The day after the day the Report came out

Yesterday was a day we all knew was coming for a long time. A Grand Jury report on sexual abuse of minors and others by Roman Catholic priests, long-awaited and long-delayed through legal maneuvers, finally came out. (Located here, for the moment.) It names names - mostly, except for those temporarily redacted as a result of those legal maneuvers - and details not just the crimes committed by the priests, but the efforts of bishops and others to cover up the facts of the crimes and to silence the victims of the crimes.

The report is huge, coming in at just under nine hundred pages. It lists the offending priests by diocese - there are fifty-nine in the Diocese of Scranton alone - and lists for each offending priest all the parishes they have been assigned to over the years. This list is not entirely accurate. One elderly priest who had been in residence in my home parish for the past few years is listed as a consequence of crimes he allegedly committed before starting here, but nowhere does it mention "Nanticoke" among his assignments.

Most of what is in the report is no surprise to...well, most Catholics. Sexual abuse by priests has been an open secret for most of my life. The Bishop's Annual Appeal, a pledge drive for extra donations with targeted goals for every parish, is also known as "Peter's Pence." A common refrain is that Peter's Pence go to pay for the priests who couldn't keep their peters in their pants.

What is most shocking is the pattern of cover-ups on the parts of bishops. I remember when James Timlin became bishop decades ago. I was just a grade school kid, but even then it seemed that he was young for a bishop. He is no longer the bishop in charge of the Diocese of Scranton, but he still pays a role in diocesan activities. Many of the priests listed are now very old or have died, but Timlin is still around. Will he be called upon to account for all the things he did to cover up the actions of criminal priests?

Predictions for 2016

I haven't been blogging at all lately. Mostly that's been from working as much overtime as possible to try to bring in something close to a living wage. In part it's been because I've been spending my precious BEU's in other ways. But it's also been because things have been pretty grim and it seems that nothing I can say will make any difference.

Many, many years ago I bought a journal from the Lee Valley Workshop. I imagined that I might use it to preserve my thoughts about the events of the day, and see how those thoughts held up over time, how history would judge those events. I put in one entry, about the single most important event of the day: the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was consuming the nation and threatening the very stability of the Union. Remember that? Remember how important that was?

I never used it again. I still look at it from time to time. It's a really nice journal.

I've been thinking about something that I expect to happen in the near future, and then thought of something else that could almost be considered a fashion trend. I realized the two things are related, and one naturally flows to the other.

I see the time frame for both to be eighteen months, possibly far less. As this is April 2015, that would easily place both of these things well before the end of 2016. So I feel comfortable predicting both of these as things that will happen by the end of 2016:

1. Wearable cameras for the masses.  After several incidents involving police confrontations that were caught on dashcam or body cam, and countless others where an audio/video record of the event would have been very useful, many police departments are requiring their officers to wear body cameras. Which is nice, except that if there is ever a controversy over an encounter, only one side has access to and control over the records. There was a recent non-police interaction involving a reporter for ESPN and a staffer at a towing company, after which the towing company released a heavily-edited version of the altercation that presented the reported (who was keenly aware of the presence of the recording equipment, and addressed it directly) in a very negative light, but did not include any record of provocation by the staffer. If everybody is making their own record of every confrontation, this wouldn't be an issue.

There are several technical hurdles to overcome: Such recordings are illegal in many states, where both sides need to agree to a recording before it can begin. Recording of the police is still maintained to be illegal in some states (including Pennsylvania), though recent court findings have taken issue with this. Recording in some locations -  tunnels, for example - is considered a danger to national security. And most recorders store the record in the device, rather than in "the cloud" or some remote location - so destroying the recording device often destroys the record.

I expect these obstacles to fall away fairly quickly, and the prices of wearable cameras to drop to less than an iPhone.


2. Police killed in self-defense. Sometime before the end of 2016, a police officer will be killed while on duty. The person doing the killing will maintain that it was in self-defense. And a judge - or jury - will agree.

One of the recent events that have shaken this nation involved Walter Scott fleeing from police after an altercation following a traffic stop. Officer Michael Slager draws his gun, fires numerous times at close range, mortally wounds the fleeing victim, and then drops his TASER next to the man to create a justification for the shooting. All of this was captured on video by a passer-by on his way to work. Without this video, this would have been just another "good shoot."

The more  recent event happened to Freddie Gray. In a crime-ridden part of Baltimore, he spotted a police patrol and, for reasons unknown, fled from them. They gave chase and took him down, retroactively justifying their arrest based on his possession of a knife whose blade length exceeded legal limits. He was trundled into a prisoner transport van, unbelted, unsecured, and was taken for what a police union spokesman has suggested was a "rough ride" - after which he was found to have a nearly severed spine. He died of his injuries a week later. If Freddie Gray fled because he was afraid the police would kill him, he was right.

At some point someone in one of these confrontations will respond with deadly force, and maintain that they feared that if they did not, they would have been killed. A judge or jury somewhere will review the evidence and declare that, yes, the person acted in self-defense, and they will be free to go. (Until, of course, they are accidentally killed a week or two later. Oopsie.)

I'm not saying that I want to see this happen, or that it will be right. It won't be. I want to see bad cops off the streets, stripped of their badges and guns. I want to see criminals off the streets forever. But I see this thing as an inevitability. And I expect it to happen very soon. Probably before the end of 2016.

We'll see.

Redneck school shooting

Ayup. 'Round these parts, we don't need psychotics in combat gear to shoot up schools - just some rednecks doing a little target shooting uprange of an elementary school.


WNEP: Bullet hits elementary school

MIDDLE SMITHFIELD TOWNSHIP — State police in Monroe County said a stray bullet hit an elementary school on Thursday.

Troopers said the bullet struck a double-paned window at Resica Elementary School near Marshalls Creek. The school is in the East Stroudsburg School District.

It smashed through one pane of glass, but not through the second.

No one was hurt.

State police questioned four men who were target shooting nearby. They could face charges in Monroe County.



WBRE: Bullet Pierces Second Grade Class Window
(linked story includes video)

Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County - A bullet hit the window of a class full of second graders Thursday. It happened at Resica Elementary School in Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County.

...Police say people at 823 Resica Falls Road were target shooting and someone missed a target. The bullet traveled at least a half mile. It went over a road, through the woods, and across the school parking lot.

Forsyth said the teacher in the hit classroom jumped into action. He explained, "The classroom teacher immediately sheltered the children along a wall where they wouldn't be visible from the outside."

...School District Police Officer Marc Iannazzo found the people who were shooting. He said he discovered four young men in their late teens or early twenties doing target practice. He said, "They were shooting into the woods down the hill towards the school." He noted, "I saw multiple guns, about three or four rifles, a couple handguns, laying on the bed of a truck and they were shooting at targets tied to a tree."

Police are investigating the young men.

Eyewitness News tried to talk to the people at 823 Rescia Falls Road but a man started yelling as soon as a reporter and photographer pulled into the driveway. He demanded the crew leave.
The school district is holding a parent meeting about the situation at Resica Elementary School Friday at 3:45.


Four people investigated after stray bullet hits Resica Elementary | PoconoRecord.com

State police continue to investigate the incident that caused a stray bullet to hit Resica Elementary School. The school was not targeted for any criminal purpose, said police.

Patrol units located four people who were target shooting today after a bullet hit a second grade classroom window at the school on Route 402 in Middle Smithfield Township. All 20 students who were in the classroom are safe, according to superintendent Sharon Laverdure.

The people, ages 18 to 21, were target shooting about a half-mile from the school, according to Lt. Robert Bartal of Troop N State Police. Their names have not been released.

...Bartal said police would confer with Monroe County District Attorney David Christine to determine if charges will be filed.

“By all indications, they were just target practicing. It was not an intentional act,” Bartal said.

Yes. There's a term for that kind of unintentional act. It's called "criminal negligence."

The address given for the shooters is indicated by the red marker "A" at the top right. The elementary school is the cross-shaped building at lower left. Note the scale at bottom left, and the houses, road, and baseball field between the two. How could they have possibly known these things were there? File under "heroes of the NRA."

A warning to Pinterest users: Redbook may steal your ideas

(UPDATE, 1/1/13: According to Jen, Redbook is promising to make things right, and according to Michelle, I got some things wrong. UPDATE UPDATE: And Jen got something wrong, too! See updates at bottom.)

The first time I ever saw anything from Pinterest I had no idea what the site was about. It was a photo of cakes baked in mugs. Ohh, I see, it's a place where people creatively use mugs - pint mugs? - to...ummm...make cakes? Which I suppose made as much sense as it being a place for people to discuss the works of Harold Pinter, which I also considered a possibility.

Michelle Hryvnak Davies, co-administrator at NEPA Blogs and Queen of All Media, Social or Otherwise, tried to drag me into the world of Pinterest last year when she added a Pinterest component to the NEPA Blogs media empire. Which I still didn't understand; by this point I had determined that Pinterest was some sort of image posting site (though there were already, like, a billion of those at the time) merged with a social network, all of which for some reason appealed overwhelmingly to those of the female persuasion. It also now was coming across as some sort of creative-works outlet, which seemed like an odd fit for a blog about blogging in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but whatever. Even when Michelle and local blogger Karla Porter went on Blue Ridge Communication's ComputerWise TV to do a full hour-long program on Pinterest I still didn't understand - though it didn't help that I fell asleep early on and woke up right at the end. I was exhausted from work. (See updates below.)

So gradually I've worked out that Pinterest is an image posting and sharing site merged with a social network, designed to allow people to share and showcase their creativity and see the creativity of others. Unlike, say, Flickr or DeviantArt these aren't just photos or artistic creations; these are, for the most part, creative projects that can inspire others to their own projects, or even be recreated by other people. Like, say, cakes baked in mugs. It's not just that, so NEPA Blogs can post our blog headers and whatnot and still not be tossed off the site, but it's mostly creative works, being posted and "pinned" and "repinned." Sometimes with attribution, more often - like photos on Tumblr - without.

There are a lot of creative people out there. A lot of people who invest a lot of effort into their creativity. A lot of people who deserve credit for their creativity.

And there are some people out there who want to skim off the best ideas, repost them, and claim them as their own.

Redbook magazine has just done that to one of the biggest names in blogging.

Jen Yates is the blogger behind the wildly popular Cake Wrecks site and the author of two books based on that blog. She also has a spinoff blog, EPBOT, that provides an outlet for her non-cake-related stuff. On this site she also features some creative projects and tutorials, the sort of stuff that finds its way to her Pinterest site. As with her blog, her Pinterest posts tend to have broad general appeal and are enormously popular.

In a recent article, Redbook magazine copied some of the most popular Pinterest posts, created  artwork from the posted photos in an apparent attempt to avoid copyright issues, and presented them without attribution.

EPBOT: Shame On You, Redbook Magazine

Now, this is a dickish maneuver to begin with. But what makes it entirely douchey - perhaps unintentionally douchey, but douchey nonetheless - is the fact that the project of Jen's that Redbook stole and reprinted without attribution was one that was scheduled to be presented with attribution in an upcoming edition of Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping.

You may get the sense that bloggers - especially successful bloggers - see themselves as New Media hotshots who look down upon the Old Media, especially the "dead trees" media of newspapers, books, and magazines.  But nothing could be further from the truth. Most bloggers I know consider it to be the height of success to get your work presented in published form, on paper. Newspaper and magazine articles are considered incredibly valuable for getting the word out about your blog to new audiences, audiences that might otherwise never hear about your blog. So having the opportunity to get her work featured and credited in Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping was extremely important to Jen. Now that may not happen at all, since Redbook has effectively scooped the article by publishing the details of the project first. Will Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping cancel the article? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Redbook claims that it is planning a response to the numerous messages it has received complaining about this situation. Do they plan to make this right? Or will they hunker down and claim that once an idea is published to the Internet it becomes public  domain?

Whatever happens, be warned: if you're posting the fruits of your creative efforts on a site like Pinterest, you might just be making it easier for someone else to come along, steal them, and claim them as their own.


UPDATES:

1. Jen has posted a response from Redbook that promises to make things right:

EPBOT: Redbook Makes It Right

Jen is satisfied with this response, so I guess we can put away the pitchforks and torches. For now.

2. Michelle pointed out that I have mashed together two episodes of ComputerWise TV from the past year: One which Michelle and Karla went on to promote the NEPA BlogCon, and one that featured Michelle by herself talking about Pinterest.

3. Jen misidentified Good Housekeeping, the magazine slated to feature her project, as Better Homes and Gardens in her original post. 

OCCUPY NANTICOKE, OCCUPY NEPA

I've been trying to follow along the Occupy Wall Street movement as best I can. As far as I can tell, this is a genuine, grassroots expression of public discontent with the status quo.  It is largely disorganized and leaderless. Its biggest criticism is that it has no single, coherent message: not like the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Egypt, where the goal was the removal of President-for-Life Hosni Mubarak and the establishment of a democratic state, nor like the Tea Party, whose goal is the removal of democratically elected President Barack Obama and the establishment of a Republican state.

Still, some themes are emerging from Occupy Wall Street. The economy is a mess, and people want elected leaders to work to fix that - not work to block any possible improvements for fear they might actually benefit the incumbent. People want jobs that pay decent wages, not the ongoing destruction of the middle class while the wealthiest 1% gets ever richer at the expense of the other 99%.

The "Occupy" movement has moved beyond Wall Street. It's moved into cities all over the country. People are pissed off, and they don't want anyone to pretend or imagine that all is well, that things are just fine the way they are. Naturally, there's been some push-back from the people who benefit from the status quo, and from their toadies and allies and sycophants.

Occupy Nanticoke would mean...something else.

Nanticoke has all the problems the rest of the country has, but worse. We're well ahead of the curve when it comes to economic devastation. Decades ago a decision was made that Nanticoke would be primarily a residential community, not a community focused on commerce or industry. As the coal mines and cigar mills and garment mills shut down, no new industries moved into the city. As the industries shut down, the businesses did too. The Leader Store and Leventhal's, Woolworth's and J.S. Raub Shoes, clothing stores and sundries shops, all closed their doors between the 1970's and 1990's. Our two hardware stores closed and were torn down, as was our decades-old theater, which had been closed since the early 1980's but was not torn down for about fifteen years. (When the wrecking ball hit the State Theater the first time, it bounced off.) The long-vacant Duplin Mill was turned into a skating rink and bowling alley in the late 1970's, and burned down in the early 1990's. It remains a burned-out hulk, repurposed for a time as a marijuana-growing operation a few years ago, until someone noticed that the property wasn't zoned for agricultural purposes.

(And the banks closed, too. Nanticoke was once famous for its many large, granite banks. Now one of them is a shuttered pawn shop. One or two have come back as smaller, less opulent banks housed within the shells of the old banks. The rest have been torn down.)

Nanticoke was reimagined decades ago as a bedroom community: people would come here to sleep, but would work and shop and play somewhere else. And many of the children of those who came here to sleep decided to move away the first chance they got, leaving older and older sleepers behind, until they died in their beds - or, more often, in strange and lonely beds in hospitals or nursing homes.

Now Nanticoke is a city filled with vacant houses. Well, not all vacant:  some are being rented out to drug dealers, or being used as crack houses or meth labs. Not all industry and commerce has left the city.

But many of the best and brightest have. There are no jobs around here, not any that pay a decent living wage. The ceiling on most wages in this area is $10 an hour - and that's in Northeastern Pennsylvania, not just Nanticoke, where there really aren't any jobs to be had, outside of the schools and the hospital and a few machine shops that haven't moved away yet. While this is well above the minimum wage (currently $7.25 an hour), it still translates into an annual pre-tax pre-deduction income of only $20,800, assuming fifty-two forty-hour weeks.* In what decade was that a living wage?  (When I asked this question of an employment professional, he replied that that is why so many people have second jobs.)

This has all resulted in an increasingly aging population of retirees and social security recipients generating little or no income ("Occupation") tax for the city. Most taxes are property taxes and school taxes (which go to the school district, not the city, which goes to pay for the education of students in the Greater Nanticoke Area, whose boundaries extend far outside the city itself.) Many vacant houses, many old people, and an increasing population of resident drug dealers and manufacturers. Vacant houses make a tempting target for scrappers who treat the houses as copper mines, just loaded with copper and iron pipes (and sometimes brass fixtures and aluminum siding) that can be removed and sold to one of the many scrapyards that dot the outskirts of this area. (Business is booming at these places, especially the ones who don't ask too many questions about where the latest load of copper pipes came from.)

There is a vicious cycle at work, in Nanticoke and in all of Northeastern PA. Fewer and fewer good jobs are available. More and more of the population leaves the area for greener pastures. Those left behind are either unwilling or unable to move, or have decided to stay and work for a better future, or have decided to stay and exploit the decrepit present. Houses become vacant.  The tax base shrinks, the population dwindles, employers leave the area, and new employers stay away and fail to fill the void. Even fewer good jobs are available. More of the population decides to leave. More houses become vacant. The tax base shrinks. More employers decide to pack up and move away.

There's a way out, I think. But it's not easy.

Elected officials need to step up and work to attract businesses to the area. With a dwindling population, this doesn't seem easy. But we do have a secret weapon: schools. Colleges. Universities. They actually count as one of the largest employers in this area, and the student population is a significant fraction of the residents of any area in which a college or university is based. These students come here from all over, from Northeastern Pennsylvania and Southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York and even points beyond. But they don't stay here; as soon as they get their degrees they get the hell out of the area and go to where the jobs are. If the jobs were here, some of them might stay. Maybe. If the jobs were here.

Unfortunately, the newly-elected Republican governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, has made a single industry his top priority: gas drilling. He wants to see Pennsylvania become the Texas of the natural gas industry; so apparently he dreams of a devastated landscape, an environmental ruin brought on by unregulated industrial exploitation, where wildfires race across the the state annually. And its not like the state would see any direct benefit from the gas extraction industry: to make the state more attractive to drillers, he has taken a strong stance against any taxation of gas extraction. Any economic benefit from gas drilling would have to come from revenue generated by income taxes on workers, and sales taxes on products purchased by people employed by the industry, and business taxes on businesses that expand to serve the industry.

But this support is fairly exclusive. Support for alternative energy investment by the state has gone away. No energy is being put into attracting other industries to this area. And other Republican politicians, elected in the wave of anti-incumbency that swept across the nation last November, have not bucked Corbett's lead.

Those of us who live in Northeastern Pennsylvania know where economic monocropping leads. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, we were one of the most important sources of anthracite coal in the world. Most of the people of the Wyoming Valley were employed by the coal industry. Coal mines were everywhere, even where you couldn't see them, even where they shouldn't have been. Much of this area is literally "undermined" by abandoned coal miles, much to the surprise of the Army Corps of Engineers, who declared during the September flood that this is some of the most complex topography that they have ever had to deal with, with floodwaters suddenly vanishing into mines unexpectedly - and suddenly popping out of mines elsewhere unexpectedly. Giant culm banks still cover the landscape. Mine fires dot the region, impossible to extinguish by conventional means. Mine subsidences occasionally suck up parts of houses, or even whole houses. Individual homeowners are responsible for carrying their own mine subsidence insurance. The coal mining companies moved away long ago and disclaimed all responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And when coal mining in this area came to an abrupt end on January 22, 1959, the economic monocrop went away - as did the primary source of income for the area.

Regardless of whether the people of Pennsylvania ignore this lesson or not, we need jobs in this area. Relying on a single industry is foolish and shortsighted in the extreme. And the gas industry is not exactly the sort of industry that would persuade college students to remain in the area. So let's imagine that maybe some politicians get a clue and decide to work to bring other jobs to the area. What next?

Well, now these people will need places to live. In areas where the gas industry is "booming," such as Wyoming County, this is actually a problem: all available housing has filled up with roughnecks and drillers and truck drivers and other employees that the gas drillers have brought with them from out of state.** So when locals in these areas found their homes wiped out by the September floods, they also discovered that there was nowhere in the area where they could stay. No vacancy. And even if there were, the prices had inflated to a level the market could bear, with rental rates set at what people in the gas drilling industry could afford - not what suddenly flooded-out locals could afford.

Nanticoke has housing. Vacant houses by the score. Granted, some of them need some work. Some of them need a lot of work, especially ones where all the copper water pipes and iron gas pipes and copper electrical wiring and aluminum siding have been cut out and torn out and torn off and sold to scrap-metal merchants. In these cases it might be better to tear down the houses and connect the empty lots to nearby un-ransacked buildings, making them more attractive to potential buyers who might prefer to have spacious yards.

New residents, residents with jobs, and incomes, incomes in excess of ten dollars an hour, will help increase the local tax base. As the tax base grows, the city's coffers will fill. More improvements will take place, perhaps expansions of the fire and police departments. Perhaps more time will be invested by the police in identifying and removing drug dealers and crack houses and meth labs. As these places are shut down and removed, property values will rise. The desirability of property will rise. Fewer people will feel compelled to abandon Nanticoke to seek a better life elsewhere, More people will make the decision to move into Nanticoke to snatch up some extremely affordable housing.

And maybe stores and businesses will return to downtown Nanticoke, providing even more jobs and even more tax income.

It's not a pipe dream. There are plans to make it happen, although from another direction entirely - an approach which in no way precludes this one. I've been asked to be a part of the group investigating this possibility, and I have said yes. That approach, however, is a downtown-centered one, one which will begin to rebuild the downtown of Nanticoke independent of the rest of the city, or the region. It's a good vision, and one that could work.

But my dream is broader in scope. Bring back jobs to this area. Jobs that pay well. Convince college graduates to stay in the area. Provide them with highly affordable housing. Build the tax base. Drive out the druggies. Bring up property values.

And not just in Nanticoke. This approach is necessary for all of NEPA. It's something that a boom-town economy from a natural gas rush won't provide sustainably. It requires effort by elected officials to bring jobs and employers to this area. It requires a lot of courage and resolve from the residents of Nanticoke to stand and fight rather than to run off to greener pastures. It requires persuasive efforts to convince the best and brightest not to abandon the area. And it requires determination from police officials to crack down on the drug problem that's been allowed to flourish unchallenged.

For years - decades - the trend has been to vacate Nanticoke, vacate NEPA. Abandon it to the criminals and scumbags and druggies. It's time for us to reverse this trend.

Occupy Nanticoke.

Occupy NEPA.



* Minimum wage will get you $15,080 a year.  Good luck living on that.

**Yes, that's another fun aspect of gas drilling: it provides jobs - but not to locals. Instead the jobs go to trained workers from out of state, many of whom have homes and families out of state, many of whom send a significant portion of their paychecks back out of state - so once again, Pennsylvania sees very little economic benefit.

Thugs to bloggers: "Watch what you say online!"

In Mexico last week, two bloggers who spoke out online against drug cartel activity were found hanging from a pedestrian bridge over a highway after having been tortured and beaten to death. (The cause of death of the female blogger may have been her disembowelment.) You can read the details - and see the chilling image as it was seen by drivers - here.

In Pennsylvania, for now, the thugs are content with suing people who speak out online into bankruptcy.

Gas firm’s suit targets 3 families | The Times Leader, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton PA - News

The suit, filed by Texas-based Chief Gathering LLC, is "seeking close to $20 million in damages from three families the company claims interfered in the project without grounds and damaged the company’s reputation in the community."

Now, I don't know about you, but to me, few things will damage a company's reputation in a community more than the knowledge that if members of the community say the wrong thing, they will find themselves sued for a preposterously enormous sum.

From the linked article:

Suit cites Facebook

Chief bases that assertion on posts the defendants made on the Facebook page of the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, a group of local citizens opposed to natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale as it is currently occurring.

“I understand that Darling Farms signed a lease with Chief recently and that other residents of Hildebrandt Road are now being approached by Chief,” one post allegedly made by Dickson in July reads. “Please, if anyone has heard anything, let us know so we can plan to fight and also try and figure out their revised plans!”

What Chief Gathering LLC is doing is called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP.  It's an old technique, much-beloved by corporate thugs. In it, a corporation decides to make an example of some person or group that has been a thorn in their side. So, using the massive financial assets at their disposal, they bring a suit for an outrageous sum (say, twenty million dollars) against the person or group. Generally this is a sum that far exceeds any actual damage, but, more importantly, far exceeds the assets available to the defendants. The defendants are faced with two options: surrender, or fight. If they choose to surrender - and if the corporation chooses to accept the surrender - then they have been defeated; but if they choose to fight, even in a case where the suit against them is so outrageous that the prosecution has no reasonable chance of winning, the defendants immediately begin incurring legal costs that will quickly mount to levels that again exceed the assets available to the defendants.

Sometimes corporations will pursue SLAPPs just to the point that they have bankrupted the defendants; sometimes they will follow through all the way. Sometimes the case will go to court and the corporation will lose, and will be ordered to pay all legal costs incurred by the defense. And the corporation will agree, and drag it heels interminably, using legal argument after legal argument to justify the delay in rendering payment. And sometimes they will appeal the decision, possibly incurring further costs for the defendant but in any case leaving the defendant in a penurious state until such time as a final decision is made and payment is rendered - if any is forthcoming at all.

This won't end here. Chief Gathering LLC isn't the only gas-drilling-related company to draw the ire, criticism, and opposition of members of the community. If these companies intend to sue everyone who has criticised them until the criticisms stop, they're in for a long, hard road. But make no mistake: these companies are not here with any intention of being good neighbors and good corporate citizens. Just like the drug cartels in Mexico, they're here to make money, and will destroy you if you stand in your way. They won't torture you, gut you, and leave you hanging from a bridge - not yet. But companies like Chief Gathering LLC will sue you into bankruptcy if you dare to speak out against them.

See also:

Chief sues Dallas Twp. residents over anti-pipeline tactics - News - Citizens Voice

Victims, aren't we all?

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella received his sentence today: 336 months in prison. That's 28 years. He's 61 mow; when he gets out of jail he'll be 89 - and face several additional years of supervised probation.

Even if you're not from Northeastern Pennsylvania you might have heard of this case. Ciavarella was one of two judges accused in a scheme known as "Kids for Cash." Allegedly, he and another judge had entered into a scheme to accept kickbacks from a local developer who built a new juvenile detention center. In exchange, Ciavarella and the other judge would see to it that his facility received a steady supply of customers.

Ciavarella developed a reputation as a strict juvenile judge. Very strict. Even minor infractions, for which other judges might impose a fine and a suspended sentence, resulted in lengthy custodial sentences from Ciavarella. Prosecutions were done in a swift, efficient manner, due to the frequent absence of any public defender to represent the juveniles. Parents would enter the court with their children, only to see them hauled off directly out of the court to begin serving months- or even years-long sentences at Ciavarella's friend's detention center.

This went on for years. There were rumblings about it, but nothing could be done - in Pennsylvania, judges are effectively the highest authorities in the land, answerable only to the Judicial Board of Review, an organization Ciavarella  had already used to have a fellow judge who had complained about his practices removed from the Luzerne County bench. One juvenile, who had already served one sentence under Ciavarella, exploded with fear and rage when she found that she would have another hearing before him; she claimed that he had ruined her life, and threatened to kill him.

The case finally broke a few years ago, thanks to efforts from several fronts - former County Controller Steve Flood, a civil rights group from Philadelphia, and even a convicted mobster named Billy D'Elia. D'Elia reportedly sang like a canary to federal investigators on the matter of local businessman Louis DeNaples' alleged criminal activities - and when that investigation and any related convictions was suddenly and mysteriously thrown out by a Dauphin County judge, the feds allegedly went back to him and said words to the effect of, "Well, that was a waste of time. What else have you got?"

In the end Ciavarella and his co-conspirators were caught and brought to justice. Ciavarella's prosecutions ultimately had nothing to do with unjust convictions of juveniles; instead, he was convicted of conspiracy and accepting bribes tax evasion. But that was enough. Enough to get him twenty-eight years.

Meanwhile, justice of a sort was done to the juveniles convicted in his court. All of their convictions were thrown out, and any fines or other requirements of restitution were dismissed. The problem is, of course, that not every juvenile who appeared before Ciavarella was innocent. Many of them were guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. So along with those juveniles who were unjustly prosecuted, and those who were unjustly sentenced to lengthy custodial terms, a third class of victims emerged: those people who had been victimized by juvenile criminals, and who had sought justice and restitution through prosecution.

But there's another, larger set of victims here.

Northeastern Pennsylvania has long enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as being a cesspool of corruption. From politicians who could easily send any of Chicago's most corrupt back to the Windy City for remedial courses, to judges who act like tin gods, to a broad and well-known network of organized crime figures, Northeastern Pennsylvania has it all. Many people wonder why businesses don't set up shop here: we have a large population with a tradition of hard work, family bonds, and loyalty, yet industries routinely shy away from setting up in the area. The reason, as told to me by several individuals with inside knowledge of the subject, is that few businesses are prepared to pay out the vast array of bribes and kickbacks expected from anyone who wants to do business in this area.

It's hard to fight against a reputation like that. So many people flee the area at the first possible opportunity. Northeastern Pennsylvania has many excellent colleges and universities, yet our population ranks among the lowest-educated in the country. This is not because people in this area are inherently dumb, or because they shy away from higher education; it is simply that the vast majority of those who attend institutes of higher learning take their degrees and flee to greener pastures with more job opportunities. With each departure, Northeastern Pennsylvania is diminished. And with each departure, the revised demographics creep incrementally closer to making the point for businesses who choose not to locate here not only because of the culture of corruption, but because of a lack of skilled workers.

There's a thing endemic to this area known as the "Coal Miner's Mentality." I've never been able to pin down what exactly that means, and I've started to think that it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean at the time the words are spoken. To me, the mentality could be summed up as this: The people - the "coal miners" - recognize that the system, the region, whatever, is completely corrupt, unjust, and unfair, and is slowly destroying them. And so they get together and get blind drunk to rail against the injustice of it all. And the next day, they wake up and put on their hard hats and go back to working under the same corrupt, unjust, unfair, and destructive system, because they have no choice, because they believe that nothing that they ever do will make a damned bit of difference.

Everybody knew that something was very wrong in the juvenile court system in Luzerne County. But everyone accepted it as one of those things that we just have to live with, about which nothing can be done. It took a federal investigation to actually bring some sort of justice to the area. But it came at a price. It came at the price of making Luzerne County, and all of Northeastern Pennsylvania, look like the cesspool of corruption and criminality that many of us, and many outside the area, believe it to be. What Ciavarella did made that corruption into something tangible, taking it from the realm of the abstract to the realm of the very, very real.

Ciavarella made Northeastern Pennsylvania look as bad as everyone thinks it is. He reinforced the biases and prejudices that people have about this area. He may have helped to dissuade any businesses from even considering setting up shop in and bringing jobs to NEPA for the foreseeable future.

The juveniles that Ciavarella convicted falsely were victims. Those juveniles that Ciavarella sentenced unjustly were victims. The people who saw justice undone and restitutions unmade by criminals whose cases were thrown out because of Ciavarella were victims.

And everyone else living in Northeastern Pennsylvania was a victim of Ciavarella, too. When will we get our justice?


Title reference: The resurrected Eric Draven's last words to the criminal Tin-Tin in "The Crow."

SEE ALSO:

The Lu Lac Political Letter: The LuLac Edition #1710, August 11th, 2011

The Lu Lac Political Letter: The LuLac Edition #1711, August 11th, 2011

NEPArtisan: Ciavarella; Where Mercy Is Given, Mercy Is Shown; Bye-Bye

THE RIGHT TO GRIPE: 336 Months Equals 28 Years In The Slammer

Andy Palumbo: What Have We Learned?

Gort42: 28 years for Ciavarella (explicit language)

Larry Hohol: “Kids for cash” cover-up, federal style?

Oh, The Irony! » PureBunkum

FIX IT! Contaminated well water in Dimock

Several years ago natural gas driller Cabot Oil & Gas was found liable for the contamination of residential wells in Dimock, in one of the first well-publicized cases of damage caused by a drilled in Marcellus Shale territory in Northeastern Pennsylvania - and a taste of things to come.

The Marcellus Effect: Despite "Consent Order" Dimock Story Unresolved

Faced with an initial agreement to provide water to the affected residences through water lines to municipal sources, Cabot balked and used legal maneuvering to get a new judgement. They agreed to install "treatment systems" inside each affected residence. Contaminated water would be pumped into the residence, and the "treatment system" would remove the methane and contaminants and whatnot that Cabot maintained weren't even there in the first place. And Cabot's legal obligations would be fulfilled with the installation of the system; maintenance and repairs would be the responsibility of the individual homeowner. And good luck using that as a selling point when you decide to sell your home. Better keep the manual to pass on to future purchasers.

Naturally, some residents found this to be an unacceptable solution.

And so it goes. Cabot refuses to abide with the original (and now vacated) consent order, which is understandable - after all, they went through all the trouble and expense of getting it overturned. Residents find the prospect of drinking and showering out of plastic "water buffaloes" to be as unacceptable as the notion of becoming the managers of in-house "treatment systems." Residents have one vote apiece, while Cabot and other gas companies pour millions of dollars in bribes contributions to state and local governments to make sure everybody remembers how to vote when it comes to regulation of their industry and settling disputes with the peons.

Some residents of Dimock decided they had had enough. They purchased a billboard ad featuring an image of a pitcher of water drawn from their well, a list of the chemicals that have been found within, and the words "FIX IT!"

Within twenty-four hours, the billboard ad was taken down.

Susquehanna River Sentinel: Freedom of Speech DOA in Susquehanna County

Here is the text of the press release that included the billboard image that I have posted above:

Less than twenty-four hours after Dimock residents held a press
conference beneath a newly installed billboard that called attention to their
contaminated water wells, the billboard came down. It had displayed a
photograph of brownish water drawn from the well of Craig and Julie
Sautner, and listed some of the chemical contaminants it contained.


The billboard apparently rattled Cabot Oil and Gas, the company widely
assumed to be responsible for the water woes in Dimock. A lawyer
employed by Cabot videotaped residents as they spoke about living in
homes with contaminated wells, and a Cabot spokesperson, George Stark,
was on hand to call the billboard “a lie.” Mr. Stark disputed that the
discolored water came from the Sautner well, and claimed to be unaware
that tests conducted by Duke University and the Pennsylvania Department
of Environmental Protection found dozens of contaminants in the water.
These included acetone, aluminum, arsenic, barium, beryllium,
bromodichloromethane, butylbenzylphthalate, dibromochloromehtane,
ethane, lead, lithium, methane, nitrate, silicon, strontium, sulfate, thorium
228, thorium 230, uranium 234 and uranium 235/236.


At one point Mr. Stark stood in front of the cameras and claimed that the
Sautners water was no longer contaminated and boasted he’d drink a glass
of it himself. He has yet to keep that promise.

Last Saturday a local resident was killed when a car he and his daughter were in was crushed by a truck carrying fracking materials - driven by an out-of-state (and allegedly unlicensed) trucker. Earlier this week a pristine stream was contaminated with "drilling mud" - a slurry of water, bentonite, and assorted other chemicals specific to each mix. Everything is unfolding as it has been predicted by those who warned about this years ago. How much more has to happen before we decide we've had enough?

Fix it!

Not just the problem of contaminated well water in Dimock, but the whole damned problem of environmentally destructive gas extraction in Marcellus Shale territory!

A death in Marcellus Shale country

We keep being told that natural gas extraction by hydrofracking can be done safely, responsibly, and without harming the environment. We keep being told that this can be done. So the question is, why isn't it being done?

We all knew this day was coming, what with the overweight trucks carrying loads of water and chemicals roaring all over the back roads and highways of Marcellus Shale country. We all knew that at some point, somehow, somebody from Northeastern Pennsylvania, some innocent bystander, was going to get killed as a consequence of the mostly-unregulated explosion of natural gas drilling operations in this area. And on July 31, 2011, it happened.

The new bullying

UPDATE, 2/20/2011:  The person in the pictures below is, in fact, named Paul Nelson.
http://gbcol.edu/bbmens/index.php/paul-nelson-continues-his-basketball-career-in-army/
Whether this is actually the person making the harassing Facebook posts described is unknown.

UPDATE, 2/25/2011:  The Facebook page of the person claiming to be "Paul Nelson" is gone.  I contacted someone who knows the real Paul Nelson and he told me he would relay the information to him.  If this was, as I suspect, a case of someone fabricating an identity by stealing information from publicly-available sources, and the person whose identity was stolen was a member of the armed forces, I hope the full investigative power of the federal government was brought to bear against the identity thief.

Consequently, I am removing the standalone pictures of Paul Nelson,and am blurring his images in the fake Facebook profile.


On Wednesday a girl in a school district about eighty miles from here killed herself as an apparent result of harassment and bullying.

Now, teen suicide is, tragically, nothing new.  It's not something that came about as a result of Facebook, or MySpace, or instant messaging, or the Internet, or heavy metal music.  Nor are harassment and bullying products of the modern world.  Back in my day harassment took the form of anonymous letters and phone calls, back before caller ID and anonymous call rejection and even star sixty-nine.  Bullying was generally done through threats or violence against the person or their property.

The Internet didn't bring about harassment or bullying.  But it certainly has made doing these things from the cover of anonymity that much easier.

Well, apparent anonymity.  No one is truly anonymous on the Internet.  If the right people want to trace you, they will, no matter how many fake Facebook profiles or proxy walls you hide behind.

Take, for example, the person calling himself Paul Nelson.

(Photo removed. See 2/25/2011 update, above.)

The person in this photo is most likely not named "Paul Nelson."*  The person in this photo is most likely not the person posting as "Paul Nelson."  It is, however, a very interesting and important photo, for several reasons.

I don't know the girl who killed herself.  I had to look up her location on a map.  It's right on the very edge of what anyone could reasonably call "Northeastern Pennsylvania," practically out of the coverage area for the local news.  I might never have heard of her if it had not been for someone I knew in high school "liking" a memorial page that was set up on the day of her death.  I noticed this on Facebook, and I became curious.  I clicked through.  I did some basic Googling, and came up with a disturbing top result for her name, an apparent example of online bullying.

The truth is a little more complicated and even more disturbing. The result was for a website where people can anonymously pose questions to specific individuals.  The question being asked was very offensive - and it turns out the person being asked was one of this girl's best friends.  But it gets weirder:  the person who posed the disturbing question was the girl herself.  For more insight into this, see this post: danah boyd | apophenia » Digital Self-Harm and Other Acts of Self-Harassment.  Danah Boyd has written several other pieces on teens and bullying.  This one investigates why so many teens don't perceive bullying as bullying.  (One poster on the memorial site described the bullying and harassment as "kids being kids.")  Her whole blog looks promising as a resource for someone who wants to learn more about dealing with bullying and harassment. 

Back to the issue of Paul Nelson.

I've never really spent much time on a memorial site, a place where friends gather to share their thoughts and memories and strangers come to offer condolences.  Or, in some cases, to harass and troll everyone else at the memorial site.

I've never seen that before.  But here it was.  Message from a friend, message of condolence from a stranger, another friend sharing thoughts, and then a picture of an aborted fetus with the caption "I BELIEVE THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE - JUST NOT THIS ONE."  More messages from friends, more messages from strangers, then a posting of a YouTube video called "LOL YOU'RE DEAD."  And then this guy.

In case you can't see that picture at the bottom clearly, here it is in close-up:

A lot of his posts and comments have apparently been deleted.  As of last night, he had one telling everybody who was getting upset by what he was doing to calm down, Facebook wouldn't do anything about him anyway, and neither would the police, since he was out of state.  "This isn't my first rodeo," he said, implying that this isn't the first time he's harassed and trolled a stranger's memorial site.

He's not the only one, either.  At least half a dozen different, fake profiles have popped up with people posting obscene or harassing comments, pictures, and videos to this memorial site.  One of them was traced to a person in England.  These people apparently have no connection to the subject of the memorial site.  Instead they have simply picked up the news of a memorial site from friends, or from a groupthink site like 4chan, whose anonymous members banded together last year to harass an eleven-year-old girl and her family.

But, remember, there is no true anonymity on the Internet. As that bastion of scholarship, cracked.com, pointed out in its article "5 Wacky Internet Pranks That Can Get You Jail Time," an anonymous 4chan poster was able to get into Sarah Palin's Yahoo accounts.  Now, regardless of what you think of Sarah Palin, whatever you think of her preference for conducting state government business on her personal Yahoo email account rather than on, like, state government email accounts, what this anonymous 4chan poster did, from behind the added safety of a proxy wall, was illegal.  And he got caught.  And his anonymity evaporated like the illusion it was.  (His name is David Kernell, by the way.)

Which brings us back to "Paul Nelson."

(Photo removed. See 2/25/2011 update, above.)

"Paul Nelson" most likely isn't this guy's name.  The picture above probably isn't of anyone named "Paul Nelson,"* nor is it likely a picture of the person posting harassing messages to the memorial site.  But it's definitely a picture of somebody.  Somebody whose picture is being used as part of a Facebook account that is being used to harass people at a memorial site.

That's identity theft.

Now, I know jack shit about military decorations and insignia.  The colored ribbon on the chest of the fellow in the photo could mean that he's a newly-commissioned Second Lieutenant straight out of ROTC.  Or maybe it means he's a highly decorated sniper with a dozen confirmed kills.  I have no idea.  But what I do know is that if the person posting as "Paul Nelson" is not the person in that photo, then the person posting as "Paul Nelson" has no right to represent himself as the wearer of those ribbons, whatever they mean.

That's Stolen Valor.

Now, we can throw in all the usual stuff about harassment and wire fraud, and whatever.  The "Paul Nelson"s of this world know that a site like Facebook can't be bothered to police every interaction between members, and that state and local police and the FBI probably aren't going to prioritize any investigation into what they're doing.  So they'll continue to post their images of aborted fetuses, and their images of dead girls with captions like "SHE'LL STILL BE A WHORE IN HELL" splashed across them, because they can.  And if one Facebook account gets shut down, they'll just switch to another.  They've got lots.

Welcome to the future.

What are you gonna do about it?


*UPDATE, 2/20/2011:  The person in the picture is, in fact, named Paul Nelson.
http://gbcol.edu/bbmens/index.php/paul-nelson-continues-his-basketball-career-in-army/
Whether this is actually the person making these posts is unknown.

Who's crazy here, anyway?

Everyone's queer 'cept thee and me,
and I'm not so sure about thee.
- One of my grandmother's favorite sayings

It wasn't long after Saturday's assassination attempt on Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords which left her seriously injured and several others, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, dead, that shooter (or alleged shooter, if you care about the legal niceties, which I don't at this moment) Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube videos started making the rounds.  They weren't videos in any traditional sense; they were screeds presented as text in a video format.  When I saw them there were three of them, which I assumed were in chronological order.  In each one he spoke of three major themes:  grammar, currency, and something he called "conscience dreaming."

I was willing to view these things with open eyes and an open mind.  What is he saying here, anyway?  What clues to his motives in Saturday's shootings is he leaving?  Why the hell don't these people have blogs, so we can see their crazy stuff all neatly laid out in individually indexed posts?

On the "grammar" issue I quickly moved to the assumption that he was speaking of some sort of theory of grammar from a Philosophy of Language point of view.  Had this guy had some brief encounter with Philosophy of Language, maybe even from the Wikipedia entry on it, and gone off on some track about constructing a view of reality through the construction of a proper grammar?  (This is a theme taken up in Fredrik Pohl's "The Gold at the Starbow's End", though I noticed that Pohl has made no mention of this on recent entries on his blog.)  'Cause there was no way on Earth this kid could be talking about the ability to construct sentences properly in English - something he was demonstrating a distinct inability to do.

The issue of "currency" seemed also vague enough that I wondered if he was speaking metaphorically.  Was he speaking of that to which you assign value, that which you use as a form of exchange with the world?  But then in the final video he writes "No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!", it seemed like that interpretation was out the window.

The concept of "conscience dreaming" and "conscience dreamers" was a puzzling one.  I found a few scattered references on the Internet.  Was he maybe talking about "conscious dreaming," and letting his poor grasp of grammar twist his words?  A friend of his explained in an interview posted today that these were actually references to "lucid dreaming," and suggested things would become more clear once investigators had read his dream journal.

Throughout the videos there were also repeated pseudo-logical formulations.  Was there anything behind this, or...

In the end I came to a simple conclusion:  this kid was just nuts.

(See also:  Jared Lee Loughner's Mental State - Newsweek )

Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin have - metaphorically, at least - come under fire since this issue.  Angle was the one who spoke of "second amendment remedies" to issues involving members of Congress.  Palin published a map of hotly contested congressional elections, with crosshairs (or, according to information coming from Palin's camp since the shootings, "surveyor's symbols") indicating the locations - and a list of names at the bottom - of targeted candidates.  Gabrielle Giffords, the Democrat who was the target of Saturday's assassination attempt, was on that list.

Now:  no sane person would hear Sharron Angle speak of "second amendment remedies" and decide that this was a call to go out and shoot members of Congress that they had issues with.  No sane person would look at Sarah Palin's map with its crosshairs (as Gabrielle Giffords herself interpreted them) and decide this was a call to  action to go out and start shooting down the members of Congress on the targeting list.  You'd have to be crazy to do these things.

And, to all appearances, Jared Lee Loughner was at least a little bit crazy.

It seems like every time there's a mass killing incident we find out that the perpetrator had a long history of mental illness.  Virginia Tech.  Columbine.  These were done by people who were clearly crazy.  The system had been blinking red, to paraphrase the 9/11 Commission, and no one had responded adequately.

But that's not always the case:  Lee Harvey Oswald.  James Earl Ray.  Tim McVeigh.  Ted Kaczynski.  Nidal Hasan.   Were they crazy?  Maybe a little.  Don't you have to be crazy to set off a truck bomb outside a federal building packed with civilians, to open fire on an army base?  Is this the sort of thing sane people do?  Or were they sane people who had been persuaded by the invective of others coming into synch with their own twisted lines of thinking?

And who else is crazy out there?  Fred Phelps, the leader of the so-called "Westboro Baptist Church?"  Late-night UFO and conspiracy enthusiast Art Bell?  How about Glenn Beck?  People who believe that climate change is being caused by human activity?  People who believe that all of the science behind climate change has been faked?  Birthers?  Truthers?  Scientologists with their stuff about Thetans and Xenu?  What about Catholics, who believe they eat flesh and drink blood - not symbolically, not metaphorically, but literally eat flesh and drink blood - in their weekly rituals?

You've probably seen a few Internet posts about this weekend's shooting.  Have you tried wading through the comments?  Some of them are probably people doing a "Poe" - pretending to espouse a radical and delusional belief while in fact not believing it at all - but some are almost certainly the writings of deranged individuals.  Lots and lots of deranged individuals.

So where does it end?  Maybe it doesn't.  Inflammatory, incendiary speech - shouting "Fire!" in a tense political theater - is still considered protected speech, a proper expression of First Amendment rights.  Even if someone calls for acts of violence against public officials, you would have to be crazy to follow up on those calls.  Maybe.

But in any case, there are a lot of crazy people out there.

OK, you win

I don't remember exactly when and where this incident happened.  I think it was in the York, PA school district, and I think it was possibly between 1995 and 2000.

One of the most treasured and despised bits of the U.S. Constitution is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."  This has been interpreted to mean (to borrow the language favored by Thomas Jefferson) a separation of Church and State.  One of the upshots of this - not actually put into action until the efforts of one woman - is the elimination of overt religious activity in public schools.  Prior to her efforts, Christian prayer in schools was the norm and was required of all students, Christian or otherwise.  Afterwards, even religious trappings commonly associated with holidays were prohibited, though the secular items associated with these holidays were still acceptable.*

Depending on who happens to be in charge of a school board at any given time, numerous school districts try to skirt this issue, coming up with convoluted plans to obey the letter of the law while thumbing their noses at its intent.  Sometimes they don't even try to give the appearance of following the law, but just charge through in an assumption that no one will complain.

In a school district that may or may not have been in York, PA, in a time that might have been sometime between 1995 and 2000, one school decided it would just plow through and put on some display that simply ignored the general interpretation of the Establishment Clause.  I don't recall if this was some Nativity display for Christmas, or crosses for Easter, or just a display of the Ten Commandments**, an old favorite of folks wishing to stick their finger in the eye of those who hold the Establishment Clause dear.  They probably figured they were in a district which was religiously and culturally homogeneous, so the likelihood that someone would complain was low.

Someone complained.  I don't remember the details.  I believe it was a student, or a pair of students, maybe even a group of students, who fancied themselves as Pagans or Wiccans or something else that was popular among kids at the time.  (And for all I know, they might have been serious and honest about it.)  But they made an issue of the overt religiosity of the display in question, and complained that other religions were not getting similar representation, and thus, as public tax dollars were being used to fund the display, there was a clear violation of the Establishment Clause.

I don't think it went to court, which is important to the story.  I don't think there was ever an official order settling this case.  Instead the school conceded the point:  yes, it was wrong to put on a display for one religion without granting others equal time.  So this display would just be the first in a series.  After it came down, the students who raised the objection would be allowed to put up a display, in the interest of equal exposure of other cultures and religious beliefs.  It's all about education, you see.

So the Christian display came, and the Christian display went.  And then the school realized it had made a terrible mistake.  It had been wrong to even contemplate this display in the first place, let alone put it up.  They completely conceded the point that the students had originally raised:  any such display with such an overt presentation of religion clearly violated the Establishment Clause.  They had made a mistake, and had seen the error of their ways, and they would never let it happen again.

Starting with the display the students were going to put up.

See, the students were right, and the school was wrong, and had been from the start.  They should never have put that display up in the first place.  And the students' display would be just as wrong.  It would be compounding the original wrong the school had committed.  Best to just recognize the school's error and move on from there.

But the students weren't going to get to put on their heathen display.  No way no how.

I don't know how this situation ended.  I may have some of the critical details wrong, though I'm pretty sure I got the gist of the story.  The moral is, if you concede a point after conceding the point is completely moot, after you've had your way and had your say, and if the act of conceding will prevent the other guy from having his way and having his say, you have effectively gotten to have your cake and eaten it, too.  You've won by conceding.

There was a comedian who did a routine about this, about dealing with a rambunctious son.  (Maybe it was supposed to be how his father dealt with him as a child.  The comedian may or may not have been Rondell Sheridan.)  He would play a game:  let's see who can punch the other on the arm the softest.  First the kid would go, giving a light tap.  Then the father (I think) would take his turn, inflicting a punishing smack, followed by the concession "OK, you win!"  (The joke also works if the father goes first and concedes while his son is writhing in pain, and that may have been the way the joke went.  The same idea was used in the South Park episode "Mecha-Streisand.")

In 2009, the Health Care Reform legislation debate had been intentionally dragged out by Republicans so that there was no vote and no resolution prior to the summer Congressional recess, when members of Congress traditionally return home and have meetings with their constituents.  For many constituents the reaction to Health Care Reform was "meh," "whatever," or "Didn't Bill Clinton try to get this passed in 1995?  Good Lord, this is way overdue!"  But not for constituents who were taking their marching orders from right-wing radio and TV.  Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Back were busy firing up the troops.  Sarah Palin was warning about "Death Panels" that would be a natural consequence of health care reform.  This was treason, they told their loyal listeners; that guy in the White House was running roughshod over the true interests of the people of America, and was arrogantly planning to impose his own vision of America on them all.  So the voices on the radio came up with a plan for the summer:  Hijack these town hall meetings.  Shout down any opposition.  Travel en masse to wherever a member of Congress was holding a meeting - even if they weren't constituents of that member of Congress - and get their message across, loud and clear.  Particularly loud.

And that's what happened.  These people went to these meetings and vented their fury.  What they were furious about, they weren't entirely clear.  But they were mad as hell, and they weren't gonna take it anymore.  Not from Democrats, or Liberals, or Progressives.  And especially not from that Negro Mulsim Kenyan in the White House.

And it worked.  Democrats brought sheets of paper to a rock fight and were trounced.  Anyone with a genuine question or concern about Health Care Reform got drowned out by all the people screaming with rage because they had been instructed to scream with rage.  Participatory Democracy was derailed in favor of mobocracy.  Somewhere, Rush Limbaugh leaned back and lit another cigar that had been paid for by the Insurance lobby, satisfied with a job well done.

The Democrats never recovered.  The unfocused rage spiraled and coalesced.  The 2010 elections saw many Congressional Democrats swept from office by the activism of the people who had worked so hard to derail Health Care Reform.

And now it's our turn.  Republicans are everywhere.  They just got sworn into office this week.  They're not going to be able to turn this thing around, not in six months.  Not before the summer recess, and the summer town hall meetings.  Time for them to face some rage - or at least some heat - from the other side.

Today a mentally deranged and well-armed man opened fire on an open-air "town hall" sort of meeting in Arizona.  Representative Garielle Giffords, D-AZ, who was one of the Democrats targeted with crosshairs of a gunsight by Sarah Palin in an ad during the 2010 election, was shot in the head at close range.  She was seriously injured, and several other people (including a young child) were killed.  Giffords had been targeted by violence in the past, including someone who brought a weapon to a town hall meeting, and she had spoken out about the rise of violence in what passes as political rhetoric.



Maybe this is just a case of a lone psychopath operating for his own purposes.  Maybe it was someone who was influenced by the violent rhetoric expressed by Republicans and Tea Partiers.  In any event, it is likely that, starting now, constituents will have far less access to their Congressional representatives than they did before today.  

Huffington Post: The End Of Access

Anyone who tries to express Summer of Rage-level political opinion is now more likely to be arrested than to be featured on CNN and Fox News.  At last the nation is willing to recognize that there is a point when the rhetoric is so out of control that it has come to represent a serious threat to individuals and to the political process itself.  Finally the nation may be willing to see that the Summer of Rage was taking things too far.  The other side is willing to say, "OK, you were right all along" - after they've had their say and gotten their way.





*Except, for some reason, Halloween.  Thought this is a relatively recent development and may be part of a religious backlash.
**In which case they would probably have been the version used by the apostate hellbound Protestants, rather than the correct version used by Catholics.

Backing off, again

Well, after a month with an almost-perfect daily record of blog posting, I think I'm going to be backing off again.

I've got some stuff going on.  Most immediately is the notice that arrived the other day informing me that my homeowner's insurance was being cancelled.  This came with a little notice that I could appeal this cancellation by asking for a review by the state, but the request had to be made within ten days.  Within ten days of what, I'm not sure.  The notice was issued and mailed last Tuesday, which would reasonably have had it delivered by last Thursday - which just happened to be Thanksgiving, a day without mail delivery.  So we lose one day there.  Lose more days for holiday visiting with family and friends, so I didn't even see the notice until Sunday.  Filled out the appeal form yesterday and mailed it this morning.

I've called the insurer to see if we can get this reversed.  I spoke to someone in their President's office, who told me I would have to take it up with my agent; I contacted the agent, who told me I would have to follow the instructions from the President's office.  Typical runaround.  The agent told me to get back to them on Wednesday, which happens to be a work day.  I work all night and sleep during the day.  I'll have very limited windows in the morning and the afternoon in which I can get this taken care of, if I can get it taken care of at all.  If not, then I get to use more of these very limited windows to try to secure other insurance before December 27, which is when my insurance is due to be cancelled.  If I don't get homeowner's insurance before then, I suppose I'll be getting contacted by my mortgage holder...which is, coincidentally, an insurance company.  I wonder if I can get insurance through them?

Let's review:  In August, while I was off donating blood and making chicken soup for my sick, elderly mother, someone broke into the side of my double-block house that I use for storage and cut out all the copper pipes.  I quickly replaced the window they broke to gain entrance, then reinforced all the entrances with alarms and locks and other means.  After a visit from an insurance adjuster to assess the damage, I had a monitored security system installed on both sides of the house at considerable expense.  My current plans include tying the electrical and water utilities on both sides of the house together, which will cost rather a lot of money. 

And now I've been informed that my homeowner's insurance is being cancelled.

The estimated recycling value of the stolen copper pipe is about $60.  It's like being victimized over and over again by the same crime...most recently by my insurance provider.

And that's just one of the things I've got going on right now.  So, please excuse me if I miss a day of blogging here and there.  

Broken habit

Once upon a time I used to write a blog post every day.  Sometimes more than one.  Sometimes I would cheat a bit and pre- or post-date the post by a few hours.  Occasionally I would miss a day.

My dog died and I kept on posting.  My father died and I kept on posting.

My house was robbed and I got knocked off track.

Part of that was a deliberate decision.  I was probably oversharing things about my schedule, giving too much information about when I would be at work and when I would be away, information that potential burglars might, in theory, find useful.  (Ironically, my house was robbed on a day when I was not working, near the end of a longish stretch when I had been laid off and had been spending an until-then unprecedented amount of time at the house photographing the Saturn-Mars-Venus trio.)

Part of that is a direct consequence of the robbery.  Even though my homeowner's insurance - which will probably have a higher premium next year, thanks to the robbery - will cover the cost of the window and the copper pipes and (I think) the more than 10,000 gallons of water that flowed into a floor drain, there is still the matter of a $500 deductible.  Add in the cost of having a security system installed (which was done last week, after a lengthy audition process), and the monthly monitoring of the system, and the extra little alarms and locks and other security devices I've installed around the house, and it becomes clear that the collateral costs of responding to this robbery exceed the cost of replacing the stolen pipes themselves.  (As for how much the scumbags who robbed my house got for the pipes they stole, I probably spent that much on my first trip to Lowe's for alarms and locks and wire mesh and lag screws - and I've made several more trips since then.)

But all this requires money.  And for the last few weeks, I have had a marvelous moneymaking opportunity opened to me.  It's called "overtime."

Here's how it works.  My company laid off a huge number of my fellow employees back in August, including a bunch of people who did what I do.  Things were slow, so they also temporarily laid off a lot of us who weren't permanently laid off for the first few weeks of August.  (That was when my house was robbed.)  But then things got busier sometime in September, and they now needed more employees than they had to get the work done.  (There's also the matter of filling in for employees on sick leave and vacation.)  So since that time overtime has been available.

Overtime will pay time-and-a-half for every hour that you work over 40 in a calendar week.  Say you're working a 36-hour week, which happens four weeks out of every eight when you work a four-day-on, four day off twelve-hour day (or night) schedule*.   Your fourth day of work - your first day of overtime worked within the same calendar week as those three days of a 36-hour week - will pay straight time for the first four hours, and then time and a half for the next eight, giving you fifty-two hours of pay for forty-eight hours of work.  (This is also the starting point for any four-day week; your last day is paid at time-and-a-half after the first four hours.)  The second overtime day (or first, if you started with a four-day week) within the same calendar week is pure overtime, an additional eighteen hours of pay for twelve hours worked, for a total of seventy hours of pay for sixty hours of work. Your sixth day worked in the same calendar week will get you eighty-eight hours of pay for seventy-two hours worked, and your seventh day (if you can manage to get it) will pay one hundred and six hours in exchange for a mere eighty-four hours of your life.

I need the money, so I'm taking as much overtime as I can get and can handle.  This past week that was two days.  Maybe at some point in the future I'll try for three.  Of course, every penny I'm earning is already spoken for, courtesy of the robbery and my response to it and veterinarian's bills and accumulating credit card debt.  And in the very near future I'm looking at being permanently laid off.  I should be conducting a job search now, and actually got a job suggestion from a local politician back at the Blogger/Politician Mixer a few weeks ago, but I've been too busy with overtime and house-related stuff to do anything like that.

Or even to blog. 

I miss blogging.  I miss doing my daily posts.  I miss keeping up with all of my fellow-bloggers, and I just realized that even though I have read everyone's current posts, there are many other posts from the recent past that  I haven't caught up with.

My house now has a monitored security system, so that's one set of stresses that have been slightly alleviated.  Homer, I believe, is on the mend.  And whether I like it or want it or need it or not, overtime will not last forever.  (Nor will my job.)  Someday I may get back into the habit of doing a post a day.  Someday soon, I hope.



*Rotations that begin on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday are 36-hour weeks - these three rotations actually cover four calendar weeks with three twelve-hour days each.  It doesn't sound right, but try working it out for yourself on a calendar and you'll see that it's true.

Things to say, and no time to say them

I've got myself on a new schedule that involves face-time (so to speak) with my house across town every day.  When the break-in happened, I had been spending quite a bit of time over there - an hour or two each evening, to photograph the Venus-Mars-Saturn trio that had been visible throughout August and early September.  But that had been the first significant time that I had spent over there in quite a while.  Sometimes a week or more would go by without me even stippong to check the mail.  (I don't get much mail there.)  So as it happened I was there late on a Saturday night - not to observe, because the sky was completely overcast, but apparently to use the phone and watch TV.  After I left that night I didn't return until late Monday afternoon, which is when I discovered the break-in.  When police and the insurance adjuster asked when the break-in occurred, I wasn't able to narrow it down to much more than that.  Thank goodness the uncertainty was not greater, or some eyebrows might be raised.

But now I'm trying to make sure that answer in the future to the question "When were you last here?" will be "yesterday" or "earlier today."

Unfortunately this means I now have even less time than I used to.  So my blog reading/writing schedule is completely off.  I'll get back to writing as soon as I can.

Remind me to tell you about The Mysterious Cat.

Ugh

Overtime and estimates and insurance adjusters and security contracts and security installations and waiting for my water bill from last month so I can complete my loss summary and then get it notarized and submit it to the insurance company.  What fun.

Meanwhile, we heard another pipe theft on the scanner today, in a part of town pretty far from where I live.  This time they needed to call in the gas company to shut off the gas.

Don't think that this is part of the economic downturn.  People aren't stealing pipes because they need money to buy food for their kids.  They're stealing pipes so they can buy their next dose of heroin or crack or meth or whatever their drug of choice is.  And they'll keep doing it until they overdose or get killed.  The sooner, the better.

Things that make you go hmmmm....

Two things seen about the neighborhood today, both mentioned in a previous post:

This is a truck belonging to (well, used by - I have no evidence that they own it) the neighborhood skanks who are the leading "persons of interest" in the theft of the copper water and heating pipes from my house, among other local crimes.  The "I LOVE SCRAP" bumper sticker is from a local scrapyard belonging to a prominent local family.  The scion of that family, long troubled and drug-addicted, went berserk a few years ago and was the subject of a days-long manhunt.  I wonder if he's still in prison?  If not, I wonder where he's living now?

White unmarked contractor's van parked across the street from my house.  I watched two individuals - fifty-ish and twenty-ish white males - stand on the front porch and knock on the door for a while.  Later I saw the front door was open.  (I think it's open in this picture.)  I never saw them leave, and never noticed if they left with a vanload of copper pipes.  I should have checked the license plate number, but didn't.


Bonus third thing:

I took this picture a while ago but just downloaded it from my phone today.  Used to be that truckers just wanted girls to flash them their breasts as they drove by.  Now they want to know Age, Sex, and Location.


TITLE REFERENCE:  Catchphrase from 1980's late-night host Arsenio Hall, later turned into a song.