Irony: Atheist organization "unpublishes" article because it violates one of the group's religious tenets

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Your Mother is watching

Next up for banning: articles disparaging Mother Gaia or questioning global warming.

Richard Dawkins leaves atheist foundation after it unpublishes article saying gender is based on biology

Dawkins accused the Freedom From Religion Foundation of caving to 'hysterical squeals from predictable quarters' in censoring the article

He says Germany's, I'd say Western Civilization's

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salt plowers: Greta, Angela, and al

Victor Davis Hanson: Germany's New Morgenthau Plan

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II -- along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919 -- the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany.

Postwar Germany would have resembled something akin to the ancient, pre-civilized frontier that the first-century AD historian Tacitus wrote about in his Germania.

The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany's surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.

The Ruhr, the renowned center of European industrial strength, was to be permanently neutered, starved of its energy, raw materials, and infrastructure.

After the war, the plan demanded virtual complete disarmament of Germany. Its once-feared armed forces were to be rendered nonexistent.

There were also promised massive reductions in Germany's borders. Various countries, such as the Soviet Union, Poland, and France, were to be given large slices of the old Third Reich.

Future German security would hinge only on the power and goodwill of the victorious United States and its allies.

…

But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their "ally" Russia's Joseph Stalin was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Truman administration backed off the plan.

“There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.”

Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.

Erratic solar and wind "sustainable energy" means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government's green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.

Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing -- in the costliest European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.

Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.

More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally, the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.

The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and depressed. Their 1.4 percent fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world.

A tragic irony now abounds.

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau's plan -- as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders -- without a United States-led NATO.

“Eighty years ago, Germany's former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing -- and destroying -- itself.”

Whack-a-Mole stops Jan. 20th

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Cleaning day at the Augean Stables

(Image created with X/Grok - fun tool)

As predicted here on December 26th because, for Congress, Christmas never ends.

Here’s what we posted then:

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


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."

…. 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).

…. 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. 

And here’s what The Washington Examiner reported yesterday: State Department documents reveal secret plans to route ‘censorship’ office to new hub

Unlike the Examiner, the NY Post has no paywall, so I’ll use its summary (although personally, I do financially support the Examiner)

Biden admin ‘rebranding’ State Dept’s controversial Global Engagement Center under new name — with same employees: report 

The State Department said it shut down the Global Engagement Center last month after Congress refused to reauthorize the agency.U.S. Department of State. The [State Department] plans to realign 51 employees and associated funding from the GEC to a proposed Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub reporting to the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy (R),” read a notification letter sent to congressional lawmakers on Dec. 6, according to the Washington Examiner. 

The planning document indicated that $29.4 million in GEC funding would be shifted to the new office. 

The letter noted that the remaining GEC employees and funding would be sent over to the Bureaus of African Affairs, East Asian and Pacific Affairs, European and Eurasian Affairs, and other offices.

The plan to establish a new “information manipulation” hub at the State Department is expected to trigger congressional investigations, the outlet reported. 

“[President-elect] Donald Trump and [Secretary of State-designate] Marco Rubio are going to have to track every single office, down to every single staffer, if they want to end the weaponization of the federal government against conservatives,” a senior GOP aide said of the GEC shift. 

“The State Department is filled with Resistance Democrats who think they got through the first Trump administration and will get through the second the same way,” the aide added. 

Incompetence vs diversity? It's no contest within our modern security and military organizations (UPDATED)

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Our intrepid FBI sent agents over to the New Orlean’s terrorist’s home hours after the press had already arrived and begun interviewing neighbors.

Inside terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s squalid home, where sheep and goats roam his yard — after his financial ruin

By Jennie Taer

Published Jan. 1, 2025

By mid-afternoon, the feds swooped in — kicking The Post and other journalists out of the area and cordoning it off.

Dozens of police vehicles swarmed the neighborhood, including an armored, military-style truck.

Sooner than that, actually; they missed their chance in 2020, when his senility was already obvious

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Democrats Actually Missed Their Chance to Ditch Biden a Year Ago

Matt Margolis: “Many Democrats blame their loss in 2024 on Joe Biden for not getting out of the race sooner. But, they were handed an out on a silver platter nearly a year ago, and refused to take it.”

It’s incredibly frustrating to watch members of the mainstream media now admitting they failed to question Joe Biden’s cognitive health sooner—a failure many believe could have significantly altered the outcome of the election. Had Biden dropped out earlier, they argue, it would have given Kamala Harris, or perhaps a more competent Democrat, the time needed to build a stronger, more competitive campaign and potentially defeat Trump.

Yet, they had such an opportunity to do so a year ago, but they missed it—months before the June debate with Trump made it impossible for them to keep covering for him.

The truth is, there had been mounting evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline for years—even during the 2020 election—but they decided to defend him, ignoring growing concerns about his fitness for office. His verbal gaffes and memory lapses were hard to ignore, but the mainstream media dismissed these concerns as “conspiracy theories” or “ageist attacks.” ….

Despite their instinct to defend Joe Biden, the media’s first real opportunity to address his cognitive issues came not after the infamous Biden-Trump debate but with the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents in February 2024. 

That should have been the turning point, not the debate.

Though no charges were filed, Hur’s report raised serious concerns about Biden’s mental health, particularly his memory issues. 

The irony of the situation was that it was Biden’s advanced age and memory issues that saved him from being charged with mishandling classified information.

The report assessed that Biden's memory was "significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017 and in his interview with our office in 2023" and determined it wasn't worth bringing him to trial because Biden "would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Thus it would be "difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him [...] of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Hur’s report presented a clear opportunity for Democrats to reconsider Biden’s candidacy, but they failed to act. In fact, Democrats doubled down on their support of Biden, and attacked Hur for even making such an assessment of Biden. 

It’s not like the Hur report came out of nowhere, either. Hardly a week went by during Biden’s presidency without fresh evidence of Biden’s cognitive impairment coming out. The media even conceded the report was damning, yet the Democrats stood firm in support of Biden. And nothing was done about it. So, the media went back to pretending the Biden problem wasn't a problem at all. Instead of acknowledging the evidence, the media chose to focus on Trump’s nonexistent issues, affording Biden an opportunity to maintain a façade of competence.

All this is probably irrelevant anyway. Although it’s amusing to read various Democrat “experts” bewailing Biden’s late departure from the race, what would any replacement have to offer voters except more of the same policies, intensified? That wasn’t an attractive proposition, then or now.

Also irrelevant now, but fun nonetheless, here’s a clip of those same Democrats and their media monkeys lying about their man’s mental acuity, put together by the Trump team.

Mr. Biden tore down this wall

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New Orleans attack suspect named

To the complete astonishment of the FBI, which initially saw no indication that the man might be a terrorist

The suspect accused of plowing a truck through a crowd on Bourbon Street early Wednesday morning has been identified by a law enforcement source as 42-year-old Shamsud Din Jabbar.

Police fatally shot him after the attack, which killed 10 people and injured 35. 

The source said Jabbar was carrying an ISIS flag in the truck, and authorities have said he was dressed in military gear. 

Welcome to the new year — may the Democrats continue to prove that they learned nothing from the past one

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The Daily Chart: Why Democrats Lost for Dummies

Steven Hayward, Powerline:

The evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who always regarded himself as a centrist-liberal, got a lot of heat for generating the top chart below of how the aggressive-progressive left (which is how they ought to be understood) went so far left that it pushed people like him to the right. The media/academic complex is wedded to the idea that it is the Republican Party that has become the “insurgent outlier” destabilizing American political life. But as the second chart below, produced by the Financial Times from survey data on immigration and affirmative action, shows, Wright had it right all along.

As bonus material, Hayward has included this photo, with self-explanatory caption, of the 81-year-old, 18-term Congressman from New Have Rosa DeLauro. Connecticut probably deserves to be punished for keeping her in office all these years, but is that fair to the rest of the country?