Tag Archives: Florida

BAC Funding Consortium, Inc., v. Ginelle Jean-Jacques et al.—As a Birthday Present, another Florida District Court Judge (Craig C. Villanti, 2nd DCA) “Got it Right”—but the struggle is fierce (and how curious that as between two Banks, the standard of pleading and proof is so much stricter)

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

BAC FUNDING CONSORTIUM INC. ISAOA/ATIMA, Appellant, v. GINELLE JEAN-JACQUES, SERGE JEAN-JACQUES, JR., and U.S. BANK NATIONAL ASSOCIATION, as Trustee for the C-Bass Mortgage Loan Asset Backed Certificates, Series 2006-CB5, Appellees.

35 Fla. L. Weekly D369a

28 So.3d 936

Mortgage foreclosure — Summary judgment for plaintiff in mortgage foreclosure action was premature where plaintiff had failed to establish standing to foreclose — Plaintiff moving for summary judgment before an answer is filed must establish that defendant could not raise any genuine issues of material fact if defendant were permitted to answer complaint — Because exhibit to plaintiff’s complaint conflicts with allegations concerning standing and exhibit does not show that plaintiff has standing to foreclose mortgage, plaintiff did not establish entitlement to foreclose mortgage — Incomplete, unsigned, and unauthenticated assignment attached as exhibit to plaintiff’s response to defendant’s motion to dismiss did not constitute admissible evidence establishing standing to foreclose note and mortgage

BAC FUNDING CONSORTIUM INC. ISAOA/ATIMA, Appellant, v. GINELLE JEAN-JACQUES, SERGE JEAN-JACQUES, JR., and U.S. BANK NATIONAL ASSOCIATION, as Trustee for the C-Bass Mortgage Loan Asset Backed Certificates, Series 2006-CB5, Appellees. 2nd District. Case No. 2D08-3553. Opinion filed February 12, 2010. Appeal from the Circuit Court for Sarasota County; Robert B. Bennett, Jr., Judge. Counsel: F. Malcolm Cunningham, Jr., and Amy Fisher of The Cunningham Law Firm, P.A., West Palm Beach, for Appellant. Cindy L. Runyan of Florida Default Law Group, LP, Tampa, for Appellee U.S. Bank National Association. No appearance for Appellees Ginelle M. Jean-Jacques and Serge Jean-Jacques, Jr.

(VILLANTI, Judge.)(http://judgepedia.org/index.php/Craig_Villanti)

BAC Funding Consortium Inc. ISAOA/ATIMA (BAC) appeals the final summary judgment of foreclosure entered in favor of U.S. Bank National Association, as Trustee for the C-Bass Mortgage Loan Asset Backed Certificates, Series 2006-CB5 (U.S. Bank). Because summary judgment was prematurely entered, we reverse and remand for further proceedings.
             On December 14, 2007, U.S. Bank filed an unverified mortgage foreclosure complaint naming the Jean-Jacqueses and BAC as defendants. The complaint included one count for foreclosure of the mortgage and a second count for reestablishment of a lost note. U.S. Bank attached a copy of the mortgage it sought to foreclose to the complaint; however, this document identified Fremont Investment and Loan as the “lender” and Mortgage Electronic Registrations Systems, Inc., as the “mortgagee.” U.S. Bank also attached an “Adjustable Rate Rider” to the complaint, which also identified Fremont as the “lender.”
              Rather than answering the complaint, BAC responded by filing a motion to dismiss based on U.S. Bank’s lack of standing. BAC argued that none of the attachments to the complaint showed that U.S. Bank actually held the note or mortgage, thus giving rise to a question as to whether U.S. Bank actually had standing to foreclose on the mortgage. BAC argued that the complaint should be dismissed based on this lack of standing.
              U.S. Bank filed a written response to BAC’s motion to dismiss. Attached as Exhibit A to this response was an “Assignment of Mortgage.” However, the space for the name of the assignee on this “assignment” was blank, and the “assignment” was neither signed nor notarized. Further, U.S. Bank did not attach or file any document that would authenticate this “assignment” or otherwise render it admissible into evidence.
            For reasons not apparent from the record, BAC did not set its motion to dismiss for hearing. Subsequently, U.S. Bank filed a motion for summary judgment. At the same time, U.S. Bank voluntarily dismissed its count for reestablishment of a lost note, and it filed the “Original Mortgage and Note” with the court. However, neither of these documents identified U.S. Bank as the holder of the note or mortgage in any manner. U.S. Bank did not file the original of the purported “assignment” or any other document to establish that it had standing to foreclose on the note or mortgage.
               Despite the lack of any admissible evidence that U.S. Bank validly held the note and mortgage, the trial court granted summary judgment of foreclosure in favor of U.S. Bank. BAC now appeals, contending that the summary judgment was improper because U.S. Bank never established its standing to foreclose.
              The summary judgment standard is well-established. “A movant is entitled to summary judgment ‘if the pleadings, depositions, answers to interrogatories, admissions, affidavits, and other materials as would be admissible in evidence on file show that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.’ ” Estate of Githens ex rel. Seaman v. Bon Secours-Maria Manor Nursing Care Ctr., Inc., 928 So. 2d 1272, 1274 (Fla. 2d DCA 2006) (quoting Fla. R. Civ. P. 1.510(c)). When a plaintiff moves for summary judgment before the defendant has filed an answer, “the burden is upon the plaintiff to make it appear to a certainty that no answer which the defendant might properly serve could present a genuine issue of fact.” Settecasi v. Bd. of Pub. Instruction of Pinellas County, 156 So. 2d 652, 654 (Fla. 2d DCA 1963); see also W. Fla. Cmty. Builders, Inc. v. Mitchell, 528 So. 2d 979, 980 (Fla. 2d DCA 1988) (holding that when plaintiffs move for summary judgment before the defendant files an answer, “it [is] incumbent upon them to establish that no answer that [the defendant] could properly serve or affirmative defense it might raise” could present an issue of material fact); E.J. Assocs., Inc. v. John E. & Aliese Price Found., Inc., 515 So. 2d 763, 764 (Fla. 2d DCA 1987) (holding that when a plaintiff moves for summary judgment before the defendant files an answer, “the plaintiff must conclusively show that the defendant cannot plead a genuine issue of material fact”). As these cases show, a plaintiff moving for summary judgment before an answer is filed must not only establish that no genuine issue of material fact is present in the record as it stands, but also that the defendant could not raise any genuine issues of material fact if the defendant were permitted to answer the complaint.
              In this case, U.S. Bank failed to meet this burden because the record before the trial court reflected a genuine issue of material fact as to U.S. Bank’s standing to foreclose the mortgage at issue.  The proper party with standing to foreclose a note and/or mortgage is the holder of the note and mortgage or the holder’s representative. See Mortgage Elec. Registration Sys., Inc. v. Azize, 965 So. 2d 151, 153 (Fla. 2d DCA 2007); Troupe v. Redner, 652 So. 2d 394, 395-96 (Fla. 2d DCA 1995); see also Philogene v. ABN Amro Mortgage Group, Inc., 948 So. 2d 45, 46 (Fla. 4th DCA 2006) (“[W]e conclude that ABN had standing to bring and maintain a mortgage foreclosure action since it demonstrated that it held the note and mortgage in question.”). While U.S. Bank alleged in its unverified complaint that it was the holder of the note and mortgage, the copy of the mortgage attached to the complaint lists “Fremont Investment & Loan” as the “lender” and “MERS” as the “mortgagee.” When exhibits are attached to a complaint, the contents of the exhibits control over the allegations of the complaint. See, e.g.Hunt Ridge at Tall Pines, Inc. v. Hall, 766 So. 2d 399, 401 (Fla. 2d DCA 2000) (“Where complaint allegations are contradicted by exhibits attached to the complaint, the plain meaning of the exhibits control[s] and may be the basis for a motion to dismiss.”); Blue Supply Corp. v. Novos Electro Mech., Inc., 990 So. 2d 1157, 1159 (Fla. 3d DCA 2008); Harry Pepper & Assocs., Inc. v. Lasseter, 247 So. 2d 736, 736-37 (Fla. 3d DCA 1971) (holding that when there is an inconsistency between the allegations of material fact in a complaint and attachments to the complaint, the differing allegations “have the effect of neutralizing each allegation as against the other, thus rendering the pleading objectionable”). Because the exhibit to U.S. Bank’s complaint conflicts with its allegations concerning standing and the exhibit does not show that U.S. Bank has standing to foreclose the mortgage, U.S. Bank did not establish its entitlement to foreclose the mortgage as a matter of law.
               Moreover, while U.S. Bank subsequently filed the original note, the note did not identify U.S. Bank as the lender or holder. U.S. Bank also did not attach an assignment or any other evidence to establish that it had purchased the note and mortgage. Further, it did not file any supporting affidavits or deposition testimony to establish that it owns and holds the note and mortgage. Accordingly, the documents before the trial court at the summary judgment hearing did not establish U.S. Bank’s standing to foreclose the note and mortgage, and thus, at this point, U.S. Bank was not entitled to summary judgment in its favor.
        In this appeal, U.S. Bank contends that it was not required to file an assignment of the note or mortgage or otherwise prove that it validly held them in order to be entitled to summary judgment in its favor. We disagree for two reasons. First, because BAC had not yet answered the complaint, it was incumbent on U.S. Bank to establish that no answer that BAC could properly serve or affirmative defense that it might allege could raise an issue of material fact. Given the facial conflict between the allegations of the complaint and the contents of the exhibit to the complaint and other filings, U.S. Bank failed to meet this burden.
             Second, regardless of whether BAC answered the complaint, U.S. Bank was required to establish, through admissible evidence, that it held the note and mortgage and so had standing to foreclose the mortgage before it would be entitled to summary judgment in its favor. Whether U.S. Bank did so through evidence of a valid assignment, proof of purchase of the debt, or evidence of an effective transfer, it was nevertheless required to prove that it validly held the note and mortgage it sought to foreclose. See Booker v. Sarasota, Inc., 707 So. 2d 886, 889 (Fla. 1st DCA 1998) (holding that the trial court, when considering a motion for summary judgment in an action on a promissory note, was not permitted to simply assume that the plaintiff was the holder of the note in the absence of record evidence of such). The incomplete, unsigned, and unauthenticated assignment attached as an exhibit to U.S. Bank’s response to BAC’s motion to dismiss did not constitute admissible evidence establishing U.S. Bank’s standing to foreclose the note and mortgage, and U.S. Bank submitted no other evidence to establish that it was the proper holder of the note and/or mortgage.
         Essentially, U.S. Bank’s argument in favor of affirmance rests on two assumptions: a) that a valid assignment or transfer of the note and mortgage exists, and b) that a valid defense to this action does not. However, summary judgment is appropriate only upon record proof — not assumptions. Given the vastly increased number of foreclosure filings in Florida’s courts over the past two years, which volume has taxed both litigants and the judicial system and increased the risk of paperwork errors, it is especially important that trial courts abide by the proper standards and apply the proper burdens of proof when considering a summary judgment motion in a foreclosure proceeding.
         Accordingly, because U.S. Bank failed to establish its status as legal owner and holder of the note and mortgage, the trial court acted prematurely in entering final summary judgment of foreclosure in favor of U.S. Bank. We therefore reverse the final summary judgment of foreclosure and remand for further proceedings.
          Reversed and remanded for further proceedings. (ALTENBERND and SILBERMAN, JJ., Concur.)

Daniel Christian Mack comments on the fate of Tim Turner and the Republic of the USA

Charles,
I don’t normally respond to emails not addressed to me, but I wanted to express my satisfaction with your tenor concerning the news about Tim Turner.  Where you could’ve said “I told you so” you didn’t. And if you had been in the company of the man both publicly and privately as often as I was (and not anywhere near as many hours as most of his followers were) you might especially appreciate Tim’s Christian foundation (without being a Bible-thumper), his love for his country (the constitutional republic form of it), and desire to help people help themselves by filing the proper papers while understanding what it was they were filing and why.

Let me say that I never drank all of the Kool Aid that the supporters of the NR did, and I sometimes wondered if that was because I was just concerned about the implications of such an association in the long run, or if it was because I didn’t see any immediate results or benefits, or because I couldn’t afford the copying and postage costs associated with filing the famous “freedom documents”, or if it was a combination of the above.  But while I wasn’t an avid supporter, I also thought that if there was ever a man who stood for principles that I believed the founding fathers would espouse, it was Tim Turner.

It also seemed that Tim Turner was more than familiar with the stranglehold the private banking system had on our Constitutional Republican form of government and was addressing that as lawfully as anyone could–always NOTICING through administrative process (and isn’t that one of the maxims of law that most attorneys never even touch?—exhausting the administrative process FIRST so as not to waste the court‘s time??? –and that’s why attorneys like to pick cases up in the “middle”, in litigation, because that’s where the real money for them is—in the controversy/arguing??) all concerned parties in such a way that they were asked to respond/answer in a certain amount of time so as not to be answering “yes” by acquiescence.  

I never saw anyone offering a remedy that made any MORE sense according to the law.  Yet, it did often expose the fact that often the parties weren’t hearing, much less listening, much less answering.  It appeared that they’d prefer to stand in their too-big-to-fail-good-ol-boy-fraternity position than give the appearance or impression that they had any obligation to anyone other than their own agenda–and certainly not the law!

I also remember that he was one of the Directors of FEMA in Florida under Jeb Buah I believe, and how he resigned voluntarily because of what he was being asked to do against conscience, and how there was at least one, if not two attempts on his life after that because he couldn’t stay quiet about some of the evils that FEMA was up to and trying to make him party to as a Director.

I also remember how he was supposedly in close communications with the FBI, inviting them to every assembly or meeting that was held for the New Republic so that none could say that what he was doing was subversive or otherwise a threat to the country.  I remember hearing that after attending so many meetings, the FBI actually stopped showing up at every meeting because they were in fact supportive of what the NR was doing and realized it was of no threat.

Now, on the other side of the coin, Ken Cousens, one “studied in the law” and I believe the de jure governor of the republic of California for a short time also produced a lecture as to why the NR was nothing more than a private association styled after the form of a republic and was never properly put together to warrant it being recognized by any legitimate government in the world, starting with the fact that it didn’t have it’s own post office or banking system, and ending with the fact that the executive officers were never voted-in correctly by electors (supposedly one of the LAST things you do in forming a new government, not one of the FIRST!).  For such cogent reasons as Ken laid out (after he resigned from the office) he said of course the NR would NEVER gain the traction or respect among governments/nations that people were hoping they would.

On one of those notes, I’d also like to elaborate a bit as can also support the sober tenor with which you address the voting process.  I can’t say that I would disagree with some of your recommendations, but it does seem to completely side-step what Robb Ryder (he has numerous YouTubes) and his research have let him to discover; namely that as sovereigns in the de jure, we are actually “electors” who give up our authority to direct City Hall (as to what they should be doing/holding them accountable to the job descriptions of their offices) when we are coaxed/persuaded (believably through the public screwel system or pitch of the democratic process (where two wolves and one sheep vote what’s for dinner!) that by becoming a REGISTERED VOTER we are actually giving up our greater authority as an elector in the de jure, and becoming just another vote in the de facto democracy further believing that somehow NOW WE HAVE A VOICE THROUGH OUR VOTE!

Did you ever watch that Robb Ryder video I sent you?  He‘s kind of like a bull in a china closet the way he bumps around trying to pronounce words and the like.  But while I fear I get hung up on grammar and those issues (the details), I also fear that I might be missing the forest for the trees while someone like former VietNam vet Robb Ryder might be seeing the real forest a lot easier than I can!

More chicanery? Trickery? Subversive programing to aid in the powers that be bringing the sheep to the slaughter?  I grew up trusting that somehow the powers that be were even more concerned about protecting baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet more than I was!  Now, I don’t trust anyone with government credentials, even if that means someone trained only in the public screwl system and their attending universities.  

And the more I see/experience/hear about the courts where justice is supposed to be sought, the more I realize there is little if any justice to be found there, that instead it is “just us” looking for fairness, for remedy, for justice.  And why anyone with your credentials would want to go back is illogical given that people in the know usually aren’t seeking the help of an attorney, and when they do, they usually discover how impotent they are to make any significant changes or differences when it comes to getting justice.  (i.e. Michael Pines, Richard Fine, Charles Lincoln III, etc.) 

There’s a lot to be said for the schools of hard knocks, and the people who have attended them like you going through what you have to become dis-barred, and extradited and the like.  You show more by those actions the kind of character that attracts honest people–though admitedly maybe honest people who can’t afford your services!  Haven‘t we learned by now that any attorney that is really going to live on the cutting edge of making a difference is also going to put his BAR card at risk?  If not, is not the end result going to be some sort of compromise or settlement instead of a victory?  Or is a settlement supposed to be the victory?

I was reminded of this yesterday when a registered agent with the IRwho’s helping us deal with over $22k of “frivolous filing” penalties finally counseled us to take advantage of a new law with the IRS that puts a maximum ceiling on our penalties of $500 or $1000.  Sure, sounds a lot better than $22k plus!  But is it just?  Is it right? No!  Not when you have others more learned in the law pointing out their dirty laundry!  How conditioned havwe become to accept the lowest we can afford rather than go after the #$%%#  ##$#!$!^%’s for taking advantage of folks that THEY KNOW don’t have the resources to expose their crimes!!! A bottle of Tide is still more affordable than buying the whole laundrymat.ndry (As JT who you met and has the IRC all but memorized says, “they’re citing codes under Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sections, and not codes under income tax!  Furthermore, the code section you SHOULD be under they ignore because it has no implementing regulation.  In other words, they have no authority to regulate or make judgements or impose fines in the code section under which your activity falls.  So they pull you in under another one and make it hell for you in every way to correct the record!

Enough for you to chew on for now. 

Dan
San Juan Capistrano, Orange County, California

Racial Presumptions of Guilt in the Criminal Justice System as a proxy for intelligent dialogue concerning Race in Society

Why do you think the laws should be color blind, given that 1/2 of all Negroes (about 20 million)  and 45% of non-white Hispanics (about 23 million) have IQ so low they cannot graduate from high school?  Don’t you recognize that those 43 million (plus 33 million low-IQ whites) reliably make wrong decisions and cannot accurately evaluate relative importances?  Doesn’t that mean to you they cannot be trusted with dangerous weapons?
Charles, when you start promoting sterilization of and removal from suffrage of the stupid, your argument about color blindness might make some sense.   But you don’t address the unfairness of the criminal justice system to stupid whites.  Are you having a little trouble with color blindness?
And then there’s the proven track record of felons.  Sure some innocents land in prison.  But I believe 99% are guilty.  Do you have any proof to the contrary?
Bob

Bob Hurt
2460 Persian Drive #70
Clearwater, FL 33763-1925
(727) 669-5511
Visit My Home Page  ·  Email Me  ·  Visit My Blog

Dear Bob Hurt:

We must NOT (not now not EVER) hide behind the pretext that blacks or hispanics are by some sort of genetic, moral, or spiritual disposition inherently more CRIMINAL than Whites.  That is a hateful lie, and it is the kind of disgracefully unreflective lie that gives law and the justice system a bad name.  Eugenics is, on the whole, the most dangerous of all sciences because it really does tend to tempt humans to take the roles of God and Nature, and that is in every possibly way, totally wrong.

The Thirteenth Amendment had a strange effect—it apparently abolished chattel slavery for private individuals but has gradually either acted directly to transform or has merely supported [created a major incentive for] the transformation of penal slavery into big business for the government, the so-called Criminal Justice System in the United States, well-known to late night TV viewers to be the fastest growing industry in North America…..

The American Criminal Justice System is only genuinely CRIMINAL because of the way it is run, which lacks any connexion with JUSTICE and is a SYSTEM mainly of oppression and division in society, creating a vast underclass of unjustly convicted people, most of whose “crimes” hurt no one and whose imprisonment benefits no part of society except the operators of public and private prisons…..

And as I’ve told you before—given what you and I BOTH know about corruption and inefficiency in government, trusting the government State Social Engineers to determine the who, where, when, how, and why of eugenics, to sterilize people and decide on subjective standards who gets to vote is insane.  The fact that eugenics was an American project first and a Nazi Project only second—-continuing in America (in some quarters) for at least two decades after Hitler’s bunker fell to the Soviets—makes one wonder exactly why the Second World War was quite such a “Good War” as popular mythology tells us to think it was.

BUT DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT “99% are guilty?”  ARE YOU IN TOUCH WITH THE WORLD WE LIVE IN AT ALL?  DO YOU EVEN READ YOUR OWN NEWSGROUPS & BLOGS????   They are all about INJUSTICE and the CORRUPTION in and ERRORS of the “Justice Systems” (Civil, Criminal, Domestic, & Probate, State, Federal, and “other”)….

The most detailed studies have been done of the most serious cases—namely death penalty cases.  In one famous study in Illinois, it was determined that 50% of the people on death row were INNOCENT OF ANY CRIME.  That was about ten years ago but it led to a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois.  NO cases are taken more seriously in state court criminal justice systems than death penalty cases—and in fact ALL non-capital cases receive MUCH less in the way of appellate scrutiny than those where the death penalty is involved.  And in Illinois, NOT AT ALL one of the most backward or famously corrupt (except for the City of Chicago) states in the USA, DEATH ROW was populated by a process that was roughly as accurate as to guilt or innocence as FLIPPING A COIN.

As for further proof, look at the studies and statistics from the Innocence Project and the results of cases reopened with DNA testing—a HUGE PERCENTAGE of rape and murder cases are REOPENED and thrown out because of DNA results—and what about crimes with no such independently objective standards of testing like burglary or other forms of theft which leave few biotissue residues behind?  I’d say that the Criminal Justice System in the United States is APPALLING inaccurate and unfair as to guilt, innocent, or even probable cause to believe in guilt….. BUT ONE of the major motivating factors in keeping the system going is the desire for COVERT racial oppression and segregation.  (Another is the profitability of the prison system to state and local governments and the utility of criminal justice as a form of and adjunct to Welfare….)

I have seen with my eyes that most people in FEDERAL custody are innocent of anything worthy to be called a CRIME under the Laws of God as stated in the Bible, the Common Law of England and America, or the Civil Law, and that most of the people in FEDERAL custody are there because of corrupt plea bargains, perjured testimony, and regulatory laws that make everyone “factually” guilty of something—no matter how trivial.

As for race and the law—I believe in HONESTY in the Law—this means that people should not be arrested or found guilty or put in prison MERELY because they are black or Hispanic.  As you know, I have STRONG personal beliefs AGAINST black-white racial integration, miscegenation, and stronger doubts about the honor and integrity of the Civil Rights movement.

HOWEVER, I can and do distinguish between honest color-blind law enforcement and honest endorsement of segregation.  And what I see in the STATE systems, and up to a point in the Federal System as well, is that CHARGING PEOPLE WITH CRIMES has become a dishonest and hypocritical SURROGATE for lawful segregation.

I do not believe that most of the blacks and hispanics are in jail because they have committed serious crimes.  I do think that many or most of them are in jail because they are black or hispanic and this is EXTREMELY dishonest administration of justice. IF there are rational and positive reasons to segregate the races, and I think that well there may be, then we need to reopen THAT debate and address it full frontally, face on.  My Ph.D. in Anthropology, and my studies of biology ad history as well as law and politics all lead me to believe that a restoration of racial segregation COULD be a positive good for all peoples.

BUT INSTEAD, since the 1870s, more and more with time, black slavery has been replaced by black penal servitude and now hispanic penal servitude.  THIS IS IMMORAL BECAUSE IT IS DISHONEST.  It means that WHITE prisoners are more likely to get fair trials and be acquitted or convicted based on actual guilt or innocent, whereas there is a PRESUMPTION that all blacks and hispanics, once arrested, need to be incarcerated, especially the males.  THIS IS SO OFFENSIVE TO ME IT MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL.  The White Power Elite of the United States wants to PRETEND to protect racial equality by Civil Rights but they go on rounding up a hugely disproportionate number of blacks and hispanics.  EVERYONE who has seen the prison statistics and the faces of the prisoners KNOWS THIS TO BE TRUE.  And as I’ve told you—I simply do not accept your presumption that IQ statistics are valid as indicators of much of anything except success in school.  There are tricks to taking tests and scoring high on them which are taught in school and sometimes taught at home.  I know because I’m a life-long beneficiary of being taught such tricks (and even so the Louisiana Bar Exam Materials this year seems like the most difficult thing I’ve ever tackled).

But DO YOU SEE MY POINT: The CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM cannot HONESTLY and JUSTLY act as a SURROGATE MEANS OF SEGREGATION.  The entire criminal justice system is ROTTEN, State and Federal for Whites, Blacks and Asians.  That is a reality, but the deeper well of reality is that the ROTTEN Criminal Justice system serves a dishonest purpose—it keeps black males off the streets BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK more than because they are dangerous.

And Felonies?  Well, you just are talking to the wrong person if you want a certification that most regulatory Felony Statutes Judgments in the USA are just or proper.

I have lost, had stolen, or given up a great deal of wealth and property in my life, way too much to be called sane, but as regards “felons in possession” was it fair that I had to give away a large historic and modern firearms collection when indicted for the alleged heinous crime of misstating two digits of my social security number in an application for a non-interest bearing checking account at Wells Fargo Bank on Congress Avenue in November 1996 when I had 14 other bank accounts at Wells Fargo and other banks which all had my correct number?  When Wells Fargo Bank never noticed that my SSN was wrong (because all other information was correct and all accounts were clearly MINE and traceable to ME and nobody else)?

I am totally in favor of EQUALIZING the restoration of post-conviction rights of “Felons” to keep and bear arms with the post-conviction rights to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion, and yes I provided Herbert Paul Bethel’s briefs and all the case research I did to the New Orleans Public Defenders who won this major victory.

IF there is to be a dialogue about RACE in the United States it must be an HONEST and DIRECT dialogue, and it should be focused on the processes of BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION, ECOLOGY, and the maintenance of GENETIC, GENOTYPIC, GENOMIC, and PHENOTYPIC DIVERSITY—exactly as we so readily discuss the endangered species act and conservation laws in relation to animal and plant species and the maintenance of their diversity.


From: Bob Hurt <bob@bobhurt.com>
To: Charles Edward Lincoln III <lincoln_for_california@rocketmail.com>
Cc: ”herbhogs@msn.com” <herbhogs@msn.com>
Sent: Sunday, 24 March 2013, 20:29
Subject: Re: Major New Orleans Ruling on the RIght to Keep & Bear Arms—following MacDonald v. City of Chicago

A MODERN SATYRICON/CENA TRIMALCHIONIS: Fellini could not possibly have better portrayed Depravity, Degeneracy, Funny Money, and the American Dream gone to the Dogs—all in Orlando, Florida (White Trash this Rich Deserve all the Dog Poop They’ve Got…on their Diningroom tables and floors)

Being a graduate of Harvard University for the most part is an amusing anecdote to tell at parties in Malibu or one of the better lines to use while fishing for youthful female companionship in the perilous world of a single man alone, 52 years old, who has never used Viagra to maintain….any ….ehem… relationship…. but has never grown up either, suffering from a long-term aggravated Peter Pan complex.

But just occasionally though, Harvard alumni status works out and introduces me to something interesting and genuinely of continuing educational quality worthy of the 02138 zip code’s long tradition.  Thursday, November 1, 2012, was such a night—-at the invitation of a group called “Harvardwood” (“Harvard in Hollywood”), I attended a screening a a marvelous documentary called The Queen of Versailles….  True to its title, this marvelous, marvelous full-length movie is a story about extravagant wastrels who cannot potty train a dog much less be trusted with a Nation’s wealth and national heritage.  Conceived and directed by Lauren Greenfield—who apparently attended Harvard during my middle-graduate years (1983-1987)—it is part personal history, part reality TV writ-large (and well written), part metaphor of our time and the decline and fall of our civilization.  I was pleased to meet Ms. Greenfield who studied Visual Environmental Studies across from Sever Hall and down the street from the Fogg at Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at 24 Quincy where just three summers ago in 2009 my son Charlie and I were attending movies almost every night….  She has created a masterpiece that captures the spirit of our times—focusing on the cultural, economic, political, and spiritual crisis in which we live much better than “Obama 2016″, and with a much more limited coherent cast of characters and time frame the Josh Tickell’s still phenomenal Big Fix.  Like any good movie, we feel we know this cast of characters and what makes them tick (or “fail to tick” as the case may be), but it is all real and all terribly relevant.  I wish Queen of Versailles could be broadcast on all three major Networks prior to the election—narrated by Ron Paul who would explain why voting for either Romney or Obama will just lead to more of the same….  Together with Tickell’s “The Big Fix”, this IS a movie to use at the start of a major Third Party Movement in the USA…..

        To make a very long story short, David Siegel is a monstrously low-brow modern type nouveau riche multi-millionaire (imagine Archie Bunker with billions) who made his money the truly old-fashioned way: by adopting the latest fad in a fraudulently invented, completely new, kind of marketing device that skins everyone who buys it alive and provides no real lasting benefits to anyone.

         What is that product?  Well, I have to give credit to my Italo-Yucatecan Creole co-madre Arqueóloga Beatriz Repetto-Tio de Maldonado for her perfect explanation of Mr. Siegel’s business:  ”In the olden days there was a short simple word for ‘time-share properties’—they called them fraud.   Every charlatan from the time of the Medes and the Parthians has dreamt of ways to sell the same product 52 times a year for different prices to different people, squeezing just as much as you can out of every chump according to his means, and when they invented time-share, they did just that: no the same trashy apartment can be divided into TIME units of 52 weeks in the year, plus maybe a few leftover weekends, and sold over and over and over again.”   Betty definitely has a way with words but she was spot-on 100% right.   And David Siegel—time share king of time-share land—was a Charlatan to the Charlatans, and his empire covered all the trashy spots where trashy people like to hang out, from Orlando to Vegas…   Of course, by his own account, from his own mouth in the movie, David Siegel was (at least in part) also involved in the electoral fraud that brought George W. Bush to the White House in 2000 and 2004 (remember in which state the hanging chads should have led to a new election, but instead led to the Supreme Court usurping the electoral role and appointing the man who must now, in all fairness, be called only the SECOND WORST President in US history—sorry George, but your handpicked Kenyan Successor Mr. Obama has utterly surpassed you….that Constitution which you said was only a piece of paper?  Mr. Obama has used it in the White House privy….).  This year David Siegel has reached new lows in American standards of political depravity in electoral history by threatening his employees with dismissal if they don’t vote for Romney:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-10/why-david-siegel-told-his-employees-to-vote-for-romney 

But Lauren Greenfield’s documentary is about his life, his family, and especially is wife Jackie (who plays herself as the eponymous Queen of Versailles herself).   There is not a white-trash cliché that these people don’t fit.  They have extravagant taste in pure trash.   Unlike William Randolph Hearst or his fictitious alter-ego Citizen Charles Foster Kane, David & Jackie Siegel do not assemble great art collections or great libraries, just great piles of junk, trashy children, and pounds and pounds of dog poop piling up in huge, in artful, nightmare-like McMansions in that trashiest of all Citadels of the 20th Century Disney Fantasy—ORLANDO, FLORIDA.   I was last in Orlando just over two years ago for a Glenn Beck weekend long presentation with Judge Andrew Napolitano at the University of Central Florida—Andrew Napolitano has formally rejected the establishment as corrupt (both Democratic and Republican) but Glenn Beck’s integrity is somewhat less sharply defined.  However good or bad that program was, nothing can ever salvage the fakery or pretense of Orlando…..the worst of all Florida’s degenerate and depraved imitations of culture, parodies of civilization.

The movie captured all this Siegel family’s peculiarities with a Federico Fellini-like surrealism.  I asked Ms. Greenfield if anyone had compared her work to the Satyricon and she allowed as how I was the first.  In fact, her work was better than Fellini and actually reminded me of the ORIGINAL Satyricon by Gaius or Titus Petronius, often said to be ”the most celebrated fable of ancient Rome …..perhaps the most remarkable fiction which has dishonored the literature of any nation.”  The movie industry is not dishonored by Lauren Greenfield’s work, but America is dishonored by the truth of the life of the Siegels….. they use none of their wealth for the acquisition of knowledge or insight or anything else of value, they apparently have neither religion nor philosophy, only greed.

Without going into more details than necessary, I think the epitome of the depravity of the movie is to be found in the portrayal of the family dogs.  The dogs frame and echo the very much Ancient Roman-Satyricon “Cena Trimalchionis” favor and quality of Ms. Greenfield’s masterful films of family meals and gatherings involving food.  These portrayals are enough to make anyone abjure dinner invitations for the next decade.

Like their ancient Roman counterparts, David & Jackie Siegel’s dogs just have the free run of the house and poop everywhere, and eat all the food the humans leave behind.  Unlike their ancient Roman counterparts, when the Siegel’s dogs die they either buried in elaborate tombs greater than remain from any of the Roman Emperors—or (in the case of particularly beloved pets) they are taxidermically skinned and stuffed and kept around the house as ornaments.  I do not know whether there is a special Dog God or not, but if there is, these people are going to that Dog God’s Hell where they will burn for all eternity…..

In terms of their cultural, historical, or literary antecedents,  David & Jackie Siegel are plainly modern avatars for Trimalchio—a freedman or former slave who takes the name “Thrice King” in a polyglot of ancient languages, just as Mr. Siegel has himself painted in a Royal Ermine of vaguely European costume shop quality….and Trimalchio’s wife “Fortunata” whose modern reincarnation is Jackie Siegel, just as Jackie Siegel is the epitome of every marginal model’s dream of getting a major boob job and landing a big Typhoon (I mean Tycoon, a Typhoon is just a very big and blustery strong wind that blows people and property away….oh, never mind, trivial differences here).   Trimalchio’s house appears in the original Satyricon as replete with ubiquitous and swinish excesses, but frankly NOTHING in Petronius’ “Palaeo-technic” imagination could come close to the riches of extravagant trash piled up in the home(s) and businesses of David & Jackie Siegel….. oh me oh MY!

The words “Federal Reserve” and “unsound money” are nowhere uttered in this movie—probably because David & Jackie Siegel cannot conceive of the evils of the “funny money” economy, with all its massive ecological and social waste and divorce from reality, as anything other than the very foundation for their existence.

To become billionaires and then lose hundreds of millions on anything as insubstantial and wasteful as “time-share resort properties” does make for a funny setting, but to see the uneducated American Elite of the Early 21st century for what it is—is not quite so funny.   Jackie—”Queen of Versailles” in Orlando—is not a stupid woman—in fact she’s probably smarter than her beetle browed husband who manages the Time-Share Empire, but as an old fashioned male chauvinist he does not share the management of his empire with his queen, and probably all to the worst.  But what she does with his money is gain shallow pleasure out of it.

The twist which makes the movie interesting is the impact the 2008-2010 financial crisis has on this repulsive family’s fortunes, and how they react to it.  When they can no longer buy really expensive trash, Jackie just goes to Walmart and buys a lot of really cheap trash…..

This movie is a parable, a fable, for anyone who would like to see virtue and intelligence restored to American Cultural Life and Civilization—but—with these examples as our Elite?  Is it too late?  It is pointless to say that in the late 17th Century the Elite of Harvard College all believed in Witchcraft and assisted in the prosecution and hanging of Witches at Salem—because by the late 18th century the Natural Aristocracy of the new Land had become the most high-minded and brilliant assemblage of philosophers the Western World has ever known—-and there are relics of that genuinely well-bred aristocracy—-in the wreckage under the rotting swimming pools and decaying cheap architecture of McFlorida (and yes, the Siegels DID and probably DO routinely shop and eat at McDonald’s)—can we revive an America worth living in?   Can we reassert the values of yeomanry and freedom, where sound money is the law and forces sound economic and ecological policies?  I think we can—but if the Bankers have their way, a new generation of Siegels will inherit our land first, probably the children of the Siegels’ long-suffering Filipino and Mexican maids and nannies will seek to recreate the American dream for themselves, unburdened by any notions whatsoever of Anglo-American Civilization and its Traditions or Heritage….

This documentary is socio-cultural commentary of the worst kind on our country—but it makes it all the clearer and more obvious how disasters such as the two Bush Presidencies, Clinton, and Obama really can happen.  In answer to a British Newspaper’s question after the presidential elections in 2004—yes, 67,000,000 people really can be THAT stupid!

WAKE UP, AMERICA!  WAKE UP!   Wake up to smell the burning oil and poisoned Southern Bayous shown in The Big Fix, but also wake up to the dog poop in the living rooms and dining rooms of the uneducated, probably nearly illiterate “elite” who shape and select our political “elite” in “exemplary American states” such as Florida…

In short, I highly recommend Queen of Versailles and all of Lauren Greenfield’s earlier purely photographic work as well:

www.laurengreenfield.com

www. evergreenpictures.tv

Which came first? The crisis of marriage through divorce or the crisis in marriage through governmental regulation and licensing…. Comparing Charles Stanley Thorne’s December 2005 Motion with Mine from April of earlier this year 2012…

Dear Kathy:
          So which came first?  The crisis of marriage through divorce or the crisis in marriage through governmental regulation and licensing…. I want to compare Charles Stanley Thorne’s & Larry Klayman’s December 2005 Motion with what I formulated and you submitted in April of this year: 061205MntoDismiss[1]-JudyEdit 04-13-2012 KAGL Motion to Stay IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE FIFTEENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT
          You have a Ph.D. in psychology.  I have a Ph.D. in anthropology.  Maybe that’s the difference in where we would start analyzing the marital relationship: you are looking (as a psychologist) at the trauma that comes in the end, rather than the social milieu in which a healthy (and stable) relationship might best evolve at the beginning.
         The late great Claude Levi-Strauss was famous for turning around the Marxist presumption and theorem that “the mode of production defines the infrastructure and determines the superstructure” upside down into “the mode of reproduction controls all aspect of social structure, material and ideational.”
          In reviewing what you have here, in Charles Stanley Thorne’s December 2005 Motion, it seems so strange to me that you would not have seen that it is allowing governmental interference with marriage and any aspect of the family relationship itself, not government regulation of divorce, that is at the heart of the problem in the breakdown of the family today.
          The Constitution, First Amendment, Fourth & Fifth Amendments, Seventh, Ninth & Tenth Amendments all guarantee the right to create and enforce private social and economic relations free from governmental interference.
        The Constitution says absolutely nothing about the agreements you make with the government, and buying a state marriage license is indisputably a contract with the government: YOU AGREED TO ALL THE GOVERNMENT’S RULES, just as you did when you signed your application for a Driver’s License, a license to practice psychology, and just as everyone does who applies to practice law.
            The key argument in the old Larry Klayman-Stanley Charles Thorne motion started out with:
           ”And there is no doubt that multiple aspects of the intact family life of Wife and Child have been recognized by the Supreme Court of United States as fundamental or basic civil rights.  Throughout the modern era, the Supreme Court of the United States has consistently emphasized the importance of the family and repeatedly described the rights of citizens in marriage, parenting, and family rights as “fundamental” or “basic civil rights.”
               “The rights to conceive and to raise one’s children have been deemed ‘essential,’… ‘basic civil rights of man,’” (citations omitted.)  Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U.S. 417, 447 (1990).
               “[T]he liberty…to direct the upbringing and education of children, …are among ‘the basic civil rights of man.’” Thornburgh v. American Coll. of Obst. & Gyn., 476 U.S. 747, 773 (1986) (Mr. Justice Stevens, concurring).
               “[O]ne of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ is the right to marry and procreate.” (citations omitted)  Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U.S. 432, 463 (1985).
               “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival”… “the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress”… (citations omitted).  Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374, 383, 384 (1978).
               The “rights to conceive and to raise one’s children have been deemed ‘essential,’… ‘basic civil rights of man,’”.  Weinberger v. Salfi, 422 U.S. 749, 771 (1975).
               “[T]here is a right ‘to be free from unwarranted… intrusion… affecting… the decision whether to bear or beget a child.’…  [M]aternity leave rules directly affect ‘one of the basic civil rights of man.’” (citations omitted.)  Cleveland Board of Education v. Lafleur, 414 U.S. 632, 639-640 (1974).
               “The rights to conceive and to raise one’s children have been deemed essential … basic civil rights of man… far more precious … than property rights…” Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651 (1972).
               “[T]he right ‘to marry, establish a home and bring up children,’… and ‘the liberty to direct the upbringing and education of children,’… are among ‘the basic civil rights of man.’” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 503 (1965)(Mr. Justice White, concurring.)
               “The history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental concern for the nurture and upbringing of their children.  This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.” Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 232 (1972).
               “It is cardinal with us that the custody, care, and nurture of the child reside first in the parents. … The integrity of the family unit has found protection in the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, … the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Ninth Amendment …” (citations omitted).  Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651 (1972).

From these and other cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has articulated a long, but not exhaustive, list of parental rights.  “The liberty interest at issue… care, custody, and control of their children… establish a home and bring up children… control the education… direct the upbringing and education… nurture him and direct his destiny… prepare him for additional obligations… custody, care, and nurture… companionship, care, custody, and management… [I]t cannot now be doubted that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.”  Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65-66, (2000).

        The political problem is this: people want to have their cakes and eat them too.  They want free dating, free love, free sex, and to marry ONLY for love, on the one hand, and the OLD system of marriage by contract interferes with that.
        You see, if women know in advance (“ex-ante”) that their security comes from their social relations rather than from their political dependency on the government, they simply will not engage in free sex before marriage (or not nearly so much) in circumstances such as existed 100 years ago in this country when virginity itself was once and could again be a “commodity” that a woman can offer in exchange for a contractual promise of support, along with her fertility and child-rearing capacity.
        And if women jealously guard and treasure their virginity and fertility as a “security” for their future, then the marriage contract is a “secured transaction” and has to involve a lot more in the way of substantive promises enforceable or secured by property on the part of the man.  And parents would be much more interested in the economic relations of their children’s marital arrangements because THEIR security in turn would potentially and really depend on such relations.  It is the WELFARE STATE that has broken all these ties of design and individual interdependence.
         This is the most fundamental of social contracts which Marxist-feminists do not like or want to admit.  I was born in 1960 and as a teenager I certainly enjoyed my share (some would say quite a bit more than my share) of the benefits of the “sexual revolution”.  And then, as has happened to so many men of my own and adjoining generations, the moral but entirely logical and practical consequences of this lifestyle came around to bite me in the posterior parts.  You haven’t talked to me in detail about your premarital life but I definitely get the impression that you and I belong to the same generation in every sense.
         My wife Elena turned from me to the “death to all organic social relations” Marxist-trained social-workers, counsellors, Lawyer-Judges and the Socialist State, of which Brooklyn-born Hungarian-speaking CIA Operative Edward Barna Kurjack was an integral part, and thus much more “reliable” than me as a source of support and advice.
         But if you look at the Supreme Court opinion excerpts and passages you (Messers Thorne & Klayman) quoted here below—none of which was strung together in any kind of a coherent argument so far as I can tell—IT IS ALL ABOUT MARRIAGE and CHILDBEARING-CHILDREARING needing to be free from state regulation, not about divorce needing to more heavily regulated.
          These people really made an abysmal argument, and the Motion to Dismiss was a less advantageous format because “Motions to Dismiss” do not require evidence—they are all legal argument—and there was no request for a hearing or proffer of evidence.  Compare it with what we wrote in April—
         ”Nor has Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson ever been afforded the right to amend her pleadings in accordance with her constitutional objections and challenges to the personal and subject matter jurisdiction of this Court.  Accordingly, Respondent here and now further requests that this Court acknowledge, affirm, and enforce her right under Article I, §§1, 2, 3, but especially §5 (Right to Instruct Representatives and to Petition for Redress of Grievances), §9 (Due Process of Law) and §21 (the “Open Courts” provision) of the Florida Constitution to amend her pleadings, conduct discovery (Art. I, §24), file pre-trial (and, unlike under Judge Oftedal, have a full and fair hearing on all) motions (including but not limited to Constitutional questions of both substance and procedure[1]), and otherwise to prepare try her constitutional and jurisdictional challenges related to the current Florida Statutory Scheme for the Dissolution of Marriage.  Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson submits that seven years is too long already, and that she should no longer have to wait to challenge and deny the power of the State of Florida so to intrude upon her fundamental rights as to design and enforce upon her a Family Law Jurisdiction and application of judicial process without consent to deny her (1) right to petition, (2) right to privately contract, (3) right to due process of law, (4) right to a trial-by-jury, (5) rights and powers reserved to her as one of the American people under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
       ”Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson has already collected statistical and documentary evidence which she would have plead and presented by and through expert witnesses and testimony (long ago) to the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, had she been allowed to do so by Judge Richard L. Oftedal, which shows that Florida Courts automatically grant 100% petitions for divorce without regard to any principal or standard other than that to allege that a marriage is irretrievably broken is taken as sufficient proof of the same as a matter of both fact and law.
         ”Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson would also have argued that such a system was enacted by the Florida Legislature without legitimate or even colorable constitutional authority, then enforced by the State Judges and “officers of the Court,” and applied to her in defiance of all constitutional and statutory law, and in violation of her rights guaranteed under the Federal and Florida Constitutions to rights to due process, equal protection, and freedom from both state impairment of the obligations of contract and takings of liberty and process in violation of the First, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
        “Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson would further have pled and proved by a preponderance of the credible evidence, or even by clear and convincing evidence had she been allowed discovery and a trial-by-jury, that the state statutory scheme by which Florida marriages are licensed is itself unconstitutional.
     ”Respondent would further have pled and proved that these unconstitutionally authorized (statutory) dissolution proceedings for unconstitutionally licensed marriage unconstitutionally creates an institutional double-nullity (a wrongfully dissolved marriage, which marriage offended the First Amendment’s prohibition against establishment of religious sacraments, such as the sacrament of marriage, ab initio).
      “The institutional (and unconstitutional, strictly extra-constitutional and statutory) double-nullity of State Created and State Dissolved Marriage effects only cultural, social, and economic destruction of obscene proportions, without redeeming positive practical value or importance of any kind.
      “Unconstitutional State Licensing of Marriage followed by unconstitutionally forced dissolution of that licensed marriage is, Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson contends, precisely the kind of law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof which the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Rights in Article I of the Florida Constitution were BOTH designed to prevent.

[1]           This Court should be aware that Judge Oftedal, on the record, refused to hear or rule upon any constitutional issues in his court, which is surely a denial of Kathy Ann Garcia’s rights under both the State and Federal Constitutions of Florida and the United States.

The Historical Reason why the Republicans are “Red” on the Electoral Map—the Republican Party was Founded by Socialists and Communists—the real Conservatives in America were the (mostly Southern) Constitutional Democrats—the Harry Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Sam Ervin, and their brethren…..

What Allen West Does Not Know About Communists and Congress

John Nichols on April 13, 2012 – 8:17 AM ET

Florida Congressman Allen West was wrong when he suggested that there were dozens of communists in the current Congress. Misled by crank websites, the out-there Republican from Florida said Tuesday, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party… They actually don’t hide it. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

It would be generous, indeed, to suggest that West is confused.

The Congress is not currently a haven for followers of Karl Marx.

And there are none to be found in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has over the years included a few friends of democratic socialism—which espouses an economic and social justice vision every bit as far removed from the Stalinist excesses that West seems to be decrying as the current Republican Party’s views are from those of its radical founders.

The democratic socialist connections and tendencies that exist are no secret. The CPC was once led byUS Senator Bernie Sanders, who has always identified as a socialist, and it is includes as a longtime member former House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, who (like former US Senator Ted Kennedy and the Reverend Jesse Jackson before him) has worked with groups such as Democratic Socialists of America to advance proposals for single-payer “Medicare for All” healthcare reforms.

But the vast majority of CPC members are run-of-the-mill progressive Democrats, very much in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson when it comes to domestic policy and to their support for civil rights and economic fairness.

As for Marxists, they’re in short supply in this current Congress.

But West might take a measure of comfort in knowing that he is not entirely wrong about the fact that the Congress has included readers of Marx, ideological allies of the Communist Party and members who were elected in alliance with the Socialist Party.

For the most part, these radicals have operated under a single banner. But it is not that of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—and certainly not that of the Democratic Party.

The banner around which radicals have historically gathered in official Washington has been that of the Republican Party.

Founded at Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854 by utopian socialists and militant abolitionists, the early Republican Party included many German-American immigrants who had come the United States after the wave of European revolutions that stirred in 1848 fell short of its radical goals. Among the first Republicans were allies and associates of Karl Marx, such as Joseph Weydemeyer, who would eventually serve as as a Civil War colonel.

Abraham Lincoln, who like so many of the leading Republicans of his day read Marx and Engles in the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (where they served for many years as European correspondents), spoke often about the superiority of labor to capital and was highly critical of concentrated wealth. Among Lincoln’s White House aides was Charles Dana, Marx’s editor. And the sixteenth president accepted the congratulations of Marx and his fellow London Communists after Lincoln’s 1864 re-election.

The radical Republicans of the late nineteenth century and the progressive Republicans of the early twentieth century often worked closely with Socialist Party stalwarts. Indeed, when Robert M. La Follette, a lifelong Republican, sought the presidency in 1924, he did so with the backing of the Socialist Party.

In the 1920s, New York Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, another lifelong Republican and the future mayor of New York, was elected on the Socialist line. When LaGuardia served as mayor in the 1930s and 1940s,Manhattan’s Republican borough president hired the political writer for the Communist-aligned Daily Workernewspaper as one of his top aides.

La Guardia’s successor in the US House, Vito Marcantonio, was elected on the Republican line but with open support from Communists. Though Marcantonio often voted for policies backed by the Communists and was hailed in the pages of the party press, it is not believed that he ever joined the Communists. He identified as a Republican, and he served as a independent man of the left who was beloved by his working-class constituents.

Marcantonio’s Republicanism was in the tradition of the party’s founders, very radical and very committed to breaking the grip of racist and segregationist Democrats on the policymaking of the country. It happened that this stance, in this regard, paralleled that of the Communist Party—which during the period of his Congressional service elected members of the New York City Council from Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Marcantonio, who represented part of Harlem, worked to bring African-Americans into the Republican Party and championed their candidacies. He would have delighted in the fact that a once-segregated Southern state such as Florida now sends an African-American Republican—Allen West—to Congress.

But Marcantonio, a student of Lincoln and the radical Republican tradition, would probably have encouraged West to read a bit more of the real history of the Republican Party.

John Nichols is the author of The “S” Word: A Short History of a American Tradition—Socialism(Verso).

“A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people better. And I do not hold to that.” Eugenics and Bioengineering as forms of State Sponsored Welfare DO NOT make people better…..a debate with Bob Hurt of Clearwater, Florida….

Von: Bob Hurt <bob@bobhurt.com>
An: Charles Lincoln <charles.lincoln@rocketmail.com>; Lawsters <lawsters@googlegroups.com>
Gesendet: 14:06 Samstag, 19.Mai 2012
Betreff: Re: [Lawmen 4733] Eugenics is NOT A Reason to Revise the 13th Amendment
Charles:Thank you for responding.  That was the first intelligen comment I have received on the topic, so I appreciate it.
Bob, like I said—I respect you a great deal, we’ve done some great things/seminars together and I hope we’ll do more in the future—I consider you a friend, if terribly blind on this point….

First, I don’t believe you understand IQ tests, for you you did, you would know that in the past 100 years they have evolved to become absolutely the best predictor of the ability to evaluate relative importances, solve problems, and achieve academic excellence.  
What I see and understand about IQ tests is that they are a circular argument, a Catch-22, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Certain specialists designed IQ Tests, persuaded other specialists to rely on them, and since these specialists rely on them, the USE them, and discriminate among people according to such tests.  ALL Standardized tests work EXACTLY the same way: SAT, MCAT, GRE, LSAT, etc.—yes, even the Multistate Bar Exam and the Multistate Ethics exam—CLASSICAL EDUCATION IN THE US HAS BEEN REPLACED BY TEACHING TEST-TAKING SKILLS.  I think it is disgraceful, and that all standardized tests need to be thrown in the garbage—”the rubbish pit of history” to use one K. Marx’ catchy phrase….
You seem loathe to admit that, but for the protection and support of government and society, the stupid would perish or become slaves, as they have down through the millennia, not because of race, but because of cognitive ability.
No, I am NOT “loathe to admit” anything—but I read the record differently: GOVERNMENT and SOCIETY decide who is stupid, and for those who really can’t adapt—natural selection works MUCH more fairly than “Government Protection and Support.”  In fact–what I LOATHE is that very phrase: “Government Protection and Support.”  I don’t know whether you’ve seen the movie “The Hunger Games” yet—but if not you (and everybody else) really should.  
“The Hunger Games” is a story set in and about the aftermath of a revolution in North America of the future in which “the people rose up against the Government that fed them, loved them, protected them….” and were punished severely as a result.  LOOK AT THE WAY Southerners have been degraded and caricatured as stupid ignorant oafs since 1865.  The Post-War Southerners did JUST FINE for many years without government Protection and Support—in fact, they did fine IN THE FACE OF government oppression and intentional discrimination—arguably, they did better than they’ve done WITH such protection and support.  Likewise, all of Latin America and Africa were “undeveloped” by U.S. and European Colonialism which sought to protect these “poor pathetic people” from themselves—i.e. since they couldn’t organize multi-national companies and international banks on their own.  The people of District 12 grew strong through quiet resistance and isolation within Panem (the name of the “North American Union” in the “Hunger Games” were “protected and supported” by a totalitarian regime which existed by squeezing everything they could out of the people and leaving them with nothing).  
Third, you seemed to have missed the point that we of competence have become slaves to the incompetent, through welfare, minimum wages, crime, and associated infrastructure costs which we must pay.  That has happened largely because of flaws in the constitutions, gnawing guilt and political correctness, and suffrage for the stupid, incompetent, and irresponsible.
BOB—YOU seem to miss the point that it is precisely a paternalistic attitude like yours—whereby some people THINK they are stronger or better than others, that breeds this kind of stupidity in Welfare—we have to stop thinking that WE KNOW better or can make OTHER people better—we have to learn to live by the adage “Let it be.”  NO ONE has the right to make decisions for anyone else, except by agreement.  We do not have the right to classify people in LEGAL terms, deprive them of rights, based on our OPINIONS of them.  We have the right to live our own lives and not be bothered with anyone else UNLESS WE WISH TO BE—and this, I think is the biggest single reason I feel I have to argue for you.  You are SO much like Madison Grant and the “Progressives” of Theodore Roosevelt’s Age—like Oliver Wendell Holmes on the Supreme Court writing in favor of sterilization of imbeciles in the 1920s—THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE RISE TO THE CURRENT WELFARE STATE—even though the “gnawing guilt and political correctness” elements are basically a 1960s Herbert Marcuse—Frankfurt School of Social Though addition which the Elite Find EVEN more useful—precisely because it gives them the right to call people who are NOT politically correct or do not feel the guilt “stupid, inferior.”  Southern Whites are stupid hicks but racists everywhere have lower IQs than non-racists, didn’t you know that?  Patriotic Constitutionalists are the stupidest people of all because they just don’t understand the Marxist progression of history which will PROTECT AND SUPPORT all people everywhere…. Can’t you see that?  Christians are stupid compared with Atheists, Conservative Republicans have less education than Liberal Democrats—all of this is part of the competitive instinct of humans, inherited through evolutionary competition, as E.O. Wilson has described so well in “The Social Conquest of Earth”
Fourth, you have erred in your assessment of slavery in ancient times.  The foreign survivors of successful wars always became slaves for life, although laws provided ways to win freedom, typically by demonstrations of deserving freedom.
I have certainly NOT erred in my assessment of slavery in ancient times—I said it was not based on inherited characteristics, so that Angles enslaved in one war did not give rise to any presumption that “Angles” would be slaves forever.
Fifth, you seem not to grok the outcome of a system such as what I propose.  
I do not “grok” it because I would BLOCK it with every bone in my body, every fibre in my muscles, every neuron in my brain.

  • And, we can refer to masters/slaves by different terms to mollify the leftist liberals seeking political correctness in place of substance.  We could call it the Ward system and the participants caregivers/wards.  How’s that?
    You forget that I perfectly see the system of involuntary servitude you propose because I OPPOSE THE VERY NOTION OF WELFARE and that ANY person should ever be WARD to another as a matter of birth, “intelligence” or class.  If our parents develop alzheimers WE should take care of them—they should not become “Wards of the State”—our children are helpless at birth but even LESS should we allow THEM to become WARDS OF THE STATE—but ultimately, your system (based on early 20th Century Eugenic Theories) LEADS INEXORABLY to the wardship of all children and RIGHT BACK TO THE BRAVE NEW WORLD.  This has NOTHING to do with Political Correctness—it has EVERYTHING to do with restoring MEANINGFUL FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOM FOR ALL—and protecting MY Second Amendment Right to Shoot anyone in the head who thinks they are smarter than me if that means they think they can take me for a WARD….by the way…
  • Government or private parties could encourage the stupid to undergo voluntary permanent sterilization, just by offering money.  The ranks of the stupid would diminish dramatically from that clever negotiation, repeated in communities all over the nation.  And from the viewpoint of the economy, it would dramatically reduce the burden on taxpayers.  That bit of eugenics does not hurt anyone. 
  • Again, Bob—this is just beyond repugnant to me—it is Progressivism and New Deal/Great Society Socialism run amok—that is why it is, in essence NAZIISM at its worst….. Taxes like the Income Tax ONLY exist because people are WILLING to have OTHERS make socially important decisions for them—I say, to HELL WITH THAT—Everyone makes their own decisions and lives or dies by them…. that’s freedom….
  • Government should outlaw procreation of the stupid because such procreation is such a tort against the innocent baby that it becomes a crime against the person and society as the child grows into adulthood and resorts to crime and welfare abuse to subsist.  This really is a legal matter and a matter of right.  A baby has a right to grow into a well-functioning adult, and parents have the responsibility to make that possible.
  • If this is really what you want—I will have to fight you if you ever come to power—which I guess means we’ll never have to fight—but “outlaw the procreation of the stupid?”  This is EXACTLY what Oliver Wendell Holmes was advocating, along with Madison Grant and others, in the first 3rd of the 20th century—YOU have no right to say who should procreate and neither do I, and neither did Oliver Wendell Holmes or Madison Grant or either of the Presidents Roosevelt.  I think this is just loathsome—and I wonder about it–because I think of your niece—I can’t remember her name—in your own family there are examples of what can be called less than brilliant breeding, are there not?  You would not begrudge your own flesh and blood the right to procreate as she sees fit, would you?
  • Families of means, including middle class families, could typically afford to house, feed, and clothe the stupid, so long as those stupid did not procreate children the caregivers did not want.  Many if not most homes have extra bedrooms to accommodate live-in Wards who could become loved, respected members of the family, perform services for the family, and submit to the discipline of the head of the household.  Most so-called slaves prior to the 1860′s were really NOT slaves in the sense of wearing chains, getting horsewhipped and served only gruel to eat, and suffering untreated diseases and illnesses. Nor would modern Wards suffer such abuse.  The spirit of love would blossom in most families with one or more live-in Wards.  This alone would keep many Wards out of crime, malnutrition, prison, drug abuse, and general dereliction.
  • You are saying something very different in this paragraph and I have no wish to disagree that “charity is our first obligation” and civilized people and as Christians, and that such charity, if enshrined as a real cultural norm, would go a long way towards solving all these problems. 

Churches could start playing a big role in the administration of the Ward system, which they should have all along.

Again, this is something I have no intention of arguing about—but it is irrelevant to your contentions regarding the 13th Amendment….or “the belief that they can make people better…AND I DO NOT HOLD TO THAT.”  

As for eugenics, it is nothing more than family planning on a larger scale, and it is perfectly ethical.  In fact NOT to engage in eugenics plans and programs is the height of hyocrisy and disrespect toward the members of future civilizations.  If you want me to explain it to you in detail, let me know.  Meanwhile, ponder the adage “It takes seven generations to create a gentleman.”  It does not happen by accident.
You seem determined to prove Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the Good Ship Serenity correct when he said:

So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. 'Cause as sure as I know anything I know this: They will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground, swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that.

Bob

 

On 05/18/2012 10:49 PM, Charles Lincoln wrote:

My Dear Bob Hurt:
Your recidivism in your support of Eugenics is just appalling.   You know I feel that way.  Why do you keep coming back to this topic?
Eugenics is the most outrageous of all infringements on the fundamental rights of humanity, whether we believe that those rights originate from the State of Nature or God’s Endowment.  The Ancient Latin Legal classification of slavery was a contractual arrangement both socially approved and lawful but contra natura.
It is particularly appalling that you frame it (with a great deal of intellectual honesty and analytical integrity—for which at least you deserve due credit) in terms of a repeal of the 13th Amendment, and that you start off with a comparison to seat belts.  You may recall—my war against Seatbelt laws and the police abuse such laws invite is at the root of everything that made me into a FORMERLY licensed lawyer, as well as a FORMER Republican (President of Tulane College Republicans 1976-78).  
I believe in freedom and liberty and I wouldn’t trust ANY HUMAN BEING to determine my fitness or yours to live and breathe.  I think I am basically as conservative as anyone could possibly be, but I do not consider Naziism genuinely conservative, even though I can admire and sympathize with some of the traditionalist, historical identity and heritage aspects of the Fascist movements in 20th Century Europe and Latin America.  
To me, the ideology of the Founders in 1770-1792 (Boston Massacre of 1770 through Washington’s First Term as President under the Constitution of 1787 and the adoption of the Bill of Rights) and of John Randolph of Roanoke, Andrew Jackson, Roger Taney, John Caldwell Calhoun, John C. Breckenridge, Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and the all Founders of the Confederate States of America represent real, genuine, honest and truly American “Classical Liberal” conservatism.  AND NONE of them would ever have tolerated Eugenics—because it is an interference with the fundamental rights of individuals and families.
And that brings up an interesting point—you are advocating REPEAL or REVISION of the 13th Amendment in order to implement Eugenics?
Now, I just said I deeply admire and support the memory of the founders of the Confederate States of America, and the Southern Partisans who preceded them, but Slavery and Freedom are, by definition, incompatible lifestyles.  The 13th Amendment was adopted without the popular support of the 40% of the Nation who had no real vote in 1865, and yet today it is one of the least controversial provisions of the Constitution, and I think it needs to stay that way, and be enforced for every person.
I agree that the citizenship questions created by emancipation and left unresolved as of today are a threat to a homogeneous society in which freedom can flourish, but I totally disagree that slavery on any pretext, including the criminal laws of the United States, or Eugenics through anything as totally malleable and manipulable as IQ scores, could or should be allowed to exist.  In my opinion, segregation of the races might be a better path to restoration of true freedom and dignity for all, as well as a more natural path to foster divergent evolutionary paths which could, in the long run, compete my old Harvard neighbor and Museum of Comparative Zoology Professor E.O. Wilson has recently described the sociobiological origins of racial separation and competition (http://www.vdare.com/articles/e-o-wilson-nationalist, review of “The Social Conquest of the Earth.”)
Black Slavery was, in so many ways, America’s “original sin”—every student of the Bible knows that “original sin” is that in which we all share, as human beings, from which none of us can ever completely escape except through Salvation.  Original Sin is “sin” because it embodies and reflects everything that we need, everything that we want, naturally, and yet it is wrong.  People WANT to live free of care, fear, labor and all kinds of responsibility, which they would like to dump on someone else’s broader shoulders.  The Africans were naturally strong and by selective breeding in slavery they were made stronger.  Was this a good or desirable result for the White People?  For the White Race as a whole?  As an evolutionary experiment?  No, it was not. It was in fact a disaster—a continuing disaster.
But Bob—what you are suggesting is that we use IQ tests, one of the results of the “Original Sin” of Slavery having been to artificially import and then depress the intelligence of the Africans and other groups by educational intent, and then solidify that back into history by restoring IQ as a substitute for skin color in the restoration of slavery.
This is, I think, wrong in every possible way.  I do not believe that miscegenation is the road to happiness or a cure for the original sin of slavery, because I think that race-mixing destroys the natural diversity of the species—which I think is a GOOD and POSITIVE thing—even if it results in some people SEEMING dumber, less intelligent, or attractive to us than others.  We need to MAINTAIN the diversity of the world AND the freedom of each individual by securing individual and family autonomy, not slavery.
In the Ancient World (Rome & Greece), Slavery was almost always a temporary thing, by contract (arising from debt), and there were no permanent slave classes.  Slaves were often extraordinarily talented artists, cooks, musicians, actors/dancers, or even poets, and Slaves often tutored their masters’ children.  Even when Rome brought in captive armies or whole communities as slaves, these communities did not stay enslaved forever, from generation to generation. (I think of the comment about the Angles [Ancestors of the English] whose appearance was so beautiful on the Streets of Rome that Pope Gregory the I said, “non Angli see Angeli” and promptly dispatched as missionary the future Saint Augustine of Canterbury to preach to the Kentish Angles as well as the South and Eastern Saxons of Sussex and Essex—the point being that there was no pretense that the Angles would be a hereditary class of slaves forever).
But worst of all, I think your criteria for selecting a “slave” vs. a “free” class are more subject, and hence more unfair than even the Nazis could devise.  It is normally fairly clear, after all, who is Black or White, who is Jewish or Christian by birth or heritage.  
But in what I can only call an adoration of pseudo-science, you equate IQ and wealth with class and entitlement.  This, too, is appalling.  All IQ tests have been shown to be matters of learned behavior—”nurture not nature”, and so education would be the solution for that, except that compulsory education is itself a form of governmental interference with the absolute freedom into which all living beings and creatures are born.
I believe that people have to be free to make choices, good and bad, just like genetic mutations, some of which are beneficial, some of which are not, but most of which are simply neutral.
NO GROUP OF HUMANS has the God-like capacity or the God-like right to try to guide evolution or the “re-creation” of the human species.
I don’t know whether you ever saw the movie Serenity directed and produced by Joss Whedon (whose latest creation is the new Avengers), but Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the “Good ShipSerenity” (a “Firefly” Class Spaceship) engages in the following key monologue, after the discovery of what had really happened to the people of Miranda—who were poisoned by Government experiments in “behavioral improvement” based on similar pseudo-science:
This report is maybe twelve years
          old. Parliament buried it, and it
          stayed buried til River dug it up.
          This is what they feared she knew.
          And they were right to fear,
          'cause there's a universe of folk
          that are gonna know it too.
          (touches the cylinder)
          They're gonna see it. Somebody
          has to speak for these people.
          (everybody waits)
 (CONTINUING)           You all got on this boat for
          different reasons, but you all
          V0 come to the same place. So now
          I'm asking more of you than I have
          before. Maybe all. 'Cause as
          sure as I know anything I know
          this: They will try again. Maybe
          on another world, maybe on this
          very ground, swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that.

Charles Edward Lincoln, III

“Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht.”

Deo Vindice/Tierra Limpia

Telephone: 512-968-2500
In case of emergency call Peyton Yates Freiman (Texas)
at 512-968-2666 or e-mail freimanthird@gmail.com


Matthew 10:34-39
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. . . . And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. . . .  

Von: Bob Hurt <bob@bobhurt.com>
An: Lawsters <lawsters@googlegroups.com>; Lawmen <lawmen@googlegroups.com>
Gesendet: 13:21 Freitag, 18.Mai 2012
Betreff: [Lawmen: 4733] A Reason to Revise the 13th Amendment

I welcome discussion of the questions and issues raised below, but please keep hateful or insulting rejoinders to yourself.
A Reason to Revise the 13th Amendment
Copyright © by Bob Hurt 18 May 2012. All rights reserved

Pesky Questions About Bozos

Does a society have the right to enact laws that effectively prevent members of the society from
  • becoming a financial burden on the rest of society?
  • endangering others in society?
  • infecting innocent babies with a condition of lifelong obtuseness, brutishness, torpidity, and lack of intelligence?
How and why has the USA changed in average intelligence since its beginning?
Does any right of a society or civilization justify limiting the lower boundary of intelligence for parenting, such as through eugenics programs?
This commentary addresses those questions and might provide insights for the sincere truth-seeker.

Law and Likelihood of Harming Others

Consider the legislative enactments regulating business practices, highway traffic, and human relations. Take for example seatbelt laws. Government requires people to buckle themselves in because:
  • People often cause car crashes through negligence, incompetence, judgment error, or equipment failure;
  • The violence of car crashes often maim or kill people in and out of the car;
  • Such terrible loss causes families to suffer from reduced of earning power and enjoyment of life, and becoming a burden on society;
Thus, modern civilizations prohibit human actions likely to endanger selves. others, and society.

Qualities and Uses of Intelligence in Civilization

According to Wikipedia’s IQ article, IQ has high heritability, intgelligence highly correlates to SAT scores, and people with IQ of 70 to 90 will likely engage in criminal behavior. Lynn and Vanhanen’s books on IQ show the high correlation of national average IQ to gross national product. Therefore, means exist for society to determine the intelligence (g factor) and IQ of its members, and their corresponding value to society in terms of productivity, academic achievement, likely crimnality, burden on society, and the likelihood of low-intelligence parents procreating low-intelligence children.
One must have an IQ of at least 85 to graduate from high school. US IQ distributions from actual tests reveal that at least 75 million of its people have IQ below 85 and even more cannot graduate from high school because of behavior and health problems associated with low intelligence.
In the past 150 years the US has moved away from circumstances requiring massive numbers of low-intelligence people in its military and work forces. The military leaders of today desperately want recruits to have high school diplomas, and many manual labor jobs have moved to 3rd world countries as mechanization has modernized farms and factories. America needs people who can think, arrive at correct evaluations, and make correct decisions.

Hypocrisy of Ignoring the Gene Pool

Wouldn’t it make sense to reduce the need for protective laws, prisons, and welfare infrastructures legislating to elevate the quality of the gene pool?
I see the refusal to take such action as rank hypocrisy:
  • We demand laws regulating seatbelt usage, road, motor vehicle, and building construction, highway speed, driver licenses, professions like plumbing, dentistry, medicine, and lawyering, and many other areas of life, on the basis of likelihood of resultant injury. But,
  • We ignore the far higher likelihood of injury resulting from procreation by people of low intelligence.
How much sense does that make?
Hypocrisy aside, does it not seem unintelligent to refuse to discuss the reasons and means for reducing the percentage of grossly unintelligent people in future populations? Does it not seem even more stupid to refuse out of political correctness – the notion of feeling embarrassed that the topic might offend those of grossly low intelligence?
How about taking a poll of the stupid and ask them whether they enjoy feeling confused, frustrated, victimized, in trouble, and unable to learn, to figure things out, or to make prudent decisions? We might discover that they think they figure things out just fine, or that they hate the condition and would become smart if they could.
Well, aside from that, it could go without saying that the highly intelligent would find some tasks boring that the lowly intelligent would find gratifying. Likewise, tasks that would challenge and gratify the intelligent would frustrate and anger the unintelligent.
Many jobs exist that would suit the unintelligent. Thus, society’s needs for the unintelligent still exist, such as domestic servitude, and simple tasks for which employers cannot afford machines. But such tasks have an economic value nonetheless, and it makes no economic sense to force an employer to pay more than the value of them.

Intelligence Strata (Classes) in America

The existence of 75 million relatively unintelligent people in America and the lack of available jobs for such people poses a serious problem that has resulted in America’s prisons bursting at the seams.
America has entered an age where it handles unintelligent people as follows:
  • Puts them into the welfare system (they burden taxpayers); and
  • Suffers crimes at their hands (they burden their victims and then the criminal justice system).
Meanwhile, the very smart have advertised the American Dream’s cornucopia of goods and services which the unwealthy obtain through debt. The unwealthy, unlike the unintelligent, do have intelligence, but either don’t use it sufficiently to become wealthy, or actually don’t have quite enough intelligence to become wealthy. That is, wealth does not generally happen by accident except when inherited by someone who very likely has high intelligence, the offspring of someone intelligent enough to garner wealth.
So we have three major strata:
  • The highly intelligent wealthy (high class)
  • The somewhat intelligent or lazy unwealthy (middle class)
  • The unintelligent poor (low class)
In practice:
  • The high class has managed to make the middle class into voluntary servants through glitzy ads and debt.
  • Many of the high and middle class employ the low class for domestic servants.
  • Some, but not that many, of the middle and high classes provide the low class with food, clothing, and shelter as part of the domestic servitude arrangement.
  • The existence of many if not most of the low class have made the high and middle classes into their involuntary servants through crime, and taxation that pays for welfare abuse, health care, social workers, failed education efforts, and prisons.
  • Even though taxes on the high class do pay for the upkeep of the low class, the high class never notices it as a burden because of other tax benefits and shelters, but those taxes impose a severe burden on the middle class.

The 13th Amendment and Reverse Slavery

This makes it apparent that the 13th Amendment did not actually abolish involuntary servitude. In reality, it appears that Americans, through their misguided sense of fairness, justice, and altruism, have destroyed the effectiveness of community charity programs for the feckless, handing those to government, and converted the middle class into slaves of the low class AND the high class.
The upshot of this weird dilemma: Americans have upset the Law of the Survival of the Fittest with a system of legislated slavery of the middle class to the high class through usurious debt and to the low class through taxation. Victims of this system can only imagine that the high class engineered it intentionally. It does seem pretty slick when one ponders it. And that explanation clarifies the reason Government refuses to patrol the borders or impose some kind of check on the presently unrestrained procreation of children by unintelligent parents.
This dilemma and its causes constitute a wholly immoral, unethical perversion of civilization’s ideals. A society ought to engineer civilization for evolution toward some age of light and life, so to speak, where no crime, poverty, or war exists, and people can prosecute their ambitions without unduly burdening their fellows. That can never happen in an increasingly mechanized society in which 25% of the people haven’t the cognitive ability to graduate from high school, and will certainly resort largely to crime or welfare abuse to get by.
People of low intelligence make sense in a free society so long as others don’t become systematic slaves to them. The unintelligent must have a means of becoming gainfully, self-sufficiently, and happily employed, or the wards of those willing to care for and obtain economic benefits from them. The unintelligent simply cannot become and remain wards of the state without an economic justification. Liberty, after all, comes at the expense of commensurate responsibility.

Reverse Slavery Justifies 13th Amendment Revision

The foregoing discussion sheds new light on the 13th Amendment. That Amendment should stand, but ONLY for people with sufficient IQ and ambition to operate self-sufficiently. So, Congress ought to modify it a bit to that end.
Though many might feel loathe to admit it, involuntary servitude gave many benefits to many people, in spite of members of master and slave classes abusing one another.

Potential Benefits of 13th Amendment Revision

It provided sustenance, employment, and regulation for the servants and labor and other economic and personal benefits for the masters. Both sides benefited and to a large extent enjoyed the arrangement. And most of the servants, though slaves, escaped far worse conditions in their homelands.
But, involuntary servitude had serious deficiencies:
  • Incorrigible and violent slaves endangered the master and other slaves, and belonged in prison, not in a family or commercial enterprise.
  • Abusive or negligent masters hurt or deprived their slaves.
  • Many people became slaves who had the intelligence and raw ability become good, self-sufficient citizens, and should not have become involuntary servants.
Today we have a reverse-slavery system where the high and middle classes, who can care for themselves and become good citizens, have become involuntary servants to the low class who cannot care for themselves or become good citizens.
Society must reverse this situation while dramatically reducing the low class to a size that society actually needs for a smoothly functioning economy. That constitutes the supreme reason to outlaw production of bozos in America. Within 3 generations the averate intelligence of the nation will rise significantly, welfare will diminish so that neighborhoods can handle it without government interference, crime will drop dramatically, inner city ghettos will disappear, prison industries will shrink, and America will become monumentally more productive, more competitive than ever in the world economy.
And, Americans with good sense should demand a change to the 13th Amendment to impose a system of involuntary servitude on able-bodied people who, by their nature, cannot or will not care for themselves without hurting or burdening others.
Americans of good sense will otherwise remain slaves to the unintelligent of the land. And that just doesn’t make much sense, does it?
# # #
Bob Hurt
2460 Persian Drive #70, Clearwater, FL 33763-1925
(727) 669-5511   http://bobhurt.com


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Lawmen” group.
To post to this group, send email to lawmen@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lawmen+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lawmen?hl=en.

Bob Hurt

2460 Persian Drive #70, Clearwater, FL 33763-1925
(727) 669-5511   http://bobhurt.com

A Message of Manifest Destiny from the Queen of Mexico and Empress of America: we should be one Nation in North America divided into many local sovereign counties or smaller subunits. Could the “Federalism” inherent in the titles of the Virgin of Guadalupe finally lead (after 163 years) to a truly Democratic-Republican United States of America and the restoration of power to the people throughout North America?

Queen of Mexico, Empress of America---is there a political message here?

 In California, one of the most tortured issues, whether one likes it or not, turns on the position of California as Anglo-Hispanic or “Global” by way of fundamental culture and identity.  Another slogan-like Title of the Virgin is “Madre de la Patria” (“Mother of the Fatherland”).   Still another is “La Morenita”, “the slightly dark-skinned lady”.  

From December of 1531—barely ten years after the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, when there were still enough remnants of the Aztec aristocracy, priesthood, and warrior nobility* (See Note Below) to have dreamed and perhaps even had some chance at a nativistic revolution against the Spanish—the Virgin of Guadalupe both physically embodied and symbolized the unique syncretism of cultures which is that which we call “Mexico” or “Mexican”, the culture of Anahuac and the race of Tlatelolco (the site of the final battle between the Aztec and Spanish in 1521, also the site of Sahagún’s bi-cultural “College” where the Aztec and Spanish aristocracy came together.

And now we face, whether we like it or not, in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and my native Texas, the question of whether the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was a mistake or not: whether the ultimate destiny of the Southwestern United States is Anglo- or Hispanic.  

The Mexicans are winning the birth race and the immigration race, despite the rather nasty political invective (by my fellow WASPS and Anglo-German descendants, primarily) against “Illegal Immigration”.   It was just pointed out to me yesterday by Melody Castillo Gillespie that, under that same Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, there could have been no such thing as “illegal immigration” because the freedom to cross the border together with one’s property was absolutely guaranteed, even 12 months after the initiation of a new war between Mexico and the United States, and that Mexicans who acquired property in the United States by contract would be absolutely protected in their ownership on the same basis as other U.S. Citizens: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=009/llsl009.db&recNum=975 .  

I have often written on these pages about the strong historical connexions which exist between Anglo-American and Latin-Hispanic culture and history on this continent—especially but definitely not limited to the states of Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Texas.  

I do not, in any way, agree with the oppressive and homogenizing practices of globalism, but I see no realistic way to argue or maintain that the three Nations of North America do not share a common destiny.   I have lived at different times in the United States, where I was born in Texas, Mexico, where I have spent more time than any other foreign country including England (where I lived with my parents when I was a small child, until age 6), and Canada (where I have lived less time but from whose population I have derived several of the great and deepest friendships I have known in my life).   Crossing back and forth between the three countries of North America would seem to be a fundamental right of liberty, and yet it is one of the most hotly contested issues in America.

I submit that, if elected as a Senator from California, addressing these issues of historical identity, historical injustice, and ethnic affiliation and “destiny”, whether Manifest or not, will be one of the most serious issues I would address.  I fear and despise the “mainstream” Republican approach to immigration from Mexico which would perpetuate the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of hardworking economic immigrants and utilize all the injustices inherent in the modern American judiciary against people of Hispanic speech and “southern” North American origin.  But I equally despise the “mainstream” Democrats who would use issues of welfare and “entitlement” to social services and assistance essentially to wipe out Anglo-American culture and give a superior advantage to immigrants for the purpose of socially and economically destabilizing, and politically disenfranchising, the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-German, and general Anglo-European (non-Hispanic) population.

Local cultural and ethnic autonomy needs to be established throughout the American Southwest.  Counties, Cities, and unincorporated areas must be given, perhaps according to the principles of local determination for each geographically coherent unit of 100,000-250,000 people (“neighborhoods” in Los Angeles) that they can select their identity and structure the nature of government and laws to avoid homogenization by “majority rule” (especially since there is simply no genuine population majority along ethnic or cultural lines anywhere in the Southwest anymore, but especially in California).  

I would particularly suggest the devolution of legislative control over executive (police) authority and judicial decision-making to the county or municipal level in each and every area where this can conceivably be done, including but not limited to issues of family law, domestic violence, local property ownership and control, so long as all of these processes are subject to general and specific regulation by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the general precepts of the common law of contracts, property ownership, and the definition of (most) crimes.

The only way for such a process of political decentralization to take place is if the Federal Government abdicates its current policy in favor of increasing centralization and concentration of power in the hands of the government in Washington D.C..  If it is possible for the United States government to USURP unconstitutional power over all matters touching upon family, contract, and ownership of property, it should be possible for the United States government to RETURN that power to the states and local governments, to ABDICATE its central roles.  

Once again I recommend a recent book I read on one of the oldest constitutional principles uniquely designed for North America, in 1650 by Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland.  Carl Douglas 2011, “The Baltimore Principles“, Mesa, Arizona: the Arnett Institute.  This book clearly shows how Constitutional abrogation and tyranny can best be preserved by granting increased power to local governments through a system of vertically integrated bi-cameral legislations starting at the local and county levels, where the people vote for one house at EACH level of government, but the governmental representatives elect representatives to a SECOND house at EACH Level of Government.  

Full implementation of the Baltimore Principles would permit the devolution of local power downward on the vertical scale of hierarchy, thus permitting, at once, the equation of Federal (“Title 25″) Indian reservations with Counties or Municipal Governments as local sovereign entities while still preserving the Federal Nature of the United States, and even permitting such a process as the integration of all three countries in North America (subject to full open and honest plebiscite, NOT tainted by voter fraud or computerized manipulation) in such a manner as to maximize personal freedom, local autonomy, and abolish the injustices created by NAFTA and what amounts, in essence, to massive cross-border fraud, exploitation, and invited and fostered welfare dependency.

If you would like to help the fight for “corny old values” like Truth, Justice, and the American Way, for Family, Home, and Freedom, and to add one Senator for the Bill of Rights and against Indefinite Detention, against the PATRIOT ACT, and against the use of United States Troops in this Country against its own citizens, please support Charles Edward Lincoln, III, for U.S. Senator from California.  We are fighting one of the most entrenched establishment seats in Congress—Dianne Feinstein who tried to make cosmetic changes in S.B. 1867 to hide and disguise its truly oppressive nature (and to claim she had “done the best she could”, perhaps?)—and we ask you to send your check or money order to Lincoln-for-Senate 2012 to Charles Edward Lincoln, III, 952 Gayley Avenue, #143, Los Angeles, California 90024.  Call 310-773-6023 for more information. 

Note*And, yes, the Tenochca-Mexica clearly had a society divided into three functional categories exactly corresponding to those posited as diagnostic characteristics of Indo-European Soceity by Georges Dumézil.  This three-part organization (without direct Dumezilian reference) is most clearly outlined in Rudolph van Zantwijk’s 1985, “The Aztec Arrangement” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), although it was reasonable clear from Jacques Soustelle’s 1961 Daily Life of the Aztec, and indeed, directly from the organization of Fray Bernaldino de Sahagún’s 16th Century twelve volume Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España.”  

“Behold El Capitan,” “Remember the Maine,” Guy Fawkes’ Day, September 11, and the Culture of Deception

Some of my happiest days as an undergraduate at Tulane University were spent in Dixon Hall under the tutelage of my voice and singing instructor Francis Monachino, long-time Chairman of the Tulane & Newcomb Music Departments and a great and inspiring teacher.  

My first part in any major production at Tulane was as “Senor Amibile Pozzo, Chamberlain of Peru” in John Philip Sousa’s Comic Operetta El Capitán (Premiered in April 1896 in Boston & New York).  I never realized it at the time, but this comedy had great historical significance, and may have played a part in launching 20th Century America’s Culture of Deceit and Deception.  

The plot is pure farce, on its face: “El Capitán” is in fact Don Enrique Medigua, a fictional Spanish Viceroy of Peru, which was in reality the richest of all the dominions in the New World, whose production of gold, silver, and agricultural products far outstripped even Mexico during the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries.  Don Medigua fears assassination by rebels, and secretly arranges for the murder of the (real) rebel leader known as “El Capitán” (so the real rebel leader plays no part in the operetta). Unbeknownst to the rebels or anyone except his Chamberlain Pozzo, Don Medigua disguises himself as El Capitán and sabotages the rebel movement from within, but not before allowing the beautiful Estrelda, daughter of the former Viceroy, to fall madly in love with him based on his reputation as a fierce terrorist and warrior.  Don Medigua’s actual wife and daughter think he has been kidnapped by the rebels and have Pozzo pretend to be the Viceroy so that the Spanish born Aristocrats of Peru will not lose hope and despair.   An enterprising band of rebels then capture Pozzo, believing him to be the real Viceroy, and bring him before El Capitán who is, of course by this time in something of a pickle.   But Don Medigua disguised as El Capitán has so completely exhausted the rebels by his “mis-leadership” that the rebellion collapses, the Spanish nobility wins, and the story ends “happily.” 

A thought that never occurred to me when I was playing Pozzo at 16 (to Anthony Laciura’s brilliant performance as Don Medigua/El Capitán) now seems so obvious to me: was it mere coincidence that the most popular writer of military marches in American history composed this operetta less than two years before the sinking of the Battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898.  Most historians now concur that the Maine, the second armoured cruiser (pre-dreadnought Battleship) in the U.S. Navy, was deliberately sunk by its crew for the sole purpose of inciting American popular opinion in favor of America’s first “World Wide War” of expeditionary conquest (i.e., the direct precursor of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq).   El Capitán exemplifies the literary, historical, and/or dramatic trope that certain ideas appear first as a comic joke and then are later taken seriously: if John Philip Sousa’s operetta was not the template for the sinking of the Maine, it is nevertheless a remarkable historical coincidence that Don Medigua first murders and then impersonates his enemy in order to defeat him in a popular drama that was still playing all over the United States when the USS Maine blew up.

And yes, I write all this at the close of Guy Fawkes’ Day, November 5, 2011: Remember, Remember the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot; I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.  I like to pat myself on the back and brag that no sooner had Osama bin Laden been named as the perpetrator of 9-11 than I predicted with great confidence that he was the new Gunpowder Plotter, and that 9-11 was the new 5th of November.  I predicted that bin Laden’s name would endure forever beside Guy Fawkes, but unfortunately, I had no role in producing the amazing movie based on that theme which came out in 2005, on the 400th Anniversary of the original Gunpowder plot in 1605.

V-for-Vendetta remains, to my mind, probably the finest political movie of the century, and I mean the past hundred years since the beginning of the cinematic film industry, not just the 21st Century in which we have lived for barely 11 years.  Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving marvelously portray the principle characters in this story which explores all the possibilities of the use of the Guy Fawkes gunpowder story, and this movie has in turn given a new birth of metaphoric and dimensional analysis to the study of false flag attacks, false heroism, and the role of government as “first among all liars.”

There is not a shred of doubt that the movie V-for-Vendetta is the story of 9-11, metaphorically, allegorically, fictionalized as Britain under a pseudo-Fascist (Adam Sutler, whose name is awfully reminiscent of Adolph Hitler) instead of the United States of America under a pseudo-Republican (George W. Bush), in future time rather than historical, but with so many direct references to 9-11 and associated events…. well, it’s just incredible.  

Also incredible to me is that the Wikipedia article on V-for-Vendetta does not even mention the parallels between the Sutler regime’s use of false-flag bioterrorism against the British people and the (9-11 “Truth Movement’s” theory that the) Bush regime used false-flag air terrorism against the American people.  To me, the parallels are inescapable: the producers of V-for-Vendetta analyzed the same facts concerning recent history as those which gave rise to the 9-11 Truth Movement and came to the conclusion that terrorism originates not (primarily anyhow) with real Muslim extremists but with governments who see the “genius” of fear and use it against their own people to suppress civil liberties and maintain power.  

The Muslim terrorists (in both North American and Western European modern history and V-for-Vendetta mythology), to the extent that they are real, are rather like Guy Fawkes in the 17th century.  Modern Muslim terrorists, like Papist plotters of the past, have great value as symbols and embodiments of a real but rather vague threat to the national identity which justify the use and maintenance of real power.  The Papist threat in England could only materialize when it comes in the form of a Catholic King (like King James II Stuart, grandson of James I, against whom Guy Fawkes allegedly plotted, and younger brother of Charles II who had no legitimate offspring [although he had literally dozens of illegitimate children by his mistresses].  The tumultuous history of 17th Century Stuart England focused on the maintenance of royal power through popular fear of Catholicism, balanced against royal fear of popular power manifested through Cromwell’s Civil War and Commonwealth (including the Regicide/Martyrdom Murder/Execution of King Charles I on January 31, 1649 after a preposterous “show” trial of the King for treason) and finally the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-1689 which firmly established the modern Constitutional Monarchy of Great Britain ruled by Parliament.

In Adam Sutler’s England, like George Bush’s America, maintaining fear of Muslims among the people supported the repression of the historical “English Freedoms” secured under Elizabeth I, James I, Charles II, and William III & Mary II.  If there are real fears of Muslim domination in America, they are coming to fruition under George W. Bush’s successor, “Barack Hussein Obama” whose name resoundingly echoes both “Osama” (bin Ladin, the modern Guy Fawkes) and the former dictator of Iraq whom George W. Bush decided to eliminate to maximize control over a nation which simply did not accept the “Bush doctrine” of Global government under US control.  

Any way you look at it: elaborate governmental lies concerning faked attacks and falsified heroes have been used to justify strong central governments for a very long time now.  It is hard to say whether the original Gunpowder Plot was real or staged. The “November 5″ plot on King James I and his wife and Court MIGHT have been real, and if so, it was a REALLY stupid plot (there was not enough Gunpowder under the houses of Parliament or any other explosive technology available in 1605 to have blown through and killed the King).  Even if successful, the plotters had no Papist “nominee” lined up to become King of England on King James’ death, and James’ eldest son at the time, the future Charles I, was only two weeks short of five years old on November 5, 1605. (But admittedly, if James AND his children had been killed, legitimate succession at that point might have been very difficult, in that no English Monarch since Henry VIII had had any children: all of Henry Tudor’s children: Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, died childless, possibly in part a testament to their own horror at their father’s gruesome “family and marital” life and history).  

Other historians have seen Guy Fawkes as a “Patsy” (scapegoat) comparable in real role and status to Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, being the “Fall Guy” for the “False Flag” Gunpowder Plot just as “9-11 Truthers” (including this writer) believe that Osama bin Laden was merely the “Patsy” for the events of 1998-2001 and afterwards which gave rise to the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and all the subsequent greatest suppressions of English and American liberties in the entire history of both nations since the reign of Henry VIII (who died 102 years and 3 days before the execution of Charles I, on January 28, 1547).  

The study of “false flag” terrorism and warfare is a rising subject of historical deconstruction.  It is stark testimony to the general lack of confidence people have in the U.S. government that a large number of people (polls differ) disbelieve the “official stories” of the Warren Commission concerning the events of November 1963 in Dallas, the origins of the Vietnam War in the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident the very next year, in August of 1964, and the subsequent stories of the events in the 1990s at Ruby Ridge (Idaho), Mount Carmel (Waco, Texas), Oklahoma City, the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and finally 9-11 itself in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.  Pearl Harbor, the trigger for World War II, was obviously not a “False Flag” attack (there is not and has never been any doubt that the Imperial Japanese Navy was correctly identified as the culprit, and that it acted under official orders from Tokyo). But many Americans (and others worldwide) believe that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had despaired of ever finding a politically adequate or emotionally sufficient excuse to embroil or involve the United States into World War II, and so he either expressly invited the Japanese to attack or at the very least intentionally disabled the U.S. Naval and air forces around Hawaii in early December 1941.

The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, in this day, appear to be governments based on a culture of pure deceit and deception.  All governmental pronouncements and actions should be regarded with the most stringent suspicion.  As one of the newscasters says in V-for-Vendetta ”we just report the news, we don’t make it up….that’s the government’s job.”

Janus—January—Ganesha—REL & MLK—Liminality and Transition in Modern Holidays

As Jadis, the White Witch/Queen of Eternal Winter in Narnia once said, “A door from the world of men; I have heard of such things; this may wreck all”.  Clive Staples Lewis, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”

If there ever were a god who personifies the door from or to the world of men, or any other portal, it would be the Roman god Janus, the two-faced deity who looked forward and backward through time and space.   Janus was among the most ancient of the distinctively Roman gods, one of my earliest girlfriends/ crushes in life was named “Jana”—Janus’ female counterpart and closer cognate to the Hindu Ganesha-Jayanti.   Ganesha is the elephant-god whose “pachydermal” strength and size permit him to remove all obstacles from the way—like an elephant charging through the forest (or anything else, I guess).  Janus personified and presided over the obstacles themselves—especially barriers, passages, and doorways in particular.

As through the barriers of time we fly on our annual travels to and from the dimensions of one year to another, we pass each year through the month of “January” named for this particular god of most apparently ancient and revered antiquity in the Indo-Germanische Ur-sprach und Ur-Gesselschaft as they (the proto-Indo-European language and society) might have existed in some vague yet certain to have been real at one time Indo-Arisches Ur-Heimatland.

New Year’s Eve-to-New Year’s Day is the generally recognized boundary or liminal moment between one year and the next, but I would suggest that the joint celebration of General Robert E. Lee’s birthday together with Reverend Martin Luther King’s birthday this coming Monday January 17, 2011, is a much more profoundly liminal, Janus-like moment—Robert Edward Lee’s birthday (January 19, 1807) looking backwards towards the Old Confederacy, and the Old Constitutional Federal Union from which it sprang, and Martin Luther King’s Birthday (January 15, 1929) which (at this point in time also looks back) albeit on the Post-Robert E. Lee South of Reconstruction and Jim Crow more than on the early Republic.

I grew up taught to love and revere General Robert E. Lee as the brilliant military commander under whom my ancestors fought in 1861-1865.   And although I’m sure that MLK and I would have disagreed on many particular questions of policy, I cannot help but feel deep and profound awe when I re-read Reverend Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail, to which I can personally relate so many times more than his “I have a Dream” speech which is by far the best known of his speeches.   I do believe that Martin Luther King was a man after Jesus Christ’s own heart—the heart of a revolutionary bludgeon against legal tyranny and hypocrisy on the part of a self-centered elite.  But I see so much of myself in Robert E. Lee’s life, internal conflicts, and career that I cannot help but feel closer to the Confederate leader—even though my life, frankly, is more that of a civilly or uncivilly disobedient activist.   Does it have anything to do with my status as a white man, son of the South?  Of course it does.  And it tortures my mind and conscience, because I realize the contradiction—-Lee was a product of the Establishment who remained an instrument of the establishment.  MLK was a product of the underclass who always remained an instrument of the underclass struggling for some measure of equality.  I am a product of the establishment and child of upper class (read “rich”) family who, having lost it all or most of it all to what he perceives as serious injustice and governmental-corporate malfeasance has dedicated his own life to the assisting struggles of the underclass, of all underdogs, and of the disenfranchised.

When recently in Baltimore I went to several of the Thurgood Marshall exhibits scattered around Thurgood Marshall’s home city and was similarly moved by the struggles of the First African-American Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  I do not think he was a good lawyer, and he was frankly an abysmal justice—but he was definitely in the right place at the right time, and his struggle for freedom is much like mine.  The airport between Baltimore & Washington, located closer to Annapolis where my son studies at St. John’s college than anywhere else, has one of these exhibits and in fact the BWI Airport is called the “Thurgood Marshall” International Airport.  Strange that there is no airport named after John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States from 1801-1835, even though this Justice Marshall is justly credited with forming and shaping the modern Anglo-American tradition of constitutional jurisprudence in the United States.  John Marshall was former and shaper to the same degree that Thurgood Marshall was formed and shaped by the times in which he lived, and was an effective and competent participant in those times and events.

When checking out how the transition in my lifetime had occurred between the mid-January celebration of Robert E. Lee’s Birthday and the Mid-January celebration of Martin Luther King’s Birthday, I was more than mildly surprised to learn that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi all jointly designated the Third Monday in January as Robert E. Lee day AND Martin Luther King Day.   In Florida, January 19, is still Robert E. Lee Day, but not a paid holiday, so nobody gets an extra day off, while in Virginia the day is jointly Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s birthday.  I’ll bet there are a lot of racially segregated parties this weekend with very few crossover members attending both.

In a very real sense, that is too bad I guess—in the spirit of Janus and Ganesha, the lives of both Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King represented (and up to a point, constituted) the ritual re-enactment of boundaries.  One of the great boundaries that Robert E. Lee had to cross in his life was the boundary between the blue and the grey.  He was a graduate of West Point and up to a point the founder of the effective U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  He built up the levees around St. Louis—a kind of boundary maintenance between dry land and riverbeds—and he retained his U.S. Army commission until the secession of the State of Virginia, to which he felt a primary loyalty traditional in those early days of the Federal Republic.  He believed he was a Virginian more than an American, so he respected the boundary between the State and Federal government more than most of us can imagine possible in this modern era.

For Martin Luther King, the primary boundary was one of color, between black and white, of all the symbolically and physically cordoned spaces which separated black and white in the buses, trains, schools, parks, restaurants, and movie theaters of the Southern United States and many other parts of the country as well.  (In the Northern part of the United States, where de jure segregation was less rigid, de fact segregation by residential areas was much stronger.  As former California Senator (and Japanese-American linguistic/semanticist) S.I. Hayakawa once explained it to us when he addressed my high school in 1973, “Southern Whites don’t care how close the Black man gets so long as he doesn’t get too high; the Northern Whites don’t care how high the Black man gets so long as he doesn’t get too close.”

So Robert E. Lee’s life was all about boundary maintenance, and Martin Luther King’s life was all about boundary destruction.  Some say that Robert E. Lee’s strategy for fighting for Southern Independence in 1861-65 was hampered by his excessive respect for boundaries: when the Northern will and organization was low during the two earlier years of the war, Lee several times stood back in Northern Virginia and failed to invade Maryland and seize Washington D.C.  By the time Lee finally decided to cross the boundary and go—I’ve never quite understood why—into Southern Pennsylvania (did he expect an uprising of the Pennsylvania-Dutch/German Amish in favor of the Confederacy? probably not….for Lee was a very smart and well-educated man) it was too late.  The Northern Armies had become stronger and better organized and even if Lee had won Gettysburg, he could not have realistically conquered Pennsylvania—so as I say, I’ve always wondered why he bothered at all—it’s as if he was afraid frontally to attack Washington—too close to the “boundary” of his own home in Arlington perhaps?  If so, his respect for boundaries really did “cost him the farm” for Arlington was seized and made forfeit.

In my world, as I’ve said so often before, I am interested in boundaries, albeit in very different ways.  With regard to the law—I want to crash the remaining boundaries between Black and White in regard to the enforcement of Civil Rights—I think that the idea that Civil Rights Law is primarily a welfare program for racial minorities is just AWFUL—both un-American and Anti-American—and it is wholly inconsistent with what the Supreme Court has been preaching about affirmative action and racial categories in the law since at least 1978.  I would love to see the Civil Rights Laws completely removed from their Public Welfare location in Title 42 and moved perhaps to Titles 4, 5, or 28, or perhaps entirely into Title 18.  It is evil to associate constitutional rights with Welfare programs in my opinion: equally evil to using access to civil rights laws to maintain racial conflict and competition in the U.S.

Which is not to say that there should not be competition between the races, or even some degree of separation.  Readers of this blog will also recall that I am a constant critic of the failed doctrines of “diversity” which suggest that everyone should mingle and mix and get together and physically as well as culturally obliterate all the boundaries between different cultural, economic, ethnic, occupational, racial, and social groups.   I submit that the real appreciation and maintenance of diversity, and all the socio-economic an cultural (as well as physical) evolutionary and competitive-stimulus benefits which real diversity provides—mandates that we encourage and foster the ability of the people to test out alternative ways of life and see which ways work better for different people—and to watch these ways of life compete for the betterment of each cultural, economic, ethnic, occupational, racial, and social group.  Why should we NOT want a diversity of ideas fomented by separate but parallel development?  Why would we, how could we, really want a world characterized by bland homogeneity in which everyone shops at Walmart and CVS, the Gap, Starbucks, and maybe a MAXIMUM of a dozen other name-brand stores throughout the world.  Such drab uniformity to me as a nightmare, but also an inevitable consequence of promoting “diversity” meaning “shake-and-bake-hamburger helper-mixed-powdered just add water world global society.”

In conclusion the Mississippi proclamation of the joint holiday we celebrate this weekend seems to me worth quoting, even if it is last year’s proclamation which I just found  (Martin Luther King’s & Robert E. Lee’s Birthday):

Martin Luther King’s Birthday
Robert E. Lee’s Birthday

Print Holiday Notice

TO THE OFFICERS AND EMPLOYEES OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI: WHEREAS, the Legislature has designated the third Monday in January as the day for the observance of the birthdays of ROBERT E. LEE and DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., and under the provisions of Section 3-3-7, Mississippi Code of 1972, is a legal holiday in the State of Mississippi; 

THEREFORE, all officers and employees of the State of Mississippi are authorized and empowered, at the discretion of the executive head of the department or agency, to close their respective offices in observance of the holiday on

MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010 GIVEN under my hand and seal of office at Jackson, Mississippi, this the 4th day of January, 2010.


C. DELBERT HOSEMANN, JR.
SECRETARY OF STATE
STATE OF MISSISSIPPI