But Paracelsus Recovery, which is based in Zurich and London, warned it had seen a 150 per cent increase in the number of people being treated for porn addiction between 2019 and 2023. Its chief executive Jan Gerber said: 'It is clear from our research that porn addiction is significantly more common than official numbers suggest.'

One 27-year-old British man treated by Paracelsus Recovery said he became addicted to pornography after he started watching it from the age of 12. He said: 'I had lost all control over my behaviour. I was sitting in my room smoking weed and watching porn videos from morning to night. I had no friends, it had messed up my education, and I felt hopeless.'

After stating, “The answer is in your mirror,” Townhall columnist Phil Hollaway questioned why Weingarten turned off comments. ”Are you afraid of the answers you’ll get? You and the teacher unions with help from [former CDC director Rochelle Walensky] sent public schools into a death spiral from which they may never recover.” Another poster responded: “A person touted as the country’s top teacher asks a question then turns off replies to keep people from answering it. That sums up pedagogy in public schools right now.”

In the past, various prominent politicians have been dubbed “Gun Salesman of the Year” after involving themselves in gun-control legislation. The same sentiment can be applied to the upper echelons of public education officials, who cannot seem to grasp the concept that parents want their children educated, not indoctrinated. When public schools were closed during COVID, millions of parents learned they could educate better at home, and never looked back. Schools are now being dubbed “knowledge-free zones.”

First, we must understand the febrile landscape of faraway Balochistan, where the conflict is taking place. This remote landscape, covering the southeast of Iran and areas in the west of Pakistan, has a population of 10 million and has long sought independence. You might think both countries would be united against the Balochi separatists, but it's not so simple.

The border region is a safe haven for Balochi rebels, as well as Sunni Islamists waging guerrilla war on the Shi'ite regime in Iran, and drug cartels shipping heroin to the West. The disputed and dangerous region is yet another flashpoint, then, in the Middle East - one that has just ignited. You might think of Iran as a global pariah. But if its war with Pakistan were to escalate, Tehran would have qualified support from three regional superpowers – Russia, India and China.

RT reports: Israel claims Iran was involved in plotting the October 7 attacks, when around 1,200 people were killed and scores taken hostage in the surprise Hamas raid near Gaza. Israel retaliated by launching an intense military bombardment of the Palestinian enclave, so far leaving about 24,000 dead, according to local health officials. The operation is aimed at wiping out the militant group, West Jerusalem says.

Israel has previously openly accused Iran of aiding Hamas “with money, training and weapons and technological know-how” and intelligence. “Iran is standing behind it. We are in conflict with Iran. Imagine not what Iran can do to us, to destroy us,” Netanyahu said, claiming he will only agree to a deal that grants West Jerusalem security control over all of Gaza. Netanyahu added that “Iran is the head of the octopus and you see its tentacles all around from the Houthis to Hezbollah to Hamas.”

The stage is set for a societal implosion of epic proportions, and many Americans are feverishly preparing for a coming collapse that they believe is inevitable. For a long time, many people had faith that the government would be able to keep society stable, but now that has changed. In fact, one recent survey discovered that a whopping 71.2 percent of all Americans “have no faith in the US government to save them or prevent a doomsday event”…

If you actually believe that the government will be there to rescue you when things really start hitting the fan, you are just being delusional. If it was equally divided up among the entire population, the emergency supplies that the government has on hand would last less than a day. Evil is literally growing all around us, and the inmates are taking over the asylum. And I am entirely convinced that 2024 is going to be a historic turning point. Are you ready for the tremendous chaos that is coming?

At this moment, the wintry beginning of 2024, German farmers are staging large-scale and escalating protests and forcing the ruling coalition into concessions, the trains are not running on time due to a strike, the country’s wholesale sector has dropped to pandemic-level pessimism, “dampening hopes of a rapid rebound in Europe’s largest economy,” as reported by Bloomberg, residential property prices are in record decline, and the office real estate market “has collapsed,” according to leading German news magazine Der Spiegel.

The Economist finds Germany to be “down” politically as well – in fact, self-relegated – from its status as leader of Europe (or, at least, the EU) to less than second fiddle (that would be France, perhaps): while “Angela Merkel was the continent’s undoubted leader, Olaf Scholz, has not taken on her mantle.”

For her enemies, there is an irony waiting to catch them: They may hope that accusing Wagenknecht of being too friendly toward Russia will weaken her appeal. Yet that ship has sailed. The days of making hay with unbridled neo-McCarthyism are ending. It is more likely, fortunately, that the BSW’s reasonable approach to foreign policy will only get it more sympathy and voters. As it should. Because remember: At this point, Germany is so dependent on the US that it is treated not only like a vassal, but like a vassal whose wishes and interests do not count. Even Germans who distrust Russia will come to understand that this is fundamentally unsound. In its own national interest, Germany must re-establish some balance by rebuilding its relationship with Russia.

Earlier, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said there was “no way” to solve Israel’s long-term security challenges in the region and the short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state. International pressure for advancing the two-state solution has intensified in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

“Without the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, there will be no security and stability in the region,” Palestinian state news agency Wafa quoted Abbas’s spokesperson Nabil Abu Rdeineh as saying Thursday. The Palestinians seek Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — which were captured by Israel in 1967 — for their state.

Troubles in the Middle East have brought an almost complete stop to tourism in the region, with Israel, Lebanon and North Sinai in Egypt out of bounds to holidaymakers on Foreign Office travel advice. Meanwhile, mayhem in Ecuador has seen crime gang leaders break out of jail sparking widespread unrest and the declaration of a state of emergency.

In Iceland, volcanic activity has closed the popular Blue Lagoon thermal water attraction — although tourism elsewhere in the country continues. Throw in the almost two years old Russian re-invasion of Ukraine, closing off what had been the increasingly popular city breaks destinations of Kyiv, Lviv and Odessa on the Black Sea — with Russia itself, the world’s biggest nation, also on the no-go list — and much of the planet is now out of bounds.

Under Kremlin chief Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union wielded a colossal arsenal and interfered in politics across the globe, but its goals were fundamentally rational... unlike the deranged threats of nuclear escalation now heard frequently from the Putin regime, or the nihilistic death cults of Islamist extremists. The fact our Defence Secretary appears only now to be waking up to this international poly-chaos highlights how naive and arrogant successive UK governments have been in running down our armed forces for 30 years. It is not just Britain. Europe's democratic leaders have not looked weaker since the 1930s.

Trump has made it clear he thinks the rest of the West gets a free ride on US shoulders. In 2020, he stunned the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, by telling her, 'NATO is dead', and he means it. 'You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you,' he said, in a private meeting that came to light only this month.

Anyone who finds the consequences of that threat difficult to imagine need only look at the Red Sea, where the US Navy is keeping sea lanes open in the teeth of attacks from Houthi rebels in Yemen. The route to the Suez Canal is crucial, not for American trade, but for Europe. Yet Britain is a token presence there and our continental allies are nowhere to be seen.

War among our neighbours has been unthinkable for decades, but the era of strong leadership from Washington, London and Paris died with that generation of politicians led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The sheer uselessness of our politicians, inflamed by external meddling via a weaponised social media, has undermined the certainties of international diplomacy.

In light of the military debacle in Gaza, where Hamas has only grown in popularity and credibility, the attention of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have shifted outside the borders of Palestine-Israel. This is likely down to the fact that the Israeli PM knows his political career is effectively over once the war on Gaza ends.

On January 2, Israel carried out an assassination strike in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, killing the deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Salah al-Arouri, and six others who were with him. This constituted the first Israeli strike on the Lebanese Capital since the Hezbollah-Israel war of 2006.

Let me give you some numbers that illustrate what I am talking about.

• Approximately 3 million people work directly for the federal government.


• The federal government spent $6.13 trillion in 2023. That figure is larger than the GDP of every nation on the entire planet except for the US and China.


• More than 70 million Americans are on Social Security.


• More than 65 million Americans are on Medicare.


• More than 81 million Americans are on Medicaid.


• More than 41 million Americans are on food stamps.

Of course there are many more programs that hand out money to the population on a regular basis.

We have reached a stage where most US households are at least partially dependent on the federal government. We cannot provide enough money to keep it going, and so the federal government has been piling up insane amounts of debt. Since 1980, the size of the US national debt has gone from $1 trillion to $34 trillion. The combined wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Ken Griffin, Mark Cuban, Ray Dalio and George Soros would not be enough to even pay the interest on our national debt for a single year…

America’s “empire of money” really has reached the endgame. Our debt spiral is out of control, our currency is rapidly losing value, and everyone can see that our entire system will inevitably collapse.