The Test of Character

In southern literature there is something called "the test of character".  In this trope, the main character, or one of them, has to choose between doing the easy thing and doing the right thing and doing the right thing is much harder.  

Several friends of mine are unfortunately in a situation where they have to choose between doing the selfish thing or doing the right thing and I am sorry to say that they are probably going to do the selfish thing. 

This is my expectation and it makes me sad but then at least I will know.  The cost is that I will be more cynical, but then what did I expect.   

I am already bitter, but maybe not bitter enough. 

If you dont know what I am talking about then nevermind, you will never understand unless you have had the experience.

"The Test of Character"

What Everyone In the South Knows (about the Supreme Court Decision)

I am from the South (Virginia, with time in Los Angeles) and anyone in the South would know immediately what the latest so-called Supreme Court decision means. But you might not, having grown up perhaps in a more genteel part of the world, so please forgive me if I mention something you might already know.

There have been dozens of variations on the Ohio law that the Supreme Court upheld, and they all had one purpose and one purpose only. It was to keep poor people, particular N-words, but certainly other groups as well including "poor white trash" and Puerto Ricans, and others, from voting. Period. End of story. There is a lot of history here. You and I might not know it all, but I promise you, everyone on the Supreme Court does. And anyone in the South would immediately know what this decision means.

Unambiguously, we have a racist supreme court.

Tim Kaine Notes

First of all, Tim Kaine is not from Virginia, he is from Missouri by way of Harvard. This is good and bad but no one from Virginia would for a moment think he was from Virginia, so you should know that. Second, he is not old-school Southern Democrat. That is good. Third, he is not a racist. Most of my ignorant west coast friends think all Southerners are racists. Fourth, he has been elected to political offices on a regular basis in a state that is heavily gerrymandered, has a large African-American vote, but which is a very conservative state, in the classic sense of the word.

Kaine is not in any way a radical, a progressive, or anything else along those lines. He will reinforce the Hillary Clinton approach to things, which is to say, a Rockefeller Republican approach. He may help to trivially increase education benefits. He may understand how hopeless the poor and the minority population is in this country, but he is not likely to stick his neck out too much unless Hillary tells him to, which I doubt. When it comes to foreign policy, he will be a solid American representative and will not embarrass us.

I can not emphasize the following too much. Kaine is a representative of the Harvard/Washington elite. If you have been happy with that elite's governance of America, then vote for him. If not, dont vote for him. He is not unlike John Kerry, if you will.

I dont think that voters in this country have any choice in who they will have to vote for in November. And I am not at all happy about this. Do not think that these people represent a big chunk of America just because they win in November. We had a gun to our head, and you know what I am talking about here.

I will update this post with new information about Kaine as it comes in.

Autobiographical note.

For what it is worth, I was born and grew up in Virginia (and California). A Californian friend of mine recently told me that Virginia was the Deep South. Another friend was angry that they had to have votes from the Southern states, e.g. that the South had votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate. I didn't have the heart to tell her that this was not the fault of the South, they did not want to be part of the Union either. There was a war about that, recall? It is my impression that most of my friends out here don't know much about the South but are completely certain that they do, a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Corruption and Degradation in Orange County

“The law must be honest, just, reasonable and according to the ways of the people. It must meet their needs and speak plainly, so that all men may know and understand, what the law is. It is not to be made in any man's favor, but for the needs of all them who live in the land. No man shall judge contrary to the law, which the king has given and the country chosen. [...] neither shall he [the king] take it back without the will of the people.”

English translation of the Latin from the Danish code of Holmiensis from roughly 1291. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Holmiensis

Why should we, as citizens, be concerned if it turns out that the District Attorney office of Orange County is a snake pit of unconstitutional illegalities?   I am of the opinion that nothing we do could possibly make a difference to our justice system.   Just publicly discussing the issues will probably result in some sort of action against the citizen who complains.  

I suppose that the reason we should care about the local insanity is that it puts us in a better position to accuse the rest of the world of being unjust and racist.  I mean how does it look for us to point the finger but not be aware of our own little, or not so little, corrupt cesspools?

So I want to bring to your attention two scandals closer to home.  The first is in Orange County and involves the District Attorney's office.  The second will be for another post and involve the LAPD.

To give you a feel for the magnitude of this gross violation of law, by those that we trust to enforce the law, consider the following paragraph chosen almost at random from the articles listed below:

In recent months, we've learned, over the objections of the Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD), that the agency created TRED, a computerized records system in which deputies store information about in-custody defendants, including informants. Some of the data is trivial; other pieces contain vital, exculpatory evidence. But for a quarter of a century, OCSD management deemed TRED beyond the reach of any outside authority. In Dekraai, deputies Ben Garcia and Seth Tunstall committed perjury to hide the mere existence of TRED. Those lies didn't originate from blind loyalty, however. The concealed records show how prosecution teams slyly trampled the constitutional rights of defendants by employing informants—and then keeping clueless judges, juries and defense lawyers.

from  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/29/1388819/-Judge-disqualifies-all-250-prosecutors-in-Orange-County-CA-because-of-widespread-corruption#

The scandal in Orange County is pretty amazing. The news broke about 16 months ago, but I never heard a word of it until I stumbled on this about a month ago. Why not?   Why isnt our media discussing this, what should we call it, gross abuse of justice? A scandal that affects thousands and thousands of innocent citizens who have been victimized by a corrupt justice department in flagrant and egregious ways.

The thing to realize is that the corruption in Orange County is that it is so bad, that it may literally be the worst of its kind in American history.  True there has been a lot of corruption in American history, so that is quite a statement.  But it may be true because this is a particularly specific form of corruption. 

Its a complex story, a very large story, and I am sure I only know a few percent of the big picture. But let me tell you what I think I know and point you to some news articles. Then the both of us, you and I, can watch our justice system fail to punish the guilty and release and compensate the innocent. We can watch together as our system does what it has always done: support criminals as long as those criminals are in bed with the politicians. As it has always been in America.

What seems to have happened is that through a series of misadventures, a few judges demanded some information which revealed that the entire justice system of Orange County was completely corrupt. That they were keeping a database of evidence that proved the innocence of people which the County was prosecuting and getting convictions for. That the system was running an informant system in the jails that violated the rights of prisoners in an egregious and systematic fashion.

Check these out.  They are pretty terrific.

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/06/national_review_calls_forepublicans_to_take_responsibility_in_orange_countys_informant_scandal.php

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/03/seal_beach_salon_massacre.php

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/29/1388819/-Judge-disqualifies-all-250-prosecutors-in-Orange-County-CA-because-of-widespread-corruption#

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/orange-county-da_n_6993390.html

Excuse me? All 250 prosecutors for the county are disqualified? Excuse me, the entire office of the District Attorney of Orange County?

The problem is, you don't get to wash this shit under the rug forever you know. One day you wake up and find that citizens no longer believe that there is any justice, that all politicians are corrupt, and that the state exists purely to exalt the rich. Of course that is the case, now, all of these things are true: the politicians are corrupt, there is no justice except for the rich, and the state and the law and the economy only exists for the rich. But not everyone knows it. But when everyone does know it, then you have a bad situation. So you want to correct the problems before everyone figures it out. That would be the smart thing to do. Unfortunately, as proven over and over again, our leaders and their masters, the rich, are not smart. They are just greedy and corrupt.

Before we go beating up our friends in the South, I think we should clean up our own puddle of nastiness first.

Lets start with the Orange County DA office.

In another post, I will write up what I think I know about the LAPD and the jail that they run.   But that will be extra credit and later.

The Prophesy of John Hendrix (1865 - 1915)

This post is part of the "Archaeology of the Cold War" series.

From time to time, we will review entertaining stories of anomalous events, events which are unlikely to have occurred but would be very interesting if they had as that would imply unknown physics or stand as examples of phenomena such as time travel, ghosts, predicting the future and so forth. This category is in opposition to another topic of discussion on this blog, which is the creation of entertainment fiction that purports to predict the future. That however is a different topic from the one in this post. This topic is more in the nature of oral history that, if true, would mean that someone long ago had predicted the future.

The story goes something like this...

Once upon a time, in a very rural area of Tennessee, there lived a man named John Hendrix. Mr. Hendrix, who was born in 1865 and died in 1915, became distraught after the death of his daughter and his separation from his wife and the rest of his family. He became very religious and started to report having visions. Supposedly he told everyone about his visions and nobody paid much attention.

As silent as the grave

Hendrix described the vision that was given him as follows:

In the woods, as I lay on the ground and looked up into the sky, there came to me a voice as loud and as sharp as thunder. The voice told me to sleep with my head on the ground for 40 nights and I would be shown visions of what the future holds for this land.... And I tell you, Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be. And there will be a city on Black Oak Ridge and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock's farm and Joe Pyatt's Place. A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville and then branch off and turn toward Scarborough. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake. I've seen it. It's coming.

Of course no one believed him, John was being just a little crazy, they thought. Well maybe more than a little crazy and it seemed that he was institutionalized for a time. But the years went by and there was no great city in Bear Creek Valley or up on Black Oak Ridge. There was a great war but the war got fought and won without any thousands of people running around in Eastern Tennessee or new railway lines or earthquakes either. John died before what we now call World War I ended and that was all there was to say about the matter until 1942 when the government came to kick the people of the four rural communities of that part of the world off their land.

Army Corps of Engineers picture of the old Hendrix home before they tore it down

About 60 years after Hendrix first started having his visions, the US Army Corps of Engineers began researching potential sites for several very large, experimental industrial plants that needed to be built on a rush basis for some project they would not talk about.   The plants needed to be far enough away from population centers and industrial areas so in the event that they exploded, the damage would be limited. They wanted to find a place that was sparsely settled so that they could quickly evict the people who were there and get started immediately.   They also hoped to find a place that had physical barriers in the case that one plant exploded it would not cause others nearby to also explode.  Access to a dam for water and a lot of electric power was critical.   The further out in the country it was the easier it would be to keep secret.   It needed to be near a rail line and existing road network because that would save time.

So one day the people of the four rural communities in this part of East Tennessee came home to find eviction notices nailed to their door. Some of them were out in the rain within two weeks, some in six weeks. They got a small amount of money for their land, but it was not enough to buy its equivalent somewhere else. And to their amazement, thousands of workers were bused in, a city with hundreds and hundreds of houses and dozens of stores and restaurants was built seemingly overnight, security fences were put up and, strangest of all, very large factories were built behind those fences that had armed guards who promised to shoot you if you did not go away.

These new people chose a name for what was now their community and they chose to modify the name of part of the countryside thereabouts.   They named their town for the same Black Oak Ridge that crazy old John Hendrix had talked about in his visions.  

Only they left out the "Black" and just called it Oak Ridge.

Scarboro?   Never heard of it. 

So as time went by, people remembered crazy old John Hendrix and his visions. You can read more about them in the links below. People marvelled at the amazing story of the man who saw the future and predicted the project that may have won the war.

So what are the possible explanations. On the one hand, Hendrix may have seen the future as described. Who knows, it wasn't particularly written down, it was just something people remembered. Hendrix certainly lived and he was on record for having been institutionalized and people can point to his grave. Maybe he did see the future, or maybe when the future imposed itself so violently on the peaceful citizens of that valley in Tennessee, the pissed-off locals chose to repurpose a member of their community, now deceased, who had truly lived when they said he did and died when they said he did and who had been a little crazy and got put away for a time because of that.  All true, all part of the public record.   Maybe, now that you mention it, this was one of his visions, I seem to recall.

Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, ain't too many people around these days who were around then and would contradict us, so you are going to have to take our word for it, I reckon. And maybe we can make a few dollars selling trinkets and entertaining all those thousands of gullible people who are running to and fro on what used to be our land up there on Black Oak Ridge.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/wp-style/2013/09/13/the-prophets-of-oak-ridge/