AUSTIN, TX — Twitter owner Elon Musk has rebranded the popular social media app under the name “X.” This announcement came shortly after the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino talked him out of going with his first name proposal: “69Boobies420.”
“As brilliant as Mr. Musk’s hilarious proposed name was, we decided it was not the right direction for us,” said Yaccarino to reporters. “We believe that ‘X’ perfectly captures what this company is all about, and we are all about being owned by an eccentric billionaire who really likes the letter ‘X.'”
Sources say Musk is disappointed by the decision. “He he he he 69! Get it? And who doesn’t like boobies? It’s literally the perfect name!” said a frustrated Musk on Twitter. “420! He he he he he! Classic! Come on, guys!”
Journalists reacted to the announcement in a calm and reasonable manner by looking for hidden fascist messages in the “X” logo, while PBS announced they will be pulling all episodes featuring the letter “X” from their lineup. “We’re pretty sure this rebrand by Elon Musk is sinister somehow,” Washington Post tech reporter Xondrie Finklextien “X’d” on her “X” app.
At publishing time, Musk had warmed up to the new “X” name after realizing it was the last letter in the word “sex.”
Why is freezing, rainy Britain burning yellow (with hints of red) in this BBC mock up of weather hell?
Comments under BBC’s tweet, from Scotland to Italy, all say the same. May in Greece was more than 10 degrees cooler than usual, but we didn’t read about it in the Legacy Media.
Why does the Legacy Media lie like this? Short answer: It’s all designed to make people afraid of global warming, and as we saw with covidiocy, fear is a tactic that unscrupulous globalist politicians use to make people obey them.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t too crash hot in the end, but I let it all out on the road and there’s no regrets from me.–Best Australian rider, Jai Hindley
The 21st and last stage of the Tour de France is the ride into Paris and eight laps of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It is a gentle start and traditionally the jersey winners drink a glass of champagne along the way.
In 2023 the winners of the various categories had been decided by the end of Stage 20 and they just had to stay on their bikes to the finish in Paris to take the prizes. They all succeeded in doing just that, and the overall winner Dane Jonas Vingegaard made it two in row.
Le Grand Départ was from Bilbao in the Basque country in northern Spain.
Most of the 21 stages were of course in France and for the first time the course left out the northern and southern regions of the country. From Aquitaine in the south-west the 150+ bike riders travelled across the centre of the country to the Alps in the east, and ultimately on to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. An estimated 10 million spectators watched from the road sides on mountains and plains, and in villages and cities along the 3405.6 km course.
Jonas Vingegaard won in 2022 and his great rival Slovenian Tadej Pogacar had triumphed in the two previous years. By half way through the 2023 race it was clear that one of the two would win again this year. At the start of the time trial in Stage 16 the Dane had a slender lead of 10 seconds. Riding last of the 22.4km course, Vingegaard stretched this advantage to 1.48 – still not enough to be confident of victory in Paris.
The following day, Pogacar cracked on the mountain stage allowing his rival in the yellow jersey to extend his advantage to a comfortable 7 minutes 29 seconds.
So the Dane is the general classification winner for 2023, however, as some consolation, Pogacar did win the white jersey competition for the best under 23 rider. The coveted green jersey for the best sprinter went to German Jasper Philipsen and Giulio Ciccore from Italy was King of the Mountains.
The 2024 Tour
In keeping with the tradition of starting the Tour outside of France it will be the Italian city of Firenze (Florence) hosting Le Grand Départ next year. For many of the Tour cyclists it is now on to Spain for the last of the three big European tours: the Vuelta a España.
Independent Police Conduct Authority to review police inaction at this event, after complaints.
Hecklers’ veto and violence targeted women’s rights activists.
NZ media and politicians downplayed violence that occurred, labelling Let Women Speak event as hateful.
Parker is returning to NZ in September. The Free Speech Union expresses their support.
Independent review of police inaction
The IPCA (Independent Police Conduct Authority) announced a review into the police response to the scuttled Let Women Speak event in Auckland, in March 2023, following 162 complaints. Many were made by “concerned citizens” who’d seen media coverage of the event while dozens of complainants had attended in person.Complaints include concerns about inadequate police action to protect Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull’s freedom of expression and failure to prosecute assaults that occurred at the event.Keen-Minshull is a British women’s rights activist who also goes by the name Posie Parker. The scope and timing of this review are yet to be finalised, but it will likely assess police planning and response during the protest. A report will, presumably, be made publicly available.
Suppressing free speech
The event faced the “heckler’s veto” (also known as the “thug’s veto”) as protestors physically overpowered the audience, hindering free speech. Although some argue such behaviour is counter-speech, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, professor Nadine Strossen, argues that their prevention of Keen-Minshull from being heard constitutes censorship. Keen-Minshull was physically abused with tomato juice, and claims to have received further online abuse from her alleged assailant, Eli Rubashkyn, since the event. And she wasn’t the only victim of violence at the Let Women Speak event in March. A 71-year- old woman was punched in the face by a 20-year-old man from Gisborne.
The media and Government fanned the flames
Speak Up For Women and Keen-Minshull faced opposition from universities, councils and Government officials, attempting to censor and silence discussions about women’s legal rights.
There were 162 complaints over how Police handled events at Posie Parker’s (pictured) rally in March 2023. Image from YouTube
Michael Wood, who was Immigration Minister at the time, made inflammatory statements about Keen-Minshull by associating her with extremist groups that she vehemently opposes. The media largely ignored her core positions, such as advocating for women’s privacy in personal spaces and fairness in sports, and often portrayed the mob successfully disrupting her rally with violence as peaceful and loving.
TheSyrian Arab Army eliminated several NATO-sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists in the bombings earlier yesterday of their posts in the countryside of Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo in response to the provocations of the terrorists in the northwestern region.
Local sources reported a series of bombings carried out by the Syrian Arab Army’s artillery against the posts used by the NATO Turkey-sponsored Al Qaeda Levant (aka Nusra Front – HTS – FSA) in the western countryside of Aleppo, Hama, and the southern countryside of Idlib.The local sources confirmed the killing and injuring of several terrorists in the bombings as follows:
Artillery units of the Syrian Arab Army with the support of reconnaissance drones targeted the posts of Al Qaeda Levant in the Kafr Amma – Kafr Taal axis, and the outskirts of Al Qasr village in the western countryside of Aleppo.
The bombing resulted in confirmed casualties of terrorists killed and injured, one of the confirmed killed is a so-called Hussein Ahmad Masri – Abu Ahmad Takad, a commander of a local Al Qaeda group.
Proposals for online censorship would see a Super-Regulator established which would control what you’re allowed to say online; on your social media, in podcasts, or on blogs.
This Regulator would make the rules, but without input from the public, and without Parliamentary control.
Kiwis don’t need an unaccountable body telling them what ideas are ‘harmful’ or what content makes them ‘unsafe’. We already have strong laws against extreme material. These changes will be weaponised to silence your beliefs and expression.
This is about ideas that make individuals “feel unsafe”. This is about silencing certain perspectives, views or speech.While the intention to address “safety” and online “harm” is arguably laudable, the cure is worse than the disease. This is an inelegant solution to the “lawful but awful” category of speech, which is best addressed through counter-speech. Frameworks of this kind do nothing to increase mature discourse or community interconnectedness. On the contrary, they breed suspicion and division. Silencing Kiwis online does not promote social cohesion or build trust.
Kiwis will see this work as nothing more than online hate speech laws, and will resist this overreach also.
“We call on all political parties to refuse to implement the Department of Internal Affairs’ proposed media censorship reform, and commit to maintaining free speech online.”
That’s right kids! We’re turning Ukraine into an uninhabitable wasteland of death and dismemberment to save the Ukrainians!
In a new article titled “Ukraine’s Lack of Weaponry and Training Risks Stalemate in Fight With Russia,” The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Michaels reports that western officials knew Ukrainian forces didn’t have the weapons and training necessary to succeed in their highly touted counteroffensive which was launched last month.
Michaels writes:…The claim that western officials had sincerely believed Ukrainian forces might be able to overcome their glaring deficits through sheer pluck and ticker is undermined later in the same article by a war pundit who says the US would never attempt such a counteroffensive without first controlling the skies, which Ukraine doesn’t have the ability to do:
“America would never attempt to defeat a prepared defense without air superiority, but they [Ukrainians] don’t have air superiority,” the U.S. Army War College’s John Nagl told WSJ. “It’s impossible to overstate how important air superiority is for fighting a ground fight at a reasonable cost in casualties.”
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following on the latest Wall Street Journal revelation:
“Leading up to the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which was launched in June, the Discord leaks and media reports revealed that the US did not believe Ukraine could regain much territory from Russia. But the Biden administration pushed for the assault anyway, as it rejected the idea of a pause in fighting.”
So the empire is still knowingly throwing Ukrainian lives into the meat grinder of an unwinnable proxy war, even as western officials tell the public that this war is about saving Ukrainian lives and handing Putin a crushing defeat whenever they’re on camera.
This attitude from the empire is not a new development. Last October The Washington Post reported that “Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table.”
Now why might that be? Why would the western empire be so comfortable encouraging Ukrainians to keep fighting when it knows they can’t win?
We find our answer in another Washington Post article titled “The West feels gloomy about Ukraine. Here’s why it shouldn’t.”, authored last week by virulent empire propagandist David Ignatius. In his eagerness to frame the floundering counteroffensive in a positive light for his American audience, Ignatius let slip an inconvenient truth:
“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”
Anyone who believes this proxy war is about helping Ukrainians should be made to read that paragraph over and over again until it sinks in. The admission that the US-centralized power structure benefits immensely from this proxy conflict is revealing enough, but that parenthetical “other than for the Ukrainians” aside really drives it home. It reads as though it was added as an afterthought, like “Oh yeah it’s actually kind of rough on the Ukrainians though — if you consider them to be people.”
The claim that this war is about helping Ukrainians has been further undermined by another new Washington Post report that Ukraine is now more riddled with land mines than any other nation on earth, and that US-supplied cluster munitions are only making the land more deadly.That’s right kids! We’re turning Ukraine into an uninhabitable wasteland of death and dismemberment to save the Ukrainians.
We should probably talk more about the fact that the US empire is loudly promoting the goal of achieving peace in Ukraine by defeating Russia while quietly acknowledging that this goal is impossible. This is like accelerating toward a brick wall and pretending it’s an open road.
The narrative that Russia can be beaten by ramping up proxy warfare against it makes sense if you believe Russia can be militarily defeated in Ukraine, but the US empire does not believe that Russia can be militarily defeated in Ukraine. It knows that continuing this war is only going to perpetuate the death and devastation.
“Beat Putin’s ass and make him withdraw” sounds cool and is egoically gratifying, and it’s become the mainstream answer to the problem of the war in Ukraine, but nobody promoting that answer can address the fact that the ones driving this proxy war believe it’s impossible. In fact, all evidence we’re seeing suggests that the US is not trying to deliver Putin a crushing defeat in Ukraine and force him to withdraw, but is rather trying to create another long and costly military quagmire for Moscow, as western cold warriors have done repeatedly in instances like Afghanistan and Syria.
Wanting to weaken Russia and wanting to save lives and establish peace in Ukraine are two completely different goals, so different that in practice they wind up being largely contradictory. Drawing Moscow into a bloody quagmire means many more people dying in a war that drags on for years, with all the immense human suffering that that entails.
The US does not want peace in Ukraine, it wants to overextend Russia, shore up military and energy dominance over Europe, expand its war machine and enrich the military-industrial complex. That’s why it knowingly provoked this war. It’s posing as Ukraine’s savior while being clearly invested in Ukraine’s destruction.
It is not legitimate to support this proxy war without squarely addressing this massive contradiction using hard facts and robust argumentation. Nobody ever has.
