It seems all too common these days, but this happened almost 16 years ago.

Robert McNiel (not his real name) was arrested at work in Arkansas.  He pled guilty in Wyoming and was sentenced to three years and two months on Federal charges.

I didn’t know McNiel well as he worked in another part of the facility.  However, I had worked with his wife – who was a lot younger than him – on a couple of projects.  Both had worked there for several years.  McNiel, a Naval Academy graduate, had started at the facility soon after resigning his naval commission.

McNiel had tickets to events of the XIX Olympic Winter Games, held in Utah from February 8th through February 24th, 2002.  His planned route would take him through Wyoming on Interstate 80.

McNiel’s arrest resulted from a Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) undercover operation. A DCI agent posed as a 39-year-old Cheyenne, Wyoming woman in an internet chat room where people interested in sex with preteens gathered to trade photos and solicit contact with children. At some point, McNiel contacted the agent and, within a few minutes, was discussing the possibility of a sexual encounter with the agent’s fictitious 9-year-old daughter. As the conversation continued, McNiel started sending images depicting children engaged in explicit sexual activities, eventually sending 10 pornographic images as well as an image of himself to help the woman he was corresponding with – the undercover DCI agent –  decide if she wanted her daughter to have sex with him.

Robert McNiel is now a registered sex offender living in an isolated mobile home
on the windswept plains of eastern Wyoming.

The agent and McNiel agreed to meet in Cheyenne in February, 2002, when he was planning to travel to Utah.  FBI and DCI agents arrested him at work in Arkansas on January 22nd.

McNiel pled guilty to interstate transportation of child pornography in May 2002 and was sentenced in August.  During the sentencing, the judge stated that he never would have imagined he would have been called on to sentence a Naval Academy graduate for a child pornography offense.

The Victims.

It would be easy that there were no victims in this case, that McNiel was caught through an undercover internet sting. However, that would be wrong.

Even if McNiel didn’t take the pictures, the kids in the images are victims of a perverse underground system that exploits some of society’s weakest.  McNiel had to have gotten those images from somewhere. More than 80% of sexual abuse offenses against children are committed by people they know.

“In a sense, every viewing of child pornography is a repetition of the victim’s abuse.” –  from the Supreme Court majority opinion in Paroline v. United States et. al.

There are also other victims, victims in all crimes that all-too-often are never considered, never mentioned – the families of the perpetrator.

I have known two women who were at one time married to men who became sex offenders. One was McNiel’s wife.  The other was an internet blogging friend. These women are, for the most part, unacknowledged victims. They have had to accept that a person they had once completely trusted has done, or planned to do, morally reprehensible and criminal acts.  They have had to deal with the horror that the person they thought they knew could even think of going down that path.

Then, of course, there are the children.  The wife – or, probably, ex-wife – has to deal with what to tell the kids about where daddy is gone and why.  The kids, of course, have lost their father, sometime temporarily, sometimes, where the criminal penalties are severe, permanently.  While my parents divorced when I was quite young, I can only imagine the trauma of having one’s father go to prison.

… Monsters are real.

As a convicted and registered sex offender, former engineer
Robert McNeil has limited employment opportunities.

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References:

• What Happens When You’re the One Being Photographed for Child Porn: A Victim Shares Her Story
• I watch child pornography to prosecute sex crimes.

Dust, Drought, and Depression #1.

In the 1930s, the dust bowl, drought, and economic conditions drove many independent farmers,  tenant farmers, and sharecroppers from the land.

Others left because of advances in agriculture they couldn’t afford.

Dorothea Lange, with her photo of James Abner Turpen, a Texan farmer on relief, recorded the impact of farm mechanization.

Goodliet, Hardeman County, Texas. James Abner Turpen, a Texan farmer on relief – ‘Tractored out’ in late 1937. Now living in town, and on the verge of relief. Wife and two children. “Well, I know I’ve got to make a move but I don’t know where to. I can stay off relief until the first of the year. After that I don’t know. I’ve eat up two cows and a pair of horses this past year. Neither drink nor gamble, so I must have eat’n ’em up. I’ve got left two horses and two cows and some farm tools. Owe a grocery bill. If had gradutated land tax on big farms, that would put the little man back again. One man had six renters last year. Kept one. Of the five, one went to Oklahoma, one got a farm south of town and three got no place. They’re on WPA (Works Progress Administration). Another man put fifteen families off this year. Another had twenty-eight renters and now has two. In the Progressive Farmer it said that relief had spoiled the renters so they had to get tractors. But them men that’s doing the talking for the community is the big landowners. They got money to go to Washington. That’s what keeps us from writing. A letter I would write would sound silly up there.” 

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Dust, Drought, and Depression 001. Originally published February 23, 2013
Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000001797/PP/ (Accessed August 23, 2016.)

 

Andy Baily, creator and developer of CommentLuv, a premier comment and spam busting WordPress plugin, closed the doors at some point in the last year or two.  Andy had been very public about his struggles with Multiple Sclerosis¹ (MS) since the battle began in 2012 and eventually decided that he could no longer provide support for the plugin.

Apparently the disease progressed to the point that Andy could no longer provide the service and quality in the product that his thousands of customers had come to expect. While the plugin seems to work fine for now, eventually as WordPress continues to be upgraded, compatibility and/or security issues may develop.

For bloggers, Christine Cobb at My Bonus Blog has a couple of suggestion for replacement plugins for the features that are included in CommentLuv Pro.

Andy is still active online with a Facebook MS diary and an account on Twitch, which I don’t have a clue about.

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1. Multiple sclerosis is the most common autoimmune disorder affecting the central nervous system. – Wikipedia

While looking for an image to go with this post on Pixabay, I came across an image of a blue colored bird on a branch, puking.  While that may be very appropriate for how some feel about Twitter, I decided to find something more visually appealing.

I’ve tried Twitter – twice, at least.

Now, I’m sure that Twitter is useful and worthwhile to some. I’ve not been able to see that for me.  I’ve tried both a personal account and a “business” account. For the amount of time I spent with each, there was little reward.  Sure, there were times where I was able to follow breaking trends and news, but I can get all of that in other places – if I want to.

I actually created my personal account 5 years ago. I’ve made 730 tweets and I have 7 followers.  (There were a few more followers at one time.) 730 tweets in 5 years averages out to 146 tweets a year or about .4 tweets a day.  However, the tweets all came in a very few periods where I was trying to figure Twitter out and use it.

Bully-Pulpit

Like many others I am bothered by the tweeting of the POTUS.  He comes across as a loudmouthed bully, even on Twitter where you can’t really hear his voice.  As president, he has the Twitter bully-pulpit which should not be, despite current evidence to the contrary, a place for a bully to preach, but rather a wonderful platform from which he could –and should –  advocate his positions and agenda.  Trump’s personal account has 41.1 million followers.  His POTUS account has 20.8 million.  Even with duplications between the two and “followers” from the opposition, that’s a hell of a bully-pulpit that is badly utilized.

As I was writing the blog post yesterday afternoon, I kept hearing a beeping sound, something like a smoke alarm when the battery is just about dead. That didn’t make sense, because our smoke alarms are brand new – with 10 year sealed batteries –  just installed last week. Beep…..

For a while I ignored it as I wanted to finish the post before heading in to work. Beep…..

After I got dressed for work Beep…..I started looking for where the sound was coming from. Karen was in town at the gym, followed by shopping, so she couldn’t help.

I stood under the hallway alarm. Beep…..  That wasn’t it.

So, I went and stood under the kitchen alarm.  Beep….. Nope, not there, either.  Sounded like it was coming from the living room. I stood in there for a while and Beep….. couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.

I couldn’t wait around any longer as I needed to head in to work. Beep…..

 

As I left the house, I grabbed the bag of trash waiting by the front door and took it outside to the trash bin. Beep…..

After I got home from work, I asked Karen if she had thrown out an old smoke alarm.  She had, but it wasn’t beeping.

I wonder if it beeped when the trash was picked up this morning. Beep…..

With power lost yesterday morning at 2:30, I was wide awake – and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up.

No power to the TV. No power to the computer.  I did have my iPhone, but I really wasn’t interested in surfing the web. I did use it to access the Entergy ap to see how extensive the outage was – and to file an outage report, even though they already knew our stretch of road had lost power.

It looked like it was going to turn out to be a day for reading. Fortunately, we’ve both got Kindles and mine had books on it I had not yet read.

My Kindle Paperwhte’s charge was pretty low, so I wasn’t sure how long the battery would last. I finished 2 books and was into the third at bedtime without having to charge the device.

I started on one set that includes several apocalyptic novels.  I rather liked the first one in the set, Reaper’s Run: Plague Wars Series, Book 1 so, after we had internet access back later in the day, I “bought” its prequel, The Eden Plague: Plague Wars Series, Book 0:

Not all plagues kill. But there are those with much to lose from the advancement of the human race, and there is nothing more dangerous to the hidden powers of the world than a plague with the ability to improve Mankind through simple human contact.

When veteran combat lifesaver Daniel Markis finds a mystery woman with armed invaders in his home and it all goes sideways, he turns to his brothers in arms to fight back. On the run from the shadowy Company, soon he finds himself in a war for possession of a genetic engineering puzzle that threatens the stability of the world. But who is behind it all – and are they even human?

With power out, it was, after all, a reading day, though I did take a short nap during the afternoon after getting up so early. I finished the second book some time around 7 P.M.

I’m going to continue with this series for a while.

It’s been really really dry here for several weeks.  While we’ve had a little bit of rain on a couple of days in the last months or so, much of the state of Arkansas counties have banned outdoor burning of any kind to minimize the potential for wildfires.

The weather forecasters had been predicting rain for this weekend and, as the weekend approached, were warning that there was some possibility for severe weather accompanying a strong cold front that was to come through the area.

Saturday night and early Sunday morning, radar showed that there was a sharp demarcation along the front. With the mild weather we had left windows at the front of the house, protected from rain by the porch, open.

Around 2:30 A.M., I woke, for some reason, just as – or after – power was lost to our area of the county.  We live on a state highway between two towns with a main power line running along the highway, servicing the home along the highway and down branch roads.  Often, if we lose power, it is out for everyone along that stretch of road.

We’re set up where we can run power from our motorhome’s generator to power part of the loads in our house.  Unfortunately, the motorhome was parked too far away for the 30 amp power cable to be connected between the house and the motorhome – and the motorhome engine battery was dead!

So I improvised with extension cords until I could get the engine battery charged so I could move the motorhome.

Power was restored at about 6:20 P.M. 

It could have been worse.  For a time, power restoration was predicted for 12 P.M. – tomorrow!

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone use the interjection, meh.

Used as an expression of boredom or indifference, meh is supposedly the verbal equivalent of shrugging on one’s shoulders.

Meh was apparently popularized after its use in the animated TV series The Simpsons. I can quite happily say that I have never watched a single episode of that show, now in its 29th. No particular reason for it – we’ve both caught glimpses of it here and there as we’ve changed channels or it’s been mentioned in some other show – but neither of us have had any particular reason to watch – meh…….

A humorous definition is found on T-shirts available from Amazon: “Meh – the universal, non-committal answer to every question ever posed. It’s the answer that doesn’t actually give any answer.”

Merriam-Webster definition of meh: used to express indifference or mild disappointment.

Others:

1. Urban Dictionary
2. Wikipedia
3. Dictionary.com
4. Oxford Living Dictionaries
5. Macmillan Dictionary BuzzWord
6. Collins English Dictionary
7. Cambridge Dictionary

21^st Century Digital #31

Cities of the Dead Cemetery tombs, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2007.

The above-ground tombs in New Orleans cemeteries are often referred to as “cities of the dead.” Enter the cemetery gates, and you will be greeted by rusty decorative ironwork and blinded by sun-bleached tombs. Crosses and statues jutting from tomb surfaces cast contrasting shadows, adding to the sense of mystery. Votive candles line tombs on holidays, reminding you that the dead have living relatives who still care.

New Orleans has always respected its dead, but this isn’t the reason that our departed loved ones are interred above ground. Early settlers in the area struggled with different methods to bury the dead. Burial plots are shallow in New Orleans because the water table is very high. Dig a few feet down, and the grave becomes soggy, filling with water. The casket will literally float. You just can’t keep a good person down! The early settlers tried placing stones in and on top of coffins to weigh them down and keep them underground. Unfortunately, after a rainstorm, the rising water table would literally pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. To this day, unpredictable flooding still lifts the occasional coffin out of the ground in areas above the water table, generally considered safe from flooding. (Experience New Orleans)

Photograph retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2010630059/. (Accessed March 06, 2017.)

Photograph: Carol M. Highsmith

Credit line: Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Medium: 1 photograph : digital, TIFF file, color.

Highsmith, a distinguished and richly published American photographer, has donated her work to the Library of Congress since 1992. Starting in 2002, Highsmith provided scans or photographs she shot digitally with new donations to allow rapid online access throughout the world. Her generosity in dedicating the rights to the American people for copyright free access also makes this Archive a very special visual resource.

Note – This image has been digitally adjusted for one or more of the following:
– fade correction,
– color, contrast, and/or saturation enhancement
– selected spot and/or scratch removal
– cropped for composition and/or to accentuate subject matter
– straighten image