Jenny’s Pennies

Sorry about the lack of posts lately (to my approximately two readers); here’s a clue to what I’ve been doing.

So, remember this? Now, the investigation is apparently finished and…

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A bailiff who forgot about a woman locked in a courthouse holding cell and left her there for four days without food, water or access to a bathroom has been suspended for 30 days but will keep his job, officials said Wednesday.

Washington County Cpl. Jarrod Hankins acted without “intentional misconduct” when he left Adriana Torres-Flores in the 9 1/2-by-10 1/2-foot cell, Sheriff Tim Helder said.

Hankins “became busy and simply forgot” about the woman last Thursday, leaving her in the cell with only a jacket until Monday morning. (full story here)

Yep, that’s right. He’s getting off with a slap on the wrist. No criminal charges, no loss of job. For doing something that could have left a person dead.
Oh, no sorry, not a person, an “illegal immigrant from Mexico”. I’ll just second what Vox ex Machina said:

Just because someone has broken the law by crossing a border does not mean that it is okay to deprive them of basic human rights. If Adriana Torres-Flores had been Nancy Worthington, Nice White Lady Born and Raised in Little Rock, that bailiff would be facing charges right now. But immigrants are only people if they have the documents to prove it in today’s America, I guess.

The reason Adriana Torres-Flores appeared in court was because she was charged with selling pirated CDs. Oh yes, the terrible terrible crime of selling pirated CDs. So let’s compare here: Selling pirated CDs plus being an undocumented brown woman = okay to be deprived of basic human rights. “Forgetting” someone in a cell for four days without food, water or access to the bathroom = nah, not so bad, just suspension without pay and then back to business.

Wow. This is appalling.

A woman was locked for four days in a tiny holding cell in a northern Arkansas courthouse, forgotten by the authorities and left without food or water, the local Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.

The woman, Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, a longtime illegal immigrant from Mexico, slept on the floor with only a shoe for a pillow, and with nothing to drink except her own urine, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. There was no bathroom in the cell.

The chief deputy of the county’s sheriff’s department, Jay Cantrell, says there will be an investigation, but assures that the incident was an “honest mistake” without any malicious intent.

Honest mistake? Well, that may be true, but it’s still a mistake that should get your ass thoroughly fired. But there’s no mention of that idea in the article. Only that there will be an “investigation”. What’s there to investigate? The procedures and policies of the department, yes. But the fact that his gross negligence make the employee in question unfit for his job? That seems pretty clear to me. But of course, the victim was only an undocumented brown woman, so it wasn’t all that serious, right.

While we’re into the immigration issue in the USA:
You really should read this article in the New Yorker about Hutto, a former prison in Texas which is being used to detain immigrants and asylum seekers. Note: immigrants and asylum seekers. Not criminals. About half of the detainees in Hutto are children, many of them born in the USA. Hutto is run by CCA, the Correction Corporation of America, a huge private prison corporation. Their deal with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security pays them approximately $2.8 million dollars monthly for Hutto. There’s good money to be made from keeping unwanted noncriminal brown people locked up. Feministe has more on the subject.

Saturday, on International Women’s Day, Claes Schmidt/Sara Lund was supposed to give a lecture on diversity and the equal worth on all human beings, in a pentecostal church in southern Sweden. It was not a church event - a women’s association called Zonta had rented the church for the speech, which was titled “Women, men and all the rest of us” (Kvinnor, män och alla vi andra). But when the minister of the church, Magnus Jonegård, heard about the lecture, he stopped the meeting. You see, Claes Schmidt/Sara Lund is not two different persons. Claes Schmidt/Sara Lund is one person - a heterosexual married man, who sometimes dresses as a woman under the name Sara Lund, i.e. a transvestite, and who does lectures and stand up comedy about norms and values, gender and “normality” (website in English here).

The minister said that he had nothing against Claes/Sara in person (they never do - love the sinner, hate the sin, you know), but that the contents of the lecture was against the values and teachings of the church. You know, human dignity, loving thy neighbor as yourself, respect - all very unchristian concepts…

The church was of course under no obligation to rent out its premises to Zonta and Claes/Sara’s lecture. But when the Swedish good templar order IOGT expelled Åke Green (the Swedish minister who compared homosexuals to a cancer growth on the body of society, was tried for this in court and acquitted), because Green’s opinions did not correspond with their values and teachings, then the Swedish Christian right was up in arms about it and said that this was so intolerant and undemocratic.

As Tor of Antigayretorik said then: it would becoming to the right wing Christians if they would think a bit further before they start to scream about “intolerance” and “oppression”.

And over in the States, Dolores Huerta, human rights activist and well-regarded progressive leader, was supposed to give a talk to Catholic school children about her funding role in United Farm Workers and the importance of public service. But she was stopped, because of her views on reproductive choice (which had nothing to do with her talk whatsoever), which makes her an “unfit role model”. Yes, social justice, integrity, non-violence… all very unfitting concepts for the Christian right it seems.
(Via Feministe).

I have been too busy to post today, but I have to direct you to this little gem: A “psychiatrist” has diagnosed liberalism* as a mental disorder.
Well, it takes one to know one I guess.

Via Pam.

*Liberalism, as you know, has a slightly different meaning in the States than it does here.

So, over in US of A, republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has endorsed a proposed Colorado Human Life Amendment that would define personhood as a fertilized egg.

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement.

“With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value,” Huckabee said. “Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”

Burton’s initiative, if approved by voters in November, would extend state constitutional protections to every fertilized egg, guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law.

About 76 000 signatures are needed from registered Colorado voters to get the initiative on the ballot in the November election. From what I have understood from reading various comments on this, it will be possible to collect the signatures needed, but it is, thank god, highly unlikely that it will pass.

Nevertheless, the idea creates some interesting questions. Will the “fetus citizen” get a social security number (if it is a separate person, it needs to be identified somehow, right)? Will you be able to claim tax deductions for unborn children, just as you can for born ones? Does the “fetus citizen” need a passport if it leaves the country?

And of course, we somehow need to control women’s periods. Loads of of fertilized non-implanted eggs are flushed out with periods every year, without the woman ever knowing that she actually had that “person” in her. Like one of Pandagon’s commenters said: Tonight on CSI: “You only think it’s a bloody tampon. But there’s a fertilized fetus American in there - natural death or murder?…”

Pandagon has more, Feministing too.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has also commented on the “we need to breed”-nonsense that I wrote about yesterday. She also has a video from the Nation that summarizes the article.

And, today in Dagens Nyheter, the latest statistics from SCB (Swedish bureau of statistics), that show that more people are getting married and having children in Sweden than in previous years. Marriages are up 5 percent from 2006 (to the highest number since 1968, if you discount 1989 when a change in law regarding pensions for widows/widowers made many people drive into marriage-ville) and births are up 1.4 percent. In 2006, we had a excess of births over deaths of 15 692. So no, we are not going extinct. Of course, we don’t know how many of those births that are of the “right” babies (you know, blond, blue-eyed and born of God-fearing parents who only had sex to create that baby). But there it is.
If you’re into statistics, SCB has it all in English here.

Kathryn Joyce of The Nation has written a long article called “Missing: the ‘Right’ Babies” about the so called “demographic winter of Europe” - that the “West” is failing to produce enough babies and is in danger of becoming “out-breeded” by the Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring. From the article, a quote by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who quit the republican presidential race in the beginning of February:

“Europe is facing a demographic disaster” due to its modernized, secular culture, particularly its “weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for human life and eroded morality.”

This nativist “pro-family” movement is a mess of sexism and nationalism blended with religious extremism. For them, women’s liberation, contraception, gay rights, divorce, abortion, and secular humanism is to blame for the demise of Europe. The movement is spearheaded by American right-wing Christians, but has the backing of politicians and organizations in Europe. Even Muslims are sometimes allowed into the unholy alliance - when it comes to blocking rights for women and gays at the UN, these people are happy to gang up with Iran and Saudi Arabia. But when it comes to babies, they want the right babies - white babies.

But for this to work, women need to dedicate their lives and their wombs to this demographic warfare. And I have a suspicion that the way they want to do this is not by implementing true family-friendly policies: not by ending work place discrimination against women who have children, not by making life easier for single parents, not by improving child care and education, addressing poverty, and ensuring access to equal and affordable health care.

This quote by Paul Mero and Allan Carlson, writers of The Natural Family Manifesto, says it all:

“Above all, we believe in rights that recognize women’s unique gifts of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.”

If they want to get me behind the idea of preserving “Western culture” they will have to include in their definition of this culture all the progress that we have made in the last decades and that makes me happy to live in Sweden: the possibility for women to have careers outside the home or the schoolteacher/nurse option, the advancement in rights for gays and in how non-heterosexuals are viewed in the society, the right to choose one’s own religion or lack thereof, the ability to chose and control the number of children you have, and so on.

But this is not what they wish to preserve. To them, all the things which I see as good and positive developments, are a threat to “our way of life”. In their logic, by allowing freedom for women and freedom of (or from) religion, we are being overrun by people who treat their women miserably and advocates killing all the infidels. Funny how their world views coincide…

(Update: the article is also reprinted over at Alternet; it’s always interesting to read the comments section there.)

So, CIA has admitted that they have used the torture technique known as waterboarding. Of course, they emphasize that it was a long time ago, and only in three cases, and only on the really bad guys. Yeah right. And they admit it on “super Tuesday”, when the news are likely to drown in the flood of primary election frenzy. Hm.
And they “may” use it again.

John McCain, the republican presidential candidate who seems likely to win his party’s nomination, has spoken out against torture. McCain is a Vietnam veteran and was a prisoner of war for over five years. In November 2005, in a piece for Newsweek called “Torture’s terrible toll” he wrote:

Obviously, to defeat our enemies we need intelligence, but intelligence that is reliable. We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear-whether it is true or false-if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse. It seems probable to me that the terrorists we interrogate under less than humane standards of treatment are also likely to resort to deceptive answers that are perhaps less provably false than that which I once offered.

About waterboarding, he wrote:

For instance, there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called “waterboarding,” where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth-causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn’t, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.

The whole piece is available at Truthout.

In a study from 2007, Metin Basoglu and Maria Livanou from King’s College in London, UK and Serbian psychiatrist Cvetana Crnobaric, asked whether there was any difference between physical and psychological torture. The study is published in Archives of General Psychiatry (payment required to access the article). The subjects, who had experienced torture during the civil war in former Yugoslavia, stated that the worst experiences were fake executions (such as waterboarding - my comment), watching someone you know being tortured, rape, and isolation. A text about the study, in Swedish, is available here.

CIA hasn’t said anything about what kind of “intelligence” they got from waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nothing about how it averted terror attacks or gave them the location of Osama bin Laden. Maybe all they got was the latest Green Bay Packers lineup.