Amerika

~~~

• Supreme Court upholds Trump exemptions to Obamacare contraceptive mandate
  

  The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the Trump administration’s broad exemptions to employers who raise religious or moral objections to providing free birth control coverage to workers, paving the way for more employers to opt out of a provision of the Obama-era health care law that has been at the center of a long-running dispute before the courts.

  We are seeing the first cracks in Pluralism 1.0. Pluralism — the idea that multiple conflicting viewpoints can occupy the same group or organization — comes in two forms. The first attempts to accept everyone, and then impose a rule by which everyone can live; the second attempts to accept everyone but acknowledges that no rule will include all of them. By its very nature, the second provides a foyer to the end of pluralism, since it points out that differing viewpoints mean no unity and no shared social behaviors, standards, or aesthetics. A Pluralism 2.0 society would be a place where everyone rented lots and did their own thing, with Nazis next to Rabbis, Jews next to Palestinians, Atheists next to Wiccans, and Eugenicists next to Morons. In theory, they would all tolerate each other for the sake of having a shared society, but what scares government is that they would at first vote to take wealth from each other, but eventually figure out that they too were getting taxed into doom, and start abolishing shared institutions entirely. This basically delivers you to the third world level. In summary, pluralism is a bad idea, and it is dying rapidly as people try to work out its paradoxes.

• JK Rowling joins 150 public figures warning over free speech
  

  Some 150 writers, academics and activists – including authors JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood – have signed an open letter denouncing the “restriction of debate”.

  They say they applaud a recent “needed reckoning” on racial justice, but argue it has fuelled stifling of open debate.

  The letter denounces “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” and “a blinding moral certainty”.

  Cancel culture and deplatforming may have hit their high-water mark. Since our society is comprised of many groups, and each relies on at least one thing that offends others, we have to get rid of “offense” as a presumption that something must be removed. Get ready for the mainstreaming of extremist views, because our other option is a rapidly decaying public tolerance. In the meantime, SJWs who grew up on Harry Potter novels are choking on their own vomit, and nothing will be worse for their loss.

• President Trump: Display of confederate banner is freedom of speech
  

  President Trump has suggested NASCAR made a mistake in banning the Confederate flag. When I asked him about the flag’s place in our society, President Trump reiterated: “It’s freedom of speech.”

  President Trump also reiterated that he opposes the ongoing “cultural revolution” in the country and is denouncing calls to erase U.S. history.

  This man has done more good than two centuries of ordinary Right-wing presidents. He does the opposite of the Left: the Left “frames” an issue, or looks at its boundaries; Trump looks right to the center and brings out the controversy, even if his own statements appear mild. We are talking about stuff that would have been inconceivable in 2015. Let us hope for — and work towards — another four years of Trump.

• Victims speak out after July 4th assault
  

  “Effing kill me and my white daughter,” said Vikki.

  Somehow this is:

  • Not a hate crime.
  • Not front page news.
  • Not causing riots.
  • Not the subject of “a national conversation.”

  We have open race warfare in the USA on a regular basis now. Diversity is over.

• In France, study shows virus hit African immigrants hardest
  

  Death rates among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled in France and tripled in the Paris region at the height of France’s coronavirus outbreak, according to a study from the French government’s statistics agency released Tuesday.

  The INSEE agency’s findings are the closest France has come yet to acknowledging with numbers the virus’s punishing and disproportionate impact on the country’s Black immigrants and the members of other systemically overlooked minority groups.

  “I can’t breathe” takes on new connotations. The West will have to decide whether it wants to shut down its economy because of a holocaust of minorities and (as we see in Texas) mixed-race people. No one really wants to harm minorities, but after FLOYD-19, no one really wants them around permanently, either.

• Cloth face masks offer zero shield against virus, a study shows
  

  Kazunari Onishi, an associate professor at St. Luke’s International University in Tokyo, found that cloth masks had a 100-percent leakage rate in terms of airborne particles penetrating the fabric and through the gap between masks and faces, substantially raising the risk of infection.

  He used special equipment to gauge the protectiveness of masks by measuring the number of particles of more than 0.3 micrometer in the air and the number of particles in the space between masks and faces.

  This particle size is bigger than the viruses themselves, so this addresses the argument that masks help filter out the aerosol droplets when we breathe, talk, or scream. Those droplets are smaller than what is leaking through the masks tested. Leftists want us to stay home until full Socialism can be adopted, at which point we will have to put on our Party-approved masks and go out into the fields to harvest those turnips.

• New Transcripts Detail Last Moments for George Floyd
  

  Even before he was on the ground, Mr. Floyd said he was in physical distress, telling officers who were trying to get him into a squad car that he was claustrophobic and could not breathe.

  This is consistent with Floyd having a heart attack brought on by stress and drug use, and disproves the idea that he was strangled by police. The country burned for two months for a lie. This is Typical Leftist Behavior.

• NYC Rental Market Pushed to Breaking Point by Tenant Debts
  

  With no federal relief in sight, New York state enacted the Tenant Safe Harbor Act last month to stop evictions. It supersedes a previous eviction ban that would have lifted on Aug. 20. In the meantime, landlords can seek money judgments against tenants for missed rent. So while the economic victims of Covid-19 can’t be forced out of their homes, their indebtedness will grow month by month, potentially damaging their credit rating and their ability to find another landlord willing to take a chance on them.

  Two thoughts: (1) this is why Republicans want to get the country back to work and (2) the cost of housing is too expensive, and it is driven by high costs of property taxes, insurance, lawsuits including discrimination, and licensing. As always, removing government from the situation improves things, but the Left fights this kicking and screaming.

• ‘Black Lives Matter’ Banner Leads To Eviction Notice For Bloomington Tenant
  

  Donavon Burton put up his first social justice banner at his Clobertin Court apartment soon after George Floyd’s killing in May. He later replaced it with one that says just “Black Lives Matter.” It is visible on the west side of Veterans Parkway, south of Oakland Avenue.

  The problem: His lease doesn’t allow for any “personal belongings” to be left out on the balcony. His landlord, First Site, asked him repeatedly to take down the banner. Burton has declined to do so. On June 29, he was told First Site planned to evict him.

  Turnabout is fair play; you cannot be evicted for being Black, but you can be evicted for flying a controversial banner — just ask everyone thrown out for Confederate flags. Do you see why we opposed “cancel culture” yet?

• Scientists warn of potential wave of COVID-linked brain damage
  

  “Whether we will see an epidemic on a large scale of brain damage linked to the pandemic – perhaps similar to the encephalitis lethargica outbreak in the 1920s and 1930s after the 1918 influenza pandemic – remains to be seen,” said Michael Zandi, from UCL’s Institute of Neurology, who co-led the study.

  So… the virus is just like democracy, then? Maybe we will get zombies.

• San Francisco supervisor introduces ‘CAREN’ Act to outlaw racially motivated 911 calls
  

  During the Board of Supervisors meeting Walton said both measures “are part of a larger nationwide movement to address racial biases and implement consequences for weaponizing emergency resources with racist intentions.”

  The name Karen has become synonymous on social media with people who call 911 with racist intentions, as several high-profile incidents captured on cellphone video, including some in the Bay Area, have shown people threatening to call police because of racial biases.

  More icy hot stuntin’ for those cool media karma points. In reality, “Karen” is a nasty slur for pushy white women. It is equivalent to someone proposing a SHANIQUA Act.

• Facebook suspends disinformation network tied to staff of Brazil’s Bolsonaro
  

  Some of those accounts posed as fake Brazilians and news outlets to spread “hyper-partisan views” supporting Bolsonaro and attacking his critics, said researcher Luiza Bandeira. Their targets included opposition lawmakers, former ministers and members of Brazil’s Supreme Court.

  More recently, the accounts also amplified Bolsonaro’s claims that the risks of the coronavirus pandemic are exaggerated. The disease has killed more than 66,000 people in Brazil and Bolsonaro himself tested positive this week.

  “We have known for a long time that when people disagree with Bolsonaro they are targeted by this machine that uses online disinformation to mock and discredit them,” said Bandeira.

  Disinformation… according to whom? Right, the same “fact checkers” that have been banning conservatives for years. We see you, Facebook.

• Facing $25 million deficit, Stanford cuts 11 sports teams
  

  Stanford has one of the largest NCAA Division I programs in the United States and its athletic department has been facing spiraling financial deficits the past several years. The school originally forecasted a $12 million deficit for the upcoming academic year, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and recession now expects a $25 million deficit that would grow to over $70 million in three years.

  If COVID-19 kills off most of “higher” education, it will be doing us a favor. Once these were amazing institutions but now they are, like our public schools, political indoctrination camps. Purge!

• 2 face hate crime charge after allegedly vandalizing Black Lives Matter mural in California
  

  The district attorney said Nichole Anderson, 42, and David Nelson, 53, both residents of Martinez, California, would be charged with three misdemeanor counts, including a hate crime, for their alleged actions over the holiday weekend when Anderson covered up a Black Lives Matter mural with black paint and Nelson directly aided in her alleged criminal conduct.

  We warned you about a slippery slope to “hate crimes” charges and civil rights in general. You refused to listen. Black Lives Matter is an organization; the fact that it represents a protected group does not protect the organization or its iconography. It is nonsense and criminality to classify these as “hate crimes.”

• Celebrated BLM Toronto leader called white people ‘subhuman’ and ‘genetic defects’ in since-deleted post
  

  “Whiteness is not humxness,” reads the statement. “in fact, white skin is sub-humxn,” Khogali wrote on Facebook — a post that has since been deleted, according to reports.

  “White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual,” the post later says. “white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.”

  She goes on to note that whites have a “higher concentration of enzyme inhibitors” which decreases the production of melanin, important for several things including the formation of strong bones, vision, hearing, and intelligence.

  She is correct.

  To a Black person, only Black supremacy is right. Just as the Nazis wanted only Germans in Germany, a mentally and spiritually health Black person will want to be surrounded only by Black people. Consequently, people of every other race are (for the purposes of that person and Black people generally) not wanted.

  This is not “Black supremacism” without context, in the same way there was no “white supremacism” without context. Each group wants itself alone, and others are seen as potentially hostile and a replacement for the desired group.

  We should just mature and admit that diversity does not work and that each group needs its own space and control of its future. Since parallel societies will only lead to war, reparations-with-repatriation is the best model for the future of non-WASP groups in America.

• BLM Teacher Says 2+2 Only = 4 Because of “Western Imperialism”
  

  Nope the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.

  She is correct. There are other ways to conceptualize numbers. People confuse our interpretation (2+2=4) with the underlying reality of the situation, which is that four is our symbol for two groups of two combined. Each group needs its own way to express this and will rightfully not trust foreign methods.

• California man fired over alleged white power sign says he was cracking his knuckles
  

  The Twitter user wrote in a now-deleted post that the SDG&E employee, later identified as Cafferty, was using a white power symbol near a Black Lives Matter rally in Poway, Calif.

  Cafferty, who is Mexican American, told the outlet that he was just cracking his knuckles outside of the window and had no idea that the gesture could have a racist intent.

  “It’s scary that you can be charged, tried and convicted on social media, without your permission, with no corroborating evidence, of any type,” Cafferty said.

  America is learning to hate pluralism. In its purest form, pluralism means “agree to disagree.” This means we will all see offensive things and there will be no universal standards. Since we cannot accept that, we keep trying to come up with a rule that will fit everyone, and because we are an egalitarian society, our method of doing that consists of damaging the majority in order to subsidize minorities. This has created a toxic culture of destroying lives without a second thought. As of this writing, it seems he has not gotten his job back, despite being wholly innocent of the charges (and the “OK” sign not actually being a white power symbol).

• Sen. Duckworth: “We should listen to the argument” on removing Washington statues
  

  DANA BASH: “Senator, I know that you support change in the name of military bases named after Confederate leaders, but there are leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who were slave owners. And some people are demanding their monuments come down, too. In your view, where does it end? Should statues, for example, of George Washington come down?”

  DUCKWORTH: “Well, let me just say we should start off by having a national dialogue on it at some point. But right now we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. And one of our countries that are opposed to us, Russia, has put a bounty on American troops’ heads. What really struck me about this speech that the president gave at Mount Rushmore was that he spent more time worried about honoring dead Confederates than he did talking about the lives of our 130,000 Americans who lost their lives to COVID-19, or by warning Russia off of the bounties they’re putting on Americans’ heads. His priorities are all wrong here. He should be talking about what we’re going to do to overcome this pandemic. What are we going to do to push Russia back? Instead, he had no time for that. He spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”

  BASH: “That may be true, but George Washington, I don’t think anybody would call him a traitor and there are moves by some to remove statues of him. Is that a good idea?”

  DUCKWORTH: “I think we should listen to everybody. I think we should listen to the argument there, but remember that the president at Mount Rushmore was standing on ground that was stolen from Native Americans who had actually been given that land during a treaty.”

  Every person represent their ethnic group and its interests before anything else. Even veterans who were wounded in war. Duckworth is the new McCain: someone who cannot be criticized because she was wounded in war and therefore is a patriot. However, patriotic to what? Apparently, to a legal system she can use to destroy those who created this society.

• Why I don’t have a child: I don’t have enough money
  

  My apartment is fine, and not too expensive. I would probably need to work double my current hours to have an apartment that is nice and clean – those cost at least $600-$800 a month. I’m usually able to save about $40 per month. Sometimes I do go out to eat.

  Leftists treated ordinary citizens as a piggy bank, raising property taxes and other taxes which were promptly passed on through higher housing costs. Now people cannot find decent affordable housing at a regular wage. Leftists now want to raise those wages, passing on the higher food costs, at which point poor people will find it difficult to afford both housing and food. Poor people do not have the intellectual ability to see through the Leftist fa¸ade of “free stuff,” not realizing that they always get socked with the bill.

• FBI monitors threats against Seattle-area protests
  

  We have seen individuals — and again, we view Antifa as an ideology, as opposed to an organization — we have seen individuals here that align with that ideology, but “organized,” I would say no.

  This is basically true but not wholly true. Antifa is a trend, sure, but it is being orchestrated by people with ties to organized Leftism.

• Bright feathers, bright brains: hummingbirds ‘can order numerically’
  

  “Counting has a more anthropocentric connotation,” said Dr Maria Tello-Ramos of the University of St Andrews, a co-author of the study. “This is more like ordering things in a sequence. We cannot say [the hummingbirds] were counting, ‘One, two, three, four,’ but that they knew that [the] fourth [flower] was different from the third flower that they encountered,” she said.

  Nature has more mysteries than we think.

• Ottawa to post $343B deficit as spending hits levels not seen since Second World War
  

  Finance Minister Bill Morneau tabled a fiscal snapshot today that shows the federal government’s deficit is expected to hit $343 billion this year — an eye-popping figure largely attributed to pandemic-related support programs that have pushed federal spending to a level not seen since the Second World War.

  Coronavirus demonstrated the power of the “Black Swan” event or unexpected stress on an already-weak system. In democracy, the half who pay nothing vote for more free stuff paid for by the rest, in the Soviet model. This works until suddenly new expenses appear. Look for a wave of bankruptcies across the world and corresponding fall of governments.

• UberEats Ends Delivery of Toronto Restaurant Products Over ‘Zionists Not Welcome’ Social Media Post
  

  Foodbenders, which serves as a grocery store and caterer that provides customers with the option for take-out meals, posted on July 2, “Open now – 8 pm for non-racist shoppers.” The post then added a series of hashtags, including “#freepalestine” and “#zionistsnotwelcome.”

  Pluralism resembles a he-said-she-said trial: you must be unfair to one group. Either you crack down on the pro-Palestine group or the pro-Zionist group depending on which one you decide is offensive. A mature person might say that the only fair pluralism consists of accepting both “Zionists Not Welcome” and “Palestinians Not Welcome,” since both are opinions of ethnic groups. However, practically speaking, at that point you have an anarchy where people rent space to live and hate each other. Of course, any sane person knew long ago that this would be the outcome of pluralism, yet another exercise in wishful thinking and reality-denial by the Left.

• Raleigh mom says 2 men wearing MAGA hats pulled gun on her and teen daughter
  

  “He pointed (the gun) at me and my 15-year-old daughter that was in the passenger side seat, and I told him to put his gun away cause he wasn’t going to shoot anyone. When I said that, it kind of made him mad. He started saying ‘Oh they’re not scared of guns. They’re ghetto, black b****s. He immediately turned his hat around and said ‘This is exactly why we need to Make America Great Again because of these ghetto black b****s,'” Balogun recalled.

  Another credulity-straining fake “hate crime.”

• India cuts China imports by half in a year; needs measured approach to further lower dependence
  

  As compared to FY19, there has been a drastic decline in the value of imports from China in FY20, a report authored by Soumya Kanti Ghosh, Group Chief Economic Adviser, State Bank of India, said on Wednesday. The value of import from China halved in FY20 compared to the previous financial year. In FY19, India’s import dependence on China was between 50-60%. The country imports 823 products from China worth $3.9 billion. Most of these imports are organic chemicals, tools and products made from base metals, toys, furniture etc.

  The government recently banned 59 Chinese apps such as TikTok, ShareIt, Shein, etc citing “sovereignty and security” concerns. However, the government must take a gauged response to reduce imports from China and must avoid knee-jerk reactions. “Clearly, China has slowly and steadily build a solid base in both high and low-value imports into India. We thus have to clearly take a calibrated call in reducing our import dependence from China and not through sudden stops,” the report said, adding that restrictions must be placed on certain products where India has a competitive advantage.

  Following the American lead, the civilized world finds itself consciously decoupling from failing, toxic China.

• Sweden’s daily tally of new COVID-19 cases falls to lowest since May
  

  Cases in the Nordic country have declined sharply over the past few days and on Tuesday only 283 new cases were recorded.

  That contrasts with a torrid month of June when daily numbers ran as high as 1,800, eclipsing rates across much of Europe, even as deaths and hospitalisations continued to decline from peaks in April.

  Watch herd immunity play out in real time. You have more cases at first, but then the disease loses its grip fairly rapidly. Sweden may turn out to have played this one the best, disrupting itself the least, being the least neurotic, and ending up with the best results as it returns to full force far before the rest of the world.

• Protecting 30% of planet could bolster economy, study says
  

  The report, from the Campaign for Nature charity, found about $140bn (£110bn) a year would be required by 2030 to place 30% of land and sea under protection.

  Such a target would require a doubling of the area of land under protection, which is roughly 15% of land globally, and more than a quadrupling of marine protected areas, which make up only 7% of the oceans currently. About $24bn is spent annually around the world on nature-protected areas.

  Achieving the target of 30% protection would lead to increased economic output of between $64bn and $454bn a year, the report found, depending on which areas were subject to conservation efforts, as well as generating other benefits.

  Uh, guys. All economics depends on the assumption of a base input, namely a functional planet with stuff like oxygen and water available. On top of that, Earth becomes more valuable the more beautiful it is, and that requires a functional ecosystem. The real argument comes from the realization that we like ourselves when we protect rare and precious things, and hate ourselves when we consume the rare for our common, transient, and purposeless desire.

• Coronavirus: ‘The masks you throw away could end up killing a whale’
  

  Globally we are using 129 billion face masks and 65 billion plastic gloves every month, according to some estimates.

  And divers and observers are spotting more of this discarded waste floating underwater, causing problems for wildlife and washing up on shorelines all over the world.

  Self-pitying humanity vandalizes its environment because humanity is frustrated at its condition. It voted itself into instability, which attracted a virus to come along and upset everything, so now we live in pollution wearing masks against a virus that may or may not be a threat, since we cannot trust our governments, media, or science which are all caught up in the special interest group political infighting that has consumed our societies. Guess democracy, equality, and diversity really are a dead end after all, eh, voters? Democracy makes people feel miserable and helpless. Equality creates a “crab bucket” where we all compete to pull others down as we pull ourselves up, promoting the most fanatical but excluding people of quality, hence the massive incompetence and mental ineptitude of our officials, doctors, and scientists. Diversity means constant infighting until we exhaust ourselves and COVID-19 delivers a slow but welcome death.

• Major report calls for huge pesticide reductions to halt collapse in vital insect populations
  

  The report says in the UK over the last 48 years, 41 per cent of wildlife species have suffered strong or moderate decreases in numbers. The chief causes of this decline include habitat loss and industrial-scale use of pesticides.

  The country has lost 97 per cent of its wildflower meadows since the 1930s and 87 per cent of its wetlands. Both of these habitats supported a huge array of wildlife.

  Compounding the destruction of these ecosystems is the fact that 16,900 tonnes of pesticides — toxic chemicals — are applied to the countryside every year, and that figure doesn’t include additional pesticides used in gardens, across towns and cities, or those which go down the drain.

  Oh, look: the modern miracle just ended. Our magic agriculture has failed. Immigration has swollen our populations and eaten up all of our wildland. Now we pay the toll. You can lead a horse to water, but…

• China’s grip on Hong Kong eroding its status as financial hub, investors believe
  

  Amid a broader move towards Singapore as a regional hub for multinationals, money has been quietly leaving Hong Kong since late last year – although the territory’s monetary authority disputes this.

  Like Mexico, China has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. We had a politician in our neighborhood who had a bright idea: since there was one good school in the wealthier area, and a terrible school in the poor area, he would combine the two and end those bad test scores! In reality, he just destroyed the good school and all the parents pulled their kids out after a number of muggings, stabbings, rapes, and drug use incidents at the new combined public school. Now no one gets a good education. In the same way, like all third-world tyrants, China thought hard but not hard enough, and decided to seize a nearby wealthy area, but in doing so deprived that area of what made it valuable: a lack of third-world-style centralized rule. In the same way, Mexicans flee Mexico for the United States, but by entering the country illegally, undermine the rule of law and make it more like Mexico. No one wins; all we do through egalitarian “take from the good to give to the bad” style thinking is make sure that no one can have anything good, which is fine with those on the bottom, who are on the bottom because their thinking is moronic. This is a lesson for the third world: your search for magic solutions is what has made you poor; your are poor because your nations are not valuable because they are not run according to realistic long-term qualitative principles. You can either adapt, or continue to be poor, because ultimately the first world is going to do what money in Hong Kong is doing or white people in Detroit did, namely just move away.

~~~

I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I’ve seen the future, you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sittin’ around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing “I’m an Oscar-Meyer Wiener”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-1FDfxxgfI

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