Randazzled: hail the free-screech superhero of [alleged] rapists and Nazis and trolls

You may be familiar with Marc Randazza, free-speech attorney and former hero of Jason Jones' Salty Droid blog. In this February 2016 post, I wrote about Randazza and his defense of prick-up "artist" and accused rapist Daryush Valizadeh, more commonly known as Roosh Vorek or Roosh V or simply Roosh (or Doosh, on this blog). It's a long post, but to get to the Randazza/Doosh part, scroll down to the sub-head, "There's Doosh. I mean, Roosh..." In my post I go to great lengths to acknowledge that everyone has the right to freedom of speech and that even someone who has been accused of sexual crimes deserves a good defense, and that, furthermore, wrongfully accusing someone of sexual assault (had that been what was going on) is a very bad thing. But I also acknowledged that there seemed to be an abundance of evidence that Roosh really is a Doosh, and that it appeared that Randazza was unfairly going after a blogger who simply wrote about the rape accusations against his client, and that... well, you can follow the link and read it yourself. Point is, I did try to be more than fair to the less than savory.

I'd initially heard of Randazza because, as indicated above, he was an apparent friend and champion of Jason Jones, whose muckraking Salty Droid blog has, since its inception, been a frequent target of legal action, both real and threatened. In fact I thought of Randazza as sort of a free-speech hero, especially given his boasts that he does a lot of pro bono work to defend unpopular speech. Granted, when I got sued by the loathsome fake doctor and cancer fraud Leonard Coldwell, Randazza seemed indifferent to my own plight (as did another noteworthy free-speech attorney who shall remain nameless here but whose name is mud to me), but Randazza was helping my pal Jason, and that was good enough for me.

But, to put it charitably, he turned out not to be the champion of Jason's work that Jason had hoped -- as Jason explained, not so charitably, in this April 2016 blog post.

If you already knew this background stuff, I apologize for the redundancy. In any case, Marc Randazza has been in the news more recently for some of his other stellar clientele who belong in the Squall of Shame along with Doosh. For example, there's the publisher of the Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin. In spring of 2017 Anglin was sued for coordinating a terror campaign of online harassment against a Jewish real estate agent, Tanya Gersh. Randazza had filed a motion to dismiss the suit based, of course, on his client's First Amendment rights. But last week Dana L. Christensen, chief judge for the U.S. District Court in Missoula, Montana, denied the motion, saying that the real estate agent was a private citizen and that Anglin had incited his followers to harass her as part of a personal campaign.

The civil case (there have been no criminal charges) is now expected to go to trial. From the New York Times article linked to in the above paragraph:

...It has taken a long time because it proved impossible to serve Mr. Anglin with legal papers, Mr. Dinielli said. Mr. Anglin’s last known address was in Ohio, but his whereabouts have been unknown for nearly two years. He is still running the site, possibly from overseas.

His lawyer, Marc Randazza, said that Judge Christensen’s decision was dangerous for free speech.

“The rule we lay down for the Nazi applies equally to the civil rights activist,” Mr. Randazza said in a statement. “And that ruling, if it stands, is not going to be good for anyone who engages in common outrage culture. Maybe that’s a good thing, but I think not.”

Well, Mr. Randazza, notwithstanding your histrionics, in light of the fact that Ms. Gersh has faced truly frightening harassment and death threats as a result of Anglin's blatant incitement, I would say that defending this form of "free speech" is not a good thing. From the "Background" section in Judge Christenson's November 14 order:

The messages received by Gersh and her family, including her son, were filled with ethnic slurs and misogynistic rants. Many messages referenced the Holocaust, and some threatened violence. When Gersh filed her Complaint in the spring of 2017, she and her family had received more than 700 disparaging and/or threatening messages over phone calls, voicemails, text messages, emails, letters, social media comments, and Christmas cards.

In case you missed it, which I apparently did back in July of this year, Randazza also chose to defend conspiracy-porn peddler Alex Jones in some but not all of the numerous legal actions that families of the Sandy Hook victims have filed against Jones. Randazza is involved in a couple of cases in Connecticut. From the July 2, 2018 New York Times article linked to in the previous sentence:

Mr. Randazza has appeared on Mr. Jones’s radio show and in InfoWars videos. In a brief telephone interview, he acknowledged opinions by First Amendment lawyers not involved in the cases that the Sandy Hook families have a strong claim against Mr. Jones. “I think if you look at the allegations in the complaint, that’s an easy conclusion to make,” Mr. Randazza said. “But as these cases progress sometimes things turn in the other direction.”

“We are going to be mounting a strong First Amendment defense and look forward to this being resolved in a civil and collegial manner,” he said, asserting that Mr. Jones has “a great deal of compassion for these parents.”

Randazza, not surprisingly, has vigorously defended his choice to represent Alex Jones as well as the Neo-Nazi Anglin, even as he vigorously defended his choice to represent RooshV back in 2016. In an interview with the Connecticut Law Tribune in July, as reported on the Law.com site, Randazza said that when choosing clients he has no social litmus test or political litmus test; the First Amendment is his only litmus test. He 'splained that he has also represented left-leaning clients -- even some who are Muslims, for goodness sake! -- and that he leans leftward himself. He also says he took pains to make sure that representing the Neo-Nazi guy, Anglin, was okay with his Jewish partner, Jay Wolman.

But others have taken issue with his claim about being a First Amendment purist. F'rinstance, there's Elie Mystal at the Above The Law site. He has considered himself to be an ally if not actually a friend of Randazza, but regarding the Jones representation, even he felt compelled to point out, in this July 3, 2018 post, that Randazza's moral compass appears to be broken.

...you can defend deplorable people without adopting and promoting their deplorable logic. There’s a difference. The legal community does not talk about that difference very much: lawyers shun deplorable lawyers, and deplorable lawyers put their heads so far up their own ass that they think any suggestion of restraint smells bad. But we can draw a line of demarcation around zealous legal defense and ridiculous alt-white dogma.

For me, that line is right here:

“We are going to be mounting a strong First Amendment defense and look forward to this being resolved in a civil and collegial manner,” [Randazza] said, asserting that Mr. Jones has “a great deal of compassion for these parents.”

No, Alex Jones does not have “compassion” for the families of Sandy Hook victims. Saying he does is a lie. Alex Jones has argued that the parents of Sandy Hook victims are FAKING the death of their own children. That means he has no compassion for their suffering. That’s not a difference of opinion, that’s not a certain point of view, that’s a straight lie designed by the alt-right so that the assholes who support Alex Jones can tell themselves that they aren’t going to end up in Hell for their terrible beliefs.

It’s a lie that all lawyers, no matter how steeped they are in Nazi appeasement, have no duty to repeat. If you are going to make your career along the lawyerly duty to give the most disgusting among us a competent legal defense, then stick to the law. If you have a First Amendment argument, MAKE IT, and leave the rehabilitation of Alex Jones’s character to Donald Trump. If you want to argue that Jones’s didn’t have “actual malice” when flinging his wild conspiracies, fine, make that case IN COURT where you can be held to a standard of EVIDENCE for your ridiculous assertions.

The bottom line? Mystal continues:

If you want to represent detestable clients, fine. But when you go out into the media and don’t just defend them but actually adopt their logic and moral arguments, that’s different. Then, it looks like you agree with them. And if you agree with them, you can no longer avail yourself of the lawyerly presumption that you are just doing your job. Instead of being a mere part of the process, you become part of the problem.

Exactly.

I imagine that Salty Droid has some choice words about Randazza and his choice of clients. I'll leave that to him to address (again) on his own blog, should he choose to do so.

As someone who has had her own speech threatened by ill-intentioned scoundrels, I'm a pretty big fan of free speech. I took some time to explain my views, which are more nuanced than some might imagine, in a post I wrote back in August re Alex Jones' whining about being "censored" by several major social media platforms. Here is that link. Even the vilest and most loathsome folks have a right to have their say. They most certainly have the right to legal representation when sued for civil offenses or charged with crimes. And even the hallowed ACLU has defended Neo-Nazis. But when Nazis and trolls having their say crosses the line to harassment and incitement, the First Amendment doesn't -- or at least shouldn't -- protect them. I'm no highly-paid First Amendment attorney, but even I can figure that one out.

* * * * *

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On Death Ray, Salty Droid, and manly men

I'm not yet up to writing anything long and thoughtful, but in the continuing interests of revitalizing this Whirled, here are a few little snippets to close out the cruel month of April.

Death Ray is still at it
If you can access Facebook and can stomach it, here is a beyond-disgusting bit from convicted killer James Arthur "Death" Ray's presentation at last week's "Wealth Summit" held in Clearwater Beach FL (which also happens to be Scientology country). Here's the link, and don't say I didn't warn you:

https://www.facebook.com/100009492367881/videos/2047490262244033/  

The good news is that Death Ray is still playing to much smaller audiences than he did in his glory days, and he had to share billing with several other hucksters, including fellow star of The Secret and third- or fourth-tier Scamworlder, Lisa Nichols.

The bad news is that he is still playing to audiences, and getting them to chant stupid things like, "The naysayers don't know how to count!" He is still framing his imprisonment for negligent homicide, and his lame attempts at a scumback, as a heroic journey. And even if only a very few folks are buying that shtick, that's still far too many.

Salty Droid on QTR podcast
My friend and favorite scambusting blogger/lawyer, Jason Jones, aka Salty Droid, did a podcast for Quoth The Raven earlier this month. While it could probably benefit from a bit of editing, it's still well worth a listen, being a powerful reminder that in Scamworld, there are no neat and tidy endings, and that the more things change with MLMs like Herbalife, the more they stay the same.

One aspect that really struck out for me is that Jason remains consistent in his refusal to condescend to victims of scams, even people who are serially victimized. As frustrating as it may sometimes be to someone observing a friend or loved one under the spell of an obvious scam, any one of us could be vulnerable to even the most blatantly scammy scams given the right (or grievously wrong) circumstances. And it can happen more than once; being screwed by one scam or scammer is almost never a guarantee that you won't be screwed again, in much the same way, by yet another scam or scammer somewhere down the road. In fact that probably happens more often than not. As Jason has pointed out to me (and I quoted him in this October 2016 post), "Manipulation causes susceptibility to manipulation as a side effect."

Here's the link to the podcast.


Manly men, redux
This little blog may not have many readers, and the conversations may not be as active as they were in years past, but it does still get comments, which I greatly appreciate. It shows me that someone is still paying attention. Just yesterday I got a comment to a post I published in January 2011. Framed around criticism of the men's LGAT (Large Group Awareness Training) organization The ManKind Project, the post also covered the mythopoetic "men's movement" in general, a phenomenon that took hold in the culture back in the 1980s.

A woman named Aimee sent in a comment thanking me for my post and providing a link to a 2015 guest post her husband had written on the EcoFeminist blog. Her husband had been "groomed" by his therapist to attend a ManKind "Warrior Training" event that, she says, left him traumatized for years. And apparently there were repercussions from the therapist in question following her husband's abandonment of the "training."

Here is a link to the blog post by Aimee's husband. I think he did a wonderful job of pointing out what is wrong about ManKind Project and as an extension, about the whole mythopoetic-men's-group phenomenon. Some of my favorite bits:

Its apolitical and anti-rationalist thinking narrows down the concept of manhood to fairy tales and atavistic concepts that reinforce separation from women rather than look at rational and practical ways to heal disparities, discuss inequalities and examine existing power structures. Kind of like a ‘they have their side of the bus, we want ours’.

I don’t want to be part of a bastardised Grimm fairy tale.

I don’t want to be part of an epic.

If I’m wounded, I don’t want to exclude a great portion of the world in seeking solutions, let alone run around in the bush banging drums and howling like a fucking wolf and pretending I am carrying the strength of male lineage in my family.

I don’t want to make up stories about childhood abuse or repressed memories (a highly dubious technique with very little empirical support).

I don’t want to shed my identity and name myself after an animal.

I’m not interested in LGAT and the rabbit holes it can lead you down and I don’t want to place my emotional/ psychological wellbeing in the hands of someone who has no background in professional mental health services or who subscribes to outmoded and pseudo-scientific ‘therapies’.

I want to be the author of my own story.I want to walk through the bush quietly comfortable in my own skin (and maybe see a real live wolf). I want to be proud of all of my traits no matter how they are labeled.

Good for him. As for me, I need to be the author of my own story too, but for now I'll settle for being the author of this blog, and I'll be back with more in (what I hope will be) the merry month of May. Thanks for reading.

* * * * *

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#NOprah2020

A belated Happy New Year, y'all! Now let's get right down to business.

The world is gabbing about Oprah Winfrey's instantly famous Golden Globes speech, an admittedly moving but at times histrionic bit of oratory that had much of the black-clad audience of narcissistic, self-important celebs in tears, and resulted in far more buzz than a sane country should be comfortable with about a Big O presidential run in 2020. And I have just one question: Has the elevation of an outrageously unqualified billionaire reality-show host to the most powerful position in the world really lowered the bar that much?

Now, in the plus column, Oprah has been pretty consistently liberal/progressive on social issues, and she's literate (and actually loves reading and encourages others to do it), and she has truly done some good in the world. So... totally not like Trump. But Oprah is also a billionaire celebrity and serial hawker (often of questionable people and concepts), and she has no political experience and no "qualifications" other than the ability to work a crowd. So... totally like Trump, though granted, Oprah probably is wealthier than Trump and actually earned her wealth. No silver spoon story for her, in other words.

But still. My initial objection to Oprah-as-president -- and central to this blog's normal beat -- concerns the way she has enabled Scamworld luminaries over the years, particularly those associated with the loathsome New-Wage moviemercial, The Secret. One such luminary/Secret star was convicted killer James Arthur Ray. To my knowledge, Oprah never apologized for her part in elevating him to far, far greater heights of fame than he deserved.

I've mentioned the Oprah/Scamworld connection before on this Whirled, such as in this May 2014 post. In that 2014 post I linked to a powerful blog post from Jean Brown Allison, the sister of Death Ray victim Kirby Brown. Jean has indicated that she will have a lot to say about an Oprah presidential run, and I will happily provide links when she does.

My blogging colleague Salty Droid, now a practicing lawyer fighting Scamworld, has also written about the cozy relationship between Oprah and Scamworld. (Here's a link to more Oprah-tagged posts on Salty's blog. And by the way, Salty just announced that he intends to continue blogging, but in a more serious manner.)

And I can't overlook the contributions of the author and journalist who inspired me to begin blogging in the first place, Steve Salerno at SHAMblog. Over the years, particularly since the initial release of The Secret in 2006, Steve has written plenty about the Oprah effect.
 
In a comment to my Facebook post about an Oprah candidacy, my friend Kathryn wrote that she would not support Oprah as a presidential candidate even though that Golden Globes speech was inspiring. Kathryn added:

For too long she has promoted a new age, positive-wishful thinking prosperity paradigm, rather than naming the structural injustices that are undermining the working and middle classes. Her O magazine, unless it has changed in the last several years, peddled that paradigm with gauzy "live your best life" self help articles that promote products and experts that will presumably help one reach this best life. Personally, I can't forgive her for promoting the likes of Rhonda Byrne and Elizabeth Gilbert as gurus. Also, I don't think people should be elected based on celebrity. I want to support people who have experience and passion for public service and public policy.

Well said, Kathryn.

Of course Death Ray and The Secret are far from Oprah's only promotional sins, as noted in this Slate piece (which does also mention The Secret, but not Death Ray specifically).

Then there is what could be viewed as a bit of hypocrisy, on Oprah's part, regarding the whole #MeToo/Time's Up thing. For there's no doubt that Oprah was pals with one of the villains at the center of #MeToo: film director Harvey Weinstein. The right-wing media have been on fire with this. Here's The Daily Caller.

Now, don't get me wrong here. Contrary to what some of the wingnut memes are insinuating, I don't for a moment believe that Oprah was overtly conspiring to lure young women, such as Brit actress and La Toya Jackson lookalike Kadian Noble, into Harvey's lair. But Oprah did hobnob with Weinstein, and even though she initially expressed shock and dismay at the allegations against her buddy, I think she still has a lot of 'splainin' to do. Her soaring rhetoric at the Golden Globes does not exonerate her.

(At this point I should probably interject that as a woman and a nearly-lifelong feminist I generally support the #MeToo/Time's Up movement, despite my snark at the beginning of this post. The conversations resulting from this movement are long overdue, even if they don't result in any measurable change over time (obviously it's too early to call). However, I do have several concerns. I'm concerned that in their eagerness to honor the stories of countless named and un-named victims of sexual harassment and assault, nuance is lost. Promoters of the movement sometimes verge on vilification of all things male. And apparently men who were at worst guilty of social awkwardness or poor judgment are being caught up in the net with true predators and victimizers. All of this does nothing but give strength to the inevitable backlash, providing ammo to the most loathsome misogynists and men's rights activists. But that's probably worth its own blog post.)

The Oprah/Harvey connection is potentially damning enough, but let's not forget Oprah's history of friendship with Donald John Trump, who, in 1999, suggested that he'd pick her as his running mate if he were ever to run for president. As recently as 2015, he defended that choice. Following O's famous Golden Globes oratory, The Hill posted some past Trumptweets praising Oprah to the moon and back. And after the 2016 election Oprah made some statements that could charitably be described as desperately over-optimistic, but that in retrospect, one year into the reign of the Mad King, are idiotic. (To many of us, of course, these statements sounded idiotic when she first made them.) Notwithstanding her very public support of Hillary Clinton, O said she was "encouraged" by Trump's "willingness" to work with the transition team. She also said that she could sense by his body language during his acceptance speech that perhaps he'd been "humbled" by the experience of having been elected. (In fairness, she did say in passing that she could be wrong. Ya think?)

As I noted in a recent Facebook conversation regarding Oprah and Weinstein, she is either a lousy judge of character, or she just doesn't give a damn.

The Big O and The Big Oaf may or may not still be buds, but I do believe that Oprah Winfrey's nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate would, as many have suggested, be a gift to Trump and his supporters and enablers. So come on, America. I know Trump is unpresidentedly and unprecedentedly awful, and homophobic theocrat Pence is just as awful, and so are most of the likely-at-this-point Republican contenders.

But Oprah? Let's just not, okay?

Related on this Whirled -- March 2016: The Devil at the crossroads of politix and Scamworld (in particular, the part about Neil Postman and his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death)

Not to overstate the case, but... here's more about the Oprah effect:

• Another one from Slate: Oprah Winfrey Helped Create Our American Fantasyland
• From VOX: Oprah's long history with junk science

 * * * * *

Now more than ever, your donation is needed
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Salty Droid (With Pants): off to a great start by suing Herbalife

I have bad news and good news.

The bad news, and it's pretty bad, is that (1) Leonard Cohen, who would have been celebrating his 83rd birthday today, is still dead; and (2) Herr Twitler is still the #NotMyPresident.

The good news, and it is very, very good, is that my favorite scambusting blogger, Salty Droid, aka Jason Michael Jones -- who was admitted to the Ohio bar last year and has begun practicing law again -- has, in partnership with Miami litigation firm Mark Migdal & Hayden, filed a class-action lawsuit against multi-level marketing (MLM) scam giant Herbalife, alleging civil racketeering (RICO) violations.

Here is a direct link to the 83-page complaint (1:17-cv-23429), which was filed in the United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, on September 18, 2017.

Salty/Jason first announced the lawsuit against Herbalife on his blog the day the complaint was filed, and he posted a followup yesterday.

As for the rest of the media, which jumped on coverage of past legal actions against Herbalife, they seem to be a little behind the curve on this one. The Truth in Advertising site reported the lawsuit yesterday, however, and did a good job of summarizing the case and the issues.

And the Valuewalk investment blog mentioned the lawsuit on September 19. The writer noted that Herbalife stock was "about flat today," indicating that investors weren't too worried. He added:

Herbalife will either distance itself from those distributors or take over their defense. So they’ll either be condemning their conduct or endorsing it. Other high level distributors will have to worry about whether they will be added to the lawsuit.

The other big difference between this and Bostick [a previous class action against Herbalife] is the new complaint alleges a RICO conspiracy – a corrupt enterprise consisting of the company and many top distributors – and it alleges that their sales-event methods violate the FTC order as well as other fraud statutes.

But the mainstream business and financial press don't seem to have paid it much heed as of now, at least if the Google search results as of today (September 21, 2017) are any indication. Oh, well, give 'em time.

The September 18 complaint focuses on Herbalife's live events, specifically, their Circle of Success gatherings across the country. While many might think that live events are rapidly becoming obsolete -- what with Skype and other technologies that are considerably cheaper and much less of a hassle -- live gatherings are still very much a part of Scamworld. Wrote Salty in his September 18 post:

These events are dangerous :: weaponized fraud … and they permeate the scam industry. Every wretched festering scamhole I’ve climbed down has contained one of these escalating event sequences at the heart of the harm … anchoring victims to the bottom of Lake Misery.

He pointed out that the fatal faux-sweat lodge that killed three of James Arthur Ray's followers was the culmination of a "deeply manipulative $10,000 event..." Moreover...

Many scams :: like the one I raged about here in 2013 {owned and operated by the now President of the United States of America} … are nothing but events.

And I can add, based upon my conversations with many ex-members, that events were what kept so many faithful followers of currently-imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau drinking the GIN (Global Information Network) Kool-Aid for so long. (Not that Trudeau is actually serving his sentence for the huge GIN fraud -- he's locked up for criminal contempt related to infomercials for his diet book -- but my point is still valid.) The live GIN events -- which included lavish cruises, weekend gatherings at fine hotels, and countless regional events that focused on aggressively manipulating attendees to upgrade to higher membership levels and teaching them to become more aggressively manipulative recruiters themselves -- were carefully and expertly crafted to foster the delusion that GIN members were part of an exclusive, elite group... but that they could only achieve true success and happiness and fulfillment by continually pouring money they didn't have into GIN's coffers, which turned out to be nothing more than a personal piggy bank for Trudeau.

Live events were also how Trudeau's former b.f.f., fake doctor/cancer quack/semi-literate conspiracy peddler Leonard Coldwell, tried to recreate GIN (after being fired by Kevin) through his IBMS Masters Society, but Lenny and his former partner and bro-in-harms Peter Wink (another former Trudeau employee) never had the drawing power that Kevin Trudeau enjoyed. The IBMS events were pretty much a flop, with ever-dwindling attendance, and the "club" ultimately failed in the United States. (Lenny is apparently trying to recreate the magic in Germany now, but I predict it won't last, and can say with near-certainty that even now, it isn't nearly as successful as his Facebook boasts would indicate.)

And, of course, live events have been a very big part of the Herbalife fraud. A little over a year ago Herbalife agreed to a $200 million settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that required it to change its compensation system from being based on recruitment to being based on actual product sales to real customers. But, as the current RICO complaint notes, the FTC didn't address the Circle of Success events, which are described in the complaint as "the single most effective fraud in the arsenal of Herbalife and its top distributors."

The event system lures and ensnares people such as Plaintiffs with the guarantee of significant income, a better lifestyle, and even happiness – all to be easily attained through event attendance.

Yup... just like in GIN.

Meanwhile, in related Scamworld news, the family of Herr Twitler's Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is reportedly pushing Congress to pass a rider that would limit regulatory oversight of MLMs, presumably to make life easier for her family's company, Scamway, and help them avoid some of the troubles suffered by Herbalife. The rider would curb the ability of the FTC to investigate whether MLMs like Amway are pyramid schemes.

Jason et al., y'all have your work cut out for you. But your class action against Herbalife is a great start. Keep it up.

And by the way, here again is a link to Jason's Salty-Droid-With-Pants web site, JonesAtLaw.com. Eat your hearts out, Culbertson&Ass.

PS added 23 September, 2015: Here is a link to the extended version of the complaint against Herbalife, with all exhibits attached.

Related on this blog:
Tin Promises: How MLMs Can Tear Lives Apart
Part 1 and Part 2

Herr Twitler and the wrecking crew proceed with the rape of Amerika

Oh, dear. Here we are on the very the last day of March, and I'm just under the wire again. For the nearly eleven years of this blog's life -- since July 2006 -- I've blogged at least once every calendar month, and often much more than that. I've been preoccupied once again with real work and real life and falling in love with my husband all over again and other engaging things, not to mention that I've been busy railing on social media, and that takes a lot of energy. But now it's high time to return to the Whirled. And though this is still not a political blog, except when it needs to be, I'm feeling like it needs to be again today. I know some of you don't like that, so you'll just have to turn the other way for a while.

Despite the roiling Trussia scandal and all of his other worries, our esteemed SCROTUS Herr Drumpf is still engaging in his petty wars with the critical media, and shaking his tiny little fist at the First Amendment. I first wrote about his threats against the First Amendment over a year ago, shortly after he had bloviated about "opening up libel laws" to make it easier for him to sue journalists and media outlets that hurt his feelings.

Now here we go again, as Herr Twitler takes to his favorite forum on 30 March, 2017, to make noise about "libel laws" once again. Tweeted he:

The failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?

I'm sure the New York Times is quaking in its boots over that threat. Fortunately he's getting a lot of #Resistance to his dumb tweet. Follow the link to the tweet, and enjoy the responses. Detractors spared no effort with their snark, cartoons, and general smackdowns.

Of course I haven't forgotten the Drumpf/Scamworld connection, which makes SCROTUS more relevant to my regular beat. Not that it's even such a reach any more: unfortunately Scamworld and politix have merged in unpleasant new ways that are shaking the foundation of America.

At any rate, in a post this past January, Salty Droid mentioned billionaire investor/corporate raider Carl Icahn:

Carl Icahn :: President Trump’s new special advisor on regulatory reform … owns the biggest chunk of cult-Herbalife.

That Herbalife/Icahn connection is eminently worthy of further exploration (though already explored at length by Salty Droid), and I suspect that our little fake robot has been engaged in such exploration for the past couple of months, which may help 'splain why his blog has been mostly quiet since that January post.

But other media are on now Icahn's case too, including the "failing" New York Times. This is from 26 March, 2017:

[[Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Icahn] to help the nation “break free of excessive regulation.” But there is an additional detail that is raising eyebrows in Washington: Mr. Icahn is a majority investor in CVR Energy, an oil refiner based in Sugar Land, Tex., that would have saved $205.9 million last year had the regulatory fix he is pushing been in place...

...The blitz has already generated at least one clear outcome: Since Mr. Trump was elected president with Mr. Icahn’s very vocal support and nearly $200,000 in political contributions to Republican causes — the stock price of CVR Energy has soared. By late December, it had doubled. It is still up 50 percent from the pre-election level, generating a windfall, at least on paper, of $455 million as of Friday.

The merging of private business interest with government affairs — aspects of which have previously been reported by Bloomberg, but which The New York Times has found further evidence of — has generated protests from ethics experts in Washington, as well as certain Senate Democrats. They consider Mr. Icahn’s dual roles perhaps the most troubling conflict of interest to emerge so far in the new administration.

The larger problem is that the Drumpf wrecking crew seems hell-bent on waging an all-out war on science, and in addition to decimating safety regulations, they are apparently attempting to erase all mention of "climate change" and related matters from official communications issued by any of the government agencies that are involved with environmental issues. In the new "political correctness" under Donald J. Trump, the term "climate change" has become very, very politically incorrect indeed.

And that's every bit as scary as the Scammer in Chief's war on the First Amendment... and possibly even scarier than the Drumpf/GOP parliament of whores' war on Internet privacy... but maybe the privacy thing is a whole 'nother blog post. Or maybe I'll get back to simpler fare, such as imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau and his continuing whiny campaign to have Herr Drumpf set him free.

Anyway, tomorrow's another month, and let's make it as good a month as we can. Under the circumstances, you know.

Vive la Résistance

I did not and will not watch any of the inauguration and post-inaug hoopla. I most certainly did not listen to Herr Drumpf's "American carnage" inauguration speech, which was apparently little more than a rehash of the same old pseudo-populist wrath that helped push the world's nakedest emperor into power. Maybe I'm being a bit of a hear-no-evil see-no-evil monkey, which is quite unlike me, but I just haven't been able to stomach the spectacle. (And speaking of American carnage, there's evidence of it right now on the WhiteHouse.gov web site.)

That said, there were actually good reasons for anti-Drumpfs to watch it all if they were in a position to do so, as Kathryn VanArendonk explained in a piece that originally appeared in Vulture and was posted on Salon.com earlier today.

You should watch it because watching the whole of it, rather than clips filtered through other media, will give you a stronger, more visceral, more immediate sense of the reality of what’s going on. You should watch it actively, skeptically, thoughtfully, critically, and as just one part of a bigger plan of action and resistance. You should watch it because it’s really happening, and we need to learn how to look directly at the thing we don’t like or don’t understand. Refusing to watch Trump will not make him less the president. We need to learn to watch the president we have, and use that knowledge so that we never let this kind of presidency happen again.

I get that, but I still didn't watch. Which doesn't mean that I'm going to continue not watching Drumpf on TV and other media, moving forward. It's just that I really, really needed a bit of a break.

Let the record show...
Except for the parts relating to being a person of faith -- since I'm not, really -- I could have written this post, which was actually written by North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz. And so, I think, could at least 65 million other Americans.

Let the record show that I did not consent to this.

Let it show that I did not vote for this man, that he did not represent me, that I did not believe he was deserving of being here, that I grieved his ascension....

...And if I prove to be wrong, it will be one of the most joyful errors of my life. I will own these words and if necessary, willingly and gladly admit my misjudgment because it will mean that America is a better and stronger nation, and the world a more peaceful place.

But right now I don’t see that happening.

Right now I am worried for my country, concerned for our planet, scared for the future of my children, and greatly saddened that 62 million Americans seem okay with all of this.

Let the record show that I was not okay with it.

Not at all.

U.S. voters who protest Trump's ascendancy to the throne are not alone. Our friends across the pond are expressing their views as well; for instance, a banner reading "Build bridges not walls" was draped across London's Tower Bridge earlier today. And that's just one of many protests planned across Britain. My friend Tammy Samede, whose thoughts on activism and unity I shared here shortly after the election, is right in the thick of it.

And the protests are and will be going on around the globe. Most heartening of all, the Women's March on Washington, taking place in D.C. on January 21, has gone global, with even Antarctica getting in on the act, meaning that the movement now covers all seven continents. You can find a map of the planned protests, as well as additional information about demonstrations in various cities around the world, in this CommonDreams.org piece.

Let the record show that millions and millions and millions of people across the globe are not happy with the profoundly narcissistic, thin-skinned, grievously unqualified and egregiously unprepared man-child who has just become the most powerful man in the world. And he'll have a historically unqualified Cabinet to help him try to wreck the republic.

"I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet..."
Damn, I miss Leonard Cohen, from whose song, "Democracy," the above sub-head was snatched, and I grabbed it because, despite all of the above, there may be reasons even now for hope. And like comic relief, I will take reasons for hope where I can find them. Tech company founder, author and speaker Peter Leyden speculates that Drumpf's rise to power heralds not the beginning of a new era of hatred and retrogressive policies, but the end.

It’s easy for politicians to whip up public fears against [progressive] changes and rally people to go back to the old ways, to make America great again. This is the standard playbook for right-wing nationalism. In the 1930s... that era’s right wing took those fears and drove a good chunk of the world into fascism and a world war. Today Trump is heading down that path — but he won’t get far.

I think Trump ultimately is going to do America and the world a service by becoming the vehicle that will finally take down right-wing conservative politics for a generation or two. He is getting the entire Republican conservative establishment to buy into his regime. He is creating an administration that is blatantly all about rule by — and for — billionaires, sold out to the oil and carbon industries, and celebrating an out-of-control corporate capitalism. It will be a caricature of conservative policies. In short order he will completely and irrevocably alienate all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century: the Millennial Generation, people of color, educated professionals, women. He’ll eventually do the same for a significant number of more moderate Republicans. And does anyone out there really think Trump will do anything for the white working class that got him elected? Watch as repealing Obamacare blows up in his face.

I hope to Goddess that Leyden is correct. Pablo Picasso famously said that "every act of creation is first an act of destruction." I hope that in the process of creation, the most precious parts of the American experiment are not completely destroyed.

Vive la Résistance.


More than one way to skin a dragon 
The really, REALLY good news -- and now I can say it publicly -- is that Jason Michael Jones, aka Salty Droid, is a fully licensed lawyer once again (he'd voluntarily dropped out of the legal profession about ten years ago). Jason was one of the first to document the Scamworld creds of our new Scammer-in-Chief. And he has already gone to work battling some of the other scum of Scamworld.

...why can’t I be a lawyer and a SaltyDroid? Because it may cause “a certain amount of emotional distress” among Scientologists and their attorneys?

I’m pretty sure I just answered my own question.

I’m fuckin’ doin’ it.

And he seems to have hit the ground running.

Where should we start? {#alreadystarted}

How about maybe multi-billion dollar snake-oil hydra head Herbalife?

Carl Icahn :: President Trump’s new special advisor on regulatory reform … owns the biggest chunk of cult-Herbalife. Edith Ramirez :: who is not not a foe of the company :: is stepping down as chairwoman of the FTC … leaving three of the five commissioner slots open for The Donald to fill. I’m sure HotCarl will have some super duper great ideas about how to ‘reform’ the agency.

Go, Jason and Salty. We're going to need both of you, now more than ever.

Drumpf: the nakedest emperor of all

Our favorite little fake robot, Salty Droid, had been silent again for a while after his last post about the Herbalife scampire. I wasn't too concerned because I knew he was busy with other Matters of Consequence having something to do with Salty Droid 2.0, but I still missed him on his blog. Well, now he's back, with a resolution to help see us through the final daze of this appalling U.S. presidential campaign. In his inaugural countdown post, dated 18 October, he wrote:

Twenty days until the election … here comes twenty fake robot posts about the worst piece of shit of Earth. I don’t have enough substance to fill that many posts :: but it seems that those without substance are free to rave like lunatics … and that I can fucking do with the best of them.

That was soon followed by a post about Trump's performance in the third and final (and I have to admit that using the word "final" makes me a little uneasy) presidential debate.

This clowned-faced egomaniac :: full on scammer :: and proud member of Sarah Palin’s no-books club … lost the third presidential debate as badly as he’d lost the first two. But he did make some solid points along the way :: like …

• Nasty women :: who are too ugly to grope … are ripping babies out of their wombs to support ISIS.
• Crooked Hillary caused the Middle East.
• America is a disaster.
• The cyber emails are a disaster.
• #lockherup
• Black people = war zone.
• War zones = confusing.
• Syrian refugees are murdering us disastrously because Bashar al-Assad is smarter than President Obama.
• Why won’t people Wikileaks Sean Hannity?
• Don the Con shouldn’t have to concede an election to a girl that nobody likes … bigly! #FuckYouAmerica

Apart from the fact that Salty's summary is more coherent than some of Trump's actual word-salad tossing during that debate, I think he nailed it pretty well. And those "solid points" have kept the right-wing foaming-at-the-mouthers pretty busy on social media for the past few days. Some of them just can't stop crying about their conviction that horrible Hillary wants to rip innocent little babies out of the womb hours before they're due to be born. They have zero interest either in Clinton's actual views or the realities of late-term abortion in America.

So let's just let them blather among themselves while we proceed to Salty's final point on that post, which concerns "Donald J. Trump’s next {scam supported} venture :: Trump TV … which is going to be exactly as successful as Tony Robbins TV."

The following day Salty was back again with a post about Drumpf's attempts to con vulnerable people into thinking they could all get rich selling a stupid diet program, Silhouette Solutions, through The Trump Network.

Do you want a silhouette that Donald Trump would consider inappropriately ogling :: or do you want your current silhouette … which {let’s face it ladies} wouldn’t be his first choice?

...Here’s how it worked …

1. Pick the silhouette that you are.
2. Pick the silhouette that you want to be.
3. Eat soy isolates instead of food until you get there.

You think that’s a joke :: because it sounds so stupid and this is a joke site … but it’s not a joke … picking silhouettes was the actual fucking gimmick.

The Starter Program was an eight-week deal that cost $1,325. But, noted Salty, "Judging by his current silhouette... it would seem that Mr. Trump couldn't afford his own solution."

Here is a more detailed analysis of Silhouette Solutions, published in August 2015 by a former naturopath. Says she:

I find it telling that Trump ended up selling suspect health products, one of which was designed by a naturopathic doctor, to financially desperate families. Donald Trump is a voracious profiteer.

If Donald Trump became president, the American people can count on a lot of hyperbolic talk with very little intelligent leadership. At least one prominent naturopath might have his ear. Who knows what might happen. There’s always money to be made selling snake-oil.

Trump sold his interest in the diet scam to Bioceutica, LLC in 2012, but the evidence of his pudgy littlefingers being in that pie lives on in Internet archive infamy.
 
In the previously-linked October 18 post Salty wrote:

I know it seems like the “Trump is conman” story has been eaten by the “Trump is the worst piece of shit on Earth” story … but I think the conman thing is still important. Manipulation of the preprogrammed masses by fake reality celebrities :: the story here … is at the root of all the toxic vines in Trump’s pumpkin patch.

Indeed. There's a devil at the crossroads of politix and Scamworld, and given our celebrity-addicted, entertainment-befuddled culture -- a culture where wingnutty conspiracy narratives are increasingly winning out over nuanced analysis -- it's really not so surprising after all that Herr Drumpf got as far as he did. Frightening, yes, but not surprising.

And not to put too fine a point on the matter, but as I've mentioned before, there seem to be scads of Scamworld luminaries and wannabes who are really into the Donald, imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau being one of them, and the notorious Not-Doktor Herr Loony Coldwell being another. It's the old like-attracts-like scenario.
And the sad part is that Drumpf's scams, past and present, are far from unique.

In any case, as I've noted here several times previously, Salty Droid was one of the first and one of the best to nail Drumpf on the latter's Scamworld creds. And I look forward to reading more of his musings as we make our way to what I fervently hope is a rousing victory for that nasty woman, Hillary Clinton. I suppose that it's too much to hope that this season's nakedest emperor, Donald J. Drumpf, will slink into obscurity, but I personally don't care where he slinks, as long as it's nowhere near the Oval Office.

Robot reboot

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 ​S​enators 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.