I won't dissemble: the past few years have sucked. I lost my career, which I really loved. I am poor.
But when I look around, I have been extremely fortunate. That fortune needs to be called out.
I have the greatest privilege I have enjoyed in my entire life. I have sat with Combatant Commanders in their inner offices. I worked with the most secret operatives our country's service; but I have never enjoyed the company of better, more committed, more skilled patriots than my partners at Flint, Grimes & Hullinger; Utah's best criminal defense attorneys.
My professional friends are among the best attorneys I've ever met.
I get to go to the office in the morning knowing that I will learn something, and will be part of something that is important.
I resolve to love what I am doing. I resolve to be better at what I do. But I can only do that because I have been fortunate enough to work in the company of Good Attorneys, and Good People.
Happy New Year to you! I think it will end badly; but that is no reason to start poorly.
28 December, 2010
13 November, 2010
I am Spartacus. . . Spread this Word
Please read this blog entry and pass it on.
[These events took place roughly between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, November 13th in Terminal 2 of the San Diego International Airport.]
. . . I looked him straight in the eye and said, "if you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested." . . .
03 November, 2010
11603
Well, not only did I lose, but I managed to earn just a hair more than one percent more than Andy got when he ran for the same office in 2002. This tells me two things.
First, there are about 12-15% of the population that are immune to the disease of this place, and have pretty much always been so.
And second, the other 85% will eagerly wait in line to be trampled by politics.
Well, on to the next windmill, Sancho!
First, there are about 12-15% of the population that are immune to the disease of this place, and have pretty much always been so.
And second, the other 85% will eagerly wait in line to be trampled by politics.
Well, on to the next windmill, Sancho!
29 October, 2010
Sauce for the Goose: or Why Utah County Needs an Independent County Attorney
You do not get Justice in Utah County.
For all but about 50 residents of Utah County; and virtually no person who isn't a resident, but still finds themselves caught in the criminal justice tax lottery in Utah County; this is sadly the cold, unalterable truth.
Highland's bankrupting by its own mayor, the rank I-15 contract corruption, the complete abdication of any interest in doing anything more than conducting mere show trials for the Founder's Capital scam, city police officers giving powerful people passes on violations of law, and now a Police Chief(!!!) caught on tape shoplifting, but absolutely not getting prosecuted in any way seems to be of absolutely no importance to the voters of Utah County. Republican Candidates (overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of the back-scratching power structure) are apparently going to cruise to office or re-election merely because they wear the right color tie. There will be no competition of ideas or philosophy. Inertia voting will define our lives for the next two years, and possibly forever. Your opinion is unimportant. Your vote is irrelevant. Your life and livelihood are just baubles for the plucking.
This may be the final post here before election day. The issues are clear: Political Party Favor or Professional Defender of the Constitution? The Bank Gets Your House (whether or not you paid for it) or The Bank Gets Prosecuted for Violating the Law? RepubliCrat Kleptocracy or Libertarian Freedom?
As County Attorney, I will police the Government at least as zealously as I police the citizenry. I will demand the same compliance with the law that the police demand of each of you when you're driving on the road, or surfing the internet with your computer, or shopping at Dillards. . . If you're tired of all this corruption and injustice by now, you have to lift just one hand to cast a vote for Liberty.
Throw 'da Bums OUT!
For all but about 50 residents of Utah County; and virtually no person who isn't a resident, but still finds themselves caught in the criminal justice tax lottery in Utah County; this is sadly the cold, unalterable truth.
Highland's bankrupting by its own mayor, the rank I-15 contract corruption, the complete abdication of any interest in doing anything more than conducting mere show trials for the Founder's Capital scam, city police officers giving powerful people passes on violations of law, and now a Police Chief(!!!) caught on tape shoplifting, but absolutely not getting prosecuted in any way seems to be of absolutely no importance to the voters of Utah County. Republican Candidates (overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of the back-scratching power structure) are apparently going to cruise to office or re-election merely because they wear the right color tie. There will be no competition of ideas or philosophy. Inertia voting will define our lives for the next two years, and possibly forever. Your opinion is unimportant. Your vote is irrelevant. Your life and livelihood are just baubles for the plucking.
This may be the final post here before election day. The issues are clear: Political Party Favor or Professional Defender of the Constitution? The Bank Gets Your House (whether or not you paid for it) or The Bank Gets Prosecuted for Violating the Law? RepubliCrat Kleptocracy or Libertarian Freedom?
As County Attorney, I will police the Government at least as zealously as I police the citizenry. I will demand the same compliance with the law that the police demand of each of you when you're driving on the road, or surfing the internet with your computer, or shopping at Dillards. . . If you're tired of all this corruption and injustice by now, you have to lift just one hand to cast a vote for Liberty.
Throw 'da Bums OUT!
16 October, 2010
Priorities
Polygamists? No. (This is Utah. . . read your history books.)
Spice? No. I'm supposing you'd also like possession of baby aspirin or Coca-Cola to also allow the police to kick down your door at 3:00 a.m. with a search warrant?!
Rather, let me say what I will prosecute: If you bought a house, and now the bank is threatening or trying to foreclose on you, and (after receiving $800 billion of your tax dollars to stay in 'business') they fail or failed to follow every letter of the law, I will prosecute the bank and the individuals who committed fraud or violated any laws, including brokers, collection agents, attorneys, and bank executives.
I will restore to Utah County, at the very least, the integrity of our government, the sovereignty of our citizens, and the rule of Law above the whims and money of our current corporatist masters.
Your home and your family come first with me. Tell the County Attorney's office who has let Utah county become the fraud capitol of the country that it is time to change. Vote for Hullinger. Vote for Liberty.
02 October, 2010
The Anatomy of Aristocracy
Tea Parties.
Patriots.
Three-Percenters.
'Conservatives'.
"Main-Stream".
What will history say about these things? It will say little. They will be footnotes; perhaps colorful details used to illustrate how 21st Century Americans slowly burned down one of the most intriguing developments in human history: The United States of America.
The participants in the American Revolution were the first in centuries to raise their eyes from the oppression of feudal aristocracy, and to say that there is a promise of a better way. What they rebelled against was the idea that one person was divinely anointed to rule over another. That this is so is unremarkable. Elementary school children might work this out.
What neither they, nor, apparently, the majority of their parents seem to grasp is that the Revolution raised Americans above -- considerably above -- the historical 'mean' of human civilization. It was a revolution not because they changed the titles. It was a revolution because they abandoned the accretion of centuries of brute human nature.
Nobody, except for the most inbred final generations of the European royalty actually believed in the Divine Right of Kings. It was merely a convenient 'platform' to excuse and legitimate centuries of petty betrayals and brutality that had inevitably placed almost all of the wealth and most of the power in the hands of a single person. But the story was not the power in the hands of a King. The story was the numberless march of thugs, flatterers, and thieves, each throwing a stone into the lake of humanity until it was completely buried beneath the desert of monarchy.
Nobody remembers what the realities of Feudalism were.
When Rome collapsed, whatever power of the Empire there was evaporated like water in the desert. Nobody was in charge. Any power that was left was the power of violence or fraud. Every man and woman lived dependent upon or in fear of other men with strength, food, and weapons. A good man without these lost, every time, to an animal possessed of them. After a few generations of such a life, other men arose, and spent a lifetime securing such power and overthrew the reigns of some of those animals, and their offspring.
In doing so, they recognized the advantage of collective action with other such men, and the successor society to tribes arose. Small nations of people who would, together, resist encroachments of marauders and secure their own advantage by joining together. It was inevitable that a people that survived by this strategy would look to replicate this in their dealings with other such nations.
But this only elevated the State of Nature to the level of petty rulers. Those who could or would not fight tooth and nail were enabled to shelter under the protection of men who would kill to secure their food, families, and strength. So, the cycle began anew; with brutes banding together to resist or overthrow other brutes, and in the process being obliged to reenact the savage rites of submission and dominance of the wolf pack or lion pride. And this repeated itself, over and over, until Europe had divided itself into the Westphalian powers that spread out over the world, conquering and colonizing by the agency of brutal men blinded by belief or animal avarice as they ground humanity under their heels.
This world expanded into the fertile, and almost cosmically limitless frontier of the Americas at the same time that philosophers and pioneers began to question if there were some way to live their lives other than prisoners of the coral reef of greed and power that encircled their reality, whether they were peasants or nobles. Both peoples were forced into their 'stations' by the inflexible demands of the thefts and murders that had put them there, either as slaves or as overseers.
So, they arose. Imperfectly, some times almost oblivious to some of the implications of their actions, other times only succeeding by complete luck and cosmic twists of fate that upended otherwise almost universal laws of human and natural dynamics. They purported to raise a new reality, and indeed might have.
But they were still human. While they may have been animated by Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, they still had to eat, clothe themselves, shelter against the winter, and protect their families. For two centuries they strove, with varying degrees of success, to embody the new paradigm that had risen from the flames that would eventually engulf the British Empire.
Things happened. The world changed in some ways. And the 20th century arrived. Distance faded away in the wake of the Wright Brothers and Samuel Morse. Frontiers receded, and then disappeared. The penultimate evolution of the State of Nature crashed into the fire of World War I, and then burned to the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What arose was nothing less than the re-incarnation of Westphalia, with the Great Powers replaced by the Cold War of the Bi-Polar world.
The humans in this arc were no more or less active and alive than at any other time in history. The residents of the States, rather than somehow defying nature, were busily engaged in securing a home for their families, with a white picket fence, an automobile, and a refrigerator. And they were doing so by cooperating with others, deferring to, or becoming leaders, joining alliances, cooperating against competitors, and generally following the human tradition. Except in stead of calling themselves serfs, they thought themselves consumers. Instead of Barons, they called themselves CEOs, or Representatives. They thought it made it different.
But we're not.
Brutality and elitism are both alive and well, and also aggressively reserved to the beneficiaries of natures lottery. I watch it every day. I probably live in it like a fish lives in water. But I can name the water. And I can poke my eyes above the surface and aspire to walk beyond it.
In the U.S., as in Utah, and in Utah County, an aristocracy has gradually, inexorably, and most shockingly with the active encouragement of both the aristocrats and their victims, arisen. No less terrible than the legions and Senate of Rome. As irresistible as the Great Oaken Wall of the Empire Where The Sun Never Set. So ominous, indeed, that if there are any who would call out its true name, they do so from the wilderness, or its modern analog, the slum.
You are not serfs. You can only be ruled by your own consent. But Americans, Utahns, and citizens of Utah County are rushing, smugly and headlong, to avert their eyes while they bow to a small group of thieves, bullies, and flatterers who are taking everything this valley has and laughing as they watch us fight over the scraps. . . and think themselves holy in their submission.
The Revolution tore down the institutions so that Nature could renew humanity, with the hope that we could flourish beyond the walls and eyes of the rulers. Our walls are crumbling now, too.
Are you going to rush, and struggle with all your strength to shore up and repair the same walls? Are you going to hate the sunlight that shines into the pen in which you were born? Will you trade a cell for a shack while the predators watch you, amusedly, from their palaces?
Stand up! Make a decision. Stop mindlessly groveling every November to the same political gang that has been robbing you blind for decades. Take the power away from them at every turn. Elect -- Choose -- men and women who hate tyranny, who love freedom, and who stand for the rights of the Individual over the State.
If we have to start small, so be it. Taking the County Attorney's office, or a seat on the County Commission, a Seat in the Legislature, or a Congressional district, or the Governor's Office are battles we can win. You only have to dare to do something other than what you have been told. Vote for Liberty. Vote against the Republican/Democrat Corporation. Lift up your eyes and stand!
Patriots.
Three-Percenters.
'Conservatives'.
"Main-Stream".
What will history say about these things? It will say little. They will be footnotes; perhaps colorful details used to illustrate how 21st Century Americans slowly burned down one of the most intriguing developments in human history: The United States of America.
The participants in the American Revolution were the first in centuries to raise their eyes from the oppression of feudal aristocracy, and to say that there is a promise of a better way. What they rebelled against was the idea that one person was divinely anointed to rule over another. That this is so is unremarkable. Elementary school children might work this out.
What neither they, nor, apparently, the majority of their parents seem to grasp is that the Revolution raised Americans above -- considerably above -- the historical 'mean' of human civilization. It was a revolution not because they changed the titles. It was a revolution because they abandoned the accretion of centuries of brute human nature.
Nobody, except for the most inbred final generations of the European royalty actually believed in the Divine Right of Kings. It was merely a convenient 'platform' to excuse and legitimate centuries of petty betrayals and brutality that had inevitably placed almost all of the wealth and most of the power in the hands of a single person. But the story was not the power in the hands of a King. The story was the numberless march of thugs, flatterers, and thieves, each throwing a stone into the lake of humanity until it was completely buried beneath the desert of monarchy.
Nobody remembers what the realities of Feudalism were.
When Rome collapsed, whatever power of the Empire there was evaporated like water in the desert. Nobody was in charge. Any power that was left was the power of violence or fraud. Every man and woman lived dependent upon or in fear of other men with strength, food, and weapons. A good man without these lost, every time, to an animal possessed of them. After a few generations of such a life, other men arose, and spent a lifetime securing such power and overthrew the reigns of some of those animals, and their offspring.
In doing so, they recognized the advantage of collective action with other such men, and the successor society to tribes arose. Small nations of people who would, together, resist encroachments of marauders and secure their own advantage by joining together. It was inevitable that a people that survived by this strategy would look to replicate this in their dealings with other such nations.
But this only elevated the State of Nature to the level of petty rulers. Those who could or would not fight tooth and nail were enabled to shelter under the protection of men who would kill to secure their food, families, and strength. So, the cycle began anew; with brutes banding together to resist or overthrow other brutes, and in the process being obliged to reenact the savage rites of submission and dominance of the wolf pack or lion pride. And this repeated itself, over and over, until Europe had divided itself into the Westphalian powers that spread out over the world, conquering and colonizing by the agency of brutal men blinded by belief or animal avarice as they ground humanity under their heels.
This world expanded into the fertile, and almost cosmically limitless frontier of the Americas at the same time that philosophers and pioneers began to question if there were some way to live their lives other than prisoners of the coral reef of greed and power that encircled their reality, whether they were peasants or nobles. Both peoples were forced into their 'stations' by the inflexible demands of the thefts and murders that had put them there, either as slaves or as overseers.
So, they arose. Imperfectly, some times almost oblivious to some of the implications of their actions, other times only succeeding by complete luck and cosmic twists of fate that upended otherwise almost universal laws of human and natural dynamics. They purported to raise a new reality, and indeed might have.
But they were still human. While they may have been animated by Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, they still had to eat, clothe themselves, shelter against the winter, and protect their families. For two centuries they strove, with varying degrees of success, to embody the new paradigm that had risen from the flames that would eventually engulf the British Empire.
Things happened. The world changed in some ways. And the 20th century arrived. Distance faded away in the wake of the Wright Brothers and Samuel Morse. Frontiers receded, and then disappeared. The penultimate evolution of the State of Nature crashed into the fire of World War I, and then burned to the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What arose was nothing less than the re-incarnation of Westphalia, with the Great Powers replaced by the Cold War of the Bi-Polar world.
The humans in this arc were no more or less active and alive than at any other time in history. The residents of the States, rather than somehow defying nature, were busily engaged in securing a home for their families, with a white picket fence, an automobile, and a refrigerator. And they were doing so by cooperating with others, deferring to, or becoming leaders, joining alliances, cooperating against competitors, and generally following the human tradition. Except in stead of calling themselves serfs, they thought themselves consumers. Instead of Barons, they called themselves CEOs, or Representatives. They thought it made it different.
But we're not.
Brutality and elitism are both alive and well, and also aggressively reserved to the beneficiaries of natures lottery. I watch it every day. I probably live in it like a fish lives in water. But I can name the water. And I can poke my eyes above the surface and aspire to walk beyond it.
In the U.S., as in Utah, and in Utah County, an aristocracy has gradually, inexorably, and most shockingly with the active encouragement of both the aristocrats and their victims, arisen. No less terrible than the legions and Senate of Rome. As irresistible as the Great Oaken Wall of the Empire Where The Sun Never Set. So ominous, indeed, that if there are any who would call out its true name, they do so from the wilderness, or its modern analog, the slum.
You are not serfs. You can only be ruled by your own consent. But Americans, Utahns, and citizens of Utah County are rushing, smugly and headlong, to avert their eyes while they bow to a small group of thieves, bullies, and flatterers who are taking everything this valley has and laughing as they watch us fight over the scraps. . . and think themselves holy in their submission.
The Revolution tore down the institutions so that Nature could renew humanity, with the hope that we could flourish beyond the walls and eyes of the rulers. Our walls are crumbling now, too.
Are you going to rush, and struggle with all your strength to shore up and repair the same walls? Are you going to hate the sunlight that shines into the pen in which you were born? Will you trade a cell for a shack while the predators watch you, amusedly, from their palaces?
Stand up! Make a decision. Stop mindlessly groveling every November to the same political gang that has been robbing you blind for decades. Take the power away from them at every turn. Elect -- Choose -- men and women who hate tyranny, who love freedom, and who stand for the rights of the Individual over the State.
If we have to start small, so be it. Taking the County Attorney's office, or a seat on the County Commission, a Seat in the Legislature, or a Congressional district, or the Governor's Office are battles we can win. You only have to dare to do something other than what you have been told. Vote for Liberty. Vote against the Republican/Democrat Corporation. Lift up your eyes and stand!
18 September, 2010
I am not a Democrat, because I have no idea what their economic policies are; And I am not a Republican, because I know precisely what their economic policies are.
Indeed, the entire left/right debate is false, an artificial framework for analyzing policy. In my mind, the real debate is the corporatocracy versus the individual.
And right now, the individual is losing . . .
(Does this mean I would have to go to work naked? ? ?)
(Does this mean I would have to go to work naked? ? ?)
14 September, 2010
This explains a great deal. . .
Angelo Codevilla has really done a job. A hard, sometimes distasteful one that, in the end, fails to answer all questions, solve all problems, or radically disrupt the prevailing paradigm.
But he did a difficult job, and did it as well as anyone could.
The job he did was to attempt to lay out the basic clash that is reaching its denoument in these days, and years coming up. Almost no one will whole-heartedly like it. Everyone will find something incomplete, or slanted, or simplistic within it. If, however, we ignore it, and fail to take up the spark it ignites, then we will have nowhere to turn as preventable disaster overcomes us.
You don't have to read it. You should, though.
But he did a difficult job, and did it as well as anyone could.
The job he did was to attempt to lay out the basic clash that is reaching its denoument in these days, and years coming up. Almost no one will whole-heartedly like it. Everyone will find something incomplete, or slanted, or simplistic within it. If, however, we ignore it, and fail to take up the spark it ignites, then we will have nowhere to turn as preventable disaster overcomes us.
You don't have to read it. You should, though.
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
11 September, 2010
01 September, 2010
Of Variety, and Life.
It's official.
The Republican Party in Utah County absolutely cannot tolerate anybody, especially teenagers, going up the canyon to get away from strip malls and planned real-estate development. Apparently, it's far preferable that our children be contained in malls or convenience stores, where they are 'contributing to the economy'.
How will they halt this growing scourge? By making everything you can do suspect and/or illegal.
That's right. Now, anybody under the age of 35 will be subject to being detained and interrogated by the Sheriff's office anywhere outside of incorporated municipalities. And they will base their reasonable suspicion on the possibility of the use of SPICE!!!!!!!!!!!!! (did you notice how scary that word is?)
Since Spice is not a schedule drug, and its 'high' is a dismally short version of what happens when you drink a Red-Bull, or a Super Big Gulp, everyone will be a suspect. You can't actually tell when somebody is using it, but now, police will be able to stop you, request your identification, require you to speak in order to invoke your Constitutional right to remain silent, and if they don't like what you look like, they will justify the stop on suspected Spice use, and then arrest you for possession of a substance that was specifically designed to be harmless.
Oh, yeah, and Spice doesn't show up in metabolite tests, so there can never be any evidence one way or the other that you used Spice.
Is this what Utah County wants its very expensive law enforcement resources spent doing? Rousting our kids out of the canyons?
I'm wondering why the County Attorney's office is supporting this grab for more police-state powers? (You might recognize a police state by its resemblance to old good-guy/bad-guy cold war movies: Bad guys have thugs who walk up to innocent non-government-connected citizens and demand, "Your papers!" Which are never in order. . .) I'm guessing that the County Attorney's Office can't find enough to keep themselves busy. Apparently, there aren't enough murders, thefts, assaults, oh, and frauds that they care to prosecute in the county to keep them occupied in a professional manner. . .
If you like the idea of a government that can say that anything enjoyable is illegal, then you probably ought to validate and encourage the past decade and a half of Government For the Rich, By the Connected, and Of the Authoritarian, and vote Republican. If you want to take back your government -- your LOCAL government -- then say, "Enough!" to the unelected (remember, it's not an election if there's only one candidate. . .) One Party Statists that have been making your county a national laughing-stock, and vote for Hullinger for County Attorney.
I guess if you say there's nothing wrong, or you like the way things are, or you think somebody ought to do SOMETHING!! well, maybe you've been smoking a little too much Spice. . .
The Republican Party in Utah County absolutely cannot tolerate anybody, especially teenagers, going up the canyon to get away from strip malls and planned real-estate development. Apparently, it's far preferable that our children be contained in malls or convenience stores, where they are 'contributing to the economy'.
How will they halt this growing scourge? By making everything you can do suspect and/or illegal.
That's right. Now, anybody under the age of 35 will be subject to being detained and interrogated by the Sheriff's office anywhere outside of incorporated municipalities. And they will base their reasonable suspicion on the possibility of the use of SPICE!!!!!!!!!!!!! (did you notice how scary that word is?)
Since Spice is not a schedule drug, and its 'high' is a dismally short version of what happens when you drink a Red-Bull, or a Super Big Gulp, everyone will be a suspect. You can't actually tell when somebody is using it, but now, police will be able to stop you, request your identification, require you to speak in order to invoke your Constitutional right to remain silent, and if they don't like what you look like, they will justify the stop on suspected Spice use, and then arrest you for possession of a substance that was specifically designed to be harmless.
Oh, yeah, and Spice doesn't show up in metabolite tests, so there can never be any evidence one way or the other that you used Spice.
Is this what Utah County wants its very expensive law enforcement resources spent doing? Rousting our kids out of the canyons?
I'm wondering why the County Attorney's office is supporting this grab for more police-state powers? (You might recognize a police state by its resemblance to old good-guy/bad-guy cold war movies: Bad guys have thugs who walk up to innocent non-government-connected citizens and demand, "Your papers!" Which are never in order. . .) I'm guessing that the County Attorney's Office can't find enough to keep themselves busy. Apparently, there aren't enough murders, thefts, assaults, oh, and frauds that they care to prosecute in the county to keep them occupied in a professional manner. . .
If you like the idea of a government that can say that anything enjoyable is illegal, then you probably ought to validate and encourage the past decade and a half of Government For the Rich, By the Connected, and Of the Authoritarian, and vote Republican. If you want to take back your government -- your LOCAL government -- then say, "Enough!" to the unelected (remember, it's not an election if there's only one candidate. . .) One Party Statists that have been making your county a national laughing-stock, and vote for Hullinger for County Attorney.
I guess if you say there's nothing wrong, or you like the way things are, or you think somebody ought to do SOMETHING!! well, maybe you've been smoking a little too much Spice. . .
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