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)
@Buddha: “Facts got your tongue?
Literally LOL.
RE: J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., March 25, 2011 at 12:17 pm
I made a mistake.
I left something out that I intended to include.
Mistakes happen.
I have no point or points to make and I decline to make any points and this comment is of no points, hence it is pointless.
However, this comment has meaning and is not meaningless, for I experience meaning in terms of denotation (process or procedural brain function) and not in terms of points or connotation(s) or declarative brain function.
For me to have any points to make, I would have to be able to think in words (or connnotation(s) or declaratives) and my life has never allowed me to internalize deception which I would have needed to have internalized so as to have become capable of thinking in words and thereby having points to be made.
What is my problem with points? Points are procedurally dimensionless, they are empty of process, and, as I find life to be a process, I find points to be lifeless. I am alive, and not lifeless.
RE: Anonymously Yours, March 25, 2011 at 11:53 am
Brian,
Please make your point or points and then move on….Life sucks sometimes….its what you do with the sucking part that makes the difference….Take a hint form what others have said…
AND
RE: Anonymously Yours, March 25, 2011 at 11:54 am
Brian,
Please….Take a hint from what others have said…
################################
I have received your invitation to become unethical as I understand the ethics of my profession, I thank you for the invitation, and I respectfully decline to accept it.
I do accept hints from folks who actually understand my work and why I work in the way I work, and that is why I continue my effort to bring to public awareness a legal theory question I deem of worthy significance.
I have what might foolishly be thought of as an entourage of supporters, with whom I am in communication. I listen far more to people who know and understand me regarding how to conduct my professional work than I do to people who neither understand me nor my work. Ever wonder why that is so?
What is a completely new paradigm?
Could a completely new paradigm be one which incorporates previous paradigms only as being of error being overcome?
It took me a while to figure out that my comments were beginning to function as counter-transferences which elicited transferences which reveal the inner personality structure of folks who, as a trauma response, attempt to control the lives of other people because of having been so seriously depersonalized as to have become nearly incapable of exercising effective executive self-control, and who thereby displace their inner conflicts on those around them…
“Displacement” is plausibly a useful synonym for “addiction.” Those who are addicted may wisely study the books of Lance Dodes, M.D.
What about people who are addicted to not understanding that they are addicted?
Might anyone who posts comments here have unintentionally and unwittingly have become addicted to not understanding being addicted?
I find that addiction is a no-fault condition resulting from environmental trauma which is of addictive structure and function.
So, anyone will get me to stop by demonstrating a mistake made and demonstrating the achievable process whereby the mistake already made was not made before it was made after it was made.
Go ahead… If you can… One mistake demonstrably made which demonstrably was actually avoidable before it was made such that it was not made when it was made. Only one such demonstration will be quite enough to “shut me up.”
Merely citing the old paradigm which the new paradigm replaces will not refute the new paradigm, but will only, it seems, result in words spinning as though meaninglessly. Why is that not clear to those to whom it is evidently not yet clear?
I am waiting…
New Color app promotes mobile voyeurism
(CNN) — The makers of a new and much-anticipated smartphone app called Color are operating on this principle: “We’re all inherently voyeuristic,” said Peter Pham, president and co-founder of the Palo Alto, California start-up.
Color, however, is a location-based, photo-sharing app that takes voyeurism to post-Twitter level by letting users see all of the photos that are being taken by strangers who happen to be within a 150-foot radius of the user’s smartphone.
Photos taken through the app, which launches on Thursday morning, are public by default. They’re stored on Color’s servers and the company owns them, said Pham, who co-founded the 30-person company with Bill Nguyen, previously of Lala.com and a force to be reckoned with in the tech world.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/03/23/color.photo.app/index.html?iref=obnetwork
Maybe a thread about who stole my privacy….
Brian,
Please….Take a hint from what others have said…
Brian,
Please make your point or points and then move on….Life sucks sometimes….its what you do with the sucking part that makes the difference….Take a hint form what others have said…
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, March 25, 2011 at 12:53 am
Buddha Is Laughing, I find the following two-paragraph claim, made in your posted comment of the above date and time is a claim that is of falsehood, though I allow that you sincerely believe it to be not false in error:
The statement of fact, “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”, is self-evident as in the absence of moderated dispute resolution the stronger human party will oppress, ignore or kill the weaker human party to get what they want. If a caveman thought another caveman stole his antelope, he would simply try to kill the other caveman to get it back.
This is inherent to human nature – a fundamental aspect of our psychology and biology in general as this is how animals resolve disputes – and the natural state of man absent the social compact and the resultant laws and dispute resolution mechanisms. Violence and oppression are the method in which barbarians solve disputes. Without social compact and the resultant rule of law, humans are naturally barbarians. This is a fact whether you like or not and whether you believe it or not. Without laws and dispute resolution, the strong with tyrannize the weak and do so without repercussion.
#################################
What evidence do I have that your claim, however sincere, is actually a false claim? The evidence is so simple you apparently cannot recognize it within what I have been posting in my comments.
I am human. What you claim to be inherent in human nature is not inherent in my human nature: therefore, what you claim is inherent in human nature cannot be inherent in human nature if there is at least one human without that which you claim is inherent human nature.
The mere fact of my life is actually an effective rebuttal of your (sincere, yet false?) claim.
Buddha is Laughing, your (apparently?) sincere belief regarding human nature is a belief which I find to be of the form of a very widely held delusion generated through the trauma of internalizing the mechanism of deception, typically at around the age of 18 months. The process of internalization of the mechanism of deception has been named, “the infant-child transition,” or, when really intensely severe, “the infant-child discontinuity,” and often in the vernacular, “the terrible twos.” People who go through the infant-child discontinuity form of this socialization-trauma event tend to be unable to recall their life prior to the internalization of the trauma and tend to hold young children in contempt because of unconscious envy in my research and findings.
In my experience to date, people who have accomplished the infant-child discontinuity with exceptional aplomb tend to find fault with me in more ways than I can yet count, and tend to fling hateful words at me with due diligence.
Because I have long observed that it is people whose belief structures most closely resemble the ones you have been projecting onto me are the ones who most severely damage (abuse) children through the conventions of deception internalization, I have been allowing those who judge me to inform me about their beliefs by simply being as truthful as my word skills allow about my life, life work, and life circumstances.
Stanford psychology professor emeritus, Philip Zimbardo was one of the consultants in the Abu Ghraib investigation. I recall his appearing on a television program in which he attempted to explain the situational aspects of the Abu Ghraib disaster.
The person interviewing Zimbardo asked Zimbardo something like, “So, the problem at Abu Ghraib was a few bad apples?” Zimbardo answered, in effect, “No, it was situational.” The interviewer again said, as though he understood the “situation,” “So, it was few bad apples?” Zimbardo again responded with something like, “No, it was situational.”
It came to me that the interviewer thought the situation was “a few bad apples.” What did Philip Zimbardo do about being so remarkably misunderstood? For one thing, he wrote a book of nearly 500 pages with many more pages of notes, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” Random House, 2007.
Buddha Is Laughing, as I have encountered you via the Internet, your conduct with respect to my work is a remarkably close fit, as best I can yet discern, to the sort of person Zimbardo may regard as having been captured by The Lucifer Effect.
You have the best of intentions, yet I find you utterly oblivious to the dastardly havoc your belief system accomplishes in very young children. Oblivious to such dastardly havoc, I am decidedly not.
However, in stark contrast with my grasp of the view of Philip
Zimbardo, I find that what you are doing with your life is not at all evil. Neither do I find any fault with you. You are not your beliefs because your beliefs are of situational factors which have never fully been within your actual operative locus of control, hence, while your beliefs are, in my research findings, atrociously abusive to little children, and the process of such belief internalization is near the limit of what I observe to be horrible child abuse, my research also informs me why such abuse has been a necessary aspect of the evolution of human society.
Were I to guess (something fraught with its own hazards), I would guess that you cannot quite understand why I am not getting your message.
If you do not quite understand why I am not getting your message, I can give a simple account of why I am not getting it. I got the message you have been sending my way by the third day of kindergarten, while I attended Columbia School, in Seattle, Washington. That was the day I decided to never commit suicide to avoid people much like you treating me much as you have been treating me. I have more than 65 years of relentless success in avoiding internalizing the message you have been sending my way. If I was strong enough during the first three days of kindergarten to avoid internalizing the “time-corrupted-learning-is-good-for-me” message my kindergarten classmates sent my way back in 1944, the news is that I am plausibly many orders of magnitude stronger in terms of self-integrity than I was then.
And I continue to observe, millenia of Adversarial System events notwithstanding, that not one person has refuted or rebutted my observation that no mistake ever made either could or should have been avoided, and that observation is rather nicely the antithesis of the Adversarial System… Therefore, my legal theory question remains without having actually been addressed in any meaningful manner, for my legal theory question is itself of the form of a rebuttal of The Adversarial System.
I inquired of your understanding of what the universe is made, and you provided an explanation I regard as typical of someone who has a high-school or perhaps one year of college physics background, though that is mere speculation on my part.
I began studying electronics at college level during the first week after completing fourth grade. Electronics is really a branch of applied quantum mechanics, and my dad, a scientist who worked as a minister to support his scientific research and his family, had shared his considerable understanding of the meaning of quantum mechanics with me, my brother, and my mother during many mealtime dialogues. By the time I was nine, I was already “armed to the teeth” for working at making intelligible sense of the relationship of quantum mechanics to human society.
Furthermore, I had the strength of conscience to avoid internalizing the message I find you sending me at the typical time a vast majority of people internalize it, to wit, when I was about 18 months of age. Someone (me, in particular) given the strength of conscience to reject deception and the mechanism of deception at only 18 months of age and who has relentlessly strengthened conscience ever since just may have become virtually invulnerable to deception and the mechanism of deception by the age of seventy one years since birth.
It is because I find I am effectively invulnerable to deception, the mechanism of deception, and any pathway of internalizing deception that I set out, now that I may be able to find words at least a few people may be capable of grasping, that I set out to put the work of my life to an unbridled test.
What is evil? To me, evil is any belief which asserts that something is what it isn’t and/or isn’t what it is.
With respect to the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence, a particular instance of evil is the commonplace notion that the state of understanding of a particular person acquired only after doing something was actually available to the person before doing it. Such error is the core fallacy of the legal fiction of “the reasonable person.”
Your account, given in an earlier posted comment of yours, Buddha Is Laughing, of what the universe is made of is wonderfully simple and incomplete. You left out the Pauli Exclusion Principle. And you left out much more.
The plausibly most useful, to scientific laypersons, explanation of the meaning of quantum mechanics that I have yet found is in the movie, “Mindwalk.”
I find existence (including the universe) most usefully modeled as a set of probability patterns, and one way of modeling the set of probability patterns is to recognize three categories of such probability patterns as subsets of the totality of probability patterns. One subset is the set of all possibilities which have not been realized and which are not impossible to realize. Another subset is the set of all impossibilities, or possibilities which are impossible to realize. The third subset is the set of all possibilities which are in the process of being realized (this may be thought of as the eternal now of the evolution of creativity?). The fourth subset is the set of all possibilities already realized.
If the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence had not adversely affected people in my family and friends of mine many, many times, accomplishing dastardly damage time and time again, and if the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence did not treat me, my family and my friends as though chattel property, I might not so vehemently protest the abuses I have long observed which I find inimical to the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence.
From time to time, I talk with some of the psychiatrists, psychologists, and other people who were involved in my experiences as a psychiatric inpatient and outpatient. Without exception, those folks are supportive of my research and research effort. People who really know and understand me invariably support what I am doing.
So, demonstrate the actual existence of at least one mistake actually made and demonstrate the actual existence of the actually achievable process through which at least one mistake actually made could actually have been avoided or I will continue my work as a mandatory reporter of child abuse (being that I am a member of the ordained clergy in Wisconsin) because it is unlawful for me to do otherwise.
BIL:
“Facts got your tongue…”
************
I am providing notice here and now that I will use that phrase often.
Facts got your tongue, Maury?
Why do you hate America?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZf3vRHmkw
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZf3vRHmkw?rel=0&w=480&h=390%5D
I HATE when the embed screws up…
What’s your meme????
is it one with a corporate theme????
To be sung to the tune of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZf3vRHmkw
What’s your meme????
is it one with a corporate theme????
Well Screw em Maury,
Its kind of like this….Business’ do not operate for fun mostly….take even the amusement parks..They operate for a profit…They are supposed to be fun…Not all parks treat the employees with a great deal of respect and even dignity….hell…maury…even some of the patrons going don’t do that either….. Maury did you know that those parks that don’t operate on a profit basis go bankrupt? Really….and everything is handed to them to get them to come to the city…really….
So maury….did you use to work at an amusement park and get treated shabbily by management and the patrons….I’d be angry too….and well…I’d find someone to talk to to help me get through this…Maury…You do have someone to talk with don’t you…
I think Maury and Tootie are not people….I think they are manifest corporate tools. Some of the first programmable blogbots coursing through the blogosphere dropping corporate memebombs…:)
so in deciding how to move forward I hope this country looks at the CURRENT facts, at HOW WE GOT HERE, and why way greater than 50% of the governed body are either dealing with victimizations by banks, builders and other bullies,corporate or otherwise…and/or are voicing protests (despite the lack of adequate media support)….and why our government is feeling the need to wage wars on (so many)foreign soils. Its all beyond my complete understanding but by G*d I hope that someone out there has transcended their selfish greedy gut.
Interesting, W=c.
A strong possibility.
Why do you hate America, Maury?
—————————–
perhaps he is not American?
Historical facts are pertinent to the times in which they occurred, when they are history, they become tools of teaching and should not be used as instruments of treachery. It is a neurosis to keep re-creating by the same methods when all circumstance has changed. That is why we have ideals and instruments like the Constitution, and regulations to preserve the healthy dynamic, to preserve our lives from simply becoming a shadow of the past…and enslaved by those with lesser ideals and lesser ability to regulate their base demands…
So, Maury . . .
Why do you hate America?
Tony C,
“So if you don’t like the level of taxation in this country and the level of government control, you should move.”
LMAO!! Ironically, most of the top 10 happiest countries in the world are evil, socialist empires … the U.S. doesn’tmake it into the top 10 …
Table: The World’s Happiest Countries
Francesca Levy, 07.14.10, 05:00 PM EDT
By and large, rich countries are happier–and that’s no coincidence.
Quantifying happiness isn’t an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure two types of well-being.
First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a “life evaluation” score from 1 to 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their “daily experiences”–things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged. Subjects that reported high scores were considered “thriving.” The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings.
Rank
(by % Thriving) Country Region Percent
Thriving Percent
Struggling Percent
Suffering Daily
Experience
1 Denmark Europe 82 17 1 7.9
2 Finland Europe 75 23 2 7.8
3 Norway Europe 69 31 0 7.9
4 Sweden Europe 68 30 2 7.9
4 Netherlands Europe 68 32 1 7.7
6 Costa Rica Americas 63 35 2 8.1
6 New Zealand Asia 63 35 2 7.6
8 Canada Americas 62 36 2 7.6
8 Israel Asia 62 35 3 6.4
8 Australia Asia 62 35 3 7.5
8 Switzerland Europe 62 36 2 7.6
12 Panama Americas 58 39 3 8.4
http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gallup-table.html
Maury the dumbass just makes this entirely too easy!
12 Brazil Americas 58 40 2 7.5
14 United States Americas 57 40 3 7.3
Oh, and the fact that Maury conveniently neglects that tariffs didn’t cause the 1929 crash and stock speculation did.
Psychophysical Haiku
Where are my thresholds?
I left them in the sound-booth.
No-one hears you scream. (Vit)
Silence is golden
Gaussian noise is for free
Which do you prefer? (Vit)
Indecisiveness
Two-interval forced-choice task
Monotony grows (Judi)
Why psychophysics?
Exploring the interface.
Living on the edge (Judi).
Models of being
It is what we humans do
Reality bytes. (Judi)
What? Did you not know?
Models of being are wrong
So it has been said. (Vit)
You’re damned if you do
(Go on, make the decision)
You’re damned if you don’t. (Vit)
http://www.psychophysics.org/vithumour.htm
Remember the choice
to study life or to dare-
fully live life well (Woosty)