Libertarian Senate candidate from Iowa dies in plane crash

Libertarian Senate candidate from Iowa dies in plane crash

New Electronic Media: Here today, gone tomorrow...forever.

There are books that are older than the United States. We're all going to die one day, and all of us hope that something we leave behind will somehow endure. It's been a reality for centuries that this has in fact been achieved through reasonably reliable forms of information storage for thousands of years. While most of what was written on on stone, on wet clay tablets and parchment throughout human history has been lost, we're still finding what we've forgotten collectively, as a species.

Forgetting and remembering is practically central to the human condition. We're always in a state of amnesia, wondering, attempting to penetrate the great mystery, ourselves.

Because we're mortal, we forget. This is what worries me a little about the new electronic media and how poorly it archives. With one entirely new system and code after another being introduced onto the consumer market, only data migration is going to preserve a lot of it. (On the other hand, we might find one bright spot in the NSA's fusion centers--they'll preserve everything currently on the Internet.)

Any movie shot on HD video will have to be transferred to another code eventually, and so on. It's inevitable that some data will be lost along the way. A low-tech nitrate print can last a century, if properly stored. At least a decade ago, there were articles about how a digitized version of the Domesday book (a log of taxable lands commissioned by William the Conqueror in the 11th century) couldn't be accessed by scholars in the UK because the language of the files was obsolete. Without the process of data migration done at a specific stage, you cannot access the information. A hard copy book doesn't crash. A 78 RPM record doesn't crash. A CD doesn't crash, albeit that it's prone to a similar obsolescence. Now we've learned how to encode DNA with information. That might actually be a good route for archiving, at least so long as you can preserve its substance, perhaps keeping it in a biologically immortal medium.

But, have we finally begun to admit with our embracing of the new media that all of this is ephemeral, and that we're not leaving a legacy worth rediscovering behind? Has it come down to this?

The Bonnie Banks O Fordie (Babylon)

THERE were three ladies lived in a bower,
Eh vow bonnie
And they went out to pull a flower,
On the bonnie banks o Fordie
They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man.
He’s taen the first sister by her hand,
And he’s turned her round and made her stand.
“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”
“It’s I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”
He’s killed this may, and he’s laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.
He’s taken the second ane by the hand,
And he’s turned her round and made her stand.
“It’s whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”
“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
But I’ll rather die by your wee pen-knife.”
He’s killed this may, and he’s laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.
He’s taken the youngest ane by the hand,
And he’s turned her round and made her stand.
Says, “Will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?”
“I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.
“For I hae a brother in this wood,
And gin ye kill me, it’s he’ll kill thee.”
“What’s thy brother’s name? come tell to me.”
“My brother’s name it is Babylon.”
“O sister, sister, what have I done!
O have I done this ill to thee!
“O since I’ve done this evil deed,
Good sall never be seen o me.”
He’s taken out his wee pen-knife,
And he’s twyned  himsel o his ain sweet life.

all soul's day

I knew without planning it that the account was going to be finished on this day. That's not just serendipity, it's the architecture of fate. Rather than the dead burying the dead--part of why we have historical amnesia in this country--I, the living, am burying my part of Jeane. Why she picked me to assist her I believe is complicated. For one, I know she didn't want me pissing in the tent and preferred me pissing outwards. You could say she wanted to keep me on ice during the proceedings, most certainly a good possibility there. That means I was definitely onto something, maybe many fundamental somethings about her case. The problem was, not a lot of that was exculpatory. Such is life. Her suffering is over, ours continues until we meet our own endings, like a story. Anything ending tends to choke the best of us up, it's got a sadness to it that's part of the human condition. And so it goes. I'll probably even lay out a meal for her, and all of the people who I and my family have lost--who everyone has lost, because that's what All Soul's Day is about, remembering, honoring, and continuing on.

Postscript 11.03.12--And so it did, so mote it be, the circle is completed.

RIP Jeane...

This isn't a five year or ten year benchmark, but considerable time has passed now, and I need to make my peace. Jeane, I tried my best to help save you, but as the months and years have passed by, I came to understand that there was no saving you, that you were doomed long before we crossed paths, before you came my way asking for help. I'm sorry you had the life you had, my heart was broken watching them destroy you, a human being, flawed, but not evil, not nearly as "criminal" as the people prosecuting you, who used Pamela Martin. No one is as evil as them, no one.

At least once a week I think about how this all affected your mother, maybe one of the most painful things I have to consider in all of this. That's why I have left her in peace. You did the best you could with a rotten life in a bad culture, a sexist, exploitative nation that appears as doomed as you were. Your case made you a proverbial canary in the coal mine--a victim of the final stages in the construction of a police state in America, the end of a good dream, maybe the end of everything. Perhaps you were lucky to go when you did, I don't know, but the future doesn't appear a bright one for the rest of us, the "survivors".

All I can hope is that you're at peace, and that hope is hardly in vain. Whether there's something after this (I find this doubtful) is irrelevant: you are free, they can no longer harm you, and you won, you beat the "bastards," as you referred to them so accurately. Jeffrey Taylor, Cowden, Butler, Connelly, Rakestraw--everyone involved in investigating and prosecuting you--will have to carry this around with them for the rest of their lives. If it doesn't bother them, they have bigger problems, like being a deranged psychopath, like the people they serve, and that's not the public, hardly. One day the entire truth will be known and people will gasp at the horror of what was done to you.

Rest in Peace, Jeane, you earned it. Soon, they're going to get a taste of payback simply by my telling the truth.

On the Death of Andrew Breitbart

Finito Mussolini.

Three Fates

The First Sister said: "Come unto me, and I will give you rest."

The Second Sister said: "I will rend your life and your soul."

The Third Sister said: "I am the way out," and I took that door, in sorrow.

Top this shit, Sarah Palin...

Sarah says she can see Russia from her house, but I got one better. I can see Jesus from my house, and man, he looks like shit, dudes and dudettes, all carbonized, dust. They say that we're breathing atoms that were inhaled by the likes of Socrates, Heraclitus, Frederick the Great, Hitler, DeGaulle, DaVinci, Ivan the Terrible, FDR, William Blake, Zoroaster, Billy the Kid--everyone that ever lived, ever.

If Jesus was divine, wouldn't we all be touched in some way by him in this manner? Were there ever a human being divine, wouldn't we all be transformed? It's a pipe dream, and I want a suck on that, it must be good shit if it makes logic and reason flee almost entirely...

It's all a fairy tale to enslave you. The miserable need something, some vain hope. How about one that has something to do with life? Drop the death cults. Civilization has been around roughly 11,000 years, a blink in an inky abyss, our temporal universe. We have this time to get things right, and that's it. Even the Old Testament says there is no wisdom beyond the grave. It's better to assume that this is it, the only life we will ever have, and that death is inevitable and frequently a friend bringing release and a well-earned rest. Accept this, and you have part of the key as to how we're going to evolve and survive this century as a species.

Patrick Swayze (1952-2009)

WWW--I will always remember the Patrick Swayze of Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, Donnie Darko, To Wong Fu, and yes, even Red Dawn (but only in a "camp" sense). He was a great dancer and actor. Today, Patrick Swayze died of pancreatic cancer, and my heart goes out to his family, I know where they're at right now.

I'll never forget the first time watching The Outsiders and loving his big brother character because he was just so good, so real. When I went and saw Red Dawn he was just as great, not that it's a great movie, but we all have bills to pay, and so did he. The next time you watch Red Dawn, play songs from the Violent Femmes' first album every time a character dies, I swear to God it fits, it works. I nearly got into a fistfight seeing that one at the theater because I couldn't stop laughing since the scenario in it could never have happened logistically, it's literally a campy science fiction movie by the very closeted John Milius, a guy who likes to play with army toys in his advanced age. He should run for office.

But besides his role in The Outsiders, I have to say that the pinnacle of Swayze's acting career was as a motivational speaker/evangelist/closeted pedophile in 2001's Donnie Darko, a classic that I believe paints a fairly accurate portrayal in many parts of how unpleasant the 1980s really were. Yet, he was one of the good parts, and I'll remember him always for it. There will never be another actor quite like him. There are watersheds in everyone's life, and this is one of them. You made a very drab life and world a little more interesting, sleep well. What a cool dude he was.

Songs from the Site Meter: D.C.M.A. & someone looking to read about the enigmatic Sam Deskin

Site Meter--Some very interesting visitors! Do I think DCMA cared about the actual search they did on vets coming home? That's the most likely explanation until you realize that defense contractors figured highly in the DC Madam scandal, and then your suspicions begin to get raised a tad.

Yet, that's not enough since it's never enough and never-ending with the DC Madam narrative, it just keeps on ticking. If that weren't enough, there's someone reading about L.A. attorney Sam Deskin, a most mysterious fellow whom I encountered online and in a very weird conference call during that whole mess who wanted to buy Palfrey's remaining phone records (they were never released in their entirety, she had more), ostensibly to make some money off of...I'm not clear on this.

Publish them? Movie deal? I'd love it if he told me exactly what he had in-mind, but I assume he was repesenting some former clients and wanted to bury the records, maybe that's just me. Did I mention that he wanted to merge this blog with his own?

Luckily, there was a problem with compatability, all around. You think he wanted the materials related to the DC Madama scandal on here? I do. Sam's not talking, but I told him to hit the pavement long ago, and besides, he probably stuck his neck out far enough in his correspondence with Palfrey and his statements to me on the phone that were very peculiar indeed.

At one point, Sam induced (no money, he's that kind of an asshole) me to write for what must surely be a dummy-blog he put up for...I'm not clear on this one either, but it was up no earlier than 2007. A mysterious one, that Sam Deskin, say what you want about him, and I will. Considering how many government contracts he does--by definition making him a government contractor--you could be forgive in thinking that he was looking after someone's interests, probably other contractors and even some agencies, anagrams galore.

In short, he "practices false claims act law for the federal government and state governments brought by whistleblowers," according to his own site, but also others areas of the law. Did I mention that he sounds like he's a potty-mouthed 16 year old on the phone? If I was to guess, it was Deskin or one of his associates checking-up. Hold on, there's a wolf at the door, gotta run...

Domain Name		dcma.mil ? (Military)
IP Address		144.183.31.# (Defense Contract Management Agency)
ISP		Defense Contract Management Agency
Location		Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : Virginia City : Alexandria Lat/Long : 38.7909, -77.0947 (Map)
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution : 1152 x 864 Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit		Sep 1 2009 10:47:18 pm
Last Page View		Sep 1 2009 10:47:18 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://search.yahoo....e=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
Search Engine		search.yahoo.com
Search Words		vietnam war veterans tell og going home
Visit Entry Page		http://chickasawpick...ar-hero-and-who.html
Visit Exit Page		http://chickasawpick...ar-hero-and-who.html
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Sep 1 2009 10:47:18 am
Visit Number		59,175

Domain Name		sbcglobal.net ? (Network)
IP Address		76.222.254.# (SBC Internet Services)
ISP		SBC Internet Services
Location		Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : California City : Hanford Lat/Long : 36.276, -119.6322 (Map)
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution : 1280 x 800 Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit		Sep 1 2009 1:59:06 pm
Last Page View		Sep 1 2009 2:14:54 pm
Visit Length		15 minutes 48 seconds
Page Views		2
Referring URL		http://www.google.co...Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		samuel deskin los angeles, ca cases
Visit Entry Page		http://chickasawpick...deskin-missives.html
Visit Exit Page		http://chickasawpick...deskin-missives.html
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Aug 31 2009 10:59:06 pm
Visit Number		59,163

Edward Kennedy (1932-2009)

Rest in peace good Prince Edward, sleep well. You were one of the few to speak out against the current wars in the Middle East, and you tried to help working-class people. You were one of the few to abstain from the madness. You did the best you could, even with your imperfections, your human frailty. That's the most anyone can ask of someone. You wanted the American public to have universal health coverage as a right, not a privilege, which made you human in the best sense of the word. Goodbye.

Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter has another ethics complaint filed against him, this time by Louisiana Democrats

Baton Rouge, Louisiana--And it's about time. It seems that Davey is still unaware of or doesn't care about campaigning laws. In recent months, he attempted to and was allowed to used campaign funds to pay for his legal expenses surrounding the fact that he used the prostitution service of the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey (aka "The DC Madam"), but it helps to have friends in the right places--put their through crony political appointments.

Now, it seems that Davey is going around on the taxpayer's buck (wouldn't you?) campaigning against Democratic U.S. Representative Charlie Melancon throughout Louisiana, very openly uttering the man's name in-the-pejorative. 

That's campaigning.

Louisiana Democratic Party Chairman Chris Whittington filed a sworn complaint with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics Thursday accusing U.S. Sen. David Vitter of using taxpayer-funded town hall meetings to engage in campaign activity.

Whittington’s complaint is based on Vitter’s statements at several taxpayer-funded town hall meetings criticizing U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, a potential re-election opponent. At one town hall meeting, Vitter encouraged the audience to “keep up the pressure on” Melancon.

Vitter has said that Melancon supported the health care revamp legislation proposed by the Obama administration when he actually voted with Vitter against the measure. ("La. Democrats file ethics complaint against Vitter," The Advertiser, 08.21.2009)

This is similar to the rules surrounding "franking." Sorry, you can only lie on the taxpayer's dime when you're in the nation's capital.
 
While they're at it, they might want to drag a dead madam into the picture. It seems that the Senator's counsel threatened Palfrey with legal costs around February 25th, 2008. Three days later, she sent this email to journalist Jason Leopold, cc'd to me and a co-researcher in the defense:

Jason… let’s put it like this, the bastards aren’t going to take me alive. Of course, anytime that you want to do an interview – I will make myself available. However, I doubt that I will be doing any interviews once I am in D.C., for the trial. –Best, Jeane

Did the threats from Vitter's counsel at Wiley, Rein & Fielding finally push Palfrey over the edge and onto a firm course leading to suicide? Don't ask Alex Jones, Geraldo, or even Alex Constantine, you won't get a rational answer anyway--not that that should be any surprise. Yet, it's all about the big, bad "government," that boorish catch-all, when it's really about morons like Vitter abusing their office and the bureaucracy. Like any tool, government is amoral. How it's used or abused is the real issue. Abusing power is what it's all about for morons like Davey.

I'd ask Vitter and his counsel about whether they think they pushed Palfrey too far, but I don't expect an answer that wouldn't insult my intelligence. Life is too short. Never let it be said that David Vitter is unwilling to crush anyone who gets in his way. Lying is fine, obfuscation is fine, and a general tone of ruthlessness runs through his political career as one would expect it to be in American poltics. I'm sure that if the people of Louisiana really knew the man for who he truly is, they'd recoil in terror and chastise themselves for being so delusional as to have ever voted for him. Nah...

Revised 08.23.2009

"La. Democrats file ethics complaint against Vitter," The Advertiser, 08.21.2009: http://www.theadvertiser.com/article/20090821/NEWS01/90821020

Right wing columnist Robert Novak belatedly dies at the age of 78

WWW--He was a demagogue, a player, a hater, and just one-of-many jackapes screeching in our collective-ear for the last 30+ years, ramming a failed and moronic rightist agenda down all of our throats. At the end of his very pathetic and partisan career as an ostensible journalist and political commentator for old and young fools alike, he outed an active CIA officer for political purposes, for the Bush II administration. That's not a columnist, a journalist, or even a talking head. That's a political mercenary who deserves no respect whatsoever, a hack like Tim Russert or former NYT journo, Judith Miller.

But you wouldn't know any of this listening to NPR today, those scions of ass-licking. I expected this since they're as predictable as a Rush Limbaugh monologue, but they were gunning for a new low today and their rush to the bottom was achieved. When NPR offers the same drivel as the rest of the mainstream media--which is generally free--why pay for it at all? Thankfully, few are, and jazz fans are going to have to deal--all 10,000 of them.

Whenever I feel the slightest twinge of guilt over never having contributed to public radio, it's days like this that remind me that it was always a good move. But NPR are hardly alone in this bizarre adulation of this not-a-man, this moron, this careerist slimeball. No, we shouldn't be mourning Robert Novak, we should be mourning the perfectly viable cancer cells that had to die with him, it's not fair. That he was intellectually bankrupt is a given. That he was annoying is a given. That he was a liar is a given. There's no reason to celebrate him anymore than it would have been when some clone-like apparatchiki died in the former Soviet Union. Good riddance.

Nixon's former counsel John Dean (no, not Howard Dean, former DNC chair) once told the late President Richard Nixon that, "There's a cancer on the presidency," referring to the Watergate burglars. He was far too optimistic--Nixon was that cancer. When thinking of the late conservative columnist it just brings-to-mind the obverse: "There's a Robert Novak on the cancer." Poor cancer. He wasn't a journalist, he was just some asshole powerful people gave a soapbox to, and for far too long. Thanks for reminding me that mortality's not so bad, Bob, thanks for the reminder (thanks God!). At least you die too.

And what should be his epitaph? We already know: Valerie Plame, and the fact that he did a hit-and-run on someone, went to the doctor, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. That seems to sum-up the reactionary right. Finally, I and millions of others don't have to tell this asshole to shut the fuck up.

Les Paul (1915-2009)

WWW--The man was a giant. Long after his popular singles with his wife Mary Ford in the 1940s until the early 1960s, Paul was noted for being the inventor of the solid-body electric guitar, and much more.

Without Les Paul, there would have been no Sgt. Pepper's. Without Les Paul, there would have been no Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Wes Montgomery, John McLaughlin, or even a Velvet Underground, DEVO, or a Joy Division. There would be no techno. There would be no industrial music. There would be no hip-hop. There would have never been any punk rock. There would have been no funk, no James Brown, no Parliament.

The fact is, Les Paul invented multitrack recording long before anyone else had. The ability to record and isolate guitar, bass, drums, and any number of combination of instruments as we now know them today would have either taken longer, or been an impossibility without Les Paul. As a musician, he was practically unparalleled in his abilities, he was a stunning jazz-guitarist and even dabbled in country and other forms of pop music.

My second guitar was a Les Paul Custom, and it was a beauty, a great model. I have to wonder, however, if we're ever going to know how his "Les Pulverizer" worked. Paul could mount the stage alone, playing to his own accompanyment. The guitar-controller itself had wires leading from it to a unit offstage, but Paul would never let anyone near it or to examine it, and he claimed he would take the secret of it to the grave. I'm betting he did.

Les Paul died today of complications from pneumonia, as many people his age do. He was 94. But there will never be another Les Paul again.

Les Paul using the Les Pulverizer live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foXSXOAfB4U

A.J. Weberman's Homothug (2008) review

“My books are worth more unsigned.”

--A.J. Weberman to the author, 2009.

In the hot summer of 1991, and in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave, there was a pogrom in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn that has been called “one of the most serious incidents of anti-Semitism in American history.”[i] The pogrom was over an accidental hit-and-run of a black child named Gavin Cato by members of the Lubavitch Community. Within this racially-charged environment, a Hasidic Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered by a mob of African-American vigilantes spouting anti-Semitic epithets at the victim. This crime--and countless other events in the city at the time--ignited widespread calls for a law and order agenda from City Hall. 

The rioting took place under the administration of African-American mayor David Dinkins who ran on the race card in NYC’s 1989 mayoral elections, and appearances are everything in American politics. 

According to New York State’s Girgenti Report, Mayor Dinkins allowed the riots in Crown Heights to rage for three long days before doing much of anything about it, and his poor record in curbing crime created a backlash that grew over time. Things hadn’t gotten much better by the next election cycle when Dinkins ran against the Republican Rudolph Giuliani, and the perception was that Dinkins was “soft on crime.” At that time the Republican candidate was known for his record as an aggressive prosecuting U.S. Attorney in the Southern District (NYC region)—if he was known for anything at all. But did New Yorkers really know who—or perhaps what--they were voting for in 1993?

Did Rudy play to the outrage? You bet.

Political biographies are a minefield for any author, and especially when the subject is alive-and-kicking, and kicking his perceived enemies is exactly what Rudy Giuliani does best. As a matter of fact, sometimes it appears that it’s all that he does once in office--besides filling key governmental positions with his criminal cronies. First released in May 2008 on Amazon.com, Weberman’s profile of the former mayor of New York City was abruptly pulled by the online seller (who also printed the book through BookSurge) without much explanation, though it can be assumed there were threats regarding defamation of character. That’s rich considering the subject and the people he’s surrounding himself with over the years. According to Weberman, Giuliani’s own attorneys directed legal threats at Amazon.com, causing the removal of the book (still available @ http://yippiemuseum.org/homothug/ ) .

Was it Giuliani? Weberman appears to believe so.

There don’t appear to be any indications otherwise, but there are a few other characters in the narrative besides Giuliani who might have wanted the book pulled like the “defrocked” Monsignor, Alan J. Placa, an individual with a most peculiar attitude towards pedophilia and its relation to society and the law, and there are others who might have wanted the same. Placa handled charges of pedophilia against the Church on Long Island for several years, and doesn’t have a stellar reputation. Nevertheless, it’s safe to assume that Placa and Giuliani are still close friends and associates, if not two men who are stuck with each other thanks to mutual blackmail of some kind. According to Weberman and others, this is probably because Giuliani and Placa have had sexual relations with one another at some point during their youth, and therefore, they share secrets that are a threat to their power. Placa’s powerful? It helps to have powerful friends…

The author quotes Placa himself about his attitudes towards pedophile priests, and they’re not mainstream ones (the emphasis in the quote is Weberman’s):

“In my own experience, attempts to reintegrate people into the ministry have been quite successful. I have never been involved in attempting to reintegrate a clinically diagnosed fixated pedophile [MJ: he’s being very careful in his wording here] into the ministry, however, similarly, I have never been involved in attempting to reintegrate a person into the ministry after that person has been convicted of a criminal offense and has served time in prison. Such a move would be inappropriate, at the very least, for ‘public-relations’ reasons [MJ: the only real time the Church is concerned], if not also for clinical, legal, and moral reasons. With these provisos in mind, I report that my own experience (in many cases over the last six years) leads me to believe that most people who have engaged in the sort of inappropriate behavior we are describing here can successfully be reintegrated into some useful and fulfilling Church ministry…” [ii]

Yet, as Weberman points-out, and as anyone with any sense knows, you cannot reform a pedophile, making Placa’s written statements not only disingenuous, but bald lies that one would expect to come from a pedophile. For this reason and many others laid-out in the text, Placa has a very important place in Giuliani’s life and in the development of his character and his behavior. The author treats the other players in similar fashion since this is a study of a man’s character and how he came to have it. Assuming that Giuliani has character might be taking a wild leap of logic. 

Logically, Weberman also delves a little into the effects of heredity on sexual tendencies as well as the general effects of environment on Giuliani. Rudy’s father Harold was a convicted exhibitionist, a violent malcontent who consorted with other street criminals, and was a low-level organized crime soldier. What went on in the Giuliani home in front of little Rudy? We’re not entirely sure, but if you grow-up in a milieu of sexual depravity, violence, and organized crime, there’s a good chance you’re going to act in similar fashion later on. It appears that this has been the case throughout Rudolph Giuliani’s sordid adult life.

Certainly, some members of the gay community are going to be offended by the title of this chronicle, but it has a very real urban basis to it, and Weberman didn’t coin the term, nor is he claiming to have. If even a fraction of what he and the Yippie Museum research team have uncovered is true, the term fits, especially looking at the smoke coming from Giuliani’s father, his own official behaviors as a prosecutor and Mayor of NYC, and his other questionable associations. 

In short, he seems to fit most of the definitions of an urban “homothug”:

5. homo thug

A male thug who has [a] sexual interest in both males and females. Lives an ag[g]ressive lifestyle ( a well known result of hood life), mentally unstable (most of the time) and can claim to be of heter[o]sexual orientation (or not); mainta[n]ing a reputation that can be associated with the life of urban minority men (aka thugs) in and around predominantly black neighborhoods (unless they are a celebrity). All the while attempting to remain the alpha male in people's perception of him, therefore having to sustain the life of a straight male, with only or mainly heter[o]sexual intents to be accepted into society without consid[e]ration.

"Tyshawn" is your typical average thug. He's flippin' weight in the hood, got a clique with niggas that don't give Shit about much. On the block all night, having sexual leasions with chicks and even has a 4 year old son. Nigga dresses fly, got a fly ride and is known by people who otherwise would more likely than not, be associated with a homo Thug. Tyshawn has a relationship with a pre-op tran[s]sexual("Tania") who passes quite well and looks and maintains herself better than a lot of females. She herself is also "notorious" in the hood (for her own reasons). "Tyshawn" and "Tania" have a sexual relationship period[i]cally but consistent. And all the while these sexual rendezvous occur[r]ing on the DL [MJ—“on the down low.”] with no knowledge of his actions amongst his family or his crew. [iii]

Giuliani’s social interactions have been described by former NYC Mayor Ed Koch in his contemporary columns as being like “Frankenstein’s” monster. Koch was hardly alone in his use of this word in describing Giuliani’s governing practices, this one coming from Former Deputy Police Commissioner John Miller:

"Frankenstein's monster was a misunderstood character [that] reached out to people and frightened them and they ran away. I don't think the mayor has made that much of an effort. He just kind of frightens them away without reaching them at all."

Miller, a former television newsman, said, "When a police department becomes politicized because it's being run by a shadow police commissioner who is the mayor, you have to question as to whether the department is acting based on what is right and what is lawful or whether the department has become a political arm."[iv]

Did they even know the half of it? Maybe…and maybe not.

Interestingly, the author spends the first one hundred pages of his profile of Giuliani by focusing on his lifelong relationship with Alan Placa and the former Monsignor’s very curious background and tendency to protect pedophile priests. According to Weberman and several sources, were it not for the statute of limitations (and very conscious legal motions by him in several other cases so that it would expire), Alan Placa would be a convicted pedophile. Looking at his sources, he makes more than a good case for it. Worse still, Placa might have been involved in negligence with a victim of a pedophile priest, perhaps leading them into a situation where their suicide was all-but-inevitable. The overall picture of Placa is not only bad, and if even a smidgen of it is true, he’s a dangerous criminal degenerate and a threat to the community no matter where he lives. 

So why hasn’t he run for public office yet?

As a matter of fact, it appears that Alan Placa’s pedophilia is very real and the author cites Suffolk County grand jury proceedings as well as his own interviews with one of the alleged victims of Placa, one Richard Tollner, to support the contention. Tollner’s accounts of molestation jibe with other parts of the public record in so many areas that one has to assume the only reason the former Monsignor is still walking around a free man is because he has friends in high places, such as Giuliani and the Church itself. The main problem for Tollner—and other victims of Placa and his network of pedophiles—has been the statute of limitations, which Placa used as a lawyer (a role he hid from the victims and their families, not to mention the authorities on many occasions).

Yet, Giuliani has been zealous and consistent in defending his lifelong friend, often referring to him as an asset to the community. Is Placa blackmailing him? It’s a good question, and we should remember that there’s no honor among thieves and criminals, generally. It’s even money that Placa got a lot of practice in this area of dodging the law through his little game of protecting himself and other pedophile priests and clerics from accountability. Yet, Giuliani calls him a “friend.” Sometimes, “friends-for-life” takes on a different meaning, a dark one.

Consorting with know criminals and the corrupt, ruling with brutality and an iron fist, and ignoring the law while claiming to uphold it was all part and parcel of “Giuliani time.” To truly know someone, you must judge them by their actions, not merely by what they say. Weberman’s approach to Giuliani is that it’s all about character, a perspective that he shares about the troubled mayor with former NYC mayor Ed Koch, and he’s right in doing it. The man’s background and the people he surrounds himself with suggest that Rudolph Giuliani is a criminal, if not an unimaginably compromised individual, and that he is a fool who’s simply useful to the establishment and the criminal underworld. It’s hard to say what’s worse.

When held against the authoritarian mayoral record of the Giuliani years, the author’s text comes off like a very professional police dossier and will likely become a part of the permanent historical record regardless of the tactics unleashed to suppress it. It is thoroughly researched, indexed, and footnoted, and the author draws on the public record while adding primary sources of his own from interviews with various players in the narrative, like the inimitable FBI informant and City Hall “fixer”, Larry Ray. In other words, Homothug isn’t just some second hand retelling, but a part of the primary record. It’s a chronicling, if you will, of what genuine corruption looks like, how it behaves, and it wisely delves into where it comes from. The sad truth is that it comes from social injustice, that gift that keeps on giving. 

There’s a genuine yearning on Weberman’s part to try to understand why Giuliani and the people he’s surrounded himself with over the years are such irredeemable scumbags, and that’s being charitable referring to them as such here or anywhere. True, there are pointed and personal jibes in the text, but they are well-earned ones considering the targets involved. 

Many of Giuliani’s lieutenants were and are—in fact—career criminals with mafia connections and a skill for gaming the system, even on Wall Street. As Weberman notes, Giuliani himself grew up in an organized crime milieu, and his own father was a low–level mafia soldier as well as a general sociopath. But to Rudolph Giuliani, acute moral degeneracy appears to be that credential for being one of his “wiseguys,” making it a reminder to all that our political system is based on mutual blackmailing, more often than not. That’s not just an epitaph for New York City and Giuliani; it’s one for a very troubled American polity trying to find its way back to the light, and a flimsy sentimentalism isn’t going to fix things.

Perhaps former Mayor Dinkins was “soft on crime,” and there are good arguments for it (according to Weberman and others, Giuliani is “soft” in other areas these days after prostate surgery). But: was Giuliani a better alternative? It depends on who you are. If you’re part of the economic establishment, sadistic lower-level police officers, corrupt cronies, and organized crime, “Giuliani time” was a trip back to Eden and the joys of crony machine politics. Rudy had all their backs, but he didn’t have the backs of the people of New York City. 

Having run one of the most worst presidential campaigns in American history in 2008 wasn’t the only thing that sank his monomaniacal ambitions: It was the intuition of the American public that not only was Giuliani an uninspiring demagogue who used the events of September 11, 2001 to his political advantage, but that he was also corrupt, thanks-in-part to the scandals surrounding people who were close to him. The most familiar name would be Bernard Kerik, when the corruption-ridden Bush II administration chose him to head the Department of Homeland Security. As Weberman makes clear, Kerik was just the tip of the iceberg in the life of a very pathetic, deluded, and crazed individual who should have never held public office.

Homothug will be part of the epitaph of a very sick and deluded individual who should have never held public office. Therefore, it’s also an epitaph for the times he came up in.

---

[i] Shapiro, Edward S. (2006). Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England. xi.

[ii] Weberman, A.J. (2008). Homothug: The Secret Life of Rudy Giuliani. New York City: The Yippie Museum Press/BookSurge Press. 83.

[iii] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=homo+thug

[iv] http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1995/07/27/1995-07-27_mayor__frankenstein___ex-cop.html. Marzulli, John and Sheridan, Dick. “MAYOR ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ EX-COP BIG CALLS RUDY CONTROL FREAK,” New York Daily News, July 27, 1995.

The WWII-era mass grave in Malbork could have been a specific historical statement

Malbork, Poland--Polish workers digging in a WWII bomb crater at the base of the Teutonic Knights fortress last October have found what appears to be a mass grave containing the bodies of 1,800 ethnic Germans of the town that was once called "Marienberg" under German rule, now Malbork under the Polish. The discovery is both shocking, and raises more questions so far than it answers.

The original inhabitants of Marienberg from that era have been missing since those murky last days of WWII when Red Army troops shelled the town in their push to Berlin. After the war, the town was repopulated with Poles driven-out of areas of Poland claimed as Russian territory by the Soviet regime. Until recently, nobody has had any idea what happened to them. Millions of civilians went missing in the chaos of WWII and have never been found. The discovery was made on the site of a proposed luxury hotel where there had been some exploratory digging before construction.

It's unknown whether the construction of the proposed hotel will proceed or not, but more official excavations by Polish authorities are planned to continue until there's more certainty that these are the missing inhabitants of Marienberg from over sixty-years-ago. By all accounts, they are. Since the end of WWII, 1,840 German citizens of the town have gone missing, so the numbers are very closely matched at this writing.

There is every reason to believe that the victims were slaughtered by Red Army troops. More than a few of the bodies had been shot in the back of the head in an execution-style that echoes the victims of the 1940 Katyn forest massacre of the Polish officer corps, begging the question of whether Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) or the NKVD also had a hand in the killings. After April 6, 1918, the Red Army was accompanied by "political commissars," generally appointed by the Communist Party's hierarchy, separate from the military's. After 1942, political commissars were referred to as a "politruk"(политру́к).

Until 1991, every military leader in the Red Army's hierarchy had a political counterpart. Both officers would have to agree on an order or action for it to be "legally"expedited by troops on the ground. In other words, the Communist Party had to be part of the decision to execute the surviving citizens of Marienberg after the initial shelling of the town. According to Der Spiegel, one-in-ten of the bodies recovered so far had been shot in the head; all the dead were then buried naked without any belongings, not even shoes or identification papers.

There is the possibility that Stalin was indirectly or directly part of this decision--and many others of its kind--as he was intimately familiar with the political commissar structure. Stalin had been a political commissar during the Russian Civil War. The phantom of Katyn and other massacres of that era haunt the Marienberg event, the vagaries of war aside.

In the final days of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev revealed in 1989 that the NKVD had in fact expedited the slaughter at Katyn under Stalin's orders and that there were three killing-and-disposal sites located in the forest outside of Smolensk. Numbers of the murdered in this one instance hover at around 25,000. While the numbers slaughtered by totalitarian regimes during the 20th century were unprecedented, there is a long history of this kind of activity in the Baltic region, and there are clues in the historical record that point to the possibility that the killings in the then-Marienberg were symbolic and meant to send a message to ethnic Germans.

The location of the mass grave was certainly convenient, but it's placement before a Teutonic Knights fortress could be very telling.

700 years before the slaughter in Marienberg, the Teutonic Knights had invaded Russia at Novgorod, then were defeated by Russian Prince Alexander Nevsky and his troops at the "Battle of the Ice" ( Ледовое побоище) on April 5, 1242 at Lake Peipus. The Teutonic Knights were part of a coalition of Swedish, German Livonian and Teutonic orders, and Danish forces sent under the auspicies of the Vatican (Pope Gregory the IX) to subdue pagans and Eastern Orthodox ruling structures throughout the Baltic region in the "Northern Crusades." Outside of the expected killing incurred during warfare, liquidations occurred in the name of spreading the Catholic faith and monarchial influence, while extinguishing the pagan and Eastern Orthodox ones. The Iron Cross comes from the Teutonic Knights.

Was the Red Army contingent sending a historically-tinged message to Germans? Perhaps. German resistance in Marienberg had been especially vicious, so any vengeance message pointing-out a historical-parallel might have been accidental on the part of the Red Army contingent: Marienberg had been founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1274 when it was part of conquered pagan Prussia, just a little over thirty years after the Battle of the Ice. After its founding the town was the seat of the Teutonic Order, and it controlled access to the Baltic, levying tolls on the merchant shipping of various nationalities. Similar ambitions arose during the 20th century.

It was well known during WWII that Himmler's SS had consciously patterned themselves after the Teutonic Knights, with their own racialist and anti-communist rhetoric of "godless" Slavic enemies being barely distinguishable from their Medieval Catholic counterparts. The parallels between the SS system and the Teutonic Knights' expansionist feudalism, enslavement, their network of castles, and their own purges of civilian populations, are eerily similar.

Stalin and his NKVD (later, the KGB, now the FSB) had similar aims and utilized the same terror tactics, and on a comparable scale. Soviet troops had plenty of reasons to want payback that had nothing to do with crimes committed 700 years earlier, but it might have been a factor in their actions. Soviet archives could answer most of these questions. The Teutonic Knights still exist, with their seat in Vienna since 1809. History has a way of repeating itself, negating the necessity for reincarnation.

"Katyn Forst Massacre-Polish Deaths at Soviet Hands": http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/

"Malbork Massacre: World War II Mass Grave Unearthed in Poland," Der Spiegel, 01.08.2008: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,600216,00.html