I think we all saw this coming

The United States is an outlier in the world when it comes to mail-in voting, as most industrialized democracies either ban it or require photo ID to acquire a ballot. Last week, President Donald Trump vowed on Truth Social he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.” Trump’s Truth Social post said, “All others gave it [mail-in voting] up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”  While not “all other” countries abandoned voting by mail, an overwhelming 84.3% of countries in the world, or a total of 172, don’t allow what’s typically known internationally as in-country postal voting, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, also known as International IDEA.  And even in those countries that allow in-country postal voting, it is generally only available to someone who is out of the country for military service or similarly vital reasons.  John Lott, an economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, issued a report in 2020 that focused on mail-in balloting mostly on advanced democracies titled “Why Do Most Countries Ban Mail-In Ballots?: They Have Seen Massive Vote Fraud Problems.” Lott told The Daily Signal that Europe falls into three categories. Thirty-five countries outright ban mail-in voting. Another 10 countries allow mail-in voting if the voter picks up a ballot and provides an ID. The third category is a subset of the 10: six require a person to prove he or she would be in the hospital, in military service, or otherwise unable to vote on Election Day to get a mail-in ballot.  “Before 1975, France was similar to how the United States is now. But on the island of Corsica, votes of the dead were counted, votes were being bought,” Lott said. “One big problem with vote-buying is that it’s in the interest of the buyer and seller to hide the transaction. This interestingly came to light in France when some people felt guilty and reported themselves and then reported others.” The United Kingdom added ID requirements after a 2004 mail-in ballot fraud case, Lott noted, in what a British judge described as a “massive, systematic, and organised” postal voting fraud campaign that involved as many as 40,000 fraudulent ballots. Most U.S. states join Canada, Germany, Iceland, South Korea, Liechtenstein, Luxenberg, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom as the only nations in the world that allow what is effectively no-excuse mail-in voting, according to International IDEA. This means voters are allowed to mail in their vote without providing a reason, such as being out of town on Election Day. In the United States, 28 states—both red and blue—allow for no-excuse mail-in voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.  Of those, eight states—Vermont for general elections only, and Oregon, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, and Washington state—have moved beyond mail-in voting to instituting what elections experts worry are an even bigger threat to election integrity: all-mail elections. The post Trump Wants US to ‘Get Rid of Mail-in Ballots.’ Most Countries Already Have. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The other morning, I was walking through Union Station and stopped short. It was clean. Strangely clean. No vagrants harassing commuters or tourists. No drugged-out shouting matches. Not even the ever-present fog of marijuana that seems to hang over every street corner in Washington, D.C. these days.  But as I took in the rare calm, I did witness one ugly moment. A professionally dressed middle-aged woman took it upon herself to curse out a pair of young National Guardsmen patrolling the station, venting her fury at President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown.   The young men politely ignored her and went back to their duty. But the exchange said something important: The fury of Washington’s liberal class isn’t directed at the criminals who have terrorized this city for years. It’s reserved for those finally trying to stop them.  That became crystal clear after Trump announced on Aug. 11 that he was placing the Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and deploying 800 National Guard troops to the capital, using Section 740 of the Home Rule Act.  As a District of Columbia resident, I’ve grown used to crime being part of the background noise here. Washingtonians talk about it the way Los Angeles residents complain about traffic or New Yorkers grumble about rent prices. It’s constant. It’s expected. And until now, nothing ever changed.  The numbers are staggering. In 2024, the district’s homicide rate hit 27.3 per 100,000. The city’s murder rate is three times higher than Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than Havana, Cuba. Juvenile arrests have risen every year since 2020, many for repeat violent crimes. Vehicle theft is triple the national average. Carjackings surged 547% from 2018 to 2023.   Everyone living here has felt it: the smashed car windows, the youth gangs, the feeling of unease when walking home at night.  And yet, since Trump’s crackdown, the fashionable outrage has been directed not at the criminals but at those enforcing order. Activists and media elites are treating this as some sort of coup against democracy. Never mind that Washington is a federal district and the federal government has both the authority and the obligation to maintain law and order here.  We’ve seen the theatrics. A (now former) Department of Justice staffer, Sean Charles Dunn, made a fool of himself by shouting at an officer, throwing a sandwich at him, and awkwardly running away. A local activist, Arianna Evans, was hailed online as a hero after being arrested while “cop watching.” She was, in fact, detained for using a Kids Ride Free card meant for students. Somehow this became a civil rights cause célèbre.  What bothers me most, though, is the selective compassion. Where is the sympathy for the real victims?  Take the case of Sen. Rand Paul’s staffer who was brutally attacked on H Street in 2023. He and a friend were walking down the street when a man, just released from federal prison the day before, jumped out from behind a corner. The attacker slammed him to the ground and repeatedly stabbed him in the head and chest, leaving him with life-threatening injuries. The young man spent weeks in the hospital, his life forever changed. Yet from the activist class? Silence.   Or consider Mohammad Anwar, a 66-year-old Uber Eats driver. In March 2021, two teenage girls—just 13 and 15 years old—armed with a Taser, brutally carjacked him near Nationals Park. He was thrown violently to the pavement and died from his injuries. The girls got the maximum juvenile sentence. Detention until age 21. Anwar’s family, meanwhile, got a lifetime of grief.   And these are just two cases that broke into the news cycle. Thousands of smaller tragedies don’t make headlines: the families shattered by loss, the mothers whose children are sucked into the cycle of violence, the neighborhoods slowly hollowed out by fear. These people don’t get marches or op-eds written in their defense.  Instead, activists save their outrage for criminals being held accountable to the most basic standards of a civilized society.  The irony is that they would rather women be unsafe after dark, families risk carjackings, and normal people be terrorized on the Metro if it means Trump doesn’t get credit for restoring order.  As a woman who lives here, I’d prefer not to be robbed or attacked while walking down the street. I don’t care who gets credit. I would have actually preferred it if local leaders had fixed this mess long ago. But they didn’t. They let it spiral to a crisis point. And so the president stepped in.  The people of Washington deserve better than this misplaced compassion for criminals. They deserve law, order, and the ability to live in peace. And for the first time in a long time, there is a chance we might get here. Safe streets aren’t too much to ask for in the capital of the free world. They are the bare minimum we owe to every family who calls this city home.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Compassion for Criminals, None for Victims appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Consciousness is the ultimate wonder and the deepest mystery — even for the devout. Not dark matter or quantum mechanics, but the fact that you are reading these words, that there is something it feels like to be you.Believers may affirm that God made man in His image, and I agree, yet the question remains: Why should dust, shaped by divine hands, open its eyes and know itself? Why breathe into us not only life, but the inner life — the hidden sanctuary where thought, memory, and prayer rise and take flight?The mystery matter can't masterScientists can catalogue every neuron. They can trace every chemical cascade and chart every flicker of electricity racing through the brain. They can build diagrams so precise you could almost mistake them for the thing itself.Yet none of it explains the one detail that matters most — that there is an inside.That matter, when shaped in a certain way, suddenly gazes back at the universe and says, “I am.” Perception isn’t just the processing of inputs. It’s the lived immediacy of them: the taste of coffee, the ache of loss, the terror before a fall. These are realities experienced, not merely computed.Some argue this is a puzzle that can be solved. All we need is more funding, more computational power, and more time, the argument goes.What nonsense.Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.The answer, it turns out, has been staring at us all along. Consciousness isn’t an accident of biology. It’s a fundamental part of reality, present before the first atom came to be. Matter doesn’t simply wake up by chance. It’s animated by something older, deeper, and impossible to quantify.Call it spirit. Call it soul. Call it God.The Dawkins delusionFor the Richard Dawkinses of this world — those allergic to religion — “God” sounds like a convenient escape hatch, a quick patch over the gaps in our understanding.Yet the theological view is anything but a shortcut. It doesn’t merely declare, “God made man and switched on the lights.” It suggests that the light itself — the act of knowing — is the purpose. Awareness is the link between dust and divinity, binding the created to the Creator.In other words, consciousness is no evolutionary afterthought but the central drama of existence, the stage on which heaven and earth meet within the human soul.RELATED: Richard Dawkins' atheism collides with reality francescoch/iStock/Getty Images PlusThis changes everything.If awareness is fundamental, then the mind is not just an observer of the universe. It is a participant in it, a co-creator. The inner life becomes more than a collection of survival tricks honed by natural selection. It becomes the very arena in which the material and the divine meet.Every moment of thought, every flicker of self-recognition, is a point of contact with something infinite.That idea unsettles people because it shifts responsibility onto each conscious being. If awareness is a sacred link — which it is — then how we use it carries weight beyond anything science can quantify. The ethics of thought, intention, and attention move to the center. A life squandered in distraction or cruelty becomes much more than a personal failure.In this view, it becomes the misuse of something unimaginably rare.The sacred spark Even our most advanced machines make the contrast clear.They can mimic conversation, create art, and solve problems at rapid speeds, yet they remain completely vacant. There is no inner witness, no “I” behind the code. Their outputs may dazzle, but no one is there to be moved, to care, to suffer, or to rejoice. Set beside a single conscious breath, a single human glance, the difference is profound. And perhaps that’s the point. Consciousness is not about speed or efficiency. It is about relationship — between mind and world, self and other, creature and Creator.For centuries, Christian mystics have spoken of the soul as a mirror made to catch and reflect the light of God.Teresa of Ávila wrote of the “interior castle” with its deepest chamber reserved for union with Christ. John of the Cross spoke of stripping away every lesser light until only God’s radiance remained. The German theologian Meister Eckhart called it the “spark of the soul,” a place untouched by sin where God’s presence burns brightest.In their eyes, consciousness isn’t a random flicker of awareness. It's the faculty by which the creature knows the Creator, the meeting place of heaven and earth within the human heart. We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.Modern science has given us remarkable tools to study the mechanisms of the mind, but the mechanism is not the mystery. The circuitry is not the song. You can dismantle a radio and never hear the music that once flowed through it. Likewise, you can map the brain and never touch the consciousness that animates it.That gap — the chasm between matter in motion and the breath of being — is where the divine dwells.Conscious by creationWe live in an age that prefers to compress the mystery into whatever measurements our tools can take. It's the spirit of 2025, an era when meaning is traded for metrics and a culture drifting toward nihilism mistakes data for doctrine.But we must let the mystery magnify us and let it widen our grasp of what it means to be alive. Consciousness is a bridge between two eternities — the dust God shaped us from and the divinity that calls us home. To stand in the middle is to bear the weight of the world and feel the pull of the world that awaits.Atheists will no doubt roll their eyes, but the reality remains: Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.We are not bystanders in God’s creation. We move through it as participants, shaping its story as it shapes us. We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.Every thought, every act of attention, every choice is a line in the ongoing dialogue between Creator and created, a conversation that will echo into eternity.

The stark economic reality of the health care system in America is that every single institution that touches our health — from hospitals to pharma to insurance companies — will make more money if you are sick and less money if you are healthy.“So, chronic diseases … the system profits off treating those as separate things that you do things to for long periods of time. Chronic disease management. So not actually healing it, but managing it,” Dr. Casey Means tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”“And so, because that's built into the deep finances of the largest and fast-growing industry in the United States, which is the health care industry, there is no incentive for people to back up and look at all of the things going on and say, ‘Wait a minute, maybe we’re looking at this wrong,’” she continues.This is why Means regards the health care system with very little trust.“As we’ve started medicalizing these chronic diseases which are primarily based in diet and lifestyle, and many of which didn’t even exist 75 years ago, at the same time we’ve been asked to ‘trust the science,’” Means says.“These diseases have exploded in their rates and are going up every single year as we spend more money on them,” she adds.What our health care system has done well, Means says, are “acute issues.”“Things that are immediately going to kill you, like an infection or a trauma surgery or something like that that you need to have,” she says.“But what the health care system has done — has asked us to take our trust on its success in acute issues and apply it to chronic issues, issues that last for a long time that need to be treated for life,” she explains.“And so essentially, the system is asking us to not ask questions and to trust blindly,” she says, adding, “because of the trust they engendered from acute issues.” 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.

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Got an old iPhone lying around? With a few inexpensive gadgets, you can turn it into a reliable dash cam for security and protection.

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Germany should look beyond a trade deal between the United States and the European Union that slaps 15% tariffs on EU goods by finding new trade partners in coming years, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Sunday."How do we handle world trade if for example the Americans are...