I just had to share this great lecture with you from 8-figure CEO and hockey coach, Michael McLean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSjwBktQrE&ab_channel=MichaelMcLean-BadAssCEO

And btw, I never knew the sleazebag magistrate, Joseph Carroll Knight, was Jewish until I happened on a website suggested to me by a Jewish friend to learn that kinfolk of the friend had joined Chabad House as members. Some anonymous coward jumped me by sending me snail mail claiming I am anti-Semitic. Well, I am not, and I did not know sleazy Knight was Jewish until after I saw his photo on the website of Chabad House.

The late Muryel Sue Gross, Dr. and Barbara Michalove and their sister Lois Michalove, Marc Rudow (he worked in my office as a student intern), Dr. Ruth Westheimer (whose parents died in the Holocaust after having sent her to Switzerland circa Kristallnacht), Ted Frank (conservative attorney I used to debate in usenet), Asheville mayor Kenneth Michalove, Mayor Leni Sitnick, Bob and Andrea Fink (college friends who came to Knoxville from Brooklyn), other college friends — Robert Schwartz, Bill Zwick, Ronnie Werner, Alan Roth and his Catholic wife Sharon (she converted and they invited us to their synagogue and we attended), Bob Satz Asheville restaurateur and a client, the late Lloyd Cooper (a great friend and client who invited me to his son’s Bar Mitzvah), Stephanie Cooper (Lloyd’s surviving spouse and a wonderful travel agent here in Asheville), concert cellist Mischa Maisky, concert pianist András Schiff, NY Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, comedian Myron Cohen, Buddy Hackett, Simon and Garfunkel, Norman Mailer, Marcel Proust, Heinrich Heine, pianists Helene Grimaud and Martha Argerich, and Khatia Buniatishvili, Attorney Paul Rifkin, and so on, almost ad infinitum.

I lived with a friend, Dove Landsberg, for several months as her tenant in Torrance, CA. She was a retired schoolteacher and full of mirth, goodness, and wisdom. “The Jews learned to live by their wits,” she said, “in order to survive.” I agree. That Dove! She was one hell of a wonderful human being. And so is my beloved friend, Lois Michalove.

We have a NC constitutional guarantee of open courts, but here in Asheville the judges thumb their noses at it: “All courts shall be open…” One judge, the chief district court judge [Calvin Hill], closes his court at will by having the door locked and a deputy posted at the door. Another, if she sees you in the courtroom and dislikes you because she’s afraid you might write something uncomplimentary (but true) about her [Julie Kepple], will single you out and angrily tell you to leave and even have her bailiff threaten you with his gun and taser. Still another one [Edwin Clontz] – who has recently been embarrassed by a pubic reprimand adopted by our Supreme Court – will have his bailiff rush at you as if to lay violent hands on you and then tell you, as he opens the door to shove you out, that “You’re free to leave!” If you want their names, I’ll give them to you. — published in Volokh Conspiracy, as a comment about an article in VS by Prof. Volokh in which the great Roman philosopher Plutarch advocated for open courts when a Roman nabob requested that a lawsuit in which he was a party be tried at his home. [The names were added here in brackets.]

But there is more: I learned from a Dr. Hubbard, a NC orthopedic surgeon, that he filed an application here in Buncombe for an absolute divorce. The property settlement had been concluded in earlier proceedings. Then I learned from him that the judge, Andrea Dray, refused to grant him the divorce when his ex showed up and demanded his Lexus. In other words unless he turned his Lexus over to her, also a medical doctor, Dray would not grant the divorce. Now that is about the extent I know about this shocker, and I have been trying to get to the courthouse to look at the file (Hubbard vs. Hubbard). The first time I looked for it, the file could not be found but then I called recently and it is in the clerk’s office… and thick too! So as soon as I am able to look at at and draw some conclusions for passing on here, I’ll pass on some more commentary about it. I am trying to get better at walking after kidney surgery.

Oddly, as you know, Hill and Dray, have been replaced by two more mopes, one from the despicable dissembling farce known as Pisgah Legal, and the other from Ron Moore’s nest of snakes. I can only infer that some of the Brahmins of the Bar convinced Hill, the courtroom golfball tosser, and ultra vires Dray that they had become personae non grata.

There will be more about the scandalous Buncombe courts, and in the meantime I am thankful to the one or two folks in the courthouse who anonymously send me very helpful hints about its numerous skanks and the sullied institution known as our courthouse: Whistleblower 1 and whistleblower 2. Aren’t you glad that the “fierce little biscuit,” Katie Dreher of Fifth Amendment fame, never got to be a judge? Well, let me tell you these latest two may be even rottener than she was. Meredith and Robin, I got my calculating eyes on you!