90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1581

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Girls With Guns

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants too

Outside in the cold distance

A wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl, hey

All along the watchtower

This Is Your Decision; Not The Government's.

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #144

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #143

Prominent Dem Lawyer Predicts Lawsuits To Remove GOP Members From House Seats Next Year

Between Joe Biden’s poor poll numbers and his party being increasingly out of touch with the American public, the Democratic Party is widely expected to suffer devastating losses in the 2022 midterms.

But prominent Democrat lawyer Marc Elias is predicting that Democrats will try to use litigation to prevent some duly elected Republicans from serving.

“My prediction for 2022: Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress,” Elias tweeted last week. “We may even see litigation.”

Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center scoffed at Elias’s absurd idea. “Marc is admitting Dems can’t win the election. So now he wants to cheat. Democrats are the real insurrectionists. Just like last time.”

Elias, however, insisted that “members of Congress who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States are not eligible to serve in Congress.”

However, no members of Congress participated in the riots that Democrats have incorrectly dubbed an “insurrection.” Not only have text messages released by the Jan. 6 Committee proven that there was no insurrection but no one has been charged with insurrection either. It would be incredibly difficult to prove that members of Congress who didn’t even participate in...

Sowing Winds and Reaping Whirlwinds

The Left is being consumed by its own hatreds and hubris.

"For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. "

— Hosea 8:7

Joe Biden, first as a candidate and then in the White House, from the outset saw the COVID-19 pandemic mainly as a means of leveraging political support, from the manner in which the lockdowns allowed him to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the COVID-19 virus.

Like many on the Left, Biden was overt in such cynicism. So were Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, and Jane Fonda—who claimed that COVID was a “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” moment. Panic and lockdowns could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or the end of Donald Trump himself.

At the height of the last presidential campaign, Biden in September 2020 declared that Trump was responsible for the then-current 200,000 COVID deaths: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.”

Biden felt no need to list details where Trump had lethally erred or had not “done his job.”

He did not explain how any president should be able to prevent all deaths from a plague. And in 2020, Biden certainly had no expectation that before his own first year as president was over the cumulative deaths from the pandemic would exceed 800,000. He would have found it surreal to even imagine that soon there would be far more deaths under his own tenure than during Trump’s presidency—despite being the beneficiary of ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies, and antiviral drugs unavailable throughout most of 2020.

During the 2020 campaign, both Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris also had cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines. They repeatedly implied that any forthcoming jabs would be tainted by Trump’s sponsorship.

Yet, later in office, both would publicly deplore any doubt similar to their own about vaccination safety or efficacy. Indeed, they equated remaining unvaxed to being unpatriotic. In addition, when Biden was inaugurated, he claimed that no Americans had been vaccinated. In fact, on some days under Trump more than a million people were receiving vaccinations.

Given that the new daily cases and COVID fatality rates had begun to decline shortly before Trump left office, and due to the growing ubiquity of the Warp Speed vaccinations, Biden gladly took ownership of the virus and boasted it would be essentially gone by July 4—due to his own rebranding of Trump’s vaccination programs.

Biden had assumed he could blame Trump for all 2020 COVID-19 deaths, while few would die from the pandemic in 2021, and that, again, he could take credit for the Warp Speed vaccination program.

But fate, not Biden, was the master of our COVID-19 destinies. Soon both the Delta and Omicron variants arrived, and we are now back to a Groundhog Day of possible lockdowns and mask mandates. Certainly, Biden would not wish a political rival to do to him what he did to Trump: question the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, blame Biden for more than 400,000 deaths on his watch, and claim the continuance of the pandemic was Biden’s fault alone.
Truth and Consequences

What’s the moral of Biden’s current troubles? From the Bible and the Greeks and throughout the Western tradition, there is a constant refrain of being wary of hubris, the lying and arrogance that are innate to it, and the divine power that ultimately levels things out.

Biden and the Left so despised Donald Trump that they lost all sense of moderation, of proportion, of logic itself. Thus, they find themselves in the current ridiculous situation of suffering the consequences of their own unhinged rhetoric and actions.

This madness was birthed in part because Trump’s newly calibrated populist Republican Party had the potential to permanently draw the working class away from Democrats. In part, they found Trump’s salesmanship and braggadocio repulsive and contrary to bicoastal manners. Partly his agenda had more success since any first term since Ronald Reagan. Add it up, and the result was toxic hatred and mindless rejection of the successful policies.

Biden’s undoing was claiming not just to be antithetical to Trump, but the antithesis of all that Trump did. His hatred blinded him to the reality that Trump’s record on Afghanistan, the border, COVID-19, the economy, foreign policy, energy, and regulation was in each instance either adequate or very good. To simply nullify all of it, and to claim Trump was an ungodly disaster, meant Biden’s own one-dimensional rejectionist policies had to be winning and successful. And when they were neither, he suffered not just the wages of failure, but of hypocrisy and...

Feels Like A Frog Boil...

New York Times editor, 49, dies of heart attack one day after posting that he got his booster shot

Carlos Tejada, deputy Asia editor for The New York Times, reportedly died from a heart attack one day after receiving the Moderna booster shot.

According to his social media account, Tejada previously received two Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine shots.

In a December 17 tweet, Tejada’s wife Nora announced on Twitter (in an account that is now locked) that the 49-year-old journalist tragically died of a coronary-related issue the night before. “It’s with deepest sorrow that I have to share with you that Carlos passed away last night of a heart attack. I’ve lost my best friend and our kids lost a truly great dad. I will be off social media for awhile,” she wrote.

In breaking the story, lockdown and vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson, himself an ex-Times reporter who is permanently banned from Twitter (and is now suing the platform as a result), asserted the following on his Substack page:

“On Dec. 16, in Seoul, South Korea, [Tejada] received a Moderna mRNA/LNP ‘booster.’ No clinical trials have ever been conducted to examine the safety or efficacy of mixing various types of these vaccines, and Carlos did not give informed consent, as the consent form was in Korean, a language he could not read.”

Tejada, a former Wall Street Journal editor who went to work for the Times in 2016, had commemorated his third jab on Instagram: “Double-vaxxed. Janssen-fueled, Moderna-boosted. Hey, Omicron: Hit me with your wet snot.”

The Times obituary also included the cause of death, attributing that information to his spouse, and explained that Tejada “helped shape coverage of the global Covid-19 crisis that won a Pulitzer Prize.”

The write-up from the so-called newspaper of record contains no mention of a vaccine issue, however, which perhaps is hardly a surprise in that the corporate media establishment has monolithically adopted a pro-vaccine editorial policy, including frowning upon even those who raise good-faith questions or merely seek additional information about safety or efficacy.

This dismissiveness often extends to those who are anti-mandate but nonetheless favor the COVID vaccination program itself.

In a July Instagram post, Tejada, who worked as an editor in Asia for 13 years, wrote, among other things, that he and his wife benefitted from the “privilege” to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and he was thankful for the scientists and medical professionals in that context.

The news of the respected journalist’s tragic passing, and particularly the lack of coverage of the timetable, has prompted a huge response on Twitter. Here is just a sampling: