Alabama Municipal Judge Carlton Teel is packing more than legal principles under his robe. When a defendant Brian (Bryant) Keith Ford reacted badly to a sentence and started swinging his crutches at the judge, Teel whipped out a gun and then a deputy shot Ford in the side.
Accounts differ on how much danger the man posed — with some witnesses saying that he was not attacking the judge when he was shot. Others say he tried to grab the gun.
Ford was in the courtroom on a harassment charge from a neighbor who said Ford had cursed at her in December after accusing her of talking about him to police.
Teel reportedly fined him $800 — a rather modest sum when one considers he now faces serious criminal charges and remains in critical condition.
The most disturbing account was:
Sara Williams said she was sitting in the front row when the man, whom she knew, got agitated after the judge fined him $800. He waved one of his crutches in the air.
“The police were hollering for him to get down” when an officer opened fire, she said.
Williams said she yelled “Don’t shoot him no more!” right before the officer fired again.
If that is true, it is hard to see why potentially lethal force was used. However, others describe Ford as attacking the judge.
Do you believe judges should be allowed to pack heat in a courtroom?
Source: ABA Journal
RE: Woosty’s still a Cat, February 11, 2011 at 2:37 pm
“As hatred is only love distorted ….”
Attack is a cry for love.
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Yes…
Yes… …
One of my thesis committee members taught psychology at two colleges, and I was asked from time to time to be a guest presenter, while working on my remaining necessary field work.
The professor told his class that I would be coming, and, on one such occasion, one student announced, in effect, that he knew “how to get the guest presenter (me) and would do so.”
Of course, the professor, chuckling audibly, told me of this promise.
As a stage prop for those presentations, I had made an object of three sheets of 8.6 by 11 inch paper, glued together and cut into the shape of a lower case “m” such that it could be turned 90 degrees at a time and change from representing an m to a 3 to a w to an E. One face paper is red, the other face, blue, and the center paper a sheet of stiff, white paper.
Usually, in my presentation, I would hold the paper so it would be a 3 when I would see the other side as an E. I would then turn it 90 degrees so both the class and I would be seeing an m. Then I would turn it another 90 degrees, so that my side was 3 and the class side E. Next, another 90 degrees and the class and I would both see a w.
I would use this prop to demonstrate that the class and I could be looking at the same object and sometimes see it in the same way and sometimes in different ways. The object did not change what it was, yet interpretations of the class and me were the same or different depending only on the orientation of the prop.
In all but this one class, after the four orientations already mentioned, I would turn the object on its vertical axis, so the class would see that the other side was a different color after telling the class, while we both saw a w, that I now saw a 6.
Puzzlement countenances came out. After the vertical axis rotation, so the class saw that the two surfaces were of differing color, I would say, that I saw a 2.
Then I would explain that I worked on electronics and that, before I was born, the Radio Manufacturer’s Association had devised a color code for electronic parts: black=0, brown-1, red=2, orange=3, yellow=4, green=5, blue=6, purple=7, grey=8, and white=9. I informed the class that I had done so much work in electronic that I knew those colors as numbers.
The orientation having no effect on the color, turning the object through its m-3-w-E rotation did not change the 2 on one side or the 6 on the other.
Finally, I would turn the object so I was seeing it edgewise, and, seeing mainly the thick center paper, would announce that I now saw 9. Then I would show one of the front row students the object so the student could validate for the whole class the 9 between the outer 2 and 6.
I used this prop to convey the significance of the contrast between denotation and connotation without using big words.
So…
What about that student who was out to get me?
I always held the prop and asked the class what they saw. I did not use the same sequence (like emEw for every class, and I did not start with the same color facing the class.
In the class with the “gonna get me” student, I started with m, then 3, and the class all agreed about the m and the 3. When I next got to the w, the intended trouble-maker shouted out, “I see a woman’s breasts!” Let me tell you, there is nothing like being well prepared! I turned the object back to the m position and said, “And now she’s lying down.”
One wanna be bully rendered effectively mute.
After that fella came to his senses, by the next class, he told the professor that what I had done had been very helpful.
Tony C., I love you, in the agape sense, unconditionally. Yet I have as much burden as I am able to safely carry, I cannot manage your burden and mine.
My burden threatened as though to crush the my entire life into oblivion many times, and every time one person came and carried away enough of my life that my life could continue. That person is, in my whole life experience, the absolutely most real person I find has ever walked this earth, a real person with the strength to carry away every human burden of unresolved pain there will ever be. This I know, for my whole life tells me so.
When, one day, it was as though I had lived my very last moment, along came the most real person I have ever encountered, and took away so much of my life burden as was amazing and graceful beyond everything I had ever imagined possible and impossible.
And that most perfectly real person i have ever encountered told me, my burden lighter than a feather, not in words but in pure meaning, “When you are ready, you may tell others of the truth of your life. Do not fear those who cannot yet hear, allow time for them to first shed every necessary tear. For I will always be here, and near.”
What I say is for those whose ears can hear, what I do is for those whose eyes can see, and who I am is for those who know themselves to know.
I am an ordinary person. I am at best, only any sort of authority regarding my own life and life experiences.
At the beginning of one of the six stories on the two-DVD set, “Masters of Science Fiction,” the story, “A Clean Escape” (based upon a John Kessel short story), Dr. Stephen Hawking (with his “computer voice” may be heard saying, “Are there events so impossible to forget that they become too painful to remember?”
I have my own version of that question:
“What happens when an event has been so painfully shattering that it is as impossible to forget as it is to remember?”
Is such an event possible?
If it is possible, is it possible to avoid it?
If it is possible and impossible to avoid, what is it?
I find it to be the apparently nearly ubiquitous infant-child discontinuity.
I find it is that discontinuity which blocks people who cannot consciously remember their infancy from so remembering it.
My life somehow has excluded from it the infant-child discontinuity.
Nothing of my life has ever been so painfully shattering as to be impossible for me to consciously remember it.
For existence, all that may ever exist is possible.
Whereas it may be well said that to retrace the path of humanity to its origin requires an impossible, infinite regression, there is what is as though a wormhole, a real sort of wormhole which of only a single step from the chaos of contemporary society to a society of unbroken people in an unbroken world.
In writing the words of my comments on this blawg, I have passed back and forth through that wormhole, it is impossible forever for that wormhole to close, and it is indeed a wormhole, in the quantum mechanical sense, between parallel universes.
The wormhole is described accurately, albeit poetically, in my doctoral dissertation. There is but one such wormhole, as best I yet understand, and it is as though perfectly unique for everyone who steps through it.
Believe what I write to be false?
What better explanation, not merely superstitious, can you provide for what I here, on this blawg, have been writing and sharing?
In the world in which I was born and in which I actually live, there are no adversaries, for it is the real world.
The world of adversaries is but a prototype of the real world, which is merely one step away.
Fully, completely, totally, without limit accept and live according to the truth that what exists is what can exist because existence is of a process which creates itself, always at the absolute limit of its existential attainment, such that nothing is ever other than as best as it can possibly be, which is the experience of those in-the-womb and yet-to-be-born, and, with that one, simple step, you will find yourself in the real world, free to return to the prototype world as you wish and free to be in the real world as you wish.
This I know, this I understand, this I live, for real.
Think I merely Jive-talk?
I suggest the real walk!
Why live in fear,
With safety near?
If you are certain that what I write is wrong, tell me how you have tested that for real.
As opinions are personal, surely facts are impersonal.
I herewith state that I herewith state facts with words.
I welcome factual contrary demonstrations with words.
And only with words.
W=c,
“Attack is a cry for love.” To quote my personal physician, Dr. Hubert Farnsworth, “Whaaaa?” To paraphrase that famous coke-head Freud, “Sometimes
a cigaran attack is justa cigaran attack.”Freud was a lunatic, but he occasionally had a point.
@Woosty: Sometimes attack is a cry for justice; or a cry to stop insanity; or just a desire to slow down the flood of endless lying bullshit. Sometimes hatred is just hatred, and revulsion and disdain are exactly what they seem to be.
“As hatred is only love distorted ….”
Attack is a cry for love.
RE: Tony C., February 11, 2011 at 2:26 pm
@Brian: Okay, now you are a bigger idiot.
######################
Well said, indeed! Thank you!
RE: J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., February 11, 2011 at 2:01 pm
RE: Woosty’s still a Cat, February 11, 2011 at 1:51 pm
Dr Harris, this is a good place to come to get armour…
######################
Yep… !
#@##@#@#@#@#@#@#@#@#@#
However…
The armour is lovely and invulnerable to penetration.
I simply love it.
Yet is mere decoration, beautiful and flawless though it is…
What real need is there for real armour if there really are no real bullets?
I follow the path others before me made.
Albert Einstein, previously mentioned, his Self-Portrait in his book, Out of My Later Years:
“…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.”
It is now more than sixty years since Out of My Later Years was published, in 1950.
For me, arrows of hate have been shot at me, more than I could ever hope to count. They belong to a world with which I seek decent connection.
Arrows of hate never hit me, only because arrows of hate cannot exist. Only arrows of love do exist, and people who have not yet learned how to aim for, and hit, the mark will never hit me with their arrows.
As hatred is only love distorted by unrequited pain, it grieves me to the depths of my sorrow, that so many arrows of love are shot out so far beyond my reach, that I am unable to catch and cherish them.
I do not send arrows, I only send forth gentle zephyrs whose passing kiss is of the comfy warmth of gentle, affirming kindness.
I cry that those toward whom I send my gentle zephyrs are so often so terribly busy attempting to shoot their imaginary arrows of hate toward me as to not be able to notice the zephyrs and their lovely, heartwarming kisses of “Yes…”
@Brian: Okay, now you are a bigger idiot.
RE: Woosty’s still a Cat, February 11, 2011 at 1:51 pm
Dr Harris, this is a good place to come to get armour…
######################
Yep… !
Tony C. 1, February 11, 2011 at 1:38 pm
@Brian: You are an idiot.
############################
Exactly! We now are in apparent perfect agreement?
That is what I have been working to share as incontrovertible fact all along!
Oh, the wonderful fragrance of the sweet smell of success!
I rejoice!
And, according as I find to be the essential essence of the eternal truth of Islam:
Peace Be Upon Us!
Dr Harris, this is a good place to come to get armour…
@Brian: You are an idiot.
Having perchance sufficiently well set the scene, in this theater of words: Now comes, from stage center, the actor speaking his opening line:
The Play begins.
Curtain opens.
the Actor (looking around quizzically, hands spread in astonishment):
To the question, “Do you believe judges should be allowed to pack heat in a courtroom?” I reply, “Absolutely.”
Why so, may you ask? Because judgment is heat and heat judgment, and without packing heat of one or an other kind, the judge is without the ability to judge or to judge judgments.
It matters little whether the judge shoots gunpowder-actuated full metal jacket bullets or shoots words of time-corrupted learning bullets, both kinds of bullets are inherently equally lethal.
(An hour of hushed silence)
Curtain closes.
The Play is over.
Or not.
The opening line is the ending line, the Alpha and the Omega.
I cannot tell of a life I have not lived, and I have no way to scientifically test whether I am the only infant to have truly prayed before being able to speak aloud, but pray as I have told, I indeed did.
My dad was the minister of United Congregational Church, in Butte, Montana, when I was born, and, as I have elsewhere written, my parents took me to the church services because United Congregational Church had no nursery for babies and my dad’s salary was not enough for my parents to get a baby sitter during church.
On the day before she died, in 1997 after my thesis committee had unanimously approved my disserttion, I talked with my mother, gently, for over two hours. She reminded me that I had never interrupted church by crying.
I had heard my dad’s voice before that first Sunday at church and I listened to the sounds of his voice, for it was already familiar to me.
My parents were both educated in the ways of science and both approached religion as scientists first. Bible reading at home, with my parents and brother talking, while I listened happened even before that first Sunday in church.
Luciano Pavarotti, as I recall, was once asked how to get children interested in classical music, and his answer was of he form, “Simply expose them to it.”
My parents simply exposed me, from my birth on, to a scientifically intelligible religious home and church environment, doing so deliberately and effectively. I was never given the Santa Claus story other than as an imaginary fairy tale, I never received a present “from Santa Claus.” Instead of presents from imaginary notions of fairies, I was given presents only be real people.
When, in grade school, another child asked me, “What did you get from Santa Claus,” I simply answered, “Santa Claus isn’t.” Another nearby child, somewhat older than the one who asked, treated me in a way that I experience as reminiscent of being told I am a “liar.” That somewhat older child harshly criticized me, lambasting me for what I had done, being truthful as I understand truthfulness, and thereby not complying with socially-mandated lying.
By what truthful way do you say that I did not, as an infant, pray?
Could it be because you did not pray, and because you sincerely believe that everyone else lived a life almost exactly the same as yours?
Such errors are the mischief of the mirror neuron system gone awry, methinks.
If so, I find that rather tragic.
Stupid? With that, I completely agree. As best I can yet discern, there is yet to been one ordinary human being whose stupidity is not at least infinite, and that definitely includes me, though I allow that I may be mistaken about this; not mistaken about myself, but about others.
As it occurs to me that you were not there in church and at home with my parents, whenceforth cometh thy authority that thee thereby maketh thy claims?
Mistakes happen. Learnings happen.
I find you to be truthful about your life.
What an infinite load of bullshit. Infants do not pray, Infants are atheists, they don’t “believe” in anything because they don’t know anything. Religion is a concept that can only be taught to children with both language and a sense of cause and effect; because all religions are false explanations of how things came to be and how things work. Religion is failed science.
You are a liar and a fraud, a charlatan, and a stupid charlatan on top of that.
My first comment posting effort evidently found its way into the Internet bit bucket, so I reiterate the effort, thus
Whereas I observe that most social science work uses the methods of studying central tendency phenomena, my work is focused on the one percent who are least able to adapt to present-day society and on the one percent who are most able to so adapt.
To study the one percent least able to adapt, and live among them as peers, I identified two possibilities. One was committing a heinous crime, a notion I absolutely reject without exception, and the other was to become a very real, severely mentally ill psychiatric patient.
The first way would be stupid beyond anything I could ever imagine and the second is supposedly impossible of attainment. However, authentic prayer just might be authentic.
Beginning in infancy, I asked that my whole life be a prayer, that I would be given whatever needed that I would best serve God, as I know of and understand God.
My dad died of surgical complications following successful cancer-removal of metastatic colon cancer secondary to colon cancer secondary to the genetic condition known as familial adenomatous polyposis.
I beseeched my brother, J. Don Harris, Ph.D. to get screened for colon cancer, his physicians totally refused to screen him, and, in June of 1986, he was found to have terminal cancer secondary to familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP). He died in January, 1987.
With the discovery of my brother’s terminal cancer, I was able to arrange to get a colonoscopy at the now-defunct Michael Reese Hospital, in Chicago. Dr. Ernestine Hambrick observed a cluster of four small polyps in the ascending colon and recognized that also have the FAP gene, and my total colectomy with ileo-rectal anastomosis was performed a few weeks later, when it could be properly scheduled. Morphine for post-surgical pain not only controlled the pain adequately for my purposes, but also flung me into a form of morphine-induced psychosis, a toxic reaction to morphine and not an actual mental illness.
It was the morphine-induced psychosis which opened the door for me into the psychiatric hospital environment where, as I had a very genuine brain condition, I was accurately regarded by patients and staff as properly being a psychiatric patient. Thus, unlike Rosenhan’s pseudopaitents, who were often recognized as pesudopatients by real patients, though not by staff, I was a real patient in fact.
When I was first admitted to the 8-East psychiatric unit at the University of Ilinois Hospital, in Chicago, it came into my thoughts, that, if I were absolutely as truthful as life allows, I would have the possibility of the research opportunity of a million or more lifetimes.
So, as a psychiatric patient, I kept as perfectly truthful within as being alive allowed, while learning from staff and peer patients about the one percent of humans who are least able to successfully adapt to social expectations.
I have thousands of pages of records of my hospitalizations and subsequent events. After I have been able to redact all information which, if published, would violate ethical confidentiality standards for human subject research, I intend to scan and self-publish the whole conglomeration on the Internet as fair use within the public safety, scientific research data copyright law provisions.
In my work and its findings, there is no such person as is actually a liar or a fraud, just as malingering and factitious disorders are truthfully forms of brain trauma and trauma response.
Within the viewpoints available to people whose socialization falls within two or so standard deviations of centrality, my work is as though of a psychopathic sociopath of utterly absurd nature, for I never admit to being guilty of anything whatsoever, and I do this because I can invariably find the accurate situational attributions for every event which comes to my attention. I do not admit to being guilty about anything because I know and understand why guilt is the most neurologically addictive delusion I have ever encountered. It is so addictive as to rule out people intensively addicted to the notion of guilt from recognizing it as delusional.
On the bookshelf where I have been keeping that bible my folks gave me in 1950, is a space-defining object, made by Circle, Inc., 4600 W. 72nd St.Chicago, IL 60620. On the face of this object are words of Elbert Hubbard, “The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.”
I am not afraid of making mistakes because I am not afraid of learning.
The “mirror neuron system” may be most manfestly evident in the saying, “If everyone is doing it, it is okay.”
“If everyone is doing it, it is okay,” is a notion which my research may most profoundly rebut.
Anabaptist sociologist, Donald Kraybill, years before he co-authored the book, “Amish Grace…” about the Nickel Mines school horror, wrote a book, “The Upside-Down Kingdom.”
In my world the world of those who find need to label me as “liar” or “fraud” or other words of such ilk are living in a world I experience as being upside-down, and in that upside-down world, what is circular in my right-side-up-as-I-experience-it world is quite evidently not circular in the world I find inverted and what is not circular in the world I experience is deemed circular in the world I experience as inverted.
I keep using words that are intended to inform those who disagree with my understanding of the nature of the misunderstanding as I am able to convey it with words.
If the words I use are transformed into inverse meanings when interpreted by a person as though living in a world I find plausibly as though inverted, that inversion is totally without my locus of control.
And the Lord of the Dance dances on.
@Brian: Ha! More lies. If you are an engineer — What did you do, write a little program that can emulate a blithering idiot and post claptrap on blogs?
You’re entire screed is that you can’t change the past. Duh. How utterly moronic, it is deserving of a seventh-grade lunch room philosophy debate, and anybody that thinks you are doing anything more than talking in circles needs to go back to the seventh grade and recapitulate their education, because maybe it will stick if they do it twice.
You are a LIAR.
I guess it kinda rattles me when someone persists, by sincere mistake, in labeling me dishonest…
So, have evidently been making mistakes in part due to being “rattled.”
Oh. Sorry.
Unintentional, unavoidable mistakes continue to happen…
My mother was a high school English teacher before she and my dad married. While I know better, I did not understand that, in editing, I done did another blunder
Poor English usage, as first posted:
Neither the null hypothesis nor the alternate hypothesis are about mistakes which have not happened.
Proper English usage, as correction:
Neither the null hypothesis nor the alternate hypothesis is about mistakes which have not happened.
.
I do much better writing with WordPerfect and using all the writing tools available with WordPerfect, except it is a nuisance to keep switching WordPerfect from using to not using curly quotes, which do not show up decently through WordPress, according to what I have noticed.
Editing blunder. Unavoidable mistake happened…
Words omitted at end of paragraph
Was posted as:
The alternative hypothesis is that no such mistake, first demonstrably made, then demonstrably avoided after it was made, then demonstrably unmade after it was avoided after it had been made and therefore demonstrably did not happen when it happened.
Was intended to be posted as:
The alternative hypothesis is that no such mistake, first demonstrably made, then demonstrably avoided after it was made, then demonstrably unmade after it was avoided after it had been made and therefore demonstrably did not happen when it happened, can actually be demonstrated.
And, as clarification:
The null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis are only about mistakes which actually happened.
Neither the null hypothesis nor the alternate hypothesis are about mistakes which have not happened.
Not so long ago, I attended a conference with a focus on traumatic brain injury; I have the certificate of attendance. The presenter was a state licensed neuropsychologist, who is a member of the American Psychological Association.
Because I am a licensed engineer, my main professional association is the National Society of Professional Engineers. However, I am a member of the Association for Psychological Science, a group for which the focus is scientific instead of professional.
I am looking into the possibility of working as a colleague with the neuropsychologist, I shared with him a few basic aspects of my research and its findings.
In my work, the null hypothesis is that one or more mistakes actually already made could have actually been avoided with a demonstrably achievable process. To demonstrate the null hypothesis, it is necessary to demonstrate the mistake being made and, after it has been made, demonstrate that it could have been avoided by demonstrating that, it having been avoided after it had been made, it was not actually made.
The alternative hypothesis is that no such mistake, first demonstrably made, then demonstrably avoided after it was made, then demonstrably unmade after it was avoided after it had been made and therefore demonstrably did not happen when it happened.
It is common in null hypothesis testing to allow something that happens less than five percent of the time to qualify the null hypothesis as false.
In my work however if the null hypothesis qualifies as false if only one instance of the null hypothesis failing can be found. Methinks null hypothesis testing can be no stronger than that.
Furthermore, I have constructed the alternate hypothesis and the null hypothesis to be perfectly dichotomous, such that the null hypothesis being false renders the alternative hypothesis inescapably true.
The University of Illinois at Chicago research methods expert was quite sure my work and my hypothesis testing approach was suspect, yet could not find any flaw of any sort after several hours of talking over the methodology I used to minimize bias.
The neuropsychologist earned his doctorate at an engineering school. We may find we share language usefully.
The null hypothesis I plan to explore with this trauma expert, if said expert agrees to such exploration, is that folks who use words like “liar” or “fraud” about me are not dealing with a form of brain injury resulting from what, in my work, I have named, “socialization trauma.”
I do not find anyone to be a liar because I find that traumatized people accurately report their trauma, in words when allowed, and in acting out otherwise.
I find no fault with those who label me “liar,” “fraud” or other epithet, for I both know and understand what happens to people who adapt to life experiences in such a manner, and, additionally, I know and understand why such happens.
Words are not a problem for me, however, acting out can be horrifically dangerous.
If someone needs to believe that I am dishonest or deceptive, that is a need that is real for the person in need, yet such need is about the person in need and is not actually about me.