90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Concealed Carrier Ends Sexual Assault

We often talk about the “good guy with a gun” as being the way to stop a whole lot of crimes in their tracks. Meanwhile, anti-gunners pretend the good guy with a gun is a myth and little more. Of course, we know that’s untrue and have plenty of examples otherwise.

However, we now have one more. This time, the good guy with a gun also put an end to a #MeToo moment.

A 14-year-old was arrested after Clay County deputies said he threatened a Fleming Island Walmart customer with a knife and demanded she have sex with him.

According to the Clay County Sheriff’s Office, a man who was nearby stepped in with his gun to help. Deputies said he had a concealed-carry license and did the right thing.

According to the incident report, the assault happened Tuesday around 6 p.m. at the Walmart on County Road 220. In a Facebook post, the women explained she thought the teen wanted to help her with groceries, but as he approached he told her, “I want you to have sex with me. I’ve got a knife in my pocket.”

When she saw a man walking by the aisle, she yelled for help, the Sheriff’s Office said. News4Jax spoke with that man, who wished to remain anonymous.

You never know when something bad is going to go down. As I’ve said before, we good guys don’t have the initiative. The bad guys always get that because they pick the time and the place of the crime.

All we can do is respond.

Luckily, though, in this case, the woman called for help, and the assistance came in the form of an armed citizen. That...

Google plans to update its U.S. and Europe-based street view cars with pollution recording devices — but will also reportedly replace factual pollution data on its new censored search engine for China with statistics provided by the Chinese government.

The Washington Times reports that Google will soon be outfitting its Google Street View cars with pollution recording devices in Europe and the United States to monitor fluctuations in air quality. This is not Google’s first step into environmental studies, the company’s Earth Outreach division has been monitoring air quality since 2014 but the majority of the information has stayed in-house, something which may soon be changing.

Google has now partnered with California-based company Aclima, which builds Internet-connected air-quality sensors, and with the Environmental Defense Fund. Google will soon begin making their study data available to researchers linked to both groups.

Google Earth Outreach program manager Karin Tuxen-Bettman told TechCrunch: “These measurements can provide cities with new neighborhood-level insights to help cities accelerate efforts in their transition to smarter, healthier cities.”

However, despite Google’s apparent dedication to climate activism in the U.S. and Europe, it would seem that in China, its commitment to the cause may not be so strong. In a report on Google’s new China-based censored search product, called Dragonfly, the Intercept reported that the search engine will only return pollution results provided by the Chinese state.

The Intercept states:

Sources familiar with Dragonfly said the search platform also appeared to have been tailored to replace weather and air pollution data with information provided directly by an unnamed source in Beijing. The Chinese government has a record of manipulating details about pollution in the country’s cities. One Google source said the company had built a system, integrated as part of Dragonfly, that was “essentially hardcoded to force their [Chinese-provided] data.” The source raised concerns that the Dragonfly search system would be providing false pollution data that downplayed the amount of toxins in the air.

So while it seems Google is willing to fight for climate issues in the U.S., in the Chinese market — where their reporting of air quality levels could affect them financially — the tech firm suddenly becomes very compliant with the Chinese state’s...

The Washington Post and New York Times each completely botched a hit piece on the Trump administration in recent weeks, as a result of shirking basic journalism standards.

Chuck Todd’s accusation that conservative outlets are to blame for the public’s growing lack of trust in the media was still in a steaming pile on the ground when two of America’s biggest papers had to scramble their way to corrections this week.

Both The New York Times and Washington Post had to perform reconstructive surgery on stories critical of the Trump administration. The botched reports indicate a different cause for the public’s lack of trust in the media: a years-long trend of exaggeration, innuendo and flat out false reporting on Trump.

The Washington Post reported in late August that the Trump administration is cracking down on passports at the border, in contradiction to official government statements and other publicly available facts. That story is still unraveling. And last week, The New York Times falsely framed Nikki Haley as responsible for an expensive curtain purchase that was in fact made by the Obama administration. Both outlets overhauled the stories and issued lengthy corrections.

In both cases, journalists shirked reporting standards as basic as reaching out to key players in the story, or putting the facts in their proper context. They exemplify the trend of bad reporting that has come to mark the established outlets waging open war on Trump, and is no doubt fueling distrust in the media — perhaps to a greater extent than the established press would like to admit.

Let’s go through these two reports one by one.

The Washington Post is standing by its August 29 report that the Trump administration is cracking down on potentially fraudulent passports, although it is marked by a stunning number of reporting failures, detailed most thoroughly by The Huffington Post on Monday. Reporters and editors on the story got facts wrong, misled readers, left out key data contradicting the premise of the article, and failed to reach out to the family of a deceased man accused of fraud in the story.

The initial story claimed the Trump administration is taking unprecedented action against thousands of Hispanic people living near the southern border suspected of having obtained false U.S. birth certificates. It was based largely on anecdotal evidence from immigration lawyers working in the area who said they are seeing a surge in the number of passports under scrutiny.

Within hours of its publication, a Slate reporter pointed out the practice of denying passports to people issued birth certificates from midwives suspected of fraud began under the George W. Bush administration, and continued through the Barack Obama administration. The story was corrected Aug. 31 to reflect this error. The story also asserted the Trump administration is newly targeting people delivered by a Texas doctor suspected of fraud, but HuffPo reports that practice also predates this administration.

After the State Department released numbers contradicting the story’s premise a few days after publication, editors added a new claim — that the Trump administration was...