Crazy Meds offline

Both the forum and the medication pages are off the air until I can figure out what the fuck is causing HTTP session to use unholy amounts of CPU time.


Update: the medication pages are available.  The forum should be up soon, although some features may be a bit constrained. 

Update: the forum is back up now. 

Update: I've taken the forum is offline for a bit.

Update: well, I thought it was going to be just for a bit, but I've run into that problem where I can't get an http connection.  I can see all sorts of http connections happening for other people, I just can't get one going.

Crazy Meds Ver 2.0 Beta Is Now Up

Due to med pages coming up blank at random times for anyone using the most recent versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome, along with assorted other technical issues,  I've had to convert the non-forum part of the site to the new format a hell of a lot sooner (i.e. now vs. whenever I managed to get enough of it done to open it up) than I wanted. 

So there's a lot missing, far too many of the pages are fugglier than shit with no updates to the content like I wanted to do prior to unveiling it, and it's full of missing links, dead ends, incomplete and barely started pages. But at least you can see all of my incompetence instead it merely taking the form of empty space.

The new URL is http://crazymeds.us/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/.  Redirects should be happening automagically, so don't worry about too much about updating anything.

No more frames, although there is a menu down the left side.

Pay attention moron.

As if I needed anything else to go wrong.  Shortly after waking up this morning I take the pills that were in the pill case, just like any other day, right?  Except that I took the night doses, not the morning doses.  And didn't notice until after I swallowed everything except the lamotrigine, which, of course, is the same dosage (100mg for those keeping score) both times.

So that was 250mg topiramate vs. 50mg and 30mg protriptyline vs. 10mg.

Other than being extra super spacey and completely unable to drive - hence screwing my plans for the day after they were hosed yesterday because the lack of antifreeze was enough to freeze me more than the truck - I'm not really worried about the early Topamax.  It's the protriptyline that has me concerned.  60mg in the course of 11 hours shouldn't be that big a deal, except protriptyline is one of the few crazy meds with an actual warning about, and recommendation of a dosage adjustment for people who are poor metabolizers of CYP2D6; and 60mg a day is the maximum in-patient dosage if your liver isn't as lazy as mine is.

One of the reasons why protriptyline isn't prescribed very often: complicated pharmacokinetics makes it tough to nail down a good dosage.  W00t.

I'm having second thoughts about Torrent's topiramate.  It might be as unreliable as Teva's used to be.   Or it could be I'm especially sensitive to being sleep-deprived.  I had a total of eight hours of somewhat restless sleep last night.  If I don't get that full 9-10 hours a night - and naps don't help, they just mess with me - I'll just do shit like this.

Missed the aurora, had a great aura instead

There's been a lot of solar activity lately, some of which has hit the earth's atmosphere.  For details see:

Latest solar events.

Space Weather and their March Aurora Gallery

Spring is Aurora Season

The only aurora I've seen so far made the sky look like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were the same shade of faded green.  It's been too cloudy on nights with events that could be seen at this latitude.  Or I don't get the alert until it's too late.  Or I've been too out of it.  Or there's a full moon.  And when there's a lot of snow on the ground a full moon is as bright as, if not brighter than dawn.

Yesterday I had one hell of an aura.  At first I thought I needed coffee, as I've been drinking the extra strength stuff I make that's like a weird hybrid of Vietnamese and Turkish.  But no.  The headache was still there after the coffee.  Getting the electric-shock tingling sensation in the palms of my hands was new, so I thought I had slept on my arm in a strange way.  Nope.  The odd feeling in my stomach wasn't from hunger, as it stayed around after I ate.  I just zipped through the Sunday crossword puzzle, so I could think relatively clearly.  For awhile.  Eventually that stopped.  And the tingly-shocks started running down my legs as well as my arms.  My stomach tightened up, the headache was getting worse, and I began to get disoriented.  It was an aura, no doubt about it.

So take a 1mg lorazepam tablet, an extra 25mg of topiramate, 800mg of gabapentin, my usual afternoon 10mg of protriptyline and 25mg of topiramate a few hours early, crawl into bed and, for everything to go away and probably take a nap.

No such luck.

I don't know if the lorazepam has reached it's expiration date or the aura is just too strong, so I take another 1mg of lorazepam.  Eventually I pass out around 3:00 p.m.  I wake up around 1:00 a.m., stumble into the kitchen to take my nighttime dose of 250mg of topiramate, 100mg of lamotrigine, and 30mg of protriptyline.  Then it's back to bed.  Where I sleep until nearly eight this morning.  Seventeen hours of sleep and I'm still groggy and somewhat out of it.

I have no idea what brought it on.  Is Torrent's topiramate crap?  Have I been working too much on Crazy Meds?  Some days I'll work on it for five hours.  Am I sleep deprived?  Lately I'm getting only 8 to 8.5 hours a night.  Have I been drinking coffee that's too strong?  Or was it just some random epilepsy thing?

Life in epilepsyland, one never knows what could trigger a seizure.

You still haven't found what you're looking for

Every now and then I get fed up with all the whining I've done about my boring life and how much it sucks.  Considering how I don't live in Haiti, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or wherever people wish they had my problems I don't have much cause for complaint.

So if you were looking for things like "Whaleshit on the Bottom of the Ocean," or "Nothing Nice," they've been relegated to bit heaven some time ago and are unlikely to return.  I've been using what time I have when I'm functional enough to do more than feed the cats and wash dishes to work on long-overdue improvements to Crazy Meds.  I may whine more here in the future.  If you're lucky, I won't.

Crazy Meds was temporarily off the air.

We were off the air for about an hour and a half today.  This was due to several spambots, spiders looking for non-existent files, and one brute-force crackerbot all converging on the site at once.  The result was the same as if we were hit with a denial-of-service attack.  We weren't, it just had the same outcome.

It's back to the usual insanity now.

Happy Fucking New Year. Those Mayans had best be right about 2012.

Nothing starts the new year right like a fuel tank lid refusing to come off, a blinking "check engine" light, and spiraling into depression.  So much for driving into Missoula early New Year's day, so I could deal with shit when everyone was hungover and the stores wouldn't be too crowded.

I've had plenty more to whine about for the last two months, but I didn't want to write about it.  What little functionality I've had has been devoted to keeping my life barely together or working on Crazy Meds - mostly behind-the-scenes crap.  I've become socially avoidant to the point of rarely answering e-mail and just occasionally checking in on the Crazy Meds forum.  That's it.  Not this blog - the blogrolls need a lot of pruning - let alone other blogs, no other sites, nothing.  I'll use my laptop exclusively as a radio for days at a time.  I haven't been depressed.  Sunday was the first time I felt real, near-suicidal depression in months, maybe more than a year, and I'm already getting over it.  I'm just fed up with clogged drainpipes that prevent the washing machine from working, and yet another mystery leak in the plumbing, and all the other problems people in Haiti wished they had.

I did find one thing that still cracks me up.  Best off-label application ever:

Exorcism-resistant ghost possession treated with clopenthixol.

Background: An Indian man now in Britain explained his criminal behaviour as episodic ghost possession. Traditional exorcisms failed to help.
Method: A 'Western' diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia was made. Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol.
Results: The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession.
Conclusions: Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.

Forum software upgrade completed.

I'm doing yet another software upgrade.  I hope this will resolve some of the problems users of mobile devices have been having, as well as some of the problems with searches.  I also hope this will be relatively quick.

No notice because my functionality has been dodgy, and this sort of thing has to happen on a weekend when traffic is minimal.


As of 2:15 PM Mountain Time (GMT -7) the upgrade is complete.  Nothing appears to be broken.  Yet.  However I don't see much in the way of fixes regarding the search function or mobile devices.

Now it looks like the search feature is working like it should.  Cache, cookies, the usual Interwebs wackiness was messing with me.  I'm still not sure about mobile devices.

Fuck if I know what the problem is, part 2.

I still don't know what's going on regarding the sporadic connectivity problems I'm having.  Just like last year I have found that if http://www.crazymeds.us is unavailable http://crazymeds.us works just fine.  I haven't been messing around with apache, so I don't know what the deal is.

I'll probably change all internal links that explicitly reference the domain from the flaky www.crazymeds.us to crazymeds.us.

Fuck if I know what the problem is.

Suddenly Firefox and IE can't find Crazy Meds.  But I'm still connected via telnet and ftp.  I can ping the site from domaintools.com and traceroute goes through fine, but ping and tracert fail from here.  For shits and grins I restarted the HTTPD service, but that didn't make any difference.

I'll ask tech support, but my money's on it being due to Internet weather or something else between here and the server.

--------------------------------------

Update: We're back on the air.  Whatever and wherever the problem was, it's gone now.

Dave's not here man

You know how you get to keep your cell phone number when you switch carriers?  What they don't tell you is your previous carrier may give your phone number to someone else, so you both have the same phone number.  Anyone who calls the number using your old carrier will get the person who was just assigned your phone number.  Anyone who calls using a landline or any other carrier winds up calling you.

This happens to me three or four times a year.  Usually it lasts two days and is no more than a minor inconvenience for the person with my phone number, while I don't particularly care and, if I feel like answering the phone, tell the callers what happened.  Over the last two weeks it's been alternately annoying and amusing for me.  I have no idea what it's been like for the very popular B., as it took him long enough to both get a new phone number and let everyone know what it is.

I wasn't up to talking on the phone most of the time, but they couldn't get a clue from my voicemail message that I'm not B.  I kept seeing the same phone numbers on the list of missed calls.  B.'s wife kept calling because she didn't update her contact list.  Only one person left a message, and he had just got out of jail.

The jailbird called the other night asking for B.  I tried to explain what happened and he couldn't quite understand it, because he kept asking for B.'s new phone number.  He said he had a wad of cash and wanted a big bag of pot.  That certainly explained why he couldn't grasp the situation, why B. is so popular, why it took so long for B. to get a new phone number and inform everyone he knows what it is, and why no one could take a hint from my voicemail message that I'm not B.

After telling this guy several times I didn't know B.'s phone number or where he could buy some pot he got pissed off at the world, ranting about the Mayans and 2012, and got pissed off at me.  He told me that everyone I know will die some day, that I'll die some day, and so forth along those lines before hanging up.  I think he was trying to harsh my buzz or something.

Blog roll updates

Once again I've moved some blogs to and from the defunct list.  Nothing new was added.  Anyone who reads the blogs regularly will notice, most of you won't.  I still feel like crap, so I was barely paying attention to what I did.

Video of Brent Arthur Wilson's Guilty Verdict

I know it's a month after it happened.  I've been ill.

Like the other videos of Brent and Jackiya you'll need to turn up your speakers to 11.

Brent Arthur Wilson: Guilty

Brent went to trial on Monday and was found guilty Tuesday morning. That's swift even by Montana standards, where it can be under a year from arrest to conviction for murder without a confession, and under six months with one.  It's not like I'm surprised or anything.  Sentencing is scheduled for 19 August.  The maximum punishment is 30 years in prison for the three felonies, six months in jail for the misdemeanor, and a $151,000 fine.  I don't have a clue as to what the likely sentence will be.  Judge Christopher might throw his ass in prison for 20 years just to save Lake county the cost of another trial.

From the Missoulian's coverage of Monday's proceedings:

Peering through reading glasses, accused house thief Brent Arthur Wilson spent the first day of his trial Monday alone at the defense table and seemingly uninterested in what was unfolding around him, poring over what appeared to be an Internal Revenue Service publication instead.

A few feet away, Lake County prosecutor Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson told a jury of nine men and three women that a year ago Wilson was unemployed, deeply in debt and living in a travel trailer.
But, she said, he was a "man with a plan," and the plan was to steal area homes in foreclosure - up to 100 of them, according to journals seized by authorities after they executed a search warrant on his residence.

Brent's residence at that time being another house he was attempting to steal.  That's making sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed with the same colored ink.  

Wilson, who has refused all attempts by District Court Judge Kim Christopher to appoint him legal counsel, didn't lift a finger in his own defense outside of repeatedly telling the judge that as far as he's concerned, he appears in her courtroom not as a criminal defendant, but only as the beneficiary to a trust in his name.

For anyone coming in late, Brent has repeatedly asked Judge Christopher to be the trustee of the BRENT ARTHUR WILSON Trust.  As she kept declining one can only assume the trustee of Brent's other trusts - "the creator, Yahweh" - has taken up that position.

He didn't ask a single question of potential jurors during the morning's jury selection, didn't exercise his right to preemptory challenges of any jurors, didn't object to the introduction of any evidence, and didn't cross-examine a single witness.
At times he appeared so engrossed in his reading material that only the silence in the courtroom made him aware the judge had addressed him and was waiting for an answer.
"Thank you for the question," Wilson said each time Christopher asked if he wanted to cross-examine someone, "but I appear only as the beneficiary. That question needs to be addressed to the trustee."

I can already see where this is going.  The basis of Brent's appeal will be that the trustee, i.e. God, was not allowed to be involved in the trial.  However, since God is omniscient and omnipresent, He was there and aware of all questions, statements, evidence, etc. and could have said something anytime He wanted to.  Even if prosecutor Cole-Hodgkinson said, "a trustee who apparently exists in his [Brent Arthur Wilson's] mind only."

The Missoulian didn't name the "Missoula financial institution" where Brent tried to get a loan for $125,000 using the property in question as collateral, nor how far into the loan process he got.  While I don't care all that much as to which bank / credit union / savings & loan was involved, just how deep into a home equity loan on property he didn't own is key to this symbolic denouement of the real estate pyramid scheme.

Not much happened on Tuesday.  A couple more witnesses, the prosecution's closing statement, and it took less than hour for a guilty verdict.  The verdict was the banner headline on today's edition, but there was a lot of padding with recap to justify that, because you can't run an above-the-fold story that's only five paragraphs long.  Plus there's not enough crazy, irony, or anything else to make up for the entire comics page not getting printed.  In any event, from the Missoulian:

Brent Arthur Wilson sat at his defense table alone on Tuesday, reading the Bible as jurors filed into the courtroom and delivered unanimous guilty verdicts in the peculiar case of a pilfered home.

Sentencing date, maximum possible punishment, recapping the saga, favorite wackiness, possibility of more charges, and at the very end the buried lede:

Cole-Hodgkinson said the spurious documents Wilson filed "created a cloud on the title," and he even scrawled his name into the property tract books maintained by the clerk and recorder's office.
"Of all the crimes that the defendant committed, that was probably the most heinous. The most far-reaching," she said, adding that people rely on those records when choosing their investments.
"I think he undermined everyone's sense of security," Cole-Hodgkinson said.
Susan Newton has worked in the Lake County Clerk and Recorder's Office since 1982, and has always felt the records should be accessible to the public. The way Wilson manipulated the records has her second-guessing that policy.
"We're a small county and we'd like to keep our books open to the public, but after this we may have to re-evaluate that," Newton said.

Anyone who has bought, sold, or taken out a loan for property knows the importance of a title search.  Any hiccup can delay or derail the process, and this is why it's important to know how far Brent got in getting a home equity loan.  It's like identity theft, in that once some jerk screws with your credit history you're the one who ends up paying for it.

The AP picked up the guilty verdict and ran an abbreviated version of the Missoulian's report.

I missed the report of a hearing on 1 July.  Here's a video of Judge Christopher and Lake County prosecutor Cole-Hodgkinson repeatedly trying to tell Brent all the different ways he can stop being stupid and get a shorter sentence.  Brent will have the last laugh. He's successfully stolen housing, food, and medical coverage from the state of Montana, and will continue to do so for how ever long he's sentenced.

FDA sanity fail: condoms cause breast cancer and eating disorders

This puts neuropsychiatric medication fearmongering into a new perspective.  I don't know exactly what that perspective is, but it's different.  Not only are condoms bad, but pearl necklaces and facials cause eating disorders as well, but blow jobs don't.  I guess this 'doctor' (who isn't a health professional) has issues and/or he's fed up with money shots.

Here it is on the FDA's website.

We're back on the air!

The forum is back up.  I'm really loopy.  It's a little before 8:00 PM, the fireworks are still two hours away (as if I were planning on seeing them in the first place, although I did want to go to the parade, lumberjack games and other 4th of July festivities) and I'm ready to go to bed.

There's one remaining problem I'm aware of: importing additional skins (IPBoard-speak for color schemes / styles) isn't working properly.  I have a good idea why and how it might be fixed.  It can wait until I recover from all this, which might not be until Friday.

At least there are a shitload of new anime avatars.

And you can put polls in your blogs.

Have fun with the new forum.

The Never-ending Crazy Meds Forum Software Upgrade Status Report

Actually there is some light at the end of the tunnel.  The software upgrade and data conversion are finished.  I'm doing some clean-up now.  More details to follow.


6:40PM MT  Jason from IPS tech support came through again.  When I hosed the production database two weeks ago I managed to convince the production version of the software that an upgrade was underway.  So even with fresh-out-of-the-box programs the process itself was somehow flagged as being about half-way through.  I'm still the better idiot that made me great at testing software.  So that part is done.

I'm finished with the system settings, and I just determined that I need to run the rebuild & recount tools.  That might take an hour or so.

Crazy Meds Forum Software Upgrade Status Reports

I couldn't get my act together until around 11:00 this morning, mainly because I thought I wrote that the upgrade would be starting at noon.  In any event there was a minor burp during the initial upload of the software, otherwise that part is fine.  I don't have an estimated time as to when it will all be finished.

One problem the new version of the software doesn't fix is resizing avatars loaded into the directory via FTP.  A lot of the anime avatars exceed the 120x120 pixel limit, and that was occasionally problematic.  I found some freeware that resizes batches of files, so they all meet that standard.  I've also added a shitload of new avatars.  Because of those two events I sorted the avatars into several galleries instead of having the single anime gallery.  As always the promise of more of your¹ favorite² anime avatars will be hanging for who the fuck knows how long. Once I'm finished there will be over 3,000 avatars from about 20 different series, so that should satisfy your inner otaku.

3:25 p.m. MT: Look at that.  The upgrade to the most current version assumes you are already at 3.x and not 2.3.x  So I first need to upgrade to 3.something and then upgrade to 3.1.latest&greatest.

It's a good thing I don't throw anything away.


6:20 p.m. MT: Nope, that wasn't it.  I've opened a ticket with IPS tech support. 

My guess is the problem has to do with my breaking the forum on 14 June.  The message I get is an SQL failure when something runs a query with a select based on a column that exists only in version 3.x of a table that hasn't been converted, so it doesn't have that column.  In other words, even though the upgrade tells me it's going to take version 2.3.6 and turn it into version 3.1, when the software actually starts it expects version 3 data.

Why do I think that's my fault?  Because whenever I ran the upgrades in a test environment they worked just fine.  The only difference now is the funky database that's a mix of old and new tables.  It didn't give me any problems, so I didn't know there extraneous tables until it was too late to do anything about them.

So we're off the air until at least tomorrow.  The old version comes up just fine, so the fallback is still good.

¹i.e. mine 

²that I could find

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.

--------------------------


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.