We need to talk about Julie Sweeney.
She’s a 53-year-old English woman who used to live in Church Lawton, Cheshire, and she once had a Facebook account. Today, she’s in prison, serving a 15-month sentence after being convicted under new Criminal Code provisions in the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.
Few things in modern news media are as useless as the journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate news story.
There’s a lot of this going around these days.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
A new Social, Personal, and Health Education (SPHE) textbook trashes traditional Irish families as backward and bigoted, idealises diverse families and forces students to choose which family they’d prefer to belong to, fumes Niamh Uí Bhriain in Gript.
Yesterday, as I watched a podcast about my favorite NFL football team, a commercial interrupted my reverie. Yes, I know. Podcasts have commercials. However, this was not one of those “buy this, buy that, take this to end constipation” commercials. This was some angry man loudly complaining that Trump had failed to do X, Y, and Z. It made me angry, but not in the way intended. It motivated me to send a campaign contribution to Trump. I thought the Harris campaign deserved to know that.
On Friday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced his decision to replace the commander of the country’s air forces, Lt Gen Mykola Oleshchuk. Lt Gen Anatolii Kryvonozhko has been appointed interim commander and, while Zelensky did not provide any explanation for the change, he stressed his responsibility to “take care of all our warriors”.
It is time to call out Western liberals’ craven silence in the face of Hamas’s fascism.
The discovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Rafah confirms what many of us knew about Hamas – that it is a Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement. That it has no purpose beyond the persecution and slaughter of the Jewish people. That its aim, for all the crowing of its useful idiots in the West about ‘resistance’ and ‘decolonisation’, is nothing more and nothing less than the fascistic terrorising of the inhabitants of the Jewish State. The ‘brutal murder’ of these six people, their only crime their Jewishness, is the bloodiest proof yet that in Hamas Israel faces not only a military foe, but also a virulently racist, existential threat.
Now 88 years old, John M. Ellis studied German at London University, has taught at a series of universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and has written several books that are critical of the corruption of the humanities by ideology. His newest book, A Short History of Relations between Peoples: How the World Began to Move beyond Tribalism, is a fascinating and utterly timely piece of work. Why timely? Because we are living in an era when millions of people in the Anglosphere have been taught that the history of their countries is something to be ashamed of, marred by centuries of racism and white supremacy, and that we therefore should not only look with disdain upon our forebears but should applaud when statues of men and women once considered to be heroes of our civilization are torn down.
A powerfully built man who served in the US military in Afghanistan and Kuwait, and also ran anti-terrorism missions against Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Lebanese militants Hezbollah, Luis Elizondo doesn’t seem like the type to scare easily.
However, even he admits his ‘blood ran cold’ when his children reported seeing a green, glowing orb hovering in the air near them inside their family home in Maryland outside Washington DC.
The three-dimensional ball was ‘translucent and suffused with an eerie green light’ and ‘behaved as if guided by some intelligence’, stopping dead still in the air before drifting off down a hallway and disappearing. Elizondo says on another occasion he saw the same thing – a glowing green object, the size of a basketball and with ‘soft edges that weren’t defined’ floating slowly from their kitchen to his bedroom door just below ceiling height before disappearing into a wall.
Leslie Kean is worth keeping an eye on.
One of the world’s most popular social networks, X, has gone offline in Brazil – the country with the fifth largest digital population – after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws meant it was blocked by the supreme court.
Millions of Brazilian X users found themselves unable to access the network on Saturday morning as internet providers and mobile phone companies began to enforce the ban.
When the Guardian tried to access the network on its computer and mobile phone, it received a message reading: “Seems like you lost connectivity. We’ll keep retrying.”
“We were raised on the faith
The center’s holding
And can’t be broken
And now that it’s started
It might not stop”
Maybe only a few Hub readers listen to Dinosaur Jr. (a grunge-era band led by guitar god J. Mascis), but I suspect many more share their worry about the degree of polarization in the political discourse of the Western world these days.
On Thursday, Pierre Poilievre wrote a letter to Jagmeet Singh asking the NDP leader to pull his support for the Liberal government and trigger a fall election. There is scant reason to think Singh will entertain such an idea, but that wasn’t the point of the letter. Poilievre is looking to divide, and conquer a coalition government.
Mark Cuban sends poll to parents asking if Trump or Kamala is a better role model for their kids – and is shocked by the result
Mark Cuban was curious whether his followers on X think that Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is a better role model for children.
Despite the billionaire’s vocal opposition to Trump over the years, the former president overwhelmingly won the informal social media poll.
‘Who’s persona and character would you like to see young children grow up to have,’ Cuban posed to his 8.8 million followers with the options being the 2024 Republican and Democratic candidates.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and CBC CEO Catherine Tait are trading barbs about the continued relevance of the CBC. Among its fans, and even some foes, there’s much hand-wringing about Poilievre’s threat to shut down the English-language arm of the public broadcaster.
“I think the Conservative party has a lot of very valid criticisms of the CBC as it now stands,” nods the soft-spoken media stalwart Kenneth Whyte in a recent conversation. “And there are many more criticisms that you could make of the CBC beyond Pierre Poilievre’s concerns, which are mostly ideological.”
“What's your reaction to the six hostages being found dead in Gaza?"
Tim Walz: *walks away*
One of the hostages was an American citizen.
Just like Biden and Kamala, Tim Walz turns his back on American citizens being held hostage & kiIIed by t*rr*rists. pic.twitter.com/McQp8TU5ki
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 1, 2024
A couple of weeks into September, Dara was driving her son home from his new middle school, happy he seemed to be settling into Grade 7, when the 13-year-old made a startling confession: He was petrified of using the school washroom.
“There are bullies in there; there are kids vaping,” the Mississauga mom recalls him telling her in the car last fall. The teen had already witnessed several fights. He described damaged toilets and sinks, deliberately clogged and overflowing.
I wonder how our diverse youth will react to the cell phone ban.
