Government Agency Abolished

It's been mentioned here that the that the US State Department has financed an entity called the Global Engagement Center since 2016, ostensibly to combat the supposed proliferation of misinformation with a negative effect on US interests. A change in US politics and extensive criticism led the State Dept. to terminate the effort in Dec. 2024.

Allegations of censorship, particularly in the response to the Covid plague, were a major factor. The closing of a govt. agency is a rare event and this one seems to be significant. A government agency with even a peripheral focus on free speech flies in the face of democracy. It's efforts were concentrated on digital social media, dead tree communications no longer being an object of concern since they are now considered obsolete.

Governments in other nations, Germany for instance, fight "misinformation" in a much more draconian manner. Economic minister Robert Habeck was referred to as an idiot by a pensioner which ultimately led to large fine.

 

Techno Issues

It's been mentioned before but depending on technocracy for solutions to serious problems brings along its own sets of problems. There's many examples that never see the light of day but the latest one, the impersonation of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on the phone, is going to need some repair. Her nemesis could have ordered a pizza with anchovies from some unsanitary ghetto parlor delivered to innocent congressional interns. Then what?

As people lean more and more on equipment and processes beyond their "complexity horizon" the chances for real disaster increase dramatically. Just ask the Hamas communications experts on how well their pager program worked out. No doubt  publicity has brought the auto-pen guys some badly needed overtime to meet the new demand. The latest rocket explosion is another "what went wrong?" moment. At some time in the very near future an unnecessary self-colliding car will squash a group of school children.

It's obvious that the never-ending evolution of mysterious and dangerous technology and behavior needs to be re-evaluated to see if the risks involved are really necessary.    

Rachel Hardeman

Rachel Hardeman, until recently the  the director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota, is a member of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2024. Unfortunately, in what's become a frequent development in academia world, she plagierized the work of a fellow researcher, Bridgette Davis, in a submittal for a grant from  the NIH. While Davis's article was written in 2019 she didn't realize until recently that the Hardeman work was almost a verbatim copy of her own. Hardeman has since resigned. 

Since Hardeman's departure the University of Minnesota has decided to close the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity.

What are the consequences for using fraud to apply for federal funds? Are academics ineligible for prosecution when lying to obtain research grants? How much effort do universities exert in guaranteeing the truth of applications for grants? Why isn't Hardeman out on bail right now? 

 

Apollo News Translation

By Max Roland

 A statue of Venus must be removed – it discriminates against women, says an equal opportunities officer. Institutionalized feminism has finally closed the great circle between Islamism, the Middle Ages, and "progressive" moral terror.

 "Nuditas criminalis" – criminal nudity. This is how the European Middle Ages largely viewed the sculptures of the ancient world. The Romans and Greeks celebrated human beauty, but in the "Dark Ages" it fell victim to ecclesiastical dogma.

Over hundreds of years, we have slowly but surely left such things behind us. From the Renaissance to the Neoclassical period, Europe not only revived the art and architectural styles of antiquity, but also gradually buried the religiously prudish narrow-mindedness of the Middle Ages. Or so it was thought. But this narrow-mindedness is making a comeback, albeit under different auspices.

Where the priest once stood, there now stands the equal opportunities officer – but the fury of a regressive prudishness remains essentially the same. The case of the "Venus de Medici" – an ancient statue that has become a political issue – demonstrates that modern regressive feminism and everything that is often summarized under a term like "woke madness" now seems like a fundamentalist, religious, medieval dogma.

A bronze replica of this Roman statue has now been removed from a federal office because an equal opportunities officer was bothered by the depiction of the naked Roman goddess of love. There were allegedly complaints. The statue may be incompatible with the Federal Equal Opportunities Act, according to a report by Bild (read more).heremore).

 There's nothing sexist about this statue, of course: The Venus de Medici is about as misogynistic as Michelangelo's David is misogynistic. No one would ever argue the latter—but the Venus becomes a political issue. A scandal.

Behind this lies an ideology that, like in the Middle Ages, places prudishness and moralism above all else. Its illogical dogmatism could almost be considered a religion. It calls itself "progressive," but it is anything but. It is, in fact, so regressive that, strictly speaking, such an equation does an injustice even to the historical Middle Ages.

When an "equal opportunities officer" suddenly acts the way a Saudi Arabian morality watchdog would, it's called a "full circle moment"—we as a society have regressed. Yet this is precisely the core of woke madness and regressive fundamentalist feminism: a yesterday's prudishness that could also fit into Taliban Afghanistan. They would have removed the Venus statue from one of their offices just as a federal equal opportunities officer did.

The mechanisms behind this are the same as in fundamentalist Islam—the immediate association of nudity, especially female nudity, with sexuality and sinfulness. This logic culminates in the hijab, the niqab, and the burqa. Modern feminism has long since reached the point of absurdly turning the headscarf, imposed on women, into a symbol of "empowerment."

The dogma is the same: Here, modern feminism and Islamism join hands. Strangely enough, they also join hands in the total sexualization of the female body. It no longer has anything to do with what we understand as Western values. This postmodern nihilism ends not in liberation and equality, but in the iconoclastic moral terror of a dark past.

Throughout history, those who toppled statues and banished works of art were never the torchbearers of freedom and progress, but rather their gravediggers. From the excesses of the Reformation to the National Socialist and Communist concept of art to Islamism, those who censored, removed, and outlawed art with virtue and dogma behind them were and are always the enemies of freedom and the thwarters, even the reversals, of progress.

 The Equal Opportunities Officer specifically responsible for this issue probably just wanted to prove she was working with her rebellion against the Venus statue—after all, she's one of dozens of Equal Opportunities Officers who have to do something all day. Instead of institutionalizing moral terrorism, these officials could be given more meaningful work. It would be desperately needed, given these excesses.

 

christianvonholst.de

Galaxy News

Who are the artists that provide the pictures used as illustrations for media articles about galactic activity taking place billions of years ago and a similar distance away? One must assume that their work is based on either visible versions acquired from telescope analysis or verbal descriptions provided by astronomers. If the source of the images are available to the astronomers to look at themselves and then pass them along  to artists, why not just use the initial images? 

theroyalheirpost

If you've taken the trouble to leave the couch on a cloudless night and gaze into the depths of the sky you'll see, just as every human in history has, an uncountable number of stars. In fact, you are seeing the very same stars that proto-humans once saw many thousands of years ago, in the same positions they are today. 

The modern proliferation of various telescopes has allowed researchers to assume a position corresponding to the astronomers of antiquity who used their familiarity with the cosmos to hold positions of importance in society that usually included a place in government and religion. Today's astronomers must be satisfied with a say in dispersal of research funding and a sinecure in a field where they are the ultimate authority of essentially useless information. 

Eleven NASA projects may not be funded

According to on-line NASA cheerleader Big Think the stupendous sums necessary to investigate various aspects of the universe millions of light years away may not be realized because of "unprecedented, ill-motivated budget cuts." They point out that NASA isn't just exploring space, it also  "includes Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics",  the mastery of which our current crop of urban barbarians needs to keep the balance low on their credit card accounts. Ill-motivated budget cuts are the same as lack of money or the realization that the money needed is better spent on other things.

 

 

                                    NASA

An example, PRAXyS, or the Polarimeter for Relativistic Astrophysical X-ray Sources, is a small explorer/mission of opportunity that uses an X-ray telescope to explore how space’s shape and curvature has been distorted by black holes and neutron stars, along with their associated nearby magnetic fields. It's important that the distortions caused by black holes, neutron stars and magnetic fields be analyzed, probably to determine their potential for war in space. Only people engaged in this research are even capable of a basic understanding of it which their income depends upon. The general public doesn't know if they're successful or not. Much of NASA is dealing with subjects closely akin to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Whatever they discover will be of zero use to humans now or in the future. 

Ivanpah Solar Plant To Be Shut Down

https://www.eit.edu.au/a-solar-tower-at-ivanpah-solar-power-facility-caught-on-fire/

 

The multi-billion dollar Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert of California will be closed and demolished soon.The combination of bird deaths, threats to the endangered desert tortoises, unpredictable sunlight and failed economics have made the installation a disaster in every way.

Fortunately, the remaining recipient of this purchased free power, Southern California Edison, has appointed to its board of directors an effective and well known expert on energy issues, former Secretary of Energy  Jennifer Granholm.

 

bridgemi.com

According to Politico on April 14: 

GRANHOLM’S NEW HOME: Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is headed downtown after her time in the Biden administration, to join global consultancy DGA Group as a senior counselor.

— Granholm, who served two terms as governor of Michigan prior to her four years leading the Energy Department, will advise multinational companies, investors and energy and infrastructure firms on a variety of issues, she said in an interview, including on cross-border strategy and policy, reshoring manufacturing and how to navigate “difficult geopolitical and regulatory environments” as well as the clean energy transition.

— But one of the key pieces of Granholm’s legacy on the latter issue is under threat, with Republicans across Washington pushing to repeal or roll back clean energy incentives that were created under the Inflation Reduction Act and implemented by Granholm’s DOE.

— Granholm told PI she was encouraged by congressional Republicans speaking out in support of those provisions, which she argued are in alignment with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities and noted have overwhelmingly supported projects in red states. “This transcends administrations, transcends political parties,” she said. “It’s really good for America to have the full suite of technologies built in the U.S.”

— Beyond that, Granholm told PI she hopes to put her leadership roles at DOE and in Lansing, Michigan, to good use for her clients. Her experience in both positions will be useful for international clients, for example, “to understand, what do states deal with when it comes to siting projects or connecting to the grid?” she said.

— Though Granholm won’t register to lobby and will not represent any clients before the Energy Department, she noted that she can “certainly say what the Department of Energy has been doing, and certainly I keep my eye on the ball about what the strategy is going forward.