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Lecture Notes: April '05
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Imus Protests April 2004
Last Will & Testament
Funeral Procession
Baghdad Claims Office: How I would settle Iraqi Prisoner Claims.
Top 40
Metaphysics 303
Who Killed Duane Garrett: Part II
This is what is Wrong with the Republican Party. Part I & Part II
A Public Letter to Rosie Allen
A Public Appeal to Governor Davis
How Don and Mike Removed the Evil One From MSNBC
Who Killed Duane Garrett? 3 Suspects: Motive Greed & Power
McGurk Tutorial
45 minutes and the Distortions of History
Don Imus Says Good Morning
Judgment Day
© COPYRIGHT  2005 by NewRuskinCollege.com

New Ruskin College Lecture  Hall:

History’s judgment rendered today!  

John Paul II, 1978-2005
pope-john-paulii.jpg
Karol Józef Wojtya , 1920-2005

"Love of and preference for_the_poor."
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John Paul the Great

“The Church does not have technical solutions to offer for the problem of underdevelopment as such, as Pope Paul Vl already affirmed in his encyclical. For the Church does not propose economic and political systems or programs, nor does she show preference for one or the other, provided that human dignity is properly respected and promoted, and provided she herself is allowed the room she needs to exercise her own ministry in the world ... Its aim is thus to guide Christian behaviour. It therefore belongs to the field, not of ideology, but of theology and particularly of moral theology."

 

What is possible for the Church is to (a) establish in the minds of its members a "commitment to justice", (b) to offer certain guidelines as to the priorities which they should pursue, and (c) to delineate the special responsibilities of Catholics in seeking to influence the policies of their respective governments.

 

John Paul II leaves no doubt that, for the Catholic, the central objective of social action is not to be found merely in its political dimension but in "our manner of living", which should reflect the "love of and preference for the poor".  --- Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 1 No 2 (May 1988), p. 4  commentary on John Paul II's new social encyclical, Sollicitudo rei socialis  (http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/1988/may1988p4_556.html)

 

 

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Lecture Notes:  The Dishonesty of Stewed Tomatoes

 

Lecture Notes:  The Dishonesty of Stewed Tomatoes

 

Pro-reform movement spreads across Egypt


Kefaya gains more ground as coalition group of dissents stages simultaneous pro-reform rallies across Egypt.


By Hassen Zenati - CAIRO

 

Egypt's pro-reform movement Kefaya (Enough) gained considerable ground when it staged simultaneous rallies across the country in protest at President Hosni Mubarak's unchallenged 24-year-old rule. (http://195.224.230.11/english/?id=13357)

 

Oh, no, of course  Mr. Franken this also is probably unrelated to Mr. Bush’s policies in the Middle East and the world.  Our young people’s sacrifice in Iraq has all just been a waste.  Yes, yes of course.  What would we do without Mr. Franken’s acute insights?

 

The Palestinians, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Saudi, the Egyptians,  no, no, they are all quite unaffected by anything we did. 

 

Of course, in any event, I supported Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy because Saddam Hussein signed an armistice agreement and then violated it.  Oh, and he attempted to assassinate a former Commander in Chief who lead our forces against him.   . . . Oh, and because the World Trade Center attackers came from and returned back to Iraq in 1993 after the attack, and then he denied our request for extradition.  . . . Oh, and because he sponsored terror around the world including the planners for Bojinka that lead to the second World Trade Center attack.  (We have the copies of his bandked checks that he gave to terrorists. ( http://www.husseinandterror.com/ ))   . . . Oh, and because he was an evil vile man, who murdered over a million people, and would have done worse had we let him, Mr. Franken.  

 

 

“Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad offered its condolences to the family of Lamia Abed Khadouri al-Sakri, 50, a Shiite Muslim legislator in the National Assembly who was shot and killed Wednesday at her home in Baghdad. She was the first elected official slain since the parliamentary elections.” --- After nearly 3 months, Iraqi Cabinet approved Oil, defense posts still in dispute, however  Associated Press

 

“A friend of Khaddouri said she had been singled out because of her outspokenness. "They chose her as a target because she spoke out and took little care whom she criticized," said Haifa el-Azawi, also a National Assembly member. "She was a brave woman and she was talking a lot about the situation." Azawi said Khaddouri's friends had told her that her bodyguards were too young and that she needed better protection.

 

“ . . . Earlier in the day Khaddouri was interviewed on television, said her brother, Amar abd al-Khaddouri, a dentist. "She was always afraid to be on TV," he said.

 

“ . . .According to the bodyguard, after she had finished the interview, she said, "I'm afraid they will kill me because I've been on TV."

 

“ . . . Khaddouri, who was unmarried and in her 40s, shunned living in the relatively protected Green Zone, where some other legislators live. . . .

 

“. . . One neighbor, a 17-year-old who would identify himself only as Husam, said, “When she was elected to Parliament, I said, 'Why don't you have better security?' And she said, 'God will protect me.’ ” ” 

 --- By Richard A. Oppel Jr. The New York Times  FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2005 

 

I do not know how you can read this and not know whose side you should be on, Mr. Franken?  Of course, Maureen Dowd can write columns simply stating that there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda, “no connection” with the second attack on the World Trade Center.  That is all.  The bare unsupported assertion:  “no connection.”    

 

Mr. Franken asserted today that because the settlement agreement worked out for Lebanon made provisions for ethnic representation, specified posts, this mere fact completely negates and undoes any possibility that Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy is supporting the peoples of the Middle East as they move towards freedom and democracy. 

 

Some College visitors may have wondered why I stayed in Marin and have refused to leave these fifteen years, if, as I have claimed, many rich powerful people here have targeted me?

 

I have been protesting them.  I moved to Marin immediately as I learned of Yvonne’s betrayal.  1991. 

 

My life has been a protest against these people.  I have not made speeches.  (I did write a few short notes to Yvonne to try to shame my enemies.  (For example, after Michael Weiner staged the break in at the Colonial Motel, (with the help of the San Rafael Police), I wrote a note to Yvonne.   And he went into a fit and stayed home for a week.  (That was when Barbara Simpson made her comment that “ . . . my career may not have been as meteoric as some others, . . . but at least I have not committed a felony.”))  But when he returned to the air I realized that these people were beyond shame.)  I even stopped writing.  Mine has been a silent protest.

 

I only started this web site in 2003 after Imus harassed me at GAB Robins.  (But I said nothing when he did the same sorts of things in 1998 when I was working at State Farm with Shotgun Tom Kelly’s brother who supplied Imus with the information he needed to harasse me.)

 

So when I murder myself in a few weeks, days, it will be the end of 15 years of protests.  There are other things I could have done . . . but I am tired . . . 15 years of harassment will do that to you.  

 

I have fought against them and now I am finished.  I pray for the courage to murder just one person, myself.   I have driven my self to this end because I do not want to live in such a country.  It is not just that there is no “legal recourse” but there is nothing at all.  Not one human being survives.  Left, Right, what is the difference?  I pray for my deliverance. 

 

So the dishonesty of Franken and Dowd will have to be left to someone else. 

 

Someone else will have to take on the Dishonesty of Stewed Tomatoes. 

 

“Stewed Tomatoes”,  that is what Franken said the other day  . . .  to be continued . . .

 

 Notes:

Friedman:  “You can not make it as a B+ student in Brooklyn anymore.”

 

“They are mining serious brain power.”

 

“No one has told the kids.   . . . I tell my daughters to do their homework because there is someone in India or China who is starving for their jobs.”

 

Deliberately obfuscates the reality.                    

 

Glenn Beck was on the radio the other day ridiculing fat retarded people who live in apartments of “300 square feet.”

 

"Over the generations, we have received energetic, ambitious, optimistic people from all over the world ... our country is a welcoming society," Bush said. "America is a stronger and better nation because of the hard work and faith and the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants."

 

“We'll all have to trust each other," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the committee chairman.

autumnmask-au2.jpg

 

 

Lecture Notes:  04-27-05  Populorum Progressio

 

When I was in High School pope Paul VI said that it was much easier to think of ways to limit the number of people at the table than it was to think of ways to feed all those who were at the table. ( POPULORUM PROGRESSIO,  ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PAUL VI   ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PEOPLES  MARCH 26, 1967  )(http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum_en.html)

 

I reasoned that this is the difference between the engineer and the scientist.  The scientist is free to examine any problem he wishes and solve the problem anyway he likes.  The engineer has a client.  Formerly I had thought the scientist superior to the engineer due to this freedom of  choice.  However pope Paul VI’s challenge caused me to question this judgment.  True the scientist has more freedom but isn’t the engineer’s challenge greater?  It is not enough for the engineer to “solve” the problem, but that solution must conform to the client’s requirements!   Ah!  That makes it much harder.  

 

Where I live there is a company called Market Engineering.  I think this is a perfect sort of name as both words relate to each other.  You can not have a market without engineering for the market implies choice; choice implies substitution; substitution implies research and development, i.e. engineering.  All research and development departments in companies should be renamed “market engineering” to remind the team members that they serve the market.  Without the market the engineers would have no clients.  They would only be scientists. 

 

Pope Paul VI was the client.  His “opinion”, values, beliefs, defined “success.”  Of course the problem of too many people at the table can be solved in many ways.  The client however, the “consumer,” determines what values will define the acceptable design solution.

 

So though I recognize birth control, population control, the term now, (PC), family planning,  is important, (I personally give it preeminence in any development plan), yet I have never been interested in discussing the question separately.  Birth control has preeminence in development planning not just because it limits and prevents the problem from racing ahead of our technology, but for the purely logical reasoning of our science,  for quite independent of any particular economic calculation choice is the supreme value in Economics.  Women should be given choice, because all consumers in the market economy should be given choice.

 

The preeminence of choice is, in terms of logic or philosophy, a “postulate” or better an “axiom” of  Economics.  As explained elsewhere, (see Wrong at the Max Weber Institute), this is one of the aspects of Economics which makes it a tautology;  a self defined, self referencing system of thought.  First we say that choice is the supreme value.  Why?  We could call on neurophysiologists,  sociobiologists, etc., but independently of these sciences we define the science of Economics as the study of choice, in the same way we define human action as “remunerative action” even though there are many other types of human action.  The science of Economics unfolds from these definitions, postulates, conditions, the way Euclidian Geometry unfolds from its definitions and postulates.  The science having been established we no longer need to justify these axioms, independently of the findings that result from them.  The justification is that it works:  it explains.  

 

The reasons why the Church teaches that birth control is a sin has never much interested me, in the same way I suppose that a client’s preference for beige in the exterior color of the house never causes the architect to probe deeper, exploring the client’s psyche, childhood traumas, or that sort.  ‘The client wants beige, fine, let’s get on with it.’

 

It is a matter of indifference to me.  Personally I think the line of reasoning starts with something like, ‘God has a plan . . .’  or  ‘Human action in some matters is prohibited, taboo,  . . .’ etc.  Ho, hum.  The often heard theory that using the “rhythm method”, (based on the estimated time of female fertility),  is a system of “birth control” that is “natural” and somehow in accord with Devine Law,  seems odd, for it first can be seen that this theory contradicts the presumed Law, the thesis that some matters are taboo or that we are not allowed to interfere with “God’s plan”. 

 

Therefore any claims to categorical necessity are destroyed and the argument must proceed within the system of thought that birth control is acceptable.  (Note that this condition does not arise within the system,  Economics, with respect to :  Choice.  For the system of thought, Economics, does not at any subsequent point contradict its first principle that choice is an unadulterated good.)

 

Therefore the entire question of birth control must now devolve to subsidiary arguments as to the degree of “possibility” left open to Nature or God in the various contending systems of birth control.  For no system is perfect and it must be admitted that the possibility of conception, and presumably God’s plan is always possible in any birth control system chosen including sterilization.

 

Or perhaps I am not very clever.  In ‘Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, Iris Murdoch warns her readers early on that there are some philosophers who just are not very interested in morals.  My cheeks burned.  Me? 

 

I am an engineer, I have a client,  the challenge lies in meeting his specifications.  Therefore it can be seen that the more irrational, even self contradictory the specifications, the more,  . . . the more . . . challenging?  No, interesting.  May you live in interesting times.

 

So, for example, in  . . .  Education:  Apply technology.  Which technology?  Distributive. Self paced.  Scalable.   Inexpensive.   Laser disks.

 

In Housing:  Manufactured, panelized, utility cores of high value, (plumbing, heating, appliances), multi story high density, existing urban areas.

 

Food production: Genetically engineered, designed for local climates, reengineer biomass in uninhabitable areas, (see Technical Corrections at the Weber Institute).   

 

Global Warming:  Control global climate by controlling amount of solar radiation reaching the planet using artificial clouds.  (See Artificial Clouds at the Moynihan) 

 

Human Engineering:  Increase oxygen uptake of neurons, progressive development, to fully engineered human, Homo Sapiens Engineerus.

 

For every problem there is a solution.

 

When I first came to the San Francisco Bay Area I saw an interview with a local executive of Bank of America, or P. G. and E., one of the big local businesses.  I do not recall now the subject but as the interview proceeded I grew ever more alarmed.  “And this is a businessman!” I exclaimed.  “If this is how businessmen talk, if this is the ‘conservative’ establishment,  . . .?  How is this going to work,” I wondered.

 

And now 25  years later I know.

 

In the insurance industry there has been a boom in ‘construction defect’ claims.  I have tried to explain that these claims are the natural result of the construction market but no one will listen.  “Why,” they tell me, “Have you seen how much they are getting for their buildings!  Buildings are selling for much more than the cost of construction!” they reason, “So how could this market cause defects?  They can make so much on the building, charge any price they like, multiples of the actual cost.”  

 

In fact a recent Harvard study compared the price of land, construction costs and actual selling prices and identified how in  Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, Building and Zoning codes have driven up, “inflated”, the cost of housing well over the actual cost of building and in point of fact:  of land.  (Regularly you hear the feeble minded, Ron Owens for example, claim that land is the reason for the higher San Francisco prices.  But the point of the study is that the selling prices are well above even the higher area land costs.)  

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2002papers/2002list.html)

 

Yet my point is just this:  over heated market causes building defects.  Why?  Because consumers must buy buildings the first day they see the place,  sometimes before the place has even been built.  There are multiple offers.  Offers in excess of the asking price. 

 

So then, they ask me, incredulously,  “Why defects then?  They can get any price they want?  The property turns over before it is finished!  Why defects?”

 

This is what scarcity does:  distorts markets.  The richest country in the world and in the richest places in the richest country and you have created scarcity.   Because you have bureaucrats like that businessman I saw in the interview in the late 1970’s.  Because the leftists know better than the market.  Because you wanted to “preserve” Mill Valley.  That is the word Peter Coyote used at a Mill Valley City Hall meeting.  “Preserve.”  For whom?  Millionaires like Peter Coyote?  F. . .  ing  dick head.

 

Counselor:  What is this?

 

Misplaced aggression.

 

And no one will take responsibility for it.  You can not go to anyone individual and say “You,  you,  that’s right you.  You did this.”  (Which is one reason I am not much interested in morality.  It seems a gimmick to me.  A confusion of terms as Wittgenstein has shown.  Just define your terms and puff, all the deep questions disappear.)

 

“We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

 

In Russia, the profit motive having been removed, quality was supposed to go straight to the consumer, the theft of the exploiters having been stopped  . . . what went wrong?

 

Possibly capital, profit, isn’t theft after all?

 

Choice makes quality.  Scarcity makes defects.

 

Get this into your heads.  There is only the market.  There is no “third way.”  There is no socialism.  No communism.  No communalism.  No . . . taunting, leering, mocking, egotists smirking, Ivey League, U. C., Foundation Grant,  (they call Mill Valley, “Trust Valley”,  because of all the self centered ----

 

Counselor:  What are you doing?

 

Digressing.

 

Look.  The consumers do not have a choice.  It is either buy it or lose it.  So they buy it.  The contractors know this.  So yes, the windows were put on without the flashing then the stucco was applied, then the flashing was put on, so?  Sue me! 

 

Or, rather sue the General, who sues the subcontractor, then the window manufacturer then the stucco contractor, the architect, then they call the insurance broker, and so it goes.

 

Why?  Because you do not understand economics.  Without choice there is no competitive pressure on the builder entrepreneur.  The habit to check the window subcontractor’s work, atrophies in non competitive environments. 

 

Wealth is not theft.  Wealth is the promise to participate in future economic interactions.  It is created not by “taking” but by mutual assent of the parties.  Each promises to participate in future economic activities.  That is what those bills are that are  in your wallet.  Promises to participate in some future enterprise, by mutual assent.

 

In scarcity, as Paul VI noted, this mutual assent starts to break down.  The mutual promises become compromised, “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.”

 

Economics has been mistaught.  Most of you have read your Samulson in college economics.  There you have learnt, for example, that capitalist demand higher returns for greater risk.  This is wrong.  And if you look at how wrong it is you will learn something.  The way it is wrong will teach you much about real economics.

 

Ludwig von Mises illustrates how it is wrong this way:  An entrepreneur persuades a capitalist to fund a hotel in the mountains.  “Will we make money?” asks the capitalist.  “Are you kidding?” (imagine Sid Rosenberg) “We can charge any price we like there are no other hotels for miles!”   Note that the capitalist does not say:  “In the mountains you say?  Well that sounds risky, I will want a lot more money in that event.”

 

This is the way the market really works, not the way dusty old Economics professors teach it.  The “risk” and the “rate of return” arise together.  The Chinese have understood this for a long time:  Risk = Opportunity.

 

But in your “logical” narrow constrained square “rational” Western minds risk and opportunity are two different concepts.  Oh, the inscrutable West!

 

So the flashing is put on after the stucco because, well, because that is human nature.  Because he can?  Because this is how humans act.  This is why choice is so important. 

 

So in the 1970’s the bell bottomed, turtle necked, peace necklaced, executive, (ok I added the necklace part), tells us that “Increased zoning regulations are a good thing for the economy, there has been far too much choice in the San Francisco Bay Area”   and 25 years later I am sitting in an insurance office talking to the interview committee of a major insurer and they are looking at me questioningly, shaking their heads, at the very idea that contractors and builder entrepreneurs would  try to pass off shoddy construction onto their insurers because we are in a  scarcity market, created by those “community leaders” of the 1970’s and 1980’s  and 1990’s.

 

The fashions have changed, in hair, clothes and politics but not the reality of the market.   

 

Now you tell me.  Where is your morality?

 

The Marin Senators Boxer and Feinstein were two of those “community leaders.”  They both helped down zone Marin and San Francisco.  They throttled down our market.  Our lives.

 

Who do you think is paying for those construction defect claims?

 

Insurance Industry:  We do not pay claims, we finance them.

 

You pay the claims.  In higher prices.  The cost of insurance is passed on to the consumers, just as taxes are passed on, just as all costs are redistributed by the dynamics of the market.  Again I ask, where is your morality?

 

Who is responsible?

 

Boxer?  Feinstein?  The Democrat Party controls Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco.  What percent of people in the Bay Area can afford the median priced home? 15%  What percent in the nation? .01%?  (And if you are in a Red State and are laughing “ha, ha, losers, . . .” think again hillbilly.  Why do you think Dr. Greenspan is raising interest rates?   Because of what the elite is doing in the  Blue States!  Hillbilly.)

 

Where is your morality?  

 

The Guardian had a piece on John Paul the Great saying he had “blood on his hands,”  because of birth control and the association of condoms with the reduction of AIDS. 

 

But where is The Guardian when we discuss how the liberal elite in Britain, and the US, is responsible for the much more direct and obvious conditions here? 

 

When will you take responsibility for your own social policy here?

 

It turns out that morality is a problem of definition.

 

You define yourself into the not responsible position.

 

Those children in the picture.  Need they go hungry?  You blame the capitalists?  How about you?  How about the restrictions on economic development in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the country, in education, medicine, housing, transportation, etc. etc.

 

You are concerned about global warming?  Ok how about the restrictions on nuclear power?  How much more could have been done? 

 

Feed the poor?  But your friends, possibly you, have worked against genetic engineering of food crops.  The market will work around you but we are talking about delay.  Delays that you have caused.  What could you have done to help those children?

 

You wanted to preserve the ‘neighborhood’ for your fellow millionaires instead of setting an example for the public by tearing down your shabby little plywood suburban villas and building multistory buildings for the people.  How much more could you have done?

 

For example, the plight of airline pilots whose pensions may be put into a government subsidized pension plan has been discussed as an example of capitalist immorality.  Even  Bob Brinker has expressed dismay.  Why?  You think this is a question of morality?  Why should there be a government program in the first place?  The rich using the government to help themselves?  Isn’t this just like the Social Security System we discussed earlier?  The poor are taxed to benefit the rich.(Lecture Notes:  03-17-05   Betrayal III, Lecture Notes:02-18-05

 Lecture Notes: 02-14-05 trophy hunters,   Requiem @ Funeral Procession (http://www.newruskincollege.com/id23.html ))

 

The Unions, (who had extremely talented lawyers, bankers, accountants, economists), negotiated with the airlines and took every loose penny they had.  The airlines had billions invested and faced ruin if they did not agree.  After all the money had been taken they then negotiated “fringe” benefits for retirees.  Both parties knew that all the money was already gone.  Gone to wages, fuel, interest payment etc.  The only money left to “negotiate” was the future money.  In the future we will pay your pension.

 

We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.

 

This is a joke.  The airlines had no choice.  This was a labor created scarcity market.  Labor manipulated the market.  They knew it.  Everyone knew it.  Bob Brinker blames airline management but really the problem was that there was no free market for the airlines to contract with another set of flying bus drivers and cocktail waitresses.

 

Fine.  But now we are expected to weep for the union members who will lose pensions or health benefits?  This is your morality?  This is a gimmick.  All the money was taken, then they said ‘ok,’ as they untied their hostages, ‘in the future, if you should survive,  we want you to agree to pay additional ransoms, our pensions and health care.’

 

Yeah, right, in the future.  If we survive. Sure thing.

 

And if you think I am anti union or taking management’s side, you only show how you have taken sides.  I told you before, ho, hum, I do not care.  Your morality is a joke.  The unions, with expert advise, all the advantages negotiated the deals it liked.  But do not come to me now and tell me the companies laboring under the staggering load of these debts are “immoral” for dumping what they can.  Morality has nothing to do with it.

 

Or rather it has far more to do with it than you will acknowledge.  For starters did the flying bus drivers and cocktail waitresses think to “negotiate” for a national health policy for everyone, including those of us not so lucky to make $200,000 a year flying to Paris three days a week? 

 

Well?  What is the answer?  You ----

 

Counselor:  Stop it.

 

The answer is NO!

 

Did the GM workers think about health care or national pensions for the rest of us?  NO no no no !!!

 

Morality? 

 

You talk to me of morality?  

 

Those kids in Africa.  In the picture at the top of  this page.  Do they have $95 laser disk players in their village school?  They have courses on treatment of tropical diseases for the village medical provider?  Farming and animal husbandry courses  for the village farmers?  Etc. etc.?  Of course not.

 

Fifteen years ago I wrote to the Senate about the importance of technology in education.

 

And what was the result?

 

Morality?

 

John Paul the Great has “blood on his hands”? 

 

Then you must be at the bottom of a sea of blood.

 

This is why I think morality is phony.

 

You and your party have blocked the market.  You have stopped development.  Obstruction after obstruction. 

 

Daily your policies, the direct consequence of your Party’s actions, misdirect hundreds of billions of dollars.  All about you is confusion and destruction.

 

The children starve.

 

And you want to discuss morality? You blame John Paul the Great?-------

 

Counselor:  Don’t say it.  

       

The last few days I have become completely lost.  My enemies have been on the radio complaining about “those Democrats” because they criticized Majority Leader DeLay for trying to make a “political issue” out of Terri Schiavo.  “God’s gift to the Republicans.”

 

“And now those Democrats are trying to make a political issue out of it themselves!”  These are the people who destroyed my life?  Dogs.

 

They can not distinguish between DeLay’s attempt to use the shameful tragedy of one family’s dispute over ending life support for a dead girl, and the justified criticism of DeLay for this attempt?

 

I have been set upon by dogs.

 

When I first started this site, after several posts on this site about Mrs. Jack Swanson, she started calling in sick.  I would make a post and she would call in sick.

 

Finally, one morning, Lee Rodgers, called her on the phone and started arguing with her.  Shouting at her.  He refused to go on the air without her.

 

She said she was proud to be “vicious” but when exposed on this little web site she would not go on the air.

 

Was that morality coming up in her? Shame?  She helped destroy a man and now she felt shame? 

 

No, she soon got over it.

 

She was soon back on the air saying stupid things about Democrats and DeLay. 

 

Such a confusion in the world. 

 

Morality?

 

I tried to help get laser disks for the children of the world and I have been set upon by dogs.

 

Who can be held responsible for what?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lecture Notes:  04-21-05

 

The End

 

(Prerequisite Lecture Notes:  04-16-05)

 

These children, are they part of the body of Christ?

 

Are you?  Am I?

 

Are they just protoplasm, so many living beings, human animals? 

 

They are shown here lined up for food.  They are hungry.  How about you?

 

Or have you hardened your heart against them too?  If so what has it cost you to harden against them?

 

In order to harden your heart what have you had to give up?   They are only hungry, but what about you?  This photo was taken some time ago.  They have eaten many times since then.  Gone to bed;  woken up.  Played.  Laughed. Lived.

 

But you, in order to harden your heart against them, what have you given up?  Your life?

 

In the recent news coverage of the Roman Catholic Church the Church’s teaching on contraception, has been discussed, both in terms of its affect on global population, and in Africa the spread of AIDS.    Theories of harm have been examined and the harm has been traced back to the Church’s teaching, all be it, it was generally allowed, an “unintended” effect.

 

The cause and effect relationship has been highlighted and  contrasted.   That harm should flow from good has been the focus of coverage on this aspect of the Church’s teaching. 

 

Partisans have presented on this subject and the popes and the Church have received both critical and supportive examination.

 

What I have not seen anywhere, not even hinted at with sly irony, or any indication at all, by anyone, friend or foe, partisan or disinterested commentator, in fact an empty desert of bland vapid utterly unaware discussion, has continued for weeks;  what I have not heard is can this same method of analysis be applied to us?   Does no one else thirst for some insight into the human condition?    Has no one thought to think that this line of reasoning might expose something more general about the human condition?

 

You have the issue of over population.  You have the Roman Catholic Church.  Pope John Paul the Great.  And now the new pope.  Major issue.  Major institution.   Major world figures.  A fundamental question of “good” and . . . shall we say,  ‘the human condition’, if not “evil” incarnate in our lives. 

 

And   AIDS, another major global issue.  And the spread of AIDS which is associated with a method of contraception disallowed by the Church’s teaching.  (A competing web site which also is focused on the role of technology and public policy, apparently in response to this coverage in the news, published an article disputing the question of AIDS in Africa, i.e. if AIDS is mainly spread by intercourse, pointing out that hypodermic needles are implicated by some researchers.  (Our association of their article with a partisan defense of the RC Church is based on the timing of their article, and because their article did not dispute that upwards of 30% of the transmission of AIDS must still be associated with sexual intercourse. (http://www.techcentralstation.com/041505E.html ) 30% of those infected is still a big number (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12665438 ).  Clearly they were attempting to limit or dispute what degree of blame for the transmission of AIDS should be attributed to the use of condoms, or rather the failure to use condoms.) And now more recently they have explicitly risen to the defense of the pope on the use of condoms, (http://www.techcentralstation.com/042105D.html )  indicating a party preference.  Does technology have a party preference?  Does science?)

 

So we have in the news: over population, and AIDS in Africa.  We have the association of the Church, an institution for “good” and we have the troubled ‘human condition’.   We have these gigantic personalities, John Paul the Great, the new pope, historic figures.  We have the disputed teaching.  “Evil” arising from “good”.  Tremendous issues.  Overwhelming issues.  The stuff of thousand page Russian novels.  Enormous!   Colossal!!

 

And in the news?  What?   . . . nothing. 

 

But then, where does one start?  And after starting where does one stop?

 

Only those who wander in the desert, or lost in the mountains, cloud hidden, the castoffs of society can talk about such things. 

 

For if evils result from holiness, if good and great men destroy, if white becomes black, have we not run out of language?  Is this not madness?

 

I no longer can think of a theme or connect one thought, fact, with another.  With my approaching death a haze has descended.  The world appears random.  Good men.  Evil men.  Is there a difference? 

 

These children . . . look at them . . . what is your relationship with them? 

 

How many were born who would not have been born?  How many brought into this world who would not have been brought into this world if their mothers and fathers had had a contraceptive?  What if they had another choice?  At this level of technical development how many can be, or are we saying ‘should be’, born, this year, this decade?  And then there is the question, independent of these questions, of AIDS.  How many contract AIDS simply being born into this world?  What if they had a choice?

 

Ought we even be allowed to ask such questions?  Are we “playing” God?  Is any of this permissible?

 

How to think about John Paul the Great?  What is the criterion?  What is the scope of our discourse? 

 

How ought we think of you dear reader?  What criteria shall we use in our examination of you?

 

Where should we begin?   Is there anything for which you will take responsibility?

 

How about these children here?  Will the reader take responsibility for them?  For starters? 

 

If we look beyond intention,  your intentions, what will you be responsible for?  What can you be said to have “caused”? 

 

In law you are held to account only for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your acts?  But let us start with your “acts.”   Ought you be called to account for the acts of your party?  Your country?  Starting when?  In preparing your defense do not imagine that there are any limits to your liability.  We are no longer limited by time and place, we are unbounded now.  Deranged?

 

Or have we already crossed the line into madness?  Are we asking too many questions?  Is this why we are already all alone in the media?  Who wants to be the first to scoop this story?

 

We could start anywhere but let’s start here:  Do you believe in an absolute or not?  Is there a good?  If it is good how can evil flow from it?  Is it reasonable to hold the Church responsible for the spread of AIDS an the increase of unwanted children?  Were these results reasonably foreseeable consequences of the Church’s teaching? 

 

Then by this theory of liability are we to judge the “good” as “relative” to the consequence?  If so then your theory implies that good is “relativistic” to the consequence.  It is then instrumental not absolute?  The “good” will be determined by its instrumental value.     

 

If you do not believe in an absolute value for good then how can you proceed in your life, for logically you can not know the consequence of your actions for some time to come in the future, possibly the results will be known only far in the future?  How do you live your life?  Play the odds?  You propose gambling as an alternative to absolute values?  (I have in mind the image of the soldiers playing dice at the crucifixion of Christ.)

 

And if the “good” is to be judged by the results what about a wrong?  If you are trying to support the Church, wouldn’t a lie be justified?  If the good is instrumental then why can not the same approach be applied to evil? 

 

Can you lie for Christ?  Is that permissible? 

schiavo.jpg

“A common cause of compression fractures is the disease osteoporosis. This disease thins the bones, often to the point that they are too weak to bear normal pressure. The thinning bones can collapse during normal activity, leading to a spinal compression fracture. In fact, spinal compression fractures are the most common type of osteoporotic fractures. Forty percent of all women will have at least one by the time they are 80 years old. These vertebral fractures can permanently alter the shape and strength of the spine. The fractures usually heal on their own and the pain goes away. However, sometimes the pain can persist if the crushed bone fails to heal adequately.”  ---- Chief Editor , Kenneth Kurica, MD, Managing Editor Randale C. Sechrest, MD, Editorial Board Richard Lazar, MD  Brent Dodge, RPT

 

Liars for Christ.

 

 

Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck both repeatedly claimed that Michael Schiavo had attempted to murder his wife.  For proof of their charge both offered the evidence of a nurse who claimed she discovered an empty insulin bottle and multiple hypodermic needle holes in the patient Schiavo’s body.  However neither Beck nor Hannity ever mentioned that the Schindlers declined to call the nurse to testify in a 2003 evidentiary hearing.  Nor did they mention that the judge in that same hearing specifically mentioned the failure of the Schindlers to call the witness to give her evidence.  These facts were never mentioned by Beck nor Hannity, and we learned of them only because of the reporting of Randi Rhodes. ((Only the liberal talk show host was willing to report the whole story, the facts, and let us decide.)  I hate to be the one to break the news to you Randi, but you are a temporal being too.)    

 

The nurse claimed that she contacted the police and reported the crime at the time of discovery.  However, FOX News contacted the police department and reported that the nurse did not in fact contact the police as she claimed.  Bill O’Reilly several times reported on the air that FOX had proven the nurse’s claim to be false.  Yet Sean Hannity, who also works for FOX TV, not only did not correct the record but he continued to report the nurse’s claim that she had contacted the police;  despite FOX’s reporting to the contrary.  Why?  This seems neither fair nor balanced.  Can FOX report the same story several different ways?  Does it have standards for accuracy or not?

 

Both Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck offered as further evidence of Michael Schiavo’s attempted murder the unsubstantiated claim that a “bone scan” had  revealed that the patient Schiavo had numerous “compression fractures.”  They both listed the bones with “compression fractures,” including a rib bone and a wrist bone.  However, neither Sean Hannity nor Glenn Beck seemed to understand what a compression fracture indicated.

 

Bones do not normally fracture on compression.  Fracturing on compression, in normal use, indicates that the bones have weakened.  What might cause a bone to become so weak that it fractures in normal use?  If, for example, the body were deprived of calcium in the patient’s diet, due to starvation, for example, then the body might compensate for the loss of dietary calcium by taking calcium from the body’s own bones, and thereby weakening them to the point that they would fracture. 

 

Yet both Hannity and Beck pointed at Michael Schiavo as the cause of the compression fractures and demanded a criminal investigation.  There was no claim of beatings of Terri Schiavo, who was seen regularly by both her family and friends prior to her heart attack.  In fact Hannity and Beck offered no evidence except the unsubstantiated claim of the nurse, who was proven to be a liar by FOX, who was not called in 2003 by the Schindlers, and  the “bone scan” which they claimed showed “compression fractures”.    This latter evidence, if true, far from strengthening their claims, actually undermined their own arguments.  It would rather serve as additional evidence that the patient’s eating disorder caused not only the heart attack but the bones to weaken to the point that they fractured in normal use.

 

That both Hannity and Beck appear not to have understood this,  that they were undercutting their own argument, is not only not surprising but typical.  And if you think that either of these Christian gentlemen will be ashamed of their repeated lies, now that they have been exposed here, you would be wrong.  They believe they were lying for a good cause.  They see themselves as liars for Christ. 

 

Hannity has started bragging about his years of study in a seminary and Beck often will talk of his hour in the Garden of Gethsemane ---  before making a sleazy segue to a commercial.  (After we first mentioned his “wink wink” segue from Jesus to commercial, he complained on the air that he did have to after all have commercials.  (But we were not criticizing the commercials but his smarminess.))    

 

They both claim the absolute good of their convictions even as they lie.  They claim righteousness yet when pressed defend lies by reference to the instrumental value of their lies.     

 

For example, they introduced the fraud Dr. Hammesfahr as a “Nobel Prize nominee.”   (He claims his congressman sent a letter to the Nobel committee.)  They  know that this constant association of this quack with the Nobel Prize is another lie but they feel these lies are justified to “save Terri’s life”.

 

Dr. Hammesfahr’s claim that the patient Schiavo could speak was not questioned by either of our Christian gentlemen liars.  And they offered no reasoning to explain why this, their sole expert, was in the minority of doctors who had examined the patient.  Nor could they explain why the judge in the case could find no published papers by their “Nobel Prize nominee.”   Instead they repeatedly made the claim that “the majority of affidavits from medical doctors” support their position.  Affidavits?  See?  Affidavits that is legal talk.  That this coven of doctors had not actually seen the patient nor had any evidence to give in the case was of course never examined.

 

Nor did Beck nor Hannity ever mention the inconvenient facts about their Dr. Hammesfahr:   “In February 2003, the Florida Board of Medicine ruled

 

. . .” ---- Media Matters (http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220002 ) .

 

Given their credulity of Hammesfahr’s claim that the patient Schiavo talked to him who can be surprised that Hannity and Beck accepted without question the Schindler family claim that the patient Schiavo told them “I want to live.” 

 

What if the Schindler family had claimed that an Angel or that Mary, the mother of God, had appeared in the Hospice room?  Would Hannity or Beck have questioned this testimony?

 

Indeed they spiraled down each day damaging their credibility.  They began to exhort their audience to question not only the Florida judges but after an act of Congress the Federal judges too.  Who are you going to believe Hannity and Beck or these State and Federal judges?

 

And the answer came back that the people agreed with the judges and not our Christian gentlemen liars.  (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/)  So Hannity and Beck attacked the polls too!  And the politicians that went along with the Liars for Christ also fell in the polls.  Mr. Bush is still falling.  (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ articles/A43180-2005Apr11.html )    

 

I was originally targeted by the liberal-radicals of the San Francisco Bay Area because I was a conservative Republican who had written letters to President Bush and the U. S. Senate.  So you might suppose I would be sympathetic to his son’s fall in the polls.  I am not.  Nor do I feel anything but contempt for the “conservative” Congressman Mr. DeLay who joined in with Hannity and Beck in attacking the judges:  “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.”

 

And how do I know Mr. DeLay was wrong?  He has himself admitted his error.  But not Hannity and Beck.  Having dragged our party down they fell even further.

 

Both next targeted the Hospice.  Both spoke with dark suspicion of the place that had by all reports kept the patient Schiavo in good health for years.  And Beck joined Michael Weiner in describing the Hospice as a “death camp” for the “extermination” of patients.  And what were Beck and Weiner’s exhortations but an attempt to provoke violence against the Hospice?  If the Hospice is murdering people then isn’t violence justified against the murderers to prevent them from “killing” others? 

 

Indeed isn’t this the reasonable interpretation of Mr. DeLay’s words?  And is this not part of the reason for his apology for his words?

 

But Beck and Weiner did not apologize.

 

Indeed Laura Ingraham, “livid,” joined in.  She  accused those who disagreed with her, society, of being part of the “culture of death.”  This is her accusation against the society that carefully reviewed this case for fifteen years, collecting and confirming, exhaustively, the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that the patient was gone, had died years before.  But “culture of death” was Laura Ingraham’s charge against a society that spends 50% of its medical dollars in the last six months of life. (http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/resources/topics/end_of_life.shtml#fact )

 

Half!  We do everything we can do to stave off death.  Everything that is humanly possible!  Half our money spent in the last six months and this “livid” neurotic, in an emotional fit,  accuses us of being “the culture of death.”

 

And when we first posted this criticism of her, (see Lecture Notes:  March), Laura claimed that she was only concerned that there was no “documentary evidence” of the patient Schiavo’s intentions.  Then in our next posting we called Laura Ingraham’s claim that she was concerned solely about the absence of “documentary” evidence, a lie.  We pointed out that we expected better from a lawyer.  We  pointed out that her emotionalism was no help to anyone trying to decide how we should proceed.

 

So then in her next show she claimed that she could distinguish this case from the thousands of other cases that doctors and families must deal with every week .  “Distinguish” cases.  That is how they talk in law school.  The young law students have to be taught how to “distinguish” cases.

 

She offered that she was only concerned with cases in which the family disagreed with the with drawl of life support.

 

Oh, great!  That is a big help Laura.  Yes thank you.  Of course the only cases that come to court are the cases where some family member disagrees.  That is all the cases.  What we want to know is how to resolve the cases where there is disagreement!  That is the whole point.  Or are we going to give everyone a veto?

 

Now let us stop for a moment and remember that Laura is smarter than me.  So why is she and the others making such obvious mistakes?

 

Nor does Laura Ingraham deal with the Texas law, signed by George Bush, that authorizes the withdrawal of life support in “futile cases.”  Does not even mention it.  Nor does Beck, Hannity, or Weiner.  A fine pack of liars.

 

At any time Laura et al. could have organized a political campaign to write a Florida State statute on this subject.  They did not.  The judges followed the statute.  Federal review determined that the petitioner failed to show a “substantial likelihood” that he would prevail, i.e. prove that the Florida courts failed to protect the rights of the patient Schiavo.  Laura Ingraham never did explain how she would resolve disputes of a similar type, which take place every week.

 

The complaint about the courts was that the judges did not write new law, did not seek and outcome  different from that which the People, meeting in the Legislature of the State of Florida, determined was the best way of resolving such disputes.  Isn’t that what we mean by “judicial restraint”?  Isn’t this what conservatives believe?

 

And as we take the inventory of casualties in this engagement, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Michael Weiner, Glenn Beck,  George Bush, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett,  Bill “killing” Kristol, Tucker Carlson, Debra Saunders, and her husband, the author of the book, “the Culture of Death”, Wesley J. Smith, Barbara Simpson,  Brian Sussman,  Lee Rodgers, and the despicable Mrs. Jack Swanson,  what can we conclude?

 

What of the law?  What of the science?  Wither truth?

 

What are we to make of Beck and Weiner accusing society of “extermination” and the others whose accusations of “judicially sanctioned murder” were made not a month after a Federal judge in Chicago found her family in a pool of blood. And all of this at the same time Weiner is ridiculing the mentally ill abandoned on our sidewalks, or Beck the disabled children riding in the back of “short busses” with “helmets on their heads”?

 

Weiner advocated rounding the homeless up off the sidewalks and shipping them to death camps in the desert.  Hannity and Beck both have segments on their shows were they call up people and ridicule their lack of knowledge of current affairs, etc.  (In one broadcast a caller called in to stump Beck by showing that Beck could not spell the word “peace.”  It worked.  Beck was taken by surprise and his producer had to break in to explain, “p-e-a-c-e.” )

 

But these people, the mentally ill abandoned to the streets, or the ones in the “short busses,” these are exactly the ones we did not “kill,” these are the ones in those hospitals upon whom we spend 50% of our health dollars, these are the ones we try to keep alive.  And these are the ones Hannity, Beck, and Weiner ridicule every week. 

 

And of course, Weiner and Mrs. Jack Swanson are the ones who have for a period of years harassed me, following me from place to place, work place to work place, with Don Imus and Ron Owens and Michael Krasney.  We know that in their private lives they are despicable people.

 

Then too so do many of you.  You know and do nothing.

 

And here in this case of the patient Schiavo, we have seen them, hypocrites, liars, thoroughly dishonest. 

 

Mr. Bush signed the law in Texas that provided for less review than this Florida case received.  Mr. DeLay has himself apologized.

 

Not one of them discussed the CAT scan or even acknowledged that the consensus of medical opinion was on the other side of the case from their simple minded emotionalism.

 

Just in terms of debate tactics, one never leaves off and important piece of evidence.  The CAT scan should have been at least mentioned if only in passing.

 

And more fundamentally if the collected evidence argues against your position why not revise your position if you can not explain the evidence?   If the CAT scan suggests a Persistent Vegetative State why not alter your preconceived views? 

 

They could not discuss the CAT scan because they knew it contradicted their position and they could not defend their opinion.

 

So the charges of NAZI and “the culture of death.”  Call the Hospice a “death camp.”  Call the judges, the legislature, then finally the public wrong. 

 

Mrs. Jack Swanson boasts, “Oh, I’m vicious.”

 

I do not know how to separate out all this from what they have done to me.  My mind turns first to the Red Comedian on the West Coast Weekend show on KQED, to Yvonne sitting in her office, lying to me, week after week, the secretary at GAB Robins going through my briefcase, the San Rafael Police dispatcher reporting on the movement of the “Colonial Motel Suspect,”  the adjusters in Portland Maine talking about my mother’s death before I learned of it, the trash talking druggy Scott Bobro at Farmers, and that Farmers agent in Marin, insisting again and again that I tell him my address, “where do you live?  Where do you live?” he demanded.  The dishonesty.  From top to bottom.

 

I do not understand you.  How do you justify yourselves?  How do you live with yourselves?    

 

And then the new pope tells the cardinals that relativism "recognises nothing definitive and its final measure is no more than ego and desire".  You see?  They know the absolute.  They are on the side of absolute Truth, Goodness, God.  This is how they justify themselves.  They are Liars for Christ. 

 

“Destiny.  My destiny!  Droll thing life is-- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets.  I have wrestled with death.  It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.  It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.  If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.” --- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

 

Africa's last chance, World Bank warns

April 18, 2005

Washington - World Bank president James Wolfensohn has urged global action to help Africa meet targets to slash Aids and poverty by 2015.

He said that this year provided a "last opportunity" to make the necessary changes if Africa was to meet the so-called Millennium Development Goals.

"Looking ahead, and with just a decade to go to 2015, achieving the (goals) presents an enormous challenge," he told a meeting of the International Monetary Fund's policy-setting committee in Washington.

Africa has been hardest hit by HIV infections. The Great Lakes region is home to more than 6-million people infected with the virus, according to World Bank figures.

Last week the bank approved a $20-million (about R125-million) grant to step up the fight against Aids in the six Great Lakes countries: Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. - Sapa-AFP.

 

 What are you doing?

 

 

Are you responsible for anything?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lecture Notes:  4-14-05

Conditions of Time and Place

 

Pope John Paul the Great was born in the East and lived for years in a Marxist state.  His view of the market was colored by Marxism and by the Church’s own teachings about the market, commercialism, consumerism, usury, (i.e. the charging of interest).

 

Like most classically educated philosophers he found the theories of the market as disturbing as classically educated physicists found the new physics of the quanta;  e.g. Dr. Einstein’s “God does not play dice with the universe.”

 

Can “value” really be so ephemeral as to be nothing more than the transitory subjective evaluation of the consumers in one fleeting moment in time?  Are there no absolutes?

 

So, because of his limitations of time and place he was skeptical of the market.  He could not accept that the “market” was encoded in our genes, that it works because it is the direct expression of how we are wired, how we think, perceive.  He thought that this was a question of “ideology.”  In philosophical terms the market may be regarded as a theory of how to organize society and that communism is another competing theory.  But this is not quite right.  True they are both of them “theories” yet only a philosopher can find this equivalence meaningful.  

 

Our market theory results from the study of human evolutionary development over millions of years, with conscious and deliberate study of market interactions as a subject of scientific inquiry over the last several hundred years.  Communism was merely the result of a few philosopher’s speculations founded on the false notion of “scientific objectivism” developed in the Nineteenth Century, and shown to be false both analytically and by practical experiment in which several individual countries were walled off with one side being the experimental portion and the other the control. 

 

Communism’s failure proved that there is not an “objective” one best way despite the appeal of this idea to our simian minds.  This idea of an objective “best” is appealing to the human brain because the social animal man, this social predator,  evolved in a social organism, a social structure of dominance hierarchy, of progressively “superior” power organization, culminating in the leader, the best, God.  This single hierarchical structure of the best, though intuitively appealing, does not correspond to reality, in which there are various contending values, which arise and decline over time in our minds,  which is  itself an ever changing pattern of neuron networks, ideas, spilling into consciousness joining with other neuron networks, and for which a marginal increase or decrease can be noted but to which no single absolute “objective” value can be affixed.   

 

The way we define our human ancestors in archeology, the way we distinguish ourselves from the other ancient great apes,  is by the presence of tools among the fossils.  Tools?  (It is a male thing.)  ‘Property’,  is better.  Stone Age property among the fossils.  We have the bone needles and knives too.  And then too there is all the other property which we have not inherited.  The mats woven out of reeds, the animal skins.  We have the sea shells, but not the utensils made of leaves, bark, twigs, gourds, all those female things whose existence we can guess at; but over the millions of years, all of these have been reduced to dust, only the stones, and bones, and sea shells remain, proclaiming:  these were mankind’s ancestors:   Owners of  Property.   

 

Then there is all the “real property”, the territory, that the ancient ancestors guarded; again all this can only be guessed at from anthropological observations of modern human hunter bands, and by inference from our field studies of our fellow creatures.  More attention has been paid to the ‘competition’ between hunter groups than the cooperation within the hunter communities.  (Again a male thing;  another limitation of time and place.)  I think John Paul the Great would have appreciated the find of the toothless skeleton about whom it was theorized he had been cared for by someone, a whole group of someones. .(http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/PA_NEWA25125781112785897A0?source=)  Not all churchmen would have.  Even today some churchmen would have been threatened by the dating:  7 million years.  (More limitations of Time and Place.)   But he was not afraid.

 

However, the problems he identified were not themselves the product of the market but were rather problems resulting from our  failure to utilize the market;  the failure to use our human creativity.  This failure results from two reasons:

 

One, the most common reason for the failure to use the market is the limitation of time and place itself, i.e. the universe.  Ludwig von Mises relates the story of the Menshevik at an early communist congress, who, after listening for hours to one Bolshevik speaker after another denounce the “exploitation” of the workers, stood up and shouted,  “The universe is the greatest  exploiter!” 

 

Just that, the brutal cold universe is the main reason for our failure to use the market.  The universe gives up its secrets only grudgingly.  Our simian brains grasp the meaning only haltingly, painfully.   We do not know how to develop energy more efficiently, or mine minerals, or grow crops,  all the things we do not know how to do, these are what prevent us from utilizing the market. 

 

This failure is not the failure of the market mechanism itself, as Ludwig von Mises points out, if the capitalists can be faulted for anything in this respect, it is there utter credulity, their sometimes laughable willingness to “try” seemingly anything.  He notes for example, that the constantly heard claim of a  100 miles per gallon carburetor sitting in a safe deposit box in a Detroit bank vault is not believable if only because of the accumulated evidence that in a  market economy  no idea is unfunded for long.

 

But the more obvious and vexing cause of all the rest of the world’s grief, which John Paul the Great observed, is again not the result of the market but rather results from the  unwillingness of humanity to allow the market to operate.  Thus the second cause for our failure to use markets to end suffering then, is the failure of governments, society, us, our failure, to establish stable legal environments in which the market can operate to end human suffering to the extent alleviation is humanly possible. 

 

One wishes for the opportunity to tell John Paul the Great that we ought not blame the market for our grief  but the unwillingness of humanity to allow the market.  The market is the most efficient way of organizing human action. (The name of Ludwig von Mises’ book.)   If the first problem in utilizing markets can be surmounted,  i.e. if we can overcome our human ignorance, then the only thing standing between ourselves and the alleviation of human suffering is not the market but our shameful disorganization, or irrational obstruction of the market.

 

As George Gilder pointed out in his ‘Wealth and Poverty’,  reversing a liberal piety :  “Crime causes poverty.”   It is easy to see that Mugabe  in  Zimbabwe, for instance, is a villain whose policies have run that country into ever more hideous poverty.  However the clarity of our observation misleads us into supposing that here in America all is right with the world and markets are busy ending human suffering.   

 

In housing, education, medicine, transportation, agriculture, electrical energy production, oil and gas, the currency and banking, in fact in every sector of the economy our interference with the market is sometimes far more invasive than anything Mr. Mugabe has ever contemplated in his little basket case of a country, and perhaps our interference is in many instances more destructive to the operation of the market, yet we are unaware of the damage we have done, are doing this very moment, only because our vast wealth is matched by our vast stupidity, selfishness, which blinds us to the harm we do, are inflicting on others, our fellow if anonymous countrymen, protected as we are by our thickly wadded  ignorance. 

 

Counselor: . . . What is it?  Why have you stopped . . . what’s wrong?

 

Nothing.  It is better to continue,  it takes my mind off the time running out.

 

Counselor:  But you want to come here full time don’t you?

 

Yes.  Yes of course.  It is just, . . . you know, the change  . . . from living. 

 

 

 

And if you are thinking, “Just what we need, another apologia for free enterprise,” then you still have not grasped the point.  There is no alternative to the market.  That is all there is.  That is who you are.

 

It means nothing more to criticize the market than to criticize our noses, or our thumbs, or the way our feet go back and forth when we walk. 

 

Once and for all give up your illusions, hallucinations, pretensions.  There is nothing else.  There is no “third way.”  There is the market, and there is the market at various levels of distortion, where it has been manipulated by powerful people, sometimes acting under color of law, and sometimes not bothering with the mask of righteousness:  brazen plunder.

 

Or if you say that you don’t see what difference it makes if we criticize markets or, as I would have it, if we instead criticize the way markets are implemented?  Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?  Either we are being screwed by the market or we are being screwed by the rich and powerful who have manipulated the market;  doesn’t  it come out the same way?  What’s the difference? 

 

It makes no difference if you do not mind straying around aimlessly lost in your illusions. 

 

John Paul the Great might have focused his criticism where it belonged.  Not on the abstraction, the intellectual construction, ‘the market;’   he might have criticized what deserved criticism:  humanity, and humanity’s sin:  ignorance.

 

By focusing on the market he misdirected the people’s scrutiny away from themselves, where it belonged, and instead encouraged them to look ‘out there’ as if they were being thwarted, poisoned, by markets.

 

First realize what we are not discussing.   We are not discussing “Christian charity.”  Go ahead and give, give all you like.  What we are discussing is not charity but how society is best organized.  And when John Paul the Great criticized consumerism, commercial culture, the market, he was not himself offering charity as an alternative.  The Church does not teach that charity is a substitute for the ordinary work a day world.  The Church would rather a man had a job, a job of his own, and the dignity that that confers, than that he be the beneficiary of charity, no matter how generous.

 

Also consider how first was the good created that is to be given in charity?

 

And have you never reflected that the social welfare regulations were first written not in times of famine and ruin, but in times of surplus?  It was only after capitalism began heaping up abundance that child labor, minimum wage, collective bargaining, 40 hour work week, safety and health, pollution, and all the other laws which we now teach our children protect us became possible.  Now, several generations later, this dogma, ideology is accepted as ‘truth.’ 

 

But know this, before the welfare state there was the market that begat the welfare that the statists now claim to have been their beneficence.  (Some simpleminded conservatives feel the need to speak against charity as if they feel compelled to choose up sides.)  We are not speaking against charity, or social welfare legislation, we are examining the conditions that make them possible.

 

Or more to the point what we are really examining is not the underlying  reality of the market but how that reality is misperceived, by John Paul the Great, and others, and how this misperception leads us further and further away from the reality of our situation into darkness.

 

For example, consider how far you are already surrounded by darkness.  See how John Paul the Great was not alone in having limitations of time and place. 

 

Which country has greater state involvement in its economy, the U. S. or Sweden?

 

At first one would suppose Sweden.  Taxes are higher there so their 60% income taxes must mean higher state involvement in the economy, right?

 

First consider that not all Swedes pay the highest tax rate, (not even the ones who are supposed to pay).  Second consider that in Sweden the medical sector is counted as part of the “state” sector.  In America 15% of the GDP is tied to the medical sector ( http://la.indymedia.org/news/2005/03/124278.php ),  higher than any other country.  Why do you suppose that is?  Could it be that some very smart people have taken control of this sector and are using it to enrich themselves?  Have you never wondered why America is not training tens of thousands of doctors a year and sending them out to all the world?  (Open University has created a medical school program for people around the globe.  But not the USA. Why?  Greed?  Selfishness?  Plunder?  Manipulation of the market to the grief of the people? )  But please do not tell me that this is the result of the market.  Yet the medical sector is one of the most tightly regulated, controlled sectors of the economy.   

 

You call the medical sector “private” yet from a purely economic perspective this label is arbitrary.  There is no innovation of products and services to meet consumer’s changing demands.  There is no free entry.  Most importantly substitution is not allowed.  A priesthood of “medical doctors” exercises a monopoly control and has decisive influence over the  legislative  regulation.  What would the U. S. statistics look like if we moved the medical sector over into the government sector based on the degree of regulation?

 

Let’s see:  Federal 20 -22% of GDP, (http://www.house.gov/jec/growth/govtsize/govtsize.htm), State and Local  at 16-17% (http://www.house.gov/jec/growth/govtsize/govtsize.htm), 1993 estimate,  plus 15% medical =  why that is 54%!  Astonishing!

 

And here we have just briefly examined one sector of the economy. [Note: Federal spending is projected to become 35% by 2050 if Medicare and Social Security continue as expected. (http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7117)]  (Yes, thank you class.  There is a little overlap in Medicare appearing here as Federal and then being counted again in the medical sector.  Thank you.  We are ball parking these numbers.  As will be seen we can not even calculate all the control exercised over real estate, manufacturing, pensions, etc.  Technically they are “private”  but the question we are examining is are these sectors  still part of the market economy?)  And see how you have accepted this, even enjoying feelings of superiority over Sweden, and yet what is your misunderstanding of all of this but another example of the limitations of time and place.

 

What is really shocking is how little free enterprise there is in the American economy.   

 

For example, you may feel that in America the insurance industry is private.  So all the statistics reflect this.  But what possible difference does it make to you if you pay “tax” dollars or “insurance” dollars?  Because one is “voluntary”?  What do you mean voluntary?  Do you want health insurance or not?  Yes, ok, you can choose company A, or company B, but the dollars will leave your wallet and go to a huge bureaucracy, tightly controlled by the legislature, state or federal, sometimes, as in medical insurance, both.  The amounts charged taxes or premiums, (as you like it), are determined by state regulators.  The amounts paid also are determined by regulators, and the legislatures, and of course, all of this is overseen by the judiciary.

 

You call this free enterprise?  And not just health insurance but in all sectors of insurance the “products” offered by the insurance industry are determined by the state not the consumer’s demand.  The language of the policies is often written by the state, the pay outs determined by the state, the amounts charged, (premiums or taxes) determined by the state.  Many states require auto insurance so even the fig leaf of “voluntary’ action is removed.  The judges, i.e. the state, oversee all.

 

Often it is claimed that there is no litigation explosion because the number of new law suits has not sharply risen.  This is true and false.  Once the precedence is established, insurance adjusters start adjusting their claims accordingly.  For example, at one time insurance adjusters did not pay for the loss of psychic abilities.  Then after the California courts said that a fortune-teller’s claim that her injury in an accident caused her to lose the ability to see into the future, all of the adjusters took the judicial instruction and began taking releases in similar claims.  Only "new" cases, i.e. cases with a new theory of liability, go to trial.  What is significant is not the total number of new lawsuits but rather the total number of new rulings, i.e. instructions to pay. 

 

What possible difference can it make to you if your money is siphoned off in taxes by the legislature, or by the judiciary in premiums?  The insurance industry is the tax collector for the judiciary.    The judges sit like kings of olden times in their courts ruling on this case or that and then some startling money awards are reported in the press.  What most readers do not think to consider is that for every trial court decision there are tens of thousands of similar claims in insurance claims offices around the country awaiting the court’s decision.  And from that day forward, until legislation to the contrary is passed, or policies rewritten, (of course only with regulatory or legislative approval), claims are paid based on that judge’s ruling.  Payments made not for that one award that you read about in your newspapers but for the tens of thousands of other similar claims  If the tort claims were a tax it has been estimated that this one portion of the insurance industry would account for a 3% wage tax or an 8% capital tax, ( http://www.policyalmanac.org/economic/archive/torts.shtml )  or 2% of GDP, ( http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2005/04/08/53576.htm  ), and that is tort claims alone.

 

So now what?  54% of GDP under state control  plus 2% for tort claims = 56% state controlled.  Can you speak Swedish?  The rest of insurance (other than tort and medical) accounts for another 1%?   57% of the GDP either directly under state control or so closely directed as to make no difference.  57% of the economy removed from the market and directed by the state.  What else?

 

From the perspective of the market, from the perspective of “free enterprise”, what is “free” about any of this enterprise?  What free association of consumers and producers is really taking place?  Are the demands of the consumers being carefully analyzed and satisfied by entrepreneurs responding to the changing marketplace?  Of course not.      

 

Our regular College Visitors will already have been lectured to about the intervention of government in the housing sector and how zoning and building codes are used to limit supply.  {see Lecture Notes:   03-21-05 [see paper no. 1948. Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko  The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability ( http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2002papers/2002list.html )];  Lecture Notes:  03-18-05     Betrayal IV;  Lecture Notes:  03-17-05   Betrayal III;  Lecture Notes:  03-15-05   Betrayal ;  Lecture Notes:  12-17-04   Betrayal . . .  

 

Counselor:  He has a lot of issues with betrayal.

 

. . . Lecture Notes:  12-02-04;  Lecture Notes:  10-28-04, How do you sustain yourself?;  Lecture Notes:  09-30-04, Junkie Nation;  Lecture Notes:  08-03-04, The Truth;  Lecture Notes:  06-30-04, Upper Class Warfare;  Lecture Notes:  06-28-04;  Lecture Notes:  06-26-04}

 

Thus far we have yet to put a figure on this government manipulation of the market. How much of real estate is out of the market economy and under state control?  (?%) Well?  Oh, you have not thought about it?  Ok, we can wait?   . . . So?  What is the answer?  Come on we do not have all day.  How much?

 

Agriculture? 17% of the GDP but how much should be put in the  private sector and how much under government control? (http://www.ndu.edu/icaf/industry/IS2003/papers/2003%20Agribusiness.htm )  Direct farm subsidies of $20 billion a year, with 45% going to just 7% of the farmers, (  http://www.retrovsmetro.org/book/chapter_2.html?c=2&p=1 ) however this represents only a fraction of all subsidies.  Ag research, rural electrification and phones, small business administration, Army Corps of Engineers, guaranteed and subsidized loans, a constant torrent of public money flows out to the farm states protected by a Senate which is disproportionately weighted with representatives of agricultural states.  These farm state Senators do not see their constituency as the United States but rather know their job is to secure more subsidies for their states.  Where are we now 59%?  62%?  

 

Regular College Visitors will have read about the state monopoly of the roads and highways and will have already considered how state control has retarded technical innovation in this sector of the economy.  (After Technical Correction Number Five was posted Michael Krasney had a couple of local bureaucrats on his KQED radio program to discuss the Bay Area highway system.  A caller asked about “how digital technology can improve the carrying capacity of our highways?”  The guests snipped that “well . . . (long sarc II pause) . . . the technology is just not there yet that can drive your car for you.”   Of course, the caller did not ask about cars that “drive your car for you.”  He only asked about “digital” technology which he did not define. (But I was encourage that from their answer they appeared to be responding not to the caller but to my posting here at New Ruskin College.) 

 

But here we now consider the value to the GDP of our state controlled highway system.  When a highway is built through real estate how much of the resulting increase in property value should be accounted for as private and how much as public?  I realize that all the profits will be counted as private and all the costs of the road will be billed out as public, but how much of the GDP is thus public sector?  Are we Swedish yet?  63%? 65%?

 

And if you are thinking well yes, of course, roads they are public, then think again, or at any rate read Technical Correction Number Five.  They could be sold off and privatized.  But reflect why are not elevators public?  How about hall ways?  Why do we build fire houses, and install fire mains in our streets as a public enterprise, but regard sprinklers in a high rise buildings as private?  We will pave our city streets as a public project and let private cars park on the street for free, but the building of a parking garage for a multi story building is entirely a private activity.  Why?  What is this, this misunderstanding of yours, but another limitation of time and place?

 

I originally argued for government assistance in the development of computer aided individualized instruction by pointing out that the huge government subsidies to public schools made it impossible for private companies to compete.  Therefore I argued that a private market could not develop the innovative new methods that were so desperately needed to educate the children of the world.  President Bush, (41), commented at the time he had “heard about that sophisticated argument” when a reporter presented him with this argument in a press conference.  (see New Ruskin College Project in the Moynihan)

 

Though he had “heard” the “sophisticated argument” before he still had no answer for it.  He did not help develop the laser disks.  He was not reelected either.  There is a rough justice in the world.

 

See here conservatives two things:   First see in what darkness you walk.  You think that yes America is the home of free enterprise and Sweden is socialist or nearly so.  But what if this “objective” reality of yours was an hallucination?  An accounting gimmick?  What if you have been suckered?

 

And that is the second point:  How many times have you been beseeched that we need just a little more, please, a few dollars, and all will be well.  But see now, the darkness is pushed back a little and you can see how much of our money has already been taken from the private market economy and redirected to highways in West Virginia, stop lights in Chicago, tractor research grants to California, new regulation to “improve” health care in our hospitals, or help the little scholars in our schools, or . . . and on it goes . . . a never ending torrent of money . . . and then there is the so called “private economy”:  as we have seen medicine, insurance, operate, exist as they do only at government sufferance,  “private real estate” development at public expense with all of its zoning and building codes, supported by government finance monopolies and protected by tax shelters in the tax code,  the private pension funds regulated, controlled, and directed by government,  regulation of products, labor, construction, from corner markets to nuclear power plants, autos, aircraft, medicines, and the look of a new building’s façade,  regulation upon regulation, review commissions, planning boards, and after all of  that the judiciary and litigation, litigation sometimes for years, and all of this money which is in truth being directed by government is still counted as “private”.  Ah, private, then it must be ok.

 

Private gains, public losses.  Yet I tell you that people are dying because of these distortions.  However, owing to the limitations of your place and time you are not even aware of the extent of your intervention in, your manipulation of, the market. 

  

Not even aware of the harm you are causing.  That is how far you are from the truth. 

 

 

 

 

GET WELL SOON!
laura.jpg
"Laura Ingraham, thank God, is fine!"

04-27-05:

Counselor:  So I guess you are feeling pretty small?

 

What.  I . . . What did I do . . . we were  . . . you know  . . . debating . . . I gave her special dispensation . . . I didn’t know she was engaged . . . but I was trying to  . . . help . . . eh . . .  so good, . . .  I was only trying to  . . . help her . . .

 

Counselor: . . . um, hum . . .

 

I wish her well . . . ah . . . God bless you Laura Ingraham .  . .

 

 

 

04-28-05:

Counselor:  I’m sure she will do fine.

 

Yes, yes.  Our technical analysis of biotechnology is that the learning curve is starting to turn upwards.  All the old medicine is based on yesterday’s experience.  As the rate of technical change increases the past experience fades in importance because the doctor’s advise is always drawn from out of date statistics, increasingly out of date statistics, because based on the old technology.

 

This is the point we have been making.  The increasing rate of change always surprises. 

 

Counselor:  So she is better off than her doctors know.

 

Yes exactly.  Much better than they know, and increasingly better off . . . the rate of change ---

 

Counselor:  Um, hum, so she will have babies the regular way she will not need your help after all?

 

 . . .

 

Counselor:  So she will not need your special dispensation? . . . maybe you could give it to Ann Coulter?

 

Oh, that croc, she can lay her eggs anywhere. 

 

Counselor:  You just never learn do you? 

 

I'm sorry Ann . . . we all have to be on our best behavior while Laura recuperates.

 

Counselor:  Better.  Now let’s see.  Senator McCain was on Imus’ show and said,  “The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.”  And you said, quoting from ‘A Dance to the Music of Time,’ by Anthony Powell,  quoting the closing line . . . where was that?  Oh, yes I remember on  The Hannity Carnival,  Lecture Notes: 03-26-05,(http://www.newruskincollege.com/id29.html),  remember the “Press Release from the Outdoor Amusement Industry of America,” when Hannity was staked out trying to drum up ratings ---

 

(She has a photographic memory.)

 

Counselor:  ---  where was that you ended that Lecture Note .  .  . quoting Athony Powell A Dance To the Music of Time ----

 

What is your point?   

 

Counselor:  Was Senator McCain sending a message to you?  Is this another example?  Why doesn’t he just use email?

 

. . . .

 

Counselor:  No?  Is he saying something more to you?

 

Yeah, he is probably saying, ‘Go ahead blow you f - - - ing brains out on the walls of the KQED building we don’t care.’ . . . something like that.

 

Counselor:  Oh?  (No one pouts for you like Yvonne.)  And what about all that “Faith of My Fathers' stuff?  Republicans . . . Navy Families . . . I thought you said your grandfathers served together in World War II?  Remember?  Their carriers patrolling the Japanese home waters together?

 

As Weber said:  “The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy. . . The specific intellectual and mystical attempts at salvation in the face of these tensions succumb in the end to the world dominion of unbrotherliness. On the one hand, their charisma is not accessible to everybody. Hence, in intent, mystical salvation definitely means aristocracy; it is an aristocratic religiosity of redemption. And, in the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree ( e.g. Marin, and increasingly the whole Bay Area as exclusionary zoning continues to restrict, limit, and evict). Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.”

 

bush.jpg

04-29-05:

Gosh Mr. President.  Where did that come from?  If you did that in 2004 you would have won in a landslide.  You been studying up?

 

Counselor:  So you thought his press conference went well?

 

Well?   Who was that?  He was articulate.  He was in command of the facts, detail.  He was humorous.  Thoughtful.  What’s not to like?

 

Counselor:  Well . . .

 

What.

 

Counselor:  Well, like you say, it is not very flattering to be so surprised.

 

Right. Right.  Fine, Mr. President, sir.

 

Counselor:  This doesn’t change our plans does it?

 

No, not at all.  It is just . . . ironic.  I mean now I can die.     

 

 

 

04-29-05:

Mrs. Jack Swanson was a no show today for her radio program.  Her absence yesterday was explained as a “travel day”.  But today we heard no excuses.  Did the station manager, Jack Swanson, know where his morning drive radio “personality” was, . . . hiding?  Oh, Mrs. Jack Swanson, come out, come out wherever you are.

 

Coward!

 

She was proud of how “vicious” she was.  She had me followed and delighted in going on the radio to taunt me.  She used her contacts with the millionaire owners of CENCAL Insurance Services to harasse me.  She worked with Don Imus to ruin me.  She positively rejoiced in her viciousness.  But now, when confronted, she hides.

 

And Al Franken side stepped today.  He has been making references to this web site, (see Stewed Tomatoes), but after we gave him every opportunity, (we praised Mr. Bush, we supported his Iraq policy, we contradicted Al Franken’s putdowns of the democracy movements of  the  Moslem Middle East states), and yet Mr. Franken did not respond.  How typical, snipe, sneer,  but when confronted ----

 

And this is another aspect of Al Franken’s cowardice:  mocking and ridiculing the Moslem’s halting steps towards democracy, but when challenged Al Franken was a no show also.  He snipes but he will not respond directly.  (Your ridicule of the Moslems is just because you, as you yourself said, “hate” Mr. Bush, right?  There is no other reason is there? No . . . prejudice, is there?)   

 

Coward!

 

Imus at least does not pretend, or hide.  He acknowledged “The dog barks, the caravan moves on.”    (Take note of that, Al “the coward” Franken.)

 

 *   *   *   *  *  *

 

Site Report for: www.newruskincollege.com

Date Range: 4/21/2005 to 4/21/2005

                                      343.

irs.gov

 

 

No, not yet.  Check back later.  Just a few more weeks. 

The horror!  The horror!

 

The horror!  The horror!

 

Hey!   Laura look:  The Dartmouth Review!

 

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:O-8FeklH3wEJ:dartlog.net/news/index.index+%22new+ruskin+college%22&hl=en

 

http://dartlog.net/news/2005/04/17#Feedster.httpnewruskincollegeblogspotcom200504cultureoflifeatnewruskincollegehtml

 

http://about.feedster.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewruskincollege.blogspot.com%2Fatom.xml

 

Counselor:  That is so pathetic.

 

What do you mean?  . . . we are helping to educate tomorrow's leaders . . .

 

Counselor:  So what is this?    http://www.trucking101.info/trucking/18397.html  You are being published on a trucker’s blog?

 

I am a populist conservative . . . I am . . . eh . . . a man of the people.  Yes that’s it.  I’m a man of the people!    

 

Laura, I give you permission to use my name on the birth certificate.  The rest of you conservatives listen up.  If Laura wants to have a baby out of wedlock.  Well that is ok.  It will not affect her standing as a conservative do you hear?  Good.  It is ok Laura we grant you special dispensation . . . if you want. 

 

Counselor:  What are you doing?

 

I just want to make sure everything is taken care of before I go.

 

 

Andromeda and the Sea-Nymphs
 
Charles Kingsley (1819–75)
 
 
From “Andromeda”
 
 
  AW’D by her own rash words she was still: and her eyes to the seaward
Look’d for an answer of wrath: far off, in the heart of the darkness,
Bright white mists rose slowly; beneath them the wandering ocean
Glimmer’d and glow’d to the deepest abyss; and the knees of the maiden
Trembled and sank in her fear, as afar, like a dawn in the midnight,         5
Rose from their seaweed chamber the choir of the mystical sea-maids.
Onward toward her they came, and her heart beat loud at their coming,
Watching the bliss of the gods, as waken’d the cliffs with their laughter.
Onward they came in their joy, and before them the roll of the surges
Sank, as the breeze sank dead, into smooth green foam-fleck’d marble,         10
Aw’d; and the crags of the cliff, and the pines of the mountain were silent.
  Onward they came in their joy, and around them the lamps of the sea nymphs,
Myriad fiery globes, swam panting and heaving; and rainbows,
Crimson and azure and emerald, were broken in star-showers, lighting
Far through the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus,         15
Coral and sea-fan and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the ocean.
  Onward they came in their joy, more white than the foam which they scatter’d,
Laughing and singing, and tossing and twining, while eager, the Tritons
Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreprov’d, and above them in worship
Hover’d the terns, and the seagulls swept past them on silvery pinions         20
Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins
Sigh’d as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which bore them
Curv’d up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms of the maiden,
Pawing the spray into gems, till the fiery rainfall, unharming,
Sparkled and gleam’d on the limbs of the nymphs, and the coils of the mermen.         25
  Onward they went in their joy, bath’d round with the fiery coolness,
Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal: but others,
Pitiful, floated in silence apart; in their bosoms the sea-boys,
Slain by the wrath of the seas, swept down by the anger of Nereus;
Hapless, whom never again on strand or on quay shall their mothers         30
Welcome with garlands and vows to the temple, but wearily pining
Gaze over island and bay for the sails of the sunken; they heedless
Sleep in soft bosoms forever, and dream of the surge and the sea-maids.
  Onward they pass’d in their joy; on their brows neither sorrow nor anger;
Self-sufficing, as gods, never heeding the woe of the maiden.         35
 

 

One Man, One Vote:

 

". . .these plaintiffs and others similarly situated, are denied the equal protection of the laws accorded them by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States by virtue of the debasement of their votes, …"

 

We conclude that the complaint's allegations of a denial of equal protection present a justiciable constitutional cause of action upon which appellants are entitled to a trial and a decision. The right asserted is within the reach of judicial protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

 

The judgment of the District Court is reversed and the cause is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

 

Reversed and remanded.

 

---Baker v. Carr,    369 U.S. 186 (1962) (http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Baker/ )

 

 

Ventura County             753,197    North Dakota     634,366

San Francisco County    776,773   South Dakota   754,844

San Mateo County         697,456   Wyoming           593,782

Orange County             2,957,766   Connecticut   3,405,565   

Contra Costa County    1,001,136   Delaware        783,600

Santa Clara County      1,682,585   Montana          902,194

Los Angeles County 10,179,716     Ohio            11,352,140     

Alameda County           1,433,741   Maine             1,274,923

San Diego County        2,813,833   Mississippi    2,697,243

Riverside County         1,545387   Vermont            608,827

San Bernardino County1,709,433 West Virginia 1,808,344

Sacramento County      1,330,711  Rhode Island   1,048,319 

 

 

Votes in the U. S. Senate:         0                                       24

 

 

This is a Senate that cares more for cattle than people.  Cares more for the health of hogs than the health of our children. 

 

This is a Senate that represents more acres of wheat than people.  Represents the special interests of its “constituents” not the American people.

 

This is not the United States Senate.  It is the Ag Senate.  It is the Commodities Senate.      

 

The people are forsaken.  And if you should make the mistake of writing these Senators, beware, they will destroy you.

 

“I’ve heard what you do to some of your listeners.”   ---Senator Hatch on the Imus show  

 

 

This just in:

And do you not think that Senator Craig can count votes?  . . . in the Ag Senate?

 

 Alameda County          1,433,741     Idaho  1,393,262

 

If an Alameda County Supervisor were to propose this he would not be taken seriously.  But because the Senator “represents” not Alameda County but Idaho there is a chance he can over turn our immigration laws from the floor of the Senate, i.e. without a Senate Committee’s approval. 

 

Such is the power of the Senate that it can raise up such a person to such power!

 

WASHINGTON:    Sen. Larry Craig., R-Idaho, could not be talked out of trying to add AgJobs, a farm worker measure that would create a new temporary guest worker program that offered the prospect of legalization and eventual citizenship to migrant workers.

 

When word spread that such additions might be in the wind, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Tiburon, Marin, Calif., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, authored a non-binding resolution that no such measures be added. It passed 61-38. But almost immediately after that resolution passed, the immigration provisions began to be offered. More of the same is expected today.

 

Feinstein was particularly upset at the notion that AgJobs could be considered now.

"This is going to be a huge magnet" for illegal immigrants, Feinstein warned her colleagues during an impassioned floor speech. "Mark my words." That measure, she said, "could bring millions of people into this country - workers, their spouses, their minor children."

 

Feinstein said bills like AgJobs should go through the traditional committee hearing and debate process.

 

But Craig has been trying to get his measure onto the Senate floor for more than two years and saw the Iraq bill as his chance. Craig has long said if given a chance on the floor, his bill would pass.”  ----  Dems Try to Sneak Immigration Reform in Iraq Bill

NewsMax.com Wires,  Friday, April 15, 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Iman, you are a lone wolf.”

--- Patrick McEnroe, 

during his last appearance. 

 

 

 

Lecture Notes:  04-08-05

Ah!  Who could have known?

 

Others Aware of Red Lake Plans, Officials Say

As Many as Four Believed to Have Helped Plot Attack

By Dana Hedgpeth and Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 2, 2005; Page A03

 

RED LAKE, Minn., April 1 -- As many as 20 teenagers may have known ahead of time about plans for the shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people on the Indian reservation here March 21, tribal and federal officials said Friday.

 

W.Post: http://www.newruskincollege.com/moynihanmemoriallibrarynewruskincollegecom/id20.html

 

NYT:  http://www.newruskincollege.com/moynihanmemoriallibrarynewruskincollegecom/id20.html

 

No!  You don’t say?  Can you imagine?  As many as 20 people?  They Knew?

 

Fortunately we are surrounded by the lights of “the culture of life.”

 

And who are they:  the representatives of  “the culture of life”?  People like Michael Weiner, who previously advocated rounding up the homeless and trucking them off to remote Western deserts where they were to be left to die.  He advocated death camps, and the transportation of the undesirables, and the Vice President of the United States of America still went on his show!

 

He repeatedly avowed that the adherents of Islam were “subhuman”, making no distinction between ordinary Moslems and terrorists, in fact advocating a religious war, (this while our young men were in a war, in several Moslem nations), and despite this Michael Weiner is put on Armed Forces Radio, and broadcast into that same war zone!

 

Just as there have been repeated attacks on the homeless in this country by fans of the “Savage Nation”, so too we have seen that our soldiers have humiliated, beaten and killed their “Moslem” prisoners, and not one member of our “the culture of life” seems to have “known” that there might be a connection between this dehumanization of a people, over a period of years, the repeated slurs, lies, and incitements to violence and the actual acts --- the killing.  

 

The same Vice President appeared recently on the Don Imus show, another member of “the culture of life”.

 

And what can be said of Armed Forces Radio?  Why would they broadcast racial and religious hatred into a war zone?  But then, why would our Armed Forces load 30 soldiers into helicopters and fly them into sand storms?  What was the mission in Western Iraq, or just yesterday in Afghanistan that required that risk?

 

Were they closing in on the terrorists with the bio-weapons?  ‘Men, this is our last chance to save humanity,’  was that it?

 

Or was it just that some Colonel could not admit that the flight, “the mission”, could be canceled, grounded until the sand storm passed?  Could not admit that “the mission” was not so important, as to require a helicopter, fully loaded with 30 of our sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, to fly into a sand storm . . . in the night . . .? 

 

And then the generals at the Pentagon speak in wonder that America does not trust them with her sons. 

 

They who choose to broadcast Michael Weiner into a war zone, who hand out Xeroxed copies of maps to National Guardsmen who have just that day arrived at the base, and tell them, to “Go out and find the insurgents . . . Present yourselves to the enemy . . . for combat!”   Thus speaks Colonel Blimp.

 

And you know what?  Those National Guardsmen took those Xeroxed maps and they did go out and “present” themselves to the enemy.  And lived to tell about it.   But that is why America does not trust the bureaucrats in the Pentagon with her sons.  They have come back and told us what is really going on.

 

We have learned how the flight rules allow fully laden helicopters to be flown into sand storms rather than require the egotistical self absorbed Colonel to explain why his “mission” is so important that he has risked so many lives. 

 

Did anyone at the Pentagon “know” that needless risks are being taken.  Did they “know” and yet do nothing?  Did they “know” that Michael Weiner was inciting religious intolerance?  Did they “know” that flight rules were allowing needless risk?  Do they “know” that their incompetence is undermining our strategic policy? 

How about you?  Do you “know”?  Are you part of “the culture of life”?   

 

What else do you “know”?

 

 

 

 

.