Everyday Erinyes #83

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.  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.  Even though there are many more which I can’t include.  As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I had better start with this story and get it off my chest.  The title is ‘I come from a rich and white family’: White dad denies responsibility for abused 5-year-old black stepson, and there is not too much more about it you need to know.  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.”)  But this guy is almost 30, and it appears to me that “life” has given him some pretty dead eyes in that face.

The child, a little boy, whose name is (wisely, IMO) not provided, is five years old.  He cannot speak or walk.  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.  When found, he was reaching into the carpet for cereal to eat.

His hands and feet were orange and blistered, apparently from chewing at them — 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.

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

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

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.  You see, it can happen that unauthorized immigrants’ “fingerprints can be disfigured through manual labor or self-inflicted wounds.”

Well, we can’t have that, can we.  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.

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

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.  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.

From the company’s senior vice president (John Leonard, pictured):

The frustration law enforcement has is this: ‘Alright, I got this criminal, the guy raped three kids. He’s back in my community again. I don’t even know who he is, and the federal government has never given me what I need….’

You get all these people that say, ‘Well Trump is going after all these illegals, these immigrants, who have made America great.’ Well there’s a lot of immigrants that have made it great, but there’s a lot of assholes, too.  So BI2 is stepping up to the plate and donating this.

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.  Alecto, 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?

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.  We all know about the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union.  Well, the ACRU is the American Civil Rights Union, designed essentially to oppose everything the ACLU dies or wants to do.  R for Right, L for Left, I suppose.

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.  Because, the ACRU claimed, “there were more people registered than there were voting age citizens on the county.”

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

Now the ACRU is pushing the court for a default judgement.

Mother Jones mentions three lawyers who are purging voter rolls.  The first is J. Christian Adams.

[Adams is] a former staff attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adams joined the department in 2005, when high-ranking official Bradley Schlozman was found by the department’s 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 “exhibit A” of Schlozman’s hiring practices.

The other two are Chris Coates and Robert Popper.  Both are bio’ed on the site – the backgrounds are similar.

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

Megaera, if this is not grudging, I don’t know what is.  Have at it!

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 at http://www.care2.com/news/member/101612212/4061508