• The Keynesian god of growth has failed.

• The Keynesian god of borrowing from the future to fund today's consumption has failed.

• The Keynesian god of monetary stimulus / financialization has failed.

Every major central bank and state worships these Keynesian idols.

The global financial system is in the eye of an unprecedented hurricane. While central bankers are congratulating themselves on their god-like mastery of Nature, and secretly praying to the idols of the Keynesian Cargo Cult every night, the inevitable consequence of borrowing from the future, the obsession with "growth" at any cost and financialization / monetary stimulus…is systemic collapse.

Don't fall for the mainstream media and politicos' shuck-and-jive that all is well and "growth" will return any day now. The only "growth" we're experiencing are the financial cancers of systemic risk and financialization's soaring wealth/income inequality.

"Our meeting is the message," Francis said in a brief comment at the start of his meeting with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, shortly after he had hugged and kissed his guest, Vatican officials told a small pool of reporters covering the event. In a statement on the trip, Al-Azhar, an institution that also comprises a prestigious seat of learning, said the two sides had agreed to convene a "peace conference".

A statement quoted Tayeb as telling Francis: "We need to take a joint stance, hand in hand, to bring happiness to humanity. Divine religions were revealed to make people happy, not to cause them hardship." The imam's deputy, Abbas Shuman, told Egyptian TV channel CBC that the two leaders had agreed to resume dialogue and that the proposed conference would cover the issues of poverty, extremism and terrorism.

The Vatican did not immediately confirm the conference plans. A spokesman said the talks had been "very cordial" with the imam spending 30 minutes with the pope and just over an hour in total at St Peter's. Tayeb's decision to fly to Rome, unexpectedly announced last week, followed the easing of serious tensions that marked the reign of Francis's predecessor, Benedict XVI.

School officials can't stop you anymore. To question your biological age would be "bigoted" or "discriminatory" because you self-identify as a permanent 17-year-old. It's your civil right, you see, to decide to be a man, a woman, a child or even a teenager. Whatever biology you want to be that day, it's yours for the asking!

After you clean up on the court, if you're wondering where your team coach is, he's showering with the girls' varsity team because he suddenly decided he was an 18-year-old female today. Thank goodness we live in a progressive society that respects his "right" to be himself, huh? Some of the girls started to complain when he entered the shower looking all naked and gross, but they were quickly chided back into line by the school's thought police enforcers who reminded them that they would be practicing "intolerance" if they didn't allow their 35-year-old coach to shower with them. None of them wanted to be called "intolerant," so they all just showered with the guy and told themselves what loving, compassionate, progressive people they were.

A conservative skeptic might observe all this and say, "Hey, wait a minute! These people can't change their biology! That guy's a 35-year-old creepy dude!"

But biology, you see, is now considered wholly subjective and decided based on a whim. If you DECIDE to be female, everyone else must now accept you as a female. And if you DECIDE to be 15 years old, how can anyone argue differently? If they dare say, "But your birth certificate says you're 35, not 15," then you just call them an intolerant, discriminatory bigot and threaten to sue them for violating your civil rights.

This is what America has now come to: An insane, delusional land of the politically correct mentally ill. When an entire society loses touch with biological reality and economic reality, it's only a matter of time before the entire system collapses upon itself, by the way. This era of runaway lunacy won't last for long.

This brings me to the perfect answer that young Christian gal at the Indiana pizza parlor should have given when she was under attack for saying their pizza shop wouldn't cater for a gay wedding... She should have announced to the world that she self-identifies as a 15-year-old gay man trapped in the body of an older woman and forced to serve pizza to white racist bigots in Indiana. The entire lunatic media would have turned her into a cultural hero!

Presented to the European Geosciences Union General Assembly last April, the study looks at the extreme impacts of natural hazards like earthquakes, tsunamis, extreme weather and volcanoes. It states that “extreme volcanic eruptions pose a higher associated risk than all other natural hazards” including asteroid impacts.

It has led to numerous reports that the earth is in the midst of a volatile ‘volcano season’ – a ‘ticking time bomb’ period that could see supervolcanoes in places like Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming erupt and kill millions.

Speaking to the International Business Times Rebecca Williams, volcanologist at the University of Hull said there is “no such thing” as "volcano season". “There has been talk about Yellowstone erupting and killing everyone but this is nonsense. There is no scientific data that suggest an eruption is likely to occur in the near future,” she said.

To put this amount in perspective, the US spent more on its military than the next six nations combined, with China coming in second at $215 billion, followed by Saudi Arabia at $87 billion, Russia at $66 billion, with the United Kingdom, India and France spending roughly $50 billion each on defense expenses.

The sheer enormity of the sums being given to the military-industrial complex is enough to boggle the mind. Think for a moment how else that $600 billion could be spent to actually assist in creating growth rather than death.

Consider that in January 2015, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found there were 564,708 homeless people on a given night in the United States – the government could actually purchase a $1 million dollar home for each individual homeless person in the US and still have money left over.

But if anyone is suffering from ‘political amnesia’ it is the EU grandees and their allies in the British establishment. As a journalist and author who has studied in detail both the foundation of the European Union and the Nazis’ plans for post-war economic domination, and who has reported from all over Europe for more than 20 years, I believe that Johnson’s reference to Hitler was not only correct, but absolutely necessary.

The Nazis, like Napoleon, whom Johnson also referred to, are part of a historical continuum of European empire-building. It is a story that goes back to the original Roman empire, through Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and its Ottoman rival, the Third Reich, the Soviet Bloc in the east of the continent and today’s European Union.

And Johnson is being smeared. He had deliberately NOT drawn parallels between the methods and aims of the EU and those of the Nazis. Of course the EU is not fighting a race war or organising mass exterminations. There are no parallels to be drawn between the way Brussels carries out its business and the Nazi approach in wartime Berlin.

What Johnson did do was to make an apt and timely historical observation about diverse attempts to unify Europe that have taken place over the centuries. Nazi Germany, far from being a subject to gloss over in any debate on the EU, is one that has to be scrutinised. For many senior figures in the Third Reich wanted economic union in Europe - and it is incumbent on us to examine whether their hopes actually came to fruition.

'The uncomfortable - and usually unspoken - truth is that the parallels between the plans of the Nazi leadership for the post-war European economy and the subsequent process of European monetary and economic integration are real'.

Postwar Britain famously lost an empire but couldn’t find a role; now, Germany has acquired an empire of sorts but can’t work out how to run it. All of Europe’s problems — the flood of Syrian refugees, the euro crisis, Vladimir Putin’s belligerence, the euro zone’s anemic growth, Eastern Europe’s drift toward rampant nationalism, Brexit — keep landing in Angela Merkel’s lap. Germany’s chancellor has usually found some way to cope, most obviously by kicking each problem down the autobahn. But she lacks the power (and too often the inclination) to lead Europe, while her partners, even when they don’t obstruct her, do very little to help. So the problems drift, and frustration in Berlin mounts.

The overriding worry is that a vicious cycle has begun: As Germany gets ever more frustrated with Europe’s inability to change; it gets ever less likely to lead, so the change it wants becomes ever less likely to happen. In a strange way, Brexit might alter this dynamic. Merkel is desperate to keep Britain within Europe because she sees David Cameron, for all his Little Englander elements, as a voice for reform.

Yet if Britain were to opt to leave and other countries threatened to hold referendums, then even the cautious Merkel might be forced to seize the moment and bully reforms through Brussels to create a more cohesive, modern euro zone with a deeper single market. Hence an irony for Johnson and his fellow Brexiters: The dominant Germany they fear is more likely to come into being if Britain votes to leave the union.

Countries are just waking up to the most serious global food crisis of the last 25 years. Caused by the strongest El Niño weather event since 1982, droughts and heatwaves have ravaged much of India, Latin America and parts of south-east Asia. But the worst effects of this natural phenomenon, which begins with waters warming in the equatorial Pacific, are to be found in southern Africa. A second consecutive year without rain now threatens catastrophe for some of the poorest people in the world.

Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Madagascar, Angola and Swaziland have already declared national emergencies or disasters, as have seven of South Africa’s nine provinces. Other countries, including Botswana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have also been badly hit. President Robert Mugabe has appealed for $1.5 billion to buy food for Zimbabwe and Malawi is expected to declare that more than 8 million people, or half the country, will need food aid by November.

Politicians may talk of going on to the world market to buy a million tonnes of maize, but Ushiyama [head of the UN World Food Program in Malawi] is unsure where it will come from. There is usually enough food in the region, but South Africa, which usually exports a million tonnes of food a year, will need to import 3.5 million tonnes this year. Only Zambia may have enough food to export and it has imposed restrictions, she said.

Finding the cash to feed possibly 50 million people for eight or more months is the biggest problem of all, says the UN, because Africa’s slow-burn crisis must compete with Middle East wars, refugees and natural disasters for attention. According to the UN, which is holding an unprecedented humanitarian summit this week in Istanbul, 125 million people worldwide need long-term assistance and a further 60 million have been forced from their homes by war, violence and disaster.

Instead of droughts, La Niña usually brings heavier monsoon rains in south-east Asia and much cooler and wetter conditions in southern Africa. “We pray hard for rain and then we must pray harder that it stops. Is there no end of extreme weather?” said Malawian villager Richard Kapenda.

This is not science fiction: “By delivering synthetic genes into the muscles of the [experimental] monkeys, the scientists are essentially re-engineering the animals to resist disease.” “’The sky’s the limit,’ said Michael Farzan, an immunologist at Scripps and lead author of the new study.”

“The first human trial based on this strategy — called immunoprophylaxis by gene transfer, or IGT — is underway, and several new ones are planned.” “IGT is altogether different from traditional vaccination. It is instead a form of gene therapy. Scientists isolate the genes that produce powerful antibodies against certain diseases and then synthesize artificial versions. The genes are placed into viruses and injected into human tissue, usually muscle.”

Here is the punchline: “The viruses invade human cells with their DNA payloads, and the synthetic gene is incorporated into the recipient’s own DNA. If all goes well, the new genes instruct the cells to begin manufacturing powerful antibodies.”

Read that again: “the synthetic gene is incorporated into the recipient’s own DNA.” Alteration of the human genetic makeup. Permanent alteration.

On a climbing holiday in Scotland, it was almost 24 hours before she emerged into clear mobile phone range to be told of the apparent crisis engulfing her organisation after details of the controversial new policy were first reported in a Sunday newspaper. In the days since, her phone has been making up for lost time as a petition demanding a rethink has swollen to 35,000 signatures, hundreds of midwives signed a public letter of protest and MPs openly attacked the policy change.

Critics accused her of “riding roughshod” over midwives’ views by signing them up to an “abhorrent” and “radical” campaign which, they say, goes against the most basic principles behind a profession dedicated to helping bring new life into the world.

The furore erupted after the organisation published a new policy document on abortion and, crucially, drew attention to Professor Warwick’s earlier decision to sign the RCM up for a campaign led by Britain’s biggest abortion provider BPAS calling for complete decriminalisation of the procedure. Such a move would sweep away the 1967 Abortion Act, with its 24-week limit on performing terminations, its legal requirement for the approval of two doctors and the need for legal criteria to justify ending a pregnancy.