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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • According to the lawsuit, the father’s uncle Kevin Montgomery contacted the agency to tell them Harmony had a “vibrant” black eye after she was “punched clear in the eye socket with full force” and that Adam had told him he’d “bounced her off” every wall in the house.

    What the actual fuck.

    The couple later discovered the girl was dead after the car broke down, Kayla Montgomery testified. She said her husband put the body in a duffel bag. She described various places where the girl’s body was hidden, including the trunk of a car, a cooler, a homeless center ceiling vent and the walk-in freezer at her husband’s workplace.

    So this guy was toting a child-corpse around and hiding her in places where others simply didn’t notice? I wanted more info on the step-mother. Is she in prison for complicity in the scheme? I gotta think so.

    Followed a link in the article to her testimony:

    Kayla Montgomery said Harmony was potty trained, but had begun having frequent accidents. She testified that her husband punched Harmony in the head after two such accidents in the car.

    He later covered Harmony with a blanket as the child cried, moaned and eventually went silent, the stepmother said. Their car broke down soon afterward and Adam Montgomery put Harmony’s body in the duffel bag, she said.

    […]

    “Right,” said Montgomery, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to perjury for lying during grand jury testimony about where she was when Harmony was last seen.

    […]

    The duffel bag made it from the trunk of a friend’s car to a hallway cooler near an apartment where Kayla Montgomery’s mother lived, and then to a ceiling vent in a shelter where the family stayed for about six weeks.

    I find it difficult to believe that a corpse spent six weeks in a ceiling without detection, but there’s no reason to believe that she’s lying about this child dying from abuse. If anything, I think the step-mother may share more guilt in hiding the body. But I guess prosecutors weighed his conviction as the most important aspect of the case.

    We live in such a fucked up society.





  • And have multiple copies in at least two locations of anything truly important to guard against disaster (such as a fire or regionally appropriate natural disaster). I got a spare drive to copy all the music that I’ve made and sent it to my father in a different part of the country. I could lose everything and be pretty bummed, but not that (without severe depression). I also endorse use of a safe deposit box at a bank if you don’t have someone who can hold data in a different city.







  • Roughly one third. I believe it’s Wyoming that gets an equal number of Senate seats as California while having one twentieth the population (I could be wrong about which state, but the statistic is the important part). My state gets the same number of representatives in that house of government with twenty times as many people. Meaning that my vote is diluted twenty times or theirs is amplified twenty times.

    It’s a shit show.





  • Indiana law requires any assets seized in a civil forfeiture case to go directly to the school fund — likely to mitigate the moral hazard and incentive to steal citizens’ assets — but little money is actually going to that fund. Instead, police departments are keeping it for themselves, and a 2019 Indiana Supreme Court case upheld that, allowing police, prosecutors or private lawyers contracted to carry out the cases to keep a minimum of 90%.

    Naked corruption.

    Something similar happened to me. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) seized money from a bank transfer paying rent to my landlord (years ago). It took five days of calls to the bank to find out why the transfer didn’t go through. I got a case number and filled out paperwork disputing it (with OFAC) and the letter I received in response said they had no record of the case.

    The best I could hypothesize what happened was that because my landlord had a Middle Eastern-sounding name, maybe this was suspected to relate to terrorism. I gave up. I knew it wasn’t worth my time to pursue because to get justice, I’d have to invest more time and energy than the cash was worth. I nearly got evicted because of this shit and I still judged the bureaucracy too great to address (I think I made the right choice; no sense fighting the government unless my freedom is on the line or it’s some huge sum of money).

    I got money orders at the post office and deposited them directly into my landlord’s bank account after that. Huge pain in the ass to make sure my money went where I wanted. I live in a building owned by a corporation, now. I don’t think I’d rent from a private citizen again because of that bullshit. (It’s not like I’ll ever own a home, given that I like living in the Bay Area.)




  • I’ve had two kitties that got one or two pounds overweight and both were long-hairs. I always figured that cats that are built for colder weather have an instinct to eat and bulk up in case of food scarcity. My short-hair kitty has stayed slender which, to me, seems to back that up. But I don’t know anything scientific or medical, it’s just an observation.