CeaseFire Pennsylvania’s Other Board Member

While we’re busy focusing on Alexander Tristan Riley, and whether or not he is or isn’t a well known and vile troll here on Al Gore’s Internets, I thought it might be rather interesting to shine some light on some of their other board members, in this case, Jennifer W. Stein:

Jennifer W. Stein has been a CeaseFire PA supporter since its founding. She was a co-founder of the Coalition Against Jewish Domestic Violence in 1983, and has been active in anti-violence causes since then. She is an independent documentary filmmaker and lives in Delaware County.

What they don’t mention here is that Jennifer W. Stein is also Pennsylvania State Regional Representative for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. Be sure to follow that link. It’s a great read:

Jennifer Stein has been a local Radnor resident for the past 20 years. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Science in textiles. She has worked, a clothing designer with her own business for a number of years, as a women’s rights activist and president of a Jewish Women’s rights organization, and a founding member of the Coalition Against Jewish Domestic Violence. As an entrepreneur Stein has operated her own special events coordination business, J. W. S. Events Inc. for the past 10 years but is now choosing to make documentary films. Jennifer currently is on the board of CeaseFire PA and is trying to make her home town a safer place to live thru the active support of sensible gun laws in Pennsylvania. She in the process of writing a book about life experiences with Pre-cognition to help others to trust heir instincts when making life changing split second decisions. One chapter of this book is up at the following site should you be interested to read a sampling from this book. http://www.connectingstories.com/moreStories8.html

Jennifer pursues her passion for knowledge in many areas including, archeology, phenomenon experience, including UFO’s crop circles, & ESP as well as the science of consciousness. Jennifer is an avid organic gardener, and loves to faux paint, is an accomplished seamstress, macrobiotic cook, and is happily married to a life time partner, whom she claims is her greatest teacher, and the mother of two young adult daughters, who are her second greatest teachers.

She describes her self as a modern day Kabalist & mystic who studies tuning fork sound dynamics, macrobiotics, Yoga, transcendental mediation, Kabala, Ancient Egyptian mystery school teachings, crop circles, sacred geometry, and ancient civilizations as well as precognitive phenomena. For her these areas overlap like puzzle pieces to understanding her own life experiences and the modern day spiritual evolution engulfing the world. She is a member of the Noetic Sciences organization, which is committed to the study of the evolving human consciousness movement.

If CeaseFire PA wants to have kooky, new age type folks on their board that like to study crop circles and UFO phenomena, I’m not one to complain. A free and confident society has plenty of room for such people. Jennifer W. Stein has the right to associate with other like minded people, enjoy their company, and swap stories about the Greys. But free people also have a right to provide for our personal security, our families security, to enjoy our sport, and hunt food for our dinner tables. Ms. Stein associates with an organization who believes that idea is far outside of the mainstream, and only held by a tiny vocal minority, who don’t deserve to be listened to.

How much farther from the mainstream can you get than believing a highly advanced race of spacefaring creatures has the inclination to take a break from warping time and space to doodle in Farmer Bob’s corn field? Folks like Ms. Stein should especially understand the importance of upholding the Bill of Rights; all of it. After all, everyone is an unpopular minority in some aspect of their life. It saddens me to see someone like this speaking out against other people’s liberty, while pretty clearly taking advantage of it themselves.

Home Crap Home

I have arrived back in the Philadelphia area to my nice warm 55 degree house.  It’ll be painful while I wait for the house to come back up to temperature.  When I plan to be away for a while, I drain the plumbing and turn down the heat so I’m not burning through cash while I’m away.  While I enjoy traveling away from home, I will be happy to rest my aching back in my own bed tonight for the first time in a week and a half.

Water Tower Vandalism

Looks like some bozo with a rifle decided to take some pot shots at a water tower in North Carolina:

Catawba County Sheriff’s deputy Major Coy Reid said the tower appears to have been shot three times with a high-powered rifle. He said authorities believe the shooting took place early Monday morning.

I would have thought water towers would be pretty resistant to small arms fire.  In addition to the shape usually being rather roundish, I would have imagined the metal would need to be thick enough just to contain the water that it could deflect a hit from most projectiles.

Go John McCain?

With polls showing John McCain coming back strongly in New Hampshire, and me looking at a distinct possibility of Huckabee pulling a win out of Iowa, and with my preferred candidate Fred Thompson not looking good at all, I’m prepared to bury the hatchet with the whole idea of McCain and get behind him by the time Pennsylvania’s primary rolls around.   Compared to my other choices, McCain isn’t looking too bad.

That says a lot about my other choices, none of it good.

Hillary Losing the Young Vote?

Eric notices she’s not doing too well among the young.  Looks like she does best with the over 55 crowd.  She would also appear to not be a college educated person’s type of liberal.

My theory on this is that younger, better educated people aren’t enamored with the whole idea of a woman president.  To our generation, the idea that a woman could be president isn’t very revolutionary; we expect it will happen, and the idea isn’t novel. Aging women, who didn’t grow up with full societal acceptance of women in positions of power, really want to see a woman president in their lifetime, and Hillary is their gal.

Special Interests

This is a startling admission from the New York Times:

 There’s an attractive logic to this argument, except that, in practice, it runs into some nettlesome inconsistencies. For instance, the National Rifle Association is also a dues-paying group that aggregates the power of its members, as is the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and I doubt very much that Edwards or other Democrats would describe these as anything other than special interests. Just like the N.R.A., Big Labor tries to manipulate elections to gain access and favor for its members. That doesn’t make unions a corrupting influence; as Andrew Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, always says, unions have been the greatest antipoverty program in American history. But it does make labor a special interest, whether Democrats like it or not.

Is it just me, or is that the first time you’ve ever seem anyone at the New York Times state that the NRA represents its members interests, rather than being a toady of the firearms industry?

Muffling Chelsea?

According to this AP article, Hillary Clinton doesn’t want the media talking to her kid:

But onstage, Chelsea never speaks; she stands next to her mother and applauds but utters not a single sentence and doesn’t even say hello. And reporters covering the campaign have been put on notice that Chelsea is not available to speak to them. An aide follows the former first daughter as she works the crowd, shushing reporters who approach her and try to ask any questions.

Seems kind of odd to me to have your child show up and campaign for you to just be a pretty face.

BBC Article

Both War on Guns and Armed and Safe have offered their takes on this BBC article.   I have one as well:

Police commander Michael Anzallo says the capital has seen an influx of handguns from neighbouring states where there are fewer controls.

“The police department recovers more than 1,000 guns a year,” he says.

“The problem is easy access to firearms. Most of the motives for homicides are arguments or robbery related and the quick pull of the trigger means somebody’s life.”

This seems to be a common tactic; blaming the neighboring states.  The way this is always presented suggests the gun law of the controlling jurisdictions are strict, and effective at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but that criminals can just cross over into another state and buy a firearm because of the lax laws there.

Given that most people aren’t aware of what current gun control laws actually are, this is an effective tactic to deflect the criticism that gun control will never work.  Most people don’t know that it’s illegal to buy a handgun out of state, or that someone with a criminal history will fail a background check, and aren’t aware of the current laws about straw purchasing.

It’s effective to evoke images of a criminal heading to a Maryland gun store and picking up a gun because of the “lax” gun laws there, rather than explain the existing laws, or the black market networks through which criminals obtain firearms.