With Gov. Ron DeSantis' signature of approval, Florida's latest book challenge law took effect on July 1. Soon after, media specialists across the state, including in Leon County, said the law could mean Shakespeare's works would have to be put on the chopping block.
The father came home and found his wife and three children shot to death. The children and the mother were all shot in the head. The mother was also shot in the chest. An apparently new .22 German-made pistol between the mother's legs that the father “was unable to say where it had come from.” Police called it a murder-suicide with no apparent motive. I have my suspicions. How many people shoot themselves in both chest and head (besides Epstein, or various associates of Stalin and Putin). This happened in Oregon, Ohio. No, I had no idea an Oregon existed in Ohio.
Previous incidents included a 2016 domestic call to his home that did not result in an arrest, police said. A year later, another call led to his temporary detention for emergency health services under Florida's Baker Act law.
Baker Act, more formally, Florida Mental Health Act.
The gun banners will keep insisting these are coincidences.
Funny, and it accurately describes the mindset, even if some conspiracy theories turn out to be spoiler alerts:
1/11/18 Campus Reform. Not recent but still a reminder that the value of higher education needs re-evaluation:
Three British professors recently claimed that statistical analyses have been weaponized to “serve white racial interests” within academia and beyond.
Led by David Gillborn, a professor at the University of Birmingham, the professors argue that math serves white interests because it can “frequently encode racist perspectives beneath the facade of supposed quantitative objectivity.”
“Contrary to popular belief, and the assertions of many quantitative researchers, numbers are neither objective nor color-blind,” Gillborn and his team assert in their article for the journal Race, Ethnicity, and Education....
Numbers are not neutral because “quantitative data is often gathered and analyzed in ways that reflect the interests, assumptions, and perceptions of White elites,” they contend, adding that even so-called objective analysis fails to take the pervasiveness of racism into account.
Other key tenets of QuantCrit theory include realizing that math tends to legitimate existing racial inequalities, acknowledging that numerical analyses disadvantage minorities, and understanding how numbers play to the benefit of white interests.
Even if data is gathered by methods that either unconsciously or consciously reflect racist goals or beliefs, numbers are neutral. Hindu-Arabic numerals are not Western. Algebra has roots in the Muslim world (hint look for al-). I am increasingly of the view that universities need to be self-funded.
ST. LOUIS – Just hours after St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones announced plans for new gun legislation Tuesday, the Missouri Attorney General fired back and said her office is “on notice.”
Jones, with support from the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, plans to introduce new legislation that would ban AR-15s, AK-47s, and similar military-grade weapons on city streets.
Andrew Bailey announced Tuesday evening that he wrote a letter to Jones, which stated that new legislation to ban military-grade weapons would “violate the constitutional right of Missourians to keep and bear arms.”...
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who appointed Bailey to the role of attorney general, shared similar concerns over the new gun proposal.
“Governor Parson is a strong and proud supporter of the Second Amendment and does not support any measure that he views weakens Missourians’ right to bear arms,” said Johnathan Shiflett, press secretary for Gov. Parson’s office, in a statement to FOX 2. Cities with the strictest gun laws still have some of the highest rates of gun violence because, simply, criminals are not deterred by restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens.”
While announcing her plans for legislation on Tuesday, Jones acknowledged she expected some GOP pushback. She recently signed Board Bill 29 into law for St. Louis as well, which requires individuals openly carrying firearms to have a concealed carry permit.
One of you sent me $20 with Zelle. Thank you. I am trying to figure out how to transfer that $20 to checking. Zelle tells you how to send money but I cannot figure out how to move that money into my account at First Tech Federal Credit Union, nor is their online tech support of much value.
L.M. v. Middleborough (D.Mass. 2023):
On March 21, 2023, L.M. attended school at Nichols in a t-shirt with the message “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS” (the “Shirt”). L.M. Aff. ¶ 14 [Doc. No. 43].1 While L.M. was participating in gym class, Principal Tucker asked L.M. to come speak with her. Id. at ¶ 15; Tucker Aff. ¶ 6 [Doc. No. 46]. Tucker informed L.M. that he could not wear the Shirt because of complaints, and that he could either remove the Shirt or discuss it further in another room. L.M. Aff. ¶ 15 [Doc. No. 43]; Tucker Aff. ¶ 6 [Doc. No. 46]. L.M. indicated he would like to discuss it further and Tucker escorted him to another room, where the school counselor joined the conversation. L.M. Aff. ¶ 16 [Doc. No. 43]; ...
Here, the School’s rational for prohibiting the Shirt is not that LM is bullying a specific student, but that a group of potentially vulnerable students will not feel safe. A broader view directed at students’ safety has been acknowledged by other courts.
Do not hurt anyone's feelings justifies censorship. Wait until some school bans rainbow flag T-shirts.
I just read this book by Helen McDonald. It is hard to describe: part memoir of loss after her father's death; part her experience of training a goshawk so she can be a falconer; part thoughtful examination of the life and writing of T.H. White author of The Sword in the Stone.
An arsonist who attempted to set a church on fire in Florida accidentally set themselves ablaze, a new video shows.
On Thursday, the Broward County Sheriff's Office released surveillance video footage of the unidentified culprit walking onto the property of the Power Outreach Ministry located at 2600 N.W. 21st Avenue, shortly after 1:40 a.m. on August 14.
There was one arsonist, identity unknown at press time. Are they afraid of misgendering him/her?
As the fire spread further into town, the problems multiplied: Hydrants ran dry as the community’s water system collapsed, according to firefighters. Powerful sirens, tested every month in preparation for such an emergency, never sounded. Lahaina’s 911 system went down.
Many of those who evacuated said they were corralled by road closures and downed power lines into traffic jams that left some people to burn alive in their cars and forced others to flee into the Pacific. Videos shared with The Times and posted on social media show cars on Front Street crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic as smoke, embers and debris billow around them. Fuqua, abandoned their cars after getting stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
I am in northern Idaho at a
meeting of gun rights lawyers, legislators, and other activists in a lakefront house. We were discussing this among Lahaina disasters and trying to understand the blockade.$6.25 $1 a week for your first year.
$6.25 $1 a week for your first year.
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In spite of a lot of press about Charles Whitman's hunting rifle, he actually used an M1 Carbine.
The news report claiming the Parkland murderer used 10 round magazines? Apparently not true. 8/3/19 South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
Along with his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, Cruz abandoned at least six magazines that each contained 30 bullets at the scene of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, according to two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
COLUMBUS, Ohio) — In a win for the state of Ohio, the Tenth District Court of Appeals has upheld state law on firearms uniformity, overturning a preliminary injunction granted nine months ago to the city of Columbus, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced today.
"Federal prosecutors said the aide, Samuel Miele, was behind “fraudulent fund-raising” emails and phone calls that were sent and made to more than a dozen potential campaign contributors."
A little deeper:
"The case against Mr. Miele was filed by the same legal team that is prosecuting Mr. Santos in a separate case involving wire fraud. In a letter filed Wednesday, the lawyers advised the court that the two cases should be presumed to be related “because the facts of each case arise out of overlapping events.”
"Mr. Santos, 35, was charged with 13 counts that include money laundering, wire fraud, theft of public funds and false statements following an investigation into his finances that began last year. He has pleaded not guilty."
When New York was defending itself from Bruen, they cited some of the Test Acts, which disarmed Tories during the Revolution. So far, I am finding citations to the wrong chapter and page numbers. The text is often right, but taken out of context. I suspect these are coming from the father of lies, the Duke University Repository of Firearms Laws, which on rare occasions cites laws accurately. If any of you want to search for these laws there, and tell me if you find them there. it would speed up this process:
In the Revolutionary era, colonies frequently disarmed individuals based on their reputation for being disloyal or hostile to the new American nation. Massachusetts, for instance, had a law “disarming such person as are notoriously disaffected to the cause of America.” Act of March 14, 1776, in 1775-1776 Mass. Acts & Laws 31, TD Ex. 11. Once an individual had been deemed disaffected to the cause of America, he could often only regain his right to bear arms by appearing in person before an official to swear an oath of loyalty. In a Pennsylvania law passed in 1776, all white male inhabitants were required to appear “before some one of the justices of the peace of the city or county where they shall respectively inhabit” to take a prescribed oath of allegiance, and if they failed to do so, they were “disarmed by the lieutenant or sublieutenants of the city or counties respectively.” 1776-1777 Pa. Laws ch. XXI, §§ 1, 4, at 61-63, TD. Ex. 12. Other colonies adopted similar provisions. See An Act for the Better Security of the Government, 1777 Md. Laws Ch. XX, TD Ex. 13; An Act to Amend An Act for Declaring What Crimes and Practices Against the State Shall Be Treason, . . . and for Preventing the Dangers Which May Arise From Persons Disaffected to the State, 1777 N.C. Laws 228, TD Ex. 14; An Act to Oblige the Free Male Inhabitants of this State Above a Certain Age to Give Assurances of Allegiance to the Same (1777), in 9 William W. Hening, The Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia 281, 281-82 (1821), TD Ex. 15. In New York, if an individual refused to sign a loyalty oath, his arms were taken and redistributed to the colony’s militia. Journals of the Provincial Congress, Provincial Convention, Committee of Safety and Council of Safety of the State of New York, 1775-1776-1777, at 389 (1842), TD Ex. 16
Thanks to all who have been looking these up for me. I know that many are not what New York claims. The question is, did these often incorrect citations appear in the Duke Trash Repository linked above?
I just reinstalled Windows. I want local directories to show up in Windows Explorer in the left pane. I do not want to go out to OneDrive to open directories. One of you told ne how a couple years ago. Making OneDrive the default for everything drives me crazy.
"Researchers found those who worked on changing their mindset from a scarcity mindset to a growth mindset saw increased self-confidence and were able to break their previous habits of when they saw risk as a danger rather than an opportunity to create something new."
The economist Thomas Powell derides the notion of systemic racism as something undefined and therefore untestable. This study suggests that continually telling a group, "You cannot make it on your own," creates those same expectations. I have mentioned America's black billionaires that are not entertainers. Several grew up in segregated schools. Somehow, they developed a growth mindset. Perhaps they did not have the "Your a victim" rhetoric thrown at them repeatedly. Many of America's ethnic white immigrant groups and Asian immigrants were subjects of discrimination and the disadvantages of language and religious minority status (Jews and earlier Catholics). For Asians they had both federal and state laws against them. They had not been slaves but still they were successful.
Been there; done that.
I am not sure what has damaged Word on my PC, but I started seeing weird problems with screens going black, then coming back after a few seconds last month. Lenovo sent me a Windows 11 install disk. I have used LapLink's PCmover program to image all my applications and settings (or so they promise), done a full backup of my files to a USB drive and OneDrive and after enough rest and time away from the computer, we start over.
Reset this PC and Word can open documents and see macros again. I am unclear if it restored on my drive D or drive C. Either way works. C for programs and D for data. Right now I am attempting to get my installed applications restored using LapLink PCmover.
Interesting story about LapLink. Back in the 1990s, I sold a product called ETSR that intercepted Epson dot matrix printer codes, translated them to PostScript and sent them on their way to the printer. Lots of applications back then did not have PostScript support yet but every application had Epson dot matrix racket printer support. The code was all in C. A terminate-and-stay-resident program attached itself to the printer device driver (interrupt 13). In this case, it fed characters into a C program that I had written. I sold a few copies but the big win was that LapLink near Seattle was an early vendor of programs for transferring files PC to PC via parallel ports and the president thought the code might be useful so I licensed it to him for $5000, which was big money back then, especially for me.
I need to remember how I mapped my pictures directory to the Libraries level in the magic list on the left side of a file selection window. I also want to figure out how to make applications default to my local drive not OneDrive.
This decision from the 5th Circuit is perfectly argued. USA v. Daniels (5th Cir. 2023):
Throughout American history, laws have regulated the combination of guns and intoxicating substances. But at no point in the 18th or 19th century did the government disarm individuals who used drugs or alcohol at one time from possessing guns at another. A few states banned carrying a weapon while actively under the influence, but those statutes did not emerge until well after the Civil War. Section 922(g)(3)—the first federal law of its kind— was not enacted until 1968, nearly two centuries after the Second Amendment was adopted.
In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage. Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users. As applied to Daniels, then, § 922(g)(3) violates the Second Amendment. We reverse the judgment of conviction and render a dismissal of the indictment.
I do not care (much) how drunk you get, as long as you are sober when you have your gun.
Yes, Hunter, thank us by ratting out your father.
The massive Word document including my mass murder incidents crashes if I try to run any macro, or even start the Developer->Macros command. I renamed the Normal.docm file as DefectiveNormal.docm to see if this file is the problem. No change.
From the event log:
| - | EventData |
| AppName | WINWORD.EXE |
| AppVersion | 16.0.16626.20170 |
| AppTimeStamp | 64cc5d7a |
| ModuleName | VBE7.DLL |
| ModuleVersion | 0.0.0.0 |
| ModuleTimeStamp | 63e1cbeb |
| ExceptionCode | c0000005 |
| FaultingOffset | 00000000002c623a |
| ProcessId | 0x26e8 |
| ProcessCreationTime | 0x1d9ccb21829fe6d |
| AppPath | C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\WINWORD.EXE |
| ModulePath | C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VBA\VBA7.1\VBE7.DLL |
| IntegratorReportId | a0f686fa-3f8f-4e4c-81a7-4eb84d491aea |
| PackageFullName |
| PackageRelativeAppId |
"In the past several months, substations in North Carolina, Washington and Oregon have been damaged in various attacks. In February, the Department of Homeland Security warned in a bulletin that “domestic violent extremists” have looked at attacking electrical and communications infrastructure “as a means to create chaos and advance ideological goals.” The motivation behind Vail’s alleged attack is unclear."
I would wonder if ecodambusting or mental illness is a better explanation.
It’s not a ban when we do it
If the headlines are to be believed, book banning is exclusively the purview of the political right. The restriction of the graphic Holocaust memoir Maus at a school in Tennessee; the reshelving of Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem, "The Hill We Climb," for middle school instead of elementary school readers at a school library in Florida; the ongoing imbroglio over the graphic memoir Gender Queer, which features a strap-on blowjob scene that is simultaneously too boring to qualify as pornography yet also too explicit to be shown on television: every one of these incidents became a global news story, fueled by a media class that is heavily invested in the narrative of a national censorship crisis, and even moreso in the idea of a slavering mass of would-be book burners rioting in MAGA gear on the steps of every library in America.
It's true that incidents like these tend to be initiated by conservatives concerned that the content of certain books is inappropriate for children — although in many cases, it's more like one conservative for whom trying to get books removed from the library has become something akin to a weird hobby (one analysis found that 60 percent of challenges from the 2021-2022 school year were initiated by just eleven people). But this isn't the whole story when it comes to the removal or restriction of books that someone finds morally objectionable. For every parents' rights group demanding the removal of Gender Queer from the school library, members of the political left have their own, no less ideology-driven ways of restricting access to books. The only difference is there's no oversight, and no media outcry.
Every year, librarians and educators quietly purge their shelves of titles they've deemed outdated, irrelevant, or offensive in a process known as weeding. This is standard practice in school and public libraries across the country, and just as reflective of political pieties as the highly-publicized challenges to books like Gender Queer. Like so many other professions, library science has become increasingly preoccupied with progressive politics in recent years, while the notion that the library should remain apolitical is increasingly unpopular among those who work there. In 2016, librarians donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign over Trump's by a ratio of 419 to 1. The annual conferences of the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest professional consortium of librarians, are packed with DEI-related programming, and librarians are instrumental in the DisruptTexts and Decolonize Your Bookshelf movements designed to steer readers away from the problematic classics written by straight, white men. Even the Dewey decimal system has been declared racist.
The archetypal librarian ingrained in the American imagination (and whom many of us still remember from our youth) might have shushed you for talking too loudly, but she'd happily connect you with any book you wanted. Today's librarians, on the other hand, often see themselves not only as custodians of literature, but gatekeepers, educators, and activists, and they've been as instrumental as anyone in turning the library from an ideologically neutral space into a political battleground.
Once a book has been deemed "harmful" — that is, guilty of one of the -isms or -phobias — it's not unusual for librarians to look for ways to keep it out of children's hands, if not pull it from the shelves entirely. There are many ways to suppress a library book when you're the one in control of which titles get displayed, promoted, and included on reading lists (just this week in the UK, a "best practices" guide for librarians reportedly advised keeping books by "transphobic" authors out of sight and off recommendation lists lest the reading public become distressed). As one blog post on the American Library Association website coyly explains, "While I’m not saying you need to out-and-out remove Tikki Tikki Tembo, Dr. Seuss or Little House on the Prairie from your library, what I am saying is we all — most especially white librarians — need to be more conscious of the messages our recommendations send to our public, and the lessons children are learning from those recommendations. If a classic isn’t circulating the way it used to, if it no longer meets the criteria set for inclusion in your collection — maybe it’s time to weed."
In other words, we're not saying you need to remove this book. We're saying, you should do everything in your power to stop people from reading this book, and then remove it because people aren't reading it anymore… for some strange reason.
If you want to have some fun with your local woke librarian, ask why they do not have The Turner Diaries in their collection. Is it important? For understanding the tiny neo-Nazi movement and the destruction of the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, yes. Would it provoke young people to turn neo-Nazi? Some, perhaps. It is a well-written, entertaining novel, once you get past the racism, anti-Semitism, and incitement to violence.
Do they have Dan Giffords' documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997)? It is certainly important. But it raises questions about the honesty of the FBI and the integrity of the official news media.
Oh yes: The Myth of Extermination of the Jews and Holocaust: The Greatest Lie Ever Told. Of course, some progressives might appreciate those.
These are public libraries. If the people funding them have no say in how the collections are curated, then the "woke" should fund them.
