June 10, 2008 at 8:18 A.M. For the past hour or so, I have been trying to access my MSN group in order to write essays for today. At this time, I am unable to do so. My cable signal was blocked, briefly, this morning and attempts to print items from my computer left me with a blank page bearing this address:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3285.msn_CUSA/B2343920.20sz=300x250;ord=438962351? (Cuban American National Foundation? Appellate Division, NJ, where several judges are probably affiliated with this organization?)
This is the second day this week when I have been unable to write. It is impossible to tell at this time how much damage has been done to essays. I will continue to struggle.
June 9, 2008 at 4:40 P.M. I am running scans, trying to back up files, struggling against the usual harassments. I may be unable to write today. However, I will keep trying until I can do some more work.
June 7, 2008 at 11:20 A.M. My updating feature is blocked again. I will struggle to run scans all day. I will attempt to repair any harm done to essays, here or at Critique. I may be unable to write very much, until these obstacles can be overcome. However, I will spend part of every day trying to write. I wonder whether things are this difficult for writers in Cuba?
June 5, 2008 at 10:46 A.M. My security system's updating feature, which had been briefly restored, was just blocked AGAIN. I am unable to update my security system. This means that there will be new attacks on my writings, defacements, obstructions to further writing efforts. I will keep struggling to write every day. I am blocking:
http://docs.google.com/EmbedSlideshow?docid=d...
http://docs.com/js/1277619420_pres_embed_view.css (JS? NJ Superior Court Judge?)
http://docs.google.com/js/28725/9978_PresentlyInit.js (JS? NJ Superior Court judge?)
http://docs.google.com/js/2683405365_EmbedSlideshow.js (JS?)
http://docs.google.com/presently/images/embed_menu_bg_s.png (Image Blocker?) No images can be posted at my blogs or profile.
June 5, 2008 at 8:51 A.M. "errors" were inserted in a number of posts overnight. I am blocking:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3753.msn/B271049... (Appellate Division Judge, NJ.?)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=... (NJ)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=... (NJ)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3753.msn/B271049... (Appellate Division Judge, NJ.?)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=... (NJ)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=1652863;met=... (NJ)
How gratifying to think that New Jersey judges are interested in quantum theory and postmodernist philosophy, fractals, to say nothing of the philosophy of mathematical objects in abstract spaces. (See "'The Prestige': A Movie Review.") At 9:33 A.M. call received from 219-710-8185.
June 4, 2008 at 2:55 P.M. after fighting obstacles to post new work at my msn group, being prevented from doing so, struggling against computer attacks, I will try re-starting my computer. Scans provide little assistance since my system cannot be updated, after alterations by hackers. I will do my best to continue writing somewhere. All of this is familiar to me and to readers of these essays. This tolerance of cybercensorship is both sad and frightening for America. I am blocking:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3285.msn-dm/B171... (DM)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3285.msn-dm/B171.. (DM)
http://m1.2mdn.net/879366/externalscript... (Allows for altering or defacing texts!)
At 1:23 P.M. call received from 760-526-8117. At 4:48 P.M. My fraud protection is gone. I will try to restore it.
June 4, 2008 at 8:48 A.M. My Internet signal was obstructed this morning. This blockage frustrated efforts to access my blogs. I am unable to update my security system because, I surmise, hackers are also blocking my normal updating feature. I will continue to struggle to write freely.
Access to these blogs was obstructed for hours yesterday, June 2, 2008. At 3:09 P.M. calls were received from 402-727-2510. June 3, 2008 at 8:49 A.M. calls from 616-980-2305. (More harassment and difficulties working at my msn group this morning will make it difficult for me to do any new work.) I was in the middle of reading one of my essays when I was obstructed from my msn group. I will struggle to get back to that site. This usually means that new "errors" are being inserted in my work. I will do my best to make all necessary corrections.
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBR00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01
Michiko Kakutani, "How Abu Ghraib Became the Anything-Goes Prison," in The New York Times, May 14, 2008, at p. E8. (Book Review)
Errol Morris, "Standard Operating Procedure," film. http://nytimes.com/books
Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1964), pp. 284-300 ("The Psychology of the SS").
Douglas M. Kelley, M.D., "What Does it Mean to America?," in 22 Cells in Nuremberg (New York: Torch McFadden, 1961), pp. 176-180.
George Steiner, Errata (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 135.
"A hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires dangling from his outspread arms. A pyramid made of human beings, stacked like cordwood, one on top of another. A woman holding what looks like a dog leash attached to a groveling prisoner. A naked prisoner cringing before a snarling police dog. Such heinous pictures have become iconic images of the war in Iraq: gruesome symbols of what went wrong with the war and the occupation."
I am afraid that the reality only partly depicted in those infamous photos is much more troublesome than even this statement suggests. The events depicted in those horrifying photos make it clear that Americans can no longer entertain illusions concerning their "exceptionalism." The American experiment in democracy was once viewed as the "last best hope for humanity." Not too many people are expressing such sentiments today.
The loss of this sense of our unique identity and moral dignity is much sadder (to me) than any terrorist incident could ever be -- despite the tragic nature of such terrorist crimes and their casualties. For the greatest casualty of our so-called "War on Terror" may well be the Constitutional system put in place by our Founding Fathers and Mothers at the birth of the nation.
"... As Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, notes in his new memoir, 'Wiser in Battle' (Harper), the 2002 presidential memo concerning Geneva 'constituted a watershed event in U.S. military history.' ..."
"Essentially, it set aside all of the legal constraints, training guidelines and rules for interrogation that formed the U.S. Army's foundation for the treatment of prisoners on the battlefield since the Geneva conventions were revised and ratified in 1949,' General Sanchez writes. '... that guidance set America on a path towards torture.' ..."
"Within days of 9/11, Vice President Dick Chenney declared that the administration intended to work 'the dark side,' and in the ensuing months, Mr. Gourevitch writes, 'the vice president's legal counsel, David Addington, presided over the production of a series of secret memorandums, which argued against several centuries of American executive practice and constitutional jurisprudence by asserting that the president enjoyed essentially absolute power in wartime, including the authority to sanction torture." (emphasis added)
This is, of course, a prescription for tyranny and dictatorship. If anything may be described as a breach of legal ethics, then it must be Mr. Addington's use of his skills and training to undermine America's Constitution. No doubt Mr. Addington will be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in a future Republican presidential administration. Cognitive dissonance is unavoidable when the issue of legal ethics is raised in my presence. This is one of many days when attacks on my security system and computer will make it very difficult for me to write or revise my work on-line. My updating feature is blocked, again. I will run scans all day to keep going.
There have been American war crimes in "undeclared wars" or military actions -- Mi Lai, for example (yes, there are several spellings of this place name) -- but what is unique and frightening about the nation's current psychic state is the appalling collective indifference and celebration of cruelty and inhumanity as aspects of national foreign policy. There is no outrage among the vast majority of Americans at the tortures for which we are responsible. There is an obvious indifference to the horrors depicted in those Abu Ghraib photos, even to the murder of hundreds of thousands or millions. I say "we" -- as a nation -- bear responsibility for this atrocity, an unrecognized responsibility. (See "What is it like to be tortured?" and the fothcoming "Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
It is undisputed that we must now speak of more than a million civilian as well as military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet even the daily killing of American soldiers barely registers on the numbed sensibilities of television viewing Americans. Are those million-plus lives of innocent children, old people, civilians making us safer in the "War on Terror"? I doubt it. Are we not in danger of becoming the "terror" for billions of others throughout the world? Will we not face the rage of survivors of our war effort who are not pleased at the murder of their loved-ones? At what point will we have revenged the killing of several thousand victims on 9/11 with the murder of millions of "little brown people" since that date and deaths of thousands of American military people, every day? (Noise and distractions have suddenly arrived at my window.)
The earthquake in China was a blip on newscasts yesterday where the lead stories concerned the possible winner on America's Next Top Model and a newscaster cursing over the airwaves. This brutalization of America's political and moral culture is not unrelated to the sort of television programs that are popular -- American Gladiators, Survivor, America's Next Top Model, along with many other "shows" seem to depict a nation celebrating ruthlessness in competition and a near total absence of ethical constraints on self-interested conduct. It is usually such brutal persons who speak to us of "ethics." Ethics? (See "Maurice J. Gallipoli and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
New Jersey's mafia-saturated tribunals, for example, have sanctioned grotesque tortures of jail inmates as well as secret violations of citizens' rights, which must have been known to the highest authorities in the state entrusted with preventing such criminality and upholding the Constitution's promise of civil liberties for everyone. No one cares. Less than a century after the events of the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot, Rwanda, and the recent atrocities in the former Yugoslavia evoke only a yawn among young people: "Each day that the cover-up of crimes against humanity continues is a renewal of the tortures." (See "A Letter From the DRB, in New Jersey!" and "Another Letter From the DRB, in New Jersey!")
In coming to understand what makes such horror possible and how it can be that persons, willingly, abandon their humanity in crowds, one is forced into the presence of the mystery of evil just as surely as men and women were forced to face this abyss after the events of the Second World War. We are still baffled and numbed at what is possible for ordinary men and women in dark times. (See "How to be a Politician or a Lawyer in New Jersey" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")
"In the nascent American republic," George Steiner writes, "Thoreau found most of his fellow citizens living lives of 'quiet desperation.' Today, these desperations grow raucous and impatient. I have had neither the compulsion nor the courage to enter politics. In Aristotelean terms, such abstention amounts to idiocy. It gives to the thugs, the corrupt, and the mediocre every incentive and opportunity to take over."
In New Jersey -- perhaps as a result of a failure of nerve on the part of judges -- they have taken over. The daily criminalities emanating from police officers and government agencies are clearly beyond the control of the authorities. This means that, within a short time, in the worst jurisdictions -- like the Garden State -- men with guns will wield the real power. Laws and those concerned with their application will be marginalized and indulged, until they become troublesome -- when these statutes and legal functionaries will simply be removed through smears in the media or by means of hypnosis-induced interrogations, or possibly by being confronted with embarassments in their private lives. America has turned into the Weimar Republic.
Men with guns and big muscles (but small brains) tend to dislike subtle arguments and abstract ideas. They are impatient with language and its elusive beauties as well as revelations. More can be accomplished quickly by beating up a person, whether that person is a criminal or not. In fact, a concern with such subtleties and laws -- or even bothering to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt -- may reveal the very "abnormality" that must not be tolerated by the protectors of America's "goodness." Meanwhile, dissent and squeamishness about the "dark side" is a sure sign that persons deserve a beating -- or worse, hesitating to resort to violence may be an indication of male homosexuality. Freedom is not for everyone. Freedom may not be for anyone in such a "carceral continuum." (Michel Foucault) Enslavement and preventive imprisonment, according to Fascists, may be for the victim's "own good."
"The sum of my politics is to try and support whatever social order is capable of reducing, even marginally, the aggregate of hatred and pain in the human circumstance. And which allows privacy and excellence breathing space."
Compassion and solidarity may be seen as evidence of "softness" (male anxieties of the Freudian sort are clear in the use of such a word) in response to crime. One is embarassed to read that:
"The Enlightenment, voices as clairvoyant as Voltaire's and Jefferson's, had proclaimed an end to judicial torture, to the burning of dissenters and of books. [To all Star Chamber-like 'secret proceedings.'] The abolition of slavery was imminent. Nineteenth century positivism and a spectrum of liberal and of socialist messianic programs, Marxism foremost among them, had envisioned mankind on a long, sometimes tortuous, but inherently certain march towards political emancipation, social justice, economic well-being, and peace (whose universality Kant had deemed a realistic concept)." (Steiner)
No one expresses such hopes today. "Hope" on the part of Senator Barak Omaba is enough for Mr. Carville to refer to the Senator from Illinois as "not manly enough." Is that sort of accusation not what Senator Clinton's candidacy was meant to eradicate? I thought so. My sense of despair and sadness is heavy today. At the same time, my commitment to struggle against this drift towards totalitarianism is iron-like and indestructible. Resort to the race card, challenges to the masculinity of "liberals" (what if they're women?), wedge politics, and other disgusting campaign tactics I hoped would be left behind cause me to wonder, again, about what we have become in the aftermath of 9/11:
"It is up to us to determine whether to foster racial hatreds and prejudices. It is up to us whether we learn from the Holocaust of Europe and apply what we learn to our own lives. It is up to us to develop a truly democratic nation where we and our children can live without bickering, without hatreds, emotionally secure because we are" -- or we will finally become -- "an emotionally mature nation." (Kelley)
