Odds and Ends (Justify the Means)

As life goes on without my nephew Charlie, I often find myself at some juncture or other thinking, "The kid would have loved this." Other times, obviously, I find myself taking the opposite point of view.

The coronavirus pandemic has staying power here in Michigan, even if the governor does not. She has been reduced (by our legi$lature and our ©ourts) to public pleading: Stay at home, wear your masks, wash your hands.

I don't know how many of us are buying in anymore in certain parts of the state. Our urban centers are hit the hardest. I would not call Kalamazoo a real city - no chance of that ever happening - but it could provide a haven for those who want to get away from the spread.

Nationally, 10 percent of the population has tested positive for Covid-19. While Grand Rapids is in the Top Ten cities where cases are concerned, our polluted little river valley is not. Here, only 1 in 16 County residents have experienced the virus.

Why, you're just as likely to be the victim of a crime in our city limits, no greater statistical likelihood than that. And most of those are just property crimes.

The violent crime rate here is about three times higher than the state average, sure, but it's still lower than it is in, like, Detroit. (Assaults, mostly; barely over a hundred rapes each year and only a double-handful of murders.) And, least heralded of all, we've made a lot of progress on our feral cat problem.

Only 580 residents in Kalamazoo County have been hospitalized by the virus, about 1 in 500... 287 deaths, which is less than 1 in 1,000. That's the same fatality rate associated with motorbike racing, and who does that? Maybe that's why fewer than 1 in 4 of us have been vaccinated here...

Anyway, even though Charlie can't be here to see all of this, you can be! Save yourself from the pandemic. Leave your disease-stricken metropolises and come to Kalamazoo.

Just don't look at the Townies the wrong way.

pH 4.11.21

***

Timber

"Consumers signing any contract with a business do so with the expectation that they will be treated fairly." - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel

***

As a consumer, and as a citizen, I have two reactions to the Attorney General's broad statement, which is in reference to a logging company lying to its customers about how much and what kind of timber it had removed from their properties.

First reaction: Uh, no.

Second one: Thanks for nothing, Dana.

As a citizen of Kalamazoo County, I am also bound as a consumer to the contract the County has signed with Homer Stryker School of Medicine (alias: WMed) to conduct forensic pathology work. Y'know... Coroner services.

When the lying skank Medical Examiner, "Doctor" Joyce deJong, bungled my nephew Charlie's death certificate in 2015, and even admitted that she made up the official circumstances she used in erroneously determining Suicide, she was not made to treat us fairly. Anything but.

Of course, the Attorney General and everybody else knows about the whole thing already. If she doesn't know - and it is possible; Michigan's adult literacy rate isn't what it used to be - then I have two more reactions, as a citizen and as a consumer:

First reaction: Shame on you, Dana.

Second one: Start at Chapter One.

I know, it's easier to take a stand when there's nothing but lumber at stake. You don't have to go out on a limb for anybody. No one sees that your bark is worse than your bite. You're not a wooden politician, no. You're the Lorax. You speak for the trees.

But not for the people who elected you.

The facts: If one dies here, the coroner can capriciously make up anything she wants and put it on one's death certificate. No Commissioner, no Representative, no Senator will help you. No judge will step out of the County line to relieve your family of their anguish, from lowly Circuit Judge Lipsey to the Michigan State Supremacy Court.

At the very most, all these selfish ham-and-eggers will do is listen politely, smile and nod and check their manicures, and then when you leave, they'll go right back to doing what they were doing, which is nothing. They do nothing, they care nothing.

That's why nothing ever changes here in Little Shitsville. Not since I was a kid. Unless it was to change for the worse.

And really, this is all that awaits any weary traveler that jumps off I-94 on any of our, what, four freeway exits. Take it from one who knows:

Don't come here. Don't spend your money here. Don't look for an education or a job or a home here. Don't raise your kids here. Unless you want to be drowned in your own tears. Because that's all what ever happens in Kalamazoo.

pH 3.26.21

***

Miracle Miles

Boys love cars. Or, at least, all the boys I knew growing up did. Charlie carried that auto-adoration in his heart, too. He would often use them as a play space in the driveway. He made forts in the backs of the SUVs. He even stowed away in the back seat of my sister's car when she went to work on one fine, eventful day - but that's another story.

All the cars that Charlie knew are long gone from the world now, just as he is, having succumbed to catastrophic failures or fatal accidents. As a matter of fact, even the cars that replaced those ones are on their way out. The years and the miles, the tears and the smiles, those things take their toll.

When I came home from Phoenix in 2011, I was driving a Hyundai which I called Little Grizzly (or The Gray Ghost, depending on whether it was running or not at the time). It had a 16-valve engine and a stick-shift, and the first time I took my nephew for a ride in it, I warned him:

"Buckle up, kid. Uncle Paul drives crazy sometimes." 

Which he loved with gleaming eyes. 

My Uncle-ish pleasure was doubled when I later heard him say to one of his friends, upon climbing into the back of the Little Grizzly to be taken someplace, "Buckle up, man. Uncle Paul drives crazy."

The Gray Ghost outlived Charlie. But not by much. Its replacement, a black Neon that he would be driving to school and back by now, is limping to its own finish line. Between Michigan roads and Michigan weather, the car has about had it.

Yesterday, my sister and I drove out close to Lansing (an hour away) to look at a used car, a Buick. The car was immaculate, clearly having been babied and garaged its whole life. I stuck my head underneath it to look at the frame, and was amazed. Solid steel coated in factory paint. Not a speck of rust.

You see, it's not just the water that gets them, even though Michigan has rainfall on par with Seattle or any other rainforest. It's the tons of rock salt they put on the roads in winter, you know, to save lives. The salt-slush freezes on to the undercarriage of the cars and trucks here, for weeks or even months, and eats them until there's nothing left. Corrosion is more than a metaphor here.

The other thing I noticed about buying a car out of town: Normal people. You do not run into that when searching for a used car here. Basically, Kalamazoo can be boiled down into four subgroups: Bums, thieves, tweekers and crazies. The nice couple with the Buick did not meet any of those criteria, which is why they don't live in Kalamazoo.

My sister bought the Buick. She deserves a nice vehicle after all that has been done to her here.

And so before us all lies the open road. Like the instructions say... Tear along the dotted line.

pH 3.o4.21

***

This One's For You, Erik

There is an occasionally-expressed sentiment that we run across in our Sisyphean struggle, a variant of, "Why can't you just let it go?" It's tempting to take offense to that, even if the utterer is unaware of his or her idiocy in the moment.

My answer is always short and simple: Kalamazoo County is not telling the truth in the case of Dennis Charles Wolf. Nobody here wants anything more than honesty (yet). Public officials are employees. Who among us would tolerate our workers lying to our faces?

Secondarily, of course, is the noble notion of not wanting to see this happen to anybody else. But it's hard to fly that flag in this place, where fresh winds seldom fill our sails. Such things become harder to justify when you know it's been done before.

Ask Erik's Army.

Erik Cross was a kid about the same age as I was when he was killed in 1983, run over by a car as he walked home from a party on an otherwise-normal summer night in Southwest Michigan. His family believes it was a case of horrifying murder. They seek justice to this very day.

Seems they can't let it go.

And I don't blame 'em.

What they are up against is more monstrous than what we've experienced. Imagine living with the knowledge that your loved one's vicious killer still roams free (for the most part). 

They're not shy about exposing the details, either. My sister and I got sued for exposing someone's disturbing criminal history - in Michigan they call that defamation - but Erik's Army is a bit more strident, a bit more explicit than that.

I completely understand their reasons for being this way. They've run into the same roadblocks that we run into, year after year. It basically amounts to a cowardly County prosecutor who isn't about to take on any case that he doesn't know for sure he can win. (In other words, one against White people.)

For their part, Michigan's Attorney General's office did no more for the Cross family than  they did for my family (less, actually). They, too, may not want to actually work. The cream of the Slacker Generation crop, they prefer to cash their checks, gobble down their meals and look good in the papers... All for rather handsome pay.

Erik Cross deserves justice. So does my nephew. But Jeff Getting doesn't have to do his job. He ran unopposed. Nobody else wants to be him, or anything like him.

It should all make you wonder: Why would anybody want to live here? Absent justice for those who deserve it, there is no answer to that question, and none of us can afford to feel safe. Or whole.

pH 2.19.21

***

Whether Report

Since not much is happening around here this time of year, I guess I can fall back on the weather. Global warming has not affected Michigan as much as it has other places. It's actually a little milder in the summer these years, and the winters don't bring as much snow.

We can blame the annual polar vortex for that. Instead of getting wet weather from the Southwest pushed in our direction, turning rain into snow, we get cold, intrusive air from a thousand miles north of us, nesting over the Great Lakes. It makes Siberia seem like summer in Siam.

It snows once in awhile. And because it's so cold, day and night, that snow sits around for months, getting dirtier all the time. It's as bleak as a moonscape here. The only warmth comes from the prevailing Westerly winds bringing Chicago's emissions right into the funnel of the Kalamazoo River Valley.

The pandemic took a bad situation and made it worse. Even the animals have moved out of the woods and into town. It's not uncommon to hit deer on roadways where they were never seen before. Illicit urban hunting has become a thing, the most brazen form of poaching... So, yes, the economy in Michigan is so bad now that people are killing and eating the animals.

Naturally, property crime has increased. Someone just cut the catalytic converter out from under my Ford a couple of weeks ago. Muggings are sure to rise, purse snatchings, break-ins, stuff like that.

Most people don't even bother to call the police, because they're pretty sure the same thing will happen as did the time before: Nothing. What can the police do? Even if they were to prosecute every crime that happens around here, the courts don't seem to be able to make sense of much of anything.

So if you're Walter White, you're doing great; otherwise, you're just another victim of our woeful economy, a collateral casualty resulting from the dull, vapid mediocrity of our hapless local officials.

We have a governor who would love to do all sorts of nice things for the people, as any good Governor would want to do, but an opposition party in the legislature that would just as soon tie her hands behind her back, some more literally than figuratively.

It's hopeless.

Wayfarers be warned: For the vast majority of the United States, Michigan is North of you. Let that be your compass - just don't go North -  because once you get up here, the sun disappears and the needle just spins around and around and around...

pH 1.3o.21

***

Quacks Like a Duck

I just sent the following to one of the local reporters who is looking into the unfortunate case against my sister, Charlie's Mom. And it's not the only thing I've sent.

***

Hello. Please see attached, a long-ago-sent email from then-Corporations Counsel Thom Canny (I think he works in Probate now) having to do with my sister's case. In his letter to my sister's lawyer, at the end, you can see that Kalamazoo County tried to violate my free speech rights. They sought to make the changing of Charlie's Cause of Death contingent upon my legal silence.

After we rejected that offer (or attempted extortion, whatever you want to call it), Redmond sued me, with the plaintiff receiving a fax from the Medical Examiner [Redmond lied about having received it under oath - pH]. This resulted in one blog post being removed by Judge Lipsey's ex parte Order, several others modified out of fear of further claims, and a chilling effect - exactly the County's intent.

It was in that endeavor that Martha Redmond committed perjury. So I am not stretching it by saying that the Medical Examiner is directly involved in this horrible lawsuit against my family, which would prefer to grieve in peace.

I hope this makes sense, although I doubt it. It doesn't make sense to me sometimes. But it's a big part of the story. Why did Joyce deJong send that fax to Martha Redmond? And what other communications did they have? Unanswered questions.

When I filed a FOIA request with Kalamazoo County for all communications between Joyce and Redmond Funeral Homes, the reply I got was that no such communications existed. But obviously one did, with both sender's and receiver's information stamped on the document! So, Joyce, too, lied in this case, about the same thing.

Combined with the Canny letter, it's pretty clear that my civil rights were violated by the County where the First Amendment is concerned, and Judge Lipsey (who oversaw both my sister's cases somehow) was going to sweep it all under the rug.

Have a good day. Sorry to take up so much of your time with this.

***

pH 1.25.21

Disrespect for the Dead

 Just in case you're behind on your annual quota of nightmares, here is a supplemental one fresh from America's Nightmare Garden, Kalamazoo County.

Check that... It's Defendant Kalamazoo County this time. The crowd with the pitchforks and torches is heading for the Admin building again, over basic larceny by conversion, looks like.

The outgoing County Treasurer, Mary Balkema, could probably care less. She got thumped like a tub in last month's historic election, and will soon be filling out job applications, one might suppose. But it's her shop that made headlines this week, sort of.

I'll link you to the article, which tells the horror story better than I'll be able to, but the gist of the grist is simply this: If you die here, and owed delinquent taxes on your property, we'll seize that property and sell it.

Yeah. Now imagine your foreclosed home sells at auction for, say, $79,500... But the outstanding tax debt was only $14,500. That means the deceased citizen's heirs would have $65,000 coming their way, seem right? Yep, seems right.

And that is right as of only very recently. Kalamazoo County used to simply keep the funds. Screw the people. But we didn't change our stripes; the Michigan Supreme Court had to change our stripes for us last July after a lawsuit was filed. Which is usually how things have to be done here.

However, the state Supreme Court didn't tell counties WHEN they had to pay back the money, and so Kalamazoo doesn't do it at all, which is how we got sued. From the horse's front end:

"They're kind of punting it to the Legislature for them to make a legislative fix," says Balkema, who knows a thing or two about the subject, having been kicked out of public office by the voters just weeks ago.

Balkema has also mercilessly foreclosed on people's homes, for as little as $2,000 in tax delinquency. Much of that money was funneled to her favorite contractor, or given to the charity run by the mother of County Commissioner Stephanie Moore. This culminated in an investigation by the Michigan State Police, at the behest of former Corporations Counsel Beth White, who was summarily fired.

(White turned around and filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, and the county reached a settlement with her, shelling out $300,000. This is all old news here, okay? Old news. Like so many other cases in Kalamazoo that will turn your stomach.)

So I am glad to see Visser Law suing our County. I hope we lose big and are forced to pay. In fact, I may even start a petition drive to raise our taxes in Kalamazoo County across the board, in order to make whole those victims of the cruel, sausage-fingered idiots who run this asylum.

Now, what was the other item I was looking - oh, yeah... That's right.

When considering the goings-on in a dirty little shire like ours, it should come as no surprise that Michigan schools have fallen quite short on the number of pupils they expected to have, by about 53,000 kids.

Local media estimates our share to be a 5% decrease in the student body, with 690 "lost" learners. This, despite The Kalamazoo Promise, a program that provides college tuition for those who can survive the Kalamazoo Public School system. (Having run that gauntlet myself, I can tell you, there are easier ways to pay for college.)

A five-point drop, though, that's pretty startling. Imagine if this was way back when Titus Bronson was in charge. Imagine the little one-room schoolhouse with 20 children in it... And then imagine, one day, one of them just doesn't show up anymore.

Call him Charlie. And don't expect this place to care.

pH 12.18.2o

***

The Cowards of the County

The past few presidential elections in the United States have shown us one thing. County governments have too much power - too much importance commensurate with the functions they actually have to perform. The will of half of the nation's people should never be placed in the hands of a few counties, but that is indeed the case, every four years.

And what do these peculiar creatures do with this power? Sometimes they get busy feathering their own nests. Or doling out favors to those who are owed them. And sometimes they take that opportunity to reach into the Payback Bag.

My county, in particular, seems a little bit more concerned with personal matters than it does with carrying out whatever the hell its functions really are. This becomes tiresome even to the people who work there. The turnover rate is alarmingly high, so high in fact that the office of Corporations Counsel now sits vacant. They've been farming that stuff out for a long time now - at no small expense to the taxpayers.

Other things cost the taxpayers a pretty penny now and then. The most recent example is the settlement that had to be reached with former Corporations Counsel Beth White. White was fired, thank God, a while back and so filed a federal lawsuit against Kalamazoo County for wrongful termination and such.

Part of her lawsuit demanded she be reinstated to her job, with full pay and benefits of course. Perhaps she felt she had some unfinished business here in our polluted little river valley... With me.

After all, Beth did try to turn me in to the Undersheriff, ostensibly for threatening our wrong-doing M.E., Joyce deJong, which was patently ridiculous. I'd guess that it made her look stupid. And it may have played a part in her firing. (I would hope so.)

Anyway, after getting canned, Beth rolled back up to Kent County, where she went on to lose an election in November... Like the Quakers say, tough oats.

Her pricklily-worded lawsuit specifically mentioned County Commissioner Julie Rogers. Ms. Rogers is now my House Rep in the Michigan state legislature, having won her election in November, unlike Beth.

Like Beth, Ms. Rogers knows damn near every detail about our case(s) having to do with my nephew Charlie's erroneous Death Certificate. So does my state senator, Sean McCann. So do most of the County Commissioners. So do all of Beth White's predecessors going back to Thom Canny. So does Kalamazoo County's 9th Circuit Court. So does the Michigan Court of Appeals, and the Michigan Supreme Court. So does the Attorney General. So does the Southwest Michigan chapter of the ACLU. So do half the attorneys in this town. So do half the reporters who cover it.

So do you.

Some might ask: Why. Why would anyone go out of their way to compound the grief of a mother who lost her child? Why completely ignore the wishes of some of the citizens who sign your paychecks? Why risk your political futures (read: Your careers) by irritating a high-volume blogger?

It doesn't make any sense.

If you never want to find out, all you have to do is never come to Kalamazoo County, and that's my recommendation anyway. If only Beth White had known.

pH 12.o5.2o

***

Seasoning

It's hunting season. I don't do that anymore, because I enjoy access to food, and I don't find it sporting to destroy nature on a full stomach. Even so, every morning well before light, my eyes snap open and my brain is activated. This time of year, I still feel like I belong in the woods.

I have a small game license if I need it. I stay up on the regulations so I can freely exercise that privilege. And one has to pay careful attention because they change quite frequently. For instance, you can hunt deer over a limited quantity of certain types of bait in the Upper Peninsula this year, but not in the Lower Peninsula.

If you get confused about that, you might well run afoul of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, as represented on the ground by their Conservation Officers. These men and women are the most highly trained law enforcement agents in the state of Michigan. They have nearly unlimited power to arrest people or to confiscate their property.

You can bet that if a DNR officer submits a complaint to your County prosecutor against you that the case will be taken up, and that you will shell out thousands of dollars if you've done something wrong, like killing a deer without a license. In short, they can mess your life up.

They can save your life, too. Whenever a motorboat dies out on the water, or whenever an ATV rider hits a tree, or whenever an unlucky angler falls through the ice, or whenever a little kid gets lost in the woods, there is almost always a CO involved in rescuing that person.

When the state of Michigan decided it could not trust Enbridge Energy to tell the truth about the condition of an antique oil pipeline running through the Straits of Mackinac in the Great Lakes, they sent their own dive team, consisting of DNR officers, to the bottom of the lake to get footage. Once they saw it, they ordered the pipeline shut down. Not many other states have the ability to do that.

However...

Law enforcement should also exist to protect people in the same way that they protect fish and ducks around here. And in the tragic case of my sister's son, that has not been our experience. She has been damaged by this. Literally.

I have made no secret of the fact that the two plaintiffs who are suing her both committed perjury during deposition testimony. Nobody cares. But they care about this:

(Courtesy of Michigan Outdoor News.)

In other words Kalamazoo County will be prosecuting the Infamous 2020 Daddy-Daughter Spring Turkey Conspiracy, wholeheartedly, just in time for Thanksgiving. But if you are a certain funeral home owner and her certain ex-con employee, you can push a court case against my sister for FOUR YEARS before even getting a trial date from a Circuit Court judge who has powdered the plaintiff's backside through the whole sickening ordeal.

That happens to be same judge who dismissed my sister's timely Appeal to have her son's Death Certificate corrected to reflect what the mendacious Medical Examiner admits to be factual... And that happens to be the same mendacious Medical Examiner whose department faxed a rather key document to Martha Redmond, who later lied under oath about having received it.

It's enough to drive a person to shoot Wild Turkey.

pH 11.21.2o

***