by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

People ask if I go back to visit the States. I reply, "I go back to visit my daughter in New Orleans. But New Orleans isn't really the United States. It was French."

In fact, before it was French, it was Spanish. Also, in the un-American vein, there is a very strong Caribbean feel to the place, including a long history of voodoo.

Similarly, San Miguel is not really Mexico, not for the expats and not for the Mexicans. Also in common, San Miguel and New Orleans are both very friendly, with life on the streets. Both are small cities that attract a lot of international interest and tourism.

In the larger frame of reference, Louisiana and Mexico have things in common as well. Corruption and organized crime are everywhere, but certain places are proud of their criminality. Lawlessness, in "Luziana" and México, has found fertile ground, becoming an institution.

My daughter has a dear friend, Jim Mustian, who after years of writing for New Orleans' local paper, The Times Picayune, now works as an investigative reporter for AP News and teaches journalism upstate: "investigative journalist and storyteller with a focus on criminal justice and injustice; college journalism instructor, podcaster and full-time reporter..."

I just finished listening to an audio series that Jim helped produce, investigating, writing and narrating an audio series about a bad agent in the New Orleans DEA.

I haven't spoken with Jim about it yet, but after listening to the series my impression remains more or less the same: this or that drug dealer or DEA agent who gets arrested is only a piece being removed (and often only temporarily) from the board. But the game goes on.

The true beneficiaries are never at risk. Their game is never interrupted. The real players are very well-connected men. In the series someone in the DEA admits the ineffectiveness of their effort:

The bad agent in the New Orleans DEA got removed from the board, but not for beating handcuffed suspects or otherwise violating civil rights. He is now serving a 13-year sentence, because he broke the rules of the game, taking too much for himself, pissing off people that you don't want to piss off.

Speaking of institutionalized crime: the case against the Archdiocese of New Orleans, the Catholic Church which is being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars for child sex abuse (if it were only rape), is about to get much bigger.

The problem was that the statute of limitations had expired for many of their crimes. So, a lawyer, interested in helping those victims (and, one imagines, his pocketbook), a member of a prominent Louisiana family, arranged for the state supreme court to suspend the statute of limitations as it applies to those cases.

It was all set to go, until one justice changed his mind. This lawyer then arranged to have that one justice appointed to head a university (the same one upstate where Jim Mustian teaches) and to have his supreme court seat filled by a justice more amenable to the plan.

On another lawless note: I looked up a woman who used to write for me, who is now living here in the French Quarter. She shared with me a screenplay she wrote. There's nothing illegal about that, but the play does center upon two women set on uncovering their involvement as children in the CIA's MK Ultra project, which was trying to engineer human beings. The CIA wanted to create super smart kids: "Leave me alone with your little girl, while we play some very adult games." MK Ultra also sought to create Manchurian candidates, sleeper assassins, using LSD and electroshock.

The play's plot also involves Tulane Medical School's decades-long involvement in illegally harvesting organs. (It's amazing what you can get away with in Louisiana.) Go in for a hysterectomy and leave without half your liver or two thirds of your intestines. The black population has a much lower rate of Covid vaccination for a reason. They know (a la the Tuskegee Airmen, et al.) that the government is playing dirty games.

It is public record that, at least today, the CIA is quite interested in mind control. "Former" members of the intelligence community make up a large percentage of the administration of Google, Facebook, and other social media companies.

The world can be divided into two types of people: those who divide the world into two types of people and those who don't. Still, all of this has got me thinking of a dichotomy: insiders and civilians.

Cinematographically these two types of people are perhaps best represented by Jack Nicholson reprimanding Tom Cruise in the courtroom drama A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth!" We don't want to think about it, but there are powerful bad actors out there, and they have a lot of company.

The bayou up here is very pretty. But, bicycling the path winding alongside it, I can't be sure if what is peeking out of the water at me, is a partially submerged log or an alligator, and I'm not sure that I really want to know.

San Miguel and New Orleans could be sister cities. Their abundance of culture and their manageable size both make them wonderful towns for Lokkal, SMA's local internet project; the people presenting their own city, and keeping the profits from doing so; a kinder, gentler, community internet; Collective Human Intelligence as opposed to Artificial Intelligence.

The case can be made that the internet as we know it is another form of institutional crime, that our Big Tech overlords, telling us what to think and feel, function as dictators. If Google is Joseph Stalin, and Facebook is Mao Tse Tung, then Lokkal is Athenian democracy - of, by and for the people.

With elections upon us, I submit that the solution is not going to come from the top down, but from the bottom up, from the community united. And that the community needs its own website.

I have some good connections up here in the Crescent City, including maybe some financial backing, to start Lokkal here. There could be a lot more New Orleans in my future. Most importantly, I've got a daughter who told me last night, "It's really nice having you in town." It's been a good visit.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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