Significant historical research has gone into this question over the years. And all of that research leads to the conclusion that it’s always been called Lovers Point. And it got that name because it was and is a famously popular smooching and hoochie-cooching location for young romantics.
A description of Lovers Point published in the American Guide Series’ Monterey Peninsula said the place was “named by legend and designed by nature as a trysting place for sentimental youth.”
The confusion comes, I guess, because some people mistakenly thought that a lot of religious services were conducted at Lovers Point, back in the day. But researchers say that, while some occasional services were held at Lovers Point, most of the religious stuff actually happened at Jewell Park, just down the road from Lovers Point. In fact, a “preacher’s stand” had been erected at Jewell Park for the convenience of pastors holding services there.
Well, the point seems to be that you could find Jesus at the Jew Park in Monterey. Makes sense when you think about it.
In fact, a true adherent to the teaching of a Jew might say Lovers Jesus Point is redundant. Like saying Point Point or Park Park.
A reliable reference book about Monterey place names, Monterey County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary, by Donald Thomas Clark, cites several authoritative sources on the matter. As far back as 1885, the rocky outcrop was referred to simply as Lovers Point, according to Clark.
Clark and McCombs also pointed out that the location had a bunch of other names over the years, including Point Aulon, Laboratory Point, Organ Point, Spooney’s Point and simply The Point.
The Point. I like it.
Apparently blame for attempts to inject Jesus where he doesn’t belong goes to Santa Cruz in 1968, which is a notable place and time, let alone their more recent campaign “save the Swastika“.
“You can’t regulate what’s on the inside of somebody else’s house,” said police spokesman…. The man apparently rotates the swastika flags with other, less controversial banners, and Friend said police started receiving complaints of Nazi flags about a month ago. Over the weekend the resident hung America’s Old Glory and Britain’s Union Jack under two Nazi flags. Monday, he hung a modern German government flag between the two flags of the Third Reich.
Notable the Santa Cruz police openly admit they don’t know how laws work. An ideologically permissive zone in the direction that flows all the way to Monterey.
We all know which way the baptismal waves go in the bay.
Calvin Duncan spent 28 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. During those years the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court office repeatedly denied him access to the records he needed to prove his innocence. He taught himself law inside the prison. He earned a paralegal bachelor’s degree after release. He graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School at age 60. In November 2025 he won 68 percent of the vote to become Clerk of Criminal Court in the same office that had helped keep him wrongfully imprisoned. He’s an American hero.
Calvin Duncan is the founder and director of the Light of Justice program in New Orleans. Zack Smith Photography/Penguin Random House
On April 23, 2026, the Louisiana House voted 63 to 28 to dissolve the office.
Senate Bill 256 shutters the entire criminal court clerk system in a week and folds it under the Clerk of Civil Court. No election will be held for the consolidated position. Nobody in New Orleans has ever voted for an Orleans Clerk of Court. Duncan was scheduled to take office May 4.
Governor Jeff Landry is expected to sign the bill before that date. Why?
As Attorney General in 2018, opposed the voter referendum requiring unanimous juries for felony convictions. Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury rule came out of the 1898 constitution, designed to nullify Black juror votes.
As Attorney General in 2023, opposed Calvin Duncan’s petition to be compensated by the state for 28 years of wrongful imprisonment.
Fought the federal court order creating a second majority-Black congressional district under the Voting Rights Act. Signed SB 8 only after courts ran out the clock. His AG Liz Murrill is now in Louisiana v. Callais asking the Supreme Court to gut Section 2.
Pushed legislation to release juvenile offender records, targeted to the three Louisiana parishes with the highest Black populations.
Ran a sustained campaign against police reform in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, including moving to terminate the NOPD federal consent decree.
His Department of Justice created a legal fellowship named for E.D. White, the Louisiana Supreme Court justice who wrote in favor of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Won a federal lawsuit permanently blocking the EPA from considering race when regulating pollution in Louisiana, including in Cancer Alley. This goes right back to the Civil War continuing through 1873 Slaughterhouse pollution cases.
In 2016 helped craft legislation to block sanctuary cities from state bond money after New Orleans police adopted a policy preventing officers from inquiring about immigration status.
Called Black Lives Matter protesters “armed thugs.” Named an anti-racial-profiling policy “Hug-a-Thug.”
Sat on the executive committee of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which summoned Trump supporters to the Ellipse on January 6, 2021.
April 2026: directed Senator Jay Morris to introduce SB 256, dissolving the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court office before Calvin Duncan could take it.
Senate author Jay Morris of West Monroe has acknowledged that Landry asked him to introduce the bill to remove the seat for Duncan. And I’ll say it again, Landry opposed Duncan’s petition for wrongful-conviction compensation when Landry was Attorney General in 2023. His successor Liz Murrill denied Duncan’s exoneration throughout the campaign, despite more than 160 legal professionals signing a public letter confirming it.
This is a long game of structural, systemic, racism.
Mardis Gras 2024 Krewe du Vieux float showcases the Landry laundry: “Klan robes washed free” and “Coloreds must be separated from whites”
You have to see Landry for the piece of racist shit that he is. Look at who is using state power to repeatedly attack an American Black man to hold him down based on his race alone.
Laundering in seersucker
Representative Dixon Wallace McMakin of Baton Rouge carried the bill on the House floor. He described dissolving a municipal court system as continuity through modernization. It isn’t, and that’s a specific phrase with a racist history. Typically “modernization” is the coded language for dismantling Black institutions and political power.
He cited the consolidation of the New Orleans tax assessors’ offices as precedent. It wasn’t. When Democratic Representative Delisha Boyd asked him how long that consolidation took, he said he did not know. Boyd told him the answer. Four years. This bill says it will bomb the office out in six business days, just so no Black man can have it.
Have you been to Baton Rouge?
Can you imagine a neighborhood today in Germany with all its streets named for Nazi generals? No, because the Allied occupation forced renaming. Back in America, however, its enemies are busy shoving racist propaganda onto every street corner.
Representative Denise Marcelle of Baton Rouge asked McMakin whether he would accept the governor eliminating Marcelle’s district before she could take office. He said he would be fine with it, presumably as it would keep whites in power and still block any Black from office.
McMakin acknowledged on the floor that there is no precedent for eliminating an elected office before the duly elected person can take their position. He then apologized. Not to Duncan, for being racist. To his fellow Republicans. For being called racist.
Hate holding longer than the state constitution
Louisiana is known for this.
In 1868 Oscar Dunn became Lieutenant Governor. In 1872 P.B.S. Pinchback served as acting governor. By 1898 the state had written a new constitution whose framers openly declared its purpose: eliminate Black political participation. The mechanism evolved across a century. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Grandfather clauses. White primaries. The Voting Rights Act struck most of them down. The losing white supremacists taught their children to repeat the hate generationally.
Thus the current move is identical. A Black official wins an election by a 36-point margin. The state invents an administrative reason to eliminate the victory by declaring the seat erased. Sixty-three legislators vote for white supremacist power. The governor signs to keep hate alive.
McMakin called it modernization, because that’s a whistle to white supremacists. They are hiding records of their past crimes by committing new ones.
The archaeological detail
Duncan ran for this office because the office had wronged him. The records that would have proved his innocence sat inside the Clerk of Criminal Court’s files. He was denied access to them for years. When the Innocence Project of New Orleans finally pried the documents loose through litigation, the files showed police officers had lied in court. That is what a functioning records office is supposed to prevent and what a captured one enables.
Duncan’s victory threatened to put a man who understood the records system’s failures in charge of fixing them. The people holding racist power, who corrupted records and denied justice, preferred to dissolve the system before it could be fixed.
That is integrity breach as policy. Failure by design, like a ladder thrown down so others can’t climb the wall.
“Throwing Down the Ladder by Which They Rose.” Thomas Nast, 1870, for Harper’s Weekly, New York, New York. The “Know-Nothing Party,” a nineteenth-century nativist political party, throws down the ladder “by which they rose” in an attempt to deny entry. The hypocrisy of the descendants of immigrants denying citizenship to new immigrants is fundamental to American history.
Office, what office?
The accountability mechanism was working. Voters elected a true American reformer by a landslide. The white supremacists responded by removing the mechanism rather than accepting the accountability. Because white supremacists by definition are people who can not accept accountability.
Representative Candace Newell of New Orleans said it plainly before the vote. The rights they eliminate today are a template for the rights they eliminate tomorrow. And that has a specific history in Louisiana, with a specific “modernization” term used to enact state-level white supremacist doctrine.
Polymarket CEO tells insiders to leak. So cool, he said five months ago. Do it, for the market.
…what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden…
Insider leak is the entire product. Harvard researchers estimate more than $143 million in Polymarket profits may be linked to individuals with access to nonpublic information. I’m surprised it’s not 100%, given the CEO statement.
And now, as you might expect, Polymarket says insiders who leak will be selectively reported to law enforcement.
Source: Twitter
Proof? Arresting the CEO would be the only acceptable proof.
The insider-leak-harvesting system is sacrificing one publicly identifiable service member, without explaining how, to preserve the Polymarket platform as a pipeline of crime. The referral is compliance theatre that protects the CEO, who is in bed with the government and will victimize again.
Inducement to crime is the business model. Selective corrupted enforcement is the margin.
An insider named Van Dyke did exactly what Coplan advertised he made Polymarket for, and was held out as the “not cool” kind of leaker once the political cost of privacy exceeded the marketing value of generating leakers to sacrifice.
How many Polymarket users will be trapped and burned so that the CEO may continue his crimes?
The resolution mechanism (who gets prosecuted) is cheaper to corrupt than the underlying event (controlling who leaks). Polymarket positions itself now as above the law, as it chooses which leakers to expose and which to hide for profit. That selection power is worth more than any individual trader’s profit, and it is apparently corrupted.
The “Eddie Murphy Rule” charge is novel and narrow. It punishes Van Dyke’s misuse of classified information. It does nothing to the platform that monetized his misuse, or to the CEO who described the misuse of classified information as a core feature of his business.
The FBI raided the Polymarket CEO’s apartment in November 2024 as part of an investigation into US users trading on the platform. Trump’s DOJ and CFTC abruptly dropped both investigations in July 2025. Then in September 2025 Polymarket bought a CFTC-registered exchange to go onshore. Talk about insiders. Coplan was on a call from Mar-a-Lago the same week as the raid. The acting Attorney General applauding “our men and women in uniform” on the Van Dyke arrest is Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney. The FBI Director praising the indictment is Kash Patel.
The arrest is entirely political.
The system got the wrong guy, on purpose.
Critical OPSEC integrity failure, by design.
The Van Dyke arrest is the only visible prosecution against a backdrop of total federal withdrawal, on both sides of a rigged competition the First Family is paid to sit atop like President Andrew “genocide” Jackson would have wanted.
President Jackson was one of the most, if not the most unjust, immoral and corrupt men in American history.
Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi, the two largest prediction markets competing for the same regulatory carve-out. At an April House Agriculture Committee hearing, Representative Jim McGovern asked CFTC Chair Mike Selig whether the White House had pressured CFTC to drop its Polymarket probe. Selig refused to answer. Selig also runs a CFTC with one commissioner out of five, a quarter of its staff cut, and a public admission that AI is covering the enforcement gap. On April 2, that same CFTC joined DOJ in suing Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois to block state enforcement against prediction markets. One of the DOJ attorneys on the case is Yaakov Roth, who represented Kalshi in the 2023 lawsuit that opened the door for these platforms in the first place. Blanche meanwhile issued his “cease cryptocurrency enforcement” memo while still holding between $159,000 and $485,000 in crypto, despite an ethics pledge not to act on matters affecting those holdings. He divested after.
Tucker Carlson apologized on his podcast. For what?
He says he was “misleading” his listeners about Trump.
No specifics.
No mention of Dominion.
No mention of January 6 footage.
No mention of Covid disinformation killing Americans.
No mention of a decade of rhetoric about immigrants and Black Americans.
No mention of antisemitism and platforming Nazis into the White House.
He just says he was “misleading.” The apology seems designed to collect absolution and avoid the judgment, especially without triggering restitution for all those harmed.
His former colleagues told Lyz Lenz in 2018 that Carlson never believed any of what he was selling the public. He was making money by doing a misleading bit.
That makes it worse. A true believer can plead conviction. A performer who knew the rhetoric was false and deployed it anyway because the ratings were good, knowing the harms it caused, is complicit.
The bet on not being held accountable paid for a decade. Maybe the Infowars case has spooked him. The Jones $1.5B judgment plus the Dominion $787.5M settlement where Carlson was named is real precedent.
All the Trump, MAGA, America First bets now have spoiled so badly, they apparently are beyond Carlson’s ability to spin harming others into his personal profit. So he wants out. Carlson would book all the harms as regret and keep the ill-gotten winnings. Victim money stays with him. His victims stay unnamed. The innocent and vulnerable people his show helped target get nothing for his role in profiting off their harm. The journalists that his adherents went after get nothing.
This apology therefore settles nothing, as much as he pleads he should get away free.
When [Tucker] Carlson parents sold the property, they sold the land off separately to housing developers, thus raping the woods where generations of kids had wandered and reaping the highest profits for themselves. Suffice to say that the signs — of extreme privilege, of decimating nature for profit, and of treating your own neighbors with disdain — were all there, in the parental nest, long before Tucker Carlson became America’s most pernicious super-spreader. What finally put an end to Father Coughlin’s stirring speeches promoting fascism in Europe and antisemitism in the United States was the Second World War. What might put an end to the mad and dangerous ravings of (the presumably celibate) Coughlin’s many honorary children?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
