Authored by Jacob Howland via UnHerd.com,.

Peter Thiel is a big thinker, and these days he’s been thinking about Doomsday.

In a series of four lectures he’s given three times, at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin, he’s tried to understand human history, and particularly modernity, within the framework of biblical prophecies of the End of Days.

Thiel believes that the Antichrist, whose identity is uncertain – is it a person, a system, a global tyranny? – is “not just a medieval fantasy”.

His free-ranging lectures, moving rapidly between disparate texts (Gulliver’s Travels; Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen) and topics (sacred violence; high-velocity global financial systems), defy easy summary.

But their leading themes include the Antichrist’s relationship to Armageddon and the roles of technology and empire in the Antichrist’s rise. It’s an ambitious, thought-provoking attempt to weave, from seemingly unrelated strands of meaning, a theological/anthropological/historical narrative that aims to make sense of the whole of human experience.

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd.

How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John?

Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously?

As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread.

They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilisation. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilisation, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

While the past displays a seemingly endless cycle of civilisational rises and falls, Thiel believes that modern science and technology have turned history into a linear progression, as the Bible teaches, with a beginning and a final, irreversible end. From its inception, technology — a political project as much as one of engineering — has dangled before us the shimmering promise of godhood, with which the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the project’s 16th- and 17th-century founders, rightly understood it to be an anti-Christian endeavour that needed to be cloaked with a veil of religious orthodoxy.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which describes a secretive, ostensibly Christian community of scientists devoted to the experimental investigation of the properties and uses of all material things, features a prototype of the modern research university called the College of Six Days’ Works. Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which advances (with a similar veneer of piety) the bold promise of making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature”, has six parts in imitation of the first six days of God’s creation. In both books, the Sabbath — the seventh day devoted to God — falls by the wayside. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration further hints at the transgressive nature of technology. It features a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), a landmark the divine hero established to warned ancient sailors not to exit the Mediterranean into the unnavigable Atlantic. And the book’s epigraph, “Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased,” is from the prophecy of the End of Days in Daniel 12, as if to suggest that the expansion of technological power would bring history to its apocalyptic conclusion.

An early modern conceit that has in many respects become a late modern curse, technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is it the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force mentioned at 2 Thessalonians 2:6 that forestalls the Antichrist (the Greek word katechein means “to hold down”)? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa. In the absence of the existential threat of Communism, for example, Western countries like the US and UK, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state. Even so, there is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”.

The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God. Speech is a living voice that springs from the soul — to give interiority its biblical name — embedded in body of an existing individual. But AI is not a living being, and it replaces inner plenitude with mechanical, algorithmic emptiness. Embeddedness in space and time expresses itself as concern for, and responsiveness to, the actual conditions of existence, the biblical paradigm of which is Adam’s naming of the animals who live alongside him in Eden. But while AI requires material substrates — servers and other hardware — it inhabits them in purely occasional and contingent ways, like the demons that beg Christ to pass from the mad Galilean to the herd of pigs. Its relationship with actuality is equally contingent. It exists in a digital cloud of pure possibility, where it arranges information according to no criterion of truth besides probability and the rules of logic. That’s why ChatGPT and other LLMs are so prone to hallucinations, like citing books that exist only in Borges’s fictional, virtually infinite Library of Babel.

Yet, like the sham philosopher and bad citizen Plato calls “the sophist”, who is equally indifferent to truth, AI has a seemingly divine ability to imitate virtually anything with lifelike plausibility and vividness, and in multiple media. The market, whose whims have for decades guided the world’s best software engineers, has made this soulless capacity of representation, tailored to the tastes of the individual consumer, available to almost everyone on the planet. It has taught us to spend hours every day in its virtual reality, entertaining or distracting ourselves with the shadows it casts on the walls of our own private caves. Yet, using AI for more serious purposes is no less a Faustian bargain. Every advance AI makes in serving our desires degrades fundamental human capacities and gives it more mastery over human beings. Using AI to navigate makes us less capable navigators. Using AI to write makes us less capable writers. Using it to make decisions weakens our executive capacities of judgement and action. Peak AI, ministering to the inner emptiness and boredom of atomised, directionless selves, will mean peak human debility and enslavement. Aren’t these the goals of the Antichrist — which, whatever form it may take, always seeks to remake human beings in its own image?

Not so fast: perhaps AI is really a katechon. That is the argument of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Karp (a classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford who also studied philosophy and, with Thiel, founded Palantir Technologies) and Zamiska, his longtime deputy, insist that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done using LLMs. They acknowledge that this will require a massive cultural shift among our technological and cosmopolitan elites, who’ve embraced an “ethereal”, “post-national”, and “disembodied” morality that scorns patriotism, and who’ve learned “that belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided”. Yet it is the market’s deployment of advanced technology, including AI, that has above all promoted this “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (the title of the book’s second part), not least by rapidly dissolving social bonds, encouraging pathological self-absorption, and making possible — even incentivising — digital swarms of doxxing and online cancellation.

Considered in the context of Karp’s and Zamiska’s urgent call to arms, the revelation of this contradiction is genuinely apocalyptic. Whether it will accelerate or slow the advent of the Antichrist and the bang or whimper of the world’s end depends on our individual and collective capacities to make informed decisions that call for moral courage — capacities that have been eroded by technologically-induced oblivion, historical, moral, and metaphysical forgetfulness, and our ingrained habit of “ced[ing] direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market”. Contemplating our predicament, it is hard not to feel discouraged. Hope alone remains in the Pandora’s box our clever man-gods have constructed — hope, without which the understanding (at least, for those whose prayers delivers no consolation) would be plagued by the perplexity and fear that have flown therefrom. It’s time to take it out of the box and hold it close to our hearts and minds, where it might inspire new growths of wisdom.

*  *  *

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

David Tregear, a Victoria man, saw his Equifax credit score unexpectedly drop to zero, leaving him unable to access loans or credit. He had stopped using credit to avoid debt but never expected to be penalized, according to CBC.

“I was just stunned,” Tregear said. “What do you mean I don’t have credit?”

Equifax only explained the issue after CBC’s Go Public got involved, citing a rarely publicized policy: credit scores may be reset to zero after long inactivity.

Tregear’s score was around 700 before it vanished, and now he must rebuild it from scratch — a catch-22, as lenders reject him without an existing score.

Go Public found no law governs how credit scores are calculated in Canada, giving private agencies like Equifax unchecked control.

CBC writes that consumer advocate Geoff White called this lack of transparency a major flaw in the system, saying, “A credit score is a very important piece of information. It shouldn’t be arbitrarily wiped out through lack of use of credit.”

Tregear spent over a year filing complaints with multiple regulators, only to be referred in circles. It was only after media attention that B.C. consumer agencies agreed to investigate — after previously turning him away due to jurisdictional confusion.

“I’m being punished for living debt-free,” Tregear said, as he continues to face major barriers without a credit score.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

An executive order on science slipped through last week with almost no comment from the media. Its central concern is to set science on a better path after so many years of egregious abuses in which the core principles of science have been set aside in favor of political messaging.

The title is “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” It is an ambitious attempt to reframe what science is and does, not to politicize it but exactly the opposite. Only better science with the highest standards, the order says, is capable of restoring trust.

You have surely heard that the Trump administration is waging war on science. Read this order: the opposite is true.

“Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly. A majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis. The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research.”

To solve the problem, the order seeks to “restore the American people’s faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good. Reproducibility, rigor, and unbiased peer review must be maintained. This order restores the scientific integrity policies of my first Administration and ensures that agencies practice data transparency, acknowledge relevant scientific uncertainties, are transparent about the assumptions and likelihood of scenarios used, approach scientific findings objectively, and communicate scientific data accurately.”

The gold standard of science has the following features, say the order:

(i)   reproducible;

(ii)  transparent;

(iii)  communicative of error and uncertainty;

(iv)  collaborative and interdisciplinary;

(v)  skeptical of its findings and assumptions;

(vi)  structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;

(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;

(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and

(ix)  without conflicts of interest.

If anything like this really began to govern scientific standards, many things would change. NIH will be using these standards for funding science for the next four years. One hopes it will last further. There is tremendous wisdom here. In the end, it will be up to journal editors and science reporters to adapt new standards of scrutiny over what is good science and what is not.

Consider just one principle: communicative of error and uncertainty. This profoundly affects the hypothetical models that have come to play a huge role in policy decisions. Nearly all the climate change papers rely on elaborate models that presume to reveal exactly what they presume. Once you dig through these things, you almost cannot believe that they were published.

‘Honey, can you take out the trash?”

“Not now. I’m working on a model to prove it is wholly unnecessary to do so. My model further reveals that the trash will never need to be taken out again, given the assumptions. It’s science.”

Models are also what drove the world to lock down for a virus. We all saw the drawings that urged us to flatten the curve. They presumed exactly what they were attempting to demonstrate. Instead of seeing the obvious fakery, most science reporters acted like the PhD’d prophets were contemporary versions of Nostradamus.

That was only the beginning of an amazing tsunami of fakery that lasted for years.

I’ve recently revisited the standards by which the initial vaccine trials for SARS-CoV-2 were run. We hear that they were placebo-controlled and randomized. That is supposed to make all other questions irrelevant.

Remember that there are two standards: effectiveness and safety. Most of the doubts about the shots these days focus on safety and rightly so. But even if we isolate the effective part of the question, we run into astonishing examples of manipulation and subterfuge.

* The trials lasted just long enough (2–4 months) to capture an immune response but not long enough to show that it evaporates quickly after. By 5 months and following, effectiveness wanes further and further. The trials simply could not capture this, though it is highly likely that the manufacturers knew this was inevitable. By the time people caught on, the shot salesmen had another product to hawk from their wagons. They called it a booster.

* The trials defined fully vaccinated as two weeks following the second dose, snagging the absolute peak of response but neglecting anything else. The protocols were laid out to succeed on paper even if they did not really succeed in real life.

* The trials seemed rigged to minimize participation from the population groups that were most vulnerable to significant medical consequences of infection while including as many non-vulnerable groups as possible, thus skewing the results.

* The trials claimed effectiveness against hospitalization and death but the number of unvaccinated people in those affected groups was so low as to be statistical noise. The studies were underpowered. In one trial, only 10 people in the unvaccinated group landed in the hospital. It was on this basis that the shot was said to prevent that.

* The trials wholly excluded accounting for asymptomatic infection, which means they did not test for transmission at all, thus deleting all concerns to stop the spread and so on. In other words, people who took the shot could still spread the virus but the trials were structured to ignore that signal. When it became obvious, the promoters pretended to be amazed and shocked.

* Many trials later unblinded placebo groups that were offered vaccines as early as December 2020, thus removing the control group. They deliberately eschewed following up on the best feature of the trial design, clearly with an attempt to cover up unfavorable results.

* Everyone knows that these viruses mutate very quickly but the rushed trials dealt only with the initial wild type, which, by the time the shot arrived, was already changing to a new variant. This was clearly not a mistake!

Experts published all these criticisms as it was happening. It was extremely difficult for nonspecialists to keep up. I can personally recall receiving a flood of submissions detailing each of these points. It was overwhelming, especially since all these criticisms pertain only to whether the shot even worked to do what they claimed. Safety then became another problem.

It was like watching a magic show: you know it is not real but everything is moving too quickly to debunk it in real time. In any case, there is zero chance that all these issues and problems were mere mistakes. They were all designed to do exactly what they did, but even then the public was skeptical. At that point, the politicians decided to assist industry and force everyone to take the shot.

And yet it gets better. All other boosters for variants were approved based on the old results of the presumably unimpeachable trials. The boosters were never tested in any rigorous way. They would inject a few mice, observe an immune response, and call it a day. Top officials at the FDA even resigned because they could not stand by and watch this unfold as it did.

I’m still gobsmacked that all this happened.

Very clearly, the pharmaceutical companies are genuine experts in how to deploy the appearance of science without the reality.

The new executive order should prevent this sort of thing in the future. Indeed, the new head of the FDA has specifically said that no more shots will be approved without well-constructed and transparent trials using the highest standards. Given what we know, there is no chance that any more versions of this shot will even be approved. The manufacturers won’t even attempt to try. Indeed, Moderna has already stopped its work on a combination COVID/Flu shot, knowing full well that they cannot get it through.

The new standards are highly welcome but the long-term solution is to erect a much higher wall between government and science. Ideally, government would stop funding research altogether simply because the effort has proven to be so dangerous.

Science in the first and second industrial revolutions was largely decentralized. Innovation came not from government but from private tinkerers and practitioners with real-world experience. The period from 1850 to 1900 gave us the world we know today, born not of agencies with huge budgets but businessmen, doctors, engineers, and builders, looking for better ways to serve humanity at a profit or at least with minimal losses. In those days, we did not call the results “technology” but rather the fruit of the “practical arts.”

I’ve always adored that term and wish we could take it back.

What changed about science in the 20th century is that it began to serve the cause of powerful interests rather than the people. After the Second World War and following the ominous deployment of nuclear weapons, there was no turning back.

This is what must be fixed. The ultimate goal of gold-standard science must be to restore the rigors of past achievements without the corruptions that come with politics.

In this way, the cause of science should welcome a pull back in government backing of science. The funding by industry posing another unique set of problems but at least in this case there is no doubt about the purpose and drive. It’s validity can be assessed in light of that.

If you want to travel back in history and get a glimpse of the spread of violent Bolshevism across Europe in the early 20th Century, the west coast of the US in 2025 is a close parallel.  Seattle in particular has become a cesspool of extreme Antifa activism and apathetic local governance.  It’s a place where zero tolerance is displayed for differing political views and violence is considered an acceptable strategy to silence opponents.  Seattle is a glimpse back to the height of the woke era, and a warning of what could happen if the political left is ever allowed to gain real power again.

As we covered last week, Antifa groups organized and descended on a Christian event held by Mayday USA in Cal Anderson Park, within the same area that was once the “CHAZ autonomous zone” during the riots of 2020.  The reaction from the woke mob to the peaceful free speech event was vicious and at least 23 arrests were made by police. 

What the local news does not mention, however, is the fact that these kinds of disruptive actions are a regular occurrence in the Seattle area.  Any visit from a conservative group or speaker in a public venue is immediately swarmed and attacked; people who attend the events are specifically targeted for harassment.  Antifa isn’t only seeking to intimidate the speakers or the organizers, they go after anyone who shows up to listen.  The establishment media will never show you most of these incidents.

Breaking: Violent Trantifa members attacked a detransitioned gay man (in the glasses and grey suit) who was attempting to go to the Christian worship event at City Hall in Seattle. Video by @camhigby: pic.twitter.com/ItwL6vX2cw

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 28, 2025

What activists get away with is astonishing. The behavior on display is grotesque and the Seattle police have done very little to stop it.  To put it plainly, 23 arrests is nowhere near enough.  No one is safe from these people, including women, children, the elderly and journalists.

Antifa targets mother and baby at Christian worship event in Seattle. Send in the National Guard! pic.twitter.com/dakqrxzaD4

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) May 28, 2025

In some cases, the police yell at those filming the activists and their crimes, instead of forcing the activists to behave.

I was just physically chased by Antifa militants and trans activists outside the pro-Christian rally in Seattle.

Dozens of Seattle PD officers came to my rescue. I was told I am no longer allowed to be on the outskirts from my own safety. pic.twitter.com/6VPYTVt3XS

— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) May 28, 2025

A common methodology of Antifa groups is to provoke – They surround a target to harass and intimidate, blocking their path or herding them in another direction.  If the target strikes back to defend themselves, the protesters then cry “assault”. 

Breaking — Journalist @choeshow was just assaulted by trans Antifa activists outside of Seattle City Hall.@SeattlePD made two arrests.

The incident occurred ahead at the pro-Christian rally calling for Mayor Harrell’s resignation. pic.twitter.com/JaxCFR2LLk

— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) May 27, 2025

At a Riley Gaines speaking event at the University of Washington in Seattle, Antifa freaks stalked attendees as they left and threatened them with death.  The police did nothing.

“It would be so beautiful to see your bodies hanging from the tree”

Trantifa/Antifa members threatened an elderly couple leaving a @Riley_Gaines_ event at the @UW campus. Police had to escort them as the militants followed. Video by @KatieDaviscourt: pic.twitter.com/ZapSmwQo8y

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 7, 2025

The intimidation tactic skirts the line of free speech and protest in every way, but activists are given considerable legal immunity by the city government. 

Antifa followed a woman walking with a cane & encouraged her to kill herself for attending a women’s rights event at @UW in Seattle featuring ex-collegiate swimmer @Riley_Gaines_. The extremists followed attendees to their cars to broadcast plate numbers. pic.twitter.com/hCY3lNR2XW

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 7, 2025

The notion that Antifa is just an “idea” rather than an organized group of people is nonsense.  These mobs are highly coordinated and they are clearly trained in provocateur strategies.  Whether or not they are being paid to show up is something that should be investigated.  FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino says the agency is looking into the targeted violence against the Christian event last week, but he should also look into the complicity of city officials as well as the possibility that NGOs are funding the activists in question.

Antifa and other woke groups have become accustomed to doing whatever they please without real consequences and this needs to change.  Violent leftists thrive in environments where permission is assumed; in other words, they expect to receive special treatment from the government and police.  The fact that 23 of them were arrested is a kind of miracle given the complicity of Seattle’s Mayor Bruce Harrell, but it is a limited measure.  The reality is that most of those people will likely be released with a slap on the wrist, and the cycle begins all over again.

Keep in mind, any conservative group using the same tactics would be met with an aggressive response from the city and they would be labeled domestic terrorists in the process.  Seattle’s Antifa problem is a symptom of a greater disease; the wokeness trickles down from the government and poisons the rest of the community.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Federal government scientists will likely be told to stop publishing in medical journals such as The Lancet, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a new podcast.

Kennedy said that if that happens, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will launch its own journals to publish research from its scientists.

Kennedy was speaking on the Ultimate Human Podcast in an interview released on May 27.

The health secretary said existing journals have serious problems, including not publishing datasets. That makes it hard to replicate studies and incentivizes cheating, he said.

“What we’re going to do is we’re going to devote probably 20 percent of NIH’s budget to replication; every study has to be replicated,” Kennedy said.

“We’re going to publish the peer review for the first time. We’re probably going to stop publishing in The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt.”

Kennedy cited Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet. Horton has written that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue,” with issues such as conflicts of interest and small sample sizes plaguing the field.

Kennedy also referenced comments from former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell, who wrote in 2009 that “it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.”

The current publication system means researchers must pay to get their research published, and often involves pharmaceutical companies funding research that supports their products, Kennedy said.

“Unless these journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there, and we’re going to create our own journals in-house in each of the institutions,” he added later. “And they’re going to become the preeminent journals.”

A spokesperson for the New England Journal of Medicine told The Epoch Times in an email that the journal has “an impeccable record of scientific rigor and independence.”

“We use rigorous peer review and editorial processes to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the research we publish, whether the work comes from academic or industry authors,” the spokesperson said.

“NEJM will continue to focus on publishing scientific breakthroughs to improve the health of Americans and people around the world.”

The Lancet and JAMA did not return requests for comment by publication time.

The NIH did not respond to an inquiry by publication time.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, and Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, are on the editorial board of a publication, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, that was founded earlier this year. The journal centers on open access, open peer review, paying and acknowledging reviewers, and letting any members of the academy publish their research “without article gatekeeping,” Martin Kulldorff, one of the founders, said in its first issue.

Both Bhattacharya and Makary are listed as on leave from the board.

The Make America Healthy Again Commission, which is chaired by Kennedy, recently said in its first report that American children have been getting sicker in part because of “overmedicalization” that is driven by “‘corporate capture,’ in which industry interests dominate and distort scientific literature, legislative actions, academic institutions, regulatory agencies, medical journals, physician organizations, clinical guidelines, and the news media.”

Assumptions about scientific literature, such as that the journals have confirmed the articles are accurate, are incorrect, the commission said. For instance, journals often don’t have access to patient-level data from researchers, which makes them unable to verify the accuracy of the reported data.

One of the commission’s 10 recommendations was that the NIH launch an initiative “to confront the replication crisis, investing in reproducibility efforts to improve trust and reliability in basic science and interventions for childhood chronic disease.”

In a first since 2012, an American flag has been raised over the long shuttered US embassy in Damascus, Syria.

The US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack – along with some US Marines – were on hand for the flag raising ceremony for the re-opening of the ambassador’s residence, which marks another huge milestone in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s December 8 overthrow as Al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took over the country.

With regime change accomplished, Saudi and other Gulf and American money is quickly pouring in, and in the wake of President Trump having lifted the long in place sanctions during his Gulf tour this month.

Ambassador Barrack “met with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa and attended the signing of an agreement for a consortium of Qatari, Turkish and U.S. companies for development of a 5,000-megawatt energy project to revitalize much of Syria’s war-battered electricity grid.”

WaPo details further, “Under the deal signed Thursday, a consortium led by Qatar’s UCC Concession Investments — along with Power International USA and Turkey’s Kalyon GES Enerji Yatirimlari, Cengiz Enerji — will develop four combined-cycle gas turbines with a total generating capacity estimated at approximately 4,000 megawatts and a 1,000-megawatt solar power plant.”

The US-led sanctions ultimately served the punish the Syrian population, even as Western officials feigned humanitarian concern for the suffering of the masses. But all along the Western and Gulf capitals poured billions in arms, munitions, and training into hardened jihadi groups – including HTS – led by one-time ISIS emissary Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (President Sharaa), which helped fragment and burn the country.

Syrian-Armenian Christian and geopolitical analyst Kevork Almassian explores an interesting theory and reporting of what happened in the immediate lead-up to Assad fleeing the country on a Russia-bound plane in early December:

THREAD: The speed at which the Syrian Army disintegrated raised eyebrows even among its most ardent opponents. Many knew a military operation was underway, but few understood the invisible war happening behind the frontlines.

Now, we may do. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/UBVmylLhEj

— Kevork Almassian (@KevorkAlmassian) May 28, 2025

The US Embassy closed up all operations in Damascus in protest of the Assad government in 2012, as the proxy war ramped up. The embassy still kept up its online presence and operations from neighboring Jordan, and also often referred people to consult the US Embassy in Beirut.

At the time US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford had actually traveled to various cities in Syria, fomenting street protests and ‘revolution’ against Assad – and all the while the CIA was pumping weapons into the insurgency, and many of these Islamist fighters had ironically just come from Iraq, where they had spent years been blowing up Americans and Iraqi civilians.

Meanwhile, the jihadis now in control of the Syrian state have been engaged in ethno-religious cleansing ‘score settling’ especially in coastal areas near Tartus and Latakia. This has involved mass killings targeting Alawites, Christians, and Druze – and sectarian fighting which has at times entered the environs of Damascus.

Middle East Christian lobby groups which work on Capitol Hill have meanwhile complained that President Trump should have more firmly linked the lifting of sanctions with firm demonstration that the HTS government would protect Christians and other Syrian ‘minority’ communities. The country has been rife with foreign jihadist fighters ever since the height of the US/Gulf backed proxy war for regime change, and the blood-letting of innocents is likely to continue. Washington has largely been silent.

Authored by William Barclay via RealClearPolitics,

When FBI director Kash Patel condemned Canada allowing Islamic terrorists to gain a foothold in North America, Canadian politicians and pundits, including new Prime Minister Mark Carney, dismissed Patel’s assertions as baseless fearmongering.

Unfortunately, it is clear that the Trump administration is correct: Radical Islamic ideology has become endemic in Canada over the past decade.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service itself has confirmed that, since 2015, radical Islamic ideology has become commonplace throughout Canadian society, as a result of the porous borders and the Liberal government’s unwillingness to effectively regulate the influx of international migration into Canada. Numerous terrorist leaders and those with intimate connections to terrorist organizations such as Samidoun and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been permitted to migrate within the Canadian state and promote their own nihilistic ideology over the past decade.

Islamic schools in Canada are not compelled to abide by a standardized curriculum and, consequently, covertly promote radical Islamic ideology and extremism to vulnerable children in Canada. At one prominent Islamic school in Canada, the East End Madrassah, administrators were recently pressured to issue a public apology after it was exposed for “… teaching children that treacherous Jews conspired to kill the Islamic Prophet Mohammed.”

Since 2015, explicit Islamic terrorist acts have become increasingly prevalent in Canada.

According to data from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “[N]early a dozen terrorism-related incidents [have occurred] in Canada or abroad involving Canadians” since Oct. 7, 2023, alone. In addition), “The number of terrorism charges laid in Canada jumped 488% last year” and “Canadian police have foiled six terrorist plots in the last 12 months alone, with arrests spanning from Edmonton to Ottawa to Toronto.” The Liberal government recently publicly downplayed a report from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth, & Development Office that a “terror attack attempt in Canada is very likely.”

The globally renowned Counter Extremism Project has recently reported that “within the past few decades, several hundred Canadian civilians have been killed or injured in incidents related to violent extremism,” and that, in spite of the glib posturing and “apparent policy shifts in the Trudeau government, Canada has historically viewed violent Islamist extremism as one of the leading threats to its national security.”

In addition, the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre recently warned the Canadian government that Canada will likely “experience a lone-wolf terror attack soon … and antisemitism is overwhelmingly the motivating factor.”

And to Kash Patel’s point, over the past decade Canada’s porous borders and the Liberal government’s tolerance of Islamic extremism have functioned in concert to enable various terrorists to transgress from Canada into America to commit crimes and even mass murder.

In 2024, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a longtime resident of Canada, attempted to carry out a mass shooting in support of ISIS in New York City, and Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the ISIS terrorist who committed the horrific “Bourbon Street Attack” in New Orleans, was also previously permitted to travel freely between Canada and the U.S. Furthermore, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service itself has long recognized Canada’s modern transformation into an exporter of Islamic terrorism and for years has attempted to “monitor and respond to the threat of Canadian extremist travellers (CETs).”

According to Director Patel and the FBI, “over 300 known or suspected terrorists crossed into this country last year illegally … 85% of them came through [Canada and] the northern border,” and “This year, 100 known or suspected terrorists have crossed into this country illegally, 64 or so from the north.” Even Justin Trudeau, Canada’s previous prime minister, was recently forced to admit that “bad actors … have been exploiting [Canada’s] immigration system for their own interests.”

Despite all this, the Canadian political establishment and the media have stubbornly denied any suggestion that Islamic extremism has successfully entrenched itself within Canada.

More importantly, it is readily apparent that until the Liberal government starts to earnestly secure Canada’s borders and begins to excise Islamic extremism from within Canadian society, Canada will continue to serve as a womb for Islamic extremism in North America and a constant source of terrorism in the U.S.

William Barclay is a political theorist and private consultant, as well as a Contributor for Young Voices. William’s work has been published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Palgrave-Macmillan, The Hill Times, and the Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, among others. Follow William on Twitter/X @WillBarclayBBC.

China’s overarching central planning model, meant to keep the economy from keeling over, has become so tangled up it is next to impossible to keep track of fake supply and even faker demand. It is also starting to dangerously resemble late stage USSR, when supply-side economics covered up the rot in the economy until the absolute end.

According to Reuters, with its economy slowing, if not contracting, China is pressing its coal-fired power plants to stockpile more of the fuel and import less in an effort to shore up domestic prices, but traders are skeptical the measures will help to stop the slide.

The coal industry in China faces rising coal stockpiles after a massive expansion of output following shortages and blackouts in 2021 is churning out more coal than even the world’s largest thermal power fleet can consume.

To support money-losing miners whose profits are under growing pressure, the state planner has asked power plants to prioritize domestic coal and increase thermal coal stockpiles by 10%, setting an overall target of 215 million metric tons by June 10, the sources said. However, with inventories piling up along the supply chain, the guidelines would be unlikely to spur much buying or support prices.

Mine stockpiles are up 42% from a year ago, while northern Bohai area port inventories are up 25% annually, the state-run China Energy Daily has said. Buyers are also being asked to procure coal from northern ports to chip away at high port stockpiles, three Reuters sources said.

The NDRC’s moves follow months of calls from industry groups and companies to curb coal imports and output. Chinese coal prices have marched steadily downwards, however. Prices for medium-grade coal with a heat value of 5,500 kilocalories per kilogram stood at 620 yuan ($86) per metric ton on Tuesday, the lowest since March 2021.

Prices have fallen so far that some buyers have tried to wiggle out of long-term contracts in favor of spot sales.

China imported a record 542.7 million tons of coal in 2024, but the total is expected to fall this year. Coal imports slid 16% in April on the year.

Chinese mine production continues to grow despite the collapse in prices, with a government haunted by the shortages and blackouts of 2021 and 2022 unlikely to consider output cuts.

“I think they’re very mindful to avoid a repeat of that,” said LSEG lead coal analyst Toby Hassall. “They will tolerate a period where some domestic production is really struggling.”

China’s coal production rose 6.6% on the year during the period from January to April, to stand at 1.58 billion tons.  At the same time, industry profits fell 48.9% year-on-year for the same period, official data showed on Tuesday.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Sixteen states are suing the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the agency’s recent actions against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accused NSF of taking actions jeopardizing “America’s longstanding global leadership in STEM.”

“First, NSF announced that it would no longer abide by Congress’s longstanding policy to promote a robust STEM workforce that draws in underrepresented populations,” the states said in the May 28 filing.

On April 18, NSF announced updated priorities for its funding programs. It clarified that efforts aimed at broadening STEM participation “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

“Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities,” it said, noting that projects relying on “DEI frameworks or advocacy do not effectuate NSF priorities.”

According to the complaint, on the same day that NSF published its updated priorities, the agency started issuing termination notices for several projects, many of which are in the plaintiffs’ states.

Affected projects include those seeking to “increase STEM participation by women, minorities, and people with disabilities; that study misinformation; and that address environmental justice,” according to the filing.

The second NSF policy challenged in the lawsuit is the agency’s May 2 announcement that it would cap indirect costs on research projects at 15 percent. Such costs include expenses related to lab space, facility operations, and security for sensitive research.

This rate cap is “far below the rates” that higher education institutions have negotiated with the federal government, according to the complaint.

In a May 28 statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who co-led the lawsuit, said the “administration’s attacks on basic science and essential efforts to ensure diversity in STEM” will weaken the economy and national security.

“Putting politics over science will only set our country back, and I will continue to fight to protect critical scientific research and education,” James said.

According to her office, NSF’s April 18 directive has resulted in the cancellation of funding for 18 programs worth $11 million within the City University of New York that specifically sought to “promote participation in STEM fields by women, minorities, and people with disabilities.”

The lawsuit asked the court to issue an order declaring the NSF’s new policies illegal and blocking their implementation.

The Epoch Times reached out to the NSF for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Terminating DEI Grants

The NSF is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering fields by issuing research grants. Its investments make up about 25 percent of the federal support received by U.S. colleges and universities for basic research.

NSF has been under the scanner of Republicans over its DEI policies. In February, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database of more than 3,400 NSF grants issued under the Biden administration worth more than $2.05 billion, according to a Feb. 11 statement from the lawmaker’s office.

The funding was used for pushing “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” or “questionable projects” promoting DEI, it reads.

One of the awards was a $401,744 grant issued to San José State University in 2022 to train students and teachers to be “climate justice action researchers and change agents.” A $1 million grant given to Northwestern University in 2023 sought to reimagine STEM education through the framework of “racial equity.”

“DEI initiatives have poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans,” Cruz said at the time.

Under the Trump administration, NSF has undergone a radical change.

The agency’s updated priorities now state, “Awards that are not aligned with program goals or agency priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), environmental justice, and misinformation/disinformation.”

According to a May 21 update, NSF has terminated more than 1,750 research grants worth more than $1.36 billion. Affected institutions include Harvard University, Cornell University, Purdue University, the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and Vanderbilt University.

“NSF continues to examine awards to ensure they align to agency priorities,” the agency said.

When ZeroHedge asked leading voices in the MAHA Ag Movement how the Trump administration could partner with America’s farmers and ranchers – an industry that rarely agrees on anything – unanimously agreed that restoring Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) is a top priority. 

In the years leading up to 2015, the USDA was trusted by consumers and ranchers to fairly grade and label meat – giving only the most prime “product of the U.S.A.” its stamp of approval. 

“Throughout 2013 and 2014, beef and cattle prices rose to the highest nominal levels in history, and cattle producers were finally recovering a profit from the marketplace itself,” said Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF USA.

Advocates point to these profit increases as evidence that consumers prefer to buy meat raised in the United States when given product transparency. However, it wasn’t long before the “Big 4” corporate meat Packers convinced Mexico and Canada to file a trade barrier complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

Starting in 2015, Congress capitulated to the demands of the Big 4 and the WTO, sullying consumer confidence in the USDA’s stamp with cheap imports.

In 2022, some progress was made with the American Beef Labeling Act, introduced by then-Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD). However, the legislation still allows a sizable caveat for the Big 4 corporate meatpackers who own 85% of the livestock marketplace—and growing. 

In 2009 It became mandatory to know what country our beef came from via the MCOOL (Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling) policy overseen by the USDA

In 2015, under the Obama administration it was removed supposedly over concerns from the WTO ( World Trade Organization)

As we…

— Dr Shawn Baker 🥩 (@SBakerMD) May 10, 2025

“Products materially altered or transformed within the borders of the United States,” are still allowed to be stamped and approved by the USDA as a “Product of the U.S.A.” This includes frozen meat imports, or live animals that have been raised in another country,  so long as they’re processed or packaged in the United States.   

The result of this form of plagiarism has been catastrophic for American farmers and ranchers, with domestic cattle volumes at a 70-year low and the United States losing farms at the rapid rate of 77 per hour. 

With recent promises from the Trump administration, and talks of partnerships to Make America Healthy Again, COOL became the central focus during a press conference with the new Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture.

During the presser, Chairman John Boozman (R-AK) – a former optometrist – signaled that he might not be seeing eye-to-eye with America’s farmers.  

“No, you know,  that’s a, that’s such a, it’s a controversial issue,” Boozman responded to the question of restoring COOL in the Farm Bill.

“So that’s another issue we need to look at in the Farm Bill,  and work through, just to see what the ramifications are. So many times you do things and then they have unintended consequences. So, in order to make a decision, and times change, uh, thinking changes. Sometimes you do need to change the direction you’re going in. But, you need to do that, or something like that with, you know, by having hearings and really understanding exactly what the ramifications would be one way or another.” 

The MAHA report, outlining solutions, is expected to be released by August. Policy outlines will be considered as the bicameral Agricultural Committees draft their new versions of the Farm Bill—expected sometime in September. 

Restore transparency on supermarket shelves—otherwise, consumers will lose trust and turn to cleaner beef alternatives.