90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, February 11, 2018

A Simple Logic Question That Most Harvard Students Get Wrong

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Know Your Rhetorical Fallacies..

The Real News In America Is All Good News...

U.S. jobless claims drop to near 45-year low

- Yahoo News

The numbers of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell last week, “dropping to its lowest level in nearly 45 years,” Yahoo News reports. This drop follows last week’s numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor, which also showed “strong job growth momentum.”

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Trump’s approval rating tops Obama’s at same point in presidency

- The Washington Times

According to the latest Rasmussen Reports, President Donald J. Trump’s approval rating is now higher than President Barack Obama’s was on the same date of his first term. “These approval polls reveal a public that has tuned out the mainstream media’s nattering against the president,” Victor Morton writes.

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Food stamp recipients drop under Trump

- The Daily Caller

The U.S. Department of Agriculture released new data this month showing that the number of individuals in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has continued to decline under the Trump Administration.

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DISH bringing over 200 new jobs to Tulsa

- News on 6

On Tuesday, satellite provider DISH announced that it is bringing about 1,000 jobs back to the U.S. from overseas—with 250 of those jobs coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma. These new jobs include roles in sales, human resources, and customer relations.

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Polls: Strong public support for 'DREAM' compromise that includes top Trump priorities

- Townhall

Townhall’s Guy Benson details the strong public support behind the President’s latest immigration proposals. As the DACA deadline approaches, Benson outlines why it only makes sense for lawmakers to back President Trump’s proposal.

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No ‘amnesty surge’ on southwest border as numbers drop in January

- The Washington Times

Illegal immigration along America’s southwest border ticked down in January, The Washington Times reports. “The declines spanned both illegal immigrants caught trying to sneak in between ports of entry, and those showing up at legal checkpoints demanding entry without permission,” Stephen Dinan writes.

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Chipotle, citing tax changes, sends bonuses, ups benefits

- Chicago Tribune

This week, Chipotle joined the ranks of companies giving out cash, stock bonuses, and improved parental leave benefits to workers following sweeping changes to the outdated U.S. tax code championed by President Trump.

Fox News Caves to Leftist Pressure, Pulls Their Own Editor’s Op-Ed Decrying Identity Politics at Olympics

Fox News published an op-ed by John Moody, executive vice president and executive editor, Wednesday titled “In Olympics, let’s focus on the winner of the race — not the race of the winner,” only to pull the piece under pressure from identity-politics lobbyists and left-leaning media.

By Friday, Fox had removed the editorial – which criticized the heavy focus on the racial and sexual “diversity” of the American team at the upcoming Winter Olympics at PyeongChang, South Korea, to the detriment of the traditional emphasis on athletic prowess – from their website without an explanatory note. When asked, a Fox News representative told Breitbart News only that “John Moody’s column does not reflect the views or values of FOX News and has been removed.”

In his op-ed, Moody slammed Jason Thompson, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s (USOC) “director of diversity and inclusion” for insisting on a Winter Olympics team that “looks more like America.” The Washington Post’s Rick Maese, who wrote up his interview with Thompson, openly admits this, in large part, merely means a team with fewer white people on it. “[T]his year’s U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathering in PyeongChang this week, is still overwhelmingly white,” he laments.

“We’re not quite where we want to be,” the USOC’s Thompson told Maese about the racial makeup of the American Olympic team, adding later, ““We still have some work to do. … We’re not quite there yet.”

Of the U.S. Winter Olympic team, the Wapo’s Maese writes, “10 are African American — 4 percent — and another 10 are Asian American. The rest, by and large, are white.”

According to 2016 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, white Americans make up 73.3 percent of the U.S. population (62 percent if white-identifying Hispanics are counted separately). Accepting Maese’s estimate that 92 percent of the 2018 U.S. Winter Olympic Team is white, this would mean whites are over-represented by 25.5 percent.

Next, however, Maese notes that the much larger Summer Olympic Team USA has a “strikingly” different racial makeup. “The United States took more than 550 athletes to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Of that group, more than 125 were African American — about 23 percent,” he writes.

The same Census Bureau estimates put black Americans at 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, meaning blacks were 82.5 percent over-represented at the summer Olympics. If Maese’s numbers are correct, the combined winter and summer teams feature 135 black American athletes out of 793 total Olympians. That is to say, they are 17 percent black and that African Americans are 35 percent over-represented, significantly more than the 25.5 figure for white Americans at the Winter Olympics that Maese and Thompson call a “lack of diversity” that is a “priority” to rectify.

Nowhere in the Washington Post’s piece about the work in progress to combat the over-abundance of whites on the winter Team USA do Maese or Thompson make any negative implication about the massive over-abundance of...

An 18-year-old asylum seeker in Germany was just arrested on rape charges — shortly after he was released from prison for a rape charge.

The man, who is not being named in the media, denies the allegations.

But the alleged victim said she was attacked in Esslingen, inside a home.Esslingen, Germany

An Afghan asylum seeker has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in Germany.

The 18-year-old man was arrested on Thursday last week after the girl contacted police to say he had attacked her inside a home in Esslingen, near Stuttgart.

The man previously served a year in juvenile detention for attempted rape and was released in December last year under court supervision.

Police and prosecutors in Esslingen said the girl visited the man at his apartment in the city on Monday after becoming friends.

It was in the apartment that he allegedly forced her to have sex against her will.

The girl saw the man in the city’s downtown area again on Wednesday when he threatened her, before she reported the attack to police.

He was arrested at his home the following day, Süddeutsche Zeitung reports. He has denied the allegations.

A spokesman of the German Interior Ministry said it is not possible to tell whether the man will be deported while the investigation is ongoing.

But, the spokesman pointed out, deportation is mandatory for any asylum seeker handed a prison sentence of three years or more.

Asylum seekers can also be deported if they have received a prison sentence between one and...

LAKELAND, FL (The Miami Herald) – Pleading guilty to putting lye in sauce led to a seven-year prison sentence for a Florida restaurant worker — and possibly more punitive action at the federal level.

Margarito Padilla began serving his sentence Monday, according to Florida Department of Corrections records.

On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Tampa office filed a detainer on the 54-year-old Guadalajara, Mexico, native, meaning ICE wants to know when Padilla finishes doing his time.

Padilla’s employment at a Hibachi Express in Lakeland ended last June, after franchise owner Zhong Jiang thought the Yum-Yum sauce refrigerated in a 55-gallon barrel didn’t look so yummy. He took a taste off a single-dipped finger.

“The victim’s mouth immediately began burning and he described the pain as a cutting of his tongue and mouth,” the arrest report read.

After asking the employees about the sauce and getting no explanation, Jiang announced he was calling police. Padilla asked Jiang to refrain from calling the cops, heightening Jiang’s suspicion, according to the report.

Via surveillance video review, Jiang saw Padilla kneeling next to where the restaurant kept the Plumbers Choice Lye industrial strength drain cleaner. He noticed a flat pocket when Padilla first kneeled and a bulging pocket when he rose. The pocket deflated to flat after Padilla swung by a sink briefly holding a container of Yum-Yum sauce.

When first interviewed by Lakeland police, Padilla denied anything before cops played the video. He then admitted he had contaminated the sauce because he...

Barack Obama’s cash payout of $1.7 billion, some or all of it, has been traced back to terror groups.

We all know that Iran sends cash to their favorite terrorists. The cash is used to cover their tracks. Despite that, Barack Obama sent the money we “owed them” in three separate cash payments? That was $1.7 billion that should have been preserved until a lawsuit was settled seeking restitution by the families of soldiers and civilians murdered by Iran.

Why did Barack Obama send the world’s largest sponsors of terrorism any money, much less cash?

In September 2016, the State Department’s Spokesman Mark Toner finally acknowledged that the U.S. used three separate payments, each in hard foreign currency to settle a dispute with Iran over frozen Iranian assets.

TERRORISTS NOW HAVE THE MONEY

What you won’t hear in the mainstream media is that the government traced that money back to terror groups, including Hezbollah and other smaller groups.

In a sane world, people would care that Barack Obama, John Kerry and others in the former administration gave nearly two billion dollars to a terrorist nation that wants to destroy the United States and Israel. They knew “some” of it would go to terrorism. John Kerry acknowledged it...

American paratroopers are seriously fucking badass. I mean, there really aren't a whole lot of people out there willing to jump out of a fast-moving airplane several hundred feet above the ground under ideal conditions, let alone attempt it in the middle of the pitch-black goddamned night wearing sixty pounds of battle gear while crazy Germans are trying to ram a bunch of anti-aircraft flak cannons up your ass. While you’d think it would be basically impossible to get anybody to actually volunteer for this line of duty, the paratroopers don't seem to give a shit. These guys just go out there and do their job, and they don't really give a crap about trivial garbage like blindly leaping into unfamiliar territory teeming with hidden enemy soldiers or constantly being surrounded by people trying to kill them.

Now, among this aforementioned brotherhood of hard-drinking, hard-fighting badasses, few men have been more respected or feared than Captain Ronald Speirs of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. This tough-as-fuck Scottish-born Bostonian crotch-stomped his way across Europe in World War II, generally just kicking asses, ruining German lives, and making a name for himself as a completely fucking insane asskicker who didn't show fear, didn't back down, and didn't hesitate to pop a cap in the face of anyone who pissed him off for any reason.

Speirs was a Lieutenant in Company D of the 506th when he combat dropped into France in 1944 and immediately went to work softening up Nazi positions for the D-Day assault on the beaches of Normandy. He probably best effected this when he and Captain Dick Winters led a dozen men on the Brecourt Manor Assault – single-handedly attacking the four German 105mm artillery guns that were shelling the American positions on Utah Beach. During the battle, it was Spiers and his boys that captured the fourth artillery piece in an appropriately badass manner - by charging across a couple hundred feet of open ground (running full-speed towards a gargantuan gun barrel roughly the width of a pimped-out Volkswagen), leaping muzzle-first into the German entrenchments, and taking down a couple squads of elite Nazi paratroopers by bodyslamming them onto some TNT. To this day, the Brecourt Manor Assault is studied at West Point as one of the best examples of small-unit tactics and large-testicled badassitude ever demonstrated. In fact, I'm pretty sure the after-action report is required reading in Asskicking 101.

related: The Badass of the Week - Chuck Yeager

That's just how Speirs operated – the dude was completely fearless, aggressive, and didn't give a shit about trivial things like bullets flying around his head or artillery shells blowing up in his face. He was going to kick serious asses, and nothing was going to deter him from his mission to grab a couple SS troopers and crack their helmets together so hard that their heads exploded. And by the same token, Speirs inspired the sort of fear that you generally don't hear about any more these days.

Countless rumors circulated about this guy being an insane, cold-blooded asskicker – some claimed that he once lined up twenty to thirty German prisoners of war, gave them cigarettes, and then gunned down all but on of them. Another rumor circulated that he shot one of his own Sergeants in the head for being drunk and/or repeatedly disobeying direct orders on the battlefield. Speirs, for his part, did nothing to dissuade these rumors. He, like a real badass, didn't need to talk about his about how fucking hardcore he was, and the fact that he never confirmed or denied any of these rumors only made everybody under his command fear him that much more. Sure, maybe earning a reputation as a man who will just whip out his sidearm and shoot you in the balls for the most trivial of offenses might not be the most ethical way to keep your men in line, but you really can't dispute its effectiveness. Nobody wants to argue with the meanest, toughest son-of-a-bitch in the whole regiment.

Speirs also won the Silver Star during the Arnhem Campaign for going on a borderline-insane one-man “lone wolf” reconnaissance mission deep into enemy territory. When he was ordered to scout enemy positions on the far side of the Neder Rijn River near Rendijk, Holland, Spiers (in the true balls-out fashion we’ve all come to expect from the man) just waited until the middle of the night, jumped in the water, swam across the river, and started sneaking around the enemy camp like a ninja with a Tommy gun. He scouted out positions of enemy machine gun nests, mortar teams, and artillery positions, stole an inflatable raft, and then burned rubber out of there while the German gunners took potshots at him. He got capped by an MG-42 while hauling ass across the river, but this apparently only served to make him more angry and bitter. Speirs made it back to Allied lines intact, and his intel was vital to the combat operations of his unit.

What Ron Speirs is best known for, however, is the utterly fucking badass way he handled the assault on the Belgian town of Foy during the infamous Battle of the Bulge. After somehow surviving a brutal siege of Bastogne in the dead of winter, where the 101st Airborne was completely surrounded and getting pounded day and night by the most elite SS Panzer Regiments the Germans had to offer, the men of Company E of the 506th Parachute Infantry launched a counter-attack on Foy. Well their commanding officer, Lieutenant Norman Dike, was basically a worthless moron who couldn't lead his way out of a quart-sized Ziploc freezer bag if you gave him a welding torch and a machete. Dike split up the assault team into two forces, and promptly went about getting both sides of his divided force utterly ass-reamed by German tanks and artillery. After a couple minutes of watching his best buddies get torn apart by the Nazis, Major Dick Winters had enough of that bullshit. He grabbed the first officer he saw, who just so happened to be Ronald Speirs, and told him to go deal with the situation.

Speirs didn't even fucking blink.

The young, battle-hardened officer just grabbed his submachine gun and started sprinting across the field toward Foy, determined to bail out the pinned-down Americans and shove his foot up some Nazi asses. He ran over to Lieutenant Dike, who at this point was basically so shell-shocked and brain-dead that he probably couldn't remember how to tie his bootlaces, and told him he was taking over as company commander. Dike, utterly awed by being in the presence of such an unflinching hardass who obviously meant business, simply nodded.

Spiers ran over, gave out orders for a mortar team to take out a German sniper position, regrouped the soldiers, and provided Easy Company with some much-needed tactical direction. The assault continued, morale was bolstered, and the Americans stopped getting their fucking asses handed to them on a silver platter.

Then there was this whole issue of the assault force being stupidly divided into two teams, neither one really coordinating properly with the other. Speirs had a plan there, too, and it's got to be one of the most awesome/badass/crazy battlefield plans ever devised – Ron Speirs just grabbed his rifle and fucking ran directly through the German positions to reach the Americans on the other side. No shit, he fucking blew past Nazi artillery crews, riflemen, and Tiger tanks like he was out for a run around Boston Common on a quiet Sunday morning.

At this point basically every German firearm in the town of Foy was trying to bust a chunk of lead into Lieutenant Speirs' brain, but he didn't give a crap. He ran through the streets, bullets and explosions going off all around him, and...

The young, battle-hardened officer just grabbed his submachine gun and started sprinting across the field toward Foy, determined to bail out the pinned-down Americans and shove his foot up some Nazi asses. He ran over to Lieutenant Dike, who at this point was basically so shell-shocked and brain-dead that he probably couldn't remember how to tie his bootlaces, and told him he was taking over as company commander. Dike, utterly awed by being in the presence of such an unflinching hardass who obviously meant business, simply nodded.

Spiers ran over, gave out orders for a mortar team to take out a German sniper position, regrouped the soldiers, and provided Easy Company with some much-needed tactical direction. The assault continued, morale was bolstered, and the Americans stopped getting their fucking asses handed to them on a silver platter.

Then there was this whole issue of the assault force being stupidly divided into two teams, neither one really coordinating properly with the other. Speirs had a plan there, too, and it's got to be one of the most awesome/badass/crazy battlefield plans ever devised – Ron Speirs just grabbed his rifle and fucking ran directly through the German positions to reach the Americans on the other side. No shit, he fucking blew past Nazi artillery crews, riflemen, and Tiger tanks like he was out for a run around Boston Common on a quiet Sunday morning.

At this point basically every German firearm in the town of Foy was trying to bust a chunk of lead into Lieutenant Speirs' brain, but he didn't give a crap. He ran through the streets, bullets and explosions going off all around him, and...

America’s so-called Sea Hunter has taken a major step forward.

On January 30, the U.S Navy accepted the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) from DARPA, the Pentagon’s premier technology-innovation agency. The Sea Hunter, as the first ship of the ACTUV program is called, is an unmanned ship primarily designed to track quiet diesel-electric submarines for months with little or no human help. DARPA has described the objective of the program as developing an “advance unmanned maritime system autonomy to enable independently deploying systems capable of missions spanning thousands of kilometers of range and months of endurance under a sparse remote supervisory control model.”

This included demonstrating the ship’s ability to follow all international maritime laws, and “the capability of the ACTUV system to use its unique characteristics to employ non-conventional sensor technologies that achieve robust continuous track of the quietest submarine targets over their entire operating envelope.” DARPA also noted that while the immediate goal was to improve antisubmarine warfare (ASW) tracking capabilities, “the core platform and autonomy technologies are broadly extendable to underpin a wide range of missions and configurations for future unmanned naval vessels.”

The resulting prototype is a 140-ton ship that is 132 feet long, making it the largest unmanned ship ever built. The ship can reportedly also reach speeds of twenty-seven knots. Further work on ACTUV, including building new ships, will be handled by the the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which became a partner on the program in 2014. DARPA itself began work on the program around 2010. Joint testing began in 2016.

“ONR will continue developing the revolutionary prototype vehicle—the first of what could ultimately become an entirely new class of ocean-going vessel able to traverse thousands of kilometers over open seas for months at a time, without a single crew member aboard—as the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV),” DARPA said in a statement announcing the transfer.

Although, as the name suggests, the ACTUV system’s main mission is expected to be ASW. DARPA and ONR also tested the ship on other missions by using different modular payloads. One particular interesting prospect is using the Sea Hunter and future ships to conduct mine-clearing missions, which wouldn’t require putting sailors’ lives at risk. According to DARPA, the prototype vessel completed tests using a mine countermeasures (MCM) payload in August 2017.

One DARPA official who worked on the ACTUV program noted that the ship represents something of a shift in philosophy for the U.S. Navy. “ACTUV represents a new vision of naval surface warfare that trades small numbers of very capable, high-value assets for large numbers of commoditized, simpler platforms that are more capable in the aggregate,” Fred Kennedy, the director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said. “The U.S. military has talked about the strategic importance of replacing ‘king’ and ‘queen’ pieces on the maritime chessboard with lots of ‘pawns,’ and ACTUV is a first step toward doing exactly that.”

Although begun before the Third Offset Strategy was unveiled, the ACTUV program certainly fits in with that effort. Former deputy secretary of defense Robert Work, who is often credited as the architect of the Third Offset, repeatedly stated that exploiting advances in artificial intelligence and autonomy would be central to the strategy’s success. He also stressed the potential for machine and...

The Trump administration has declined to release the Democrats’ response to the Nunes memo on FISA surveillance conducted on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Democrats’ memo was sent back to the House Intelligence Committee, as the White House explained, due to “significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests.” The February 5th memo, drafted by the top ranking Democrat Adam Schiff, was passed unanimously through committee to send to the president’s desk.

More details on the president’s decision were reported by Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.

“It says consistent with the review of previous memorandum, meaning the G.O.P. one,” MacCallum reported, “the president asked the office of Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice to assess the declassification process and request rather than provide him recommendations.”

“The department has identified portions of the February 5th memorandum,” MacCallum continued. “The disclosure of which is [President Trump] believes it would create specially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests. The enclosed letter from the deputy attorney general and the department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation explain these determines in greater details.”

“Although the president is inclined to declassify this February 5 memo, because it contains numerous properly classified and insensitive passages he is unable to do so at this time,” MacCallum reported, citing the memo.

Did the Democrats specifically include highly classified “poison pill” information that would prevent the president from releasing the memo? Or does the White House truly have something to hide when it comes to releasing more information on the FISA surveillance?

It’s up to the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to clarify this issue, so that ...