BEWARE...SOME DAYS ARE NOT VERY PRETTY. I GET CRABBY LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE DO. AND I DO SPEAK MY MIND.
DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO TRUE, REAL, EVERYDAY FEELINGS LIKE MINE.(But I think you would enjoy it)
DON'T FORGET...FREEDOM OF SPEECH !
Vaccinated Michigan couple die minutes apart from COVID-19 while holding hands
Misty Severi
A vaccinated Michigan couple died less than a minute apart Monday from a breakthrough case of COVID-19. The two were holding hands when they died.
Cal
Dunham, 59, and Linda Dunham, 66, started to feel sick during a family
camping trip earlier this month but assumed it was a cold. Their
daughter, Sarah Dunham, said her father warned her that the couple was
not feeling well. The couple was hospitalized and placed on ventilators a
few days later, according to a local Fox station.
Doctors
told Dunham on Sunday there was not much else they could do, and the
couple would likely need to come off life-support the following day.
When it came time to disconnect the couple on Monday, Cal was wheeled
into Linda's room, and the couple was reunited. Fox-17 reported that
moments later, the couple held hands, and Cal died at 11:07 a.m. with
Linda right behind him at 11:08 a.m.
“[My father] called me before
our family camping trip and said he wasn’t feeling good, but he thinks
it’s just like sinus, and [Linda] caught it, and she’s like, 'He gave me
his cold,'” Dunham told the local outlet. “The third day, they woke me
up and said, ‘We’ve got to go because we don’t feel well.’ So I packed
them all up, and they left.”
“She always joked and said, ‘Well,
you’re going to go before I am. I’ll be right there behind you. I
promise,'" Dunham said of her mother. "She really was, like she really
was right there behind him.”
According to Dunham, the couple took
the virus seriously and were always cautious. However, both had
underlying health issues. Dunham said it was comforting to know that her
parents were together in both life and death. But her comfort turned to
anger at the people who were not taking the virus seriously.
“I’m
angry because so many people are like, ‘If I catch COVID, I catch
COVID. That’s what it is.' No, it’s not,” Dunham said. “It could be any
person. It could be anybody. They did everything right. They did
everything to protocol the way it should be done.”
According to the New York Times, 22,227 people in Michigan have died from COVID-19, and 690,558 people have died in the United States.
Suspected vandal Roy Lee Gordon Jr., an-ex Emory University employee and black man, has been arrested for allegedly spraying racist graffiti at his workplace.
In what appears to be another incident in a string of hate hoaxes in
the past several months, the former part-time Emory staff member is
accused of vandalizing the university’s Autism Center with racist and
antisemitic graffiti in early August.
According to the Daily Wire, racial
slurs were written near the workspace occupied by two African-American
women. There was also a swastika painted near the office of a Jewish
individual. In addition, a glass door had been ruined and nearby vending
machines were damaged.
(Bunch of NUTS... DO NOT allow them to ruin your life)
She Bought Her Dream Home. Then a 'Sovereign Citizen' Changed the Locks.
Sarah Maslin Nir
Shanetta
Little at her home in Newark, N.J., on Sunday, July 11, 2021. Little
was startled one day to find that the locks on her new home in Newark
had been changed by a man who claimed he was the rightful owner. (Bryan
Anselm/The New York Times)
The
official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little
bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark, New Jersey. Bearing
a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed
that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her
new house as his own.
She dismissed the letters as a hoax.
And
so it was with surprise that Little found herself in her yard on Ivy
Street on a June afternoon as a police SWAT team negotiated with a man
who had broken in, changed her locks and hung a red-and-green flag in
its window. He claimed he was a sovereign citizen of a country that does
not exist and for whom the laws of the United States do not apply.
Little
was a victim of a ploy known as paper terrorism, a favorite tactic of
an extremist group that is one of the fastest growing, according to
government experts and watchdog organizations. Known as the Moorish
sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black
people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it
encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of
empowerment. Experts say it lures marginalized people to its ranks with
the false promise that they are above the law.
The man who entered
her house, Hubert John of Los Angeles, was arrested June 17 and charged
with criminal mischief, burglary, criminal trespass and making
terroristic threats. Prosecutors in New Jersey are preparing to take the
case before a grand jury, according to Katherine Carter, a spokeswoman
for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. He was released on his own
recognizance.
But the strange letters declaring that Little’s home
is not her own still come. They arrive on faux-consular letterhead
using the name Lenapehoking of the Al Moroccan Empire at New Jersey
State Republic. Lenapehoking was the land between New York City and
Philadelphia that includes New Jersey and was home to the Indigenous
Lenape tribe before it was colonized by European settlers. John and his
group refer to themselves as Moors.
“The Moors claim to be about
Black liberation and opportunity, and uplifting Black people,” Little
said in an interview. “But he is literally oppressing me and taking
what’s mine as a Black woman.”
This past summer, the Moorish
movement exploded into public view, after Little posted viral TikTok
accounts of her ordeal and when the police pulled over members of a
militant offshoot of the group on a Massachusetts highway. That
subgroup, known as Rise of the Moors, engaged in a standoff with the
police for more than nine hours, claiming that because they were
sovereign citizens, law enforcement had no authority to stop them. No
one was injured; 11 people were arrested and charged with unlawful
possession of firearms and ammunition, among other offenses.
Increasingly,
across the country, sovereign citizens have clashed with authorities,
tied up resources and frazzled lives in their insistence that laws such
as the requirements to pay taxes, obey speed limits and even obtain,
say, a license for a pet dog do not apply to them.
People who
claim to be Moorish sovereign citizens believe they are bound mainly by
maritime law, not the law of the places where they live, said Mellie
Ligon, a lawyer and author of a study of their impact on the judicial
system in the Emory International Law Review.
Initially espoused
by white supremacist groups, sovereign citizen ideology first cropped up
in America in the 1970s, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Moorish permutation appears to have picked up in popularity in the
1990s, inspired in part by Black identity ideology of a similarly named
religious group, the Moorish Science Temple of America, which disavows
the sovereign citizen movement.
Membership in the Moorish
sovereign citizen movement has been driven by the internet into the
hundreds of thousands, the law center said. On its website, Rise of the
Moors, for example, has cited reparations — part of national
conversations about race and equity — as a driving factor for its belief
that its members can claim things as their own.
Rise of the Moors, as well as the members arrested in Massachusetts in July, did not respond to requests to comment.
Like
many Moorish followers, John adopted an Arabic-influenced name, Jaleel
Hu-El. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Via an
email, a staff member at the Al Moroccan consulate, where John is listed
on the website as the consul general to the United States and China,
initially scheduled an interview but then canceled.
The events of
June 17 are a distinct departure from John’s public persona: Dressed in
sharp suits and often wearing a red fez, John is a self-styled fashion
mogul. In a podcast interview, he said he spent nine years in banking
before buying a one-way ticket to China in the wake of the 2008
financial crisis.
There, John said, he was scouted by a modeling
agent. He became fluent in Chinese and produced several fashion shows
focusing on Black designers and models, according to multiple accounts.
How
he changed from dapper entrepreneur to a Moorish national confronted by
a New Jersey SWAT team is opaque. Around 2018, the social media
accounts associated with Black X, his business association, changed
tone, with posts about how to obtain Moorish license plates and identity
cards, and explainers of abstruse legal tactics.
Why John set his
sights on Little’s house is unknown. They don’t know each other,
according to Little, who says they have never met before she found him
in her home.
In documents that John posted online, he refers to
Little’s house, which was built in the 1950s, as his “ancestral estate,”
but according to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, there does not
appear to be a connection.
On June 16, Little came to inspect her
dream home. She had closed on it in February and was planning
renovations before moving in.
Buying the home felt like a triumph
for Little, who grew up mostly in Florida as a foster child, finding
security as a teenager only when her high school principal took her in.
She graduated from the University of Central Florida but struggled as a
young adult, living out of motel rooms for periods of time. Now a senior
customer service specialist with Jaguar Land Rover North America, she
could afford to buy a house.
She tried to unlock the door but was
puzzled: the locks had been replaced. The next day, she returned with a
locksmith and was confronted by two men, one of whom was John and who
said the house was his. After a heated exchange she called the police.
When
the police arrived, both Little and John showed documents claiming the
house was theirs, according to a report by Brian O’Hara, Newark's public
safety director. Little shared the property deed proving ownership, she
said; he showed the fabricated papers bearing the Al Moroccan seal.
The
men “claimed to be sovereign citizens of the Al Moroccan Empire and
that their status permitted them access to the property,” O’Hara’s
report said. The officers verified that Little bought the house in
February, and they asked the men to leave. They did.
Thirty
minutes later, John returned, brushed past Little on the porch, she
said, opened the door with his own key and locked it behind him.
When she called the police a second time, they returned with a SWAT team.
Little
is still shaken, enraged each time an ominous letter arrives in the
mail. “He feels entitled that something I basically worked my whole life
for, something I was deprived of my whole life, especially as a kid not
having a safe space to call home,” Little said. “I deserve it, not
because of ‘ancestral lands’ or some scam trying to be pulled. I deserve
it because I earned it.”
For decades, followers of the Moorish
sovereign movement have remained largely off the radar, cropping up
mostly in outlandish-seeming news stories on their paper-terrorism
tactics.
But across the country, they have clogged court dockets
with those arguments, filing spurious lawsuits and burying county clerk
offices in flurries of fake deeds, liens and other documents. Police
departments nationwide have begun training officers on how to deal with
people who drive without licenses or with fake plates and who claim the
police have no authority over them.
When Jordan Fainberg, a real
estate agent in Bethesda, Maryland, visited a mansion he was selling for
its owner in 2013, he was startled to find inside a man named Lamont
Butler who said he was the real owner, with paperwork that referenced
the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and a peace treaty from the
1700s between the sultan of Morocco and the United States. Butler was
arrested and convicted of several crimes. He could not be reached for
comment.
“It was the most bizarre thing in the world,” Fainberg
said recently. “This was just somebody saying the sky is purple when
it’s blue.”
In Montgomery Circuit Court, Butler continued to claim
his rights as a Moor. Judge Terrence McGann did not agree: “Under your
set of rules, every house is fair game, you own the entire United
States, you own the oceans, you own anything you want,” he said,
according to reports. “And that’s not how a free, orderly society
works.”
If an election were held today, a substantial number of those who
voted President Joe Biden in November wouldn’t do so now, a new
I&I/TIPP Poll shows. This comes after a spate of recent polls from
TIPP and others suggesting Biden’s political support is in a freefall as
Americans question his leadership on issues ranging from COVID-19 to
the chaos on the U.S.’ southern border to the recent botched withdrawal
from Afghanistan.
The I&I/TIPP Poll asked Americans: “If the presidential
election were held today, and the following were the candidates, for
whom would you vote?”
Respondents were given the following choices: “Donald Trump, the
Republican,” “Joe Biden, the Democrat,” “Other,” “Not sure,” and “Prefer
not to answer.”
Just 46% of those who voted in the November 2020 election said
they’d vote for Biden today, more than five full percentage points below
his official total 51.3% share in the 2020 presidential election.
That doesn’t mean voters are wishing they’d instead picked Trump,
who in recent weeks has hinted at a possible re-run in 2024. The poll
found 42% said they’d pick Trump now, down from his actual 2020 election
total of 46.9%…
Also interesting is where Biden lost the most support – among
women, suburbanites, moderates, and the middle-class. In other words,
the key groups that helped put him in the White House.
The questions that remain now are, whether Biden will even
finish his first term and if he does, will he try to run again in 2024?
Roy Lee Gordon, Jr.
