DURANCE VILE*

Both San Jose and Oakland are pulling people off the streets and holding them in detention centers built for drug addicts. Addicts, like everyone else, prefer to go to therapy in a support group scenario.

The best way to get over trauma, is to have a support group who will listen to your every word with kindness and sympathy, even if you are telling the same stupid story again and again. Sworn to secrecy, these support groups, based on the model of AA, are amazingly effective. To the rest of us, this is boring and sounds like whining, but it is the only thing that works.

Consequently, all of the really nice facilities we were using for drug clinics are going out of business. (They are perfect as homeless shelters for street kids, as long as we unlock the outside doors and let the kids lock their room doors.)

Instead of looking for a new use for their facilities, two clinics in San Jose and Oakland seem to prefer trolling the streets for anyone they can say can not care for themselves. Note that the criteria for not being able to take care of yourself is to have not have a home or a way to reach that home. Taxi money home should bring IMMEDIATE release.

I understand that this scam has expanded to include technical people who rent rooms while doing business in the Valley.

The law is pretty clear. You have to be a danger to yourself or others, or you have to be unable to care for yourself. The decision is made based on the person in front of the judge, on or off medication.

In my Oakland case, the defense asked if my ongoing rental of both a room with bath and an office had been verified. The court was assured that the information had been verified. I insured that the judge knew I had $300 in my purse and $2000 immediately available. She ordered me held as unable to care for myself.

These clinics use Kaiser referrals. I believe that they can be paid to target certain individuals. Trust me, if they were paid to keep me in durance vile for a total of almost three weeks, someone is right now following the money. When I left, they were in the middle of multiple Kaiser audits.

This could not have worked without the collusion of police, courts, and people at Kaiser. Have I ever mentioned the Federal False Claim Act to you? You NEED an attorney, but courts and hospitals keep records of EVERYTHING.

And, of course, you all are too busy putting nice working people out of business to pay attention to the governments of the cities and counties around you.

Why are there people still on the streets in this wealthy and innovative place?

Have I ever mention that not paying a decent wage to government workers would lead to BAD THINGS?

TRUMP GOT ELECTED BECAUSE THE INTERNET COMMUNITY DECIDED TO VALUE THINGS OVER PEOPLE!

* How old novels and poems spoke of the horrors of imprisonment.

THE SAD TRUTH

After the tragedy in Las Vegas, stock markets reported that stocks of gun manufacturers ROSE.

This is because the propaganda around gun sales results in people buying more guns every time you pass gun restrictions. Plus the fact that the US is awash with guns.

We need to put our energy into where it is the most effective.

Before we again try to tackle the gun problem, we need to solve health care and get rid of prohibition.

More people die from lack of health care than die from guns. We could afford more health care if we used visiting nurses to provide health care for the severely disabled. Many are in such pain that a doctor visit is torture for both them and their caretakers.

Almost all of the street violence is caused by prohibition. Take all recreational drugs off the DEA schedules and the violence will go down. It is unlikely that Sessions will do this as he owes his career to irrational, illogical and prejudicial policy towards blacks and browns.

I am extremely tired of even California thinking that a benign healing herb is a scourge on the universe.

Much of this is coming from stay at home mothers who are very easy to frighten with horror stories of addiction. Too many people still believe propaganda lies from 60 years ago.

BTW, algorithms are actually quite stupid. They can be reverse engineered so that Russian trolls can still mess with our news.

REAL PEOPLE, and professional advertizing agencies are needed to make and post ads that are not propaganda. Choosing the news feeds with real news, stopping the fake news, must be done by REAL PEOPLE.

You are all using math to substitute for human intelligence. I liked Spock also, but even Spock admitted that human emotions required solutions from humans.

THE TRAGIC STORY OF ESMERALDA

We all know that the truest evil is to stop someone else from exercising free will.

Esmeralda knew this. She knew that using a love potion to get herself a groom to love, was the most dire evil.

Loneliness is a dreadful thing.

Esmeralda was born brown, tiny, beautiful, in dire poverty. Her brown, tiny, beautiful sisters found marriage and moved to the big city. Esmeralda was not allowed into their homes. No one from her family would speak to her.

One night, Esmeralda met Charming Musician. Her Prince Charming, she thought. She fell completely and totally into the kind of love that is a mirage. Esmeralda's love was a mirage because the man was only being a musician as a hobby to relax from his powerful job.

Charming Musician discovered Esmeralda's secret, she had been born anatomically male. He remained her friend, laughing and teasing, and playing songs just for her.

Then Charming Musician turned back into Investment Banker.

Esmerelda was devastated. She did the evilest of evil, putting a love spell on Charming Musician. The spell backfired badly as Esmerelda did not even know Charming Musician well enough to set correct parameters for the spell.

Her spirit protects A Wedding Chapel For You in San Jose. Only during the month of October is she visable to muggles.

Free will is our human gift. Use it WISELY.

SAVING OUR SUPER CITIES*

SUPER STOCK SALES TAX (SSST) FOR SUPER CITIES that are home to stock, bond or commodity markets.

SSST will be a sales tax**, collected by the exchange, of .001% of every dollar of any transaction completed in under THREE SECONDS.

TWO THINGS WILL HAPPEN:

Suddenly cities will have plenty of money to fix social problems caused by the super rich.

There will be a dampening of the kind of trading that is just sophisticated gambling.

Right now, up to 75% of all capital may currently be invested in derivatives rather than invested in businesses, farms, etc. It is very difficult to have capitalism if you do not have capital. This tax will slowly free up needed capital for our water projects.

CITIES CAN TAX STUFF VERY QUICKLY

In most U.S. cities, a new sales tax city ordinance can be passed in about three months.

NEW YORK CITY -- YOU COULD HAVE MONEY FLOWING IN BY JANUARY! (And Trump will HATE it!)

I am fairly certain that the exchanges will not oppose this tax. They see the same possible future that I see.


* Since the dawn of civilization, the city-state has been where civilization moved forward. New laws, new art, new social fabric, all came from the cities. It is unfair that advances in farming always led to advances in the cities. Feeding people is the most critical part of a civilization.

** In the City of London, it will probably be called a VAT or value added tax.

AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN

AGAIN, they are going after health care AGAIN.

I honestly do not know WHY Republicans are trying to undo an increasingly popular method of providing needed health care to vulnerable people.

If you drop everything and write a letter TODAY, maybe you can change minds. If you are in a purple or red state*, your letter could save health care for us all.

Letters should go to: Trump, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, both your US Senators, and your US Representative. Do not forget to date your letter, and make a copy for yourself.

My legal opinion is that these letters are petitions to the government, and therefore part of the public record. It will be fun to do Freedom of Information Requests to insure that our letters do become part of the public record.

You can also email and call. But just as conservatives ignore demonstrations, they can erase email and take bad notes regarding your phone call.

I know this sounds like homework. Would you rather lose your medical coverage?

* For some unknown reason, states which sometimes elect Republicans and sometimes elect Democrats are called PURPLE states. Republicans get RED. Democrats get BLUE.

OUR DEBT TO THE DREAMERS

All this malarkey about "you have to immigrate the legal way".

Most of the children who desperately came to the US illegally, came to escape the violence caused when the DEA decided to escalate the War on Some Drugs by fighting drug dealers South of the Border.

The resulting violence decimated families. Mothers and children fled for their lives.

We blithely ignore the drug violence in Mexico. Shoot someone in Chicago and it makes headlines. Hang fifty headless bodies from a bridge in Mexico, and we ignore it.

WE CAN NOT WIN THE WAR ON SOME DRUGS. The only way to beat the drug scourge is to GET TREATMENT to those whose substance use interferes with their ability to live life.

Our experiment in off-shoring the drug violence, provided us with LOTS of traumatized children who we should embrace and care for. Especially since our DEA caused the violence.

NAFTA was an attempt to get decent jobs for the people of Mexico. Because wages are only one part of the equation, NAFTA has strict regulations for union organizing and environmental protections. The reason the neo-cons want to get rid of NAFTA is that they want to move the jobs to Mexico without the pesky unions demanding that workers be paid. And without those pesky environmental rules, so they can trash Mexico.

The real problem with neo-cons is that they think that laws and orders are the way to get people to do what you want people to do.

People are not computers. People often respond to laws in the exact opposite way that you want them to respond.

You have to PERSUADE people. You can not just ORDER people around. Even torture will not get people to do what you ORDER tham to do.

I am tired of the neo-con fantasy that all people on welfare are lazy and stupid.

I am tired of the neo-con fantasy that they can bully us into discriminating against our neighbors.

I am tired of the neo-con fantasy that the only way to get respect is to get RICH.

I am seriously tired of the neo-con fantasy that men have an obligation to keep women from power.

The way you get respect is to acknowledge that you can make mistakes, and to do your best to fix the mistakes you did make.

Although prostitutes are willing to trade money for a pretend respect.

Stop reading Atlas Shrugged. You are not that architect. Start watching Citizen Kane. Do you really want to die a lonely death?

TOTAL INCOMPETANCE

The CA Unclaimed Property Office has NO IDEA how to deal with stock certificates escheated to the state.

Betty Yee must be the most incompetent comptroller in the universe.

I have been trying to help a disabled friend get his escheated stock back. One of the stock certificates escheated to the state does not even show up on the unclaimed property data base.

The other two stock certificates are on record as having been escheated to the state. So I helped my friends put in an application. They were told in might take ONE YEAR to even give her an answer. Recently they sent back her entire packet of correctly filled out forms and documents regarding the two stocks they can actually find in their data base. (The packet was returned six months after it was sent, with no explanation.)

I called up the controller's office and they told me that I could not even give them the information they need to start fixing the problem. Understand that I told the poor receptionist that I only wanted to give information, not be given information. FOR WHICH I DO NOT NEED TO HAVE PERMISSION FROM ANYBODY!

The receptionist was so poorly trained that she did not even respond to the words attorney, disabled person, please help get me to a person so I can inform you of a crises in your office.

So I told her I would blog about the problem.

You need a computer program that can remove the escheat on the stock, so the person owning the stock can sell it. You do not need to sell it yourself.

This problem has been festering for about five years. This means that the controller is NOT PROPERLY EXERCISING HER AUTHORITY over the unclaimed property office.

This means that the controller is DELIBERATELY REFUSING TO BE GIVEN ANY UNPLEASANT INFORMATION.

SO HERE IS YOUR UNPLEASANT INFORMATION. It is LEGALLY THEFT if you withhold property from the actual owner.

So the STATE OF CALIFORNIA is guilty of THEFT!

If you think I am wrong, you could ask the Attorney General.