Progressio at New Ruskin College

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Lecture Notes: 04-27-05 Populorum Progressio

When I was in High School pope Paul VI said that it was much easier to think of ways to limit the number of people at the table than it was to think of ways to feed all those who were at the table. ( POPULORUM PROGRESSIO, ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PAUL VI ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PEOPLES MARCH 26, 1967 )(http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum_en.html)

I reasoned that this is the difference between the engineer and the scientist. The scientist is free to examine any problem he wishes and solve the problem anyway he likes. The engineer has a client. Formerly I had thought the scientist superior to the engineer due to this freedom of choice. However pope Paul VI’s challenge caused me to question this judgment. True the scientist has more freedom but isn’t the engineer’s challenge greater? It is not enough for the engineer to “solve” the problem, but that solution must conform to the client’s requirements! Ah! That makes it much harder.

Where I live there is a company called Market Engineering. I think this is a perfect sort of name as both words relate to each other. You can not have a market without engineering for the market implies choice; choice implies substitution; substitution implies research and development, i.e. engineering. All research and development departments in companies should be renamed “market engineering” to remind the team members that they serve the market. Without the market the engineers would have no clients. They would only be scientists.

Pope Paul VI was the client. His “opinion”, values, beliefs, defined “success.” Of course the problem of too many people at the table can be solved in many ways. The client however, the “consumer,” determines what values will define the acceptable design solution.

So though I recognize birth control, population control, the term now, (PC), family planning, is important, (I personally give it preeminence in any development plan), yet I have never been interested in discussing the question separately. Birth control has preeminence in development planning not just because it limits and prevents the problem from racing ahead of our technology, but for the purely logical reasoning of our science, for quite independent of any particular economic calculation choice is the supreme value in Economics. Women should be given choice, because all consumers in the market economy should be given choice.

The preeminence of choice is, in terms of logic or philosophy, a “postulate” or better an “axiom” of Economics. As explained elsewhere, (see Wrong at the Max Weber Institute), this is one of the aspects of Economics which makes it a tautology; a self defined, self referencing system of thought. First we say that choice is the supreme value. Why? We could call on neurophysiologists, sociobiologists, etc., but independently of these sciences we define the science of Economics as the study of choice, in the same way we define human action as “remunerative action” even though there are many other types of human action. The science of Economics unfolds from these definitions, postulates, conditions, the way Euclidian Geometry unfolds from its definitions and postulates. The science having been established we no longer need to justify these axioms, independently of the findings that result from them. The justification is that it works: it explains.

The reasons why the Church teaches that birth control is a sin has never much interested me, in the same way I suppose that a client’s preference for beige in the exterior color of the house never causes the architect to probe deeper, exploring the client’s psyche, childhood traumas, or that sort. ‘The client wants beige, fine, let’s get on with it.’

It is a matter of indifference to me. Personally I think the line of reasoning starts with something like, ‘God has a plan . . .’ or ‘Human action in some matters is prohibited, taboo, . . .’ etc. Ho, hum. The often heard theory that using the “rhythm method”, (based on the estimated time of female fertility), is a system of “birth control” that is “natural” and somehow in accord with Devine Law, seems odd, for it first can be seen that this theory contradicts the presumed Law, the thesis that some matters are taboo or that we are not allowed to interfere with “God’s plan”.

Therefore any claims to categorical necessity are destroyed and the argument must proceed within the system of thought that birth control is acceptable. (Note that this condition does not arise within the system, Economics, with respect to : Choice. For the system of thought, Economics, does not at any subsequent point contradict its first principle that choice is an unadulterated good.)

Therefore the entire question of birth control must now devolve to subsidiary arguments as to the degree of “possibility” left open to Nature or God in the various contending systems of birth control. For no system is perfect and it must be admitted that the possibility of conception, and presumably God’s plan is always possible in any birth control system chosen including sterilization.

Or perhaps I am not very clever. In ‘Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, Iris Murdoch warns her readers early on that there are some philosophers who just are not very interested in morals. My cheeks burned. Me?

I am an engineer, I have a client, the challenge lies in meeting his specifications. Therefore it can be seen that the more irrational, even self contradictory the specifications, the more, . . . the more . . . challenging? No, interesting. May you live in interesting times.

So, for example, in . . . Education: Apply technology. Which technology? Distributive. Self paced. Scalable. Inexpensive. Laser disks.

In Housing: Manufactured, panelized, utility cores of high value, (plumbing, heating, appliances), multi story high density, existing urban areas.

Food production: Genetically engineered, designed for local climates, reengineer biomass in uninhabitable areas, (see Technical Corrections at the Weber Institute).

Global Warming: Control global climate by controlling amount of solar radiation reaching the planet using artificial clouds. (See Artificial Clouds at the Moynihan)

Human Engineering: Increase oxygen uptake of neurons, progressive development, to fully engineered human, Homo Sapiens Engineerus.

For every problem there is a solution.

When I first came to the San Francisco Bay Area I saw an interview with a local executive of Bank of America, or P. G. and E., one of the big local businesses. I do not recall now the subject but as the interview proceeded I grew ever more alarmed. “And this is a businessman!” I exclaimed. “If this is how businessmen talk, if this is the ‘conservative’ establishment, . . .? How is this going to work,” I wondered.

And now 25 years later I know.

In the insurance industry there has been a boom in ‘construction defect’ claims. I have tried to explain that these claims are the natural result of the construction market but no one will listen. “Why,” they tell me, “Have you seen how much they are getting for their buildings! Buildings are selling for much more than the cost of construction!” they reason, “So how could this market cause defects? They can make so much on the building, charge any price they like, multiples of the actual cost.”

In fact a recent Harvard study compared the price of land, construction costs and actual selling prices and identified how in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, Building and Zoning codes have driven up, “inflated”, the cost of housing well over the actual cost of building and in point of fact: of land. (Regularly you hear the feeble minded, Ron Owens for example, claim that land is the reason for the higher San Francisco prices. But the point of the study is that the selling prices are well above even the higher area land costs.)
( http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2002papers/2002list.html)

Yet my point is just this: over heated market causes building defects. Why? Because consumers must buy buildings the first day they see the place, sometimes before the place has even been built. There are multiple offers. Offers in excess of the asking price.

So then, they ask me, incredulously, “Why defects then? They can get any price they want? The property turns over before it is finished! Why defects?”

This is what scarcity does: distorts markets. The richest country in the world and in the richest places in the richest country and you have created scarcity. Because you have bureaucrats like that businessman I saw in the interview in the late 1970’s. Because the leftists know better than the market. Because you wanted to “preserve” Mill Valley. That is the word Peter Coyote used at a Mill Valley City Hall meeting. “Preserve.” For whom? Millionaires like Peter Coyote? F. . . ing dick head.

Counselor: What is this?

Misplaced aggression.

And no one will take responsibility for it. You can not go to anyone individual and say “You, you, that’s right you. You did this.” (Which is one reason I am not much interested in morality. It seems a gimmick to me. A confusion of terms as Wittgenstein has shown. Just define your terms and puff, all the deep questions disappear.)

“We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

In Russia, the profit motive having been removed, quality was supposed to go straight to the consumer, the theft of the exploiters having been stopped . . . what went wrong?

Possibly capital, profit, isn’t theft after all?

Choice makes quality. Scarcity makes defects.

Get this into your heads. There is only the market. There is no “third way.” There is no socialism. No communism. No communalism. No . . . taunting, leering, mocking, egotists smirking, Ivey League, U. C., Foundation Grant, (they call Mill Valley, “Trust Valley”, because of all the self centered ----

Counselor: What are you doing?

Digressing.

Look. The consumers do not have a choice. It is either buy it or lose it. So they buy it. The contractors know this. So yes, the windows were put on without the flashing then the stucco was applied, then the flashing was put on, so? Sue me!

Or, rather sue the General, who sues the subcontractor, then the window manufacturer then the stucco contractor, the architect, then they call the insurance broker, and so it goes.

Why? Because you do not understand economics. Without choice there is no competitive pressure on the builder entrepreneur. The habit to check the window subcontractor’s work, atrophies in non competitive environments.

Wealth is not theft. Wealth is the promise to participate in future economic interactions. It is created not by “taking” but by mutual assent of the parties. Each promises to participate in future economic activities. That is what those bills are that are in your wallet. Promises to participate in some future enterprise, by mutual assent.

In scarcity, as Paul VI noted, this mutual assent starts to break down. The mutual promises become compromised, “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.”

Economics has been mistaught. Most of you have read your Samulson in college economics. There you have learnt, for example, that capitalist demand higher returns for greater risk. This is wrong. And if you look at how wrong it is you will learn something. The way it is wrong will teach you much about real economics.

Ludwig von Mises illustrates how it is wrong this way: An entrepreneur persuades a capitalist to fund a hotel in the mountains. “Will we make money?” asks the capitalist. “Are you kidding?” (imagine Sid Rosenberg) “We can charge any price we like there are no other hotels for miles!” Note that the capitalist does not say: “In the mountains you say? Well that sounds risky, I will want a lot more money in that event.”

This is the way the market really works, not the way dusty old Economics professors teach it. The “risk” and the “rate of return” arise together. The Chinese have understood this for a long time: Risk = Opportunity.

But in your “logical” narrow constrained square “rational” Western minds risk and opportunity are two different concepts. Oh, the inscrutable West!

So the flashing is put on after the stucco because, well, because that is human nature. Because he can? Because this is how humans act. This is why choice is so important.

So in the 1970’s the bell bottomed, turtle necked, peace necklaced, executive, (ok I added the necklace part), tells us that “Increased zoning regulations are a good thing for the economy, there has been far too much choice in the San Francisco Bay Area” and 25 years later I am sitting in an insurance office talking to the interview committee of a major insurer and they are looking at me questioningly, shaking their heads, at the very idea that contractors and builder entrepreneurs would try to pass off shoddy construction onto their insurers because we are in a scarcity market, created by those “community leaders” of the 1970’s and 1980’s and 1990’s.

The fashions have changed, in hair, clothes and politics but not the reality of the market.

Now you tell me. Where is your morality?

The Marin Senators Boxer and Feinstein were two of those “community leaders.” They both helped down zone Marin and San Francisco. They throttled down our market. Our lives.

Who do you think is paying for those construction defect claims?

Insurance Industry: We do not pay claims, we finance them.

You pay the claims. In higher prices. The cost of insurance is passed on to the consumers, just as taxes are passed on, just as all costs are redistributed by the dynamics of the market. Again I ask, where is your morality?

Who is responsible?

Boxer? Feinstein? The Democrat Party controls Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. What percent of people in the Bay Area can afford the median priced home? 15% What percent in the nation? .01%? (And if you are in a Red State and are laughing “ha, ha, losers, . . .” think again hillbilly. Why do you think Dr. Greenspan is raising interest rates? Because of what the elite is doing in the Blue States! Hillbilly.)

Where is your morality?

The Guardian had a piece on John Paul the Great saying he had “blood on his hands,” because of birth control and the association of condoms with the reduction of AIDS.

But where is The Guardian when we discuss how the liberal elite in Britain, and the US, is responsible for the much more direct and obvious conditions here?

When will you take responsibility for your own social policy here?

It turns out that morality is a problem of definition.

You define yourself into the not responsible position.

Those children in the picture. Need they go hungry? You blame the capitalists? How about you? How about the restrictions on economic development in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the country, in education, medicine, housing, transportation, etc. etc.

You are concerned about global warming? Ok how about the restrictions on nuclear power? How much more could have been done?

Feed the poor? But your friends, possibly you, have worked against genetic engineering of food crops. The market will work around you but we are talking about delay. Delays that you have caused. What could you have done to help those children?

You wanted to preserve the ‘neighborhood’ for your fellow millionaires instead of setting an example for the public by tearing down your shabby little plywood suburban villas and building multistory buildings for the people. How much more could you have done?

For example, the plight of airline pilots whose pensions may be put into a government subsidized pension plan has been discussed as an example of capitalist immorality. Even Bob Brinker has expressed dismay. Why? You think this is a question of morality? Why should there be a government program in the first place? The rich using the government to help themselves? Isn’t this just like the Social Security System we discussed earlier? The poor are taxed to benefit the rich.(Lecture Notes: 03-17-05 Betrayal III, Lecture Notes:02-18-05
Lecture Notes: 02-14-05 trophy hunters, Requiem @ Funeral Procession (http://www.newruskincollege.com/id23.html ))

The Unions, (who had extremely talented lawyers, bankers, accountants, economists), negotiated with the airlines and took every loose penny they had. The airlines had billions invested and faced ruin if they did not agree. After all the money had been taken they then negotiated “fringe” benefits for retirees. Both parties knew that all the money was already gone. Gone to wages, fuel, interest payment etc. The only money left to “negotiate” was the future money. In the future we will pay your pension.

We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.

This is a joke. The airlines had no choice. This was a labor created scarcity market. Labor manipulated the market. They knew it. Everyone knew it. Bob Brinker blames airline management but really the problem was that there was no free market for the airlines to contract with another set of flying bus drivers and cocktail waitresses.

Fine. But now we are expected to weep for the union members who will lose pensions or health benefits? This is your morality? This is a gimmick. All the money was taken, then they said ‘ok,’ as they untied their hostages, ‘in the future, if you should survive, we want you to agree to pay additional ransoms, our pensions and health care.’

Yeah, right, in the future. If we survive. Sure thing.

And if you think I am anti union or taking management’s side, you only show how you have taken sides. I told you before, ho, hum, I do not care. Your morality is a joke. The unions, with expert advise, all the advantages negotiated the deals it liked. But do not come to me now and tell me the companies laboring under the staggering load of these debts are “immoral” for dumping what they can. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Or rather it has far more to do with it than you will acknowledge. For starters did the flying bus drivers and cocktail waitresses think to “negotiate” for a national health policy for everyone, including those of us not so lucky to make $200,000 a year flying to Paris three days a week?

Well? What is the answer? You ----

Counselor: Stop it.

The answer is NO!

Did the GM workers think about health care or national pensions for the rest of us? NO no no no !!!

Morality?

You talk to me of morality?

Those kids in Africa. In the picture at the top of this page. Do they have $95 laser disk players in their village school? They have courses on treatment of tropical diseases for the village medical provider? Farming and animal husbandry courses for the village farmers? Etc. etc.? Of course not.

Fifteen years ago I wrote to the Senate about the importance of technology in education.

And what was the result?

Morality?

John Paul the Great has “blood on his hands”?

Then you must be at the bottom of a sea of blood.

This is why I think morality is phony.

You and your party have blocked the market. You have stopped development. Obstruction after obstruction.

Daily your policies, the direct consequence of your Party’s actions, misdirect hundreds of billions of dollars. All about you is confusion and destruction.

The children starve.

And you want to discuss morality? You blame John Paul the Great?-------

Counselor: Don’t say it.

The last few days I have become completely lost. My enemies have been on the radio complaining about “those Democrats” because they criticized Majority Leader DeLay for trying to make a “political issue” out of Terri Schiavo. “God’s gift to the Republicans.”

“And now those Democrats are trying to make a political issue out of it themselves!” These are the people who destroyed my life? Dogs.

They can not distinguish between DeLay’s attempt to use the shameful tragedy of one family’s dispute over ending life support for a dead girl, and the justified criticism of DeLay for this attempt?

I have been set upon by dogs.

When I first started this site, after several posts on this site about Mrs. Jack Swanson, she started calling in sick. I would make a post and she would call in sick.

Finally, one morning, Lee Rogers, called her on the phone and started arguing with her. Shouting at her. He refused to go on the air without her.

She said she was proud to be “vicious” but when exposed on this little web site she would not go on the air.

Was that morality coming up in her? Shame? She helped destroy a man and now she felt shame?

No, she soon got over it.

She was soon back on the air saying stupid things about Democrats and DeLay.

Such a confusion in the world.

Morality?

I tried to help get laser disks for the children of the world and I have been set upon by dogs.

Who can be held responsible for what?

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The End at New Ruskin College

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Lecture Notes: 04-21-05 The End

(Prerequisite Lecture Notes: 04-16-05) Photo of Children : Link at www.NewRuskinCollege.com

These children, are they part of the body of Christ?

Are you? Am I?

Are they just protoplasm, so many living beings, human animals?

They are shown here lined up for food. They are hungry. How about you?

Or have you hardened your heart against them too? If so what has it cost you to harden against them?

In order to harden your heart what have you had to give up? They are only hungry, but what about you? This photo was taken some time ago. They have eaten many times since then. Gone to bed; woken up. Played. Laughed. Lived.

But you, in order to harden your heart against them, what have you given up? Your life?

In the recent news coverage of the Roman Catholic Church the Church’s teaching on contraception, has been discussed, both in terms of its affect on global population, and in Africa the spread of AIDS. Theories of harm have been examined and the harm has been traced back to the Church’s teaching, all be it, it was generally allowed, an “unintended” effect.

The cause and effect relationship has been highlighted and contrasted. That harm should flow from good has been the focus of coverage on this aspect of the Church’s teaching.

Partisans have presented on this subject and the popes and the Church have received both critical and supportive examination.

What I have not seen anywhere, not even hinted at with sly irony, or any indication at all, by anyone, friend or foe, partisan or disinterested commentator, in fact an empty desert of bland vapid utterly unaware discussion, has continued for weeks; what I have not heard is can this same method of analysis be applied to us? Does no one else thirst for some insight into the human condition? Has no one thought to think that this line of reasoning might expose something more general about the human condition?

You have the issue of over population. You have the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul the Great. And now the new pope. Major issue. Major institution. Major world figures. A fundamental question of “good” and . . . shall we say, ‘the human condition’, if not “evil” incarnate in our lives.

And AIDS, another major global issue. And the spread of AIDS which is associated with a method of contraception disallowed by the Church’s teaching. (A competing web site which also is focused on the role of technology and public policy, apparently in response to this coverage in the news, published an article disputing the question of AIDS in Africa, i.e. if AIDS is mainly spread by intercourse, pointing out that hypodermic needles are implicated by some researchers. (Our association of their article with a partisan defense of the RC Church is based on the timing of their article, and because their article did not dispute that upwards of 30% of the transmission of AIDS must still be associated with sexual intercourse. (http://www.techcentralstation.com/041505E.html ) 30% of those infected is still a big number (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12665438 ). Clearly they were attempting to limit or dispute what degree of blame for the transmission of AIDS should be attributed to the use of condoms, or rather the failure to use condoms.) And now more recently they have explicitly risen to the defense of the pope on the use of condoms, (http://www.techcentralstation.com/042105D.html ) indicating a party preference. Does technology have a party preference? Does science?)

So we have in the news: over population, and AIDS in Africa. We have the association of the Church, an institution for “good” and we have the troubled ‘human condition’. We have these gigantic personalities, John Paul the Great, the new pope, historic figures. We have the disputed teaching. “Evil” arising from “good”. Tremendous issues. Overwhelming issues. The stuff of thousand page Russian novels. Enormous! Colossal!!

And in the news? What? . . . nothing.

But then, where does one start? And after starting where does one stop?

Only those who wander in the desert, or lost in the mountains, cloud hidden, the castoffs of society can talk about such things.

For if evils result from holiness, if good and great men destroy, if white becomes black, have we not run out of language? Is this not madness?

I no longer can think of a theme or connect one thought, fact, with another. With my approaching death a haze has descended. The world appears random. Good men. Evil men. Is there a difference?

These children . . . look at them . . . what is your relationship with them?

How many were born who would not have been born? How many brought into this world who would not have been brought into this world if their mothers and fathers had had a contraceptive? What if they had another choice? At this level of technical development how many can be, or are we saying ‘should be’, born, this year, this decade? And then there is the question, independent of these questions, of AIDS. How many contract AIDS simply being born into this world? What if they had a choice?

Ought we even be allowed to ask such questions? Are we “playing” God? Is any of this permissible?

How to think about John Paul the Great? What is the criterion? What is the scope of our discourse?

How ought we think of you dear reader? What criteria shall we use in our examination of you?

Where should we begin? Is there anything for which you will take responsibility?

How about these children here? Will the reader take responsibility for them? For starters?

If we look beyond intention, your intentions, what will you be responsible for? What can you be said to have “caused”?

In law you are held to account only for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your acts? But let us start with your “acts.” Ought you be called to account for the acts of your party? Your country? Starting when? In preparing your defense do not imagine that there are any limits to your liability. We are no longer limited by time and place, we are unbounded now. Deranged?

Or have we already crossed the line into madness? Are we asking too many questions? Is this why we are already all alone in the media? Who wants to be the first to scoop this story?

We could start anywhere but let’s start here: Do you believe in an absolute or not? Is there a good? If it is good how can evil flow from it? Is it reasonable to hold the Church responsible for the spread of AIDS an the increase of unwanted children? Were these results reasonably foreseeable consequences of the Church’s teaching?

Then by this theory of liability are we to judge the “good” as “relative” to the consequence? If so then your theory implies that good is “relativistic” to the consequence. It is then instrumental not absolute? The “good” will be determined by its instrumental value.

If you do not believe in an absolute value for good then how can you proceed in your life, for logically you can not know the consequence of your actions for some time to come in the future, possibly the results will be known only far in the future? How do you live your life? Play the odds? You propose gambling as an alternative to absolute values? (I have in mind the image of the soldiers playing dice at the crucifixion of Christ.)

And if the “good” is to be judged by the results what about a wrong? If you are trying to support the Church, wouldn’t a lie be justified? If the good is instrumental then why can not the same approach be applied to evil?

Can you lie for Christ? Is that permissible?

Photo of Terri Schiavo: Link at www.NewRuskinCollege.com

“A common cause of compression fractures is the disease osteoporosis. This disease thins the bones, often to the point that they are too weak to bear normal pressure. The thinning bones can collapse during normal activity, leading to a spinal compression fracture. In fact, spinal compression fractures are the most common type of osteoporotic fractures. Forty percent of all women will have at least one by the time they are 80 years old. These vertebral fractures can permanently alter the shape and strength of the spine. The fractures usually heal on their own and the pain goes away. However, sometimes the pain can persist if the crushed bone fails to heal adequately.” ---- Chief Editor , Kenneth Kurica, MD, Managing Editor Randale C. Sechrest, MD, Editorial Board Richard Lazar, MD Brent Dodge, RPT

Liars for Christ.


Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck both repeatedly claimed that Michael Schiavo had attempted to murder his wife. For proof of their charge both offered the evidence of a nurse who claimed she discovered an empty insulin bottle and multiple hypodermic needle holes in the patient Schiavo’s body. However neither Beck nor Hannity ever mentioned that the Schindlers declined to call the nurse to testify in a 2003 evidentiary hearing. Nor did they mention that the judge in that same hearing specifically mentioned the failure of the Schindlers to call the witness to give her evidence. These facts were never mentioned by Beck nor Hannity, and we learned of them only because of the reporting of Randi Rhoades. ((Only the liberal talk show host was willing to report the whole story, the facts, and let us decide.) I hate to be the one to break the news to you Randi, but you are a temporal being too.)

The nurse claimed that she contacted the police and reported the crime at the time of discovery. However, FOX News contacted the police department and reported that the nurse did not in fact contact the police as she claimed. Bill O’Reilly several times reported on the air that FOX had proven the nurse’s claim to be false. Yet Sean Hannity, who also works for FOX TV, not only did not correct the record but he continued to report the nurse’s claim that she had contacted the police; despite FOX’s reporting to the contrary. Why? This seems neither fair nor balanced. Can FOX report the same story several different ways? Does it have standards for accuracy or not?

Both Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck offered as further evidence of Michael Schiavo’s attempted murder the unsubstantiated claim that a “bone scan” had revealed that the patient Schiavo had numerous “compression fractures.” They both listed the bones with “compression fractures,” including a rib bone and a wrist bone. However, neither Sean Hannity nor Glenn Beck seemed to understand what a compression fracture indicated.

Bones do not normally fracture on compression. Fracturing on compression, in normal use, indicates that the bones have weakened. What might cause a bone to become so weak that it fractures in normal use? If, for example, the body were deprived of calcium in the patient’s diet, due to starvation, for example, then the body might compensate for the loss of dietary calcium by taking calcium from the body’s own bones, and thereby weakening them to the point that they would fracture.

Yet both Hannity and Beck pointed at Michael Schiavo as the cause of the compression fractures and demanded a criminal investigation. There was no claim of beatings of Terri Schiavo, who was seen regularly by both her family and friends prior to her heart attack. In fact Hannity and Beck offered no evidence except the unsubstantiated claim of the nurse, who was proven to be a liar by FOX, who was not called in 2003 by the Schindlers, and the “bone scan” which they claimed showed “compression fractures”. This latter evidence, if true, far from strengthening their claims, actually undermined their own arguments. It would rather serve as additional evidence that the patient’s eating disorder caused not only the heart attack but the bones to weaken to the point that they fractured in normal use.

That both Hannity and Beck appear not to have understood this, that they were undercutting their own argument, is not only not surprising but typical. And if you think that either of these Christian gentlemen will be ashamed of their repeated lies, now that they have been exposed here, you would be wrong. They believe they were lying for a good cause. They see themselves as liars for Christ.

Hannity has started bragging about his years of study in a seminary and Beck often will talk of his hour in the Garden of Gethsemane --- before making a sleazy segue to a commercial. (After we first mentioned his “wink wink” segue from Jesus to commercial, he complained on the air that he did have to after all have commercials. (But we were not criticizing the commercials but his smarminess.))

They both claim the absolute good of their convictions even as they lie. They claim righteousness yet when pressed defend lies by reference to the instrumental value of their lies.

For example, they introduced the fraud Dr. Hammesfahr as a “Nobel Prize nominee.” (He claims his congressman sent a letter to the Nobel committee.) They know that this constant association of this quack with the Nobel Prize is another lie but they feel these lies are justified to “save Terri’s life”.

Dr. Hammesfahr’s claim that the patient Schiavo could speak was not questioned by either of our Christian gentlemen liars. And they offered no reasoning to explain why this, their sole expert, was in the minority of doctors who had examined the patient. Nor could they explain why the judge in the case could find no published papers by their “Nobel Prize nominee.” Instead they repeatedly made the claim that “the majority of affidavits from medical doctors” support their position. Affidavits? See? Affidavits that is legal talk. That this coven of doctors had not actually seen the patient nor had any evidence to give in the case was of course never examined.

Nor did Beck nor Hannity ever mention the inconvenient facts about their Dr. Hammesfahr: “In February 2003, the Florida Board of Medicine ruled
. . .” ---- Media Matters (http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220002 ) .

Given their credulity of Hammesfahr’s claim that the patient Schiavo talked to him who can be surprised that Hannity and Beck accepted without question the Schindler family claim that the patient Schiavo told them “I want to live.”

What if the Schindler family had claimed that an Angel or that Mary, the mother of God, had appeared in the Hospice room? Would Hannity or Beck have questioned this testimony?

Indeed they spiraled down each day damaging their credibility. They began to exhort their audience to question not only the Florida judges but after an act of Congress the Federal judges too. Who are you going to believe Hannity and Beck or these State and Federal judges?

And the answer came back that the people agreed with the judges and not our Christian gentlemen liars. (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/) So Hannity and Beck attacked the polls too! And the politicians that went along with the Liars for Christ also fell in the polls. Mr. Bush is still falling. (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ articles/A43180-2005Apr11.html )

I was originally targeted by the liberal-radicals of the San Francisco Bay Area because I was a conservative Republican who had written letters to President Bush and the U. S. Senate. So you might suppose I would be sympathetic to his son’s fall in the polls. I am not. Nor do I feel anything but contempt for the “conservative” Congressman Mr. DeLay who joined in with Hannity and Beck in attacking the judges: “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.”

And how do I know Mr. DeLay was wrong? He has himself admitted his error. But not Hannity and Beck. Having dragged our party down they fell even further.

Both next targeted the Hospice. Both spoke with dark suspicion of the place that had by all reports kept the patient Schiavo in good health for years. And Beck joined Michael Weiner in describing the Hospice as a “death camp” for the “extermination” of patients. And what were Beck and Weiner’s exhortations but an attempt to provoke violence against the Hospice? If the Hospice is murdering people then isn’t violence justified against the murderers to prevent them from “killing” others?

Indeed isn’t this the reasonable interpretation of Mr. DeLay’s words? And is this not part of the reason for his apology for his words?

But Beck and Weiner did not apologize.

Indeed Laura Ingraham, “livid,” joined in. She accused those who disagreed with her, society, of being part of the “culture of death.” This is her accusation against the society that carefully reviewed this case for fifteen years, collecting and confirming, exhaustively, the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that the patient was gone, had died years before. But “culture of death” was Laura Ingraham’s charge against a society that spends 50% of its medical dollars in the last six months of life. (http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/resources/topics/end_of_life.shtml#fact )

Half! We do everything we can do to stave off death. Everything that is humanly possible! Half our money spent in the last six months and this “livid” neurotic, in an emotional fit, accuses us of being “the culture of death.”

And when we first posted this criticism of her, (see Lecture Notes: March), Laura claimed that she was only concerned that there was no “documentary evidence” of the patient Schiavo’s intentions. Then in our next posting we called Laura Ingraham’s claim that she was concerned solely about the absence of “documentary” evidence, a lie. We pointed out that we expected better from a lawyer. We pointed out that her emotionalism was no help to anyone trying to decide how we should proceed.

So then in her next show she claimed that she could distinguish this case from the thousands of other cases that doctors and families must deal with every week . “Distinguish” cases. That is how they talk in law school. The young law students have to be taught how to “distinguish” cases.

She offered that she was only concerned with cases in which the family disagreed with the with drawl of life support.

Oh, great! That is a big help Laura. Yes thank you. Of course the only cases that come to court are the cases where some family member disagrees. That is all the cases. What we want to know is how to resolve the cases where there is disagreement! That is the whole point. Or are we going to give everyone a veto?

Now let us stop for a moment and remember that Laura is smarter than me. So why is she and the others making such obvious mistakes?

Nor does Laura Ingraham deal with the Texas law, signed by George Bush, that authorizes the withdrawal of life support in “futile cases.” Does not even mention it. Nor does Beck, Hannity, or Weiner. A fine pack of liars.

At any time Laura et al. could have organized a political campaign to write a Florida State statute on this subject. They did not. The judges followed the statute. Federal review determined that the petitioner failed to show a “substantial likelihood” that he would prevail, i.e. prove that the Florida courts failed to protect the rights of the patient Schiavo. Laura Ingraham never did explain how she would resolve disputes of a similar type, which take place every week.

The complaint about the courts was that the judges did not write new law, did not seek and outcome different from that which the People, meeting in the Legislature of the State of Florida, determined was the best way of resolving such disputes. Isn’t that what we mean by “judicial restraint”? Isn’t this what conservatives believe?

And as we take the inventory of casualties in this engagement, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Michael Weiner, Glenn Beck, George Bush, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, Bill “killing” Kristol, Tucker Carlson, Debra Saunders, and her husband, the author of the book, “the Culture of Death”, Wesley J. Smith, Barbara Simpson, Brian Sussman, Lee Rogers, and the despicable Mrs. Jack Swanson, what can we conclude?

What of the law? What of the science? Wither truth?

What are we to make of Beck and Weiner accusing society of “extermination” and the others whose accusations of “judicially sanctioned murder” were made not a month after a Federal judge in Chicago found her family in a pool of blood. And all of this at the same time Weiner is ridiculing the mentally ill abandoned on our sidewalks, or Beck the disabled children riding in the back of “short busses” with “helmets on their heads”?

Weiner advocated rounding the homeless up off the sidewalks and shipping them to death camps in the desert. Hannity and Beck both have segments on their shows were they call up people and ridicule their lack of knowledge of current affairs, etc. (In one broadcast a caller called in to stump Beck by showing that Beck could not spell the word “peace.” It worked. Beck was taken by surprise and his producer had to break in to explain, “p-e-a-c-e.” )

But these people, the mentally ill abandoned to the streets, or the ones in the “short busses,” these are exactly the ones we did not “kill,” these are the ones in those hospitals upon whom we spend 50% of our health dollars, these are the ones we try to keep alive. And these are the ones Hannity, Beck, and Weiner ridicule every week.

And of course, Weiner and Mrs. Jack Swanson are the ones who have for a period of years harassed me, following me from place to place, work place to work place, with Don Imus and Ron Owens and Michael Krasney. We know that in their private lives they are despicable people.

Then too so do many of you. You know and do nothing.

And here in this case of the patient Schiavo, we have seen them, hypocrites, liars, thoroughly dishonest.

Mr. Bush signed the law in Texas that provided for less review than this Florida case received. Mr. DeLay has himself apologized.

Not one of them discussed the CAT scan or even acknowledged that the consensus of medical opinion was on the other side of the case from their simple minded emotionalism.

Just in terms of debate tactics, one never leaves off and important piece of evidence. The CAT scan should have been at least mentioned if only in passing.

And more fundamentally if the collected evidence argues against your position why not revise your position if you can not explain the evidence? If the CAT scan suggests a Persistent Vegetative State why not alter your preconceived views?

They could not discuss the CAT scan because they knew it contradicted their position and they could not defend their opinion.

So the charges of NAZI and “the culture of death.” Call the Hospice a “death camp.” Call the judges, the legislature, then finally the public wrong.

Mrs. Jack Swanson boasts, “Oh, I’m vicious.”

I do not know how to separate out all this from what they have done to me. My mind turns first to the Red Comedian on the West Coast Weekend show on KQED, to Yvonne sitting in her office, lying to me, week after week, the secretary at GAB Robins going through my briefcase, the San Rafael Police dispatcher reporting on the movement of the “Colonial Motel Suspect,” the adjusters in Portland Maine talking about my mother’s death before I learned of it, the trash talking druggy Scott Bobro at Farmers, and that Farmers agent in Marin, insisting again and again that I tell him my address, “where do you live? Where do you live?” he demanded. The dishonesty. From top to bottom.

I do not understand you. How do you justify yourselves? How do you live with yourselves?

And then the new pope tells the cardinals that relativism "recognises nothing definitive and its final measure is no more than ego and desire". You see? They know the absolute. They are on the side of absolute Truth, Goodness, God. This is how they justify themselves. They are Liars for Christ.

“Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is-- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.” --- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Africa's last chance, World Bank warns
April 18, 2005Washington - World Bank president James Wolfensohn has urged global action to help Africa meet targets to slash Aids and poverty by 2015.He said that this year provided a "last opportunity" to make the necessary changes if Africa was to meet the so-called Millennium Development Goals."Looking ahead, and with just a decade to go to 2015, achieving the (goals) presents an enormous challenge," he told a meeting of the International Monetary Fund's policy-setting committee in Washington. Africa has been hardest hit by HIV infections. The Great Lakes region is home to more than 6-million people infected with the virus, according to World Bank figures.Last week the bank approved a $20-million (about R125-million) grant to step up the fight against Aids in the six Great Lakes countries: Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. - Sapa-AFP.

What are you doing?


Are you responsible for anything?


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Ag Senate at New Ruskin College

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From:
PlinioDesignori@newruskincollege.com

Reply To:
PlinioDesignori@newruskincollege.com

To:
senator craig@craig.senate.gov

Subject: Ag Bill

Date:
Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:27:37 -0400

CC:
, , , , , , , , <">senator_byrd@byrd.senate.gov>, <

Dear Senator:

Note: This is your copy.
Please send a copy to Senator Hatch
his email is not working.

“I have heard what you do to some of your listeners.” --- Senator Hatch on the Don Imus show.

Your agents at the IRS continue to monitor my web site, waiting for me to die.

Is this democracy?

Site Report for: www.newruskincollege.com
Date Range: 4/21/2005 to 4/21/2005
343. irs.gov

(See The IRS and the Illegals from the North, at the Moynihan Memorial Library @ New Ruskin College .com.)

I wrote to the Senate 15 years ago about the need for computer based instruction in education, not only for our children but the world. For my trouble I have been targeted by the rich and powerful, like Don Imus for example, who have used the IRS and their connections to ruin my life. And Senator Hatch thinks it is “amusing.”

I am betrayed.

Now you would betray the entire nation with your “Ag Bill”.

One Man, One Vote: ". . .these plaintiffs and others similarly situated, are denied the equal protection of the laws accorded them by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States by virtue of the debasement of their votes, …" We conclude that the complaint's allegations of a denial of equal protection present a justiciable constitutional cause of action upon which appellants are entitled to a trial and a decision. The right asserted is within the reach of judicial protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgment of the District Court is reversed and the cause is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. Reversed and remanded. ---Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962)

(http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Baker/ )

Ventura County 753,197 North Dakota 634,366
Francisco County 776,773 South Dakota 754,844
San Mateo County 697,456 Wyoming 593,782
Orange County 2,957,766 Connecticut 3,405,565
Contra Costa County 1,001,136 Delaware 783,600
Santa Clara County 1,682,585 Montana 902,194
Los Angeles County 10,179,716 Ohio 11,352,140
Alameda County 1,433,741 Maine 1,274,923
San Diego County 2,813,833 Mississippi 2,697,243
Riverside County 1,545387 Vermont 608,827
San Bernardino County 1,709,433 West Virginia 1,808,344
County 1,330,711 Rhode Island 1,048,319
Votes in the U. S. Senate: 0 24

This is a Senate that cares more for cattle than people. Cares more for the health of hogs than the health of our children.

This is a Senate that represents more acres of wheat than people. Represents the special interests of its “constituents” not the American people.

This is not the United States Senate. It is the Ag Senate.

It is the Commodities Senate.

The people are forsaken. And if you should make the mistake of writing these Senators, beware, they will destroy you.

“I’ve heard what you do to some of your listeners.” ---Senator Hatch on the Imus show

This just in: And do you not think that Senator Craig can count votes? . . . in the Ag Senate?

Alameda County 1,433,741 Idaho 1,393,262

If an Alameda County Supervisor were to propose this he would not be taken seriously. But because the Senator “represents” not Alameda County but Idaho there is a chance he can over turn our immigration laws from the floor of the Senate, i.e. without a Senate Committee’s approval.

Such is the power of the Senate that it can raise up such a person to such power!

“WASHINGTON: Sen. Larry Craig., R-Idaho, could not be talked out of trying to add AgJobs, a farm worker measure that would create a new temporary guest worker program that offered the prospect of legalization and eventual citizenship to migrant workers. When word spread that such additions might be in the wind, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Tiburon, Marin, Calif., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, authored a non-binding resolution that no such measures be added.

It passed 61-38. But almost immediately after that resolution passed, the immigration provisions began to be offered. More of the same is expected today.

Feinstein was particularly upset at the notion that AgJobs could be considered now. "This is going to be a huge magnet" for illegal immigrants, Feinstein warned her colleagues during an impassioned floor speech. "Mark my words." That measure, she said, "could bring millions of people into this country - workers, their spouses, their minor children."

Feinstein said bills like AgJobs should go through the traditional committee hearing and debate process. But Craig has been trying to get his measure onto the Senate floor for more than two years and saw the Iraq bill as his chance. Craig has long said if given a chance on the floor, his bill would pass.”

Dems Try to Sneak Immigration Reform in Iraq Bill NewsMax.com Wires, Friday, April 15, 2005


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John Paul the Great at New Ruskin College

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Lecture Notes: 4-14-05
Conditions of Time and Place

Pope John Paul the Great was born in the East and lived for years in a Marxist state. His view of the market was colored by Marxism and by the Church’s own teachings about the market, commercialism, consumerism, usury, (i.e. the charging of interest).

Like most classically educated philosophers he found the theories of the market as disturbing as classically educated physicists found the new physics of the quanta; e.g. Dr. Einstein’s “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Can “value” really be so ephemeral as to be nothing more than the transitory subjective evaluation of the consumers in one fleeting moment in time? Are there no absolutes?

So, because of his limitations of time and place he was skeptical of the market. He could not accept that the “market” was encoded in our genes, that it works because it is the direct expression of how we are wired, how we think, perceive. He thought that this was a question of “ideology.” In philosophical terms the market may be regarded as a theory of how to organize society and that communism is another competing theory. But this is not quite right. True they are both of them “theories” yet only a philosopher can find this equivalence meaningful.

Our market theory results from the study of human evolutionary development over millions of years, with conscious and deliberate study of market interactions as a subject of scientific inquiry over the last several hundred years. Communism was merely the result of a few philosopher’s speculations founded on the false notion of “scientific objectivism” developed in the Nineteenth Century, and shown to be false both analytically and by practical experiment in which several individual countries were walled off with one side being the experimental portion and the other the control.

Communism’s failure proved that there is not an “objective” one best way despite the appeal of this idea to our simian minds. This idea of an objective “best” is appealing to the human brain because the social animal man, this social predator, evolved in a social organism, a social structure of dominance hierarchy, of progressively “superior” power organization, culminating in the leader, the best, God. This single hierarchical structure of the best, though intuitively appealing, does not correspond to reality, in which there are various contending values, which arise and decline over time in our minds, which is itself an ever changing pattern of neuron networks, ideas, spilling into consciousness joining with other neuron networks, and for which a marginal increase or decrease can be noted but to which no single absolute “objective” value can be affixed. We live in a floating world. This realization, far from being an example of "egotism", (as the new pope cliams with scorn), rather it humbles us. The "I" turns out to be a fake, an apperition, in Christian terms we should say we must admit that we are a branch on the vine of Christ. As Alan Watts put it in his prayer: Lord save us from our beliefs and deliver us unto our faith.

The way we define our human ancestors in archeology, the way we distinguish ourselves from the other ancient great apes, is by the presence of tools among the fossils. Tools? (It is a male thing.) ‘Property’, is better. Stone Age property among the fossils. We have the bone needles and knives too. And then too there is all the other property which we have not inherited. The mats woven out of reeds, the animal skins. We have the sea shells, but not the utensils made of leaves, bark, twigs, gourds, all those female things whose existence we can guess at; but over the millions of years, all of these have been reduced to dust, only the stones, and bones, and sea shells remain, proclaiming: these were mankind’s ancestors: Owners of Property.

Then there is all the “real property”, the territory, that the ancient ancestors guarded; again all this can only be guessed at from anthropological observations of modern human hunter bands, and by inference from our field studies of our fellow creatures. More attention has been paid to the ‘competition’ between hunter groups than the cooperation within the hunter communities. (Again a male thing; another limitation of time and place.) I think John Paul the Great would have appreciated the find of the toothless skeleton about whom it was theorized he had been cared for by someone, a whole group of someones. .(http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/PA_NEWA25125781112785897A0?source=) Not all churchmen would have. Even today some churchmen would have been threatened by the dating: 7 million years. (More limitations of Time and Place.) But he was not afraid.

However, the problems he identified were not themselves the product of the market but were rather problems resulting from our failure to utilize the market; the failure to use our human creativity. This failure results from two reasons:

One, the most common reason for the failure to use the market is the limitation of time and place itself, i.e. the universe. Ludwig von Mises relates the story of the Menshevik at an early communist congress, who, after listening for hours to one Bolshevik speaker after another denounce the “exploitation” of the workers, stood up and shouted, “The universe is the greatest exploiter!”

Just that, the brutal cold universe is the main reason for our failure to use the market. The universe gives up its secrets only grudgingly. Our simian brains grasp the meaning only haltingly, painfully. We do not know how to develop energy more efficiently, or mine minerals, or grow crops, all the things we do not know how to do, these are what prevent us from utilizing the market.

This failure is not the failure of the market mechanism itself, as Ludwig von Mises points out, if the capitalists can be faulted for anything in this respect, it is there utter credulity, their sometimes laughable willingness to “try” seemingly anything. He notes for example, that the constantly heard claim of a 100 miles per gallon carburetor sitting in a safe deposit box in a Detroit bank vault is not believable if only because of the accumulated evidence that in a market economy no idea is unfunded for long.

But the more obvious and vexing cause of all the rest of the world’s grief, which John Paul the Great observed, is again not the result of the market but rather results from the unwillingness of humanity to allow the market to operate. Thus the second cause for our failure to use markets to end suffering then, is the failure of governments, society, us, our failure, to establish stable legal environments in which the market can operate to end human suffering to the extent alleviation is humanly possible.

One wishes for the opportunity to tell John Paul the Great that we ought not blame the market for our grief but the unwillingness of humanity to allow the market. The market is the most efficient way of organizing human action. (The name of Ludwig von Mises’ book.) If the first problem in utilizing markets can be surmounted, i.e. if we can overcome our human ignorance, then the only thing standing between ourselves and the alleviation of human suffering is not the market but our shameful disorganization, or irrational obstruction of the market.

As George Gilder pointed out in his ‘Wealth and Poverty’, reversing a liberal piety : “Crime causes poverty.” It is easy to see that Mugabe in Zimbabwe, for instance, is a villain whose policies have run that country into ever more hideous poverty. However the clarity of our observation misleads us into supposing that here in America all is right with the world and markets are busy ending human suffering.

In housing, education, medicine, transportation, agriculture, electrical energy production, oil and gas, the currency and banking, in fact in every sector of the economy our interference with the market is sometimes far more invasive than anything Mr. Mugabe has ever contemplated in his little basket case of a country, and perhaps our interference is in many instances more destructive to the operation of the market, yet we are unaware of the damage we have done, are doing this very moment, only because our vast wealth is matched by our vast stupidity, selfishness, which blinds us to the harm we do, are inflicting on others, our fellow if anonymous countrymen, protected as we are by our thickly wadded ignorance.

Counselor: . . . What is it? Why have you stopped . . . what’s wrong?

Nothing. It is better to continue, it takes my mind off the time running out.

Counselor: But you want to come here full time don’t you?

Yes. Yes of course. It is just, . . . you know, the change . . . from living.



And if you are thinking, “Just what we need, another apologia for free enterprise,” then you still have not grasped the point. There is no alternative to the market. That is all there is. That is who you are.

It means nothing more to criticize the market than to criticize our noses, or our thumbs, or the way our feet go back and forth when we walk.

Once and for all give up your illusions, hallucinations, pretensions. There is nothing else. There is no “third way.” There is the market, and there is the market at various levels of distortion, where it has been manipulated by powerful people, sometimes acting under color of law, and sometimes not bothering with the mask of righteousness: brazen plunder.

Or if you say that you don’t see what difference it makes if we criticize markets or, as I would have it, if we instead criticize the way markets are implemented? Doesn’t it amount to the same thing? Either we are being screwed by the market or we are being screwed by the rich and powerful who have manipulated the market; doesn’t it come out the same way? What’s the difference?

It makes no difference if you do not mind straying around aimlessly lost in your illusions.

John Paul the Great might have focused his criticism where it belonged. Not on the abstraction, the intellectual construction, ‘the market;’ he might have criticized what deserved criticism: humanity, and humanity’s sin: ignorance.

By focusing on the market he misdirected the people’s scrutiny away from themselves, where it belonged, and instead encouraged them to look ‘out there’ as if they were being thwarted, poisoned, by markets.

First realize what we are not discussing. We are not discussing “Christian charity.” Go ahead and give, give all you like. What we are discussing is not charity but how society is best organized. And when John Paul the Great criticized consumerism, commercial culture, the market, he was not himself offering charity as an alternative. The Church does not teach that charity is a substitute for the ordinary work a day world. The Church would rather a man had a job, a job of his own, and the dignity that that confers, than that he be the beneficiary of charity, no matter how generous.

Also consider how first was the good created that is to be given in charity?

And have you never reflected that the social welfare regulations were first written not in times of famine and ruin, but in times of surplus? It was only after capitalism began heaping up abundance that child labor, minimum wage, collective bargaining, 40 hour work week, safety and health, pollution, and all the other laws which we now teach our children protect us became possible. Now, several generations later, this dogma, ideology is accepted as ‘truth.’

But know this, before the welfare state there was the market that begat the welfare that the statists now claim to have been their beneficence. (Some simpleminded conservatives feel the need to speak against charity as if they feel compelled to choose up sides.) We are not speaking against charity, or social welfare legislation, we are examining the conditions that make them possible.

Or more to the point what we are really examining is not the underlying reality of the market but how that reality is misperceived, by John Paul the Great, and others, and how this misperception leads us further and further away from the reality of our situation into darkness.

For example, consider how far you are already surrounded by darkness. See how John Paul the Great was not alone in having limitations of time and place.

Which country has greater state involvement in its economy, the U. S. or Sweden?

At first one would suppose Sweden. Taxes are higher there so their 60% income taxes must mean higher state involvement in the economy, right?

First consider that not all Swedes pay the highest tax rate, (not even the ones who are supposed to pay). Second consider that in Sweden the medical sector is counted as part of the “state” sector. In America 15% of the GDP is tied to the medical sector ( http://la.indymedia.org/news/2005/03/124278.php ), higher than any other country. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that some very smart people have taken control of this sector and are using it to enrich themselves? Have you never wondered why America is not training tens of thousands of doctors a year and sending them out to all the world? Instead we must bring into our country half (50%) of our doctors admitted to practice each year. Thus do we drain the world of its best doctors. (Open University has created a medical school program for people around the globe. But not the USA. Why? Greed? Selfishness? Plunder? Manipulation of the market to the grief of the people? ) But please do not tell me that this is the result of the market. Yet the medical sector is one of the most tightly regulated, controlled sectors of the economy.

You call the medical sector “private” yet from a purely economic perspective this label is arbitrary. There is no innovation of products and services to meet consumer’s changing demands. There is no free entry. Most importantly substitution is not allowed. A priesthood of “medical doctors” exercises a monopoly control and has decisive influence over the legislative regulation. What would the U. S. statistics look like if we moved the medical sector over into the government sector based on the degree of regulation?

Let’s see: Federal 20 -22% of GDP, (http://www.house.gov/jec/growth/govtsize/govtsize.htm), State and Local at 16-17% (http://www.house.gov/jec/growth/govtsize/govtsize.htm), 1993 estimate, plus 15% medical = why that is 54%! Astonishing!

And here we have just briefly examined one sector of the economy. [Note: Federal spending is projected to become 35% by 2050 if Medicare and Social Security continue as expected. (http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7117)] (Yes, thank you class. There is a little overlap in Medicare appearing here as Federal and then being counted again in the medical sector. Thank you. We are ball parking these numbers. As will be seen we can not even calculate all the control exercised over real estate, manufacturing, pensions, etc. Technically they are “private” but the question we are examining is are these sectors still part of the market economy?) And see how you have accepted this, even enjoying feelings of superiority over Sweden, and yet what is your misunderstanding of all of this but another example of the limitations of time and place.

What is really shocking is how little free enterprise there is in the American economy.

For example, you may feel that in America the insurance industry is private. So all the statistics reflect this. But what possible difference does it make to you if you pay “tax” dollars or “insurance” dollars? Because one is “voluntary”? What do you mean voluntary? Do you want health insurance or not? Yes, ok, you can choose company A, or company B, but the dollars will leave your wallet and go to a huge bureaucracy, tightly controlled by the legislature, state or federal, sometimes, as in medical insurance, both. The amounts charged taxes or premiums, (as you like it), are determined by state regulators. The amounts paid also are determined by regulators, and the legislatures, and of course, all of this is overseen by the judiciary.

You call this free enterprise? And not just health insurance but in all sectors of insurance the “products” offered by the insurance industry are determined by the state not the consumer’s demand. The language of the policies is often written by the state, the pay outs determined by the state, the amounts charged, (premiums or taxes) determined by the state. Many states require auto insurance so even the fig leaf of “voluntary’ action is removed. The judges, i.e. the state, oversee all.

Often it is claimed that there is no litigation explosion because the number of new law suits has not sharply risen. This is true and false. Once the precedence is established, insurance adjusters start adjusting their claims accordingly. For example, at one time insurance adjusters did not pay for the loss of psychic abilities. Then after the California courts said that a fortune-teller’s claim that her injury in an accident caused her to lose the ability to see into the future, all of the adjusters took the judicial instruction and began taking releases in similar claims. Only "new" cases, i.e. cases with a new theory of liability, go to trial. What is significant is not the total number of new lawsuits but rather the total number of new rulings, i.e. instructions to pay.

What possible difference can it make to you if your money is siphoned off in taxes by the legislature, or by the judiciary in premiums? The insurance industry is the tax collector for the judiciary. The judges sit like kings of olden times in their courts ruling on this case or that and then some startling money awards are reported in the press. What most readers do not think to consider is that for every trial court decision there are tens of thousands of similar claims in insurance claims offices around the country awaiting the court’s decision. And from that day forward, until legislation to the contrary is passed, or policies rewritten, (of course only with regulatory or legislative approval), claims are paid based on that judge’s ruling. Payments made not for that one award that you read about in your newspapers but for the tens of thousands of other similar claims If the tort claims were a tax it has been estimated that this one portion of the insurance industry would account for a 3% wage tax or an 8% capital tax, ( http://www.policyalmanac.org/economic/archive/torts.shtml ) or 2% of GDP, ( http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2005/04/08/53576.htm ), and that is tort claims alone.

So now what? 54% of GDP under state control plus 2% for tort claims = 56% state controlled. Can you speak Swedish? The rest of insurance (other than tort and medical) accounts for another 1%? 57% of the GDP either directly under state control or so closely directed as to make no difference. 57% of the economy removed from the market and directed by the state. What else?

From the perspective of the market, from the perspective of “free enterprise”, what is “free” about any of this enterprise? What free association of consumers and producers is really taking place? Are the demands of the consumers being carefully analyzed and satisfied by entrepreneurs responding to the changing marketplace? Of course not.

Our regular College Visitors will already have been lectured to about the intervention of government in the housing sector and how zoning and building codes are used to limit supply. {see Lecture Notes: 03-21-05 [see paper no. 1948. Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability ( http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2002papers/2002list.html )]; Lecture Notes: 03-18-05 Betrayal IV; Lecture Notes: 03-17-05 Betrayal III; Lecture Notes: 03-15-05 Betrayal ; Lecture Notes: 12-17-04 Betrayal . . .

Counselor: He has a lot of issues with betrayal.

. . . Lecture Notes: 12-02-04; Lecture Notes: 10-28-04, How do you sustain yourself?; Lecture Notes: 09-30-04, Junkie Nation; Lecture Notes: 08-03-04, The Truth; Lecture Notes: 06-30-04, Upper Class Warfare; Lecture Notes: 06-28-04; Lecture Notes: 06-26-04}

Thus far we have yet to put a figure on this government manipulation of the market. How much of real estate is out of the market economy and under state control? (?%) Well? Oh, you have not thought about it? Ok, we can wait? . . . So? What is the answer? Come on we do not have all day. How much?

Agriculture? 17% of the GDP but how much should be put in the private sector and how much under government control? (http://www.ndu.edu/icaf/industry/IS2003/papers/2003%20Agribusiness.htm ) Direct farm subsidies of $20 billion a year, with 45% going to just 7% of the farmers, ( http://www.retrovsmetro.org/book/chapter_2.html?c=2&p=1 ) however this represents only a fraction of all subsidies. Ag research, rural electrification and phones, small business administration, Army Corps of Engineers, guaranteed and subsidized loans, a constant torrent of public money flows out to the farm states protected by a Senate which is disproportionately weighted with representatives of agricultural states. These farm state Senators do not see their constituency as the United States but rather know their job is to secure more subsidies for their states. Where are we now 59%? 62%?

Regular College Visitors will have read about the state monopoly of the roads and highways and will have already considered how state control has retarded technical innovation in this sector of the economy. (After Technical Correction Number Five was posted Michael Krasney had a couple of local bureaucrats on his KQED radio program to discuss the Bay Area highway system. A caller asked about “how digital technology can improve the carrying capacity of our highways?” The guests snipped that “well . . . (long sarc II pause) . . . the technology is just not there yet that can drive your car for you.” Of course, the caller did not ask about cars that “drive your car for you.” He only asked about “digital” technology which he did not define. (But I was encourage that from their answer they appeared to be responding not to the caller but to my posting here at New Ruskin College.)

But here we now consider the value to the GDP of our state controlled highway system. When a highway is built through real estate how much of the resulting increase in property value should be accounted for as private and how much as public? I realize that all the profits will be counted as private and all the costs of the road will be billed out as public, but how much of the GDP is thus public sector? Are we Swedish yet? 63%? 65%?

And if you are thinking well yes, of course, roads they are public, then think again, or at any rate read Technical Correction Number Five. They could be sold off and privatized. But reflect why are not elevators public? How about hall ways? Why do we build fire houses, and install fire mains in our streets as a public enterprise, but regard sprinklers in a high rise buildings as private? We will pave our city streets as a public project and let private cars park on the street for free, but the building of a parking garage for a multi story building is entirely a private activity. Why? What is this, this misunderstanding of yours, but another limitation of time and place?

I originally argued for government assistance in the development of computer aided individualized instruction by pointing out that the huge government subsidies to public schools made it impossible for private companies to compete. Therefore I argued that a private market could not develop the innovative new methods that were so desperately needed to educate the children of the world. President Bush, (41), commented at the time he had “heard about that sophisticated argument” when a reporter presented him with this argument in a press conference. (see New Ruskin College Project in the Moynihan)

Though he had “heard” the “sophisticated argument” before he still had no answer for it. He did not help develop the laser disks. He was not reelected either. There is a rough justice in the world.

See here conservatives two things: First see in what darkness you walk. You think that yes America is the home of free enterprise and Sweden is socialist or nearly so. But what if this “objective” reality of yours was an hallucination? An accounting gimmick? What if you have been suckered?

And that is the second point: How many times have you been beseeched that we need just a little more, please, a few dollars, and all will be well. But see now, the darkness is pushed back a little and you can see how much of our money has already been taken from the private market economy and redirected to highways in West Virginia, stop lights in Chicago, tractor research grants to California, new regulation to “improve” health care in our hospitals, or help the little scholars in our schools, or . . . and on it goes . . . a never ending torrent of money . . . and then there is the so called “private economy”: as we have seen medicine, insurance, operate, exist as they do only at government sufferance, “private real estate” development at public expense with all of its zoning and building codes, supported by government finance monopolies and protected by tax shelters in the tax code, the private pension funds regulated, controlled, and directed by government, regulation of products, labor, construction, from corner markets to nuclear power plants, autos, aircraft, medicines, and the look of a new building’s façade, regulation upon regulation, review commissions, planning boards, and after all of that the judiciary and litigation, litigation sometimes for years, and all of this money which is in truth being directed by government is still counted as “private”. Ah, private, then it must be ok.

Private gains, public losses. Yet I tell you that people are dying because of these distortions. However, owing to the limitations of your place and time you are not even aware of the extent of your intervention in, your manipulation of, the market.

Not even aware of the harm you are causing. That is how far you are from the truth.

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Lone Wolf at New Ruskin College

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

“Iman, you are a lone wolf.”
--- Patrick McEnroe,
during his last appearance.



Lecture Notes: 04-08-05
Ah! Who could have known?

Others Aware of Red Lake Plans, Officials Say
As Many as Four Believed to Have Helped Plot Attack
By Dana Hedgpeth and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff WritersSaturday, April 2, 2005; Page A03

RED LAKE, Minn., April 1 -- As many as 20 teenagers may have known ahead of time about plans for the shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people on the Indian reservation here March 21, tribal and federal officials said Friday.

W.Post: http://www.newruskincollege.com/moynihanmemoriallibrarynewruskincollegecom/id20.html

NYT: http://www.newruskincollege.com/moynihanmemoriallibrarynewruskincollegecom/id20.html

No! You don’t say? Can you imagine? As many as 20 people? They Knew?

Fortunately we are surrounded by the lights of “the culture of life.”

And who are they: the representatives of “the culture of life”? People like Michael Weiner, who previously advocated rounding up the homeless and trucking them off to remote Western deserts where they were to be left to die. He advocated death camps, and the transportation of the undesirables, and the Vice President of the United States of America still went on his show!

He repeatedly avowed that the adherents of Islam were “subhuman”, making no distinction between ordinary Moslems and terrorists, in fact advocating a religious war, (this while our young men were in a war, in several Moslem nations), and despite this Michael Weiner is put on Armed Forces Radio, and broadcast into that same war zone!

Just as there have been repeated attacks on the homeless in this country by fans of the “Savage Nation”, so too we have seen that our soldiers have humiliated, beaten and killed their “Moslem” prisoners, and not one member of our “the culture of life” seems to have “known” that there might be a connection between this dehumanization of a people, over a period of years, the repeated slurs, lies, and incitements to violence and the actual acts --- the killing.

The same Vice President appeared recently on the Don Imus show, another member of “the culture of life”.

And what can be said of Armed Forces Radio? Why would they broadcast racial and religious hatred into a war zone? But then, why would our Armed Forces load 30 soldiers into helicopters and fly them into sand storms? What was the mission in Western Iraq, or just yesterday in Afghanistan that required that risk?

Were they closing in on the terrorists with the bio-weapons? ‘Men, this is our last chance to save humanity,’ was that it?

Or was it just that some Colonel could not admit that the flight, “the mission”, could be canceled, grounded until the sand storm passed? Could not admit that “the mission” was not so important, as to require a helicopter, fully loaded with 30 of our sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, to fly into a sand storm . . . in the night . . .?

And then the generals at the Pentagon speak in wonder that America does not trust them with her sons.

They who choose to broadcast Michael Weiner into a war zone, who hand out Xeroxed copies of maps to National Guardsmen who have just that day arrived at the base, and tell them, to “Go out and find the insurgents . . . Present yourselves to the enemy . . . for combat!” Thus speaks Colonel Blimp.

And you know what? Those National Guardsmen took those Xeroxed maps and they did go out and “present” themselves to the enemy. And lived to tell about it. But that is why America does not trust the bureaucrats in the Pentagon with her sons. They have come back and told us what is really going on.

We have learned how the flight rules allow fully laden helicopters to be flown into sand storms rather than require the egotistical self absorbed Colonel to explain why his “mission” is so important that he has risked so many lives.

Did anyone at the Pentagon “know” that needless risks are being taken. Did they “know” and yet do nothing? Did they “know” that Michael Weiner was inciting religious intolerance? Did they “know” that flight rules were allowing needless risk? Do they “know” that their incompetence is undermining our strategic policy?
How about you? Do you “know”? Are you part of “the culture of life”?

What else do you “know”?

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Imus v Frank at New Ruskin College

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Date: 3-31-05

To: Robert Frank
Wall Street Journal
robert.frank@wsj.com

From: Plinio Designori
Magistor
New Ruskin College
PlinioDesignori@NewRuskinCollege.com

Re.: And it will never stop, I will destroy Robert Frank’s life . . . it will never stop. --- Don Imus


Now that you have started to learn the truth about Don Imus perhaps you can benefit from my experience.

I invite you to visit NewRuskinCollege.com to learn how Don Imus used his influence to destroy my life. In a few weeks I will commit suicide in protest of Don Imus and the others who have oppressed me for these last fourteen years. (Yes, fourteen years. When he says it will never stop he means that it will never stop. He will use his influence and power to destroy your life.) It will not stop.

Please understand that I too want to live. Even though I have been pushed to the very limits of society, oppressed, driven into poverty, still, in the morning, the sunrise is so beautiful my heart rejoices. As my time runs out the sun has been racing through the sky.

Life has resolved itself into a granular or cellular structure. My alienation is now so complete that I no longer live in a world of isolated individuals, but they themselves have devolved into isolated moments in time. People appear in a bewildering array of personalities minute by minute, seemingly talking gibberish and no one else seems to notice.

For example it started with me noticing intellectual inconsistencies. Tax shelters for the rich for example: The Gallo Brother’s Wine Institute or the Imus ranch. And of course Imus is so vain he does not see the larger issues. That anyone should question whether a wasted wizened old man and his young deranged wife should be allowed to shelter millions of dollars in an enterprise that would not exist except for our tax laws, never once occurs to him.

Why shouldn’t we allow a degenerate old druggy to decide how our tax dollars are spent? It is futile to point out that the money thus sheltered means that the rest of the people will now have to pay more. And who are they? The ones with the lowest ability to raise their prices; the highest “propensity to spend.” But in this idiocy Imus is in no way exceptional. (Senate Finance Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said: “In exchange for these very generous tax breaks, charitable assets should be going to those in need. More and more, we're seeing that some people view charities and charitable gifts as a chance to help themselves, not others. What's going on isn't a pretty picture in the harsh light.” Acknowledging that “our enforcement presence faded in the late 1990s,” (Boy! Did it! How about completely sold out and corrupted by the very corporate entities the IRS and the Senate were supposed to be overseeing? Would you say that Mr. Grassley? ) and "weak governance practices.”)

Just recently “conservatives” who previously condemned “junk science” presented the obviously, and self admitted religiously biased, “doctors” culled from across the country, as representing “main stream scientific consensus” when they in fact knew that the consensus was just the opposite. It was an intellectual betrayal.

One minute they say one thing then in the next breath they contradict themselves . . . And you may be thinking ‘Well, come on, everyone has their limitations, different perspectives, how do you go from this to the complete disintegration of reason . . . the impossibility of communication . . . utter hopelessness?’

It is said that Ted Kaczynski was the subject of a psychological experiment when he was at Harvard. They wanted to find out what would happen to the subject if you deliberately denied everything. They found out. The survivors of the Soviet Prisons said that the worst of it was that they were housed with the lunatics, and diagnosed as being insane. After a while, they began to wonder . . .

But this is what I am trying to tell you, this is my warning, this is what happens to you when they start in on you. First you will think, “coincidence.” You will receive a letter from your sister, or a friend, someone you trust absolutely. And then Imus will repeat a phrase from the letter word for word. Coincidence. Then Michael Weiner will start reading from a notebook that you have left at home, or on a car seat, or in a motel room. Then you editor will hand back a story you have written and tell you to rewrite it. But then driving home, only an hour later, someone else on the radio will talk about having to “rewrite” and how editors do not know how to tell reporters when they are in trouble and about to be fired.

And right now you think: paranoia. Yes! Exactly! You will never know! Don’t you see? Once they start in on you, your wife? Can you trust your wife? Then what? A marriage counselor? Garrison Keillor? Rush Limbaugh? Your employer? Co-workers, for example? You go to lunch and when you get back to the office your brief case has been moved, opened? The secretary nods affirmatively to your co-worker’s questioning glance that you catch just out of the corner of your eye. They went through my briefcase? Then Imus reads something you emailed your editor.

Right now you might think that there are limits. You may work for a prestigious newspaper, or you are well to do, you think you have friends, or perhaps you simply think that you live in a nation where the ‘rule of law’ is respected. Is that what you think?

Or perhaps you are thinking that your colleagues, friends, family, or even just people generally, your fellow citizens, will not allow you to be targeted in this way. You may think, ‘This is America, there is justice.’ What you do not yet understand is that they will all join in. It will become a kind of game for them. This is what I meant about the granular structure of their personalities. They can not be trusted. They will betray you on questions of economics and medicine? If they will not accept an EEG or a CAT scan then how can you trust them on such trivial questions such as your oppression, the theft of your papers, etc. , etc.?

Right now you think you can trust them. There is Truth. Justice? You trust in good faith. Take this letter as a warning: One, it will not stop, Two, no one will help you.

Over the years many people have commented on my situation. They wanted me to know that they knew about Don Imus and Michael Weiner, Mrs. Jack Swanson, Ron Owens, Michael Krasney. Part of the game for them was that I should know that they knew. Do you see? They wanted me to know:

“I have heard what you do to some of your listeners.” --- Senator Hatch, on the Imus Show

“What are you going to do . . . hire an attorney? I’ve got the best attorneys in the country.” --- Don Imus

“Drop a card on someone.” --- Chris Matthews

“Let’s watch our metaphors.” --- Jim Leher

“I hope you are ‘adjusting’ to your new life of ‘white collar crime’.” --- John McLaughlin

“We better stop, I don’t want to get you into trouble.” --- Phillip Matier, S. F. Chronicle

“No talent . . . you are lint.’ --- Bill O’Reilly

“. . . so she can park her car in a red no parking zone.” --- unidentified Bay Area journalist.

“Like the man said, ‘The mass media is a hydra headed monster.’ --- fat balding reporter for the Sacramento Bee, on KQED

“Is Charles going to be around for a wile?” because “I want to call back and run a few things by Charles.” --- David Gregory on Imus, 04-13-04

“His mother . . . she died? . . .” --- Scott Bobro, Farmers Insurance

“taking baths.” --- Ron Owens

“witches” --- Jim Dunbar and Ed Wygant

“I love it when conservatives go after one another.”--- Bernie Ward

“Colonial Motel suspect . . .” --- The San Rafael Police, police radio

“Michael Krasney is on line three for you.” ---- AAA auto insurance

Barbara Simpson explained that she has no sympathy for people “who keep journals and diaries . . . writing everything down. And then it gets stolen and made public. So? And so? So? What do you expect?” --- Barbara Simpson

Last month Rush Limbaugh held up Mrs. Jack Swanson’s arm in a victory pose. (Mrs. Jack Swanson had tried to have Limbaugh fired from the Kansas City radio station they both worked at in the 1980’s. (She objected to his Femi-NAZIs. She was a liberal then. ))

Good luck.



Site Report for: www.newruskincollege.com
Date Range: 3/29/2005 to 3/29/2005

282. irs.gov


Counselor: What are they doing here?

Waiting for me to die. Not yet! Check back in a few weeks.

Counselor: Well, . . . maybe they are feeling remorse and are investigating themselves and will make amends for what they did?

. . . (You always need to keep it in your mind that she used to live in Marin County, California.) Yes, well possibly.

They may think that their Criminal Investigation Unit, headquartered in Atlanta, had developed too close a relationship with Crawford and Company, (world’s largest independent adjustment company), also headquartered in Atlanta, and that just because they developed more leads from the information illegally supplied by Crawford and Company, than I was able to help them develop, still, they should not have asked me to help with their investigation of Crawford and Company only to then give my name to Crawford and Company, and ruin my career in national and international claims settlements and investigation, and drive me into poverty and bankruptcy, and force me back to the Bay Area where my other enemies, Michael Weiner, Don Imus, Mrs. Jack Swanson, Ron Owens, Michael Kraseney could then use their influence to ----

Counselor: Yeah, yeah, we have heard all that before. (see the I R S and the Illegals From the North at the Moynihan) I was just wondering why they are still visiting?

Just waiting for me to die.

Counselor: Hmum. You know he wants his name spelled with two n’s?

Yeah.

Counselor: I thought so.


www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Culture of Life at New Ruskin College

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Lecture Notes: 03-30-05
The Culture of Life Exposed

Oh, I get it. This is just your way to drive me off the edge! Boy! You guys! You really had me going there.

But you don’t have to do all that. I am going to kill my self. Just a few weeks now.

I know some of you had access to my credit card data, (remember Bo Dietl released Mr. Benedict P. Morelli’s client’s credit history? (well they did the same to me, (didn’t they Garrison?))), so I suppose you have access to my bank information. As you can see the money is almost gone.

Then me too.

Good bye, in case we don’t connect again.

So really there is no need for all this. I’m going. I’m almost gone.

Peace.

Then I think . . . no, they really do not see themselves. They really do not know how phony they are . . . or, how phony they appear . . . give them the benefit of the doubt.

You see when you take up the moralist’s pose over Schiavo’s bed. You know, you condemn everyone else as being part of the “culture of death;” that whole routine of yours.

Right? You know when you claim a profound respect for the dignity of every human being, innate worth, unconditional love for all man kind, that whole routine you have developed? Right? What “quality of life” issue? You know when you pick up your voice to that shrill pitch of self-righteousness?

You know how you do that.

And then when it is pointed out to you that thousands of patients a day, not all in PVS, but literally thousands of patients and doctors and families a day have to face up to the question of when to stop treating a hopeless case . . .

Oh, well, of course, you say, but . . . in this case . . . that husband of hers . . .

You do see that don’t you? The sleight of hand. You have just shifted the debate? You see that don’t you? Tell me you know what you are doing. Please?

You could have held your position and I would have come to you. In Tibet when they start a construction project, before they start digging the foundation, they get down on all fours and pick the worms out of the soil. They do not want to hurt them.

So for me, unlike the liberals, I would not smirk at your religiosity. The liberals will accept the most bizarre religious practices from little brown men, especially little brown men from Asia. Especially the liberal women, they are hot for the little brown men from Asia. (Go figure.)

But let some Mormon, or Southern Baptist, or Catholic set up some religious condition and they are all over it with sarc I, II, III and more. See, White religious people are not allowed to have religious doctrines?

But I am not one of them liberals.

If you had wanted to set it up that we did not give up on anyone I would help you organize it. Calculate how many hospital beds, how many nurses, how much money. It wouldn’t really be that much more. Right now something like 50% of all US health dollars are spent on the last six months of life. (http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/resources/topics/end_of_life.shtml#fact )

So what the . . .

You see as a conservative I was willing to accept your religious doctrine. And unlike Justice O’Conner I do not say your religious principles do not have a place in our law. They do. Remember me? I am the one shouting “Bravo!” Have I not always encouraged you? Am I not the one who said that if you do not hold “the good” as good, then there is no good?

But that is just the problem isn’t it? For when questioned you backed down.

You all say “. . . . well . . . but in this . . . case . . . her husband . . . ?”

You know? Then your voice starts to trail off . . . . you know that thing you do with your voice when you are backing down . . .?

What happened to “kill”? You xxxxxxxx

Counselor: Stop it.

What are you doing?

Counselor: I’m not going to let you talk like that.

Fine.

So what happened, you, . . . what happened to “kill”? “Judicial homicide”? “State sanctioned murder”? You said all of that. (Note Dr. Edel, your patients came to us. )

You cowards. When challenged you changed the subject. And all of you. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Weiner (who persuaded his first wife to have two, not one, but two, abortions), Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Tucker Carlson, everyone of you, when challenged, backed down.

All this talk about how you stand for “the culture of life” and everyone who disagrees with you stands for the “culture of death” turns out on just the most cursory of examinations, what little you allow in a phone call, to be hollow, insubstantial, phony.

For on reflection we discover that “the culture of life” also recognizes that life support can be, even should be, stopped in hopeless cases.

All of this multi-year vulgarity has , it turns out, been hype, overstatement, gross overstatement, phony.

What were at first described as “absolute religious convictions” turn out to be, on sober examination (i.e. without the vulgar emotionalism), contingent, even limited to just this one case: the patient Schiavo.

If your statements were limited to this one case how did you get to “the culture of life versus the culture of death”? I will tell you how. Because you are egotistical, self satisfied hypocrites.

For example, couldn’t your opponents have been – just - wrong about the facts of this one case and yet still not be part of the “culture of death”?

Indeed, what if you were wrong? What if the patient Schiavo died years ago?

But in either case, because now on reflection, you must agree that you are not opposed to the withdrawal of life support from hopeless cases, it is not an absolute, then the only other general subjects for us to discuss are the general topics of when and how, etc.

What should the rule be for determining the wishes of the patient? What is your proposal? For example, where is your model statute?”

Wait ------- let me guess? You do not have a model statute do you! I knew it! Phony, Phony, phony hypocrites.

“Anyone who is trying to do good will always be open to the charge of hypocrisy.’ ---- Glenn Beck.

No! Phony hypocrite. Not anyone. Just those who carry on for years about how “every life is precious to me,” “who can say what makes a life worth living,” “Oh, how can you judge the ‘quality of life’ of another of God’s sacred human beings? Our Brother?!”

And then . . . (I kid you not) . . . and then this sack of shit, this hypocrite on steroids, this low life piece of garbage, (who, whenever he is challenged immediately resorts to ‘Oh, I’m just a recovering alcoholic,’ or ‘I’m just a former drug addict’, and in this way escapes all responsibility); this radio detritus, then every Friday ridicules the “kids wearing the helmets in the back of the short busses,” and calls convenience stores to ridicule the clerks there.

(See? This “recovering alcoholic” is a Yale drop out. Like a character out of ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’ he has it made, he was accepted to Yale. So now it does not matter what he does, drugs, alcohol, playing songs about the kids in the back of the short busses with helmets on their heads, prank calls to convenience stores, smarmy segues from Jesus to commercials (wink, wink, ‘don’t think I take this Jesus stuff too seriously,’ wink, wink), --- see? --- he was accepted to Yale. He is smart.)

And then he goes on the air and makes out like the righteous over the bed of the patient Schiavo. (He must see what he is? Or is he like Weiner? Completely lost?)

Hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Carlson asked “Well if you are right and she (the patient Schiavo) is already gone then how can she suffer any ‘indignity’? I mean if she is already dead what difference does it make?” (. . . if we keep her body functioning.)

So in the middle of this discussion of life support and its removal, Tucker Carlson suddenly wants to take up the Ancient Roman Law of Estate? What, are we going to go back and follow the Etruscan ideas of theology, the role of the father in the governance of society, pater familias, the development of Roman Law and the right of the Estate to the status of legal entity? Shall we consider the theological implications especially with respect to Jesus and the idea of the immortal soul? Shall we see here, (note this Justice O’Conner) that the theological idea of ancestor worship developed into the modern idea of inheritance and estate?

No.

Tucker Carlson was just rambling. He did not want to discuss any of this.

Laura Ingraham made out, (ah, poor choice of words), set out that she was really only interested in examining “how the patient’s intentions should be determined in the absence of documentary evidence.” Lie!

You have yet to examine this general topic. Law degree? University education from Dartmouth? Years of experience? Nothing, for all the good it does us. No model statute, no instructions for the judges, no method of determining the patient’s wishes. Nothing, but emotionalism, self-righteous indignation, phony posturing about being the sole defender of “the culture of life”.

And what of Bill Kristol’s “killing”? So if discontinuing life support for the hopeless patient is “killing” what words shall we use when we discuss agency in termination of life? Euthanasia? Is Mr. Kristol capable of distinguishing between the two cases? Yes and no. He can but does not want to; he prefers to posture.

But let us have no talk about trying to advance the public’s understanding.

And Rush Limbaugh makes no such claim. He bloviates this way and that and then takes another commercial break. He has nothing to say either on this particular case or on the general question, but of course he wants to posture too.

But Sean Hannity is the worst, because the dumbest. He tried to take up “the culture of life” versus “Culture of Death”, but because he is so inarticulate that when challenged he had to revert to “well I wasn’t there and neither were you, but the nurses say that he tried to kill his wife . . . but I’m not even going to go there . . . but they say he tried to kill his wife . . .” A bigger ass could not be imagined. Well yes there is always Michael Weiner, but he is so contemptible that he does not even count.

Hey, Sean, tell the class the most common origin of eating disorders for American women? No? Laura Ingraham? Would you like to explain to the class the most common cause of eating disorders in American women? From whom do children learn their obsessive compulsive behaviors ? Especially the daughters?

Oh, that’s right we do not talk about that.

But we do talk about the nurses who say they heard the patient Schiavo say . . . and even just last week the family told us that they heard her say “I want to live .”

Now class the brain has been well mapped and we know where language, and cognition for language formation occur. Class? Would anyone care to point to the portion of the patient Schiavo’s brain scan to indicate in which portion of the brain the language centers are located?

No? And we do not want to discuss the CAT scan at all do we? Glenn Beck even claimed that there had been no CAT scan. (Even the author of “the Culture of Death”, Wesley J. Smith, on KSFO, did not bother to review the CAT scan or the EEG (which was flat) for the patient Schiavo even though he claimed to have spent years of work on this particular case. So what then? We are not going to discuss either the general or the specific? Exactly. Posture. Yes, all day long, in long emotional tirades. But as for informing the public. Drop dead. Ah, the culture of life. This is what you claim for yourselves. Utterly without shame. Hypocrites.

He claimed to be a medical ethicist? How can you be an ethicist and yet not talk about the medical findings? Then I realized. He is an ethicist, who talks about medicine. But he does not have to actually know anything about medicine. His wife, the columnist Debra Saunders, appearing on the David Gold show, said though she had followed the story “for years” she did not bother to acquaint herself with the medical findings or the medical consensus. You can be a San Francisco columnist without actually knowing anything. For in the post liberal Bay Area, to be a columnist, connections are more important than reporting.)

We do not want to discuss the findings of the last court appointed guardian examiner, Dr. Wolfson?

Dr. Jay Wolfson:
I was appointed by the judiciary, according to the requirement of the law for a special guardian to investigate Terri's swallowing capacity. This opened the door to issues relating to her neurological capacity. I was required to review and report on the previous 14 years of legal and medical evidence and activities. After spending hours with Terri, getting to know her parents and siblings and her husband, and reviewing all of the evidence, my conclusion was that the competent medical evidence provided in the the case, following the Florida rules of civil procedure and evidence, and according to the Guardianship law in Florida, which was carefully crafted over fifteen years of bipartisan political and religious efforts --- indicated by clear and convincing evidence that she was in a persistent vegetative state, according to the most credible science and medicine. I also concluded that based on the same Florida laws and rules, the trier of fact appropriately determined that Terri had expressed, while she was competent, the intention never to be kept artificially alive under such circumstances. The evidence supporting this included competent legal evidence demonstrating that she personally expressed those intentions at the funerals of two family members who had been on life support -- so it was contextual. Due to the conflict between the parties, I suggested that additional testing could and should be done but ONLY if the parties agreed in advance as to how the results would be used. We almost came to agreement on this option, but for legal reasons, one of the parties pulled out on the last minute. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57781-2005Mar22.html )


We do not want to discuss the consensus of the medical and scientific community? (We always want to misrepresent this by claiming that there are “differing views” or that medical opinion is “split” which are, each of them, a misrepresentation? A lie. (The overwhelming consensus is that the patient Schiavo is dead, though her heart and lungs continued on for years after her death thanks to life support.))

No it does not matter if we look at the general questions or the questions specific to this one case. You are phony from beginning to end.

But now tell me the truth, you have just been putting me on right? You have been trying to drive me crazy.

Make me think that I am living with a bunch of mindless zombies?

Right? It has been a put on?

No?

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