Surviving Tough Times

Over the weekend, the Biden administration used the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to go after law-abiding gun owners, passing new unconstitutional regulations that will require around 10 million owners of an estimated 40 million firearms to register or surrender their guns. The ATF finalized a new regulation Friday that will treat guns with stabilizing accessories like short-barreled rifles, which require a federal license to own under the National Firearms Act. The new “rule”, which goes into effect 120 days after it is published in the Federal Register, demands gun owners register, alter, destroy or surrender their brace-configured pistols or face a potential 10-year jail sentence and $10,000 fine. Announcing the rule, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that stabilizing brace accessories, which were designed to help disabled combat veterans enjoy recreational shooting, transform pistols into short-barreled rifles.  “Keeping our c...

 t he human being is apparently the most aggressive and cruel species that has ever inhabited the Earth: There is no other animal that kills members of its own species in such a systematic way as man does (Sangrador, 1982). So it is not surprising that the current Ukraine war raises difficult political and ethical questions, because these day with technology we fail to see systematic polarisation, because we all assume good and bad are equally distributed among us, but that is just an abstract idea, far from the reality. If western leaders think that their arms-length encouragement of Ukraine will bring about a Ukrainian military victory, then they are fatally misreading Putin’s intentions and resolve. Russia’s progress may be slowed, but it’s highly unlikely to be stopped, far less pushed out of Ukraine, and in the meantime the grinding destruction and hideous war crimes continue. The west’s current approach of supporting Ukraine’s war aim of defeating the aggressor, and providing...

What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity? Temptation is to say, that you may rest assured that it will be another year of unadulterated verbal dioramas diarrhoea. With humanity waging war on nature the risks we are taking are astounding. What did Earth look like from space in 2022? It looked beautiful, it looked dangerous. It looked small and inconsequential, it looked incredible. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. About 96% of all mammals by weight are now humans and our livestock, like cattle, sheep and pigs. Just 4% are wild mammals like elephants, buffalo or dolphins. Seventy-five percent of Earth’s ice-free land is directly altered as a result of human activity, with nearly 90% of terrestrial net primary production and 80% of global tree cover under direct human influence. We have grossly simplified the biosphere, a system of interactions betwee...