Tag: society

Lionel Hutz meets Sideshow Bob in Rapetown

cavalloDefense lawyer/supervillain/accused bailbond fraudster Joseph Cavallo is included in a lawsuit by the Jane Doe victim in the Haidl Gang-Rape Case. He’s responded as expected; with threats and hints of blackmail. Meanwhile, it’s clear that L.A. Times’ columnist Dana Parsons has completely and permanently disgraced himself with his coverage. I know that columnists are more “personal” in their approach than daily news journalists, but letting your seething misogyny ruin analysis of a gang rape case that highlights the bizarre world of Orange County wealthy teens and reveals corruption and collusion all the way to the top of County government is… lame.

But back to Cavallo. Clearly, if he’s included in this lawsuit, then that little bitch is going to find out what happens when you fuck with Joe Cavallo! Why, he’s going to tell the ENTIRE SCHOOL what a SLUT she is, and she’ll never get to have lunch with the popular girls again! Dude, she was raped with a Snapple bottle and she’s after blood. I don’t think you can do much worse to her now. Go ahead and release your terrible revenge upon the town of Springfield.

Attorney vows SoCal sex assault victim will regret suing him

ASSOCIATED PRESS

1:50 a.m. March 20, 2006

SANTA ANA – The attorney for one of three young men sentenced to prison for the videotaped sexual assault of an unconscious teenage girl vows that the victim and her family will regret naming him as a defendant in a $26 million civil lawsuit.

“They’re going to rue the day they brought me into this case,” said Joseph G. Cavallo, who represented Gregory Haidl, son of a former Orange County assistant sheriff.

Haidl, 20, and co-defendants Keith Spann and Kyle Nachreiner, both 21, were sentenced earlier this month to six years in state prison stemming from the July 2002 incident.

The civil lawsuit filed in December by the victim, now 20, names as defendants her attackers, Cavallo and two defense investigators, John Warren and Shawn Smigel.

The victim, known only as Jane Doe, alleges that Cavallo and the investigators harassed and intimidated her by staking out her Rancho Cucamonga house, improperly obtaining her medical records and revealing her identity, among other things.

“We’re taking these people to task about what they did,” said her attorney, Sheldon Lodmer. “They crossed the line in terms of appropriate legal defense.”

Cavallo said he did nothing wrong. He denied Jane Doe’s claim that investigators screamed out her name at her new school and said they had to stake out her home to serve her parents with court papers.

He characterized the lawsuit as “revenge” and said that during the civil trial, his defense will include bringing up new information about Jane Doe’s past.

“By the time I get done with Jane Doe, the case won’t be worth $10. I know more about Jane Doe than her lawyer and her family,” Cavallo said.

Haidl, Spann and Nachreiner were convicted last year of 15 felony counts for sexually assaulting the then-16-year-old victim with lighted cigarettes, a pool cue, a Snapple bottle and a juice can as she lay nude and unconscious on a pool table at the home of Haidl’s father, who was not present.

During the criminal trial, Cavallo and other defense attorneys portrayed the victim as an emotionally troubled, promiscuous, would-be porn star who faked unconsciousness on the tape.

Lodmer said he anticipated Cavallo would attack his client.

“I’m sure he will use this opportunity, and she’s ready to stand up to it,” Lodmer said.

Not addressed to anyone who’ll read this

Once again this week (not in this forum) I’ve run into the triumphantly ignorant mindset that mental illness and neurological problems aren’t diseases, that people with these problems are not worthy of medical attention, that anyone who hasn’t triumphed over head problems by sheer force of will and/or approved religious or 12 step methods is a weakling, and that people with mental problems are making up stuff.

These people are almost exactly equivalent to those who think that homosexuality is a choice. Somewhere between that and the people who don’t believe in germ theory because germs are really small and you can’t see them.

I can identify a few fallacies that keep recurring when I run into this mindset. Most of them are variations on generalization. They are:

  • Mildly neurotic people annoyingly claim mental problems as an excuse for their behavior, although they could in fact be less annoying pretty easily. Therefore, everyone who has bigtime head problems is also doing this and should just stop being weird already.
  • My own experience with drug addiction/neurotic behavior/weird mental blocks was resolved with 12-step groups/just getting over it/moving to a different town and therefore any other person’s head problems, no matter how different or how much more extreme, should be solved this way too. Otherwise they’re not trying.
  • Drug companies make a lot of money selling lifestyle drugs, and often create new ailments or over-market medications. Therefore, anyone who takes medication for any neurologic or psychiatric problem is making a mistake, because nothing sold by these companies is useful or necessary.
  • I knew someone once who had a lot of head problems and she tried a lot of things to fix it and nothing worked and she didn’t get better and was really annoying. Therefore no kind of medical or psychological intervention works and people with mental problems are tiresome losers.
  • People with head problems are choosing this lifestyle to get sympathy and because it agrees with them somehow, and they’re using medications as a crutch instead of choosing to be healthy, like me. Therefore they are weak and worthy of scorn.
  • Problems that affect behavior and personality should not be treated as diseases or treatable problems. They should be treated in the old-fashioned way as character flaws and sins, and people who exhibit them should be punished, shunned, shamed, and mocked. Only deluded softies and hypnotized idiots believe otherwise. Nothing like this has ever happened to me or anyone I like, the problem can’t be seen with the naked eye, and I keep being told by authority figures who annoy me that it’s happening. Therefore these problems don’t exist, and I’m a unique and beautiful snowflake for standing up to this nonsense. I know this is true because a loud person on the radio said so.

This is all medieval horseshit. I’d like to find the source of it, because it’s both pre-scientific and new. It’s as though someone merged L. Ron Hubbard and Bill O’Reilly and treated this mutant as a medical authority.

Admittedly everyone is insane to some degree about mental health, the way everyone is insane about food and sex and education. But this shit is just off the map. It’s aggressively proud ignorance. I want to collar all these people and take them to a “Scared Straight” tour of the local mental health facilities so they can see how bad it gets.

“Bipolar” isn’t your moody ex boyfriend who used that as an excuse for the time he fucked your sister. It’s people driving from San Diego to Maine for no reason and changing their name eight times along the way. “Phobia” isn’t that woman at your office who hates spiders. It’s someone who has to spend two days in her room if she sees one. And “depressed” isn’t the showy Goth you went to junior college with who wrote sad poetry in large black letters. It’s people who can’t get out of bed or clothe themselves or do anything except wish they were dead for years and years on end. This shit is real, assholes, and it kills and ruins lives.

Shitting on the people it’s happening to just because their lives are outside your cramped imagination is quite literally adding insult to injury, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You should also put down the talk radio and read a fucking book now and then.

What happened to high school?

I graduated from high school in 1983. It was a pretty good high school, and I learned a lot there. This was partly because of the accidental presence of some unusually good teachers and partly because California schools were well-funded at the time.

Every day I dragged my ass out of bed and got to school for morning classes. With lunch and a couple breaks I did school stuff until 3something. This was an iron rule. Some kids with more money left campus during lunch to go to a restaurant or something, but most of us just didn’t leave campus at all. When there was a hole in the schedule in senior year, I got stuffed into “study hall”, where I read.

We had a lot to do. There was homework every day, and assigned reading and exercises from our textbooks, which we took home. There were frequent tests and projects. At the end of junior senior year, too, there were a few Advanced Placement tests. Since I was doing pretty well academically I took AP classes and passed I think three of these tests. I worked harder and learned more in my senior year in high school than I did in my first quarter at UCLA.

If you left campus, it was likely someone would notice and you’d get in trouble. We had a legendary vice principal, Jack “Bring ’em Back” King, who would drive down to the beach and haul surfer truants out of the water, stuff them in his Chevy, and put them , dripping and sullen, in class complete with wetsuits. School was pretty serious business.

There were the requisite number of hack teachers and administrators, some classes that were worse than useless, a fair amount of wastes of time, and the other things one expects from that level of education, but mostly a student went there all day, learned all day, and went home and did homework for a few hours daily.

My friends from around here who are 30 or younger went to a different kind of high school, and I’m not sure why.

First of all, attendance is optional now. The kids may be in class, or they may be at home, or on vacation with their parents, or doing some project or other, or just… not around. Kids can barely attend some class the whole semester and pass it. I see high school kids shopping at some mall at 11 am on a Tuesday. If their parents are going to Maui for a few days in February, they just pull the kids out and go. One high school here instituted a “ski week” because everyone disappeared that week every year anyway, and tried to tack the days on the end of the year. There was no decrease in days lost.

Since Proposition 13 (please see my screed here from a while back if you don’t know what that is), there’s been less and less money for education. Quite often there aren’t enough textbooks for the students, and more often than not there aren’t enough for students to take them home. I don’t understand how you do math homework in that situation. The non-sports extracurricular activities, especially music, are gone, so those are off campus. There seem to be less classes generally, so junior and seniors have these big gaps in their days, and no one locks them up in the study hall. It’s easier to take classes in college simultaneously (this is a good thing!), so many students go back and forth between two campuses. And finally the enforced extracurricular activities like D.A.R.E., required “community service”, kareer kounseling krap, and whatever latest Young Pioneers thing is they’re being forced to do takes hours out of the school day.

It doesnt seem like there’s that much homework, either. Kids cram for the AP tests (which give them higher than perfect GPAs, another bizarro new thing), but their own classes and homework they view with scorn.

From my outsider’s eye it looks like kids from 14-18 are just doing less school overall, and not doing so in any structured way. Some of this is good news. Study Hall was a horrible waste of time, and going to college classes instead of high school ones must be awesome if you’re academically interested.

With all the blather about how our children is not being educatated, though, it’s weird to see the kids spending less time in school total, less of that time being taught, less homework, less resources to actually learn (hello, books?), and less supervision of any kind.

And the teachers just suck. Horribly. This whole train of thought was started by a high-school age friend telling me that her English teacher borrowed her Spark Notes for Samuel Beckett because she didn’t know that stuff.

If anyone had listened: the Exile on Frey from last year

The Exile had James Frey pegged on Day One and even more so on Day Two, even before he was unmasked as a proven fake.

just another dry drunk asshole. They’re popular these days. Representative quotes:

Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost.

Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little-specifically, Frey looted Little’s great debut novel, Another Day in Paradise.

The accusation of theft from Eddie Little is interesting; I’ll have to find that book.

Thanks to salome_st_john for pointing this one out.

just another sucka on da vine

This wants to be my myspace friend:

Konnected Inc was established in January 2004, based out of Irvine California. The company’s main objective is to plan, promote and operate specific events for businesses looking to increase traffic, build awareness, create a steady flow of sales, promote an image and deliver a message.

Konnected Inc specializes in promoting, but not limited to, nightly entertainment, focusing mainly on dance/night clubs in Orange County and surrounding areas.

. Okay, DJ company, typical. I browse around looking at their leadership.

I find Steve. Steve lists his location on myspace as “Da Vine, OC”. Has anyone else here ever seen the city of Irvine referred to as “Da Vine”? I am familiar with “Da Bronx”, and “The LBC”, and “The Downs” and “The Gardens” in Watts. I’ll even accept “The OC” because we all called it that as a joke long before the TV show.

“Da Vine” just has to fucking go, though, Steve. I was going to post a picture of Steve, but all pictures of 20-something suburban kids throwing gang signs or the “shocker” are the same, whether they are with augmented party babes or not. I will point out that one of his pictures is at a suburban baby shower, though, and it looks genuine and kind of sweet.

How, then, shall we live?

Lately I am often proved wrong.

Intellectually I like being proved wrong, because I like learning. Although it’s more important than it should be for me to be right, when I manage to tamp down the ego and accept a different viewpoint it’s a very good thing.

And when one of my depressive or pessimistic beliefs is sunk it’s cheering. Not frequent, but I hang on to those.

The last year or so has been full of “evidence to the contrary” and most of it has been unpleasant. Whether it’s been an educational or destructive experience remains to be seen.

I’ve always thought I could trust people implicitly if we got along, and someone showed me that wasn’t true. I’d been screwed before, but not by someone I respected like that, and it’s still shocking when I think of it. The aftermath was in some ways worse, because the ambiguous reactions of other friends made me question the quality of my friendships and the validity of all those feel-good assumptions I had. The statement “I can trust my friends without worry, and they will stand up for me when I have clearly been wronged” was invalid. Still not over it.

Similarly, I’d also had the habit of believing what others said if there wasn’t evidence to the contrary, and assuming they were mistaken rather than dishonest if such evidence existed. That one was blown up and sunk also. It’s been hard to me to see that there’s a continuum from the pathological liar who is ill to the sociopathic liar who uses truth and untruth as weapons, and that a lot of people are in between those two bad extremes. It’s been another huge trust failure. The people who lie because they want something to be true, or because they know what they are expected to say, or because they think someone else will feel better, arrived in force this time.

The hardest grade I got, though, was on my world view. Events, people, and various therapies have conspired to show me that I’ve had it wrong the whole time. Something about my whole relation to the world — particularly socially — is just cracked. Social relations are clearly more brutal than I had seen before, and the gulf between what others say are their values and how they live is far bigger than I’d been able to grasp. I’d always seen relations among friends and families as community. This was the year I saw them as an economy, where people exchange tokens for desired things, and where the money is only visible when you’re poor. As much as I might have faux-cynically said “People do what they want!” a million times before, now I lived it.

So I managed to remain socially innocent until I was 40, and by 41 I’d learned for real the things others seemed to learn in their teens. It doesn’t feel like a good kind of “proved wrong”, though.

I never wanted to believe people who said cynical crap. You know, people would say to me that you get what you take in life, or that you need to be pushy and dishonest and maybe a little threatening to get the girl, or that trust is a mistake, and I’d write them off. “I don’t know anyone who behaves that way and gets anywhere,” I said, “and the people I like and spend time with don’t.” Wrong, and wrong.

Before, I saw basically good people trying and often failing to do the right thing. Now, I see the apes stealing each others’ fruit, abandoning the injured one to the tigers, and raping each other. And they’re doing way better than I am; I’ve been proved wrong.

Damn it’s cold out here.

Have a safe dysfunctional obligation activity

This year I am once again grateful for my family’s behavior at holiday times. I grew up agnostic, so there was never any religious pressure. Christmas was a gift exchange and a couple of nice meals, and it still is. The most frequent verb I see this week is “survive”, as in “surviving the holidays” or “survived my family again”. There’s tremendous stress about food, gifts, the presence of difficult relatives, and every kind of parent/child conflict. People don’t eat the food their parents eat any more, or the gifts are too much or not enough money, or the gifts have been a form of warfare for 20 years, or Uncle Ted is a racist, or Dad always asks the boyfriend if he’s going to be anybody ever, or or or.

And more seriously some people I know go into a major PTSD mode during the “holidays” because their childhoods were so gothically horrible that memories of family togetherness are a symptom rather than a pleasant reverie.

It’s a big joke in our culture that holidays are a stressful mess and that everyone is miserable and drunk, etc. “Surviving the holidays” in every way is the goal. It’s linked in my mind with the “Safe” thing, e.g. “Have a safe holiday!”. It’s sort of assumed that you’ll hate the whole thing, drink like a fish and pop pills, and die in a 7-car pileup on some snowy turnpike, thereby causing what the newspapers inaccurately call a “tragedy”.

My family’s troubles are constant, ongoing, and subtle. We don’t have screaming matches or drunken rampages, no one hits anyone, and we don’t say nuclear weapon phrases like “I don’t love you”. We may undermine for years at a time, or be unreasonably irritable, or fail to connect in some dispiriting way. There are conflicts and painful situations that aren’t allowed to be mentioned or discussed.

But we don’t have “holiday” stress. Despite all my complaints about my psyche and my issues, I’m very grateful for my family 99% of the time. My heart goes out to everyone who has to Survive instead of relaxing around now.

The American Fuck Yeah Association

Driving down Westcliff Avenue last night I was obstructed by a big RV that was drifting in and out of lanes. The damned thing was so wide it could barely fit in one lane and was bumbling about dangerously. I passed the monster with a wide berth, tapping my horn and thinking “probably some drunk who lives in his RV.” Then I noticed it was painted all over with ads, logos, and signs. Racing team? Soft drink promotion? What the…

tale gators

Yes, there is such a thing as the American Tailgate Association.

The American Tailgaters Association (ATA) was founded for several reasons. The “sport” of tailgating has become a national phenomenon as a recreational activity, yet there has never been a venue for tailgaters to come together in a single place.until now!

The ATA will allow tailgaters all across our great nation to meet in forums, discuss the best tailgating places, talk about their favorite teams or sports, find discount merchandise, post pictures, and generally be the one stop tailgaters “community”.

[…]

Our desire is to promote ATA membership and our corporate partners and we believe by offering an entertaining, interactive, cost-effective and ever-expanding experience, our membership will in turn promote organizational allegiance, brand loyalty and name recognition for our corporate partners and ourselves.

An outstanding characteristic of my country is our inability to have fun without creating an association with bylaws, getting corporate sponsors, copyrighting and trademarking it, having an annual competition, and finally and inevitably adopting a mission and vision statement. See: Little League, car stereo enthusiasts, etc.