90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, August 6, 2018

Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro Survives Drone Attack

Caught by surprise mid-speech, Maduro and his wife, looked up at the sky and winced after hearing the sound of an explosion.

A televised address by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was cut short during a speech at a military event on Saturday and soldiers were seen running before the TV transmission was cut off.

The 81st anniversary of the country’s National Guard was abruptly interrupted after an alleged assassination attempt on Maduro as documented on video, Maduro was delivering his speech when he and those around him onstage suddenly looked up as participants in the military demonstration rushed from the scene, according to several Venezuelan media outlets with access to the footage.

Explosions caused pandemonium sending National Guard troops scurrying in what administration officials called an assassination attempt using drones.

Oficers surrounding Maduro with what appeared to be a black bullet-proof barrier as they escorted him from the site.

Maduro, who was unharmed, later told the nation, “To all of our friends in the world, I am fine, I am alive,” blaming right-wing elements and added, “The Bolivarian revolution keeps its path.”

“This was an attempt to kill me,” he said later in an impassioned retelling of the events. “Today they attempted to assassinate me.”

Within seconds, Maduro said he heard a second explosion and pandemonium ensued. Bodyguards escorted Maduro out of the event and television footage showed uniformed soldiers standing in formation quickly scattering from the scene.

“That drone came after me,” he said. “But there was a shield of love that...

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Taiwanese missiles targeting Chinese airports are now operational

A Ching-kuo fighter jet armed with Wan Chien cruise missiles.

Chinese airbases and airports are within the 200-kilometer hit range of the precision guided missiles

Taiwan’s defense ministry said its indigenous Wan Chien air to ground cruise missile – a cluster munition – was fully operational after a classified live-fire test aimed at targets at sea.

The submunitions-bearing missile utilizes GPS and an inertial navigation system to achieve an effective range in excess of 200 kilometers, bringing civil and military airports along the coastal Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces of China within its range if fired from optimal locations on and off Taiwan.
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The Taiwan Strait is about 130 kilometers wide at its narrowest.

The new missile will give the air force the ability to strike at the Chinese Air Force’s coastal strongholds as well as amphibious ship groups, according to the island’s semi-official Central News Agency.

All of the island’s fighter jets, particularly the homemade Ching-kuo aircraft, have been upgraded to carry the new missiles to fire from the east of the central line in the Taiwan Strait to attack Chinese air bases, assembly areas, loading zones and military positions to neutralize any threats.

The missile partly resembles the United States’ AGM-154 precision guided weapon and Europe’s low-observable, air-launched cruise missile Storm Shadow, and serial production started in 2015.

This year it has undergone more rigorous tactical trials to ascertain its reliability and effectiveness in destroying airbases and other installations.

In one test firing, missiles were launched from fighter jets at surface targets in the Taiwan Strait, while being monitored by the another fighter and a drone, which transmitted real-time data and footage to a Taiwanese army command center. Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen was reported to have watched some of the test firings.

Computer simulations in previous anti-China invasion Han Kuang exercises indicated that Wan Chien missiles were crucial in fending off...

New details have emerged revealing that George Soros helped prop-up democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political career in an attempt to put 400 Bernie Sanders-like politicians in Congress.

A former organizer for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s under-dog win in the democratic primary was undoubtedly helped by far-left organizations linked George Soros — specifically, online media which played a crucial role in her campaign.

Members linked to Soros-funded digital media asked Ocasio-Cortez to run for office which guaranteed she would get favorable coverage by a media network that reaches almost 300 million people monthly.

One member of the Soros-funded media, Cenk Uygur, also founded one of the two political groups responsible for asking Ocasio-Cortez to run, Justice Democrats — whose goal is to get Sanders-like politicians elected to Congress.

Uygur, a former Armenian genocide denier, was eventually forced out of the organization after old articles revealed some of his previous sexist comments, often referring to women in a derogatory way.

Incumbent Joseph Crowley — whose footprint in the Democratic establishment led to speculation that he would succeed Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader of the House — greatly outspent Ocasio-Cortez.

However, her strong online presence — thanks to the coverage of the Soros-linked digital media — she was able to gain traction and defeat Crowley in the primary June 26. She is expected to win New York’s 14th congressional district handily, given the...

Editor’s Note: In response to the deadly Carr Fire in Northern California, many in the media have advanced the narrative that it is the result of climate change. However, this misses the ongoing problem of poor forest management which has led to larger fires throughout the West. The following story was published in the wake of the devastating Tubbs Fire.

The massive fires that took the lives of over 40 people in California were not the only devastating wildfires as of late.

Utah, Montana, and other states have been hit by destructive infernos that have left death and widespread property damage in their wake.

Forest fires—what firefighters call wildland fires—are undoubtedly a part of nature and can never be stopped entirely, but the measurable uptick in extraordinarily large fires is a trend that is causing intolerable amounts of damage.

Forest management policy has become calcified and centralized over the last half century, but there are some serious ideas that can turn things around.

Since the 1970s, the number of forest fires in the United States has remained fairly constant, but there’s been a significant uptick in the size of these blazes. The average wildfire is now twice the size of fires of 40 years ago.

Some have tried to pin the blame on climate change, but as a 2015 Reason Foundation study noted, climatic factors like higher temperatures and increased droughts “cannot explain the pattern of fires observed over the past century.”

“While it is possible that climate change has played a role in increasing the size of fires, the primary cause seems to be forest management practices, which have changed several times over the course of the past 200 years,” the study said.

The United States Forest Service, which manages most of America’s wilderness, made some big changes in the 1970s that many say have led to our modern predicament.

The selective clearing of forests, in which only certain trees are removed, had been highly successful in the past. But perverse incentives for the agency made clear-cutting, or uniformly chopping down trees, more common in the 1950s. This led to a backlash of lawsuits, environmentalist attacks, and unfortunately, more centralization in Washington for the Forest Service.

“In 1976 Congress tried to resolve the debate by instituting a comprehensive forest planning process,” wrote Randal O’Toole, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “The resulting plans proved to be a costly mistake: The agency spent more than a billion dollars planning the national forests, but the plans were often based on fabricated data, and they did not resolve any debates.”

Nearly a half century of bureaucratic centralization and environmentalist initiatives have left forests overgrown, vulnerable to fire, and dangerous to individual property owners and the economies of many states.

California state Sen. Mike McGuire, a Democrat, estimated that the recent fires may have...