfathomable, convoluted, expensive, and internally contradictory thicket that has emerged over the decades.
In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book with the title “Over Ruled.” It is outstanding with a focus on all the ways in which government imposition hobbles the freedom we are supposed to be guaranteed in the United States.
“The truth is, something’s happening in our country,” he writes.
“Law is multiplying, and its demands are growing increasingly complex. So much so that ordinary people are often caught by surprise, and even seasoned lawyers, lawmakers, and (yes) judges sometimes struggle to make sense of it all.”
“At the most basic level, law in our country has simply exploded. Think Congress is wracked by an inability to pass legislation? Less than a hundred years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the last decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to about 2 to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of around 2 pages in the 1950s to 18 today.”
“Still, these figures from Congress only begin to tell the story. Federal agencies have been busy, too. They write new rules and regulations implementing or interpreting Congress’s laws. Many bear the force of law.”
Years ago, I began to notice how household items were not working anymore. The showerheads are federally regulated to restrict flow, as are the toilets and garbage disposals. The mandated designs and blueprints make all the products worse.
The new gas cans are awful, while the old ones sell for a premium. I was mowing the lawn and found that it kept getting clogged because of a lack of airflow. Sure enough, the functioning was hobbled by safety regulations that forced the cage ever lower to the grass surface, to the point that the machine does not do what it is supposed to do.
Indeed, it is hard to think of a single product you use that is not trapped in some kind of forced design emanating from a federal bureaucracy. This pertains to everything in your house but also to every business, all the way down to the fabric of the aprons in every restaurant. These are just federal laws but state and local ones also add to the burden.
Ask any real estate developer and he will tell you the reason for the housing shortage.
It comes down to extreme controls on every single step in hiring and building. The customer ends up paying in two ways: higher prices and less choice.
Gorsuch notes: “If you’re a budding pasta entrepreneur, take note: by federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 1.1 and .27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than .06 inches in diameter. Both may contain egg whites—but those egg whites cannot constitute more than two percent of the weight of the finished product.”
Every product in the grocery store is regulated this way. Ever wondered why the meat stock you buy at the store is mostly water with not much stock? That is heavily regulated. As I’ve pointed out before, the United States is one of the few countries in the world that requires eggs to be washed before being sold, which means that they have to be refrigerated. First-time visitors to the United States are amazed at this.
It’s true with meat: it is simply not possible to raise a cow and sell the meat without jumping through many regulatory hoops and using independent processors. This has benefitted agri-business but has been very harmful for small farmers. Small farmers suffer daily because of this.
Elon himself has told stories about how his Starship launches are routinely delayed by crazy mandates. His recent launch-and-catch had to be delayed for studies on how the landing would impact the sharks, the whales, and the hearing of the seals. And that’s just the start of it. All of Elon’s companies are facing an astonishing blizzard of attacks from agencies.
Truly, there are no words to describe the reach and scope of the regulatory state. It’s a minefield with no map and danger with every step. If you have ever attempted to start a business, you know. Every industry faces huge compliance costs. It’s not just capital you have to spend. You need lawyers. You need consultants. You need, above all, time, and lots of it.
People imagine they will go into business only to discover that the vast amount of their focus is not on serving the customer but on compliance and administrative red tape. Just try hiring one employee from New York, for example.
The array of bureaucracies who want a piece of you will amaze you. They all charge for everything they do. They will send letters demanding more with no end in sight. And this is just for one employee. Once the staff grows so do the mandates and the legal risks.
You no doubt have stories of friends who attempted to start a business and gave up. I know of many.
The bureaucracies simply cannot sit still. They make new rules and regulations daily if only to foil industry, with not a care about what it costs or the impact on economic growth and job creation. The United States has created whole industries entirely devoted to smoothing compliance.
The word “deregulation” doesn’t quite describe the fullness of what we need. The United States needs a raging bonfire of regulatory codes, one that should last for months. What is the path to achieving that? As Gorsuch says, it is not up to the judiciary to make a fundamental difference. That is the job of the legislatures.
In the late 1970s, there was a bipartisan consensus to deregulate three industries: trucking, energy, and telecommunications. All three initiatives were a huge success and the prosperity of the 1980s is owed to these emancipations.
The reason the word “deregulation” fell into disrepute is due to the financial deregulation of 1983, which freed up the banking sector which caught blame for every crisis that followed from the S&L debacle to the 2008 financial crisis. There is a strong reason to believe the assignment of blame here is correct. The problem traces to the doctrine of too-big-to-fail made possible by the Federal Reserve.
There will always be problems with deregulation so long as the government’s printing presses are still in operation. Sadly, these issues added some discredit to the whole idea of deregulation.
Another point to remember: you can still have the good kind of regulation in absence of government intervention. Every professional field has an oversight organization that certifies credentials even apart from any government mandate. And consider the role of Underwriters Laboratory (UI), founded in 1894 and still in wide operation with more credibility on safety than any government agency.
Even if dozens of agencies were abolished, there would be private associations still around to regulate but they will do so with a market-based focus, the way UI does today.
Another market-based form of regulation is reputation. When you buy online, do you look at reviews? Of course you do. This is a method by which quality is assured in our times. User ratings have a much larger role in our buying decisions than any administrative edict.
In other words, deregulation does not mean anything goes. It means that society itself is in the position to provide market standards of quality. If the federal Food and Drug Administration were abolished, for example, we might well end up with safer food and more effective drugs. For one thing, all the indemnifications for vaccines would disappear, making companies legally liable for damages.
There is an ongoing controversy to figure out what to do about agency capture wherein the largest private companies operate a revolving door with the regulators and game the system against startups. The best and most effective answer to agency capture is simple: eliminate the agency and the laws and legislation that sustain them.
We should all be thrilled about the new push for another round of genuine deregulation. Agency compliance is too expensive, too arduous, and too ubiquitously threatening for free enterprise to thrive. In an ideal world, the government would only do what is mentioned in the Constitution and nothing more. That would mean cutting back the regulatory state by 90 percent or more.
This is not possible in four years but something has to give. We need a dramatic turn against force and toward freedom in the management of our economic lives.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
