Socialists Communists in Congress Silent as Cubans Rise Up Against Communist Dictatorship

Protests erupted yesterday in all of Cuba’s major cities against the nation’s ruling Communist dictatorship following over six decades of oppression. Protesters chanted “freedom,” “enough” and “unite,” and demanded the dissolution of their nation’s communist dictatorship.

Protesters had specific complaints about the nation’s food shortages, high prices, and handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which were correctly attributed to their government.

The Biden administration was initially silent on the protests, and only commented that they’d vow to condemn any violence in Cuba. Biden himself waited until this morning to say that the U.S. stands with the Cuban people.

Meanwhile the socialists in our Congress – Bernie Sanders in the Senate and all members of “The Squad” in the House – have remained completely silent. The Squad includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush.

According to Fox News:

Critics will likely say that these Democratic socialists are remaining quiet in the early stages of the protests because there are so many unknowns. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who heads the Communist Party, has already called on the country’s revolutionaries to counter the demonstrators. “We are prepared to do anything,” he said during a national address. “We will be battling in the streets.”

The National Review reported that these legislators have never even denounced Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Sanders, I-Vt., once defended some of the policies of Cuba’s previous communist dictator Fidel Castro.

Following his win during Nevada’s caucus in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Sanders was asked by Anderson Cooper during an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” why the Cuban people didn’t rise up and help the U.S. overthrow the Castro regime. Sanders replied that the dictator “educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society.”

If or when our socialists in Congress do address the protests in Cuba, it’s more likely they’ll end up siding with the regime.

Six Facts the Left Doesn’t Want You To Know About Global Warming

President Biden implores us that climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry preaches to us that “[t]he climate crisis as a whole is a national security threat because it is disruptive to the daily lives of human beings all over the world.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns us that in 2030, “the world is going to end … if we don’t address climate change.”

Hold on to your wallet. The Left’s global warming Chicken Littles insist that the sky is falling but don’t want you to know six key facts.

First, in his new book “Unsettled,” Obama Administration Department of Energy chief scientist Steven Koonin shows that the models relied upon by the Left to predict future global warming are so poor that they cannot even reproduce the temperature changes in the 20th century.

If these models cannot reproduce past temperatures already known when the models were developed, how can they possibly reliably predict temperatures decades into the future?

Second, Koonin’s book also documents that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own analysis indicates that any negative economic impact that global warming eventually may have will be so modest that it warrants no action.

Third, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UN IPPC do not claim that a link has been established between global warming and natural disasters.

Most people don’t know this company exists. That’s why Tim Plaehn wants to share this private information with you before other investors catch on.

In 2020, the NOAA stated: “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” and “changes in tropical cyclone activity … are not yet detectable.”

The UN IPPC, the Wall Street Journal reported, “says that it too lacks evidence to show that warming is making storms and flooding worse.”

Fourth, as the earth’s temperature has risen, natural disasters have become far less deadly.

Since 1920, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1.29 degrees Celsius and world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion – yet EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, reports that the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent, from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.

Fifth, some of the world’s best scientists believe that global warming will be beneficial rather than harmful.

In 2017, a group of eminent scientists – such as Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Judith Curry of Georgia Tech – wrote that “[o]bservations [over the last] 25 years … show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.”

Carbon dioxide, they noted, “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth.”

Sixth, global warming saves lives. A study published in 2015 by the British medical journal The Lancet found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat.

This study by 22 scientists from around the world – which examined over 74 million deaths in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1985-2012, “the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature-health associations”– reported that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent.

And small changes in the temperature matter: “moderately hot and cold temperatures” caused 88.85 percent of the temperature-related deaths, while “extreme” temperatures caused only 11.15 percent.

We must not let the Left bully us into draconian action with unfounded claims of a looming climate catastrophe. Know the facts. Global warming is not a problem.

This is what your money gets you when you pay for a FOID or concealed carry license in Illinois

We exposed the financial misuse (or lack of use) of funds meant to facilitate FOID cards and concealed carry licenses in Illinois back in late 2019. It ended up becoming a federal lawsuit. Well, not too much has changed in July of 2021. Check out this article from Guns Save Life and look at the massive errors happening when cards (both FOID and concealed carry) are being sent out to people LOFL.

The nazis in Germany, as well as the communists later in East Germany also promoted this.

FBI Says Narc On Your Loved Ones to Battle ‘Homegrown Violent Extremism.’

FBI Goes Full Soviet

As I wrote in my Morning Briefing last Friday, the federal government has gotten even creepier ever since Joe Biden was installed as acting president. There’s a lust for federal control on the Left that’s grown immeasurably, especially since January 20, 2021. It had been getting out of hand all during the pandemic last year. We’ve witnessed the uncomfortable spectacle of almost half the country willingly ceding their freedoms and celebrating government control of their lives.

Somebody should tell them they live in the United States of America.

Kidding. It’s getting more difficult by the day to recognize our beloved country. For example, here is a little something from the FBI’s Twitter account:

Those graphics look like they were done in a Soviet propaganda shop in 1975.

I’ve repeatedly said that Donald Trump’s greatest failure as president was not purging the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s leftist loons. The organization tasked with domestic security is allowing its priorities to be established by a woke leftist narrative that completely ignores the real threats to the homeland.

The document that this tweet links to was written in 2019 and goes all-in on the leftist lie about the biggest threat to America being a handful of drunk whackos here at home. That lie is the cornerstone of an ambitious attempt to portray every white American who votes Republican as a ticking time bomb who is always on the verge of committing violence. Democrats can’t make a logical case for any of their insane policies so they continually resort to demonizing anyone who disagrees with them. It’s all they’ve got.

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The Politics of Gun Ownership Change as Millions of First-Time, ‘Anti-Gun’ Americans Bought Firearms.

According to this Washington Post article, the percentage of Americans who own guns has jumped from 32% to 39% in the past year. That’s due to huge waves of new, first-time gun owners, of all political and cultural persuasions, deciding that owning a firearm is a good idea.

For many new gun owners, though, the decision to arm themselves is a political pivot — an accumulation of anxieties that led them to discard long-held beliefs. It’s a decision that is particularly difficult for people who belong to groups at higher risk of being on the wrong end of gun violence.

Jabril Battle, a 28-year-old account representative at a financial services company in Los Angeles, had always believed that “anyone who had a gun was a gun nut,” he said. “I really bought into the whole idea that the more people have guns … the more likely it is for people to start killing each other.”

But as the pandemic paralyzed the nation, Battle said, “I just saw how crazy people got.” He found himself conjuring the worst scenarios: “I was like, if my block has 10 houses, how many people in these houses have guns? If the food and water gets cut off, [if] supplies run out … what does that look like? Is this going to be a ‘Mad Max’ situation? Like ‘The Walking Dead,’ but not with the zombies?

“I was just, like, ‘Do I want to be the person who has a gun or doesn’t have a gun?”

Battle bought a Beretta 92FS, then added a Glock 34 pistol.

Still, he had reservations: “Being Black with a gun is a very high risk, a way higher risk than other races,” he said. “You are seen as a threat without a gun, and with a gun you are seen as a super threat.”

He kept imagining the scene if he were stopped by a White police officer.

“It’s still in my head, honestly, when I go to the gun range and I have my gun in my car,” he said. “If I get pulled over, and they ask, ‘Are there any weapons in the car?’ [and] I say there’s a gun, and then I hand in my registration, will they shoot me?”

But he’s enjoying the new world that guns opened to him — classes, an organization of Black gun owners, shooting competitions.

“Once I started being around guns more, and I kind of saw the culture and the environment, I’m falling in love,” he said.

In Battle’s family, guns were “not a good thing,” he said. “It kind of represented crime, especially for Black people. It’s just different for African Americans.”

But his family has accepted his decision, he said. His grandmother and two aunts came to the range with him and are considering returning to take lessons.

— Marc Fisher, Miranda Green, and Andrea Eger in ‘Fear on top of fear’: Why anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners

Yes, I do notice something. It sounds like the symptoms of a head cold.

The Experts Say These Could Be New Symptoms of the Delta COVID Variant…Notice Anything Peculiar Here?

The COVID panic porn peddlers are still at it again with this Delta variant that no one should really fear, but the experts and the media are still treating like the Andromeda Strain. It is more contagious, but it’s not more lethal and it doesn’t make you sicker. Instead of peddling images of body bags, it’s being used to ensure we vaccinate everyone. No doubt the Democrat-media complex is going to use this to push for mandatory vaccination, even suggesting door-to-door measures to ensure the nation reaches that 70 percent threshold. Oh, wait—that’s already been tossed around by some folks.

As we debate the ‘ver are your papers’ protocols about vaccinations, let’s check in with The New York Times who reported these could be new symptoms of the Delta variant. I’m sure you’ll have a good laugh (via NYT):

The spread of the super-contagious Delta variant is prompting new lockdowns around the world and spurring new warnings from public health officials.

The World Health Organization, citing the rise of Delta, the dearth of vaccines and high rates of community transmission in many parts of the world, has encouraged fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks.

[…]

Does the Delta variant cause different symptoms?

It’s not clear yet. “We’re hurting for good data,” Dr. Osterholm said.

In Britain, where the variant is widespread, reports have emerged that Delta may cause different symptoms than other variants do. Researchers conducting the Covid Symptom Study, which asks people with the disease to report their symptoms in an app, have said that the most common symptoms of Covid have changed as the variant has spread through Britain.

“What we’ve noticed is the last month, we’re seeing different sets of symptoms than we were seeing in January,” said Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London, who leads the study.

Headaches, a sore throat, and a runny nose are now among the most frequently reported symptoms, Dr. Spector said, with fever, cough and loss of smell less common.

These data, however, have not yet been published in a scientific journal, and some scientists remain unconvinced that the symptom profile has truly changed. The severity of Covid, regardless of the variant, can vary wildly from one person to another.

So, nothing has changed. We’re acting as if sore throat, headache, and runny noses are new ailments never seen in medical science. There is nothing peculiar about these symptoms. Nothing. First, all three have been around since the time of Hammurabi’s Code. Second, they’re the same freaking symptoms when COVID first escaped from a Chinese lab, I mean—they’re the same when this virus first appeared. ………….

Texas silencer law, NFA, No Commandeering, Commerce Clause, Test Case

Texas recently passed HB 957 into law. It will become effective on 1 September, 2021. The law repeals the Texas state ban on the possession of silencers/suppressors/gun mufflers, puts into effect a “no commandeering clause” for federal enforcement of the National Firearms Act (NFA) for silencers, and sets up a federal test case of the NFA in federal court.

In a previous article the repeal of the Texas law and the anti-commandering section were discussed. The likely federal test case was not.

HB 957 came from the brain of Representative Oliverson of Texas District 130, north of Houston. Dr. Oliverson is not a lawyer.  This correspondent was able to talk to Representative Oliverson about how he formed the idea for the law.

Dr. Oliverson came up with the idea to reform suppressor law in Texas because he had purchased two suppressors. He personally experienced the bureaucratic insanity it takes to legally obtain a silencer/suppressor/gun muffler in the United States.

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Do we really want a nationwide federal police force accountable solely to a small number of legislators, not subject to FOIA and other citizen protections applicable to the executive branch?  The Acting Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police has recently announced the expansion of their federal force into Florida and California.  Two new field offices will be opening in Tampa and San Francisco, due to claims from Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman that the number of threats against sitting Congressmen has doubled in the last year.

However, this isn’t D.C.’s first effort to implement a new national police force.  Just last June, House Democrats voted to pass H.R. 7120, an attempt to nationalize state and local police departments across the entire country, disguised as legislation for defunding the police.

Is it hypocritical that the same lawmakers who have been calling for a total overhaul of law enforcement since the death of George Floyd in police custody last May, now want their personal police force expanded nationwide? Absolutely, but that’s never stopped a politician before.

However, the USCP is a completely different beast.  Unlike any other law enforcement agencies, including federal ones like the FBI, the Capitol Police fall under the legislative branch and therefore remain exempt from being subjected to oversight like the Freedom of Information Act.

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Five Tenets of CRT: What they say vs. what they mean

One of the problems with discussing and debating CRT is that it’s a complicated set of teachings and beliefs about which people know very little and which probably vary at least somewhat according to whom is doing the trainings. The most pernicious aspects of CRT are often in the details of how the trainings and/or classes go.

Here’s a set of five supposedly basic tenets of CRT:

(1) Centrality of Race and Racism in Society: CRT asserts that racism is a central component of American life.
(2) Challenge to Dominant Ideology: CRT challenges the claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy in society.
(3) Centrality of Experiential Knowledge: CRT asserts that the experiential knowledge of people of color is appropriate, legitimate, and an integral part to analyzing and understanding racial inequality.
(4) Interdisciplinary Perspective: CRT challenges ahistoricism and the unidisciplinary focuses of most analyses and insists that race and racism be placed in both a contemporary and historical context using interdisciplinary methods.
(5) Commitment to Social Justice: CRT is a framework that is committed to a social justice agenda to eliminate all forms of subordination of people.

As with so much jargon, one can use these principles in a benign way or a destructive one. From what I know about CRT in actual practice, they tend to be used destructively and somewhat differently than the words in those five principles would indicate.

For example, let’s take principle #1: “CRT asserts that racism is a central component of American life.” Actually, CRT asserts that racism is the central component of American life and pervades every aspect of it.

Or #2: “CRT challenges the claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy in society.” Actually, CRT challenges not just the claims of those things, but also challenges the idea that they are worthwhile goals. CRT considers meritocracy, for example, to be utterly bogus and inherently racist and would like to eliminate it as a goal or standard. CRT would like to substitute color awareness and eliminate colorblindness. Same for objectivity and neutrality, which are defined as white values and inherently racist.

Or #3: “CRT asserts that the experiential knowledge of people of color is appropriate, legitimate, and an integral part to analyzing and understanding racial inequality.” Is there anyone who disagrees with that? I think you’d find very few people who don’t think that the experiences of black people and other minorities are worthwhile to hear. However, CRT actually asserts that this “experiential knowledge” is far more important than statistics in the aggregate – in other words, that anecdotal evidence (which, among other things, can be a misperception even if a sincere one) is of far more importance than anything else, and it’s only the anecdotal evidence of “people of color” that matters.

On #5: “CRT is a framework that is committed to a social justice agenda to eliminate all forms of subordination of people.” More jargon that obscures what’s happening. “Social justice agenda” is an example of what Thomas Sowell referred to in his book The Quest For Cosmic Justice (highly recommended by me) as an endeavor that is doomed to create more problems than it solves. As Sowell writes:

In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.

The costs of achieving justice matter. Another way of saying the same thing is that “justice at all costs” is not justice. What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost—whether economic, psychic, or other—on an innocent person? And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?

Those who are promoting CRT leave out all the costs and are mum about the anti-white racism inherent in those costs. However, word has been getting out recently, and more people (not enough, but more) are starting to understand what CRT is actually about in practice rather than in the descriptive language that attempts to obscure that practice.

Man shot and killed during attempted home invasion in Naples [Florida] gated community

A man was shot and killed while attempting a home invasion Saturday morning in a North Naples gated community, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office says.

At around 4:30 a.m., the suspect fired a single gunshot through the front door of an occupied residence in Raffia Preserve, detectives said in a news release. A confrontation between the suspect and an armed resident ensued outside the home, which ended in the resident shooting the suspect.

The suspect, who detectives are working to identify, was transported to a local hospital where he died, CCSO said.

No arrests have been made, the sheriff’s office said.

The investigation is ongoing, but detectives said it was an isolated incident with no danger to the community.

Running Scared

I have a number of things to attend to but I do have something to “tide you over.” The collection of links below presents a convincing picture of Left-wing panic and the reasons for it:

Well-verified evidence that the elections in six states were corrupted by fake ballots, multiple-counting of votes, deliberate invalidation of votes for President Trump, and votes by non-citizens will present the Usurper Regime with a serious problem: It will have lost all pretense to a “right to govern.” However, it will also present Us the Patriots of America with an equally serious problem: What can we do about it?

It has already been noted that once a president has been inaugurated, there is only one non-electoral method for removing him from office: impeachment by the House of Representatives, followed by conviction by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. That remedy is unlikely to be applied. What, then, must we do?

I shall refrain from making any “insurrectionary” suggestions. But would such a suggestion really come as a surprise, Gentle Reader?

Homeowner shoots, kills distraught man who tried to break in and threatened family near Battle Ground

A homeowner shot and killed a distraught stranger who got past a locked gate, tried to push his way into the house and threatened to hurt the family inside, Clark County sheriff’s officials said Friday.

Deputies were called to a home near Battle Ground in a rural area of the county about 9:45 p.m. Thursday after a 911 caller said an “unknown and unwanted man” was at the front door of the home and trying to get inside, the Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. The caller said the stranger had gotten past a locked driveway gate and was trespassing.

Sheriff’s officials didn’t immediately identify the homeowner or the man who was killed.

The man appeared to be emotionally distraught and was agitated, according to the statement. The homeowner answered the door armed with a handgun and tried to speak to the man.

The man tried to push past him into the house, but the homeowner eventually calmed him down and talked to him on the front porch as others in the home hid in a back bedroom, sheriff’s officials said.

The 911 caller reported that the man at one point told the homeowner to shoot him and threatened to “go after” or “hurt” the homeowner’s wife if the homeowner didn’t shoot him, sheriff’s officials said.

The homeowner was still trying to calm down the man when the man assaulted him, according to the Sheriff’s Office. The homeowner then shot the man, who died at the scene, sheriff’s officials said.

The homeowner and residents of the home near Northeast 176th Avenue and 202nd Street in unincorporated Clark County have cooperated with the investigation, sheriff’s officials said. No arrests have been made, they said.

Gunfire erupts when West County homeowner confronts burglar

EUREKA, Mo. (KMOV.com) – Eureka police are investigating after a homeowner confronted a burglar rifling through his truck and it turned violent.

As the suspect was running away, surveillance video captured him shooting at the homeowner, who returned fire.

“It happened so fast, I didn’t know he had a gun,” said the homeowner, Jesse Leuthauser.

It happened just before 1:00 a.m. on White Doe Court. The bullet the suspect fired at Leuthauser missed him. Eureka police are not sure if the suspect was hit. Police believe there were three suspects involved. They took off in a Nissan after the shooting.

“I’m not scared of them. I’m going to take these guys head on if they come back,” said Leuthauser.

Leuthauser is worried they will return because he believes the same guy have been at his house before.

“This is the third time in three months that it’s happened. They stole it on May 23 and took me 11 days to get it back, and it was destroyed,” said Leuthuaser.

Leuthauser said several of his neighbors’ cars were also hit early Friday morning. Eureka police believe the trio is behind as many as 12 break-ins Friday alone.

“We believe it’s an organized group that’s out there targeting, they’re using stolen vehicles, they are armed. What they’re looking for is weapons and other valuables,” said Lt. Mike Werges with Eureka police.

Werges said this type of crime is on the rise across the St. Louis metro. His department is stepping up patrols, which will include unmarked cars and license plate readers since many of the vehicles used in these crimes were reported stolen.

“I think that at times we live in a kinda a false sense of security. This is a very safe community; however, you wake up to motion in your driveway, you go out to confront someone, which you think maybe is just stealing change and you end up being involved in a violent altercation,” said Werges.

Leuthauser’s situation is proof that even a well-lit home and an obvious camera mounted on the garage won’t always stop criminals. He said the criminals’ boldness is what he finds most alarming.

“It’s getting old, you know? Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot,” said Leuthauser.

Pandemic gun violence surge was not linked to rise in gun sales, study finds
Research suggests looking at role of job loss, economic change, closure of schools and community organizations and civil unrest

Gun homicides surged across the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, in the same year that Americans bought a record-breaking number of guns.

But some of America’s leading gun violence researchers have concluded that what might seem like an obvious cause-and-effect – a surge in gun buying leads to a surge in gun violence – is not supported by the data.

Through July of last year, there was no clear association between the increase in firearm purchases and the increase in most interpersonal gun violence at the state level, according to a new study published in Injury Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

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A Defeat in the Courts for Biden’s Racist ‘Equity’ Policies.

If you were an Armenian Christian who fled your home to Glendale, California in 1915 to escape a genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks that killed roughly one million of your countrymen and women, how would you feel about paying reparations for black slavery that ended more than fifty years before you arrived?

Not so good, I would imagine.

The whole concept of so-called reparations in America is mired in such contradictions, tens of millions having migrated to this country from all over the world and continuing to do so well more than a century after slavery ended. Many of these people suffered from onerous, sometimes extremely onerous, even life threatening, conditions of their own.

Yet, the Biden administration—under, among other things, the meretricious mask of something called “equity,” as opposed to “equality”—is asking millions of our fellow citizens to pay for an acknowledged evil, slavery, in which they did not remotely participate.

President Biden and his people relentlessly pursue this “equity”—essentially a euphemism for reparations—largely for political reasons, further dividing the races in our society in a calculated manner and nurturing a grievance culture without end. (Gandhi’s “An eye for an eye and the world will die” means nothing to them.)

One particularly egregious way in which they were doing it was through the recently enacted program of forgiving loans for farmers based on the color of their skin.

It always sounded unconstitutional—besides being unremittingly racist—and, it turned out, that on July 8, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee declared it to be so.

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