90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Planned New FBI HQ Is Twice the Size of the Pentagon

The GOP House can stop the project and rein in a runaway bureau.

The federal government is proceeding with plans to build a new FBI headquarters complex twice the size of the Pentagon building.

Riveted into the colossal new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals.

The plan, unveiled last September, has received little attention. For years the FBI has sought to vacate its present headquarters, a brutalist concrete bunker on stilts and occupying two city blocks between the White House and the Capitol.

Plans for the new FBI headquarters specify that it will be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres.

That means, at minimum, the new FBI headquarters complex would be twice the size of the Pentagon building. Covering about 29 acres plus a five-acre courtyard, the Pentagon, until recently, was the largest office building on earth.

The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66 acres in area.

The General Services Administration, which administers federal properties, has selected the three sites. The 58-acre property in Springfield, Virginia, GSA says, is “federally owned land under the jurisdiction, custody, and control of GSA.”

The government would have to buy or lease either of the two properties available in Maryland. The State of Maryland and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority own the 61-acre site in Greenbelt. The 80-acre parcel is the former Landover Mall, which is privately owned.

GSA set out five criteria for choosing the property: FBI mission requirement; transportation access for FBI personnel; site development flexibility, which includes the suitability of the actual property and the earliest time construction could begin; promoting sustainable siting and advancing equity; and cost.

Of those five criteria, cost to the taxpayer is viewed as least important. The equity criterion, to comply with diversity and climate-change executive orders signed by Joe Biden, is weighted as 50 percent more important than the cost.

The site, design, and structure of the new FBI headquarters must “advance racial equity and support for underserved communities through the Federal Government,” GSA says, citing Executive Orders 13985 and 14057. The FBI complex must be a “sustainable location” to “strengthen the vitality and livability of the communities” in the area, according to GSA.

On his first day as president, Biden signed Executive Order 13985 as part of what he called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

The executive order defines “equity” as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons,” and so on.

That is one of the main factors driving the location of the new, double-Pentagon-sized FBI headquarters.

Biden signed the other part of the equity criterion, Executive Order 14057, in December 2021 to push his climate change agenda. That order directs that it is the policy of the federal government to “create and sustain . . . well-paying union jobs” and a range of other issues, including...

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1284

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Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.

If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.

Please Leave Silently Into The Night......

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1984 - 1984 Edition!

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

Visage à trois #753

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #933

Study: To Get Hired At UT Austin, Faculty Must Prove Allegiance To Racism

After years of left-wing activists pushing racially divisive philosophies under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in higher education, a recent case study of the University of Texas at Austin exposes DEI initiatives’ toxicity.

In a report last week, aptly titled “Comprehensive Restructuring,” the National Association of Scholars revealed that the push for so-called DEI at UT Austin has fundamentally restructured the school. With a “clear ideological agenda,” DEI initiatives “call for a vast overhaul of curriculum and instruction” that includes growing the bureaucratic behemoth and making Marxist groupthink a faculty job requirement.

“To many, the term ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ might sound like a benign commitment to fairness,” wrote John Sailer, the author of the report. “The DEI initiatives at UT Austin, however, frequently espouse controversial political and social views, whether through mandatory training sessions, book groups and administrator-endorsed reading lists, or curriculum guidelines.”

Sailer observed how “bureaucratic language” distracts observers from the reality of UT Austin’s DEI rot, which is ironically anything but diverse, equitable, or inclusive. The report found that when you strip away the fancy buzzwords, academia’s obsession with skin color, sex, sexual attraction, and commitment to the left-wing hivemind have affected all areas of campus life and fields of study, summed up by curricula and faculty.

Curricula

Consider the curriculum at the Dell Medical School. In the summer of 2021, UT Austin added “Health Equity” to the list of core competencies at its med school. More specifically, according to UT Austin, medical students must:

Demonstrate an understanding of the root causes of health inequities including how the socialization of dominant cultural norms, beliefs and values and application of public policy create these health inequities among defined populations.

The medical school also requires its students to participate in “intentional disruptive action” to “act against and educate on systems that perpetuate health injustice and health inequities.”

The effects of DEI in medical school are already being felt in real-world hospitals. For instance, so-called “health equity,” which is rooted in critical race theory, means implementing intentional racial discrimination in health care. Under Oregon’s Medicaid, for example, which invokes the same ideas of “disrupting” as UT Austin’s med school, your medical care can be affected by the color of your skin. Marxist ideas not rooted in science have also corrupted prestigious medical journals.

And that’s just the medical school. Many of UT Austin’s 13 schools have overhauled their curricula to fit the anti-science and race-obsessed dictates of DEI.

Faculty

More of UT Austin’s leftward lurch has been accomplished by pressuring faculty to accommodate, a pattern that has...

As auditors and congressional investigators try to figure out just how much federal COVID relief went to fraudsters, they are missing the trillions of dollars in fraud committed by the federal government itself in a war that we had no chance of winning.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office reported that fraudsters took in about $60 billion in unemployment checks. That’s on top of the tens of billions in fraudulent claims made through the Paycheck Protection Program, the tens of billions handed out through a Small Business Administration program, and on and on.

This Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability will hold a hearing “to investigate rampant waste of taxpayer dollars in COVID relief programs.”

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the chairman of the committee, said “we owe it to Americans to identify how hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent under the guise of pandemic relief were lost to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.”

That’s all well and good. But what we really need is an investigation into how the war against COVID wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars, imposed massive disruptions, handicapped millions of students, and probably didn’t save many, if any, lives.

That sort of investigation, if done honestly, would likely conclude that we would have been better off if we’d done nothing at all beyond asking people to wash their hands and stay home if they’re sick.

Shocking? Impossible to believe? Let’s review the evidence.

Start with the fact that since COVID-19 first landed on U.S. shores three years ago, 1.1 million have died from the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Even now, deaths are averaging around 4,000 per week.

Way back in early March 2020, the CDC met with experts from around the world met to map out COVID-19 scenarios. “Between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic,” reported the Yale School of Medicine. “As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.” That assumed the country did nothing to mitigate COVID’s spread.

So, the U.S. embarked on an unprecedented effort to slow the disease’s spread and develop vaccines in record time, spending trillions of dollars in the process. For months, the entire nation was locked down. People were ordered to stay at home. Businesses were forced to stay closed. Church services were suspended. Students were locked out of their schools. The elderly weren’t allowed to...