His name was Carlos. What more do you need?

Someone named Carlos murdered Wanda Lopez in Texas. Carlos Hernandez. Someone named Carlos was arrested near the scene of the crime. Carlos DeLuna. Good enough! So after a hasty trial with a cheap and incompetent defense lawyer, Texas executed Carlos DeLuna.

Hernandez had a mustache and was wearing a grey flannel shirt, DeLuna was clean-shaven and wearing a white dress shirt. Hernandez was later arrested for another murder, and confessed to killing Wanda Lopez.

Didn’t matter. Texas had a Carlos.

There can’t be that many Hispanic men named Carlos, right? Just round ’em all up.

Once we’ve cleaned them out, we can start on the Juans.

Man, it’s like Texas took all the flaws of America and blew them up to ten times the size of anyplace else, and is proud of them.

The mystery of the disappearing laptop

That priest who flashed gay porn at his audience is being investigated, and something strange has happened: the laptop that he used has vanished completely and somewhat mysteriously. It’s also the only thing stolen from the priest’s home.

Makes you go “hmmm”, doesn’t it.

I’ve got two possible explanations: 1) them evil gays broke into his house to steal his legendary Gay Porn stash, or 2) Jesus teleported the computer to his party room in Heaven. I can’t imagine any other way this could happen.

Oh, OK, a priest could have intentionally destroyed evidence that he had a computer full of dowloaded porn, but that’s so ridiculous and ludicrous that it beggars belief. Priests have vows and a special connection to a beneficent god and know for sure that lying and masturbating to gay porn and using a condom or other such sinful apparatus would send them straight to hell, so they’d never ever do that. Ever.

The future of Republican health care

Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re a 68 year old black man with a serious heart condition, and a medic alert bracelet, just in case. You accidentally press it one night.

Don’t expect an ambulance with EMTs. The police will come to your door and demand admission.

You will say, “Please leave me alone. I’m 68 with a heart condition. Why are you doing this to me? Can you please leave me alone?”

The police will tell you they don’t give a fuck. They will call you a nigger. They will force open the door as much as the chain allows.

They will taser you. You’re a 68 year old man with a heart condition, remember?

They will shoot you with a beanbag shotgun.

Then, they’ll shoot you dead with live ammo.

Sounds like some grim dystopian fantasy, doesn’t it? Nah, that could never happen. In what insane world would police, rather than doctors, respond to a medical alert, and treat it with deadly gunfire rather than medicine?

It happened in America, in White Plains, NY, last November. It happened to Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr.

What the hell is wrong with this country?

Talk cancelled. Threats of violence found persuasive

A talk on Sharia law and human rights was about to begin at Queen Mary, University London, when someone made an announcement.

Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said ‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Muhammad, I will hunt you down.’ He then left the room and two members of the audience applauded.

The same man then began filming the faces of Society members in the foyer and threatening to hunt them down if anything was said about Muhammad, he added that he knew where they lived and would murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, seemingly there to support him. We were told by security to stay in the Lecture Theatre for our own safety. On arriving back in the room I became aware that the doors that opened to the outside were still open and that people were still coming in. Several eye witnesses reported that when I was in the foyer a group of men came through the open doors, causing a disruption and making it clear that the room could not be secured. Unfortunately, the lack of security in the lecture theatre meant we and the audience had to leave and a Union representative informed the security that as students’ lives had been threatened there was no way that the talk could go ahead.

This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate. Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.

Guess what? Cowardly extortion works! The talk was cancelled.

I guess we’re not supposed to say anything against holy Prophet Muhammad, but he didn’t say we couldn’t talk about his benighted followers. So…fuck you, rabid Islamicists. I hope people in the audience snapped open their phones and got pictures of angry ranty threatening guy and his followers, and that the police will be giving them a few lessons in the rule of law and how to live in a civil society real soon.

Catholic morality

A German priest is on trial for numerous cases of child rape. The one thing that is truly remarkable about the case is how unaware the priest is of simple human morality.

A German Catholic priest has admitted 280 counts of sexual abuse involving three boys in the past decade, saying he did not think he was doing harm.

The priest said it had not been his intention to get close to the boy sexually, and that it had never occurred to him that he was doing harm.

“It was never my impression that the children did not consent,” the priest was quoted as saying at the trial.

When asked in court if he was a paedophile, he replied, according to local newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung: “It would be wrong to say No but to say Yes would also fall short of the truth.”

He was molesting 9 year old boys. He had pornographic pictures of them on his computer. But he had no idea that what he was doing was wrong.

What exactly do they teach in Catholic seminaries? How can anyone grow up in European society and be unaware that raping children was wrong?

The Vatican must have a special program to seek out ethically blinkered sociopaths and make them priests.

I’m sure they are a very spiritual couple

Kristy Bamu and his two sisters were visiting their older sister, Magalie Bamu, and her partner, Eric Bikubi, over Christmas in London. Initially, it was apparently a jolly time…and then Eric got it into his head that his three visitors were witches.

The court was told that over a period of days the pair, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, attempted to exorcise evil spirits they believed were in three of the children – Kristy, his sister Kelly, 20, and their 11-year-old sister, who cannot be named. Bikubi refused "to let them eat, drink or sleep for days, while the punishments became increasingly violent, with [the attackers] using the many implements found in the flat as weapons of torture", Altman said.

During their ordeal the siblings were forced to pray and chant throughout several nights and, in a "staggering act of depravity and cruelty", the defendants recruited sibling against sibling as "vehicles for their violence", said Altman.

Kristy became the focus of Bikubi’s attention, the court heard. He allegedly struck the boy with a hammer in the face, knocking out his teeth; on another occasion he shoved a metal bar into the teenager’s mouth, the court heard.

When Kelly attempted to hit her brother using something light, she was ordered to use a heavier implement. In a desperate attempt to prevent any further suffering, Kristy and his two sisters eventually admitted to being sorcerers, said Altman. "As Kristy’s injuries became ever more severe he even pleaded to be allowed to die," he added.

They gave him his wish and drowned him in the bathtub.

A couple of people believe there is magic in the world and that their delusions are real, and a 15 year old boy ends up tortured to death.

The couple are denying that they committed murder; Eric Bikubi claims “diminished responsibility”, apparently because he’s an evil idiot who believes in spirits.

The children of Polk County must be especially sexy and delectable

That must be it. How else to explain how four pastors in one week were arrested on child rape charges? Those tempting little minxes! To tempt even saintly men of God!

As an extra special bonus, the George Jenkins High School football coach and the St. Petersburg baseball coach were arrested for sex with minors this month, too.

It couldn’t possibly be that the culture grants churches and athletics excessive privileges that draw in cocky parasites, could it? Nasty little men who believe their calling gives them special dispensation to abuse?

The ugly facts about rape

There’s a lot of pain in this country. The CDC has just released the results of The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, and it’s not a happy story.

  • Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration.

  • More than half (51.1%) of female victims of rape reported being raped by an intimate partner and 40.8% by an acquaintance; for male victims, more than half (52.4%) reported being raped by an acquaintance and 15.1% by a stranger.
    Approximately 1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else during their lifetime; most men who were made to penetrate someone else reported that
    the perpetrator was either an intimate partner (44.8%) or an acquaintance (44.7%).

  • An estimated 13% of
    women and 6% of men have experienced sexual coercion
    in their lifetime (i.e., unwanted sexual penetration after being pressured in a nonphysical way); and 27.2% of women and 11.7% of men have experienced unwanted sexual contact.

  • Most female victims of completed rape (79.6%) experienced their first rape before the age of 25; 42.2% experienced their first completed rape before the age of 18 years.

  • More than one-quarter of male victims of completed rape (27.8%) experienced their first rape when they were 10 years of age or younger.

The survey used standard methods to get a representative sample: random digit dialing of both cell and landlines, and a fairly thorough phone interview. They got about 9,000 women and 7,000 men to participate. This is a reasonably definitive study by a respected organization, and it confirms prior estimates of the frequency of rape in the US.

I just thought you’d want to know the depressing news before you went to bed.

Who is the enemy here?

To think I had to learn about horror stories going on in the US military from the British press. It seems that our military shares some of the same attributes as the Catholic church — exclusivity, privilege, and a culture that rejects criticism — and has some of the same vices: sexual predators flourish within it.

Rape within the US military has become so widespread that it is estimated that a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. So great is the issue that a group of veterans are suing the Pentagon to force reform. The lawsuit, which includes three men and 25 women (the suit initially involved 17 plaintiffs but grew to 28) who claim to have been subjected to sexual assaults while serving in the armed forces, blames former defence secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates for a culture of punishment against the women and men who report sex crimes and a failure to prosecute the offenders.

Why would any woman want to serve in the military, given the statistics? Of course, that might be part of the reason rape culture thrives: there are plenty of military men who detest and diminish the contributions of women.

Last year 3,158 sexual crimes were reported within the US military. Of those cases, only 529 reached a court room, and only 104 convictions were made, according to a 2010 report from SAPRO (sexual assault prevention and response office, a division of the department of defence). But these figures are only a fraction of the reality. Sexual assaults are notoriously under-reported. The same report estimated that there were a further 19,000 unreported cases of sexual assault last year. The department of veterans affairs, meanwhile, released an independent study estimating that one in three women had experience of military sexual trauma while on active service. That is double the rate for civilians, which is one in six, according to the US department of justice.

Beyond the statistics, there are the stories. I’m sure the rapists in the military are the minority, but they are taking advantage of a culture that refuses to acknowledge their existence — that is more willing to punish and silence the victims than the perpetrators.

Stories such as Weber’s are commonplace. On mydutytospeak.com, where victims of military rape can share their experiences, there are breathtaking tales of brutality and mistreatment. Only 21 years old, and weeks into her military training, Maricella Guzman says she ran to tell her supervisor in the hours after her rape at a military boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. “I burst into his office and said, ‘I need to speak to you,’ ” explains Guzman, now 34, and a student at a college in Los Angeles studying psychology, who talks about many lost years when she couldn’t function as a result. “One of the procedures if you want to speak to someone in the navy is you have to knock three times on the door and request permission to speak. But I didn’t do that. I was too upset. So my supervisor said ‘Drop’, which means push-ups. So I did the push-ups. But I was still in tears. I said, ‘I need to talk to you.’ He said ‘Drop’ again. Every time I tried to say anything, he made me do push-ups. By the time I was composed in the way he wanted me to be, I couldn’t say anything any more. I just couldn’t.” After that, Guzman didn’t try to tell anyone for another eight years.

Rape culture doesn’t hurt just women, either. The statistics on men being raped are also horrific.

But military rape is not only a women’s issue. According to the Veterans Affairs Office, 37% of the sexual trauma cases reported last year were men. “Men are even more isolated than women following rape,” Bhagwati says. “Because it has an even bigger social stigma.”

There is an interesting discussion of why rape is such a huge problem in the American military.

“We looked at the systems for reporting rape within the military of Israel, Australia, Britain and some Scandinavian countries, and found that, unlike the US, other countries take a rape investigation outside the purview of the military,” explains Greg Jacob, policy director at the Service Women’s Action Network. “In Britain, for example, the investigation is handed over to the civilian police.

“Rape is a universal problem – it happens everywhere. But in other military systems it is regarded as a criminal offence, while in the US military, in many cases, it’s considered simply a breach of good conduct. Regularly, a sex offender in the US system goes unpunished, so it proliferates. In the US, the whole reporting procedure is handled – from the investigation to the trial, to the incarceration – in-house. That means the command has an overwhelming influence over what happens. If a commander decides a rape will not get prosecuted, it will not be. And in many respects, reporting a rape is to the commander’s disadvantage, because any prosecution will result in extra administration and him losing a serviceman from his unit.”

There’s the start of a solution. The Pentagon claims that the problem of sexual assault in the military is now a “command priority” — but will they take the necessary actions to correct it, or will they turtle up and make it even more of an in-house process? I’d bet on the latter, given their history.

I also wonder, given the brutality and neglect with which some American soldiers are allowed to treat their comrades-in-arms, is it a surprise that they treat the people in the countries we occupy with brutality? Even disregarding the inhumanity of the rape behavior that is tolerated, I think it is also counterproductive to the long-term aims of our military.

For greater moral rectitude!

Penn State’s reputation will be saved now! They’ve got an ally willing to work with them to get over the stigma of pedophilia: the Catholic church. Whaaa…?

The Roman Catholic Church is willing to partner with American educational institutions to educate the public about child sex abuse after the Penn State scandal, according to the head of the U.S. church.

Well, sure, that makes sense. It’s like if you’re caught stealing cars, you do restitution by volunteering to work in the biggest chop shop in the state. You bring together two groups renowned for a crime, and they magically cancel each other out and return to a state of probity, right?

Using my gift of prophecy, I see other brilliant tactical moves from PSU soon to appear. The fired coaches will be replaced with recruits from the sex offenders wing of Graterford, and they’ll soon have a new mascot:

That won’t be as big a change as you might think. Here’s the current mascot:

He just wants to give the boys and girls a big hug!