As Democratic and Republican members rush to line up with new bills to restrict speech or guns after the Tucson massacre, Rep. Peter King once again will not be outdone in criminalizing conduct. He is reportedly planning to introduce a bill that would make it illegal to knowingly carry a gun within 1,000 feet of the President, Vice President, Members of Congress or judges of the Federal Judiciary. This, of course, raises the problem with politicians being mobile. In states allowing concealed weapons, the appearance of any federal official or judge would require a fast estimation of 1,000 feet to avoid criminal charges.
However, Rep. Louie Gohmert is about to introduce legislation to allow members to carry guns in Congress. Thus, armed members could move around in a 1000 gun-free zone except for the one that they are carrying.
For his part, Rep. Dan Burton wants the entire House chamber encased in Plexiglas to protect members from the public. No one has suggested encasing members in Plexiglas to combine both concepts.
Once again, a tragedy has led to impulse buy legislation with little concern for the impact on the Constitution or our political system.
Having federal officials move around in a 1000 foot protected zone is appealing until you consider the legal and practical problems. Under this logic, an official walking toward a person with a legally permitted gun would require the citizen to flee the moving protected zone. Analogies to schools (which are often the subject to such limitations) are not very helpful since they tend to stay put and are immediately recognizable.
The only positive aspect to this proposal would be the scene of a campaigning member walking into a gun show to see the pandemonium.
Source: Politico
Jonathan Turley
Chan,
You haven’t shown you can think about anything other than your own selfish self-rationalizations for being greedy so I don’t really care what you think.
Shouldn’t you be practicing your unicycle some more instead of getting your ass kicked here, red nose?
Careful peddling with those big shoes!
Bubbha is Dirt Bag:
I think you owe Dr. Harris an apology. But you wont because you have some sort of personality disorder. Narcissism comes readily to mind.
Gyges:
are you jealous? Bubbha not paying enough attention to you? Maybe he didn’t praise you enough? Didn’t pat you on the head and say good boy?
Dr. Harris:
Bubbha is Laughing is wrong about almost everything so it is of no surprise that he doesnt think you are autistic.
Who is the lady with a PhD who works with animals and has autism. Ah yes, Dr. Temple Grandin.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Bubbha:
you really are a moron and not a very nice one at that.
RE: Tootie, January 14, 2011 at 7:26 am
Thank you, again.
I have spent most of the day, today, while puttering around doing housekeeping things, searching for words that may have a chance of communicating my understanding effectively and accurately.
As I find your comment to be lacking in insignificance, triviality, and unkindness, I have allowed time to read and ponder it enough that I may usefully reply.
? “lacking in insignificance…” ? means “significant”…
? what is a lack of unkindness? 🙂
Perhaps I am putting the cookies and frosted brownies on a shelf just right for me, but too high for you or my wife, who is shorter than I am. If so, let me know, and I will move some dishes and use a lower shelf.
I do have a few accessible books, one being Young’s Analytical Concordance, copyright 1917. Iniquity has many instances, inequity has none. While “inequity” and “iniquity” are much the same word in the dictionary I checked, inequity is like injustice and iniquity is like gross injustice. Either word works for me, and you may have, like I often do, bumped the wrong key on your keyboard. And, for me, in the scriptural sense, lawlessness and inequity and iniquity are very much the same.
When an attorney in Sturgeon Bay, when I asked, “What is the law?” replied, “I don’t know,” I find an iniquitous inequity between my livable life and the law seemingly known to said attorney.
In the manner I find described by Philip Zimbardo, in “The Lucifer Effect,” when I, without malice of any sort, asked an attorney a question I, being autistic, thought important to my safety, and was rebuked for asking, my inner, purely subjective, response was as though of an encounter with utterly lawless iniquity.
It befuddles me to reflect on how I might have responded to a question the answer to which may become a life and death matter for me because of my being autistic and often misunderstood by others because of my language limitations. I can easily imagine that, for people not raised by authoritative-reciprocal parents, and who had learned the ways of passive aggression, such a “cursed regardless” response, if it happened enough times, might eventually take anyone to terrible violence.
As for mathematical inequality, inequity and iniquity with respect to law and society, after thinking deeply about what your question means to me, I find it true that there is a mathematical inequality, but not in numbers as one might first think.
If I am before a judge in a bench trial, the inequality is simple. The judge has the only vote.
If I am in court before a judge and jury, the judge has the only approved vote as to what the proper law interpretation is.
If I am in a court before a judge and jury, the judge has the only vote as to what evidence is allowed. If
If I am in a court before a judge and jury, and no person is autistic in ways similar enough to the way I am autistic, so that I cannot be tried by a jury of peers, and cannot find a profoundly autistic super-good attorney to accurately represent me, the judge has the judges vote as to admissible evidence, the jury has twelve non-autistic votes, and Brian has no vote and no peers who can truthfully represent accurately him in court.
No matter what, the inequality is, Judge or Judge and Jury, all the votes, Brian no vote.
As to the abnormal being part of the normal, I find that an absolute truth. The so-called “bell curve” (the normal density function) is everywhere the normal curve. The whole normal curve is normal, all of it, out beyond a googolplex standard deviations. To deem anything anywhere on the normal curve is a cultural fiction error. Or, might I be mistaken. Let me check.
Google, “the normal density curve” got some 32,000 hits.
Google, “the abnormal density curve” got 0 hits.
If abnormality is statistically distributed, it is apparently to be found only on the normal curve. All that is abnormal is within all that is normal. Yes!
If one aspect of existence is creativity, and diversity among people is found to exist, I find that diversity to be of the nature of the creativity which has resulted in people existing.
Henry Petroski, a professor of history and professor of civil engineering is one published writer who demonstrably has a grip on both history and engineering, and he wrote books about his view that the difficult problems of society may be so difficult that only the rigorously applied scientific methods of engineering portend any resolution…
I do not describe other people and I do not describe other people’s experiences.
I am not other people, so I cannot describe other people.
I do not have other people’s experiences, so I cannot describe other people’s experiences.
My life as given to me is all I need. If my life is nothing, it is plenty of nothing, and nothing is plenty for me. (apologies to the spirits of DuBose Heyward & Ira Gershwin)
I do describe myself, my life, and my experiences with the possibility in mind that someone else may find some use for what I describe. I neither expect nor do not expect any such use.
Only for those for who find their response to be,
“Without Objection”:
Franz Kafka, “The Trial,” Breon Mitchell, tr., Schocken Books, 1998.
Franz Kafka, “The Castle,” Mark Harman, tr., Schocken Books, 1998.
Congress persons should run the same risks as the rest of us, otherwise they just don’t give a damn if we are shot, unemployed, starving, sicke or dying in Afghanistan.
If there are specific threats they should get the same protection as battered wives and children. That is, a peace of paper from the judge that gives them no protection at all.
Congress persons are already so far removed for the realities that most Americans live in that removing them even further into the walled cloister is going to continue to allow them to be less and lees “representative” of voters ad less interested in being representative.
Brian,
Liking or disliking you doesn’t have anything to do with it Brian. You being wrong does. If you don’t spout anti-legalism bullshit or claim to be an expert in legal systems, I won’t correct you. If you do? I will. Because quite frankly, when it comes to the law, you don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about. How do I know this? Because I’m a J.D. – Juris Doctorate. I am an expert on legal systems, not some tangentially related field at best. If your feelings got hurt? I don’t really know why unless it was calling something you wrote bullshit. If your feelings were hurt, you should have said so initially instead of responding in a way you say you don’t comprehend – by contention – because the snider you get? The nastier I get. That’s the rule if you’re not a troll. That is the nature of conflict. I was nice (or so I thought) until you gave me a reason to not be nice. Learn that lesson.
If I start talking bullshit about engineering? You feel free to correct me. But when you spout nonsense about the law and legal systems? You bet I’ll correct that. If that correction hurts your feelings? Too goddamn bad. Don’t talk anti-social nonsense about that which you don’t understand or keep misusing technical terms like adversarial and it won’t happen.
BBB,
If you don’t like my responses to him? Don’t read them.
BBB,
Thank you, thank you profoundly.
I am not in the least offended.
Some time back, when I replied to a posted comment which I thought had nothing to do with BIL, he responded in a way I experienced as though hurtful, for he mentioned my reply specifically, though I had not replied to any of his comments in mine.
I made a gentle effort to let people know that my inner experience in such situations is of the simply iformational form, “It tends to hurt me when people do that.”
If I never describe or otherwise let someone know what I experience as possibly hurtful or as hurtful, how can I ever hope to help people learn to avoid doing what may hurt me?
I do not expect anyone to know anything about me or about what may hurt me if I do not share my experiences.
People I have known, similarly profoundly autistic in the manner first described in the literature by Dr. Leo Kanner, have shared with me their experiences of abuse inflicted by the social norms of plurality groupthink methods. Some such folks, recognizing that I had a somewhat better ability to find words than they, asked me to tell what it is like for us, if ever I found a way to do so.
Many people, more than I have noticed posting comments on this blawg, have asked me to work at sharing with those people who are unable to understand us, to help build such understanding, doing so for those people who similarly to me, are of the profoundly autistic and no less for everyone else.
In 1964, the year before I began working at the Medical Center, in Chicago, initially concurrently in Pediatric Cardiology at both the University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospital and at Cook County Children’s Hospital, Dr. Bessie Lendrum, who later became my main colleague during my hospital employee and Hektoen Institute employment, gave me a book from her library. I have quoted from this book already, and yet choose to end here with one single sentence from that book, for it helped frame my whole approach to bioengineering, followed by a short bit as to what this has meant to me in terms of my participation on this blawg.
The book, Albert Einstein, “Out of My Later Years,” Philosophical Library, 1950. From page 5, the quote is:
“Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.
As Einstein wrote, so is my life, with but one added feature; I find I am required to obey laws I can neither know nor understand, and that requirement forces upon me a personally terribly hurtful connection with a world outside the whole of my possible comprehension, and utterly impossible for me to understand; it is for this reason that my understanding of law is as though nil; while I am not alone in this, not everyone who experiences life much as I do is able to have the degree of executive control given to me such that I never retaliate, not even in words, yet accept that I may always be tragically misunderstood by people who live not in the world wherein I live, for it, to me, is much as Einstein described.
If BIL, and others who do not know or understand me and those much like me, do not go about “correcting us” I will not respond to such “corrections” as do not occur.
Grace and Sumner Harris were murdered. Margaret Cortino was murdered. People in Tuscon were murdered. What can possibly be wrong with learning enough about what happened to people who murder, in a decent effort to learn how to prevent whatever happened to them from happening to others in the future?
Tootie,
RE: Tootie, January 14, 2011 at 7:26 am
While I already understood the essence of your comment and more, I am grateful, truly grateful, for your sharing your understanding as you did, today.
I do not internalize bullying, not from anyone, not for any reason. Yet I live as though in a society in which many people who have never acted out with criminal violence have what I observe to be personality traits which, in my brain associations, have some similarities to traits I observed in the aforementioned James Durante and James Cinelli.
Durante, being too young to, according to statutes in use, commit a crime, was found to be delinquent and was at the “State Reformatory” (as it was commonly called) until he reached the age of majority (21, back then) and was released.
Subsequently, I was told by people I knew when in school in Sturgeon Bay, James Durante married, had children, and lived an exemplary life, and died of old age a few years ago. Evidently he was decently reformed while in the “reformatory.”
The stunning emotional impact on me from James Durante having bullied me in ways I experienced as atrocious, and to which I objected both in private and in public, and his murdering Grace and Sumner Harris three days after my parents and I had been guests in Grace and Sumner’s home, led me to work at unriddling what happened to James Durante and how, in achievable ways, society would need to improve its regard for the diversity of life such that, eventually, no one would ever murder anyone ever again.
What to do and how to do it, to make such social accomplishment achievable cannot be in the past traditions of humanity, else we would already have it and be able to use it.
The remedy cannot be found within the notion that delusions are departures from group consensus, else Jonestown would not have ended the way it did, there would have been no Sobibor camp from which to escape, and the list is tragically long.
When, as has happened thousands of times during my life, I come upon the belief that the remedy for human violence is what I find, in terms of human brain biology, to be what causes human violence, I become very skeptical of the view I, however accurately or inaccurately, find espoused by people who believe my work to be delusional.
I have read lots of books, and cannot know how well I have understood any of them. One such book is a story book, previously mentioned, the public domain edition of East O’ the Sun and West O’ the Moon.
Another book has a story of two paths, one broad and easy, which most people take, and another narrow and hard, which few find and take. In this story, after all, it is just a story, those who take the broad path are headed toward some place with what is, to me, a strange name, “Perdition.” In this story also, those on the narrow path are headed for a place with a name I believe I may be able to understand, the name, “Life.”
Perhaps those who, it seems to me, as though find fault with me or my work are entirely correct; because I am incapable of making judgments, I cannot test this.
When someone does what I experience as suggesting or imploring or commanding me to take what I see as a broad path, the path of majority understanding which, were I to take it, would violate my conscience, I respectfully decline, without expecting anyone to regard my respectfully declining as being respectful.
Someone, years ago, suggested that we may find it worthwhile to disenthrall ourselves. Yet, that, too, is just a story.
I have been told the “standard story” many times, I know about it in great detail, yet it is impossible for me to understand because it is impossible for me to actually live it.
I do not mention sources to show that I am well informed, I mention sources so to make clear that much of what I do understand came to me from other people, and I seek to not steal their thunder.
Tootie, thanks. You are among the people who comment here whose comments I most value.
BIL,
I submitted some of Brian’s writings from this blog to an expert in the field of autism. Her response;
“Interesting, yet difficult, readings! Obviously, high functioning autism in order to be so accomplished academically, and socially, at least it appears since he’s married. Sometimes that never happens. He certainly has a unique way of expressing himself, which is consistent with someone with autism. His feelings and emotions, and the difference between his and someone who might be considered to be “normal” are also consistent with someone with autism. They don’t experience emotions in the same way that others do. Clearly, neither does he! Interesting guy!”
I hope I don’t offend you or Brian when I ask the you throttle back a little when responding to him. By all means, correct him when he is wrong, but realize that what you take for granted, he has to work very hard to accomplish.
Brian,
You may be a first. An autistic bullshit artist.
“J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. is properly competent in his field of post-doctoral research endeavour using bioengineering methodologies to study human brain function as made manifest in the structure(s) of human society, with particular emphasis on public safety aspects of the contemporary law structure of and in the United States of America.”
On the Likert scale, I’m saying “No.” Your ignorance of the law and the foundations of law is staggering. You’ve admitted yourself you are not a legal expert and now you are asserting you are?
Ehhh . . . that’s what is known as being monumentally full of shit.
You say math doesn’t lie yet ignore the consequences of the Incompleteness Theorem when it’s inconvenient for you by changing the meaning of completeness from the one I referenced. Gödel’s completeness theorem refers to a different definition of completeness. Because I’m asserting that law is a form of closed, self-referential system, the Incompleteness Theorem is the more applicable. Whether you approve or not is beside the point.
Keep misusing the term “adversarial” too, despite multiple corrections on the matter. It’s funnier than Hell.
And while you’re at it, you go right on ahead and be impressed with yourself for the Barber Paradox. It’s pretty basic logic.
If you are truly autistic, which I doubt even more now, you can’t help your delusional applications of frameworks. Your brain is literally incapable of utilizing them properly because you don’t process context properly. This keeps you bound to your point of reference – a point of reference that is by its very is an expression of aberrant psychology.
On the other hand, if you are simply a bullshit artist – an ever increasing likelihood given your persistent mischaracterization of concepts to attempt to demonize the practice of law and legalism in general by a non-expert suddenly claiming to be expert – you’re a verbose one. And also your persistent mischaracterizations and distortions comport to a anti-legalism agenda. And who would possibly have an agenda like that? cough cough cough Koch teabaggers cough cough cough. We have paid trolls here for a fact. That their failure would merit a more tailored and sophisticated attack – namely hiding behind a condition that you think no one would attack your statements based upon – is not an unreasonable supposition. A fairly sophisticated form of troll, but I’m pretty sure you’re just a troll nonetheless. And if you don’t like the criticism? Take your bullshit game elsewhere. If you talk nonsense and outright lies about law and legalism? You’re going to get called out on it. Just like mepso called you out (first I might add) and I’ve called you out. Trying to hide behind autism? Yeah, that’s a suckhole tactic too, buddy.
Like I said earlier, you overplayed your hand talking about Sun Tzu. Attempting to be inscrutable by hiding behind alleged autism is simply low even by troll standards.
RE:
[begin quote]
Buddha Is Laughing, January 13, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Two words for you, Brian.
Infinite regressions.
That’s why courts use concepts like proximate cause.
And this?
“What I require with a scientifically rebuttal is accurately including all such causes as have happened since the dawn of human events and before and all such consequences as shall occur within the eternity of the future.”
Is simply ridiculous. What you “require” is an impossibility. It requires not only perfect knowledge of the past, but perfect knowledge of the future. Setting aside the issue of temporal mechanics, perfect knowledge is not possible. See Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem if you’re confused as to why perfect knowledge is not possible.
[end quote]
Within the viewpoint perspective of majority consensus, my mere existence is not merely simply ridiculous, it is infinitely, absurdly ridiculous. This, I have known and understood since rather early infancy.
Consider a paraphrase of Bertrand Russell’s “Barber Paradox.” There is a town with one, and only one barber, in which town all the men are shaved and all the men who do not shave themselves are shaved by the barber.
Who shaves the barber?
Obviously, if the barber does not shave the barber, then the barber shaves the barber and so the barber does not shave the barber, until after the G.I. tracts of all the town’s bulls are empty.
Paradox?
Perhaps paradox for you, but not paradox for me.
Absurdly trivial solution:
The barber is a woman, who does not shave.
Trivial solutions may suffer from their triviality.
Before waxing philosophic, it may be useful to be a competent philosopher, if such be possible.
[begin detour]
A testable hypothesis may be emerging…
Hypothesis to be tested: “J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. is properly competent in his field of post-doctoral research endeavour using bioengineering methodologies to study human brain function as made manifest in the structure(s) of human society, with particular emphasis on public safety aspects of the contemporary law structure of and in the United States of America.”
I propose using a five point Likert scale:
No, Unlikely, What the…?, Perhaps, Yes
[end detour]
The person who shaves all the men in town is one of the men of the town. Forget being trivial?
The puzzlement of Russell’s “Barber Paradox” is of the philosophical diddle of self-reference. So are those two aforementioned Kurt Gödel theorems, methinks.
It appears to me that my realizable unriddling of Russell’s Barber Paradox is the first one, ever; I have searched the Internet for anyone who described it before I did, with no success as yet. Tell me who found it before I did, and I will give full credit where full credit is due.
I observed, long before I read the books written by Robert Scaer on trauma, that apparent paradox is a consequence of time confusion (Erik H. Erikson) and time-corrupted learning (Scaer).
By not having gone through the terrible twos, aka the infant-child transition, aka the infant-child discontinuity, I never incorporated time-confusion or time-corrupted learning into my life journey.
The word “Barber” in Russell’s Barber Paradox is does not symbolize a person, but a profession. Removing this classification error from Russell’s Barber Paradox makes available another, paradox-free, paraphrase, to wit:
[begin another paraphrase]
There is a town, in which all the men are shaved, with exactly one man whose profession is that of the barber; this man shaves all the men of the town who do not shave themselves.
In this town, professional people are paid for their services by those who receive professional services, as is common and usual with professions, such as the profession of law and the profession of barbering.
The man whose profession is that of sole town barber shaves himself when he is not engaged in his profession, as it is impossible for him to pay himself and thereby receive income from his profession by shaving himself.
[end another paraphrase]
Long before I set out on the field work research which enabled my dissertation, my advisor, Dr. Earl E. Gose, in illustrating difficulties in establishing viable decision boundaries using Bayes’ Theorem statistical approaches, regarding garnering suitable priors, mentioned a supposed self-reference paradox.
{begin supposed self-reference paradox]
This sentence is false.
[end supposed self-reference paradox]
My advisor, in that class, remarked that “This sentence is false” is nonsense. Not being willing to interrupt his lecture, I waited until after class to explain to him why “This sentence is false” is not only a not a paradox, but is an essential component of ordinary digital computers.
[begin illusion of paradox]
If, “This sentence is false,” then, “This sentence is false,” is true, and if This sentence is true,” then, “This sentence is false.”
[end illusion of paradox]
[begin dissolution of illusion of paradox]
For people who completed the infant-child transition superbly, and who consequently experience thought mainly declaratively in words, nonsense is the likely result; how can something be what it isn’t (by violating the law of non-contradiction)?
The difficulty I observe in the lives of people who have mastered conventional socialization is the remarkably (to me) eradication of procedural understanding, as declarative words are not procedures, even if the ways of using them are procedural.
As binits skipping along the Internet, as pixels on a computer display, as ink dots or fused toner particles on a sheet of paper, the symbol sequence, “This sentence is false” don’t nohow do nothin’.
But plug those words into a human brain, visually, audibly, using Braille, or otherwise, and the words as though come to life within the brain.
{begin restatement of illusion of paradox]
When the sentence, “This sentence is false” occurs as process within a living human brain, its state may initially be either true or false if no initial condition has previously been given.
If the initial state is “false,” as “This sentence is false” changes its state to “true” as “This sentence is false occurs and has been fully processed in the time interval during which it is being processed. The next time “This sentence is false” occurs as a brain process, with its state being left as “true” when it was last processed by said brain, the state of “This sentence is false” will change to “false” when its procssing has been completed this time.
As a mental mechanism, “This sentence is false” functions in the manner of a binary divider or clocked flip-flop.
A common item in many households which is a form of clocked flip flop is the “power switch” on a typical television set of recent vintage. If the tele power is off, and the power switch is depressed and released, the tele will turn on if working properly and adequately supplied with electricity. Depress and release the power switch a second time, and the tele power, all else being much the same, will turn off.
Two cycles of the power switch being depressed and released and one power on – power off cycle for the tele power. A clocked flip-flop, the clock being the person who depresses and releases the power switch.
“This sentence is false” is, in a living brain, a mental mechanism, which means it exists within the brain as a process, said process being not one whit paradoxical.
Did I just whittle away that illusion of paradox thereby disillusioning it?
[end dissolution of illusion of paradox]
Meanwhile, back at Kurt Gödel’s ranch…
People coerced into abandoning sentiently concious procedural brain process direct awareness are relegated to the, to me, remarkably empty world of dimensionless points. The infant child transition, in its typical occurance, accomplishes that abandonment.
The reason Kurt Gödel needed both his Incompleteness Theorem and his Completeness Theorem is found in the philosophical dance of self-reference. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is itself incomplete. No joke.
Cite incomplete understanding of an incomplete theorem about incompleteness, and, in my brain’s processing of such incompleteness I will completely reject the assertion that incomplete understanding is complete understanding such that incomplete understand can completely determine that complete understanding is impossible.
Evil is the brainchild of incomplete understanding of self-reference?
“Perfect knowledge is impossible” is, to me, a testable hypothesis, one that is, in principle and in fact, refuted by one counter-example.
Because one counter-example may be deemed a fluke of human error, how about three instances of perfect knowledge? (Remember that “trinity” delusion?)
[Uno]
If, “Falsehood does not exist,” the statement “Falsehood does not exist does not exist because neither the word “Falsehood,” nor the meaning of falsehood exist; the statement, “Falsehood exists,” therefore “falsehood exists.
[Dos]
If the statement, “There is no truth” is true, then the statement, “There is no truth,” is true, and there cannot not be truth.
{Tres]
If the statement, “There is no absolute truth,” is true, then the statement, “There is no absolute truth,” is an absolute truth, and the there cannot not be absolute truth.
I say, to “there is no perfect knowledge,” “Strike tree! Yer Out!”
Winner? Truth, Perfect Truth and Knowledge of Perfect Truth as here, now, process.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
While the eternal Tao cannot be told, it is easily understood by anyone who is not time-confused or using time-corrupted learning according to the belief that the corruption does not exist.
Adversariality is its own adversary, due to the its inescapable self reference nature.
The problem seeking its solution is simply this, as I can grasp it. People, lawyers and non-lawyers, are being caught, shot, and killed in the crossfire of the adversariality bullets of the deemed-sacred process adversarial law relentlessly shooting itself down.
And… I am familiar with the social mechanism of conformity and the effort people who have been coerced into conformity make to cope with the coercive events which precluded other than conformity as a way to survive. Alas, conformity may have tragic effect.
From the neighbors of Kitty Genovese, I learned to not ignore someone crying out for help and I learned to believe that, if I take no action to be helpful, perhaps everyone else will do the same, and someone may die for lack of help.
From Dietrich Bonhöffer, I learned that, if others are endangered and I am not endangered, if I do not work to stop endangerment, I will soon become endangered.
Being alive, I need be take the risk of being alive and the risk of being dead, or I am already dead.
The crossfire of the law shooting itself down may be as deadly as it gets. I am not working to shoot down adversarial law, it is doing that to itself; or, as per Justice Robert Jackson, the adversarial system of law has built itself up with so many stories that it is crushing itself by its own weight; the Temples of Adversarial Law may be collapsing from within, entrapping all who do not escape in a timely way.
In accord with the Constitution, in my proper role as a member of the citizenry arm of the well-regulated militia, I do have my gun, but no firearms, bullets, bows, or arrows. I am now fully prepared to do my civic duty, having taken apart my Healthways TopScore 175, and used a single cut mill bastard file to compensate for some wear in the safety mechanism. When set to “SAFE” it will no longer fire with any strength of trigger squeeze I can produce. With my having no pellets, I surmise my gun is as safe as any actual gun can likely be.
I regulated the safety with a bastard, and it is now, like me, well regulated.
Ignorance may be unknowingly ignorant of itself.
Brian,
Oh, I understand Nash Equilibrium. I also understand it’s inapplicable to the issue at hand other than as a proposition governing non-cooperative games. It says nothing about the open or closed nature of systems in reality or how they apply to law (and sociology). As to “open sum”? Sorry. That’s a nonsensical term. Although some sums of infinite values can be derived, they are only derived with limits – forming a series. As these limits – like legal fictions, maxims and/or rules – are defined by man, they are inherently artificial. That does not impact either their utility or necessity. If Slarti – our resident mathematician – would like to expound on this, I invite him to do so.
Each universe is a closed system despite the nature of reality containing (many) multiverses. This comports to m-theory as all objects withing a given universe are confined to their D-brane with the only force capable of multiversal interaction being gravity. Only in respect to gravity is the multiverse an open system. The D-brane confinement boundaries make each individual universe operate as a limited series. The D-brane is the limit keeping all possible realities from existing in one spacetime. The multiverse is a truly open system, but by the nature of having a limit, each universe is a closed system – a series.
You are making the mistake of thinking open systems as a concept in systems theory comports to open systems as a concept in sociology. It does not. You should read Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems. He applies systems theory to sociology in a more appropriate way to understand law than you are attempting. Luhmann proposes that social systems (like law) are self-referential autopoietic systems. These systems are distinct from their environment, i.e. they are closed systems. The environment in which these systems rest is essentially noise and potential and these systems remain closed unless they need information from the environment. This process of informing the closed system by referencing the environment (a form of controlled opening of the system) is analogous to the function of discovery in legal proceedings – the uncovering of facts surrounding a case that either inform the argument to follow the form of the law in a certain way or justify making new law (essentially altering a rule within the closed system to reflect a substantive change in the environment).
As to speaking with you directly? I have no interest. Some of your previous statements have led me to doubt your claim of autism although my personal autism expert (and she is truly an expert, being both a mental health professional and the mother of an autistic) assures me that some of your more outrageous statements that do not conform to reality are not out of line with the condition, I haven’t ruled out that you are not as you represent.
However, whether from your own misapplication of conceptual frameworks, a function of your alleged condition, or from you simply being a bullshit artist, I’ve just called your bluff.
No need to call.
And the Vortex is needed Scotty beam em up….heck….you do that and I’ll just take the Beam….Jim that is…
First thought was “WOW, gun control for the but not for me!” But I realize that Rep King is a gun fetishist and one of their mantras is that more guns = less shooting so really he should sponsor a bill making it mandatory for every elected official to always carry a loaded gun on their person. By the NRA logic this would prevent anyone from ever shooting another elected office.
I say that as a gun owner (both long & short), hunter and shooter so save your snark for someone else.
Harris,
Wow, you are one interesting dude.
You wrote:
“Yet I live in a society in which lawyers, attorneys-at-law, and judges employed in the courts set mandatory rules of conduct for me which I find unfathomable and incomprehensible. I do no such thing to such extent as my work is applicable to lawyers, attorneys at law, or judges.”
That comment reminds me of an article I read yesterday over at Lew Rockwell. In it the author wrote “China is run by engineers, America by lawyers”.[1]
This was meant to be an alert or warning to Americans. LOL
Another interesting article (which, like most of your writing, is well beyond me)is at the link below.[2] Gary North talks about using algorithms in economics. I’m wondering what you think of it?
What do you think about Industrial Engineers and their suitability for government office (systems analysis, efficiency, algorithms, etc.)?
I have always had trouble with math, but I love science. And I love God. So, sometimes I wander around both subjects toying with various concepts that might connect.
And one thing I’ve wondered about is this. In scripture God mentions that the cause of evil in the world is connected to an unexplained concept call the “mystery of inequity”. Some English translations use the word lawlessness instead of inequity. This suggests there is something amiss with justice (perhaps a mathematical inequality).
I’m wondering if evil shows up in the math in the form of an inequality? Perhaps in Pi? (especially considering the shape of the planets, atoms, electrons, protons, etc.). Yes, I understand Pi is a constant. But isn’t it perhaps a constant which is not fixed? Like being blind is a constant human defect? In other words the abnormal is part of the normality?
I’m of opinion God is, among all His other roles, the greatest mathematician. And I believe his math explains how he laid the framework for his creative work. Sadly, it isn’t something I can easily enter into. But I would love to!
What do you think? Please put the cookies put on the lower shelf so I can reach them. (thank you in advance)
Also, you wrote to Buddha:
“I found that, if one person knows even slightly more than another, in some field of knowledge, the person with the lesser knowledge is often utterly unable to appraise the authenticity of the one with the greater knowledge, and the one with the lesser may become jealous and hide the jealousy by denigrating the one with more…
…Your approach to my work tends to prod me toward flashbacks of people attempting to denigrate me as though their doing so would make us have comparable knowledge and understanding.”
Maybe I can help you with that.
It seems BIL denigrates people because it is his nature. Another mystery of life, no doubt. And it looks like it applies to those above him and those below.
So I don’t think it is just you.
And his enablers rule these blog pages too. If they had any sound ethics or morals to speak of themselves he would have already been sent skittering off to another website more suitable for his temperment. Perhaps a website like “I Hate People Not Like Me” would be more suitable? Or “Insulting People For Fun and Personal Gratification” might fit the bill?
This ethical problem tolerated at a legal blog might explain the widespread criminal-thinking and cruelty that characterizes those who run the justice system in America or write our laws.
Hopefully the toleration of it is meant to expose it.
China, engineers instead of lawyers? Wow, I don’t know what to make of that.
1]
“http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed195.html
[2]
http://www.garynorth.com/public/7497.cfm
BIL,
That which has been achieved cannot be an impossibility.
The non-trivial alternative to an infinite liability regression is simply recognizing that liability is a legal fiction.
Furthermore, infinite regressions may converge.
And there was Kurt Gödel’s Completeness Theorem, also.
Perhaps you regard existence as a closed system, perhaps you do not fully fathom the open sum nature of the Nash Equilibrium.
The view of existence I find you seem to propound is that of existence being a closed system. No closed system can actually exist; the closed system model allows analytically solving certain problems in physics and systems based on physics.
Define an actual physical space having well defined boundaries, and then tell me how that system is actually closed if, once in an eternity, a “super-energitic cosmic ray quantum-tunnels in to or through said well defined boundary space.
While a Professor of Theoretical Physics at U.C La Jolla, Walter Elsasser wrote “The Physical Foundation of Biology: An Analytical Study” Pergamon Press, 1958. Subsequently, Elsasser became the Homewood Professor at Johns Hopkins, was the recipient of the 1987 National Medal of Science in the U.S.A, and wrote “Reflections on a Theory of Organisms, Editions Orbis, 1987.
From the second paragraph of Reflections on a Theory of Organisms, page iii iv:
As distinct from the majority of those who have written about the problem of reductionism, I am not a biologist by profession; I am a theoretical physicist. I do not consider this a drawback but rather a distinct advantage: Since by general consensus a theoretical biology, a theory of organisms, has not existed before, a person who wishes to contribute to the establishment of such theory must either be an experienced biologist or else he must be thoroughly at home in the methods and principles of constructing theories. In a long life I have [italics on]never[italics off] met a man who would have claimed competence in both fields, that is, a biologist who is really at home in the mode of thought that underlies the formation of theories, which have in the past of course been mostly in physics.
As a Ph.D. Professional Engineer who did three years at Carleton as a physics major, then did a B.S. in Engineering, bioenginering major and subsequently did a Ph.D. in Bioengineering (both engineering degrees from the University of Illinois, in Chicago) I claim appropriate competence for the work I do in physics, biophysics, biology, and engineering. From when I started college in 1957, it took me until 1997 to learn enough in enough fields to be able to do the theoretical and applied design and development the theory that is the basis of my dissertation and its following work.
I claim no competence in the field of law and I claim, truthfully, to not be a lawyer or an attorney-at-law. Yet I live in a society in which lawyers, attorneys-at-law, and judges employed in the courts set mandatory rules of conduct for me which I find unfathomable and incomprehensible. I do no such thing to such extent as my work is applicable to lawyers, attorneys at law, or judges.
Acquire the background in physics and biology and the mode of thought regarding formation of theories as told of by Elsasser, which I have long ago accomplished, and we can usefully communicate with one another about the significance of the work I do as a theoretical bioengineer whose main research focus is on developing a scientific theory easily refudiated if false and unrefudiatable if valid.
Were I to have poeticistical ability of any sort I might ponder whether you are as though so focused on the necessary details of law needed for proper lawyering as to be like your being focused on minute fragments of dead leaves from three years ago and are oblivious to the rest of the world around you.
Any law, statute, ordinance or interpretation can be made to appear intelligible if sufficiently isolated from its environment of other laws, statutes, ordinances, and interpretations, and it takes what I consider an arduous sort of education to master the method and details of effective law practice.
But I have, by circumstances not within my locus of control, been denied attainable access to such education, whether arduous or not.
It is my decision, as an act of conscience, according to the dictates of my conscience, to never be in violation of any valid law; valid meaning that, by conscience and intent I can successfully choose to avoid violations as an act of conscious will.
There is mathematics and there is mathematics. Theory of functions is a field not all mathematicians study, it is particularly useful in the form of contour integrals in the complex plane, an approach which can reduce a nearly intractable problem in ordinary calculus to one solved by mere inspection.
While I was still in grade school, having started Harris Electronic Service in sixth grade, I became aware of a curious “thing.” I found that, if one person knows even slightly more than another, in some field of knowledge, the person with the lesser knowledge is often utterly unable to appraise the authenticity of the one with the greater knowledge, and the one with the lesser may become jealous and hide the jealousy by denigrating the one with more.
Your approach to my work tends to prod me toward flashbacks of people attempting to denigrate me as though their doing so would make us have comparable knowledge and understanding.
If you have not yet learned the ways of treating people with greater, and people with lesser, knowledge and understanding than you have, I apologize, for I learned those ways while yet in grade school.
I find I have neither more nor less value, worth, and validity as a person as has anyone else. I am fully adequate to my life, and have no need nor means to prove myself, not to me, not to anyone. I am merely one unique person of many, neither more nor less unique than any one else for unique is an absolutely absolute absolute.
It makes perfect, albeit tragic, sense to me that people may strive for validity by demeaning others in response to having been unable to escape experiences which are depersonalizing.
Having avoided being depersonalized, I have no need to become personalized, as though life were a zero-sum teeter-toter such that you have to lose anything I win because we are locked in adversarial competition. I decline to compete with anyone.
The irony with someone who acts as Jared Loughner did, is that people around him, while intending to extinguish his socially-inappropriate behaviors, may have reinforced them without apparently understanding what they were actually doing, because the only hospital roommates I had who expressed thoughts as Jared did on his web presence were people who had been ignored by others, so, by this model, what would extinguish a behavior not driven by having been ignored actually reinforced the socially inappropriate behavior.
I have a cheap webcam and free Skype access and cellular modem mid-speed Internet access sufficient for low resolution, low frame rate Skype video with two-way talking.
I am willing to use free Skype with someone else who has Skype access, to have a chat about my research and its meaning (if any) and its value (if any).
It would be easy to set up a sched (ham radio jargon) via the land line. I have a listed phone number anyone can find without much bother. Brian Harris, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
I give to you, BIL, permission to give me a phone call to arrange using Skype, assuming you are set up so as to be able to use Skype. Either way, you may call me. I do not give my phone out on blogs, but it is simple to get. I am not anonymous.
If you are bluffing, BLL, I just called your bluff.
You have permission to call my bluff if it exists to call.
If I am bluffing, I do not realize it, and I can use some help to correct that error.
If my bluff does not exist, and cannot be called, you may call me anyway.
Brian
savaship,
That is a tough story. The only legal bright point seems to be the reduced charges you both received in the plea agreements.
Documenting your case on your blog should help others understand that their lives can be ruined quickly, even when they do what they consider is the correct and reasonable decision at the time.
Good luck with your new life.
I would like you guys to read my story of ridiculous gun laws that basically tore my life apart. F fed, this is for you:
http://midwestoppression.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-this-blog-exists.html
Thanks!