BREAKING NEWS: Seventy-Two Killed Resisting Gun Confiscation In Maryland.

BREAKING NEWS: Seventy-Two Killed Resisting Gun Confiscation In Maryland.

National Guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault weapons were ambushed by elements of a Para-military extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.

Speaking after the clash, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement.

Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices. The governor, who described the group’s organizers as “criminals,” issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government’s efforts to secure law and order.

The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed wide-spread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed assault weapons.

Gage issued a ban on military-style assault weapons and ammunition earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting in early this month between government and military leaders at which the governor authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms.

One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that “none of these people would have been killed had the extremists obeyed the law and turned over their weapons voluntarily.”

Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply of outlawed weapons and ammunition. However, troops attempting to seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from heavily-armed extremists who had been tipped off regarding the government’s plans.

During a tense standoff in the Lexington town park, National Guard Colonel Francis Smith, commander of the government operation, ordered the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the right-wing extremists.

Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange.

Ironically, the local citizenry blamed government forces rather than the extremists for the civilian deaths. Before order could be restored, armed citizens from surrounding areas had descended upon the guard units. Colonel Smith, finding his forces over matched by the armed mob, ordered a retreat.

Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state/national joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and leading the attack against the government troops.

Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as “ringleaders” of the extremist faction, remain at large.

And this fellow Americans, is how the American Revolution began, April 20, 1775.

History. Study it, or repeat it.

Our entire supply of illegal drugs contaminated

Our entire supply of illegal drugs contaminated

 It’s time to stop talking about the “opioid epidemic.” We don’t have just an opioid epidemic — and never really did. We have a drug overdose epidemic. Our entire illegal drug supply — except for marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms — is contaminated. That’s causing overdose deaths throughout the illegal drug using population, which I estimate (based on federal drug surveys) at 800,000 to 1 million residents a year, excluding marijuana.

The term “opioid epidemic” — or, even worse, “heroin problem” — has created the false belief that a horrible thing is happening to a defined population of opioid users, especially heroin addicts.

The so called “opioid initiatives” are well-intentioned responses to something real. Opioid users have died and continue to die in extraordinary numbers. And the drug doing the most damage — fentanyl and its analogs — is an opioid. Doesn’t that make what’s happening an “opioid epidemic?” No. Opiate overdoses are a heartbreaking subset of a much larger drug overdose tragedy. The full epidemic needs our attention.

To turn the overdose epidemic around, we must reconsider the idea that throwing law enforcement, treatment and naloxone at opioid users will end an “opioid epidemic.”

Opioid users are a declining share of overdose deaths. Autopsy lab results find cocaine-fentanyl combinations twice as often in the blood as heroin-fentanyl. Have you heard about the “stimulant epidemic?” Did you know more cocaine users than heroin users died last year?

Meth-related overdoses are soaring too. The drug is being cut with fentanyl. Ecstasy, LSD and fake pills (Adderall, OxyContin, etc.) all carry a significant risk of a fentanyl overdose, too. Most users of these drugs lack a tolerance to opioids, putting them at even greater risk of overdose death than a heroin user.

Did you know that fentanyl-laced cocaine is taking a heavy toll on a demographic odd couple: affluent whites who use powder cocaine and inner-city blacks who smoke crack cocaine?  Cocaine users killed by fentanyl-laced cocaine aren’t victims of an “opioid epidemic.” They’d be just as dead if the poison was arsenic or hemlock. They died of contaminated black- market drugs. The contaminant was an opioid, but the victim was using a stimulant — or at least thought so.

The Nation is suffering a drug overdose epidemic of catastrophic proportions. Opioid users are not the “cause” of the epidemic any more than being gay caused HIV/AIDS. The nation needs to focus objectively on who’s dying, why and what can be done.

Drug users don’t want to die. Drug dealers don’t want to kill them. A slaughter is underway because drug users don’t know what’s in the mixtures they are smoking, injecting and snorting. Nothing in the U.S. billion-dollar response is dedicated to helping drug users prevent their own death.

Fentanyl test strips need to be made available free everywhere. (They work like pregnancy tests.) crime labs test more than a million drug seizures a year. Make that information available in real-time on the internet! Drug users and public health authorities need to know the contents of the illegal drug supply.

Let’s create an anonymous service to test illegal drugs in a lab, just like a crime lab analyzing police drug seizures, except nobody gets arrested and nobody dies.

Dennis Cauchon works full time on drug policy reform as president of Harm Reduction Ohio.

Radical Feminists have ‘snake-filled heads’

Radical Feminists have ‘snake-filled heads’

  

It is entirely likely that many Americans both women and men agree with many of the statements made here. The problem being is they are too afraid to say so publicly. This man has more character than most of those that with claws out and attack him!

Courtland Sykes, a Republican who hopes to replace Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in the U.S. Senate, says feminists have “nasty snake-filled heads,” in a Facebook post meant to clarify his stance on women’s rights.

“In light of recent questions regarding my views on Women’s Rights, attached is my full statement from September 2017,” Sykes said on his Facebook page.

In the statement, Sykes said he supports women’s rights because his fiancée, Chanel Rion, has given him “orders” to favor them. But that support isn’t free, Sykes notes.

“Chanel knows that my obedience comes with a small price that she loves to pay anyway: I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at six every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives — think Norman Rockwell here and Gloria Steinem be damned,” he said.

The political newcomer says that he supports women’s rights, but not “mean-spirited radical feminists.”

“I don’t buy into radical feminism’s crazed definition of modern womanhood and I never did. They don’t own that definition. They made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads,” he said.

Sykes hopes that if he has daughters, they will forgo the traps of “radical feminism” in favor of home life.

“I don’t want them (to) grow up into career obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils,” he said.

Theft plagues U.S. union offices: Millions of dollars stolen in hundreds of locations

Theft plagues U.S. union offices: Millions of dollars stolen in hundreds of locations

Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press

As the UAW, Fiat Chrysler and federal investigators unravel a scandal over the misappropriation of millions of dollars meant for worker training, federal records show embezzling from union offices is endemic around the country.

U.S. Department of Labor documents obtained by the Detroit Free Press reveal embezzlement from hundreds of union offices nationwide over the past decade. In just the past two years, more than 300 union locations have discovered theft, often resulting in more than one person charged in each instance, the records show.

Two UAW incidents uncovered in 2017, one in Michigan and the other in New Jersey, exceed the $1 million mark, among the biggest labor theft cases in a decade.

Cases involved unions representing nurses, aerospace engineers, firefighters, teachers, film and TV artists, air traffic controllers,

musicians, bus inspectors, bakery workers, roofers, postal workers, machin-ists, ironworkers, steelworkers, dairy workers, plasterers, train operators, plumbers, stagehands, engineers, electricians, heat insulators, missile range workers and bricklayers.

For the UAW, its two biggest cases involved members working handin- hand with corrupt auto industry executives. The UAW says that illustrates its constitution provides the intended checks and balances that essentially require two keys and conspiracy to steal.

In the Fiat Chrysler case in Detroit, money provided by auto companies for worker training was embezzled from 2009 to 2015 by men who were supposed to be working together to negotiate a labor contract rather than divvying up hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal gifts. The case is working its way through the court system, so far resulting in charges against four people.

In the other multimillion-dollar case, charges were filed on Jan. 9, 2017, against a former UAW president in New Jersey accused of hatching a scheme with a health insurance broker to steal $1 million from the union’s self-insured health plan and defraud Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of about $5.5 million.

In addition to the UAW, federal records show the biggest embezzlement cases resulting in criminal charges over the past decade have unfolded in the courts over the past three years:

❚ Laborers Local 657 in Washington, D.C., saw its business manager sentenced to four years in prison in February 2017 for embezzlement and was ordered to pay $1,632,000 in restitution. Two contractors were sent to prison and ordered to pay restitution, too.

❚ The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh saw its former business manager plead guilty in September to embezzling $1.5 million, plus tax evasion.

❚ A former financial secretary for the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 970 in Norfolk, Va., was sentenced in February 2017 to 41 months in prison after stealing $1,072,669 from the union by making cash withdrawals and using money to buy gas, food, clothing, shoes, toys,entertainment and home improvement supplies.

❚ A former executive director of the Hawaii Painting & Decorating Contractors Association pleaded guilty in May 2016 to embezzling approximately $1,483,800 from the Hawaii Painters Trade Promotion & Charity Fund, which comes out of the hourly wages of Painters District Council 50 in Honolulu.

❚ A former union business manager for Allied Novelty and Production Workers Local 223 in New York and former president of Teamsters Local 810 in August 2016 pleaded guilty to soliciting and receiving kickbacks to influence the operation of an employee benefit plan and commit theft of $1 million.

❚ The founder of Prim Capital Corp., who managed as much as $250 million for the National Basketball Players Association, was sentenced in June 2014 to 18 months in prison for trying to defraud the union of $3 million.

Embezzlement cases are often discovered by unions or during routine audits. The situation may be as simple as a bookkeeper going on vacation and leaving an attentive part-timer in charge who notices irregularity.

I have a radical sexual idea–a kind of dream.

I have a radical sexual idea–a kind of dream.

Let’s re-re-define marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife–the unique form of relationship that is ordered to and would naturally be fulfilled by the coming to be and rearing of children together. Let’s regard the social role of marriage as uniting a man and woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children born of their union, thus conferring upon those children the inestimable blessing of being brought up in the committed love of the two people whose becoming one in an act of marital communion gave them the gift of life, and further providing those children with the benefit of both paternal and maternal examples, influences, and care.

Now here comes the really radical part. Let’s view sex as having its meaning and significance in expressing in the most intimate and profound way the conjugal love and commitment of the spouses. Let’s understand it as uniting them as one-flesh in a uniquely comprehensive sharing of life–a sharing at all levels of their being as human persons, the biological, the affective, the rational-volitional and spiritual. Let’s regard marital love and commitment as the very principle of sexual morality, the normative basis for distinguishing upright from unworthy sexual conduct. Let’s embrace a set of virtues that guard us against objectifying others (and indeed ourselves) and treating human beings (others or ourselves) as mere means of gratification.

Let’s respect each other’s inherent worth and human dignity by honoring each other in all aspects of our being, including its sexual dimension, and never treating sex as a way of asserting, expressing, or exercising power over others. Let’s not deceive ourselves into supposing that virtue in the sexual dimension of our lives is merely a matter of gaining consent from an object of our desires to use him or her to satisfy our lust. Let us not reduce ourselves to seducers or sirens.

Sex has become depersonalized in our culture and in cultures like ours–and the carnage of the sexual revolution that we now see all around us is the appalling testament to that fact. Let’s re-personalize it.

A quarter of homicides linked to domestic violence

A quarter of homicides linked to domestic violence

Example: Marshall’s boyfriend was arrested and charged with murder in connection with her death. Earlier in 2017, a restraining order was filed against him for domestic violence, court documents show. “Maybe she would have called if she knew there was an advocate that could have helped,” said Lt. Col. Mike John, Police assistant chief.

Every day in the United States, three women are killed by a current or former intimate partner on average, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

 Nearly half of female homicide victims are murdered by an intimate partner. For males, that number is just below 5 percent. A  quarter of all 2016 homicides involved an offender who was either directly engaged in a domestic assault at the time of the offense or who had a history of domestic or sexual assault, according to the records.

Some other troubling statistics:

❚ According to numbers from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, intimate partner violence makes up 15 percent of violent crime in the United States.

❚ On top of the homicides that were the direct result of a domestic violence offense, another nine homicides were committed by an offender with a history of domestic, sexual or child abuse, John said.

Victim advocates and police felt the pressure to address what Kristin Smith-Shrimplin, president and CEO of Women Helping Women, called a “public health epidemic.” The Domestic Violence Emergency Response Team, or DVERT, will launch in January, to provide more support for victims.

Think about it. If domestic violence came into the national conversation as much as we are seeing “sexual abuse”, a significant impact could be made on women’s deaths by homicide.

Muslim writer makes plain the desire to call people to activism while ignoring the real problem

Muslim writer makes plain the desire to call people to activism while ignoring the real problem

Her call? It’s time to choose: Stand up to hate or sink into division

Below are excerpts with responses to her declarations….

This is a watershed moment in our nation’s history as we struggle to overcome racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, etc. Normally, we Americans could expect our president, the leader of our nation, to be at the forefront of this struggle, lighting the way toward a brighter future for all Americans. Instead, our president has chosen to produce and amplify messages of hate, marginalization and division, tearing our nation apart.

First, she misrepresents the moment as compared to U.S. history. The watershed is the invasion of Muslims that refuse to become a part of the American Culture. Secondly, she lies about Trump as the cause. In his words and behavior, he is not.

We have all seen more than the usual level of prejudice over the past three years, targeting nearly every minority community. American Muslim families have borne the brunt of this bigotry for more than a decade.

Here, she admits a lot of her complaints pre-date Trump.

The effect on all minority communities has been huge increases in discrimination, hate crimes and the bullying of children. The negative effect on the future of our nation, our families and communities is hard to overestimate.

Again, a vacant declaration. No citations or supporting data.

So, what are we, as fair-minded Americans, to do? In circumstances like these, it’s up to each one of us to set examples with our own actions and help lead the way toward a better future, for our families, our communities and our nation. While those who spread hatred and division claim their right to free speech, we must choose to firmly grasp our own freedom of speech to turn back the tide of negativity that threatens to engulf us all.

I’ve listened to this woman and what she has written for a number of years. It is Free Speech that allows this. CAIR (she is one of their executive directors) has been declared to be exactly what she says is wrong. Speech keeps us free!

Every one of us, as fair-minded Americans, can use our freedom of speech to inspire our fellow Americans to be their best selves.

So, if you agree with her you are fair-minded. If not, sorry, you must not be fair! She completely ignores the foundation of our country that is clearly spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. The love for and the commitment to those principles and truths called out is what makes us uniquely Americans!

Our voices, amplified through media and other platforms, can help inspire millions of fair-minded fellow Americans to do their part to build inclusive communities, to find solutions to the challenges of the future. We all have talents, abilities, ideas and networks that we can and must use to start repairing the damage that has been done to the fabric of our nation. It can’t wait until next month or next year. Each of us can start by visiting a mosque, a synagogue or a church of a different denomination so that we can truly get to know one another. Then, we can inspire our fellow Americans to also do the same by talking to family, friends, neighbors and co-workers, and by using social media to reach beyond those circles.

One’s religion or any other factor really comes into play in her world view. It is not simply thoughts, it is behavior. When one or more people kill large numbers of innocents, we judge the behavior. If those responsible, claim a particular allegiance, we judge that as well. 

This country is our home, and it is one of the most beautiful, and beautifully diverse, places in God’s amazing creation. I truly believe that if we can all work together and raise our voices for good, we can help make it the best it can be.

Again, she ignores the harsh reality of what is going on in our nation and others. Muslims are arriving and not assimilating into the American Culture.  They demand Sharia Law and want our Nation to bend to Islamic belief. Going to a Mosque or another person’s place of worship will not change that. How can we be one nation if we have those that come in (some say invade) to our countries and refuse to assimilate?

CAIR may be what they are accused of being. That is not my purpose here. I have read the Koran and know the Bible. I can find no way these two beliefs can co-exist; for one is diametrically opposed to the other in all ways.

Karen Dabdoub is executive director of the Cincinnati office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, America’s largest American Muslim civil rights organization wrote the above article.