Author: Lee Ardis

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced new legislation to legalize “aid in dying” that will allow adults facing end-of-life illness to take lethal medication, a first in the country.

The move follows last year’s report indicating that most French citizens support legalizing end-of-life options.

In an interview published Monday by French newspapers La Croix and Liberation, Macron said the new bill will be restricted to adults suffering from an incurable illness who are expected to die in the “short or middle-term” and who are suffering “intractable” physical or psychological pain.

Macron said the law will offer “a possible path, in a determined situation, with precise criteria, where the medical decision is playing its role.”

He gave the example of of people with terminal cancer, some of whom until now have gone abroad to end their lives.

Only people aged 18 or above who are capable of forming their own views will be allowed to get in the process, meaning those with severe psychiatric conditions and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease won’t be eligible, Macron specified.

Patients who seek to enter the process will need to reconfirm their choice after 48 hours and they should then receive an answer from a medical team within two weeks maximum, Macron said. A doctor will then deliver a prescription, valid for three months, for the lethal medication.

People will be able to take the medication at home, at a nursing home or at a health care facility, Macron said.

If their physical condition doesn’t allow them to do it alone, they will be allowed to get help from someone of their choice or by a doctor or a nurse.

Macron said the new bill will refer to “aid in dying … because it’s simple and humane,” rather than terms like euthanasia or medically assisted suicide.

Medically assisted suicide involves patients taking, of their own free will, a lethal drink or medication that has been prescribed by a doctor to those who meet certain criteria. Euthanasia involves doctors or other health practitioners giving patients who meet certain criteria a lethal injection at their own request.

Read more at: breitbart.com

The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”

There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.

Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.

The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.

The Daily Sceptic has reported on numerous recent examples where the lack of interest in ecological damage is a feature of green industrial development. Last month, we noted that one of India’s iconic large birds, the great Indian bustard, was on the verge of extinction due to the growth of electric power lines in its home area of the Thar desert. To reach global Net Zero, it has been estimated that new power lines equivalent to circling the globe 2,000 times will need to be built in the next few years.

Read more at: dailysceptic.org

The app will help in cases where ‘a person’s voice does not match their gender identity’

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded over $200,000 to researchers to create a “transgender voice training” app that aims, in part, to help trans women sound more feminine.

A transgender professor and two speech therapy experts have teamed up to create the software at the cost of $213,878 in taxpayer funds from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, an agency of the National Institutes of Health, according to documentation. The research will be conducted by the University of Cincinnati, led by Associate Professor Vesna Novak, as well as speech scientist Victoria McKenna of UC and speech-language pathologist Tara McAllister of New York University.

“Transgender and gender diverse people exhibit a significantly lower quality of life than the general public,” according to an abstract of the study first reported by The College Fix. “One reason for this is voice dysphoria: distress because a person’s voice does not match their gender identity (e.g., trans women with deep voices).”

The project, titled “Improving the Accessibility of Transgender Voice Training with Visual-acoustic Biofeedback,” aims to improve “gender-affirming voice and communication training (GAVT)” with software to coach trans women on their “pitch and resonance” through voice exercises, which are the two main indicators of voice femininity and masculinity the abstract states.

In an announcement of the NIH grant, McAllister discussed the goals of the study.

“Some trans people can be negatively impacted if their voice is perceived as incongruous with their gender identity, and they may choose to work with a speech pathologist to achieve a vocal presentation that is comfortable for them,” McAllister said.

“In addition to the pitch of the voice, male and female vocal tracts also differ in their resonating characteristics, but resonance is harder to understand than pitch, and harder to target in therapy.” McAllister added. “The staRt software allows learners to visualize the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract, which could make it easier to adjust them to match a target that is appropriate for their personal speech goals.”

Forty trans women will be randomly assigned to either an experimental group that will use the researchers’ software or a control group that will use a generic voice analysis app. They will meet once a week with a speech-language pathologist for remotely administered GAVT, who will assign homework, while participants will self-report their amount of daily practice, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation scores that will be compared between groups.

Read more at: foxnews.com

The Rising Tide of Shoplifting

In a significant effort to address the increasing problem of shoplifting, major retailers Walmart and Target have taken an unprecedented step by placing essential items such as underwear and socks under lock and key.

This move highlights the severity of theft issues affecting retailers across the country, with losses amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

It appears that Doritos Spain has made the same mistake as Bud Light. It has hired a “transgender girl” to peddle its products, and this one might be a worse pick than the beer brand’s Dylan Mulvaney.

Samantha Hudson hates the traditional family and has mocked rape victims. And, his X feed shows, he fantasizes about sex with little girls. That makes him a pedophile.

And already the boycott has begun.

Another Day, Another Freak Show

The End Wokeness X feed summarized the case against Hudson:

“Doritos just picked Samantha Hudson as their brand ambassador in Spain,” the post says:

Samantha Hudson:

-Admitted to being a pedophiIe

-Identifies as a non-binary trans girl

-Openly mocked victims of child r*pe

-An advocate for “annihilating, completely destroying, and abolishing the traditional family”

Ian Miles Cheong offered some of Hudson’s notoriously deranged comments.

“Doritos is doubling down on wokeness by hiring Samantha Hudson, a transgender ‘woman’ and self-admitted p*do as its brand ambassador in Spain, resulting in calls for the boycott of the company’s products,” he wrote:

He has expressed a desire to be with 12 year old girls. In addition to her apparent desire for minors, Samantha Hudson has also shown her contempt for women, even women who have been victims of abuse.

“I hate women who are victims of r*pe and who turn to self-help centers to overcome their trauma. What—heavy wh*res,” he wrote. He also assured that “if a minor came to ask me for help because she is being a victim of s*xual harassment, I would spit [in] her face.”

Among other things, Hudson has written that “I cry with laughter with videos of bullying that ends in suicide,” and that “the little ones too … they deserve pleasure.”

Nice guy.

Doritos is a product of PepsiCo, and has produced a “rainbow” bag of the famous chips for “Pride Month” since 2015.

Boycott Begins

Just after Doritos Spain picked Hudson, who looks about as much like a “girl” as Hulk Hogan, calls for a boycott began.

The company’s decision to hire a “transgender” spokesman — and one who has openly advocated sex with minors and openly reveled in the suicide of bullying victims — is mystifying, particularly given what happened to the sales of Bud Light.

After Anheuser-Busch introduced Mulvaney, yet another “influencer” who masquerades as a woman, sales tanked. The company introduced a can in April last year to mark Mulvaney’s “365 days of girlhood.”

By August, revenues had dropped $395 million.

In some places, Bud Light was cheaper than bottled water, and at least at one store was almost 30 percent of the price of competitor Miller Lite, $8.99 versus $24.99 for a 30-pack.

And the brand still hasn’t recovered, Fox News reported in January. Sales were down 29.9 percent, and the brewery’s Budweiser label lost 15 percent.

Meanwhile, “Molson-Coors’ Coors Light saw 12.2% sales growth, while Miller Lite sales rose 6.9%, and Yuengling Light soared by 72.3%.”

Read more at: thenewamerican.com

It has been said ad infinitum, mostly by people from other countries, that the United States would do well to pay close attention to the developments in other Western countries since their current status provides a grim preview of our future. We have seen how immigration has impacted countries in the EU and that those issues are rapidly becoming commonplace here. The once-great nation of England has become a morass of left-wing aggression, with individual rights and even faith not just falling to the wayside but into the irrigation ditch running next to it. We see renewed attacks on those rights in the U.S. with every news cycle. And depending on the outcome in November, the United States may resemble the EU more closely than anyone could have seen by this time next year.

Despite a Supreme Court ruling, the battle over abortion continues apace here. France will have no such problems. On Monday, the French Parliament voted 780 to 72 to pass an amendment making abortion a constitutional right. The New York Times reported that the vote came during a special session at the Versailles Palace. During the discussion, there were speeches given honoring French women who had fought for abortion rights and talking about the rights of women across the globe.

Prior to the vote, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told the assembly, “We are sending the message to all women: Your body belongs to you and no one has the right to control it in your stead.” With the decision, France becomes the first nation to add a legal right to an abortion to its constitution. Abortion will become a “guaranteed freedom” in France. As such, future governments will not be able to modify laws that fund abortion up to 14 weeks into the pregnancy.

Green Party senator Mélanie Vogel stated that by passing the amendment, France has shown that abortion is “a condition of democracy.”   She added, “The French Republic will no longer remain democratic without the right to abortion.” According to the Daily Caller, President Emmanuel Macron posted on X:

French pride, universal message. Let us celebrate together the entry of a new freedom guaranteed in the Constitution by the first sealing ceremony in our history open to the public. See you this March 8, International Women’s Rights Day. (sic)

The Times article stated that the impetus for the amendment was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. That ruling gave the states the right to determine their abortion laws. Vogel commented that she wanted to send a message to feminists outside of France that nothing is impossible if a society can be mobilized. The Caller had a quote from Lola Schulmann with Amnesty International in Paris:

U.S. activists — don’t give up the fight. What is happening in France is for you and all women fighting for abortion rights in the world.

The point has been made that the number of elective abortions far outweighs the number of those due to medical reasons or sexual assault. but that is of no concern to abortion activists. And even with the Dobbs decision, one can certainly choose to have an abortion in the United States. There are plenty of people and organizations to ensure that, and no ruling or legislation will ever stop it.

But there is also the choice to have the child. Doing so can take a negative situation and make it into something positive. It is the opportunity to elevate the human condition. If one so chooses. What value does human life have? The question is not just the humanity of the fetus, or even if it has a soul, but what of our own humanity and souls? Who do we want to be?

Read more at: pjmedia.com

The threat of antibiotic resistance is increasing as the pharmaceutical industry continues to pump out new antibiotic drugs to replace old antibiotic drugs that no longer work.

Believe it or not, most antibiotics sold in the United States are administered to livestock used in the meat industry. And they are typically given to healthy animals for purposes other than treating sickness – this includes for prophylactic and growth promotion purposes.

As of 2020, upwards of 69 percent of the U.S. antibiotic supply is found in meat that people and other animals eat for sustenance. Since the drugs often persist in meat tissue, many people are thus consuming a steady dose of antibiotic drugs on a daily basis with every meal.

The vast majority of the country has no idea this is the case, assuming instead that their meat is “safe” since it bears approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but this is not necessarily the case.

“When animals are given antibiotics, it causes unnatural growth by altering their gut microbiome,” warns Dr. Joseph Mercola. “In the process, some of those gut bacteria become antibiotic-resistant. Contaminated meat can then become a source of drug-resistant infections.”

Natural antibiotics are better

Some may recall that in 2013 we published the above-linked article about the FDA’s antibiotic allowance in food that the same federal agency issued a guidance calling on farmers to begin phasing out the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock production. This aimed to stem the tide of antibiotic resistance, which is something the World Health Organization (WHO) likewise agreed was best in 2017 when it urged farmers to stop giving their healthy animals antibiotics just to make them grow more quickly.

Also in 2017, the U.S. government tightened its rules for antibiotic use in healthy animals, followed by California becoming the first state one year later to outlaw the use of antibiotics in food-animal production, as well as outlaw the use of antibiotics in animals without a veterinarian’s prescription.

The after-effects of these policy changes appeared beneficial at first, resulting in a 42 percent decline in antibiotic use in America between 2015 and 2017. Then, between 2017 and 2022, antibiotic use spiked by 12 percent, with 4.3 percent of that rise occurring in 2022 alone.

The way Big Pharma is getting around the new restrictions is by creating new antibiotics that are slightly different than the older ones, which allows farmers to give their animals a larger variety of antibiotics in smaller individual amounts. Think of it like a loophole that the pharmaceutical industry is exploiting, as usual for profit.

Besides the antibiotic resistance problem, there are also the health problems associated with antibiotics, many of which bear a “black box” warning from the FDA for being extremely dangerous. The good news is that there are natural alternatives.

Dr. Mercola recommends the following “natural antimicrobials” which he says are safer and often more effective than the kind dispensed by your local pharmacy or veterinary clinic:

1) Garlic: effective against Salmonella, E. coli, Klebsiella, Clostridium and Vancomycin-resistant enterococcus

2) Ginger: effective against E. coli, S. Aureus, Streptococcus mutans, Candida albicans and Enterococcus faecalis

3) Echinacea: Effective against urinary tract infections (UTI), vaginal yeast (candida), ear infections (otitis media), athlete’s foot, sinusitis, hay fever (allergic rhinitis) and slow-healing wounds

4) Goldenseal: Effective against gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA

5) Myrrh oil: Effective against gingivitis, treatment-resistant trichomoniasis vaginalis (an STD) and Lyme disease

6) Thyme

7) Oregano oil: Effective against Streptococcus mutans (causes dental cavities) along with 11 0ther multidrug-resistant bacteria including MRSA, as well as their biofilms

8) Clove: Effective against gram-negative and gram-positive UTI-causing Proteus mirabilis, Staphylococcus epidermis, S. aureus and K. pneumoniae

9) Olive leaf: Effective against Klebsiella, Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli and Salmonella

10) Colloidal silver: Effective against multidrug-resistant gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria

In many ways, America’s food supply is among the most toxic and contaminated in the world. Find out more at FoodCollapse.com.

Read more at: foodcollapse.com

The UK’s Commissioner for Countering Extremism warns central London is being allowed to turn “into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend”, but march organisers counter-claim the government is just trying to “whip up” fear.

“Anti-Semitism skyrocketing” and protests are becoming more forceful, leading to central London becoming a “no-go zone” for Jews at the weekend, the UK government’s Commissioner for Countering Extremism has warned. Robin Simcox, a former Henry Jackson Society and Heritage Foundation fellow who was appointed to the UK advisory post for his expertise on extremism in 2022 observed the tone and nature of protests, warning of a “permissive environment in the UK and saying that: “Protests [are] becoming ever more vociferous, with “from the river to the sea” beamed onto the side of Big Ben during a vote on Gaza.”

Central London has seen weekly protests Israel-Palestine protests since Hamas launched its deadly terror attack last year, with protesters voicing their views against Israel even before the counterattack began, a key difference observed by Jewish rights groups.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Simcox counselled the government to do more to tackle rising extremism, saying the state has latent power it has yet to deploy. He said: “…the Iranian government does not have an inalienable right to run schools and mosques in our capital city. It is not an unalterable democratic principle that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood must be allowed to run a multitude of charities. We have not betrayed democracy if extremists are no longer able to operate television channels. And we will not have become an authoritarian state if London is no longer permitted to be turned into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend.”

Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a UK charity which works with the police to protect the Jewish community, responded to Simcox’s remarks to state that he had personally stopped going into central London on the weekends due to the presence of large Palestine protests, and that the CST had received testimony from a large number of British jews that they had reached the same decision. He said: “I don’t go into town when there’s these demonstrations… We hear all about the right of protesters to demonstrate, but God forbid anybody say anything against them. Then you will find out about your freedom of speech.”

The BBC aired the thoughts of John Rees, a national officer of the Stop The War Coalition, one of the bodies that contributes to the London protests. Rees insisted there was “absolutely no need” for Jewish people to be afraid of the protests, and accused the government of stoking fear to discredit them. He said the Prime Minister had been “irresponsible” to suggest there was any extremism present, and insisted: “if the government decides to whip up that kind of fear, then people are going to feel that, of course they are”.

As noted by Simcox, a recent area of concern over the protests in London has been the brazen display of extremist rhetoric, particularly in one instance where the words of chants were projected in enormous letters onto Parliament’s clock tower, known colloquially as Big Ben.

Last month, the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestina will be free” was projected onto the tower while the House of Commons voted — a day of business at the national Parliament disrupted by fears of Islamist terror, according to the claims of the speaker — a phrase former Home Secretary said clearly means the destruction of Israel. Pretending otherwise, she said, is “disingenuous”.

Read more at: breitbart.com

Two bills recently introduced in the Florida Legislature that would allow volunteer chaplains to provide counseling services in public schools have prompted The Satanic Temple to threaten legal action if its members are barred from participating.

Senate Bill 1044 and its companion House Bill 931, which already passed the Florida House of Representatives last month, would also mandate that principals in schools with volunteer chaplains tell parents about it and offer them a list of the volunteers, all of whom will be subject to a background check.

Parents will be allowed to choose from the list of chaplains and allow their children to receive counseling with written permission, though representatives from The Satanic Temple have expressed a desire for their chaplains to be included in such offerings.

“Any opportunity that exists for ministers or chaplains in the public sector must not discriminate based on religious affiliation,” Penemue Grigori, who serves as The Satanic Temple’s director of ministry, told The Tallahassee Democrat.

“Our ministers look forward to participating in opportunities to do good in the community, including the opportunities created by this bill, right alongside the clergy of other religions.”

Lucien Greaves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, spoke out against what he described as the legislation’s attempt to allow a back door for religious instruction and “proselytizing evangelism” in Florida’s public schools, according to Fox News Digital.

“In an effort to dismiss concerns about bringing religious viewpoints into schools, advocates for chaplain bills have a scripted response that insists their interest is in merely providing additional ’emotional support’ for potentially troubled youth,” Greaves told the outlet.

“If that were true, they could simply be calling upon volunteers who hold licensure as counselors to offer their services in the schools in their communities.”

Greaves also said that school districts can expect legal action if satanic priests are prohibited from participating in the chaplain program, which would go into effect on July 1 and largely be left for individual districts to govern, according to local Fox 35.

“They should also not want to waste public funds on a lawsuit that’s certainly going to lose because of some superfluous effort to put chaplains in schools on a false rationale,” Greaves told the outlet.

Florida state Sen. Erin Grall, a Republican who represents Vero Beach, did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment but said she is concerned about the potential of satanic priests taking advantage of the legislation she sponsored.

“But I think that as soon as we get in the middle of defining what is religion and what is not, and whether or not someone can be available and be on a list, we start to run up to constitutional problems,” Grall said, according to The Tallahassee Democrat.

“So I think that us making sure that it’s open and available to anybody who wants to put themselves through the background screening, and let parents know they’re available for that service, is the best way to go,” she added.

The Satanic Temple of Iowa also made news in the lead-up to Christmas last December when they prompted fierce debate even among Republican lawmakers by erecting a statue of Baphomet near a Nativity scene in the Iowa state Capitol.

Read more at: christianpost.com

Federal debt is up $100 billion in just four days. We’re on track for $37 trillion by the end of this year. And $40 trillion by the end of next, Peter St. Onge warns.

A prominent Wharton professor is warning of a “meltdown” as early as 2025 as debt swamps financial markets.

At some point, the US will crash, probably sooner than later.

“Juan Gomez Wharton, senior vice Dean of Research at Wharton, warns the $34 trillion debt, soon to be 35 trillion, could trigger a spiral like we saw in Britain in 2022 when national debt fears spiked interest rates, sparking panic selling in bonds that threatened to crash the economy and bankrupt banks and even pensions…”

St. Onge said, “The CEO’s of Bank of America and JP Morgan, the two biggest in the country recently warned of a quote market rebellion over debt as we careen towards a $5 trillion quote fiscal Cliff at the end of next year.

“Keep in mind that’s all counting current projections. In other words, it assumes no new trillion dollar spending surprises and it also assumes no recession, so the fabled soft landing, if instead a recession does hit, then going by history, the deficit grows potentially by another couple trillion as social spending spikes and tax collection slump.

“Even without recession and those new spending surprises, we’re looking at 37 trillion in debt by the end of this year and 40 trillion by the end of next year. It’s worth noting that’s about twice the pace that the Congressional Budget Office forecast…

“$144 trillion…Yes, that was the forecast that said we’ll have $144 trillion in federal debt by 2053. Now, when it came out, that 144 trillion was met with an audible gasp. After all, that is more than literally all the money in the world. It’s about one-third of the accumulated assets of humanity, and at the moment, we’re actually going a lot faster…

“Washington has lost all semblance of fiscal sanity at this point. They’re competing for who can drain the treasury fastest…”

Read more at: independentsentinel.com