".....And Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely."

I have written that the Government loves symbolism, and I wish here to provide an illustration from my life. As indicated in my Helium profile, Laura Bush made a campaign appearance here in Las Vegas in October 2004, and I had written her afterwards. I wrote some comments to Mrs. Bush about placing "symbolism over substance". About a week later on CNN, Wolf Blitzer carried a brief White House blurb which stated that "symbolism IS substance"! As stated in my Helium profile, I received a White House reply, signed by Laura Bush's chief of staff. In early 2005, I included a copy of this White House letter in a letter I wrote to Carlos Garcia, Clark County (Las Vegas) Schools Superintendent. I had become agitated in viewing local TV news coverage of a program conducted between the school district and law enforcement here, in which children were being taken to downtown courtrooms to role-play criminal trials. The kids, in some cases, were even being provided stuffed animals to animate them in the setting! I was certain that these children were being indoctrinated into an approval mode for a system which is rife with abuse and unacknowledged tyrannies (author Philip Smarto - himself a former career probation officer and then adviser to the Illinois Supreme Court - writes in "Keeping Ex-Offenders Free", "...virtually every person who passes through the American criminal justice system suffers injustice at one or more stages of the system"). I received a telephone call at my home in April 2005 in response to my letter. I was invited to address Deputy Superintendent Dr. Augustin Orci with my concerns. The date for my talk was.....April 20th - the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine shootings, which formed the premise for heightened law enforcement presence on school campuses nationwide. I was ambushed - there was a conference room full of officials (I feel certain - from a background of familiarity with some Government agencies - that the man sitting to my left was law enforcement, probably FBI), I was not even offered a glass of water, and Dr. Orci only showed up for the final five minutes of my presentation. For those of you who have read my Helium article on the Phillippe LeMenn case - I brought up this event in detail to those in the conference room. I wish to emphasise something here - that the Government illegally and surreptitiously entered my home for purely venal reasons in that case, because they didn't like letters I had written to two newspapers and to France's Los Angeles consul-general. I have borne, observed, and read about various law enforcement travesties on America's roadways and amongst social dissenters over the years, but when your home is no longer considered the proper last refuge from Government crime, the nation has sunk to a point where even the most feeble-hearted must act. At any rate, one of the conference attendees followed me out into the hallway afterwards, and privately paid me a high compliment on my presentation.......Now, there is more to this account. At about 4:30 A.M. on April 19th 2005 - the morning prior to my appearance at school district headquarters regarding, essentially, law enforcement abuse - I was taking an early-morning walk around our neighbourhood. This was an occasional habit from the time I moved here in early 1994, eleven years earlier at that time. I had never experienced any problems before, but this morning a Las Vegas Metro police helicopter roared across the sky and circling overhead, lit me up while two police cars raced up to me from opposite directions. One officer began his routine, and I just told him up front that I would not show him any identification, inasmuch as I was only minding my own business. The encounter lasted about ten minutes. He attempted to give me a line about "reasonable suspicion". In the end, I told him that, if he wished to know who I am, he could watch me enter my front door about 75 feet away. I asked the school officials the following day after telling them about the incident, "What about all the homeless and others across the nation who face this sort of situation and do not have a front door 75 feet away?" Superintendent Carlos Garcia resigned the following week, and Ellen Knowlton - area FBI director - resigned shortly after this. She made a statement to the press about their respect for authority. For me, it fell on deaf ears. In "Elizabeth - The Golden Age", the Queen states, "I have no Master". I do not consider that true about myself. My Master has something to do with human dignity, constraints on wrath and retribution (remember - with the criminal justice system, YOU ARE NEVER DONE PAYING!), and an observation of the taunting and perks of those who enforce that Rule Of Law so prized by the highest officials (including the present Queen Elizabeth) which keeps their banking interests protected and their hideous crimes obfuscated by a whorring media.

" It is the glory of God to conceal a matter..."

A seasonal change in my life came in April 2000. This is when the various components of your life converge towards a new direction or way of thinking. At this time, I decided not to pursue secondary employment here in Las Vegas, while working my main job. More importantly, I decided to reach out and across the travesties which I had witnessed and experienced, and attempt to share my deepest concerns with some former acquaintances in California, and elsewhere. On my birthday in May 2000, then, I drove into California to speak with the directors of a camp for abused children near Idyllwild where I had done volunteer work about fifteen years earlier. A couple months later, while seeking others with whom I might share more deeply about consequential matters, I began attending the 6:30 A.M. Wednesday Men's Bible Study at a large church about ten miles from our house in Las Vegas. Thousands attend this church, but generally only about half a dozen men would show up for the Bible study. I had visited a couple times when the subject came up regarding a group of people (including pastors, music director and members, and others) who had split from this church. I had met some of them, and found them to be the most gifted and compassionate people there. One of the attendees at this study group mocked them for differing with the chief pastor, and for departing the church. Then he called them Satan's servants and wished them eternity in hell. I did not return to the Bible study, nor to the church. On my birthday the following year in May 2001, I arranged to meet with a former co-worker in California, to share deep concerns about the Government. He remained clueless, despite my best effort. That summer, I wrote a series of letters expressing my concerns. I wrote to Kathy Wilburn in Oklahoma City, who lost grandchildren to Timothy McVeigh's bombing (I wrote, "...perhaps you will discern the one letter out of many"), and to writer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph Group in London (former Economist editor for Latin America Affairs, and author of a book on the Clinton years where Ms. Wilburn's story comprises Chapter 2). My final letter was written on August 11th 2001, to my former co-worker, Ron. I told him of the day in December 1988 when I arrived at our job site and encountered our Bangladeshi employee, Raj Chowdury. I had just heard the news of Pakistani President Zia-ul-haq's death in a plane explosion. I asked if he had heard the news. He smiled broadly and said, "Yes! And they killed all those with him as well!" Later, materiel was found in the lungs of the two pilots, which only a couple national intelligence agencies used. I wrote Ron, "They will build memorials for what will soon happen." Ron never contacted me to make further enquiry, and neither did anyone else - and I telephoned Ms. Wilburn twice, and Mr. Evans-Pritchard in London once..........I began occasionally visiting a smaller church nearer my home in fall 2001 and through them met the young pastor of a ministry to Las Vegas' homeless downtown. I became the cook for this group, preparing food for about 400 people each week on a volunteer basis. I had done this before, and knew what I was doing. I received high compliments for my cooking. I'll always remember the first sermon I heard this Pastor Mike deliver to hundreds of drug addicts, fugitives, and broken-hearted people. He preached on the subject of "The Circumcision Of The Jew In The Mosaic Law". I helped out with this group for six months, until May 2002.....Pastor Mike died of cancer at the age of 39 in early 2007. (The article title here derives from King Solomon's writings in the biblical book of Proverbs - "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter. It is the glory of kings to search out a matter." At some point in looking back on the events of 2001, these words did occur to me.)

A Season Of Life.....

My younger brother's wife gave me a Christmas present in 1987. It was a book by Oswald Caruthers titled "Growing Strong In The Seasons Of Life" - a series of daily devotionals. In all honesty, I read a few of the devotionals, and put the book aside and never looked at it again. But I did remember the title. There certainly are seasons of life, and the subject is too rich for a brief blog posting......for me, a seasonal change took place in the latter half of 1987. It began with my near-death on July 4th as I crashed head-on at nearly 50 m.p.h. in my small Toyota pickup truck into two pine trees near Lake Hemet in the Southern California mountains. I managed to crawl out of the wreckage shaken but unscathed. I actually returned to my job a week later on a Saturday, encountering our Hungarian employee, Andy Sandor. We talked for a while. He spoke about the day in 1956 when, at the age of 6, the walls began vibrating in his family's Budapest apartment. Then, as he said, "my father grabbed me with one hand and my mother with the other and we went outside. The Soviet tanks were coming from one direction, and we went the other direction" - to freedom. It was around this time in 1987 that I encountered another guy at our employee parking lot. I had never seen him before, and never saw him again. He claimed to have moved into the vacant room of a house in Irvine where I had lived the previous year with an older couple. This guy mentioned Bob, the devoutly religious recovering alcoholic who owned and lived at that house. Seems like Bob fell into a vat of chemicals on his job and died. I drove down and visited his wife Peggy, and the circumstances of Bob's death appeared quite suspicious. It was precisely at this time that several very deliberate and over-qualified fellows began employment with our airline transportation company. The lead guy was Mike, and on several occasions after work at about 2 A.M. we would sit in my truck and talk. One night, he turned to me with his grizzled half-smile and said, "Phil, when we move in, people die." And they did.

Writing My Way Out Of A Paper Bag.....

I was a journalism major in college, and have written sporadically over the years since. I wrote an article after leaving the military entitled "Why I blasted off the end of the Huntington Beach Pier in my spaceship". During the first few months after leaving the military in early 1974, I would drive down to Huntington Beach (in Southern California, about ten miles from where I was living) to fish during the early morning hours. On one of those occasions, I encountered a Vietnam veteran sitting beneath the pier, looking pensive and not particularly hopeful. I asked him what he was doing there. He replied, "I'm waiting for a spaceship to come and take me away". We talked a while, and nothing else he said indicated serious mental problems. He had just been through a lot, and this was his way of expressing himself. My article was a swipe at various issues of the time. I began writing again about a year ago, being motivated by events in my life and in the world around me. In this regard, I am appreciative to Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post for having included my brief commentaries on several occasions, in response to some of their articles. The Jerusalem Post boldly printed my commentary regarding an article in which I mentioned American filmmaker Harvey Weinstein's collusion with the Government, and my insinuation that Queen Elizabeth granted him CBE (Commander of the British Empire) under less-than-honourable conditions (my exact words as published by JPost, after mentioning the late royal practise of granting titles to rock stars and film producers, were "...I can understand the latter, in terms of rewarding filmmaking which has been complicitous with an allied Government. Perhaps Harvey Weinstein would care to explain". I must say that I was a bit surprised that The Jerusalem Post printed this, and I commend them for it as highly as I am able to do so here). Just a few days later, the Washington Post newspaper's Michael Abramowitz put a question to President Bush at the Rose Garden in a press conference, which I understood to be a reference to this Jerusalem Post article. Bush responded, "Yes...what I can tell you is that there is an internal investigation taking place at the Justice Department". That's the last you'll hear of it from official sources. But I will be saying more in a future blog posting.