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
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
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.
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.
The following article was provided by Larry Reed and MoneyMetals.com
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Nineteenth century gold miners brought democracy and property rights to Australia, as well as riches. But the history was at times bloody.
Historically, the connection between gold and liberty is a potent one. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to assert—if you will pardon the pun—that they are two sides of the same coin. Australia in the 1850s provides a sterling example.
Gold’s allure dates so far back that to say it is “prehistoric” is not inaccurate. Long before any written records, it was widely prized. Though the yellow metal has also been found on every continent, it was not until 1848 in California and 1851 in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria that a genuine “rush” to acquire it unfolded on a grand scale.
The Australian Gold Rush that began in 1851 produced remarkable transformations. Australia’s population quadrupled from 437,655 that year to 1.7 million twenty years later.
For centuries before the mid-19th, dictatorial regimes quickly grabbed new gold for themselves or deployed force to stymie the efforts of ordinary people to acquire it. In the 1840s and ‘50s, both California and Australia (despite the latter being founded as a penal colony) were much freer places. Greedy kings and potentates were absent. A private citizen could buy or rent a piece of land, or stake a claim on vacant land, and keep whatever gold he found for himself. Gold fever in both California and in the Land Down Under, half a world apart, prompted large numbers of fortune-seekers to migrate and dig up whatever they could find.
Gold has multiple applications, from metallurgy to jewelry to art, but its most important utility in history has been as a preferred and freely chosen medium of exchange, or money. No other medium—especially government-issued fiat paper—yields the long-term economic stability that monetary gold can boast. Even today, the phrase “as good as gold” is a high compliment. No one ever declares that something is “as good as unbacked government paper” unless he intends it as an insult.
Big, rapacious, liberty-squelching governments typically hate gold, or at least gold in private hands as money. Why? Because they cannot print it. Because it is a reliable competitor for the people’s confidence. And because it exemplifies the very honesty that dishonest politicians despise. If they desire to control you or enrich themselves (or both), they will invariably seek to control money. They seem to know a version of the Golden Rule instinctively: He who owns the gold makes the rules.
In small, easily transportable quantities, gold represents highly concentrated wealth that its owners can take with them while escaping a repressive regime. People have concocted ingenious ways to do so, from putting it in their teeth to painting it and inserting it in wagon wheels. When governments debauch their paper currencies, gold is a primary refuge into which people flee.
During the gold rush, miners (or “diggers” as they are often called in Australia) had to pay British authorities for a gold license. It was essentially a tax.
(As a valuable precious metal with many of the same attributes as gold, silver has performed similar duties in history. It has often served as subsidiary coinage by the free choice of market participants.)
For a quarter century before the California Gold Rush, British colonial authorities tried to keep news of small gold finds in southeast Australia from becoming public. They feared a gold fever-inspired uprising amongst the more unsavory elements of society. But when thousands of Australians left to join the fun in California, the authorities reversed themselves. According to the National Museum of Australia, the governor announced a reward for anyone who could find it in commercially viable quantities. With major discoveries in the states of New South Wales and Victoria in 1851, the rush was on! Even many Australians who went to California returned home and started digging.
One of the titles I proudly hold at FEE is Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, named for an old and generous Australian friend who knows the gold business well. In the 1980s, he founded Croesus Mining and during his tenure with the firm, it produced 1.275 million ounces of gold.
“The influence of prospecting and mining in Australia runs deep,” says Ron. “Even today, it’s the single biggest reason why the country survived the coronavirus crisis and could still pay its bills.”
Expenditures last year for gold mining in Australia hit a new record, helping to make the country the world’s second largest gold exporter, behind Switzerland. Having earned his fortune in the business, Ron founded the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation and supports liberty-minded groups like FEE.
The Australian Gold Rush that began in 1851 produced remarkable transformations. Australia’s population quadrupled from 437,655 that year to 1.7 million twenty years later. Ancillary industries from agriculture to ranching blossomed. Gold financed massive railway and irrigation projects and modernized towns and cities. The National Museum of Australia asserts that because of the riches flowing from the mines, “Australians soon had the highest standard of living on earth.” Moreover, gold’s connection to liberty in Australia is direct and profound, in great measure due to an event called the Eureka Revolt.
It was the gold miners who brought democracy to the colony and protected the concept of property rights for Australians.
During the gold rush, miners (or “diggers” as they are often called in Australia) had to pay British authorities for a gold license. It was essentially a tax, though the miners could not vote. The franchise was the exclusive privilege of what Ron Manners calls “a very, very private club of people.”
Historian Alex McDermott of La Trobe University in Victoria notes that as the gold near the surface ran out, miners had to work harder and dig deeper to find the mineral, which set the stage for confrontation with the governing British authorities:
Not meeting with any luck, many miners avoided paying the license fee, hiding down shafts or running off through the trees when police made periodic sweeps of the goldfields to check for licenses. The police, a pretty rough and raw lot, responded by cracking down. Anyone found without a license on them—even if they’d left it back in their tent while going down the water-soaked shaft, for instance—was arrested and carted off to the lockup. If no lockup was nearby, they could just be chained up to a tree and left there for hours, or overnight.
To say this infuriated the miners is to understate the case significantly. They figured they were British subjects in a British colony—just because they’d sailed halfway round the world to get there didn’t mean they could be deprived of their rights and have punishment such as arbitrary imprisonment inflicted on them.
This amounted to “taxation without representation,” and the miners said so in those very same words, echoing American rebels of the 1770s. Ron Manners is even less charitable toward the authorities and their police in Victoria than McDermott. As he puts it,
The license fee was collected by a bunch of armed thugs who were not paid a wage at all. They were paid out of the license fees that they collected and the process of doing that was to go around to the top of every shaft, shouting down “Produce your license!” The digger had to then climb up the ladder laboriously, produce their license and then go down the ladder again. Then about an hour later another thug would come along requesting, “Produce your license!” The prospector would have to climb up the ladder again. They were not getting any work done. How long can you put up with this nonsense?
The monthly license fee being extracted by force from the diggers was equivalent to a week’s wages. That is a tax of about 25 percent with almost nothing offered in return. They say that a fine is a tax for doing wrong, and that a tax is a fine for doing well. But this tax or fine was being forcibly extracted and it applied whether you found gold or not.
When local magistrates cleared the owner of the Eureka Hotel in Ballarat of murdering a digger, other miners were outraged. They burned the hotel to the ground, then demanded that the Governor release the arsonists, abolish the gold license, and grant men the right to vote. They burned their gold licenses, built a crude fort they called the Eureka Stockade and hoisted for the first time a flag featuring the constellation of the Southern Cross. That flag has ever since symbolized freedom against the tyranny of colonial authorities and the independent spirit of Australians.
As news reached them that British troops were on their way to crush the rebellion, the miners of the Eureka Stockade swore the following oath: “We swear by the Southern Cross to truly stand by each other and defend our rights and liberties!”
The miners fought valiantly but were so vastly outgunned that the battle, which took place on December 3, 1854 near Ballarat in the state of Victoria, lasted a mere 15 minutes. Thirty miners and five soldiers were killed. In one of its videos cited below this article, the National Museum of Australia documents the extraordinary events that followed:
The government may have won the battle but it lost the war as Victorians overwhelmingly supported the defeated miners. The rebels were acquitted of treason and the gold license was replaced by a “miner’s right,” which allowed the diggers to mine, vote, and occupy vacant land for a small annual fee.
Miners were subsequently elected to Victoria’s Legislative Council, including their leader, Peter Lalor. This upswell of activism for democratic values led directly to other reforms important to Australia’s political development as a free society—reforms such as the secret ballot and eventually, women’s right to vote (1908).
Since the Gold Rush of 1851-71, more than 2,500 tons of gold have poured forth from the mines of Victoria’s Golden Triangle. That river of yellow metal produced the two largest chunks of gold ever found in the world—the “Welcome Stranger” nugget (173 pounds) and the “Welcome Nugget” (152 pounds).
In a remarkable way, Ron Manners explains, “It was the gold miners who brought democracy to the colony and protected the concept of property rights for Australians.”
That is quite a feat, wouldn’t you say? In the entire history of paper money, I can recall no instance in which one could make the comparable claim, “It was government with its printing presses that brought democracy and protected property rights.”
So to all the reasons that governments don’t like gold, add one more: Sooner or later, it beats them. Three cheers for Australia’s gold miners, past and present!
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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
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.
