OUT: SCIENCE. IN: SACRIFICE TO APPEASE THE GODS OF WOKENESS. Harvard researchers claim COVID-19 wouldn’t have been so bad if US paid reparations.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Biden Removes ‘We the People’ Petitioning From White House Website.

The system has been around for many years. At any given time, hundreds of petitions were active. If you get 100,000 signatures, the White House is supposed to give an answer. You may remember that there was an active “Free Assange” petition that the Obama Administration was obligated to answer (and gave a bad answer).

When Trump took office, he briefly discontinued it but put it back up after a media uproar.

Now it appears the Biden White House has removed it.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for another uproar.

‘FACE DIAPERS’ NOT NEEDED: Florida Restaurant Advertises Mask-Less Entry.

NO RUSH, IT WAS MY PRIVILEGE: My conversation with Rush Limbaugh.

I PREDICT ANOTHER ‘REMARKABLY SCANDAL-FREE’ ADMINISTRATION:Biden’s Bedtime and Adorable PDAs Give the Corporate Media All the Feels.

DECLINE OF TRUST: Thousands of service members saying no to Covid vaccine: Some Army units are seeing as few as one-third agree to the vaccine.

Service leaders have vigorously campaigned for the vaccine. They have held town halls, written messages to the force, distributed scientific data, posted videos, and even put out photos of leaders getting vaccinated.

For weeks, the Pentagon insisted it did not know how many troops were declining the vaccine. On Wednesday they provided few details on their early data.

When you put a politicized, flip-flopping weasel like Anthony Fauci out front as your representative, people will trust you less. That’s disastrous for public health, whose chief asset is public trust, but public health has chosen politics over doing its job well, as have most of our institutions.

FACEBOOK IS AN UNTRUSTWORTHY PARTNER AND NO ONE — GOVERNMENT OR BUSINESS — SHOULD RELY ON IT: Facebook’s Australian news ban wreaks havoc on government pages.

COVID WOULD BE THE LEAST OF HIS PROBLEMS: Covid: Man offered vaccine after error lists him as 6.2cm tall. “A man in his 30s with no underlying health conditions was offered a Covid vaccine after an NHS error mistakenly listed him as just 6.2cm in height. Liam Thorp was told he qualified for the jab because his measurements gave him a body mass index of 28,000.”

NUCLEAR DOESN’T FREEZE: Sweden gives Texas advice about how to restart their frozen wind turbines: Scandinavian experts suggest adding a layer of carbon fiber to wings which can be heated to melt ice.

EFFORTS AT UNPERSONING SO FAR A FAILURE: Republicans choose Trump over Reagan as ‘best president’ ever 2-1.

The greatest power of the media has always been to demoralize and intimidate people on the right. This suggests it’s not going very well. No wonder they’re crying in their gluten-free beer.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Why Biden’s New Dawn of Net-Zero Is Looking Like a Dark Day for Labor.

Last Labor Day, candidate Joe Biden made an impassioned pitch to leaders and members of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest labor federation. Stressing that “the great American middle class was built by unions,” he jabbed his finger in the air for emphasis as he promised, “I’m going to be the strongest labor president you have ever had,” drawing a smile from his longtime ally and friend, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

But Biden has also declared climate change the nation’s greatest challenge and is supporting strategies that could cost struggling union members hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs that will not be easily replaced. From interviews with labor leaders, RealClearInvestigations has found that President Biden may be hard-pressed to balance the competing demands of these two core constituencies — unions and environmentalists. How he addresses those tensions will shape his much-anticipated climate plan to cut carbon emissions.

As a famous man once said, never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up. Plus:

The global imbalance in fighting climate change also fuels the grievances of fossil-fuel workers who believe they are getting a raw deal. China, which burns about half the world’s coal, plans to expand its coal power fleet in coming years and increase carbon pollution as the U.S. and European Union slowly shave output. While global emissions dropped sharply last year because of the COVID lockdowns, they are expected to rise again, with coal as the biggest source.

The nonbinding Paris Agreement can’t compel China to change course, so Biden is banking on the power of the U.S. example.

Sure, that’ll work.

Related: Gentry Party: The Democrats Now Represent The One Percenters.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Rush Limbaugh’s ‘No-Yield’ Authenticity Won’t Be Forgotten. “As has been noted by every person in conservative media since yesterday, we have a platform because of Rush Limbaugh. It’s so much more than just that though. Rush could have easily been the detached godfather of conservative media, and we would all be giving him props for that. But almost everyone on this side has a personal story about how Rush inspired or or motivated them.”

JUSTICE FOR DEAD GRANNIES: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo under investigation for nursing home deaths.

Related: U.S. attorney, FBI investigating Cuomo’s handling of nursing home deaths: In recent weeks, the administration revealed that 15,000 long-term care residents have died, up from the 8,500 previously disclosed.

UPDATE: The first link above, at ABC News, has gone dead for some reason. Here’s the Albany Times-Union story it appears to have been based on.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a different ABC News link to what appears to be the same story.

BIDEN’S $1.9 TRILLION ‘STIMULUS’ WILL SHRINK THE ECONOMY: Hans Bader notes that even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees that in the long run, the Biden plan will shrink the economy.

IT ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK: Donald Trump’s official app has been suspended from the Google Play Store. “Google has just taken down the Official Trump 2020 App from the Play Store. The company has since explained to us that the app ceased functioning correctly, and, after multiple attempts to contact the developer regarding these problems, Google elected to follow its policy to remove non-functional apps from the Play Store. Android Police can confirm that prior to the takedown, the app hung and could not load content, reporting connectivity issues”

It makes sense that the Trump 2020 app wasn’t being tended to. The question is whether there will be a Trump 2024 app.

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN STATUE TOPPLING WAS ONLY ABOUT CONFEDERATE STATUES:“Mayor Lori Lightfoot is confronting the ‘hard truths of Chicago’s racial history,’ launching a public process to review the fate of 41 statues and other monuments, including some of former presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and William McKinley.”

It was only 12 years ago that Obama modeled the run-up to his inauguration on Lincoln.

ME, NEITHER: U.S. Still Not Convinced the Coronavirus Didn’t Escape From a Wuhan Lab.

SOME PEOPLE GET TO USE CULTURE AS AN EXCUSE:

Others do not.

GRAFT, AND CONTROL, FOR THE POLITICAL CLASS. THAT WAS ALWAYS WHAT IT WAS ABOUT. “If the Affordable Care Act Can’t Cover a Little Girl Battling Cancer, What the Hell Good Is It?”

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY? IS AMERICA RACIST? I doubt that there is a more tolerant nation anywhere on the globe or in history, but that fact doesn’t stop the Hate America Crowd from constantly telling us we are all a bunch of bigots.

Having endlessly heard that accusation for so long, my temptation is increasingly just to tell the accusers to bugger off. Here, however, the Colson Center’s Ryan Bomberger offers four more diplomatic responses to proponents of Critical Race Theory.

WHAT AUSTIN, TEXAS TEACHES ABOUT PREPPING. “This video is a couple of days old. This line was about a mile long as guessed by the videographer. There are no more lines like that because the grocery stores are out of food.”

Plus:

My family member is safe and sound with copious supplies for everything, and I told him that the only people who would have been prepared for something like this is preppers. He responded that people do in fact listen to the government and that had a warning come out in time to concern yourself with potable water, run water into bathtubs, get freeze dried foods, visit the grocery stores, get batteries, get medical kits, stock up on ammunition, get charcoal and be prepared to grill, have enough water to flush toilets, and so on and so forth, the people would have responded.

I told him that he had misunderstood what I said. I meant that the only people who worry about preparations like this without being told to by the government is preppers, and that he was prepared because we talked about this sort of thing before.

He agreed. Most of America is 24-48 hours from starvation and dehydration. If the water system and/or electric grid goes down, people must be prepared for that. Preparation isn’t just for the Northwestern redoubt, with all due respect to the folks at the Survival Blog. In fact, it may be more difficult in an urban area like Austin that it would be in Idaho, weather notwithstanding.

Indeed. But InstaPundit readers have been hearing this for years.

TROLLING THE PRESS: “I’m the only guy who gets impeached and my numbers go up.”

TWO MEN SAY THEY’RE JESUS — ONE OF THEM MUST BE WRONG:

Shot:

Chaser: Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: Obama Is ‘Sort of God.’

—NewsBusters, June 5th, 2009.

(Via Small Dead Animals.)

TAMMY BRUCE: “In the 90s I was a host on a talk radio station in LA, the same that aired Rush. I was president of LA NOW, & the liberal wkend host when he visited the station. He was so vilified by my then-crowd, I expected a monster. Instead, I met a remarkable, kind and encouraging man. He was gregarious & generous when we met. He shook my hand & I was shocked that he was nice genuinely curious about my radio work and activism. I realized I was going to have a fascinating conversation.”

Read the whole thing.

#JOURNALISM: Flashback: June 30, 2020: Trump’s bet on a vaccine could come at a cost: The federal government has poured $10 billion into Operation Warp Speed. “As coronavirus cases surge to record levels and states backtrack on efforts to reopen their economies, the Trump administration is increasingly pinning its hopes on a vaccine that may never come.”

Spoiler: It came.