Searching for Satan?

Olympia – Thurston County Superior Court Judge Tabor has created some controversy of late by publicly announcing, due to ‘philosophical and religious’ reasons, he will not make himself available to perform same sex marriages despite Washington State’s recent passage of a referendum making such unions lawful. Tabor is an admitted fundamentalist Christian. He also believes in witches and prosecuting them.

RCW 26.04.050 authorizes, but doesn’t require, judges to solemnize marriages. Tabor is apparently relying on this when he says his refusal is discretionary. RCW 2.08.080 and Canon 1 of the rules for Washington State courts, however, require that judges perform the duties of their office impartially. Canon 1 also requires that judges “avoid impropriety or the appearance of impropriety.”

Is a judge that says he has and will marry heterosexuals, but, not homosexuals performing his duties impartially?

RCW 49.60.030 says Washington state citizens have the right to be free of discrimination related to their sexual orientation. Tabor apparently intends to violate this law.

Tabor’s tenure on the bench is now problematic at best. The county he serves is demographically among the gayest in the state yet he has no intention of treating gays equally.

Those appearing before him may rightly question his impartiality and wonder which other of his views he will allow to influence his decisions. Certainly members of the gay community have reason to question whether they can get justice from him. Others may understandably quail at the prospect of a man who, when deputy prosecutor, could scarcely contain his elation (during recess) after being assigned his first murder case.

It is just a matter of time before complaints against Tabor are filed with the Human Rights Commission and the Commission of Judicial Conduct and lawsuits are filed.

Taxpayers will end up paying for his defense.

But who’d want a (literally) witch hunter officiating at their wedding anyway? This guy, while deputy prosecutor for Thurston County, bragged about how he was going to be the 1st one in the country to convict a witches’ coven in the 1992 Paul Ingram case. (One can read about Mr. Tabor by searching for ‘remembering satan’ & ‘new yorker’ (Remembering Satan)  to find the excellent New Yorker piece exposing this tiny little man w/the power now to sign death warrants. He was so obsessed with looking for witches, he bankrupted the Thurston County Sheriff’s budget. The Dept. had to make an emergency appeal to the State Legislature for $ to finish out the year. Yet voters elected this witch persecutor general, repeatedly, who was also a supporter and close associate of the Kiawanis Boy’s Ranch which was exposed for its longtime pattern of sexual abuse of the children residing there.

Yeah, wouldn’t anyone who really knew this guy rather have someone else officiating during the happiest day of their life? Litigants and their attorneys would be wise to move for Judge Tabor to recuse himself for all the above reasons, though he’s reportedly not (incredible as it may be) the WORST judge on Thurston’s bench. That honor, according to attorneys who practice there, goes to Judge Chris Wickham. Yet voters continue to reelect the latter as well. Should Judge Tabor refuse to step down from your case, you have one (but only one) statutory right to ‘affidavit’ a judge so long as you do so before they make any discretionary ruling. The language for accomplishing this is contained in RCW 4.12.050.

Less is More

As bad as PM2.5 (very tiny) particles are in hastening you and your family’s personal demise, they’re accelerating climate collapse too. This may be welcome news to those who believe misery loves company. Simpson (aka: Green Diamond) doesn’t care whether Mason County residents suffer collectively or in isolation so long as its profits from crimes against humanity (poisoning the air we breathe and the water we drink) are secure. No doubt, it envies the aplomb of those Chinese industries responsible for the off-the-scale Beijing smog of late. What with coal train advocates hoping to sell our Oriental cousins even more of the black stuff and Simpson’s own local BioMassacre proposals, can we be far behind?

Burning Fuel Particles Do More Damage to Climate Than Thought, Study Says

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

The tiny black particles released into the atmosphere by burning fuels are far more powerful agents of global warming than had previously been estimated, some of the world’s most prominent atmospheric scientists reported in a study issued on Tuesday.

The Winds of (A)narchy?

This journal has often noted the injuries and assaults on photojournalists such as those covering Seattle’s 2012 violent May Day street demonstration or Tony Overman of the Daily Olympian as an example of the ‘fatwas’ against photojournalists put out by various (A)narchist blogs/publications, enjoying the fruits of 1st Amendment guarantees while they make every effort to deny them to selected others. This is not simply idiosyncratic perfidy in the Pacific NW, but an ill conceived overarching global effort on the part of these violent street radicals to quash the right of the public to see/hear what is in their midst by the media/reporter of their choice, to undermine the very tools necessary for an open democratic process. The separation between these wanton vandals, the Taliban, and the civil rights crushing brute power of the state is a distinction without a meaningful difference.

The following report from Greece illustrates this point:

Up In Smoke

(A)narchists calling themselves ‘Lovers of Lawlessness’ (the core of the Circles of Offenders) and Fighting Minority have assumed responsibility for the cases of arson in front of houses of journalists. Thu, 01/17/2013 – 02:04  They released a statement on the website of the so-called anarchist space.

The statement, entitled “Breaking News: Arson in houses of journalists”, notes among other things: “The media are the official representatives of the system. Under the new conditions, their role will be changed – from keepers of the balance between society and the political system, into main leaders of the repressive state plans, by means of social manipulation. In Western democracies, a supposedly objective judge has always been needed to oversee democratic freedoms, destroying, in parallel, real struggles for freedom.” Recent police actions in buildings in central Athens are also mentioned and it is noted that these cases of arson at houses of journalists represent a clear position against slanderers. The reasons why certain journalists were attacked are also explained.

A new circle of political skirmishes between government representatives and SYRIZA began, following the firebombs attack on Thursday night at the entrance of the block where famous journalists live. These are employees of the Athens News Agency, newspapers and television. The attacks began at 3:40 a.m. from Kolonaki and continued in Agia Paraskevi, Pendeli, Maroussi and Alimos. Targets included journalists George Ikonomeas, Antonis Skilakos, Evangelia Baltadzi, Antonis Liaros, Petros Karsiotis and Christos Konstas. George Ikonomeas does not live in the house that was attacked. His children live there. An explosion was first registered in Ikonomeas’s house in Kolonaki, then, at 4:10, at the house of Antonis Liaros in Agia Paraskevi, and, at 4:15, at the house of Antonis Skilakos and his wife Evangelia Baltadzi in Pendeli. At the same time, there was an explosion in Maroussi, at Christos Konstas’s house, and, at 4:45, at Petros Karsiotis’s house in Alimos.

This morning, government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said from Cyprus, where he is on a visit together with Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, that he condemns the attacks and blamed SYRIZA and “their spoilt hooded kids” for them. The full statement of Kedikoglou reads: “Yesterday – an invasion of radio stations. Today, explosions at houses of journalists. An open terror against the media is being conducted. What does SYRIZA want in order to finally give up their spoilt children with hoods?”

A statement by SYRIZA followed, condemning the attacks, and noting: “Once again, such dangerous actions provide an alibi for a government that has adopted a strategy of division, violence and terror against the Greek society, so that it can continue to restrict democracy.” The statement also reads that SYRIZA absolutely condemns today’s attacks against homes of journalists. “Today’s statement of the government spokesman is an absolute example. It proclaimed the recent days’ division and intolerance in a laughable but dangerous way … The fight to protect public and political rights of the world of the working will continue on the basis of mass united peaceful struggles, whether today’s government of the memorandum wants it or not.”

George Ikonomeas also said that the responsibility is SYRIZA’s. As one of the victims, he declared his resentment to party MP George Statakis, who was his guest on the show on Mega TV.

New Democracy said: “We strongly condemn the attacks against homes of journalists. This coordinated attempt of terror against members of the press will be in vain. It is the duty of all of us to support the foundations of democracy.”

Fofi Genimata, PASOK’s press officer, also condemned the attacks against journalists. “This chain of blind violence, lawlessness and political instability, with attacks on offices of political parties, public buildings and universities, politicians, and, now, journalists, is an organised plan for terror and must be stopped immediately,” reads the party statement. “Social and political peace must be kept by all means, without cheap excuses. All political and social forces are obliged to defend our country’s democratic nature.”

The Democratic Left noted that violence has become endemic. After the attacks against radio stations, buildings, party offices, now there are firebombs against homes of journalists. The party condemned the attacks, which, according to them, are directed against society and democracy, and offend freedom of thought. It is noted that all political parties should take a clear position against violence.

General Secretary of the Communist Party Aleka Papariga said the party condemns the attacks, and the main question is what kind of combat society needs today and where these events will lead to.

President of the Organisation of Chief Editors of Daily Newspapers in Athens, Dimitris Trimis, said: “It seems that the strategy of tension, implemented by government circles, is progressing. Curious circles inside and outside the state and the mafia target the freedom of thought and information, and disorient and frighten society by means of a process of elimination of democracy, for the benefit of the most extreme forces of oligarchy.” Trimis added that democracy must respond with more force in order to defend the freedom of the press and oppose poverty and inequality, brought by the memorandum with mass creative struggles.

Flames of ‘Revolution’?–or the Conflagration of a New Tyranny?

84%, according to the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine, of fish have hazardous levels of mercury, posing a health risk for people who eat some fish more than once a month.

The UN is facilitating an effort to Reduce mercury pollution at a conference this week in Geneva, where international delegates may agree to a treaty backed by the United States.

Eating fish is the primary means by which people are poisoned by mercury. Tuna & swordfish contain the most mercury of all, which permanently damages the brain and kidneys. Mercury pollution is global; no country alone or subset can rid its food supply of this contamination.

It isn’t just California with a long history of on duty cops raping women and in the case of one Highway Patrol trooper in the ~70’s, murdering them after pulling the women over on isolated San Diego freeways. Washington State has similar ugly stains in its record. Does anyone recall Seattle Judge Gary Little who molested boys for years, and then committed suicide as the story about his sexual relations was about to be exposed by the PI?

Few stories have had a more direct — or quicker — impact than the revelations about Superior Court Judge Gary Little that ran on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Friday, August 19, 1988.

Inspired by rumors that had recently led Little to announce his retirement, the stories detailed Judge Little’s sexual relations with five teenage boys during the early 1970s when he was a prominent Seattle attorney and part-time teacher at Lakeside, the city’s most prestigious private prep school.

As the first edition of that Friday’s P-I was rolling off the presses, Little shot himself outside his chambers on the eighth floor of the King County Courthouse in downtown Seattle. A janitor found his body in the hallway beside a handgun and a suicide note.

Rania Khalek

Recently, Rania Khalek on January 7, 2013 published the following account of how Police officers accused of rape get a pass from the LA Times:

The Los Angeles Times reports that two veteran police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department are under investigation for using the threat of jail to force several women they had previously arrested to have sex with them.

Though the crimes committed are horrific, this wouldn’t be the first time rapists disguised as police officers have abused their authority to rape vulnerable women. Recent examples include the two California Highway Patrol officers who raped a drunk woman they pulled over for a DUI (neither will face rape charges); two NYPD officers who were acquitted of rape charges last year, also for raping a drunk woman; a Memphis police officer who was recently charged with rape and incest; and the list goes on.

Still, my stomach knotted up as I continued to read the article, which I now understand to have been the result of egregious reporting by the Times combined with willful ignorance at best or a cover up at worst by the LAPD.

For starters, I wish I could shout at the Times for employing every word imaginable besides “rape” to describe what these two officers did (more on that later). To add insult to injury, the Times unquestioningly regurgitates police statements as fact, almost all of which are suspicious, to say the least.

The suspects, Officers Luis Valenzuela and James Nichols, stand accused of “targeting at least four women whom they had arrested previously or who worked for them as informants.”

The first woman to accuse Valenzuela and Nichols came forward in January 2010, when she told a supervisor in their narcotics unit that the officers had stopped her more than a year earlier, according to the warrant. The woman, who worked as a confidential informant for the narcotics unit and knew the men, said they were dressed in plain clothes and driving a Volkswagen Jetta. Valenzuela threatened to take the woman to jail if she refused to get in the car, then got into the back seat with her and exposed himself, telling the woman to touch him, the warrant said.

You’d think this accusation would raise red flags about the duo. Instead, “An investigation into the woman’s claim went nowhere when the detective assigned to the case was unable to locate her.” So the case was dropped on the basis of what sounds like a lame excuse crafted by a child who didn’t do his homework. Consequently, officer pervy and his partner twiddly-fingers kept forcing women to suck them off with impunity for at least another year:

A year later…another woman demanded to speak to a supervisor after being arrested and taken to the LAPD’s Hollywood station. Sometime in late 2009, according to the warrant, two officers driving a Jetta pulled up alongside her as she was walking her dog in Hollywood. The officers, whom she recognized as the same cops who had arrested her in a previous encounter, ordered her into the car, the woman recounted. It is not known why she was arrested.

Chinook

If a salmon swam upstream and nobody cared, would it make a ripple?

The first time he was arrested for fishing the Nisqually River, Billy Frank Jr. was 14 years old.

He would be arrested more than 50 times defending his tribe’s treaty right to fish, throughout the fish-ins of the 1960s and ’70s, as Indians and their supporters at Frank’s Landing and further north, at Puyallup, were tear gassed, shot at and beat up by state and federal police. On more than one occasion, Frank had his face shoved into the mud while being arrested by a trooper’s boot to the back of his head.

Eventually, the tribes’ treaty right to fish was affirmed in federal court in the Boldt decision of 1974. Yet as Frank, now 81, stood on the banks at Frank’s Landing on Saturday, his family’s nets were out of the water and the skiffs were on the grass.

For there were no fish in his tribe’s home river to catch.

Despite all the good intentions, hundreds of millions of dollars spent, lawsuits won and treaty rights affirmed in the highest courts, the battle to save the salmon and the habitat that supports them is being lost — not only here, but all over Western Washington.

In a blistering State of Our Watersheds report issued recently, the 20 treaty tribes across Western Washington, through the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which Frank Jr. chairs, documented habitat loss destroying salmon runs all over the region.

That report came on the heels of a white paper by the treaty tribes of Western Washington in 2011, Treaty Rights at Risk, that found their treaties will be but paper promises if habitat loss is not reversed.

The tribes’ reports affirm findings by both state and federal agencies. NOAA Fisheries is charged with protecting salmon and steelhead in Puget Sound under the Endangered Species Act. A report for that agency found that habitat protection is the single most important step to restoring Puget Sound chinook — and that from tree cover to eel grass, the basics that salmon need to survive are still being lost.

The most recent report, State of the Sound 2012, issued by the state Puget Sound Partnership in December, found few of the targets set by the partnership to achieve recovery of the Sound by 2020 have been met, and in critical respects, the state continues to go backward. There is less tree cover, less eel grass, more pavement, and more shoreline hardened with bulkheads and other alterations today than before Puget Sound chinook were listed for protection more than a decade ago, the report found.

There have been spectacular advances: Dikes are being ripped out of the Nisqually and Skokomish river deltas, and dams taken out of the Elwha River — habitat restorations on a grand scale costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

But it is not enough: The day-to-day losses — of trees cut and land paved; road culverts blocking fish passage; logging roads leaching silt into streams; development converting open land, especially outside of urban growth boundaries — all overwhelm the gains made to date, tribal, state and federal research all found.

That is no surprise to Frank, who says he sees a lot more process than progress.

In addition to the fish commission, he sits on the board of the Puget Sound Partnership’s Leadership Council, and has served over the years on more salmon boards and commissions and task forces than he cares to think of.

Not that long ago, Frank said, his family would have caught 200 chum on Christmas Day, and his boys would be preparing to go out fishing Sunday on the Nisqually in a season that stretched clear through winter. But this year, the chum outlook was so poor that the tribe shut the season down last week. It was the earliest closure ever.

“The state of Washington, all they know is process,” Frank said. “It’s ‘we gotta have a blue-ribbon panel, another meeting.’ You get processed out. God almighty, you never see anything coming back. What the hell?

“The directors retire and move away to Arizona and Florida and play golf, and they haven’t done a … thing for the natural resources.”

At stake is more than fish, Frank said. For tribes, the fight for salmon is also a battle for cultural survival.

In two of the past three years, the Stillaguamish, a tribe of just 274 members in Snohomish County, have had to get fish from other tribal nations to have enough to feed those at the tribe’s First Salmon ceremony, honoring the first salmon of the year to return home.

“It goes beyond treaty rights,” said Shawn Yanity, tribal chairman. “Our identity is slowly melting away, and we are trying to keep that from happening.”

Will Stelle, Northwest regional director for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said his agency largely confirms the tribes’ findings in its reports and takes them seriously. He sees a commitment to habitat protection that needs to be extended from forestland protections, achieved through the spotted-owl wars of the 1990s, to land-use changes controlling development in the lower elevations.

“We have seen this movie before,” Stelle said. “Just as we had to wrestle with riparian issues in the higher-elevation lands in the forestlands, we have to wrestle with those same issues in the flood plains and lower elevations of Puget Sound. And we have not yet done so.

“The tribal call for significant progress in protecting and restoring habitat is deeply serious and fundamental. And it poses for us collectively here in the Puget Sound region the question of whether we are prepared to take this effort to another level.”

Tribes intend to keep up the pressure, Frank said.

“We have to fight for all the animals. The whales, the sea lions, all these things that swim. It’s important. Not just to the treaty tribes. But to everyone.”

For the uninitiated, let it be known that even the ‘pillars’ of the community (perhaps especially) including judges, cops, prosecutors, juvenile probation officers, librarians, and State’s complaining witnesses have skeletons in their closet. What’s often overlooked, this obvious flaw in human nature, is the higher the office, the greater the loss should the holder be brought low. Thus corrupt officials at risk of being exposed are greater threats to the safety/welfare of the community than the often maligned criminal element.

Olympia – A Thurston County Superior Court judicial assistant pleaded not guilty to a charge of unlawful manufacture of marijuana Wednesday. A judge from Mason County ordered Debbie Requa, 60, released on recognizance, meaning she did not have to post bail.

Portland – Kerry Cunneen, a self described (A)narchist, refused to cooperate when subpoenaed to testify before the Pacific NW federal Grand Jury Inquisition allegedly investigating the Seattle May Day street violence last year.

The following communication from Kerry Cunneen and article was recently posted by the Committee Against Political Repression (CAPR):

Resident of the Skokomish Valley are chafing at the frequent power outages they endure at the hands of PUD#1. Yet another one lasting several hours occurred 1-3-13 (Thursday) @ ~7:40 p.m.  This one was due to a disruption originating with the BPA (Bonneville Power Administration) which provides electricity to PUD#1 as a retailer of the same.

The outage affected PUD#1 & PUD#3 residents alike including those of Lake Cushman. The time has come to discard the band-aid maintenance of 20th century infrastructure in favor of more reliable 21st equipment (and buried distribution lines) for the more critical needs commensurate with our modern technology based existence. Today, repeated power failures mean dead phone lines, no e-mail or internet access, lack of water (well pumps), frozen water lines in the dead of winter, loss of business, no communication with emergency services, no heat, no light, and an increasingly lasting level of frustration.

Isn’t it time to elect PUD#1 commissioners who will recognize how great the need and failure has become…willing to bite the bullet and spend the money to serve customers who, in theory, own PUD#1? We are no longer a back woods community, but one who needs to fully participate in the 21st century to survive.

“Journalism is printing what someone doesn’t want published, everything else is Public Relations!” -George Orwell-

“The gypsies rightly believe that one must never speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language, the lie must reign.” -Translator’s Introduction by Bill Brown-

When the Scriblerus Club of Verona, Italy first published Il segreto è dirlo (“The Secret is to Tell”) in 1983, it was an anonymous work. In the words of the very brief text on its back cover, this novel is the story of the “life and adventures of Salvatore Messana,” who is “a thief, sinner, adulterer, sailor, bank robber, militant of the extreme left, swindler and, finally, a ‘specialist in getting sacked’ who amassed a large fortune.”

Before going any further, allow me to remark that, though I can certainly understand why someone would want the story of downtrodden Salvatore Messana (a kind of Savior Messiah) to have a happy ending, that last idea is false. Though the novel’s hero may have “earned” money by being such an intentionally bad worker (a saboteur, in fact) that his employers were forced to buy him out of his work contracts, he certainly didn’t “amass a large fortune.” His various scams only netted him enough money (no more than $10,000 at a time) to be able to live without having to have a steady job.

Normally, such people – scam-artists, con men and the like – do not reveal their secrets. As Guy Debord says in Panegyrique, which is the story of his own life and adventures, “The gypsies rightly believe that one must never speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language, the lie must reign.” This is why the hero calls himself Salvatore Messana (it appears that his real last name is Upim) and why the author of Il segreto è dirlo wanted to remain anonymous. To be safe from police prosecution, they both did not want to be correctly identified. (Note well that my use of the word “both” assumes that Upim and the author aren’t one and the same person.)

But Salvatore Messana is not a typical scam-artist or con man. Unlike his friend Piras, who chose “to take the money and disappear,” he is dedicated to the education of his fellow proletarians, who, thanks to him, “learned more in an instant than they had learned their whole lives.” To educate as many people as possible, Messana opens Il segreto è dirlo with a short statement entitled “Preliminary Points.” In it, he explains that the secret (the ultimate secret: not just a particular one) is not to keep everything a secret. Telling one’s secrets is a very good way to piss off “the prudent cowards, who are always ready to whisper appeals to stay silent, and the muddled minds that get bogged down in the details, murmuring that the secret is to say nothing,” as well as his own “cunt of an attorney […] who immediately advised me to not divulge the systems that have allowed me to increase my revenues at the expense of the bosses.”

This is what distinguishes Salvatore Messana from his friends in the extreme Left. Unlike them, he knows – and wants it generally known – that engaging in militant class struggle isn’t simply “the right thing to do” and that it doesn’t require one to renounce the acquisition of money and the good things that it can buy. If done in a certain way, class struggle pays. “If you went through the necessary negotiations,” Messana says, “this accursed modern society was able to provide even the outcasts with a salary.”

In 1989, Il segreto è dirlo was translated into French as Le Secret C’est De Tout Dire! (“The Secret is to Tell All!”) by Monique Baccelli and published by Editions Allia. Apparently informed of this translation, and supposedly involved in its preparation (“the majority of the footnotes were created following the author’s indications”), the creator of Salvatore Messana decided that the time had come to identify himself. In the words of a short text that appears on the back cover of the French edition,

Gianni Giovannelli was born in Ferrara in 1949. An attorney, he lives and works in Milan. He has published Svaraj Gandharva (Bianca e Volta, Milan, 1982; second edition: Tranchida, Milan, 1986); Confessioni di un uomo malvagio (Tranchida, 1988); and, under the pseudonym Palmiro, Lettera al Giudice Forno (Machina Libri, Milan, 1981) and Poesie dalla latitanza (C.T.A., Milan, 1982).

I have checked: these books really exist. But of course this does not rule out the possibility that, in the same way that “Palmiro” is a pseudonym for Gianni Giovanni, “Gianni Giovannelli” is a pseudonym for someone else. I say this because there is in fact a well-known Italian politician by that name, and he is closely affiliated with the notorious crook Silvio Berlusconi. As such, he would make an excellent target for a disrespectful parody.

“My book appeared anonymously,” the man calling himself Gianni Giovannelli says in his preface to the French edition, “so as to avoid confusion with the bands of little opportunists who published ambiguous and insidious chronicles of the Italian struggles in the obvious hope of obtaining some crummy job.” This is reasonable, I suppose: an anonymous author cannot hope to use his book to obtain “some crummy job.” But there are problems with this explanation. On the one hand, Il segreto è dirlo is not an “ambiguous and insidious” chronicle of the class struggles in Italy during the 1970s: it is in fact quite clear and open about its intentions. On the other hand, I know of two books that are “ambiguous and insidious chronicles of the Italian struggles” of the 1970s – The Truthful Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy and Letters to the Heretics – and both of them were not anonymous originally, but were passed off as the works of authors who did not in fact write them (a conservative capitalist who called himself Censor and Enrico Berlinguier, the head of the Italian Communist Party, respectively). And, just like Il segreto è dirlo, these books (which were actually written by Gianfranco Sanguinetti and Pier Franco Ghisleni, respectively) were tributes to the anti-work politics of the Situationist International and clearly intended to destroy Italian capitalism. (Note well that Il segreto è dirlo is in part dedicated to someone named “Gianfranco” and that Sanguinetti seems to be alluded to in the book’s last chapter: he is the “strange character, who had made the art of wreaking havoc into his philosophy of life.”)

There are a couple of other odd details in the French preface to Il segreto è dirlo. Why does it refer to the person who printed the original Italian edition (Marino Mardersteig, who runs Stamperia Valdonega), but not its original publisher? Why does it make such a big deal about “the adventures of a strange client of my services, the worker Stabile Fioravante,” when it appears that Stabile Fioravante doesn’t exist? I am reminded here of Salvatore Messana’s reference to “Professor Lapo Meneghetti,” who is thanked “for having the patience to correct my manuscript, which was written haphazardly, for having respected its spirit, and for having been happy to translate it into good Italian,” but who in fact doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it was these “tells” – or the book’s publication by Editions Allia, which has published several situationist-related titles – that caused Guy Debord to believe he recognized Gianfranco Sanguinetti behind the name Gianni Giovannelli. “Do you know the recent book by Gianfranco?” he asked Charles Vincent on the back of a postcard dated 25 February 1991. “There are pleasing things in it.” A footnote that was affixed to Debord’s possibly mistaken but certainly positive evaluation by either Alice Becker-Ho (aka “Alice Debord”) or the book’s publisher refers to “Le secret c’est de tout dire, by a [sic] Gianni Giovannelli (published by Allia),” and explains that Le Secret is a “fraud that, in a picaresque mode, mixes real facts with the ‘adventures’ of a known informer.” It is abundantly clear that the person who wrote this offensively stupid footnote never read the book in question (it is certainly not a fraud [supercherie] nor is there any reason to believe that either its author or its hero is a known informer [un indicateur avéré]) and wishes his or her readers to think the worst of Gianni Giovannelli, that is to say, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, who, ever since 1981, had been on Guy Debord’s shit list. (Note that the identification of “Giovannelli” as a pseudonym used by Sanguinetti – which is something that Gianfranco himself has denied – is repeated by the index included in the very last volume of Guy Debord Correspondance, published by Librairie Artheme Fayard in 2010. Under “Giovannelli, Giovanni” is says “see Sanguinetti, Gianfranco.”)

* * *

As the reader will see from the footnotes (all of which are mine, as are all phrases that appear within brackets [thus] and the subtitles given to the six sections of Part One), there were a good number of significant discrepancies between the Italian original and its translation into French. Sometimes whole passages were left out; other times, passages were inserted. Even worse, sometimes the French translator changed the meaning of particular passages. It is my opinion that, though she knows Italian much better than I do, I know the book’s politics much better than she does, and thus my version is easily the better of the two.

NOT BORED!
New York City
28 December 2012

First Part *

I (The war)
II (Street urchin)
III (Maria)
IV (The Sultana)
V (In the chain locker)
VI (Return to Liguria)

Second Part

Living in Milan
The Hunt for Money
Return to the Factory
Operation Super-Cleaning
Operation Splendor
The Blitz and Operation Salve

Conclusion

Text on Back Cover

Translator’s Introduction

*The subtitles were not part of the original edition and have been added by the translator

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