“A trend we’ve been following is showing up in Democrats’ internal surveys, McClatchy reports, as a top Democratic pollster is warning that based on the emerging data, the party’s expected 2018 midterm layup victories may not materialize as easily as assumed — if at all. These results were shared with the media as an obvious wake-up call to guard against complacency and to urge Democrats to focus attacks against Trump’s policies. Some specifics:
A leading Democratic group — Priorities USA — is warning party leaders they could squander a strong political climate in 2018 if they don’t start to emphasize pocketbook issues over loose and unfocused critiques of Donald Trump. According to internal polling by the super PAC, President Trump’s approval rating climbed to 44 percent in the first week of February, compared to 53 percent who disapprove. That mirrors Trump’s improving position in public polls. In November, the same survey found his approval rating at 40 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. The group’s survey also showed the Democratic Party’s generic ballot advantage had shrunk, with 46 percent preferring Democrats to 42 percent for Republicans…Democrats, the memo said, must “not allow themselves to be sidetracked and distracted by Trump’s latest tweets.” “While still on track for a successful November, the extent of Democratic gains will be blunted if Democrats do not reengage more aggressively in speaking to the economic and health care priorities of voters,” it said.”
———————-
Gee, maybe because those “officials” are the same ones pushing false stories of collusion, seeking Trump’s downfall and such? You know the “officials at the FBI, CIA, and what not. Might be hard for him to take their word on anything, given what we know now about what the leadership at those places has been doing to undermine him. This could simply be a consequence of their poor and in some cases, criminal behavior.
Those officials are his own appointees. All major Western leaders and intelligence agencies agree with those officials. The only people who don’t believe those officials are Trump and his Cult followers who get their news by watching YouTube videos produced by idiots calling themselves things like “the Black Pidgeon”.
Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia puts out some interesting stuff:
Americans pick JFK, Reagan, Obama as best Presidents since 1952. Worst: Nixon, LBJ, Trump. NEW in the Crystal Ball-Our national survey with Ipsos for Presidents Day. https://t.co/7ZeeSIcxHx
“But she noticed in 2016, there seemed to be a concerted effort by the MSM to focus America’s attention on the idea of “fake news” in conservative media. That looked like a propaganda effort to Attkisson, so she did a little digging and traced the new spin to a little non-profit called “First Draft,” which, she said, “appears to be the about the first to use ‘fake news’ in its modern context.”
“On September 13, 2016, First Draft announced a partnership to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports,” Attkisson explained. “The goal was supposedly to separate wheat from chaff, to prevent unproven conspiracy talk from figuring prominently in internet searches. To relegate today’s version of the alien baby stories to a special internet oblivion.”
She noted that a month later, then-President Obama chimed in.
“He insisted in a speech that he too thought somebody needed to step in and curate information of this wild, wild West media environment,” she said, pointing out that “nobody in the public had been clamoring for any such thing.”
Yet suddenly the subject of fake news was dominating headlines all over America as if the media had received “its marching orders,” she recounted. “Fake news, they said, was an imminent threat to American democracy.”
Attkisson, who has studied the manipulative moneyed interests behind media industry, said, “few themes arise in our environment organically.” She noted that she always found it helpful to “follow the money.”
“What if the whole anti-fake news campaign was an effort on somebody’s part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?” Attkisson posited.
Digging deeper, she discovered that Google was one of the big donors behind First Draft’s “fake news” messaging. Google’s parent company, she pointed out, is owned by Eric Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary Clinton supporter.
Schmidt “offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,” Attkisson said. “Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the effort.”
Attkisson declared that “the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign,” she said. Attkisson added, “But something happened that nobody expected. The anti-fake news campaign backfired. Each time advocates cried fake news, Donald Trump called them ‘fake news’ until he’d co-opted the term so completely that even those who [were] originally promoting it started running from it — including the Washington Post,” which she noted later backed away from using the term.
Attkisson called Trump’s accomplishment a “hostile takeover” of the term and cautioned people to always be wary of “powerful interests might be trying to manipulate” their opinions.
She described two warning signs to look out for.
When the media tries to shape or censor facts and opinions rather than report them.
When so many in the media are reporting the same stories, promulgating the same narratives, relying on the same sources — even using the same phrases.
Attkisson pointed out that there’s an infinite number of ways to report stories, so “when everybody’s on the same page, it might be part of an organized campaign.”
———————-
is fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.
So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars!
Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.
I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!
I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,—
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.
Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blesséd Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
Chas, On Twitter people assume each user is a real person. People follow other users and see their Tweets and reTweets. Russia created 500,000 fake accounts to rebroadcast Trump’s Tweets and other pro-Trump messages. That was a profound violation of our election law. We will never know if it made a critical difference in 2016. It is critical that our government try to prevent a recurrence in 2018.
How about the latest school shooting. How are we going to fix that and keep people from getting killed. School should be safe. Heck, just going to the mall ought to be safe . I am not for gun control, but maybe we should take the AK47 type guns off the market. Maybe we should focus on mental health. Maybe we should identify the marginalized students and do some sort of intervention.
Hey! Hears a thought. Let’s quit debating TRUMP and focus on something else for a while. While we are all Pro-Trump or Anti-Trump there is REAL stuff out there that we may be able to start trying to fix.
I was alienated and had no friends at a small “Christian” school. I was miserable. I cried. I begged not to be sent back there. Finally my senior year I told me dad he could pay the tuition but I wasn’t going. He let me go to public school. I have paid THOUSANDS of dollars to various therapists over the years to reach the point I am today, but I still think people don’t like me and that I am at fault and they are all talking about me behind my back. I’ve even taken anti depressants in the past but I have NEVER thought to pick up a gun and kill the people at the school or workplace. WHY DON’T WE FOCUS ON HELPING THOSE STUDENTS.
Every day you people are arguing about TRUMP. You know what? You are letting him live rent free in your mind. Trump couldn’t care less about any of you. We are now down to less than 3 years of his presidency and I am assuming he will be a one term president.
WHAT WILL WE BE DOING WHILE HE IS RETIRED? WILL WE STILL BE KILLING EACH OTHER?????
“Last fall, a Mississippi bail bondsman and frequent YouTube vlogger noticed an alarming comment left on one of his videos. “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” said a user named Nikolas Cruz.
The YouTuber, 36-year-old Ben Bennight, alerted the FBI, emailing a screenshot of the comment and calling the bureau’s Mississippi field office. He also flagged the comment to YouTube, which removed it from the video
”
KIm. There are evil people in the world.
They do bad things.
We c an control much of it. But not all.
They have had this on the news for 24 hours and haven’t given any more enlighten than we got the first 15 minutes.
School shooters: I have noticed that lots of the shooters were adopted. I have noticed that a lot of the shooters had mental problems and the parents were trying to find help. I can understand that. My daughter has serious mental problems and we are told there is no place for her, nothing to be done until she turns eighteen, at which point, she can decline services.
The shooter is at fault, not the weapon. Personally I’d guess lack of mental health options is more to blame than the gun in this case. The gun is just a tool. Everyone at school, teachers, admin, kids, even the FBI knew he was a tragedy waiting to happen. But there’s little they can do about it.
Since we don’t institutionalize the mentally ill anymore because it’s considered cruel, no more state hospitals for them here in PA, so they wander freely, and this is the result. I’m not saying everyone who struggles with mental illness should be institutionalized, but when one sets off this many red flags over time, with everyone including law enforcement, it is appropriate.
So the usual suspects will scream for gun control, and the real underlying problems will continue unaddressed until it happens again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Mental health is a difficult thing. Some people think drugs are the answer. They are not necessarily for everybody. Some people think counseling is the answer. Not for everyone.
I would not be surprised if we find that a lot of the mental health issues are from things like fetal alcohol syndrome and not very many are going to want to give up alcohol. “They” know that FAS is caused by the mom drinking at certain times in the pregnancy as the baby is being formed. The warnings are there but the addicts will continue.
Then you have to decide who should be institutionalized and should it only be voluntary or can friends and family and law enforcement make requests.
I know several people who sincerely believe strict-strict gun control will “fix” it. Of course, it won’t, but they see the problem in a very black-and-white way. Guns are the problem. Take them away.
I am not opposed to reasonable restrictions on guns, but people with evil intentions still will find a way to get them. The school shootings have become “a thing,” a copy-cat kind of event repeated by the disgruntled among us, unfortunately. Schools are soft targets (as are malls). Make everyone go through metal detectors at every entrance? I don’t think that can even work and everyone would be late for school besides. And many (most?) alienated students and adults who spout and post scary things don’t ever act on them.
So I don’t know what we do about it. Looking at the big picture, I am still convinced it is all part of something much deeper, something spiritual that is going on, though I would stop just short, perhaps, of declaring it a judgement of God (although it certainly could be — in the sense that our judgement is “us” as it plays out with mass shootings and pornography and abortion and on it goes). We now live in a culture that is angry, often frighteningly imbalanced, confused (to say the least) in its thinking and ethics, and is internally at war, neighbor against neighbor.
But, yes, I have a colleague who, when these shootings happen, always says “But no one ever does anything about it” — as if taking away guns is a one-stop, simple cure that America refuses to see.
Institutionalizing folks is very tricky business, of course, and in its day drew strong civil liberty objections. With the advent of drugs that seemed to genuinely work well, at least for many, in making folks much more functional and able to have more independent, normal lives with jobs and families, the mental health system shifted to a de-centralized model. Sanitariums closed in favor of out-patient care and treatment. It was, for many anyway, more humane. Of course, it all relies on people being diagnosed properly and whether the patient/client is taking his or her medications faithfully.
I fully concur it is a spiritual issue. We are denying God as a country and as individuals. We are denying “love thy neighbor” and “honor thy parents”. We are teaching that to our children. Many children can handle that and live as moderately ethical people, but many of the mentally ill cannot.
This article looks at the issue. One of the things it points out is that what we thought we knew about the Columbine shooters turned out to be false. There is a link within the article to more information about that. Another thing it says is that there are not more mass shootings than before, but they have been deadlier.
“Yes, This Is a Good Time To Talk About Gun Violence and How To Reduce It
The Florida school shooting is horrific, but making sure such tragedies never happen is no simple matter.”
There are discussions in LA County about finding a new approach that would allow for some short-term, involuntary institutionalization of the severely mentally ill (currently it’s limited to a 3-day hold which doesn’t help very much in most cases). Because institutionalizing folks can be so abused (in a fallen world, of course), none of it is easy to navigate legally.
But it is believed that the mentally ill have become a significant portion of the homeless street populations in our area. Many are preyed upon by others, many also have overlapping addiction issues as well — either as a way to cope with their mental illness or, in some cases, the drug abuse may have brought on the mental issues.
A lot of these shooters are children, there is no help for them. We had daughter in Provo for ten days and she is probably eighty percent worse than when she went in, based on all of the bad behaviours she picked up there. And a mentally ill person can pick those up quickly with no filter to decide which is okay and which is not.
On theory I’ve heard about homicide rates dropping is that our medical care and emergency response with that care has improved by leaps and bounds in the past 20 years, so fewer victims are dying.
I am saddened and troubled by the school shooting. ..What a terrible and senseless tragedy… the Trauma to the survivors.. the lives and families cut short.. the wounded… oh for the ways of God here on Earth!!
See. This is why I don’t wanna look at it to closely. There’s warnings aplenty from his Instagram feed, not to mention all the stuff Facebook and the like already pulled. He made his evil intents quite clear, but it looks like it was ignored by the only people who could do anything, the authorities, who now wanna play dumb.
And this is the other problem I have. The way it’s misreported and the coverage is agenda driven. It makes it hard to get the facts when all of the media seem to be working from the same false script. Talk about fake news…..
“In the wake of the horrific school shooting on Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida, various news outlets, seemingly trying to convince the public that an astronomical number of school shootings have occurred in 2018, promulgated the claim that the Wednesday shooting was the 18th school shooting since January 1, 2018, by running with that narrative at the top of their articles.
Here are some examples:
ABC News: “There have been 18 school shootings in the first 45 days of 2018, according to a nonprofit group.”
New York Daily News: “There have been 18 school shootings so far this year, including one that claimed 17 lives at a Florida public school Wednesday.”
WUSA9: “Within the first couple months of 2018, there have now been 18 school shootings across the United States.”
But that narrative was gleaned from the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety. Here are some facts, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the facts:
Twice, someone shot themselves on school grounds; one incident, on January 3, featured a man shooting himself in a former school’s parking lot; on January 10 a teen killed himself in an Arizona elementary school bathroom.
Four times, a bullet was fired through a school or dorm’s window: on January 4, a gunshot was fired at a high school in Seattle through an office window; no one was hurt. On January 10, a shot was fired shattering a California State University classroom window. No injuries were reported. The same day, in Texas, a bullet was accidentally fired through a classroom wall at the Grayson College Criminal Justice Center. No one was injured. On January 15, a bullet traveled through a residential hall’s dorm room. No injuries were reported.
On January 25, a Mobile, Alabama, high school student fired a gun on campus. No one was injured. On January 26, in Dearborn, Michigan, shots were fired from a car in a parking lot; no injuries were reported.
On February 5, in Maplewood, Minnesota, a third-grader pulled the trigger on a cop’s gun. No one was injured. On February 8, in New York, a shot was fired inside Metropolitan High School. No one was injured.”
———————-
As Donna is saying, the shootings are the presenting the problem, the real ones can be traced to several things:
Access to these horrible killing machines
Mental health issues
Inability to do much with a known threat.
How about these:
The ready availability of video games teaching people how to slaughter others
Violence as entertainment (that includes violence against women . . . )
The last two are things that can be changed–why don’t we see any calls for that?
The heart of all:
Spiritual depravity and refusal to bow to God.
Revival would solve that one. Prayer is the greater work. How often do we think to pray for revival? Rarely in my church, though most would agree with the need.
You have the majority of children, who are latch key, if they even have parents. Parents allow their children to play video games from toddlers. The majority of video games aimed at teens, are filled with violence. Shooting and killing multiple people is the point of most games.
With both parents working, many children do not get the interaction needed to learn how to get along with others. Children have to learn how to deal with disappointment, anger, and a myriad of other feelings. Daycare workers do what they can, but children need their parents. Parents that are involved in their life.
Then you add in substance abuse, physical and sexual abuse.
There really is no mental health safety net. I work in an ED. We cannot get a mental health facility to accept a pt for transfer unless they are homicidal or suicidal. Do we have to let it get that far before we can get help?
I don’t hear of children who have hunted for game being involved in a school shooting. You don’t hear of teenagers that belong to shooting clubs being involved in these incidents.
Wandering Views 
Democrats are shocked to find out that just being anti-Trump is not enough.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2018/02/14/internal-dem-poll-trump-is-gaining-and-democrats-are-in-danger-of-blowing-it-n2448635
“A trend we’ve been following is showing up in Democrats’ internal surveys, McClatchy reports, as a top Democratic pollster is warning that based on the emerging data, the party’s expected 2018 midterm layup victories may not materialize as easily as assumed — if at all. These results were shared with the media as an obvious wake-up call to guard against complacency and to urge Democrats to focus attacks against Trump’s policies. Some specifics:
A leading Democratic group — Priorities USA — is warning party leaders they could squander a strong political climate in 2018 if they don’t start to emphasize pocketbook issues over loose and unfocused critiques of Donald Trump. According to internal polling by the super PAC, President Trump’s approval rating climbed to 44 percent in the first week of February, compared to 53 percent who disapprove. That mirrors Trump’s improving position in public polls. In November, the same survey found his approval rating at 40 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. The group’s survey also showed the Democratic Party’s generic ballot advantage had shrunk, with 46 percent preferring Democrats to 42 percent for Republicans…Democrats, the memo said, must “not allow themselves to be sidetracked and distracted by Trump’s latest tweets.” “While still on track for a successful November, the extent of Democratic gains will be blunted if Democrats do not reengage more aggressively in speaking to the economic and health care priorities of voters,” it said.”
———————-
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Gee, maybe because those “officials” are the same ones pushing false stories of collusion, seeking Trump’s downfall and such? You know the “officials at the FBI, CIA, and what not. Might be hard for him to take their word on anything, given what we know now about what the leadership at those places has been doing to undermine him. This could simply be a consequence of their poor and in some cases, criminal behavior.
Just a thought.
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Those officials are his own appointees. All major Western leaders and intelligence agencies agree with those officials. The only people who don’t believe those officials are Trump and his Cult followers who get their news by watching YouTube videos produced by idiots calling themselves things like “the Black Pidgeon”.
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Tell me again what theses evil people are doing to influence our elections.
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The same people who talk about “election security” are those who object to identification of voters.
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Chas, This article by conservative David French is almost a year old, but its facts about 2016 Russian actions are still good.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446339/donald-trump-russia-and-2016-election-controversy-explained
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This article explains how Russia used 500,000 Twitter accounts that did not represent real people to rebroadcast Trump’s message in 2016.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/27/technology/business/russian-twitter-bots-election-2016/index.html
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Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia puts out some interesting stuff:
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The origin of “fake news.” If you follow the money, it all leads back to Democrats, their preferred media outlets like WaPo, and their donors.
https://pjmedia.com/video/sharyl-attkisson-explains-tedx-talk-origins-2016-fake-news-narrative/
“But she noticed in 2016, there seemed to be a concerted effort by the MSM to focus America’s attention on the idea of “fake news” in conservative media. That looked like a propaganda effort to Attkisson, so she did a little digging and traced the new spin to a little non-profit called “First Draft,” which, she said, “appears to be the about the first to use ‘fake news’ in its modern context.”
“On September 13, 2016, First Draft announced a partnership to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports,” Attkisson explained. “The goal was supposedly to separate wheat from chaff, to prevent unproven conspiracy talk from figuring prominently in internet searches. To relegate today’s version of the alien baby stories to a special internet oblivion.”
She noted that a month later, then-President Obama chimed in.
“He insisted in a speech that he too thought somebody needed to step in and curate information of this wild, wild West media environment,” she said, pointing out that “nobody in the public had been clamoring for any such thing.”
Yet suddenly the subject of fake news was dominating headlines all over America as if the media had received “its marching orders,” she recounted. “Fake news, they said, was an imminent threat to American democracy.”
Attkisson, who has studied the manipulative moneyed interests behind media industry, said, “few themes arise in our environment organically.” She noted that she always found it helpful to “follow the money.”
“What if the whole anti-fake news campaign was an effort on somebody’s part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?” Attkisson posited.
Digging deeper, she discovered that Google was one of the big donors behind First Draft’s “fake news” messaging. Google’s parent company, she pointed out, is owned by Eric Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary Clinton supporter.
Schmidt “offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,” Attkisson said. “Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the effort.”
Attkisson declared that “the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign,” she said. Attkisson added, “But something happened that nobody expected. The anti-fake news campaign backfired. Each time advocates cried fake news, Donald Trump called them ‘fake news’ until he’d co-opted the term so completely that even those who [were] originally promoting it started running from it — including the Washington Post,” which she noted later backed away from using the term.
Attkisson called Trump’s accomplishment a “hostile takeover” of the term and cautioned people to always be wary of “powerful interests might be trying to manipulate” their opinions.
She described two warning signs to look out for.
When the media tries to shape or censor facts and opinions rather than report them.
When so many in the media are reporting the same stories, promulgating the same narratives, relying on the same sources — even using the same phrases.
Attkisson pointed out that there’s an infinite number of ways to report stories, so “when everybody’s on the same page, it might be part of an organized campaign.”
———————-
Sound familiar?
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’Henry Van Dyke
is fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.
So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars!
Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.
I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!
I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,—
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.
Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blesséd Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
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Ricky @ 8:08
Are you telling me that if I see a million comments about something, it doesn’t mean that a million people have said the same thing?
😯
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A gutsy move by Idaho:
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Chas, On Twitter people assume each user is a real person. People follow other users and see their Tweets and reTweets. Russia created 500,000 fake accounts to rebroadcast Trump’s Tweets and other pro-Trump messages. That was a profound violation of our election law. We will never know if it made a critical difference in 2016. It is critical that our government try to prevent a recurrence in 2018.
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How about the latest school shooting. How are we going to fix that and keep people from getting killed. School should be safe. Heck, just going to the mall ought to be safe . I am not for gun control, but maybe we should take the AK47 type guns off the market. Maybe we should focus on mental health. Maybe we should identify the marginalized students and do some sort of intervention.
Hey! Hears a thought. Let’s quit debating TRUMP and focus on something else for a while. While we are all Pro-Trump or Anti-Trump there is REAL stuff out there that we may be able to start trying to fix.
I was alienated and had no friends at a small “Christian” school. I was miserable. I cried. I begged not to be sent back there. Finally my senior year I told me dad he could pay the tuition but I wasn’t going. He let me go to public school. I have paid THOUSANDS of dollars to various therapists over the years to reach the point I am today, but I still think people don’t like me and that I am at fault and they are all talking about me behind my back. I’ve even taken anti depressants in the past but I have NEVER thought to pick up a gun and kill the people at the school or workplace. WHY DON’T WE FOCUS ON HELPING THOSE STUDENTS.
Every day you people are arguing about TRUMP. You know what? You are letting him live rent free in your mind. Trump couldn’t care less about any of you. We are now down to less than 3 years of his presidency and I am assuming he will be a one term president.
WHAT WILL WE BE DOING WHILE HE IS RETIRED? WILL WE STILL BE KILLING EACH OTHER?????
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From jrudge
“Last fall, a Mississippi bail bondsman and frequent YouTube vlogger noticed an alarming comment left on one of his videos. “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” said a user named Nikolas Cruz.
The YouTuber, 36-year-old Ben Bennight, alerted the FBI, emailing a screenshot of the comment and calling the bureau’s Mississippi field office. He also flagged the comment to YouTube, which removed it from the video
”
Given this information, what can the FBI do?
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KIm. There are evil people in the world.
They do bad things.
We c an control much of it. But not all.
They have had this on the news for 24 hours and haven’t given any more enlighten than we got the first 15 minutes.
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School shooters: I have noticed that lots of the shooters were adopted. I have noticed that a lot of the shooters had mental problems and the parents were trying to find help. I can understand that. My daughter has serious mental problems and we are told there is no place for her, nothing to be done until she turns eighteen, at which point, she can decline services.
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Kim,
The shooter is at fault, not the weapon. Personally I’d guess lack of mental health options is more to blame than the gun in this case. The gun is just a tool. Everyone at school, teachers, admin, kids, even the FBI knew he was a tragedy waiting to happen. But there’s little they can do about it.
Since we don’t institutionalize the mentally ill anymore because it’s considered cruel, no more state hospitals for them here in PA, so they wander freely, and this is the result. I’m not saying everyone who struggles with mental illness should be institutionalized, but when one sets off this many red flags over time, with everyone including law enforcement, it is appropriate.
So the usual suspects will scream for gun control, and the real underlying problems will continue unaddressed until it happens again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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Mental health is a difficult thing. Some people think drugs are the answer. They are not necessarily for everybody. Some people think counseling is the answer. Not for everyone.
I would not be surprised if we find that a lot of the mental health issues are from things like fetal alcohol syndrome and not very many are going to want to give up alcohol. “They” know that FAS is caused by the mom drinking at certain times in the pregnancy as the baby is being formed. The warnings are there but the addicts will continue.
Then you have to decide who should be institutionalized and should it only be voluntary or can friends and family and law enforcement make requests.
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I know several people who sincerely believe strict-strict gun control will “fix” it. Of course, it won’t, but they see the problem in a very black-and-white way. Guns are the problem. Take them away.
I am not opposed to reasonable restrictions on guns, but people with evil intentions still will find a way to get them. The school shootings have become “a thing,” a copy-cat kind of event repeated by the disgruntled among us, unfortunately. Schools are soft targets (as are malls). Make everyone go through metal detectors at every entrance? I don’t think that can even work and everyone would be late for school besides. And many (most?) alienated students and adults who spout and post scary things don’t ever act on them.
So I don’t know what we do about it. Looking at the big picture, I am still convinced it is all part of something much deeper, something spiritual that is going on, though I would stop just short, perhaps, of declaring it a judgement of God (although it certainly could be — in the sense that our judgement is “us” as it plays out with mass shootings and pornography and abortion and on it goes). We now live in a culture that is angry, often frighteningly imbalanced, confused (to say the least) in its thinking and ethics, and is internally at war, neighbor against neighbor.
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But, yes, I have a colleague who, when these shootings happen, always says “But no one ever does anything about it” — as if taking away guns is a one-stop, simple cure that America refuses to see.
Institutionalizing folks is very tricky business, of course, and in its day drew strong civil liberty objections. With the advent of drugs that seemed to genuinely work well, at least for many, in making folks much more functional and able to have more independent, normal lives with jobs and families, the mental health system shifted to a de-centralized model. Sanitariums closed in favor of out-patient care and treatment. It was, for many anyway, more humane. Of course, it all relies on people being diagnosed properly and whether the patient/client is taking his or her medications faithfully.
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I fully concur it is a spiritual issue. We are denying God as a country and as individuals. We are denying “love thy neighbor” and “honor thy parents”. We are teaching that to our children. Many children can handle that and live as moderately ethical people, but many of the mentally ill cannot.
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This article looks at the issue. One of the things it points out is that what we thought we knew about the Columbine shooters turned out to be false. There is a link within the article to more information about that. Another thing it says is that there are not more mass shootings than before, but they have been deadlier.
“Yes, This Is a Good Time To Talk About Gun Violence and How To Reduce It
The Florida school shooting is horrific, but making sure such tragedies never happen is no simple matter.”
http://reason.com/blog/2018/02/14/yes-this-is-a-good-time-to-talk-about-gu
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There are discussions in LA County about finding a new approach that would allow for some short-term, involuntary institutionalization of the severely mentally ill (currently it’s limited to a 3-day hold which doesn’t help very much in most cases). Because institutionalizing folks can be so abused (in a fallen world, of course), none of it is easy to navigate legally.
But it is believed that the mentally ill have become a significant portion of the homeless street populations in our area. Many are preyed upon by others, many also have overlapping addiction issues as well — either as a way to cope with their mental illness or, in some cases, the drug abuse may have brought on the mental issues.
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A lot of these shooters are children, there is no help for them. We had daughter in Provo for ten days and she is probably eighty percent worse than when she went in, based on all of the bad behaviours she picked up there. And a mentally ill person can pick those up quickly with no filter to decide which is okay and which is not.
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A lot of parents are pleading for help but there is nothing.
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On theory I’ve heard about homicide rates dropping is that our medical care and emergency response with that care has improved by leaps and bounds in the past 20 years, so fewer victims are dying.
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Chas… that poem is beautiful! Thank you for sharing! I loved it.
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I am saddened and troubled by the school shooting. ..What a terrible and senseless tragedy… the Trauma to the survivors.. the lives and families cut short.. the wounded… oh for the ways of God here on Earth!!
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See. This is why I don’t wanna look at it to closely. There’s warnings aplenty from his Instagram feed, not to mention all the stuff Facebook and the like already pulled. He made his evil intents quite clear, but it looks like it was ignored by the only people who could do anything, the authorities, who now wanna play dumb.
CONTENT WARNINGS!!!!!!!!!
For language, content, you name it.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/02/lies-fbi-says-not-identify-nikolas-cruz-youtube-threats-profile-social-media/
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/02/breaking-instagram-account-fl-shooter-nicholas-cruz/
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See…….
This is why…..
https://www.dailywire.com/news/27175/report-fbi-was-warned-september-about-florida-james-barrett
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/15/trump-so-many-signs-florida-shooting-suspect-was-mentally-disturbed.html
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And this is the other problem I have. The way it’s misreported and the coverage is agenda driven. It makes it hard to get the facts when all of the media seem to be working from the same false script. Talk about fake news…..
https://www.dailywire.com/node/27165
“In the wake of the horrific school shooting on Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida, various news outlets, seemingly trying to convince the public that an astronomical number of school shootings have occurred in 2018, promulgated the claim that the Wednesday shooting was the 18th school shooting since January 1, 2018, by running with that narrative at the top of their articles.
Here are some examples:
ABC News: “There have been 18 school shootings in the first 45 days of 2018, according to a nonprofit group.”
New York Daily News: “There have been 18 school shootings so far this year, including one that claimed 17 lives at a Florida public school Wednesday.”
WUSA9: “Within the first couple months of 2018, there have now been 18 school shootings across the United States.”
But that narrative was gleaned from the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety. Here are some facts, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the facts:
Twice, someone shot themselves on school grounds; one incident, on January 3, featured a man shooting himself in a former school’s parking lot; on January 10 a teen killed himself in an Arizona elementary school bathroom.
Four times, a bullet was fired through a school or dorm’s window: on January 4, a gunshot was fired at a high school in Seattle through an office window; no one was hurt. On January 10, a shot was fired shattering a California State University classroom window. No injuries were reported. The same day, in Texas, a bullet was accidentally fired through a classroom wall at the Grayson College Criminal Justice Center. No one was injured. On January 15, a bullet traveled through a residential hall’s dorm room. No injuries were reported.
On January 25, a Mobile, Alabama, high school student fired a gun on campus. No one was injured. On January 26, in Dearborn, Michigan, shots were fired from a car in a parking lot; no injuries were reported.
On February 5, in Maplewood, Minnesota, a third-grader pulled the trigger on a cop’s gun. No one was injured. On February 8, in New York, a shot was fired inside Metropolitan High School. No one was injured.”
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Just. Stop. Lying.
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And yesterday in Washington, a grandmother called the police over her grandson’s journal and probably stopped a school shooting.
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As Donna is saying, the shootings are the presenting the problem, the real ones can be traced to several things:
Access to these horrible killing machines
Mental health issues
Inability to do much with a known threat.
How about these:
The ready availability of video games teaching people how to slaughter others
Violence as entertainment (that includes violence against women . . . )
The last two are things that can be changed–why don’t we see any calls for that?
The heart of all:
Spiritual depravity and refusal to bow to God.
Revival would solve that one. Prayer is the greater work. How often do we think to pray for revival? Rarely in my church, though most would agree with the need.
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You have the majority of children, who are latch key, if they even have parents. Parents allow their children to play video games from toddlers. The majority of video games aimed at teens, are filled with violence. Shooting and killing multiple people is the point of most games.
With both parents working, many children do not get the interaction needed to learn how to get along with others. Children have to learn how to deal with disappointment, anger, and a myriad of other feelings. Daycare workers do what they can, but children need their parents. Parents that are involved in their life.
Then you add in substance abuse, physical and sexual abuse.
There really is no mental health safety net. I work in an ED. We cannot get a mental health facility to accept a pt for transfer unless they are homicidal or suicidal. Do we have to let it get that far before we can get help?
I don’t hear of children who have hunted for game being involved in a school shooting. You don’t hear of teenagers that belong to shooting clubs being involved in these incidents.
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