May The Force Protect Us

Somebody has got to say it – December 18 makes an ideal target for ISIS sympathizers.

On that day hundreds of thousands of people will be attending the opening of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

If we learned anything from events in Colorado at the opening of The Dark Knight Rises a few years ago or the more recent case of the Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris, it is this - people sitting passively in a theater are perfect targets for a deranged killer or killers. 

It is not any attempt on my part to cast a somber pall over what is expected to be a joyous occasion for so many people. Rather, I hope that by raising this prospect that our security personnel are properly prepared to deal with this matter.

Walmart’s Impact On American Job Loss

A report issued today by the Economic Policy Institute focuses on jobs lost to the U.S. economy as a result of Walmart’s Chinese imports.

Imports from China have cost the United States a lot of jobs—3.2 million of them between 2001 and 2013. And Walmart accounted for around 415,000 of those lost jobs, the  report estimates. That’s 13.2 percent of the jobs lost to Chinese imports that can be attributed to Walmart. 

Stanton Is Superintendent Candidate In Granby

Southbridge’s Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Sheryl Stanton, is a finalist for the Superintendent’s position in Granby.

The three finalists for the permanent Superintendent position will be visiting Granby next week. They will meet with staff and tour the schools during the day. There is an opportunity for any member of the community to come and meet them at an open reception, which will be followed by a School Committee meeting during which the final interview will take place. The public is also welcome to attend the School Committee interviews, as they will be done in Open Session. Both events will take place in the Media Center at Granby Jr.-Sr. High School. 

DESE Head Mitchell Chester In Southbridge December 11

Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester will visit Southbridge this Friday, December 11. He will be accompanied by the author of the report on the site visit assessment of Southbridge schools.

Southbridge Middle/High School is one location Mr. Chester plans to visit.

His visit comes shortly before a planned presentation to the School Committee of the report on the assessment of Southbridge schools prepared following a site visit in October. That presentation will be made to the School Committee on December 15.

Liberal Or Conservative ?

Let’s play a game. Look at the image below, and think about what you see. 

From your response, I can probably guess your political leanings. 

Want to play? 

Okay, let’s go.

Is Donald Trump's Playbook Mein Kampf?

Thus far Donald Trump has built his campaign on a platform of media domination combined with a nativist appeal and xenophobia underwritten by unsubstantiated allegations and outright lies.

We'll have a final answer if we have an event analogous to the Reichstag fire before the primary elections are finished.

Thirty-Five Years Ago Today...

Trump Secures The Neo-Nazi Vote

The Times of Israel uses a telling 

photograph of Trump to highlight 

“the nativist racism inherent in his latest remarks”

"Heil Donald Trump - THE ULTIMATE SAVIOR."

So wrote Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, in response to Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump's call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

"Finally: someone speaks sense," Anglin wrote, pasting Trump's new proposal under the headline "Glorious Leader Calls For Complete Ban on All Moslems."

The World According To Trump

Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Local Assault Weapons Ban

On Monday, the high court refused to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a 2013 ordinance passed by the city of Highland Park, Illinois, without giving reason. The NRA and 24 U.S. states urged the Court to hear the case brought forth by a Highland Park resident and the Illinois State Rifle Association, according to Reuters. The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals previously rejected the challenge, upholding the Highland Park measure as constitutional. Similar bans exist in California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Connecticut. The Newtown, Connecticut gunman who killed 20 schoolchildren and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary used assault weapons equipped with high-capacity 30-round magazines.

Back To The Future

10 of the Most Popular—and Wrong—Arguments Gun Advocates Make

By Paul Waldman / The American Prospect 

Gun advocates are trotting out the same old discredited lines.

There has been yet another mass shooting, something that now seems to occur on a monthly basis. Every time another tragedy like this occurs, gun advocates make the same arguments about why we can't possibly do anything to restrict the weaponization of our culture. Here's a guide to what they'll be saying in the coming days:

1. Now isn't the time to talk about guns.

We're going to hear this over and over, and not just from gun advocates; Jay Carneysaid it to White House reporters today. But if we're not going to talk about it now, when are we going to talk about it? After Sandy hit the East Coast, no one said, "Now isn't the time to talk about disaster preparedness; best leave that until it doesn't seem so urgent." When there's a terrorist attack, no one says, "Now isn't the time to talk about terrorism." Now is exactly the time. 

End The Gun Epidemic In America

The following Editorial appeared in today’s New York Times. It marked the first time since 1920 that an Editorial has appeared on the paper’s front page. 

End the Gun Epidemic in America

​It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

*** 

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper. 

Australia enacted one of the largest gun reforms ever nearly 2 decades ago — and gun deaths plummeted

Christina Sterbenz from the Business Insider

Mick Roelandts of the New South Wales Police in 1997,
examining weapons that were handed over through
a government buyback program. CreditDavid Gray/Reuters

A man and woman dressed in tactical gear — what police called "prepared" — shot and killed 14 people on Wednesday at a Southern California center for the mentally disabled.

This massacre comes just five days after three people died at a shooting that targeted a Planned Parenthood. And it comes two months after 10 people died in a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

So far, 2015 has seen more mass shootings — 352 — than days in the year. Many people, frustrated with the continued violence, want more than "thoughts and prayers."

In 1996, Australia took action. Just 12 days after the worst mass shooting in the country's history, the government passed a law that would become one of the largest gun reforms in recent history. Afterward, gun deaths plummeted.

How It Really Was...

It's all part of the lore of the Wild West: men armed to the teeth ready to shoot it out with one another on Main Street at a moment's notice.  And it's an image, bolstered by Hollywood, that gun-lovers and the NRA are only too happy to cultivate, as they look to our romanticized view of the past to justify having virtually no gun-control laws today. But is that the way it really was in the Old West?

Not according to Katherine Benton-Cohen, history professor at Georgetown University.  

In an article she posted in Politico immediately after the Gabrielle Giffords' shooting in Tucson in January, 2011, she argues that many people have the lesson of Tombstone all wrong, that Tombstone was NOT a place of carefree gun usage and wild shootouts (except for the obvious one):