Monday, October 16, 2017
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Mental Health Laws Used to Silence Critic
Mental
Health Laws Used to Silence Critic
Pennsylvania
powerbrokers abuse legal system to lock up political opponent
By
Dave Gahary
A law on
the books in the Keystone State intended to apply to individuals with mental
illness is now being used for a more sinister purpose: to involuntarily commit
political opponents who pose a threat to the established power structure in the
commonwealth’s capital. Andrew J. Ostrowski, a former Pennsylvania civil rights
attorney, found himself in the sights of the powers-that-be in Harrisburg, and
learned the hard way how the 1976 Mental Health Procedures Act (MHPA) is being
used to chill criticism of the power prism.
The MHPA
“establishes procedures for the treatment of mentally ill persons” and “set[s]
forth the Commonwealth’s policy and procedures regarding the provision of
mental health services.” Article III of the act defines the requirements and
limitations on involuntary emergency examination, treatment, and
hospitalization of individuals who present a “clear and present danger to
others.”
That key
phrase is defined as meaning “within the past 30 days the person has inflicted
or attempted to inflict serious bodily harm on another and that there is a
reasonable probability that such conduct will be repeated.” Longtime AMERICAN
FREE PRESS subscriber and supporter Dorene Shutz tipped off this reporter to
Ostrowski’s recent kidnapping.
“He is
awake to the corrupt courts,” she explained. On Aug. 26, this reporter spent
most of the day with Ostrowski, Ms. Shutz, and other mild-mannered patriots at
The Nationalist Times conference, and found all the participants to be
scholarly truth-seekers. None who were present that day could ever be
considered severely mentally ill and in need of involuntary treatment by even
the most incompetent authority, but that says nothing of corrupt authority.
Ostrowski
was born and raised in Lancaster, Pa., attended Millersville University, and
“was in the first graduating class at Widener University” in Harrisburg. “I
trained for several years in the formal legal law firm environment,” he told
AFP.
He soon
discovered, however, that his chosen profession as an “officer of the court”
wasn’t what he thought it might be. “I had been a practicing lawyer until 2010
when I ran into disciplinary issues,” he said, “and, as I distanced myself from
the formal practice and started to look at these things, I started to see that
there really was no basis for the licensing of the practice of law. The
licensing of the practice of law really is an impediment to everybody’s access
to justice, because your attorney is not free to advocate without risking his
or her own property.”
On Aug.
23, Ostrowski filed a motion, attacking what he saw as a corrupt system. “I
filed what is called a motion for declaratory relief,” he explained, “which is
a vehicle that gives you access to have declarations made that certain things
are constitutional, not constitutional, lawful, and unlawful. And I did it to
challenge the basis of the attorney law license. This . . . is a very
significant motion that really would upset the entire judicial structure in
this country.”
Sitting
at his desk on Sept. 19, Ostrowski found out how significant it really was. “I
posted a notice on Facebook and sent out emails notifying people I was going on
Facebook Live and, within 15 minutes of that, the police were at my door.”
Facebook
Live allows a user to broadcast live video streams, requiring nothing more than
a computer with a video camera and a Facebook account.
“I looked
out the front window,” he said, “and there was a cop climbing over my railing
to come around back, so I went around to the back door and locked it, and I
went on Facebook Live. And then somehow, they got a key and they came in with
gloves on and with their tasers pulled, three of them, a female and two males.”
The
webcam captured the interaction between Ostrowski and the police, who entered
his home without his permission. In the video, Ostrowski can be seen asking the
officers to show him their warrant. Viewers see an officer telling him they
have one but then forcingOstrowski from his desk before the video ends.
“They did
not have a proper warrant; they didn’t have any paperwork,” Ostrowski said. “I
had to kind of—as passively as I could—resist them dragging me into an
ambulance and throwing me in without seeing some paperwork.” The short trip
from his house to the ambulance was not without injury.
“I had
bruises and a cut on my wrist from the handcuffs,” he said. AFP asked what
happened next. “I was taken in to the local emergency room where they process
you,” he explained, “and then they sent me to [Brooke Glen Behavioral Hospital]
down in the Philadelphia suburbs. That was a horrific experience. It was clear
that the agenda was, as expressed to me by the doctor, to get me on some kind
of pharmaceuticals, and/or, if I refused or resisted, to have me placed
long-term, and do it involuntarily. He specifically advocated for that in the
hearing on Sept. 22.”
They held
him there for seven days, two days longer than Section 302 of the MHPA
ostensibly allows. Eventually a judge signed an order denying any commitment
petition.
“They
basically said I shouldn’t have been there,” explained Ostrowski. AFP asked if
he had any recourse, as the judge’s ruling can’t erase the fact that he had
been kept there against his will for all that time. “Of course, yes,” Ostrowski
said. “This is a gross violation of all my fundamental civil rights. There’s
not one that you can discount from it, [except] maybe cruel and unusual
punishment.” Alarmingly, this wasn’t the first time they came for Ostrowski,
“all directly related,” he believes, “to my advocacy efforts.”
“This is
the third time this year,” he explained. Ostrowski contends that the abuse of
this mental health law to truncate people’s due process rights is a clear
problem.
“This is
why AMERICAN FREE PRESS exists,” he said. “This is why The Nationalist Times exists. This is why you guys
do what you do, because this stuff happens to real folks.”
Want to fight back? Contact the Foundation for Child Victims
of the Family Court Here
Original Article Link http://americanfreepress.net/mental-health-laws-used-to-silence-critic/
Man Arrested For Allegedly 'Marrying' Stepdaughter at Age 12, Holding Her Captive For 19 Years At
Link
to original article
Man
Arrested For Allegedly 'Marrying' Stepdaughter at Age 12, Holding Her Captive
For 19 Years At
Deborah Hastings
Inside Edition October 9, 2017
An arrest has been
made in the strange saga of a woman who told FBI agents her stepdad had
kidnapped her at age 12 and held her captive for 19 years.
Henri Michele Piette,
62, was arrested last week in Mexico and extradited to Oklahoma, where he was
charged with rape, child abuse and other offenses, The Oklahoman reported.
Rosalynn Michelle
McGinnis, now 33, said she was able to escape last year from a filthy tent with
eight of her nine children. She made her way to a U.S. Embassy, investigators
said in court documents, the paper reported.
Her eldest child is
grown and escaped before her, she said. They have since been reunited, she
said.
In an interview with People magazine, McGinnis said she was speaking
publicly because “I want the world to know. I want him to be stopped and I want
justice to be served.”
She was beaten with a
baseball bat, raped, stabbed, shot and choked unconscious during nearly two
decades with Piette, she said.
He has been charged in
Wagoner County. He “married” her in a van after kidnapping her from school, she told investigators.
Her mother had left Piette because he beat her and the mom and daughter were
living in a women’s shelter, McGinnis said.
McGinnis and Piette’s
children were dragged across states including Texas, Montana and Arizona,
according to FBI agents.
Ultimately, they
landed in Mexico, where they lived in a tent in a remote village.
After 19 years of
abuse, and recovering from a crude surgery to remove her gallbladder, McGinnis
decided it was now or never.
“I knew that if I
didn’t get out of there,” she told the magazine. “I’d either go insane or I
would end up dying and leaving my kids with that man.”
Back in the U.S.,
McGinnis has been working the JAYC Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit began by
Jaycee Dugard, who was abducted at age 11 in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., before
she was rescued after 18 years.
She also has been
helped by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“It took a lot of
courage. It took a lot of bravery,” Robert Lowery, vice president of missing children for the organization, told the
publication.
“She wasn’t only
concerned for herself,” he said, “but for her children.”
Want to fight back? Contact the Foundation for Child Victims
of the Family Court Here
Man accused of raping 12-year-old girl given joint custody of her child
Man
accused of raping 12-year-old girl given joint custody of her child
Christopher
Mirasolo
SANILAC COUNTY, Mich. — A Michigan man who allegedly raped a
girl when she was 12 years old and got her pregnant has been given joint
custody of her child.
Christopher Mirasolo, 27, is accused of raping the victim and
getting her pregnant in September 2008, according to The
Detroit News. He was 18 and she was 12.
The victim’s attorney, Rebecca Kiessling, says Mirasalo lured
the victim, her 13-year-old sister and a friend into his car and took them to a
vacant home in Michigan and held them captive for two days before releasing
them.
Inside the home, Mirasolo forcibly raped and threatened to kill
the victim, Kiessling says.
Mirasolo was arrested a month later and sentenced to one year in
jail for attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct. He served roughly half
the time before he was released to care for his sick mother.
In 2010, Mirasolo was convicted of the assault of another child
and given four years in jail.
According to The Detroit News, after a paternity test showed
Mirasolo was the father, he was given parenting time and joint custody of the
child.
Now, the victim is seeking protection under the federal Rape
Survivor Child Custody Act.
Original Article Link:
Why I Will Never Stand for the National Anthem
We must learn to examine everything that we have been taught. Some of it is brain washing.
This is why I will never stand for the national anthem.
http://www.theprogressivethinkers.org/2016/08/why-i-will-never-stand-for-national.html#.Wd2gJFuPKM8
Monday, October 9, 2017
Las Vegas was not the worst mass killing in American history: A History Lesson
Friday Oct 06, 2017 · 8:03 PM PDT
See the original story here:
 |
| U.S. Calvary stand at the edge of a mass grave where hundreds of Lakota men, women and children were buried after the Wounded Knee Massacre on 29 December 1890. The Lakota pipe line has now cut through their sacred burial ground. |
American cavalry troops pose at the edge of
a mass grave for some of the victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Share this article
It has been said that Sunday’s mass shooting in Las
Vegas in which Stephen Paddock open fire with assault weapons modified to fire
automatically on a large crowd of concertgoers is the worst in American
history. That’s not even close to being accurate.
Others more correctly say that Las Vegas was the worst
mass killing in modernAmerican history. Depending on how you define
“modern,” that is closer to accurate.
Paddock's body count of 58 dead victims surpassed the
49 murdered by Omar Mateen when he opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub in
Orlando in June 2016. That led some to proclaim this killing spree to be the
worst.
But the history of mass shootings didn’t begin 20 or 30
years ago — or even when Charles Whitman opened fire from the clock tower
at the University of Texas in 1966.
You don’t have to go back much further in American history
to find slaughters even bigger than Vegas. You can start with Wounded Knee on what
is now the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota.
On the morning of December 29, 1890, Chief
Spotted Elk (Big Foot), leader of a band of some 350 Minneconjou Sioux, sat in
a makeshift camp along the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. The band was surrounded
by U.S. troops sent to arrest him and disarm his followers. The atmosphere was
tense, since an order to arrest Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock
Reservation just 14 days earlier had resulted in his murder, prompting Big Foot
to lead his people to the Pine Ridge Agency for safe haven. Alerted to the
band’s Ghost Dance activities, General Nelson Miles commanded Major Samuel
Whiteside and the Seventh Cavalry to apprehend Big Foot and his followers, and
the regiment intercepted them on December 28, leading them to the edge of the
creek. While confiscating their weapons, a shot pierced the brisk morning air.
Within seconds the charged atmosphere erupted as the Indian men rushed to retrieve
their confiscated rifles and troopers began to fire volley after volley into
the Sioux camp. From a hill above, a Hotchkiss machine gun raked the tipis, gun
smoke filled the air, and men, women, and children ran for a ravine near the
camp, only to be cut down in crossfire. More than 200 Lakota lay dead or dying
in the aftermath as well as at least 20 soldiers.
The number of victims at Wounded Knee varies widely,
depending on which account you read, from 150 up to 300. But whatever the
number, it apparently doesn’t count as “modern.”
And then there is the Sand Creek Massacre of November 29,
1864, in which Colorado volunteers under the command of Col. John Chivington
slaughtered and mutilated anywhere from 70-163 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of
whom were women and children.
Here is an eyewitness account from the Wikipedia article on Sand Creek that
describes just how brutal and sadistic it was:
There was one little child, probably three
years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone
ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little
fellow was perfectly naked, travelling in the sand. I saw one man get off his
horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire.
He missed the child. Another man came up and said, 'let me try the son of a b-.
I can hit him.' He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the
little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar
remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.
— Major Anthony, New York Tribune, 1879
And then there was the white mob that attacked and burned the Greenwood community
of African-Americans in Tulsa, Okla., on May 31-June 1, 1921, killing as many
as 300.
As with some of the others, the Tulsa riot
seemed to have started with the explosive accusation that a black man had
sexually assaulted a white woman. (The charges were dropped after the riot.)
On May 31, 1921, hundreds of armed white men
gathered outside the courthouse where the man was being held, and a group of
armed black men arrived to prevent a lynching. A shot was fired. The black men
fled to Greenwood, and the white men gave chase.
The battle that ensued, enabled by the Tulsa police chief,
who deputized hundreds of white men and commandeered gun shops to arm them,
lasted through the night and well into the next day.
When the New York Times wrote that story in 2011 on the
Greenwood killings many survivors were still alive. But it apparently doesn’t
qualify as “modern.”
There were other mass killings. The Colfax Massacre of
1873 in Louisiana resulted in 150 deaths of African-Americans. The list goes on and on.
Many of those massacres have been largely forgotten by a
nation that often wants to erase its bloody history.
Thus the necessity, perhaps, to make a distinction between
modern history and all of history.
In practical terms, one reason is that it's difficult to
determine the exact number of victims murdered in the 19th century — a problem
that persists today, too. There's also a vocabulary issue, as different
words used to describe similar events can affect perceptions of their
significance. "The mid-2000s is around the time that the phrase 'mass
shootings' started being used more and more," Duwe says, "whereas
during the 1980s and the 1990s, the phrase 'mass murder' is used." (His
research uses the term mass public shooting to describe
incidents in which four or more victims are killed with a gun in a public
location.)
There’s that. But that’s not the real reason. Emphasis
added.
Many have argued this week and in the past that events
like the Colfax Massacre and Wounded Knee are seen as separate because, within
American history, the deaths of Native Americans and African Americans
have not been seen the same as the deaths of white people — and that
failing to specify "modern" history while talking about events like
Las Vegas only underscores that idea by implying that earlier shootings don't
count.
Massacres of Indians larger than Wounded Knee (I have left out slaughters that happened as part of British and French warfare, or as part of military engagements in the Civil War):
1637: 600-700 Pequot were burned alive in their Connecticut village and escaping survivors shot to death
1644: 500 sleeping Lenape in New York were either burned alive or shot trying to escape
1675: 350 Narragansett in Rhode Island burned alive or shot trying to escape
1692: 300 Abenaki killed in Massachusetts Bay
1712: 300 Tuscarora killed in North Carolina
1712: 1,000 Fox Indians killed near Detroit
1713: 1,200 Tuscarora killed in North Carolina
1832: 150 Menominee in Wisconsin
1840: 150-200 Pomo in California
1846: 200 Wintun killed in the Sacramento River Massacre (California)
1853: 450 Tolowa killed in California
1860: 200-250 Wiyot killed in California
1861: 240 Wailakis killed in California
1863: 290 Shoshoni killed in Idaho
1864: 300 Yana killed in California
1864: 170 Arapahoe and Cheyenne killed at Sand Creek, Colorado (as you noted)
1870: 173 Piegan killed in Montana
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