Crazy Meds Forum Scheduled to be Offline for Software Update

I plan on upgrading the forum software this weekend.

We'll be offline for however long it takes from around 10:00 a.m. Mountain time (16:00 GMT) 3 July until I'm finished.  One way or another we'll be back on the air sometime in the evening of 4 July, (early morning 5 July GMT) even if that means still being on the current version of the software.

I'll post on here when I start and when the forum is back up, as well as any status updates I feel are necessary or interesting, or I have nothing better to do.

Unlike the weekly backups, I'll be doing a manual backup without the forum software running, so I'm fairly confident all posts, etc. will be safe in case anything goes wrong.

I spy with my little eye diverse fungi

Last Saturday (12 June) it stopped raining after about 10 straight days of varying amounts of rain.  I walked around the property to check out what sort of mushrooms might have fruited and the pickings were pretty good.  As I'm way off of my game I have no real idea what these are, and, at best, can pin them down to their genera.

First up are the ones I see all of the time:

This one is representative of the ones that frequently fruit on or near the meadow (like this one) or the 'lawn' from late spring through mid autumn.  My guess is it's either a type of lepiota or amanita, although only strong remnant of a veil is the annulus / ring.  When I can pull one up the base of the stem is bulbous, it's just not an obvious volva.  Still, the gills are detatched, the stem isn't particularly smooth, and the spores are rather white.

Also popular...

Miniature puffballs, which I'm likely to find whenever the lepiotae / amanitae are fruiting.

I have mostly pine trees, most of which are lodgepole pines.  I expected to find more Slippery Jacks (suillus species), but the conditions aren't right, the deer like them too much or something.  Here's a fairly generic Slippery Jack that fruited amongst the pines:

And a couple of less-than-generic specimens:

You can't tell from this picture, but the cap is yellow. I found the remnants of another one a deer really liked that was chanterelle yellow.

I found this suillus (I think) on the 'lawn.' It had a very sweet scent and was hardly slimy. As you can see it was popular with critters of all sizes, as a couple of fairly large bites were taken out of it.

This one from the meadow is pretty neat:

I found another just like it alongside the driveway.  It sort of looks like a bird's egg.  Based on the two I found the off-center stalk seems to be the norm.  It didn't cooperate and leave a spore print, so I don't know where to start in trying to identify it.

This one fruited Thursday the 17th.  It's obviously an agaricus of some kind, with the purplish-brown spores pretty much ruling out most anything else.  I'm impressed by how it forced its way up through the packed clay and gravel of the driveway!  It doesn't look like A. bitoruis, because its stalk and ring are too small, but I could easily be wrong.

 

Finally, file these under nothing special. Colorful, but otherwise unremarkable shelf conks and waxy caps.

Polite Antics Ensue

That's the headline for the article the print edition I received this morning. The headline of the online version is far more staid.

Brent continues to treat the case against him as a civil matter involving the BRENT ARTHUR WILSON Trust and that the US Constitution does not apply to him. Good luck with that.

Brent Arthur Wilson's courtroom demeanor has changed noticeably.

His legal strategy, not so much.

The defendant, who at one time had lectured the judge presiding over his multiple felony case by telling her she was "not God," was polite - sometimes exceedingly so - during an omnibus hearing here Thursday morning.

But the alleged Polson house thief, who is representing himself, remained just as committed to his unusual courtroom tactics as well.

He insisted that District Court Judge Kim Christopher address questions she asked of him to herself instead, as his "appointed trustee" of an express revocable trust in his name.

[...]

When Wilson tried to waive his "constitutional benefits in a trial" on Thursday, Christopher told him, "We don't conduct them any other way, Mr. Wilson."

Wilson's polite reply:

"I appreciate your offer, it's very generous of you, but I'm going to waive that constitutional benefit offer."

The big news, to me, is that everything up to this point involved what I've been calling the "third house," i.e. not the one he was living in nor the one he rented out to someone else, but the house he attempted to use as collateral for a home equity loan.  At least I hope it's the house he tried to use for a loan, but as there could be more than three houses involved who knows if that's ever going to be evidence in a trial.  I really, really want everything regarding a home equity loan on a house with paperwork involving Yahweh and reincarnation to be brought out in the open, because that will be the icing on the cake of the YIIKes! decade's real estate pyramid scheme.  

It's not easy to bury that sort of stuff in Montana like it is in other states.  

I've bought and sold property in California and it takes several hours to go through all the paperwork with a good Realtor who will explain everything so you don't have to read all of it yourself (which would take at least a day, assuming you had the correct reference books at hand) and not be an idiot and sign anything they put in front of you.  In Montana you can actually read each of the few documents in its entirety, understand them, and be done in under an hour.

The Lake County DA's office is still compiling charges, and may file those as a separate case. Why?  Because it's so freaking complicated.

The other properties involve other witnesses and different paper trails, and all are complicated, the assistant county attorney [Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson] said. She must also decide whether to amend the current charges - which include theft, deceptive practices and tampering with public records or information, all felonies - to include the other properties.

If Brent decides to, or Judge Christopher rules Brent is too crazy to represent himself and forces him to use a public defender, he could plead guilty and instantly be out on probation for time served. Hell, he doesn't even need a public defender to do that, all he has to do is stop believing in the Sovereign Citizen bullshit.

No, really.  From the last two paragraphs of the story:

Her other option is to file separate charges in those cases in a situation where, at least some have speculated, Wilson might otherwise already be out on probation and credited with time served, were he not insistent on following his curious courtroom strategies.

Wilson has already been judged mentally fit to stand trial.

So if Brent isn't crazy and thinks the Sovereign Citizen thing is a rational defense, even if being a true believer is keeping him in jail longer than necessary, does that make him a de facto member of the 'patriot' movement?  According to David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars it does.  Personally I think that's insulting to Brent, who might be opting for the guaranteed three squares and a bed.

Don't underestimate Brent's legal kung fu.

Whoops!

The Crazy Meds Talk forum is temporarily broken.  The database error is my fault.  It'll be back up soon, but everything posted after midnight Sunday Mountain Time will be lost.   Life just sucks that way.

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OK, it's fixed now.  At least it was both easy and fast to repair.  That took all of fifteen minutes, most of which was spent RTFM for MySQL to make sure I had the syntax correct for a full restore.

I was doing yet another test installation of the forum software upgrade, because version 3.1 was just released so there wasn't much point in installing 3.0.5.  I forgot to change the database name in one location.  So the production database was updated to version 3.1 during the installation.

At least I know that part of the upgrade process works.

Everything is backed-up on Sundays around midnight Mountain Time, (GMT -6, -7 winter time), so it could have been a lot worse.

Jackiya Ford: Officially Crazy. Brent Wilson: Unofficially Scary

Jackiya Ford is officially crazy. According to the article in the Missoulian from 1 June 2010 (I'm having problems with my meds, hence the delay):

A psychological evaluation of the 37-year-old woman accused of stealing a home in Lolo revealed that she is not mentally fit to proceed to trial, but prosecutors want a second opinion.

[...]

An appointment for the second evaluation couldn't be made until mid- to late July, however, and Public Defender Chris Daly said that was too long to wait under Montana's speedy trial guarantees.

[Judge Robert L. "Dusty" Deschamps III] agreed, and said the prosecutor would have to find a private psychologist who could perform the evaluation sooner.

"I'm not going to leave someone who is mentally ill and suffering from delusions sitting in a jail cell for two months while she waits for a bed at the state hospital," Deschamps said.

I wonder what gave it away? Was it her LinkedIn page where she claimed to have marched with MLK several times, the Dr. Bronner-like rant on her MySpace page (see Jackiya Ford: Crazier than I thought for more of that sort of madness), or the pure insanity of an African-American gospel singer appropriating the language and methods of a scam rooted in Identity Christianity to attempt to steal property in MONTANA? (see Reverend Colonel William Potter Gale must be spinning in his grave for details)

Perhaps she had something new for the people evaluating her.

Meanwhile, since the 1990s were 20 years ago it's time for '90s retro chic.  Militias were hot as the right-wing political extremists of the 1990s, so they're back.  Montana had two organizations in the vanguard of patriots guarding against the Black Helicopters and New World Order: the Militia of Montana and the Freemen.  Brent is reminding people of the Freemen.  I originally thought he wasn't involved with the neo-Freemen who are openly back in Lincoln county.  Most political extremists are united only by overlapping aspects of their ideologies;  Brent is probably acting on his own, like whoever did the drive-by "paper terrorism" in Hamilton county earlier this year.  So if he used the Freemen's tactics to try to acquire some property, will he do the same during his trial?  An article in the Missoulian from 3 June 2010 tries to answer that.

Nick Murnion was Garfield County attorney who prosecuted members of the Montana Freemen.  He said:

"Some have said very few things and mostly just sat there," ... "This fellow sounds more vocal. Obviously, none of them believe the state has any authority over them - they claim they aren't citizens and the courts have no jurisdiction. It gets kind of bizarre."

How bizarre?

"Does the courtroom where he's appearing have an American flag in it?" ... "If the flag has a fringe on it, I've seen them claim it's a maritime flag and therefore the court only has jurisdiction on water."

Like the Freemen Brent insists he has no rights, wants no attorney, and doesn't recognize Lake County's jurisdiction over him.  It's doubtful anyone would believe it if Brent offered a $1 million dollar bounty on the prosecutor as happened to Mr. Murnion, but Brent rented out one of those houses and was in the process of getting a home equity loan, so anything is possible.

In 2008 the US Supreme Court ruled that if someone is declared competent enough to stand trial the judge could still say that person is too crazy to represent themselves, and the judge gets to determine that however they like.  (Indiana v. Edwards) It's like obscenity, the judges know it when they see it.  However...

Broadwater County Attorney John T. Flynn says the Montana Supreme Court has said that defendants have an absolute right to represent themselves, in a ruling that essentially read, he says, that "in Montana, you have a constitutional right to be a fool."

A defendant who disrupts proceedings and does not conform to a certain level of decorum, however, does not have an absolute right to be present in the courtroom, and Flynn says that leads to a couple of competing rights for those who represent themselves.

They have the right against self-incrimination, but they also can't obstruct justice.

A defendant who disrupts proceedings and does not conform to a certain level of decorum, however, does not have an absolute right to be present in the courtroom, and Flynn says that leads to a couple of competing rights for those who represent themselves.

It would be a tad bit difficult to represent yourself if you're not allowed to be in the courtroom.  Judge Deborah Christopher would probably have to invoke Indiana v. Edwards, tell Brent to suck it up, and appoint a lawyer to represent him.

Read the full article for more potential courtroom antics and wacky prosecutorial war stories.