AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS WANT TO ELIMINATE ALTERNATE CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION: Cuba Jamming Ham Radio? Listen For Yourself.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Missouri Teachers, CRT Advocate Plotted to Hide Social Justice Curriculum from ‘Trump Country’ Parents.

HOES UP: Facebook Flags the Name of a Gardening Tool When Used in a Gardening Group. “This is funny and would be a lot funnier if the Biden White House hadn’t deputized Facebook to chase you and me around on its platform if we post something the regime doesn’t like. But it has.”

WHAT THE LEFT PLANS FOR AMERICA: “Five speech therapists were arrested this morning by Hong Kong’s national security police, accused of conspiring to share ‘seditious’ children’s books.”

From the comments:

We should be doing everything possible to help the people of Hong Kong. And Cuba. They are both crying out for freedom. And had Trump been President, they would have received help in some form. China would have felt the sting, we would have allowed for Hong Kongers to emigrate. Instead, the cabal running the Joe & Kamala show are working hard to make nice with the terrorist leaders of Iran.

Everything is completely upside down right now. And there is no better example of this than the US handling of Hong Kong and Cuba. We used to stand for freedom. We used to be a beacon to the world for freedom and people would risk their lives to come here- not for handouts, but to have the chance to live their life for their own sake. Now our FBI works to concoct events to portray their own citizens as enemies.

Sounds eerily like the CCP. Not sure there’s a difference anymore.

Well, there is, but some people are working hard to erase it.

FASTER, PLEASE: New approach eradicates breast cancer in mice.

HOW NOT TO CONVINCE PEOPLE THAT YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE:

SAD, BUT TRUE: Despite Tuesday’s flight, Jeff Bezos is running out of time to save Blue Origin.

In late 2014, Blue Origin stunned the space industry by announcing that it had reached a deal to build rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, then the premiere launch company in the United States. United Launch Alliance selected Blue’s BE-4 engine for its new Vulcan rocket over an offering from Aerojet Rocketdyne, the blueblood propulsion company behind the majority of large rocket engines in US history.

About a year later, Blue Origin pulled off another feat by safely launching and landing the New Shepard rocket and capsule on its up-and-down suborbital mission. This marked the first time in history that anyone—country or company—had vertically launched a first-stage rocket into space and then landed it back on the ground.

The next month, in December 2015, SpaceX repeated this launch-and-landing feat with its orbital Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. From a technical standpoint, the Falcon 9 landing was much more significant, as it requires about 30 times more energy to boost a payload into orbit and complicated engineering to slow such a booster down and return it to the landing site. No matter: After the Falcon 9 flight, Jeff Bezos cheekily tweeted, “Welcome to the club” to Musk and SpaceX.

Musk was decidedly not amused, but this banter underscored the emerging rivalry—Bezos and Musk, billionaire versus billionaire, on a quest to build reusable rockets and remake the space industry. Back then, it all seemed so clear: The 21st-century space race would be run by Blue Origin and SpaceX, and it was going to be a hell of a thing to watch.

Only it hasn’t been. There has been no race. Since the end of 2015, Blue Origin has launched its suborbital New Shepard system just 15 more times, an average of fewer than three missions per year. Only this week did humans finally get on board for a launch. As for the BE-4 engine, after promising it would be ready for spaceflight in 2017, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a flight-ready version to United Launch Alliance more than four years later.

ULA is in a real bind here.

A MODEST PROPOSAL FROM MICHAEL WALSH: What Is to Be Done? Restore Federalism and Elect Trump as Vice President.

SPACE: Russia launches Nauka module to space station after years of delay.

VDH: These Aren’t the Democrats of Old.

The left got drunk on the idea that it now had its hands on the money and influence in America. So it systematically began targeting institutions and leveraged them not from the noisy street with empty protests but from within.

Suddenly, the once-revered Supreme Court, now with a majority of conservative justices, became an obstacle to democracy and had to be packed or restructured.

The First Amendment was redefined as a bothersome speed bump that slowed progress. It needlessly protected noisy conservatives and their backward values.

The CIA, FBI and Pentagon were suddenly OK — if staffed with the right people. Their clandestine power, their chain-of-command exemption from messy legislative give-and-take and their reliance on surveillance were now pluses in the correct hands. These institutions became allies, not enemies, and so their powers were augmented and unchecked.

Sports were cool, given that they offered a huge platform for the social-justice warriors among the athletes to damn the very system that had enriched them.

The higher the gas and electricity prices, the better to shock the clueless bourgeoisie that their SUVs and home air conditioners were anti-green and on the way out.

The union shop was written off as a has-been enclave of old, white dinosaurs — an ossified, shrinking base of the Democratic Party.

The media glitterati were no longer to be mocked as empty suits and pompadour fools, but rather treated as useful foot soldiers in the revolution.

So what happened to turn the party of Harry Truman, JFK and even Bill Clinton into a woke neo-Maoist movement?

Read the whole thing.

Related: Roger Kimball on The Success of the Counterculture in Becoming the Dominant Culture.

I EXPECT THIS TREND WILL CONTINUE AS WE LEARN MORE: Fewer Americans disapprove of those who occupied the Capitol on January 6, 2020. It’s still a vary large number, but it’s down significantly since the beginning of the year.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE MIGHT HAVE TO BE PERMANENTLY RETIRED: Defendant in Whitmer ‘Kidnap’ Plot Says Zealous FBI Agents Stagecrafted It and Entrapped Defendants.

WELL, GOOD: Menopausal hormone therapy may reduce odds for dementia in women.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Democrats’ spending plans don’t show any signs of sanity. “Lest we forget, Democrats were not, in fact, sent to Washington with a mandate to change everything, but given an evenly divided Senate, the slimmest House majority since World War I, and a president who won in a squeaker. Had just 90,000 votes gone the other way, it would be the Republicans, not the Democrats, who would control all of Washington, D.C. Were this a time of plenty, the case for a splurge would remain weak.”

They’re looting the treasury because they got the keys, end of story.

JUST DON’T MENTION THE CULTURE WAR: Democrats Running in Rural America Trying to Hide Their Party Identification.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Everything Is Up in Biden’s America: Food Prices, Jobless Claims, Division…

Plus:

• When Rennaissance Fair rejects with too much makeup attack!
• Iran has even more domestic troubles Biden won’t exploit
• How a dark money group determins who can say what online

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

HOW IT STARTED: The Panic Pandemic.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

How it’s going: The Pressure Campaign to Restore Pandemic Restrictions Is Succeeding.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that we’re witnessing a pressure campaign designed to compel the CDC to reimpose COVID mitigation restrictions on the public. There’s more where this came from. The World Health Organization advises all adults to continue masking even if they’re fully vaccinated. Donald Trump’s surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, insists that the CDC was “premature” to abandon its masking guidance. Ubiquitous public health advocate Dr. Leana Wen advises all parents of children under 12 to continue to avoid public indoor settings like restaurants even with a mask. But if you must go inside, masking should be mandatory. “With coronavirus infections climbing throughout the country and the pandemic worsening once more,” she wrote, “the Biden administration needs to strongly urge a return of covid-19 restrictions.” After all, the United States is on a much “different trajectory” than it was in May (when she also opposed the lifting of mask mandates).

To judge from the media landscape, the activists who favor a return of pandemic-related restrictions even despite the nation’s enviable immunization rate are winning the argument. Polling—an industry whose own professionals confess is hopelessly broken—suggests that the public overwhelmingly favors the reimposition of onerous mid-pandemic restrictions on social and economic life. It seems like a safe bet that the Biden administration will eventually agree with the loudest voices in the room—sacrificing its claim to have broken the pandemic and scuttling much of the progress toward a full economic recovery in the process.

It’s not at all clear what effect restoring mask mandates will have on localized rates of COVID infection. If, however, the Biden administration accepts the premise that the pandemic is back in full force despite all the sacrifices the public has already made over the last 18 months, the political consequences are far easier to predict.

QED: Michigan Legislature Eliminates Whitmer Emergency Power Law and She Can’t Veto.

That’s going to make a lot of FBI members quite cross.