Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Warning: You are about to enter the Twilight Zone.
Imagine, if you will, that you live in a state where a governor wields extraordinary power over its residents. Imagine, if you will, that your governor has the legal
authority to appoint an “Emergency Manager” to oversee the local government in the town where you reside. Imagine that the monetary compensation for the Emergency Manager of your community has no cap. Imagine that your Emergency Manager declares that there’s a financial emergency in your town and then takes over control of it. Imagine that the Emergency Manager can break contracts, seize and sell assets, eliminate services—and can also fire duly elected public officials who serve your community. Imagine, if you will, that the Emergency Manager empowered by your governor to run your town has the right to dissolve your school district and to disincorporate your town. AND imagine that you and your fellow residents have no say about what is going on! Just imagine how you might feel if you lived in a state where that kind of thing was going on. Well, the people who live in Michigan may not have to imagine much longer.
Who, you might ask, will be responsible for transforming the state of Michigan into a Rod Serlingesque otherworldly undemocratic Twilight Zone right here in the United States? Why, Governor Rick Snyder and his bold band of Republican state legislators–that’s who. In January, Governor Snyder called for “Emergency Manager” legislation—and the Republican state legislators were more than happy to comply with his request.
This all seems hard to believe, doesn’t it? I’m not making it up. Karen Bouffard of The Detroit News reported the following: Legislation that would allow emergency financial managers to throw out union contracts and overrule elected officials in financially distressed municipalities and school districts was approved Wednesday by the state Senate. Similar legislation passed in the House in February, and the two chambers are working on a final version to send to Gov. Rick Snyder.
In an article published in The Michigan Messenger, Eartha Jane Melzer wrote:
Under the law whole cities or school districts could be eliminated without any public participation or oversight, and amendments designed to provide minimal safeguards and public involvement were voted down.
An amendment to require Emergency Managers to hold monthly public meetings to let people know how they are governing was rejected by Senate Republicans, along with proposals to cap Emergency Manager compensation and require that those appointed to run school districts have some background in education.
Critics say that Republicans are manipulating concerns about budget problems in order to consolidate power by undermining unions.
According to E. D. Kain: Snyder’s law gives the state government the power not only to break up unions, but to dissolve entire local governments and place appointed “Emergency Managers” in their stead. But that’s not all – whole cities could be eliminated if Emergency Managers and the governor choose to do so. And Snyder can fire elected officials unilaterally, without any input from voters. It doesn’t get much more anti-Democratic than that.
Mark Gaffney, Michigan State President of the AFL-CIO said: This is a takeover by the right wing and it’s an assault on democracy like I’ve never seen.
Do you agree with Mark Gaffney? Do you think what’s going on in Michigan is an assault on democracy?
SOURCES
Rachel Maddow Exposes Michigan Republicans Secret War On Democracy (Politicus USA)
Michigan Governor Plays Fast and Loose with Democracy, Invokes Radical New Powers (Forbes)
Michigan Republicans Use Budget Crisis to make Outrageous Assault on Democracy (AFL-CIO)
Michigan Senate passes emergency manager bills (Daily Tribune)
Emergency managers bill sweeps toward final approval (The Michigan Messenger)
Conyers: Emergency Manager bill ‘raises serious constitutional concerns’ (The Michigan Messenger)
Financial manager bill passes Michigan Senate (The Detroit News)
Michigan bill would impose “financial martial law” (CBS News)
One lives to be of service.
“Either way, I end up laughing and you end up with a wedgie.”
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dam, I just had a serious flashback to a very boisterous childhood….:) thanks!
Well I would think it was abundantly clear that I was talking to you, Auntee Candyass.
If you want to defend Brian’s point – when in all likelihood you are “Brian” or simply another propaganda goon – then do so. You’re the one who stepped in the middle of argument you can’t finish. Like I said, feel free to put up or shut up. I can sit back and laugh at you running away or I can smack you around and laugh at you trying to defend the indefensible. Either way, I end up laughing and you end up with a wedgie. So bring it or begone.
I like a good laugh.
Who is this you are talking to boy? If you are talking to me you better get your toys out and play with them. This is so you won’t be alone.
“Wanted to add my old favorite “schnorer” an example of which is a friend who you keep going out to dinner with, but is never able to pay their half of the check, due to one phony reason or another.”
Must be some friend.
Glad to be at a point in life where those kind of friends belong to someone else.
🙂 🙂 🙂
For some reason, still find myself picking up tabs. Sometimes habits and characters are built in days of need, and don’t change when the need is past.
OS,
Yep.
BIL, from the comments, it appears that our Brian had a tough time with the courts, and if I read it correctly, something to do with custody of a grandchild following a family tragedy. It is really hard to wade through all the circumlocutions and hypergraphia, so I may have misread parts of it. We both run into this kind of blame game all the time. Blame the judges, blame the system, blame one’s own lawyer, and so on ad nauseum.
I have an attorney friend who has a needlepoint sign on his office wall, His wife made it for him. It says, in old English lettering, “The Truth Will Make You Mad.”
Brian appears to have concluded that it’s the fault of a legal system that has worked for centuries that is the cause of his personal problems. Therefore it must be scrapped for some other model that does not involve forensics. Good luck on that. I would have hated to be the lawyer trying to pin him down on either a direct or cross examination. I am sure he was his own worst enemy in any litigation with which he was involved.
Better than you have tried. Oh, and failed miserably. Has Andy resorted to the “B” Team? You’re welcome to put up or shut up though by proving Brian’s work for him though.
Good luck.
Oh lookie Boys, there is the fat green thingy that utters BS. Can’t you make him shut his clap trap?
Work with me?
Oh, now that is funny.
Considering you’d work to tear down a fundamental cornerstone of civilization.
No, Brian. I work to destroy your “work”. As a proponent of civilization, that is in my nature. Evidence? How about evidence in the form of every civilizations form in recorded history backed with solid irrefutable logic? Cause I gots me some of that. If your “work” was worth a damn logically or on an evidentiary basis, you should be able to disprove these statements:
Your postulate about the a 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.
3) Courts of some form have been an integral part of every civilization since Sumer. Courts in the adversarial mode are the form most likely to encourage justice as they are the form that most encourages equity – a necessary component of justice – by allowing all sides of a dispute to present their arguments and evidence as to how a neutral judge should rule on a given case, thus allowing all sides an impartial hearing.
Do so without fallacious logic, appeals to religion, appeals to your own misplaced authority, making up a definition, distorting history or otherwise lying.
Until you can disprove those statements in a formally correct and factually honest manner?
You will remain completely and utterly defeated in your “work” and relegated to the depths of trollery and nuisance posting.
If you find any of these reasonable requests for counter-argument and valid proof “traumatizing”?
Good.
If you think this request is somehow rooted in a flaw or injury past in me? Feel free to bloviate about it in your obfuscating evasions that will surely be forthcoming in your repeated absence of a cogent defenses to your “work”. Because to save you time, I’ll stipulate that I was not traumatized as a child and indeed had a happy childhood and that my only flaw relevant to this matter is a really low tolerance for bullshit and liars – which is not really a flaw when one merely seeks the truth, by which no man was ever harmed.
Carry on.
RE: Otteray Scribe, March 23, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Brian, you are not only a narcissist, you are not very smart for a guy who professes to have a Ph.D. For one thing it is not a URI, it is URL. And anti-plagiarism software is hard to circumvent as well. You can play the part of the poor benighted and put upon person all you want. You score no points here. You seem to come here with the purpose and intent to hijack discussions. You do that by making long, rambling and borderline incoherent announcements that have absolutely zero to do with the discussion. Your comments are self-centered to the exclusions of any meaningful discourse. You allude to your mysterious “research” which makes no sense in and of itself. You attack the adversarial system without explaining WHY you think it the worst thing since lutefisk. I am a trained researcher myself, sport, and your behavior bears no resemblance to any research model found in the known universe.
In short, you are rude and inconsiderate of others. Period.
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BINGO!
Sooner or later, Mere Ignorance announces its presence.
Otteray Scribe, I truly thank you for driving your ignorance into the light of day.
URI = Uniform Resource Identifier.
There are two forms of URIs in common use, to wit:
Uniform Resource Names (URNs)
AND
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
Sooner or later, your ignorance regarding my work was bound to show up for all to see…
I used URI with the hint in mind that your scope of knowledge and understanding might just happen to not include Uniform Resource Identifiers.
Do a Google Search for URI, URL, and URN, and you may find the following site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier
The simple fact, Otteray Scribe, is that I have chosen to be gentle with you, I am aware of tragedies in your family situation, yet, when you continue to proclaim my work not valid, eventually, I needs be raise sufficient objection as needed to overcome your sincerely mistaken understanding of my work.
As for lutefisk, my mother’s parents were of Swedish origin and lutefisk is delicious to some of Scandinavian ancestry
And, as for your observation, to wit:
“I am a trained researcher myself, sport, and your behavior bears no resemblance to any research model found in the known universe.”
What in the universe do you think a completely new scientific paradigm might be and why in the universe do you believe that a new research methodology is not required when all prior methodologies have utterly failed as ways of solving a scientific problem?
Of course, my methodology resembles no other prior method, that is the essential nature of a new scientific paradigm which is the result of a completely new scientific research methodology!
I will be putting a .pdf scan of the letter from Irving F. Miller regarding the originality of my research after the equipment to do the scanning and .pdf conversion arrives. It is now scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, depending upon the weather. I will put, as time and effort allow, some hundreds of such scanned pages as documentation of my work.
Dr. Phyllis Bowen, the research methods expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, objected for a long time about my research methodology. I responded to, and overcame, every such objection easily, until she began to object to my stating in my dissertation drafts that I had done an experiment. Like you, Otteray Scribe, she could find no parallel to my work in the annals of science.
Finally, I arranged to go to her home for a very long evening, during which I described in great detail every form of bias which my research method had been designed to control, and how I used longitudinal controls in a form of naturalistic experimental protocol to elicit the data of my thesis. When, after hours of dialogue, Dr. Bowen finally understood what I had done, and how and why I had done it the way I did, she finally said, “You could not have gotten the data any other way.”
It may surprise you to learn that my research methodology was designed and developed so as to comply with criterion #4 in 45 CFR 46 as valid during my field work. Therefore, my work neither qualified for University of Illinois at Chicago Institutional Review Board review, nor required it.
Why did I design my field work research protocol so as to absolutely, totally, and perfectly exclude University of Illinois at Chicago Institutional Review Board review? For the simple reason that I had come upon the sort of objections you, Otteray Scribe, and Buddha Is Laughing continue to raise, and because I could avoid conflict with the Institutional Review Board members by a sufficiently ingenious and honest research methodology as would make it impossible for the IRB to improperly critique my work through the IRB members being ignorant of the need for a completely new research methodology which would be as unfamiliar to them as my methodology evidently is to you and BiL.
When a serious problem has defeated the best minds in the world for thousands of years, surely something other than the methods of the past is needed to resolve such a problem.
I am reminded of Dr. Paul MacCready’s comment about the Gossamer Condor, which was, if I recall it correctly, that it had to “have the right amount of flimsy.”
My work appears to me to have required “the right amount of autistic stupidity.” I guess I needed to be autistic-stupid enough to be too stupid to learn the conventional lesson of the infant-child transition, yet not too autistic-stupid to properly earn a Ph.D. from a “major research university.”
Were I autistic-stupid enough to make a guess (and I am not?), I would guess that someone with the right amount of autistic-stupidity is of an a-priori probability of perhaps one in a trillion; therefore, by frequentist statistics, I have no right to exist.
Rev. Bayes, however, came to my rescue! My work is primarily based on Bayesian statistical methods, with an occasional trace amount of frequentist ways as though of frosting on the cake.
For how many times have I attempted to communicate the simple fact that my work is of the “scientific-revolution/new-paradigm/profoundly-original-research-methodology” type? Why is it of that type? Because all prior approaches have totally and absolutely failed to correctly identify the real, root cause of human violent destructiveness, and, for want of correct identification of the real root cause, have been limited to mere palliation of symptoms and reinforcement of the underlying real root cause.
It bothers and saddens me to have needed to use “URI” as a way to communicate that I may happen to know and understand vastly more than you, Otteray Scribe, or Buddha Is Laughing can believe to be possible. I prefer not being put in the sort of double-bind your (and BiL’s) responses to my valid bioengineering concern have led me into. However, your (derogatory?) comments have made it necessary to expose your inability to adequately critique my work. Had it been possible, I suppose that I would rather you had not forced the issue. Force it, you did, and I will continue to respond with protest regarding your apparent prejudice regarding my work.
I am well satisfied that you, Otteray Scribe, and also Buddha Is Laughing, are as fully competent in your field of work as I am in mine. My work necessarily includes the biophysics of the safety of human social structures perhaps as much as your (and BiL’s?) work excludes my work in bioengineering.
I would greatly prefer to work with you and BiL and others in actually solving the predicament of the re-entrant vicious cycle mechanism of reciprocal retaliation than engage in a transactional game of pseudo-intellectual verbal sparring.
Children are even now suffering the abuse of conventional, time-corrupted-learning-based socialization traumatization.
Given that you have not demonstrated any error of significance in my work and given that I have never found anyone who can do that, and given that my work properly passed rigorous peer review (not including many typographical errors which could not be corrected because I was not allowed the time needed to find and correct them by Dean Amy Levant of the UIC Graduate College) by my thesis committee.
If being told I am wrong without it being demonstrated that I am wrong would ever work, and if that did not work during the first three days of kindergarten and if that did not work during the major part of second grade when I was repeatedly paddled by Mrs. Edith Knudsen at Marshall School Eureka, California for not lying on command, what evidence is there that I can be persuaded to act in violation of my conscience by any living person or any set of living persons?
You have such evidence, tell me about it, because I have totally overlooked it.
If it is your belief that my being truthful regarding the dictates of my conscience makes me rude, is not being rude a term of the highest possible form of endearment?
Brian sez:
“What is a proper descriptor for someone obviously not qualified who takes on the work of a professional engineer doing very original scientific research? The best word I can yet find to describe Otteray Scribe is, “traumatized.””
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Logic does not appear to be your strong point, Sport. First, you comment that I am not qualified to take on the work of a trained engineer. In what area? You keep referring to your research into human behavior and the legal system. Being a trained engineer has squat to do with either of those areas. Want to do a stress analysis on an I-beam? That’s fine because that is engineering work. But to attack the legal system and the adversary trial system on which it is based puts you into the role of an ordinary layman. Your engineering background is worth jack shit in that regard and your opinion and belief is no better than that of my barber. As for your trying to do some kind of behavior “research? Exactly how is your training in building bridges better in this area than mine, since I spent thirteen years of my life in university studying the subject.
AS BIL says, you have opinion and speculation. Nothing else. It has nothing to do with your repeated assertion about being a licensed engineer. Once you step across the threshold into another professional’s specialty, you are not an engineer any more–you are a layman.
By the way, for anyone wondering, “schnorer” rhymes with “explorer”.
Mike S.,
Growing up in Skokie, IL many of my Jewish friends used the term “putz”. I also get a kick out of that word whenever I hear it!
Thanks, vlf. It’s good to be back.
May the insomnia never strike you.
BIL,
1. Glad to see you’re getting back to your old, green self 🙂
2. I give you major kudos for not only actually reading what Brian posts but responding to him in detail as well.
The only usefulness I can see in what he posts is if I needed some reading material to help me sleep at night …
Mike,
I love the word “schnorer” too. It also has the honor of actually being part of a song lyric thus earning a post-dated win of the “Toto/Serengeti” Award for Awkward Words in a Lyric. The word is found in “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” by Groucho Marx.
Windbag,
“I find sincerity and truthfulness to be uncorrelated.”
That’s funny.
Because what you express ad nauseum with sincerity has no correlation to truthfulness let alone reality. Whereas all of the previous deconstructions of your nonsense I have provided don’t need sincerity as they have, oh, what’s that pesky thing that keeps kicking you in the balls . . . oh yeah! Logic. Cold irrefutable logic based upon evidence that spans the entirety of human history that shows not only the necessity of courts in maintaining society but the benefits of adversarial courts over any other form to date. I could give a damn what you think about my sincerity let alone my truthfulness, troll. I have logic and proof and my side and you’ve simply got a lot of obfuscating self-absorbed logically flawed bullshit.
Again, you mistake being the object of address for being the object of message.
To reiterate – just so you get the message – I don’t give a damn what you think of me, troll. Love me? Hate me? Indifferent to me? I really don’t care. As long as your pro-tyranny/pro-anarchy bullshit is defused before anyone accidentally thinks you might have a clue.
Your “research” is a joke. You regularly lie, distort history and make up definitions. Your logic, when present at all, is riddled with a multitude of formal fallacies which you have refused to address let alone correct. You cannot rationally defend your ideas. You spread antisocial poison that promotes anarchy and tyranny all the while claiming – sincerely I might add – that you are ‘just trying to help’.
Why would I care what you think about me, Mr. Circular Logic?
I smack down your Big Lies lest someone gullible mistake them for having anything other than antisocial propagandistic content. Not for your approval. Somewhat for my amusement. For the benefit of others.
So unless you figure out how to cogently defend your indefensible ideas? Next time you want to express your opine of my sincerity or truthfulness, I cordially invite you to go fornicate yourself. Because 1) I do not care, 2) you cannot logically defend your statements nor present any valid evidence which renders your “work” down to simple opinion at best and 3) it’s just more attempted distraction on your part.
Defend your flawed ideas instead of addressing what you think of me. Oh, that’s right. You can’t. Because your ideas are indefensible junk.
Now blow, windbag.
You’re nothing if not predictable and predictably nothing in substantive argument.
Mike S,
“Tell that to the Governor of Arizona and its’ legislature that will not pay for people who are dying and need organ transplants.”
Funny how there are real death panels now, but the GOP is eerily silent … In fact, Grim Reaper Brewer has already had two citizens kicked off the organ list die …
“Schmuck!”
Lol!
“Wanted to add my old favorite “schnorer” an example of which is a friend who you keep going out to dinner with, but is never able to pay their half of the check, due to one phony reason or another.”
Oooo … thanks for that Mike … keeping in storage for future use!
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, March 23, 2011 at 11:24 am
“21. I do not actually hurt people. My work does not actually hurt people. My work is of demonstrable truthfulness.”
The removal of the role of adversarial courts from legal dispute resolution would inherently promote the tyranny of the strong over the weak and encourage the violent options of self-self for dispute resolution, ergo, your ideas do harm people, troll boy.
Now blow, windbag.
#####################################
Now, we are finally getting somewhere?
In my work, the adversarial system itself is, and is only, the tyranny of the supposedly strong over the supposedly weak; while, as though with unmitigated gall, falsely claiming otherwise with nearly unlimited coercive threat. This process, BiL, methinks you perchance model to near perfection in your obstinate rejection of some very diligently done, evidently unprecedented, bioengineering research.
In my work it is, and is only, the Adversarial Principle which generates the disputes the Adversarial Principle, as used in the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence purports to resolve, while, through the purported resolution process, generating a many additional disputes as possible.
Otteray Scribe seems to deem me rude, whatever that word connotes to him may be.
What is a proper descriptor for someone obviously not qualified who takes on the work of a professional engineer doing very original scientific research? The best word I can yet find to describe Otteray Scribe is, “traumatized.”
Sturgeon Bay Atty. James O. Ebbeson, after our son and his wife were killed when their car exploded at least in part due to defective welds, set out to teach me what I regard as the same basic sort of lesson your words appear as though intended to teach me. Ebbeson failed in doing that, if such was his intention, in much the same way as methinks you may be failing to similarly teach me.
As with Atty. Ebbeson, I cannot in conscience respond to you with what I regard as an adversarial way, nor can I in conscience ignore your tragic misunderstanding of my work and its value to a valid system of human law.
Atty. Ebbeson is, per the Wisconsin Bar Association web site, now an Emeritus member with good license status. His member ID is listed as 1007960. He did much as you are doing, disregarding every significant concern I had regarding our son’s son, as I worked at preventing effectively becoming divorced from our son’s son.
If attorneys like Ebbeson had not worked so diligently to command me to hold their view of justice with unmitigated abjection, I would never have come to regard the Adversarial Principle as the ultimate of all possible forms of attainable evil.
Ebbeson finally realized that he was not getting anywhere in persuading me to accept his view (a view I found to be of severe distortion of directly observable objective reality) and I learned to not give up when someone who does not in any viable way understand my work, in whatever form if sincere ignorance (or whatever else) precludes a deeply caring person from being capable of understanding the simple truthfulness of a newborn infant.
So, for the sake of his sorrowful passion, I continue, for as long as I am able as long as no one actually demonstrates any error of consequence in my work.
I find sincerity and truthfulness to be uncorrelated.
I have shared my ideas with many people with whom I have met in person and who trusted themselves and other people enough to tell me who they were and to tell me their “real” name. Not one such person has ever reported to me any harm which came to them from or through the ideas I share with other people.
Unlike you, BiL, I have tested whether people find the ideas of my research to be in any way harmful, and have done so with hundreds of people, without a single actual report of actual harm.
I find sincerity and truthfulness to be uncorrelated.
BiL, I totally respect your sincerity regarding your expressed beliefs about my work. I also find the truthfulness of your expressed beliefs about my work to be identically zero.