First, we had the Spygate scandal, the Russia collusion hoax, the counterfeit impeachments, a rigged election (as no sentient and honest person can doubt), an open border to ensure a future Democrat voting bloc, and a Soviet-style show-trial resulting from a so-called “insurrection.” Next, the former president’s home was raided by the FBI on patently false pretenses, presaging a possible indictment. Now we learn that Joe Biden will supplement the IRS with 87,000 additional armed agents.
A purge of pro-U.S. bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter has given way to an inside look at covert propaganda on social media. In a new report, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and Graphika analyze these pro-America accounts, including the kind of content they shared and the paltry influence they had.
In July and August, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram removed more than 100 accounts spreading pro-U.S. messages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East. The accounts—including fake people with images generated through artificial intelligence as well as sham news outlets—were kicked off Twitter for violating its policies on “platform manipulation and spam” and off Facebook for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
Maternal instinct is not a chauvinist myth
A little friend of my daughter’s has just had one of her parents walk out, to start a new life with a new partner. Given that they were a heterosexual couple, and based on your observations about the world, can you guess which parent stayed behind to feed, care for and try to comfort a shocked and grieving little girl?
Go on. You know the answer. We all know which way round this usually works.
Why the war will not revitalise the West.
Almost from the moment Russia invaded Ukraine in February this year, Western governments and commentators seized on the war as an opportunity for revitalising the West. This is why the war was widely proclaimed to be heralding the beginning of a new era – as the ‘crucible of the new world order’.
Among the world leaders to promote this line was German chancellor Olaf Scholz. Back in March, he claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meant that the world stands in a ‘new era’. He announced an ‘historic shift’ in German defence policy, pledging €100 billion of investment in the German army for 2022 alone.
In fact, talk of a new era began before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For many, the war played into the pre-existing idea of the ‘Great Reset’. The Great Reset is a fantasy scenario invented by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. Back in June 2020, he argued that the Covid pandemic provided a compelling reason for the pursuit of a ‘great reset of capitalism’. For Schwab, this meant a more technocratic approach to capitalism.
It has been in business since 793AD, survived the English Civil War, 17 recessions, two World Wars and five pandemics including the Black Death.
Now Ye Olde Fighting Cocks is battling to stay open as the cost of living crisis threats to cripple thousands of businesses across the UK.
The watering hole in St Albans, Hertfordshire, was driven to enter administration in February due to the financial impact of Covid-19 and bought by new owners.
Big Pharma and Big Tobacco are helping market high-potency, psychosis-inducing THC products as your mother’s ‘medical marijuana’
For 30 years, Dr. Libby Stuyt, a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new.
“I started seeing people with the worst psychosis symptoms that I have ever seen,” she told me. “And the worst delusions I have ever seen.”
These cases were even more acute than what she’d seen from psychotic patients on meth. Some of the delusions were accompanied by “severe violence.” But these patients were coming up positive only for cannabis.
I will not work on a more important film,” says Ken Burns about The U.S. and the Holocaust, a three-part, six-hour documentary (Sept. 18, PBS) about America’s response to the Nazis’ genocide. A comprehensive examination of both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s actions and the anti-Semitic and anti-immigration climate in which he operated, Burns’ latest—co-directed by long-time collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein—seeks to grasp why we chose to admit so few Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, and whether we could have done more to stop, or at least slow down, Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The answers it comes up with are not always flattering, complicating our understanding of the country’s WWII legacy. Yet per Burns tradition, they’re handled with enlightening and affecting nuance and empathy.
I liked his Civil War doc but can never forgive the disaster of his WW II effort. All I remember of the little I was able to stomach is the horrible sound track.
Corporate hypocrisy is as old as corporations themselves. But there are levels. It is important to recognize astounding achievements in business insincerity. So let us send a note of congratulations today to Starbucks: rarely in modern history have we witnessed a company that so exquisitely combines a cultivated image as a caring, progressive employer with the well-documented, large-scale behavior of a gangster who expects to rule employees through bullying and fear.
Starbucks is often the first business trashed during progressive riots so clearly the lie never took.
Tracy Shannon married a man and divorced a “woman.”
She had no early indication that her husband and high school sweetheart had a desire to become a woman and the clues were slow in becoming apparent.
The panic is palpable as Europe is effectively placed on a war footing
Russia’s disinformation machine has repeatedly struggled to put an alternative spin on the realities of its devastating war in Ukraine. But it was almost like the Kremlin couldn’t be bothered to come up with a credible explanation for a permanent halt to the flow of gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe on Friday night.
Even German industrial giant Siemens, which oversees maintenance of the pipeline, was quick to rubbish Russia’s claims that repair work couldn’t be carried out.
The whole world understands what’s happening – in closing one of the most important gas supply routes to Europe just hours after the G7 group of countries unveiled plans to impose a price cap on Moscow’s oil exports, Vladimir Putin has pre-empted the West and declared an all-out energy war.
Pierre Poilievre’s appeal to young voters, something of a novelty for Canadian Conservative politicians, raises questions about both his popularity and the ability of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) to capitalize on the trend over the long term.
Why has Poilievre, unlike his recent predecessors, been successful at gaining support among younger voters, and what impact could this have on the CPC’s electoral coalition?
This is from a “family-friendly” drag show in Utah last week pic.twitter.com/ioVBBrLiOf
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 4, 2022
Germany’s political parties on the extreme left and extreme right of the political spectrum have announced a “hot autumn” with regular Monday demonstrations, starting on September 5. The socialist Left Party, the smallest opposition party in the Bundestag, called for the campaign, choosing Leipzig as the main location.
Leipzig, an internationally-renowned trade fair and university city in the east of the country, has a powerful symbolic resonance: This is where East Germans played a decisive role in toppling the dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with their Monday demonstrations in 1989.
Timothy Thibault, the FBI agent alleged to have interfered with an investigation into Hunter Biden, was assigned by the Washington Field Office as “point man” to manage whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, the first son’s former business partner, before the 2020 election — but he suppressed his damning revelations, sources say.
Bobulinski spent over five hours secretly being interviewed by the FBI on Oct. 23, 2020, about his inside knowledge of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business deals with China.
