FIghting back

This is the way. Not by taking away our freedom, our liberties.
Teach the kids to live without fear!

Students being taught to fight back if a gunman invades

By JEFF CARLTON
Associated Press

Oct. 13, 2006, 3:57PM

BURLESON — Youngsters in a suburban Fort Worth school district are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit him with everything they got — books, pencils, legs and arms.

"Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success," said Robin Browne, a major in the British Army reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing the training to the Burleson schools.

That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and some fear it will get children killed.

But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania last week.

The school system in this working-class suburb of about 26,000 is believed to be the first in the nation to train all its teachers and students to fight back, Browne said.

At Burleson — which has 10 schools and about 8,500 students — the training covers various emergencies, such as tornadoes, fires and situations where first aid is required. Among the lessons: Use a belt as a sling for broken bones, and shoelaces make good tourniquets.

Students are also instructed not to comply with a gunman's orders, and to take him down.

Browne recommends students and teachers "react immediately to the sight of a gun by picking up anything and everything and throwing it at the head and body of the attacker and making as much noise as possible. Go toward him as fast as we can and bring them down."

Response Options trains students and teachers to "lock onto the attacker's limbs and use their body weight," Browne said. Everyday classroom objects, such as paperbacks and pencils, can become weapons.

"We show them they can win," he said. "The fact that someone walks into a classroom with a gun does not make them a god. Five or six seventh-grade kids and a 95-pound art teacher can basically challenge, bring down and immobilize a 200-pound man with a gun."

The fight-back training parallels the change in thinking that has occurred since Sept. 11, when United Flight 93 made it clear that the usual advice during a hijacking — Don't try to be a hero, and no one will get hurt — no longer holds. Flight attendants and passengers are now encouraged to rush the cockpit.

Behind the First Foley site

Now that's some good digging:

ABCNews.com brought Mark Foley's boy-chasing to national attention, but it wasn't the first website to flog the story.

That dubious honor belongs to StopSexPredators, a pseudovigilante blog filled with plagiarized, hastily-assembled posts, which no one seems to have heard of, visited, or linked to before last week—and whose operator has a suspiciously savvy grasp of the news cycle.

In other words, a blog whose sole raison d'etre seems to have been to get the Foley ball rolling.

If its time/date stamps are to be trusted (Like most free blogware, Blogger allows its users to backdate posts), the pervert-outing anony-site was set up on July 28 as a "clearing house for the public to report sex predators and as a resource for concerned citizens."

..... read the link to get the full story. Good stuff.

On the side of bad stuff... this was just a matter of time:

"The List" (of Gay GOP Aides on the Hill); Hubris on Bloggingheads.tv

There's a list going around. Those disseminating it call it "The List." It's a roster of top-level Republican congressional aides who are gay.

On CBS News on Tuesday, correspondent Gloria Borger reported that there's anger among House Republicans at what an unidentified House GOPer called a "network of gay staffers and gay members who protect each other and did the Speaker a disservice."

The implication is that these gay Republicans somehow helped page-pursuing Mark Foley before his ugly (and possibly illegal) conduct was exposed. The List--drawn up by gay politicos--is a partial accounting of who on Capitol Hill might be in that network.

I have a copy.

I'm not going to publish it.

For one, I don't know for a fact that the men on the list are gay. And generally I don't fancy outing people--though I have not objected when others have outed gay Republicans, who, after all, work for a party that tries to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and that welcomes the support of those who demonize same-sexers.

What's interesting about The List--which includes nine chiefs of staffs, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications--is that (if it's acucurate) it shows that some of the religious right's favorite representatives and senators have gay staffers helping them advance their political careers and agendas.

These include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. Should we salute these legislators for being open-minded enough to have such tolerant hiring practices?

After all, Santorum in a 2003 AP interview compared homosexuality to bestiality,incest and polygamy. It would be rather big of Santorum to employ a fellow who engages in activity akin to such horrors.

That is, if Santorum knows about his orientation.

And for those of you who blame this as an October surprise. from the Wall Street J

Ex-Pages Brought Explicit Messages to Light

By SARAH LUECK
October 4, 2006; Page A13

WASHINGTON -- Former congressional pages themselves supplied some of the
most damning emails in the scandal that forced the resignation of Rep. Mark
Foley, stepping forward only after tamer messages were posted by ABC News on
its Web site Thursday.


Several media organizations, along with law-enforcement and congressional
officials, had seen the Florida Republican's tamer messages to male teenage
pages months ago, but the messages didn't set off alarm bells, even at ABC,
which didn't consider them worthy of its broadcast TV news, a reconstruction
of events shows.

Mr. Ross declined to identify any of the sources by name. He described the
first tipster as a "Capitol Hill source" -- though not an aide or
congressional official -- who was "aware of the pages' complaints" and
"concerned about kids and pedophiles." This person, Mr. Ross said, is
"involved in public-policy issues" but isn't affiliated with either
political party.


Mr. Ross's account sheds new light on a question that has vexed Washington
insiders for days: Why did the story, which had circulated months before to
several news outlets, break just five weeks before the election? The timing
of the news, which emerged too late for the Republican Party to put a
different candidate's name on the ballot in Mr. Foley's congressional
district -- has led some Republicans to question whether the sources had
partisan political motives.


Appearing with conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh, House Speaker
Dennis Hastert said the opposition was orchestrating the leaks of explicit
instant messages between Mr. Foley and former pages dating from 2003. "We
have a story to tell, and the Democrats have -- in my view have -- put this
thing forward to try to block us from telling the story. They're trying to
put us on defense," Mr. Hastert said.


Mr. Ross said that, in his opinion, ABC's path to the story was too
convoluted to be part of a broader partisan conspiracy. "The chain of events
that just doesn't hold up...in terms of being from a political party," Mr.
Ross said. "I know how that works. This was not it."

The pages who provided information to ABC insisted on anonymity, in some
cases because they were worried about the impact on their current or future
political careers, Mr. Ross said. One of the former pages "is now involved
in politics," he added. If his name surfaced "it would be extremely
detrimental to him and to his candidate, who is a Republican."

Synchronizing sex

Lol ... how great...and true.

Synchronizing sex: Time to harmonize your hormones

By Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

How many nights have you spent on your side of the bed awake with passion, while your partner is curled up next to you deep in sleep? Or maybe you're the one who's OK with having sex every week or so, while he's looking for it every other day.

You used to do it all the time. What happened? Has the thrill packed up and gone? Not necessarily. The problem is that you've got what therapists call desire discrepancy -- you're out of sync sexually with your better half.

"desire discrepancy" ... gotta right that one down...

If you're worried that you and your partner have fallen out of lust, consider this: You may never have been in sync at all. It just seemed that way because the novelty and excitement of having a new lover boosts the hormones that inspire desire. As a relationship continues, though, the initial infatuation disappears and each partner returns to his or her "normal" level of sexual desire- - which may be high, moderate, or low. And libido may wax and wane at different times in a person's life.

Gotta right that one down, too.

The rest of the story here.


Ah, one last part of note:

Stress also causes different sexual reactions in men and women. "For men, sex tends to be a stress reliever," Kingsberg says. Women, however, often have to de-stress before they can get in the mood.