Authored by Peter Mitchell via RealClearDefense (emphasis ours),

Golden Dome has captured headlines as America’s next-generation missile defense shield in the debates around the FY 2026 defense budget’s trillion-dollar price tag.

But danger lurks between the headlines. America’s fighter fleet—the smallest in modern Air Force history—lacks the numbers needed to both protect the homeland and secure the skies abroad. While no one questions that fighters have a vital role in homeland defense, the trouble is that we simply don’t have enough of them. Neither the defense budget nor the $150 billion reconciliation package include plans for multi-year aircraft procurement.

New Threats to the Homeland

Iran’s 2024 attacks on Israel delivered a masterclass in modern air defense—and a preview of threats heading our way. When Tehran launched hundreds of drones and cruise missiles, it was primarily fighters—Israeli F-35Is supported by American and Jordanian aircraft—that decimated them over Iraq and Syria before they could reach ground-based defenses. The lesson was unmistakable: fighters are the indispensable first line of any modern air defense system.

The threat to the American homeland from these cheap, hard-to-detect weapons is now enduring, not episodic. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the potential for attacks on American soil is higher than at any point since the late Cold War. Ground-based defenses like Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis BMD are essential but can’t do it all on their own. The nature of their equipment makes them relatively immobile and limited by terrain and curvature of the earth.

Fighters, by contrast, are highly mobile. They can visually confirm targets, ensuring that no civilian aircraft is accidentally attacked. Fighters can reposition quickly, cover vast areas heedless of terrain, and be aerially refueled to extend their range. A single F-35A can carry over 22,000 lbs of ordnance using its external hardpoints—providing a flying magazine capable of confronting dozens of threats in a single sortie. Future technologies promise even greater effectiveness. Directed-energy weapons could provide a virtually unlimited magazine to counter drone swarms at minimal cost per shot.

With the rise of small and cheap drones the need for fighter-based defense at home is more urgent than ever. These weapons can be launched from mobile platforms, fly low and evade radar, and slip past static systems with their small radar cross-section.

America’s Shrinking Air Superiority

Yet just as this threat materializes, the Air Force finds itself with the smallest fighter fleet in its history. Only one-third of our fighters are 5th generation aircraft—F-22s and F-35s—with the stealth and advanced sensor suites essential for detecting and engaging modern threats. The remaining two-thirds are aging 4th generation platforms.

The math becomes alarming when we consider new homeland defense requirements. Maintaining continuous combat air patrols around critical infrastructure and population centers would strain our already overtaxed fighter squadrons. The Air Force needs to produce 72 new fighters annually just to maintain its current inadequate numbers. Yet actual procurement is barely half of that, with the Air Force only receiving 42 new F-35As in its 2025 budget request.

Building Capacity for the Long War

This production shortfall isn’t just a procurement hiccup. It’s a strategic vulnerability that adversaries are watching closely. In any high-intensity conflict, combat losses would quickly deplete our limited inventory. America lost 3,744 fixed-wing aircraft in nine years during the Vietnam War. The Air Force currently has around 1,300 fighters. Against peer competitors with advanced air defenses, loss rates would likely be higher, and—with no industrial surge capacity to replace downed aircraft—disastrous.

The solution requires a fundamental shift in how America approaches fighter procurement. Just as we’re revitalizing missile and shipbuilding capacity through multi-year procurements, we need similar stability for aircraft production. Long-term contracts would enable manufacturers to invest in expanded production lines, automation, and workforce development. American industrial capacity isn’t just about peacetime fleet size; it’s about wartime resilience.

A Multi-Domain Dome

Golden Dome will be multi-domain, integrating ground, sea, air, and space-based assets into a seamless web. The ground layer—Patriot, THAAD, and GBI—provides point and area defense. The sea layer extends this umbrella with Aegis destroyers and cruisers. The space layer, with new infrared sensor satellites already in development, provides crucial early warning and targeting data.

But it’s the air layer—fighters on combat air patrol—that gives the system its flexibility and forward reach. Fifth generation fighters, with their advanced sensors and stealth characteristics, can operate in contested environments where fourth generation aircraft cannot survive. They can serve as flying command posts, data fusion centers, and interceptors, extending the defensive perimeter hundreds of miles beyond American shores.

Investing in Peace

Lawmakers face the choice to invest in proven capabilities or to continue in our current vulnerability. The failed Iranian attacks have demonstrated that we need more fighters and the industrial capacity to sustain them through conflict. This is not extravagance but strategic necessity.

The ongoing modernization of our ground- and sea-based defenses is essential but insufficient. Only 5th generation fighters—and their eventual 6th generation successors—can meet this requirement. Without such a robust fighter force, our air superiority on offense and defense will be able to be exploited by adversaries.

Securing American skies demands industrial commitment and technological innovation. Multi-year procurement contracts for fighter aircraft, similar to those revitalizing our missile and shipbuilding industries, would provide the stability needed to expand production capacity.

Golden Dome’s success will ultimately be measured not by the sophistication of its technology but by its ability to prevent attacks. Without a recommitment to America’s air fleet and the industrial capacity to sustain it, that mission remains in jeopardy. When it comes to building America’s future, the cost of not investing in our air fleet could be catastrophic.

From RealClearWire

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

This week a 49-year-old naturalized American citizen has been sentenced to a decade in federal prison, after confessing to traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State.

Lirim Sylejmani pled guilty to terrorism charges in December, and was sentenced by a federal court on Monday.  Sylejmani had attended an ISIS training camp beginning in November 2015, after moving from Kosovo to Syria with an intent to joint the terror group. “The defendant will spend a decade in prison thinking about the betrayal to this country,” US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said in a statement.

UPI writes that “Prosecutors said he changed his name to Abu Sulayman al-Kosovi and trained alongside other recruits to be an ISIS soldier following his arrival in the Middle Eastern country. His training included instruction on using AK-47 rifles, PK machine guns, M-16 rifles and grenades.”

According to the Defense Post:

When the Kosovo-native was 23, he found refuge in the United States after fleeing a genocidal regime. Sixteen years later, he decided to join one.

Sulejmani is one of hundreds of American citizens believed to have joined Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014. But as the Trump administration transfers dozens of high-priority ISIS suspects from makeshift prisons across northeast Syria as U.S. troops levels draw down…

But the unspoken irony and contraction here is that he had joined the Syrian battlefield at a time the West was “looking the other way” as thousands of international jihadists joined the fight to topple Assad (a fight that the CIA and Pentagon were supporting covertly). NATO member Turkey had essentially opened the border, a ‘jihadi highway’ into Syria as part of the covert effort to overthrow the Syrian government.

The other irony is that the US has just embraced Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani), who himself was at one point early in the Syrian proxy war a personal emissary of ISIS terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Apparently some kinds of terrorism are OK, according to Washington’s regime change playbook…

Jolani is also well-known for being the founder of Syria’s initial al-Qaeda branch, Jabhat al Nusrah, which has since morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which rules from Damascus in the wake of Assad’s overthrow in December. HTS has even spent a long time on the US terrorism list, though the $10 million bounty which had been on Jolani’s head has recently been removed by the FBI and US Treasury.

As for Sulejmani, he had long been held in an prison near Hasakah run by the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Thousands of suspected ISIS fighters were held there for years, amid efforts to send foreign fighters to their respective home countries for prosecution.

Sulejmani had actually asked to be deported to Kosovo, due to it being largely Islamic and a small country, but that didn’t happen. Kosovo was recognized as a nation by the Bush administration, after it was forcibly peeled away from Serbian control following years of war as well as NATO military intervention.

Meanwhile, Syrian AQ founder al-Sharaa is planning to travel to New York in December to address the United Nations…

“Moderated” Al Qaeda leader to address UN General Assembly in New York in September.

What a time to be alive.
https://t.co/uQOil90Mxl

— Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) June 3, 2025

Confused Americans might rightly be asking: what was 20 years of the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) really all about? What was it all for?

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Food and Drug Administration on June 2 launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool.

FDA officials said Elsa, the tool, will help employees “work more efficiently.”

The agency is utilizing Elsa to speed up clinical protocol reviews and scientific evaluations, as well as to identify targets for inspections.

FDA officials described Elsa as a “large language model–powered AI tool designed to assist with reading, writing, and summarizing.” They said it can summarize adverse events to help with safety profile assessments, compare labels faster than humans, and generate code to help develop databases.

“Today marks the dawn of the AI era at the FDA with the release of Elsa, AI is no longer a distant promise but a dynamic force enhancing and optimizing the performance and potential of every employee,” FDA Chief AI Officer Jeremy Walsh said in a statement.

AI refers to computer systems that perform complex tasks typically performed by humans.

Dr. Marty Makary, the FDA’s commissioner, said in May that the FDA would immediately start using AI and fully integrate it by the end of June.

“Following a very successful pilot program with FDA’s scientific reviewers, I set an aggressive timeline to scale AI agency-wide by June 30,” Makary said on Monday.

“Today’s rollout of Elsa is ahead of schedule and under budget, thanks to the collaboration of our in-house experts across the centers.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the FDA’s parent agency, cheered the development, calling it “a revolution in public health” in a post on social media platform X.

The FDA recently fired thousands of employees. HHS officials had said they would cut about 3,500 full-time workers but ended up terminating about 2,500 workers, according to a Senate Democrat report.

Makary told a congressional panel during a recent appearance that no scientific reviewers were fired, although some research scientists were among those terminated.

President Donald Trump has promoted the use of AI, saying in one order that “with the right Government policies, we can solidify our position as the global leader in AI and secure a brighter future for all Americans.”

The first report from Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission, headed by Kennedy, contained markers of AI, including nonexistent studies and multiple instances of “oaicite,” which developers say is inserted by OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI tool.

“The pattern is consistent with other cases we’ve seen of using generative AI to create citations,” Dr. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch and executive director of The Center for Scientific Integrity, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“The fact that these fake citations made it into the report are evidence that no one checked the report for rigor. That should concern anyone who reads it or considers relying on it.”

The 73-page report was updated in late May to fix 58 errors, including 39 citation errors, according to an Epoch Times analysis.

When asked whether the commission used AI, the White House referred reporters to HHS, which declined to directly answer the question.

“Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same—a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children,” a spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

By James Varney and RealClearInvestigations.com,

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals—not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines—pose no threat current to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in Net Zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent—or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Some renewable supporters acknowledge Mills’ point. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which supports government-funded research on recycling panels and turbines, said the “circular economy” Mills referred to has yet to materialize.

“With the existing energy infrastructure, a lot of end-of-life questions have never been addressed,” the Alliance’s executive director, Logan Burke, told RCI. “It may be that those costs have to be embedded in the front-end, but somehow we need to make the market circular. How do we find that market at the end of their useful life?”

Just how many panels the U.S. will dispose of or retire each year is also unclear. No clearing house keeps track of national figures, according to Meng Tao, an energy engineering professor at Arizona State University and a consultant on renewable waste issues.

The estimates can vary widely. Solar panels generally have a life expectancy of 25 years, but factors like damage and system upgrades make the number of panels coming out of circulation each year impossible to ascertain. In 2021, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which did not respond to a request for comment, estimated that between 3,000 and 6,000 panels would be retired annually through 2026.

Critics say even the high end of those numbers seems suspiciously low given the hundreds of millions of panels now in use and tens of millions yet to come.

The problem will not be confined to the U.S. Several European countries are further down the NetZero road than America, and in March, the European Union estimated it “will cumulatively amass 6-13 and 21-35 million tons of (solar) waste by 2040 and 2050, respectively.” The waste coming from wind turbines will be even greater, the EU said, sounding a hopeful note that recycling renewables will become more prominent.

“Both PV [photovoltaic] and wind power infrastructure waste streams require special handling and recycling methods that are not widespread in Europe today,” the EU wrote.

The U.S. accounts for roughly 10 percent of the waste, according to several experts, and Tao estimated the U.S. would be producing roughly 2 million metric tons of solar waste a year by 2043, but other studies have a much higher figure. A 2019 study in renewable energy predicted roughly 10 million metric tons of solar waste between 2030 and 2060.

“Solar waste will grow exponentially in the next 20 years,” Tao said. “Globally, we produced 20-25 million tons of solar panels in 2023. They will come offline in roughly 20 years. That is 20-25 million tons of solar waste a year in 2045.”

The Institute for Energy Research puts the potential mountain even higher, pointing to studies that put the 2050 figure at 78 million tons.

For now, 90 percent of this detritus goes to landfills. And the panel fields and towering turbines must be dismantled, trucked away, usually by diesel-powered vehicles, and then sent to landfills or ports, where they are shipped to poor, developing countries. Fossil fuels may foul the air, but renewables may pollute the ground.

There has been promising research, most of it government-funded, on making components like turbine blades more recyclable, but the Trump administration appears unlikely to continue such funding. Such a shift under Trump would put the onus for developing more recyclable, renewable equipment on the private sector.

But the recycling industry as a whole has never been dynamic. Indeed, the last few years have seen widespread admissions that the recycling revolution that has led Americans to separate their trash into various categories has been a bust.

The push to make renewable waste renewable has smacked up against basic questions of profitability, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University.

“The recycling industry overall is not one that has blossomed in the last 50 years; it’s just not a booming industry,” he said. “You’re going to need enormous amounts of installations and this stuff is made to last, made tough, which is the enemy of recycling. So it’s all still a big challenge and I think there are a lot of unanswered questions or we’ll be left with a lot of stranded assets.”

Tao agreed that, absent more profit, the recyclable future for renewable equipment is dim.

“We still don’t have a perfected technology for recycling them, we’re not there yet,” he said. “We’re trying to see how the industry will move forward, but there are multiple challenges, including the fact it is not profitable.”

Renewable energy champions insist all this will mean big business, perhaps as much as $2.7 billion in solar recycling in 2030, according to one estimate. But for now, it isn’t. Clark said his company clears about $5 from each panel.

It isn’t only the lagging technology and market pressures. At root, there isn’t much in the panel worth recycling. There are tiny amounts of silver and copper, along with some silicon, but those wafers are deep within a compressed sandwich of glass and other elements. Crushed glass has some limited value in construction, but extracting the small amounts of valuable components is an intensive, high-tech process, Clark said.

Ausubel said he thinks the smaller residential solar market can probably handle itself and that the real work will be disposing of millions of panels in the sprawling fields. Because unraveling the panel’s crunched knot is difficult and expensive, it only makes sense to recycle panels in the thousands, and the residential solar market is of less interest, Clark said.

“It’s like mining that way,” he said of the process. “The way they are assembled, stacked, with the cells intertwined and wired together amid sheets of plastic, resins, glue and the like.”

And all leaching cannot be prevented. While the hazardous materials contained in each solar panel, like its valuable elements, are slight, they could present a long-term problem. Even if a landfill strictly adheres to EPA regulations, the leaching from potentially millions of panels poses health risks that Tao compared to mercury poisoning.

Laws mandating recycling have proved difficult to enforce.

“To date, no single regulatory framework has been developed to serve as a North Star for renewable energy project end-of-life planning, leaving a patchwork of federal, state, and local policies and regulations to sift through—and leaving project owners and developers, as well as landowners and other interested parties, to fend for themselves,” a 2024 report concluded.

For example, Washington passed a law mandating solar panel recycling in 2017, but it has yet to be enforced. Currently, the law is set to take effect on July 1, but the Department of Ecology opposes that date in part because manufacturers and consumers have proved reluctant to pay the recycling costs, crimping the solar market there.

“The state’s clean energy transition is facing a setback if the law goes into effect on July 1, 2025,” the department said. “If the law is unchanged, it would disrupt the supply and cost of panels available for sale in Washington.”

The question of who will pay to dismantle the panels, transport them to landfills or recycling centers, or even, in some cases, ship them abroad has been left unanswered in most states. Lobbyists for wind and solar projects, eager to keep costs low, along with lawmakers captivated by the concept of a NetZero future, have left the market too lightly regulated, said Jason Isaac, founder and chief executive of the American Energy Institute, which supports “abundant, affordable and reliable energy.”

In many cases, when highly regulated power companies look to build a new plant, laws require them to set aside money in bonds or escrow accounts to cover or defray decommissioning costs, Mills said. That is not always the case. A recently decommissioned coal mine in northern Louisiana may cost $300 million to break down, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which says those costs will probably be borne by ratepayers. But Isaac and Mills believe financial decommissions requirements have been either ignored or insufficiently funded in the renewable market.

Some state legislatures, like Louisiana’s, are moving to address that vacuum and prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the cleanup bill.

“The goal is to not leave the state or a farmer with a field of broken solar panels by putting in cradle-to-grave assurances of bonding requirements,” said H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute, a group skeptical of apocalyptic global warming scenarios. “We need to treat these like any other energy source.”

In April, Burnett testified in Baton Rouge on just such a law, prompted in part by a solar field in Livingston Parish that has been damaged over the years by hurricanes. In 2022, the legislature passed a bill requiring a bond from renewable project builders, but the specifics of that have not been promulgated, leaving new projects in limbo, said Rep. Brett Geymann, a sponsor of the new bill.

“No existing projects here have required decommissioning, unless that’s part of a private contract with a landowner,” he said.

A small number of solar panels are even finding a secondary market in places like Haiti, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere, Clark said. Groups like Brighten Haiti, which did not respond to a request for comment, take replaced panels that still have some life in them to that impoverished island, although some said that amounts to misguided philanthropy.

“It’s sort of a ‘nice’ way of dumping, really,” Tao said. “Because those places have no clue what to do with it in the end.”

All of these issues are outweighed by the carbon emission reductions renewable energy represents, according to other experts. Paul Gipe, a California-based energy analyst and proponent of wind, said concerns about renewable waste are overblown and advanced by enemies of NetZero goals.

“Solar panels are mostly glass, so glass is easy to recycle,” he said. “Wind turbines are mostly metal; again, easy to recycle. Most of the concern about ‘recycling’ is fear, uncertainty and doubt from the usual suspects.”

It’s true that turbines, which have a lifespan of about two decades, are mostly metal, but they nonetheless present their own set of end-of-life problems. While most of it may be recyclable, breaking down and transporting the gigantic contraptions on land or offshore requires tremendous labor—and energy. The thousands of tons of concrete that make up their bases will likely remain in the ground or on the ocean floor in some form for decades, according to Mills and others.

Blades on offshore turbines today can be as long as a football field, and the structures are equal to 10-story buildings, with those offshore sitting on an ocean floor slab as big as a city block.

“These offshore things are not renewable and not clean—it takes boat loads of equipment out to the sites to build and maintain them, and it will take boat loads to bring it all back,” said Robin Shaffer of Protect Our Coasts, a grassroots group that began fighting a since-scuttled offshore project in New Jersey.

What’s more, bankruptcies among European companies have begun to mar the renewable wind landscape as surely as the towers, a trend that could continue or accelerate as the Trump administration stops the federal spigot.

“The government has let them off the hook by shaping their policies around climate activism,” Shaffer said. “They’re not putting down escrow money for decommissioning and someone’s going to have to come along and remove them, or we’ll be staring at these rotting towers in the ocean.”

The blades are so big that they are usually broken into three pieces when decommissioned, and the giant chunks of fiberglass, resin, and composite materials go to landfills or warehouses.

Already, horror stories exist of municipalities faced with decommissioning problems. Towns like Sweetwater, Texas, which for many years has been the leading state for wind power, have seen turbine recycling contracts ignored. Global Fiberglass Solutions, one of the companies handling such contracts, did not return requests for comment.

“You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already,” Isaac said. “It’s an environmental disaster we’re looking at.”

Rockets were fired from Syria at Israel on Tuesday, for the first time in a year, according to the Israeli military (IDF) and media statements. 

“A group that calls itself the Martyr Mohammed Deif Brigades says it fired two Soviet-made ‘Grad’ rockets at Syria’s occupied Golan Heights,” Al Jazeera reports of the obscure or unknown militant group.

The rockets landed in open fields of the occupied Golan Heights and no damage or casualties were reported, but Israel was quick to say it will respond militarily to the attempted attack.

Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Israel views Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa as “directly responsible for every threat and [rocket] fire toward the State of Israel” and that “The full response will come soon.”

The group’s name and logo is in reference to slain Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, which is why Katz statement said he won’t allow for a “return to October 7.”

“We are a generation born under the bombs and raised on the sound of rifles that will not accept living in humiliation,” Katz’s statement said.

The Israeli military indicated it “recently attacked” southern Syria with artillery fire in the wake of the rocket launches from Syria, as part of the initial response. But a representative from the Syrian militant group declared that “Our operations will not stop until the bombing of the oppressed people in Gaza stops.” 

Israel has already bombed Syria hundreds of times in the wake of Assad’s December 8 ouster, ostensibly to ensure there’s no advanced hardware left over from the Syrian Arab Army.

As for Syria’s Sharaa (Jolani), he interestingly just days ago signaled he’s ready to make peace with Israel: “We have common enemies, cooperation is possible,” he said of the matter.

“I want to be clear,” al-Sharaa had said in reference to Israel. “The era of endless mutual bombings must come to an end. No country can thrive when its skies are filled with fear. The reality is that we have common enemies, and we can play a major role in regional security.”

Video purporting to show the rocket fire from Syria on Tuesday:

Several rockets launched from Syria reached Israeli-controlled Golan Heights

Right now, Israel is launching artillery and air strikes on Syrian territory in response to these missiles. The sender of the missiles is still unknown. pic.twitter.com/L7KA4OlfVX

— War Designer (@WarDesigner0) June 3, 2025

Of course, Israel had been bombing Assad’s Syria on a weekly basis prior to the regime change events of last December, and at that time the claim was that Iranian troops and assets were being targeted.

Syria for decades had the most feared Russian-supplied anti-air defense systems in the whole region, but Syria’s current status is that its skies are completely undefended and at the mercy of Israel, the Pentagon, and Turkey.

Authored by David Mansdoerfer via The Epoch Times,

America’s kids are navigating a health crisis, and our outdated K–12 health classes aren’t helping.

With childhood obesity at 20 percent, teen mental health issues doubling, and chronic diseases looming, the current curriculum—think food pyramids, anti-drug lectures, and awkward sex-ed—is woefully inadequate.

It’s time to transform these classes with a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) approach, empowering students with practical, science-based tools for lifelong wellness.

Nutrition education needs a complete overhaul. Ditch memorizing calorie counts for hands-on lessons in reading labels, spotting hidden sugars, and cooking affordable, nutrient-dense meals. Schools could partner with local farmers or chefs to make it fun, showing kids that real food isn’t just for influencers. Imagine middle schoolers mastering a stir-fry or high schoolers debating ultra-processed foods’ impact on their bodies. These skills build confidence and independence, setting kids up to make smarter choices in a world of fast-food traps.

Mental health demands equal focus. Anxiety and depression rates among teens have surged, yet coping strategies are rarely taught. A MAHA curriculum would introduce age-appropriate mindfulness, stress management, and sleep science. Elementary students could practice breathing exercises; high schoolers could explore how social media algorithms hijack their attention. Teaching kids to set tech boundaries isn’t coddling—it’s equipping them for a digital world where mental resilience is non-negotiable.

Physical activity must evolve beyond dodgeball and humiliating fitness tests. Only 24 percent of kids meet daily exercise guidelines. Health classes should inspire movement through yoga, strength training, or outdoor challenges. Schools could use wearable tech to gamify fitness, rewarding effort over athletic talent. The aim? Make exercise a joy, not a chore, fostering habits that stick into adulthood.

Prevention ties it all together. Kids need to grasp how lifestyle shapes their future, from cutting diabetes risk to boosting heart health. Lessons could use real data—like how 10,000 steps a day lowers disease risk—or feature doctors sharing relatable stories. This isn’t about scaring kids; it’s about showing they hold the reins.

Skeptics might call this overhaul costly or unrealistic, but poor childhood health habits fuel billions in healthcare costs annually. MAHA classes are an investment, like building roads—do it right, and the benefits compound. Start with pilot programs, retrain teachers, and tap community resources. This isn’t partisan—it’s common sense. Every parent wants their kid to thrive. By remaking health classes, we give students the tools to build healthier bodies, minds, and futures.

Let’s stop lecturing kids on health and start teaching them how to live it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by Oscar Zarrage Perez via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Last week, Ross William Ulbricht, at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, gave a speech about the principles of freedom, decentralization and unity.

Ross Ulbricht started by talking about his experience in prison and the price difference when he got into prison compared to now.

“When I launch Silk Road, buying a whole bitcoin will set you back less than a dollar,” said Ross.

“Pocket change. Can you imagine that? Now they are worth over $100,000 each.”

“Bitcoin’s power comes from the fact that any one of us can mine if we choose to, and any one of us can generate addresses if we choose to,” stated Ross.

“Any one of us can send bitcoin to anyone else. We are all on equal footing with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, we are all free.”

Ross told everybody to stay united and that if we are together we will be able to accomplish anything.

“When I was put in prison for life. I was isolated and weak. I was stripped of everything. Had nothing to give everyone, but you didn’t abandon me. You didn’t forget me. Wrote me letters. You raised money for my defense. When I was silenced, you spoke up against the slender and smearers and in the end when I didn’t know if I would ever get out from behind those thick iron bars. We even got President Trump to see that Bitcoin is the future.”

Ross ended his speech by saying, “please never see each other as enemies. Those that oppose decentralization and freedom love it when we are divided. Stay united. As long as we can agree that we deserve freedom and that decentralization is how we secure it. Then we can be united. We can have each other’s backs. Just like you had mine.”

“Freedom, decentralization and unity,” said Ross. “Stay true to these principles and the future is ours.”

Ross Ulbricht’s Journey: From Life Sentence to Presidential Pardon

Ross Ulbricht became a controversial figure after launching Silk Road in 2011, an online marketplace that used Bitcoin for anonymous transactions. While the site was unfortunately used for selling illegal drugs, it also served as Bitcoin’s first real-world use case, showcasing the power of decentralized, censorship-resistant money.

In 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to double life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

His punishment quickly became a symbol of government overreach for many in the tech and the Bitcoin world.

Critics argued that his sentence far exceeded the limits of justice, especially considering the nonviolent nature of his crimes.

His pardon, announced shortly after Trump returned to office, is seen as a strong move to honor campaign promises and support Bitcoin’s values of personal freedom and resistance to government overreach. It sparked celebration throughout the Bitcoin community but also reminded advocates that the fight for justice is far from over.

Ten years ago to the day, I was sentenced to die in prison. Instead I gave my first public speech in freedom.

I wore a red tie as an homage to @realDonaldTrump, the man who saved my life. pic.twitter.com/WWp0vL3C9T

— Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) May 30, 2025

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

The position of the United States on the Islamist Syrian government has been complex since the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took power in December. The HTS, after all, was effectively al-Qaeda’s Syria branch up until it distanced itself from the parent group, with al-Qaeda’s blessing, and started trying to present itself as a more palatable group with effectively the same ideology.

The US has very publicly warmed to HTS in recent weeks though, with President Trump praising HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly know as al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) as an “attractive” and “tough guy.” Keeping the HTS purely internal to Syria was seen as a key though, contrasting them to international Islamist movements with global aspirations. It was insisted that HTS exclude foreign Islamist fighters, despite many of the group’s high-ranking members actually being foreign Islamists.

Yet US officials are now confirming that they have blessed a plan whereby the HTS will directly integrate several thousand foreign Islamist fighters into the Syrian Army. The army is even creating a new division, the 84th Division, which will be made up of some 3,500 jihadist fighters, mainly Uyghurs.

Many of the Uyghurs are from the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is designated by China (and others) as a terrorist group. China had reportedly been pushing Syria to ban the group, though the strategy of the HTS seems to be just claiming the party no longer exists and have its members fully integrated into the military.

Looming large in this US-endorsed plan is the massacre of huge numbers of Syria’s Alawite minority, violence which began in March but has continued to this day. The HTS has tried to present the incidents as unrelated to their ongoing crackdown against Alawite militias in the same area at the same time, but the Alawites told a very different story.

Indeed, to the extent it wasn’t uniformed Syrian Defense and Interior Ministry personnel dragging Alawites into the street and shooting them, which was heavily reported as well, the killers were described consistently as foreign Islamists, including Uyghurs.

If the massacres continue to rage, and every indication is that they will, it will be increasingly difficult for the HTS to try to claim it’s not plainly their own newly integrated membership carrying out the sectarian killings.

Foreigners have even made into top ranks of the Sharaa (Jolani) government in Damascus…

the Newly Appointed Vice Minister of Defence in Syria.

What’s the catch? He’s Egyptian pic.twitter.com/5DPithlCRS

— Rūm ☦︎ن (@Antiochian_Rum) June 1, 2025

People defending the move are arguing if the HTS tries to exclude the jihadist fighters, they’ll just go join ISIS or some other such movement.

While that may be true, it also underscores that the HTS isn’t particularly dissimilar from ISIS in the first place, it’s simply the one that the Trump Administration has decided to support.

Back on April 14 when bond yields were soaring in the aftermath of Trump’s liberation day amid speculation that China or Japan were selling some of their US paper to stabilize their currency, a selloff which was compounded by the concurrent unwind of the massive $2 trillion basis trade, Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent appeared on Bloomberg TV to ease fears of a wholesale unwind of the US bond market. In the interview, among other things, Bessent revealed that he has breakfast with Powell every week, and also said that if the Fed does nothing, he might take matters in his own hands, and since the Treasury has a “big toolkit” one of the things it could do is “up the Treasury buybacks” (to prop up Treasuries, in lieu of QE). 

Six weeks later, with the Fed sidelined and unwilling to do anything to ease the plight of US treasuries which continue to trade at dangerous levels – the 30Y is flirting with a 5% level – it appears this is what Bessent has done.

At 2pm on Tuesday afternoon, the Treasury announced the results of its latest Treasury buyback operation (which some had likened to a QE lite because it effectively monetizes Treasuries in the open market, similar to the Fed’s POMO operations, and similar to stock buybacks). While the operation itself was not remarkable – the Treasury had been holding these these more or less weekly since April 2024 – the size of it was: at $10 billion, this was the largest Treasury buyback operation in history.

Here is a snapshot of all historical Treasury buybacks in the past year: the trajectory is clear.

And while the maturity range of the cusips accepted for buyback was of low duration, in the interval between July 15, 2025 and May 31, 2027, we are about to see sizable increases in the total buyback size of longer duration treasuries. 

Sure enough, tomorrow at 2pm, the Treasury will complete a buyback focusing on Treasuries maturing in the 2036-2045 interval, i.e., 10-20 year paper, and the maximum amount to be redeemed will be $2 billion, up 100% from the last such buyback on May 6, when the maximum amount to be redeemed was $1 billion. In fact, the last time there was a treasury buyback anywhere close to today’s amount was in mid/late April when Treasuries were tumbling and when someone had to step in and cushion their fall since Powell was nowhere to be found.

Which begs the question: with the political Federal Reserve – which had no qualms cutting rates two months before the election but refuses to do so now that core PCE has slumped to the lowest level since the covid crash, is Bessent finally stepping in to rein in the Treasury market, and is Yellen’s Activist Treasury Issuance strategy which dominated bond buying for much of 2023-2024, about to be replaced with Bessent’s Activist Treasury Buyback strategy until such time as the Fed finally does something. 

Authored by James Bovard via The Brownstone Institute,

Biden administration policy-makers hated you more than you knew. 

From the start of the Covid pandemic, I warned that the feds were vilifying anyone who failed to kowtow to the latest commands. In October 2023, I wrote: “Federal bureaucrats heaved together a bunch of letters to contrive an ominous new acronym for the latest peril to domestic tranquility. The result: AGAAVE—’anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism’—which looks like a typo for a sugar substitute. The FBI vastly expanded the supposed AGAAVE peril by broadening suspicion from ‘furtherance of ideological agendas’ to ‘furtherance of political and/or social agendas.’ Anyone who has an agenda different from Team Biden’s could be AGAAVE’d for his own good.” 

Vague, catch-all federal definitions became a Pandora’s box that permitted politicians to denigrate vast numbers of Americans as dangerous extremists. The House Weaponization Subcommittee warned in 2023 that “the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the Administration’s political narrative” that domestic violent extremism is “the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently declassified a December 13, 2021, report by the National Counterterrorism Center. Gabbard’s version had a more honest title than the original version: “Declassified Biden Administration Documents Labeling COVID Dissenters, Others as ‘Domestic Violent Extremists.”

What did it take for Biden’s Brain Trust to covertly condemn people? Simply warning that “COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, especially for children, are part of a government or global conspiracy to deprive individuals of their civil liberties and livelihoods, or are designed to start a new social or political order.” After government lockdowns had destroyed millions of jobs, only the paranoid would fear the government would ever violate their liberties or subvert their livelihoods. No wonder that a top federal official told Newsweek in 2022: “We’ve become too prone to labeling anything we don’t like as extremism, and then any extremist as a terrorist.”

Biden policy-makers pretended that the surge in criticism of Covid policies was proof of the psychopathology of the president’s opponents. But in September 2021, Biden dictated that 100 million Americans working for private companies must get the Covid vaccine. The official counterterrorism report stated that it anticipated that “the threat will continue at least into the winter, as many of the new COVID-19 mandates in the U.S…are implemented, including US workplace vaccination policies that carry disciplinary or termination penalties.” The Supreme Court struck down most of that vaccine mandate as illegal in January 2022, but not before it had profoundly disrupted legions of lives and businesses, as well as American health care. 

The official report warned that “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists…characterize COVID-19 vaccination and mask mandates as evidence of government overreach.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito characterized the Covid dictates as “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” But that wasn’t “overreach” – it was simply public service. 

Criticisms of Covid policies were turbocharged by the failure of the Covid vaccines. In early 2022, the effectiveness of the Covid booster shot had fallen to 31% – too low to have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Though most American adults had gotten Covid vaccines, there were more than a million new Covid cases a day in January 2022. Most Covid fatalities were occurring among the fully vaxxed. Studies showed that people who received multiple boosters were actually more likely to be hit by Covid infections.

So obviously, the Biden administration had no choice but to demonize any and all Covid critics. A confidential 2022 Department of Homeland Security report detailed pending crackdowns on “inaccurate” information on “the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines,” among other targets. A few months earlier, Jen Easterly, the chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, declared: “We live in a world where people talk about alternative facts, post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.” Plenty of Biden administration officials considered it “really dangerous” to permit people to assert that Covid vaccines were failing. 

The National Counterterrorism Center report noted: “The availability of a vaccine for all school-age children might spur conspiracy theories and perceptions that schools will vaccinate children against parents’ will.” In the same way that some states and many school systems have sought to enable children to change their gender without their parents’ knowledge or consent? The report also warned that “new COVID-19 mitigation measures – particularly mandates or endorsements of vaccines for children – will probably spur plotting against the government.”

The FDA knew that Covid vaccines sharply increased the risk of myocarditis – an inflamed heart – in young males but the Biden White House browbeat the agency into fully approving the Covid vaccine anyhow. New York Governor Kathy Hochul sought unsuccessfully to mandate vaccines for all schoolkids in the Empire State even though her State Department of Health reported in May 2022 that the Pfizer vaccine was only 12% effective for children during the Omicron surge. The Biden administration included Covid vaccines in the semi-mandatory regimen for young children despite the vaccine’s failure and perils. 

Portraying doubts on Covid policy as a warning sign of domestic violent extremism unleashed the FBI to target anybody who howled against mandatory injections or the near-total destruction of their freedom of movement. 

That report is also a reminder that “extremism” has always been a flag of political convenience. In Washington, anyone who doesn’t worship government is considered an extremist. How far did officialdom go in smearing the American people? 

In September 2022, President Biden made history with the first prime-time presidential speech with a backdrop inspired by the movie V for Vendetta and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Biden raved that his opponents were practically assassins waiting to finish off American democracy. A few hours before Biden’s speech, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, “When you are not with where the majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” This is a definition of extremism that could put the federal crosshairs on practically anyone who visits this website.

Actually, the feds used definitions of extremism that extended far beyond Covid controversies and undermined the First Amendment. Biden’s FBI targeted conservative Catholics who preferred to hear the Latin-language version of the mass, claiming they were potentially violent extremists. An FBI analysis portrayed rosaries as extremist symbols. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) stretched its “suspicious behavior” definition, warning banks to track “‘extremism’ indicators that include…the purchase of books (including religious texts),” according to a House Judiciary Committee report. Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained that the federal government “urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”

That December 13, 2021, National Counterterrorism Center report may be only the tip of the iceberg of federal mischief. We may soon learn of more direct federal machinations to vilify, undercut, or silence Covid critics.

Biden-era crackdowns and the newly declassified report should spur Americans to ask: What if the government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?

An earlier version of this post was published at The Libertarian Institute