The thing that wouldn't die

As the Dorean Group saga grinds on in seeming perpetuity through the court, the "victims" of the scheme are also facing the music. Consider the judgment against Greg Poppin, of California, who got a trust set up in Johnson & Heineman's swindle for a property in Grass Valley.

After ordering the bogus Dorean documents cancelled, rendered void and expunged from the county records, the judge left it up to the Plaintiff (lender) as to whether they could go ahead and foreclose, or in addition, collect damages jointly and severally against Heineman, Johnson and Poppin in the amount of nearly $390,000 (plus interest) and over $16,000 in attorney's fees and costs. All of which stands there and collects interest until paid. With the perpetrators incarcerated and facing long sentences, Poppin (the client) was left to face the music.

So another one of the faithful falls on the Dorean sword, while Johnson (or at least someone who purports to be him) posts ever-more bizarre religious dogma on his blog. In between pumping up the martyr angle, he languishes in a California jail generating hundreds of pages of legal drivel with his partner on government-supplied notebook computers.

A lot of what Johnson and Heineman rail on about contains little more than plagiarized cut and paste nonsense from die-hard radicals who have tried for decades to convince their merry band of sycophants they really aren't who they are, the law isn't the law and the whole US Government is bogus, including the court system. If one believes Johnson, Christ has sent angels to burn down judge's homes and continues to counsel him.

This kind of nonsense is even a profitable venture for some. For a few, it's not much more than a notably silly hobby, complete with inane ramblings on multiple web sites that typically espouse almost every conspiracy they can allude to and some that are truly delusional and even completely imaginary. Some of it is quite possibly a strange on-line laboratory experiment; a game of wits vs. half-wits where someone is testing to see just how gullible people can be.

A lot of it is so far out even the late-night AM radio bastion of whacky theories (the Art Bell "Coast to Coast" show) won't give them credence - and that is telling. Thus they're relegated to the Internet, CD's, books and DVD's, group meetings and a handful of hysterically funny public demonstrations. And let us not forget the laughable court filings.

In this culture of self-induced paranoia, the arguments don't evolve; they mutate. Context be damned. Definitions of words can be argued for days, weeks, months. The cycle of lunacy repeats itself when a theory dies under its own weight of stupidity but someone new (or under another name) comes along later and dredges up an old post or link and fans the flames once again.

Proponents and authors of such crap sometimes wind up in actual trouble with the law. Then they often find themselves ruled against in the very courts they've been telling people don't have jurisdiction over them. I suppose we're forced to chalk that one up to deeper and more sinister conspiracies among the Judges and the attorneys.

A lot of the courts are just too damn sympathetic with these nut balls. The amount of time invested in reading some of the voluminous BS and writing some of the more detailed rulings is astonishing. And because it's available on the Internet, the garbage proliferates and shows up in other cases.

I, on the other hand, have freed my court of such burdens. There's a setting on the ol' Acme cattle-prod from 1 to 5. The more pages of loony drivel I have to read, the higher the setting gets. (On "5" the spark can go clean through several pages on its way through the fool's buttock.)

I'm thinking of sending my backup unit to the Northern District of California. Judge Alsup may be able to persuade Johnson and Heineman to move things along a bit.