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“Drill, baby, drill” are the words Donald Trump chanted to a cheering crowd in Pennsylvania just two years ago. For many people in the Keystone State, that was music to their ears as the state is second largest in America for fracking.

Fast-forward two years, and the issue has become a focal point of the 2026 gubernatorial race, and it absolutely should be, because what is happening in Pennsylvania right now is nothing short of a policy abomination.

‘Drill, baby, drill’ isn’t just a slogan. For Pennsylvania, it’s a lifeline, and Harrisburg keeps cutting it.

I’m a Pennsylvania girl. I know this is what’s going on in my community, I’ve seen decisions in Harrisburg impact people throughout the commonwealth in real time, and right now, working families are hurting.

For one, electricity bills have surged across Pennsylvanian homes in recent years, with the average household getting double-digit rate hikes and higher summer costs impacting family budgets. Utility shut-offs climbed toward four million households nationwide in 2025. Pennsylvanians alone are being squeezed dry every time they flip a light switch.

Here’s the kicker: Pennsylvania is sitting on a gold mine. The Marcellus Shale formation underlies roughly two-thirds of the state and holds an estimated 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. We are an energy exporter. We produce more natural gas than almost any state in the nation. We should be flush with affordable, reliable power.

RELATED: Drill, baby, drill: Oil tech expert reveals why Trump’s toughness on the industry is actually good

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Instead, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) is writing strongly worded letters.

The crisis in Pennsylvania isn’t a political messaging problem that a few stern letters to utility executives can fix; it’s a supply crisis.

Demand is exploding, with PJM, the operator managing the grid for 65 million people across 13 states, is projecting a razor-thin energy surplus of just .2 gigawatts for the coming delivery year. This is despite a recommended safety buffer of nearly 20%.

And what has Shapiro done to actually address supply? He’s strangled it.

His so-called “Lightning Plan,” which was touted as a bold, all-of-the-above energy strategy, is anything but. Critics have correctly identified it as a disguised carbon tax through his Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act. His administration has maintained a moratorium on new drilling in state parks and state forests. His regulatory environment has made permitting a slow, grinding nightmare for the very energy producers who could relieve the pressure Pennsylvanians are feeling every time they open their utility bill.

The situation regarding the natural gas sector also paints a clear picture of the situation. The industry employs roughly 120,000 workers in Pennsylvania today, less than half of what it employed a decade ago. The important thing to note is that we still have the resources and the workforce, yet we don’t have a governor willing to get out of the way and let Pennsylvania be the energy powerhouse it’s supposed to be.

While Shapiro holds press conferences and plays whack-a-mole with rate hike requests, the fundamental problem compounds. Threatening grid operators and appointing “watchdogs” doesn’t put one dollar back in Pennsylvanian families’ pockets. It’s a press release masquerading as a plan, engineered for headlines not results. That’s because we have a governor with one eye on Harrisburg and the other on a future presidential run.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity gets it. On day one, she pledges to lift the moratorium on new drilling sites, call a special session to fast-track energy permits, and in her words, “drill and frack our way out” of Pennsylvania’s fiscal hole. That’s not recklessness. That’s leadership. It’s the kind of no-nonsense energy policy that built this state and can ultimately save it.

Pennsylvania doesn’t have an energy crisis because it lacks resources. We have an energy crisis because we’ve had leadership that talks affordability while making production harder, slower, and more expensive at every turn. Sounds counterintuitive right?

“Drill, baby, drill” isn’t just a slogan. For Pennsylvania, it’s a lifeline, and Harrisburg keeps cutting it.

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​Opinion & analysis, Pennsylvania, Drilling, Energy, Josh shapiro, Electricity, Opinion 

Radical Muslim Democrat Darializa Avila Chevalier appears to be headed for Congress, despite having publicly advocated for extremist and anti-American positions.

And Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is extremely concerned.

“She has called for abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, and abolishing all borders. She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision means ‘ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,’” Glenn explains.

“She retweeted posts saying, ‘Yes, literally abolish the border,’ and, ‘All deportations are wrong.’ She has called the United States an effing disgrace. Referred to the U.S. as occupied Native American land and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag,” he continues.

“She wrote favorably about communism. She wrote, ‘Seize the means of production.’ That’s a quote. She called for nationalizing all of the utilities, nationalizing all the pharmaceutical companies, and seizing all properties from landlords. She wrote that pyromania associated with anarchism is intriguing,” he adds.

Avila Chevalier even criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being “too pro-Israel” as well as retweeting that “Israel doesn’t exist.”

“And she wrote that black and Arab men fetishize ugly colonizing women,” Glenn says.

Avila Chevalier is also a founder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest. The organization’s stated goal is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and it is admittedly seeking “community and instruction from the militants in the global South.”

“Our intifada is an internationalist one. We are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people. We reject every genocidal, eugenist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized,” the organization’s statement reads.

“How does she possibly serve? How can she raise her hand and say, ‘I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’ when she has said these things?” Glenn asks.

“That oath is not just part of the ceremony. That is a sacred oath,” he continues, adding, “It is legally binding, and it is made so people like her cannot serve.”

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​Aoc, Bernie sanders, Congress, Glenn beck, Israel, Zohran mamdani, Communism, Islam, The glenn beck program, Darializa avila chevalier 

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can infect any nucleated cell in any warm-blooded animal and can cause a wide range of health complications — some fatal, such as miscarriage or inflammation of the brain.

This singled-celled parasite, which can survive up to a lifetime in a human body, is stereotypically associated with crazy “cat ladies” due to its presence in cat feces — cats are its only known definitive hosts — and its association with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suicidal behavior.

‘Toxoplasmosis is just getting left behind.’

Despite its association with “cat ladies,” the parasite is an equal opportunity invader. A study published last year noted, for instance, that the rapidly dividing asexual form of the indiscriminate parasite can “colonize and proliferate” within testes, decapitate sperm, and cause “oxidative stress leading to male infertility.”

A study published on Thursday in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases warned that toxoplasmosis, the virus caused by the parasite, is not receiving sufficient attention from the scientific powers that be — certainly not the level that might otherwise be warranted by its impact and pervasiveness.

“Toxoplasmosis continues to be one of the most common parasitic infectious diseases affecting humans, and the leading intraocular infection worldwide,” said the study.

Toxoplasmosis chronically affects nearly one-third of the human population and is present in every country around the globe. South America is home to the highest rates of infection, with some regions reporting up to 80% of their adult populations afflicted. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40 million people are infected with the parasite in the United States.

RELATED: Foreign ‘Fauci acolyte’ and his African crony charged with smuggling monkeypox onto American soil

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“Yet, the condition receives limited attention on health agendas,” continued the researchers.

In a comparison of data provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, researchers found that “toxoplasmosis research was funded at a level of $177 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the period 2018–2024, compared with research on trachoma and Chagas disease, at $283/DALY and $337/DALY, respectively.”

“Key gaps persist across basic science, diagnostics, therapeutics, prevention, and implementation research,” said the study. “No licensed human vaccine exists. Serological testing is widely available, but expensive for low-income scenarios and poorly standardized, complicating surveillance and estimation of the burden of disease. Treatment protocols lack robust comparative evidence, particularly for congenital and ocular toxoplasmosis. Environmental monitoring of oocysts remains technically demanding and absent from national programs.”

“What we’re seeing is that while there are these improvements occurring in the fight against other neglected tropical diseases, toxoplasmosis is just getting left behind,” senior author on the paper Justine Smith, an ophthalmologist at Flinders University, told Gizmodo.

The researchers criticized the prevailing notion that the infection is “a zoonosis that is an unavoidable consequence of everyday human-animal interactions,” stating that “accumulated evidence indicates otherwise: toxoplasmosis has well-characterized pathways of transmission and is preventable and controllable.”

In hopes of addressing the “research deficit” and challenging the parasite status quo, the researchers proposed that the World Health Organization — which the U.S. officially withdrew from in January — officially designate toxoplasmosis as a “neglected tropical disease.”

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NTDs are called “‘neglected’ because they generally afflict the world’s poor and historically have not received as much attention as other diseases. NTDs tend to thrive in developing regions of the world, where water quality, sanitation, and access to health care are substandard. However, some of these diseases also are found in areas of the United States with high rates of poverty.”

An official NTD designation would prompt the WHO to mobilize global resources to tackle the parasite and unlock new funding streams for prevention and control measures, research, food safety measures, and environmental surveillance tools. The researchers noted further that an official designation “would facilitate technical guidance for Ministries of Health, helping Member States integrate toxoplasmosis into mother-child health programs, food safety systems, and primary-care protocols.”

“That sort of recognition translates through to researchers being funded to work on things like vaccines, diagnostics, and curative drugs,” Smith told Gizmodo. “There is no commercially available vaccine against toxoplasmosis. And the drugs we give patients can limit a flare-up of the disease, but there is no drug that cures it at this point.”

While bullish on the WHO designating toxoplasmosis as an NTD, the researchers conceded that doing so “could strain resources that are already limited and dilute the efforts underway in existing programs for other NTDs.”

Infection with toxoplasma gondii can result from foodborne transmission, animal-to-human transmission, mother-to-child transmission, and blood transfusions.

The CDC says that to reduce risk of infection, Americans should:

freeze meat for several days before cooking; use a food thermometer to cook food to a safe internal temperature high enough to kill the parasite; avoid consuming unpasteurized goat milk, raw oysters, mussels, or clams; cook or rinse fruits and vegetables under water before eating;wear gloves when gardening or touching soil that may be contaminated with cat excrement;wash hands with soap any time that they might be contaminated with cat feces; andchange their cat’s litter box daily.

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​Parasite, World health organization, Insanity, Health, Sperm, Politics 

Growing up just outside Galway City, life in the West of Ireland was exactly what the postcards promised. It was a beautiful place, with generous people and a great spirit.

I use the term was deliberately. That Galway, and the Ireland it represented, is officially dead and buried — a lot like the Irish language itself.

Liberals love to romanticize this migration by drawing parallels to Ireland’s own history of exodus.

Galway recently elected its first black mayor, Helen Ogbu, a Nigerian-born former social worker. The local and international media immediately fell into a state of rapturous, celebratory euphoria, framing it as a textbook example of a modern, inclusive Ireland, complete with a self-congratulatory pat on the back for everyone involved.

But beneath the surface-level applause and the performative progressive high-fives, the mood on the ground isn’t exactly celebratory. These rapid-fire changes are fueling a deep dread about what being Irish even means any more, besides holding the right passport.

Demographic rewrite

While Rotimi Adebari, another Nigerian, became Ireland’s first black mayor back in 2007 in Portlaoise, Galway’s latest civic milestone cements a broader trend. This is less a blending of cultures than a demographic rewrite.

For anyone who remembers the not-so-old days, these lightning-fast shifts feel like the systematic gutting of everything we used to call home. It’s a brutal reality that local broadcasters prefer to completely ignore, though American commentator Tyler Oliveira recently traveled to Ireland to document this unfolding madness firsthand.

As his dispatches note, almost a quarter of Ireland’s population is now foreign-born. Watching the footage, it’s impossible not to recall Donald Trump’s infamous 2015 declaration regarding immigration in America: “They’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems. … They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

Trump was speaking about the U.S. southern border, but looking at the insanity unfolding in Dublin and parts of the rural West, he might as well have been describing modern Ireland. The influx has brought an undeniable undercurrent of low-IQ degeneracy from parts of Africa and the Middle East, fundamentally altering the safety of communities that used to leave their front doors unlocked.

Locals only

Ireland is gripped by a crushing homelessness crisis, but if you look at the people actually sleeping in cardboard boxes in city centers, they are far less likely to be from foreign lands than born-and-bred locals.

There’s a sickening irony to the history here. Our ancestors, including my own family in the West, fought, bled, and died to kick the British Empire out, only for the current generation to willingly open the gates to a different kind of conquest.

To be fair, it wasn’t the ordinary Irish people who made this choice, but a political class utterly beholden to Brussels and the EU bureaucracy. When Angela Merkel opened the floodgates in 2015, a cowardly, compliant Irish government offered to take its share of the burden, setting off a chain reaction that has left the country unrecognizable.

The magnet pulling people in is a bizarrely generous welfare state. While working-class Irish citizens struggle to put food on the table, the system rolls out the red carpet for foreign arrivals. In Oliveira’s documentary, one migrant casually admits to receiving a €1,200 monthly cash allowance. To an outsider, €1,200 (roughly $1,400) a month might not sound like an extravagant fortune, but when it is paired with free housing, medical care, and education, it means you are essentially being subsidized by the Irish taxpayer to do absolutely nothing.

Kick me, I’m Irish

Liberals love to romanticize this migration by drawing parallels to Ireland’s own history of exodus. When Conan O’Brien visited his ancestral home in Ireland, he spoke about the real courage it took for generations of Irish people to cross the Atlantic for a better life, noting, “People leave not because they think: ‘Hey, I just want to go have fun in America.’ They leave because they have to.” The pro-immigration lobby uses this exact sentiment as a shield, arguing that today’s arrivals are just the modern equivalents of the 19th-century Irish.

They’re not. That comparison is utter nonsense. The historical Irish diaspora weren’t greeted by a waiting welfare check, free medical cards, and state-subsidized housing; they stepped off the boats into starvation, hostile “No Irish Need Apply” signs, and manual labor that regularly killed them. Furthermore, modern migration has become a cynical game of regional arbitrage. As Oliveira’s interviews reveal, many migrants openly admit to using Portugal as a soft entry point into the EU, obtaining papers there before immediately making a beeline for Ireland’s superior welfare benefits.

What we are witnessing is the absolute, spectacular failure of Western liberalism. Notice that his toxic brand of pathological altruism doesn’t exist in Africa or Asia. It is an exclusively Western suicidal pact — a bizarre cultural mental illness where nations willingly subsidize their own erasure while smiling for the cameras. Ireland is simply the latest country to gladly sign its own death warrant, completely convinced that disappearing is the ultimate form of progress.

​Lifestyle, Migrants, Immigration, Europe, Ireland, Nigeria, Welfare state, Letter from ireland 

If you’re not familiar with the power of a simple yellow pencil and what it can teach about economics, freedom, and the limit of government power — then Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is here to help.

“I’m holding a pencil. Yellow, six sides, little pink eraser at the top. And we’ve used these our whole life,” Glenn begins.

“The cedar comes off a mountain in the Pacific Northwest. It’s cut by a steel saw. That steel came from an iron ore in Minnesota, smelted with coal hauled by the rails by people who are long dead,” he says.

“The graphite comes out of the ground in Sri Lanka, and it’s mixed with clay from Mississippi. The little band up at the top, that used to be copper from Chile, zinc from Canada. The yellow paint, the rubber that never once met a rubber tree in its life,” he continues.

“All of these things, thousands of people on five continents that don’t speak the same language, who never met, who’d probably cross the street to avoid each other … these people couldn’t agree on lunch, and they built the pencil,” he adds.

The point, Glenn says, is that “no one was in charge.”

“There’s no department of pencils in a marble building deciding how much graphite Sri Lanka needs to mine this year. Nobody on the planet wakes up at 3:00 in the morning in a cold sweat thinking, ‘Dear God, does Ohio have enough erasers?’ Nobody does,” he says.

“So here’s how you explain capitalism and socialism. If no one is smart enough to plan a pencil, nobody … it just happens. Who exactly do we figure is smart enough to plan an entire economy?” he asks, before citing the economist Friedrich Hayek.

Glenn notes that Hayek “spent his life on this one idea,” which was that “the knowledge that it takes to run an economy doesn’t live in any one place.”

“It’s scattered across millions and billions of heads. It’s the welder who can feel a batch of steel running brittle. It’s the grocer who notices that young families are starting to move in, and they got all these kids, so I better stock up on more diapers. It’s the farmer that can read the sky,” he says.

“None of them could write down what they know. They couldn’t fill it out in a form. They’d lose the form. But they act on it every single day,” he adds.

However, when you introduce a central planner, Glenn explains, even the ones with the most sincere hearts will fail.

“And that’s when the bread line happens. Bread lines are real, and it happens the same way every single time,” he says.

“It’s like a band that only knows one song. That’s what socialism is,” he adds.

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​Capitalism, Economics, Economy, Freedom, Glenn beck, Pencil test, Socialism, The glenn beck program 

If you want to glimpse the future of artificial intelligence, don’t start in Silicon Valley. Start in a South Korean factory.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, South Korea now has 1,012 industrial robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers — the highest robot density in the world. Put another way, roughly one in every 10 manufacturing “workers” is now a robot.

For now, however, even the world’s most advanced humanoid robots still struggle with tasks that young children perform effortlessly.

That startling figure is one piece of a much larger story stretching from American AI labs to South Korean factories, Chinese assembly lines, and Indian garment workshops.

For most Americans, the AI revolution is something that happens on a screen. We think of ChatGPT writing emails, Claude summarizing reports, or Google Gemini answering questions. The race appears to revolve around Silicon Valley companies building ever more capable language models.

But the next phase of artificial intelligence is becoming much more physical.

Instead of asking how machines can write like humans, researchers are asking how they can move like humans — how they grasp a coffee mug, fold a shirt, stitch a collar, or crack an egg without crushing it.

That challenge has created an unexpected global division of labor: America builds the brains, South Korea builds the bodies, China provides the classroom, while India supplies the teachers.

Together, they’re revealing something surprising: the future of artificial intelligence depends on ordinary human beings.

South Korea: Building the bodies

If robotics has an epicenter, it may well be South Korea.

The country’s dominance in robotics didn’t emerge from nowhere. It grew out of decades spent building some of the world’s most advanced automobiles.

The same expertise that allows South Korean companies to manufacture electric motors, precision steering systems, sensors, braking technology, and other high-performance automotive components translates remarkably well to humanoid robots. Goldman Sachs Research estimates Korean companies could account for roughly 30% of global humanoid robot production by 2035, either by manufacturing robots directly or supplying the critical components that allow them to move.

Yet South Korea’s embrace of automation has also exposed its tensions.

This week, Hyundai workers overwhelmingly voted to authorize strike action after contract negotiations stalled, with robots emerging as a central issue for the first time.

The union isn’t simply demanding higher wages.

It wants guarantees over how artificial intelligence and humanoid robots will be introduced onto factory floors, arguing that workers deserve a voice before machines begin performing jobs currently done by people.

The dispute centers on Atlas, the humanoid robot developed by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics.

While company executives describe Atlas as a way to perform dangerous, repetitive, and physically demanding work, union leaders see a machine that could eventually replace the people who build Hyundai’s cars.

The disagreement captures the paradox facing much of the developed world.

Countries like South Korea desperately need automation. It has one of the world’s fastest-aging populations and one of its lowest birth rates, creating labor shortages that robots may eventually help fill.

Yet the workers whose jobs are most vulnerable understandably want assurances that they won’t become casualties of the technological transition.

Child’s play

For now, however, even the world’s most advanced humanoid robots still struggle with tasks that young children perform effortlessly.

Finding a coffee pot, identifying its handle, lifting it correctly and pouring without spilling remains astonishingly difficult for a machine.

The bottleneck is no longer the body or the brain. It is experience.

Engineers can now build remarkably capable robot bodies and increasingly sophisticated AI models. What they can’t manufacture is the accumulated experience that allows humans to navigate the physical world almost without thinking. Like a child learning to walk — or an apprentice learning a trade — robots improve only through repeated interaction with the real world.

RELATED: Your child’s new best friend might be a Chinese surveillance device

akinbostanci/Getty Images

China: Generating the experience

South Korea may lead the world in robot density, but China wins on sheer scale.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, China had 2.027 million industrial robots operating in its factories in 2024. It installed another 295,000 robots that year alone, accounting for 54% of global robot demand.

That scale gives Beijing an enormous advantage in the next phase of AI.

Unlike ChatGPT, which learned from enormous quantities of text on the internet, humanoid robots must learn by interacting with the real world. Every object they grasp, every obstacle they navigate, and every task they complete generates valuable information that helps improve future models.

China has more of that real-world classroom than anyone else.

Part of the urgency stems from demographics. After decades of the one-child policy and collapsing birth rates, China faces one of the fastest-aging populations in history. Its working-age population is projected to shrink dramatically over the coming decades, threatening the labor force that powered its manufacturing rise.

Humanoid robots have become one response. Every robot deployed today becomes another teacher for tomorrow’s robots. More deployment generates more real-world data, and better data produces better AI models.

Better models create more capable robots, which in turn generate even more data.

In the race toward physical AI, experience itself has become a competitive advantage.

India: Supplying the trainers

If South Korea is building the machines and China is putting them to work, India is asking who benefits from the knowledge that makes them possible.

Across the country, companies are asking factory workers, construction laborers, delivery drivers, and homemakers to wear head-mounted cameras while they go about their daily routines.

No gesture is too small to escape the camera’s eye: how a garment worker guides fabric through a sewing machine, how a mason carries bricks across uneven ground, how someone folds laundry, washes dishes, packs a lunch.

The recordings — known as “egocentric data” — have become one of the world’s most valuable resources.

Many workers reportedly weren’t told exactly why they were being recorded; in fact, some laughed when cameras were first strapped to their foreheads. That laughter changed to unease as they realized they were teaching machines that might someday replace them.

Labor advocates have raised new questions. If a worker’s lifetime of accumulated skill is converted into an AI dataset worth millions of dollars, should that worker share in its value?

Can consent really be voluntary if refusing to wear the camera could jeopardize someone’s livelihood?

And who owns years of accumulated know-how once it has been converted into a commercial AI dataset?

For perhaps the first time, the routines of ordinary life are becoming economically valuable in their own right.

Skills that were never considered professions — sewing a collar, folding towels, washing dishes, preparing meals, gripping an egg without breaking it, carrying heavy materials safely — are becoming indispensable training material for the world’s most sophisticated robots.

Indian startup Neocambrian AI estimates it could require 100 million hours of first-person human activity before machines approach human-level dexterity.

The irony is impossible to miss.

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, researchers are discovering just how difficult it is to replicate the quiet competence of ordinary people.

We, robot

The AI revolution has often been described as a triumph of silicon over flesh. Instead, it is becoming a lesson in just how remarkable ordinary human beings really are.

The machine doesn’t know what an ordinary person knows: how tightly to grip an egg, how to instinctively shift its weight while walking across uneven ground.

These are forms of embodied wisdom acquired through years of living in a human body.

Christianity has long insisted that human beings are not merely minds that happen to inhabit bodies. In Genesis, mankind is introduced not simply as a thinker but as a worker — cultivating a garden, naming animals, building a family, and exercising stewardship over creation.

These are not incidental tasks. They are ways human beings express creativity, responsibility, and love.

One of the strangest consequences of the AI revolution is that it is reminding us of the enduring dignity of the same ordinary human work it seeks to replace.

​Ai, Ai race, Automation, China, Culture, Humanoid robots, Hyundai, India, Lifestyle, Robotics, South korea, Workers, Tech 

The debate over autonomous weapons has started from the wrong premise.

Critics ask whether the United States should permit machines to kill. Advocates frame the question as whether we can afford to fall behind adversaries who will deploy such systems regardless. Both sides treat autonomous lethality as a novel moral category that demands a novel governing framework.

The United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.

The U.S. military already possesses such a framework, however. It has been used for decades, it scales naturally to autonomous systems, and the public debate would improve considerably if both sides understood these realities.

The military governs the use of force through weapons control statuses, a graduated system that every air defense operator and ground commander knows by three commands. “Weapons hold” authorizes engagement only in self-defense or under specific order. “Weapons tight” authorizes engagement only against targets positively identified as hostile. “Weapons free” authorizes engagement against any target not positively identified as friendly.

A commander sets the status based on mission, threat, and environment, as units within his command may operate under different statuses depending on the situation. The framework already calibrates lethal authority to circumstance. It does not require a soldier to seek individual approval for every trigger pull, because the controlling judgment comes from the posture the commander has set rather than in each discrete engagement.

This structure maps directly onto the problem of autonomous weapons.

The objection that a machine cannot exercise the contextual judgment that distinguishes a combatant from a civilian, a threat from a bystander, has force only in environments where discrimination is genuinely difficult — precisely the condition the weapons control framework already addresses.

The Taiwan Strait and downtown Tehran are not the same operating environment, and no serious framework should govern them in the same way.

Consider the contrast. An autonomous system operating in the Taiwan Strait is tasked with engaging naval vessels in a declared conflict zone where civilian traffic is minimal. Every surface combatant of a certain signature is presumptively hostile and faces a discrimination problem that is nearly trivial. The environment is uncluttered, the targets are large and militarily unambiguous, and the consequences of restraint include the loss of American ships and sailors to adversary missiles that outpace any human operator’s reaction time.

A weapons-free or weapons-tight posture for autonomous engagement in that environment is defensible on the same grounds that justify those postures for human-operated air defense.

The same autonomous system operating in a dense urban environment such as downtown Tehran, where combatants and civilians occupy the same streets, should operate under weapons hold, which requires a human to authorize each engagement. The environment dictates the posture, and the framework already exists to make that determination.

RELATED: The empire cannot drone-strike its way out of decline

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

The Pentagon has, in fact, started to incorporate this framework into existing policy. Directive 3000.09, updated in January 2023, requires that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. It also requires that the design of such systems confine each engagement to a time frame and geographic area consistent with commander and operator intentions.

The directive presupposes that the appropriate level of human control varies with the system and mission rather than holding constant across all cases.

What the directive does not yet do, and what the public debate has not yet grasped, is connect that variation to the weapons control vocabulary the force already uses, which would render the entire question legible to commanders, policymakers, and the public in terms the military has been employing for generations.

Adopting this approach requires trusting the military to set the posture, which is the crux of the matter for a public institution. The objection that the U.S. cannot trust commanders to calibrate autonomous lethal force responsibly proves too much.

We already trust those same commanders to calibrate human lethal force through an identical framework — one that, when commanders adopt the wrong posture, produces civilian casualties.

An autonomous system governed by the same logic inherits the same accountability structure, because the commander who sets a weapons-free posture for an autonomous system owns the consequences exactly as the commander who sets it for a battery of human-operated interceptors.

A public institution governing an autonomous force must establish this policy explicitly rather than allow it to emerge on a case-by-case basis from procurement decisions and after-action reviews.

The military should state as a matter of doctrine that autonomous weapon systems operate under weapons control statuses set by the responsible commander; that the status a commander may set for a given system depends on the discrimination difficulty of its operating environment; and that the most permissive postures remain available only in environments where the discrimination problem is genuinely simple.

RELATED: The AI gold rush could become an incumbent graveyard

Tasha Art/Getty Images

This codification would accomplish two things that the current ambiguous debate does not. First, it would give commanders a clear and familiar vocabulary for governing systems that would otherwise arrive without doctrinal handholds. Second, it would give the public a transparent standard by which to hold the institution accountable, because a weapons control status is a decision with a name and an owner rather than a diffuse property of an algorithm that no one can identify.

The alternative is not a world without autonomous weapons. Adversaries are building them, the technology is proliferating, and the United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.

The alternative to adopting a clear framework is fielding these systems under an ambiguous one, in which the absence of explicit doctrine forces operators and engineers to improvise the hardest decisions in the moment rather than letting commanders govern them in advance within a system the nation has already validated across decades of use.

The military knows how to use lethal force. The framework is sound, familiar, and accountable. The task now is to apply it deliberately to new autonomous systems rather than assume that such systems require the country to invent its ethics of force from scratch.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Autonomous warfare, Drones, Us military, Weapons free, Taiwan strait, Iran, Russia, China, Military drones, Opinion & analysis, Pentagon 

A data center already under attack from locals has announced a move that probably will only make residents more upset.

American company Hyperscale Data Inc. has a data center in Dowagiac, Michigan, that residents say is too loud. A class action lawsuit filed in May says a constant hum from the facility is overwhelming.

‘… create a unique environment for developing and evaluating next-generation AI systems.’

Neighbors said that they can hear the data center’s cooling systems and fans from inside their home, limiting whatever they want to do on their property.

“I’m walking [my son] more than a mile away to get away from the noise,” one man said, per WSBT.

Piling onto this already (allegedly) burdensome data center is a recent announcement that Hyperscale Data will employ Chinese robots at the facility.

Hyperscale and its subsidiary company Omnipresent Robotics are reportedly partnering with Chinese robotics firm Agibot PTE Ltd to get components for 30 OPR-R2 humanoid robots, Data Center Dynamics reported.

Set for deployment in Q3 2026, the bots are intended to support the “development of embodied artificial intelligence applications, autonomous workflows, and advanced robotics systems.”

RELATED: The KIDS Act would turn web browsing into a TSA line

Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu/Getty Images

While the OPR-R2 bots are not listed on Agibot’s website, their top model of humanoid bot (the Agibot A2 Ultra) is about five-and-a-half feet tall and just over 150 pounds. It comes with three cameras — head, chest, and waist — a microphone and a speaker.

The bots are described as a “rising star” in the entertainment industry, as well, and are recommended for brand ambassadors and performances.

As workers, the machines will reportedly be assigned to the Omnipresent Robotics’ Model Training Laboratory, where they will work “side-by-side” with data center employees to mimic their movements, also described as real-world training.

“The company believes the integration of humanoid robots with high-performance AI computing infrastructure will create a unique environment for developing and evaluating next-generation AI systems capable of operating in real-world environments,” Hyperscale said, per DCD.

RELATED: GOP bill aims to gut online censorship funds — and where the money is going will shock you

Jason Alden/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Hyperscale’s chairman said that the company believes “physical AI” is the future of AI, with “tomorrow’s AI systems” needing to be capable of understanding and interacting in the physical world.

As for the data center itself, it sits at approximately 617,000 square feet and takes about 28 megawatts of power. According to DataCenters.com, there are 12 other data centers within 50 miles of the facility.

Hyperscale Data is currently trading at around 17 cents per share at the time of this writing.

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​News, Data center, Michigan, Chinese robots, Tech 

Charlie Kirk’s death has affected people across America, and Vice President JD Vance is no exception.

In an interview with BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey, Vance revealed that Kirk’s passing is what inspired his family to grow even more.

“So this has been sort of an ongoing conversation, as it probably is with all families with a lot of kids, and you know, I remember when we had our first kid and you go from zero to one, I was like, I’m never doing this again,” Vance tells Stuckey.

“It was such a shock to the system,” he explains, noting that his oldest was a “tougher” baby.

“And then we had number two and number three. And now I’m just all like, I would have nine kids,” he says.

Vance’s wife, Usha, just turned 40, which, he points out, has made it a little harder.

“The older that you get, the harder it is on the body. And so she was kind of like, you know, I don’t really know that I want to be pregnant again. Like I’d love to have a fourth baby; I don’t want to be pregnant again with all the spotlight,” he explains.

“And you know, when Charlie died … we fly out the morning of the 11th, pick up his body in Utah, and then fly him and Erika and some of the family back to Arizona. And you know, there’s so many things I remember from that moment, and you know, you see Erika and you want to say something profound, but what can you possibly say? There’s just nothing to say,” he continues.

However, what he recalls Erika saying is what changed his mind about having a fourth baby.

“She sort of just makes this observation through her tears that she really wishes they had had more kids. They have two little kids who have actually stayed here a number of times since Charlie passed away. And for me, at least, that really drove it home,” he says.

“For me, it was like, we have to have a fourth baby, and she got pregnant like six weeks later,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Relatable, Allie beth stuckey, Erika kirk, Jd vance, The blaze, Charlie kirk, Usha vance, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

America is in a dire generational predicament. A day is coming — soon — when Gen Z, a generation known for distrust and disillusionment, will be deciding whether this experiment called America is still worth saving or if we’ve earned our place in the ash heap of history.

On this episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” Deace addresses 23-year-old Ben’s question that no older generation wants to look at: What happens when the older generations are gone and Gen Z takes over?

His response is one of the most honest, chilling, and ultimately challenging things he has ever said on air.

“Given what the American left wants to do to us as a people and how obvious they are making it, if systemically we have deceived our own people so much and we have disappointed them and gaslit them so much that an entire generation emerges that pulls the plug on our side, then we will deserve at that point whatever we have coming to us,” says Deace bluntly. “It’ll be sad, it’ll be tragic, but it is what it is.”

Even so, he isn’t panicked in a worldly sense.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. There’s only one perpetual kingdom. … Every generation, every nation eventually gets its tombstone in the ash heap of history,” Deace declares.

“I try to be as honest as I can possibly be, but you know, I can’t fix everything. Not by a long shot. So if the end result of this is that your generation has just been so systemically lied to that you tap out and the result is that the Democrats and the left plant the flag, that would suck. But would we sit here and say that’s necessarily undeserved?” he asks.

“I know it’s deserved right now,” co-host Todd Erzen chimes in.

But despite the betrayals and gaslighting, Deace believes sticking with Trump and the current MAGA movement is the only realistic option right now, even with all its flaws.

“Hear where we’re coming from, and then you decide for yourself if you think we’re right,” he says to Ben and other Gen Zers.

“A lot of you young men aren’t married yet and don’t have kids yet, and so you’re not thinking yet in terms of 20-, 30-year increments,” he explains.

“It’s not that I don’t see the betrayals that you’re bringing to my attention. It’s not that I’m unaware of the gaslighting on several fronts. It’s not that I think Donald Trump tiptoes between the raindrops,” Deace continues.

“It’s that there’s not another army for me to go serve in. There’s not another alternative for me to go enlist in to punch back at the spirit of the age that wants to end my way of life before I can pass it on to my kids and grandkids.”

The older a person gets, he explains, the more he or she begins to realize how little time there really is. Becoming a parent and then a grandparent especially puts things into perspective.

“Your time starts getting shorter for the mark I can really leave for [children and grandchildren] and what I’m going to leave behind and what messes I’ll leave them to clean up that I could have confronted myself,” says Deace.

“There’s not another army for me to go in and enlist in. The only meaningful opposition in America and in the West of the spirit of the age is Trump and his movement.”

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​Steve deace show, Steve deace, Gen z 

The receptionist asked me to verify my date of birth.

I gave her Gracie’s.

For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.

She glanced down at the chart in her hand and then back at me with a puzzled expression. Before she could say anything, I caught myself.

“Oh … that’s my wife’s birthday.”

After 40 years as a family caregiver through surgeries, appointments, hospital admissions, medications, insurance forms, and enough medical paperwork to clear a small forest, I had automatically answered with the date I have given thousands of times before.

This time, however, I was the patient.I was at the cancer center for imaging and treatment planning in preparation for radiation therapy for prostate cancer. Thanks to routine screenings and excellent physicians, it was caught early. The prognosis is excellent.

Still, it felt strange.

I have spent most of my adult life in hospitals because of someone else. This time, they called my name.

Looking around the waiting room, I realized I was easily the youngest man there. That does not happen to me very often anymore. Later, one staff member told me most of their patients are in their 70s and beyond. Sometimes, they see men in their 60s like me, and every so often someone in his 50s.

For this visit, I was the new kid.

I took a chair off to the side, careful not to intrude on this fraternity of men who seemed to know the ropes. They reminded me of the old men who gathered at Nick’s grocery and gas station near my childhood home in rural South Carolina. As a boy, I would stop in for a soda and candy bar while they held court around the coffee pot, solving problems that ranged from weather and crops to politics and church business.

The subjects changed from day to day. The cadence never did.

Men of a certain age possess a remarkable conversational gift. They can begin with trout streams and end with urologists without anyone noticing where the turn occurred.

RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion

Yuliia Konakhovska/iStock/Getty Images

True to form, this conversation drifted toward prostate cancer, treatments, and the assorted indignities that accompany aging. One fellow described an examination during which the sheet covering him slipped.

Before he could react, the nurse matter-of-factly told him, “Don’t worry. If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll kill it.”

Such is the sort of thing you expect to hear in a cancer clinic in Montana.

The men laughed.

I raised an eyebrow and thought, “How comforting.”

But I still laughed.

Soon enough, they called me back. The technicians positioned my legs, explained the process, and slid me into a machine that looked remarkably like something from an old “Star Trek” episode. If memory serves, it resembled the device that kept Spock alive after somebody stole his brain.

After the instructions were complete, they eased me into position and left the room.

A few minutes later, one of the technicians returned looking slightly sheepish.

“We have a bit of a challenge.”

“Do tell,” I replied.

“There’s a gas bubble.”

The expression on my face evidently communicated that I was not following.

She delicately clarified.

“It’s in … you.”

“Oh.”

I considered several responses, including one with my outstretched index finger that would have made my four brothers proud and the medical staff considerably less appreciative. Fortunately, decades of maturity prevailed.

“What do you recommend?” I asked.

“Maybe take a walk and see if anything happens.”

So there I was, strolling through the halls of a cancer center, trying to solve a problem that five boys growing up under one roof would have regarded as entirely manageable without professional consultation. At times, our household rivaled the campfire scene in “Blazing Saddles.”

The problem was that they had instructed me to drink a substantial amount of water beforehand to achieve the proper imaging. Solving one problem too enthusiastically threatened to create another.

Men over 50 approach certain situations with caution for good reasons.

Eventually, however, everything worked itself out.

Ahem.

The imaging was completed, the planning was finished, and in a few days, I will return to begin treatment.

As I left, I noticed the bell hanging in the hallway. I have seen bells like that before. Patients ring them when treatment ends.

Lord willing, I will ring that bell myself within a month.

RELATED: The song that lets sorrow tell the truth

Sanghwan Kim/iStock/Getty Images

Driving home, I thought about those older men in the waiting room. None of them appeared eager to be there, but neither did they seem intimidated by it.

They knew where to park. They knew where the coffee was. They knew which jokes were worth telling.

In short, they knew the territory.

Eventually, if you stay on any road long enough, you stop asking for directions and start giving them.

One day, perhaps sooner than I would like to admit, I may be the guy telling stories to the new kid who walks through the door — even if the story involves a gas bubble that needed to be walked off.

For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.

Prostate cancer is often called a silent disease.

Mine was.

Fortunately, silent does not have to mean deadly.

​Cancer, Caregiving, Hospitals, Opinion & analysis, Waiting room, Aging, Mortality, Family, Faith, Health care 

The United Kingdom is constitutionally a Christian nation.

Its king, Charles III, is “supreme governor” of the Church of England — England’s established church — and an ordinary member of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Anglican bishops serve as members of the House of Lords, and the Anglican church’s legislation requires parliamentary oversight.

‘If we’re serious about the future of this country, we shouldn’t shy away from that heritage.’

The United Kingdom — whose flag is an amalgam of Christian crosses — is not, however, a majoritively Christian nation.

A Labour Force Survey survey conducted in summer 2025 found that only 44% of adults in Britain identified as Christian, down from 54% in early 2018. The 2025 British Social Attitudes survey found that just 5% of all adults attend a Christian service on a weekly basis.

Elements of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party and Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain have discussed in recent months bolstering or at least maintaining Britain’s Christian identity. If serious about such a project, they might have to consider the matter of Christian representation in top government leadership roles.

RELATED: ‘Beyond evil’: Nightmarish report reveals full scale of mass Islamic rapes of ‘250,000’ white British girls

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The home secretary is the fourth most senior political office in the U.K. government after the prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer, and the foreign secretary. Yet a publicly self-identified Christian has not held the position for nearly a decade.

The current home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is an avowed “practicing Muslim.” Her six immediate predecessors were either non-Christians or individuals who do not appear to have publicly identified as Christian:

Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary who in 2015 chose to affirm allegiance to the Crown rather than swear an oath on a holy book, which Christian Today noted at the time is usually done by nonbelievers;James Cleverly, the current shadow secretary of state for housing, communities, and local government, who identified himself in a parliamentary debate last year as “an atheist” and “a humanist”;Suella Braverman, a practicing Buddhist who served in the post from Sept. 6, 2022 to Oct. 19, 2022, and again from Oct. 25, 2022 to Nov. 13, 2023;Grant Shapps, a Jewish politician who was in the role for only a few days during Liz Truss’ tumultuous final days as prime minister, then later served as secretary of state for defense;Priti Patel, a practicing Hindu from an Indian family who migrated to the U.K. via Uganda, who now serves as shadow secretary of state for foreign, commonwealth, and development affairs; andSajid Javid, the son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants who reportedly referred to himself as a “Muslim Home Secretary” but also claimed “not to practice any religion.”

Blaze News did not receive comment from Cooper or the Home Office.

While the religiosity of Amber Rudd — home secretary from 2016 to 2018 — has not been publicly advertised, there is no mystery about former home secretary and Prime Minister Theresa May’s affiliation. May — in the post from 2010 to 2016 — made clear on multiple occasions that she is a practicing Anglican.

Of the current and past seven chancellors of the exchequer dating back to 2016, two have been self-identified Christians; two hail from Muslim backgrounds; one is a practicing Hindu; and the other two have kept their religiosity out of the public eye.

Of the eight foreign secretaries the U.K. has had dating back to 2016, one — Cleverly — is an avowed atheist; one — Cooper — has signaled she might be a nonbeliever; four — David Lammy, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Jeremy Hunt — have identified as Christians; one — Liz Truss — has said she shares Anglican values but doesn’t practice the faith; and one is an apparent enigma — Dominic Raab, who has a Jewish father, was raised in the Anglican Church, and married a Catholic, has expressed uncertainty about which boxes to check for “diversity questionnaires” with regard to his family.

As for prime ministers going back to 2016, half — Johnson, May, and Cameron — have been Christian, and the other half — Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, and Liz Truss, are, respectively, an atheist, a Hindu; and what statisticians refer to as a none.

The character of these so-called great offices of state have — like the public they represent — tended in recent years not to be Christian in character. The Christian character of the nation is, however, something that politicians right of center have fixated on in recent months despite polling indicating that the public is generally unfussed about the nation’s de-Christianization.

Reform’s Home Affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf said in a February interview with the Times (U.K.) that renewing Britain’s Christian faith was essential to tackling the “crisis of meaning culturally,” especially among young men.

Yusuf emphasized that Christianity was “core to the history and the DNA of the country” and the country was losing its Christian values because of the “sheer quantities of people that came to the country in a short period of time.”

“Regardless of whether somebody is of faith or not, or which faith they follow, I think the Christian heritage of this country is very important, and protecting our heritage and our culture is important. Otherwise the country is not a country; it’s just an economic zone,” added Yusuf.

Danny Kruger, a Reform UK member of Parliament, said months earlier that he would “love us to be a more confidently Christian country that acknowledges its Christian heritage. A society aligned more closely with the teachings of Jesus would be a happier one.”

Reform UK is not the only outfit signaling a keenness to reverse the U.K.’s atrophying Christianity.

Rupert Lowe, leader of the Restore Britain party, stated earlier this year, “Britain is a Christian country, and under a Restore Britain Government — it will remain a Christian country.”

Like Reform’s Yusuf, Lowe has identified mass immigration — particularly from Muslim countries — as a factor driving Britain’s de-Christianization. He has, accordingly, advocated for halting mass immigration and reversing the “islamification of Britain.”

Neither Reform UK nor Restore Britain immediately responded to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

Even the Conservative Party has expressed a need to return to Christianity — if not to the roots then to its fruits.

Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch stated in April, “Britain was built on a foundation of Christian values that have guided our institutions, our laws, and our sense of right and wrong. If we’re serious about the future of this country, we shouldn’t shy away from that heritage, we should be confident enough to embrace, promote, and defend it.”

David Jeffrey of the University of Liverpool published a dashboard last year that provides some sense of how many members of Parliament are Christian on the basis of their public affiliation, their public speech about their affiliation, and what text they swore in on. The dashboard suggests that as of last year, 54.7% of MPs were Christian; 36.4% were nones; 3.9% were Muslims; 2% were Jewish; 1.9% were Sikh; 0.9% were Hindu; and 0.2% were Buddhist.

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​Religion, Christianity, Britain, United kingdom, Rupert lowe, London, Parliament, Faith, Nigel farage, Reform uk, Restore britain, Politics 

Steven Spielberg’s 2026 sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day” about a whistleblower exposing a government cover-up of extraterrestrial life is performing strongly at the box office with over $160 million worldwide to date.

BlazeTV host Rick Burgess has been suspicious about this summer blockbuster since he first saw the previews. Not only is the timing a bit odd in light of the government’s ongoing declassification of UFO-related files, but Spielberg’s own comments about how real disclosure could rattle the faith of many people has Rick’s guard up.

The movie reflects this theory, as many characters wrestle with doubts about God’s divinity and humanity’s place after learning about aliens.

Rick, who argues “aliens” are most likely angels or demons, believes that even if aliens proved to be otherworldly beings, it would not affect believers like Spielberg predicts.

“If it turns out like in the movie that they’re straight up people from somewhere else and they’re not demonic and they’re not angelic, this notion that somehow that’s going to rattle our faith … it’s just not so,” he assures.

True Christians, Rick argues, know that everything is created by God.

“The Scriptures tell us even in Genesis that God is the creator. He is the beginning and the end of all things. If space people show up from another planet or another galaxy, it doesn’t change what we believe about God,” he says.

Believers already know that a great cosmic celestial war between God’s forces of good (angels) and Satan’s forces of evil (demons) rages invisibly all around us.

“So if there’s another bunch from somewhere else, I don’t know what their situation with God may or may not be, but their existence doesn’t equal God doesn’t exist,” says Rick.

But one thing is certain, he says: “What Satan is hoping that we’ll take from this … is that if space people show up, and they’re really something, they must have created us, not God.”

To hear more of Rick’s analysis of Spielberg and “Disclosure Day,” watch the full episode above.

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​Strange encounters, Rick burgess, Steven spielberg, Disclosure, Spiritual warfare 

When President Trump emerged from a recent meeting with automotive executives and said he found it strange that some industry leaders oppose Americans repairing their own vehicles, most coverage focused on the politics.

I was more interested in what happened afterward.

If manufacturers truly support independent repairs, why remove provisions governing the very data modern repairs increasingly depend upon?

Because the deeper you dig into the latest right-to-repair fight, the more one question keeps surfacing: Why are automakers fighting so hard to control information generated by vehicles consumers already own?

Follow the money

Follow the money, and the picture becomes much clearer.

The U.S. automotive service market generates roughly $200 billion annually. Service departments are among the industry’s most reliable profit centers. As vehicles become more software-driven and connected, automakers have discovered that selling the car no longer has to end the customer relationship. Software subscriptions, connected services, maintenance plans, warranty work, and dealership repairs all create recurring revenue long after the vehicle leaves the showroom.

There’s nothing wrong with companies pursuing new revenue streams. The problem begins when protecting those revenue streams limits consumer choice.

That’s why the latest legislative fight deserves attention.

Stripped for parts

The debate centers on H.R. 7389, the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026. Supporters describe it as a way to modernize regulations while preserving independent repair access. On the surface, that sounds like good news for consumers.

Then something interesting happened. One of the most important parts of the broader right-to-repair debate disappeared.

Language covering telematics — the wireless vehicle data increasingly needed for diagnostics, calibrations, software updates, and repairs — was stripped from the bill before it advanced through committee. For many independent repair advocates, that wasn’t a technical detail. It was the entire fight.

That raises an obvious question. If manufacturers truly support independent repairs, why remove provisions governing the very data modern repairs increasingly depend upon?

The answer may have less to do with repairs than with control. For decades, owning a vehicle meant deciding who repaired it. Consumers chose their mechanic. Independent shops competed with dealerships. Competition kept prices down and choices open.

Modern vehicles work differently.

Data-driven

Today’s cars constantly generate data. They monitor component performance, transmit diagnostics, receive software updates, and communicate through manufacturer-controlled networks.

Control the data, and you gain influence over the repair process. That’s why automakers, dealers, independent repair shops, aftermarket suppliers, consumer advocates, and lawmakers are all fighting over the same issue.

Manufacturers argue that unrestricted access creates cybersecurity risks. Those concerns shouldn’t be dismissed. Modern vehicles are vastly more complex than the cars many of us grew up driving.

But independent repair shops aren’t asking for access to nuclear launch codes. They’re asking for the information needed to diagnose, repair, calibrate, and maintain vehicles consumers legally purchased. This is key in an era when more and more repairs require access to software rather than simply a wrench.

Viewed alongside other industry trends, the picture becomes even clearer. Vehicle telematics continue expanding. Subscription-based features are becoming common. Driving data has become valuable to insurers and analytics companies. Manufacturers can now change vehicle functionality through over-the-air software updates.

Each development can be defended on its own. Taken together, they suggest an industry steadily increasing its influence over vehicles long after they are sold.

RELATED: Cheap Chinese cars: Trojan horse built to undermine US security?

Jade Gao/Bettmann/Getty Images

Taking ownership

That’s why the right-to-repair debate increasingly looks less like a repair issue and more like an ownership issue.

Farmers confronted the same problem years ago as manufacturers restricted repairs on modern agricultural equipment. Purchasing expensive machinery no longer guaranteed the ability to fix it without manufacturer involvement.

The auto industry now appears headed toward a similar crossroads.

Technology has unquestionably made vehicles better. They’re safer, more efficient, and more capable than ever before. But technology also changes incentives. Every connected system creates opportunities for convenience, recurring revenue, data collection, and greater manufacturer control.

What makes H.R. 7389 so important isn’t what remains in the bill — it’s what was removed. The fight over telematics reveals where this debate is headed next.

The future isn’t really about brake pads or oil changes. It’s about who controls vehicle data, who profits from it, and ultimately who decides what owners are allowed to do with products they have already purchased.

The fix is in

For more than a century, vehicle ownership had a simple meaning. You bought the car. You decided who repaired it, how long you kept it, and what modifications you made.

Today, that definition is becoming less clear. The question isn’t whether modern vehicles should be secure. Of course they should. The question isn’t whether repairs have become more complicated. They have.

The real question is whether ownership still means what consumers think it means. Because if automakers are willing to fight this hard over repair data today, consumers should pay close attention to what comes next.

The right-to-repair battle may ultimately be remembered as the moment Americans discovered that ownership in the connected-car era no longer carries the assumptions previous generations took for granted.

​Right to repair, Telematics, President trump, Lifestyle, Drivers, Auto industry, Repair, Oem, Automotive 

The ladies of “The View” have once again proven that objective truth is not on their list of priorities.

On a recent episode, the panel discussed the case of Karmelo Anthony, who was recently sentenced to 35 years in jail for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet in April 2025 after the two had a verbal confrontation.

Whoopi Goldberg noted that all qualified black prospective jurors were struck from the jury pool — a move Anthony’s defense team challenged under a Batson ruling. The judge overruled the objection, however, after prosecutors provided a race-neutral explanation: The three jurors were educators whose profession made them too closely connected to a school-related incident involving high school students.

“The case has a lot of people divided. Some people believe that race was a factor in the trial because there were no black jurors. … Some folks think, ‘No, no, he got a fair trial.’ But is this a jury of his peers?” asked Goldberg.

Co-host Sunny Hostin then replied, “I don’t think so. And you know this has been an issue for such a long time in the judicial system where prosecutors use what are called, you know, Batson challenges.”

Pat Gray is disgusted by Hostin’s sneaky half-truth.

“Prosecutors and defense attorneys use [Batson challenges],” he corrects.

The other factor Hostin conveniently left out, says Pat, is the fact that “there were more than three black people in the jury pool.”

Some of those black candidates were struck, he argues, because they made statements of obvious bias.

They were “saying things like, ‘Yeah, I’d have a real hard time with putting a brother in jail.’ OK, well, then get out. Obviously, that’s not going to work,” Pat scoffs.

Sadly, Hostin wasn’t done lying.

She went on to claim that Batson challenges are loopholes for racism.

“It’s a challenge that is used to strike a juror, generally a juror of color,” she declared.

“No, it’s not generally a juror of color. It could be white … it could be anybody!” exclaims Pat, accusing Hostin of playing the race card.

To make matters even worse, Hostin, producer Kris Kruz points out, has a law degree from Notre Dame Law School and even served as a federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice.

But despite her prestigious education and high-profile government experience, Hostin still doesn’t seem to understand what a jury of one’s peers really means.

“You’re supposed to have a jury of your peers, and you’re not supposed to just strike someone because they’re black,” she said, arguing that striking jurors for being educators was not “an appropriate reason.”

“A jury of your peers does not mean that they’re all your same color or same age. That’s not what a jury of your peers means,” says Pat.

But perhaps Hostin’s worst take came next.

Citing the recently released footage where Anthony told cops, “He put his hands on me. I told him not to,” Hostin said, “[Metcalf] was 200 pounds. [Anthony] was 130 pounds.”

Anthony’s weight has been a point of contention throughout the trial. While he was frequently described as weighing roughly 130 pounds in the trial, his high school football bio listed him at roughly 160 pounds.

Pat couldn’t care less what Anthony weighs, though. “Just because Austin was bigger than him doesn’t mean it’s OK to kill him!”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Pat Gray?

To enjoy more of Pat’s biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Pat gray unleashed, Pat gray, The view, Sunny hostin, Whoopi goldberg, Karmelo anthony, Austin metcalf 

Oratory is out of fashion. The word itself sounds archaic to our ears, denoting something people used to practice in antiquity and at long length in 19th-century America. Even the more down-to-earth sounding “rhetoric” is heard to mean “mere” rhetoric — words false or deceptive by definition. Politicians talk about “messaging,” and the more significant politicians have layers of staff for “communications.”

This does not bode well for the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Every politician in America will feel obliged to say something for the occasion. Whoever can — with perhaps some rare exceptions — will deploy a staff member or staff members to draft his remarks.

The American people declared to the world and under God principles constituting not just the foundation and purpose of their political existence, but the only foundation for legitimate government.

The staff members themselves, products of American universities where American history is frowned upon or given the 1619 treatment, will have to do original research to prepare for the task. A significant percentage of them will rely on artificial intelligence. Patriots have reason to wonder whether there is a politician (or comms team) in America today who understands and can articulate for his fellow citizens and the world the meaning of July 4, 1776.

John Quincy Adams took July 4, 1776, with the utmost seriousness. The Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution became the north star of his politics over a 60-year career of devotion to his country and its cause.

He understood that man is a political animal because he is endowed by nature with logos (speech, reason) and that in American politics, the statesman’s first task is to understand the logos — the word fitly spoken, the apple of gold — of the Declaration of Independence.

He articulated his understanding of the Declaration and its principles beautifully, often, and at length in formal orations and other speeches and writings from the early to the late years of his remarkable political career. He served for a few years in his late 30s and early 40s, when he was also a United States senator, as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Later, in what his biographer Samuel Flagg Bemis called his “second career” of nine outspoken terms in the House of Representatives, he became known as “Old Man Eloquent,” in great part for his faithful championing of the principles of the Declaration. He was an avid, lifelong student of Cicero.

Adams was born into the American Revolution to a mother and father who were revolutionaries. When he was 7 years old, the Battle of Bunker Hill took place (Saturday, June 17, 1775) within earshot of the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother, Abigail, and three siblings.

On the morning of the battle, his mother took him with her and climbed to the top of nearby Penn’s Hill. From there, the two could see fire and smell the smoke from houses burning in Charlestown. John Quincy remembered the moment vividly to the end of his life. His father, John, was 400 miles away in Philadelphia as part of the Massachusetts delegation to the Second Continental Congress. Braintree was in a war zone.

RELATED: America turns 250 with a broken heart

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Weeks before, as militia streamed into the area in the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord, Abigail Adams had collected the family’s pewter dishes and melted them down to make bullets in a large kettle held over the kitchen fire. From time to time, she heard alarms, warning that the Royal Navy was about to land forces along the coast. She had good reason to fear that the British would try to seize rebel leaders and their families.

The best John Adams could do at the time was to write to his wife from Connecticut: “In Case of real Danger … fly to the Woods with our Children.” July 4, 1776, was still more than a year away, undefined in the uncertain future. But young John Quincy Adams was already learning its lessons.

On July 4, 1785, less than two years after the peace settlement ending the American war for independence, 17-year-old John Quincy, who had served as his father’s private secretary during the peace negotiations, was sailing back to America after six life-forming years in Europe. He wrote in his journal, slightly misquoting James Thompson’s “Rule Britannia,” that July 4 was:

The greatest day in the year, for every true American. The anniversary of our Independence. May heaven preserve it: and may the world still see:
A State where liberty shall still survive
In these late times, this evening of mankind
When Athens, Rome, and Carthage are no more
The world almost in slavish sloth dissolv’d.

The mature John Quincy would come to believe that on that date the American people declared to the world and under God principles constituting not just the foundation and purpose of their political existence, but the only foundation for legitimate government. He held that these principles of reason emerged in the providence of the Christian God through centuries of oppression and superstition and were destined in the providence of God to spread across the earth.

In God’s good time, the feudal monarchies of Europe would be overthrown and replaced by regimes based on the true principles of the American Revolution. The same providential fate awaited all the world’s barbarous, savage, or tyrannical regimes.

These facts, in his mind, were perfectly compatible with the maxim he would make famous, that America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy — and equally compatible with the reality he faced throughout his political career, that America itself, in its freedom, might abandon its principles and descend into barbarous tyranny.

In Fourth of July orations over four decades, Adams would explain to his fellow citizens why and how, in fidelity to the laws of nature and nature’s God, America should, in all weathers, steer its course by the north star of the principles of the Declaration.

These orations and other speeches and writings are conveniently collected in “John Quincy Adams: Speeches and Writings,” recently edited by David Waldstreicher, the distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, for the Library of America. They are full of history, reasoning, learning, and even oratory that should come in handy for those hoping to say something that rises to the occasion of the coming semiquincentennial.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​America 250, Declaration of independence, Fourth of july, John quincy adams, Semiquincentennial, Rhetoric, Politicians, American revolution, Consent of the governed, Europe, Opinion & analysis 

Summer is here, and if you’re looking to shed some pounds before you slip into your swimsuit, we have something that can help. These apps are all designed to count calories, track your weight, and reclaim a healthier, fitter you. The best part? They actually work.

The great American epidemic

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a staggering 72.4% of American adults over age 20 are either overweight or obese. Even worse, cases of “severe obesity” have tripled since the 1960s, signaling an extreme weight crisis for the country.

Growing obesity and degrading American health are the pinnacle of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement, which aims to end childhood chronic diseases by reforming America’s “food, health, and scientific systems.” As part of the initiative, the USDA and HHS reconfigured the food pyramid to prioritize protein, fruits, and healthy fats while minimizing carbs — a complete reversal of the original national food pyramid adopted in 1992. Kennedy has also pressured food processors to eliminate artificial dyes and use cleaner ingredients.

These apps are available for free, and they support paid subscriptions.

These are all good steps toward giving Americans access to better food, but when it comes to actually shedding the pounds, this can only be tackled on the personal level. Some people have tapped into sheer willpower to lose weight. Others turned to controversial miracle drugs, like GLP-1s, to drop the pounds. Then there are the tech nerds like me, who look to smartphones for relief.

The science behind weight-loss apps

I am not a specimen of perfect health. Far from it. Like nearly three-fourths of the nation, I fall into the CDC’s obese category, and like most people in this crowded bracket, my weight has yo-yoed up and down over the years. Throughout this journey, only one thing ever actually made that dreaded number on the scale go down — weight-loss apps.

The reason these apps work is simple: They take your raw data — like your age, height, current weight, and target weight — and use it to determine the ideal calorie limit for your goals. Then they combine this with calorie-counting and activity-tracking algorithms to compare the amount of calories you ingest against calories you burn for the day. If you take in more energy than you expel, you will gain weight, and if you lose more, you will lose weight (barring a medical condition that is physiologically keeping you overweight).

Simple math, right?

There are a couple of caveats to keep in mind.

First, in order for these apps to work, you have to log everything you eat. Even a single missed snack will throw off your numbers for the day, leading to weight-loss stagnation or even unintended gains.Second, you will need to either pair the app with a supported fitness tracker or use the pedometer feature on your phone (if you do this, make sure you carry your phone at all times to capture your steps). Taking steps throughout the day adds to your calorie bank, so the more active you are, the more you’re allowed to eat. When you run out of calories for the day, you’re done.

My favorite weight-loss apps

There are plenty of weight-loss apps on the app stores, and only you can decide which ones work for you. If you’re not sure where to start, these are my top three favorites. Note that these apps are available for free, and they support paid subscriptions to unlock additional features.

MyFitnessPal

As the app that has helped me lose more weight than the others, MyFitnessPal includes a robust food library that makes it easy to find the exact foods you eat and log them into your diary under “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dinner,” and “snacks.” After all, it is impossible to log your calories correctly if you can’t find the exact thing you just ate. The paid version makes this even easier with an included barcode scanner for processed foods and a meal scanner that logs foods simply by taking a picture, but it’s not a necessity.

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This new app for new moms is a game-changer ArtistGNDphotography/Getty Images

If you want to nerd out on your food data, MyFitnessPal lets you take a closer look at your calories for the day, providing insights into which meals were the most calorically dense, as well as nutrients and macro information that tells you all about the proteins, carbs, fats, fiber, and sugars on your plate. This is especially helpful for people on specific limited diets or for those who simply want to better understand their food choices.

Finally, MyFitnessPal offers free meal plans with complete recipes that show you how to make healthier food with no guesswork.

Download: Apple App Store, Google Play Store

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/MyFitnessPal

Lose It

Where MyFitnessPal excels at raw data, Lose It wins points with its attractive design. Food metrics are all laid out in a neat interface that clearly highlights calorie intake, macronutrients, daily logging streaks, weight progress over time, and calorie bonuses from daily exercise. Lose It also offers a broad food library that makes it easy to find the foods you eat and log them properly.

Unfortunately, Lose It locks some of its more interesting features behind a paywall, including personalized nutrient information, granular nutrient goals, and health insights that tell you how you’re progressing. Luckily, it makes up for this in its free Discover feed that provides health articles, a friends list to lose weight with friends and family, and community groups where users can chat with like-minded individuals on their weight-loss journeys.

Download: Apple App Store, Google Play Store

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Lose It

Google Health

This one ranked third. I haven’t had a lot of time to test it yet, but the brand-new Google Health app has impressed me so far. When I first looked at Google Health, I was mostly focused on the exercise metrics that went along with the new Fitbit Air. However, its food tracking features were a surprising benefit. Unlike MyFitnessPal, Google Health lets you scan the barcode of processed foods for free, though in my testing, the food library isn’t as robust, so this feature may or may not be helpful for some. Of course, if you can’t find your food item by barcode, you can always type it in the search bar manually.

On the daily view, Google Health clearly lists your calories, all divided by breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. You also get a quick view of your macros and nutrient information. Also unlike the other food tracking apps, Google Health offers a window of ideal calories to hit instead of a rigid cutoff, giving you some wiggle room from day to day. The way it is laid out, Google says that reaching the first number in the window consistently will help you lose up to two pounds per week, while hitting the higher number will only result in one pound per week.

Finally, if you spring for the premium subscription with AI Coach powered by Gemini, you can take photos of your food or tell the Coach to log them manually, and AI will mark them down. I found this feature to be especially useful for foods that weren’t available in the barcode scanner. Even though the food library didn’t have them, Coach can use a photo of the label to create a new item in your log with little hassle.

Download: Apple App Store, Google Play Store

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Google Health

A path to sustained weight loss

The important thing to keep in mind is that weight-loss apps are all about the long game. Unlike GLP-1s that help you drop weight fast and put it back on when you’re done with the injections, weight-loss apps provide education on the foods you eat and modify your eating habits.

They’re designed to keep your body in a caloric deficit that is both reasonable and sustainable. If followed consistently, you’ll lose an average of 1-2 pounds per week without any major energy crashes or side effects. At the same time, you’re retraining yourself on how to choose better foods that support a healthier lifestyle and a thinner waist for years to come.

​Tech 

My husband has bipolar disorder. I know firsthand that the medications he takes do not merely improve his quality of life — they make our family life possible.

I am thankful for the drug companies whose products and innovations help keep my family together. But that does not mean I trust Big Pharma.

The pharmaceutical industry’s incentives are often at odds with the people it treats.

The pharmaceutical industry has helped create a culture in which Americans are taking more prescription drugs than at any point in history. Last year, more than two-thirds of Americans reported taking a prescription drug daily, and 26% said they take four or more.

No wonder the average price of prescription medications in the United States has risen by about 37% in the last decade. Many of the most popular brand-name medications have doubled in price over the past 15 years.

One study found that prescription drug prices in the United States are nearly three times higher than prices for the same medications in 32 comparable countries. Family health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored plans jumped 26% from 2020 to 2025, outpacing wage growth and inflation.

A quarter of Americans recently reported having difficulty paying for their medications. About 19% said they had skipped or rationed doses because of the cost. Research indicates that medical expenses are now the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in this country, surpassing job loss.

I understand that high prices help fund the astronomical cost of clinical trials that test and bring new drugs to market. But Americans have also seen pharmaceutical companies acquire the rights to off-patent drugs and raise prices overnight. They have watched insulin prices climb for years even though insulin is relatively cheap to produce.

Let’s face it: The pharmaceutical industry’s incentives are often at odds with the people it treats.

The same industry that helps my husband is increasingly keeping medications out of reach for many families.

Drug prices would not be so high if Big Pharma did not spend between $13 billion and $14 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising. They would not be so high if the pharmaceutical and health sectors did not consistently spend more on federal lobbying than any other industry.

Those efforts shape the laws and policies that allow current drug prices. The industry clearly views them as worthwhile investments.

Americans spent 12.7% more on pharmaceutical drugs last year than they did in 2024. A significant share of that increase came from popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Roughly 12% of American adults are currently taking one of these drugs, and that number is expected to rise significantly in the coming years.

I am not saying people should not take these medications. That is not for me to say. But I am deeply concerned that, culturally, we increasingly treat medication as the first line of defense for nearly every challenge before seriously exploring other options.

RELATED: Want to live to 100? Don’t expect Big Pharma to help.

lucigerma/iStock/Getty Images

That concern comes from firsthand experience.

As someone who has battled addiction, I am acutely aware of the power substances can hold over a person’s life. That experience has left me worried about others who may develop dependencies on drugs.

I remember how the opioid crisis destroyed entire communities and caused a staggering number of deaths after companies such as Purdue Pharma aggressively pushed OxyContin while downplaying its risks. That epidemic continues today with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Is it any wonder some of us remain skeptical of pharmaceutical companies’ motives?

As a parent, I do everything in my power to ensure that my children do not become unnecessarily dependent on medications. I want them to understand that any drug they take should be used carefully and for its intended purpose.

I acknowledge the value of medicine. I deeply respect what the health care industry can do. My own family depends on it.

But respect should not require blindness.

The pharmaceutical industry should remember the families paying the bills, rationing the doses, and wondering whether the medications they need will remain within reach.

Innovation deserves reward. Exploitation does not.

​Bankruptcy, Big pharma, Health insurance, Opinion & analysis, Opioid crisis, Prescription drugs, Health care, Insulin, Glp-1, Advertising, Lobbying 

In a culture constantly telling young people that the future is bleak and their problems are unprecedented, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is offering a different message: Don’t buy the despair.

“I think for a lot of you, there is this quiet voice that has been whispering to you for a while now. And it says the world’s broken and somebody’s handing it to me, and I don’t know what to do,” he says.

“Let me start with the hard truth here. Life is hard. It is. It’s just not as hard as people profiting from your panic need you to believe. Okay? It’s not. The hardness is real. The hopelessness is a product. Don’t buy in to that. There’s an entire industry whose only job is to convince you that just being alive right now is the heaviest thing a human has ever carried,” he continues.

“The weight is real, but the despair is a sales pitch,” he adds.

And one major source of stress for young people is AI. Glenn points out that while it may be able to pass the same exams, it will never be human.

“The machine that we have right now, in your pocket, that can read every book ever written, but it has never once been afraid of the dark. It can know everything and understand nothing. It will know more about you by Tuesday. Yet it will never really know what it’s like to be you,” he says.

“And that’s not your weakness. That’s the entire point of you. It has all of the answers, but not a single reason to get out of bed. You have all of the reasons. You may not have the answers, but you have the reasons. Don’t trade those away,” he continues.

Glenn goes on to explain that you should not mistake all the knowledge AI has for wisdom.

“Don’t confuse the two, and don’t worship either one of them,” he says, before pointing out that human beings were created by God — and AI was not.

“A universe of cold math does not produce a soul that weeps at music by accident. You were made. And you were made on purpose. You, not just man — you,” he continues. “And somewhere underneath all that noise, purpose is still waiting for you to get quiet enough to hear it. I’m telling you: You will find it.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Ai, Americans, Blaze media, Glenn beck, Knowledge, Machine, The glenn beck program 

New York police have released new details from their investigation into a possible murder-suicide incident that makes a grandmother the lead suspect.

On Tuesday evening 2 adults and 4 children were found dead inside of the home in Mechanicville, a small town north of Albany.

‘Many residents knew the family involved, have children and grandchildren of their own, or simply cannot comprehend the loss of six lives under such heartbreaking circumstances.’

The adults were later identified as 64-year-old Amy Steadman, her 44-year-old daughter Sarah Myers, and her four children, 13-year-old Harper Harmon, 11-year-old Hudson Harmon, 10-year-old Gavin Harmon, and 10-year-old Gracelynn Harmon.

Mechanicville Police Chief William Rabbitt said Thursday that police were called for a welfare check on the family after a neighbor said they had not been seen in many days.

He said the bodies had been dead for an undetermined period of time before they were found.

“I can’t speculate as to the number of days, but it was such that making identification at the house was difficult,” he said.

Rabbitt said “numerous” prescriptions and over-the-counter medications were found at the home that led police to believe the cause of death was intentional poisoning. The official cause of death are yet to be determined officially.

One of the children had also suffered from sharp-force injuries, he added. A handwritten note found at the home indicated that Steadman was responsible for the deaths, but the investigation was ongoing.

“I cannot get into the authorship of the note at this time nor the contents of what was in it,” he said. “Until we get the cause and manner certified, we can’t speculate on the involvement of all persons.”

Rabbitt said there was no threat to the public.

Investigators contacted the father of the children, Brady Harmon, who lives in Utah. Harmon spoke to WRGB-TV and said he had been the subject of false rumors and accusations on social media.

Harmon said they were in a custody dispute but denied the online allegation that he had abused his children.

“Never touched my kids. And this is coming from someone who has been abused. Unless you’re in that room and living a day-to-day, you know, life with her, you know nothing,” he said.

Court documents did not indicate any allegations of abuse related to the couple, but Harmon told WRBG that he had been assaulted by Myers on the last day he saw his children in person in 2019.

“I was called a sperm donor, nothing more than an ATM, deadbeat father. I put my hand up and then she opened the door and stabbed me in the face with a medicine dropper,” he claimed.

RELATED: Elderly woman found beaten to death with a hammer after husband talked about suicide pact

Social media users also uncovered a GoFundMe started by Steadman, the maternal grandmother, that was titled, “Help get a domestic violence lawyer save my kids.”

Harmon said that Myers had not come to Utah for any of the legal hearings in more than 6 years, and had only appeared via Zoom.

Sheriff Rabbitt described how the horrible incident affected the residents of the city.

“Mechanicville is a close-knit city,” he said. “Many residents knew the family involved, have children and grandchildren of their own, or simply cannot comprehend the loss of six lives under such heartbreaking circumstances.”

The town has about 5,200 residents.

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​Murder suicide, Grandmother, New york state, Domestic violence, Poisoning, Crime