If Madonna penned a new pop song for teens growing up in the Zettabyte Era, she could do worse on the lyric front than: “We are living in a data-rich world, and I am a data-rich girl.” What is a zettabyte? It equals 1,024 exabytes, which is a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. Expressed with all the zeros, a zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — phew.
Last Thursday at 5:45 p.m., two gunmen opened fire on each other inside the Oak Brook Terrace Mall in Oakbrook, Ill. Oak Brook is a quiet suburb of Chicago in DuPage County, and any kind of violence involving guns used to be extremely rare.
Football, cricket, Olympic gymnastics… no sport is now safe from woke politics.
In 2021, the culture wars thoroughly colonised all of our favourite sports.
Nowhere was this clearer than in football. The people’s game was rife with woke politics this year, as it was last year. Players are still ‘taking the knee’ before each game, more than 18 months after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, which first inspired all the knee-taking. The kneeling still frequently features as a highlight alongside shots and saves on Match of the Day, in case we hadn’t got the message yet.
Conservatism may have won the Cold War, but conservatives lost the peace in the West
Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific and highly competitive category) dissolved without violence. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had all but ended months earlier, when Russians took to the streets to defy the communist hardliners who had seized the government from an impotent Mikhail Gorbachev. That popular countercoup was itself largely bloodless: the soldiers called upon to enforce the hardliners’ rule refused to shoot their own countrymen.
The Biden argument has been that we can and should dispatch over a hundred million dollars of humanitarian aid and that we can safely fund and stock aid efforts in Afghanistan because somehow the Taliban won’t get their hands on it.
Defense attorneys want dismissed the indictment against five men accused of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, because of what they call “egregious overreaching” by federal agents and informants.
The government alleges that the men were upset over coronavirus restrictions last year when they conspired to kidnap Whitmer, a Democrat then spoken about as a possible vice-president, even scouting her second home in northern Michigan.
Five people are charged with kidnapping conspiracy and face trial on 8 March in Grand Rapids. They have pleaded not guilty and claim to be victims of entrapment. Federal prosecutors have argued the men were not entrapped.
As a Christmas present to statistics lovers, the Census Bureau has released its estimates of the population of the nation and the 50 states as of July 1, 2021. The Bureau admits up front that, due to COVID, its numbers are subject to more than usual uncertainty. But overall, they provide important clues as to how the public has coped with the pandemic and how COVID may have changed the trajectory of national growth — and contraction.
He’s prepared to make war at a time of his choosing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin scored major propaganda points in his over four-hour annual press conference this week. He turned attention away from Russia’s invasion of Crimea, support of Russian separatists in the Donbas region (Donbas), and troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Instead, Putin guides the untrained eye through the conflict in terms of Russian grievances. In Putin-speak, the Ukrainian conflict is a product of Ukrainian persecution of Russians and separatists, and NATO’s expansion eastward. Putin also used the news conference to showcase the growing Russia-China strategic partnership.
G. Tod Slone has written that “as a political ideology, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), has proven time and again to be against freedom, reason, and truth. Proponents of the ideology tend to be hypocrites and anti-white racists [.]”
In fact, DEI is also a pathway to anti-Semitism.
Idaho sheriff attempts to justify pulling a gun on church youth group who had dropped a Thanksgiving card at his home by saying he feared they were ‘drunk Indians’ from nearby reservation
… This year, the German cities of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich canceled their fireworks celebrations and prohibited large gatherings due to Omicron. Celebrations have been canceled in Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; London, England; and New Delhi, India.
“Due to the surge in Covid cases, we’ve taken the difficult decision to cancel our NYE event in Trafalgar Square,” Mayor of London Sadiq Khan wrote on his Twitter account. “The safety of all Londoners must come first.”
From “the warm comforts of your home … a dynamic array of international speakers” will kick off this year’s Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) Convention in a virtual setting. One of the most important Islamic conferences in the West, this two-day Canadian event will feature a wealth of world famous Islamic clerics and activists, as well as leaders of both Canada’s political Left and Right: Jagmeet Singh, the head of Canada’s New Democratic Party; and Erin O’Toole, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party.
… One of Saturday’s controversial speakers includes Shaykh Abdul Nasir Jangda, the founder, of the Qalam Institute in Arlington, Texas. In his early academic career, Jangda studied at Jamia Binoria—an international Deobandi Islamic educational institute located in Karachi, Pakistan. Extremist ideas have followed the Shaykh back to the United States, where, in his sermons and lectures, he has reportedly attempted to justify sex slavery and has “expressed support for the killing of apostates and adulterers.”
Ain’t diversity grand?
In a normal world an Ass-clown like O’Toole would be forced to resign the party leadership. But in Canada it’s simply accepted that our political leaders will cultivate the most evil of Muslims.
This is who you entrust your kids with. She gets her validation from 10 year olds saying the right pronoun pic.twitter.com/EQsaQeD415
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 24, 2021
Scientists are cautiously optimistic that the variant may be a sign the virus is losing its power, despite the high infection figures
Once again, Britain is experiencing a festive season hit by waves of Covid-19 infections. Last year, Christmas and New Year were spoiled by the appearance of the Alpha variant. This time, it is Omicron that has sent case numbers soaring. Christmas cancellations have swept through Britain’s restaurants, pubs and clubs and left the country on the brink of another bleak New Year as the NHS warns once more that it is facing the threat of being overwhelmed by spiralling numbers of seriously ill patients.
The scenario has raised fears that this now represents the shape of Christmases to come. Social restrictions and lockdown threats could become our normal festive fare.
Meet the very clever people who think our world is a simulation
With the release of the fourth Matrix film this week, the idea behind the original movie is once again being talked about. The notion that the “real world” is a computer-generated simulation was considered pure science fiction when the original film was released in 1999, but philosophers have long argued that there are good arguments to suggest we could very well be.
