Prytulak to Winston: The saga of the 57-cent photocopy
"If those two missing dollar bills turned up as well, it would constitute one small step toward redeeming the Los Angeles Superior Court from the low regard to which it has fallen in my eyes." � Lubomyr Prytulak
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Lubomyr Prytulak Ukrainian Archive, www.ukar.org [Address] [Telephone] [Email] 30 September 2002 |
Steven Winston, Deputy Clerk
Los Angeles Superior Court
6230 Sylmar Avenue
Van Nuys, CA
USA 91401
Re: Rambam vs Prytulak 02E00326
Steven Winston:
I understand that Judge Barry A. Taylor passed on to you the following request for a copy of his Order to Show Cause (OSC):
You, in turn, were good enough to send me the following instructions:
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Then from my direction, complying with your instructions did not promise to come cheap either. The only money order that I had purchased within memory (the US$193 filing fee for Motion-to-Quash-C that the Los Angeles Superior Court seems to have lost) had cost me a service fee of CAN$5.00, so that I anticipated paying a CAN$5.00 fee to purchase a money order for US$0.57. On top of that, I had no easy way to supply you with a stamped return envelope � you may have noticed that I live in Canada, and you may be able to guess that American postage stamps are not sold in Canada. What did you expect me to do � make a day trip to the United States to purchase a 37-cent stamp? My local post office informed me that for CAN$3.50, I would be able to purchase a Universal Postal Union International Coupon which you would be able to transport to an American post office, and there redeem the coupon for a 37-cent stamp. Never mind the loss to me of CAN$3.50 � unless your time is worth less than I imagine, the cost of you carrying that UPU coupon to a post office would likely exceed the redemption value of 37 cents that would be that journey's compensation.
Accordingly, in order to cut through bureaucratic red tape and in order to bring an end to waste, I simply sent you (in the first few days of September it must have been) the following note written on the bottom of a copy of your own letter, and I enclosed a self-addressed but unstamped envelope, and I enclosed two US one-dollar bills that I was able to find around the house. I calculated that you might expect me to reimburse the Court the 57 cents for the photocopy plus the 37 cents for postage, which sums to 94 cents, but sent more than US$1.00 on the anticipation that the Court might request payment of some additional surcharge, as perhaps for the service of processing cash instead of the requested money order. I invited the Court to keep the change because I judged that the maximum change that could be anticipated � US$1.04 � was too trivial to warrant the Court spending time to prepare a money order, and too trivial for me to spend time redeeming that money order. One view of my willingness to write off US$1.04 in contrast to the Court's unwillingness to write off US$0.57 is that I am prodigal and the Court is frugal; the contrasting view, of course, is that I am taking more into account than the amounts of money at stake, and am being frugal of total resources, where the Court is being prodigal with them. My remitting a little more than might seem absolutely necessary was cheaply-purchased insurance against having to go through a second cycle of correspondence which the Court might trigger by demanding 10 cents, or some other small amount, beyond the original 94 cents.
Of course I understand the inadvisability of sending cash by mail, but I felt that as my letter was addressed to you personally, there was little chance the cash would fall into unscrupulous hands, and in any case, the sum of US$2.00 was so trivial that its loss would be an inappreciable burden.
Well, here it is now, 30-September-2002
- 47 days since I mailed my request for a copy of the OSC to Judge Taylor,
- 33 days since you mailed back your instructions to me,
- some 28 days since I mailed my US$2.00 cash to you,
I can see in retrospect that it was a mistake for me to try to break free of the bureaucratic gears in which I appear to be enmeshed, and I do submit to being chewed up by those gears now. Enclosed, therefore, please find the money order for US$0.57 that you requested. If you are able to receive this money order without embarrassment, then I commend you on your chutzpah. Happily, I discovered that if I went to a bank at which I did have an account, instead of to a more convenient bank at which I didn't have an account, I was spared the CAN$5.00 service charge, though I was not spared the waste of time of getting the money order in the first place. Neither was I spared the look of incredulity from the clerk who prepared the money order:
Enclosed, please find also the UPU coupon which cost me CAN$3.50 and which you will be able to redeem for a 37-cent American stamp if you find yourself with idle time on your hands which can be put to no better use than trekking to a post office to collect 37 cents:
Furthermore, as my prompt receipt of the OSC that I am requesting is vital to my ability to represent myself in Case BC271433 before the Los Angeles Superior Court, and as my experience has been that the Court typicaly ignores my requests, and as much time has already been lost, I am forced to both expedite my request, and to document it, by sending it by FedEx, which costs me a further CAN$27.47:
In closing, I bring to your attention the following four points which may be of assistance in upgrading Court operations:
- Forum Non Conveniens. Demonstrated in the saga of the 57-cent photocopy � of which the present letter documents perhaps only the beginning � is why a court may choose to take the cold shower of forum non conveniens whenever it feels itself about to succumb to an overwhelming urge to extend jurisdiction beyond the horizon, and even over the entire globe. That is, the saga of the 57-cent photocopy demonstrates that in comparison to someone able to appear at the Court to obtain a copy of an OSC, the time required for someone living in a foreign land to do the same can be vastly greater, and may even in the end prove to be in the order of thousands of times greater; and the monetary cost, if one were to include the cost of labor, including the labor of writing letters such as the present one, could similarly be in the order of thousands of times greater.
- Hassle-free OSC three months ago. In my view, I should have been mailed a copy of the one-page OSC as a matter of course, without having to request it, at the time that Judge Taylor issued it on 07-Jun-2002, which approaches three months ago. This would have been a small indication that the Court was keeping me informed, and maintaining the adversarial integrity of the proceedings by refusing to shut out one of the adversaries.
- Hassle-reduced OSC one month ago. In the alternative, when my request for the OSC arrived at your desk, you could have spared both the Court and myself needless expense, and could have spared me needless delay, by simply mailing me a copy without invoicing me for 57 cents. At the very least, you could have shown consideration by asking me for 57 + 37 = 94 cents instead of for 57 cents plus the American 37-cent postage stamp that you must have known I have no ready way to acquire. You could also have mailed out the one-page photocopy at the outset while trusting me to reimburse you the 57 cents, which would have brought the dual advantage of reducing my delay, and of eliminating the need for me to supply the self-addressed and stamped envelope. Thus, you had several paths by which you could have approached the goal of expediting; instead you chose to continue down the broad highway of obstructing.
- Obstruction of Justice. In view of the Court systematically blocking my attempts to challenge its jurisdiction, I am inclined to view my failure to receive a copy of the OSC as less plausibly resulting from the theft of my US$2.00 cash, and as more plausibly being a further manifestation of that same systematic blocking. I ask you to keep in mind that such blocking is unethical, contrary to the interests of justice, threatens to bring the Los Angeles Superior Court into disrepute, and could expose those who participate in the blocking to disciplinary measures or to prosecution.
The Prytulak publication which initiated, and continues to lie at the core of, the Rambam complaint is the Prytulak exposure of the Rambam-Abella Fifty Confessions Hoax. This hoax was perpetrated in Canada, and the brunt of the damage caused by the hoax was suffered in Canada, and thus if the Prytulak exposure of the hoax is aimed at anybody, it is aimed at Canadians for the purpose of warning them to beware of further Rambam deceptions and machinations. The Prytulak publication certainly is not aimed at Californians. Canada, therefore, is the proper forum for the Rambam law suit, and more particularly, the province of British Columbia where Defendant Prytulak resides. Plaintiff Rambam brings the law suit before the Los Angeles Superior Court not despite its being prohibitively inconvenient, but precisely because it is so prohibitively inconvenient as to diminish Defendant's capacity to reply.
Lubomyr Prytulak
cc:
LASC:
G Beavers, Deputy Clerk • LASC • PO Box 151, Main Post Office • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90053
John A Clarke, Executive Officer/Clerk • LASC • PO Box 151, Main Post Office • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90053
Robert A Dukes, Assistant Presiding Judge • LASC • 111 North Hill Street • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90012
James R Dunn, Judge • LASC • 111 North Hill Street • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90012
Gary Klausner, Supervising Judge, Civil Division • LASC • 111 North Hill Street • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90012
Gary Kurtz, Esq • 20335 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 200 • Woodland Hills, CA • USA 91364
S James Otero, Assistant Supervising Judge • LASC • 111 North Hill Street • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90012
V Ponce, Assistant Clerk • LASC • PO Box 151, Main Post Office • Los Angeles, CA • USA 90053
Barry A Taylor, Judge • LASC • 6230 Sylmar Avenue • Van Nuys, CA • USA 91401
Mike Wallace • 60 Minutes, CBS Television • 524 West 57th Street • New York, NY • USA 10019
Don Hewitt, Executive Producer • 60 Minutes, CBS Television • 524 West 57th Street • New York, NY • USA 10019
Irving Abella • Department of History • York University • 4700 Keele Street • Toronto, ON • Canada M3J 1P3
F David Radler COO • Hollinger International • 712 Fifth Avenue • New York, NY • USA 10019
Steven Rambam • Pallorium, Inc • PO Box 155 � Midwood Station • Brooklyn, New York • USA 11230
Moshe Ronen • Chair Board of Governors • CJC • 100 Sparks Street, Suite 650 • Ottawa, ON • Canada K1P 5B7
Bernie Farber • Executive Director, Ontario Branch • CJC • 4600 Bathurst Street • Toronto, ON • Canada M2R 3V2
On 01-Oct-2002, the day after the above letter was FedExed, Lubomyr Prytulak discovered that he had forgotten to enclose both the money order for 57 cents, and the Universal Postal Union International Coupon, both of which he proceeded to mail the same day. The day after that, 02-Oct-2002, Prytulak realized that he had also forgotten to mail another self-addressed envelope, which he proceeded to do the same day. If the Court is motivated to make amends for having been needlessly unhelpful in the past, then it is barely conceivable that it will quickly mail him the one-page photocopy despite the absence of the claimed enclosures. If, on the other hand, the Court continues to be motivated to be unhelpful, then the delayed delivery of the three enclosures could justify not only extended delay, but even total non-compliance with the request. The saga of the 57-cent photocopy continues.