Thursday, May 30, 2024
Sexual Assault Survivor’s Ordeal WIth Trans Inmate in Female Prison
A sexual assault survivor gave an inside look at living in a female prison with male criminals who say they identify as transgender in a new documentary released Tuesday by the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group.
The six-minute documentary, part of Independent Women’s Forum’s “Cruel & Unusual Punishment: The Male Takeover of Female Prisons” series, focuses on the story of Evelyn Valiente, a sexual assault survivor and former inmate at the Central California Women’s Facility. Valiente, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity, was forced to share a housing unit with a male inmate who said he identified as a woman while serving time for killing someone in a shooting.
“At first I thought it was going to be OK [but] it didn’t take long before this one particular individual was manipulative, calculating, vindictive, and always looking and seeking to do harm to another person,” Valiente said of the “trans” inmate, who had a history of sex crime convictions.
In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed legislation requiring the state’s prison system to house inmates based on their gender identity and not their biological sex. Under the law, corrections officers are required to ask inmates privately how they identify and then work to house them accordingly.
Before her time in prison, Valiente had been sexually assaulted. She said that being in the same housing unit as an individual who had been convicted of sex crimes, as well as other men, made it “scary” not only for her but for many other women who had “come from very abusive backgrounds.”
“It’s a lot of walking in trauma,” Valiente said.
Andrea Mew, storytelling manager for Independent Women’s Forum and co-producer of the documentary series, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that although California lawmakers claimed that the transgender inmate bill was about keeping inmates safe, the law actually further victimized women in prison who often have been abused previously.
“It’s really interesting that California, at the same time that they are focusing on being all about rehabilitation, are subjecting women to being retraumatized by a lot of their personal triggers,” Mew said. “Many women who are in prison are victims of sexual assault, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and having men in their spaces can be a very big trigger for them. At the same time, it’s allowing violent male criminals to have unbridled access to, in many cases, the thing that got them there in the first place.”
Currently, five states—Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey—as well as New York City have passed laws allowing men who say they identify as women to be housed in women’s prisons. However, other states, such as Wisconsin, reportedly moved biologically male offenders who say they identify as transgender into all-female facilities despite their violent criminal histories.
In September 2023, a female inmate sued the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in New Jersey after she said she was assaulted in prison by a male inmate identifying as transgender. Another female inmate from New York City filed a lawsuit in January, claiming that a prison official instructed a male inmate who reportedly sexually assaulted her to say he identified as transgender so he could have “access to female inmates.”
Mew said she and co-producer Kelsey Bolar wanted viewers to imagine how they would feel if someone they loved in prison was forced to share a cell or a housing unit with a transgender inmate who had a history of violence.
“People need to put themselves in the shoes of people who are in prison and just imagine yourself in there, imagine your own daughter in there,” Mew said. “There are a lot of things that could happen that could get you into prison that are complete accidents, so imagine yourself or your own daughter is in that sort of accident. Put yourself in the shoes of the person there and think about how it would feel if you’re being physically, emotionally, and, in some cases as we’ve seen, sexually threatened by male criminals while you’re just trying to do your time and get home.”
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The unsinkable Kamala Harris
Scarcely four weeks from the first presidential debate of 2024, Democrats dream of President Biden’s stepping aside for a more appealing candidate. But there is a hitch.
For starters, a convention switcheroo is all but impossible unless the president agrees — and he and the rest of the Biden family show no sign they’re ready to go.
And even if someone did manage to persuade Mr. Biden stepping aside was the right thing to do, there’s a bigger problem. Her name is Kamala Harris, and identity politics gives her an effective veto over any plans to swap out candidates.
It’s an extraordinary power considering her political weakness. A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll released last week reported that she is now the favoured replacement on the Democratic ticket if President Biden were to step down.
But when it came to head-to-head match-ups with Donald Trump in seven swing states, the same poll reported Ms. Harris trailing in all of them, by margins ranging from 3 points in Michigan to 10 in North Carolina.
That’s not surprising in light of her performance these past four years. Whenever Ms. Harris has been in the news, it’s typically been for her high staff turnover or the word salads she serves up regularly.
The one significant portfolio Mr. Biden gave her was the border with Mexico. She made one visit, and has since given it a wide berth. She rightly recognises it’s a loser for the Biden administration. But for all her insistence that she’s dealing with the “root causes” driving the illegal crossings, the whole country understands that the problem has metastasised under her watch.
So if the party is to have a stronger ticket heading into November, it probably means dumping both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris. But that raises the uniquely Democratic problem of identity politics. Could the Democratic Party today really pass over its black, female, Indian-American vice president for any one of the white candidates usually mentioned as replacements for Mr. Biden?
Even the vice president’s estranged father has been critical. When Ms. Harris in a radio interview invoked her dad’s side of the family to explain that she had both smoked pot and inhaled — “half my family’s from Jamaica!” — her dad, a retired Stanford economist, complained that their ancestors were having their names tarnished “in the pursuit of identity politics.”
It helps to remember how she got her job, after being forced to drop out of the Democratic primaries before a single vote was cast. Back in March 2020, before Mr. Biden tapped Ms. Harris to be his running mate, he announced he would choose a woman. This followed a similar promise before the South Carolina Democratic primary to appoint an African-American woman to the Supreme Court. In short, Mr. Biden has made no bones about his appeals to identity politics to get votes.
This embrace of identify politics may have been cynical, but it worked. Black voters, who constitute the majority of Democrats in South Carolina, rescued Mr. Biden after an embarrassing fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses and fifth-place showing in New Hampshire.
Now Ms. Harris is on the campaign trail trying to shore up the president’s standing with women and African-Americans. Support for Mr. Biden has been slipping with the latter demographic, which he really needs to turn out for him if he is to defeat Mr. Trump. So giving Ms. Harris the old heave-ho in favour of a white politician such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would probably backfire and further divide the party.
The only way Democrats might get away with it at this point is to nominate Michelle Obama. But the former first lady shows no desire to insert herself into the election mess that Mr. Biden has created for himself.
That leaves the vice president untouchable. Perversely that probably helps Mr. Biden because it means that Democrats who are calling for him to step down must think twice if Ms. Harris is the replacement. And if she’s not, they face the prospect of heading into the election having alienated a large chunk of Democratic voters.
Martin Luther King Jr. looked forward to an America where people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. Identity politics works the other way. In the Biden White House, people selected for their racial or gender identities are politically difficult to let go if it turns out they aren’t up to the job — because that isn’t why they were hired in the first place.
By making clear that he cared less about whether his picks were the best than he did about whether they checked some identity box, the president unfairly cast doubt on the competence of all such hires. The result is what the nation now sees with Ms. Harris, clearly in over her head but impossible to dislodge.
May is Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage month. At a Rose Garden celebration earlier this month to mark the occasion, the president introduced himself to the crowd with a joke. “My name is Joe Biden,” he said. “I work for Kamala Harris.”
His embrace of naked identity politics means it’s truer than he knows.
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How Indian PM Modi has turned the digital state to his advantage
When the party workers showed up in Deepak’s village, they already knew his name. “They had it on their phones,” the elderly farmer said. “They knew how much rice we were supposed to get and how many rupees. They reminded me it was thanks to Mr Modi.”
The digitisation of the Indian state, with a universal identification programme and online banking for all, has been one of the greatest transformations of Narendra Modi’s decade in power. But as India has gone to the polls over the past six weeks, to decide whether he deserves a third term, the digital state has emerged as one of the most powerful tools in the hands of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), leaving opposition rivals crying foul and rights advocates warning that the population is sleepwalking into an authoritarian trap.
Micro-targeting, pioneered in the United States by the Obama campaign, is nothing new. The Cambridge Analytica scandal followed, exposing how the personal data of millions of Facebook users was harvested without their consent and used to support Donald Trump’s first push for the White House.
In India, the vast bulk of the information making its way into the hands of the BJP has been surrendered by voters signing up to the government apps that facilitate their everyday lives. Vast government databases of citizens’ details have been transferred into the hands of the ruling party for use in the campaign machine and by favoured private companies. While the governments of individual, opposition-led states have sought to do the same, taking control of the national database has given the BJP an advantage rivals can only dream of.
“Party workers should not have access to data the government has collected for state programmes,” said Prateek Waghre, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group. “What we’re finding is party workers themselves taking this information and going to someone to say, ‘Hey, we know you received so and so, you benefited from the government’.”
By which they mean Modi personally, a towering figure whose image adorns rice ration packs, looming larger than any distant bureaucracy.
Now 73, Modi’s tech savvy goes back more than a decade to his last run for chief minister of Gujarat. Before his ascendance to the national stage, he appeared in hologram form at rallies in villages across the western state. Modi has his own app, NaMo, which comes pre-installed on low-cost Indian-made phones and became the centre of a 2018 privacy row when it was found that it scraped data from users’ devices.
Such data is particularly sensitive in a political climate characterised by communal divisions. At campaign rallies, Modi has stoked resentment against Muslims and accused the opposition of wanting to withdraw welfare from lower-caste Hindus and give it to their Muslim “vote bank”.
Minorities fear the reverse. While beneficiaries receive welfare irrespective of religious or caste identity, India’s polarised climate has given rise to fears the data could be used to micro-target payments selectively.
One of the greatest fears about the misuse of technology in the elections - AI-generated deepfakes - has not yet come to pass.
Deepfakes of the Bollywood stars Ranveer Singh and Aamir Khan endorsing political candidates did the rounds before state elections last year but were later taken down. Modi himself warned of the threat when he mistakenly believed himself to be a victim. A video appearing to show him dancing turned out not to be AI-generated but an old-fashioned impersonation by a Modi lookalike.
Waghre says such stunts are far more likely to be the work of private actors than political parties, for whom the reputational risks would be huge. “I’m more concerned about the loss of trust, where something is actually real and people don’t believe it,” he said.
That has already happened in the case of a BJP candidate in Uttar Pradesh who was filmed making a “let them eat cake"-style remark about the poor. Supporters denounced it as fake.
The relative absence of AI-generated misinformation is partly due to the industry’s self-policing, according to Divyendra Singh Jadoun. Known as The Indian Deepfaker, he runs an AI company in Rajasthan making products such as micro-targeted video messages in which candidates address voters by name.
“This is the first time we’ve done these political scenarios but we’ve had to turn down the vast majority of requests because what they are asking is unethical,” he said, referring to propositions that he deepfake a candidate’s rival making career-ending statements.
With the Indian election ending on Saturday, Jadoun is fielding a flood of requests from foreign political campaigns for his services, a mark of India’s global reach in the tech service sector. “So many countries are having elections, including the US, so many people are reaching out to us,” he said. “We’re still considering whether to do it.”
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Nurses head off prostate cancer admissions
Hmmm ... I am not sure that prostate cancer sufferers will get good advice from nurses. Although I feel perfectly well, I have both prostate cancer and bone cancer: A penalty of old age. I saw a urologist about the prostate cancer but she was not very helpful. But the oncologist was. He prescribed something -- Xtandi -- that fixed my symptoms without any side-effects. So if even medical specialists can be unhelpful, what hope is there for nurses? Better than nothing, I guess
Emergency departments have seen a 60 per cent reduction in admissions from men suffering from prostate cancer who receive the care of specialist nurses, a groundbreaking report has shown, sparking calls to expand the service.
The findings from an independent report by the University of Queensland’s Centre for the Business and Economics of Health has also revealed providing specialist nurses to prostate cancer patients saves the healthcare system up to $20m each year.
Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia director of nursing Sally Sara, who is calling for the service to be expanded, said the hospital-based program provides an expert to turn to, as opposed to the emergency room.
“It’s about having that primary point of contact who men can to speak to on the phone, talk about what’s going on and get some advice before things become a problem,” Ms Sara said.
“Specialist nurses can initiate action early so issues are called and treated early before they get to the stage where someone might be quite unwell and ends up being admitted to hospital.
“It may be as simple as a man ringing a nurse after surgery and describing symptoms that sound like an infection, and the nurse can fax a pathology company so he can go straight away,” she said.
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the country, with 70 Australian men diagnosed each day.
Ms Sara has overseen the program grow from a 12-person pilot study 12 years ago to a nationwide service with 110 nurses based in all major regional areas and capital cities – trained by prostate cancer experts like herself.
She said the findings indicate an extension of the program will further benefit an overburdened healthcare system and the wellbeing of Australian men.
“The report recognised that having these nurses really helped with hospital avoidance and it came straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s oncologists, urologists, and other health professionals who are reporting back to us saying they noticed that since these positions have been in place, those unplanned admissions have dropped because of early intervention,” Ms Sara said.
“There is excellent evidence that the program itself has generated a positive return financially but also that there is a really big impact in health related quality of life … men have contacted us and said they wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for the nurse who kept them going, encouraged them to go to the appointments, or let them talk through their worries.
“It is a very trusted relationship the prostate cancer nurses build with the men they care for and their families as well.”
Husband, father, and Gulf War Naval veteran Paul Bain, 54, said highly-trained specialist nurses were helping men identify and cope with a disease that often goes unnoticed.
“As someone who’s going through having to deal with all the implications of the disease, a situation for me that came out of left-field completely, it has been quite a journey through various stages of treatment, emotion, and mental and physical fatigue that we’ve got to deal with,” Mr Bain said.
“We all appreciate nurses and people in the health community in general but to have some of these specialists that are obviously focused on the intricacies around this particular disease is just fantastic and good peace of mind during what can be a really tricky time.”
Mr Bain was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2020 after his doctor decided to give him a prostate-specific antigen test (PSA) during a routine check-up, simply because of his age.
The Royalla father was fit, healthy, and asymptomatic despite having an aggressive form of cancer doctors said would have killed him before Christmas that year if not for the discovery.
Four years later, Mr Bain is recovering from another round of radiotherapy after the cancer metastasised to his ribs. He said his story speaks to the value of specialist care and greater awareness about the disease.
“Men aren’t great with talking about their health and if they don’t have support networks or family around them as they go through (cancer) it can be really difficult to deal with,” he said.
“The nurses have been amazing for me on my own particular journey and I talk to them at different times about how to approach treatment from the mental to the physical changes you go through.
“Generations ago a lot of men would have just died with prostate cancer and it is a slow growing disease in most instances so it can be overlooked … but I think it’s so important men don’t take it lightly.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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