Some People are More Equal than Others, in the “Justice” System

Loretta Nall had a great post today about a local should-be scandal. A notorious anti-drug judge’s son (Judge John Rochester, son John Alexander Rochester) was arrested with coke, meth, and pot within 3 miles of a day care center, school, and public housing. His case was assigned to a subordinate of his fathers’, Judge George Simpson, who is also his fathers’ friend. Judge Simpson set the bonds for Rochester well below the bonds he has set in the past for comparably charged persons. The prosecutor set the charges lower than comparably charged persons and declined to add the additional modifiers for his proximity to the day care center, school, and public housing.

Judge Simpson has declined to recuse himself due to his obvious conflict of interest. This case needs to be held across the state from Judge Rochester’s jurisdiction, where no one knows of him and he holds no influence. This has not happened.

I, like Loretta, do not think that non-violent drug offenders should go to jail. HOWEVER, I do think that John Rochester needs to be treated in the same manner as the other drug offenders who have gone before his notoriously harsh father, Judge Rochester. Perhaps having his son put in jail for a long time would demonstrate to Judge Rochester the injustice of non-violent drug convictions.

Another point made by a poster at Reddit is that perhaps Judge Rochester was aware of his son’s activities, and sentenced other offenders more harshly to keep down competition. While it’s a stretch, it’s an interesting point to ponder.

You can and should contact Judge George Simpson’s office at

District Judge Circuit: 40

George C Simpson

(256) 354-7633

P.O. Box 880

Ashland, AL 36251

You should also contact Judge Rochester, and ask him if his son’s experience will cause him to reconsider his harsh treatment of other offenders.

Circuit Judge Circuit: 40

John E Rochester

(256) 354-2242

P.O. Box 40

Ashland, AL 36251

I contacted Judge Simpson’s office earlier today, and here is the exchange I had (originally posted at Loretta’s blog).

“Judge Simpson’s office.”

“Why has Judge Simpson not recused himself from the case of John Alexander Rochester?”

“Who is this?”

“I’m an interested citizen and would like to know why Judge Simpson has not recused himself from an obvious conflict of interest.”

*click*

I called back.

“Judge Simpson’s office.”

“I think there was an error, we were disconnected. I would like to know why Judge Simpson has not recused himself from an obvious conflict of interest.”

“We weren’t disconnected, I hung up on you.”

“Why did you hang up on me?”

“I don’t speak to people who don’t tell me their name!”

-I told her my name-

“Now that you have that, could you tell me why Judge Simpson has not recused himself?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything!”

-This went back and forth a while, the only information I obtained was that the person on the phone is apparently not employed by the state but privately by the Judge.-

“But doesn’t the Judge employ you using his official budget? That makes you an employee of the public.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. I’m not at liberty to discuss anything.”

“So you, as an individual, don’t see any problem with the Judge not recusing himself from an obvious conflict of interest?”

“He has not been before the Judge.”

“Then how did he set bonds for Mr. Rochester that are much lower than bonds set for comparable cases?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. Please do not call us again.”

*click*

Called again.

“Judge Simpson’s office.”

“Yes ma’am, do you really not see a problem…

*click*

[with the Judge providing favors to the children of his friends?"]

We may not be able to get to Judge Simpson, but if we can at least put that seed in the head of his secretary… “Why is my boss getting so many calls about conflicts of interest? What’s going on here?” Maybe she will talk to him about that, “Judge, we’ve been receiving many calls about the Rochester case…”

Please call Judge Simpson and demand he recuse himself, and please call Judge Rochester and ask that he reconsider his positions based on his son’s experience.

Research Project Update

I’ve been down here for two weeks now, and I started my research project on Friday.

I chose to do Multi-Hop Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks, which is extremely close to what I want to do professionally. I ended up talking to the Research Adviser about my future plans with free open source wireless communication systems, and he decided to modify my research to be voice over multi-hop wireless networks. That means I’ll be using their wireless voice comm system they’ve already developed, and integrate it with additional nodes to pass the signal on (hop) to propagate it to more distant nodes that can’t communicate directly with the source.

After I get that done, if I have time, I’ll then try to implement the SDR (software defined radio) equipment they have so I can experiment with different multi-hop wireless protocols like multi-channel, spread-spectrum, frequency hopping, and other types of encoding.

Its gonna be tough, since lots of this involves programming and I’m definitely no programmer, but this experience is exactly, and I mean exactly, what I need to advance my own designs. Wish me luck!

Commerce Bank is a Fraudulent Company

Commerce Bank has a history of questionable banking practices. I have been charged overdraft fees when Commerce deposited my paycheck into the wrong account, when long dead charges appeared on the account once it was low, and now, Commerce has brazenly attempted to steal my money outright by moving a charges around in time, causing five overdrafts. This is outright theft.

The balance I keep in my books is time-ordered, that is, they are recorded in the order they are created. The only exception is a deposit, which are preferred and processed first in the day. As far as I was aware, time-ordered systems of bookkeeping are the norm for most legitimate banks, with the exception of preferring deposits by recording them first at the start of the next day. Imagine my surprise when, in order to explain the problem, a useless customer service drone printed off their second set of internal, falsified books that they use to maximize their fees-taking. Taking from you and I, with a second set of books the ordinary public does not have access to – a set of books that are not reflected in your online account summary, which we are expected to believe is accurate.

This second set of internal books is apparently the mechanism by which they re-arrange charges, hold some from the visible record, and otherwise orchestrate to screw you as deeply as they can. Here’s what I saw, from my online banking page.

Starting at 3, the charges for 6.98 and 20.40 have been reversed. The first charge was 6.98, and the second charge was 20.40, but that’s not how they’re listed – which netted two overdraft fees for Commerce instead of one. Sneaky. Up at 2, you see a deposit listed with the same date as the last two purchases and the three overdraft fees. Notice it wasn’t deposited when the other charges were processed. You might also notice that my balance wasn’t negative until after the overdraft fees were applied – first. They have purposely set up the system to process the charges in a preferred order that maximizes their overdraft fees. But that’s not the worst of it! Check out 1. What’s that other $50 discrepancy?

Hello! Its two more overdraft fees! But where did they come from? I thought banks were supposed to be good at math, and this doesn’t add up. Good thing I keep my own books.

I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt – again. I wasn’t able to log into my account all day 5/13, I figured there was a computer error. I also figured there was an error when I made that $20 deposit and it showed me as being -$94.05. But make no mistake, this was not an error, because when I asked if it was, I was told it was purposeful, and a second set of books was printed and shown to me. I wasn’t able to keep them, so I cannot show them to you, but it showed an amazing thing that explained everything. There were two sets of dates by each transaction – when it originated, and when it posted. The charges had been re-arranged so that it created five overdraft fees. I’ve been trying to figure out how they did it, seeing as how I didn’t get to keep the copy of their cooked record, but I suppose I’m not a sophisticated enough thief to understand their shell game. I’m going back tomorrow to try to get another copy of their internal books, and this time, I’m just going to walk out with them.

Every time that Commerce engages in their questionably legal but extremely unethical attempts to steal my money – maximize their profit, that is, sorry, only doing our job here – they compound the insult by behaving as if I have been somehow irresponsible, like it’s my fault that I am poor, and they keep a second set of books to screw me. Every single time they give me a condescending speech about being more responsible, and how this and that is not their fault et cetera, and each time it’s something they have done, a trap they have set, a game they have rigged, but oh, no, it’s my fault, I was irresponsible enough to wander into their traps or play one of their games. Gotcha! Irresponsible punk.

I understand that banks use fees to make money, but I cannot justify their bald attempts to steal comparatively large sums of money from a relatively small account. And I am quite certain that I am not the only one this happens to. What makes them think that the poorest of their customers are also the easiest to steal from? Oh, that’s right – because they are. Anyone with a large account can easily keep it positive, or have access to credit. They have money and influence, and are catered to. The poor, however, do not have money and do not have influence, so they are marginalized, exploited, and let’s be honest – screwed in every single way imaginable. They don’t have a voice with their aggressor, and they don’t have legal recourse – what attorney works will take their case, anyway?

Furthermore, doesn’t a good bank, run by an able management that knows what they’re doing and knows how to really make money, doesn’t a good bank make its fees from making good investments and giving out good loans, and not from fees charged for overdrafting accounts – which means your customer doesn’t have any money, anyway? Isn’t a good bank a financially sound institution that doesn’t rely on broke people for it’s bread and butter, but on making wise decisions?

Not every bank is like this. UMB has not once engaged in any of this despicable behavior, largely because their transaction record that they show me appears to be the same one they operate from. That is, they don’t appear to keep a second set of cooked books to manipulate for their own ends. All my charges show up immediately on my online account, they don’t show up days, weeks, or months later, in different orders. Furthermore, the one time I accidentally tried to overdraft my UMB account, the card reader did a novel thing, something that Commerce has never done – it refused the transaction for insufficient funds. Imagine that – giving up an overdraft fee to keep a straight set of honest books with positive balances. Now, Commerce, who is being responsible?

There are many problems in the banking industry right now, and I can understand that Commerce may be struggling from its participation in extremely questionable loan practices like so many dishonest others; but if the fat rich pricks in charge have lost their asses by being greedy lying pigs, it’s not my responsibility to clean up their mess by providing them with new funds I don’t have, obligated by possibly illegal transaction manipulations.

When I screw up and spend too much, Commerce is happy to charge me a $35 fee. When they screw up and lose money, Commerce is happy to charge me a $35 fee. When I spend hours and hours of my own time trying to fix the mess, just so that I don’t have to pay outrageous fees that I don’t even owe, who is going to pay me?

This event, and all the troublesome ones preceding it, are an accurate snapshot of the banking industry in America today – rich greedy executives making ridiculous money by screwing over the middle class in every way possible, and buying the legal and political clout to avoid any government intervention with the money stolen from the people. In fact, I would say this is a snapshot of banking in any time period. It’s no wonder smart people don’t trust banks, when crooked people run them.

Aren’t Republicans Supposed to Be…

Aren’t Republicans supposed to be good for the economy?

Aren’t Republicans supposed to support small government?

Aren’t Republicans supposed to provide balanced budgets?

And who is gullible enough to believe that bullshit anyway?

Prohibition and the Drug War

I believe it was Confuscius that said, “A society of prohibitions becomes a society of vices”, or something similar. The more we fight against something we don’t like but doesn’t actually harm us, the more widespread this behavior becomes.

PopulistAmerica published an excellent article today by the late Harry Browne, adapted from his work “The Great Libertarian Offer”.

“Until the early 1900s, the federal government did little to regulate or control the sale or use of alcohol or drugs - except for taxing alcohol.

There always will be people who are susceptible to addiction, and who take a big risk by consuming any alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. But when there’s no money to be made pushing those items on school grounds and street corners, fewer of the susceptible get hooked.

Just as today, alcohol and drugs were food for tragedy - bringing hardship and ruin to those addicted, and often to their families as well. But before government regulation, the circle of tragedy reached no further than the addict and his immediate family.”

The article goes on at some length about the connections between the enforcement of Prohibition and the growth of crime, and it’s really an excellent article, but I think that in his diplomacy Browne has missed the main point behind Prohibition and the Drug War.

That is, in my opinion, key to understanding why a failed drug policy continues to thrive, decades after it was shown to be a failure.

The drug war continues because it is the easiest and most expeditious means to institute the military style policing and political-governmental policies that facilitate the police state.

That is, the drug war is an easy excuse and ready means to wage war on the American public.

When we are all frightened about the dealer who may be living next door, the Godless, soulless, murderous junkie dealer who could be JUST NEXT DOOR, ready to molest your daughters and addict your sons - or vice versa - when we fear those around us, we are all to happy to support attacks on civil and human rights, and the erosion of freedoms and openness. Then dealers, now terrorists, if we are scared of an unknown threat that could be anywhere, any time, we are compliant.

The War on Drugs accounts for over half of all arrests in the United States in a given year, more than all violent crime combined - say it again - more than all violent crime combined. The War on Drugs excuses the highest imprisonment rate in the world, extravagant police investments into military vehicles and tactics like urban assault vehicles and SWAT teams, Gestapo tactics like no-knock warrants and nighttime raids, and all the other trappings and table dressing of a police state.

If not for the War on Drugs, the United States government could not justify its incarceration rate, its military policing and corrections investments, its spy tactics, and its outright attacks on individual privacy and autonomy. It could not justify its use of our public education systems as indoctrination systems for good-little-citizen behavior, its court systems for excusing official lies while punishing the innocent.

Over 25% of American states now allow Medical Cannabis (I really dislike the term marijuana), several more are debating doing so, and some of them are also considering decriminalization schemes, while a few major cities have already made cannabis the lowest priority for their officers. Public acceptance of Medical Cannabis is at an all-time high, as medical studies are producing positive results after being unable to study cannabis for many decades, and a large portion of the public - just about everyone I speak to, honestly - rightly believe that alcohol and nicotine are more harmful than cannabis.

It seems like cannabis has a tailwind and is making great strides towards achieving public acceptance after a 70-year reign of lies about a very useful product.

Good thing the Great Satan came up with a new public enemy #1 to keep us all scared and compliant, fearful of the unknown threat - Terrists. If not for the new fear to slot in as “DRUGGGZZZZZ!!!!” is slowly extracted, our (and I use the term “our” lightly) government might actually be put in the position to explain its outright violent aggression against civil society, peace, human rights, and personal choice.

What’s Goin On?

Hey y’all, I appreciate your comments asking where I’ve been. I’m a student, I was taking 16 hrs of coursework in Electrical & Computer Engineering, and working about 20 hrs a week also. Add that in with a social life and no internet access at home, and I’ve been notably absent.

This summer I’ll be working on an NSF research project into self-forming wireless sensor networks, right on topic for what I’m aiming to achieve. My faculty adviser at my Uni is into ultrawideband microstrip antennas also.

Anyway, I’ve got a laptop now, and should have wireless throughout the summer, so hopefully I’ll be able to put out more articles. Right now I’m really focusing on doing well in school and on this research project so I’ll have the money, experience, and education to stop talking and start doing.

I’m deeply devoted to providing free communications service for everyone, not just those who can pay extravagantly overpriced bills for the value-added government spying services, but truly everyone. I think it is our first amendment right to the freedom not only of speech, but of communication, and I think once the world can all talk to each other without worrying about whose paying the bill, we’ll all be better off.

I myself, having grown up in dire poverty and lived at mere subsistence levels in this once great, rich, powerful nation, know firsthand the limitations that come with not having enough money to do ‘basic’ things like call your congressmen or the press or a company that has wronged you somehow. If you can’t afford the bill for a call to Washington, how are you being represented? Communication is a basic human right, and we have the right to communicate without intervention, filtering, spying, eavesdropping, aggregating, or whatever other bullshit people want to claim is a necessary government function.

I think free communication services, as well as individually controlled data services (that is, hosting your own email server et al) and social networking services will transform the face of our planet, harboring a new, true direct democracy and a government that truly represents the will of the people, not just the powerful.

Thank you all who read my site, and I hope I can continue to have something interesting to say.

How to Get as Much Free Cannabis as You Can Smoke

Okay well not free, but damn cheap, I’m talkin the finest available for like, $10 an ounce. Yeah, an ounce.

How?

Well… grow your own. Seriously. It’s not hard at all, if you can grow tomatoes you can grow weed. It is, in fact, a weed, and will grow with a minimum of attention - but for the best stuff, you do need to tend to it daily.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you how to grow your own pot, there’s a million books and websites on that topic much more experienced and knowledgeable about it than I am. Look up Jack Herer or Jorge Cervantes, or go to Google and search for “How to grow (pot, marijuana, cannabis, weed, ganja, whatever you want to call it)”. This guy seems to know what he’s talking about.

What I’m interested in here is the philosophy and social impact if all of us potheads were to grow our own. Here are my principles to ponder.

1. Only grow enough for yourself - 1-3 plants, maybe 5 if you’re a heavy or have lots of friends.

2. DO NOT SELL IT - not a pound, not an ounce, not a dime bag. If you have more than you need, give it to your friends. Yes, I said GIVE IT TO THEM. If they offer you money, don’t accept it. Let them buy you some beer or a new bong or something, accept an item, not cash.

3. Don’t tell anyone you’re growing - if you give them weed, just tell them a friend is growing - a friend that you NEVER NAME - and that s/he gave you more than you need.

4. Don’t drive around with it - keep it at home only! If you give some to a friend, make them come get it.

Alright, now what’s the impact of this behavior if we were to adopt it widescale?

The energy costs of your own personal grow will be about 300-500W, maybe 1kW depending on setup, undetectable by the po-po.

You don’t have to buy it, sell it, or transport it, so there goes 90% of the risk in using it.

The price of the drug will crash, putting violent gang members and drug cartels out of business.

You will always have as much pot as you want, and don’t have to pay out the nose to get it. Imagine, enough pot to eat it instead of smoking it? Enough to cook it into your meals regularly?

You’ll be the delight of all your friends - until they catch on and get on board. Who can argue when everyone benefits?

More money AND more pot? Sign me up.

A Dialog on My Plans for a New Communications Network

I asked someone of note for their perspective on my wireless communications network plans, and much to my delight they responded with encouragement and salient criticism. I have decided to respect their anonymity unless they give me permission to name them, but enjoyed responding to their comments, and felt that the issues that they raised were well worth addressing publicly, so I’ve decided to post it here for a wider audience. In order to preserve their anonymity I have edited their comments slightly.

[This] is quite appealing, and well written too. It makes me wonder what the answers are.

I have a few comments on certain points.

What if this same technology didn’t only give you cellular service, but internet service, faster than the wired broadband you have at home? Free, ubiquitous, wireless, open source.

There’s one drawback with that wording: “free” seems to refer to price, leaving nothing to refer to “free software” as in freedom. Can you fix that?

What if it could always tell you what was down the block, anywhere in the city, or where your friends are?

Could it also tell the FBI at any moment where your friends are? And who are your friends? I think it would be difficult to tell you this without telling everyone else.

What if it kept track of all of your possessions, and could tell you exactly where any one of them was, even when you loan it to a friend?

Could it also tell the FBI at any moment what your possessions are and where they are?

I sympathize fully with [this] but I have to wonder whether there is a solution.

[This] speaks (several times) of “open source”, and doesn’t mention “free software” along with it. Instead it seems to use “free” to mean “gratis”.

That misses an opportunity to help F/OSS, and an opportunity to refer to freedom. So how about replacing “open source” with “free (as in freedom)” or “freedom-respecting”?

It also refers to the GNU/Linux system as “Linux”, which gives its principal developers none of the credit. Would you please change it to “GNU/Linux” so as to give equal mention?

My response, again edited slightly.

You are right that the only obvious usage of “free” is in price, whereas I intended it to mean freedom of use (as in speech) as well as without cost (as in beer), I didn’t make that clear. Usually when I speak of “open source” I use that as a reference to software that can be modified and controlled by the user, but perhaps that’s reaching a bit from its common understanding. I don’t think I should directly edit the article since so many have read it already, but I will definitely incorporate that clarification in the static pages on the topic I will be posting, and adding a comment to the page to clarify that as an end note.

While the FBI could conceivably intercept transmission, my plan is for all data to be encrypted with public-private keys (not sure on what encryption scheme, I’m concerned about NSA backdoors in existing standards), so that the intermediaries who pass on the packets only know where it’s headed, not what it is. And since we are bypassing centralized wired networks, it would be an extreme effort for the FBI to monitor any useful portion of the network. Interception would be most likely near actual government facilities or wherever government owned nodes exist - and I would think that a security-minded person could set their preferences to avoid any government nodes if they so chose, and have intermediaries route with respect to these preferences. I’m still in the early stages of this project, so it’s definitely something that will be kept in mind throughout the process, as security and privacy are priorities, with one of the main goals being to disable government spying, wiretapping, and data mining programs. I admit I haven’t conceptually (nor mathematically) resolved how to keep the contents private while enabling user-set routing protocols across intermediaries who have no real obligation to respect the originator’s preferences. I suppose respect for others is as much an issue on computer networks as it is in human networks. But anyway, I expect the vast majority of this traffic to be short distance, of say a few miles or so, and non-broadcast, so any spy would have to be physically located between the transmitter and receiver (of either the origin or any hop), unless one of the intermediaries copies and retransmits the packets to a third party.

As for friends, I would expect that you would exchange keys with your friends that would let them ping you and get a response with whatever information you deem to give them unless you disable their key temporarily or permanently. This would be superficially similar to exchanging friend status on say Facebook or MySpace, where you offer and accept friends via requests, adding them to your network - in this case, your key-ring. Unless another party has your keys, they might know where “a” node is, but not that the node is you - but sneaker work could overcome this simply by correlating a node on the map to a visual identification. As always, no system is without flaws.

Onto possessions, my expectation is that they would be located with RFID, but RFID that you are the administrator of - when you make a purchase, the act of purchasing would exchange administrator privileges from the purveyor to the purchaser. In doing so this would reset the encryption keys on the RFID so that the item would only respond to your ping, properly keyed. Now, if your key-ring was stolen, then yes, all your friends and possessions would be compromised. You could simply ask your friends to cancel and reissue keys, but the possessions issue is more difficult because they aren’t intelligent. I’m thinking probably a compound key that is accessible only by a preset abstract key tied to your hardware’s signature and also a personal biometric measure of some sort could solve this.

Thanks again for your comments. I greatly value the opinions of people such as yourself who have earned my respect through their words, deeds, and philosophies, and I’m pleased that you found value enough in my own words, deeds, and philosophies such as to respond to them. I have a lot of work ahead of me to achieve even a fraction of what I have promised, in fact, an entire lifetime if not more of work, and my opinion is that only by gaining the mutual respect of those who have gone before me, can I ever hope to accomplish the tasks set before me. I hope that you might continue to be interested in these plans of mine as I develop them and work towards their fruition.

Why Can’t I Shout on Digg Anymore?

For the last week and a half, I haven’t been able to send shouts on Digg. Oh, the option is there, and when I click the “Shout” button it says “Shouting”, but no matter how long I wait, nothing goes through, it never shows up on my user page, and no one ever gets the shout. I can’t send any of my stories out to my network. Why is that? Is it a glitch? If it is, why did it never happen before about a week and a half ago? If it is, why does it happen every single time I try to shout? Have I been blacklisted? What the hell is going on?

The State of the Nation, 2008

I am like a slave who, enjoying an imaginary liberty during sleep, begins to suspect that his liberty is only a dream; he fears to wake up and conspires with his pleasant illusions to retain them longer. So insensibly to myself I fall into my former opinions; and I am slow to wake up from this slumber for fear that the labors of waking life which will have to follow the tranquility of this sleep, instead of leading me into the daylight of the knowledge of the truth, will be insufficient to dispel the darkness of all the difficulties which have just been raised. - Rene Descartes, 1641

The Father of the Modern World, though more than 350 years removed, foresaw our present condition in his conclusion to his First Meditation. I was struck recently in re-reading the work how pertinent his words and how tightly applicable.

The citizens have been enslaved by their governments, their governments enslaved by their banking systems; our belief of our liberty is only a dream. Both man and government are at the mercy of business, striven to find a profit and caring not where or how it was obtained. Long have we been asleep to our enslavement, as the reaping was rich and the bounty was plentiful. But long we’ve been drawing our resources faster than they replenish.

During wealthy times, our enslavement was loose, but as the bounties decline, the bonds tighten and we become aware. Soon Americans will be forced to wake up completely and bear witness of their own enslavement; but the work required to fix their situation is great. Americans fear that they won’t be able to break the chains that bind them. They fear the heavy toll this will take, and the violence of conflict. So Americans bargain and game with their captors to delay the inevitable.

But America - and the World, and all men on it - will be forced to awake. Our eyes will be thrust open and the bright light of day will shine through us. The world, all Mankind united as one, is strong enough to withstand the oncoming darkness, and dispel it. Great difficulties have been raised as of late, and many Men will be roused in their handling.