Where can I get one of those AR-14's?
I think they’re counting on call of duty and GTA to see them through.Who has the most weapons
This Mom Was Jailed for Leaving Her Teen Home Alone. Now, She's Suing.
Midland Independent School District Officer Kevin Brunner is not entitled to qualified immunity for allegedly violating the Megan and Adam McMurrys' 14th Amendment rights—and their daughter Jade's Fourth Amendment rights—when he removed Jade from her home and refused to let her call her father. So too may the family sue Officer Alexandra Weaver, Brunner's subordinate, who was deprived of qualified immunity by a lower court and did not appeal.
In October 2018, Megan McMurry left for a brief trip to Kuwait. Her husband was to be stationed there for the foreseeable future with the Mississippi Army National Guard, and McMurry, a schoolteacher by trade, made the trek to meet with a local school to perhaps reunite the family overseas. Her neighbors, Vanessa and Gabe Vallejos, in their gated apartment complex offered to watch her two children—Jade, then 14, and Connor, then 12—while she was gone for a few days.
What should have been a benign trip turned into the beginning of a legal odyssey.
When another neighbor, a school counselor, couldn't drive Connor to school as planned, the counselor asked Weaver to take him. Weaver couldn't oblige, so someone else took him. But Weaver didn't stop there, putting an investigation in motion, alerting Child Protective Services (CPS), and going with Brunner to the family home to do a welfare check on Jade, who did online homeschooling. After Weaver conducted a warrantless search, they removed her from the home and took her to Connor's middle school for an interrogation while refusing her multiple desperate pleas to get in touch with her dad. Body camera footage shows her sobbing.
CPS closed the case after they were apprised of the details; particularly rich is that the cops breached protocol when they refused to contact the parents, which is supposed to be first priority. But the police continued pursuing McMurry, despite that the agency in charge of such matters had cleared her. The cops charged her with two felony counts of child abandonment, after which point she spent 19 hours in jail. She was placed on unpaid leave from her teaching job, supposedly until the ordeal concluded, though she was ultimately fired.
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Potentially problematic for the McMurrys is that not everyone agrees there was a relevant, identical precedent on the books to avail them. But problematic for Officer Brunner, whose case was the only one before the court this time, is that his actions were so egregious that the McMurrys didn't necessarily need applicable case law. It should've been that obvious to him that what he was doing was unlawful.
"Weaver performed an illegal search in front of her supervisor (Brunner). And instead of settling for one constitutional violation (the search), Brunner went on to commit two more (unlawfully seizing JM and violating the McMurrys' due-process rights)," wrote Judge Andrew Oldham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in a concurring opinion. "After taking custody of JM, Brunner prevented [Jade] from talking to her father and the Vallejos for a significant amount of time. All while [Jade] was crying and confused. Then CPS told Brunner that his safety concerns were baseless. And still, inexplicably, Brunner persisted and pushed for criminal charges against Mrs. McMurry."
'White supremacy': Presentation at Washington governor’s summit condemns objectivity, individualism
This was followed by a slide that listed values aligned with “white supremacy culture”, drawn from Dr. Tema Okun’s Harvard study “The Culture of White Supremacy in Organizations.”
It listed such values as “Objectivity”; “Individualism”; “Perfectionism”; “Worship of the written word”; and a “Sense of urgency.” The presentation advocated that these values be replaced by “indigenous relational pedagogy.”
Replacement values included “Honor, integrity, & honesty”; “Perception”; “Ethical usefulness”; and “Generosity” among others. These were attributed to indigenous cultures, and pulled from publications with titles such as “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World.”
Some additional presentation materials attacking objectivity said that conferees need to "Recognize that we can know things emotionally and intuitively in ways that we may not be able to explain ‘rationally,’" and that they should "Understand that often ‘rational’ thinking is actually an emotional response couched in logic."
If observation and history has taught me anything, it's that they dont' think ahead.I often wonder if these white progressives really believe that the people they are supporting are going to keep them safe and not kick them to the curb with all the other white's.
During two years of strict border controls, Australia’s conservative former Prime Minister Scott Morrison took the extraordinary step of appointing himself minister of five departments, including the Department of Health. Authorities introduced both national and state-level apps to notify people when they had been in the vicinity of someone who tested positive for the virus.
But the apps were also used in other ways. Australia’s intelligence agencies were caught “incidentally” collecting data from the national COVIDSafe app. News of the breach surfaced in a November 2020 report by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, which said there was no evidence that the data was decrypted, accessed or used. The national app was canceled in August by a new administration as a waste of money: it had identified only two positive COVID-19 cases that wouldn’t have been found otherwise.
At the local level, people used apps to tap their phones against a site’s QR code, logging their individual ID so that if a COVID-19 outbreak occurred, they could be contacted. The data sometimes was used for other purposes. Australian law enforcement co-opted the state-level QR check-in data as a sort of electronic dragnet to investigate crimes.
In the U.S., which relied on a hodge-podge of state and local quarantine orders to ensure compliance with COVID rules, the federal government took the opportunity to build out its surveillance toolkit, including two contracts in 2020 worth $24.9 million to the data mining and surveillance company Palantir Technologies Inc. to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ pandemic response. Documents obtained by the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with AP showed that federal officials contemplated how to share data that went far beyond COVID-19.
The possibilities included integrating “identifiable patient data,” such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools.
King County Human Resources warned employees not to decorate their workspaces with overtly Christmas or Hanukkah decorations. They fear decorations may offend employees.
Gloria Ngezaho, Workforce Equity Manager for the Department of Human Resources, authored a memo titled “Guidelines for Holiday Decorations for King County Employees” to outline expectations. It says the county “remains committed to honoring the diversity in its workforce and is fortunate to have employees from many diverse backgrounds.”
“Before adding any decorations to your workspace (including your virtual workspace), consider the likely effect of such decorations on all of the employees in and outside your work group,” reads the memo obtained by the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH by a county staffer who found it posted internally last week.
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“Some employees may not share your religion, practice any religion, or share your enthusiasm for holiday decorations. Displays of religious symbols may only be displayed in an employee’s personal workspace. Religious symbols should not be displayed in or as a background to an employee’s virtual workspace,” the memo explains.
The memo says you cannot include Nativity sets or menorahs. But the list of symbols banned from virtual display extends well beyond what you would display for the holidays: stars of David, a cross or a crucifix, and images of Jesus or Mary.
To ensure that HR isn’t accused of focusing exclusively on Christians and Jews, even though that appears to be the intent, the memo warns against the dharma wheel, crescent and star, aum, khanda, and a nine-pointed star. None of these symbols are displayed for the holiday season.
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“For those who are not teleworking, common areas within work units are considered a public area. These spaces are shared by multiple employees in the performance of their jobs. Such areas would include breakrooms, conference rooms, and reception areas. Religious symbols are not appropriate in these areas, because it may cause disruption to co-workers or members of the public that do not share that particular religion,” the memo claims.
The memo states that, as a public institution, it “cannot appear to support any particular religion.” And the guidelines apply to holiday gatherings.