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U.S. Signs Peace Deal With Taliban After Nearly 2 Decades Of War In Afghanistan

The U.S. and the Taliban have struck a deal that paves the way for eventual peace in Afghanistan. U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the head of the militant Islamist group, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the potentially historic agreement Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where the two sides spent months hashing out its details.

Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. commits to withdrawing all of its military forces and supporting civilian personnel, as well as those of its allies, within 14 months. The drawdown process will begin with the U.S. reducing its troop levels to 8,600 in the first 135 days and pulling its forces from five bases.

The rest of its forces, according to the agreement, will leave "within the remaining nine and a half months."

The Afghan government also will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill, in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the Taliban.

Yeah, we're going to criticize the administration because their ineptitude is going to get people killed. Get used to it.

HHS whistleblower claims US workers received coronavirus evacuees without proper precautions

A whistleblower at the Department of Health and Human Services is seeking federal protection after complaining that more than a dozen workers who received the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, lacked proper training or protective gear for coronavirus infection control.

"The report alleges that staff were sent into quarantined areas 'without personal protective equipment, training, or experience in managing public health emergencies, safety protocols, and the potential danger to both themselves and members of the public they come into contact with,'" the letter states. "The whistleblower also reported that when staff raised safety concerns, they were 'admonished by (redacted) for 'decreasing staff morale,' accused of not being team players, and had their mental health and emotional stability questioned.'"

These were the folks brought home against the CDC's objections.

And, guess where they ended up: California

Big shocker, now it's in the wild in CA: California patient with unknown origin of coronavirus is in serious condition, official says I think we may have a hint as to the origin.

So, of course, Team Trump's response is to try and cover the whole thing up. The Trump administration barred a top US disease expert from speaking freely to the public after he warned the coronavirus might be impossible to contain

The Alt-Wrong have got themselves an Anti-Greta by the name of Naomi Seibt.

The 19-year-old German is a Climate Change Denier and Islamophobe. She is also apparently a member of and speaks to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, an organisation associated with Brexit's very own Nigel Farage.

Apparently Seibt will be addressing the conservative CPAC this week in the USA along side Trump and Pence.

The other soup recipe. Electricity required.

1. Get an Instant Pot.
2. Add 2 cups of dried beans (such as black, pinto, etc.) and 8 cups of water. Manually pressure cook (High) for 5 minutes and leave it for 10 minutes before releasing the pressure. This eliminates the need to soak the beans for hours.
3. Drain, return beans into the pot, add a 15 oz can of diced tomatoes, and whatever spices you want (get bulk granulated garlic). Add 2 cups of water or broth (or water with bouillon).
4. Manually pressure cook (High) for 10 minutes. Release the pressure after ~20 minutes.
5. Mash the beans a bit with a potato masher. Add iodized salt or spices to taste.

First Mac to Use Apple’s Custom ARM-Based Processor Said to Arrive in H2 2021

Apple has made some very powerful ARM processors, and they will be among the first to get "5nm" from TSMC. 8 cores? I guess iPad Pro is the sneak preview of what the experience would be like.

Alleged AMD Next-Gen Flagship Navi ‘Radeon RX’ GPU Specifications Leaked – 5120 Cores, 24 GB HBM2e Memory, 2 TB/s Bandwidth

24 GB of VRAM would match what has been rumored to be the shared GDDR6 RAM pool of next-gen Xbox or PS5.

Some games already use over 10 GB at 4K, and machine learning workloads could use all of it.

As for the rest, they can dethrone the RTX 2080 Ti, but Nvidia will strike back with Ampere at some point. All product launches mentioned could be delayed by the coronavirus.

Four years ago, the Nevada caucuses were the moment Hillary Clinton began to turn the tide against Sanders in his upstart bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. This time around, the results could be further evidence that the Sanders surge is very real and very durable.

Caucus entrance polls show Sanders won a dominating 53% of the Hispanic vote - a demographic he struggled with against Clinton. That bodes well for the senator in the two biggest prizes coming up, Texas and California, with their sizeable Hispanic populations.

Sanders also, not as surprisingly, carried a majority of those ages 18 to 27 and voters who said they want someone who agrees with them on the issues.

If Sanders has a winning formula this time around, it could be that he has successfully diversified his coalition, while keeping his loyal support from the young and those who want a president who is with them on issues like major healthcare reform, aggressively combating climate change and addressing income inequality.

Nevada caucuses: Who won and who lost?

Submission in the queue at the time of writing: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=39288%ACe=&title=FCC+Forced+by+Court+to+Ask+the+Public+(again)+If+They+Think+Tearing+Up+Net+Neutrality+Was+a+Really+G

I have just left a comment for the FCC to consider, and I hope that you will too. As noted in the submission, the court ordered comments are obfuscated by the FCC, apparently in the hopes that no one does comment in favor of Net Neutrality. Ajit Pai is a sweetheart, isn't he?

Web address for commenting: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express

The first block at the top of the page is "Proceeding(s)", where you will enter 17-108 Once that number is entered, you find a dropdown menu, from which you select "17-108 | restoring internet freedom".

From that point, it's a normal page, where you fill in your name, address, email, and who you represent. Miss any of those required boxes, and your comment won't be counted I suppose.

At the bottom, there is a box that you can tick, if you want email confirmation that your comments were recieved.

Also at the bottom is a warning,

Note: You are filing a document into an official FCC proceeding. All information submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the web.

Don't type anything into the form that you don't want law enforcement to follow up on. ;^)

I think I still burned them, without saying all the things I would like to have said. Be imaginative, and/or be factual, but get your views recorded. Let's not allow Ajit to smother Net Neutrality again!!

Edit: Your email confirmation will contain your full comment, along with all the information you entered into the various boxes. More, that email has the exact formating of your comment as you typed it. When you submit the form, it appears that the formatting (paragraphs, etc) is lost. What you see on the final page is a single paragraph, all mashed together.

What's TLC is SLC Again: MEMXPRO Introduces PC32 Full-Drive Pseudo-SLC SSDs

Pseudo-SLC caches for TLC-based SSDs are almost as old as TLC NAND itself, serving as a simple and practical solution to TLC's lower sustained throughput. But like all caches, pseudo-SLC caches have a finite size; and once you run over it, you're back to directly hitting the TLC. So what is a user or system builder to do if they need a drive with SLC-like performance all the time? For a while, the answer to that has been MLC drives, but with MLC slowly but surely on its way out as well, other solutions are needed. And to that end, MEMXPRO is introducing a series of new drives that go the opposite direction, embracing pseudo-SLC mode to its very core by making the entire drive pseudo-SLC.

Based on 64-layer 3D TLC memory, MEMXPRO's PC32 drives use drive-wide pseudo-SLC mode to give the drives MLC-like performance and reliability. This setup is overkill for most applications, but for use cases that require SSDs with long lifespans, and high [durability] – MEMXPRO's specialty – the PC32 fills an important niche.

The MEMXPRO PC32 drives in are based on the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller as well as Micron’s B17A 64-layer 3D TLC NAND memory, which is rated for 10,000 P/E cycles. By putting the drives in pseudo-SLC mode, the manufacturer is able to increase their durability to 40,000 P/E cycles, albeit at the cost of capacity. Since TLC NAND that offers 3-bits of storage per cell is otherwise reduced to 1-bit per cell, the drives are available in capacities from just 80 GB to 320 GB. As for throughput, with the high-end controller used for the drive, MEMXPRO has rated the drives' sustained sequential read and write performance 3,250 and 2,980 MB/s respectively, which is in line with other modern SSDs featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface.

If you can figure out what kind of die size this uses (e.g. 512 Gb), you could forecast how much capacity pseudo-SLC drives of given dimensions can store in the future. NAND will eventually reach at least 256 layers, and that can be multiplied with string stacking and other techniques.

Bloomberg School of Public Health: No Evidence ‘Assault Weapon’ Bans Reduce Mass Shootings

A new study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that there is no evidence that “assault weapon bans” have any impact on “the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, named after notorious anti-Second Amendment activist billionaire Michael Bloomberg, released the results of its study last week.

The study “did not find an independent association between assault weapon bans and the incidence of fatal mass shootings after controlling for the effects of bans on large-capacity magazines.”

The study, which analyzed fatal mass shootings in 45 states between 1984 and 2017, did find that “firearm purchaser licensing laws that require an in-person application or fingerprinting are associated with an estimated 56 percent fewer fatal mass shootings in states that have them.”

Bloomberg, who is running for president as a Democrat, has a history of trying to destroy Second Amendment rights. His anti-gun organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, has a history of using misleading or outright false statistics manufactured by gun control groups that he has financially backs to assist in his efforts.

The most recent example happened during the Super Bowl when Bloomberg aired a one-minute commercial that was full of false information.

The emotional ad claimed in writing: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.”

The claim from Bloomberg was categorically false at the cited number included adults and counted suicides as examples of gun violence.

Reason Magazine reported:

According to to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FactCheck.org notes, the average number of firearm-related deaths involving Americans 17 or younger from 2013 through 2017 (the period used by Everytown for Gun Safety) was about 1,500, roughly half the number cited by Bloomberg. Furthermore, nearly two-fifths of those deaths were suicides, meaning the number of minors killed each year by “gun violence,” as that term is usually understood, is about 73 percent smaller than the figure cited in Bloomberg’s ad.

The Daily Wire highlighted Bloomberg’s views on guns in an extensive profile piece on him last September:

Bloomberg’s anti-gun advocacy is perhaps the single most defining issue of his recent private citizen activism — and perhaps the single most defining issue of his 2020 presidential bid. He is very closely affiliated with and has helped fund Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, which are both groups deeply hostile to Second Amendment rights. He also co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns while he was mayor of New York City. Bloomberg supports “universal” background checks, which often serve as a rhetorical euphemism for the government serving as an intermediary in all private firearms transfers. Bloomberg believes that every gun owner should need a permit before making a gun purchase. He supports a ban on the undefinable sub-class of firearms referred to as so-called “assault weapons” — a line of thought that, if taken to its logical conclusion, could lead to the banning of all semi-automatic firearms in America.

In addition to promulgating false information about guns, Bloomberg has also repeatedly displayed ignorance on the issue, both on how guns operate and on what gun laws exist.

Bloomberg told Rolling Stone in 2014 that he did not know whether a minor was allowed to own a rifle, and later claimed that anyone who owns a gun is “pretty stupid.”

In a 2012 interview with ABC News, Bloomberg demonstrated that he does not know basics when it comes to guns, including what the difference between a semi-automatic and fully-automatic firearm is.

Democrat presidential candidate billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who spends tens of millions of dollars pushing for extreme gun control laws, demonstrates that he knows literally nothing about firearms.pic.twitter.com/SCjpNdQm6h

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra)

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-school-of-public-health-no-evidence-assault-weapon-bans-reduce-mass-shootings

Sheriff: Prison Reform Advocate Planted Guns for Jail Break
Tennessee authorities say a longtime prison reform advocate was preparing to stage a jail break when he hid loaded guns and ammunition in a new jail that was under construction.
By Associated Press, Wire Service Content Feb. 19, 2020, at 4:43 p.m.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A longtime prison reform advocate was preparing to stage a jail break when he hid loaded guns and ammunition in a new jail that was under construction, Tennessee authorities said Wednesday.

Alex Friedmann, a former prisoner turned crusader against private prisons and a longtime editor at Prison Legal News, was charged last month with attempted burglary. He was accused of gaining access to the new jail by dressing as a construction worker and stealing keys.

As the investigation continued, “it was discovered that Mr. Friedmann, over many months, had developed and implemented an extremely deliberate and, in my opinion, evil plan,” Nashville Sheriff Daron Hall said during a Wednesday news conference announcing Friedmann’s re-arrest on upgraded charges.

Friedmann is now charged with vandalism of $250,000 or more, with his bond set at $2.5 million.

Friedmann's attorney, Ben Raybin, issued a statement late Wednesday.

“I am currently unable to comment on any of the factual allegations,” Raybin said. “Mr. Friedmann is presumed innocent and will respond through the appropriate legal processes.”

Hall said he believes Friedmann was designing a massive jail break that would endanger “every inmate, every visitor and our entire community.”

“Virtually everything I’m telling you is on video” Hall said, noting that investigators have poured through hundreds of hours of video to identify the areas of the building that were compromised.

Hall currently serves as president of the National Sheriff’s Association and said no one there has ever seen anything like this before.

“It will forever change how correctional facilities are built,” he said.

Prison Legal News is a project of the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center. Friedmann resigned as editor after his earlier arrest in January, executive director Paul Wright said in a telephone interview.

[ED: What this AP story doesn’t mention is that this celebrated “prison reform advocate” had spent ten years in a Tennessee prison for attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery.]

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2020-02-19/sheriff-prison-reform-advocate-planted-guns-for-jail-break

Don't you just love those liberal activists? Is it necessary to state the obvious? Non-violent, non-dangerous offenders locked up for weeks or months for being bad don't even WANT weapons. It would only be dangerous, violent offenders who are looking for weapons.

And, I almost missed the romanticized side of things. Attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery - much the same thing that Patty Hearst was involved in. Awwww, to bad he's not an heir to some rich old bastard, huh?