There's a lot of information out about this sick guy, Brian Steven Smith. 
ABC News
"A jury found Brian Steven Smith guilty of the murders of 30-year-old Kathleen Jo Henry and 52-year-old Veronica Abouchuk, two Native Alaska women who died on Sep. 4, 2019, and August 2018, respectively.

Smith was found guilty of all 14 criminal counts, including first- and second-degree murder, tampering with evidence and sexual assault in the deaths of both women.
The jury also found that an aggravated factor of substantial physical torture applies to Smith's count of first-degree murder in the murder of Kathleen Jo Henry.
Smith, who is from South Africa, previously admitted to committing both murders in an interrogation on Oct. 8, 2019, which was played for the jury during the trial. Still, Smith pleaded not guilty to all charges."


I'm glad these women got some justice, and that his reign of terror was finally stopped.  Because I'm sure there are other victims.  Lord only knows what he got away with during his days on the loose.  There's a reason such a person gravitated to Alaska.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  I'm so sorry for what they went through at his hands.

Former Officer Michael Christian Green pled guilty to forcing an arrestee to lick his own urine off of the jail floor, after not allowing him to use a toilet.  This was a horribly violent, prolonged, and despicable attack on an immigrant.  I'm not sure how it was discovered, whether the man filed a complaint, a coworker of Green's, or command routinely reviewed the video.

AP:
"Michael Christian Green, 26, lost his job as a Pearl Police Department patrol officer in late December, four days after security cameras showed the violent encounter in Pearl, a suburb of the capital city of Jackson.

Green — who has a large cross tattooed on one arm and the word “Blessed” tattooed on the other — stood calmly before a federal magistrate judge Thursday and did not dispute any of the accusations read aloud by a federal prosecutor."

I'm glad they acted swiftly and firmly on this in terms of revoking his ability to work in law enforcement.  But he was only charged with a misdemeanor.  And how were there not more safeguards in place to prevent it happening in the first place?  How were there not more other personnel in the area to see what kind of thing he was doing and stop it?

Mississippi has serious problems, as we see from the recent "goon squad" sentencing.  America's "justice" system is so spotty, so variable from one place to another.  A lot of things never come to the light of day.

It was weird to me the way this Mayor mentioned, in another video, his personal religious beliefs as a reason that he couldn't understand Green's behavior.  Because Green has his Christianity tattooed on his arms.  And the Mayor wasn't doing what a lot of people in Mississippi demand Muslims, for example, do every time there's a terror attack, and denounce the bad people of their own religion.  No, he was just kind of baffled at how somebody could do such a thing, tsk tsk.  I think America would be better off overall if we really did have separation of church and state.  I think that would be better even if that makes the Christians uncomfortable, checking their personal values at the door and just going strictly by the law.

I think as long as people think their personal feelings can come into their official decision-making, that America is about them and their personal values while they fulfill their municipal duties, we're screwed.

So this is the one and only thing I've ever had to say about this also-ran comedian from the 1980s.

Anti-Abortion Zealots Flex Their Biblical Muscles at the Supreme Court

Michael Ian Black was someone I used to have  a neutral-favorable opinion of.  Then he disappeared from my radar for a long time.

Then while the #MeToo Movement got co-opted/Twitterjacked by white celebrities during the Harvey Weinstein kerfuffle and other prosecutions that followed, once that started to die down, it became safe to be a rape troll again.  I was much too hard on Jim Jeffries in hindsight, which is pretty sick in terms of how low the bar is.

But once it became safe to piss on #MeToo, Michael Ian black couldn't miss his chance to draw some attention to himself by hopping on the bandwagon and coming out against it.  I don't remember/care exactly what he said.  I remember noting it at the time.  I've seen who he is now.

Now not only is Louis CK back on tour, Michelle Wolf is opening for him and Dave Chappelle -- who talks all kinds of shit about a young girl who got kidnapped and raped.  Michelle Wolf has a bunch of #MeToo jokes, as does even Kathleen Madigan.  They all do now.  Comedy was never our friend.  But rape culture is all the way safe and open now.  #MeToo is officially hysterical women persecuting men now.  The portion of the world that I'm willing to participate in gets smaller every day. 

I bring this up because I will never forget realizing Michael Ian Black was still alive when he popped up, a propos of nothing, to piss on #MeToo.  Duly noted.  Another hero heard from. 

I point this out, on the first and last time I will ever talk about this washup, because of the dripping hypocrisy.  He appears to be angling for an MSNBC job.  I'll never vote again, so I don't care what any of these hypocrites do.  But I pay to maintain this blog so that I can have an opinion. 

When I read the book Women Talking, one of the most infuriating things about it was the reviewers going all swoony on August Epp with "not all men!"  I guess it seems that way when you've never dipped below a certain level of comfort, that he's doing a great job.

To me, August Epp, like Michael Ian Black, with his heroic article in The Daily Beast, is disastrous.  With friends like him, we're better off dead.   I can't possibly grade on that hard of a curve.  I'd like to see him lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way.  I'd like to see the people with no scar tissue at all STFU for a minute and stop talking over me about everything.  I'm old now.  This is not so survivable.

August Epp knows how to read.  August Epp has not only been to England and speaks English and Spanish, knows how to use maps, he's been in prison and understands more about how society works than average, right?  And he sits in that meeting with his male gaze, ogling the women and even the girls, adding not a damned thing of value that can help them.  They don't know what questions to ask, and he offers them fucking gibberish about the Dead Sea.  I wanted to strangle August Epp.  And the unraped women reading that book all wanted to give him cookies for not killing himself or raping anybody.  That's how low the bar is for "not all men" like him and the anti #MeToo Michael Ian Black.

I have so many thoughts about both this story and the Franke/Hildebrandt case.  And they have a lot in common.  Really the Utah women are lucky that the children didn't die, is the main difference.  And the demographics.  Bottom line, all of these kids were living in hell because of the high-demand Christianity of their parents.  The two youngest Franke children barely survived.

Unfortunately people who directly experience violence in America are automatic casualties of both whatever abuse is inflicted on them, and then of America's toxic narratives.  There isn't much of a good or healthy way to talk about the life and death of this poor child.

It's obvious to note how much more attention the Franke children are getting, and how nobody knows the name Sayra Barros.  If you look at it from the superficial, identity-politics level that everything has degraded to now, it looks like just another death being swept under the rug.  Firing those two caseworkers means nothing.  They'll get other jobs.

But Ruby and Jodi had an actual TV show about how great it was, the way they treated children!  And the Mormon Church referred people to her multimillion-dollar home.  Jodi was looking to buy even more-secluded land to have children funneled to for "repentance."  The police found $85,000 cash in Jodi's home, which was child support for the two starving children.

Whereas Sayra's father and stepmother were just very quietly in a high-demand religion, not exploiting her financially or in the media.  And there was only one of her to take the wrath/be in the way of her stepmother's marriage to her father.

But showering Sayra's case in attention the same way the  Franke case is being treated would be highly problematic for a number of reasons:

• Sayra's family are immigrants from Nigeria
  
• They're black people
  
• They weren't famous child-raising experts in a huge, influential church before Sayra was murdered
  
• The prior complaints about Sayra's mistreatment were nowhere near as public as with the Franke kids
  
• The conversation in America already has never been balanced, and has only spiraled into madness in recent years;
  

and the kicker:

• Most of the discussion around "true crime" is gawking and exploitative piss-taking on the victims anyway.  That's the part nobody likes to talk about, and why Sayra's case isn't really ripe for that sort of attention.  It isn't about support or making anything better. Nothing wholesome comes of it.  It's about ad revenue.  Exploiting and screwing with minority immigrants when they've committed horrible child abuse will only play with one demographic, and they don't care what happened to Sayra because she's black.
  

The other thing that leaps out at me, based on my age and demographic, is how firing these two workers is exactly like weeding out those "bad apple" cops, which is what I grew up being told needed to happen as a white kid in the 1960s.  How did that work out?  Let's ask George Floyd -- or Philando Castile, or a lot of people.

Well as an old lady, I'm a huge fan of body cams, which would never have come to pass if we were still in "bad apples" mode.  I literally watch body cam videos every day, because I'm a believer in "your story, their story, and the actual story."  Not that people are necessarily lying.  But I learned running 911 calls that all the different perspectives of a serious event are needed, and they often conflict for many different reasons.  I know how untrustworthy my own memory is.  The more cameras, the better.   Because come to find out, it was more than just a few bad apples.

Meanwhile, exactly like with the Franke kids, Sayra died because her father deferred to his wife on however she wanted to treat the child.  Period.  Same with my dad.  "I abdicate responsibility.  Good luck, kiddo."  We live in a nation of heroes.

Like Ruby and Jodi, Sayra's stepmother used the child as a dark mirror for all of her own shortcomings.  I have to wonder what about any of this reflects Jesus, in what way.

Eve Franke, when she could finally be coaxed out of the linen closet after several hours, was brought in for questioning.  When she finally spoke, she said, "If I talk to you, it will only make my repentance process that much harder."

All of this is immensely helpful for me personally as a survivor, to see how these children truly believed it was their own fault, that they deserved what was done to them.  I recognized my mother in the Teflon denial of Jodi and Ruby, how they continued to blame first the children, then each other.  But I felt especially liberated by the children's pure acceptance of blame and responsibility for all of it.  How I recognized that.  How wrong it is.

The best thing about this is that Sayra doesn't have to deal with it anymore.

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.