Tag: oppression

Today’s blacklisted American: Democrats introduce Senate bill demanding companies censor social media

11:54 am

Democrats: No soapbox free speech allowed
Democrats: No soapbox allowed! Photo: GeorgeLouis

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em! Two Democrats, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-New Mexico), yesterday proposed a new law that would force social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to immediately remove any posts on their platforms that includes medical information those Democrats disagree with.

If the companies do not do so, they will be held liable for those posts.

As has become typical of Democrats, they label any information they disagree with as “misinformation.” To make sure their definition is sustained, their bill would have the federal government determine what is correct and not correct. That definition would then be used to justify silencing any other opinions.

Such a law would essentially repeal the First Amendment of the Constitution. Free speech will be banned. Only government-approved speech in connection with health will be allowed. If such a law was upheld by the courts (a very distinct possibility in today’s legal culture), it could quickly be expanded to cover all speech on any subject.

There is some irony in this Democratic Party proposal. » Read more

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Court rejects Viasat’s effort to stop SpaceX Starlink launches

9:31 am

Capitalism in space? A three-judge panel on July 20, 2021 rejected Viasat’s request for a temporary injunction that would have stopped all SpaceX Starlink launches until Viasat’s lawsuit against that constellation is settled.

While this decision does not settle the lawsuit, it allows SpaceX launches to continue, and likely cause the case to be expedited in the courts. The decision also suggests that the court does not favor Viasat’s claims, which are somewhat dubious on their face, and appear designed merely to shut down a successful competitor through the use of the courts.

Viasat alleged that the FCC did not comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it approved SpaceX satellite launches because the commission “refused to conduct any environmental assessment.” Viasat told the DC Circuit court that SpaceX launches should be halted because of potential environmental harms when satellites are taken out of orbit; light pollution that alters the night sky; orbital debris; collision risks that may affect Viasat; and because “Viasat will suffer unwarranted competitive injury.”

The FCC by the way disputes Viasat’s claims, and filed its own brief defending SpaceX.

Viasat’s real concern is that its satellite internet service will be considered inferior to SpaceX’s and will thus lose customers to it. Too bad. Competition means you step up your game and do better, not go to court to try to shut down your opposition.

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Russia’s new module for ISS, Nauka, in trouble after launch

12:02 pm

The new big Russian module for ISS, dubbed Nauka and successfully launched yesterday, appears to have a serious engine issue, according to these twitter reports by Anthony Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com.

From his two tweets:

UPDATE: #Nauka’s main engines (pictured in operation) are currently out of commission. Specialists are troubleshooting the issue and developing a backup rendezvous plan. The module has ~30 stable orbits at current altitude.

…one more thing: at this point, there is no information that Nauka’s tank membranes have leaks in orbit. Those rumors in the Russian press might be a garbled echo of my reporting here ;)->

Nauka’s launch came about fourteen years behind scheduled, delayed by many engineering and quality control problems. Its construction began more than a quarter century ago. If Nauka fails to dock with ISS the Russians will face a disaster to their space program that almost cannot be measured. It will certainly make the Chinese much more reluctant to depend on Russia in their supposed partnership to build a base on the Moon or to work together on China’s space station. It should also make the U.S. far more reluctant to depend on Russia in its Artemis program.

Worse, it is questionable the Russians can get anything built in any reasonable time to replace Nauka. How can anyone expect them to build anything in a reasonable time for either of the U.S. or Chinese interplanetary projects?

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Today’s blacklisted American: Baltimore’s attorney attempts, and fails, to get FCC to silence and censor local Fox radio station

11:34 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled for conservatives
No first amendment allowed for conservatives,
according to Baltimore’s government attorney.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em! On May 5, 2021 the office of Baltimore’s state attorney, Democrat Marilyn Mosby, filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against a local Fox news station, demanding that the FCC censor and shut down the station because it has repeatedly published stories that were critical of Mosby and her policies.

The May 5 complaint, addressed to FCC acting chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, accuses WBFF (a.k.a. FOX45 News) — the Baltimore-based Fox-affiliate — of partaking in an “intentional crusade against … Mosby, which given today’s politically charged and divisive environment, is extremely dangerous.” It also details what Mosby’s communications director, Zy Richardson, believes to be a “disconcerting and dangerous pattern: beginning with a slanted, rigged, misleading, or inflammatory headline; followed by conspiracy theory; and supported with guest commentary from disgruntled ex-employees or political opponents that[sic] lend false credibility.”

“The truth of the matter,” Richardson says, “is I am deeply worried that if the WBFF’s coverage is not curtailed and ceased, then someone is going to get hurt. I implore and encourage you … to enlist the full investigative and enforcement powers granted to you by the Federal government to take action against the WBFF as soon as possible.” [emphasis mine]

The blatent oppressive nature of this demand — in utter violation of the first amendment of the Constitution and all that America has stood for during its first two hundred plus years — should be somewhat shocking, but sadly it has become so common from Democratic Party politicians and many of their supporters in the past five years that it hardly made the news when it happened in early May.

Think about it however. » Read more

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New studies show that the biggest risk to kids from COVID are the policies of governments

3:28 pm

New studies about COVID-19 and its effect on children continue to show that the strigent health policies being demanded by government agencies like the CDC and WHO and many Democrats are actually the biggest health threat for children than the virus itself.

First, a major survey of 48,000 children who had become infected with COVID-19 has found that absolutely no healthy children died from the disease.

Dr. Marty Makary is a medical expert and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Carey Business School. His research team “worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020.”

After studying comprehensive data on thousands of children, the team “found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.”

Let me repeat that. They looked at tens of thousands of kids under the age of 18 and could not find one case where a healthy child died. All recovered. None needed a vaccine, as their young and very strong immune systems did what those immune systems have always done, fought off a sickness to give them an immunity for the rest of their lives.

So kids are safe from COVID, even if they are not vaccined and actually catch the virus and get sick.

At the same time, other studies have found that both masks and the vaccines are actually a greater health threat to children than the virus itself.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Army chaplin, threatened with punishment for criticizing Biden administration, sues and wins Pyrrhic victory

11:59 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled for conservatives
No first amendment allowed for conservatives.

Today’s blacklist story illustrates a growing trend I am finding in these stories of the modern leftist effort to silence and blackball anyone who criticizes or opposes it. Increasingly, the victims of this intolerance are fighting back, both in public and in the courts. How successful that resistance has been however remains unclear.

In today’s story, a decorated Army chaplin had posted in January on Facebook strong criticism of the incoming Biden administration’s decision to allow men who claim they are women (and vice versa) to serve in the military, and was immediately sanctioned by his superiors for doing so.

[U.S. Army Chaplain (Major) Andrew Calvert] objected to the anticipated government policy change. “How is rejecting reality (biology) not evidence that a person is mentally unfit (ill), and thus making that person unqualified to serve. There is little difference in this than over those who believe and argue for a ‘flat earth,’ despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” Calvert wrote in his comment, according to Army Times.

“The motivation is different, but the argument is the same. This person is a MedBoard for Mental Wellness waiting to happen. What a waste of military resources and funding!” he concluded.

Following an investigation, Calvert was issued a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) on April 22 by Lieutenant General Robert P. White.

In May Calvert obtained legal support and sued. Less than a month later, the Army backed down, ending its persecution of Calvert, clearing his record.

That Calvert fought the effort by the military to reprimand him for his opinions is commendable. Nonetheless, in this case the victory appears somewhat hollow.
» Read more

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Democrat proposes new tax on private manned spaceflight

9:48 am

That didn’t take long! Mere hours after New Shepard completed its first suborbital manned commercial flight, a Democrat in the House of Representatives introduced a bill in Congress to impose a tax on private manned spaceflight.

Oregon Democrat Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, on Tuesday introduced what he is calling the Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions (SPACE) Tax Act, which would create excise taxes on commercial space flights carrying human passengers for purposes other than scientific research.

“Space travel isn’t a tax free holiday for the wealthy,” Blumenauer wrote on Twitter. “We pay taxes on plane tickets. Billionaires flying into space—producing no scientific value—should do the same, and then some.”

The measure would include a per-passenger tax on the price of a commercial flight to space and a two-tiered excise tax for each launch into space. The first tier would apply to flights between 50 miles and 80 miles above Earth’s surface, while the second “significantly higher” rate would apply to flights more than 80 miles above Earth’s surface.

This typical Democratic Party response to the acheivement of others reminds me of a pertinent quote from Ronald Reagan:

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

While Reagan was describing many of the actions of politicans from both parties, the Democratic Party is today particularly abusive. Private enterprise has in the past decade done things in space the government and NASA spent years trying to accomplish, with zero success, while wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. The Democrats resent that success, and are very eager to squelch it. Rather than have any American achievement in space, created by the citizens of the nation and independent of their interference, they would rather destroy it. Even as they extort as much money as they can from it.

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Israel: Airborne High Power Laser Weapon test

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I’m not sure if this fits as an evening pause, but the engineering is startling, and has ramifications both good and bad, for the future. The first half of the video shows the test, the second half explains it.

Israelis are surrounded by neighbors dominated by a culture that wishes to kill them all. They need this kind of defense, especially because the world will no longer defend them against this threat of genocide. In fact, many of our ruling “intellectual” class celebrate that possibility.

That they are forced to develop this technology sadly means that some bad actors will get it soon as well. The dark age is so fast approaching that it takes the breath away. That this is where we are, on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, is tragic beyond words.

Hat tip Jim Malamace.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Catholic hospitals threatened with cancellation by University of California

12:13 pm

Religious beliefs banned by University of California
Religious beliefs: Banned by University of California.

The modern dark age: The Board of Regents of the University of California (UC) on June 23, 2021 voted to end its affiliation with all Catholic hospitals if they do not agree to perform “abortions, euthanasia, assisted suicide and the direct sterilization of patients,” in direct violation of their Christian religious beliefs.

The policy states that UC physicians practicing at a sectarian hospital must be permitted to provide any treatment at that location to a patient who can’t be safely transferred to another facility — even if the treatment would violate religious restrictions. Affiliated hospitals will have until Dec. 31, 2023, to comply with the policy, or the affiliation agreement must be canceled.

“We know that transfers are not always in the patient’s interest”, board Chair John A. Pérez, who crafted the key language approved by the board, said after the board’s meeting, conducted remotely Wednesday afternoon. [emphasis mine]

Do you see the lie in the highlighted words? All of these treatments are optional, and can be scheduled. I can see almost no medical issue preventing the safe transfer of a patient from of a Catholic hospital in order to get one of these procedures. In fact, I can’t even see a reason for any patient who wants an “abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, or direct sterilization” to even be in a Catholic hospital.

The only reason the university’s Board of Regents has for imposing such a rule is to either force Catholics to violate their religious beliefs, or to get such religious hospitals blackballed from serving any patients,. and thus in the long run destroy them as institutions.

As noted by the Alliance of Catholic Healthcare,
» Read more

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Musk donates more big money to revitalizing downtown Brownsville

12:57 pm

It appears that a charitable foundation established by Elon Musk has recently decided to up its donations to the Brownsville Community Improvements Corporation by an extra $1 million, the money aimed at helping to revitalized the downtown of Brownsville, the nearest large city to SpaceX’s Boca Chica spaceport.

The donation was revealed during remarks by Josh Mejia, executive director of the Brownsville Community Improvements Corporation, during a Brownsville developers luncheon .

In his remarks, Mejia, pictured above, gave an update on the e-Bridge Center and other quality of life improvements coming to Brownsville. But, he received the biggest applause when he mentioned inward investment by Elon Musk. “I was texting back and forth with my board members and about 45 minutes ago I receive an email from the Musk Foundation. It is like perfect timing. It is like they know we are here. Well, they just mentioned they donated another million (dollars) towards this program. So, now we have $2 million,” Mejia said. The audience cheered.

This donation is all part of the modern game that requires big business enterprises to make payoffs to local and national politicians and “community activists.” Both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos know this, and are playing the game to hilt. Both know that the politicians and “community activists” have been telling them, “Nice business you got here, shame if something happened to it.” Bezos responded by donating big to DC’s Air & Space museum, while spreading the wealth to many space advocacy groups.

Musk is instead focusing his payoffs to the local community, where it might do the most good for both him and the locals that his business affects. This donation is not the first he has made to Boca Chica, Brownsville, and south Texas. His foundation has also donated $20 million to the county schools, and another $8 million for other downtown Brownsville projects. The results, obviously helped by the business SpaceX is also bringing to the town, have been noticeable.

In the months since Musk pledged his $10 million, at least 10 downtown properties have gone under contract with interested buyers, said real estate broker Bob Torres Jr. Buildings that used to lease for 25 cents a square foot are now leasing for $1 to $1.50 per square foot.

Home prices have increased nationwide due to the pandemic and low inventory. In Brownsville, this trend has been exacerbated by SpaceX. “People are buying houses sight unseen from Washington state, Portland, Oregon,” Torres said. “They’re going above the asking price, which hardly ever happens.” Real estate broker Bruno Zavaleta III had a client drive from Atlanta and buy three houses.

According to the Brownsville/South Padre Island Board of Realtors, the median price for a home in Brownsville was $212,900 in June, up 47 percent from June 2020. To help with inventory, Esperanza Homes is building 675 houses in northern Brownsville. It will develop this master-planned community over the next six to eight years with a nonprofit community housing development organization called “come dream. come build.”

This pumping of donations by Musk to the local community however will not sell well with the mafia in Washington. The money isn’t going to them, and bullies don’t like that, even if the money is really doing good. Bezos understands this. It doesn’t really matter if the money he donates accomplishes anything real. What matters is that he has paid off the thugs who could make big trouble for him in the future.

Right now it is unclear who’s strategy will work best for protecting each company’s interests. Much will hinge on what each company actually accomplishes in the next few years. SpaceX is clearly ahead in this area, but Blue Origin can certainly catch up.

Hat tip Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

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Today’s blacklisted American: 19th century poet Walt Whitman

12:24 pm

Walt Whitman, banned
Great poets like Walt Whitman
now banned at Rutgers

The onset of the modern dark age: Ivy league college Rutgers University in Camden New Jersey is now removing its monument to 19th poet Walt Whitman because of petitions and slanders against him by today’s blacklist culture.

Rutgers University-Camden will remove a statue of the famous poet Walt Whitman from the center of campus as a result of activists’ petitions and a recommendation from a committee of scholars. The statue of Whitman, featured prominently in the front courtyard of Camden’s Campus Center, will be “relocated to a historically relevant site on campus and contextualized,” interim Chancellor Margaret Marsh recently announced in an email to students and employees.

That new location has yet to be announced by campus officials.

A petition circulated last year stated that “the statue of Walt Whitman glorifies a man who we should not hold such a place of honor on our campus. … He instead stood for white supremacy and racism against Black and Indigenous Americans.”

In other words, because Whitman was a man of his time and not perfect, his memory must be wiped from all history, his poems burned, and all effort to teach his poetry ended forthwith.

This effort is quite symptomatic of the entire modern leftist effort to slander all of American history.
» Read more

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The future of SLS?

8:59 am

In this long NASASpaceflight.com article describing the building the second core stage for NASA’s SLS rocket (the stage scheduled to take astronauts around the Moon in September 2023) was also additional information about the status of later core stages, still not entirely funded.

The key tidbit of information is this:

Core Stage-3 is the first build under the new “Stages Production and Evolution Contract” that was initiated in 2019; the contract is not yet completely finalized, with the latest estimate for definitization being early in Fiscal Year 2022 (which begins on October 1st, 2021).

Both NASA and Boeing are proceeding under the assumption that this Congress will approve full funding for later SLS rockets after flights one and two. While the signs strongly suggest that funding for at least two more rockets will arrive, that funding still depends largely on the success of the first unmanned SLS test flight, tentatively scheduled for November-December 2021.

It also depends on the political winds, and when Starship starts reaching orbit somewhat regularly (and cheaply). When that happens, all bets are off on the future of SLS. At some point it will become obvious that it can’t compete against that SpaceX rocket, and Congress will shift its funding appropriately.

Sadly, knowing Congress and the corrupt DC culture, this change will likely only happen after a lot of taxpayer money is wasted on a rocket that is simply too expensive and too cumbersome, and thus not practical for making space exploration possible.

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China launches four satellites

8:35 am

Using its Long March 2C rocket, China today successfully launched four satellites, three military reconnaissance satellites and one data communications satellite.

While the first stage crashed inside China (no word on whether it landed near habitable areas), China also claimed it attempted a recovery of the fairings for reuse. At this time no information has been released on what was achieved.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

23 China
20 SpaceX
11 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 29 to 23 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Booksellers want to burn a book they do not like

12:37 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled by American Booksellers
No first amendment allowed at the
American Booksellers Association.

The horrible ironies of this story are beyond the pale. The American Booksellers Association (ABA), a non-profit trade organization founded in 1900 to represent independent bookstores while also defending freedom of speech, has now violently condemned the publication of a book that raised questions about the modern perverse sexual movement and its unbridled support of sex changes for young children.

First, some details about that book and its author:

Irreversible Damage [by Abigail Shrier] is not some partisan screed. In the book, Shrier delves into the startling trend of adolescent teenage girls identifying as transgender, which a scientific study described as a “social contagion.” Shrier endorses transgender identity and even hormones and surgery for some people, but she warns against “treatments” that will leave many girls permanently scarred, noting that an increasing number of those who previously identified as transgender have de-transitioned.

Note how careful Shrier is to label herself in favor of sex changes for children even as she raises fair questions about some of these procedures and the possible harm they may do.

No matter. No one at all is to be permitted to question the left’s modern sexual agenda. When the ABA included a mention of this book in its July membership newsletter, the control freaks came out in force, demanding retribution and the burning of Shrier’s book.

And the ABA immediately complied, kowtowing like groveling slaves in its statement of apology.
» Read more

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Dictatorship overthrown in Michigan

11:27 am

A victory for law and freedom: The state senate in Michigan yesterday approved a repeal of the emergency powers law that Democratic Party governor Gretchen Witmer used last year to assume the equivalent of total dictatorial powers.

A Michigan House of Representatives GOP spokesman told news outlets that the chamber will vote on the petition soon. If it does not within approximately one month, or if the vote fails, then voters will decide on whether to repeal the emergency powers law in the next election. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature in Michigan.

If the House follows the Senate, then an emergency declaration will be good for 28 days before requiring the legislature’s approval to be extended.

Of course, the Democrats all voted against this repeal, as they like the idea of giving a Democratic Party governor absolute power that cannot be opposed. That the petition was brought to the legislature by the citizens of the state, as per Michigan law, also means nothing to them. They like absolute power, and want to wield it against those citizens.

That the state’s own Supreme Court has also ruled unconstitutional the emergency power law now being repealed, stating it was “an undue ceding of legislative authority to the executive,” makes no difference to the Democrats as well. And Witmer demonstrated this quite starkly when she defied that court ruling and invoked the law again to keep her lockdown of the state on-going, apparently forever.

The Democratic Party today has become the party of dictatorship, corruption, bigotry, and blacklists. Remember that the next time you vote.

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Thales Alenia to build first two modules of Axiom’s commercial space station

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: The Italian company Thales Alenia today announced it has finalized the contract to build the first two modules of Axiom’s private commercial space station, set to be docked to ISS initially but eventually to fly independent once ISS is decommissioned.

Total price for the contract is 110 million euros. According to the press release, they are targeting 2024 and 2025 for launching these modules, which will be able to house as many as eight residents.

Based on its past successful experience in building modules for the International Space Station, Thales Alenia Space is responsible for the design, development, assembly and test of the primary structure and the Micrometeoroid & Debris Protection System for the two Axiom modules.

The welding activities of the primary structure of the first module will start in September 2021, with the assembly process concluding in 2022. The first module will arrive at Axiom facilities in Houston in July 2023, where Axiom will integrate and outfit the core systems and certify it for flight prior to shipping to the launch facility.

With the launch of this station, human spaceflight in the United States will become completely independent of the federal government. Private companies will own the rockets, spacecraft, and stations, and the government will no longer have a major say on what goes on in space. The NASA bureaucracy that makes getting an experiment onto ISS cumbersome, difficult, and discouraging will be out of a job. (An example: In the 2000s American scientists studying plant growth in weightlessness ended up launching their experiments with the Russians because getting NASA approval turned out to be too difficult.)

This doesn’t mean that it will be easy to get a payload or experiment onto Axiom’s station. The demand will be quite high. It just means that the decision will no longer reside with the government, but with the private companies and citizens of the United States.

As it always should have been.

Furthermore, that the demand is going to exceed the supply will mean that additional stations will be built, and quickly, because the lure of profit will be there. For example, many of the commercial medical experiments that were on the verge of paying off but were shut down after the Challenger accident in 1986 could very well be brought back to life.

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Arizona election audit uncovers more evidence of malfeasance in November 2020 election

4:01 pm

In hearings today before the Arizona Senate, election audit officials described strong evidence of misconduct and election fraud in Maricopa County, the state’s largest.

Several issues were quite startling. First,

Audit expert Doug Logan revealed during Thursday’s Arizona state election hearing that auditors had reported there 74,000 mail-in ballots received and included in the 2020 election that were never recorded as being mailed out.

Ballots are not something that appear out of thin air. They are only supposed to be provided by the election board, under very strict rules. For there to be 74,000 voted ballots that the board never issued is suspect, to say the least.

Second,

the hearing revealed that 11,326 voters in Maricopa County were not on voter rolls on Nov. 7 but were on voter rolls on Dec. 4 and were marked as having voted in the Nov. 3 election.

That’s more than eleven thousand votes from people who were not registered to vote on election day.

Finally, they discovered that the record-keeping made it difficult if not impossible to match up duplicate ballots with the originals. According to the system used in Arizona, duplicate ballots are sometimes generated manually when the original is damaged and cannot be read by the tabulator. When this happens, the duplicate is supposed to include a serial number linking it to the original. This way no one can generate many duplicate (and fake) ballots to help their preferred candidate.

The audit found numerous duplicates with no serial numbers, meaning they could have been generated by someone to help their preferred candidate.

Would these these facts have changed the outcome? This is not known yet. We will have to wait until the final report, expected in August. Either way, these problems prove that the election was, at the least, poorly run, with the strong likelihood that actual criminal conduct occurred. And that last allegation is reinforced by the stone-walling of Maricopa County’s election board, which apparently does not want anyone to take a close independent look at what they have been doing.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Opponents of critical race theory in Virginia subjected to harassment campaign

11:40 am

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Are Americans finally waking up?

They’re coming for you next: The parents in Virginia who are putting together a campaign to keep the teaching of the Marxist and racist program called “critical race theory” out of their local schools have been subjected to a harassment campaign that included hate mail, threats, and even slanderous letters sent directly to their employers.

One example cited in the article:

An anti-critical race theory (CRT) activist, Jessica Mendez, says that in June her employer was sent a flyer that called her an “active racist.” “You should be ashamed to employ a known and active racist!” the flyer, obtained by Daily Caller, read. The flyer added, “Yes, what is wrong with her? She’s a racist!!”

It further showed photos of Mendez at various anti-CRT rallies protesting the curriculum of Loudoun County Public Schools. Loudoun County has been at the center of a revolt against the implementation of CRT in school curricula that has spread across the country.

» Read more

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New research: COVID is harmless to children

11:03 am

Surprise, Surprise! A new study of all hospital admissions in England from March 2020 through February 2021 found that, for people younger than 18 deaths from COVID-19 were “incredibly rare.”

Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.

Taken together, the unusually comprehensive studies could provide some comfort to parents who have been shielding children who they thought might be vulnerable to severe complications from COVID-19. “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave of the pandemic,” Russell Viner, who studies adolescent health at the University College London, told reporters.

In some cases, those efforts might have done more harm than good, added Elizabeth Whittaker, an infectious-disease specialist at Imperial College London. “Shields are very leaky,” she said. “The shields have not been perfect, and have probably caused more stress and anxiety for families than benefit.”

This study merely proves what common sense has known for eons, and was backed up by decades of research, both before and after the arrival of COVID-19. To kill an epidemic of a flu-like disease like COVID, the best thing you can do is to expose as many healthy children as possible to it, while keeping those children away from the more vulnerable elderly population. The children will quickly gain immunity, without risk, and then help limit the spread of the disease. More important, once immune they and their grandparents can once again see each other, with no risk to either.

Instead, today’s modern panicky and emotional expert class shut everything down, and ended up causing more harm than necessary, in all ways. Businesses were destroyed, old people died in solitary confinement, and children were subjected to child abuse with masks and social distancing.

Worse, that expert class still refuses to admit it was wrong, and in many ways is doubling down on its stupid. Witness the government’s top expert, Anthony Fauci, and his claim only yesterday that COVID-19 is dangerous to children and that toddlers older than two need to wear masks. He, like most of the government health officials who have been given vast power in the past year, speaks not from data but from his own personal opinion, shaped solely by politics.

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FAA threatens shutdown of SpaceX’s Starship program at Boca Chica

9:33 am

Banned by the FAA?
Starship banned by the FAA?

They’re coming for you next: An FAA official revealed yesterday that the agency has not approved the launch tower that SpaceX is building for its Starship/Superheavy rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, and threatened that if disapproved the government would force the company to tear it down.

The Federal Aviation Administration warned Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a letter two months ago that the company’s work on a launch tower for future Starship rocket launches is yet unapproved, and will be included in the agency’s ongoing environmental review of the facility in Boca Chica, Texas. “The company is building the tower at its own risk,” an FAA spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday, noting that the environmental review could recommend taking down the launch tower.

The FAA last year began an environmental review of SpaceX’s Starship development facility, as Musk’s company said it planned to apply for licenses to launch the next-generation rocket prototypes from Boca Chica. While the FAA completed an environmental assessment of the area in 2014, that review was specific to SpaceX’s much-smaller Falcon series of rockets.

This revelation from FAA officials is most interestingly timed, coming on the same day as this garbage article about the terrible environmental damages some activists imagine SpaceX’s launch facility might someday cause. As is usual for a mainstream news source, the article makes no reference to the wildlife preserve that surrounds the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where we have empirical proof for more than a half century that a spaceport does no harm to the environment and actually acts to protect it from development.

Nor was this the only such attack article in the past two days. Here is just a sampling:
» Read more

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Evidence found proving Georgia ballots were counted multiple times in 2020 election

3:31 pm

The audit of 147,000 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, has now found definitive proof that the same ballots were counted multiple times, thereby manufacturing fake votes.

The link takes you to a Twitter video showing examples of several absolutely identical ballots that were run through the tabulators multiple times to produced fake votes. The multiple scans were also done on the same tabulator, meaning it was likely done by the same person.

This proves that there was vote tampering in Fulton County. The investigation now has to determine who did it, which will be possible because the ballots show the tabulator used and when. Linking this to footage on security cameras will determine the perpetrator.

The audit also has to determine the extent of the fraud. One or two ballots tabulated twice is not significant. There is other evidence that suggests thousands of ballots were tabulated improperly and intentionally in this manner. If the audit demonstrates this, and calculates the number of votes involved, it could prove the election in Georgia was invalid.

At a minimum it proves that Georgia needs a complete overall of its election system, including a complete house-cleaning of all involved, especially in Fulton County.

UPDATE: Read this detail report on the new allegations and discoveries that point to outright fraud in the Georgia November 2020 vote tallies. It captures the whole story very nicely.

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Today’s blacklisted American: School district fires teachers for expressing their opinions publicly

1:00 pm

Modern science!
Modern education in Oregon: Facts don’t matter!

Persecution is now cool! An Oregon school district is moving to fire two teachers because they began a campaign to keep the bathrooms in their schools male and female only.

The teachers are suing the school district to keep their jobs.

Assistant principal Rachel Damiano and science teacher Katie Medart of North Middle School face a pre-termination hearing before the school board Thursday. They are seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO) and preliminary injunction as they continue suing the Grants Pass School District for violating their speech rights under the U.S. and Oregon constitutions.

…The district argues the federal court can’t reinstate Damiano and Medart to their positions, from which they’ve been on paid leave for three months for “inappropriate behavior,” unless the school board accepts the superintendent’s recommendation to fire them.
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Facebook gets out of satellite business; “sells” its employees to Amazon

10:02 am

Capitalism in space: Facebook has now apparently abandoned a project to launch its own communications satellites and instead has made a deal with Amazon whereby it sold its satellite division to the Bezos-founded company, where they joined Amazon’s Kuiper communications satellite project.

Over the past year, Amazon has revealed details about Project Kuiper’s antenna design, selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket for the initial satellite launches, and acquired still more office space for Kuiper employees in Redmond.

According to The Information, the employees who came to Kuiper from Facebook in April are based in the Los Angeles area. They are said to include physicists as well as optical, prototyping, mechanical and software engineers who have worked on aeronautical systems and wireless networks. One of the employees, Jin Bains, was formerly Facebook’s head of Southern California connectivity and is now described on his LinkedIn page as a director on the Project Kuiper team.

The Information reported that Amazon paid Facebook as part of the deal for the employee switchover, but did not provide further details. “It’s not unheard of for big companies to buy groups of employees from one another, just as they often buy small startups to beef up staff in various parts of their business,” The Information’s Sarah Krouse and Sylvia Varnham O’Regan explained. [emphasis mine]

This deal reveals a number of immediate facts, as well as one long term troubling one. First, it indicates as mentioned Facebook’s abandonment of its space ambitions.

Second, it suggests that Amazon might finally be recognizing that the people running its Kuiper satellite project are taking far too long to get it off the ground. Though proposed approximately the same time as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, Kuiper remains unlaunched with no launches even scheduled, while SpaceX has more than 1,500 satellites in orbit, has been providing test service to customers in selected areas, and is about to become operational globally. This difference is achievement might be explained by this fact: The person Amazon hired to run its Kuiper project was someone Elon Musk fired in 2018 from his Starlink project because that person was taking too long to get it built and launched.

The new hires suggest that Amazon might have finally recognized this issue.

Finally, the long term troubling fact.
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More evidence of shocking fraud in Georgia’s 2020 election tally

2:57 pm

The petitioners in a lawsuit claiming significant fraud and vote tampering in Georgia during the November 2020 election have announced today in a press release [pdf] further evidence that are downright shocking if true.

The VoterGA team found 7 falsified audit tally sheets containing fabricated vote totals for their respective batches. For example, a batch containing 59 actual ballot images for Joe Biden, 42 for Donald Trump and 0 for Jo Jorgenson was reported as 100 for Biden and 0 for Trump. The seven batches of ballot images with 554 votes for Joe Biden, 140 votes for Donald Trump and 11 votes for Jo Jorgenson had tally sheets in the audit falsified to show 850 votes for Biden, 0 votes for Trump and 0 votes for Jorgenson.

Fulton Co. failed to include over 100,000 tally sheets, including more than 50,000 from mail-in ballots, when the results were originally published for the full hand count audit conducted by the office of the Secretary of State for the November 3 rd 2020 election. Those tally sheets remained missing until late February when the county supplemented their original audit results.

Petitioners contend that Fulton County did not provide drop box transfer forms for at least three pickup days when obligated to do so via an Open Records Request. Those missing forms are still needed to provide chain of custody proof for about 5,000 ballots. [emphasis mine]

The evidence suggests that the tally sheets, used to make the final count, are filled with fraud and fabrications designed to steal the election for Joe Biden, changing the totals in the examples given above to remove 151 Trump/Jorgenson votes while adding 296 non-existent Biden votes to the total.

That Fulton County has failed to provide 100,000 tally sheets, and stalled for as long as it could to turn those sheets over, suggests that election officials there were well aware of these and many more fabrications, and wished to hide them.

In other words, they were partners in the crime, and have been trying to conceal this fact. One wonders what we would find if a full audit was done of all 100,000 tally sheets.

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Today’s blacklisted American: YouTube shuts down conservative channel during its annual conference

12:03 pm

banned by YouTube
No free speech for conservatives on YouTube!

Blacklists are back and YouTube’s got ’em! The American Conservative Union (ACU) was banned by YouTube this week, a ban that coincided precisely with the ACU’s annual convention, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), thus preventing it from airing content from the event.

The ACU, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), received “a strike” on their account from YouTube on July 9, preventing them from uploading new content for a week. This includes ACU’s CPAC 2021 Part 2 in Dallas, Texas, and Trump’s CPAC speech scheduled for Sunday, the organization said in a statement.

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House slams military for not reforming contracting for space missions

9:28 am

Government marches on, to nowhere! The House Appropriations Committee has issued a report strongly criticizing the Air Force and the new Space Force for its failure to reform in any way its contract acquisition management, even though that was the prime reason Congress created the Space Force in the first place.

The report dedicates an entire page to detailing the committee’s dissatisfaction with what it sees as foot-dragging on space acquisition reform — which was one of the primary congressional rationales for the creation of the new space service in the first place. Indeed, the [appropriations committee] reiterates: “The Committee believes the Space Force was established to bring greater attention and focus to fixing its acquisition issues because previous attempts to do so did not produce lasting results.”

The [committee’s] concerns include that that Department of the Air Force — which oversees the Space Force much as the Navy oversees the Marine Corp — still has no clear plan for creating a separate management chain for space acquisition. Similar concerns were voiced at a May hearing by both the chair and ranking members of the HAC defense subcommittee, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., respectively.

None of this should be a surprise. The reason the Space Force was advocated by some reformers was to get it out from under Air Force control and allow it to decide for itself what it needed. The belief was that this would streamline contracting and project development.

The fear, which I expressed repeatedly, was that the swamp in Washington would instead use this as an opportunity not to streamline operations but to create a whole new bureaucracy. That is standard operating procedure for government bureaucracies. Any time Congress has mandated a new agency designed to reduce bureaucracy it has for more than a century instead led to a larger bureaucracy, with nothing streamlined.

It appears the latter is what is now happening with the Space Force.

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Today’s blacklisted American: History professor slandered and ostracized for noting the many historical errors of the NY Times 1619 project

1:17 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
A witch hunt: What passes for intellectual discussion
at Central Connecticut State University

Persecution is now cool! A tenured history professor is under vicious and slanderous attack by the faculty and administration of his college because he has publicly and privately opposed the use in its history curriculum the New York Times 1619 project.

Jay Bergman, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University [CCSU], wrote to the state’s superintendents earlier in the year asking them to not embed the curriculum, saying it “presents America’s history as driven, nearly exclusively, by white racism” and that “nearly everything else in the 1619 Project, is entirely false, mostly false, or misleading.”

As Bergman also noted,
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Today’s blacklisted American: YouTube shuts down channel that routinely broadcasts Trump rallies

1:28 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled at YouTube
No first amendment allowed at YouTube.

Persecution is now cool! One day prior to the July 3, 2021 Trump rally in Florida, YouTube unilaterally suspended Right Side Broadcasting, the channel most well known for live streaming such events.

The suspension was for seven days. YouTube also deleted the channel’s videos from several other Trump events. From Right Side Broadcasting blog announcement:

YouTube has suspended RSBN from live streaming and posting content to their YouTube channel on the eve of President Donald Trump’s Save America rally in Sarasota, Florida.

YouTube has also deleted all of RSBN’s coverage of Trump’s June 26 rally in Wellington, Ohio, along with his June 5 speech to the North Carolina GOP convention.

The videos deleted had several million views.

As is usual for these efforts at censorship, YouTube merely claimed that “The videos contain remarks from President Trump that violate the aforementioned policies and countervailing views on those remarks are not provided.” Of course, YouTube has never demanded any Democrat to provide “countervailing views” during their political rallies, and I am sure the Google-owned video broadcasting service never will.
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FAA initiates new prelaunch air space clearance system

9:33 am

FAA has now begun using a new prelaunch air space clearance system that is intended to shorten the time airplane travel is disturbed by the scheduled launch of a rocket.

[The FAA] developed the Space Data Integrator (SDI) tool to reduce how long ATO must close airspace around space launches and reentries. The system is voluntary. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly, and the Alaska Aerospace Corporation are current partners. SDI was first used operationally for SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch last week and is being used for the SpaceX-22 Cargo Dragon reentry today.

…Space operators now are voluntarily sharing telemetry data including vehicle position, altitude and speed, as well as data if the vehicle deviates from its expected flight path. Asked when additional companies might join, Monteith said he would have to defer to ATO to answer that question.

…Using the automated SDI system coupled with “time-based procedures and dynamic windows,” the FAA expects to be able to shorten airspace closures “from an average of more than four hours per launch to just more than two hours” and eventually less.

The article makes no mention whether this new system will allow the FAA to shrink the closure areas as well, which was Elon Musk’s main complaint after SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch near the end of June was scrubbed seconds before launch when a helicopter slipped into that airspace. As Musk wrote in a tweet,

Unfortunately, launch is called off for today, as an aircraft entered the “keep out zone”, which is unreasonably gigantic. There is simply no way that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization without major regulatory reform. The current regulatory system is broken.

I suspect there is discussion to reduce the size of the closure areas, but I also suspect that the FAA is resisting industry calls to do so.

One comment

Today’s blacklisted American: Facebook to punish users who link to peer-reviewed science it dislikes

12:21 pm

Modern science!
How Facebook applies science.

Blacklists are back and Facebook’s got ’em! Facebook is now warning its users that it will punish them if they repeatedly link to peer-reviewed science papers that document the long known harmful effects from improper mask use.

Facebook is warning users against sharing a study that found dangerously high carbon-dioxide intake in masked schoolchildren, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics. “Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways,” the warning says when users paste the link on Facebook, before confirming they want to share it.

It’s giving the same warning and threat of account restrictions to users who paste a link to Townhall.com article on a University of Florida lab that found dangerous pathogens on children’s face masks, submitted for testing by their parents. [emphasis mine]

Apparently, Facebook’s “‘fact-check’ simply highlight[ed] disagreements between the scientist who conducted the test and other scientists who did not conduct the test. … Instead of acknowledging that more study would resolve the dispute, [Facebook] call[ed] the report false. That’s not science — that’s propaganda.”

The second study about the number of very bad pathogens that gather on masks used during a single day was already discussed by me in an earlier post. That study found that after a single day of use,
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