I have been arguing for years that the opposite is the case. Apart from being famously bureaucratic and therefore irrational and slow, the fact that the EU remains ideologically committed to common action among its 27 member states in nearly all areas also contributes to a systemic ‘free rider’ problem and moral hazard. EU states systematically seek to offload their internal problems onto others – the Poles offload their unemployment onto Britain, the Italians offload their immigrants onto Germany and Scandinavia, the Greeks offload their debt onto the euro zone, and the Germans offload their gigantic commercial surplus onto the whole EU.

The normal mechanisms that would correct such excesses break down where there is common action. If there were hard borders between Italy and other EU states, those states could close them to immigrants and the Italians would have to deal with the problem more firmly on their own (sea) borders. If Germany had its own currency, that currency would rise with industrial output and make its exports more expensive, thus limiting the country’s massive trade surplus. If France could not use the eurozone to raise even more debt than she already has, she would have to spend less at home. And so on.

By the same token, people are easily convinced that countries will fail if they ‘go it alone’. How will Britain manage, they ask, if it is not in the EU? This fear of being alone has been instrumentalised by pro-EU people for decades and, unfortunately, it is a very effective device, because people are indeed afraid. They have, incidentally, been anaesthetised from taking their courage in both hands and taking advantage of their right to liberty by decades of bogus promises from EU leaders about how the organisation will protect them. The counter-examples of prosperous Norway and Switzerland are simply ignored. There can be no clearer illustration that the EU cares only about itself and not about the people over whom it wields unaccountable power.

Congress is touting a plan to increase the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000 annually. Many note that’s a refund for those with jobs, and not an immediate direct payment to buy children diapers, food, school supplies and other necessities. The extra $1,000 tax refund would cover only about 6 weeks of child care, as their costs have risen 60% since the start of the pandemic.

The discussions on child poverty come as Congress has postponed yet again a long-awaited round of major household stimulus, this time in order to focus on the 2nd impeachment trial of ex-president Donald Trump. Last year American-style lockdowns led to the sharpest annual increase in the overall poverty rate in over 50 years. Many say the problem is not poor children or even poor parents and longstanding political indifference towards both groups.

Well, there are a lot of factors at work. First of all, the cost of living has gotten wildly out of control. A postage stamp of an apartment will cost you thousands of dollars per month to rent, and a lot of people don’t like paying 17 dollars for a salad. For others, the extremely high taxes and the insane politicians are more than enough of a reason to leave the state.

In San Francisco in particular, open drug abuse in the streets has made headlines all over the globe in recent years. The streets are constantly littered with drug needles and piles of human feces, and that isn’t pleasant. On top of everything else, there is always the threat of more wildfires and a giant earthquake could strike the coast at literally any moment. But none of those things are what this article is about.

This article is about the huge spike in crime that is driving countless people away from San Francisco. With each passing year, the criminals just keep becoming even more brazen. You could call the San Francisco police, and they may or may not show up eventually. Meanwhile, the junkies will continue to roam throughout your neighborhood as they search for things to steal so that they can sell them for more drugs.

Please remind me not to visit San Francisco as a tourist any time soon. Sadly, we are seeing the exact same thing happen to San Francisco that has happened to countless other communities all across the nation. Like so many other major cities, it has become a crime-ridden, drug-infested hellhole, and this has happened even though northern California is swimming in hundreds of billions of dollars from the tech industry.

In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.

Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.

This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan. I fear that the creationist conspiracy theory will not be so short-lived. It is driven by a deep-seated power struggle within religious communities, between modernists and literalists; between those who regard scripture as coming to us through human authors, however inspired, and those who regard it as a perfect supernatural revelation. And that is a struggle that will be with us for a long time to come.

The backlash to Mr Johnson’s apology was immediate. On Facebook, he reported that he received “multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry.” He also said he had lost funding from donors who accused him of being “a coward, sellout, and traitor to the Holy Spirit.” But the popularity of self-appointed prophets shows no signs of waning.

Whether the gift of prophecy continues into the present day has long been the subject of intense theological debate. But in recent years, self-described prophets have proliferated across the country, accelerating in stature over the course of the Trump era. They are stars within what is now one of the fastest-growing corners of Christianity: a loose but fervent movement led by hundreds of people who believe they can channel supernatural powers — and have special spiritual insights into world events.

Small shops might fight back — the British Retail Consortium warns of high fees charged by card issuers and that some of its members are losing thousands from incomplete contactless payments — but there are far bigger forces at play. The ‘fintech’ (financial technology) industry has sniffed its big chance, and it is going to play dirty.

Just look at the stuff pumped out over the past year claiming that cash could be spreading Covid-19 — and more. My favourite was a study which claimed to have found, among a host of other nasties, traces of vaginal fluid on banknotes. Never mind coronavirus, you could pick up gonorrhoea from a £50 note. We’ve even been told that the World Health Organisation warned against using cash during the pandemic — when actually an official merely said that people should wash their hands after handling cash, just as they would after handling any other goods.

Abolishing cash would add horribly to the problems of poverty. There are 1.3 million adults in Britain who have no bank account. One in six people, according to the Access to Cash Review, would struggle without cash. It would deprive charities of an important source of income: the loose change they collect on the street. And it would create serious problems with making payments in remote areas with poor broadband. Allow cash to be abolished and we would expose ourselves even more to negative interest rates. There are central bankers who would love to abolish cash, because it would enable governments to erode their vast debts by devaluing our savings. They can’t do this at present because cash effectively limits retail interest rates to zero: any lower and there would be a run on the banks as we withdrew it to stuff under the mattress.

Shrier told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday in July that Planned Parenthood is “one of the biggest dispensers of testosterone.” “They are very happy to furnish it,” she continued. “They provide it on an informed consent basis, meaning a young person of let’s say 18 shows up after she’s been obsessing about it for a while, because these girls can tend to imagine that [testosterone] will be a cure-all.”

Shrier wrote in her post that the former Planned Parenthood employee told her while abortions were her clinic’s “bread and butter,” which she supports, “trans identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc, whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation.”

Here in the United States, the federal government still has a monopoly on power in areas such as border security, national defense and foreign policy. But when it comes to the things that matter the most in the day to day lives of most Americans, it could be argued that the giant corporations have now become more powerful than the federal government. For example, our politicians like to brag about how many jobs that they have “created”, but the truth is that they don’t actually create any jobs unless you want to count useless government desk jobs. Our politicians can help to foster an environment that will be favorable for economic growth, but it is the corporations that really determine whether the economy will grow or not. Beyond that, now many large corporations have decided that there are certain beliefs, opinions and values that their employees are not permitted to have.

By now, you have probably heard that a certain actress was fired by Disney for having opinions that were not acceptable. That was a very high profile case, but the truth is that this sort of thing is constantly happening all over the country at this point. In the old days, Americans could go to the public square and say anything that they want. But now the big tech companies are the public square.

Freedom of speech is a thing of the past on the Internet, and more voices are being “deplatformed” with each passing day. On Wednesday, it was LifeSiteNews… YouTube just completely removed the LifeSiteNews YouTube channel. This isn’t a temporary ban; every single one of our videos is completely gone. This greatly grieved me, because so many other pro-life voices have already been silenced. We desperately need those voices, because if we stay on the path that we are currently on, there is no future for America.

On Thursday, Twitter suspended Project Veritas. Twitter has decided that Project Veritas has become too offensive. In fact, it is dangerous for you to be reading this article right now. They are always watching everything that you do on the Internet, and expressions of noncompliance are not acceptable in this brave new world that we live in.

- UK military has base sites in five countries around China: naval base in Singapore, garrisons in Brunei, drone testing sites in Australia, three facilities in Nepal and quick reaction force in Afghanistan
- Cyprus hosts 17 UK military installations including firing ranges and spy stations, with some located outside UK’s “sovereign base areas”
- Britain maintains military presence in seven Arab monarchies where citizens have little or no say in how they are governed
- UK personnel are stationed across 15 sites in Saudi Arabia, supporting internal repression and the war in Yemen, and at 16 sites in Oman, some run directly by British military
- In Africa, British troops are based in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Mali
- Many UK overseas bases are located in tax havens such as Bermuda and Cayman Islands

Britain’s military has a permanent presence at 145 base sites in 42 countries or territories around the world, research by Declassified UK has found. The size of this global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States. It is the first time the true size of this network has been revealed.

The findings come days after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an extra £16 billion would be spent on the UK military over the next four years – a 10% increase.

It was an outcome that was expected but nevertheless disappointed Democrats, who made Trump both the first US president to be impeached twice and the first to be acquitted twice. Democratic House managers who brought the charge could at least claim that the former president suffered a bipartisan rebuke – with a majority voting to convict him on the single charge of 'incitement of insurrection.' Reaching the required two-thirds supermajority established in the Constitution was already a high hurdle in a chamber that had shown consistent deference to Trump while he was in office.

Minutes after the Senate voted, Trump issued a statement attacking Democrats from his office at Mar-a-Lago. 'It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree,' he said. 'I always have, and always will, be a champion for the unwavering rule of law, the heroes of law enforcement, and the right of Americans to peacefully and honorably debate the issues of the day without malice and without hate.'

​I respect everyone's right to express their opinion on this second impeachment trial, but even before he took office, after he was elected, the Democrats viewed him as a fraudulently elected president and vowed to remove him from office by hook or by crook. Along with the media throughout his term in office, they proceeded to try and do exactly that. I'm not excusing some of his actions or comments. However, I don't want to detract from the many good things that he did to benefit our country, which I feel far outweighed the bad.

Democrats know full well they'll never get an impeachment conviction on Trump. They're only doing this to be able to say at some later date that Trump was impeached twice. If they spent one third of the time and effort they spend trying to destroy the Republicans working for the American people instead, we'd be a much more successful country. Everything they do is negative.