Friday, October 31, 2025
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Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Sunday, October 26, 2025
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Friday, October 24, 2025
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Monday, October 20, 2025
Friday, October 17, 2025
Day of DOOM! King Charles and Pope Leo XIV to pray together in historic ecumenical moment at Vatican
For the first time since the Protestant Reformation, a reigning British monarch and a pope will pray together publicly during a royal state visit to the Vatican.
King Charles III will join in ecumenical prayer presided over by Pope Leo XIV for the care of creation inside the Sistine Chapel on Oct. 23, beneath Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling, during the king’s first state visit to the Vatican with Queen Camila.
The Sistine Chapel Choir will sing together with England’s Choir of St. George's Chapel and the Choir of His Majesty's Chapel Royal for the historic ecumenical prayer which will focus on praising God the Creator, Vatican officials said.
Stephen Cottrell, the Anglican Archbishop of York, will also participate The visit will mark the first meeting between King Charles and Pope Leo XIV. The two will first meet privately in the Apostolic Palace in the morning and will later be joined by business leaders in the palace’s Sala Regia for a discussion on care for creation and environmental sustainability.
During the state visit, Cardinal James Michael Harvey, the archpriest of the basilica, will confer upon King Charles the title of “Royal Confrater” of the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls during an ecumenical service at the tomb of St. Paul in the basilica on the same day. The pope is not expected to attend.
The title, granted with the approval of Pope Leo XIV, is a gesture of “hospitality and ecumenical welcome,” Archbishop Flavio Pace, the secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, said at a Vatican press briefing on Oct. 17.
The Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls has a historic connection to England’s monarchy. After the arrival in England of Roman monk-missionaries such as St. Augustine of Canterbury and St. Paulinus of York in the 6th and 7th centuries, Saxon rulers including Kings Offa and Æthelwulf contributed to the upkeep of the apostles’ tombs in Rome. By the late Middle Ages, the kings of England were recognized as “protectors” of the Basilica of St. Paul and abbey, and its heraldic shield came to include the insignia of the Order of the Garter. That tradition was interrupted by the Reformation and the ensuing centuries of estrangement.
It was King Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who was the first British monarch since the Reformation to make an official visit to the Holy See, meeting with John XXIII in 1961. A few years later, Pope Paul VI met with Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury in 1966 in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, launching formal dialogue between Catholics and Anglicans for the first time since the 16th century.
“Without establishing a formal role for King Charles and his successors, the title of ‘Royal Confrater’ is to be understood as a gesture of hospitality and ecumenical welcome that bears witness to these historical ties and the progress that has been made since 1966,” Pace said.
The basilica will also install a specially commissioned chair for the monarch, decorated with his coat of arms and a verse from the Gospel of John in Latin, “Ut unum sint” (“That they may be one”). The chair will remain in the basilica for Charles and his heirs to use during future visits.
The ecumenical service in the Basilica of St. Paul on Oct. 23 will be presided over by Father Donato Ogliari, the abbot of the basilica, with the participation of Anglican Archbishop Stephen Cottrell of York and the Rev. Rosie Frew, moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
The service will conclude with a hymn composed to a text by St. John Henry Newman — the English cardinal and convert from Anglicanism whom Pope Leo XIV will declare a Doctor of the Church on Nov. 1. King Charles attended Newman’s canonization in 2019 and recently became the first monarch to visit the Birmingham Oratory, the priestly community founded by Newman in 1848. Source
Heir to Louis XVI denounces France’s euthanasia plan: ‘I’m pro-life. At all stages’
(LifeSiteNews) — The heir to the line of French kings which reaches back to Saint Louis IX has declared his commitment to life and announced that he is ready to serve France in a re-established monarchy, if the French people desire it. The news comes amid political chaos and the government’s third collapse since the 2024 elections – in a scenario mainstream speculation suggests could entail the end of the French Fifth Republic.
Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou and Legitimist claimant to the French throne as Louis XX, warned in an October 8 Journal du Dimanche column that “the Fifth Republic, like its sisters before it, seems to be on the verge of collapse.” This follows the disintegration of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government on October 6, after 27 days, intensifying fears of the Fifth Republic’s demise under President Emmanuel Macron.
In the same October 11 Canal News interview where he affirmed his willingness to serve as king if needed, Bourbon, a pro-life traditional Catholic, condemned France’s proposed euthanasia law, declaring, “I have always spoken in favor of life — and I’m pro-life. At all stages: from birth to the end.”
When asked about the possibility of the monarchy’s re-establishment in such circumstances he stated: “My family have served France for centuries. And if France asks for it, I will be at her service.”
The latest crisis began with Macron’s June 2024 snap elections. The vote produced a hung National Assembly. It split among the left-wing New Popular Front, Macron’s centrists, and the far-right National Rally. No bloc secured a majority. Macron has since cycled through five prime ministers. Lecornu’s cabinet, a reshuffle of prior figures, resigned under no-confidence threats.
France’s 5.4 percent GDP deficit and €3 trillion debt sparked market volatility. The euro dipped and bond yields spiked. The Telegraph has warned of “regime change.” Politico described unprecedented convulsion. Macron tasked Lecornu with caretaker duties until October 15, after which the future remains unclear. New elections or a sixth prime minister loom as Macron is under mounting pressure to resign – though he has repeatedly refused to do this.
In his Journal du Dimanche column, Bourbon wrote, “The political, institutional, and social state of our country continues to worsen.” He decried “a political crisis that is becoming more insoluble every day.” Parties, he said, “play their own game” rather than serve “the higher interests of France and therefore of the French.” He criticized the Republic’s “partisan logic” and “total absence of questioning.”
The system, he argued, is “a space of immobility and powerlessness.”
On Canal News, he stated, “I’m not in a position to remain silent…. At the moment I see France in an absolutely blocked situation, and I am filled with concern.” He added, “The tone of my discourse has never changed, but the situation has never been so grave. The French need hope.” Source
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Saturday, October 11, 2025
Friday, October 10, 2025
Thursday, October 9, 2025
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
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Saturday, October 4, 2025
48 Hours Of Confusion In Afghanistan During Internet Blackout...
Error 404: 48 Hours Of Confusion In Afghanistan
During Internet Blackout
Paralysed banks, grounded planes and chaotic hospitals: for two days, life ground to a halt in Afghanistan after the Taliban unexpectedly cut off the internet and phone networks.
Authorities had for weeks been restricting broadband access in several provinces to prevent "vice" on the orders of the Taliban's supreme leader.
But no one in Kabul was prepared for a nationwide shutdown.
Young Kabulis first travelled to high points in the mountainous capital, phones raised skyward, hoping to catch a signal. Then they tried buying SIM cards from different operators -- before giving up. For Afghanistan's 48 million people, it became impossible to send news to their relatives or receive precious remittances from abroad to pay their bills.Some residents of Herat and Kandahar travelled to border towns to pick up signal from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
But for the rest of the country, with no news from the outside world, rumours swelled to the rhythm of helicopters."The Americans are going to retake Bagram Air Base!" whispered the streets, after US president Donald Trump's recent calls to have the US-built facility returned.
Others wondered, incorrectly, that the reclusive Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and loyalists had replaced Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, who advocates a pragmatic approach to running the country.
As of Thursday, the Taliban authorities had still yet to comment on the shutdown.
Across the country, one of the poorest in the world, banking systems stopped functioning and the informal money exchange system used by much of the nation also broke down.
"Cash withdrawals, card payments, fund transfers -- everything relies on the internet. We can't do anything without it," a private bank manager told AFP.
For Afghans, there was no choice but to survive on whatever cash they had on hand. Source
Daniel's Second Beast Bear Is Social Media: Have we passed peak social media?
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Daniel's Second Beast Bear is Social Media
Have we passed peak social media?
In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do. Both Meta and OpenAI have recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos. This assumes a reservoir of untapped demand for the ability to create and binge-watch yet more content, with a promotional video from OpenAI featuring absurd fantastical animations and deepfakes, hinting at some of what may be to come. To use a nutritional analogy, this is ultra-processed content. Dopamine-dense, with at best negligible informational value, at worst corrosively negative. There is sadly considerable appetite for this “slop”.
It feeds people’s primal instincts, as evidenced by the multibillion-dollar industry of selling ads against videos of bizarrely soothing sights and sounds, people doing outrageous things, “food porn” and, well, porn. But the gradual merger of the weird guilty pleasure corner of the internet with the major social media platforms — part of a years-long degradation — appears to be turning people away. It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.
Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users — teens and 20-somethings. In many ways, Meta and OpenAI’s new platforms (AI-generated content is already rife on TikTok and YouTube) are a fitting endpoint for social media’s warped evolution from a place where people swapped updates with friends and family, to one with less and less human-to-human interaction. We have now witnessed the transformation of social media into anti-social media with the progressive disappearance of most people from active participation on the platforms and the steady displacement of real-world interactions by scrolling. Additional data from GWI trace the shift. The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Meanwhile, reflexively opening the apps to fill up spare time has risen, reflecting a broader pernicious shift from mindful to mindless browsing. In the parlance of technology writer Cory Doctorow, late-stage social media is a particularly egregious case of the “enshittification” of digital platforms as they resort to ever more desperate methods to capture eyeballs.
Many of these apps are no longer really social apps in any meaningful sense of the word; they’re screen time maximising apps, using whatever means necessary to eke out extra seconds and minutes. It would be a hugely welcome development to discover that we have not merely reached social media saturation point, but that the experience has been degraded to such an extent that it has shocked people out of their stupor and is causing them to pivot to healthier uses of their time. But that brings me to the catch. There is one notable exception to this promising international trend: North America, where consumption of social media’s diet of extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop continues to climb. By 2024 it had reached levels 15 per cent higher than Europe. The evidence that social media causes harm is highly contested, but these debates often fail to account for how the platforms have fundamentally changed from places of connection to isolation and distraction. One of the strongest cases for harm is that time on these platforms is time away from nourishing interactions with other people. If that trend is reversing, it would surely be no bad thing. If it eventually spreads to America, even better. Source
And four great beasts, different one from another, came up out of the sea.
Daniel's First Beast Lioness is Space Industry Airline Industry
The first was like a lioness, and had the wings of an eagle: I beheld till her wings were plucked off, and she was lifted up from the earth, and stood upon her feet as a man, and the heart of a man was given to her.
Daniel's Second Beast Bear Is Social Media
And behold another beast like a bear stood up on one side: and there were three rows in the mouth thereof, and in the teeth thereof, and thus they said to it: Arise, devour much flesh.
Daniel's Third Beast is Forerunner To The Antichrist
After this I beheld, and lo, another like a leopard, and it had upon it four wings as of a fowl, and the beast had four heads, and power was given to it.
Daniel's Fourth Beast With Ten Horns Is The Antichrist
After this I beheld in the vision of the night, and lo, a fourth beast, terrible and wonderful, and exceeding strong, it had great iron teeth, eating and breaking in pieces, and treading down the rest with its feet: and it was unlike to the other beasts which I had seen before it, and had ten horns.
Friday, October 3, 2025
Trump making plans to send billions in cash bailouts to farmers with taxpayer money
The Trump administration is planning to roll out the first tranche of bailout payments for farmers in the coming weeks, likely using billions of dollars in funding from an internal USDA account, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.
But it won’t be enough: USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation fund — which President Donald Trump previously tapped to provide $28 billion in farm aid during his first-term trade war with China — has just $4 billion left in the account. Trump officials, including those at the Treasury Department, are looking at how to tap tariff receipts or other funding to supplement the payments without triggering a messy fight in Congress.
The timing of the actual aid rollout is also tricky given that it’s unlikely to happen or even be possible during the ongoing government shutdown that’s shuttered vast swaths of the Agriculture Department.
Trump officials are still working on estimates of how big the first tranche of aid will be, according to the three people, who were granted anonymity to share private details.
But the president has been posting his promises to aid American soybean farmers on social media in recent days.
Hill Republicans have been pushing Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and other Trump officials for weeks to do something to aid farmers reeling from high input costs and the president’s tariffs, which have cut off American soybean farmers’ key markets in China as Beijing retaliates.
Trump has said he would use tariff revenue to provide cash bailouts to farmers, but Congress would likely need to vote to authorize such a move, triggering a major fight between Republicans and Democrats amid already dire government spending conversations.
GOP lawmakers could also move to refill the internal USDA fund in their government funding fight later this fall, but that too will be a battle with Democrats.
Hill Republicans have been quietly working on their own proposal to find additional funding for the farm bailouts, according to four other people with direct knowledge of the matter. Some Republicans estimate they will eventually need to provide $35 billion to $50 billion in aid to farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs. Source
Thursday, October 2, 2025
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Erika Kirk new messiah of MAGA Christianity...
Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow and new messiah of MAGA Christianity
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin set out last Thursday to answer the million-dollar question on the American right: Who will be the next Charlie Kirk? “You,” Youngkin said. “All of you.”
The Republican politician was addressing a packed auditorium at Virginia Tech, the university where Charlie Kirk — the MAGA youth leader and a key ally in Donald Trump’s victory in the last U.S. elections thanks to his ability to attract young voters — had been scheduled to speak. It should have been the third stop on a tour of various campuses that began on September 10 in Utah Valley, the day when a bullet ended his life while he was debating before a crowd of students. “You will have a leader that’s extraordinary,” Youngkin added. “Erika Kirk has demonstrated that she not only has the courage of a lion, but she has the heart of a saint.”
The activist’s widow and mother of their two children has emerged as an influential figure in U.S. politics after her husband’s murder. But particularly since the memorial held last Sunday in honor of Kirk, who was killed at age 31. The event was somewhere between a Republican rally and religious service, and drew 100,000 people, spread across two stadiums in Glendale, Arizona. At the memorial — an extraordinary collision of religion and politics — Charlie Kirk was celebrated as a “martyr” by Trump and much of his Cabinet.
Erika Kirk said she had forgiven her husband’s alleged killer, a 22-year-old man named Tyler Robinson, “because it’s what Christ did.” Raised in a Mormon and Republican household, Robinson, according to court documents and the testimony of his relatives, had lately embraced leftist positions and confessed to his partner that he was tired of the “hate” he believed Kirk was spreading through his ultraconservative rhetoric.
Her words, especially when contrasted with those spoken shortly afterward by Trump — “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I am sorry Erika” — won praise from both sides of the political spectrum. They even drew approval from Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian who had been briefly suspended from his show after a remark about Robinson — a move that sparked criticism of the government attacks on free expression. “If you believe in the teachings of Jesus as I do,” Kimmel said, his voice breaking, during the monologue marking his return to the air, “there it was, that’s it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow.”
“Of course, the rhetoric of forgiveness is preferable to that of holy war, but we mustn’t forget that she has also used that rhetoric,” explains Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the relationship between religion and political power in the United States and author of The Family in a telephone interview. Sharlet is referring to the speech Erika Kirk gave a couple of days after her husband’s murder, in which she said: “You have no idea the fire that you ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”
“We also shouldn’t forget that her forgiveness came after other speakers [in particular Stephen Miller, deputy to the White House chief of staff] compared her to a ‘storm,’ a ‘sword,’ and a ‘dragon,’ and before
Trump spoke openly of hatred, only to then embrace her in a hug — almost like a representation of the male and female archetypes of Christian nationalism,” says Sharlet, referring to one of the core tenets of a certain strand of the American right: the blind faith that American identity can only be Christian.
According to Sharlet, “few did more for that idea than Charlie Kirk. He told his followers to go to church, yes, but above all, he brought the church into the MAGA world, because now MAGA is the true faith: that is Christian nationalism.” Source
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