You’ve heard of Robocop, the fictional man-machine on a mission to lock human criminals away. But experts fear the opposite will soon come true and it will be machines that end up becoming the criminals, leaving us humans powerless to stop them. Artificial intelligence experts have claimed that computers and robots will commit more crimes than humans by 2040. They warned that murder machines will end up carrying out the “lone wolf” terror attacks more associated with radicalised terrorists than psycho computers.

Tracey Follows, chief strategy and innovation officer at The Future Laboratory, told Raconteur: “As the workforce moves towards more automation, we could find 35 per cent of jobs now done by humans have been replaced by robots. Futurists have been forecasting a sharp rise in lone-wolf terror attacks for years. But once robots can be hacked to become suicide-bombing machines, lone-robot attacks could become rife too.”

The robotic crime wave will be driven by the rise of artificial intelligence, which is expected to give machines a cognitive ability which could even surpass that of humans. If the robotic crimewave seems like a distant prospect, you should consider a statistic from the National Crime Agency, which found that cyber crime made up 54 percent of total offences in 2015.

When I was growing up, my father often told me that Andy Warhol once said that he wanted to be a machine, and that it would be a lot easier to be a machine — if something broke, you could just replace it. Even though small wounds and injuries heal, this has not been the case for humans. If something were inherently broken, it would stay broken the rest of our lives. Which relates to another common saying: The only two things in this world that are certain are death and taxes.

For the transhumanist movement, this is not the case. Transhumanists believe that humankind can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations to become “superhuman” and, eventually, immortal. One of the most prominent members of the movement is Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist Party and 2016 third-party presidential candidate.

For Istvan, aging and death are the biggest plague of our time. The party is proposing a transhumanist bill of rights that states that it should be illegal to stop research on longevity and eternal rights based on religious and ethical reasons.

But they oppose each other on a swathe of issues across the globe, creating a delicate political balance that could collapse and engulf nuclear states and alliances such as NATO. A range of experts have identified several flashpoints across the globe which are today the most likely triggers for such a war.

The proximity of NATO and Russian bombers flying over Syria, Vladimir Putin’s aggression in eastern Europe, and China’s movements in the South China Sea are among them. Experts have also raised concerns about the instability of nuclear-power Pakistan as extremist factions and terrorist groups within the country grow in power.

Adding to this is these groups’ sworn opposition to neighbouring India – which holds its own much-coveted nuclear arsenal. Britain’s Admiral Lord West told The Sun Online: “Basically none of us know what is going to happen but we are in a more dangerous, chaotic and unpredictable time than any other in my 50 years in the force.

“I believe that because of Brexit, I think Europe is very flaky, I think it is unfortunate that we didn’t stay in, because they actually need our military expertise. I can see bits of Europe breaking up and when Europe gets into a mess, twice in the past we’ve had to go in there and clear it up with immense loss of blood and lives.”

We have millions upon millions of strong young men just sitting around doing nothing. They aren’t employed and they aren’t considered to be looking for employment either, and so they don’t show up in the official unemployment numbers. But they don’t have jobs, and nothing the Obama administration does can eliminate that fact.

According to NPR, “nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked” in the 1960s. In those days, just about any dependable, hard working American man could get hired almost immediately. The economy was growing and the demand for labor was seemingly insatiable. But today, one out of every six men in their prime working years does not have a job…

We do have the largest prison population in the entire world by far, and without a doubt that does play a role in these numbers. However, a far bigger factor is the millions of men that have become content being dependents of the federal government. More than 100 million Americans receive money from the government each month, and a lot of people (both men and women) have found that it is just easier to sit back and collect government checks than it is to go out and try to work hard for a living.

But of course the number one factor is the lack of jobs available. I personally know people that have been looking for work in their fields for years and have not been able to get hired. We have a major employment crisis in this nation, and it is only going to get worse in the years ahead as we continue to lose jobs to technology and millions more good jobs get shipped overseas.

More than three years into this bizarre pontificate, one thing has become clear to the informed objective observer: “Father Bergoglio,” as he is wont to call himself when undermining Catholic doctrine by telephone, is abusing the papal office like no other Pope before him in an attempt to pass off his own ideas as binding on the Church.

On and on he goes, telling us whatever he thinks as if he actually expects any believing Catholic to accept his notions as authentic Church teaching, including these:

• the admission to Holy Communion of people living in adultery in “certain cases”;

• the embrace of environmentalism, “global warming” hysteria and the United Nations “sustained development goals”;

• the absurd whitewash of Islam, the demand for unrestricted Muslim immigration and the outrageous claim of a moral equivalence between Islamic terrorists and Catholic “fundamentalists”;

and so on and so forth — endlessly, day in and day out.

Evidently, Francis considers failure to adopt “green” practices a mortal sin requiring absolution and an amendment of life. This is in stark contrast to his view of people who, as even the new Catechism teaches, are living “in a situation of permanent and public adultery” in purported “second marriages” following divorce. Francis has been laboring incessantly to admit these wayward Catholics to Confession and Holy Communion without any firm purpose of amendment. Catholics who fail to care adequately for “our common home,” however, apparently cannot receive absolution, according to Francis, unless they amend their lives by “going green.”

In the same vein, Jeff Mirus, citing Lawler’s piece, has posted one of his own, mordantly entitled “Why care for the environment shouldn’t make the ‘works of mercy’ list.” A work of mercy, he notes, is always directed to the good of a particular soul whose neediness is before us. Francis’s novelty, however, “inescapably shifts our attention from the person to the environment itself [his emphasis].”

The final caption of Mirus’s piece could not be more telling: “That way madness lies.” We need not confine ourselves here to that veiled suggestion. We can say openly what any honest observer with a sensus catholicus is now thinking: this pontificate is insane. Only God knows how it will all turn out. Meanwhile, we can only hope and pray for our deliverance from this growing madness.

The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, which enforces the state’s anti-discrimination laws, recently published a “Gender identity guidance” that lays out what will be legally required of employers and “agents of places of public accommodation.” The guidance was published September 1 but has gone unreported by the media until now. The commission confirmed that the version of the guidance online is the “final edition.”

Beginning October 1, the guidance notes, “All persons, regardless of gender identity, shall have the right to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation.” The guidance notes that Massachusetts law defines “public accommodation” as “any place, whether licensed or unlicensed, which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public.” (Restaurants and hotels, for example, are generally considered public accommodations.) Violators of the law face up to one year in jail.

Then, around the time Obama was exiting through the emergency staircase, a Chinese official attempted to block national security adviser Susan Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes after they lifted a blue rope holding back press and walked to the other side of it, closer to Obama.

A member of the Chinese delegation began shouting at White House staff, demanding the pool leave the arrival scene. A White House official said Obama was our president and Air Force One was our plane and that the press was not going to move from the designated area. The Chinese official angrily responded "This is our country. This is our airport."

The scandals continued later, with members of the Chinese and US delegations coming close to throwing punches at each other: as we previously reported, two Chinese officials - one working to assist the American delegation - had to be physically separated after trying to hit each other outside an event.

As the WSJ adds, "the Chinese barred Mr Obama from including his traveling press contingent in his motorcade. The hosts also have refused a White House request for a joint press conference with Mr Xi, and they plan to block Mr Obama’s solo press briefing from airing live on Chinese television." In short, the fate of the G-20 meeting was fixed: no matter what was decided, it would forever be remembered as the event where China snubbed the US president in an unprecedented fashion one final time.

Banks and governments around the world are cracking down on the use of paper money, and in turn, eliminating any anonymity left in the current system. Through strict rules on cash transactions and civil asset forfeiture laws, for example, the system has already instituted penalties for using cash. But as payments evolve into a purely digital network, the consequences of this new paradigm are being brought into the spotlight.

The ability to track, record, and mediate transactions of all individuals is a power that dictators throughout history could have only dreamed of. Those who value privacy are turning to alternatives like cash, cryptocurrencies, and precious metals, but these directly threaten central bank dominance. This ongoing tug-of-war in financial innovation will determine whether we enter an age of individual empowerment or centralized enslavement.

As mundane as it may seem, the main reason for this push to go cashless is directly tied to what the world central banks are doing to prop up their economies. The manipulation of interest rates to zero or even negative has left central banks no ammunition to fight off the next recession. Without the ability to cut interest rates even further, stimulating economic growth is nearly impossible.

The government’s crusade to restrict financial freedom is just beginning; as always, fear and propaganda will be used to condition the masses into submission. The personal responsibility needed to protect yourself from the inevitable changes in the system can be overwhelming, but without taking the proper steps, the current ruling class will make the decisions for you.

Delinquency rates are up by double digit percentages, and major auto lenders are bracing for hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. We are a nation that is absolutely drowning in debt, and we are most definitely going to reap what we have sown. The size of this market is larger than you may imagine. Earlier this year, the auto loan bubble surpassed the one trillion dollar mark for the first time ever…

Americans are borrowing more than ever for new and used vehicles, and 30- and 60-day delinquency rates rose in the second quarter, according to the automotive arm of one of the nation’s largest credit bureaus. The total balance of all outstanding auto loans reached $1.027 trillion between April 1 and June 30, the second consecutive quarter that it surpassed the $1-trillion mark, reports Experian Automotive.

And it is undeniable that the stage is set for a crisis that will absolutely dwarf 2008. Our national debt has nearly doubled since the beginning of the last crisis, corporate debt has doubled, student loan debt has crossed the trillion dollar mark, auto loan debt has crossed the trillion dollar mark, and total household debt has crossed the 12 trillion dollar mark. We are living in the greatest debt bubble in world history, and there are signs that this giant bubble is now starting to burst. And when it does, the pain is going to be greater than most people would dare to imagine.

That's a little awkward given President Obama's meeting with, and comments on, The Fed in April… but hey, when did hypocrisy ever lose an election? Trump, who has previously accused the Federal Reserve of keeping interest rates low to help President Barack Obama, said on Monday that the US central bank has created a "false economy" and that interest rates should change.

"They're keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn't go down," Trump said in response to a reporter's request to address a potential rate hike by the Federal Reserve in September. "We have a very false economy," he said. "At some point the rates are going to have to change," Trump, who was campaigning in Ohio on Monday, added. "The only thing that is strong is the artificial stock market”, he said.

Nigerian Ambassador Usman Sarki told a meeting of national representatives, “We wish to remind the UN to limit itself strictly to activities mandated by member states and especially to promote issues that are beneficial to mankind rather than lend itself as a tool to promote aberrant behaviour under the guise of promoting human rights.”

Sarki was responding to the UN’s issuance last week of six postage stamps tied to the UN human rights office’s Free and Equal campaign advancing the status of homosexual, transgender and bisexual people. In Nigeria, with a population of 182 million people, homosexual relations can bring the death penalty in the Muslim north and 14 years in jail in the Christian south.

Sarki said the UN secretariat should not be promoting causes when many and even a majority of states oppose it. “What is clear to many is that the UN has now decided without any reservation or hesitation to side with a minority of member states and practitioners of this lifestyle, in complete disregard of the wishes and concerns of the majority of its member States and the populations that they represent,” he declared.

According to the worldwide survey of attitudes towards homosexuality conducted in 2013 by the Pew Foundation, Sarki’s views are very close to those of most Nigerians, which turn out to be the least accepting of all 40 countries surveyed: with 98 percent answering “No” to the question: “Should society accept homosexuality” and only 1 percent answering “yes.”