The de-escalatory, anti-war position taken by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party appears to have struck a chord with the German population. The latest opinion survey revealed that the party’s support has climbed to a record high, surpassing that of the hawkish Green party led by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
Conservative, Inc. seems to be coming apart at the seams lately. It’s one big fight after the next. When Steven Crowder called out “Big Con” for writing contracts that appeared to take advantage of creators, everyone took cover or took a side. That noise went on for a while until Project Veritas kicked James O’Keefe out of the organization, alleging abusive behavior. We’re still trying to figure that one out. Running in the background to all of that was the story of how Eliza Bleu worked her way into the inner circles of conservative entertainment and influencers with a dubious tale of being trafficked. When questioned, she became today’s most notorious censor, striking YouTube channels and Twitter accounts that post publicly available photos and clips of her racy video vixen past.
A highly-anticipated report into the Government’s Prevent strategy, which is designed to detect and prevent radicalisation, has been published this week, with scathing findings about the state of the nation’s flagship anti-extremism programme.
The report, headed by William Shawcross, who was appointed as the Independent Reviewer of Prevent in January 2021 by the Government, has made several shocking revelations.
Principally, the report laments that the approach to tackling Islamism has become ever narrower, while the approach to the far-right has become broader. This has various manifestations, including different thresholds for what constitutes Islamist extremism and far-right extremism, and an excessive focus on relatively minor threats from the far-right over more urgent and serious threats from Islamist groups. The Research Information and Communications Unit, a Home Office unit established in 2007 as part of the Prevent programme, comes in for heavy criticism in the report for focusing too much on the far-right at the expense of Islamism.
The Dobbs decision brought to the surface the anti-Catholicism of woke progressives.
Back in 2017, when Amy Coney Barrett was undergoing confirmation hearings for her nomination to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein expressed concern about Judge Barrett’s devotion to her Catholic faith. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said. Two years later, Brian Buescher, a nominee to the federal bench in Ohio, faced criticism from Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono for his membership in the Knights of Columbus. Then, an article in the Atlantic magazine argued that the Catholic rosary symbolized religious radicalism and had become a “weapon” for those dangerous white Christian nationalists. The author of the article, Daniel Panneton, wrote that “rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture.” Most recently, a former FBI special agent produced an internal memo from the FBI’s Richmond office that characterized as a domestic threat “Radical Traditionalist Catholic ideology.” The memo even created a new acronym for this threat group — RTC (Radical Traditional Catholics). To paraphrase Martin Niemoller, they are coming for traditional Catholics.
There was nothing ‘democratic’ about Hitler’s seizure of power.
Ninety years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, fascism is not remotely on the rise in any real sense today. There are no militarised groups of brown-shirted men fighting street battles with Communists. And there are certainly no totalitarian dictators on the brink of storming the chanceries of Europe.
One of the most diabolically clever notions the Left has ever devised in order to advance its Marxist agenda has been “systemic racism.” Systemic racism is everywhere and nowhere, requires no evidence of actual discrimination in order to make its case, and will result, if followed to its logical conclusion, in the implementation of an unlimited number of wealth confiscation and redistribution schemes. It’s so useful that “experts” keep finding it in more and more places, and absurdity is no bar for how low they will go. Their audience, after all, is Leftists, who are already accustomed to swallowing absurd claims on an industrial scale. And so the latest claim, that even wild animals are suffering from the effects of this all-pervasive malady, was just another day for the Left’s propaganda mill.
Central banks are creating their own surveillance state
Should we really be surprised that the Treasury and Bank of England are exploring whether to launch a state-issued digital pound? Sunak, after all, was the chancellor who first floated the idea of backing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — already dubbed “Britcoin”. Nor was he alone: 11 countries, including China, Nigeria, The Bahamas and Jamaica, have already launched their own digital currencies, while more than 100 others, representing over 95% of global GDP, are deciding whether to follow suit. In the United States, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has launched a pilot programme; the European Central Bank hopes to make a decision about the creation of a digital euro this autumn.
The release of the chatbot ChatGTP in November 2022 has made the once science-fiction-esque and frightening potential of artificial intelligence an everyday reality.
The tool is only a chatbot, a type of software already widely used that can produce texts in interaction with humans, usually through the internet. Most internet users have already interacted with many websites—using chatbots—to answer basic customer questions, for example.
But ChatGTP has caused a stir through its uncannily intelligent abilities. It can write poems, jokes, and intricate paragraphs so well that it is usually impossible to tell that a machine produced it.
Justin Welby said he was summoned twice to Parliament and threatened with parliamentary action to force same-sex marriage on the Church
The Archbishop of Canterbury claims he was “threatened with parliamentary action” in an attempt to “force same-sex marriage” in the Church of England.
The Most Rev Justin Welby said that he was twice summoned to Parliament over the issue as he blamed rising secularism for triggering the historic debate on blessings for gay and lesbian couples.
He also warned that the church should not be “dictated to”, “blackmailed” or “bribed” over the issue.
There’s been a sudden outbreak of queasy and sleazy ethical shortcomings as three senior politicians recently made headlines for having stretched, bent or broken the rules.
The premier of Canada’s most populous province, one of the prime minister’s favourite cabinet ministers and Canada’s biggest-city mayor faced difficult questions over their ethical conduct. One denies all wrongdoing, one admits to an oversight oopsie and the other quits over lousy moral judgment.
The initial news that a spy balloon from China was hovering over the continental United States caught many people by surprise. We’re just not used to seeing that sort of thing happen.
It seemed so out of place for our times. It had the feel of something either historical, like out of the Cold War, or something futuristic, like in a science fiction novel.
We’ve grown accustomed to thinking that sort of stuff just doesn’t happen. Here’s the thing though: Now it does. Times have changed.
There are conflicting reports of what exactly we’re shooting down over Alaska and Canada. We’re reasonably sure that a balloon with a car-sized payload was shot down over Alaska on Friday. The balloon was flying at 40,000 feet — about the same altitude as commercial jets. But the Pentagon doesn’t think the balloon was from China, given that it flew over the North Pole.
We have a serious mental health crisis in this country which is being exacerbated by TikTok pic.twitter.com/a1GpMOutEh
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 12, 2023
Musicians face an artificial intelligence nightmare from the rise of ChatGPT-like song generators, the world’s biggest record label has said.
Universal Music warned that AI-created music threatened “widespread and lasting harm” to artists and threatened a Napster-style crisis without robust copyright protections.
So-called generative AI models have already caused uproar among illustrators for using human-produced work without compensation to create art. The rise of ChatGPT, which produces authentic-seeming poems and essays, has caused concern from publishers about a tidal wave of AI-generated material.
It won’t take much to top the crap that passes for modern pop music.
This pervert is a