10 Bloody Amusement Park Accidents

10 Bloody Amusement Park Accidents - Listverse
8Action ParkPhoto: Geoff Cooper

Action Park
Vernon, New Jersey

New Jersey’s Action Park boasted perhaps the worst reputation of any amusement park in history. The place was a perfect storm of unsafe rides, drunken patrons, and disinterested teenage employees. Countless injuries were suffered on the park’s water slides. At least six people were killed during the park’s history, including three drownings, an electrocution, and a heart attack allegedly caused by the shock of frigid water beneath a rope swing.

One man died when the car he was riding on leapt off the Alpine Slide, causing him to smash his head on a rock. By 1998, the crushing weight of lawsuits forced the owners to close down Action Park. A few years later, it was reopened in a sanitized version as Mountain Creek with a new emphasis on safety, the reckless and sinister history buried beneath signs and regulations.

Cultural suicide-----Times Op-Ed Goes All In On Student Debt Silliness

Times Op-Ed Goes All In On Student Debt Silliness - Forbes
On Saturday, the New York Times op-ed page went all in on the fact-free faux-populism surrounding student debt. 
In an exceptionally tone-deaf piece—and that’s saying something, given the competition in this area—cultural critic Lee Siegel, author of un-ironically-titled Are You Serious and three-time grad of Columbia University, urges borrowers to default on their student loans, just as he did. 
Siegel argues that student loans are in fact immoral, and that defaulting is the path to liberation:

"Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society. I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans. As difficult as it has been, I’ve never looked back. The millions of young people today, who collectively owe over $1 trillion in loans, may want to consider my example."

Melodrama aside, this is, quite possibly, the worst advice you could give. 
Defaulting on student loans leads to damaged credit, relentless hounding from collection agencies, garnished wages and tax refunds, and—most importantly—an increase in the amount of money you will owe (to cover the cost of collection). 

Selling our country----An Afternoon Visit to a Chinese Maternity Hotel

An Afternoon Visit to a Chinese Maternity Hotel
After driving 30 minutes east of downtown LA, I reached the apartment complex in Rowland Heights, California, that was rumored to contain a so-called Chinese “maternity hotel”: a place of questionable legality, where wealthy women seeking American citizenship for their children and a way around the one-child rule come to stay for a long vacation—one that happens to result in a baby about two-thirds of the way through.
“For about $15,000 you can have our basic package, a three-month stay here, with food and some Los Angeles tours,” Grace explained.
“If you want to pay more, you can get more tours and outings to better shopping and more time around the city.”
This is the going rate for the thousands of wealthy Chinese families looking to ensure a good future for their children.
They pay a deposit, then jet off to Southern California on a tourist visa and give birth to American citizens, which provides them a way around the one-child policy and a pathway for their kids to have easier access to American schools. 
Maternity hotels guide them and shelter them throughout this long process.
The practice is known as birth tourism, and it’s not illegal—strictly speaking.
It is, however, against the law to mislead customs officials into believing you’re in the United States purely as a tourist if your actual intention is to have a child on U.S. soil.
To get around this, many maternity hotels offer a coaching service to help their clients get through customs with ease. (They also provide medical recommendations and transportation when the time comes to give birth.
...Information from one of the search-warrant affidavits revealed that the proprietors of StarBabyCare have been conducting business for more than 16 years..."

Egypt Backtracks on Calling Hamas a Terrorist Group | TheBlaze.com

Egypt Backtracks on Calling Hamas a Terrorist Group | TheBlaze.com:
"CAIRO (AP) — An Egyptian court overturned a decision naming Hamas a terrorist organization Saturday, a ruling coming after months of increasing hostility to the blockaded rulers of the Gaza Strip.
The Urgent Matters Appeals Court cited a lack of jurisdiction as the reason for annulling the earlier court’s ruling."

France Dumbing Down Their Curriculum?

France Dumbing Down Their Curriculum? | Better Ed
France has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the world at 20%.

According to an NPR article, the distressing dropout rate has led French president Francois Hollande to call for what critics are characterizing as a dumbing down of the curriculum.
This strategy should sound familiar to Americans. 
In response to dropouts and the presumed need to send every student to college, the curriculum in America’s secondary schools has been dramatically watered down in recent decades.
...Next, French reformers wish to present “European civilization through the lens of the slave trade and colonialism” rather than emphasize the ideas that created modern Europe – kind of like A.P. U.S. History, which goes light on the Founding Fathers and heavy on a critique of America’s past wrongs.
An overarching goal of the proposed reform, according to NPR, “is to make the heavy, French middle school curriculum more interesting and lively for students.” 
So, France thinks education will be more effective if school is more entertaining? Americans: does this sound like déjà vu or what?!?...”

History for June 9

History for June 9 - On-This-Day.com:
Peter the Great 1672 - Peter I of Russia, Cole Porter (Cole Albert Porter) 1891 - Composer, songwriter, Dick Vitale (Richard J. "Dick" Vitale) 1940 - Basketball sportscaster 


Michael J. Fox 1961 - Actor ("Family Ties"), Johnny Depp (John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II) 1963 - Actor, musician, Natalie Portman 1981 - Actress ("Star Wars" movie series) 


1534 - Jacques Cartier became the first to sail into the river he named Saint Lawrence. 


1861 - Mary Ann "Mother" Bickerdyke began working in Union hospitals. 


1931 - Robert H. Goddard patented a rocket-fueled aircraft design. 


1940 - Norway surrendered to the Nazis during World War II. 


1943 - The withholding tax on payrolls was authorized by the U.S. Congress. 


1945 - Japanese Premier Kantaro Suzuki declared that Japan would fight to the last rather than accept unconditional surrender. 


1959 - The first ballistic missile carrying submarine, the USS George Washington, was launched. 


1980 - Richard Pryor was severely burned by a "free-base" mixture that exploded. He was hospitalized more than two months. 


1986 - The Rogers Commission released a report on the Challenger disaster. The report explained that the spacecraft blew up as a result of a failure in a solid rocket booster joint. 

Rep. Jason Chaffetz Reveals Miraculous New Detail About the Border Patrol Chopper Shot at Last Week | TheBlaze.com

Rep. Jason Chaffetz Reveals Miraculous New Detail About the Border Patrol Chopper Shot at Last Week | TheBlaze.com:

"On Friday, a Customs and Border Patrol helicopter took fire from the ground while patrolling near Laredo, Texas, in the southern area of the state. Now, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is showing you one of the bullet holes that forced that chopper to land and giving a new, miraculous detail."

Smoking-gun document said to prove Obama-Muslim Brotherhood ties

Smoking-gun document said to prove Obama-Muslim Brotherhood ties:

"Former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who tried to launch an inquiry three years ago into Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the federal government, told WND, “It confirms the questions I originally asked of the inspector generals of five agencies.”

“The recent discovery of an Obama administration document evidencing support for the Muslim Brotherhood is unsurprising,” she said. “It merely confirms the consistent position of the White House’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood since Obama’s election.”

This'll make the libs piddle in their panties-----Double Barreled 1911 pistol quad wield rapid fire! 20 rounds in 1.5 sec.

'New York Times' shows its 'gotcha' colors

Glenn Reynolds: 'New York Times' shows its 'gotcha' colors
Rubio's four traffic tickets aren't news, unless you're publishing political hit pieces.

So Friday's New York Times contained an enormous scoop — one so important that it was bylined by two reporters, Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder, and a researcher, Kitty Bennett.
The scoop?
That Marco Rubio had some traffic tickets.
Well, actually, only four in 18 years.
But the story combined Rubio's driving record with that of his wife so that it could maintain that the couple "had a combined 17 citations.
In other words, Rubio had four, and his wife had 13. 
Worse yet, we're told, the Rubios had to attend driving school on four occasions.

..Folks on Twitter mocked the Times with the #RubioCrimeSpree hashtag, featuring such other alleged crimes as "Drank milk after the expiration," "Red wine with fish," and my favorite, "Called Chris Matthews, asked him if his refrigerator was running."
...Er, except that maybe the Times didn't do the digging. 
The Washington Free Beacon's Brent Scher reported that the Times likely got the records from a Democratic opposition research firm, American Bridge.
"Records show that each of the citations mentioned by the New York Times were pulled in person by American Bridge operatives on May 26, 2015. ...
Neither of the reporters, Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder, appeared on the docket records for any of the traffic citations for Rubio and his wife.
An additional researcher credited in the New York Times, Kitty Bennett, also does not appear on any of the court records..."

BOOM: What Trey Gowdy Just Said Publicly Will Put the Fear of God in Barack Obama...

BOOM: What Trey Gowdy Just Said Publicly Will Put the Fear of God in Barack Obama...:

"While grilling State Department officials during an Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Trey Gowdy asked a question that ought to put the fear of God in the heart of President Barack Hussein Obama.

“Did he have his own personal server?” the bold representative asked in regard to Obama’s email habits."

Individual Liberty----Economic History of the World

Economics and Liberty: Economic History of the World
Economic History of the World

Here we have the economic history of the world in one picture, as summarized for us by Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms:

The basic outline of world economic history is surprisingly simple. . . . Before 1800 income per person--the food, clothing, heat, light, and housing available per head--varied across societies and epochs. . . . the average person in the world in 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC.  Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world's population was poorer than their remote ancestors. . . . Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. . . . average welfare, if anything, declined from the Stone Age to 1800.  The poor of 1800, those who lived by their unskilled labor alone, would have been better off if transferred to a hunter-gatherer band.  The Industrial Revolution, a mere two hundred years ago, changed forever the possibilities of material consumption.  Incomes per person began to undergo sustained growth in a favored group of countries.  The richest modern economies are now ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.  Moreover the biggest beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution has so far been the unskilled.  There have been benefits aplenty for the typically wealthy owners of land or capital, and for the educated. But industrialized economies saved their best gifts for the poorest.[Introduction, pp. 1-3]

In other words, for most of human history and in most places in the world, almost all people lived very near subsistence.  

But, something happened around 1800 in some places, and the masses of people in those places began to break away from subsistence living and to prosper.

This is the Great Fact of history, as Deirdre McCloskey refers to it in Bourgeois Dignity.  

This Great Fact seems to be something most people are unaware of, even among the people who are living in those places in the world where most people live far from subsistence.  

It is a fact which seems to be missing from the curricula materials in our schools.  

It even seems that this missing fact contributes to many people taking our own prospering for granted.  

So, I suppose it should be no surprise that many people seem to believe ideas that are inconsistent with the explanation for why, in some parts of the world, the masses of people began to prosper and continue to prosper today.

What explains the Great Fact of history?  

I was reminded of this question earlier this morning while finishing Hayek's The Political Order of a Free People:

However little it may often appear to be true, the social world is governed in the long run by certain moral principles on which the people at large believe.  The only moral principle which has ever made the growth of an advanced civilization possible was the principle of individual freedom, which means that the individual is guided in his decisions by rules of just conduct and not by specific commands.  No principles of collective conduct which bind the individual can exist in a society of free men.  What we have achieved we owe to securing the individuals the chance of creating for themselves a protected domain (their 'property') within which they can use their abilities for their own purposes. [pp. 151-152]

There are lots of specific details we might pay attention to in answering this question, but the simple bottom line seems to me just what Hayek writes here, i.e., individual liberty.  

Unfortunately, our system of political economy today seems to move farther and farther away from a society of a free people.

Climate Change: The Eschatology of the Left

Climate Change: The Eschatology of the Left | Somewhat Reasonable:
...For me, I cannot see how any changes within a span of only 50-100 years can be taken so seriously when one considers that minute span within the history of earth.  

That is only 1/2 of 1% of the time since the last ice age.  

If the global warming alarmists simply argued that we need to do everything to minimize pollution then there would be very little disagreement.  

Yet, their claim is that we need to save the Earth, that global catastrophe is imminent, that first-world countries are destroying the planet.  

This is the “fraud” that Rush Limbaugh is talking about.  

There are many ridiculous overstatements by the Left on the environment that cannot be substantiated.  

The planet will be around for nearly five billion more years.  

Human life has survived the coldest epochs and continues to exist in the hottest desert environments.

The Left need causes that necessitate unitarian government.  

As such, they are global universalists.  

They want universal health care, global government via the United Nations, a world without borders.  

Global climate change is a perfect totalizing umbrella to unite the world under a single, controlling, horrifying rubric of an Earth in jeopardy underwritten by the prestige, authority, and inaccessibility of high science.  The truth is that the earth is a religion to the Left, and climate change is its eschatology — an end of the world scenario.  

It used to be global thermonuclear war.  
Movie after movie in the 1980s fabricated a readymade collective anti-reality that only Leftist politics of disarmament and a  “new world built on the ashes of the old” could solve.  
But that needed to be changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall (another reason to hate Reagan).  
A new collective umbrella needed to be fashioned.

Why, hasn’t anyone ever wondered why Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance (1992) was released so shortly after the fall of Russian Communism? 
Indeed, its subtitle is “Forging a New Common Purpose.” 

Climate change skeptics are not denying that a legitimate scientific issue exists that humans need to grapple with, but the political aspirations of those promoting its purported catastrophic consequences, whose ideas and solutions for humanity just might actually end life as we know it.  

Food for thought.

The Chinese Have Your Numbers

The Chinese Have Your Numbers - WSJ:
"U.S. government incompetence seems to grow by the month, and now we know it’s becoming a threat to national, and even individual American, security.
The Obama Administration announced last week that Chinese hackers made off this year with personnel files that may have included those of all 2.1 million federal employees, plus former employees going back to the 1980s.
This is no routine hack.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) lost background-check data to the Chinese nine months before this breach and still hadn’t locked the cyber front door.
OPM’s inspector general issued a damning report last November that parts of its network should be shut down because they were riddled with weaknesses that “could potentially have national security implications.” 
You can’t ring the alarm much louder than that, but the failure to take basic precautions continued.
In other words this isn’t a James Bond movie. 
It’s a Dilbert cartoon. 
Despite years of warnings, and after the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden debacles, the federal bureaucracy can’t protect its most basic data from hackers...

Experts Fear Messy Consequences if Hillary Clinton’s Automatic Voter Plan Is Enacted | TheBlaze.com

Experts Fear Messy Consequences if Hillary Clinton’s Automatic Voter Plan Is Enacted | TheBlaze.com:

"Hillary Clinton’s call for national automatic voter registration, if enacted, could create messy consequences for ballot integrity, according to some election law experts.

“Automatic registration, I’m afraid, would result in increasing the number of ineligible registrations as well as duplicate registrations,” Hans Von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Elections Commission and now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told TheBlaze.

“Many people are on government databases in more than one state,” he said. “We already have a problem in the current system with people being registered to vote in more than one state.”

Wal-Mart's U.S. chief takes aim at urgent item: theft

Wal-Mart's U.S. chief takes aim at urgent item: theft - Yahoo News Canada:
"Greg Foran, head of the retailer's U.S. operations, told a media briefing on Thursday he added theft and other forms of "unknown shrinkage" to a list of urgent items to be tackled at Wal-Mart's 4,555 stores across the United States.
Foran said he saw an opportunity to boost margins by putting a dent in a problem that typically represents 1 percent for any retailer's sales.
He noted that Wal-Mart generated nearly $300 billion in revenues in the United States in the past fiscal year.
"One percent of $300 billion is quite a lot of money. 
If you can save 10 basis points of it – boy I’ll take it every day of the week and put it into lower prices for customers," Foran told Reuters after the briefing.
One basis point is equal to one hundredth of 1 percent, meaning that 10 basis points - or 0.1 percent - of $300 billion would be equal to $300 million.
Wal-Mart had flagged the issue when it announced its first quarter earnings last month, saying that "shrink" was a major contributor to a 13 basis point decline in its gross profit margin.
It said half of the problem was related to food.
Foran said unknown shrinkage could include problems like mistakes in inventory record-keeping in addition to stealing by customers or employees.
He said the problem was not necessarily growing, but he decided to focus on it given the potential margin boost.
After Foran took over as head of the U.S. business in August, he instituted a series of "urgent agenda" items aimed at improving store management.
Foran said he had taken two projects off that list and added two more, including the focus on shrinkage.
He did not provide further details."

Headline LIES! Costs up for employees....big time!-----Health care costs rise an average of 3% for midsize companies

Health care costs rise an average of 3% for midsize companies - Crain's Detroit Business:
"Despite ongoing concerns that the Affordable Care Act will lead to higher insurance costs, midsize employers this year are enjoying historically low health care cost increases, averaging 3 percent after making plan changes.
That is the lowest rate in more than 10 years and less than the national average of 4.6 percent, according to a new survey by Troy-based Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC.
The surveyed companies ranged from 100 to 10,000 employees.
To lower costs, employers are using high-deductible health insurance plans, wellness programs tied to incentives, telemedicine programs and aggressive prescription drug management, according to more than 450 employers that participated in Marsh & McLennan's 12th annual Southeast Michigan Mid-Market Group Benefits Survey.
Shifting costs to employees through higher deductibles, co-insurance and co-payments appears to have picked up this year, although not all companies increased cost shifting to employees, said Rebecca McLaughlan, vice president with Marsh & McLennan.
For example, monthly employee contributions to benefit plans for family PPO coverage increased as a percent of premium to 28 percent this year from 27 percent last year, and up to 26 percent from 23 percent for single PPO coverage, the survey found....
"HMO and prescription drug plans saw the greatest change," McLaughlan said.  For example, 68 percent of HMO plans now include a deductible, up from 59 percent in 2014."

'Staggering' numbers of students expelled and suspended, MLive probe finds

'Staggering' numbers of students expelled and suspended, MLive probe finds | MLive.com
MUSKEGON, MI – 14,918 days, or, if you prefer, 104,846 hours.

That's the amount of class time that students in Muskegon County public schools missed in 2013-2014 because they had been suspended for misbehavior.

Add in expulsions – those longer term separations that typically are for 180 days – and the amount of time out of class soars to around 25,000 days.

A months-long investigation by MLive and the Muskegon Chronicle into school discipline reveals the extent and type of misbehavior among students that teachers and principals must address on a daily basis.
Details of each suspension handed out in the 2013-14 school year were obtained from public school districts through the Freedom of Information Act.  Details of expulsions for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years also were gathered.

The information is both illuminating and disheartening:

• There were 6,065 suspensions in the 2013-14 school year alone.
• Kindergartners were suspended for fighting, vandalism, theft, disrespect and other inappropriate behaviors.
• Bullying was a factor in more than 200 suspensions.
• The number of expulsions dropped from 76 in 2012-13 to 52 in 2013-14.
• The youngest student to be expelled was a 7-year-old second-grader, for taking a weapon to school.

Disrespect, insubordination and disturbances are the most common issues teachers face in the classroom. 
But there also are myriad other issues: constant cell phone texting, physical threats, fights, weapons, drugs, sexual harassment.

Essentially, all the problems of society walk school hallways each day.

Netanyahu Blasts World’s Silence on New Gaza Rocket Attacks on Israel | TheBlaze.com

Netanyahu Blasts World’s Silence on New Gaza Rocket Attacks on Israel | TheBlaze.com:

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharply criticized the international community for what he called “silence” in response to multiple Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel during the past two weeks.

“I have not heard anyone in the international community condemn this firing; neither has [the] U.N. said a word,” Netanyahu said during his weekly cabinet meeting Sunday. “It will be interesting if this silence continues when we use our full strength to uphold our right to defend ourselves.”

Defend your family, your business and yourself or die!------Detroit woman shoots at would be carjackers