'Papers please' for trans people?

My friend Jim Burroway has something to share: "I live in a total freak-show of a state".

Jim lives in Arizona, whose infamous 'papers please' law about having to constantly prove you're not one of those illegal brown messicuns to authority figures is currently being judged on its constitutionality.

Arizona is now considering, Jim reports, a 'papers please' law for bathroom use. This 'save us from the transgender people' proposition is that only those with the right birth certificate can use the right, gendered, bathroom.

So, ladies, if you are caught in mile-long queues and slip into the gents? The slammer for you!

Apparently there is an emergency, the proposal has an "emergency" clause. “This is about the person who will use gender identity or expression as their ruse to gain access to opposite-sex facilities,” says its proponent, who is from a group it will shock you to learn has 'family' in their title. A "ruse" you say? My, those trans people are forever plotting like some fifth column to "gain access" to your bathroom!

The reality is that trans people and anyone who doesn't fit in can face harassment and violence around bathrooms.

Here's a comment on Jim's report:

I was the victim of a sever beating for entering a men’s restroom with the wrong gender presentation. Paradoxically I was using the men’s restroom because on a previous occasion a police officer had warned me that should I use the female restroom I could be arrested on sexual deviance charges because a mother had complained about me using this restroom before. Now then this fine young college student who outweighed me by almost a 100lbs got off on the gay panic defense.

So from this we can determine that when a person enters the restroom displaying the wrong gender this can instill panic in young adult men, so shouldn’t it behoove the Arizona government to not write legislation that will result in the panic and distress of our young college age men?

I only ask it this way because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m asking for special rights, but please someone think of our heterosexual college age youths.

Here's a web resource which find locations that are, the answer's in the URL, safe2pee.org

Why is this Arizona proposal happening? Locally it is kickback because Phoenix passed anti-discrimination which included the 'T' in 'LGBT', but nationally it's because of media attention on trans kids, little kids, like a six-year old in Colorado (pictured), whose bathroom use has been the focus of bigoted parental reaction to them.

That despicable attitude to kids with a condition they obviously are born with is so reminiscent of the reaction to kids living with HIV/AIDS in the eighties and nineties.

These people don't just merit mockery -- very easy to perform mockery -- but disgust. They are obvious bigots, just like those who drove Ryan White from his school and vandalised his grave.

Humanity really is f*****

Graph from Science of the earth’s temperatures going back 11,000 years

The Guardian's Jonathan Kaiman reports today on how China is extremely interested in the Arctic.

Climate change is opening up a new trade route to Europe and access to resources.

I doubt this is news to many, in the general if not the specific. Even the likes of Fox News aficionados are undoubtedly aware that humanity, thanks to warming in the Arctic, has the technical whizz-bang-ness to double down on its own destruction.

It really matters not whether you absorb this news in whatever country you are in or through whatever ideological perspective you filter it through or whichever state of de-Nile you exist in or whether you decide to genuflect to a 'Yellow Peril' meme as you absorb it. It just IS, the outcome is the, global, same.

The world's next superpower is joining the rest of us M'F*****s in the End Times in what the NY Times rightly calls the 21st Century 'Great Game': whoopee, let's exploit the Arctic.

The world's current superpower, despite its leader's pleading, is not going to do anything to stop the Worst Case Scenario. No surprise there then, but ...

Most lefty superstars say sweet FA about climate change. There are no - none, zip, nada - lefty superstars in the entire world who are at all preaching on climate change.

Example: What did Chavez say? Who on the left - or the right!? - writing about Chavez even bothers about what he said on climate?

'Imperialism'? 'Sulfur'? Reams of copy. Role in humanity's end through greenhouse gas production? His thoughts on same? Anyone?

The left could have changed things

'Fairweather friends' and palpitating queer/ns

Today, Hillary Clinton announced her support for marriage equality in a video (see it after the jump). On any LGBT website below the line, in the comments, you will read - presumably - L,G,B or T people condemning her.

It is too late, why didn't she do it before, she's no real ally - you can guess the script.

When the first serving Republican Senator came out for marriage equality last week similar things were said. Same with the conservative British Prime Minister. And the sharpened poison aimed at President Obama by gays on his supposed inauthentic support for gay rights is everywhere.

In her video, Clinton notes her work on LGBT rights whilst she was Secretary of State. In particular, Clinton gave a powerful speech, introducing new policy, in Geneva in 2011 defending LGBT human rights, which she talks about today.

Following her speech, I published an explanation by Doug Sanders of how Clinton's new policy and outspokenness was actually a 'catch up' on the work of numerous other countries well before the US finally got to work. Yet that critique of Clinton is noticeably absent from any of today's criticism of her. The insularity of American gays who are today criticising her, and actually of those citing her State Department work in her defense as well, is telling.

What distinguishes Obama from Clinton is that he has been explicit on numerous occasions in acknowledging that, horror, he is a politician and that it is pressure from below, from movements, which moves him towards, say, openly supporting marriage equality. I've written about this numerous times, particularly in the context of the 2008 fight for the Democratic Party nomination where his statements on this subject contrasted sharply with Clinton's.

During the campaign he gave one interview to an LGBT publication in which he said the following:

Anybody who’s been at an LGBT event with me can testify that my message is very explicit -- I don’t think that the gay and lesbian community, the LGBT community, should take its cues from me or some political leader in terms of what they think is right for them. It’s not my place to tell the LGBT community, "Wait your turn." I’m very mindful of Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he says to the white clergy, "Don’t tell me to wait for my freedom."

A year after Obama's election he addressed the Human Rights Campaign and here is what I posted at the time:

Here's my tweets as I listened to his speech.

pauloCanning: #hrc dinner "I love you Barack" "I love you back"
pauloCanning:#hrc dinner Obama: "It is a privilege to be here tonight to open for Lady GaGa"
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner He's referencing Stonewall as 'inspiring'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner simple message "here with you in that fight"
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'it's not for me to tell you to be patient' - as with civil rights - now I'm teary
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'you know - and I know - we don't want to be defined by one part of us that makes us whole'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'Do not doubt the direction we're heading +the destination we will reach'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'we will put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'we're pushing for a employee non-discrimination bill. we're ging to put a stop to it.'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'we are rescinding the ban on entering US based on HIV status'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'I will end DADT, that's my commitment to you'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'I've called on Congress to repeal DOMA'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'It's about our common humanity, our ability to walk in someone else's shoes'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner now he's talking about PFLAG 'that's the story of America'
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner 'tonight somewhere in America a young person ... ' THAT'S leadership
pauloCanning: #hrc dinner brilliant rhetoric, worried by the look on his face

The speech was amazing. Historic.

Like the audience, who spent most of their time on their feet, I was really moved to hear a US President say what he said. His last flourish, which stuck progress of LGBT equality firmly into the mainstream of the 'American dream', I couldn't capture quickly enough. It was his classic rhetorical end flourish and he stuck it firmly onto the LGBT cause.

My friend Tobias Grace, who edits New Jersey's LGBT newspaper, said: "Paul: I cried - not so much on my own behalf but thinking of all the young people who will grow up in a world shaped by this man's words and leadership."

But, but ... perhaps that's why I noticed the look. He wasn't smiling. He knew that outside the cheering crowd he faced weren't just pissed LGBT at the lack of actual progress on issue after issue but a mountain of opposition to everything he'd pledged.

Remember, this was the day on which he'd been awarded the Nobel. On what he represents he'd got that acknowledgment and that's a f*cking heavy burden.

I wish I'd captured that exact look as he walked off the stage because it seemed to me one of a man who believed what he'd said, every word, but understood fully what 'change' actually means.

A bitter, bitter fight lies behind "don’t tell me to wait for my freedom". As always, it's accompanied by the background/backroom faint (to some) buzz accompanying it in the LGBT movement between those who would be inside and those who'd be outside, demanding.

Tomorrow's LGBT march on the Capitol is for the demanders and something tells me Obama is with them.

Watch Clinton's video released today after the jump:

Hacking worse than rape: America

An American court has just sentenced a 'grey hat' computer hacker who exposed corporate security flaws to more jail time than another court sentenced a group of rapists.

Andrew Auernheimer, aka 'Weev', got three and a half years, more time than two teenagers just found guilty of infamously raping a girl in Steubenville, Ohio.

Auernheimer's prosecution was vicious. That he went after the failings of telecom firm AT&T was used against him, was the reason to demand a long prison term.

Auernheimer likened his actions to walking down the street and writing down the physical addresses of buildings, only to be charged with identity theft. He later sent an e-mail to the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, blaming AT&T for exposing customer data, authorities say.

“AT&T needs to be held accountable for their insecure infrastructure as a public utility and we must defend the rights of consumers, over the rights of shareholders,” he wrote, according to prosecutors. ”I advise you to discuss this matter with your family, your friends, victims of crimes you have prosecuted, and your teachers for they are the people who would have been harmed had AT&T been allowed to silently bury their negligent endangerment of United States infrastructure.”

But prosecutors say his interest went beyond concern about the security of customer data.

According to the criminal complaint, a confidential informant helped federal authorities make their case against the two defendants by providing them with 150 pages of chat logs from an IRC channel where, prosecutors said, Spitler and Auernheimer admitted conducting the breach to tarnish AT&T’s reputation and promote themselves and Goatse Security.

'Tarnishing' corporate reputation is the real reason this guy is in jail. Apparently, the guy is a troll and a bit of a pain, a "discordian .. into throwing apples .. a right mouthy bastard". Is that why America threw him in jail?

John Koetsier explains how what the illegality of what Auernheimer did to expose the security flaw makes everyone a potential criminal.

You could be charged with unauthorized access to a computerized device, for instance, simply because you clicked on the link that brought you to this article. Oh, and Google, one of the most successful corporations in the world, is the root of all evil. A Get request is simply a note from a browser computer code asking for a resource. You issue thousands of them every day all by yourself. Google issues billions.

Whether the receiving server responds to that request in any way, shape, or form is entirely at the discretion of the developers and system administrators who control that server.

The CFAA [relevant US law] does not define the phrase “unauthorized access,” so according to Auernheimer, the government essentially told the jury that his access to the server was unauthorized because they said it was. Which, if true, means that whether you commit a legal act or an illegal act is at the discretion of anyone who runs a webserver, who can change their mind at any time without you knowing.

Good luck following the straight and narrow.

There's a lot of anger from the kidz. Writes Asher Wolf:

Putting Weev behind bars is pointless and tragic. Jailing the most outspoken men and women amongst our generation won’t stop the leaks, the hacks, the news revelations, the whistleblowers – and most of all it won’t stop the rage of the malcontent, dispossessed youth from eventually tumbling down upon the heads of the bureaucrats who sold us out and then tried to lock us up when we complained.

.. they can’t shut us all up. Fuck ‘em.

You could make it up

In today's collective strop by the newspapers about regulation there's one theme, a supposed threat to investigative reporting. One story being pointed at as potentially being threatened by 'government control of the press' is the 'scandal' of hundreds of 'avoidable deaths' at Stafford hospital.

What's funny about the press using this example to make their argument is that their Stafford reporting has, universally, from the BBC all the way to the Daily Star, been terrible, shockingly terrible.

The number of 'avoidable deaths' - the figure commonly reported is 1200 - is completely made-up. Any reporter doing their, you know, job could figure it out.

Blogger Steve Walker explains at length how '1200 deaths' was pulled out of someone's ass thin air and how its basis is undermined by just a cursory understanding of statistics. Here's a key passage:

As I explained in my post on the real story of Mid Staffs, Prof Jarman’s HSMR (hospital standardised mortality ratio) system rates English hospitals according to where they sit according to the average death rate for the nation. A hospital hitting exactly the average rate would receive a ‘score’ of 100. A hospital doing better than average would have an HSMR below 100, and one doing worse would be over 100.

So far, so clear – I hope. But here’s the key fact: every year, the system is ‘rebased‘ – the averages are re-measured and ’100′ is re-calibrated to the new average.

This leads to 3 key problems:

1. Because of how averages work, unless by some miracle every single hospital in the country got exactly the same score, you will always have some hospitals above 100 and some below. This does not mean the ‘extra’ deaths in those hospitals were avoidable – it just means that somebody has to be above the line because it’s an average.
2. Because the ’100-line’ moves every year, a hospital can maintain exactly the same standard in one year as it achieved in the previous year – and yet can score below 100 one year and above 100 the next. The performance of the hospital did not get worse. The line just moved. It’s not only wrong but ridiculous to extrapolate ‘extra’ or ‘avoidable’ deaths from a position above or below a line that moves every year.
3. Leading on from number 2 – and it’s impossible to overstate this – there is no ‘standard’ rate of deaths from a particular illness. No expert clinicians are sitting down together and saying ‘Yes, we agree that out of every 100 patients with an intracranial bleed, this many are going to die’. No. All that happens is that the average for the previous year becomes the re-calibrated ‘expected death’ figure for the following year. This means that HSMRs are measuring the success/failure in achieving/beating/failing to bear a target that moves every year – and has no basis in clinical expertise. It’s just a number.

In his testimony to the Francis inquiry, Prof Jarman claimed that he had to present the figures this way because the English are ‘simple-minded‘ – but in doing so he has committed a fundamental error of logic worthy of a simpleton.

These fundamental logical errors mean that even if everything else was perfect, HSMR scores over 100 cannot be used to calculate avoidable deaths.

Walker explains how behind the media's scary headlines lies 'rubbish in, rubbish out'. The data wasn't being properly recorded at the hospital and the woman brought in to fix that, who he has met, wasn't allowed to give evidence or speak to the media.

That women's work on correcting the errors produced the exact opposite outcome to the screaming headlines:

When Ms Kirkbright arrived at Mid Staffs, she carried out a re-coding exercise on past deaths. This re-coding corrected the absent Z51.5 code and used the case notes to add in the co-morbidities (what is known in the jargon as ‘depth of coding’) that was missing. This brought down Mid Staffs’ HSMR to 88 – well below the national average death rate.

Further:

HSMRs are a statistical device. If you want to be sure whether deaths were avoidable or not, you need to look in detail at the case notes for each patient. The doctor in charge of the Independent Case Note Review (INCR) was asked by the inquiry how many ‘excess’ deaths he had discovered among all of the cases for which families asked for a review. His answer was telling – but has been almost completely ignored:

    Perhaps one such death.

And further, Walker reports evidence that hospitals are gaming this bonkers system because of funding pressures - to increase their incomes.

Plus Walker gives examples of how reporting on supposed bad treatment of patients at the hospital could simply not be true.

The man behind the headlines, Professor Sir Brian Jarman, has a clear conflict of interest. He is financed by a company which sells services that allow NHS Trusts to use and monitor HSMRs. That has not been reported.

What is also not being reported is that the entire system is based on the most ridiculous way of recording and therefore supposedly monitoring morbidity rates.

HSMRs are based on ‘first diagnosis’.

If a patient arrives unconscious and the ambulance driver reports ‘He fainted’, fainting would be the first diagnosis. If that patient is then discovered to have had a serious stroke and dies, that death will be recorded against ‘fainting’ – a condition with a very low death-rate – resulting in an inflated HSMR.

There is no recording of post mortum results. The system is utterly broken. You couldn't make it up!

It's plain once you read Walker, or the handful of other bloggers, or this lonesome letter to The Guardian, or Computer Weekly, all similarly demolishing the media's reporting, that the headlines about '1200 avoidable deaths' aren't wrong because the media are all idiots, they are the result of an agenda. A stealth-privatisation, anti-National Health Service agenda.

Says Walker:

The threat is serious, because a lot of people will believe what’s being said and written just because it’s in the media and has apparent statistical/scientific support. Very few will look beyond the soundbites to see whether they stand up to scrutiny.

So please, if you’ve read this article and agree with its premise, spread the word. We need good information out there to counteract the absolute tripe that’s being force-fed to the British public.

Happy to oblige

• Here's a postscript

American politics' Rosetta Stone: Found?

Bill Maher on Realtime Friday night nailed how tiny, loud conservative groups have an outsized impact on American politics.

Maher (watch the NSFW video after the jump) pointed out that polls consistently show that Americans do have far more liberal views than 'Beltway' thinking assumes they do.

Earlier, he pointed out that although the budget put forward by the Republicans and especially that of their Tea Party caucus has media attention, the budget put forward by the House's Progressive caucus has zero attention. And yet the Progressive budget when given the 'blind taste test' treatment has been found to be overwhelmingly favoured by ordinary Americans.

Last week on Up w/ Chris Hayes (video after the jump) a new political science study (PDF) was discussed which shows just how misread America is. The study, discussed on the show with one of its authors on the panel, finds, writes Sal Gentile on the show's Tumblr, ..

.. that politicians tend to overestimate just how conservative their constituents are. Conservative politicians are especially bad at gauging their constituents’ beliefs — they underestimate support among their constituents for policies like universal health care and same-sex marriage by as much as 20 percentage points. 

These findings explain so much about the state of modern American politics. There seems to be such a larger appetite for conservative policies like war and austerity among politicians than among actual voters. In the latest budget fight, for example, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been insisting on the need to cut spending and “entitlements.” But polls show consistently that Americans believe spending cuts are bad for the economy, that they want to reduce the deficit through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts and that they want to preserve funding for cherished social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security. 

This disconnect between politicians and constituents has, arguably, gotten worse over the past three decades. As shown in the graph above, the share of Americans describing themselves as “conservative” has remained largely unchanged since 1976, even dipping considerably in the 1990s. House Republicans, meanwhile, have become more conservative than ever before,according to the DW-Nominate scale, a system of rating the ideology of lawmakers devised by political scientist Keith Poole. 

The striking divergence between how conservative Congressional Republicans have gotten and how conservative the American people are explains so much about how broken and dysfunctional our politics are.

Watch the Bill Maher (NSFW) and Chris Hayes segments after the jump:

Music · Joe Claussell · Suspicious Dub

Much 80s music appears to be suspicious these daze. Maybe the techo innovations then sound dated now. This is certainly true in most dance music. Sample-rich classics sound clunky. 80s Detroit techno sounds clunky.

This one is an exception which I pulled from ma dejay days memory. Still hits home!

It's a dub. 'Suspicious' is actually a track by the group Ten City but this version doesn't even credit them, just the producer. Dub in this house music sense is a version which technically comes from reggae and has the same 'stripped down' relationship with the original.

This surviving clip on Youtube, probs from radio recordings?, is solid keyboard, a type of track which especially tickled my ivorys, an orgasmic marriage with 'deep house'. After the jump, plus the gospel touched original:

Francis cannot save Catholicism

Father Murphy was a priest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He ran a School for the Deaf. He was a classic predator in the sense that he would seek out weak people. He was very charismatic like many of these predators are and also was an excellent signer.

But one of the things he did was to use the confession booth to find out things about the children and he would particularly prey on children whose parents themselves could not sign either at all or very well, so in effect he imprisoned them because he was tormenting them sexually and yet they couldn't even complain to their parents without the intercession of Murphy as an interlocutor.

So it was really a horrible, horrible crime. But even he imagined himself to be performing a holy act. He used to say, "I'm taking their sins upon myself."

This is Oscar winner Alex Gibney talking to the ABC's Tony Jones about his documentary, 'Silence in the House of God: Mea Maxima Culpa'.

The film, which is still doing the arthouse (natch) circuit, focuses on the first victims of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal to go public, the deaf boys of Milwaukee.

They pled to the former Pope's racket, Ratzinger's renamed Inquisition, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They got nowhere.

This incredible film, through its centre in these deaf boys, now men, conveys the pain of abuse better than any other I have seen on this scandal. Sign language has a power that no verbal language does, in this regard.

If you want to watch one thing to understand this issue, this issue's living rawness, seek 'Mea Maxima Culpa' out.

Jones asks Gibney: what are the chances that Pope Francis could demand that the Vatican open up its secret case files on these paedophile priests and the men up the Church's chain of command who covered up for them?

He says:

I think the chances are pretty small, frankly. I mean, the new pope is a creature of the old system, so I'd be very surprised if he does it. I think we're all hoping that he might or might have the courage to do so, but I think the chances are extremely unlikely.

Why? 'Mea Maxima Culpa' explains why. To do so would upend the very point of this church, the ridiculousness of supposed sexual piety at its core and its absolution in 'confession'.

The film interviews Richard Sipe, a former priest. Sipe names what lies at the centre of Catholic hypocrisy, a syndrome known to police as 'noble cause corruption', the belief that good intentions purify bad behaviour, turning a perversion into a holy act.

A priest who had an affair with this 12, 13-year-old girl brought to one of their encounters what he said was a consecrated host. And he touched it to her vagina and he said, "This is how God loves you." And then he raped her.

Francis cannot end that mindset, everything would crumble if he did.

Says Gibney:

One of the things about Sipe's study was that he discovered that at least 50 per cent of the clergy have an active sex life.

So if you have that kind of lie or that kind of hypocrisy at the heart of the Church, then what it does is it creates a system of secrecy and blackmail and then that colours everything surrounding investigations into sexual indiscretions or crimes in the Church.

Gibney tells Jones he suspects but cannot confirm that the scandal definitively lies behind Ratzinger's resignation. The Church and its enablers cannot admit it. Secrecy is everything.

Ratzinger is now protected by Italy, where Gibney's film has had difficulty getting screened, and Ratzinger will live out his days within the Vatican's walls. Here he will be safe from lawyers. Why? Says Gibney:

There's a direct connection to the case that we look at in this film because there was an archbishop in Milwaukee who tried to see that this priest who'd abused over 200 deaf children be defrocked. And they went to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and tried to see if then Cardinal Ratzinger would do it, but the investigation was abated because the priest himself wrote to then Cardinal Ratzinger and said, "Gee, I'm an old priest. I'd like to die in the dignity of my priesthood. Please give me a break." And that is precisely what Ratzinger did. He gave him a break rather than defrock him.

The whole film is availables for frees on the interwebs (natch) but it's still in cinemas so I'm just posting the promo clip for 'Mea Maxima Culpa', after the break, plus Gibney Q+A from the BFI Festival, where he compares the Catholic Church to tobacco companies, hoping the 'Global South' will break free:

Ceauşescu monsters London

Bucharest is possibly the city most defaced by totalitarianism. Perhaps Beijing is catching it up?

In the 1980s dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu demolished thousands of houses, churches and monasteries to build the world's biggest government building, The Palace of the Parliament.

How big? Well Bogdan Ilie and Dan Achim have created a website which allows you to drop it anywhere ... and in the above map it is dropped onto London

.... holy mother of g*d!!

HT: Atlantic Cities