Biden's First Children's Immigration Detention Center, Free Heroin Pipes at Seattle Homeless Shelter, Disney Eerily Silent on Child Porn Conviction, Cancel Culture in 1991 (The Five for 02/23/21)
Hey,
Jam-packed news day, so we’re going to dive right in.
But first:
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Let’s get into the news:
[one]
President Biden has opened the first child detention center for migrants apprehended at the border, following in the footsteps of his two immediate predecessors, Obama and Trump.
CARRIZO SPRINGS, Tex. — Dozens of migrant teens boarded vans Monday for the trip down a dusty road to a former man camp for oil field workers here, the first migrant child facility opened under the Biden administration.
The emergency facility — a vestige of the Trump administration that was open for only a month in summer 2019 — is being reactivated to hold up to 700 children ages 13 to 17.
Government officials say the camp is needed because facilities for migrant children have had to cut capacity by nearly half because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border has been inching up, with January reporting the highest total — more than 5,700 apprehensions — for that month in recent years.
But immigration lawyers and advocates question why the Biden administration would choose to reopen a Trump-era facility that was the source of protests and controversy. From the “tent city” in Tornillo, Tex., to a sprawling for-profit facility in Homestead, Fla., emergency shelters have been criticized by advocates for immigrants, lawyers and human rights activists over their conditions, cost and lack of transparency in their operations.
“It’s unnecessary, it’s costly, and it goes absolutely against everything [President] Biden promised he was going to do,” said Linda Brandmiller, a San Antonio-based immigration lawyer who represents unaccompanied minors. “It’s a step backward, is what it is. It’s a huge step backward.”
During the campaign, Biden pledged to undo former president Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. In his first month in office, Biden signed several executive orders reversing many of those policies. Last week, he and House Democrats introduced a plan that would provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. The administration also reversed some of Trump’s expulsion practices by accepting unaccompanied children into the country, a change that also is contributing to an increase of minors in government facilities, officials said.
This is an incredibly complex issue that, like the war in Afghanistan, seems to remain unchanged regardless of who’s in power.
Beyond that, I’m not well researched enough to be ready to give commentary here, so I’ll stop at letting you know it’s happening. The Babylon Bee (more context in #2) pointed out on that the children are being kept in trailers with barred windows which look a heck of a lot like little prisons.
[two]
A bit of context on the tone of this next story.
The reporting is from notthebee.com, which is the real (strange) news site run by The Babylon Bee staff, a satire news site.
The reporting is flavored with a good deal of snark, but this is definitely happening right now in Seattle.
In the past, helping addicts would have consisted of tough love, compassionate accountability, and making it harder to get drugs.
At the very least, it would have involved not making drug use easier.
The intellectually enlightened in Seattle have a better plan, however: teach addicts how to more efficiently use drugs!
These were two of the posters from the city-funded Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) advertising rectal injections and pipes to better get that poppy-infused high:
A "booty bumping kit" apparently lessens the risks of infection, taking away one of the obstacles that might discourage you from using. It also leaves no pesky tracks that might clue loved ones in that you need help!
Meanwhile, the shelter wants addicts to know that a pipe is a "lower-risk alternative," and that they have THREE types of glass that their management team can give you. What an awesome deal!
The shelter's director says such things reduce "stigma" along a "continuum" of care to help addicts, but there are plenty of critics to this idea of "care."
"The addicts in DESC care have caused considerable harm to the community," said local radio host Jason Rantz. "At the DESC downtown Seattle location on 3rd Avenue, Seattle Police responded to 253 reports of assault and 174 theft reports in 2019. All in, this location saw an average of seven single police response calls per day that year, according to KOMO TV. The DESC disputed some of the data. But walk past that location on any given day, at any given time, pre-pandemic, and you wouldn't feel safe."
The shelter’s defense boils down to “if we keep people doped up on heroin, they don’t commit as many crimes.”
That’s gross. That’s not love, nor is it compassion. Nor is it wise. Nor is it kind.
I suppose this is the inevitable conclusion to a culture that values self-identity, self-worth and comfort above all else. Those who care for the most vulnerable are now serving as slow executioners, dealing out a dollop of poison a day. Everybody is a little happier in the short term, because the addicts are high as a kite and the neighborhood is a little quieter.
But the result is predictable, inevitable death.
The U.S. has a plethora of drug treatment options, including helping heroin addicts step down with the drug Methadone, which functions in a similar manner to the way Nicotine gum does to help smokers kick cancer sticks.
This is what happens when feelings and “lived experience” are valued more than reality and reason.
[three]
As a follow up to the last issue’s lead story on Rush Limbaugh’s more controversial (and, at times, indefensible) statements, I wanted to follow up by sharing this 1991 clip from 60 Minutes, which popped up in my YouTube feed. If you don’t have time to watch the entire 12 minute clip, here’s the key part, which cuts between an interview with Limbaugh by the 60 Minutes host, and reactions from feminist leader and attorney Gloria Allred.
Limbaugh: These people don’t have any sense of humor.
Allred: He is hurting us and I can’t emphasize that enough. He’s trying to make us a joke so that we can’t be taken seriously. Part of the problem of moving the women’s movement forward is the trivialization of the women’s movement.
[Cuts to clip of Limbaugh event]: Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream society.
Allred: That’s the type of woman hating statement that is perpetuated over and over again.
Limbaugh: If they get mad at that, that’s fine. I’m not doing what I do to make sure nobody gets mad. I can understand how that would ruffle feathers, but it isn’t going to stop me.
60 Minutes Host: What are you trying to do with this show?
Limbaugh: I’m trying to attract the largest audience I can and hold them for as long as I can so I can charge advertisers confiscatory rates. This is a business.60 Minutes Host: You’re in it for the money?
Limbaugh: Sure. Of course. I’m doing a lot of this for the money. But I don’t want to just stop there.
A few observations when viewing this clip through the lens of the last 30 years of events.
A. Neither of these people are anywhere near where I’d want to hang my hat, as far as articulating my political stance in 2021. From what I can tell, Limbaugh did calm down somewhat in his later years, and everyone I know who met him (reminder: I worked in radio for a decade) described him as a kind, rather shy man in person. The 60 Minutes clip mentions five years before, he was barely paying rent and failing as music format morning show host. Limbaugh found a caricature that worked, and rode that horse to the tune of millions of dollars…perhaps in the same way that 00’s rapper Lil John, who was raised by upper-middle class an Aerospace engineer father, adopted a hard partying rapper persona to sell music, while living the life of a sober, married father off stage. I’m unsure where the persona of Rush stopped and where the personal Rush started, but he doesn’t come off great here.
B. That being said, Allred is clearly an early example of cancel culture. Allred called for Limbaugh's show to be taken off the air in the 90’s, and comes off on camera as the world’s most bitter hall monitor. These two trends are present in 2021, where swaths of the extreme left are a half step away from calling for banning comedy outright and where the Twitter mob is used as a club against anyone who puts one toe out of line [see: Gina Carano].
C. In 2012, The Atlantic, known as a moderate, middle of the road publication, described Allred as “the ambulance chaser of feminism.” Perhaps there would have been a better intellectual opponent for Limbaugh, but that’s on 60 Minutes, not me.
D. To conclude, it’s amazing to me that the ideas being debated right now were also in the headlines in 1991. (free speech vs. cancel culture, what’s allowed in comedy, Limbaugh’s legacy).
E. As for my stance, I haven’t moved. I’m always up to defeat your idea with a better one rather than trying to “cancel” you. While some comedy is offensive and hurtful, the content options are so vast now, if you find something distasteful, there’s a near infinite number of channels across streaming TV, YouTube and podcasts to move on to.
Or, as the South Park meme famously put it:
[four]
By this point, I’m assuming that you’ve read about The Muppets TV show (19 streaming on Disney+ receiving “trigger warnings” on select episodes, including one in which Johnny Cash sings in front of the Confederate Flag.
Cash wasn’t known to use the Stars & Bars as a part of his image. If I had to guess, some Hollywood yahoo thought that the banner would make Cash appear to be more “country,” based on the decade I spent in entertainment journalism, meeting a Legion of carbon copy Angelenos who knew nothing about the people who live between Las Vegas and New York.
The same thing happened with Lynyrd Skynyrd, who ne’er-do-wells have tried to “cancel” in the modern era due to the band’s use of the Conferate flag…despite the fact that Ronnie Van Zandt and Co. had no interest in using the image, which was thrust on them by the record label marketing department.
Anyway, Disney’s reworking of The Muppets is simultaneously better and much worse than it appears at first glance.
Entertainment Weekly reports on the missing music (and episodes) in the streaming version of the show:
A representative for Disney+ confirmed to EW that most of the missing pieces can be attributed to issues securing music rights. This comes as no surprise; difficulties with licensing the many songs performed on The Muppet Show kept much of the series from releasing on home video for years. Indeed, the season 1 DVD released by Disney in 2005 omitted several songs; all of those segments have been restored on Disney+.
The Chris Langham episode, however, is a thornier issue. Langham was a staff writer on The Muppet Show who stepped in as a guest star when Richard Pryor dropped out at the last minute. Langham is also a convicted sex offender; in 2007, he was found guilty of possessing child pornography and spent six months in prison. It's possible this has something to do with his episode's absence; however, Disney declined to comment on the matter.
To summarize here are things Disney will apologize for:
—“stereotypes” used in The Muppets, although they won’t specify what those stereotypes are.
—Johnny Cash performing in front of a Confederate Flag, which, likely as not, The Muppets show runners added themselves.
Here are the things Disney has not apologized for:
—Walt Disney being a raging anti-semite. If the House of Mouse is going to be in apology business, might I suggest a plague in Magic Kingdom that simply says “sorry the guy who built all this agreed with Hitler.”
—The fact that a writer and personality on a children’s show WENT TO PRISON FOR CHILD PORN.
—Thanking the literal prison guards holding Uyghur Muslims in Concentration Camps for their help on the 2020 film Mulan’s filming in the Chinese province of XinXiang.
[five]
Finally, terrorism is still a thing, even though the American media doesn’t seem to find room in the headlines for it. Four women were assassinated in Pakistan yesterday for teaching local women how to sew, so they can earn money.
CNBC reports:
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Four women who ran empowerment workshops were gunned down Monday in a volatile area of Pakistan that was once a base for the Taliban, local police and the women's employer said.
The team was hired by Bravo College of Technology in Peshawar to help local women gain vocational skills such as sewing in North Waziristan, said Fayaz Khan, the chief executive of the college.
“Is this the way to give back to someone for the hard work they were doing for the poor?” Khan said by telephone. “Their role was tremendous for the local community.”
The women were shot in an apparent targeted attack as they passed through a deserted village near the town of Mirali in North Waziristan tribal district, police chief Shafiullah Gandapur told NBC News.
North Waziristan runs along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and served as a base for the Pakistani Taliban and other militants, including Al Qaeda, until 2014, when the army said it cleared the region of insurgents.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The incident comes amid an uptick in attacks claimed by the Pakistani Taliban in the deeply conservative area in recent months and amid concern that the insurgents may be regrouping.
“North Waziristan tribal district has suffered badly from militancy for a long time," Gandapur said also by telephone. "The security situation has improved but still we face a lot of problems.”
The Pakistani Taliban is technically a different group than the Afghan Taliban, but it’s pretty much six in one hand, half dozen in the other. After 20+ years of war, the inevitable end will be a complete U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, at which point the Taliban will declare open season on local U.S. allies, just as the Viet Cong did with the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.
One way or another, it looks like this is how a war that has been going on for more than half my life will end…like the last major one did. As the last Marines pulled out of Saigon in 1975, American forces pushed their own helicopters into the ocean and pointed guns at South Vietnamese allies trying to avoid certain death by boarding American vessels.
Until the next one,
-sth