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plant lover, cookie monster, shoe fiend
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The Dec. 4 Bondi memo—leaked earlier this month—is confusing when you first read it.
On the surface it looks familiar: another directive on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” sprinkled with the right statutory citations and the usual disclaimers about respecting First Amendment rights. But taken together with Trump’s executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), and a string of European “Antifa cell” designations, the memo does something more serious. It quietly turns domestic terrorism authorities into a standing program for targeting one broad ideological camp while the administration’s own National Security Strategy claims, almost in the same breath, to reject “ideological monitoring” and “pretextual” uses of power.
That contradiction has real consequences. It signals that the formal rules that grew out of the Church Committee era—the rules that resulted in things such as the Privacy Act, the Attorney General’s Guidelines, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) —are now being hollowed out from within.
For 10 years, I served as counsel for Domestic Terrorism in the National Security Division. Before that, I worked in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel and as an Army judge advocate. My work was to help the government stop genuine threats without slipping into domestic intelligence work that treats belief itself as the problem.
I left when I could no longer tell myself that line still held.
Domestic terrorism investigations and prosecutions are inherently fraught. The line between protected speech and association as well as true threats and acts of violence is vanishingly thin, so every step carries real civil liberties risks. The system functioned, roughly, because the government had rails to run on: the Attorney General’s Guidelines, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, FISA, the Privacy Act, and lessons taken from the Church Committee. Those guardrails stood for a simple proposition: investigate and prosecute conduct tied to crime or violence, not ideas and beliefs.
The Bondi memo takes that settlement and bends it.
What the Memo Does
The memo begins with 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), defining domestic terrorism as activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are intended to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy. In principle, that definition covers a wide range of threats: neo-Nazi accelerationists, militia plots, conspiracy-driven assassination attempts, ideologically motivated mass shootings, and violence tied to anti-fascist protest.
In practice, the memo narrows the field to “Antifa aligned extremists.” It names “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” as core drivers and instructs all federal prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and grant-making components to treat those strands as the priority focus for Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
It then builds machinery around that choice.
First, the memo directs components to create and maintain lists of “domestic terrorism organizations” and “Antifa aligned entities.” Field offices are instructed to map local groups, coalitions, and supporting networks. These lists are compiled in secret according to opaque criteria. They do not come with any formal notice, hearing, or other means for redress. They live inside internal executive branch systems, shaping how resources are used and how names are flagged.
This sort of direction has happened before. In 1975, the Church Committee uncovered the FBI’s Security Index, the Rabble Rouser Index, and lists of “key activists” that rolled civil rights leaders, clergy, local officials, and students into a homogeneous category of “threats to national security” to be watched for possible detention or disruption. FBI officials and the attorney general himself defended these lists as planning tools. In truth, they were informal blacklists that saturated hiring screens, security checks, and case openings.
While the Bondi memo does not use the old labels, the underlying logic is roughly the same.
Second, the memo directs attention away from other threats that the government’s own leadership has described as acute. Recent FBI testimony has pointed to a sharp rise in nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) and other non-Antifa-related violence, including a plot by a NVE subject to kill the president. The Bondi memo barely mentions these categories. It reduces the domestic terrorism picture to one favored antagonist, “Antifa,” a term so elastic it can be stretched over protest movements, community defense groups, and online networks that have never engaged in violence.
When a policy directive targets one ideological family and leaves others to the footnotes, it sheds any pretense of neutrality.
Third, the memo calls for a dedicated Antifa tip line, backed by additional funding and reward authorities. The clear message to the public and to local partners is that reports tied, however loosely, to “Antifa ideology” are especially welcome. Anyone inclined to see their neighbor, local organizer, or rival as part of that world now has a privileged channel for that suspicion and a monetary incentive to use it. The Church Committee devoted long sections to the way informant systems and local “red squads” generated torrents of raw allegations based on lawful speech and association. Those feeds poured into federal files and, once there, tended to justify more and deeper surveillance.
A tip line organized around a vague ideological label invites that history to repeat itself.
Fourth, the memo directs intelligence analysts to produce a national Antifa product. More specifically, analysts are told to identify “nodes,” “cells,” “funders,” and aligned institutions and to assemble a unified picture for policymakers. Analysts are not asked, in the first instance, what the domestic terrorism data show. They are handed the answer and ordered to build out the supporting detail.
The lessons of COINTELPRO, Army domestic watch centers, and other programs are clear. When leadership decides in advance which movements count as threats and then tasks analysts to fill in the map, intelligence turns into confirmation work. Breadth becomes the goal. Doubt is treated as a gap to be filled, not a reason to reconsider the frame.
And fifth, the memo reverses earlier cuts to grant making offices and directs them to surge money toward state and local work on Antifa-related threats. The same administration that drained support from programs focused on white supremacist violence and crucial prevention work now refills those pipelines when the target category matches its preferred domestic adversary. Investigators and local partners are not naive about this. They know where the money is.
This is what it looks like from a squad room or an intelligence unit: You are working a mix of cases, including race-based violence, anti-government plots, threats to election workers and public officials, abortion-related attacks, and malicious predators lurking in the dark web. Then, Main Justice sends down a memo, paired with fresh funding and reporting requirements, that essentially says: this is the category we care about most. You are not ordered to stop other work, but you are expected to have answers about Antifa entities, Antifa tips, Antifa products, and Antifa grants.
Could an individual supervisor resist that pull? In theory, yes. But in practice, career officials are not free agents. They respond to what Main Justice measures, funds, and asks about in briefings. When a memo like this one becomes the reference point for oversight visits, budget justifications, and performance reviews, it shapes behavior—even if no one ever orders an agent to ignore a different threat.
That is how a written policy rebalances an entire program.
How the Memo Bends and Breaks the Rules
The Justice Department drafted the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations in response to the Church Committee’s account of domestic intelligence excess. These guidelines rest on several simple principles.
First, the government may not open or extend an investigation based only on a person’s exercise of rights such as speech, religion, or association. There generally must be specific, articulable facts suggesting a federal crime or a clear threat to national security. Second, the intensity of an investigation and the tools used must be tied to that factual basis. Third, investigators are supposed to focus on threats, not on broad ideological categories.
The Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), which implements those rules inside the FBI, repeats the point in practical language: Ideology alone is not a sufficient reason to open an investigation and cannot be the sole basis to deploy intrusive investigative techniques.
The Bondi memo strains these rules in several ways. When it tells components to build lists of Antifa-aligned entities based on “ideological indicia,” it invites record keeping on the basis of belief and association as such. When it singles out one ideological adversary and leaves other acknowledged threat streams outside its frame, it undermines any claim that the program is guided by a neutral view of the threat landscape. When it directs grant money, rewards, and analytic tasking toward that same ideological bucket, it creates a set of incentives that run against the Attorney General’s Guidelines’ insistence on factual predication and proportionality.
Tucked into a footnote, the memo includes the expected disclaimer that the department does not investigate people solely for First Amendment activity. That sentence is technically accurate, and it will be quoted in oversight hearings. It does not change the effect of a policy that tells agents and analysts, through every operational signal that matters, to build a domestic terrorism program around one broad set of ideas.
The Awful Irony of the National Security Strategy
Prior to the release of the second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), Bondi’s memo could have been viewed as just more dry internal guidance for Justice Department employees. But paired alongside the NSS—which vows to to reject “ideological monitoring” and pretextual uses of power—that explanation falls apart.
Within hours of the release of the Bondi memo, the White House released an NSS that reads, in key domestic sections, like a civics lesson drawn straight from the Church Committee. It warns that abuse of government power under the banner of counterterrorism is itself a central danger to the republic. It states that the purpose of the American government is to secure “God given natural rights” and insists that abusers of authority must be held to account. It identifies free speech, freedom of religion, and the right to choose and steer the government as rights that “must never be infringed” in the name of security.
The strategy goes on to caution that government powers “must never be abused, whether under the guise of deradicalization, protecting our democracy, or any other pretext.” It expresses open doubt about programs that monitor or correct citizens’ beliefs and warns that such efforts can turn into “elite driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties.”
Taken on its own, that language sounds like an explicit rejection of ideological policing. But taken beside the Bondi memo, which orders lists, tip lines, and tailored intelligence products built around one ideology, it reads like a split screen. One document says the government will not use security rhetoric as a cover story for targeting beliefs. The other treats “Antifa-aligned extremism” as its cover story and then builds the machinery of domestic terrorism work around that theme.
National security strategies are not casual press releases. They are usually the product of long interagency work and are supposed to capture the administration’s settled view of threat and restraint. That is what makes this dissonance so troubling. Either the Bondi memo is a quiet repudiation of the principles in the strategy, or the strategy is little more than a shield for a program that does exactly what it claims to reject.
More Than History Repeating
The Church Committee’s work demonstrated how easily domestic intelligence programs grow beyond their stated purpose. It documented Army units tracking protest organizers, the FBI’s campaigns to disrupt civil rights and anti-war movements, shared watch lists and detention plans tied to labels such as “subversive” and “agitator,” and vast files collected on lawful political activity.
The committee’s core lesson is the following: When the government builds systems for tracking domestic enemies, those systems rarely stay confined to people engaged in crime or violence. They expand, driven by broad labels and by institutional instincts to gather more information than is needed. And as perceived “national security threats” metastasize, so too does the government machinery tasked with hunting them down.
The Bondi memo fits that pattern. Antifa-themed lists echo the old indexes. The demand for an Antifa national intelligence product mirrors earlier habits of tasking intelligence to confirm a chosen story about which movements are threats. The tip line and reward structure invite the same kind of over reporting and personal score settling that filled federal files in earlier eras. The connection to NSPM-7, which reframes domestic political violence as a national security struggle requiring a coordinated federal response, recalls the blur between law enforcement and political control that the Church Committee criticized in the Huston Plan and similar efforts.
What is different now is the layer of formal language that claims to have absorbed those lessons. FISA, the Privacy Act, the Attorney General’s Guidelines, the DIOG, and now the most recent National Security Strategy all claim to treat abuse of power as a central danger. The Bondi memo does not tear those documents up. It simply works around them.
Why You Should Care
Unlike the Antifa executive order and NSPM-7, which mostly mapped out broad policy objectives on paper, the Bondi memo functions as an operational order. It instructs agents, analysts, and grant makers what to do next and with whom, and those orders will hit real people and organizations almost immediately.
A campus group that organizes confrontational but nonviolent protests against far-right speakers will find itself described in local reporting and police referrals as “Antifa aligned.” Under the Bondi framework, those referrals almost certainly will become serials in secret government databases. Names may be added to internal lists without any notice, and those lists can shape later security checks, informant targeting, and charging decisions.
A philanthropic organization that funds antifascist legal defense work, mutual aid projects, or digital research into extremist networks may discover that its grantees appear in an Antifa intelligence product, lumped together with actors who have planned or carried out violence. That can alter how banks, auditors, and foreign partners see their risk profile, even if no one in the chain has committed a crime.
City officials who decline to channel local resources into these priorities may be painted as “soft on Antifa” and may find that access to certain grants or cooperative programs suddenly depends on their willingness to feed the Antifa pipeline with tips and referrals.
None of these examples require agents or prosecutors to break the law. They describe what happens when a large system is told, through policy and money, which category of threat matters most.
You do not need to support Antifa to see how easily this architecture can be turned around. Any method that allows the government to build lists, task intelligence, and direct money around one broad ideological label can be reused for another. A future administration could swap in “neo-Nazi accelerationists,” “populist militias,” “environmental extremists,” or “Christian nationalist networks” and run the same play. The machinery would be the same. Only the names on the lists would change.
What Now?
There are steps Congress, inspectors general, civil society, and those still inside government can take now.
Congress can demand full versions of the Bondi memo and its implementation plans, along with NSPM-7 tasking documents. It can hold public hearings with current and former officials and require regular reporting on the use of Antifa lists, grants, and tip lines. Inspectors general can review whether cases opened under this framework were properly predicated and whether other threat categories were sidelined.
Civil society groups, reporters, and defense lawyers can track cases in which peaceful protesters, community groups, or charities are swept into Antifa labels based on speech and association rather than conduct. They can press courts to look carefully at how evidence was gathered, what triggered the investigation, and whether internal labels skewed the use of tools such as informants, subpoenas, and surveillance. Some of this work is already being done.
Inside the Justice Department, career lawyers and agents still have choices. They can insist on appropriate predication before signing off on new investigations. They can refuse to stretch statutes to match talking points. They can record dissent through internal channels so that later reviewers have a clear record of concern.
None of that will matter if we treat the Bondi memo and the National Security Strategy as just another pair of political documents in a noisy cycle. Together they show something more serious: a government that publicly vows not to police ideology and not to use “deradicalization” or “protecting democracy” as pretexts, while privately building a domestic terrorism program that does exactly that under the Antifa banner.
If you were not already on high alert, you should be now.
xiaq:
Even my beloved, who does not at all prescribe to gender roles etc, is not immune to the socially reinforced nonsense, at times.
Today, he sent me a reel of a mother panicking about the fact that one of her children had their diaper off and there was clearly poop in several known and yet unknown places in the house and she was trying to wrangle multiple kids, including the naked poop perpetrator and was getting a little hysterical. The husband was filming this situation as if it was a joke. At one point, the mother asks for help, which he does not do, so he can keep documenting the chaos.
B sent this to me as a bit of a poop-related inside joke. But I didn’t find it very funny and I responded “oh, yeah, the divorce really came out of nowhere.” And he was like, “what do you mean? She’s laughing.” Except any woman who listened to that audio knew exactly what kind of stressed out laugh that was. It was not funny to her. She needed help. She was asking for help. She was not receiving help.
So I said, “let’s open up the comments for peer review.” The most-liked comment with 11k likes was “someone help me means YOU, bro” followed by the second-most “DUDE GO HELP HER” and third, “The divorce came out of nowhere” (great minds think alike). This went on. There are hundreds of comments, most by women, pointing out that the man was useless and his wife was literally begging for help in a gross situation while he filmed something to post on the internet for laughs.
And B was like. “Well damn. I didn’t even have an inkling this was a shitty thing but that makes sense”. And I was like, “yeah, that tone you’re hearing is a close cousin to the ‘someone is being creepy/aggressive and it’s been reinforced since childhood that I’m not permitted to scream in their face despite my discomfort so I’m going to awkwardly giggle and make it a joke and hope that someone saves me from this situation,’” and. He had no idea what I was talking about. So then it became a larger conversation about social conditioning and such. Productive! But eye opening that even a man who I’d consider a champion of non-toxic masculinity was completely oblivious to some things I thought were obvious. Or like. Regularly experienced in my youth (I have no issue directly calling out creepy dudes, now. But it took a while for me to get there).
All the best for the festive season, and best wishes & good health for 2026 to all readers. Thoughts on the following will be appreciated. – vreaa
1. A home is simply a place to live
A home is first and foremost a place to live – that is its core purpose and ultimately its real value.
2. A home is a basic human need
It’s odd that a society obsessed with the importance of human needs such as clean air, water, food, childcare, education, and healthcare can allow a similarly basic and important human need – shelter – to become a speculative vehicle, for decades.
3. You can calculate the fair financial cost of a home
Housing’s fundamental fair-value pricing can be calculated from historical ratios of (i) local wages and (ii) rental yields. By those measures, and even taking into account recent price weakness, Vancouver homes of all types remain among the most overvalued globally, and can be argued to be roughly two to three times overpriced.
4. Some people will pay a bit more for the benefits of ownership
People may be prepared to pay for the convenience and (in some cases) pride of owning over renting, but this usually modest ‘ownership premium’ does not alone result in prices that are wildly higher than fundamentals justify.
5. Commonplace use of extreme leverage is unique to the housing market
Leverage – borrowing heavily to buy – is routine in housing. The 10-to-one or even 20-to-one leverage that is common in RE (10% down or 5% down respectively) is justifiably seen as cowboy-level risk taking in other markets. Try getting that kind of basic leverage in a margin stock account. RE is the only way in which most citizens are exposed to leveraged investing. And it works seemingly magically on the way up … a young couple’s entire net-worth may double in a year where housing prices leap 5% or 10%. But on the way down, leverage is hellish. This large leverage/deleverage phenomenon is a central factor fuelling both the virtuous and vicious stages of a bubble.
6. Unusual housing tax incentives tempt and drive buyers
Tax-free capital gains on principal residences create big incentives to buy at any cost. In a social system that aims to tax fairly across the board, why fuel speculation in homes by tempting buyers with the promise of this massive reward? And the rewards are indeed outsized – in recent years, in many parts of Vancouver, millions of dollars tax free. How long does it take an average Canadian household to save a million dollars, after tax? A life time? A fairer system might only shield long-term gains that match core inflation.
7. Mortgages stimulate an economy in a profound and unearned fashion
Where do mortgages come from? Answer: Banks create them out of thin air through their lending under our fractional banking system. Most people, even those amongst the most educated members of our society, are unaware of this fact. Test this by asking some of your friends. Most believe mortgages come from other people’s savings. In actual fact, they are created from almost nothing, in the process essentially expanding the money supply (and, yes, fuelling inflation). This results in an economy looking far better than its fundamentals merit, as a bubble expands. Sellers suddenly have large amounts of money to spend now, that they did not earn in any conventional sense. Of course, on the other end of the deal a buyer has promised to pay all this back, but that’s in the future.
8. Decades of unusually low interest rates misprice risk and encourage speculation
Artificially low interest rates since the late 1990s – thanks to celebrity central bankers egged on by eager politicians – made borrowing cheap and fuelled endless price growth. The cost of borrowing was mispriced; citizens could borrow and risk the capital without proportionate consequences. We experienced serial asset bubbles (tech, US housing, everything, AI). Interest rates are still low by historical standards, even though many are complaining that they are ‘too high’ compared with record lows of recent years. The current 5 year rate is ball-park 4%; the average 5 year rate from the 1950s to the present is about 8%.
9. A Speculative Mania
Speculation means buying largely for price appreciation, rather than primarily for income or use. Rising prices draw in more buyers, FOMO kicks in, ‘animal spirits’ take over, and pretty much everyone is dragged into the vortex. We have long maintained that everybody buying in Vancouver, over the last 20 years or so, was doing so with the conscious or unconscious expectation of continuous unrealistic price gains. This applies equally to buyers who argued that they were simply buying for use – the truth is that they would never have contemplated buying at mania prices if they thought that prices may stay flat, or (unimaginably) decrease. They bought based on the assumption of price gains. This local-buyer speculative component was a powerful force driving the market.
10. Stories that Fuelled the Vancouver Bubble
“We are running-out-of-land”, “we are the best-place-on-earth”, “rich foreigners will buy everything”, “endless immigration”. These themes in various combinations were touted widely as reasons for the astronomic prices, and reasons to expect prices to rise indefinitely. Some actual effects in all of these, but more important was the way that these narratives drove relentless buying/speculation by locals.
11. Serial undeserved and unnecessary bailouts
Vancouver RE received a bailout-shot-in-the arm in the form of very low interest rates in early 2009, when it didn’t even need it. This resulted in the second booster stage of the bubble. The ridiculously loose money of the COVID pandemic has proven to be the last booster shot, causing the 2021-2022 blowoff. We quipped at that time that all Vancouver RE prices would need to truly go into orbit would be a devastating earthquake. Price corrections thus far appear to have removed the COVID blow-off part of the bubble – but prices are still in the stratosphere.
12. Taking a second job as landlord/property manager in order to buy
Many owners became unintended landlords, buying properties with rental suites just so they could stretch to make the mortgage payments and get into the market. Thus citizens routinely got to use only a fraction of their home, and took on a second part-time job (informal property manager) to be part of all this. Many homes became de facto businesses. Is this really how we choose to live, and to spend our time?
13. Shady borrowing and lending practices further increased price pressures
One income supporting a series of mortgages. Using equity from one property to leverage the next. Fraudulent income declarations to secure larger loans. Blind-eye to the same from the lenders to compete for business.
14. No intention whatsoever to actually repay the mortgage debt
Market historians will have heard stories from a half century ago, of ‘mortgage burning parties’. This was where home owners got together with friends and celebrated finally paying off their debt. “What losers!”, thought Vancouver speculators of the last 20 years. Didn’t people know that mortgages could simply be rolled over, and finally eclipsed by the massive gains in housing prices when you sold? Why bother to pay down your debt with actual earned money, when your appreciating house value could look after all that for you? [These assumptions, of course, get very rudely destroyed when prices plunge.]
15. There is no shortage of land in Canada, only a shortage of will to use it.
Aliens (both those from other countries and those from other planets) are confused – why does a country with the second largest landmass on the planet, and such a low population density, not take advantage of this useful resource? We are most certainly not ‘running out of land’.
16. Vested interests push up prices and benefit from unaffordability
Politicians with multiple properties, realtors posing as neutral experts, media dependent on developer advertising, vocal elites with massive RE ‘portfolios’, influential boomers dependent on the value of their houses for their retirements, many other examples: all have interest in keeping the market hot and prices high. Don’t expect those in positions of influence to take any real action that may make housing affordable. True affordability would have to mean that prices would fall to the vicinity of fair fundamental value levels. Witness the first public statement by the current Federal Minister of Housing (ex-Vancouver-mayor [2008-2018] Gregor Robertson): not to worry, housing prices will not come down. He happens to own multiple BC properties.
17. Realtors are almost never impartial, and show bullish bias
Realtors earn from transactions, not from getting either the buyer or the seller the best deals. Realtors want volume; and they get the most volume in an optimistic, bullish market. Witness the market pause and reduced sales of 2025. Take any opinion, advice, or forecast from anybody in the RE industry with a grain of salt the size of your head.
18. A Real Estate Bubble causes a vast misallocation of resources
A housing bubble sucks the oxygen out of other activities in the society. Talent and capital is distracted… and flows into real estate. Professionals, distracted by stories of massive gains, become condo flippers. Youth become roofers for quick cash (and F150s!) instead of studying to become nurses or engineers. Capital is diverted from innovation, industry, manufacturing. The economy becomes overdependent on activity related to RE: by many calculations this sector swells to over 20% of all of BC’s economic activity.
19. In a bubble everything to do with housing goes up in price, because it can.
Prices increase at higher rates than inflation in construction, renovations, landscaping, yard care, condo maintenance fees, etc. Owners see their property values increase in leaps and bounds, and these expenses seem relatively affordable and appropriate – they are easy to ignore. In a related effect, demand for services increase, and the quality of many housing related goods and services appear to go down.
20. Housing invades mental space and defines the culture
A multi-decade housing bubble takes up a massive amount of mental space, both for those ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the market. It starts defining a culture. News anchors declare that they ‘love’ real estate. Social interaction is commonly dominated by talk of housing prices, unrealized profits, renovations. Infatuated owners spend an inordinate amount of money and time caring for or refurbishing their homes, which are now their most important ‘investments’. Renters experience chronic anxiety; they anticipate forever being disenfranchised. Sleep is affected. How much does a society suffer from all of this distraction and unproductive activity? Consider how far this is from the default: “A home is first and foremost a place to live”.
21. Owners and renters become two different classes of citizens, often on generational lines
The bubble divides the society. On paper, there emerges huge wealth inequality. Inter-generational conflict festers. Boomers’ retirement hopes (ridiculously high prices) clash with younger generations’ shot at a normal life (prices at fundamental values). Essentially the boomers are asking the youth to fund their retirements by overextending into RE and taking on massive debt for life. Discouraged young people leave town. Owners hunker down and try to protect their paper gains. Politicians express concern about social consequences with sober frowns, but affordable housing talk remains nothing more than talk.
22. Unintended (and not immediately apparent) consequences
Your family doctor, instead of working until 70 to build their retirement nest-egg, retires comfortably at 56 after cashing out by downsizing their primary residence and selling their large clinic space in 2022. Recall prominent architect Bing Thom’s comment on making more money on his Vancouver home than by working “an entire lifetime”. “This tells you something”, he said.
23. Wealth effect spending further boosts the economy
Owners track the prices of comparable properties, feel rich on paper and spend accordingly. They ignoring the need to save and perhaps even build further debt against their home. This makes the economy look stronger than it actually is.
24. Bubbles always end
They are destined to end once they start. When they do start deflating, participants will invariably look for triggers and reasons. Currently they blame tariffs, land claim uncertainty, immigration slowdowns, the exposure of fraud & money-laundering, youth emigration, etc. All of these factors may contribute to a market slowdown, but they should not distract one from understanding that the underlying structure of a bubble is ultimately unsustainable, and will at some point have to collapse, even without external cause.
25. Timing the top is impossible
The market can stay irrational for a long, long time. At the end of 2009 we predicted that the bubble would pop by 2019… out by an outrageous 6 to 16 years, depending on how you calculate. And, yes, retrospectively it would have been better to have purchased in 2005… or 2001… or 1996… but retrospect is cheap. The second lesson any market participant must learn (after learning about speculative manias) is that one has to learn to get over that ‘coulda-shoulda-woulda’ feeling as painlessly as possible.
26. Vicious cycles then follow; the downward-spiral is self-reinforcing
Negative equity, forced sales, banks protecting themselves, construction grinding to a halt, jobs vanishing, incomes dropping, rents falling, prices resetting lower; rinse and repeat until all speculation is flushed from the market. When prices are falling, speculators vanish – and a market that has been based almost solely on speculation implodes.
27. Price targets are lower than most can imagine
When big bubbles burst, prices often eventually drop to below fundamental values (over 50%-off from current Vancouver prices). These price targets look impossible to all but dedicated students of market history. Prices revert to the mean. Prices drop to levels supported by fundamentals. Prices drop until all bullish sentiment is completely squeezed out. All manias end like this. In RE it can take many years. We currently have (rare) predictions from industry insiders of price drops for the coming year; of the order of 4% for Vancouver. Four percent is noise, not even a correction.
28. A market that is suffering the effects of a deflating speculative mania cannot be rescued
A popping bubble involves so many powerful self-reinforcing forces that, once underway, it will simply play itself out. Attempted rescues may alter the course somewhat, but are unlikely to change the ultimate outcome and real-price targets.
29. On the way down, do not be misled by ‘buyers’ market’ descriptors
Sellers’ and buyers’ markets, in RE agent parlance, are defined by inventory:sales ratios. Currently there has been a surge in inventory and a very large drop in sales – but prices have only modestly softened. Already we have hopeful realtors calling this a ‘buyers’ market’. Do not be fooled – you will hear these calls all the way to the bottom – this indicator will ‘stick to the wall’ all the way down, as panicked sellers pile on the inventory and most buyers sit on their hands (remember: speculators hate falling prices). A true buyers’ market will emerge when prices approximate levels determined by fundamentals.
30. In the aftermath, housing may genuinely become affordable again
Affordable housing? Nothing that a good clean speculative-mania collapse cannot sort out. Once the dust clears (and it will take years), we are likely to go through a period where housing is again priced near fundamental value. This will ultimately be good for the society, and hopefully we will have learned from the entire cycle. The path getting there will be gruesome, however.
31. The human cost of a deflating RE bubble is brutal
Bankruptcies, shattered retirement plans, vanished paper wealth, and a lot of regret. Everybody suffers, in different ways, and at different times. Broadly, bulls can be destroyed in the bust; bears were massively inconvenienced and distressed during the run up. But literally everybody suffers when living in a society weathering a bubble deflation and aftermath.
32. We should try to discourage speculative manias, especially in basic needs
In the end, this is why everything possible should be done to minimize the risk of market manias in future. Humans will always be vulnerable to ‘animal spirits’ and attracted to get-rich-quick schemes – but we could take measures to ensure that structures within the real estate markets, the financial system, the taxation system, and perhaps even education, deter rather than fuel such manias.
33. Not so fast… we could be wrong (yet again)
Perhaps Vancouver RE prices will turn on a dime and boost from stratosphere to actual orbit. But, this time, it does seem like something is genuinely ‘broken’. We will see.
– vreaa
Holiday lights are up, and Hanukkah has begun, but man, it’s hard to hold onto cheer as the world delivers blow after blow. This week brings outbreaks of once-forgotten diseases, rising respiratory illness, and more mass shootings. All underscoring how fragile health and safety really are, and how much suffering can be prevented. Still, I deeply believe that connection, hope, and small, deliberate actions remain powerful ways—at times the only ways—to protect one another and keep one foot moving in front of the next.
Here’s The Dose to start your week.
I tried to put into words last night the evidence-based solutions to mass shootings. I was initially trained as a violence epidemiologist, am married to a police officer, and am a mom, and I know there are things we can do as a society. Then I deleted it. Then I rewrote it. Then I was just mad about the whole situation and stopped.
It’s hard to put into words the toll this takes on our communities. And it makes it even harder when it happens over and over and over again.
This time, tragedy struck Brown University during finals prep, a time meant for focus, hope, and growth. Students, faculty, first responders, and many of my friends—some who were working the emergency department or were on campus with students—are left in shock and grief, trying to make sense of yet another traumatic event.
As of December 14, the U.S. has had 391 mass shootings—more than the number of days in the year—for the seventh consecutive year. Seventy-five of these occurred at schools. The frequency is high enough that epidemiologists can now identify patterns. The timing of the shooting at Brown follows a familiar one: school shootings often cluster around periods of transition to and from school breaks.
Across the world, another mass shooting tragedy hit Australia, where people celebrating the first night of Hanukkah were likely violently targeted for their beliefs. The horror of losing loved ones at a gathering meant for reflection and celebration is unimaginable.
Almost immediately, social media seized on the tragedy to argue that Australia’s strict gun laws don’t work. I’ll stop that right there. This isn’t a debate because the data are crystal clear:
Mass shootings are extremely rare in Australia. Since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, strict firearm regulations (a buyback program and tight licensing) have kept mass shootings to zero or one per year on average in Australia. By contrast, the U.S. experiences roughly 400–650 mass shootings annually, with more than 46,000 deaths from gun violence each year. As the graph below shows, it’s not even close.
A tragedy does not disprove the effectiveness of these laws. Data show that strict regulations reduce deaths. Beyond Australia, places like the U.K., Japan, and Canada have similarly strict gun laws and extremely low rates of mass shootings. We can also see variability within the United States. States with the most lax gun laws have the highest rates of gun violence.
Firearm deaths are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., whereas in Australia, child deaths from firearms are extremely rare, with suicide and road accidents being the top causes.
While every loss of life is devastating and mourned, the scale of firearm deaths in the U.S. makes clear that the problem is far from isolated. It is systemic and ongoing. It doesn’t have to be this way. Public support for stronger gun laws is high. Polls consistently show that a large majority of Americans back measures such as universal background checks, restrictions on high-capacity magazines, and mandatory waiting periods.
What this means for you: Please donate blood. For those looking for immediate resources for helping children and youth, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network developed the following fantastic resources:
Below are previous YLE posts that are as relevant today as they were before. I hope they help you feel empowered. There are solutions and paths forward.
We can reduce gun violence in the U.S.—we’ve done hard public health things before.
It’s hard to explain (and fix) evil—but it’s not mental illness. Focusing solely on it largely avoids confronting the real, more complicated causes.
Firearms: What you can do right now—there’s a lot.
Epidemiology of mass shootings—you’ll notice these tragedies follow some, but not all, patterns of previous school mass shootings.
It’s officially respiratory season: the percentage of physician visits chalked up to coughs, fevers, and sore throats—also called influenza-like illness (ILI)—has passed 3% and continues to rise quickly.
Right now, rates are uneven across the country: some states remain green, reflecting minimal activity, while others are already lighting up red, signaling high levels. Before long, the entire map will be red and purple.
For flu, specifically, we’re seeing this increase first among younger populations, especially school-aged children. Soon these illnesses will spread to older adults as well. CDC estimates there have already been at least 2.9 million illnesses this year and 30,000 hospitalizations. By the end of the season, we can expect roughly 15% of Americans to get the flu.
Tragically, the first pediatric flu death was reported for the 2025-2026 season. I expect many more, given that flu vaccination rates are the lowest they’ve been in decades. Since 2004, we’ve seen an increase in the number of deaths year over year. Last year was a record year for pediatric deaths. Most children who died were not vaccinated.
Covid-19 remains low nationally, but it doesn’t look like this will continue for long. Cases in the Northeast and Midwest are increasing quickly. The South is inching upwards as well. (See your local wastewater trends here.)
We’ll see where this takes us, but given that we had a mild Covid-19 winter and summer, there are a lot of people out there susceptible to infection. Trends are still hard to predict, given this is a relatively new virus: we could see a large wave or smaller and smaller waves, with Covid-19 becoming the common cold. Time will tell.
What this means for you: All of these trends will only intensify with holiday gatherings, as mixing of households and social networks creates more pathways for viruses to travel. Wearing a mask in crowded indoor spaces helps reduce disruptions in your life. Testing is useful, though for mild illness, it rarely matters which virus you have—except for high-risk individuals, for whom results could guide antiviral treatment. Stay home until symptoms improve to protect others and prevent further spread.
Measles outbreaks continue to march on with 1,926 cases this year. Word on the street is that the U.S. will also lose the WHO measles elimination status early next year.
Two outbreaks continue to grow quickly:
South Carolina: This outbreak is growing exponentially, with Spartanburg County remaining the epicenter with 126 cases. Fifteen new cases were reported last week, mostly household transmission. Currently, 254 children are in quarantine at 11 schools, missing 21 days of school for an easily preventable disease.
Utah/Arizona: 291 cases with ongoing transmission spreading through Utah and Mohave County, Arizona.
What this means for you: If you’re near a measles outbreak, follow guidance from your local public health department. Children under 12 months can get MMR as early as 6 months old, and families up to date on vaccinations are protected.
Simply making it through this year is an accomplishment. Still, even through the fog, there have been wins and moments of good news, and I truly believe we need to hold onto them to keep hope and joy alive.
Every year, I collect public health victories to mark the close of the year, and I’m not stopping now. I’d love your help. What’s your favorite piece of public health good news or biggest win this year? It can be local, national, or global. Share it in the comments, and I’ll try to include some in the final 2025 accomplishments report.
This week, as respiratory illnesses rise and outbreaks continue, and as our communities are shaken by yet more mass shootings, taking small but meaningful actions—masking in crowds, staying home when sick, staying up to date on vaccines, and advocating for safer environments—can help protect the people we care about.
Love, YLE
Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is founded and operated by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, wife, and mom of two little girls. YLE reaches more than 425,000 people in over 132 countries with one goal: “Translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below:
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