2008 Roundup

J-7--It's been one hell of a year, hasn't it? From my work for the Palfrey defense, to my paralegal classes, to the inevitable collapse of world capitalism, to incredible revelations of Bush II administration wrong-doing and the resultant inaction from Congress and the Judicial branch, there's every reason to feel hopeful. What kind of a year did you have? Not one like mine, I can state with complete certainty.

I even had the well known Libertarian "Reason magazine" quoting me next to Val Kilmer, and conspiracy-theorist Alex Constantine has threatened to sue me for having negative opinions about him. This isn't even counting the hacking of my email account (I have my suspicions here), the phony "cease and desist" emails regarding the Palfrey information on my site about two noteworthy former clients, or the other harassing ones that came my way.

Wha? Hopeful?

Yes, there's every reason to feel hopeful about reasonable change. That doesn't mean we just sit back and let it happen, because then, it won't. Demand, demand, and demand again what you need to survive. Band together, make friends with people you might never have, and organize and act for change.

I've written on quite-a-few subjects this year, from attempts to desecrate the memory of Edgar Allan Poe, to issues of the geopolitical and of illegal surveillance. What's been most alarming is the inaction of Congress and the courts against Bush II crimes, but I have a newer take on this: they only did it to save a dying system, it was never really about protecting Bush and Cheney, and it's not working. With every revelation...nothing, no action to hold anyone truly accountable. That's desperation, kids.

American Empire is ending and history cannot be fought or denied when the currents are as strong as they are against established power in North America. It's over, now it just has to play-out, and all the king's horses and all the king's men aren't going to fix it. As a matter of fact, the more they keep doing what they always have to preserve their power, the faster they're going to lose it. Empires fall and things are moving faster than they have in decades, and can be counted on to move faster than in the past thanks to widespread access to telecommunications technology.

This decline is affecting everyone. There's nowhere to run for the jaded and the apathetic anymore. Yes, things will become ugly at times, but if you have it in-mind to help others, we can avoid a catastrophe as we have in the past. Use your head and have a safe and happy 2009. Understand that this won't always be the case, have realistic expectations, and stay honest if you can. And remember that the children are counting on us not to blow it, we owe them a better world where people look out for each other. Helping others is the most important thing.

On Jeane Palfrey: Watching a woman die from a distance after being driven to it by federal prosecutors was horrible, but I did help her as much as I could and she told me that she appreciated it, she even told went as far as to ask me if anyone had ever told me I was smart. God knows that I wish she had survived her ordeal and that her suicide will haunt me until the day I die. One can only hope it does that and much more to her tormentors. I intend to keep digging into these matters regarding everything that happened to Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and will continue to publish primary materials on this site since it's still my right as an American to do so. The vast majority of my contact with the deceased "DC Madam" was off-the-books, it wasn't under attorney-client privilege, and the public has a right to know what happened. Eventually, everything I have will be online in one form or another.

There must be accountability in this matter, and eventually, there will be. If that means people like Federal District Judge James Robertson looks like the goon and lackey that I suspect he is in the history books after his death, then so be it. The same goes for Jeffrey A. Taylor, a most unusual U.S. Attorney for the fact that he's an interim appointment that was never approved of by the Senate, as the Bush II administration sneaked him in when they were on recess in 2006...during the U.S. Attorney firing scandal. He prosecuted Palfrey. At the very least, future generations of Americans are going to view her trial as the abomination it was, a fraud that was a matter of selective prosecution in a time when there were more than would be statistically normal. Had Palfrey lived, we might know more about what happened, although she wasn't the last word as some are painting it to my mind.

At this writing, the Palfrey Estate is working against disclosure, and it's understandable. They want things to rest and for their loved one to rest in peace. They've had enough of the circus, the press, the media, and the lawyers. So have I. They're tired of others (starting with Bill Bastone, an individual they should take to court for defaming their loved one) dragging the name of their loved one and their family through-the-mud. I concur. But that doesn't mean every revelation is going to make Jeane look bad--that's not even the point. From what I know, she's beginning to look more and more heroic, or at least edging beyond being an "antihero," which in this society isn't a bad thing to be either. She was that and a whole lot more, and she was very complicated, just like the rest of life itself.

I enjoin the Palfrey Estate to move towards transparency in the matter and to realize that the government isn't going to give them what's theirs (Palfrey's remaining assets) without a major fight. Having counsel that does contract work for the government in other capacities isn't going to help them towards this reasonable goal which their loved on died for in-part. My opinion.

Astonishingly, Palfrey's will wasn't discovered until September 2008--what took so long? Why is Orrick going around and threatening various players in the Palfrey saga with lawsuits and invoking attorney-client privilege? One could imagine it has a lot to do with brokering a deal with the government, and one still hasn't been completed in the arena of asset seizure and forfeiture The abatement issue created by Palfrey when she killed herself before sentencing created problems for the State, and a semi-secret Trust created by Palfrey is causing problems for the Estate itself. She knew what she was doing. I have to wonder if her family does, but I wish them well and empathize with their suffering. There are so many unanswered questions in the Palfrey scandal, but I don't think Jeane's death closes-the-door entirely: there were many things she simply didn't know about her predicament, things that should have been included in discovery (sharing of information, what they have on you) from the prosecution. Eventually, some of these documents are going to surface, and we'll have at least a little clearer picture. I do not believe that she was innocent, I believe that she was denied due process.

The House Judiciary committee contacted Palfrey in the spring of 2008 through a "Ms. Oo," then didn't appear for a face-to-face meeting or respond to further calls and emails. Oo wouldn't do. Why? Who or what put-the-skids to their inquiry into the effect that forfeiture had on her rights to due process? They--and others--might tell me and the public, but I'm not holding my breath on that one, it's going to take years, and it's going to take persistent demands. It was quite a year, 2008. I don't expect any miracles from President-elect Barack Obama, but it's on him and Congress to initiate lengthy and serious probes into every crime committed by the Bush II administration, to rollback the precedents, and to allow justice to be served in the matter rather than in the obstruction of it. Palfrey is a part of all of this. There's reason to be hopeful, but not without demands.


Postscript, 12.29.2008: Add to the list that Larisa Alexandrovna gave me a good review on a satire about her marrying Yakov Smirnoff, which surprised the bejeezus out of me.

Dalai Lama states that "sex leads to trouble"

"I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion within it." --Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, P. 119, 1930.


WWW--The Dalai Lama's right, you know. There's a gal who I see when I go out who's interested in me, and I think she's all that, cute, etc. . But I don't want any part of it. This isn't to say that I don't believe there are those magical folks among us who can handle love and intimacy, but they're a tiny minority of humanity who don't let it get to them and who can control themselves. It's also not because I don't want to see humanity perpetuate--it's that I know there are too many of us, and we're not all that.

The Lama stated some of the unholy truth this week:

Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication. ...[There] are too [many] ups and downs. ...Naturally as a human being ... some kind of desire for sex comes, but then you use human intelligence to make [the] comprehension that those couples [are] always full of trouble. And in some cases there is suicide [and] murder cases. (AFP, 11.28.2008)

What? The Buddhists are cynics? Uh, yeah, that's a big part of Buddhism, a renunciation of this world. Most Buddhists view the world as being a place of futility, a trap for the soul, something very transitory, and brimming with evil. Correct, and it's how I view the world. Are all relationships futile? No, I don't believe this. But it's close, very close to being that way given the predictability of people's behavior in a relationship.

Freud was right once again. Sex binds us, even when it shouldn't. There would be no point whatsoever to any of this without some carrots (go wild with the symbolism of that, I know you will). The most horrible truth is that when one partner loves another more than the other, they're the inevitable victim in the equation. Almost no one is capable of coping with the responsibility of someone who loves you more than you love them. Being a restless species, we try perversely to make things worse. Not content to leave intimacy despoiled, we inject crass materialism into-the-mix, then blame each other when we fail to meet our mutual expectations.

The worst aspects of humanity have been nurtured under the capitalist order we've all inhabited in our lives, not that it's the only system or order to ruin love and sex. Women in West are especially guilty of promoting this convenient commercialism, wrapped-up as it were in "gifts" that are a mandatory prerequisite for things to be "romantic." Even worse is the female-fixation on the blustering mate who shows constant certainty that they have "things under control," the "Mr. Fix-it" syndrome, when they most definitely have nothing under control.

"Lie to me," she said, "Tell me what I want to hear, not the truth, not ever."

"If you insist," he said. You could just as easily rearrange the genders here, it doesn't matter. We just want to get laid. Men, women, regardless of sexual orientation or how raging our libidos might be. At some point, the flesh needs servicing, empty notions of "romance" aside. Lies are crucial in a culture where the lines between instinct and the repressive conditioning of civilization have blurred.

Self-interest and false sentimentality have been used to keep us buying garbage we never wanted or needed, distracting us away from what's important--each other. We bought it, literally. The Lama goes further than I ever would, Buddhism not being an entirely "humanist" religion and philosophy. He says that we shouldn't get too attached to anyone--not even our loved ones or our children.

This is where I would draw-the-line, and I believe we all need focus on empathy towards others.

There are many sects of Buddhism, so you can tell that they don't agree on such issues either. Yet, he's right about sex. That spells trouble and the over-complication of our lives, it means unnecessary drama and irrational compromise. Men and women are going to have to live separately for a long time before we're all ready for sustainable cohabitation...if that's even possible or desirable.

Hats go off to the lucky few who've already achieved it.

The basic difference between the East and the West is geographical location. The cultural sources are the same. Men and women--and individuals-in-general--are much farther apart than mere cultures in the modern world.

Freud was also right that we're always going to be in conflict with our animal side. Sometimes, a cigar really is just a cigar (why do some feminists use Freudian imagery so much?)...and you can keep it anyway. "Let's do it" might be about the most intellectually and morally honest greeting, but honesty is the last thing anyone cares about. It's enough to turn anyone off. Trouble? Brother, you don't know the meaning of "trouble."

My favorite photo, and the turning of the wheel...

This is a photograph of my mother and grandfather. He'd just returned from WWII, from the European theater, having served under that nut General George "Blood and Guts" Patton. My mother looks so thrilled to see her daddy coming home. WWII was necessary.

Military-style fascism had to be crushed in Germany and Japan and all of the occupied territories. But this same fascism still infects America, and it must be crushed. Luckily, it's extinguishing itself.

My grandfather never fully recovered from his experiences in the war. For the rest of his life, he was very nervous man with a hair-trigger temper. He couldn't connect very well with my mother because she had been born in 1944, after he'd left to serve in the Army. He wasn't a dumbass, he was drafted, he didn't enlist. I respect him for this greatly. He had sense. When he came back, the economy was far worse than it is right now (just wait). What can I say? He was a good man who found it hard to express his feelings to his family, but we loved him just the same.

Today, I dug-out some of these old photos to show to my three-year-old niece, Zofia, to show her what her grandma looked like as a baby (exactly like Zofia, since we have non-recessive genes). She's a precocious little baby with a big heart and a mostly peaceful temperment. She rarely cries. She's a joy. When I showed her this and other photos and told her "This is grandma," she said, "No--this is Zofia!"

Rollie and Billie, father and daughter, finally united--it was 1946, and the Cold War had yet to be invented by the politicians (mainly the utterly corrupt GOP). When the wars have ended, when tyranny has been smashed, when people finally learn to live amongst one another in relative peace, and when we realize that we're all a family, we'll have the same moment of love that Rollie and Billie lived 62-years-ago. That moment was--and is--love. Love for ourselves and each other, because it really is that simple. The circle is unbroken.

My Mother's Father (1922-2003) Part I

My grandfather was such a good man, but he was troubled by the world that he lived through. He never found a good way to express this until the very end of his life, which I find sad. His was a life that is no more and an America that is long-gone.

In many respects, this is a good thing, but it's impossible to say that I don't miss him or the generation he was a part of, now receding into the twilight. I won't say that my grandfather's generation was the " greatest [American] generation"--it wasn't. Most of the racists who beat civil rights activists, and even murdered them, were of the WWII generation. They were as wrong as one can be, but they weren't the whole story.

There were and are many shades of racism, and it's a part of our basic anthropology, almost innate to us. This isn't to say that people cannot overcome it, but it's a tendency within all of us as human beings. I think of racism as the greatest tragedy of the human experience. Were it not for the fact that I was shunted into the worst classes with the Black kids, I might not understand this. I understand discrimination well, and Black Americans have my admiration and empathy for the crap they have to put-up-with. I hate most White Americans myself, they're generally pigs. That said, it doesn't excuse reverse-discrimination or a racist response.

My grandfather was bigoted to-a-point, and I lament this fact, but he still saw Black Americans (and other so-called minorities) as people. God, the times he would bait me with racial-comments--he was a teaser, he loved to pick. But he didn't hate Black people, and he was a friendly man for the most part. He worked with them at his factory job at a ball-bearing plant (Torrington) for decades and had a few Black acquaintances. For someone like Rollie, this was a very big step indeed.

His job was building the equipment and tools for the machinists, and he did it for about twenty years. Before that, he and my grandmother worked in other factories and munitions-plants like many in their generation. Interestingly, he was discriminated against at his job for a variety-of-reasons (some due to his personality!). South Bend is a town that is almost predominantly Polish and Hungarian, with the rest falling-off from there. However, with the influx of Hispanics, it's changing rapidly as it is in many places in the United States. Most of these ethnic groups had (and have) one thing in-common: Catholicism, and the cold, cruel, Old world exclusionary version of it. America is a very primitive and tribally oriented place. Tribalism is for the birds and needs to go the way of organized religion. It needs to die. If that's community, you can have it, and I'm glad that the modern world is crushing it.

Like in most American cities that have ethnic enclaves, each group really just takes care of its own. South Bend has been, and is, no different in this. Each group tended to discriminate, especially when one wasn't Catholic. In truth, my family has probably been discriminated-against on this basis more than we'll ever know. This is ironic, since I was baptised a Catholic! My grandparents weren't very active religiously, which I still admire. They taught me from an early-age, "Don't ever trust the preacherman, he doesn't know anymore than you do. He just wants your money." This is pure prairie Populism, a tradition I am more-than-proud-of. After being forced to attend congregationalist churches with my father, this belief was only reinforced, what hollow, meaningless-crap. If Jesus showed-up, they would turn him away because he would be in-rags, they wouldn't recognize him if he was glowing.

My grandparents didn't trust authority of any kind, a lesson for us all, because they saw authority abused during their lives. I believe that the time has come again for prairie Populism's resurrection, only this time it won't be agrarian, and just a simple expression of the will of the people in different times. What could be more beautiful and sacred than the unprompted assertion of humanity by ordinary people? My family comes from this tradition, and our familial culture extends-back to our Anabaptist ancestors in Germany and possibly Switzerland. Somehow, it survived organically within our family's culture.

The Anabaptists were the first religious group in Western Europe to call for a separation of Church and State. I suspect we've always been anti-clerical, and anti-war (excepting defensive wars of survival) in some ways, but WWII was necessary. Few would argue this, and fascism had to be stopped. It really was the good war to my mind. It was the aftermath that the politicians and big businessmen screwed-up, and keeping them in-check is the role of the people. The "world's greatest generation" tried to do this, but I believe the postwar economic-boom caused many of them to lapse into forgetfulness--they forgot who the enemy really was, namely concentrated wealth.

My grandfather was from Kansas, while my grandmother was from Arkansas. Her family were literally dirt-farmers, and she was a mountain-girl, and such a lovely and warm woman. She was a real-life Cinderella. When she died, I nearly went with her, the shock was so overwhelming. She was literally my second mother. My grandfather's family moved to Arkansas (Marshall, I believe) during the late-1920s, and this is how they met.

His father was insane--he was both a Freemason (Masonry teaches universal brotherhood!) and a member of the KKK during the 1920s (probably because of the movie "The Birth of a Nation"), and one of the earliest Jehovah's witnesses. He'd had a good-paying job with the railroad as an engineer, but he was basically an abusive asshole who felt he was always right. So, he quit his job, and moved his family to start a farm during worst period in American history to start one (except now), right before the Great Depression! I was told many stories about the dustbowl and the dust storms that blanketed parts of the South, Southwest, and plains states, as a child.

They were stories of an apocalypse, a wall of death that smothered everything. Entire families were found suffocated-to-death in their shacks and farm houses according to my grandparents and the historical record. The Bloughs nearly starved-to-death, and eventually the hothead had to get another job. He was also a physically-abusive man, and rarely spoke to his children.

Things got better for them, gradually, in Arkansas. My grandfather was one of the only young men in his town with a car (a 1929 model A Ford with a rumble seat--I've ridden in a rumble seat! Fun!). My grandparents met at a dance that could have been out of a John Steinbeck novel, and they knew the life he wrote about intimately. They were poor, but luckier than many. They had food. My grandparents met at a public dance in Arkansas in the late-1930s.

There wasn't much work to be had, so my grandfather joined the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, public works jobs provided by the New Deal). He always talked fondly about his experiences with the CCC and said that we should do it again as a nation. This was no Leftist firebrand, no radical, but a unionized worker who slaved his entire life. He was no fool, which is what America has been overpopulated with for some time.

I heartily agree with his sentiments about public service, and I think that it should be compulsory in our society, and mandatory for all economic strata. This goes for war. The draft should be reinstated as a first-step towards ending our love affair with overseas meddling, and our bloated military budgets must be slashed for all time. The time for beating our swords into plowshares has come. We should look to past wars as they're instructive of what not to do.

The invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 dragged the world into a global conflict. The world was aflame. This takes us to 1940 in the lives of my grandparents...

Revised 10.13.2008