The Fascinating, and Horrifying story of the Craig Franklin Institute Care

We all thought Craig was joking.  We were sitting around the table after enjoying a meal when Craig launched into one of his non-computer based dreams, CFI Care.  This was to be a non-profit organization, a small one which Craig was confident would grow through word of mouth advertising. 

The Care provided was to be sex counselling carried out by Craig, who would watch couples have sex and provide suggestions as the couple made love.  We all burst into laughter.  Craig looked chagrined. You see, he was serious.

 

Note that Craig has no qualifications for providing such counseling, either those issued by institutions which train or with any body of knowledge except reading porn magazines and watching porm movies.  In this second category his personal preference is for Incest, Kiddy-Porn, an element of information which would not be available to me for many years, in fact, this did not happen until 2003.  

In 2003, several years after we were divorced, my attorney told me I needed Craig's residence address for services of papers.  I hired a private detective to obtain the information by following him home from work.  

The detective entered the lobby of the Condo building in Santa Barbara and paused, briefly wondering which way Craig had gone.  Then, Craig entered the lobby carrying a small gift bag and proceeded to deposit it on the top of a pile of trash extruding from the receptacle.  

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Noting the number of the condo unit without being observed, the detective then snatched up the gift bag and headed for my home.  I was very surprised when, with the detective still there, we viewed the contents.  But many things were explained.  

Can government immunize a person, such as Craig, from fraud in marriage?  It was clear, given the evidence available after the fact, he married me to get access to my three lovely daughters, all of whom appeared to be the goal of his sexual targets, all of whom he adopted to ensure he was their 'Daddy.'

A test case for fraud is in order, don't you think?  And a conspiracy to help him evade charges on sexual crimes by the company, for which he was Senior Vice President makes the company also a party to the crime.  

What do you think the jury will say?  How would you like to vote on this jury? Let us know, visit the LINK to express your opinion and sign up to receive updates as the Saga of Craig Franklin, Dan O'Dowd, John Fund and Saddam Hussein continues.   

The Lesson of the Duct Tape - Get Freedom; Get Local

Originally published at the LoneStar Iconoclast November 19, 2008

            When my son, Justin, was around 12 he saw a movie about Houdini.  Fired with a sense of emulation he told his sisters, then in their late teens, that he could do anything Houdini could do.  Determined to prove this he followed them around demanding they duct tape him to a chair.  They declined, for all the reasons you can imagine.  But Justin persisted. Eventually, they complied. Justin then told them not to release him no matter what because they would be interfering with his demonstration.  He told them if they released him he would nag them forever.  They believed him, having been his sisters all of his life.

            For forty five minutes  Justin tried to escape the sticky bonds of the very thorough job his sisters had done.  Exhausted, he asked them to cut the tape.  They looked at each other and declined. 

            And that is where I found him when I came home from the PTA meeting though by then he had a sock in his mouth held in place by another piece of duct tape. 

            Raising children was an education in many ways.  Justin had not been thinking strategically.  He had not tested each component of his plan for whether or not it would work.  He knew nagging worked.  He could imagine the awe of his sisters when they saw him standing there, unfettered by duct tape, and he could imagine his feeling of accomplishment.  But the escaping part was entirely untested.  He could get himself into the process but not reach the goal. 

            You need to think strategically first. 

            In the US Army War College  they understand the need to cover all those bases.  Understanding the potentials for any situation dictates that you take into account the present technology and practices and keep an eye on potentials that are yet to be applied.  Ask the builders of the Maginot Line, if your doubt that the rules can change rapidly. The rules are about to change relating to the FED, remember that.

             In software development the need to 'beta test' is understood as the time when the glitches are worked out.  Justin's Glitch:  Ignoring the need to develop  the skills of Houdini, honed by that artist over a lifetime. 

            None of the activities above relate to politics as such.  But the same is true for all forms of human activity from building a composter to a monetary system.  Know how it works.   Have a strategic plan with interim goals for achieving your final goal. Thorough study helps you evade what can be devastating and unanticipated outcomes, like spending an hour with a sock duct taped to your mouth. 

            Raising children was, as I indicated, instructive.  I already knew that politics had the equivalent of 12 year olds who put plans into motion without any thought of connecting the stated goal to a strategic plan for achieving that goal.  All too often the actual goal was to raise money for the organizers and nothing more.  “It educated the public,”  “next time we will break through,” were common mantras heard in the aftermath of confusion, disappointment, and the sad cheers from people what wanted to believe rather than confront the truth.  Their efforts had not achieved even interim goals; there had been no goal but a vague patina of rhetoric but they masked the pain  with illusion.  “Freedom for the individual,” “private ownership,” “return to the Constitution,” sounds wonderful.  But the words will not take you there without substantial planning and focused, effective, action.  

            In each instance those involved believed that their activism and money was being invested in a way that was growing freedom.  They were clearly mistaken since none of those many and varied plans actually moved us any further in that direction.   

            Today, more than ever in our history, perhaps, we need to view our time and money as an investment and treat those investments with discernment. 

            For instance, today we are confronting the break down of the Federal Reserve Bank.  It is likely that the government could end up owning our mortgages, which would put us a long way towards a nationalism more like the USSR and Nazi Germany than like anything we, as Americans, can imagine.  Such popular and well paid gurus  as Larry Edelson opine on the frightening possibilities, such as this article appearing today, “The G-20’s Secret Debt Solution”, in Money and Markets.

            It is not good.  And waiting around until 'they' decide what to do sharply limits our available options.

            At the end of the coming weekend we may or may not know what the intentions are for the global interests meeting in Washington D. C., on November 14-15.  This meeting is for, “the G20 special leaders.”  Whatever happens will be more like deciding how to serve us up as yet another entre than about how to save the economy.  At this point that is impossible. 

            So while the focus of most of the world will be on what those 'special leaders'  do our focus  should be on building an alternative for ourselves that allows us to evade their all too clear intentions. 

            Which brings us to the issue again of strategic, planning, and how we spend our time from now on.  Go home to your community and get active.  Community relief programs are over worked and struggling; people have never been more inclined to listen. 

            As you make your plans consider these guidelines.  

            First, decide what outcome you want to enact.  Those long dead revolutionaries who prosecuted the only real war for independence starting in 1775 knew what they wanted.  The outcome was not everything they wanted but it took them in the right direction. 

            What we want is to take us the rest of the way.  What we want is government by the people where the autonomy of the individual is recognized as an absolute       that precedes any government and is not alterable by government.  Here is an example of what I mean. 

            An exchange system is essential to how we live today. 

            The Fed is a system that has been designed to steal our substance and control us.

            Therefore we need a different system, not no system, but one that serves our needs. 

            “End the Fed” makes a nice meme but without a means of exchange we cannot function.  Petitioning Congress has proven to be a waste of breath. 

           

            The goal must be to rapidly displace the Fed with an exchange system that puts control in the hands of the individuals who are doing the exchanging.  That means ordinary people at the most local level.  That way as the Fed disappears we can survive, growing out that system.  

            Now, there are two points we need to consider.  Why we spend so much time and money on such 'projects' as End The Fed and Break the Bailout, both of which fail to do anything to produce the needed alternative. Second, and most important, what we do to produce such a system. 

            End the Fed has a list of 'proposed ideas for action numbering 11 possibilities.  It closes with the note that there are more ideas.  Only Nos. 7 and 8, just ideas mind you, have anything to do with developing an alternative when the need is obvious and immediate.  This is like telling the soldiers at Concord that ammunition would be a good idea and they should develop some. The time to start local alternatives is several years ago. And if that was not bad enough the next step into the quick sand of ineffective action is Break the Bailout.  There, you can find the 'plan,' which is what they will do besides issue tee-shirts and accept donations and 'educate' the public.  Here is their idea. 

“What Are We Planning To Do With the Funds We Raise?

In shorthand terms, the funds will be used to build a transpartisan community of Bailout Breakers; to spread our message about ending the bailouts and taking back control of our money; and to create the tools that are going to be needed for standing up to the banksters and their purchased politicians. For a more detailed explanation of what we intend to do with the donated funds, click here. “

            The 'click here' takes you to exhortations to 'get active.'  That is not a plan; it is a fund-raising drive with no specifics whatsoever.

     What it does accomplish is to keep activists involved in busy work, distracting them from what must be done.  The future would be grim if we were dependent on this level of strategy and thinking.

            Remember the words of Albert Einstein:  “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

            It is time to dump the summer camp approach to activism; buying tee-shirts and paying $35.00 to “be a part of history,” so that you can get together with like-minded people accomplishes nothing. Go home to your community and become involved, not in politics but in your own community. 

            Start a local barter – exchange system.  Start a coop that uses local food and gleening.  Get to know the people who run the community relief programs. 

            Fortunately, many people have been working busily on these and other actual, working alternatives.  Finding answers is easy. Many of these are now in operation and are providing communities with those working alternatives now in place.  One of these related to a barter – trade system is Fourth Corner Exchange.  But there are many others.  Each should be considered a beta test site, to be scaled up and grown, testing its viability as the community in which it is being tried applies the principle of localizing commerce.  Here, there are also challenges. 

            Localizing means more than talking and it applies not to one part of our lives but to all parts.  It means providing jobs, not talking about theories but in manufacturing and installing energy alternatives.  How about an electric car with a home based system that also powers your house?  We could have one on the market in 90 days. The basic unit, car and home generation, will sell for $20,000.  If you are interested, get in touch.   

            We do not have to originate the answers; they are out there.  What must be done is effective networking and sharing that information, not for profit but because that sharing is, itself, one of the things that builds community, taking us all to the individual autonomy that is the foundation of freedom. Seeing it happen makes believers of the most skeptical.  

            Talking to each other is fun; summer camp was exciting when we were kids.  But it is time to grow up and get serious about freedom if you want to know what it feels like before you die.

              

In 1959 Dad took me to hear something he thought was important.

He was right.  Dr. Arthur F. Pillsbury, my father, was a life-long Conservative who understood the problems we still face today with pollution, water, air and land.  Dad was named to the first EPA in 1969.

JFK Research Library

This is a transcription of this speech made for the convenience of readers and researchers. A copy of the text of this speech exists in the Senate Speech file of the John F. Kennedy Pre-Presidential Papers here at the John F. Kennedy Library.

No change in a fast-changing world presents a greater challenge 2– no problem in a world full of problems calls for greater leadership and vision – than the control of nuclear weapons, the utter destruction which would result from their use in war, and the radioactive pollution of our atmosphere by their continued testing in peace-time.

It is not a simple problem with simple answers. The experts disagree – the evidence is in conflict – the obstacles to an international solution are large and many. But the issue of nuclear tests and their effects is one which should be discussed in the coming months – not as a purely partisan matter, but as one of the great issues on the American scene.

It was well, therefore, that this issue was raised last Sunday in a constructive way by the Governor of New York. His statement contributed to the dialogue on this basic issue – it represented the position of a leading figure in the Republican Party – and he did not attempt to evade the question. So I commend Governor Rockefeller for stating his views, and I hope they will be considered and debated by interested citizens everywhere.

But I must also express my own emphatic disagreement with his statement, which called for this country to resume nuclear test explosions. Such a proposal, it seems to me, is unwise when it is suggested just prior to the reopening of negotiations with the British and Russians at Geneva on this very question. It is damaging to the American image abroad at a time when the Russians have unilaterally suspended their testing and the peoples of the world are fearful of continued fall-out.  And, while Mr. Rockefeller did suggest that the testing take place underground to prevent fall-out, he also – according to press reports – “discounted” the harmful effects of fall-out – which I am unwilling to do.

While many competent scientists agree that there has been no great harm done to mankind as a whole from the amount of radiation created by bomb tests so far, it is also true that there is no amount of radiation so small that it has no ill effects at all on anybody. There is actually no such thing as a minimum permissible dose. Perhaps we are talking about only a very small number of individual tragedies – the number of atomic age children with cancer, the new victims of leukemia, the damage to skin tissues here and reproductive systems there – perhaps these are too small to measure with statistics. But they nevertheless loom very large indeed in human and moral terms. Moreover, there is still much that we do not know – and too often in the past we have minimized these perils and shrugged aside these dangers, only to find that our estimates were faulty and the real dangers were worse than we knew.

Let us remember also that our resumption of tests would bring Russian resumption of tests – it would make negotiations even more strained – it would spur other nations seeking entry into the “atomic club”, with their own tests polluting the atmosphere – and, in short, it could precede the kind of long, feverish testing period which all scientists agree would threaten the very existence of man himself.  And, perhaps even more importantly the ability of other nations to test, develop and stockpile atomic weapons will alter drastically the whole balance of power, and put us all at the mercy of inadvertent, irresponsible or deliberate atomic attacks from many corners of the globe. This problem – called the nth country problem, because we do not know how many nations may soon possess these weapons – is at the real heart of the Geneva negotiations. For once China, or France, or Sweden, or half a dozen other nations successfully test an atomic bomb, then the security of both Russians and Americans is dangerously weakened.

The arguments advanced in favor of a test resumption are not unreasonable. The emphasis is on weapons development – the necessity to move ahead “in the advanced techniques of the use of nuclear material.” This reason is not to be dismissed lightly. Our basic posture in world affairs relies on technical military superiority. We need to develop small tactical nuclear weapons and so-called “clean” nuclear weapons, in order to deter their use or other forms of limited aggression by the enemy, and in order to facilitate a decision to respond in good conscience with atomic weapons when necessary. We need to increase the flexibility and range of weapons in our arsenal in order to increase the flexibility and range of diplomatic possibilities. This is not, I might add, justification for cutting back our ground forces and our ability to wage conventional warfare – but it is nevertheless important. Certainly the destruction rained upon us all by a small nuclear battle – and this our weapons development program is intended to deter – would be many times the damage caused by all the test fall-out in the future. But such a weapons development program cannot be suspended indefinitely in a free country without our scientists and technicians scattering to other positions in other laboratories.  In addition, France and other nations on the verge of becoming nuclear powers will resent a ban – and their goodwill is also important.

But it is even more important that we find a way out the present menacing military situation.  And let us remember that our present test suspension is implicitly conditional on a continued Russian test suspension. If we are not developing new weapons in the absence of tests, so, in all probability, will they. And the facts of the matter are that, generally speaking, we are ahead of the Russians in the development of atomic warheads of all sizes but behind in the development of delivery systems. Until this lag can be overcome, there is a lesser value for us in testing and developing further “techniques in the use of nuclear material.” In short, for both sides to resume atomic tests today might well turn out to be more of a disadvantage to the West militarily than a help. The Soviet Union – which apparently made great progress in it 1958 tests – is quite as likely as we in any new tests to score a break-through with some new means of destruction which will make all the more delicate the present balance of terror.

I would suggest, therefore, the following alternative position:

1. First, that the United State announce that it will continue its unilateral suspension of all nuclear tests as long as serious negotiations for a permanent ban with enforceable inspections are proceeding with tangibly demonstrated good faith, provided that the Russians do not meanwhile resume their own tests. The latest extension of our test suspension announcement expires on December 31 – and we cannot take the chance of continuing it indefinitely without an inspection system – or afford the cost of extending a temporary suspension so long that our scientists disperse and our laboratories break down. But neither can we afford to undercut negotiations close to success – to resume polluting the atmosphere while the Russians pose as moral leaders. As long as serious, good faith negotiations continue into the early month of 1960 – and are not prolonged indefinitely beyond that – we must continue our suspension beyond December 31.

2. Secondly, the United States must redouble its efforts to achieve a comprehensive and effective agreement to ban all nuclear tests under international control and inspection – and this means developing a single, clear-cut, well 2– defined, realistic inspection proposal of our own. We do not have this today. We have not made as concentrated and effort on techniques for preserving mankind as we have on techniques of destruction. Nor do we have a clear, concrete policy for the general arms control of disarmament program which must necessarily follow an agreement on testing if it is to be meaningful. But the whole international climate could benefit from this demonstration that East and West can reach significant, enforceable agreements. At least a part of the burdensome arms race would come to a halt. The danger of new nuclear powers emerging would be lessened. For the first time the Russians would have accepted effective international controls operating within their own territory. The hazards of health would be over. Such an agreement, in short even if not perfect – even, for example, if it looks to further modification regarding inspection systems for underground or outer-space tests – would nevertheless be worth far more effort than we are presently exerting. And it would be far more valuable than the military benefits to be gained from test resumption.

3. Third – if our best efforts do not succeed, the negotiations collapse, the Russians resume testing and it becomes necessary for our test to resume, even then they should be confined to underground and outer-space explosions, and to the testing of only certain small weapons in the upper atmosphere, in order to prevent a further increase in the fall-out menace – and in hope, moreover, that the Russians and others will be forced by world opinion to follow our example.

4. Fourth and finally, we must step up our studies of the impact of radioactive fall-out and how to control it, through the Public Health Service here at home and a special United Nations monitoring commission abroad. Let us not discover the precise point of danger after we have passed it. Let us not again reject these warnings peril as “catastrophic nonsense” (to quote Mr. Nixon), as they were rejected in 1956 when put forward by a great Democratic standard-bearer, Adlai E. Stevenson. There is every indication that had a test ban been accomplished then, it would have been far more useful, far more easily accomplished and far more beneficial to our national security than it would today, now that the missile gap had widened so far.

These four policy positions that I have stated are no magic solution – nor can they be achieved overnight without effort. The course which I am suggesting is full or risks. It will require more effort, more leadership, more moral courage than merely “running scared.” But the new and terrible dangers which man has created can only be controlled by man. And if we can master this danger and meet this challenge, we will have earned the deep and lasting gratitude, not only of all men, but of all yet to be born – even to the farthest generation.