After the posting this morning over the controversy involving former Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox, I had an opportunity to discuss the allegations with him in detail. Cox makes an interesting free speech case over his treatment and later termination for comments that he made on Twitter and on his blog. I wanted to share some of those details and the concern over a termination based on a lawyer’s statements in his private life.
Here are the salient facts that Jeff Cox revealed in our conversation:
First, Cox confirmed that he never connected his statements to his position at the Indiana Attorney General’s office. After he created his blog, he corresponded anonymously. Later, he added his name but never identified himself with his office. Indeed, he told me that Adam Weinstein from Mother Jones first contacted him at his work e-mail. He responded to that e-mail from his personal e-mail. When Weinstein again replied using his work address, Cox said that he answered his questions using his personal account.
Second, Cox says that his superiors knew that he had the blog and did not discourage him. Indeed, he said that he started the blog Pro Cynic in 2004 as an experiment for the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, which was still unsure of how to use blogs. He began to use his real name only after he was assured that he could not be punished for blogging so long as he did not associate his office or his position with the blogs. He recounted how, sometime in 2006, he had discussions with senior staff and was told that there was no need to keep his blog posts pseudonymous. He said that he viewed the blog as personal, not representative of the office, because he never identified it with the office, blogged on his own equipment and time and did not talk any issues that related to the office or state matters. The office simply asked him to avoid discussing local or state issues. Ironically, that meant that Cox focused on international issues like Afghanistan and out of state issues like that of the strike in Wisconsin.
Third, Cox insists that many of these comments are taken out of context. He said that he made a great number of comments designing to start debates and often meant in jest. He is not anti-union and actually comes from a union family (his father is a union member and his family is composed of steel workers and coal miners). He said that he was bothered by reports that the Sergeant of Arms told legislators that he could not guarantee their safety but that the reference to live ammunition was meant as hyperbole. He insisted that he liked to spar on the blog and often used incendiary language to spur debates. That is why, he insists, his site was called “Pro Cynic.” “Pro Cynic” was short for “Professional Cynic” and was “always intended to be a mixture of seriousness and humor, ‘cynic’ being a synonym for satire, sarcasm or irony.” He stated that the office was aware of his often off-the-wall commentary on the blog, which would sometimes be the subject of office joking. He says that he would make fun of himself on the site, such as proclaiming that the site was “one small step for man …”
Fourth, Cox did not work in any area remotely associated with the Wisconsin controversy. He handled eminent domain cases and was a member of the transportation practice group.
Fifth, he was terminated by the Attorney General’s office after a brief discussion with his superiors. He was told that he could be fired for simply bringing discredit upon the office — even due to statements made as an individual.
Sixth, Cox had a good record with the office. In fact, in 2010, he earned the “You Rock” award – a painted rock – for going above the call of duty in serving the people of Indiana. He had worked with the office since 2001 when he began as a law clerk and continued after his graduation.
In my view, these facts (if proven) would make for a strong free speech claim. We have been discussing the trend toward increasing discipline for public officials based on actions or statements occurring in their private lives. We have seen this regulation of private speech in cases that involve disciplinary actions against students (here, teachers (here and here and here and here and here and here), police officers (here and here and here) and other public employees (here).
The connection made in this context to the office was not apparently made by Cox but by Mother Jones magazine. Cox has since closed his blog and regrets causing the controversy. The question is why he was not simply given a warning about such comments and how they reflect upon the office. Now that his name has been associated with the office, he would likely have curtailed or stopped such comments.
There is obviously a great deal of anger over these comments, but the real question is whether a public employee like Cox has any protection for comments made as a private citizen.
In 2006, the Court decided the case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, in a close 5-4 decision against a public employee. In this case, Justice Kennedy ruled that the First Amendment does not protect “every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job.” However, this was a case where the assistant district attorney was making the comments are part of his duties and the Court ruled that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” In this case, Cox made no association with his office. Notably, even in a matter involving statements made in the course of one’s duties, the vote was a close call with Justice Alito deciding the case as the fifth vote.
In Pickering v Board of Education (1968), the Court ordered the reinstatement of a teacher who wrote a letter to a newspaper critical of the local school board. The Court found that a public employee’s statements on a matter of public concern could not be the basis for termination without more of a showing, such as knowing or reckless falsehoods or the statements were of the sort to cause a substantial interference with the ability of the employee to continue to do his job.
I have great problems with the scope of the Garcetti opinion. Yet, Kennedy did note that:
At the same time, the Court has recognized that a citizen who works for the government is nonetheless a citizen. The First Amendment limits the ability of a public employer to leverage the employment relationship to restrict, incidentally or intentionally, the liberties employees enjoy in their capacities as private citizens. See Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U. S. 593, 597 (1972) . So long as employees are speaking as citizens about matters of public concern, they must face only those speech restrictions that are necessary for their employers to operate efficiently and effectively. See, e.g., Connick, supra, at 147 (“Our responsibility is to ensure that citizens are not deprived of fundamental rights by virtue of working for the government”).
This case would appear to involve matters of public concern and comments made as an individual citizen.
What do you think?
Jonathan Turley
Additional source: ABA Journal
“Popper’s approach may be acceptable for some branches of science”
“I have no objection to the law profession making all the laws they can make, so long as none of their laws have any connection whatsoever with my life.”
Still not a defense. An excuse maybe. A rationalization certainly. But not even close to a defense of your antisocial idea.
You cannot abandon the rules of logic simply because you disagree with empirical positivism.
Your assertion fails on simple logic alone.
And you cannot falsify that which is backed by fact, observation and logic. Popper’s approach may for some branches of science, but you are attempting to falsify the fundamental state of human nature based on an improper sample space regarding the whole of humanity and relate it to falsifying the need for courts and laws out of your own personal bias and sense of vendetta. Just because you feel like you don’t need laws – since you’ve adopted the postpositivism stance – fails to take into account that postpositivism does not abandon the possibility and desirability of objective truth.
The objective truth is that legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny. That the law comes to this conclusion via empirical positivism does not invalidate the objective truth of it simply because you don’t approve of empirical positivism.
This is a great failing of Popper’s work – it easily descends into metaphysical conjecture. The necessity of laws and legal dispute resolution – in either the inquisitorial or the adversarial mode but preferably in the adversarial mode – as a check on the tyranny of the strong over the weak and against anarchy are not conjecture. They are lessons evidenced and borne out on the backs of every civilization since the dawn of recorded history. There is no more objective truth than one made in observation of the entire span of recorded history and a sample space of all mankind from the dawn of said recorded history to now.
You are simply wrong, Brian.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, March 1, 2011 at 10:09 am
“Thank you. It is because you are not an engineer that disqualifies you to lawfully criticize my work, at least to the extent that I understand relevant Wisconsin law regarding who can lawfully criticize the work of a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer”
By that reasoning, since you’re not a lawyer, you’re not qualified to criticize the work of lawyers, namely the law.
Absent some sort of magic I really doubt can ever exist, I am unable to make sense of how anyone can either know or understand anything except by having learned it.
I observe that not all persons have perfectly identical sequences of experiences through which learning can happen, thus I expect people to have contrasting knowledge and contrasting understanding, thus I expect differences in knowledge and differences in understanding to happen because I cannot find any viable alternative to this experiential-learning-existential model of knowledge and understanding which I find I know or understand.
Karl R. Popper, in “The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, Plato, Fifth Edition (revised), Princeton University Press, 1966, may have useful notions regarding the seeming philosophical contrast between the weltanschauung of BiL and the weltanschauung I have developed over the course of my life.
Methinks the core contrast may be associated with the nature of Ethical positivism. The relevant text is found on pages 71 and 71”
[Begin Karl R. Popper text]
(2) Ethical positivism shares with the biological form of ethical naturalism the belief that we must reduce norms to facts. but the facts this time are sociological facts, namely, the actually existing norms. Positivism maintains that there are no other norms but the laws which have actually been set up (or ‘posited’) and which have therefore a positive existence. Other standards are considered as unreal imaginations. The existing laws are the only possible standards of goodness : what is, is good. (Might is right.) According to some forms of this theory, it is a gross misunderstanding to believe that the individual can judge the norms of society ; rather, it is society which provides the code by which the individual must be judged.
AS a matter of historical fact, ethical (or moral, or judicial) positivism has usually been conservative, or even authoritarian ; and it has often invoked the authority of God. Its arguments depend, I believe, upon the alleged arbitrariness of norms. We must believe in existing norms, it claims, because there are no better norms which we may find for ourselves. In reply to this it might be asked ; What about this norm ‘We must believe etc.”? If this is only an existing norm, then it does not count as an argument in favor of these norms ; but if it is an appeal to our insight, then it admits that we can, after all, find norms ourselves. And if we are told to accept norms on authority because we cannot judge them, the neither can we judge whether the claims of the authority are justified, or whether we may not follow a false prophet. And if it is held that there are no false prophets because laws are arbitrary anyhow, so that the main thing is to have some laws, then we may ask ourselves why it should be so important to have laws at all ; for if there are no further standards, why should we not choose to have no laws? (These remarks may perhaps indicate the reasons for my belief that authoritarian or conservative principle are usually an expression of ethical nihilism ; that is to say, of an extreme moral skepticism, of a distrust of man and of his possibilities
[end Karl R. Popper text]
As I find the view of BiL to be comparable to the view of ethical positivism, and as I reject ethical positivism in accord with my conscience, I find no common philosophy which we share which will allow intelligible communication between us.
I am finding strong evidence that the mapping of object-denotation-connotation BiL is using is very nearly the dichotomous alternative to the object-denotation-connotation mapping which I have developed during the course of my life.
This philosophical contrast, I have come to deem possibly without pragmatic remedy if whatever I write is taken to mean anything but what I expect my words to convey.
Thus, it has been rather fascinating for a while, and I will begin to look for someone not, in my view, of the ethical positivism nihilist school of reiteration.
On the theory that this sequence of words will assume meaning incomprehensible to me, shall write them, to convey or to not convey my view regarding symmetry, wherein I have no objection to the law profession making all the laws they can make, so long as none of their laws have any connection whatsoever with my life.
As to “lawfully criticize”? There is no law saying I can’t criticize anything I damn well please in this country. In fact, we have a law that guarantees I can criticize any damn thing I want, sparky. It’s called the 1st Amendment.
Now, on to the postulate:
“Your apparently repeated assertion that I have the postulate you appear to me to be describing is an error of interpretation totally outside my entire locus of control; I have no such postulate because I am using the process of null-hypothesis/alternate-hypothesis/null-hypothesis-refutation and am absolutely not promoting any postulate in the sense I find you may be using the word, “postulate.” I am now inclined to conjecture that the difficulty you are experiencing regarding my bioengineering research may stem from it being of fact that my grasp of science and science methods so vastly exceeds yours as to make it impossible for you to have a clue as to what I am doing and how and why I am doing it.”
I don’t give a damn what you say you are doing, only what you are actually doing: attempting to undermine the role of courts and law in society.
Your response to this: 1) legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and
Was this:
“If you were actually, demonstrably capable of understanding my work in depth and detail, instead of summarily rejecting it with seeming absolute prejudice, a useful form of dialogue might ensue.”
So we are having a dialog that is meaningful in demonstrating that you cannot defend your “work”. And tell me I’m not capable of understanding it one more time. That never ceases to be funny. It’s not a defense of your work though. That’s because there is no defense to your “work” except more obfuscation, lies and bullshit.
To the second key criticism:
2) that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny.
You respond:
“Is it really beyond your ken to accept the notion of scientific discovery of the “completely new paradigm” form?”
That’s called “answering with a question” and is a form of evasion. Instead of making the blanket assertion that I, or indeed anyone else apparently, can understand your “work”, why don’t you explain it? Keep in mind, all explanations will be challenged if they don’t conform to formal logic and valid proof.
“Contrary to what I am beginning to have a hunch may be of delusion on your part, my ability to defend my thesis and dissertation stands irrefutably and irrebutably because I properly earned my Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago only because I really did defend both thesis and dissertation through proper peer review, and nothing you can assert can ever rebut that FACT! because it is a FACT!”
Ooooo. I love it when you call me delusional! It just reeks of your inability to defend your idea.
A degree in bioengineering – bioengineering being the application of concepts and methods of physics, chemistry, and mathematics to solve problems in life sciences, using engineering’s own analytical and synthetic methodologies – is an inappropriate tool to apply to the analysis of law. That’s a fact. If you want to practice epidemiology or study interactions between pollutants and organisms within a given environ, it’s an appropriate tool. Applying it to law is like trying to hammer two pieces of wood together using a jigsaw. The subject of the study of law is the law. Unlike you, I would never try to use the law as a template for curing cancer. It’s the wrong tool for the job. Just like you’ve got the wrong tool for the job in putting forth your invalid assertions about the necessity of the role of courts and law in society.
Valid formally conforming logic plus actual proof.
That is what is required.
To which you respond:
“<That is what I have actually done, hence I have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and that may be why you do not have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago."
Again, you've done nothing of the sort. You've floating a bunch of obfuscation and attempts at misdirection. You've appealed once again to your inappropriate authority. Are you going to compare yourself to Galileo, Einstein or Hawking again too? Because that's just adorable.
I can watch propagandists run in circles all day and it never ceases to be amusing.
"I find your belief to the effect that my work is of antisocial drivel to be a profound error of classification on your part."
Then you'd be once again wrong. Promoting the idea that society would be better off without laws and courts promotes both tyranny and anarchy. Since tyranny and anarchy and inherently antisocial, your idea is inherently antisocial.
The challenge stands.
"I observe that you have never challenged me or my work because, as best I can guess, some form of prejudice precludes your making the effort needed before any actual challenge can be possible."
No. I have no prejudice. I read what you wrote and found it lacking in logic and proof. I challenged you on this basis and you have yet to provide an sufficient rebuttal to that challenge. Because you can't.
Your inability to defend your idea stands.
"Contrary to what I am beginning to have a hunch may be of delusion on your part, my ability to defend my thesis and dissertation stands irrefutably and irrebutably because I properly earned my Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago only because I really did defend both thesis and dissertation through proper peer review, and nothing you can assert can ever rebut that FACT! because it is a FACT!"
And yet you cannot defend your postulate against a challenge to it based on commonly accepted principles of formal logic and standards of reasonable proof employed both in law and science.
Sorry.
The challenge and the criticism still stands as a matter of logic and proof no matter how much of a hissy fit you want to throw or appeal to your own authority.
Or here's an idea –
Put up or shut up.
Not to validate me, but rather to validate your assertion and prove me wrong. Go on. Chase your tail some more. It's funny watching the propagators of socially destructive nonsense flounder in their own inability to confront logic.
“or indeed anyone else apparently, can’t understand your “work”,”
“Thank you. It is because you are not an engineer that disqualifies you to lawfully criticize my work, at least to the extent that I understand relevant Wisconsin law regarding who can lawfully criticize the work of a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer”
By that reasoning, since you’re not a lawyer, you’re not qualified to criticize the work of lawyers, namely the law.
As to “lawfully criticize”? There is no law saying I can’t criticize anything I damn well please in this country. In fact, we have a law that guarantees I can criticize any damn thing I want, sparky. It’s called the 1st Amendment.
Now, on to the postulate:
“Your apparently repeated assertion that I have the postulate you appear to me to be describing is an error of interpretation totally outside my entire locus of control; I have no such postulate because I am using the process of null-hypothesis/alternate-hypothesis/null-hypothesis-refutation and am absolutely not promoting any postulate in the sense I find you may be using the word, “postulate.” I am now inclined to conjecture that the difficulty you are experiencing regarding my bioengineering research may stem from it being of fact that my grasp of science and science methods so vastly exceeds yours as to make it impossible for you to have a clue as to what I am doing and how and why I am doing it.”
I don’t give a damn what you say you are doing, only what you are actually doing: attempting to undermine the role of courts and law in society.
Your response to this: 1) legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and
Was this:
“If you were actually, demonstrably capable of understanding my work in depth and detail, instead of summarily rejecting it with seeming absolute prejudice, a useful form of dialogue might ensue.”
So we are having a dialog that is meaningful in demonstrating that you cannot defend your “work”. And tell me I’m not capable of understanding it one more time. That never ceases to be funny. It’s not a defense of your work though. That’s because there is no defense to your “work” except more obfuscation, lies and bullshit.
To the second key criticism:
2) that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny.
You respond:
“Is it really beyond your ken to accept the notion of scientific discovery of the “completely new paradigm” form?”
That’s called “answering with a question” and is a form of evasion. Instead of making the blanket assertion that I, or indeed anyone else apparently, can understand your “work”, why don’t you explain it? Keep in mind, all explanations will be challenged if they don’t conform to formal logic and valid proof.
“Contrary to what I am beginning to have a hunch may be of delusion on your part, my ability to defend my thesis and dissertation stands irrefutably and irrebutably because I properly earned my Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago only because I really did defend both thesis and dissertation through proper peer review, and nothing you can assert can ever rebut that FACT! because it is a FACT!”
Ooooo. I love it when you call me delusional! It just reeks of your inability to defend your idea.
A degree in bioengineering – bioengineering being the application of concepts and methods of physics, chemistry, and mathematics to solve problems in life sciences, using engineering’s own analytical and synthetic methodologies – is an inappropriate tool to apply to the analysis of law. That’s a fact. If you want to practice epidemiology or study interactions between pollutants and organisms within a given environ, it’s an appropriate tool. Applying it to law is like trying to hammer two pieces of wood together using a jigsaw. The subject of the study of law is the law. Unlike you, I would never try to use the law as a template for curing cancer. It’s the wrong tool for the job. Just like you’ve got the wrong tool for the job in putting forth your invalid assertions about the necessity of the role of courts and law in society.
Valid formally conforming logic plus actual proof.
That is what is required.
To which you respond:
“<That is what I have actually done, hence I have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and that may be why you do not have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago."
Again, you've done nothing of the sort. You've floating a bunch of obfuscation and attempts at misdirection. You've appealed once again to your inappropriate authority. Are you going to compare yourself to Galileo, Einstein or Hawking again too? Because that's just adorable.
I can watch propagandists run in circles all day and it never ceases to be amusing.
"I find your belief to the effect that my work is of antisocial drivel to be a profound error of classification on your part."
Then you'd be once again wrong. Promoting the idea that society would be better off without laws and courts promotes both tyranny and anarchy. Since tyranny and anarchy and inherently antisocial, your idea is inherently antisocial.
The challenge stands.
"I observe that you have never challenged me or my work because, as best I can guess, some form of prejudice precludes your making the effort needed before any actual challenge can be possible."
No. I have no prejudice. I read what you wrote and found it lacking in logic and proof. I challenged you on this basis and you have yet to provide an sufficient rebuttal to that challenge. Because you can't.
Your inability to defend your idea stands.
"Contrary to what I am beginning to have a hunch may be of delusion on your part, my ability to defend my thesis and dissertation stands irrefutably and irrebutably because I properly earned my Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago only because I really did defend both thesis and dissertation through proper peer review, and nothing you can assert can ever rebut that FACT! because it is a FACT!"
And yet you cannot defend your postulate against a challenge to it based on commonly accepted principles of formal logic and standards of reasonable proof employed both in law and science.
Sorry.
The challenge and the criticism still stands as a matter of logic and proof no matter how much of a hissy fit you want to throw or appeal to your own authority.
Or here's an idea –
Put up or shut up.
Not to validate me, but rather to validate your assertion and prove me wrong. Go on. Chase your tail some more. It's funny watching the propagators of socially destructive nonsense flounder in their own inability to confront logic.
RE: J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., March 1, 2011 at 8:42 am
I observe that people sometimes are mistaken. I am a person who makes mistakes, including typographical errors which I miss during proofreading efforts.
was:
<That is what I have actually done, hence I have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and that may be why you do not have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
That is what I have actually done, hence I am a Wisconsin Registered Professional engineer and that may be why you are not a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer.
was intended to be:
That is what I have actually done, hence I have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and that may be why you do not have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
That is what I have actually done, hence I am a Wisconsin Registered Professional engineer and that may be why you are not a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer.
Sorry.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, March 1, 2011 at 1:40 am
That might be because I’m not an engineer, jackass.
Thank you. It is because you are not an engineer that disqualifies you to lawfully criticize my work, at least to the extent that I understand relevant Wisconsin law regarding who can lawfully criticize the work of a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer
In these comments which I am writing for posting on the Jonathan Turley blawg, everything I post is of the form of a question in the ultimate sense because of what I find to be of the form of a law of biophysics, to wit, every message sent by one person and received by another is of the form of a “stimulus” the receiving of which inescapably produces some response in the message recipient, even if the response is as though the message is ignored. In this biophysical sense, every received stimulus is of the form of a question of the form, “How will the recipient of this message respond to this message?” and no actually received message can be other than a question in the biophysical sense here used in my writing this comment-intended-to-be-posted. I find that it is because my conscious awareness is at the level of interpretation of denotation and not connotation that I experience life only as a sequence of identical-in-basic-form; unique-in-details questions in which every apparent answer is of an oncoming question; hence all I ever actually experience are questions. In this context, I may restate why I cannot do as it appears to me that you, BiL are as though commanding me to do, for the reason of the simple fact that it appears to me that you are asking me to answer your questions with “answers” which are not themselves questions, and, in the world in which I actually live, what it appears to me that what you are asking of me simply cannot ever actually exist.
I have collected the Internet links to the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing web pages which I find contain access references to Wisconsin laws and regulations which appertain to Professional Engineering, and I list them here because I am not an attorney-at-law and yet am required as a Professional Engineer to abide by laws not all made by Professional Engineers. The information I found on the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing pointing to statutes and regulations relevant to Professional Engineering in Wisconsin is as follows:
http://drl.wi.gov/profession.asp?profid=92&locid=0
Based on my experiences with other attorneys-at-law, it is my best guess that you, BiL, are among the top tenth of a percent of attorneys-at-law in terms of professional competence and performance. I truly respect what I experience as among the most formidable of “legal minds” I have ever heard of. Therefore, as you are, in my best estimation, a superbly qualified attorney-at-law, I leave to you and your professional expertise to peruse the data to be found through the above-listed Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing web page to determine in what, if any, ways what I have posted on the “Turley blawg” contravenes my being Registered as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer.
About that delinquent taxes thing… Beginning in October of 2009, as best I now recall, my wife began to experience notable pain, which increased in intensity and severity. She went to the best physicians who were within her practical ability to be providers of care. Physician diagnosis and physician-prescribed treatment did not avert the pain, it increased and increased. Second and third opinions were obtained from other physicians,and the pain continued increasing.
Beginning with the first physician consulted, I accompanied my wife to her “physician visits.” Based on my understanding of human biology, being a bioengineer, I began raising objections to the diagnoses being given and the treatments being prescribed, and my objections were very well ignored by the physicians. Rather early in 2010, a pelvic x-ray image revealed a pelvic fracture, which was the possibility to which my understanding of biomechanics had led me to raise the objections I had raised.
My describing my concerns, as a bioengineer, about the treatment being given my wife was ignored by the physicians until the treatment she was being given had finally resulted in a total of three pelvic fractures, and the usual notion that a pelvic fracture is a stable fracture failed once one side of her pelvis had developed two fractures with an isolated section of pelvic bone between a pair of fractures. Finally, we were able to see an orthopedic surgeon, one who works with the Green Bay Packers, as I understand, and he was willing to listen to what I had to say as a bioengineer. He asked me for my “etiology” of the fractures, and when I had described it, this physician said to me, in effect, “You are certainly on top of your field.” My wife’s physician-prescribed treatment was changed so it conformed to the treatment plan I had developed as a bioengineer, and, now, not quite a year later, the pelvic fractures have healed decently and my wife is not experiencing the pain which, if not treated accurately, would plausibly have resulted in her being now unable to walk.
During the time while my wife was being incorrectly (from a biophysical-bioengineering view) diagnosed and treated and her pelvic fracture predicament was worsening instead of improving, a few documents essential to my accurately filing my Wisconsin Sales and Use taxes apparently escaped my pragmatic ability to find them beginning last November, when I began setting about to prepare my 2010 Wisconsin Sales and Use Tax return.
In Wisconsin, construction contractors have to deal with a set of tax laws and regulations which I find to be unintelligible in terms of their application to my bioengineerng business, Harris Electronic Service, a business I started in 1950, while a sixth grade student in the East Side School, in Sturgeon Bay. I corresponded with the Wisconsin Department of Revenue regarding what I find unintelligible until that Department stopped replying to my correspondence. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue was not able to resolve the predicament I presented to them regarding Wisconsin statutes and regulations relevant to construction contractors and Wisconsin Sales and Use taxes. Based on my finding that I cannot acquire an intelligible understanding of a particular aspect of Wisconsin Sales and Use taxes as pertains to my bioengineering business, as I transacted business, I made notes regarding my understanding of particularly troubling-to-me Sales and Use Tax concerns. It is these documents which escaped by grasp while I was focused almost entirely on doing my duty as husband and bioengineer to restore to my wife the ability to walk decently.
Within the next day or so, I intend to file my 2010 Wieconsin Sales and Use Tax return, doing it in the best way I find achievable. I have a form of audit trail which now suggests to me than no more than $309.00 is questionable as to whether it is of Sales Tax or Use Tax nature and as to whether it is of that which the contractor absorbs while supposedly “keeping secret from the customer the taxes the customer is actually paying” (which I deem to be a form of deception prohibited by the National Society of Professional Engineers’ Code of Ethics), and I am going to report that amount, $309 as being both of Use Tax and Sales Tax categories, and so will be paying double the proper tax on that $309.00 to the State of Wisconsin because I can find no less ridiculous option available to me. Wisconsin has a form of expected income/budget disparity, and I will do my part, most likely today or tomorrow, to help increase the Wisconsin revenue flow. The reason for my delaying a long as possible the filing of my Wisconsin Sales and Use Tax Report is the imputed crime of my not filing an accurate return, and I have worked at the limit of my practicable effort to file a return I would know to be accurate. That has turned out to be impossible and impracticable and the proximate cause of that is the errors of diagnosis and treatment which as-though threatened to destroy my wife’s ability to walk, and I place a higher priority on her life than I did on lifeless laws; even though it is my sense that, by so doing, what I did was unlawful and illegal
When I find the law to be life’s adversary, I choose life. I make no such choice for others.
The Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing has on its Internet site the Wisconsin definition of “Professional Engineer, which directly follows, copied and pasted from the drl.wi.gov web page, here not in italics as in the original on the web site:
[begin Professional Engineer definition]
Engineer, Professional
A professional engineer is a person who by reason of his or her knowledge of mathematics, the physical sciences and the principles of engineering, acquired by professional education and practical experience, is qualified to engage in the practice of professional engineering.
The practice of professional engineering includes any professional service requiring the application of engineering principles and data, in which the public welfare or the safeguarding of life, health or property is concerned and involved, such as consultation investigation, evaluation, planning, design, or responsible supervision of construction, alteration, or operation, in connection with any public or private utilities, structures, projects, bridges, plants and buildings, machines, equipment, processes and works.
A person offers to practice professional engineering if the person by verbal claim, sign, advertisement, letterhead, card or in any other way represents himself or herself to be a professional engineer; or who holds himself or herself out as able to practice professional engineering.
No person may practice professional engineering in Wisconsin unless the person has been duly registered as a professional engineer. In order to qualify as a professional engineer in Wisconsin, applicants must have the education and experience, and pass the examination or examinations, as indicated below. Further details regarding these criteria can be found in Chapter 443 of the Wisconsin Statutes and A-E 4 of the Wisconsin Administrative Code.
[end Professional Engineer definition]
I state as fact, without limitation on my part, that I am Registered with the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing as a Professional Engineer.
I state as fact, without limitation on my part, that I work as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer in accord with the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers.
I state as fact, that, since January 31, 2011, I have been liable for delinquent taxes in Wisconsin, in violation of the meaning of Chapter RL-9, because I have been unable to locate a few documents needed to make certain that I have properly paid Wisconsin Sales and Use Taxes for the taxable year 2010, and I state as fact that this is the result of circumstances outside my locus of control.
Never claimed to be one either.
And I have never misrepresented myself as an Attorney-at-Law.
Now quit changing the subject.
My subject is of Professional Engineering, and I do not deviate from that subject, regardless of any contrary assertions on your part, BiL.
Your postulate about the negative value of legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is both irrational and destructive as
Your apparently repeated assertion that I have the postulate you appear to me to be describing is an error of interpretation totally outside my entire locus of control; I have no such postulate because I am using the process of null-hypothesis/alternate-hypothesis/null-hypothesis-refutation and am absolutely not promoting any postulate in the sense I find you may be using the word, “postulate.” I am now inclined to conjecture that the difficulty you are experiencing regarding my bioengineering research may stem from it being of fact that my grasp of science and science methods so vastly exceeds yours as to make it impossible for you to have a clue as to what I am doing and how and why I am doing it.
1) legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and
If you were actually, demonstrably capable of understanding my work in depth and detail, instead of summarily rejecting it with seeming absolute prejudice, a useful form of dialogue might ensue.
2) that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny.
Is it really beyond your ken to accept the notion of scientific discovery of the “completely new paradigm” form?
Defend your postulate from the above criticism.
I find it absolutely and perfectly impossible to defend a postulate which absolutely and perfectly does not exist.
If you cannot, then the criticism is valid and your idea that doing away with dispute resolution in the adversarial mode is good for civilization is proven once again to be a load of antisocial propagandist crap. Refusing to, trying to obfuscate or attempting to evade or otherwise change the subject will constitute a stipulation that you cannot defend your postulate.
You, BiL, have never once criticized my work because its form, nature, and use appear to me to totally evade your knowledge and understanding in every practical and practicable way whatsoever. I cannot answer a criticism which, because of its internal errors, does not actually exist.
Saying that you have no postulate isn’t a valid defense of said postulate either. The above encapsulates the idea you attempted to assert as fact without proof and upon faulty logic. Especially when in one paragraph you deny making said postulate and then make it again in all caps within the same post.
Your being evidently deceived regarding my work as here expressed not containing any postulate I can defend does not create a defensible postulate merely through your personal “say-so.”
Defend it.
Prove that courts are tyranny and anarchy and not as they are in reality checks and defenses against both.
With people demonstrably capable of understanding new scientific paradigms and the processes through which new scientific paradigms arise, to wit, the members of my thesis committee, my work has already passed as rigorous a form of real and valid peer review as has any new scientific paradigm which may be of the “completely new paradigm” class. The proof has already been achieved with people I sought out solely for their ability both understand and reject (if possible) my thesis and dissertation. At least my thesis committee members actually made the necessary effort to understand my thesis and dissertation before making decisions about its scientific merit, and I observe not a hint of a trace of a sign of your having even begun to make a comparable effort.
And you can claim to be a scientist all you want, sport. A real scientist can defend their assertions. Until you comport with the scientific method, you’re just a windbag, windbag.
To and with verifiably competent research-level scientists I did what you claim I did not do. All I find you to be doing is proving that you are incapable of understanding my research work and its findings. I ruled out every person comparable to you in that way from my thesis committee.
Valid formally conforming logic plus actual proof.
That is what is required.
<That is what I have actually done, hence I have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and that may be why you do not have a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
That is what I have actually done, hence I am a Wisconsin Registered Professional engineer and that may be why you are not a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer.
Like I said, I’m going to attack your antisocial drivel as long as you try to sell it as valid. If you don’t like that? Tough. Because you have zero chance of stopping me from challenging your nonsense you try to clothe as science and pass off as fact. If you didn’t want to defend your ideas here and wanted to have only other engineers look at it? You should have kept to yourself instead of proclaiming it as fact in a blog full of critical thinkers.
I find your belief to the effect that my work is of antisocial drivel to be a profound error of classification on your part.
The challenge stands.
I observe that you have never challenged me or my work because, as best I can guess, some form of prejudice precludes your making the effort needed before any actual challenge can be possible.
Your inability to defend your idea stands.
Contrary to what I am beginning to have a hunch may be of delusion on your part, my ability to defend my thesis and dissertation stands irrefutably and irrebutably because I properly earned my Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago only because I really did defend both thesis and dissertation through proper peer review, and nothing you can assert can ever rebut that FACT! because it is a FACT!
Put up or shut up, windbag. Or better yet? Move it to your own blog if you want to keep selling poison. As long as you try to spread that antisocial infection you call your “work” here, I’m going to keep on lancing it.
What blocks you from recognizing the utter absurdness of your “Put up or shut up” admonition regarding my research and findings, and its profound validity for yourself?
That might be because I’m not an engineer, jackass.
Never claimed to be one either.
Now quit changing the subject.
Your postulate about the negative value of legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is both irrational and destructive as
1) legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and
2) that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny.
Defend your postulate from the above criticism.
If you cannot, then the criticism is valid and your idea that doing away with dispute resolution in the adversarial mode is good for civilization is proven once again to be a load of antisocial propagandist crap. Refusing to, trying to obfuscate or attempting to evade or otherwise change the subject will constitute a stipulation that you cannot defend your postulate.
Saying that you have no postulate isn’t a valid defense of said postulate either. The above encapsulates the idea you attempted to assert as fact without proof and upon faulty logic. Especially when in one paragraph you deny making said postulate and then make it again in all caps within the same post.
Defend it.
Prove that courts are tyranny and anarchy and not as they are in reality checks and defenses against both.
And you can claim to be a scientist all you want, sport. A real scientist can defend their assertions. Until you comport with the scientific method, you’re just a windbag, windbag.
Valid formally conforming logic plus actual proof.
That is what is required.
Like I said, I’m going to attack your antisocial drivel as long as you try to sell it as valid. If you don’t like that? Tough. Because you have zero chance of stopping me from challenging your nonsense you try to clothe as science and pass off as fact. If you didn’t want to defend your ideas here and wanted to have only other engineers look at it? You should have kept to yourself instead of proclaiming it as fact in a blog full of critical thinkers.
The challenge stands.
Your inability to defend your idea stands.
Put up or shut up, windbag. Or better yet? Move it to your own blog if you want to keep selling poison. As long as you try to spread that antisocial infection you call your “work” here, I’m going to keep on lancing it.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 28, 2011 at 11:33 pm
Awwww.
The incompetent would be lawyer and scientist called me an incompetent engineer.
Pity that you do not recognize that I merely raised the question of your being competent in terms of actually being a Professional Engineer who is licensed as a Professional Engineer by one or more of the states of the United States of America, and you have not furnished your Professional Engineer registration number and State in which you hold registration? Note that the prior sentence ends with a question mark and therefore is, by definition, a question? I do not pretend to be a lawyer and am not a member of any State Bar Association, nor do I regard myself as being even slightly qualified to be a member of the Bar? There is a slight irony, alas, with respect to the Bar, for I find I am effectively barred from fully understanding the Law, in the sense of understanding the Laws of Engineering because I can find all Laws I need for proper engineering with scarcely any trouble (A Gaggle of them is found in Hick’s?) and cannot possible accomplish that with regard to the laws of the Adversarial System? As an engineer, I do not command lawyers to know or understand engineering laws?
There is what I subjectively experience as an unspeakably dastardly asymmetry? In November of 2007, I showed some posters on which I printed some of my research findngs, and asked Mark Jinkins, of the Pinkert Law Firm in Sturgeon Bay to read them, and, when he had finished looking at them, I summarized my personal understanding of the total significance of the posters by saying, “I understand that ignorance of the law is an excuse.”? I continue to find that, however, Mark Jinkins spoke the standard Legal Maxim mantra, by saying, “No. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”?
So, I asked Mark how many laws there are, he said, “I don’t know,” and I asked him if it is reasonable to expect a person to do what is impossible and he said, “I don’t know,” and I asked him if it is decent to require a person to do what is impossible and punish the person for the inescapable failure, and Mark said, “I don’t know,” and then I asked Mark, “What is the law,” and Mark Jinkins, Esq, Member of the Wisconsin Bar Association, said, “I don’t know.”?
Thus, if I ask an attorney at law what the law is, so that I can, in accord with conscience, never be in violation of any law, the attorney cannot do, with respect to Adversarial Laws what I can easily do with respect to engineering laws?
The entrapment comes because the Lawyers can concoct all the laws they can devise, without real concern whether anyone can actually avoid violating them, and such is never true in the laws of engineering. It would not pose a serious problem for me in my life, except that the Law Profession requires that I not violate their law while making it impossible for me to, in accord with conscience be able to avoid violations?
That, to me, is the ultimate extreme maximum upper limit of evil, of which methinks no surpassing can ever be possible?
Were the Law Profession honest as is the Engineering Profession, the Law Profession would not make impossible rules and punish some of those who demonstrate that the Law Profession makes impossible rules as is common law practice in my experience.
That’s adorable.
It is adorable to abuse people?
Again, “I know you are but what am I is not a defense to your your ‘work’”. Nor is “it’s not ready yet”. You’ve tried those excuses before among others and they didn’t work then and they don’t work now.
As to entrapment? Well if asking you to prove your postulate without resorting to logical fallacies, lies about history and making up meanings to terms and terms themselves, religious thinking, false equivalence and appeals to your inappropriate authority makes you feel trapped, Brian, it might be because you can’t defend your postulate in any logical and proof-backed way. You’ll be asked to prove your theory under peer review too, sport. If you can’t do it now, the dollars to donuts you won’t be able to do it then. My money is you won’t be able to do it ever as your postulate is fundamentally logically flawed – as demonstrated time and again. Whether or not you think it has been proven wrong is irrelevant.
If you actually understood science as it is applicable to professional engineering, you surely would realize that I have put forth no postulate to be defended? I cannot imagine how any person with reasonable competence in science would write in the manner you have been writing, on in which a null hypothesis is tested and an alternate hypothesis (dichotomous with respect to the null hypothesis) is affirmed if the null hypothesis is rejected. In this method of doing real science, no hypothsis is either proved or defended, and a useful result only occurs if t he null hypothesis is rejected. If the null hypothesis is not rejected, nothing is learned of consequence regarding either the null hypothesis or its alternate hypothesis?
Of course, I cannot defend my postulate, for the simple reason that there is no “my postulate” in the null-hypothesis/alternate-hypothesis method for me to defend? The method I use is of indirect proof by constructing null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis as a dichotomous pair?
I am not such a perfectly incompetent scientist as to not understand the null hypothesis/alternate hypothesis approach and its correct usage? That j-operator question died a natural death, TonyC.? obviously recognized that I can do complex variables “in my sleep”?
Like I said, I don’t give a damn what you think about me personally. “I seek the truth by which no man was ever harmed.” – Marcus Aurelius. And the truth is that your indefensible postulate is antisocial destructive nonsense that invites tyranny and anarchy.
<b.In my work, the Adversarial Premise and its associated Adversarial System ARE IDENTICALLY THE ANTISOCIAL DESTRUCTIVE NONSENSE OF TYRANNY AND ANARCHY
Quit whining and prove me wrong. If I’m incompetent, that should be an easy task, sport. Remember! You must offer valid proof and sound logic for your defense to be acceptable.
As far as I am concerned, you are a perfectly competent Attorney at Law? And what I observe you to deem sound logic is indeed sound logic; only it is a tiny figment of the vastly larger realm of sound logic with which I am familiar and which I understand?
I use sound logic as applicable to professional engineering, and I can imagine no reason why you would ever have bothered to learn so much of the vast diversity of sound logic as I found it necessary for me to learn, as there is no use for most of what constitutes sound logic in the professional practice of law?
Because I am a Registered Professional Engineer, in accord with the ethics of professional engineering, I set about to first validate the veracity of my work with a professional engineer, and with my thesis committee?
Otherwise, you’re still just blowing smoke, pardner.
Opinions may differ?
Typographical errors may occur?
Awwww.
The incompetent would be lawyer and scientist called me an incompetent engineer.
That’s adorable.
Again, “I know you are but what am I is not a defense to your your ‘work'”. Nor is “it’s not ready yet”. You’ve tried those excuses before among others and they didn’t work then and they don’t work now.
As to entrapment? Well if asking you to prove your postulate without resorting to logical fallacies, lies about history and making up meanings to terms and terms themselves, religious thinking, false equivalence and appeals to your inappropriate authority makes you feel trapped, Brian, it might be because you can’t defend your postulate in any logical and proof-backed way. You’ll be asked to prove your theory under peer review too, sport. If you can’t do it now, the dollars to donuts you won’t be able to do it then. My money is you won’t be able to do it ever as your postulate is fundamentally logically flawed – as demonstrated time and again. Whether or not you think it has been proven wrong is irrelevant.
Like I said, I don’t give a damn what you think about me personally. “I seek the truth by which no man was ever harmed.” – Marcus Aurelius. And the truth is that your indefensible postulate is antisocial destructive nonsense that invites tyranny and anarchy.
Quit whining and prove me wrong. If I’m incompetent, that should be an easy task, sport. Remember! You must offer valid proof and sound logic for your defense to be acceptable.
Otherwise, you’re still just blowing smoke, pardner.
Thank God he is gone.I hope he never gets a job of resposibility ever again.
I made a video tape of that talk, “Engineering Respect for Engineers, and, once I have the video editing system properly set up (a 2 terrabyte drive should be here this week) and I have been able t o complete the task, I plan to put that talk, in as large segments as is possible, on YouTube?
The difficulty with sincere confabulation (which is not a form of lying as I understand biophysics) is that it eventually exposes itself for what it is?
Not being your vassal, BiL, I work at the pace that makes viable, intelligent sense to me, and am very much immune to your silly shenanigans?
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 28, 2011 at 8:47 pm
Oh, and if I’ve committed a crime by challenging your work?
I guess you simply do not notice unfamiliar details? Of course, you have not committed any crime in your (foolish nonsensical?) normal science notions of the work I have done and continue to do? For your silliness to be a crime, you would have to be capable and competent to understand my work well enough to have a clue as to what its significance and meaning may actually be? It would be of the nature of a crime, as I understand such laws as pertain in Wisconsin to professional engineers and professional engineering, only, I have not one whit of actual evidence that you have ever been even slightly capable of actually earning a B.S. (your choice of meaning?) degree in engineering, and I further have no evidence of your having any capacity whatsoever to really earn a bioengineerng Ph.D. from any real university?
The views I find you espousing pose terrible danger to the engineering profession and to professional engineers, as was terribly demonstrated when those Morton Thiokol engineers were ordered by management to “think management, not engineering,” caved in to keep their jobs, and that teacher lost her teaching job by losing her life when the booster rocket O-rings failed much as the engineers thought they could before they became unethical engineers by command of management?
I gave a talk some years ago at the Fox River Valley Chapter of the Wisconsin Society of Professional Engineers, “Engineering Respect for Engineers”? Engineers continue to encounter terrible disrespect from people who are not competent in engineering, and I find you making an effort to discredit me as an engineer and my work in engineering?
Because of the sort of disrespect I have encountered from the law profession with respect to professional engineering and professional engineers, I have been collecting data regarding the way top tier people tend to hold in contempt those people who actually work in a profession the laws for which are intelligible to the members of the profession? Ask me to explain Hook’s Law or the Biot-Savart law, and allow me to gather my thoughts if it has been a while since I used them, and I will be able to explain the laws relevant to engineering in any useful amount of detail, and no law within engineering contradicts any other law unless there is something more to learn about scientific principles, and, once the scientific principles are learned, no engineering law will contradict any other engineering law? Kirchoff’s current law cannot contradict Kirchoff’s voltage law because those two laws are functionally orthogonal?
Press charges.
Because I find, based on your comments about my comments on this blawg, you to be perfectly incapable of now being a Registered Professional Engineer, there is no basis for my pressing charges? Absolute Incompetence is not a crime?
With proper subpoena powers, my identity would be easy enough to ascertain.
I’ll be sitting over here waiting to hear the laughter of attorneys and prosecutors at your ridiculous requests.
I have been making no ridiculous requests? Because of your oft-evinced proclivity for playing entrapment games, if that be what they are, I am continuing to only ask questions through ending every sentence with a question mark, given that, if a sentence inadvertently happens in one of my comments through an editing or binit bucket error, all of my comments regarding any and all of your comments are implicitly questions all the way back to my first such comment? If the law can be functionally ex-post-facto while defining itself by law otherwise, and if this is a legal-focus blawg, then I assert my right to ex-post-facto declare everything I have ever written in posted comment form here as being of the form of questions and never, not ever, therefore, have I ever stipulated anything here?
Truthfulness stands the test of time?
Oh, and if I’ve committed a crime by challenging your work?
Press charges.
With proper subpoena powers, my identity would be easy enough to ascertain.
I’ll be sitting over here waiting to hear the laughter of attorneys and prosecutors at your ridiculous requests.
“It is manifestly obvious and apparent to me that there is nothing I can do to defend my work in terms of your belief system, for the simple reason that your belief system categorically excludes my life and work as ever being possible, which is the reason I have tapped key after key to map the boundaries of your belief”
That would be because my belief is in logic and proof.
As to my beliefs being irrelevant to science?
The scientific method is disagreeing with you also.
To qualify as scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. These specific principles include formal logic. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, the scientific method is “a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”
Your logic is demonstrably and repeatedly full of fallacies.
Your observations are inconsistent with history and the realities of baseline human psychology.
Your statistical methods are invalid in their application of sample spaces.
You refuse to submit your testing for verification.
In short, by definition, your “science” is crap.
And you can talk “paradigm shift” all you want to, sport. Because despite what you think of yourself? You’re not an Einstein. Whether you think my version of science is relevant or not is not the question. Whether your “science” can withstand critical scrutiny is the question. It has not and can not. If your work in unintelligible, it is because it is based upon a faulty premise, faulty logic and no sufficient evidence.
You again mistake being the object of address with being the object of message.
So defend your work or don’t. Your choice. Until you do? I’m going to keep attacking it for the illogical, antisocial nonsense that it is. If this is not to your satisfaction?
Too bad.
You should have tried to sell you poison in a different forum if you didn’t want it challenged.
RE: J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., February 28, 2011 at 7:40 pm
was:
as I have made abundantly verifiable,
may be better as:
as I have made abundantly verifiable regarding my work,
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 28, 2011 at 6:21 pm
It is manifestly obvious and apparent to me that there is nothing I can do to defend my work in terms of your belief system, for the simple reason that your belief system categorically excludes my life and work as ever being possible, which is the reason I have tapped key after key to map the boundaries of your belief? C. G. Jung rather accurately observed how folks similar to you in using psychological defenses are functionally incapable of tolerating the sort of work I do? I never made the slightest effort to convince you regarding my work for you are, in The Natural Step sense, the highest-hanging fruit I have ever come across. The Natural Step method is to pick the low-hanging fruit?
Because it is people who have your form of personality structure, though not you as an individual person, who I have, during my life, experiences as among the most helpful of people when getting their way and the most temperamentally destructive when crossed, and as it appears to me that you interpret my work as crossing you, I have taken a while to study people who are nice when other people reciprocate as wanted and wrothful otherwise?
The difficulty the “top tier” people have is being massively outnumbered by people below the top tier? The top tier people maintain their socioeconomic status, not by the value they contribute to society, but by freaking out those beneath then in socioeconomic status, doing so by effectively controlling the economy and having the power to destroy the economy to whatever extent may be required to keep their inferiors in their inferior place?
I am of the “below untouchable” caste, if one models the United States population according to social caste model. Only, that is what allows me to do the work I am doing?
Awwwwww.
An attack from Mr. Passive-Aggressive.
Diversion, such as that silly distortion of fact works with most people most of the time? It will never work with me?
That’s just adorable.
Thank you?
Now, enough about your projection of your life on to me. Or me at all for that matter. However, speaking of jokes, let’s talk about your idea.
I have never postulated about any negative value of legal dispute resolution; I have put forth my observation, made during some 25 years of working around children, that the finding of neurologist Robert Scaer, regarding trauma is apparently biophysically accurate? Dr Scaer wrote two books, one with a second edition, regarding his trauma research?
Your postulate about the a negative value of legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is both irrational and destructive as
1) legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and
I do not offer any postulate, though I allow that your belief system rules out your being able to understand this? I understand that you have a Juris Doctor degree and presume you have some sort of undergraduate degree, only that remains a mystery to me?
You seem, from your writings, to have some familiarity with the ways of “normal science” as simple extensions of settled work, and you seem, to me, to be utterly clueless as to the massive contrast between the ways of normal science and the possibly-massive-paradigm-shift science I am doing? That is reasonably to be expected, particularly as the methods I use are ones I have needed to invent/design/build/test along the way because the sort of science research I do is almost perfectly without precedent in the observable annals of science?
2) that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny?
I began with the view you appear to espouse and came upon some subtle forms of internal contradiction within said view, and these subtle forms of internal contradiction led me along the path my work has taken and continues to take?
Defend your postulate from the above criticism.
Your view of science is irrelevant to the work I have done and am doing?
If you cannot, then the criticism is valid and your idea that doing away with dispute resolution in the adversarial mode is good for civilization is proven once again to be a load of antisocial propagandist crap. Refusing to, trying to obfuscate or attempting to evade or otherwise change the subject will constitute a stipulation that you cannot defend your postulate.
Your exercise of the fallacy of assuming the consequent often appears to me to be of the form of your believing that I have a postulate, and it is this error on your part which may be the core of your incapacity to understand, in any way I note as being meaningful, how what I am doing is not at all defending a postulate but promoting the rejection of a null hypothesis which contains within it the postulate for which I seek refutation?
The concern I find you raising is best addressed in Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations, and I did not find my copy anywhere out in the open, so ordered one from Amazon a few moments ago? I do have immediate access to Karl Popper, “The Poverty of Historicism,” “Unended Quest,” “The Logic of Scientific Discovery,” “The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1,” The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol 2,” and “Conjectures and Refutations,” W. H. Werkmeister, “A Philosophy of Science,” and Paul Feyerabend, “Against Method.” Most of the rest of my philosophy of science library is in storage because we had to move from a very adequate house, in terms of my work, to a little house with nowhere the space arrangement necessary for my having full access to my library? After Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations, my new, not yet shipped copy, arrives, I will be better able to demonstrate with established philosophy of science references why what I believe you are asking is perfectly valid within normal science and utterly absurd within the work I am doing?
What I am doing and how I am doing it is rather well described in the above-mentioned Popper books and in the work of Thomas Kuhn? If you do not have the background to understand my work and insist on understanding my work without your first acquiring the necessary background, it is only natural that you will plausibly reject my work because you find it not intelligible?
Which as a matter of logic and proof, you can’t.
Please try to come up with something new as an evasion.
Your lack of creativity does not speak well for any defense you might make should you actually come anywhere near a logically valid cogent defense of your idea.
Or, is it your lack of working experience with the methods of profound paradigm shift science methodologies?
Methinks you are insisting that I defend my work using the prior notions of science of which my work is itself the refutation? It is for this reason, whether you can grasp it or not, that I have needed to use the null hypothesis refutation method, with a dichotomous alternate hypothesis, such that refutation of the null hypothesis establishes the alternate hypothesis?
If any attorney ever attempted to use the methodology I am using in a court of law, I can almost perfectly guarantee the attorney would lose the case with catastrophic efficiency and effectiveness?
I have never, ever heard a hint of any instance of profound-paradigm-shift-science ever having any trace of a chance to other than disastrously fail in any and every adversarial test?
As a plausible prerequisite for your having actual competence to challenge my methods, I need a verifiable descriptor of such of your work for your science Ph.D. degree and demonstration of your having accomplished and defended work of plausibly very significant paradigm shift form? If you cannot verifiably demonstrate, as I have made abundantly verifiable, that you have done sufficiently original scientific research in a major research university, with unanimous committee approval, I am going to suspect that you are, for whatever personal purpose, inflating your sense of science research competence unduly?
Within professional engineering, your method of being anonymous while critiquing the work of a Registered Professional Engineer is so unethical and dishonest as to be criminal in both form and content?
Awwwwww.
An attack from Mr. Passive-Aggressive.
That’s just adorable.
Now, enough about your projection of your life on to me. Or me at all for that matter. However, speaking of jokes, let’s talk about your idea.
Your postulate about the a negative value of legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is both irrational and destructive as
1) legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process is the alternative process to personal self-help adversarial dispute resolution which results in the tyranny of the strong over the weak and often violence and
2) that such an alternative to self-help dispute resolution somehow creates adversity (adversity which in fact is caused simply by human nature, human interaction and circumstance) when what legal dispute resolution via adversarial due process does is remove the potential for violence from adversity and is thus a cornerstone of maintaining civilization over anarchy and tyranny.
Defend your postulate from the above criticism.
If you cannot, then the criticism is valid and your idea that doing away with dispute resolution in the adversarial mode is good for civilization is proven once again to be a load of antisocial propagandist crap. Refusing to, trying to obfuscate or attempting to evade or otherwise change the subject will constitute a stipulation that you cannot defend your postulate.
Which as a matter of logic and proof, you can’t.
Please try to come up with something new as an evasion.
Your lack of creativity does not speak well for any defense you might make should you actually come anywhere near a logically valid cogent defense of your idea.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 28, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Someone once commented to me, in effect, “God has a sense of humor. God played a joke on himself. God won’t do that again.”?
Are you, perchance, the joke God played on himself?
Again, you have resorted to logical fallacy.
The fallacy in question is the fallacy of composition – arguing from one to all.
Also . . .
Demonstrated ignorance of valid statistical methods.
You are not a sufficient baseline for evaluating the behavior of 6.8 billion people.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
Wrong answer.
Try again without the logical deficiencies and poor understanding of statistics as they properly apply to science.