So-called climate change gets a bad rap.

Manufactured fears over the climate have not only been weaponized for decades against Western industry, affordable energy, and consumer choice, but have also contributed to mental instability and the demographic crisis underway.

‘We have jolted the system.’

Now, it turns out the alarmists may have been way off about everything — including the severity, impact, and timeline of anthropogenic climate change and even about climate change being a problem in the first place.

A new study published on Thursday in the esteemed journal Science shows that humanity’s global heat generation has spared North America from freezing over once again.

During the most recent cold glacial period, better known as the Ice Age, most of Canada and the northern U.S. was buried under the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Ice thickness in some areas is estimated to have reached upwards of 2.48 miles, and the LIS, at its largest, stretched from Chicago to above the Arctic Circle.

Thousands of years ago, this sheet melted away such that today, all that remains of it is the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, Canada.

Having studied the LIS and its remains, researchers determined that roughly 3,600 years ago, the ice sheet had gotten as small as it was going to get, then began re-expanding around the time of the Resurrection, “marking the onset of the next glaciation.”

RELATED: Start your engines! Climate experts now blame rising temperatures on reduced emissions.

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto/Getty Images

According to the study, warming temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century staved off further glaciation.

“The new LIS reached maximum dimensions in ~1960 CE, after which anthropogenic summer warming resulted in a negative mass balance, ice margin recession, and the termination of the next glaciation,” the researchers noted in the abstract for their paper.

According to the study, rising summer temperatures “is mirrored by the increase in net effective radiative forcing associated with the measured increase in well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs) since ~1750 CE.” In other words, the industrial revolution and its fruits have saved America from a slow and icy invasion.

Geochemist Nicolas Young, an associate research professor at Columbia Climate School and co-author of the study, stated that another ice age “was just getting started, everything was normal, the next glaciation was about to happen — and yet it stopped.”

“It’s a very powerful example of how we have jolted the system,” added Young.

This study also gives an out to the alarmists of yesteryear who clutched pearls about global cooling.

“It actually was happening,” said Young. “They couldn’t quite prove it, but now we sort of have the evidence.”

Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory noted that while human emissions saved the continent from an icy fate, “technically we are still living in an ice age — the Late Cenozoic Ice Age — which started about 34 million years ago.”

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​Climate alarmism, Climate change, Greenhouse gases, Ice age, Science, Study, Politics 

Here is the tough truth: Modern countries have pretty similar family policy profiles. Marriage is weakened everywhere. Most countries allow obscenity and divorce. Contraception is legal, as is abortion in the majority of countries. Many have same-sex marriage and anti-sex discrimination laws. Nearly all have family subsidies of one kind or another, and most subsidize care outside the home.

The differences that do exist do not always support social conservative expectations. What modern country has the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rate? Here’s a hint: It also has no same-sex marriage and arguably the tightest regulation of obscenity. This country has a strong family culture in a sense. But that country is South Korea, which features the world’s lowest birth rate and is the only country where fewer than 50% of adults are married.

More women think of themselves as oppressed and discriminated against today than in the 1970s. The revolution never reaches its end point.

The institution of marriage is strong in South Korea; it’s just that relatively few enter it. The industrial-scale familial indifference makes South Korea the basement for family life in the modern world.

Perhaps Italy or Spain are basements in Western modernity. The average age of first marriage in both countries is around 37 for men and nearly 35 for women, who are already past peak fertility. Both countries have fertility rates in the low 1s, and both have pretty high percentages of kids born to unmarried parents, between 40% and 50%.

Perhaps surprisingly, Italy and Spain have nearly the same family policy profile as Israel. The country is the ceiling for modern countries. Its total fertility rate is nearly 3 children per woman, while the next highest modern country is Mexico at 1.89. Israel is at the top (or near the top) in the percentage of people over 18 who are currently married (72%) and in early marriage (women marry at an average age under 25). Few children in Israel are born outside of wedlock. Israel’s relative health is not due to distinctive policies.

Two things stand out. First, Israel’s religious observance rates are higher than most countries, but not extraordinary. Second, interestingly, secular women in Israel marry and have children at rates much higher than secular women in other countries. Secular Israelis resemble practicing Christians in America, more or less.

The reasons for Israeli exceptionalism must be understood. My guess is that its state of emergency and religious observance point Israeli men and women toward marriage and children. Israeli sexes seem less suspicious of one another. Sex role realism is much more deeply accepted in Israel.

No country can have a fruitful marriage system without clearly defined roles for men and women in the family and in society generally. There simply must be more Israeli manliness and motherliness. I’m reliably told that the Jewish mother of ancient provenance has not disappeared. Israel’s men either have a military bearing or a religious patriarchalism. I have noticed both kinds of manliness during my travels in Israel.

Here is the question for Israel: If the emergency disappeared, would the family culture be as good? However we resolve this question, let’s congratulate Israel for being a modern outlier.

Even in Israel, however, the ceiling for family life is pretty low. Family decline seems a providential fact of modernity. It is universal and enduring and largely escapes the ability of human beings to reverse it. Efforts to reverse the decline often end up accelerating it.

RELATED: A roomful of young conservatives … and just one parent

Moor Studio/Getty Images

What is it about modernity that puts a low ceiling on family life and a seemingly ever-lower basement?

Novelists and political philosophers saw family decline coming. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, and Oswald Spengler all worried that the move from a more natural, rustic way of life to a technological, urban one would coincide with declines in fertility, marriage, and human vitality.

This transition is best understood as the move from “culture” to “civilization.” What Spengler says in his Decline of the West distills the reality. For “cultures,” family life is natural, unreflective, and almost instinctual. Tolstoy’s peasants just did it. Fathers worry that the family name may be extinguished, and both fathers and mothers act on a duty to perpetuate their families.

But as civilization arises, people cease caring about their family name being extinguished. “World-cities” arise, less fit for human habitation, isolated from ancestors, continually abstracted from nature.

People weigh having children, litigating the pros and cons, instead of consulting duties. The rise of great nations therefore coincides with the decline of family duties and sentiment. With the rise of “world-cities” comes an “appalling depopulation” lasting centuries, as Spengler wrote. Rousseau imagined the corruption in Paris in “Julie.” Tolstoy, in “Anna Karenina,” depicted the barrenness, decadence, and unfaithful marriages in Petersburg. Spengler described the “sterility of civilized man.”

Our post-civilized era makes family decline the object of policy, not just an indirect product of modernity. I call state-directed family decline the “Rolling Revolution.” The Rolling Revolution turns numbness toward familial destiny into a moral duty. This acceleration in the move from “culture” to “civilization” is present everywhere in the modern world. It is what I mean when I say that most countries in the Western world have roughly similar policy profiles.

Modernity begins with the fading of duty, where people no longer sense the extinction of a family line as a doom. It culminates with the state and economy promoting the Rolling Revolution. Laws cannot restore a duty souls no longer feel. The state now dismantles remaining duties as vestiges of cultural oppression, and it puts its thumb on the scales of calculation. This Rolling Revolution is the basis for the Left’s continual mobilization.

How does the Rolling Revolution work?

Men and women must be officially thought of as interchangeable and androgynous. But since men and women are different, the promised world of androgyny never arrives. Women can always think of themselves as less than or different from men. The grievance industry, fueled by highly credentialed female college graduates, is organized around goals that can never be reached.

RELATED: Young men are being left behind

Kieferpix/Getty Images

The Rolling Revolution seeks to break the bonds between parents and young children, replacing them with experiences that can be regulated and mediated. Since the most fundamental human bonds are built around natural differences and natural hierarchies, the state’s work can never be completed.

The revolution also attacks and stigmatizes biological expressions like mother and child and man and woman. Mother is recruited to work in mega-corps or as a government bureaucrat instead of slaving away in the nursery. The tired, old feminist complaints about motherhood have been largely relieved. Legal subordination has ended, and chores are split. Many women work for wages. Still, husbands are thought of as oppressors, and now children are oppressors, and murdering them is no longer universally seen as reprehensible.

More women think of themselves as oppressed and discriminated against today than in the 1970s. The revolution never reaches its end point.

Still, as Spengler notes, no situation is permanent. Civilizations cycle. Rome and China had their decadence. And modern countries now have theirs. Family decline will break modern countries. At some point, the compulsive campaign leading to neuroses and nihilism culminates in collapse. Perhaps it will happen with a whimper, perhaps with a bang. Governmental and financial structures probably cannot survive two or three generations of absolute population decline. Immigration crises continue too.

These crises will keep getting more acute until countries can no longer print enough money, pass on their debt to generations of decreasing numbers, or import enough foreigners.

Our freedom of action is real, but limited. Providence traces a fatal circle around each man and each country that none can leave, but within its vast limits, man and peoples are free and powerful. Israel is a country of national conservatism in a sense, just as South Korea is. Both mind their borders. Both face existential threats and daily reminders of them. Yet one is the ceiling for the modern world, and one is the basement — and the ceiling is a lot lower than it used to be.

National conservatism, united with religious believers, is the only force in the modern world opposing this Rolling Revolution. Only the covenantal are reproducing at decent rates today. Only they are marrying. Only they manifest the virtues associated with family life. They are the basis for a future, better national conservatism, but they are not exactly products of our current order. The counterrevolution will have to exist on fundamentally different ground than the Rolling Revolution.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

​South korea, Families, Israel, Italy, Spain, Secular, Marriage, Religion, Family life, Opinion & analysis, Birth rates, Population 

A major Big Tech investor who leans libertarian is doing all he can to try to keep Democrats from power in red and purple states.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Scott Banister is first and foremost a “capitalist.” He was an early investor in some of the biggest tech-driven enterprises, including PayPal, Uber, and SpaceX, and co-founded the anti-spam solution IronPort.

‘It’s clear that state legislatures are the next frontier in expanding political power.’

Now, he is using his wealth to try to invest in America’s future — by stopping radical Democrats.

Banister has pledged $40 million to Make Liberty Win, a right-leaning PAC dedicated to sending mailers, knocking on doors, and making phone calls to share with voters the truth about the Democrat agenda.

State filings confirm that Banister, through Make Liberty Win and First Amendment LLC, has spent more than $6.7 million to oppose state House and Senate Democrats just in Michigan alone. All of the nearly two dozen Michigan filings from First Amendment LLC note that Banister made the donation on September 21 and list his occupation as “angel investor.”

One of the Michigan Democrats targeted by Make Liberty Win is state Sen. Chedrick Greene. Back in May, Greene won a special election to represent Senate District 35, a blue-collar area in the web of the thumb of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

The district is light blue, so Republicans have a shot at flipping it red on Tuesday. Make Liberty Win has allocated an eye-popping $625,000 toward that effort.

Some of the direct mail has already reached registered voters:

Photo given to Blaze News

RELATED: Vance blasts ‘psychopath’ El-Sayed over ‘anti-white’ hatred

Photo given to Blaze News

“These paid, third-party advertising efforts are shining a spotlight on Michigan Democrats’ record of failure,” Greg Manz, senior communications adviser for the Michigan GOP, told Blaze News.

“It’s crucial that Great Lakes State voters are provided proven facts, transparency, and a clear picture of what’s happening in Lansing in order to hold these Democrat senators accountable for their reckless policy positions.”

Make Liberty Work did not respond to a request for comment, and efforts to reach Banister for comment were unsuccessful.

Michigan is not the only state infused with funding from Banister and Make Liberty Work. Funding has also been distributed to Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, with plans to reach at least three more before Election day on Tuesday, Fox News reported.

A press release about Banister’s largesse said, according to Fox News:

Self-described socialists are running for office and winning in the Democratic Party, like recently elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Make Liberty Win’s campaign will stem the tide of the far-left by mobilizing student and youth activists to knock on the doors of more than two million voters in key states.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group dedicated to assisting the GOP at all levels of government, believes the resources could help close the funding gap between state-level Democrats and state-level Republicans.

“Democrats are making clear that no amount of money is too much when it comes to taking control of state legislatures. With more than $200 million already committed by the largest Democratic state legislative groups, and wealthy outside donors pouring even more money into the fight, it’s clear that state legislatures are the next frontier in expanding political power,” RSLC President Edith Jorge Tuñon told Blaze News in a statement.

“Their growing investment in DSA-aligned candidates makes the stakes even higher. That’s exactly why Republicans in every state across the country need to get out and vote Tuesday. The fight for our state legislatures, congressional majorities, and the political map heading into 2028 depends on it.”

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​Michigan, Big tech, Libertarian, Democrats, Politics 

The family of 44-year-old Joshua Cochran knew there was something wrong when he went missing over the weekend from his residence in Alexandria, Virginia.

On Tuesday, police found his remains in the closet of his 63-year-old neighbor’s home. Cochran suffered from blunt force trauma to the head, Alexandria police said.

‘When they opened that door, the suspect gave an immediate confession.’

The family told WUSA-TV that he was not answering his phone, but they didn’t imagine he had died.

“When we stopped hearing from him, we knew pretty quickly something was up,” said Michelle Cochran, the victim’s sister-in-law, to WUSA.

“It was certainly the farthest thing from our mind that that would happen,” she added.

Investigators said surveillance video showed that Cochran had gone out drinking on Saturday with John Stremple III, who is a registered sex offender.

Cochran’s family said they didn’t know Stremple, but it was just like Cochran to befriend strangers.

“In chatting with a couple of friends, I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be so on-brand for Josh to, like, have befriended the old guy in the complex?’ Like, that was just him,” Michelle said.

Police said they knocked on Stremple’s door and were surprised when he opened the door and responded with a confession.

“It is an unexpected statement,” police said. “When our detectives knocked on the door, they were just following up on the leads that had been established. And when they opened that door, the suspect gave an immediate confession.”

He was charged with second-degree murder.

Michelle Cochran said her brother-in-law had moved to Alexandria to be closer to his 8-year-old son.

Fox News released a statement about the death of its employee.

RELATED: Woman calls 911 after making tragic and gruesome discovery inside dumpster in Los Angeles

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic death of our colleague Joshua Cochran,” the statement reads, according to WUSA. “He was a dedicated member of our FOX News Media team who will be dearly missed. Our heartfelt condolences and prayers go out to his family.”

Michelle Cochran said police took the family’s concerns seriously from the time her brother-in-law went missing.

Stremple was convicted in 2014 of sodomy against a minor.

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​Missing person, Surveillance video, Tragic death, Registered sex offenders, Virginia, Crime 

Tonight, millions of Halloween revelers will crown themselves with red devil horns and grab plastic pitchforks.

Whether their devilish guises point to irreverence, mockery, or just fun, Glenn Beck knows there is a real devil, and his intentions are far more sinister and sneaky than any costume.

In this striking monologue, the Blaze Media co-founder echoes Paul Harvey’s famous radio essay “If I Were the Devil” and warns that the real threat isn’t dramatic — it’s subtle, constant, and has already deeply transformed society.

“If I were the devil, I’d want everybody laughing at me because a man who thinks the devil is a joke will never check his own house for one,” Glenn begins.

“If I were the devil, I wouldn’t burn a single book. Book burning just means martyrs. I would just make sure that nobody could ever sit still long enough to read a book. I’d put a glowing rectangle in everybody’s hand.”

“I would teach it to know you better than your mother does — what you fear, what you want, what makes your jaw tighten. Then I would feed you that daily, all day, forever. And I’d do it for free,” he continues.

This inconspicuous conditioning, Glenn argues, would also have a profound spiritual impact.

“If I were the devil, I’d never ask you to hate God. That’s too direct. People would push back. I think I’d just keep you busy. I’d fill every single quiet minute — the car, the line at the store, the last 10 minutes before sleep — I’d fill it with noise,” he explains.

The devil’s quiet voice, he says, would then whisper warnings to each political camp.

“If I were the devil, I’d go to the right and I’d whisper, ‘They hate you. They want to destroy everything that you love. You can’t afford to wait. You can’t afford to play fair anymore. Don’t do it,’” Glenn says.

“And then I’d walk across the street, and I’d whisper exactly the same words to the left, word for word — ‘You can’t afford to play fair.’ And both sides would believe me.”

The church would become infected with these whispers as well.

“If I were the devil, I would take the church, and I’d split it right down the middle. Half of it I’d turn into a political rally so the cross becomes a campaign sign, kind of like the flag has. The other half I’d turn into a coffee shop with a band where nothing is ever a sin and nobody ever needs to change,” Glenn continues.

“I’d have one side all conviction and no grace and the other all grace and no conviction. Because either one would work for me if I were the devil.”

To the youth, he would corrupt not with temptation but with “despair.”

“I’d tell the young men that they were dangerous and useless at the same time. I would tell young women that a husband is a risk and a child is a mistake. It’s a career setback,” he notes.

“I’d make marriage a punchline, parenthood a lifestyle choice, kind of like buying a boat. And then I would just stand back, and I would watch the loneliest generation in American history call its loneliness freedom.”

To twist the knife, he would then attack their sense of worth.

“I would replace friends with followers, confession with posting, repentance with rebranding. If I were the devil, I would teach you that your worth is a number at the bottom of a photo, and I would make sure that that number was never quite high enough,” Glenn adds.

Easing the pain would look like sports betting or AI “companions.”

“I’d put a casino in your pocket. I’d call it sports. I’d make it legal. I’d make it fun. I’d put it in a commercial during every time-out and make sure that the kid who lost his rent money at 2 a.m. feels too ashamed to actually tell anyone,” he continues.

“I could give every lonely person in the world a voice that always agrees with them … a companion that never says no, never gets tired of you, never asks you to be better. Why would anyone do the hard work of loving a real person when a fake one is so much easier?”

Next, he would undermine the idea of truth — and ultimately the necessity of Jesus.

“I would teach you that the truth is whatever you feel — your truth, my truth. It sounds so kind. But if everyone is right, then nobody is wrong. If nobody is wrong, nobody needs to be forgiven. If nobody needs to be forgiven, nobody needs a savior,” Glenn insists, adding that for the devil, this would “do more of my work than a thousand horror movies.”

At the same time, though, he would sow fear, outrage, and hopelessness into the very fabric of society.

“I would make outrage profitable and gratitude boring. I’d make fear the most reliable product in America. … I would tell you that the end is coming. … I would tell you it’s all rigged and nothing you do will make a difference,” Glenn explains, “because a man who believes nothing … he will ever do will ever matter, he’ll eventually stop doing anything at all — not evil, just nothing. And nothing is all I ever really needed.”

And then he would pull out his “oldest trick.”

“I’d whisper one more thing to each and everyone privately. ‘Shhh … you know, you’re the only one that feels this way. Don’t tell anyone. They won’t understand, but I do,’” warns Glenn ominously.

“Isolation is my oldest trick. The wolf never takes the sheep in the middle of the flock. He always takes the ones on the edges, the ones that are alone. That’s the plan.”

“Look around,” Glenn says. “It’s working.”

To hear more of his powerful monologue and what the devil himself is really “afraid of,” watch the video above.

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.

​Glenn beck, Halloween, Blazetv show 

As a Brit growing up in the 1980s, Halloween was something of a rite of passage.

In October 1988, the buzz in our school canteen wasn’t over who fancied the new girl or who pissed in the swimming pool. It was about who was going as Freddy Krueger. We traded algebra for art as we painstakingly designed costumes in the back of our exercise books.

To light his way, the devil tossed Jack a burning ember from hell, which Jack put inside a hollowed-out turnip.

Of course, back then, we lived in a high-trust society: Parents let us roam the night streets unaccompanied, knocking on strangers’ doors until our pillowcases bulged with sweets we had to drag home and divide.

Fast-forward nearly 40 years, and Halloween in the U.K. feels as dead as a George Romero zombie.

Pooka power

Every year it’s the same. The commentariat inveighs against American cultural imperialism, and the British public prepares for what feels like a hostage situation. Entire streets plunge into darkness as homeowners tape up their letterboxes, turn off the lights, and pretend to be out.

I don’t blame them. If a teenager in a tracksuit and Ghostface mask knocks on a door on a typical English housing estate, he’s unlikely to be a fan of Wes Craven’s postmodern horror franchise. The knife he’s carrying will probably be real, and he won’t be after a Snickers bar.

In contrast, America seems to love Halloween. Entire neighborhoods build haunted houses, while parents dress up alongside their children and have street parades. It’s all very communitarian and, more importantly, fun!

The joke, of course, is on us. That wholesome, happy American family yelling “trick or treat” isn’t celebrating a homegrown invention. America didn’t invent Halloween. Like cricket, we gave it to you. But unlike cricket, you glammed it up, put it in a blood-soaked plastic body bag, and sold it back to us.

As with all eccentric British traditions, you have to go back over 2,000 years to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated in Ireland and elsewhere in the Celtic world around the end of October. Marking the end of harvest and the beginning of winter, it was associated with the turning of the year and the supernatural.

In later Irish folklore, this was a night when the boundary between the living and the spirit world grew thin, allowing creatures like the Pooka to roam the earth. Disguises, bonfires, and attempts to ward off troublesome spirits became part of the traditions associated with the season.

A proper carve-up

In the eighth century, the Catholic Church added another layer to the festivities. Pope Gregory III established a November 1 observance honoring the saints in Rome, a date later adopted more widely for All Saints’ Day. Whether the timing was intended to supplant Samhain remains disputed, but Christian and older folk customs eventually became intertwined. The night before All Saints’ Day became known as All Hallows’ Eve — what we now call Halloween.

British and Irish traditions helped lay the foundation for what we do today: souling and guising. In England, long before kids demanded an industrial-size bag of M&Ms or your car keys under threat of violence, children and the needy went door-to-door singing and offering prayers for souls in exchange for “soul cakes,” sweet spiced cakes. Across Scotland and Ireland, the locals were guising, a custom involving dressing in grotesque disguises and performing songs for fruit and money.

The tradition of carving jack-o’-lanterns has strong roots in Ireland, including the legend of Stingy Jack. According to Irish folklore, Stingy Jack was a notorious trickster who pranked the devil. After his death, God refused him entry to heaven for being too sinful, but the devil — aware of his shenanigans — didn’t want him either, casting him out to wander the night for eternity. To light his way, the devil tossed Jack a burning ember from hell, which Jack put inside a hollowed-out turnip. The Irish carved disturbing faces into root vegetables to frighten away wandering spirits.

During the 1840s, when famine devastated Ireland, a massive influx of Irish immigrants arrived in North America, joining Scottish immigrants who brought related customs of their own. They packed up their meager possessions and brought their traditions with them.

One thing they were happy to leave behind was the turnip. In America, pumpkins were plentiful, larger, and easier to carve. It sowed the seeds, literally, of a cultural revolution — even if some in the Protestant majority regarded the newcomers’ customs as backward, popish superstitions.

Guy tried

As America took its first steps toward cementing this new tradition, Brits were, as usual, busy dismantling their own. Halloween as we know it now didn’t really exist in 19th- and much of 20th-century England. The closest we got was “Penny for the Guy,” a tradition associated with Bonfire Night on November 5. That was when Britain celebrated sticking it to the Catholics, commemorating Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605.

By the 19th century, children were pushing straw-filled dummies around the streets of Britain in wheelbarrows, asking for pennies to buy fireworks. The life-sized effigy would then sit atop a bonfire and be subsequently burned.

By the 1980s, this once-popular custom was disappearing from the streets where I grew up. “Penny for the Guy” was either carried on by a small handful of die-hard traditionalists or turned into a rich person’s hobby, children bedecked in bespoke Victorian clothes pushing a cart the price of small sedan.

The practice was dying through a combination of classic British tropes: apathy and regulation. Fireworks were being legislated out of our tiny hands. As someone who sat at the crossroads of a new cultural era, I had no interest in building a guy. Spending an entire weekend stuffing clothes with straw and shredded newspaper was too much to ask a generation discovering video games and MTV.

RELATED: Dear America: Please give cricket a chance

Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

Blast from the past

Sourcing illegal explosives, however? We’d work overtime for that. Our autumn side hustle involved pyromania. Like all boys through recorded history, we thought explosions were awesome. Shopkeepers were legally banned from selling to under-16s and kept fireworks under the counter away from youthful eyes, but it was no deterrent.

This was the 1980s. Laws were merely suggestions, never enforced. All it took was an older mate or a “cool” adult — one who would probably buy you beer as well — and voila! A world of blowing stuff up awaited. Parents were also more liberal (in a good way) and often took a libertarian view of our minor pyrotechnic carnage. One year, we put a friend in a dustbin, threw in half a dozen lit bangers, and sat on the lid. When he climbed out, all we did was roll around laughing. He looked like Wile E. Coyote after being given a cigar marked TNT. Glory days.

Enter America with a rebrand. Recognizing a Jason Voorhees gaping knife-wound-sized void in the British calendar, Hollywood and the American retail machine swooped in. America deconsecrated Halloween. They took its ancient folk customs, stripped them of their myth, and repackaged them in lowbrow, high-fructose glitzy consumerism.

I don’t blame them. They saw a bunch of kids who wanted some fun without the tedium of manual labor. But we didn’t adopt trick-or-treating simply because we loved watching serial killers slash cheerleaders in dormitories. It was because we were too lazy to build a life-sized doll.

The irony? We now fork out £20 for a tacky “Scream” mask and a bag of imported Hershey’s, forgetting that the whole freak show was ours in the first place.

​Halloween, Lifestyle, Guy fawkes, Penny for the guy, Uk, Britain, England, Samhain, All saints day, Christianity, Letter from the uk 

The Trump administration lost a bid to force California to set aside ballots from a list of likely noncitizen voters.

The Department of Justice had flagged about 20,000 likely noncitizen voters and asked California to either verify their status as legal voters or segregate any ballots from those on the list.

‘There is a public interest in maintaining the integrity of elections. But as discussed, the district court found that the risks that noncitizens are voting are, at best, uncertain.’

California officials resisted, claiming that the list was vague and could lead to the disenfranchisement of legal voters.

The legal battle has worked its way through the court system and now may go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A two-judge majority on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the list was not credible, as a lower court had found.

“As the district court found — and we discern no clear error — there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system,” the unsigned ruling reads.

U.S. Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented from the majority.

“Throughout history, federal courts have acted to protect the voting and civil rights of our citizens by enjoining state action that violates the law,” Bumatay wrote. “And common sense also tells us that the federal government shouldn’t have to sit on its hands while a State allows the violation of federal law, especially when the integrity of federal elections is at stake.”

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber previously accused the federal government of making “vague and unsubstantiated allegations” in the list from the Department of Homeland Security.

“If the federal government possesses proof that certain registered voters in California are ineligible, we will welcome the opportunity to review that evidence and any supporting data or methodology,” Weber said.

The appeals court appeared to agree with that argument in its split ruling Friday.

“To be sure, there are countervailing public interests at stake,” the majority ruling reads. “There is a public interest in maintaining the integrity of elections. But as discussed, the district court found that the risks that noncitizens are voting are, at best, uncertain.”

The Trump administration could request that the entire Ninth Circuit Court review the case, or it could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The election is in four days.

RELATED: Newsom is OUTRAGED over Justice Department lawsuit to block votes from 20,000 ‘likely noncitizens’

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted a brief statement about the ruling.

“The courts have thrown out Trump’s desperate and dangerous attempts to meddle in the California election process. We’ll continue to fight their illegal power grabs and deliver a free and fair election,” he wrote on social media.

The appeals judges who signed the majority included one nominated by President Donald Trump and one appointed by former President Joe Biden.

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​Department of justice, Election integrity, Ninth circuit, Trump administration, Politics