The Journey Home

Once again, I find myself returning to the theme with which this journal was begun, years ago now: that of recovering as an abuse survivor. The cycle is so easy to fall back into: there is some comfort in familiarity, and one's past marks one as a susceptible target. It is further complicated when the abuser is a family member. Sometimes, a tradition of abuse within one's family can set the stage for a series of "out of the frying pan, into the fire" jumps from one abusive relationship to another over the years - looking for somewhere to escape from the unpleasantness of the situation at home, only to discover that the new situation was no better, sheepishly returning home to face more of the same.

For many years, my mother was the only advocate and guardian that I really had, and unfortunately, she had many blind spots of her own. She saw the abuse that came from her ex-husband (my father), and she saw when it came from outside the family. However, when it was her youngest son Matthew perpetrating the abuses, it was too easy for her to excuse it, dismiss it, deny it, and, when those failed, forgive it - over and over again. On at least two occasions, she had to have him removed from the family home for his habit of getting up in her face, becoming loud and overbearing, forcing her back into a corner, and refusing to back down - receiving restraining orders against him on each occasion. When he was married, he put his wife into the same position, and she also had to get a restraining order against him. While he was away at culinary school, he did the same to a roommate, who unfortunately allowed his machismo to get the better of him, leading him to punch my brother across the face, breaking his jaw - as my brother gleefully had the guy arrested, knowing full well that he himself had instigated the fight, but was untouchable because he refrained from initiating any physical violence.

When mom was diagnosed with advanced Pancreatic Cancer in summer 2006, she made arrangements for the family home to be passed jointly to Matt and myself, which was executed without complication. After she passed in early 2007, her life insurance money was used to pay off the mortgage, leaving the deed to the house free and clear, with myself and Matt as joint owners of the house and property. The intention was that we would jointly maintain the property, dividing costs and responsibilities.

Because I subsist on a disability income, combined with the severe anxiety disorder that disables me in the first place, the very idea of having to make other living arrangements for myself was more than I could handle, and considering that option led to frequent breakdowns. Part of the nature of my anxiety condition is that I cannot cope with confrontation, and even a simple interview will frequently induce a severe anxiety attack, unless I am in the company of an advocate to provide emotional support.

Matt decided that attending culinary school would be a good way to advance his career options, and offered assurance that if I could cover the cost of maintaining the house while he was away, he would pay me back after he finished school and got a job. He also convinced our other brother Michael (career US Navy corpsman, active duty) to co-sign the student loan for him, with assurance that it would just be a formality, and the loan payments would be made punctually, leaving no liability on Mike.

While Matt was away at culinary school, I was able to manage the costs of maintaining the household (utilities, basic maintenance, groceries, property taxes, etc), but I found myself needing some help with household chores (cooking, cleaning, etc). Matt agreed to the idea of me inviting a friend (Jaqie) to stay there with me to help out, and said that he was considering moving to a larger city after completing his culinary degree instead of coming back to the house at all - thus implying that the arrangement would be indefinite. Jaqie is mildly autistic, highly introverted, and has some anxiety issues of her own; as such, most of her time was spent withdrawn into her room.

After culinary school, Matt arranged for externship locally and returned home, on the logic that it would be less costly to share the maintenance expenses of the lien-free house with me, rather than to pay rent in another location, which seemed fair and reasonable enough. Not long after his return home, he became increasingly hostile toward Jaqie, expressing discomfort with having her in his home, and demanding that she should be more sociable toward him, rather than hiding out in her room. When she did come out and try to socialize with him, including inviting him into her guild in WoW, he frequently became threatening and verbally abusive toward her. She expelled him from her guild, and he responded by loudly and violently demanding that she leave his home immediately. This incident escalated to the point where law enforcement were called to intervene. By the time they arrived, he changed his demeanor completely, asserting that he had been the victim, no threats or abuse were occurring, and that the problem was the 'mental illness' of the anxiety disorders that both Jaqie and I have, causing us to make paranoid accusations. Since nothing could be proven, and it was merely hearsay, the deputies left with no action taken. Because it had been made abundantly clear that law enforcement would not (or could not) intervene until after it was too late and violence had been done, she fled in terror, leaving most of her personal belongings behind (some of which I was able to later return to her).

Once Jaqie was removed from the picture, and the household was reduced to just Matt and myself, he no longer felt obligation to maintain an image of civility or responsibility. To be fair, he did complete his externship, but thereafter he made a token gesture of applying for jobs, accepting them, and then within a month or so having a dispute with management leading to him either walking out or getting fired. He would work just long enough to put together enough money to pay for his own hobbies, but had none to offer toward household responsibilities or his outstanding debt. Eventually, his reputation had gotten ahead of him, and places in the area refused to hire him at all, at which time he decreed that it was my responsibility to fully support him indefinitely. The result was that my disability income was paying the entire cost of supporting both of us, and he was not even willing to acknowledge his financial dependence on me.

That brings us to early this spring, when some friends I had met online started talking seriously about the possibility of eventually moving me somewhere nearer to where they were, and the idea of finally getting out from under the burden of the house and my brother began to look potentially feasible. Needless to say, I was quite wary and suspicious, based on past experience with others offering to 'help' me out of an abusive environment, only to lead me into a worse one. Further complicating things, the counselor/therapist/whatever whom I had been seeing suddenly disappeared without a trace, leaving me with very little guidance or support.

In July, Claire came down to visit me, and we discussed some long-term plans of moving me out of there, into a healthier environment, and we each had some long talks with Matt about how he needed to pick himself up by his bootstraps and try to get back on his feet - including the money I'd given him to put gas in his truck to go down to Social Services so he could apply for food stamps and/or cash assistance and/or job placement assistance. Claire stayed for a week, and then I rode back to NY with her for a week (where I met several other supportive friends), and when I returned to Virginia, discovered that Matt had not done any of the things that he had agreed to do while I was away; the money that I gave him for those tasks had been spent on other things. He had run out of money for his World of Warcraft subscription, so he had instead switched to Second Life, and remained entrenched in his room, with the pile of trash from floor to ceiling sitting beside him.

We decided that I needed a vacation, and we arranged for that to happen. In August, Claire came down again with Samantha and Inky, with the intention of taking me out of there for about a month-long vacation, getting to see a bit more of the country by going back up to NY and out to Montana. As we were leaving (as in, outside, getting into the truck), he came to the door demanding that I had to give him money before leaving; I told him that I didn't have any more to give him, and that he'd shown bad faith on what I already had given him. His response was to become belligerent, making various threats against me and my friends, and we decided that the best course of action was to simply leave, rather than escalating the situation into potential violence.

Needless to say, I was a bit shaken, and it took awhile for me to settle down at all. By the time Samantha and I had gotten to Montana, I was relatively calm, and it was very clear that living back at the house in Virginia with Matt was not something that I would be able to do again. We started making arrangements for where to house me both for short-term and long-term.

The first time I got back online from Montana, I found my Skype inbox littered with still more ranting and raving and threats from Matt. At that point, I decided it would be a good idea to phone Pastor Tindall (the pastor of the church next door to the house), to see if he could talk to Matt at all, and maybe use his counseling skills to help settle him down some. The conversation between them was private, and I have no specific knowledge of its content, but Matt resumed sending me messages ranting about how I had lied to the pastor, and that I was doing it all just to abuse him. Because of how emotionally traumatized I was by this new barrage of attacks, Claire suggested that I should block him from contacting me online, which I did.

Since coming back from Montana to NY, I've been staying in Zakk's spare bedroom, waiting for an apartment to become available in the building where Claire lives. This limbo state has been somewhat anxiety-inducing, since I haven't had access to a doctor or therapist, my car and most of my possessions are still in Virginia, and I don't have a mailing address to give anyone for myself. Further, I'm *still* paying the utility bills on the house in Virginia (in addition to my own expenses here), which are draining away my meager savings at an alarming rate, and I don't dare turn off those utilities until I've removed the remainder of my belongings from the house.

I was hoping that Matt would come to his senses over time, waking up and doing what he needs to do, but last week I made the mistake of answering a phone call that woke me up, without checking the number - it was him, calling again to blame me for everything that had gone wrong in his life, accepting no responsibility for any of it. I tried to reason with him for about five minutes before giving up and hanging up on him. The inevitability of a confrontation when we return to Virginia to retrieve my belongings continues to eat away at me, and will do so until it is done, but there's no feasible way to make that happen before the Thanksgiving break.

...and in the back of my mind, there is still the nagging fear: am I doing it again? Is this just another case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire"?

it's Memorial Day here in the US...

Even if we as a nation can't seem to remember or stand up for the freedoms that our military servicepeople sacrificed their lives for, at the very least we should remember their sacrifice.

Sometimes it feels like the soldiers who gave their lives for our freedoms that we remember on this holiday made their sacrifice in vain. Our soldiers have done their part... 'We the People' have let them down, by failing to remain vigilant, allowing ourselves to be cowed into submission (and not in the kinky way), and to be silenced (or driven away) by those who "don't want to hear about 'politics'."

The reason why government (and corporate) officials in positions of power seem so much more at home with totally extravagant gross distortions of fact, telling bold lies that bear not even the vaguest resemblance to truth, rather than just the slight twisting and prevarication that the rest of us are expected to engage in, is summed up quite well in this quote:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Bonus points if you recognise the author/source of the quote.

Well, it's been nearly a week now, and I've finally gotten my thoughts sorted into a semi-coherent form that I can write out. For the moment, I'm sidestepping the issue of his execution itself, because I don't feel qualified to offer a judgment on the method by which it was carried out, or even whether it was necessary in the first place. I'm specifically addressing the widespread public celebratory response that we've seen in the media in the aftermath of his death:

Personally, I feel that all of the celebratory cheering and back-patting over it is disgusting. Yes, Osama bin Laden was a man who displayed a disturbingly sociopathic moral bankruptcy, and wrought much destruction in his wake. However, termination of a life is something which, while occasionally necessary (which it may have been in this case), still remains a solemn and regrettable event.

The fact that anyone can celebrate the death of another human being, no matter how much the target deserved it, says to me that those doing the celebrating have lost a great deal of their own humanity, and shows that the act was less about justice or security, and more about hatred and vengeance - and showing that side of ourselves as a nation to an 'enemy' only reinforces their view of us as monsters that need to be exterminated, much as the celebration of American deaths by his followers led the American people to perceive them as inhuman and unworthy of life or basic dignity.

The execution itself may have been a regrettable necessity, and I don't feel that I can judge that action in one way or another; the celebration in the aftermath, however, was a barbaric display of uncivilized behavior that cannot be excused or justified in any way.

So, as frequently happens to me when I'm in a half-asleep state, my mind started wandering into the realm of what's wrong with modern society, and how it got that way. After some discussions of the past several days, last night it drifted into the area of economics, where it quickly flooded with a deluge of disjointed thoughts, which somewhat pulled themselves together into a semi-coherent babble.

I started with the lament about how sad it is that a person's right to exist has become tied to their financial value, effectively negating all other measures of a person's worth. To be honest, the idea of comparing one person's worth to another AT ALL is troubling to me, because I am of the belief that a life is inherently of immeasurable value, and should not be ordered as one more valuable than another, but for the moment, I'm specifically addressing the issue of money as the primary (or, in many cases sole) measure of a person's worth.

If we begin with an examination of how the monetary value of a service (whether it takes the abstract form of what we generally think of as 'services', or the tangible form of what we call 'goods'), it seems to be generally agreed that value is driven by supply and demand. My contention is that there is an additional force at work that is neglected by the supply and demand model: a concept which I will call (for lack of a better term) 'social responsibility'. To illustrate this concept most clearly, I will use extreme hyperbole: Suppose that there is an imminent looming disaster that threatens to wipe out the entire population, and you are the only person in the world with the ability to prevent it. By a pure supply and demand model, the value of your service is infinite (you are the sole supplier, and the demand for it is infinite); however, unless you are an extreme sociopath, you will do what needs to be done, EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT PAID AT ALL FOR IT. That is the invisible factor that is ignored in a supply and demand model: the ability to hold the service hostage during a negotiation phase, effectively applying a form of extortion.

This ignored factor goes a long way toward explaining several of the inequities that develop in a free market economy. When it is generally realized that there are services that will be performed out of a simple sense of moral obligation and social responsibility, and not held hostage for compensation, those services are devalued by the free market, and no matter how high the demand, or how low the supply, the rate of pay for those services will be held to a minimum - providing only just enough to allow those who offer such services to continue providing them, if even that much. This has been the fate of traditional 'women's work', which has led to countless generations of under-compensation (or even total lack of compensation) for tasks that are critical to the maintenance and continuation of society (most notably homemaking and child care, but it applies to many other tasks and services as well). As we have moved forward to a time when women began to enter the competitive workforce, outside of the 'traditional' (unpaid but necessary and valuable) tasks, the assumption has continued that a woman will simply do what needs to be done, rather than hold her skills hostage to negotiate for fair compensation - thus women, who have generally been raised to be compassionate and provide for others, are still consistently offered a lower rate of pay than men, who have been raised to demand something more in return. As for the question of WHY the expectation of compassionate contribution to society has been expected of women but not of men, that lies beyond the scope of this essay.

The effect of this phenomenon goes beyond the simple matter of wage inequity between men and women in the workplace, though. It completely unbalances the entire model of supply and demand, tying value instead to the strength (combination of skill and circumstance) of the negotiating position of the supplier. If a supplier feels morally compelled to provide an essential service, it weakens that negotiating position and drives down the price; this accounts for low salaries in such fields as education, as one example: teachers tend to recognize that holding out for a more equitable compensation will do damage to society as a whole, and so are more inclined to settle for less rather than create more extensive suffering than necessary. Further (and slightly tangentially), if a supplier is being held hostage to the price of an essential service, it weakens the negotiating position; this accounts (in part - another factor is the difficulty in conceptualizing a larger income) for poorer members of the working class accepting wages far below what they could otherwise negotiate if they were not pressed for survival.

The logical progression of such a model is that those who provide essential services for society will fall into two basic categories: first, there will be those who do so out of a sense of social responsibility, who will be grossly underpaid for what they do; the other would be those who are willing to withhold those services as hostage for a 'fair' compensation (defined by pure supply and demand). The former will eventually be driven out of the market, as they progressively lose the ability to meet the cost of other needs, and are forced to perform other work which they feel no such ethical qualms against refusing to provide; the latter will develop an increasing sphere of influence, thus exerting more and more control over supply, while continuing to face inelastic demand, allowing them to inflate the price of survival. As this continues, an inevitable link develops between a person's ability to survive and their economic value (essentially, how much money one has - although it applies equally well in a pure barter system). From there, it's only a very small step before we start perceiving a person's right to survive as being tied to how much money they earn, which is disturbingly close to a state where the sole measure of someone's value as a person being how much money they have.

I contend that this situation has arisen from a lack of social responsibility. There appears to be a cultural axiom in western society that the only reason why a person would work at all is for personal gain at the expense of others. While that is certainly a strong motivating factor, I would like to point out that it is far from the only one, and a society can theoretically be built on mutually beneficial activity, in which people provide for each other simply because the advancement of the whole of society is beneficial for everyone, rather than focusing on the advancement of the individual at the expense of the whole. Certainly the individual who begins from a powerful negotiating position can advance further and faster at the expense of others through a judicious application of selfish greed, but if one advances at the cost of one's humanity, is it truly worth it? Unfortunately, once a system allows for anyone to behave in this way, it becomes necessary for all to follow suit in order to survive in any meaningful way, hence the belief that there is no other viable alternative model. I contend that a preferable solution is to devise a system by which such behavior is discouraged rather than rewarded. The question is how to implement such a system without those who are driven by selfishness and greed seizing control of the entire structure and corrupting it for their own benefit, as has happened in every historical case where such a system was attempted on a larger scale than a tribal community; the answer is unclear, but likely would require us to evolve beyond the 'monkeysphere' and recognize that everyone is equally worthy of the right to exist, rather than just those closest to us, and that nobody deserves to be excluded or othered because of differences in skills, culture, or other circumstances.

I presented the following quote to a sampling of almost a dozen US citizens, ranging in age from 15 to 35, including one active-duty member of the US military, one who works for a municipal government office, and one who works in the field of education in a school. NOT ONE OF THEM recognized the author or source of the quote - not a single one:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.

I grieve for the country of my birth. That country no longer exists, if it ever did.

I'm convinced that conflating the idea of holding the Rothschild banking cartel accountable for their corruption, with a general anti-semitism, is the root of the majority of the economic problems in modern society.

On the one hand, you have people making this logical fallacy: The Rothschilds were Jews. Therefore, people who attack the Rothschilds (for their acts of corruption) are making an attack against the Jews. This conflation was initiated from within the Rothschild cartel in the deliberate attempt to bring the honest Jewish population to their defence, turning them into effectively a meat-shield.

On the other hand, you have people who make this logical fallacy: The Rothschilds were corrupt and evil. The Rothschilds were Jews. Therefore, all Jews are corrupt and evil. While there are most definitely people who would look for any excuse they could find to villify the Jewish population, this problem was exacerbated by the Rothschild banking cartel's use of the general Jewish population as pawns to insulate the unacceptable, indefensible, destructive policies and ideologies of their banking cartel.

The end result is that, through this clever act of misdirection, based on the human tendency to overgeneralise with faulty extrapolation, the administration of justice against the most destructive cartel in world history was completely obstructed (from fear of those who would deliver such justice being perceived as anti-semitic) until it was too late, leading to the collapse of free society into the current state of neo-Feudal totalitarian control of society by corporate megaliths wielding the power to suppress any and all human rights, without regard to law or government.

Sadly, I think that even if society DOES wake up and try to take action to fix the problem, corrective measures will suffer from the same tendency toward generalisation: instead of targeting the individuals or groups responsible for the problems, the action will be directed against the weakest and most vulnerable members of [some random demographic that the corrupt leaders happen to share], while those actually causing the problem remain untouched - and untouchable.

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	3
Mind:	3.1
Body:	4.3
Spirit:	5.5
Friends/Family:	0.9
Love:	0
Finance:	5
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

As defined by US law, "acts of domestic terrorism" are those which: "(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States."

Sarah Palin's 'crosshairs' map with the name on Ms. Giffords on it (among other Democrat party members of Congress), followed by the attempted assassination of her and her staff, certainly meets (A), (B)(ii), and (C). Since Ms. Palin made it very clear that her crosshairs map was not merely an expression of her personal feelings, and represented that of her political party (Republican), the US Republican party should be declared a Terrorist Organisation and prosecuted accordingly under the Patriot Act. Mr. Loughner was merely the individual who pulled the trigger; his action was clearly incited by the policies of the party.

If President Obama had any balls at all, he would make this declaration and have every Republican official rounded up and detained under the Patriot Act, for being a member of a terrorist organization. To do anything less makes it clear that he really is 'soft on terrorism', as his critics have accused him of being.

After reading this article, and the comments in response to it, I've written up this brief summary of the events being discussed:

Basically, when copyright infringement online is suspected, the USCG (US Copyright Group) is able to file discovery motions against ISP's, harvesting the entire list of people who connect to the internet via that ISP. Then, they velveeta the entire harvested list with threats of "Pay us a $500 settlement now, or else we're taking you to court for a $250k+ copyright infringement case."

The innocent victims of these extortion notices are then faced with 3 choices:

Choice 1: Pay the $500 settlement 'voluntarily'.
Choice 2: Pay $5k+ (and frequently as much as $100k) to retain an attorney to defend themselves
Choice 3: Attempt to defend themselves in court, and get repeatedly hammered for procedural defects for not knowing the intricacies of the law.

Obviously, for those who can't afford to hire a lawyer (because this is civil proceeding and not criminal proceeding, they're not entitled to state-funded legal aid), the only viable options are 1 & 3 - and because the overwhelming majority of these defendants are innocent, they will object in principle to paying the settlement... if they can even afford it in the first place.

Some lawyer guy (Graham Syfert) was selling a $10 self-help guide book to try to make Choice 3 more viable for people who can't afford the cost of actually retaining a lawyer. Apparently, the instructions provided in the guide book was missing a minor procedural step, and as a result, everyone who has used it is having the additional claim against them of filing a 'frivolous' (i.e. procedurally defective) motion with the court. Furthermore, the USCG is filing a collection of claims against the lawyer who sold the booklet in the first place.

The motivation for this action by the USCG is quite clearly one of spite and malice (which is perfectly permissible, and as a motivation is inadmissible in court as irrelevant to the case). The fact that the people can now defend themselves, instead of simply being coerced into a settlement, is costing the copyright lawyers money. So they're suing this lawyer (and the people who used his booklet) for the 'damages' to their livelihood - because their entire income is based on innocent people being unable to defend themselves.

Of course, the independent lawyers commenting on it are saying, "This is why you need to actually hire a REAL lawyer (and pay more than the settlement demanded by the extortionists), rather than trying to defend yourself" - which completely sidesteps the two major issues of the initial case:

Point 1: A justice system is meant to provide equal protection under the law, not reserving such protection to those who are of wealth and means, and
Point 2: The defendants are (mostly) innocent victims of an extortion racket.

~~~~

At this point, I'll take a moment to point out that of the defendants who are being sued by the USCG, certainly some of them are, in fact, guilty of the copyright violations of which they are accused. However, most of them clearly are not. Furthermore, there is a legal principle that seems to be all but dead in the US: "Innocent until proven guilty."

In these cases, the defendants are being presumed guilty, and having their lives and livelihoods thoroughly disrupted by the self-appointed copyright guardians on an unfounded fishing expedition. Government actors are prohibited from conducting these fishing expeditions by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, but because these are private corporate interests, they are able to circumvent the basic rights of the people. As such, I feel that even in the cases where the defendant HAS committed the acts of copyright violation of which they are accused, the evidence gathered on these excessively broad fishing expeditions should be thrown out. However, this is a matter of personal opinion.

~~~~

With any luck, this guy will be able to file a counter-motion showing that the USCG is acting in bad faith - and carry forward to contend that every settlement contract between defendants and the USCG was entered under duress, invalid, and reversed...
Maybe even going further and demonstrating that the USCG is criminally liable for its systematic practice of extortion.

That would be the outcome if there were any true justice or karma in the world (or at least in the US).

Unfortunately, there isn't.