There is no law in Pennsylvania for Ira the Pariah as this letter demonstrates and the failure of Senator Greenleaf to answer this letter illustrates. The judicial system is as bankrupt as Wall Street and as much in need of transformation as anyone inquiring into how I am being treated by the courts will quickly discover.

November 12, 2008

Senator Stewart J Greenleaf
711 York Rd
Willow Grove
PA 19090

Dear Senator Greenleaf,

I am writing to call your attention to the on-going legal travesty (only word that fits) that I am presently experiencing.
I know how busy you are, so I am sending only one tusk of the elephant as documentation, but if needed, I can send you as much of the elephant as you want to see.
The bias is so extreme that a good friend, who is one of Pennsylvania’s best lawyers, has told me again and again 3 things:
1. No Pennsylvania lawyer will do anything to defend me for fear of what might happen to his/her other clients;
2. No judge will do anything but avoid confronting the issues due to the climate that has been created around the case by the media and the judicial system itself;
3. The Superior Court decision was pure posturing, has nothing to do with the law and everyone in the legal community knows it.

I am experiencing exactly what he so succinctly described in every interaction with the court as demonstrated below.

During the pre-trial proceedings of a case that was the most highly publicized in recent Pennsylvania history, the prosecutor Joel Rosen made the following statement: “And what has happened in this case – and I challenge defense counsel or anybody else to cite any case ever – and I really do mean that – ever in the State of Pennsylvania – possibly the whole country – that has so personalized and so sensationalized not just the case but a defendant.” N.T., 9/10/2002, p. 37, L. 20-25.

That did not stop him from helping create an egregious incident that would produce a mistrial or an absolute dismissal in any other case. See exhibit one and Remmer v. U.S., 350 U.S. 377, 381, 76 S Ct. 435 (1956). The judge should have put Ms. Lineberger on the stand. It was an abuse of discretion not to do so. Taking the hint, my lawyers conveniently forgot the issue.

Judge Mazzola was alert to the fact that three (3) people testified to seeing a dead woman six (6) months after her death. Thus, asked by neither side for such an instruction, he told the jury that the time of death was not an essential part of the crime though both sides built their entire case around the date of death, set in stone for over twenty (20) years.
These sightings were kept from the defense by the infamous Barbara Christie who blew down the pages of a report, thus removing the page numbers. She then removed the exculpatory pages. It took many court hearings to get some of them, but not all of them. We did not get the other sightings until 2002. The sightings involved two (2) Philadelphia police detectives. One detective died before we received the information, thus creating a Brady violation.
The judge then took 29 months to file his 1925(a) statement that was 218 pages long: an emblem of what a judge should not do.

The Einhorn Law is unconstitutional; every independent Pennsylvania legal expert will tell you so. No higher Pennsylvania Court has ruled on the issue. The Supreme Court has ducked it twice; the Superior Court said it would not rule on the merits as it could not grant the remedy. A farce as you can’t deal with remedy until you rule on the merits. It is also an absolute avoidance of what a court exists to do if it has jurisdiction. Not to do so is an extreme due process violation.
In retrospect, with four (4) years of intense legal study behind me, my lawyers now feel as if they were closet prosecutors.
There are about ten other major issues, but I want to focus on recent matters as they illustrate the court’s disinclination to deal with me.

Property issues
A. My wife purchased clothes for my trial which I asked Bill Cannon to return to me for safe-keeping when my trial was over. He refused, though I kept writing to him about it. Four (4) years later, he gave a friend of mine some clothes that were not mine. They were returned.
I took him to small claims court. He admitted that the clothes that he ad returned were not mine. The case is simple and clear. Instead of ruling, the judge took the case under advisement. That was almost 5 months ago.
B. Sixty-three (63) volumes of diaries – 5th amendment protected material – were taken from my apartment in March of 1979 under the auspices of a general search that produced a poisonous second warrant. See exhibit 2.
The diaries never should have been taken. You can’t use 5th amendment protected material as Davis makes clear. All U.S. Supreme Court diary issues underline this principle in a vehement matter.
Then this material taken under warrant was given to an author – Steven Levy – to publish and use for his own gain. My private property given to another to use for his own personal gain!! There is nothing similar in over two hundred (200) years of American case law.
Then the fifth amendment tainted material was brought into court and used.
My lawyers were asleep or worse, but I forced them to ask for the unused diaries back as they contained Brady material. We were fobbed off.
Thus my own fifth amendment protected material were basically denied us.
I kept pushing my lawyers (knowing no law, but operating on intuition).
As soon as I began studying the law, I could not believe that two (2) lawyers with over sixty (60) years of experience between them could have mussed such obvious first, fourth and fifth amendment violations.
As soon as I was fee of my lawyers, I filed a motion for return of property that exhibit 3 described. I was ignored, then insulted. Then ignored again until a letter to the judge produced a brief letter.
Look at section C on exhibit 4. It is pure insult from the DA Beth Grossman. An insult that contains no facts; I also demonstrated, in the fifty-one (51) page motion that I filed in rebuttal, that her opinion about lack of interest is 100% wrong.
Exhibit 5 is the letter I received from the judge’s clerk. It is ludicrous as a prisoner can’t arrange his own video hearing.
Exhibit 6 is my response.

I do not know whether the hearing was held, without me, on November 6th, 2008.
On November 7th, 2008, I received the court’s response to my affidavit, reproducd in exhibit 3.
On that day (11/7/08), I received two letters informing me that I had a hearing on 11/6/08. The first such information from the court.

I did not kill Holly Maddux, but that now seems besides the point as I continue to be subjected to the color of the law without taste and flavor. A law without law that few any longer respect.
I have also been waiting over a year for the PCRA court to appoint a lawyer/
I may wait years for there does not seem to be any law in Pennsylvania for Ira the Pariah.

I will provide you with any additional information you require and treat all letters as confidential.

Peace,
Ira Einhorn

Related letter

January 13, 2009

Dear Professor Fried,

The inherent flaws in any justice system have been exacerbated by the ‘air’ of anything goes that 8 years of the Bush Administration has created.
Those of us who have been treated in a way that would make our founders weep can’t wait for the soothing balm of history, for I am surrounded by victims of the Miasma that W and his cohorts created by acting as if law was a convenience that the ‘guilty’ did not deserve, although a lot of those ‘guilty’ are indeed innocent as I and a lot of people serving time with me are not guilty.

There is a systematic rot throughout the judicial system that must be exposed if we are to survive as a healthy society. No witch hunt, but calm exposure of the law breaking, so that we might come to an understanding that prevents future behaviour that no decent legal system can sustain.
I am enclosing one example of what has been done to me.

In addition the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Einhorn Law overturning a final decision of a court. It is an egregious violation of the separation of powers. A violation that Pennsylvania courts have refused to rule on, though the issue is of constitutional import and the case is the most publicized in Pennsylvania history.

The PA. Superior Court, in a violation unprecedented in the case law, refused to rule on the merits of the issue by declaring they could not grant the remedy. An abrogation of the basic responsibility of the court’s function: to rule on the merits of an issue that is properly before them. It is, also, a due process violation you could drive a truck through.
Thirty years ago, approximately 12,000 page of first, fourth and fifth amendment protected diaries were seized as a result of a general search that led to a poisonous second warrant.
They then gave these diaries to a journalist who used them (quoting from them extensively) to publish a very biased book against me. Property taken under warrant, then given to an uninvolved party who used my first and fifth amendment protected work for his own profit.
Some of this published material was then introduced into evidence.

They are now refusing to give any of it back, even the 60 vols. that were never used and predate the alleged date of the crime. Their only argument, which of course has no legal support: I have applied for a PCRA. So, the implication is that they are holding 12,000 pages of intimate diaries on speculation.
The court itself is aiding this attempt to sequester my property, my life’s work, by refusing to issue any orders which makes it difficult to file a valid appeal.
A smidgeon of what has been done to me and others who are not the pariah I have become. [Google: Ira Einhorn].
That is why I and many others want the process of accountability to begin. The air must be cleared. A Rule of Law must return to all courts.

Peace,
Ira Einhorn

Enclosure: Bullshit bag testimony.

“’One of the shortcomings of American society’, another billionaire financier George Soros, has written, is ‘an excessive admiration of success – measured in monetary terms – to the detriment of more intrinsic values. The buffet cult epitomizes the shortcoming.’”Richard Davenport-Hines quoting Alice Shroeder, The Snowball.

The economic system that is currently very ill (terminal?) and that rules a great deal of the planet is the most vicious economic system that I have encountered as it has an implacable ruler, profit, and only one aim, more.
If one wishes to learn about the system that is at present making life so difficult, there are three basic books to read: Adam Smith’s “The wealth of nations”, Marx’s “Das Kapital”, and Keynes’ “General Theory”. Most other economic works are major or minor commentaries on these three giants.
In the midst of such a major failure of our economic system, it is difficult for those struggling to keep the system afloat, to think about real fundamentals and the possibility of reconstituting our economies on a different basis but as the Talmud says: if not now, when.
It is not possible for someone unschooled in economics to suddenly come up with a new system that works: that is not how social change comes about nor do I have such a goal in mind. What I wish to do is review the three giants and make suggestions while the turmoil is upon us and the suggestions can find fertile ground.
The need to go back to basics is obvious as has been the inability of those “in charge” to grasp the extent of what our unregulated greed has loosed upon so many innocent lambs.

I have watched, more closely than normal, for economics is not a major interest, the continuing failure of the pundits to grasp the seriousness of the situation and the consequent failure to act, producing a present situation of such instability that what we are facing is much larger than a recession and could easily dwarf the 30s, in spite of 60 years of “greater” knowledge and supposed tools (quantitative easing for one which involves the Federal Reserve trading created money for toxic assets, thus allowing a bank to meet its reserve requirement and theoretically to lend money and ease the situation) that have not been available in the past.
Spending (consuming) is the definition of modern life and from a historical perspective very recent in the USA and even more recent in Europe.
The driving force of this change has been Capitalism and its incessant need to turn everything movable or immovable into a consumable object that will turn a profit and produce more capital for the capitalist to invest.
Somewhere in this process of commodities and abstract financial dealing we have lost sight of the reason for all this activity: basic human satisfaction. We have also failed to realize just how destabilizing unfettered economic activity can be on a planet that has limited resources.
Economic theory, suffering as all social sciences do, from physics envy, now writes partial differential equations to talk about house work, but has no sense that there is a limit or a boundary condition that should be integral to all their theory and equation writing.
Economists are also stuck in a 19th century scientific model regarding conservation laws and equilibrium theory, but physics has moved on and quantum mechanics and uncertainty is key.
Risk can be calculated, but as a the recent collapse illustrates, the analysis did not go far enough and what we failed to calculate has destroyed Wall Street and made life miserable for many older people who are literally facing the fact of street time as their houses and savings are gone and they are too old to work. The extent of this horror is unfolding daily before our eyes and can’t be wished away. Yes we need to move on, but not without a very extensive airing of responsibility (a word seemingly alien to the administration that has now vacated), for what has happened to us economically and ethically (torture, gitmo, rendition and other morally reprehensible acts) we are dead in the water, if we don’t. I am not suggesting a witch hunt, but we must look at the past eight years very critically, using the full power of the Congressional subpoena to ascertain as many of the facts as possible and to understand the motivation and culpability of those who are responsible.
So far, almost all the gifts have gone to those who have created the mess, operating upon a seat of pants decision making process that appears to be an ad hoc form of triage.
The problem of restarting an economic space ship as big as the Earth is not going to be easy, even in perfect conditions and the conditions are far from perfect. As we are only 21 months away from a mid-term election for a third of the Senate and the entire House. A constraint along with cloture that will severely limit what Obama and his cohort can do and will constrain him even more once the honeymoon is over and the election approaches.
The second and bigger constraint, particularly in the US, involves the need to deleverage and clear up the immense unsustainable consumer debt. The consumer sustains the American economy. His pocket is locked which of course means less spending and consequent job loss. That creates contraction and a psychological sense of fear that has an enormous knock-on effect.
Few will lend in such a situation and only those with money to burn (a small percentage of Americans) or great courage will spend in the face of such conditions.
Thus putting people back to work and removing the fear is top priority within the limits of the political reality and the problem that past debt and a flood of new American paper on the market will cause. If anyone blinks regarding the dollar, and there is plenty of reason to do so, the USA as presently constituted will be history.
Monetary policy has reached its limit as money ($) is there for the asking, who is going to make products that will not be bought.
Thus Keynsian fiscal policy is the answer, but if one does the math (I will not bore you with it) it does not seem to be enough. The stimulus may just be a wave on the surface without the depths of the problem being touched and then we might enter a tunnel wherein there is no light in sight.
At that point, which I hope we do not reach, many might want to do the re-reading I’ve just begun.

A Nobel Prize winning economist has estimated that the Iraq War – one that never should have been fought – will have an eventual total cost of between two and three trillion dollars. Think of Obama’s proposed $500 billion worth of Keynsian spending with that fact in mind. You will immediately realize just how irresponsible the previous inhabitant of the White House has been.

Apocalypse 2012: an investigation into civilization’s end
by Lawrence E. Joseph
Broadway Books, 2008
272 pages

Only an idiot can deny the possibility of a conscious force larger than ourselves. The problem is not the force or forces, but how our historical tradition has treated the alleged direct interactions with this force and the implications we have drawn from such alleged interactions.
We, the medium, are the problem. And, only those disciplines, call them religions, if you wish, that require a re-experiencing of the light (a very common metaphor associated with the descriptions of such experiences) are even worth consideration.
The books whether Bible, Koran or Veda keep a possibility alive that most human action denies. But it is only the realization of that possibility, in the achieving states hinted at, that is worth the candle.
The silliness of atheism matches the silliness of those who clutch a book and pontificate whether priest, imam or rabbi.
Such people are usually part of an organized hierarchical structure that have brought about death untold and have maintained, for the most part, social structures that enslave the masses and support the elite control of such masses.
The succour they offer to the downtrodden hardly balances such historical crimes, but I don’t think myself wise enough to criticize except in particular instances that impinge upon me and maintain a distance from such organizations, though I have often maintained close personal relationships with those integral to the hierarchy.

Anyone who reads as widely as I do and mixed in the circles I did for almost two decades before going underground would know about both the Mayan’s uncanny cosmological accuracy and their obviously related calendar systems and predictions. It is one of the mysteries that is always on the back burner of those who actively pursue a deeper understanding of the world that Dawkins and his ilk are now trashing in an overt and sometimes offensive fashion.
I met Jose Argüelles a few times in my 60s-70s travels, so I read The Mayan Factor when I encountered it in the late 90s. It strongly reinforced a viewpoint that I was developing and had been developing form the late 60s due to more mundane factors: the creation, mainly in the West, of a way of life that was not sustainable and that would eventually lead to the kind of collapse that Jared Diamond’s book has made into a commonplace.
By Earth Day of 1970 (the first one), when I structured and organized and then emceed two massive ecological demonstrations in Philadelphia in conjunction with the Philadelphia Earth Week Committee of which I was not a member as I resolutely joined no organizations and rarely if ever attended meetings with more than two others, through almost two decades of activism, a few simple ideas were obvious. One of those ideas was: the technology that we were creating was on course to bewilder the mind and to destroy human coherence.
I formulated this idea in a simple apothegm: “nanoseconds now, can the emotions follow.” The answer in 2009 is obvious: no.
And the data overwhelms regarding the alphabet growing of perceptual disorders that are leading to an increasing inability of a larger and larger percentage of the population to understand the complexity that surrounds; a growing disappearance of real depth of analysis, seemingly aided by too much viewing of information on mediums that do not lend to it being comprehended and utilized; and perhaps worse a comic book view of history that this book illustrates. In his discussion of Soviet use of telepathy to garner atomic secrets (p. 144) – spies were quite sufficient and well documented; and his discussion concerning the punishment of the Germans for World War II (p. 184-7) wherein he seems totally unaware of the decisions to rebuild Germany as a bulwark against the red menace. (A reading of Kai Bird’s Chairman of the Board, his fascinating biography of America’s most well-connected and perhaps powerful post World War II individual is a good place to start one’s historical education about this complex and on-going matter.)

That said his middle eastern viewpoint is a necessary corrective to the American establishments’ view of Israel, that less and less people share, and Obama’s State Department will further if it does not break the mould and appoint an Arab-native speaker among our top diplomatic negotiators and I can’t totally disagree with the Vatican’s intemperate statement about the current crisis, as since Hamas took over, the Gaza strip feels and now looks increasing like the Warsaw Ghetto. (Disclaimer: I was born of a Jewish mother.)

Very soon after Earth Day, it became obvious to me that we were heading for ecological disaster on the basis of the future studies I had begun to do. These studies plunged me deep into energy use and the history of Capitalistic development. I applied my knowledge to China and India and soon realized that the developmental path being pushed by the economists and investors I was reading and eating with would require four to six earths to sustain. My long seminar on Roegen’s book on economics and entropy with a soon again to be top Wall Street player was just icing on the cake.
We were heading for a brick wall. In addition two other apothegms that I developed for my Earth Day statement about stress and pollution were also rapidly becoming reality.
After years of studying and lecturing about stress, it became obvious that stress was information the body could not handle in the timeframe allotted. The time deficit was expressed as a symptom (low blood sugar) or a full blown condition: hypoglycaemia. My bed was hosting many women with such conditions. My awareness came from much reading, intensive dialogue with Marc Lappé and others, plus a lot of women with identical symptoms. The conditions I first began to talk about in the mid 60s are now endemic and drugs as metabolic regulators (self medication) are now a plague.

I saw pollution in the same way as an outgrowth of a process – mainly industrial – that could not be reintegrated into the biosphere on a timescale conducive to human health and well-being.
The general awareness expressed in shorthand in these few pages made me fully aware that our present course at the time was leading to a destructive collapse and that the ecological work I was doing was a stop gap – it might buy time – but it would not solve our long range problems.
Then a combination of factors lead me in the direction of what one edge of physics is now attempting to actualize: a device that would provide energy without increasing the entropy (which we experience as pollution).
That involved forays into a realm of human endeavour that is littered with casualties. The pursuit is genuine as many are attempting to formulate a science that is not limited to our present framework: the Einstein four-dimensional space-time framework.
And that is how science works in both the formulations of Popper and Kuhn: it is tentative and provisional and can be changed by a new experiment of data sufficient to demonstrate that old formulations are inadequate. It is a method, but due to its reductive nature it tends to act as if this method – very limited – is a metaphysic, excluding – often from existence – what it can’t fit upon its procrustean bed. But… to be blessed for the agreement it has produced and the world-wide conversations, in certain areas of human endeavour, that is has created and continues to support.
I only that it survives the storm that is coming. When even the best of scientists are faced with phenomena that radically deny/defy their methods and their previous understanding, they act like frightened children, repress the experience and run for cover.
I watched this process first hand for most of the 70s and ran a free data distribution network for a select group less frightened by such anomalous events.

The confluence in my life of three close friends: Moses Hallett, an A. V-P at Bell of PA, Bill Whitehead, a New York editor of large intellect and courage and Andrija Puharich, an investigator extraordinary, lead to my helping to birth the study of Consciousness, before anyone was ready and my almost bringing the device mentioned previously in this article (a story I can’t tell yet) to public notice.
What I experienced in Arthur Young’s Philadelphia town house one day in the mid 70s – the disappearance and reappearance of a heavy solid object without an explosion – just confirmed, but strongly, what I already seemed to know through many unusual experiences and deep intuition and study. An entire series of events transpired that day in front of a number of people, all of whom testified to seeing the same thing.
I have written those events up in dramatic form. I will post that write up as soon as I can cut through the malice connected to my personal situation, for much of my writing is now being held maliciously or illegally. Further posting will clarify the above statements.
I have also written a series of novels that attempt to dramatize the energy that gathers around a device that is necessary, if we are going to survive what Mr. Joseph suggest is coming in 2012. They will slowly emerge if conditions feel right, as they cast some light on the difficulties we face as a species in attempting to transcend our present economic limitations, something that our green pundits have been slow to grasp, but the present public suicide of Capitalism should make easier.
While people have been arguing about global warming, the planetary eco-system has been moving into a period of abrupt climate change. After reading scores of books in the areas of scientific interest that Mr. Joseph focuses on, I came to the sad conclusion that we are at the edge of a period of planetary and climate change that will probably bring civilization as we know it to an end and result in a reduction of our numbers that few want to contemplate.

I have read everything by and about Kozyrev (p. 143-6) I could find since I first discussed him in 1973 at lunch with my Bell executive co-worker. His ideas about time streams and the energy associated with it should be investigated with great energy as my experience with physics of great accuracy and entities of great control over the physical world could be explained by what he suggests about time, our great unknown.
Data mining techniques would certainly enable the data generated by Dmitriev, Mukherjee and others mentioned in this book to be correlated in novel ways, so that we could perhaps see patterns that link sunspot activity, cosmic rays, meteor and comet activity, planetary relations and volcanic activity in new ways.
If FEMA could not handle Katrina, I do not, particularly in the midst of an economic planetary downturn that should spell depression in any language, see the United States gearing up as a nation to prepare for what is too often presented as a g Mayan prophecy. If it happens, city dwellers are doomed, but those who live in the country can prepare by storing long lasting food, candles, extra warm clothes and a stand alone energy source in addition to a wood stove.
Apocalypse 2012 is apt to confuse those who come to it without much preparation. That is partly due to the mode of presentation whose intention I would imagine is directed at a mass audience. Mr. Joseph at time indicates that he is not certain that he is doing the right thing by producing and correlating evidence that points to massive destruction in a few short years, yet he expresses impatience at scientists who refuse to comment on a series of events until the data is available, though that is how scientists are constrained, through training and peer pressure, to act.
We have seen the same general problem in action with the global financial crisis: those most qualified to know and to act, hesitating to do anything that would create panic and by hesitating producing the very mess that quick action might have avoided.
It is not a simple problem. It is faced by anyone in a decision making position involving uncertainty. Anyone who has ever read a classified intelligence report will know what I mean instantly. Donald Rumsfeld tried to spell out the complications – very real – but the insight has been lost in the lies he propagated. George Soros has written an entire book as it applies to the stock market and Joseph could have added greatly to the value of his book by reflecting at length on the process he went through. His failure to do so is our loss.
A lot of the scientific work mentioned in this book deserves extended consideration in a book directed at a more serious audience.

A few observations before I close this review: one of the houses I called “home” during the 70s had a Kozyrev mirror in its living room, but we called it a Faraday cage and produced the same results that are described in the book: increased telepathic and distance viewing results (they are probably related). I was adamantly against one of the uses to which we put such technology: monitoring both the White House and the Kremlin. After years of reflection, I now feel that the destruction of the group, a death and my specific problems are connected to this infringement. Alexey Dmitriev’s short statement adequately conveys the problem that such work educes in the minds of the thoughtful: “Physicists cannot solve the problem of why living organisms have pre-information about catastrophic events. This forces us to change our picture of the world. The world is not simply matter and energy, but also information.”
I have mused upon this problem since 1970. I have a shorthand for expressing it: the problem of relating E=MC2 to H= -S. Consciousness – whatever it may be – and time are part of the problem.
I have also come to the conclusion that a part of the answer may be buried in the Tibetan texts now being translated, but more of that anon.
I wince whenever Joseph or scores of other like him refer to divine intervention either directly or by implication. This is not due to atheism, but rather my desire to make distinctions. When the mind enters states that indicate a loosening of space-time constraints, the experiences that result are not necessarily “divine”. That label tends to cancel observation or an attempt at accurate description. That cancellation is a loss to us all as we need to chart that territory as best we can.
Mr. Joseph does this well when he talks about the ocean and the extra-planetary space around us wherein in the past the map said : “There be dragons.” The divine label often destroys that possibility.
The use of “apocalypse” in the title is also disturbing as an apocalypse refers to a cataclysm in which evil forces are destroyed. That is not what is going to happen if 2012 occurs in terms that the book discusses. Comets, volcanoes and the like kill indiscriminately.
I thank him for his reference to the Bible Code and Drosnin references which I scanned and quickly erased from consideration, probably due to spending years listening to a close brilliant friend who was a Baconian. But, no excuses, Joseph’s discussion indicates a need for closer consideration.
It is only fair to end this review with an observation of Alexey Dmitriev that I share with full consciousness: “We have reached the point of deadly synergy, at which climatic processes communicate with and amplify each other in severe and catastrophic ways…”

“As long as he religiously respects the lives and the money of his fellow citizens, nothing more is asked of him. He may beat his wife, mistreat his servants, ruin his children, and it is no-one’s business. Society condemns only those facts that do it harm; it is not concerned with private life.” George Sand, 1832.

Reflect upon the George Sand quote for a moment to allow the enormous change in perspective to sink in.
Her 1832 statement reflects a basic assumption of our civilization that is integral to that civilization and is captured clearly in the following two quotes which are classic examples of the concept:
“Men unite for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I shall call by the general name – property.” John Locke
“So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the common good of the whole community.” Blackstone.

The legal situation has changed radically, bringing the private sphere under increased scrutiny and rapidly calling the very nature of privacy into question. Obvious to anyone with knowledge of what both young men and women are doing through the net where in sending naked pictures of oneself to a stranger has become the norm and the language in British newspapers would have brought obscenity actions not too long ago.
Along with this “openness”, there has developed a dangerous puritanical legal trend that has turned the desire to protect former victims, as mentioned in the Sand quote, into courtroom heroes, producing a raft of unsafe convictions: tailing innocents in the name of protecting the weak.
Having personally delved into a number of such cases, at great length, has made me acutely aware that the institution of law in the United States requires a total transformation as injustice is now the norm.

Until very recently a Pennsylvania senator, now thankfully retired by his constituents, could argue that there was no constitutional guarantee to privacy, thus officers could arrest two adult males for engaging in sodomy within the confines of their own home.
And a bit farther back in time, I can recall a life sentence meted out in a Southern state for receiving a blow job. Ludicrous, but not to the recipient.
Contrast those two cases with the accepted practise of the father taking the oldest daughter into his bed when his wife died. When I mentioned this practise at a Thanksgiving dinner in France, two English social workers challenged me the way anthropologists used to challenge any reports of cannibalism.
While the above discussion was going on, a local well educated man just kept smiling at me. When I called upon him to comment he was terse and to the point: “It is a common local practice.” The year was 1996.

The problem as raised can only increase as the movement of people upon the earth encysted groups of people who operate under the aegis of religious norms or tribal mores, among a larger policy.
Think upon the practise of ritual female circumcision; the ritual slaughter of lambs to end weeks of Muslim daytime fasting, protest against which has brought Bridget Bardot in conflict with the law; the murder of a disobedient daughter for failing to abide by the father’s choice of a husband or choosing one of her own; or the use of Peyote in religious ritual.
At what point does statutory law have the right to impinge upon religious practise.
I mused upon these issues as I glanced a picture of a prostitute spread across the middle of my op-ed Tribune page for January 5, 2009. she is missing one eye, gouged out by her owner/madam in a fit of anger when the prostitute told her she could not work after a second painful abortion.
Nicholas D. Kristof is trying to help prostitutes and thousands who are in similar situations. In his January 12, 2009 op-ed piece in the Tribune, he describes his purchase of two Cambodian teenagers (for $150 and $203) five years ago, complete with a receipt confirming that one of the girls was now his property.
I would not fight to secure the oil in Iraq (what the war is, was about), but I would certainly fight and risk my life for prostitutes and others in similar situations.
That “fight” is a metaphor as at 69 (in May), I am not about to be sent to war.
The conflicts mentioned above are current. The free pass that religion has had in the West is rapidly been called into question.
The pictured depicted below is indicative of that. The “probable” relates to the British requirement for truth in advertisement. The ad is appearing on 800 British buses.
And never forget: the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno in 1600 for daring, among other things, to suggest that the sun was just among many.

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks: 1947-1963
By Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
336 pages

The reading of Susan Sontag’s diaries (the first volume, there will be three), let me with a feeling of deep sadness, not only for her individual wretchedness, but also for most of the secular world that so much of modern thought has produced.
I have been reading the last works of her one time husband who was a brilliant pretentious mess as a person, a great teacher and a deep questioner about the nature of the civilization that the modern quest, to make it new, has lead so many to embrace.
There is a deep awareness in his reiterative last four books, that share the same dryness and lack of joy that fills each page of Sontag.
Jouissance is absent and I continually mused upon Wilhelm Reich as I read Sontag and thought back upon my reading of Rieff.
On Sontag’s part: an intellectual focus on art and thought that feels totally disembodied as do so many of the joyless Protestant/Jewish moments that make up so much of modern culture, no matter how thrilled I’ve been to immerse in them.
Rieff has done something lasting. Defined a cultural moment and a new personality type – the therapeutic mentality – and perhaps in doing so not given Susan, his ex-wife, enough credit for the work her precocious intellect contributed to the major that helped gain him a preferment – a chair – at my alma mater.
She will fade quickly, a minor figure in a minor cultural movement. An emblem, perhaps of the sterility that intellect breeds when a culture has died and its civilized moment is proclaiming its brittle end.
Occasionally an orgasmic squeak arises from these dry, sterile pages, but the lack of real release, the inability to transcend screamed at me as I reviewed my reading lists transcribed from her diaries and recalled my trips to New York to see ten movies in three days and though of my often reading of days with just short breaks to eat and sleep, but in my “Bohemian” world there was also joy and delight in food, nature and the body of the other: an immersion in the physical that was often for days with breaks to eat and sleep, but I liked my partners and we got off.

Jouissance, joy, pleasure, happiness.
Gone missing and certainly not to be found in Reborn.
Sad, sad, sad, alas!