The C of E adopts its Episcopalian branch's view of "faith" (UPDATED)

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“who’s to say who was right?” Marcus Welby, former medical director, C of E, reflecting on the demise of christianity

UPDATE: I’d meant to include this C.S. Lewis quote earlier, but was too lazy to look it up; now I have.

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

A lifetime grifter, exploiting his “public servant” positions from 1970 to the bitter end 54 years later.

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The biden clan has arrived at Rohlsen airport

Ironically, but not unpredictably, the Bidens will be staying at the home of one of those freeloading billionaires they always claim doesn't "pay their fair share in taxes" while taxpayers pick up the rest of the bill for the first family's travels. 

The trip has become an annual one for the Bidens, who in the past have stayed at a wealthy donor's home on the island. It's the third year in a row the president and his family have traveled to St. Croix for the New Year's holiday. Last year in St. Croix, Mr. Biden said his New Year's resolution was "to come back next year." 

The president did not speak to reporters Thursday before boarding Air Force One. Mr. Biden and his family usually largely stay out of public view during these vacations. Multiple family members are expected to join the president and first lady Jill Biden on the trip. 

"Multiple family members are expected to join." That of course means taxpayers are going to be funding another lavish tropical vacay for the newly pardoned Hunter Biden. 

Created in 2020 to fight COVID "disinformation", it's still going strong, $61 million budget and 120 govt. workers, who we can be sure will doubtless be reassigned and not fired

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there’s still plenty of work to do, but it’s a start

State Department's 'Global Engagement Center' accused of censoring Americans shuts its doors

The State Department’s foreign disinformation center, accused by conservatives of censoring U.S. citizens, shut its doors due to lack of funding this week. 

Elon Musk had deemed the Global Engagement Center (GEC), established in 2016, the "worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation," and its funding was stripped as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon’s yearly policy bill. 

"The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps."

Lawmakers had originally included funding for the GEC in its continuing resolution (CR), or bill to fund the government beyond a Friday deadline. But conservatives balked at that iteration of the funding bill, and it was rewritten without money for the GEC and other funding riders.

The agency had a budget of around $61 million and 120 people on staff. 

…. The GEC, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, "funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious—and idiotic—new form of blacklisting" during the pandemic. 

Taibbi wrote last year when exposing the Twitter Files that the GEC "flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’" 

"State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. website ZeroHedge, claiming that it 'led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.'" ZeroHedge had made reports speculating that the virus had a lab origin.

The GEC is part of the State Department but also partners with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command and the Department of Homeland Security. The GEC also funds the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).

DFRLab Director Graham Brookie previously denied the claim that they use tax money to track Americans, saying its GEC grants have "an exclusively international focus."

A 2024 report from the Republican-led House Small Business Committee criticized the GEC for awarding grants to organizations whose work includes tracking domestic as well as foreign misinformation and rating the credibility of U.S.-based publishers, according to the Washington Post. 

The complaint describes the State Department’s project as "one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.’"

The lawsuit argued that The Daily Wire, The Federalist and other conservative news organizations were branded "unreliable" or "risky" by the agency, "starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech—all as a direct result of [the State Department’s] unlawful censorship scheme."

Meanwhile, America First Legal, headed up by Stephen Miller, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for deputy chief of staff for policy, revealed that the GEC had used taxpayer dollars to create a video game called "Cat Park" to "Inoculate Youth Against Disinformation" abroad. 

The game "inoculates players . . . by showing how sensational headlines, memes, and manipulated media can be used to advance conspiracy theories and incite real-world violence," according to a memo obtained by America First Legal. 

Bonus Material

SPEAKING OF ICEBERGS …

C'mon, Riverside, can't we help our fellow townie out? Permanently out, maybe, but ....

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Thank heavens, the poor girl got one sincere, helpful solution:

We're back, and so is this old post

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A friend reminded me of this tale I recounted a few years ago, and I think it’s still relevant to these times and this day.

A Christmas story

December 27, 2017Chris Fountain

News that Greenwich's Christmas tree recycling program has begun sparked a memory from some years back.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2011, while I was preparing the holiday feast in my mother's kitchen, I heard a crash from her office. I rushed in and discovered that she'd suffered a massive stroke. This vibrant, wonderful, 88-year-old woman who was even then getting straight As at Norwalk Community College, never regained her ability to speak, and barely recognized her children. So it was a bad Thanksgiving, and Christmas a month later wasn't going to be much better.

My mother was beloved by her grandchildren and one of them, my niece Naomi, came east from California to see her, arriving the morning of Christmas Eve with her little boy Asher. Asher's father, a former Marine (sniper, then JPL engineer), had drowned before Asher was born, so he was being raised by his widowed mother. Naomi is a fantastic mother, but there's a undercurrent of sadness in the story of a young widow, a young boy, and no father. Couple that with "Mun-Mun"  in the hospital, and things weren't awfully cheery in the Fountain home.

So that's the set up; here's the point: We hadn't bothered decorating my mother's house — why bother? — and Asher was distraught when he arrived to find that there was no Christmas tree. "Distraught" is perhaps too mild a term — he was devastated. It was then about 3:30, Christmas Eve, and the chances of finding a tree vendor in Greenwich still open struck me as nil, but I loaded Asher in the car and, warning him of our unlikely prospects, we set out to find a tree. 

Sure enough, nothing. The Jerombeck Brothers' stand across from St. Catherine's had shut down for the season and so, too, had every other spot we tried on the Post Road. It was getting dark by now, but I had a sudden thought, which I passed on to Asher: the town had a a space at Tod's Point for residents to drop off their trees for recycling after Christmas. Maybe, I suggested, some family had celebrated early before heading off to the Caribbean, or a ski vacation, and left a tree behind before they left. The odds were very much against us, I cautioned, maybe 100-0, but why not try? 

It was almost dark by this time, and we arrived at Tod's just a few minutes before it closed. We drove to the collection point and discovered only one, solitary tree, but it was perfectly shaped, in prime condition, and exactly the right height to fit my mother's low-ceilinged living room. I mumbled something to Asher about there being a God after all, we loaded up the tree and returned to his great-grandmother's house. His uncles and cousins showed up, a fire was lit, the ornaments retrieved from the attic, and a great Christmas Eve was achieved after all.

So that's my Christmas story. I hope all of you have similar memories to draw on in times of sadness and, for that matter, joy. And, if a reader out there remembers dropping off a tree in 2011 at the Point the day before Christmas, know that you did, even unknowingly, a mitzvah, and you might want to consider whether we're not all part of some higher plan.

I know I do.

So we're back

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Geeze, so much happened the past few days, which I’ll get to. But let’s start off with a trivial, but oddly accurate observation about the dispiriting outpouring of supporst for the murder of any business executive who offends the mob:

The stench

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Mammoth spending bill has clause that would let Congress block subpoenas for House data, "potentially preventing any investigation into the J6 Committee"

If you haven't heard, Congress is trying to pass a ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED PAGE omnibus bill. A typical tactic of politicians for decades has been to attach a whole bunch of hidden clauses into a massive-yet-critical spending bill that no one can physically read and process in its entirety.

Thanks to Elon Musk's X, there's a place for people to read the bill together and find things that are hidden (X's AI, Grok, will also be able to read and summarize these bills in the future).

Speaking of Elon, here is his reaction:

AND:

And off topic, but worth mentioning:

Maybe she can replace Tiffany Henyard as Mayor of Henyard IL *

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NYPD’s $400K-a-year top earner Quathisha Epps is retiring early as astronomical overtime pay is investigated: sources

The NYPD’s highest-paid employee — who shoveled in more than $400,000 last year — filed for retirement this week amid an internal affairs probe into her astronomical overtime, The Post has learned.

Lt. Quathisha Epps will retire just shy of 20 years with the department, sources said — an early exit that will impact her pension and cost her a $12,000-a-year supplement for cops who reach the two-decade mark.

Leaving money on the table is seemingly uncharacteristic for Epps, who raised eyebrows by pulling in roughly $204,000 in overtime last year for her administrative job in NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey’s office, payroll records show.

Sources told The Post that Epps’ whopping overtime was capped after The Post’s exclusive report last month on her pay. She was also told she’d be put back on patrol — an apparently unappetizing prospect after her cushy desk job, according to the sources.

“There is no way she was going to go out on patrol,” one source told The Post.

Epps, 51, also faced an internal affairs investigation into her overtime, sources said.

Records showed that last year she worked nearly 1,627 hours of overtime on top of her regular shift, or an average of roughly 74 hours a week.

The overtime, plus her $164,477 base salary, pushed Epps’ total compensation past $400,000 — and made her the highest-paid NYPD employee.

By comparison, her boss, Maddrey, made roughly $292,000 the same year, records show.

Epps’ eye-watering overtime rankled many rank-and-file cops.

“What administrative work requires you to stay there 115 to 120 hours every f–king month to apply that type of money?” one Bronx cop griped to The Post last month.

*Tiffany Henyard, the mayor of Dolton, Illinois, is embroiled in multiple controversies, including allegations of corruption, misuse of taxpayer funds, and retaliating against political opponents. Her administration has faced scrutiny for excessive spending and has been the subject of a federal investigation request by village trustees.

Newsnationnow.com