Day: December 14, 2025
Nutrient deficiency linked to heart disease risk for millions, new study warns
Global omega-3 deficiency affects 76% of people worldwide, significantly increasing risks for heart disease, cognitive decline and chronic inflammation.
China’s missile surge puts every US base in the Pacific at risk — and the window to respond is closing
China’s massive missile force threatens U.S. Pacific bases as both nations race to build long-range weapons. Experts analyze the strategic competition.
Trump addresses trio of attacks in Syria, Brown University and Australia at White House Christmas event
President Donald Trump offered his condolences to the victims of a trio of attacks at Brown University, in Sydney, Australia, and in Syria on Sunday.
Not all feelings are valid: Why parents need to teach resilience over emotional indulgence
While most parents simply want to protect their kids, stepping in too fast can prevent them from developing problem-solving skills — which is why licensed therapist RaQuel Hopkins rejects the feel-good “protect your peace” culture of today.
One of the most popular phrases to come out of this has been “all feelings are valid.”
“I have heard that phrase so much … and I just think about the word. I always like to think about defining my terms. And valid means there’s truth to it. Like, if something is valid, that is representative of a reality, but that’s not really true when it comes to our feelings, ” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey tells Hopkins.
“I even talked to someone who’s head of SEL at a school, and she was saying that she teaches these kindergartners that all feelings are valid. And I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know that I want, you know, my 5-year-old to hear that her jealousy of her sister, her anger that she has to share, is valid,” she continues.
“I would agree,” Hopkins says. “I mean, I don’t teach my children that either. I teach them to be able to express themselves. Learning to figure out what you have internalized to figure out how you want to actually move forward.”
Hopkins believes that children are actually much easier to teach to think and react this way, because opportunities to teach them are “always presenting themselves.”
“Whether it’s your kid comes home and says that someone picked on me, the first thing is not to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that,’” she tells Stuckey, pointing out that when her son first came home complaining that he was being picked on, she had an entirely different approach.
“I didn’t get wrapped up on, ‘I acknowledge that it hurts when people are not saying what you consider to be nice things.’ But it was also, ‘Son, you have to learn to live with what God has blessed you with,’” she continues.
And this is what Hopkins believes is missing from most mental health conversations today.
“The spirituality part is missing,” Hopkins says.
“If I am made in His image, or fearfully and wonderfully made,” she tells Stuckey, “there are some things that you’re going to have to learn to accept about your own lived realities, and that’s not always coupled with compassion.”
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.
The country that mocks America’s ‘culture of death’ has embraced one of its own
Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.
But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.
The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.
In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”
No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.
Choosing death over care
One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.
But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.
Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.
They offered her MAID.
Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.
Bureaucracy replaces medicine
Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.
Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.
This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.
Photo by Graham Hughes/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The logical end of a broken system
We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.
When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.
The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?
The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.
Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.
PBA: CJ Cansino drops career-game to carry Meralco to Philippine Cup quarterfinals
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CJ Cansino torched Converge with a career-high showing to help Meralco pull off a wire-to-wire victory, 105-84, and extend its streak to three in the PBA Season 50 Philippine Cup on Sunday at the Ynares Center Antipolo.
Agatha Wong continues reign in SEA Games wushu; judo team wraps campaign with mixed team gold
Agatha Wong continued her Southeast Asian Games dominance by winning her sixth gold medal at the 2025 edition of the biennial meet on Sunday in Thailand.
Chile votes in presidential race expected to lurch country to the right
Chileans are voting in a runoff presidential election on Sunday that is expected to result in the South American country’s sharpest rightward shift since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990.
DSWD kicks off gift-giving, simple holiday cheer for residents of its care facilities
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) will hold a series of simple gift-giving activities and celebrations for the residents of its centers and residential care facilities (CRCFs) to remind them that they are loved and cared for, especially during the Christmas holidays.
Hanukkah security ramped up around world after Bondi shootings
Hanukkah security ramped up around world after Bondi shootings
