90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, January 16, 2022

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1600

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

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #181

Gov. Blackface Pardons Perv: Northam Absolves Democrat Jailed for Underage Sex Crimes in Final Act as Governor

Virginia Democratic governor Ralph Northam on Friday pardoned a state legislator who served jail time in an underage sex case, in one of the outgoing governor's final acts before leaving office.

Northam pardoned Democratic state senator Joe Morrissey, 64, who was charged with having a sexual relationship with his 17-year-old, part-time receptionist and pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor in 2014. After serving a three-month jail sentence, Morrissey had a child with the victim and the couple married when she turned 18.

Morrissey, who won reelection to the House of Delegates while campaigning from jail in 2015, told the Washington Free Beacon on Friday that he "absolutely" felt vindicated by Northam's decision to pardon him.

"I was absolutely thrilled that the governor pardoned me. My wife and I are most delighted," said Morrissey when reached by phone. "However, the people who will be most affected by this and who will in the future be the most grateful are our four little children."

Northam, who leaves office on Saturday, is best known for dressing up in either blackface or a Ku Klux Klan hood and declining to answer questions about it or resign. He will be succeeded by Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin, a businessman and Virginia father of four.

Morrissey has denied that he knowingly carried out a sexual relationship with his now-wife while she was a minor and claimed explicit text messages from their phones stating otherwise were planted by hackers.

Morrissey has a long history of tangling with the law. As a county prosecutor in the early 1990s, he twice served jail time for punching an opposing defense lawyer and for writing a letter to a judge that was deemed threatening. He later had his law license suspended after he...

Team USA warns athletes to leave phones behind to avoid China spying during Olympics

The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee is advising American athletes to leave their personal phones behind and instead use temporary “burner” phones to avoid being spied on when they go to Beijing, China next month.

The advice to athletes was reportedly shared in an advisory document in September and then a bulletin in December, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Friday. The bulletin reportedly advised athletes that their “every device, communication, transaction and online activity may be monitored.”

“Your device(s) may also be compromised with malicious software, which could negatively impact future use,” the bulletin added.

The advice to leave their primary personal phones behind and instead use temporary “burner” phones could cause further challenges for athletes during these Olympic Games. Athletes who follow the advice to leave their phones behind may find it harder to stay in contact with their family members, who are not allowed to attend this year’s games. China has banned all overseas spectators from attending the 2022 Winter Olympic games.

Athletes might also find it difficult to access their social media accounts from a burner phone. Many athletes are reliant on their social media accounts to promote themselves. Self-promotion on social media is an important way many modern athletes are able to get and maintain endorsements.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. isn’t the only country that has advised added precautions against cyber-surveillance and malicious...

“I have been with Union Pacific for 16 years, and I have never, ever seen this situation to this degree,” said Lupe Valdez, the company’s senior director of public affairs.

Valdez says, on average, 90 of their containers are compromised each day. But between October 2020 and October 2021, train robberies have picked up exponentially by a whopping 356%. Union Pacific has increased its enforcement and patrols, and has put drones to work, but now they are looking into diverting trains so they don’t pass through Los Angeles County at all.

“We are making arrests, but what our officers are seeing on the ground is that people are basically being arrested, there is no bail, they come out the next day and come back to rob our trains,” Valdez said.

Union Pacific’s chief has a meeting with the LAPD next week, and last month, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, calling this a “spiraling crisis” and imploring his office to hold criminals accountable.

red rain is coming down
red rain
red rain is pouring down
pouring down all over me

I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream
it can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch
this place is so quiet, sensing that storm

red rain is coming down
red rain
red rain is pouring down
pouring down all over me

Hospital System Backs Off Race-Based Treatment Policy After Legal Threat

Scoring rubric gave race more weight than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined

One of the largest hospital systems in the United States gave race more weight than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined in its allocation scheme for COVID treatments, only to reverse the policy after threats of legal action.

SSM Health, a Catholic health system that operates 23 hospitals across Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, began using the scoring system last year to allocate scarce doses of Regeneron, the antibody cocktail that President Donald Trump credited for his recovery from COVID-19. A patient must score at least 20 points to qualify for the drug. The rubric gives three points to patients with diabetes, one for obesity, one for asthma, and one for hypertension, for a total of six points. Identifying as "Non-White or Hispanic" race, on the other hand, nets a patient seven points, regardless of age or underlying conditions.

In a Dec. 30 email to physicians, the health system said it would use the same rubric for Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody treatment that has proven effective against the now-dominant Omicron variant.

Those plans appear to have changed, however, after pressure from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal nonprofit that on Jan. 14 threatened SSM Health with a lawsuit. Hours after the group demanded SSM "immediately suspend the use of" its "immoral" and "illegal" risk calculator, the health system told the Wisconsin State Journal that the "race and gender criteria are no longer utilized."

In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, SSM claimed that the scoring system "was changed last year," and that its Dec. 30 email had "inadvertently referenced an expired calculator." At the same time, it defended its use of that calculator, saying that "early versions of risk calculators across the nation appropriately included race and gender criteria based on initial outcomes."

The health system's announcement comes as conservative legal groups are gearing up to fight race-based triage schemes in court. America First Legal, founded by former Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller, said Wednesday that it was threatening legal action against the Minnesota and Utah state health departments, both of which were using race to determine eligibility for monoclonal antibodies. Such schemes constitute illegal race discrimination, several legal scholars told the Free Beacon, and lawsuits against the states implementing them would almost certainly be...