Shot Show: Police Officers Explain Why Millennials Make Terrible Cops

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Police departments across the country are struggling with staffing shortages as a result of a weak economy, hiring freezes, furloughs, layoffs, and cutbacks to salaries, benefits, and retirement incentives.

According to Police Chief Magazine, “Such difficulties spurred 7,272 applications to the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program, requesting $8.3 billion to support more than 39,000 sworn-officer positions. Altogether, both the supply of and demand for qualified officers are changing in a time of increasing attrition, expanding law enforcement responsibilities, and decreasing resources.” The problem is not new, either. The Anniston Star reported in December 2013:

Since the late 1990s the nation has seen a decrease in the number of people interested in becoming police officers. A 2006 article on police officer recruitment published in Police Chief Magazine said an estimated 80 percent of the nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies had positions they could not fill. A separate report, Hiring and Keeping Police Officers, published in 2004 by the National Institute of Justice said 20 percent of agencies experienced officer weakness as a result of recruitment and fiscal problems.

One particular question being discussed by the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA) at the annual National Shooting Sports Foundation’s SHOT Show in Las Vegas this year is how local law enforcement can recruit and retain quality individuals to their departments’ SWAT teams. An NTOA seminar on this question was well attended by SWAT team officers from all over the country, from cities including Chicago, Santa Barbara, Washington D.C., and Palm Beach.

As baby-boomers in departments look toward retirement, issues surrounding differences among officers who grew up as Generation X-ers or Millennials appear to be surfacing. Veteran SWAT officers within the group of attendees say that too many new recruits look at SWAT as a “stepping stone” or “résumé builder” to other areas of law enforcement, so finding new recruits who are willing to stay on SWAT teams for the long haul is becoming more difficult.

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Google Announces Contact Lens Glucose Monitor

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Google has announced that it is testing a prototype for a contact lens that would help people with diabetes manage their disease.

In a press release distributed Thursday, the company said that the lens it is designing would measure glucose in tears continuously using a wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor. Google says that using the lenses would be a less invasive method of measuring glucose levels than finger-pricking.

It also claims that the more frequent testing would consequently reduce the risks associated with infrequent glucose testing such as kidney failure and blindness.

The contact lenses were developed during the past 18 months in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car, Google’s Web-surfing eyeglasses and Project Loon, a network of large balloons designed to beam the Internet to unwired places.

“We wondered if miniaturized electronics — think chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair — might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy,” Google said in its press release.

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Tom Coburn to Step Down at End of 113th Congress

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Photo Credit: Medill DC

Photo Credit: Medill DC

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., plans to give up his Senate seat at the end of this Congress, he said in a statement Thursday night.

“Serving as Oklahoma’s senator has been, and continues to be, one of the great privileges and blessings of my life,” said Coburn, 65. “But after much prayer and consideration, I have decided that I will leave my Senate seat at the end of this Congress.”

Coburn, a licensed physician who formerly specialized in family medicine, obstetrics and allergy treatment, has been battling prostate cancer, and has previously suffered from colon cancer and melanoma. But he said he was stepping down to honor his pledge to serve no more than two terms in the Senate, though he will be stepping down two years before his term expires.

He was first elected to the House in 1994, where he served three terms, and later was elected to the Senate in 2004.

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The Church of Global Warming Hearts Communism

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Photo Credit: UK Guardian

Photo Credit: UK Guardian

Quick show of hands: who’s surprised to learn the global warming fanatics think communism is super-awesome?

Oh, I know what you’re thinking, People Who Have Your Hands Down. You’ve seen what communist countries look like. They’re absolute environmental disasters, horrifying wastelands of garbage and toxic pollution. You’re wondering how anyone could possibly review the history of communism and come to the conclusion that it’s a political philosophy that leads to wise stewardship of the planet.

You need to switch off your critical thinking skills, People Who Have Your Hands Down, and master the crucial global warming skill of ignoring evidence that contradicts your ideology. That’s what this scam has been all about since the beginning. Ignore 70 percent of the data, declare what remains “science,” and treat anyone who disagrees as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. If you don’t actually look at communist China, whose capital is currently enveloped in a choking cloud of pollution that’s literally driving people off the streets, you can come to the ideologically motivated conclusion that they’re the best little global warming fighters on the whole planet.

That’s what the United Nations’ climate poobah just did, as related by Bloomberg News:

China, the top emitter of greenhouse gases, is also the country that’s “doing it right” when it comes to addressing global warming, the United Nations’ chief climate official said.

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Conservative Insurgents Strike Blow Against GOP Establishment

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Cold cash, together with control of institutions, is what makes the Establishment the Establishment. But in the current Republican civil war, the insurgents have secured their own money pipelines, and they control their own institutions – which means the GOP leadership and its allies in the business lobby have a hard fight in front of them.

The firing and hiring of conservative staffer Paul Teller makes it clear that the anti-establishment has built its own establishment.

Teller was a House staffer for more than a decade, and was longtime executive director of the conservative Republican Study Committee. The RSC always exerted a rightward pull on party leadership, but it is nonetheless a subsidiary of the party.

After the 2012 election, the Republican Establishment captured the RSC, in effect, by getting Congressman Steve Scalise elected chairman. Scalise is a conservative, but he is also a close ally of the party leadership – much more so than his predecessors Jim Jordan and Tom Price. Scalise immediately swept out most of the RSC staff.

Last month, Teller was accused of working with outside groups such as Heritage Action to whip RSC members – and Scalise showed Teller the door.

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House Passes $1.1T Omnibus Spending Bill Implementing Murray-Ryan

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed with overwhelming support a massive $1.1 trillion “omnibus” spending bill to fund government operations until Sept. 30.

The bill passed 359-67. Sixty-four Republicans and three Democrats voted against the bill. The three Democrats were Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), Rush Holt (N.J.) and Mike McIntyre (N.C.).

Approving the bill “is showing the American people we actually are capable of working in a bipartisan manner,” said Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole.

He added that the bill restrains spending, explaining that its passage would be “the responsible thing to do. It’s the thoughtful thing to do.”

The 1,582-page bill works out the details of the budget agreement struck by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) in December.

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Rated-X Sex Ed Resources Being Pushed on Young Children in Kansas, New York (+video)

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Explicit Sex Ed Poster

A poster listing X-rated sex acts was posted on a door in plain view of children at a middle school in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. And it was no accident. The visual aid was part of a “district approved curriculum” for the school’s health and science course.

Unbelievably, the school administration actually defended the use of the poster as a means to encourage discussion in the school’s health class. One teacher even maintained that the rated-X sex ed poster was used for “abstinence based” curriculum.

You’ve got to hear it to believe it:

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NY Common Core website sends kids to obscene sex quiz

By VALERIE STRAUSS. Anna Shah is the mother of a kindergarten student. While looking on the Engage NY site for materials on the Common Core, she encountered highly offensive materials on the Student Services Page. The NYSED link called “Make test prep fun,” took the student to a site with quizzes to determine if they are a “sexy bitch”, “evil”, “freak” etc. The site also included racist and homophobic slurs. Some quizzes were supposed to determine if “you were a true Mexican,” a “slut,” or gay. Ms. Shah immediately notified the department and they took the site down. Apparently the link had been up since October 2012. Prior to its removal, I took screen shots of some of the pages, which you can see here. Please be warned, it contains offensive language.

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IRS ‘Horribly Harassed’ Sarah Palin’s Father Six Times Since 2008

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Chuck Heath, Jr. wrote on Facebook that his father had never heard from the IRS before 2008. Since then, he said, the IRS has tried to “dig up something on him but he’s always operated above board.”

“Coincidence? You decide,” he wrote.

He continued:

My father, who worked multiple jobs and faithfully and honestly paid his taxes for fifty years, had never heard a word from the IRS. In 2008, his daughter was tapped to run for vice president of the United States. Since that time, he has been, in his words “horribly harassed” six times by the agency. They’ve tried to dig up something on him but he’s always operated above board.

Read more from this story HERE.

Crime Study: Handguns, Not ‘Assault Rifles,’ Used in Most Mass Shootings

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Media hype about mass shootings in America has fostered a myth that the killings are on the rise and that an assault weapon ban, expanded background checks and greater attention to the mentally ill will curb a rampaging epidemic, according to an authoritative and exhaustive study by a noted criminologist.

Instead, according to James Alan Fox, author and criminology professor at Northeastern University, mass shootings have remained stagnant over 34 years, averaging 20 a year, and few were committed by the type of berserk psychos portrayed by the media.

“Public discourse is grounded in myth and misunderstanding about the nature of the offense and those who perpetrate it,” he writes in the journal “Homicide Studies.” He added: “Without minimizing the pain and suffering of the hundreds of those who have been victimized in recent attacks, the facts clearly say that there has been no increase in mass shootings and certainly no epidemic.”

The study debunks several proposals aired from President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats after the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting aimed at stopping mass killings. While he said any plan is worth trying, he concluded that short of abolishing the Second Amendment, there is little that can be done.

“Mass murder just may be a price we pay for living in a society where personal freedom is so highly valued,” he wrote in the study coauthored Northeastern criminology student Monica DeLateur.

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Senators: Police Should Get Warrants to Use Drones in the U.S.

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Photo Credit: ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Photo Credit: ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wants everyone to know that drones are a threat to privacy.

During a senate hearing Wednesday on the future of the unmanned aerial vehicles in the U.S., Feinstein told a story in which she heard a demonstration outside of her house. When Feinstein peered through the window, she was startled by a drone, flying right in front of her face. Once the remote operator saw her through the drone’s camera, it spun out of control and crashed. “So, I felt a little good about that,” she said.

It was a cautionary tale. According to Feinstein, drones can be extremely intrusive, and the time to pass legislation to protect Americans’ privacy is now, as they will soon be a common sight in U.S. skies. The Federal Aviation Administration has a mandate to integrate civilian drones into the airspace by 2015, but many drones — operated by research centers, law-enforcement agencies, and even hobbyists — are already flying.

“There should be strong binding enforceable privacy policies,” she said. “And that can be done before the technology is upon us.”

Feinstein, who didn’t reveal more about the drone incident (her press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment) is strongly in support of enacting privacy-protecting legislation before drones’ full integration in U.S. airspace.

Read more from this story HERE.