Reverend Colonel William Potter Gale must be spinning in his grave

Brent Wilson copycat Jackiya Ford had her first day in court yesterday.  From the front-page story in today's (30 April, 2010) Missoulian she's certainly following Brent's game plan, even if it's a water-downed version.

Not guilty plea entered for woman accused of stealing Lolo home

A woman accused of staking claim to a man's home by inhabiting the residence refused to enter a plea at an arraignment hearing Thursday because she does not recognize Montana as a legal entity.

[...]

Thursday's court hearing revealed little more of the ideology behind Ford's alleged acts, but a lawsuit she filed against county officials who stymied the deed transfer suggests a pronounced sense of entitlement.

In the lawsuit, Ford accuses officials of preventing her from filing her land patents with the county, of violating her birthright and of being unruly toward her. Ford, who said she is pregnant, is seeking compensation for "mental damage and scars due to duress and coorersion (sic) of all parties involved."

[...]

At Thursday's arraignment hearing in Missoula District Court, Ford asked to have the criminal case transferred to U.S. District Court, where she filed the lawsuit against Missoula County, and asked for access to the jail's law library.

When Desmond read Ford her rights, she asked the standing judge to clarify.
"Question. Are these rights outside of the Constitution of the United States?" Ford asked.

No judge sassing, no demanding to be her own lawyer, nothing as entertaining as Brent.  There is, however, one thing Brent can't top.

She's black.

What difference does that make?

Jackiya Ford essentially followed the instructions of the Redemption Movement by the book with preemptive lawsuits against county officials and filing land patents.   The Redemption Movement evolved from the Sovereign Citizens Movement, both of which came out of the Posse Comitatus (the vigilante group founded in the 1970s, not the 19th-century law).  The Posse Comitatus was key to Identity Christianity growing from an obscure cult to the de facto religion of white supremacists.  The late Rev. Col. Gale of this post's title was the founder of The Church of True Israel, as well as the Posse Comitatus and other paramilitary organizations.  Another group with the same lineage is the Aryan Nations.

I love it.

You go, girl!  This is post-racial America.  A pregnant African-American woman has every right to join up with the Sovereign Christian Redemption posse to get some real estate she's entitled to.  Emphasis on the Christian part as Jackiya is a professional gospel singer with her own record label / production company / sect. She has a single available on iTunes and a video, of sorts, on the YouTube.

Some of the more extreme tax protesters have been linked with white separatists / supremacists. Lots of people have already connected the extremist tax protesters to the Tea Baggers Party, and Tea Party rhetoric sounds a lot like sovereign citizen / redemption rhetoric.

Wow!  The Tea Party isn't exclusively white after all!

The front page of today's Missoulian is now doubly ironic.  Right next to Jackiya's story is one about a bunch of asshats in Kalispell propagating a Montana stereotype:

Protesters rally as white separatists watch Nazi film in Kalispell library

At least the protesters outnumbered the dickweeds 20-to-1.  So much for the "white homeland."

Brent Arthur Wilson in the media spotlight

Chuck Shepherd wrote up Brent's doings the Creme de la Weird entry for his News of the Weird column of 25 April, 2010. 


Edit 6 May 2010: URL updated with permanent archive address.

Real Estate Scams = Domestic Terrorism? Why not.

As Tristan Scott wrote in the second story:

The allegations against Ford smack of the recent case of Brent Arthur Wilson, 53, who faces felony charges in Lake County for his alleged attempts to steal a $300,000 house in foreclosure.

California woman charged with moving into, claiming Lolo home she didn't own

Jackiya D. Ford, 37, was arrested on April 14 and her belongings removed from a house built by Bob Paffhausen. She made an initial appearance in Justice Court on April 19 and her bail was set at $50,000.

Paffhausen said Ford had showed up about two weeks earlier to view the house as a prospective buyer. Sometime after that, prosecutors say Ford delivered paperwork to Paffhausen claiming ownership of the house and the land in a 20-mile radius around it. She offered to drop the lawsuit if Paffhausen would pay her about $900,000 in pure silver and gold.

Paffhausen received a call from NorthWestern Energy saying someone had reported a natural gas leak at the house. Paffhausen went to the house, where he found the locks and garage door codes had been changed and notices were posted on the doors claiming the house had been given to Ford by "our Lord and Savior Yahushua."

Smacks of Brent indeed.  I like the part about wanting to be paid in real money instead of the Fed's worthless fiat script.  And her name.  It seemed a straightforward copycat crime.  Brent's meme was spreading.  Why should Wall Street types be the only ones to get paid by the government to commit white collar real estate crime?  Everyone should be able to get in on it!

The next day the Missoulian published this story:

Alleged Lolo 'house theft' may have been inspired by extremist websites

Some highlights:

"It's very difficult to unrecord a document once it's been recorded, so we try to catch these things when they appear on the verge of legality," said Debbe Merseal, Missoula's chief deputy clerk and recorder.Merseal said Ford's filings were so unusual that she sent the paperwork to the legal eagles in the Missoula County Attorney's Office for review. She said the woman tried to have several certified deeds and patent documents re-recorded, but refused to give a reason for the request.

"This definitely was an unusual document," Merseal said. "She described it as a ‘patent sandwich.' I don't believe we've ever seen anything like this."

[...]

The woman first came onto the radar of local law enforcement when she became disorderly in the Missoula County Attorney's Office and had to be removed. She filed "bogus" lawsuits against several sheriff's deputies, said Lt. Rich Maricelli, and demanded settlements be paid in gold and silver.
"It's been an absolute nightmare," Maricelli said.

[...]

Ford told the deputies that she was a "sovereign citizen of the republic of America" and therefore officials had no authority over her. She said she owned the whole mountainside and that they were on private property.At the time of her arrest, she had been living in the house about two weeks.

Ford's alleged intimidation tactics are consistent with the Sovereign Citizen Movement, whose adherents use "paper terrorism" as a form of harassment.

Paper terrorism involves the use of fraudulent legal documents and filings, as well as the misuse of legitimate documents and filings, in order to intimidate, harass and coerce public officials, law enforcement officers and private citizens, according to an FBI news release warning of the practice.

[...]

That FBI issued its news release one day before Ms. Ford was arrested.  The Sovereign Citizen Movement is the third in an ongoing series to educate the public about "U.S.-based extremist ideologies."  The Montana Freemen of the 1990s were sovereign citizens.  This is just one more indicator that they're back.

I don't think Brent is involved with the neo-Freemen, or any other sovereign citizens.  I'm pretty sure his motives are from divine inspiration, and/or getting his share of the good times like everyone deserves and not just Wall Street fatcats. 

I have no idea what motivates Ms. Ford.

New and Removed Entries on the Panoply of Blogs

The following blogs have been moved to the Defunct, but not Forgotten blogroll:

A canna’ change the laws of physics

Adnoxious

Ask A Urinal - Wisdom From Bathroom Graffitti

Fuck You, Penguin

Grammar Police a.k.a. GrammarCops

Making Maps: DIY Cartography

Musings of a phenomenologist

Scalpel or Sword?

Things I've Learned from Wikipedia

This is why we love them

Why The Fuck do You Have a Kid?

They still have great content and, like back issues of Skymall Magazine, if you haven't read it before it's new to you.

Crass-Pollination: An ER blog is now invitation-only.  Pole Leaning Douchebag and Don't Judge my Hair completely vanished.  The latter is sorely missed.

The good news is there are new blogs to take up the space, although not necessarily the place, of the recently removed entries:

Autocomplete fail

Gross N00dz

Learn from my fail

My Very Worst Job

My Very Worst Roommate

People Of Public Transit

That's my boss

Tweetbaggery

Up On The Fridge

Woman fail

Autocomplete fail is the fifth such site I've come across.  Gross N00dz is just that, some of the grossest people you've ever seen with no clothes on.  There may not be enough bleach on the planet to clean your eyes.  The content warning, or something, prevents the last update and title from coming through.  Remember: once seen, it cannot be unseen.

I managed to get the Picture Pool from Texts from Last Night to update.  You need to have a Flickr account to see it.  I still can't get the Horse Head blogs to cooperate.

Forum Software Upgrade

In preparation for the upcoming degradation upgrade of the Crazy Meds Talk forum software I'm updating some operating system software today.

Short notice because I was too stupid to first read the system requirements for the new forum software.  Otherwise I would have planned for this.  I want to test the new forum software and I sure as hell can't do that without installing it.

I have no idea how long the interruption will last. Assuming anyone notices.

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

I doubt anyone noticed a thing.

Hero The Cult - Round 2

There are new ads for the HTC Hero smart phone.  A day or two prior to those ads showing up new ads for Scientology appeared.  The old ads for Scientology are in a higher rotation now.   Perhaps the new Scientology ads didn't test as well, or perhaps it's because the new Scientology ads are not as similar the new HTC Hero ads as the old Scientology ads are.

Funny how the Scientology ads kind of vanished until right before the new HTC Hero ads started showing up everywhere.  Suddenly the ads for Scientology were everywhere.  It's as if the clams couldn't afford the air time until HTC's next big media buy, then they suddenly had the money to spend on advertising.  Sort of like how the first big ad blitz featuring those ads that look and sound so much like the previous set of HTC Hero ads appeared shortly before said ads.  Makes you wonder about things, doesn't it?

As the only TV I get is via satellite, my advertising landscape is different than it is for those who watch via cable, over-the-air local reception, or teh InterTubes, so "everywhere" for me is somewhat less hyperbolic than you might think.  Agencies can buy in bulk from companies that own multiple channels and really save, on the proviso that most of the spots will be preempted by local carriers.  So buying five spots an hour on the Discovery networks means I have the opportunity to see the same ad five times an hour on seven different channels (the People Blowing up Stuff at Work Channel, the Way Too Many Children Channel, Animal Planet, the Sex, Drugs and Circus Freaks Channel, the War Channel [not to be confused with A&E's Nazi Network], the Science Films They Should be Showing in Schools Channel, and the Serial Killer Channel), while someone with basic cable would see the same ad once or twice an hour, the other times local ads and national ads targeting a specific region would be seen.  Basic cable would probably have only the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and TLC to watch it on.  While it's possible for the satellite provider to preempt a bulk ad with one they've sold, that doesn't happen nearly as often.

As Ian Flemming wrote, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."  Given how complicated the world is these days I'm willing to add a margin of error of one.  Twice may still be anomalous, or it could be evidence of collusion.

Video of Brent telling Judge Deborah, "You are not God."

Video and mugshot courtesy of the Lake County Leader.

Forum Software Upgrade and More Fantabulous Procrastination

I'm preparing for an upgrade to version 3.0.whatever-is-current of Invision Power Board.

Crazy Boards runs under IPB 3.0.x, so look there if you want an idea of what the new software is like. We won't look exactly like that, especially since they're fond of modifying the software, but you should get the general idea.

I can't give you an estimate yet as to when it'll start, how long it will take, etc. As always such things depend on my mental and physical health, as well as consecutive hours of relative clarity of thought.  I've downloaded the software and gave the upgrade manual a quick scan, so at least I've started.

As much as I'd rather leave the software as it is, Invision software has announced that the version of the software we now have will no longer be supported. In addition to the usual health excuses, I've been putting off the upgrade because version 3.0.lower-than-it-is-now was really fugly and, in some areas, had less functionality than what we have now. I'm still not a big fan of how it looks, but it does everything the 2.3.5-and-up version does in addition to all the new bells and whistles.

I like 3.1 a lot more, but it's still in beta. I just can't wait for that version if I need any technical support, as support for 2.3.get-with-the-program will end before 3.1 will be stable enough for general release, let alone stable enough for me to install.

As for the procrastination, I've created yet another stupid Facebook group.  Fans of Brent Arthur Wilson.  Why? Brent Arthur Wilson encapsulates the entire zeitgeist of the real estate pyramid scheme of the previous decade. He's probably a criminal. He may be crazy. But is he all that different from the predatory lenders offering, or the would-be house flippers taking out loans where one made payments only on the interest until that final, big-ass balloon payment? Is all the paperwork he filed packed with Biblical references any more bizarre than the recursive, debt-based derivatives that led to the near-collapse of our financial system?

To top it all off, he sasses and mouths off at the judge who is currently in charge of his immediate fate. While acting as his own lawyer. So not only is he charged with stealing oversized houses like the bankers themselves, he's a one man pitchfork-and-torch-carrying mob who doesn't consider himself subservient to a judge, or anyone else who considers one person as being the better of another.

News you can confuse, use, or lose.

There's a proposal before the Missoula city council to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  Naturally a bunch of closed-minded bigots will have problems with that sort of thing, but this one is really special.  NotMyBathroom.com allegedly represents 17 or so groups opposed to the proposal because it would allow men to use the ladies' room and thus frighten and confuse children.

I shit ye not.

It will also force ministers to perform gay marriages, give homosexuals 'special' rights, and the usual litany of orgiastic end-times tribulations.

But they don't hate homosexuals.  Really.

And the various groups that are part of the umbrella organization can't be identified because, you know, gay bashing isn't protected speech.  And since contributing over $100 to a political campaign goes on the public record, everyone who gave more than $100 to California's Prop. 8 suddenly felt threatened and oppressed by homosexuals.

Who is behind the frightened people in the bathrooms?  Tireless WalMart-funded anti-porn crusader Dallas Erickson.  It doesn't matter that there's hardly any porn where he lives, that most of it is in the form of Playboy, Penthouse, and video equivalent, and next to impossible for someone under 18 to look at.  He's one of those guys who stays up late all night worrying that someone is having a good time.  Scroll down to Time to stop this permissiveness to see one of his great anti-porn rants.

Here's the Missoulian's story on NotMyBathroom.com

You know how first / emergency responders have large-scale drills to work out various scenarios.  A bunch of people with nothing better to do act like they've been killed or injured by an earthquake, terrorist attack, bioweapon oopsie, whatever, and the coordinated police, fire, and appropriate other agencies figure out how well their plans would work when there's nothing else happening outside of the few blocks they've roped off.

How do you do that when you don't have much money?  Actual headline:

Playing with fire: Agencies stage disaster using Hot Wheels, Army men

 

The concept of getting paid to be a fireman who plays with army men and Hot Wheels must be giving 8-11 year-olds total hard-ons.

Where do you go if your end-times, Mormon-offshoot religion is too freaky-weird for Utah and Idaho?  Montana!

Religious sect rejected by Utah, Idaho moves to Fromberg

A religious group led by a man who claims to be the Holy Ghost has moved to the Fromberg area after a brief stay in a small Idaho town where residents protested the group's building plans.

Their Fromberg neighbors are wary of the group and law enforcement officials have been notified of the group's activities in Utah and Idaho.

Members of the Church of the Firstborn and General Assembly of Heaven had fled to Idaho from Utah last year after their large home in a Salt Lake City suburb was raided by federal officials investigating claims of child sexual abuse and assassination threats against President Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Thomas S. Monson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Last September, the group started moving from Idaho into two homes on a lot at 605 Bridger-Fromberg Road. The main home had been rented by Larry Daniels, who was sentenced last week to prison for murdering his adult son in the house.

The church is led by 43-year-old Terrill Dalton, who said group members are peaceful and felt drawn to Montana.

"We all prayed about where to go next and a lot of people had the same feeling that we ought to go to Montana, somewhere nigh unto Billings, not the city, but nearby," Dalton said.

Geody Harman is the church's co-leader, Dalton's "first counselor." Asked how many people live on the property, Harman had to stop and count.

"Fourteen or 15, something like that. No, it's 16," Harman said. That number includes the 36-year-old Harman's wife and their nine children.

The article continues at the link to the Missoulian.  It's '90s nostalgia.  These folk are the Church Universal and Triumphant of this decade. 

Our good buddy Brent Wilson just can't keep his mouth shut.  The headline in the early edition of the paper I get has a much better headline: Alleged house thief continues to mouth off.  "Mouth off" isn't as good as "sasses," but is still pretty good.

Brent is obviously crazy, and medication would likely help him, especially since he insists on acting as his own lawyer, but I think he's great.  The way he attempted to steal the houses is totally batshit crazy, yet he managed to get a home equity loan for one of them.  He claims to neither have nor need constitutional rights, which is probably his justification for treating Deborah, sorry, Judge Christopher, just like any other person.  A bit dickish perhaps, but it's not like he called her a bitch or threatened her.  He's just asking to be held in contempt of court and/or in crazy lockup, but it could all be weird judicial kung fu.

There's no video of Brent mouthing off, but here's a direct link to the video when he first sassed Judge Deborah Christopher.

Sassing judges: never a good idea

One reason why I love living in Montana: reading this sort of headline in the local paper.

Man accused of stealing Polson-area foreclosed house sasses judge.

Details and video of sassing at the link.

The way he stole foreclosed houses is pretty imaginative.   He'd find a foreclosed house that was on the market, take down the "For Sale" signs, break in change the locks, and file a bunch of weird paperwork.  For example:

"The designation trustee and steward as used herein," it reads, "shall include said resurrected and non-resurrected sons of man, and their heirs as required by context.

"Witnesseth that the trustee, for a valuable consideration paid by the trustee to the creator, Yahweh, the receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, has and by these presents does grant and convey stewardship unto brent-arthur: in fee-farm, all that certain lot of land situated on Lake, the county, Montana, the land, commonwealth yiisra'el, and more particularly described as follows:"

What follows is a lengthy description that begins with the "third planet from the sun" and ends with plat tract book information.

The document appears to be notarized, but in her charging affidavit, deputy county attorney Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson notes "it does not list the notary's name, expiration of their notary power, or their location." Instead, under an illegible signature, it reads, "My commission expires: upon my final breath."

"I couldn't believe the Clerk and Recorder would take something like this, but what I learned was they can't stop anybody from recording anything," [Ed] McCurdy says.

Ed McCurdy is the Realtor of the foreclosed property in the above example. Mr. Wilson was able to get at least one home equity loan on one of the properties he and Yahweh "own."  I thought lenders were being more careful these days.

Great picture of him in court.  There's something familiar about about this guy...

I couldn't help it.

Most Heartrending Consumer Medication Guide Ever

I saw an ad for Sabril (vigabatrin) in the current issue of Neurology Now, unlike any ad I've seen for a prescription drug in a consumer-oriented magazine. The ad was nothing more than a headline reading "Help for hard-to-treat seizures," the Sabril logo
and 2.75 pages of patient /consumer information. That's it.  No smiling people, no images implying one's life getting back together, no toddler with the helmet on the ground instead of on her head. Just easy-to-read text on epilepsy-awareness purple. If you fill out and send in the postage-paid card attached by the ad, Lundbeck will mail you a package of education materials that may have warm & fuzzy pictures.

Like most ads for medications these days the bulk of the ad buy is comprised of some or all of the medication guide / patient information leaflet.  Sabril's medication guide is also unlike any I've ever seen due to two words used repeatedly throughout the document: your baby.

Whenever the phrase "your baby" is used in consumer information it's always in the context of warning you that a drug could harm your baby if you take it while pregnant and/or breastfeeding.  Infants and 0-year-old children get all sorts of medications and have their own doctors, but in the world of consumer medication information babies rarely do.  Babies get vaccinations, caffeine citrate oral solution is given to premature babies, but little else.

In the second paragraph it states that Sabril is used to treat babies and you and your doctor or your baby's doctor have to decide if the infantile spasms (West Syndrome) is so bad you'll risk vision loss (which is not total blindness, but blurry tunnel vision). 

And the which sucks less for your baby equation is repeated over and over.


There are treatment options that probably suck less. There's prednisone, prescription-strength & pharmaceutical-grade vitamin B-6, ACTH (at the low, low price of $23,000, yes, 23 THOUSAND DOLLARS a vial), Topamax (topiramate), Lamictal (lamotrigine), Zonegran (zonisamide), Depakote (divalproex sodium), Keppra (levetiracetam) and Klonopin (clonazepam).  If the kid's been weaned the ketogenic diet is also an option.

If you look at these treatment guidelines and the American Academy of Neurology's official ones, the only treatments that "probably" work are ACTH (dropped by most insurance companies due to cost), Sabril, and the ketogenic diet, which can take anywhere from two to five months to start working.  Everything else is classified as "maybe it will work." B-6 is probably listed as first-line treatments due to a lower side effect profile.  I don't know why prednisone is, as it has a possible side effect of death.

Left untreated or poorly treated, infantile spasms can result in death.  Which sucks less?


Sabril was approved for use in the US in August 2009, but available to desperate parents since 1988 after the FDA updated its personal use guidelines. Lundbeck doesn't make it any easier to obtain Sabril now that it is approved in the US.  Lundbeck's SHARE program that doctors, pharmacies and patients must pass in order to prove they are qualified to respectively prescribe, dispense, and take (or give to their babies) is just as, if not more complicated than the Clozaril registry upon which it was probably based.  At least there is just one Sabril registry.  Every company that manufactures generic clozapine has its own registry.

Ironic Gun Safety Lesson or Subversive Recruiting Technique?

Superintendent accidentally discharges muzzleloader in class

Dwain Haggard’s high school history lesson on Friday backfired.

Haggard, who used to be a Civil War reenactor, was showing the five students in Reed Point High’s American history class his replica antique black powder muzzleloader when the gun fired and lodged a ball in the front wall of the classroom.

“I can’t explain how it was loaded,” Haggard said.

Haggard has been district superintendent since 2007, and each year he’s visited the high school’s American history class to show off his Civil War-era equipment. When he shows the muzzleloader, he finishes the demonstration by firing a cap, which makes a small “pop” when he pulls the trigger, he said.

But this time, “when I dropped the hammer on it, to all of our surprise, it went off,” he said.

Jake Bare, a junior at Reed Point High, was in the class when the gun fired. He said it caught everybody off guard.

When Haggard pulled the trigger, there was a loud bang,and the room filled with smoke, Bare said.

“Holy criminy, you just shot the map,” he said.

Indeed, the ball shot through the “o” in the word “North” at the top of the map and lodged in the wall, Haggard said.

[...]

He described the incident as “bitter irony.” As superintendent, Haggard has worked with the school to increase safety at the school, updating its drills and the training staff receives.

Just one of those things that makes for a funny news story, right?

The thing is, the Freemen are making a comeback here in Montana.  Talk about being on the bleeding edge of '90s nostalgia; and perfectly timed with the growing torches and pitchforks anger and outrage the teabaggers are directing at the federal government and banksters. They haven't forgotten their roots.  In addition to starting petitions to recall elected officials...

Paul Stramer now heads a small group called Lincoln County Watch, where leaders of the unsuccessful petition drive attend meetings.

The group gathers in Eureka to talk about the "banksters" at the Federal Reserve, the judges "bought and paid for," the conspiracy that took America off the gold standard, and the need to "prepare for the worst."

Stramer has set his van up as a high-tech mobile communication base, he said, and is collecting silver against the collapse of the dollar.

"There may come a time," Stramer said at a recent Eureka meeting, one of many posted by the group on YouTube, "when the precious metal of choice is lead, because at least you can make some bullets out of it and shoot something to eat, and defend your family."

Participants at Lincoln County Watch meetings have told of Black Hawk helicopters landing in the rural area, and mysterious SUV's with dark windows and no plates, men in black, and C-130 planes flying low over the remote border town, the YouTube videos show.

Stramer, in turn, recommends that citizens carry radios and cameras to track covert government activity - creating a "local patriot network."

One take-no-prisoners issue the Freeman and Tea Party have is 2nd Amendment absolutism.  If the 2nd Amendment doesn't afford enough protection, Montana has added the 10th.  The Montana Firearms Freedom Act states that any gun and any ammunition manufactured and sold in Montana is exempt from federal regulation under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.  It doesn't state which state agency, if any, would be responsible for regulating made-in-Montana guns.

You can buy a left-handed 6mm Varminter now.  But what if you can't afford it now?  And by the time you can the ATF has a problem with it?  Who is going to protect the citizens of Montana from ATF interference in our God-given right to own hand-made, small-caliber, single-shot rifles?  Or muskets?

County sheriffs.  "Constitutional" county sheriffs have always been on the front lines of protecting our civil rights, albeit hypothetically:

While many of [former Utah sheriff Richard] Mack's backers are gun owners who believe the country is taking away their Second Amendment rights, Mack said true "constitutional" sheriffs will protect the rights and freedoms of all Americans on any front.

"What would a constitutional sheriff have done in 1959?" Mack asked the crowd.

When the call came in to the Montgomery County, Ala., sheriff's office that a black woman was refusing to move to the back of the bus - as required by law - the sheriff would have arrived on the scene and talked to Rosa Parks.

"Ma'am, what's the problem," a constitutional sheriff would have asked her, Mack said. Told she had taken an empty seat and just wanted to be left alone, the constitutional sheriff would have sat down next to her, ridden with her to her stop - and, once off, for good measure taken her into a whites-only restaurant so she could buy sandwiches for her and her husband.

He'd have then escorted her home, Mack said - asked if her husband was armed and could defend his family if anyone upset by what had happened came around and threatened them - and ordered extra patrols of the house.

"Remember, segregation wasn't a tradition, it was the law of the land," Mack said. "Rosa Parks taught us what you do with stupid laws."

Which brings us back to superintendent Haggard and his one-man Civil War reenactment.  He shoots at the North, literally, as an act of rebellion against the Federal Government.  He reminds the students how far the government will go to enforce its dominion over the states and citizenry.  True patriots must be willing to stand up and defend themselves.  With muskets and varminters.

This bit of pseudo-paranoia is brought to you by:

 Batshit Crazy shirts.

Alternative History Cartography: Japanese Division

I don't expect much in the way of accuracy from a globe that's a paper balloon (kami fuusen).  For what it is the geographic features and political boundaries are pretty good; far more accurate than the wildly distorted boundaries of the Ohio Arts globes I'm so found of.  The errors that are here, accidental or intentional, are still amusing.

As the globe is from Japan I'm hardly surprised the Kuril Islands are depicted as Japanese territory, so that doesn't count.

The globe was designed in, or based on maps from early 1990.  This is easily apparent as Germany and Yemen are divided, the Baltic states are independent, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia haven't broken up, and Eritrea is still part of Ethiopia. 

While the most sloppily rendered section, the European nation states are relatively accurate for that time; allowing for Belgium and Luxembourg being too small to bother with displaying, and Switzerland and Italy being too similar in color to show up in this picture.  Someone had it in for France.  So far so good, right?

Now we get into the parallel universe.  In addition to losing the Baltic states, the USSR has split into Soviet Russia (approximate translation) and Kazakhstan (Kazafusutan), which is comprised of all of the Soviet Stans.  It's not clear from this picture that Afghanistan is an independent state as it's the same color as the super-sized Kazakhstan.

In spite of the pro-Stan stance the cartographer had, Pakistan got the short end of the stick when it comes to Kashmir.  India has full control of it.  But what the cartographer gave with one hand, the cartographer has taken away with the other.  It looks like the separatists in Northeast India got what they wanted.  Almost.  Instead of being an independent nation they're part of the unlikeliest country on the planet to have any territorial ambitions: Bhutan!  Some of the states joined with Bhutan, Burma grabbed the rest and half of Bangladesh as well.

In the early 1960s the Malay states, Sarawak, Sabah, Singapore and Brunei were trying to come to terms with their numerous conflicting, ethnic, religious and political forces and enclaves as they struggled for independence.  Eventually the first three formed what is now Malaysia, Singapore became a city-state, and Brunei decided to remain a British Protectorate until 1984.  At the time there were all sorts of possible outcomes, and an independent North Borneo Federation was one of them, albeit an unlikely one.  Especially unlikely was naming the federation Brunei and moving Bandar a few hundred miles west.

At first I thought they considered Microsoft's headquarters as the co-capital of the United States.  Nope.  That's Toronto.  Why Toronto is in Washington state and when it replaced Ottawa as the capital of Canada are the greatest mysteries of this globe.







I don't know who makes this globe, but you can get one of your own from J-List.

New Shirt Design at Straitjacket T-Shirts

Just one this time:

Are You Sure The Door's Locked And The Stove Is Off?

Each shirt in the Obsessed and/or Compulsive section is now in its own subsection.

Dumbest Criminal of the Month (to date) - Montana Edition

No comment necessary.

Trail of snacks, MySpace surfing lead to Hamilton burglary suspect

HAMILTON - Stephan Crane will probably never be a professional burglar.

The 19-year-old Hamilton man was arrested Tuesday morning following an early morning break-in to the Ravalli Republic.

Crane allegedly broke into the newsroom through a window and then watched some pornography on the computers he found inside. He also logged onto his MySpace and Facebook pages using his own name.

Somewhere along the way, the man doused the room with a fire extinguisher.

Following a short investigation, Hamilton police officers found Crane at his sister's apartment just across the hallway from the paper's newsroom.

The officers followed a trail of stolen trail mix and M&Ms to her door.

The article continues at the Missoulian's website, where you can read about Mr. Crane's incredible and nefarious motives, and further details of the Hamilton Police Department's efforts to catch Mr. Crane.

Unfortunately I am unable to find Mr. Crane's Facebook page.

Matlock. I want Matlock! MAAAAAATTTTTLLOOOOOCCKK!

How old and out of the loop am I?  I didn't know Rowland S. Howard died about six weeks ago, 30 December 2009.  Then again it's probably remarkable he reached 50 in the first place.  I consider myself fortunate to have seen The Birthday Party and Crime and the City Solution play live.

Screw the Olympics.  I'm spending most of today listening to 20-30+ year-old vinyl recordings of The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution, These Immortal Souls, the collaborations with Lydia Lunch and The Bad Seeds, Barry Adamson, and whatever I don't have but can find on the InterTubes.

Obituary from Melbourne's The Age.

Remembrance from the UK's Guardian.

Brisbane Times interview from 1 November 2008.

MySpace page.

Discogs' Discography.  

Discography by Maurice Maes and Leo Meijer at claranet.nl  Although complete only through January 2001, and included as a subset of Nick Cave's, this one is easier to read and covers important omissions from Discogs' list.  E.g. The Young Charlatans.

It didn't help that I was already weirded out yesterday when I heard Negative Trend had reformed.  Showing once again how old and out of it I am. 

While the various replacement bass players for the reconstituted version of Flipper haven't been involved, drummer Steve DePace was a couple times.  The only reason I'm bothered by this is I'm one of the last people to have seen Will Shatter alive.  The night he OD'd we were at the Mab watching somebody, drinking beer (at least I was), and, among other things, discussing my playing didgeridoo with Flipper or one of his other projects.  A few hours later he was dead.  His girlfriend even brought up the subject of how long he had been clean.  Will and I were neighbors for a couple years (we both lived on the same block on Moss, then I moved about a block away), and when Will or Bruce saw me at a gig they'd ask if I paid with my "punk bucks" (currency I'd type screeds on).  They got paid with some one night and asked to be paid with it whenever possible.

I guess whoever is supposed to walk over my grave needed to ask for directions.

Updates on Crazy Meds

If I haven't written a real article about a med after six years (e.g. Dilantin, the individual benzodiazepines), who knows when an article for said medication will be written.  As such I'm deleting the stub articles, associated PI sheets, and I'm in the process of removing links to them from most pages.

As I'm removing all those pages, I'm expanding / cleaning up pages about families of medications.  E.g. the page on benzos.  This is an on-going process.  Real articles for additional medications may or may not be written in the future.

I'm removing broken links as I find them.

References to "the usual side effects" for anticonvulsants now link to the anticonvulsants side effects page, instead of the basic info about anticonvulsants page.  Like they should have.

I'm also doing some miscellaneous cleaning up.

They're certainly appealing to *my* demographic

The 1990s are back in force here in Montana.  The Freeman reconstituted around the fear that Kenyan-born and secret Muslim 'President' Obama is going to steal everyone's firearms and county sheriffs are the first line of defense against the baby killers in the BATF.  The black helicopter crowd has found a link between socialized government-run health care and the New World Order (NWO):  The FDA's Codex Alimentarius Commission. Specifically its work with the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the International Harmonization of food. And who is overseeing all of this? None other than the World Trade Organization!  Of course it's the WTO.

Doesn't that read like the scariest shit this side of the USA PATRIOT act?  It's one of those things that has the far right and far left meeting each other in the same part of Crazy Town.  Cue the theme from The X-Files.

I bring this up because the same UNABomberish guy keeps showing up in the ads at weather.com, regardless of what they're selling.  I put the first one up on fail.blog:

It could be a demographic identification fail, or he could be the 'mom' in the new UNABomber / Manson family.  Then again they could be enticing him with the promise of lots of moms attending college, because he looks like the sort of guy who'd be hitting on the MILFs.  Or any other mammal that is breathing, or at least still warm.

Now I'm seeing this:

Oh yeah, Harold could be my neighbor.  You bet.  Assuming he hasn't had his license revoked after his 11th DUI.  Although he doesn't strike me as the type who would bother with a driver's license, let alone insurance.

Crazy Meds back online

I currently don't know why or for how long Crazy Meds was unavailable, but we're back now.  When I do know I'll post something.

EDIT: Fuck if I know what happened.  The server went down at 2:43 a.m. Mountain Time (09:43 GMT) and I brought it back up at 1:45 p.m. (20:45 GMT).  I've been through every freaking log there is and nothing explains why a shutdown was ordered.

Pruning the Panoply 2

I've pruned various defunct or defunct-seeming sites from my various blog rolls.  Most are still available in a new section further down.

I've kept some that have a history of dormancy, e.g. Hospital Food.  They may or may not be moved at a later date.

Some entries have misleading dates.  The Flickr version of Texts from last night is updated several times a day, but the feed I'm getting is updated only if someone posts to the discussion.  If the folks at Not Hired haven't received a truly awful resume in some time they'll post a classic, and that will get tagged as being a year old.  The Horse Head Huffer blogs (Spare some LOL, What the Face and others) have dates all over the map.

I'll probably be adding new sites to the various blog rolls in the relatively near future.

Scenes from my boring life

All y'all should be as bored as I am with my 'life.'   This is the shit I do or just think about when I'm too demotivated and/or too medicated to do much of anything.  Which is how I am most of the time.

With only a few days left I come up with a name for this decade: The Yikes!², which is probably more accessible than Y²Kes!, although the latter might be easier to understand.  I think "Yikes!" squared  pretty much sums up the Y2K years, which sandwiched terror attacks, war, paranoia, electoral turmoils, and a global natural disaster between the dual hangovers from overhyped panic & parties and the worst international economic downturn since the 1930s.

Wacky weather haiku:

Texas white Xmas

bare, brown Montana landscape

Climate change? Really?

I got new snow tires, so of course it's not going to snow again until 2012.  If then.

I had a music-related dream the other night, yet another one that made me sad I don't know shit about music.  I heard Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover, which for some strange reason sounded like Siouxie Sioux singing with Interpol instead of her singing with Bauhaus / Love & Rockets, which is what Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover would probably sound like.  Anyway it was an original song (like all the music I dream about) with the lyric "I look in her eyes and see I can never win."  The Google can't find anything close to that in the same sentence, but there are so many great bands whose lyrics have yet to be published on the Intertubes.

Tremble in the majesty of my Kvetchmas booty, bitches:  Seasons 1 & 2 of Wonder Showzen. Robot Chicken Star Wars Episodes I & II. Family Guy Blue Harvest & Something, Something, Something Dark Side.

The animation involving things like ships and asteroids in Something, Something, Something Dark Side is better than that in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That's saying something, I just don't know what. 

I used to be told, frequently, that I'm the reincarnation of someone from Japan.  A Meiji-era comic was the final consensus.  While hikikomori is a modern condition, it certainly describes me during adolescence:

Called hikikomori, or social withdrawal, the ill-defined but debilitating syndrome afflicts as many as 1.2 million young people--seven in 10 of them male. Symptoms include agoraphobia, paranoia, aversion to sunlight and severe anxiety; sufferers become antisocial [sic] in their teens or 20s and spend months or years holed up in their bedrooms. "They see themselves as ugly. They think they smell," says Tamaki Saito, who runs the outpatient program at Sasaki Hospital in Chiba. "They fear that they're being watched by neighbors, so they cover windows with curtains or black paper."

I didn't think I smelled bad, but everything else fits.  Although I was socially avoidant, which is what most post people usually mean when they use the term "antisocial."   I'm the kind of dick who points out that sort of shit.  I came across the article while researching Apathy Syndrome for a topic on the Crazy Meds forum.

Christmas Music

A bit late, given how this song is especially relevant this year.  But one of only two Kvetchmas songs you really need:

Culturcide's Santa Claus was my Lover

The other is Happy Flowers' All I Got were Clothes for Christmas.  From the Touch and Go compilation God's Favorite Dog.  I don't know if that has been re-issued on CD or not.

Lurn 2 spel

It's "straitjacket" you moron, not "straight jacket." Someone is tightly (strait) confined when wrapped / encased (jacketed) in one. It is not a linear article of clothing. The Cafe Press store name and reference on the Mental Mall page have been updated. 

 

It's been how many fucking years until I noticed that?