Category: Uncategorized

By  Ben Shapiro

This week, the Burning Man festival – a convocation of large groups of men and women seeking sex, drugs, rock and roll, and other forms of hedonistic bliss – was flooded. It seems that a half inch of rain swamped the event, which takes place in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, turning the dust to deep and sticky mud. The images of barely-clad neo-hippies struggling to walk through the muck spread like wildfire across the internet; even the White House was forced to acknowledge that it was monitoring the situation.

For a huge swath of Americans, all of this was simply amusing. But the rise and mainstreaming of Burning Man is a far more interesting story than its pathetic possible demise. Burning Man was founded in 1986, when some hippie types gathered at the beach in San Francisco to burn a nine-foot-tall wooden man. Over time, the bonfire became larger and larger, until eventually it moved to Nevada, where it has been located ever since. Each year, 100,000 people head out to the middle of the desert to participate in events ranging from impromptu art exhibits to orgies and mass drug use.

The fundamental principles of Burning Man are spelled out in co-founder Larry Harvey’s 10 Principles, written in 2004. These principles – 10 in number – construct a paganistic morality built around a bevy of mutually exclusive notions. For example, Burning Man is about “radical inclusion … No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.” But Burning Man is also “devoted to acts of gift giving.” Unfortunately, without some form of mutuality, giving alone cannot for the basis of a functioning society, even temporarily. All of which means that Burning Man features social pressure to ostracize free-riders – a tragic violation of the radical inclusion principle.

Burning Man values “radical self-expression,” which cannot be defined by anyone other “than the individual or a collaborating group.” But such radical self-expression quickly comes into conflict with Burning Man’s call for “civic responsibility,” which surely encroaches on the unlimited right to self-expression. Burning Man also values “immediacy,” which it calls “the most important touchstone of value in our culture.” But Burning Man also calls for the community to “clean up after ourselves,” which runs directly counter to the promise of immediacy.

All of this would be sheer countercultural nonsense, except for one perverse fact: the counterculture has now become the culture. This accounts for the fact that Burning Man now seems tired and played out, less transgressive than wearied. The age of Burning Man attendees has increased over the past decade (average age in 2013 was 32, compared to 37 just nine years later); so has the average income (in 2006, 14% of Burners listed their personal income at above $100,000, compared to 27.4% by 2016). Influencers now show up at Burning Man to sell Popeye’s Spicy Chicken; Elon Musk and Paris Hilton and Mark Zuckerberg have shown up.

And herein lies the problem for the broader American culture. Our elite class used to be inculcated in the same set of baseline values as “normal” Americans: John D. Rockefeller was a regular churchgoer; so was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Today, our elites participate in drug-fueled binges in the desert – or at least wish to appear as though they do. Throughout the 1930s, even the poorest Americans aspired to dress well, wearing suits even on the breadlines. Today, even the richest Americans dress as though they shop at Salvation Army.

Read more at: dailywire.com

A supermarket chain issued a recall for Paw Patrol snacks sold at British stores after it was discovered that a website on the packaging leads to content “not suitable for child consumption.”

Store chain Lidl said the five-packs of Paw Patrol All Butter Mini Biscotti Biscuits, Paw Patrol Chocolate Chip Mini Biscotti Biscuits, Paw Patrol Yummy Bake Bars Raspberry Flavor and Paw Patrol Yummy Bake Bars Apple Flavor bore the address of a website that no longer shows the intended content.

“We have been made aware that the URL of the supplier which is featured on the back of the packaging has been compromised and is being directed to a site that is not suitable for child consumption,” the recall notice states. “We recommend that customers refrain from viewing the URL and return this product to the nearest store where a full refund will be given.”

The website, when viewed from a desktop browser, shows a message in Chinese stating that the site is “temporarily unavailable.”

When viewed from a mobile browser, the URL leads to a holding page with numerous advertisements with sexually explicit imagery.

Read more at: upi.com

More bad news for Darwinism arrived after my last article about Cambrian Explosion. I showed there that taphonomic conditions should have produced Precambrian animal fossils had they existed. Now, some of the other props for Darwin’s House of Cards have been removed. Tom Bethell had said in that book, “The near-instant explosion of body plans is the opposite of what Darwin’s theory predicts” (p 134).

Oxygen Theory Deflated

“No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms,” begins some news from the University of Copenhagen. “Life on Earth didn’t arise as described in textbooks.” What? Textbooks wrong? Shocking!

“The fact that we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that oxygen didn’t control the development of life on Earth provides us with an entirely new story about how life arose and what factors controlled this success,” says the researcher, adding:

“Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten.” [Emphasis added.]

Textbooks had been saying, “increased oxygen levels triggered the evolutionary arrival of more advanced marine organisms.” Scientists at the university, with international peers, claim that the oxygen theory “is being disproved” by measurements of oxygen levels in rocks dating from “the Avalon explosion, a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion.” The Avalon Explosion they date at “between 685 and 800 million years ago.”

Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth’s oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest.

Evolutionists have a strained relationship with oxygen. They don’t want it at the origin of life, but they were relying on it to power the Avalon and Cambrian Explosions. And in modern times, they struggle with the complexity of molecular machines that protect life from Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Current atmospheric oxygen levels appear finely tuned for complex life, as biologist Michael Denton argues in Fire-Maker. We have a Goldilocks value that balances the advantages of oxygen for metabolism against the disadvantages of too much or too little.

Read more at: evolutionnews.org

Wow, I am SO happy I did not take my kids to see the Barbie movie.

Call it intuition, but I knew the movie would likely not be good for them.

But I didn’t know exactly WHY until I saw this from Jonathan Cahn.

As usual, Cahn takes what is hidden in plain sight and connects the dots and explains it so clearly that we can all see it.

Then once you see it you can’t UNSEE it.

Watch here: 100percentfedup.com

The combination of “warp speed” advances in neurotechnology, such as brain implants or scans that can increasingly peek inside minds, and artificial intelligence poses a threat to mental privacy, UNESCO warned on Thursday.

The UN’s agency for science and culture has started developing a global “ethical framework” to address human rights concerns posed by neurotechnology, it said at a conference in Paris.

Neurotechnology is a growing field seeking to connect electronic devices to the nervous system, mostly so far to treat neurological disorders and restore movement, communication, vision or hearing.

Recently neurotechnology has been supercharged by artificial intelligence algorithms which can process and learn from data in ways never before possible, said Mariagrazia Squicciarini, a UNESCO economist specialising in AI.

“It’s like putting neurotech on steroids,” she told AFP.

Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s assistant director-general for social and human sciences, said that this convergence of neurotechnology and AI was “far-reaching and potentially harmful”.

“We are on a path to a world in which algorithms will enable us to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions,” she told the conference.

In May, scientists in the United States revealed they had used brain scans and AI to turn “the gist” of what people were thinking into written words — as long as they had spent long hours inside a large fMRI machine.

Later that month, billionaire Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink received approval to test its coin-sized brain implants on humans in the United States.

Read more at: www.barrons.com

With child marriage still legal in California, advocates are mounting a campaign to push the state to enact a ban, but their effort is facing surprising opposition from progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

Dozens of survivors of forced or child marriages traveled to California’s state Capitol in Sacramento last month to protest the state’s existing laws. Dressed in wedding dresses with their wrists tied and mouths taped shut, they called on state lawmakers to finally outlaw the practice.

California, a solidly Democratic state, was on track to be the first to pass an absolute ban on marriages for children under 18. But the legislative proposal was met with opposition from liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood, the Children’s Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The pushback comes out of concerns that imposing an age requirement could set the stage for a slippery slope when it comes to constitutional rights or reproductive choices, specifically that an age requirement could impede a minor’s ability to seek an abortion.

California and Mississippi are the only two states where there is no minimum age requirement to get married. Most states have a minimum marriage age of 16 with parental consent, although it can range from as low as 14 to as high as 18, according to voting rights organization Wisevoter.

Newsweek reached out to Planned Parenthood via email for comment.

Minors seeking to wed in California need approval from a guardian and a court order. But those calling for a ban on child marriages point out that when it comes to issues like statutory rape, California’s definition of unlawful sexual activity between a child and an adult does not apply if the two parties are married.

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California spokesperson Jennifer Wonnacott told the Los Angeles Times that it “strongly supports protecting youth from abuse of all kinds” but said those protections should “not impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health and their lives.”

An analysis from Unchained At Last, a nonprofit dedicated to ending forced and child marriages in the U.S., found that between 2000 and 2018, 23,588 minors were married in California, making it the state with the second-highest number of child marriages behind Texas.

Read more at: www.msn.com

By Ben Shapiro

There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see — the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.

You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?

Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce “approved” narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn’t a secret and we’re not guessing.

First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney.

There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.

In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with Big Tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Google-owned YouTube; the CCP’s TikTok; and even Snapchat and Pinterest.

This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, “Content not appropriate for any advertising support.” In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.

So, what have these global elites decided to put in their censorship framework? They started with things we can all universally agree on, like preventing the distribution of child pornography or the advocacy of graphic terrorist activity. But they don’t draw the line at what is objectively criminal, abusive or dangerous. They continue expanding the guidelines to include far more subjective parameters.

For example, the framework lists subjective terms like “hate speech” as a problem. It says that anything surrounding transgenderism that they decide is dehumanizing or discussing what they deem to be a debated social issue in an insensitive way is off limits.

The framework is deliberately vague, allowing those in control to pick and choose how they enforce it and against whom.

So, how exactly do the approved narratives set by these global entities get enforced all the way down to the daily content you consume?

Well, here’s how. We’ll start with NewsGuard. NewsGuard is an organization that formulates ratings for American media. They rank news sites on a 0-to-100 scale based on nine supposedly apolitical criteria. These criteria are anything but apolitical. They often align with left-wing positions.

During the height of COVID-19, NewsGuard falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites, only well after the fact admitting that they either “mischaracterized the site’s claims” about the lab leak theory — referring to the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory” — or “wrongly grouped together unproven claims” about the lab leak with the “separate, false claim” that the “COVID-19 virus was man-made” without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated and the other was false.

“NewsGuard apologizes for these errors,” they said. “We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”

And when you compare their ratings of Left-leaning news organizations to Right-leaning news organizations, you see the same bias appear.

The Media Research Center, a free-speech nonprofit, studied NewsGuards’ ratings. The study found glaring examples of bias by NewsGuard.

The Left’s BuzzFeed managed a 100 out of 100 perfect score, despite its reporting on the Steele dossier and alleging collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia.

The study found that The Global Times, a Chinese propaganda government outlet, scored a 39.5 — that is 27 points higher than the U.S.-based conservative outlet The Federalist. Despite a scandal at USA Today revealing the publication of multiple fabricated sources in their stories and their own fact-checking operation misleading readers on the history of the Democratic Party and the KKK, USA Today maintained the 100 out of 100 rating by NewsGuard.

NewsGuard is also working with others to use AI technology to enforce Brand Safety standards at scale, by identifying scalable hoaxes and misinformation in order to streamline blanket removal. This means that the news that you read, news that is supposed to be fair and objective or at least diverse, must adhere to GARM, the WEF, the WFA and their subjective and biased standards in order to be deemed monetizable.

Read more at: pjmedia.com

“Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” — Luke 21:28.

Sam Altman, CEO of the company behind the world-altering ChatGPT artificial intelligence system, along with a partner announced yesterday the launch of Worldcoin, a global currency for those who “prove their humanity” through an iris scan. It has been tested in a couple dozen countries, and now they’re ready and hoping to take it global.

The Worldcoin website says, “If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI [universal basic income].”

Obviously this raises concerns with respect to globalism, privacy, freedom, the economy, and even biblical prophecy.

Human Intent?

Worldcoin’s stated purpose is to create a fully private and trustworthy means to prevent artificial intelligence from masquerading as humans and to keep individuals from claiming to be more than one person. At face value it sounds great: The 2020 election sure could have benefited from security like that.

Its primary application, however, would be economic, especially to keep AI out of fraudulent participation in the human business of buying and selling. That is, to solve a problem created by — guess who? — the creators of Worldcoin, among others.

Humanitarian Intent?

The company behind Worldcoin names itself “Tools for Humanity.” Its logos feature the mottoes “For every human,” and “The future is bright, and it belongs to the people of the world.”

Another part of Worldcoin’s stated purpose is to provide a universal basic income globally. Sounds great again, right? Sure, if you like socialism, and if can find it in you to believe a tech giant corporation has nothing but altruism in its heart.

That, plus you’d also have to agree with them in denying that the future belongs in any way to the God who created time and space. Humanism in our day is virtually always atheistic, or in another sense polytheistic, treating humans as gods themselves.

“We’re From a Massive Tech Corporation and We’re Here to Help”

The saying used to be “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” Usually that’s taken to mean, “Don’t trust a word of that.” I’d rather have the government than this, though: At least we can vote, and retain some semblance of checks and balances. We can at least pay lip service to the rule of law. Tools for Humanity, in contrast, is out to create a global economic kingdom with a self-appointed emperor ruling by right of economic might.

Still, you can’t deny they’ve been helpful. Tools for Humanity went to a number of developing countries, testing their iris-scanner “Orb” with promises of “free money.” How free was it? MIT Technology Review published a scathing report on it:

We found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. These practices may violate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) — a likelihood that the company’s own data consent policy acknowledged and asked users to accept — as well as local laws.

Helpful, yes. Helping themselves. Because they had the money and the power.

Read more at: stream.org

More millennials think referring to a transgender person by the wrong pronouns should be a criminal offense than think it should be legal, according to new polling conducted exclusively for Newsweek.

According to the survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, 44 percent of those aged 25-34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense,” versus just 31 percent who disagree. The remainder “neither agree nor disagree” or “don’t know.”

This view remains popular for those aged 35-44, among whom 38 percent think misgendering should be illegal, whilst 35 percent disagree and 26 percent either don’t know or didn’t express an opinion.

The rights of transgender people, whose gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were given at birth, and the corresponding impact on women’s rights, has developed into a hot political issue across the United States. Republican-controlled states have passed a string of laws impacting transgender people, such as banning sex change operations and hormone treatments for minors.

According to Pew Research Center, a millennial is someone born between 1981 and 1996, making them between 27 and 42 years old today. The organization defines Generation Z as being born between 1997 and 2012, meaning they would now be between 11 and 26 years in age. Thus among both survey age categories that contain millennials, more people think misgendering should be illegal than legal.

The poll of 1,500 eligible voters in the United States was conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, for Newsweek, on July 6.

However the figure for millennials contrasts starkly with that for Americans as a whole, among whom just 19 percent want misgendering to be a criminal offense, whilst 65 percent disagree, 12 percent “neither agree nor disagree” and four percent answered “don’t know.”

Notably Generation Z Americans aged 18-24, who can vote, are notably less keen on making misgendering a crime than the older millennials. Among this group, 33 percent think calling someone by the wrong pronoun should be a criminal offense, while 48 percent disagree and the remainder answer either “neither” or “don’t know.”

Read more at: www.newsweek.com

Certain powerful people worldwide have been advocating for a global government. Such governance would allow for only a small group of individuals to control the entire planet. World domination has long been the goal of despots and dictators throughout human history. Today we are seeing a global government being ushered in — right before our very eyes!

To help us understand this shifting political landscape, I sought out a very special guest who has just returned from a meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann served for a number of years in the U.S. House of Representatives before running for President of the United States. She continues to serve as the dean of the Robertson School of Government and remains a strong voice for conservative and Christian principles here in America and around the world.

Congresswoman Bachmann, please tell us what you experienced when you traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to join the audience listening in to all of the plans being presented by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).