I love a story where people do the right thing.

The mom -- and the tiny dog -- are both awesome, fighting 100% down four flights of stairs to save the girl from the masked man who was lying in wait.

But big up the two neighbors who also didn't skip a beat.

The person arrested is a former coworker of the victim.  I'm glad the injuries weren't worse and that everybdy's okay.  <3

"Chicago Veterinarian Planned to Sexually Assault Unborn Child"

How TF would he sexually assault an unborn child?  Inquiring minds needed to know what kind of veterinarian voodoo he had in mind.  OH, right.  Wait until the baby is born.  Look at his smiley smile in that thumbnail :D 

Truly a disgusting story if proven true.  Because everyone is innocent until proven guilty in America and on this blog. 

I'm reminded of the guy from Duke who adopted a young black child with every intention of molesting him.   This guy.   Frank Lombard.  He got 27 years.   Bye, fucker.

These two guys!  With the high-profile water bar!

I really don't talk about celebrities on this blog, because I don't know much about them.  I don't watch much in the way of TV or movies.  It's only been in the last year that my anxieties are under control enough that I can read for pleasure.  So I just don't engage the entertainment sphere that much.  (Though I did watch Dark Winds and it was awesome.)

But I am vaguely aware of who Cardi B is.  And I used to like her, at least generally.   But I'm nobody's dog.

BET:
Cardi B Plans to Sue LAPD for Mistreatment and Accusations of Drug Trafficking

"They had all the helicopters in L.A. Yo, I was freaking out. They had me outside for like three hours. They had me getting butt-naked outside,” Cardi said in the video. “Yo, like, s**t was crazy. It was deada** a movie and whatever but you already know."
“They didn't believe me, it was some White cops and they ain't know who I was. It was really tough on me and everything,” Cardi added. "

[I note that she capitalizes white when it refers to a race.  This doesn't make grammatical sense to me, which is why I've stopped capitalizing black.  It's not more respectful to capitalize something, first of all.  Asian gets capitalized, African, European, because those are  continents.  Not colors.  But that's just me, and also not the point here.]

Daily Mail UK:

"And now Cardi has come forward to say that there was 'no truth' to her wild story and that she was 'taken out of context.'

'This IG live was taken out of context and there is no truth to this story. Apologies for any confusion,' the rapper said in a statement to Billboard."

For me as a rape survivor and someone who lived through the recent riots in Long Beach, all of that is an extreme piss-take.  Because Cardi is rich now, and lives in a very different part of LA.  I'm willing to bet that during the riots -- where my neighborhood had eight full weeks of helicopters circling 24 hours a day overhead, whatever mansion Cardi lives in, they had peace the whole time.  She could get groceries, prescriptions, an ATM, every day of the riots where we were locked down in Long Beach like it was The Purge for eight weeks.  So fuck her just for the helicopter comment.  She doesn't live in the part of LA that gets terrorized by helicopters in real life.

The white police "aint" know who she was, because  she's saying "we all look alike to them."  As a 60-year-old disabled white woman with no radio, I know who Cardi B is, but on-duty cops in her neighborhood in LA don't, sure.  And they made her strip down right on the road!  Which was horrifying, because Cardi B tries so hard to keep her clothes on, especially in front of men.

No actually all of that was just a cheap shot and piss-take on African-American women who have been assaulted by white cops.  I can't help but think about Jannie Ligons getting attacked by Daniel Holtzclaw, made to expose herself on some desolate highway in the middle of the night by a stranger with a gun. The courage it took for Ligons to come forward against him, not even knowing his name.  She really was attacked, and couldn't even be sure they'd take the report, or wouldn't treat her as a suspect.  And then Cardi pulls this bullshit like it's a joke. 

The trauma other people have been through in real life is the only reason there's a red-hot button to be pushed.  I'm tired of people like me being exploited. 

I recognize that I'm not necessarily welcome to self-identify with Holtzclaw's survivors, that his attacks are sometimes defined as specifically or strictly racial.

The OKC Artists for Justice, who supported Holtzclaw's survivors, were quoted explaining how police rape can't and doesn't ever happen to white women.  They went on Democracy Now! and told Amy Goodman how a rapist's bond would be exponentially higher if his victims were white.  Amy Goodman didn't fact-check that. It is what it is.  I'm glad Holtzclaw got sentenced to hundreds of years.

All of that misinformation passes within America'
s ever-imbalanced narratives, as will this latest stunt by Cardi B.  She won't get punished as much as Carlee Russell, which is actually fair because the police wasted a lot of resources on that person.

NPR:
"In a Jefferson County, Ala., circuit court Thursday, Russell pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts for filing a false police report. She was ordered to pay nearly $18,000 in restitution and was sentenced to 12 months of supervised probation, community service and evidence of continued mental health counseling.

During the sentencing, Judge David Carpenter also suspended Russell's two six-month sentences, as said it would be a "waste of government resources" to put her in jail."

So, nothing.  She has to pay the police back for the helicopter and dog search.  Clean trash off the roadway where she pretended to be kidnapped.  I'm willing to bet she learned nothing.  Know how I know?  Because she's not a pariah among African-Americans the way Sherri Papini is with white people.  If she was, Cardi B wouldn't have done this.  People aren't really mad at Carlee Russell.

But Sherri Papini got two years in prison.  And all of the white people applauded that, because what she did was disgusting.  And we don't want to see that again.  And she at least had the decency to not pretend there was a child involved.  Sherri Papini had an actual motive, an affair.  It wasn't just for attention, like with Carlee Russell and Cardi B.  But Rebecca Latimer Felton had no excuse and wasn't sorry for everything she did, and got no punishment at all, so.

Again from DailyMail UK:

"Alright, so no, seriously, I just wanna say thank you to my mother f***ing fans,' she added at the end. It comes just days after Cardi stripped down for the X-rated music video to her new hit Enough (Miami). Cardi can be seen strutting her stuff in a racy one-piece, which partially covered her with furry coat, and knee-high platform platform."

Look, when Carlee Russell said that her kidnappers, "Didn't want to leave wrist marks," that was like Sherri Papini saying they "allowed her to do some yoga."  Then they made Carlee strip down and took naked pictures, but did nothing else.  As a rape and trafficking survivor, all of that sounded like actual bullshit to me.

As a second-generation American, and a white lady who's never even ridden in a Mercedes, much less abandoned one in a fake kidnapping, everything about Carlee Russell makes me want to dunk her head in a toilet.

The unraped portion of white America doesn't knows this, but a lot of people find a "white woman's tears" truly infuriating, along with any suggestion of rape.  It's because of the abuses of Confederate America and the Jim Crow era in particular.  After Rebecca Latimer Felton calling for "1,000 lynchings a week to prevent rape (of white women)" it's a tough sell.  People don't want to hear it.

America had all these plantation sows, bored, lonely, and desperate for attention, wanting to be Confederate favorites, crying "rape" so other people would be severely punished.  The Carolyn Donham Bryant factor is so strong, people's hatred of her so visceral, that a lot of people altogether forget the half-dozen men who actually put hands on the child.   That's why nobody's mad at Carlee Russell or Cardi B.  Because people who look like me are so much worse.

Meanwhile, in the slave quarters, women were actually being brutally attacked.  And nobody got punished for that, either.  So all these unaddressed narratives are just ripe to be exploited in this big, stupid, male supremacy -- where white men also attacked white women with impunity from Day 1 and counting.

The matter is that American "justice" has always been incredibly uneven, and thus unjust.

I don't necessarily expect Cardi B to be making things better per se.  I was glad for her to be out there for Bernie, that was cool.  But with this, she's acting like the worst white women, race-  and rape-baiting to promote herself when her fans are bored.

Here's another video that gives you a good idea of what it's like to work as a paramedic in America. 

Ronald Reagan, with his COBRA act that gave us extremely expensive healthcare you can take with you when you leave a job, ended America's federal funding for inpatient mental healthcare for the indigent mentally ill.  So now we have this situation.

Unfortunately, this is also what it's like to live in Long Beach, California.  Every day I would walk past people in this condition: rolling around the sidewalks, punching at the sky, semi-nude, beyond any reason.  This is almost certainly crystal meth.

I once saw a young woman sitting on the ground outside the auto parts store behind my apartment in Long Beach.  She was squishing her hands around in the mud and putting her fingers in her mouth.  Her hands were very close to some dog shit. 

This young African-American lady, maybe 21, was pretty enough to be a model.  Unlike the woman in the above video, who seems like she's been around a while, the woman I met that day was likely a recent graduate of something, possibly still a student.  She was someone with prospects, not one of the deranged regular homeless people I saw constantly in that alleyway, tweaking like an alien orchestra.  She made a terrible mistake that day to end up where she was.  This was somebody's daughter.  She was in grave danger.

I tried to talk her into coming away from there, at least not putting any shit in her mouth.  She said something about the nutrients from the Earth.  I offered to bring her some food.  She said she was a vegan.  I came back with some vegetables and dip.  I asked her if she had any family that I could call.  She said no.  I sat with her for a while. 

There wasn't anything else I could think of to do.  Her condition was a non-incident in Cambodiatown other than my concern for her safety.  Without a contact person to call, which she wouldn't give me, I had nothing. 

When I came back from my doctor appointment she was in the alley behind the auto parts store, giving a man oral sex next to his white BMW.  I doubt if she was with it enough to get any money from him. I only hope he didn't scoop her up and murder her.

I'm posting this here because I don't know what else to do but let people understand this is real.  We can't even pass common sense laws about guns in this country after however many schools get shot up.  All I can do is bear witness.

And in a shocking twist of fate that nobody could have anticipated, someone in the world of gymnastics may turn out to be a sexual abuser of young people.

I don't know what it will take to establish basic guidelines, where children are not left in the supervision of only one adult.

We've seen over and over that institutions simply can't be trusted to do anything but protect their faculty and themselves.  They protect their bottom line, not their students' bottoms. 

It really boggles my mind, the way the Olympics bent over backwards, did backflips, to protect some nothing little schlub like Larry Nassar.  What's so special about him?  Why do they always protect these people?

I came across a video that -- while heartbreaking to watch -- is so educational that I found it important to share.  This is what it's like to work as a paramedic in America.

I warn you it's painful to watch.  His anguished screams are simple to understand.  He can't be consoled.  There is nothing to help him, I don't think even at the hospital, but time.  I'm not sure even methadone is necessarily a help.

This young man has been resuscitated with Narcan after long-term opioid addiction.  His housemates called 911.

A lot of my coworkers would surprise me with how little they understood drug users like this young man.  They often believed that the combativeness after receiving Narcan -- which is not usually this bad -- is anger at the money they had "wasted" on the high.

Because the one and only thing that Narcan does in the human body is block its ability to work with opioids, any and all of them.  So whether you took heroin, Fentanyl, Percocet, whatever, Narcan will stop all of that dead in its tracks.  And all of a sudden you'll start breathing again, which is the paramedic's goal:  Airway, Breathing, Circulation.  Hospital.

But the people who work as police, firefighters, and paramedics, are drawn from a very specific hiring pool.  They have military hiring preference.  They drug test.  So it skews heavily toward alcoholics who never touch weed or any other drugs.  And they simply don't understand the mindset or how it works, even very simple things about marijuana usage and etiquette, anything you wouldn't learn on a traffic stop.

Anyway I'm rambling.  But this poor guy comes from a completely different world.  He's not angry about money that he lost from all the drugs he bought, as my coworkers would sometimes say.  He's not mad that he's not high anymore.

Because those people -- like the functional alcoholics that many of the first responders are -- don't actually get high anymore.  They only get "not sick."  They have to take more and more just to be okay.  I know a lot of police, firefighters, and paramedics get drunk as dogs just to be basically okay.  A lot of them wouldn't pass a breathalyzer during their shifts, GTFO.  And yet they do judge.  This is an open secret everywhere.  It has become a new thing to bust teachers with it on YouTube.

Another area where I needed to push Narcan was nursing homes.  Elderly people are frequently given high-dose opioids in patches.  Those may be applied by people with inappropriate licensing, CNAs, and placed one atop the other, or simply applied to any bare area of skin, without removing the old patches.  The elderly person is already incapacitated, and then has a massive opioid overdose.  Because the patches often continue to seep medication.  They're meant to be removed and replaced.  The nurses push their work off onto untrained staff all the time.

But this poor young man.  He's clearly been having to take increasing doses of his opioid of choice for an extended time.  And today he stopped breathing, or his roommates couldn't wake him.  Maybe he was choking on his own vomit, like Jimi Hendrix, and couldn't protect his own airway, although I didn't see any puke. 

When the medics arrived, they had to get him breathing again.  The opioids had told his brain not to signal his lungs to breathe.  So that had to be blocked with Narcan.   And once that happened, all of that long-term tolerance that had our man Joseph in the video needing higher and higher doses over time, as I'm sure he did, all of that came crashing down.  All of that hit a brick wall with that one Narcan push.

Joseph is screaming that way because he's back to Day 1 of never having met an opioid after that push of Narcan.  Again, the one and only thing Narcan does in the human body is block the action of the opioid receptors.  It simply makes opioids not connect to their targets in the brain.  So his long-term relationship with them ended all at once.  Every raw nerve in his body hit that brick wall all at once.  His entire brain is on fire.  That's why he's screaming like that.  When he can eventually form words, they are "Let me die."

I really wish Joseph all the best.  I honestly don't know what happens next for him. 

I have so much to catch up on after being ill.  And unfortunately, a lot of the backlog also makes me feel ill.

A lot of things about this story really disturb me.  Really there's only one bright spot:  the father.  I'll review the video again, going point by point with what bothers me about this.

  1.  Indian manager tried KISSING 17-year employee.  Why is the manager's nationality/race in the title? What does that have to do with anything?  Problematic.  Especially since this incident happened in Georgia, deep in the heart of pitting rape survivors against people of other races, just for the mirth and merriment.

2.  A 17-year employee is someone who has worked there for 17 years.  This is a 17-year-OLD employee, a teenager, unlike the manager in his 50s.  Why am I picking that little nit?  Well, because this whole story is being covered on a gaming channel.  It's being seen as infotainment for boys whose minds work at that level now.  I'm not sure that's a good thing.  I'm not sure they'd be on the girl's side at all if (a) there were no videotape,  (b) the manager were white or black, or (c) he was a really popular singer or sportsballer.  Or even a high-school sportsballer, like from Steubenville.  For example, the video opens with a witness giving a statement, and the gamer overtalks him with "Don't mind my massive pimple that I just popped!"  because really, we have our priorities totally straight when talking about sexual violence in America.

3.  Look how effortless the lies and victim-blaming are from the manager.  "I told her to clean the break room.  Twenty minutes later I had to go looking for her.  I found her playing on her phone. So I "charged" her.  I told her you had 20 minutes to clean the floor and table and it's not done.  Then she asked to go to the bathroom, so I said okay.  Then her father came and "charged" me."  He claims he completed the mopping she hadn't done after she went to the bathroom after doing nothing for 20 minutes.  He seems entirely baffled about why her father showed up like a crazy man.  This girl is completely nuts!

4.  The first question the police have for him is if there are cameras in the break room where the alleged incident occurred.  He makes them ask three times.  He's stalling.  Because of course there are.  And he has just lied his whole face off.  The manager confirms repeatedly that there are no cameras in there.  When the other employees say there is, and the cops go in there and see a camera, he says it's been broken for years.  I'm mentioning this part of it, because it demonstrates how very heavily this manager is relying on HE-SAID, SHE-SAID, the staple diet of rape culture.  America and the world have been running on that forever.  As long as he can fall back on HE-SAID, SHE SAID, he knows he can do whatever TF he wants.  Because of the very next question the cops had for him:

5. "How long has she been working here? Have there ever been any issues between you guys?"  Now.  I understand that he's doing an investigation, and he has to ask questions.  But that line of reasoning, where it's equally likely that this middle-aged man grabbed a teenage girl, or this teenage girl tried to frame her innocent manager who never did anything, is frankly fucking ridiculous.  It just makes my teeth hurt, how one is as common as cockroaches, and the other is more of a Faberge egg, that takes a lot of time and effort to create, you don't really see that often, and is fairly easy to spot.  Ask yourself why she would suddenly run out of her work shift and call her dad to come beat her manager's ass, for what possible reason?  Him being a horny turd and lacking impulse control is a fairly obvious reason.  Women are presumed lying and hysterical, overreacting to the little nothings that men do.  "Boys will be boys."

6. The manager, being an alleged asshole, is definitely smelling what the cop is stepping in.  And he knows how to capitalize on the momentum.  "I'm a respectful person.  I'm almost 60 years old.  I'm not going to touch the girls!" he says with a light chuckle.  He apparently hasn't been in the country long enough to know all the dog-whistle catchphrases we traditionally use to discredit rape survivors in this country, especially as a man of color in Georgia.  The police move to questioning other employees.  They say there is in fact a camera in the break room.

7.  Meanwhile, at 5:46 we see that the police have left the suspect manager to his own devices for some reason.  He has gone to the tape room and immediately pulled up the section of tape that he just told the police didn't exist. He was charged with tampering with evidence.

8.  When being arrested, after watching a video that shows him allegedly putting his hands on her waist, lifting up her face, then moving his face toward hers as if to kiss her -- exactly as the employee complained of -- the manager's question is, "What I have done?"  He's utterly baffled.  They all are.  No rapist ever thinks they did anything wrong.  Since time immemorial, women have been chattel property of men.  They get to do whatever they want with our bodies.  And for some of them that notion is really stubborn.

It is kind of horrible to hear the police notifying his wife that he's being arrested.  Because you know what?  She's an Indian wife.  That was probably an arranged marriage.  She's stuck with that jerk.  This is all her problem now. She has to support their family on her income now. 

At the end of the day, I guess what bothers me the most is what a horrible mess all of this would have been without the video.  Because nobody would have believed the girl or given a fuck about her but her father. 

If she's white and it's in Georgia, depending what year it is and what color the manager is, who her father is, it could have gone a number of different ways.  All of that would be political only.  That's how sexual assault works in America.

Now we're at a point in the post #MeToo world where this is virtue signaling infotainment for gamer boys, as long as the demographics all hit the right notes and there's the right amount of audio-visual material for their streams.  But these are the same people who make Reddit such a sewer and acquit Andrew Mitchell twice when they sit on juries.  None of them will ever read this blog or any of my books lol