from russia with...nada

Wow. I've noted for some time that Russia was second to the US in hits to my blog. Now they've ceased altogether, incredible. This happened with China back around 2007. Things must be getting bad for free speech there! In Russia, you don't surf the Internets, only secret police do, all day, all night!

 Postscript  03.19.2013: Russia is back, but with far lower traffic than normal.

Will there be an e-book? (And errata)

Yes, there will indeed be an e-book, and it's coming soon, perhaps within the month. There have been issues with formatting, and I want any e-book edition to be of a good quality like the hard copy version. It will also be available from Amazon. Let the Dead Bury the Dead isn't an easy book to format, and this is my Luddite bias rearing its head here, but it has far more impact as a pretty effective physical copy book, if I do say so myself, and I do. The fact is, I want this book to reach motherfuckers from here to Irkutsk, no bullshit, far and wide. I consider that the book is a return of historical writing as literature. 

People want to read something that's alive, not leaden and overly formal--too academic. I could have footnoted, yes, but why is that necessary in a historical account? That question hit me early-on in the process, and while I do direct the reader to where sometimes secondary information is from, a lot of the book is primary information being published for the first time, or at least outside of my blog. I didn't wait long after Jeane's death to begin sharing that information with the public, most of it emails between us, others, and any number of permutations of correspondents. There are also excerpts from public documents, Palfrey's trial transcripts, affidavits, from her case and those of others, online exchanges, and shots from slavering right-wing trolls out of the shadows of electronic aether, a lot of communications mediums, too many. No matter how you cut it, I prefer traditional books. They never crash, only burn, at four hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit.

A great deal of effort was expended trying to preserve the original layouts of emails and public documents during formatting, and while you can only do so much, most of them look essentially as they did. Some of this will inevitably be lost in formatting for various e-book platforms, but anything PDF will be unchanged. With the Kindle, I'm almost certain that it should turn out well, however, some of the impact of the original will be lost. Regardless of that, I believe the book will stand on its own legs.

To my friends on the east coast

I hope everyone's alright., safe, well. My guess is that Google is difficult to reach today for obvious reasons: people are freaking out and overwhelming the services. The same seems to be occurring on Twitter. My advice to people is not to post anything on sites like Twitter unless you have something reasonable and logical relating to the storm, that you're OK, details, etc.

Yes, I know that's asking far too much from the baboons from the Internet.

CreateSpace™ site is temporarily down

At this writing (10:35 PM, EST), CreateSpace's™ ("an Amazon™company") home site is down. All attempts to reach the site url get a blank white page with the text, "Nothing to see here, move along," in the top left hand corner below the toolbar.Amazon has been party to the financial blockade on Wikileak™. Is this a hack by Anonymous™? This had to have occurred no more than four hours ago.Or: Am I being hacked? Very curious...

12:11 A.M.: Site redesign, it's back up again.

Google: WTF?

I noticed recently that Blogger (a Google company) has removed literally all images from this blog. What's incredible is that many of the are my own photos, so this was done indiscriminately. Will I be taken offline? It wouldn't surprise me the way things have been going regarding online speech. I'm going to contact Blogger and give them an ear or an eyeful. What a crock of shit! What assholes! First it was the Jaenelle Antas images, now all images. Non sequitur. Is this some byproduct of the "intellectual property" insanity going on in Congress now? Perhaps.

DC Madam book update

Things are wrapping up: Work is about to commence on a cover design as well as a stand alone website or the book, separate from this blog. At this point, the book is clocking in at 504 pages+ an  index and a table of contents. The length is based primarily on the fact that it's packed with primary information related to and from the case from correspondence, the public record, court documents, and more, much more. This is a view into the case that--other than in Montgomery Blair Sibley's Why Just Her--no one has ever seen. I was in a privileged position to experience, view and analyze information that few outside of the defense have ever seen let alone heard of.

The primary data isn't so much as explosive as my own own take, my analysis of it. While these are my opinions, they're the opinions of someone intimately involved in the case, therefore, this is a historical accounting as well as opinion and analysis. There will never be a book quite like it, rest assured, and it might just stand as a clear-eyed testament to this troubled era in ways that many of the observers of the case at the time never quite grasped, hindsight being everything of course. You would never want to experience what I and others did. While he's been quite reviled in relation to the case, I can only imagine the hell that counselor Sibley experienced. I was fortunate not to get too close and still got my wings singed.

 
The prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was a nightmare case if there ever was one. It was without any legal precedent in American jurisprudence. No one can recall anything like it ever happening, and I doubt there will ever be one quite like it ever again, power nailed that lid shut as thoroughly as possible. Incredible forces were marshaled to shut her down, to prevent more exposure of influence peddling related to defense/intelligence contracting by members of Congress, the executive branch, and yes, even the judiciary who enabled them. As this book should make clear, we're in a lot of trouble as a nation with no hope of actual reform. I believe we're headed in the same direction as the Soviet Union. Perhaps after that there can be a real chance at rebuilding American democracy. That's at least my hope. As it stands, under the current order, there can be no reform and we will continue to push towards the brink of what could be major catastrophe.

Ironically, only government can fix these things. This wasn't just a story about a sex scandal, it was about institutionalized corruption by officeholders who are in fact criminals. The media lied, and lied, and lied, and fulfilled their usual role of protecting power from public scrutiny. Small wonder no one wants to pay to be lied to anymore. More than a few institutions will be put under scrutiny in this account. The picture's not a pretty one and the myth of democracy is revealed as just that. It's one thing to assume, it's another to have your worst fears and cynicism confirmed. Expect a spring release.

Postscript: All of the important DC Madam entries from this blog have been extracted and archived. There have been some alarming clusters of activity around the blog and I'd neglected to create copies of some of them. This is no longer the case, and I suspect that some of them faced potential removal in the current political climate. Future editions of the upcoming text could possibly include a DVD-r containing them as well as other primary materials not included in the text from the case.