Gelsenkirchen ain't a bad place to be

Paul McCartney, a former member of the Fab Four, has become the first musician to become a billionaire in U.K. history.

Ukraine and the US administration are moving the US toward war with Russia and, inevitably, World War III.  Ukraine wants NATO trainers in Ukraine that are closer to the front lines. Military contractors are already in Ukraine. The Biden administration is inching us toward world war. Ukraine has asked for troops to train their new […] The post WW3? Ukraine Wants NATO Trainers in Ukraine appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Although the NFL tried to distance itself from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker after his openly traditional remarks at Benedictine College, some of which were specifically directed toward women, they are still making money off of him: as of Friday, demand for woman’s jerseys with his name has been so strong the NFL store has reportedly has sold out. “The jersey shot up the best-selling rankings at the NFL store Thursday, and as of publication Friday, all of the women’s jerseys are out of stock,” Outkick reported on Friday, adding, “Even attempting to build a custom women’s jersey from a blank one with Butker’s name and number only gives a small as an option. The same is true for all custom female jerseys, which would indicate blank jerseys aren’t kept well-stocked.” Butker’s remarks directed toward women outraged feminists and delighted traditionalists; he stated: I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker. After Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College last week, Jonathan Beane, NFL senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, responded, “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP A Change.org petition calling for the three-time Super Bowl champion to be booted from the Chiefs for his “discriminatory” remarks has totaled more than 190,000 signatures.

In the throws of the 2024 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, social media giant Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has taken steps to suppress political content on its platforms. The new feature rolled out earlier this year prevents any content flagged as “political” from being recommended to users on Instagram.  Posts “about laws, elections, or social topics” will not not be displayed in any of the platform’s curated recommendation systems, which drives a significant amount of follower growth for platforms.  The company claims the filter is not meant to limit the exposure of any candidate or publisher specifically, and is instead meant to insulate users from politically charged content in general. “Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said. According to Pew Research, half of all American adults got their news from social media – last year 30% of all American adults consumed news on Facebook at least “sometimes” and 16% got their news from Instagram.  The filter was automatically implemented for all accounts by default, and has to be manually disabled by each user. In order to disable the filter, you’ll need to go to your profile page and tap the icon on the uppermost right to open “Settings and Activity.” From there, you’ll need to scroll down to the “what you see” section, where you’ll find “content preferences.” Click “political content,” and then you’ll need to select the “don’t limit political content from people you don’t follow” option. Photo by about.instagram.com As of now the feature does not appear to have been implemented on Facebook, which is still the most popular platform for online news. The Daily Wire has historically been one of the top publishers on the platform – last year it was revealed that officials from the Biden administration pressured Meta to redirect traffic away from right-leaning outlets, and specifically singled out The Daily Wire as a site they wanted to censor. The policy has been criticized as overly broad – the filter is applied to all accounts by default and has to manually be disabled. Meta has also been criticized for limiting voter access to information about candidates and causes during an election year.     X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has taken a strong anti-censorship stance since it was purchased by Elon Musk in 2022, and it is the fifth most popular platform for consuming news among the social media giants, after Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and controversial Chinese-owned TikTok, which is set to be banned in the United States early next year if parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it.

Early in the 20th century, there was a famous columnist known as H.L. Mencken. Two of his quotes are currently quite applicable. Number one: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Number two: “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” I point this out because we live in a representative democracy, so when we see spectacles like what we saw in the House of Representatives yesterday, it’s important to remember that these are all elected representatives of the United States. We have filled Washington, D.C., with complete imbeciles. This is our fault because we vote for them. The fact is that if you don’t like your representatives, you can always change your them, but it seems as though the American people increasingly like a Congress that is completely unworkable; a presidency filled with numskulls like the current president of the United States; and entire representative agencies of the federal government that are filled with people whose IQs, when combined, might be in double digits. If you think I’m being harsh, I present to you the spectacle yesterday, which is not, in fact, from Jerry Springer. It is from Congress. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show Yesterday, a giant fight broke out between Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the noted intellectual congresswoman from Georgia, known colloquially as MTG, on one side, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the noted intellectual congresswoman from New York, known colloquially as AOC, and Rep. Jasmine Crockett from Texas on the other side. You can tell this is similar to a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) face-off when the congresspeople are known by their acronyms. The wattage displayed by these three ladies put feminism back about 100 years, as shown by the fact that two of the men who are leading this committee, James Comer on the Republican side, and Jamie Raskin on the Democratic side, could not help but laugh at the idiocy displayed by this coterie of crows. It began when Marjorie Taylor Greene insulted Jasmine Crockett’s fake eyelashes and went downhill from there. AOC snapped, “I would like to move to take down Miss Green’s words. That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.” Greene: “Are your feelings hurt? Aww.” AOC: “Oh, girl, baby girl, baby girl. Don’t even play. Don’t even play. We are going to move and we’re going to take your words down.” After MTG said she would agree to take her words down, AOC demanded an apology. MTG refused. Crockett later said to Comer, “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleached-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” Comer, genuinely puzzled: “What now?” A shouting match then ensued. The question about all this is why? Why? These are outtakes from “Idiocracy” at this point. The answer is because Congress and our representative government have become a performative spectacle for people who are hoping to get famous and rich outside of Congress. That’s what this is. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute wrote one of the most important books of the last 20 years about this — about how our representative institutions ar supposed to shape the people who enter them because they are given the grave responsibility of representing the American people, taking care of trillions of our taxpayer dollars, figuring out our foreign policy, and trying to rectify breaches in the social fabric and the social compact. That is their actual job.  But over time, as we have become a more populous and populist country, our representatives have become stand-ins for our various gripes and grievances. And so you end up with the dumbed-down version of the American public. I don’t think that this is a partisan issue. I know hundreds of members of Congress and the Senate, both Democrat and Republican, and I can name the number of intelligent people that I know in Congress on less than two hands.  The American people have chosen poorly. It used to be when government did not have insane levels of power over our life, we didn’t actually care who was in charge of the government nearly as much because the government didn’t have the power to control every aspect of our life. Thus, politics was largely relegated to the local level. And when it came to federal politics, people who were very invested in federal politics tended to be the people who were the most knowledgeable, the people who actually cared the most, the people who were the most engaged.  But now, it’s become a popularity contest. It’s “American Idol,” and thanks to the mass media, you can take dullards and make them incredibly famous. If you want to sell papers, that’s exactly what you do. If you want higher ratings, you focus on the dullards in Congress, not the congressperson who is spending late nights poring over the bills that are being created to shape our lives; that’s the boring stuff.  The people like this. And this is why all three of these congresspeople are significantly more famous than some actual powerful congresspeople who make policy. People now use Congress as a platform for other activities to become famous — to be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, to be on various shows on TV.  That’s not good for America. Americans ought to get off of this. But the reality, of course, is that this has pervaded American politics, and it has bled up. The quality of our public leadership is a reflection of the quality of our public conversations. And our public conversations are terrible because they are low IQ and do not involve any sort of actual knowledge base for the people involved. In fact, a quick insult is considered significantly more useful than an actual understanding of the issues at play and the nuances of those issues. The latter things are not important. This is one of the reasons why you are seeing re-engagement online with three-hour long conversations with various hosts. There is a hunger in a certain segment of the population for something a little more substantive that has completely gone away for the vast majority of the American public. The American people are casually engaged. They tune in for the last five minutes of “American Idol” before they cast their vote. And what you end up with is a bunch of people who are getting rich and famous being in Congress and being complete imbeciles. This is why you end up with a presidential race featuring an incumbent president who is full-on senile, and it doesn’t matter one whit to at least half the population.  I think most people look at yesterday’s debacle in Congress and they’re ashamed of what they see. We should all be ashamed of what we see in Congress because the level of intellectual achievement in our Congress, the level of true engagement with serious issues, is so unbelievably low that you would get a better conversation about what goes on in our nation in a third-grade social studies classroom than you would in a congressional committee such as yesterday’s.

Trampolines have been around since 1936; that’s almost 100 years now. At this time, they’ve been used as tools for exercise, sports, and competitions, and the technology has even been used to support health issues. Having a trampoline in your backyard is great fun as well! But how exactly does using a trampoline for exercise […]

'You can only imagine what this car evoked'

'feel like my head's still spinning'