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The upcoming annual Balikatan military exercise will include an area in the South China Sea that is claimed by China, as well as an area not far from Taiwan. The Philippines wants peace and development in the Indo-Pacific despite tensions fuelled by Beijing.

Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} By Meghan Schrader

Meghan Schrader
Meghan is an autistic person who is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

I am commenting on the cases of the young women with autism, ADHD, depression and Borderline Personality Disorder who are planning to have their lives ended in Canada and the Netherlands from the perspective of someone who also has autism, ADHD and depression. I am not a psychologist and I’ve never met either person, but I will do my best to share insights about those situations based on my own experiences.

The cases strike me as presenting a lot of issues so this article is long. The issues that stick out to me are the devastation a person might feel when they are told that their mental health conditions can never improve, the abusiveness of that advice, the right to die movement’s flippant attitude toward death, the nature of true friendship, the autistic tendency to fixate, and the complex experience of autonomy that occurs when a autistic adult lives with their parents.

I’ll start with the 28-year-old woman in Belgium with autism, BPD and depression. Ter Beek’s situation makes me think of two issues, one being the euthanasia movement’s flippant approach to death and the potential inaccuracy or hubris of doctors who dole out mental health diagnoses. Ter Beek was told that she could never get better, which is something I’ve been told during my struggles with treatment resistant depression, at my lowest moments after multiple futile hospitalizations and medication trials. Hearing those predictions was gutting, and I understand why some people who get that kind of prognosis might feel motivated to have their lives ended.

But just giving up on a patient and suggesting that they die is abusive. It’s common for clinicians to arrogantly dole out demoralizing predictions to disabled people that would make anyone fearful of the future; and that can certainly contribute to the conclusion that one should die. I’ll never forget one counsellor at a partial hospitalization program who barely knew me, but took it upon herself to announce to me that the combination of my learning disability, autism spectrum disorder and depression was so disabling that I would never work and would have to live in a group home for the rest of my life. (That’s not true; now I live in an apartment and work at a job I love.) A medical system or physician who tells people, “you’ll never get better; maybe you should kill yourself” is doling out an even more arrogant and abusive recommendation.

It’s worth noting that dark predictions of things never getting better fit into a pattern of people with Borderline Personality Disorder struggling to access adequate care. People with BPD are more likely to have clinicians give up on them because of stereotypes about people with BPD, because people with BPD have a higher incidence of suicide, and because the symptoms of BPD sometimes make the person difficult to interact with (Link to article). But, recovery from BPD is very possible; in fact, the woman who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the gold standard treatment for BPD, had the disorder herself (Link to article). I have a colleague at my job who has BPD, and she’s now living her best life, doing wonderful work with our students. There’s also evidence that the symptoms of BPD, which can be very acute in a person’s twenties, decline with age. (Link to article) So, often clinicians assume that people with BPD are bad or unfixable people, but it’s just not true. People with BPD can effectively manage their condition and lead meaningful, happy lives (Link to a book on the topic).

Another thing that stood out to me when I looked at the article about Ter Beek is the euthanasia movement’s trivialization of death. Now, a mentor who provided feedback on this article pointed out to me that people have many different ways of processing what death is. He commented: 

“Many might argue that fear is not the only appropriate or even “reasonable” response. Many religious systems perceive death as a step toward eternal life, and other think of death as ‘not being,’ that is as potentially neutral as being, perhaps within the will/power of divine order that transcends us.” 

Zoraya ter Beek
Fair enough, but I still think that the right to die movement is trivializing the harm of death. In the interview she did for the Free Press, Ter Beek says that she’s a little scared to die, but the picture of her accompanying the article has her looking sanguine in a way that reminds me of someone who is modelling clothing; she refers to the urn her ashes will be kept in as “my new house;” as though being a pile of ashes kept in a urn on someone’s desk is the equivalent of buying a condo (Link to article). This description of death indicates an unverifiable certainty that death is a doorway to something good. The right to die movement’s current activities are as though many of the proponents have inured themselves to the concept that death is the great unknown and that dead people are lowered into graves where their bodies are eaten by worms. I think that if Canadian and Netherlands culture treated death with more reticence and a less like a trip to some amazing wonderland of delight, the choice to be dead might not seem so appealing to disabled people who are signing up for euthanasia.

Now I’ll move on to the the young woman in Canada with autism and ADHD, MV. The thing that sticks out to me the most is that she lives with her parents, and as someone who lived with my parents on and off in my twenties, I know that that can be a complex and potentially difficult experience for everyone involved, even when everyone is trying their best and loves each other very much. So, I’ll consider how I think that situation might be impacting MV’s “MAiD” request.

First of all, we live in a culture that highly prizes autonomy and expects adult children to move out of their parents house, and I’m wondering if that’s making the experience of living with her parents seem intolerable to MV (Link to an article). But, complete independence is not the only valuable or valid conception of autonomy to operate from. In the Latino culture (Link to article) it is common for multiple generations of a family to live in the same house far into adulthood. (Link to article).

Hence, I think it might help MV to consider that the Latino culture and disability justice culture emphasize interdependence-autonomy with help from others in the context of supportive relationships. Disability Studies professor Paul Longmore put the difference between mainstream Western conceptions of autonomy and the disability justice movement’s general approach to autonomy as follows:

“For example, some people with disabilities have been affirming the validity of values drawn from their own experience. Those values are markedly different from, and even opposed to, nondisabled majority values. They declare that they prize not self-sufficiency but self-determination, not independence but interdependence, not functional separateness but personal connection, not physical autonomy but human community. This values-formation takes disability as the starting point. It uses the disability experience as the source of values and norms. The affirmation of disabled values also leads to a broad-ranging critique of non- disabled values. American culture is in the throes of an alarming and dangerous moral and social crisis, a crisis of values. The disability movement can advance a much-needed perspective on this situation, It can offer a critique of the hyperindividualistic majority norms institutionalized in the medical model and at the heart of the contemporary American crisis.” (Link to article) So, if I could talk to MV, I would tell her that there’s no need to be ashamed that she lives with her family just because that’s not what most adults in Canada do; plenty of competent, fulfilled adults in this world do the same thing. In a way, those of us disabled adults who live with family are rebels living in a way that is counter-cultural, and that cultural deviance really isn’t a bad thing.

However, I also know that being a disabled adult child living in your parents house can sort of feel like you are stuck in a state of perpetual adolescence, and that this can cause a person to feel repressed. When I was living with my parents I was grateful for their support, but I wasn’t able to have the level of autonomy that I think most twenty-somethings want, and we sometimes struggled to communicate effectively about what each one of us needed. There were a lot of times when I found my parents well-meaning advice intensely grating or that they found various everyday behaviors of mine disruptive. That situation led to some very demoralizing conflict; being “roomates” with your parents can make some daily interactions start to feel like fingers on a blackboard, even if those family relationships are very loving.

My choice to move to Texas in my mid-thirties was also a good one. My parents and I are still very close, but they have more space to have time together as a couple and I have more room to say, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I, Meghan Schrader the independent disabled adult, want help with thing A, but not thing B.”

Given my own experiences, I’m wondering if MV’s desire to die by “MAiD” is at least partially motivated by an attempt to assert autonomy in a situation where she isn’t experiencing autonomy in other domains of her life. Is there perhaps another family member or friend who she could live with for a while, who could provide support for her disability and would provide the same level of encouragement for her to live, but with whom she might feel a greater sense of autonomy? Would that make her feel as though she has better adult choices to look forward to? One thing that I think would’ve helped me in my 20s is going to a treatment facility for people with clinical depression; is that the kind of thing that MV might be willing to do that might give her a break from her environment? Perhaps MV could go on a long retreat somewhere? If a change in MV’s living situation isn’t possible right now, are there other ways that she could have more opportunities to make choices about her daily routine, establish clearer boundaries with others and direct the course of her life? (Link to a book on this topic). 

Of course, as I’ve said, I am not a member of this family and I don’t know what’s going on in their everyday lives; MV struggling to assert herself in a situation where she isn’t getting other opportunities to assert autonomy is just the kind of thing that I think might be going on based on my own experience.

However, although giving MV more autonomy in general strikes me as potentially helping to alleviate her desire to die, MV’s Dad’s statement that MV is “obsessed” with MAiD and that the obsession is related to her autism and ADHD strikes me as providing important insight into how she is experiencing the conclusion that she should die by “MAiD,” and that these dynamics complicate her experience of autonomy. An article on the situation reads:

“The wrinkle, and perhaps the tragedy, in this case is that the woman, identified only as MV, has autism and ADHD, lives with her parents and has never had an independent life. Her father, identified as WV, argued that her condition is mental, not physical, so she doesn’t qualify for MAID under current law. Her condition, he said, led to her being “obsessed” with MAID.” (Link to article). I think some people might read that statement as a parent erroneously and paternalistically painting an adult autistic child as lacking agency, but I can say from experience that the autistic tendency to fixate is a real thing. This hyper focus is even more intense in those of us who also have ADHD, and that hyper-focus can sometimes make it difficult to break out of irrational or destructive thinking patterns (Link to article). In that case the person is not “incompetent,” but the fixation distorts the person’s ability to think through all the facts about whatever they are fixated on, sort of like if the person were mildly intoxicated (Link to image). A family member’s efforts to prevent a loved one from making a choice based on those thinking patterns are not “paternalistic,” it’s the family member being loving and responsible. Or, that’s been my experience.

For instance, MV’s intent to die by “MAiD” reminds me a little bit of some of the decisions I’ve made in the context of symptoms of body dysmorphic disorder. I’m going to withhold the details, but a couple of times I’ve made choices related to perceptual distortions from that disorder that my parents strongly urged me not to make, and I could have saved us all a lot of suffering if I had listened to them, even though I’m an independent adult who can make her own choices. I also made some important vocational decisions in my late teens and early twenties that my parents strongly advised against, and in my thirties I came to deeply regret not following their advice.

But, at least I lived to regret those mistakes and move on with my life. This young woman is presumably fixated on the idea that killing herself isn’t really so bad. Unfortunately, the fact that she’s reached that conclusion is sort of understandable in the same way that some of the ways I’ve handled body dysmorphic disorder are understandable. Western culture inundates us with ideas about what is attractive in a similar way that Canadian & Netherlands culture romanticize “MAiD.” So, “MAiD” has been presented as just another choice, and that’s a sad combination with the fixation that is more typical for those of us on the spectrum.

I think I remember reading somewhere that someone urged MV to die by “MAiD,” and that makes me very sad. It reminds me of a terrible experience I had in my early 20s when a close friend of 20 years suddenly started treating me horribly because that’s what her new boyfriend urged her to do. It was deeply wounding to have one of my best childhood friends, with whom I had shared some of the happiest times of my life, turn on me in that way, and the eventual dissolution of that friendship caused desperate loneliness. The friend who is urging MV to kill herself is abusing MV in a similar way. Urging someone to end their life is not the mark of a true and caring friend, this is a mark of someone living out their appetite for destruction by pushing someone else toward destruction. In fact, a young woman in Massachusetts served time in jail for encouraging her boyfriend to end his life. (Link to article).

My hope for MV is that she is eventually able to find better friends who will truly love and support her, like a close mentor of mine who lives near my current apartment and generously serves as a listening ear, a lunch partner and problem-solver for me. I also found it helpful to get involved with the local chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network; is there a Canadian chapter of ASAN or a similar group that MV could get involved with where she could experience comaraderie with other people who have disabilities, such as one of the groups that signed this letter opposing the extension of assisted suicide to people with disabilities in 2021? (Link to article)

The last thing MV’s situation causes me to reflect on is the euthanasia movement’s privileging of personal choice above all else. In respect to MV’s intent to die, the original trial judge wrote that: 

this choice “goes to the core of her being. An injunction would deny MV the right to choose between living and dying with dignity.” 

The judge’s logic shows just how cold the euthanasia agenda is; he was denying the woman’s father the opportunity to intervene to save their daughter because the impending suicide was a choice. Canada’s “MAiD” program’s operation from that logic shows that the right to die movement treats choice as something that can never be questioned, no matter the consequences: MV’s decision to kill herself with “MAiD” is a choice, so that choice must be carried out and MV’s parents should just stand there while someone injects poison into her arm.

A culture that privileges a “choice” facilitated by state-employed doctors over instincts of family and the efforts of parents to prevent their children from being killed is an empty one. Unfortunately, the politically powerful euthanasia movement values the right to be made dead more than the deepest bonds of love and care. My hope is that MV and Ter Beek will find the love and care that they need to move beyond the desire to die and achieve something much better for themselves.

You will say I am easily angered by Francis. I will reply that it is more so, that Francis is extremely angering. One of the traits of the man I can stand the least is his taking the right people and abusing them to propagate the wrong message. The last example is Saint Pius X. […]

After President-elect Prabowo's visit to Beijing, China's foreign minister travelled to Jakarta to discuss Chinese involvement in the infrastructure of Indonesia's new capital Nusantara, a project that follows the building of a high-speed train between Jakarta and Bandung.

Creak! Pop! Join Chris & Paul for another revelatory and insightful romp through the world of popping financial rivets and newly sprung holes in the monetary dike. This week, the yen, gold and what the prospect of sharply higher interest rates would mean for investors.

According to the UN health agency, about 3,500 people die of viral hepatitis every day. The highest number is in China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Despite improvements in diagnostic testing, huge disparities still exist in access to drugs.

Ryan and Tho discuss Renato Moicano's viral Mises moment and the backlash it received from pundit Sohrab Ahmari.

Ryan and Tho discuss Renato Moicano's viral Mises moment and the backlash it received from pundit Sohrab Ahmari.

Tariffs are nothing more than taxes, which means that protectionists believe high taxes create prosperity. This is an absurd claim.

Tariffs are nothing more than taxes, which means that protectionists believe high taxes create prosperity. This is an absurd claim.

Hello again and welcome to another edition of Laura's Links. It's been another busy week in our household with Passover preparations and another crazy week in world events. It really does seem that the main purpose of Obama's third term was to set the

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has warned, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly steamrollered into an expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.

We should have seen this coming.

After all, the Police State doesn’t relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn’t look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn’t like to be restricted.

What most Americans don’t get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that’s how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.

These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.

Don’t believe it.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches for Americans’ private communications each year.

No one is spared.

Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.

Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.

The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply “incidental,” as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.

As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies “could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market.”

Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

Ask the government why it’s carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

What this is really all about, however, is control.

What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

You don’t have to do anything illegal.

For that matter, you don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, it’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it won’t be long before Big Brother’s Thought Police are locking us up to “protect us” from ourselves.

At that point, we will disappear.

Reprinted with permission from The Rutherford Institute.

Last week, the Supreme Court effectively abolished the right to assembly in three Southern states. By refusing to hear an appeal of a speaker accused of being liable for what a protester did in an audience the speaker addressed, the court exposed all protest organizers and speakers to potentially ruinous financial penalties for what unknown persons have done.

Here is the backstory.

The right to taunt the tyrant — whether the tyrant be a king or a president or local police — is among the natural rights of expression integral to all persons. Your rights to think as you wish, to say what you think, to read what you choose, to publish what you say, and to do this alone or in concert with others — without a government permission slip or fear of government reprisal — are natural human rights possessed by all persons above the age of reason.

Expressing oneself in concert with others is also a constitutional right, as the First Amendment expressly prohibits Congress from making any law infringing upon it. From and after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the congressional prohibition applies to all branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial — and to all levels of government — local, state and federal.

The companion right is the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. What once were written petitions have today become mass demonstrations, at which folks articulate their antipathy to government or cultural trends, expecting extensive media coverage and hoping that their views will resonate with the public at large and bring about the change they seek or at least a general awareness of the grievances that vex them.

This right is as old as America. It began in pubs in the 1770s in Boston, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston, where revolutionaries met to complain about oppression by the British. These meetings produced county, regional and statewide gatherings that adopted early local versions of the Declaration of Independence, which itself was adopted unanimously by the Continental Congress in July 1776.

The right to assemble in public and complain about the government is so well-rooted in American history that it is hard to imagine our secession from Britain coming about without it. The colonists accepted it as normal and natural and when they gathered to shake their fists in the tyrant’s face — metaphorically of course, as George III was 3,000 miles away — they did so without fear of retribution.

Until now.

Now, if you organize, foment or even speak at a gathering in Louisiana, Mississippi or Texas, and some unknown person in the audience — at a time unknown, in a manner unknown and even unseen — harms another unnamed person nearby, the injured party can sue you.

This actually happened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where DeRay McKesson organized a rally in 2016 outside a police station to protest what he claimed were excessive uses of force by the police. Someone at the rally — not McKesson — threw a rock that hit and seriously injured a nearby police officer. The officer, whose lawyers have declined to identify, sued McKesson, even though they acknowledge that he didn’t throw the rock, didn’t advocate attacking the police and uttered no words suggesting imminent lawlessness.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit — which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — permitted the suit to move forward. McKesson asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and it declined to do so last week.

We have two fundamental legal issues intertwined here. The first is freedom of expression, and the second is vicarious liability.

Do expressive rights evaporate merely because someone in the audience became violent? Until last week, the universal answer to that was: No.

Indeed, the courts have many times rejected the so-called heckler’s veto whereby a person adverse to the speaker causes a disruption that results in personal injury or property damage and the harmed parties sue the speaker. In those cases, the courts have held consistently that unless the speaker’s words command and produce immediate lawless behavior, the speaker is not liable for the heckler’s violence.

Vicarious liability — holding A liable for the crimes or misbehavior of B — often comes up in the First Amendment context. The modern jurisprudence has uniformly held that the right to free assembly is so integral to democracy, so well-rooted in our history, so necessary for effective free expression that it actually tolerates the violence that sometimes accompanies it. Were this not so, then hecklers would have their veto and there would be no such thing as free assembly.

In Chicago in 1946, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Arthur Terminiello, gave an incendiary speech attacking President Harry Truman. The speech drew nearly as many hecklers as it did appreciators. The hecklers stormed the stage and trashed the lecture venue. The Chicago police arrested Terminiello, not the hecklers. He was convicted of disorderly conduct and the Illinois courts upheld his conviction.

The Supreme Court reversed the conviction for the reasons that have now become a well-accepted aspect of our jurisprudence: All innocuous speech is absolutely protected; and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge it.

The McKesson decision is ridiculous. When the Giants last beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl, two drunks had a fight in the stadium. Can they sue Tom Brady? Of course not.

In McKesson’s case, he neither advocated nor caused violence. Yet the court — abandoning the Terminiello principles — will allow an unnamed victim to sue him for what an unknown and unseen assailant did. This is a major blow to the freedom of expression. The court gave no reasons for its bizarre decision. One can hope that a jury will do the right thing; or the court, if it has this case again, will return to first principles.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

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Bishop Indrias Rehmat chose Fr Abid Tanvir, former diocese vicar general, as parish priest. Two catechists were also appointed to work with him. Admired and visited by Muslims, the church named after Saint Anthony was inaugurated last year. The bishop urged the faithful 'to make this beautiful church stronger in spirituality.'