And this one is for Adrian. I know he has a melanin fetish

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition. Warning signs about the woke left's radical agenda.

There was no escape from ideological indoctrination – anywhere. A job in the bureaucracy or a military assignment hinged not so much on merit, expertise, or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.
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Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always, and still is, a systemically racist country -- without ever producing proof or a sustained argument. (And what is This System?)

The Soviets fused their press with the government.
Pravda, or "Truth," was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Communist Party partners. In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks’ coverage of the Trump administration’s first 100 days was negative.

The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents. Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments. The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans. CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ online activity.

The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.
Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum, and administration at universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for, and renounce its evil foundations.

In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences.

The Soviet Union was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of their own radical ideologies. Woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans about their illiberality make millions of dollars a year. What unites current woke activists such as Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Obamas are their huge estates and their multimillion-dollar wealth. Just as the select few of the old Soviet nomenklatura had their Black Sea dachas, America’s loudest top-down revolutionaries prefer living in Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills, Montecito, and Malibu.

The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality. Are Americans any different when they indulge in a frenzy of name-changing, statue-toppling, monument-defacing, book-banning, and cancel-culturing?

The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people. Since when did Americans encourage co-workers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a rival? Why are there now new thought-criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism, or vaccination racism?

Soviet prosecutors and courts were weaponized according to ideology. Politically correct sanctuary cities defy the law with impunity. Jury members are terrified of being doxxed and hunted down for an incorrect verdict. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB.

The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought.
In modern America Pulitzer Prizes and the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, and Oscars don’t necessarily reflect the year’s best work, but often the most politically correct work from the most woke.

The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom.
Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased. Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies, and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue "fundamental transformation."

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?
Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

www.foxnews.com/opinion/american...
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This is for Don M.D. I know he is going to love it

One constitutional workaround leads to another constitutional obstacle.

When entomologist Jonathan Finch turns his dust-caked car off the highway and onto the old wartime airstrip at Manbulloo, he knows what awaits him at the other end: 65,000 blooming mango trees, an indescribably horrible smell, and the unmistakable buzz of excited blowflies.

Tom Brady made an extra $2.25 million during the Buccaneers’ 2020 playoff run. It’s an extra $960,000 that he got from the government that’s currently making waves, however. A Change.org petition aimed at getting Brady to returning money that TB12 received from the pandemic-drive Paycheck Protection Program has generated more than 160,000 signatures. ... The effort [more]
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The new Maserati MC20 is the famous Italian brand’s welcome return to supercar market

Mark Cuban took to Twitter to share his take on Bitcoin.

This is what supply chain fragility looks like.

Fifteen years later, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette deserves a reappraisal.

New Zealand and US-based space startup Rocket Lab lost a pair of satellites as the second stage of one of its Electron rockets failed to make it to orbit Saturday.

After a successful liftoff from the company's New Zealand launch facility, something went wrong after the first stage booster separated from the smaller second stage carrying two satellites for Earth imaging company BlackSky. ... A live feed from the second stage showed that after it separated, it appeared to go into an uncontrolled tumble.
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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of a fan of dust and gas illuminated by a star that forms a structure called an emission nebula. This nebula, known as NGC 2313 or LDN 1653, is located around 3,750 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros. Hubble captured the image using its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument, which looks in both the visible light and near-infrared wavelengths.

Journalist stepped down as religion editor on health grounds before publication of investigation

New study suggests anal ventilation might one day help treat respiratory failure

Police in Tempe, Ariz. made a harrowing discovery Saturday morning when they found two kids dead in an apartment after the mother told officers she was hearing voices that were telling her to kill her kids.

U.S. President Biden on Friday revoked an executive order by former President Donald Trump that had directed regulators to limit liability protections for social media companies.

An international expedition abandoned its attempt to scale Mount Everest on Saturday, citing risks posed by an increasing number of COVID-19 cases at the base camp, the organisers said.