Authored by Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Every year, it got more intense. The advertisements started earlier and earlier. The lawn decorations became bigger and brighter. And the consumerism—the craving, spending, and debt—got to be too much.

Family time seemed to be slipping away. It wasn’t what parents wanted for themselves and their children. Something had to change.

That version of the Christmas story is familiar to many Americans who have grown weary of the many social and financial obligations attached to the holiday season.

The sentiment is humorously expressed in a social media meme: “The War on Christmas cannot end until Christmas stops its illegal occupation of November. I am calling on the Claus regime to return to the borders agreed upon in the Black Friday Agreement.”

Yet the ever-growing demands of the holiday season can exact a toll on financial and emotional well-being.

More than two in five U.S. adults report feeling stressed during the holidays, according to the American Psychological Association. More than a third say the holidays feel like a competition.

Some 28 percent of Americans who charged 2023’s holiday gifts on a credit card still owe some of the balance, according to a survey conducted by The Harris Poll for NerdWallet.

Amid the crush of holiday obligations, we found some families who have found ways to pare the expectations back and create meaningful, joy-filled Christmas celebrations.

While they were quick to point out that they’re not down on the Christmas season itself, they valued taking control of their calendar, setting financial boundaries, and focusing more on religious traditions.

Anticipation

The holiday season has been growing longer since 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. Thanksgiving had been celebrated on the last Thursday of the month, which fell on Nov. 30 that year.

Concerned that the shortened shopping season would dampen the country’s recovery from the Great Depression, Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week. Congress made the change permanent in 1941.

Thus began Black Friday and what would later be called “Christmas creep,” the gradual lengthening of the holiday season. Christmas advertising and store decorations are now seen routinely in October.

A common theme among families who have retooled their holiday practices is to delay celebrating Christmas until much closer to the day itself. For many, that involves Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas observed by Roman Catholics and many Protestants. The purpose is to cultivate one’s spiritual life in anticipation of the celebration of Jesus’s birth.

For Rebecca Teti, 56, of Hyattsville, Maryland, Advent is a way of pushing back against the ever-increasing social and financial expectations of the holiday season.

Raised in a mixed Jewish and evangelical Christian home that celebrated the cultural symbols of the season, Teti converted to Catholicism as an adult. She and her husband, Dennis, reached a turning point after celebrating their oldest child’s first Christmas with the extended family.

“We went over to the grandparents’ house, and here’s this poor little toddler who’d be perfectly happy playing with a tube of cardboard, and he had to keep opening presents. It was just way too much,” Teti said.

Teti and her husband began the practice of Advent with their children. Though the kids are now grown, the couple still spends the four weeks before Christmas in prayer and reflection rather than partying and decorating.

“We don’t do parties, we don’t do lights, we don’t do decorations until much closer to Christmas,” Teti said. “If I do let myself get caught up in preparation, preparation, preparation, it kind of spoils the celebration.”

Delayed gratification is difficult for our culture to accept, according to Tracy Hilts, pastor of Living Hope Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“Advent requires an intentionality that does not come naturally to our Western mindset,” Hilts wrote in an article for the Evangelical Covenant Church website.

Yet the waiting is part of the joy for those with whom we spoke.

Sherry and Nathaniel Binversie of Fort Wayne, Indiana, heighten the anticipation of Christmas by placing an Advent wreath and candles on their dining room table.

An Advent wreath commonly contains four candles, lit one by one over the four weeks of the Advent season.

“We light the candles at every meal,” Sherry Binversie, 32, told The Epoch Times. “We’re marking the time as the light of Christ is coming.”

The Teti and Binversie families also wait until Epiphany to exchange gifts with their immediate families. That holiday, which falls on Jan. 6, marks the visit of the three wise men, or Magi, bringing gifts to Jesus. It is the day after the traditional 12 Days of Christmas, which symbolize the journey of the Magi.

“That has worked really well for us because it makes Christmas morning less about gifts and more about the joy of Christ’s coming and being able to be with family,” Teti said.

Part of the fun for the children was being able to eat whatever they chose from Christmas through New Year’s Day. Ice cream on a Monday? Sure, it’s Christmas!

Faith

The overwhelming majority of Americans, 91 percent, celebrate Christmas. That includes 82 percent of those with no religious affiliation and 74 percent of adherents to other religions. That’s according to Lifeway Research, an evangelical research firm associated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

While most are aware that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, fewer than half attend a church service during the holiday season.

For the families we spoke with, Christmas becomes more meaningful and enjoyable when they focus on the spiritual meaning. That involves some traditional religious practices. While that typically includes attending a church service on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, most of their religious traditions take place at home and involve the entire family.

Kathleen and Vincent Birch of Fort Wayne, Indiana, use an Advent calendar to count down the days until Christmas with their oldest child. An Advent calendar features a set of numbered windows or drawers that conceal a treat or other object.

Read the rest here…

Another American has been slapped with a lengthy prison sentence in Russia. On Tuesday a Moscow court ruled that Gene Spector, a dual national, is guilty of espionage for which he was given a 15-year prison sentence.

The case stemmed from or at least was added onto a prior 2020 guilty plea involving Spector mediating bribes for a previous aide to former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, according to TASS.

“Independent Russian outlet Media Zona, who had a journalist inside the courtroom, reported that Spector was sentenced to 13 years in a maximum security penal colony on espionage charges,” CNN reports.

“His previous charge for bribery was added to this term, meaning he was handed down a 15-year sentence, it reported, adding that Spector was also fined 14,116,805 rubles (around $140,500),” the report continues.

Spector is believed to have already been in jail for years amid the pending court proceedings. Little in the way of specific information on the alleged crimes have been made public, with the court citing national security secrecy. 

TASS has described that he served as chairman of the board of directors of Medpolymerprom Group, which produces cancer drugs. 

According to some of the details of Spector’s background via The Washington Post:

The trial was held behind closed doors “due to the secrecy of the case materials,” according to the country’s Interfax news agency. “Only the introductory and resolutive parts of the sentence were announced by the court.”

Spector was born in what was then the Soviet Union and later moved to the United States, where he obtained citizenship. He moved back to Russia as an adult and became an executive at a medical equipment company.

The Associated Press has recently listed the growing list of Americans behind bars in Russia, some of who have been set free in prisoner swaps with Washington.

In August of this year Russia and Washington conducted a historic prisoner swap which led to the freedom of former US Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

JUST IN: Three Americans are back on US soil following their release from Russian detention in a historic prisoner exchange with Moscow.

Follow live updates: https://t.co/pCsiV5uZ0Q pic.twitter.com/TPbFDGEE8b

— CNN (@CNN) August 2, 2024

Eight detained Russians had been sent from the US back to Russia as a result of the swap. Earlier in the Ukraine war the Biden administration came under political fire for agreeing to release international arms trafficker Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was arrested and convicted in a Moscow court on a minor marijuana charge.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

What would you do if a great cataclysm brought a sudden end to our society and you were forced to survive on what you currently have on hand?  When I was growing up, very few people thought of such things.  In fact, I never heard the words “prepper” or “prepping” until I became an adult.  But now everything has changed.  

Millions of Americans are spending enormous amounts of money to prepare for apocalyptic scenarios that they believe are quite likely to play out in our near future.  According to Investopedia, approximately 20 million Americans now consider themselves to be preppers…

Doomsday prepping has become a bona fide area of investing, with experts putting the average annual growth of the survivalist sector at over 7% until 2030 and some 20 million Americans now identifying as “preppers”—about the size of entire states like New York.

That is a significant portion of our population.

And they are spending a ton of money.

One recent survey discovered that spending on prepping supplies reached about 11 billion dollars during one recent 12 month period…

The survey found that, collectively, preppers spent around $11 billion within a 12-month period. According to the survey, preppers tend to live in the Western part of the U.S. and spent the most money on basics like food, water and toilet paper.

As our society comes apart at the seams all around us, more Americans than ever are determined to achieve at least some level of self-sufficiency while they still can.

People from all across the political spectrum and that come from all walks of life are feverishly preparing for a very bleak future.

Of course there is not a general consensus about what that very bleak future will look like.

In this article, I am going to specifically address how to prepare for life in a post-apocalyptic world.  Many preppers are preparing for scenarios that are far less extreme.  The type of scenario that I am talking about in this piece is a situation where all of our major institutions are no longer functioning and society as we have known it has totally broken down.

What this means is that the items in the list that I am about to share with you will not be needed right now.  But if an apocalyptic event or a series of apocalyptic events suddenly brings our society to an end, you will definitely need them.

I am imagining a time when there will be no functioning supply chains, and so there will be nothing to buy in the stores.

And since there will be no functioning supply chains, you will not have access to gasoline or propane.

So I have not included any items that are dependent on gasoline or propane in my list.

Also, please keep in mind that this list is not comprehensive and is only intended to represent the bare minimum that you will need.

There are countless other items that you could add to this list, but for this article I wanted to focus on the basics.

With all of that being said, the following is a list of 24 things that you will desperately need in a post-apocalyptic world…

#1 Emergency food to feed your family

#2 A water filtration system to clean your water

#3 A ferro rod for starting a fire

#4 An extensive first aid kit for health emergencies

#5 An emergency supply of antibiotics

#6 A multitool that has pliers, a knife, a saw and a screwdriver

#7 A solar-powered generator

#8 A solar flashlight

#9 An emergency shortwave radio so that you can stay informed

#10 Fishing gear

#11 Seeds for planting a garden

#12 A wood stove

#13 An axe for cutting wood

#14 A quality shovel

#15 Paracord

#16 Duct tape

#17 A hand-crank can opener

#18 A very warm winter jacket for every member of your family

#19 A durable backpack for every member of your family

#20 A compass

#21 A good pair of binoculars

#22 Wool blankets

#23 A Bible

#24 A way to protect everything that you have stockpiled from the marauding hordes that will be desperate to take all of it away from you

In a post-apocalyptic scenario, how long do you think that you would last?

In any survival situation, there are four big areas that always must be addressed: food, water, power and shelter.

Of course many would add security to that list.

In a world that has gone completely mad, there will be many that will be willing to do whatever it takes to stay alive.

If you live in an area that has a high population density, it may become nearly impossible to survive no matter how much preparation work you have done in advance.  When things hit the fan, you will want to flee to a less densely populated area if at all possible.

Many people ask me for prepping advice, and so I have tried to cover some of the most essential basics in this article.

But of course what I have shared here is just the tip of the iceberg.  Properly preparing for what is coming takes a tremendous amount of time, effort and energy, and the clock is ticking…

Authored by Elma Aksalic via The Epoch Times,

For children across the globe, one of the many joys of the Holiday season is anticipating the arrival of Santa Claus and his journey to deliver gifts waiting under the tree on Christmas morning.

With over 2 billion homes around the world and only so much time to complete the task, the “North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)” has given children the opportunity to not only track Santa’s progress in real-time but get involved in the action.

For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, NORAD “defends the homeland through aerospace warning, aerospace control, and maritime warning for North America.” But on Dec. 24, the organization makes it their mission to track Santa’s location.

Through NORAD’s “North Warning” radar System across 47 installations, along with satellites and fighter aircraft, the organization makes a point of checking the radar closely for indications of Santa Claus leaving the North Pole.

Every year, over 100,000 children call into NORAD in Colorado Springs, with volunteer’s standing by on Christmas Eve to answer any Santa or holiday related questions and in a number of different languages.

Additionally, through its website, NORAD offers Santa’s virtual North Pole Village, as well as a holiday countdown, games, a movie theater, holiday music, and a web store.

Bob Sommers, a civilian contractor and NORAD volunteer, told The Associated Press he’s often met with overjoyed callers, and makes it a priority to tell children they must go to sleep before Santa arrives.

“There are screams and giggles and laughter,” Sommers said.

The tracker also offers fun facts about Santa’s journey, including the speed at which his sleigh is traveling, how many stops he made so far, and the amount of presents left, making the experience interactive for eager children.

In an interview, Chief Master Sergeant John G. Storms of NORAD and USNORTHCOM Command Senior Enlisted Leader said it is his first year tracking Santa, and he is eager to see the system, used to protect North America every single day, be put into use for joyful reasons.

“I’m really excited to have an opportunity to participate, and the thing I’m most looking forward to is the interaction with all of the citizens spreading cheer during the holidays.”

Origins of Santa Tracking

The tradition began back in 1955, during the Cold War era, after a department store advertisement mistakenly printed the wrong telephone number for children to call Santa Claus.

A young boy ended up reaching the “Continental Air Defense Command,” which is now NORAD, asking to speak with Saint Nick while reciting his wish list.

Colonel Harry Shoup, an officer on duty, decided to play into the mistaken phone call and reassured the child he would keep a look out for his whereabouts through their radar system.

From that moment on, 50 different callers followed a day, and a new tradition was born. Combining a little holiday magic and technology, NORAD continues to bring joy, Christmas spirit, and new excitement for children worldwide to look forward to.

Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,

“China and the United States can together solve all of the problems of the world, if you think about it,” President-Elect Donald Trump said on December 16, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference.

He also called China’s President Xi Jinping “amazing” and confirmed he had invited the Chinese leader to his inauguration.

Earlier in the month, Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris and stated this in connection with efforts to end the war in Eastern Europe: “China can help.”

The victorious Trump of December was noticeably more friendly to China than the Trump of the long, grueling campaign. During the campaign, the Republican candidate was often in trade-war mode, promising to impose an additional across-the-board tariff of more than 60% on all Chinese goods.

“Trump wants to keep them all guessing,” Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told Gatestone after the Mar-a-Lago press event.

So which Trump will we see starting at noon on January 20, 2025?

Only one individual truly knows, and Trump himself is not showing his hand. In any event, trying to reach a grand bargain with China — what he was hinting at — would be exactly the wrong approach at this or any other moment.

Trump, of course, likes to make deals — famously he is the co-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal — and he could very well be looking to strike one with the Chinese regime. As Michael Schuman, writing in The Atlantic, pointed out, “a ‘grand bargain’ with Beijing has obvious appeal.”

Solving all the world’s problems, something Trump believes Xi and he can do, would ideally be one of them.

There are, however, problems confronting the next American president as he looks to strike a deal with Beijing.

As an initial matter, Trump has already tried to reach an accommodation with China: his Phase One Trade pact of January 2020.

He calls it “the best trade deal” ever, but it is now widely viewed as a bust. The Chinese, during an election year in America, never honored its terms. It is unlikely that Trump can do better this time with a Xi Jinping who is even far more arrogant than he was four years ago.

Second, Trump, despite what he says, does not have a good relationship with Xi.

“What Mr. Trump does not recognize is that the Chinese cultural concept of ‘friendship’ is a transactional relationship,” Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank told Gatestone. “Xi will never be his buddy because he sees himself as making his mark in Chinese history by becoming the global hegemonic successor to emperors of China’s self-defined glory days and to whom all must abase themselves in affirmation.”

As Burton, who once served as a Canadian diplomat in Beijing, notes, “Xi wants to manipulate the U.S. president into becoming aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s worldview and ambitions and fecklessly abandon U.S. global leadership.”

Burton has it right. For decades, American presidents believed they could cooperate with Chinese communists, and State Department diplomats thought they could make China a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. Yet whenever American leaders after the Cold War worked with Beijing on the issues of the day, their diplomacy produced horrible results, something particularly evident during the Global War on Terrorism, the Six-Party Talks to “denuclearize” North Korea, and the war in Ukraine.

American hopes of cooperation with China were always unrealistic. As Burton suggests, the Chinese regime has from the beginning dreamed of replacing the Westphalian international order of sovereign states with the Chinese imperial-era system in which emperors believed they not only had the Mandate of Heaven to rule tianxia — “All Under Heaven” — but they also were compelled by Heaven to do so.

Worse, Xi apparently believes that the United States, because of its inspirational impact on the Chinese people, poses an existential threat to his Communist Party rule. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman can argue that China should “let in more Taylor Swifts,” but that is exactly what Xi Jinping, who has been relentlessly attacking foreign culture, does not want to do.

Third, Trump faces an additional hurdle in his hoped-for dealings with the Chinese leader: Xi probably no longer has the clout in Beijing he once possessed.

The new American president can make a deal with Xi, but the arrangement may not stick because of discord inside China’s increasingly turbulent ruling group.

“Trump knows that Xi Jinping has been brought back under control by the Communist Party of China and by his loss of a power base within the People’s Liberation Army,” Copley, also editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, pointed out. The issue is whether the Chinese leader still has the power to act. Xi is embattled: There are signs and hints of instability across his regime.

Moreover, thanks to Xi, only the most hostile answers are considered politically acceptable in Beijing, so it would be hard for him to compromise and, more important, to honor promises. Xi has based his policies during the last decade on the premise that China is ascendant. His signature line, from a speech in December 2020, is “the East is rising and the West is declining.”

An arrogant Xi Jinping is clearly in no mood to come to terms with Trump — or anyone else for that matter.

Xi’s hostile conduct is not something he is prepared to bargain away. On the contrary, his actions are the inevitable result of China’s communist political system, which idealizes violence, struggle and domination. This system means there can be no accommodation with the Communist Party.

The Chinese regime believes the world is its enemy. No enduring understanding, pact, deal or agreement is possible.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Communities throughout the United States are debating the pros and cons of fluoridated water.

It’s a bit of a shock because the issue has been present in the underground of American political life for many decades. Community water fluoridation was an early example of using public services for the purpose of mass medicalization. The science was never there, however, and there is a growing awareness that the critics were always correct.

If you want fluoride, you can get your own, without mass dosing of the population without consent.

It’s the strangest thing. This issue has suddenly become a hot topic, even though it has been debated since the 1950s. One could say it is an issue whose time has come.

And not only this one.

There is new skepticism in the public mind about a huge range of things, the critics of which were only recently considered crazy cranks. The frenzy over the capacity of government to control the climate is meeting with new resistance. Governments and companies that imposed vaccine mandates are facing serious fines at the hands of court judgments. Legions of regime scientists are under fire for blessing pandemic-era lockdowns despite how much they harmed the population.

Only two years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of Children’s Health Defense, was written off as a conspiracy theorist. There’s only one problem: His theories not only came true, but his explanations (contained in two books) are enormously compelling, so much so that his following has grown to a real turning point. People ask if he can be confirmed as the new secretary of health and human services. My own sense is that there is no doubt.

The new head of the National Institutes of Health is Jay Bhattacharya, who dissented from lockdowns since their earliest days, tirelessly writing and speaking against the misuse of science in the name of controlling infectious disease. Once, during the darkest times, he and I spoke on the phone. He said to me with genuine conviction that we had the moral obligation to speak out because so many people were suffering. He had the genuine sense that this craziness had to end, or else society itself would be irreparably damaged.

Nearly five years later, his outlook has become an emergent orthodoxy. It’s but another symbol of dramatically changed times. We find daily articles in the mainstream press sounding alarms that there is a new populist movement that distrusts all the claims of science. It’s a wild exaggeration, consistent with censorship and the dogma of supposed experts. Good science is characterized by doubts and demands for evidence.

Conventional historiography divides the past millennium and a half into two great epochs: the age of faith and the age of science. This division was always overwrought. It imagines the culture from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. as mostly enraptured with mystical religious dogma and lorded over by popes and priests. Then the Enlightenment dawned, with its focus on evidence and the scientific method, and thus did we experience the dawn of technology and better lives.

There are some obvious correctives to make to this simple outlook. The “age of faith” was the very one that gave birth to scientific concerns, driven as they were in the Middle Ages by a confidence that the universe as created by God could be discovered and understood with fearless investigation. This was the essence of the scholasticism that emerged in the 12th century, which combined Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and classical wisdom with a drive to find the final truth in God himself.

Meanwhile, the birth of widespread secularism led to excesses in the name of science, such as terrifying eugenics (the belief that the human population should be bred with attention to quality, as in animal husbandry) and totalitarianism (the belief that the whole of society should be treated as a laboratory for experiments). The No. 1 mystical belief of the age of science was that the methods of the natural sciences can and should pertain to social sciences.

This key error wrecked so many different fields, from politics and economics to psychology and sociology. The attempt to take methods for studying stable things and use them to study rational and volatile things never worked. To make it plausible required building fallacies into the model. We see this everywhere now. Look up common fallacies to see the very core of the junk science that overwhelms us today.

I’ve written about many fallacies—not only post hoc ergo propter hoc but also the subject bias. Then you have the absolute junk science of modeling: Assume pigs can fly and that you can prove it.

Looking back, the most powerful and prescient critique of this outlook was F.A. Hayek’s amazing “Counterrevolution of Science,” a book I revisited in the depths of lockdown to find insight into what had gone wrong.

This is the 50th anniversary of Hayek’s Nobel Prize speech of 1974. He had received the prize for his work on business cycles. He could have delivered a technical and relatively noncontroversial talk. Instead, he used the occasion to send out a grave warning not only to all economists but also to everyone in academia and the intellectual world. Provocatively, he called his paper “The Pretense of Knowledge.” Consider the following passage:

“What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science—or to deliberate control according to scientific principles—more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

“The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking.

“It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this.

“Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems [my emphasis]. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.

“The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power.

“It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science.”

He concluded his talk as follows:

“If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible [my emphasis]. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

“There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, ‘dizzy with success,’ to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.

“The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

There we go, words spoken half a century ago never more applicable than in our time. We seem to be learning. We seem to be applying the lesson. The only way to save science from itself is to apply it in proper ways while recognizing the limits of the ability to construct the world according to the imaginings of a handful of intellectuals. It’s tragic that we had to come to the point of nearly destroying the globe to discover this, but here we are. Let the rebuilding begin.

Keep the real science, but throw out the scientism.

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 Ted Snider via AntiWar.com,

On December 11, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that, as one of the last things he would do at the end of his term as the European Union’s rotating president, he proposed a Christmas truce between Ukraine and Russia. “At the end of the Hungarian EU presidency, we made new efforts for peace. We proposed a Christmas ceasefire and a large-scale prisoner exchange,” he said. Sadly, he said, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “clearly rejected and ruled out” the idea.

There is a history of the Christmas truce, and there is a history of civilian and military leaders rejecting it.

On Christmas morning of 1914, a truce spread across multiple regions along the hundreds of miles western front. The truce broke out spontaneously and was not officially sanctioned. Pope Benedict XV had proposed a Christmas truce, pleading “that the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang.” But officials on both sides rejected his plea.

But individual soldiers did not, and an unofficial, spontaneous truce broke out in different ways in different places. In some, British soldiers could see lanterns on small Christmas trees along the German trench and could hear German soldiers singing “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.” Amazed British soldiers applauded the carol singing and responded with their own chorus of “The First Noel.”

In other places along the front, British soldiers heard German soldiers inviting them to cross the no man’s land and “Come over here.” British soldiers answered, “You come half-way. I come half-way.” Sometimes the call included the invitation to bring a bottle and meet half way.

In yet another account, British soldiers decided to take advantage of the thick fog that blanketed the field that morning to repair their trenches. As the fog suddenly lifted, they saw German soldiers doing the same thing. The two sides were close enough to shout greetings back and forth. Some German soldiers said they wanted a truce for that day, and the British soldiers approached, meeting them in no man’s land where the enemies shook hands and exchanged cigarettes. They spoke, and for one brief moment, the war came to a stop.

There are remarkable reports in diaries of the effect the Christmas truce had. One British soldier recorded that “There was not an atom of hate on either side.” Another wrote in his diary, “Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!” British soldiers report Germans telling them in accented English that “they rather dislike[d]… the whole war in fact. They weren’t aggressive at all.” There are accounts of soldiers helping enemy soldiers collect their dead. There are even accounts of a soccer game breaking out. The Germans won 3-2.

Officials were not at all pleased by the peaceful actions of their armed forces. Military leaders feared that the camaraderie and conversation would allow the men to get to know each other and undermine their willingness to kill each other. Orders were given on both sides to cease all “fraternization with the enemy.” Officers were ordered to fire on enemy soldiers who approached across no man’s land. Soldiers who violated the order face court martials.

That would be the first and last Christmas truce in World War I. After that magical Christmas, High Command on both sides prevented it from ever happening again.

In December 2022, faith leaders’ call for a Christmas truce in the Russia-Ukraine war “in the spirit of the truce that occurred in 1914 during the First World War” was drowned out by the continued sound of artillery.

And, now three years into the war, Orban has repeated that call. Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó says that Zelensky “forcefully but politely” refused a call from Orban to discuss a Christmas truce. Despite that initial rejection, Hungary is still pushing for the truce. Orban says that Moscow responded positively to the idea of a Christmas truce and prisoner exchange and that, though Kiev has so far rejected the idea, hope still remains. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also claims that “Putin has supported” the effort of Orban and that “Russian President Vladimir Putin backs Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s efforts to achieve a Christmas ceasefire in Ukraine.”

Asked about the Christmas truce proposal that “Orban seems to floating,” Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, answered that “if that is some type of ceasefire as a first step, again, we’ll – we’ll take a hard look at what that means.”

Russia and Ukraine have agreed on nothing during this war. There has even been a cultural battle in Ukraine between Russian and Ukrainian linked Orthodox churches. But, perhaps, the two churches can agree that Jesus’ message was not one of war.

It is unlikely that the two sides will officially agree to a Christmas truce. It is, perhaps, even unlikely that small, spontaneous truces will pop up along the Donbas front. But, perhaps, in some small pocket of the front, a small number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers will approach each other half way across the field that separates them and shake hands and exchange Christmas greetings and remind their leaders that the people who are suffering and dying are not just enemy soldiers but, more essentially, humans and brothers who just want to go home and stop this dreadful war.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

President-elect Donald Trump said on Dec. 24 that he plans to direct the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pursue the death penalty against the worst violent offenders.

His remarks came a day after outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 death row prisoners to life in prison, including several mass murderers and child killers.

Trump first criticized Biden’s decision to grant the commutations—in all cases to murder convicts—writing in a post on Truth Social that relatives and friends of the victims are “further devastated” by the move. The president-elect then declared in a separate post his intention to prioritize justice for victims of violent crime and broaden the use of capital punishment.

“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” Trump wrote in the post.

“We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”

Besides generally signaling a tough-on-crime approach for his administration, Trump’s message suggests he intends to pursue legal reform that would restore the use of the death penalty as a punishment in cases of rape.

A 1977 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Coker v. Georgia, however, rendered the death penalty for rape unconstitutional in cases where adult victims survived the assault, further narrowed to include surviving child victims by a ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana in 2008.

This is not the first time Trump has signaled his intention to expand the use of capital punishment and reverse the moratorium on federal executions imposed by Biden. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump signaled he would undo the moratorium and make more categories of criminals eligible for capital punishment, including child rapists and drug and human traffickers.

During Trump’s first term in office, the federal government carried out 13 executions after resuming federal executions in 2020, following a 17-year hiatus. This marked the highest number of federal executions carried out under a single president since the 1950s and reflected Trump’s long-standing pledge to get tough on crime.

The Biden administration, by contrast, has prioritized a shift away from the death penalty in favor of life sentences without parole for nearly all crimes.

Biden, in a Monday statement explaining his actions, said his commutation decision was driven by a commitment to ending the federal death penalty, which he believes is inconsistent with a just and effective legal system.

“These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” Biden said.

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss. But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.

“In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of convicted killers sparked outrage among many conservatives, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) celebrated the move, pointing out that it aligned with calls from more than 130 civil and human rights organizations, faith leaders, exonerees, victims’ family members, and law enforcement officials urging Biden to act on federal death row cases.

“President Biden has reaffirmed the power of redemption over retribution and reminds us that state-sanctioned killing does not make us safer,“ Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement.

”The ACLU has long advocated against the death penalty and shed light on its fundamental flaws: it is error prone, racially biased, and a drain on public resources.”

Critics of the death penalty, including the ACLU, argue that the punishment does not serve as a significant deterrent to violent crime and that the high costs associated with capital trials and prolonged appeals could be better spent on crime prevention and victim support.

Supporters of capital punishment argue that it serves as ultimate justice for heinous crimes, provides closure to victims’ families, and that the financial burden of executions is a necessary cost to uphold justice and deter would-be offenders.

In his Dec. 23 decision, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 death row inmates. The three federal inmates who continue to face execution are 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; Dylann Roof, who fatally shot nine people at a church in South Carolina in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.