The rich communist Patrisse Cullors lost two of her three mansions in the wildfires. She is one of three communist founders of Black Lives Matter, which was heavily funded by equally far-left George Soros (at least to the tune of $33 million). BREAKING: Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has tragically lost 2 of her […] The post BLM Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors Lost 2 of Her 3 LA Mansions appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Some in the media told us the LAFD did not run out of water. They did that to cover up serious negligence by Democrat leadership making outrageously high salaries. They claimed they didn’t, but why were firefighters filling up pouches that are the size of handbags to put out fires? The community note explains that […] The post Fire Fighting With Canvas Handbags appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Vice President-elect JD Vance condemned the “serious lack of competent governance” in California as firefighters in the Democrat-led state try to fend off wildfires that have devastated places around the city of Los Angeles over the past week. During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” anchor Shannon Bream said she wanted to discuss the emergency situation in Southern California — in which thousands of homes have been destroyed by the wind-fueled blazes and at least 14 people have been killed — because Vance and President-elect Donald Trump will soon be sworn into office. “Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has written to President Trump saying, let’s not be divisive right now, come out and visit, let people see us working together. Any indication the president-elect may do that?” Bream asked. “Well, I know the president would love to visit California. And first of all, you know, our hearts go out to everybody who has been affected by the storms. I’ve seen some of these videos of people where, you know, folks who have lived in those homes for 25, 30, 35 years, and everything is gone. And whatever your political affiliation, it’s hard not to see those images and just be heartbroken for our fellow Americans who are going through a very tough time,” Vance said. “And I do think, frankly, the federal government has to do a better job. President Trump is committed to doing a better job when it comes to disaster relief,” he added. “That’s true for the hurricane victims and flood victims in North Carolina. It’s true for the fire victims in California. We just — we have to do a better job. We need competent good governance. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize the governor of California for, I think, some very bad decisions over a very long period of time.” Vice President-elect @JDVance: First of all, our hearts go out to everybody who’s been affected… Frankly, the federal government has to do a better job. President Trump has committed to doing a better job when it comes to disaster relief… We need competent, good governance.… pic.twitter.com/IAACDCvJJA — Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 12, 2025 Vance added: “I mean, some of these reservoirs have been dry for 15, 20 years. The fire hydrants are being reported as going dry while the firefighters are trying to put out these fires. There is a serious lack of competent governance in California. And I think it’s part of the reason why these fires have gotten so bad. We need to do a better job at both the state and federal level.” Bream then noted there are “skeptics” concerned about what the Trump-Vance administration will do when it comes to giving aid to California. “They’re citing back to something that the president-elect said in September when he said, ‘We won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.’ Is there any consideration of withholding aid to Californians?” she asked. “Hey, look, President Trump cares about all Americans, right? He is the president for all Americans,” Vance replied. “And I think that he intends to have FEMA and other federal responses much, much better and much more clued in to what’s going on there on the ground. You know, President Biden has been asleep at the wheel for a number of different crises. And I think this — this the final California fire, as it’s really going — getting out of control in Biden’s last week and a half, I do think it drives home, just again, we’ve had incompetent governance for so long.” He continued:  “You know, President Trump often says that the coalition that made him the president was just a common-sense coalition. There are conservatives, there are moderates, there are even a few liberals, but the thing that united us is just this basic idea that, yes, government should be smaller but when government does the things that should do, it ought to do them well. And that’s one of the things that President Trump and I are going to fight to get back to.”

'Equal administration of law'

According to a recent survey, a wide majority of Americans want to improve their financial habits in the coming year. The survey of 2,000 adults found that 65% are hoping to improve their money habits in 2025. Nearly half (49%) are planning to hibernate in January, to be less active and social, and to spend […] The post How 65% of Americans are Determined to Improve Their Money Habits in 2025 appeared first on Good News Network.

This week, in a stunning volte-face, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be revising its censorship policies to accord with his older vision of free speech. Specifically, Zuckerberg committed Facebook to revising a series of standards: reliance on left-wing fact-checkers will end, replaced by an X-like community notes system in which fact-checking will be crowdsourced; political content will no longer be artificially muted; censorship will be ended around controversial issues like transgender ideology and immigration; the content moderation team will be shifted from California to Texas to better account for the varying views of Americans; and Facebook will work with the Trump administration to push American-style free speech standards around the world. This is all happening for one reason: the reelection of Donald Trump. While Democrats claimed for years that Trump represented tyranny, the truth is that it was the Democratic Party and its media apparatchiks that routinely used the tools of power to silence their opposition in authoritarian ways. The cudgeling of Facebook represents a perfect example of such quiet authoritarianism. Before the 2016 election, Facebook was considered a darling of the left: an open platform that could be used by heretofore underrepresented people to spread their political messages. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign met with high praise for its creative use of Facebook, for example. The same held true for the Arab Spring. And then Donald Trump won. Democrats and the legacy media decided that social media had to be clubbed into place. Alternative media outlets like my own company, The Daily Wire, were far too successful: Democrats were upset that conservative content was reaching a wide audience, and legacy media were upset at the competition. And so by early 2017, the Democrat-Media Human Centipede set its narrative: that only the perversity of social media -- and its hijacking by evil Russian masterminds -- had allowed the election of Donald Trump. By 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was openly threatening Facebook with governmental action if the social media company refused to crack down on speech Democrats didn’t like. In 2019, Zuckerberg himself responded in an excellent speech at Georgetown University, pledging his company to free speech: “We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.” But then, in 2020, Facebook began to cave under pressure from the federal government on issues ranging from Covid coverage to the Hunter Biden laptop story. By 2021, the Biden White House was openly lobbying Facebook to change its standards to downgrade the traffic of the Daily Wire, among others. That same year, in April, our traffic began to plummet. Overall, our reach dropped by 90%. Facebook got comfortable with censorship; Zuckerberg has admitted as much. The Biden administration, Zuckerberg claims, pushed for censorship. And Facebook conceded. Not anymore. As Zuckerberg explained this week, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.” That is absolutely correct. And it is also a damning indictment of a Democratic Party that always values power above principle. Free speech has become a Republican principle because Democrats abandoned it. And now free speech is returning. Let’s hope that remains a permanent feature of the social media landscape, not merely a temporary move to buy off the resurgent Trump administration.

One of the advantages of having New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon as a friend is getting a text in which he casually points out that in 2 Corinthians 6, the apostle Paul mentions 10 difficult circumstances, followed by nine phrases describing a kind of challenging scenario in which Paul shows endurance. Then, he gives eight demonstrations of the Spirit-empowered life, three antinomies, and seven paradoxes with correlating polarities: a negative experience in the fleshly dimension and an opposite positive experience in the spiritual dimension.“The most important of these polarities is the middle one,” Gagnon added, “the only one with the interjection ‘look!’ telling the reader to pay special attention: ‘dying and yet we live.’ This is the quintessential paradox or polarity expressed in the letter, underscoring that there is no living in Christ apart from dying to self."Life and death.In our fallen world, there appears to be an operative principle at work. Tim Keller wrote about this. To save a life, cancer cells may need to be destroyed. To redeem the world, Christ had to die. And for us to live as we were meant to live, we have to die to self.Such a message is eminently unpopular in our cultural moment, but this gives believers a golden opportunity to sound a countercultural message. But more importantly, it gives believers the opportunity to sound a biblical one.The professional ethics codes of psychologists nowadays are an attempt to encapsulate their guiding values, including autonomy, non-malfeasance, beneficence, justice, fidelity, veracity, integrity, respect for rights and dignity, and the like. Unique to modernism in this list is autonomy and the notion that this is something that should be categorically promoted.'Satan disguises submission to himself under the ruse of personal autonomy.'Now, something like self-love is arguably a created disposition altogether appropriate. The Bible tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, after all. But inappropriate self-love comes about because what’s healthy and ordained has been twisted and warped by sin.This dichotomy furnishes a crystal clear example of where biblical and worldly values can and do diverge. Privileging autonomy and “self-legislation” — treating everything as negotiable, malleable, fluid, etc. — easily becomes idolatrous self-apotheosis, the antithesis of the death to self to which we’re called.I see this in my own area of specialization. A well-known objection to theistic ethics is the autonomy objection, one version of which is that if we let God tell us what to do, we have sacrificed our moral autonomy.The situation on occasion has even devolved to this laughable state: Some have used an appeal to autonomy to pose an objection to moral objectivity itself — the unmitigated audacity of morality to tell us what we ought to do contrary to our wishes!Some trace the autonomy objection back to Immanuel Kant, who had quite a bit to say about autonomy, but in fact Kant is often misunderstood on this score. Kant encouraged those who follow moral truths to appropriate them for themselves, not simply to see such truths as something externally imposed. Autonomy is self-imposition of the moral law, of which we are not the authors.But the more modern and crasser variant of autonomy involves people defining what’s right or wrong, good or bad, vice or virtue, for themselves. On this view, rather than having to die to certain desires, they are conferred the authority to determine the best path ahead. Therapists constrained by such a secular conception can easily start to perform a function akin to a mirror, reflecting back to patients whatever their prevailing desires dictate, only able to challenge views out of step with prevailing secular paradigms.Incidentally, this shows that even a code of ethics in professional organizations may mislead. They often tend to capture prevailing views at odds with biblical truth. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: Who will guard the guards themselves? Who watches the watchers? (This is a relevant question in many areas, including the emergence of AI technologies.)At any rate, the Christian perspective is quite a bit different from this contemporary variant of autonomy. Former Asbury College (now University) president and Old Testament scholar Dennis Kinlaw made the point most poignantly: “Satan disguises submission to himself under the ruse of personal autonomy. He never asks us to become his servants. Never once did the serpent say to Eve, ‘I want to be your master.’ The shift in commitment is never from Christ to evil; it is always from Christ to self. And instead of his will, self-interest now rules and what I want reigns. And that is the essence of sin.”This is a powerful truth we should remember, most assuredly, although I might demur on just one point, which brings our conversation full circle. By “self-interest” here, Kinlaw perhaps instead meant something like “selfishness,” which is importantly different. Exercising and eating right is in our self-interest but not inherently selfish in the least. Likewise, our true self-interest is not something as Christians we need ever sacrifice. Serving God and doing right never goes against our ultimate self-interest. Rejecting God and the good, in contrast, is never in our ultimate self-interest. We serve a God who in his providential care will ensure an ultimate airtight correspondence between holiness and our deepest joy.In this sense, we often aren’t self-interested enough. In a series of sermons, the 18th-century divine Joseph Butler made this very point, arguing that human beings, rather than tending to operate out of too much concern for self-interest, often fail to be self-interested enough in the requisitely enlightened, expansive, and long-term way. Almost by way of providing colorful examples and thick thought experiments of this recurring dynamic, in "The Screwtape Letters" and "The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis adroitly explores the psychology of temptation and obstinate resistance to redemption and joy, venturing an answer for why human beings irrationally act against what is ultimately in their self-interest.Remember the paradox: By dying to our self, we become most alive in Christ. By submitting to God’s kingship, we are most free. By losing our life, we find it.This article is adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Worldview Bulletin Substack.