Sunday, May 11, 2008

Deaths in ICE Prisons

Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein have posted the first piece of their 4-part series "Careless Detention" about medical neglect and abuse in immigrant prisons. Here's a map showing the locations of 83 deaths which the investigation uncovered:

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List of Questionable Deaths in Detention

Name
Location of Death
Date of Death Age Country of Birth
Luis Dubegel-Paez
Rolling Plains Detention Facility (Tex.)
3/14/08 60 Cuba
Francisco Castaneda
Home after release from Otay Mesa (Calif.)
2/16/08 36 El Salvador
Juan Alejandro Guevara-Lazaro
Thomason Hospital (Tex.)
8/13/07 21 Mexico
Rosa Contreras-Dominquez
El Paso Service Processing Center (Tex.)
8/7/07 35 Mexico
Victor Arellano
Little Company of Mary San Pedro Hospital (Calif.)
7/20/07 23 Mexico
Boubacar Bah
University of Medicine (N.J.)
5/30/07 52 Guinea
Nery Romero
Bergen County Jail (N.J.)
2/12/07 22 El Salvador
Jesus Cervantes-Corona
Northwest Detention Center (Wash.)
11/18/06 42 Mexico
Antonio Martinez-Rivas
Houston Contract Detention Facility (Tex.)
10/4/06 44 Mexico
Carlos Cortez-Raudel
Mira Loma Detention Center (Calif.)
10/3/06 22 Mexico
Jose Lopez-Gregorio
Eloy Federal Contract Facility (Ariz.)
9/29/06 32 Guatemala
Yusif Osman
Otay Mesa detention facility (Calif.)
6/27/06 34 Ghana
Miguel Rodriguez-Gonzalez
San Pedro Peninsula Hospital (Calif.)
5/21/06 43 Mexico
Geovanny Garcia-Mejia
Newton County Correctional Center (Tex.)
3/18/06 27 Honduras
Felipe Garcia-Sanchez
Oakdale Federal Detention Center (La.)
2/10/06 21 Colombia
Juan Salazar-Gomez
Eloy Federal Contract Facility (Ariz.)
12/14/05 29 Mexico
Reinaldo Prado-Arencilia
Northeast Medical Center (Tex.)
10/3/05 37 Cuba
Walter Alvarez-Esquivel
Laredo Medical Center (Tex.)
6/30/05 46 Guatemala
Hassiba Belbachir
McHenry County Jail (Ill.)
3/17/05 27 Algeria
Sung Soo Heo
Passaic County Jail (N.J.)
2/16/05 51 Korea
Ignacio Sarabia-Vallasenor
Otay Mesa detention facility (Calif.)
1/4/05 32 Mexico
Joseph Dantica
Jackson Memorial Hospital (Fla.)
11/3/04 81 Haiti
Simon Reyes-Altimirano
Mesa Hills Specialty Hospital (Tex.)
10/12/04 25 Hondurus
Ervin Ruiz-Tabares
Guaynabo Metropolitan Detention Center (P.R.)
9/25/04 24 Colombia
Sebastian Mejia Vicentes
Hampton Roads Regional Jail (Va.)
8/22/04 27 Mexico
Juan Figueredo-Lopez
U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (Mo.)
5/29/04 45 Cuba
Cesar Rioz-Martinez
Frio County Jail (Tex.)
2/16/04 25 Mexico
Adetunji Popoola
Parkland Memorial Hospital (Tex.)
2/1/04 48 Nigeria
Bill Roy Kurt Marion
San Diego Correctional Facility (Calif.)
7/31/03 ? Unknown
Kwan A. Chong
San Pedro/UCLA-Harbor Hospital (Calif.)
6/10/03 ? Unknown

Friday, May 09, 2008

Friday Music — Emmanuel Jal, "War Child"

He grew up as a child soldier in the killing fields of the Sudanese civil war. Now he's telling his story through music and film.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Losing a Game, Winning at Life

This is a story about why I love sports. It's a story about the simple nobility and unaffected selflessness of genuine sportsmanship. I've been thinking about this incident from a variety of different angles, discussing it with friends and fellow sports fans, ever since I first heard about it from the amazing Joan Kelly. Here's the coverage from ESPN:

None of us can know what we would do in the same situation; but we do know that what Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace chose to do was heroic in a manner that few sports achievements can touch. Their spontaneous act of profound decency elevated the atmosphere in their own small corner of the world and propelled their names into a rarefied circle of athletes whose will to win is surpassed only by their humanity.

Photo — Blossoming

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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

New Rule: No More Boxing Metaphors

No_boxing_analogies_4No doubt, boxing metaphors are thoroughly and irreversibly embedded in American pop lingo: "down for the count", "on the ropes", "hitting below the belt", "throw in the towel", "saved by the bell", and so on. Despite my general hostility toward cliches, I've basically come to terms with such parlance because it's a convenient way to make simple points about adversarial situations, and hey at least we're indirectly talking about my favorite sport. However, I must say that I've officially had it with grinning bobblehead pundits attempting to use mangled boxing metaphors to project their vacuous truth-draining narratives onto the latest oozefest in the cesspool of Beltway politics.

My fellow citizens of the world, to see and hear the proud, noble, and sweet science of fisticuffsmanship defiled by a stiff-hairsprayed parade of morons marinating in the slime of DC-speak, who wouldn't know a left feint from a right cross, is too much to bear.

The straw that broke the heavy bag chain came in today's New York Times political blog, The Caucus. I'm taking my time getting to it because I want to be sure to properly prepare you for what you're about to witness. Warning: The butchery of thought and language contained in the analogy that I'm about to post on this page could be potentially traumatizing. But we've come too far to turn back now, so let's just get this over with:

Like a boxer roaming the ring in search of one final roundhouse round, Barack Obama alighted again and again in Indiana in the past few days in hopes of pulling off a surprise in this Midwestern state.

Deep breath. Grease the eyebrows and cheekbones. Water. Look alive.

Now I've been a boxing fan for as long as I can remember and have been involved in martial arts and fight training since I was 12; and I've heard a lot of stupid things said about fighting. But this lede has got to be among the stupidest of them all. First of all, a boxer does not "roam the ring"; a boxer fights an opponent. Fighting means hitting while not getting hit. There's no "roaming" in boxing; there's footwork which is executed against an opponent according to the principles of fighting; there's no downtime for directionless whimsy. Second, what the hell is a "roundhouse round"? Much less "one final roundhouse round"? Does this allude to a roundhouse punch (i.e. a looping rear-hand shot) which results in a knockout or stoppage? Or is it perhaps an attempt to refer to a final round of boxing in which many roundhouse punches are thrown? If so, why is this desirable, seeing that straights, tight hooks, and inside uppercuts are always preferable to looping shots? Third, and most importantly, what does any of this have to do with the utterly predictable banality of a presidential candidate making a flurry of regional campaign stops in the last days before an election?

Since I suspect that these questions are more or less unanswerable, I hereby declare my New Rule for political pundits far and wide, large or small, mainstream or intelligent. If you don't know the difference between a check hook and a liver shot; if you can't distinguish clubbing, slapping, and looping punches; then please do yourself and all of us a literary, political, and philosophical favor: No More Boxing Metaphors. Add this to Lauren's new rule, and you might just give yourself a shot at accidentally making sense in your electoral pontifications.

APA Heritage Month — "Asians Rock"

[ Via Racialicious ]

Monday, May 05, 2008

Monday Music — Mariachi Divas, "El Resbalon"

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Photos — May 1 March from Union Square to City Hall

March_onto_broadway

March_down_broadway

March

Court_house

Filipino_chain_courthouse

Courthouse

Friday, May 02, 2008

Photos — May 1 Rally in Union Square

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Union_sq_stage

Chinese_workers_banner

Musicians

Restaurant_workers_union_chinese

Indigenous_music

Unidos

Crowd

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

May Day

From NY May 1 Coalition:

May_1_march_2

12 pm: Gather at Union Square, 14th Street & Broadway

4 pm: Rally & March

Growing List of May Day Actions in NYC and Beyond
Resolutions in Solidarity

May Day 2008 is critically important. Will the optimism and hope expressed around the Presidential elections translate into an end of immigrant raids and deportations? Will it bring an end to the foreclosures of homes, the lowering of gas and food prices, or an end to lay-offs?

Whatever the outcome in November, the May 1st Coalition for Immigrant and Workers Rights will be marching once again on May Day, International Workers Day to say no to all the attacks against workers here and around the world.

We call on the progressive community, the anti-war movement, the women's & LGBT movement, and especially the labor movement, to come out for May Day 2008. March for solidarity, because an injury to one is an injury to all!

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Photo — Asians Against White Supremacy

Asiansagainstwhitesupremacy_3

[ University of Washington student Christine Tran; photo by Nick Feldman; via Angry Asian Man ]

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Weekend Music — The Shirelles

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Photos — Spring Afternoon

It's a glorious day in southwestern Connecticut, so I snapped these pics of sunlight, grass and flowers, towering trees, stone walls and steps, and of course, a rickety old basketball rim...

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Wednesday Music — Tina Turner

[ Live versions of "I don't really want to fight no more" and "Simply the Best" ]

Monday, April 21, 2008

Father Michael Pfleger Takes Fox News To School

[ via Resist Racism ]

My Photo

Reflection

  • Through holding together, restraint is certain to come about. The yielding obtains the decisive place, and those above and those below correspond with it. Strong and gentle; the strong is central and its will is done. This is called the Taming Power of the Small.
    — The I Ching, hexagram 9: Hsiao Chu / The Taming Power of the Small

Highlights

  • Brokedown Dreamhouses of a New York Suburb (Sept-2007)
    Rene Javier Perez took leave of his wife Miliana Morales and their 2-month-old daughter Gladys in the Guatemalan town of Chiquimula. Unfortunately, the years did not unfold as planned. Sometimes you just can't summon the strength to fight for yourself anymore; sometimes you stop believing that things will get any better; worst of all, sometimes it's true.
  • Immigrant Dreams and Nightmares in the White Supremacist Cauldron (May-2007)
    The tired, the poor, the huddled masses of dream-hungry immigrants coming across the Pacific — like those coming across the deserts and rivers along the Southern US border — have never been greeted by a Mother of Exiles.
  • President McKinney (Oct-2007)
    The whole notion of "electability" is a profoundly misguided and anti-democratic concept. There's a reason elementary schoolteachers ask children to put their heads down on their desks before voting by show of hands: they're learning to make independent decisions. Asking which candidate is more "electable" pre-emptively marginalizes one's own value as a unique perceiver and one's agency as a democratic participant.
  • Protesting a War of Cowards and Madmen (Oct-2002)
    As much as the invasion of Iraq is a coward's war, it's also a madman's war, and there's a dangerous intersection between cowardice and madness where many acts of horror originate.
  • The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness" (Nov-2006)
    It's axiomatic that good writing tends to avoid clichés, because clear thinking is a fresh response to living reality, not a tired repurposing of brittle brain-crust. A logical inverse to this axiom is that political commentary tends to brim with toxic portions of vapid clichés, because good writing is about as widespread in today's political discourse as it is in corporate accounting memos.
  • The White Liberal Conundrum (Oct-2007)
    Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words.

One World

Xu Beihong

  • Xu Beihong photo
    Xu Beihong's work visually manifests a meaningful and mutually-beneficial cultural encounter between China and the West.

Pictures of the Mind

August in Connecticut

  • Butterfly
    Midsummer, the woods of Southwestern Connecticut buzz with bright pastoral magic. This gallery attempts to capture a quick arbitrary sliver of that brightness. Most of these pictures were taken in my immediate neighorhood; some were shot at Wampus Pond; some at the Audubon Fairchild Wildflower Garden.

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Ink Not Pixels

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