USA - In the event you are unaware that insanity now encompasses the US Supreme Court, the Court ruled in 2020 with only three dissents that a person’s gender is self-declared and unrelated to biological fact. The consequences of the Supreme Court’s elevation of fiction over fact are now showing themselves. A female middle school child declared herself to be male, but the school prevented her from using the boy’s locker room. A naked girl showering with naked males was not the school’s idea of family values. However, a local court in Blue Springs, Missouri (57,000 population) ruled that as the girl said she was a boy, she had to be believed. The school had singled her out on the basis of her female genitalia and ruled that she was female and not eligible for the boys’ locker room. This decision based on biological fact the jury decided was discrimination and awarded the girl $4 million dollars. This is a good example of what I mean when I say that in the US facts no longer matter.

USA - Just because most people have eyes does not mean that they are able to see. We live at a time when global events are going haywire all around us, but the vast majority of the population is still asleep. Even though our world is being rocked by pestilence, economic troubles, wars and rumors of wars, widespread civil unrest and great natural disasters, most people simply assume that life will eventually return to “normal” at some point. Sadly, that isn’t going to happen. I am entirely convinced that global events will continue to accelerate as we head into 2022, and most people will be absolutely blind-sided by what is coming because they just didn’t want to believe that things could ever get so bad. ...most of the population still wants to believe that someday we will all wake up and everything will be back to normal.

CHINA - Chinese imports, particularly food scandals by pollution, have made big news -- until Big Tech took control of the internet. They are in bed with them – literally. From deadly melamine in milk products to harmful honey, China has long allowed toxic food products (and other dangerous exports) to leave its borders.

GERMANY - With the new left-Green German government, a coalition of parties has come to power in Berlin with a checkered history as regards US ally Israel, to put it kindly. The founding generation of the Greens around former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and ‘60s radicals like Dieter Kunzelmann were present at the founding of the PLO and PFLP in 1968/69, and maintained ties to Palestinian terrorists through the Red Army Faction offensive of the 1970s all the way to the current-day NGOs.

USA - The US military must start making preparations for another "insurrection" after the 2024 election, according to a trio of retired military generals. An op-ed published by the Washington Post on Friday called for action amid growing concern among former senior officials about the "potential for lethal chaos inside our military" in a flash of violence that could eclipse the Capitol riot on January 6. Multiple courses of action were advised by Paul Eaton, a retired US Army major general and a senior adviser to VoteVets, Antonio Taguba, a retired Army major general with 34 years of active duty service, and Steven Anderson, a retired brigadier general who served in the Army for 31 years. They warned of the possibility of "civil war" resulting from a "military breakdown" due to splits in loyalty. "First, everything must be done to prevent another insurrection. Not a single leader who inspired it has been held to account. Meanwhile, more than 700 people have been arrested and charged with crimes associated with the siege of Congress."

EUROPE - The global power potential of the EU and its member countries is eroding and cannot keep up with that of the United States and China, as confirmed by data in "Power Atlas," recently published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Not only the German and the EU's relative economic power is systematically declining, Germany is also losing ground in terms of its share of major corporations with global influence. According to the ECFR, the "main battlefield," on which the great powers are currently fighting their power struggles is not a military but rather an economic one. The economic "weapons" fielded to attempt to gain the upper hand, range from free trade agreements, and punitive tariffs all the way to economic sanctions. As the ECFR notes, other states are increasingly resorting to the use of sanctions against the EU and its member states - alongside Russia and China, which have imposed counter-sanctions, also Turkey had temporarily called for a boycott of French commodities.

USA - The US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it is lifting a requirement that patients seeking medication abortion had to pick up the medication in-person, instead allowing pills to be sent by mail. The move comes as the Supreme Court is poised to undo its abortion rights precedent. Relaxing the federal restrictions on medication abortion is one thing that the Biden administration could do to mitigate the fallout from a Roe vs Wade reversal, but red states are already on the march to counteract what the federal government has opted to do. "The FDA's decision eliminating its unnecessary in-person requirement did not come a moment too soon," ACLU attorney Julia Kaye said in a statement after the FDA's decision was announced. Medication abortion, in which a pregnancy is ended in a two-pill process, has become a prevalent approach to terminating a pregnancy. Both sides of the issue see it as the next frontier in the fight over abortion access, as they wait to see how the Supreme Court decides a Mississippi case where the justices are reexamining the precedent laid out by 1973's Roe vs Wade decision.

USA - Tucker questions what’s going on in our current economy, why it’s happening and where it’s going. “What happens when you crush entire sectors of your own economy for nearly two years, and then, to compensate for your crime, you decide to inject trillions of dollars of freshly printed cash into the system? Honestly, we don’t really know what happens when you do that because no one in history has ever been stupid enough to try it. Political leaders devalue the currency for short term gain.In the end, this leads to long term collapse. ‘Debasing the coinage,’ that’s what they used to call it. Every government devalues its currency at some point. They do it because it’s irresistible, you can’t not do it. If you do it, you get free money and you don’t have to raise taxes. It seems like a great idea, but in the end every government pays the price for doing this, or more precisely, its citizens do. At the very same moment we have both too many workers and also too few workers. Those policies reward people who don’t want a job and they punish people who do want a job. What they do is they degrade work, they strip it of its inherent meaning.”

USA - The Biden administration has walked away from legal negotiations in which it was considering paying $450,000 to each adult and child separated at the southern border during the Trump administration. The US government “has ended negotiations over a settlement of the cases seeking monetary compensation,” according to the ACLU. Lead attorney Lee Gelernt told CBS News that the Biden administration’s decision not to pay affected families was the result of having “allowed politics to get in the way of helping the little children deliberately abused by our government.” Approximately 5,400 children were separated at the border and sent to HHS facilities, while their parents were referred for prosecution for illegally crossing the US-Mexico border.

USA - Boston’s all-girls Winsor School, where tuition is almost $54,000 per year, recently adopted a diversity/equity/inclusion — plan which will move away from references to gender. According to Legal Insurrection, the school’s “Lift Every Voice” plan states that “although Winsor remains in its mission a school for ‘young women to pursue their aspirations and contribute to the world,’ the school recognizes the importance of inclusive language.” This means transitioning from terms such as “she, her, hers’’ and “your daughter,” to “they, them, theirs” and “student.” Faculty are “discouraged” from calling groups of students “ladies” or “girls,” and should address individual students by their preferred pronouns. To show “sensitivity” to different “family structures,” the school also will change “parent/guardian interview” to “adult family member interview.”

VATICAN - Pope Francis celebrated his 85th birthday on Friday, a milestone made even more remarkable given the coronavirus pandemic, his summertime intestinal surgery and the weight of history: His predecessor retired at this age and the last pope to have lived any longer was Leo XIII over a century ago.

PHILIPPINES - At least 12 people have died in the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year, the disaster agency said Friday, after the storm swept across the archipelago uprooting trees, toppling power poles and flooding villages. More than 300,000 people fled their homes and beachfront resorts as Typhoon Rai pummelled the southern and central regions of the country, knocking out communications in some areas and tearing roofs off buildings. Rai was a super typhoon when it slammed into Siargao Island on Thursday, packing maximum sustained winds of 195 kilometres an hour (120 miles). On Friday, wind speeds eased to 150 kilometres an hour, the state weather forecaster said. “Siargao island is heavily damaged,” Ricardo Jalad, executive director of the national disaster agency, told a briefing.

UK - A UK government commissioner has asked for parents to talk to their nine-year-old children about porn before they find themselves exposed to the material online. The suggestion that parents need to talk to their children about porn when they are at a very young age comes as the UK tries to grapple with how young people are accessing sexual material online.

USA - There was a time when churches were places for worship and fellowship. They would often be the venues from which community outreach and charitable works were accomplished. They even acted as safe havens for the downtrodden. That was then. This is now… Lutheran Church Hosts Drag Queen Prayer Time For Children... This is a truly disturbing event. A Lutheran Church in Logan Square in the Chicago area hosted a drag queen prayer time for kids during their Sunday service this past week. I’m not exaggerating in any way. A drag queen took the pulpit, spoke to the congregation, then left the pulpit and invited children to sit at his feet as he read a book about joy. A sick adaptation of the drag queen story hours libraries have been hosting the last few years. This is just the latest in a long string of ludicrous ideas becoming saddening realities.

SCOTLAND - From now on in Scotland, if a person with male genitalia (aka a man) rapes someone, Scottish Police will categorize the culprit as a “female” if he self-identifies as a trans “woman.” In order to remain politically correct and satisfy the demands of the Cult of LGBTQ, Police Scotland say that even if a rapist has not legally changed his gender to trans “female,” any rapes he commits will be considered as having been perpetrated by a woman. Responding to this, MacAskill, the Alba party MP for East Lothian and SNP defector who worked as a lawyer for 20 years and a justice secretary for almost eight is simply shocked that this is being allowed to happen. “I’ve seen some legal absurdities, but this tops it all and is dangerous,” he said. “It’s physically impossible and is about dogma overriding common sense. Women prisoners are being harmed by this and vital crime statistics rendered useless.” What this means, of course, is that men can now freely rape any women they want while placing the blame squarely on women by simply self-identifying as such.