Madness: An 11-year-old has been threatened with expulsion for bringing a virtual gun to a virtual school.
In listening to the audio of the talk radio report, the school demanded the boy change his avatar because it included an image of a pistol, and is now rushing to craft a policy that would outlaw gun images in the future. Not only is this insane, it would be a violation of the first amendment.
Does this make you feel safer? U.S. Immigrations no longer knows where more than 6,000 foreigners are who came to the U.S. on student visas and are considered a threat.
The issue here is not to keep foreigners from entering the U.S. but the complete inability of the federal government government to do its job. The government is very good at abusing legal American citizens in airports, but is a total failure at controlling access to the country by non-citizens,
The competition heats up: SpaceX is challenging a patent issued to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for landing the first stage of a rocket vertically on a floating platform.
“The ‘rocket science’ claimed in the ‘321 patent was, at best, ‘old hat’ by 2009,” says SpaceX in one of two challenges, filed last week with the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board following the approval of the Blue Origin patent in March. SpaceX cites prior work by researchers and scientists who proposed techniques similar to those in Blue Origin’s patent.
If the patent holds it might force SpaceX to pay Blue Origin for the right to bring its Falcon 9 first stage back safely,
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails show that Lois Lerner once dismissed complaints that labor unions were not reporting to the IRS millions of dollars in political activities — almost all of which helped Democrats — that they did report to the Labor Department.
In 2006, the year leading up to Lerner’s email, the national headquarters for the AFL-CIO reported no direct or indirect political expenditures with the IRS on their 990 form, leaving the line 81a blank. That same year, the AFL-CIO reported $29,585,661 in political activities with the Department of Labor. Also in 2006 the Teamsters Union reported no political expenditures with the IRS while at the same time reporting $7,081,965 with the Labor Department. Again in 2006, Unite-Here reported no political activity with the IRS and $1,451,002 with the Labor Department. In 2005, the National Education Association also reported no political expenditures with the IRS while at the same time reporting $24,985,250 with the Labor Department.
The lack of reporting to the IRS was essentially illegal. Yet, when complaints were made to Lerner about this, she poo-pooed the issue and apparently squelched further investigations.
This story is one of several published the last few days that have described the retreat of ISIS from several Kurdish and Iraqi villages.
I hadn’t posted any of the previous stories because I was unsure of their reliability. The number, however, keeps increasing and the sources are becoming more trustworthy. If true, it is mostly good news, though one should always be hesitant about the leadership of any faction in the Islamic Middle East. They might start out sounding good, but too often they end up being either incompetent or as evil as can be imagined.
An evening pause: Instead of music, let’s watch a man’s life change forever, for the better, in only one minute. And forgive me for saying so, but it is freedom, property rights, and capitalism that allowed it to happen.
A Minnesota black man is tased and arrested by police because he was going to pick up his kids from school.
Don’t believe me? Watch the video below the fold. It is heart-breaking and infuriating. The man does nothing wrong, and the police could have easily calmed the situation down. Instead, they escalated it for no reason. The man quite reasonably concludes “The problem is I’m black.”
I think the problem here is less racism and more a police force that is in love with its power. As I and many others have documented extensively, modern American police are increasingly willing to abuse their position of trust in ways that are appalling. In this case, as in many similar cases, the police officers in this case got off free, without punishment. What should have happened is that the male officer should have been fired, and the female officer disciplined.
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There are few weapons as deadly as the Israeli house. When its brick and mortar are combined together, the house, whether it is one of those modest one story hilltop affairs or a five floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water, becomes far more dangerous than anything green and glowing that comes out of the Iranian centrifuges.
Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses. Iran can keep its nuclear bombs. They don’t impress anyone in Europe or in Washington. Genocide is a minor matter when in the presence of the fearsome weapon of terror that is an Israeli family of four moving into a new apartment.
Read it all. It will make you shiver in fear at the terror produced by Israeli contractors.
New data confirms that the solar system is presently traveling through what astronomers call the Local Bubble, a region of relatively empty space blown out by past supernovae.
The sales of vinyl records has been booming, exceeding numbers not seen in decades.
Fascists: New York has passed a law requiring anyone who spends money to air their opinions during an election campaign to register with the state.
If you fail to register you will be fined.
Check out this very detailed review of the legal and political background behind Israel’s most recent decision to take full legal control over about 1,000 acres in the West Bank.
To put it simply, Israel is acting as per the Oslo Accords and its own legal system, which includes giving Palestinians the right to challenge the decision.
