Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 27,310]

WATCH: Woman pulls gun on Black family during mall confrontation in Washington state

https://www.rawstory.com/video-shows-woman-point-a-gun-at-a-family-during-confrontation-in-vancouver-mall/

 

[Vesper 27,310]

more evidence of the US going more and more fascist

and this poll was of readers from a centre LEFT (on the US scale of ideology) newsletter

 

On June 3, 2017, whilst employed by the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation, Reality Winner was arrested on suspicion of leaking intelligence reports to the media showing systemic and widespread Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, including direct ties to the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence agents.

 

BTW, Obama prosecuted FAR more leakers and whistle-blowers than any other US President ever, so do not think I am playing false left v right, 'Democrats are always good, Republicans only are bad' games.

[Vesper 27,310]

another RW white nationalist claim bites the dust

There never was a male fertility crisis

A new study suggests that reports of the impending infertility of the human male are greatly exaggerated.

https://bigthink.com/sex-relationships/sperm-count-decline

A new review of a famous study on declining sperm counts finds several flaws.

The old report makes unfounded assumptions, has faulty data, and tends toward panic.

The new report does not rule out that sperm counts are going down, only that this could be quite normal.

Several years ago, a meta-analysis of studies on human fertility came out warning us about the declining sperm counts of Western men. It was widely shared, and its findings were featured on the covers of popular magazines. Indeed, its findings were alarming: a nearly 60 percent decline in sperm per milliliter since 1973 with no end in sight. It was only a matter of time, the authors argued, until men were firing blanks, literally.

Well… never mind.

It turns out that the impending demise of humanity was greatly exaggerated. As the predicted infertility wave crashed upon us, there was neither a great rush of men to fertility clinics nor a sudden dearth of new babies. The only discussions about population decline focus on urbanization and the fact that people choose not to have kids rather than not being able to have them.

Now, a new analysis of the 2017 study says that lower sperm counts is nothing to be surprised by. Published in Human Fertility, its authors point to flaws in the original paper's data and interpretation. They suggest a better and smarter reanalysis.

Counting tiny things is difficult

The original 2017 report analyzed 185 studies on 43,000 men and their reproductive health. Its findings were clear: "a significant decline in sperm counts… between 1973 and 2011, driven by a 50-60 percent decline among men unselected by fertility from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand."

However, the new analysis points out flaws in the data. As many as a third of the men in the studies were of unknown age, an important factor in reproductive health. In 45 percent of cases, the year of the sample collection was unknown- a big detail to miss in a study measuring change over time. The quality controls and conditions for sample collection and analysis vary widely from study to study, which likely influenced the measured sperm counts in the samples.

Another study from 2013 also points out that the methods for determining sperm count were only standardized in the 1980s, which occurred after some of the data points were collected for the original study. It is entirely possible that the early studies gave inaccurately high sperm counts.

This is not to say that the 2017 paper is entirely useless; it had a much more rigorous methodology than previous studies on the subject, which also claimed to identify a decline in sperm counts. However, the original study had more problems.

Garbage in, garbage out

Predictable as always, the media went crazy. Discussions of the decline of masculinity took off, both in mainstream and less-than-reputable forums; concerns about the imagined feminizing traits of soy products continued to increase; and the authors of the original study were called upon to discuss the findings themselves in a number of articles.

However, as this new review points out, some of the findings of that meta-analysis are debatable at best. For example, the 2017 report suggests that "declining mean [sperm count] implies that an increasing proportion of men have sperm counts below any given threshold for sub-fertility or infertility," despite little empirical evidence that this is the case.

The WHO offers a large range for what it considers to be a healthy sperm count, from 15 to 250 million sperm per milliliter. The benefits to fertility above a count of 40 million are seen as minimal, and the original study found a mean sperm concentration of 47 million sperm per milliliter.

Healthy sperm, healthy man?

The claim that sperm count is evidence of larger health problems is also scrutinized in this new article. While it is true that many major health problems can impact reproductive health, there is little evidence that it is the "canary in the coal mine" for overall well-being. A number of studies suggest that any relation between lifestyle choices and this part of reproductive health is limited at best.

Lastly, ideas that environmental factors could be at play have been debunked since 2017. While the original paper considered the idea that pollutants, especially from plastics, could be at fault, it is now known that this kind of pollution is worse in the parts of the world that the original paper observed higher sperm counts in (i.e., non-Western nations).

There never was a male fertility crisis

 

The authors of the new review do not deny that some measurements are showing lower sperm counts, but they do question the claim that this is catastrophic or part of a larger pathological issue. They propose a new interpretation of the data. Dubbed the "Sperm Count Biovariability hypothesis," it is summarized as:

"Sperm count varies within a wide range, much of which can be considered non-pathological and species-typical. Above a critical threshold, more is not necessarily an indicator of better health or higher probability of fertility relative to less. Sperm count varies across bodies, ecologies, and time periods. Knowledge about the relationship between individual and population sperm count and life-historical and ecological factors is critical to interpreting trends in average sperm counts and their relationships to human health and fertility."

Still, the authors note that lower sperm counts "could decline due to negative environmental exposures, or that this may carry implications for men's health and fertility."

However, they disagree that the decline in absolute sperm count is necessarily a bad sign for men's health and fertility. We aren't at civilization ending catastrophe just yet.

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 27,310]

Tucker Carlson Bizarrely Suggests Capitol Insurrection Was Orchestrated by FBI

https://news.yahoo.com/tucker-carlson-bizarrely-suggests-capitol-020456040.html

Taking his Jan. 6 denialism to another level on Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Capitol insurrection was a false flag orchestrated by the FBI in an effort to “suppress political dissent.”

Almost since the moment that former President Donald Trump incited thousands of MAGA supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, Carlson has downplayed the violent riots, repeatedly insisting there was “no insurrection” and that it was nothing more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”

At the same time, the far-right Fox News star has rallied to the defense of the Capitol rioters, portraying them as largely peaceful protesters while raging against federal prosecutors for the hundreds of criminal charges filed in the wake of the insurrection. With more rioters still facing potential indictments, many have taken to cooperating with the feds to avoid or lessen jail time.

And according to Carlson, the reason why the government has “thrown the book” at some rioters and not others is because of a deep-state plot to control the political narrative.

Taking aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland for announcing a new strategy to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Carlson said this was just further proof that the government wants to “crush anyone who leads opposition to” Biden.

After invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest whataboutism argument about the Capitol riots, which featured Putin referencing Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit’s death to deflect answering a question about jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Carlson declared that Putin raised “fair questions.”

“Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt and why don’t we know?” Carlson added. “Are anonymous federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s okay now? No, it’s not okay.”

Carlson went on to claim that the government is “hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers present at the Capitol on January 6, not just the one that killed” Babbit, stating that the government’s own court filings reveal that officers violently took part in the riot.

“We know that because without fail, the government has thrown the book at most people who were present in the Capitol on January 6,” he exclaimed. “There was a nationwide dragnet to find them. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight.”

“But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged,” he continued. “Look at the documents, the government calls those people unindicted coconspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”

Using the indictment of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell as an example, Carlson noted that the documents show two additional people listed who haven’t been charged yet but were organizers of the riot.

“The government knows who they are, but they have not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said with a dramatic nod. “They were all certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, on Jan. 6, according to government documents!”

Carlson would then go on to also claim that the extremist plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was an FBI plot, insisting that the government was using the same post-9/11 tactics this time around.

“If you empower the government to violate civil liberties in pursuit of a foreign terror organization, it’s just a matter of time before ambitious politicians use those same mechanisms to suppress political dissent,” he grumbled. “And that is what we are seeing now.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Edited June 16, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 27,310]

American–Style Grievance Politics Comes to British TV

Britain’s newest television channel bets that the Fox News playbook will succeed in a much stuffier media market.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/gb-news-fox-news-british/619210/

In the months leading up to the launch of Great Britain’s newest television channel, GB News, its backers insisted that it wouldn’t be a British version of Fox News. They were right in one way: Fox is a slick product with fancy studios and whizzy graphics. By contrast, when GB News went on the air Sunday night, it looked as though it had been filmed in an abandoned strip club—all dark walls and neon lights—and suffered from poorly synchronized sound. When the channel’s lead anchor, Andrew Neil, concluded an interview with the Scottish historian Neil Oliver, he said that he hoped to see Oliver again, “and I promise [you] next time we’ll get you a better microphone.” The next day, an afternoon host, Gloria De Piero, encouraged the channel’s regional reporters, standing at attention in four little onscreen boxes, to say how happy they were that the channel had launched. They couldn’t hear her. Silence reigned.

For GB News’s target audience, its scrappy, homespun nature might be part of its charm—proof that this is a plucky upstart taking on Britain’s state broadcaster, the BBC, and the long-established Sky News. GB News has been hyped as a major shift in British television, away from its tradition of staid objectivity and toward the American climate of passionate, hyper-partisan anchors and highly opinionated programming. Although Britain’s broadcasting laws—which require news channels to be impartial—will place some limits on what GB News can do, its creators clearly believe that U.S.-style grievance politics can sustain at least a low-budget, tactically neutered version of Fox. Whatever else it is, GB News is a right-wing television-news channel. Britain hasn’t had one of those before. The shift is real.

Read: The ‘global Britain’ conundrum

Early shows suggest that GB News will be the channel for the “you can’t say anything anymore” crowd—a venue where hosts regularly imply that their viewers are getting the real story that’s been kept from them by the mainstream media. (Never mind, of course, that GB News is itself part of the mainstream media.) “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda,” Neil said in the monologue that opened the programming on Sunday. “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name … We will not come at every story with the conviction that Britain is always at fault.” To British ears, this is code for backing Brexit. (During the 2016 referendum campaign, those who expressed fears about the effects of leaving the European Union were regularly accused of “talking Britain down.”) It also echoes the rhetoric of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose favoured method of deflecting criticism is to ramble vaguely about the country’s greatness.

Leading figures at GB News, including its CEO, the former Sky News Australia boss Angelos Frangopoulos, reject the Fox comparison, but they clearly believe there is a gap in Britain’s television market. In their analysis, the BBC is too London-based, too full of college graduates, and too biased toward the “Remain” side of the EU referendum—in other words, dominated by what Americans might call “latte liberals” or the “coastal elite.” GB News will provide the antidote. It should therefore do particularly well among Britons older than 65, who are much less likely than their younger counterparts to have a college degree, much more conservative, and much more likely to have voted for Brexit. Many of them are also well-off, with household wealth swelled by decades of rising home prices. On culture, this group leans right, but on economics, the picture is more complicated. Unsurprisingly, older Britons support continued strong government spending—specifically in the form of their state pensions, which rise in line with inflation.

Opposition to fashionable liberal values—or sometimes a caricature of them—is therefore central to the new outlet’s appeal. In his opening monologue, Neil said that GB News would not be “an echo chamber for the metropolitan mindset”; the channel is proud of its 13 regional reporters. (Neil does his bit by keeping a house in rural France.) Just as Fox commentators railed against the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a recent morning show on GB News criticized English soccer players for kneeling to protest racial injustice. The opening night made clear that “wokeness,” that nebulous bugbear, is firmly in its presenters’ sights. One late-night show will have a segment called “Uncancelled,” speaking with those who have been silenced by Britain’s allegedly suffocating left-wing consensus. Neil himself will introduce a regular “Woke Watch” bit, and the comedian Andrew Doyle will host a weekend show called Free Speech Nation. Although GB News’s target demographic has prompted unkind nicknames such as “Boomer TV,” the channel has a number of presenters in the mould of Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro—the kind of intense young conservatives who might corner you at a party and talk to you about Ayn Rand. Women older than 50 seemed mysteriously absent from the GB News shows I saw, although perhaps that’s the kind of feminist whining that will land me on “Woke Watch.”

An explicitly anti-liberal approach has two problems, however. The first is that conservative viewpoints are far better represented in the British national print media than they are in the United States: Most of the largest newspapers, including the Daily Mail, The Sun, the Daily Express, and The Daily Telegraph, publish briskly right-of-center content. As a columnist for The Telegraph, Boris Johnson disparaged gay men, Muslim women who wore burkas, and many others. As he is now prime minister, an objective onlooker would have trouble arguing that he has been canceled. Indeed, trying to find guests for “Uncancelled” who truly cannot get a hearing elsewhere would mean booking flat-earthers, extreme religious fundamentalists, or actual Nazis.

From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos

Figuring out ways to project a punky underdog resistance to polite opinion is nevertheless central to GB News’s pitch. When I spoke with Frangopoulos a few months ago, he promised that the channel would not feature the kind of incestuous political coverage in which a news conference, featuring journalists asking questions, is followed by the channel cutting back to the studio, “where the journalist then speaks to another journalist, or perhaps to other journalists, talking about what the journalist said.” Nonetheless, the launch of GB News featured plenty of journalists talking with other journalists. In fact, the opening program consisted of Neil introducing the other GB News hosts.

This reliance on talking heads is unlikely to change. The channel’s tight budget will require GB News shows to lean heavily on studio discussions or person-on-the-street interviews, rather than the expensive, edited narrative packages that Sky News and the BBC use to deliver original reporting. In this respect, GB News will be Foxy: The presenters’ personalities must do the work of holding viewers’ attention. For now, the channel does not even have much in the way of graphics, except for a news ticker at the bottom of the screen. It’s all talk. And although the mood in the first set of programs was genial rather than apoplectic, the constant barrage of opinions, arguments, and requests for viewer submissions became exhausting. After watching GB News for an hour, the tone began to remind me of hyperbolic sports coverage. Should the English team take a knee? Should anyone take a knee? Is this my knee? Do you have a knee? Tell us about your knee!

And now the weather.

In this format, the charm and rapport of the presenters is essential, and GB News has been lucky to attract several older male journalists who have fallen out of favour with established broadcasters. The former ITV newsreader Alastair Stewart left his post in January following multiple “errors of judgment” on social media, while Simon McCoy, formerly of the BBC, came out as a Brexiteer in an interview explaining why he left the corporation. The presence of these men might strike a chord with some older viewers who support Brexit—and those who worry that Britain has become an ageist, censorious place where people are punished for not understanding the current elite vocabulary on race, gender, and sexuality.

The channel, as a stand-alone company that is not reliant on taxpayer funds, can also afford to flout the conventions of serious news. The ex–Sky News host Colin Brazier’s Twitter feed, in the days before the launch, suggested that he was eager to say everything he had not been able to say at his previous employer. “If @GBNEWS ever does hour-after-hour analysing the meaning of the ‘chemistry’ and ‘body language’ of world leaders, I’m going to open a vein,” he tweeted on launch day, over a video of leaders at the G7 meeting in Cornwall. That kind of winking outrageousness contrasts sharply with the BBC’s earnest, self-protective stuffiness—a reaction to the endless complaints it faces from across the political spectrum.

Which brings us to GB News’s second problem. In Britain—again, unlike in the United States—television channels are tightly constrained in what they can air, because they have a legal duty to avoid taking sides. GB News is pushing the edges of this duty, by copying the example of the radio station LBC, based in London. LBC does not host individually balanced discussions, but argues that it provides balance across its entire daily schedule.

GB News aims to offer the same kind of “balance.” How that squares with the hard evidence of its roster of hosts, drawn from right-wing media and right-wing political parties, is open to discussion. The furthest left it reaches is to the former Labour member of Parliament Gloria De Piero, who is hardly a frothing communist. The channel’s defence of the unsayable is unlikely to extend to such cancelled opinions as “The inheritance tax should be 100 percent,” “Marxism is an unfairly maligned ideology,” and “Abolish the nuclear family.”

Read: Britain failed. Again.

At the BBC and Sky News, impartiality means that journalists refrain from sharing any political opinions. Outside pundits from both the right and the left are invited to duke it out instead. This is an approach with sharp limits—for example, when it comes to climate change, the economic impact of Brexit, or the effectiveness of coronavirus shutdowns. When all the evidence points one way, does an impartial broadcaster have a duty to air the contrary view? On pandemic-related matters, the BBC and Sky have largely ruled no: Wild and unsupported ideas about 5G and microchips in vaccines have not been given airtime.

Here, GB News’s default oppositionalism—if something supposedly can’t be said, it must therefore be worth saying—leads it into challenging terrain. Neil opened the channel by declaring that it would not indulge “fake news,” but an hour later, Dan Wootton, hired from Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, was arguing into the camera that shutdowns infringe on Britons’ “God-given” liberty and they “should be wiped from the public-health playbook forevermore.” It was a speech that U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene would have applauded. Wootton then railed against “doomsday scientists,” adding that a “15-month-long never-ending scare campaign has suitably terrified the public into supporting lockdown.”

If GB News wants to “puncture the pomposity of our elites,” as Neil said in his opening monologue, then it should acknowledge that no group fits that description more than the small number of influential shutdown skeptics employed by right-wing papers and GB News itself. Seventy-one percent of Britons support the newly announced delay in lifting the final coronavirus restrictions. As it turns out, Britons value the God-given freedom to return to the office far less than the freedom not to die of a respiratory disease.

At Sky News Australia, Frangopoulos had great success by providing daytime content that played it straight and opinion-led evening programming that veered closer to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. GB News appears to be using the same blueprint, and critics will no doubt be accused of focusing on the most inflammatory content, instead of taking a more rounded view of the channel’s output. In fairness, the wry, welcoming tone adopted by McCoy, Brazier, and their daytime co-hosts is hard to square with some of the knee-jerk (and preemptive) criticism of the channel, such as the advertiser boycott encouraged by the Stop Funding Hate campaign. Brazier’s show, which he hosts with the Kenyan-born social-policy researcher Mercy Muroki, presented the Black Lives Matter movement as a regrettable overreach on an important subject, rather than a harbinger of the Marxist apocalypse or the start of a race war against white people.

To further rebut charges that it is copying Fox, GB News will also point to wholesome segments such as “Simon’s Good News.” On Monday afternoon, the good news began with a report on a handheld COVID-19 detector developed by a firm in Cambridge. Then we learned about community fridges and Welsh villagers joining together to buy their 200-year-old local bar. Sadly, the technical gremlins returned; the wrong video showed up on-screen.

Like the pro he is, McCoy smoothly moved on to the next item, welcoming the relaxation of restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood—itself a noteworthy sign that low-level homophobia is no longer a key culture-war weapon on the British right—and then mentioning a small dog named Midnight that had saved its owners from a house fire in Hull. “Midnight is a hero; good to see him,” McCoy said. Then he galloped on to a 51-year-old American who can sing and speak backwards. The channel played a clip of the man saying “6,666,666” backwards while driving, then reversed it to prove his aptitude. “For once, that wasn’t a technical issue,” said McCoy’s co-host, the former Brexit Party politician Alex Phillips. “He really was speaking backwards.”

So who will be the true face of GB News: Dan Wootton railing against shutdowns, or Simon McCoy praising a heroic terrier? Let’s hope it’s the latter. Political polarisation in the United States seems to have been turbocharged by a hermetic right-wing media universe built on paranoia, resentment, and mistrust of authority. As GB News matures, the channel may test how receptive Britain is to culture-war topics brought over from the U.S. Already, Brexit influencers have imported the vocabulary of the American right (snowflakes, triggered, woke) as well as the idea that “owning the libs” is a political goal in itself. In a piece for the website ConservativeHome, Donal Blaney, the founder of the Margaret Thatcher Centre, urged GB News hosts to stay strong in the face of Twitter outrage. “As these triggered snowflakes wail uncontrollably in impotent fury into their kale, lentil, and chai lattes this morning, and for months to come, all at GB News need to channel their inner Churchill.” (Side note: That drink sounds disgusting.) Perhaps GB News will bait Ofcom—the British television-news regulator—with ever more polarized content, and then pose as a cancel-culture victim if given an official rebuke. Little by little, the channel could chip away at the British principle of neutrality in broadcasting.

To achieve its goals, however, GB News needs viewers. The opening-night numbers were strong, by the standards of British rolling news. There is a big pool to be fished. Many Britons feel unrepresented by the values of the state broadcaster.

Could GB News offer an alternative to the BBC without simply becoming a right-wing propaganda channel? Yes, if it can sort out that gloomy studio lighting; yes, if it can stay within the impartiality guidelines while offering a tone different from that of the straitlaced BBC; and yes, if it can acknowledge that some minority opinions are not silenced or cancelled, but just unpopular and boring and wrong.

Edited June 16, 2021 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,392]

Loads of advertiser pulling out of Gammon Bastard News. GB News themselves have said more than half their viewers are aged 65 and over - companies selling stairlifts, incontinence pants and erectile dysfunction would do best.

Their presenter Dan Wooton with the bleached teeth, who made a career out of judging womens tits out of 10 in The Sun is thick as pig shit. 

He also always blames wokeness for everything. As a gay man he ought to remember without 'wokeness' his arse fucking and cock sucking would still be illegal. Total prick.

[Vesper 27,310]

I'd lay £10K that this white nationalist yank House Republican's staffers had to replace 'spade' with 'ace' (Juneteenth is a celebration of the last slaves being freed in the US) https://rosendale.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=191   Who are the 14 House Republicans who voted against a Juneteenth holiday? And why? https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/16/who-14-republicans-who-voted-against-juneteenth-holiday/7722634002/

[Vesper 27,310]

20 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Loads of advertiser pulling out of Gammon Bastard News. GB News themselves have said more than half their viewers are aged 65 and over - companies selling stairlifts, incontinence pants and erectile dysfunction would do best.

Their presenter Dan Wooton with the bleached teeth, who made a career out of judging womens tits out of 10 in The Sun is thick as pig shit. 

He also always blames wokeness for everything. As a gay man he ought to remember without 'wokeness' his arse fucking and cock sucking would still be illegal. Total prick.

do those poopy pants include a prick hole?

that way the old geezer can pop 10 ED pills and not shit all over the missus whilst having oldster sex time

🤢

 

[Vesper 27,310]

In secret recording, Florida Republican threatens to send Russia-Ukraine ‘hit squad’ after primary rival

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/in-secret-recording-florida-republican-threatens-to-send-russia-ukraine-hit-squad-after-primary-rival/ar-AAL8uEG

MIAMI — A little-known GOP candidate in one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats was secretly recorded threatening to send “a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad” to a fellow Republican opponent to make her “disappear.”

© Chris O'Meara/AP Photo A GOP candidate was secretly recorded threatening to send a "hit squad" after primary rival Anna Paulina Luna, who is running for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat.

 

During a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor.

 

“I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,” Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week, according to the recording exclusively obtained by POLITICO. “That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.”

Reached by text message, Braddock refused to say whether he made any threats about Luna to the person who recorded him, Erin Olszewski.

Asked repeatedly via text if he mentioned Russian-Ukrainian hit squads, Braddock wouldn’t give a yes or no answer, saying he had not heard the recording and that it’s “allegedly me … there is no proof of that.” He also suggested the recording “may even be altered and edited.”

“This is a dirty political tactic that has caused a lot of people a lot of stress and is completely unnecessary,” he said.

Olszewski denied editing or altering the recording. She said she made it because she was concerned about Braddock’s “unhinged” dislike of Luna that he had previously expressed. After she made the recording just after midnight last Wednesday, she promptly turned it over to St. Petersburg, Fla., police and gave a heads-up to her friend Luna, who filed a petition for an injunction against Braddock. Luna received a temporary restraining order against him last Friday. Braddock filed to run Monday.

In the recording, Braddock early in the call brought up the alleged assassins. He also made rambling statements about getting financial help from fellow Freemasons or by somehow importing millions of dollars from Malta and Gibraltar.

“I have access to a hit squad, too, Ukrainians and Russians,” he said about three minutes into the call, adding “don't get caught out in public supporting Luna. … Luna’s gonna go down and I hope it's by herself.”

Braddock went on to explain that he didn’t think Luna could win in the general election. Luna, an Air Force veteran and former model who went on to become a conservative activist, won a crowded GOP primary in the state’s 13th Congressional District last year but lost the general election to Crist.

It's unclear exactly why Braddock has such dislike toward Luna. The two do not appear to have any previous connection to one another, and Braddock is a lower-tier candidate in an increasingly crowded race for Crist’s seat. Already, two state lawmakers and a former Obama administration official have entered the race, with others expected to jump in.

The threats, claims of assassins and political backstabbing put an only-in-Florida stamp on what was already shaping up to be a wild midterm of congressional races. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz in the Panhandle is still batting back accusations in an ongoing federal sex trafficking probe.

Democratic Rep. Val Demings is leaving her Orlando seat to run for Senate, causing a mad scramble to replace her. And the state is getting an additional congressional seat that is certain to lead to another crush of candidates after redistricting before next year’s elections.

Olszewski, who initiated and recorded the call just after midnight on June 9, said she phoned Braddock at his insistence because he kept trying to get her to appear on a health care panel for an event he was organizing.

Olszewski, a nurse by training, became a conservative figure last year after penning a book called “Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital,” which some in the health care industry have called disinformation.

After having a few conversations with Braddock, however, Olszewski said she became concerned that he wanted to use her to advance his candidacy and that he left her “threatening” messages about Luna that sounded “unhinged.”

[Fulham Broadway 16,392]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

do those poopy pants include a prick hole?

that way the old geezer can pop 10 ED pills and not shit all over the missus whilst having oldster sex time

🤢

 

None of the major shareholders of GB news are from the UK 

“We are proud to be British; the clue is in the name,” Neil said in his opening speech. Yet this claim is hardly bolstered by the fact that all of GB News’ major shareholders are based outside of the UK. Neil himself is listed on Companies House as living in France.

Another source of aggravation for GB News, as shown in its opening hours of coverage, is the Black Lives Matter movement and the decision of the England football team to take the knee before its European Championship games – a symbolic protest against racial injustice. England players are “effectively waging a culture war against fans,” said GB News presenter Inaya Folarin Iman.

In reality, according to those surveyed by YouGov, 97% of people have heard of Black Lives Matter and 47% have a positive view of the movement, with 29% saying they have a negative view of it. GB News therefore appears to be representing and validating a minority of Brits who hold these opinions – not the country at large.

[Vesper 27,310]

5 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

England players are “effectively waging a culture war against fans,” said GB News presenter Inaya Folarin Iman.

Inaya Folarin Iman, another sell-out PoC shill

🤬

she is the UK version of Candace Owens

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,392]

10 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Inaya Folarin Iman, another sell-out PoC shill

🤬

she is the UK version of Candace Owens

 

Two Conservative Lords – who formerly served as treasurers of the Conservative Party – own shares in the controversial new TV network GB News.

Spencer and Farmer. Both men are prolific Conservative donors, with Lord Farmer having donated £530,000 to the party since the beginning of 2019. His son, George, was one of the founding figures in Turning Point UK – the controversial off-shoot of the pro-Donald Trump American student activist organisation

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“Mike Hunt has got in touch”: GB News terrorised by prank callers

Andrew Neil's new channel was launched earlier this week

https://www.nme.com/news/mike-hunt-has-got-in-touch-gb-news-terrorised-by-prank-callers-2972088

GB News, Andrew Neil’s new channel, has been pranked by callers using fake comedy names.

A number of presenters including former BBC news reader Simon McCoy and ex-Apprentice contestant Michelle Dewbury were caught out by people texting in posing as “Mike Hunt” and “Mike Oxlong”.

Many of the clips were also posted to social media with one user commenting: “Ok I know I said I wouldn’t tweet about it but I can’t stop laughing.”

Another added: “They got done by Mike Oxlong. Incredible.”

The prank eventually led to McCoy appealing to viewers to stop and urged them to “grow up”.

 

He added: “I’m just going to say something because if you’ve seen the papers, if you’ve seen Twitter, some people think it’s really funny to send in texts and messages on the basis that if we read them out we’ve been had.

“We’re a new company, we’re a new broadcaster, there are systems that we’re putting in place that would stop idiots like you getting through. They’re getting through at the minute but… please? We’ve got other things to worry about.”

The news channel was launched earlier this week with the aim of fighting cancel culture and reflecting voices not heard in the media.

But it has faced criticism from campaigners such as the group Stop Funding Hate, who say its launch brings highly partisan Fox News-style programming to the UK, reports BBC News.

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Inside Sweden: Why the government may fall next week

 

Hej,   I'm going to keep the email short today, because as you may be aware: there's a lot going on!   Things have been changing so fast this week, that as I'm writing this email late on Friday afternoon, I worry that by the time it reaches you on Saturday everything will have changed yet again.   At the time of writing, anyway, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven's government looks set to lose a no-confidence vote in parliament on Monday over market rents. This would be unprecedented.   A total of 11 no-confidence votes have been held in the history of the Swedish parliament (including six against Löfven or his ministers) and they have all failed. But a majority of parliamentarians currently support this one, including ones as stunningly diverse as the conservative Moderates and Christian Democrats, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats and the socialist Left Party.   So why is this happening? It boils down to an argument over free rent-setting on newbuilds, which we've explained in this article. The Left Party is against that and threatened to put forward a no-confidence motion, but there was a snag: the Left Party doesn't have enough MPs to force a vote. Enter the Sweden Democrats, who do have enough MPs and don't like market rents either (and like the sitting government even less), and who were more than willing to assist in putting forward a no-confidence vote on their own.   These unlikely bedfellows were finally joined by the Moderates and Christian Democrats, who do support market rents but don't support the centre-left government (you see how this is all very confusing), and vowed to vote against Löfven on Monday.

What will happen? No idea. If there's one thing Löfven is extremely skilled at, it's shrugging off political crises. A former trade union leader, he's used to tough negotiations and to scraping together reluctant consensus where there seemingly is none, and he's had plenty of practice in that since he took on the job of prime minister in 2014, leading a minority government that grew even weaker after the 2018 election.   Yesterday, I likened his strategy to the Sweden-Spain match in the Euros: Play for time, pretend nothing's going on and let the other side tire themselves out with the ball. And after 90 minutes (or in this case, a couple of days), it all ends the way it started. So don't be surprised if by the end of this, Löfven is the one still standing, either weaker or stronger than before.   You'll get your money's worth for membership next week, as we try to help you understand the crisis and possible outcomes.   Here are a few articles you may find helpful in the meantime:   Who’s who: The key players in Sweden’s political crisis What do proposed changes to Sweden’s rental laws mean for tenants? ANALYSIS: What the threat of a snap election means for Swedish politics Who are Sweden’s party leaders and what do they want?   We'll also be discussing the political crisis in our Sweden in Focus podcast, out now. Thanks to everyone who got in touch last week, I'm happy you liked the first episode!   Next week is Midsummer's Eve, so we won't send out the Inside Sweden newsletter next Saturday.

Have a lovely weekend,       Emma Editor, The Local Sweden [email protected]

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The Daily Express is taking RW, white nationalist, anti-prog, anti yank Dems, anti-EU, xenophobic, reactionary agitprop and paranoia to a new level for the year so far

 

they are becoming completely unhinged

 

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Nigel Farage wishes Hugh Janus a happy birthday - YouTube

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/06/19/bisexual-student-josh-ormond-homophobic-attack-liverpool/

What's going on with Liverpool and these attacks on the street. Already a couple of them in just June. Poor boy... 

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The far right in France is dealt a setback

In France’s first round of nationwide regional elections, voters voiced support for the center-right party, Les Républicains, over the far-right National Rally party, dashing Marine Le Pen’s hopes of turning the vote into a springboard for the presidential race next year.

Polling agencies estimated on Sunday that Les Républicains had pulled ahead in six of France’s 13 mainland regions, capturing about 30 percent of the vote nationwide. The left came out on top in five regions, Le Pen’s National Rally came first in one region and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party trailed in all regions.

In a record-low turnout, roughly 34 percent of voters cast ballots, which means that about 30 million people stayed away. The vote on Sunday also coincided with the lifting of an eight-month coronavirus curfew, the last remnant of a seemingly endless cycle of Covid-related restrictions.

Analysis: The race has been marked by acts of violence against political leaders and inflammatory speeches that reflect France’s growing culture wars. “We see a growing polarization of society, aggressive debates, an extremely frictional and inflammatory dimension,” one French political scientist said.