90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, January 14, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1963

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.

Visage à trois #711

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #890

The Russian Twitter Bots Story Is A Study In Media’s ‘Lie, Set The Narrative, Then Quietly Backtrack’ Playbook

The three-step process is regime media’s MO: spread a false claim, crush dissent, then admit the truth once the news cycle achieves its purpose.

he Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.

How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook

In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.

One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”

Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:

The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.

Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.

NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.

New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.

Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.

The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on...

The U.S. Army has prepared extensive guidance for how to integrate transgender soldiers into its ranks, including instructions for group showers and how to respond to pregnant men, newly revealed training documents show.

President Joe Biden restored an Obama-era directive codifying service for many transgender individuals shortly after taking office in 2021 amid competing judgments about the influence of gender-related psychological issues and medical procedures on a person’s fitness for service. While the number of transgender individuals currently serving is likely small, the training materials, dated August 2021, imagine a variety of problems officers and soldiers might encounter related to transgender members.

One slide in the “Tier Two” training materials addresses how an officer should respond when a soldier approaches “to discuss his newly confirmed pregnancy.” The training materials, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, come in three versions, with Tier One aimed at staff, Tier Two focused on commanders and Tier Three directed at individual units and soldiers.

“Understand that Soldiers who have transitioned gender may remain susceptible to medical conditions associated with their birth gender,” the materials advise.

Soldiers have to accept living conditions with little or no privacy, including in open-bay showers, where women might find themselves bathing alongside “a female who has male genitalia” or vice versa.

“Soldiers must accept living conditions that are often austere, primitive and characterized by little or no privacy,” the slide reads. Commanders can install new privacy features or adjust showering schedules, but no transgender-only spaces are permitted, according to the guidance.

While the Army will pay for a transgender soldier’s gender transition surgery, it won’t provide additional funding to add curtains or shower hooks inside stalls, according to materials labeled “special staff training.”

“Transgender soldiers are not expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other soldiers,” one slide in the Tier Three training packet reads. Transgender soldiers will be held to the same standards as others in their claimed gender and will be discharged if medical conditions “related to their gender identity” impede their ability to serve.

In another “vignette,” as the guidance calls them, officers are presented with a scenario involving a soldier transitioning to become female and who is on an Army-prescribed medical plan that includes hormone treatments and is expected to take six months.

“After five months, however, it becomes increasingly difficult for the soldier to meet male body composition standards,” the slide reads. The solution: Commanders are authorized to push back the soldier’s test date or give the soldier extended leave.

The soldier’s medical regime and inability to meet gender-based physical requirements “should be treated as any other medical issues would be treated,” the slide states. “The soldier is responsible to continue to meet all male standards until the gender marker is changed in DEERS,” the personnel records system.

Soldiers are permitted to request an exception to policy and adopt alternative fitness standards to those associated with their official pre-transition gender, the slides say.

Still another vignette describes how a soldier “assigned male at birth” and diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a disqualifying condition under the Trump administration, might have his “medically necessary” gender reassignment surgery disrupted by...

Visage à trois #710

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #889

Another year, another round of global warming doomsday predictions that never came to pass

No matter how far the predictions are off, the sycophants in the media will continue predicting the talking points that the science is settled and continue their support for the destruction of industries that produce reasonably priced and reliable energy.

From the following article at Roseville Earlier This Week:

Heavy rains, big snow along with power outages, overflowing rivers and high winds rocked Northern California to end 2022 in dramatic fashion. A healthy dose of hydrologic optimism has eased concerns for the moment of dire predictions for a dry winter. The season is off to a strong start with more rain and snow on the way for early 2023. Hope remains strong for replenishing California’s 10 largest reservoirs this spring.

So the dire predictions were for a dry winter and the storms seem to be never ending. Thank goodness the climate is and has always been cyclical and natural.The reason the Earth has so many deserts and so much water is because we have always had floods and long droughts. It has nothing to do with our driving gas-powered vehicles. Mother Nature is much more powerful than humans. (Is it acceptable to use the term 'mother' or is that offensive?)

How many dire predictions have to be 100% wrong before the media starts doing their job to ask questions and do research instead of just repeating what they are told? There certainly have been a lot of them...

There is no answer for this question because most journalists seem intent on infecting the U.S. with radical leftist policies to destroy our way of life.

The CBS news show, 60 Minutes, had Paul Ehrlich on recently to again warn that we would all die soon.

Why does anyone think Ehrlich is a valuable expert? Anyone who thinks 60 Minutes is a purveyor of the truth is confused.

Here are some of the previous dire predictions of Ehrlich and others that were 100% wrong, according to the AEI's Mark Perry.

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.
Erlich is an idiot. And anyone who keeps citing him as an 'expert' is a...