Friday, January 28, 2022

Annals Of Bits 'N' Pieces

Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of Mr. Young's music from way back ("Harvest" and "After The Gold Rush" still figure prominently in my LP collection). About his personal life, I know he's from Canada; after that, not so much. I certainly didn't know this: And those who don't learn from history really ARE doomed to repeat it: In the '80's and through the early '90's we had what Wikipedia now quaintly calls "day-care sex-abuse hysteria."  The apogee of the hysteria was the McMartin day care case, which started in 1983 and ended in 1990 with two separate trials.  Which is a bit misleading because the investigation began in 1983 and the first trial didn't start until 1987; but it ran for three years.  The second case sought a conviction denied in the first case.  The conviction was denied again.

Let me just cut to the chase:

The case lasted seven years and cost $15 million, the longest and most expensive criminal case in the history of the United States legal system, and ultimately resulted in no convictions. The McMartin preschool was closed and the building was dismantled. In 2005, one of the children (as an adult) retracted the allegations of abuse.

If you think Q-Anon is sui generis, consider this summary of the allegations that were made:

Some of the accusations were described as "bizarre", overlapping with accusations that mirrored the emerging satanic ritual abuse panic. It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.  When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis (the McMartins' lawyer), one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.

Some of the abuse was alleged to have occurred in secret tunnels beneath the school. Several excavations turned up evidence of old buildings on the site and other debris from before the school was built, but no evidence of any secret chambers or tunnels was found. There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their parents. Some child interviewees talked of a game called "naked movie star" and suggested they were forcibly photographed nude.  During trial testimony, some children stated that the "naked movie star" game was actually a rhyming taunt used to tease other children—"What you say is what you are, you're a naked movie star"—and had nothing to do with having naked pictures taken.

Judy Johnson, who made the initial allegations, made bizarre and impossible statements about Raymond Buckey, including that he could fly. Though the prosecution asserted Johnson's mental illness was caused by the events of the trial, Johnson had admitted to them that she was mentally ill beforehand. Evidence of Johnson's mental illness was withheld from the defense for three years and, when provided, was in the form of sanitized reports that excluded Johnson's statements, at the order of the prosecution. One of the original prosecutors, Glenn Stevens, left the case in protest and stated that other prosecutors had withheld evidence from the defense, including the information that Johnson's son did not actually identify Ray Buckey in a series of photographs. Stevens also accused Robert Philibosian, the deputy district attorney on the case, of lying and withholding evidence from the court and defense lawyers in order to keep the Buckeys in jail and prevent access to exonerating evidence.

These kind of lurid allegations were the news that  dominated the discussion of day-care centers and child-care for almost a decade.  And it wasn't the only case that drew attention, or included outlandish allegations:

Between 1984 to 1989, some 100 people nationwide were charged with ritual sex abuse and 50 were put on trial, according to Debbie Nathan of the National Center for Reason and Justice, which works to free those wrongly imprisoned. 

Frances and Dan Keller were convicted of child abuse in Travis County in 1992, and spent 21 years in jail before they were released and the charges against them dropped:

“There is a reasonable likelihood that (the medical expert’s) false testimony affected the judgment of the jury and violated Frances Keller’s right to a fair trial,” Rosemary Lehmberg, the district attorney for Travis County, which is located in central Texas and includes the city of Austin, said in a statement.

The release comes on the heels of a similar move in San Antonio where prosecutors agreed this month to release three lesbian women imprisoned since 1998 on sexual assault convictions that critics say were based on junk science and false views on sexual orientation.

Michael Mouw, the doctor whose testimony helped convict the Kellers, said in an affidavit presented to court this year that he had little training at the time on how to examine sexual abuse in children and came to the wrong conclusions in examining a child in the Keller case.

“While my testimony was based on a good faith belief at that time, I now realize my conclusion is not scientifically or medically valid, and that I was mistaken,” he said in the affidavit, which was obtained by Reuters.

That 'good faith' was the conviction by one and all that if there was smoke, there must be fire; and regarding childcare and "satanic rituals" there certainly was a lot of smoke. And honestly, a lone gunman showing up at a pizzeria looking for a non-existent basement isn’t as bad as this kind of testimony being presented in court as evidence.

The charges, by the way, were dropped because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Mouw's testimony was "mistaken."  In 2018 the Kellers were declared "innocent" and received $4.3 million in compensation from the state.

You really need to understand how bad this was, whether you remember it or not;

The Kellers’ ordeal began when a three-year-old girl who was an occasional drop-in at their home-based day-care center told her mother that Dan had spanked her “like daddy” used to, as they were driving to the child’s therapist. Under intense and suggestive questioning by her mother and the therapist, the story morphed into tales of rape and orgies involving children.

Other children questioned under similarly suggestive circumstances told fantastic tales of the Kellers sacrificing babies, dismembering animals, holding satanic ceremonies in a local cemetery, making children drink blood-laced Kool Aid and even flying them to Mexico to be sexually abused by military officers, yet returning in time for their parents to pick them up. Children who denied that such things happened were ignored.

In 2008, a reporter with the Austin Chronicle who was reinvestigating the case was stunned to learn that police and prosecutors still believed the outrageous allegations. The Austin Police Department resisted the reporter’s attempts to obtain investigative reports in the case. The reporter sued and won.

The investigative notes were “an ALL-CAPS, run-on-sentence fever dream of breathless accusations and absent any actual investigation that could prove or disprove the claims,” according to an article in The Intercept. Police investigators never questioned the three-year-old girl’s statements. The girl had recanted her claims in court and admitted she had no memories of the Kellers abusing her; nonetheless, they were convicted.

The insanity was, in other words, mainstreamed to the extreme.  To all those who warn about "It can't happen here," I would add: this could happen again. Easily.  Laurence Tribe likes this rather fatuous quote:  “We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.” — Anand Giridharadas.  I would say that the future may prevail, but the past will always make claims on it, and often prevail in at least the short-term.  Speaking of fatuous and of blasts from the past: When fentanyl is contagious and can reach me in the air I breathe on my trips to the grocery store, then we can talk. In the meantime, most of us can walk and chew gum at the same time, and asking society to protect itself against both health threats seems pretty reasonable to the reasonable among us.  Besides:
Fuck fentanyl. And fuck Abbott for his failures to protect Texans.

A majority of school board members at a school in Tennessee said Maus should not be in the schools’ libraries or taught in the classroom. Majority rule is always right? Brown v. Board was never popular, either. Of course, if you put it to a poll, people might be wary of saying they liked "separate but equal." But they did; they do. The success of Jerry Falwell is a testament to that. The explosion in private schools, as well; and in recent decades the push to allow "charter schools" and even funnel public money to private schools. All signs the majority likes things the way they were, when white people were the majority (how color-blind are polls, anyway?). I'm sorry, what was your point again? That we're a post-racial society, maybe? The Voting Rights Act was gutted by the actions of state Attorneys General, not by the Supreme Court sua sponte. Brown v. Board is far more honored in the breach than in the keeping.  The Civil Rights Act is being reduced to desegregating lunch counters, which by and large no longer exist.  LBJ famously said you can't take the chains off a man's leg and tell him to enter the 100 yard dash, or in more accurate terms the "rat race."  The inequity of treatment of blacks in this country since before this was a country is not some past event like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs (which, by the way, thanks, or we wouldn't be here to argue now.  The past is never over.).  It is an ongoing event, and the proof of it is how loudly whites scream about "unfair" treatment based on race.

They don't want to give their advantage up.

QED.  Now put a sock in it.  When California's treating all its migrant farmworkers equitably, we can talk about "freaking California."  Meanwhile it remains as American as the rest of the country; and as racist.


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned President Biden on Thursday not to "outsource" his Supreme Court nominee to the "radical left" following the retirement announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer. 

"Looking ahead - the American people elected a Senate that is evenly split at 50-50. To the degree that President Biden received a mandate, it was to govern from the middle, steward our institutions, and unite America," McConnell said in a statement. 

 "The President must not outsource this important decision to the radical left. The American people deserve a nominee with demonstrated reverence for the written text of our laws and our Constitution." 

 Dear Sen. McConnell: fuck you.
On this subject McConnell lost his credibility a long time ago. As for "qualified" Supreme Court justices v. Biden's likely nominees: The argument, of course, is not on some objective standard of merit; otherwise, no Justice Thomas, Justice Kavanaugh, or Justice Barrett; not even Gorsuch, in my estimation.  "Best" and "most qualified" are matters of opinion akin to favorite food or person you are in love with.  On that subject, my wife IS my soul mate.  Whether I am hers is a subject upon which I won't opine, because it would impair her purity, much like a Greek goddess who actually touched the ground when she walked.  (In case anybody rats to my wife about this!)  What's silly and superstitious is pretending there is an objective standard of merit. Except mine, of course.
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1 comment:

  1. rustypickup8:44 AM

    My usual apologies for not being able to do this as a live link.

    As a another example, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and how his cartoons, (and commentary) about Nixon perfectly fit today. 50 years, and we are just circling.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/legendary-cartoonist-jules-feiffer-skewered-nixon-and-now-hes-savaging-trump?ref=scroll

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