Sophianotloren

Sean Spicer is pissed, PISSED!! I tell you, that, somehow or other, the public have identified racist old right-wing desert moocher, Cliven Bundy, with The Party of Lincoln-Inside-the-Beltway.  Sacré Bleu!

In his own words:

The issue with Cliven Bundy has absolutely nothing to do with his party, zero.  He is a Nevada rancher that had a beef with the federal government’s continued overreach and suddenly this became a question when he made some inappropriate comments about what every Republican needs to answer for. That’s absolutely ridiculous. [Full video rant here]

Now, I truly don’t believe that all Republicans are racists, homophobes, conspiracy theorists, junk-scientists, theocrats, revisionists or misogynists.  They just pander to those groups for votes.  And those groups vote for Republicans because a) Republicans pander to them and b) Republican policies more closely comport with said groups’ respective ideologies than other parties.

Additionally, Fox News has carved out a media niche specializing in dog-whistling for conservative votes based on the neuroses listed above.  For their part, Republican Party leadership say nary a discouraging word no matter how Fox News skews and screws with news events to keep their far-right audience in a “let-me-at-that-ballot” lather.

These are the people you court, GOP.  These are the people you incense and suborn to carry you on their shoulders to the seats of power.  And you do it by feeding their fever dreams, by misleading, by propagandizing, by denying facts and revising history . . . literally anything to secure a vote.

So, when your proxies inevitably embarrass you in public, by hurling their peculiar beliefs thither and yon, you’re bound to get some of that on you.

Did anyone in the Republican Party establishment really believe that it was a good idea to hold up Cliven Bundy as a paragon of American civic virtue?  But did anyone in that same Republican Party establishment try, even a little bit, to temper the debate?  Bundy is a scofflaw moocher, a “taker” to use your vernacular, spouting sedition to a gang of heavily armed people with nothing better to do than lock and load, jump in the F-150 and light out cross-country to play “my gun’s bigger than yours” with a couple of federal agents doing their job. [Maybe someone should teach them to pick cotton?]

Cliven Bundy should have had his welfare cows seized long ago.  The government was a lot less patient with me, I can attest, when $300 of income tax was in dispute.  And don’t you have to wonder a little about the sanity of a guy who does owe the government a boatload of money and decides, instead of laying low, he’d like to wax philosophical for national TV cameras?

Does anyone in the Republican Party establishment honestly think that if a bunch of “lefty” students holed up on the UNLV campus to protest income inequality that Bundy’s Vigilantes would ride to the rescue if the cops tried to round up the kids?  You own this nightmare, Republicans.  You are the ones who have tried to set Americans against their own government, fiddled while your surrogates fanned that flame, and you will own the consequences.

There are disgruntled, alienated, hateful and, in some cases, downright delusional people on the fringe of American society, today, who are itching for a fight.  A big fight.  And this old wingnut, with the help of Fox News, the odd attention-seeking Republican presidential hopeful, and his own GOP senator came awfully close to setting some of them off.  Those media pundits idling through yet another protracted Congressional recess, and similarly idling politicians were more than happy to jump in front of a camera and endorse who Cliven Bundy was and what he was doing long before anyone really knew a whole lot about either. 

But who cares, right? because the base LOVES it.

And, for better or worse, this kind of stuff goes around the world in 30 seconds these days— every mis-spoken word in a Town Hall meeting, every red-meat campaign promise, every incendiary resolution read into the Congressional Record, every fringe rant in a statehouse floor fight is examined and amplified and cannot be so easily disowned.

The blessings of technology mean that we must be more vigilant, more careful, perhaps even more truthful in politics because the stakes have never been higher for the wellbeing of our country.

Bob Dole, an elder statesman of your own party, Mr Spicer, recently had this to say about your own organization, the Republican National Committee:

I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says closed for repairs.

I agree with Mr Dole.  You have lost control of your party.  The inmates now run the asylum.  You, and your party’s leadership, Mr Spicer, have allowed your formerly honorable political party to be hijacked by fringe elements and extremists. 

And you have not only abetted the hijacking, you’ve celebrated it.  So, you’ll have to forgive the sane people of this country if we have a hard time buying the idea that your party still deserves our respect, or even the benefit of the doubt.

You built it, remember?  It’s yours to repair.  Or burn down.

rhube said: {{{hugs}}} I just assumed it was EG. Sorry ppl are giving you shit for this. I can’t imagine they don’t know you run two blogs.

Thank you.  Just to clarify, nobody was giving me crap for it, I just feel bad whenever I make a mistake like that. :\ Like, I should pay more attention and it shows I’m inattentive and unreliable.

*somebody talks to me, says something nice*

Me: Awww that’s really nice.  I want to tell them how much I appreciate it.  I don’t know what to say.  I’m really scared.  Don’t screw this up.  Um… let’s answer it later after I’ve thought what to say.

*days pass*

Me: Oh crap, I haven’t answered it yet.  They must think I hate them.  If I respond now they’ll think I don’t care much about them because it took me so long to answer. :( 

Other people make mistakes.

Me: Anybody can make mistakes.  It was an accident.

Ami makes mistakes.

Me: Oh my god now everybody will think I’m not as cool as they thought.  They’ll realize how undisciplined and uncaring I am.  They’ll think I don’t care enough about them/the issue/the blog to check things, and that I’m untrustworthy and unreliable.  I’m going to lose all my friends because they’ll be scared of what else is lying beneath the surface of that mistake, and how much I could hurt them with my carelessness/awfulness.

From the New York Times:

Although the troubles have intensified this semester, they began when the college announced “Fun Home,” a memoir with themes that include sexual orientation, as the selection for a voluntary book experience last fall. For $52,000, the college bought thousands of copies of the book to distribute and arranged for its author, Alison Bechdel, to speak here.

But the selection angered religious conservatives. The Palmetto Family Council condemned the work as “pornographic,” a characterization its author disputes, and a state legislator, Garry R. Smith, ultimately led an effort to cut the college’s state budget allocation by $52,000. (Mr. Smith also targeted the University of South Carolina Upstate for a smaller reduction because of a different book selection.)

“Fun Home” is a critically-praised memoir by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which has also been made into a successful off-Broadway musical. In response to the controversy, the cast of the musical reunited for two performances in Charleston. But Republicans in South Carolina don’t believe that anyone should put on a play they don’t approve of:

Monday night’s staging of “Fun Home” — which was held off campus but hosted by the college — ratcheted up the confrontation further. Bright and several other state legislators said they viewed the event as a deliberate provocation and said they would seek to cut more funds from the school as a result. The earlier cuts, which were approved by the state House, are still under consideration by the state’s Senate.

Needless to say, this is anti-gay bigotry. And this is censorship. And this is the modern GOP.

“"I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being. Therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people don’t know that. Every time I tried to go into a public place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, “He’s a human being; don’t stop him." That bill was for the white man, not for me. I knew I could vote all the time and that it wasn’t a privilege but my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill to tell white people, “When a black man comes to vote, don’t bother him." That bill was for white people. I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapable of allowing me to live where I want. You need a civil rights bill, not me."”

-

Stokely Carmichael, setting shit straight and placing responsibility for the “race problem” squarely where it belongs. 

 

The very language in regards to civil rights in this country is embedded in white supremacist ideology. How many of us have been duped into accepting the fallacious notion that whites have “given” blacks rights? The notion itself presupposes black inferiority while failing to acknowledge the root problem: white racism. Change the language, change your mind.

(via chancellorschamber)

I never promised you a rose garden list of alphabetized pagan qualities you’d find on a “suggested” list, did I?  As I may have mentioned, I was raised by an atheist mother and a father who loved any religion that confirmed his fondest bits of bigotry.  He liked, but never joined, the Mormons — so take your cue from there.  He did pretty much force my mother and I to join, so I am still, doubtless, on some roll book in Salt Lake City.  And pssst — just for those folks horrified and offended over the Mormon habit of baptizing the dead by proxy, living in fear of the souls of dead relatives being presumably forced into some Mormon heaven?  Relax, while I find the process offensive — I also find it pointless, ok?  And this is why: my enforced term as a good little Mormon girl in training to be a good little Mormon wife proved to be quite an inoculation. In other words, I was henceforth IMMUNE.

So, yes, for me “I” is for inoculation — something that insures I won’t be infected   fooled again.  Not that I was really fooled the first time; history alone told me the Book of Mormon was a lot of hooey, but since my nature is to seek reconciliation — and synthesis — in all things?  I tried to find value in what I was taught in my year in a Mormon community in Idaho.  I thought the way members of the community supported each other was admirable.  That is not snark.  They fed us through a winter and paid my father’s hospital bills for surgery when his gut went septic from some kind of infection.  And when he abandoned us, they did their best to find a man willing to take us all on — and they had one in the wings, but then dear old drunken dad came back, flush with cash robbed from his same-named son’s college fund, to sweep us all away.

But the insistence on dogmatic belief and nice staid little sex roles didn’t impress thirteen year old me.  And no, their insistence on tithing 10% to the Church did not bother me; I could see what they did with that money and fully approved.  And their ministers were UNpaid.  But the inoculation took hold with a vengeance because of how women were regarded.  I examined every religion I encountered thereafter with the same thoroughness they insisted upon in study of genealogy (uh-oh, an Indian in the woodpile!) and their storybooks about how it was divine love for a man to have many wives and tons of kids to order around. (Yes, the official church had quit DOING that, but how they LOVED their history of “prophets” and their harems of wives.)  I dove into each new faith I decided to “try on” with absolute intensity.  I wanted to know if they all shared the same fatal flaw, or if any had a worth beyond the flaw.

I was, for instance, at 18, the Catholic who led pre-Mass prayers to the Blessed Virgin.  That was easier than I thought; the idea of an even semi-divine feminine was such a magnetic draw for me.   To my absolute shock, there was a mystical connection I’d never believed possible.  But I never did find Jesus, not even behind the couch.  Only Mary, consoling and there like a warm shadow at my shoulder.  And she didn’t seem, to me, very interested in me being a doormat for a man OR a Church.

And at last, with Pope John Paul II telling me to listen to him over my conscience?  I had enough — Mary could stay or go, thanks, but I’d had enough of the increasingly shrill “Shut up and do as you are told.”  Inoculation still working, I walked away.

I studied Islam, and found way too much of that”shut up”, specially for women.  I was not the least interested in “submitting” thanks.  I read about Judaism and found some things there that were as sweetly delicious as potato pancakes made for my children at Hannukah.  But I found a lot of “shut up and do as you’re told” to women, too.  Deal breaker.  I looked for a religion with goddesses to match gods — Hinduism, but in practice, women were treated even more like chattel, goddesses notwithstanding.  Buddhism, with a lack of theistic trappings, sounded very appealing at first glance.  But when I looked where it was practiced, I found the same patriarchal pattern of treating women like crap.  Ah, blessed inoculation!

How could I ever espouse a religion or spirituality that eclipsed half the human race with male ego and machismo? Yes, the inoculation certainly took.  I know misogyny when I step in a steaming pile of it!  So, I go my less-than-merry way, unsure of the reality of what people call deities.  Mysticism is sometimes a pain in the ass — a tie you’d like to break, but it is a bondage of an ineffable reality too sweetly sublime to deny.  Something is out there awaiting my finding the path to take me to it.

I keep walking, roaming in the shade of historic spiritual forests, dabbling in liminality of life and death.  I wander, but I am not lost — and I have all my “shots” to keep me safe from some religious poison potions!

Tagged: feminism, misogyny, pagan blog project, rational, sexism, skepticism

the-unpopular-opinions:

Warning: this opinion is about rape

Hello, tumblr. My name is Jack. I’m 17 years old. As you can tell by my name, I’m a guy. And last year, I was raped by my older male neighbor. I’d put my tumblr URL here, but I’ve received some disturbing and frankly borderline triggering messages in regards to my rape, so I’d rather not risk it. I hope you understand.

Introductions aside…

When I first went through my rape, all the supportive posts on tumblr about male rape victims was very comforting. I’m glad people acknowledged that guys could be raped and that they matter.

However…

I eventually had much more bitter feelings towards these posts when I noticed a certain trend with them: almost all of them belittled female rape victims in some way.

Just because someone is talking about girls/women getting raped doesn’t mean you need to derail it with “guys get raped too!”. As long as nobody is denying that fact, it’s unnecessary. Not every conversation about rape has to include all demographics of rape victims. There can be posts about male rape victims only, and there can also be posts about female rape victims only. 

It seems like people also act like female rape victims have it soooo easy and should just shut the fuck up, because male rape victims have it harder. A lot of women in my life including my friends and my sister have been raped, and it isn’t any easier for them. They still are told they deserved it, not given the legal attention they deserve, and accused of being liars and bitter sluts. That doesn’t sound easy to me. Male rape victims deal with a unique stigma as well (as in, some people don’t even believe we can get raped, which sucks) but that doesn’t mean it’s much easier for the ladies.

And another thing, why can’t tumblr have one nice photoset or post about male rape victims without some dumbass commenting “Because they’re men, nobody will care” or “This won’t get nearly as many notes as the female version”? Uh, shut the fuck up? You’re ruining the powerful message behind the post. And also, rape isn’t a fucking contest.

This not only pisses me off because I care about women and female rape victims, but it also pisses me off because I get the impression these people don’t actually give a shit about male rape victims at all. They only seem to use us as a prop in arguments to derail discussions of feminism, female victims, etc. by using a vulnerable group who has been through a horrible trauma. How sick is that?

While it’s important to spread awareness of other types of rapes besides male on female, there’s way to do so without derailing or talking over other victims.

So, as a tl;dr to this opinion: if the only time you talk about male rape victims is in some way to downplay or belittle women getting raped, then fuck you. You are a piece of shit, nothing more.

We deserve to be mentioned in our own posts rather than in derailment, and women who have been deserve a chance to talk about their experience without someone derailing saying men can get raped too when nobody was denying that fact. Fuck. You.

"Obama owes me personally engraved invitation inscribed with gold letters explaining to me a reason to give a damn and show up and vote in 2014.  He owes every single Democratic voter the same.  Where's my invitation, Barry?"

--David Atkins, Hullabaloo

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

But it's also up to elected officials and other party leaders to provide people the incentive to get out and vote. When President Obama took office he acted to curb many of the evils the Bush Administration was actively perpetrating. But outside of providing somewhat less expensive health insurance to around 20 million people, there hasn't been a lot of action that directly impacted people's lives or even provided some sense of accountability and justice to the people who crashed the economy. When the President promised hope and change, people really expected their lives to get measurably and demonstrably better. If people don't think their lives are going to get better, they're not going to be likely to dash to the polling place between jobs, dinner and childcare to vote for down-ballot Democrats most of them are barely aware of.

If Democratic candidates want to win in 2014, they're going to have to give their base a reason to come out to vote beyond the notion that they're better than the GOP.

If after six years of Tea Party idiocy and 34 years of Reagan's morning in America you still need a reason to vote Democrat "beyond the notion that they're better than the GOP", you're the exact damn reason they're in control of the House right now and threatening to take the Senate.  You stayed home in 2010, and the GOP took over in a redistricting year.  Sure as hell didn't make Obama getting any of the things you wanted out of his easier, did it?

Oh, and Atkins, screw you for "providing somewhat less expensive health insurance to around 20 million people" as if that's a travesty of justice.  Ask those 20 million people if it matters to them and their families.

Here's my question.  You know now that 2010 happened because liberals stayed home and didn't vote.  Why the hell would you encourage that behavior a second time?

I see a lot being said about the new law in Georgia allowing concealed carry in schools, churches, and so forth.  I DO note, however, that to get that concealed carry permit — the people have to prove they are not ex-cons, and not under treatment for mental illness.  So, gee, is it “gun control” when gun lovers do it?

Why can’t people hear when “gun control” sorts such as me say “We are not all about banning all guns all the time, but certain weapons from certain people all the time.”  We are not all about “No guns ever, anywhere,” — but I’m sorry, who the hell needs an AK-47 to hunt deer?

And as for idiots who think they need that sort of thing and rocket launchers to “fight the government” — well, then, so we should scream about the holiness of the 2nd Amendment to protect seditionists and traitors then?  Cognitive dissonance, much?

Put that in perspective, ok?  Should we say it doesn’t matter if the Russians fly bombers over Europe, because, hey, they have a right to self-defense?  Even against Holland?   I mean, if THAT is going to be the argument, that anyone anywhere has the right to be ready to fight anyone else anyplace?  Well, we are all kind of fucked at that point.

Wake up, if it doesn’t make sense — shouting “U.S.A.” isn’t going to fix it.

Filed under: Life, Politics, PTSD Journals, War & No Peace Tagged: death, everytown-for-gun-safety, guns

Child of a blood relative of SEK’s roommate, upon learning that SEK’s not a blood relative of his roommate:

CHILD: So, do you have a last name?

SEK: No, actually, I was born without one.

CHILD: God let you do that?

SEK: Yes.

CHILD: Can you get him to take mine back? I want mine to be ‘Pouncing Cat.’

SEK: I’ll see what I can do.

Rape culture at Swarthmore College:

Sendrow is a 23-year-old brunette from Princeton, New Jersey. Her mother is from Mexico; her dad is a Jewish guy from the Bronx. She graduated last spring and works in health care in Washington, D.C. If 3,000 smiling Facebook photos are a good barometer, her four years at Swarthmore seem to have passed by untroubled. But in the midwinter of 2013, Sendrow says, she was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months. They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. “I basically said, ‘No, I don’t want to have sex with you.’ And then he said, ‘Okay, that’s fine’ and stopped,” Sendrow told me. “And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.”

A month and a half went by before Sendrow paid a visit to Tom Elverson, a drug and alcohol counselor at the school who also served as a liaison to its fraternities. A former frat brother at Swarthmore, he was jolly and bushy-mustached, a human mascot hired a decade earlier to smooth over alumni displeasure at the elimination of the football team, which his father had coached when Elverson was a student. When Sendrow told him she had been raped, he was incredulous. He told her the student was “such a good guy,” she says, and that she must be mistaken. Sendrow left his office in tears. She was so discouraged about going back to the administration that it wasn’t until several months later that she told a dean about the incident. Shortly thereafter, both students graduated, and Sendrow says she was never told the outcome of any investigation. (Elverson, whose position was eliminated by the school last summer, emailed me that he would answer the “great questions” I raised, but never wrote back.)

[...]

“Sally,” a 2012 graduate, said she was at a party in the fall of her freshman year when a fellow student cornered her, pushed her against a wall, and began to kiss her, before being pulled off by a mutual friend. Later that night, Sally awoke to find the same student had entered her room and climbed on top of her. She managed to push him off. When she told associate dean Myrt Westphal she wanted to pursue charges through the College Judiciary Committee (CJC), she says, Westphal asked her to say “harassment” rather than “assault,” and questioned whether she really wanted to “pit her two friends against each other.” Discouraged, Sally declined to pursue judiciary action. (Westphal, who retired last spring, declined to comment.)

Similar stories are legion. Jean Strout, a 2010 graduate now studying at Harvard Law School, says that after she was pinned to the ground by a naked, drunk rugby player, she spoke to a male administrator by phone, who told her it sounded like a “misunderstanding” and that she should ask the offender for an apology.

A recent graduate who now practices law in New York City says that when she told an administrator she had been raped, the administrator said, “You don’t sound as if you were raped,” and, noticing the cross hanging around her neck, asked if she wanted to see a priest. She declined to pursue the case.

Another student, according to the Title IX complaint, was raped in her dorm room by a friend of a friend with alcohol on his breath. Before he left the room, he looked at her, smiled, and told her, “It’s your word against mine.” After she recounted the incident in a long email to a member of the administration, her complaint says, school officials never got in touch with her or did any investigation.

As spokeswomen for fellow victims, Hope Brinn and Mia Ferguson often underemphasized their own stories, but they too joined the complaints. Ferguson says she was raped her freshman year in a dorm room by someone she considered a friend. After keeping it bottled up for a semester, she told two resident advisers who were required to report what she told them. They proceeded to tell no one. Hope Brinn says a male student burst into her room while she was naked and refused to leave, after having harassed her via text message. According to her Title IX complaint, when she reported the incident, an administrator laughed and told her she might consider having him write “knock” on his hand as a reminder before he goes out. (Brinn has also spoken about a separate incident of sexual assault.)

As Zuylen-Wood observes, The Obama administration has announced that it will seriously investigate all of the schools who are in violation of the Civil Rights Act if they fail to properly investigate sexual assault and harassment complaints. Hopefully it will follow through.

Melissa McEwan has a storify that’s well worth reading. It goes on to discuss a lot, but here’s how it begins:

While I love with so many hearts the return of warm weather, that also means the returns of people shouting at me from cars w/ open windows.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

Life While Fat means that even just existing in public necessitates weathering the random shouts of passers-by.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

@Shakestweetz and then enduring "do people really do that??" when you try to talk about it (thin folks: "that's never happened to me!")

— erin thunderball (@jortician) April 21, 2014

.@jortician That, and the ubiquitous: "How do you know they're yelling at YOU?" and various other challenges to my lived experience.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

It's a very particular kind of street harassment, which rarely gets identified thus. Just constant shouts from strangers at fat people.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014

Understand: I have poor hearing. I can follow conversations by concentrating on them, but voices that are distorted – like by a doppler effect – or unexpected are hard for me to make out.

So yeah, people yell stuff I can never understand at me from cars. Frequently. Not every time I’m out walking, but often enough so I don’t think twice about it when it does happen.

So I read these tweets and I’m like “wait, seriously? That doesn’t happen to everyone?”

Learn something new every day, I guess.

Although I don’t have any data, I would bet money that this sort of fat harassment happens more often to fat women than fat men, although clearly it happens to both.

UPDATE: Paul Campos relates a story a fat woman told him:

Let me tell you a story — just one of many. One summer, when my twins were about three, they were in a little wading pool in my front yard, and I was sitting on my front porch steps watching them and enjoying the beautiful day. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. A white pickup truck with several guys in it drove by. The truck circled the block, and on the second pass it slowed down and the man in the passenger seat hurled a bottle at me, shouting, “Go back inside where you belong, you fat fucking bitch!” The bottle shattered on the walk, sending glass flying everywhere. Fearing for my children I jumped up and grabbed them, rushing for the house. They were OK, but I cried for days thinking that someone was willing to endanger two babies just for the chance to humiliate me.

Aaargh.

Yes, high school students of Topeka, you win in your battle to show the First Lady of the United States her "place" and have successfully convinced her to not come to your graduation ceremony to give a speech celebrating the anniversary of Brown v Board of Education because her presence isn't an honor for 1,750 of you, but a disruption that you greatly resent because graduation is all about you.

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on March 30^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

There’s something missing from this story in Smithsonian magazine:

…since 2012, about 900 workers have died while working on  infrastructure in Qatar, in a building boom anticipating the World Cup…the Guardian reported that over 400 Nepalese migrant workers had already died at building sites.  Between 2010 and 2012 more than 700 workers from India lost their lives working on construction sites in Qatar, too.  A report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) says that if conditions don’t get any better, by the time the World Cup kicks off, at least 4,000 migrant workers will have died on the job…Workers described forced labour in 50C (122F) heat, employers who retain salaries for several months and passports making it impossible for them to leave and being denied free drinking water.  The investigation found sickness is endemic among workers living in overcrowded and insanitary conditions and hunger has been reported…According to the ITUC, there are already 1.2 million migrant workers in Qatar, and about a million more will probably pour into the country to help with construction. These are essentially slaves…

So we’ve got migrant workers being imported to do jobs locals don’t want, for employers who hold their passports, pay them too little and force them to live in poor conditions…hmm, what’s the missing bit?  Perhaps if we look at another recent story which gave me a similar feeling, we’ll be able to figure it out:

African artists hired by a Korean museum have been laboring under conditions “similar to indentured servitude”…They…were promised salaries of…minimum wage…and comfortable accommodations; instead, they were…forced to live in cold, mice-ridden rooms…[and] their salaries barely covered the cost of three meals a day…Their contracts stipulated three performances per day, but they were often forced to do four to six…

No, I still can’t quite put my finger on it.  How about this one?

…in India’s handmade carpet sector…workers toil 10 to 12 hours a day for six to seven days a week [in buildings that are] “cramped, filthy, unbearably hot and humid, imperiled with stray electrical wires and rusty nails…and contaminated with grime and mold”…Workers were subjected to frequent beatings and abuse and…suffered from…long-term health issues because of the grueling nature of the work…The average adult worker was paid between 21 and 24 cents an hour, while children were paid less…

And it doesn’t just happen in Asia:

A company within Sweden’s home care services…mistreated migrant workers by making false promises about work conditions…Hassan…said that his official job offer stated that he would be employed full-time by…TPS Vårdteam…with a monthly wage of 26,500 kronor ($4,000)…”In the beginning I didn’t get any work at all…Then I had to work seven days a week….[for] only…8,000 kronor per month”…

It’s in the US as well:

…more than 150 Jamaican guest workers who clean luxury Florida hotels and condos walked off the job…They…borrowed to pay recruitment fees of $2,000 to $2,500, counting on promises of full-time work and good housing.  But…the cleaning company packed as many as 15 people into unfurnished two-bedroom apartments, for…as much as $5,000 a month.  Charges for rent and required extras like $70 for a T-shirt “uniform” reduced the workers’ net pay to subminimum levels, sometimes even zero, and…paychecks repeatedly bounced…Guest workers…are tied by law to the employer who sponsored their visas, which means that if they are found too “difficult” for any reason…the employer can…deport them and blacklist them from receiving future work visas…

Maybe we can identify the absentee in this one involving McDonald’s:

…the visiting students each paid $3,000 or more…and were promised full-time employment; most received only a handful of hours a week…“Their employer is also their landlord,” said [an advocate]…“They’re earning sub-minimum wages, and then paying it back in rent” to share a room with up to seven co-workers…management required [them] to be on call twenty-four hours a day, ready to show up for work at thirty minutes’ notice…

I’m sure that by now, you’ve noticed what’s missing from all these stories: it’s the word “trafficking”.  In theory, “trafficking” supposedly means any worker recruited by fraud or coercion and held under exploitative conditions, but in reality the term is nearly always used to mean sex work or some other sex-related arrangement like surrogate motherhood or mail-order marriage.  When the employer is politically connected and the workers employed in providing entertainment, cheap goods or creature comforts for the bourgeois, you can be sure the word “trafficking” will not appear no matter how slavery-like the conditions nor how egregious the coercion.  But when sex is involved you can bet that workers’ agency will be denied, lurid details will be exaggerated, and employers will be demonized when they exist and fabricated when they don’t.  As I wrote in “Chauvinism”,

Nobody is concerned about immigrants doing awful work that middle-class people don’t want, so this is rarely labeled “trafficking” even when it clearly fits the standard definition; but because sex work offends both conservative Christian and radical feminist notions about “proper” female behavior, it is labeled “trafficking” even when it clearly involves neither travel nor coercion.

The saddest thing of all is that once the moral panic collapses and the public finds something else to obsess about rather than other people’s sex lives, the new fixation definitely won’t be the kind of evil described in the items above.  If people don’t even care about the exploitation of migrant workers in the midst of hysteria supposedly about that very subject, it hardly seems likely they’ll care once the topic becomes an obsolete fad.

If they come for me in the morning, they’re coming for you that night.  –  Monica Jones

Eleven months ago Monica Jones, a transgender sex worker, activist and social work student at Arizona State, was arrested for “manifestation of prostitution”, Arizona’s label for the tyrannical laws which allow cops virtually everywhere in the United States to arrest any woman they like by claiming she “acted like a whore”.  The tag “Lack of Evidence” is full of such instances, and I synopsized a few of them in “Be Careful Who You Rape”:

…When prostitution is criminalized to any degree, women who carry condoms, answer personal ads, wear sexy lingerie, go without lingerie, fail forced “virginity tests”, ask a cop if he’s a cop, “act sexy”, go out after dark without a male chaperone, or even just “look like a prostitute” are regularly arrested and charged with having sex for a reason some people don’t like…

Though there have been a few cases of such ridiculously-flimsy charges being struck down lately, those were not in Phoenix, Arizona, a city so addicted to authoritarianism it has kept Joe Arpaio in office for 22 years.  Jones argued in class with Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, the ethically-retarded academic paid by Arizona prohibitionists to produce bogus “studies” for them; she was thrown out of a previous “diversion” program for refuting the lies and exaggerations the propagandists were trying to drum into their victims; she has prominently protested the blatantly-unconstitutional Project ROSE; and she has posted Backpage ads to warn sex workers about the stings held to force women into the program.  In other words, she was a known enemy of the Phoenix prohibitionist machine and ventured into public (i.e. cop territory) during a time she knew they were out hunting; it was a virtual certainty she would be arrested.  And though many activists expressed shock and surprise when she was found guilty eleven days ago, I would’ve been extremely surprised had she not been.  The American courts are not about justice; they are about providing the appearance of due process while grinding up every single person cops and prosecutors decide to target, and the few who escape are like the bits of meat that are occasionally hurled free from a mechanized abattoir and go flying to the floor: not totally chopped to pieces, but not the same as when they went in, either.

As is typical in emotionally-charged legal cases, there are a lot of rumors and half-truths flying about; I therefore think it would behoove us to set the record straight on a few matters.  First:  the statement which I’ve heard more than any other since this whole thing started is that Monica was arrested for “walking while trans”, in other words unjustly profiled as a sex worker based on nothing other than her transgender status.  But while it’s true that cops do often wrongly assume transgender women are all hookers and harass them on that basis, this was obviously not what happened in Monica’s case; as I explained above, she was a persistent gadfly and a thorn in the prohibitionists’ side, and would no doubt have been targeted for that reason no matter what her race or gender status.  Furthermore, it’s a bit disingenuous to say she was wrongly profiled when she is in fact a “known prostitute” and a vocal member of SWOP Phoenix.  Her arrest was wrongful because laws against sex workers are wrongful, not because she was misidentified.

Next, as I pointed out above, the US court system is not designed to produce justice but to produce prisoners, and while there are some wise jurists out there who really do care about justice, they generally aren’t judging misdemeanor cases in municipal courts.  The typical judge at this level isn’t a brilliant doctor of the law carefully considering questions of fairness and constitutionality; he’s a fair-to-middling lawyer who graduated in the bottom half of his class and is more concerned with what he’s going to have for lunch than whether a law under which someone’s been charged is just or moral.  Such a man isn’t interested in rocking the boat; he pretends to believe whatever lies cops vomit out, decides whether the defendant probably did whatever it was, then reads out whatever’s on the little idiot-proof sentencing chart the ruling legislature insists he follow.  Monica admitted to grabbing the cop’s crotch (for some unfathomable reason); that alone was enough to convict her under the statute even if Hizzoner had been disinclined to play the stooge for lying cops that day.

Finally, given the circumstances as explained above, the judge was actually fairly lenient by Conviction, Inc standards.  In recent years the judicial branch’s power has been eroded very badly by both the legislative and executive branches; plea-bargaining and universal criminality have handed control of the proceedings to the prosecutor (executive branch), and mandatory sentencing has allowed the legislative branch to usurp much of the remaining judicial authority.  Having declared Monica guilty, the judge was bound by law to sentence her to at least 30 days, which is what he gave her.  The suggested fine was $2500, but he had the authority to reduce it for hardship; he lowered it to $150.  Arizona’s fascist prison system also demands a prisoner pay for his own abduction and mistreatment, to the tune of $2540.70 for 30 days; the judge used a loophole (because Monica is a student) to lower that to $350.  Moreover, he deferred the sentence until the end of May so as not to interrupt her school semester, and also said he would stay the sentence if she filed an appeal within the required 14 days.  If she does go to jail, it will undoubtedly be the men’s jail because this is, once again, Arizona we’re talking about; however, she would be placed in solitary confinement for the duration as she was last time and would therefore “only” be in danger of rape or assault from the guards rather than the other prisoners as well.

It goes without saying that I’m neither defending the conviction itself, nor the caging of human beings on the say-so of subhuman thugs.  I’m merely pointing out that it’s foolish to expect a bean-counter to paint pictures or compose violin concertos when he is paid to (and is indeed only qualified to) count beans, and that it’s naïve in the extreme to expect anything but tyranny from the worst pocket dictatorship in America.   If Monica can find lawyers to handle her appeal pro bono (or nearly so), she has a chance of winning based on a judgment of the law itself at the appellate level, but there is no guarantee of that; cases like this can work their way all the way up to the Supreme Court if the losing party has enough time and money to pursue it that far.  Clearly, neither Monica herself nor SWOP has that kind of resources, and I’m not really sanguine about anyone else (like the ACLU) investing in it.  The case has, however, drawn international attention and is even being watched by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights; perhaps some deep-pocketed organization will finally decide to stop dodging the issue and commit itself to sex worker rights by challenging the laws that let cops arrest virtually any woman they like without any valid reason at all.

A book is like a child:  it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.  –  George Bernard Shaw

Last Thursday I had my very first book signing at the Healthy Rhythm Community Art Gallery in Fairfield, Texas.  I had met the owner, Ken Vail, at the Southern Harm Reduction Conference in New Orleans last December, and he had graciously invited me to hold my very first event there.  A reporter from the local newspaper interviewed me; she also reviewed my book last week and had some very kind things to say about it (I have already posted a quote on Amazon).  Following that was the actual event; the crowd was small, but Fairfield is a small town so I didn’t expect a multitude.  What was really nice about it was that it turned into a sort of discussion group, and one young couple stayed after for quite some time after the official end of the event, asking the sort of intelligent questions I love answering.

One of the things I’m looking forward to is doing a number of different types of events.  I expect that some of them will be large and some small like this one; in some I’ll perhaps share the stage with others, while other times I’ll be alone.  Some events will be more book-centered, while others will concentrate more on my blog or activism.  But the important thing in all of them – large or small, lucrative or not – is that I’ll be meeting people, giving them a chance to ask questions, busting myths and showing that sex workers are neither vampires nor victims, but just people like anyone else they might meet.  And as long as I get plenty of opportunities to do that, I will consider this tour a success.

Today, a bare majority of the Court upheld the constitutionality of a search that stopped a truck and found 30 pounds of marijuana. The sole basis for the search was the uncorroborated tip of an anonymous informant. That sentence is nearly sufficient in itself to refute the majority’s case, but Breyer and (somewhat more surprisingly, Thomas, who spoke for the Court) joined the Court’s three consistent opponents of the Fourth Amendment to uphold the search. Scalia dissented for Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor.

There’s really not much I can add to the Scalia dissent, which demolishes the majority and leaves nothing standing. There is one paragraph I’d like to highlight, however. This is a little different than the typical drug case in that the possibility of impaired driving presents a immediate potential public safety risk that someone possessing drugs in their apartment does not. The police certainly do have the leeway to conduct traffic stops if they observe someone driving recklessly, and if they’re altered to reckless driving by even an uncorroborated informant, that’s usually OK. In this case, however, the police had nothing resembling reliable evidence of impaired driving either coming or going:

It gets worse. Not only, it turns out, did the police have no good reason at first to believe that Lorenzo was driving drunk, they had very good reason at last to know that he was not. The Court concludes that the tip, plus confirmation of the truck’s location, produced reasonable suspicion that the truck not only had been but still was barreling dangerously and drunkenly down Highway 1. Ante, at 8–10. In fact, alas, it was not, and the officers knew it. They followed the truck for five minutes, presumably to see if it was being operated recklessly. And that was good police work. While the anonymous tip was not enough to support a stop for drunken driving under Terry v. Ohio, it was surely enough to counsel observation of the truck to see if it was driven by a drunken driver. But the pesky little detail left out of the Court’s reasonable-suspicion equation is that, for the five minutes that the truck was being followed (five minutes is a long time), Lorenzo’s driving was irreproachable. Had the officers witnessed the petitioners violate a single traffic law, they would have had cause to stop the truck, and this case would not be before us. And not only was the driving irreproachable, but the State offers no evidence to suggest that the petitioners even did anything suspicious, such as suddenly slowing down, pulling off to the side of the road, or turning somewhere to see whether they were being followed. Consequently, the tip’s suggestion of ongoing drunken driving (if it could be deemed to suggest that) not only went uncorroborated; it was affirmatively undermined. [Some cites omitted]

That should settle it. Even under the probably-too-forgiving standards of Terry and its progeny, there was no “reasonable suspicion,” and the search is therefore unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment and the evidence collected should be suppressed. Scalia again:

The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity: (1) that anonymous 911 reports of traffic violations are reliable so long as they correctly identify a car and its location, and (2) that a single instance of careless or reckless driving necessarily supports a reasonable suspicion of drunkenness. All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, by the police. If the driver turns out not to be drunk (which will almost always be the case), the caller need fear no consequences, even if 911 knows his identity. After all, he never alleged drunkenness, but merely called in a traffic violation—and on that point his word is as good as his victim’s.

Drunken driving is a serious matter, but so is the loss of our freedom to come and go as we please without police interference. To prevent and detect murder we do not allow searches without probable cause or targeted Terry stops without reasonable suspicion. We should not do so for drunken driving either. After today’s opinion all of us on the road, and not just drug dealers, are at risk of having our freedom of movement curtailed on suspicion of drunkenness, based upon a phone tip, true or false, of a single instance of careless driving. I respectfully dissent.

In my colleagues' view, examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.

And that's the lynchpin of the argument: in 2014, race still matters.  Chief Justice Roberts has told us multiple times that it simply does not.

The dissent states that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.” ... But it is not “out of touch with reality” to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and—if so—that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to “wish away, rather than confront” racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.

Unless the balance of the Supreme Court changes, we're only a couple of major cases away from a 5-4 decision ending affirmative action in this country.  Maybe after that point, Roberts will discover race still matters.

Because it'll sure matter to those of us who aren't white. The Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Martin:

The tyranny of the majority won. Access to college for African Americans and Latinos suffered another major defeat. Instead of surveying the destruction of opportunity that is occurring at this very hour, the Supreme Court cowered behind a purist reading of the Constitution and upheld the 2006 decision by Michigan voters to ban affirmative action in higher-education admissions.

The decision upheld the right of white voters to continue to roll back the clock.

The ballot initiative was sought by anti-affirmative action forces still smarting over the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision that upheld the use of race as one of many diversity factors at the University of Michigan law school. Michigan is 80 percent white, and ban supporters undoubtedly assumed they could tap into enough resentment over affirmative action to win.

They were correct. The initiative won with 58 percent of the vote. In a CNN exit poll, Proposal 2, as it was called, received 64 percent white support (including 70 percent among white men). It mattered not that African Americans voted against the proposal by nearly a 9 to 1 margin.

Unfollow me if you want to, but I am sick of anyone who is white telling anyone who isn't that racism is over and that we should just get over it already.

The first of three parts of a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake consumed eight years of translator Dai Congrong’s life. The almost unreadable book proves even more difficult to translate because of the many puns and layered meanings, explains MobyLives:

The novel has been deemed “untranslatable” and the translations that are successful tend to be consuming: the Polish version took ten years to finish, the French version thirty years, and the Japanese version took three separate translators after the first disappeared and the second went mad.

Still, if Congrong can keep at her current pace, she’ll finish the translation in less time than the French required.

Related Posts:

• Is There Too Much Translation?
• Gary Shteyngart Won’t Blurb Your Book
• The Tale of Two Community Bookstores
• Amazon Guilt
• Jay Gatsby Invades Poland

moth866643999642311568:

i found this series of stock images that are supposed to be of bullying but they just look really gay to me

Evangelicals probably buy these stock images in bulk and put them in their pamphlets.  LOOK ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF LESBIAN RECRUITING.

No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
-  Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

As you’ve probably noticed, I’m really extremely busy these days; between doing this blog, working on commissioned articles, giving interviews and going on my book tour I barely have time for real life.  We’re also hoping that by the end of this year, my husband will be able to spend a lot more time at home; that’s a good thing, but it does decrease the number of hours per week I can spend writing.  As I explained in “Public Conversation”, the changes I’ve already made have allowed me to shorten my email response time to a maximum of a week (by the end of last year, it was commonly two weeks or more).  But that’s not enough; I still spend over 72 hours a week researching and writing, and I need to get it down to 56 or below by the time I start the tour next month so I can have at least 6 hours a day average for tour activities, 6 for sleep and 4 for personal care (yes, I’ve planned it that closely).  By the end of the year, I need to get it down to about 40 hours a week.

Since I’ve instituted a new procedure to streamline my research time, I’m confident I can achieve these goals; something else has to give, though, and that’s unpaid guest writing (other than my long-term arrangement with Cliterati, because I republish those essays in my blog anyhow).  In the past, I was happy to do guest posts for others, and I still would be if time and energy permitted; unfortunately, figures don’t lie and the cold equations must be obeyed.  I had to find some way to save time, and I think this will affect fewer readers than any other change I could make.  I’m still available for interviews without charge; an interview takes far less brainpower than an essay, and is done in an hour or so rather than three or more for an essay.  And I’m still available for commissioned articles, of course, nor am I too persnickety about the word rate (so don’t feel bad if you can’t pay a lot).  The important thing is justifying the time and energy in my mind, and even if I get only $100 plus really good exposure, that’s totally worth it to me.  As regular readers well know I’m a creature of habit and don’t like to change things without good reason.  But as I’ve explained when I’ve made other changes in the past, sometimes they’re necessary for me to maintain both the pace and quality y’all expect from me.

When I stopped working outside the home for pay, back at summer’s end in 2003, and began being totally immersed in a workplace that NEVER granted a day off — my home and gardens, not to mention the Labyrinth I built that year, I soon realized it was going to kick my ass completely.

So, I began taking a day off once per week. I could goof off, do nothing but pet care — watch movies, read books, nap, do crafts. I chose Monday. It was awesome. And of course, yes, there were Mondays life took over and I didn’t get a day off that week. But mostly, for my own health — mental and physical — I took that day.

Well, until recently. It dawned on me just today that for the last six months, more or less, I’ve not taken my day off. The last seven weeks in particular have been CRAZY busy and with virtually no time off and so stressed out I am barely sleeping.

Today? I’m supposed to complete the round off post-kitchen rebuild cleaning in the large bathroom. You know what? Fuck that. That bathtub will wait till Tuesday. Monday off is re-instituted right now!

Tagged: healing

A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

So wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1774, foreshadowing his more famous quote about the “inherent and inalienable rights” of men, in the Declaration of Independence.

To me, what Jefferson meant by that is that we, as humans and citizens of a great free democracy have certain inherent rights that are ours by the very nature of our existence and these rights are not dependent upon the charity of ministers, politicians and judges.

Yet, for the most part, the realm of criminal law has continually drifted away from this Jeffersonian concept of “self-executing” rights and toward a more passive, dormant view of individual liberties and freedoms that need to be invoked to be awakened into performing their duties as our guardians. The right to remain silent now only applies if you break that silence and state out loud that you wish to remain quiet. The right to an attorney has to be unequivocally and explicitly invoked. The police cannot enter your home without a warrant except when they can and may do so even over your objection.

There is, then, a new generation of jurisprudence that has turned our jurists into something akin to DMV clerks whose primary function is to determine whether the forms have been filled out correctly.

But for those that don’t practice criminal law, let President Jefferson remind you why you should care:

What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.

It is thus critical that each and every one of us is aware of the ministerial treatment given to our rights. And the primary way in which courts have done that is to make the defense attorney the steward of those rights and placed her in the driver’s seat.

Of course that makes sense, you will no doubt say. The attorney is in the best position to safeguard those rights and to make sure that they are exercised as needed. True, but when you change the very nature of the rights to make them not self-executing, but rather dormant, awaiting the utterance of an incantation by a defense attorney, is when you strip the judge of her traditional role of overseer of due process and justice and hand that responsibility to the defense attorney.  By shifting the responsibility of ensuring a fair trial to the defense attorney instead of the judge, you’re making jurists nothing more than glorified legal clerks.

The logical outcome of such a restrictive view of appellate review is that courts are confronted with a scenario where an obviously illegal and unconstitutional act occurs during a trial and because the defense attorney fails to recognize it, relief must be unjustly denied.

This corner that our supreme court has painted itself into was squarely before it this week in State v. Raquann Davis [PDF]. In Davis, the trial court clearly instructed the jury contrary to the law, to the detriment of Davis. His lawyer, however, did not object to this faulty instruction. Under our existing jurisprudence, this obviously illegal conviction is required to remain.

Hiding behind the plea of saving trial judges from “trial by ambuscade,” our appellate jurisprudence, as concretized and heartily endorsed in the 2011 decision of State v. Marvin Kitchens, has turned into more of an exercise in officious form checking than an examination of the fundamental fairness of a criminal trial whereby the liberty of an individual has been taken away.

The premise is simply this: an appellate court will not review a claim of error — evidentiary or constitutional — if it was expressly or impliedly waived in the trial court. Every decision made by a defense attorney during the course of a trial is deemed to be a deliberate tactical decision — not only a decision to ask for the thing sought, but also a decision to not ask for everything else.

You can see the obvious problems with this: it is humanly impossible to be that prepared. By making the rights of an individual dependent on the imagined and unrealistic tactical decisions of overwhelmed trial attorneys — and all attorneys are overwhelmed during trial – the courts have, in essence, created a presumption against appellate review.

What is not as immediately apparent, however, is that this philosophy makes the availability of rights to individual citizens dependent on the skills of a particular attorney and the time that she has to devote to preparing for trial in any case. This implicitly perpetuates the notion that those with money are bound to get the full benefit of their individual rights, while those who do not will have to rely on attorneys who they don’t get to choose or those who aren’t as qualified or who are overworked and thus those individuals run the risk of being punished.

Making rights dependent on the ability of the lawyers is making the rights optional.

It seems that perhaps the court in State v. Davis might have gotten the hint that its crusade has gone too far, but unfortunately that pronouncement remains for another day. In order to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that it had walked itself into an entirely illogical and altogether foreseeable application of its doctrine, the majority found a way to avoid confronting the issue head on with the assistance of some dubious reasoning.

Justice Richard Palmer, in a blistering concurrence the likes of which haven’t been seen since the retirement of Justice Robert Berdon at the turn of the century, points out this very hypocrisy in the majority opinion in Davis and urges a rejection of the principle endorsed in Kitchens.

Kitchens requires us to presume, first, that counsel thought of every possible claim, from the most meritorious to the most frivolous, and everything in between, and, second, that, upon due consideration of each and every one of those claims, counsel decided to abandon them all, presumably for strategic reasons,” Palmer write. “Because it is obviously impossible for any defense attorney, or any team of defense attorneys, to conceive of all potential claims, whether meritorious or not, it is clear that Kitchens is predicated on a palpably unrealistic assumption.

But Justice Palmer himself shouldn’t be let off so easily, for he authored the majority opinion last year in State v. Jorge P., a case that functionally employs the same logic as Kitchens. In Jorge P., the defense attorney objected at trial to the testimony of a pediatrician who specializes in child abuse on the grounds that the pediatrician was going to offer opinion testimony as to the ultimate issue in the case. The court deemed that the issue was not preserved for appellate review despite conceding that one interpretation was that the defense attorney objected on the grounds that the pediatrician’s testimony would constitute vouching for the complainants.

As a result, no appellate court in Connecticut reviewed Jorge P.’s real claim of error because his attorney failed to utter the magic words in a precise order to the liking of a reviewing court. Thus, the question of whether a trial court impermissibly let a witness testify as to the ultimate issue for the jury went unexamined.

And therein lies the problem with this change in approach: judges have gone from guardians of justice and gatekeepers of evidence to passive observers of a trial; no more than spectators who are called upon to call balls and strikes from time to time. Meanwhile, trials have been allowed to occur unscrutinized, unexaminated and potentially rife with error.

Why are we content to see judges relegated to the role of umpires? Wouldn’t justice be better served if our judges returned to judging the enforcement of our “inherent and inalienable rights”? Can rights that are not self-executing, but rather granted at the discretion of our “chief magistrates” be called rights at all?

---

The above originally appeared in the latest edition of the CT Law Tribune in a modified form and without the hyperlinks.

I suppose it takes a blatant misstep by a governmental agency to draw attention to any injustice and so it seems is the case with Jane Doe, the transgender self-identifying girl who has been transferred from DCF¹ custody to the adult women’s prison by way of the men’s young-adult prison.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that this attention is being paid to the state of our juvenile detention facilities, our prisons and their inadequacy in meeting the needs of troubled teenagers, but just remember as you read about Jane Doe and her predicament that there is probably no substantial difference between her story and that of hundreds of other teenagers in state custody other than her gender identity.

Her story, unfortunately for us in the business, is depressingly familiar:

[She] first entered [state care] at age 5 because her family members were incarcerated, sexually abusive or addicted to drugs.

…

Jane reports that by age 15, she had been raped dozens of times (including at facilities she was sent to live at by DCF), sold for sex, beaten up and addicted to crack cocaine.

Her behavior eventually turned violent, as chronicled by DCF, who reports that the teenager “has an extensive history of violence,” including stabbing a female peer with a fork, four assaults or threats of assault while in a pre-trial detention facility in Bridgeport, and 10 assaults on staff while at the state’s psychiatric center for children.

Her affidavit [PDF] reads like any other teenager: depression, self-loathing and self-doubt, fear and, most of all, loneliness. But it also gives information about the conditions in which she is being held: 24 hour watch, confined to her cell 22-23 hours a day, no contact with peers, no contact with anyone, really.

And for all teenagers in juvenile detention, the specter of rape is omnipresent (more).

But Former Supreme Court Justice and DCF Commissioner Joette Katz oddly stands behind her decision:

“At the time,” Katz said, “I said, I’m running out of options. [The teen] engaged in some of her typical behaviors assaulting youth, grabbing hair, punching; but the one that really was the final straw was the one at the end of January.”

That’s when the teen got into a fight with staff. Katz said the teen fractured a staff member’s jaw and temporarily blinded her. The teen’s attorneys said there were only minor injuries, and no charges were filed.

Fairly typical behavior indeed. And behavior that routinely gets teenagers with mental health issues sent to detention facilities.

In some cases, the detention is accompanied by the institution of a criminal proceeding; in some like Jane Doe’s, it is not. Jane Doe got lucky. There are hundreds of teenagers who may have done exactly what she did and been charged with crimes. In Connecticut we already have too many crimes for which 14year olds are automatically treated as adults and sentences to harsh adult prison sentences. Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is a rare, one-off event.

And some of what you may think of as “crimes”, may actually just be what are called ‘status offenses’².

A new report [PDF] released by The Texas Public Policy Foundation chronicles our knee-jerk reaction to send juveniles to detention facilities for what should generally be regarded as ‘teenagery’. The study concludes (and be sure to check out the stats in the report):

The findings in this report suggest that, as a nation, while we have made significant progress in reducing confinement of status offenders, there remains a great deal of work to be done to shift away from confinement as the means of responding to these behaviors. Although the numbers of status offenders detained or committed to confinement have declined substantially since the year 2001, we estimated that nearly ten thousand youth each year are still being confined in the U.S. for offenses that would not be considered crimes if committed by an adult. Given the non-serious nature of those offenses and the fact that community based alternatives are much less-expensive, more-effective, and avoid the damage incarceration and other types of residential placement does to status offenders, the continued confinement of thousands of youth for status offending represents one of the major shortcomings of the nation’s juvenile justice systems.

When you combine that depressing picture with another recent report lambasting the prison system for becoming de facto mental hospitals, you begin to realize that we should be exceedingly careful when sending children to detention centers, much less correctional facilities.

According to the report, Connecticut doesn’t fare well: approximately 18% of our inmates have mental health issues and the last remaining mental hospital (CVH) has fewer inmates than the Garner Correctional Facility in Newtown. It also costs approximately 2.5 times more to care for mentally ill inmates than it does others.

As you can well imagine, prisons are no place for people with mental health issues, not only because mental health is rarely the focus of incarceration but also because we don’t fund proper treatment and they are ill-equipped to provide it. The consequences for the patients can be catastrophic:

The consequences of failing to treat mentally ill inmates are “usually harmful and sometimes tragic,” according to the report, which represents the first compilation of state laws and practices governing such treatment. Without intervention, symptoms worsen, leading inmates to behave in disruptive and bizarre ways and become vulnerable to being beaten, raped or otherwise victimized, mutilating themselves or committing suicide, the study found. Inmates whose symptoms are uncontrolled also are more likely to be confined in isolation or placed in restraints and, as a group, contribute to the overcrowding of prisons and jails and the increased cost of corrections for both states and counties.

Not only are the troubled and mentally ill disproportionately sent to solitary confinement, but they’re kept in jail longer because we don’t know what to do with them:

According to the report, mentally ill people tend to stay in jail longer than other prisoners because they aren’t likely to get bail and also because they are often chronic rule-breakers. For example, according to the report, in Florida’s Orange County jail most inmates stay an average of 26 days, but mentally ill inmates are there for 51 days on average. Even worse is New York’s Rikers Island jail, where last month a homeless, mentally ill veteran, who’d been arrested for sleeping on the roof of a public housing project, “basically baked to death” in his cell. The average stay for an inmate at Rikers is 42 days. Mentally ill inmates get stuck there for an average of 215 days.

So when we examine the plight of Jane Doe, we must remember that there are hundreds others out there who may not be as sympathetic, but who are just as discriminated against and we must make sure that our legislators and our administrators think long and hard before subjecting juveniles and teenagers to the harsh realities of the detention and prison worlds, even if it is for made-up crimes.

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No, of course violations of Brady v. Maryland aren’t a problem; no, of course, no prosecutor ever would intentionally hide evidence that tended to show that the person accused may not be guilty; no, of course, the system that we have is great.

And yet. Yet again.

Say hello to Dejuan Hammond, who was 5 days into a trial accused of murder. Hammond had just finished sitting through the testimony of his ex-girlfriend, Princess Bolin, who gave two interviews to police implicating him.

Or did she?

[Defense attorney] Shouse was cross-examining Princess Bolin then and mentioned the two statements she was known to have given: one in June 2011 and the second the following month.

[Lead Detective] Stalvey noted to [prosecutors] Jones Brown and Lesousky that there was a third statement, the one given in August 2009, just months after Sheckles’ murder.

Prosecutors scrambled during the weekend to track down the interview. Stalvey apparently found a copy in his truck Sunday, according to prosecutors’ statements in court Monday morning.

Lesousky said he also found a copy that had been overlooked. Prosecutors alerted the defense first thing Monday.

Yeah, he just happened to find a copy “in his truck”. This missing interview was her first statement to the police, in which she provided an alibi for the defendant. This is particularly relevant in this case, because:

The years-long court proceedings have been fraught with allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and witness coercion. Shouse has blamed Louisville Metro Police Detective Roy Stalvey and former prosecutor Tom Van De Rostyne.

To make matters even worse, Van De Rostyne ran for district attorney and lost to Wise, the guy who took over and then immediately fired Van De Rostyne, who, as these things go, now works for the state Attorney General’s office.

Van De Rostyne, whom everyone is quick to blame, can’t remember why the exculpatory report wasn’t disclosed. But of course, every report that pointed to Hammond was and then there’s this:

Shouse told [Judge] Bisig the information was withheld on purpose and pointed out that the evidence right before and after the interview were given to the defense but there is a blank spot where the Bolin interview should be.

So whoever “accidentally” “forgot” to turn over the exculpatory report, conveniently managed to fortuitously and totally by accident I swear pick out the one report that exonerated Hammond and then it somehow by magic! ended up in the Detective’s truck.

In. His. Fucking. Truck.

Now Commonwealth Attorney Wise is going to launch an investigation into all cases Van De Rostyne handled to make sure nothing else like this is out there. No doubt  he will be aided in this noble effort by Stalvey’s truck.

But if only this were all. If only. Meet Steven Pettway. Who’s he, you ask? He’s Hammond’s co-defendant, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 55 years in jail on the strength of Bolin’s testimony. Without the benefit of this exculpatory statement and magic of Stalvey’s truck. So while Hammond had the blind luck to get this report before he got convicted¹, Pettway will have to fight an uphill battle against the monsters of finality to get his conviction reversed.

Maybe he’ll just take an apology instead, since, you know, all of this is just one big misunderstanding?

 

So, after two and a half years here in the Haven, moves are underway to return to my marital home with my “Minotaur” husband.  He was originally so nicknamed because he looked like a bull — curling chestnut hair over his forehead, wide-set brown eyes, and massive shoulders.  But with time, it was clear that the savagery of that mythic being was also his — he boiled inside with old traumas and used almost all his energy holding it behind walls that isolated him from everyone in his life.  He could be as fearsome as the ancient abused child-monster, we never knew who was walking in the door by night.  But our hearts WERE entangled, along with all else in our lives. (BTW, that excellently evocative piece of art is only the beginning of Kate MacDowell’s wonders! Including this splendor!)

After over three and a half long lonesome decades, we feel a new seed of hope and love growing.  I fought, in recent weeks, to stifle my own fears; and then conceded defeat.  Acknowledging and confronting fears is better.  So, I edge my way.  A craft project invested with heart, hope, and magic went back to the House first.  A coffee tin crafted with favorite tarot images representing my odyssey of recovery and self-liberation sits above the Minotaur’s espresso machine, to remind me (and him) that I have a place in this home, too.

And with the finish of the kitchen, a few of the things I had in my wee Haven kitchen returned to the large version — mixing bowls with beehives, a pitcher and mug set from my son, a string of bee-painted bells by the newly wood-framed window.  I also took a vase shaped like a peacock, that evokes Hellene Hera — goddess of marriage (among other things), filled with freshly dried roses, back to the house. And after we spent almost four hours cleaning the living room, I returned ritual tools to the fireplace hearth there.  My hand-made antler and brazen-belled rattle, my feather wand for incense, and the Heart lamp that burns for Hestia and Hekate.  Hestia, a Hellene archetype of family life to me and Hekate — she whom I hail at each new moon as “Guide of Brides — keeper of the keys of the universe,” — I need to keep live those ideals in the forefront of my mind.  I return to my long-marital home like a new bride this August, a sort of un-celebrated third wedding.  The Minotaur and I wed in February in a Berlin city hall in 1977.  And again, in August in 1979, in a Catholic chapel in Massachusetts.  This August, a third observance of what I hope at last will be marriage.

I feel my way towards the summer rejoining.  This weekend, the kitchen window will be adorned with a water-glass to throw prismatic glamours on my walls, and with the beautiful bee-glass, gifted to me by a Colorado stained glass artist.  It once adorned the living room window, but will now look out on the roses and irises that will bloom in late spring.  Will it all be perfection, love and light?  Will my inner myth of the girl who did not run from the Minotaur come true?

Well, Will alone will tell, right?  My Will was shaken and driven into exile two and a half years ago.  But it has been nourished on solitude, music, peanut butter, mac & cheese, and romping with ferrets.  Will we enchant ourselves into joy?

 

Tagged: healing, marriage, ptsd

I was a child of the ’50′s.  I grew up watching “Father Know’s Best” and “Marcus Welby”…ok, fine, also the Drs. Kildare and Ben Casey.  The later two had fuck-all to do with medicine, so far as I was concerned.  But as it turns our neither “Daddy” (thank you, Sylvia Plath) nor Doctors know best every time.

In fact, sometimes they are full of shit.  And they have been told so, in at least one recent instance, by the FDA.  A dangerous (and I’m sure profitable) procedure for women is now very much UNrecommended as it spreads hidden uterine cancers in some cases.

In fact, it seems that docs run about a 5% chance of being wrong.  One in twenty patients gets a diagnosis that is wrong enough to do serious harm, possibly even killing some of them.

I’ve been wrongly diagnosed.  I was dismissed as “merely stressed” when I actually had five cervical vertebral disks bulging and pressuring and killing nerve tissue.  Because I kept arguing and insisting it WAS my neck and not tension as the problem, I finally did get the necessary care, but three years AFTER the injury when some of the damage was permanent.  My neurosurgeon was delighted to see me get 65% of strength and function back — he found that phenomenal; I still wanted to beat my GP bloody for blowing me off to save my insurance company money.

I was told by three different sets of doctors and health care providers that nothing was wrong with my daughter.  I could never convince them that there was an underlying mental issue causing her behavior; it was all written off as “sibling rivalry” or “a stage”.  She is an adult now, permanently estranged from the family and almost certainly bipolar or afflicted with a personality disorder — or both.  When I last saw her she was drinking and taking prescription drugs, and her behavior was dangerously out of control.

So, do, oh do, let me give you and the doctors the news: They are humans, those who err, and not gods.  TALK BACK!  Especially when the docs want to prescribe the makings of Big Pharma without considering the risks OR when they want to KEEP you on certain drugs for life.

Filed under: PTSD Journals Tagged: medicine, science