Marissa Alexander, the woman who fired a warning shot and got slapped with a ridiculously excessive sentence, has had that verdict overturned and the state of Florida is now considering retrying her. The Black Skeptics are making a Call to Action : read their blog for the details.
Oh, man, I can’t endorse this action by Lakota and Dakota women. I think people have a right to do as they please (as long as it doesn’t harm others) on their private property — that goes for worshipping Jesus or Thor, desecrating Bibles, or even flying Nazi flags. (All bets are off if the Nazi sympathizers in Leith, ND, who were trying to stage a takeover of the local government, were flying that flag as representative of the city.)
So I can’t support seizing the Nazi flag and burning it, if it were someone else’s private property. But I still look at this picture and think…whoa, but they are badass.
Lakota and Dakota grandmothers captured the Nazi flag hanging in Leith, ND and burned it. Warriors!
Out there in awesomely racist Pennsylvania, Coatesville Area School District superintendent Richard Como and Director of Athletics and Activities Jim Donato were just swapping knee-slapping text messages back and forth, as rednecks are wont to do on phones they barely understand how to use. One catch is that they were using phones issued by their employers, and when their IT assistants went about upgrading their phones, they discovered the messages. And whoa, the messages…don’t read them unless you really want to learn just how racist and sexist state employees in Pennsylvania can be.
Como has retired. Donato has abruptly resigned.
It’s the ugly season, I guess.
The lesson is never learned. MPR is running a local story on a St Paul parish which was afflicted with another of those perambulating pedophile priests. Curtis Wehmeyer was a known sexual predator to the Catholic church, and they sent him to St Paul and didn’t tell any of the locals.
Curtis Wehmeyer kept his white 2006 camper parked outside Blessed Sacrament Church in St. Paul where he served for six years, three of them as pastor.
With the shades drawn, Wehmeyer could avoid the obligations of priestly life. He got drunk, smoked pot and looked at child pornography. He also lured to the camper two boys whose mother worked at the parish, plied them with alcohol, turned on pornography and told them to touch themselves. Several times, he touched one of the boys, according to police records.
The family trusted "Father Curt." As a priest, he had special powers. He could anoint the sick and baptize the young. Maybe, the mother hoped, he could inspire one of her sons to become a priest.
Why would anyone want their child to become a priest?
The St Paul/Minneapolis archdiocese had a “delegate for a safe environment” who actually wrote a letter concluding that he would “recommend against any disclosure in his workplace” — apparently, “safe environment” means safe for priests, because they did a remarkably good job covering for a nasty man who was exploiting the children of his parish. The coverup has been unambiguously documented in a memo posted at the link.
Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who was one of the earliest national whistleblowers on clergy sex abuse in the 1980s, said the memo shows that parents cannot trust the archdiocese to protect their children.
“Celibate clergy who aren’t trained in psychology are in no position to make that kind of a judgment call over someone like Wehmeyer,” he said.
Yet they all assume that their training in theology, or perhaps it is their imaginary direct line to a god, gives them the expertise to be counselors, psychologists, and therapists. It does not. These people are quacks and frauds who let a child molester have access to children for a decade — and even now they’re unapologetic about it.
I’m at a loss for words. Elyse was raped. Several times. In different ways.
The world sucks in so many ways, doesn’t it? And I get to float above all of it, buoyed by my wings of privilege.
So far we’ve had honest rape, legitimate rape, and now forcible beat-up rape. Oh, and let’s not forget forgotten rapes, although everybody else seems to have.
How about if we keep it simple? There’s sex without consent. That’s rape, period. It’s not somehow ameliorated if the target is drunk, unconscious, too young to know better, or if you were so kind as to not beat them up, tie them up, or kill them during the act.
It’s also still rape even if you intimidate the victim into silence, get social collusion to shame the victim, or otherwise suppress the evidence that you did it.
If you force someone to eat shit, it doesn’t matter if you put sugar sprinkles on it, or worse, if you put ground glass on a different piece of shit and try to excuse yourself because you didn’t make them eat that.
I presume you’ve all been following the Doonesbury story line this past week? If not, you can start here, with Sgt. Melissa giving a career day presentation to her former school:
Yeah, she’s tearing heads off now. With facts.
The two old guys at the end look familiar…or at least their behavior is. Quick, let’s silence the unpleasant truth!
Don’t be those guys.
It’s sad reading. Dabholkar was clearly a good man.
Dabholkar was hated by fundamentalists. But, being the peaceful, open-hearted and kind man he was, he was adored and loved by the people. Over the years, his popularity in Maharashtra grew and grew – together with public understanding of the importance of the rationalist fight.
Stories like this make me wonder. We can praise the dead and we can talk about the good he had done, but we don’t hear the conversations of the cowards who shot him in the back, and their defenders. I’d like to see what they have to say, because I’m confident that their words would be even more persuasive of the rightness of Dabholkar’s cause.
Dabholkar was a leader of the rationalist movement in India, who had been fighting for anti-superstition and anti-black magic bills. He was gunned down by cowards on motorcycles this morning — it was an assassination, plain and simple.
I’m passing along a brief summary I received this morning.
With deep distress and regret I have to report to you the assassination this morning of one of India’s most important Rationalist and Humanist leaders, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, founder of the Maharashtra Andha Shraddha Nirmulan Samiti or Maharashtra Forum for Elimination of Superstition. News is trickling in.
Inspired by the work of the great rationalist Basava Premanand, Dr. Dabholkar, a medical doctor, plunged into anti-superstition work in 1983 and built a concrete movement in his home state of Maharashtra. He was briefly Vice President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, a Member Organisation of IHEU.
A person of great charm and commitment to the cause,he refused to spread his activism outside Maharashtra because he was keen on first developing a branch of his organisation in each village of Maharashtra.
Organisational work of this kind made the movement a force to reckon with in Maharashtra state where he was spearheading the movement for a Bill against Witchcraft earlier called the Anti-Superstition Bill. The earlier Bill was passed in one house of the legislature but did not get through the second. His untiring efforts were successful, and the new Bill garnered the support of all the political parties except that of the Shiv Sena and the BJP. The ruling Congress party, however, did not take it up on the Business Agenda of the Legislature – many suspect that this was because of the upset it would cause to the orthodox. When passed, it would be a most potent weapon in the fight against superstitions which sap the life blood of Indian society.
Babu Gogineni
Rahul, a child in India, is covered with horrible burns (caution: large color picture of scarred baby at the top of the article.)
The infant was admitted to the hospital on Thursday with burn injuries. The baby had had four such episodes with the first one barely nine days after his birth and another more recent one three weeks ago.
“An episode may or may not recur. It’s like any other burn injury, with the likelihood of scars and secondary infections. Plastic surgery is also expected to be done. The relatives or parents have to always keep an eye on the baby. Matchsticks, crackers or anything that can catch fire should not be kept near him,” Dr Babu added.
A bucket of water and fire extinguisher have always to be kept ready near the baby’s bed.
Huh? He’s in the hospital. Why are they worried about more burns rather than treating the ones he’s got?
Because they are blaming the child’s injuries on Spontaneous Human Combustion. Recurring spontaneous human combustion, no less — the kid is claimed to just burst into flames with no discernible cause.
The paediatric intensive care unit at Kilpauk Medical College and Hospital on Friday received a number of curious visitors wanting a glimpse of three-month-old baby Rahul who suffers from Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC).
Only 200 cases have been seen such in the world over the past 300 years, the last reported case being in the United States in 2010.
“The body burns spontaneously due to combustible gases emitting from the patient’s body, without any external source of ignition,” said Dr R. Narayana Babu, head of the paediatrics department, Kilpauk Medical College. “Clothes and other things nearby that are inflammable may also catch fire.”
I have a suggestion. The bucket of water and fire extinguisher are silly. Instead, I recommend a hidden video camera…especially one that is carefully monitored whenever the parents come to visit.
