Author Archives: Billy Sinclair

The media is reporting the U.S. Justice Department’s spiel that the billionaire financier and accused child sex trafficker killed himself by hanging in the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center—a facility controlled and operated by the DOJ.

There is a popular saying, “speak truth to power.” There is a lesser known saying, “power kills problems.”

Epstein was a big problem to a lot of very powerful and politically influential people across the globe. This problem became acute last fall when Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown resurrected the extremely favorable treatment Epstein received from the DOJ in a number of child sex offenses. The media coverage ultimately forced U.S. Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the DOJ prosecutor who orchestrated Epstein’s infamous plea deal, to resign and skedaddle out of Washington.

The Epstein problem forced the DOJ to remove Epstein from the uncontrolled environment of the free world and place him in the controlled environment of a federal jail cell.

It would be difficult, if not logistically impracticable to remove a billionaire problem through suicide or homicide in a free world setting. Not so in a jail setting where suicide is a fairly routine occurrence. This prevalent fixture of the jail experience allows jailers to casually dismiss the “conspiracy theories.”

President Trump is already fueling the conspiracy mania by implying that former President Bill Clinton arranged Epstein’s suicide.

I don’t guess the president understands how it looks for him to concede that the “hated Clintons” have so much influence that they could get inside a Trump DOJ-run jail facility and kill off the most infamous inmate in America.

One thing for certain: blaming the Clintons removes the conspiracy theory lens from the Trump insider machine – or so they think.

The best way to cover up a real conspiracy is to flood the public arena with hundreds of false, incredulous conspiracies—like Bill wrapping Jeffery’s pants leg around the pedophile’s neck while Hillary stood watch “for the man” at the end of hallway just outside the shower area while the other tier inmates snored the night away.

Epstein was the recipient of a political conspiracy—at one level or another. Attorney General William P. Barr’s DOJ did not suddenly revisit the pedophile’s case out of a sense of justice. The decision was remove Epstein from the uncontrolled free world environment and place him in the controlled jail cell environment was made far beyond AG Barr’s sense of justice, much less a commitment to do the right thing.

The Miami Herald’s front page disclosures about Epstein’s 2008 plea deal undeniably created a political need to neutralize him. An arrest and an indictment for a laundry list of child sex trafficking charges would do the trick—one that would generate the right media narrative.

Once he realized that he had been double-crossed by his “rich and powerful friends,” it can be reasonably speculated that he sent them word that he would take care of the “problem” himself with a “jail suicide;” that their pedophile secret would go to the grave with him.

Not a stupid man, Epstein concluded that was a better way to “go out” than to be sodomized by a couple of Aryan Brotherhood goons before they slit his throat on the promise that their “old ladies” would get a “get out of jail free” pass.

Now Epstein’s “rich buds” can breathe a sigh of relief. The jail tier video has been doctored or removed. The problem is dead. 

And what the fuck, the rich and powerful pedophiles can blame the Clintons for the dirty deed.

When is a table is not a table?

This past week the law of contradictions reared its ugly head in the nation’s death penalty arena.

Stephen West was put to death in Tennessee’s electric chair for the double murder of a mother and her 15-year-old daughter in 1986.

During his 33-year stay on death row, West became a man of faith and a model of rehabilitation.

Dexter Johnson was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the Texas death house but was granted a stay of execution by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals because the condemned man may be intellectually disabled.

Johnson was sentenced to death for the murder of two teenagers in Houston in 2006. That double murder came on the heels of a 25 day crime spree in which Johnson (just days after turning 18) and four other teens killed three other people and pulled off a string of robberies.

The public record does not disclose what Johnson may have accomplished during his stay on death row.

The contradiction?

West, an intellectually capable person, was put to death because he had the mental capacity to understand all the ramifications of his execution.

Johnson, an intellectually incapable person, was spared execution because his mental capacity to understand all the ramifications of his execution was in doubt.

Intellectual comprehension put to death.

Intellectual incomprehension spared execution.

The logic in this death penalty scenario defies normal reasoning.

It is a table that is not a table.

They visit our consciousness un-invited and unexpected. They come at any time during our consciousness; sometimes even slipping silently into our sleep dreams.

Some of the memories are good—a brother’s embrace after taking on a bully in the school yard; a sister’s laugher at a brother’s constant hair grooming; a mother’s affectionate forehead kiss calming an unnecessary fear in a daughter; or a father’s rubbing a son’s forehead to let him know everything is going to be alright.

Some of the memories are bad—regret at having done something mean or stupid; sorrow at having made the wrong personal or professional choice; and shame at the failure to act when the rightness of the situation demanded action.

We’ve all had our heroism and experienced cowardice; we all have questioned our life actions, “why did I do that” or “how could I have done such a thing;” and we all have served humanity in one way or another just as we all have abused humanity in one way or another.

Memories are a reflection of the complications of life—a convoluted process we did not ask for, more often or not, the unintended consequence of an unbridled rut; a good fuck that produced a fucked up life.

From its very inception, life in any form is never intended to be easy; the most basic instinct of all life, survival, destines every life to be a struggle, from first breath to last. We fight through the worst possible diseases and the pain they produce just for one more breath of life—and perhaps it is the memories of what was that makes us struggle for just one breath of life.

The memories we share alone are mostly raw and unfiltered; the memories we share with others are filtered through the lens of self-interest. The latter memories range from minor embellishments to grandiose fabrications. Too often, and most certainly unnecessarily, it doesn’t matter one rust-colored penny what others think of us.

The question in the most philosophical sense is this: are our memories like radio signals that travel through space forever? Perhaps. Children sometimes have memories (or accurate dreams) about ancient times. How? Why? Will a stranger one day relive our memories?

We don’t know. What we do know is that memories can bring us joy and happiness or they can bring us fear like the ghost seen in the shadow of light in the dark.

We simply must understand that old memories are like old friends – they are never in recollection what they were like in real time. We shake the hand of an old friend in parting while wondering, “how in the fuck did I ever like this person.”

My advice is this: let old memories pass unfettered in your consciousness and give them nothing more than a “how ya’ doin?’ in passing. The present moment is too valuable to waste in trying to rearrange old memories.

I remember when I was a kid we use to …

An unbridled emotion found in both humans and animals.

Humans use anger as a tool to express or carry out the very worst in their either developed or chaotic character. Presidents and peasants use anger to hurt other people, most often emotionally but sometimes physically.

At a recent Market Day event in the Texas Hill Country in a town of less than 900 known as the “Cowboy Capital of the World” a local Democratic club had their booth set up on the courthouse square. Nearby were a Republican booth and another booth selling Trump paraphernalia. A host of other booths selling crafts and food were also set up in the town square.

One man walked up to the Democratic booth and spat, “I would never vote for a goddamn Democrat” while another man said “Black Lives Matter … that’s a bunch of shit!” A woman said she didn’t care if immigrant children were being yanked off life-supporting medical care before being deported. She didn’t want her “tax dollars” spent on that.

This is the sort of anger eating away at the bowels of the American political system. Amongst themselves, these three individuals believe this sort of political and racist fueled anger is what makes them “fine people” who own the “land of the free” and “home of the brave.”

As these “fine people” were spewing out their unsolicited anger toward people simply occupying a booth, an angry man was driving around the Odessa-Midland area firing an AR-style automatic weapon at anyone and everyone near him—an angry rampage that left seven innocent people dead and another 22 injured.

According to media reports, the Odessa-Midland shooter was angry at everyone and everything around him, including his own miserable, useless life. He spent his last hour on this earth doing everything he could to destroy as many innocent lives as possible.

Anger is a contagious disorder. It moves from one individual to another, steadily consuming the society that ties humans into a collective body.

142 innocent people have died so far this year in mass shootings. More angry individuals are stockpiling their weapons, either as a perceived need to protect themselves from imagined enemies or to take their anger out on others.

America is consumed with anger at the moment. The Netflix documentary “American Factory” captured that anger in the workplace—the same anger that exists in the marketplace, our schools, our political systems, and even in our churches.

Big Pharma doesn’t have a pill for anger. The only cure for anger is rational thought—and it is losing its centuries old battle with anger. Rational thought is fast-approaching a place on the “endangered species” list. Anger will then reign supreme.

American will turn to Mussolini over Barak Obama.

This past June the state of Georgia executed Marion “Murdock” Wilson, Jr. He became the 1500^th person put to death in the United States since Gary Gilmore’s January 17, 1977 execution—an execution he requested—that effectively reinstated the death penalty following a ten-year moratorium on executions throughout the nation.

America has always had a special, although somewhat peculiar, affection for the death penalty.

Between the nation’s Declaration of Independence in 1776 and over the next 23 years through 1799, some 618 persons were executed in this country. The death penalty affection intensified in the 1800s as the nation executed 5,381 persons, a significant proportional increase from the previous two-plus decades. By the 1900s America was in a full-blown love affair with the death penalty, marching 7,980 persons into death houses between 1900 and 1967.

The last person put to death in this country before the so-called “Furman Moratorium” was Louis Jose Monge who was put to death in Colorado’s gas chamber on June 2, 1967.

The decade between Monge’s execution and Gilmore’s execution was the only decade in American history when the nation did not execute someone.

Altogether, since 1776 to the present day, America has executed roughly 15,439 people.

Those executions include 365 women, 575 teenagers (13-19), and three 12-year-olds. The youngest person executed in modern times was George Junius Stinney, Jr., a 14-year-old African-American youth who was convicted and executed in South Carolina’s electric chair by white men—the police who arrested him, the prosecutor who prosecuted him, the jury that rendered the verdict against him, the judge who preside over his trial, and all the men who participated in strapping him into the electric chair.

With the exception of the 1500 persons executed since 1977, the overwhelming majority of all death penalty convictions since the nation’s founding were rendered by all-white, male juries.

Although the Supreme Court extended the right to serve on juries to African Americans in 1880, the right was a hollow as white prosecutors in all states created statutory and procedural mechanisms to keep African-Americans off juries in criminal cases.

And while the first female jury was seated in Los Angeles in 1911, women did not gain the legal right to jury duty until 1975 through a Supreme Court decision.

Thus, in a nutshell, the American love affair with the death penalty is rooted in the white man’s desire, and need, to kill. White men killed Native Americans in order to steal their Eastern land; enslaved and killed Africans to work their Southern land; killed Chinese to make them build railroads to travel across their Western land; and robbed and killed Mexicans to gain more Southwestern land for America.

White men have pretty much killed anyone or anything that stood in their way of obtaining whatever they wanted, regardless of the human suffering and costs it inflicted upon non-whites.

That’s why white men have always held that peculiar affection for the death penalty.

Before the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, some 57 percent of all the people executed in this country were non-whites—African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native-Americans—who have always represented a narrow minority of the American population.

White men in America—those in the halls of legislatures and those sitting on court benches—have historically justified their love for state-sponsored killing on three fundamental premises: One, the death penalty deterred killings and other violent crimes; two, the killing of an offender exacted a just punishment for their offense; and, third, the Old Testament, God’s law book, repeatedly blessed the death penalty “in the name of God.”

Whether any of these premises are effective is the subject of continuing debate—one that has roiled the soul of the nation since roughly 1907 when the first states began to outlaw the death penalty.

Ruben Gutierrez is scheduled to die on July 31, 2019 in the Texas death chamber at Huntsville. He will be the 11^th person executed in 2019.

Besides Gutierrez, there are at this time 23 more persons scheduled to be executed in 2019 in this country.

The heartbeat of injustice goes on.