The Club of Rome and the Hot or Cool Institute” intend to “launch the ‘Materials and Consumption Taskforce’ that will give policy recommendations that if implemented, would restrict your ability to decide how you travel, what you eat, and how you live your life – all in the name of sustainability and the global economic system.
My first thought: what the hell is The Club of Rome?
It is this, according to our friends (ha!) at Wikipedia:
The Club of Rome is a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy. It consists[clarification needed] of one hundred full members selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.[1]
Sounds like an invitation to tyranny.
The LifeSiteNews piece went on to note that the taskforce for this was launched on May 23, and will begin producing:
… guidelines that will serve as a critical resource for policymakers, businesses, and civil society, providing an in-depth analysis of materials and consumption and offering practical solutions for a more resource-secure future.
Also:
The taskforce recognizes that materials and consumption lie at the heart of many interconnected crises. From the escalating demand for critical minerals to the impact of supply chains on climate change and social inequalities, addressing these issues is essential to building a sustainable and resilient future.
Ergo, materials are bad and consumption is bad.
Got it?
One naturally wonders if The Club of Rome, the Hot or Cool Institute, and the soon-to-be-created ‘Materials and Consumption Taskforce’ will be using any materials or consuming anything. If so, how will they explain it?
The Club of Rome? Who the hell are they to tell the rest of us what to do? What gives them the right? Did I miss the vote? What’s next? Is The Hair Club for Men going to tell me what I’m allowed to have for supper? Is Oprah’s Book Club going to start issuing guidelines for allowable building codes?
What is it with unelected entities telling the rest of us, including President Trump, how we have to live, think, and behave!
Every district judge, international organization, and Democrat political hack is trying to block Trump’s actions, block the sun to stave off global warming, or attempting to assassinate him and jail their political opponents.
When in The Club of Rome, I guess you must do as The Club of Romans do.
The German government handed out a record number of citizenships to immigrants last year, rising to nearly a quarter of a million passports with Syrian and Turkish nationals representing the largest cohorts.
According to data collected by 13 of 16 federal states in Germany and provided to the Welt Am Sonntag newspaper, 249,901 foreigners were granted citizenship in 2024, the highest number since records began in 2000. This number surpassed the previous record set in 2023, when 200,095 people were awarded citizenship.
Last year’s record naturalisation number is likely much higher, given that the states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein did not provide naturalisation records, with data set for release in the coming weeks.
Once again, Syrians and Turks were the main ethnic groups recorded as obtaining German citizenship. However, the paper did note a noticeable increase in the number of Russians being naturalised.
General Manager of the German Association of Cities Helmut Dedy told Welt that the significant increase in the number of citizenships handed out was a result of the immigration reforms implemented by the previous ‘traffic light’ coalition government of ex-Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year, which reduced the number of years spent in the country to become eligible down from eight to five years.
“Many people who came to us during the major refugee movements in 2015 and 2016 are now submitting applications or have already done so,” Dedy added.
Although the recently installed government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz has focused heavily on the controversial “turbo-naturalisations” also passed under the preceding government, which allow for high-performing migrants to obtain citizenship after just three years, Welt noted that such cases are exceedingly rare, with on Berlin having even broke in the hundreds of passports handed out last year.
Thus, critics have accused Chancellor Merz of political gamesmanship by vowing to reverse the turbo programme while refusing to roll back the standard to an eight-year wait.
“The turbo naturalisations are a nice example of the fact that pure symbolic politics alone does not necessarily have to correspond to the concrete reality of life“, said the President of the German District Council, Achim Brötel.
While successive German governments have claimed that they need migrants to fill jobs, a recent study from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) found that 33 per cent of all long-term unemployed last year were migrants, with 317,000 out of the 972,000 being foreigners.
Again, the true figure is likely much higher, as the study did not include migrants who obtained German citizenship. Still, it represented a significant increase, with around 187,000 long-term unemployed being foreign in 2018.
The mass migration agenda imposed upon Germany by successive globalist governments in Berlin has radically transformed the country’s demographic makeup. According to Destatis, the proportion of people with a “migration background” (either migrants or people with at least one migrant parent) represented over 30 per cent of the population, or over 25 million people.
The issue of migration has become one of the top issues according to Germans, particularly in the wake of several high-profile terror attacks over the past year, suspected of being committed by migrants, including in Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg, and Munich.
Horrifying scenes on Friday evening in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district: a young man runs through the skate park holding a gun, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ – and fires several times. The police arrive with a large contingent, but there is no trace of the perpetrator. The police are now investigating.
A threatening pursuit took place at around 9.00 pm in the area of Bodenstedtgasse. Several youths ran through the skate park there, one of them carried a gun, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ loudly – and fired several shots. Eyewitnesses immediately called the police. They were on the scene within a few minutes with several patrols and the special police unit WEGA and secured the area around the Floridsdorf railway station – but the perpetrators were able to escape.
The incident was captured on video. The footage clearly shows one of the young men firing several times in different directions – accompanied by religious shouts. The scenes appear to be from a war zone – except that they took place in the centre of Vienna.
The footage was published by Heute. A reader had filmed the events from his flat – because ‘strange scenes’ are often observed in the neighbourhood, as he explained.
Schüsse und Schreie im Skaterpark Floridsdorf: Polizei-Großeinsatz, Täter flüchtig 🚔 https://t.co/mAAKJycxDM
Forensics started investigating the crime scene that very night. A total of seven shell casings from a blank firing pistol were recovered. Fortunately, no one was injured and no damage to property was found. Nevertheless, the investigation was immediately handed over to the State Office for State Security and Counter-Extremism (LSE).
According to police spokesman Markus Dittrich, the manhunt for the suspects is in full swing.
Karl Marx said that the poor have only to lose their chains, but terrorism always comes from the elite of society, from the Tsarist Russia portrayed by Dostoevsky to the present day.
A violent gnosis typical of the wealthy cultural classes and economic elites, contrary to popular belief that terror is a result of poverty and deprivation. They have diplomas from private schools and prestigious degrees, often excellent bank accounts and are committed full time to overthrowing the Western society that generated them and destroying the culture by which they were, in spite of themselves, nourished.
The father of the terrorist who shot dead two members of the Israeli embassy staff, who were about to be engaged, at the Jewish Museum in Washington, was honored in March by a left-wing member of Congress with an invitation to Donald Trump’s joint speech, the New York Post has learned exclusively.
Eric Rodriguez and Rep. (Dem.) Chuy Garcia in March Instagram
In March, Democrat Congressman Chuy Garcia welcomed and praised Eric Rodriguez as “an outspoken defender against attacks on the rights of unionized federal employees. Eric represents the best of our community.” This was, of course, before his son cold-bloodedly murdered Yaron Lischinsky, 28, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, who were about to get engaged.
But let’s leave aside the terrorist’s Democrat party father or the fact that his murderous son donated to Joe Biden’s campaign.
The problem is that terrorists are emerging, as in the 1960s and 1970s, from the family album of progressivism. Like the cultured and very Western bourgeoisie that, in the name of class struggle, wanted, as the poet Jean Genet said, to stick a spear “in the too fatty flesh” of European democracies.
It is not the “Stockholm syndrome”. They are the lost children of the West.
“I did it for Gaza,” Rodriguez told the police who arrested him. He participated in pro-Gaza demonstrations and donated to Palestinian Arab causes. He was a militant for a time in the Chicago chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, supporters of Putin, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and China. At the time of his arrest, Rodriguez also said: “There is only one solution, globalize the Intifada until the revolution”.
The dynamics of the attack are chilling: Rodgriguez approached the Israeli couple from behind as they were about to cross the street, pulled out his gun and shot them in the back. After the couple fell, he headed toward them, shooting several times.
Now investigations are looming into the civil and political organizations (and there are many) to which the terrorist was affiliated.
On social media, the killer of the Israeli couple is already a hero. “More Elias,” says the Western ventriloquist of Jihad. Tiktokers with a million followers are cheering the killing of Israelis.
Rodriguez was born in Chicago, has a degree from the University of Illinois, was a researcher for an archive of African-American life stories founded by Carnegie Mellon called “The History Makers” and was a far-left activist, without missing a thing, from the fight against Amazon to Israel.
Rodriguez does not present himself as an illiterate barbarian, but as a “woke” man who thinks, reads, judges, studies and acts.
A year ago the Chicago section of his little party wrote: “Exterminate the Zionists”.
Not long ago, another anti-Israeli terrorist, Cody Balmer, 38, set fire to the residence of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Jew.
Rodriguez was radicalized in America by radical left-wing groups who believe that killing Jews makes them morally valid people.
A few days ago, a peer of Rodriguez in California, Guy Edward Bartkus, blew himself up in a successful attempt to destroy a fertility clinic. He adhered to the “anti-natalist” philosophy, radical environmentalism according to which it would be better not to be born and for no one else to be born, for the good of the planet.
Rodriguez, the terrorist who killed the Israelis, was a fan of Luigi Mangione, the son of rich Italian-Americans who killed the CEO of New York of UnitedHealthcare insurance, Brian Thompson, last December. Another left-wing extremist of Rodriguez’s age who has become an idol of “Generation Z”. Mangione attended a private school in Baltimore and graduated from an elite university. A university where his assassination was celebrated by professors. An appalling 41 percent of young people who go to college in America justify Thompson’s murder.
The worm is in the fruit. The heart of Western darkness.
Luigi Mangione’s face is printed on T-shirts and projected onto skyscrapers. His name is written on stickers to be purchased on a special website and these stickers have been stuck to lampposts from the Pacific coast to Long Island, as well as in Turin (while the Bibas youngsters’ stickers were torn down) . He has become the patron saint of all progressives who believe that insurance executives like Thompson are evil ogres.
The famous singer Marianne Faithfull dedicated a song to Ulrike Meinhof, the red terrorist who, not coincidentally, attacked Jews as well as “capitalists.”
In Nashville, Tennessee, another daughter of Western privilege, transgender artist Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a male who identifies as a “trans woman,” entered her old Christian elementary school and committed a massacre: three children and three adults (including the principal and his nine-year-old daughter). She also left a manifesto of claim.
We have essentially raised a generation of dangerous fanatics who have seen murder as a form of communication. And, needless to say, they are with Hamas rather than Israel.
Student groups at universities that Donald Trump is now fighting claim they want to “eradicate all Western civilization.”
The pro-Hamas demonstrations on university campuses were shocking enough. But perhaps, as the bombing of the fertility clinic, the killing of a corporate executive, and the massacre at a Christian school demonstrate, we need to go back to the political correctness that we have in place as well as anti-Semitism.
Because if the same people who cry and stamp their feet when you say that “women don’t have penises” rejoice in the face of the murder of Jewish women, old people and children and end up killing a young Israeli couple in New York, then it means that Western civilization has gone to pieces.
Dutch consumers could pay three times as much for electricity after an ambitious offshore energy expansion, barring a massive change to the current financing model.
The average household grid tariff in the Netherlands could nearly triple after new planned wind power projects, from €400 today to more than €1,100–according to Dutch public broadcaster NOS.
State-owned transmission system operator TenneT plans to invest €88 billion by 2040 to connect a new fleet of North Sea wind parks to the Dutch mainland network.
The expansion is key to meeting the country’s national climate targets: by 2033, offshore wind is expected to supply around 75 per cent of the Netherlands’ electricity demand.
Currently, grid costs are passed on directly to Dutch consumers through fixed tariffs.
The expensive new infrastructure will include hundreds of kilometres of undersea cables and large offshore converter platforms.
As projects move farther out to sea, such as with the Netherlands’ offshore IJmuiden Ver and Nederwiek wind farm zones, their technical complexity and costs increase.
So far, all this will be paid for in higher annual household and business grid fees, a model which continues to be the default, even as the government reviews other alternative options–ones that could include drawing on other parts of the government budget.
The offshore wind build-out also requires more up-front investment than previous land-based wind upgrades.
Each new off-shore wind farm zone will need a tailored high-voltage link, and greater cooperation between marine, environmental, and industrial authorities.
Analysts say there is a risk of delays due to regulatory uncertainty, shifting tender conditions, and pressure on supply chains.
Some developers are becoming more selective in the wind-farm projects they take on.
Rising inflation and uneven profitability have already slowed down new projects in other European countries, including France, reports French daily Les Échos.
Still, the Dutch government is pressing forward, hoping new technical innovations—such as hybrid wind-solar parks and electrified offshore platforms—could improve long-term returns, according to industry publication Duurzaam Ondernemen.
Port authorities, cable-laying companies, and engineering firms are all hoping to benefit from these vast new construction contracts.
SBM Offshore, a key player in offshore infrastructure, recently reported a 27 per cent revenue increase in its turn-key division.
It is confident about its own order flow remaining solid, even given broader market volatility, says Beleggers Belangen.
New wind-farm installation developers are also hoping to play a role in industrial decarbonisation.
There are pilots underway for new technologies for carbon capture on off-shore production units, and using zero-emission power supply to data centres, which developers claim could offer potential efficiency gains.
Under the current tariff structure, fixed grid fees apply no matter how much power a household consumes.
While this offers stability for long-term planning, critics argue it disproportionately affects smaller users.
Large industrial actors—expected to benefit most from the influx of renewable electricity—would pay a smaller share of the cost relative to their usage.
The Netherlands’ offshore push is part of an ambitious broader European race, under the Green Deal, to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels.
But the broader geopolitical balance is shifting, with the EU remaining exposed to volatile LNG markets and ongoing tensions over Russian gas supplies.
In this context, offshore wind’s backers argue building new wind farms is more than a climate strategy, but also a hedge against external shocks.
But with costs rising and benefits unevenly distributed, Europe’s energy transition may be in danger of seeing public support eroding before it has a chance to deliver more energy security.
An immigration tribunal has ruled that a Sudanese asylum seeker with hairy legs and arms and a deep voice is a child, overturning assessments by the Home Office and a council that he was in his mid-20s.
The court backed his claim that he was 16 years old, dismissing the Home Office’s assertion that his physical appearance “very strongly suggested” he was “significantly over 18” and likely around 24.
The asylum seeker arrived in the UK in December 2023, telling officials he was 16.
He said he fled Sudan because of the ongoing war and fears he would be kidnapped by a paramilitary force that had already taken three of his friends.
The upper tier of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber heard that the asylum seeker had “very hairy legs” and “very mature hands, with thick hair on his arms”.
He was said to have a “deep voice”, a “very mature face and beard”, a “receding hairline”, a “pronounced Adam’s apple”, and “significant and deep lines on forehead that remain even when he is not making facial movements”.
However, Upper Tribunal Judge Gemma Loughran dismissed these physical characteristics as “not a useful indicator of age”.
She said: “We are not persuaded thick hair on a person’s arms and legs is a useful indicator of age.”
The judge noted that photographs showed the asylum seeker “did not have a beard or indeed any visible facial hair at all” and that forehead lines were neither “significant” nor “particularly deep”.
Qualified social workers conducted a later assessment of the asylum seeker’s age in June last year and found he was the age he claimed to be.
The social workers said: “Based on the information available, we believe that the overwhelming evidence supports [the asylum seeker’s] claimed age.”
They dismissed previous professional judgements as “unreliable due to its content or lack of transparency concerning the processes undertaken when gathering this information”.
The tribunal found the asylum seeker was “consistent” throughout proceedings that his date of birth was September 20, 2007.
The council’s decision that he was significantly over 16 years old has been quashed.
The local authority must now treat him in accordance with his claimed age and pay the costs of the judicial review claim.
Poles vote this Sunday, June 1st, for their next president in what is widely seen as a watershed election. The two options they are being presented with could hardly contrast more starkly.
On the one hand, a victory for the liberal pro-EU Rafał Trzaskowski would consolidate the European Union’s anti-nation agenda in Poland—or, as former MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski this week toldeuropeanconservative.com, would “give the government a Brussels-sanctioned license to dismantle democracy.”
A win for PiS-backed conservative historian Karol Nawrocki would, however, represent a win for sovereigntists, laying the groundwork for policies that prioritise border control, defence of the family and a rejection of EU-imposed structural reforms.
Much will depend on how the supporters of Konfederacja candidate Sławomir Mentzen, who placed third in the first round, will vote, as they could easily decide the outcome in one or the other presidential hopeful’s favour.
Hopes of a Nawrocki victory have been expressed at this week’s CPAC Hungary conference, including by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who complained that Donald Tusk’s government is currently trampling over Poland’s constitution, with the help of Brussels.
The election’s first round took place earlier this month and ended with a thin vote margin. Trzaskowski came away with 31% of the vote while Nawrocki secured 29%.
Western media said on Friday, May 30th that the likely result is too close to call, with poll differences falling within the margin of error. Trzaskowski had led in the polls for much of the campaign, but more recent surveys have put the pair neck and neck, if not pinning Nawrocki ever so slightly ahead.
While the German police confiscate pocket knives from little old ladies at Christmas markets, and the instances of knife attacks rise to an astronomical high of 79 per day, one local discount supermarket is basically giving away machetes, selling them at rock bottom prices to any ol’ Günter or Hänsel—or Muhammad.
There is growing outrage after a discount retailer in Berlin, Norma, launched a sale on machetes, marketing the blades as low as €9.90 per machete despite a surge in knife crimes reported throughout the city and the country.
The first deputy federal chairman of the German police union (PolG), Manuel Ostermann, wrote on X: ‘79 knife crimes per day in 2024 and at the discount store you can buy a machete with a barb for 9.90 euros. Hello Norma, are you still feeling any impact? Why not just give it away to potential knife murderers? Unbelievable.’
Just last Friday I wrote an essay for the American Thinker Members Weekly newsletter, detailing that Germany had experienced two mass stabbings on the same day—so here’s my shameless plug to become a subscriber for an ad-free experience and access to additional exclusive content from the editorial team.
Anyway, here’s that tweet, showing an image of the machetes currently on sale:
If there were ever a case for “corporate greed,” then this would be it. I mean, if you’re selling giant blades that are exclusively meant for hacking and chopping something into bits, in a nation that’s completely overtaken by foreign hordes of violent Muslims who happen to prefer the knife as a weapon of choice, then you’re definitely not a “people over profits” type of company. (See a blog I wrote last week titled “Toxic femininity: Foreign-born Muslim women in Germany are far more violent than German men” for a quick refresh on crime stats.)
I mean, why doesn’t Norma just start selling instructions on how to build suicide bomb vests? Perhaps jugs of sulfuric or nitric acid right next to the machete display? Copies of the Koran beyond that? They could start a service to arrange child marriages, or perhaps launch a van/truck rental venture, complete with a brochure on all the upcoming public gatherings where thousands of people are sure to be?
Hashem Abedi threw hot cooking oil over guards, then produced homemade weapons and proceeded to stab them in April GREATER MANCHESTER POLICE
Manchester Arena terrorist Hashem Abedi was granted more than £1,200 in taxpayers’ money to launch an equal rights case in jail.
The sum went to his lawyers for a complaint of religious discrimination.
The funding has been added to a huge legal aid bill to fund his trial defence even though he refused to take part in the court process.
Figures disclosed under a Freedom of Information request show the total now stands at £354,015.
Prison bosses also had to instruct their own lawyers before the latest wholly unjustified claim was discontinued.
The legal aid bill has reached £354,015 despite Abedi refusing to participate in his original trial proceedings.
The 28-year-old was jailed in 2020 for a minimum of 55 years for helping his suicide bomber brother Salman kill 22 Ariana Grande fans in 2017.
In 2022, he was given another three years and ten months for attacking two officers at Belmarsh Prison in South East London.
The religious discrimination claim was made before Abedi seriously wounded prison guards in a stabbing and scalding oil attack at HMP Frankland, County Durham, last month.
The religious discrimination claim was discontinued before Abedi’s recent attack on prison guards.
The 28-year-old seriously wounded prison staff in a stabbing and scalding oil attack at HMP Frankland in County Durham last month.
The timing means taxpayers funded the legal challenge despite it ultimately being abandoned.
Prison authorities were forced to instruct their own lawyers to respond to what was described as a wholly unjustified claim before Abedi withdrew it.
Tory Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick condemned the taxpayer funding for the convicted mass killer’s legal costs. “This is just another outrageous example of taxpayers’ money being wasted on a convicted mass killer,” he said.
The criticism highlights concerns over legal aid expenditure on prisoners who have committed the most serious offences.
Abedi’s case demonstrates how convicted terrorists can continue to access public funding for legal challenges even after receiving lengthy sentences for mass murder.
The Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 killed 22 people attending an Ariana Grande concert, making it one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in recent British history.
