—> { TaleRocker – 11:34 pm — July 17th, 2020 — Would have been Aunt Val’s Birthday — }  – ” I don’t know when this is from: but I do remember parts of a couple spooky dreams – and don’t really know if the first “page” of sticky notes is related to the other nine pages ( which were numbered – beginning with a (2) – circled in the upper right hand corners of each note. )

=  = = = =

I can’t believe another summer’s gone by without me being able to go down to Vermont & New Hampshire & Connecticut to catch up with people I care about.

I can’t believe how ‘boxed in’ I’m beginning to feel – Like a conspiracy of would-be petty dictators who want to control every little thought & action of everyone, everywhere – is manipulating the ‘monetary crisis’ which is gripping us all. –  I don’t believe there is a crisis – I believe it’s all an attempt to control perception.

= = = = =

I used to think women were nicer than men – that women were nurturing and caring and men were bullying and controlling.

= = = = =

(2) the top structure of a sky scraper in a city that may have been NYC – I may have been up there to get it – it released itself and went sailing out + down. I knew it was okay – but I was slightly worried – looking down – I started to wake up + realized I’d been dreaming – in the dreamscape – I wondered if I could have flown – gone sailing out over the city at night.

3. My sister was driving a station wagon. We had a young girl with us – some one she was baby sitting for? But anyway my sister got nervous about narrow roads + steep hills – I told her I recognized the area – We stopped somewhere – She told me it was her boyfriend’s house. I saw her boyfriend and his mother – introduced myself to his mother who was talking on a cell phone or something (I had thought she would think it strange or worrisome tht someone she didn’t know was walking around in her house. My sister picked up stuff and had me carry some stuff – We went outside where somebody – B.F.’s Father? – backed his Cadillac ( beige? ) with a friend’s coat of arms on the point of the hood (?) — out of our way and then followed my sister into another house ( next door ) where an evil monstrous animal sound growled somethingat us and I felt something radiating toward my left foot – I started praying & told my sister I had to meditate – she apologized – We walked out of the burned up house and she apologized, said she thought I wasn’t bothered by that stuff any more because I watched spooky television shows. I explained that I had just had my soul raped and re-itterated that I had to meditate ( I did when I woke up ) right after that.

4. ( Before the rest ) As I was falling asleep – walking home at night – I passed a petite your woman – walked into a dark section ( at night ) and saw a darker space inside the shadow – I thought I could feel that the young woman was afraid and reached back to her – She didn’t just take my hand – she tugged on my arm and slipped under it ( for protection? ) – I thought she might be and Asian Indian.

= = = = =

— The worst thing you can do to an electric cord is twist it tightly around your arm.  {{{ ? }}}

= = = = =

—> That’s it – ten 6 inch high / 4 inch wide ‘Sticky notes’ on yellow lined paper – #’s 2-9 were stuck neatly together and the other two were stuck back to back – with the last line of page one – { a paragraph that began with “I can’t believe how ‘boxed in’ -” was scrawled on half of the unlined back of that piece of note paper – which was folded neatly in half – vertically – the unlined side’s words had been upside down to the lined side. )

— Shrug —

—T.R. —

Tuesday, October 31st, 2017 —> 7˚C / 44˚F — With a clear blue sky and bare trees that weren’t bare this time yesterday in Atlantic Canada

“Gramma Dot” with Dave and Charles, photo shot around the holidays in 1987, in the ‘old hacienda’ in Stratford, CT USA.

— I found the above photo again last week. Yesterday I found several notebooks, including the one I’m about to transcribe below :

= = = = =

— Sunday, June 23, 2002—>

— ( After a full day of emptying the last bits of ‘stuff’ from the house and into the dumpster in front of the old family home that mom just sold and the real estate agent was hoping he could charge us an extra $3,000.00 U$ dollars for taking ‘too long’ to move everything out. – The old Chevy Corsica hatchback is literally packed to the rafters – um, wait, Chevy’s don’t have rafters – I have a tunnel between me and the right side rear view mirror, otherwise the stuff that’s coming to Canada with me is packed to the roof.  I promised Mom I would take a nap in the driveway before taking off to begin my new life with Cathi in Canada. )

9:57 pm – Stop & Shop Stratford, CT { odometer = 119378.6 miles } Just bought this notebook here

10:20 pm Called Cathi. She answered. I told her I as leaving & promised I would pull over & rest if I got tired.

10:30 -ish pm a bird (or something) swooped down in front of the car – hard to tell, but I think it looked brown to me. Amir Rashid was on the air at WPKN FM as I left.

11:48 pm { 119,439.7 } $17.50 gas exit 15? i84 – Dunkin Donuts not open. Clerk told me there is one the other way, open 24 hours.

11:59 — Coffee

Monday, June 24, 2002 —>

1:05 am woke up from “Power Nap(?)” in New York in a rest area on i84.

2:00 am – Pennsylvania – { 119520.2 } – Stopped to check gas cap. Yes it was there. Maybe I didn’t fill the tank completely? ( 3/4 of a tank? )

3:12 am { 119647.5 } ( 5/8 of a tank ) Needed to stop & rest ( Outside the locked gate at a Truck Inspection Station – Sign says “No Public Use”) (Eep?)

4:20am { 119647.5 } – on Route 81, North of Cortland, NY – Needed another rest stop. ( just under half a tank of gas )

5:03 am – woke up – I can see without headlights. It’s cloudy.

5:49 am { 119681.6 } New York Thru Way – Food and Gas –

6:18 am ( +11.34 gallons = $18.25 Gauge reads over full )

7:13 am { 119737.6 } Seneca Rest Area – I was ‘blinking’ again.

7:37 am – Broke a $100.00 bill @ a roadside Burger King (Yay! they took it) (‘Bev’ took the bill into the back and returned with 5 twenty dollar bills)

8:48 am – { 119811.4 } Buffalo, NY – I called Cathi.

8:52 am – I’m on Route 290.

10:30 am – I am through Canadian Customs. ( Had to sit on a curb about twenty yards from two border guards who put on rubber gloves and went through some of my luggage and left half a car’s worth on the pavement for me to re-pack 🙂 ) I repacked, then called Cathi. She was on standby in case she had to vouch for me or something like that.

11:30 -ish = I got to Cathi’s a little after 11:30 am. She looked at me and told me I better get some rest. I sat on her bed and meditated (during the eclipse?) then conked out. She went to Erin’s graduation from some grade ceremony. Yay! I made it in one piece & the car didn’t blow up. { I forgot to write down the mileage when I got here. }

— I’m pre- publishing this to keep it below my previous ‘post’.

– This is Cathi and Me on July 13th, 2002 –

— Tuesday, June 25th, 2002 :

— ( I was too tired to write this on Monday, the 24th: )

— More details about Monday: 🙂

— Cathi looked absolutely wonderful when I got here ( this was probably more than ‘just the effects of being completely exhausted’ 🙂 ) She looked even better than I remembered her looking last month, the last time I was up here? ( sigh, I’ve got it bad… )

— We cuddled and I fell asleep. She went to Erin’s graduation and I slept. I woke up hearing Ben playing with his friends.

— It was eclipse time. So, I meditated for 10 or 15 minutes – then went to the washroom. I came back and meditated for another 15 minutes — closer to the ‘height’ of the eclipse? { 5:15 -5:30? } It had rained and cooled off.

— Erin’s friend Rene came over to play with her. – Erin wasn’t feeling all that well. Neither was Rene. ( Neither was I. )

— Cathi ordered KFC with Popcorn Chicken { – Erin’s choice } I watched some of { Most of? } ‘Waking Ned Divine’ (?) ( I was in and out of consciousness ).

— I did tell Erin that I was impressed by her patience with her brother. { He was acting up. }

—Cathi got Ben off to bed after I conked out on the couch. – She brought me another pillow and left a glass of water on the coffee table.

— And that was Monday.

~~~~~ Jim

Thursday, June 8th, 2017  —> 28˚C / 82˚F @ Noon in Atlantic Canada —> & That’s too hot. [ imagine smiley sticking its tongue out at the weather man here ] —

Another Dream of moving back to a childhood home:

I dreamed the government forced us to move back

into ‘the projects’ we moved out of in 1959

on January 8th – I was 9 years old

I pointed out the wall

my father built

between the living room

and the kitchen

where I remembered eating venison one Sunday

after my father came home drunk

before we knew what ‘drunk’ meant –

He sang silly songs and confessed undying love

for everybody

then grinned

and asked how we liked eating Bambi?

my sister, two years younger than me –

screamed and ran away crying

My father got red in the face angry and screamed,

“You get back here and finish eating what we put in front of you!”

But then he let my mother talk him out of that

And sang another slightly off key

silly barber shop song

and smiled from ear to ear

“I’d walk a mile –

for a smile -”

{ I think that might have been “Daddy’s Little Girl” ? }

– but in this dream

the two bedroom duplex

had been altered.

An archway had been cut through the wall

between one bedroom and the grumpy old neighbours’ half of the house

{ they had to be long dead by now – the husband

was a World War I vet who’d been gassed

in the trenches and sat in a chair in the shade or on his porch

all day, almost every day, unless it was raining or snowing or too cold,

and scowled at the world while he worked his dentures

without touching them

and rocked back and forth

in a chair with no rockers. }

– and

on the other side of that arch

the old neighbour’s two bedroom unit

had been turned into a store – that sold

Christmas stuff year round.

And then I heard

some kind of evangelical preacher

demand we all come to his church

every day of the week

every week of every year

and pay him

more money than anybody could make

legally

or face burning in hell throughout eternity

I walked back to the living room,

– couldn’t find Cathi,

realized three or four families’ kids had opened up the couch

and thrown mattresses around the floor and were

making a real mess in the kitchen –

– I tried to lay myself down to rest

and one dark haired girl with a ‘pixie cut’ screamed,

“Hey – get out of there, that’s my spot.”

and I screamed back,

“This is my house, and no, I’m not moving.”

before anybody could think of a clever response –

I woke up

—– Jim

Thursday, June 8th, 2017 —>  24˚C / 76˚F  —> Sunny & maybe too bright @ 11:11 am in Atlantic Canada —> J.J. Kacik’s Birthday – & I just realized that Yesterday was my brother in law, Roger French’s birthday  —

Bugs:

I’m beginning to hate bugs

a lot more than I used to

it feels like there oughtta be a way

to easily keep the damned things

out of this house.

either I need so many blankets I sweat to death

or wake up with a million bites all over

and feel like I’d rather just lay down and die

than go through another day of this –

Gaaaaaaaaa!

—– Jim

Copied and Pasted from “jdaerendel” wordpress blog:

=====

Wednesday, 20 January, 2016 -(-5˚C / +23˚F & Mostly Cloudy Near Fredericton, NB @ 7:00 am )-

This is a shot from the Web Cam atop the CBC building in Fredericton, showing the intersection of Prospect and Regent Streets. This view is available every morning, M-F, on the “New Brunswick First” Television Broadcast – which is simulcast along with with CBC Radio One’s “Info Morning Fredericton”.

— A Canadian Potash Corporate group announced yesterday that they were closing down a Potash mining operation near Sussex, NB – All the teevee news broadcasts were forecasting doom and gloom for the Sussex area economy – The corporate spokespeople blame falling prices for Potash, possibly aggrivated by falling oil prices and failing Canadian Dollar in relation to the US Dollar. Some morons are trying to blame the New Brunswick Moratorium on Fracking, which the corporate spokespeople said has nothing to do with this.

— The corporation promised 75 years of Good Jobs for New Brunswickers  inside the Province of New Brunswick in return for tax breaks. One person complained that those, “75 years only lasted a total of 2 years.”

— Listening to the spokespeople left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I don’t know – as I’m aging (Maturing?) here – it becomes more and more painfully obvious that we’re being lied to. I can hear it in their voices. And it bothers me. More and more – I’m convinced that we’re being conned – deliberately deceived and misled by greedy corporations whose agenda is to manipulate everybody into believing their propaganda – while they’re receiving record high profits and crying poverty, laying off as many workers as they can get away with and forcing the rest to accept pay cuts.

— Welcome to Corporate Fascism and The Next Phase of Ekonomic Warfare Against Your Family, Friends and Neighbours —

Figures on Actual Job Creation per Million Dollars invested in Various Areas.

Recent tweet fighting anti-union propaganda- from a group called Unions For Workers.

Higher Minimum Wages: Propaganda/Myths Vs Reality:

“The US and Canada need to step up their campaigns to protect the Great Lakes”

Pollution Kills – More people die from the effects of pollution than from Malaria and HIV combined.

— Sigh, Good Luck navigating the wasteland of intense propaganda –,

— jda —

{ Copied & Pasted from “j d’Aerendel” }

= = = = =

January 14, 2016Categories “Deliver us from Morons who believe they know better than we do what we really want!” –, “Just give me the Truth!”, “Schnarr” is my favourite nonsensical universal euphemism –, ‘Fun With Health Care’, – duh –, Adventures in ‘Reality’, Compassion, Conspiracies –, Controlled Main Stream Media, Ethics –, Fun With Mercury Retrograde –, Life should be more fun., Life should be more relaxed., Schnarr, The evil ones will ultimately kill each other off in their nasty power struggles –, Uncategorized, We need more positive news.

Welcome (Back?) To the Age of Superficiality

– “You can’t call this ‘Education’-“

– Wiki Leaks: “How to Surrender All Your Rights and Priveleges: – Begins when you believe everything your government tells you.”

— Maybe we never left the Age of Superficiality. Maybe it’s always been with us. But was it always so glamorized? Never mind ‘Glamorized’ – it suddenly seems canonized.

— Maybe I didn’t pay attention to a lot of things in the last few years. Maybe I dismissed mindless ‘entertainment’ and ‘infotainment’ as if was totally insignificant. But wait – Somebody is paying attention to this stuff. There are way too many programs celebrating celebrity. Reality TV shows look too much like they were designed to convince us that housewives in every city in this world, especially housewives who believe they are rich and powerful – are complete idiots – and not just idiots, but mean spiteful egotistical bitches who believe they should be able to kill and eat their neighbours as long as some good conservative party member makes a profit in terms of votes for their candidates – or better yet, gold and silver in their untraceable emergency escape fund.

— Remember the song “Dirty Laundry” bu Don Henley? I thought it was brilliant. I thought I could laugh about dumbed down television news and walk away from that and never be bothered by its mindlessness again.

— But now the ‘Bubble headed bleached blondes’ are everywhere – and they’re not necessarily blonde any more – sometimes they are wearing grey hair like badges as they try to get you to spend your hard earned money to buy more life insurance (that the insurance companies welcome as ‘free money’ – maximum input with minimum output for them). – Buy more life insurance than you’d ever need so you can die with a smile on your face, safe in the illusion that your grandchildren will have hundreds of thousands of dollars to deposit as a down-payment toward a multi-million dollar education as the universities of this world become more and more greedy and less and less effective? Remember when we thought that a university education would teach us how to think effectively? Did they ever teach us how to see through shuck?

— Maybe I was able to tolerate the superficiality of many things because I thought they had no impact on the vast majority of the human race. Maybe I believed that average humans were much more intelligent and much more wise than the ‘pundits’ of Madison Avenue gave anybody credit for being. Was I wrong?

— And why, all of a sudden, with the beginning of this New Year – has it become so painful for me to sit in front of a television monitor and see smiling faces of attractive people as they try to appear completely guile-less while they attempt to deceive anybody stupid enough to believe they might be telling the truth as they read their news or sell the garbage we never wanted and never believed we needed until some hyper-attractive young member of the opposite sex smiled at us with his or her eyes dilating at the prospect of engaging in possible sexual fulfillment with the proud owner of whatever it is that they’re trying to sell you at the moment?

— Or am I completely insane to believe that, if for instance, you want to do something for the good of humanity, like feeding starving children in third world countries – or smuggling innocent followers of non-sanctioned religions out from under the military dictatorships in countries where the ‘leadership’ believes they have every right to vivisect anyone who doesn’t follow their proclamations to the letter and then sell their precious bodily organs to the highest bidder –– you should do that anonymously – and you should do it because you know that it pleases God and strengthens everything that makes life on this planet worth living? The fact that you would be doing something selfless and good for the benefit of all life on this planet is one thing. Handing somebody a huge cheque on television, more concerned about how you look while you’re doing it and ‘who you are wearing’ at the time the cameras are rolling is not what charity is all about. Is it?

— And like I hinted at a couple paragraphs up. Why has knowing that this kind of activity is going on become so much more painful in the last two weeks? Have I given up believing in the sanctity and sovereignty of each and every human being on planet Earth?

— Or have I just watched too many television commercials lately and taken them much too seriously?

 – jda –

Or  Maybe- Back in the Groove?

Friday, July 31st, 2015 -( 28˚C / 82˚F — Muggy, grey and stuffy @ 2:39 pm in New Brunswick  —  26˚C / 79˚F & ‘Clear’ in The finger lakes region of Nouveau York State @ 1:39 pm  — 13˚C / 55˚F & ‘Mostly Cloudy’ @ 9:39 am in and around North Pole, Alaska )-

We’re not sure the light at Yoko’s Imagine Peace Tower has gone out, but this tweet says she will relight it on John’s Birthday.

– It’s good to check in  on you guys and see that both Doug and Jim are busy, hey it looks like you’re up to your eyebulbs in projects, hey?

There’s something in the air, and it isn’t all peaches and cream. The Harper Fascists are bombarding the airwaves with terribly banal propaganda commercials that I can probably quote from memory, word for disgusting word – just from wincing and groaning every time the bloody commercials play- And it looks like the ‘prime minister’ wants to call a long election season because he smugly believes his party’s ‘war chest’ is so much bigger than his rivals’ that he can outspend them to death and maybe even drive them into bankruptcy – What he, in his short-sightedness probably doesn’t realize is, unlike similar matters in the U.S.A. a lot of us are betting that the Conservatives up here CAN lose an election by grossly underestimating the intelligence of the voting public. 😉

But there is a lot of positive stuff in the air, even when my allergies have my eyes burning and my nose either stuffed up or running any time, night or day, allergy pills or not-

My favourite brother’s divorce has come through. I might actually be able to reconnect with him now. It’s really sad when a wonderful person gets hooked up with someone whose toxic personality drives incredibly deep wedges between a warm, outgoing, friendly, decent human being and everyone he or she is connected to- Welcome back – Nob!

Every one of us caught the same bug at the same time, it seems. Some kind of viral nesting instinct kicked in. Jim tells us he is trying hard and constantly to tidy up his office while his game developing whoopy do zing zang walla bing bang nifty windows computer is down until he can afford replacement parts, or even a replacement zing zing zoom zoom computer – Jim and Cathi are rescuing pallets from their neck of the woods and threatening to tear them apart and use the recycled wood for all sorts of creative projects. Cathi’s writing up a storm and getting stuff published. Jim’s got at least three novels that he works on every chance he gets. They’re also working on getting regular podcasts together and sharing them with the rest of us out here in the ‘Real World’

Doug’s heart is with his sweetie up here even if he spends most of his time, down there – more like down there and turn right – drive all night and stop for lots of coffee on the way- and I hear he’s taken a couple vacation days he would have lost if he didn’t use them and worked on the look of his News Service Blog/web site – Radio Free Earth News – and is considering moving a copy of everything he’s ever done there to one of our servers just in case somebody threatens to shut him down by charging magical new fees for their free services.

– jda – seems to be distracted by technical issues, Moe is thinking that it would be really nice to find a warm sunny spot and just relax for a change – but then, he’s been scouring his little corner of this planet for the perfect spot to sit, smile at Mother Nature’s handiwork,  and maybe stretch out and roll around on a soft bed or moss and think about either reliving his favourite stories of hunting in the wilds or just reveling in past glories. He isn’t hard to please.

And we all noticed a very short blackout or power spike a couple days ago. Jim says that three computers he was working on at the same time survived the surge or spike or disruption, whatever it was, but then crashed for no apparent reason in the next day or two. One computer that had a lot of his almost forgotten stories and old photographs stored on just stopped working. He’s pretty sure the hard drives with their valuable old ‘stuff’ are still okay, but the death of an old computer, while it is not as traumatic as the death of a treasured pet – is no fun at all.

And I’ve had a couple computers of my own drop dead on me in the past few months, it seems like I’m in a constant state of backing things up before I lose them. I don’t want to stop and count the number of hard drives that have dropped dead, and I’m not even sure I want to know how many hard drives I’ve got that are still working. One or two of them are getting cranky and may need to be backed up, reformatted, re-thought – have their operating systems re-installed and reconnected to their productive purpose in this life.

Okay, so maybe I am guilty of thinking of my hard drives as sentient beings- but – since there is a word for that, I can’t be the only one, right?

— anthropomorphically yours –,    Jassper LeBoof 😉

Friday, May 8th, 2015. -( 10°C / 50°F – Damp, chilly and overcast at 7:55 pm in Atlantic Canada )-

Justice in America? Justice in Canada? Don’t hold your breath. Since the end of World War Two something like the lunatic fringe has taken over North American Politics. There hasn’t been an honest Election in the US since Kenedy’s assassination. If you believe the spin doctors, that election wasn’t honest either. LBJ sending his underlings back into a graveyard to try again to read the name on several unreadable gravestones with the explanation, “Those people have just as might right to their votes as anybody else in this graveyard!” might have been symptomatic of politics since Adam and Eve. And who knows? Politics and power struggles and subtrafuge, manipulation and all that may have been with us long before Adam and Eve became the poster children for the first human souls to have evolved up through the animal kingdom here on this planet. One of my more sagely friends says that this earth is the third experiment of a planet “Earth” based on free will. Evil manipulating muddah fuppahs sabotaged the first two. The ‘bad guys’ have been out to undermine ‘God’s Will’ all along. Power fuppers can’t stand the idea that a society based on free will, brotherhood, honesty, peace, love and understanding – should exist without their micro-managing total control. This isn’t a case of human nature. This is pure evil in practice. Greed and hunger for power are the names behind this game.

The Bush family has been manipulating, pulling strings, making dirty deals, lying, cheating and fixing elections since before their guy, Adolf Hitler, had their full support before 1939. Henry Ford sent Adolf Hitler the 1980 equivalent of $40,000.00 every year on his birthday in the hopes that a fascist victory in Europe could help him and those like him do away with trade unions everywhere.

Justice is a political football. ‘Law and Order’ is a war cry to rally the minions who have been manipulated into the anxiety that the monsters they’ve been convinced lurk under their beds and in the halls of public education, and anywhere else the lying cheating muddah fuppahs can convince the ‘supporters’ they call the ‘great unwashed’ that evil, un-american, freedom-hating, phantoms hide ready to destroy everything those *good people hold near and dear and worth living for  [*the ‘great unwashed’ have been pains takingly convinced that honesty is their road to satisfaction, the good life, and unlimited riches while the ice-holes who want to rule over their ‘great unwashed’ wouldn’t tell you the truth about anything or play the game by the rules of decent morality and proper ethics if their lives depended on it.]

And now Stephen Harper, the Conservative Prime Minister of Canada – until the next election?- has his shorts all in a bunch about some one, or a group of ‘misled individuals’ in the justice department granting bail to Omar Khadr while the Canadian Citizen is working with his lawyers to put together an appeal of his conviction and sentence. My friends in Canada have told me that Canadian Conservatives worship US Conservative Republicans.

But lets stick to facts for a moment here. Harper’s harping on Omar Khadr being a dangerous terrorist is not based on the evidence of hard facts. It is based on the political currency that the politics of fear can buy him. Omar Khadr was described as a model prisoner who had demonstrated to prison authorities that he was not a threat while he served the part of his sentence he’s been serving in Canada. Harper pushes the terrorist button in an attempt to use the politics of fear to get as many possible voters to believe that he has their best interest in his heart of hearts when he stands up and gestures and spews forth accusations that Omar Khadr is a dangerous terrorist and does not have any legally recognized facts to back that argument.

Let me explain my experience with the US legal system. In 1971 I was 21 years old. I was renting a house on the beach with a couple friends. I was working at a trucking company office, keeping track of every shipment on every trailer leaving the Bridgeport terminal of McLean Trucking Company. The Bridgeport terminal was in Stratford, Connecticut. But since I was already well acquainted with absurdity, this fact did not throw me for a loop then, and it doesn’t bother me now, either. Of my original two roommates, one was a nineteen year old university student from a ;arge family in Shreveport, Louisiana. He needed a car to commute to class. A nineteen year old could not register a car in his own name when he first aquired that car. His father could not register that car for him in Connecticut, where his son lived, because the father did not live in Connecticut. My friend wasn’t rich enough to fly to Louisiana, buy a car there, register it in his own name or have his father register it in Louisianna, and drive it back to Connecticut. I’m a nice guy. I believe in helping honest people achieve honest goals whenever I can. I let my friend register his car in my name. One night when my friend wasn’t home. Some younger kids were at a party in the area. One young man was told he was too drunk to drive his girl friend home. He did not take this well, he came to our home, grabbed my friend’s keys, stole my friend’s car, tried to follow the car in which his girl friend was receiving a ride home, got lost, ran over a stop sign, went up on the curb a couple times and finally wrappped the car around a tree. This guy’s father was a lawyer. In the police report the officer indicated that he couldn’t tell whether the young man was drunk, high on drugs or in shock from the accident. The father of the young man we did press charges against assured my friend, the owner of the smashed up car, that he would take care of everything. A couple weeks later, the car appeared all nicely smashed up and twisted and impossible to drive, on the street near where we lived. We got in touch with the young man who had smashed the car up. He assured us that his father would take care of it. The car disappeared a couple days later. I think the legal age at which my friend could have registered his own car dropped from 21 to 18 on New Year’s Day. In June Police from Milford, Connecticut found me, where I was living, back with my parents in Stratford, Connecticut, across the river from Milford. They asked me to come to Milford, they wanted to ask me some questions. Okay, I went. When I got there I was arrested and charged with abandoning a motor vehicle. My mother had a friend who was a lawyer. I couldn’t afford the at least $500. to have that lawyer represent me in court, but he was a nice guy, he listened to the whole twisted story, explained to me that that sort of thing wouldn’t have to happen since the law had changed and my friend could now register his own car in his own name, and the lawyer went on to advise me that I should go in and talk to the prosecutor, explain everything and then plead, “No Contest”. On my day in court, my friend from Louisiana was at my side, we went in and talked to the prosecutor, explained everything and told him my mother, the lawyer’s name and explained that he had advised me to plead ‘no contest’ and my friend was there to pay the fine, after all it was his car. I’m pretty sure the prosecutor knew the lawyer who was the father of the kid who stole and smashed up my friend’s car. The prosecutor nodded his head, like he accepted that explanation and told us to go wait in the courtroom. We did. When the case was called I stood up and told the judge I’d been advised to plead no contest. The judge said I couldn’t do that. I had to plead guilty or not guilty, and if I pled not guilty, I could be found financially responsible for all courty costs if and when I was found guilty. Nobody said anything about providing a public defender pro bono. I explained the whole thing to the judge and he smiled at me and said, “You’ll never do that again, will you?” I did not stand up and scream, “You fuppin idjit- I don’t have to, the law has changed-” But I felt extremely coerced into pleading guilty. I am sure that God would not find me guilty of abandoning a motor vehicle in Milford, Connecticut in 1971. Next time I was in court, I had been charged with speeding up hill with a car packed to the rafters with the heaviest newspapers of the season in a car that was not firing on all cylinders, that couldn’t possibly make the speed the ‘officer’ claimed I was travelling at, not if the bleeding car was empty. The officer also got the date wrong on the ticket. I thought the judge would throw this out of court. Again, I couldn’t afford a lawyer. I was there with my girl friend, she had been with me while I was delivering those weekend newspapers and was there for moral support. This judge was drunk at 10:00 am on a week day. He was joking with the prosecutor, buddy-buddy, laughing about all the stupid things the ‘perpetrators’ were doing and how idiotic they all were. The judge sat there and laughed like a happy drunk until a minority teenager came into the court room wearing a baseball cap. The judge became enraged and spit out the words that if that ‘boy’ didn’t remove his hat immediately he would find himself in jail for thirty days and pay a nice fine to boo. “Nobody wears a hat in MY courtroom!” I wondered what would happen if any of the defendents were Orthodox Jewish. But anyway. Same deal. When I explained that the officer had gotten the date wrong and probably got the speed wrong too, the prosecutor glared at me and snarled, “We can change the date, that’s not a problem.” The judge said, “Well, you’re honest about this, you’re here, I’ll reduce the speed on this so your insurance rates won’t have to go up. You can pay the fine and have a nice day.” Whether he changed the speed on the file or not, I got a notice from my insurance company that they were raising my rates because I was guilty of reckless driving at the speed I couldn’t possibly have been going in the first place.

So. That’s the face of ‘justice’ in twentieth century America. Promise them anything but keep your fingers crossed and screw them all –

On Omar Khadr. I don’t know him. I believe the passage in my version of the Bible that says, ‘Judge not- lest ye be judged.” I can imagine a teenaged kid dragged to a foreign country where he might not have any rights at all, being charged at by soldiers who look like monsters from any science fiction epic. My guess is the fifteen year old did not want to die, did not want to suffer any physical or psychological pain if he could help it. I don’t know if he threw any grenade at anybody. I heard that there is credible evidence that he might not have had anything to do with the action that cost the life of a US soldier. I have experience with the US ‘Armed Forces’- I was in the US Navy. The truth has no place in the chain of command. “You tell them anything you need to tell them to carry out that order. Do You Understand?” is screamed into the faces of non commissioned officers every day, ad nauseum. A perfectly reasonable human being could be convinced to sign a confession that he or she had traveled back in time and brutally murdered Abraham Lincoln if there was a breath of a chance that they would suffer a little less for having done so.

And while I’m at it. Superman better change his motto. ‘Truth and Justice’ are no longer compatible with ‘the American Way’, at least not the version of the American Way subscribed to by anybody with even the slighest bit of power in office anywhere.

Don’t ask me what I know about the US Postal System.

~~~~~ Jim

Thursday, May 7th, 2015 -( 21°C / 70°F – Becoming evening out there with late sun reflecting blindingly brilliantly from houses across the street, a little farther up the hill @ 7:55 pm in Atlantic Canada )-

Our electricity went out for a little over an hour this afternoon. I remembered hearing Jess Ventura complaining the last time he was interviewed on Coast To Coast A.M. that since he’d moved to Mexico, “Way out in the middle of nowhere”, he hadn’t had a single power outage, but when he retured to Wisconsin to clear up some legal business, he experienced like three or four power outages in one week. — So, it looks like Ronald Ray-Gun’s plot to turn the US into a third world country is working well for the evil conspiracy string pulling ice holes.

Sigh.

And while I was waiting for the power to come back on, I remembered the following and had to write it down “Long-Hand”:

In 1989 or ’90. I met a family in New York State who were trying to live off the grid, opting for solar collectors and deep cell batteries. The wonderful people at Child Protective Services were called in, possibly by the electric company who had lobbied for and gotten a law in place that still raises my hackles here.

Those delightful people at “Child Protective Services” -( more like “Ice-Hole protective services” / “Common People Subjugation Services” / “Corporations Uber Allis – Institute Corporate Fascism Services” )- basically said, “Well, solar power might be well and good, but if you can’t prove to us within a week that you are connected to one of these listed and approved electric power companies, we will have no choice but to remove your children from the unsafe environment you have subjected them to.” I think their kids were 9 and 7 years old at the time. There were Amish families living in that area, I don’t know how the evil electric company ice-holes managed to trample on their rights along with everybody else’s.

The family packed up and moved to another state rather than submit to those ice holes.

I hope they’re well and doing fine somewhere off the grid.

~~~~~ Jim