{"id":28565,"date":"2017-07-15T08:55:24","date_gmt":"2017-07-15T15:55:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=28565"},"modified":"2017-07-15T08:55:24","modified_gmt":"2017-07-15T15:55:24","slug":"everyday-erinyes-83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/15\/everyday-erinyes-83\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #83"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.\u00a0 These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.\u00a0 Even though there are many more which I can’t include.\u00a0 As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto<\/span>, Megaera<\/span>, and Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

I had better start with this story and get it off my chest.\u00a0 The title is \u2018I come from a rich and white family\u2019: White dad denies responsibility for abused 5-year-old black stepson<\/a>, and there is not too much more about it you need to know.\u00a0 I am not a big fan of lookism, particularly turned onto people under 50 (Coco Chanel: “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.”<\/em>)\u00a0 But this guy is almost 30, and it appears to me that “life” has given him some pretty dead eyes in that face.\"\"<\/p>\n

The child, a little boy, whose name is (wisely, IMO) not provided, is five years old.\u00a0 He cannot speak or walk.\u00a0 He weighed, when taken into the hospital, 24.9 pounds – so low the weight did not register on the growth charts for a five year old.\u00a0 When found, he was reaching into the carpet for cereal to eat.<\/p>\n

His hands and feet were orange and blistered, apparently from chewing at them \u2014 an action his mother said let him know he was hungry because he is nonverbal. She also told police she often would not feed the boy for days at a time, and that he was not on his required medication for some developmental issues he has.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are two other children in the home which the – father? stepfather? what do I call this PoS? – claims are his.\u00a0 A different source<\/a> said the other two children are younger, so infidelity doesn’t appear to be a factor.\u00a0 Not wanting to support “some other guy’s kid,” however, apparently looms large.<\/p>\n

Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>, revenge here is definitely appropriate.\u00a0 But my heart wants you to put on your Eumenides hat and find this child a home where he can receive care and love.\u00a0 Good luck.\u00a0 You’ll need it.<\/p>\n

Back on the third of April, a group of 31 county sheriffs, representing every county across the border between the US and Mexico, took a meeting and unanimously voted to adopt face (specifically eye) recognition hardware and software as a new enforcement tool<\/a>.\u00a0 You see, it can happen that unauthorized immigrants’ “fingerprints can be disfigured through manual labor or self-inflicted wounds.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, we can’t have that, can we.\u00a0 If an immigrant has worked at manual labor so long and hard that his (or her) fingerprints have become disfigured, or has become so desperae as to attempt to disfigure his or her fingerprints through self-inflicted wounds (not as easy as it sounds, BTW), well, we just have to find another way to kick him or her out.<\/p>\n

Didn’t that use to be called “kicking a man when he’s down”?\u00a0 Oh, wait – law enforcement now does that literally and routinely.<\/p>\n

\"\"Well, I’m sure that is not the point for the company, Biometric Imformation and Identification Technologies, affectionally nicknamed BI2, which is giving the sheriffs a FREE three-year trial of their stuff.\u00a0 No, I’m betting it’s much more important that the company will add – “a huge influx” – of biometric information to its existing national iris database.<\/p>\n

From the company’s senior vice president (John Leonard, pictured):<\/p>\n

The frustration law enforcement has is this: \u2018Alright, I got this criminal, the guy raped three kids. He\u2019s back in my community again. I don\u2019t even know who he is, and the federal government has never given me what I need….’<\/em><\/p>\n

You get all these people that say, \u2018Well Trump is going after all these illegals, these immigrants, who have made America great.\u2019 Well there\u2019s a lot of immigrants that have made it great, but there\u2019s a lot of assholes, too.\u00a0 So BI2 is stepping up to the plate and donating this.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, I think that anyone who believes this will have any impact on immigration, legal or not, might be interested in a bridge that TomCat has for sale.\u00a0 Alecto<\/span><\/strong>, can you – I know it’s a long border – but kind of watch out for the innocents and give them some protection from the abuses this will lead to?<\/p>\n

For the third story here (out of SIX I bookmarked on Monday alone), I want to issue some warnings about a group known as the ACRU.<\/a>\u00a0 We all know about the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union.\u00a0 Well, the ACRU is the American Civil Rights Union, designed essentially to oppose everything the ACLU dies or wants to do.\u00a0 R for Right, L for Left, I suppose.<\/p>\n

In June 2014, the five Election Commissioners of Noxubee County, Mississippi, received a letter threatening legal action if they did not purge their election rolls, legal action would be taken.\u00a0 Because, the ACRU claimed, “there were more people registered than there were voting age citizens on the county.”\"\"<\/p>\n

Noxubee County could not afford to lawyer up; however, the Board pushed back as best they could.\u00a0 They ignored the letter.\u00a0 In November 2015, the threatened lawsuit was filed.\u00a0 The ACRU was pushing for a consent decree which would agree to remove voters.\u00a0 After some time, the commissioners were being leaned on to sign that consent decree.\u00a0 Three caved.\u00a0 Two didn’t.\u00a0 As one commissioner said, \u201cWe are not gonna get those [voter] cards back.\u00a0 I promised my voters I would look out for them, and to me, that\u2019s not looking out for them.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Now the ACRU is pushing the court for a default judgement.<\/p>\n

Mother Jones mentions three lawyers who are purging voter rolls.\u00a0 The first is J. Christian Adams.<\/p>\n

[Adams is] a former staff attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department\u2019s Civil Rights Division. Adams joined the department in 2005, when high-ranking official Bradley Schlozman was found by the department\u2019s inspector general to be illegally using political ideology to fill the Civil Rights Division with conservative lawyers. Adams, a conservative attorney from South Carolina, was \u201cexhibit A\u201d of Schlozman\u2019s hiring practices.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The other two are Chris Coates and Robert Popper.\u00a0 Both are bio’ed on the site – the backgrounds are similar.<\/p>\n

Much attention has been paid to voter ID laws, which heaven knows are bad enough.\u00a0 this goes deeper, and is intended simply to prevent anyone not a Republican from voting.\u00a0 These attorneys speak about “election integrity.”\u00a0 But in reality, integrity has nothing to do with it.\u00a0 The battle is just moving from ID card to voter rolls.<\/p>\n

Megaera<\/span><\/strong>, if this is not grudging, I don’t know what is.\u00a0 Have at it!<\/p>\n

The Furies and I will be back.<\/p>\n

Cross posted to Care2 at http:\/\/www.care2.com\/news\/member\/101612212\/4061508<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.\u00a0 These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.\u00a0 Even though there […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":18437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}