4.22.2009

George and Cindy Anthony say that Casey is "presumed innocent".

ORLY.



George and Cindy are on a media tour to try to improve Casey's image. It's not working. When Cindy is asked about the decomposition smell in the car, you can tell that she's about to unleash on the interviewer, but she catches herself and then turns to Brad Conway to intervene.

George is a slightly sympathetic creature though.

I rate their effort to improve Casey's image a big fat FAIL. What do you think?

A War of Identities

People who left MMAC are now being threatened by monoxide's posse. These sycophants of monoxides are claiming that they're going to post names, addresses, phone numbers, and photos of those people on 4chan and other sites.

ChloroformCasey, McDidit, Mamamook, Pom - are you sure that you want "Dutch" to go there? You realize of course that you're not the only people armed with information about the other party right? You're not the only people with the capabilities to post at 4chan. What a dumb move that would be on your part.

People have been begging me to out ChloroformCasey on 411. They have been emailing me info about her. And she actually provided enough info about herself that she was easy to find. I could have outed her if I wanted to, but I had no reason to. She has wisely removed herself from the battle and has been mostly quiet about it. But should her friend carry through on his threat, she will see herself here as will others.

Pom and others - you betray the trust of people who once trusted you and considered you friends by giving this information to people who want to hurt your former friends. Are you so stupid not to realize that you exchanged info with your former friends? That you gave out your real names, phone numbers, addresses, and additional information that made sleuthing you quite easy? Rose Abate? Did you think that that fake name would hide your real identity?

Information about people who stayed on the sidelines has not appeared in this blog because I have had no impulse or reason to use it. But should your pal "Dutch" decide to carry through on his threats, then each of you - and others - can expect to see your photos and information here and elsewhere.

And, as for you, "Dutch," you had your own daughter and wife on your ustream cam. And you want to threaten others with outing them?

Do you really want to go there? Your decision. If you make good on your threats, then you can expect to be confronted by the backlash your rash decision provokes.


(So much for this blog moving in a new direction. Thank you to the readers who appreciated that new direction. Hopefully we can drop this idiot stuff and move back to exploring true crime and other topics that we had intended to discuss here.)

4.21.2009

How Common is Child Abduction by Strangers?

Both these articles were published yesterday, but their messages are quite different on the topic of child abduction.

According to this
Blogger News Network article, children in America are under seige:

What’s going on with the kids in this country? It seems to be open season on them, especially young girls. It’s difficult to surf the cable news channels or talk radio programs these days and not come across a show or two about a missing or dead child.

The sad case of two-year-old Florida girl Caylee Anthony has held our attention for over nine months. Another case out of Florida involves the bizarre disappearance of five-year-old Haleigh Cummings. She vanished from her home on February 10 and hasn’t been seen since. And the body of eight-year-old Sandra Cantu was found on April 6, ten days after she went missing in Tracy, California.

I became interested in this topic earlier this year when I did a Blog Talk Radio show about Hanna Mack, the six-year-old Texas girl raped and murdered in 2007. My guest on tha
t program was Heather Steele of the Innocent Justice Foundation. The stats Heather provided about sexual predators and the child porn business both astounded and disgusted me. After doing Hanna’s show I became determined to do whatever I can to bring this horrible problem to the attention of the public.



But HOLD ON A SECOND.





The statistics doe not bear out Denny Griffin's and Heather Steele's assertion that stranger child-abduction and murder in America is as rampant a problem as they'd like you to believe. Another instance of media pushing the sensational for ratings? Dunno.

Here's actual data presented in an article by the Gainesville Sun:

Crime wasn't an issue in tiny Benton, the southern Illinois town where Regina Freeman grew up.

"Two murders in 20 years," Freeman says wistfully, and one of them was the result of a drunken brawl.

The other, she says, was committed by the unlikeliest of suspects: a friendly young man who lived near the local middle school and handed out candy to boys and girls passing by on their way home.

The man, Rodney Barnhill, sexually assaulted and strangled a 12-year-old girl from Freeman's school and left her body in an abandoned home. Barnhill was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

As awful as it was, the incident didn't deter Freeman and her friends from exploring their small town. They continued to venture far from home to visit friends or the corner store, out of sight of parents.

Now 39 and a mother of two preschoolers in Gainesville, Freeman ponders the dangers her children face and doubts they'll have the same freedom to roam that she did as they get older.

There is no doubt in her mind that the world in 2009 is a more dangerous place to be a child.

For her, incidents like the disappearance of Haleigh Cummings from her home near Palatka and the abductions of Jessica Lunsford in Citrus County and Carlie Brucia in Sarasota are sobering reminders that predators lurk everywhere.

"It was nothing for me to walk five or six blocks to the store," she says. "Nowadays, I say there's no way my child is walking five or six blocks anywhere."

But Freeman's fear belies two important facts that experts have known for years.

First, violent crimes against children have declined steadily over the past generation. The U.S. Departme
nt of Justice reports that 81 out of every 1,000 children between the ages of 12 and 15 were victims of violent crime in 1973, compared with 44 out of 1,000 in 2005.

And, second, the worst of those crimes - kidnappings, rapes and murders - are being committed not by strangers hunting innocents but by family members, neighbors or trusted adults the family knows.

In fact, the kidnappings of Carlie and Jessica by complete strangers, while terrifyingly sinister, are fairly rare events, representing only about one in every 2,900 abduction cases.

The most recent survey of kidnapping data conducted in 2002 for the U.S. Justice Department revealed that of the roughly 261,000 children who are abducted each year, the vast majority (203,900) are taken by a family member - often in a custody dispute - and j
ust 90 to 115 are victims of "stereotypical kidnappings" like Carlie and Jessica.

A stereotypical kidnapping, according to the survey, known as the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), is committed by a stranger or slight acquaintance. In these cases, the child is kept overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom, abducted with the intention of keeping the child permanently, or killed.

The remaining 58,000 or so abductions that occur annually are known as "nonfamily abductions," which occur when someone other than the child's family detains the child for a short period of time.

To many law enforcement agencies, these don't even qualify as abductions because the act of detaining the child is incidental to the primary crime, usually sexual abuse.

Often, the perpetrators of nonfamily abductions are people in a position of trust: neighbors, Scout leaders, friends of the family or even clergy.

That was the case with 13-year-old Sarah Lunde of Tampa, who was abducted and murdered in April 2005 by David Lee Onstott.

Onstott had been in a relationship with the girl's mother.

Yet the idea of a child being dragged off to be tortured, raped and murdered by a stranger is so terrifying and so well reported in the news media that parents, educators, even law enforcement officers and politicians, have accepted as fact that stranger abductions are
more commonplace than they actually are.

"Those are the ones that capture the public's imagination, and they should because they're awful" says Jim Beasley, supervisory special agent for the FBI and a specialist in crimes against children. "But because they hear the story told over and over, people tend to forget that this is the same incident."


Read more of this article at the link above.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'm well aware that there are stranger abductions every year in the United States. Polly Klaas, Samantha Runnion. And others that the media tell us about. But stranger abductions are much more rare than the media would have us believe.

In the overwhelming number of child abduction cases the problem isn't strangers. It's family members and social contacts. We would shun a pleasant person at Publix for fear of that person wishing to do harm to our children, while without a thought we drop off our kids to the care of trusted associates at Boy Scouts meetings or at sleepovers or at Sunday School, where they come in contact with people who are much more likely to do them harm than some stranger who says Hi at Sam's Club, according to statistics.

Anyway, I thought that the Gainesville Sun article was an important piece of objective journalism, especially in stark contrast with the Blogger News Network article's sensationalistic alarmism.

Looking forward to reading your opinions on this.


4.20.2009

Is it possible for racists to truly care about justice?

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Over the past month or 2, a new trend has developed in true crime internet circles in which people are basically outing themselves as being racially prejudiced. I figure it's a new trend. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention before. Maybe they didn't stand so prominently on the soapbox as they do now. Maybe they're emboldened by like company.

These people won't tell you that they're racists - they declare quite the opposite.

But when they pass universal judgments about entire peoples from the position of their own white privilege then they're racists.

Obama is a "nigger" who only won the election because he's black.

Black people should quit bitching about slavery.

Japs deserved to be forced into internment camps. Slant eyed bastards.

Mexicans are filthy and lazy and sponge off the system.

Jews are greedy and evil and only care about money and the holocaust.

Brown desert people are innately violent and want to kill everyone.

Indigenous Americans are too sensitive about sports caricatures.

And on and on and on. And on. I guess some of these people think that they live in a post-racial world and that their racists opinions aren't racists at all, but are "informed" and "evolved." How little they know about history, to hold such views.

It's ironic to me that the very people who possess such bigoted attitudes about other races are so involved in true crime forums, blogs, chatrooms. Most of these people will say that the main reason they follow true crime cases is because they want to see the guilty face justice. They care about justice. But what is justice?

The most fundamental aspect of justice in the United States system is that all people are the same under the eyes of the law. Regardless or race, creed, sex, they shall be treated equally in the court of law. Unfortunately, that ideal is not always met in criminal cases in the U.S. (I feel that that's as much a class thing as a race thing - we can discuss that later; even by comparing the media treatment of Caylee and Haleigh the class differentiations are evident in disparities in media attention given to the two cases).

So back on topic, my question is this. How can someone who claims to care about justice be so unjust in their views of other races? Bigotry is grounded in unequal treatment. (And ignorance.)

Look at forums around the true crime net. Forums for Caylee, and Haleigh (though attention to her case is quickly dissipating), and Jon Benet. But hardly any mention of black children who are missing. Is that because that's supposed to happen in poor black communities, but when it happens in middle-class white suburbia, it's a freak occurrence and therefore newsworthy?

I think I'm rambling so let me get back to the main reason I wrote this today. My question.

Can racists care about justice? Do racists gravitate towards each other, even in the e-world? Blog guests, what are your opinions on this topic?






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4.18.2009

No Sodomy Saturday

Ewwwww! Ewwwww! Ewwwww!!

Would someone remove monoxide from grandmamamooks grasp RAHT NOW before I blow grits?

AAAAH! Hillbilly Butt Babies!

Its lucky we caught them in time or else they may have tried to make some Kenfuckied-up butt babies or shit, given how Monoxide likes to raep and gaep anooses. (Latent hom ....... urgh, nevermind.)

Open topic...talk about whatever you want.