Case Type: Other PI/PD/WD (General Jurisdiction)
Case#: BC403639
CASE NAME: ANNIE HALL ET AL VS JUDGE AVIVA K BOBB ET AL
Parties: BOBB AVIVA K. JUDGE – Def/Res,BOHLMAN MAGGIC – Def/Res,BRAR VIKRAM – Def/Res,CHEN JACKSON – Def/Res,HALL ANNIE – Guardian,HALL ANNIE – Plaintiff & Plaintiff In Pro Per,HALL ISAAC LEE – PL/PET,KAPOOR MANISHA – Def/Res,KATZ RONALD – Def/Res,LIFE SERVICES INC. – Def/Res,SAWYERS WANDA – Def/Res,SCOTT ADAM – Def/Res
At this party Thursday night, I interview authors Stephen J. Gertz (Dope Menace), Maja D’Aoust (The Secret Source), Adam Parfrey (founder of Feral House), and Bill Nelson (Hollywood Hellfire Club).
Bill: "We put together this book about this closed drinking circle in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. It mainly revolves around this painter named John Decker. They all resided at his house on 419 N. Bundy Drive, the Bundy Drive most famous for O.J. Simpson… This group of raconteurs…made the rat pack look like boy scouts."
Luke: "How did you become interested in this topic?"
Bill: "I read this book, ‘Minutes of the Last Meeting‘ by Gene Fowler. He was one of the Bundy Drive boys… This book came out in the 1950s. It was about his experiences with this group. My idea was to do an unexpurgated ‘Minutes of the Last Meeting.’ All the stuff Gene Fowler couldn’t put in…"
Luke: "How could you write an antidote to The Secret when a friend of mine read The Secret, lived The Secret, and then he got to seduce all the beautiful women he used The Secret for?"
Maja: "But at what cost?"
Luke: "To his soul?"
Maja: "Yes."
Luke: "I’m really jealous."
Maja: "It works. There’s no question about it — voodoo works, but should you do voodoo, that’s really the question. In the book, I give a history of the Law of Attraction… Voodoo is sympathetic magic. You do an intention and then you do an act or a thought. What people don’t understand is that it attracts all kinds of things. If you want to attract love to you, like your friend, and beautiful ladies, you’ll get love to you and beautiful ladies, but a magnet just attracts metal, it’s not discerning. You’ll get stalkers and rapists and all the girls who won’t leave you alone and get all psycho. They left that whole part out of The Secret, the flip side of The Secret."
Luke: "But isn’t The Secret as American as apple pie?"
Maja: "Yeah. It’s total entitlement, which is another reason I ranted about it. This false entitlement is another reason we’ve had this fallout because everybody thinks they’re entitled and they don’t take any responsibility for it. She incurred a great deal of bad karma on her soul when she put that book out."
I turn to Mr. Gertz. "What’s the thesis of your book?"
Stephen: "That these books that started flooding the market in the immediate aftermath of WWII played a major role in introducing Americans to drug use for the first time in nearly two generations. The previous drug epidemic in the United States was in the late 19th Century. When those addicts died out, two generations went by before before the average American had an awareness of what drugs were about. These paperbacks sold so well going into 100,000 retail outlets across the country that Americans couldn’t help but see these things. The covers were so dramatic, so sensational and lurid, that your eyes would go to them immediately."
"One of the reasons that the drug culture took off in the sixties was a complete rejection, not only of parents, but all the crazy things that had been said about drugs in the past. They were so unbelievable that nobody believed anything anyone said about drugs. So an entire generation started from scratch and experimented."
The second drug epidemic in America ended around 1975. Then in the 1980s came the third one — cocaine.
Luke: "Maja, I’m from Australia. We have these folk stories that the Aboriginees would poke a bone at someone and they would die. Do you have any insight?"
Maja: "Almost any kind of voodoo uses some form of sympathetic magic. There’s a great book called ‘The Golden Bough‘ by James Frazer. He breaks it into two categories — homeopathic magic and contagious magic. Contagious sympathetic magic would be if I took a little hair from your beard and then I kept it and did something to it. It would affect you — even at a distance — because it was on you. Homeopathic means like treats like."
Luke: "Does it work?"
Maja: "There’s lots of literature about voodoo. Some says that the victim has to believe in the voodoo for it to work but there are lots of documented cases of people being affected with no knowledge it was being worked on them."
Luke: "Do you believe there’s validity to it?"
Maja: "I believe there’s validity to it. You can try it. You can light a candle with an intention…"
I return to Stephen, who says: "Sex sells drugs. All the women on these covers, it’s as though only women are drug users. All the figures on the covers of these things are gorgeous women in a state of half-undress, of half-ecstasy… Sex and drugs have been married almost from the beginning."
"I can’t think of any other publisher [aside from Adam Parfrey] who’d have the nuts to put this book out."
Luke: "Adam is the only publisher to give a fair go to serial killers."
Adam: "Everybody’s human."
Luke: "Where’s your Joe Stalin painting these days?"
Adam: "Jodi [Mrs. Parfrey] doesn’t really care for that so much… It’s now in the attic."
Luke: "It’s not in the bedroom?"
Adam: "Sometimes for special events we bring that out."
Stephen: "Is the attic becoming the new Feral House vault for all things that can’t be mainstreamed?"
Adam: "There’s an aesthetic taboo there."
Luke: "Are you limited in what you can publish now that you are married?"
Adam: "No. Process Media is our collaborative effort. Feral House she can’t get near."
Luke to Stephen: "What role did Adam play in your book?"
Stephen: "He stayed out of the way. The book I pitched is the book that’s published. We made the deal. We signed the contract. I said we’d see him in six months… Adam is a writer’s dream. He did not cut a syllable from my book."
Luke: "Are you an occultist devil worshiper?"
Maja: "I don’t worship the devil. It’s hard to say what my religion is."
Luke: "You’re a waverer."
Maja has a BA in Bio-Chemistry and a Master’s degree in Transformational Psychology from one of those accredited spiritual institutions (the University of Philosophical Research).
Maja: "I died while I was on drugs [at age 16] and then I had a shamanic experience where I was torn apart and put back together. An initiation. After that, I had these ecstatic experiences which made me even more interested in studying science and religion."
Also in the house were friends Maja D’aoust, husband Kiyoshi Nakazawa and baby Momoko. Maja is a writer/artist and second generation esotericist who lectures on alchemy at L.A.’s Philosophical Research Society. Kiyoshi and Maja make zines together, and Kiyoshi also works with the folks at Giant Robot magazine. This clan somehow escaped the party camera, but here’s the glamorous Christmas card photo they sent Adam and Jodi.
By Deborah Bigelow, Director, Leonia P.L., NJ – Library Journal, 1/15/2008
Picking up where Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret left off, coauthors D’Aoust (lecturer, Philosophical Research Soc.) and Parfrey (Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalyptic Mind) explain how believers and visionaries from a variety of teachings have improved their well-being using mental powers. They guide readers through several Hermetic teachings, shed light on the New Thought spiritual movement, explain how the Christ mythos and Jewish kabbalistic texts borrowed from the Hermetic tradition, and reveal how many of today’s get-rich-quick schemes have roots in Hermetic laws. While not for everyone, this book provides an unbiased view of the teachings of secret societies and will interest many patrons. Recommended for all libraries.
By: Elizabeth Headrick | 01.25.08 | filed under: Stranger Than Fiction: Book Fetish By: Elizabeth Headrick | 01.25.08 | Stranger Than Fiction: Book Fetish
The success of Rhonda Byrne’s self-help manual The Secret, while undoubtedly noteworthy, is somewhat baffling considering that the subject matter is nothing more then the age old “Law of Attraction”. Byrne has taken an idea as old as any alchemical school of thought and turned it into a mantra to make a quick buck and lose weight fast. In Secret Source: The Law of Attraction Is One of Seven Ancient Hermetic Laws: Here Are the Other Six authors Maja D’aoust and Adam Parfrey break down the ancient Hermetic teachings that have led to the recent outbreak of self-help ideas and schools of New Thought that are taking over the gullible masses.
The Law of Attraction seems to be the most popular of the Hermetic laws but it isn’t the only one. The belief system behind these laws goes back thousands of years and has been studied, and expanded upon, by some of the greatest philosophical minds of the ages. The authors break down each law in turn, explaining its significance and how it interrelates to the other laws. They also go into great detail about the volumes that inspired so much of the ideas, such as The Emerald Tablet and The Kybalion. The reader is introduced to not only the minds that gave birth to these ideas but those that carried it into the various New Thought movements.
Though the subject matter is at times a little deep and the philosophies can be somewhat esoteric, the authors have done a good job of laying everything out in terms that are understandable without being dumbed-down. They strip the “secret” out of The Secret and show that the Law of Attraction isn’t something that should be trifled with for greedy personal gain. For anyone who thinks that they may have found the answer in The Secret, I highly suggest that you make this book your next selection.
Join us as we gather to honor the coming of the darkest day of the year and the sun’s rebirth with libations, salutations, and ritual book signings.
Commune with your friends and our authors, tip back some ancient brew…
Free tarot readings by Deborah
Gong sounds by DJ Chadstice Dong Chi
*Anyone coming wearing a robe of any kind gets a special VIP tarot reading!
Authors present include….
Stephen J. Gertz —Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks
Amy Wallace—The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People
Adam Parfrey—Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century
Mike Bara—Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA
Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne—The Urban Homestead
Tony Stamolis—Frezno
Louis Sahagun—Master of the Mysteries: The Life of Manly Palmer Hall
Maja D’Aoust—The Secret Source
Chairman of Yeshiva University Syms School of Business indicted in one of the largest ponzi schemes in history, as much as $50 BILLION — not million.
Sorry, something is fundamentally wrong. From an analytic and statistical approach, the sheer concentration of indictments of the modern orthodox leadership is an outlier way off the probability charts, and particularly concentrated at YU. There is no polite way to say this. Like the Mafiosos devout in their ceremonial and ritual adherence to Catholicism, there seems to be a complete disconnect between religious ritual and true practice.
And the source of that cancer is undoubtedly, the divorce between ritual and true practice of the recent leadership and new generation of Rabbis both graduating and controlling REITS and YU. They have transformed the profession into Big Business, and for considerable profit. Bernie Maduff is simply the latest in a long line of scandals — sexual, political, criminal, financial — that were likely inevitable consequences of that fundamental decision to alter the modern Rabbinate.
When Rabbi Menachem Genack, whom I revere and therefore employ as example, is the CEO of the OU’s kashrut division because it is a multi-million dollar revenue center, rather than a Rav HaMachshir, then Agriprocessors is an inevitabilty.
When Rabbi Kenneth Brander, whom I revile, chairs the Center for Jewish Future due to his fundraising capabilities, then Bernie Maduff scandals and NCSY sexual scandals are foregone time bombs simply waiting to explode.
When Rabbi Steven Riskin generates multi-million dollar revenues portraying women as victimized in the Bet Din system rather than conceding that the system as practiced is fundamentally flawed and equally dishonest and disreputable to husbands and wives, then families are destroyed and halacha is perverted for the sake of financing his million dollar home and campuses.
Bernie Maduff was as inevitable a consequence as Lander’s sexual conviction, and Tendler’s acknowledged sexual improprieties, of the YU Rabbinic culture of this generation. which has tragically metastized into a cancer likely beyond repair.
Rav Yoshe Be’er Soloveitchik has been transformed into a marketing product for significant branding and profit by the Big Business Rabbinate generation.
JOE EMAILS: "It’s ridiculous to blame YU for Madoff. Nobody knew about his scam not even his sons who were running his business. Certainly not the many people who invested money with him. How is YU supposed to know that this famous investor with a great reputation is really a crook? Do you think that any non-profit is more savvy than professional investors? Not even the SEC or IRS caught him! I checked the YU alumnus directory and Madoff never went to any YU schools so
you can’t even say that YU gives a bad ethical education."
On Wall Street, his name is legendary. With money he had made as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At age 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.
But on Thursday morning, this consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme — perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.
Regulators have not yet verified the scale of the fraud. But the criminal complaint filed against Mr. Madoff on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan reports that he estimated the losses at $50 billion. “We are alleging a massive fraud — both in terms of scope and duration,” said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the enforcement division at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors.”
Andrew M. Calamari, an associate director for enforcement in the S.E.C.’s regional office in New York, said the case involved “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.”
According to his lawyers, Mr. Madoff was released on a $10 million bond. “Bernie Madoff is a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” said Daniel Horwitz, one of his lawyers. “He will fight to get through this unfortunate set of events.”
Mr. Madoff’s brother and business colleague, Peter Madoff, declined to comment on the case or discuss its implications for the Madoff firm, which at one point was the largest market maker on the electronic Nasdaq market, regularly operating as both a buyer and seller of a host of widely traded securities. The firm employed hundreds of traders.
There was some worry on Wall Street that Mr. Madoff’s fall would shake more foundations than his own.
According to the most recent federal filings, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the firm he founded in 1960, operated more than two dozen funds overseeing $17 billion.
These funds have been widely marketed to wealthy investors, hedge funds and other institutional customers for more than a decade, although an S.E.C. filing in the case said the firm reported having 11 to 23 clients at the beginning of this year.
What it means to be kosher — the nub of a debate sparked in May by sweeping labor abuse charges against the Orthodox Jewish owners of the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the nation — was pondered Tuesday night in a panel discussion at Yeshiva University in Upper Manhattan, the academic nexus of Orthodox Judaism.
It was, for the most part, a subdued and scholarly discussion about ritual law, Jewish ethics and what to do if you suspect that the kosher meat on your table has been butchered and packed by 16-year-old Guatemalan girls forced to work 20-hour days under threat of deportation, as alleged in a recent case.
“Is it still possible to consider something ‘kosher certified’ if it is produced under unethical conditions?” asked Gilah Kletenik, one of the organizers of the student group that arranged the session, which drew an overflow crowd of 500, most of them students.
In keeping with the Talmudic tradition embodied by the rabbis on the panel, the answer seemed to be yes and no.
“The basic underpinning of Jewish tradition is ethics,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, a Yeshiva dean and the chief executive of kosher certification for the Orthodox Union, the group that oversees kosher standards in 8,000 food manufacturing plants around the world, including about 25 meatpacking facilities in the United States.
But he said the process of producing food that is certifiably kosher according to Jewish law is one thing; the conditions in which that process is undertaken are another. “The issues are not obvious sometimes,” he said.
In a more pointed comment, Rabbi Avi Shafran, who has defended the prerogative of the Orthodox rabbinate against what he sees as well-meaning but misguided efforts to add social-justice protections to the criteria for the production of kosher food, said, “Lapses of business ethics, animal rights issues, worker rights matters — all of these have no effect whatsoever on the kosher value.”
The realm of kashrut, or Jewish dietary law, which for 5,000 years has been the exclusive domain of orthodox authorities, has received new scrutiny from a broad spectrum of Jews since federal agents raided an Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, on May 12, arresting 389 illegal immigrants. The owners, Aaron Rubashkin and his son, Sholom, members of a prominent Orthodox family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, were charged with bank fraud and employing under-age workers.
After the raid, workers’ organizations said that many Agriprocessors employees had long complained of frequent accidents and forced overtime but did not take their claims to the authorities because they feared deportation.
The workers’ stories gave a boost to a kosher-reform campaign known as Hekhsher Tzedek (in Hebrew, kosher righteousness), which was begun in 2006 by Rabbi Morris J. Allen, a Conservative rabbi from Mendota Heights, Minn., who has long promoted ethical reforms in kosher meat plants.
The only Jews who say things such as "I’m a proud Jew" and "I feel strongly about my heritage" are Jews who don’t practice Judaism. Those who are observant are too busy for such prattle.
I am a high holiday Jew. I had a bat mitzvah, a confirmation, and even stayed in religious school all the way through 12th grade. I was very active in my Synagogue in Los Angeles growing up. My community has always included many Jews, I feel strongly about my heritage, and being Jewish is a large part of my identity. That being said, I went to a Presbyterian elementary school and sat next to the Bishop at my high school’s water polo banquet one year. It never mattered and if anything, I’ve always been grateful for the opportunity to learn about different religions and embrace a multi-ethnic society.I have also always been a die hard anglophile, and consequently moved to England several years ago to get a MFA in Staging Shakespeare. For the last five years I’ve lived in London and work as a Theatre Manager in the West End. During this time I have been forced to really look at what being Jewish means to me, and embrace more of an inward Judaism. I’m still not religious, but many of the things I took for granted as a child, I now find were a product of the community I grew up in as opposed specifically to Judaism.
The Los Angeles Times, for instance, could multiply their Adsense earnings by five or ten times if they simply did it the same way I do, blending the ads with the content (not setting them off in different colors, shadings, and containing them within borders), and using rectangular 336 by 256 ad blocks on top of content, etc (I’ve not had any complaints about it). Every professional news organization I’ve seen, including the Jewish Journal, does Adsense in a way that minimizes their earnings.
Why don’t people look to me as their example of how to do things right? I am like a light on a hill.
I haven’t seen anyone sporting these ethics certifications.
Now the rabbis are struggling with auditing. If businesses want to do stuff off the books, the rabbis won’t be able to audit that. How will they find out if an employer offers an employee cash off the books to work overtime at a regular wage? Employees in Pico-Robertson want overtime hours and will work it even if they don’t get paid extra per hour.
Let’s say you hire a caterer for Beth Jacob for $5000 cash. And the caterer pays his employees in cash off-the-books. The rabbis and their auditors won’t be able to find that on the books of the caterer.
Now let’s say the state busts the caterer for some reason and the caterer has one of these ethics certificates, the rabbis will look bad.
The rabbis will write-up a covenant for business ethics and sign on to it. The businesses CPAs will sign off that he has no knowledge of any violations. Employees will be educated about their rights and their responsibilities and the whole thing will become self-certifying.
The challenge is finding the kind of ethics certificate that the rabbis can give out that does not expose them to looking like idiots.
If an employee wants to work eight hours on the books and two hours off the books for cash, the rabbis won’t be able to police it. Sure, it is cheating on California law and on taxes but that’s the way business works. If the rabbis attempt to certify things and then there’s a government investigation revealing unkosher stuff, the rabbis will look stupid putting their certification on businesses busted by the state.
Pat’s, traditionally the best kosher restaurant in town, once got a B from the CA Health Deparment. Why did they get a B? Because the automatic fly screen at the back of the restaurant? The spring had broken. So even though they were closing it manually, they were considered in violation. The temperature of the hot water was one degree below the threshhold required for hot water.
One nursing home got in trouble because they had a can of apricots where the label had been removed from the can. That’s a violation and for that sort of stuff, liberal rabbis sign a two-page ad in the Jewish Journal to try to push an establishment to employ only union labor.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
