Cryptonomicon 6b

I am forever telling my closest friends that they need to read the Cryptonomicon. None of them have. I will now start posting the book on my blog, page by page.

All Parts are copyrighted by Neal Town Stephenson.

Read the Cryptonomicon yourself

============

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.

Charlene’s crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn’t being told that they were wrong that offended them, though—it was the underlying assumption that a personcould be right or wrong about anything. So on the Night in Question—the night of Avi’s fateful call—Randy had done what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien’s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia, these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

Then the topic of the Information Superhighway came up, and Randy could feel faces turning in his direction like searchlights, casting almost palpable warmth on his skin.

Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a few things to say about the Information Superhighway. He was a fiftyish Yale professor who had just flown in from someplace that had sounded really cool and impressive when he had gone out of his way to mention it several times. His name was Finnish, but he was British as only a non-British Anglophile could be. Ostensibly he was here to attend War as Text. Really he was there to recruit Charlene, and really really (Randy suspected) to fuck her. This was probably not true at all, but just a symptom of how wacked out Randy was getting by this point. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had been showing up on television pretty frequently. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a couple of books out. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was, in short, parlaying his strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into more air time than anyone who hadn’t been accused of blowing up a day care center should get.

A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what really mattered.

That was what Randy always told himself, anyway. But on the Night in Question, it didn’t work. Partly because Kivistik was too big and real to be a Hobbit—probably more influential in the real world than Randy would ever be. Partly because another faculty spouse at the table—a likable, harmless computerphile named Jon—decided to take issue with some of Kivistik’s statements and was cheerfully shot down for his troubles. Blood was in the water.

Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn’t handle issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.

"How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?" Kivistik said. This profundity was received with thoughtful nodding around the table.

Jon shifted in his chair as if Kivistik had just dropped an ice cube down his collar. "What does that mean?" he asked. Jon was smiling, trying not to be a conflict-oriented patriarchal hegemonist. Kivistik in response, raised his eyebrows and looked around at everyone else, as if to say Who invited this poor lightweight? Jon tried to dig himself out from his tactical error, as Randy closed his eyes and tried not to wince visibly. Kivistik had spent more years sparring with really smart people over high table at Oxford than Jon had been alive. "You don’t have to bulldoze anything. There’s nothing there to bulldoze," Jon pleaded.

"Very well, let me put it this way," Kivistik said magnanimously—he was not above dumbing down his material for the likes of Jon. "How many on-ramps will connect the world’s ghettos to the Information Superhighway?"

Oh, that’s much clearer, everyone seemed to think. Point well taken, Geb! No one looked at Jon, that argumentative pariah. Jon looked helplessly over at Randy, signaling for help.

Jon was a Hobbit who’d actually been out of the Shire recently, so he knew Randy was a dwarf. Now he was fucking up Randy’s life by calling upon Randy to jump up on the table, throw off his homespun cloak, and whip out his two-handed ax.

The words came out of Randy’s mouth before he had time to think better of it. "The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!" he said.

There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison. Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. All they could do now was grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt.

"That doesn’t tell me very much," Kivistik said. "Everything is a metaphor. The word ‘fork’ is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork. "All discourse is built from metaphors."

"That’s no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said.

"Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik said, doing his killer impression of a heavy-lidded, mouth-breathing undergraduate. There was scattered tittering from people who were desperate to break the tension.

Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academician’s ace in the hole: everything is relative, it’s all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with: "Who decides what’s bad? I do."

Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn’t sure if Randy was joking. "Excuse me?"

Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. "It’s like this," he said. "I’ve read your book. I’ve seen you on TV. I’ve heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you’re not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.’’

"Oh," Kivistik said in mock confusion, "I didn’t realize one had to have qualifications."

"I think it’s clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I’m sick, I don’t ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it."

"Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet," Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd.

"You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true," Randy said, pleasantly enough. "A number of Internet experts have written well-reasoned books that are sharply critical of it."

Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone.

"So," Randy continued, "to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D."

"Oh. I see," Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. "So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology."

The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck.

"I’m not sure what a technocrat is," Randy said. "Am I a technocrat? I’m just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?"

"You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that book," Kivistik said. "The ability to wade through a technical text, and to understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege conferred by an education that is available only to members of an elite class. That’s what I mean by technocrat."

"I went to a public school," Randy said. "And then I went to a state university. From that point on, I was self-educated."

Charlene broke in. She had been giving Randy dirty looks ever since this started and he had been ignoring her. Now he was going to pay. "And your family?" Charlene asked frostily.

Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. "My father’s an engineer. He teaches at a state college."

"And his father?"

"A mathematician."

Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table. Case closed.

"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat. "No one in my family has ever had much money or power," he said.

"I think that the point that Charlene’s making is like this," said Tomas, one of their houseguests who had flown in from Prague with his wife Nina. He had now appointed himself conciliator. He paused long enough to exchange a warm look with Charlene. "Just by virtue of coming from a scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite. You’re not aware of it—but members of privileged elites are rarely aware of their privileges."

Randy finished the thought. "Until people like you come along to explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are."

"The false consciousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes entrenched power elites so entrenched," Charlene said.

"Well, I don’t feel very entrenched," Randy said. "I’ve worked my ass off to get where I’ve gotten."

"A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere," someone said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun.

"Well, I’m sorry I haven’t had the good grace to get nowhere," Randy said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, "but I have found that if you work hard, educate yourself and keep your wits about you, you can find your way in this society."

"But that’s straight out of some nineteenth-century Horatio Alger book," Tomas sputtered.

"So? Just because it’s an old idea doesn’t mean it’s wrong." Randy said.

A small strike force of waitpersons had been forming up around the fringes of the table, arms laden with dishes, making eye contact with each other as they tried to decide when it was okay to break up the fight and serve dinner. One of them rewarded Randy with a platter carrying a wigwam devised from slabs of nearly raw tuna. The pro-consensus, anti-confrontation elements then seized control of the conversation and broke it up into numerous small clusters of people all vigorously agreeing with one another. Jon cast a watery look at Randy, as if to say, was it good for you too? Charlene was ignoring him intensely; she was caught up in a consensus cluster with Tomas. Nina kept trying to catch Randy’s eye, but he studiously avoided this because he was afraid that she wanted to favor him with a smoldering come-hither look, and all Randy wanted to do right then was to go thither. Ten minutes later, his pager went off, and he looked down to see Avi’s number on it.

Uncle Pauly's Birthday Dash

Here's a new game I just made based on birthday greetings from my niece and nephews.

Raw Concept Art

Thank you guys for the wonderful cards and the ideas! Have fun playing!

THE CHILD-RAPE ASSEMBLY LINE

IN RITUAL BATHHOUSES OF THE JEWISH ORTHODOXY, CHILDREN ARE SYSTEMATICALLY ABUSED

By Christopher Ketcham


from here





Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, the lone whistleblower among the Satmar, a powerful Hasidic sect, who recently was the victim of a bleach attack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. All photos by Christian Storm.

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg—who is 63 with a long, graying beard—recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a “child-rape assembly line” among sects of fundamentalist Jews. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to be graphic,” he said.

A member of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim fundamentalist branch of Orthodox Judaism, Nuchem designs and repairs mikvahs in compliance with Torah Law. The mikvah is a ritual Jewish bathhouse used for purification. Devout Jews are required to cleanse themselves in the mikvah on a variety of occasions: women must visit following menstruation, and men have to make an appearance before the High Holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many of the devout also purify themselves before and after the act of sex, and before the Sabbath.

On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005, Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighborhoods in the city, Mea She’arim. “I opened a door that entered into a schvitz,” he told me. “Vapors everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapors. On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy.”

Rabbi Rosenberg paused, gathered himself, and went on: “This boy was speared on the man like an animal, like a pig, and the boy was saying nothing. But on his face—fear. The old man [looked at me] without any fear, as if this was common practice. He didn’t stop. I was so angry, I confronted him. He removed the boy from his penis, and I took the boy aside. I told this man, ‘It’s a sin before God, a mishkovzucher. What are you doing to this boy’s soul? You’re destroying this boy!’ He had a sponge on a stick to clean his back, and he hit me across the face with it. ‘How dare you interrupt me!’ he said. I had heard of these things for a long time, but now I had seen.”

The child sex abuse crisis in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, like that in the Catholic Church, has produced its share of shocking headlines in recent years. In New York, and in the prominent Orthodox communities of Israel and London, allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant. The alleged abusers are schoolteachers, rabbis, fathers, uncles—figures of male authority. The victims, like those of Catholic priests, are mostly boys. Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community—the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world—have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders. Ben Hirsch, director of Survivors for Justice, a Brooklyn organization that advocates for Orthodox sex abuse victims, thinks the real number is higher. “From anecdotal evidence, we’re looking at over 50 percent. It has almost become a rite of passage.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak out about these abuses are ruined and condemned to exile by their own community. Dr. Amy Neustein, a nonfundamentalist Orthodox Jewish sociologist and editor of Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals, told me the story of a series of Hasidic mothers in Brooklyn she got to know who complained that their children were being preyed on by their husbands.

In these cases, the accused men “very quickly and effectively engage the rabbis, the Orthodox politicians, and powerful Orthodox rabbis who donate handsomely to political clubs.” The goal, she told me, is “to excise the mother from the child’s life.” Rabbinical courts cast the mothers aside, and the effects are permanent. The mother is “amputated.” One woman befriended by Dr. Neustein, a music student at a college outside New York, lost contact with all six of her children, including an infant she was breastfeeding at the time of their separation.



Rabbi Rosenberg inspects a ritual purification bath, known as a mikvah. In 2005, he witnessed a young boy being raped inside a similar bath.

Seven years ago, Rabbi Rosenberg started blogging about sex abuse in his community and opened a New York City hotline to field sex abuse complaints. He has posted appeals on YouTube, appeared on CNN, and given speeches across the US, Canada, Israel, and Australia. Today, he is the lone whistleblower among the Satmar. For this he is reviled, slandered, hated, feared. He receives death threats on a regular basis. In Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, advertisements taken out by the self-described “great rabbis and rabbinical judges of the city of New York” have denounced him as “a stumbling block for the House of Israel,” “a public rebuker and preacher of ethics” who “persists in his rebelliousness” and whose “voice has been heard among many Jewish families, especially young people in their innocence… drawn to listen to his poisonous and revolting speeches.” Leaflets distributed in Williamsburg and Borough Park, the centers of ultra-Orthodoxy in Brooklyn, display his bearded face over the body of a writhing snake. "Corrupt Informer," reads one of the leaflets, followed by the declaration that Rabbi Rosenberg’s “name should rot in hell forever. They should cut him off from all four corners of the earth.”

When Rabbi Rosenberg wants to bathe at a mikvah in Brooklyn to purify himself, none will have him. When he wants to go to synagogue, none will have him. “He is finished in the community, butchered,” said a fellow rabbi who would only talk anonymously. “No one will look at him, and those who will talk to him, they can’t let it be known. The pressure in our community, it’s incredible.”

The powerful men—and it is worth noting that this community is regulated by men only—who govern the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism would rather their adherents be blind in their faith, their eyes closed to the horrors Rabbi Rosenberg is exposing. Like the Catholic establishment, the rabbinate seeks to cover up the crimes, quiet the victims, protect the abusers, and deflect potential criticism of their institutional practices. Those who speak out are vilified, and the faithful learn to shut their mouths. When the father of the seven-year-old boy whom Rabbi Rosenberg rescued from the Jerusalem bathhouse showed up to collect his son, he couldn’t believe his son had been raped. Trembling, terrified, he whisked his son away to get medical help, but was still too scared to raise a formal complaint. According to Ben and Survivors for Justice, “The greatest sin is not the abuse, but talking about the abuse. Kids and parents who step forward to complain are crushed.”

As for Rabbi Rosenberg, when he voiced his concerns to the rabbinate in Israel, he was brought up on charges by the mishmeres hatznuis, the archconservative Orthodox “modesty squad,” which regulates, often through threats of violence, proper moral conduct and dress in the relations between men and women. The modesty squad is a sort of Jewish Taliban. According to Rabbi Rosenberg, the rapist he caught in the act was a member of the modesty squad, which charged him with the unconscionable offense of having previously been seen walking down a street in Jerusalem with a married woman. “But it’s OK to molest children,” he adds.

The abuse and its cover-up are symptoms of wider political dysfunction—or, more precisely, symptoms of socially disastrous political control by religious elites.

“This isn’t a problem about a few aberrant cases or an old-fashioned community reluctant to talk to police about sexual matters,” said Michael Lesher, a practicing Jew who has investigated Orthodox sex abuse and represented abuse victims. “This is about a political economy that links Orthodox Judaism with other fundamentalist creeds and with aspects of right-wing ideologies generally. It’s an economy in which genuine religious values will never really rise to the top, so long as they’re tied to the poisonous priorities that elevate status and power over the basic human needs of the most vulnerable among us.”

Michael, who is completing a book on the topic, noted that the infamous Rabbi Elior Chen, convicted in 2010 in what was arguably Israel’s worst case of serial child abuse, is still defended in public statements by leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Among other legal and moral crimes, the rabbi forced his victims to eat feces, claiming that this cruelty was necessary to “purify” the children he abused.

According to Ben, the ultra-Orthodox community has never been as repressive as it is today. The repression, as he describes it, stems from the burden of having too many children. Huge families are encouraged: every child born to a Hasid is seen as “a finger in the eye of Hitler.” Ben also told me that the average family size among Williamsburg Hasidim is nine, and that some families include more than 15 children.



Mikvah Israel of Boro Park, one of the many mikvahs in Brooklyn that no longer accept Rabbi Rosenberg.

Families saddled with an increasing number of children soon enter into a cycle of poverty. There is simultaneously an extreme separation of the sexes, which is unprecedented in the history of the Hasidim. There is limited general education, to the point that most men in the community are educated only to the third grade, and receive absolutely no sexual education. No secular newspapers are allowed, and internet access is forbidden. “The men in the community are undereducated by design,” Ben said. “You have a community that has been infantilized. They have been trained not to think. It’s a sort of totalitarian control.”

The rabbis, dominating an ignorant and largely poverty-stricken flock, determine the fate of every individual in the community. Nothing is done without the consent of the rabbinical establishment. A man wants to buy a new car—he goes to the rabbi for counsel. A man wants to marry—the rabbi tells him whether or not he should marry a particular bride. As for the women, they don’t get to ask the rabbi anything. Their place is beneath contempt.

Michael told me that current Orthodox leadership, accruing wealth from the tithes of subservient followers, is “drifting to the right, politically as well as religiously.” Many rabbis in New York City have taken up the banner of neoliberalism. “Every English-language Orthodox publication I know embraced Romney during the 2012 elections, decried national health insurance, blamed liberals for bribing the lower classes,” he said. “In Orthodox society, just as in America at large, the financial mismatch between the elite and the rest of us is ominously large.”

Michael also notes that the problem is not confined to the extremists. “The same patterns of victim-blaming, covering up, idealizing the rabbis so that cover-ups aren’t even acknowledged, are found all across the spectrum of Orthodoxy,” he told me. “The Orthodox left was shamefully slow to react to Rabbi Baruch Lanner’s abuse or to the similar case of Rabbi Mordechai Elon.” Rabbi Lanner, a former New Jersey yeshiva high school principal, was found guilty in 2000 of sexually abusing dozens of teenage students over the decades of his tenure. Rabbi Elon, who had publicly denounced homosexuality, was convicted last August on two counts of forcible sexual assault on a male minor, following several years of reports of his abuse of young boys.

“I have children come to me with their parents, and the blood is coming out of the anus,” Rabbi Rosenberg told me when we met. “These are zombies for life. What are we to do?”

This of course is the key question, and no answers are forthcoming. Michael holds out little hope that the situation will change. “If Orthodox institutions continue on their current trajectory,” he said, “I’d say things could get worse before they get better.”

A few weeks after our interview, Rabbi Rosenberg was walking through the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn when an unidentified man rushed up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and threw a cup of bleach in his face. He went to the hospital with facial burns and was temporarily blinded. Such is the measure of justice among the Satmar that a once-respected rabbi, now amputated from the community, should find himself chemically burned on a street in a neighborhood considered holy.

Later Rabbi Rosenberg told me a story of being surrounded by young boys in Williamsburg. The boys cursed him, laughed at him, threatened him, and spat at him. He wondered how many of them would end up molested.

Las Vegas Installs “Intellistreets” Light Fixtures: Capable Of Audio and Video Recording

From HERE

The Las Vegas Public Works Department has begun testing a newly installed street light system around City Hall with wide-ranging capabilities including audio and video recording.





According to the Michigan based “Illuminating Concepts,” the system’s main benefits include “energy management, security and entertainment.” The Las Vegas setup includes such features as emergency notification flashers, playable music and a sound announcement system, all controlled from an Ipad.

“Actually, there’s a server that’s housed by the company that’s providing this product and we’re communicating with just a wireless, wi-fi connection,” Neil Rohleder of the Public Works Department told My News 3.

The company’s lights, which also offer a “Homeland Security” feature, received major backlash in 2011 following reports of the system’s federally-funded roll out across the country. The feature allows for emergency government announcements which will likely include such slogans as “See Something, Say Something” as well as other irrationally fear-based messages already seen in Wal Mart’s DHS-run “telescreens.”

Local privacy advocate Daphne Lee has begun speaking out against the system, pointing to the ever-increasing surveillance dragnet cast over everyday innocent Americans.

“This technology, you know is taking us to a place where, you know, you’ll essentially be monitored from the moment you leave your home till the moment you get home,” said Lee.

The Public Works Department claims they have no plans to use the system’s surveillance cameras… for now, leading many to believe the plan is already well underway as city-wide implementation is discussed.

“Right now our intention is not to have any cameras or recording devices…it’s just to provide output out there, not to get any feed or video feed coming back,” said Public Works Director, Jorge Servantes.

In light of the TrapWire system, a sophisticated program that uses advanced facial recognition software through regular CCTV surveillance cameras across the country, the likelihood of the city’s cameras being covertly used by the federal government, or with permission, remains a likely outcome.

Talking street lights have already been implemented in parts of Europe for a number of years. Apartment residents in North London were shocked to discover cameras ordering them to stay away from their communal garden, warning them that their photograph was being taken for entering a “restricted area.”

“At what point do we say this is the land of the free? People have a right to a reasonable amount of privacy,” Lee added.

As new NSA revelations widen the general public’s understanding of just how pervasive the surveillance state has become, the real question lies in whether or not the public will demand accountability as well as their privacy rights.

Natural Cancer Treatment: Cancer Goes Away.

ENDA's Game

What is ENDA?

It's a supposed anti-discrimination act on gender and sexuality...

And, being Federal, it overrides State Anti Voyeurism laws.

ENDA stipulates that employees “transitioning” from one sex to the other may use existing lavatory and shower facilities of the sex they want to become!

This means a male employee who says he is in transition to becoming a woman can enter the locker room of an educational institution and shower with young girls and women (maybe your daughter)... With full authority of federal law under section 8 of the EDNA Bill.

SEC. 8. CONSTRUCTION.
(a) Dress or Grooming Standards- Nothing in this Act shall prohibit an employer from requiring an employee, during the employee’s hours at work, to adhere to reasonable dress or grooming standards not prohibited by other provisions of Federal, State, or local law, provided that the employer permits any employee who has undergone gender transition prior to the time of employment, and any employee who has notified the employer that the employee has undergone or is undergoing gender transition after the time of employment, to adhere to the same dress or grooming standards as apply for the gender to which the employee has transitioned or is transitioning.

(b) Additional Facilities Not Required- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require the construction of new or additional facilities.

Facilities means Restrooms. And this is not cool.

Take a young new teacher, maybe twenty three, arriving at a new high school... Just putting a barrette in his hair and walking into the 8th grade shower room... OK? School security escorts him out. The principal is called. Parents are notified. The school is in an uproar. The new teacher is suspended. He sues... AND WINS, and comes back to school the next week and does it all over again.

My point, however is that under these new laws, there would be nothing to stop the testosterone fueled idiocy.

At what point can the GLBT community say that they are fuck-tarded for letting creeps get at our daughters? No point, I am afraid. The rest of the bill may be passing, but this part fails miserably. FIX IT.

They will howl and moan because of the "GAY BASHY"-ness of the people who got offended at the male teacher with the barrette in his hair, they will get mad at the parents of the 8th grader who was washing herself and saw a man watching her? I would freak the fuck out and drive over there and bash his teeth in if it happened to my God-kids.

Maybe. I'm not violent, but those are my God-kids... I don't even have real kids yet. I can't imagine what I would do.

Heck, when I was a kid, Wally Resner was my fifth grade teacher, and (mysteriously) was my seventh grade teacher as well. He was always friendly to the girls in my class. Very friendly actually... too friendly as it turns out... In 1991, he was pulled out of the back of a van while he was having sex with an 8th grade girl... He was 50 something.

Fucking WRONG dude.

And that's the point. Even though I can forgive him, and I have, and Jesus loves him, and even though he never touched me and (to my knowledge) never touched the prettiest girls in my class: Heather, Farra, Rebecca, Whitney... I don't KNOW any of that to be sure. Maybe he whacked his salami and ate his own jizz in his spare time with their pictures?
HOW WOULD WE KNOW?

But, dang, I mean, ok... Now, give HIM permission to come downstairs and "help" the little girls get dressed. Dads with shotguns please take a number, stand over there, form a line... The torture will begin precisely at four.

So, what is the point of ENDA? To give equal rights to the naturally handicapped and naturally ignorant. Giving them rights to be hired is fine. I would say that everyone is ignorant and incapable of something, and it shouldn't be held against them if they don't know if they are an inny or an outtie. Confusion is a part of "Human Nature" and only Jesus heals that kind of stuff.

But those of us who took biology class, and who understand how basic copulation and reproduction works, and what the anus is really for, believe that our restrooms should be designed for the natural born sexuality of the creature as nature intended them to be. God bless the naturally born hermaphrodites, poor people. They should be the only ones who have the option to choose which restroom they can go to.

ENDA. Yes, hire the homosexual. But keep the creeps out of the restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms.

When "Mister Resner" becomes "Missy Resner", what are you going to do?

My Radio Interview with Mama Jean

I talk a little bit about myself in this radio interview.



Hope you enjoy!

-Pauly

"The Artist and the Internet" or "Why Bitstrips is their most powerful free creative tool online"

The artist and the Internet (or)
Why Bitstrips is their most powerful free creative tool online

By Pauly Hart
10-31-2013



As I sit here in my favorite coffee shop in Indiana I am reminiscent of a day not too long ago when I was living in Oklahoma. It was raining then, like it is today, back in march of 2008 and I was just fresh off of the oil fields. With muddy boots and a slippy disposition, I hopped on to Stumbleupon and began stumbling. Probably early in the afternoon, I ran into the 2008 SXSW conference news-feed and found out about Bitstrips.

And so a love affair began.

A strip featuring Dorian, by BA, made at SXSW in 2008

I didn't sleep much that week. After joining the "beta" website, I created comics non stop all day. Working in the oil field had it's advantages, and one of them was being off for a week at a time. This just so happened to be one of those weeks. I slid into a flash-based comic zen that was almost impossible for me to rise out of... until I had to put my boots back on and go to work.

In this one week I created one hundred comics, invented Bitstrips line art, invented the first drama series and blew away the creators with my zeal and passion for their product. Even the creator's mother was impressed with my love of the site. She was happy for the attention that her boy was getting, and rightfully so. She had raised a winner. Bitstrips was a lazy artists dream come true. A chance to say the things that I always wanted to say in a comic, but didn't have the ability to do... as I am unable, with my mitts (that I call hands) to do anything with realistic images.

And the funny thing of it all is that the product was accidental.

An example of one of my comics.

BA, DK1, Dorian, Thomas, TV and others had forged Bitstrips on a lark, an almost supplemental item... trying to find a way to easily story-board their animated series: Griddleville. G-ville was the first major project that their host company, Corematrix, had attempted. Maybe not the actual first, but the first largest. BA, the owner/chief/mage had brought together his right hand man DK1, and the rest of the Scooby gang and had driven from Toronto, Canada to Austin, Texas with a wagon full of hopes, dreams, and Tim Horton’s coffee: landing at SXSW that year hoping to be the breakout app of 2008.

Did they succeed? In my mind: “yes”. In actuality: they had hit the jackpot on building a bridge between my mind and actualized digital art… so another “yes”.

After one week of furiously vomiting out my ideas onto the Bitstrips server in Canada, I took a break. A forced break, seeing as I had to go clock back in at the oil rig... but all I could think about was Bitstrips. I would find myself thinking in almost any funny situation: "Oh that would make a great Bitstrip." Odd that the word "Bitstrips" worked itself into my conversation so quickly, and invariably people would ask: "What's a Bitstrip?" Thus, the conversation would begin. it was awesome, fun and unique and at the time, full of artistic adults who had found it rumbling around at /b on 4chan or whatever.

It was paradise-on-the-web.

Until 2009. Then came a flood of children.

Behind our backs, the innovators of the wonderful little world that incorporated my new existence had been talking to the Canadian school system and introducing Bitstripsforschools.com into the world. With this, came a new wave of popularity and a new wave of stupidity. Whereas before, the main servers of Bitstrips had been an elite group of inventive 30 and 40-something adults creative efforts, now it was primarily comprised of a home for12 year old testosterone-fueled angst and lunacy.

Not that the people were stupid... per se... many of those bright young minds published some wonderful things. But imagine, if you will, that your favorite hole-in-the-wall coffeeshop started passing out fliers for free lattes at the middle school down the street. How quickly would you commit seppuku? Or just unplug your Wi-Fi and go home. As such: many elderly Bitstrips users did. On one of the user-spawned Bitstrips Wikis, I named this: "The Onslaught". And it was a good analogy. But, now, in retrospect, I am happy that it happened. More people means more stuff.

Today look back and realize that I am not happy how my attitude was at the time (sorry youngsters).

And yes, grumpiness ensued and I slacked off my usage from Bitstrips... As many of the old ones did. But we who recognized (eventually) its true power from amalgamation came around and thrived in the new chaos. And Bitstrips strove on... like a monkey up a hill... or, a better analogy. Hiring new staff, incorporating new ideas, revamping the character builder (twice), they finally left their almost-perpetual beta stage... And with "wings as eagles" they launched their Facebook app.

There were times where I really did try to bring smiles and hope to the people of the interwebs.

And then they launched their mobile app.

And then Huffington Post got all shitty and wrote an article on how to block it.

And as I sit here, Halloween morning, the servers are down. Across the board, the servers have succumbed to a shutdown of almost DDoS attack proportions. Shut down due to popularity. It's a  wonderful problem to have: Popularity. It's like having too much money that you have to buy a bigger wallet and a larger pair of pants to put the wallet in... And then a second dude to carry around another couple of wallets who just hangs out with you. It's actually awesome how popular Bitstrips became, literally, in leaps and bounds, seemingly overnight. I've read probably six or seven articles just this morning about how "annoying" they are and how to "block" them from your facebook feed.

Fools! If only they knew the power of the force!

Bitstrips is a powerful tool.

Not only do you have the power to create storyboard material (as it was originally intended), or to make Farside-esque comics, or even to do the old Beetle Baily tell-the-story story three panel comic. It's awesome. And, for someone who can't draw stick figures, like me, it's a time saver.

Hey kids! Comics!

Even in my own life I have used Bitstrips on the web and it came with surprising popularity. When the Pirate Bay advertised it's homepage as available to host "The Promo Bay", I submitted a comic to them about my game: Empires and Generals, to which one of the mods replied: "This sounds awesome. And it's pretty unique in the big pile of 3000 promo requests we've gotten. So we're gonna promote you worldwide 26-28 May." Well, thank you very much for blowing me away. Hosted world wide on their front page was a big thing for me, and it was made possible by Bitstrips and the creative folks there... Plus the fact that I got 470,000 unique hits on my site was pretty cool as well.

Example of one of the submitted ads to The Pirate Bay

And so the love affair continues.

I love Bitstrips and so should you.

So, if, when, the servers are back up… Hop on, sign in, and make one or two things. It’s quite catchy, and not as glitchy as when I first started. At least five of my facebook friends use it now, that didn’t use it two weeks ago. At least, if you are an artist, you should hop on board. Fiddle around, learn and innovate. Grow your creativity and make cool stuff.

Bitstrips.com... It's the coolest thing since Google Chrome... Wait. It came out before Google Chrome.

You can visit Bitstrips.com HERE.

========

Pauly Hart wrote this without the consent of the good people at Bitstrips.com and apologizes if any information is incorrect.

Pauly Hart is a freelance writer, artist and weirdo and lives in Indiana, which explains some of it.

new test art

"The Worst Story I Ever Heard" By Rich Schapiro

The Worst Story I Ever Heard

By Rich Schapiro

St. James Davis is crying. It's a loud, whooping wail of a cry. He's sitting in the driveway of his childhood home, a sprawling, L-shaped ranch house in West Covina, California, on a sun-drenched day last September. Standing next to him is his wife of nearly forty years, LaDonna. On the brink of tears herself, LaDonna grabs a cloth and gently cradles his cheek with her right hand. With her left, she carefully dabs at his mouth. St. James keeps his head still as she tends to him. He doesn't say a word as he calms down. He doesn't have to — LaDonna knows what he wants now that the sun is beating down on him. She grabs the beige bucket hat hanging around his neck and eases it onto his head.

LaDonna tends to St. James because he can't tend to himself. St. James, sixty-six, a former high school football star and onetime Nascar driver, is severely disabled and disfigured. There's a two-inch hole in the heel of his swollen left foot, and he is confined to a wheelchair. He has no nose, only a red, raw, exposed septum, surrounded by narrow openings. At the top are three tiny magnets designed to hold in place a crude silicone prosthesis, which is constantly falling off. His right eye is gone, replaced with glass. The skin on his face droops like candle wax because so many bones around his cheeks and eyes were broken. His mouth, which has been completely reconstructed, is stuck in a frown. On his left hand, his index, middle, and ring fingers are stumps. His right hand is much worse. He has a misshapen hunk of flesh for a thumb, which appears as if it were lumped onto his wrist with clay. His index and middle fingers are gone; his ring finger and pinkie are immobile.

But St. James's crying has nothing to do with his physical condition. He's crying because of news he and LaDonna recently received about what really can only be called their boy. At first, St. James and LaDonna were reluctant to speak about all that's happened to them. LaDonna prefers not to talk to outsiders about their life because, she says, they are so often misunderstood.

To begin to understand, you have to go back to early 1971, when West Covina's "monkey trial" captivated this small California city about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. St. James and LaDonna Davis were in court, found in violation of a city ordinance against harboring a wild animal — a young chimpanzee they'd kept in their home nearly from birth. The chimp, named Moe, rode to the courthouse shotgun in St. James's jet-black 1932 Ford roadster. Dozens of spectators lined up outside the Citrus municipal courthouse to catch a glimpse of the Davises and their monkey. St. James was a tall, handsome mechanic and race-car driver. His young wife, LaDonna, was a sun-kissed blond with wholesome good looks. Holding St. James's hand, Moe, decked out in a checkered shirt, white trousers, and shoes, entered the courthouse to cheers. Inside, he shook hands and waved to his supporters. He kissed the court reporter and jangled the keys of the bailiff.

St. James and LaDonna both made impassioned pleas to the court. "Moe is like a son to us," LaDonna said. "He wouldn't hurt anyone, and so far as we're concerned, he's a member of the family."

The trial was a sensation. Journalists fawned over Moe in person and in print, and the outcome was never in doubt. Prosecutors dropped the case, and Judge Jack Alex's assessment of the chimp, delivered to a packed courtroom, echoed in newspapers all the way to Texas. "From what I've observed of Moe outside and in the courtroom," the judge said, "he doesn't have the traits of a wild animal and is, in fact, better behaved than some people."

He's a member of the family. That's something plenty of people say about their dog or bird or even a cow in the barn. But with St. James Davis and his wife, LaDonna, that sentiment grew into a singular kind of devotion, into a singular kind of love, into a singular kind of family. And how that came to be, and what that ultimately would mean for them, is a singular kind of story. It's a story at once understandable and incomprehensible, at once comic and tragic, at once familiar and utterly bizarre.

After all, what kind of family takes a wild animal and invests it with humanity?

From the moment St. James returned from a trip to Africa with Moe in 1967, the chimpanzee was the center of the couple's life. Moe was tiny, barely a foot long. His body was covered in brown hair, except for his pink face, ears, hands, and feet. His ears, the size of large clamshells, stuck out a couple of inches from his head. But it was his deep brown eyes and what St. James and LaDonna thought they saw in them — wonderment, innocence, comprehension — that moved them the most.

Scenes from their life together are like scenes from the life of any young family with a small child.

It's a Saturday night in 1970, and St. James is sitting on the couch next to Moe, who is sucking down a vanilla shake. LaDonna is in the kitchen, cleaning up after their dinner of beef stew and vegetables. Moe, four years old, was hungry after a day in the park, and he wolfed down his plate. Now he's clapping his hands because St. James has just turned on his favorite cowboys-and-Indians show.

LaDonna joins her boys on the couch. In two hours, they'll all be on the floor sleeping, their bodies linked at the arms.

Then there was the first trip to the dentist. When Moe was about two, St. James took him to a veterinary specialist to have a crooked front tooth pulled. As the doctor prepared a shot, St. James stroked Moe's tiny arm and concentrated on keeping him distracted. He spoke to him softly: "What are you looking at, Moe? Are you trying to see out the window?" Just before the doctor plunged the needle into Moe's forearm, St. James gripped him tightly. Moe let out a yelp but fell asleep in seconds. St. James never left the room during the forty-five-minute procedure.

As soon as they got home, St. James carried Moe to the couple's bedroom. He gently placed Moe, still in his T-shirt and plastic diaper pants, on his chest so the sleeping chimp could feel him breathing. They remained in bed together that way for more than six hours until Moe, groggy and glassy-eyed, finally woke up.

LaDonna spent hours with Moe every day, essentially trying to home-school him. She would sit beside him in the living room, coaching him as he played with Erector sets or colored with crayons. She was stunned by how thoughtful Moe appeared to be. He stared at the page, sometimes rubbing it with his hairless palm, before putting crayon to paper. Whenever Moe motioned for a new color — sticking out his hand palm up — LaDonna offered a few and asked Moe to think about which one he wanted: "Do you want this green one? Or would yellow be better? Think about it, Moe. Think."

Moe had his own bedroom, complete with a bed, a large closet where his clothes were kept — the Davises dressed him in plaid button-down shirts, blue jeans, and even dinner jackets and trousers on formal occasions — and a bureau with his toys on top, though of course Moe preferred to sleep with St. James and LaDonna. When he got too big — by age six he weighed about fifty pounds — St. James would carry Moe back to his bedroom after he fell asleep. Hours later, the couple would awaken to Moe at the foot of their bed, climbing back in.

From the beginning, Moe's demeanor surprised St. James and LaDonna. He was gentle and well-behaved. Moe seemed to take pains to avoid scratching anyone with his flat, sharp fingernails. He was affectionate and loved to hug and kiss, throwing his hairy arms around St. James's neck often. And when he wanted St. James to sit down next to him, he'd bound over and softly push on the backs of his knees.

There was one bright day about 1973. For nearly half an hour, St. James and Moe had been frantically running back and forth, trying to catch falling leaves underneath a massive maple tree in the park. St. James, exhausted, lay down on the grass. "I need to rest, Moe. I can't run like you anymore." Moe, with all the energy and insistence of a seven-year-old boy, grabbed his hands, pulling him along. They played for a while more before ending up in a heap on the grass again. St. James looked at Moe and asked him a question: "What are you going to be when you grow up, Moe?"

St. James and LaDonna hadn't planned to keep Moe forever. In truth, there never really was a plan. At first, St. James thought he'd drop Moe off at a zoo, but he says they all turned him away. In time, it became clear that there was no way the couple was going to part with the chimpanzee. So St. James and LaDonna kept Moe and raised him in their home. They taught him how to eat with a fork, use a toilet, even, they say, how to crudely write his name. Over the next thirty years, the Davises' devotion to Moe would push the boundaries of human love. It would also test the limits of that love.

"Okay, then, now you're talking," St. James says after I offer to help him with his car. We'd been sitting outside his mother's old home for a couple of hours, and it had become clear that St. James was far more concerned with getting work done on his car than talking about his life. Zooming ahead in his motorized wheelchair, he leads me to the driveway, where the wooden frame of a 1923 Franklin is resting on a table. It's shaped like a six-foot-long tuning fork and is covered in rusty bolts and nails. St. James is giddy. His condition has kept him from working on the car for three years, so LaDonna has taken over the labor. Having another pair of hands is priceless to him.

On his instructions, I pick up a hammer and start prying out some of the decaying bolts. A half hour later, holding a yellow angle grinder, I'm smoothing out a section of the gray fender as St. James provides an excruciatingly detailed real-time tutorial: "Okay, turn your thumb toward your nose. Now drop your elbow two inches and press the machine against the metal. You don't have to be gentle."

Watching from a few feet away, LaDonna is laughing. She's thin and pretty at age sixty-five. Guided by her husband, she has taken apart the Franklin over the past three months. Now she's rubbing epoxy on the fender with a piece of cardboard. St. James is less patient with her.

"LaDonna, what are you doing?" he says as she applies the epoxy. "It's dripping all over the place."

LaDonna doesn't get flustered. She knows he's just frustrated. After St. James commands her to pull out an extension cord, she laughs. "I can do that," she says, "because I love you so much."

Later, over some In-N-Out burgers that we eat sitting around the Franklin, the couple begins to tell the story of their lives. And, as it often does with St. James, it comes back to cars.

St. James and LaDonna were high school sweethearts in West Covina. They dated for a few years before St. James reluctantly agreed to get married. He was obsessed with cars and worried that marriage would put a wedge between him and his hot rods. By 1966, everything was in place for their wedding at a small brick church in West Covina, but St. James never showed up. Instead, he spent the afternoon under the hood of one of his cars while LaDonna was left alone in the church before all their friends and relatives.

The following week was the worst of St. James's life. The story of the jilted bride became the talk of the neighborhood. The entire town, it seemed, had turned against him. When he saw the ad in the paper, he knew he had found his way out: A merchant ship was looking for deckhands for an around-the-world voyage, all expenses paid. St. James had never been on a boat, but he didn't care.

What happened over the next several months altered the course of St. James's life. It is impossible to know for sure how he ended up with a baby chimpanzee. The tale he tells strains credulity in places, but he recounts it passionately, in vivid detail. By now, its facts are beyond any proof or evidence besides St. James's earnest telling. In any case, it seems to be what St. James has come to believe. It goes like this:

The ship suffered damage off the coast of Africa, forcing it to come ashore in Tanzania. Days later, while following a group of Tanzanians he befriended on a hunt, St. James witnessed a band of poachers slaughter a female chimpanzee just after she gave birth. He returned the next day, found the helpless newborn chimp alive, and began caring for him. St. James jumped ship, and for a period of several weeks and perhaps months, he provided for the animal, foraging for food, nurturing him with fruits, bird eggs, and rainwater as he searched for a way home. St. James lost weight. The chimp's fingernails left him riddled with sores. His ordeal finally ended when a tall villager, who called the chimp Mogambo, took St. James to German missionaries, who eventually secured him a flight bound for Los Angeles. Moe sat on his lap on the plane. He behaved like a prince.

By the time St. James stepped off the plane into the warm air outside Los Angeles International Airport, he was a changed man. His imposing frame had wasted away. His cheeks were hollow. Gaping sores covered his face and neck. And in his arms there was no luggage, only a baby chimpanzee.

Waiting for St. James inside the terminal was his mother, Estelle. LaDonna was there, too, and she was seething. She hadn't seen him since the day before he left her at the altar.

St. James hugged his mother. He and LaDonna locked eyes but didn't exchange words. She was waiting for him to start explaining, and she had no idea what to make of the tiny monkey at his side. St. James and LaDonna left the airport that day not knowing if they were ever going to speak again.

St. James brought the infant chimp to his mother's home in West Covina. He was tiny, about a foot long, and more playful than the most rambunctious child. Then there were those big, brown eyes. Estelle fell for him immediately. LaDonna's mother, who happened to be Estelle's close friend, began coming over. She, too, was captivated by Moe.

In time, LaDonna's mom started dragging her daughter over to play with the chimp. Like everyone else, LaDonna soon fell in love with Moe. It wasn't long before she also fell back in love with St. James.

The wedding, on June 6, 1970, was a modest affair, held at LaDonna's parents' home in West Covina. Moe was St. James's best man. The four-year-old chimp, dressed in a tight-fitting black tuxedo, walked down the aisle holding hands with the flower girl as she tossed rose petals on the floor. At the reception, Moe scampered from table to table, stealing sips of champagne. When one of the guests, a friend of LaDonna's mother's, began sharing her glass with him, the chimp clung to her for the rest of the night. Moe got drunk and pissed all over her pale yellow dress, which everyone in the room thought was about the funniest thing they'd ever seen.

As St. James told his friends, Moe was the "bond between us two." That bond would only deepen with news they received less than a year into their marriage. The couple had talked about having a large family, maybe as many as five children, and LaDonna had gone for a routine OB-GYN visit. St. James was sitting in the waiting room with LaDonna's mother when a doctor approached with a solemn expression. The doctor told them that LaDonna had cancer and needed a hysterectomy. She was in the exam room, crying.

LaDonna left the hospital with her mother and didn't come home. She refused to see St. James. She was overcome with guilt and began talking about a divorce, but St. James would have none of it. "We already got a kid," he reassured her. They spent hours and hours on the phone, talking it through. After five weeks, he convinced LaDonna that not having children should not drive them apart. Moe would remain the couple's only child.

So it was that an unconventional household began to transform into something truly different, even for southern California. Over the next three decades, the Davises lived what they considered a near-perfect life. They brought Moe along with them everywhere — to shopping malls, restaurants, weekend trips to the beach. The couple bought a three-seat bike and rode around town with Moe in the middle. And the chimpanzee, who developed a fondness for cheese burritos and coffee, took his meals with the couple at the kitchen table.

In time, as Moe grew, so did his notoriety. Already an honorary citizen of West Covina — he'd earned that distinction at the time of the trial — Moe attended ribbon-cutting ceremonies and fundraisers, once manning a kissing booth at an Actors and Others for Animals event in Burbank with Doris Day and Lucille Ball. The Davises fielded dozens of TV and movie requests for Moe. He appeared in episodes of Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, BJ and the Bear, and Bowling for Dollars and had bit parts in movies, including the 1975 comedy Linda Lovelace for President. St. James, meanwhile, gained notoriety of his own. Though he still earned most of his living through the auto-body shop he and LaDonna owned, St. James competed on the Nascar circuit, with Moe often appearing at his side for racing events.

The Davises' feelings for Moe deepened as his behavior became more complex. According to biologists, chimpanzees are humankind's closest genetic relatives on earth. The subtlety of Moe's expressions and emotions could be uncanny. There was the time with the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Moe was obsessed with peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Standing on a chair at the kitchen table, he'd always make one for himself and then one for St. James. One day, when he was about nine, there wasn't enough peanut butter for a second sandwich. Moe tried to cover up by overloading St. James's bread with jelly. But St. James reached for Moe's sandwich, throwing him into a tantrum. Moe stomped his feet and made gagging noises. He stormed out of the kitchen, found LaDonna in her bedroom, and dragged her into the kitchen. Indignant, he pointed at the sandwich, pointed at St. James. Finally, St. James capitulated and offered Moe the good sandwich. The chimp shook his head and refused to eat it.

As he matured, Moe began to understand no and yes. He knew that shaking one's head up and down meant okay and side to side meant disapproval. Eventually, he developed his own form of sign language. He'd cross his arms over his chest and tap his shoulders to signal he wanted a hug. He'd motion as if he were turning a steering wheel back and forth when he wanted to go for a ride.

Moe's playfulness continued through his teens and twenties. One night in 1984, the eighteen-year-old chimp methodically prepared his bed of multicolored blankets inside his cage in the backyard before bounding into the kitchen to give LaDonna a goodnight kiss. She handed him a flashlight and a cup of hot chocolate. Holding one in each hand, Moe carefully walked back into his cage and sat down. He grabbed one of the blankets, draped it over his head, and began flicking the light on and off, on and off. LaDonna could hear her boy making laughing noises as she headed for her bedroom.

By this point, of course, Moe looked nothing like the baby monkey who held hands with the flower girl at their wedding, a rascal straight out of Curious George. He stood four feet tall, weighed roughly 130 pounds, and was covered in deep black fur. Over the years, St. James had gone to the library and studied chimpanzee behavior. He had learned what foods they eat and what their habits were. And he'd also read that no matter how docile they were when young, chimpanzees could turn aggressive as they grew older.

"We had a really good relationship," LaDonna says. "There was no tugging and pulling. Everybody kind of understood everybody. It was a lot of harmony, a lot of happiness, a lot of fun."

The Davises say they never saw aggressive behavior from Moe, even as he began to age. And it's true that Moe never harmed the couple.

"He was just such a happy little guy," LaDonna says.

They're still sitting near the car. The sun is setting, but now St. James can't stop talking. His hands are flying through the air as he talks about Moe.

"Listen closely now: I've told this story to very few people," he says more than once. He talks over LaDonna frequently. She barely seems to notice. She's hunched forward, her elbow on her knee, her face in her palm-clearly lost in the past. Still, a huge smile spreads across her face when St. James taps me on the knee and says: "I used to tell people, 'My son is thirty years old, and he still wants to live at home.' "

But what happened later in their lives is difficult for the Davises to discuss. The details force them to pause often. LaDonna buries her face in her hands. At times, she shakes her head and keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. St. James stares off into space. He can't get through the next few minutes without breaking down several times.

The unraveling of the Davises' near-perfect life began on a hot day in August 1998. Moe was about thirty then, with broad shoulders, thick arms, and long fangs. A welder who was repairing Moe's cage accidentally left a piece of equipment turned on and gave the chimp an electrical shock, spooking him so intensely that he bolted out of the house. Moe didn't return immediately. The police were called, and they closed the street. By the time the standoff ended, Moe had dented a police car, injured an officer's hand, and scratched an animal-control agent.

A year later, on September 2, 1999, a visitor came to meet Moe. The woman was told not to put her hand in his cage, but she did anyway. Moe bit the tip of her finger. Afterward, the Davises argued that Moe mistook her long red-painted fingernails for his favorite candy, licorice. To the city, why Moe bit the woman didn't matter. Now a mature ape and packing the upper-body strength of four or five grown men, Moe was too dangerous to remain at the Davises' home, West Covina officials decided.

A team of officers arrived at about 2:00 p.m. the following day. Police cars swarmed the street trailed by ambulances and fire trucks. Officers cordoned off the streets surrounding the Davises' home. Moe was inside his cage when two cops arrived at the front door. St. James confronted them. "Where's your court order?" he demanded. "Where's your warrant? Get out of here!"

A fiery argument broke out, and St. James was wrestled out of his house while cops and animal-control officers, some armed with dart guns, swarmed inside. Moe screamed as one dart, then a second, pierced his stomach. His shrieking turned into gagging noises as he furiously banged on his cage with his hands and feet. St. James was on his knees on the front lawn, bawling, when Moe, unconscious and bleeding from the stomach, was carried out of the house and tossed into a horse trailer.

The Davises were broken. They cried for hours, and they couldn't sleep. The community rescued them. Four days after Moe's removal, St. James checked his mailbox and found it filled with notes, cards, and a petition, titled "Citizens to Bring Moe Home." Within days, more than eight thousand people had signed, and many put yellow ON BOARD WITH MOE signs in their car windows. Scores of people stopped by the house. Even more honked in support as they drove by.

A single phone call punctured the Davises' brief optimism. It came nine days after Moe was taken, and it was from the operator of the facility Moe had been taken to — the Wildlife WayStation in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, a 160-acre refuge for exotic animals. The woman on the line called to ask St. James a brutal question: Have any arrangements been made for when the chimp dies? Moe hadn't eaten since he arrived and wasn't expected to live much longer. The Davises rushed to the facility with a vet in tow. They found Moe splayed on the floor of his tiny cage, covered in his own stool. His eyes were vacant. He was too weak to acknowledge them. The vet injected Moe with a drug that perked him up immediately. Within minutes, he went for a few grapes, drawing tears from the Davises, who resolved to return weekly to monitor their boy.

The court battles stretched for years. Gloria Allred, a high-profile civil-rights attorney, took the Davises' case pro bono. The couple filed a due-process suit against the city as they fended off criminal charges once again for harboring a wild animal. Animal-rights groups got involved. The petition grew longer. In a span of five months, more than twenty-four thousand people signed it. St. James and LaDonna visited Moe every week, all the while clinging to the hope that they would someday be reunited. The visits sustained them, though they were also heartbreaking. Moe started doing better after the couple installed a new cage complete with a TV three months after he arrived. But the Davises — who were not permitted to come close enough to touch him during their fifteen-minute visits — could see the pain in Moe's eyes. He'd signal that he wanted a hug. He'd put his hands up and turn an imaginary steering wheel. He wanted to go home.

After extensive negotiations, in 2004 the couple succeeded in getting Moe transferred to Animal Haven Ranch, a private sanctuary near Bakersfield where they could visit him without restriction. The sanctuary, tucked into rolling hills just a few miles south of Lake Isabella, was a home for exotic animals dumped mostly from zoos and circuses. Its owners, Virginia and Ralph Brauer, had seven primates in all, but everyone agreed Moe, now thirty-eight — approaching elderly for a chimp, his flat brown face rimmed with gray — would remain alone in a specially built cage during his first few years there. The arrangement was a dream compared with the Wildlife WayStation. The Davises made the two-and-a-half-hour trip every week, delivering new toys for Moe and food for the other primates as part of the arrangement. They'd arrive early and spend all day with their boy, playing with him inside his cage.

On March 3, 2005, St. James and LaDonna drove to the sanctuary to celebrate Moe's thirty-ninth birthday. They left home early, around 7:00 a.m., in a car filled with toys, presents, balloons, and a white-frosted sheet cake with raspberry filling. After arriving at Animal Haven about 10:00 a.m., St. James hopped out of the car and headed straight for Moe with a carton of chocolate milk in his hand. Moe was going mad — clapping his hands and hooting happily. LaDonna set the cake down on a picnic table, cut two slices, and handed them to St. James. St. James handed one to Moe through the bars of his cage, and the animal's eyes went wide as he devoured his piece. LaDonna savored the moment. The family had been through so much over the last six years. Moe was finally at a place where he seemed content and where the couple could spend as much time with him as they wanted. If they couldn't ever live together again, this seemed like the next best thing. St. James and Moe were kissing each other. The moment was beautiful. Perfect almost.

Out of the corner of her eye, LaDonna suddenly noticed a large form about forty feet away. It was a chimpanzee, a young adult male, somehow out of his cage, and he was glaring at her. The chimp held her gaze for a moment, and then charged. St. James rushed to his wife. The animal barreled into LaDonna's back, knocking her into St. James. She wrapped her arms around her husband's neck, but the chimpanzee locked his jaws around the thumb of her left hand. With a single, ferocious jerk of his neck, he tore it off.

St. James threw his hysterical wife under the picnic table and pushed her further underneath as the chimp tried to pursue her. LaDonna was screaming commands — "No! Stop! Sit!" — in a desperate bid to stop him. The remaining cake was on the table, still in its box, but the chimp didn't go for it. Instead he went after St. James.

As St. James confronted the chimp, the six-two former running back turned to find a second chimp — also a male, this one older and bigger — bearing down on him as well. With both hands, he pushed the bigger animal. Both chimps pounced. One of the animals grabbed him in a bear hug before chomping into the bone above his right eyebrow. He then stuck his finger in St. James's right eye, gouging it out. The same animal clamped his teeth onto St. James's nose, biting it off, as the other chimp chewed away at St. James's fingers. In the melee, one of the chimps dug in his claws and ripped the skin off the right side of St. James's face, causing it to flop over and cover his left eye, temporarily blinding him. One of the primates sunk his teeth into St. James's skull. He then closed his jaws on St. James's mouth, ripping off his lips and most of his teeth. St. James tried to put one of his hands down the animal's throat, but the chimp just kept chewing on it and chewing on it, and he couldn't get it out.

St. James fell to the ground, no longer able to defend himself, and for at least five minutes, the mauling continued as he lay helpless. One of the chimps gnawed on his buttocks and bit off his genitals. They ravaged his left foot, leaving it shredded. Blood poured from his body, and LaDonna was screaming. It looked as if they were eating him alive. Finally, LaDonna's screams drew the owners' son-in-law, Mark Carruthers, who came running armed with a .45-caliber revolver. After struggling to find a clean shot, he opened fire on the younger primate. The shot had no apparent effect, and Carruthers raced back to his house, a few dozen yards away, to reload with more-powerful ammunition. When Carruthers returned, he focused on the older male, the prime aggressor. Kneeling down, he shot him once in the head from close range. As the animal fell to the ground, the younger chimp began dragging St. James's mutilated body down a hill leading away from Moe's cage. Dirt filled St. James's lungs and seeped into his bloody openings.

For the briefest of moments, LaDonna looked toward Moe. He was sitting in the corner of his cage, frozen, seemingly stunned.

The lone chimp continued tearing at St. James's limp body with his teeth until Carruthers caught up to him and shot him once in the chest, ending the attack. St. James, lying facedown, felt the lifeless animal fall on his back.

An investigation later found that the chimps had escaped from their cage after one of the sanctuary's owners failed to lock two of its three doors. Animal behaviorists suggested the chimps' aggression could have been caused by a number of factors, including jealousy over the attention the Davises lavished on Moe, an innate desire to defend their territory, or abuse they may have suffered at the hands of humans in the past.

Despite the ferocity of the attack, when the paramedics arrived, St. James was still conscious. His face and body, however, were mutilated beyond recognition. Where his mouth, lips, and nose had been there was only a bloody hole. Where his right eye had been there was a pit. Where his fingers had been he had only stumps or simply gaps. "I had no idea a chimpanzee was capable of doing that to a human," Kern County fire captain Curt Merrell, who was among the first on the scene, told the Los Angeles Times. "It looked like a grizzly-bear attack."

LaDonna kept repeating the same five words as St. James was loaded into an ambulance: "Don't you die on me." She held on to his arm until the vehicle reached the main road, where St. James was lifted into a helicopter and rushed to a nearby hospital.

After arriving at Loma Linda University Medical Center, St. James was immediately put into a medically induced coma. He would remain unconscious and in critical condition, and LaDonna rarely left his bedside. St. James underwent dozens of surgeries. LaDonna was in agony for him.

And — how could it be otherwise? — she also worried about Moe. She visited Moe the day before Mother's Day. And when doctors temporarily woke St. James up for the first time, in May, his first question was: "How's Moe?"

The couple's dusty blue Dodge minivan has just pulled up near the Franklin on this Wednesday afternoon. LaDonna hops out of the driver's seat and rushes over to the side door. She hauls out St. James's wheelchair and places it on the ground just outside the passenger door. After opening it, she links her arms under St. James's armpits and grabs him around the back. Grunting in pain, St. James slides his body so his legs are hanging out the door. He then places his arms on LaDonna's shoulders. On the count of three, LaDonna hoists his massive frame out of the car, her thin body enveloped by his. Teetering under St. James's weight, she somehow guides him into the chair.

A few minutes later, St. James is sucking on a cherry ice pop as he describes how the attack has changed his life. LaDonna is hovering over him with a cloth to wipe away the red slush spilling out of his mouth. "I can't do anything on my own anymore," St. James says, "except sit around like a potted plant."

Three years after the attack, St. James is completely dependent on LaDonna. He cannot bathe himself, go to the bathroom, or even eat without her help. He still has no teeth and limited control of his mouth. His vision in his remaining eye is blurry. His swollen, punctured left foot remains in grim condition. The Davises were awarded $100,000 after the city settled their original due-process suit, but St. James says he doesn't have enough money to afford a special boot for his mangled foot. (The couple decided not to sue the ranch where they were attacked because it had no liability insurance.) Doctors are now recommending amputation because he has contracted the MRSA superbug. "They say if the MRSA activates while the wound is open, they probably couldn't amputate the foot fast enough to save his life," LaDonna says.

It's not until later in the day that St. James starts crying. It's a loud, whooping wail. His tears have nothing to do with what happened to him, though. He never complains about the attack or how it left him. He's just begun talking about something that happened more recently — something that happened to Moe.

The phone call came around 11:00 a.m. last June 27. LaDonna answered. On the other end of the line was Tammy Maples, co-owner of Jungle Exotics, a business that houses animals and rents them to the entertainment industry. Moe had been transferred to Jungle Exotics' sixty-acre sanctuary in the San Bernardino Mountains eight months earlier.

Just two days before the call, the couple had made the forty-five-minute drive to see their boy, a weekly ritual that, despite everything, they resumed in 2007, when St. James was finally able. Although the compound is on such uneven terrain that it prevented his wheelchair from approaching Moe's cage, the trips were still the highlight of St. James's week. On this visit, they brought Moe a hairbrush and an old computer keyboard. And they discussed their plans for their aging chimpanzee, chief among them installing solar panels on his facility, which would allow him to watch TV. It would also enable the Davises to set up a video camera and monitor, so they could interact with him every day.

Maples's voice on the line was shaky. LaDonna was so stunned by what she heard that she asked Maples to repeat it.

"I want to let you know I went by Moe's facility, and he's not in it."

"What do you mean he's not in it?" LaDonna said.

Moe, Maples said, had disappeared.

The couple sped to the ranch. They were met by Joe Camp, Maples's partner, who told them Moe had somehow broken off six steel welds from the cage, allowing him to open a sliding door and escape. By the time St. James and LaDonna saw the enclosure, it had been repaired and cleaned. LaDonna was perplexed. The cage was spotless. There were no blankets, there was none of Moe's stool. It was as if he had never been there. She wanted to see his stool, how he had slept the night before. She wanted to see what his thinking was.

A frantic search began. For weeks, Jungle Exotics workers and volunteer searchers combed the dense brush around the facility on foot and in 4x4 vehicles. St. James and LaDonna drove through the hills in their mini-van calling out for Moe. Bloodhounds were brought in. Helicopters flew overhead. The search was a media sensation locally and drew national and international press attention as well. The couple waited for news-and worried. A month went by and still no trace of Moe was found. The search was officially called off last July 31.

Camp remains baffled as to how Moe escaped. On the day of his disappearance, Moe's enclosure was cleaned as part of the daily routine, he says, and his cage was repaired so quickly because he expected the chimp to be found within hours. "We were hoping he'd wander back in. That's what they usually do," Camp says. After Moe inexplicably managed to break through the cage's welds, workers spotted him hopping over a security fence before disappearing into the hills, Camp says. "This was an animal that liked to be around people. The mystery is why this animal left and where he went. Or did somebody find him and move him off — we don't know."

St. James's phone rings as LaDonna is rummaging through the garage for a pair of pliers. It's a call for her from a friend, and within seconds it's clear she's being asked about Moe. After several months, there hasn't been a single sighting of the chimpanzee.

The couple has received calls constantly since Moe went missing. That's the word they use: missing. LaDonna protests the use of the word escape.

"We don't know what happened," she says.

St. James and LaDonna refuse to speculate about what led to Moe's disappearance. But with Moe gone, St. James is painfully lonely. The two were so close, there was no room for anyone else except LaDonna. Neighbors fascinated with the chimp stopped coming by years ago, and St. James's racing days and the camaraderie they brought are long over.

"I can talk for days about Moe," he says. "I just miss him so much. I've never loved anything as much as I loved Moe."

"We haven't heard anything new," LaDonna, pacing in the driveway, tells her friend on the cell phone. "Not a thing. Oh, no, no, no, this isn't something that's going to be unsolved. It's going to be solved."

St. James and LaDonna expect to see their boy again. The fruitless search convinced them Moe did not slip off into the woods. Chimpanzees are social creatures. Even in the wild, they are unlikely to venture off alone, St. James and LaDonna both explain, an assessment shared by primatologists. Something else must have happened. What exactly, they do not know.

But they're convinced that Moe is alive somewhere.

"He was brought up to use his brain," LaDonna says, "to always make decisions." Now it's as if she's talking to Moe: "There are lots of things here. I want this tool, but maybe you don't want that tool. Or maybe I'm going to eat this, but maybe you don't want that. There's choices here, Moe. Make the choice you want. Think about it. Think. Do you want a yellow crayon or do you want this green one?"

She pauses. "I'm hoping that wherever Moe is, he's making good choices for himself."

Much of the Davises' lives today revolve around caring for St. James — getting him to doctors' appointments, looking into new procedures, and simply negotiating the world given his physical difficulties. Progress is slow but continuing. By the end of the year, St. James hopes to have a new mouth and a fully formed left hand. He'll need to have his upper lip surgically reconstructed, then prosthodontists will outfit him with a special set of dentures so he can eat more easily and speak more clearly. And doctors have already designed prosthetic fingertips for the three stumps on his left hand, which St. James hopes to be wearing in a matter of months. St. James wants to one day work on his cars again. His right hand presents more of a problem, though, since on that hand most of his thumb is gone and two fingers are missing entirely.

And of course, what's also missing is Moe. What became of Moe we simply can't know. But what's left in his place, as painful as the vestige of a lost limb, is the Davises' singular devotion.

After all the years St. James and LaDonna shared with Moe and everything they've endured, how could he be gone forever? How could they not someday see their boy again?

A Clarification and a Correction
The article above includes the Davises's account of their chimp, Moe, in the days after authorities seized him and placed him in an exotic-animal shelter. The couple say his health quickly deteriorated, and he required their intervention to survive. The operator of the facility, the Wildlife WayStation, disputes that version of events, and the story should have pointed this out. The same article incorrectly reported that the Davises decided against suing a different animal shelter, Animal Haven Ranch, where St. James sustained grave injuries. The Davises have indeed filed a personal-injury suit against the shelter in Kern County, California, Superior Court. Trial is pending.

The second Internet

From Here


Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.comOctober 24, 2013

BRICS countries are close to completing a brand new Internet backbone that would bypass the United States entirely and thereby protect both governments and citizens from NSA spying.



In light of revelations that the National Security Agency hacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, in addition to recording information about 124 billion phone calls during a 30-day period earlier this year, the fallout against the NSA has accelerated.

Brazil is set to finalize a 34,000-kilometre undersea fiber-optic cable by 2015 that will run from Vladivostok, Russia to Fortaleza, Brazil, via Shantou, China, Chennai, India and Cape Town, South Africa.

According to the Hindu, the project will create, “a network free of US eavesdropping,” which via legislative mandates will also force the likes of Google, Facebook and Yahoo to store all data generated by BRICS nations locally, shielding it from NSA snooping.

“The BRICS countries have the muscle to pull this off,” notes Washington’s Blog. “Each of the BRICS countries are in the top 25 largest economies in the world. China has the world’s second largest economy, India is 3rd, Russia 6th, Brazil 7th, and South Africa 25th.”

However, some privacy experts fear that this will do little to stop the NSA, given that it has tapped undersea cables since the Cold War era. Others are more positive.

“Any alternative would be a positive thing, writes Michael Dorfman. “The more choice you have, the better. Yet no-one can say for sure whether this new Internet will be safer than its US counterpart and will be able to protect the rights of regular users, including the privacy of personal data and free access to resources, more effectively.”

The BRICS cable was already in development months before the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden first became public in June.

In September it emerged that the NSA had been spying on Brazilian government communications as well as Brazilian oil company Petrobras. Spooks hacked into the firm’s computer network to eavesdrop on conversations between CEOs.

The current Internet architecture is dominated by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is largely controlled by the United States.

Other entrepreneurs are also fighting back against NSA surveillance. Tech maverick John McAfeerecently announced that he was to fund a $100 gadget named Decentral that would sync up with a modem to thwart NSA spying and provide total anonymity.

Asked what he would do if the US government banned the product, McAfee responded, “I’ll sell it in England, Japan, the Third World. This is coming and cannot be stopped.”

Don't take my EBT!