Tyler Cowen has a post entitled "Can you fake being crazy". His link leads to this link which leads to a story in the Guardian. The whole story is below:
Into the cuckoo's nestThirty years ago psychiatry was rocked by the revelation that nine sane volunteers had faked hearing voices and fooled thier way on to locked wards. Has diagnosis improved since? Psychologist Lauren Slater repeats the experiment.
In 1972, David Rosenhan, a newly minted psychologist with a joint degree in law, called eight friends and said something like, "Are you busy next month? Would you have time to fake your way into a mental hospital and see what happens?"
Surprisingly, so the story goes, all eight were not busy the next month, and all eight - three psychologists, one graduate student, a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife - agreed to take the time to try this treacherous trick, along with Rosenhan himself, who could hardly wait to get started. Pseudopatient Martin Seligman says, "David just called me up and said, 'Are you busy next October?' "and I said, 'Of course I'm busy next October', but by the end of the conversation he had me laughing and saying yes."First, there was training. Rosenhan instructed his confederates very, very carefully. Five days prior to the chosen date, they were to stop shaving, showering and brushing their teeth. And then they were, on the appointed date, to disperse to different parts of the country, east to west, and present themselves at various psychiatric emergency rooms. Some of the hospitals Rosenhan had chosen were posh and built of white brick; others were state-run gigs with urine-scented corridors and graffiti-scratched walls. The pseudopatients were to present themselves and say words along these lines: "I am hearing a voice. It is saying thud." Rosenhan specifically chose this complaint because nowhere in psychiatric literature are there any reports of any person hearing a voice that contains such obvious cartoon angst.
Upon further questioning, the eight pseudopatients were to answer honestly, save for name and occupation. They were to feign no other symptoms. Once on the ward, if admitted, they were immediately to say that the voice had disappeared and that they now felt fine. Rosenhan then gave his confederates a lesson in managing medication, how to avoid swallowing it by slipping it under the tongue, so it could later be blurted back to the toilet bowl.
The pseudopatients practised for a few days. Much of the practice was, admittedly, passive, letting entropy and odour wend their way in. Their hair grew out and clumped. Their breath got a greenish tinge.
The day that Rosenhan departed for one of Pennsylvania's state hospitals was brilliant. The sky was a frosty, pre-winter blue, the trees like brushes dipped in paint, turned upward and wet with colour. Rosenhan pulled into the parking lot. The psychiatric hospital had gothic buildings, every window caged. Orderlies in pale blue smocks floated on the grounds.
Once in the admissions unit, Rosenhan was led to a small white room. "What is the problem?" a psychiatrist asked.
"I'm hearing a voice," Rosenhan said, and then he said nothing else.
"And what is the voice saying?" the psychiatrist questioned, falling, unbeknown to him, straight into Rosenhan's rabbit hole.
"Thud," Rosenhan said, smugly, I imagine.
"Thud?" the psychiatrist asked. "Did you say thud?"
"Thud," Rosenhan said again.
The psychiatrist probably scratched his head. He could have been confused, bemused. The problem is, we don't know what exactly happened in any of the admitting rooms because Rosenhan has neglected to give any detailed reports. We do know that each pseudopatient, Rosenhan included, said that the voice was of the same sex as he or she, that it had been bothering the pseudopatient to some extent, that he or she had come to the unit on the advice of friends who had heard that "this was a good hospital".
Rosenhan was led down a long hallway. Across the country, the eight other pseudopatients were also being admitted. Rosenhan must have been scared, exhilarated. He was a journalist, a scientist at the apex, putting his body on the line for knowledge. He was taken to a room and told to undress.
Someone inserted a thermometer into his mouth, wrapped a black cuff around his arm, pressed on his pulse and read it: normal, normal, normal. Everything was normal, but no one seemed to see. He said, "You know, the voice isn't bothering me any more", and the doctors just smiled.
"When will I get out?" we can imagine Rosenhan asked, his voice perhaps rising now, some panic here - what had he done, my God.
"When you are well," a doctor answered, or something to this effect. But he was well: 110 over 80, a pulse of 72, a temperature that hovered in the mid-zone of moderate, homeostatic, a machine well greased. It didn't matter. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and kept for many days.
There was a glassed-in office, which Rosenhan came to call the "bull pen". Inside, nurses flurried about, busy as a blizzard, pouring cherry-red medicines into plastic cups. Rosenhan cooperated absolutely. He "took" the pills three times a day and then rushed to the bathroom to spit them back out. He comments on how all the other patients were doing this, too, and how no one much cared so long as they were well behaved.
Psychiatric patients are "invisible ... unworthy of account", Rosenhan writes. He describes a nurse coming into the dayroom, unbuttoning her shirt and fixing her bra. "One did not have the sense that she was being seductive," Rosenhan reports. "Rather, she didn't notice us." He saw patients being beaten. He describes how one patient was severely punished simply because he said to a nurse, "I like you." Rosenhan does not describe the nights, which must have been long, lying in that narrow bed while orderlies with flashlights did 15-minute checks. Did he miss his wife, Molly? Did he wonder how his two toddlers were getting on? That world must have seemed so far away, even though it was no more than 100 miles; this is what science teaches us.
Rosenhan and his confederates were given some therapy, and when they told of the joys, satisfactions and disappointments of an ordinary life - remember, they were making nothing up save the original complaint - all found that their pasts were reconfigured to fit the diagnosis: "This white 39-year-old male ... manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships ... affective stability is absent ... and while he says he has several good friends, one senses considerable ambivalence in those relationships."
In 1973, Rosenhan wrote in Science, one of the field's most prestigious journals, "Clearly, the meaning ascribed to his verbalisations ... was determined by the diagnosis, schizophrenia. An entirely different meaning would have been ascribed if it were known that the man was 'normal'."
The strange thing was, the other patients seemed to know that Rosenhan was normal, even while the doctors did not. One young man, coming up to Rosenhan in the dayroom, said "You're not crazy. You're a journalist or a professor." Another said, "You're checking up on the hospital."
Rosenhan followed all orders while in hospital, asked for privileges, helped other patients to deal with their problems, offered legal advice, probably played his fair share of ping pong, and took copious notes, which the staff labelled as "writing behaviour" and saw as part of his paranoid schizophrenic diagnosis. And then one day, for a reason as arbitrary as his admission, he was discharged.
Rosenhan's paper describing his findings, On Being Sane In Insane Places, was published in Science, where it burst like a bomb on the world of psychiatry. Early in the article, Rosenhan lays it on the line. He claims that diagnosis is not carried within the person, but within the context, and that any diagnostic process that lends itself so readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one. The paper generated a flood of fluorescent missives:
Most physicians do not assume that patients who seek help are liars; they can therefore, of course, be misled ... It would be quite possible to conduct a study in which patients trained to simulate histories of myocardial infarction would receive treatment on the basis of history alone (since a negative electrocardiogram is not diagnostic) but it would be preposterous to conclude from such a study that physical illness does not exist, that medical diagnoses are fallacious labels, and that "illness" and "health" reside only in doctors' heads.
The pseudopatients did not behave normally in the hospital. Had their behaviour been normal, they would have walked to the nurses' station and said, "Look, I am a normal person who tried to see if I could get into the hospital by behaving in a crazy way or saying crazy things. It worked and I was admitted to the hospital, but now I would like to be discharged from the hospital."
And my favourite:
If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a peptic ulcer, I doubt I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.
Robert Spitzer, one of the 20th century's most prominent psychiatrists and a severe critic of Rosenhan, wrote a 1975 article in the Journal Of Abnormal Psychology, in response to Rosenhan's findings. "Some foods taste delicious but leave a bad aftertaste. So it is with Rosenhan's study," he said. In a footnote, he writes, "Rosenhan has not identified the hospitals used in this study because of his concern with confidentiality and the potential for ad hominem attack. However, this does make it impossible for anyone at these hospitals to corroborate or challenge his account of how the pseudopatients acted and how they were perceived." Spitzer later says, in a phone conversation with me, "And this whole business of thud. Rosenhan uses that as proof of how ridiculous psychiatrists are because there had never been any reports before of 'thud' as an auditory hallucination. So what? As I wrote, once I had a patient whose chief presenting complaint was a voice saying, 'It's OK, it's OK.' I know of no such report in the literature. This doesn't mean there isn't real distress."
I don't want to challenge Spitzer, but a voice saying, "It's OK" sounds pretty OK to me.
Spitzer pauses. "So how is David Rosenhan?" he finally asks.
"Actually, not so good," I say. "He's lost his wife to cancer, his daughter Nina in a car crash. He's had several strokes and is now suffering from a disease they can't quite diagnose. He's paralysed."
That Spitzer doesn't say, or much sound, sorry when he hears this reveals the depths to which Rosenhan's study is still hated in the field, even after 30 years. "That's what you get," he says, "for conducting such an inquiry."
Spitzer wrote two entire papers devoted to dismantling Rosenhan's findings, totalling 33 pages of dense, extremely cogent prose. "Did you read my responses to Rosenhan?" he asks. "They're pretty brilliant, aren't they?"
Spitzer argues many, many things. At root, he is arguing for the validity of psychiatry, and its diagnostic practices, as sound scientific, medical procedures. "According to Rosenhan," he writes, "all the patients were diagnosed at discharge as 'in remission'. A remission is clear. It means without signs of illness. Thus all of the psychiatrists apparently recognised that all of the pseudopatients were, to use Rosenhan's term, 'sane'."
Reading Spitzer's articles and the letters following Rosenhan's publication, I find myself swayed, as in a tennis match. On the one hand, the study was flawed. If I drank a quart of blood and if I vomited it in the ER ... which must mean psychiatry really is no different from its supposedly more medical kin. But wait a minute - in the blood scenario, I wouldn't be held for 52 days, and besides, blood is not thud .
For me, psychiatric illness is absolutely real. Just two years after Rosenhan presented his findings, I, a mawkish 14-year-old, entered an east coast psychiatric institution with all sorts of symptoms. I saw the glassed-in nurses' station, the candy stripers pushing chrome carts, the lunatic manic with sweat runnelling down his face, the woman named Rosa, found in the bathroom, neck bunched in a noose. I saw some things.
In Rosenhan's study, the staff beat patients and woke them with, "You motherfucking son of a bitch", and this in private as well as public facilities. I was in a semi-public facility and no staff ever swore at me. It is true that the psychiatrist in charge of my case spent very little time with me, but actually I remember him in crisp detail, because I liked him so much. His name was Dr Su, and he had a little broom of a moustache, and for some odd reason he often had a baseball mitt with him. We used to meet in a small office and he would lean forward, look at the cuts on my arms - like little lips these cuts were, because I kept them fresh and open with stolen shards. He would look at the cuts and say with true feelings, "It's such a shame, Lauren. It's such a shame you have to hurt yourself."
Rosenhan's experiment, like, perhaps, any piece of good art, is prismatic, powerful and flawed. You can argue with it, as in all of the above. Nevertheless, there are, it seems to me, some essential truths in his findings. Labels do determine how we view what we view. Psychiatry is a fledgling science, if it is a science at all, because to this day it lacks firm knowledge of practically any physiological basis for mental illness, and science is based on the body, on measurable matter. Psychiatrists do jump to judgment - not all of them, but a lot of them - and they can be pompous, probably because they're insecure. In any case, Rosenhan's study did not help this insecurity. The experiment was greeted with outrage, and then, at last, a challenge. "All right," said one hospital, its institutional chest all puffed up. "You think we don't know what we're doing? Here's a dare. In the next three months, send as many pseudopatients as you like to our emergency room and we'll detect them. Go ahead."
Now, Rosenhan liked a fight. So he said, "Sure." He said in the next three months he would send an undisclosed number of pseudopatients to this particular hospital, and the staff were to judge, in a sort of experimental reversal, not who was insane, but who was sane. One month passed. Two months passed. At the end of three months, the hospital staff reported to Rosenhan that they had detected, with a high degree of confidence, 41 of Rosenhan's pseudopatients. Rosenhan had, in fact, sent none. Case closed. Match over. Psychiatry hung its head.
Since Rosenhan, psychiatry has tried admirably to locate the physiological origins of mental disease - mostly in vain. Much of the current research is a knowing or unknowing response to Rosenhan's challenge and to the inherent anxieties it raises in "soft" scientists. Spitzer says, "I'm telling you, with the new diagnostic system in place, Rosenhan's experiment could never happen today. [In the 1970s, Spitzer and a group of colleagues completely revised the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders, or DSM for short, tightening the diagnostic criteria, taking away from it signs of subjectivity and psychobabble.] You would not be admitted and in the ER they would diagnose you as deferred." (Deferred, by the way, is a special category that allows clinicians to do just that, officially put off a diagnosis due to lack of information.) "No," repeats Spitzer, "that experiment could never be successfully repeated. Not in this day and age."
I decide to try.
Many things are the same. The sky is a poignant blue. The trees are turning, each scarlet leaf like a little hand falling down on our green autumn lawn.
"You're what?" my husband says to me.
"I'm going to try it," I say. "Repeat the experiment exactly as Rosenhan and his confederates did it, and see if I get admitted."
"Excuse me," he says, "don't you think you have your family to consider?"
"It'll never work," I say, thinking of Spitzer. "I'll be back in an hour."
"And suppose you're not?"
"Come get me," I say.
I do my preparations. I don't shower or shave for five days. I call a friend with a renegade streak and ask if I can use her name in lieu of my own, which might be recognised. The plan is to use her name and then have her, later, with her licence, get the records so that I can see just what has been said. This friend, Lucy, says yes. She should probably be locked up. "This is so funny," she says.
I spend a considerable portion of time practising in front of my mirror. "Thud," I say, and crack up, no pun intended. "I'm, I'm here ..." - and now I feign a worried expression, crinkled crow's-feet at my eyes - "I'm here because I'm hearing a voice and it's saying thud", and then, each time, standing in front of this full-length mirror, smelly and wearing a floppy black velvet hat, I start to laugh. If I laugh, I'll obviously blow my cover. Then again, if I don't laugh, and if I tell the whole truth about my history save for this one little symptom, as Rosenhan and company did in the original experiment, well, then I might really go the way of the ward. There is one significant difference in my re-test setup. None of Rosenhan's folks had any psychiatric history. I, however, have a formidable psychiatric history that includes lots of lock-ups, although, really, I'm fine now.
I kiss the baby goodbye. I kiss my husband goodbye. I haven't showered for five days. My teeth are smeary. I am wearing paint-splattered black leggings and a T-shirt that says, "I hate my generation."
"How do I look?" I say.
"The same," my husband says.
I drive there. I have chosen a hospital miles out of town with an emergency room set up specifically for psychiatric issues. I have also chosen a hospital with an excellent reputation, so factor that in. It is on a hill. It has a winding drive. In order to enter the psych ER, you must stand in front of a formidable bank of doors in a bustling white hallway and press a buzzer, at which point a voice over an intercom calls out, "Can I help you?"
I say, "Yes."
The doors open. They appear to part without any evidence of human effort, to reveal a trio of policemen sitting in the shadows, their silver badges tossing light. On a TV mounted high in one corner, someone shoots a horse - bang! - and the bullet explodes a star in the fine forehead, blood on black fur.
"Name?" a nurse says, bringing me to a registration desk.
"Lucy Schellman," I say.
"And how do you spell Schellman?" she asks.
I'm a terrible speller and I hadn't counted on this little hurdle; I do my best. "S-H-E-L-M-E-N," I say.
The nurse writes it down, studying the idiosyncratic spelling. "That's an odd name," she says. "It's plural."
"Well," I say, "it was an Ellis Island thing. It happened at Ellis Island."
She looks up at me and then scribbles something I cannot see on the paper. I'm worried she's going to think I have a delusion that involves Ellis Island so I say, "I've never been to Ellis Island - it's a family story."
"Race," she says.
"Jewish," I say. I wonder if I should have said protestant. The fact is, I am Jewish, but I'm also paranoid - not as a general rule, of course, but at this particular point - and I don't want the Jewish thing used against me. Of what am I so scared? No one can commit me. Since Rosenhan's study - in part because of Rosenhan's study - commitment laws are far more stringent, and so long as I deny homicidal or suicidal urges, I'm a free woman. I am in control.
I don't feel in control, though. At any moment someone might recognise my gig. As soon as I say, "Thud", any well-read psychiatrist could say, "You're a trickster. I know the experiment." I pray the psychiatrists are not well-read.
This emergency room is eerily familiar to me. I have been in many that were just like this, but that was a long time ago. Still, the smells bring me back: sweat and fresh cotton and blankness. I feel no sense of triumph, just sadness, for there is real suffering somewhere here.
I am brought to a small room that has a stretcher with black straps attached to it. "Sit," the ER nurse tells me, and then in walks a man, closing the door behind him - click click.
"I'm Mr Graver," he says, "a clinical nurse specialist, and I'm going to take your pulse."
A hundred per minute. "That's a little fast," says Mr Graver. "I'd say it's on the very high side of normal. But, of course, who wouldn't be nervous, given where you are and all. I mean, it's a psych ER. That would make anyone nervous." And he shoots me a kind, soft smile. "Say," he says, "can I offer you a glass of spring water?" And before I can answer, he's jumped up, disappeared, only to re-emerge with a tall, flared glass, almost elegant, and a single lemon slice of the palest white-yellow. The lemon slice seems suddenly so beautiful to me, the way it flirts with colour but cannot quite assume it.
He hands me the glass. This, also, I had not expected - such kindness, such service. Rosenhan writes about being dehumanised. So far, if anyone's dehumanised here, it's Mr Graver, who is fast becoming my own personal butler.
I take a sip. "Thank you so much," I say.
"Anything else I can get you? Are you hungry?"
"Oh no no," I say. "I'm fine really."
"Well, no offence but you're obviously not fine," says Mr Graver, "or you wouldn't be here. So what's going on, Lucy?" he asks.
"I'm hearing a voice," I say.
He writes that down on his intake sheet, nods knowingly. "And the voice is saying?"
"Thud."
The knowing nod stops. "Thud?" he says. This, after all, is not what psychotic voices usually report. They usually send ominous messages about stars and snakes and tiny hidden microphones.
"Thud," I repeat.
"Is that it ?" he says.
"That's it," I say.
"Did the voice start slowly, or did it just come on?"
"Out of the blue," I say, and I picture, for some reason, a plane falling out of the blue, its nose diving downward, someone screaming. I am starting, actually, to feel a little crazy. How hard it is to separate role from reality, a phenomenon social psychologists have long pointed out to us.
"So when did the voice come on?" Mr Graver asks.
"Three weeks ago," I say, just as Rosenhan and his confederates reported.
He asks me whether I am eating and sleeping OK, whether there have been any precipitating life stressors, whether I have a history of trauma. I answer a definitive no to all of these things: my appetite is good, sleep normal, my work proceeds as usual.
"Are you sure?" he says.
"Well," I say, "as far as the trauma goes, I guess when I was in the third grade, a neighbour named Mr Blauer fell into his pool and died. I didn't see it, but it was sort of traumatic to hear about."
Mr Graver chews on his pen. He's thinking hard.
"Thud," Mr Graver says. "Your neighbour went thud into his pool. You're hearing 'thud'. We might be looking at post-traumatic stress disorder. The hallucination could be your memory trying to process the trauma."
"But it really wasn't a big deal," I say. "It was just ..."
"I would say," he says, and his voice is gaining confidence now, "that having a neighbour drown constitutes a traumatic loss. I'm going to get the psychiatrist to evaluate you, but I really suspect that we're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder with a rule out of organic brain damage, but the brain damage is way far down the line. I wouldn't worry about that."
He disappears. He is going to get the psychiatrist. My pulse goes from 100 beats a minute to 150 at least - I can feel it - for surely the psychiatrist will see right through me or, worse, he will wind up being someone I know from high school, and how will I explain myself?
The psychiatrist enters the little locked room. He is wearing baby-blue scrubs and has no chin. He looks hard at me. I look away. He sits down, and then he sighs. "So you're hearing 'thud'," he says, scratching the chinless chin. "What can we do for you about that?"
"I came here because I'd like the voice to go away."
"Is the voice coming from inside or outside your head?" he asks.
"Outside."
"Does it ever say anything other than thud, like, maybe, kill someone, or yourself?"
"I don't want to kill anyone or myself," I say.
"What day of the week is it?" he asks.
Now, here I run into another problem. It's actually a holiday weekend, so my sense of time is a little thrown off. Sense of time is one way psychiatrists judge whether a person is normal or abnormal. "It's Saturday," I say, I pray.
He writes something down. "OK," he says. "So you're experiencing this voice in the absence of any other psychiatric symptoms."
"Do I have post-traumatic stress disorder," I ask, "like Mr Graver suggested?"
"There's a lot we don't know in psychiatry," the doctor says, and suddenly he looks so sad. He rubs the bridge of his nose, his eyes momentarily closed. With his head bowed, I can see a small bald spot on the dome of his scalp, and I want to say, "Hey. It's OK. There's a lot we don't know in the world." But instead I say nothing and the psychiatrist looks sad, and baffled, and then says, "But the voice is bothering you."
"Sort of, yeah."
"I'm going to give you an antipsychotic," he says, and as soon as he says this the sadness goes away. His voice assumes an authoritative tone; there is something he can do. "I'm going to give you Risperdal," he says. "That should quiet the auditory centres in your brain."
"So you think I'm psychotic?" I ask.
"I think you have a touch of psychosis," he says, but I get the feeling he has to say this, now that he's prescribing Risperdal. It becomes fairly clear to me that medication drives the decisions, and not the other way around. In Rosenhan's day, it was pre-existing psychoanalytic schema that determined what was wrong; in our days, it's the pre-existing pharmacological schema, the pill. Either way, Rosenhan's point that diagnosis does not reside in the person seems to stand.
"But do I appear psychotic?" I ask.
He looks at me. He looks for a long, long time. "A little," he finally says.
"You're kidding me," I say, reaching up to adjust my hat.
"You look," he says, "a little psychotic and quite depressed. And depression can have psychotic features, so I'm going to prescribe you an antidepressant as well."
"I look depressed?" I echo. This actually worries me, because depression hits closer to home. I've had it before and, who knows, maybe I'm getting it again and he sees it before I do. He writes out my prescriptions. The entire interview takes less than 10 minutes. I am out of there in time to eat Chinese with the real Lucy Schellman, who says, "You should've said 'thwack' instead of 'thud', or 'bam bam'. It's even funnier." Later on, I fill my prescriptions at the all-night pharmacy. And then, in the spirit of experimentation, I take the antipsychotic Risperdal, just one little pill, and I fall into such a deep, charcoal sleep that not a sound comes through, and I float, weightless, in another world, seeing vague shapes - trees, rabbits, angels, ships - but as hard as I peer, I can only wonder what is what.
The following is the second part of the story:
It's a little fun, going into ERs and playing this game, so over the next eight days I do it eight more times, nearly the number of admissions Rosenhan arranged. Each time, I am denied admission, but, strangely enough, most times I am given a diagnosis of depression with psychotic features, even though, I am now sure, after a thorough self-inventory and the solicited opinions of my friends and my physician brother, I am really not depressed. (As an aside, but an important one, a psychotic depression is never mild; in the DSM, it is listed in the severe category, accompanied by gross and unmistakable motor and intellectual impairments.) I am prescribed a total of 25 antipsychotics and 60 antidepressants. At no point does an interview last longer than 12 and a half minutes, although at most places I needed to wait an average of two and a half hours in the waiting room. No one ever asks me, beyond a cursory religious-orientation question, about my cultural background; no one asks me if the voice is of the same gender as I; no one gives me a full mental status exam, which includes more detailed and easily administered tests to indicate the gross disorganisation of thinking that almost always accompanies psychosis. Everyone, however, takes my pulse.I call back Robert Spitzer at Columbia's Institute for Biometrics.
"So what do you predict would happen if a researcher were to repeat the Rosenhan experiment in this day and age?" I ask him.
"The researcher would not be admitted," Spitzer replies.
"But would they be diagnosed? What would the doctors do about that?"
"If they only said what Rosenhan and his confederates said?" he asks.
"Yeah," I say.
"They would be given a diagnosis of deferred."
"OK," I say. "Let me tell you, I tried this experiment. I actually did it."
"You?" he says, and pauses. "You're kidding me." I wonder if I hear defensiveness edging into his voice. "And what happened?" he says.
I tell him. I tell him I was not given a deferred diagnosis, but almost every time I was given a diagnosis of psychotic depression plus a pouch of pills.
"What kind of pills?" he asks.
"Antidepressants, antipsychotics."
"What kind of antipsychotics?" he asks.
"Risperdal," I say.
"Well," Spitzer says - and I picture him tapping his pen against the side of his skull - "that's a very light antipsychotic, you know?"
"Light?" I say. "The pharmacological rendition of low-fat?"
"You have an attitude," he tells me, "like Rosenhan did. You went in with a bias and you found what you were looking for."
"I went in," I say, "with a thud, and from that one word a whole schema was woven and pills were given, despite the fact that no one really knows how or why the pills work or really what their safety is."
Spitzer clears his throat. "I'm disappointed," he says, and I think I hear real defeat, the slumping of shoulders, the pen put down. "I think," he says slowly, and there is a raw honesty in his voice now, "I think doctors just don't like to say, 'I don't know'."
"That's true," I say, "and I also think the zeal to prescribe drives diagnosis in our day, much like the zeal to pathologise drove diagnosis in Rosenhan's day, but, either way, it does seem to be more a product of fashion, or fad."
I am thinking this: in the 1970s, American doctors diagnosed schizophrenia in their patients many times more than British doctors did. And now, in the 21st century, diagnoses of depression have risen dramatically, as have those of post-traumatic stress disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It appears, therefore, that not only do the incidences of certain diagnoses rise and fall depending on public perception, but also the doctors who are giving these labels are still doing so with perhaps too little regard for the DSM criteria the field dictates.
Here's what's different: I was not admitted. I was mislabelled, but not locked up. Here's another thing that's different: every single medical professional was nice to me. Rosenhan and his confederates felt diminished by their diagnoses; I, for whatever reason, was treated with palpable kindness. One psychiatrist touched my arm. One psychiatrist said, "Look, I know it's scary for you, it must be, hearing a voice like that, but I really have a feeling that the Risperdal will take care of this immediately." In his words, I heard my words, the ones I, as a psychologist, often use with patients: You have this. The medication will do this. I speak such words not to promenade my power, but just to do something, to bring a balm. If we can only fix a mystery in space - Atlantic blue depression, the haziness of happiness and where on the continuum it lies - if we can only pin these things down for just the time it takes a neuron to pulse, well then maybe we could get our hands and heads around emotion. I believe this is what drove the psychiatrists I saw, not pigheadedness. One psychiatrist, upon handing me my prescription, said, "Don't fall through the cracks, Lucy. We want to see you back here in two days for a follow-up. And you know we're here 24 hours a day, for anything you need. I mean that. Anything."
I felt so guilty then, so touched. "Thank you so much," I said. "I can't tell you how much your kindness means."
"Be well," he said.
Three weeks have passed since my last ER debacle, and out of the blue my daughter has developed an obsession with Band-Aids. Her dolls have many hurts not visible to the human eye. I come home at the end of the day and find Band-Aids applied to the exposed floor joists, the kitchen cabinets, the walls, as though the walls themselves are wounded. Our house hurts, and it is old. In the night it creaks. My daughter cries. Sometimes she cries for no reason at all, except, I think, that there are thuds we cannot capture, and when this knowledge dawns on her she throws herself to the floor and screams, "I just want to go to the zoo!" I comfort her, then, with Band-Aids. The Band-Aids soothe, even though we don't know just what or where her wound is.
Rosenhan used the results of his study to discredit psychiatry as a medical specialty. But are there not many, many diseases or wounds in our country's pain clinics, oncology centres, paediatric wards, where etiology, pathogenesis, even label itself, are hazy? Does the woman have fibromyalgia or Epstein-Barr virus? Does the person have epilepsy or a brain tumour too small to be detected? For a time, Rosenhan himself was suffering from a mysterious disease that could be given many names, depending on the practitioner.
I'd like very much to help Rosenhan, who is still in a west coast hospital, paralysed, even his vocal cords. I'd like to tell him that I redid his study and had a grand old time, because I think it would please him to know this. I would like to visit. "I don't think now would be a good time," Jack, his son, says. "He still can't talk and he's very tired."
But it's not talking I'm after. I'd just like to see him. I picture, right now, a nurse bathing him. I don't even know the man, but I have an unreasonable fondness for him. I'm partial to jokesters, to adventures, to people in pain. As an ex-mental patient, I'm impressed with anyone who cares to understand the intricacies of that distant world. So I would bring Rosenhan gifts, this essay, an apple, a watch with a face large enough to see the swirl of time and, from my daughter, boxes and boxes of Band-Aids
· David Rosenhan recently recovered from his illness and returned to his post as emeritus professor of law and psychology at Stanford University.
To blog, or not to blog: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
Apologies to Bill.
The following is a true story of how a woman hid from some cops for some years while the woman was pregnant. The complete story can be found here.
Around 1979 I found myself living in Portland, Oregon. There I met a rather unattractive woman of easy virtue, dishonest character, below average intelligence, and an obsession with being popular. She was in a gang of drug dealers and prostitutes.I met her because she came into my place of employment and (with her boyfriend who was on parole from Arizona State Penitentiary) ripped off the merchandise.
As fate would have it sometime later she and I actually went on a date. After that first date I decided it would not be wise to pursue the relationship. However, she was adamant and soon began bugging me and my friends. She and her psycho friends followed us around and harrassed us where we lived. I lived in a dormitory on Portland State University at the time.
The day after our first date she called my boss and told him I lived with her and that I should give her money for groceries. (She actually needed the money for drugs for her and her gang.) I finally got my boss to come down from his high horse and not bug me to give her money. From that day on she made a practice of calling my various bosses over the years and trying to get them to order me to do what she ordered.
In part because she and her friends continuously bugged me to be her boyfriend and to give her money for this or that reason, I soon found myself paying her rent and hanging out at her apartment more and more.
Within a couple of weeks after our first date, I had sort of moved into her apartment because everytime I went back to spend a night in the dormitory, she and her friends would come over and bug me to go to her apartment. As they told me over and over, "You don't live in the dorm anymore. The apartment is your home now". Faye and her friends really knew how to harass a person.
Soon thereafter I met the future psycho mother-in-law.
The mother wanted to know why I was living with her daughter. And then...
and then the psycho mother demanded that I marry her daughter.And demanded......and demanded....and screamed...and over a period of a month or so even became violent when I refused. The crazy mother even screamed at me that if I didn't marry her daughter, her daughter's father wouldn't speak to his daughter.
I figured why marry the daughter when the daughter was still screwing half the guys on the block and the daughter was always drunk or high on drugs.
When I explained to the mother that marrying someone I had only known for a month or two was not a good idea, the mother, as usual, became furious.
The psycho mother remained furious with me throughout the short marriage with herdaughter.
After the marriage the psycho mother-in-law showed an even more bizarre side.
She tried to tell us (her daughter and I) what we could eat and what we couldn't eat; what books we could and could not read; what television shows we could watch and not watch; what clothes we could wear and what not to wear; where we could live and where not to live.
The psycho mother-in-law even tried to tell us what we could and could not talk about.
Man, she was the ultimate control freak.
What is really bizarre, before, during, and after this short marriage, the psycho
ex-mother-in-law's daughter continued to have a sleazy affair with her boyfriend behind my back.One of the weird characteristics displayed by the daughter was a need to manipulate those around her. This included almost every guy she met.
Anyway, shortly after our first date, she tried to get her other boyfriend (the guy on parole) and I to fight over her. Apparently it worked. He attacked me with the head of a hatchet one afternoon after I got an anonymous message to meet him.
That sneaky attack put me in the hospital. It took me awhile to recover.
After I recovered somewhat, and after the daughter and I got married, we decided to move to Tucson, where I could enroll in the University of Arizona.
One of the undeclared reasons for moving to Tucson was to get the daughter away from her gang influences.
We moved to Tucson where I got a job working nights and made preparations to go to the University of Arizona.
However, unbeknownst to me, the daughter got involved with a gang once again and, apparently, committed some crimes with her new gang. This caused the Tucson cops to want her for various reasons. One night a couple of Tucson cops came to where I was working and asked me if I knew where she was at. I told them she was at home but it turns out she wasn't. Once Faye had found out she was wanted, she hightailed it back to her parents' house in Portland, Oregon.
Of course, she did all this without my knowledge. Later on, however, I found out she was pregnant. Also, later on, during and after the divorce, she was able to hide from the Tucson cops and the Portland cops in Washington County, Oregon. Faye, her mother, and Roger Weidner cooked up a scheme to hide Faye from the cops that entailed falsely accusing me of various crimes, some of which are listed below. The part of the scheme that involved falsely accusing me of various crimes behind my back, I found out many years later, convinced some people to help hide her. I'm not sure, though, if the people helping Roger Weidner and the Oekermans hide Faye knew they were, in reality, hiding her from cops.
The following are just some of the crimes I was falsely accused of in order to gain sympathy for Faye so people would help Faye hide from the cops.
- Being a homosexual
- Having AIDS
- Being an ex-convict
- Being addicted to heroin and cocaine
- Being a pedophile
- Being a Satanist.
- Being a child molester
- Sniffing glue for years as an adolescent
- Being an arsonist
- Being a woman beater
- Shooting up a vehicle the ex-wife and I owned
- Being a bank robber
- Being a drug, guns, etc. smuggler
- Being a car thief
- Being a burglar
- Being married to the ex-wife when I'm not
- Being a forger
- Being a rapist
All this scheming, hiding, and falsely accusing me in order to hide Faye from the cops was done behind my back.
A couple of weeks after Faye mysteriously disappeared from our residence in Tucson, I got a call from her telling me I had to move back up to Portland.
So I did. By necessity I had to move in with the ex-wife at her parents' house.
Because the ex-wife was pregnant I was expected to stay in the house at almost all times.
- I was not to go out and get a job.
- I was not to enroll in either the local community college or the university in Portland.
- I was not to do anything with friends.
Nevertheless, I did go out and get a job.
During this time the ex-wife became convinced I was having an affair with every woman I came into contact with.
Because the ex-wife was convinced I was having an affair with every woman I came into contact with, her hostility towards me was seemingly constant.
When I went to work she would come to my work and accuse me of having affairs, or of being a homosexual because many times
after work (when I was working days) I would go out and play basketball or go
to chess lessons or chess practice sessions.The ex-wife even tried to run me over with a vehicle on a couple of occasions.
She would also spy on me from outside the building of where I worked.
After about a month of this nonsense I suggested we move out of her parents' house and get an apartment. The psycho mother-in-law said, "No."
The ex-wife said, "No."
I said, "Yes" and moved into an apartment. The really difficult job was getting my stuff out of the psycho house. It was so difficult I was only able to retrieve a few of my belongings.
One day I made arrangements to come over and pick up some clothes. When I arrived at the psycho house the ex-mother-in-law slammed the door in my face and called the police.
As I was walking away, a cop car pulled up and hauled me off to jail where I paid fifty dollars bail and got out of jail.
The charge against me was criminal mischief. When I went to court the judge
(Judge Brown of Multnomah County) threw the case out and gave my ex-mother-in-law a lecture about using his courtroom to manipulate me into staying in her house.I found out later she had made the rounds around the courthouse trying to find someone to order me back into the psycho house.
My wife managed to get a lawyer by the name of Roger Weidner to be her divorce attorney. It turns out at the time this Roger Weidner was one of the most mentally ill, psychopathic citizens to ever inhabit Oregon. If you click on the link above and read about Roger, you will find he lies about almost everything and he instructs his clients, buddies, and members of his gang to falsely accuse almost everybody of heinous crimes.
Soon after moving into an apartment I realized my ex-wife's gang buddies were following me around. Soon after that I noticed guys in suits following me around.
Shortly before the divorce and on the day of the birth of my son I got a phone call from the ex-wife from the hospital telling me to get down to the hospital as fast as I could. So I did.
When I got to the hospital there was the psycho ex-mother-in-law. When she saw me she became furious. I found out later that I wasn't supposed to know when the son was born because the ex-in-laws had already made plans to terminate my parental rights without my knowledge.
Not only was the ex-mother-in-law furious, but she immediately ordered me to leave and when I didn't she ordered the nurses to order me to leave. At first they wouldn't do it, but after twenty or thirty minutes of the ex-mother-in-law screaming and getting in my face and blustering about like an unhinged loony, one of the nurses suggested I leave.
Even though I had hardly talked to the ex-wife or had much of a chance to see the son I agreed to leave.
As I was about to leave the ex-mother-in-law rushed at me once more and I turned to her and said loudly something along the lines of "Get away from me, or I'll kill you," or something like that. I was hoping she would quit bothering and threatening and harassing me. But, she never did.
Then I left the hospital. Shortly thereafter the ex-wife and I were divorced.
Senator Gordon Smith is a co-sponsor of National Guard and Reserves Reform Act for the 21st Century.
Mr. WALDEN of Oregon (for himself, Mr. Blumenauer, Mr. DeFazio, Ms. Hooley of Oregon, and Mr. Wu) sponsors H.R. 3739. A bill to waive time limitations specified by law in order to allow the Medal of Honor to be awarded posthumously to Rex T. Barber, of Terrebonne, Oregon, for acts of valor during World War II in attacking and shooting down the enemy aircraft transporting Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; to the Committee on Armed Services.
Senators Wyden and Smith are sponsoring S. 2039. A bill to waive time limitations specified by law in order to allow the Medal of Honor to be awarded posthumously to Rex T. Barber of Terrebonne, Oregon, for acts of valor during World War II in attacking and shooting down the enemy aircraft transporting Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; to the Committee on Armed Services.
At the request of Mr. Wyden, the name of the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Corzine) was added as a cosponsor of S. 1484, a bill to require a report on Federal Government use of commercial and other databases for national security, intelligence, and law enforcement purposes, and for other purposes.
Well, since everybody on the planet thinks my website is sleazy, I might as well link to
A Vote Of Thanks.If we're going to take on the black homophobes who preach religious bigotry, we should also take the time to praise the black heroes who stand up for equal rights for all. Last week, when the Ohio Senate voted to ban gays and lesbians from getting married, all 3 African American senators voted against the anti-gay bill. For all the talk about black homophobia, it's worth noting that many black leaders are on the front lines of the fight for equality.
The vote last week in Ohio was not easy. Eighteen members of the state Senate voted in favor of that state's version of the Defense of Marriage Act, while only 15 senators voted against it. But all three black senators voted the right way. Assistant Minority Leader Mark Mallory voted against the bill. Senator Tom Roberts opposed the bill. And Minority Whip C.J. Prentiss voted against the bill.Senator Prentiss was perhaps the most colorful leader of the opposition. Prentiss quoted from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and labeled the bill "good, old-fashioned discrimination."
When Ohio Christian Coalition executive director Chris Long testified that God ordained marriage, and that it has since been “favored by civilization after civilization for procreation," Prentiss wisely asked if the Christian Coalition would favor an amendment to outlaw divorce.
I don't know why, but this post makes me feel good. I learned about a sports star and an interesting person I had never heard of before.
Where Jack leads, the Oregonian follows.
The One True b!X has a post about Portland's reservoirs being listed as historic. This is supposed to be a secret but I'm going to tell my four faithful drunk readers in Joe's Saloon in the Virgin Islands who the One Tru b!X really is. He's a secret agent for the Reservoir Bureau of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and he's in Portland to spy on Portland's attempt to bury our historic fishing holes.
The Gweilo Diaries: China's "Missing" Middle Class has a link that leads here and from there you go here and then.....oh, I'm so confused, I thought for sure there was a Chinese Middle Class and that I could sell them something....anything....and become rich, YOU UNDERSTAND!!!!!!....RICH!!!>>>RICH!!!......beyond my creditors' wildest dreams.
But no, it was not to be, and what's even worse is that Living in China and Takkun no Curry Bento won't show any more boobie pics. Aaaarrrgggghhhhh!!!!!!
Cato the Youngest has a post about why Iraq needs the Kurds. Iraq does, indeed, need the Kurds as well as the Assyrians.
For more info about Kurds click here and here. For info about Kurds and Assyrians click here. To learn more about Assyrians, click here and here.
Absinthe has a cold. I hope she gets better. I know when I have a cold I discover the nose hairs from hell.
At least when I have a cold, I don't worry about the bugs from hell.
She left a comment on a post about about obesity and I agree with her. Check out Heather's Obesity Rant
I've had a very good mother-in-law and I've had the psycho mother-in-law from hell. Visit
Mother-In-Law Stories and Mother-In-Law JokesPosted: 1-NOV-03
Q. What should you do if you see your Mother-In-Law rolling around in pain on the ground?
A. Shoot her again.
Posted: 21-OCT-03What's the difference between a catfish and a MIL?
One's a scum sucking bottom dweller, and the other one is a fish!
Posted: 29-DEC-02I bought my MIL a chair for Christmas, but she wouldn't plug it in.
Now check out Mother In Law: Variations On A Theme
By the way, my very good mother-in-law was Jewish and she had a mother who was Jewish and for some reason everytime I was around the mother of the mother I found myself eating lots of soup. I wonder why.
As a person who worked for a company who did customer support for various computer companies, I know first hand how some customers have difficulties with customer support. I wasn't IT support for Dell or Gateway, though. The companies I was IT for will remain unidentified, even though their customer service support was, in my opinion and according to surveys, pretty good. Unfortunely many customer support centers are being exported overseas, especially to India, because workers work for less and, besides, many in the corporate world view customer support to be not only "revenue negative" but a pain in the butt as well. By "revenue negative" I mean that customer support costs money but produces no immediate income.
Personally, I view customer support as extremely important because a happy customer is a customer who will buy more products and tell friends, neighbors, and relatives about what the customer buys and this in turn causes more products to be sold. The idea of the worth of good customer service seems obvious to me but, apparenty, in much of the current corporate culture, immediate gratification is where it's at.
Senor Green has a post about his difficulties with Gateway customer support.
Wendy McElroy has an excellent editorial entitled " A Man's (and Woman's) Home Is a Castle". The following is an excerpt:
The story of Anthony Bars -- the 4-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death in Indiana by foster parents with a criminal record of child abuse -- continues.Due to media and public outrage, the caseworker who recommended removing Anthony from an earlier, loving foster parent is facing charges. Denise Moore is accused of official misconduct and of falsifying reports in an adoption proceeding: misdemeanor offenses.
Sadly, Anthony is just one in a long list of children neglected or abused by Child Protective Services in state after state. In his case, the press is still pounding on why child welfare officials never disciplined Moore for her actions and cited state confidentiality laws at almost every question asked.
Emerging scandals and conflicts in Indiana and elsewhere should not be allowed to distract from more fundamental questions: When should a third party have the terrible right to separate a child from its parents? By what right do civil servants enter your home and threaten to remove your children if you do not answer accusations of abuse -- often accusations made anonymously -- to their satisfaction?
What can you say?
Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/27/2004 | Police chief arrested in prostitution stingThe longtime chief of the Runnemede Police Department was among those caught in a prostitution sting yesterday at a Maple Shade brothel, police said.
James Martin Leason, 56, was arrested around noon as he left an apartment at the Arbors Apartments on South Lenola Road, police said.
Also arrested, police said, were the brothel's madam, two prostitutes and two others.
I wonder if what the chief did is as bad as a cop (like the one we have here in Washington County) having sex with female informants.
According to a report - Boston.com / News / Local / Mass. / Prison chief out; Geoghan case cited - apparently the taxpayers of MA have been paying for a completely corrupt prison system. I wonder what they think about that. The following is an excerpt from the news report:
A three-member panel appointed at Governor Mitt Romeny's request, is investigating Geoghan's slaying, and concluded in its preliminary findings that Grant tolerated a "culture" at the Concord prison that allowed guards to abuse inmates with impunity, the Globe reported last month, citing two state officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The loonies here in Oregon spend a great deal of time trying to infiltrate many of the email lists I'm on. The following from Roger Weidner and his Oregon neo-Nazi loonies accidently got posted to one of the email lists I'm on. This particular email list is about fathers' rights. The following is what was sent to this email list. My reply follows what is immediately below.
Subject: Chief Justice Carson, Attorney General Myers Confronted "AGAIN" About Court Corruption US~Oregon Observer NewspaperUS~Oregon Observer Newspaper February, 2004
Pictures can be viewed at: www.avoiceforchildren.com Newswire, Declaratory Judgement article links
Chief Justice Carson, Attorney General Myers Confronted "AGAIN" About Court Corruption
Us~Oregon Observer StaffLaw Commission Chairman and State Representative Lane Shetterly shuts down hearing to block angry citizens from testifying about the wide spread corruption and abuse in the Oregon Court system and in the Oregon State government in general.
On December 12, 2003 the Oregon Law Commission met in Hearing Room D in the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon. Those in attendance besides Shetterly included Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Carson, Jr., Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, Oregon State Senator Vickie Walker, Wilamette University Law School Dean Simon Simeonides, Marsha Walters, Dom Vitri, Wendy Johnson, David Kenagy, Greg Mowe and Sandra Hansberger.
Also present, and invited to testify were 5 or 6 representatives from different state agencies and from Governor Kulongoski's office. Among the other 30-35 concerned citizens present, but not invited to speak were Roger Weidner, l998 Oregon Reform Party candidate for governor and currently president of Oregon Judicial Watch; Pamela and Will Gaston, directors of A Voice For Children; Susan Detlefsen, Director Oregon Family Rights; Dee Michaels, Grandparents
for Family Justice; Yvonne Heinrichs, Provably Innocent Prisoners (POP); Velma and Ernie Hartwig, FAIR Family Advocacy Group; Ed Johnston, Advocate and Lobbyist for Constitutional Government.An hour into the hearing the fire alarm sounded. In the hall outside the hearing room Susan Detlefsen (who had emailed Judge Carson a copy of a letter she had sent to the League of Women Voters about the ongoing fraud and family and child abuse by "Children and Families"), confronted Carson and identified herself. Judge Carson nervously responded that he knew who she was. As Judge Carson was walking down the hall Roger Weidner, who has testified about the court corruption before Carson in the Supreme Court and prior Law Commission hearings, again approached him and said that although there has been some improvement with the corruption problem in the courts, it is still a very serious intolerable problem. Judge Carson told Weidner "keep up the good work". As Judge Carson walked through the exit doors on the South side of the Capitol Pamela Gaston approached him (see picture) and said she had filed a Petition in the Supreme Court naming him. He said "I understand". She then said to him, as he stood silent, "Our child (Melissa Gaston) is not released, our houise has been stolen, we are not going to do this, Mr. Carson."
As the Commission members were standing across the street, waiting for the all clear signal, the subject of the conduct of former prosecutor Roger Weidner came up. Will Gaston, standing near Judge Carson said "Well, you know Roger is usually right"; to which Judge Carson responded by saying, "Yes he is."
The hearing was scheduled to coontinue until 5pm. At 4:30pm Shetterly stated he was concluding the meeting. Roger Weidner immediately stood and told the panel, "You can't do this. The people here have come from all over the state to testify about the outrageous way they have been abused by the corruption in the court system and state agencies, you must let them be heard." As Weidner was speaking the others wanting to testify started demanding to speak. The Commission members were obviously embarassed and confused while being confronted. Weidner approached Attorney General Hardy Myers who was still sitting down and said "Hardy the corruption going on in the court system and these state agencies is out of control. There will be violence if there is not immediate action taken to stop this corruption and abuse of the citizens."
As Weidner was speaking to Myers, Judge Carson stood by listening as did many of the other angry citizens present. As the Commission members hurriedly tried to leave the hearing room they were confronted by the angry citizens who had not been allowed to testify. The Commission members were obviously embarassed and intimidated by the harsh criticism they were receiving from their constituents. Roger Weidner told the group "When the government fears the people you have liberty; when the people fear the government you have tyranny."
Weidner also quoted Thomas Jefferson who said what he feared more than standing armies was the tyranny of a corrupt judiciary. Weidner said it is the tyranny of a corrupt judiciary that the citizens of Oregon have been enduring for far too long. Weidner quoted Abraham Lincoln who said, "Our life our liberty depends on preserving the constitution as our founding fathers made it inviolate. The people are the rightful masters of both the courts and theconstitution, not to overthrow the constitution but to overthrow those who subvert it." Weidner said the time is now for all citizens to forcefully notify their elected public officials and inform them that they must act immediately to end the wide spread corruption, in our courts and state government, and restore clean constititutional government to the citizens of Oregon.
After the hearing there was a candlelight vigil sponsored by Oregon Family Rights and A Voice For Children, in memory of the children and families who have been injured and destroyed by CAF (Children and Families), formerly SOSCF (State Offices for Services to Children and Families), formerly CSD (Child Services Division).
The following is my reply:
The US-Oregon Observer, the Oregon Family Rights Association, Roger Weidner, and some of the others mentioned below are members of a loony, small sect of white supremacists who are also affiliated with the neo-Nazi movement, the Christian Identity Movement and the Sovereign Citizen Movement and they are so far out of the mainstream of Oregon society that very few people take them seriously.That coupled with the fact that some associates of the above mentioned people have been busted by the FBI, the ATF and local law enforcement and are currently serving sentences for bank robbery, fraud, income tax evasion, theft, weapons violations, and drug violations indicate that these people will never influence how courts are run, which fathers' rights legislation will be passed, etc. These people are poison to any kind of fathers' rights agenda or family rights agenda and they will never accomplish anything in Oregon other than going to jail, which is where a lot of them have been and many are going to be.
I imagine Law Commission Chairman and State Representative Lane Shetterly, Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Carson, Jr., Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, Oregon State Senator Vickie Walker, Wilamette University Law School Dean Simon Simeonides, Marsha Walters, Dom Vitri, Wendy Johnson, David Kenagy, Greg Mowe and Sandra Hansberger are pretty sick of the loonies constantly disrupting meetings and threatending violence and harassing them.
I know I'm sick of the loonies stalking me, my two kids and people I come into contact with.
Whenever I post about fathers' rights, crooked non-profit organizations, the the cult or crazy Marxist feminists I get mass quantities of hate email so I imagine this post will cause the loonies to send mass quantities of hate email to me. And, of course, since this is loony, homophobic, racist Washington County, the loonies will probably send over a few people to insult me, threaten me, and harass me.
Here in loony Washington County, Oregon we have an underground railroad.
We also have a group of ugly old hag white women who are experts at everything, including pointing out to white women that they've been victimized by the black folk, the Mexican folk, the patriarchy, western civilization and a whole host of supernatural victimizers.
We have something called the Washington County Housing Authority. It is supposed to do some jobs mandated by local, state and federal laws. Sometimes they actually do the job but most of the time the Washington County Housing Authority doesn't do anything except look busy. There used to be, and probably still is, a couple of people associated with the Housing Authority who are, and were, also associated with the group of ugly old hags and the underground railroad.
Many times when the ugly old hags would inform a white woman or white women that she or they were a victim or victims of one or more of the victimizers previously stated in the second paragraph, this would cause the white woman or white women to engage in activities that were not socially redeeming, such as; robbery, burglary, assault, starting a meth lab, sometimes even murder, and on and on.
Once the cops, sometimes only a few cops, started looking for the white woman or women for engaging in unseemly and illegal behavior, depending on the circumstance or circumstances, it was time for the various components of the underground railroad to leap into action.
The underground railroad would whisk the white wanted woman or women up to Alaska where the people of the underground railroad believed the meany cops couldn't get to the victimized white woman or women who had to - just really, really had to - almost were forced to - engage in unseemly or illegal behavior because of their victimization.
There is and was a small group of loony preachers and their followers helping the underground railroad and sometimes these preachers and their followers would go to gatherings and shout to the heavens, "Lord Almighty, just for these poor white women to have to live in the same country with the spawn of the devil is terrible, and this is what causes these poor white women to get caught up in a life of crime and it's not their fault because they're the true vicims!!!!"
On a related note: What with all these people a cursing and a praying and a screaming it's a wonder the wildlife or the spawn of the devil in Washington County, Oregon ever got a good night's sleep.
The Buck Stops Here has a post comparing today's candidates' campaigns and the The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. It's a pretty interesting post.
This is from the Gannett News Service and the Newspaper Network of Central Ohio.
COLUMBUS -- A panel of medical and nutrition experts last week blamed lack of activity, deplorable eating habits and poor direction from parents for the rise in obese children.But "the cruelest hoax of all," according to Children's Hunger Alliance chief operating officer Dianne Radigan, is that 40 percent of low-income children are overweight because of a lack of healthy, available food and malfunctioning metabolisms because of starvation.
"When you think of kids who go hungry you think of kids who are skinny," she said. "It continues to surprise people that obesity and hunger are linked. Obesity is another form of malnutrition, and many times linked to those who suffer at some point in the month from lack of food."
I say give them free beer every morning. Beer, the "breakfast of wannabe champions".
I always say, "A beer a day keeps obesity away".
Ok, now I'll get serious. Because kids are kids, I don't really see how busy parents can make sure they get the kids to eat at least one nutritious meal a day until they bring back family oriented TV programming at the dinner hour and get rid of those dinner time commercials extolling the virtues of getting rid of strange body odors, diarrhea, upset stomachs, vomiting and all manner of bodily excretions.
According to an article by the AP in the Washington Times, David Kay says:
"I don't think they exist," David Kay said yesterday. "The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why."Mr. Kay's remarks on National Public Radio reignited criticism from Democrats, who ignored his cautions that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "not a political issue."
"It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information," Mr. Kay said.
Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the gap between his warnings on banned weapons in Iraq and Mr. Kay's findings, the inspector said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."
I don't think the question of whether WMD were found or not concerns most Americans. While the Democrats may think it's a worthwhile issue to pursue, I think most Americans would agree that Bush did not deliberately lie about WMD.
David Kay tends to blame the intelligence community and its analysis that there were WMD, and this is probably accurate, but "intelligence" is not a perfect science and "analysis of raw data" is definitely not an exact science. I think most Americans realize this.
Many pundits who supported the war in Iraq, which I also supported, tend to say the war was basically about Iraq violating U. N. resolutions over and over. Many pundits who didn't support the war bring up the WMD position as Bush's reason for war.
The one thing we do know for sure is that the plans for actions after the initial combat with Iraq's military were less than perfect. We also found out our armed forces were undermanned and our reserve components and the administrative departments of our reserve components were not quite ready for extended deployments.
One of the most disgraceful results of the deployment of so many of our reserve components was the lack of enforcement of laws that protect our reserve servicemembers, especially laws designed to protect their jobs upon their return from duty abroad. This war with Iraq also showed that the Department of Labor is wandering around out in right field trying to figure out where the ball was hit. If the Department of Labor doesn't realize we are in a war, isn't it the President's job to sort of notify the Secretary of Labor, you know, maybe send the Secretary a memo saying something like, "Wake up, wake up, we are sort of in a war. When our reservists return could you sort of make sure at least a few labor laws are being adhered to."
According to this report from the Government Account Office, Customs not only has to deal with illegal drugs, illegal aliens, and possible shipments of illegal weapons into the U.S., but also illegal shipments of texttiles. Below is an excerpt of the report:
To identify potential illegal textile transshipments, CBP uses a targeting process that relies on analyzing available trade data to focus limited inspection and enforcement resources on the most high-risk activity. In 2002, CBP targeted about 2,500 textile shipments out of more than 3 million processed, or less than 0.01 percent.Given resource constraints at CBP ports, CBP’s textile review process for preventing illegal textile transshipment increasingly depends on information from foreign factory visits that CBP conducts, based on the targeting results. However, CBP’s foreign factory visit reports are not always finalized and provided to ports, other agencies, or the foreign governments for timely follow-up. Further, after the global textile quotas end in 2005, CBP will lose its authority to conduct foreign factory visits in former quota countries. U.S. overseas Attaché offices and cooperative efforts by foreign governments can supplement information provided to the ports.
Under CBP’s in-bond system, foreign textiles and apparel can travel through the United States before formally entering U.S. commerce or being exported to a foreign country. However, weak internal controls in this system enable cargo to be illegally diverted from its supposed destination, thus circumventing quota restrictions and payment of duties. Moreover, CBP’s penalties do not deter in-bond diversion. Bond amounts can be set considerably lower than the value of the cargo, and violators may not view the low payments as a deterrent against diverting their cargo.
Steven Den Beste has an excellent post entitled "USS Clueless - American robustness" that should be taught in high schools and colleges.
I like CSPAN for a number of reasons (the main reason being I don't have a life) and one of the reasons is that I get a chance to get to know the Democratic candidates a little better. The coverage is more than just a few soundbites or those things called "debates". I like the candidates....not enough to vote for them.....but I like them.
Sometimes, though, it seems like they have to say some really stupid things to appeal to this or that special interest group. It could be worse. We could live in a one party dictatorship or a theocracy.
I'm not a Democrat and I'm not a Repblican. I'm independent. I have tended not to make too many comments until each party's general campaign candidate is decided. Even then...well, the last two candidates I voted for were a Libertarian Party candidate and then (please chug all the beer from the cans before you throw them at me) Ralph Nader. I do not support the Greens but I like Nader and I didn't think the difference between Bush and Gore was that big a deal.
Before that I voted Libertarian because I wasn't crazy about the Republican or Democratic candidate. Despite what I've heard over and over, the Republicans and Democrats don't seem to be that much different on most issues and before 9/11 foreign affairs didn't seem all that important because it looked like both the Democrats and Republicans were going to screw up what passed as a foreign policy.
On the domestic front the Democrats and the Republicans seemed, especially before 9/11, to be in favor of locking up half of America, making everything criminal, taxing the hell out of the individual while expanding welfare for powerful corporations, and squeezing out small businesses from the national scene and woe to those small businesses that were actually profitable.
On an unrelated note:
It's amazing to me how much work it takes to run for office and how much a person has to sacrifice. Sometimes, though, winning is worth all the sacrifice or so I've been told.
As any sailor can tell you, around Navy bases there's always a certain female criminal element that finds many sailors to be easy pickings. The following is about an old scam that I had been led to believe was on the way out but, apparently, it's still going on. The Navy may be trying to be family friendly, but the Navy is still not very family accurate.
This is how the scam would work. A female criminal type would find out the name of a sailor who was going to be out at sea for awhile, go to certain officials on base, tell them she was married to the sailor and needed some help. Many times paperwork would be initiated so this female criminal type would get financial benefits and base privileges. For reasons of bureaucratic negligence and often times because one department of the Navy has no idea what other departments are doing, many times nobody would ask the sailor or sailors if they had a wife or wives. Of course, many times the female types would over do it. I mean, c'mon, don't you think a female criminal type pretending to be married to four or five guys on the same ship is overdoing it?
Sometimes these females would get caught and slapped on the wrist. The Navy preferred not to deal with this type of fraud and many times just tried to push these types of fraud under the rug, so to speak.
Then, and I find this sort of funny, there were those females who actually marry two or three or four sailors and receive a bunch of benefits. If most of the sailors were out to sea most of the time, then for the wives back on shore it was "party time".
There's also a relatively small percentage of women who are divorcees who find out their ex-husband has enlisted or become an officer and go to certain Navy officials, say they are still married, and get base privileges and financial benefits.
One thing I found out was that once the female criminal types managed to con the Navy into accepting them as "wives", the Navy would give out all sorts of personal and private information about the sailor or sailors to these fake "wives".
I'm not sure if the other services have this sort of problem. Maybe they don't merely because being out at sea for most of the year enables mischief makers back home a lot of freedom to make mischief.
The Shark Blog has a post entitled "Shark Blog: Democrat Expectations" that, in part, says the way to guarantee that students attain high achievement in public schools is
Serious attention must be given to creating learning environments that are intolerant of racism and exclusion and in which high expectations are held for all students; curriculum and teaching practices must recognize differences in ethnicity, language, and culture and teachers must be skilled in teaching students unlike themselves; and in order to close the achievement gap, there must be understanding of the impact of language, culture, race, and poverty on student achievement.
Whatever ever happened to the concept of "teaching" in like, "teaching" -
1. To impart knowledge or skill to: teaches children.
2. To provide knowledge of; instruct in: teaches French
Definitions provided by yourdictionary.com.
If boot camp operated the way the Washington House Education Committee wants public schools to operate, we'd never win any wars.
The ex-wife, her idiot family, and their mentally ill legal advisor have been stalking me, among others, for years. The psycho ex-wife has a small circle of females who she is able to manipulate and get to do the nuttiest things. My ex-wife, her family and Roger Weidner have convinced this small circle of females of all sorts of silly things. The things include Satanic Ritual Abuse, abductions by space aliens and other nonsense.
The psycho ex-wife likes to send these mentally challenged females over to spy on me. When they come over they act really stupid, saying inappropriate things at the weirdest times, trying to act as if they've just got through with "beginning charm school" and trying to convince me how sexy they are by bragging about how many boyfriends they have. If you ask them a question about current events or try to talk about any topical subject, they look at you as if you just came down the mountain with the tablets.
I've been told the psycho ex-wife (who still pretends one day I'm going to come back to her) likes to surround herself with females who are more stupid (is that possible?) than she is and females who are uglier than she is. I wouldn't doubt it. If you saw her family then you would know why they would attempt to surround themselves with people less attractive than themselves.
It's amazing to me the things my ex-wife and her crazy family can get people to do and believe. For example, the ex-wife and her family actually convinced my sister, my mother and Cathy Winters that after the divorce in 1980 I suddenly became a homosexual, a satanist, a member of the Illuminati, a member of the International Jewish conspiracy, a heroin addict, a cocaine addict, a jealous wife beater, a member of the patriarchy who oppresses women, a pedophile, a person who shoots up cars with all sorts of guns, an alcoholic, an addictive gambler and on and on.
Most intelligent people hear all this and think, "Let's see, at the age of twenty six right after the divorce he suddenly becomes all these things. I don't think so."
But the crazies have always been able to find a small group of people stupid enough and gullible enough to believe this nonsense, which is bad enough. But to make matters worse, many times these morons will come over to where I live and bug me to stop doing all these things and come back to the family, or scream at me to quit doing all these things, or they call the cops over and over again and tell the cops I'm doing all these things. Many times this has caused a couple of cops to spend a lot of time trying to come up with evidence that I'm doing all these things. They never do find any evidence, although one particular cop who believes everything loony ex-prosecutor Roger Weidner tells him has spent twenty years investigating me. Of course, this idiot cop spends a good deal of his time fighting the "great homosexual conspiracy to turn all high school students into homosexuals", so you know his enchilada is a few ingredients short. This idiot cop has since retired, or so I'm told.
To give you an idea of just how delusional these imbecilic morons are read egregious actions of the cult.
This link from NathanNewman.org concerns the California prison guards and their union.
From The Lincoln Plawg we have this link and this link and this link, all dealing with the sleazy way the prison industry in California operates.
MedPundit offers some common sense.
Medpundit - Obesity CostsObesity Costs: I posted this as an update to the orignal post below, but the study that purports to show that obesity is costing billions of tax dollars may be statistical hype.
Check out the whole post.
Looks like we've got some people dedicated to wiping out the freedom to have a few drinks and they're not doing it the straight forward way.
Back Door to Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking by Radley BalkoThe year 2003 marked the 70th anniversary of the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed alcohol prohibition in the United States. The 13 years between the passage of the Eighteenth and Twenty-First Amendments saw the alcohol trade go underground, bringing with it all the ancillary crime that comes with a black market. Alcohol abuse in the United States went up, not down, and civil liberties and tax dollars were sacrificed to what amounted to a grand, failed experiment in state-enforced morality.
One would think that, given the failure of Prohibition, Americans wouldn't need to worry about its return. That may not be the case. A well-funded movement of neoprohibitionists is afoot, with advocates in media, academia, and government. The movement sponsors a variety of research organizations, which publish dozens of studies each year alleging the corruptive effects of alcohol. Those studies are taken at face value by well-intentioned policymakers at the local, state, and federal level. New laws are enacted that curb Americans' access to alcohol.
News from NASA:
Spooky Atomic Clocks.January 23, 2004: Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance." Now NASA-funded researchers are using an astonishing property of quantum mechanics called "entanglement" to improve atomic clocks--humanity's most precise way to measure time. Entangled clocks could be as much as 1000 times more stable than their non-entangled counterparts.
Tyler Cowen has a post about the current state of affairs in Haiti. He paints a pretty grim picture.
Some years back when I lived in Beaverton, Oregon and my landlord was Sang Soon Kim, there was a woman who lived upstairs. She was skinny, always dressed in expensive clothes that made her look ridiculous, and she had a son that was about six to eight months old. She also had a black BMW.
Whenever I talked to her she would always say she had a black BMW. If you tried to talk to her about the weather or politics or any subject she would always change the subject back to her BMW. She loved that BMW. She also loved drinking bourbon. Just from counting the empty bourbon bottles she left near the garbage, I would assume she was drinking a bottle a day.
She also had a boyfriend who drove a red Trans Am or Camaro. He would come over, she would scream at him and he would leave. This woman had a mother who would also come over. The mother was an ugly old hag with short hair who dressed expensively. The woman's mother looked ridiculous in her expensive clothes. I guess that means some people just have no taste when it comes to expensive clothes. The mother would come over, scream at her daughter and then leave.
The woman who lived upstairs would get drunk and then decide to drive her black BMW. Many times I saw her get in her car and then drive away and, as she was driving away, she would swerve back and forth. A couple of times she hit a couple of the garbage cans that the neighbors would put out by the street.
I always wondered what she did with her son when she was out driving around drunk. Maybe she took the kid with her.
She once told me she had a restraining order against her boyfriend. I don't know if she was even capable of sobering up enough to be able to get one, but she said there was a senile old judge down at the courthouse that would give a restraining order to anybody. She made some jokes about this senile old judge and that he had a quota of restraining orders to give out each week and so he was asking everybody who came to his courtroom if they wanted a restraining order.
She said you could get a restraining order, then get money from the person the restraining order was against, drop the restraining order, then get it again and again and continue bilking the sucker out of money for quite awhile. Imagine that, turning restraining orders into money making ventures.
I wonder what's bugging Cobb. He's usually so.....sedate and sagacious???.... He has a post and he's pissed. I'm not really sure what he's pissed about because once I saw that the "pissed off" post was by Cobb, I immediately went to the next post....even though I knew the probabilities of the next post being authored by Cobb were great, indeed, because I had noticed, with my keen "notice" superanuater sensor, that maybe Cobb was behind the whole website.
If only I could prove it. That's my dream.
Crimlaw has a post that sort of leaves me and the leaves speechless, but.........if you gotta go somewhere, then go to San Mateo County.
I'm trying to start a rock and roll band and we need a singer. We decided we want a singer who sounds like Robert Plant. Hmmmm......Howard Dean?????...Howard Dean.....yeah, let's hear that speech from Iowa again.
I wonder how easy it would be to convince Howard Dean that being a rock star with lots of young groupies is better than being a doctor or an elected official, or...maybe...even a candidate who's going downhill fast.
American Samizdat has a post about genocide in Ethiopa. It's definitely a must read.
According to the The Volokh Conspiracy we should boycott A AAAdvantage Auto Transport, and National Auto Transport. Eugene, despite his boy jeanius reputation, seems to be a pretty honest person and he gives some pretty good reasons for a boycott so I think I'll try to publicize his boycott a little.
Over the years for various reasons I have boycotted certain businesses. For some reason I can't fathom, me boycotting the companies didn't drive them into bankruptcy, but when I joined with others in boycotting a company, sometimes the company actually changed some of its practices. The following shoe companies I have boycotted at various times in my life, but now buy from them because I've been led to believe they are better corporate citizens than before. I'm probably wrong, though. In any event, the following are footware companies that I once boycotted but feel comfortable today saying that they make good products at ridiculous prices.
I now buy in cycles. One time I'll buy Adidas when they're on sale, then Nike when they have a sale, then Reebok and then Avia. Since I do a lot of walking, running, and yard work I go through athletic shoes like Howard Dean goes through Iowa voters. I prefer the cross country styles because they seem to be better suited to all kinds of activities.
United Farm Workers Union also boycotts some companies and I almost always don't buy from companies the United Farm Workers are boycotting.
TalkLeft has a post about Informants Who Set Up Fake Drug Busts Get a Sentence Break.
Three police informants who set up fake drug busts in Texas were sentenced to between 33 and 41 months in federal prison Thursday. As a result of their actions, dozens of immigrants were falsely charged with crimes.
Jeralyn Merritt also has another post about the detective that was Too Cute. Apparently, this detective utilized his cutsiness to entrap gays into buying illicit drugs. This is a "shame, shame" moment for the sleazy detective.
One of the new types of criminals are the serial false accusers. Click on the preceding link and you can register a serial false accuser.
"I'm innocent, I'm innocent I tell you. I'm not beaming mind control radio waves into anybody's brains. I'm not a member of the secret new world order conspiracy to take over the world!!!"
It all began when my ex-in-laws and their brilliant legal advisor called my sister, Chris Andrea Hays, and told her I was secretly beaming mind control radio waves into her brain. This caused my gullible sister to go into a frenzy. She called my mother, Neta Hays, who also got all tizzied up. They then went to my father, John McClelland Hays, who called up one of his cult buddies and told him to come over to where I live and demand I quit beaming mind control radio waves into my sister's brain. By this time I was beginning to believe these people didn't have any brains to beam mind control radio waves into.
In the meantime, my sister and mother were notifying their friends, fellow church members, and my other relatives that I was a part of the evil new world order conspiracy and beaming mind control radio waves into people's brains with my cool, ultra-modern, mind control radio wave master blaster.
Soon people, including some of my neighbors and some of the people who work up at Thriftway in Aloha, Oregon, were up in arms. Jim Spinden and Dr. Ron Turco were notified and Jim Spinden immediately decided that they needed to send undercover cops over to where I live in order to confiscate my ultra-modern, technologically advanced, mind control radio wave master blaster.
But since Jim Spinden was retired the local DA's office nixed the undercover cop idea and by now, very few people believed in any of Dr. Ron Turco's conspiracy theories, although Dr. Ron and Jim Spinden believe Washington County, Oregon is still having a Satanic Ritual Abuse epidemic.
On a related note:
Back when credulous Jim Spinden was sheriff of Washington County, he had my sister, her son, my mother, and my father become snitches in order to gather evidence that I was a homosexual doing super-natural crimes.
Part of my relatives' duties as snitches was the wearing of body wires to record conversations I had with them. For some reason, whenever my relatives wore body wires they would start walking funny and talking funny. Maybe the body wires made them itch.
They would also say bizarre things like, "Why don't you admit you're a homosexual and that you lied to get into the Navy," or "Where did you hide the corpses after the satanic rituals?" or "Come back to the family, quit being a satanic homosexual and confess to all the evil you've done," or "Bonnie Oekerman is spying on you because she loves you." editors note: crazy Bonnie is the mother of the woman I divorced in 1980. She never recognized the divorce and for years pretended I was still married to her daughter.
On another related note:
Was it Jim Spinden who contacted Cathy Winters and convinced her I was a satanic homosexual bad guy? We know that Roger Weidner, using his prestige as an ex-prosecutor, conned somebody into attempting to tamper with my military records. When the postal inspectors and a couple of FBI agents checked out my military records because they received anonymous phone tips that I was AWOL and doing all sorts of crimes, including bank robbery, forgery, eating corpses, etc., the postal inspectors and FBI agents noticed there was something wrong with my military records. When I first became employed with the U.S. Postal Service after leaving the Navy, I had a background check that included checking out my military records and health records.
After the postal inspectors and FBI agents checked out the records with the state veterans department office, my own originals of my military records, and the federal veterans department, they came to the conclusion that someone had attempted to tamper with my military records. They didn't try to find out though because after their investigations of me turned up nothing, they called it quits. Apparently, checking out people who might tamper with military records is outside their area of jurisdiction.
It's been a while since I posted about 2nd amendment stuff. I'm neither pro-gun nor anti-gun, I'm just pro-2nd amendment. The second amendment is:
A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
Oregon has something similar in its constitution:
Section 27. Right to bear arms; military subordinate to civil power. The people shall have the right to bear arms for the defence (sic) of themselves, and the State, but the Military shall be kept in strict subordination to the civil power[.]
Oregon even has the Oregon Gun Owners.
While I'm on the subject, I would like to say that there are crazies, homophobes, racists and all sorts of lunatics who try to leech themselves to honest activitists for the preservation of the 2nd amendment. One of these white supremacist organizations in Oregon is the "Constitution Party".
It's a damn shame the loonies are always trying to infiltrate honest organizations. They're using the communist trick of "infiltrate and then control". Anyway, the link below is what got me on this subject.
damnum absque injuria: Your Home Is Your Castle - Unless It's In Illinois
MilitaryCorruption.com has a story about a female Master Sargeant MP, Lisa Marie Girman, who got busted for brutality against Iraqi prisoners of war. We are not a nation of thugs, communists, or Nazi's (although we do have some thugs, communists and Nazi's) and for this to have happened is a disgrace.
Insight Mag has an article entitled "Why Bush Won Iowa".
The article says in part:
The Iowa caucuses make the early emergence of a single Democratic challenger a whole lot less likely. The Democrats now head into New Hampshire with four strong and viable candidates all battling for the lead: Kerry, Edwards, Dean and former Gen. Wesley Clark, who ducked the Iowa contest to save his ammunition for New Hampshire.Kerry has the momentum after the Iowa win. But Dean still has the money, that $50 million war chest raised through the Internet and his host of dedicated supporters. Clark has the heavy investment of time, organization and much of the old Clinton network in New Hampshire. And Edwards has the prospect of the South Carolina primary on Feb. 3, where his local Southern roots should give his the advantage.
For all the glow of Iowa's victory, Kerry has a problem. He is broke. He mortgaged his Boston house (for $6.4 million) and plunged almost all of it into Iowa. To make a strong TV showing in New Hampshire (let alone in South Carolina and the costly media markets of New York, Texas, Ohio and California), Kerry has to raise a lot of money fast. That means hours and days on the phone, pleading to potential donors -- time he needs to spend on the stump in New Hampshire.
I suppose if Kerry wins in New Hampshire then he would be a clear front runner who needs money to continue and Dean might be searching for a new shrieking place. I don't think Clark will do so hot and as for the others, only Edwards looks like he might make out ok. However, I'm not a campaign strategist and I'm not one of those brilliant political pundits who saw Dean tripping up the victory aisle in Iowa, so ignore my prognostications and read the Insight article.
Looks like Dr Peter Maguire, deputy chairman of the BMA's board of science is on some sort of hallucinogenic drugs. He says in part:
"Cannabis is a drug that can kill," Dr Peter Maguire, deputy chairman of the BMA's board of science told Reuters. "People are making the conclusion that it is safe where in fact it is actually more dangerous than tobacco....."
Maybe we shouldn't tell Art Garfunkel.
Singer Garfunkel Charged with Marijuana PossessionGarfunkel, the only passenger, was due to appear next Wednesday at the Town of Hurley Court charged with unlawful possession of marijuana. He faces a $100 fine.
Looks like Art is on a crime wave.
What the hell is going on? Kids aren't supposed to have a "boot camp" lunch. Al brings up an interesting subject at the following link: Poynter Online - Thursday Edition: School Lunch Rush.
I think I've read almost everything Clive Cussler has written. One of the characters he created, Dirk Pitt, is one of my favorites. According to The Southern California Law Blog: Author Clive Cussler Sues Filmakers for Changing Sahara Script Over Cussler's Objections.
Good. I hope Clive Cussler wins his lawsuit.
Rick Ross has an interesting post about a cult who uses its influence to bilk the taxpayers out of money and he asks a good question, "Why should taxpayers keep picking up the tab for these polygamists?"
Chief David Brame was the Tacoma Washington police chief who shot himself and his wife in 2003. There was a bunch of Marxist feminist propaganda about the shooting which, of course, was false and was spewed out in order to further the crazy Marxist feminist agenda. Believe it or not, some gullible people fell for the mindless propaganda.
The Chief, in fact, was married to the psycho wife from hell. To her kids she must have been the mother from hell.
The following is the true story of how an extremely mentally ill woman drove her husband to do a terrible thing.
© 2003 The New York TimesReproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
Tacoma, Washington, April 27, 2003 — The wife of the Tacoma police chief was in critical condition today, a day after her husband shot her in the head in a mall parking lot and then fatally shot himself, the authorities said [she died on May 3, 2003].
The shootings occurred at the Olympic Plaza shopping center in Gig Harbor, a maritime suburb across the Tacoma Narrows, a day after abuse accusations in the couple's divorce case appeared in local papers.
Chief David Brame, 44, was pronounced dead at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Detective Ed Troyer of the Pierce County sheriff's office said. Crystal Brame, 35, remained in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center, according to news reports. Hospital officials would not comment on her condition.
Tacoma's city manager, Ray Corpuz, issued a statement today expressing shock at the shootings, which were witnessed by the couple's children, Haley, 8, and David Jr., 5.
"Right now I'd ask that everyone pray for Crystal Brame and for the future of Haley and David Jr.," Mr. Corpuz said. "More than anything, their welfare is on my mind."
The chief and his wife arrived in the parking lot in separate cars, with the couple's children riding with their mother. At one point, the chief took the children to his car, then went back to his wife's car, where the pair engaged in a heated conversation, witnesses told the authorities.
Witnesses reported hearing two quick shots from the parking lot, Detective Troyer said. The children ran toward their mother's car after hearing the shots, he said.
One witness, Dana Mossman, told the The News Tribune of Tacoma, "I heard them say: `Daddy shot Mommy. Daddy hurt Mommy.' "
The children are now in the care of Ms. Brame's mother.
In their divorce case, Crystal Brame had accused her husband of choking her and threatening to kill her, while Chief Brame said that his wife had physically and verbally abused him, according to court records cited by The News Tribune.
Until then, most city officials had been unaware of Chief Brame's conflicts at home, Mayor Bill Baarsma of Tacoma said in an interview today. He recalled how Chief Brame was "beaming" when his wife pinned a star to his chest at his installation ceremony in January 2002 as one of this city's youngest chiefs of police.
Chief Brame "just seemed to be the absolute perfect choice" for the job, Mr. Baarsma said.
The chief had been in the midst of a wrenching departmental audit, Mr. Baarsma said, but his demeanor betrayed little evidence of any deeper problems.
The mayor, who is also chairman of the city's public safety committee, often worked closely with Mr. Brame. He was also Mr. Brame's faculty adviser while a professor at the nearby University of Puget Sound. He remembered the chief as a serious student and one set on advancing himself.
"He rose through the ranks, always finishing at the top," Mr. Baarsma said. Most people in law enforcement in Tacoma knew Mr. Brame. He was a Tacoma native and a graduate of Lincoln High School in the city's working class East Side neighborhood. Once a uniformed officer, he took pleasure policing the streets where he grew up, Mr. Baarsma said.
Catherine Woodard, an assistant chief, is now acting chief, Mr. Corpuz said. The Gig Harbor Police Department is investigating the shooting, with the help of the Pierce County sheriff's office.
Sister tells of long years of abuse David Brame suffered from his wife
October 20, 2003 — I have put together the story of my brother, deceased Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, before the fatal shootings on Saturday, April 26, 2003.David was hired as a rookie for the Tacoma Police Department in December of 1981 at 23 years of age. He worked diligently to move up in the ranks reading and studying books for months to test for promotions. David proudly, but humbly became the police chief in January 2002. He thoroughly enjoyed his police career and worked with the officers to better the department. He was a very trustful, honest person and was well liked by everyone who knew him and worked for him. What you saw with David, was what you got. He would work long hours, go home for awhile, and return at shift change in order to meet with the officers and to be a part of their meetings. He also would ride along with the patrol men and women to get to know them individually, which he felt was important. David took pride in his work and also his home life and children.
David met his wife, Crystal, when she was 20 years old and working for the Tacoma Police Department as a prostitute decoy. She later found an office job working for the courts in Tacoma. David and Crystal were married in August of 1991 and Crystal worked for the first three years of their marriage prior to their daughter Haley's birth.
David had concerns about marrying Crystal from the very beginning but went through with it anyway. One incident that was a red flag for David, and our family, was soon after they met she told him of an old boyfriend who had beaten her so badly she had to be hospitalized. That was where the victim role started in their relationship.
Due to continuing conflicts in their eleven year marriage, David and Crystal separated at the end of February 2003, and their divorce was pending. They had marital discord for about eight years that seemed to start after the birth of their daughter, Haley, in December 1994. The up and down mood swings Crystal had were very wearing on their family. David was always the one on an even keel, quiet, calm and very stable. He always said, "I feel like I'm raising three kids."
Crystal frequently would lash out, scream and yell enough that she would keep David up till after 1:00 AM, not caring that he had to go to work in the morning. He would sometimes go to bed before her and then, in a rage, she would enter the bedroom, turn on the lights and start ranting and raving, keeping him awake for hours. David was not a fighter and never was even as a boy.
David left their home one night to go to our parent's house to get some rest. After he left that night, Crystal called the Gig Harbor police and they came out and took a report. They apparently asked if he had threatened her and she told them no. A report was written but nothing was done. My point is she would take inappropriate steps like that when it was uncalled for, and so minor. Yet she claimed she never told anyone about the "death threats" she accused him of later. I don't think there is any way she would have kept quiet about such threats if they were real, especially since she was so close to her parents.
She practically lived on the telephone. And she told the neighbors, and whoever would listen to her, all kinds of "poor me" stories. When she talked to me on the phone I knew it was going to be an hour conversation, with her controlling it and not giving you a chance to even try to get off the phone. She repeated herself over and over, rambling on and on. It was quite annoying and our whole family went through this experience with her. When we talked, everything she did was a big chore to her, nothing was easy. She made a big deal out of just ordinary daily chores that all mothers do. I often thought she never appreciated being able to be at home with the children and not work.
One time when David was asleep she came into the bedroom and turned the lights on and she held her hands behind her back and then stuck her arms straight out as if she had a gun and pointed it at David. He thought that was very strange. Another time, in the middle of the night when she was pregnant with David Jr., she was crying and upset, sitting in the middle of the bed looking up abortion doctors saying she didn't want to be pregnant. David talked to her about her mental state, but to no avail. This would make her angry and upset, not facing the truth. She was very peculiar and acted as though she never noticed her outbursts.
David owned one gun (not two) and kept it in a locked holster at home. When he got this gun he demonstrated to Crystal the use of it and how careful they had to be because accidents can happen. She transposed what he said to make it look like he was threatening her. She would also pick up stories that David told her regarding his police job and twist them around so as to put herself as the victim somehow and imply that David was the perpetrator.
During their marriage David felt like he never knew what he was going to come home to. He had said when the relationship was "good, it was real good, when it was bad, it was real bad." Crystal was very extreme, seeming to be obsessed in her actions, checking over and over in Haley's crib when she was a baby, as if looking for something that was not there. It was as though she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was a very stressed, anxious-type person who had a difficult time relaxing. David would try to encourage her to get involved in activities outside of the home, make friends, get a job if she wanted, but there was no way he was going to make her happy. Confronting her and trying to give her options to enable happiness just did not work.
David Jr. was born in 1997 and her bizarre behavior continued. David had told me that when David Jr. was a toddler, and was sick with a fever, he had vomited on the family room carpet. Crystal stood over the baby, screaming, and swearing at him. Unfortunately, this was something she did on a regular basis when the baby was in his crib and would wake up crying from what we were told by David.
In July of 1998, Crystal was on a tangent and started slugging David. She bruised him badly and he had pictures taken of this. He said he stood and did not touch her, which was the way my brother would have been.
It was said that little Crystal couldn't hurt him. Well, she did and the hitting continued several times thereafter. She was also continually badgering him and complaining. Her excuse as to how he got the bruises was that she claimed David hurt himself while lifting weights with barbells, but they didn't own barbells then. After their deaths, we also read where he performed ritualistic self-mutilation on a regular basis. Now how odd is that? She went to great lengths to cover herself.
When Crystal got angry with David two or three years ago she told him that she was going to ruin his career. And she also stated at another time that she could be a good actress. David was always an honest man and it hurt him to think he was married to someone who would lie at the drop of a hat and could be so vengeful.
David came home from work early one day and heard Crystal screaming at the kids. Another time he came home and changed David Jr.'s diaper and his bare bottom was beet red with hand prints on it. She told David that she "almost lost it." He had real concerns and expressed this to our family and their family physician. David thought maybe it was a hormone imbalance. The doctor was told then about her hitting him and how out of control she was.
She had a hysterectomy a couple of years ago, but her moods never changed. She was in need of serious help for her mental instability. It wasn't just David that was being abused, their little kids went through a lot emotionally and physically. David listened to Crystal last fall (2002) tell Haley, who was almost 8 years old, that the kids were going to laugh at her school pictures because they didn't turn out good. Of course, she had Haley crying and upset. David had to intervene so many times during these outbursts and stop her from being cruel to their kids.
Haley lost a baby tooth last fall and accidentally dropped it and it couldn't be found. Crystal screamed and yelled at little Haley until she was in tears. One night when David tucked David Jr. in bed when he was about three or four, David Jr. said, "good night asshole." He would call his little cousin a "bastard." David did not swear, but the kids were being sworn at by their mother. It saddened David to see his two little children being raised by an abusive mother. These are just a few horrible incidents the kids and David had to endure.
At Christmas Crystal would buy expensive suits, shirts, ties, and such for David and he would tell her, "These things don't mean anything to me, Crystal. All I ask is for you to be nice to me and you can have the world." She didn't get it. Material things were the most important...looking good on the outside. She didn't want to fix what was going on in her head. Birthdays and Christmas' were so out of whack with her and the gift giving. It would take the kids 45 minutes to open their birthday presents. It was so ridiculous it was sickening. Why would a little 5 year old girl need 35 Barbie dolls? David wanted his kids to have everything nice, but not to that extent. Everything was overboard. The normalcy was not there with Crystal.
Crystal also made over 50 long distance phone calls in a two month period up to Canada calling a couple they met in Palm Springs at a resort a couple of years ago. She ran their phone bills up to $400 to $500 for two months. Why would she call a couple that she "barely" knew? She spent a couple of hours roller blading with a man she just met, leaving David at the pool alone. She also spent a couple of hours in the couple's room with them late one night without David. I wonder what she was looking for?
David and I would talk on the telephone on weekends. If Crystal was out of the house at the time, he would tell me if he had to get off the phone real quick it was because Crystal drove up. She would literally feel the phone to see if it was warm to tell if David was using it or not. I thought it was a horrible way for my brother to live. She was very jealous and insecure.
When David went to Quantico, VA last January 2003 for 7 to 10 days, Crystal gave him a card in his suitcase that was very loving. She told him to have a great time, to go sightseeing, say "hi" to George and Barbara Bush, and told him how much her and the kids loved him and were going to miss him. An abused woman does this? I don't think so!
The allegations in the news that when David moved out of the house he'd left a fortune cookie, a newspaper opened to the obituaries, and a book about a wife being murdered by her husband is ludicrous. Crystal was seemingly determined to ruin him one way or another. She was out of control and doomed for trouble. This whole little scenario fits Crystal to a "T."
We read in the paper that, while David and Crystal were separated, for sixty-one days she never was without one of her family members when out and about until April 26th, the day of the shooting. David and Crystal were together at Haley's school one morning and after leaving Haley in the building, they went to David's car and sat and talked for quite awhile. Why would she sit and talk to him if she was so deathly afraid?
The lies about David threatening to kill Crystal and choke her started after David told her that he was telling his attorney about how abusive she was to the kids. So it was pay back time and she was going to get him good. In retaliation, she started the stories of David choking her three or four times and the supposed death threats. David told us that never occurred, which we believe because she would have had him arrested in a flash. David was not a game player like her. She was so angry with him she was adding more stories to the already strained divorce. The reason no one knew of the threats in the past, is because they didn't happen. David said to me, "She's delusional." What I questioned was if Crystal had been abused wouldn't she have told her attorney when she filed for divorce in February rather than wait until April when David told of her abuse?
Crystal did not have anything to lose making all of the false accusations and David had everything to lose. It was as though she was driving herself to the grave. I do not understand how someone can be so devious and cruel and think they can get away with it. Eventually, liars get caught. And why would she go this far with the stories? Because David never did anything to her in the past except for the shooting on April 26th!
Crystal played yet another victim role of not having any money and being physically abused by David. She had called the police and attorney over minor, made-up stories. So why didn't she call them when she claimed he attempted to choke her? This woman could have had him arrested, moved in with her parents, and been protected if all of this was true. It doesn't take much to see through this.
In David's divorce decree, there are copies of credit card charges that total over $10,000 in the past year, all signed by Crystal from her shopping sprees ($300 here, $500 there, etc.). She went tanning on a regular basis, helped out at the school occasionally, had a beautifully-decorated $300,000 home with custom draperies, Thomas Kincaid paintings, and two new cars. They were all very well dressed in name-brand clothes and they were not purchased at the thrift store either. They had the best money could buy, but it still was not enough. She shopped at Nordstrom's, but tried to portray herself as almost penniless. In December 2002 she bought a beautifully decorated $1,100 Christmas tree. They also had three themed Christmas trees, one for the family room with a ton of snowmen on it, and the other two in the kids' bedrooms with expensive Disney ornaments on them.
She would take pictures of the snowman tree before she took it down after Christmas so she could decorate it in the exact same fashion the following year. This was another "odd, obsessive way" she had. She bought a $900 comforter set for a king size bed that they didn't have and stored it in the closet for the future. Per the TNT she tried to convince storekeepers of her penniless state. Well, why would she shop in a specialty shop in Gig Harbor that was too expensive for her? Someone should have taken pity on her and suggested to her maybe it would be at her best interest not to shop there. There are lots of thrift stores around after all.
Crystal was not only divorcing David, she was brainwashing their kids to think of him as a bad father, gradually pulling them further and further away from him, and was working on bringing down his career. It was very apparent she was coaching Haley and telling her all kinds of lies. That was a very heavy burden David carried and he was backed into a corner by his very own wife. When there are continual lies being made and a person is under the stress of going through a divorce, a man feels devastated losing everything he has worked for and loves.
David talked to her on the phone once while they were separated and she said to him, "Remember when you tried to choke me?" And he replied, "Crystal, you know you're lying." I believe her family was right there listening and she was playing the poor little victim part again. David also told me after they separated she said to him, "Now I can start wearing fingernail polish again." David said to me, "I don't know where that came from." I remember her always wearing bright fingernail polish and lipstick and thick, dark eye shadow. She would even put the dark nail polish on Haley, which was so inappropriate for a little girl.
David was a very good father and his kids were his life. Haley and David Jr. both attended a Christian pre-school and David taught Haley to say grace at mealtime. He tried to provide them with a secure and happy home, taking the time out to read bedtime stories to the kids every night.Crystal never wanted to be a part of that even when the kids were really little. David was the one that would tuck them in at night. He said the kids and him had a ritual of running down the hall each night racing to their bedrooms. He was so proud of Haley's reading abilities and had looked forward to David Jr. starting T-ball this past spring. Of course, this was squashed by Crystal telling him there was no way he was going to participate in any of David Jr.'s T-ball practices and games. She even went so far as to change dentists where David Jr. went because David would always take him and be there for him. So she took it upon herself to take another enjoyment out of David's life. He always encouraged Haley to read and do well in school. The kids were the light of his life and loved them more than anything. It hurt him terribly to see their relationships being ruined due to her insecurities.
When he had the kids on the weekends during the separation, he always made sure they had bubble baths because they never got to do that when the four of them lived together. They were used to Crystal jerking their little arms, pulling them into the shower with her everyday. David would talk to her about the way she would grab Haley's arm. Everything had to be hurry, hurry with her. He wanted it to be relaxing for them and let them be ordinary kids. He would fold out the hide-a-bed and the three of them would camp out and watch TV, which was another treat. If the kids wanted to jump on the bed, he would let them. He wanted them to have a fun, relaxed life like he had as a child. He was a very loyal father with a great sense of humor and enjoyed his family immensely.
When I was with David in April when he had the kids for the weekend, he called her to tell her what time he was bringing the kids to her parents and told her that I was coming along also (this was because he needed someone for a witness due to past problems). I listened to David talk to her on the phone and when he mentioned me going with him she said, " No, I'm going to call my attorney. I'm going to call my attorney." David said, "Crystal, it's my sister." So when he got off the phone with her he told me, "Don't be surprised if the Pierce County Deputies are over there." And I just said, "This I have to see." Crystal and I had never had words with each other in the past and we were always cordial even though there were many times I wanted to sit down and have a talk with her and find out where she was coming from. When we arrived at the Security Gate to the housing community Cyrstal's parent's live in, the parents came along with her in two cars, but there were no deputies. All went fairly well though the kids were definitely not happy. David Jr. walked right past Crystal without a hug after not seeing her for four days, and after getting in her car, jumped back out and ran to his dad and said he wanted to go with him. This was pitiful to witness.
Last year my parents went to their home to babysit the kids for awhile. David Jr. was 4 1/2 years old then and for some reason he hit my mom in the chest. She gave him a little swat on the bottom. When David and Crystal returned, Haley told Crystal that my mom spanked David. After this happened and the divorce had started a year later, Crystal was telling everyone (attorney, psychologist, etc.) that my mom had been abusing the kids for years and also, that they went a year without seeing her. There was no truth to that whatsoever. She and the kids were at the family functions during the holidays throughout the years. She told David during the divorce that my mom was never going to see the kids again. He told me that he told her, "We can get the divorce, but I want my mom to see the kids." This was another problem she started. Of course, I could go into great detail what kind of a mother and grandmother my mom has been, but the best way to describe her is being loyal, loving, and very dedicated to family in the same manner as my father is. They have eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren and there have never been any problems with either of my parents with the grandchildren. Unfortunately to this day, our family has not seen the kids since the tragedy occurred. We have seen the psychologist report (TNT let the world see it as well) and Crystal lied her way through that also and was working on the kids big time to turn them against their grandmother, whom they had always been crazy about. So this is another battle we are dealing with besides grieving the loss of David.
Crystal had such an exaggerated mind. There was another bizarre story she told everyone. David and she went to a gathering of some sort with other police officers and their wives in December 2002. David said she was going around telling everyone that she was being stalked by a man. The story I heard from David was that a family friend of Crystal's apparently came to visit her parents in Gig Harbor about a year or so ago. He had had problems with drugs and had bouts with the law. He had asked about Crystal because he remembered her as a young person and always liked her. Well, come to find out, after this visit he had with her parents, he was put in the Pierce County jail for several months, apparently on drug charges. He was released months later and Crystal was out of control about that. She was bound and determined he was stalking her. Crystal talked to me about it also and I just thought, "How strange. Here we go again with another fabricated story." She was paranoid and going on and on about this to everyone. David said she going off about nothing. It was really quite embarrassing for him. The victim role was in the works again.
My husband and I would give her a birthday card with $20 in it and she would say, "Oh, now I can buy myself some new tennis shoes. I've had this pair forever." I would think, "who are you trying to kid?" They had more money than most people I knew.
She was always sick with something. She played the hypochondriac for years. I thought that was strange for being so young. And who went over and helped her when she was sick and the kids were babies? My parents!
About two years ago there was a Tacoma rapist loose. She knew the description of him and his truck, and she called David at work and told him she saw the guy driving in their neighborhood. I thought that was a bit much also. She either was looking for attention all the time or she really believed what she said. Our family recognized her as seeming to have bipolar symptoms, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, lying, very self-centered, and downright unbalanced. We would catch her in lies time and time again.
After the tragedy the Tacoma News Tribune stated that David made Crystal weigh herself everyday and would watch her use the bathroom. I don't believe David had time to deal with such oddness. David did tell us how she would get on the scale almost every day and lean her hands against the wall in order to weigh a little lighter. She was obsessed with her weight and was so concerned about getting fat. She was a very miserable young person who simply did not like herself or her life.
The day of the shootings David had his kids for the weekend and was shopping for bath toys and groceries. Crystal followed his car when she spotted it in the Gig Harbor Shopping Center. I think something was said to him that put him over the edge and both of their lives were taken. She was not afraid of him in anyway or she would never have gotten near him. There was not an ounce of fear in this woman. David was living in the family home for a couple of months alone and Crystal and the kids were living with her parents a few miles away. She would come over with her mother and badger David until finally David contacted his attorney to put a stop to it. She was contacting him, he was not contacting her. She would put their daughter up to calling him and harassing him with questions until it was ridiculous. A woman that is afraid of her estranged husband does not tell him to cut the lawn before he moves out. But that's what Crystal did and, unfortunately, David did it. She also told him that she deserved to be married to a millionaire and live in Canterwood (a prestigious Gig Harbor neighborhood where her parent's live).
The day David moved out of the house, his neighbor came over and talked to him. He told David, "Just between us guys, we know Crystal is loosely wrapped." When David told me that I said, "Doesn't it make you feel a little better knowing that the neighbors recognize her for what she is?" And he said, "Yes."
We have an explanation regarding the flowers David sent to Crystal after the alleged choking incidents. David did send her flowers on holidays, but she managed to say he sent them the day after the supposed abuse. Why would she wait until after the separation to go to the florist to find out who sent them to her? Since David sent them to her and they were on their credit card, did she not get the bill in the mail? She was a stay-at-home mom that was home while David was working 10-12 hours a day. Who would get the mail first? H'mmm...I wonder? And would David set himself up to do such a foolish move? Never, he was far too intelligent for that.
We were never surprised when David would tell us some of the odd games she played. It was typical Crystal...we all knew her too well.
I listened to the tape of the phone call Crystal made to her psychologist at 4:35 PM on April 25 th . She claimed she was afraid for her life. I was at David's apartment with my daughter, her husband, David and the kids that evening. Crystal called the kids about 8:30 to tell them goodnight and of course, she had to talk at great lengths to Haley and then had to call back ten minutes later. She sure wasn't afraid to call over there and talk to David to ask to talk to the kids.
I will never be convinced that this woman was afraid of David. There is no way an abused woman would do all the vicious acts that she did. She never thought it would come to this. There are such things as boundaries and I am a firm believer in not pushing people. I was always raised that if you hit someone you might as well expect that person to hit you back. When a person is in an abusive relationship you leave as quickly and cleanly as you can, especially if someone is threatening your life. She had 10 to 12 hours a day alone where she could pack up her things and move out of the house and David would never have known. She had protection all around her, but we know she was exaggerating more absurd stories. She was an actress playing the victim. When this woman wanted to speak up, believe me she could tell anyone off!
David was someone that was dependable in every aspect of his life. My family is terribly hurt and saddened over this tragedy. We have not only lost a son, brother, father, uncle, nephew, and cousin, but the city of Tacoma has lost someone who really cared about our community and had big plans for the Tacoma Police Department. And we have lost the little family that we truly loved. We wish Crystal would have sought treatment for her seemingly out of control serious emotional problems.
Women can be just as vicious as men, if not more so in marital conflicts, and men need the same support regarding domestic violence as women and children receive. David was a strong supporter of domestic violence prevention, yet he was in the middle of his very own abusive marriage. I do not defend the acts that were made on April 26 th , but I do defend David after hearing his agonizing stories throughout their marriage.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Jane Brazell nee Brame
I notice that the kids are in the care of their maternal grandmother. If the grandmother was responsible for making her daughter a psycho, then those kids are going to face a difficult life.
DB's Medical Rants has an interesting post about Health Savings Accounts and some info on why health care costs so much.
I watched GB's State of the Union Address. It was ok. State of the Union addresses are interesting but I don't usually expect great eloquence. I did like the part about not asking anybody for permission to defend ourselves.
Since I disagree with many of the President's domestic polices, especially his apparent embrace of the paranoid Christian fundamentalists' delusion that we need a constitutional amendment to save marriage, I can't really say it was the greatest speech GB has ever given. If the paranoid Christian fundamentalists want to save marriage they should work to get crazy Marxist feminists out of family court and positions of authority in various academic environments.
The link below will take you to some history about the State of the Union Address and to some State of the Union Addresses from our history.
State of the Union Messages Since Washington
Well, it's time to study for the states quiz. Now let's see, where is that exciting geography lesson by Howard Dean? Maybe we can get a copy of that tape from John Kerry.
Rosemary says she's done and it's a shame some idiots decided to send a bunch of mindless, hatefilled drivel to her. While I disagreed with her on many issues I still liked reading a lot of what she wrote. The blogosphere may be many things, but it is not important enough for anybody to try to harass out, insult out, threaten out or force a person out of blogging with sleazy shenanigans.
This post shows why I hope she comes back to the blogosphere.
My four drunk readers in Joe's Saloon in the Virgin Islands sent me a communique saying that while most of the time they didn't quite understand her posts they liked some of them and they would like to tell her that if she's ever in Joe's Saloon they would be proud to have her buy them drinks.
On an unrelated note: My four drunk readers also told me they didn't understand most of the stuff I wrote but when they sobered up and they read my posts they understood why my site is sometimes called "Sleazeball's Ruminations". Then they told me blogs (especially mine) weren't important enough to sober up for just in order to read them.
This is my reply to them: It's not "Sleazeball's Ruminations". It's "Sleaze Report Ruminations"...........Uuuhhhhhh......I mean it used to be "Sleaze Report Ruminations" but I thought that that was such a stupid name that I renamed to.......to.........hmmmm.......let's see......what did I rename it to? Oh, yeah, I renamed it "JohnHays.net".
My four drunk readers have sent me another email. In it they say, "We don't care what you call your blog, it will always be known as 'Slimeball's Ruminations' to us. We still can't figure out why when the bartender reads your blog he throws the computer out the window."
I wish I could tell the barkeep to cut them off, but they never cut anybody off in Joe's Saloon in the Virgin Islands.
Because of the ridiculous way loony Oregon decides which services deserve funding and which services don't when it comes to money crunch time (which is most of the time in loony Oregon), one of Oregon's most important services, the Oregon State Crime Lab, can be expected to cut employees if measure 30 doesn't pass. Of course, even if Measure 30 passes the Oregon State Crime Lab is still way short of the people needed to do its job properly.
In two of my previous posts I've written about crime labs, their problems, their lack of funding and other issues that seem to plague crime labs. The posts follow:
Post number one:
Inside the DNA Labs - Rocked by allegations of deceit, misconduct and incompetence, DNA crime labs across the nation increasingly are finding themselves under both federal and state criminal investigations. Even the FBI's DNA crime lab is under scrutiny by Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Glenn Fine, who ordered a sweeping audit of the bureau's forensic laboratory. But Fine didn't stop there. He was so incensed by the bad science infecting crime labs nationwide that he expanded his probe to review several local police DNA crime labs where errors may have jeopardized thousands of cases and sent innocent people to death row.
Post number two:
According to the news report Caseload Crunch, the laboratory that conducts tests for all of Kentucky's criminal courts is struggling with a record backlog of 10,000 cases.Sounds like the laboratory employees are way overworked, under appreciated, and not given enough resources by the state of Kentucky to do the job the way it should be done.
Of course, in most states public defenders also have the same problems.
Apparently crime labs and public defenders are not seen as important parts of the justice system. Too bad, because when crime labs and public defenders are not given the resources to do the job, there really is no "justice" in the justice system.
One of the reasons I'm bringing up the crime lab situation in Oregon is because of an amazing case that was solved by some very good detectives who actually believe in gathering evidence, the Oregon State Crime Lab, the help of some federal agencies, and Norm Frink of the Multnomah County DA's Office actually not being given a chance to blow this case with his usual inept prosecutorial blunders.
Here in loony, homophobic, racist Washington County, Oregon there is also a team of forensics experts but I don't know their status mostly because retired sheriff Jim Spinden spent a lot of his time running around trying to solve non-existent crimes committed by the "international homosexual Satanic Ritual Abuse gang", the "Illuminati gang", the "International Jewish Conspiracy gang", the Conspiracy's many allies, and the "intergalactic space aliens who abduct innocent bystanding Washington County residents". All these horrible non-existent crimes were pointed out to Jim Spinden by his super duper, master Aryan race buddy and intrepid ex-Multnomah County Prosecutor, Roger Weidner.
Emma at the Oregon blog has her opinion about spending and budgets and how Oregon might pay for needed services.
As Jack Bog's Blog: Measure 30 explains so well, the tax code is nuts no matter where you live, but if you live in Multnomah County, then it becomes really nuts. Corporations pay very little, percentage wise, in income tax and since Oregon doesn't have a sales tax, but a hodgepodge of property taxes and incomes taxes, most of the funding responsibilities for vital public services and non-vital public services falls on the individual.
Oregon has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, which means less taxes are being collected. During boom times the incompetent legislature spends foolishly and during bad times the legislature spends foolishly
Maybe we should do away with the personal income tax, up the corporate income tax slightly, put a cap on property taxes at 1.5 percent, quit giving tax breaks to certain expensive condos and houses built on specially tax exempt property, quit giving tax breaks to urban renewal projects, and (this will never happen because this is loony Oregon) simplify the state tax code. Oh, year, I forgot, initiate a sales tax that exempts food, drugs, medical necessities, and related items and make sure the sales tax cannot go above a limit without a statewide election.
One thing is for certain. The legislatures have shown an inability over the last twenty five years or so to solve the problem of high taxes and foolish spending, so I really don't know how Oregon is qoing to quit being one of the looniest states in the nation.
Transterrestrial Musings has a great post about some of the ridiculous talk being bandied about in opposition to Bush's recent proposals concerning NASA and what we should be doing in space. I agree with Rand Simberg.
I also think NASA needs to come out of the nineteen seventies and into the twenty first century. NASA has been screwing off for years and has behaved like a seventh grader who keeps going through the seventh grade year after year.
I figured I would ask a few questions of my relatives, John McClelland Hays, Neta Hays, and Chris Andrea Hays. The questions are as follows:
1. Don't you think that the twenty year stalking of me, my friends, and any woman the Victor Oekerman clan perceives I'm going out with is a sign of mental illness? (Note: My relatives know about the stalking because a few of them helped the clan stalk me.)
2. Don't you think the fanatical hate the clan developed for me and that has lasted for twenty years is a sign of mental illness?
3. Don't you think the twenty year obsession of the clan to either destroy me or get me back into the clan is a sign of mental illness?
4. Don't you think the clan's obsession with controlling every aspect of my life and my two daughters' lives even now is a sign of mental illness?
5. Don't you think the bizarre behavior of the clan's disgraced, disbarred ex-attorney and still legal advisor, Roger Weidner, is a sign of mental illness? (Note: Roger Weidner was committed to the Oregon State Hospital's program for the criminally insane and the general consensus among the Oregon legal community and the law enforcement community, with the exception of Jim Spinden, is that Roger Weidner is quite mentally ill and dangerous.)
It seems my relatives won't, or can't, or are forbidden to, or are afraid to answer the preceding questions or even to express opinions about many other subjects.
Well, so much for freedom of speech in loony, homophobic, racist, paranoid Washington County, Oregon.
Questions of the week
Who would have the authority to be able to order people on probation and parole in Washington County, Oregon to assault me over a period of several years?
Why, when living in a certain geographical area of Washington County, Oregon have I been unable to get anybody to investigate any of the assaults against me or the breakins to my various residences or the vandalism done to my various vehicles?
Who would have the authority and why would this person use trickery on me in order to get me to live within certain geographical boundaries within Washington County, Oregon for a period of several years? According to Postal Inspectors and FBI agents whoever this person was, this person did it with it the intent of slandering me and framing me for the benefit of Roger Weidner and the cult family.
Who tried to tamper with my military records?
Well, my youngest daughter just woke up. The first thing she did was insult me in much the same way the pig family has been insulting me for twenty years. Then she told me how much she hates me. Just now she flipped me off and went outside.
It's amazing how much hatred the pig family can direct towards me and how much effort they make to get other people to hate me as much as they do.
My youngest daughter probably will never feel any love for me considering how well she's been brainwashed into hating me.
I almost hate having her around because all she does is disrespect me and insult me. I've heard these insults ever since I met the pig family twenty years ago.
Sometimes I become convinced that Washington County, Oregon is probably the craziest place I've ever lived. Only in Washington County have I ever been accused of ridiculous crimes, been stalked by a whole family and cult, heard so many Christians threaten people, call them names, brag about being super white, and use so much profanity.
Only in Washington County have I heard the following question asked by so many stupid white people.
"Why are all these Mexicans coming to our Cinco de Mayo celebration?"
Washington County is also the only place I've heard the remarks, "I've hated you since before I met you," and, "I'm just using you" and "You must quit being a homosexual Satanist and come back to the family."
I've never lived in a place before where I've been tricked into living in a certain geographical area just to make it easier for crazy cultists to stalk me.
I've never lived in a place before where so much effort is made to make kids hate their parents like the effort to make my two daughters hate me.
I've never lived in a place before where a person or persons can make false accusations about another person being gay and having the AID's virus and cause such hysteria, like the false accusations made against me at one of my places of employment.
I get a lot of hate emails and threatening emails from people who write, usually in the first paragraph, something like, "I'm a fine upstanding Christian," or, "I'm a fine upstanding white Christian. " Then the writers of the emails go on to threaten me and call me all sorts of names while using mass quantities of profanity.
It seems many of these fine upstanding Christians, especially from the Washington County, Oregon, area have a great belief in repressed memories of "Satanic Ritual Abuse and being abducted by space aliens".
I wrote an earlier post concerning a CBS news story exposing the fallacy of repressed memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse and other delusions.
Loony Bonnie Oekerman and Faye Marie Oekerman convinced a couple of my relatives, Neta Hays and Chris Andrea Hays, that they had repressed memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse and of being abducted by space aliens. My relatives got so caught up in this nonsensical paranoia that my relatives gave themselves life histories filled with delusions, demons, space aliens and all manner of outlandish falsehoods. My relatives and others must have been in a generous mood because they gave me a crazy life history much like theirs, except I was the supernatural victimizer and not the victim. When I first began hearing about these fantastic repressed memories I thought, "Who would believe this nonsense?" Man, you might be suprised at who believes this nonsense. Many members of a loony Church of Christ in Washington County, the cult from hell, Cathy Winters and many others, including loony Jim Spinden. There are still people who come over to where I live who are convinced they were the victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and of being abducted by space aliens and these people are also convinced what they've been told about me being the leader of the local Satanic Ritual Abuser gang. Some of the really witless people who come over to where I live actually believe I help space aliens kidnap innocent, bystanding earthlings.
As most experts will tell you, when a person becomes convinced they have repressed memories of various delusions many of these delusional people become filled with paranoia, hatred, a need for vengeance and really become downright evil. The change in my two relatives from being relaxed humans into being humans filled with absolute total hatred for everything is amazing. For all practical reasons you could characterize my two relatives as being criminally insane.
When these various delusional females, many of them in bizarre white supremacist cults, go to the various police chiefs and sheriffs in Oregon in order to try to get the law enforcement guys to arrest whoever the delusional females identify as Satanic ritual abusers or helping space aliens abduct innocent, bystanding earthlings, most police chiefs and sheriffs aren't conned into making snap judgements and going on wild goose chases.
However, there's always one bad apple in any barrel and here in loony, racist homophobic Washington County, Oregon, that bad apple was Jim Spinden, retired Sheriff of Washington County, Oregon. When the delusional females would get together and put the slightest pressure on Jim Spinden, he would fold faster than a poker player without a pair.
I've written in a previous post about a crazy cult here in Oregon who often go cop shopping in order to find a cop that will help members of the cult arrest millionaires, judges, sheriffs, police chiefs, the governor, the Oregon Supreme court, me, and others the cult is convinced is doing Satanic Ritual Abuse, helping space aliens, sacrificing mass quantities of pets and babies, and eating all sorts of corpses.
I figured that my relatives and others in the crazy cult must have found another cop to investigate me because last summer while I was waiting at a bus stop in Beaverton, Oregon a couple of people came up to me and asked me how many neighborhood pets and babies I had sacrificed in bizarre Satanic rituals, how many corpses I've eaten, and if I buried any corpses under any cement anywhere. Oh yeah, just for good measure, I was also asked about space aliens.
I got a couple of emails asking me to say something more about stalkers and people who help the stalkers stalk.
I talked to my father a couple of months ago and, as usual, he was convinced marriage was forever (even if it's to a crazy spouse obsessed with killing you). He reminded me that the woman I married in 1979 (I divorced her in 1980 because she was psychopathic) was still my wife. He then went on to say I married into her family and that they considered the marriage to be forever.
The following is a true story about how crazy my ex-wife's family really is.
Some years back, while I was living in Beaverton, Oregon trying to raise a family, and while I was the stay-at-home father and the mother was working full time outside the home, unbeknownst to me my psycho ex-mother-in-law, Bonnie Oekerman, and her equally psycho daughter, Faye Oekerman, were keeping the apartment that the mother of our two daughters, our two daughters, and I were living in under surveillance.Here is what the psycho ex-mother-in-law would do. She would come to Beaverton from her residence in Oceanside, Oregon, where she and her husband had a business ripping off the locals, and she would stay at the Ambassador Hotel in Tigard, Oregon. The Ambassador Hotel in Tigard is very near Beaverton, Oregon.
Then she would snoop around our apartment complex, make friends with one or more of the residents (usually by telling them lies about me and my family) and then she would spy on us surreptitiously. Her psycho daughter, who lived in Hillsboro, Oregon, also near Beaverton, would also spy on me and my family.
During the school year it was my habit to get up early, make breakfast for the girls (they were in elementary school), walk them to the bus stop, and make sure they got off to school. Then I would clean the apartment and do whatever shopping needed to be done, study, and then meet them at the bus stop when they got off the bus after school.
We lived in an apartment with an indoor swimming pool and so, usually, at least once a day, the girls would go swimming with their friends and I would play lifeguard and watch them. It helped that in my younger days I actually was a lifeguard. Studying and learning and then actually doing lifeguard duty were some of the jobs being on a swim team entailed. That and learning how to clean pools and keep them clean.Had I known what the sleazy Oekerman family was up to I would have been much more apprehensive. But, can you believe that they would stoop so low as to stalk me and my family after I divorced the psycho Faye Oekerman in 1980. AND GET THIS!!!!!!! My mother and sister were helping them and lying to me about it!!!! Don't the Oekerman's believe in amicable divorce, or does a person have to be continually stalked and hunted when leaving the psycho Oekerman family? What do they think they are...some crime family nobody can get out of?????!!!!!
What makes this even weirder is that for years, without me knowing about it, they had been spying on me and whenever I went out with women, members of the psycho family would go to these women and tell them all these horrible things about me, including the lie that I was still married to her.
The following from William A. Eddy, LCSW, Esq. explains some of the mental illness of my ex-wife and her stalking family.
Because of their history of distress, those with personality disorders perceive the world as a much more threatening place than most people do. Therefore, their perceptions of other people's behavior is often distorted -- and in some cases delusional. Their world view is generally adversarial, so they often see all people as either allies or enemies in it. Their thinking is often dominated by cognitive distortions, such as: all-or-nothing thinking, emotional reasoning, personalization of benign events, minimization of the positive and maximization of the negative. They may form very inaccurate beliefs about the other person, but cling rigidly to those beliefs when they are challenged -- because being challenged is usually perceived as a threat.Lying may be justified in their eyes -- possibly to bring a reconciliation. (This can be quite convoluted, like the former wife who alleged child sexual abuse so that her ex-husband's new wife would divorce him and he would return to her -- or so she seemed to believe.) Or lying may be justified as a punishment in their eyes. Just as we have seen that an angry spouse may kill the other spouse, it is not surprising that many angry spouses lie under oath. There is rarely any consequence for this, as family court judges often believe the truth cannot be known -- or that both are lying.
My youngest daughter has actually been taught to hate me by my crazy ex-wife and her sick and evil family so my youngest daughter spends a lot of time telling me how evil I am and how much she hates me. She and her elder sister are over here right now and not just too long ago my youngest daughter told me once again how much she hates me. Man, I'm telling you, my ex-wife and her family are determined to even use my own daughters in order to get me to come back to that evil family.
Of course, the ex-in-laws are also pschyzo because one day they're trying to figure out ways to kill me and the next day they're trying to figure out ways to get me to come back to the ex-wife.
I think my ex-wife and her idiot family must be the king of the stalkers.
The L.A. Times has an interesting opinion piece called "When Children Run the Schools, Society Suffers". It points out how bad the situation is in many schools and why students are not learning much from their school experience. The following is an excerpt:
In one Southern California public school, the teacher tells an unruly group of eighth-graders that they are reading two to three years below grade level. This should not be breaking news because they get their test scores yearly. Rather than accepting responsibility for their deficits and working harder, the more savvy among them tell the principal that the teacher is insulting them.This same naive teacher then goes over the eighth-grade graduation requirements with them. Those who get two or more fails and more than two unsatisfactory marks in work habits and cooperation will not be graduating onstage with their peers. This time some of them write letters to the principal complaining that the teacher is calling them losers and telling them that they will never succeed in life.
When the inmates run the jail things become pretty sleazy.
For non-governmental organizations who become too sleazy, we have the NGO Watch - A Project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society
For companies who think environmental laws don't apply to them we have Scorecard Home
The Washington Post exposes a sleazy non-profit organization at the following link.
IRS to Audit Nature Conservancy From Inside (washingtonpost.com)
One of the cleverest shows on tv is USA's Monk. I'm watching the season premiere right now and the writing, acting and direction is still witty and biting.
I also highly recommend Peacemakers.
Other than the Portland Trailblazers and an entertaining local minor league baseball team and Portland State Football (PSU used to have a baskeball team) there isn't a lot of sporting events here. While I'm not a big golf fan, it is fun to watch the golfers that come here once a year to play in the LPGA tournament and a tournament that used to be sponsored by Fred Meyer and is hosted, of course, by one of our favorite local golfers, Peter Jacobsen.
Absinthe & Cookies (a little bit bitter, a little bit sweet) has a post about....my lord...
faked moon landings. Man, how does the US government keep those fake moon landings secret when it can't keep anything else secret? Must be them space aliens.
My favorite therapist, Zoe D. Katze, is famous. The story that Dr. Katze was in was about scams in the therapy business with a particular emphasis on a sleazeball therapist by the name of Pat Mansmann. Apparently, Pat Mansmann knew only one diagnosis and her diagnosis was always to diagnose people with the dreaded "repressed memories of satanic cult activity" diagnosis which is, of course, a fake diagnosis. Also, Mansmann used the old "beat the hell out of the pillow" therapy which is a ridiculously useless therapy for anything.
Crimlaw has a post that links to a website where I found at this post where we find that among experts for lawyers are polygraphers who make more than many experts.
- Arson investigator $115
- Blood spatter $150
- DNA $205
- Fingerprint $100
- Firearm $96.43
- Hair/fiber $113.33
- Handwriting $287.50
- Neurologist $400
- Pathologist $248.85
- Pharmacologist $141.67
- Physician $356.25
- Polygraph $416
- Psychiatrist $215.30
- Psychologist $152.02
- Radiologist $125
- Toxicologist $219.44
Gimme a break. The polygraph is an instrument of scammers and junk science at its worst. AntiPolygraph.org has all sorts of information about polygraph junk science.
Lately there have been a few females that have come over to the house where I live and they get involved in deep, real deep, discussions about various international conspiracies. One of the conspiracies is that the Jews have an international conspiracy to take over the world. These females, including my female housemate, are convinced I'm a member of these conspiracies.
They bug me about my involvement in these conspiracies and whenever I say I'm not a part of all these delusional conpiracies they scream, "YOU'RE IN DENIAL! YOU'RE IN DENIAL! DENYING YOUR INVOLVEMENT SHOWS THAT YOU'RE REALLY INVOLVED!"
My female housemate never fails to slander me behind my back whenever anybody stops by. She told me that I was tricked into moving into this house in order to keep me within certain boundaries of Washington County for various reasons, one of the reasons being that a certain crooked cop in a certain stupid cult who believes the delusional accusations of a mentally ill ex-prosecutor and the false accusations of my ex-in-laws' idiot, racist cult needed me to move into this house in order to get me. She's probably right about the reasons for tricking me into moving into the house where I currently live.
The Vice Prez of the U.S. was recently in Portland. He didn't draw as many protesters as Prez Bush usually does but the Portland Police Bureau had to provide security anyway, as usual.
Protecting Presidents and Vice Presidents costs money. I'm not going to go into the amount of federal money needed to properly protect our presidents and vice presidents and other dignitaries, but on the local level some members the city council always bitch about how much it costs Portland, Oregon to wheel out the local gendarmes for protection. I don't know what the solution is for this little problem or even if there is a problem.
It got me to thinking about Iowa. Do the people of Iowa bitch about the cost of protecting the candidates?
In addition to acknowledging Clayton's contributions to software necessary for future NASA projects, he points out in this post the logic of building a moon base.
By the way, Clayton is a great writer of history on the second amendment and he has spent a lot of time building a collection of newspaper clippings and other types of archival material detailing the everyday, mundane activities of those engaged in commerce in our country's early years.
I heartily recommend his blog for daily reading. You might have to ignore his rather peculiar opinions about modern American culture, but do what I do. Read only his posts you like.
The following link will take you to a story of how a prosecutor got fired for...get this...
a prosecutor with the Jefferson County Commonwealth Attorney's office was fired yesterday amid allegations she grabbed and berated a juror who helped acquit a man accused of rape.Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Stengel fired prosecutor Sandra McLeod yesterday afternoon, hours after McLeod approached a juror in the Jefferson County courthouse about the case of Edward Nation.
Janet Irwin, an assistant jury manager who witnessed the incident, said McLeod grabbed the juror by the back of the arm and screamed at her in a packed hallway, asking why the jury found Nation innocent Tuesday night of kidnapping and raping a 17-year-old girl in the summer of 2002.
This is a novel way to get convictions......just beat up jurors who don't do what you want them to. Wait a minute, didn't the MAFIA try this to avoid convictions???!!!
Maybe this prosecutor hasn't figured out yet that maybe evidence of a crime should be presented to a jury before a jury should find someone guilty of a crime.
----------------------------------------
In other news there is LA Police Chief Bratton making news.
Bratton said he wanted the department to solve more cases. The LAPD clears about 21% of its cases, and Bratton wants to increase that rate to 25% in 2004.
So the LAPD only solves less than one quarter of its cases. Maybe the idea that a police department should solve crimes is a bit outdated. Maybe the real job of police departments today is to help the Marxist social engineers re-engineer society.
---------------------------------
Well, it seems like the Detroit police are stuck in an eighteenth century bureaucratic nightmare.
The Detroit Police Department has made little progress fulfilling promises to end civil rights abuses against witnesses, suspects and citizens, a confidential report says.The Police Department still uses outdated detention cells, has failed to rewrite policies and continues to detain people without probable cause, according to a 114-page draft report prepared by an independent monitor and obtained by The Detroit News.
More broadly, the report suggests a growing frustration with the city’s lack of progress in meeting the commitments of two agreements, called consent decrees, the city signed with U.S. Justice Department officials in June.
Is it just me, but I always thought beating up and jailing witnesses was the best way to deal with crime. Isn't that how totalitarian regimes control crime? Stalin and Hitler and Saddam Mao and Pol Pot hit upon a clever way to control crime amongst the citizenry - just kill half or even two-thirds of the citizenry and crime will go down.
You know, if you carry the above to its logical conclusion, it would seem the best way to completely get rid of all crime is just to kill "everybody". I'm not sure how that would be accomplished because somebody's got to do the killing, but I would ask - just who would decide who would do all the killing in order to completely eradicate crime?
Just think, I know the answer. But noooooo, Britney wouldn't marry me for a few lousy hours and now I've lost the contest.
But now I learn that Howard has a winner.
By the way, the answer to the trivia question lies here and here.
Howling Point has a post that indicates not only is he feeling feisty, but he has an opinion about politics in NASA and he's feisty enough to share it with us. I don't know about you, but I hope Howling Point stays feisty for a long time.
There is something I want to add to all the discussions going on about the Prez's idea to transform NASA into an agency that can actually get us into space and it is:
Was the ultimate goal of NASA to get us to the moon and then slack off?In NASA's off-time did the administrators just sit around and congratulate themselves on getting to the moon and figured they could waste money appropriated by Congress for space exploration in favor of a space station which has not really contributed to the original mission of NASA?
The following is an excerpt from loony Roger Weidner's book entitled "The Weidner Method". The loony Victor Oekerman/Roger Weidner gang thinks the book is a brilliant law book but the gang also thinks I'm helping space aliens kidnap half the population of loony, homophobic, racist Washington County, Oregon.
The following excerpt shows how crazy Roger and some of his buddies are planning on arresting one of Roger's enemies on false accusations of murder and other crimes. Roger calls the sheriff's department, tells him he's a former prosecutor and needs help making an arrest. The cop that goes out to where Roger is is not stupid, though, and won't be conned into arresting an innocent person.
Roger and Victor Oekerman are always telling my relatives and other people to falsely charge me with all sorts of crimes including, like I've written before, that I'm helping space aliens kidnap half the county. Roger and some of the rest of the gang tell my relatives to go from cop to cop until they find somebody who will arrest me. That's probably one reason why I'm always being investigated.
Believe it or not, Roger and the gang actually get people to believe some of their delusional false accusations, including a Dr. Ron Turco of Washington County, Oregon.
The Roger Weidner/Victor Oekerman gang used similar tactics to the ones described in the excerpt below to get somebody in the Navy to attempt to tamper with my military records.
"This is Milton Brown, he's a shameless treacherous thief. He murdered his partner, forged the documents, he's wiped out every partner he's ever had." and he was just tweeking, twitching back and forth while I said this about him. He had his auctioneer with him."If you come down to number 8 Brown I'm going to arrest you," I said.
I went down to number 8, went in and called the sheriff's office and said I was going to perform a citizen's arrest. They said to call 911 and then Sergeant Johnson from the Gladstone police department showed up. Johnson is mid-forties, gray/blond hair, 5-10 maybe 180 pounds, has kind of a drill sergeant persona about him. He tries to project that hard edge military type. When Johnson arrived with another police officer down there at number 8 I told him that I was going to arrest Milton Brown for murder and theft. He was writing this down.
"You're not going to arrest anyone or I'll arrest you," he said.
"Listen Johnson, I'm a former prosecutor. I didn't ask you for your advice. I just asked you to come down here and stand by." So that kinda backed him off a little bit. I went over to Brown and I grabbed him by the arm.
"I'm arresting you Milton Brown for the murder of Don Kettleberg and the theft of that property," and his eyes-I've known the guy for 30 years and I've never seen his eyes because they're right down in the corner of his nose. When they're real crooked like that they won't look at you. They always look down. You cannot get eye contact with a thief because he cannot look at you because he's lying. You have to be a very accomplished attorney to lie with your eyes open. Of course, an attorney is usually not lying, he's getting someone else to do it. I was kind of fascinated to see what color his eyes actually were. He's a Shylock. If you want to know about Milton Brown read The Merchant of Venice and you've got a picture of Milton Brown. These little beady eyes, he's had his nose bobbed, he's had his ears laid back, he's had a hair transplant to make himself look ordinary, but if you saw him in his natural configuration he would be bald, big out ears, long pointed nose- an absolute Shylock-and these Eurasian eyes, slightly slanted back, a kind of unusual gray color, like a wolf's eyes. So I arrested Milton Brown and then Brown ran around and hid behind Sergeant Johnson.
"You stay away from me! You stay away from me!" he says standing back behind Johnson, looking over his shoulder while Johnson's talking to me. I wasn't intending on taking Brown into custody.
"Did you get pictures of all this?" I asked one of my supporters. Someone bought #8 and then they went to another unit, number 2, to auction that off. I was pointing out Brown.
"He's stealing this one too," and just making these statements to intimidate him. I'm fascinated by Milton Brown because of his genealogy and what he represents. Milton Brown is the antithesis of everything that I believe in and the epitome of a miser. Everything for him is money. Everything is bought and paid for. He is totally devoid of any kind of moral conscience at all. That fascinates me that he has been able to corrupt to the extent that he has, to the extent that our culture has become a money culture. He is the center. He has the whole state, the whole court system, the state government circling and protecting him. He is what the laws are written to protect us against. It's completely upside-down. The thought that that little viper could do that is just mind-boggling. I had no idea when I became involved in this. I thought, naively, that once I exposed some of this they would be forced to break loose. Instead, there's been this coalescing around him by the whole system.
We left out of the Tri-County Mobile Home Park and there were 2 police cars parked about a block away with 4 officers in each one. They were waiting as back-up in case something happened. We went down to the Gladstone Police Department to report to chief of police King because I'd told King previously what was going on. King is about 5 foot 10, bald, cuts his hair short, pug-nosed, looks like he had maybe been a boxer at one time. He has that small face, fairly husky fella, maybe 180 lbs. When I'd spoken with him before he was a little bit nervous talking to me, but not threatening at all in our previous conversation. Now I was back to tell him that Johnson threatened me with arrest. We walked in and asked for King. He came around the outside and Johnson was with him. I started to explain to him what I was doing, arresting, and that I was threatened by Johnson.
"Well I've read all that stuff that you submitted and it's a bunch of crap Weidner," he said.
"Well King, it is not a bunch of crap. I've testified to this in court repeatedly and." Glaring, with Johnson standing by his side, he interrupted me.
"You're full of shit Weidner." I couldn't believe it.
"Well, you're obviously very corrupt King and in the pocket of Milton Brown," I said, "but you're not very smart King because you're saying this in front of all these witnesses here," and we left. I went over to the city council and said that I wanted to speak at the next council meeting, which was coming up on June 11th. Gladstone. I showed up out there on the appointed day with 8 to 10 people. I'd asked King to show up and he showed up. Retired Marion county sheriff Jack Utterback and his wife Dixie showed up also. When they called my name I got up in front of that council, said who I was, pointed to King and said what I did out there.
Message to black people. Don't tell me I have to vote for a white guy just because I'm white. Of course, I'm not white enough for the white supremacists and they would kill me if they ever got power and they would kill me just for not being white enough, but again, I say, "Black people, don't tell me I have to vote for only a white candidate." Remember, I voted for Ralph Nader, who is Lebanese, and this caused Democrats, Republicans, and people who didn't even vote to hate me.
According to Howard Bashman if I win a trivia contest I don't get nuthin. That ain't fair. I should get at least a million dollars or get a chance to marry Britney Spears for a couple of hours.
You know what I think. I think Howard Bashman is some sort of attorney. Probably one of those subversive attorneys that work for drug addicts like Rush Limbaugh.
According to a couple of news outlets a judge made a decision based, in part, on data provided by a brilliant professor and his ertstwhile students that just "happened to be non kosher".
The following is a paraphrase of one of the students: "We're just college students, but hey, we're not as bad as Pete Rose".
Since sports and academics have such sterling characters and they are protecting the American way of life, I'm not worried about illegal immigration.
Did you know that if you put the phrases "Harvard Divinity School" and "Harvard Women's Studies" into the Google search engine, you will get curse words?
Tim Blair: ZIONIST PUPPET REJECTED. Tim Blair has more of a common sense perspective about American news and American idiosyncrasies than many American journalists. I also like Tim's sense of humor.
Go Phily. Of course, the Colts will win the Superbowl but Phily will give them a good fight.
By the way, I would have spelled Phily as "Philly" but I lost one of my "L's". I lost my period (".") once and then I had to use stars ("*") a couple of times but it caused some people to think I was writing posts insulting them* You know***** what I truly f***ing, me****an****####!!!!!???
It never ceases to amaze me at the absolute insanity of my ex-in-laws, the Victor Oekerman clan which I call the pig family. Only in Washington County, Oregon have I ever witnessed the following: an ex-father-in-law and his neo-Nazi buddies bribing my relatives into falsely accusing me of weird crimes with the convoluted reason being that this might force me back into a relationship with a violent, psychopathic female.
Now remember, in my late teens and early twenties I did a lot of partying in Hollywood, which is one of the weirdest places on the planet.
Washington County is the only place I've ever been where an extremely ugly family spends such a huge amount of time trying to pretend to strangers (and me) how popular they are. I've also never been associated with a family (I divorced out of this family in 1980) with such low self-esteem. If they want to be popular, then they ought to join one of the clubs or sports teams. Since they spend so much time, money, and effort trying to be popular maybe I should tell them that THE BEST WAY TO DO IT IS TO PLAY IN A ROCK AND ROLL BAND.
For some reason, as soon as I joined my first rock and roll garage band, all of sudden I was popular as long as I brought the other band members and their musical instruments with me. I could never figure it out. People would invite me to a party and when I asked, "Sure, when and where?" They would say, "Well this time and this day." I would say, " Ok, I'll be there and I'll even bring some blues albums."
Sometimes I heard somebody say something like,"Blues albums? Why would we want to listen to blues albums if you guys are going to be playing?"
Sometimes I would be astonished and say, "You mean.....you mean...you want me to invite those other guys? If we do that then we'll never get to hear the blues albums because we'll have to listen to that loud horrible, off key, off chord crap that they call music?"
Sometimes I would hear this reply, which chagrined me beyond belief, "Well, yeah, we know you guys sound like crap, but we like the drummer. By the way what do you do in the band? We saw you talking to one of the two important guys in the band and we thought, since you don't seem to be so important, if, you know, we figured we could ask you if they would come and play at our party?" I replied I played rythym guitar but only under duress. Anyway, I told, many times, "no" to the people who wanted our band to be popular playing crappy music. I was overuled by the other, more popular, members of the band who always got more invites than I did, but I didn't care because....hahahaha....I was usually the one making all the arrangements for getting the guys and accessories to whichever place had been decided on for us to play music and.......hahahaha...I decided which party we would play at. The other guys didn't seem to care.
I suppose I must digress to explain something. When I say I was in a garage band I didn't mean to say that I was in a band where the members stayed the same.
Band members were always coming and going and if there were two bands playing in the same two blocks, then we just exchanged places. in other words, I was in a garage band that was in two places in the same afternoon and which was constantly evolving with different numbers of members and most of the music, with the exception of playing the basic rock and roll classics back for the late seventies and early 80's (there were none, thank the Lord), we played music that was part latin, rock and roll, blues, reggae, latin salsa, blue grass (in honor of the Grateful Dead) and just jammed.
Man, I got off on a tangent. Anyway the following is more ridiculous stuff that is real.
It seems the neo Nazi ex-father-in-law bribed some of my relatives (John McClelland Hays, Neta Hays, and Chris Andrea Hays) to attempt to falsely accuse me to a couple of local police departments and the local DA's office.
Apparently, it didn't work over the years and my ex-father-in-law, Victor Oekerman, and his circle of neo-Nazi friends won't give my relatives the money that was promised.
Also, Deputy Chief Lila Ashenbrenner of the Hillsboro, Oregon police department was a member of a state board which fined one of Victor Oekerman's private investigators 1000 dollars for misrepresentation.
Apparently, since 1980 Victor has been hiring private investigators whose jobs were basically to harass me into coming back to his psycho daughter, Faye Marie Oekerman.
Since it seems so easy to bribe members of the local Chruch of Christ into making false accusations like my relatives did, I am really developing a low opinion of the Church of Christ and its members.
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. Aaaarrrggghhhh, were all going to die and if you don't believe me just ask USS Clueless - Global Zorching.
Note to myself: Aren't we all going to die anyway? Answer to myself: Yeah, but when I say it nobody believes it, but when Steven Den Beste says it, then we know it's true.
Ok, now that I've had my fun let's get on to important stuff. SDB has a post entitled Teleology and Solipsism.
SDB's post is extremely important because he analyzes a segment of society that, I believe, poses a great threat to all freedom lovers. I also believe the mindset he describes has infiltrated family law and other areas of law much to the detriment of the average citizen of the U.S.
This might explain the views of some crazy Marxist feminists that if a person is born female then that person is automatically born being a victim of some delusional patriarchal system.
It seems like the neo-Nazis have taken this view and applied it to themselves. In other words, if you are born white, you are born a victim of all sorts of bizarre delusional conspiracies.
This analogy can also be applied to other ethnic groups. For example, if a person is a member of a Japanese supremacist group, then anybody being born Japanese is born being a victim of other ethnic groups.
Many academics in the social sciences and related groups, especially in the psychoanalytical arena, give credence to the above idiot ideas and, in my opinion, SDB points this out.
Click on this link and then click on this link.
VodkaPundit has a post about Tom Harkin endorsing Howard Dean. I agree with Vodka Pundit that the Iowa caucus is going to be fun to watch.
The Baseball Hall of Fame has become politically correct and, as stupid as it seems, now only saints can get in. Pete Rose should be in the hall of fame for the simple reason that he was a great baseball player.
Anybody who is stupid enough to believe that because you are good at playing baseball you should be some sort of saint or you are incapable of stupid, sleazy behavior needs to reassess the situation. For example, what on earth was Pete Rose thinking when be bet on baseball???!!!
Loony, homophobic, racist Jim Spinden turned my relatives (John McClelland Hays, Neta Hays, Chris Andrea Hays and Alex Hoover) into snitches based on the lunatic, delusional false accusations of the "pig family".
This could only happen in loony, homophobic, racist Washington County, Oregon - hangout of the psycho Roger Weidner/Victor Oekerman gang.
"TalkLeft: Bush's Immigration Plan Supports the Corporatists on the Right" brings up something interesting. What we should not do is make law or series of laws that create a permanent sub-minimum wage pool of workers and workers without legal protections just for the benefit of certain sleaze corporations.
Because America is considered to be a beacon of freedom to most of the rest of the world, we will probably always have illegal aliens among us, many who come here for this or that particular freedom and/or to make some money. Most of these illegal aliens do honest work under terrible and illegal conditions because somebody is willing to pay for their work. These workers should be protected and the people who take advantage of illegal alien labor should be chastised.
While some sort of immigration policy is probably necessary, I think because we are an open society there will always be illegal aliens among us. I don't think having illegal aliens amongst us is necessarily bad, unless, of course, the illegal aliens are members of gangs.
At the moment one of the greatest dangers facing America isn't illegal immigration or legal immigration or even foreign terrorists from abroad. The gravest danger facing America is gangs, both foreign and homegrown. According to some gang experts there are over 500,000 people in gangs in the U.S. That's a small army. These gangs also have war material.
The local police simpy do not have the resources to deal with gangs that are interstate and international. The federal government must become more active in fighting gang related domestic terrorism.
I don't believe my website is a billboard for useless drugs. However, the following slimeballs must think so. The spam comments have been erased but I hope the spam email bots will send the slimeballs tons of spam.
IP Address: 211.29.136.11
Name: phentermine
Email Address: viagra@discount-phentermine.biz
And we have another spam comment from:
Nordeng Amy
pamela_woodlake@yahoo.com
IP Address: 62.213.67.122
62.213.67.122
There are four democrats I could vote for even though I'm a registered independent. They are Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator John Kerry, Senator John Edwards and Rep. Dick Gephardt. Although their record on individual rights is abysmal, at least they care about something. I just wish they would quit parroting silliness about the ability of the U.N. to be able to be a beacon of individual rights and a republican form of government. I've brought this up before and I'll bring it up again. I'm a fan of the government philosophy of Hubert Humphrey and the following is why:
American Rhetoric: Hubert Humphrey - 1948 DNC AddressFellow Democrats, fellow Americans:
I realize that in speaking in behalf of the minority report on civil rights as presented by Congressman DeMiller of Wisconsin that I am dealing with a charged issue -- with an issue which has been confused by emotionalism on all sides of the fence. I realize that there are here today friends and colleagues of mine, many of them, who feel just as deeply and keenly as I do about this issue and who are yet in complete disagreement with me.
My respect and admiration for these men and their views was great when I came to this convention. It is now far greater because of the sincerity, the courtesy, and the forthrightness with which many of them have argued in our prolonged discussions in the platform committee.
Because of this very great respect -- and because of my profound belief that we have a challenging task to do here -- because good conscience, decent morality, demands it -- I feel I must rise at this time to support a report -- the minority report -- a report that spells out our democracy, a report that the people of this country can and will understand, and a report that they will enthusiastically acclaim on the great issue of civil rights!
Now let me say at the outset that this proposal is made with no single region. Our proposal is made for no single class, for no single racial or religious groups in mind.
All of the regions of this country, all of the states have shared in the precious heritage of American freedom. All the states and all the regions have seen at least some infringements of that freedom -- all people -- get this -- all people, white and black, all groups, all racial groups have been the victims at times in this nation of -- let me say -- vicious discrimination.
The masterly statement of our keynote speaker, the distinguished United States Senator from Kentucky, Alben Barkley, made that point with great force. Speaking of the founder of our party, Thomas Jefferson, he said this, and I quote from Alben Barkley:
He did not proclaim that all the white, or the black, or the red, or the yellow men are equal; that all Christian or Jewish men are equal; that all Protestant and all Catholic men are equal; that all rich or poor men are equal; that all good and bad men are equal. What he declared was that all men are equal; and the equality which he proclaimed was the equality in the right to enjoy the blessings of free government in which they may participate and to which they have given their support.
Now these words of Senator Barkley’s are appropriate to this convention -- appropriate to this convention of the oldest, the most truly progressive political party in America. From the time of Thomas Jefferson, the time of that immortal American doctrine of individual rights, under just and fairly administered laws, the Democratic party has tried hard to secure expanding freedoms for all citizens. Oh, yes, I know, other political parties may have talked more about civil rights, but the Democratic party has securely done more civil rights.
We have made progress; we have made great progress in every part of this country. We’ve made great progress in the South; we’ve made it in the West, in the North, and in the East, but we must now focus the direction of that progress toward the realization of a full program of civil rights for all. This convention must set out more specifically the direction in which our party efforts are to go.
We can be proud that we can be guided by the courageous trail blazing of two great Democratic presidents. We can be proud of the fact that our great and beloved immortal leader Franklin Roosevelt gave us guidance. And we be proud of the fact -- we can be proud of the fact -- that Harry Truman has had the courage to give to the people of America the new emancipation proclamation!
It seems to me, it seems to me, that the Democratic party needs to make definite pledges of the kinds suggested in the confidence placed in it by the people of all races and all sections of this country.
Sure, we’re here as Democrats. But my good friends, we’re here as Americans; we’re here as the believers in the principal and the ideology of democracy, and I firmly believe that as men concerned with our country’s future, we must specify in our platform guarantees which we have mentioned in the minority report.
Yes, this is far more than a party matter. Every citizen has a stake in the emergence of the United States as a leader in a free world. That world is being challenged by the world of slavery. For us to play our part effectively, we must be in a morally sound position.
We can’t use a double standard -- there’s no room for double standards in American politics -- for measuring our own and other people’s policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.
Friends, delegates, I do not believe that there can be any compromise on the guarantee of civil rights which I have mentioned in the minority report.
In spite of my desire for unanimous agreement on the entire platform, in spite of my desire to see everybody here in honest and unanimous agreement, there are some matters which I think must be stated clearly and without qualification. There can be no hedging -- the newspaper headlines are wrong! There will be no hedging, and there will be no watering down -- if you please -- of the instruments and the principals of the civil-rights program!
To those who say, my friends, to those who say, that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late! To those who say, to those who say this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!
People, people -- human beings -- this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds -- all sorts of people -- and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.
My good friends -- my fellow--Democrats -- I ask you for calm consideration of our historic opportunity.
Let us not forget -- let us do forget -- the evil passions, the blindness of the past. In these times of world economic, political, and spiritual crisis, we cannot -- we must not -- turn from the path so plainly before us. That path has already lead us through many valleys of the shadow of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on that path of American freedom.
For all of us here, for the millions who have sent us, for the whole two-billion members of the human family, our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can -- I know that we shall -- begging here the fuller and richer realization of that hope -- [have] that promise of a land where all men are truly free and equal, and each man uses his freedom and equality wisely and well.
My good friends, I ask my party, I ask the Democratic party, to march down the high road of progressive democracy. I ask this convention, I ask this convention, to say in unmistakable terms that we proudly hail, and we courageously support, our President and leader Harry Truman in his great fight for civil rights in America!
Man, I keep getting hate and threatening emails and hate comments from the Roger Weidner/Victor Oekerman gang. I wonder why. The following are two emails and a comment I got. Remember, these are from of the same people who who sentenced me to death in a common law court about twenty years ago.
It's a good thing private investigators, cops, federal agents, federal prosecutors, and others regularly read this blog because if I turn up dead, at least there will be definite suspects. The following are two emails and a comment I got.
Here's an email.
Date: 1/8/2004 16:01:32 EST From: RaWydner@aol.com To: editor Subject: Hate mail, sorry-----------------------------
Roger Weidner is an ass head, given. But Bruce Wydner, my father, is a brilliant inventor responsible for Cost-effective Machine-Translation, Natural Language Processing, Automatic Parshing, and on and on. I would appreciate if you didn't poo-poo his fight to reclaim his lost property from Bastian and his corpo-thugs as "insane" as per your July 25 posting. More importantly, Bruce Wydner is a Christian--never has he claimed that "Jews are the offspring of Eve and the Serpant form of Satan," or that "non-whites have no place in heaven." The man who wrote that "insane" article in the Oregon Observer describing our lawsuit is, in fact, GASP--a black man, and he's a family friend. You're mis-informed, that's understandable. You're confused--why would a great inventor involve himself with someone as...eccentric...as Roger Weidner. One can't choose family. One can, however, choose enemies, and believe me, I'm not the kind of enemy you want to have. So never call my family Neo-nazis again.Regards,
Ransom Leif Wydner V
Here's another email.
Date: 1/8/2004 16:32:52 EST From: RaWydner@aol.com To: editor Subject: I'm sorry
---------------------
I wrote an unkind e-mail just a second ago and, after reading your web pages, I must say that I apologize. You see, I made my verbal attacks on the assumption that you were sane. Now, I plainly see that you are incapable of forming rational thought and I apologize. Get a job and some proffesional help, asshole.
The following is a hate comment.
Do you have a job? Because it seems that the majority of your time is spent obsessing over the minute details of my (admittantly "off") uncle Roger and My Father, Bruce Wydner. I don't know what my uncle has done to you, frankly I could give a damn, but do not speak ill of my father. How dare you accuse him of being a "neo-nazi" member of the "Weidner gang?" You do not know the first or even seventh thing about the history of natural language processing and, therefore, have no idea what it's like to know that someone else is living rich on your property. But your absolute ignorance is not so much what bothers me, I'm not even the slightest bit angry that you are a complete asshole who has nothing better to do than insult his intellectual superiors, but never call my father a racist again, or I will personally see to it that you do not enjoy a long and happy life.Regards,
Ransom Wydner
Maybe the writer of the hate and threatening emails and comments is a bit upset at this post. I seriously doubt that any black guy would write an article for the USOREGONOBSERVER because that little news website is known in the white supremacist world as a white supremacist news website, which it is.
In any case, I've been advised to forward hate email and hate comments to the FBI and the ATF because they have the resources to analyze the emails and comments and to investigate the white supremacists and I don't have those resources.
Update on my bizarre situation:
I'm starting to learn a little about the specifics of some of the things that were done to me for twenty years, behind my back, by a psycho neo-Nazi group which also includes a mentally ill ex-wife and her neo-Nazi family, neo-Nazi allies and secret neo-Nazi allies.
First, unbeknownst to me, the psycho ex-wife and her family belonged to a somewhat secret neo-Nazi group that included former assistant district attorney for Multnomah County, Oregon, Roger Weidner and retired Sheriff of Washington County, Oregon, Jim Spinden.
Then, while I'm away in the military from 1980 to 1984 my assets and my son disappear and I find out later that my relatives became brainwashed by the cult and that they joined the cult. Then I found out that my relatives have done what the leaders of the cult have told them to do for years and that they have played the victim card and are claiming to be victims of every Paranoid Conspiracy on the planet AND, much to my chagrin, I have found out that my mother and sister have become victims of Mexicans, Jews, Blacks, me and a whole bunch of other people. They have become convinced of these delusions because my relatives have been brainwashed into believing the following lunacy by the cult:
Christian Identity beliefs
St. Louis Post-Dispatch/March 5, 2000
And Joe Holleman
- White Anglo-Saxons, the supreme race, are God's chosen people because they were created by God and are the descendants of the lost "12 Tribes of Israel."
- Jews of today are false Jews and not the chosen people; instead they are the offspring of Satan as a result of Eve mating with the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Some preachers say Jews "must be killed."
- God will send another savior to restore the state of Israel to the rightful people; all others will be condemned.
- Nonwhites are soulless "mud people."
- Isolationism and segregation are required; socializing with Jews or people of other races is condemned.
- Interracial marriage, or mating with a non-white, is a sin.
- In some parishes, pastors call for the death penalty for homosexuals.
- Other religions gloss over the true meaning of the Bible, therefore assisting in the erosion of society's morals.
- The mass media, controlled by the Jews, further erode our society's moral standards.
Since that idiot, Jim Spinden, believed all this crap because he was a secret member of the cult for about twenty years, he spent a good deal of time trying to either manufacture evidence or find evidence to frame me because of his belief that I was evil, Jewish, and Satanic beyond belief.
I'm not Jewish so the cult's belief that I'm a part of the Illuminati and an elder in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is ridiculous. Even my relatives, especially my mother and sister, became so brainwashed by the cult that they became convinced that I was really Jewish and that I was adopted and that I had to be killed because I was so evil.
Recently I've found out that the cult and my relatives convinced some Navy JAG officers that I was AWOL from the Navy and some Navy JAG officers became so hot and bothered about this that they actually rented an apartment not far from where I live and hung out there while they investigated me. The Navy JAG officers, who didn't bother to find out that the people who were making ridiculous accusations against me were under investigation by the Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI and the Clackamas County, OR County Sheriff's Office for all sorts of felonies. Many of the members of the cult were later busted and convicted of various federal crimes as the following news reports indicate:
[1] Assistant Attorney General Eileen J. O'Connor and United States Attorney Michael W. Mosman announced today that a federal jury in Portland, Oregon, convicted six defendants, Richard George Flowers, Dorothy Lenore Flowers, Jeffrey Allen Weakley, John David Anderson, Ronald William Stacey, and Dan Romaine Kirkham, of conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). All defendants were associated with the Christian Patriot Association, a warehouse bank located in Boring, Oregon, which provided anonymous banking for 900 members nationwide. According to proof at trial. this warehouse bank was operated for the purpose of impeding and impairing the Internal Revenue Service and bad deposits totaling $186 million during the 14-year span of the conspiracy. The jury also found Richard George Flowers guilty of failure to file federal income tax returns for 1995 and 1996 and found Anderson, Ronald and Elecia Stacey, and Dan Romaine Kirkham guilty of tax evasion.[2] The indictment alleged a conspiracy that involved a nationwide web of financial transactions from March 1986 until July 2000. The scheme was designed to enable members to conduct banking transactions anonymously by using numbered accounts that were come singled in a single comercial bank account.
UPDATE ON FRITZ SPRINGMEIERJohn S. Torell
September 15, 2003On October 8, 1997 the Damascus branch of Key Bank of Oregon was robbed. The robbers fled with $6,000.00 in cash. One of the robbers, later identified as Forrest E. Bateman Jr., used a gun in the robbery, when he fired one shot into the ceiling of the bank to warn the bank clerks that he was willing to use the gun if they did not comply with his demands. Bateman was dressed in army battle fatigues. Ten minutes prior to the robbery, a bomb exploded at the Fantasy Adult Video Store, located six miles west of the bank. No one was injured in the explosion but police investigators believe that the bomb was set off as a diversionary tactic.
Bateman and another man (which I will not identify in order to protect his family, but will give him the fictitious name Roger), had sometime earlier been recruited by Fritz Springmeier 1, and both of them lived on a remote property on and off for eight years which was owned by Roger’s family. Fritz would come often and spend time with the men. According to a family member (which I have spoken to on several occasions), they were preparing for some kind of action against government authorities. Roger, Bateman and Springmeier grew marijuana on the family property (which was not known to the family), and it was sold as a source of income to fund their activities. The family eventually became very afraid of Fritz and forbade him to come back on the property.
Some time after the robbery Roger was arrested and charged with having an illegal shot gun, with a barrel that was not in compliance with the law and also for being part of the marijuana growing. He was promised a lighter sentence if he would testify against Bateman and Springmeier, but the deal was later reneged on by the assistant U.S. Attorney, Frank Noonan. Roger was sentenced to a prison term of 47 months to be served out in federal prison, and was then shipped off to a federal prison in California.
In January 2002 Bateman and Springmeier were indicted by a grand jury on charges of armed bank robbery, the use of a firearm in a violent crime and possession of a destructive device in a violent crime; but they did not go to trial until January 2003.
At this time Roger was brought back to Oregon from the federal prison in California and held in a local county jail. According to family members of Roger, he was very scared and feared for his life and wanted to be returned as soon as possible to the federal prison in California where he felt safer.
Bateman was facing up to 20 years in federal prison when he accepted a plea bargain on January 27, 2003 in the U.S. District Court in Portland, Oregon and plead guilty to the charge of bank robbery. When Batemen was sentenced on April 3, 2003, he was sentenced to 10 to 12 years.
On February 12, 2003 Springmeier was convicted in a jury trial on two counts, while a third was thrown out. Count one charged defendant with armed bank robbery and count two charged defendant with using and carrying a firearm during the armed robbery. Count three which charged defendant with using and carrying a destructive device during a bank robbery, did not go to the jury because the court ruled that the evidence did not support that charge.
To repeat myself, the idiots in the Navy JAG office didn't know that the people making these crazy accusations against me, including my relatives, were being investigated by authorities who had already heard these idiotic accusations against me and realized that the false accusations were from delusional and exceedingly crazy people. The NAVY JAG officers actually brought in some agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) to investigate me for various crimes that the cult had accused me of committing.
At the moment I have been informed, maybe correctly, that the NCIS agents and the Navy JAG officers have vacated the apartment right down the road.
In the meantime, my relatives are furious that nobody believes any of their conspiracy theories, the false accusations against me, and any other lies that they've told to tons of people.
Also, in the meantime, idiots from the cult are still communicating with me in their own bizarre, pushy manner in order to make me feel guilty about divorcing the the extremely white, extremely superior, extremely Aryan, extremely perfect repository of perfect genes, ex-wife. At times they inform me I must be destroyed for abandoning such a perfect example of purebred, white Christian womanhood.
The cult is also extremely upset because I deigned to attempt to have a family with a female member of "an inferior race".
All in all, this situation sucks. And what really pisses me off is that these idiots have convinced my two daughters that I'm evil and a Homosexual Satanic Abuse ritualist who wants to hurt them, who doesn't love them, and who kills all the little kids and pets in the neighborhood while being evilly Jewish.
My mother, Neta Hays, and my sister, Chris Andrea Hays, are throwing more and more temper tantrums because more and more people think they are mendacious to the max.
On a related note - I have found out that when females become convinced that they are members of the super duper, master Aryan race, they tend to start taking mass quantities of tranquilizers, anti-depressants, and pain pills, in addition to drinking more and more in order to keep from being bombarded by the various paranoid conspiracies they believe in. I'm beginning to think one of the reasons a couple of my relatives behave so outrageously is that they are walking pharmaceutical experiments.
So......let's see.....John McClelland Hays, Neta Hays, Chris Andrea Hays, Alex Hoover and some of my other relatives became mentally ill from joining a cult; then made false and delusional accusations against people, including me; searched far a wide for somebody in law enforcementwho was stupid enough to believe their ridiculous accusations (idiot Jim Spinden); became snitches in order to coerce confessions or manufacture evidence to support the ridiculous accusations; felt silly afterwards and crawled into their version of a spider hole. And......at the moment......that's where they reside in a desperate attempt not to face the real world.
The following was sent by
Charles E. Corry, Ph.D., F.G.S.A.
President, Equal Justice Foundation http://www.ejfi.org/
455 Bear Creek Road
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906-5820
For some years now the Equal Justice Foundation has been providing what help and support it can to Dr. Tim Emerson of San Angelo, Texas, an MD and gun collector. We are now soliciting contributions to pay for a private investigator with the hope of freeing him from prison.Synopsis
Originally charged under U.S. Code Title 18, section 922(g)(8) that makes it a federal felony to possess a firearm while under a restraining order for domestic abuse, Dr. Emerson's case first made national headlines on March 30, 1999, when federal district Judge Sam Cummings dismissed the charges against him in a now-famous memorandum opinion. Judge Cummings, for the first time in American history, ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right of all citizens.
In his opinion, Judge Cummings notes that the restraining order was placed on Dr. Emerson at the request of then Mrs. Sacha Emerson, who claimed in a hearing that "her husband threatened over the telephone to kill the man with whom Mrs. Emerson had been having an adulterous affair."
Later, contention in the divorce led to Sacha going to Dr. Emerson's medical office, where he had some of the weapons from his collection, while the restraining order was still in effect. Leaving his office after an argument, Sacha reported to local authorities that Dr. Emerson had threatened her. Both state and federal charges were then filed against him. He was subsequently acquitted of all state charges and the federal charges dismissed. However, the federal government, under then Attorney General Janet Reno (of nearby Waco fame) and the Clinton administration, appealed Judge Cummings dismissal of the federal charges. The US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Judge Cummings finding that the Second Amendment is an individual right but remanded the case back to district court for trial. Dr. Emerson's case was then appealed to the US Supreme Court but in a brief submitted by the federal government, Attorney General John Ashcroft stipulates that the government recognizes the Second Amendment is an individual right. With no constitutional issue before it, the US Supreme Court upheld the appeals court decision to remand the case back to district court for trial. Heard on the narrow issue of whether Dr. Emerson violated 18 USC 922(g)(8), on October 7, 2002, Dr. Emerson was convicted. Pending sentencing and the outcome of his appeal, Dr. Emerson was released on bond. On October 19, 2002, he underwent open heart surgery at public expense because all his licenses have been taken and he has not been able to practice medicine since 1998. On December 11, 2002, Dr. Emerson was sentenced to thirty (30) months detention in a Federal penitentiary. He immediately appealed and his case is scheduled for oral arguments on his second appeal tomorrow, Thursday, January 9, 2004, before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.Why is Dr. Emerson now in a federal penitentiary?
A condition of Dr. Emerson's bond was that "The defendant shall not commit any offense in violation of federal, state, or local law while on release in this case." On February 12, 2003, a Nicole Weber, age 21, reported to San Angelo police that Dr. Emerson was stalking her at the Hunter Run Apartments, #115, 4404 Southwest Blvd. in San Angelo, Texas. No charges were filed by the San Angelo police. However, as a result of that report Judge Cummings set a hearing for bond revocation at 5 PM on April 22, 2003. Dr. Emerson then arranged for witnesses to appear on his behalf on that date. However, without prior notice the hearing was actually held on April 21, 2003, and only Nicole Weber testified. On that black day for justice, Dr. Emerson's bond was revoked and since that date he has been in a federal penitentiary in Fort Worth, Texas. The circumstances surrounding the stalking report by Ms. Weber have always been suspicious and her motives for making such a damning accusation unknown. With the assistance of Blue Moon Investigations, the Equal Justice Foundation has now uncovered substantial evidence that Nicole Weber did not reside at the Hunter Run Apartments in January-February of 2003, where she reported being stalked. Therefore, we have employed Blue Moon Investigations of Houston, Texas, to look into the matter. While they have volunteered to help Dr. Emerson pro bono to the extent possible, we must pay for their travel and living expenses to and from San Angelo.
Comments about and by Bobbi Bacha PI, Blue Moon Investigations:
Bobbi Bacha, Vice President of Blue Moon Investigations has taken an active personal interest in Dr. Emerson's case. Bobbi Bacha and Blue Moon Investigations have been featured in over three novels involving the cases of Robert Durst (the millionaire that killed his neighbor in Galveston, Texas.) Books " A Deadly Secret" by Matt Birkbeck and "With Out a Trace" by Marion Collins, "Out of Control "by Steve Long.
Bobbi Bacha has been featured on 48 hours, American Justice, Court TV, Dateline, Inside Edition, Good Morning America, Early Show, Fox News, CNN, Connie Chung, Geraldo At Large, O'Reilly Factor, The Crier Report, along with many other talk shows and news networks and newspapers internationally including a guest appearance on Glenn Sacks and KTRH.
Bacha's initial investigations into Dr. Emerson's case have left her with more questions than answers. Besides, the obvious ones concerning the abuse and testing of federal laws vs. state laws involving the of the use of a little known federal law and its applications during a restraining order (Dr. Tim Emerson, the live Guinea Pig of this legal duel), the mystery begins to unravel concerning the origins of the stalking claim.
As Dr. Tim Emerson had no known history of stalking, how did a one time, unsubstantiated claim made by a woman that barely knew him, evolve into his imprisonment? No one should be jailed without trial on any charge or accusation without an opportunity to present witnesses in their defense. Yet Dr. Emerson was jailed with out trial or a fair hearing based upon an accusation he has had no opportunity to defend against.
Our initial look into the police report showed a poorly-written document with little more information than the alleged victim, Ms. Nicole Weber, stating that she saw a white vehicle that she claimed followed her and a statement that she had seen the vehicle for about a month. Neither the vehicle or the driver were apprehended at the scene of the alleged crime, no description of the driver or of the vehicle (truck, car ???) or the person driving it (was it a male, a woman, who knows???).
No other witnesses to this "stalking" have been identified and this was the only report.
I would hate to be in a white car in San Angelo, Texas and be arrested on such an non-descriptive account of stalking.
The questions are why, what purpose, what, and who would gain from such an accusation?
Motives...It is important to check out the backgrounds and motives concerning all parties involved in any type of case. Dr. Tim Emerson has been kept very busy defending himself and his character while everyone has assumed the characters of the accusers are honorable and with out motive.
Our initial investigation into the stalking report made by Nicole Weber immediately revealed discrepancies in information she gave to the police at the time of the report in relation to her documented address history. We are in the process of developing a complete investigation of all parties associated with the accusations related to the stalking charges against Dr. Emerson.
We plan to have all the actual facts, statements and motives fully documented in the case. Facts that we believe will help secure a release and overturn Dr. Tim Emerson's conviction. Dr. Emerson's case has never been investigated and he has not had a trial by a jury of his peers concerning the allegations affronted him. Blue Moon Investigations and Bobbi Bacha have pledged to assist in this investigation and any contributions would be greatly appreciated and needed to compensate our time, of course the greater the contributions made, the more time and effort we can lend to this case.
What the Equal Justice Foundation is asking:
The immediate need is to raise approximately $500 for the initial PI visit and investigation in San Angelo by a Blue Moon PI. We ask you to contribute whatever you can to help free Dr. Emerson from prison.
Dr. Emerson has done more to preserve our Constitutional liberties and our right to keep and bear arms than nearly any man since our nation was founded. Your help is vitally needed. Your tax-deductible contribution to his aid can be made via PayPal (please note that the contribution is for the Emerson defense fund), or by sending a check and a note to the Equal Justice Foundation, 455 Bear Creek Road, Colorado Springs, CO 80906-5820.Note that the EJF has not, does not, and will not take any administrative fees or overhead from contributions made to help Dr. Tim Emerson. All contributions will be used solely for his defense.
Check out the Private Investigator Blog where there's a good post about Forum Etiquette.
The story of Thomas Huffman, a man without principles and his extreme sleaziness.
Almost everytime I mess with my database or delete an old entry, it screws up my trackbacks. I checked some of my trackbacks to other sites and many of my trackbacks have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the posts on other blogs. I'm going to have to figure out what's going on.
The Homeless Guy is indicating he's quitting and that's too bad. I honestly don't see how he was able to put so much info on his blog about one subject. Let's wish him well in any endeavor he chooses.
I've written about this before and it involves somebody defauding me out ot $69.95 with a check number 200 with my name on the check. I also wrote before that I haven't had check number 200 in a couple of years. My checks have the address of a bank in the Portland, Oregon tri-county area. The fraudulent check had the address of a bank in Richmond, VA.
I called my bank's fraud department and they sent me a copy of a check to X-Press Communications Inc. in the amount of $69.95 for an unknown drug purchase. Whoever illegally got checks in my name got the account through a bank in Richmond, VA.
This fraudulent check caused an overdraft of over fifty dollars and I was charged twenty-five dollars by my bank to cover it. Of course, I didn't find out about the fraudulent check until I got a statement from my bank, but this sucks.
This sounds like something a meth-freak, cocaine-freak bitch by the name of Faye Marie Oekerman pulled a couple of years ago by pretending to be married to me.
Cops in Portland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona knew what she was like and, probably, the writer of I am Jack's blog knows about bitches like Faye Marie Oekerman but here in loony, homophobic, racist Washington County, Oregon loonies like retired Sheriff Jim Spinden are in denial. Because of loony Jim Spinden's bizarre religious beliefs, he apparently believes only guys can do wrong
Jessica C. Rydman (a 31 year old stripper) was wanted for nearly a week as the suspect in a murder. Her picture was all over the TV news. She decided to turn herself, and the gun she used, into authorities at the Washington County Jail in Hillsboro, Oregon. But they told her to go away because she didn't have proof of identification. They didn't even look in the bag containing the gun that she handed to them."We screwed up. We screwed up big-time," Washington County Sheriff Jim Spinden said Wednesday. "We should know better. It's basic Cop 101."
This is the second embarrassing situation for the jail. Earlier this year a serial rapist escaped from custody because they failed to handcuff him.
Content preview: Attention site admin of The Sleaze Report, On Jan 05,
2004 at 07:51 PM the Postnuke code has detected that somebody tried to
send information to your site that may have been intended as a hack.
Received: from nobody by (redacted) with local (Exim 4.24) id 1AdiFg-0000ei-Hx for (redacted); Mon, 05 Jan 2004 22:51:32 -0500 To: (redacted) Subject: Attempted hack on your site? (type: pnSecurity Alert) From: The Sleaze Report X-Priority: 1 (Highest) Message-Id: Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 22:51:32 -0500 X-Spam-Exim: VwmAgYs9GuKS1Shh7VTcOfNY Attention site admin of The Sleaze Report, On Jan 05, 2004 at 07:51 PM the Postnuke code has detected that somebody tried to send information to your site that may have been intended as a hack.
And the following must be spam.