New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu rejects CDC's mask mandate.

“Everyone in America agrees that the messaging out of Washington is extremely confusing and this latest announcement only reinforces that at this time, the best solution to getting out of this pandemic lies with the individual,” Sununu’s office said in a statement to Boston25News, referring to the CDC’s recent masking policy shift, which came several months after the agency announced that fully vaccinated persons didn’t need to wear masks indoors because of the protection provided by the vaccines.

Read the rest here.

I wonder if the reason so many people don't trust vaccinations is that they are being recommended by four of the least-trusted institutions in America:

1. Government
2. The Fake News Industry
3. Social media companies
4. Scientists

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 26, 2021

Democrats would have no standards at all.

More of those two standards of justice that are becoming the hallmark of DOJ. Merrick Garland-led DOJ moves to protect Biden allies in Democratic states by dropping investigations into governors' policies that led to deaths of thousands of people in long-term care facilities. https://t.co/uhYOq6h5wO

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 24, 2021

I agree with Lawrence Solomon when he says that systemic racism exists.  I'm afraid I have to disagree with his assessment as to who its perpetrators are. 

The systemic racists aren’t the non-woke white majority, who typically deny that systemic racism even exists. Today’s systemic racists—successors to proponents in the formal slavery period that ended with the Civil War and its informal continuance under Jim Crow—are America’s woke whites.

These white liberals, though well-intentioned, are so blinded by their racism that they believe blacks can’t feed themselves and their families without food stamps, can’t succeed on their own merits without affirmative action programs, and can’t even manage to get voter ID to cast a ballot for the candidate of their choice.

White liberal prejudices are not necessarily intentional, nor are they systemic in themselves.  Though they may be widely and sincerely held, liberal beliefs in the black stereotypes Mr. Solomon describes are the beliefs held by individuals.  The deliberate reinforcement of those stereotypes by a Democratic party as a matter of political strategy is systemic racism, and there is nothing well-intentioned about it.

Mr. Solomon buttresses my argument with this:

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives in the mid-1960s created the sea change that stymied the rapid advancements of blacks in overcoming the shackles of centuries of slavery. The Harvard Business School would describe the 1900–1930 period as “The Golden Age of Black Business” in which enterprising blacks were thriving despite the wholesale bigotry in society at large. Over the entire first half of the 20th century, in fact, blacks were less likely to be unemployed than whites and when they were, they were likelier to be reemployed faster than their white counterparts.

Moreover, despite their high poverty rate, most blacks had middle-class values—82 percent lived in married, two-parent households; 40 percent were small-business owners; children sought and got good grades. Harlem was a low-crime, vibrant community where whites as well as blacks felt comfortable walking the streets at night.

All that would change following Johnson’s sweeping welfare reforms, which had the effect of putting people on the dole, discouraging the work ethic, fast-tracking the decline of the family, and in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an architect of the War on Poverty, of “defining deviancy down,” or normalizing what had previously been considered deviant behavior.

Before the passage of Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty legislation, the worst of white racism was manifested in murderous attacks on black communities when the threat of black prosperity became more than whites could tolerate.  The Tulsa Race Massacre was one such incident.

The false belief that a large-scale insurrection among Black Tulsans was underway, including reinforcements from nearby towns and cities with large African American populations, fueled the growing hysteria.

As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires later testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.

According to a later Red Cross estimate, some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other Black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.

The East St. Louis Massacre, described in this Riverfront Times article published on the 100th anniversary, is another such incident.

This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most brutal and shameful episodes of mass violence in American history. Dubbed the East St. Louis "race riot," the events of July 2 and 3, 1917, tore East St. Louis apart and shocked the nation. The violence was largely one-sided, with mobs of armed whites burning hundreds of black homes and beating, lynching and shooting black residents. Most historians estimate that more than 100 people died.

[...]

Although President Woodrow Wilson initially opposed launching a federal investigation, Congress felt otherwise, in light of the fact that the massacre had disrupted wartime industry for more than a week and left hundreds of buildings destroyed. The congressional inquiry's final report was delivered July 6, 1918, and it can be read in full here, though you'll have to make sure you're on page 8,826 and scroll to the the middle of the right-hand column.

The report blasted East St. Louis' corrupt civil government, its incompetent police force and complicit militia members. Presenting a broad of range of competing explanations for the causes of the violence, the report concluded that while labor issues played a role, the underlying driver of the massacre was racial[.]

Although Woodrow Wilson is still held in the highest esteem by progressives, he was, in fact, an incorrigible racist, believing that because of their inferiority, blacks would not benefit from college or university education.  The Wilson administration segregated the federal civil service under that same rationale, claiming it was necessary to protect blacks from unfair competition with whites and thus relegating black federal workers to lower level jobs.  It was not a coincidence that the worst white-on-black race riots began during the Wilson administration and carried over into the next.

Wilson's prejudices are alive and well today, thanks in large part to Lyndon Johnson's legislation.  According to Ronald Kessler’s 1995 book Inside the White House, Johnson bluntly assured two southern governors that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have blacks voting Democratic for 200 years.  (Johnson's quote was abhorrent in the original.)  Having successfully trapped generations of blacks in the endless cycle of inner city poverty, the Great Society serves to instill those prejudices in today's liberals who remain convinced that blacks need their help.

But again, individual prejudices, while racist, are not systemic.  The Democratic party's reliance on racism is. 

The all-too-common paternalistic liberal belief that blacks aren’t up to the job, and thus need more of a handicap to compensate, is sincerely held and inherently racist. Because bleeding-heart liberalism has permeated government, this racism of low expectations has become systemic in our institutions. In recent years, this racism has also spread to newsrooms where white journalists, who are overwhelmingly liberal in their outlook, have been wokedly acknowledging their own racism and, in the belief that almost everyone holds their same low view of black competence, demanding that others follow suit.

The source of the bleeding-heart liberalism that has permeated our government is the Democratic party.  If there was ever a sincere effort to improve the lot of inner city blacks, Democrats might have considered abandoning policies that have failed for the last 50-plus years.  Instead, electoral success has encouraged Democrats to double down.

In a sane world, the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency would have been seen as a milestone in race relations.  White America embraced a black president.  But race relations deteriorated over the course of the Obama presidency.  Democrats rely so heavily on accusing their opponents of racist motives that they would not admit that relations had actually improved.  They were not about to change a winning formula.  It's been a strategy that always got them elected despite substantial opposition to the policies they promote —  gun control, open borders, opposition to voter ID verification, to name only a few.

The Democratic party is systemic racism.  Until enough Americans see this, race relations will get worse before they get better.

Biden is our second anti-American president, the first being Obama.

The 4-year storyline from the corporate press that the Kremlin had taken control of the levers of power of the US Government through blackmail was as deranged as anything you'll find on QAnon. Now, those who spread it want to censor the internet in the name of "misinformation."

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 21, 2021

The most popular president in American history can’t fill a small auditorium. Discuss. pic.twitter.com/r7CtQiLNkc

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 22, 2021

Isn’t this you? https://t.co/23nhZnbqUN pic.twitter.com/t3s9LPrStW

— Kassy Dillon (@KassyDillon) July 21, 2021

The insistence on getting kids vaccinated is about control, not science or health.  In the U.S., the chance of getting sick enough from COVID to report on it, for all ages, is 10.55%.  Among kids, it's closer to 0% since the susceptibility to infection increases with age. 

The numbers below come from the Coronavirus Worldometer as of July 22, 2021.

	Population	Cases	Deaths	Infection Rate	Fatality Rate per Infected	Fatality Rate per Population
The U.S.	333,045,503	35,147,918	625,852	10.5535%	1.7806%	0.1879%
India	1,394,272,063	31,264,684	419,169	2.2424%	1.3407%	0.0301%

That would be the Antifa/FBI coalition.

The FBI has a history of instigating terrorist plots that they thwart with great fanfare. This is not a conspiracy theory. 

The New York Times has reported there have been twenty terrorist plots against the U.S.  Three of those plots were real; the other 17 were created — and then stopped — by the FBI.  

The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case is based on evidence provided by two FBI informants and two undercover agents according to the FBI’s affidavit.  As many as twelve informants were used in this case.  Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, was at one time an FBI informant.  Several sizable right-wing organizations were involved in the Jan. 6 disturbance.  The FBI had infiltrated every one of them and therefore knew exactly what they had planned.  

The DC Metropolitan Police also had at least one undercover employee embedded within the pro-Trump crowd.  This is not speculation.  It is based on court records.

Read the rest here.

Reinforcing my conclusion that socialism is not a goal. It's a strategy.

 

Historian @VDHanson

“The biggest enemies of free speech are the Left”

Hosts@francisjfoster @KonstantinKisin pic.twitter.com/qL2tCBRD6E

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) July 21, 2021

 

Anyone who continues to believe the FBI didn’t run agents into groups like Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, 3 percenters for months before January 6 and didn’t have agents on the ground stoking violence that day is in massive denial https://t.co/u9qGHq51fq

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) July 21, 2021

pic.twitter.com/9s0uiB0GpO

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 19, 2021

Update:  The Biden administration's acknowledgment that the coronavirus may have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a relatively recent development.  Before Biden made that public admission, social media, news outlets, and Democrats all insisted that the Wuhan virus could only have evolved naturally.  That old narrative is no longer operative, to use Nixonian phraseology.  "Gain of function" is a new phrase describing coronavirus research in Wuhan, and it means engineering the virus so that it can be transmitted to humans. 

It's becoming clear that the virus actually didn't evolve naturally.  Instead, stories about it evolved.  First, the ability of the virus to jump from bats to people occurred naturally, so U.S. health officials said.  There was a "wet market" in Wuhan where it was supposed to have happened.  Then officials admitted that people working in the lab could have become infected.  The virus escaped.  Or it leaked.  There's little discussion in the media about why the Chinese and U.S. governments would want to modify a virus so that it infects people.  But then, it is an inescapable fact that the virus was instrumental in the defeat of Trump in the Electoral College vote.  All of which leads me to suspect that the next narrative evolution might be when someone admits that the virus wasn't leaked — to more accurately say it was distributed from the lab.

At Gateway Pundit:

The Bannon War Room on Monday was OFF THE CHARTS!

The BIG LIE is being exposed and THERE IS NOTHING THAT CAN STOP IT!

Steve invited Professor David K. Clements from New Mexico State University and retired Army intelligence captain and former baseball analyst Seth Keshel to discuss their latest analysis on the 2020 election.

Seth Keshel droppeed a BOMB on the War Room.
According to Seth, President Trump won Pennsylvania by 6-8% in 2020.

Video below and at the link.

Read the rest here.

I am sitting still in shock at what I just listened to. Biden's DOJ and a federal judge ruined a man's life because he held up a Trump flag in the Senate chamber and protested Biden's election.

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) July 19, 2021

Lefty music blogger, Bob Lefsetz, called it "heinous," the number one country hit, Am I the only one. 

Lewis’ song, “Am I the Only One,” soared to number one on the country charts despite getting no radio airtime. The song is very pro-America and slams liberals, including rock star Bruce Springsteen, for their anti-American ideas.

Some of the lyrics include, “Am I the only one who can’t take no more/Screamin’ ‘If you don’t like it, there’s the fuckin’ door,'” Lewis sings. He adds that he is willing to “take a bullet for being free.” And he also dings Springsteen with this line: “Am I the only one who quits singin’ along/Every time they play a Springsteen song?”

Read the rest here.

https://t.co/1tasW8dHGX

— Tom Bowler (@TDBowler) July 19, 2021

Sadly enough, this is not satire:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill into law that ensures children younger than 16 can operate a lemonade stand without a government permit or license.

Senate Bill 119, or Hayli’s Law, was filed by state Sen. Patrick Joyce after 11-year-old Hayli Martenez of Kankakee had her lemonade stand shut down by the local health department due to lack of running water.

Hayli Martenez started “Haylibug Lemonade” back in 2017 to raise money for her college fund. Her stand was a hit with her community in Kankakee and neighbors would buy up all of her 50 cents a cup.

In a short time, county health department officials visited the 11-year-old and told her to shut down the stand or face fines because the house she lived in did not have running water.

Read the rest here.

Says College Freshman To Man Who Escaped Socialism On A Raft

MIAMI, FL—While on his way to a summer sociology course at the University of Miami, local college freshman Eddard Pollyton noticed a Cuban American man sitting on a bench. He took the time to lecture the man, who had escaped socialism on a raft when he was young, on why socialism is actually good and how he knows a lot more about socialism than people from socialist countries.

"Greetings!" Pollyton said. "I'm Eddard, he/him.

Read the rest here.

U.S. Department of Justice deliberately delayed the investigation into Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas business dealings and potential tax law violations because it might have hurt Joe Biden's presidential election chances.

Delaware’s U.S. Attorney David Weiss allegedly postponed allowing prosecutors to obtain search warrants and issue grand jury subpoenas last summer, after facing pressure from other officials who feared the investigation’s influence on the 2020 presidential election and now-President Joe Biden’s campaign.

“They advised [him] to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election,” reported Politico, one of the many corporate media outlets that brushed off the possibility of any wrongdoing by Hunter despite the discovery of his incriminating laptop.

DOJ’s only purpose anymore is to protect the ruling regime’s friends and persecute the regime’s political enemies. It is corrupt and unsalvageable. https://t.co/A9VACBt4hN

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 16, 2021

Read the rest here.

The European Central Bank announced on Wednesday the start of a two-year investigation into the design and distribution of a digital euro.

"Given the digital transformation under way, which has the potential to transform the payments landscape and even the entire financial system, central banks must be bold and keep up with the pace of change," Fabio Panetta, a member of the ECB's executive board, said in a blog post.

A digital euro wouldn't replace cash, but would function in much the same way. Instead of paying for goods or services with banknotes, Europeans could use an electronic form of money issued by the European Central Bank or national central banks to a digital wallet.

Panetta said the central bank will aim to start developing a digital euro once the investigative period is over. That subsequent process "could take around three years," putting Europe on track to potentially roll out a digital currency in 2026.

I don't see the advantages of a digital Euro to currency holders.  One of the attractions to cryptocurrencies is decentralization and the communities of miners and validators that maintain the integrity of the blockchain.  If the central bank maintains the blockchain, how will blockchain integrity be assured?  Another attraction is anonymity.

I suspect that the central bank investigation aims to establish mechanisms the ECB will employ to manipulate its currency supply in a digital world.  Once that is accomplished and the digital Euro is widely accepted, central governments will enjoy greater abilities to monitor transactions and possibly even block them — things beyond their reach with hard currency or decentralized crypto transactions.   Read the rest here.