Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

The EPA versus Arlo Guthrie

It is well understood that pretty much all members of the Guthrie family of musicians are staunch liberals, but when listening to Alices Restaurant tonight, I realized that if Obama wanted to know what is wrong with his whole approach to things, he doesn't even have to talk to a conservative, he just has to talk to ole' Arlo Guthrie:

Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on Thanksgiving,
when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant, but Alice doesn't
live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the
bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And livin' in the bell tower
like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be in.  Havin'
all that room, seein' as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they
didn't have to take out their garbage for a long time.

We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it'd be a
friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump.  So we took the
half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW microbus, took shovels and
rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the city dump.

Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the dump saying,
"Closed on Thanksgiving."  And we had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving
before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another
place to put the garbage.

Here you have it, a small naive (and the narrator of Alices Restaurant is VERY naive) gesture of friendship on Thanksgiving, and because no one can be at the dump guarding it, the dump is closed.

We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the side road
there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there was another
pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and
rather than bring that one up we decided to throw our's down.  That's what we did, and
drove back to the church, had a thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep
and didn't get up until the next morning, when we got a phone call from officer Obie.
He said, "Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage,
and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And I said, "Yes, sir,
Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage."

Not finding any available bureaucracy, they use their common sense outside of the bureaucracy, and do something that seems reasonable. The officer, never available to help them sort this out at the beginning of the story, is now suddenly very very available to sort them out.

After speaking to Obie for about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we
finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down
and pick up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the
police officer's station.  So we got in the red VW microbus with the
shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the
police officer's station.

He's available for fourty-five minutes to talk about the "consequences," after the fact, and schedules an appointment to see them in person, having never been available to prevent the problem to begin with. Why? Because it was Thanksgiving, and he's entitled to not talk on Thanksgiving.

Now friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at
the police station, and the first was he could have given us a medal for
being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and
we didn't expect it, and the other thing was he could have bawled us out
and told us never to be see driving garbage around the vicinity again,
which is what we expected, but when we got to the police officer's station
there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was
both immediately arrested.  Handcuffed.  And I said "Obie, I don't think I
can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on."  He said, "Shut up, kid.
Get in the back of the patrol car."

And that's what we did, sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the
quote Scene of the Crime unquote. I want tell you about the town of
Stockbridge, Massachusets, where this happened here, they got three stop signs,
two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to the Scene of the
Crime there was five police officers and three police cars, being the biggest
crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper
story about it. And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment that they had
hanging around the police officer's station. They was taking plaster tire tracks,
foot prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour
glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one
explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.  Took pictures of
the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not
to mention the aerial photography.

After the ordeal, we went back to the jail.  Obie said he was going to put us in the
cell.  Said, "Kid, I'm going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your belt."

Not only has "Officer Obie" encouraged them to, in the future, lie and cheat when he should've known that without their "kindness" he could have not done his "job", instead of simply giving them a good yelling and telling them to pick it all up, he has to make a scene, bring in all the police cars and airplanes and special teams, do massive investigative work wholly unnecessary to the situation at taxpayer expense, and then, when finished, throw them in jail as a reward for their original honesty and with no seemingly good reason.

And I said, "Obie, I can understand you wanting my
wallet so I don't have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you
want my belt for?"  And he said, "Kid, we don't want any hangings."  I
said, "Obie, did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?"
Obie said he was making sure, and friends Obie was, cause he took out the
toilet seat so I couldn't hit myself over the head and drown, and he took
out the toilet paper so I couldn't bend the bars roll out the - roll the
toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape.

Undertaking more rash and unneeded steps, and adding additional uncomfort to the individuals life, for no apparent reason except the "Precautionary Principle," better known as cowardice.

Obie was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice (remember
Alice? It's a song about Alice), Alice came by and with a few nasty words to Obie on
the side, bailed us out of jail, and we went back to the church, had a another
thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning,
when we all had to go to court.

After all these herculean efforts and expenditures, for a long time in jail, the fellows are bailed out.

We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy
pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down.  Man
came in said, "All rise."  We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the twenty seven
eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye
dog, and he sat down, we sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the
twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph
on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at twenty seven
eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of
each one and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case
of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge
wasn't going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the
circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to
be used as evidence against us.  And we was fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the
snow, but thats not what I came to tell you about.

Having gone to all this trouble to stack the deck against these young lads for his own personal benefit, his mechanations and manipulations fall apart against a single loose cog in the plan - a blind judge who will not be condescended in to sentencing by fancy pictures and paragraphs, quite a metaphor for our current Academic elites and their tendency to use "settled science" (LOL!) to rule anyone who disagrees with them unfit to speak. Thankfully, the judge can't see, much as the American Redneck was never overtaught to overrespect these dishonest manipulations and crass overreaches. "Blind Justice" indeed. In many ways voters are, when you get right down to it, a judge of elected officials.

They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.  I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning.  `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I waked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the phsychiatrist, room 604."

Not caring one bit what they put people through or the pride or dignity of anyone, government agencies poke and prod and inspect, and says "yea or nay" without any regard to the humanity or sensible value of what they're looking at. They have their quota, and if it kills them, or anyone else, they'll fill it.

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill.  I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill.  Kill.  I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth.  Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL."  And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL."  And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

Didn't feel too good about it.

Although his job is to be a Psychiatrist, the shrink at Whitehall Street suspends his duty when he hears what he wants to hear, that being far more important then actually carrying out his job, much like Green Energy and Mass Transit engineers who apply standards and bigotries that would never consider outside of these sectors when analyzing the plans of the environmental left, selling out their professional integrity for the sake of an ideological warpath.

Proceeded on down the hall gettin more injections, inspections, detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin' to me at the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four hours, I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty ugly things and I was just having a tough time there, and they was inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they was leaving no part untouched.  Proceeded through, and when I finally came to the see the last man, I walked in, walked in sat down after a whole big thing there, and I walked up and said, "What do you want?"  He said, "Kid, we only got one question. Have you ever been arrested?"

Finally, after having jumped through all the hoops, a single malfeasance is found, a single problem or trouble in something that otherwise fits, much like the Cape Wind project in Massacheuttsets. From the link: "The decision signals further delays for the $2.6 billion project, which was under review for about a decade and which has struggled to find financing."

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice's Restaurant Massacre, with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff like that and all the phenome... - and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, did you ever go to court?"  And I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one, and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W .... NOW kid!!"

A couple bad answers and the kid finds himself a virtual pariah, all for the minorest and most senseless of violations.

And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there.  Mother rapers.  Father stabbers.  Father rapers!  Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!  And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me.

Having given a bad answer, the organization, or individual, finds itself in a category that it does not fit, associating with those far worse then it is.

"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna- know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing- you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting- officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there

Doesn't this sound a whole lot like the Healthcare Bill, you know, the one we have to "pass to find out what's in it?" (Madame Pelosi) And then, finally, of all great and horrible humiliations and slanders and acts of true hypocrisy:

("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")

They have the gall to ask have we fixed ourselves, when they were the problem all along, when they have no right to judge, when they have done far worse things to this country then refusing to buy health insurance or keeping the lights on too long. But it's all us, it's never their fault, they're above being at fault, above the law, above manners and procedures, above morality.

A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.

Free Letter from K.L. Jamison

The following letter, according to my friend Shane Seckler, is available to anyone under the following conditions: 1) the letter is credited to its author, the honorable and good K.L. Jamison, Attorney at Law of 28 years experience, specializing in self-defense and weapons, state of Missouri, 2) the letter is unaltered and a notice like this one is provided with it. Any variance from these terms will result in the right to publish it being waived.

Considering how many hungry lawfirms would love to swallow you whole for losing the right to publish this, I suggest you don't.


IT'S JUST THE LAW: Police Protection Law

by K.L. Jamison

The law allows a policeman to command a citizen to come to his aid. The reverse is not true. In 1849, Jonathan W. Pottle was held captive and forced to pay $2,500 for his release. Mr. Pottle thought that this was unreasonable because the sheriff was present during the extortion and refused to assist him. As a loyal American, Mr. Pottle sued over this failure to act, and lost. In an 1855 decision the United States Supreme Court perfunctorily recited the facts, and ruled that there is no right to police protection and no right to sue over its lack.

Since that decision, there has been no right to police protection recognized in the United States. It could have been worse. More recently, women in a Washington D.C. home were raped and tortured while other women, hidden upstairs, twice called for help. Twice officers drove past the house without investigating. The hidden women were then discovered and tortured over a fourteen hour period. They sued. The court was sympathetic, but ruled there was no cause of action.

The states have the same philosophy. In a Missouri case, an outraged community sued their sheriff demanding that the court order him to perform his duty. The requested order was to force the sheriff to close a facility that did not measure up to community standards; or at least those members of the loyal American community that filed lawsuits. The court refused to issue the order. A long chain of federal and state cases state that police have a responsibility to protect the community as a whole, but no duty to protect any individual within that whole. It may help to visualize the metaphysics of the philosophy to realize that the point is to prevent victims of crime from suing the police.

The courts have allowed that the police must protect persons with a "special relationship" to the police. Such relationships are so special as to be nearly extinct. In my early years at the bar, the courts found special relationships in cases involving drunk drivers and protective orders. Federal courts have put an end to these special relationships. On May 16, 2006, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in McCloskey v Mueller III, finding that the FBI had no duty to arrest a violent criminal. The criminal in question, Gary Lee Sampson, had called the FBI and advised them that he wanted to surrender on an armed robbery warrant. The FBI did not oblige.

Reacting badly to the perceived snub, Mr. Sampson murdered three people. Their estates sued, but the court ruled that the FBI had no duty to the victims.

Protective orders in adult abuse cases typically require police action to protect the subject. However, the Supreme Court has put an end to this fuzzy thinking. In Town of Castle Rock v Gonzales, Jessica Gonzales had obtained a protective order against her husband. The order contained a "Notice to Law Enforcement Officials" which stated:

You shall use every reasonable means to enforce this restraining order. You shall arrest, or . . . seek a warrant for the arrest of the restrained person when . . . the restrained person has violated or attempted to violate any provision of this order . . ."

The husband violated the order by kidnapping the couple's three children. Ms. Gonzales notified the police repeatedly, alerting them to the protective order and even the location of her husband. Mr. Gonzales subsequently murdered the children. The Court ruled that the explicit language of the order did not require the police to do anything and provided no cause of action.

There is not even the right to have the police patrol one's neighborhood. In 1972, Kansas City, Missouri conducted a patrol experiment to discover the impact of vehicle patrols on crime rates. Some neighborhoods received increased patrols, some the same level, some none at all. The neighborhoods involved were not informed they were part of a test, much less given a choice as to which group they could join. The experimenters were surprised to find that vehicle patrols made no difference in crime rates or citizen satisfaction. A later withdrawal of patrols was less popular. On June 1, 1996, drug dealers in the area of 27th and Benton in Kansas City became outraged at the arrest of one of their guild and rioted. Police units were withdrawn from the area in order to allow emotions to burn themselves out. While doubtless good operational practice, it was a trifle hard on the citizens at 27th and Benton. The rioters burned a passing car and attacked the owner.

It might have been worse. During the April 1980 riots in Miami, police headquarters was under siege by the rioters. It could be a great deal worse. National Guard troops assigned to guard airports after 9-11 carried unloaded weapons in many cases. It appears that some commanders were more concerned about a John Wayne mentality among their troops than they were about terrorists in the airport. It might have been a very great deal worse. In 1919, the Boston police went on strike for 102 days and Home Guard units formed for WW I had to be called in.

One can never be certain of police response. There are regular "blackouts" in Kansas City when no police officer is available for any call. When they are available, there is no guarantee they can be called. The Kansas City emergency communications system is notorious for dead spots, areas where it functions badly or not at all. Even the Plaza, a fashionable shopping district less than five miles from the communications building, has numerous dead spots endangering police, firefighters, and citizens.

A Kansas City police officer, while vainly radioing for backup, was shot and wounded by a drug dealer. Officers were a minute away, but the radio crackled and hummed ineffectively, telling the assailant that the officer was alone and vulnerable. The officer sued the radio system builders. It is possible to sue such outside parties, but not possible to sue the police.

When police are available and can be called, they may not respond. A New York City woman pressed a silent alarm when an armed robber entered her business. The alarm company called 911; the operator, however, garbled the name of the business. The lady was murdered while the authorities put it down as a false alarm. After her funeral, the company received a letter threatening no response if there were further such alarms.

A Kansas City businessman was alerted to a burglary by his alarm company. He went to his business, expecting to be met by the police, only to find himself pursuing the burglar alone. The alarm company had called 911, but the dispatcher refused to send police officers because the business' alarm permit had expired. In fact, the alarm permit had not expired. A permit system intended to limit false alarms has instead been used to limit police protection.

The ACLU has provided video cameras to residents of a crime-ridden St. Louis neighborhood. The cameras are not to provide evidence of crime, but to document police brutality. While police brutality does occur, the effort is not likely to speed officers to calls in the neighborhood.

The problem of "de-policing" has arisen since the Cincinnati riots of 2000. The term describes a demoralized police force which no longer initiates action out of fear of criticism, police discipline, civil suits, and even criminal charges. In the last twenty years, "community policing" has relied on aggressive enforcement of seemingly minor laws on the theory that lack of enforcement indicates a tolerance of serious crime. With criminals filing bogus criminal charges against aggressive officers, and wild charges of racism (some both wild and true) many officers are reluctant to exercise the requisite aggression.

When the system functions, and an officer is available, and an officer responds, it may still not be enough. One department's policy is to wait for backup when responding to domestic violence reports. This sensible practice had a woman stabbed to death while a police officer sat in his car three doors away, waiting for backup.

Police response is directly related to police contact. This contact is tied to cell phone coverage and the 911 system. Cell phone coverage can be eccentric and dependent on the reliability of electronic devices. Even today, not all of Missouri is covered by the 911 system, and there is no map of the places that are not covered (for those who like surprises). Some places have the equipment to locate a 911 call from a cell phone to within 75 yards, but most can only narrow it down to the nearest cell phone tower. A Missouri cell phone user can dial *55 and be linked to a Highway Patrol headquarters, but not necessarily the nearest headquarters.

Police are recruited from "Type A" aggressive personalities. They want to rescue people and charge into danger; it is their nature. However, they are ruled by bureaucrats and politicians both in and out of uniform. If these rulers decide that a person or persons shall not receive police protection, there is no recourse. One federal court has proclaimed that "there is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen." Fortunately, there is a constitutional right to the means to defend ourselves.

Kevin L. Jamison is an attorney in the Kansas City Missouri area concentrating in the area of weapons and self-defense.

Politics in Quotes

With so much dirt and horse handicapping in the news, and maybe even a little here, I wanted to take a moment to show politicians for who they really are, and I find no better vehicle for this then their most insightful quotes, and especially those insightful about themselves. These quotes were extracted from various places over the internet, primarily BrainyQuote but a few others as well, and I hope you'll learn a thing or two about how people who agree with you and disagree with you come to their conclusions.

Most of the politicians quoted here are current, but a handful of quotes from previous generations, and especially Ronald Reagan, Malcom X and LBJ, are provided as well due to the continuing impact of these figures and their political heirs:

"One thing about the Senate, it is not the most efficient organization." -John McCain

"You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” -Rahm Emmanuel

"I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it." -Charles Schumer

"Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them." -Ronald Reagan

"I didn’t come here to be partisan, I didn’t come here to be bipartisan..." -Nancy Pelosi

"After a century of striving, after a year of debate, after a historic vote, health care reform is no longer an unmet promise. It is the law of the land." -Barack Obama

"I sat next to [Sarah Palin] once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there." -Barbara Bush

"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." -Sarah Palin

"Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy." -Rudy Giuliani

"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, `You are free to compete with an the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." -Lyndon B. Johnson

"I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence." -Malcom X

"Faith crosses every border and touches every heart in every nation. " -George W. Bush

"A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about." -Newt Gingrich

"She wants a new California, I want the California of my forebears." -Jerry Brown

"Blunt? Direct? . . . maybe you might say honest and refreshing. Maybe we can see that in your paper tomorrow." -Chris Christie

Guest Post - Roy Sanders is Magic (and other discoveries at the CHoA Autism Conference)

Yet another guest post from our good friend Walt Guthrie on the "social sciences." Enjoy!

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I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last Saturday.
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?

But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.

First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.

Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus
Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders, if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.

Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?

Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue:
"Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.

In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.

I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and i think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.

I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.

The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.

Way, way past.

Walt Guthrie

Nihilism and Love

I've been away for the past few weeks, travelling Greyhound and seeing family. This article is partially about Loughner, partially about me, and partially about God.

This may sound bizarre, but I think, to a very small degree, I can empathize with Loughner.

Loughners obsession with Giffords, according to his friend Tierney and Mother Jones, had almost nothing to do with any political movement. In fact, Loughner himself asked Giffords "what is government if words have no meaning?" When she inadequately answered his question, he became very angry at her, often calling her a "fake" in the presence of his good friend Tierney.

Loughner was mostly a loner, living largely by himself. Thus, he tended to encounter the worse side of people, the side that wants to control and push away. He also never really be He himself was a control freak, even keeping a dream journal to look for hints in how to control his mind, which he had faith in as a source of another reality he could conquer for himself. His obsession with words indicate a kind of politicization in its strictest meaning, but not the one we would be familiar with, rather the kind of politicization one would find in office politics or academic politics, the politicization of someone with no ideology and a lot of lust for power. In his safe, according to the AP, was found the name Giffords, next to his signature.

Why do I say I may empathize with him? After encountering someone ironically very similar to many profiles of Loughner, academic, obsessive, paranoid, and having a hard time with a Greyhound bus company where the employees take priviliges paying customers are not entitled to, and being told I wasn't humble enough, and being isolated from nearly everyone, I contemplated a killing spree, just because I felt, after 48 hours on a bus run by a company that had me totally under their control and didn't even permit me to drink alcohol or cuss or be five minutes late for the bus when I'm getting food but finds it quite reasonable to not keep a parts shed for when the windshield motors break down in Montana, like a total slave, and wanted something, anything, for myself. Everyone around me was rude, vicious, and would hurt me over anything. If I got in to an argument with one of these powder kegs, I would be kicked off the bus for making noise. I thought of bombing Greyhound especially, just to put them out of business. Eventually my desire for the blood for others turned to a desire for the blood of myself, when we came to a canyon out in North Dakota for a rest stop, and I looked down and contemplated jumping.

What stopped me from jumping? The thought of my mother crying. What stopped me from contemplating further a killing spree? The thought of my parents shamed. I felt like a marked man, having such horrible, capital thoughts, thoughts of actions that can bring shame to not only me but my loved ones, of such actions that both can and should lead a person to death, and also how easy then it seemed for a person to be totally disposable and hated, and for a long time I cried silently. I called my father, and that made me feel better, but still, the shame of having such an awful thought, the fear of such thoughts, and the realization of just how pointless people suddenly seemed at all levels, combined with an already stressed psyche, brought me nearly to suicide.

Later on, we encountered the little small town of Alexandria, Minnesota. We were only there for ten minutes, but a lady helped me when my coffee cup exploded, the driver kidded me around about my fear that someone would steal my laptop, and overall the warmth and openness touched my heart. I also heard a story, at the register, of a man from Tennessee who was traveling to Seattle by Greyhound and ended up being so sick and tired of the bus that he got off it, and is still living in Alexandria! And that's when I realized just how valuable people were, how complicated, loving, faithful, interesting and all other things people can really be, and why they would be so valued in the eyes of God. "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot." (Matthew 5: 13, NIV)

In addition, soon after one of the people who made me feel bad got his! That made me feel even better.

But back to Loughner, whose name could be pronounced "loner" in some languages, he was a very nihilistic man. "If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem." -Loughner. In High School he engaged in drinking nearly to the point of death, and smoked marijuana nearly every day while talking to friends about conspiracy theories. He believed in very little. He was very atheist, and believed people were essentially sheep herded by government. Not only did he believe that God didn't exist, he didn't even believe the world existed. He didn't like guns until he finally wanted to use them. He apparently did volunteer time at a Book Festival, but his political diatribes were highly incoherent, and his obsession was always with control and meaning. He believed in nothing, and a little rudeness from Gifford was all it took.

Loughner had no one, and he saw only one side of people. According to neighbors and the AP, he "kept to himself and was often seen walking his dog, almost always wearing a hooded sweat shirt and listening to his iPod." He loved nothing but control. And how could he love more? His view of what was important was so small, so limited, so, in fact, meaningless. "The question [to Giffords] was classic Jared: confrontational, nonsensical and obsessed with how words create reality." -Two friends of Loughner and AP.

People have meaning, and are beautiful even though they are also somewhat evil in their actions and thoughts, God looks after even Cain (Genesis 4:15), and soon Loughner will get to find out just how much meaning words can have when the judge passes sentence against him. He will get to see how meaningful government can really be, and maybe some fine day the meaning of that beautiful little girl he shot dead will haunt him in his sleep when he can no longer control his dreams and his "second reality" is filled with images of his tragic and evil past, and he finds all around him that he lives entirely in what he has already done.

Our Current Murder Laws

Farmland of Bentley, North Dakota. Image by Andrew Filer, license cc 2.0 generic

One of the most critical of all laws is trespassing. Without it, property means nothing, hard work means nothing, and no one has any security at all, not even in their own home. It also protects something deeper and more sacred, a kind of respect that only can come from such borders and barriers.

One of the most sacred human rituals is the funeral. Yet, there are people out there who would let silly politics get in the way of the most important events in anyones life, one of the few things that truly demonstrate how valuable an individual human being is. There are people out there who see it as a moment to talk, to intrude, to threaten, to intimidate, and to steal from families and loved ones their chance to say goodbye.

It has long been accepted that when you trespass on somebodies land, you have the right to kill them, so when you trespass on somebodies very life and soul, shouldn't you have the same right? It may not be your land permaneantly, but as you're laying the body to rest, its your land, and your time, your last time together, the time to say goodbye, and why should you allow such foul and awful beings to contaminate that hollowed ground? Should they not clean away their foul footsteps with their very blood?

Obviously, no one should harm these people now. They are now entitled to the same sacred protection they denied others, and even if the law is not changed, it has a value to itself, so do not let our nation become lawless for that is even worse then this, but if Westboro protesters showed up to my funeral, I would hope my family would have the right to tell them to leave at the point of a gun, and if they don't, kill them as the common crooks that they are.

It is a travesty of justice that our current legal system does not allow such. This must change, and if you feel angry, if you feel upset, I ask you to, along side me, campaign for good laws, better laws in any way you can. Honor the dead by making sure that future dead are honored, and then their name shall be hollowed alongside those you have protected from such defilement:

"Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness!
You have relieved me in my distress;
Have mercy on me, and hear my prayer.

² How long, O you sons of men,
Will you turn my glory to shame?
How long will you love worthlessness
And seek falsehood? Selah
³ But know that the LORD has set apart for Himself him who is godly;
The LORD will hear when I call to Him.

⁴ Be angry, and do not sin.
Meditate within your heart on your bed, and be still. Selah
⁵ Offer the sacrifices of righteousness,
And put your trust in the LORD." (Psalm 4, NKJV)

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." (Romans 12: 21)

Do not be a hypocrite. God calls us not only to be right, but to be at peace, and to be peaceful to his creation, especially at the level of America and all of its citizens. Therefore, do nothing worthless, and do nothing against the law which has a value in and of itself, but seek to work with the law to make it better. We have a democracy, use it!

Julian Assange Must Follow the Example of Christ

US Supreme Court Building. By Duncan Lock, license cc asa 3.0 unported

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea." -Matthew 18: 6, the word of our Lord

One of the reasons folks have a hard time understanding espionage laws is they see law as about morality, they see law as about preventing immoral behavior and punishing the wicked. But that is not what government is for, nor has it ever been for that. The purpose of law is to resolve disputes, to settle differences in a manner that is open, transparent, fair, and respectful to the rights of everyone involved.

The fact is that the government has a real difference with Julian Assange. They had secrets, Julian released them, they had protocols, Julian broke them, and now they're friends can't trust them, they can't look at each other, spies and envoys are fleeing, and the worlds mightiest powers and superpower know not how to handle their own states. Right or wrong, this is where things stand.

Now, there are countries that don't utilize Espionage laws much. Israel and Russia both immediately come to mind. Both, instead of finding and prosecuting spies in a court of law, send out secret assasins, with ice picks, guns, poisons, and all manners of traps, destroy the peace, and when they find their victim, leave no trace of him, and give him not a second, not a minute to answer for his sake. If they make a mistake, too bad, the wrong person is dead. They don't tell his or her family either, and all the citizens are left questioning what happened to their fellow man. Without a doubt, if Americas ability to try spies in a court of law is interfered with, they will have to, for the sake of preserving their government, resort to much the same.

Julian, we all know what you stand for, or at least say you do, transparency, but what you fail to see is that this law is also created for transparency, and in fact, the most important kind of transparency, the ability of individual citizens to see what they are charged with, and society to see what happens to them, along with the ability of all to make their decisions in a conscious, responsible manner. You have angered a lot of powerful people, and if you continue to be successful, you will anger only more. If you do not turn yourself in now, you will be bodybagged, and no one will ever hear from you again, but if you do turn yourself in, whether you are imprisoned or killed, you will be so before the common man and all eyes to see, and all minds to know how arguments are settled in a civil society.

Civil Disobedience is a fine and honorable thing, but it involves taking the consequences of your actions, in part so that fights don't get out of hand. Lets face it Julian, if you die the wrong way, something else dies with you, but if you die the right way, transparency only grows, and you can speak for your own defense in court, and stand by your actions, and speak, for all the nation and world to hear, about your values and what you find right. And you will go to jail, and possibly even be put to death, but if you stay out there on your own running, people who are very good at this stuff will get to you, and they will kill you, in a way that destroys everything that you stand for.

There were four Roman soldiers who confessed a faith that their commander could not stand. He had them put in to a freezing lake, and said that if any of them gave up their faith, they would be given a warm bath, but if they didn't, they would be left there to freeze to death. Three of them stayed there, holding hands as brothers, to die the whole night through, but one just couldn't stand it anymore, and came out, and renounced his faith. And yet, all four of them died that night. Tell me Julian, which one will you be? Will you join your brethren of all the other convicts at jail, and spread the light of wisdom and righteousness to the people you are called to, or will you die shamefully at the hands of a foreign spy, possibly even painfully, as a former KGB agent died not long ago.

Two thousand years ago, a visionary far greater then yourself, or anyone now alive, was crucified above a hill in Calvary. He didn't fight the police when they came to get him, and he didn't complain about his fate either, nor did he lie in court to get off easy. He accepted what he had came to do, took his cup of sorrows in Gethsemane, and went up that hill cross in hand for all things to come to pass. Julian, if you really do care about transparency to the extent that you claim, you must do likewise. The worse thing that could happen here is for America, already weakened, to be hamstrung by those who think they know better, and with them, all the world to where espionage laws can no longer truly exist. They are an important part of transparency. Law isn't about what's right or wrong - it's about a peaceful, serene society that is transparent and honorable, and when you accept this, you can have your fate handed to you fittingly, and become the hero you were born to be.

Update 12/6/2010 - It seems, according to AOL News, Assange has done a wicked and cowardly thing. Holding over 1.4 gigabytes of what Assange considers worthy secrets, Assange, rather then turn himself in as he should, is withholding them, and thus his objective, from the public as a bargaining chip to secure his freedom. If this is how it appears, Julian has much to be ashamed of.

Guest Post - "Dr. James McPartland is a Dick (and more)"

I received an email from a friend whose a member of an Autistic Issues student group called SWANSA that made some very valid points about not only autism, but "civilized" society in general, that I felt my readers would very much benefit from taking a gander at. The friends name is Walt Guthrie (he never told me whether or not he was related to Woody and Arlo):

I caught the James McPartland talk at Emory November 8.
Off the bat, three things you need to know about him.
One: he's the Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center.
Two: He's the Associate Director of Developmental Electrophysiology Lab
Three: he's a dick.
He's actually more than that. But we'll get to that.
First, the dick:

In the course of his "research," McPartland makes use of a computer program called "Cyberball," which is a sort of "video game". Now, I have put quote marks around the words "video game" because it is the most primitive-looking thing you can possibly imagine. We are not talking "Gears of War" here. From the brief demonstration, given during the talk, it appeared to be something that might have come out in 1975 just prior to the introduction of "Pong." But what do I know? For all I know it might have just popped out of the MIT Media lab last month. In any case, I cannot emphasize enough how boring this game is.
It is a simulated game of catch between three players. Each player can choose to throw the ball to the person on his left or the person on his right. That's it. That's the game. It doesn't appear that you can miss or that the other person can fail to catch the ball. There is no skill and no chance whatsoever involved. For all intents and purposes, assuming the demonstration of this game was representative of actual "play," the "game" is the equivalent of nothing more than three people with one person calling out the name of one of the two others, and then that person being able to do the same and so on and so on.
Of course no human being would ever willingly choose to waste their time playing such a "game," but McPartland has apparently made countless kids waste irretrievable hours of their childhood at no discernible benefit for themselves "playing" this simulation that simulates nothing.
But this is not what makes McPartland a dick.
This is:
What is the purpose of Cyberball? Well, it turns out it does have a one. According to McPartland, Cyberball is designed to make a player feel excluded and outcast. You see, the other two "players" of Cyberball don't exist. They are just part of the program and what they do is ignore the player and just toss the ball back and forth to each other. Now, McPartland claims that the children he works with are, by the nature of their autism, already shunned and socially mistreated by their peers. So what does he do with them? He experiments on them by making them play games designed to increase their sense of isolation and social ostracism. And these are experiments solely for his benefit since McPartland made no claim during the course of his talk that these sessions would provide any benefit whatsoever for the children playing them.
McPartland tricks ostracized children into performing activities designed solely to further their own sense of ostracism.
Where I come from this sort of person is also technically known as a douchebag.
Oh, and did I mention that he was excited about the prospect of a computer program that might test for empathy.
Let the irony of THAT sink in.

The bulk of his talk is old territory that I've addressed before. More laser-pointer-on-the-head sort of nonsense. This time we learn that autistics take 200 milliseconds or so to process faces. Regular folk take, on average, 180. Noting that that might not seem like a big deal, McPartland admitted as much and then went on to claim that it actually was, without offering the slightest bit of evidence except to note that those 20 milliseconds add up over time (Yeah, he's right Those two percents of a second add up. Work those face recognitions, kids. You only have 86,400,000 milliseconds in a day to work with!) During it all he performed the verbal sleight-of-hand of telling us that some of this was hard science, some was unpublished and some was just speculation. It was almost like a psychic doing a "cold reading" to the room, leaving himself plenty of wiggle room should anyone call him him on any of his claims (The main one being that autistics maybe just aren't properly motivated to have the desire to be social. Or something. As someone who understands the spectrum from living it, listening to McPartland's meandering theory of autism was like listening to my great aunt and her circle describe what goes on in Grand Theft Auto). There was more talk about perceiving upright faces vs inverted faces. If you believe this is relevant to anything on Earth then God love. I won't be dragged into another discussion on it.

Afterwards, in the reception following McPartland's talk, I asked him directly whether or not autism was empirically or definitionally a "disorder." He responded that it was definitional and that ALL people on the autistic spectrum are, by definition, "disordered." Then, having admitted this, he jumped to the it's-only-a-word defense. If I found the word "offensive" (a word I never employed in the course of the discussion) then that was on me. Because who could find any objection to being labeled "disordered?"
I told him what the word "disordered" actually means.
It means "nigger."
It means "faggot." It means "kike."
It performs the same societal function and is derived in PRECISELY the same manner. It is a derogatory classification whose purpose is to dehumanize one arbitrarily grouped and categorized set of humanity. And like the white racist, who feels that he can designate, by his own criteria, any one that he chooses to include into or exclude from the inferior class of "nigger," James McPartland and his intellectually low-functioning behaviorist brood think they are entitled to arbitrarily classify an entire subset of humanity as definitionally "disordered" and then have full power to say who is and who is not in that set. Neither James McPartland nor the typical hardcore white racist feel any need to empirically justify their respective words. Why should he? Just as the word "nigger" empowered and elevated the white power structure, the word 'disorder' gives the behaviorists their power, income, and justification for their very existence.
James Mcpartland is a grinning clown, the moral equivalent of a racist, who experiments on vulnerable socially outcast children to make them feel worse about themselves, all so he can grind out a steady stream of lazy speculation disguised as science.
Fuck him.

Vox Populi - A Socratic Rant

Open Clip Art Library, public domain.

In latin, "Voice of the People." Although seldom seen on any reasonable scale, the idea of the Vox Populi is an exploitable dream that has been dreamt by many and used to control large numbers of "ordinary guys" throughout time. Liberals claim it on welfare and taxing the rich, and (in the past more then now) opposing the norms of society, while conservatives claim it on social issues and representing the values of the working class, or the society which is made of most people. Perhaps most pecuiliar is when freedom or "hope" becomes intermingled with "being taken care of."

I was talking to a friend yesterday who told me I needed to take my mind out of its snare, to free myself of this idea of my life being cheap. I responded to him that you can't get much more free (cutting the nonsense) than being willing to die. Perhaps it is wasteful, freedom often is, but it most certainly is free. But that seems to be a common theme, the idea that people who don't agree with us are trapped in their own minds, and aren't really free, and therefore do not represent a voice of the people. I suspect I'm not alone in seeing how this can be exploited by bullies and malcontents against the people.

And then there's always the issue of education, but here we find a contradiction, for if people need be educated to be a voice, then you no longer have a voice of the people, but a voice of the educated. Worst, in some ways you have a voice of the educators, as their minds may well have been broken and molded to fit an academic "goal" or "proper behavior." When it comes to truly ensnaring a mind, there are few better people then educators, but even with this noted, we must be careful to not fall in to the trap of thinking we know that someone has been trapped. We don't, and if you trap yourself by thinking that you know where someone has gotten an idea without a logically-correct mathematical proof (pretty much the only methodology for properly recording the origin of ideas that man has ever created, and most people don't know how to write one) you will take away from yourself the power of whatever knowledge they may have that they are willing to give. Once you have taken away power beyond your own humble means, you will in turn be easily caged by the clever, the manipulative, and the "experts."

Experts should always be listened to, for in many cases they did earn their degrees through true excellence, but no one is right all the time, and least of all the people who decide who the experts are. The experts too are also sometimes wrong, and they're also sometimes greedy or evil. Further, in many cases even when the experts are right, if we are unwilling to question what they say, we will be unable to truly learn, on any deeper level, anything from them, but will instead only memorize shallow facts that we in turn, deprived of our roots, misinterpret and abuse, not only ruining ourselves, but tarnishing their good name with our stupidity.

Further, an expert in economics is not necessarily an expert in politics, and an expert in politics is not necessarily an expert in science. Indeed, even an expert in science may not necessarily be an expert in engineering. These peoples expertise may well be one dimensional, which makes it both useful and limited.

There are also people who claim greatness to themselves for selfish ends. Perhaps the lowest of this ilk (or close to it) are the older folks who cry "listen to your elders" while speaking of things of which they have no experience, or even talent. These people manipulate and contrive, hurt and disparage, and drive wedges between entire groups of people. They harm families, and provoke disrespect against others who did not earn it like they did. One must be very wary of people like this, though there are certainly true elders as well. Remember that no matter how many years one has had to experience life, a truly idiotic man will learn nothing from them, and there are many true idiots in this world.

Herman Hesse believed that at the end of childhood, one leaves the world of "light and warmth" for the world of "darkness." Today, we, the American People, are confronting the darkness of a government that does not care for us, a president that wishes to manipulate us, a congress that wishes to waste our money and plunge us in to debt, and vested interests, often moneyed interests, that try to buy elections. We are seeing that even "reputable scientists" are not necessarily of any well-earned repute. We see that histories can be distorted, books can be misrepresented, and the shepherds can fleece their flock, or make them in to lamb chops. We are seeing, indeed that no one can speak the Vox Populi but the Populi, the people.

At the same time as this has happened, small nonprofit organizations like the Mozilla Foundation, who makes firefox, the Open Clip Art Library, who provided the illustration for this post, small bloggers like myself and those more successful then myself, and public advocacy organizations that publicize the records of the organizations within our nation, are taking over many of the traditional offices of the elites. A growing number of people are going not to supermarkets and big chain stores, but ma and pa shops and neighborhood farmers markets, to buy the staples of life. Ordinary citizens like you and I are demanding electric cars and new kinds of energy to replace our polluting grid. An unprecedented level of discussion and thought is happening throughout our society.

Finally, with the growth of the Tea Party, we are seeing for the first time in a long time grass roots organizers finally listened to and political apparati organized from the smallest local level. We are seeing the people finally speak. The people are not used to speaking, so at first they will have much to learn, but I feel, now that it is possible, that it is the peoples birth right to decide their own destiny. The time has come for, as Arthur C. Clarke would put it, childhoods end. We have a great adolesecent - he will become a great adult, or he will disintegrate in to nothing. My suspicion is this will turn out well, and I know where we were headed before was oblivion, but even if I'm wrong, it is their birth right, let them have it, and let no man interfere with their share of the inheritance, for it is theirs, and what they do with it they shall live with, or die with.

For a Friend

Aerial view of Mercer Island, public domain by Derrick Coetzee

I would like to thank a blogger I know from Pretoria for bringing to mind the events of many years ago. This is a story I believe everyone needs to hear.

To protect my friends privacy, I will call him Seth. He was someone I wish I had gotten to know better, and earlier, and someone whose story would enlighten all of us today about the most important side of morality: love.

Seth is gay. And no, this story does not end with him being killed by armed KKK brutes, nor does it end with him taking his own life, he is far more resilient then that. It ends with something more common, and for most of us, more true. Yet without the story, the ending means nothing anyways.

Seth was bright, intelligent, healthy, and in no way or manner effeminate. There is nothing about Seth that would seem less of a man, that would make him any less male than I or any man that you know. He was civilized, and never rude, and always spoke softly and carefully, every word that came out of his mouth, something he learned from his own life, and yet he still had a sense of humor. He is one of those rare people who can keep himself totally disciplined and still be open to everyone and everything around him at the same time. He was strong-willed and frank, saying exactly what he means and doing exactly what he intends. He had a strong work ethic and a sense of responsibility for himself that too many people are missing today. Seth was a talented actor and singer.

He had grown up on an island of 13 square miles with 19,000 people (since then the population has grown to 22,000), two miles from Seattle. You could ride a horse along a short section of the main drag of town. There were many beautiful cliffsides and views from out across the lake, and he lived on a one-lane road that wound up the hill with no guard rails and a 300 foot cliff on one side, from which you could see the tops of the trees. He was the only son of his wealthy father, a careless, neglectful single father who would rather spend his time with 15 egotistical mistresses who all thought they were the only one then take care of his only child.

Seth was called many names at school, and ridiculed, even though he was hardly a homosexual stereotype, and even in the place, the Drama Department, that one would least think such abuse would occur. The actors in the Drama Department were a very dog-eat-dog bunch, never caring for their own, always set on themselves, and when abuse occurred, they would not stand against it, lest they anger someone. The only person who seemed to care at all was the teacher, and since most people knew this, they simply waited until she was away, then recommenced their behavior.

I don't remember entirely what happened, but somehow one day I told Seth a joke I really shouldn't have, something very offensive towards gays. Realizing what I had done, I quickly apologized for it. What happened next I don't believe I will ever forget. He looked me straight in the eye and said "do you honestly think that would offend me? I've heard so much worse then that." He paused, sighed and then concluded: "What you would think if you heard what I've heard."

I spoke to Seth many more times, and before the school year was over, he told me he was consulting his boyfriend about moving to Houston, Texas. We were out among the fallen chestnuts, speaking after school, him alone waiting for over an hour to be picked up before I found him after Track practice. He seemed very at peace, but also very anxious to get off of our island. He was only a junior, had not graduated from high school yet, but when I met a friend of Seth's next year, and asked him why I had not seen Seth, he told me he had moved to Maryland - while his father was still here on the island. I doubt very much that he completed high school there.

Regardless of what you think about homosexuality morally, no one, in their right mind, will say that my friend Seth, my kind, civilized, open, disciplined, honorable, thoughtful, and honest Seth, was treated justly.