Mark Reminds UsThat He Was Raised to Be a Leader…To Be Attacked by a Cyber-Space Troll, installment eight

By Mark Richards, 2019

To recap: In the first installments of this report, I expressed how my family and I have found ourselves in the unenviable position of becoming targets for the Fake news pundits, and some fanatic English cyber bully and his pack of New World Order followers. The cyber thug opened his attack in the early winter of 2018, claiming that he would ruin our Christmas with some sort of ‘tell-all’ video. While they have failed to manage that, they have produced a series of interviews that offered some questionably one-side ‘witnesses,’ attacking us with accusations and twisted truths based more on mistakes and their deliberate lies than any sort of real evidence – apparently a standard for this sort of cultural molestation by half-baked internet hacks.

In March 2019, the English troll – whose sole claim to fame seems to be how deeply he has wallowed in the porn industry – informed the public in one of his mad, semi-literate diatribes – that he as “declared war” on a number of people involved in the whistleblowing field, my family, friends, and myself. As I’ve mentioned before, it was an interesting choice of words, in this day of terrorist threats and murderous manifestos that would seem to bring up a number of questions concerning the rights and expectations of American citizens to be protected from such attacks. And as the problem grows we have started to note that thee seems to be a number of connections with the government that hint at something far more sinister than some simple-minded, foul-mouthed sexual deviant and his clan of second-rate losers slandering anyone who has tried to help us.

As I pointed out previously, some media types are determined to keep the public ignorant about the threats and political forces that would harm the United States and its citizens. Perhaps they worry that the information might actually set the public on a new path to greater safety and freedom. Perhaps they are just so corrupt that they just do what they are told without any sort of thought about the actions. Whatever the case, their actions threaten the very freedom of free human civilization. The more crazed our attackers become, the more we realized how close we were to a truth that they and their masters want to keep from the public and the more we realized how important it is to press forward with the information that so many of us have been trying to get out of the shadows.

Apparently the Internet Trolls who are working so hard to color the public opinion against those of us trying to bring any sort of information concerning the Alien Question to the public are clearly willing to lie, falsify information, and threaten families, just to silence us. Their unkind insults and degrading personal remarks are the stuff of immature intellects that for the most part are more to be pitied than defended against. But they still cause pain and seem to still convince many people who have fallen for this attack, to jump in and add their two cents to the insults.

A typical example of ‘mob terror’ and ‘mob rule.

Before you join the screaming horde to tar and feather anyone, there are a few things that you might consider. No matter what my enemies may say about me, most have to admit that I was brought up in a military household to be a leader. Leaders have a command philosophy – a way of looking at the world; beliefs on the purpose of life and command; and, a desire to see subordinates in certain ways when their leader is not there to guide them. There is a feeling of duty towards not only your direct subordinates, but to the public at large.

To be continued….

To Be Attacked by a Cyber-Space Troll, installment seven

By Mark Richards, 2019

People must remember that every tyrant understands that knowledge is a security threat! And as Churchill said, you can tell what direction a government is going by how it treats its prisoners. Since publishing The New Jim Crow in 2010, author Michelle Alexander has sold over one million copies. The book argues that the “war on drugs” is the modern incarnation of racist Jim Crow laws, resulting in mass incarceration that serves to keep black people segregated and impoverished in extensions of social constructs rooted in slavery. Alexander’s publisher, The New Press, said dealing with book bans by correctional facilities has been “a game of whack-a-mole, working prison to prison to get the book to prisoners.” In January 2018, the same month the New York COCCS suspended Directive 4911A – which the New Press publisher Ellen Adler called “painfully stupid and wrong” – New Jersey prison officials rolled back a ban that had been in place on The New Jim Crow at the State Prison in Trenton and the Southern State Correctional Facility in Delmont.

A June 2016 report by The Sentencing Project – a criminal justice research and advocacy organization – had found that New Jerseys’ incarceration rate for blacks was over twelve times higher than the comparable rate for whites. It was the highest discrepancy in the nation. New Jersey’s incarceration rate was 94 per 100,000 whites and 1,140 per 100, 000 blacks. ACLU attorney Alex Shalom fired off a letter to New Jersey DOC Commissioner Gary M. Lanigan, saying that for a state “burdened with this systemic injustice to prohibit prisoners from reading a book about race and mass incarceration is grossly ironic, misguided, and harmful.” (Zoukis, Christopher; “Censorship in Prisons and Jails,” Prison Legal News, [December 2018], pp. 8-9). Shalom asked why the two state prisons had banned the book, even though it was one of the texts being used by prisoners enrolled in the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education Program. In response, he merely received a list of books disallowed at each facility. Shortly after that, though, The New Jim Crow was removed from the banned list.

Michelle Alexander, a visiting professor at the Union Theological Seminary by 2019, said she hopes media coverage surrounding policies that prohibit prisoners from reading her book will inspire people to wake up to the reality of mass incarceration.

In January 2018, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety (DPS) removed The New Jim Crow from its list of banned book titles following a demand by the ACLU. It had been added to the state’s Master List of Disapproved Publications in February 2017. That list also included Jailhouse Lawyers – written by imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal – as well as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, titles with erotic content and some encyclopedias, magazines and tattoo books. DPS spokesman Jerry Higgins pointed out that some books are banned due to their size, though The New Jim Crow was not one of them. Chris Brook, legal director for North Carolina’s ACLU chapter, called the attempt to ban Alexander’s book “cruelly ironic.”

“For North Carolina – a state with such stark racial disparities in its criminal justice system – to keep a book about racial injustice away from those incarcerated is not just shameful and wrong, it’s also unconstitutional,” he noted.

Brook added that in 2016, African-Americans made up 52 percent of the state’s prison population but only 22 percent of its overall population. Nationwide – including in California – the black incarceration rate is five times higher than that of whites, according to The Sentencing Project.

Heather Ann Thompson, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, pointed to the historic practice of keeping knowledge and information from black Americans.

“Slaves weren’t allowed to read because reading would directly lead to rebellion,” she observed, drawing a parallel with policies that prevent prisoners from reading books that address racial disparities and inequalities in the criminal justice system.

The point now is that this is true as well for the general public, when the government of any ‘agent’ of authority attempts to silence information that the people are entitled to learn! The problem is no longer just within the prisons.

In the March 2018 op-ed published by USA Today, three criminal justice experts at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law considered the cruelty of a state using its power to keep books out of the hands of prisoners. Myesha Braden, director of the group’s Criminal Justice Project, joined Michael Huggins, its George N. Lindsay Fellow, and its counsel, Courtney Alexander, to highlight the similarities between US systems of slavery and incarceration, both of which “demand the suppression of thought, activity and expression.”

“Just as pre-Civil War literacy bans perpetuated the institution of slavery, restrictions like [the one in North Carolina] perpetuates mass incarceration and ensure that prisons, jails and the industries that serve them continue to flourish,” they wrote. Quoting Frederick Douglass, who said “knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave,” the authors added that “knowledge also makes individuals less likely to become or remain incarcerated.”

Or as stated by the American Library Association: “Learning to be free requires access to a wide range of knowledge, and suppression of ideas does not prepare the incarcerated of any age for life in a free society.” That can be said as well for every citizen within a supposedly ‘free society’! if people who are trying to bring the public a point of view or information that is not popular with the government or some of its media representatives, are silenced by character assassination or other attack, then the suppression of the ideas in question does not prepare the public in general for life in a ‘free’ society.

Some media types are determined to keep the public ignorant as possible about the threats and political forces that would harm the United States and its citizens. Perhaps they worry that the information might actually set the public on a new path to greater safety and freedom. Perhaps they are just so corrupt that they just do what they are told without any sort of thought about the actions. Whatever the case, their actions do harm to more than those of us to whom they are openly attacking. They do an injustice to the people of the United States, and everything that the country stands for.

Of course, it is understood that, as author Upton Sinclair once said, “It is hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” Many of you don’t want to consider the topics that my family and I have brought to light, as the truth can be frightening and overpowering. Plus, attacking the messenger is the easy way to avoid facing the subject at hand. As Ellen Adler, publisher of the The New Press said, it is morally reprehensible to try to strip the people “of their humanity and limit what they can read…Books have the power to teach and inspire and help people rebuild their lives – who could possibly object to that?”

Apparently the Internet Trolls, who are working so hard to color the public opinion against any of us trying to bring any sort of information concerning the Alien Question to the public, object rather madly. They are clearly willing to lie, falsify information, and threaten families, just to silence us. I have been saddened to see how many people have fallen for this attack, to turn on us without considering the crazed or one-sided allegations. Just as with the civil rights movement, people who do not fit the mold of those in power make easy targets for the ignorant or the close-minded.

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell correctly pointed out that the “court of public opinion” is the most brutal court of all. The powers that be who did not flinch when Jamal Kashoggi was murdered and dismembered, and who want to punish Mr. Julian Assange for illuminating secrets, are more than willing to do just about anything to influence the public’s point of view to protect their version of the status quo. That ‘court of public opinion” is, increasingly, being hijacked by spin doctors that would have made Joseph Goebbels and Hitler proud. However, they do not own the theater that they play in, and there are a number of heroic people who are willing to put up a fight to bring what they believe to be the truth to the people. As with Mr. Assange, some may believe that with all the negative press releases and threats, my adversaries have effectively already publicly reconvicted me in the public eye. But one might ask the question: Whose sword took Goliath’s head off? It was his own. (Letter by James Kor to DEMOCRACY NOW!, dated 4/11/19).

In prison there is a balance between being self-reliant and depending on others. We all know people who would rather suffer or go without than ask someone else for help. At best, they value being self-reliant and not needing to bother other people for things. At worst, they view asking for help as a sign of being human. We stand on our own two feet by recognizing that we are connected to a larger whole that is part of our identity. We are necessary to the whole, and the whole is necessary to us. We need each other, plain and simple. Being with and helping others is our way of experiencing and nurturing not only ourselves but our society. While there is a need to rely on ourselves and our own inner strength, it doesn’t mean that we don’t reach out to others who can remind us of that infinite reservoir of strength that each one of us has within. Denying help from others is denying our connection.

The flip side is that it is our job to remind others of their innate strength and to extend our arms in friendship and support to others. This is the way Americans made our country great in the past, and it is the way we will survive the onslaught of the Barbarians at the gates today. The American message of freedom needs us to express it at every opportunity. Even as the agents of evil pound us, we celebrate our connection with our nation and our world, and continue our efforts to bring our side of the truth to the public.

That message will expand in the next installments of this essay.

To be continued…

To Be Attacked by a Cyber-Space Troll, installment six

By Mark Richards, 2019

In the previous installments of this report, I expressed how my family and I have found ourselves in the unenviable position of becoming targets for the Fake News pundits, some fanatic English cyber bully, and his pack of New World Order followers.  The cyber thing opened his attack with a series of interviews that offered some questionably one-sided ‘witnesses,’ attacking us with accusations and twisted truths based more on mistakes and their deliberate lies than any sort of real evidence – apparently a standard for this sort of cultural molestation by half-baked internet hacks.

In March 2019, the Englishman – whose sole claim to fame seems to be how deeply he has wallowed in the porn industry – informed the public in one of his mad, semi-literate diatribes – that he has “declared war” on my family, friends, and myself. An interesting choice of words, in this day of terrorist threats and murderous manifestos, that would seem to bring up a number of questions concerning the rights and expectations of American citizens to be protected from such attacks. And yet, when we question how it is that these rude trolls are able to carry on such attacks unencumbered by truth or the protection of the law, we are told that is all a matter of perception.

Cell biologist Bruce Lipton put forth that our perceptions control biology and that we acquire many of our perceptions indirectly without even realizing it. These perceptions dwell in the subconscious mind, prompting us to engage in limiting behaviors.

Perceptions give rise to beliefs, and beliefs are incredibly powerful. This is why it is important to be aware of exactly what we believe and really determine the perceptions that have caused us to adopt particular beliefs. Was it something that we heard our parents say repeatedly as we were growing up? Did the perceptions come from a particular teacher we admired? Are we buying into the perceptions of collective consciousness?

One way to uncover those beliefs is to look at our experiences and work backward, asking ourselves what belief caused a particular event or situation. When we have a flat tire and someone immediately stops to assist us, the belief might be that everything we need comes to us. If we are in continuous conflict with others, the belief could be that the Universe is not a friendly place. When we determine our beliefs, we can ask ourselves if those beliefs that we picked up along the way really serve us or not.

One might remember the scene in the movie Tangled (based loosely on the story of Rapunzel), that occurs when the heroine subdues a mischievous thief who ended up in her tower while he was fleeing the authorities. She knocks him out with a frying pan and stuffs him into a wardrobe while she decides what to do. The woman who kidnapped and raised Rapunzel conditioned her to believe that all people are dangerous and bad and taught her to fear outsiders. In this scene, Rapunzel stands in front of the wardrobe and exclaims twice, in fear, “I’ve got a person in my closet!”

Then she catches her reflection in the mirror, and her perception shifts from one of fear to one of possibility. She exclaims, this time with confidence, excitement, and anticipation, “I’ve got a person in my closet!” This man, she thinks, can help to guide her to the kingdom’s annual festival of lights. She has long dreamed of witnessing the festival up close, not just from her distant tower window.

Like Rapunzel, people, too, have the ability to shift perception in the blink of an eye from one of fear to one of possibility.  When we remember that the Universe is operating for our good, we can look at what might seem to be a scary and uneasy situation, and know that there is infinite possibility in it. This shift in perception empowers us to affect the outcome of the situation to one that places us securely in a feeling of confidence, peace, and the expectations of good.

I am consciously aware of how I perceive the world, choosing to perceive the truth and seek positive answers without attacking the thoughts of others or condemning people just because we don’t agree. When confronted with a challenging situation, I choose to consciously shift my perception, accepted the unlimited possibilities for good that lie within it. Only when some nasty dangerous fool openly “declares war” on me do I shift into a darker response mode.

I remember my maternal grandmother pointing out that “The foolish man, living only in sense perception, has no measure for Reality and builds his home on false opinion and erroneous concept.” The current enemy, who has apparently centered his life to this point in a world of pornography and self-indulgence, clearly is such a ‘fool.’ Sadly, as he is vocal and able to reach a large audience without any sort of control, he seems to have influenced a number of easily swayed souls so that they have now turned against anything I might say in my own defense. As the Talmud points out, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” And if we are misled by a corrupt Pied Piper, we too become confused and blind to the truth. As Nona L. Brooks wrote, “Our attitude has all to do with determining the kind of experiences that come to us. The love attitude brings harmony of experience; the fear attitude, confusion.”

The American legal system attempts to protect the nation’s citizens from such Chaos, as the Founding Fathers of the country understood another teaching of my grandmother: “Heaven is lost merely for the lack of a perception of harmony.” They understood that a corrupt government, or a corrupt media, could destroy democracy and any hope of a ‘free and healthy’ society.

In its landmark ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) – which held political campaign spending is a form of protected speech – the US Supreme Court noted the First Amendment is “[p]remised on mistrust of governmental power.” The Court has also held that such mistrust extends to bans on books and other reading materials, since “freedom of speech is not merely freedom to speak; it is also freedom to read.” (See: King v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 415 F.3d 634 [7^th Cir. 2005].)

Apparently the Internet Trolls that are currently attacking my family and myself have no regard for the US Constitution or the laws of this country. In addition to the many other privations that prisoners experience, we are often subjected to censorship of books, magazines, and even our own correspondence by prison officials. As the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, “The simple opportunity to read a book or write a letter, whether it expresses political views or absent affections, supplies a vital link between the inmate and the outside world, and nourishes the prisoner’s mind despite the blankness and bleakness of his environment.” (See: Wolf v. Levi, 573 F. 2^nd 118 [2d Cir. 1978], revised sum nom. Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520 [1979].)

Yet my current attackers have made it very clear that they seek to silence my right to free speech, and remove any ability that I may have to communicate what I see as the truth to the outside world. Such people might be reminded that in 1974, the Supreme Court affirmed “[t]here is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.” (See: Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539 [1974].) Writing for the majority that same year, Justice Thurgood Marshall stated, “when the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his mind does not become closed to ideas; his intellect does not cease to feed on a free and open interchange of opinions; his yearning for self-respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded. If anything, the needs for identity and self-respect are more compelling in the dehumanizing prison environment.” (See: Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396 [1974].)

Crucial to that need for self-improvement is the ability to read and study, to thereby learn new ideas and ways of thinking – and thus behaving, and working within the social structure. As a result, federal courts have found that incarceration does not automatically deprive prisoners of the First Amendment’s protection from policies that abridge the freedom of speech. (See: Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 [1978].)

It is clever that our enemies at this point have absolutely no care whatsoever about these protections. They see only that I have presented a thought that they do not agree with, and they believe that I should be silenced at any cost.

To be continued….

To Be Attacked by a Cyber-Space Troll, installment five

By Mark Richards, 2019

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently ruled that the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause was violated when the government introduced videotaped deposition testimony without making a good-faith effort, based on the facts of the case, to secure the witnesses’ presence at trial. It is the law of the land in America that people get to face their accusers – for a number of good reasons.

In the case at hand, the government filed a motion to declare the witnesses were ‘unavailable’ and to allow the introduction of their videotaped depositions at trial. The defendant countered with a motion to exclude the depositions on the grounds that the government had failed to prove the witnesses were unavailable and that the introduction of the videotaped depositions violated his right to confrontation. (Ankney, Douglas; “Fifth Circuit: Introduction of Deposition Video Without Making Good-Faith Effort to Secure Witnesses’ Presence at Trial Violates Confrontation Clause,” Criminal Legal News [March 2019], pg. 29.) As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. Allie, 978 F.2d 1401 (5^th Cir. 1992): “…[b]ecause of the importance our constitutional tradition attaches to a defendant’s right to confrontation, the good-faith effort requirement demands much more than a merely perfunctory effort by the government.”

In the past, the public has been protected from such un-Constitutional attacks by the appeal courts for criminal encounters, and by local courts when it came to what most would consider ‘slander’ or ‘false witness’ accusations. But because the legal system has not been able to keep up with the technology, we now find fanatics of every sort are able to accost us with any wild accusation or statement that they want, with seemingly no realistic recourse on the part of the victim.

How many children have you heard about over the last few years who have killed themselves after a cyber-bully attack? Nor are well-healed adults immune from such reactions to being emotionally butchered by such cowardly backstabbing. A well-known 23-year-old porn star, apparently hung herself in December 2017 after a number of bitter media attacks over something she had said.

My only recourse in my own case seems to be to ‘vent’ a bit, and try to remind the public of a number of factors that my enemies have overlooked in their rush to do harm to my family and myself. I am reminded of actor Jackie Chan’s words: “I allowed myself to be bullied because I was scared…I was bullied until I prevented a new student from being bullied. By standing up for him, I learned to stand up for myself.” (Quoted in Guideposts, March 2019, pg. 12.)

After 35 years in California prisons, very little scares me, and nobody bullies me. Another point, however, that most of us have heard before, but those of us in prison know often to be a false hope, is that “the truth shall set you free.” Anyone in prison, or who has suffered a government or media attack, will tell you that all too often the ‘truth’ becomes so twisted by the expert enemy forces that the sure weight of the falsehoods are going to convict you no matter what the truth might have been. And because in the new “Media Rules” society there is no such thing as “You’ve done your time,” or “Give the man another chance,” the more vicious pundit can excite the public ‘will,’ the less chance a man has to ever get out of prison.

Because of the timing of my own case – that the attack came shortly after the filing of paperwork requesting a commutation that might have allowed me to start going to a Parole Board with the long-range hope of someday going home – my family and I have to consider the possibility that the government still so fears my whistleblowing efforts that they will go so far as to organize a media attack to further discredit me and rebuild an active ‘hate’ and ‘fear’ towards me in the public mind. Why else, after nearly 40 years, would anyone try to dig up such long-forgotten stories?

Well, money for one thing. The men involved have been trying to get money from the public for months to supposedly use it in the making of a more elaborate video against me. One can only guess how much money they’ve already been given by interested sources that have a stake in trying to silence me. I might remind the public of the words of Ray Bradbury, when he warned that, “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

In its landmark ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) – which held political campaign spending is a form of protected speech – the U.S. Supreme Court noted the First Amendment is “[p]remised on mistrust of governmental power.” The Court has also held that such mistrust extends to bans on books and other reading materials, since “freedom of speech is not merely freedom to speak; it is also freedom to read.” (See: King v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 415 F.3d 634 [7^th Cir. 2005.)

In addition to the many other privations that prisoners experience, we are often subjected to censorship of books, magazines and even correspondence by prison officials, and everything we attempt to write of say is constantly looked at and often censored. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, “The simple opportunity to read a book or write a letter, whether it expresses political views or absent affections, supplies a vital link between the inmate and the outside world, and nourishes the prisoner’s mind despite the blankness and bleakness of his environment.” (See: Wolfish v. Levi, 573 F.2d 118 [2d Cir. 1978], rev’d sum nom. Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520 [1979].)

Yet restrictions on books and magazines have become commonplace in prisons and jails, and now someone is trying to silence my comments on a number of subjects by turning public attention against me – or perhaps even provoking an attack on me in prison to silence me once and for all. It should be noted that the men involved in this ‘cyber’ attack have already contacted my fellow prisoners in the attempt to make me look bad in their eyes – something that, in prison, can result in very dangerous situations, and leave me in a position where I have no options but to defend myself, and thus ruin any hope there may be for a positive action by the Parole Board.

In 1974, in Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396 (1974), writing for the majority, Justice Thurgood Marshall stated, “when the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his mind does not become closed to ideas; his intellect does not cease to feed on a free and open interchange of opinions, his yearning for self-respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded. If anything, the needs for identity and self-respect are more compelling in the dehumanizing prison environment.”

Crucial to that need for self-improvement is the ability to read and study, to thereby learn new ideas and ways of thinking – and thus behaving. As a result, federal courts have found that incarceration does not automatically deprive prisoners of the First Amendment’s protection from policies that abridge the freedom of speech.

And yet, here we are, with some group of cyber bullies, performing a smear campaign, trying to convince the public that you shouldn’t pay attention to what I might say because they want you to believe that I’m a ‘bad man.’

Let’s get something clear: after 35 years on the main lines of California prisons, I am a really bad man. I sure as Hell wouldn’t want me for an enemy. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to my voice when I try to warn you that something is going wrong! I have never spoken or written a word over the last three decades that I didn’t expect people to question. I’ve told the public to question and research everything they are told. What I object to is the current fad of attacking a speaker or writer on a personal level when you can’t find a ‘real’ flaw in their arguments. This becomes no different than the street thug who beats someone into silence just because he is more brutal and can get away with the attack. The sad fact is that the government, and the New World Order-backed media, get away with this sort of tactic just about any time they desire. That doesn’t mean that we have to like it, or that we should remain silent when we see it happening yet again! As Americans, it is up to each of us to demand that our rights are not violated by the government or any individual who thinks they are above the laws of the land.

And it is our right, according to our American Constitution, that we can defend ourselves against those who attack us, or pose a threat to our loved ones and our nation. That is why I have started this series of essays, and why events have been set in motion to legally present my side of the story to the public in a rational and organized manner. If my attackers become a little worried about the direction things may take, so be it. How does it feel, punks? You should never have attacked my wife and children in public!

Sad, when a convict is the only one with any class left standing.

To be continued….