Month: December 2000

Peggy McMartin Buckey, 74, was found unconcious at her California home and prounced dead on December 15, 2000. McMartin should have lived the last years of her life peacefully but instead was one of the victims in a witch hunt that claimed too many lives.

Buckey helped her family operate the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, California. In 1983 children who had attended the McMartin Pre-School began telling fantastic tales of ritual sexual abuse directed at them, much of which allegedly took place in secret tunnels beneath the pre-school. Ultimately 349 of 384 students at the pre-school told investigators that they had been sexually assaulted at the pre-school. The fact that there simply no secret tunnels and that the claims of the children proved false in many details did not deter prosecutors from charging McMartin Buckey and others with sexually assaulting children

The case helped kick off a nationwide hysteria about Satanic and ritual abuse of children, helped on by a gullible media. McMartin Bukey was charged with sexual assault, but the case against her fell apart after it became clear that the testimony of the children had been improperly shaped and coerced by social workers who acted as latter day agents of the Inquisition. McMartin Buckey was acquitted on all charges, but was shadowed by the destruction of the business she helped run and the stigma attached to those even accused of sexual abuse of children.

Investigator’s relied on the highly specious belief that children always told the truth about such acts and could not be coerced to give false testimony or fail to remember accurately. In a series of experiments, memory expert Elizabeth Loftus demonstreated that it was relatively easy to get young children to falsely believe in events that had never happened.

Unfortunately there are still many people in jail based on testimony gleaned under such coercion or based on psychologists who used false memory techniques on their clients. The hysteria is largely over, but the effects still remain.

Source:

McMartin Case’s Legal, Social Legacies Linger. Ted Rohrlich, The Los Angeles times, December 18, 2000.

Adelaide Abankwah’s request for asylum in the United States made headlines and earned support from politicians such as Hillary Clinton and actors such as Julia Roberts and Vannessa Redgrave. Abankwah claimed she had been chosen “queen mother” of her tribe in Ghana and would be subjected to female genital mutilation if forced to return to that nation. She eventually won her asylum case, but now it turns out her entire story was false.

The woman’s real name is Regina Norman Danson, and she made up the story after being caught trying to enter the United States illegally in 1997. Somehow the real Adelaide Abankwah’s passport ended up in Danson’s hands, and Danson decided to assume the woman’s identity in an effort to stay in the United States. The real Abankwah says she didn’t come forward to dispute Danson because she was fearful of being deported due to unrelated immigration problems.

The Washington Post reported that prosecution of Danson was hindered by bureaucrats who didn’t want to embarrass the Clinton administration officials who had championed her asylum claim.

Source:

Hillary’s asylum queen was a fake. The Times (UK), December 21, 2000.

The BBC reports that remarkably well preserved fossils of tiny winged dinosaurs may be the missing link to resolve the debate over the origin of birds. But the real question is: will anybody believe the fossils are genuine?

As recently as 1999 gullible paleontologists put up $80,000 for an alleged winged dinosaur fossil from China that was featured on the cover on National Geographic. The only real problem was that the fossil was a fake.

Now the BBC ominously reports that,

We drove between parched brown fields and passed low mud-brick farms. An icy wind blew from Siberia to the north. The farmers buttoned up their coats against the chill as they gathered every last scrap of vegetation in the hope that they could keep their donkeys alive through another winter. Two years of drought have also meant these are impoverished people.

But as we came to the little village of Sihetun, there was a subtle difference. There were a few modern villa-style homes and some of the young men were riding new Japanese motorbikes. Clearly, there was an additional source of income here.

With the additional source of income coming from selling the many fossils being removed from nearby hills. We’ll see if these new “missing link” fossils stand up to scrutiny over the long term (and personally the whole story has a “too good to be true” feel to it).

Art historian and radical feminist Tricia Cusack is concerned about the patriarchal bent that Christmas is taking. Specifically, there are just too many snowmen appearing on Christmas cards these days, according to Cusack, who is a professor at Great Britain’s Birmingham University.

In a press release put out by Birmingham University, Cusack writes,

In both the UK and US, Christmas has been gendered as women’s realm in its emphasis on children and family…

The snowman’s location in the semi-public space of garden or field reinforces a spatial-social system marking women’s spheres as the domestic-private and the men’s as the commercial public.

In other words, the prevalence of snowmen is evidence that Western culture is regressing into a far more conservative, patriarchal form more akin to the Medieval period.

Who knows how much worse the diagnosis will be should she turn her brilliant mind to the hidden meaning behind Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Source:

Snowmen ‘reinforce gender stereotypes’, says doctor. Ananova, December 20, 2000.