Archive for the 'Johnny Law' Category

Drone Who Thou Wilt Is The Whole Of The Law

Published April 24, 2013 Afghanistan/Pakistan , Africa , Asia , Capital Crime , Destry , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , War On Terra 9 Comments

And so now the United States has determined that it is Vital and Necessary to establish and enforce tight and binding international Rules for the use of drones.

President Barack Obama, who vastly expanded U.S. drone strikes against terrorism suspects overseas under the cloak of secrecy, is now openly seeking to influence global guidelines for their use as China and other countries pursue their own o noez! chinese drones!drone programs.

The United States was the first to use unmanned air-craft fitted with missiles to kill militant suspects in the years after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

But other countries are catching up. China’s interest in unmanned aerial vehicles was displayed in November at an air show. According to state-run newspaper Global Times, China had considered conducting its first drone strike to kill a suspect in the 2011 murder of 13 Chinese sailors, but authorities decided they wanted the man alive so they could put him on trial.

“People say what’s going to happen when the Chinese and the Russians get this technology? The president is well aware of those concerns and wants to set the standard for the international community on these tools,” said Tommy Vietor, until earlier this month a White House spokesman.

As U.S. ground wars end—over in Iraq, drawing to a close in Afghanistan—surgical counterterrorism targeting has become “the new normal,” Vietor said.

Amid a debate within the U.S. government, it is not yet clear what new standards governing targeted killings and drone strikes the White House will develop for U.S. operations or propose for global rules of the road.

Obama’s new position is not without irony. The White House kept details of drone operations—which remain largely classified—out of public view for years when the U.S. monopoly was airtight.

This is typical. One need only consider very recent history. Such as when the United States enjoyed a monopoly, or near-monopoly, in nuclear weapons, at which time it felt no need to establish any nuke rules at all.

And, indeed, that nation’s premier serial killers—a.k.a. “generals”—wished, and fervently urged, at various times, that there be nuke-rain-down-on-thee in Japan, the Soviet Union, Korea, China, Vietnam . . . even the freaking Moon.

They got their way, did the serial killers, in Japan. But never after. Nor, in their thereafter everafter lust to later nuke-rain the Soviet let's bombUnion (multiple times), Cuba, Afghanistan, etc., and on to the present day: Iran. Always, one of more civilians, tethered to the ball of sanity, have blocked them in their way.

Useful news, for those who perceive Reality through that glass-darkly straw in which the boys in the serial-killer blues forever get their way.

Anyway. Once humans not interned in the dirt-patch known as “the United States” began possessing nuclear weapons, suddenly a Great Flap swept across the American land, and it became at once Right and Meet that many and myriad Rules be established, to prevent non-’Mericans from getting themselfs a nuke, or, worse, Wrongly using one.

This is why, these days, every time you look at the news, there is something about Iran or North Korea. Something where some American is leaping and shrieking and running around with his or her hair on fire. Because some humans in these countries—Iran or North Korea—may be thinking about getting theyselves a nuke. And the US, sitting on more nukes than Midas has gold, and still the only country ever to use one to wantonly and needlessly and insanely incinerate hundreds of thousands of people, says This Cannot Be.

Decree of the US being: “I got mine. None, is yours.”

Now, I guess, we must gird our loins to eternally recur through this same sort of nonsense with drones.

furthur=>

Requiem

Published April 24, 2013 Into The Light , Johnny Law 4 Comments
Tags:

(this one writ by our Alexa)

Sometime late Thursday night, 26-year-old Sean Collier was assassinated, allegedly by two terrorists who lived among us.

In so many other ways, they lived in different universes.

Sean Collier wasn’t using his time on this earth plotting death and destruction. And he wasn’t living his life as a coward.

Sean Collier was going to help keep the peace. That was his goal, his dream. He was going to “protect and serve.”

That phrase has somehow become a cliche over the years, a punch line.

But it’s what cops do; it’s what Sean Collier was going to dedicate his life to doing.

Vaya con Dias, mi hermano, con mi más sincero agradecimiento, respeto y amor. Tu ido demasiado pronto.

Gone too soon.

The Way Of San Jose

Published March 20, 2013 Capital Crime , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law 17 Comments

San Jose is a renowned scum-pit. An endless expanse of smog, sand, strip malls. Of humans heaving with rage, impotently driving their fists into the steering wheel, progress stalled amid thousands of other idling internally-combusting humans, moving no more furthur than they.

Those who wonder why extraterrestrials do not simply straight-forward approach human beings, need only consider San Jose.

San Jose marks the southernmost stretch of Silicon Valley. That ant-like conclave established shockley the monkeywhen the pocket-protected variant of human concluded that lies and ignorance and madness should no longer be confined to podiums and pulpits, to printed treesheets and undulating airborne frequencies, to foam-flecked froot-loops shouting at buildings. But instead should at all times be instantly available to all, all over the planet, through one vast interweb, whereby anyone, anywhere, at any time, could consult a Reality where, say, it is Known that when Lindsay Lohan is sentenced to community service in a morgue, this is a tip-off that she is an MK-ULTRA-like sex/drug slave embroiled in Call to Chaos rites, cruelly captive of a Freemasonic conspiracy involving those demonic US intelligence agents who also owned and controlled Marilyn Monroe and directed “Manchurian Candidate” Sirhan Sirhan.

The Valley and all its interwebbing works the brainchild of one William Shockley. A deeply disturbed human who, once he had successfully dumped silicon into the human brainpan, flapped madly across the land howling that he had Looked at a Gene, and thereby concluded that black people are congenitally dumber than two fence-posts.

This sort of “thinking” for many decades informed the law-enforcement philosophy of badged and gunned humans in the San Jose region. A philosophy which involved beating with big sticks any black or otherwise melanin-infused human who Happened To Be There.

Today I see that this philosophy has migrated up the valley of silica to San Mateo County. Where it has been determined that land so poisoned with toxins it is forbidden to build residences there, shall house the new “San Mateo County Replacement Jail Project.” And thus, there, caged humans shall reside, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week after week, month after month, year after year, stewing in their fellow humans’ left-behind poisoned juices.

Last week the aptly named Chemical Way was cleaned of decades of toxic chemical residue, according to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department.

The site of the proposed new jail was so permeated by volatile organic compounds that the Department of Toxic Substances Control declared the land too hazardous for residential use. Unfortunately, it is still too hazardous to meet residential toxicity standards. The county cleaned it to commercial-level standards, which are lower, presuming that people don’t regularly sleep or eat or coming soonspend as much time in commercial settings. But the jail will have people eating and sleeping on site —24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If the jail site isn’t safe for residential use, where most people aren’t home 24 hours a day, it certainly isn’t safe for the people who will be locked inside for months or years at a time.

Perhaps for that reason, the county failed to include a Human Health Risk Assessment, which is used to measure people’s likely exposure to toxic chemicals and whether that level of exposure is safe. Should we infer that the county doesn’t believe jails are residential, or just that the potential health risks to prisoners are not important enough to fully assess?

But you know: it’s all alright. Because these aren’t real humans. These are humans with melanin.

Black people make up 24 percent of San Mateo’s jail population even though they represent only 3 percent of the county’s population. Similarly, Latinos constitute 35 percent of the jail population but only 26 percent of the county’s.

It is time, I think, for some musical accompaniment. A number that not only explains why extraterrestrials do not straight-forward approach human beings. But also why there is some debate, out there in space, about maybe just erasing the place, to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

When To Stop

Published March 14, 2013 Capital Crime , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Wyrds 6 Comments

“They were doing renovations to extend the basement cafeteria. A bunch of Turkish workers were digging. They got a little surprise.”

Excavation work had torn up part of the sidewalk. Arkady joined the onlookers on the precarious edge, where klieg lamps aimed an incandescent surpriselight at a power shovel in a hole two stories deep and about twenty meters square.

In the hole an organized crew of men in coveralls and hard hats worked on the ground and up on scaffolding with picks and trowels, plastic bags, surgical masks and latex gloves. One man dislodged what looked like a brown ball, which he placed in a canvas bucket that he lowered by rope to the ground. He returned to his trowel and painstakingly freed a rib cage with arms attached. As Arkady’s eyes adjusted he saw that one entire face of the excavation was layered with human remains outlined by the snow, a cross section of soil with skulls for stones and femurs for sticks. Some were clothed, some weren’t. The smell was of sweet compost.

The canvas bucket was passed fire brigade style across the pit and pulled by rope up to a tent where other shadowy bodies were laid out on tables. The colonel went from tent to tent and barked at the men sorting bones to work faster.

Sergeant Gleb said, “They want all the bodies out by morning. They don’t want people to see.”

“How many so far?”

“It’s a mass grave, who can say?”

“How old?”

“From the clothes, they say the forties or fifties. Holes in the back of the head. In the basement of the Supreme Court yet. March you right downstairs and boom! That’s how they used to do it. That was some court.”

Gleb asked, “What if the grave runs under the entire court?”

“That’s always the problem, isn’t it? Once you start digging, when to stop?”

—Martin Cruz Smith, Stalin’s Ghost

This Is A Stickup

Published March 8, 2013 Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Oddbins 14 Comments

The term “concealed carry,” it has developed a whole new meaning, now that a woman has been found to have lugged around a loaded revolver stuffed up her vagina.

Jennifer Delancy and Christie Harris were blithely, though blearily, weaving along the roads of these United States, when local gendarmes what's up?determined it might be a wise idea to pull them over.

In the course of the ensuing traffic stop, it was discovered that both women had rap sheets longer than god, and that one had an active warrant out for her arrest.

Meanwhile, drug dogs deployed, and sniffing round these two women, were going absolutely batshit.

It was decided to transport the two women to the local pokey.

“On the way there, one of them tells the officer she has a[] hypodermic needle in her shoe, and they remove that,” Pontotoc County District Attorney Chris Ross said. “The other one said she had to go to the bathroom.”

“The other one”—a.k.a. Ms. Harris—was, it was discovered during booking, harboring “something strange” within her corporeal container.

“The officer observed the handle of a revolver sticking out from inside her body,” Ross said.

Court records state it was a “wooden and metal item sticking out from her vagina area.”

A further search brought forth “[b]ags of drugs [] secreted in Harris’s rectum.”

Yeehaw.

Crystal meth, drug paraphernalia, a pistol and a loaded clip of bullets were found inside the vehicle.

During the ride to jail, Harris “stated several times that she needed to go to the bathroom,” said police.

Officer Kathy Unbewust conducted a strip search of Harris, despite the latter’s objections.

Unbewust said that she observed a wooden and metal item sticking out from her vaginal area. The concealed weapon contained “three live rounds inside and one spent shell.”

“It would seem to be a very dangerous place to carry a loaded firearm,” Ross said. “If it goes off it’s only going one place.”

As might have been predicted—with something like 100% accuracy—Harris is a methamphetamine person.

For, not only does meth convince a person that it is Absolutely Imperative to completely dismantle one’s car at 3:00 in the morning, so too does it command that ramming objects strange and unnatural up the glory hole is nothing but Right and Meet.

Oklahoma has previously been identified on this blog as the veritable vortex of the emerging national penchant for brewing methamphetamine in the aisles of the local WalMart.

Now, apparently, Oklahoma is also on the absolute cutting edge of The Need to squirrel away vast quantities of meth, accompanied by firearms, up the holy of holies.

As has been here heretofore observed, the Oklahoma state motto is currently Labor Omnia Vincit— or, “Labor Conquers All Things.” I believe—I say again—it is time to change that motto. To something like E Pluribus Dumbfuck. Or, “Meth Labs R Us.”

Now Hear This

Published March 2, 2013 Cineman , Johnny Law 11 Comments

It is in the nature of a “job” that sometimes They want you to do things you’d rather not do.

I try to avoid doing things I’d rather not do. Which is why I have never been known for making money.

At present I am employed in the law game. And occasionallyodor in the court the lawyers want me to go to court.

Now, going to court is one of those things I’d rather not do. Because it involves watching police officers testify as if they feared they’d be struck by lightning if they told the truth, prosecutors strutting around like they’re wearing swastika armbands, and judges leaping up from behind the bench to fawningly kneel to grovelingly offer their genitals, their brains, and their lips, to the prosecutors and the police.

There are enough nightmares in this world, without willingly offering oneself up to spectacles like that.

Recently one lawyer wanted me to go to a court where I would be subjected to a prosecutor who I swear has the number 666 carved into his forehead, and a police officer who has already “transferred” from two different local departments when his superiors wearied of the fact that his fingers would burst into flame if he even once inscribed an accurate police report.

I sent the lawyer the video clip below. Informing him that my sinuses were acting up. And that if he asked me—for whatever amount of money—to sit there and endure those swine, there was no doubt whatsoever that I would be compelled, there in the courtroom, to loudly and repeatedly emit the same sort of sounds as possessed Felix Unger.

I didn’t have to go.

Dem Bones

Published November 28, 2012 Johnny Law , Oddbins 6 Comments

The Americans, noted Puritans, tend to regard Sweden as a hotbed of sexual libertines, who run utterly wild at all times, ceaselessly plunging in and out of each other’s orifi, with total abandon, and no restraint.

So shocked, probably, shall these Americans be, that the Swedes appear to have drawn at least one line, in matters sexual.

For in that nation, now, a 37-year-old woman faces criminal prosecution, simply because she seems to prefer sex with skeletons.

This, apparently, constitutes the crime of “violating the peace of the dead.”

The prosecutor could not explain how the woman had managed to collect almost an entire skeleton, but explained that the human remains had been used in an “unethical” way.

“In the confidential section of the investigation we have material which indicates she used them in sexual situations,” the prosecutor told the TT news agency.

The woman is believed to have used the human bones for sexual gratification. The evidence that the prosecution presented to the press on Tuesday included two CDs labelled “My necrophilia” and “My first experience.”

Katarina Öberg, head of the centre of Andrology and Sexual Medicine at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, admitted this was the first time she had heard of such a case in Sweden.

“During my ten years I have never had a patient with necrophilia,” she said. “Although, I guess it is not really something that one confesses to having.”

The woman has pled not guilty, and maintains she did nothing wrong. She admits to collecting bones, but says she accumulates the dry stuff “out of a historical and archaeological interest.”

And it’s not like she was keeping it a secret.

She had reportedly bragged to some nearby children about keeping knives and dead people in her apartment.

She is also willing to share her bones, having peddled a few over the intertubes.

According to the prosecution, the woman has also sold skulls over the internet.

The latest transaction was between the woman and a person in Uppsala, eastern Sweden. The buyer had allegedly stocked up on three skulls and a spine.

She has reportedly posted to an intertubes forum:

“I want my man like he is, whether he is dead or alive. He allows me to find sexual happiness on the side.”

You know, this is pretty broad-minded. A lot of people, they can be pretty picky about their lovers. This woman, she doesn’t even require that her partner be alive.

And they want to put her in jail.

What is this world coming to.

That Made It Right

Published November 22, 2012 Animal Matters , Capital Crime , Cineman , Into The Light , Johnny Law , Peasant Palate 10 Comments

(A slice and dice of several previous red Thanksgiving pieces, including those here and here.) 

One Thanksgiving I spent in jail. I was young, and therefore brash and rash, and so thought myself immortal, impervious. Didn’t think then, there in stir, about doing serious prison time, which is what I was facing. Just had to wait for the holiday weekend to pass, I figured, then the lawyer could tease the bail down to a Sane level. Which is what happened. The serious grinding over the prison time, that came later.

Thanksgiving was my third or fourth day in the place. I occupied alone a single-cell, which I belatedly learned was supposed to be a sort of punishment. I could smoke in there—can’t do that no more, in the jails in this state—and I could think and plan and wonder and reflect. There were tolerable volumes from the jail library with which I could pass the time. Nobody bothered me. I could talk to the folks—though yes I couldn’t see them—in the cells on either side of me. But I could choose not to, too.

This was 25 years or so ago, when they still fed you decently in the jails around here. And so on Thanksgiving they shoved through the bars a fair approximation of a traditional American Thanksgiving repast: turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, yams, etc. I ate all of it. Yams I hadn’t much eaten before, and I haven’t eaten them since. But I had already discovered, there a monkey confined to a cage, that I’d eat just about anything the keepers slid my way. You do tend to get hungry, in every way, when your life is caged.

After Thanksgiving dinner the screws punched a video into the TV/VCR combo that sat on a low metal table rolled about on casters in the hall outside the cells occupied by we “serious felons.” I absolutely could not believe it: the film was The Black Stallion, one of my favorite movies, a tone poem completely about freedom, but one that I figured these cynical magpies in the “serious felon” row would hoot down and away, dismissing it as a “children’s flick.” How wrong I was. They, as it developed, had been on this row much longer than I; they had seen this film several times before, and they valued it. They got it as only people who don’t have it could get it.

Because it was Thanksgiving, that night we got a double feature. The second film was a ninja thing. As soon as it was punched in, we heard a groan from the guy in the cell to the far right.

“What bullshit,” he groused in his gravelly voice. “This is the one with the guy who takes more bullets and lives than even the guy in Scarface. What bullshit.”

And it was true. The ninja hero at one point was riddled with what looked like 20 or 30 bullets, mostly to the head and chest . . . but still, he kept on coming. As this nonsense approached its zenith, the guy in the cell at the far right kept muttering variations on “bullshit” and “check out this shit” and “no way.”

My unseen jailbird companion to my left at one point whispered to me: “That dude at the end, the reason why he’s pissed at this stupid shit: he’s in here on murder. He knows what it takes to kill a person. And it ain’t much.”

Several years later I spent Thanksgiving at Denny’s. I didn’t have to be there; I could have been other places, with other people. But Denny’s is where that Thanksgiving I chose to be. Even at the time, I knew that my Thanksgiving in Denny’s was worse than the Thanksgiving I’d spent in jail. Because then, in jail, somebody else had locked me up. But in dining at Denny’s, I had entered a jail of my own making.

Usually, these days, I don’t associate Thanksgiving with jail. But in 2010 it came back at me. Because the day before Thanksgiving, there in 2010, a jury out of Texas decided that Tom DeLay, former majority leader of the United States House of Representatives, had committed enough crimes to stash him away in a cage for the rest of his life.

furthur=>

Sadsacks Of Crime

Published November 21, 2012 Johnny Law , Oddbins Leave a Comment

Back in the day, miscreants had cool nicknames.

Pretty Boy Floyd. Baby Face Nelson. Legs Diamond. Machine Gun Kelly. Ma Barker. Mad Dog Coll. Dutch Schultz.

But, as they say, times today, ain’t what they used to be.

And so now we have this pitiful sadsack, picked up today by the government boys, known by the name John Doe Duffel Bag.

This is the most singularly unexciting moniker I have ever heard. He might as well be called Boredom Bill. Yawny Yanni. Somnambulent Sam.

When he goes into the big house, he is going to have to be placed in solitary. Because all the other prisoners will laugh at him. John Doe Duffel Bag. That is beyond pathetic. The other inmates: he will have to do all of their laundry, iron their shirts, shine their shoes.

So it is best that he just stays in his own good hole, hiding his face in shame.

John Doe Duffel Bag. There is simply no hope for such a fellow. No will ever write a song, make a film, about John Doe Duffel Bag. ‘Cept maybe a cartoon.

Broken English

Published November 8, 2012 Johnny Law , Oddbins 3 Comments

Robbing is an occupation fraught with peril. The authorities frown on it, and so do most of the Normal people. And, once the caper is launched, there’s just no telling what might happen.

Of course, generally this is true only of robbery at the retail level. As Woody Guthrie observed: “some will rob you with a six-gun/and some with a fountain pen.” The latter is mostly pretty safe. You just sit in an office and sign stuff.

Out on the street, though, that’s different. My friend S—-, in recalling his criminal career, would ruefully recount the time he and a friend resolved to rob a bank. Meticulously they had planned. The job, there at the end, required running three long city blocks, after the money had been secured.

This seemed, in Idea, no problem, the running. However, when it came time for Execution, S—- and his pal pantingly discovered that they had failed to factor in to the Plan that each man carried a giant heroin monkey on his back. This great weight, they quickly learned, elided any running.

Neither man had run anywhere for some months. They’d just naturally assumed they could. But no. And so they went to the pokey.

Recently in Orlando, Florida, a trio of robbers just naturally assumed that their victims would understand that they were being robbed. But no. And so, no robbery.

[T]hree masked men entered the New China eatery in Orlando a little after 9 p.m. Monday and demanded three employees hand over the money from the cash register.

However, the employees apparently had trouble understanding the robbers. Two of the masked men pounded on the register in an attempt to open it, accidentally firing a gun in the process.

Police said the attempted robbers left without any cash and hopped a retaining wall into Woodridge Apartments.

The employees spoke only Cantonese: the robbers but English. Holding a gun to an employee’s head apparently did not properly transmit the message that a robbery was underway. Neither did banging a gun on the sealed money machine, causing the gun to discharge and bullets to whine round the restaurant.
There was, here, a failure to communicate.
This seems useful information to me. Robber come hither, with gun or pen? Simply make it clear that you simply don’t understand.

The Green Light

Published July 19, 2012 Ala , Cineman , Destry , Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , Johnny Law , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Rutting For Office , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good , Wyrds 2 Comments

The very most interesting thing about the United States is that it died even as it was born.

As expressed in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which must serve as the “great American novel,” for there shall never be another:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away. Until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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Welcome to Walmeth

Published June 10, 2012 Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Oddbins , Rutting For Office 12 Comments

It’s time to just rename Walmart, Walmeth. I mean, that’s what people seem to do in there. Manufacture methamphetamine. So why not be up-front about it? Truth in advertising.

Back in December, one Elizabeth Alisha Greta Halfmoon strode into a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart and there set up shop, brewing herself some Hitler hooch. Six hours later, she was still at it. Apparently your common Walmeth is so vast and cavernous that it requires many hours for store employees to notice that someone is transforming it into a laboratory.

Now, at the time, one might have been tempted to dismiss this as an Oklahoma thing. For it is known that the people of Oklahoma, they are not the same, as you and I. For instance, they have dispatched to Washington DC to represent them in the United States Senate, Tom Coburn, who is a Cro-Magnon Man.

However, it must now be admitted that Walmeth is a nationwide phenomenon. Seeing as how a woman in St. Louis, Missouri felt compelled to wander round her local Walmeth with a “shake and bake” meth lab in her purse.

When it was discovered that the woman was a roving free-lance chemist, people were filled with Fear.

St. Louis County Police Lt. Mark Cox said if the meth concoction had spilled or leaked, it would have quickly circulated through the store’s ventilation system, contaminating the building and sickening lots of people.

“The sergeant on the scene that helped to dismantle it said that it was cooking when they showed up, and had the potential to become flammable or blow up at any time,” he said.

Security initially pulled the woman and another man aside for shoplifting. Those items were not meth-making ingredients, although Lt. Cox said that investigators wearing gas masks did find pills and chemicals inside a car in the parking lot.

Walmethian shoppers were evacuated from the lab until the Danger could be contained. There they were accosted by newsbeings.

“It’s kind of scary,” one woman said as she stood behind the yellow police tape, waiting for the all-clear to return to her car. “I’m just kind of astonished that somebody would come up here with a meth lab in their purse. And be dumb enough to shoplift on top of it.”

Au contraire. Dumbness too often veritably defines the nation. To wit, the president of the place, [s]elected first in 2000, and then again in 2004.

“Evolution”

Published May 12, 2012 Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Rutting For Office , Wyrds Leave a Comment

Today we had a Conference on the motion of the US in US v. Thomas [(1960) 362 US 58] to vacate the stay granted by the Court of Appeals.

During the Conference [United States Supreme Court Justice Felix] Frankfurter got very heated. He recalled how I, as far back as 1946, was urging the Court to meet the segregation issue and bring cases up. He said if the cases had been brought up then he would have voted that segregation in the schools was constitutional because “public opinion had not then been crystallized against it.” He said the arrival of the Eisenhower Court heralded a change in public opinion on this subject and therefore enabled him to vote against segregation. [Justice] Bill Brennan’s response was “God Almighty!”

—memorandum, Justice William O. Douglas, January 26, 1960

Fire In The Hole

Published April 29, 2012 Johnny Law , Oddbins 3 Comments

Previously on this blog we examined the sadsack who wandered into an Oklahoma Walmart to there brew methamphetamine, the place so vast and cavernous that for many hours No One noticed the criminal chemistry experiment.

And also the Mississippi miscreant who attempted to flee a Winn Dixie with live lobsters wriggling around in his pants. As well as the North Carolina gentleman who sought to celebrate his 45th birthday by absconding from a supermarket with shrimp, rib-eye steak, baby back ribs, and smoked turkey stuffed down his drawers.

Now comes a man who has managed to combine these capers.

David Williams of Mounds, Oklahoma was a passenger in a vehicle tooling along through Okmulgee County early Friday morning, when the driver was pulled over for speeding by Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Shiloh Hall.

During the ritual production of papers, Trooper Hall asked Williams why a noxious chemical smell seemed to be emanating from his person. Williams, he entered a lizard-brain panic state, and burst from the vehicle. Then, during a struggle with the trooper, his drawers exploded.

“After a brief struggle it was determined there was an active meth lab in his pants that burst during the struggle and got all over his body,” said OHP trooper Shiloh Hall.

Medical personnel checked out Williams and the road was closed so emergency crews could clean up the scene.

Williams was booked into the Okmulgee County jail on a complaint of manufacture of a controlled and dangerous substance.

The driver was not arrested. He told authorities that he was transporting Williams to the latter’s semi. Apparently Williams drives the nation’s roads behind the wheel of a massive big rig, while cooking narcotics in his pants.

In Oklahoma, people brew meth in the Walmarts, people brew meth in their pants. The state motto is currently Labor Omnia Vincit, or, “Labor Conquers All Things.” I believe it is time to change that motto. To something like E Pluribus Dumbfuck, or “Meth Labs R Us.”

Cane Mutiny

Published January 21, 2012 Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Oddbins 2 Comments

Once upon a time, about thirty or so years ago, I was charged with combing the public prints for news strange and unusual, to be offered to readers weekly as examples of What Can Happen.

I recall then coming upon a report of a very old woman who one evening was compelled to whip out her cane and commence whomping the bejesus out of her equally aged husband’s testicles, as he sat there in his wheelchair, “because he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Well, I thought at the time, prob’ly won’t read anything like that ever again.

Oh, foolish youth.

For now comes the report of 87-year-old Dorothy Desjardins, who took a pistol to 88-year-old husband Peter, because she was convinced the old reprobate was carrying on an affair with her hairdresser.

Fitfully literate Springfield, Missouri police-people record this:

On 11/05/2011 officers were dispatched to 2941 E. Lamonta Drive in reference to a domestic assault where a female had shot a male. Upon their arrival, they contacted Desjardins and P.E.D. in their living room. When P.E.D. told the officers Desjardins had shot him in the arm she made several spontaneous utterances. Some of those statements included, “He had it coming. He was cheating on me,” “I’m not mad at him anymore,” “I caught him folling around,” “I intended to scare the shit out of him,” “I wasn’t going to kill him,” “I just went a little bit beserk,” and “I did what I intended to do to scare him.”

Before firearms entered the fray, Desjardins asserted to her husband that the hairdresser had confessed all to her. Her husband denied all charges, claiming the only time he ever laid eyes on this hairdresser was when she was laying hands on his wife. Tiring of his wife’s continuing accusations, he retreated to their bedroom. She then came roaring in on her walker, and proceeded to toss books at him.

Next:

When Desjardins ran out of books to throw she picked up P.E.D.’s revolver from nearby shelf. P.E.D. said Desjardins then started flinging the revolver around in the air and he told her to stop because she didn’t know how to handle it. P.E.D. said it was at that time that Desjardins pulled back the hammer and fired the revolver at him. P.E.D. said he had his right arm covering his face when the gun went off.

The projectile pierced said right arm. However, the weapon was not loaded with bullets, but instead “fine grain pellets,” most often used on small mammals and reptiles, rather than aged lotharios. An examining physician stated that the victim sustained no “vascular damage,” and that surgery would not be performed to remove the pellets lodged in his appendage.

All You Need To Know About The FBI

Published January 14, 2012 Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Wyrds 3 Comments

“The FBI doesn’t conduct investigations, they pay informers. Doesn’t matter what kind of case—spies, civil rights, Mafia—all they know is informers. Most Americans are touchy about informers, so the bureau specializes. Their informers are mental cases and hit men. Where the bureau touches the real world, suddenly you get all these freaks who know how to kill people with piano wire. Say a freak got caught, and now he’s willing to fry his friends. He tells the bureau what it wants to know and makes up what he doesn’t know. A bureau agent is really a lawyer or an accountant; he wants to work in an office and dress nice, maybe go into politics. That son of a bitch will buy a freak a day.”

—Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park

Welcome To Walmart

Published December 10, 2011 Capital Crime , Cineman , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law 9 Comments

So it seems that today’s Walmarts are so vast and cavernous that denizens of Oklahoma have taken to cooking methamphetamine there, bubbling speedy brew in the friendly Waltonian confines, until their public chemistry experiments are belatedly noted and aborted by party-pooping badge-and-gun people.

On Thursday, one Elizabeth Alisha Greta Halfmoon entered a Tulsa Walmart about noon. Six hours later she was still there. It was then that security officers managed to notice that she was “acting suspicious.” Summoned Tulsa police officers discovered that Halfmoon was cooking methamphetamine: she had stationed herself “to the back of the store near restrooms, where she began mixing ingredients, Tulsa Police Corporal Scott Anderson said.”

“When I saw her she had just finished mixing sulfuric acid with starter fluid in a bottle,” reported Officer David Shelby. “She didn’t have the money to make the purchases of the chemicals that were needed so she was taking what was needed in the bottle.”

Officer Shelby said: “When firefighters were on the scene she made statements to them that is what she was doing, she was attempting to obtain these chemicals and was in the process of trying to manufacture meth. However, she said she was not very good at it.”

Fellow shoppers were said to be crippled by Horror, when they learned that they had been wandering through an active meth emporium.

Jessica Fuentes, who was with her one-year-old son, was in tears when she found out, and told Fox: “This is a family store. People need to start thinking. If she has family she needs to think about her family.

“If you are broke go out and get a job. It’s just wrong.”

Apparently this Fuentes person is suggesting that Halfmoon should have secured a job—at, say, somewhere like Walmart—in order to generate sufficient funds to allow her to erect a meth lab in her own home. Which I suppose makes sense in some sort of Reality or other.

furthur=>

Lost

Published September 20, 2011 Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law 6 Comments

lost
in a Roman
wilderness of pain

—Jim Morrison

This is a story about a guy I know who will be warehoused in the state prison until he is dead.

I know more about what landed him there than anyone else does, because I am the only person who ever bothered to try to find out.

Too late, though.

He’s gone.

On October 1, 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped from out of her Petaluma, California bedroom, while her mother puttered about, unawares, elsewhere in the house.

A common, a terrifying, American parental nightmare.

Accompanied by the retroactive remembrance that:

Polly had a lifelong fear of the dark. She could not get to sleep unless there was a little light on. She was scared of a mysterious bogeyman and of the possibility of being kidnapped. It was something she had discussed often with her parents. Marc Klaas would recall with bitter irony how he had assured his daughter “that everything would be all right, I would always be there to protect her.”

Klaas was kidnapped, then raped, then murdered, by Richard Allen Davis. The rape and the murder unknown, to all but those two, for months. For Klaas’ body was not found, and Davis not apprehended, until long after Klaas’ kidnapping had gone viral, via the white-girl-in-distress template ascendant uber alles in American media culture.

When the “truth” did out as to Richard Allen Davis—that he was a career criminal who had earlier been incarcerated for a kaleidoscope of offenses, including kidnapping and sexual assault—the people of the state of California commenced the St. Vitus Dance.

They determined that such a person should never again be allowed to return to the streets to prey on people like Polly Klaas. They went to the state initiative process, originally fashioned to break the strangehold on the state of monied interests. But in recent years most often used to express the worst vigilante instincts of the populace. Eternally recurring the truth of Robert Stone’s words: “American populism, notorious as a pious front for venal corruption, the curse of this nation, and now, empowered by American wealth and resources, a worldwide plague.”

Californians wept and rended their garments, en masse, as they raced to the polls, to make sure that the killer of Polly Klaas would never again leave the big house, but in a box.

Except that this is not what they voted for. They voted instead for a measure wherein life-in-prison qualifying strikes could be both “violent”—i.e., you hurt another human being—or “serious,” the latter those crimes that Somebody had Decided had the mere potential for violence.

Like, say, residential burglary. The thinking being: but what if the homeowner comes home, during the burglary? The burglar might harm them. Whereas, in truth, in the vast majority of cases, at the first glimmer of an additional human presence, the burglar runs off like Richard Pryor with his body on fire.

Further, the three-strikes law provided that once a miscreant had accumulated two strikes, the three-strikes qualifying offense, the one that could send him or her to the state prison for life, could be any felony. As in, petty theft with a prior. As in, shoplifting a piece of pizza. And indeed, there are today people doing life in the state prison, for just such an offense. Under the law intended to send people like Richard Allen Davis to prison for life. But that instead, most often, locks away for life, wharf rats.

furthur=>

A Dangerous Country

Published July 11, 2011 Animal Matters , Capital Crime , Cineman , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , Liberte Egalite Fraternite 3 Comments

Cartoons of a certain age would occasionally feature some sunny jim happily piloting a little animated airplane through the wild blue yonder.

Then, for reasons various, the craft would begin to come apart around him. Pieces of the plane would peel off, or just plain disappear. As this proceeded, discomfort, upon the visage of the sunny jim, would be expressed.

In the end, the sunny jim would be reduced to holding but the wheel, all other portions of the craft having vanished. Momentum would carry the de-planed creature forward for a bit, until the wheel too would wink out; shortly thereafter, all forward motion stopped: a moment of stasis.

Then, the fall.

That’s pretty much what happened with the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, once presumed the future successor to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

There they were, American prosecutors, breezily flying the friendly skies, towing a banner reading: “Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Gallic Monster: Ravenous Prevert Maid-Raper.” Until their own investigators determined that their complaining witness was a lie with feet.

The banner is gone now, and so is the plane. All that’s left is the wheel. And the prosecutors, their asses hanging out there in the air. The fall comes next. Soon.

Across the Great Water, the French, who know more about America, and American cinema, than do Americans, are now again confirmed in their belief that the United States can best be apprehended through the film roles of Richard Widmark and Jack Palance: here cackling delightedly as an old woman in a wheelchair is shoved down a flight of stairs, there shooting an unarmed man in the back; here babbling cornpone senilities around a campfire, there grabbing a rope to stretch the neck of some sadsack, mostly only because “the folks” Can, and Feel Like It.

Unlike Americans, the French are not real big on horror films. This is because they understand what horror really is. And watched it play out in real-time, with Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In what Bernard-Henri Levy aptly characterized as “the cannibalisation of justice by the sideshow.” The “perp walk.” The daily dueling press conferences. The leaked photographs. The ludicrous “security arrangements.” All designed to mock and humiliate and diminish and demean. The ham-handedly planned street-theater. The endlessly talking heads, on all manner of tubes, serving as self-appointed insta-voting judges and juries and executioners. The hooting knuckledraggers, in the tabloids and on the streets, snickering about “Chez Perv” and “Frog Legs It.”

And, further, Levy: “the Robespierrism of the sideshow,” wherein “we are compelled to observe that, regarding the Strauss-Kahn affair, America the pragmatic, that rebels against ideologies, this country of habeas corpus that de Tocqueville claimed possessed the most democratic system of justice in the world, has pushed [] French Robespierrism, unfortunately, to the extremes of its craziness.”

From Dominique Moïsi:

The case does damage to the image of America and recreates negative stereotypes that existed before. Now this feeling is reinforced—that the United States is not a fully civilized country, with a police that behaves like that, that wants to humiliate. There is a sense that it’s a dangerous country.

Gee. Ya think?

furthur=>

“Can I Pet The Nice Park, Daddy?”

Published June 8, 2011 Animal Matters , Cineman , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Johnny Law , War On Terra 12 Comments

(This piece was originally published in a now-deceased local paper, about four or so years ago. I am reprinting it here now. Because.)

My daughter has always been attuned to suffering. When still but a toddler, those she perceived as in some sort of pain she dubbed “poor,” and she felt compelled to actively empathize by formally, soberly, petting them. This gift she bestowed indiscrim-inately, from bloated dead sea lions festering on the beach, to cruelly shaped and tamed ornamental shrubbery.

“Poor car,” she would say, running her hand over some rusted, abandoned junkheap. “Nice car.”

My daughter has not yet experienced that cruel and abusive torment of nature known today as  ”Downtown City Plaza.” I know, though, that she would instantly see it for what it is: crabbed, crimped, crippled. Sterile, suffering, more or less dead. She would gaze upon it with compassion, and then she would ask: “Can I pet the nice park, daddy?”

furthur=>

Public Burning

Published June 5, 2011 Capital Crime , Johnny Law 18 Comments

This is cheery news to wake up to.

Seems there be some yahoos in Congress who don’t much understand them some intertubes, but do understand that people who use those tubes need to go to The Jail.

According to these people, a bill introduced by Senators John Cornyn, Christopher Coons, and Amy Klobuchar would potentially toss in the pokey people who manage to make it behind the Maginot Line erected by Clem Kaddidlehopper, and successfully embed videos offered by YouTube.

[T]he bill tries to also define what constitutes a potential felony crime in these circumstances:

the offense consists of 10 or more public performances by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works

So yeah. If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link… you could be facing five years in jail.

Oh noez! Goin’ to the Big House! Get clickin’ on the video below, folks, and thereby commence dire straits.

Just Give Me Some Twoof

Published March 15, 2011 Afghanistan/Pakistan , Africa , Asia , Capital Crime , Destry , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , War On Terra 5 Comments

We seem to be in the midst of a mini-epidemic of people getting pilloried for saying things that are true.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been fingered by the wingers as an al Qaeda operative for accurately assessing the appeal of Al Jazeera. Clinton’s now-former spokesman PJ Crowley has been shown the door for rightfully decrying the government’s treatment of accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning. The soon-to-be-former National Public Radio executive Ron Schiller has been pronounced anathema for correctly characterizing the nation’s teabaggers. And New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller is under siege for aptly describing Fox News.

It’s not like this sort of thing hasn’t happened before. Cassandra was mocked and eventually chopped for Knowing All and talking about it. Jesus of Nazareth was nailed out to dry for unpalatable utterings in re church and state. Giordano Bruno was burnt black for apprehending the faith better than did his firestarters. And Galileo Galilei was threatened with same unless he left off his nonsense about the Earth revolving around the Sun.

Just goes to show that, now as then, people may say they want the truth, but, in many cases, many people really don’t. Truth, in this world, well, it just isn’t done.

furthur=>

We See You

Published March 11, 2011 Afghanistan/Pakistan , Capital Crime , Caribbean , Eternal Recurrence , Johnny Law , War On Terra 2 Comments

I occasionally grouse, here in my dotage, that, because I am in my dotage, I am living through the truth expressed by Arthur Schopenhauer, when he wrote:

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.

Most recently I invoked this Schopenhauer in noting that in Afghanistan the Bomb Men are rerunning the Vietnam-era Hellerian absurdity of “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” and while observing that the racists and related ignoranti who flock to smoothbrains like Sarah Palin are indistinguishable—down to the very words they commonly employ—from the knuckle-draggers who once hooted their approval of George Wallace.

Of late I am noticing a somewhat related phenomenon. And that is that They are working like twelve bastards to bring into Real Life various and sundry Horrors that I encountered, when once a wee youth, only as science fiction.

To wit: the skies will soon be filled with demonic winged mechanical devices that will see and report on anything I might say or do, a la the fever-dream imaginings of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. And they’ll be watching and reporting on you, too.

furthur=>

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