The Republican-controlled Texas Senate voted on Saturday to allow the licensed carrying of concealed handguns in most state university buildings.
The measure includes a caveat that lets college presidents designate "gun-free zones" on their campuses.
Passage by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives is expected on Sunday and would send it on to Republican Governor Greg Abbott to be signed into law.
No surprise: women are 3x more likely to be sexually abused than men. Of course that would require us to ask the questions liberals hate: Why are homosexuals so much more likely to be sexually abused as children? Might this be a cause of homosexuality and the serious depression problems in that community? http://claytonecramer.blogspot.com/2014/03/not-run... http://claytonecramer.blogspot.com/2014/03/another...
http://claytonecramer.blogspot.com/2014/03/assumpt...
Meth-head squatters, why am I not sympathetic?RENO, Nev. (AP) — Accused of murder for confronting two unarmed trespassers with a deadly barrage of gunfire, Wayne Burgarello walked out of a Nevada courthouse a free man after the jury found him not guilty of all charges in the latest of a series of cases nationally testing the boundaries of stand-your-ground self-defense laws."It's going to be OK," he said as he laughed with family members outside the courtroom after hugging his lawyer after the clerk's reading of the verdicts Friday night.Burgarello, 74, a retired Sparks school teacher, insisted he was acting in self-defense when he shot and killed Cody Devine and seriously wounded Janai Wilson in a vacant, rundown duplex he owns in February 2014....Wilson testified during the two-week trial that she stayed at the duplex off and on for three years. She said Burgarello opened fire without provocation while she and Devine were sleeping in a makeshift bed on the floor.Neither trespasser had a firearm, but Burgarello told police Devine's arm "came up like a gun."Ristenpart said he might have mistaken a black flashlight found at the scene for a gun and had only a split second to respond. She said it was Devine and Wilson, not Burgarello, who "created the dangerous, threatening situation, trespassing, getting high on meth and being where they shouldn't be, where they had no right to be."
Exporting firearms and ammunition from the U.S. normally requires a license--from the State Department for rifles, handguns, and rifle or handgun ammunition, and from the Commerce Department for shotguns and shotshells. But for many years, the State Department’s International Trafficking in Arms Regulations (ITAR) have allowed Americans to temporarily export up to three non-automatic firearms and up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition without a permit, as long as the firearms were declared and presented to a Customs officer. This was done by bringing the firearms to a Customs office at some point before the trip and completing Customs Form 4457--a form that can be completed for any personal property and that is normally used to prove that the traveler owned the property before going abroad, thus protecting the traveler from paying import duties on items already owned. The traveler would retain the form and present it upon reentry if needed.
But a 2012 State Department rule change added an important new requirement that the traveler declare rifles or handguns “upon each departure” by presenting documentation generated through the Commerce Department’s “Automated Export System” (AES)--an online reporting tool designed for use by businesses. (Non-“combat” shotguns are not regulated by the State Department, so the AES requirement does not apply to temporary shotgun exports.) The rule change was buried in a Federal Register notice aimed at authorizing the temporary export of gas masks by government employees and contractors.
Fortunately, the change was never enforced—until now. In postings on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website and in internal ICE documents obtained by NRA-ILA, ICE makes clear that it has begun enforcing the rule change. Form 4457 may no longer be used for firearms, and electronic declarations will be the norm.
To establish such proof, a bill of sale, receipt, copy of ATF Form 4473, household effects inventory, packing list, or registration on Customs Forms 4457 or 4455 may be used, if the registration form is completed prior to departure from the U.S.
(a) The Attorney General may prescribe only such rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter, including—
(1) regulations providing that a person licensed under this chapter, when dealing with another person so licensed, shall provide such other licensed person a certified copy of this license;(2) regulations providing for the issuance, at a reasonable cost, to a person licensed under this chapter, of certified copies of his license for use as provided under regulations issued under paragraph (1) of this subsection; and(3) regulations providing for effective receipt and secure storage of firearms relinquished by or seized from persons described in subsection (d)(8) or (g)(8) of section 922. No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established. Nothing in this section expands or restricts the Secretary’s [1] authority to inquire into the disposition of any firearm in the course of a criminal investigation.
An investment banker jumped to his death from the window of his million-dollar apartment in the Financial District on Thursday, sources and authorities said.
The 29-year-old man plunged from the 24th floor of the luxury Ocean apartment building at 1 West St. at about 10:40 a.m. and landed on a guardrail near the northbound Battery Park Underpass, narrowly missing a black SUV.
The man’s body was mangled by the impact, leaving one of the vehicle’s passengers horrified, witnesses said.
“I went outside, and the woman in the car was screaming, ‘I didn’t know where he came from!’ ” said Hans Peler, 48, a manager at the building’s parking garage.
“It happened right in front of our guy who waves cars in with the flag. He was so shaken up, I told him to go home.”
Zainab Bangura, the U.N.'s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic State commands swaths of territory. She heard a host of horror stories from victims and their families and recounted them in an interview earlier this week with the Middle East Eye, an independent regional news site.I keep think9ing of the war crimes committed by the Japanese in China in the 1930s, and in Germany, and why those weren't our problems.
"They are institutionalizing sexual violence," Bangura said of the Islamic State. "The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology."
Bangura detailed the processes by which "pretty virgins" captured by the jihadists were bought and sold at auctions.
Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold.
There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market. At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive.
J. Dennis Hastert, the longest serving Republican speaker in the U.S. House, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges that he violated banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million because of “past misconduct” against an unnamed individual from their hometown west of Chicago.What in the world could he have done that was worth $3.5 million to cover up? Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach. Did he ever coach at Penn State? I have pointed out in the past that there is a lot of evidence that homosexuals were disproportionately sexually abused as children and I do not doubt that many of the abusers were pretending to be respectable sorts.
Hastert, 73, who has been a high-paid lobbyist in Washington since his 2007 retirement, schemed to mask more than $950,000 in withdrawals from various accounts that violated federal banking laws that require disclosure of large cash transactions, according to a seven-page indictment delivered by a grand jury in Chicago.
The indictment did not spell out the exact nature of the “prior misconduct” by Hastert against the individual from his hometown, Yorkville, but noted that before entering politics in 1981, Hastert spent more than a decade as a teacher and wrestling coach at the local high school. The unnamed individual has known Hastert for most of that person’s life, the indictment states.
In 2006, he faced criticism that he and top aides failed to respond to warnings about the behavior of Representative Mark Foley of Florida, whose sexually explicit electronic messages to former Congressional pages sparked a scandal that contributed to the Republicans’ losing their House majority. Mr. Hastert chose not to seek re-election in 2008.Gee, I wonder why? Afraid to come out of the closet?
Indicted former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was paying a former student from Yorkville, Ill., to conceal his alleged sexual abuse of the youth that took place while Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach at a high school there, federal law enforcement officials said Friday.
A top official, who would not be identified speaking about the federal charges in Chicago, said investigators also spoke with a second person who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the student said
The University of Oklahoma raised some eyebrows last year when it announced it was partnering with the History Channel to offer a new U.S. history survey course. The thrust of the initial interest was the university’s decision to pair up with a relatively old-school medium -- cable television -- to offer distance learning in the midst of a digital platform boom. But after a successful first run of the course, another story has yet to be told: that of history faculty members’ lingering distaste at what they call being left out of the process and, more generally, at the university partnering with a commercial entity now perhaps better known for reality TV shows such as Ice Road Truckers and Swamp People than college-level history. Proponents of the partnership, meanwhile, tout the channel’s top-rate archives and audiovisual capabilities, as well as its mission to make historical study more accessible.
I understand the concern about the pop nature of many of History Channel's offerings. I spent the weekend in the hospital, and tuning into HC gave me Sons of Liberty (which wasn't bad) and Ancient Aliens (which would lower the IQ of Joe "I remember when FDR went on television at the start of the Depression" Biden). But the solution to Ancient Aliens and Pawn Stars is to produce popular history of high standards that will interest the masses. The Master's Whip: Homoerotic Sadomasochism And The Maintenance of Herrenvolk Democracy is not going to cut it. (Those who have already switched over to Amazon.com to see if there is an illustrated edition, sorry.)
Last December, Science published a provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that.The Science study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” seemed to offer a method that could work. The authors—Donald Green, a tenured professor of political science at Columbia University, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student in the poli-sci department at U.C.L.A.—enlisted a group of canvassers from the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center to venture into the L.A. neighborhoods where voters had supported Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. The canvassers followed standardized scripts meant to convince those voters to change their minds through non-confrontational, one-on-one contact. Over the following nine months, the voters were surveyed at various intervals to see what those conversations had achieved. The survey highlighted a surprising distinction. When canvassers didn’t talk about their own sexual orientations, voters’ shifts in opinion were unlikely to last. But if canvassers were openly gay—if they talked about their sexual orientations with voters—the voters’ shifts in opinion were still in evidence in the survey nine months later....
David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, the Berkeley grad students, were impressed by LaCour and Green’s findings. They decided to devote their own resources to pushing the research further. Broockman and Kalla prepared the online surveys, taking the initial steps towards a pilot study on May 6th. Nine days later, they noticed that their response rates were much lower than LaCour and Green’s. Hoping to match the earlier study’s rates, they looked for more information. They enlisted Peter Aronow, a professor at Yale, and the three began to examine the nuances of the data set. When they began to encounter a number of statistical quirks, Green contacted LaCour’s dissertation adviser, Lynn Vavreck. On Monday, Vavreck met with LaCour to demand the raw survey data. After some delay, LaCour told her that he had accidentally deleted it. Later, when the head of U.C.L.A.’s political-science department called Qualtrics, the online survey platform used for the study, they said that they could find no evidence of a deletion: whatever data was collected in the account LaCour claimed to have used was, presumably, still there. (LaCour was also unable to provide the contact information for any of the respondents.) At Green’s behest, Vavreck had also looked further into the study’s financing. It turned out to be nonexistent. “He didn’t have any grants coming to him. He had a small one that he didn’t accept,” Green said. “There was no data, and no plausible way of getting the data.”
It’s one of the largest video game franchises in history.
The Call of Duty series has sold over 175 million copies with millions of players competing against each other 24 hours a day across the planet.
The video game series has evolved over the last 10 years into a refined and respected multi-player online franchise that has spawned spin-offs, card games and action figures.
The game strives to be realistic and that is where SRM Arms based in Meridian, Idaho, comes into play. SRM Arms reinvented the shotgun that gun nuts across the country have highlighted in YouTube videos, online reviews and blog posts.
The SRM 1216 is a 16 round 12-gauge shotgun that met the needs of law enforcement agencies across the country and eventually the military.
The SRM 1216 is a semi-automatic shotgun that can fire quickly and has a reduced recoil for the user.
It's been another weird week in news from the Hermit Kingdom. Outside observers were titillated by reports of the supposed punishment meted out on the North Korean defense chief, who was accused of treason, in part for napping during a high-level meeting, and reportedly executed in public with an anti-aircraft gun....
It reminds me of the nonsense progressives do and say in the enclaves that it controls, like most prestige universities in the U.S., magnified by ten.
Pyongyang's leadership, which presides over the world's most closed and oppressed society, "invites such treatment," writes Korea scholar Andrei Lankov. We see North Korea as a monstrous, absurdist spectacle, an image reinforced by journalists' inability to do real reporting in the country.
Moreover, writes Lankov, "the government produces tons of comically inept propaganda (visit any North Korean official website to enjoy the style), and it is very repressive. There is little doubt that the regime is brutal and often acts in a peculiar way."
For a snapshot of the country's comically inept propaganda see a news bulletin published this week by the Korean Central News Agency, Pyongyang's official mouthpiece. It's reproduced here in full:
Korea Boasts of Long History in Magic
Pyongyang, May 11 (KCNA) -- Korea has a long history in performing traditional magic.
It was well evidenced by an old album published by a neighboring country 1 500 years ago.
According to historical data, the magic developed to a higher level in the period of Koryo Kingdom (918-1392), the first unified state of the Korean nation.
Typical of the magic pieces were the magic with fire and the one with knife.
Today magic has made a big stride forward in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
BALTIMORE (WJZ) — City crime spike. A dramatic increase in violence in Baltimore. Dozens of shooting and murders in the last few weeks following the riots last month.Even if police officers did wrong in Freddie Gray's death, the harsh reality is that poor blacks need a strong police presence to control the savages in their midst. The alternative is worse.
Christie Ileto reports some are concerned police are hesitant to crack down after six officers were charged in the death of Freddie Gray.
No parent should ever have to bury a child, but it’s Vel Hick’s reality.
“He took my baby away from me. That’s my baby,” she said.
Her 33-year-old son Louis is now one of 96 homicides in Baltimore this year–an undercurrent of violence that’s up almost one-third from this time last year.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- They were Albany's most powerful men: the governor, the Senate leader and the Assembly speaker. Together, they negotiated billion-dollar budgets and decided which bills passed and which ones didn't.Now two face federal corruption charges, and the third - Gov. Andrew Cuomo - appears eager to focus on other issues even as he faces questions about his ties to a major real estate firm at the center of the newest scandal to rock the state Capitol....
"If the charges are correct, it's deeply disturbing," is what Cuomo said following the arrest of Senate Leader Dean Skelos on charges that he extorted payments for his son from the developer and another business. The Long Island Republican resigned his leadership post Monday.Skelos' arrest comes after Manhattan Democrat Sheldon Silver stepped down as Assembly speaker in January after he was charged with taking nearly $4 million in payoffs. Both men say they are innocent and are keeping their legislative seats.In the political language of Albany, the governor, the speaker and the Senate leader are known collectively as the "three men in a room," a nod to the longstanding practice of negotiating the budget and other key pieces of legislation behind closed doors. Silver's arrest came the day after Cuomo referred to Skelos, Silver and himself as the "three amigos" during his budget presentation, which contained a depiction of the three men wearing sombreros.Millions of dollars in contributions by New York City real estate interests, mainly funneled through LLCs, have been cited in the cases against Silver and Skelos, who received large contributions from Glenwood Management, a New York City real estate firm headed by Leonard Litwin, Cuomo's top donor.
Joseph Rivers was hoping to hit it big. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the aspiring businessman from just outside of Detroit had pulled together $16,000 in seed money to fulfill a lifetime dream of starting a music video company. Last month, Rivers took the first step in that voyage, saying goodbye to the family and friends who had supported him at home and boarding an Amtrak train headed for Los Angeles.Didn't A-G Holder promise to do something about civil forfeiture a while back?
He never made it. From the Albuquerque Journal:
A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied.The agent found Rivers's cash, still in a bank envelope. He explained why he had it: He was starting a business in California, and he'd had trouble in the past withdrawing large sums of money from out-of-state banks.
The agents didn't believe him, according to the article. They said they thought the money was involved in some sort of drug activity. Rivers let them call his mother back home to corroborate the story. They didn't believe her, either.
The practice has proven to be controversial. Earlier this year, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced measures restricting the use of some types of civil asset forfeiture. But as the Institute for Justice noted in a February report, these changes only affect a small percentage of forfeitures initiated by local law enforcement agencies, not federal ones like the DEA. About 90 percent of Justice Department seizures won't be affected at all.Add your signature to a petition to the White House to end civil forfeiture.
Question: Can copyright trolling be profitable without suing over porn?
Answer: Probably not.
At least that's what the example of Rightscorp seems to be teaching. The company is the most recent effort to build a business being an online copyright cop, but financial data made public yesterday shows that Rightscorp, which has never been profitable, is losing money faster than ever.
The RIAA's giant lawsuit campaign lost loads of cash, and Righthaven (remember them?) dried up and blew away after legal setbacks interrupted its collections of four- and five-figure settlements from mom-and-pop bloggers.
The latest incarnation of the business model comes in the form of Rightscorp, which tries to compel Internet users to pay up to $20 per song when its clients' copyrighted works are downloaded over BitTorrent networks. The publicly traded company reported its quarterly financial results yesterday, and they're an unmitigated disaster—although company executives somehow managed to put a happy face on.
Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.Instapundit points out that this is roughly the progressive model for destroying religious liberty in America.
So yes, war is hell — but have you considered the alternatives? When looking upon the long run of history, it becomes clear that through 10,000 years of conflict, humanity has created larger, more organized societies that have greatly reduced the risk that their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for higher living standards and economic growth. War has not only made us safer, but richer, too.
CALEDONIA TWP. (WWJ/AP) – Michigan State Police say a Saginaw County man is facing multiple charges for allegedly kidnapping a woman he met through Craigslist.It makes me all the more confident that meeting my wife at a Bible study was a superior strategy.
Lt. David Kaiser said troopers pulled over the 41-year-old Chesaning man around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday in Shiawassee County for suspicion of drunken driving, when they heard a woman calling for help as they approached his car.
According to Kaiser, troopers found a 22-year-old Okemos woman in the back seat with a bag over her head, tape over her mouth and hands tied behind her back. She wasn’t seriously injured.
Kaiser said the man posted an ad on Craigslist expressing his interest in finding a submissive partner, luring the victim with a phony profile.