My Old AOL Blog (older entries)
Feeling Ecstatic
Hearing “Welcome, Welcome Emigrante” by Buffie St. Marie
My Friend Nazy
On Cinco de Mayo I had the distinct privilege of witnessing a swearing in ceremony for new American citizens. One of the over 900 immigrants in that ceremony, of the many thousands sworn in that day, was my friend Nazy from Iran.
Nazy is one of the most courageous women I’ve ever met as well as one of the most intelligent. It’s a real pleasure to know her. She’s been battling UCLA Medical Center where she works for years. When she first started there, she performed experimentation to prove that the institution was over-using chemical re-agents at great expense to the taxpayers. She came to America to be law-abiding and not to put up with corruption. For that, she was rewarded with being framed on a bogus charge, but after years of proceedings, an arbitrator finally ruled that there were no grounds whatsoever for the disciplinary action in the first place. Since then, UCLA has been discriminating against her and enabling her harassment, including sexual harassment by a supervisor, in an effort to get rid of her.
In spite of this, she has persevered. While waiting in the long, long line of new citizens being sworn in, Nazy showed me her Iranian passport and explained how she was so thrilled to never be forced to wear a Hejab again just to take a passport photo; in America women have come a long way even if they still have a long way to go until they get full equality.
With all the ranting and raving these days about immigration, I am still very moved and very mindful of the experience of immigrants. Unlike most people who spout off on the topic as though they know something about it, I worked undercover for eleven months early in my career in three factories filled with immigrants, both “legal” and sin documentos. I also lived for a year with una mujer sin documentos.
For those who have not had the experience of living and working amongst emigrantes, at least do two things before you condemn them: read Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque to get an idea of the universality of the undocumented immigrant experience and listen to Buffie St. Marie’s Welcome, Welcome, Emigrante. As it says, and as I think of my own grandparents’ experience, “I am proud, I am proud, I am proud of my forefathers and I sing about their courage. For they came from far away, to a land they didn’t know. They spoke a foreign language and they labored with their hands…the same way you do, my friend.”
So to Nazy and to all emigrantes, welcome; welcome home to America.
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | 
Add to del.icio.us | 
digg this
This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own
Feeling Mischievous
Hearing Lemon Tree
Mutant Lemon
My lemon tree has a tendency to produce mutant lemons. This is because it was pollinated by super-natural beings. If you want to hear the whole story, contact me privately.
Notice that the lemon has claw-like fingers!
Remember the old Calypso tune, “Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat…” Well, the song for this lemon should be, “Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of this old lemon tree is impossible to believe…”
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own
Feeling Hopeful
Hearing “Billy Rose” by Joan Baez
Secty of State & the Death Penalty
What does the California Secretary of State have to do with the Death Penalty?
Sound like a bizarre question? Not really.
I have just taken out my petition to run for California Secretary of State because if elected, I will do something that no Democrat or Republican who has ever held the office since voter registration information became restricted has ever done. I will make sure that the policy on who is entitled to use voter registration address information complies with the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
California law says that this information is available for use for “governmental purposes.” When that law was passed, representatives of process server, legal, and private investigator organizations were assured in the legislative process that this would apply to the service of process, which is reasonably interpretable as being for a “governmental purpose” whether it is done by a government agent or a private party. But once the law was the on books the Secretary of State and all County Registrar of Voters have interpreted it not to apply to situations where a private criminal defense investigator is trying to find witnesses for the defense, even though they allow access to police to find criminal suspects or witnesses for the prosecution.
How the Secretary of State justifies this disparity is beyond me, other than that it is simply good politics to deny indigent defendants the right to defend themselves in violation of their rights under the “equal protection” and “due process” clauses of the United States Constitution.
The denial of voter registration data to private investigators also seriously impacts the ability of poor women to locate “dead-beat dads,” non-custodial spouses who skip out on child support. Before the restrictions took place, this was a relatively cheap data base to use to locate dead-beat dads and many private eyes used to be able to do so pro bono. But with cheap data bases like voter registration and DMV information taken away, poor women are increasingly being priced out of the market of trying to locate non-paying, non-custodial spouses.
If you would like to help me raise issues like this in the Secretary of State’s race, please contact me at janbtucker@aim.com. I need your signatures to get on the ballot for this important election.
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 0 comments: Add your own
Feeling Angry
Hearing Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Eroica)
On “Tookie” Williams
The death of Tookie Williams has a lot of people thinking about the death penalty as it is administered in California. There are a couple of issues that need to be discussed and thought about.
I wrote Governor Schwarzenneger to make the point that first of all, I don’t know one way or the other whether Tookie Williams was innocent or guilty, but that is precisely the problem: a trial should leave no reasonable doubt about a defendant’s guilt. Why am I not convinced? Well for starters, the following question should have been asked of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office by the Governor and by the Defense to see what kind of answer they could conjure up since the official position of that office is that the District Attorney continues to believe in his guilt: what if anything would the District Attorney’s office do differently in the prosecution of Tookie Williams today than what they did in 1979 as a matter of policy?
One answer to that question is that as a matter of policy, they would not put informers on the stand who would claim that Williams confessed to them without giving them a polygraph examination. This change in policy came about after 1990 when a special grand jury exposed the longstanding misuse of jailhouse informers to invent confessions. I was one of the friendly witnesses called before that grand jury, because I had been trying to expose these abuses for years.
I’d really love to hear the District Attorney’s office answer that question and I’d really like to know whether Governor Schwarzenneger considered the points I made in my letter or whether it just got lost in the shuffle.
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own
Feeling Quiet
Hearing Beethoven’s Pastorale (6th Symphony)
Peace to all, goodwill to People
My holiday wish is that every teacher in the world would assign every student this year to read “All Quiet on the Western Front” by my favorite author, Erich Maria Remarque. I read that book when I was in Fifth Grade and I utilized that book in Mr. Calvin Parlato’s Book Court classroom project to get an extra credit grade. I went on to read every book that Remarque ever wrote, the last one being Flotsam, about the plight of so-called “illegal aliens” just prior to World War II in Europe; Jews, leftists, small “d” democrats and other minorities struggling to stay out of the grasp of the Nazis and not exactly finding the so-called democracies willing to accept them.
Almost all of Remarque’s books were made into movies, a number of them twice. All Quiet on the Western Front first starred Lew Ayres, Sr., who became a pacifist from his experience in the movie; and the second version (very different from the first and well worth watching) starring Richard Thomas (who I’ve heard is ethnic Roma [Gypsy] and Ernest Borgnine (whom I once met attending a Shirley Chisolm for President rally at Hansen Damn recreation center in Pacoima in 1972). Another movie that was made twice from the book was Arch of Triumph. The first version starred Ingrid Bergmann, Charles Boyer, and Charles Laughton; the latter Anthony Hopkins, Leslie-Anne Down and Donald Pleasance.
In any event, before young people go charging off into war, they need to read Remarque’s books and watch the movies made from them. If they have never thought seriously about things before, then will think twice about going to war if they are capable of thinking at all.
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 0 comments: Add your own
Feeling Quiet
Hearing Society’s Child-Janice Ian
No such thing as race
There is no such thing as race, unless you want to distinguish the human race from other primates….
A few months ago, I went to www.nationalgeographic.com and got involved in the Genographic Project. I ordered a kit to take a DNA sample and National Geo traced my Y-Chromosome (Male side of the family) DNA. In a million years, I never expected the results that I got.
Turns out, I am “Haplogroup G (M201)” which is a very rare genetic marker that originated in the Indus Valley of Northwestern Indian sub-continent around 10-20,000 years ago. Before that, my lineage is from a genetic marker from somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa and going further back, from the marker for “Eurasian Adam” which was the only male to survive the initial crossing out of Africa (all non-Africans are descended from him and 90-95 of non-Africans have the second trait in the chain).
Haplogroup G is usually 1-3% of population groups, but for some reason, it is concentrated in the Caucusus, especially Georgia where 30% of the populace is Haplogroup G. Probably means I’m related to Stalin. In the Island of Sardinia off the coast of Italy, 14% of the population is Haplogroup G.
After you’ve done the test and get your results after a couple of months on-line, National Geo gives you an opportunity to put your results in a public data base called the Family DNA Project. That group has now placed me as an exact Y-Chromosome 12 point match with over 30 people, all Ashkenazic Jews in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Who’d a thunk it???
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own
Feeling Mischievous
Hearing Beethoveen’s Eroica
Greatest Mistranslations
Niccolo Macchiavelli
Macchiavelli never wrote or said that “The ends justify the means.” What he actually wrote in “The Prince” is “The outcome is what counts.”
Nikita Khrushchev
When Khrushchev appeared before the United Nations, a Russian translator mistranslated him as warning the Western nations, “We will bury you.” The problem with having a Russian translate Khrushchev is that he was Ukrainian which is as close to Russian as is Polish: they are separate languages in the Slavic family, not dialects of the same language.
What Khrushchev actually did was to tell an old Ukrainian proverb: “We will attend your funeral.” In other words, we’re very sorry, but Capitalism will kill you, not us. Unfortunately, the mistranslation at the U.N. exacerbated the Cold War and led to countless complications internationally.
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own
Feeling Mischievous
Hearing Night on Black Mountain
Tucker’s Black Magical Mystery Tour
Macchiavelli wrote in The Prince that “the outcome is what counts” (which got mis-translated as “the ends justify the means.” Well, the outcome is definitely what counts, whether or not the ends justify the means which is another topic entirely. What follow may be criticized as illogical because its reasoning is arguably post hoc ergo propter hoc, but consider this: do you really want to tempt the dark forces of black magic by defying them after you’ve seen their potential…..
Crazy Penny
Penny the Witch began her career in Black Path Wicca by digging up a Kabbala coin in her garden. Intrigued, she began to study Kabbala which I am told by tradition that it is forbidden to do unless one is male, 40 years old minimum, and thoroughly versed in Talmud and Torah. Of course, Penny had no such qualifications at the time.
To make a long story short, after she got into Kabbala, she got into witchcraft, after which her mother fessed up to her that she was a fourth generation witch: her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had all preceded her into the craft.
I had Penny place curses on two prisoners in the Los Angeles County Jail system, one spouse-beater and one jailhouse snitch. Given that it was her first curse, the Karmic waves got crossed and each one got what the other one was supposed to get, although both curses came into affect simultaneously on the same day.
The wife beater was mistaken for a snitch and shanked by two prisoners. At the same time, for some unknown and mysterious reason, the real snitch was accidentally transferred by the computer to Wayside Maximum. Two prisoners who barely knew him were talking to him when all of a sudden, they picked up heavy aluminum lockers and began beating him in the face with the jagged edges. Four other prisoners who weren’t involved in the conversation grabbed their shanks and started shanking him.
As the last prisoner was being dragged off of him by the guards, he kicked the snitch in the head and said “that’s for your girl friend a—hole.” When he came out of his coma six months later, he must have been wondering what the hell he did to his girl friend to warrant that beating.
Duey’s Revenge
Arthur pissed off Duey, then-King of the Moshwara Clan of the Gypsies. There’s no point in determining who was right or wrong in the dispute, but suffice it to say that Duey was pissed and had a 95 year old Gypsy fortune teller put a curse on Arthur that he would get sick for the rest of his life.
At the time of the curse, Duey thought Arthur was in Santa Monica but he was actually studying with the Dalai Lama’s folks in Nepal. No matter: Arthur got a mysterious illness and couldn’t get back on a plane for the states for 6 weeks.
When Art got back, I warned him to make peace with Duey. Arthur thought I was kidding and didn’t. Next thing, he got flesh eating bacteria in his leg, wound up hospitalized for over a year and almost had his leg amputated three times.
Arthur probably now believes that the curse is real, is still sick, and never made peace with Duey before Duey’s own demise.
Bad Luck Comes in Threes — Irv, Apeshit & the Munchkin
On Halloween 2000, I had the Valcoven-San Fernando Valley Black Path Wicca-put a curse on Irv Rubin and the twin identical brothers Barry (”Apeshit”) and Earl (”the Munchkin”) Krugel of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). I announced their curses in the January 2001 “Millenium of Evil” Edition of the Voice of Evil.
Well, look at the results: previously all three were free as a bird, now Irv died reportedly from suicide in prison; Barry died in 2004 from a heart attack; Earl died recently reportedly beaten over the head in prison with concrete. Shortly after the original curse, a Judge I’d had cursed died in an auto accident and a woman who was cursed was hit by a semi and became a paraplegic.
Is the Outcome What Counts?
So, if Niccolo Macchiavelli was right and the outcome is what counts, don’t run afoul of those with magical powers who can curse you and definitely piss me off or I will have those with the power curse you. With this track record, you are risking the reverse-Midas touch and everything you touch will definitely not turn to gold!
Written by janbtucker Permalink | Blog about this entry | Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 2 comments: Show Recent | Add your own