What Are The Side Effects Of The COVID-19 Vaccines?

CNN Touts COVID Lab Theory It Previously Slammed Fox Over

It’s Been Three Weeks, Where Are The COVID-19 Surges?

Another Round Of Toilet Paper Shortages Looms Amid Global Shipping-Container Crunch

Why Is Everyone In Texas Not Dying?

Here Come The Global Vaccine Passports

Dartmouth-Brown Study Documents Media’s Stoking “Vicious Circle Of Fear” On COVID

‘Children Can Clearly Wind Up Getting Infected’: Dr. Fauci Says Children Should Continue Wearing Masks While Playing

Cancel Georgia! Media Calls For Major League Baseball To Yank All-Star Game From Atlanta

College Student Reinstated After Suspension for ‘Man Cannot Become Woman’ Post

Wichita State University Student Gov’t Senator Threatened For Highlighting Female Conservative Activist In Women’s History Month Twitter Post

The Week in Cancel Culture: First Edition

Journal of the American Medical Association Fires Editor for Having Doubts About Dogma of Systemic Racism

Brother of Gen. Flynn Sues CNN for Defamation, Seeking $75M

Far-Left MSNBC Guest: Racist, White GOP Would Deny Water to Jesus Dying on the Cross

Facebook whistleblower pens tell-all book after work to expose anti-conservative bias leaves her unemployable

Letter from Washington: How the left fell out of love with the First Amendment

In New Sesame Street Episode, Elmo Joins Antifa And Torches Local Businesses  Babylon Bee.

Professor John Vincent.’ An early case of cancellation

Sen. Pat Toomey Rips Democrats’ ‘False Narrative’ On Voting Rights: ‘We’re Not Going To Be Cowed By Being Called Racist’

Defense Department Hires A ‘Diversity And Inclusion’ Officer Who Compared Trump To Hitler

Masters Now In Left’s Crosshairs After Georgia’s New Election Integrity Law

Joe Biden’s Potemkin ‘Press Conference’

Even ‘SNL’ Mocks Biden’s Press Conference Cheat Sheets

The Bromance Continues: Biden Lets Obama Pilot Drone Into Syria For Old Times’ Sake  Babylon Bee.

Chris Wallace Presses Psaki On Border Facility Access: ‘You Are Being Less Transparent Than The Trump Administration’  My, what a surprise.

Coyotes to Univision: ‘Business Is Booming’ Due to Biden ‘Benefit’

Climate Dynamics: The True Control Knob of Climate Change

Sea-level rise is accelerating to its highest levels in at least 2,000 years across the Northeast, including New York City, study says (CNN) I keep waiting for Manhattan to be underwater. They keep promising, and promising, and promising, and it never happens.

Climate change could be averted by HACKING glaciers to halt rising sea levels, scientists claim I’ll believe that sea levels are rising when property in Malibu and Palm Beach starts dropping in value.

African countries deem EU carbon border levy ‘protectionist’

The Latest Subsidisaster Paper

Lemon LOSES IT: ‘We Need Some Indignation, We Need Outrage’

Critical Race Theory: The Great Evil of Our Time

Fly like a Jim Eagle

New Universal Basic Income Program In Oakland Excludes Low-Income White Families  Racism straight up.

Black Girl Magic: Two Teen Girls Smash Carjacking’s Glass Ceiling by Murdering a Driver

USA Today FIRES ‘Diversity & Inclusion Editor’ for Tweeting Mass Shooters Are Always White

A printout of George Floyd’s toxicology report was found on a Black History display at Duke University, insinuating that he deserved to die  (CNN) Insinuating!

Watch: Two Teenage Girls Carjack And Kill An Uber Driver; CNN Calls It An Accident

NAACP Image Awards on CBS Open with ‘Wise Old Grandpa’ Biden and ‘Hip Auntie’ Harris

Chris Wallace Grills Psaki On Democrats’ Filibuster Policy Shift: Is It ‘Racist’ When Used Against Tim Scott?

Biden Describes GOP Voting Law Efforts as ‘Jim Crow in the 21st Century’

House Democrats Can Use Taxpayer Money to Overturn an Election

Mitt Romney Receives JFK ‘Profile In Courage’ Award For Voting To Impeach Donald Trump

Is Gov. Andrew Cuomo Just Going To Northam His Way Through This Impeachment Crisis?

MSNBC Spreads Anti-Gun Propaganda While Smearing Conservatives

More Bisexual Tumblrina Craziness (and Other Random Insanity Updates)

This Week in Campus Insanity

Oakland: 14th Amendment’s “Equal Protection of the Laws” Is Suspended for the Duration

Former Obama NASA Chief Slams Biden for Tapping a Man to Lead Space Agency

New Democratic Push For DoD Cuts Highlights China, Shipbuilding Woes

Bernie Sanders Changes Mind On Space Travel After Elon Musk Builds Him A Fourth Home On Mars  Babylon Bee.

Congress demands tech CEOs to censor the Internet

AP Language Cops: DON’T Use ‘Crisis’ to Describe the Border Crisis

‘We Can & Will Silence The Opposition’: Loudoun County Public Schools Committee Posts, Then Deletes, Call For Action Against Opponents

New MSNBC Republican Sounds Like Every Other Network Liberal, Slams GOP ‘Tyranny’  They keep coming up with these fake ‘Republicans’ who always sound — what are the odds? — just like Democrats. Do they really think that this trick will work?

Read it.

On Friday Sylvia Gonzalez—a retiree and former Castle Hills, Texas, councilmember thrown in jail for speaking out against her local government—got the news she has waited more than a year to hear. In a powerful ruling issued Friday afternoon, Judge David Alan Ezra dismissed the city’s motion to dismiss and ruled that her case alleging First Amendment retaliation against the city’s chief of police, the mayor, a detective, and the city itself can proceed.

Read it.

The refrain is all too familiar: Widening income inequality is a fatal flaw in capitalism and an “existential” threat to democracy. From 1967 to 2017, income inequality in the U.S. spiked 21.4%, and everyone from U.S. senators to the pope says it’s an urgent problem. Yet the data upon which claims about income inequality are based are profoundly flawed.

We have shown on these pages that Census Bureau income data fail to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments—including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and some 100 other government transfer payments—as income to the recipients. Furthermore, census data fail to count taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. When official government data are used to correct these deficiencies—when income is defined the way people actually define it—“income inequality” is reduced dramatically.

We can now show that if you count all government transfers (minus administrative costs) as income to the recipient household, reduce household income by taxes paid, and correct for two major discontinuities in the time-series data on income inequality that were caused solely by changes in Census Bureau data-collection methods, the claim that income inequality is growing on a secular basis collapses. Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.

Phill Gramm and John Early do some debunking.

(I have yet to see anyone attempt to justify the common assumption on the Left that ‘income inequality’ is per se a Bad Thing.)

Read it.

Well, we now know what Big Brother looks like.

Read it.

How does an organization become a ‘watchdog’? Is there a licensing exam? An entrance fee to pay?

Maybe it’s the ability to hear the ‘dog whistles’ that the Narrative Media obsess over.

Read it.

ABC News was obviously working as an arm of the Biden administration during Sunday’s Good Morning America, as they spewed lies and misinformation about Republican efforts to increase the integrity of our elections. Despite claiming the GOP were targeting “black voters who helped him win there in Georgia,” the network refused to explain exactly how the law and other proposed bills would do that. Instead, they used broad stroke fear-mongering in an attempt to poison the GOP to viewers.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The description of the fatal incident in this NBC News account doesn’t adequately explain the horror of what was captured on cellphone video by an eyewitness who started recording as Anwar was attempting to prevent the teenage girls from stealing the car. Answer was at the driver’s side door of the vehicle, holding onto the wheel, when the carjackers sped off with him hanging out the side of the door. They swerved left, evidently trying to ram him into a lightpole, and then turned right around a corner. The vehicle disappears from sight in the video, then a loud crash is heard. The witness runs down the street and, when he turns the corner, we see the car toppled onto its left side, the two teenage carjackers scrambling out while Anwar’s apparently lifeless body lies on the sidewalk.

The perps were two black teenage girls.

ZMan does a deep dive.

One of the reasons conservatives preach against identity politics is they believe it contradicts republican virtue. In a republic, people are supposed to be supremely loyal to the institutions of the republic. The men that hold office are not what matters, but rather, the office itself. You are supposed to respect the office, even if the man in the office is not respectable. This is why preventing low character people from holding office is important, as it diminishes the respect for the office.

Identity politics, in the conservative formulation, is tribalism and that means the tribe comes before everything else. A person who puts his tribe ahead of all else will sacrifice the office he holds or the political system itself, if it is good for his tribe. This is why conservatives moan about identity politics. They think it is un-American. They are not entirely wrong on this point. This is clear with the Jonathan Pollard case. His primary loyalty is to his people, so he spied for Israel.

Salon magazine explains to conservatives what they ought to believe.

It’s not just the bedraggled band of “never Trump” Republican refugees on MSNBC and elsewhere who are endlessly vexed. For four long years, the whole mainstream media sphere has been laced with talk about the need for a healthy GOP, a vibrant two-party system, and a return to true conservative values. Critiques of that system, like Lee Drutman’s “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” only get a fraction of the attention devoted to these themes. But even more absent is any discussion of what a responsible conservatism might actually look like.

As you might expect, a ‘responsible conservatism’ looks just like … liberalism! My, what a surprise.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

The fact checkers at the Washington Post are biased, but not corrupt. They will fact check and correct false statements by Democrats.

But when it comes to rating the false statements — a highly subjective exercise — they are more forgiving of Democrats. They tend to go light on the number of “Pinocchios” they award Dems, compared to Republicans. And it’s my impression that they are more inclined to fact check statements by Republicans than those of Democrats.

Read it.

USA TODAY Sports’ race and inclusion editor Hemal Jhaveri announced Friday she was fired after falsely saying an “angry white man” was responsible for Monday’s mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado.

“[I]t’s always an angry white man. Always,” Jhaveri said Monday evening before police revealed the shooter was 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a migrant from Syria.

Last I knew, Arabs were considered ‘white’. But now, I guess not. Maybe its because proglodytes consider ‘Muslim’ to be a race or something.

Read it.

Krugman’s new op-ed was headlined, “How Not to Panic About Inflation.” The article was published just a few days before Axios released a story headlined, “77% of Americans are worried about inflation.” Krugman’s tactic was to get Americans to remember the “great inflation scare of 2010-2011.” He argued that conservative worries about inflation failed to materialize after former President Barack Obama injected the economy with his own asinine stimulus. His only criticism of Obama’s stimulus was that it was “inadequate,” but he also falsely argued that there was “consensus among economists that [Obama’s] efforts were helpful.” Now, Krugman has said worries about inflation in Biden’s stimulus were resurfacing the same right-wing worries: “[H]ere we go again.”

Read it.

American sailors swear an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, “foreign and domestic.” We ask them to put their lives on the line to protect their country. Recommending that sailors read books that trash the Constitution and denounce the country as irredeemably racist is not just absurd — it’s downright dangerous.

Yet, this is exactly what the Navy’s Professional Reading Program (CNO-PRP) is doing. Its reading list includes several books that insist American society is deeply compromised, not worth defending and in need of wholesale change. Naturally, not everyone in Washington feels this is a message well calculated to bolster service to our country. But the Navy, so far, is resisting congressional calls to reconsider its list.

That’s what they’d like you to believe….

Read it.

A Yale University psychiatrist who practically made a career out of diagnosing President Donald Trump as dangerously mentally ill from afar has been fired for being in gross violation of the “Goldwater Rule.” Dr. Bandy X. Lee is no obscure doctor since for the past four years she has made frequent appearances on MSNBC and CNN shows as well as being prominently written up with a favorable slant in such periodicals as the New Yorker and the Washington Post.

‘GRINCH Act’ introduced to protect children’s books from cancel culture: ‘No one is safe’

White teacher who failed to hang up Zoom call is caught calling black parent ‘a pieces of s***’  And so will be Cancelled.

FAA investigating pilot’s expletive-filled rant about Bay Area, liberals

White Supremacist YouTube Channel Gives Tips on Avoiding Homeland Security (Newsweek)

Asian American students have a target on their backs thanks to critical race theory

Editor of top US medical journal put on leave amid outcry over racism podcast

‘Jim Crow 2.0’: Critics Compare Georgia’s Voting Integrity Bill To Racial Segregation

BLM Supporter Given Probation For Firing Shotgun After Trump Supporters Honked At Him

Scientists Find Evidence That Novel Coronavirus Infects Cells in the Mouth – Saliva May Play Role in COVID Transmission  TMI.

Rutgers Becomes First US College To Make COVID Jabs Mandatory For Students  Time to transfer.

WHO Delays Report On COVID’s Origins As China ‘Fights Tooth & Nail Over Each Sentence,’ WHO Advisor Says

Greenwald: CNN’s Defense Of Chris Cuomo’s Special COVID Privileges Is Grotesque

White House might tax motorists by the mile to fund $3-4T infrastructure plan  I’ll bet you didn’t know that the White House, rather than Congress, gets to decide what taxes people pay. Foolish you.

Judges erase ‘and bear arms’ from Second Amendment

Baltimore will no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, low-level crimes

OOPS: WashPost ‘Fact Checker’ Promoted Un-Factual ‘There’s No Migrant Surge’ Article

Cyclist Transportation Secretary Wants to Tax Americans Who Drive Cars

Biden’s Chorus: Hateful CBS Slimes Georgia as ‘Anti-American’ for Voting Bill

Trans Woman Tears Into ‘Transphobic’ TSA In Viral Video Over Scanner Sensing ‘Anomaly Between My Legs That Sets Off The Alarm’

Georgia Election Officials Are Sued Over New Voting Rules  Of course they are.

‘Not My Job’: Scarlett Johansson Hits Back At Idea Actors Need To Share Political Views  She is one of my favorite people.

Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively

The New York Times Can’t Get Basic Facts Right on Election Reform

It’s Officially Now An Offense To Leave England

Democrats claim filibuster is a racist tool — but only when Republicans use it

ANALYSIS: Dems Tapped Biden As A Centrist Candidate. He’s Governing As Anything But

Biden Pentagon Pick Colin Kahl Denies Leaking Classified Information on Social Media

Biden’s ‘Commanding’ Press Conference Performance Dispels GOP Theories About His Cognitive Ability, MSNBC Analyst Says  Except that it doesn’t; MSNBC has a very loose definition of ‘commanding’.

White House Confirms Biden Will Sign Gun Control Executive Orders  And promptly get sued.

‘It Didn’t Go Well For Him’: Pollster Says Biden ‘Torched’ His Message On Unity During Press Conference

Jen Psaki Avoids Answering Why Biden ‘Never’ Takes Questions From Fox News

Read it.

If House Democrats get serious about contesting a tight House election in Iowa, they will have a slush fund at their disposal.

Hidden in the House rules package is a provision for “Further Expenses for Resolving Contested Elections,” a one-year fund lawmakers can tap in their quest to overturn a House election they lost in Iowa.

Read it.

There are numerous principled reasons to oppose D.C. statehood. But, really, no arguments are more applicable than the ones offered by the founders, who created a federal district for the distinct purpose of denying it statehood.

Read it.

Michigan Republicans have begun working on a plan to change the state’s voting laws following their losses in the 2020 election without having to work with Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, The Detroit News reports.

Michigan GOP chairman Ron Weiser reportedly told the North Oakland Republican Club on Thursday that the party is looking to group together a number of bills that have been proposed in the House and Senate in a petition initiative, which, if it gathered at least 340,000 signatures, could be approved by the Republican-controlled state Legislature without Whitmer having the chance to issue a veto.

Read it.

When are they going to cancel Shakespeare? Except for Othello, his plays are chock full o’ white people.

Read it.

Retail giant Amazon is publicly clashing with senators in what Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) described as “snotty tweets.”

After Warren tweeted her frustration at the amount Amazon pays in taxes, the company’s official news account responded, “You make the tax laws @SenatorWarren, we just follow them.” Warren answered that she would “fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

I hate to have to say it, but ‘snotty tweets’ are what the First Amendment is all about.

Read it.

A constellation of dark money groups is pushing U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the D.C. Court of Appeals with an eye to elevating her to the Supreme Court.

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate Jackson to replace Attorney General Merrick Garland on the D.C. circuit, NBC News reports. Liberal activist group Demand Justice has come out in support of Jackson, who is on the group’s Supreme Court “shortlist.” Demand Justice created the list explicitly to influence Biden’s judicial appointments.

I’ve heard them say it.

Read it.

But they won’t, because nobody cares about Bernie’s socialist fantasies.

The Guardian is irate.

Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the US which makes hundred of millions of dollars in profits, is shutting down grocery stores and laying off scores of employees in response to local hazard pay rules for essential workers even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage.

Reality is what sticks around ever after you quit believing in it. Politicians think that they can ignore elementary economics and just hand out other people’s money with impunity.

Proglodytes, of course, think THAT’S JUST TOTALLY UNFAIR:

“Why are they punishing us?” said Hernandez. “If it weren’t for us they couldn’t run the stores. As a person we have value. As workers we have value. They don’t seem to care about you as a human being. They don’t care.”

Read it.

Only a Democrat would believe that increasing taxes would help a fragile economy.

‘Bleed the patient until his health improves!’

Imagine how fragile it will be when the people fleeced by these new taxes decamp to Florida.

Read it.

Once making up about 14% of US farmers, Black farmers make up less than 2% today. Many were forced out by racist lending practices by the agriculture department that led to vast losses of land, income, profits and generation wealth.

Really? I’ve never seen a black farmer, or even heard tell of one, outside of proglodyte whining.

Read it.

Almost nothing, as it turns out. At least, nothing that they will say in public.

Read it.

A Texas ranch owner, John Sewell, said Thursday that he has “never seen” a migrant surge as serious as the one that has developed in recent months under the Biden administration, after defending his home from 12 migrants.

More details emerge about man accused of taking 6 guns into Atlanta Publix

Minnesota Dinner Theater Scraps ‘Cinderella’ Because of Too-White Cast

Racist Joy Reid: White GOP Wants to End Democracy, ‘Torture’ Black People

Georgia State Rep. Arrested Outside Governor’s Office

Oakland, California, will exclude white families living in poverty from $500 a month checks

Ex-CNN producer calls for network to ‘step in’ and stop Don Lemon’s ‘dangerous’ rhetoric

Here’s what the “Black tax” does to so many families — including mine

REPORT: 49ers Player Kevin Givens Charged With Assault After Allegedly Attacking A Man

‘Sesame Street’ Brings In 2 Black Muppets To Talk About Racism

1 Dead, 7 Injured In Chicago Shooting

Filibuster Conveniently Revealed To Be Racist The Moment It Stands In Way Of Dems’ Agenda  Babylon Bee.

Reclaiming Freedom in the UK, with Laurence Fox  Uncommon Knowledge, with Peter Robinson.

Former Yale psychiatrist says she was fired after Alan Dershowitz complained about anti-Trump tweets

Medical Journal Editor Sidelined Over Healthcare Racism Remarks

Biden Bumbles His Way Through First WH Press Conference

Releasing Immigrants Without Court Date Is A ‘Systemic Failure,’ Experts Say

HHS Reveals Thousands Of Unaccompanied Minors Have Tested Positive For COVID-19

A tame press conference for a lame president

There Was One Moment During The Presser That Biden Appears To Utterly Lose Track Of Himself

Biden lies about the border

EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Immigrants Cross The Rio Grande By The Hundreds Every Day. A Handful Of Border Agents Are There To Meet Them

Biden Post-Mortem: Cheat-Sheets & A Trip Into An Alternate Reality

Biden Nominates Gayle Manchin, Joe Manchin’s Wife, For ‘Key’ Co-Chair Of Federal Commission Ka-CHING! Can you spell B-R-I-B-E? I’m sure you can.

Quid Pro Joe? Biden Taps Wife Of Swing-Voter Joe Manchin To Federal Post Ahead Of Infrastructure Push

Biden Administration Fires DHS Advisory Council In Continued Purge Of Trump Appointees

‘Human Traffickers & Cartel Members’ — Cruz Gives Firsthand Look At What He Has Seen On Senate Border Trip

Greta Thunberg Tweets How Penises Are Getting Smaller Due To Pollution, Recruits For Climate Strike

Joe Biden Pledges to Make Solar Panels More Environmentally Toxic

The Coming Climate Lockdowns

Claim: Direct Observations Confirm that Humans are Throwing Earth’s Energy Budget off Balance  I’ll bet you didn’t know that The Earth even had an ‘energy budget’.

California Has A New Idea For Homes At Risk From Rising Seas: Buy, Rent, Retreat

The Ice Age Goeth

Climate Grief: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.”

Social Media Doesn’t Allow Posts That Break COVID-19 Narratives, Even Though Health Organizations Keep Backtracking Previous Findings

CBS Finally Discovers Cuomo’s Latest COVID Scandal, Give it Just 20 Seconds

Coronavirus: ‘Double mutant’ Covid variant found in India  Perhaps India will have to go on Double Secret Probation.

Fauci Does Damage Control After Fmr. CDC Director Suspects Wuhan Lab Leak

Former CDC Chief Redfield: Coronavirus ‘Escaped’ From Wuhan Lab

Wisconsin Republicans Launch Investigation of 2020 Election

Pelosi Argues She Has A Right Not To Seat Certified Election Winner In Iowa

Rep. Ted Lieu Screams At Civil Rights Attorney For Bringing Up Harvard Discrimination Against Asians

Parler Says It Repeatedly Warned FBI Ahead Of Time About Violence Planned For Jan. 6

Nets Boast Biden Bashing GOP Election Laws, Skip Pelosi STEALING Iowa Seat

LA Cops Attacked With “Rocks, Bottles, And Smoke Bombs” While Trying To Clear Out Homeless Camp

“Boycott Georgia” – Furious Dems React As Gov. Kemp Signs “Election Integrity” Bill

Elizabeth Warren Suggests Stacey Abrams Is Rightful Governor Of Georgia

IRONY: Disgraced Dan Rather Decries U.S.’s Bad ‘Reputation’ (on Guns)

Elon Musk Must Delete Anti-Union Tweet, Rehire Fired Employee, Labor Board Rules

Read it.

And I’m sure he did.

The trouble with ‘gun control laws’ is that they don’t control guns — people who ignore laws wind up with guns, and the people who might need them for defending themselves from the people who ignore laws wind up without.

Severian waxes nostalgic.

Back in late 2015 or thereabouts, I opined that while a Hillary Clinton presidency wasn’t ideal, America could survive it, since Hillary at least had some idea why she wanted to be president other than “it’s my turn.”* Those reasons never rose above the pecuniary, and of course she would’ve gotten eaten alive by the real sharks out there, but her astounding venality at least made her predictable. As a politician, she was Boss Hogg — she should’ve topped out as a county comptroller back in Toad Suck, Arkansas, but The Swamp has long experience working around the Peter Principle. “Incompetent but predictable” is often the very best we can hope for in a mass democracy. Have you noticed?

Read it.

A congressional measure introduced on Friday in the House calls out the American pharmaceutical industry’s overreliance on China, warning that “decades of policies rooted in socialism” have stifled domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing and left the United States exposed to “the hostile actions and unfair trade practices of the People’s Republic of China.”

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R., Texas), a member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, authored the resolution as part of an effort to galvanize Congress into addressing what he says is a dangerous dependence on Chinese Communist Party goods.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I am torn on whether this age should be called the Carny Age, the Crazy Age, or the Age of Hysteria. I like all three and there are probably others that work, but the last one really gets to the heart of the matter. America is like an aging woman, suddenly realizing that her biological clock is running out of ticks. All of that phony confidence she learned from modern feminism is quickly turning into anger and bitterness. Much of the lunacy is driven by early and middle middle-aged women.

…

Everywhere you look in the ruling classes, the people who should be secure in their position are desperately shouting, “Look at me! look at me!” Despite their wealth and power, they carry on like they need affirmation. That is the carny culture. The engine that drives that sort of society is the willingness to do anything for some applause, some attention, or some laughs. Whatever it takes to get the crowd to perk up and take notice of you is acceptable. There is no bad publicity.

Read it.

The good news is that the picture in America is changing for the better. Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a surge in payments online and experimentation by consumers with new services provided by digital-payments firms. In the past quarter the volume of transactions on PayPal was 36% higher than a year earlier. The number of people using Square’s digital Cash App rose by 50% to 36m during 2020. Investors are now betting that these two firms, together with Stripe and Adyen (which is Dutch), form a quartet that can take on America’s stodgy financial establishment. (The chairman of The Economist’s parent group is a director of Square.) PayPal is worth $275bn, nearing Bank of America, the country’s second-biggest lender.

Yet there is a catch. Despite the rise of innovative firms, fees for American consumers have yet to fall by much. Square charges 2.6% on the average transaction; Stripe’s fee nears 3%. By contrast, China’s big fintech firms charge below 0.5%. Fees have been kept low by a fierce price war.

Pretty sad when Communist China has more competition than the U.S.