For academics, there is no greater sin than the alteration of a historic document. That is precisely what amateur historian Thomas P. Lowry is accused of doing in writing a “5” over a date of a pardon by Abraham Lincoln – immediately gaining fame for finding the last official act before Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865.
Lowry, 78, now insists that he was coerced into signing a confession — which he did without the aid of an attorney. For its part, the Archive says that he cannot be prosecuted because of the passage of the five-year statute of limitations.
The pardon was for Pvt. Patrick Murphy and records show that it was signed exactly one year before Lincoln’s assassination. Lowry confessed that he brought a fountain pen into the research room in 1998 and wrote a 5 over the 4 in 1864.
Trevor Plante, an Archives official, was always suspicious about the darker ink on the 5. The pardon became part of Lincoln lore but Plante could not get beyond the shade of ink. He then consulted a Lincoln collection of documents edited by Roy P. Basler in the 1950s and found the reprinted pardon with the date of April 14, 1864.
Ironically, the confession itself is now being challenged but the inspector general insists that “we have a written confession in his own hand.” Are you sure about that?
Source: Washington Post
Jonathan Turley
fighter pilot* and a myriad other typos…..sorry
MIKE SPINDELL:
RE: Literacy and Jews.
Well, you seem to have stumbled upon another chicken and egg scenario. Are they readers because they are highly intelligent or intelligent because they are readers?
I happen to believe you don’t have a CHANCE to be a reader if you don’t have a requisite level of intelligence. You can give a substantially mentally retarded person all the books in the world, counsel them on reading, read to them, try to teach them to read, nurture reading in every way, taking them to libraries, and bookstores. But you are not going to be able to get them to overly benefit from reading if they are not physically able to.
In other words: I’m a egg and chicken person.
And I believe that Jews are highly literate BECAUSE they are genetically predisposed to be. And so on on down. This doesn’t those predisposed to high intelligence have to be literate.
But if they want to be, they are exceptionally fit to be so.
I understand the extent of flexibility is a genetic trait. I think a person predisposed to being very flexible makes a better gymnastics athlete. No matter how hard an inflexible person work out, they are just not going to be able be as flexible.
Chuck Yeager (fight pilot) had 20/10 vision in both eyes. It seemed to have given him a clear advantage. It is looking like eyesight could be genetically controlled as well.
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/yea0int-8
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20101409-21319.html
B.I.L.:
I learned to live with the adversarial process before I began talking, at less than a year of age. I cannot learn to live with the adversarial process because I have already so learned.
There simply is a better solution, it is here, now, and everyone has already lived within it, before learning enough words to be taught to not so live.
The fact (at least as you state it, I take it to be fact) that you do not know of a better system is no evidence that I, not being you, do not only know a better system, understand a better system, and live according to a better system.
My subjective response to your comments about my research and its findings reminds me profoundly of when, in kindergarten, about a third of the other boys bullied me atrociously.
Am I correct in guessing that, you being an authority on law, expect me to abide in your law authority? If so, I here inform you that you are mistaken. I am not your chattel property.
I usually find that, when someone advises me in the manner I guess you may be doing, the person so advising is displacing his/her issues onto me, as though I need to be ordered to do what I am told by someone who does not know me at all.
I find the adversarial system generates the issues it purports to solve, in a thus-far endless vicious cycle. So, I do not accept that cycle as a matter of personal conscience and objective science.
I invariably experience the adversarial system as a predator, which particularly preys upon the weak.
In Europe may be found somewhat of an alternative to the Anglo-American Adversarial System, e.g., The French Inquisitorial System.
In a world in which no ordinary person has been able to live a life substantially like my life, one in which a person can do everything other people can do in the manner of typical personal versatility, except just one specific thing and, in so doing, live a life no less rich, satisfying and constructive as any other typical person’s life, it is reasonable to assert that o person very nearly like me can exist because not person very nearly like me has ever existed.
Alas, there is this little science bugaboo, evolution. Evolution allows a species to take on a characteristic never before found in the species.
I find that evolution has allowed one person I personally know and understand to evolve into a person who can live decently as a member of human society without ever having the experience of truthfully being at fault, to blame, or guilty regarding anything and everything.
In putting my work on the Internet, mostly elsewhere than on this blawg, I have as one purpose finding if there is another living person with whom I may communicate who also has never had the experience of truthfully being at fault, to blame, or guilty regarding anything and everything.
However, to make moot the notion that someone like me cannot exist, I need only demonstrate my actual existence. Such demonstration is an aspect of my comments here.
I find that I am able to live in a world you can neither understand nor believe exists.
I find that you appear to me to be unable to describe or understand the world in which I actually live.
I find that the world you appear to me to live in excludes not only me, but the actual world in which I really live.
I find that I live in a world which includes the adversarial world it appears to me in which you live, but only as a world made entirely of what it is wise to learn to avoid doing.
So, the news, if it be news, is that your belief that “there is simply no better solution to the problem” is rendered absolutely and perfectly moot by my merely having existed as an ordinary person living in the world you may sincerely believe does not exist.
Your view, I recognize, is very conventional. A few minutes ago, I snatched a book of our back hallway bookcase. Philip Yancey, “Where Is God When It Hurts” (Zondervan, 1997, 1977) The copy I found is a recent printing.
From the page facing the copyright page:
“Dedicated to those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, and their loved ones left behind to wonder why.”
What I choose to excerpt from this book is toward the bottom of page 55:
“Consider another apparent enemy: guilt, a universal human response that many people want to purge from their lives. But try to envision a world without guilt, a society with no curbs on behavior. The U.S. court system defines sanity as the ability to discern between good and evil, and a world without guilt would tilt toward insanity.”
I find that what Yancy wrote, as on the above excerpt from page 55, is very close to your espoused view. However, my work is grounded in relatively recent biology research evidently not understood by Yancy. (Or you?)
Once the dogma of guilt has been sufficiently inculcated as to have become impossible to disbelieve, it becomes impossible for the victim of such inculcation to grasp the fact that guilt is a dogma of delusion.
That guilt is a delusion is trivial to demonstrate to any person with decent competence in the methods of scientific theory development which are typically the hallmark of cutting edge theoretical physicists.
“Cutting edge theoretical physicists?” What on earth might know about such folks? I have a little surprise, which I state as fact under penalty of finding my P.E. license properly revoked if this be not so: That “Unified Field Theory” that is supposedly “the holy grail of physics” is embedded within my Ph.D. dissertation. I have only recently drawn any attention to this fact because “The Unified Field Theory” is both simple and trivial (so simple and trivial that many people have come upon it and not recognized it for what it really is), and the work I do on the public safety aspects of the structure(s) of human society is orders of magnitude more significant.
The Unified Field Theory transcends analytical mathematics. Those who strive to find and solve the analytical equations of The Unified Field Theory are looking for it where it isn’t. Oh, yes, one of my thesis committee members observed in some of his classes that I was then working on a unified field theory. And he was correct.
One never finds something where it isn’t. The solution to the issues of the adversarial system are not to be found within or using the methods of the adversarial system. Perhaps that is why it appears to me that my work is so often rejected before I can tell what it is.
I respect every person without reservation regardless of a person’s situation or circumstances. In respecting people as I do, I uncover sincere beliefs which most people reject which would be wisely accepted from a brain-biology-function view and sincere beliefs widely accepted which are remarkably damaging to brain-biology-function.
Show me verifiable competence in my profession and I will rejoice and collaborate as peers. Because my work rebuts the possibility of the adversarial system being other than damaging to human brains, I intend never to have competence in the adversarial law profession because I decline to take on the necessary physical brain damage such would inextricably entail.
When people bully me, I find it always true that I know and understand better than to bully anyone, and that those who bully others simply don’t know or understand better. Thus, I totally forgive those who bully me instantly. Then I go to work on what I learned from being bullied that I had not previously learned.
Bullying, as also every other form of authoritarianism, is an adaptive biological response to depersonalizing trauma.
The problem I have regarding The Anglo-American Adversarial System is its being authoritarian while espousing otherwise, which methinks may be the ultimate indicator of any and every form of authoritarianism.
At issue is not actually people as such. At issue is the state of evolution of human society within the process of human social evolution.
The essential precedent scientific psychology research needed for the work I do as a bioengineer is largely confined to the past few decades. Assimilation of such research into society typically required longer than the time yet available.
Perhaps that is why so many people lack almost the whole of the finely detailed background required to accurately critique my research and its findings.
Within conventional notions of law and justice, I knew and understood my research would be deemed perfectly absurd by many who accept said conventional notions. Yet the conventional notions have yet to stop all wars and all brutality.
The tragedy found in my work is how the adversarial system, as a trauma response, generates the trauma it claims to prevent, doing so only after the fact, and therefore, not at all.
Theory-espoused denies theory-in-use and theory-in-use denies theory espoused, and actual science is absent, and, at best, only pretense remains.
To me, that rather well explains your comments regarding that of my work which I have shared here.
B.I.L., I really would welcome collaborating with you (and anyone else) within a process of mutual respect and shared decency, the better to help those within and without the law profession to avoid ever getting bad results.
None of which changes you are full of crap about the value of the adversarial system and its value to civilization, Brian.
Without it? There would be anarchy. If you want anarchy or brutal despotism. Simply because that is human nature without due process. If you want anarchy or despotism? Move to Africa. They have several states that will fit your needs for dispensing with the rule of law.
If its any consolation? Even people who know how to use the system occasionally get bad results. It’s not a perfect system because people are inherently imperfect, but it is quite a bit better than the alternatives of the inequity and injustice created by predation of the strong upon the weak without any rules or moderation. So unless you have a way to perfect people? I suggest you just learn to live with the adversarial process. There is simply no better solution to the problem and your perpetual bitching about it and mischaracterizations about it won’t change that fact.
RE: Jill Chavez, January 29, 2011 at 11:52 pm
[begin quote]
Gosh Brian, you have really been a victim too. I too am a victim. I am Jill and I share your pain. Some people can really be like so mean that you just want to yell at them. Please tell more of what has happened to you. Are you really a Phd? What is it? I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. In case you forgot I am Jill.
[end quote]
Jill,
Thanks for your comment and your concern. Yes, I have a very real Ph.D. in Bioengineering, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. My being autistic may be a factor in why it took me until I was 59 to complete my university doctorate.
To verify the Ph.D. easily, you may go to the University of Illinois web site, www(dot)uic(dot)edu and go to the main library catalog, go to the advanced search for author words “Harris, J. Brian”
When I just did that, my dissertation was fourth down on the list.
When, in 1986, I first became a psychiatric outpatient, my psychiatrist commented soon after I began to see him, to me, “Your life is like you were stepped on like a bug a thousand times and more.”
For a person to be “squashed like a bug” is a truly terrible experience. Yet, here I am.
Do a Google Advanced Search for “J. Brian Harris” and see what you find. I just tried it, got 54 results. My dissertation shows up on one of my web sites. You may find “The Matrix of Autism” useful for seeing things I put on the Internet a while ago.
Because of financial factors and not needing Radon Measurement or Mitigation Certification in Wisconsin, I no longer hold National Environmental Health Association radon certification.
Mohandas Gandhi suggested that people be the change they seek in the world, and I have never heard a wiser suggestion yet.
Thus, in a world as though of mistrust, I choose to trust the world. Therefore, I am not anonymous.
D…. Typo. Where did that d… “d” go?
Was:
“Your religion apparently oes not include an option which my religion includes.”
Was intended to be:
“Your religion apparently does not include an option which my religion includes.”
Mistakes happen.
That is why the need for truthfulness and truthful forgiveness.
Mistakes do not always happen?
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, January 29, 2011 at 8:29 pm
[begin quote}
There will always be disputes. As such, there will always be the following options available for dispute resolution:
1) Self-help (which is simply a form of vigilantism).
2) Trial by combat. Worked for feudalistic swine, but hardly a measure of equity or justice, merely a measure of who can kick who’s ass.
3) Adversarial Due Process – Which is adversarial simply by the nature of a dispute having more than one side claiming rights. However, far from being anti-civilization, using a judge or mediator and rules to settle disputes actually puts the “civil” in civilization. without them, there would be rule by brute force.
[end quote]
##################################
Your religion apparently oes not include an option which my religion includes.
I shall designate it thus:
0) Truthfulness and truthful forgiveness.
My religion never ever gets to 1) because option 0) always works perfectly, every time, every way, for every dispute, without the possibility of any exception.
Muslim? There is an eighth heaven, beyond the seventh. I have visited there; it is where all the power there will ever be is; the power that made Allah. Peace be upon us.
Buddhist? Option 0) is actual Nirvana, here and now.
Christian? Option 0) is the aftermath of rapture.
Mormon? What evidence did the Angel Moroni give that Jesus will not be triumphant?
Hindu? The taboo against full self-knowledge is being lifted.
Taoist? Option 0) is the eternal Tao which is now told.
Native American? Option 0) is the immediate presence of the Great Spirit, the Giver of Life.
Shinto? How better to honor one’s ancestors…
Atheist? Option 0) is the attainment of real secular humanism.
Agnostic? Option 0) may be the limit of achievable skepticism.
Dead? What is death?
I can add more if necessary…
If we do not fight life, we will not fight ourselves, and we will have no adversary.
How do I know and understand this?
I actually, really live it, here, now.
Human society has never been able to touch the intact conscience given to me by the time of my birth on earth.
Oh, yes.
I know and understand who I am.
I am come into this world to learn to understand how to never hurt or harm anyone.
When you know and understand who you are, you will become able to know and understand who I am.
It may be limiting to set limits on what may exist.
I am a plain, ordinary, unique, not-special person.
How all this is possible, I willingly give to anyone willing to accept it, for free. It belongs not to me.
Gosh Brian, you have really been a victim too. I too am a victim. I am Jill and I share your pain. Some people can really be like so mean that you just want to yell at them. Please tell more of what has happened to you. Are you really a Phd? What is it? I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. In case you forgot I am Jill.
There are not enough words in an infinitude of universes to convey the absolutely utter contempt I have been given by “the adversarial system” through its absolute contempt of me as a valid person.
If you find that I hold as though in absolute damnation “The Anglo-American Adversarial System,” you are remarkably correct.
What I would guess is your sense of “the rule of law,” I invariably experience as the unmentionably dastardly atrocity properly named, “the cruel of law.”
Of course, I am mis-using all sorts of brutalizing legal terms.
What on earth gives to you the notion that what I do and how I do it other than stems from becoming so awefully good with the trash of legalistic jargon through having checkmated some very experienced attorneys who seemed intent on absolutely and totally destroying my family merely because I am autistic and needed cancer-preventive surgeries which led to a mis-diagnosed and mis-treated morphine-induced psychosis?
I have known people who were told they needed to get an attorney to represent them in court, and the attorney or attorneys so abused the people that the abuse precipitated a severe psychotic break and months of inpatient psychiatric hospitalization?
One such person, before The Adversarial System drove him to the mercy of suicide, who gave me permission to tell his story if he died, was David Jennings, who lived in Sturgeon Bay, and who had a common-law marriage (the only sort of marriage that I, as a member of the clergy, deem valid) and there were employment issues (his common law wife could only find a satisfactory job in another state) and the lawyers demanded that David devalue and denigrate his wife and his children’s mother to win his share of custody.
David asked me, as his pastoral counselor, to help him get his attorney to understand David’s needs better. I told David that I would gladly go with him, but it was my guess that, because of attorney-client privilege, his attorney would refuse to talk with me, no matter how much I would be able to help David find a solution to the predicament of getting his children’s needs best met.
The attorney refused to talk with me, though I gave him my name.
David would get himself together and would have a counseling session with me, and then would be told to see his attorney and would be blasted to smithereens by his attorney for not being willing to be adversarial with his common law wife.
This cycle of my working through the trauma of his lawyer visits followed by the lawyer re-traumatizing David continued until, one day, the lawyer got so adversarial with David that he shattered David’s personality into a profoundly devastating psychotic break in the attorney’s office.
The attorney called me, and I arranged for David to get to a local hospital for evaluation, and David was taken by ambulance to the Brown County Mental Health Center. I visited him there, and he told me of the absolutely cruel abuse from his attorney.
David had been molested in church as a child by an “officer” of the church, and this molestation had left David badly damaged. I was working with David to resolve these childhood issues when the attorney’s abuse drove David into horrifying flashbacks.
David found himself being ruled by brute force by the attorney and the attorney’s notions of law.
It is cute to have a brutal, brutalizing system which claims that its brutality is not brutal. It is also murderous. It effectively murdered David Jennings.
For the record, I herewith stipulate that I regret to inform you that I have no blatant disrespect for or simple misunderstanding of the function and necessity of the rule of law in its present form of utter atrocity.
Take all the emphasizing words in an infinitely infinite set of universes of universes, and you will not have even a jot of an iota of the words needed to convey the degree and extent of the unbridled contempt I have for “The Anglo-American Adversarial System.”
I am becoming flummoxed with bulbitating exacerbating amazement.
B.I.L, you seem to me to be a very intelligent person. Yet you write as though you are perfectly clueless as to who I am, what I am doing, and why I am doing it.
What I am doing here is my memorial to the life and death of David Jennings, murdered against his vehement protests by the demon-nature of the Anglo-American Adversarial System.
Pro-se, I have danced through the courts when commanded to be in court, as though the courts were introductory preschool sandbox.
And I did so without deception. As I do here.
Have you the ability to grasp what you are doing? You are doing my work for me, proving that my view of the Anglo-American Adversarial System is no less dishonest, deceptive, and dastardly as I had surmised.
Perhaps you are not yet acquainted with the music of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, or Anna Russell, or the Hoffnung Festivals. I am so acquainted.
Jonathan and Darlene Edwards were pseudonyms for Paul Weston and Jo Stafford. They made recordings in which, for example, Jo would hit a note perfectly and then slide a tenth or so of a semitone sharp or flat.
Their phonograph records came out in the 1950s, and one of my Carleton biology professors was much into music and invited some students to his apartment to listen to music and talk biology. Two of us students were very attentive listeners to music, the other students not.
The two of us who heard the subtle music jokes burst out laughing while the other students were oblivious to the “musikalischer Spaß.”
You keep bringing to my attention defects (defects from a brain biology perspective, defects because of the brain damage they cause when internalized) in the structure of adversarial law that I had not previously noticed.
I am using the words I use with great care and due diligence as a licensed engineer doing ethical bioengineering research into the socio-biology of human destructiveness, and I am doing so while using my very real autism-related word issues as one of my main research tools.
I am misusing words because the meanings of the words of the adversarial system contradict the meanings of the words of the adversarial system for people who are given the wonderful gift of never needing words to have any possible thought.
I am not being cute and I am not being devious in any way. I am simply being as truthful as words allow in describing and sharing my own experiences of shattering abuse at the behest of the adversarial system and sharing such experiences as other shattered people have asked me to share.
In my work in engineering, I need many laws, and I need laws which, by conscientious effort, I can always adequately obey. In my work as a certified master electrician, if I violate Ohm’s law, I may make improper, high-resistance connections or splices which, because Ohm’s law cannot actually be violated, may result in a lethal structure fire.
The waterfront house we owned in Sturgeon had been partly modified by the previous owner, and I had obtained proper permits and had begun to systematically correct wiring errors made before we bought the house.
I was getting to the kitchen, but before I did, a defective splice behind the dishwaser started a wall-cavity fire which, I surmise, would have burned the house to the ground had I not been walking through the kitchen when the splice failed and started the fire. I heard the “pop,” knew what it was, and immediately called the fire department.
When we were forced to move to the country because of the financial devastation of the adversarial system on my family after that Mercury Sable automobile exploded and murdered my son and his wife, I checked all the wiring here before we moved.
The upstairs was commercially wired, but I believe the owners wired the basement. There was not one receptacle, luminaire, junction box, switch, or splice that was properly made. The town where we live does not do electrical inspection of remodeling work.
There is no law within engineering which I cannot conscientiously obey.
There is no law within the Anglo-American Adversarial System which I can conscientiously obey.
Give me laws of society which I can obey as conscientiously as I can obey the laws of engineering, and I shall cease my objections.
Tell me that the laws of society are not like the laws of engineering and I shall draw to attention your ignorance.
Your ignorance? Show me that the human brain is not a biophysical organ and therefore subject to the laws of biophysics.
I am vividly aware that anyone who really believes in the adversarial system will be troubled by my work. But my work does not murder people, whereas the adversarial system murders milliongs of people every year. One year, David Jennings was one of them.
Wisconsin Circuit Court Internet access will allow finding Door County Case Number 2007TR003466. This is a case in which I was falsely accused of violating a red light. Take a look.
There is something rather peculiar in what I found when I checked that case yesterday. It shows, falsely, that I plead “No Contest” on 12-21-2007, and was Found Guilty at Court Trial on 05-09-2008.
If it were true that I plead “No Contest” in December of 2007, how on earth was there a trial in May of 2008? I did what led to that absurdity to demonstrate the dishonesty of the court system, and it demonstrated it beyond my wildest dreams.
Sturgeon Bay Police Officer Joseph M. Bilodeau came to the intersection where Yvonne Bermudez, driving without insurance and on an suspended license, drove into the rearmost three feet of a trailer I was pulling.
Without asking me and without telling me he was doing so, Bilodeau decided that I had violated the light even though I ahd told him otherwise. At the pre-trial hearing, I declined to enter a plea, which, under relevant Wisconsin law, means the Judge is required to enter a Not-Guilty plea for the defendant. But the City Attorney had lied to me in telling me that I had, by law, to enter a plea. He did not understand that I had already read the law via the Internet, and knew that the City Attorney was lying to me.
At the trial, Yvonne Bermudez never said or suggested that I violated the red light. Officer Bilodeau was not at the scene of the collision when it happened and he was not a witness to the accident. As to Officer Bilodeau’s testimony regarding what he had asked me and my replies when he came to investigate the collision, when it came to my turn for cross-examination, I asked Officer Bilodeau if he understood that everything I said to him was about situational factors which can never be of personal fault. He indicated that he had not understood what I had said to him. Then I asked him, “So, you did not understand what I said and you did not ask for clarification?” Officer Bilodeau affirmed that as correct.
Therefore, there was not one whit of evidence presented at trial to the effect that I had violated the red light. Not one iota of a jot of a whit. Yet Judge Diltz announced that he found me guilty because of “clear and convincing evidence.”
So, I was found guilty based on the Judge Diltz’ pure delusion of clear and convincing evidence. I am reminded of the “pre-trial hearing” in “My Cousin Vinny,” after which Vinny tells his clients that it did not matter what happened at the hearing, the case was going to trial regardless of the hearing.
I was found guilty of “Violate Red Traffic Light” by Judicial Delusion. I have both transcripts of that single trial, the first one with its glaring error, and its corrected replacement. Poof goes the notion of court transcript accuracy!
While I am using words as though I were Jo Stafford as Darlene Edwards, in ways plausibly dissonant to anyone well schooled in law and procedure, I do what I do because it is the best I am actually able to do.
If the structure and procedure of the Adversarial System was even remotely intelligible to me, I might be able to use words and word patterns as though I were able to understand them.
I do not ask anyone else to think as I do, or to understand as I do.
Yet the Adversarial System, in its unmitigated contempt of me as a real person commands me to think and act in ways absolutely incomprehensible to me.
Perhaps what I am able to do reminds others of their unresolved socialization traumas, and perhaps that sort of reminder is discomfiting. Such is not within my control, I did not abuse you and cause any such trauma.
I am not the one who is actually hurting people.
I merely object to people being traumatically hurt.
I find no fault with anyone, and therefore, find no fault with anyone on this blawg.
Until such time as Professor Turley may deem my being here unacceptable to him, I shall do my best to be a caring, decent, concerned, sharing person. And I shall be civil without being like a worn out soggy dishrag being thrown in the trash.
It is impossible to actually bait me into any sort of actual retaliation.
I have personal integrity orders of magnitude beyond what would allow me to be baited into childish “My Daddy can Lick Your Daddy” transactional games.
And I find that the Anglo-American Adversarial System committed terrible murder on my friend and pastoral counselee, David Jennings.
I remember.
I do not forget.
I forgive all people who hurt me, I forgive absolutely and without limit.
And I first remember forgiveness.
And I do not forget.
And I do not forget to forgive, absolutely and without limit.
Which here I demonstrate to the extent words allow.
I am neither attacking the people whose profession includes the Adversarial System, nor the Adversarial System itself.
I am merely describing the horrific, dastardly atrocious, heinous colossally catastrophic damage I find the Adversarial System actually accomplishes in human lives and in humans while deceiving itself and its proponents of its actual function, which is quite simply the absolute destruction of the whole of humanity if that becomes possible.
Perhaps you may think it useful to pretend that I am like Jo Stafford, hitting a note exactly, but knowingly sliding flat by exactly a thousandth of a semitone.
Semitones? I have repaired musical instruments, including church organs. Some churches want equal tempering, some want the organ well-tempered, the better for playing J.S. Bach’s music. For certain music, it is possible to use a pure fifths temperament, only the final fifth will be contemptibly dissonant if one does that. Equal temperament does every key equally poorly.
If you dislike the dissonance of the adversarial system when it echoes back to you, why not find a better temperament for the law?
Except that you’re full of crap about the fundamental nature of the adversarial system, Brian. There will always be disputes. As such, there will always be the following options available for dispute resolution:
1) Self-help (which is simply a form of vigilantism).
2) Trial by combat. Worked for feudalistic swine, but hardly a measure of equity or justice, merely a measure of who can kick who’s ass.
3) Adversarial Due Process – Which is adversarial simply by the nature of a dispute having more than one side claiming rights. However, far from being anti-civilization, using a judge or mediator and rules to settle disputes actually puts the “civil” in civilization. without them, there would be rule by brute force.
If you don’t like being corrected about misusing technical terms like “adversarial” to hide your blatant disrespect for and simple misunderstanding of the function and necessity of the rule of law? Quit misusing the terms. “Adversarial” is part of the terminology because of the nature of disputes, not the nature of legalism. Due process and rules are fundamental to legalism, but dispute resolution will go on with or without the law. It’s just that disputes will be decided by who kills whom first. And that’s “adversarial”. It’s just not a process nor is it a semblance of equity or justice.
Is over-generalization a superstition?
There may be “mystics” who are irrational by any intelligible evaluation process.
There are also “mystics” who ponder the unknown using intelligible evaluation processes. There is a name for such “mystics.”
I know the name because I am one some such “mystic.”
That name is, “scientist.”
As a mystic scientist, I study the mysteries awaiting their revelation though accurate observation.
If not through some sort of revelation, whereby do new scientific discoveries arrive?
Like, “The Fundamental Error of Social Reality,” as one some such instance?
I find my ignorance to be at least infinite. That means there is always more available for me to learn.
Especially, I work at learning to be a better and more effective skeptic.
What greater mystic can there be than a true skeptic?
Is not, for a genuine skeptic, everything of mysticism, especially skepticism as such?
It is because I am as profoundly skeptical as I can find any way to be, that I work to unriddle the mystery of the superstition of adverse relationships.
I reject the notion of the rule of law as other than superstitious disastrously abusive nonsense, because I am skeptical of anything and everything, and only allow into my life that which I cannot recognize as deceptive.
And…
I value learning from everyone who comments here, and I value everyone who posts comments here, doing so without prejudice against anyone.
Yet, what I cannot find, no matter how skeptical I can be, to be other than what abuses children, I bring to public awareness.
Our late son, Michael, was born on St. Valentine’s Day, 1968. The priest let me sprinkle holy water on his casket on St. Valentine’s Day, 1996.
Adopt a child who suffered serious neglect and abuse through not fault of his or his biological parents or foster parents, and work with that child through terrible forms of trauma, and then attend his funeral because the Ford Motor Company evidently improved their profits by not adequately evaluating the spot-welding process during the manufacturing of the car, and you might become quite a skeptic regarding the structure of human society, as I did.
The law mandates that a corporation maximize profits for the benefit of the stockholders. When maximizing profits as a mandate of corporate law mandates such mistakes as murdered my son and his wife, I become very skeptical of the validity of law.
I find the Anglo-American Adversarial System to be of the form of a civil war against civility itself. And so, I am somewhat of a a civil war historian, only the civil war is now.
BIL, From your link, a quote from Sir John Mandeville’ book of travels (pub. 1357 and 1371):
“And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping… ”
Thanks, I love old travel narratives with their (short on science) lyrical language. That quote is the high point of my literary day so far. I’m going to have to search on line and see if I cant find a copy of the book.
Trolls . . . crocodiles. A scaly inhuman ambush predator by any other name is still a scaly inhuman ambush predator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile_tears
Also, the tactic of false consensus – especially in the form of the circular love-in – is not a new troll tactic around here. If this is Charlie and/or Kurt? Seriously boys. You need better tactics.
Mrs. Katz,
What have I done to you? Why would you say such a thing about me. Remind me, have we eaten together? Then you don’t know me, yet, are abusing me. Why?
Mr. Chan can have all the friends he wants, I want to find out if he has discovered how to stop the hair from growingvin his palm as has been suggested.
You say that you don’t like me, well, my family said that there are folks like you that would eat me up. Do you usually eat people you don’t know? Does that make you feel good? You have hurt my feelings. Thank you, I must go and cry now.
Chan L., Jill Chavez is not good company to be hanging around with. Consider the nature of this board; the people on it will argue with anybody, a well spoken turnip will get some play,(Hell, a rude turnip will get some play!) but nobody talks to Jill C., nobody.
Jill C is either one of our own acting as an agent provocateur or a troll that adopted a regular posters name. Jill C’s rasion d’etre is to sow discord by encouraging various posters to argue with others, stand up for their principles, etc. We are starving the troll as in DNFTT (Do not feed the troll.) Please help in that effort. Thank you.
Why is everyone seem to be picking on tootie? I hope you are not saying that tootie is a racist. Tootie has never come out and said anything racial has she? See, if tootie were racist she would tell you. She is all about being honest.
“Ashkenazim Jews, with the highest IQ of all people on earth, are nearly extinct.”
Tootie,
As usual you make blanket statements, probably drawn from suspect sources, about things you know nothing about. I’m an
Ashkenazi Jew in origin. There are many, many Ashkenazim Jews around among the Jewish population. That there are fewer today is a reflection of the Shoah performed by that group of white supramacists called the Nazi’s.
As to Jews having higher I.Q.’s there is a simple explanation for it that has nothing to do with genetics. To be a member of the Jewish faith is to be literate. We are required to study the Torah AND To Question Its’ Teachings as a way of ensuring that we comprhend it fully. We are probably the only religion that requires literacy as part of being a member.
Secondly, since Christianity and Islam barred Jews from many occupations they were forced to take up more complex occupations that required study and knowledge. Therefore again knowledge and learning are considered requisite.
While we’re on the subject, as much as I feel proud of being a Jew, both China and India have maintained continuous cultures for at least the past 4,500 years. In other words perhaps a thousand years before the even was what you might call a Jew.
Perhaps if you did a little more study on the various cultures created by black people, you might be surprised at their long historical background and cultural complexity. One that in America was broken up by those kind and innocent southerners you so admire.
Anyors:
Be careful, a progressive screwed up Mich.
Ya’ll quit picking on Chan….if he was a good student he could have gotten into a better college….the school he goes to reminds me of the typical training ground that the guy from Kansas went to….the BTK guy…..oh whats his name….so when the college is exposed as this you all better watch out…..
But then again….he’ll suffer from starvation ….as he’d be to proud to ask for assistance…when he needed it….his college is in Michigan…and we know how great the unemployment rate is there…but of course from his explanation….it is all because they choose not to work or over extend the budget….
At least that’s not stopping your perpetual research, Chan.