“What is perfection in love? Love your enemies in such a way that you would desire to make them your brothers … For so did He love, Who hanging on the Cross, said ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” (Luke 23:34)
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Site: AsiaNews.itToday's news: two weeks after the first failed attempt, Pyongyang has launched its warship. At least five people, including three journalists, have been killed in Israeli raids on an Anglican hospital in Gaza. During the night, Russian drones and missiles rained down on several Ukrainian cities, including Kiev. Xi and Trump spoke on the phone for 90 minutes, with the 'trade war' at the centre of the talks. ...
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Site: Zero HedgeChina Automakers Are Overtaking Japanese Competitors In ThailandTyler Durden Thu, 06/05/2025 - 18:00
Japan’s hold on Thailand’s auto market is quickly slipping as Chinese brands make big gains. Japanese automakers’ market share fell to 65% in April—down over 10 points from a year earlier and far below the ~90% they once enjoyed, according to Toyota Motor Thailand data.
Meanwhile, six Chinese-owned brands doubled their share to a record 24%, led by BYD at 14%, according to Nikkei.
While Thailand’s auto market grew just 1% year-on-year to 47,193 vehicles—thanks to a boost from the Bangkok International Motor Show—sales are being held back by high household debt and tough auto loan approvals, keeping monthly sales at around 40,000 units. Even pickup truck sales, the “national car,” have slumped 21%.
Toyota’s April sales fell 8% but it still led with 38% share. Isuzu dropped 18% to 12% share, Honda’s sales plunged 42% to 7% share, and Mitsubishi’s sales fell 21% to 4%.
Nikkei writes that Chinese automakers saw huge growth: BYD sales jumped 7.3 times, giving it 14% share, passing Isuzu and Honda. MG’s share hit 5% with a 46% sales increase, while Changan hit 3% after a 53% rise.
Driving China’s surge: BYD’s aggressive discounting at the motor show, plus new plug-in hybrids and EVs. BYD’s sales now outpace Japanese brands in some segments.
Recall, we wrote last month how China part makers in Thailand had tripled.
And we said we couldn't help but notice the timing - with tariffs on goods coming from China through the roof - seems to be...coincidentally beneficial for Chinese corporations.
In the Eastern Economic Corridor, about two hours from Bangkok, new factories are rapidly rising. Battery maker Sunwoda Electronic is investing over $1 billion to build a lithium-ion battery plant, with mass production set for 2025. Battery cells will be made locally, and a Thai official noted it’s likely to become Southeast Asia’s first plant producing batteries from cells.
More than 20 Chinese auto brands, including BYD and Great Wall Motor, have entered Thailand.
BYD’s factory, which began production in July 2024, is becoming the hub of a growing supply chain. Alongside Sunwoda, battery makers CALB, Gotion, and SVOLT have started local production, while CATL is building a joint venture plant with Thailand’s state-owned PTT.
However it may not all be tariff related. Nikkei writes that Chinese manufacturers began accelerating their investments in Thailand around 2018, amid rising U.S.-China trade tensions.
As of March, Chinese-invested auto parts companies in Thailand reached 165—over triple the number from the end of 2017. Across Southeast Asia, Chinese companies established more than 7,000 firms by 2023, with direct investment topping a record $25 billion that year.
This growth is expected to continue. In April, Ningbo Tuopu Group announced plans to invest up to $300 million in a Thai factory, saying the move would help it “win more orders and strengthen support for important foreign customers.”
Nikkei writes that Japanese automakers, dominant in Thailand since the 1960s, have built a network of about 1,400 local suppliers through joint ventures and vertically integrated operations. In contrast, Chinese carmakers are building independent supply chains, often excluding Japanese-linked suppliers.
Chinese parts are nearly 30% cheaper than those from Japanese firms, and Chinese companies typically produce core components like batteries in-house or source them from affiliated suppliers. “Thai suppliers will not be able to fully benefit from the Chinese push into the country,” Sompol said.
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Site: LifeNews
Pressure is growing on federal agencies to regulate the abortion drug mifepristone, following publication of a series of alarming reports. The latest report, published last week by the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), analyzed Medicare and Medicaid data and discovered that the vast majority (over 80%) of women who visited an emergency room with complications from the abortion drug had their abortions miscoded as miscarriages.
The study examined nearly 30,000 emergency room visits and found that between 2016 and 2021, a period of five years, miscodes of emergency room visits following surgical abortions increased in prevalence from a rate of 26.8% to 73.9%, while miscodes of ER visits following mifepristone abortions increased in prevalence from a rate of 45.5% to 83.5%. Additionally, acuity — that is, the measure of the severity and complexity of a patient’s condition — was significantly higher (at a rate of 50%) among miscoded cases than correctly-coded cases.
“When abortion-related emergencies are disguised as miscarriages, it impairs a doctor’s ability to make informed, evidence-based decisions. That isn’t just a documentation error — it’s a public health crisis,” said Dr. James Studnicki, vice president and director of data analytics at CLI and one of the authors of the study, in a statement obtained by The Washington Stand. He added, “The abortion industry’s push for concealment is unethical and dangerous. Women deserve honest guidance and proper medical care, not advice that jeopardizes their health.”
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Another of the study’s authors, CLI Vice President and Director of Medical Affairs Dr. Ingrid Skop, told TWS, “As a board-certified OB-GYN practicing in Texas, I’ve seen firsthand the devastating effects abortion drugs have on women, as I have been called to care for them in the ER regularly.” She explained, “This study exposes the abortion industry’s reckless advice for women to hide their abortion drug use from doctors, delaying proper care and risking their health.”
Skop continued, “Doctors are disadvantaged when they are unaware of a patient’s abortion history. They may need to intervene more quickly to remove retained pregnancy tissue and/or the dead baby to prevent serious infection when abortion drugs fail.” The veteran medical practitioner added, “No other area of medicine tolerates such dangerous misinformation — it’s a direct threat to women’s safety.”
Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told TWS, “The miscoding of a mifepristone abortion as a miscarriage can lead to a delay in care for a mom whose life may be in danger as the result of the use of the abortion drug mifepristone.” She clarified, “Miscarriage and abortion are not the same thing — and they do not have the same impact on a woman’s body. Planned Parenthood even records miscarriage and abortion as separate occurrences; but, at the same time, Planned Parenthood advises women it’s ‘up to them’ whether they tell their doctor about their use of mifepristone.”
Szoch concluded, “Unfortunately, they leave out that a decision not to tell their doctor they took mifepristone might result in severe bodily harm. Mifepristone is an incredibly dangerous drug. It kills unborn children and maims moms physically and emotionally as it does so.”
Another recent study, this one from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, found that serious complications related to the use of mifepristone are 22 times more common than claimed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), prompting widespread calls for the health agency to reexamine mifepristone and restore stringent regulations surrounding its prescription and use.
A subsequent CLI report debunked the “baseless claim that ‘abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol’ because it lacks scientific credibility and evidence.” The report found that the claim must be based on “a controlled, scientifically appropriate study comparing abortion drugs to Tylenol,” which does not exist and “would be impossible to do [conduct] because these drugs are used for entirely different purposes.”
When the FDA first approved mifepristone for use in 2000, three in-person physician visits were required before the drug could be prescribed, the drug could only be prescribed by a physician, it had to be dispensed and consumed in the physician’s office, and a follow-up visit was required, as was reporting of any complications.
In 2016, then-President Barack Obama eliminated many of those provisions, including the requirement that the abortion drug be prescribed by a physician and consumed in-office, as well as the mandatory follow-up visit and reporting of complications. The Obama FDA also lowered the number of required in-person physician visits prior to prescription from three to only one and increased the “maximum gestational age” for prescribing the drug from seven weeks to 10.
In 2023, the Biden administration further weakened the remaining safeguards, requiring no in-person physician visits, no physician to prescribe the drug, no dispensing or consuming the drug in-office, no follow-up visit, and no reporting of complications.
Earlier this week, newly-minted FDA Commissioner Marty Makary pledged to conduct “a review of mifepristone and work … with the professional career scientists at the Agency who review this data.” As TWS documented, his new promise to reassess the abortion drug is a shift from his previous positions on the subject, refusing to commit to reviewing mifepristone.
LifeNews Note: S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
The post Abortion Pill Coverup: Injuries to Women are Falsely Classified as Miscarriages appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
The Trump administration just overturned a highly controversial Biden-era policy, and pro-lifers are cheering it on.
President Donald Trump’s Tuesday reversal targeted redefinitions of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) that had stirred intense debate over abortion funding and medical ethics.
Under the Biden administration, EMTALA was reinterpreted in July 2022 to allow taxpayer dollars to fund what were termed “emergency abortions.” This guidance not only permitted federal funding for these procedures but also imposed penalties on health care workers and hospitals that refused to carry them out, even when such actions conflicted with their deeply held moral or religious convictions. The policy effectively compelled medical professionals to act against their conscience, creating a moral and legal dilemma for those who prioritize the protection of unborn life.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a joint statement following Trump’s executive order, announcing the rescission of the July 2022 CMS guidance titled “Reinforcement of EMTALA Obligations specific to Patients who are Pregnant or are Experiencing Pregnancy Loss.” The agencies emphasized their intent to restore clarity to the application of EMTALA, stating, “CMS will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”
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Moving forward, the Trump administration affirmed that EMTALA would continue to be utilized, but in a manner consistent with its original intent — to ensure emergency medical care without mandating procedures that conflict with ethical principles or state laws.
Trump’s move has received criticism. Critics argue that the reversal undermines access to critical health care services, particularly in the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion regulation to the states. Amy Friedrich-Karnik of the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization, stated, “EMTALA’s importance has only increased as our nation reckons with the fallout from the Dobbs decision, which has led to a fractured and chaotic abortion access landscape.”
She claimed that the policy reversal could exacerbate challenges for women seeking emergency care in states with restrictive abortion laws. Similarly, Alexa Kolbi-Molinas of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned the move, as reported by Axios, saying, “[T]he administration sent a clear signal that it is siding with its anti-abortion allies — a move the group said will come at the expense of women’s lives.”
In contrast, pro-life advocates have hailed the executive order as a restoration of both legal integrity and moral clarity. Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, took to X, posting that the Trump administration’s move “ends years of pro-abortion lawfare against pro-life states and doctors, as well as the lie that pro-life states deny emergency care to pregnant women.”
“Let’s be clear,” she added, “every pro-life state already protects moms in medical emergencies. This mandate was never about care or saving lives — it was about coercion & pushing abortion into every hospital, by force.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino, a former Trump administration official, also celebrated the move. “Wide majorities of Americans oppose forcing doctors and hospitals to take innocent human life,” he said, “and this change goes back to respecting conscience and the rule of law.” When following its original intent, “EMTALA requires hospitals to treat unborn children and mothers in labor.” But as Severino went on to explain, “shamelessly, abortion radicals inverted this clearly pro-life law to unlawfully mandate abortion nationwide, even though every state already has life of the mother exceptions.”
“To add insult to injury,” Severino stressed, “the Biden order refused to acknowledge that the law protected mothers, or even women, instead calling them ‘pregnant patients.’ A stain on America’s conscience is now gone, and good riddance.”
This enthusiasm was echoed by Mary Szoch, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, who spoke to The Washington Stand about the significance of the policy shift. “Killing an unborn child has never been and never will be health care,” she asserted. Szoch described the executive order as part of a “growing list of common-sense changes” implemented by the Trump administration to protect both unborn children, mothers, and the conscience rights of medical professionals.
“Thank goodness President Trump was elected,” she concluded. “Now, the government is no longer attempting to force doctors to kill their patients. Praise God!”
LifeNews Note: Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.
The post Trump Policy Confirms Abortion is Not Health Care appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Catholic ConclaveOn an ecclesial day charged with symbolism, Pope Leo XIV received Kiko Argüello, founder of the Neo-Catechumenal Way, in a private audience this morning. The event sparked particular interest, not only because of the visitor's profile, but also because of the doctrinal and liturgical implications underlying this encounter.Meeting with Pope LeoMeeting with previous PopeA liturgy outside the Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: Novus Motus LiturgicusOn May 18, the Fourth Sunday after Easter, His Excellency Ronald Gainer, Bishop Emeritus of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, celebrated a pontifical Mass in the traditional Roman Rite at St. Joseph’s Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Mass was sponsored by our friends at the Durandus Institute; the program of sacred music included Victoria’s Missa O Quam Gloriosum. Anyone who has ever served this Gregory DiPippohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295638279418781125noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: LifeNews
The Trump administration sharply criticized the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) during a recent Executive Board meeting, accusing the agency of complicity in China’s coercive population control policies.
The critic comes after recently announcing the complete withdrawal of U.S. funding, totaling $335 million, under the Kemp-Kasten Amendment.
In remarks delivered on June 3 at the UNFPA segment of the 2025 Annual Session of the UNDP/UNOPS/UNFPA Executive Board, Acting U.S. Representative to ECOSOC Jonathan Shrier condemned UNFPA’s long-standing partnership with Chinese government agencies responsible for implementing forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations.
“Millions of families suffered under China’s abhorrent population control,” Shrier said, highlighting the “barbaric” legacy of these policies and questioning UNFPA’s silence on the ongoing suffering of affected women.
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“Where is their justice?” he asked.
The administration’s decision to defund UNFPA, first reported by LifeNews on May 9, 2025, marks a continuation of President Donald Trump’s pro-life policies from his previous term. In 2017, Trump similarly cut funding to UNFPA, citing its role in supporting China’s population control regime, which has been linked to human rights abuses, including forced abortions and sterilizations.
The recent move terminates over 40 existing projects, redirecting $335 million in taxpayer funds away from the pro-abortion UN agency.
Critics of UNFPA, including pro-life advocates, argue that the agency’s collaboration with China’s government undermines its stated mission to promote reproductive health and rights.
The Trump administration’s stance aligns with the reinstatement and expansion of the Mexico City Policy, renamed the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy, which prohibits U.S. funding to foreign organizations that perform or promote abortions. The policy, initially introduced by President Ronald Reagan, has been a cornerstone of pro-life foreign policy under Republican administrations.
UNFPA expressed regret over the funding cut, stating on May 8, 2025, that it “notes with deep regret” the U.S. decision to invoke the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. The agency denied claims of supporting coercive practices, asserting that its work promotes voluntary family planning and human rights. “Over the past four years alone, with the U.S. Government’s life-saving investments, we prevented more than 17,000 maternal deaths,” UNFPA said, urging the U.S. to reconsider its position.
Shrier’s remarks also called on the UNFPA Executive Board to scrutinize the agency’s financial ties to China, questioning why UNFPA continues to subsidize technical assistance for a country with the world’s second-largest economy.
“UNFPA should not be complicit in China’s population control,” he said, reinforcing the administration’s commitment to prioritizing human rights in U.S. foreign aid.
The post Trump Admin Slams UNFPA for Supporting Population Control in China appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) praised the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, for his planned review of the abortion pill mifepristone.
National Right to Life today released a letter the organization sent to FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary on May 29, 2025, asking for a review of the abortion drug in light of new studies showing its frequent association with serious, often life-threatening adverse events.
“The FDA owes it to the American people—especially to women—to reconsider the standards under which this drug was approved and is currently being distributed,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Women deserve the truth about the risks associated with abortion pills.”
Tobias continued, “At the very least, the agency should reinstate pre-2016 safety protocols, including in-person physician oversight, an earlier gestational cutoff, and full adverse event reporting.”
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NRLC’s letter calls for a full review of the FDA’s approval and deregulation of mifepristone and an immediate halt to online and pharmacy distribution of the drug, pending a complete reevaluation of its safety profile. This followed a new study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) revealing serious safety concerns at nearly 22 times the rate reported by the abortion industry’s sponsored studies.
“This is a matter of public health and ethical responsibility,” said Tobias.
In the letter, National Right to Life highlighted the EPPC study’s findings, which analyzed medical records from more than 865,000 abortion pill users and revealed alarming rates of complications—far higher than those reflected in earlier studies used to justify FDA approval and deregulation of the drug.
National Right to Life also pointed to similar findings from large-scale studies in Finland and Canada, which reported significantly higher adverse event rates than those cited by the FDA or in studies sponsored by the abortion industry.
The letter details critical safety issues that have arisen in recent use of mifepristone, including:
- Use of the drug beyond the FDA’s approved gestational age, as advertised by prominent providers;
- High rates of emergency room visits by women experiencing significant pain, uncontrolled bleeding, or other serious complications;
- Improper prescription of the drug to women with undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies, which can lead to life-threatening outcomes;
- Concerns over the safety and quality of abortion pills shipped by mail without inspection or temperature control;
- The way abortion pill advocates have minimized the seriousness of complications such as failed abortions, hemorrhages, and even uterine perforations as “minor” to claim high safety rates.
“The EPPC study paints a stark contrast to the small, idealized clinical trials put forward by the abortion industry,” added Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC Director of Education and Research. “This research of EPPC and these other large, neutral foreign studies reflect real-world conditions and demonstrate that many women suffer serious medical complications as mifepristone is currently prescribed and used.”
Read the full letter here.
The post With Abortion Pill Injuring Tens of Thousands of Women, FDA is Right to Review appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Catholic ConclaveKatharina Jost Graf: "Equality is under attack – women's networks are increasingly needed again"Parish chaplain Katharina Jost Graf recently became co-president of the Swiss Women's Federation, together with Pia Viel. She wouldn't have wanted to become president, even though she advocates for equality. "Even we theologians are not entirely immune to clericalism," she says.You were previously viceCatholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: PeakProsperityThe China trade wars are anything but over, US consumers are leveraged up, tapped out and rolling over, And Trump is fretting over the huge impact that loss of China's imports represents.
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Site: The Orthosphere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oADHdNwrpc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRsHuvqBJAcThe following is a rough transcript of a video by Academic Agent (AKA, Neema Parvini) with a few minor editorial additions and editing for clarity.
Recently, James Lindsay made a video on elite theory. As the author of the bestselling book The Populist Illusion, which is a primer on elite theory, and since I am a modern purveyor of elite theory, when somebody critiques it like James Lindsay, I take that seriously.
Lindsay’s 20-minute video on the topic was, unfortunately, quite disappointing. It was obvious to me that Lindsay had not engaged with any of the material. He had not read The Populist Delusion. It was obvious to me that he had not really read Mosca or Pareto or Robert Michels. This is understandable in the case of Pareto. The Mind and Society is a big thick book. It is quite complicated. However, The Ruling Class by Mosca is not particularly long. And neither is Political Parties by Michels. The Populist Delusion is an even shorter book, so it is not really that difficult, I think, to get some of the core propositions of elite theory correct.
One of the things that you are meant to do as an intellectual is to show your interlocutors some intellectual charity. Ideally, what you should be able to do is to summarize their positions as strongly if not stronger than they are able to do and unfortunately Lindsay just did not do that. He did not give an accurate summary of what elite theory is, so in this video I’m going to give a couple of quick pointers as to what elite theory is, and what it isn’t, and why Lindsay’s entire video fell flat as a result of getting these things wrong.
The first thing to mention is that elite theory simply says that the disorganized mass is always ruled over by an organized minority. It says that in politics the organized minority tends to win over the disorganized mass.
The organized minority is called the ruling class; the rulers, and the disorganized majority is the ruled.
In his video, James Lindsay did not really come up with this formulation. He said something like “In every society, elites rule.” And then he said that that is a tautology; that it is true by definition. Or, it is just saying in every society there is an elite class.
At some level, that is right, but elite theory makes a much stronger claim. It says that regardless of what you call the system; whether you call it monarchy, or whether you call it a communist state, whether you call it social democratic or liberal democratic, a merchant republic, whatever you want to call your system of government, an aristocracy, feudalism, you name it, they all basically have the same structure and the same principles apply to power no matter what you call the system; namely that the organized minority rule over the disorganized mass.
The truth of this is hard to dispute and most people when confronted with it will concur. To get anywhere in this world you need to get together with some friends and plan and work together, in order to bring about some outcome. The problem is that the people who are in power right now, have an absolute advantage over everybody else who is trying to organize. They have a knowledge advantage. They have a communications advantage. They have technical expertise and skills managerialism that coalesce to make their rule quite difficult to overcome.
Overthrowing a government is something that only a handful of people have managed in history and the set of conditions that keep the ruling class in place and make them extremely difficult to dislodge is known as “the iron law of oligarchy,” and that is what Michel’s Political Parties is about. So, what James Lindsay did in his video is that he said, well there is a difference between elite theory as a descriptive set of tools and a prescriptive elite theory.
First of all, none of the elite theorists have any prescriptions. Elite theory is a value-free. It pretends to be a scientific way of trying to approach power and politics. Elite theory resembles economics. Economics is what they call a wertfrei science. It is value free. It does not try to smuggle in any other value. It just describes what is and elite theory is the same. Pareto, who was one of the elite theorists, was of course more famous as an economist, so it is using some of those tools that you would use in economics and applying a similar framework to politics and power. If you want a political science, that is what it was trying to do. That is what all of them said that they were doing, in the tradition of somebody like Nicolo Machiavelli who was also trying to give an ABCs of power; a set of laws of power that are true pretty much regardless of who is in the system. It is not really concerned with this system or that system; democracy or monarchy or whatever, it is concerned with the actual mechanics of power, regardless of what you call it.
Now one of the things that Lindsay did is he said, well the thing is that the descriptive part is fine but the danger comes when it becomes proscriptive; when people take elite theory and they say this the way things ought to be. He says it goes over the is/ought gap that David Hume talked about. This is an issue because, as far as I know, none of the elite theorists did that. That is not the point of their work. In my book the Populist Delusion which is a work of elite theory, I also do not advocate for any particular system of government.
James Lindsay went on to make a more moral, normative argument where he says that the problem occurs once you start saying that rule by an organized minority is the way things should be. Lindsay takes Curtis Yarvin’s advocation of monarchy as though that were an example of prescriptive elite theory, with monarchy being a particularly clear example of elite rule. However, when Curtis Yarvin advocates for monarchy, that is monarchism, not elite theory. That is, he is just making pro-monarchy arguments. That has nothing to do with elite theory. That is just him favoring that system over the other available systems. Elite theory does not do that. If anything, the elite theorists, to the extent that they advocate for anything at all, talk about an aristocracy of the talents. In other words, a meritocracy; a system which allows the most talented people into the ruling class. They argue that that system would be superior to systems that artificially lock out people of talent from the ruling class. And in fact, if you read Mosca, he says that if you look at the old Chinese system, they had a way of accepting talented people into the ruling class, even though there was an emperor. Elite theorists also argue that it is a weakness in hereditary systems that they do not do this. In a hereditary system, you can have an idiot king and things like that, and this is a problem.
So to the extent that elite theorists advocate for anything, they just say that if you look historically, these systems tend to have a problem of having a too restricted ruling class. So, the ruling class needs to be adaptive enough to absorb talent from the pool of the ruled.
[The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia from 1459 until the early 19th century would take promising young Christian men from all conquered regions back to Constantinople to serve in the administration or the Ottoman military. This practice was called the Devshirme. It involved forced conversion to Islam.
Daniel, from Daniel and the Lion’s Den fame, was a talented Jew recruited by the Achaemenid Persian regime under King Darius. Jealousy about this foreigner and non-coreligionist being given an important role in the administration was the reason King Darius was tricked into having to put Daniel in the lion’s den overnight. When Daniel survived this ordeal by divine intervention, Darius then took his revenge on those who had wanted to get rid of Daniel by throwing them and their families to the lions who immediately ate them.]
Lindsay, having falsely attributed a prescriptive element to elite theory, then goes on to claim that those who talk about elite theory are really trying to promote themselves as the new elite:
that the whole purpose of elite theory is to say that we need to be the new elite. That is just not the case at all. Elite theory is a descriptive, quasi-scientific empirical method of looking at the mechanics of power; the logic of power, and then using that as a way of looking at politics and power today. Elite theory can also be used to look at politics and power historically as well, and it does provide all sorts of illuminating insights, but it is a descriptive and analytical tool. It is not prescriptive or proscriptive (what should be done and what should not be done).
Machiavelli’s number one maxim was, “I write as things are, not as they ought to be.” Then we get to the crux of where Lindsay’s video falls flat for me which was when he was talking about America and the American Constitution and the founding fathers and saying, “Well elite theory is anti-American.” To talk about elite theory; that the organized minority rule over the disorganized mass, goes against the ideology of the American experiment as he calls it. Now this gets to the crux of the matter, because if you understand elite theory properly they are making a much stronger claim. They say essentially that democracy is impossible. Those who claim to rule in the name of the people are lying. This a delusion. That is the populist delusion. The idea that the people are actually ruling rather than the ruling class is a lie, and what Mosca, Pareto and Michels do in their books is they show you all of the ways in which the iron law of oligarchy tends to prevail. They show you the ways in which dissident energies are contained by the system. They show you the ways in which capital P power generally is able to outmaneuver the rival castles as I call them, as do the later works, like James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and Machiavelli’s The Prince and Bertrand de Jouvenel is another person I talk about. Burnham and Jouvenel are not typically thought of as the classical elite theorists, but they built on those ideas later on. There is Sam Francis as well. What they are showing is that any system that claims that it is ruling in the name of the people tends to be lying about that fact.
At the start of The Populist Delusion, I cite a statistic from a Chicago quantitative study across 1779 different laws passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, which showed zero correlation whatsoever with the wishes of the people. Voters seldom, if ever, get truly what they voted for. What Mosca says is that it is not really accurate to say that the people voted a certain person into power. It is more accurate to say that that person has themselves put into power by their friends and when it comes to big mass democracies, power is concentrated in the media, in newspapers, in the people who are able to fund campaigns, in moneymen, in lobby groups and so on.
So, when people talk about the ruling class in America, we need to look at things like banking groups. Lindsay refers to the Clintons and the Bushes, and people like Klaus Schwab and Davos. But, there is a whole cluster of people constituting a ruling class. There are these individuals in Davos, but there are those also in investment banks and elsewhere; the funders of the Democratic party and the Republican party. They are not “the people.” They are the organized minority. They are the ruling class, and they are the ones who have a habit of getting their own way; groups like the defense contractors and the military-industrial complex. The American people did not want any of these things and yet they got them.
A lot of the things that have happened in American history were not voted for. They were either passed by judicial activism by various different judges, or Supreme Court rulings, or Congress passing these massive pork stuffed bills; a lot of other things, like Woke. All of these things come from organized minorities. It is not always the same organized minority. There can be different ones at different times and places who are getting their way over the disorganized mass. So, what the elite theorists are saying is that the fundamental dream of the American Constitution is just a line. Saying “the will of the people” is no different from a medieval king saying, “I rule in the name of divine right.” It is just what Mosca calls a political formula. “BS BS BS therefore I rule.” This is fundamentally what all those lines are and what democracy is. Democracy is particularly good at hiding this fact. It is particularly good at allowing enough quote unquote “normal” people into the ruling class to renew the ruling class and to give a semblance of upwards mobility.
You could say this is an advantage of democracy. Another advantage of democracy is the fact that so many people believe that when they cast a vote there is a genuine link between that vote and an actual outcome. But, we have seen so many times politicians just openly lie in this country [the UK]. The people voted for Boris Johnson. They voted to take back control of the borders with Brexit. However, Boris Johnson promptly flooded the country with more immigrants than in the entire history of England from 1066 to now. Boris Johnson let in more than six million people in five years, or something ridiculous. [The UK has 68 million people]. Nobody voted for that and yet this is what the ruling class did.
So, Lindsay’s point misses the mark because he has not grasped what elite theory is saying. Elite theory is not saying it is bad to have the desire of the interests of the ruled registered by the ruling class. It is not saying that the dream of democracy is bad per se. Just that it is impossible, due to the mechanics of power, for true mass rule to prevail. Even if people rise up as an inchoate mob, sooner or later a leader must emerge for any progress to be made. Consider the analogy of an army: a rabble of a thousand people against one hundred well-trained men led by a captain. Who wins? The hundred trained men win ten times out of ten. Elite theorists argue that, with the best will in the world, power always consolidates around an organized minority. Robert Michels, who was part of the German Social Democrats—a democratic party opposed to World War I—witnessed this firsthand. As soon as his party gained power, they betrayed their base and supported the war, demonstrating the “iron law of oligarchy” once again.
James Lindsay gave a superficial summary of elite theory and ended with a warning: anyone discussing elite theory should be treated with caution. In his video, he spent most of his time talking about Marxism, Lenin, and Vanguardism. While Marxists recognized the need for an organized minority to rule over the disorganized mass, it is inaccurate to equate Marxist vanguardism with elite theory. In fact, Marxists explicitly rejected elite theory for several reasons.
First, classic Marxism is centered on class struggle, identifying the capitalists as the ruling class because they own the means of production. Marxists critiqued elite theory for being too universal; elite theorists sought a single theory for all systems, while Marxists offered a specific critique of capitalism and the capitalist class. They argued that elite theorists failed to focus on ownership of the means of production, which is central to Marxism. Elite theorists, on the other hand, argued that all systems gravitate towards rule by an organized minority, regardless of ownership.
James Burnham’s “Managerial Revolution” introduced the idea that power could be severed from ownership. In modern capitalism, asset managers or the expert class like BlackRock control vast resources without owning them. Larry Fink does not personally own BlackRock’s trillions in assets; he manages them. The same elite theory principles apply: passive shareholders are ruled by the organized minority of asset managers. Decisions about those assets—such as funding ESG initiatives and the Woke agenda—are made on behalf of shareholders, just as politicians make decisions on behalf of voters. Thus, democracy in practice functions like any other system: a top-down triangle with elites at the top.
Previously, tycoons like Henry Ford or J.P. Morgan held concentrated power as sole owners. Now, when companies go public and many people own shares, power shifts to the managers—the CEO and the managerial class. This is applied elite theory, updated for the twentieth century. James Lindsay overlooks this crucial point.
The second Marxist objection to elite theory is that it draws attention to the power of Marxists themselves when they are in charge. Marxists claim that capitalist rule is bad, but their own rule is good. Elite theory, however, highlights that Marxist regimes are also governed by an organized minority. Communist states often styled themselves as “people’s republics” or “democracies,” claiming to rule in the name of the people. In reality, decisions were made by a small group, just as in any other system. Elite theorists argue that this is not unique to the USSR; it is equally true of liberal democracies like the USA, Britain, or France. They are as totalitarian, top-down, and undemocratic as the USSR. James Lindsay might not be happy with this claim, given his support for liberal democracy, but he knows that much of what we have witnessed concerning wokery and global governance is against the quote unquote “will” of the people from his own work. So, I do not know why he would be against the idea.
Despite ideals set by the US Constitution, it is difficult to argue that the American experiment delivered true democracy for the people, given how often unpopular decisions are made by organized minorities. We have seen this in our own lifetimes. So many things that were retconned after the fact and things that were unpopular at the time, were brought about by an organized minority. Things that were later written up as if they have the support of everybody. (I believe AA has in mind things like school busing and the forced desegregation of schools).
The third Marxist critique, articulated by Antonio Gramsci in his “Prison Notebooks,” is that elite theory does not sufficiently account for ideology. Gramsci and later theorists like Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, Louis Althusser, and Noam Chomsky explored how consent is manufactured in mass democracies through media manipulation and propaganda. (See Edward Bernay’s book “Propaganda.”) While Mosca, Pareto, and Michels mentioned newspapers, they wrote before the rise of mass media, television, and radio. Updating elite theory for the twentieth century requires considering the role of ideology and consent manufacturing.
In summary, it is inaccurate to claim that Marxists accepted elite theory. They explicitly rejected it for the reasons outlined above and never recognized Mosca, Pareto, or Michels as their own. After World War II, the liberal establishment also sought to reject elite theory in the name of liberal democracy, though many critiques failed to address its core arguments. Interestingly, some elements of the “deep state,” such as the Rand Corporation, Hoover Institute, and neoconservatives, adopted aspects of elite theory, as well as Carl Schmidt, as did some leftists at various times. So, it is not as though there was a blanket rejection of elite theory after World War II. People were writing on elite theory in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and even into the ‘90s and basically accepting its basic tenants. This is because elite theory is almost impossible to deny; its principles are as fundamental as the law of supply and demand in economics. The theory is morally neutral and descriptive, not prescriptive. Most elite theorists have not advocated for specific systems based on elite theory. James Lindsay conflates different ideas, such as Curtis Yarvin’s pro-monarchy arguments, which are not rooted in classic elite theory. And neither is Hans-Hermann Hoppe – the German-American economist associated with the Austrian school of economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism and opposition to democracy.
When people discuss elite theory, they are not necessarily advocating for themselves to become the new elite. While some, like Vivek Ramaswamy, have claimed to represent a new elite, following James Burnham’s concept of new elites being cycled in, almost nobody has come to power as a self-identified elite theorist. Tony Blair is one example of a member of the elite who understood elite theory. Possibly Mussolini did. He read the elite theorists. But, this is somewhat incidental because whether they knew elite theory or did not know elite theory, they are still going to be engaging in those ABCs of power. Understanding elite theory is not required to participate in power dynamics, just as one does not need to understand economics to buy a sandwich. Elite theorists simply describe the mechanics of power, which often go unrecognized by those involved.
The concept of the organized minority is not controversial; it is simply how politics works. Mancur Olson, an excellent American economist and political scientist, wrote “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups,” (1965) detailing how organized minorities can prevail in democracies because they are focused on a single issue, while the masses are dispersed and less organized. Throughout history, single-issue groups have often succeeded because the general public is too fragmented to oppose them effectively. This explains why organized minorities tend to get their way in democracies.
In this country, you could say there is currently a Pakistani organized minority who have managed to get their way on all sorts of issues because they are focused on that one thing and everybody else has got hundred different things that they care about. And none of them are organized enough to do anything about it. Another example would be Nigel Farage who really cared about leaving the EU and actually managed to get his way in the long run. And he did it by being part of an organized minority who cared about that one thing. The public is seldom, if ever, all united on one thing, so that is why the organized minority tends to get its own way, especially in a democracy.
For more on this topic, the author recommends his book, “The Populist Delusion.”
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From another video, Parvini states that Socrates represents the end of the Athenian hegemony. Asking questions that challenge the most fundamental Athenian beliefs; demanding justifications for basic ideas, spells the end of the regime. Homer marks the beginning and Socrates and Plato represent what Vico calls the Barbarism of Reflection.
Religion starts out as tribal. For instance, Jews, and no one else, are the Chosen People and God has a special interest in them alone. Barbarian tribes have “asabiya” – a strong group identity and self-belief – a fanaticism and a local religion. The Muslims defeated the Byzantine empire and the Persians through frightening conviction. They were violent and determined. But, once the barbarians have won, if they are too successful, they now have an empire to run. They need an administration. Lions who rule by force and fear are supplanted by foxes who use cunning. Since the empire covers multiple cultures and religions, a new universalist religion arises with a moralizing god who is watching you at all times. Universal religion does not generate the conquering culture. The conquering culture gives rise to the universalist religion. All civilizations become a victim of their successes. They become soft and used to luxury. They become liberal and humanitarian. Towards the end, you get the reign of quantity in the shape of egalitarianism, democracy (maybe), and utilitarianism. Each stage of the cycle generates its own types of people. If you are born in the Winter of civilization, then you cannot have the characteristics of the Spring. Nobody goes from playing their Xbox to becoming Genghis Khan.
Conservatives always lose because either an empire is expanding, or it and its associated civilization is in the process of collapse. The existence of “conservatives” at all, indicate that the end is nigh. Genghis Khan’s barbarians have no intellectuals and they have no conservatives. Neither do they have liberals. Conservatism arises in response to liberalism and liberalism is the inevitable product of soft living, money and luxury. We can be sentimental and soft-hearted. Women and children are especially protected, but we also lose our taste for violence.
Conservatives want to preserve the universalist religion and think this will save us, but they are mistaken. The universalist religion is not what got the civilization started in the first place. It was a necessary feature of a certain stage of civilization and it marks the beginning of the end. The civilization has become so large and complex that it needs fox-like bureaucrats running the show. At a certain point, intellectuals start questioning everything and we slide into decadence with the best people lacking all conviction. We lose our self-belief. Women stop having children as a result of their “emancipation” and access to jobs and education and in an acceleration of decline, softness, femininity, looking out for the lost lamb supplants manly virtues of strength, courage, and ambition.
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Site: Henrymakow.comPlease send links and comments to hmakow@gmail.comMark Carney is the ultimate Insider. His family is part of the Illuminati establishment.Yes, Mark's brother Sean Carney works for King Charles as the Chief Operating Officer at Kensington Palace, managing the household of Prince William, the heir to the British throne.-While Mark Carney builds his statesmanlike stature in Canada, his brother Sean manages the household of the heir to the British throne.Sean Carney's role places him at the heart of the British royal household, managing day-to-day affairs and supporting the royal family's engagements. His position underscores the Carney family's presence in both Canadian political leadership and British royal administration.Additionally, the Carney family includes another brother, Brian Carney, who resides in Northern Ireland.--Carney belongs to the Predator Class
https://traiforos.substack.com/p/mark-carney-is-a-crisis-actorOf course, Mark Carney's whole career is based on the utter fallacy of de-carbonization, environmental social governance and "sustainability". Instead, the world has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars "sustaining" the wallets of think tanks and institutions of which Mark (of the beast) Carney is or was heavily involved with:1. Bilderberg Group - steering committee member2. Chatham House - President3. Brookfield Asset management - head of ESG policies4. United Nations - Special Envoy for climate action5. Goldman Sachs - former employee6. World Economic Forum - senior member7. Bank of International Settlements8. Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican9. Bank of Canada and Bank of EnglandThis leopard won't change his spots. He is a crown plant intent on enriching the stakeholders to whom he is a lapdog of. His new Chief of Staff is Marc-Andre Blanchard - Executive Vice President of CDPQ Global and Global Head of Sustainability. CDPQ is a major investor in the Catalytic Transition Fund of Brookfield Asset Management, establishing significant support for the climate transition strategy and promoting sustainable investment. There is NO short or long-term plan for oil and gas exploration and mineral mining in Canada for these climate zealots."Sheldon Whitehouse: Tariffs on Canada Are Just a Tax ScamIn a fiery Senate speech in April, Dem Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse dismantles President Trump's so-called "national emergency" with Canada used to justify 25% tariffs on Canadian imports. His message? The tariffs are a backdoor tax on American families and a gift-wrapped loophole for billionaires and big corporations.He says only 2% of fentanyl enters from Canada. He calls out the economic damage to Rhode Island, and expose how this entire policy funnels pain upward so the wealthiest can keep dodging taxes.-A Rothschild Confirms the Masonic Jewish (Satanic) Conspiracy is RealIt appears the Illuminati "leaders" are now engaging the public directly through social media apps with their openly satanic propaganda. This Rothschild seems to know precisely what they want to do to the whole world. They seem proud and not ashamed at all about their "satanic organization"." Hello, greetings. I'm Hannah Marry de Rothschild from England, I belong to the Illuminati Rothschild family, I enjoyed meeting new people, being a manager, economist and global banker and also a humanitarian leader. My purpose is to serve Humanity and promote the prosperity of Humanity. you have been invited to become part of the ILLUMINATI secret fraternity if you're interested in joining the ILLUMINATI.The Illuminati it's a secret satanic organization it is interpreted as the New World Order (NWO) hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government.The reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States (1776). The Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", appearing on the reverse side of the Great Seal since 1782 and on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill since 1935, translates to "New Order of the Ages" and alludes to the beginning of an era where the United States of America is an independent nation-state.The common theme about a New World Order is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian one-world government--which will replace sovereign nation-states and an all-encompassing propaganda whose ideology hails the establishment of the New World Order and betterment of humanity as the culmination of history's progress. Many influential historical and contemporary figures have therefore been alleged to be part of a cabal that operates through many front organizations to orchestrate significant political and financial events, ranging from causing systemic crises to pushing through controversial policies, at both national and international levels, as steps in an ongoing plot to achieve world domination.Hail The Light "--Carnage has proposed a $10K limit in amount of cash an individual can hold!Canada faces CATASTROPHE as Mark Carney pushes MASSIVE military plan and EU defence plan-Rand Paul- Our Food is Being Poisoned with mRNA TechnologyIs this Bill Gates and George Soros' Doing?Many folks are familiar with mRNA COVID vaccines and the harm they caused to people's hearts and internal organs. However, what's much less known is the extent to which mRNA technology is being used to contaminate the food we eat.GROK- "Regulatory bodies like the FDA and USDA tightly control vaccine use in animals, and no approved mRNA vaccines are currently used in U.S. livestock for human consumption. Any suggestion of "transgenic edible vaccines" or mRNA in food lacks peer-reviewed studies or official confirmation. Always cross-check such claims with primary sources like the USDA or FDA."-The Great Poisoning Explained by Catherine Austin FittsCatherine Austin Fitts says the vaccine was intended to decrease population because pensions are insufficient to cover the liability---Hamdy Mig--"Every morning I leave my tent, carrying my small container, and start wandering the streets and camps, covering great distances, in search of a living. One day I find food, and the next I don't. And if I find food, there are hundreds of hungry people in front of me, racing to take what will satisfy their hunger. Unfortunately, it is food cooked from tree leaves, herbs, and poor-quality legumes. This is what is available to us and what we can eat in light of the deadly famine."A Way to Help Gaza-
Zionist Motto- What's Yours is Really Mine - Applies to Organized Jewry in GeneralDC Dave Martin--"You either want to burn children alive, or you don't. You either want to deliberately starve civilians, or you don't. You either want to bomb hospitals, or you don't. You either want to deliberately assassinate Palestinian journalists while forbidding foreign journalists entry into Gaza, or you don't. You either want to deliberately massacre civilians and systematically destroy civilian infrastructure in order to force the removal of Palestinians from a Palestinian territory, or you don't. And if you don't, you must oppose the state of Israel.There is one big reason why Israel can get by with its lawlessness, and it goes back to the very founding of the country. It holds the levers of power in the United States, controlling its politicians and the national opinion-molding apparatus (NOMA), primarily its press. The situation has been brought into vivid relief in recent weeks with the United States, virtually alone, continuing to enable the ongoing slaughter in Gaza."-DC MARTIN- DON'T POKE THE BEAR!-Alex Newman-Federal Reserve: The Ultimate Deep State Tool of Control & DestructionThis privately owned cartel creates currency out of thin air and then lends it to us at interest, stealing the hard-earned wealth of Americans. But restoring honest money is possible, says top expertRFK Jr 70% of pharmaceuticals are sold to Americans who represent only 4,5 % of the world populationPharma ads should be banned.-Surprised Baldwin doesn't mention that Queen Esther was responsible for the genocide of "antisemites" in PersiaPastor Chuck Baldwin--Donald Trump Following Project Esther PlaybookSupport for Israel among the vast majority of evangelical churches borders on fanaticism. People write to me every week telling me of their experiences within these Zionist "churches." The word fanaticism is not hyperbolic. Christian Zionism has become a religious cult.These very powerful and influential institutions are uber supportive of Trump's anti-free speech tyranny. What has started on university campuses will spill over into the commercial and religious worlds in earnest during the rest of Trump's administration.The so-called modern civilized world is showing itself to be as uncivilized as any corrupt, authoritarian society in world history. And the United States of America and Israel are leading the pack. There are no nations on the planet today that are showing themselves more bloodthirsty, more calloused to the mass murder of innocents and more guilty of international war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity than these two countries.I think it is more than coincidental that over 80% of Israelis support Benjamin Netanyahu's genocidal mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza and over 80% of evangelicals in America do the same.Both Judaic Zionism and Christian Zionism are eaten up with the spirit of religious bigotry, racial supremacy, hatred, war and death.--Anna Faris tells Chris Pratt "I want you to poop on me." -- Civility is disappearing as people revert to their disgusting animal natureThis is disgusting and inappropriate but YouTube doesn't have a category when you report that, just DEI BS -
Site: Catholic ConclaveFormer Bishop Zanchetta, convicted of abuse, remains out of prisonThe Network of Survivors of Ecclesiastical Abuse denounced cover-ups and privileges for the former Bishop convicted of sexual abuse. Despite the final sentence, he remains out of the prison system.Gustavo Zanchetta, the former bishop of Orán convicted of aggravated sexual abuse, recently returned to Argentina after spending more Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: Fr. Z's BlogLet’s continue with a few more pics from the digs of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta on the Aventine Hill. I received this from a reader who also requested a Mass intention for the same. This seems a worthy … Read More →
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Site: Zero HedgeRisk of Escalation With Russia 'Going Way Up' Due To Ukrainian Attacks: KelloggTyler Durden Thu, 06/05/2025 - 15:00
Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,
President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Ukraine conflict said that recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian air bases have created a significant risk of escalation in the war.
"I’m telling you, the risk levels are going way up – I mean, what happened this weekend," Trump’s envoy, Keith Kellogg, told Fox News.
"People have to understand in the national security space: when you attack an opponent’s part of their national survival system, which is their triad, the nuclear triad, that means your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side is going to do. You’re not sure," Kellog explained.
On Sunday, the Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU, launched a major attack on Russian airbases thousands of miles from the front lines. Kiev claims to have disabled one third of Moscow’s fleet of strategic bombers.
Washington and Moscow each possess the ability to conduct nuclear attacks via bombers, submarines, and land-based ballistic missiles, known as the nuclear triad.
The White House claims that it was not informed of the attack by Kiev. However, the CIA is deeply tied to the SBU.
The SBU has conducted other provocative attacks in recent days, hitting Russian railways and bridges and reportedly killing seven civilians.
Trump said he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the attacks on Wednesday.
"I just finished speaking, by telephone, with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour and 15 minutes," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The below is a reaction from independent journalist and geopolitical commentator Michael Tracey:
- If no one in the US military/intel apparatus knew about the sweeping Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's nuclear triad that was supposedly being planned for 1.5 years, they're catastrophically incompetent
- If elements of that apparatus did know and purposely kept it from Trump, then Trump is suffering from the same problems we were told dogged him in the first term, and were going to be solved in the second term
- That is, Trump is being subtly subverted by underlings with conflicting agendas
- As a compounding factor, it could be the case that Trump still lacks the attention, interest, and/or organizational capacity to ensure his chain-of-command funnels such information to the top
- It could alternatively be the case that high-level administration officials, up to and including Trump, did in fact know about the attack in advance. After all, it was only last week that Trump warned on Truth Social that "really bad things" may be in store for Russia...
- In that scenario, Trump and administration officials simply wish to retain plausible deniability for political/diplomatic reasons
- Without dispositive evidence for any of the possible scenarios, the scenario one thinks to be the most likely will inevitably align with their preconceived notions about Trump, Ukraine, and Russia
While waiting for confirmed details of drone strikes on Russia's strategic bomber fleet and terrorist attacks on civilian passenger trains, remember...
— Brian Berletic (@BrianJBerletic) June 1, 2025
... US media (NYT) already admitted the US runs Ukrainian intel, with US CIA bases established all across Ukraine training… pic.twitter.com/7YgFe1qfMR"We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides," Trump stated. "It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace. President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields."
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Site: LifeNews
The Massachusetts Public Health Committee is delaying their consideration of the state assisted suicide bill by 30 days. Chris Lisinski reported for Yahoo News on June 3, 2025 that:
Legislators last week asked for a 30-day extension on a bill that would authorize physician-assisted suicide (H 2505), according to the House clerk’s office, keeping it idling in the Public Health Committee through a Tuesday event that drew both supporters and opponents of the long-debated policy.
Backers of the proposal, which has stalled out without a House or Senate vote for multiple terms in a row, argued they made “historic progress” last session by winning support from both the Public Health Committee and Health Care Financing Committee.
Lisinski reported that Senator Jo Comerford told an opponent of the bill that:
“This is not an easy conversation to have, yet in this State House, we welcome democratic engagement, we welcome debate, we welcome dissent,” the Northampton Democrat said. “If we weren’t asking important questions about whether or not assisted suicide could be made safe — and I do believe it’s made safe in this bill, I do believe that — we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. This is too important a bill for us not to engage seriously with, so you are welcome here.”
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“If there are ways to make this stronger, let’s do it together, friends. We are not railroading this bill through the State House,” she added.
As stated by one of the signs at the Public Health Committee, Assisted Suicide Cannot Be MAiD Safe.
The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition urges our supporters to continue contacting their elected representatives in Massachusetts to oppose the bill. We oppose killing people.
LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.
The post Massachusetts Committee Will Vote on Assisted Suicide Bill in 30 Days appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Fr. Z's BlogAs the pogrom against those who desire the traditional sacred worship of the Roman Rite continues – to build great unity, of course! – I invite the readership to take in some of the liturgical wisdom of Fr. John Thomas … Read More →
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Site: LifeNews
On May 22, the assisted suicide lobby filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Jeff McComas and two Colorado physicians challenging the state assisted suicide law residency requirement.
The complaint argued that the Colorado assisted suicide law residency requirement violates the U.S. Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause which “prohibits State officials from restricting non-resident visitors’ access to medical care within its borders absent a substantial State interest and restrictions narrowly tailored to those interests.”
The assisted suicide lobby made the same arguements in Oregon, Vermont and New Jersey. Oregon and Vermont have subsequently removed their state assisted suicide law residency requirements whereas New Jersey has successfully defended their state assisted suicide law residency requirement in the court.
Jeff McComas’s rights are not being infringed by Colorado’s assisted suicide law being limited to state residents.
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First: Oregon and Vermont will assist the suicide of out-of-state residents. McComas has access to assisted suicide in Oregon and Vermont, therefore his constitutional rights are not being violated.
Second: Assisted suicide is not a form of medical treatment or care therefore the Privileges and Immunities Clause does not apply to assisted suicide.
Colorado legalized assisted suicide by passing Proposition 106 during the November 2016 election. In 2024, Colorado passed Senate Bill 24-068 expanding their assisted suicide law by:
- allowing advanced practice registered nurses to approve and prescribe lethal poison,
- reducing the waiting period from 15 days to 7 days, and
- allowing doctors or advanced practise registered nurse to waive the waiting period if the person is near to death.
The original version of SB 24-068 allowed non-residents to die by assisted suicide in Colorado but this amendment was rejected by legislators.
The 2024 Colorado assisted suicide report indicated that there were 510 lethal poison prescriptions written in 2024 up by 28% from 398 in 2023. 18 of the lethal poison prescriptions were based on the person having an eating disorder.
LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.
The post Assisted Suicide Advocates Say Killing People is Medical Care appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Catholic ConclaveScroll down for today's:Saint of the Day/ FeastReading of the MartyrologyDedication of the MonthDedication of the DayRosaryFive Wounds Rosary in LatinSeven Sorrows Rosary in EnglishLatin Monastic OfficeReading of the Rule of Saint BenedictCelebration of MassReading from the School of Jesus CrucifiedFeast of Saint NorbertBorn at Xanten on the left bank of the Rhine, near Wesel, c. 1080; died at Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: OnePeterFive
Above: A bride in a homemade gown of silk crepe back satin. Fall 2023. Courtesy of Isabel Nolen. In December, 1888, Ellen Terry appeared as Lady McBeth at London’s Lyceum Theatre. She wore a gown adorned with the casings of beetle wings. Only nature could supply the wanted eerie shimmer in that era before plastic sequins.[1] Michael Jackson and countless others have since shimmered more than…
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Site: non veni pacem
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Site: 4ChristumWith the complicity of the apostate and schismatic Udo Markus Bentz, a group of sacrilegious dancers with dead decapitated chickens desecrate the German cathedral of Paderborn.
The apostate and schismatic Udo Markus Bentz desecrated the German cathedral of Paderborn by hosting a sacrilegious spectacle.Cathedral desecrated in Germany with blasphemous performance.
ComplicitClergy: TAKE ACTION: Contact Bishop Bentz and ask him to denounce this scandalous event (blasphemous sacrilege).Here we clearly see the example of a headless church, where the "bishops" are unaccountable to their alleged "pope" and commit any sacrilege with impunity. And it is the faithful who defend the rights of the House of God.“The abomination shall be seen in holy places, in convents, and then the demon shall make himself the king of hearts.” Our Lady of La SaletteThe apostate Udo Bentz was appointed by Bergoglio
Bergoglio maliciously chose the apostate Udo Markus, knowing that he supported the schismatic German synodal path.
Saint Paul warns that sodomites are idolaters who, instead of worshipping God, worship creatures.The desecration of a temple by a priest is an unequivocal sign that he has already desecrated his own body with the vice of sexual impurity, thereby expelling the Holy Spirit from himselfDaniel 11:31
New Catholic Bible
31 “Armed forces of his shall obey his command to desecrate the sanctuary, abolish the daily sacrifice, and install the abomination that causes desolation.[a]
Footnotes
Daniel 11:31 Abomination that causes desolation: see Dan 9:27; 12:11; this is the characterization of the altar to the pagan god Zeus Olympios set up in 168 B.C. by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, which prefigured a similar abomination that Jesus predicted would be erected (see Mt 24:15; Lk 21:10).
Paderborn Bishop Silent Amid International Scandal – Gloria.tv
Gloria TV News:
The scandal surrounding the 'chicken ballet' in the presbytery of Paderborn Cathedral on 15 May is spreading.An online petition entitled 'Against the desecration of Paderborn Cathedral: For the protection of our sacred sites' gained over 20,000 signatures within a few days.The oligarchic media in Germany, such as Bild.de and Spiegel.de, as well as many alternative media outlets, have reported on it.On Nius.de, Alexander Kissler spoke of the “final stage of a Church that shreds faith because it has lost it”.He added: 'What are we to make of a Church that tolerates such a mindless, pointless and tasteless spectacle at the heart of a diocese, in the cathedral, between the altar, the cross and the tabernacle?'Birgit Kelle notes on Exxpress.at that “nobody knows how it came about” and that alledgely “everyone was surprised”. It is still unclear “who came up with the idea that this performance group was suitable for any ceremony in a church”.Alexander-Wallasch.de filed a criminal complaint for disturbing the practice of religion. The complaint states that the combination of undressed human bodies and dead chickens in diapers in the altar area is likely to seriously offend the religious sensibilities of the average believer.The responsible Paderborn Archbishop Bentz, who was sitting in the first pew during the chicken ballet, still refuses to comment.Aciprensa: The petition from German faithful, hosted on the CitizenGo platform, is addressed to the Archbishop of Paderborn, Msgr. Udo Bentz. The signatories demand not only a public apology, but also an act of penance and reparation, as well as the rededication of Paderborn Cathedral, which was desecrated by this act.
Apostate Bentz does not see Prevost as an obstacle to the synodal path.Father E. Sylvester Berry (eminent, 20th Century scripture scholar):
“. . . The ‘abomination of desolation’ has been wrought in many Catholic churches by heretics and apostates who have broken altars, scattered relics of martyrs and desecrated the Blessed Sacrament. At the time of the French Revolution a lewd woman was seated upon the altar of the cathedral in Paris and worshipped as the goddess of reason. Such things but faintly foreshadow the abominations that will desecrate churches in those sorrowful days when Antichrist will seat himself at the altar to be adored as God.
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Site: AsiaNews.itWhile the phone call between Trump and Xi Jinping is attracting the world's attention amid the Sino-US trade war, Beijing is moving forward with a project for large free trade zone on its southernmost island. To attract foreign investment, it is also launching a pilot project for direct access to the global Internet for authorised users and under state control.
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Site: Zero HedgeTrump 'Purges' Israel Hardliners In Overhaul Of Mideast Policy
Between late May and early June, in what insiders are calling an "America First" course correction, US President Donald Trump has been removing key pro-Israel hardliners from his foreign policy team.
He is reportedly targeting individuals known for their militaristic views on Iran and deep alignment with Israeli policy, often in ways critics say undercut broader US strategic goals. Such individuals include National Security Council officials Eric Trager, Merav Ceren, and Morgan Ortagus. The purge comes after Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar in May – a trip that notably bypassed Israel.
Morgan Ortagus, who was also a former US intelligence analyst and national security contributor to Fox News, AFP.
Trump is now reportedly seeking to steer his administration toward a more diplomatic and economically driven approach in the region, with moves underway to ease sanctions on Syria and reopen negotiations with Iran.
According to sources familiar with the changes, the president is looking to replace outgoing officials with voices more aligned with Vice President JD Vance’s anti-interventionist stance, in an effort to reassert White House control over West Asia policy and curb Israel’s internal influence on US decision-making.
Former National Security advisor Mike Waltz was among the first to be pushed out after reports that he had coordinated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a potential pre-emptive strike against Iran – without the approval of the White House.
However, Waltz was quietly reassigned as US Ambassador to the United Nations.
Merav Ceren’s removal drew particular attention, given her well-known ties to Israel’s military. Before her role at the NSC, she had worked with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and was closely linked to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington think tank known for its hardline stance on Iran and vocal support for Israeli military campaigns in Lebanon.
Eric Trager, another official on the chopping block, had long been vocal about his hardline views. An Iran hawk who authored critical work on Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, Trager held a relatively low-profile role within the NSC but symbolized the ideological faction Trump is now sidelining.
Former US envoy Morgan Ortagus, who led US policy on Lebanon, sparked backlash after publicly thanking Israel for “defeating” Hezbollah during a visit to Lebanon’s presidential palace. Her aggressive push to disarm the group drew criticism from Lebanese officials and raised concerns about undermining regional diplomacy. Though she reportedly sought to take over Syria policy, the role went to Trump ally Tom Barrack.
The US president reportedly aims to cut National Security Council staff by half, a move that reflects his preference for a tighter circle of loyalists over traditional policy hands, consolidating decision-making around trusted allies.
Tucker Carlson has been making a lot of noise of late over the undue Israeli influence within the administration...
Mark Levin was at the White House today, lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it. We need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, he and likeminded ideologues in Washington are…
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 5, 2025Behind these moves lies a growing rift between Trump and Netanyahu. Insiders suggest the Israeli leader’s push for military action against Iran clashed with Trump’s renewed interest in deal-making. The shakeup appears designed to dilute Israeli influence in Washington and reassert Trump’s control over US strategy in the region.
Trump’s Iran policy remains a moving target. After news broke that the administration had offered Tehran a deal allowing low-level uranium enrichment, Trump swiftly denied it. The contradiction reflects the internal tug-of-war still playing out within his reshaped foreign policy team.
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Site: Zero Hedge"Thousands" Of Empty Units After LA Wastes $1 Billion On Homeless HousingTyler Durden Thu, 06/05/2025 - 14:00
Once hailed as a fast-track solution to California’s homelessness crisis, Project Homekey now looks like a billion-dollar boondoggle littered with empty buildings and broken promises.
In Los Angeles County, shuttered motels meant to house the unhoused stand lifeless—fenced-off, vacant, and increasingly resembling abandoned movie sets rather than havens for the vulnerable, according to Westside Current.
Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, other properties funded by Homekey have become de facto homeless encampments, complete with tents and makeshift fire pits. Out of 2,157 rooms the county bought with $550 million, a staggering 71% sit empty. The city’s record is only slightly better, with 44% of its 1,237 units still unoccupied despite spending $820 million.
The problem? Bureaucratic delays, ballooning costs, and questionable deals—like a luxury Mid-City apartment building the city bought for $36.5 million despite contractor liens, or a facility flipped for twice the price just days after a private buyer snagged it.
Westside Current writes that even sites that briefly housed residents often remain empty after relocation. “Construction takes time,” county officials say—yet the clock’s been ticking since 2020. Meanwhile, shelters that do operate are often overshadowed by the gaping emptiness elsewhere.
Analysts initially praised the plan. But as empty rooms pile up, so do costs—interim housing placements, security contracts, staff salaries, and millions spent just to keep these “investments” from decaying.
Worse, the program has seen scandal: One developer and its nonprofit partner face foreclosure, lawsuits, and fraud allegations. Lawsuits allege that over $114 million in funds vanished, with the California Attorney General and federal prosecutors now circling.
While Governor Newsom touts Homekey as a model solution, even he’s ordered new accountability measures.
On the ground, though, the gap between promises and reality is painfully clear: thousands of homeless remain, while motels meant to house them are as empty as ever.
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Site: ChurchPOP
The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was privately revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a 17th-century French nun.
Through her mystical encounters with Jesus, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque received a message of divine love that would transform the lives of countless faithful and ignite a worldwide movement of devotion to the Sacred Heart.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus devotion is a powerful reminder of God's boundless love and mercy.
The private revelations granted to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque provide a powerful invitation to all believers to encounter Jesus's compassionate heart and respond with love and devotion.
Below are the promises privately revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque by Jesus:
Caroline Perkins, ChurchPOP
1) I will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.
2) I will establish peace in their homes.
3) I will comfort them in all their afflictions.
4) I will be their secure refuge during life, and above all, in death.
Caroline Perkins, ChurchPOP
5) I will bestow abundant blessings upon all their undertakings.
6) Sinners will find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.
7) Lukewarm souls shall become fervent.
Caroline Perkins, ChurchPOP
8) Fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.
9) I will bless every place in which an image of my Heart is exposed and honored.
Caroline Perkins, ChurchPOP
10) I will give to priests the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.
11) Those who shall promote this devotion shall have their names written in my Heart.
12) I promise you in the excessive mercy of my Heart that my all-powerful love will grant to all those who receive Holy Communion on the First Fridays in nine consecutive months the grace of final perseverance; they shall not die in my disgrace, nor without receiving their sacraments. My divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.
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Site: LifeNews
A medical emergency was reported on April 4, 2025, at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center, located at 500 North Kings Highway in New Jersey. The incident involved a 37-year-old woman undergoing an abortion procedure.
The Emergency
According to public records, a staffer from the abortion facility placed a 911 call around 11:00 A.M. While the official 911 audio was heavily redacted, it features an unusual and notable moment where the abortionist suddenly asks the caller for the phone in order to speak directly with the dispatcher. Abortionists rarely take care of 911 calls themselves. This may be an indicator that the situation was very serious. The abortionist also requested that emergency medical personnel enter the facility through the back entrance.
Though details of the emergency were redacted in the 911 audio, Operation Rescue obtained radio dispatch recordings that confirm hemorrhaging was at least one complication that required emergency transport. Hemorrhaging is a very common and dangerous abortion complication that can quickly become life-threatening. The patient’s current condition is unknown.
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The Abortionist
During the 911 call, the abortionist identifies herself as Lisa Perriera, a late-term abortionist who apparently has already killed one patient: 22-year-old Lakisha Wilson in 2014. At that time, Perriera was an abortionist at the notorious Cleveland abortion mill, Preterm.. Lakisha Wilson also developed a hemorrhage during an abortion. In 2015, after obtaining Wilson’s autopsy, Operation Rescue reported:
According to official documents, including abortion records, EMT notes, hospital charts, an autopsy report, and 911 records all in Operation Rescue’s possession, Wilson began to hemorrhage during her abortion on March 21 and her blood pressure began to drop. Instead of stopping the abortion and tending to her patient, Perierra continued the abortion until Wilson went into hemorrhagic shock, suffered cardiac arrest, and stopped breathing. . . . CPR was started and she was shocked once, but those efforts were not successful at restarting her heart or respiration. Nine minutes later, a 911 call for help was placed.
Though no criminal charges were filed against Perriera, Operation Rescue and other pro-life groups called for a criminal investigation and disciplinary action, providing solid evidence.
Instead of justice, a year later the abortion cartel presented Perreira with the honorary “George Tiller” award which “recognizes a physician early in their career who provides abortions while demonstrating leadership and courage, even in the face of adversity.”
“It’s not courageous to let your patient’s heart stop and then wait nine more minutes before calling 911,” says Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “And it’s not leadership to still be sending women with uncontrollable bleeding to the emergency room ten years later. All Perriera should have ever been awarded was a revocation of her medical license.”
The Aftermath
There is no way of knowing just how many women Perreira has sent to the emergency room or, even worse, the morgue. Operation Rescue has launched a full investigation into this new case and will be following up with the appropriate authorities.
“We are deeply concerned about what happened at Cherry Hill Women’s Center,” adds Sarah Neely, Chief Operating Officer of Operation Rescue. “When a patient is rushed to the hospital due to a hemorrhage, it raises serious questions about the facility’s emergency preparedness and overall safety protocols. Women deserve better than secrecy and redacted recordings. Women deserve full transparency and accountability — especially when the abortionist in question has already killed one patient through complete incompetence and carelessness. How many other injuries or deaths have gone unreported? How many women remain silent out of fear?”
At this time, local emergency services and Cherry Hill Women’s Center have not commented on the specifics of the April 4th incident. Additional details may emerge pending further review and possible state oversight.
LifeNews Note: This article was originally published by Operation Rescue, a leading pro-life, Christian activist organization dedicated to exposing abortion abuses, demanding enforcement, saving innocent lives, and building an abortion-free America. The author, Ricardo Pinedo, writes for Operation Rescue.
The post Abortionist Who Killed Woman in Botched Abortion Sends Another Woman to ER appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Euthanasia Prevention CoalitionAlex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention CoalitionOn May 22, the assisted suicide lobby filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Jeff McComas and two Colorado physicians challenging the state assisted suicide law residency requirement.The complaint argued that the Colorado assisted suicide law residency requirement violates the U.S. Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause which “prohibits State officials from restricting non-resident visitors’ access to medical care within its borders absent a substantial State interest and restrictions narrowly tailored to those interests.”
The assisted suicide lobby made the same arguements in Oregon, Vermont and New Jersey. Oregon and Vermont have subsequently removed their state assisted suicide law residency requirements whereas New Jersey has successfully defended their state assisted suicide law residency requirement in the court.
Jeff McComas's rights are not being infringed by Colorado's assisted suicide law being limited to state residents.
First: Oregon and Vermont will assist the suicide of out-of-state residents. McComas has access to assisted suicide in Oregon and Vermont, therefore his constitutional rights are not being violated.
Second: Assisted suicide is not a form of medical treatment or care therefore the Privileges and Immunities Clause does not apply to assisted suicide.
Colorado legalized assisted suicide by passing Proposition 106 during the November 2016 election. In 2024, Colorado passed Senate Bill 24-068 expanding their assisted suicide law by:- allowing advanced practice registered nurses to approve and prescribe lethal poison,
- reducing the waiting period from 15 days to 7 days, and
- allowing doctors or advanced practise registered nurse to waive the waiting period if the person is near to death.
The 2024 Colorado assisted suicide report indicated that there were 510 lethal poison prescriptions written in 2024 up by 28% from 398 in 2023. 18 of the lethal poison prescriptions were based on the person having an eating disorder. -
Site: Zero HedgeCoal Is The New Bridge FuelTyler Durden Thu, 06/05/2025 - 13:40
Authored by Bernard L. Weinstein via RealClear Energy,
Once again, the consensus of government and private weather forecasters is that this coming summer will witness above-average temperatures in most parts of the United States. Already, warnings have been sounded that America’s power grids will be under great stress—as has been the case for a number of years—with a strong probability of blackouts and brownouts in some parts of the country. For example, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) summer reliability assessment published on May 18 cited the 15-state Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) as the regional grid most likely to see a meltdown this summer.
NERC’s warning proved to be prescient. On May 25, more than 100,000 customers in and around New Orleans lost power for most of the day when electricity demand exceeded supply, despite an emergency order from the Department of Energy several days earlier to keep a 1,560 megawatt coal plant in Michigan on-line that was slated for closure by the end of May. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, has also warned of possible outages this summer due to potential low solar and wind energy availability during peak demand.
The strains on America’s power grids are easy to explain. After remaining relatively flat for a decade, electricity demand is now projected to jump 50% over the next 10 years. Investments in server farms, artificial intelligence, crypto-mining, and a revival of manufacturing activity account for most of this growth. For example, a recent study by the Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers consumed 4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 but will account for 12% of power demand by 2028.
At the same time, construction of new base-load power plants—natural gas, nuclear, and coal—has plummeted. Driven by federal, state, and local tax incentives, wind and solar have accounted for the lion’s share of new installed generation in recent years. The problem, of course, is that these power sources are intermittent, which is why New Orleans lost electricity in May and why the Iberian Peninsula suffered a blackout in April.
Although several states—most notably Texas—have adopted programs to encourage new construction of natural gas plants, for the near term it’s critical to keep the nation’s remaining coal plants online.
Since 2010, 300 “always on” coal-fired power plants have been closed, reducing its share of generation from 45% to 16% nationwide. Only about 200 remain on the regional grids today.
The Trump administration has taken several steps to enhance power grid reliability and resiliency by keeping these coal plants on-line, including a series of executive orders signed by the President in early April. One of these orders allows a number of aging coal plants slated for closure to continue producing power.
Not surprisingly, these actions have energized environmentalists who remain committed to shuttering the remaining coal fleet and banning the construction of any new fossil fuel power plants. But the renewables-or-nothing approach they favor is crashing into a new energy reality. Not only is power demand poised to surge but building and connecting wind and solar plants, as well as the infrastructure needed to integrate them into the grid, is proving increasingly costly and challenging. Coupled with higher interest rates and supply chain challenges, local opposition to wind and solar farms, as well as new transmission lines, is having a significant impact on the speed and scale at which new generation is entering service.
The era of tearing down existing, well-operating power plants before reliable replacement capacity is built and connected to the grid is over. The on-demand power plants already in service are more valuable than ever. While coal’s long-term future remains in question, its near-term importance is clear. Our existing fleet of coal plants can help us manage the transition to a more reliable and resilient energy future as we build the next generation of base-load resources.
Bernard L. Weinstein is retired associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of North Texas, and a fellow of Goodenough College, London.
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Site: LifeNews
There was a court case that challenged the approval by the Food and Drug Administration of the use of mifepristone, the abortion drug that is widely used as a replacement for surgical abortions.
The Supreme Court ruled that the drug should be available, but the ruling was on very narrow grounds, and was based only on the court’s claim the pro-life physicians who brought to challenge didn’t show they had been harmed personally because it would be others who actually used the drug.
Now there’s going to be a new review of the drug by the FDA itself.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who has advocated for tighter controls over the use of such chemicals, posted on social media that the FDA chief, Marty Makary, “just committed to me to do a full review of the chemical abortion drug’s safety.”
HELP LIFENEWS SAVE BABIES FROM ABORTION! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation!
Makary said, in fact, the FDA “continues to closely monitor the postmarketing safety data on mifepristone for the medical termination of early pregnancy.”
“I am committed to conducting a review of mifepristone and working with the professional career scientists at the agency who review this data,” Makary said. He explained mifepristone remains the subject of “pending litigation,” and the FDA doesn’t comment on such matters, so he cannot provide more details now.
A report in the Washington Examiner said Hawley has been pushing for the FDA to take such action.
“The review comes after Hawley and anti-abortion groups slammed Makary in April after he said he had ‘no plans to take action’ regarding FDA regulations on mifepristone that have allowed healthcare providers to ship the abortifacient to patients in other states, irrespective of state laws prohibiting elective abortions,” the report explained.
Those actions, by abortion businesses who sell and ship drugs even to states which have abortion limits following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the faulty Roe abortion standard that was used for years, have been exploding.
There have been problems because drugs shipped into a state with those limits don’t always comply with that state’s abortion restrictions.
In chemical abortions, mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, causing the death of the unborn child.
The FDA in 2016 made its rules on the drug lax, allowing its use for chemical abortions and no longer requiring abortionists involved to report complications.
Then Joe Biden removed in-person screening requirements for patients to obtain the medication, allowing healthcare providers to ship mifepristone to patients in other states without a physical consultation.
But the report noted a study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center pointing out that “severe complications” from the abortion drug use is “22 times higher than FDA data indicate.”
When the Supreme Court ruled on the dispute over the lethal drug regarding the physician plaintiffs, several state attorneys general said they would continue the case on their own.
LifeNews Note: This column originally appeared at WorldNetDaily.
The post FDA Review of Abortion Drug Could Save Thousands of Babies From Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Catholic ConclaveHe is a Pope with a profoundly Augustinian charisma, a man of dialogue, with a very calm temperament. He is not a centralizer, but neither is he a person who cannot decide. Bishop Luis Marín de San Martín, an Augustinian, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, was called to Rome as archivist of the Augustinian Curia by the then superior, Robert Francis Prevost. Today, his old superior has becomeCatholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: Mises InstituteThe so-called White House “coverup” of former President Joe Biden‘s dementia was really a coverup by the legacy media, which worked with White House officials to ensure Americans would not know the truth.
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Site: Zero HedgeNetanyahu's Rule In Peril As Ultra-Orthodox Move To Dissolve Knesset Over Conscription Of HaredimTyler Durden Thu, 06/05/2025 - 13:00
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling government coalition is under a new threat of being toppled after the largest opposition party introduced a measure to dissolve the parliament -- and key ultra-Orthodox political and spiritual leaders, angered over the prospect of ultra-Orthodox youth being included in the country's military draft, are supporting the move to force new elections.
Since Israel was created in 1948, ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews have been exempted from the military conscription that's imposed on almost all other men and women. Haredi men typically dedicate their entire lives to religious study in seminaries called Yeshivas. With Israel waging a multi-front war encompassing Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, the exemption has become increasingly unpopular with the other segments of Israeli society that must heed the call.
Protesters of Haredim draft exemptions outside the Israeli Defense Force induction center push mock coffins (Mothers at the Front)
In June 2024, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the government must start drafting the Haredi. "At the height of a difficult war, the burden of inequality is more than ever acute," wrote the court in a unanimous decision. The Haredi erupted in protests -- some of which turned violent. Since last summer, ultra-Orthodox politicians, including the non-Haredi variety, have been pushing for the Knesset to overcome the high court ruling by codifying the exemption.
On Wednesday, leading opposition party Yesh Atid advanced a bill calling for the Knesset's dissolution. The first vote on the measure is expected next week. “This Knesset is finished,” said Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid. “It has nowhere else to go. All that it has brought to the people of Israel is pain, and disasters, and bereavement and crises.” That move cam on the same day that two spiritual leaders of a faction of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, Rabbis Dov Lando and Degel Hatorah, instructed members to move forward with an attempt to topple Netanyahu's government over the draft issue.
Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews -- many of whom reject Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel -- demand that their draft exemption continue (Anadolu Agency)
There are 120 seats in the Knesset, and Netanyahu's coalition controls 68 of them. Of his coalition, 18 come from Israel's two main ultra-Orthodox parties. They've already been boycotting votes for several weeks. Though he's proven his ability to dodge political bullets time and time again, Netanyahu would likely be ousted in a new election: A new survey projected Netanyahu's coalition would garner only 46 to 48 seats, compared to 62 to 72 for an opposition bloc led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who has repeatedly opposed the draft exemption.
The ultra-Orthodox have rattled their Knesset-dissolution sabers before, but this move is being perceived as far more serious -- as a measure is on the table with the backing of the parties' religious advisors. On Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu's office assured that a crisis can be averted, saying "there is a way to bridge the gaps on the draft issue.” However, any such bridging threatens to trigger outrage among the non-Haredi whose young family members continue facing death and loss of limbs in Gaza and elsewhere as they're forced to serve.
Rabbi Dov Lando, who chairs an ultra-Orthodox faction's Council of Torah Sages, directed Knesset members to support dissolving parliament and forcing new elections (Shlomi Cohen/Flash 90 via Times of Israel)
The internal division comes as the country is steadily treading deeper into international-pariah territory, owing to growing convictions that the country's military campaign in Gaza has inflicted a wildly disproportionate toll on civilians. In the latest indicator of that dynamic, YouGov reports that support and sympathy for Israel among Western Europeans have reached the lowest levels the firm has recorded in its nine years of polling. Israel's net-negatives are -44 in Germany, -48 in France, -54 in Denmark, -52 in Italy and -55 in Spain. In the United States, Pew Research in March reported that Americans' support of Israel was the lowest in its 25 years of tracking that sentiment.
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Site: Catholic ConclaveIn Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, the number of priestly ordinations this year is at an all-time low. This news from the Archdiocese of Hamburg seems almost like a small ray of hope.Better days before he CouncilAfter five years, there is a new priest for the Archdiocese of Hamburg. Archbishop Stefan Heße will ordain a 47-year-old former Bundeswehr officer on Saturday in Hamburg's St. Mary's Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
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Site: Mises InstituteThe Federal Reserve System released its May 2025 Beige Book yesterday, and the Fed has stopped painting a cheerful picture of the US economy.
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Site: OnePeterFive
Editor’s note: under the new pontificate of Pope Leo, we will now publish this monthly reminder of the proven, time-tested method to end heresy and the responsibility of every bishop for this, the “greatest act of charity.” Back in 2023, all orthodox Catholics of good will heard the news of His Excellency, Bishop Paprocki’s condemnation of heresy in one of the most prominent American journals…
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Site: AsiaNews.itJomana Solman, project manager for the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, told AsiaNews that no remains have been found where the Italian priest was abducted in 2013. The organisation continues to work on mass graves in northeastern Syria, but identifying remains is complex and expensive. A recent spate of fake news has fuelled hope among the families of the missing.
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Site: LifeNews
Remember when Taylor Swift’s last-minute endorsement of Kamala Harris won her the presidential election? Or remember how just calling something “brat” (inspired by singer Charli XCX) was enough to catapult voters into liking and voting for Democrats?
Yeah, I don’t remember that happening either.
That is why it is so maddening and confounding when the Left pulls celebrities out of a hole. Because it almost never works.
Enter the latest tone-deaf Leftist experiment.
Last week, 250 rich, elite celebrities, alongside Planned Parenthood, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times insisting we plebeians forcibly fund Planned Parenthood through our federal tax dollars. How is that for freedom?
HELP LIFENEWS SAVE BABIES FROM ABORTION! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation!
This has all the awareness of the peak cringe COVID-19 Imagine celebrity sing-along.
According to Planned Parenthood’s exclusive Rolling Stone write-up, the celebrity campaign includes the following slogans: “I’m for Planned Parenthood. For Freedom. For Healthcare. For You and Me.”
Here is why all that sloganeering is a load of rubbish.
Planned Parenthood would not be paying tens of thousands of dollars and calling on over 200 celebrities for a New York Times ad, if they weren’t nervous about something. That nervousness stems from the fact that Democrats no longer oversee the federal purse. Rightfully so. The current administration and Congress recognize that Americans cannot sustain giving another $800 million to fund the largest abortion giant in the country.
Last week, the House passed President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” bill and as of today, it is with the Senate. As part of promises to cut waste, the bill stops hundreds of millions of forced taxpayer dollars to Big Abortion. Naturally, Planned Parenthood sees the writing on the wall. No longer will everyday Americans be forced to use their money to artificially keep this organization alive. They are crumbling and they know it.
But don’t just take my word for it; take the word of the newspaper that they placed the ad in.
In a direct counter to the campaign’s “For Healthcare” line, a recent article in theNew York Times argues that money is not being used to help patients, but rather to fund the politics of its abortion lobby. The grisly New York Timesstory features atrocious conditions at Planned Parenthood, like botched abortions and leaking sewage that caused patients to vomit. A Missouri branch was shut down for using moldy abortion equipmenton women. Staffers confessed to botching STI tests and not informing patients when they tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases. Story after story in the article shares testimony from staffers painting a scary reality on the ground. It leaves the reader without a doubt that Planned Parenthood lacks basic health and safety standards.
However, the New York Times ad campaign emphasizes Planned Parenthood providing birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and then at the bottom of the list they mention abortions and trans treatments. But in Planned Parenthood’s recently released annual report, their own data confirms cancer screenings, pap smears and breast exams plummeted by 50%. Their STI testing was down 38%. In fact, the top three items were: abortion, transgender treatments, and political spending–those have all skyrocketed. Last year, they spent nearly $70 million to try and elect Kamala Harris and other Democrats.
So, why on earth are our country’s richest and most famous clamoring for us to provide our hard-earned dollars to an organization that is actively causing harm to women and children? Your guess is as good as mine.
What are we really looking at here? A flailing political machine desperate to rake in taxpayer dollars with glitter and hashtags, hoping we will be too dazzled to notice the rot underneath.
But Americans are not stupid—we do not need Hollywood to tell us what health care is, or what it is not. We do not need millionaire activists lecturing us about “freedom” while demanding our money to fund an organization with a failing record and a partisan agenda. We all know that Hollywood Leftists love Planned Parenthood. But they should not demand that the rest of us foot the bill for their pet projects.
The era of celebrity politics is over. The American people are wide awake—and we are not buying it.
LifeNews Note: Emily Davis is the vice president of communications at the non-profit organization, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
The post We Don’t Care What a Bunch of Hollywood Liberals Say, Defund Planned Parenthood appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: LifeNews
About 250 Hollywood stars joined with Planned Parenthood last week in a full-page New York Times ad that called for continued taxpayer funding of the abortion industry giant.
“I’m for Planned Parenthood,” proclaims the ad. The celebrities, among them singers Stevie Nicks, Sheryl Crow, and Cyndi Lauper, and actor George Lopez, cite three reasons for their support, including because they’re for “freedom” and for “health care.”
Their third reason echoes Planned Parenthood’s common deceitful claim that they support getting “the government” out of decisions about abortion. In reality, Planned Parenthood and its allies are, in this very ad, pushing for all Americans to be forced, by the government, into paying for abortions.
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Former Planned Parenthood facility director-turned national pro-life activist Abby Johnson told CatholicVote the abortion lobby’s ploy of using leftwing Hollywood celebrities to influence Americans – who overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump in the last election – is futile.
“This publicity stunt shows that the abortion industry has not learned its lesson from the past election,” said Johnson, the foundress of And Then There Were None and Pro-Love Ministries. “No one cares about celebrity endorsements of a multi-billion-dollar industry whose sole purpose is to destroy innocent life. It would be laughable if it didn’t deal with life and death. This isn’t what true empowerment of women looks like.”
In an op-ed Monday at Fox News, Emily Davis, vice president of communications at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, agreed.
“The era of celebrity politics is over,” Davis asserted. “Enter the latest tone-deaf Leftist experiment.”
The ad appeared in the wake of the House passing Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” bill and sending it along to the Senate. The bill cuts hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood through Medicaid and grants. The abortion business’ latest annual report shows it took in $792.2 million in the form of these government health services reimbursements that Americans are forced to support through their taxes.
“What are we really looking at here?” Davis asked. “A flailing political machine desperate to rake in taxpayer dollars with glitter and hashtags, hoping we will be too dazzled to notice the rot underneath.”
Ironically, the ad appeared in the same New York Times that, in February, published a shocking report exposing numerous examples of Planned Parenthood’s alleged malpractice in performing abortions and other procedures.
The report revealed allegations, uncovered by the Times through a review of clinic documents and legal filings, that include complaints claiming Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are operating with “aging equipment” and “poorly trained staff.” The malpractice complaints allege practices that endanger the lives of women.
The Times report also revealed that, since the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood “has enjoyed a fund-raising boom, with $498 million in donations” in that year alone.
“But little of it goes to the state affiliates to provide health care at clinics,” the Times reported. “Instead, under the national bylaws, the majority of the money is spent on the legal and political fight to maintain abortion rights.”
Additionally, Planned Parenthood has used taxpayer-funded grants to promote gender ideology in its “education” programs in government schools.
A report published Friday at the Daily Caller News Foundation revealed that, in the Philadelphia School District, nearly $40,000 in taxpayer funding was granted to Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide up to 79 training sessions that present biological sex as a “myth.”
According to uncovered documents, the sessions, held during the 2023-2024 academic year, taught from the perspective that children should be able to receive medical intervention to live as the opposite sex, and that men who believe they are women should be allowed to compete with real women in sports.
Planned Parenthood’s investment in gender ideology-based “education” is interesting, at best, in light of the fact that it’s now also one of the nation’s largest providers of cross-sex hormones.
Lila Rose, foundress of Live Action, recently exposed Planned Parenthood’s alleged prescriptions of cross-sex hormones for minors via virtual appointments.
Johnson argued that, by supporting the abortion industry in the New York Times ad, the Hollywood stars are once again missing a real opportunity to help women and their families.
“When these celebrities wake up and start giving money and time to help women in desperate situations to get their lives back on track without taking the lives of their children, then let’s have a conversation,” the pro-life leader said. “Until then, I imagine Americans are using the NYT to start their summer campfires with families so at least the paper is being put to good use.”
LifeNews Note: Susan Berry writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
The post Stevie Nicks, Sheryl Crow, and Cyndi Lauper Want to Force Americans to Fund Planned Parenthood appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Ron Paul Institute - Featured Articles
For years, Jake Tapper, the leading newsreader for CNN, has been very unfair to and very biased against Republicans in general, and to President Trump in particular.
Now, in an attempt to restore some of his lost credibility, he has written a new book with Alex Thompson of Axios about the Biden health cover-up.
He apparently is embarrassed and/or feels guilty about all he did in a very partisan way to try to keep a very unhealthy Joe Biden in office as president, but I will give him credit for now admitting to some extent how wrong he was. Of course, he is putting most of the blame on the White House staff.
I will not try to help Tapper in this personal campaign of his by buying his book. However, I have read and heard many things he has said and I have read some of the reviews.
He said: “Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media.”
In an interview with Piers Morgan, Tapper said the cover-up of Biden’s health by the White House, aided by Tapper and most of the national media, was “maybe even worse” than the Watergate scandal. In fact, he used those words three times in the interview.
He added: “It is without question and maybe even worse than Watergate in some ways because Richard Nixon was in control of his faculties when he was not drinking.”
In its story about Tapper’s book, the U.S. edition of the Daily Mail (a British newspaper), led this way: “CNN star Jake Tapper has been branded a ‘fraud’ and a ‘phony’ over his self-righteous rants about former President Joe Biden’s health cover up.”
The story said “many believe the journalist was complicit in Biden’s cover up” and added that early reviews “were quickly overshadowed by allegations that Tapper himself was part of the cover up and is now seemingly trying to rewrite history.”
The national media hated Trump so much that reporters were eager to jump on and exaggerate anything unfavorable to him and to emphasize anything favorable to Biden.
Tapper’s book apparently says that Biden’s inner circle “couldn’t believe how easily (the media) swallowed campaign lies” and how eager reporters were to say something Trump said was false.
Much of the mainstream media was doing everything it could to protect and promote Biden. They would never ask him tough questions or criticize him for not holding press conferences and for not having anything on his schedule.
In the summer of 2023, the New York Times reported that “people who deal with him regularly, including some of his adversaries, say he remains sharp and commanding in private meetings” and “he has at times exerted striking stamina.”
His two young press secretaries said at different times they were having trouble keeping up with him and that videos shown by Fox News and other conservative media were “deep fake.”
Yet, several months before the election, the Biden campaign tried to film a town hall meeting to use on TV ads, but they couldn’t use it because, according to the Tapper book, Biden “couldn’t put together coherent thoughts.” The book also said Hunter Biden was “effectively chief of staff.”
In a survey released on Dec. 30, 2023, Syracuse University’s School of Public Communications said the number of journalists identifying themselves as Republicans fell from 18% in 2002 and 7.1% in 2013 to only 3.4% in 2022.
I received my journalism degree in 1969 and worked as a full-time reporter for the Knoxville Journal, our morning daily newspaper, during my senior year at U.T. in 1968-69. I taught journalism for one year. In those years, newspapers felt it was important to have a separation between the news pages and the editorial pages.
They never would have allowed a reporter to use words like “obviously false” in what were supposed to be news stories unless some official made the accusation. Reporters were supposed to be reporters, not editorial writers, and especially not flunkies for one political party.
Finally, not only did they hide the truth about Biden’s health, but Tapper and the national media also pushed the story that Russia had aided the 2016 Trump campaign. After paying 18 very anti-Trump lawyers for two years and spending many millions of taxpayer dollars, they found no proof at all of this Russian hoax.
Reprinted with permission from Knoxville Focus.
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Site: LifeNews
Illinois Right to Life is celebrating the close of the 2025 legislative session with a significant victory: the defeat of a dangerous Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS) bill that would have legalized physician assisted suicide in our state.
The Illinois Legislature attempted multiple strategies to push this bill through, including a legislative sleight of hand: after identical PAS bills stalled in both the House and Senate, proponents amended a food sanitation bill, stripping its original content and replacing it with PAS language. The maneuver allowed the bill to reach the House floor, where it passed. However, the Senate did not vote to concur with the amended language—effectively killing the bill for now.
“This is a critical win for Illinois’ most vulnerable citizens,” said Mary Kate Zander, President of Illinois Right to Life. “Our lawmakers heard from thousands of Illinoisans who refused to allow death to become a state-sanctioned ‘treatment.’ We are grateful to our coalition partners, and most of all, to the countless constituents who made their voices heard. We give glory to God.”
Get the latest pro-life news and information on X (Twitter). Follow @LifeNewsHQ//
Despite this victory, Illinois Right to Life is disappointed by the passage of two deeply troubling chemical abortion bills, both of which are now headed to the Governor’s desk.
HB3709: Forced Promotion and Dispensing of Abortion Drugs on College Campuses
This bill amends the Public Higher Education Act, forcing public universities to:
- Provide access to abortionists authorized to prescribe chemical abortion drugs
- Dispense these drugs through campus pharmacies
- Promote chemical abortion on their official websites
“These drugs starve preborn children to death and pose serious risks to women’s health,” said Mary Kate Zander. “No woman should be committing her own abortion alone in a dorm room. This bill not only endangers lives—it targets young women at one of their most vulnerable moments.”
Unprecedented Defiance of Federal Drug Safety Standards
In an unprecedented act of political overreach, Illinois lawmakers have decided they know better than the FDA. Apparently, when it comes to women’s health, politics trumps science.
The Illinois Legislature passed a bill that will allow Illinois to ignore FDA safety decisions on chemical abortion pills—as long as the World Health Organization (WHO) supports their use.
Illinois Right to Life remains committed to protecting women, children, and the medically vulnerable. We will continue to educate, advocate, and build a culture that respects every human life.
The post Dangerous Illinois Bill to Legalize Assisted Suicide Has Been Defeated appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Ron Paul Institute - Featured Articles
Last week, the Trump administration announced the streamlining of access to illegally seized personal data from unsuspecting Americans, thereby making warrantless domestic spying easier for the spies.
Here is the backstory.
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesn’t create the right; it limits government interference with it. President Joe Biden often misquoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that Justice Scalia believed that the Bill of Rights creates rights. As Justice Scalia wrote, referring to the right to keep and bear arms but reflecting his view on the origins of all personal liberty, the Bill of Rights secures rights; it doesn’t create them. It secures preexisting rights from interference by the government.
Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They preceded the existence of the government. They come from our humanity, and in the case of privacy, they are reinforced by our ownership or legal occupancy of property.
The idea that rights come from our humanity is Natural Law theory, which was first articulated by Aristotle in 360 B.C. The natural law teaches that there are aspects of human existence and thus areas of human behavior that are not subject to the government. Aristotle’s views would later be refined by Cicero, codified by St. Thomas Aquinas, explained by John Locke, and woven into Anglo-American jurisprudence by British jurists and American revolutionaries and constitutional framers.
Thus, our rights to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to defend ourselves from crazies and tyrants, to own property, and to be left alone are all hard-wired into our human nature by God, the uncaused cause. Nature is the means through which God passes along His gifts to us. We come about by a biological act of nature, every step of which was ordained by God.
His greatest gift to us is life, and He tied that gift to free will. Just as He is perfectly free, so are we.
In exercising our free wills, we employ rights. Rights are claims against the whole world. They don’t require approval of a government or neighbors or colleagues. The same human rights exist in everyone no matter their place of birth, and each person exercises them as she or he sees fit. The government should only come into the picture when someone violates another’s natural rights. So, if someone builds a house in your backyard, you can knock it down and expel the builders or you can ask the government to do so.
Suppose the builders haven’t consented to the existence of the government? That does not absolve them. Though government is only moral and legal in a society in which all persons have consented to it — this is Thomas Jefferson’s “consent of the governed” argument in the Declaration of Independence — the poignant exception to actual consent is the use of government to remedy a violation of natural rights.
Professor Murray Rothbard examined all this under his non-aggression principle (NAP): Initiating or threatening force or deception against a person or his rights is always morally illicit. This applies to all aggression, even — and especially — from the government. The folks building a house in your backyard have either used force or deception to get there. Both violate your natural rights and the NAP.
Now, back to the Fourth Amendment and privacy. In a famous dissent in 1928, which two generations later became the law of the land, the late Justice Louis Brandeis argued that government surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and thus, per the express language of the amendment, cannot be conducted by the government without a warrant issued by a judge. He famously called privacy the right most valued by civilized persons and described it as “the right to be let alone.”
Today, this is the most violated of personal rights; not by judges signing search warrants for surveillance, but by government officials — local, state and federal — ignoring and evading the natural right to privacy and pretending that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them. The linchpin of the amendment is the judicial determination of the existence of probable cause — meaning that it is more likely than not that a crime has been committed, and that there is evidence of that crime in the place to be searched and in the things to be seized.
Today, the feds, and this has been picked up and mimicked by local and state police, have told themselves that so long as they are not looking for evidence of crimes, they needn’t follow the Fourth Amendment.
Today, the government rarely bothers to obtain a search warrant for surveillance because it is cumbersome to do so and because it is so easy to surveil folks on a massive scale without one.
Today, the National Security Agency — America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spying apparatus — captures every keystroke on every desktop and mobile device, and every conversation on every landline and mobile device, and all data transmitted into, out of or within the United States.
Moreover, you’d be hard-pressed to find a geographic area that is not covered by police using hardware that tracks the movement and use of mobile phones. When Edward Snowden passed on to journalists the facts of massive warrantless spying in the Bush and Obama administrations, he had the journalists put their mobile devices where his was — in his refrigerator in his hotel room, as anywhere else would have alerted his former colleagues of their collective whereabouts.
The government spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually just to watch and follow us. Who authorized this? Why do we tolerate it? Whatever the answers to these questions, warrantless spying on Americans just got a lot worse.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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Site: Mises Institute
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Site: Steyn OnlineHello once again and welcome back to another batch of Laura's Links. The timing of this week's column worked out well because earlier in the week it was the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, so I was quite busy with preparations and of course, scarfing down
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Site: Zero HedgeDark Irony: 75th Anniversary Edition Of Orwell's 1984 Comes With Trigger WarningsTyler Durden Thu, 06/05/2025 - 09:45
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
A new 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 includes ‘trigger warnings’ in the introduction written by an American professor.
The College Fix reports that the warning comes:
Courtesy of Dolen Perkins-Valdez, who according to her website has “established herself as a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life,”and teaches literature at American University.
According to the report, the introduction, authorised by the Orwell estate, makes note that “there are no Black characters at all” in the novel.
What? Why is this relevant to the book?
I'll have to wait till I finish my read to see exactly what you are referring to, but I took a look at the introductory essay by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and am in dismay at aspects of it:
— Mark Blair (@mblair) June 2, 2025
"That sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does… pic.twitter.com/NPMPaSmi51When Orwell wrote the novel in the late 1940s, black people made up less than 1% of the English population.
The report adds:
For a “contemporary reader” such as herself, Perkins-Valdez says this gives her “pause.” She also says a “sliver of connection” is difficult with a book that “does not speak much to race and ethnicity.”
Yeah, the novel isn’t supposed to be about race and ethnicity.
In your world where you have to make absolutely everything about race, this book isn’t going to connect.
It is all she knows how to do: look for herself in other people's stories. Use her own racial identity as a lens through which to judge (not truly evaluate, but judge) everything she encounters. This sort of narcissism is endemic.
— Brian Patrick Eha (@brianeha) June 3, 2025Perkins-Valdez continues, “I’m enjoying the novel on its own terms, not as a classic but as a good story. That is, until Winston [Smith] reveals himself to be a problematic character.”
Yeah. He’s supposed to be. But in what way do you mean?
“For example, we learn of him he dislikes nearly all women. And especially the young and pretty ones,” she further explains.
Faceplam.
“Winston’s views on women are, at first, despicable for the contemporary reader. He is the kind of character that can make me put a book down,” she adds.
Imagine if Orwell had instead written Winston as a woke liberal policing his own thoughts. The Party wouldn’t even need Big Brother.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, along with his podcast host Walter Kirn pointed out how idiotic this all is, given that the book is a warning about the erosion of language and freedom of thought.
In which you will learn that the current leading paperback version of 1984, its official Orwell-estate-approved 75th anniversary edition, includes a 1984-ish trigger-warning introduction calling the novel's hero "problematic" because of his "misogyny."
— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) June 2, 2025
I am not making this up. https://t.co/U9UAR3dsdQThe 1984 part of the discussion begins at 1 hour 36 mins:
America This Week, Live on Monday 6-2-25 https://t.co/Lc1K4WEGC1
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 2, 2025The material in 1984 is supposed to be traumatising, that’s the entire point of the book. Putting trigger warnings on it is ludicrous and only proves Orwell was prescient.
Having this drivel as an introduction to one of the most iconic dystopian works of literature is like something out of Idiocracy.
It mirrors the novel’s own warnings about ideological conformity and the rewriting of art to appease dogmatic sensitivities.
It’s insulting.
Who on Earth commissioned it?
Perhaps the same people who agreed to a politically correct modern day re-write of 1984 from a feminist perspective.
* * *
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.
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Site: AsiaNews.itThe measure was introduced in 1989 after the war to reduce the pressure on scarce resources. Removing the limit is meant to reverse the declining birthrate and the aging of the population. The drop is not uniform and affects mainly large centres like Ho Chi Minh City.
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Site: LifeNews
The ACLJ is taking decisive action to defend the constitutional rights of pro-life advocates who faced discriminatory enforcement and wrongful arrest for peacefully exercising their First Amendment freedoms. We’ve told you about our defense of the Knotts family, who faced criminal charges for simply advocating for the lives of unborn babies outside an abortion clinic. As the trial began, with a packed courtroom watching, the prosecution folded. It dismissed the wrongful criminal charges entirely.
Now we’ve gone on the offensive to defend pro-life advocacy. We’ve filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Zack and Lindsay Knotts, challenging their unconstitutional arrest and an unconstitutional city ordinance that silences disfavored speakers while protecting those with opposing viewpoints.
The Story So Far
What happened to the Knotts family in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, represents a textbook case of viewpoint discrimination – an egregious violation of the First Amendment. The shocking details of their treatment reveal a deliberate pattern of government censorship based solely on the content of their pro-life message.
Get the latest pro-life news and information on X (Twitter). Follow @LifeNewsHQ//
On December 28, 2024, the Knotts traveled to the Northeast Ohio Women’s Center, an abortion clinic, to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights, engaging in sidewalk evangelism and pro-life advocacy. What happened next exposed a troubling pattern of government officials weaponizing local ordinances to silence religious and pro-life speech.
Zack used a battery-powered megaphone – quieter than ambient traffic noise – to share his life-affirming message from a public sidewalk. Meanwhile, abortion clinic escorts actively worked to drown out his speech using their own sound devices, including whistles and kazoos, while making threats against the couple.
One escort even told Zack to “suck-start a shotgun.” During a previous encounter, Zack had told escorts how his mother-in-law had considered an abortion while pregnant with his now wife, and if she had gone through with it, his wife “should be dead.” An escort interrupted, stating, “We can fix that.”
Despite this harassment and the escorts’ use of the same types of sound devices prohibited by the city’s noise ordinance, only Zack was arrested and cited.
The Discriminatory Arrest
The circumstances of Zack’s arrest reveal the true motivation behind the police action:
- A Biased Complaint: A nearby resident supposedly called the police complaining specifically about Zack’s pro-life message – notably, she did not complain about the escorts’ kazoos and whistles, only the pro-life speech.
- No Firsthand Witness: The arresting officers, Sergeant Dobney and Officer Paratore, never personally witnessed Zack using the megaphone. By the time they arrived, the megaphone’s batteries had already died. So they could not possibly have known if his megaphone was loud enough to violate the ordinance – which it wasn’t.
- A Biased Investigation: The police only took a statement from Officer Oldham, who was working off-duty as private security for the abortion clinic – creating an obvious conflict of interest. No other witnesses were questioned.
- Selective Enforcement: Despite knowledge of the escorts’ threats, noise-making, and harassment, only Zack was arrested, cited, and prosecuted.
- Chilling Threats: When Lindsay tried to report the threats against her husband, she was told they were “not a crime.” Sergeant Dobney then threatened that Zack would be arrested again if he caused “annoyance” in the future – even without amplified sound.
The impact of this unconstitutional enforcement extends far beyond one arrest. The Knotts now fear exercising their constitutional rights, knowing they face arrest while their opponents remain free to engage in identical or worse conduct. This chilling effect on protected speech is precisely what the First Amendment was designed to prevent. When citizens must self-censor their constitutionally protected speech due to fear of government retaliation, the Constitution has been violated.
An Ordinance Designed To Discriminate
Cuyahoga Falls’ Ordinance § 509.03(a)(6) prohibits amplified sound that might cause “inconvenience or annoyance to persons of ordinary sensibilities” – vague language that invites arbitrary enforcement. But the biggest constitutional problem lies in the ordinance’s exemptions, which favor certain organizations while discriminating against individual citizens. The law specifically exempts amplified sound from educational organizations and charitable organizations, for example.
This creates an impermissible hierarchy of speakers, in direct violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government cannot grant preferred status to certain speakers while silencing others, especially in traditional public forums like sidewalks.
Three Constitutional Violations, One Clear Pattern of Discrimination
Our lawsuit challenges this discriminatory ordinance on several constitutional grounds. In our motion for preliminary injunction, we reveal three distinct ways Cuyahoga Falls’ ordinance violates the Constitution:
- Facial Invalidity Under the First Amendment: The ordinance’s speaker-based exemptions transform what should be a content-neutral noise regulation into an unconstitutional content-based restriction on speech. Such regulations are presumptively unconstitutional and subject to strict scrutiny – a test this ordinance clearly fails. This creates a two-tiered system where politically favored institutions can use amplification freely, but individual citizens exercising their constitutional rights cannot.
- Unconstitutional Vagueness: The ordinance prohibits causing “inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm” through “unreasonable noise” – but fails to define any of these subjective terms. What constitutes “unreasonable noise”? What level of “annoyance” triggers enforcement? The law provides no guidance, leaving enforcement entirely to the personal discretion of police officers.This vagueness creates exactly the kind of arbitrary enforcement we witnessed: Zack’s amplified pro-life message was deemed “unreasonable,” while equally loud pro-abortion counter-protesters using musical instruments specifically mentioned in the ordinance faced no consequences.
- Viewpoint Discrimination: The selective enforcement against pro-life speakers while tolerating identical or worse conduct from pro-abortion advocates constitutes impermissible viewpoint discrimination. Most troubling of all is the selective enforcement pattern. The Knotts and abortion escorts were engaged in directly comparable conduct – using sound devices to amplify their messages on the same public sidewalk. Yet only the pro-life speakers faced arrest and prosecution.When Lindsay informed officers about the threats made against them, she was told these statements were “not a crime” – while her husband sat in the back of a police cruiser for using a megaphone.
One of the central cases we rely on to defend pro-life advocates is our very own victory against an abortion buffer zone law in Louisville, Kentucky. That court decision requiring an injunction against a speech-suppressing buffer zone is crucial to holding the government accountable for vague laws that infringe on speech. The First Amendment demands that pro-life advocates have their rights protected.
Why This Case Matters
This lawsuit represents more than just one family’s fight for justice – it’s about preserving fundamental constitutional principles that protect all Americans.
The government prosecuted Zack for months before ultimately dismissing the case on the day of trial – but only after the constitutional damage was done. The arrest, prosecution, and ongoing threat of future enforcement have already achieved the government’s apparent goal: silencing disfavored speech.
This case exemplifies why the ACLJ exists: to defend the constitutional rights of Americans against government overreach and discrimination. We refuse to allow local officials to use vague ordinances as weapons against unpopular speech, and we will not stand by while religious and pro-life voices are silenced through selective enforcement.
The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee freedom from annoyance or inconvenience – it guarantees freedom of speech, especially for unpopular viewpoints that challenge the status quo. When government officials start deciding which messages deserve protection based on their own preferences, we’re all at risk.
Our lawsuit seeks:
- A declaration that the ordinance is unconstitutional
- An injunction preventing future discriminatory enforcement
- Compensation for constitutional violations
- Return of Zack’s seized megaphone
- Attorney’s fees under federal civil rights law
The Broader Battle for Religious Freedom
This case is part of a larger assault on religious freedom and pro-life speech across America. From college campuses to city sidewalks, government officials are increasingly willing to silence religious viewpoints while protecting secular ones.
The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly affirmed that the First Amendment does not permit the government to make such distinctions. In Reed v. Town of Gilbert, the Court emphasized that content-based restrictions on speech are presumptively unconstitutional. In Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, the Supreme Court held that viewpoint discrimination is an “egregious form of content discrimination.”
These precedents are clear: The government cannot silence speakers based on the religious or political content of their message.
The Knotts family courageously chose to stand up for their constitutional rights rather than submit to government censorship. Their willingness to challenge this discrimination in federal court will help protect the rights of all Americans to engage in peaceful religious and political expression.
Your support enables the ACLJ to take on these critical cases without charging our clients, ensuring that constitutional rights aren’t limited to those who can afford expensive litigation. Together, we can continue fighting for the fundamental freedoms that make America exceptional.
LifeNews Note: Nathan Moelker is Senior Associate Counsel at the ACLJ’s Washington, D.C. office. Liam R. Harrell is Associate Counsel at the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) Washington, D.C., office.
The post Pro-Life Advocate Fights Back After He’s Arrested for Preaching Gospel Outside Abortion Biz appeared first on LifeNews.com.
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Site: Rorate CaeliFrom reader N.A. in Sweden, in a letter sent to friends and acquaintances of John Bogärde, a pioneer of the revival of the Traditional Latin Mass in Sweden and a father of seven, who recently passed away at 44: I would also like to share with you these photos from John's funeral. It was such an astonishing and moving experience. The Requiem Mass was celebrated in the Church of Husaby; New Catholichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118576661605931910noreply@blogger.com
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Site: Mises InstituteIf we really want America to be "great" it must first be free.
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Site: Mises Institute
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