we're all doing time riddles and puzzles

    An old lawyer buddy likes to give me riddles and I tend to respond unpredictably :-). When I told him that I’m a patriot, he said he’s read my writings and I’m a radical. I said I have a different perspective of patriotism.

    When he asked me, “What was wrong with the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on October 6, 2023?”, I said that was a very good question, and Hamas figured out what would punch every button in Israel’s leaders, and Hamas hoped that would provoke Israel to do what it did in Gaza and turn the entire world against Israel and its benefactor America, and when President Biden saw Israel’s response, he should have stopped giving Israel money and weapons and munitions to obliterate Gaza; and President Biden should get America of the Middle East altogether. because America has no business being there.

    I gave my old lawyer buddy a riddle the other day.

    Please help me understand how Amendment 2 gives Americans the right to own AR-15s, when the citizens right to bear arms is predicated on there being a well-regulated militia? 

Amendment II 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    He said that he said he sided with me on that, and the U,S. Supreme Court has ignored the well regulated militia predicate.

    I said there has not been a well regulated militia since the Revolutionary War. He said, what about the national guards? I said, then only the national guards should have such weapons. He said, then there is the question of what is “arms”?

    When Amendment 2 was passed, arms meant sticks, rocks, hammers, hoes, rakes, shovels, hatchets, axes, spears, bows and arrows, knives, daggers, sabers, black powder ball and shot pistols and muskets, black power cannons and cannon balls, and black powder explosives.

    But what’s that got to do with a well regulated militia? The Founding Fathers never dreamed the 2nd Amendment would be twisted to nilly willy private citzen ownership of guns designed to quickly kill as many unarmed Americans as possible.

    Flash back to 1991, when, at the request of a prison chaplain, I did a two-day workshop in his maximum security prison, about which I wrote in Prisons & Freedom, which I self-published later in 1991. 

    How the workship came about was the chaplin had read my book, The High Legal Road: A New Approach to Legal Problems, which I had self-published in 1990, 

    The chaplain told me ahead of time that some of the inmates were convicted of sex crimes and were very sensitive about that, and I should not go into that during the workshop. What I did instead was ask them if they did what they were convicted of doing?

    Unable to sell The High Legal Road and Prisons & Freedom, I gave several thousand copies to the Prison Library Project in Clermont, California, which was founded by Ram Dass, with Bo Lozoff’s help. Bo’s book, We’re All Doing Time, had helped prod me to write Prisons & Freedom. The Prison Library Project mailed inmates books on topics in which inmates expressed interest. I ended up with some prison inmate pen pals for a while.

    In the Preface to Prisons & Freedom, I gave Bo and his wife Sita attaboys for their going into prisons and teaching yoga and meditation ti inmates, and I gave favorable mention to Bo’s books, and I said in one of his books, he had said he and Sita had reluctantly decided to start asking for donations for their work. 

    I had sent Bo a copy of The High Legal Road, and after Prisons & Freedom was published, I sent him a copy of it. 

    In one his books, Bo had written that he and Sita told inmates that they struggled with their own sexual urges, which some yoga practitioners view as low base energies, and I wondered out loud in Prisons & Freedom.about what it might be like to be married to someone trying to practice celibacy?

     I received a letter from Bo, in which he tore up my books as psychobabble, and he said I had cut him and Sita’s feelings to the quick. That led to more back and forth letters, which went nowhere, and I moved on.

    One day, I called the Prison Library Project about something they had sent me regarding a tax deduction for donating my books to them. The fellow said he needed to tell me something: after they received my books, Bo told them to tear out the Preface to Prisons & Freedom, which they had done before sending it to inmates. The fellow said he didn’t feel right about that. I said keep doing it, it’s Bo’s karma.

    I wrote Bo a letter explaining that. He did not respond.

    I started receiving unsolicited copies of Bo’s newsletter, in one of which he announced he was going into silence. There was something in the letter about him being interviewed in the media about him going into silence. I didn’t get any of his newsletters for a while.

    Then a newsletter came in the mail which Bo announced someone  had given him and Sita a nice piece of land in the country,  where he could build a retreat for former prisoners to live and work their way back into society, and he had come up with the ideal of “money yoga”, and it would be the spiritual thing to do for people to donate money for that project.

    I wrote Bo a letter, in which I said he had gone into silence to enhance is internal feminine, yin, and God heard him and someone donated them the land, but instead of waiting for the next step, instead of being patient, honoring the feminine, he had  gone yang and invented money yoga.

    Bo did not respond.

    Another newsletter came in the mail and I read it and left it on the kitchen table and my wife, who was a licensed clinical social worker, looked thorough it and found a picture of Sita, which was in all of Bo’s newsletters.

    My wife asked me to cover the right side of Sita’s face and look only at the left side of her face, which I did, and Sita’s left eye and the left side of her face look like a seriously tortured soul. The left side of the body is the feminine, or yin, side.

    I wrote Bo a letter, telling him what my wife had observed. In Bo’s next newsletter, there was no photo of Sita. Nor was her photo in any future newsletters.

    Many years later, I read in an online publication that Bo had confessed that he was a fraud, a con man. He had sex with women in his ashram. He was abusive to released inmates, who came to live and work at his farm retreat cult. Later, I read somewhere that Bo had died.

    A Substack missive from a fellow who had done time showed up in my email account the other day.

A Convict’s Perspective

Rearview Mirror 

Objects on the internet may appear closer than they are

COLEMAN

MAY 27 

 

I was going to write an article based off my Note this morning and decided I didn't want to be tic-tacing on my phone all day. 

 

https://indamidle.substack.com/p/rearview-mirror?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=1147979&post_id=145032318&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&r=8wjd3&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email&initial_medium=video

Anyway, I haven't even listened to it yet because I knew I would've been annoyed by some thing or another and don't want to re-record like I'm a YouTuber or some nonsense like that.

I would've gotten halfway through and been like, “this is dumb” and deleted it.

So, anyway, enjoy the dumb.

Or don't.

Whatever 

 

     After listening to Coleman sitting in the front seat of his parked car ramble on about Americans fret a lot about stuff they can’t do anything about, and learning about him only what might be read between the lines, I posted this comment.

Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter

I’m curious about what you do after you wake up in the morning not in a prison? Although most people wake up  each morning in a prison of their own making, about which a guy named Bo Lozoff wrote some books, as did I. Bo ended up not so swell, but I thought his early books were  important. Last below is a link to one of my books, Prisons & Freedom, a free read, no ads, no soliciting, no hustle. You might be asked if you wish to open the link? Archive.org is an internet library funded and operated by American colleges. The free library specializes in out of print books and books by authors who give their writings to the library. 

 

https://archive.org/details/prisons-and-freedom-revision-3oh-1-compressed 

 

About six months ago, I received an email from a fellow who said he read Prisons & Freedom at the free library, and it moved him to leave a cult in which he had been very active for a couple of decades. I didn’t write the book with cults in mind, but I did have some people come to me from time to time, who were involved in cults and wanted help moving on. 

    So far, no reply from Coleman.

   Today’s comic relief is provided by Al.com's "Down Home In Alabama”. Al.com once was The Birmingham News.

'I ain't writing no letter'

A judge has dismissed the case against an Ozark man who was caught speeding and said he'd rather go to jail than give the police officer a written apology for his behavior, reports AL.com's Amy Yurkanin. The story was picked up on some national outlets. Reginald Burks was pulled over and ticketed for speeding while taking his kids to school. He said that as he was trying to leave the officer was standing in front of his car so that he had to back up and go around. He said he then told the officer to "get your (butt) out of the way," but he didn't say "butt." (Note: This is the most G-rated newsletter you'll read today. Apparently more G-rated even than car line.) Now, folks may have varying degrees of respect for law enforcement or opinions on their motives, but this isn't one of those stories. The big question in this story is not so much the appropriateness of the officer, or of the motorist. It is about the appropriateness of the Ozark Municipal Court judge's order for the man to apologize to the officer in writing or face 10-30 days in jail. University of Alabama law professor Jenny Carroll said up to 30 days is a long sentence for somebody who dropped a mere A-bomb in a moment of frustration. The man wasn't budging, either. He said he'd pay his fines. However: “What am I going to do? I’m going to jail. I ain’t writing no letter.” A hearing was set for June 4, but evidently the city's prosecutors weren't interested in pursuing the case because the judge dismissed the case on Wednesday.

    Ya’ll come!

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com