Poor Mojo's Newswire

PAUL: With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery. I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

The Rajneeshees had been making headlines in Oregon for four years. Thousands dressed in red, worked without pay and idolized a wispy-haired man who sat silent before them. They had taken over a worn-out cattle ranch to build a religious utopia. They formed a city, and took over another. They bought one Rolls-Royce after another for the guru -- 93 in all. Along the way, they made plenty of enemies, often deliberately. Rajneeshee leaders were less than gracious in demanding government and community favors. Usually tolerant Oregonians pushed back, sometimes in threatening ways. Both sides stewed, often publicly, before matters escalated far beyond verbal taunts and nasty press releases. Three months after the aborted Comini plot, the commune collapsed and the Rajneeshees' darkest secrets tumbled out. Hand-picked teams of Rajneeshees had executed the largest biological terrorism attack in U.S. history, poisoning at least 700 people. They ran the largest illegal wiretapping operation ever uncovered. And their immigration fraud to harbor foreigners remains unrivaled in scope. The revelations brought criminal charges, defections, global manhunts and prison time. But there was much more. . . .

Vermont Review: You said that the Kent State shooting sort of served as a catalyst for your theory of Devolution, which spawned Devo. Jerry Casale: Absolutely. Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear. Helicopters surrounding the city with hourly rotating runs out to the West Side and back downtown. All first amendment rights are suspended at the instance when the governor gives the order. All of the class action suits by the parents of the slain students were all dismissed out of court because once the governor announced martial law, they had no right to assemble.

A Chinese national was arrested in California on Tuesday, on charges that he created a fake Army special forces unit and convinced more than 100 other Chinese nationals to join and pay him fees to participate, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said. Yupeng Deng, aka David Deng, a 51-year-old El Monte, California resident, allegedly called himself the "Supreme Commander" of a phony military unit called the "U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve." According to the DA, Deng formed the unit in October 2008, and recruited other Chinese nationals by telling them that joining was a path to U.S. citizenship. Members allegedly paid Deng initiation fees ranging from $300 to $450, along with yearly $120 renewal fees. In return, Deng provided recruits with fake U.S. Army uniforms, fake documents and fake military ID cards. Deng also allegedly decorated his Temple City, California office to look like a U.S. military recruiting center, and ordered his recruits to report for military training and indoctrination. The DA's office press release says the fake unit even marched in a parade in Monterey Park, and went in uniform for a tour of the USS Midway museum in San Diego.