90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, February 3, 2020

Rush Limbaugh Announces Advanced Lung Cancer Diagnosis

On Monday, talk radio took a devastating blow as syndicated conservative Rush Limbaugh announced on air that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Limbaugh, a pioneer of the talk radio format, said upcoming treatments would impact his broadcasting abilities in the future.

Transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):

Ladies and gentlemen, this… This day has been one of the most difficult days in recent memory for me because I’ve known this moment was coming in the program today. Now, I’m sure that you all know by now, I really don’t like talking about myself, and I don’t like making things about me other than in the usual satirical, parodic, joking way.

I like this program to be about you and the things that matter to all of us. The one thing that I know that has happened over the 31-plus years of this program is that there has been an incredible bond that has developed between all of you and me. Now, this program’s 31 years old, and in that 31 years, there are people — you hear them call all the time — who have been listening the whole time. They’ve been listening 30 years or 25 years.

I just had somebody say they’ve been here three years. But, whatever, it is a family-type relationship to me, and I’ve mentioned to you that this program and this job is what has provided me the greatest satisfaction and happiness that I’ve ever experienced, more than I ever thought that I would experience. So I have to tell you something today that I wish I didn’t have to tell you.

It’s a struggle for me because I had to inform my staff earlier today. I can’t escape… Even though people are telling me it’s not the way to look at it, I can’t help but feel that I’m letting everybody down with this. But the upshot is that I have been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, diagnosis confirmed by two medical institutions back on January 20th. I first realized something was wrong on my birthday weekend, January 12th.

I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, and I thought about not telling anybody. I thought about trying to do this without anybody knowing, ’cause I don’t like making things about me. But there are going to be days that I’m not gonna be able to...

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What is Rule 5?

The Other McCain has: Rule 5 Monday: A Fine Pair

Proof Positive has: Best Of Web Link Around

The Woodsterman has: Rule 5 Woodsterman Style

EBL has: Rule 5 And FMJRA

The Right Way has: Rule 5 Saturday LinkORama

The Pirate's Cove has: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup

The Cadillac Of Lies And Deceit...

Lying In State

Megadeth

What we are witnessing is the decline of western civilization
Crushing our potential and piling it on, how will history portray us?
Attack the family, attack their faith and dreams
Attack the body and the head will fall

A lasting legacy or ruin brought in haste?
The enemy of truth is lying there in state

Another day, another manufactured crisis keeping the people distracted
There's no one playing by the rules anymore, how will history portray us?
A broken backbone with nothing left to lose?
That hate the sight of all the ones that do?

A lasting legacy or ruin brought in haste?
The enemy of truth is lying there in state

A shiny new agenda, birthed from a depraved mind
Of failing us on purpose, to culturally sanitize
Its opiates for the masses under cloak…

The Audacity Of The Corrupt...

Watching Congenital Liar Adam Schiff Pontificate And Lie While Acting Like He Is Working In The Best Interest Of America And Americans Is So Distasteful To Me, And Then To See The Propaganda Leftist Media Act Like He Is Some Kind Of A Hero Is So Alternate Reality To The Truth, It Makes You Realize Just How Hard We Have To Work To Bring All Of These Actors To Justice.

The Failures Of Government Should Not Warrant More Government...

#kylekashuv

US scientist recruited by China pleads guilty to lying to government

A former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist accused of lying about his contact with a Chinese recruitment program pleaded guilty last Friday to one count of making a false statement to the U.S. government.

Turab Lookman of Santa Fe accepted the plea as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors that includes dismissal of two other charges.

Lookman will be sentenced at a later date, probably within 60 to 90 days, federal prosecutor George C. Kraehe said.

He could face up to five years in federal prison and be fined as much as $250,000.

Lookman, who was 67 when he was arrested, admitted to lying to a LANL investigator in 2018 about his contact with a program that prosecutors said had been “established by the Chinese government to recruit people with access to and knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge B. Paul Briones told Lookman that the 10-month sentence the defendant had discussed with attorneys was “on the low end” and would not be binding to the U.S. District Court judge who will decide whether to accept the terms of the plea deal.

The FBI arrested Lookman after he was indicted in May 2019 on three counts of making false statements about being recruited by and applying to participate in China’s Thousand Talents Program for personal compensation.

“The laboratory proactively recognized this issue and since then has worked cooperatively with federal law enforcement and will continue to assist as appropriate during the sentencing phase,” lab spokesman Kevin Roark said in a statement Friday.

Lookman joined LANL in 1999 and was named a laboratory fellow in 2017, one of the laboratory’s highest scientific honors. He has authored two books and more than 250 academic articles.

His indictment came as tensions escalated between the U.S. and China over intellectual property disputes and a mounting trade war. U.S. officials have accused China of extensive intellectual property theft, including for high-tech military weaponry that raises national security concerns.

China has worked in the past decade to boost its status as a superpower, creating several recruitment initiatives such as the Thousand Talents Program to lure top-level scientists in high-tech fields, partly by offering large research grants. The White House has called Thousand Talents a threat to the U.S.

The Thousand Talents Program is cited as one of China’s most successful efforts at appropriating rival countries’ high-tech research. China’s applications for new patents have grown almost fivefold to 1.5 million since the program was...

Bad Medicine: Gun Control Advocacy Doesn’t Stand Up to the Facts

Dr. Patrick Neustatter recently penned an op-ed for the Fredricksburg Star supporting typical “common sense” gun control legislation. I feel for my colleague because I too once believed the medical mythology that guns are bad and need to be “eradicated.”

Over the past year — I celebrate my first guniversary next week — I’ve opened my Hippocratic eyes to actual facts and figures and have reached the conclusion that “guns save lives.” Here’s are my rebuttals to the usual points people like Dr. Neustatter make:

“Gun violence” isn’t a public health problem. It isn’t even an actual thing. Like “gun sense” and “assault weapon” it’s a made-up phrase designed to do one thing: facilitate civilian disarmament.

“Gun violence” consists of two parts suicide and one part criminal homicide, the latter largely the result of inner-city gang and drug-related warfare. According Giffords, is perpetrated by 1% of the population. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t even make the CDC’s top ten list of public health problems and Virginia is the fourth safest state in the Union.

Here are some additional facts to disarm the disarmamentarians.
Shootings cause 100 deaths per day.

Humans cause death, and nothing makes this clearer than research that “shows” that confiscation reduces gun-related suicide, but the suicide rates climbs nonetheless. Why? Because people kill themselves and others, not guns. When people are literally left to their own devices, they find another way.

This is why red flag laws are a terrible idea.
“Gun deaths” per 100,000 in Australia, Canada and the U.K. are 0.9 , 2.0 and 0.23, respectively, compared with 12.21 per 100,000 in the U.S.

Cherry-picked numbers do not advance the discussion. The U.S. ranks 30th worldwide for gun-related homicide, and the rate of “gun violence” per gun, since that’s what others want to focus on, is about 37,000 gun-deaths divided by roughly 420,000,000 guns, a rate of less than 0.01%.

This means that Americans are astonishingly “well-regulated,” or “in good working order,” with their guns.
The U.S. government will never be so authoritarian that guns will be needed to fight off its agents.

I’m sure Venezuelans thought the same thing when they disarmed in 2012. I bet they changed their minds when armored personnel carriers ran over their own people in 2019, and their doctors were hauled off by thugs for protesting the lack of basic medical supplies in their hospitals.

Guns are about deterrence, and an armed population provides a necessary and important reminder to the government that its officials govern with the consent of the governed. Human nature hasn’t changed much since the Bill of Rights was written, and history has proved, over and over, what happens to unarmed civilians.

The Washington Post reported the percentage of people who have used a gun in self-defense “is similar to the percentage of Americans who said they were abducted by aliens.” Also, a survey by the Harvard School of Public Health said, “The National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss” . . .

I wouldn’t trust my life to the Washington Post or the Harvard School of Public Health. I’m not a fan of the CDC either, but when it reports, begrudgingly, that guns are used defensively 1,000,000 times per year, I’ll believe it.

I don’t have the benefit of Michael Bloomberg’s armed security detail, and I don’t work for the Virginia Legislature on the other side of metal detectors and armed Capitol Police officers, so I’m concerned about actual criminal humans, not...

#vonnegut

Study Reveals the Absurd Conformity of Higher Education

A recently released study confirms the suspicion that American higher education has become absurdly and ruthlessly monolithic in terms of political ideology.

The study found that the ratio of college professor donations to Democrats as opposed to Republicans was 95:1.

Besides federal agency employees, few other industries outside working for the Democratic National Committee or the media are so strongly skewed toward Democrats and the left.

The authors of the study, Heterodox Academy Research Director Sean Stevens and Brooklyn College Professor Mitchell Langbert, admit to some uncertainty on the numbers.

But even if the disparity in donations isn’t quite so high, it’s still clearly extreme and highly problematic, as the researchers explain.

“Researchers have raised concerns that ideological homogeneity may lead to questionable research practices,” Stevens and Langbert wrote. “This concern is grounded in research on confirmation bias, group polarization, motivated reasoning, and the tendency for these phenomena to be even more pronounced among the highly educated. As well, partisan polarization has been leading to Republicans’ increasing skepticism about higher education.”

Beyond problematic research is the larger problem that, at all but a handful of Americans colleges, young Americans are being dropped straight into left-wing indoctrination centers.

Anyone who has recently attended a college or university knows that even if one avoids politics and the humanities in their coursework, most campuses are pervasively left-wing. From professors, to administrators, to the most vocal students, rarely does one find a campus with even a tiny bit of...