What? It’s not just Catholic priests?

The Penn State football scandal is just sickening. One of the coaching staff, Jerry Sandusky, has a long history of sexually abusing children, and the rest of the staff were apparently baffled about what to do. You report the incidents to the police, you dummies.

A Penn State graduate assistant coach shows up at the football locker room unexpectedly, and hears slapping noises from the shower. Here’s what the report said:

“As the graduate assistant put the sneakers in his locker, he looked into the shower. He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.”

The assistant fled in fear and confusion. Much the same way a janitor fled after allegedly witnessing Sandusky engaged in a sexual act in the showers with a “young boy” — Victim 8, later described in the report as being “between the ages of 11 and 13.”

Now it’s blowing up into a major scandal involving more than just the child rapist because all these clueless guys had evidence of child rape going on, and couldn’t figure out that this was both a crime and an offense against human decency, and that it demanded immediate strong action. Action more than just talking among themselves.

I’m getting the impression that this is what happens when you’ve got an off-balance, all-male culture (and I suspect that an all-female culture would also be off-balance and pathological in other ways). Both the Catholic priesthood and football coaching are male preserves, which serves to both attract individuals with odd proclivities and generates a kind of sexual tribalism that allows them to close ranks unthinkingly to protect their own.

Now I’m wondering even more about the military. I think the women who have struggled to crack into that field have a few stories about their refractory nature, too.

Last chance for Troy Davis

The state of Georgia is planning to execute a man for murder tomorrow, on the basis of a very shaky case in which most of the witnesses have recanted their testimony, and who have said the police pressured them into their initial accusations. I can’t make any judgments on whether he is guilty or innocent — the case has not been made strongly enough to justify an irrevocable and terminal decision. That is why it is criminally wrong for the state to kill him for this crime.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles is about to commit an injustice. Write or fax them at (404) 651-8502 now.

You can also send a message through Amnesty International. It’s a disgrace that our country is about to do something as horrific as what we condemn Islamic regimes for doing — a barbaric punishment on the most tenuous grounds.

(via RDF)

(Also on FtB)

More crime!

I don’t know whether to be pleased or dismayed at this story of an obsessed Minnesotan who turned to crime for petty revenge. Barry Ardolf got mad at his neighbors, the Kostolniks, because they reported him to the police for kissing their 4-year-old child on the mouth, which is already a bit creepy, and then he got really creepy.

The man, a Medtronic computer technician, downloaded a Wi-Fi hacking program to tear into his neighbors WEP encryption. Ardolf created a fake Myspace page as well as several fake emails for Matt Kostolnik. The hacker then posted child porn on the Myspace page and emailed the same child porn to co-workers at Kostolnik’s law office.

To top it all off, the Blaine hacker sent death threats to Vice President Joe Biden and other politicians from Kostolnik’s Yahoo account. This granted Kostolnik a visit from the secret service who had traced the emails back to his IP address. One of the emails told Biden, “I swear to God I’m going to kill you!”

The good news: Ardolf was caught, tried, and convicted. That’s one lunatic punished and off the streets.

The worrisome news: he got sentenced to 18 years in prison with a further 20 years of supervision and restriction from computer access. That seems excessive for a non-violent crime, and for an individual who seems to need psychological help. But then, read this story of another grudge-bearing, angry, vindictive man…do we wait until the guy crosses the line into physical violence?

(Hi, Dennis Markuze! For some reason, these stories made me think of you.)

It’s the petty stuff, going on and on

If you work for the Florida Museum of Natural History, someone doesn’t like you. For years, someone has been vandalizing the vehicles of workers at the museum.

It started small. Darwin Fish emblems would be ripped off cars a few times a year. Undeterred, the victims would simply replace them. Then bumper stickers were scraped off. Then notes containing prayers were left on cars. And now the vandal has apparently taken the next step: driving nails into tires. One researcher said she discovered a long nail had been deliberately forced into the side rim of her new tire, destroying it. Another researcher had both front tires ruined by long nails. These incidents all happened in a parking lot behind Bartram-Carr Hall.

Why hasn’t the local law enforcement installed a security camera or two to catch this cowardly miscreant in the act? This would be big news and the subject of public outrage if it happened, for instance, in a church parking lot.

What has happened to Amina?

Amina is the young Syrian woman who was threatened with rape by Islamist thugs. She disappeared a few days ago.

Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.

Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.

The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.

This is the world we live in, that such nightmares can occur. There has been one update, but no encouraging words: keep an eye on her blog for any news.

Trigger happy

As a young man, I often walked the streets of Seattle — it’s a great city, and wonderful to explore. But then, I never walked the streets while brown. That experience would be completely different.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This country is well on the way to becoming a petty tyranny, run by small-minded bullies. There is a crime caught in that video, but the culprit isn’t John T. Williams, native American woodcarver — it’s the abuse of power by Officer Ian Birk.

“He was really a nice guy. He went to church and everything.”

Those are ominous words. Brian and Shannon Gore have been arrested after police, investigating evidence that Shannon Gore had been selling stolen goods, found their 5 or 6 year old daughter caged in their trailer home, gnawing on her own skin.

Then they found the body of another child buried under a shed.

Fine upstanding members of the Christian community, they are.

I don’t consider every Christian to be a child-torturing murderer, but one thing I wish we could get across is that church attendance has nothing to do with morality or ethical behavior or goodness of any kind. So why do so many people consider a weekly session with a deranged, delusional ranter in a pulpit to be a seal of approval?

The heroic Andy Wakefield

The New York Times has a long profile of Andrew Wakefield. It’s not at all laudatory (read the last paragraph in particular), but it does include quotes from people who regard Wakefield as a hero…and even something more.

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”

Handley, of course, is a certifiable kook and an awful excuse for a human being. I am amused that he sees Wakefield as a Jesus, though; there doesn’t seem to be much self-sacrifice in Wakefield’s past or any prospect of martyrdom in his future. Jesus did say “suffer the little children,” though, which we can quotemine to apply appropriately to these promoters of childhood mortality.

After reading about callous fraud Wakefield, though, you need some context. How about this?

Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

“This is a lot of cases, to put it mildly. In past years we’ve had very few cases,” said Rebecca Martin, head of WHO’s office in Copenhagen for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization.

“There’s been a buildup of children who have not been immunized over the years,” she said. “It’s almost like a threshold. When you have enough people who have not been immunized, then outbreaks can occur.”

Wakefield’s body count is much higher than Jesus’s or Mandela’s.

Christian barbarians

The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have destroyed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.

I don’t want to hear another word from Catholics about my destruction of a mass-produced cracker. Their extremists use violence and the destruction of private property to deface a work of art in a museum.

It’s not even a particularly anti-religious work — that luminous golden glow is as reverential as the bloody, gory, suffering Christ figures mounted in Catholic churches all around the world.

i-fa3fdc6435bd30ca77f694ac633ad519-pisschrist.jpeg

Tragedy in Brazil

Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here’s the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you’ll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation:

First of all you should know that the impure can’t touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven’t been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with me, nor anything
impure touch my blood, no impure may have direct contact with a virgin
without permission, those that take care of my burial should take off all
my clothes, bathe me, dry me and wrap me while totally naked in a white cloth
which is in this building, in a bag I left in the first room of the first floor, after
wrapping me in this cloth you may put me in my coffin. If possible, I’d like
to be buried next to the grave where my mother sleeps, my mother is
called Dicéa Menezes de Oliveira and is buried in the Murundu cemetery.
I need the visit of a faithfull follower of God in my tomb at least once,
I need him to pray in front of it asking for God’s forgiveness for
what I did asking that when Jesus comes he will wake me up from the
sleep of death to life.

At least this savagery won’t be pinned on atheists, not this time. I don’t think we can blame religion, either, although his insanity clearly found expression in religious idiom — this guy was just malignantly deranged.

I hope no one is respecting the killer’s final wishes, and that his corpse is treated like dead rotting meat, nothing more, and buried with exactly the same treatment anyone else’s body would receive. And then may his name be forgotten.