How American Soldiers Invented GPS On Labor Day Weekend In 1973

From The Federalist.com (Aug. 31, 2023):

With the letters GPS, we instantly recognize an innovation that has revolutionized our lives. The concept was born half a century ago in a sweltering room at the Pentagon over Labor Day weekend in 1973.

That’s the genesis of the concept for a constellation of platforms orbiting the Earth, transmitting radio signals to determine location. Many years of calculation, experiment, and miniaturization led to the Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) satellites that became known as the Global Positioning System (GPS).

The dedication and intellect of the engineers, scientists, and technicians involved led the way to worldwide freedom from getting lost — and governments’ ability to always know where you are if you’re carrying a phone.

……..

The Beginnings of Satellite Positioning

So how did that all change? A few days after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik a few hundred miles above the Earth’s surface, scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory realized the satellite could be tracked from the ground merely by the radio signals its transmitters emitted by exploiting the Doppler shift as it passed.

In August 1966, the U.S. Air Force submitted proposal 621B to engage these principles in reverse: using the satellite to locate a ground position, such as for search-and-rescue operations. Although useful for military use, that was not economically scalable. It also required an enormous quantity of satellites for global coverage from low-Earth orbit.

Then over Labor Day weekend in 1973, a group of U.S. Air Force officers led by Col. Bradford Parkinson met in empty Pentagon rooms to bring this idea to fruition. Ground receivers had to be passive, with no feedback to the transmitters in orbit. The system had to operate worldwide. Intersection from four separate signal emitters within the line-of-sight would correspond to a single receiver location.

Measuring the time elapsed can calculate the distance between the satellite and the receiver. Depending on these time delays, the intersection of the spheres corresponds to the receiver’s location, allowing trilateration plus time offset to compensate for the receiver’s temporal inaccuracy. The convergence in this example points to a location in northern Europe.

Configuring GPS

The Atlas booster then available constrained the payload mass for reaching medium orbit. The teams chose a constellation of at least 24 platforms with 12-hour orbital passes at 12,500-mile altitude to satisfy payload requirements, mapped into six orbital planes with four or five satellites per plane.

To distinguish multiple satellites operating on the same frequency, James Spilker at the company Aerospace created code division multiple access, or CDMA. This technique assigns a particular identifier to each transmitter.

Richard Schwartz and Hugo Fruehauf at Rockwell miniaturized and radiation-hardened rubidium vapor oscillators to serve as the NAVSTAR atomic clocks. These achievements from Air Force, Rockwell, and Aerospace teams are summarized in the Lonely Halls documentary.

Fixing What Went Wrong with the Concept

Sources of errors for this plan abounded. Among these included space-time dilation, revealed by Albert Einstein in 1905 and 1915. Due to special relativity, the NAVSTAR satellite’s orbital speed of 2.4 miles per second decelerates the clocks by seven microseconds per day.

By contrast, general relativity speeds up those same clocks by 45 microseconds per day due to the GPS satellite’s greater distance from the Earth’s core. That reduces that gravitational influence compared to the surface.

Together, failure to compensate for these effects induces an error of more than six miles per day. So before launch, the satellite clocks are slowed down by 0.000000045 percent to synchronize with ground stations.

Additional sources of error include free electrons in the ionosphere, Sagnac distortion, and Earth’s axis perturbations called the Chandler wobble. GPS compensates for these by incorporating two separate transmit frequencies, calibrated against each other, as well as atmospheric modeling and coordinate transformation between transmitter and receiver.

GPS Finally Launches in the 1970s

Led by Roger Easton, Naval Research Laboratory developed a pair of proof-of-concept satellites to test time-based navigation. These were launched in 1974 and 1977.

Starting in February 1978 and continuing until October 1985, the Air Force launched 10 prototype Block-I NAVSTAR satellites aboard Atlas F rockets for testing. From February 1989 through November 1997, it launched nine Block-II and 19 Block-IIA by Rockwell aboard Delta-II rockets (after the exclusion of the Space Shuttle). This formed the initial GPS constellation.

Today, 31 GPS satellites remain operational, not counting four reserve or spare platforms. Various improvements have been incorporated.

Throughout their development, GPS satellites have shared common features. Shown below is the Block-II configuration, weighing about one ton (about double the prototype Block-I). Louvers on the side dissipate excess heat via thermal radiation to maintain consistent internal temperature. Attitude thrusters adjust satellite orientation. Photovoltaic solar arrays convert sunlight into electrical power. [read more]

Interesting military history.

Woman’s mystery illness turns out to be 3-inch snake parasite in her brain

From Ars Technica.com (Aug. 28, 2023):

A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.

A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain.

When the woman’s illness began, “trying to identify the microscopic larvae, which had never previously been identified as causing human infection, was a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Karina Kennedy, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) Medical School and Director of Clinical Microbiology at Canberra Hospital, said in a press release.

The case, reported in the latest issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, began in January 2021. The woman went to a local hospital in southeastern New South Wales, Australia, with a three-week history of abdominal pain, diarrhea, dry cough, and night sweats. Her blood work indicated an infection of some kind, and scans showed signs of pneumonia in her lungs as well as lesions in her spleen and liver. But tests for known microorganisms and parasites came up negative, as did tests for cancers and autoimmune disease. She was diagnosed with an unexplained case of pneumonia and given a corticosteroid, prednisolone.

Three weeks later, she was admitted to another hospital for recurrent fever and persistent cough. Again, doctors found the lung, liver, and spleen injuries as well as signs of an infection. Her blood had high levels of eosinophils, white blood cells known to fight off parasitic infections. They treated her for the high eosinophil levels and, out of concern there was a false-negative for a human roundworm infection, treated her with the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin.

From mid-2021 to early 2022, the woman’s liver and lungs improved. With the addition of another drug to help keep her eosinophil counts down, she was able to lower the dose of prednisolone.  [read more]

Glad the doctors got the worm out in time.

Former US Marine Held in Russia for More Than 4 Years Has Been Released

From Newsmax.com (Aug. 11):

Russia has released an American military veteran who spent more than four years in prison on disputed charges under abusive conditions and was said to be gravely ill and at risk of dying, a group advocating for him said Tuesday.

Robert Gilman was on his way to a U.S. military hospital in Texas, where he will be medically and psychologically assessed and treated, said Eric ‌Lebson, chief strategy officer of Global Reach, a group that’s been working to free him and other American detainees abroad.

Gilman’s family has flown to Texas to be with him, including his mother, who was in Russia attempting to see him at a hospital.

President Donald Trump, however, posted on social media that Gilman will arrive at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland outside of Washington on Tuesday evening.

“I just spoke to him, and he had one request — A GREAT cheeseburger when he lands,” Trump wrote. “I will take care of that!”

Trump said he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin before Gilman's release, which Trump said was “very much on a Humanitarian Basis.”

“We appreciate this decision, and the fact that Russia asked for no one in return — No exchange took place,” Trump said.

Gilman, a 32-year-old teacher detained since 2022, was initially handed a 3 1/2-year sentence when he was convicted of beating a police officer after being taken off a train for causing a disturbance.

He later was convicted of attacking a prison inspector during a cell check, beating an investigator and assaulting a guard, and he was sentenced in October 2024 to eight years and one month. His sentence was extended last year to 10 years after he was found guilty of assaulting prison guards.

Gilman’s father has disputed the charges against him.

Gilman's sister, Lexie Hudson, credited Trump and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts with bringing about the former Marine's release.

“There is no other reason that Robert is alive today other than that President Trump heard about the case and took action,” said Hudson, who thanked Markey “for leading our advocacy efforts in Congress.”

“The Russians treated my brother so badly," Hudson said. "They hurt him for no reason, other than that he was both an American and a Marine. What did they get out of this? Why did they do this to such a wonderful person?”

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service did not respond to a request for comment on Gilman’s health deteriorating behind bars.

Arrests of Americans have become increasingly common in Russia in recent years. Concern has risen that Russia could be targeting U.S. nationals for arrest to use later as bargaining chips in talks to bring back Russians convicted of crimes in the U.S. and Europe.

The State Department also said Gilman, who had been determined recently to have been wrongfully detained, was released on humanitarian grounds and “was not part of an exchange, and no other concessions were provided.”

“This as a welcome step that we hope leads to the release of Americans unjustly held in Russia, such as wrongful detainee Stephen Hubbard,” it said.

During Gilman’s December 2025 trial in the southwestern city of Voronezh, where he was found guilty of beating two prison guards and had his term extended to 10 years, Russian media reported that he pleaded guilty to the charges and apologized to the guards he was charged with assaulting.

The business daily Kommersant said he explained his actions by saying he wanted to stay in the prison where he was serving his sentence and avoid being moved to another penitentiary.

Gilman’s lawyer Irina Brazhnikova told the Russian news agency Interfax on Friday that Gilman was in a psychiatric ward of a civilian hospital, where he’s been since early July.

He was there “due to a psychiatric condition,” and according to doctors, his condition has worsened, but neither his defense lawyers, nor his family were allowed to visit, she said.

Before Gilman was flown out of Russia, he had been in “a dissociative stupor” for 47 days due to the abuse he had suffered in prison, Lebson said. After he was moved to the hospital, he was hooked up to a feeding tube and handcuffed to a bed.

Hospital reports conveyed Gilman’s condition “as dire and life-threatening,” pushing the U.S. government into action and leading to his release, Lebson said.

Markey had called on Russia and the U.S. to work together to get the Massachusetts resident released. Gilman was among at least eight Americans who remained in Russian custody after a series of high-profile prisoner exchanges with the U.S. in recent years.

Markey blamed Russia for Gilman's poor health, saying his return to the U.S. was long overdue.

“It is a tragedy that it took Robert’s near-death condition for his case to receive the attention that it required for his release to be negotiated," Markey said. "Throughout his detention, Robert was subjected to physical torture, forced medication, and provocations by Russian authorities. There is no doubt that his treatment by Russian authorities is the reason Robert is in this precarious state today.” [source]

Good to know! Welcome back home.  Get well and enjoy your cheeseburger.

Another person released:

President Trump Brings Another American Home-Announces Return of Christian Missionary Kevin Rideout Who Was Kidnapped and Held by Jihadi Terrorists in West Africa

Texts: Fauci Gave Mixed Message on Vax Miscarriage Risk

From Newsmax.com (Aug. 10):

Text messages obtained from the government-issued cellphone of Dr. Anthony Fauci show the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases privately raised the possibility that a reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine could theoretically be associated with miscarriages.

Days later, he publicly said regulators had found "no red flags" involving pregnant women.

The messages, released Monday by Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., were among more than 34,000 texts obtained by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs. The government-issued iPhone also contained more than 522 voicemails.

Paul and Johnson said in a news release that only three contacts were listed and that all other text messages were identified only with phone numbers rather than contact names. They said it was too early to determine whether any data was deleted.

Johnson referred to the revelations as "a major scandal" during an appearance Monday night on Newsmax's "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE." He added that the information was found after a "quick little search" and that lawmakers have yet to go through the full trove of texts and voicemails.

"I thought we better release this one right away because it impacts public health today," Johnson said.

Fauci, then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy discussed potential risks of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, including whether the timing of vaccination could affect those risks.

"I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of," Fauci wrote in a Jan. 25, 2021, text exchange with Walensky and Murthy.

"Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester," Fauci added.

Walensky replied: "Definitely a good point, esp. after dose two."

Murthy replied: "This is really helpful, thanks. I've been hearing the concern about the mRNA causing mutations in the developing fetus as well. That's a really good point re the cytokine storm post second dose."

Other messages showed Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky weighing potential vaccination risks against the risks COVID-19 posed to pregnant women.

Fauci noted that more than 10,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated at the time without reported problems and that animal toxicology studies had raised no red flags.

A day later, Murthy mentioned in a text to Fauci and Walensky that he was "surprised to see WHO [World Health Organization] put out a strong [line] saying they do not recommend moderna in pregnant women."

"That's a strong statement to make and potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women," Murthy wrote.

On Feb. 3, 2021, Fauci said during a question-and-answer livestream with the Journal of the American Medical Association that the FDA had "found thus far, and we have to be careful, but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women."

On Aug. 30, 2021, Fauci, who also served as chief medical adviser to the Biden White House, told pregnancy expert Heidi Murkoff, "[If] you look at the literally — literally — tens and tens and tens of thousands of women who have been followed by the CDC, who have been vaccinated when they were pregnant, there's no indication whatsoever that there's any increase of any adverse issues in a pregnant woman who was vaccinated compared to a pregnant woman who wasn't vaccinated … it's pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated."

Paul's committee last week voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a July 29 hearing, even though Fauci received a broad pardon from former President Joe Biden.

Paul then referred the contempt finding to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

Newsmax reached out to Fauci's attorney for comment. [source]

The Fauci dark saga continues... Just seems to get worse and worse.

More on the texts:

Texts: Fauci And Friends Covered Up Concerns About The Covid Vax And Miscarriages

My truth, your truth, or the truth? How wokeness undermines the concept of truth itself

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 19, 2024):

In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, the disgraced plagiarist and ex-president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, used some interesting language about “truth” — language that should make any Christian’s eyebrows pop up.

She said, “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged …Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”

But the use of the phrase “my truth” isn’t only found among the progressive left these days. In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, outlined her (rather weak) position on abortion and claimed to be pro-life. Later, when facing criticism for not being pro-life enough at a candidates forum in Iowa, she said “What you heard me say at the debate was very much my truth.”

This raises a serious question: Since when did truth become something that needs to be modified with a personal possessive pronoun?

Christian apologist Frank Turek, perhaps having witnessed these strange personal modifications to the concept of truth, recently asked on X (formerly Twitter), “What do you say to people when they talk about ‘their truth?’”

Ryan Helfenbein, Executive Director of the Standing for Freedom Center, gave an excellent answer:

“There is no ‘your’ truth or ‘my’ truth. There is only ever one universal and absolute truth. The language of postmodernity and indeed Wokism, is a total affront and assault on truth.

Jesus said, ‘I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ John 14:6. Appreciate this question from @DrFrankTurek.”

There is no “your” truth or “my” truth. There is only ever one universal and absolute truth. The language of postmodernity and indeed Wokism, is a total affront and assault on truth.

Jesus said, “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through… https://t.co/kCNfgAluj9

— Ryan Helfenbein (@RHelfenbein) January 3, 2024

Ryan is right. There is only “one universal and absolute truth.” And there is only one being in the universe who has a right to make a personal claim on that truth — the Triune Creator God.

But in today’s increasingly secular world, the concept of truth has become blurred. The rise of postmodernism and its offspring, wokeness, have contributed significantly to this confusion. As Christians, it is essential to understand the implications of these ideologies and how they impact our understanding of truth. Let’s explore the concept of this sort of subjective truth from a Christian worldview and examine how wokeness undermines the very idea of objective truth.

The Christian understanding of truth

The Bible, as the foundation of the Christian faith, provides a clear understanding of truth. In John 14:6, as Ryan referenced, Jesus declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” This statement reveals that Jesus is the embodiment of truth and that truth is not a concept or an abstract idea but a fixed reality determined by God and miraculously embodied in Jesus Christ through the incarnation.

Moreover, the Bible teaches that truth is not relative but absolute. In John 8:32, Jesus says,

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

This statement teaches us in no uncertain terms that there is a single, objective truth that can be known and that this truth has the power to liberate us from the chaos and confusion of the world — and, more importantly, from our sin and rebellion against the God of truth. [read more]

Wokeness like Marxism (which wokeness is a variation actually) is a mental virus which needs to be eliminated.

The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty: The End of National Sovereignty and Freedom

From Mises.org (June 2, 2022):

Even as much of the world continues to move past the covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) is already looking ahead and preparing for the emergence of “other pandemics and other major health emergencies.” To ensure that the world is adequately prepared for future pandemics, “the World Health Assembly” held a special session, on December 1, 2021, entitled The World Together.

The World Health Assembly is “the decision-making body of WHO” and “is attended by delegations from all WHO Member States and focuses on a specific health agenda prepared by the Executive Board.” In this special session, which was actually only “the second-ever since WHO’s founding in 1948,” participants agreed to “draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” This would come to be known as the Pandemic Treaty, which was the main focus of discussions at the Seventy-Fifth World Health Assembly, which was held in Geneva during May 22–28, 2022.

According to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the first director-general of the WHO and who is not actually a medical doctor, this treaty represents an “opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well-being of all people.” If passed, the Pandemic Treaty will allow the WHO to make radical changes to the healthcare systems of its member countries starting in 2024.

In particular, this agreement will grant the WHO the power to declare a pandemic, based on its own vaguely defined criteria, in any of its 194 member countries at any point in the future. It will also permit the WHO to unilaterally determine what measures will be imposed in response to these future declared pandemics, including lockdown policies, mandatory masking, social distancing, and coercing the population into undergoing medical treatments and vaccinations.

Contrary to popular opinion, the WHO is not an independent, unbiased, and ethical organization that aims to achieve the common good. In reality, its goals and agendas are set by its donors, including some of the world’s richest countries and most influential philanthropists. For decades, “philanthropists and their foundations have [gained] increasing influence” when it comes to shaping the global health agenda by “placing people in international organizations, and gaining privileged access to scientific, business and political elites.”

For example, as Jens Martens and Karolin Seitz explain in Philanthropic Power and Development: Who Shapes the Agenda?,“ the Gates Foundation and earlier the Rockefeller Foundation, have been shaping global health policies not only through their direct grant-making but also through the provision of matching funds, the support of selected research programmes, the creation of global health partnerships with Foundation’s staff in their decision-making bodies, and by direct advocacy at the highest political level.” In fact, back in 2006, The Guardian reported that “the Gates foundation is now the second largest donor to the World Health Organization after the US, as well as one of the world’s largest single investors in biotechnology for farming and pharmaceuticals.” Unfortunately, when philanthropists and their foundations advance their own interests, they do so at the expense of the common interests of society. There is no reason to believe that this dynamic will be any different in the case of the Pandemic Treaty.

The Pandemic Treaty has the potential to be extremely detrimental to the future of humanity, because it will allow the WHO’s most powerful contributors to shape universal pandemic measures instead of recognizing the importance of developing specific policies and approaches based on the social, economic, and physical realities and needs of each individual country. The treaty will eliminate the national will and sovereignty of member countries, as it will dictate their health policies based on abstraction, as opposed to considering the realities that prevail in each place.

Even if the Pandemic Treaty genuinely aimed to achieve purely noble humanitarian outcomes, it still has to be opposed on the basis of liberal thought, which maintains that the individual alone must possess absolute responsibility for his own well-being, assuming that he is of mature age and of sound mind. That is to say, the individual is the only one permitted to make decisions that affect his body, his life, and his future, absent the coercive power of any external authority.

However, the Pandemic Treaty will not allow individuals to rely on their own physical, spiritual, and intellectual faculties in order to achieve their own well-being. Instead, it will impose treatments and vaccination on individuals against their own will, thereby violating bodily freedom on a global scale. History is a testament to the fact that violating bodily freedom leads to slavery and retrogression in society.

The Pandemic Treaty will also give the WHO the authority to issue dictates within the private spheres of individuals and to exercise control over their social and public lives, the institutions of their society, and their governments, all in the name of public health. In doing so, it will suppress civil liberties, economic freedom, positive freedom (freedom to), and negative freedom (freedom from). All these forms of freedom are intended to be constructive forces in society that contribute to the achievement of social progress. Once these freedoms are stifled, the foundations of progress and advancement also vanish.

Through the Pandemic Treaty, the WHO will impose its own value judgment on the world population, thereby ignoring the fact that values differ significantly between people, cultures, traditions, and nations. In other words, it will disregard the diversity of people when it comes to making decisions about their own bodies based on their own religious beliefs, commitments, views, commitments, and cultural and traditional values. It will also violate inclusiveness, as the imposition of a single value judgment; namely, the “One Health” approach, means that the WHO does not treat other value judgments, nor cultural and traditional practices, fairly and equally.

The Pandemic Treaty ignores the fact that, as Joseph Schumpeter noted, there is no “unambiguous standpoint with regard to the social whole, upon general welfare and so forth; nor would such a unitary standpoint exist if all individuals and groups wished to act and evaluate on this basis, since the general good and the social ideal appears differently to each and every one.”1

When it comes to medicine, Schumpeter continues, even though people “sufficiently recognize what good health is and generally seek to achieve such a condition,” “it cannot be proved to anyone that health should be positively valued,” as health cannot “be unambiguously defined.”2  In reality, people pursue “good health with very different levels of commitment, valuing this good in relation to others very differently; nor that their aims are not all exactly the same—the health regimes followed by the boxer and the singer are very clearly not identical.”3  Even surgeons trained in the same area would not necessarily agree on the same treatment and operation.

For example, writes Schumpeter, “faced with the option of removing an ulcer, or avoiding the damage associated with surgical intervention, two physicians can argue about whether the one or the other would achieve the desired recovery in the same way.” Moreover, within a particular nation-state, “between people of the same political, social, economic, and cultural interest and with the same perspective on the social world there can always be differences over what is worth striving for.” Accordingly, why would any person or organization that purports to support liberal democratic values back the Pandemic Treaty?

Those that support the Pandemic Treaty ignore the core principles of liberal thought and the principles of democratic governance, as they do not , as Ludwig von Mises put it, “see any reason why they should not by means of force coerce other people to do what these people are not prepared to do of their own accord.” The treaty’s advocates believe that it is acceptable to employ large-scale central planning to coerce people into doing “the right thing” based on value judgments that are not theirs. It does not matter to them, continues Mises, that “the apparatus of physical compulsion resorted to in such endeavors is that of the government’s police power or an illegal “picket” force whose violence the government tolerates…. What matters is the substitution of compulsion for voluntary action.”

Supporters of the Pandemic Treaty should remember the words of John Stuart Mill:

Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own well-being, the interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.

That is to say, the individual is in the best position to be the final judge of action when it comes to his bodily autonomy, his private sphere, and his freedom. [source]

Scary. One step closer to the One World Order.

44-Year-Old Hoarder Left Behind Treasure Trove Worth Up to $5 Million After Passing Away

From Western Journal.com (Oct. 10, 2020):

Hoarders are notorious for calling themselves “collectors,” and claiming that their hoard is made up of valuable items. Many times, those items turn out to be trash — worse than worthless — but, every once in a while an antique or box of items will turn out to be worth something.

The only way to know if a group of items are a “collection” and not a landfill in progress is to call in the experts. And one man in England is incredibly glad he did.

The man’s brother was a 44-year-old bachelor computer programmer who died suddenly last year, according to Metro.

That man had spent over a decade filling up every part of his three-bedroom house in Nottingham floor to ceiling with stacked boxes, bags and packages, earning him the title “Britain’s Biggest Hoarder.”

When he ran out of space, he filled up 24 bins outside and rented two garages and a neighbor’s backyard. Eventually, he had to stay elsewhere because there was nowhere for him to live at his home.

When he passed and his brother was tasked with cleaning up the hoard, the brother very nearly just had it all thrown out — but decided to get it evaluated first. Enter Terry Woodcock of Unique Auctions in Lincoln. With decades in the business, Woodcock was astounded at what he found.

“This collection is beyond belief,” Woodcock said, according to Metro. “I met the man’s brother at the house and he was just as shocked as I was. He had no idea his brother lived like he did. His house and garage were literally crammed full of items.”

Apparently, the deceased bachelor had taken to ordering items online and was hoping to sell them one day to fund his retirement. Lots of vintage electronics, piles of rare comic books, old science kits, Beatles memorabilia and countless other collections were found stacked haphazardly in every space he owned.

According to Metro, it took eight men and three vans more than six weeks just to clear the house, let alone open packages and research the value of items.

But the estimate of what the items could be worth is absolutely staggering: between £500,000 ($650,000) and £4,000,000 ($5,200,000).  [read more]

Nice.

Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil

From Real Clear Politics.com (August 29, 2023):

Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.

Here are a few proofs.

It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.

When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao's Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.

Why don't students know about evil?

The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, "On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion," "Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart... All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it."

This nonsense had been foreign to the Western mind. Its view of humanity was rooted in the Bible, and neither Bible-based religion -- Judaism or Christianity -- affirmed the goodness of the human heart. As Genesis states, "The will of man's heart is evil from his youth," and the rest of the Bible repeatedly warns us against following our hearts.

However, as the West began to abandon the Bible, including belief in the God of the Bible, Westerners began to believe in man. As Marx put it, "Man is God." People had no choice. For if there is no God to believe in, one must believe in man -- or one has literally nothing to believe in. Therefore, belief in man's inherent goodness became both psychologically and philosophically necessary.

A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.

If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not -- and cannot be -- interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.

This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn't want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left. [source]

Great points. Dennis Prager's last comment sums his essay up quite nicely: "This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn't want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left."

Top 10 takeaways from Anthony Fauci's hearing in front of Senate committee

From Just the News.com (July 29):

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, where he was grilled about his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Despite Fauci's refusal to answer questions, the hearing was filled with major revelations and accusations.

Here are the top 10 major takeaways from the Senate hearing:

1. Fauci applied for government grants for himself/got government employees to do it for him

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley revealed during the hearing that Fauci allegedly used federal employees while he was NIAID director to apply for government grants on his behalf for his work during the pandemic.

"You got rich while people were dying," a heated Hawley said. "You were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars."

Hawley said he has evidence of the applications for cash prizes that Fauci received, including the Dan David award and the Smithsonian award.

"You actually wrote to people and said, 'Do you think maybe I'd qualify?' And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn't just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash awards. Isn't that true?"

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in response.

2. Ron Johnson alleges Fauci covered up evidence ivermectin works

Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson accused Fauci during the hearing of covering up alleged evidence that the controversial prescription drug medication ivermectin actually is effective against the coronavirus.

“You said there was no evidence," Johnson said. "There were all kinds of evidence. Loved ones had to go to hospitals, had to sue hospitals ... So I want to know, to what extent were you involved in sabotaging Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?”

Johnson highlighted studies that found there were 60-70% effectiveness rate against the virus. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment again in response.

3. Moreno asks why Fauci hired a criminal defense attorney

Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno questioned why Fauci would hire a prominent criminal defense attorney if he had done nothing wrong when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that the attorney was someone a client hires if they are in "deep s***."

"Let me tell you who David Schertler is for the audience," Moreno said. "He's a high-profile criminal attorney. He's represented some really great people like Senator Bob Menendez ... And there's an article here in the Washington Free Beacon that talks about why you would hire a guy like David Schertler. The comment is, 'if you're in deep s***, that's who you call.'"

4. Rand Paul confirms plans for Fauci contempt vote

Another top moment related to the hearing comes after Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul confirmed that he plans to hold a contempt vote against Fauci for pleading the Fifth in order to dodge answering the panel's questions.

"We believe... he didn't need to hide behind the 5th Amendment and that maybe the 5th Amendment doesn't attach when you have a pardon in place," he told reporters. "The question on contempt will be voted on and then there's the question of whether or not the Department of Justice will take that up."

5. Senators question legality of 5th amendment plea

Several senators also questioned whether Fauci could even plead the Fifth since he was pardoned by former President Joe Biden before he left office last year.

"You don't have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you've been pardoned, as you very well know," Hawley said. "As the Supreme Court has been clear for a century or more. Brown vs. Walker, 1896, 'when he has been pardoned he may not stand upon his privilege.'

"You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now, shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it. This isn't about the Constitution, this isn't about the law," he continued. "This is about contempt, contempt for this body and contempt for the American people." [read more]

The other takeaways:

1. Rick Scott tells Fauci how lockdowns hurt his own family
2. Hawley claims Fauci wanted to be 'Sun god of science'
3. Paul presses Fauci on alleged deletion of federal records
4. Fetterman regrets partisanship over lab leak theory
5. Fauci's lawyer booted from the hearing

More stories and a video on the hearing:

• Fauci Hearing and Diary Leave More Questions Than Answers
• Anthony Fauci, The ‘Covid Czar,’ Ticked Off The Wrong Moms
• Fauci gave off ‘signals of deception’ during Senate hearing, body language expert says
• Here's what the Fauci hearing is really about
• Fauci CAN'T Plead The Fifth If Congress Does THIS [video]

Fauci Diaries Reveal Fame Focus Amid COVID Deaths

From Newsmax.com (July 26):

Newly released diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci suggest that the former White House COVID adviser became increasingly preoccupied with his growing celebrity status even as the coronavirus pandemic claimed tens of thousands of American lives.

The journals, released Sunday by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chronicle Fauci's private thoughts during the early months of the pandemic, when he served as the nation's top infectious disease expert and a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

In an April 7, 2020, diary entry, when more than 60,000 Americans were already dead from COVID-19, Fauci wrote, "Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me."

Weeks later, on May 21, Fauci described his "national and international fame" as "explosive and really unimaginable," adding that it was "not hyperbole" to characterize his level of global recognition that way. By then, nearly 98,000 Americans had died from the virus.

The diary also shows Fauci receiving invitations tied to his newfound celebrity. In late June 2020, as daily U.S. COVID-19 cases climbed to a then-record 40,000, he wrote that he had been invited to appear on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars."

Fauci also documented growing tension with President Donald Trump's White House, writing that extensive media coverage was turning him into "a star that outshines" the president.

He recalled Secret Service officers at White House security gates routinely recognizing his vehicle and waving him through without requesting identification.

Despite the attention, Fauci wrote that he had "no desire to conflict with, embarrass or show up the POTUS" and later decided to stop participating in profile interviews.

Paul, a longtime Fauci critic and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the diary entries days before Fauci is scheduled to testify before the committee under a subpoena issued by the Kentucky Republican.

Paul argues the journals depict a senior public health official overly focused on his public image and media profile during one of the nation's worst public health crises.

"Anthony Fauci will answer to the American people," Paul wrote in a June 28 post on X, accusing federal health officials of prioritizing self-promotion and media narratives during the early months of the pandemic. [source]

"I am science" Fauci sure did love the attention and limelight even more than informing the general public affected by the pandemic. He did not serve America at all.

More info on the "diary:"

• Fauci’s Diary Shows 5 Major Covid Lies He Told The American Public
• Here Are All The Media Hacks Who Got Shoutouts In Fauci’s Diary For Giving Him Tongue Baths
• What Anthony Fauci's Diary Reveals About COVID
• Fauci Solicited Award Noms From NIH-Funded Scientists
• Fauci privately estimated COVID-19 death rate far lower than he gave Congress, diary shows
• Fauci's Diary Was Just Leaked. Here's What It Says. [video]
• THIS Is How RFK Jr. Found Fauci's Diary [video]

AI and Smart Wisdom

From John Stonestreet on Breakpoint.org (Apr. 27):

Recently, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of  NVIDIA, was asked to name the smartest person he knew. He replied by suggesting that the meaning of“smart” has been made obsolete by machines. He then offered an updated definition:

I think long term the definition of smart is someone who sits at that intersection of being technically astute, but human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken, around the corners, the unknowables.

Recently, my Colson Center colleague Dr. Glenn Sunshine suggested that if a scholar from hundreds of years ago was shown what AI can do, he’d be both impressed and disappointed. “You know a lot,” he might observe, “but you understand nothing.” As much as our machines can do, more is not always better. Having all the information and data from history, science, literature, art, philosophy, and medicine constantly accessible at our fingertips is hardly making us wiser.

Last month, a quote from the novel Dune went viral on X. It read, “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Of course, Frank Herbert, who wrote the sci-fi series, was basically repeating an earlier observation from C.S. Lewis.

In a recent controversial essay entitled “Something Big is Happening,” Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, sparked an intense and wide-ranging conversation with this stark admission:

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just . . . appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Shumer is not bragging. He’s alarmed about the future of work and the need for humans to do it in the world he is helping to create. You might say that he is concerned that AI will replace human work. We should also consider how our technologies have replaced human wisdom.

Nearly a century ago, in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” TS Elliot foresaw this confusion:

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man,

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

What has been lost in the uncritical embrace of technological advancement are the insights of ancient wisdom. Lost in the consistent pursuit of ease and pleasure are the habits that cultivate virtue. It’s not fundamentally a question of being for or against specific technologies. It’s that it is not sufficient to be technically “smart” if we are not also morally wise. What matters most for our collective futures are not which capacities and tools we can develop, it is what sort of people we are.

Knowledge can be dangerous when in the hands of the foolish, the immoral, or the wicked. Wisdom is not just the ability to “see around the corners of life.” Rather, it is the ability to live in light of what is true and good. It is about knowing the realities of the world, seen and unseen, and bowing to the One who created it this way. [source]

Don’t think AI will ever have smart wisdom that’s why people can’t lose it and should cherish it.

Ben Franklin and the Gulf Stream

The warm Gulf Stream current that flows eastward across the North Atlantic Ocean is one of the greatest movements of water on Earth. It is driven east by prevailing westerly winds, and is part of a great loop that then recrosses the Atlantic to the Caribbean. The current had been known since 1513, when Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León found his ship moving back north off Florida despite winds blowing him south. But it was only properly charted in 1770, by US statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin.

As deputy postmaster of the British American colonies, Franklin was fascinated by why it took British packet ships delivering mail two weeks longer to cross the Atlantic than American merchant ships. Already famous for his invention of the lightning conductor, he asked Nantucket whaling captain Timothy Folger why this might be.

Franklin’s chart was published in 1770 in Britain, but it would be years before British captains learned to use the Gulf Stream to cut sailing times.

Source: The Science Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (2014) by DK Publishing.

In case of apocalypse, find the nearest 4-H club

From Chloe Coleman on Washington Post.com (Aug. 21, 2023):

Raising and training animals. Growing food. Fishing. Archery. Sewing clothes. Making preserves. These are some of the skills that humanity is going to need if one of the many fictional post-apocalypse narratives ends up coming true.

Growing up in rural Ohio, I developed some of those skills by participating in 4-H, the network of youth development organizations whose roots (in Ohio, coincidentally) date to 1902. Recently, I paid a nostalgic visit to my childhood county fair, and it was while strolling the various barns occupied by 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) projects that my brain connected this wholesome form of learning to grim scenes from “The Last of Us.” [source]

Yea, when the poop hits the fan, having 4-H skills would be an advantage. Going back to the days of the old west before electricity. I am not a 4-H member but I get the writer's point. The Amish and Mennonites probably would be okay. I wonder if they would even notice if the electric grid stopped working.

Marxist teacher who called for 'forceful cultural revolution' lands seat on state legislature

From Fox News.com (Aug. 28, 2023):

A Marxist teacher from Colorado, who called for a "FORCEFUL Cultural Revolution" against "Whiteness," was voted in by Democrats to fill an open state House of Representatives seat Saturday.

Tim Hernández was selected as a state representative for the Denver area on Saturday by a committee of Democrats tasked with filling the vacant seat after its incumbent, Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, was elected to the Denver City Council.

Hernandez worked at Aurora West Preparatory Academy in the Aurora Public Schools District, according to its website from May. Their staff list has since been scrubbed, and it was unclear if he continues to work in the Colorado district. A sign in his classroom called for "Dismantl[ing] White systems."

Fox News Digital previously found that Hernández went on a Marxist diatribe at a protest organized by unions.

"I want to tear some s---t up it out for you. Are you ready?" Hernández said.

"What I think is happening in our schools, what I think is showing up in my classroom, is a lot of the things that we get into ideological circles up here. We like to compete who knows Marx better, who knows these things better, who's a Leninist. Listen, all right, I'll give you a real take on this s---t. Kids don't care," he said.

It wasn't enough to preach the communist theory, it had to be put into practice, according to Hernández.

"Yes, it's important to know theory. But you have to do some practices, you have to get out into the streets. You have to get into your workplace. You have to go to your families. If we are just sitting, talking in an ideological circle, our kids are still going to schools that are underfunded where they are investing more in their failure than in their success."

"Your [communist] theory will not save you. The revolution… will happen in the hood. It will not be led by who understand Lenin best, it will not be led by the deepest Marxists. The revolution will be led by the people…. And I say all of this because I'm a teacher." 

Fox News Digital also probed into Hernández's public social media, and found the teacher called for a "FORCEFUL cultural revolution," particularly against American "whiteness" and "white supremacy."

He has signaled that he was including lessons on communist theory in his classroom.

For example, to engage young children in his lens of society, Hernandez said they should be shown the movie "A Bug's Life" followed by a lesson on "proletariat revolution," meaning a social revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

"A lot of people call me a 'unicorn.' I am not an anomaly. I am a testament to the work we still have to do; this is sacred; this is powerful; this is necessary. I tell my students the truth," he said, according to his notes from a Memphis rally in September 2021 which was reviewed by Fox News. [read more]

Actually, not too shocking. The Left is gradually being taken over by the Marxists. They are losing their soul. And humanity.

Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Really Is Slashing Violent Crime

From The Federalist.com (July 9):

Is crime falling? Some conservatives, notably Steve Bannon, argue that Americans should ignore the FBI’s crime statistics showing record drops in violent crime. The murder rate last year fell to the lowest rate ever recorded, and the violent crime rate is clearly at the lowest in many decades. But Bannon recently declared that “nobody believes” FBI crime data or its director, Kash Patel, adding: “I don’t want to hear any more statistics about how crime’s coming down.”

That skepticism overlooks an important distinction.

The FBI has made mistakes in the past, particularly in its active shooter reports and hate crime data. Some police departments have also failed to report complete crime data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. But those problems do not explain the concerns with the measure of overall crime.

The real issue is understanding what different crime measures actually tell us. Past problems with the FBI’s measure of crimes reported to police do not mean anyone manipulated the data. Nor do they mean that last year’s reported decline in crime — or the declines so far this year — are inaccurate.

The United States has two primary measures of violent crime. The FBI tracks crimes reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates both reported and unreported crime. Researchers have known for decades that most crimes never reach the police. Victims report only about 40 percent of violent crimes and roughly 30 percent of property crimes.

The media focuses almost exclusively on FBI crime data. Before 2020, FBI data and the NCVS generally moved in the same direction. During the Biden administration, however, they sharply diverged. While reported violent crime fell by about 8 percent, total felony violent crime measured by the NCVS surged 59 percent — the largest four-year percentage increase since the survey began more than five decades ago.

Several factors explain that gap. Whether victims report crimes depends heavily on whether they believe police will catch and punish offenders. As cities reduced police staffing through budget cuts, retirements, and, in some places, “defund the police” policies, arrest rates declined. Lower arrest rates gave victims less reason to report crimes.

Some police departments also made reporting more difficult. In some jurisdictions, 911 operators asked whether the offender was still at the scene. If the answer was no — as it almost always was — they instructed victims to visit a police station later to file a report. Simply calling 911 does not place a crime in the FBI’s statistics; an officer must complete an official report. When governments make reporting more burdensome, some victims understandably decide it isn’t worth the effort.

Fortunately, many of those policies have been reversed.

Although reported crime has declined, we will not know whether total crime also fell in 2025 until the Bureau of Justice Statistics releases the next NCVS this September.

Even so, there is good reason for optimism.

Reducing crime is not complicated. Governments must make crime riskier by increasing arrests and convictions, imposing longer prison sentences, and allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. The news on each of those fronts has been encouraging.

FBI arrests surged in 2025, rising 184 percent over 2024 levels. Total FBI arrests — a broader category that includes many joint operations with state and local agencies — increased by 197 percent.

Voters also replaced several George Soros-backed prosecutors in jurisdictions such as Los Angeles and San Francisco with district attorneys who prosecute criminals more aggressively and seek tougher sentences. Across the country, President Trump’s U.S. attorneys have also pursued criminals far more aggressively than their predecessors. In Washington, D.C., for example, the Biden administration’s U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested. Under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, that figure has fallen to just 4 percent.

Nor is it a coincidence that the record influx of illegal immigrants during the Biden administration coincided with a sharp increase in violent crime. It is equally unsurprising that crime has fallen as deportations have increased. Deportation records show that 70 percent of illegal immigrants deported during the Trump administration had either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States. Even those who avoid arrest understand that any contact with law enforcement could lead to deportation, giving them a strong incentive to stay off the police’s radar and avoid committing additional crimes.

Finally, the number of adults carrying concealed handguns has risen sharply, with the latest survey data showing a 5-percentage-point increase in concealed carry over the past year and a half.

Americans shouldn’t blindly accept crime statistics, but they need to understand what the different numbers actually measure. The FBI’s numbers show that reported crime has fallen dramatically, while the NCVS will tell us this September whether total violent crime has also declined. Stronger law enforcement, more aggressive prosecution, and greater accountability provide good reasons to expect that the encouraging trend in reported crime reflects a real improvement in public safety. [source]

Good to know!  Glad that illegal migrant crime is going down. It’s bad enough when America’s own citizens are committing crime—we don’t need to add to the crime stats.

Trump ATF Scraps Dozens of Gun Rules in Sweeping Rollback

From Newsmax.com (July 5):

The Trump administration is dismantling more than three dozen federal firearms regulations, ending a zero-tolerance policy against wayward gun dealers, easing scrutiny of stabilizing braces, and clearing a path for some Americans with a history of mental illness to buy firearms, part of what officials call the broadest rewrite of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rules in the agency's history.

The rollback, executed under President Donald Trump's Executive Order 14206 on Second Amendment rights, was formally launched April 29, when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and newly confirmed ATF Director Robert Cekada unveiled 34 notices of final and proposed rulemaking.

Officials called it the most comprehensive regulatory reform package in ATF history. Cekada was confirmed by the Senate hours earlier and signed off on the changes within an hour of taking office.

The package raises the legal bar for stripping a federal firearms dealer of a license, requiring evidence that the dealer knew it was breaking the law.

It formally rescinds the Biden-era pistol brace rule, which has already been blocked in much of the country by federal courts.

It narrows the Biden administration's "engaged in the business" rule, which was designed to force more sellers at gun shows and online marketplaces to run background checks, a measure gun-control advocates called a partial closure of the so-called gun show loophole.

Other proposalswould allow some Americans previously flagged for mental health reasons or an inability to manage their finances to purchase firearms.

On Friday, the ATF unveiled further changes, including a proposal to trim fingerprinting requirements for National Firearms Act applications.

Under the plan, individual applicants would submit a single fingerprint card instead of two and could verify identity with a photo ID rather than a passport-style photo. The rule is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on July 6, opening a comment period through Oct. 5.

The administration is simultaneously challenging state gun laws in court.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department sued California over Assembly Bill 1127, which bars sales of Glock-style pistols with a cruciform trigger bar that officials say can be readily converted to fully automatic fire, and over the state's Handgun Roster, which restricts which models may be sold.

It also sued Virginia and the Virginia State Police over Senate Bill 749, which criminalizes the sale or transfer of AR-15-style rifles and magazines holding more than 15 rounds. The department earlier filed similar challenges to semiautomatic rifle bans in the District of Columbia in December and Colorado in May.

Blanche said the rules had been written "without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms, or what truly improves public safety."

Gun control advocates rejected that framing. Kris Brown, president of Brady, told The New York Times the moves take the country "back 100 years" and are "decimating A.T.F.'s ability to regulate this industry." [source]

Another win especially for gun rights advocates! 

Transhumanism is a Christian Heresy (and a False Gospel)

From Break Point.org (Aug. 1, 2025):

One of the clearest proofs that Christianity addresses the fundamental problems of humanity is the bizarre lengths to which non-Christians will go to address those same problems without Christ. For example, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, former CEO of PayPal, recently went on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast to discuss AI, Mars, immortality, and other light topics. The conversation was genuinely interesting, especially when Douthat asked, “Should the human race continue?” Thiel paused and said “um” and “I don’t know” quite a few times.

“This is a long hesitation!” observed Douthat, laughing nervously.

Finally, Thiel explained that humanity should survive, but that there are problems in need of solving. Chief among those is death, he said, which transhumanists have long hoped to conquer via a “radical transformation” of the human body into an “immortal body.”

The problem with efforts like transgenderism, in Thiel’s opinion, isn’t that they change bodies too radically, but not radically enough: “[W]e want more transformation than that. … We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.” Thiel then pointed to Christianity and its doctrines of Redemption and Resurrection as precedent for the transhumanist idea of total self-transformation and conquest of death. Maybe, he hinted, the two philosophies aren’t so different.

Douthat, a Roman Catholic, pushed back, pointing out that according to Christianity, God does the transforming. “The person,” Douthat said, “who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up a dystopian character.” Do-it-yourself immortality is, at best, “a heretical form of Christianity.”

Theil’s fundamental assumption, which is foreign to the Bible and Christianity but common among tech futurists and transhumanists, is that our minds are more important and fundamental than our bodies. Our “true selves” are our minds and separable from who we are physically.

Not only is this assumption a rehashed version of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, it also creepily resembles the philosophy of the evil National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (or N.I.C.E.) from C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. In the story, Dr. Filostrato hopes to cleanse the world of organic life, replacing trees, birds, and even human bodies with machines. He even proposed something akin to uploading human consciousness.

That’s not to say that transhumanists like Thiel are involved in an intergalactic conspiracy run by demons speaking through a disembodied Head, as in the book. At least not knowingly. But the transhumanist’s urge to overcome human limits, become more machine-like, and live forever is eerily similar. As is their rhetoric.

It’s also notable that, unlike anti-humanists on the Left, transhumanists assume the human race is worth preserving. Elon Musk, for example, thinks it’s our duty to have as many babies as possible, by any means necessary. He also thinks that humans should be the ones to colonize other planets. In a sense, he acknowledges that humans are exceptional, in a way at least similar to how Scripture describes humans.

Yet, his view of human exceptionalism has a “you will be like God” promise to it, and a sense that all human problems are technical glitches to be overcome by innovation and engineering. So, our mortality can be solved through “radical transformation” of our bodies. Our fragile fertility can be solved through IVF. Our lack of knowledge can be solved through AI, and our limits can be overcome by the technologies pioneered by Thiel and others like him.

Theil’s company Palantir was named, without any apparent irony, after the “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings that corrupt all who gaze into them.

Humans were made in the image of God and, as such, were made to be like Him and live forever. Death is “the last enemy,” and our longing for immortality is core to who we are. Perhaps this is why transhumanist promises are so compelling. However, we were made to do and receive all this through God, not our own ingenuity.

Transhumanism, it turns out, is indeed a Christian heresy, an ideology that rightly identifies the problems of a fallen world. But it seeks to overcome them with a false gospel of technological godhood, rather than the true gospel of salvation through Christ.

God willing, Thiel’s openness to Christianity and his conversations with Christians will move him to accept his need for Christ. Until then, believers should be fully aware that the transhumanist gospel is a false one. Only Christ can change our hearts, change our minds, and change our whole bodies … not a tech billionaire. [source]

Transhumanists fear death. Their ego (living forever) might come into play too.

Another article on transhumanism:

Our Transhumanist, Sci-Fi Future Has Arrived. But You’re Not Going To Like It

Why Progressives Love Government “Experts”

From FEE.org (June 9, 2022):

In twenty-first-century America, ordinary people are at the mercy of well-paid, unelected government experts who wield vast power. That is, we live in the age of the technocrats: people who claim to have special wisdom that entitles them to control, manipulate, and manage society’s institutions using the coercive power of the state.

We’re told these people are “nonpolitical” and will use their impressive scientific knowledge to plan the economy, public health, public safety, or whatever goal the regime has decided the technocrats will be tasked with bringing about.

These people include central bankers, Supreme Court justices, “public health” bureaucrats, and Pentagon generals. The narrative is that these people are not there to represent the public or bow to political pressure. They’re just there to do “the right thing” as dictated by economic theory, biological sciences, legal theory, or the study of military tactics.

We’re also told that in order to allow these people to act as the purely well-meaning apolitical geniuses they are, we must give them their independence and not question their methods or conclusions.

We were exposed to this routine yet again last week as President Joe Biden announced he will “respect the Fed’s independence” and allow the central bankers to set monetary policy without any bothersome interference from the representatives of the taxpayers who pay all the bills and who primarily pay the price when central bankers make things worse. (Biden, of course, didn’t mention that central bankers have been spectacularly wrong about the inflation threat in recent years, with inflation rates hitting forty-year highs, economic growth going negative, and consumer credit piling up as families struggle to cope with the cost of living.)

Conveniently, Biden’s deferral to the Fed allows him to blame it later when economic conditions get even worse. Nonetheless, his placing the economy in the hands of alleged experts will no doubt appear laudable to many. This is because the public has long been taught by public schools and media outlets that government experts should have the leeway to exercise vast power in the name of “fixing” whatever problems society faces.

The Expert Class as a Tool for State Building

The success of this idea represents a great victory for progressive ideology. Progressives have long been committed to creating a special expert class as a means of building state power. In the United States, for example, the cult of expertise really began to take hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it led directly to support for more government intervention in the private sector. As Maureen Flanagan notes in “Progressives and Progressivism in an Era of Reform,”

“Social science expertise gave political Progressives a theoretical foundation for cautious proposals to create a more activist state…. Professional social scientists composed a tight circle of men who created a space between academia and government from which to advocate for reform. They addressed each other, trained their students to follow their ideas, and rarely spoke to the larger public.”

These men founded new organizations—such as the American Economics Association—to promote this new class of experts and their plans for a more centrally planned society. Ultimately, the nature of the expert class was revolutionary. The new social scientists thought they knew better than the patricians, religious leaders, local representatives, and market actors who had long shaped local institutions. Instead,

Progressives were modernizers with a structural-instrumentalist agenda. They rejected reliance on older values and cultural norms to order society and sought to create a modern reordered society with political and economic institutions run by men qualified to apply fiscal expertise, businesslike efficiency, and modern scientific expertise to solve problems and save democracy. The emerging academic disciplines in the social sciences of economics, political economy and political science, and pragmatic education supplied the theoretical bases for this middle-class expert Progressivism.

The Progressive impulse for expertise-based rule was perhaps exemplified by the Progressive transportation planner Emory Johnson, who advocated for a strong federal executive branch that would be resistant to political pressure while relying on the supposedly “scientific” judgments of government planners and other bureaucrats. Johnson

explicitly took up the question of the role of expertise in the American state…. he maintained that success relied upon what he termed “executive functions.” He sought to empower the federal government’s executive branch as experts’ natural home.1

In the Progressive view, business leaders and machine politicians lacked a rational and broad view of the needs of society. In contrast, the government experts would approach society’s problems as scientists. Johnson felt this model already somewhat existed in the Department of War, where Johnson imagined the secretary of war was “quite free from political pressure and [relied] on the counsel of the engineers.” Johnson imagined that these science-minded bureaucrats could bring a “really economic and scientific application” of policy. [read more]

Why Do Some Countries Stay Poor?

From Peter Jacobsen on FEE.org (Aug. 23, 2023):

Accounting for "The Wealth of Nations."

This week for Ask an Economist, I have a question from a reader named Mark. He says,

“I’ve worked with immigrants that recently moved to the US, and workers still living in their native country and working for me remotely.

My experience is that they’re on average, much harder working and more skilled (even in technical fields) than my American colleagues. The foreigners work hard, making no excuses, grateful for the work, and take every opportunity to better themselves. Americans, on the other hand, demand much higher wages, complain about the work, and make little effort to improve themselves.

Since the people from many of these poor countries are better workers, why are their home countries so poor? Immigrants on average start more businesses and do better in the US than US born citizens. With all their skills and ambition, it seems their home countries ought to be significantly richer than the US cities, yet this isn’t the case. What’s the cause of these countries’ poverty?”

Mark asks perhaps the single-most important question in the history of economic thinking. Why do some countries grow rich while others stay poor?

A Long History of Answers

In 1776, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published perhaps the most influential work in the history of political economy: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

This book, usually referred to as “The Wealth of Nations,” tries to answer the question Mark poses. Since then, wealthy countries have grown much wealthier, some poor countries have grown wealthier, but there are a substantial number of countries lagging behind.

Before we get into the right answer, we should spend some time talking about some popular wrong answers.

Economist Bill Easterly has done a great job chronicling some of these wrong answers in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth.

Easterly’s point in the book is simple. Throughout the late 20th century and into the 21st century, the United States and other countries have attempted to trigger economic growth in poor countries. These attempts have failed.

Easterly discusses three failed panaceas which experts believed would trigger development: investment, population control, and education. Before looking at each once, though, consider the unifying theme here. Developed countries tend to have higher levels of investment, lower birth rates, and more education. From this, experts have tried to infer that if these conditions are replicated in poorer countries, then development will follow.

This strategy has failed. It turns out these factors are more a consequence of growth than a cause. Let’s look at each failed panacea.

1. Investment

In the 1950s, experts began to believe that simply having machines and financial capital to take on big projects would make countries rich. This belief, ironically, was based on the (false) success of the Soviet Union. Soviet production numbers were going through the roof, and for decades economists believed they would overtake the US. Why?

The Soviet Union was industrializing through forced savings. By reallocating private resources to large industrial investments, it appeared the USSR was able to shock the economy into early industrialization. It turns out that this growth was illusory, as economist Murray Rothbard rightly predicted, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the Soviet Union fooled many economists in the 1950s, so the model of centrally planned growth via investment took off. The belief was that because poor countries were in such dire situations, citizens had no ability to save. Without saving there is no growth. A vicious cycle was preventing growth.

So developing countries could fix this by giving the required investment for countries to have sustained growth. This investment would increase incomes, which would increase savings, and spur on permanent natural growth. Easterly calls this the financing gap approach.

The approach failed, though. Models failed to live up to their predictions, and poor countries were not made rich via air-dropped investments. The reason for the failure is the same reason noted by Rothbard in his analysis of the Soviet economy. Production is a means to the ends of consumption. If your production is not linked meaningfully to the well-being of consumers via the knowledge of prices, profit, and loss, then it will not lead to any sustained growth.

Central planners attempted to create production for its own sake, leading to the misallocation of capital and natural resources. Investment alone is not enough—you must have the right investments.

2. Education

A natural next plan for development experts was education. If increasing production via physical capital was not enough, maybe increasing knowledge or human capital would do the trick. Easterly chronicles how education development policy dominated from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The results did not bear out on this either. Easterly chronicles how study after study finds little to no correlation between education and economic growth. One study shows that as the education explosion happened in poor countries, the growth rate of income in these countries actually fell. This is exactly the opposite of what we’d expect if education theories were true. Another study found that for countries that grow 1% faster than average, education could only explain 0.06% of that in terms of growth in human capital.

Easterly points to several other types of studies which show a simple, consistent result: education does not create economic growth.

……

The Best Answer

So if all these answers are wrong, what is the right answer? Let’s go back to Adam Smith, and take a look at his famous conclusion. Why do countries become rich according to Smith?

“Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Smith is arguing that the ultimate cause of growth in a country stems from its institutions. In other words, the rules that govern your daily economic activity are at the bottom of the different growth outcomes we face in our world.

Another way to frame this is that in order for a country’s economy to grow, the citizens need economic freedom or access to private property rights.

When people have private property, they can use, sell, or rent out their property. This leads to a few results. First, people have an incentive to maximize the value of their property. If you own a house, you want to keep it in good condition because letting it fall apart means you lose some money. Private ownership incentivizes responsibility.

Furthermore, when people are able to sell their goods, prices form for those goods. Prices reflect the value of a good or service relative to other things, and embody societal knowledge about the good. When an oil rig breaks down in the ocean, oil becomes more scarce. We don’t have to be told oil is more scarce to curb our consumption. The rising price causes us to curb consumption whether we know it or not.

Prices also allow firms to do accounting to determine their profit or loss. If a firm makes a profit off of a sale, this tells them consumers valued the final product more than the value of the inputs used to create it. This process of transforming less valuable inputs into more valuable outputs is at the center of economic growth. To paraphrase the economist Peter Boettke: without ownership of the various goods used in production, there can be no markets for them. Without markets for these goods, there are no prices. Without prices, there can be no economic calculation.

So institutions which are economically free are the cause of economic growth. The data bear this out. Economists James Gwartney and co-author Robert Lawson pioneered the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World Index.” The Index measures how free the economies of different countries are and uses that information to examine the connection between freedom and flourishing. What they find fits perfectly with the theory here. Economically free countries are richer and healthier than unfree countries.

Economist Peter Leeson also examines the evidence in a paper titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism?” His conclusion?

“According to a popular view that I call ‘two cheers for capitalism,’ capitalism’s effect on development is ambiguous and mixed. This paper empirically investigates that view. I find that it’s wrong. Citizens in countries that became more capitalist over the last quarter century became wealthier, healthier, more educated, and politically freer. Citizens in countries that became significantly less capitalist over this period endured stagnating income, shortening life spans, smaller gains in education, and increasingly oppressive political regimes. The data unequivocally evidence capitalism’s superiority for development. Full-force cheerleading for capitalism is well deserved and three cheers are in order instead of two.”

In The Elusive Quest for Growth, Easterly has one other insight that merits our attention on this question. Easterly points out how much of the United States government’s focus on development in the late 20th century was really an attempt to win allies against the Soviet Union.

This is extremely ironic, considering that the US government was essentially incorporating Soviet style central planning to attempt to bring about growth in these developing countries.

Instead, it would have been better to follow a US-style pursuit of economic growth. Institutions which enable economic growth are the true driver of wealth creation. Once you enable individuals to freely compete and cooperate, the power of human ingenuity does the rest. [read more]

Food for thought. Lessons the Left never gets--especially the "easy taxes" part.