Mom Arrested, Charged with Felony for Putting Recorder in 9yo’s Backpack to Catch Her Bully

After the school failed to help this mother address her daughter"s bully, the mom took action and now she"s facing a felony and 5 years in prison.

5 Critical Stories Being Ignored While We All Watch Hollywood Implode

The Harvey Weinstein Hollywood sex scandal dominated the news cycle this week, as over 20 women publicly accused the media mogul of sexual harassment and assault—a massive revelation. However, as a result of the swarm of media coverage, several significant stories fell under the radar.

Here are 5 critical stories being ignored while America watches Hollywood burn:

1. Police Have Begun Making Massive Reversals in the Official Vegas Narrative

Police made significant changes to the timeline of the Las Vegas shooting this week, which drastically changed the official narrative. First, the story was that suspect Stephen Paddock encountered Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos in the hallway, and shot him in the leg after he unloaded a volley of bullets into a crowd of 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

In the revised timeline, which is actually backed up by audio that was released this week, Paddock shot Campos at least 6 minutes before he opened fire on the crowd from his window on the 32nd floor, and he fired a total of about 200 rounds into the hallway. A nearby maintenance worker witnessed the scene and reported it, which should have given law enforcement a clear location of exactly where their target was before the massacre officially began.

There have also been reports claiming that after police announced the significant change in the timeline involving Jesus Campos, he has since canceled several media interviews, and his family is under a gag order.

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Since Monday home of @MandalayBay security guard, Jesus Campos, guarded by private security– today armed. #LasVegasShooting pic.twitter.com/6GZgGHB1eM

— Craig Fiegener (@CraigNews3LV) October 11, 2017

2. Congress is Considering a Law That Will Make The Government’s Spying Powers Permanent

In the days after 9/11, the United States government preyed on the fear felt by many Americans to justify the passage of the USA Patriot Act—a law that gave the government unprecedented spying powers and became a vital component of the “War on Terror.”

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Now, one of the most crucial provisions that the government has used to justify spying on innocent Americans is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2017. In response, the USA Liberty Act has become the latest trendy name for a law that would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows “the collection of electronic communications by non-U.S. persons for use in our nation’s defense,” according to the House Judiciary Committee.

However, what the USA Liberty Act does not advertise is the fact that it does not actually address the legitimate problems that exist with Section 702. While the purpose of FISA was reportedly only to allow surveillance on the communications of foreign targets who were suspected terrorists, it has been used to spy on the communications of innocent Americans—despite the practice being ruled illegal—and any reauthorization of the law will only allow the practice to continue under the guise of “defeating terrorism.”

3. A Newly Passed Law will Jail Parents if Their Kids are Caught Bullying

A new law is now in effect in North Tonawanda, New York, that sets a troubling precedent for cities across the country. While it is no secret that bullying is an issue among children and teenagers, lawmakers have decided that parents should be held accountable for their child’s actions—even to the extent that they face jail time if their child is caught bullying.

As a professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, noted, “Very little research has been done to determine the effectiveness of laws that hold parents criminally liable. It’s often just a way for politicians to look hard on juvenile delinquency.”

The new law states:

“Members of the North Tonawanda Common Council hope the new law will put a stop to bullying by holding parents accountable for their children’s actions. Parents could be fined $250 and sentenced to 15 days in jail if twice in a 90-day period their child under 18 violates the city’s curfew or any other city law, including bullying.”

4. Evidence Emerges Showing the FBI was Behind the 2015 ISIS Terror Attack in Texas

The only person injured in the first ISIS-claimed terrorist attack on U.S. soil in 2015 is now suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a lawsuit claiming agents “solicited, encouraged, directed and aided members of ISIS in planning and carrying out the May 3 attack.”

Bruce Joiner, a security guard who was shot and wounded when two men opened fire outside of a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, is seeking $8 million in damages.

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As the Washington Examiner noted, if Joiner does not reach a settlement with the Bureau, “the case could shake loose hundreds of documents from both local and federal officials about what happened that day, and could answer the question of why an FBI agent was in a car directly behind the attackers and did nothing as the events unfolded.”

Not only was an FBI agent in the car directly behind the suspects, the FBI had been in contact with one of the suspects for years, and they were well aware that he was considered vulnerable to radicalization.

5. ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ — 70+ Kids are ‘Missing’ from Foster Care

More than 70 foster children are currently missing in the state of Kansas, highlighting a troubling disconnect between the Kansas Department for Children and Families (DCF), which oversees foster care in the state, and the private foster care contractors that the state utilizes to oversee the direct placement of children within foster homes.

One of the main foster care contractors, KVC Kansas, admitted that it has roughly 38 missing children, and Saint Francis Community Services admitted that 36 children are missing from its database. To put that into context, Kansas has around 7,100 foster children, which means that around 1 percent of them have gone missing.

Chairman of the state’s Child Welfare System Task Force, Rep. Steve Alford, said he is not surprised by the number of missing children because of the separation between DCF and the contractors. “Once the children … (go from the court) into the possession of the secretary, she hands them off to the contractors and it’s their responsibility, you know, it’s kind of like out of sight, out of mind in a lot of aspects,” Alford said.

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KAKE.com | Wichita, Kansas News, Weather, Sports

Newly Passed Law Will Jail Parents if Their Kids are Caught Bullying

North Tonawanda, NY — As Americans continue to become more and more dependent upon the state to manage their daily lives, a new law that was just approved in New York epitomizes this irresponsible and outright complacent practice.

On Oct 1., a new law went into effect that will jail parents if their child is found bullying other minors. 

According to WBNG:

Members of the North Tonawanda Common Council hope the new law will put a stop to bullying by holding parents accountable for their children’s actions. Parents could be fined $250 and sentenced to 15 days in jail if twice in a 90-day period their child under 18 violates the city’s curfew or any other city law, including bullying.

North Tonawanda officials say the law is geared toward minors who repeatedly bully other children in public places.

This law comes after four teens were reportedly kicked out of North Tonawanda Middle School for alleged bullying.

On the surface, the idea of fining and jailing parents for their bully kids may seem like an effective strategy to curtail bullying. However, all it does is open Pandora’s box into horrid nature of the police state and it provides no real solution.

We’ve already seen what happens when police get involved in matters that should not involve them, like childhood quarrels on playgrounds.

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Just last week, TFTP reported on a horrifying video that showed a police officer pick up a tiny black child and slam him down face-first onto the concrete for being involved in a scuffle with another student. The presence of police in that situation only made it more dangerous.

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Now, with the enactment of this new law, the parents of both of those students in the video mentioned above could also face potentially brutal police action.

Yes, parents are ultimately responsible for the behavior of their younger children. However, politicizing and criminalizing normal, yet often cruel, childhood behavior is not the answer. Also, there is simply no data to support its effectiveness.

We can have all the laws we want holding parents responsible for their children’s actions, writes Anita Kulick from ecparenting.org, but do they really make a difference?

“Very little research has been done to determine the effectiveness of laws that hold parents criminally liable”, says Eve Brank, an associate professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.  “It’s often just a way for politicians to look hard on juvenile delinquency,” she says.

Often times, fining the parents of a bully could make the situation worse. Bullies, as multiple studies have shown, often have abusive parents who would probably not be too happy if their child happened to get them fined or thrown in prison.

Also, this law assumes that the bully will be correctly identified in the situation. Studies on the subject tell us that the opposite will often happen. School staff often have no idea that a child is being bullied. The same goes for the parents.

It is also important to note that many times, what parents and officials refer to as bullying is not at all seen as bullying by the child.

The real issue, Danah Boyd, who actually studies social interactions online among young people, suggests, is not that “bullying,” is a problem. It’s a lack of empathy. And, of course, that goes way beyond kids. As she notes, “just ask any marital therapist who’s trying to help a couple work through their relationship.” From there, as Tech Dirt notes, she points out that these interactions really aren’t all that different from adult interactions:

When I look at how teens hurt each other, I can’t help but also see how they’re developing training wheels for future relationships and reflecting normative behaviors that they see around them. I hear teens’ dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight — with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they’re witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn’t pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements.

While Boyd admits that she doesn’t have the perfect solution to preventing future bullying, looking at the situation through a different lens that isn’t so black and white is a much better start.

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All this law does is use the state’s only tools to attempt to solve a problem — revenue collection backed with the threat of violence — ironically, they’re employing one of the tools of bullies.

Instead of simply making something illegal and claiming that it fixes the problem, perhaps it’s time we apply common sense to these scenarios and make it part of everyday life. Instead of teaching children how to be victims and call the police if they think they are being bullied, perhaps — with the right training wheels — we can teach them how to avoid being bullied altogether. Or, we can focus on teaching children empathy, so a bully thinks how they may feel before resorting to their abusive tactics.

As Mike Masnick writes:

There’s a great quote, apparently by Ian Percy that “we judge others by their behavior, while we judge ourselves by our intentions.” It’s really accurate, and highlights the difficulty of having empathy in such situations. People never think that they are in the wrong — and since they can’t readily understand or know the thought process and intentions of others, it often leads to them thinking the worst. If there were better ways to get people to at least recognize that others might also have good intentions, it could at least limit the negative impact of some interactions. Such fights and misunderstandings will never go away. It’s probably wishful thinking to even imagine they can be decreased even slightly. But calling them “cyberbullying” and outlawing jerky behavior or doing silly costumed song-and-dances isn’t going to help matters at all.

'Supervolcano' Alert - Not Just In Yellowstone

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Thar she blows!

Once every 600,000 years or so Yellowstone’s supervolcano erupts, making Mt. St. Helens, Pinatubo, and Krakatoa look like firecrackers. It blankets thousands of miles around it in lava and ash, casting a pall over the earth that lowers temperatures and hinders plant life for decades. Compared to Mother Nature we anthropogenic climate changers (if we are that) are pikers. Interestingly enough, that supervolcano is due for another eruption.

Interestingly enough, so too is another supervolcano, one constructed entirely by humans. As to which erupts first, bet on the latter.

Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Coercion and violence generate a reaction, a countervailing pressure. They are historical constants, so like Yellowstone’s volcano, the pressure has been building for centuries, although not 6,000 of them. Like Yellowstone’s geysers, pressure-reducing steam has occasionally been released; coercion has abated and freedom briefly flowered. We know those periods as the times when progress mostly happened: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. However, the twentieth century marked a resurgence of pressure.

Their intellectual degradation complete, the coercive class meets any manifestation of countervailing pressure with still more coercion. The most pathetic case is the US government. Left at a zenith of power at the end of World War II, it has squandered its moral, military, and financial capital trying to squelch the forces that will inevitably topple its empire. After each disaster, it has sought new disasters. President Trump’s tripling down on Bush’s and Obama’s Afghanistan bets is yet another instance of the belief that force which fails can be “fixed” with more force.

The reactive opposites are decentralization and individual autonomy. Individuals now have unprecedented capacities to wage violence, communicate, and compute. Since World War II governments are batting virtually zero trying to suppress insurgencies waged by guerrillas fighting on their home turf.

Try as they might to suppress the Internet, they can’t go too far without severing their economies from the backbone of the information economy. Individuals perform computing feats on their smart phones that were beyond the capabilities of room-size computers fifty years ago. These are the forces pushing back against governmental centralization and coercion.

Lately, not a day has gone by where an article hasn’t appeared arguing that the US government or the media or the globalists or some other nefarious entity is pulling the strings of some nefarious “divide and conquer” strategy. “Divide” needs no help from anyone. Unless humans develop the ability to split themselves, division has proceeded as far as it can go. A solitary soul can work, shop, eat, drink, find amusement and information, and do everything else necessary to sustain life without ever leaving his dwelling or coming into contact with another human being. Undoubtedly some do.

Dividing is a done deal. Conquering is more problematic and in fact won’t happen. A government that’s sixteen years on in Afghanistan and hasn’t won a significant military engagement since World War II is going to have a bit of a problem either maintaining its faltering empire or subjugating its own well-armed population, half of which doesn’t like it very much, the other half expecting a perpetual payday. What if its creditors pull the charge card from the Empire of Debt?

The same problems—imperial inefficiency and debt far in excess of the underlying economy’s ability to support it—will unexpectedly walk in on the globalists’ masturbatory fantasies. Governments at all levels have collectively plighted their troth to a spurious order maintained by force and fraud, resting on a supervolcano. The seismic portents have registered for decades. The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years, the Soviet Union sixty-nine. The Chinese government extended its life by rearranging its battery of forces, but the potential—so far successfully suppressed—counter-reaction leaves the rulers in a perpetual state of repressive anxiety.

The western welfare states are beset by bankruptcy, unsustainable expectations, faltering economies, Brexit, Trump, separatist and secessionist movements, and pitched battles over campus speakers, statues, and whatever else triggers the triggered. These are akin to Yellowstone’s recent seismic swarms, and they’ll only get more numerous and intense.

The list of irritations and grievances that can morph into confrontation and chaos is endless. It dawns on the debt-slave young that they are supporting their elders in a style to which they will never become accustomed. The productive tire of funding the unproductive and their government-sponsored rackets. Natives wonder why they should open their arms to migrants, especially those who hate them. Americans rebel against their government’s costly military interventions (okay, that one’s remote). Europe finds the Islamic chokehold increasingly choking and European manhood rediscovers its testicles (even more remote). It would be fitting if the first big morph came at some place like Davos or Jackson Hole.

The think-tank terms for today’s tremors are “devolution” and “decentralization,” always characterized as threats. Supervolcanos take no prisoners. When this one erupts, it will obliterate the rickety superstructures of global governance, finance, and economic. The proper phraseology will be, “blown to smithereens”: the just and unjust, prepared and unprepared, wise and foolish buried under lava flows and choked by ashes, reality beyond a hand in front of one’s face impossible to make out amidst the smoke and haze. The beloved order of the ruling class giving way to entropic atomization.

Atoms are life’s building blocks. Most everything worthwhile—family, community, trade, inquiry, innovation, production, progress—starts with individuals and builds. Most everything deleterious—repression, state-sponsored rapacity, tyranny, war—is imposed from the top by sociopaths masquerading as leaders. Bad as the supervolcano will be, it will blow this “top” to bits, giving the green shoots of decentralized freedom a chance to poke here and there through the ash. It’s about time.

How Government Literally Makes People Go Insane

Via The Daily Bell

The most effective way to change the world if you have kids is to treat them right. Everything could change in one generation if there were a radical shift in parenting.

Unfortunately, some indicators suggest things are getting worse. For instance, there has been an increase in kids hospitalized for attempted suicide or suicidal indicators.

Now we can just hope that parents are becoming more alert to the warning signs and are therefore properly identifying them early in order to prevent suicide.

But the most concerning thing is that these incidents tend to be concentrated at certain times of the year. One of the most likely times for a kid to need a hospital visit because of suicidal tendencies or attempts is in the fall when school starts back up.

There are two probable reasons for this. One, being ridiculed and bullied by their peers makes kids feel like social outcasts, and transitioning to a new school year could increase that. Evolution has programmed the human mind to want acceptance of the group for survival reasons, so being ostracized can make you literally feel like you are going to die because if this was 10,000 years ago, you probably would.

And then there are the drugs. You know, the legalized forms of cocaine and heroine that we give to kids to make them alert, focused, or calm, and manageable. There are all sorts of side effects to the drugs, and based on the spiking and dropping levels of dopamine and other chemicals in the brain, this can cause erratic behavior.

But either way, the school system seems to be the root of the problem, whether it is exposing kids to negative people they don’t need in their lives, drugs to help them function “normally” in an abnormal school environment, or just the unnatural environment itself where one is trapped, caged, and coerced in order to prepare them for an equally coercive society afterwards.

Coercion is Ruining Society

It turns out coercion is a serious problem that can lead to mental health issues. Coercion might even cause most of the ills we see in society today. The same thing that makes a teenager lash out and act erratically in opposition to strict rules is what makes people do crazy things in a society dominated by arbitrary and oppressive government edicts.

According to Bruce Levin, PhD, in his article, Societies With Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness:

Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness.

It Starts With Your Kids

Most parents have their kids’ best interests at heart when parenting, yes some still treat their child like a wild animal that must be broken. So many people in our society would have no idea what to do with freedom because all they have ever known is oppression. It starts in childhood, and evidence suggests that a more free child leads to a happier adult.

Levin points out that some cultures see very little mental illness, and he suggests it is because of the way the children are reared.

For many indigenous peoples, even the majority rule that most Americans call democracy is problematically coercive, as it results in the minority feeling resentful. Roland Chrisjohn, member of the Oneida Nation of the Confederacy of the Haudenausaunee (Iroquois) and author of The Circle Game, points out that for his people, it is deemed valuable to spend whatever time necessary to achieve consensus so as to prevent such resentment. By the standards of Western civilization, this is highly inefficient. “Achieving consensus could take forever!” exclaimed an attendee of a talk that I heard given by Chrisjohn, who responded, “What else is there more important to do?”

Among indigenous societies, there are many accounts of a lack of mental illness, a minimum of coercion, and wisdom that coercion creates resentment which fractures relationships.

How could we expect coercion to yield results as positive as agreement? All interaction should be voluntary; you cannot have positive ends if you do not use positive means to achieve those ends. I am not a parent, and I don’t expect perfection from anyone, but parents should at least try to solve issues with their kids without being so forceful and coercive.

Let kids be who they want to be, with the steady hand of your guidance, not an iron fist. Clearly, a child cannot always get what they want, and I am not advocating giving in to any random whim. Just realize how important freedom is for children in order to grow and learn.

This is why the public school system is horribly damaging to a large percentage of children. That is not the only nor best way to learn, and in fact really just teaches obedience to authority. Public schooling sets children up to be mindless drones in the work world, where they will be used to the coercion, but not happy about it.

[Jared] Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday (2012), reports how laissez-faire parenting is “not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted.” Diamond concludes that by our society’s attempt to control children for what we believe is their own good, we discourage those traits we admire:

“Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-­confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly ­telling them what to do.”

Bravo to home-schoolers and free range parenting. They are ahead of the curve by going back to the basics.

Then It’s Your Job…

I don’t believe the reason so many hate going to work is not the work itself, but the fact that we cannot act like ourselves when at work. We feel coerced in one way or another into not being who we want to be. This is a mild form of coercion, one that often doesn’t go beyond venting over a beer after work, or every once in a while both middle fingers and: “I quit!” screamed at the boss.

But is the quiet desperation of a 9-5 you hate–saving for retirement, but probably drinking yourself to death before you get to enjoy it–really the way to live? What if we couldn’t afford cable, couldn’t afford a new car, or a perfect house–but were happy?

Critics of schooling—from Henry David Thoreau, to Paul Goodman, to John Holt, to John Taylor Gatto—have understood that coercive and unengaging schooling is necessary to ensure that young people more readily accept coercive and unengaging employment. And as I also reported in that same article, a June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have checked out of them.

Unengaging employment and schooling require all kinds of coercions for participation, and human beings pay a psychological price for this. In nearly three decades of clinical practice, I have found that coercion is often the source of suffering…

In all societies, there are coercions to behave in culturally agreed-upon ways. For example, in many indigenous cultures, there is peer pressure to be courageous and honest. However, in modernity, we have institutional coercions that compel us to behave in ways that we do not respect or value. Parents, afraid their children will lack credentials necessary for employment, routinely coerce their children to comply with coercive schooling that was unpleasant for these parents as children. And though 70% of us hate or are disengaged from our jobs, we are coerced by the fear of poverty and homelessness to seek and maintain employment.

In our society, we are taught that accepting institutional coercion is required for survival. We discover a variety of ways—including drugs and alcohol—to deny resentment.

And the government is perfectly happy with the arrangement because it is easier to control–and tax–“normal” people who just go to work every day.

Government Enforces and Exacerbates the Problem

We cannot even live on a piece of land without being coerced by government to earn some money in order to pay the property taxes. But we have to earn more than the amount owed in property taxes because we are taxed on our earnings as well. We are taxed on the vehicle and gas that gets us to work, which require more work to pay off–earnings, again, that must go above and beyond what we need because it will be taxed.

Could this be the overlooked factor that makes America more violent than some other developed nations? Has the American government piled so many laws, regulations, and statutes on top of each other that American citizens can’t just go through life without being told perfectly normal, non-violent behavior is wrong?

I think this highlights the problem with mass shootings that many have been pointing out. Whoever the shooters feel they are being oppressed by, they are correctly identifying that they are being coerced. Of course, their response is insane, and probably related to the drugs they take (some of which we also give kids), but there would never be a need for drugs if a coercive society had not reared them.

The hopelessness felt when being forced to spend money, behave a certain way, or notdo something you want to do, is one of those gut wrenching deep feelings of despair that grow inside some people until they burst.

But now imagine that the government has taken everything from you. Imagine if they took your car as a civil asset forfeiture? What if your tax burden is 50%? What if you give up on that business you want to start because of the pile of paperwork and extra costs required by the government?

What if they take your kids because they are home schooled, or shoot your dog for no reason whatsoever? All these things happen, unfortunately relatively regularly, in America.

Many of us are baffled by why someone would become a terrorist, especially a suicide bomber. Again, this is the coercion the Middle East is smothered in by the USA. Imagine losing your childhood because you could not go outside because of the American drones. Imagine family members having been murdered by laughing soldiers. Imagine all your hopes and dreams bombed away in the blink of an eye. Again, this is the unfortunate reality for many people today.

In the 1970s, prior to the domination of the biopsychiatry-Big Pharma partnership, many mental health professionals took seriously the impact of coercion and resentful relationships on mental health. And in a cultural climate more favorable than our current one for critical reflection of society, authors such as Erich Fromm, who addressed the relationship between society and mental health, were taken seriously even within popular culture. But then psychiatry went to bed with Big Pharma and its Big Money, and their partnership has helped bury the commonsense reality that an extremely coercive society creates enormous fear and resentment, which results in miserable marriages, unhappy families, and severe emotional and behavioral problems.

Buchanan: Is Secession A Solution To Cultural War?

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.

Yet, given the divisions among us, deeper and wider than ever, it is an open question as to how, and how long, we will endure as one people.

After World War II, our judicial dictatorship began a purge of public manifestations of the “Christian nation” that Harry Truman said we were.

In 2009, Barack Obama retorted, “We do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation.” Secularism had been enthroned as our established religion, with only the most feeble of protests.

One can only imagine how Iranians or Afghans would deal with unelected judges moving to de-Islamicize their nations. Heads would roll, literally.

Which bring us to the first culture war skirmish of the Trump era.

Taking sides with Attorney General Jeff Sessions against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the president rescinded the Obama directive that gave transgender students the right to use the bathroom of their choice in public schools. President Donald Trump sent the issue back to the states and locales to decide.

While treated by the media and left as the civil rights cause of our era, the “bathroom debate” calls to mind Marx’s observation, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Can anyone seriously contend that whether a 14-year-old boy, who thinks he is a girl, gets to use the girls’ bathroom is a civil rights issue comparable to whether African-Americans get the right to vote?

Remarkably, there was vigorous dissent, from DeVos, to returning this issue to where it belongs, with state and local officials.

After yielding on the bathroom question, she put out a statement declaring that every school in America has a “moral obligation” to protect children from bullying, and directed her Office of Civil Rights to investigate all claims of bullying or harassment “against those who are most vulnerable in our schools.”

Now, bullying is bad behavior, and it may be horrible behavior.

But when did a Republican Party that believes in states rights decide this was a responsibility of a bureaucracy Ronald Reagan promised but failed to shut down? When did the GOP become nanny-staters?

Bullying is something every kid in public, parochial or private school has witnessed by graduation. While unfortunate, it is part of growing up.

But what kind of society, what kind of people have we become when we start to rely on federal bureaucrats to stop big kids from harassing and beating up smaller or weaker kids?

While the bathroom debate is a skirmish in the culture war, Trump’s solution — send the issue back to the states and the people there to work it out — may point the way to a truce — assuming Americans still want a truce.

For Trump’s solution is rooted in the principle of subsidiarity, first advanced in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII — that social problems are best resolved by the smallest unit of society with the ability to resolve them.

In brief, bullying is a problem for parents, teachers, principals to deal with, and local cops and the school district if it becomes widespread.

This idea is consistent with the Republican idea of federalism — that the national government should undertake those duties — securing the borders, fighting the nation’s wars, creating a continental road and rail system — that states alone cannot do.

Indeed, the nationalization of decision-making, the imposition of one-size-fits-all solutions to social problems, the court orders emanating from the ideology of judges — to which there is no appeal — that is behind the culture wars that may yet bring an end to this experiment in democratic rule.

Those factors are also among the primary causes of the fever of secessionism that is spreading all across Europe, and is now visible here.

Consider California. Democrats hold every state office, both Senate seats, two-thirds of both houses of the state legislature, 3 in 4 of the congressional seats. Hillary Clinton beat Trump 2-to-1 in California, with her margin in excess of 4 million votes.

Suddenly, California knows exactly how Marine Le Pen feels.

And as she wants to “Let France Be France,” and leave the EU, as Brits did with Brexit, a movement is afoot in California to secede from the United States and form a separate nation.

California seceding sounds like a cause that could bring San Francisco Democrats into a grand alliance with Breitbart.

A new federalism — a devolution of power and resources away from Washington and back to states, cities, towns and citizens, to let them resolve their problems their own way and according to their own principles — may be the price of retention of the American Union.

Let California be California; let red state America be red state America.

Cop Harassed, Punished and Beaten by Fellow Cops for Being Muslim — Lawsuit

New York City — A female police officer has filed a lawsuit against her New York Police Department colleagues after she endured punishing discrimination and was even beaten — because she’s Muslim and wears a hijab.

Thirty-eight-year-old Officer Danielle Alamrani describes years of horrendous verbal abuse — fellow cops called her a “Muslim bitch,” regularly referred to her as “the Taliban” and “terrorist,” and even refused to work with her, once she began wearing the headcovering on the job.

According to the lawsuit, as paraphrased by Gothamist, “In one particularly disturbing incident [on Christmas Day] December 2012, Alamrani claims that two officers in the precinct tried to rip off her hijab, referred to her as ‘a Muslim bitch’ and one told her ‘I will punch you in the face.’ Alamrani’s suit says the officers who allegedly did this weren’t disciplined and therefore felt empowered to continue harassing her. Two years later, in 2014, Alamrani’s suit says she and her husband were arrested after a neighbor made a noise complaint about their children despite a responding officer finding the children asleep when they came to her home. The suit claims that the responding officer also detained Alamrani’s children for eight hours ‘just to harass her.’”

“During this incident, the responding officer,” states the lawsuit, “made numerous comments about Plaintiff Alamrani’s religion, including that Plaintiff Alamrani’s family were ‘Arabs’ who ‘slept on the floor like animals.’”

Alamrani came to the New York Police Department in 2006, and converted to Islam the following year. Harassment — including violence — coincided with the time she began wearing a hijab, even though she sought and received religious accommodation before doing so.

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According to the lawsuit, the bullying eventually became unbearable and Alamrani took a leave of absence in 2015 — but faced even greater discrimination, led by a new supervisor, upon her return.

Gothamist explains:

“[I]n November 2015, shortly before leaving the 94th Precinct, Alamrani claims that a fellow officer took a picture of her when she was at a gun range for work reasons and then posted the picture to Facebook. Other police officers, including her coworkers, commented on the photo that Alamrani was ‘a moving target,’ ‘a fucking disgrace,’ that she was unfit to do her job” — many commenters brazenly threatened violence.

“She has been severely impacted,” attorney for Alamrani, Jess Rose, told the Independent. “She had to take a leave of absence. You cannot treat people like this in New York City. You cannot treat people like this in the United States.”

Now matter how she responded and whom she complained to, Alamrani did not receive any assistance from the department who’d employed her for years.

NBC News reports:

“Alamrani said she reported the harassment to a supervisor, who notified the department’s equal employment opportunity office, but it allegedly kept up even after a complaint was filed, court papers said.

“In response to the attack, officers allegedly involved in it were assigned to different shifts, but they all still encountered one another in the station house’s common areas, such as the locker room, according to court papers. One of those officers, the lawsuit said, was Alamrani’s equal employment opportunity liaison.”

In fact, formally complaining or attempting to follow departmental policy appears to have aggravated Alamrani’s xenophobic colleagues — worsening their already abhorrent behavior.

Danielle Alamrani seeks an unspecified total in damages from the NYPD and City of New York for allowing a hostile work environment in which religious discrimination and physical violence thrived.

“I think justice,” Rose, the attorney, told NBC News, “if there is such a thing in our legal system, would be to hold people accountable for their actions within the NYPD, that there would be at least some disciplinary or other action taken to let people know that you can’t treat coworkers this way.”

Danielle Alamrani v City of New York, NYPD by Nbc AsianAmerica on Scribd

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