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)
Unkie,
Brian is lost in his own Utopia. You may go look for him and bring him home.
“Physics is also the wrong tool to examine the brain, Brian.”
WRONG! We use MRI’s, CAT and other tools created by physics research to study the brain everyday.
So physics is used as a tool to study the brain.
Looks like Brian is the one with the brains here.
Dr. Scribe:
Seems reasonable to me, I wouldn’t even give them food stamps if they were on strike. Why would you want to subsidize that sort of behaviour? If they want to go on strike let their union pay for them to live. Why should the family of 4 trying to make ends meet, with the father or mother possibly working 2 jobs, be forced to support some jackass who has a job but refuses to work because he doesn’t like the fact that he may have to clean a toilet?
I wouldn’t give them unemployment benefits either. Let them subsist on their savings and union dues. Maybe they would then think twice about striking and only strike if they had a real beef with wages or working conditions.
That is the problem with socialism, pretty soon you run out of other people’s money. But not before ignoring reality and thinking the other person owes you a living.
I for one resent having to pay for someone to live who is perfectly capable of going to work. If I were management I would just fire them and hire people who were actually willing to work for a living. The stories I have heard from friends about union labor are sickening. Nothing but a bunch of parasitic thugs as far as I can tell. I know it didn’t used to be that way as my grandfather and uncle were union men. But back then they paid their own way and the union had a strike fund set up.
Now they are just the brown shirts of the progressive party. Funny how only a very few private sector employees even belong to a union now.
Oh, it’s not a belief, Brian.
I have – in fact and reality – proven you wrong about the societal value and necessity of courts. I could do the same thing about the utility of proximate cause too if I wished, but quite frankly your ever expanding insanity is growing boring.
Your espoused beliefs are a really nifty example of what a delusional and narcissistic mind can accomplish.
By the way, I never said brains were exempt from physics. I said physics was the wrong tool to examine law. Physics is also the wrong tool to examine the brain, Brian. It’s like trying to fix a car with many complex parts using only a screwdriver or write a complex program using only for/next loops or cooking a six course meal using only a toothpick. It’s only one part of the puzzle. Legal theory exists for the same reasons physics does, Brian. To address and understand a set of specific problems and issues presented by reality. In physics, the primary problems are those presented by the interaction of energy and/or matter. In law, the primary problems are those presented by the interactions of people in both small and large groups. Arguing that physics applies properly to law is just a weak form of square logic. Just because people are made of matter/energy does not mean all their interactions can be described solely by physics. They are a much more complex system than that.
You are in fact a nuisance. Motivation wise, at worst, you are a troll. At best, you are a well-intentioned fool, but intentions aside, a fool nonetheless. And you are hopelessly wrong about the law and always will be using your non-sequitur approach. You lack both tools and context to handle the issues you would speak to and a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of an area that is quite frankly not your expertise. You’re like a baker trying to build a bridge: just because you know what one looks like doesn’t mean you know how or why it works and trying to design one based on your limited knowledge is a recipe for people getting hurt.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, March 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm
You espouse ideas that promote the anarchy, violence and the tyranny of the strong over the weak and I proved you wrong.
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I allow that you may indeed sincerely believe that you have proved me wrong in such form of reality as you sincerely believe exists.
I do not share such belief in such form of reality with you.
And you have done nothing I can find to prove or otherwise show my biophysics-based research wrong.
Do you really believe that the human brain is not a physical (aka, biophysical) body organ which has no connection with what is physical? If so, how really remarkable, indeed.
My brain just happens to be a physical body organ and is therefore subject to the laws of physics as are all things physical.
Delusions are beliefs within a physical organ (the brain) which, were they actually real in denotation, would violate the laws of physics.
You just cannot help yourself from validating my work through your claims that the human brain is not a physical organ and is therefor not subject to the laws of physics.
Buddha Is Laughing, your espoused beliefs are really nifty examples, to me, of what time-corrupted-learning brain trauma can accomplish…
(Nifty may sometimes be synonymous with “sadly, innocently tragic.)”
Who wrote to the effect that excessive consistency may be the hobgoblin of a small mind? What on earth might that mean? Is that something about me?
Buddha,
For Walker’s buddies, I am guessing that the mistress will have plenty of “down” time.
raff,
You mean “mistress” isn’t a full time job?
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Brian,
Nothing I have said defies the laws of physics, however, physics – Newtonian, quantum mechanical and theoretical – are not the appropriate tool(s) for evaluating law or the role of law in society in any case.
Nothing I have said is untrue or illogical. I have provided clean, clear logic, truthful statements of fact and proofs.
By contrast,s most of what you have said is both untrue and illogical with inappropriate and/or insufficient proof to meet even the lowest standards of judgment for law or science – both of which employ rigorous proofing processes.
You lost the challenge to prove your ideas. You failed to provide a sufficient case for your assertions. And on top of it, you’re a whinny ungracious loser. “Slave master”. That’s just hysterically funny considering I’m sworn to protect the very document that prohibits slavery in this country while you seek to undermine it with your every word.
Again, I’m not trying to persuade you of anything. You’re (either) insane and/or paid to be a disruption to this blog. You are quite simply beyond convincing because you are firm in the delusions about human nature you base you ideas upon. I’m speaking to others who might mistakenly think – because of your tactic of argumentum verbosium – that you know might what you are talking about when it comes to the law when clearly and demonstrably you do not.
You espouse ideas that promote the anarchy, violence and the tyranny of the strong over the weak and I proved you wrong.
That does not mean I’m a “slave master”.
It simply means I’m correct about the societal necessity and value of the courts and you’re simply . . . not.
Sorry a bold off html code right before the excerpt from Black’s Ninth got away from me, somehow.
I only make unavoidable mistakes, which is how and why they sometimes happen. The happen because they were not avoided because, in the actual context of the mistake, they are not recognized before they happen.
That is so simple that I understood it before I was born…
RE: Nate, March 23, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Dr. Harris,
I hadn’t engaged you on-topic per your discussions because it appeared clearly to me that you believe them completely. To try and discuss why I personally don’t see eye-to-eye would be to open myself up to the world in ways in which I don’t want to – only of course to see nothing change.
You believe as you do. Obviously you have to cast your work upon the water and let it be of value as it may.
But now that I’m here…
I don’t believe it “letting people off the hook.” In other words, not assigning blame. Not for some people.
People hurt other people sometimes. Usually because they’re not aware of the consequences that they’re having on others. Sometimes because it isn’t important enough; what they gain is more important to such individuals than the pain they cause. And when those who have been hurt inform the perpetrator how they have been hurt, and the perp will simply not accept that they have been the cause of said person’s pain and simply choose to live in a lie, fuck them. Justice please – preferably in this life, in the next if it exists and comes down to that.
People do wrong sometimes. And people do wrong when they hurt others. That not everyone is willing to acknowledge pain that they’ve been the source of, AND make the necessary amends… well, here then is the uncrossable divide between you and I. Crossable in wishing you well, but not crossable in that what you believe stinks for me.
Of course I wish you well. But that’s me and we all know you’re you.
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It is never my purpose to get anyone to believe anything I believe because I believe except when I have a sense of serious and imminent real danger, and then I only seek to get others to consider whether they also recognize real danger worth avoiding.
Using bioengineering pattern recognition methodologies developed by my doctoral thesis adviser, Dr, Earl E. Gose, and others, I admonished my brother to be screened for possible colon polyps as I was being screened. I worked at explaining the relevance of the Bayesian methods my adviser had developed, only my brother, which is B.A. in psychology and his Ph.D. in Sociology, had been so indoctrinated in frequentist statistics that I had not gotten him to properly understand the nature of the risk until after he had developed terminal cancer.
As for why I never blame anything or anyone, that is because the way I am autistic allows me to very easily solve certain problems which most people find impossible or nearly impossible to solve. I can give a specific example…
From Black’s Ninth, page 250, under “proximate cause:
” ‘Proximate cause’ — itself an unfortunate term — is merely the limitation which the courts have placed upon the actor’s responsibility for the consequences of the actor’s conduct. In a philosophical sense, the consequences of an act go forward to eternity, and the causes of an event go back to the dawn of human events, and beyond. But any attempt to impose responsibility upon such a basis would result in infinite liability for all wrongful acts, and would ‘set society on edge and fill the courts with endless litigation.’ [North v. Johnson, 58 Minn. 242,59 N.W. 1012 (1894).]”
Were the adversarial system capable of actually being truthful, the effect of any single identifiable actual proximate cause would be an infinitesimal portion of whatever finite damages actually happened, because no actual (therefore, finite) consequence is itself infinite in effect.
The simple reality of the present situation of adversarial law is that the courts are already filled with endless litigation, because litigation has yet to cease for the rest of all time.
I also do not blame anyone or anything because I found how to solve the supposed “infinite regression” problem supposedly presented by using actual cause instead of the legal fiction of proximate cause; the result of actually solving that infinite regression problem, using high-dimension-space, complex-variable, tensor calculus with Bayesian statistical methods is that the actual liability precedes the supposed “big bang.”
Rather than having some attorneys devise methods of promoting hatred for profit, a simple mutual non-profit insurance pool would resolve every form of harm with vastly better outcomes than any imaginable adversarial method. That this is so has been shown with the introduction of, as two examples, “no-fault divorce” and “no-fault automobile insurance.”
If it were ever to be truthfully demonstrated as a verifiable and reproducible fact, and not merely as an assertion of blind faith, that one or more mistakes actually made could actually have been avoided through some actually achievable process, then the assigning of liability in preference to mutual non-profit insurance might make biophysically intelligible sense.
Alas, no one on this blawg and no one else I have ever heard of has been able to provide even one single instance of a mistake actually made and the actually achievable process through which the mistake actually made could actually have been avoided.
I note that not one person who as-though takes exception to my work has ever show my work to be in error by demonstrating the one thing which would actually rebut my work, the mistake actually made which could demonstrably have been avoided through a demonstrably achievable process, and the difficulty is, to demonstrate the process would require that the mistake actually made become not actually made after it had already actually been made. Dr. Robert Scaer rather well describes the mental mechanism of believing that a mistake already actually made could demonstrably be shown to not actually have been made after it demonstrably had actually been made, time-corrupted learning, and he also defined trauma as time-corrupted learning.
There is a saying in education and in psychology, “If you are told something often enough, you will come to believe it, no matter what it is.”
While I find that to indeed be true, what is often enough for one person may not be often enough for another. Because I never “think in words” (that is, I never think in connotations) and because I only think in patterns of meaning (that is, I always think in denotations), and because it makes no sense in terms of denotation to be able to know or understand something not yet learned, no matter how many times I have been told, in whatever manner, “Brian, you made a mistake you could have avoided,” I always find that to be an utterly psychotic notion in terms of denotation. Connotation, on the other hand (that is, thinking in words) can obviously interchange psychosis with reality with perfect ease, and in ways which allow connotative thinkers to be perfectly oblivious to the swap until something sufficiently awful happens as to give notice of the psychotic belief’s presence. And, to maintain the psychotic belief, the additional psychotic (to me, if to no one else) belief in blame is needed.
I am now beginning to have hints that the need to think in words (connotations, that is), instead of using direct observation denotations, is itself a form of trauma response of form so profoundly addictive (as a displacement psychological defense) as to readily trap some of the best and brightest people in the world within it. Anything which is so profoundly addictive as to be capable of that surely can never be any person’s fault.
I do not blame for the simple reason that, to blame someone, I would need to be vastly more psychotic than the two episodes of iatrogenic morphine-induced psychosis ever came close to making me.
To me, the “Thinking in Pictures” as described by Dr. Temple Grandin would be thinking in pictorial connotation and that would be no less protective for me than thinking in words would be.
To do the math of high-dimension-space, complex-variable, relational-tensor-calculus that solves the theory of everything problem, I need to be in a sufficiently quiet space either dark or with my eyelids closed, so that I can be undisturbed in denotative thinking long enough to solve such problems without interference from words or pictures.
That is how I solved problems before I was born; before I was able to hear words as connotations and before I was able to have light enter my eyes as pictures.
During the twenty or so years during which I worked at Cook County Children’s Hospital, I consistently noted that little children processed their experiences as I do until they got to the infant-child transition, and I noted that their inborn truthfulness was fading fast.
Some time ago, I included a short sentence in one of my posted comments:
“Demons are make-believes which make people believe in Demons.”
Blame is one such demon to me (again, even if to no one else)…
OS,
Well said. You forgot about jobs for their mistresses!
Otteray,
Let’s add that they’d like to privatize all the public sector jobs.
Elaine, of course they want to create jobs.
They are having to hire lawyers to pursue the appeal on DADT the DoJ is refusing to appeal because it is an unwinnable case. That should provide full employment for a number of lawyers.
Then there is the need for a small army of investigators and tax agents to monitor all those wild uteri.
And we must never forget the agent provocateurs hired to disrupt demonstrations, blogs and the like.
And who could forget all those call center workers in customer service jobs……………in Bangladesh.
Of course they want to create jobs. It is just that none of the jobs have to do with building roads, bridges and teaching kids to read and write.
Otteray,
I just read about that on Think Progress. The Republicans, as you can see, have their full attention focused on jobs creation. Sometimes, I feel like I’m living in a dystopian society.
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rafflaw,
It seems the “Republican governors” posts get people talking.
Latest outrage: Republicans want to cut food stamps and benefits for anyone on strike.
Full story here
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/23/959506/-House-Repubs-billcut-off-familys-food-stamps-if-anyone-in-family-on-strike
Elaine,
Another 500!
RE: Onogonga, March 23, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Dr. Harris:
they are indeed slave masters.
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Sooner or later (I prefer sooner if possible) the slaves may recognize their being enslaved and be wise enough to not in turn become slave masters while overthrowing their enslavement.
I do not ask people who “get it” to comment in reply, but I do welcome comments. I deem it wise for anyone who does not have the supposed protection of being in a state-licensed profession with a proper research background to consider commenting anonymously, which I am not doing.
Think of what stuff has been sent my way before making your identity known. “Slave Masters” tend to be vicious when challenged, as has here been amply and repeatedly shown.
If the present system of law did not impose upon me a structure of law which precludes my being in compliance with it as a matter of definition, I would be content for those who believe in the adversarial system to use it for their own purposes so long as they never impose it upon anyone who believes otherwise.
I am very familiar with the ways attorneys dance around by interchanging denotation with connotation with terrible skill, and proclaim as logic that which defies the basic laws of physics.
It would make sense to me that those whose work exploits others while entrapping said others in abusive vicious cycles of deceit to do everything possible to keep most people totally in the dark as to what is and is not truthful.
Sooner or later, those “zombified” by abuse may wake up.
You who decry what I am doing are getting nowhere in persuading me that my work is improper because your responses are your “spilling your guts” regarding your actual views of ordinary people. That an autistic simpleton like me can get you to so spill your guts as you have been doing may yet astonish some ordinary people who may yet take up the cause for human decency for real.
Dr. Harris:
they are indeed slave masters.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, March 23, 2011 at 9:32 pm
You have stunningly well validated my view that there are no words in the universe which I can write about anything which you will not, as a matter of blind faith, automatically reject with absolute prejudice.
Within absolute blind prejudice, only absolute blind prejudice is reasonable, thanks for proving this.
You have much helped me understand the slave-owner mindset. They also resolutely thought they were treating their purported inferiors properly, much as it seems to me you do.
Changing the name of a process (i.e. the connotation of the process) neither changes the process nor its denotation.
Buddha,
You are correct…nothing unreasonable.