90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Helpless Native American Gets Laughed At By White Man In MAGA Hat...

World’s biggest fleet of campus delivery robots now transporting student meals

Whether it’s dropping off our mail or bringing snacks on demand, delivery robots are fast moving from novelty concept to real world game changer. Now things are taking the next step with the world’s largest fleet of delivery robots on a university campus arriving at Fairfax County, Virginia’s George Mason University. Starting today, January 22, Mason’s 40,000 students, faculty, and staff can get meals delivered, courtesy of a collaboration between food services giant Sodexo and delivery robot pioneer Starship Technologies.

The new delivery service, which costs just $1.99 per delivery, will transport Blaze Pizza, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts takeouts anywhere on campus. Additional retailers are set to be announced in the coming weeks. In total, 25 robots are included in the fleet, which represents a new benchmark in the size of a delivery robot rollout.

“Not only will this be the largest fleet of delivery robots on any university campus, but it is also the first delivery system to be compatible with students’ meal plans,” Jeff McKinley, Sodexo district manager for George Mason University, told Digital Trends. “That component itself elevates the value of the program tremendously, because meal plans at GMU are tax exempt, thus saving the students not only time but money by ordering via robot.”

The robots are described as being “99-percent autonomous” — capable of driving themselves around campus, including checking both ways before crossing a street, and even changing their own batteries. “It’s quite amazing, actually,” McKinley said.

To order their food, students and faculty use the Starship Deliveries app, select their items, and drop a pin on a map to show where the food should be sent. The app then allows them to track the robot’s progress. When it arrives, the customer receives an alert, after which they can obtain their food by unlocking the robot with an in-app command. The process takes an average of 15 minutes or less, depending on...

Nathan Phillips Is Not A Vietnam War Veteran But Does He Have A Richard Blumenthal Problem?

During his 2010 run for the Senate, then Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was revealed to have lied about serving in Vietnam. Over the years, Blumenthal had made much of his service in Vietnam as a Marine but it was revealed that not only had Blumenthal not served in Vietnam, his USMC service was limited to being a member of the Marine Corps Reserve which, along with his college deferments, kept him out of Vietnam.

Let me pause here of a moment. I don’t have any huge objection to men who grew up in the 1960s using the system to avoid being drafted any more than I object to people using an accountant to minimize their tax liability. The government makes the rules and if they make stupid ones…and the draft law was chock to the gills with really stupid rules…then I don’t see where you are under a moral, legal, or ethical obligation to say, “hey, that rule is dumb but I’ll not take advantage of it and go ahead and screw myself so that I can show the world what kind of a righteous person I am.” Where my tolerance ends is when you say you served in combat.

That brings me to Nathan Phillips. Phillips is the guy who manufactured a controversy over the weekend (again). He and a group of his cronies participating in the alleged Indigenous Peoples March decided to walk into the middle of a group of Catholic high school students who were under verbal attack by another protest group. Phillips directly approached one of the students, got in his face, and proceed to bang his tom-tom right in the kid’s face. For a few hours, the left and NeverTrump engaged in an orgy of hate…the kid was wearing a MAGA hat so you know what that means…a kid was erroneously doxxed, the school was threatened, and, all in all, it was much as we’ve come to expect from the news media winding up an online lynch mob. And the headlines usually reflected that Phillips was a veteran or a Vietnam veteran (apparently that was supposed to authorize an extra dose of hate directed at the Kentucky students).

A quick search found an lot more instances of the same.

Wikipedia: “Nathan Phillips (activist), Native American activist and Vietnam War veteran.”

UPI: “…laughing and chanting at Vietnam War veteran Nathan Phillips…

TMZ: “A mob of MAGA hat-wearing teenagers swarmed around a Native American Vietnam veteran…”

Slate: “…Nathan Phillips, a Vietnam War veteran…”

Washington Post*: “…Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War…”

*the Washington Post has since stealth edited this story but the original clip is below:

Huffington Post: “Phillips served in the Vietnam War and is the former director…”

GoFundMe: “…Native American Vietnam War Veteran Nathan Phillips was mocked and harassed…”

But the other thing that struck me was Phillip’s age.

The Washington Post: “…Phillips, 64,…”

The Omaha World Herald reprinted a profile it ran of Phillips in November 2000: “Now 45, Phillips has been sober for 16 years”

That struck me as curious because that places Phillips year of birth in 1955. At that point we can call bullsh** on Phillips having served as a Marine in Vietnam. According to the USMC official history of its involvement in Vietnam:

But by the end of 1970, more Marines were leaving than arriving as replacements. On 14 April 1971, III MAF redeployed to Okinawa, and two months later the last ground troops, the 13,000 men of the 3d MAB, flew out from Da Nang.

Although Marine combat units were no longer in Vietnam, Marine advisors remained to assist the South Vietnamese.

In 1971, Phillips was 16 years old. The earliest he could have enlisted, either as an emancipated minor or with parental consent, was 1972. And Phillips does claim to have enlisted at 17. Junior enlisted guys and junior officers weren’t sent as advisers to Vietnam in the last days of the war, after US ground involvement had essentially halted. A Marine infantry private was not going to go to Vietnam a year after the last Marines left Vietnam.

This Ain’t Hell blog, which hunts out Stolen Valor claims, points out that we aren’t all that sure what Phillips has said about himself. There is no direct quote of Phillips calling himself a Vietnam vet, but, being less charitable than them, I’d point out that several of those articles were undoubtedly run by Phillips to check for accuracy and it doesn’t appear that Phillips ever raised an alarm about being misrepresented. To the contrary, he seems to have know exactly what he was doing in using a variation of Department of Veterans Affairs terminology to...

New IRS spy software is ultimate Big Brother…

One of the reasons identify theft is considered by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to be the crime of the century is because of the IRS. The Internal Revenue Service makes growing demands for information about people’s businesses and private lives every day. There is no such thing as personal privacy these days. That the IRS sends citizens a so-called “Privacy Act Notice” in all its mailings is a farce. The IRS lays claim to your data without court authority more so than any other government agency. And to make matters worse, they share the data with any other federal, state or local government agency claiming an interest, including foreign governments.

A river of data

In 2019, there will be about 152 million individual tax returns filed with the IRS. There will be roughly another 100 million business tax returns filed. There will be millions more miscellaneous tax returns, including trust, estate and gift tax returns. On top of that, over 3.6 BILLION information returns (Forms W-2, 1099, etc.) will be filed. There is quite literally a river of data flowing into the agency. The flow cannot be stopped, and as far as the IRS is concerned, they need even more.

For example, one of the six “Strategic Goals” presented in the IRS’ 2018-2022 Strategic Plan is to increase its access to data, and use that data more effectively to drive its agency-wide decision making, as well as case evaluations and selections for enforcement purposes. See: IRS Publication 3744 (4-2018). This is consistent with the IRS goal of becoming a “data driven agency.”

The IRS is awash in data. The 2018-2022 Strategic Plan boasts that the IRS’ volume of data was 100 times larger in 2017 than it was 10 years prior. In 2018, the IRS Criminal Investigation unit alone collected 1.67 terabytes of data from various sources. A terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 1,024 gigabytes of data. I’m told that approximately 900,000 plain text files can fit into a single gigabyte. The number of users in the IRS with access to that data has increased 23 times (Strategic Plan, p. 19) in the past 10 years.

Managing massive data

How do you manage, process and assimilate such a massive amount of data to the point where it becomes usable? The 2018-2022 Strategic Plan expresses the goal to “invest in analytics and visualization software and tools, and develop processes to support analytics in IRS operations” (p. 20). The end game is presented in these words:

Advancements in how data is collected, stored, accessed and analyzed will allow us to deploy data better. We’ll standardize our data processes and protocols and encourage collaboration among all IRS business units. Increased interoperability of data systems and sources will enhance the secure and seamless flow of data to enable greater authorized access to information. We’ll invest in training to develop more advanced analytics skill sets across the IRS, and use data to improve our business processes. (Strategic Plan, p. 19.)

The investment in analytics was recently undertaken – in a big way.

Big Government, meet Big Data

On Sept. 27, 2018, the IRS entered into a contract with Palantir Technologies of Palo Alto, California, to handle the task of data assimilation. The contract calls for Palantir to...

Limbaugh: NRO Pushed Covington Hoax to Win ‘Approval of the Mainstream Media’

Rush Limbaugh identified National Review as a news media outfit that prioritizes the pursuit of “approval [from] the mainstream media” over veracity in reporting, offering his remarks on Monday’s edition of his eponymous show.

Limbaugh highlighted recent news media narratives framing a group of Covington Catholic High School students as “racists,” including agreement from ostensibly conservative news media outlets and personalities.

LISTEN:

Limbaugh said:

One of the biggest problems that we as conservatives have was on full display all weekend long, continuing into this morning — and that is, quite simply, we have a lot of people who would rather lose gracefully with the approval of the mainstream media than simply use their heads and understand who our opposition is.
…
When we see a picture of a teenager who’s white wearing a Trump hat, a “Make America Great Again” hat, and he’s standing there smiling while some aging Indian leftist activist is beating a war drum, what do we do?

We immediately condemn the kid, without even thinking! Without even learning anything, without even taking a few minutes to understand what happened! Instead of using our instincts! “Okay, we got a left-wing Indian activist there. We’ve got the media jumping all over it.” The red flags should have gone up immediately, and everybody on our side should have called ’em out for what this was! But instead, we had people on the right condemning the kids.
…
These people are scared to death of the media and the first and only thing they care about is media approval. They don’t want to be lumped in with the kids! So you have a bunch of kids from a Catholic high school standing around minding their own business, being assaulted by a militant, leftist black group and then having...

Native American Who Cried ‘Harassment’ Exposed as Democrat Activist

The Native American man who falsely claimed “harassment” by a group of peaceful pro-Trump Catholic students has been exposed as a Democrat activist with a history of race-related public relations stunts.

Several video feeds surfaced over the weekend showing far-left activist Nathan Phillips banging a drum in front of a group of students outside the Lincoln Memorial for the pro-life march, which the mainstream media then egregiously claimed was an act of racism by the Catholic students in attendance.

Infowars.com reports: The media demonization campaign resulted in the Covington Catholic school students receiving death threats, prompting several students and their parents to release lengthy statements setting the record straight.

As liberal figures and publications backtrack their accusations in light of additional videoshowing the full picture, more information is coming to light about Phillips and his history of “drumming up” racial division.

In 2015, Phillips accused a group of Eastern Michigan University students of racism after confronting them for wearing Native American garb for a theme party.

“For me just to walk by and have a blind eye to it,” he told local media. “Something just didn’t allow me to do it.”

“They had their face painted,” he added. “I said what the heck is going on here. ‘Oh we are honoring you.’ I said no you are not honoring me.”

Additionally, the media is reporting that Phillips served as a Vietnam veteran, but the validity of those reports remain in question given Phillip’s claim that he was a “Recon Ranger” is a nonexistent operational force.

Phillips also made his politics known in 2012 when he appeared in a Skrillex music video called “Make It Bun Dem,” which demonizes law enforcement.

In further evidence that Phillips supports the left’s agenda, he also protested the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation in...

Authorities say they have arrested a man they believe is connected to four killings that have shaken Northern Nevada and put residents on edge over the past two weeks.

Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam says Wilbur Ernesto Martinez Guzman, a Carson City resident who is either 19 or 20, was taken into custody Saturday afternoon on suspicion of burglary, possession of stolen property and immigration law violations. He’s being held in the Carson City Detention Center under 24-hour watch from medical and mental health personnel.

“At this stage in the investigation, we feel confident we have the evidence that will link him to all four homicides,” Balaam said at a Sunday afternoon press conference, adding that deputies don’t believe there are additional outstanding suspects.

The killings began in Gardnerville, the Douglas County community about 50 miles from Reno, when two women, Connie Koontz, 56, and Sophia Renken, 74, were killed inside their homes earlier this month only miles apart. The two victims were found Jan. 10 and Jan. 13 — within four days of each other.

Days later on Jan. 15, authorities began investigating two killings in Reno after Gerald David, 81, and Sharon David, 80, were found dead in their South Reno home. Gerald David was a former president of the Reno Rodeo, the Reno Gazette Journal reported.

Given the similarities between all four killings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began aiding in the probe last week, the Associated Press reported. All of the killings relied on a firearm, appeared to target elderly victims and at least two involved property stolen from the homes.

Carson City Sheriff Kenny Furlong said law enforcement had received tips in the cases from Jan. 10 to Jan. 19 and deployed a multi-agency surveillance team on Friday to put Martinez Guzman under 24-hour surveillance.

They later learned from immigration officials that Martinez Guzman was likely in the country illegally and could be detained on those grounds. Furlong said activities that raised concern for public safety prompted immigration officials and Carson City deputies to take him into custody Saturday afternoon a few blocks south of the state capitol.

Officers also seized control of an apartment on Menlo Drive in Carson City, two vehicles, another family member and another apartment resident without incident, Furlong said.

Authorities say Martinez Guzman did not have interactions with Carson City deputies in the year he was apparently in the area. Officers declined to offer much about a motive, and did not elaborate why they zeroed in on Martinez Guzman except to say the investigative process and a tip led them to him.

Northern Nevada businesses selling guns and alarm systems told KOLO news that they saw an uptick in sales in the days following the killings.

“I want you to know we feel strongly we have...

A-ha!

You could almost hear the collective glee of social justice warriors and identity politics aficionados this weekend when a video emerged that appeared to show a teenage white boy in a Make America Great Again red cap smirk disrespectfully as a Native American stood in front of him—beating a drum—at the Lincoln Memorial.

Finally, they had a piece of proof that supported their cherished narrative: that most Trump supporters were bigots and racists who backed the wall and other initiatives because of their racist views.

And they took no time before gleefully dancing on the reputational grave of these teens. Here’s CNN commentator Keith Boykin:

The MAGA-hat wearing Covington Catholic High School students mocking Elder Nathan Phillips at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington are direct descendants of the white privilege that empowered white kids to mock Elizabeth Eckford at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. pic.twitter.com/tQroBf6aPb
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) January 19, 2019

The Atlantic’s James Fallows compared the boys of Covington Catholic High School to those who protested desegregation, writing:

The crowd members’ names don’t matter, any more than the names of the crowd members you see in the photo below, from North Little Rock in the 1950s. The young men from Covington Catholic High School should know that they will be immortalized, the way the angry young white people you see below were: as a group, a movement, a problem, beyond their identities as individuals.

Activist Shaun King likewise made the issue about race:

I am so deeply grieved and angry by this as young kids in MAGA hats surrounded and mocked a beloved Native American elder yesterday.

When your power is centered in your whiteness, mocking others who are unlike you makes you feel strong.

But it’s weak. And despicable. pic.twitter.com/38FtzGtowL
— Shaun King (@shaunking) January 19, 2019