APPARENTLY, most people are convinced they can’t keep up with investigative bloggers because the investigation skills are either not there, not being consistently exercised, or because the people that need this most are struggling to handle their own court disasters and are pressed for time — and economically.

**Note: expanded a section after publishing, re: connection between certain protective mothers advocacy speakers, their related nonprofits, the NACC, and billing problems in Connecticut,

Could you put together information like this? Would you have? Have you before?

Washington Times Communities Article, 5/23/2010, by Anne Stevenson

Whether or not, here is an example of what COULD be done, so let’s cut to the chase. What’s up next? More complaining and sarcastic commentary?

Admittedly, it’s not easy. It requires a commitment of time and energy and a focus that says, I’m not going down other dead-end paths. Most of us aren’t independently wealthy, and the type of investigative blogging MOST needed are from individuals with a vital interest in the truth, but who are NOT actual stakeholders in organizations whose very essence depends on a stream of distressed or disgruntled parents. As parents are almost never listed as “stakeholders,” I also say, this should normally be at the minimum, parents who’ve been exposed to the courts, and/or have personally experienced some of the critical issues that drive parents in front of the courts.

But a subset of this group has to be people who have not lost their minds and/or been recruited into some advocacy group with characteristics a cult-like as the groups we need to report on! And unfortunately, there are a lot of recruiters out there. A sound-minded individual will want proof and not be satisifed with fast, easy or shallow answers.

However, another reason they “can’t” keep up is just an “I won’t” or “I don’t feel like,” or any other number of excuses.

Some would rather sit on comments fields, or sit back and let others do the work, and boo or cheer them, as well as boo or cheer the local judges, or local judges’ ideas, and look for a group to join on-line. So what, really, ask yourself, is the excuse for cheering on good investigative bloggers — but failing to imitate what they do?

“Time’s Up!” for those excuses.

Exhortation

Sure we all have natural talents, mindsets, and skillsets. But — what are you doing with yours?

Too many excuses are no longer valid excuses. Some people tenacity to investigate because they choose to investigate year after year.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you just got this post by Twitter or as a wordpress follower, know it wasn’t fully-cooked yet. I was in the process of separating one long into two shorter posts — Looks like “Save Draft” was NOT pressed and “Publish” was.

Some of my published posts my also look half-baked (or too “runny”) but I have a little pride left — and that one was definitely not ready for public. So expect a better version. I’ll change the title some.

I don’t believe I’d even made the main point yet!……

Unless a lifetime of welfare, begging, or fighting in the courts sounds like fun, I suggest people learn to get a grip (understand), if not from me, from someone better equipped to relate this — about which way the winds are blowing, which is to say, which way the money (income-producing assets, aka “wealth”) is flowing.

We ought to have a post — or a page at a minimum — on the Carlyle Group (a very interesting history), at a minimum at least 150 years of recent history spanning two or three continents (like: United States, Europe (London, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. — and Africa). I got a start on another blog over at:

I figure there are different approaches:

Passive — let someone else deal with it, and think about it, and go back to work (thereby contributing to the problem — by contributing to the investment platform which, given a little attention, it’s pretty obvious workers are doing. Which sheds a different understanding on the whole concept of the income tax, the Social Security Act, (social services per se) and a lot more.

Active — jump in, and by doing also get the understanding, and at least improve your personal situation. This should also free up some time for more political activity, which is definitely needed.

ANYHOW — here’s a Pension and Investments on-line that as of 12/27/2010 is reporting on the largest FOUNDATIONS based on their pension holdings, for the year 2009.

What amazes me is that, having done so many lookups, so very many of them have been dumping money into the courts, and promoting marriage and fatherhood, not to mention adoption incentives. I don’t see that any of them are particularly feminist or concerned about violence towards mothers AFTER they separate from abusive fathers…. Here’s that list.

I’m going to talk about #17 in this post. I brought up #5 in a post yesterday (CDRC post) and FYI, Ford, Robert Wood Johnson, Kellog, John d and Catherine T. MacAthur, Lilly (of course0, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Charles Stewart Mott, Cargill (although I forget for what) and others HAVE come up when it comes to family court matters. As has The Tulsa Initiative.

My first indicator was learning that MDRC (formerly Manpower Development Research Corporation), on which Ron Haskins, Isabella Sawhill and some others sit as board members — was formed in 1974 as a cooperative effort between FEDERAL government and PRIVATE agencies. I started reporting on it (particularly its piechart page showing funding) and “outing’ the multiple fatherhood demonstration projects written up in glowing terms (Parents Fair Share) which – from other web sources — were rife with overbilling, and subjected to audits. These foundations are all over the map (geographically) and “like white on rice’ when it comes to matters of controlling individual families’ relationships with their own (or so they thought!) kids!

So, at least read the list, OK?
From:

Pensions&Investments

(Pionline.com article dated 12/27/2010. Merry Christmas)

Largest foundations
Ranked by total assets, in U.S. billions, as of Dec. 31, 2009, unless otherwise noted.

Notes: 1: Data are as of Sept. 30, 2009. 2: Data are as of June 30, 2009. 3: Data are as of Aug. 31, 2009. 4: Data are as of Dec. 31, 2008. 5: Data are as of Feb. 28, 2009. 6: Data are as of March 31, 2009. 7: Data are as of June 30, 2010. Source: The Foundation Center

Through collective government investments from all individual governments across the United States, the government owns most of the major corporations in America, and beyond.

I’ll say it again, in a different way. Collectively, through investment, the United States government owns most major corporations and just about everything else in America.

It really boils down to economics, which are of course connected as well. So, like it or not, we ALL have to understand more than we do, and quit speaking into the air, without understanding what the walls of the room resonate to. As it turns out, a whole lot of private funding drives public policy that builds the rooms we are shouting about court corruption (etc.) in.

Look at a recent Wall Street Journal on how Private Equity Buyout Firms are now Building — Dams — instead:

Private Equity Firms Build Instead of Buy”

(the title is also a link to the article)
May 14, 2013, Wall Street Journal, in “Markets.” See photo:

The private-equity firm Blackstone, branching out from corporate takeovers, built a hydropower dam, above, on the White Nile in Uganda.

BUJAGALI, Uganda—A new dam at the headwaters of the White Nile, nearly 20 years in the making, generates almost half of this East African country’s electricity.

Its owner isn’t a state utility or an energy giant. It is Blackstone Group LP, best known for corporate takeovers.

The private-equity firm built the dam with partners and has a contract with energy-hungry Uganda to sell it power at rates that ensure profits for Blackstone for years to come.

The project, fraught with holdups that included a pirate hijacking and rituals to appease spirits before flooding an island, has little in common with the debt-fueled billion-dollar buyouts Blackstone helped popularize.

But the firm and its rivals increasingly are moving beyond the buyout playbook in search of other, sometimes unfamiliar sources of profit: drilling for oil in Oklahoma, building tract homes in North Dakota or shipping gasoline on the high seas.

What does private equity have to do with family courts, child protection, or anything else?
Well, guess where I heard about Blackstone (let alone Carlyle, another formerly Private Equity firm)?

Annie E. Casey Foundation. Here’s a fancy (visually clear, graphics, color, well-designed) January 2012 publication (just found) on an “AECF.org” (Annie E. Casey Foundation) website. It’s called “Skin In The Game” regarding Arizonans and put out by Children’s Advocacy Alliance (Board membership at the very back page).

Up front (about page 2) it quotes a billionaire founder of private equity Blackstone Group as saying Arizonans don’t have enough “skin in the game” — and this brochure is countering that, I gather in opposition to a movement for a flat tax to replace the graduated income tax. The general tone is Annie E. Casey is going to speak up for the poor people against this billionaire’s unfair mindset, from The Blackstone Group. Take a look: Page 3 is the Blackstone quote, look at a few other pages from this “Children’s Advocacy Alliance” of Arizona.

Annie E. Casey and its Foundation is all over the family court arena (especially when it comes to foster care and promoting responsible fatherhood). I have a topic over at Scranton Political Times on some of their involvements. They are a major philanthropy.

Look at how AECF makes ITS income: — here’s its 1999 tax return

:
Read the rest of this entry »

This post is for a brief (ha, ha, ha, right?) teaching point. I’ve never met, heard speak, or spoken to this particular woman (mediator, custody & divorce lawyer, AFCC member) and could’ve picked another individual for an example based on their website. However, it’s not every day one sees something so “AFCC” openly suggesting that because mayhem (murder) correlates to custody battles, the real problem is the word “custody,” which should be abolished, and then goes immediately into quoting AFCC (The California Chapter)’s public declaration that the treatment of children IN the courts is a public health crisis — and therefore, the overloaded judges and courts need more resources…

I have been advising parents (in particular) to figure out WHO in the lobbying, rules-of-court-changing, profession-inventing, task-force-chairing State by State Supreme Court (or thereabouts) legal/judicial powerhouses — has AFCC affiliations, or at least has drunk that Kool-aid. As a handle, it’s definitely an indicator. Many symptoms accompany membership. When a certain panorama of symptoms show up (this particular post has most of them, like idiocy) then the diagnosis “AFCC” is probably pretty accurate, whether or not it’s on the website already as a nametag.

The same Association (loosely speaking, given how inconsistent are the incorporation records) appears to unilaterally taken credit for the basic formation of family and conciliation courts to start with, which in other places (on other website), they call positive, innovative, problem-solving, and all things healthy. Talk about flipping cause and effect, and dodging accountability!!! We’re in it deep. Taken at face value, these people (at least the rank and file) are insane, illogical, and evasive, and have a casual disregard for the truth, or even attempting (for the public at large) to connect what they say to it.

Possibly some have been hypnotized or entranced by the hypnotic allure of power, or by some of the leadership with known connections to practicing the art of confusion and hypnosis itself i.e., the Milton H. Erickson crowd. (read at least first three paragraphs of this “Cliff notes” to the topic. Here’s just one paragraph:

For hypnotic rapport to become established you must appear rational and sensible most of the time. Then when you do become confusing they will work harder at focusing because they will logically assume it’s them missing some meaning that ought to be clear, and if they focus hard enough they will get it. Confusion as a technique should be used wisely and sparingly. You wouldn’t want to become known as ’that person who just talks gibberish!’

Same idea behind “Moses and the burning bush.” First, you get their attention. It’s not a new concept…Also, like Moses, once he turned and started listening, his life went through what looks like some rapid? and radical changes. From JHOM:
Theophany at the Burning Bush (by Nahum Sarna)

While tending his flocks in the desolate wilderness, Moses arrived at Horeb, the “mountain of God.” Here he suddenly beheld an awesome spectacle that defied nature’s laws and all human experience. A bush was all aflame yet remained intact, unaffected by the fire. Given its non-material, formless, mysterious and luminous characteristics, it is understandable that fire is frequently used in descriptions of the manifestation of the Divine Presence. [1]

---

. . .
Overcome with irresistible fascination at the astonishing scene, yet now profoundly sensible of the divine potency with which the place is charged, Moses’ attention shifts from the visual to the aural. The sight of the Burning Bush fades away and is not mentioned again. Its place is taken by the Divine Voice. Here, too, a transformation takes place. The imperious Voice, commanding and admonishing, gives way to softer tones of pathos, concern, and tidings of liberation.

The parallel here is quite loose. What Moses saw (according to the story), and what I saw are quite different — but definitely gripping: HOW can this (level of illogic) exist?? WHY is our society putting up with so much of this influence, unnoticed, but powerful, throughout our own court system, which we pay for? Who charmed whom into insensibility? I mean, sometimes, you gotta just ask WHY.

What I’m going to show, posted (presumably written?) by an “Orange County Mediator, Divorce and Custody Lawyer” today IS gibberish if language has meaning, and if history (of the development of our conciliation and family court system) exists. However, in a cause-less and irresponsible world of the eternal “now” (except when gloriously relating a mythological past of heroic exploits) — I guess ANYthing goes. And as such, an ethereal (rarely consistently “incorporated”) Association (that calls itself “AFCC” for the most part) has a set of followers who have never seen it in the flesh, most likely, and are spreading fabulous stories of what it can do — if only more tributes would come in, and competition (such as other languages symbolizing “OLD” belief systems, like the kind that actually have a right and wrong encoded into the criminal law, with consequences attached — not just therapy, plus more therapy, plus more problem-solving courts…..)…

And it got my attention — yes, I was “caught” by the sheer audacity of the irrationality of it. Note: Abusers can do the same thing. They talk out of both sides of their mouth immediately after an incident, or when confronted on an incident, and cannot or will not be pinned down to the truth.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post is an off-ramp to too much commentary, as I watched in stunned incredulity, an AFCC professional (a.k.a. a custody and divorce lawyer and mediator)stumbling around the language of logic and attempting to piece together a semblance of it.

Hey, my blog — it humors me to say all this. There’s no real intention to organize or structure it. I took it off the original post will leave a footprint (link) there. That’s it.

This was taken out of the introductory section.

Regarding “the art of confusion” — it’s a real technique taught by therapists and psychoanalysts to put people into a trance; particularly people who are intellectually resistant to the concept of “going under” and like to believe they are in cognitive control of their own minds (I must admit, a desirable state in general).

Read the rest of this entry »