It may be the ultimate dream come true for Republicans: the Democratic National Convention saluting the brave comrades of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. That appears to have occurred according to Navy experts who have identified the images of ships used at the convention as our Russian brothers and sisters in arms. When retired Adm. John Nathman, a former commander of Fleet Forces Command, took the podium to honor America’s veterans, it appears that someone did not bother to check the identity of the warships used as the backdrop. [Update: the DNC has now apologized for the oversight]
One former Navy vet spotted the problem immediately. Rob Barker, 38, a former electronics warfare technician, quickly identified the closest ship as the Kara-class cruiser Kerch.
Moreover, the ship in the foreground is featuring a MR-700 Podberezovik 3-D early warning radar, commonly known as a “Flat Screen” radar used by the Russians. There are other telltale signs.
There is one spin I can suggest however for the DNC. The assumption was that the tribute was to the large ships. However, if you look closely there are seven planes that fly by which appear to be F-5 jets. It could be treated as a tribute to those brave American pilots in their trainers facing off against the Black Sea Fleet.
Of course, while defending taxes on the wealthy and national health care, the image of a line of Russian warships coming toward you might not be the best visual for the DNC.
Source: Navy Times
Atoms don’t disappear. Neither does energy, it just takes a different form.
I understand that the earliest version of the “Alcoholics Anonymous” prayer that I am aware of dates back to 1937, and is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.
I tend to think of it as “The Courage Prayer”:
“Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”
I find that I have the courage to put to my jury of peers (world society as a whole) my understanding of the infant-child transition as being a shatteringly traumatic experience that indoctrinates children into the ways of social-tradition mandated deception.
Starz Media LLC produced a series of six science-fiction stories with the overall title, Masters of Science Fiction, in 2006.
These stories were “Hosted by Professor Stephen Hawking.”
Hawking ‘s introduction to the series:
“From the very beginning, we have wondered how life began, what our purpose is, and where we are headed. We have struggled to understand time, matter, the infinite universe, who we are, and if we are alone. Great minds have imagined the most wonderful and the most terrifying answers to these questions.”
In his introduction to the first of the series on the 20-DVD set I have of Masters of Science Fiction, “A Clean Escape,” Hawking’s introduction is:
“Are there events so impossible to forget that they are too painful to remember?”
For Hawking’s summary at the end of “A Clean Escape” is:
“When the fate of so many rests in the hands of so few, can the failure to be accountable ever be forgiven?”
As best I can yet understand, people who have amnesia for their infancy and perhaps early childhood are amnestic because, for them, the trauma of their being taught to obey regardless of whether obedience is possible, have had an experience so impossible to forget that it is immensely too painful to remember.
As the focus of my bioengineering research, my effort has been directed toward learning if “the most wonderful” of answers to what life is, and is for, is achievable in a practicable manner.
In his privately printed book, “Biological Theory on a Holistic Basis,” Walter Elsasser suggested that biology is “the pinnacle science.”
That book is apparently quite rare, in addition to the copy I have, WorldCat (www{dot}worldcat{dot}org) lists two copies at Johns Hopkins, one at Princeton, one at Abilene Christian University, one in the University of California, San Diego libraries, and a digital copy that is unavailable for reading because of copyright restrictions in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
Elsasser was a 1987 National Medal of Science recipient.
For myself, I accord to biology the status of pinnacle science for more than one reason. Among the reasons:
Given that the universe may be usefully understood as having two aspects, organisms and the substrates of organisms, such that the universe itself is life itself (no living organism has ever been observed that does not require a substrate for being alive) and life itself is the universe itself.
Indeed, the late theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, wrote a book titled, “Life Itself.” And A. H. Louie, wrote, more recently, a book titled, “More Than Life Itself,” a book which I find strongly conveys to me the view of the universal universe in total necessarily being an open system, such that the laws of thermodynamics apply most accurately only to closed proper subsets of the universe.
There is a story that I recall being of the Bahai faith tradition, that goes something like this:.
“On the dawn of a new day, for people living on a mountain, there will be one person who first sees the first ray of light seen on the new day; think not that person nor that ray of light to be any more, or less, special than any other person or ray of light.”
Imagine a nearly spherical mountain, and name it “Earth.”
Is the day nigh when humanity comes to understand child abuse well enough to end forever after the entire domain of child abuse?
I have the courage to ask that question.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Matt,
you posted:
“A person may approach a difficult problem, may withdraw from it, may stay in place, or may cease to be a person. Did I miss something?
================================================
Yes, you did.”
Regarding the distance between a person and a problem, please inform me what else there is other than coming closer, getting farther away, staying at the same distance, or abandoning the problem?
Perhaps you are better at hyperspace mathematics than I am. I welcome being enlightened
A person may approach a difficult problem, may withdraw from it, may stay in place, or may cease to be a person. Did I miss something?
================================================
Yes, you did.
lk,
From your 3:54 am posting:
“Circular logic. They wouldn’t have happened if they were avoidable. That they happened was the proof. Even if they were in fact avoidable, the fact that they were not avoided, even by direction,by direction makes them an inevitability.”
I find that you have provided an excellent illustration of the core predicament of the nature of time-confusion and/or time-corrupted learning.
I further find that people who are sufficiently well versed in philosophy of science are generally quite capable of distinguishing a-priori from a-posteriori probabilities.
I also find that people who are well versed in biology, biophysics, and quantum mechanics tend to be vividly aware of the a-priori probability of some supposed event is necessarily greater than zero and less than unity.
I additionally find that the a-posteriori probability of an event which actually happened is identically unity, whereas, the a-posteriori probability of an event which did not happen is identically zero because the mental model of an event which has not happened merely of hypothetical substance.
However, brevity may be contiguous with inaccuracy.
In the moment(s) of the occurrence of an event which is occurring, the probability of the event is in transition from the realm of a-priori events to the realm of a-posteriori events.
For all hypothetical events which have never actualized, meaning that their probability is a-priori, the a-priori probability is “inevitably” more than zero and less than unity. Therefore, no hypothetical event is necessarily inevitable. Because all events which have happened have the a-posteriori probability of identically unity, all such events are inevitable only after the fact, and their after-the-tact inevitability is indicated by their identically-unity a-posteriori probability.
What happened in my life, through my totally eluding the social tradition of the infant-child transition is my equally and totally eluding the traumatizing effects of time confusion and/or time-corrupted learning.
Erik H. Erikson, in his epigenetic chart of psychosocial developmental crises, identified “trust v. mistrust” as the first such crisis. In the fullest version of his epigenetic chart, a valid temporal sense accompanies trust and time-confusion accompanies mistrust.
Neurologist Robert C. Scaer, in his books “The Body Bears the Burden” (first and second editions, and “The Trauma Spectrum,” identifies trauma as “imprisonment of the mind” as a “thwarted freeze discharge” that is functionally “a time-based corruption of learning.”
Page 58 of Robert Scaer, “The Trauma Spectrum: HIdden Wounds and Human Resiliency,” W. W. Norton, 2005, has about as good a short presentation of the nature of trauma and its effects as I have yet found.
Because of copyright, I will here provide, as a form of paraphrase, what I believe to be the core essence of the meaning of the idea(s) presented on page 58 of “The Trauma Spectrum,” with interspersed copyright fair use direct quotations from Scaer’s work. This page is the first page of Chapter 3, which is titled, “Trauma as Imprisonment of the MInd.”
Scaer’s definition of the mind is stated as, {a direct quote immediately follows}
{begin direct quote}
In Chapter 1, I defined the mind as “a perceptual experience, generated by a complex set of synapses, neurons, and neurochemical states, determined by genes, instinct, and experience, that is capable of developing and directing novel behavior.”
{end direct quote}
Scare then observes that the brains of people who have been traumatized and who have not been able to free themselves from the effects of having been traumatized will have their minds and their brains significantly changed by a traumatizing event or by traumatizing events.
He goes on to offer the view that the a major result of trauma is {begin direct quote} corruption of procedural memory {end direct quote} and that such corruption damages the skills necessary for survival.
With people who are imprisoned in trauma, past events remain in procedural memory in ways that inform the mind that the past event is unfinished.
{begin direct quote}
The brain in trauma has lost its ability to distinguish past from present, and as a result it cannot adapt to the future.
{end direct quote}
The main consequence of trauma, as I understand my work, along with the work on trauma of Peter A. Levine, Alice Miller, Jeffrey Seinfeld, and many others, is one or more forms of diminished adaptability to environmental changes. I am willing to allow that people who reject, with apparent prejudice, my work and its findings regarding the core nature of severe to catastrophic child abuse may do so in responses that are somewhat proportional to their traumatic childhood experiences.
Useful reading might include, in addition to “The Trauma Spectrum,” Philip Zimbardo, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” Random House, New York, 2007, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children,” Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012, and Peter A Levine & Maggie Klein, “Trauma Through A Child’s Eyes: Awakening the Ordinary Miracle of Healing: Infancy through Adolescence,” North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 2007. (Zimbardo was the principal researcher of the “Stanford Prison Experiment.”)
I am only one of a goodly number of scientists, both theoretical and applied, who are diligently at work in efforts directed toward solving the human destructiveness phenomenon.
A story (or anecdote?) about Galileo came to my attention some time ago. Galileo was asked why he had found what no one else had previously found, He replied that others had been looking in the wrong places.
It is my best grasp of the bioengineering work I have been doing, that I may very well have happened to look for the causation of human destructiveness where it actually is.
Given that I find that my work and its findings contravene thousands of years of human social tradition, and given that there apparently are millions of people in prison in the United States, it is my understanding that those who are in prison testify to the child abuse which I find that my research has accurately investigated.
What is the remedy? Is it is baby-simple?
Once neurologically-oriented scientists have adequately researched and published their research regarding trauma, it will become clear enough to enough people what trauma is and also how and why the infant-child transition is of severely brain damaging trauma, that people will become capable of not only stopping the traumatizing of children, but also capable of usefully repairing the brain damage of people already traumatized.
In terms of law, and the practice of law, the remedy is also baby-simple. There is no need to re-write any laws, there is no need to find any law unconstitutional; all that is necessary is to change the interpretation of laws so that time-corrupted learning is excluded from any and every interpretation of laws.
Step one in implementing the remedy, in my view, may simply be recognizing the baby-truth that no mistake ever actually made could have been avoided through any actually achievable process, regardless of the nature of the mistake made or its consequences.
Finally, from Scaer, page 58
[begin direct quote}
The brain in trauma has lost its ability to distinguish past from present, and as a result it cannot adapt to the future. This confusion of time further immobilizes the trauma victim, who still remains immobilized by a thwarted freeze discharge. Procedural memory is bombarded by environmental and internal cues that represent old, unresolved threat. Declarative memory is assaulted by intrusive thoughts, memories, and dreams that repetitively warn the person of potential danger. Furthermore, the constant activation of brain circuitry related to threat alters and suppresses structure and function in the verbal and thinking brain. Trauma indeed is a state of imprisonment.
[end direct quote}
There are four responses to life events, two of which are “fight and flight.” The other two responses are freeze and finish.
A person may approach a difficult problem, may withdraw from it, may stay in place, or may cease to be a person. Did I miss something?
The Navy Seals with help from other personnel killed Bin Laden.
BarkinDog: “One in seven Republican conservative in Ohio thinks that Romney killed Bin Laden.”
Yea, I know, kind of amazing isn’t it? Our politics have become downright paranormal.
OS re: “all mistakes which have actually happened were actually unavoidable when they happened; the simple evidence of this being that all the mistakes which have actually happened were actually unavoidable when they were actually not avoided.”
***
Circular logic. They wouldn’t have happened if they were avoidable. That they happened was the proof. Even if they were in fact avoidable, the fact that they were not avoided, even by direction,by direction makes them an inevitability.
The good doctor plays with words. Don’t over-think it.
***
Dr. Harris, I hope you’ve been well, you haven’t been around in about a year. I’m glad to see you’re up to visiting, I occasionally think of some of the posters that have not returned in a while and hope that they are well. You have crossed my mind on occasion, in a kindly manner. My postings are getting wordy, introverted and preoccupied with navel gazing again, we both still need to work on brevity.
ID707, both albums are whole, coherent compositions. Just put either one on and start listening. To be hippster about it: I’m sure it’s just me though. 🙂
The following three excerpted quotations are from University of Massachuestts-Amherst psychology professor, Robert Feldman, “The Liar in Your Life” (Twelve, Hachette Book Group, New York, 2009), and are used with written permission from the publisher.
Quotation #1, from page 258: “There’s a dirty secret I’ve been trying to avoid emphasizing in this book, but its about time we faced it. All of us are liars. Yes, that means you. And yes, it means me, too.”
Quotation #2, from page 73: “Parents of children with autism often report that their children are simply incapable of lying. While at first glance unrelenting honesty might be seen as a virtue, in fact it is at the heart of the social difficulties children with autism experience.”
Quotation #3, also from page 73: “Consider the irony of the situation. Honesty in children with autism is viewed as a manifestation of their disorder. Subsequently, autistic children who were originally unfailingly honest but have begun to show signs of lying effectively are considered to be showing improvement in their condition.”
I am autistic, and have yet to begin to start showing improvement in my condition…
Simple understanding of complex issues tends to be fraught with deception, or such is my unbroken experience. Herewith, I address what I find to be a complex issue, hence my writing about the issue is of complexity comparable to the complexity of the issue itself; that being so all the better to minimize deception.
What I have here written is short, sweet, and simple, in my view, when contrasted with Prosser and Keeton on Torts, Fifth Edition, or your choice of edition of Henry Black, “Handbook on the Construction and Interpretation of the Laws, or Lowey, “Criminal Procedure.”
Sometimes people amaze and astonish me with what they do and say.
While I did figure out that I am autistic, using that word, before any physician or psychologist used it about me in my presence, I am decidedly not “a self-proclaimed autist.” It took a while to check my primary care physician records; a little earlier today, I spoke with my primary care physician’s assistant by telephone, and the assistant informed me that my chart states that my being autistic is “a proven condition.”
Given my nearly lifelong observations that the variability of personal opinions may be as good evidence for the utility of chaos theory as will ever be needed, I am always profoundly skeptical of personal opinions, and am increasingly skeptical the more people who hold to a particular cluster of closely related opinions.
I have, only slightly differently phrased, put the content of my prior post on this topic before many people (in the range of 3000 by my best practical estimate) and have found a great diversity of responses. In general, people who are observably autistic find my work valid; one such person around 20 years ago remarked to me, and this is eidetic-verbatim, “What you say makes more sense to me than anything else I ever heard before.”
Without testing by attempting to post this to the Turley Blog, I have no way to know whether it will, or will not, get posted. So, I shall write this and learn what happens…
For the sake of accuracy, many words follow. I admonish anyone who has serious difficulties with atrocities to avoid reading what follows.
When, at about the age of 18 months, I was presented with the classical argument of the infant-child transition, always, to me, some variation of the basic form, “You were told what to do (or not do) and you did not (or did) do it; you were disobedient, and you deserve to be punished,”my previous life circumstances had enabled me to observe children a few to several months older than me going through that transition, and I had decided that deception was the lesson of the infant-child transition, and had decided to not go through it.
Came the week before kindergarten started for me, and, at dinner, my dad said to me (also eidetic-verbatim), “There is something that concerns me. You never went through the infant-child transition. I never heard of anyone who didn’t do that before, and I don’t understand it; but, however you are doing it, your life seems to be working for you. If things happen in school, talk with your mother and talk with me.”
Shortly before my mother died slightly short of her 89th birthday, she and I had a gentle dialogue that lasted a couple hours or so. During that dialogue, she mentioned that I had never gone through the infant child transition, and summarized what she had said with (also eidetic-verbatim), “You never went through the terrible twos.”
Because I never went through the infant-child transition, consciously and intentionally avoiding it for cause, I never learned to have any responsibilities, and have never yet had the experience of having even a wisp of a trace of a phantasm of any responsibility. What I have, what I have had for the whole of my life, is ability to respond to events which affect my life, and, as I respond to the events of my life, I learn increasingly of my ability to respond to life events.
I have a simple word for my learning of my ability to respond to life events, an ability that has never been insufficient to the needs of my life; that word is “adaptation.”
To me, learning through life events and adaptation to life events are of the same process, the essential process of human life. Because I have not experienced events which have not yet happened, I am unable to understand how I will adapt to any future event.
Nonetheless, as I have never experienced my ability to adapt to the events of my life to be in any way inadequate or insufficient for meeting the needs of my life, I have never had any life event experience which has ever successfully called into question my actual response abilities.
As I find my actual response abilities to invariably and fully meet all the needs of my life, I have never had any incentive for developing responsibilities.
Perhaps Chief Justice Rehnquist described a form of the difficulty many people experience with my life and my life work. I refer specifically to Daubert v. Merrill Dow, the concurring in part and dissenting in part, opinion in which Justice Stevens concurred.
From the next to last, and last, paragraphs of the partial dissent of Chief Justice Rehnquist:
{begin quote}
… The Court speaks of its confidence that federal judges can make a “preliminary assessment of whether the reasoning or methodology underlying the testimony is scientifically valid and of whether that reasoning or methodology properly can be applied to the facts in issue. … The Court then states that a “key question” to be answered in deciding whether something is “scientific knowledge” “will be whether it can be (and has been) tested.” … Following this sentence are three quotations from treatises which speak not only of empirical testing, but one of which states that “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability. …
I defer to no one my confidence in federal judges; but I am at a loss to know what is meant when it is said that the status of a theory depends on its “falsifiability,” and I suspect some of them will be, too.
{end quote}
In my view, a decently and throughly diligent study of the philosophy and history of science, including, but not limited to, the work of, “William Cecil Dampier, Karl Popper, W. H. Werkmeister, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos.
It concerns me far more when I observe that judges appear to me to be rather oblivious to the research and research findings directed toward the development of a scientific understanding of human beliefs as an inseparable function of human biology.
If there are sitting judges who are vividly conversant with theoretical biology, such as, and not limited to, the work of Robert Rosen, Francisco Varela, Walter Elsasser, A. H. Louie, and who are comparably conversant with cutting edge work in the neurology and psychology of trauma, including, and not lmited to, the work of Robert C. Scaer, Peter A. Levine, Fritz Redl & David Wineman, Alice Miller, Anthony Storr, and Ernest Becker, I remain unaware of their existence.
To me, one of the most notable findings in theoretical biology during the last fifty years or so, is the recognition that the most significant problems in biology cannot be solved using reductionism. The importance of that finding to my work is, to me, if to no one else, profound and then some. I consistently observe that the fundamental methods of the law profession are predominantly of reductionist and pre-reductionist science. Therefore, the problem of human criminal conduct is impossible to solve with our present legal system, for it is bereft of the relational methods such as have been described by Elsasser, Louie, Varela, Rosen, and others whose grasp of biology is sufficient for the making of apparently-useful scientific progress in unriddling human biology and human conduct as expression of human biology.
I find that people who are not decently proficient in doing high-dimension-space, complex-variable, relational tensor calculus are bereft of the mathematical capability required for decently accurate modeling of neural networks, such as a typical human brain happens to be.
To illustrate, consider the definition of “proximate cause” in Black’s Law Dictionary, your choice of Seventh, Eighth, or Ninth Editions; part of the definition and explanation is from Mitchell, J., in North v.Johnson, 1894, as found on page 264 of Prosser and Keeton on Torts, 5th Edition:
{begin quote from North v. Johnson, 1894}
“Proximate cause”—in 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 liability upon such basis would result in infinite liability for all wrongful acts, and would “set society on edge and fill the courts with endless litigation.”
{end quote from North v. Johnson, 1894}
Based on my demonstrated ability to read and understand Keith Henny, “Principles of Radio: Fifth Edition, Wiley, 1945, the week after I completed fourth grade, it is vividly clear to me that I understood simple arithmetic vastly better than Judge Mitchell apparently did, in his decision as reported in Prosser and Keeton…
For a given event, in a sequence of the total set of causes of the event which go back to the dawn of human events, and beyond, the total number of causes is obviously gigantic, if not effectively immense. The proximate cause event of the final actor in an effectively infinitesimal portion of the gigantic-to-immense total of the causal events which culminated in the event in question. While simple arithmetic demonstrates that the actual liability of the person whose conduct comprises the final act in a gigantic-to-immense sequence of acts, the liability truthfully assignable to the final actor’s final act in the causal process is blatantly negligible. Assigning full liability for an event having countless contributory causes to the final act of the final actor is, to me, of staggeringly blatant negligence of simple truthfulness.
Why do I bother to work at unriddling the effect of human-made laws on human public safety? For one reason, because my license as a professional engineer requires that I do so because of the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, in accord with which my license requires of me that I abide.
Because I am licensed in Wisconsin, and work in Wisconsin, until Daubert became the law in Wisconsin on February 1, 2011, anyone, regardless of relevant scientific or engineering competence, could put forth a pseudoscientific or unscientific argument against my work and any judge or jury could hear such unfounded evidence and give to more credence than my properly scientific and properly engineering work. Daubert becoming Wisconsin law rendered that possibility functionally moot in any decent Wisconsin Court of Law.
As the Daubert decision was rendered in 1993, I, as was true for many other scientists and engineers, recognized its significance with respect to the relationship of the work of scientists and engineers with the work of the legal establishment. With the Daubert decision of June 28, 1993, I adapted the remainder of my field work and the entire writing of my dissertation to fully meet the Daubert standard.
Until September 4, 2012, it was possible, at least in principle, to deem my work to not be engineering and to deem my claiming my work to be engineering a deceptive act. That was rendered moot on September 4, 2012 in a decision regarding my using the Fall Working Conferences of the Erik Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center to meet my professional development 13 hour classroom-interactive professional development hour requirement for renewal of my license in 2014. In my request for allowing professional development hours accredited by the American Psychological Association to be counted for Professional Engineering, I needed to adequately demonstrate to the Engineer Section of the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services that my work was engineering, else my request would have been recognized as deceptive and would have been rejected.
From my request to the Engineer Section:
{begin quote}
In notable contrast with seemingly lolng-standing human social tradition to the effect that people make mistakes which could have been avoided, muy work shows that all actually-avoidable mistakes are always actually avoided, such that avoidable mistakes never happen and it is impossible to know what they are because they never are. Furthermore, all mistakes which are unavoidable happen, and only actually unavoidable mistakes actually happen. The social convention to the effect that people have made mistakes which they could have, and should have, avoided making is a biological fallacy.
[end quote}
My request to the Engineer Section ended with:
{begin quote}
I have talked with Arthur Schwartz, Esq., the General Counsel of the National Society of Professional Engineers regarding the nature of my bioengineering research, and he told me that he found it to be unobjectionable.
From time to time, some engineer starts a new field in engineering, or a new sub-field. The best model I have to date for my bioengineering work is simply that it appears to me to be a new engineering field, or a new engineering subfield, and I am as yet the only engineer working in it, using the bioengineering methods of my work, that of my graduate advisor, and the particular work I have studied done by many other people who have put effort into unriddling the enigma of human destructiveness.
Having worked on this problem for many years, I was thrilled and delighted to read, “The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010, by Duke University Civil Engineering Professor Henry Petroski.
If science alone could solve gthe problem of human destructiveness, I would expect the problem to have been solved long ago. I am in agreement with what I understand is Petroski’s view, that engineereing alone, among the learned professions, has the necessary methodology for solving those most difficult among the human problems which cry out for efficient, economical, and effective solution.
Please advise…
{end quote}
My communication with the Engineer Section was through Jill M. Remy, Education and Examinations Program Manager, Department of Safety & Professional Services, of the State of Wisconsin.
The reply to my request came from Charles Kopplin, the Engineer Section’s education liason, and is dated Tuesday, September 04, 2012 7:36 AM. The text follows:
{begin quote}
Subject: RE Bioengineering-relevant PDHs
Jill,
As long as the PDH’s for the courses Mr. Harris takes meet the requirements of A-E 13, they will count. It is the responsibility of the registrant to determine if the courses are relevant to their area of practice. If they are audited, they will have to demonstrate that they are relevant, but I would not expect any registrant that puts forth a good faith effort to meet the requirements of A-E 13 having any problems with an audit.
Based on Mr. Harris’ email, it appears to me, he is making a good faith effort. It also appears that he has a very specific area of practice and as such, I can understand why he is considering attending the conference he mentioned in the email.
My personal advice to Mr Harris would be, if he believes the PDH’s he earns meet the requirements of A-E 13 and he can make a reasonable case to someone else they meet the requirements of A-E 13, he should satisfy the continuing education requirements.
If Mr. Harris would like to submit a specific request to the Section, he certainly has a right to do so. However, in the past, the Section has taken the position of not approving courses.
If it would be helpful, you have my permission to forward this response to Mr. Harris.
Chuck Kopplin
{end quote}
I find an accurate summary of the response of Chuck Kopplin to my description of my bioengineering research work in my request, including the bioengineering based finding that no mistake actually made was actually avoidable, to be, “Without Objection.”
I suppose it would be fair, if not also decent, to describe, albeit rather tersely, what led me to inquire into human destructiveness from a biological-bioengineering methodology. Many of the ideas that I pursued during my research came from many conversations with the late Sidney M. Perlstadt, Esq., then a senior partner of the Sonnenschein, et al. Law Firm, in Chicago.
In 1965, I began working as a medical lab technician at Cook County Childrens Hospital, in Chicago, with a joint appointment as a senior electronics technician at the University of Illinois at the Medical Center, working mainly with a pediatric cardiologist, Bessie Lendrum, the wife of Sidney Perlstadt.
At that time, Bessie, Sidney, and I all lived on the north side of Chicago, and I lived not very far from their house. For about two years, during 1966 and 1967, after work was done for the day, Sidney would take the rapid transit train from the Loop to the hospital, and the three of us would, most days, drive to their house for dinner and to have more time for Bessie to talk with me about her research interests and my technical abilities’ usefulness in her research. Of course, Sidney got equal time during dinner conversation. Sidney, born in Warsaw, Poland, had done is undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and earned his J.D. from John Marshall Law School. Much of what he told me was of what troubled him and bothered his conscience regarding law and the practice o f law.
In December of 1960, I had completed three years as a physics major at Carleton College, which, at that time, had a 3-2 program with MIT, such that three years at Carleton and two at MIT would garner bachelors degrees from both schools. However, after I did my three Carleton years, I recognized that MIT simply did not then have any engineering curriculum that interested me even slightly.
In early 1961, I moved to Chicago, and got a job as a repair technician at Allied Radio Corporation. In 1963, I got a job with Crossley Associates, the area sales representative for Hewlett Packard Company, repairing HP test equipment. Crossley Associates was taken over by Hewlett Packard while I worked there, and I became a Hewlett-Packard employee.
During 1965, the University of Illinois at Navy Pier became the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC), began a bioengineering program, and, in 1966, I began my undergraduate work in bioengineering at UICC. I graduated with a B.S. (High Honors) in Engineering, Bioengineering Major, in June, 1970. As an honors student, I was given admission to graduate school in bioengineering, with full funding promised, at both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
As neither of those schools had a bioengineering graduate program that interested me, I applied to be, and was accepted as, a graduate school bioengineering student at UICC in the fall of 1970.
In the summer of 1971, my dad had colon surgery because of colon cancer. The surgery was deemed successful at the time. However, in the summer of 1972, his primary care physician noticed liver enlargement, and he died from surgical complications from liver resection within a couple months.
As I learned, with great sadness, in in 1986, my dad’s doctors had apparently lied to him about his condition, withholding from him his actual diagnosis. What I did understand about my dad’s cancer led me to understand that he had been met with a very rare form of cancer, one which was terminal well before it gave him any clinical symptoms.
My graduate advisor, Dr. Earl E. Gose, did his main work on biological pattern recognition methodologies related to finding rare cancers at an early enough stage to be able to prevent them from becoming terminal. As my dad was dying from cancer, I was being trained in the most scientifically informed methods then available for the timely recognition of the sort of cancer from which my dad had died.
The more I learned about the biology of rare forms of cancer, the clearer it became to me that my family was one in which some such form of cancer was unpleasantly likely. I set out to obtain proper cancer screening and was successful; however, my brother’s physicians refused to screen him, and they realized their blunder in rejecting my concerns when, in the early summer of 1986, they diagnosed my brother as having terminal cancer. He died from that cancer in January, 1987.
In the summer of 1986, my colon was removed to prevent colon cancer, and, because the condition I was found to have, familial adenomatous polyposis, can cause cancer in other organs than the colon, and because my dad very nearly died from prostate disease fifteen years before he died from metastatic colon cancer complications, I also, earlier in 1986, arranged for a bilateral orchiectomy because I found unacceptable evidence that testosterone might seriously raise my risk of cancer. The fact that I am transgendered made the orchiectomy a far easier decision for me than I guess it would be for many, if not, most “men.”
Transgendered? On the first day of kindergarten, at Columbia School, in Seattle, Washington, as I got to the classroom, my teacher suggested that I play with the toys at the far end of the kindergarten room, which I did. The teacher saw me, and hurried over to me, saying, “No, Brian, those toys are for the girls.” It bothered me to be told to not play with the good toys and to be told to play with the bad toys. Most of what is ordinarily deemed proper for boys and men has consistently been contrary to my sense of inner identity.
My kindergarten classmates recognized that I was a “sissy” and a “baby,” and about a third of them attempted to teach me to not be a sissy and not be a baby. So, on the third day of kindergarten, walking beside my mother, when we came to the Rainier Avenue traffic signal, it was red for us, and an electric city bus came from our left, stopped, let off and picked up passengers, and, still having a green light, pulled in front of us. Not having learned to think in words, two thoughts came to me as though simultaneously. One thought was that the children who were abusing me would never be able to do that again if I dove under the back wheels of the bus as it went by. The other was that my doing that would hurt my family “a thousand times” more than those children could ever hurt me. So, I never even twitched. And, in an instant, became about as immune to suicide as I guess may be humanly possible.
So, when my sense of cancer risk informed me that not doing everything achievable to reduce my probable cancer risk, to avoid suicide by cancer, I did everything practicable to reduce my risk. Hence the colectomy and orchiectomy. The average age of death from familial adenomatous polyposis is commonly reported in the medical literature as 42 years. I am now past 73.
At the beginning of second grade, I was put in the classroom of Miss Josephine Hanson, at Marshall School, in Eureka, California. As best I can grasp what happened, Miss Hanson “knew” that second grade boys were resolutely, relentlessly skillful liars. She readily got all the other boys to confess to telling lies, I did not confess because I had no way to tell lies, and no way to understand that I was supposed to know, at the age of 7, how to tell lies and how to admit to telling them.
Result? I was sent to Mrs. Edith Knudsen, the principal, to be paddled as punishment for being incorrigible. Result? Mrs. Knudsen paddled me until I shattered with terror into agitated catatonia. Result? Mrs. Knudsen thought I had learned the lesson she intended to teach. Result? Not so.
The first day that I was paddled into agitated catatonia, I told my parents what had happened. Because it was clear to me that neither Miss Hanson nor Mrs. Knudsen knew any better, were familiar with any better, or understood any better, I forgave them instantly, and so, never developed any resentment for being so paddled. Being paddled to agitated catatonia is terrible, it is terrible beyond any power I have with words to tell.
It is one thing to forgive absolutely and completely, and quite another to be entirely unaffected by indescribably horrible abuse. When I got home after the first time I was paddled by Mrs. Knudsen, I told my parents what had happened at school. When it was bedtime, I went to bed, closed my eyes, began to drift into sleep and was screaming in utterly stark terror, “at the top of my lungs.” That brought my parents to my bedside.
They told me that my screaming might get the neighbors attention, the neighbors might call the police, the police might decide that it was my parents, and not my teacher and principal, who had abused me, and the police might take me from my parents. They asked me if I could think of another way to deal with what had happened at school.
After a few moments of thinking, I put my right thumb in my mouth for contact comfort, as any decently autistic child in a similar situation might do, and, lying on my back, began to throw my head from side to side as hard and as fast as I could. After two or three minutes of doing that, I fell asleep, and slept soundly through the night.
Well, I had not learned the lesson, because it was impossible for me to learn it. I was paddled the next day. I forgave every blow instantly. After school I went home and told my parents. At bedtime, I started sucking my thumb and throwing my head from side to side until I fell asleep.
The pattern of being paddled, not every day, and sometimes twice in one day, continued for about three quarters of second grade, as did the pattern of sucking my thumb and throwing my head as violently as possible from side to side to release the terror of the school day. On Saturday, I released whatever residual terror remained after Friday. On Sunday, I released the terror of anticipating school on Monday.
When I asked Miss Hanson what I had done wrong, so I could know what it was and change it, she said, often verbatim, “You know perfectly well what you did wrong, I saw you do it.”
I guess, now, that she had no way to tell me that I had to lie to her by admitting to lying when I was not lying, thereby solving the problem of not lying, because, if she told me that, she would understand the impossibility she was demanding that I accomplish.
Authoritarianism, it appears to me, allows people to demand the impossible from other people and to demand the impossible with boundless impunity along with utter indifference to harm.
My parents protested my being abused with the teacher, the principal and the school district administration. To no avail for three quarters of second grade. My parents took me to every physician available, none of whom found anything wrong with me. Finally, about three quarters through second grade, the school district agreed to transfer me to another school where, no matter what I did, or did not do, I would never be paddled.
However, for third grade, my parents fled with my brother and me to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where they had learned that no student in the Sturgeon Bay public schools was ever given “corporal punishment.”
My orchiectomy was done under local anesthesia in the manner of a vasectomy, simply and with no complications. The colectomy was done with general anesthesia and morphine for post-surgical pain.
Morphine managed the post colectomy pain and also messed up the residual pain experiences of second grade. Having known people who, in a psychotic break, murdered other people I had known, when morphine messed up the way I had dealt with the beyond-excruciating agony of the second grade paddling-to-agitated-catatonia horror, it occurred to me that morphine might activate a violent response, in the form of a psychotic break, to what had happened to me in second grade. So, for the safety of myself and others, I voluntarily entered the psychiatric unit of the University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital.
The staff there informed me that I was not autistic, and that what had happened to me in second grade was also a delusion. While I understood that they were severely mistaken, I also understood that I could not ask to be discharged because I had not fixed the problem of the possibility of flashbacks to second grade terror setting off a psychotic break.
After two years, mostly in, and sometimes out, of psychiatric hospitals in Chicago, the predicament of flashbacks activating a psychotic break remained unresolved, even though I had been put on a cocktail of “strong” psychotropic medications. My psychiatrist/psychologist team in Chicago realized that they had not helped me overcome the psychotic break risk and suggested that I apply for admission to the identified long-term psychiatric facilities in the U.S.; Menninger, Chestnut Lodge, and Austen Riggs. I applied and was accepted at all three, subject to an intake interview. After careful review, my psychiatrist/psychologist team and I all decided that Austen Riggs, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was the most promising.
Today, only Austen Riggs survives. And it was almost certainly the most promising, for I came there under the care of a psychiatrist who was able to actually fathom what I needed, and help me achieve it. What I needed to accomplish was to usefully understand why so many people I had encountered during my life treated me with atrocious, and sometimes terribly violent, contempt.
While at Austen Riggs, the medications I was taking, prescribed in Chicago, took me along the path to a profound, oriented times zero, dementia. I could not add five and six, often could not recognize my name, and was often unaware of where I was. Fortunately, the psychoanalytic psychotherapy was effectively completed before I became too demented to continue with it.
My return to Chicago was arranged, where I came under the care of a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Chicago, who, in a locked unit (Austen Riggs has no locked unit), I was taken off all the psychotropic medications. In about two months without any psychotropic medications, my tested (WAIS-R) IQ score had skyrocketed to 70, and I was deemed capable of returning to my home. That was made practical as the psychoanalytic work at Austen Riggs had thoroughly solved for me the risk of flashbacks to the terrors of my second grade abuse and possible resulting psychotic breaks.
In 1990, I was found to have a cancer-threatening polyp on my Ampulla of Vater, and underwent major surgery, including morphine for post-surgical pain, for the second time. Morphine did the same sort of number on me that it had done in 1986, and, for the second time, I was in the psychiatric unit at the University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital.
However, it only took me three days and a few Atavan, PRN, to fix the mess-up in my brain from the morphine. After a couple days to see if the mess-up was adequately fixed, I wrote up a discharge plan, that would get me discharged at the end of the next week. My psychiatrist said to my treatment team, so one of them told me, “This is a good discharge plan. Let’s use it.” And I was a good plan, and it worked as planned.
With the arrival of side view esopho-gastro-duodenoscopy apparatus, and pill cameras, the need for major surgery has not come my way since 1990. For all I know, if I again need major surgery and morphine for post-surgical pain, and again find my brain messed up by morphine, it may only take me about three minutes to fix the morphine mess-up. It seems that my capacity for learning remains fully effective and efficient.
In 1990, a year after I was taken off the medications at the University of Chicago, I was given another WAIS-R. My score was high enough for Mensa membership. Perhaps I have lived a really balanced life; perhaps my tested IQ has been as far below 100 as above 100. But, then, is IQ actually anything other than a terrible measure of acculturation?
For anyone who has gotten this far, the short posting that some folks deemed unintelligible was written as a transliteration of the way I actually experience thought in the form of meanings and not in word form. Autistic people, in my experience so far, tend to find that way of writing and talking to be far more meaningful than the way people I tend to regard as severely autism deficient tend to write and talk.
Now that the problems of standing under law have been resolved to my satisfaction, I have set about to ask Google Books, who have a scan of my dissertation, to make it fully available under a minimally restrictive Creative Commons license.
I have also been working at writing the work I have done since completing my doctorate, as Google Books allows publishing there at no cost to me or to those who may read what I write.
Were there to be anything I would deem absolutely unconscionable anathema to me, it would be privatization of the commons. For that reason, I have no intention of earning any income from my research work, nor from the decades of arduous effort it has taken me to do the work.
By every means I have found to test this, I find that the infant-child transition is a shatteringly traumatic and devastatingly child-abusive event that teaches children to distrust themselves so severely as to be amnestic for their infancy and its pure, genuine innocence. I, for one, have no such amnesia.
As I find that no mistake ever made could have been avoided, I apologize for any proofreading mistakes which I have made in this work.
Don’t blast hospital ships. That’s all I’ve got to say.
Why it doesn’t matter how we vote. Clinton did some good stuff but he’s the one who delivered NAFTA. The TPP is an Obama priority. Do you think Bain’s Romney wouldn’t like it? TPP is shaping up to be NAFTA on steroids.
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/13444-tpp-a-worldwide-corporate-power-grab-of-enormous-proportions
The TPP is called a ‘trade agreement,’ but in actuality it is a long-dreamed-of template for implementing a binding system of global corporate governance as bold as anything the world’s wealthiest elite has attempted before. Of the 26 chapters under negotiation, only a few have to do directly with trade. The other chapters enshrine new rights and privileges for major corporations while weakening the power of nation states to oppose them. The TPP essentially proposes to establish a parallel system of justice where companies can sue countries in a tribunal of judges composed of unaccountable international trade lawyers with little to no process for appeal.