Screens aren't all bad: How FaceTime helps me stay close to my kids



I recently covered the harmful effects of screen time. But like most technology, screens have also improved my life. Let’s explore some of these positives, which come with problems of their own.

When I travel for work, FaceTime connects me to my children. When I'm hundreds of miles from home, I feel impossibly far from my family. Nothing is more important to me than seeing their faces and hearing their voices. There’s a redemption to the warmth and comfort that these video calls provide.

I like to think of these apps and platforms as connective. They unite the sender and receiver despite any real-world obstacles.

Skype and WhatsApp allow me to chat with family and friends overseas, and Instagram can serve as a kind of video telegram that exists in perpetuity. Thinking back to the isolation caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns, where would we be without Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams?

Video communication also appears throughout social media. YouTube brought cinema and documentary into our hands, fracturing visions of a bloated system of channels by transforming mass media into a network of content made by anyone and everyone. As a journalist, I rely on various video platforms to conduct interviews and gather information.

If Facebook lives up to its dreams of a metaverse, these interactions will be immersive. I’m a bit old for Snapchat, but the video messaging function adds levity to conversations. Twitch, X, Discord, and TikTok all contribute to the ongoing advancements of audiovisual two-way communication. Not to mention the luxury of our cellphone cameras. It has been a mere 60 years since Abraham Zapruder captured one of America’s darkest moments on an 8mm camera.

I like to think of these apps and platforms as connective. They unite the sender and receiver despite any real-world obstacles. After all, this is the era of the network, when the narrative of stand-alone humans no longer has legs.

Connective interfaces strengthen social bonds and provide much-needed clarity. There's none of the missing context that hinders letters, texts, and emails — even phone calls can muddle the reality of a conversation. They offer a version of telepresence, the feeling that everyone on the call is closer than possible.

Remote telepresence has caused many interesting outcomes. One is the death of geography. Distance is no longer absolute. This has led to a disintegration of the private space, which has proven disastrous.

Devotion to telepresence has disrupted a far more important experience: presence. It is truly a paradox of our time that the improvement is a fabrication that belittles the original, like meatless burgers and Marxist theory.

This muddies the distinction between the real and the virtual, a pornographization of the connective process, something as simple as small talk at the market, any interaction that slows you down.

A life of constant tele-action is bad for people. It denies us our need for a life without performance or observation. At its worst, it facilitates tele-surveillance. Like the nuclear family, the home is supposed to serve as a private institution apart from the State.

This divide between public and private life is crucial for the health of a civilization. Without this separation, we can easily collapse into a culture of deadening indulgence (“Brave New World”) or a dystopia of authoritarian stricture (“Nineteen Eighty-Four”).

Also, the speed of exchange is immediate. This worsens our servitude to a burnout society.

On the flip side, this remote transmission is nothing short of a revolution in transportation. Society is now an endless practice of live coverage. Real-time connectivity offers each of us a superhuman view of life in all of its complexity. Imagine explaining that to an 11th-century peasant.

So next time you feel overburdened by the pace of technology and the ubiquity of screens, slow down, if you can, and remember the good they can bring to you, that they allow you to meet with anyone, anywhere, in what could almost be called face-to-face.

The elites dream of turning America into China. Sadly, they're succeeding.



This week, Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, took advantage of a new meme to make an old point that is gaining new importance: “You can’t make us China if we China ourselves first.”

The idea, which goes back at least to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s infamous 2010 China-for-a-day daydream, is simple enough: The Chinese seem to have figured out how to harmonize technology with unity, resulting in massive growth for the people and massive privilege for elites; can’t we take a cue from Beijing and do that too?

The solution there is to overthrow America with a new, digital-age America, one that borgs up the country and its people just as much as China and the Chinese, but in our own unique way.

The joke is that, of course, Friedman didn’t really want to become China; he wanted to have his American cake and eat it too, and so does just about everyone else who looks over the sea with envy at China’s apparent mastery of political reorganization on digital-age terms. Because the quickest way to become China is to let China remake us in its image, and well ...

The wishcast takes on a different tenor: If only our elites could “pull a China” here, all on their own! But here, the obstacles morph too. It’s sinking in that we’re not very good at becoming China, and for this, our elites are happy to blame the American people, who are proving harder to pacify than expected, and time is running out.

There’s another obstacle: China is trying to unseat the U.S. as the dominant, definitive global power. This suggests the things our elites envy about China can only be achieved by overthrowing America’s global dominance, which, in turn, threatens American elites.

For us in the West, there’s really only one path to that kind of collectivist unity. Many insist that’s communism, but communism — at least as we’ve known it — is just a halfway step.

Communism, as we’ve known it, gained power and adherents by positioning itself against not just Christianity but all religions. That proved to be reasonably effective for a time — for about as long as radio and television dominated our technologically mediated environment.

That environment made human imagination the most powerful force in the world — a world where, of course, the soft atheist communist song “Imagine” became the most popular, echoing John Lennon’s earlier contention that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first — rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary."

America’s imagineering elite built digital technology to consummate post-religious America’s capitalist-powered communism around the world. Yet alarmingly, that project failed, and China’s post-religious capitalist-powered communist project started to really take off.

This is because digital collectivism vibes very well with the religious frameworks established at the origin of the Chinese civilization-state. After the end of the Cold War, Chinese elites began putting effort into demonstrating to themselves and their people that, basically, Western communism suffered from certain internal problems that China didn’t have to deal with because of its deep civilizational anthropology and cosmology.

America certainly does not share this deep origin, to say the least. The spiritual origins of American civilization are Protestant, and since the beginning, the anarchistic tendencies of the Southern colonists and the theocratic tendencies of the Northern colonists have created a complex and conflicted identity that only leaves one absolute path toward authentic “native” collectivism at the national scale: that of the established church.

Of course, that’s squarely at odds with our Constitution. So the real challenge faced by American elites trying to beat China at its own game of usurping American global dominance in the digital age is to answer the riddle, “When is a church not a church?”

It is deeply sensed, if rarely ever articulated, that the answer to this question will unlock the ultimate cheat code — imposing a theocracy on Americans that will allow the elite to digitally collectivize quickly and powerfully enough to replace the old America’s global dominance with that of the new, boxing out China before it can win the world.

And for the elite, this approach had better work, because no other alternative seems to exist. It’s an all-or-nothing gamble.

And so, in the struggle among different elite factions for control over deciding which theocracy is established through the church that is not a church, two candidates for institutionalized worship, drawn from the deep religious substrate of the West, have swiftly risen to the top of the pack.

The first is Justice, the god of the woke, a queered version of Zeus who’s all about bringing infinitely prideful yet interoperable identities under one perfect arbiter to rule them all. The second is Enlightenment, the god of tech, which increasingly worships the convergence of all interoperable things into a single, infinitely illuminating intellect.

You can see that interoperability and infinity dominate both these creeds, and as we all see, most techies are willing to worship the god of Justice so long as the god of Enlightenment (and its priests) has pride of place, and most wokies are willing to worship the god of Enlightenment so long as the god of Justice (and its priests) has pride of place.

After all, true absolute justice on Earth requires a superhuman intelligence capable of constantly computing, adjudicating, and ruling on all micro-injustices. Only the merger of the human and the machine into a cyborg collective allows this. The outlines of a church unlike any other begin to emerge. Woke and tech harmoniously combine into one big cyborg theocracy ... one big enough even to ingest China itself.

That’s the plan! And that’s why, without being able to turn to a church that is a church yet does not establish a theocracy, Americans trying to rescue their country and their humanity will find themselves falling back darkly on only what weapons they manage to cling to.

Transhumanism is coming to destroy the human soul



Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on.

The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica.

This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change.

In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.”

Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds.

This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable.

This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day.

Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives.

Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian.

In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.”

Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will.

This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save.

C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.”

He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.”

Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago.

The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross are perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate.

The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression.

Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them.

A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post.

The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed.

EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facilityyoutu.be

Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense.

The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed.

G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps.

This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it.

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis.

The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.

World Economic Forum ranks weather and 'misinformation' as greatest global risks, prompting ridicule



North Korea's communist dictator kicked off the year by threatening to annihilate America. China, facing another year of economic turmoil and record-high youth unemployment, continues to threaten to conquer Taiwan and engage its defenders. Ukraine remains occupied by nearly 500,000 Russian troops. While signaling continued support for Israel in its war against Hamas terrorists, American forces, running low on munitions, recently sank the ships of Iranian proxy fighters.

Despite the pressing threat of worsening armed conflicts and possibly even nuclear holocaust, Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum revealed this week that the world has far more pressing concerns.

According to the WEF's " Global Risks Report 2024," the greatest threats facing humanity over the next two years are "misinformation and disinformation" and bad weather.

The report — based on a September survey of 1,490 academics, politicians, bureaucrats, and other elites ostensibly severed from Main Street concerns — analyzed global risks through three time frames "to support decision-makers in balancing current crises and longer-term priorities."

Concerning the year at hand, 66% of respondents suggested weather was most likely to present a material crisis on a global scale. Only 25% said the same of war or escalations in ongoing conflicts.

After undesirable speech and weather events, societal polarization, cyber insecurity, and interstate armed conflict ranked third, fourth, and fifth in terms of risk severity, according to the technocratic outfit's two-year period risk assessment. Inflation of the kind now eating away into American savings and driving up the cost of living ranked seventh, while economic downturn barely made the top ten.

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Josie Glabach, the commentator known online as the Redheaded Libertarian, highlighted that the "first four concerns deal in how to control the populace. The following topics that deal more in the well-being of that populace come secondary."

The Virginia Project, a state Republican PAC, responded to the WEF's list, noting, "Literally every single one of these problems is driven by the kind of people who made this chart."

Unlike the globalized average, American respondents to the survey indicated their top five risk concerns were: economic downturn; infectious diseases; inflation; use of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons; and energy supply shortage.

The report claimed that over the next 10 years, the top four perceived risks were all related to the environment: extreme weather events; critical change to Earth systems; biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse; and natural resource shortages, in that order.

"Misinformation and disinformation" reappeared, ranking fifth. Unlike misinformation, war did not make the top ten for the list of 10-year global risks. Totalitarianism, plutocracy, sterility, and a declining birth rate similarly did not make the list or receive mention.

South African billionaire Elon Musk responded to the report, writing, "By 'misinformation', WEF means anything that conflicts with its agenda."

One critic suggested, "This is how Experts always end up sleepwalking into censorious and/or genocidal policies. Just take it to the logical conclusion: - 'Misinfo is worse than War because it causes War.' - 'Dissidents are worse than Misinfo because they create Misinfo.'"

The report defines misinformation and disinformation thusly: "Persistent false information (deliberate or otherwise) widely spread through media networks, shifting public opinion in a significant way towards distrust in facts and authority."

While acknowledging that the crackdown by authorities on so-called misinformation, particularly of an AI-generated sort, poses a risk of "repression and erosion of rights," the WEF suggested that there is also "a risk that some governments will act too slowly, facing a trade-off between preventing misinformation and protecting free speech."

The WEF report concluded by claiming "known and newly emerging risks need preparation and mitigation. ... Localized strategies, breakthrough endeavours, collective actions and cross-border coordination all play a part in addressing these risks. Localized strategies, leveraging investment and regulation, are critical for reducing the impact of global risks."

Unsurprisingly, the report stressed the need for "cross-border coordination."

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