Category Archives: Other Stuff

Other Stuff

Billions in Family Dollars Going to Lawyers and Bureaucrats

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I came across an excellent article by attorney Leon Koziol via his article, Billions in Child Support Going to Lawyers and Bureaucrats.

porkAttorney Koziol details how the current family legal system exploits children and parents out of billions every year in legal fees, making them fight over their children.

“... parents, children and extended families are being fleeced by lawyers and third party beneficiaries every day to unconscionable levels. It’s all part of a lucrative child control industry.“

It’s effectively a $40 billion dollar a year child-trafficking scheme sanctioned by the state.  Koziol writes:

“Support obligations are artificially hiked through such judge-created fictions as imputed income. Fathers comprise 82% of support debtors per our Census Bureau …. In countless cases, particularly those involving veterans and minorities, the debtor fathers will never be able to complete their servitude, landing them in debtor prisons. 

“This kind of piling-on caused one police investigator to commit a murder-suicide, leaving three children without parents and city taxpayers with a $2 million liability. Nowhere in the civil rights case will you read about this father leaving support court living on $28 per week, see Pearce v Longo, 766 F. Supp. 2d 367. It begs the question: what would make a law man resort to such extremes after following the “proper” channels?“

Welcome to the hell that is the family legal system.  It literally drives thousands of parents to die every year and kids lose their fathers/mothers, all under the bogus fiction doctrine of the “best interest” of the child.

Other Stuff

“Selfie” by Will Storr is the greatest book you haven’t read yet …

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I stumbled upon this book “Selfie: How We Became So Self Obsessed and What It’s Doing To Us” by author Will Storr in Paris, FR at Shakespeare and Co. last year.

Selfie

The cover of the book is bit of marketing gimmick – it’s not really about the social Facebook/Instagram age, rather it’s about the narrative history of self-identity and personal psychology in Western society. 

Storr makes the argument the “I” generation derived out of Ancient Greece, which later led to things like the Esalen Institute in the 1980s, which gave birth to people like Joseph Campbell, Aldeous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, and Steve Jobs, among other people and ideas which dominate our culture.  There is strong evidence for his arguments.  He traces many connections, too much to get into detail here.

Storr writes about how many modern psychologist believe there is no one true self, rather we’re a reflection of many parts of ourselves in different situations.  Thus, there is no core “I” as we’re a bunch of multiple personality types which arise in different contexts.  So, the “I” generation, Storr argues, is based on a lie perpetuated for a variety of reasons.  It’s a false belief.

The book explores darker subjects such as reasons for suicides (when our personal narrative goes awry) and the overall narrative of the “self” that we all tell ourselves.  

Highly recommend this book to those with the interest.

Other Stuff

Quotes from my favorite author, Geoff Dyer

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I don’t read as much fiction as I used to these days.  But there are a few current authors that no matter what they publish, I’ll buy their books sight unseen.

British author Geoff Dyer is one of the few, along with Paul Auster.  I first discovered Dyer about twenty years ago with one of his very first novels, Paris Trance, his modern take on expats living in Paris, which I found to be Hemingway-esque.  It was well observed and just a really good book.  I think I just happened to pick up the book at a book store – because I liked the cover. But that’s how life works sometimes – accidental discoveries.

I’ve since read most of all of Dyer’s books (he has many), some of which are non-fiction. Some of my personal favorites are Missing of the Somme, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which I consider his best fiction novel.

His 2012  book, Zona, which is a reflexive meditation on Andrei Tarkovski’s film, Stalker, is one of the best books I’ve ever read on film analysis from a viewer perspective.  It’s brilliant.  It should be mandatory reading in any film theory class in college (alongside Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader).

I got the chance to meet Geoff Dyer back in 2013 here in Austin (at a screening of Stalker) and he kindly autographed one of his books for me.

Because I had nothing else better to do today, I’ve listed some of his best quotes below.  Enjoy.

“But you cannot wind the clock back in this life, not even two seconds. Everything that has happened stays happened. Everything has consequences.” – Geoff Dyer

“Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels.” ― Geoff Dyer, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush

“I’ve always liked things I can just trance out to. Because what that means is that you’ve escaped the chafe of time. Often when you’re bored, it’s that friction between you and time.”
― Geoff Dyer

“Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what’s so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

Other Stuff

People who Manipulate aka Gaslighting

I was in a relationship once with a woman who was an expert at manipulating me, and she used it on me very effectively. 

Business Insider has a good article on how people do it.  They call it “gaslighting” after the 1944 movie “Gaslight,” which is about a man who tricks a woman into losing her mind.  That’s about what happened to me.

Whatever you call it, it sucks to be the victim of it.giphymanip

Finance, Other Stuff

Why I left Los Angeles …

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LA Weekly recently published an article saying one needs to make $109,000 dollars per year to be able to reasonably afford a two-bedroom apartment, which now costs, on average $2,556 per month, not including utilities.  To earn $109,000 per year, one would need to be in the top 10% of all earners in the United States. 

Back in 1995 to about when I left in 2003, a typical two-bedroom apartment was about $1,250 and that was on the low end .  In 2000, my old bungalow style two bedroom apartment off of Melrose Avenue was about $1,000 per month because I got grandfathered into the low rate.

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