we’re all doing time riddles and puzzles

 

    An old lawyer buddy likes to give me riddles and I tend to respond unpredictably :-). When I told him that I’m a patriot, he said he’s read my writings and I’m a radical. I said I have a different perspective of patriotism.

    When he asked me, “What was wrong with the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on October 6, 2023?”, I said that was a very good question, and Hamas figured out what would punch every button in Israel’s leaders, and Hamas hoped that would provoke Israel to do what it did in Gaza and turn the entire world against Israel and its benefactor America, and when President Biden saw Israel’s response, he should have stopped giving Israel money and weapons and munitions to obliterate Gaza; and President Biden should get America of the Middle East altogether. because America has no business being there.

    I gave my old lawyer buddy a riddle the other day.

    Please help me understand how Amendment 2 gives Americans the right to own AR-15s, when the citizens right to bear arms is predicated on there being a well-regulated militia? 

Amendment II 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    He said that he said he sided with me on that, and the U,S. Supreme Court has ignored the well regulated militia predicate.

    I said there has not been a well regulated militia since the Revolutionary War. He said, what about the national guards? I said, then only the national guards should have such weapons. He said, then there is the question of what is “arms”?

    When Amendment 2 was passed, arms meant sticks, rocks, hammers, hoes, rakes, shovels, hatchets, axes, spears, bows and arrows, knives, daggers, sabers, black powder ball and shot pistols and muskets, black power cannons and cannon balls, and black powder explosives.

    But what’s that got to do with a well regulated militia? The Founding Fathers never dreamed the 2nd Amendment would be twisted to nilly willy private citzen ownership of guns designed to quickly kill as many unarmed Americans as possible.

    Flash back to 1991, when, at the request of a prison chaplain, I did a two-day workshop in his maximum security prison, about which I wrote in Prisons & Freedom, which I self-published later in 1991. 

    How the workship came about was the chaplin had read my book, The High Legal Road: A New Approach to Legal Problems, which I had self-published in 1990, 

    The chaplain told me ahead of time that some of the inmates were convicted of sex crimes and were very sensitive about that, and I should not go into that during the workshop. What I did instead was ask them if they did what they were convicted of doing?

    Unable to sell The High Legal Road and Prisons & Freedom, I gave several thousand copies to the Prison Library Project in Clermont, California, which was founded by Ram Dass, with Bo Lozoff’s help. Bo’s book, We’re All Doing Time, had helped prod me to write Prisons & Freedom. The Prison Library Project mailed inmates books on topics in which inmates expressed interest. I ended up with some prison inmate pen pals for a while.

    In the Preface to Prisons & Freedom, I gave Bo and his wife Sita attaboys for their going into prisons and teaching yoga and meditation ti inmates, and I gave favorable mention to Bo’s books, and I said in one of his books, he had said he and Sita had reluctantly decided to start asking for donations for their work. 

    I had sent Bo a copy of The High Legal Road, and after Prisons & Freedom was published, I sent him a copy of it. 

    In one his books, Bo had written that he and Sita told inmates that they struggled with their own sexual urges, which some yoga practitioners view as low base energies, and I wondered out loud in Prisons & Freedom.about what it might be like to be married to someone trying to practice celibacy?

     I received a letter from Bo, in which he tore up my books as psychobabble, and he said I had cut him and Sita’s feelings to the quick. That led to more back and forth letters, which went nowhere, and I moved on.

    One day, I called the Prison Library Project about something they had sent me regarding a tax deduction for donating my books to them. The fellow said he needed to tell me something: after they received my books, Bo told them to tear out the Preface to Prisons & Freedom, which they had done before sending it to inmates. The fellow said he didn’t feel right about that. I said keep doing it, it’s Bo’s karma.

    I wrote Bo a letter explaining that. He did not respond.

    I started receiving unsolicited copies of Bo’s newsletter, in one of which he announced he was going into silence. There was something in the letter about him being interviewed in the media about him going into silence. I didn’t get any of his newsletters for a while.

    Then a newsletter came in the mail which Bo announced someone  had given him and Sita a nice piece of land in the country,  where he could build a retreat for former prisoners to live and work their way back into society, and he had come up with the ideal of “money yoga”, and it would be the spiritual thing to do for people to donate money for that project.

    I wrote Bo a letter, in which I said he had gone into silence to enhance is internal feminine, yin, and God heard him and someone donated them the land, but instead of waiting for the next step, instead of being patient, honoring the feminine, he had  gone yang and invented money yoga.

    Bo did not respond.

    Another newsletter came in the mail and I read it and left it on the kitchen table and my wife, who was a licensed clinical social worker, looked thorough it and found a picture of Sita, which was in all of Bo’s newsletters.

    My wife asked me to cover the right side of Sita’s face and look only at the left side of her face, which I did, and Sita’s left eye and the left side of her face look like a seriously tortured soul. The left side of the body is the feminine, or yin, side.

    I wrote Bo a letter, telling him what my wife had observed. In Bo’s next newsletter, there was no photo of Sita. Nor was her photo in any future newsletters.

    Many years later, I read in an online publication that Bo had confessed that he was a fraud, a con man. He had sex with women in his ashram. He was abusive to released inmates, who came to live and work at his farm retreat cult. Later, I read somewhere that Bo had died.

    A Substack missive from a fellow who had done time showed up in my email account the other day.

A Convict’s Perspective

Rearview Mirror 

Objects on the internet may appear closer than they are

COLEMAN

MAY 27 

 

I was going to write an article based off my Note this morning and decided I didn't want to be tic-tacing on my phone all day. 

 

https://indamidle.substack.com/p/rearview-mirror?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=1147979&post_id=145032318&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&r=8wjd3&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email&initial_medium=video

Anyway, I haven't even listened to it yet because I knew I would've been annoyed by some thing or another and don't want to re-record like I'm a YouTuber or some nonsense like that.

I would've gotten halfway through and been like, “this is dumb” and deleted it.

So, anyway, enjoy the dumb.

Or don't.

Whatever 

 

     After listening to Coleman sitting in the front seat of his parked car ramble on about Americans fret a lot about stuff they can’t do anything about, and learning about him only what might be read between the lines, I posted this comment.

Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter

I’m curious about what you do after you wake up in the morning not in a prison? Although most people wake up  each morning in a prison of their own making, about which a guy named Bo Lozoff wrote some books, as did I. Bo ended up not so swell, but I thought his early books were  important. Last below is a link to one of my books, Prisons & Freedom, a free read, no ads, no soliciting, no hustle. You might be asked if you wish to open the link? Archive.org is an internet library funded and operated by American colleges. The free library specializes in out of print books and books by authors who give their writings to the library. 

 

https://archive.org/details/prisons-and-freedom-revision-3oh-1-compressed 

 

About six months ago, I received an email from a fellow who said he read Prisons & Freedom at the free library, and it moved him to leave a cult in which he had been very active for a couple of decades. I didn’t write the book with cults in mind, but I did have some people come to me from time to time, who were involved in cults and wanted help moving on. 

    So far, no reply from Coleman.

   Today’s comic relief is provided by Al.com's "Down Home In Alabama”. Al.com once was The Birmingham News.

'I ain't writing no letter'

A judge has dismissed the case against an Ozark man who was caught speeding and said he'd rather go to jail than give the police officer a written apology for his behavior, reports AL.com's Amy Yurkanin. The story was picked up on some national outlets. Reginald Burks was pulled over and ticketed for speeding while taking his kids to school. He said that as he was trying to leave the officer was standing in front of his car so that he had to back up and go around. He said he then told the officer to "get your (butt) out of the way," but he didn't say "butt." (Note: This is the most G-rated newsletter you'll read today. Apparently more G-rated even than car line.) Now, folks may have varying degrees of respect for law enforcement or opinions on their motives, but this isn't one of those stories. The big question in this story is not so much the appropriateness of the officer, or of the motorist. It is about the appropriateness of the Ozark Municipal Court judge's order for the man to apologize to the officer in writing or face 10-30 days in jail. University of Alabama law professor Jenny Carroll said up to 30 days is a long sentence for somebody who dropped a mere A-bomb in a moment of frustration. The man wasn't budging, either. He said he'd pay his fines. However: “What am I going to do? I’m going to jail. I ain’t writing no letter.” A hearing was set for June 4, but evidently the city's prosecutors weren't interested in pursuing the case because the judge dismissed the case on Wednesday.

    Ya’ll come!

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

priceless

    Someone asked me recently how I write, longhand or type? I said, when I entered my freshman year at Ramsay High School in Birmingham, my father told me to take a typing class, because typing would come in very handy later on. I said typing was the only usable skill I learned in school, before I attended law school. I ended up writing about 20 books and 50,000 or perhaps 70,000 pages at blogs, some of which became books, because I knew how to type. I did not say, but for inheritances from my father, I would not have written any books, I still would be homeless, or I would be dead.   

    Some things are so priceless that I suppose they make angels sing:

POETIC OUTLAWS April 27, 2024
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

Sloan Bashinsky

poignant-
getting married, 
birthing a child and having it die at seven weeks,
birthing two more children
and raising them,
or trying to,
watching them grow from nursing and shitting their cotton diapers
I washed out in a toilet,
watching them learn to walk and fall down and walk, and talk,
watching how curious and full of energy they were,
watching their mother and I grow apart, 
watching me not being the father my children needed,
watching my life go to hell,
watching my children have their own struggles,
some their doing,
some because I was not the father they needed.
watching me get married 7 more times,
each wife remarkable,
each wife woke something up in me 

I did not know was there,

they enriched my life,
I hope the same for them,
since I was not easy to live with,
nor was it easy for me to live with me,
how empty and I suppose boring my life would have been,
but for those women and the three children,
the one who died suddenly
so unhinged me
that I was never thereafter able to fit into 

the molds and plans
made for me by my ancestors and me,
he broke my heart and set me on my journey,
a dozen different lives in one lifetime,
I did leave the old, many times,
and start anew,
in places where I knew no one,
but now I’m back where I started, 
my hometown, 
a blue southern city surrounded by MAGA counties,
the local churches seem right where they were when I left
and came to wonder when I ever was not in church?
Most people I once knew here 
seem where they were when I left the first time in 1986,
I have lived in this same old apartment building three times
after I stopped running away from home,
It was all-white, then it was somewhat integrated, now international,
the Internet makes it a lot easier to run away for a spell,
but everywhere I go,
there I am,
can’t run away from me,
nor from many, many memories,
waiting for the Lord to take me, 
hopefully before I am in assisted living 
or a nursing home 
or nut house,
I crawl out of bed each morning
and engage what gets on my plate today,
chop wood, carry water, I suppose 

    Some things are not entirely priceless: 

Nicholas Morrissey Substack

The Wisdom Compass

I am up to 300 Subscribers and got my first paid Subscriber today (besides me Ma. Love you, Mom. Lol). Thank you so much, JD!! I very much appreciate it and it definitely helps out for further work! I will be adding my book behind the paywall shortly! 

substack.com/@myalchemicalkitchen?utm_m…

JD Greene Substack

A cook, a baker, a candlestick gazer, a forest bather, a magick maker, a writer and weaver of tales. These are j...    

 

Sloan Bashinsky
This flopped out of me the fall of 1993: 

“God’s gifts are not for sale, but are freely given to angels, saints, sinners, devils and fools alike, because all are God’s children.” 

At that point in my life, I still hoped to become a great capitalist like my father and his father, and I hoped to do it through my writings. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I wrote, no matter how many people told me they liked what I wrote, non-fiction, poetry, novels, stranger than fiction, it didn’t happen. 

I then went through a dry spell when I wrote nothing, during which I prayed to die and plotted killing myself every day for 16 months. That had nothing to do with my writing or wanting to be a great capitalist. It had to do with entering what I later would call the black night of the soul, in which there was no light, no hope.  

I was in a 4-year dark night of the soul when the God’s gifts are not for sale poem flopped out of me. I knew what it was, because I had read Antonio T. de Nichola’s book, St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul, about a year prior at the suggestion of a licensed clinical social worker friend, after he heard some of my not of this world stories.  

In his commentaries, Juan de la Cruz described two dark nights of the soul. He called the first, the cleansing of the soul. He called the second, the cleansing of the spirit. He said the first dark night was rough, but doable. He said, the second dark night was unimaginably horrible, and woe be to anyone it befell, who was not in a protected environment with people who understood what was going on. 

The black night started to lift after I left my 4th wife. I wondered if I would start writing again? What happened instead was I was taken by angels known in the Bible through an unimaginably intense physical and soul cleansing and healing, which lasted about two years. Then, the Muse returned, in spurts. Then, She ran full-bore. 

I was homeless off and on for several years, and when I was homeless, I hoped my writings would somehow make me a living wage, but alas, no, it seemed I was slated to be the Anti Capitalist. 

No real surprise, after I slept in a tent near Helen, Georgia, I was told by the angel Michael in a dream that I was going back into a prison where I had once lived, and the next night  Michael told me in my sleep, “You cannot do this work correctly, if you are looking to get anything back from the people you are trying to help.” 

By then, my writings, non-fiction, poetry, novels, stranger than fiction, were very different from when I was in the dark night of the soul.  

In 2007, I started blogging, and I suppose I wrote 50,000 pages on blogs, maybe more. During that time, I wrote no books. 

In 2019, I wrote another book, which was about different parts of my life. I wrote it on a blog, and a publisher took it on, but it did not sell. 

I wrote several more books at blogs, one was a sequel to an earlier novel. A friend with unimaginable to me tech skills formatted them into books at the free internet library, archive.org. He also scanned and digitized some of my earlier books and put them at archive.org, which is funded and operated by colleges in America. It specializes in out of print books, and books by authors who are not trying to monetize their writings. 

Archive.org has a translator, which lets people read its books in English and about 35 other languages. My tech friend tells me that my books at archive.org average about 1,000 complete reads per month, per month. 

My friend learned that the free library readers are far more open to and interested in something different, than are users of regular libraries. 

If you wish to see what books at archive.org look and read like on any device, open archive.org and enter Sloan Bashinsky in the search space and click Enter. Icon links for my books will come up and you can click on the links and open and read the books. 

You might be asked if you are sure you want to open that site. People all over the world use that library, because they can find material there, which they cannot find in libraries where they live. 

My tech friend also created The Redneck Mystic Lawer Podcast, where I did most of the talking. He launched it on Spotify, which is audio only. We did not solicit money and we did not let Spotify run ads in our podcast. We developed a pretty good following worldwide. 

Spotify’s cash cow, Joe Grogan, made racial remarks during one of his podcasts, and a number of Spotify’s celebrity clients ditched Spotify, which kept Grogan and ditched a lot of its small clients, including us. 

My friend launched The Redeck Mystic Lawyer Podcast onto YouTube. I was seen and heard, and he was heard but not seen. We did not solicit and we did not let YouTube run ads in the podcast. We developed a pretty good following worldwide.  

My friend discovered the Torrent platforms, and we started launching the podcast there, too. We learned that Torrent clients were far more open to and interested in something different, than were YouTube users. My friend told me our podcast averaged about 300,000 complete watches per episode. 

Eventually, we stopped using YouTube, which became more difficult to deal with, in part, because our material was not well received in some circles, and, in part, because YouTube was overwhelmed with political posts and its server was overloaded and its AI moderator and upload was moving very slow. 

My friend says on torrent platforms our podcast averages about 300,000 complete watches per episode. 

Torrent providers are a breed apart. People living in countries that control what they can see online can bypass Big Brother on Torrent. 

However, some torrent platforms contain malware, and people who use Torrent need to know what they are doing. Based on how our podcast does in the Torrent universe, there are a lot of internet tech savvy people out there.  

 

Nicholas Morrissey

The Wisdom Compass
archive.org had been a website I used for years and years and years… Another good one is, sacred-text.org. 
If you want to write shorter letters, I will reply to those. Too long, too much going on here to make time to reply to, unless it was just random? Anyhow, thank you though for taking the time and for the thought. 

Pick just one or two topics and I’d be happy to discuss those :-)

SloanBashinsky
The topic I picked in my long-reply to yours was getting paid for spiritual work.

  

April 2001: 
 

“The World's Greatest Failure” 

 

I know what it is 

to love fully,

have my heart broken by death

and by loved ones’ rejections,

Over and over again,

So I can love even more. 

 

I know what it is 

to be engulfed in pain,

Awash in evil,

Terrified, enraged, despaired,

Believing God has again forsaken me,

Then be given the truth

that again makes me free. 

 

I know what it is 

to doubt,

Be lost and wandering

time and time again,

Then be rescued yet again

and my faith grows deeper. 

 

I know what it is 

to blindly trust,

Then be destroyed by betrayed

time and time again,

Until I trust only God. 

 

I know what it is

to have much

and be completely of this world,

Then have it all taken away

and be in the world but not of it. 

 

I know what it is 

to fail in this world,

And fail and fail and fail:

The world’s greatest failure,

I can serve only God. 

I know what it is 

to give and give and give and give;

I cannot stop giving

because giving is receiving. 

 

I know what it is 

to explain God

time after time after time again. 

Something demands I keep explaining:

Maybe someone will listen,  

 
Maybe me.  

 

Nicholas Morrissey

For anyone with a conscience, making money on the spiritual path can be a great challenge. I had given away work for free for over 15 years. If you’re truly helping people, they will support you. It also depends on your message and also social awareness.

Sloan Bashinsky
I’ve been at this since 1987. I had various trainings in the human realm, which ended in 1988, when angels took over completely. Very few people have any sense of what is really ailing them and what they need to do. I can only speak for myself, it is forbidden for me to charge money or solicit money or anything else that benefits me.
I look at the Sufis of old. They did not try to earn a living off what they knew. Nor did Jesus in the Gospels, nor did Buddha, nor did Lao Tzu, nor did Yogananda’s teacher. I think there is a really good reason for that. The reason is, when there is nothing in it for the teacher, then the teacher has no conflict of interest, the teacher loses nothing if the student leaves. The teacher has to be at ease with having no students.
I take no credit for the changes in me other than I kept trying to hang in there with the angels, who had captured and harnessed me, and I did not kill myself, or try to escape via booze or other drugs, or by running away and trying to hide from what life was serving me, which the angels used to test and refine me. Their main tool was standing me before endless mirrors, looking at me. 
What I experience is not imaginable to anyone around me but two people I know well. I knew a few people in the past, who were in somewhat similar predicaments. There are stories of it happening to people in history, but they were anomalies, who felt like they were from another planet, stuck on this planet until their time was up. They mingled with people, they were in this world, but they were not of this world.

    

    Some things cannot be repaid- posted at religiousforums.com on Memorial Day:

https://www.religiousforums.com/threads/gaza-was-before-the-war-the-greatest-open-air-prison.277855/page-8#post-8566634

"Gaza was before the war the greatest open-air prison. Today it's the greatest open-air graveyard," Borrell said on Monday at a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels. "It's a graveyard for tens of thousands of people and also a graveyard for many of the most important principles of humanitarian law."

Icehorse
MayPeaceBeUpOnYou said:
"Hamas is backed by Iran. Hamas built a multi-billion-dollar war machine to attack Israel, after Israel gave them Gaza.”
That doesn't sound very "oppressed" to me. It sounds like Jihadis and Islamists pursuing the idea that no Jews should live in the ME. Please recall that Jews have been living in the ME for thousands of years. There are now virtually no Jews in the ME except in Israel.
Tell me again how oppressed Muslims in the ME are?

Redneck Mystic Lawyer
What’s going on in Gaza is horrific.
The “good Catholic” President Biden keeps sending Israel money and the weapons it needs to keep obliterating Gaza and killing, maiming, battle-shocking, displacing and/or starving around 2,000,000 civilian men, women and children. 
I wonder if Gaza’s surviving civilians wish Hamas had not launched the October 7, 2023 attack, because Hamas seems to have zero concern for the civilians in Gaza and uses its October 7 hostages to bargain for the release of Hamas’s people in Israel prisons? 
It looks to me that when Hamas’s war strategist Yahya Sinwar spent many years in an Israel prison, he figured out how Israel’s psyche worked, and Hamas could not beat and America-backed Israel, and he came up with an attack that would provoke Israel to respond as it has responded in Gaza, to turn the entire world against Israel and America.  

I had many discussions online and in person with people about Gaza, and my take is American Christians, who back Israel in that war, do it because their Bible says God promised land in Palestine to the Israelites, and Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem at the behest of Jewish leaders, and they want Israel to protect where Jesus was born, roamed and was killed at the behest of Jewish leaders. 

Donald Trump has said he is Israel’s best friend. If President Biden were to cut off all money and weapons to Israel, Trump would win by a landslide this November.  Perhaps American Christians, who back Israel’s war in Gaza, should ask themselves how Jesus feels about that war? I can’t imagine he would applaud that war. Nor can I imagine God would applaud that war. Nor can Imagine Allah would applaud the October 7 raid, my 81st birthday. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Memorial Day reflections: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you

 

    Another old fart's Substack howler flew itself into my Yahoo inbox yesterday and set me to howling, too.

My Two Senses

“D-DAY 2024” 

Some thoughts on how we got here and why we can’t make it go away

OL’ FLAWRIDUH CRACKER

MAY 24, 2024

The Apprentice, and massive Fascist propaganda over a 40 year period generated millions of aggrieved Americans.

© MojoMan 2024

The turn to the far right for Republicans has it’s roots in an amalgam of Rich White Men who embrace Fascist ideologies, from race supremacy, antiSemitism to an obsessive fear of Communism stealing their ill-gotten rents. The road to Trump goes back to the Goldwater race for the White House. The Young Republicans and the JBS, backed by Corporatist Republican elites formed what amounted to a dopplegänger of the Communist Cadres they so feared.

This John Bircher Society ideology clearly inspired the 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” by Richard Hofstadter, that was and is still considered a seminal work that tracked the conspiratorial roots that would lead to the JBS. Later Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas” tried to relate how being aggrieved, and as Hofstadter put it, feelings of being dispossessed fueled resentment that took us into the Reagan/Nixon/Bush fiascos. Having been largely rejected as wingnut fascist ideology the Fascist loving billionaires put on a little lipstick and pretended to reflect mainstream thinking.

Now (talking about paranoia) I’m actually beginning to believe that microplastics in the diet of Far Right Republicans, whether put there by intent or as a bi-product of redneck lifestyle, is a likely major contributor to the cancerous mental malignancy reflected in todays Neo-Fascist ideology.

Along the same lines I have become a fanboy of Dr. Bandi X. Lee, and her recent work on “mass psychosis” Dr. Lee was academically cancelled from her professorship at Yale (thanks largely to the efforts of Allen Dershowitz) because she dared to correlate the clear symptoms of Trump’s “malignant narcissism” in explaining his bizarre behavior. This effort centers (and again I agree with her) on a lock and key paradigm of Trump to his base about that cements this “mass psychosis”. He seeks their constant adoration and they seek his ability to enact their insane dreams of revenge and overwhelming dictatorial rule.

Here we are confronted with essentially a religious cult, fueled by 40 years of paranoia, aggrievement and a complete embrace of Fascism/Christo-Fascism.

Is there a way outta here?

At some point I actually had genuine hope of finding the proverbial key to unlock the mind of these delusional masses, but today it appears that  the Fascist  Republican mindset is beyond any form of cognitive repair.

It is mirrored in science to cases if brain damage of the frontal pre-cortex suffered by veterans who have suffered TBI from being too close to blasts. Study has validated that there is a propensity to embrace deeply rightwing religious and political views.

Think about it. 50 years of constant Fascist propaganda packaged as “patriotism”, true Christianity, and White Identity. Do we really think there is a chance in Hell of helping these deluded masses to see how downright evil their thinking is in the next six months? 

Eighty percent of registered Republicans are prepared to go all the way with Trump and that means to avenge and destroy millions of decent Americans in his demigod name.

In closing I’d like to share that I just finished watching “The Manchurian Candidate” beautifully restored to hi-def black and White. Could it be that Ivanka (an FSB spy under direction of Putin) is Trump’s handler? I know, I’m again sounding a bit paranoid, but given our current threat to Democracy in Trump I’d like to consider it facing reality.

Sloan Bashinsky

A friend of mine once said, “Just because you're paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

“Deer Ed”, in honor of the key deer that inhabited Big Pine Key, operated the very popular “Coconut Telegraph” public forum at bigpinekey.com. The forum catered to “Kudos & Whiners”. 

Deer Ed built my websites, goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com, which were read all over the Florida Keys.

Deer Ed designed a campaign website for a woman friend of mine, who decided to run for sheriff in the Florida Keys.

One page of my friend’s campaign website described the sheriff department harassing her sons, whom the sheriff department contended were criminals, and she contended otherwise. She had some pretty good conventional ammunition, and she had something else. 

She became so concerned that sheriff deputies would find one of her sons and do him harm, that she sent him to work one day with his father, who operated a tree trimming company. Trimming a tree that day, their son touched a high power electric line and was electrocuted. His body was taken to the hospital on Stock Island, where the sheriff department and jail were, the island just above Key West. While she sat with her son’s body, grieving, the sheriff detective, who had pursued her son, came into the hospital room and made her leave so he could fingerprint her dead son’s hands and continue prosecuting him.

The Coconut Telegraph and my blogs heralded her campaign website coming online. The morning her campaign website went active,  bigpinekey.com was destroyed by hackers. Deer Ed was freaked out, because he had installed every kind of protection known at that time to protect his website.

 

The page on my friend’s campaign website, which contained the worst dirt on the sheriff department, was destroyed.

Deer Ed repaired his website and reported there what had happened, and the context. Some readers accused Deer Ed and my friend of being paranoid. Dear Ed responded with, “Just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

Deer Ed was a recluse, and he was reluctant to take my suggestion to get the FBI involved, but he finally asked them to investigate. He told me that the FBI finally told him that his site had been hacked, but whoever did it was really good and covered their tracks really well.

 

I ran ten times for public office in the Florida Keys: 6 times for mayor of Key West, 3 times for county commission, 1 time for school board. I got my belly full trying to change the minds of people on the left and on the right, whose heads seemed to terminally live where the sun never shined. Quite a few of them were regular readers of and contributors to the Coconut Telegraph. A lot of them were conservative Christians.

When Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race, I watched him adroitly pluck every last string in redneck Christian America. He plucked them like they were little red violins that had longed all their lives to be plucked. 

What bugged me most was the people who ought to know better, who were not little red violins, voted for Trump in 2016. I was just as bugged by the Democrats running Hillary Clinton against Trump. That’s when it saw just how truly fucked up America was. 

I had no clue how much more fucked up America would become. 

Putting In God We Trust on its money and One Nation, Under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and claiming America was founded on Christian principles didn’t make it so.

When I was writing the goodmorning blogs, which eventually went to Internet heaven, I heard about a black comedian in Texas, who said something like, “Attending church has as much chance of making you a Christian as sitting in your automobile in your garage has of making you an automobile.”

There was a regular contributor to Kudos and Whiners, went by the handle “From The Right”, or “FTR”. I met him after he asked Deer Ed to see if I would have dinner with him and his wife and Deer Ed. FTR seemed nice enough. His wife seemed nice enough. FTR was well versed in all things conservative. It was his religion. He was articulate.

After he outed himself at Kudos and Whiners, FTR posted on his Facebook that, as devoted as he was to the Republican way, he would. not vote for Donald Trump if he gained the Republican nomination. I wondered if FTR would hold true to that. 

By then, I was publishing at my new blog, afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com, that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should be locked up in adjoining cells.

After Trump won the Republican nomination, FTR announced on his Facebook that he would vote for Trump. That led to some interesting back and forth, and to FTR losing his cool and tearing into me and displaying what I had figured was there all along.

Back when I was writing frequently at Kudos & Whiners, I developed a posse of Sloan haters, who took lots of pot shots at me from behind their fake names, which Deer Ed allowed them to have. I offered to meet them anywhere they chose, they could bring anyone they liked, and any weapons they liked, and I would bring me and the angels that never left me alone, and we could get to know each other. There were no takers.

I think voting for Trump has as much chance of making God like you as waving a Confederate or Nazi flag has of making God like you. Alas, I don’t think voting for Joe Biden will get you any kudos from God, either. 

Old farts like you and me ain’t able to do the roughhouse things we once did, but we have l-o-n-g memories, and we know how to type, and we don’t like sitting at home playing TV bingo, and we still have some functioning brain cells, and we use them, and we shoot off our mouths, and it don’t change nothing, but at least we tried, and at least we are not going out brainwashed by cult leaders and stupidity, ignorance and gullibility.

Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

I remain deeply, deeply distressed on this Memorial Day that the ultimate sacrifice and suffering of so many Americans that was about preserving our Democracy within a freely elected government acting in the spirit of E Pluribus Unum, is falling to a Fascist, Grifter Authoritarian hellscape. 

Sloan Bashinsky

That falling deeply distresses me, too, but I do not  think America’s wars during my lifetime were noble, given what America did to help those wars get started. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com