Taking a stand for animals is a safe, non-controversial position, Clark contends, and “no political party in recent times has come to much harm by doing something to help furry, feathery or scaly animals.” Proof of this is that over the past 20 years, Parliament has passed dozens of animal laws, “controlling the use of animals in circuses and in advertising campaigns, laws against sow stalls and numerous others.”

The oddity of this, Clark observes, is a contemporaneous unwillingness to even discuss the status of unborn human children or to consider reforming Britain’s outdated abortion laws. “There seems to be an unwritten rule in politics that the issue must not be discussed, and that anyone holding views which are disapproving of current practice on abortion must be dismissed as an extremist or religious nutter,” he laments.

“A Martian looking at us from the outside might well conclude that it is a committee of animals which sets the terms of our political debate,” Clark wryly comments. “How can it be that we swoon over baby chicks, calves, puppies and the rest, and yet seem blithely indifferent about the industrial-scale destruction of human foetuses?”

Mental health watchdog group Citizens Commission on Human Rights is drawing attention to the concerning fact that more than a million kids younger than six in our nation are currently taking these psychiatric drugs.

According to Natural News, around half of these children are four to five years old and an incredible 274,804 of them are younger than a year old. That’s right: babies are being given psychiatric drugs. The number rises for toddlers aged two to three, with 370,778 kids in this category taking psychiatric drugs overall. If this isn’t horrifying to you, congratulations on your brainwashing.

The side effects of these drugs are nothing to scoff at, however, with antianxiety, antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs linked to heart attacks, psychosis, suicidal ideation, diabetes, stroke, mania and sudden death. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s also the fact that many of the high-profile public shootings in recent years were perpetrated by young people on such drugs, so not only do kids have the risk of dying when they take these meds, but they could also take out a whole classroom or movie theater with them.

Is this a war on our children perpetrated by Big Pharma and condoned by the government? Maybe. Nothing seems impossible anymore.

The report was published by the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, Hans-Peter Bartels.  "The army's readiness to deploy has not improved in recent years, but instead has gotten even worse," Mr Bartels told reporters at a press conference in Berlin.  "At the end of the year six out of six submarines were not in use. At times, not one of the 14 Airbus A-400M could fly," he said. 

Mr Bartels said all of the vehicles were being repaired at the time of the report.  The condition of the military's fleet of fighter planes, tanks, helicopters and ships is described as "dramatically bad". The report also says a lack of spare parts and outdated equipment has left "big gaps" in the armed forces. It notes that thousands of positions for officers were vacant, resulting in a lack of adequate leadership.  The report calls on the government to pursue reforms "with greater urgency" and increase the defence budget. 

That gender-trumps-biology demand requires government to silence women when men who claim they are women parade into women’s’ bathrooms and showers, sports contests and civic groups, or into fashion and status displays or into feminist advocacy groups.

The ideology also requires that men keep quiet when women claim they are men, and demands that parents and doctors, reporters, researchers and surgeons all stay silent in face of growing evidence that the ideology and associated medical treatments are hazardous to the subjects’ lifetime physical health and to personal stability.

But its woes are only a harbinger of what’s to come. The SPD’s political competitors face similar questions over the coming years and will need to reinvent themselves to remain relevant. It’s a process of internal change that could have serious consequences for Germany’s European and global engagement.  The demise of social democracy across Europe has caught up with Germany, and has put a serious question mark over the future shape of the country’s political left. 

The SPD is desperate to avoid the fate of its counterparts in the Netherlands (the Labor Party) and France (the Socialist Party), which were obliterated in recent polls. Currently polling at historic lows — between 17 to 19 percent according to recent figures — the party knows it urgently needs to change direction. 

It’s no secret that a significant faction within the CDU has taken inspiration from Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his right-wing coalition and wants the party to take a turn to the right. 

If, as seems most likely, SPD members back the coalition next month, Germany will settle in for another four years of “grand coalition.” The news will calm the waters and create the illusion of steadiness. But the ground is shifting under Germany’s feet. The next four years will be a major test for its major political forces.

For example, through the use of what Amazon calls “skills”, Alexa can perform the role of an entertainer that plays music and reads bedtime stories, a teacher who answers homework questions, and even a tutor that teaches children a foreign language. It may, therefore, seem like a good idea to expose children to AI technology from a young age, but it’s not yet clear how interactions with artificial intelligence can affect the ways in which children think and behave.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Dr Allison Druin, a child development expert, explained that AI-enabled digital assistants “don’t have emotional intelligence.” She pointed out that young children are naturally inclined to anthropomorphize objects by attributing human qualities to non-human objects and forming emotional connections to these entities.

Studies show that children are, just like adults, biased to learn from sources that are familiar and look and sound similar to them. This means that children are more likely to accept the information offered by a friendly digital home assistant that they “know” without questioning the answers or asking for evidence.

Unfortunately, the same large Silicon Valley companies and people who have been accused of censorship and discrimination against conservatives are developing these algorithms that answer kids’ questions about the world. In doing so, they are introducing their own ideological biases into AI systems like Alexa or Google Assistant.

When popular conservative commentator Steven Crowder posted a video of himself posing political and religious questions to Amazon’s Alexa home assistant in November 2017, many of his viewers were surprised to learn just how “helpful” Alexa tried to be — by telling him that there were more than two genders and that Jesus Christ was a fictional Biblical character.

If AI developers are mostly progressive liberals, is it a good idea to expose our children to it, and if so, how much?

Writing in a blog on the website of the £33,960-a-year Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk, Mr Robb said he was worried that some young people lacked "grit" and "look down their noses" at certain jobs. Mr Robb added: "Grit is not a new idea, nor even a new buzzword. Grit remains, however, something that schools and parents seem to have failed to engender in large swathes of young people." His blog went on: "Among this generation there is an underlying sense of entitlement. I don't blame them.

"They have been advertised to since birth; they have had credit and loans on a plate; they have been overly molly-coddled; and they have been overwhelmed by a strange combination of fictional sit-com characters, reality TV and social media stars, who paint a picture of perfection to be achieved.

"They have even been encouraged by governments to believe that they deserve 'more' than their parents and grandparents had (capitalism, after all, requires consumers to always want to have 'more')."