But I'm stubborn as those garbage
bags
that time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet
~ Leonard Cohen, "Democracy" (1992)
free speech on the internet is a lie. the possibilities are
limitless and intoxicating to imagine :: but the actualities are
primitive and trampled upon by the forces that be … the same
boring ass forces that always have been.
~ Salty Droid, "reboot revolution" (2016)
He has risen.
After too many months of silence, Jason M. Jones' "tiny piece of the Internet," the Salty Droid blog, has been revamped and
re-launched. Here is the first post from the "new" SD. It was actually published on March 24, but due to some
files still being switched around and other technical stuff I
can't claim to understand, I wasn't able to actually read it
until yesterday, March 26.
So today is as good a day as any to celebrate the resurrected
Salty Droid.
One major difference between the old SD and the new SD is that
the new blog is a static site, and comments (all 50,000 or so of
which were carefully preserved in the changeover) are now handled
through Disqus, thus closing the database gateway for the hacks
that Jason had been fighting since his blog's inception in 2009.
And indeed, it was an almost constant battle for more than six
years. In contrast to paranoid lunatic drama queens such as Not-Doktor
Leonard "Loony" Coldwell, who
has been claiming for years that his web sites and
Facebook pages are constantly being hacked,
it appears that Salty Droid -- who actually is a force to be
feared by bad guys -- was being hacked, attacked,
phished and otherwise compromised.
my content has been removed ::
destroyed … and banished from an unlistably wide array of
internet platforms. hackers :: attackers :: malware ::
lawyers :: lawsuits :: smear tactics :: irl harassment …
every kind and sort of smelly shenanigan deployed to silence
me.
Some of those smear tactics include a couple of
asinine "documentary" videos about Jason, cobbled
together from various news stories about other folks who are real
scammers and hackers, but made to look as if Jason were the
perpetrator of the reported crimes. And the lawsuits against him
have been even stupider -- particularly those initiated by the
aforementioned Loony Coldwell. In February 2014, as many may
recall and as I've recounted numerous times here, Coldwell unsuccessfully sued Jason for blog posts
written by another blogger, Omri Shabat
(the case was ultimately dismissed on April 17, 2014, for
"want of prosecution"). And in January 2015 he
unsuccessfully sued Jason in a hilariously wrongheaded defamation
case in which I was also named as a defendant. There have been numerous other lawsuits too, including
a comical trillion-dollar joke by a crazed wordslinger named Crystal Cox.
But you can't keep a good fake robot down.
* * * * *
Free speech on the Internet is a volatile issue, and it is the
issue at the heart of Jason's struggle, and to a less dramatic
degree (since almost nobody reads my blog) to mine as well.
Scammers fight fiercely for their right to utilize every online
resource available to prey upon the vulnerable; they battle for
their right to make the most outrageous claims about their
accomplishments and their overpriced frauducts and
flopportunities -- and they fight with equal or greater passion
to silence their critics. They will stop at nothing to quash any
speech that threatens to disrupt their income stream by exposing the scammers and their scams for what they really are. The Church of Scientology's "Fair Game" strategies represent an extreme, but hundreds of lesser
organizations and individual scammers use similar tactics. And
when you have a front-runner in the 2016 US presidential race
threatening to "open up libel laws" in the US to make
it easier to silence critics of scams and scammers, that's truly cause for concern.
Krispen Culbertson, the North Carolina lawyer who headed the
two-man "legal team" that sued Jason and me on behalf
of Coldwell, wrote a blog post in April 2015 in which he
referenced that case without naming any names except that of his
heroic partner, Bill May. There's no permalink to the individual
post, but you can find it if you follow
this link and scroll down to April 6, 2015. The profoundly self-important Mr. Culbertson wrote:
I have been a lawyer for more than 20
years. I've seen my clients wearing London tailored suits
and I've seen them with tear-drop tattoos at the corners
of their eyes on their faces. I've represented every
kind of person, from State Senators to alleged senior
members of Mexican drug cartels in federal court. I
have seen the angel in the human race, and I have seen the
scariest of the devils. But now there is a new kind of
devil evolving in the law. And I'm not sure if this type
isn't ultimately more dishonest than the type with tear-drop
tattoos.
I'm almost honored to be categorized, along with Jason, as
"a new kind of devil." Mr. Culbertson went on and on
about online defamation, claiming that he as well as his clients
have been the victim of same. Said he:
We mustn't accept this as the new
reality. Europe has taken steps in the right direction with
its "Right to Be Forgotten" laws, which require
search engines to remove outdated and inaccurate information
about individuals. As much as we Americans hate following
Europe's lead on anything, it isn't a bad idea at all. It
puts the human element back into the machine...
But you see, bad guys don't have a moral
"right to be forgotten" -- and they shouldn't have a legal
right either -- if they continue doing their bad-guy things to
the present day, like Mr. Culbertson's former client Coldwell
does. In any case it is worthy of note that Culbertson &
Associates no longer lists Internet defamation as one of their
areas of practice. I rather think that Jason shamed them out of
it.
But there are plenty of others who continue to fight on the wrong
side of this war, defending the indefensible and seeking to
destroy the wrong people. (By the way, this March 2012 Salty Droid post has some good stuff about protecting freedom of speech
and going after scammers who would destroy it.)
* * * * *
Hobby blogging is for the most part a thankless
task; it has to be its own reward. Some people make tidy little
incomes from their hobby, and I've nothing against that at all,
but so far haven't managed to do so. If you're not making money
from your blog (as Jason isn't, and as I'm currently not, apart
from the occasional donation), it's
inevitable that at some point you'll ask yourself why you keep
doing it. I most certainly have, as I mentioned in my belated New Year's post in January of this year.
I ruminated at greater length about these matters in late December 2014,
following Jason's "Merry Christmas Goodbye" post, in
which he announced that he was putting his blog on hold for an
indefinite period to attend to other things. (Some of us feared
it might really be goodbye, but as it turned out it was neither
goodbye nor even a true hiatus, as Loony Coldwell's
Culbertson-fueled flawsuit actually gave the Salty Droid blog a
little bit of a shot in the arm during those fallow months.)
And author and journalist Steve Salerno, whose SHAMblog initially
inspired me to tread into the blogosphere, recently questioned his own blog's purpose as well. This is in response to a comment I made on his March
16, 2016 post, where I wrote that I missed the conversations many
of us used to have on SHAMblog.
Yeah Connie, there are days when I miss
the sizzle of the old thriving SHAMblog. And I certainly miss
the mix of personalities, both individually and in the way we
all played off each other. ...But then there are other days
when I think of all the time and energy I put into the blog,
and I say...to what end? How might I have better served
myself and my family if, instead of coasting along on the
reasonably solid workload I had going then (and running back
to SHAMblog at every opportunity), I put out the kind of
single-minded effort I've been forced to expend over the past
few years?
And I also ask myself: What was changed? What was the upshot
of all that banter? Did we really make a difference? I do get
appreciative notes now and then from people who say I
"helped save" them from this or that, but it all
seems so disproportionately small compared to the investment.
I dunno. I guess every writer who isn't Grisham or whoever
asks himself at some point, why am I doing this? Maybe even
Grisham asks himself.
I can't count the times I've asked myself those questions too,
but these days I keep coming back to the concluding paragraphs of
the Jennifer Garam blog post
that I cited on my own New Year's post, linked to above. Someone,
somewhere, does give a sh-t about what I'm writing. This
despite my pathetic stats, which I check every once in a while.
Here's a shot I took on March 15, 2016. The number in column 2
following the blog post title indicates number of comments, and
the one in the next column indicates number of visitors. I'm
really raking 'em in.
But I still care enough to keep on writing
because of the possibility that somehow it matters. As well, I
know that a lot of folks still care about what Steve writes on
SHAMblog, and -- more importantly for the purpose of this post --
they care about what Jason writes as well. I can't wait to see what's next.
So on this day when millions are celebrating what many believe to
be the Greatest Miracle of All, I'm celebrating a lesser one: the
persistence of one little wild bouquet that blooms on, despite
the most toxic campaigns of who knows how many scoundrels. Writes
Salty, "it’s not supposed to be some big fu----g triumph
that i continue to exist … but i guess it is. much of my energy
:: and most of my frustrations … flow to and from this battle
for basic existence."
Bleep on, little robot.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go in the house and bite
the head off of the chocolate bunny that my friend Joan gave me. I'll be back soon.
In case you haven't seen it yet, here
at last is Part 1 of what is intended
to be a three-parter by Jason Jones, aka Salty Droid, one of my
co-defendants in a failed defamation lawsuit brought against us
and a few other real and imaginary defendants in January of this
year by the comically but disturbingly daft Not-Doctor Leonard Coldwell. [Case number 15-CVS-2791, filed
in the General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division,
Guilford County, North Carolina]
The suit was dismissed nearly four months ago, but Jason was busy
with other Matters of Consequence and is only now able to turn
his attention to doing justice to this story of a most unjust
lawsuit. And it appears to me that it was well worth the wait.
As many of you may recall, I wrote about this dumb lawsuit
from my own perspective in May of this year, just after the case
was voluntarily dismissed by the Plaintiff, but I told only a
very small part of the story. For several reasons Jason has many
more insights and much more hilarity to offer, and in the process
he is accomplishing something I was not fully equipped to do:
giving the lawyers who handled this utter sham of a case, William
Franklin May and K.E. Krispen Culbertson of
Greensboro, North Carolina, the smackdown they so richly deserve.
I feel that these lawyers deserve sanctions and that I deserve an
apology from them, but for now Jason's efforts are providing more
than a small measure of satisfaction for me. It almost makes up
for the disappointment I felt when a mainstream-ish media outlet,
after months of back-and-forth, killed this story, supposedly
because the case had been dismissed and was no longer "a
thing." Almost certainly it was not because the media outlet
(which is constantly getting lawsuit threats about stories but
runs with them anyway) had been intimidated by either the
Plaintiff or his attorneys, whose lunatic accusations and threats
against the reporter would have made for a richly humorous story.
But that's water under the bridge. In the end, hobby bloggers,
who lack both the safety net of dedicated legal teams and the
promise of monetary compensation for their efforts, are the ones
left to tell the stories from which other media, for various
reasons, still shy.
Apart from his own knowledge of the law, Jason is able to flesh
out this narrative in ways I could not because he engaged in
extensive private communications with the lawyers. One topic of
conversation among them was that they never properly served
him, supposedly because they couldn't find his address, which is
on the public record. This contrived logistical glitch gave rise
to some more totally loony lies from Coldwell about how Jason was in hiding from service -- kind of a
deja vu of the big and little fibs Lenny told during his last failed lawsuit against Jason, which was filed in February 2014 and dismissed by the
judge in April 2014 "for want of prosecution."
In a February 2015 post Jason
wrote a comical tale of May and Culbertson's attempts to pretend
to serve him with the most recent suit, and he very briefly
quoted some of their communications with him. But what he quoted
there was just the tip of the iceberg... or should I say the tip
of the pile of guano, because clearly, the Plaintiff in this case
wasn't the only one who was displaying signs of being bat-crap
crazy.
Jason also uploaded and provided links to most of the documents in
this case, so you can see clear evidence of how I tried to
respond and how the lawyers ignored my response and continued to
try to intimidate me. On my own post I had only uploaded the
original complaint and the notice of dismissal. So there's a lot
of information about the case on Jason's post that hasn't been on
this blog.
Questions without answers?
In this first installment of his new series Jason raised some
interesting questions about issues that had both him and me (not
to mention the North Carolina court, apparently) puzzled about
the lawyers' true intentions. It appeared, even to my unschooled
eye, that they were not proceeding in anything like a
conventional and certainly not a very professional manner in
response to the motions we filed, and particularly in regard to
the process of discovery.
Jason also hints in his post about the ludicrous efforts by the
lawyers to build a criminal case against him for helping me with
my responses to the lawsuit. Jason -- who as of this writing is
not licensed to practice law and, despite Coldwell's hysterical
attempts at "exposing" him, has not pretended to be
so licensed -- was simply a defendant acting as a friend to
another defendant who had tried repeatedly but failed to get
legal representation. He never claimed to be representing me in
this case in any way. He never offered me legal advice and I
never asked for it. But apparently the lawyers' and Lenny's
little panties were in a wad because I responded in a timely
manner to the complaint, and my response looked an awful lot like
Jason's.
It appears that as a result of my response, that
ace team went back to their crummy little office space in the
shadow of the mighty Guilford County Courthouse, and spent some
time and brain cells trying to cobble together a new pleading
that included criminal charges against Jason for practicing law
without a license. That wouldn't have gone anywhere either, as
they had no grounds for a criminal case. But the total absurdity
of suggestions of criminality did not stop their loose-cannon
client from crowing about it prematurely to Jason in April, and, the month before that, bragging on Facebook about "criminal charges"
and "arrest warrants."
In truth, no criminal charges were filed and no arrest
warrants issued in this now-dismissed CIVIL case. So
Coldwell lied... yet again. (I know I went on a bit about that in
my May post, but it deserves a revisit.)
Were the discovery irregularities and the threats of a criminal
case the results of incompetence on the lawyers' part, or were
they simply trying to intimidate me and, as Jason wrote, to scare
him away from helping me in order to "further isolate and
terrify" me? After all, I seemed to be the main target of
this joke of a multi-defendant pleading. And lawsuits can
be terrifying or at the very least very stressful to us novices.
I won't lie: it did stress me out at times, even though I knew I
was not in the wrong and I had no intention of removing my blog
posts. But many times unrepresented defendants, not knowing any
better, are intimidated into responding to a suit in a way that
does not serve their best interests. And it seems that Loony and
his legals were banking on that happening with me. Fortunately I
did not cave.
At any rate, judging from the attorneys' actions, including the
original lawsuit, my guess is that incompetence and
(sleazy but clumsy) intimidation strategies were both factors in
this travesty.
There were so many flaws in the lawsuit beyond the obvious lack
of jurisdiction. Although I was properly named in the original
complaint, the web site address for Jason's blog was not properly
named, nor was that of another co-defendant, RationalWiki. There was also
further evidence of the attorneys' web ignorance as well, which
Jason pokes fun of. And in case you haven't seen this
one yet, here is another humorous jab at the stupidity of
Culbertson & Associate's lawsuit on behalf of Leonard
Coldwell, written by the same guy who,
as it happens, also wrote the RationalWiki article on Coldwell.
Moreover the lawsuit got it all wrong regarding Jason's writings
about Coldwell. The complaint against Jason focused on a September 2012 post he
had written about a 2007 Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina police
report on Coldwell [case number 2007-04652]. The claim on the
lawsuit was that Jason had published the police report and other
commentary "which falsely accuse Plaintiff of having forced
a person or persons to have sex" --
but Jason never wrote such a thing. He didn't even publish the
police report, only a very, very small portion of it. He captured
the essence of the allegations of multiple complainants by
combining their stories and scrambling details that might
identify them. Essentially what he wrote was that the police report indicated that Coldwell had
manipulated numerous women into having sex, under false pretenses. In other words, Jason never actually claimed that
Leonard Coldwell is a rapist.
And I won't even get into all of the inaccuracies
in the claims against me. Yes, they got my name and county and
state correct. But that's about the extent of the accuracy. No
specific blog posts were cited; words and concepts were simply
lifted, seemingly at random, from various posts about Coldwell.
Most of the allegations regarding specific things I had written
about him were either paraphrases, quotations taken out of
context or in a couple of cases were words that I had actually
written about someone else (e.g., Kevin Trudeau) rather than
Coldwell. Regarding other things I'd written about Coldwell that
the complaint listed as false or obscene or abusive, I provided
plenty of screen shots and links to source material to back up my
writing.
The complaint also falsely said I was making money from writing
about Coldwell and that because the things I had written were
false (according to the complaint) I was engaging in deceptive
advertising and fraud. And the complaint inaccurately claimed I
had been asked and demanded previously to remove content about
Coldwell from my blog. That is not the case. Until this January
2015 lawsuit I had never been asked or demanded to remove any
content about Coldwell. In fact the complaint demanded a temporary and then permanent injunction to make me remove the content, but that was a pleading to the court, not an attempt to communicate directly with me.
Jason's post also raises another question: to what extent was
Coldwell playing his lawyers and to what extent were they playing
him? It appears to me that neither the Plaintiff nor his
attorneys were being completely honest with each other.
Dismissing the case was the only right thing to do, but a
"righter" thing to do would have been for the lawyers
to vet the client at the outset, and never to have taken the case
in the first place. Let's hope that any future prospective
attorneys will do their homework and discover that
Leonard Coldwell is a serial frivolous
litigator.
And this man who claims to be such a brave hero and fighter is
doing the very thing he has often accused Jason/Salty of doing:
hiding. But there is nowhere left for him to hide, and now his
stupidity has brought two more lawyers into the harsh and ugly
glare of the spotlight that has been on Leonard Coldwell for
years. And, contrary to what Culbertson & Associate might have
once claimed about their now ex-client, this is not a false
light, but the truest one there is.
I look forward to enjoying the next course in the Salty banquet.
Meanwhile, here's
that link to Part 1 again.
