LOWELL, MA (The Boston Herald) – A man accused of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend and stabbing her 18 times with a broken beer bottle in Tewksbury was arraigned as “John Doe” today because he has a fraudulent Massachusetts ID as well as welfare cards — and police don’t know who he is.
The man, arraigned in Lowell District Court as John Doe aka “Luis Hernandez,” was held without bail. Police say he stole the identity of a Puerto Rican man. He is now being investigated by ICE to determine whether he is an illegal immigrant.
The man was charged with armed assault with intent to murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, mayhem, aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, kidnapping, intimidating a witness, impeding a police investigation, possessing/using a false RMV document, identity fraud, furnishing a false ID to law enforcement, and assault and battery on a family/household member.
The man listened in court Tuesday afternoon as a Spanish interpreter relayed the charges.
“It’s unclear what his true identity is,” Assistant District Attorney Gregory Galizio told Judge Barbara Pearson.
The defendant told Pearson through the interpreter that his name is Luis Hernandez and he was born in January 1983.
On Monday, his ex-girlfriend living above Tewksbury Funeral Home tried to escape. The man had locked her in the...
Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
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Wednesday, March 27, 2019
America’s 233-Year-Old Shock at Jihad
Exactly 233 years ago this week, two of America’s founding fathers documented their first exposure to Islamic jihad in a letter to Congress; like many Americans today, they too were shocked at what they learned.
Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or “Barbary,” had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States’ hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:
One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors -- who years earlier had asserted that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” -- thought of their Muslim counterpart’s answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.
It should be noted that centuries before setting their sights on American vessels, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa -- specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis -- had been thriving on the slave trade of Christians abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe -- including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful that, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.
The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were Christian “infidels.” As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe had written in his Book of Martyrs that, “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”
The punishments these European slaves received for real or imagined offenses beggared description: “If they speak against Mahomet [blasphemy], they must become Mahometans, or be impaled alive. If they profess Christianity again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive [as apostates], or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.”
As such, when Captain O’Brien of the Dauphin wrote to Jefferson saying that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was clearly not exaggerating.
After Barbary’s ability to abduct coastal Europeans had waned in the mid-eighteenth century, its energy was spent on raiding infidel merchant vessels. Instead of responding by collectively confronting and neutralizing Barbary, European powers, always busy quarrelling among themselves, opted to buy peace through tribute (or, according to Muslim rationale, jizya).
Fresh meat appeared on the horizon once the newly-born United States broke free of Great Britain (and was therefore no longer protected by the latter’s jizya payments).
Some American congressmen agreed with Jefferson that “it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them” -- including General George Washington: “In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary?” he wrote to a friend. “Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.”
But the majority of Congress agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Considering the perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility, Adams may have been more right than he knew.
Congress settled on emulating the Europeans and paying off the terrorists, though it would take years to raise the demanded ransom.
When Muslim pirates from Algiers captured eleven more American merchant vessels in 1794, the Naval Act was passed and a permanent U.S. naval force established. But because the first war vessels would not be ready until 1800, American jizya payments -- which took up 16 percent of the federal budget -- began to be made to Algeria in 1795. In return, over 100 American sailors were...
Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or “Barbary,” had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States’ hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise
One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors -- who years earlier had asserted that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” -- thought of their Muslim counterpart’s answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.
It should be noted that centuries before setting their sights on American vessels, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa -- specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis -- had been thriving on the slave trade of Christians abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe -- including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful that, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.
The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were Christian “infidels.” As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe had written in his Book of Martyrs that, “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”
The punishments these European slaves received for real or imagined offenses beggared description: “If they speak against Mahomet [blasphemy], they must become Mahometans, or be impaled alive. If they profess Christianity again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive [as apostates], or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.”
As such, when Captain O’Brien of the Dauphin wrote to Jefferson saying that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was clearly not exaggerating.
After Barbary’s ability to abduct coastal Europeans had waned in the mid-eighteenth century, its energy was spent on raiding infidel merchant vessels. Instead of responding by collectively confronting and neutralizing Barbary, European powers, always busy quarrelling among themselves, opted to buy peace through tribute (or, according to Muslim rationale, jizya).
Fresh meat appeared on the horizon once the newly-born United States broke free of Great Britain (and was therefore no longer protected by the latter’s jizya payments).
Some American congressmen agreed with Jefferson that “it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them” -- including General George Washington: “In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary?” he wrote to a friend. “Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.”
But the majority of Congress agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Considering the perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility, Adams may have been more right than he knew.
Congress settled on emulating the Europeans and paying off the terrorists, though it would take years to raise the demanded ransom.
When Muslim pirates from Algiers captured eleven more American merchant vessels in 1794, the Naval Act was passed and a permanent U.S. naval force established. But because the first war vessels would not be ready until 1800, American jizya payments -- which took up 16 percent of the federal budget -- began to be made to Algeria in 1795. In return, over 100 American sailors were...
Wikipedia Editors Paid to Protect Political, Tech, and Media Figures
A report in Huffington Post recently revealed the case of Wikipedia editor Ed Sussman, who was paid by media clients such as NBC and Axios to help diminish critical material. Paid editors operating in a similar manner to Sussman have worked on behalf of CNN contributor Hilary Rosen and the CEOs of Reddit and Intel, among other clients.
Other conduct by Sussman not covered by the Huffington Post shows him authoring fluff pieces for NBC executives and getting his proposed changes approved by another paid Wikipedia editor.
The report by Ashley Feinberg detailed former journalist Ed Sussman’s work as a paid Wikipedia fixer for clients such as Axios, NBC, and Facebook. Sussman did this work through the firm WhiteHatWiki, which he argues follows Wikipedia policies. Sussman disclosed his paid editing on Wikipedia and ostensibly worked within the rules by having other editors approve proposed changes.
However, Feinberg’s article noted several of Sussman’s requests involved removing or watering down potentially damaging material about clients, even when citing sources considered reliable on the site. Such removals would appear to violate Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, which states:
In one example Feinberg cited, Sussman requested changes to the page of Axios journalist Jonathan Swan regarding a false report he made last September claiming Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was resigning. A line noting the incident in Swan’s article was replaced with a paragraph hyping that Swan was “the first to report” Rosenstein’s offer to resign, despite the offer being refused. Sussman backed this spin with a...
Other conduct by Sussman not covered by the Huffington Post shows him authoring fluff pieces for NBC executives and getting his proposed changes approved by another paid Wikipedia editor.
The report by Ashley Feinberg detailed former journalist Ed Sussman’s work as a paid Wikipedia fixer for clients such as Axios, NBC, and Facebook. Sussman did this work through the firm WhiteHatWiki, which he argues follows Wikipedia policies. Sussman disclosed his paid editing on Wikipedia and ostensibly worked within the rules by having other editors approve proposed changes.
However, Feinberg’s article noted several of Sussman’s requests involved removing or watering down potentially damaging material about clients, even when citing sources considered reliable on the site. Such removals would appear to violate Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, which states:
All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.
In one example Feinberg cited, Sussman requested changes to the page of Axios journalist Jonathan Swan regarding a false report he made last September claiming Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was resigning. A line noting the incident in Swan’s article was replaced with a paragraph hyping that Swan was “the first to report” Rosenstein’s offer to resign, despite the offer being refused. Sussman backed this spin with a...
Here Are 4 Egregious Ways the Left Wants to Transform American Politics
“When you can’t win the game, change the rules.”
That seems to be the motto of the far left these days. Not content to play by the rules, it hopes to tilt the playing field to its own advantage and in the process transform American politics.
Here are four ways it has proposed doing that.
1. Packing the Supreme Court
A number of Democratic presidential hopefuls have floated the idea of adding new seats on the Supreme Court.
To begin with, this is something the Constitution gives Congress the power to determine. But this isn’t the first time the political branches have played politics with the Supreme Court by trying to tinker with the number of seats.
Congress initially set the number at six justices (including the chief justice) when it passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. Then, in the waning days of President John Adams’ presidency, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, known as the “Midnight Judges Act,” which reduced the number of Supreme Court justices to five and created a number of new circuit court judgeships to be filled by Adams before his rival, Thomas Jefferson, took office.
For the next 60 years, Congress periodically added new seats, and the Supreme Court reached its high-water mark with 10 justices in 1863. Following the Civil War, Congress reduced the number of seats to seven amid its battle with President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction. Then in 1869, Congress set the number of justices at nine, where it has remained since.
The last major attempt to alter the Supreme Court’s composition was in the late 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, upset with the conservative “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court thwarting parts of his New Deal agenda, tried to persuade Congress to allow him to appoint a “junior justice” for every sitting justice who remained on the Supreme Court beyond age 70.
That measure failed in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But Roosevelt got the last laugh—he got to “pack” the court the old-fashioned way, and ended up appointing eight justices throughout his time in office.
So while it’s not unprecedented to alter the number of seats on the Supreme Court, proponents of “court packing” should explain why they want to do so and what kind of justices they would appoint.
Odds are, they would favor activist judges who don’t understand the proper, limited role the judiciary is supposed to play in our government. That would end up compounding the problem of an activist Supreme Court that inserts itself into matters that should be handled at the ballet box and in Congress or statehouses across the country.
2. Granting Statehood to Washington, D.C.
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #573
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
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