Tag: hypocrisy

Private Jet-Flying Climate Activist Harrison Ford Exposed For Eco-Hypocrisy

Harrison Ford, a famous Hollywood actor, has frequently traveled via private jet in recent months despite his well-known climate change activism.

Ford’s private jet, a multimillion-dollar Cessna Citation Sovereign, has made at least eight trips stretching roughly 5,284 miles and emitting about 35 metric tons of carbon dioxide in less than two months, according to data from ADS-B Exchange and Celebrity Jets. [bold, links added]

Ford, however, has made regular appearances at global climate conferences, calling upon individuals and government leaders to support efforts to reduce emissions and prevent disastrous global warming.

“It’s hard to read the headlines — floods, fires, famines, plagues — and tell your children that everything is alright,” he remarked at a conservation summit in France last year.

“It’s not alright. Damn it, it’s not alright. It’s alright to feel frustration, anxiety, grief, but don’t run away from it. Cry out for justice, justice for mother nature.”

“The Earth has irreplaceable ecosystems rich in carbon and biodiversity,” he continued. “By preserving just a small fraction of these wetlands, tropical forests, and mangroves, we can protect our wildlife, our air, water, food jobs, and climate.”

Ford added that a younger generation of climate activists has the energy and conscience to do “what we have not yet been able to do.”

“If we don’t stop the destruction of the natural world, nothing else will matter,” Ford said during a separate speech at the 2020 Global Climate Action Summit.

But Ford’s jet has emitted more carbon into the environment in less than two months than the average American burns every two years and the average person worldwide burns every nine years.

The average carbon footprint of an American is 16 tons a year while the average person worldwide burns about 4 tons a year, according to The Nature Conservancy.

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Democrat Slams GOP for Posting ‘Child Pornography,’ Then People Remind Him Where It Came From

Democrats appeared horrified in response to a Nebraska Republican Party Twitter account posting explicit cartoon-style images of what appears to be young adults (if not underage children) committing sex acts.

“We apologize for the graphic nature of this tweet. We support Republican values/candidates to protect children, their education and parental rights. The tweet showcases the hard facts of what materials and books are in Nebraska Schools, due to Democratic policies and agendas,” the Nebraska GOP wrote in the since-deleted tweet.

One Nebraska Democrat in particular, former chair of the Nebraska Democratic party Vince Powers, was especially put off by the images.

Sadly for Powers, he failed to realize these are the very same images his colleagues in the Democratic Party have been fighting to keep in school libraries for months on end now.

“[The Nebraska Republican Party] has posted child pornography on Twitter . I won’t retweet it. It’s disgusting.@RepDonBacon @Flood4Nebraska @SenatorFischer and Jim Pillen need to condemn this sick public tweet immediately or otherwise it will be fair to say each is ok with child pornography,” Powers wrote regarding the since-deleted tweet, according to Not the Bee.

As it turns out, the disgusting, explicit pictures shared by the GOP account were from a book called “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Powers’s allies in the Democratic Party have been fighting to make that book available to underage school children for months.

“Gender Queer” and other books depicting transgender individuals committing sex acts have appeared in schools in Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, according to an October 2021 report from The Western Journal.

The Western Journal’s report found one potential reason for the book’s wide dissemination: Two prominent national school library organizations have promoted the book as essential reading material for minors.

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FACEBOOK TELLS MODERATORS TO ALLOW GRAPHIC IMAGES OF RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES BUT CENSORS ISRAELI ATTACKS

AFTER A SERIES of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.

Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.

Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.

No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence — nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.

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US Invades Syria, Kills People, Claims Self-Defense

Numerous Syrian and foreign militants have reportedly been killed and several US troops injured in an escalating exchange of attacks between the American invaders and the people in the country whose territory they are illegally occupying.

On Tuesday night US Central Command announced that it had “conducted precision airstrikes in Deir ez-Zor Syria” in order to “defend and protect U.S. forces from attacks like the ones on August 15 against U.S. personnel by Iran-backed groups.”

“The President gave the direction for these strikes pursuant to his Article II authority to protect and defend U.S. personnel by disrupting or deterring attacks by Iran-backed groups,” CENTCOM said.

Iran has denied any link to the troops targeted in the airstrikes, up to ten of whom were reportedly killed.

The US attack was followed by rocket attacks on US military positions in eastern Syria, injuring an unknown number of US troops, to which the US responded with an Apache helicopter assault on Syrian vehicles from which it claims the rockets were launched. Central Command claims “two or three suspected Iran-backed militants” were killed in the helicopter attack.

As of this writing it remains to be seen if this exchange of attacks will continue, but what’s crystal clear is who the aggressor is.

“US claims to be in Syria to fight ISIS, but it rarely fights ISIS,” journalist Aaron Maté tweeted of the exchange. “It’s actually there to deny Syria its own oil and wheat, and to occasionally attack Syrians and their allies who defeated US-backed sectarian death squads in the dirty war.”

What he says is completely true. The US is an occupying force who is there without the permission of the Syrian government, without having been attacked by Syria, and without any valid claim to be defending itself from anyone in Syria. The “Iran-backed” militias in Syria are operating with the full authorization of the Syrian government. The US has quite literally invaded a nation on the other side of the world, killed the people in that nation who don’t want them there, and then claimed self-defense in doing so.

If I broke into my neighbor’s house to steal his things, and then murdered him when he tried to stop me or make me leave, it would look pretty ridiculous if I tried to plead self-defense. It would look even more ridiculous if anyone believed me.

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Climate-activist celebrities ‘wasting thousands of gallons of water’ amid California drought

Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian and Kevin Hart are among several celebrities being accused of wasting over a million gallons of water in May and June in violation of California’s drought restrictions, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Kardashians, Hart, Sylvester Stallone and former NBA star Dwyane Wade used an excess of 1.4 million gallons of water in the months of May and June and received notices from Las Virgenes Municipal Water District concerning the excess usage, according to the Times’ review of documents it acquired through the California Public Records Act. The Kardashians and Hart are among celebrities who have previously pushed to combat climate change, a phenomenon that may be exacerbating California’s drought, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources.

Two properties in the Hidden Hills neighborhood listed under a trust associated with Kim Kardashian received notices that the properties were in violation of their June water allowance by about 232,000 gallons, according to the Times. Kourtney Kardashian’s 1.86-acre property in Calabasas also allegedly exceeded its water limits by roughly 101,000 gallons.

The Kardashians have previously supported actions to stop climate change such as promoting veganism or ending the use of plastic bottles. Kim Kardashian praised Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019, calling climate change a “serious problem,” Reuters reported.

The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District called for a 50% use reduction attempt in response to California’s drought and restricted watering lawns and plants to one day each week, according to the district’s website.

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Steven Spielberg’s private jet has burned $116,000 worth of jet fuel in two months

A private jet belonging to Steven Spielberg has burned more than $116,000 worth of jet fuel since June despite the famous Hollywood director’s past warnings about global warming, according to a flight tracking database.

Spielberg’s plane, a Gulfstream G650, has burned at least $116,159 worth of jet fuel over the course of 16 trips spanning nearly 17,000 miles since June 23, according to flight tracking data from ADS-B Exchange and compiled by the database Celebrity Jets. The figures are likely an underestimate since the database didn’t calculate fuel and distance metrics of at least three trips made by Spielberg’s jet.

However, Spielberg has previously stated that global warming “terrified” him and ripped people who “go blithely through life” without caring about their impact on the environment.

“I’m terrified of [global warming],” Spielberg remarked during a 2018 interview for his film Ready Player One. “Global warming is a scientific reality. It’s not a political trick. It’s a true piece of real, measurable, quantifiable science.”

“People have to come around to believing that this is — we are going to have to have a kind of confrontation with destiny unless we do something about it today,” Spielberg said.

He added that “everybody has to be held responsible” for their role in climate change.

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Purported Free Speech Champion Elon Musk Writes Article for Chinese Censorship Bureau Magazine

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk wrote an article for a magazine produced by the chief censorship bureau of Communist China, despite being a self-described “free speech absolutist.”

The world’s richest man penned an article in the July issue of China Cyberspace, a magazine produced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the top internet regulator, responsible for enacting the strict censorship apparatus of the regime in Beijing.

So central to the power structure of the Communist Party, the director of the CAC, Zhuang Rongwen, is also the head of the Propaganda Department, and it is a subsidiary of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, of which Xi Jinping, himself, is the director of.

While the CAC is mostly involved in laying out the censorship agenda of the government, it also has the ability to purge material directly, notably being at the head of Operation Qinglang (cleansed and uncontaminated), launched in 2021 to crack down on non-state run media entities, such as social media users and citizen journalists from posting “harmful” material on the Chinese internet, which is itself already heavily censored.

The decision by Musk to choose to write an article for a magazine produced by the CAC comes in direct contrast to his self-described status as a “free speech absolutist” and his persistent criticism of censorship in the West, namely on social media sites like Twitter. However, it perhaps demonstrates the lengths to which the Tesla founder will go to maintain a cosy relationship with China, a key country for the future expansion of the electric car company. It also provides further proof for Donald Trump’s claim that Musk is a “bullshit artist.”

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Hypocrites! Disney adopts “don’t say gay” policy in order to appease Middle East censors

Disney, which famously went to battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over that state’s Child Protection Act, hilariously named the “Don’t Say Gay” bill may have a little bit of explaining to do over its blatant virtue-signaling hypocrisy.

The decision to throw down with the radical alphabet mafia cost the entertainment titan a ton of money in canceled Disney+ subscriptions and canceled Disney World vacations by parents who think their children don’t need to be groomed by what used to be a wholesome entertainment company.

Now, they may have some ‘splainin’ to do with the alphabet community.

According to RedState, the House of Mouse has decided to remove all LGBTQXYZ content from Disney+, the company’s streaming service. Oh, not for the West but for Middle Eastern countries as a means to pacify censors there.

Bounding Into Comics writes that after several Disney films were banned in the Middle East for alphabet community-friendly content, such as Thor: Love and Thunder and The Eternals, Disney has caved to censors in Middle Eastern countries and will remove LGBTQ content from Disney+ there.

According to a release, a Disney spokesperson said:

“Content offerings differ across our many Disney+ markets, based upon a number of factors. Content available should align with local regulatory requirements,” while also stressing the platform has parental controls which allows parents to decide what their family members are able to view.

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Let Them Eat Cake: Macron Blasted for Jet-Skiing While Telling Public to Save Energy

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire for using a gas-guzzling jet ski on the French Riviera while demanding citizens curtail their energy use.

In a modern take on the infamous, if possibly apocryphal, remark of the French queen Marie Antoinette that, if the starving people were unable to buy bread, the state should “let them eat cake”, President Emmanual Macron has caused a stir among his countrymen for jet-skiing while his country faces the worst energy crisis in decades, BFMTV reported.

The French leader, fresh off a stinging defeat in the National Assembly elections, losing his legislative majority and dashing his dreams of a “Jupitarean” presidency — and indeed his hopes of becoming the undisputed top dog of Europe — fled Paris to vacation with his wife Bridgette at Fort de Brégançon, the official retreat of the President of France since 1968.

Paparazzi pictures over the past week have shown the French leader lounging in the sun and cruising the Mediterranean in a not-so-eco-friendly jet ski, less than one month after calling on the public to engage in an “effort of solidarity” by cutting their energy usage in the face of European gas shortages amid the war in Ukraine.

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