Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalFour Cops Showed Up at a Texas Woman's Home Over Her Angry Tweet About Abortion Rights
attie Walker, 24, was asleep when the knocks on her door began—but “once I heard how they were knocking, I figured it was the cops,” she told Jezebel.
Law enforcement officers had shown up to her home in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area, bearing a letter from the Department of Homeland Security, Walker says, due to a tweet she posted in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
It all began on June 24th—not June 4th, as the letter states—the day that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was announced. In reaction to the decision, Walker posted an angry quote-tweet in response to a clip of President Biden urging pro-abortion protestors to “keep all protests peaceful.”
“Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet.. “Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs.”
Six days later, Walker says, officers arrived at her door. One of the questions they asked, she says, was, “Do you still plan on burning any government buildings down?”
“I said, ‘No, sir. That wasn’t my plan in the first place,’” Walker told me in a phone interview. “I was like, I honestly haven’t even been able to make it to any protests yet.”
https://jezebel.com/four-cops-showed-up-at-a-texas-womans-home-over-her-ang-1849135781
Read further to find out what the other side is saying and NOT being visited by cops for....
Voter fraud claims are heating up a battle for political control in an oil-rich Texas county
One of the worst-kept secrets in Loving County sits along the shoulder of a desolate stretch of state highway in the heart of the Permian Basin.
It’s a sprawling ranch with a sunbaked adobe home that the Pecos River flooded out years ago, nestled near a trailer and a mobile home on stilts, all behind a padlocked gate.
Eleven people are registered to vote at this address. One of them is Loving County Commissioner Ysidro Renteria, who has been in office since 2011 and listed this property in December as his permanent address on his application to run for re-election, signed under oath. He and at least three relatives used the address to vote in the March primaries.
The secret?
“No one lives there,” Loving County Sheriff Chris Busse, who also serves as the registrar of voters, said in May. “I can attest that I’ve been here since 2008 and there has never, ever, ever been any of the Renterias — not even Ysidro — occupying it.”
The old Renteria farmhouse is hardly the only open secret in this county, the least populated in the continental U.S. Voter registration has been suspiciously high for generations, driven by bitter feuds among a handful of prominent families fighting for control of the local government. The voter registration roll is 97 people long, according to the Texas secretary of state, but the U.S. Census Bureau estimates only 57 people live here.
Elections often come down to tiny margins, but the stakes are high: Winners are awarded sway over an outsized budget. This roughly 670-square-mile patch of desert sits atop some of the richest oil and gas reserves in the U.S., generating a tax base that has hovered around $7 billion to $9 billion. Salaries for top elected officials are in the six figures. They steer an annual budget of more than $28 million.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/loving-county-texas-voter-fraud-claims-rcna35791
Texas, continuing its race to the bottom. Bet they are all RepubliQans
Gov. Lee's education advisor: Teachers come from 'dumbest parts of dumbest colleges'
A new report from CBS affiliate WTVF claimed that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s education advisor has been mocking the state’s public education teachers and questioning their roles in the classroom.
WTVF reported that they managed to obtain hidden-camera footage of a closed-door reception between the governor and Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. In the video, Arnn reportedly belittled diversity efforts in higher education and claimed that people have education degrees because they are “easy” and you “don’t have to know anything.”
The report also said that, throughout the nearly two-hour video, Lee never once stood up in defense of Tennessee’s teachers and only offered praise for Arnn, who Lee has in charge of setting up Tennessee charter schools across the state. Additionally, Lee did not mention his own wife, Maria Lee, who has a degree in elementary education and worked as a teacher for 14 years.
WTVF also listed examples Arnn’s remarks:
“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
“They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/06/30/gov-lees-education-advisor-teachers-come-dumbest-parts-dumbest-colleges/
Go to the link for the rest of it. It's appalling.
Gov. Lee's education advisor: Teachers come from 'dumbest parts of dumbest colleges'
A new report from CBS affiliate WTVF claimed that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s education advisor has been mocking the state’s public education teachers and questioning their roles in the classroom.
WTVF reported that they managed to obtain hidden-camera footage of a closed-door reception between the governor and Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College. In the video, Arnn reportedly belittled diversity efforts in higher education and claimed that people have education degrees because they are “easy” and you “don’t have to know anything.”
The report also said that, throughout the nearly two-hour video, Lee never once stood up in defense of Tennessee’s teachers and only offered praise for Arnn, who Lee has in charge of setting up Tennessee charter schools across the state. Additionally, Lee did not mention his own wife, Maria Lee, who has a degree in elementary education and worked as a teacher for 14 years.
WTVF also listed examples Arnn’s remarks:
“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
“They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/06/30/gov-lees-education-advisor-teachers-come-dumbest-parts-dumbest-colleges/
Go to the link for the rest of it. It's appalling.
Virginia lawsuits indicate pattern of schools ignoring reported sexual assaults
A pair of lawsuits that for years has plagued Virginia’s largest school system with allegations that it ignored students’ accusations of sex assaults are back in front of federal judges.
One of the lawsuits includes allegations of horrific abuse suffered by a student at a Fairfax county middle school and was the basis for a 2014 federal investigation.
The lawsuits attracted low-level attention when they were filed before the pandemic and became caught up in appeals. Now, both cases are moving forward again at a time when schools’ responses to alleged sexual assaults are receiving more intense scrutiny, as evidenced by the national attention in neighboring Loudoun county.
The middle-schooler filed an amended complaint earlier this month after the school board’s efforts to block her suit were rejected. Her ordeal began in October 2011, according to the lawsuit, when she was a seventh-grader at Rachel Carson middle school in Reston. A classmate started telling others that he had engaged in sexual activity with the girl, identified only by her initials in the lawsuit.
As rumors spread, she started to face harassment and name-calling at her locker in hallways. Then, she alleges, a boy at the school began routinely sexually assaulting her – sometimes with others joining the assault – and threatening her to remain silent.
The assaults occurred over a period of months, according to the lawsuit. The girl was evaluated by a nurse who confirmed scarring consistent with anal rape, but a school resource officer dismissed the activity as consensual.
School officials continued to downplay and minimize the alleged assaults as consensual, even though the girl was 12 and was pleading with administrators and counselors for protection while the supposedly consensual relationship was ongoing.
She also alleges that on school grounds, a group of boys forced her into a closet and sexually assaulted her.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/30/virginia-lawsuit-schools-ignoring-reported-sexual-assaults
A 12 year old CANNOT LEGALLY CONSENT to sexual activity, no matter the age of the assaulter.
Even Army Heads Shocked by Putin's 'F*cking Imbecile' Troops
Even Russian military leadership was shocked to learn of the mayhem and dysfunction among Vladimir Putin’s troops in occupied eastern Ukraine, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
In a five-minute recording shared by the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry on Thursday, a man identified as a fighter in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic can be heard complaining to his wife that “Russians are fucking imbeciles” and revealing that his fellow fighters raped and murdered civilians.
No details were provided on when the phone call was said to have taken place, or where exactly in Donetsk the man was based.
“Basically, today our guys went to the Russian headquarters,” said the man, who was not identified by name. “They are not aware that there are so few of us here... They all think that we’re professionals, that we’ve been fighting since 2014 and we’re already experts, that we’re badass fucking warriors,” he said.
“They raised the question about us not having a rotation, and not having weapons, nothing,” he went on. “Basically, they promised that within three days, some fucking Russian bogeys will come... they promised to change us out, the generals didn’t even know what kind of situation we had here,” he added, complaining that “we are almost down 50 fucking percent.”
The fighter recalled an incident where he said a group of Russian troops were sent to back up their fellow Russians, but then both sides “started to shell the fuck out of each other, Russians with fucking Russians, they fucking killed each other.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/even-russian-leadership-shocked-by-infighting-and-chaos-among-putins-troops?ref=home
Inside the Rural Psychiatric Hospital Staff Call a '21st Century Asylum'
On the morning of April 14, at the Meadows Psychiatric Center in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, a 28-year-old man named Thomas Birkl allegedly walked up to a mental health technician and punched her in the face.
Birkl had been “acting out and throwing food around the facility,” according to a police affidavit. While the woman was “cleaning up the mess [Birkl] had created,” he hit her “with a closed fist,” and then proceeded to hit her two more times in the head. When another worker tried to intervene, Birkl also hit that worker on her back and head, police alleged.
Birkl was arrested and charged with two counts of felony assault; both women were sent to the hospital with head injuries, and the second worker complained of numbness in her left arm.
A dozen current and former workers who spoke to VICE News said the incident was far from a one-off. Instead, they describe Meadows as a facility rife with violence directed at both workers and other patients, in poor condition, and providing less than the bare minimum of resources to patients.
“It’s like a 21st century asylum,” Jordan Zimmerman, a mental health technician who worked at Meadows from October 2021 until May, told VICE News. “Patients are telling me that they would be better off where they were, that this place is making them worse.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzdmm/meadows-psychiatric-hospital-pennsylvania
Long, but worth the read. This is why NO health care should be outsourced to private entities.
Inside the Rural Psychiatric Hospital Staff Call a '21st Century Asylum'
On the morning of April 14, at the Meadows Psychiatric Center in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, a 28-year-old man named Thomas Birkl allegedly walked up to a mental health technician and punched her in the face.
Birkl had been “acting out and throwing food around the facility,” according to a police affidavit. While the woman was “cleaning up the mess [Birkl] had created,” he hit her “with a closed fist,” and then proceeded to hit her two more times in the head. When another worker tried to intervene, Birkl also hit that worker on her back and head, police alleged.
Birkl was arrested and charged with two counts of felony assault; both women were sent to the hospital with head injuries, and the second worker complained of numbness in her left arm.
A dozen current and former workers who spoke to VICE News said the incident was far from a one-off. Instead, they describe Meadows as a facility rife with violence directed at both workers and other patients, in poor condition, and providing less than the bare minimum of resources to patients.
“It’s like a 21st century asylum,” Jordan Zimmerman, a mental health technician who worked at Meadows from October 2021 until May, told VICE News. “Patients are telling me that they would be better off where they were, that this place is making them worse.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzdmm/meadows-psychiatric-hospital-pennsylvania
Long, but worth the read. This is why NO health care should be outsourced to private entities.
Emmett Till: family seeks arrest after discovery of unserved 1955 warrant
A team searching the basement of a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till has found the unserved warrant charging a white woman in his 1955 kidnapping, and relatives of the victim who initiated the hunt want authorities to finally arrest her nearly 70 years later.
A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham – identified as “Mrs Roy Bryant” on the document – was discovered last week inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, the Leflore county circuit clerk, Elmus Stockstill, told the Associated Press (AP) on Wednesday.
Documents are kept inside boxes by decade, he said, but there was nothing else to indicate where the warrant, dated 29 August 1955, might have been.
“They narrowed it down between the 50s and 60s and got lucky,” said Stockstill, who certified the warrant as genuine.
The search was started by the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and included two members of Till’s family: cousin Deborah Watts, head of the Foundation, and her daughter, Teri Watts. They want authorities to use the warrant to arrest Donham, who at the time of the slaying was married to one of two white men tried and acquitted just weeks after Till was abducted from a relative’s home, killed and dumped into a river.
“Serve it and charge her,” Teri Watts told the AP in an interview.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/29/emmett-till-warrant-carolyn-bryant-donham-family-arrest
She lied and Emmett Till died.
How Elizabeth Cotten's music fueled the folk revival
As a Black woman playing fingerstyle guitar, Yasmin Williams has been hailed as a "hero for a new generation." She says she often felt like an anomaly- until she discovered a YouTube video of Elizabeth Cotten.
"I knew about Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other kind of more rock and roll or electric players and singers and I loved them too, but just seeing an acoustic guitarist was amazing." But when Williams tried to learn more about Cotten she discovered that most accounts of her life skipped over the hardships she overcame, focusing only on her late-career success.
Cotten was born in Chapel Hill, N.C. around 1893. Her father worked in the mines. Her mother cleaned houses. When Cotten's brother was off at work, Sis Nevills, as she was called then, snuck into his room and took his guitar off the wall. Since she was left-handed, she turned it so the bass strings were at the bottom, therefore "backwards." She used her thumb to play the melody and her fingers for the low notes.
When Cotten's brother discovered her playing, he tried to offer advice, "'You got it upside down, turn it around or change the strings." She tried but liked the sound better the other way, so she kept with it, practicing for hours on end. After the third grade, Cotten left school to work. Making 75 cents a month cleaning houses and cooking, she saved up to buy her guitar. Cotten picked up new songs after hearing them only once or twice, and wrote her songs, including "Freight Train."
Cotten was married in her mid-teens and had a daughter. A pastor discouraged her from playing "wordly" songs. But by the mid-1940s she had left the church and her marriage and she was living with family in Washington, D.C. when she applied for a job at a local department store, where she was hired to sell dolls. When a girl wandered away, Cotten saved the day by reuniting her with her mother. She didn't know it, but that woman was composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, wife of ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, and mother to budding folk musicians Mike and Peggy, and stepson Pete- who was well on his way to stardom as a member of the Weavers.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1107090873/how-elizabeth-cottens-music-fueled-the-folk-revival
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