people-from-jacksonville

"I was not prosecuted by the U.S. government. I was prosecuted by a private law firm, Seward & Kissel, appointed by a federal judge after the U.S. government declined to prosecute me. And the judge never disclosed that the law firm had Chevron as a client. So, essentially, I’m being prosecuted by a Chevron law firm, a partner in a Chevron law firm, a private law firm, who deprived me of my liberty... this is the first corporate prosecution in U.S. history... What’s really happening here is Chevron and these two judges and, really, allies of the fossil fuel industry are trying to use me as a weapon to intimidate activists and lawyers who do this work, who do the frontline work of defending the planet. What’s... at stake is the ability to advocate for human rights in our society."

"Meanwhile, the global support for Donziger is growing. Some 29 Nobel laureates, including nine Peace Prize winners, signed a letter calling for] “a judicial remedy for the legal attacks orchestrated by Chevron against Donziger and for the defamation of his character.”"

"bI have never seen anything like this attempt to destroy Steven Donziger. Chevron and its law firms have taken control of the awesome power of government to prosecute an environmental activist and deprive him of his liberty. They have done so with the active complicity of two federal judges. It’s something I’ve never before seen in my career."

"What’s disgraceful is that the maximum jail sentence that Donziger would face if he’s found guilty of contempt is six months—less than half the time he will have already spent locked up... It is this kind of questionable conduct from the federal bench that prompted Frisch to file an emergency motion on May 11 at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit accusing Preska and Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who has pursued Donziger since 2011, with “abuses of power and discretion.” Donziger’s supporters argue that Chevron’s own lawyers are collaborating in the effort to persecute him."

"The Chevron corporation’s legal onslaught against the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger continues. The oil giant and two federal judges in New York are apparently in a de facto alliance to persecute Donziger, who in 2013 helped win a landmark $9.5 billion legal victory against the company for polluting vast stretches of rain forest in Ecuador... Federal Judge Loretta Preska, who has already kept Donziger under huse arrest in New York City for the past 10 months, on May 18 refused his request to relax his confinement before his trial for contempt, which will not start until September 9. Donziger’s attorney had asked Preska to allow him out of his Upper West Side apartment for three hours a day. Preska said no. She repeated her preposterous claim that Donziger could be a flight risk, saying, “I could be to the airport and on an airplane in three hours.” Donziger lives with his wife and 13-year-old son. He has already surrendered his passport."

"Steven Donziger has been under house arrest for over 580 days, awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge. It’s all, he says, because he beat a multinational energy corporation in court."

"Ahead of Steven Donziger's sentencing scheduled for Friday, five United Nations human rights experts ruled that the American attorney who won a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron in Ecuadorian courts has been "arbitrarily" detained in the U.S. for 787 days... The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, made up of independent experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, said that it was "appalled by uncontested allegations in this case," noting that the U.S. government did not respond to its request for input... the working group called on the U.S. government to "take the steps necessary to remedy the situation of Mr. Steven Donziger without delay and bring it in conformity with the relevant international norms, including those set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."

"We are relieved that Steven Donziger will finally recover his freedom after almost 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, which included 45 days in prison and over 900 days under house arrest. He should have never been detained for even one day, as it has been clear the whole process against him has been in retaliation for his human rights work that exposed corporate wrongdoings"

"It has become clear to me in recent months that my unprecedented house arrest is the result of apparent misconduct and conflicts of interest by a number of people in the judiciary. It feels like Chevron has taken over the role of government to deprive its main litigation adversary of his freedom. That’s a terrifying prospect for me and my family, but also for everybody who cares about the nature of freedom and advocacy in our society. I don’t think it has ever happened before. I hope it never happens again."

"This goes way beyond me. It goes to really what kind of society we want in America. How does one man get so targeted by an oil company such that he's being prosecuted by one of their law firms? What does that mean for other advocates? What does that mean for environmental justice advocates and corporate accountability advocates and lawyers? What does that mean for our planet? Because if you can't do this kind of legal work to hold these polluters accountable, the destruction of the earth will happen at a faster pace."

"As the case was coming to an end in Ecuador, Chevron's lawyers and executives made it clear they would never pay the judgment. They sold their assets in Ecuador, so the Ecuadorians would have nothing to collect. They threatened the Indigenous peoples with “a lifetime of litigation” if they didn't drop their case."

"So, what’s really happening here is, Chevron and its allies have used the judiciary to try to attack the very idea of corporate accountability and environmental justice work that leads to significant judgments. And I think they’re not only trying to retaliate against me; they’re trying to send a broader message to the activist community, to the legal community, that these types of cases, that truly challenge the fossil fuel industry, that are intimately connected to the survival of our planet, should not be allowed to happen in court, at least not at this level."

"I didn’t have a relationship with my family, I didn’t have a close relationship with anybody. When people said I was good enough to do porn, I thought I guess I should. Anything I did that was sexually acting out, all of that is because I longed for purpose and meaning. It’s hard for me to get back in my own head because my thinking back then was so irrational, I thought no one cared about me. And I wanted to please these men. … I had a revelation of God and it changed everything. I had to leave the industry, immediately. … Part of my dream has come true, to get married and have a normal life. After all the things I’ve been through, I would never imagine my life like this. I probably sound younger, but I honestly feel like my life has just begun. … Women are getting lured in, sometimes for money, some are single moms or going to school, but they aren’t thinking about what happens down the road. If you think about what your life is going to be after, you wouldn’t make the choice to get into it. That’s what makes me a good fit for the job that I’m in. I’m a survivor."

"Guys there started ... laughing. I asked what they were looking at and they told me it was one of their wives posing topless. Out of nowhere I got really angry and I said I would hope that when I'm married that my husband would not be passing around pictures of me topless or nude. Everybody started laughing, but the guy to my left said when I get married I wouldn't show pictures like that to anyone. I was in shock! Later on that day, he and I started talking. He asked me what I did for a living. I said modeling. He asked me what kind and kept prying. Eventually I told him I did pornography. He said he knew already and that my boyfriend had told the guys and then he asked me if I believed in God. I told him yes and he proceeded to preach the Gospel to me. I started crying and he asked me if I wanted to rededicate my life. I said yes. [After that], I didn't do any more shoots and stopped accepting any income from pornogrpahy."

"[On the January 6 Capitol attack in Washington D.C.] These are people that were there to attend a rally and then they were there to protest [...] Now it devolved, and it devolved into a riot. But the idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true, and it's something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and for political aims."

"Too many in Washington display a ruling class mentality and congressional term limits would go a long way towards restoring the citizen-legislator ethos of the Founding Fathers, Americans of all political background overwhelmingly support term limits, yet term limits have floundered in Congress. An approach that phases in congressional term limits reconciles the self-interest of members of Congress with the public–s desire to see these changes enacted and gives us the best chance to make term limits a reality."

"I think all that has to be vetted in a way that errs on the side of protecting the American people. If there's a chance that someone may be inclined to be an enemy of the country, then I think you have to err on the side of caution."

"Look, Hollywood is a cesspool. The idea that Wienstein is alone, or even that conspicuous, I don’t think is true, I think this is pervasive behavior in Hollywood, and I think it does implicate the media. I think they’ve been complicit in it, I think businesses have been complicit in it."

"I promised to be the most pro-Israel Governor in America and our bold agenda for my upcoming Business Development Mission to Israel includes many historic firsts and strengthens Florida’s ties with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East."

"We looked at the data that we had from other parts of the world as we were getting into March, and we saw that this was a virus that had a disproportionate impact on elderly people and we're the second-oldest state in the country, so that was something that was obviously very concerning to us"

"We are going to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters and we are absolutely going to stand strong in support of the Florida-Israel relationship. The Legislature and I have worked really hard on a lot of great legislation over the past few years on issues including Holocaust education, anti-BDS legislation, security for synagogues and Jewish day schools, and so much more."

"You have hundreds of thousands of people pouring across every month Not only are they letting them through, they’re farming them out all across the country, putting them on planes, putting them on buses. Do you think they’re worrying about COVID for that? Of course not. Whatever variants there are around the world, they’re coming across that southern border. He’s not shutting down the virus. He’s helping facilitate it. Why don’t you get this border secure? Until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about COVID from you."

"(High school students around him were wearing protective masks.)"

"It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism"

"We reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die!"

"I know a lot of people that were there who were just there [...] They didn't have any designs on doing anything. [...] But to say that they were seditionists is just wrong."

"We're going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one."

"There are people now attempting to suppress history and whitewash the systemic racism so central to our nation. Leading the pack of these revisionists is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis."

"The central question about DeSantis is this: Is he a corporate tax-cutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he closer to Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Greene? The great DeSantis innovation has been to realize how much cover calculated outrage provides for rewarding cronies—and that the more you preach "freedom," the more you can get away with authoritarianism."

"DeSantis led a Florida law that has already forced women to carry unviable pregnancies to term, just to watch their newborn die. But instead of acknowledge his brutality against women, he wants to scare you with his alleged accounts of struggling people, whom he also won’t help."

"DeSantis returned to his culture warrior roots, with answers that focused disproportionately on Mexican fentanyl and children’s genitals."

"Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is rather like Donald Trump, only without the charm."

"The title of this book must surely be ironic: The Courage to Be Free. DeSantis is all about the restriction of freedoms wherever possible."

"He's a chilly man, with a heart of ice and — like so many politicians on both the right and left these days — full of resentments, grudges and the urge to destroy anyone who doesn't aree with him. The courage he claims for himself he would deny to many others."

"It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office. We’ve made that mistake before."

"It would be easy to write off DeSantis as a cartoon culture warrior or as racist, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. He may well be all those things, and so may some of his constituents. But he may not be, and either way, it would be foolish to characterize all his followers as such. Assuming a stance of moral superiority will do us no good. (See: Hillary Clinton, "deplorables.")"

"Finally, we shouldn’t let DeSantis co-opt positions on which Democrats have historical strength and a natural advantage: education, health care, jobs...As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the "Don’t Say Gay" law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school. Democratic leadership should worry, too. Keeping quiet or pretending those concerns aren't real won't make them go away."

"Which brings us back to Trump. We know that he takes DeSantis seriously because Trump has shown signs that he's scared of DeSantis as a competitor. If even Trump knows that much, Democrats are capable of knowing more. Trump may think the best way to defang DeSantis — whom he calls "DeSanctimonious" — is to mock and belittle him. Democrats should recognize it will take far more than that."

"In the following years, however, more and more of the ideological arguments behind this rebranded white nationalism made their way into the conservative bloodstream. Fox News hosts spoke loudly and frequently about "demographic replacement," a paraphrase of the white nationalist conspiracy theory of "white genocide." Car ramming would become startlingly common at the Black Lives Matter protests that manifested in response to the killing of George Floyd by police, to the point that Republican elected officials like Florida governor Ron DeSantis would urge the passage of laws that define a tactic popularized by the Islamic State as self-defense. (p 110 "The Cruelty of the Nativists")"

"We're winning big, big, big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody's ever seen before"

"Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he's going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, "I'm only focused on the Governor's race, I'm not looking into the future." Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that's really not the right answer."

"[DeSantis pollster Ryan] Tyson pointed to a voter he had heard speak at a recent focus group in Alabama. “The voter said, ‘I’m voting for DeSantis in 2024 because he is Donald Trump without the crazy’ — his words, not mine,” Tyson said. “That is the kind of voter that we see that is gravitating toward the governor.”"

"I liked Merian Cooper well enough. He had this wonderful, boyish enthusiasm, and I was keen about his style and his friendship and what he stood for as a human being. I was ready to take whatever Merian Cooper wanted me to do. He was like a big boy who had enthusiasms."

"I just heard what was said, it isn't strictly accurate by any means, I'm a man who's just been lucky on having wonderful partners, Schoedsack alot more than I did on Grass and Chang, and right down the line I've only had John Ford as a partner, Thomas is a great friend on technicolor, and for cinerama, Fred Waller invented it, Thomas picked up the ball and ran with it, and there's a young man in this audience, Bob Bendick, that most of you have never heard, that did far more of the production then I did. I want to thank all the great partners I've had in my life, thank you. I just want to add I'm still John Ford's partner."

"You're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

"John Platt, a physicist who wrote a number of essays on science policy including "What we must do" (1969). He developed the concept of the “step to man,” an idea based on the envelope curve of technologies, a technique used in technological forecasting. A characteristic curve exists for many activities, such as transportation, communication, and explosive power. These curves depict increasing capabilities which reach a physical limit. Platt claimed that these curves and thresholds can be thought of as the “step to man,” a dramatic increase in human capabilities."

"Planning a good society as far ahead as one can see, does not mean that our adventures have ended; they have just begun. Human nature is growing up. As we put behind us the accidents and tears of childhood squabbles and the wooden swords and shields, and begin to try on our new space pilots'" uniform, so to speak, we begin to see what we can teach ourselves and what we can really become with new self-control over new adult powers. (p.169.)"

"Jesus does not give us a discourse on the nature of the universe, he gives us a set of active verbs. And yet what better discourse on the real nature of the universe could there be? (p.178.)"

"Now, suggests John R. Platt..., we are reaching a leveling-off period. Most of the dramatic changes that have characterized the twentieth century, like those in travel, communications and weapons, cannot continue at their at the present rates for anything like these lengths of time."

"The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it."