Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Got your attention yet? Hope so. Remember a while back when I made that post about how IrregularTimes is fixating on just a handful of topics and letting a lot of other important things fall by the wayside? Well, this is another of those things, but I can’t rightly fault the staff here for failing to catch wind of it before now. But this is something that I really, honestly, truly wish would be added to the List of Things To Cover Until Doomsday. This is regarding the systematic torture of United States children. But no, it’s not by the government.

It’s at the request of the parents.

Confused? Appalled? I don’t blame you, I was too when I first heard about this. But I want to give (most of) the parents the benefit of the doubt and say they’re well-meaning, if naive. See, what happens is, for whatever reason, they’ll find out about these schools for “troubled teenagers” run by a group calling themselves the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP) and go their their website. They’ll read, see nothing wrong, then take a quiz to see if there are warning signs that their kids are in danger of becoming out of control. Through a series of loaded questions which a “yes” answer would, for the average parents, just say “typical teenager” the website says your kid is at risk and to send them there to get help.

Also, send them there if the kid is/might be gay and/or bisexual. See, these schools are run by fundamentalist Mormons.

As I said, for the most part, the websites will sell you a story of a fairly easy going place rather than the reality which is that it’s little more than a concentration camp (yay for Godwins!) on the far side of the River Styx. The warning bells should be going off when they tell you (either through the phone, in person, or on the fucking website) that your child will lie to you about what is going on at that school. When anyone, even a school or corporation, has to poison the well with regards of what is going on there, you should know something is up.

And if that isn’t enough, the “emergency teen escort service” (no, it’s not a door-to-door brothel) that will wisk your child away from their bed at 2 or 3 in the morning should. These are people who’ll enter the home in the early hours, terrorize the kids, kidnap them and transport them to one of the WWASP’s schools either in the USA or overseas. Here, I could sit and type all these things out, but I want to share a story from someone who’d gone to one of these place. A wonderful little school called Cross Creek.

From Reddit.

On May 10th of 2007 at around 2:30 in the morning two strangers barged into my bedroom. I started screaming and crying, as in my mind I was sure that these two strangers had broken into my house and were going to abduct me, rape me, kill me, or in some way harm me. They immediately told me that if I did not shut up that they would handcuff me. I was not being in any way violent or threatening. I was reacting in fear for my life by being vocal and hoping that someone would come to help. I had no idea what was going on. I stopped screaming, still in fear for my life. They started going through my closet digging out clothes as I was only in a night gown. They still had not explained what was going on. I asked, frightened, what the wanted from me, trying to see if I could in some way appease them and get them to leave. They then explained that they were going to take me to a school. It took me a second to understand what they meant by this, as this was an extremely bizarre way to introduce a child to a new school. It then occurred to me that this was what my mother had arranged for my brother several years ago when she had him shipped away to Cross Creek. The two strangers were from Teen Escort Service, a for-profit company that transports teenagers, usually by force, to WWASP (World Wide Association of Specialty Programs) facilities.

I was extremely upset and cried the entire trip, but I obeyed all of their orders. Even though I was being cooperative they said it was their policy to put a belt around the bust of the child and hold the belt so that there would be no chance of attempting to run. It was so humiliating to be led around like a fucking dog around the airport. It was also extremely uncomfortable to have this strange older male putting his hand so close to my breast. I never understood how any of this was legal but definitely knew that none of it was ethical. To this day I feel extremely angered, disturbed, and violated by this entire experience. In addition to this they “forgot” all of the psychiatric medication I had been on at my house. It’s not that I am for psychiatric meds, but it certainly did not feel healthy or normal to go from taking this medication regularly, to just not having it and stopping with out tapering off of it.

From the moment I arrived at Cross Creek, I was treated as though I was broken, dirty, and inhuman. During my stay I saw many others treated this way. I had never spoken to R., the program director, before and my first experience with him was horrible. He asked me why I was there, and I told him all of the things I’d done that I could think of that could possibly be perceived as “bad”. He yelled at me, saying that I was lying and that I didn’t love or care about my parents. I was shocked and confused, unsure of what I had done to deserve this treatment from someone I had just met. To this day, the only thing I can think of that I possibly could have left out was my attraction to other females. In one of the Parent-Child seminars we were made to attend, my mother shared with me that this was one of the biggest “issues” that caused her to send me to Cross Creek. Not the drugs, not the sex (she told me she had no knowledge of me being sexually active prior to being forced to disclose it to her), not the issues with school, but just the fact that there was a possibility that one day I might fall in love with a female. Sorry for not realizing what a horrible, broken child this made me, R.

Shortly after I arrived, my “HOPE buddy” (the student they assign to “mentor” you and teach you the rules in your first few weeks) started asking me about my past, why I was there, and what issues I needed to work on. I talked briefly about my experimentation with soft drugs, my issues with depression (something I’m pretty sure most teenagers experience), and the abusive relationship I had been in with my first girlfriend. As soon as I said the words “girl” and “relationship” in the same sentence she said “STOP! STOP! We can’t talk about that.” I was filled with shame regarding my sexuality simply from the fact that I was not even allowed to talk about homosexuality in any way shape or form. Shortly after this incident I started talking to the therapist they assigned me to there about this abusive relationship I had experienced, and how it bothered me that I was not allowed to talk about a part of me that I have no control over. His response was that I DID have a choice over whether or not I was attracted to females and that I should just deal with these thoughts of same sex attraction. His opinion was that this was probably a result of some anger I had toward men, particularly my dad and that I probably just wanted to be with females because they were “safer” (even though I had been with an abusive female before!!!) He also said that ultimately this was probably just a phase and a result of my crazy teenage hormones. He believed that if I tried hard enough and ignored these thoughts and feelings one day I might marry a nice boy.

I had no interest in having a relationship with anyone there, but when other girls formed relationships with each other, the repercussions were pretty extreme. I understood why it was not allowed, as relationships are generally distracting no matter the gender of either partner, but the way people were treated was pretty unnecessary in my opinion. It usually involved lots of yelling, ostracizing, and shaming. I remember one R. meeting where two girls were being confronted about this and R. was yelling about how stupid they were being and how no one would be able to trust them now. He went on to say that he had “nothing against homosexuality, but it was not the way God intended things.” and that the Bible definitely did not condone it. These “God” and bible references were used on a regular basis, along with religious videos, praying, etc. even though Cross Creek claimed that they were not in any way religious. The rule book and protocol also appeared to be directly based off of the Mormon religion (no caffeine etc.) The program reprimanded children for telling their parents about this religious influence and regularly tried to hide it from parents. I am in no way against people having their own beliefs and following what ever religion is right for them, however I think that it’s completely and totally immoral to lie to parents about what they are getting. More on this later.

The queer shaming was present in nearly every aspect of the program, including the language used. We were not allowed to use curse words such as “shit”, or “bitch”, but I never saw anyone reprimanded for saying “fag” or “faggot.” This fostered an environment in which teasing and bullying for all sorts of things were fully tolerated. I even remember a facilitator in a seminar trying to trigger a girl by calling her a “dyke.” And no, before you say something, I really don’t care about breaking confidentiality of seminars at this point because I am fed up. What these people said and did broke me down and created so much shame inside of me.

In addition to shaming people on basis of sexual orientation, they taught children that sex was evil and damaging outside of marriage, another blatantly religious notion. We were forced to regularly watch videos involving horror stories of abortions gone wrong, shown gruesome pictures of STDs that had been left unattended for long periods of time, and told that if we had sex before marriage we would likely die or get some horrible ailment. Rather than promoting safer sex methods, we were shown that abstinence was the only option that would not result in death or unwanted pregnancy.

Rigid gender roles were also a big part of the Cross Creek way of life. Many of the rules were extremely gender based. Boys were allowed to crack their backs and knuckles, though girls were not because it was “unladylike”. Boys got meal portions double the size of girls. Boys were allowed to use more curse words than girls were. The list goes on.

I remember when they moved the girls from Center 1 to Pro 1 (these are all names of the dorms we stayed in.) The boys had been living in Pro 1, and when they moved the girls in the dorms were extremely messy. Rather than having the boys come back and clean up this mess, they made the girls clean all day. This was completely, and totally humiliating. What a great way to build confidence and teach girls how to be independent and stand up for themselves.

This is just part one of three parts, the rest of which can be read by following the links. Some of the replies are from others who have gone to one of these places or who knew someone who’d gone to one. The one thing that’s always the same from the latter group is how the people they knew were never the same as they were before they went.

SkyOne news also did a short little article on these places. It’s short, just around ten minutes of your time, but it’s worth a watch.

Teen Rendention

The things that go on in these places are nothing short of psychical and mental torture, and it’s all perfectly legal because the USA still hasn’t signed on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This is a post aimed at the IrregularTimes.com blog writers; Jim Cook, JClifford, Peregrin Wood, ect.

You all know I am a long time poster and an even longer time reader. I have nothing but respect for the news you bring and the corrections of falsehoods you can give, but what I have noticed lately is a case of Tunnel Vision. The sum of the articles I’ve been seeing have been aimed at just a few subjects such as the war in Libya, No Labels, Americans Elect, and the Military Commissions Act. Now, I won’t debate the merits of these subjects, they’re important and need to be covered by someone. But they should not be covered at the expense of so many other important stories on both a national and a local level.

An example of a neglected story would be the rise of Emergency Financial Managers. The Daily Kos covered a story involving the arrests of teen mothers and children after they conducted a sit-in in protest of Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager closing down their highly successful school. Emergency Financial Managers have broad, unilateral powers, including the ability to dismiss elected officials, sell off public assets (like schools) to private interests and dis-incorporate entire cities. And aside from The Daily Kos, the only other person I’ve seen covering this story is Rachel Maddow.

Another example of a neglected story, one I’m really amazed you guys didn’t jump all over, is the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee approving (right along party lines of 5 – 2) SRJ 1218, a bill that actually funds Churches with state money. With such a blatant display of contempt for the First Amendment, how could IrregularTimes not pick this up and at least give it a glance?

Or, how about the story of how America has fallen so low that it is now cheaper for Ikea to build their cheap Swedish crap here in the USA than it is to build it in Sweden? That isn’t so bad, but what is bad is how Ikea is abusing it’s employees by forcing them to work overtime, ordering them to go to meetings where they’re “discouraged” from unionizing as well as other abusive policies.

And let’s not forget Texas establishing “Traditional Values Centers” because they’ve gotta protect their precious, innocent Gawd-fearing Christian students from the evil baby killing LGBT students.

And if you want to turn your gaze back to Florida, you’ll see the Governor cutting funding for the mentally disabled.

Or, if you want to pay attention to the national stage, how about the Supreme Court shielding prosecutors who convict innocent people, even if it’s proven that the prosecutor knew in advance that he was innocent, and even if that prosecutor hid or destroyed evidence of that suspect’s innocence?

As I said before, I love this website and have nothing but respect for it. But please, focus on some of these other stories that get little attention but have big consequences.

Overheard this evening, really and truly…

He: Wait, quiet. Can you hear that? Is that a trombone?
She: No, dear, I think it’s a chain saw.

From MotherJones.com, The House GOP’s Plan to Redefine Rape

For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith’s spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)

Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old’s parents wouldn’t be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn’t be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

So what they’re saying is that girls and women who are either drugged up or under the threat of force or coerced would be ineligible for a government assisted abortion. A woman could be surrounded by fifteen guys and repetedly threatened with violence while being gang banged on the pinball machine and still not be able to get help terminating a resulting pregnancy. There is also a wonderful little tidbit in the article pointing out that there is no federally mandated term “forcible rape” and very few local laws use that term. So, taking this bill to it’s extremes, a woman could be ineligible for an assisted abortion unless she was shot or stabbed during the encounter. The language is just that vague and it doesn’t offer a definition for “forcible rape.”

Thank you, Republicans, I’m sure your constituents feel much better knowing you’re there to stand up for justice and common decency. Oh, and by the way? You SUCK.

For young writers who are considering whether to take their romantic relationships to the next level, and make a baby, I offer the following scenario: It’s Sunday morning, and you get up at 5:00 AM to sneak in a little bit a quiet writing time, as if it’s a guilty pleasure. Your older son hears you, and follows you down to enjoy your company and read aloud every scene out of the comic book you got to encourage his sense of humor. Then, your daughter comes down, plays a CD of cute folk songs, and asks you to watch her as she does a cute dance for each tune. Hearing this noise, your youngest arises and snuggles in next to you on your chair. He loves your attention, and so every time you’ve got a good thought that you’re about to capture in words, he puts his little index finger into your ear, giggling.

It’s a great life, but it’s not the best environment for effective writing.

Keep it in your pants, young writer.

I remember the class asking my high school geometry teacher, “Why do we need to know about sines and cosines? How will we use this in real life?” He didn’t give us much of an answer, and at least in my life the answer was that I didn’t need trigonometry, not until now. I finally figured out what it’s good for in my life.

I’m looking at the Maine state legislature and would like my computer to put icons for each member of a legislative committee on a circle, equidistant from one another. Why? Well, later on, I intend to draw lines between the members’ icons in order to express something about the relationships between them. But for now my problem is to get a nice, neat circle of dots, each representing a legislator. For committees with size X, the dots should be placed (360/X) degrees away from one another on the circle. For a committee of 12 people, then, there should be dots placed at 0 degrees, 30 degrees, 60 degrees, 90 degrees, 120 degrees … and so on, all around the circle.

That’s all well and good, but what are the x,y coordinates for a point 30 degrees along in a circle? Trig!

The center point of a circle and a point along the edge of a circle mark two points of a right triangle; the third point in the example to our left forms a right angle along the horizontal axis of the circle.

For an image of width W and height H, the center point of the circle will be (W/2),(H/2). The radius r of the circle is W/2, and it is also the hypotenuse of the right triangle. The location to place our dot on the edge of the circle will be (W/2)+b,(H/2)-a. We can set the values of the width W and height H of the image. All we need to do is figure out the values of a and b for angle A. Those values are

a = r * Sin(A)
b = r * Cos(A)

What’s A? It’s whatever we want it to be. To find a series of 12 dots for 12 legislators, we can draw a series of right triangles all the way around the circle, each anchored at the circle’s center point and at the edge of the circle, with angles in increasing increments of 30 degrees. For each triangle, we can use the sine and cosine of A to find out how where to place our dots.

Here’s the Maine state legislature’s Appropriations Committee, drawn by a computer using the GD graphics commands in the language PHP. Republicans are pinkish, Democrats are bluish.

This process can be used for any number of dots representing any number of committee members.

There’s how I’ll use trigonometry in real life, Mr. Sobieraski.

This is my favorite time of the year for pumpkins: not on Halloween, when the orange gourds blaze in menacing glory. I like the look of pumpkins that linger a few weeks later on. They’ve dried out and shrunk inward upon themselves a bit, adding a hint of pathos. The mouths of the formerly toothsome pumpkins curl inward, making the Jack O’ Lanterns resemble senior citizens looking out and yelling at all the kids to get off their lawn.

They’ll be compost soon, completely unrecognizable. Pumpkins make great compost material, right up there with cucumbers and spinach in their decomposing glory. But why toss ‘em right away? Let ‘em linger, just at the time when the growth of the past summer is finally petering out. My challenge each year is to leave the pumpkins out long enough to really get some character, but to get them before the bottoms rot out and they fall off the shovel and all over the place. I didn’t move them in time last year. Let’s see what happens this season.

How late do you leave out your pumpkins, and what is their final destination?

I am quite disgusted right now.

Democrats to let offshore drilling ban expire

Democrats to let offshore drilling ban expire

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer 15 minutes ago

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Democrats had clung to the hope of only a partial repeal of the drilling moratorium, but the White House had promised a veto, Obey said.

The House is expected to act on the spending bill Wednesday. The Senate is likely to go along with the House.

“The White House has made it clear they will not accept anything with a drilling moratorium, and Democrats know we cannot afford to shut down the government over this,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “We look forward to working with the next president to hammer out a final resolution of this issue.”

While the House would lift the long-standing drilling moratoriums for both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a drilling ban in waters within 125 miles of Florida’s western coast would remain in force under a law passed by Congress in 2006 that opened some new areas of the east-central Gulf to drilling.

Just last week, the House passed legislation to open waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas drilling but only 50 or more miles out to sea and only if a state agrees to energy development off its shore. It quickly became clear that measure would not get the 60 votes needed in the Senate.

Republicans called that effort a sham that would have left almost 90 percent of offshore reserves effectively off-limits.

The Interior Department estimates there are 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil beneath the Outer Continental Shelf, about half of it off California.

While the ban on energy development will be lifted if the Senate goes along with the House action, it doesn’t mean any federal sale of oil and gas leases in the offshore waters — much less actual drilling — would be imminent.

The Interior Department’s current five-year leasing plan includes potential leases off the Virginia coast but probably would not be pursued unless the state agrees to energy development. And the state is unlikely to do so without Congress agreeing to share federal royalties with the state.

The congressional battle over offshore drilling is far from over. Democrats are expected to press for broader energy legislation, probably next year, that would put limits on any drilling off most of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to fight any resumption of the drilling bans that have been in place since 1981.

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has promised to make offshore oil drilling a priority if elected president. He has called for developing the oil and gas resources along all of Outer Continental Shelf and for the federal government to share royalties with states who go along with drilling.

Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama has said he would support limited drilling in certain areas — possibly the South Atlantic region — if it is part of a broader energy plan to shift the U.S. away from oil to alternative fuels and more energy efficiency.

The debate over offshore drilling is not expected to subside in the first months of the next presidency — no matter who sits in the White House.

Lifting the drilling ban gives considerable momentum to the underlying bill, which includes the Pentagon budget, $24 billion in aid for flood and hurricane victims and $25 billion in loans for Detroit automakers in addition to keeping the government open past the Oct. 1 start of the 2009 budget year.

But Democrats decided not to use the must-pass measure as a battering ram to carry an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless past White House veto promises, prompting grumbling among some lawmakers. Efforts to boost food stamps and give states billions of dollars to help with Medicaid bills also fell through.

But the measure would double, to $5.2 billion, funding for heating subsidies for the poor, Obey said.

The measure also would provide more than $600 billion to fund the 2009 budgets for the Pentagon, Homeland Security Department and the Veterans Affairs Department. Nine other spending bills for the 2009 budget year starting Oct. 1 remain unfinished.

Bush had threatened to veto bills that don’t cut the number and cost of pet projects known as “earmarks” sought by lawmakers in half from current levels or cause agency operating budgets, taken together, to exceed his request. Obey said, however, the White House would reluctantly sign the measure.

Democrats have shown themselves to have all the spine of a wet noodle. They’ve got control of Congress and yet they’re still letting Republicans have their way? They’re letting the ban on offshore drilling expire even though we know that all the drilling in the world will do next to nothing to help?

Can we fire all these bastards? Something is very, very wrong when you’ve got one party that’s as red as a stoplight and the only alternative to that way of thinking has turned a pretty dark shade of pink.

When I saw our cat carrying a bird in its mouth as I took my family out the back door this morning, I tried to redirect the attention of my children, but my oldest son had already seen what was happening by the time I thought of something to say. He rushed out into the grass, and grabbed the bird as it flopped along the ground.

He held the bird just right as he brought it back to show us. It was a baby mourning dove.

I put the bird in a tupperware container so that it wouldn’t jump free, and then took it a few hundred feet out, to some tall weeds at the edge of the woods. “It will be able to hide there,” I told my son.

As we walked downtown, we ran into one of my son’s teachers. “I saved a baby dove this morning, my son said. He told almost everyone we saw what he had done. He told them he was a hero.

When we arrived home, I told my son to go play upstairs for a bit while I cleaned up a mess downstairs. I did not tell him that I had found a pile of mottled feathers from an in immature mourning dove at the top of the basement stairs.