Re: lol

[Ray E. Harrell]

 
 
My niece, a wonderful single mother, supporting her child by
running a day-care program that works with other working
mother's children, sent me this little story.  Her parents work
two jobs as teachers and work in the civil service while they
have put their four children through school and two through
college with a third in college at present.  The entire family
helps each other with the parents supporting children and
grandchildren in their endeavors.    This little story
seemed
more like "black humour" when I thought of how hard they
actually work in this "paradise."    So I took it seriously
and
wrote a reply.  I hope it is not too serious.
REH
Dawn Beam wrote:
I've been feeling very tired lately. I've been blaming
it
on iron poor blood, lack of vitamins, dieting and a dozen
other maladies. But now I found out the real reason. I'm
tired because I'm overworked!
The population of this country is 237 million. 104 million
are retired.  That leaves 133 million to do the work.
There are 85 million in school, which leaves 48 million to
do the work.
Of this, there are 29 million employed by the federal
government. This leaves 19 million to do the work.
Four million are in the Armed Forces, which leaves
15 million to do the work.
Take out the 14,800,000 people who work for the state and
city governments, and that leaves 200,000 to do the work.
There are 188,000 in hospitals, so that leaves 12,000 to do
the work.
With 11,998 people in prisons now, that leaves just two
people to do the work. You and me. And you're sitting
there reading e-mail!

Dawn,
Thanks for the lightness, but it masks a serious question.
First of all there are more people than you said, probably 300
million and over 100 times as many in prison, most being minorities.
I know, however that your joke is not so funny when it expresses real
frustration.   I also know you are overworked and
a wonderful
mother and granddaughter as well.
The one question you aren't asking is how much work is there
that is significant and how much is just tiring busy work?
Busy work makes one feel ignorant and useless while significant
work makes one feel energized.   The number of significant
and
community oriented jobs i.e. jobs where people work in teams for
long periods of time, are slowly being devoured by what is called
the "Lean and Mean" industrial strategy.   In short it means
down size
labor and replace with machines and computers.
Give labor jobs that have little permanence and make them individually
supply
their own health-care, disability, family health & retirement. 
Unlike your
father's inadequate government job which just pays too little for a
family of
four children with college, "Lean & Mean" is a deliberate strategy
to get the
average worker to accept less and lower their expectations.  
In order
to cover this up you must distract them (like you do with children
when
they complain about doing something you want) with:
    1. games like the stock market (gambling
and usury)
    2. complexity  like taking money
out of medicine and education
    and giving it to a third party (stockholders) and
calling the resultant
    lower amount available for the actual task "efficiency."  
Less effort
    for the company and more tasks for families working
two jobs already.
    (Reagan's Law:  "Overworked people don't have
the energy to protest
 societal and environmental abuses!")
    3. an enemy:  in Europe it was
Jews and Gypsies (they are still
    sticking it to the Gypsies ), in the
    U.S.A today it is your neighbor who doesn't agree
with you about
    abortion or who isn't the same religion, or who
is elderly,  or retired
    after a long work life in the same job (and whose
retirement funds is
    the basis for capital that makes the market prosperous). 

Great
    targets for envy but these retired skilled folks
would make ideal allies
    if the current youth could find a way to enlist
them as such.
There is a word for all of this and it can be looked up on the Internet.
It is called AGILE Manufacturing and is the code word for temporary,
flexible jobs that require people to have flexible mobility
(be willing to
move anywhere and the family be damned!),  no loyalty to anything
in
work except the temporary task at hand (how much money, is the
supreme indicator of personal value, i.e. your "worth.") & the
slow
withering
away of the democratic government in favor of the stockholder
controlled
corporation, ("the big government is 'corrupt' while the 'competition'
of the
market keeps people honest.")
Well Dawn,
Dad taught me that the most important thing was to tell the
truth, even if no one else did.  But to balance the harshness
of that light
with the reality of your community and to try to live together in peace. 
If
your neighbors are constantly moving that is hard to do and truth becomes
just one more irritant in your life.   I still try to live
the way Dad taught me
and as he said  "God gave me eyes, ears and a mind to help me
decide
what w

Re: Blaming the victors

[Ray E. Harrell]

I wonder if it doesn't start in our families.  I have a lot of successful
relatives who have made it through hard work and connections with
the fundamentalist Christian groups.  They are convinced that
large
sectors of the world are evil and find no problem with doing evil to
them.
 
On the other hand they are family.  Do I make myself anymore of
an
outsider than I am already by challenging the hatred against Gays and
others.  Or by their cataloguing anyone who believes that abortion
is
a family issue, that must be decided sensitively for the living,
as a murderer.
All the while supporting polluting industries and anyone who practices
population
control through mechanical means as being against their god's population
policy.   Or that teaching their children that the world
is older than 10,000
years, even though they made their fortune in the pursuit of geological
wealth, is also a sin against their god or that those who teach
sexuality as
a need are also against their god even while they eat themselves to
death
and get prostate cancer from too little pleasurable activities while
the
women gets cancer from too much after menopause.   So when
you
talk to them about David and Bathsheba or Leonard Bernstein or scattering
one's seed, where do you draw the line?    It is certain
that there is little
prostate cancer within the rape and pillage community, even if we are
talking about the market, as long as it isn't metaphor.  But is
it right?
No, but neither is dying from cancer.   Perhaps there is
a third way?
When does it mean that choosing life means one leaves one's family,
community or the religion of their recent family?
Because not to do
so means to choose one's untimely demise?
So how does this relate to bureaucracy?   And the choices
that one makes
while working within one?  I don't know, I have chosen not to
work within one
all of my life and have paid for it but have been free to choose my
own creative
path.   It is much harder for me with family because I love
them and am
tied to them by springs deep within my soul.    But
they are wrong, as wrong
as they believe me to be.    I have learned simply by
getting older, of the
foolishness of their ways.   Come on in the water's fine.
REH
"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COME" wrote:
Yup.  I tell my colleagues that the most profound
form of  censorship in our
workplace is self-censorship.  One reply I get, though, is that
the only
faultless move a bureaucrat can make is to do nothing!!
Arthur Cordell
 --
From: Timework Web
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Blaming the victors
Date: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 1:39PM
The scum is in ourselves, not in our stars, methinks. It would be much
easier to "do something" about the injustice in the world than most
of us
admit, either to ourselves or to others. It seems to me that the
self-censorship I encounter in people at the middle levels is far in
excess of what people need for their personal and career survival.
I can
only understand it as a defense against getting so committed that they
would then overstep the actual taboos. And I'm talking about
self-censorship from people who are self-identified as political
progressives.
Tom Walker

Re: FW: New technologies threaten human extinction - Web entrepreneur(Vancouver Sun)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Not a new scenario.  Just read the Greeks.  But we have killed
our eyes and ears by shutting down the memory that the great
works of art teach us.   Reduced to a profession for the purpose
of "making" a living, a job, we have lost our souls.  That is the
root of the evil.  Some will say, REH's at it again.  And I am,
these people are by and large Americans who have overcome their
fear of security with huge salaries and now worry about losing it.

None of them have the courage to do much more than whine.
Religion has failed, science is a gun but the soul comes from
true sight, connection through love, an intelligent heart and knowing
the great gifts of the past well enough to project forward to the
seventh generation.   The only thing I can see that Europe has
given us is their great art, otherwise its genocide and funeral
industries.

REH


"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COME" wrote:

> This may be a straw in the wind, a growing reaction/questioning of just what
> is being created.
>
>  --
> From: Sid Shniad
> Subject: New technologies threaten human extinction - Web entrepreneur
> (Vancouver Sun)
> Date: Monday, March 13, 2000 2:04PM
>
> THE VANCOUVER SUN   MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2000
>
> WEB ENTREPRENEUR OFFERS GRIM VIEW OF HUMANITY+S EXTINCTION
>
> Sun Microsystem's top scientist writes in a
> provocative new article that technological advances
> could eventually threaten our existence.
>
> By Joel Garreau, Washington Post
>
> A respected creator of the Information Age has written an
> extraordinary critique of accelerating technological change in which
> he suggests that new technologies could cause -something like
> extinction- for humankind within the next two generations.
>
> The alarming prediction, intended to be provocative, is striking
> because it comes not from a critic of technology, but rather from a
> man who invented much of it: Bill Joy, chief scientist and
> co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., the leading Web technology
> manufacturer.
>
> Joy was an original co-chairman of a presidential commission
> on the future of information technology. His warning, he said in a
> telephone interview, is meant to be reminiscent of Albert Einstein's
> famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerting
> him to the possibility of an atomic bomb.
>
> In a 24-page article in Wired magazine that will appear on the
> Web Tuesday, Joy says he finds himself essentially agreeing, to his
> horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore
> Kaczynski+that advanced technology poses a threat to the human
> species. -I have always believed that making software more reliable,
> given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place,-
> Joy wrote in the article, which he worked on for six months. -If I
> were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally
> obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine that such a day may
> come.-
>
> Joy enjoys a level-headed reputation in the industry. -Nobody is
> more phlegmatic than Bill,- said Stewart Brand, an Internet
> pioneer. -He is the adult in the room.-
>
> Joy is disturbed by a suite of advances. He views as credible the
> prediction that by 2030, computers will be a million times more
> powerful than they are today. He respects the possibility that robots
> may exceed humans in intelligence, while being able to replicate
> themselves.
>
> He points to nanotechnology +the emerging science that seeks
> to create any desired object on an atom-by-atom basis +and agrees
> that it has the potential to allow inexpensive production of smart
> machines so small they could fit inside a blood vessel. Genetic
> technology, meanwhile, is inexorably generating the power to
> create new forms of life that could reproduce.
>
> What deeply worries him is that these technologies collectively
> create the ability to unleash self-replicating, mutating, mechanical or
> biological plagues. These would be -a replication attack in the
> physical world- comparable to the replication attack in the virtual
> world that recently caused the shutdowns of major commercial
> Web sites.
>
> -If you can let something loose that can make more copies of
> itself,- Joy said in a telephone interview, -it is very difficult to
> recall. It is as easy as eradicating all the mosquitoes: They are
> everywhere and make more of themselves. If attacked, they mutate
> and become immune That creates the possibility of empowering
> individuals for extreme evil. If we don't do anything, the risk is very
> high of one crazy person doing something very bad.-
>
> What further concerns him is the huge profits from any single
> advance that may seem beneficial in itself. -It is always hard to see
> the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change,- Joy
> wrote. -We have long been driven by the overarching desire t

Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...

[Ray E. Harrell]

Wrong Harry,  don't you know that a woozy feeling generated
by an MD's prescription isn't being "stoned" but is a "side
effect"?

How come you can see through that statement but are so rigorous
in your defense of doctrine over data?

Just thought I'd ask.I understand that you believe the only
capital
is land based but that just won't work in competition against those

states like Japan who don't.  And if you don't believe that we are
all
predators, in the state sense, then I certainly fear for the life
of your
followers.  More than likely success would change them, just like
it
does ill-prepared R & R "artists".

You know Harry, I was always taught to be non confrontational, but
it really is fun over here on the dark side.   You just have to
make sure
that your off-spring are as plenteous as the leaves on the trees.


REH

Harry Pollard wrote:

> Ray E. Harrell wrote:
>
> >My apologies to the list for not being able to punch the
> >spellcheck button on the last two posts.   It's the Neurontin.
> >Makes me woozy but fun.
>
> Ray,
>
> I've already said you write well.
>
> You write even better when you are stoned!
>
> But, get off it as soon as you can.
>
> Harry

Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...

[Ray E. Harrell]

Since I already answered your current post in one you supposedly
commented on (see below)  I  won't say more about that. 
However,
I would suggest that those in love with the private school system
go teach in it for awhile.  I have, as has my sister.  She
finally joined
the hierarchical Catholic School system because she was getting
older and needed a medical plan and a retirement with four kids
and her husband working three jobs.   19th century solutions
are
as irrelevant to education as they are to the Information Era. 
As
for the farms,  have you done it?    My family
has farmed, worked
in private business, as do I, taught in the schools,  been anti-Union
city managers and business leaders.  As my grandfather used to
say, liberal Democrats are those who are trying to make it while
Conservative Republicans are those who have and are trying to hold
the other's back.   The startling history of the rise of
African-Americans
in a single generation after the fall of segregation, certainly makes
a fool and a liar out of all of those who blamed them for their failure
in segregated society. Any group that has become
so successful
in areas where they are truly allowed to compete would indicate superiority
rather than the reverse but logic and reason are not the tools here
although they are claimed by the descendants of those early slave
owners.
I'm a very practical man Harry.  I'm only interested in what works
and what has happened in those places where people tried the theories.
Agitprop is nothing but annoying to me.  Did it work and where
is
the data?   America and European culture has done some very
fine things in the world, mostly for themselves and against others
but the Art of Europe is the one contribution to world life that has
no drawbacks.   Everything else has been used to violate
other
peoples.
In each world group there have been things that  they have done
that benefits us all.   J.S. Bach needed German Paternalism
to
raise his 20 kids while he wrote his music and Palestrina's
patron murdered millions who didn't agree or who were old with a
bad case of acne, but the art didn't validate the patron anymore
than the art was an expression of the patron's murderous impulses.
I give credit for the art and I am grateful.   Any system
held too
long or grown too big is ridiculous and serves as a dam that will
eventually be swept away by the environment.   I believe
that
we must have the good sense and critical judgment to get beyond
the doctrinaire and to see as much of the whole of things as
is
possible while creating a humane and tolerant culture,
environment and future.   I have little time for those who
explain
away the failures of their system and Messiahs, wherever they
have been tried, with the excuse that it was poorly executed
and
that trying harder is the answer.
For example,  think we should accept that there were good things
that came from Stalin as well as murder.  Today there is plenty
of murder and oppression in Russian prisons worse than under
Communism but blame is spread around with no one villain to
focus on.  That doesn't make it right, just convenient and easy
to exploit by pathological individuals.   It is not surprising
that those
who know the territory, i.e. former communists, are the best exploiters.
If State Communism had existed in a vacuum and lasted as long
as the other Western International Universalistic theories,  they
would have lied about their past, just as America, the church
and all of the others have lied about theirs, pointed to their ideals
and become the "saviors" of the world.   Doesn't mean it
was true
anymore than for the Christians, Moslems or the European version
of Democracy.   Communism failed because it couldn't compete
with an older more advanced system existing in a more comfortable
ecological niche in an encreasingly technological age where they
couldn't hide behind their curtin of weapons.
America succeeded because it was more seperated age and the Brits
couldn't intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing here in the way that
Clinton
did in Kosovo and Bosnia.  George Washington's name amongst the
Iroquois
means "Destroyer of Villages."    The invention of the
murderous
Hunter/Gatherer pillager comes from Lewis Cass, Thomas Jefferson's
apologist and Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War.  It is an invention
of his experience and a projection of his imagination.  "They
may have
been great once but they are now degenerate and deserve to die." 
A
sentiment echoed by "Wizard of Oz" author L. Frank Baum  fifty
years later in his comment on his approval of the massacre at Wounded
Knee even as he lamented the loss of life amongst the soldiers who
murdered the women and children on Christmas.  
All of which is to say once more.  If you control the history and
define
the information that may enter the argument, then you can prove anything.
Ask President Bob Jones of Bob Jones University.  His world is
complete.
But completely wrong.
 
REH
 
 
Harry Pollard wrote:
Ray,

Re: NY POST on US Statistics ruse

[Ray E. Harrell]

Good to see you back.

Ray

Steve Kurtz wrote:

> I couldn't quickly determine which date this appeared, but it seems
> recent.
>
> Steve
>
> CPI REPORT DID NOT
> INCLUDE ENERGY COSTS
> By JOHN CRUDELE
> NY POST
>
> Did Washington eliminate the rising price of oil from
> the last Consumer Price Index?
>
> If you have a car, you know that the price of gasoline
> has beaten up the family budget in recent months.
> Homeowners who heat with oil haven't missed that point
> either. In fact, the fear is that every industry from
> airlines to the makers of widgets will try to pass on
> their energy-cost increases to consumers in the months
> ahead.
>
> [snip]
>
> See the rest at http://www.nypost.com/business/25545.htm

Re: The Bill of Gates fallacy

[Ray E. Harrell]

Well, it had to come to this when the road was taken by the West that
relations with an object as a physical extension of the slave was the
meaning of life rather than the growth of consciousness.  Poor Maslow
got the credit due to the fact that his Western readers saw his diagram
as steps rather than concentric circles in time.So Mr. Gates is just
the latest version of work for objects sake rather than for the evolution
of the mind and soul.

I'm sure that he considers his work as worthwhile as any you might
devise.  The problem is that real personal work (work for its own sake)
is considered play while the manipulation of the environment is the only
"work" there is.  As long as you believe that you deserve Gates and the
rest. Maybe we should call it the "Future of Play".

REH

Christoph Reuss wrote:

> Tom Walker quoted
> >   MR. GATES: Well, part of the lesson of economics is that there are
> >   infinite demands for jobs out there, as long as you want class sizes
> >   to be smaller, or entertainment services to be better, there's not a
> >   lump of labor where there's a finite demand for a certain number of
> >   jobs. And so, as efficiency changes, such as in food production, the
> >   jobs shifted to manufacturing. As efficiencies were gained there,
> >   those jobs moved into services. In fact, there's no shortage of things
> >   that can be done. So, it's not like we're going to run out of jobs here.
>   ^
> Yes, indeed the "qualities" of M$ products are maximising the amount of work
> for PC supporters, network administrators, technical writers (vast manuals!),
> PC course teachers, hardware manufacturers (HW "arms race" to cope with the
> SW's resource wasting), and most of all, "end users".  How all this _surplus_
> work (that would be UNnecessary with decent software) should be _paid_, is a
> different question (especially for the "end users"!), and this question
> doesn't seem to bother Mr. Gates (as in the quote above).
>
> The statement that "there's no shortage of things that can be done" is
> trivial and quite crucial in the field of environmental work, but the
> "multi-million dollar question" is always:  How can it be funded ?
>
> How sad that all the billions that are being wasted for inefficient M$
> products and its bugs/viruses/crashes  are lacking in environmental work
> that would be so much more urgent.
>
> Chris
>
> 
> "The problem (and the genius) regarding Microsoft's products is bloat.
>  Microsoft's penchant for producing overweight code is not an accident.
>  It's the business model for the company ... While [bloatware has] made
>  Bill Gates the world's richest guy, it's made life miserable for people
>  who have to use these computers and expect them to run without crashing
>  or dying."  -- John Dvorak, PC Magazine

Re: Fw: One Country Two worlds [more than 2...]

[Ray E. Harrell]

It is because I admire Brad that I continue this and he
may answer what I say but I can speak only from my own
perceptions in my work and life and the experience of
those perceptions.    So here goes but I cannot continue
the discussion beyond this post.
Ray
"Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
(snip) If Ray is disturbed by my denigration of
unreflected life in all its forms (what I
intentionally provocatively call: "ethnic formations"), (snip)
Actually I am disturbed by what you expressed.
As the poet Jerome Rothenberg has said on many
occasions, "there is no culture or people that has
survived by twiddling their thumbs and speaking
in half-formed thoughts."  A good case can be made
for that belief as a left over piece of 19th century
Utilitarian thought that was used to justify aggression.
Edward T. Hall had to train that attitude out of the American
Diplomats and businessmen because they were in
danger of failure in both areas.   The multi-linguistic
future on the internet puts us all in danger if we see
ourselves "above" ethnicity rather than a part of it.
 
I can only say that I hope I made it clear that 
my

critique is not aimed at "primitive peoples"

but at everything which is *primitive* (i.e.,
not radically grounded in self-accountable
reflective reconstruction of all that which
merely is given) -- wherever it occurs. (snip)

Nothing is primitive in that sense.  Just relative to
its place in time/space and its growth structure.
Primitive more accurately means Primal but to
me it is a fake issue.  I never met a primitive but
I have met provincials and ignorance.
 
Neither will it do to reply to this that: "Everyone
makes
mistakes."  Galilean natural science, Hegelian dialectic
and Husserlian phenomenological reflection are all
self-grounding projects for [albeit iteratively and
asymptotically] overcoming error in every aspect
of life.
The books of C. Castenada caused a stir a while back
because no one wanted to admit that the people, he
claimed taught him, existed.  Don Juan was compared
to Husserl and as one scientist said to me, "If these
people exist then we have committed a monstrous
three hundred years."    Well I believe  the books
are
fake but the beginning of any young Shaman's instruction
is "be observant!" and "put your feet where no one else
has stepped."    My teachers were far more reflective,
artistic and outrageous than Castenada's stories.  They
also dealt with some of the nation's greatest scientists
both Newtonian and Quantum from a place of equals.
They were neither afraid of science nor worshiped it.
They also had a healthy believe in the evolution of
consciousness but in much too complicated a way to
consider one cultural universe more important than
another.
 
That the 17th Century Chinese recognized in
Galilean natural science "something new, because true for
everyone who took the effort to learn it", and not just
true for those childreared to believe it (--Joseph Needham),
seems to me to lead to one of two possibilities: (1) The
Chinese understood that *their own limited form of life* was
superseded by the Universality of Science, or (2) That the

Chinese are just like "The West" and so their
admiration for
Science just proves they aren't "real peoples" any more
than the Jesuits who brought Galilean science
to them
Jerome Rothenberg spent several years with the Iroquois
studying the poetry contained within their everyday life and
the ceremonials.   From that point on he concluded that most
of the Indigenous people's he worked with were "Technicians
of the Sacred" and far more subtle and complicated than the
Jesuits whose rigidity made science seem both universal and
profound.    How could you compare the Chinese language
with its tones and subtleties as well as the calligraphy to such
"limited" forms as most Western languages and science?
Europe has its genius and science is just another adolescent
in its history.  Its genius is in its art.  More about that
later.
Finally, there is Margaret Mead's _New Lives for
Old_,
and a recent report in the NYT of one traditional culture
in Africa, where the elders have undertaken a
thoroughgoing inventory of their traditional culture,
to see what parts of it are still viable and which
are not worth preserving (e.g., ritual genital
mutilation of children).
Another shamanic rule is that one must always know
the past while living in the present and manifesting the
future.  It's in the language.  (check out Benjamin Lee
Whorf and his exploration of the Pueblo verbs).   Of
course we are not all the same.    Cherokees were
wonderful at language, science and business in the
19th century.  It was our success that created the
envy that destroyed what writers at the time were
calling an "American Athens."   I don't know much
about Africa, they have little problem speaking for
themselves these days.
 
I see these developments as
somewhat similar to our recently having
taught some apes to speak (ASL, etc.):

I'm not sure where you are going here but 

Re: Fw: One Country Two worlds [more than 2...]

[Ray E. Harrell]

 
"Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
(snip)
.) Robert Musil's vision of a world in which "mystical experience"
would be rescued from the muddled hocus-pocus of fuzzy feelings
and [what *would* Musil have thought of these folks?!]
new-Age-ers, et al., etc. -- and "the mystical"
realized by each of us at the center
of the most exact technological work (which thereby would
at last discover its *heart*) is only one of the great "dreams"
(I am referring here esp. to Husserl's sad statement
from the late "30s"...) of the 20th century, which is
"over" only in the sense that we have not yet
even begun to take it up, and, in trying to realize it,
to *test it out*. (snip)
The most advanced sectors of
"The West" still, in my estimation, remain largely
in the thralldon of unreflected ethnicity.  The Egyptean
elevator operator says his traditional prayer to
Allah the merciful.  A Harvard or Wharton Tech.
diplomate investment banker says his equally
traditional prayers to "commercial paper" and
Professional Football.
 
And then there is the following article about the rest of
we ethnics whose practicality is buried so deep that the
rest of the world considers it superstition and screws it up in
the argument about the future without understanding the
past.    Might the elevator operator and the banker
be
both  "Johnny Come Latelys" in the world praying to
an image of their own reflection.   To bad Freud didn't
really have the guts to get it beyond his own Viennese
prejudice.  Narcissism and Idolatry are sisters except
he was too embarrassed by his tradition and desire to
be accepted in a racist society, to say so.   Don't
throw away the old until you understand it and have
something better to put in its place.
Meanwhile I'm listening to someone who didn't blow
it but understood the Viennese better than they did
themselves.  Gustav Mahler and his Resurrection
Symphony conducted by another Jewish fellow
who was also Gay.  Leonard Bernstein.  But the
fundamentalists of every ilk would put him in jail
and some would have never had him be born.
Bernstein said that Tchaikovsky was forced to
drink the poison water by an aristocrat who was
insulted by his making a pass at him.  Well the
Mahler is great and it took him one afternoon to
do his analysis with Freud.   Today it takes people
years.   Don't give up chromatic harmony for
rock and roll, it can cost you millions in psycho-
analysis.   Know the old before you dream the
future.
I have a wonderful mezzo Darcy Dunn who is going
to perform the Mahler alto solos here in NYCity.
(4th movement Urlicht)
O Roeschen rot!
Der Mensch liegt in Groesster Not!
Der Mensch liegt in groesster Pein!
Je lieber Moecht ich im Himmel sein!
Da kam ich aug einen breiten Weg;
Da kam ein Engelein und wollt mich abweisen.
Ach nein! ich liess mich nicht abweisen!
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott!
Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben,
Wird leuchten mir bis in das ewig selig Leben!
What a pity that so many mistake their own teachers
and arrogance for Der liebe Gott.  If it works, it all
fits together.  If not then someone is wrong somewhere.
The mirror is a pretty good place to begin.
 
   
January 30, 2000  NYTimes Week in Review
  

Now the Ancient Ways Are Less Mysterious
   
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
   
Each June for at least the last four centuries, farmers in 12 mountain
   
villages in Peru and Bolivia follow a ritual that Westerners might think
   
odd, if not crazy. Late each night for about a week, the farmers
   
observe the stars in the Pleiades constellation, which is low on the horizon
   
to the northeast. If they appear big and bright, the farmers know to plant
   
their potato crop at the usual time four months later. But if the stars
are dim,
   
the usual planting will be delayed for several weeks.
   
Now Western researchers have applied the scientific method to
   
this seeming madness. Poring over reams of satellite data on
   
cloud cover and water vapor,  Professor Benjamin Orlove, an
   
anthropologist at the University of California at Davis, and
   
colleagues have discovered that these star-gazing farmers are
   
accurate long-range weather forecasters. High wisps of cirrus
   
clouds dim the stars in El Nino years, which brings reduced
   
rainfall to that part of the Andes.   In such drought conditions,
it
   
makes sense to plant potatoes as late as possible.
   
Orlove's work, which was reported in January in the British journal Nature,
is
   
just the latest example of indigenous or traditional knowledge that has
been
   
found to have a sound scientific basis. In agriculture, nutrition, medicine
and
   
other fields, modern research is showing why people maintain their
   
traditio

Re: capitalism and "health" care quality

[Ray E. Harrell]

I think this goes a little deeper.  Medicine like charity, theoretical
art,
scientific research and space exploration have a problem with profit.
The physical "worth" of the marketplace rarely accrues to the creator,
discoverer or practitioner of the profession.  An exception
being
surgeons in the current situation.    The economist
William Baumol
has been doing work on this problem and has not arrived at any
solution in the current free market.  It is the Achilles Heel
of Economie
of Scale and eventually leads to a revolution where the creative
practitioners are forced to destroy the system just to keep creativity
flowing.    If something is highly needed like surgery
or practical, like
the current technology for the information revolution then it works
for
a while but eventually the middle money men take over and the
process repeats.  Edgar Allen Poe wrote a humorous piece on it
in the 19th century with a name something like the "Strange Case
of Dr. Tarr and Mr. Feather" and likened it to a mental asylum.
REH
Christoph Reuss wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Harry Pollard wrote:
> Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists went to the Soviet Union
and
> for two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital doing,
I
> suppose, triage as they took patients from the multitude to operate
and
> save lives. I remember one comment from a US doctor. He couldn't
believe
> that the Head of Cardiology at the Moscow hospital got a salary of
$7 a
> week - about the same as a bus driver. A sure way to attract the
best
> people into medicine.
Harry obviously said this last sentence in jest, but it's actually true:
Giving doctors a small salary will attract the best people into medicine
--
those who become doctors to help and heal people, instead of those
who are
"in it for the money" (as in the West).  The still-increasing
excesses of
the medical-industrial complex in the West illustrate quite "well"
that
public health  and  profit-making   is rather *inversely*
related...
Chris
To quote from an earlier posting on this list:
>
> Report Says Profit-Making Health Plans Damage Care
>
> July 14, 1999
> WASHINGTON -- Patients enrolled in profit-making health insurance
plans
> are significantly less likely to receive the basics of good medical
care --
> including childhood immunizations, routine mammograms, pap smears,
> prenatal care, and lifesaving drugs after a heart attack -- than
> those in not-for-profit plans, says a new study that concludes that
the
> free market is "compromising the quality of care."
> The research, conducted by a team from Harvard University and Public
> Citizen, an advocacy group in Washington, is the first comprehensive
> comparison of investor-owned and nonprofit plans. The authors found
that
> on every one of 14 quality-of-care indicators, the for-profits scored
worse.
> "The market is destroying our health care system," Dr. David U. Himmelstein,
> associate professor of medicine at Harvard University Medical School
[...]

Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...

[Ray E. Harrell]

Good point.  I believe that Mike Hollinshead was the first to point
this out to me.  I think that it will take a correlation of all of the
external factors with requisite comparisons before serious conclusions
can be drawn.  Of course if you define the parameters you can
prove almost anything by virtue of what you leave out.

One of the
things that is often left out of the Com/Cap comparison between the
U.S. and the old Soviet Empire is the weather.  They didn't suffer for
want of oil but it was a hell of a lot easier to get it out of almost any
of our fields than it is out of Siberia.

Agriculture is another point.
lf your growing season is short you need tremendous amounts of
land to compete with those who can plant many crops in a small
amount of land.And on and on.

My point is that in areas where
we are roughly equivalent like education, we have gotten our behinds
whipped.

The Arts are another area even though the official dogma
is that they were pampered,  anyone who knows their refugees
finds the opposite is true although they are magnificently trained and
have far superior work experience since they did have work before
the collapse of the Soviet.

American graduates who paid for their
own education have an average full time employment of 2%.   They
also lose out to the émigrés because of the superior work experience
that they bring to America.  That makes the competitive advantage
overwhelming in their ability to be creative, improvise and invent
new models.

If you have no work experience, your creativity is
profoundly impaired as most of America's performing artists have
discovered.  Those who have succeeded usually have European
experience to replace America's cultural poverty.

William Bradford Ward wrote:

> HARRY: Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists went to the Soviet Union and for 
>two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital doing, I suppose, triage as 
>they took patients from the multitude to operate and save lives. I remember one 
>comment from a US doctor. He couldn't believe that the Head of Cardiology at the 
>Moscow hospital got a salary of $7 a week - about the same as a bus driver. A sure 
>way to attract the best people into medicine.
>
> I couldn't let Harry's comment go unnoticed although I really am not interested in 
>the communist/capitalist argument but do have problems with people who use irrelevant 
>arguments to make their point.
>
> At a meeting of the American Heart Association one year a bunch of cardiovascular 
>surgeons said that the reason that there had been a 30% drop in cardiovascular deaths 
>in the previous ten years was that open heart surgery was up 30% in the same period.  
>A biostatistician friend of mine got up after that and showed that beer consumption 
>was up 30% in the same period and said that it was truly the increase in beer 
>drinking.
>
> By the way, no one has ever been able to show any relationship between health 
>services in the US [except for immunizations] and improvement in health [except for 
>the health of health care workers].
>
> ---
> Bill Ward, MA, MPH, DrPH
> Research Director
> Arthritis Research Institute of America
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2000 13:32:24   Harry Pollard wrote:
> >Victor wrote:
> >
> >>I am by no means a communist or socialist, but this looks like
> >>propaganda-sriven tunnel vision to me. Comments follow.
> >
> >I rarely find a genuine communist or socialist. Lots of waffling liberals,
> >but hardly any genuinely philosophic communists, or socialists. It's a shame.
> >
> >Meantime, you did not answer a single point in my post.
> >
> >You said:
> >
> >VICTOR: "There were most certainly inequities with high party officials
> >living in
> >luxury and ordinary people living very humbly in crowded apartments. (By the
> >way what's the difference in life-style between a US senator and your
> >average Washington, DC resident?)"
> >
> >HARRY: The Ukraine after the separation was landed with a dacha of a high
> >party official. The story appeared in the newspapers because they were
> >trying to get rid of it. They couldn't afford the $300,000 a year it cost
> >to maintain it.
> >
> >Yep! There certainly were inequities.
> >
> >But the USSR was a classless society - remember? The "to each" and "from
> >each" nonsense - remember? Meantime, Senators like other politicians all
> >over the world lead the good life as they "serve us".
> >
> >VICTOR: "However, medical care was universally available and pensioners
> >could live without financial anxiety. This is not the case after a decade
> >of US-driven free enterprise in Russia. For another communist country,
> >Cuba, I read recently that the infant mortality rates are less than in the
> >USA."
> >
> >HARRY: Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists went to the Soviet
> >Union and for two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital
> >doing, I suppose, triage as they took patients from the multitude to
> >operate and save li

Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...

[Ray E. Harrell]

My apologies to the list for not being able to punch the
spellcheck button on the last two posts.   It's the Neurontin.
Makes me woozy but fun.

Ray

Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...

[Ray E. Harrell]

I know this is yours Victor but:  Also Sally where is my post where
I
answered point counterpoint Harry's questions?    Meanwhile---
Harry Pollard wrote:
Victor wrote:
>I am by no means a communist or socialist, but this looks like
>propaganda-sriven tunnel vision to me. Comments follow.
I rarely find a genuine communist or socialist. Lots of waffling
liberals,
but hardly any genuinely philosophic communists, or socialists.
It's a shame.
Meantime, you did not answer a single point in my post.
Yes he did Harry,  he answered the two that he chose to answer.
 
VICTOR: "There were most certainly inequities with
high party officials
living in
luxury and ordinary people living very humbly in crowded apartments.
(By the
way what's the difference in life-style between a US senator and your
average Washington, DC resident?)"
HARRY: The Ukraine after the separation was landed with a dacha of
a high
party official. The story appeared in the newspapers because they
were
trying to get rid of it. They couldn't afford the $300,000 a year
it cost
to maintain it.
Yep! There certainly were inequities.

The problem Harry is that you wish to set the rules of engagement
and they
are loaded in your favor.  You have your anecdotes and all we
do is trade
anecdotes from our own experience.  You are selling Georgism as
your
business and that shapes your point of view.  Nothing wrong with
that but
you have not thus far dealt with the practicalities and you sound more
like
a common run of the mill neo libertarian conservative to me.
Or if it was in the time of George you would have been called a Moss-back
Liberal the kind that claimed the Cherokees were Georgists and broke
the contracts, destroyed our government, decided how much land each
of
us should have then opened what was left (most of it) to a huge land
rush
where the whites could stake out as much as they could before the day
was over, (certainly more than the 160 acres they gave us.)  But
here is the problem.  Nothing stands still, the terms constantly
shift and
Republicans today sound like Jackson and Democrats sound like Lincoln,
and as Klugman pointed out in today's NYTimes, Clinton has acted like
a supply side economist.   How very liberal of him.  
The point seems to be
that liberality means that one can move and that conservative means
that
one is stuck in the mud.  Tough!
But the USSR was a classless society - remember?
The "to each" and "from
each" nonsense - remember? Meantime, Senators like other politicians
all
over the world lead the good life as they "serve us".

But the crucial difference ala my lost post, is that they could
not pass their
wealth on to their children.
Where is Eva when we need her?   Is this silence her "Marxist
revenge"?
HARRY: Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists
went to the Soviet
Union and for two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital
doing, I suppose, triage as they took patients from the multitude to
operate and save lives.
Ah the old triage story.  Perhaps you should talk to Paul Robeson
or at
least read his experience with the two medical systems.  I had
a teacher
who also had a good experience when she had a medical issue in Moscow.
And then there are all of those stories about Western Medicine from
the
point of view of all of the other medical practices of the world. 
It seems
everyone wants to be on top.  Missionaries every one of them. 
What a
bore!  Meanwhile they can't deal with Chronic Fatigue except to
deny its
existance and send you to the psychiatrist.  You should have heard
the
story about that building Sloan Kettering owns where everyone was coming
down with Chronic Fatique.  They called them (bugga bugga) sick
buildings
but denied the people were sick just the buildings.  People have
to work
you know, otherwise they are welfare cheats. (said in jest)
 
I remember one comment from a US doctor. He
couldn't believe that the Head of Cardiology at the Moscow hospital
got a
salary of $7 a week - about the same as a bus driver. A sure way
to attract
the best people into medicine.

Right and the only reason anyone excels is their salary?  How
about curiosity
and the desire to accomplish things? 
Did those Doctors have food, clothing
and shelter?    How about laboratories and other research
facilities?    They
were poor in US machines but the US has been terrible in preventive
health
as well. Something the Russians have shown
many Americans how to
do well.
Yes Harry the top paid profession in the US is the Medical profession
whether
their patient dies or lives.    No wonder they are lobbying
against keeping a
government data base on success and failure in the hospital system.
"But she NEEDED that hysterectomy!"
I also wonder whether the millions of "officials"
in the communist
hierarchy used that hospital - or perhaps they had an inequity somewhere,
fully over-staffed and without the problems the common folk suffered.
I don't know, they sure complained about the lost time spent in having
to ride
p

Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...

[Ray E. Harrell]

 
Harry Pollard wrote:
One major warning! Socialism and Communism and their
spin-offs have proven
themselves to be hopeless at increasing production. The international
conferences to "solve the problems" are loaded who want to "provide
proper
services".
 
Hello Harry,
Long time no read but you are still beating the same horse.  Actually
the
refugees from the former communist countries are so well trained that
they
are doing just fine once they were allowed to take their training and
intellectual
capital and run away to the older and more advanced economies. 
But all is
not well here.
USA Today pointed out last Wednesday on their front page that America's
computer companies are creating their own Berlin
walls around their hired and company trained help.  Sound familiar?
"Mr. Gates tear down that wall!"  
Like the stores filled with communist fashions on 34th street in NYCity,
fashions that were considered junk when the old Soviet Union existed
are
now high fashion.  It's all just politics, hypocrisy and whoever
has the
media and money.    Communism, like Capitalism has huge
problems
but the problems bear little resemblance to either side's rhetoric.
Otherwise American business and Republican Congressman wouldn't
be sounding like apparatchiks when it comes to facing the same
problems that an ulcerous Berlin was in the 1950s before their bloody
wall.   Do I think that American businesses would do the
same (with
guards and all) if they could, you bet.  Read how Truman applied
the
same person and process to the Indian problem as had worked with
the Japanese in world war II in Chief Wilma Mankiller's biography.
America didn't win the cold war we just spent the East's  young
nations
broke and now are in the process of being locked out by the intellectual
capital of their refugees.
And then there is their so called "non creative" artists.  Anyone
who believes
that should get a life, that crap will just make them seem foolish
before their
children who will be taught by the refugees in every school from k-conservatory.
My daughter's favorite acting teacher (who is Russian Jewish ) is taking
his
most proficient students to Russia next year to study Stanislavsky
techniques.
What most people complain about in both Communism and Capitalism is
really culture and convention and is older than both systems. 
One should
sit down and have a read in literature that pre-dates both.  Discussions
about "interest" for example in Roman Catholic literature of the middle
ages.
Or have a read in the Nicene and Anti-Nicene Fathers.  There is
little that is
new in the present.  Digitalized libraries and decent search engines
will be
the real revolution of the 21st century.    It will
decimate the book industry
as old rehashed ideas in new form are considered the banal trash that
they are.    Politicans will be shown to have switched
sides many times
and ignorance and banality will be shown for what it is, mere commercial
entertainment.  That will be the real test of Capitalism. 
What constitutes
real change and expansion?
 
We had better learn that the stories of the last 150 years here and
70
years in the Eastern bloc were mostly hype and that a nation filled
with good
weather and a huge reservoir of natural resources with 200 years of
stability
against a group of nations that were barely seven decades old coming
from
below third world status was never a fair contest.  That it was
a contest at
all speaks very highly for these 20th century systems.   
That they were
violent, murderous and lied constantly is not something that I would
consider new.  The lead pollution that I carry in my bones and
the problems
experienced by the children on my reservation even today show 
the
hypocrisy of both sides and the foolish resistance of those who are
being
ignored, and exploited, to demanding recompense.
If  America doesn't learn to read and be honest about their history,
the rest
of the world will (as scholars at Oxford are doing about pre-columbian
forest
technology in America) and show us for the provencial fools that we
are
turning out to be.
REH

Re: 2. Re: FW: The structure of future work and itsconsequences

[Ray E. Harrell]

 
Keith Hudson wrote:
I disagree here. If you were selecting for resourcefulness
alone, yes. But
the basic elements of a techno-culture, like all culture, is laid down
so
early in a child's life, that street kids wouldn't have a chance of
establishing a toehold in a high-tech society. However, if our increasingly
high-tech society collapses -- and that's always a possibility to bear
in
mind -- then the 'other' population of highly resourceful people (if
it
then existed) would certainly have a better chance of surviving.

I disagree on this issue.  Take my Steinway piano for example.  
I bought 100
shares of stock in a company at two dollars a share and sold them six
years
later, added $5,000 of my Mother's money to the $10,000 from the stock
and
bought a "slightly used" Steinway which the company told me was fine. 
It
wasn't and after two years of haggling and four pianos I ended up with
a new
$30,000 piano as settlement for my trouble.  The company valued
its reputation
and dealt with me as a part of their consumer capital.   
But it was not the
IQ folks in the company who knew how to deal with their consumer base. 
It
was the artists and technicians who came from all walks of life but
mostly,
like Beethoven, from the lower and lower middle classes.
Why did I buy the stock?    The President was a Jewish
friend of mine who
was making optical parts for the space program.    I
say Jewish because his
father, in a small village in Russia, fell on his son to protect him
as the Nazis
shot them.  My friend, who was five years old, crawled out and
escaped into
the winter forest.    From that time till the end of
the war he was a child
resistance fighter carrying a 38 pistol and living in the forest. 
After the war
he and the other wild children were shipped to Israel where the Jewish
authorities cared for them.  Emphasize cared.   The
taught them that they
were the future of Judiasm and that they must live and become but they
did not take their guns away.   Eventually, when they felt
safe, they gave
them up.  They were re-united with the remnants of their families,
in my
friends case, his mother and brother, and they moved to NYCity. 
My
friend worked the streets and learned English in the movies. 
He also
studied hard and earned a PHD in physics from City College.  He
made
mistakes but eventually this former Jewish countryboy turned freedom
fighter, made one of the most significant scientific discoveries, having
to
do with Time, of the space program.  I don't mention his name
because
he has never been a public soul and I will respect that.
But let me say this.  The most significant people that I know have
come
from the lower middle and lower classes and still do.  As for
British schools,
perhaps the problem is their curriculum and its practicallity. 
That is a
rather common problem for "Education of Scale."    That
is also the reason
for a successful "home school" movement in the USA.  Unfortunately
the
social skills necessary for networking are not learned in private lessons
but need the "banging of heads" that is only found in the school environment.
I suspect that it is a lot like singing.  I never met a voice I
couldn't train.  There
are many who claim "tone-deaf" disabilities but if the time, money
and desire
is there anyone can learn to sing and read. 
But that does not mean that
anyone can learn to sing in a chorus.   "Mass produced music" 
requires that
the learning already have taken place and the using ready to begin.  
Being
able to sing changes one's life.  If it doesn't then the growth
stops and the
limitations of the singer's mentality destroys the talent.  We
call it having the
"fire in the belly."   Most don't, but sometimes  societies
suffer from the same
loss of heart or visceral intelligence as well.   Like the
"end of government"
folks who would give up their freedom and vote to a TNC.
IMHO it all
depends on the society's courage, tenacity and willingness to put up
with the
changes that takes place when education is successful.  
Real education tears
down the weak and the unprepared even in educational institutions. 
It also
doesn't tolerate rigid fools.   But most of all it costs
much more than can ever
be planned or budgeted.  It is rare that there is the courage
to practice it
even though the survival of a society and culture is what's at stake.
I notice that the "well schooled" are better at networking than the
lower
classes and the poor but this could be laid to more resource capital
in
their own class.    What I don't see in this upper IQ
group,  is a
committment to genuine freedom and unique discoveries unless it is
found in an institution.
I didn't learn
much about institutions on the Indian reservation but I did learn that
freedom can be lost and uniqueness is a value above all monetary
"worth."  So I never was and still am not a very institutional
soul although
many of my more civilized upper class colleagues are.  I don't
escribe
utlimate value to one or the other although I d

Re: Einstein: Time's man of the century [China]

[Ray E. Harrell]

You're welcome Ed.  Just a few further thoughts.
Ray
Ed Goertzen wrote:
==Ed G said:
Many thanks to Ray for his detailed answer.
 (snip)
Ed said; I have to agree with Kazantzakis. In an excellent book by David
Astle "Babalonian Woe" (Copyright 1975) he traces
the causes of conflicts
from the time of Summerian dominance and attributes them to  the
infectious
anomaly of monetary systems.

I tend to think that it had more to do with literacy.  Literacy
freed the
memory and allowed for communication over distances in a general
fashion.  This created the first "information of scale" if I may
paraphrase
the economists.
 
Ed continued:
=The jacket quote is enlightening. "The intellectual faculties
however are not of themselves sufficient to produce external action;
they
require the aid of physical force, the direction and combination of
which
are wholly at the disp[oasal of money, that mighty spring by which
the
total force of human energies is set in motion. [Augustus Boeckh;
Translated: The Public Economy of Athens, P, 7; Book 1, London 1828.
Money as a symbol or substitute for an object or effort was and is tied
to
literacy.
 
I said:
Einstein made the same point, more politely, in his
essay. I think you
could ask what "needs" the Europeans "had" that made them finally use
the
printing press, an earlier import that sat
for a good while before Europe broke forth with books for the common
man.
You could also remember the problem with the first Millennium being
that
the Spanish Catholics didn't understand zero or Al Jabaar until they
had
expelled the Moors and the Jews just prior to the 1500s and translated
their books.
Ed replied: I would question the "needs" to which Einstein refers. My contention
continues to be that, while the printing press "sat
for a good while" it
was only when its use as a means of excercising power over peoples
minds,
thereby "moving" them, was realised, that it came into popular usage.
(i.e.
it obtained the financial backing that popularised it employment.)
That is not my understanding.    I believe it was tied to
the trauma of the loss of
oral information through the plagues and the fragility of the existing
libraries
written by hand and subject to fire. 
Even in the 20th century the Steinway
Piano company used the same logic to build the manual from the information
contained in the minds of their individual craftsmen.   
Two generations later, the
families of those craftsmen are still pissed off about the theft of
their grandfather
secret knowledge.  Value went from people to process and the people
were
then downgraded to hired hands from irreplaceable experts.   
The piano has
never been the same since certain information simply is not literary. 
But the
printing press and later the computer did protect the written information
by
dissemination.
Ray continues:
After expelling the above there was ample reason to get these violent
and
disruptive folks out of the country and into some safe activity like
murdering the Inca for gold to cover the ballrooms
of Europe.  But,  I think it is a mistake to mislabel the
intent as profit.
No one wanted Cortez or Pizarro around in Spain.
Ed answers:I see that as making my point. It is not neccessarily the
invention
that is either good or bad for humanity. It is the (profit) purpose
to
which the invention (new idea etc.) can be put in terms of geopolitics.

I tend to think that culture and the external world shapes our perceptions
and options but I think we can control those through manipulation of
the
external.    I agree that something can be either good
or bad but my examples
were of two very violent and pathological personalities who anti-social
acts
made their own countries glad to have them abroad.
(snip) As I pointed out:
The violence behind the ethnic cleansing, that had taken 700 years of
constant  warfare, lent itself to conquest and Empire.  
The bankers were
the economic structure of choice but certainly not the motivation
or the
intent for all of that murder and pillage that spread around the world,
including China, by the Hunter/Gatherers from the Europe of the time.
(See the NYReview of Books URL mentioned later.)
Ed continues: Without trade we could not have progressed beyond the
family
stage into the extended and tribal stage of social organization. (in
fact,
even within families trade takes place, albeit without the monetary
accounting practices.) At the time of Summerian acendance "money" as
an
intrinsic value for purposes of trade already was well established
within
and between city states.

There was trade in the Americas from the tip of Tierra del fuego
to the
arctic but various things were used instead of "money"  i.e. cacao
beans,
wampum, quetzal feathers etc.   The market in Tenochtitlan
was the
largest in the world at the time.   They were also a violent
people but
it had little to do with money, profit or capital in the sense that
we think
of it today.   Cortez remarked that they had "thought him
a

Re: Einstein: Time's man of the century

[Ray E. Harrell]

 
Brad said:
Needham's orienting
question was: Why, when China was in many ways more
advanced than Europe even in the 1500s, did Europe "take
off" but China remained in feudalism?  His answer,
which he did not like, was that Capitalism seems
to have been the engine which drove not just
the West's economic exploitation of the whole world,
but also the great flowering of genuine
Enlightenment in the West.
 
When Kazantzakis wrote out the "story" to explore these questions in
Odysseus a 20th Century Sequel he came up with the answer that
it
was war that did it.
"I praise you Helen for your heaving thighs that lit in slothful men
a
raging war that opened minds and widened seas."
Einstein made the same point, more politely, in his essay.
I think you could ask what "needs" the Europeans "had" that made
them finally use the printing press, an earlier import that sat
for a good while before Europe broke forth with books for the common
man.   You could also remember the problem with the first
Millennium
being that the Spanish Catholics didn't understand zero or Al Jabaar
until they had expelled the Moors and the Jews just prior to the
1500s and translated their books. 
After expelling the above there was ample reason to get
these violent and disruptive folks out of the country and into some
safe activity like murdering the Inca for gold to cover the ballrooms
of Europe.  But,  I think it is a mistake to mislabel the
intent as profit.
No one wanted Cortez or Pizarro around in Spain.  The same could
be said for Ceasar and Rome.  Better that they fight "out there."
See what happened when he stayed home too long!    If
El Cid
had lived, he would have been off to America in no time at all.
The violence behind the ethnic cleansing, that had taken 700 years
of constant  warfare, lent itself to conquest and Empire.  
The bankers
were the economic structure of choice but certainly not the motivation
or the intent for all of that murder and pillage that spread around
the
world, including China, by the Hunter/Gatherers from the Europe of
the time.   (See the NYReview of Books URL mentioned later.)
As to Needham, the real question for me and my tradition,  is why
a
"sedentary China" is considered less advanced than a predatory Europe?
Braudel not withstanding, the Europeans allied their businesses with
their Navies and in China's case made today's drug cartels look positively
virginal.    The trade routes of Gengis were no more
violent than the
opening of Hong Kong.   The case has been made that the Hordes
that
so traumatized Europe were actually more beneficial, and liberal in
their
tolerance of all but fealty issues, than the Spanish and Brits on any
level in their Empires.   Again Einstein makes the point:
"most of the major states
of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples
established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged
class of
the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of
the land
ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks.
The
priests, in control of education, made the class division of society
into a
permanent institution and created a system of values by which the
people
were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their
social
behavior."
This is pure European.  Gengis and his relatives enjoyed war but
treated
their subjects well and Gengis' Shamanism, even today, has a taboo
against predatory spiritual proselytization  (PBS History Channel
Series
on Gengis Khan and his Army, so this is not cutting edge heresy.)
I found the Einstein article gratifying on many different levels not
the
least being his justification for the Arts in the life of the society.
"Memory, the capacity to make combinations, the gift of oral
communication have made possible developments among human
beings which are dictated by biological necessities. Such developments
manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations;
in
literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works
of art.
This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence
his life and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting
can play
a part."
This is pure Herbert Read.  His Education Through Art made
the same
points but with a serious analysis of how it happened and what the
implications were for development of the young.  (Univ. of London
1941)
Read's work got him knighted and his many books on art and culture
were the stuff of intelligent conversation of the day.  
Education Through
Art was written while the country was at war with Hitler.
I wonder how both Needham and Einstein would
adjust their outlooks given the current environment?
An interesting "take" on this can be found in the archives of the
New York Review of Books website.  Below is the URL then search
for the article "Family Values."
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/archives.html
Dec 16, 1999 Robert Skidelsky: "Family Values"
    The House of Rothschild:
The W

Re: FW: The structure of future work and its consequences

[Ray E. Harrell]

It ain't necessarily so!

REH

Keith Hudson wrote:

> Happy New Year to all FWers. (I'm assuming that Futurework is operational
> now!) Here's something I wrote over the break and which will appear in a
> new type of Internet encyclopedia  starting in about a month
> ()
>
> -
>
> THE STRUCTURE OF FUTURE WORK AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
> Keith Hudson
>
> The structure of future employment will not be compatible with the
> distribution of talent
>
> --
>
> In human history there have been four distinctly different types of
> economies, each requiring different working structures, or intellectual
> inputs. The four phases are: 1. Hunter-Gatherer; 2. Peasant Agriculture; 3.
> Manufacturing Industry; 4. Post-industrial Service Society.
>
> 1. Hunter-gatherer. Homo sapiens emerged from primate origins several
> million years ago and became indistinguishably human at about 50,000 years
> ago. Most of man's food was collected by the females, but topped up with
> animal protein from the hunting expeditions of the males. Their daily life
> was perilous because predators could easily attack their primitive camps
> and hunting groups, and the unintelligent or incapable would be easily
> culled. By definition, the normal genetic distribution of abilities that
> man's predecessors had evolved over millions of years precisely matched the
> 'job structure' of early man.  For our purposes, this genetic distribution
> may be considered to be a diamond shape in which the abilities of the broad
> mass of the population lie across the widest part of the diamond, with
> decreasingly fewer people of much higher or lower abilities occupying the
> top and and bottom parts of the shape.
>
> 2. Peasant Agriculture: From the time when man had finally extinguished
> most slow-moving large game at around 10,000BC, he had to resort
> increasingly to settled agriculture. Generally, this required far less
> intelligence than hunting. However, the ability to store cereals and the
> development of metal products (including coinage) which then followed meant
> that wealth could be passed on within families and, from then onwards,
> society became dynastic and intensely hierarchical. The various civil and
> religious authorites ensured that the peasantry were well and truly
> conditioned to accept their role and not to develop their inborn abilities.
> While suppresion of this sort could be maintained for quite a long time
> within a hierarchical society it could not be maintained for ever. The bad
> fit between the distribution of abilities and the nature of
> work/opportunities and the subsequent tensions have been the cause of
> repeated strife and savagery in every agricultural civilisation from about
> 5,000BC until the present day.
>
> 3. Manufacturing Industry. The first successful long-term development of
> manufacturing industry from about 1700 onwards in Europe meant that the
> uneducated peasants were forced off the land and into the factories. Here,
> a higher skill level was necessary and many new skills had to be acquired.
> In addition, the industrial society required a considerable extension in
> the number of professional and academic jobs, and there were huge
> opportunities for able and enterprising individuals. The pyramidal
> structure of jobs of the previous agricultural era would no longer do. The
> requirements of industrial society were much more akin to the
> diamond-shaped distribution of abilities and, generally speaking,
> industrial societies have been somewhat more peaceful than the wars and
> revolutions that characterise peasant societies.
>
> 4. Post-Industrial Service society. Since about the middle of the 20th
> century, the types of industry which needed large numbers of workers of
> average abilities have seriously declined. Automation, plus an even faster
> growth of brand new service occupations, means that people with high
> abilities are at a premium. At the same time, there is a considerable
> dumbing down of many traditional service jobs.  The job structure in the
> developed countries is thus rapidly becoming more akin to an hourglass
> rather than a pyramid or a diamond. The shape of an hour-glass is very
> different from that of the diamond. The mismatch betwen abilities and
> requirements will undoubtedly lead to renewed civil problems in developed
> countries and, as some aver, a widening gulf between two parts of the human
> population.
> 
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
> Tel: +44 1225 312622;  Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

Re: Microsoft cooperates with Scientology

[Ray E. Harrell]

Chris,

Are you serious about this?There are a lot of Scientologists in
the arts and I don't find them anymore of a problem than the regular
church groups with calls for public support in sending the poor to
parochial schools.Can Scientology be any worse than church abused
orphans of a generation ago in Quebec?Abuse where technology
meant for the insane was used on sane orphans to keep them in line?

If you want to complain about any one group with an agenda then you
have to, IMO, do the same about the rest as well.It is good to point it
out but I'm sure the NSA knows already and is in the business of making
everyone more paranoid about each other.So the point here is to
tell the story and remember that each group is busy trying to do the other
under.   The trick is to get out of the way of both elephants and hyenas.

REH



Christoph Reuss wrote:

> Microsoft cooperates with Scientology
> Experts suspect Trojan Horse in Windows 2000
>
>(Summary of an article in the renowned German computer magazine "c't",
> full article at http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/25/058/ )
>
> An integrated operating system component of Microsoft Windows 2000, the
> defragmentation program "Diskeeper", is made by a Scientology company.
> German data protection and security officials have expressed concerns
> that once Windows 2000 will be shipped, "Diskeeper" will have access to
> all data on the harddisks of government agencies, companies and citizens
> worldwide. The psycho cult Scientology is known for attempts to infiltrate
> key positions in industry and government, and has been involved in
> espionage cases.
>
> Replying to concerns, Microsoft wrote that it is not a Microsoft-specific
> problem if somebody can obtain access to the system [yeah, all virus
> programmers know this], and that customers could remove Diskeeper at
> any time by manually deleting its files and registry entries. However,
> computer experts found out that when a user tries to delete Diskeeper,
> another component of Windows 2000 immediately restores Diskeeper by using
> a cached copy. In other words, the Scientology component cannot be removed
> from Windows 2000.
>
> Since they don't intend to financially support Scientology and have their
> data snooped, German churches and government agencies now consider to
> boycott Windows 2000.
>
> __
> Scared of M$ ?  Lighten up at http://www.dumbentia.com/pdflib/exploder.pdf

Re: Not moving on very fast.

[Ray E. Harrell]

Been away at my Mother's funeral and had the opportunity to sit down and
read this conversation almost from beginning to end.

Yes Tim there is an excellent archive very easily accessed.

I followed each post with a kind of  admiration for the various positions
but basically it seems in my opinion to boil down to one premise.   A
premise that  is as true of "posts" as it was about my first sexual experience.

Over forty years ago an Elder told me the old "saw" about how many
people were going to be in bed together on that first encounter.

She stated that there were six.  The person I thought I was, the person I
thought
my mate to be and the person I really was.  The same was true of my mate as
well.

Since  that time I have, in my own work, determined that for every word there
are at
least three denotative and four connotative meanings.  In a seven word sentence

that makes the possible numbers of interpretations run seven to the seventh
power
and some say more.  Given my reservation math I can't dispute either way.  But
it all does seem quiet amazing that anything being written can be truly
interpreted
without constant redefining by the original writer as he is questioned  about
what
he meant to say.

That any of us did not "get it" is not a reflection on  anything other than the
fact
that we do not share his/her brain or experience and thus their unique
expressivity.
That makes questioning necessary unless we are going to be reduced to simple
pre-judgement.At another time we might discuss the root of stereotype and
convention as positives rather than as rhetoric but not tonight.

You may be just having "fun" but fun can sometimes be like putting graffiti on
windows
and then breaking them just to bust up the various group's reason for a
convention.
Then again you may be being severely misunderstood.  But either way it us up to
you
to say that, just as Ed did when you interpreted him with one of the several
thousand
possible meanings of his various combinations of morphemes.   Which brings up
another
cogent question written earlier by Arthur Cordell:

Is writing up to expressing what is truly meant without the added elements of
tone,
inflection, body language and rhythm that makes a singular interpretation
reasonable
most of the time?  I don't know.  But I am sure that given the various cultural
and
linguistic perspectives brought to this list, it can become hopeless chaos if
reduced to
chatting.

We each have to admit that the only person who knows what Ed meant
or even said is Ed himself.  Then it follows that we can demand the same
respect
for ourselves.Tit for Tat games are often played in academic circles and
happens
here as well.  The list knows I'm guilty, but zero/sum thought is not worth
much.  It
just causes the list to stop for a while and is very unsatisfying.   Primarily
because
it is not up to describing much of anything.

I apologize for going on about this but the word for "chat" is related, in my
background,
to "chatpile" which is a pile of "tailings" from the lead and zinc mines that
is so
chemically contaminated as to be useless for much of anything.   So when one
wants
to "chat" and when I use the word it has a visceral meaning in my life
experience,
since today I suffer from the results of that pollution (gained in childhood
play) in
my lungs and life expectancy.But who would know that was what I meant
unless
I told them my specific connotation?

In short, the "word" for me is respect BEFORE  you attack  AND have the ability
to ask questions
clearly and with intelligence in order to ascertain correct meaning.  That then
can be examined
and might even cause change and growth.

I gave you the respect  of reading all of the various
interactions before I entered this discussion.I am still unclear about your
intent.It seems about
"winning" rather than examining.  Lord knows I've gotten into it with Ed before
but this time I don't
get your point.How can what you have said bring change?Do you wish a
confession of the
accuracy of your reading from the original author?  He has said that what
you read and what he
meant was in conflict as have many others.It seems to me that he is the
authority on what he
wrote.

It also seems to me that his denial of your judgement means that either A) he
didn't say it
well or B) he is lying by his denial.   Neither seems correct because in A) the
rest of the list didn't
get your reading and B) since they got his "reading" a simple "no that is not
what I said or meant"
should be sufficient.Once that is said you should get on with the "meat" of
the discussion and
help the list in its learning. I believe that organizations (including
lists) have the ability to grow
as a consensus evolves.In fact the believe in that growth is only possible
reason I can ascertain
for writing to this or any other list at this time in my life.


Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble Inc.
[EMAIL 

Interesting test

[Ray E. Harrell]

http://www.selectsmart.com/

Here is a little site that tests your views on political issues.
Check it out.


REH

Re: FW: Re: torn

[Ray E. Harrell]

http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Esther_Dyson/ip_on_the_net.article

Mark R Measday wrote:

> (from the futurework list)
>
> Mr Harrell,
>
> Do you have the relevant URL?
>
> "Ray E. Harrell" wrote:on that
>
> > URL that I posted earlier, makes a point about value that is very much
> > in keeping with the mentality of TV and the defense industries.  Because
> > we cannot truly fund creativity, it makes more sense to give it away and
> > to fund the truly banal activities that everyone believes they need, like
> > advertising for example or $500 toilet seats on military aircraft.

Re: FW: Re: torn

[Ray E. Harrell]

This has been a wonderful conversation.  I would like to add my two
cents which is not much different but is some.   Esther Dyson on that
URL that I posted earlier, makes a point about value that is very much
in keeping with the mentality of TV and the defense industries.  Because
we cannot truly fund creativity, it makes more sense to give it away and
to fund the truly banal activities that everyone believes they need, like
advertising for example or $500 toilet seats on military aircraft.  Since the
bidding process makes them undervalue what is truly valuable and necessary
they charge for the common things or hide the charges in those areas.  Hence
the Congressional "expose's" that appear from time to time.

Dyson states the theory very neatly as she restates it for the internet and
especially computer software.

The only problem lies in the equation that says that value = financial worth,
and the reverse.

Such an equation elevates the banal and diminishes the truly unique aspects
of humanity.   Humanity is not to be found in banking or wall street but in the
great soaring work of the human spirit.  But that work is easily enjoyed by all
when accomplished.  It is difficult to charge a ticket for its enjoyment and have
its
remuneration equal  its cost.  Almost anyone can free ride on the public welfare
in these projects.   The internet as well as a mediocre product like a TV Sitcom
suffers from this same productivity problem.   It is advertisement that is
valuable
while the "drama" is a vehicle and thus less valuable.  The Internet is supplied
by
the government but no one wants to admit such a thing and thus claims that it
is paid for by the servers which is nonsense since without the government it
would
collapse or be taken over by the TNCs and made impossible for people like you
and I.   All of this chatter is no more in their self interest than free lawyers
for the poor were prior to Reagan's cutback of such.   That is why we get this
letter about individual telephone charges for e-mail on a regular basis.  We know

that it will happen if they have the power to cut us off.

So if you raise the value of the banal and diminish the value of the truly
valuable
then what you get is an irrelevancy and decadence.  Which is what we saw with
the IMF in Yugoslavia and other places and what we are seeing with the singular
dominance of the linear reality of pure cash.Artists made the same mistake
when
they raised the value of the "culture of the rich to themselves" for the purpose
of
funding unprofitable art in the 1880s.  That led to a century of elitism and a
collapse
of real artistic creativity.

What we got was Art as the precursor to targeted advertising.  The middle and
lower
classes got sitcoms while the rich got symphonies.  Both served as advertisement
for something beyond itself and its real value.

Capitalism and Western religion has screwed it up in the last century.  We are
now
responsible for the results.  I would recommend a read in the Dyson article even
though she is a grazer and advocates such.  IMO the issue of value is the core
issue from which all of these problems spring and I don't see economics or any
other
profession having come close to dealing with it.


Regards

REH


Dennis Paull wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I think it very important to separate the economic issues from the political
> ones. In my mind, the major down side of the WTO is the abrogation of
> government powers to specifically non-democratic, greed oriented
> international bodies with no recourse to any counterbalancing judicial
> body.
>
> Those who are willing to give up control by the masses for short term
> gain are truly a threat to democracy world-wide.
>
> Granted there are important economic issues too such as have been mentioned.
> But we can work these out in ways that benefit large populations. But when
> we regress back to robber barons and monarchic non-accountability, we are
> truly risking much of the benefits that the western world has obtained over
> the last century.
>
> Dennis Paull
> Silicon Valley, CA
>
> At 11:54 PM 12/3/1999 , you wrote:
> >To comment on just one sentence in Andrew's contribution:
> >
> >>In my opinion, after listening to the many distinguished voices on this
> >>list, we are in a period of turbulence which will last for some
> >>time--perhaps another 20 years?
> >
> >Yes, I agree, but I think the turbulence will last for much longer than 20
> >years--probably at least another two or three generations. It won't really
> >stop until the whole world has arrived at similar standards of living.
> >
> >I follow with my summary of a recent article from The Independent by Hamish
> >McRae. This condensation will be one of many short articles that will
> >appear in a new type of Web site that will start life in the next few weeks.
> >
> ><
> >3. FIVE NIGGLES ABOUT FREE TRADE
> >
> >Keith Hudson
> >
> >On balance, and over the longer term, free trade is immensely beneficial
> >but, over the

Re: Fw: NYT on the Future

[Ray E. Harrell]

Tom,

Thanks for your compliments.  I would like to point out a
couple of things from my own discipline.  There is such a thing
as stylistic convention.  French Style is a coherency that is
different from German or Italian.   Before the abuse of "convention"
and its subversion into a primitive scientific provenciality now
called racism, people understood that groups, eras, ages and
even human stages were good ways to comprehend reality and
make some order of it.  The trick was to understand that it was
a convention and not applicable to the exception.  Also the "convention"
was something that could be described but basically fit no one
exactly because it was based upon a general view.

It was in that spirit that I made my comment about adolescents.
We might consider that one of the elements of adolescence is
heightened perceptions within a limited life experience.  We might
also consider that they are in the process of growing which makes
that task subvert almost everything else to the achievement of its
goals.  This is not a crazy time but it can become so if it is not
controled by wisdom and experience.  It is also not criminal although
criminals tend to have the same self absorbtion but at later times
in their lives.  It is not criminal but can become so, as in the murders
in American schools of late.I tend to believe that children and
adolescents need to be given the greatest latitude while being protected
from their lack of knowledge and the experience that real knowledge
is built upon.I also know that "latitude" depends upon the ability of
the parent to exercise the kind of protective control within an attitude
of benevolence and wisdom.

It is not wrong for 16 year olds to be 16 and adolescent.  It is normal.
You can take any portion of my post and create your own world but
that is not the world that I responded to and from.  Consider:

To rephrase what I said, the problem is with adults operating from the
same limited experience or use of experience (that fits adolescence)
that we are faced with the delemma that "widens worlds and rips minds."

Consciousness is the only process that has any hope of manifesting a
humane future.  What we do that limits consciousness, and its evolution
within the individual, is like what happens in the limited view of the
adolescent whose intractibility can create a life threatening situation due
to inexperience and an unwillingness to be take advice.  That is why I
brought the spiritual folks in at the end of my post.

They seem to be particularly
effected with the "way the truth and the life" and are convinced that their
local knowledge will save the world and if the world rejects it then they can
just "go to hell."But that choice makes the rejector a murderer and worse
and therefore deserving of any punishment the locals wish to inflict.

Sounds adolescent to me.  THE  world only began with the writing of their
book.  Not THEIR world but THE world began a few thousand years ago.
I think neither they nor the local adolescent deserves to be followed as long
as they manifest such provenciality.  Do you?

Regards,

REH



Tom Karnofsky wrote:

> Ray,
>
>  I've been lurking on future-work for years, and love and often agree with
> your thought provoking and passionate posts.  In regards to this one,
> though, I would like to point our that there is no such thing as a "typical
> 16 year old adolescent", any more than there is such thing as a typical
> southerner, African-American, or Mainer.  Prejudice against young people,
> and its expression, seems to be acceptable even among "sophisticated"
> persons but should be no more so than prejudice against any group of people.
> A good consciousness raising book on the topic of adolescent prejudice, and
> its destructive results,  is Scapegoat Generation- America's War on
> Adolescents, by Mike Males, 1996, Common Courage Press.
>
> Tom Karnofsky
>
>   Sounds like your
> >typical 16 year old adolescent.  Any parent who has gone through
> >that should be willing to grow up themselves or quit complaining when
> >their kid explains the world to them.Whether it is my kid or the local
> >minister, rabbi, mulah,
> >
> >
> >REH
> >
> >

My complete post:  REH

It seems that it still comes down to whether the chip in the brain to
record all of life's experiences constitutes consciousness.  Since I
do not believe that it does, it follows that nothing put into any linear
pattern can ever describe or encapsulate reality.  What does this
have to do with the future and future writers, thinkers, etc. ?

We are still only thinking as far as our hands and literate minds
function.  That is inadaquate for a serious discussion or exploration
of the universe, world society, the environment, any world culture,
a family or even an individual.  Seems that the mechanistic theories
are alive and well and as destructive as ever.   We can blame
bureacracy but the problem is the linear rule of science and Western
thought.

As a musici

Re: Knowledge - The New Frontier ( for exploitation ! )

[Ray E. Harrell]

 
"Ray E. Harrell" wrote:
Correction paragraph five should read:
They were tired of governmental and societal activities that imposed
uncompensated costs upon themselves even though their work was
being used and forced them to make a living in other than their
expertise.
(negative externalities).    They were forced to either
give up their
professions or to create benefits for people who didn't pay for
those benefits. (positive
externalities)  In other words the "free riders" in the society
created the
climate which produced a monster and murdered the most convenient and
affluent
group in order to solve a job population problem.  Here is a "reasonable"
defense of grazing by the Queen herself.
I post it since grazing on her seems to be what she wants.
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Esther_Dyson/ip_on_the_net.article

Re: Knowledge - The New Frontier ( for exploitation ! )

[Ray E. Harrell]

John,

You make a very good case for not paying composers, painters,
movie directors and other artists.Which is what has happened in the
U.S   William Baumol has a paper on the NYU Economics site about
the problem of "spillovers" which means that the person who comes up
with an idea does not get the full financial benefit of his R & D.  Of
course you make the case that his discovery is meaningless since
it was all out there to begin with.

Sort of "A cow is of a bovine ilk  one end is moo the other milk."

And we all have the right to graze to  our heart's content.   What is that
cow on the internet's name?   You  know the one.  She grazes for her
ideas and then makes money without  compensating the poor fools who
wanted recognition so bad they wrote  it all down on the net.   She is
their visable partner or is that parasite?

What about "externalities"?  Are you suggesting that there is
no such thing as private property?  Or is only physical property capable
of being private or capital?What about money?  Is it physical property?

Should all "intellectual capital" folks make their living teaching in
Universities
and compose, philosophize, research etc. for fun?   Is this the root of all
of that half-hearted, poorly thought out education in the Universities these
days?Of course if you have a really hard-nosed composer like a Wagner
or a Strauss you might find him selling his soul to the local devil just to
be able to compose full time.This happened in 1938 with most of the
musicians and university staff of Germany when they elected to follow full
employment in their professions into the Nazi party.

They were tired of governmental and societal activities that imposed
uncompensated costs upon themselves even thought their work was
being used and forced them to make a living in other than their expertise.
(negative externalities).They were forced to either give up their
professions
or to create benefits for people who didn't pay for those benefits. (positive
externalities)  In other words the "free riders" in the society created the
climate
which produced a monster and murdered the most convenient and affluent
group in order to solve a job population problem.   The best the local
Georgists or others can seem to come up with is scarcity.  Make it scarce
enough and it will grow in value and make compensation happen.  Of
course it didn't and doesn't work that way with intellectual capital.  Scarcity
just means your consumers grow dumb and don't know the difference between
having it and not.Same problem with software.  So find a way to charge
for everything or nothing seems to be the only solution by the intellectually
barren.

In artistic styles you can usually forecast the end of an era by the complexity
and brownian movement required to accomplish formerly simple tasks.I
suspect that we are approaching the "North" in our economics and that something
new is in the works.  Something less linear and more able to integrate the idea
of linkage and networking that the Internet is now teaching the formerly linear
business world.   As has been said often on this list.  It may be the very
nature
of work itself as well as the concept of value.  I don't work for money and I
know
few artists who do.   But we all must eat, live and propagate or make war.
Artists,
as I noted earlier, make the best propagandists, for Tyrants, in the business.
So
maybe the issue here is a more mature grown-up attitude about work itself.
Perhaps
people should work to accomplish goals within the work itself rather than for
money.

It finally just took too much to keep Copernicus afloat.  Are we approaching
that
same situation with the economic theory of markets?They try to claim that
they
are ultimately simple and yet the language and theories are convoluted and
resemble
artistic (art for its own sake) formulas more than practical ways of keeping a
society
afloat.  And they lie.  Consider the sublime duality that even permeates so
liberal an
institution as this list itself.

On the one hand you have the commons and on the other you have the
individualists.  Why must we be hung on the cross of these two alternatives?
The one thing about a cross is that it isn't one unless you have both sides at
once.   But a cross is not a circle, except in one dimension, and so only
signifies a tremendous lack of imagination in problem solving that
infects those who can only see two sides. The individual and the commons
are just two pendulum swings on the circle and should be acknowledged
as two vital parts but only two.  Can we get beyond the Barron's Business
Review Series for a discussion on these issues crucial for the Future of Work?
Or should we say that there is a bottom line bibliography for serious discussion

of any of these problems?

Regards

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Here is a "reasonable" defense of grazing by the Queen her

Re: God save us from .pdf files!

[Ray E. Harrell]

Sorry Keith

But I'm just too busy doing those non-essentials,
wish I had time to chat.   As for the phones, have
you read the recent environmental data on electric
fields and cancer?

REH

Keith Hudson wrote:

> Ray,
>
> I don't think this list has ever had a ban on attachments. When they
> appear, it's either a case of thoughtlessness (usually by tyros) or sheer
> bad manners. Sensible people never open attachments unless they know
> precisely what's in them. When I had a new hard disc a week or two ago my
> consultant took away my old one and found two viruses there which were
> waiting to be activated. But there was no possibility that I'd ever open
> the attachments that contained them.
>
> At 21:44 11/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
> >I believe this list has ban on attachments.
> >
> >As for web sites, I rarely look since I find the
> >content is often more out of context than a dialogue on
> >list.
>
> Oh, what a pity,  Haven't you looked at mine?
>
> An attachment is to me, a footnote which may or
> >may not be opened.I often do not open it if the
> >person has convinced me that they are doctrinaire or
> >predictable in their answers.I make a distinction
> >between repetition and predictable because repetition
> >can be quite surprising and interesting as the minimal
> >soho composers like Reich and Glass have shown.
>
> Ah! I happen to think that they and many more like them are tricksters --
> the Emperor's new clothes and all that. They're not intentional tricksters,
> of course, just misguided and befuddled people. They've been carried away
> by their own disciplinary verbosity and snobbery like a very considerable
> part of the musical, artistic and literature professions. These professions
> have largely had their day. As self-conscious artforms, they've risen and
> fallen in bell-shape fashion  between about 1000 and 1850. Huge quantities
> of music, art and literature will continue to be produced, of course, for
> all sorts of occasions and consumer fashions, and there'll be many a
> best-seller among them as they touch on something really sensitive in the
> public domain, but there'll be nothing new in a technical sense.  All the
> great discoveries in their respective trades have already been discovered
> (and surprisingly few of them -- as in economics, see below).
>
> >I also find that web sites often take so much energy that
> >others don't converse much about their work.   I don't even
> >give out my web site since I think it is doctrinaire and is
> >just plain unsuccessful.It just sits there like a lump with
> >a couple of innocuous graphics.
>
> Well, why don't you make it interesting?  If it's got something to offer,
> people will find their way to it and news will also spread by word of
> mouth. But I agree about Web sites in the main.  Most of the Internet is
> over-rated and most of it is a complete mess. Even now we haven't a decent
> indexing system by which we can make our way dependably to any destination.
> I don't think it will ever happen -- at least not for a very long time --
> because sales of the PC are now topping out in mature societies and will be
> rapidly overtaken by the mobile phone in the next few years and, although
> mobilers will be using the Internet, the devices will be of an easy-to-use,
> programmable sort to be able to go to a small number of Web sites such as
> shopping for groceries, job vacancies, ticket buying, video films, share
> buying, and a few more specific uses, which is what the vast majority of
> the public want.
>
> And, talking of mobile phones -- which, unlike music, is a field where lots
> of develoments will occur in the coming years -- the evidence from the
> Scandinavian countries is that almost everybody will buy one (Sweden
> already has 93% adult coverage) and it's likely that most people will have
> several specialist ones (my own business is loss-making now because we sell
> only one score to each choir but is aiming towards the time when choral
> singers will have hand-held music readers into which they'll be able to
> download any music they want  -- and then we'll be selling to individuals
> again).
>
> Ray might well ask me: "Well, if you think music has finished developing,
> what are you doing publishing music?".  To which I reply: "Ah, but choral
> and community music will live on because our social instincts are far
> deeper than what passes for music today -- the snobberies and artificial
> social cachets of the concert hall or  the opera house or the youthful
> fashions of open-air raves. We have become individualised so much in the
> course of this last half-century that there is bound to be a reversion to
> community -- of which choral singing will be a part.
>
> Actually (I think I'd better return to the main purpose of this List or
> else Sally or Arthur will tell me off), I think the mobile phone will
> probably do more for jobs than anything else. Forget recent economic
> theories (often self-contradictory

Re: God save us from .pdf files!

[Ray E. Harrell]

I believe this list has ban on attachments.

As for web sites, I rarely look since I find the
content is often more out of context than a dialogue on
list.  An attachment is to me, a footnote which may or
may not be opened.I often do not open it if the
person has convinced me that they are doctrinaire or
predictable in their answers.I make a distinction
between repetition and predictable because repetition
can be quite surprising and interesting as the minimal
soho composers like Reich and Glass have shown.

I also find that web sites often take so much energy that
others don't converse much about their work.   I don't even
give out my web site since I think it is doctrinaire and is
just plain unsuccessful.It just sits there like a lump with
a couple of innocuous graphics .

Just a thought,

Ray Evans Harrell


Christoph Reuss wrote:

> > So I would say make more and better attachments!
>
> REH, no point in argueing about this:  Sending attachments to a list
> violates the official Netiquette, is a waste of bandwidth and
> clutters up the harddisks of hundreds of users, many of which
> can't decode the attachment anyway and/or don't even have a
> clue how to locate/delete the clutter from their harddisk.
>
> If someone *needs* to visualize content, then put it on a website and
> send the URL to the list.
>
> Chris

Re: God save us from .pdf files!

[Ray E. Harrell]

Why?

You seem to have a lot to say.  In fact reading more
in the form of some extended writing or a graphic or
two seems reasonable.  Junk mail should be junked
and I do.  I never open an attachment from someone
that I do not know.  I don't like bugs.  But the limitations of
my lists often reduce serious discussions to sound bites.

I just returned from the Eddie Adams Workshop for
photographers in the Catskills.  From the greatest
war photographers on the planet and many of the
best artists.  They were teaching a select group of
younger photographers in the business.  As I attended
the lectures and watched these people who will form
our images in the future I was surprised at

1. their morality and social activism
2. their sense of power in their profession
3. their professionalism
4. the sense of their value as the eyes of the world.

They asked serious questions about the effects of
their work on the future of society.  Questions  that
would have put most religious moralizing to shame.
And it is hard not admire a man or women who leaves
his/her comfort and goes to a well-known unjust area of the
planet to photograph its roots and prejudices only to
return home to the same issues in their own streets.
To be changed and made more complicated in their
artistic questions and of both situations.

So I would say make more and better attachments!


Ray Evans Harrell







Colin Stark wrote:

> >
> >God save us from .pdf files!
> >
> >\brad mccormick
>
> God save us from attachments!
>
> Colin Stark

Re: Constitutional Differences? In practice or by intention ? (Was Re: Germaine Greer on N.Y. and Ottawa)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Hi Mike,

Are the Germans still buying up Nova Scotia?


REH

Michael Spencer wrote:

> "john courtneidge" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > One ?significant? comparison between the US  and Canada lies inthe
> > Constitutions:
> >
> > * The US focus on "Life, liberty and the pusuit of happiness."
> >
> > As compared to:
> >
> > * The Canadian focus on "Peace, order and good government."
> >
> > The former is the personal agenda, the second relates to our social needs
>
> The American phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, not the
> Constitution:
>
>WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created
>equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
>unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
>the Pursuit of Happiness 
>
> The Declaration *recognizes* a putatively self-evident state of
> affairs.  I think the impeachment of the Creator and His replacement
> with Biology leaves the Declaration's observation unchanged.  But the
> authors wouldn't have suggested that people are innately endowed with
> a right to "good government", as they go on to make explicit:
>
>-- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among
>Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,
>that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
>Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and
>to institute new Government,
>
> Good government is an artifact which we have to exert ourselves to
> create and maintain through the exercise of the aforementioned rights.
> The US Constitution goes on, over a decade later, to institute a "new
> Government" and is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
>
> So far as I've been able to see over the last 30 years and from the
> sidelines, Canada is ahead on points on the "good government" scale
> but it might do even better with a stronger dose of "Consent of the
> Governed".  Of course, that would require a rather larger portion of
> the Governed to get off our  butts and make our consent -- or the
> withholding thereof -- a force to be reckoned with.
>
> - Mike

Re: Constitutional Differences? In practice or by intention ? (Was Re: Germaine Greer on N.Y. and Ottawa)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Well Jolly Roger.   I love New York and enjoyed Canada.
The point should be made that Germaine Greer lives and
has worked in Tulsa for years.  I kiss the ground every time
I get off the plane from the narrow focused fundamentalism
of my home state and I graduated from the school where
Greer now teaches.  I wouldn't imagine that anyone who
enjoys that conservative atmosphere could stand the
multiplicities of New York.To many of us that is liberating.

REH

john courtneidge wrote:

> Dear Friends
>
>  I snip, then comment below.
> --
> >From: Melanie Milanich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Subject: Re: Germaine Greer on N.Y. and Ottawa
> >Date: Wed, Sep 29, 1999, 2:02 pm
> >
>
> >Melanie Milanich wrote:
> >
> >> The Globe and Mail, Saturday Sept. 25, 1999, p. D2
> >> Dreary as Ottawa was, it was in the end a better place than New York
> >> by Germaine Greer
>
> 
>
> >>Though I love New York, I disapprove of it.  Dreary as Ottawa was, it
> >> was in the end a better place than New York. Canadians believe that
> >> happiness is living in a just society; they will not sing the Yankee
> >> song that capitalism is happiness, capitalism is freedom. Canadians have
> >> a lively sense of decency and human dignity. Though no Canadian can
> >> afford freshly squeezed orange juice, every Canddian can have juice made
> >> from concentrate.  Thae lack of luxury is meant to coincide with the
> >> absence of misery.  It doesn't work altogether, but the idea is worth
> >> defending.
> >>
> >> **
> >> It's flattering that Germaine Greer sees more dignity and social justice
> >> in Canadian society..but along comes the new right and the Harris
> >> government rushing blindly to push us into the same thing
> >
> ---
>
> I worked in Ottawa for two years and love it to pieces.
>
> One ?significant? comparison between the US  and Canada lies inthe
> Constitutions:
>
> * The US focus on "Life, liberty and the pusuit of happiness."
>
> As compared to:
>
> * The Canadian focus on "Peace, order and good government."
>
> The former is the personal agenda, the second relates to our social needs
> (I've an essay about this, but i know that I speak and post too much
> already.)
>
> Whether this comparison over-rides (or perhaps? underpins)
> action-in-legislation I don't know, but the culture of the two countries is
> as marked as might be (perhaps the results of different banking
> systems/ethoses - is the plural of ethos ethoses?)
>
> Dance well, friends,
>
> j
>
> ***

Re: workfare

[Ray E. Harrell]

I just watched a racist piece this morning at the
American Theater Alliance about Indian killers of
"White Children."The crowd wept as the
pregnant Mother escaped the savages and swam
the raging torrent to find her husband.

But then there is this post which seems to say
that the benevolent loving pioneer's descendants
have screwed it up.  Or have they?

Maybe it just goes to show you how  Western spiritual
practices "work."As Red Jacket a Seneca chief said
after being told by a minister about the superiority of
his book over RJ's way of his ancestors, "I am impressed
by both your book and your words.  Now we will take a
little time and see about your actions, what kind of neighbors
and friends you turn out to be."The preacher left without
even shaking his hand.

The more things change the more they stay.


REH from the NYCity res. just watching.

Melanie Milanich wrote:

> Actually for the $520 monthly "workfare" in Ontario a person is expected to work
> 17 hours per week--supposedly using the rest of the time to apply for more
> permanent work.  But even before it was implemented the recipient had to provide
> a list of places, with names of personel directors, that (s)he applied to.  I
> think 10 were required per week.
> Which one would think is a fulltime "job"
>Today the CBC interviewed a grandmother who has legal custody of her five
> grandchildren. She was forced to obtain workfare. She leaves home early and does
> not get back until after they have left school, and two of the children have
> serious problems with school and the law but she is now not able to attend to
> their problems.
>   I have one "workfare",  person renting a room in my house.  He is in
> training courses.
> But since I charge him $300 a month for rent, transit fare is $88 per month, and
> he has a phone for $29 per month--his $520 does not stretch for food, clothes,
> personal care,
> let alone books, newspapers, postage stamps, vitamins, entertainment or
> socializing
> (he washes his clothes with bars of soap in my bathtub and hangs them in his
> window
> and I won't tell you what he uses for toilet paper) and his religion requires
> him to give 10 percent of income to the mosque.
>There was a program on the radio this morning about the increase in evictions
> since the province enacted the "Tenants Protection Act" allowing landhoards to
> evict tenants and convert to condominiums and charge more.   With the increase
> in evictions are increasing numbers of single mothers in homeless shelters and
> living on the streets.  They represent the  group with the largest increase in
> numbers of homeless.  And to top it off, the newly appointed federal Minister of
> Homelessness has announced that she has finished her "research" and will shortly
> present to cabinet her information.  She is quoted in the newspapers to the
> effect that she doesn't know if they will do anything about it, but she will
> give them the information that she gathered!
> john courtneidge wrote:
>
> > Dear Friends
> >
> > I snip and then comment.
> > --
> > >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Christoph Reuss)
> > >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > >Subject: Re: workfare
> > >Date: Mon, Sep 27, 1999, 3:00 pm
> > >
> >
> > >
> > >Victor Milne calculated:
> > >> If a workfare participant works 8
> > >> hours each working day (22 workdays in the average month) for his welfare
> > >> benefit of $520 a month, then he is being paid $2.95 an hour.
> > >
> > >Over here, the 'wage' is about 2-3 times higher.  Considering that the
> > >workfare work is very easy work that can't be compared with the stressing
> > >work in private companies, and that it basically helps the candidates to
> > >maintain a regular activity (and possibly to find a 'real' job), I think
> > >this wage isn't too bad...
> > >
> > >Chris
> >
> > 
> > One intriguing aspect of wages under capitalism is that the people who do
> > the crap jobs get the crap money.
> >
> > Given that, as income (and wealth) inequality grows, ill-health also grows
> > (Richard Wilkinson's book) then we *have* to work out how to close the
> > present, obscene factors of income inequality.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> > j
> >
> > 

Re: workfare

[Ray E. Harrell]

As far as I'm concerned Cook got what he deserved.
So why not learn how to balance books instead of destroy
in order to consume?

Learn the meaning of the wheel of balance instead of
nailing yourself to it.

REH


Christoph Reuss wrote:

> > It all sounds to me like a bunch of Easter Islanders arguing over the
> > value of a statue while the wood diminishes.  (REH)

Chris answers:

>
>
> All right, Captain Cook, so what do you suggest ?
>
> Chris

Re: workfare

[Ray E. Harrell]

It all sounds to me like a bunch of Easter Islanders arguing over the
value of a statue while the wood diminishes.

REH

Christoph Reuss wrote:

> Franklin Wayne Poley asked:
> > Two questions: (1) In Switzerland do workfare recipients have as much
> > choice in their workfare situations as other people have in selecting
> > pre-employment, education or employment?
>
> No, but I think this applies to all countries...  Basically, they can
> select the work together with their advisor, who of course will take
> their individual abilities, preferences and possibilities into account.
>
> > (2) What is the GDP contribution
> > of those welfare recipients before and after workfare? (ie the volunteer
> > work done before workfare may exceed the forced work done after workfare).
>
> I would estimate their GDP contribution is below 0.1%.  But as we all know,
> the GDP is an inappropriate metric for these kinds of work, which are of
> little economical value but of significant social and environmental value.
> (Also, these activities must not compete with commercial services.)  This is
> a good opportunity (esp. for NGOs) to get things done that couldn't be done
> with 'regular' jobs, e.g. guarded bike parkings, free bike rentals, recycling
> of various stuff, restoring old buildings, cleaning up the environment, etc.
> One new service that my program introduced is a free E-bicycle courier for
> shoppers, so mothers and the elderly can go shopping without a car and
> without carrying heavy loads.
>
> Victor Milne calculated:
> > If a workfare participant works 8
> > hours each working day (22 workdays in the average month) for his welfare
> > benefit of $520 a month, then he is being paid $2.95 an hour.
>
> Over here, the 'wage' is about 2-3 times higher.  Considering that the
> workfare work is very easy work that can't be compared with the stressing
> work in private companies, and that it basically helps the candidates to
> maintain a regular activity (and possibly to find a 'real' job), I think
> this wage isn't too bad...
>
> Chris

Re: request for resouces

[Ray E. Harrell]

Anne,

These communities, like my home community, were not
originally single industry communities but were made so
by the loss of the children to the cities and the tendency
for companies like Phillips Petroleum (in my case) to
eliminate the competition to reduce costs.

I would suggest your studying the farm communities of the
19th century before the rise of the mass production models
that lured the children away.

What does it take to make a community.  Economics are often
the by product of a deeper motivation to band together.
If that deeper motivation is missing, the economics won't work,
in my opinion.

I believe you must first know the history of something before you
can understand how it must work in the present or project a plan
for the future.That is just my opinion.

Ray Evans Harrell

Anne Miller wrote:

> Hello
> I'm an adult educator following a graduate program in Community Economic
> Development at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC.  I'm hoping to hear
> some thoughts on good literature to help me address a question I'm posing.
> My question is grounded in rural communities in transition.  The economies
> of small rural communities are often based upon single industries, which of
> late, have been collapsing in record numbers.  These communities, struggling
> for survival, are eager to change their traditional livelihoods to something
> that promises to be more viable.  CED interventions demonstrate that this
> transition from one economy to another [or others] has had varied success.
> CED strategies and models in themselves are not enough to ensure that an
> intervention will be successful.  My question then is:
>
> What critical issues, factors and questions must be considered at this time
> of transition to enable a small rural community to make a successful
> transition to a new economy?
>
> If anyone has any ideas about particular resources- books, journals,
> articles, and resource people - I would appreciate hearing about them.
>
> Anne Miller

Students Seek Some Reality Amind the Math of Economics.

[Ray E. Harrell]

To the list:

Here is an article that confirms what I have been saying
on the list about the impracticality of modern economic
theory and the cultural chaos that surrounds it.   But
first as a prologue.

In his discussion of evolution Dr. Leonard Schlain
points out the reason for the primacy of culture
and the minimization of genetic instinct in humans
as opposed to other species.Here are some
statements about the evolution of genders that
eventually ended in a dumber baby but a more
intelligent child through the tools of culture.

1. Hominids were originally scavengers who followed
the big cats.

2. Upright throwing created the first ability for
hominids to become a  competitor with those
they had previously been parasites upon.

3. By freeing the hands through upright walking
they become hunters; as a result brain size increased
in response to the new needs of predation.

4. Bigger brains meant longer childhoods and
the necessity for greater childcare.This made
the fathers hunters while the mothers nurtured
the helpless infant.

5. The female of the hominid species became the
first mother of any animal species who could not
easily take care of herself in the postpartum period.
Food sharing, a trait of the hominid line with its
collateral attributes--altruism, kindness, generosity,
and cooperation--also increased.

6. As a result, the bigger brain needed greater
quantities of energy, with the mother needing up
to two years for nursing and the necessity of
an adequate diet for the nursing survival of the
young, hunters were forced to resist the urge to
consume game immediately and drag the food
home over many miles for the survival of the
species.   Females, especially in the less
tropical areas,  are iron poor without  exception
of meat.

7. The disappearance of estrus in the hominid
line reduced the necessity for monarchies, (alpha
male).  In such societies the interest of the male
wanes as the female leaves estrus.  Without
estrus, the possibility of sex is no longer periodic
and creates a "sexuality of scale" that makes
females available to all of the males whether "alpha"
or not.   Sex becomes a bargaining chip for iron,
i.e. meat.   The disappearance of estrus in the
hominid line made it possible for a lower male in the
hierarchy to secure sexual access to a female without
challenging the alpha male.  (Mike Hollinshead has
made the point that English society reverted to this
alpha male system when economic stress reduced
the family's ability to support children of younger
brothers and sisters, thus creating bachelor uncles
and spinster aunts.)

8. Hunting is associated with danger and pride while
gathering is not.  Hunting possesses an erotic overtone:
"meat as an aphrodisiac."In general, the men
hunted, and the women gathered.

9. As estrus disappears from hominid females a new
sexual feature, menses, becomes prominent.   A
quicker menses means a great loss of iron amongst
females.   Consider the following from author Schlain
a medical doctor:

"Other large mammals experience infrequent
periods of estrus and minimal menstrual flow.  They
conserve iron by repeatedly licking themselves when
they bleed, an anatomically impossible task for the
human female.   Human menstrual flow, by far the
heaviest amongst all mammals, predisposes females
to iron deficiency anemia, which in turn can lead to
lack of vigor, and increased susceptibility to all
diseases...infants of iron deficient mothers are sickly
from birth and are less likely to surviveiron rich plants
in winter are problematic while the only food consistently
rich in iron is meat...Males have no particular need
for iron, but females absolutely must have it.  If sex-
for-meat was the unspoken exchange that rewired the
female's physiologic responses, then her appetite for
iron would motivate her to be ever more sexy...thus
increasing the value of meat to the male.   (Loss of
estrus was also responsible for the disturbing fact
that among mammals rape is common only in our
species and orangutans.) ...the male's sexual drive
would goad him into taking greater risks to kill game
in order to impress the female he desired."

(Think of Jesse Ventura, REH)

"Menses was the prod that inspired males to become
audacious hunters.   The pair bonding we now call
marriage has its taproot sunk into this primitive
transaction."

10. It is commonly considered by the social scientists
that the female hip size and walk common to humans
(and not other primates) evolved as an attractor for
males.

Schlain makes a more practical and common sense
suggestion for this.  He finds the root in the need for
larger brains in children  who are not covered with fur
or possess fangs or claws.  (a point found in native
myths and legends as well).   He is suggesting dance,
(or a type of dance/walk) just as belly dancing
evolved from birth rituals, as having a practical
purpose in the evolution of our bodies.

Babies with bigger heads needed a different birth canal
th

Re: NEW YORK TRIES TO HALT DEADLY OUTBREAK OF ENCEPHALITIS

[Ray E. Harrell]

Well John, where do you live?

I live in NYCity and the spray is extremely toxic not
only to mosquitos but if you read the malathion labels
that you can buy over the counter you will find that
it is so to humans as well.

So this "up for election
mayor" (running against Hillary Clinton) is going to
saturate an area of humans that runs in the millions
with the "black helicopters" and the  little "men in
black" on the ground.  I've already seen several
allergic reactions to the spray just in my studio
alone.  Who knows how many others there are?

But when you live in a city, that is by virtue of being
an international city filled with every kind of traveler,
you get used to viruses and every imaginable bacteria.

Who knows what the swing result of the spraying will
be in the environmental species chain?

I think you are not meditating deeply enough on Carson.
Perhaps you should live at 45th street and Broadway
and be out in the air on the way to work when
the helicopter comes over until the first frost.

Frankly I was delighted when Hurricane "Floyd" did
a little clean up.  It has felt much better here since
Thursday.  So how many deaths will occur in the long
term from pulmonary and other allergic problems?
How many universal reactors are going to the hospital
today or are simply suffering at home as their immune
systems are destroyed from this latest onslaught of
pesticides?

Encephalitis is an easy
enemy.  You can label it and shoot at it.  But these
problems are the kind of complex issues that defy
simple or "technological" thought processes.

The
engineers and "re-engineers" thought they could
turn the city and society into a paradise through
technology.All they created was an ugly, polluted
monster that is all too apparent when you return
from vacation in the clean countryside.It is not the
engineers but the people who make a city livable.

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Stock Market as Casino

[Ray E. Harrell]

For those who find themselves opposed to Indian Gaming
but support the idea of the Stock Market I would suggest a
read at the following site.

http://www.health-and-freedom.com/sg/

REH

Re: FW Reminder about searchable archives

[Ray E. Harrell]

S. Lerner wrote:

> Searchable archives for the Futurework list are available at
> http://www.mail-archive.com/futurework%40dijkstra.uwaterloo.ca/

Wow! did I have a good time.   These are great.
I followed a thread that had answers that I had never
read because..   This is really wonderful Sally.

Thanks to both you and Arthur for all of your great
work.

Question:  Is this a new Hyper-mail or some other program?

REH

Re: THE ECONOMY GREAT BUT SOME SUFFER

[Ray E. Harrell]

Johnny Holiday said: (snip)

> Technocracy contends that to understand today’s society, one must have
> an understanding of how our age differs from those of yesterday. Part of
> the organization’s research: Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has
> lived in primitive societies and austerity was an imposed condition that
> only a limited few could escape from. Conditions were barbaric with
> scarcity of the wherewithal of life as the main controlling factor of
> people’s actions. Life was rough and cruel. Working from dawn to dusk
> and living short lives at backbreaking toil prevailed. Wars were
> constant.

Grossly inaccurate.  Sounds like you are selling something.
The Puritans and other immigrants came here with skills
that were not consonant with what had been developed but
they did not have the technology to live anywhere other than
where indigeneous people had died out due to their diseases.

On the other hand there are many environments of plenty
such as polynesia and the rain forests where strategies were
worked out that included a lot of leisure time.  Europe itself
had more trouble with its political and religious systems than
it did with food and shelter until the great plagues.  But the
short and brutish life described by certain social scientists and
philosophers with a religio-economic agenda has been greatly
exaggerated.

> Selfishness and greed were omnipresent. Nevertheless, there never was a
> lack of self-rightious people preaching and preaching. They might as
> well have been preaching to the wind as far as changing human being’s
> behavior. Why?

Actually they absorbed the older behaviour like theMithrians and the Celts
because their cultures worked.
Even the Roman Catholic Cardinal's hat is of Mithric
origin not to mention the four directional shaman's
circle found around the world including the Sistine
Chapel.  As for wars, over the last thousand years
it has been about one war every 25 years on average.
The invention of canning and the importation of certain
foods like potatos from the Americas, made European
armies more able to travil than before.  That and the
new rifle technology speeded up the occurance of
wars into the modern age.  But there are many who
know more about this than I on this list.  I'm just the
local art's administrator.

> Technocracy finds that the environment dictates behavior.

Yes but

> In scarcity
> conditions, selfishness and greed are the major components of the
> prevailing drive for survival.

Actually there is quite a bit of research to the contrary.It seems that
scarcity creates teams as strategies
for survival.

> Yes, one strived for one’s family to
> live. If your neighbor could or couldn’t live, that was up for grabs.

I'm sure this was true in societies that were broken downby stress from
plagues, wars, oppresive political systems
or proscylitization,  but generally this is over simple.

> There was hardly a year that some war was not being fought somewhere.

one every 25 years on the average in Europe.  As for thepre-contact America,
the histories are all myth.  They
don't have a clue and don't bother them.  It upsets
their forcing others to play out their fantasies.   First
it was the White Man's Burden, then it was animal
experimentation and now it is robotics.  Each makes it
easy to avoid learning one's self.


> Technocracy advises North Americans that today we have the wherewithal
> to turn yesterday’s way of life completely on its head.
> Science/technology, not politics, makes this possible. But to turn life
> on its head, we have to make a huge change. The change involved has
> nothing to do with morality nor with an attempt to bring into existence
> a Utopia. Such thinking belongs to dreamers.

Cute.  You may have something worthwhile but yourlanguage is not up to your
claims.

> We must initiate a social structure that is compatible with modern
> times, with our scientific-technological age. Technocracy has laid out a
> design of social operation meets modern day requirements. The design is
> called Technocracy’s Technological Social Design. Check it out.

Where is it?  I looked up the Technocracy web site and didn't
find it.

REH

Re: Work on work (Futurework and @Work)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:

> Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> [snip]
> > Mothers are not ready for the virtual world.
> [snip]
>
> Neither is the virtual world ready for
> mothers.  Donald Winnicott's enormous contributions
> to understanding (to borrow the title
> of one of his books: "The Maturational Processes
> and the Facilitating Environment" (International Universities
> Press, 1965) have not been metabolized by our so-called
> society (i.e., what calls itself such without earning the
> honorific).

I agree about "so-called" especially in the over-simplifiedmass
production anti-creative models of the past 100
years or so.   They break their arms patting themselves
on the back about how they have developed technology
but most science is pretty simple and relativity is something
that has been in the arts and languages for at least three
hundred years.   I believe history will not tie the advances
of cultural anthropology to science and psychology but
to the arts and languages which have done it first and
with fewer genocidal wars.   Even the scientists at the
old Einstein "Think-Tank" in Princeton have trouble with
Clifford Geertz because he just isn't linear (Darwinian?)
enough and grounds his work in observation and language.
Even Murray Gell-Mann's seminal study was as a linguist
before he decided that he couldn't make a living at it and
chose physics instead.   But his basic impulse and
understanding is still linguistic and pedagogical as well as
talmudic.

In music we call relativity "style analysis".   And if
you want to see real complexity then analyze a late
romantic chromatic symphony on the computer or
better still, compare the memory necessary to simply
write it down.  Of course the dull simplicities of
mathematics which do just fine on the computer.
Language is another matter.  I suspect that the
science of the future will consider "higher" Mathematics
much as we consider the use of leeches in medicine.

I suspect physics is crucial but it will be
forced to join the complexities of language and the
abstract expressions (the arts) in a grand "unified theory"
because Math  will be to the understanding
of the universe as "Country Western Music" is to
Schumann or Debussy.

Or as Debussy said over 70 years ago about Sousa's
marches:

"These cakewalks are the best that America
has to offer the world of art?  This military music is to
music as military justice is to the world of jurisprudence!"

Meanwhile America's over-simplified economics
complains about the bureaucratic complexities of
socialism while creating corporations larger than
most socialist countries.  What do we call them?
Monarchies?  Marauding armies?   I can't give you
the name of the executive officer who said that IBM
was a "socialist" system, because he asked me not
to, but he preferred the description "socialist" to
"marauding army", feudalism, or monarchy.  What
he couldn't call it was democratic.   I tend to think of
these companies as "Hunter/Gatherers".

It is interesting that these totally inaccurate
descriptions of indigenous people's politics and
culture have arisen with the rise of the great corporations.
Hunter/Gatherer was included in the dictionary only
in the publication of American Heritage II.

The Sioux, a late horse culture,  are closer to the
meaning of "virtual" than they are to Hunter/Gatherer
according today's social sciences.   And the H/G
term is totally inaccurate to the agricultural populations
of all but the plains cultures prior to contact.   It isn't
even an accurate description of the rain forest peoples.
The term came out of the simple-minded thought of
19th century economically oriented social scientists.

So Brad this is not a dualistic answer.  There are not
simply demons and angels but a whole universe of
ideas and paths that see the world in ways that
Winnicott and the others have only begun to explore
from their own cultural context.  They remind me a bit
of the Jacobin Era's attitude about the universality
of all art and their being the only one's practicing it.

The French were the first to break this provincial idea
with the word "Musics."It is also interesting that
the first founders of the baby science in France were
artists and writers.  Men familiar with the multiplicity of
things.   Even the great Beaumarchais was an expert
in Time.  But science was practical while art and language
was theoretical.  Today the science and simplicities
of  economics, math and the social sciences demand
that art justify itself practically by being simple and giving
up its history (birthright) to science.   Shades of the
first Jacob and Esau.  Most artists have been exiled to
the mountain when they sold out!

> Both the basic nurturance of the
> 

Re: Work on work (Futurework and @Work)

[Ray E. Harrell]

To the list,

I agree about making the archives more usable.  I have
found the hyper-mail functions of the Learning Org. list
to be very handy when researching or keeping a
thought going.  It also saves me space on my hard drive.

However there is one drawback.  Britton's comments
about intelligence are correct but easy access to the
archives would shoot his comments about our lack of
contentiousness all to hell.  Consider the following:

As for the other two issues 1. the issue of sustainable
work in today's society and 2. the issue of unions and
their relevance.

1. I find very little willingness on the part of any of these
lists to discuss anything more than the old industrial
system's models cast in the guise of the Information
Era.  Not to be disagreeable but I think that the new
IE has been discussed rather well by such people as
William Greider, Hedrick Smith and Fortune Mag.
columnist Thomas A. Stewart for the general public.

What I don't understand on these lists,  is how a
continual repetition of Industrial Era models
proves their value.  If Greider, Smith and Stewart
writing for the layman can articulate why the
old models don't work then why can't we hear it?

Britton refers to the continual high level of discussion
at FW and I agree.  He also says that we are civil
with one another and on that I would say that we operate
on a level of democratic rigor that is built on practical
experience and less on political formula.  We do have
a very low BS tolerance with the deft hands of Arthur
and Sally making a point without being obvious enough
to stir resistance or counter-transference.   Their rigor
and our unwillingness to be exposed in our foolishness
serves as a governor on our word processing.

As for the other lists on the nature of work that I have
visited:

As I stated above too often their new models are
not really new at all.  Even their information models
are the models of the Art's and Entertainment
Industries cast in the mode of "re-something or other."
e.g.
In the arts we often barter, use other models to
substitute for cash exchange, thrive on linkage
(connections) and drive ourselves to finish a project
no matter what the fiscal, emotional, familial or
physical cost.

As I have pointed out and documented for a couple
of years now on this list,  this new Information work
world IS brave AND has many problems already
demonstrated in the pioneer world of the Arts and
Entertainment Industry.

That does not mean that we can reference
past Industrial models as an answer for a hyper-
democratized world built around a plethora of information.
The past is not the answer and the futurist models
potential "success" can be seen in the ruined lives of
the Arts and Entertainment industry pioneers.

There is no COMMON on the planet that exists like the
COMMON of the world of the musical ensemble.   They
make all of the mistakes that could bankrupt the planet
if the rest of the work sector follows suit. (And it seems
to be!)

In addition their use of Unions creates work for a
few but is largely impotent at the kind of creative
work that builds the industry.   What Hedrick Smith
calls the need for "constant learning, constant
technological change and constant self-improvement
as the engines of long term success"  is largely
impossible in Union companies.

The most creative
work being done, the R & D of the music world is
being done in small high pressure companies that
are self-funded by the artists themselves.   This is
what the composer Charles Ives observed 80 years
ago when he said that true creativity was impossible
in the "professional" musical world.   He opted to
earn his money in insurance and write and fund
whatever he pleased.  (We have basically done the
same.)

Musical ensembles are pure learning organizations
built around the exploration of the values of abstract
aural formal information.   They even define the
abstract thought of whole nations and cultures by
translating the deepest psycho-physical intentions
of the time into visual, theatrical and aural art forms.

They give aid, comfort and even create a meaningful
life when practiced by amateurs, but when the models are
"professional" in the Union worker sense, they are often
an unmitigated disaster for the creative life of most of
their "workers."   The music business is a microcosm
of the world at large with the upper one to two percent
making most of the money with the rest forced to
subsist out of love and work at other jobs.  Not unlike
that NYTimes article on wealth that I posted yesterday.

Lest one complain that this is too complicated for the
average person, I would point to the great amateur
Concert Bands of the coal miners in England which
fostered the tradition of the greatest brass players in
the Western world or the choruses of Wales  which
even in their dying has recently given us magnificent
Bryn Terfel or the new orchestra at Hewlett Packard.

The first two built the finest Instrumental and choral
organizations on t

Re: Worldwatch report on Unemployment

[Ray E. Harrell]

Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:

> (snip)  I find it remarkable how quickly that same
> society retreats to the recourse of the mindlessness
> of the "market" just
> because the problems of coordinating social
> production with individual freedom are difficult.

Sounds like the balancing of authority with the concept
of freedom that is the hallmark of the "sweet sixteen
year olds."How often the cultural insecurity and
outright shallow thought is blamed on the terrible
adolescent (society).I'm posting an article from today's
NYTimes.

>From the NYTimes

September 5, 1999


Gap Between Rich and Poor Found
Substantially Wider

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

The gap between rich and poor has grown into an economic chasm so
wide that this year the richest 2.7 million Americans, the top 1
percent, will have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom
100 million.

That ratio has more than doubled since 1977, when the top 1 percent had as
much as the bottom 49 million, according to new data from the
Congressional Budget Office.

In dollars, the richest 2.7 million people and the 100 million at the other
end
of the scale will each have about $620 billion to spend, according to an
analysis of the budget office figures.

The analysis was done by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a
nonprofit organization in Washington that advocates Federal tax and
spending policies that it says would benefit the poor.

The analysis, released last night, seems certain to stoke the debate that is
about to resume in Washington over projected Federal budget surpluses and
possible tax cuts.

The data from the budget office show that income disparity has grown so
much that four out of five households, or about 217 million people, are taking

home a thinner slice of the economic pie today than in 1977.

When adjusted for inflation, as all of the income figures have been, these
households' share of national income has fallen to just under 50 percent
from 56 percent in 1977.

But among the most prosperous one-fifth of Americans households, or about
54 million people, whose share of the national income grew, that fatter slice
of the pie was not sliced evenly. More than 90 percent of the increase is
going to the richest 1 percent of households, which this year will average
$515,600 in after-tax income, up from $234,700 in 1977.

Since 1993, the economy has lifted the incomes of all of the income groups
tracked by the budget office, but the incomes of the richest Americans are
rising twice as fast as those of the middle class. In addition, the budget
office figures understate the economic power of the richest 1 percent
because they exclude deferred forms of income like restricted stock, which
have grown rapidly in recent years as companies have expanded their pay
plans from senior executives down to store and plant manager levels.

Though the economic pie has grown over the past 22 years, the
Congressional Budget Office data show that the poorest one-fifth of
households have not shared in this bounty. The average after-tax household
income of the poor, adjusted for inflation, has fallen 12 percent since 1977.
So the poor not only have a small slice of a big economic pie, but the pie is
bigger and their piece is even smaller.

The poorest one-fifth of households will average $8,800 of income this year,
down from $10,000 in 1977.

Congressional Republicans have passed legislation to cut taxes by $792
billion over the next 10 years, legislation that President Clinton has
promised to veto, saying it is imprudent and favors the rich.

The Republicans say that a tax cut is justified because Federal tax revenue
rose last year to 21.7 percent of the economy, the highest since World War
II, and because the Congressional Budget Office anticipates surpluses as
far into the future as its projections go.

The Republicans acknowledge that most of their proposed tax cuts will go to
taxpayers making $100,000 or more a year, but they say that since these
high-income Americans pay 62 percent of Federal income taxes they should
get most of the benefits of a tax cut.

"The tax bill's benefits are roughly proportional to the taxes that each
taxpayer pays," Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the Reagan and Bush
Administrations, has written.

President Clinton, who says that budget surpluses may never materialize,
wants to pay down the national debt before cutting taxes. He also says that
a tax cut should not bestow the bulk of its benefits on the rich, and he
wants part of any surplus to finance new programs.

The budget and policy center's report says that one reason the rich are
doing so well is the cumulative effect of tax cuts since 1977, when the top
Federal income tax bracket was 50 percent, compared with the current 39.6
percent.

These tax cuts are worth an average of $40,000 this year to each of the
slightly more than one million households that make up the top 1 percent,
said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget 

Re: FW: [Co-opNet] Co-operative work, Linux and the future of computing (fwd)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Just a question.  Who pays the salaries for all of these
folks doing free things and giving up their ideas for nothing?

We give $123,000 in scholarship awards to worthy
students and art projects but someone always pays
the bill.  People do have to eat.

Also the first post that ascribed this to communism
seems strange since that involves committees.  It
seems more accurately to be a Democratic process,
not unlike the cultures of many pre-Columbian societies
here.  But there was a social safety net built into the
religion and family structure to protect those who
"gave away".  By the way the word for a process that
ascribes more value to giving away that to accrual is
called a "potlatch."Maybe they should call the answer
to Inktomi, (the Lakota word for the spider trickster)
potlatch.

REH

Michael Gurstein wrote:

> more...
>
> M
> -- Forwarded message --
> Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 17:22:43 +1000 (EST)
> From: Ian Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: john courtneidge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: econ-lets <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: FW: [Co-opNet] Co-operative work, Linux and the future of
> computing
>
> On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, john courtneidge wrote:
>
>  > To: "Quakers (Britain Yearly Meeting) online meeting place"
>  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>  > Cc: econ-lets <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> (Response trimmed to econ-lets only.  If you wish to post it back to the
> other lists to which I'm not subscribed, please feel free)
>
>  > Friends, all - for your entertainment/astonishment/whatever
>
> Hi John.  This is indeed an interesting post, with which I rather agree
> on a level of sentiment, but I feel I must respond to a couple of issues
> of fact, perception, and projection, raised by its author:
>
>  > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (heiko)
>
> [..]
>  > and is suddenly valued at $6.4 Billion. All Red Hat have done is package
>  > Linux, the free and open source software programmes made by volunteers
>  > across the world and charged for it. What does this signify?
>
> In part it signifies that many people would rather pay someone to box up
> a set of CDROMS, than spend maybe a hundred hours on the net downloading
> the latest 'free' distribution :) and in another part it signifies that
> the current insane prices for stocks with 'e-' or 'i-' in front of their
> names is merely a huge bubble, just waiting to be pricked.
>
>  > For those who don't know, Linux is an operating system that works by
>  > providing all the "source codes" for all programmes that run on it, so
>  > there are no secrets, errors can be corrected immediately and development
>  > has no limits. Unlike private copyrighted source codes of commercial
>  > companies. In a word Linux can be made to run any computer operation you
>  > can imagine, and an infinite variety you cannot yet thing of, AND IT IS
>  > FREE.
>
> As are FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD, other open-source UNIX-like operating
> systems that are based on a (once) free public release of the University
> of California at Berkeley's source code.  Linux is getting all the press
> admittedly, in fact it's the only one that most media people know about.
>
>  > The Financial Times carried a major article today August 13 1999, p 14
>  > asking whether co-operative made software can defeat Microsoft, and
>  > concludes yes..!
>  >
>  > According to the United Nations Human Development Report 1999 Linux
>  > "Apache" programme on servers now runs over 50% of all web servers
>  > world-wide, and the FT reports 70% of e-mail is sent on Linux "Send Mail".
>
> This is just misleading.  Apache was not developed by, for or on Linux;
> it's an open collaboration alright, but was developed for UNIX systems
> in general, and has been 'ported' to many Unices, plus OS/2 and others.
>
> And Sendmail has been moving most of the world's email for at least
> twice as long as Linux has existed, or was even thought of; it too runs
> on all UNIX-like systems.  The statement above suggests that Linux is
> the operating system used by these >50% of web servers running Apache,
> and the 70% of mail servers running sendmail, which is patently untrue.
>
> This is not to denigrate Linux in any way, it's one of a number of fine
> open-source operating systems, but serves to illustrate the massive hype
> surrounding Linux that has been generated by ignorant mainstream media,
> and if you've represented the UN report accurately, ignorant UN people :)
>
>  > In other words the Internet is being run by co-operative endeavour, nay by
>  > the communist ideals that Marx spoke of "from each according to his
>  > ability, to each according to his needs".
>
> To invoke Marx here is to draw a very long bow indeed.  Familiarity with
> open source communities suggests a more sanguine approach to guessing at
> peoples' motivations for being involved with open source development.
>
> There's an element of community, for sure, but there's plenty of ego and
> oneupmanship involved too.  An

A PEOPLE INTERESTED IN THE FUTURE + article.

[Ray E. Harrell]

Barry Brooks wrote:

> (SNIP)
> Speculators, bandits, and other short-term thinkers and hyper-active
> bean-counters should not be allowed to run the country.

Fortunately or unfortunately in the Western world sincethe Spanish kicked out
the Moors and absorbed Al Jabar,
only that which could be quantified was considered to
exist and still is true today.   That is why the NEA's most
important function has not been the support of Artists but
the numerical proof of what we accomplish in the society
compared to the rest of the professions.   Consider that
without the numbers we in New York would never realize
how much the rest of the country is taking from us in taxes
with a sixteen billion dollar balance of payments deficit.  It
is the only protection, the numbers that are stuffed
down the throats of the wealthy families out of state who
live in municipalities that have a balance of payments
surplus received from the federal government compared to
the taxes they actually pay.   These are usually the one's
who complain the most about paying too much taxes.

Numbers or beans have their purposes.

> The whole industrial
> world knows that good government can't be run like a business or by people
> who are interested in personal wealth without inviting total corruption.

The reverse is also true.  Where the people do not pay a
living wage consonant with the value and complexity of the
job then people tend to "moonlight" to make up the difference.
Most legislatures are filled with such "moonlighters" including
the U.S. Congress.  Better to have a wage that is correct and
to put them in jail when they betray the people's trust.  To do
the latter without the former puts them in an adversarial
position to the general population and thus vulnerable in their
victimization.

I consider Clinton for example to be a very strong personality
considering his dearth of funds and his great legal bills while
he, a Rhodes Scholar and career politician receives the same
amount as Bill Gates, a college drop out and idiot savant,
blows off in a day or two.   All he did was have foreplay with
an employee who pursued him, others would have stuffed
their pockets with future jobs and cash and much more.

It need not be that way.  Consider the following article in
today's NYTimes about the way the French are involving
the population in the objects that will identify them as
French in the future.  Instead of leaving it to families,
the lowest market bidders or state employees, they are
placing the materials out in the open for all to see and
judge.  Maybe the French know more about Democracy
than anyone else other than the Iroquois.  Come to think
of it, Rousseau knew a little about the Iroquois himself.

REH

August 8, 1999
CELEBRATING AN ARCHITECT,
HAILING AN ARTIST

By ALAN RIDING

PARIS -- Architects who consider themselves artists are
understandably delighted when their work is featured in museums,
but Richard Meier, the designer of the Getty Center in Los Angeles,
has special reason to feel honored.

The Musee du Jeu de Paume in Paris has chosen Meier, an American, as
the subject of its first-ever architectural exhibition. And in doing so, it has
set out to reinforce the notion that architecture is art.

True, for Paris, this is not exactly a revolutionary idea. Parisians, and indeed

foreigners, have long regarded this city as an exquisite urban sculpture.
When the government began a daring program of Grands Travaux, or Great
Works, in the 1980s, it invited "artistic" architects to participate in design
competitions.

Parisians in turn judged the results primarily for their esthetic worth -- and
they remembered the names of the architects responsible for both the good
and the bad.

Yet even the French are not accustomed to studying buildings through
photographs, drawings and models. So "Richard Meier Architect," which
runs through Sept. 26, is something of an experiment.

Until now, architectural shows held in the Georges Pompidou Center have
drawn mainly specialists. But with a new Cite de l'Architecture being
planned for Paris in 2002, the Jeu de Paume, on the Place de la Concorde,
is a good place to gauge general interest in architecture.

The show opened on July 13, and the public response has been
encouraging. Architects and architectural students were to be expected to
stop by, but museum officials said many people were visiting out of sheer
curiosity and then lingering as the show caught their attention.

"People like models," Meier had predicted with a mischievous smile.

The exhibition is certainly people friendly. Three naturally-lighted upper
galleries display detailed models of 24 of Meier's buildings. The first room
presents his corporate and public-sector projects, including a stunning
representation of a proposal (ultimately rejected) for a Madison Square
Garden site redevelopment.

The plan envisioned three high-rise office blocks, which would have been
Meier's first-ever skyscrapers. The second gallery is dedica

Re: y2k bug urgent request -- If Microsoft Built Cars...

[Ray E. Harrell]

Christoph Reuss wrote:

> (snip)
> Then again, the basic idea of the Internet was to enable *all* computers
> and OS's (from different manufacturers) to work together -- if they *adopt*
> the common standards,  instead of "embrace&extend"ing them in order to
> *hijack* (aka proprietarize) these standards...

Meanwhile the French can't get along with the Brits, theIrish Catholics and
Protestants have been fighting for 400
years, the Spanish had a 700 year war with the Moors who
taught them how to count (an early example of Freud's
teacher/father hatred) The only true Internationalists, the
Jews and the Gypsies are the despised of the West, the
Jews still see Philistines when they talk to the Arabs and
the Arabs are still trying to prove the superiority of their
recently acquired brand of monotheism.   Except the Bahais
have usurped the "most recent" title and that makes them
the scum of the earth to Islam.

Then there are the Croatian Catholics and the Serbian Orthodox
and the Bosnian and Albanian Moslems.  And get this, they
are all cousins.   They look more alike than Cherokees and
the Sioux!

So tell me Chris,  how can these folks even imagine linkage
on an information Internet?   The moment the world gets
connected it will be germ warfare all over again.  This is no
recipe for the future.Like Germany's Schmidt put it,  "The
market is filled with psychopaths!"So what do we call the
silicone CEOs with the culture of college dropouts?How
about Idiot Savants?

You forwarded:

If Microsoft Built Cars...

> ==
>
> The Top 13 ways  things would be different if Microsoft built cars:
>
> 1. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until after that
>year, instead of before.

No they would put out the same model in a different skin, on time andat a higher
price.

> 2. It would be completely acceptable to have new cars stop in the middle
>of a road for no apparent reason, forcing the driver to shut the car
>off, restart it, and continue driving.

And they would require that everyone else wait until they couldplay again.

> 3. The oil, alternator, gas, engine warning lights would be replaced with
>a single "General Car Fault" warning light.

Already done.   I rent cars living in New York City.  Whenwas the last time you
saw an oil or heat gauge?

> 4. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars,
>forgetting completely that they had been available in other brands for
>years.

This is not new.  This is the consumer society!   They've
been playing such a  game for at least 100 years.  Fake
newness is the only way that modern manufacturing can
guarantee productivity.  The economists lie about creativity.
It barely exists.   True R & D is too expensive to be
profitable. The same crowd that used to lie about
it on the left are now neo-s on the right.  Their styles and
even words are the same socialist realism crap.   The only
advantage is that they are no longer so involved with the
schools.  It was horrible when I went to school and they were
the left wing.

> 5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car... Wait a second,
>it's that way now!

You're getting it now.

> 6. You would have to take driving lessons every year, because the traffic
>rules are changing regularly -- special traffic rules would apply to
>Microsoft cars.

You couldn't do this with cars so they invented Y2K as acomputer version of
"Chicken." The lives of the banal,
involved in insignificance, too simple for the art of living,
must become involved instead in the art of death.   Eros
and Thanatos.

> 7. You'd have to switch to Microsoft Gas(TM).

You weren't around when the auto manufacturers lostthe right to choose their own
fuel due to its extreme
polluting properties.   A section of my family was involved
with Ford at the time and you should have heard them
scream.  They lost the potential to do what no. 7 describes
and they realized the billions that it cost them.

> 8. You could only have one person at a time in your car, unless you
>bought a car NT, but then you'd have to buy more seats.

This is what I call the hotrod mentality.  Just another wayof making those of us
who stupidly threw away our typewriters,
and don't care "sh...t" about the new computers but just want
to do the real work of the world, experience computer rage.

> 9. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

Already done.  Chiropractors are making a fortune withtheir new car seats and the
adjustments that go with
them.

>10. Sun Motorsystems would make a car that was solar powered, twice as
>reliable, 5 times as fast, but only ran on 5% of the roads.

Are you talking about the Delorian?

>11. The US government would be getting subsidies from an automaker, instead
>of giving them.

I don't get this?

>12. Car radio manufacturers

Re: y2k bug urgent request

[Ray E. Harrell]

An interesting post Chris,

I feel like the average driver who wants his "dictulena" car
to get him to and from work while talking to a race car
mechanic about his problems with General Motors.

I believe it is General Motor's purpose to build a universe
where their products are the simplest and works the best
for their consumers.  It doesn't concern them that Ford's
parts don't work within their universe.  Unfortunately for
us, the computer universe is all connected in ways that
no other industry has to be.

As for Gates and Cato, I could see it coming on the bias
of MSNBC news.Some of the scuzziest people in the
country including racists, a genocidal psycho-path host and
a man who could bring back the anti-Roman bias with his
stereo-typical culture bound ideas.  And then there is the
Jewish Puerto Rican Libertarian who has a good heart but
is personally confused.  They got rid of the only artist they
had.  He was too tricky.

I wish I was a composer, I could write some great works
with these strange characters.

If you want to read a couple of interesting articles check the
Sunday NYTimes Books in Review.One article is called
Performance Art and is on Emerson and the other is The
First Squillion Years, a review of a book on cosmology.
When they do it right the NYTimes is a good read and these
two are that.

Ray

Christoph Reuss wrote:

> REH wrote:
> > Most of the people that I talk to about this says much the same
> > about Gates and Micro-soft.  However, for the record I was not speaking
> > of Gates only but the Libertarian Party cell that inhabits almost all of
> > silicone valley.  They fund anti community initiatives all over the
> > country and one of their crew just did in fair minority hiring practices
> > in California as "socialist."  Generally they are followers of Ayn Rand
> ...
> > Their scholar's think tank is funded by that nutty Koch family from
> > Kansas and calls itself the Cato Institute which shows how
> > the media will kiss any body part that smells of money.
>
> Yup.  See  http://cato.org/gatesvisit.html  for a weird example of
> Gates whining about the bad bad Justice Dept. going after this poor
> innocent victim of a socialist conspiracy.
>
> > On the other hand it could be just money and built in
> > obsolescence.  Something that has been done often in
> > the past by big business selling individual products toconsumers.
>
> You've guessed it.  So everyone will **have to** buy Windows2000.  The
> concept is total dependence.
>
> > > M$ also isn't interested in "hyper individuality" on the user's part --
> > > quite on the contrary, total "assimilation" to the "industry standard"
> > > (yeah, incompatible with itself)  is the goal, with nobody but Gates
> > > calling the shots.
> >
> > You mean mass production which is the only productive way to go.
>
> No, I meant diversity and the degree of "customizability" of the software,
> which is very low in M$ products.  M$ doesn't want creative users, but
> assimilated conformists.  "Where do you want to go today?" is a rhetorical
> question:  You can't go anywhere else, only where M$ will let you go.
>
> > But you are confusing the dynamics of the net with the
> > PC itself.   My point is still that they have to inhabit the role
> > of the "Trickster" with such a massive commune like entity as
> > the Internet.  It is literally vulnerable to anyone.
>
> That's why it's so important that users have bug-free and useful software
> so they know what they're doing/sending and don't mess up mailing lists
> with wrong-dated (by their insidious OS!) postings.
>
> > The
> > only way I can see the net working is if there is standardization
> > of structure with individuation of the process.
>
> The "standardization of structure" already exists (W3C etc.), but
> unfortunately, M$ changes such standards (in the infamous "embrace
> and extend" style) and inserts bugs, messing up the whole structure
> (and process).
>
> Dennis Paull wrote:
> > First, much of the Y2k difficulties will come from embedded microchips
> > buried in products most of us don't think of as computers. Examples
> > are traffic lights, medical and other scientific equipment and industrial
> > control systems such as safety systems on refineries and power generators.
> ...
> > But there is another, difficult problem, that of legacy systems running
> > COBOL programs on main frames. Can't blame Big Bill for that either.
>
> I didn't blame Big Bill for either; "only" for the PC software problems that
> some listmembers are now experiencing.  (Embedded microchips and COBOL
> mainframes aren't programmed by M$, so it couldn't mess these up too.)
>
> Chris
>
> 
> "I think anybody who is savvy about this market knows that Microsoft
>  is getting away with stuff it probably shouldn't get away with."
>-- GEOFFREY MOORE, Marketing Guru

Re: Co-stupidity

[Ray E. Harrell]

Douglas P. Wilson wrote:

> (snip)
>
> It might help if I use (and abuse) a metaphor from the days of logical
> positivism.  Let us imagine our society (and system) as a boat
> floating in the middle of the ocean.

I would prefer thinking of it as a body that contains all of thepersonalities that
are the sum total of its experiences.  At the
present it is in the process of trying to negotiate the meaning
of and perpetuation of its physical health.The boat is dead,
the body is alive.  I find the consideration of a relationship
between an alive system and the entities within that system a
more realistic metaphor for my imagining.

> Actually requirements analysis should precede designing or planning,
> (viz. http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/requirements.html) but that's
> another issue.

True for a bridge but again, I believe the problem is the belief inthe very
objectivity which you seem to strive for.  Am I wrong?
Plans always go before that which is known.  But the future is
more appropriately explored as an unknown with history to
keep us from being totally blind.

> But what Mr. Atlee has is (apparently) a resolve, or resolution, or
> firm intention to plan things very well -- it is not itself a plan for
> anything.  That's why I said I couldn't actually detect any idea in
> Mr. Atlee's prose -- all I saw were good intentions.

What I saw was a critique with an implication.

> I could well be wrong about that -- I'm wrong about lots of things,
> though I never admit it.  Perhaps there is some idea there that I've
> missed.

Me too.

> As for the comments of Thomas Lunde, I am sure I have missed something
> in what he wrote, because I just didn't understand much of it.
>
> > Try the formula "Structure determines the form of the processes" in which
> > structure is a defined state.  ...

Tom is capable of speaking for himself but I read it asa statement of simple
classicism.  In the Classical
style of Western music (like Mozart, Haydn, etc. )
"Structure determines the form of the processes."  or
we could use terms like Mies Van der Rohe in architecture
"form defines content" or "less (content) is more."

> Have you ever read Process and Reality, by Alfred North Whitehead?
> Ah, I didn't think so -- I don't think anybody has.

I've read some of Whitehead and liked him but not the above.My favorite was a
little practical book called "The Aims of
Education" and I once slogged a little of his and Russell's
Principia (how's that for name dropping?).

> To the best of
> my knowledge he is saying "Process determines the form of the structures",
> but I've never figured out what that means, either.

That is "Romantic" within the same artistic structure.Emerson in America with Lord
Byron, Marx, Darwin,
Freud  and Wagner in Europe.  An interesting deviant
from this is Ives and Frank Lloyd Wright, both of whom
insisted that form defined content but that each
form was the content of a greater form.   Generally
Romanticism says that the form is the "skin" of content
and exists as a kind of limit to the process that is going
on within the content of the form.   In art they are not
polar opposites but exist as a dual symbolization of the
whole.   They are synergistic and also a conception of
the human mind meant solely to make the incomprehensible
useful.   First Nations peoples generally consider that there
are not two but seven.  Each as aspects of time/space which
is a unity.  On the other hand you might also consider it
with the Greeks Dionysian (you and Whitehead) or Apollonian
(Tom Lunde).

> > Representative Democracy is in my opinion a structure for political
> > goverance selection.   ...
>
> I'd be happy calling it either a system or a process, not a structure.
> But the words don't really matter.

I think the problem here is the way English mixes time andplace.  Systems
generally refer to time while structure refers
to place.  But you would not call a Sonata Allegro a system even
though it is a form in time.  Instead it is called a structure, i.e.
one of the structures of music.   Process is analogous with
system because they are both time rather than space but
even that is not really true.  English is not Latin.  It flows and
becomes an objectified structure when needed or a  system
and process when that is required needed.Music provides
the reverse phonetic of speech while nouns become verbs,
adjectives become nouns, etc. and the reverse based upon need.

The process here is a Gestalt one.  The first person to define
the reality being discussed is the one followed no matter
what you believe unless you wish to destroy them with a
withering criticism.  That is the realm of Thesis committees
and Ivy league academics.So I find you picky on this one
but not convincing.

> What matter is that Representative
> Democracy isn't a very good (whatever it is).  I think of it as
> technology, a tool or technique for making government work.  Something
> we invented.  A long time ago.  Before we really knew 

Re: y2k bug urgent request

[Ray E. Harrell]

Christoph Reuss wrote:

> REH wrote:
> > We all notice the immense contradiction between
> > people greedily taking everything they can, declaring
> > that everyone is only responsible to themselves while
> > building an internet of sites where the "butterfly effect"
> > is more the rule than their hyper individuality.
>
> For the record:  The Internet wasn't built by Gates and his Y2K-bug gang
> (just as little as it was invented by Al Gore..) -- in fact, M$ "slept"
> over the Internet for years and then copied the technology developed by
> Netscape et al. Let's state this clearly:  The Y2K problems which
> various members of this list are now experiencing  are due to the Micro$oft
> dumbware they are using.

Hi Chris,

Most of the people that I talk to about this says much the same
about Gates and Micro-soft.  However, for the record I was not speaking
of Gates only but the Libertarian Party cell that inhabits almost all of
silicone valley.  They fund anti community initiatives all over the
country and one of their crew just did in fair minority hiring practices
in California as "socialist."  Generally they are followers of Ayn Rand
and follow the new term of "Dynamists" as opposed to the rest of
us which they have coined "Stasists".Actually their history is
confused and their philosophy is a mongrel mix of romantic and
classical 19th century artistic & cultural styles.  The mix shows
that they understand neither.

I suspect that the mix of digital mechanics that they use in
programming really is what they say, an ignorant mistake
based upon a two dimensional view of the world.   Their
scholar's think tank is funded by that nutty Koch family from
Kansas and calls itself the Cato Institute which shows how
the media will kiss any body part that smells of money.

The Internet was the government's invention based upon a
need for scientists to communicate, or so the myth goes.
I suspect that they all had something to do with it, Al Gore,
Gates, the Army Band and all of the other connected
folks.  My point was how they are rabidly anti community
(Gore excepted) in their politics and how that would make
them truly awful when trying to work from network integrated
systems when they don't believe in them.  The key word is
"believe."I would call this a giant double bind for such
conflicted folks.


> They're not using mainframes from the 1970ies, they are using PCs with
> OSs from the 1990ies, but unfortunately, Gates has "migrated" the Y2K bug
> to the PC, ALTHOUGH there would have been plenty of storage space and
> upgrade changes to work with "complete" date formats -- as the MacOS did
> from the start.

On the other hand it could be just money and built in
obsolescence.  Something that has been done often in
the past by big business selling individual products toconsumers.   The PC is a
lot cheaper than an automobile.

> M$ also isn't interested in "hyper individuality" on the user's part --
> quite on the contrary, total "assimilation" to the "industry standard"
> (yeah, incompatible with itself)  is the goal, with nobody but Gates
> calling the shots.

You mean mass production which is the only productive way togo.  But you are
confusing the dynamics of the net with the
PC itself.   My point is still that they have to inhabit the role
of the "Trickster" with such a massive commune like entity as
the Internet.  It is literally vulnerable to anyone.  Imagine what
it would be like for everyone to be able to change the traffic
lights in New York's traffic grid simply by running the clock
forward on their car and you get the linkage problem.  The
only way I can see the net working is if there is standardization
of structure with individuation of the process.Those who still
think like process when they are responsible for structure are
like someone walking into another linguistic culture and speaking
only their own language while demanding that the others grow
up and speak his language which doesn't fit their culture or
personal lives.

> Dump the M$ crap and get yourself REAL software!
> Chris

This all reminds me of the Cherokee word for automobile,
obviously of recent invention.  It is dicktulena.  If you say
the word enough you will get the image of some drunk
dick driving down a two lane road, which means to us
"watch out!"

I'm sure we could come up with some comparable word
for this beast.

REH

>
>
> ___
> "640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody." -- BILL GATES, 1981
> [just like 8 characters for filenames...]

Re: y2k bug urgent request

[Ray E. Harrell]

Robert,

I'm sure there are many people testing their
machines.  What I am doing now is to be sure
that my clock registers the correct time and date,
no matter what, if I am sending an e-mail.

Like any disease, finding the beginning of it is
interesting but not much practical use other than
as a lesson.

Being connected to each other is a very difficult
problem for people on many levels.  It has to do
with what stops the negotiations on futures situations,
like Ed's dealing with the indigenous peoples, and it
has to do with the extreme libertarian positions of
people in silicone valley who should know better.

We all notice the immense contradiction between
people greedily taking everything they can, declaring
that everyone is only responsible to themselves while
building an internet of sites where the "butterfly effect"
is more the rule than their hyper individuality.

>From the impotent cry of the virus maker to the
businessman (or woman) trying to adjust their world
to the new information reality while swimming in a sea
of sharks, we all are extremely vulnerable to each other's
welfare.

It is no less so as we listen to the government
committee that is supposed to arrive at solutions to
this rapidly growing, out of control organism careening
towards a creator imposed wall set to hit on the
millennium.

Does anyone ask why the inventors
imposed such a limit?   Well, yes, but when you do
you just get the "aw shucks we're just human and
incompetent" explanation.

The same people who advocate the negation of all
regulations and the incorporation of contracts
enforceable only by the most wealthy as
the "wave of the future."

Who will make business on the illness of computers?
This medical model is currently at work in the HMOs
in the U.S. and proves that you are only healthy of
you can afford a wife to do your home corporation or
if you do so little in your business that you can do
it yourself or if medicine or computers IS your business,
or if you have a major educational institution conning
their students into supporting your "research" as long
as it is published.

Like that great Amateur Charles Ives said before the first
great crash of the 20th century.  "If you want to do it right
then it has to be something other than your job."   Ives
followed his own advice as he made millions and shaped
the Insurance Industry in the 20th century.  At night he
wrote music at a furious pace, tossing the pages over his
shoulder to land in a heap on the floor.   In the morning his
wife Melody would dutifully gather up the leaves, (kind of like
the tons of e-mail that we now write) and place them in a
cabinet never to be opened until Ives death and his biographers
Braunstien and Smith tried to put the unnumbered pages in
order.

Ives had a heart attack, from the pace, in his forties
at which point he only did insurance until his death in his
eighties.  He once heard a bit of Bernstein's performance of
his second symphony at which point the ringing in his ears
drove him away from the radio.  His only comment was "It
sounded like I thought"  and America's only great composer
died in a fit of forty year's rage rather than creativity.  He
knew the logical positivists and he knew intimately the sell out
that the artists made to the rich giving up their connection to
the "masses" that contained the wisdom that was dribbling away
during his day.

The same baronic rich, who needed the classical artists to
validate their faked aristocracy today, continue their
"hero's journey" in silicone valley led by people who wouldn't
have a musical thought if it hit them in the face.  As they
earned their cultural validation with cash, they gave up any
type of learning that doing the real thing might bring.

It is said that music can kill cancer, in a new book by an
MD from New York Hospital.  No doubt it should be locked
away lest this cancer be healed and the silicone gang lose
their key to our pocketbooks.

REH



Neunteufel Robert wrote:

> Could it be, that the mails on future-work with wrong dates are
> disturbing my mail system?
>
> I am working with Netscape 3.0 under Windows 3.11.
> When loadinng down the wrongdated mails Netscape crashed.
>
> So I had to uninstall and install Netscape twice.
>
> Now I have removed all the mails from the last two month. Netscape seems
> to work again.
>
> What is going on? Are we - is anyone - testing the y2k bug?
>
> Could you please tell me how to handle the problem.
>
> With best wishes, Robert Neunteufel

Re: my very dated remarks

[Ray E. Harrell]

Douglas,

This time my inbox has you as arriving at 12/31/69
while the date on your post is 3 August 2099.

Why 69?   And your Dilbert comic is exactly what I have to do
to reboot my machine except it is unplugging the scanner from
the machine. It was suggested that my running the machine
ahead could have screwed up the clocks in other programs.
Something that makes sense to me since I am not a programmer.
I will discuss it tomorrow with my hotrod mechanic but the thing
that makes be wonder is why so many other people are reporting the
same thing.  Synchronicity?   Or incompetence.  I don't have to
be an expert at everything so I'm perfectly comfortable at admitting
my computer incompetence.The problem for me is how many
science and computer types wander in to  my studio singing
impossibly and become riled if I speak to them with the same
attitude they show about my incompetence as a computer
mechanic.

I know that I need their business and so I am kind and work with
their arrogance and insecurity at feeling foolish.  Because an art
without an audience has no purpose.  But do they know the same
thing about their product?  I doubt it.  They just don't seem to care.
Or is this some expression of their own inner insecurity with the
complexity they don't understand themselves?  This is the reason
that New York City got rid of the private subway companies and
decided to run the while system in an organized regulated fashion,
with just a little private enterprise to keep the socialists honest.

I suspect that eventually the medical system will go the same way.
And now it may be the virtual system as well.   I've been a part of
the private enterprise system in the arts for all but 13 years of my
professional life.  I happened to like it but I can't believe how foolish
my colleagues are in their irresponsibility.  They are creating the very
world that will crush us all in favor of a more regular, predictable
life.  I have heard people on this list praise the private life but then
they are hired and work for giants which is no different that a civil
service job.  Even the upper management at IBM under the Watson
era referred to the company as socialism.

It is said that much work is lost in computer complexity and
crashes.   How much more work is lost in having to be your own
mechanic, your own doctor, your child's teacher supervisor, your
own lawyer, etc.That was the point of logical positivism.  The
development of efficiency through professionalism.  Right?
They said it would "work" but it doesn't.

So is it better to
have a large system with built in incompetence or many little
systems.   Either way it seems that we are impotent to change
the situation.  So we just wait to see if the the clock breaks on
the Nuclear Power Station cooling system and whether we have
12 hours to live after the system blows.  I'm sure there was a similar
feeling amongst those Japanese who felt they could withstand anything
after the fire storms in Tokyo, but the Inola Gay and the Little Guy
changed all of that for whose who survived.

Hubbell was in space and just money.  But this havoc is not and
shows that the private sector is impotent when faced with large
issues other than mass production of relatively non complicated
products.

Do the non Capitalist computers have the same Y2K issue and if
so why?

REH

Re: Ideological bullshit:[CPI-UA] The Dane and the Wes

[Ray E. Harrell]

According to the Danish therapists that I once shared a
therapy supervision group with, "Bullshit" means something
different to Danes than to Americans.  Their quality of
swearing was more calm, usual and commonplace than
the American therapists in the group, myself included.

I noted the "linguistic difference" and we did some very
interesting transcultural "work" on the issues of what
expletives meant to the originators as opposed to the
translators.  For example I wouldn't have any idea how
to inflect the French word "merde" which is used with
such color by native French speakers.   Although the
English shit feels closer to the German Sheissen
due probably to the connection of "Shiten" of middle
English.  Close enough for my feeling comfortable
substituting Sheistkopf (of Joseph Heller fame) for
Shithead when I want to seem effete.

But generally we might say that in English the Bull
is used metaphorically in the sense of dangerous
arrogance, while the Shit, actually could be translated
beyond simple body doo and moved to the level of
societal garbage.  So we might say that the use of
the term is not simply an obscene reference to nonsense
but moves almost (but not quiet) to the realm of the
mythological.  In America's multi-cultural and
fundamentalist religious atmosphere the use of the
term translates from the lower case "nonsense" into
the upper case "Arrogant Garbage."

In short, old generation Americans, sensitive
to the distinctions that language bestows on the various
cultural classes, don't take the use of "Bullshit" lightly.

Oh yes, if you wish you may use the Lakota word which
I am told is "Tatanka Huckapuck" if you wish to seem
effete but you should check about the order, I'm not
sure which end the Sioux put first.

REH

John Graversgaard wrote:
 Dear futureworkers,

This illusionary talk about Internet being the future agenda for the
fighting poor and workers in a deregulated world with no governing states
to intervene in the global market economy, is smart and many people will
believe it.

In the neo-liberalistic ideology there is only subjects and corporations.the
ultimate reign of freedomthe capitalist state is no threat to this
project, but supporting transnational capital.unions and workers parties,
the defendants of the working population, is offered only a marginal role!

It is a fist in the eye of fighting unionists and workers parties, which
are fighting against neo-liberalism and unfettered capitalism.

Thomas Friedman is cynical person and spokesman for the US imperialism
and Doug Henwood calls him precisely "the pop theoretician of the era"where
: "Market freedom is implicitly equated with freedom itself, and free competition
among monads given an egalitarian spin"(see Dougs article in Monthly Review,
july/august 1999).
This Thomas Friedman is also the person responsible for the words about
the hidden hand of the market that will never work without a hidden fist...McDonald`s
cannot flourish without McDonnellDouglas, the designer of the F-15.

What is needed is a renewed discussion on reform/revolution, not ideological
bullshit from an arrrogant  academic from his privileged and paid
position at New York Times.

John Graversgaard,
labour inspector and psychologist
Aarhus, Denmark
homepage: http://hjem.get2net.dk/graversgaard
 

Michael Gurstein wrote:
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 23:26:55 +
From: Kerry Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [CPI-UA] The Internet Solution for  Workers' Rights

Occasionally Tom Friedman gets the picture:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/friedman/073099frie.html

July 30, 1999

  FOREIGN AFFAIRS
/ By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

  The New Human
Rights

In this post-totalitarian world, the human rights debate needs an
update. While Americans are focusing on issues of free speech,
elections and the right to write an op-ed piece, people in the
developing world are increasingly focused on workers' rights, jobs,
the right to organize and the right to have decent working
conditions.

Quite simply, for many workers around the world the oppression of
the unchecked commissars has been replaced by the oppression
of the unregulated capitalists, who move their manufacturing from
country to country, constantly in search of those who will work for
the lowest wages and lowest standards. To some, the Nike
swoosh is now as scary as the hammer and sickle.

These workers need practical help from the West, not the usual
moral grandstanding. To address their needs, the human rights
community needs to retool in this post-cold-war world, every bit as
much as the old arms makers have had to learn how to make
subway cars and toasters instead of tanks.

"In the cold war," says Michael Posner, head of the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights, "the main issue was how do you
hold governments accountable when they violate laws and norms.
Today the emerging issue is how do you hold private companies
accountable for the treatment of

Re: FW: fun with dates and the future of Natives.

[Ray E. Harrell]

pete wrote:

>  "Thomas Lunde" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >Thanks for your detailed comments.  On one point we have agreement Douglas,
> >we have both got our dates set wrong on our computer.  I was puzzeled that
> >your message was at the bottom of my date ordered inbox - really,  Friday,
> >Feb 27, 1920 is further than I ever dared to err.
>
> It may be much worse than you think - the date of Doug's post shows on
> my VMS machine as Sun, Aug 2, 2099. Could be some serious y2k problems
> in your mailreader...
>
> As to the main substance of this thread, I'm quite enjoying it, as
> it goes a long way to puncturing the sort of vacuous rhetoric surrounding
> the subject of how our society can be fixed. We can all (those of us
> who are awake and paying attention) see the problems, but it's going
> to take a real nuts-and-bolts approach to do something about it,
> not just `we all get together and [magically] fix it'. Education
> and public discourse can be part of the solution, but only in the
> sense of getting the issues on the table. The actual work is going
> to involve getting our hands dirty, taking risks in public policy
> by actually manifesting non-trivial changes in society, and the hardest
> part is going to be hammering out what those changes will be, and
> accumulating the political will to implement them.
>
>  -Pete Vincent

Well said Pete,

It seems to me that the only person who has indicated
that he has done the real work that you are describing is
the work that Ed has done with the Native Peoples.  That
is real, practical and laced with the kinds of problems that
any serious, well funded and socially supported future's
type work would face.

He has shown that he understands
the problem and has been hired to seek solutions.  What
I also hear him saying is that they have not arrived at any
solutions that are wholly acceptable to any of the sides.

This is a large abandoned area with a small population.
Not an area of plenty by any means and also an area
that the rest of the country has not shown any particular
ability at sensible development.

This resembles the future's gentrification strategy
followed by the city government of New York
who tosses artists into the worst neighborhoods where
they gentrify the most awful conditions, simply in pursuit
of a place with large, open spaces, with plenty of light
and separation from the rest of the population who hates
performance practice at rents they can afford.

Once we have gentrified, Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich
Village, Soho, Noho, the East Village, Red Hook and
all of the other "Hell's Angels" and drug dealing areas then
the rich people move in, drive up the prices and the artists
who could buy their lofts make a profit and leave New York
while the rest are simply kicked out to the next impossible
area.

This is a very old "cattle ranch model" where they simply
wait until something has been developed whether it is Noho
or the Internet and then move in grazing off of the capital
whether real estate or IC.  (shades of Ms. Dyson.  Why
couldn't she fix Y2K?   Because she is waiting for YOU
TO!)

One might call this experimental challenge that Canada
has thrown the first nations sort of:

"You say you developed the country for our ancestors,
let's see you prove it and do it again.   And we'll be
keeping a sharp eye on you to see that you live up to
your end of the deal!"

It was this same script in Brazil that made the natives
hide their agricultural methods in the rain forest from
the government writers and agents.  Noted in the NYTimes
Science Section a couple of years ago, along with the
extremely productive farming methods around Lake
Titicaca in Peru this story's subtext pointed out all
kinds of parallels with the so called Doctors who
invade the forest every year to "help" the natives with
their health problems when in reality they are spies
trying to get native "medicine men" to divulge their
horticultural methods so that the drug companies can
synthesize and sell them on the open market.  (The
latest market is in tooth decay guaranteed to put the
dentists out of business if it succeeds.)

But I think that all of this "confidence game" (that is very
old in our relationship) has clouded the unique significance
of what Ed and his colleagues have really done.  They
have really struggled with the issues that this list is
committed to explore.   Whether it was ethical to make
such an experiment is one question but the reality is
that it is there and should be seriously studied for
models that might help us truly deal with the future of
work in the general population.

"Mengele's information" is an interesting dilemma that
has even found its way into a couple of Star Trek episodes,
But let me be very clear about this.  If the life of my family
or people became dependent upon anything that came
out of his experiments.  I would make my offerings to
the spirits of those who were sacrificed, thank them and
honor th

Re: Trail of Tears

[Ray E. Harrell]

All true Ed and thank you.   There is more to the
story that made this such a divisive issue.  The issue
that the writer and poet William Payne went to write
an article about in the Cherokee Nation.  He found a
community of what now is acknowledged to have
contained around 22,000 individuals made up of
the same social stratas as the White community
around it with three distinct classes.

The City of New Echota in
Georgia, like the wealthy community of Nichol's
Hills in Oklahoma City and the Grammercy area
of Manhattan was filled with new beautiful homes
and government buildings.  These were not burned
and are still extant and although tremendously
"run down" at one point are now a part of Georgia's
push for tourists after the completed renovation.
Park Hill, outside of Tahlequah, Oklahoma was the
new home equivalent of New Echota but, due to
the new Cherokee brick factory, were largely built
from the more permanent brick.   The Cherokee
middle class absorbed the best of the farming methods
of the Europeans and added it to their already formidable
skills.  The one important tool they got from the
European farmer was the spinning wheel which made
it easier to work with wool and flax which they had
begun to use and the cotton which was developed
here.  The spinning wheel reduced their use of the
fine tanning, but difficult to do, processes with leather.
The inner skin of the deer is more fine than any cloth
except silk and is amazing.   It is still done in some
places for personal use as well as in Canada.  There
used to be a huge market for this clothing in trade.
The Cherokees were not socially divided in the same
way that economic classes were in the Whites but
the most wealthy group were the 10% who were
Christians.

There was extensive trade in farm goods.  The Cherokees
had huge orchards.  Many more than the 22,000 individuals
who developed them .  The Cherokees developed writing
for the Cherokee language which was useful as code for
the Cherokee businessmen and since the provinciality of
the local non-Indians included the racist belief in their
superiority over non-Whites, this inability constituted both
a block to learning, since the language is complicated,
and the lack of a strategic tool in doing business.  Not
guaranteed to make "friends."    But most of all it
was
the fact that the Cherokees used a mirror image of the
Washington government to stress the independence and
sovereignty over their own lives that was the problem.  It
was for the Southerners their first taste of the issue of
State's rights and 22 years later they would go to war
using the same arguments against the North that the
Cherokees had skillfully used in Congress and the Supreme
Court, against them.

Also mention is not made that Marshall's dictate was not
stopped by Jackson's seditious statement which was
probably never said by Jackson, although it was certainly
his position.  What stopped Marshall was that the local
non-Cherokee Christians convinced Worchester and
the other missionaries to not push their suit to the next
step.  The reason given was that it could destroy the Union.

So 1. the Cherokees were as divided as the Jews of
Germany with three classes.  2. their overall wealth
was superior to the states around them.  3. They
functioned both culturally and linguistically as the
French in Canada who refuse to give up and speak
only English.  4. Economically they were the doors
to trade between four different states and as such
fed the herds of livestock that had to travel through
the nation, as well as charging tolls for the use of
the nation's roads and ferries.  5. Gold was more of
a glamour issue but it constituted the final straw in
the minds of the ignorant Georgians.

REH
 
 

Ed Weick wrote:
 Over the
years, I've collected quite a lot of material while working on issues affecting
Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis.  I used some of this in a recent
posting on Canadian Indian claims.  The following excerpt on the eastern
US may give you a better idea of what Ray Evans Harrell is talking about
in some of his postings to the list. It is based on John Collier's Indians
of the Americas, first published in 1947.  Collier was US Commissioner
of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945. Ed
Weick 
 1830s-1840s - Trail of
Tears and United States (Marshall) concept of Indian Nationhood: Five Civilized
Tribes removed beyond the Mississippi.  Collier (Mentor edition,
1948) focuses on the Cherokee, an Iroquoian people, and the largest of
the "civilized tribes".  Prior to the American Revolution, the British
had repeatedly prevented incursions into Cherokee lands by "borderers"
and the Cherokee allied themselves with the British during the revolution. 
They continued to fight the Americans until 1794, when the signed a treaty
with the US Government.  This was breached in the letter and spirit
repeatedly by the US Government in the subsequent years.  In 1828
Andrew Jackson, who had been a famous Indian fighter and borderer and who
had bea

Re: Canadian Indian Claims

[Ray E. Harrell]

That is a terrific description from an obvious
professional.  Thanks Ed.

Ray

Ed Weick wrote:

> Brad:
>
> >Another popular idea I find dubious is
> >providing reparations to the living for the
> >harms done to the dead.  Should a [black, indian,
> >etc.] M.D., lawyer, university professor,
> >etc. be paid reparations for the harm
> >done to his or her ancestors, who, being
> >dead, are presumably beyond the ability of
> >earthly things to affect them any more?
> >
>
> In the case of the settlement of aboriginal claims in Canada, it is not a
> case of reparations to the living for what was done to the dead.  It is a
> matter of recognizing longstanding rights which aboriginal people have held
> since time immemorial and which are now entrenched in the Canadian
> Constitution.  The dead held these rights, unique to aboriginal people, and
> passed them on to the living.  The living are now able to enter into a
> negotiating process in which the rights can be defined and distinguished
> from more general rights held by the Canadian population as a whole.  In
> this process, certain things to which the special rights apply, such as land
> and resources, may be relinquished or become part of the public domain, and
> it is for this that monetary compensation is paid.
>
> Canadian treaties and claims settlements, which have acknowledged aboriginal
> rights, have a rather mixed origin. The earliest treaties in which England
> was the main colonial power, those in the Maritimes, did not deal with
> rights but were essentially treaties of peace and friendship. In colonial
> French Quebec, the process was similar. Initially, the French saw Canada as
> fully occupied, and apart from establishing centers for trade with the
> inhabitants, did not expect to settle extensively themselves.  In both
> regions, Indian people were viewed as self-governing nations, and there was
> no question of having them relinquish their rights to land and self-
> government.  However, both regions were in fact settled.  While rights were
> not extinguished, aboriginal people were pushed to the margins of society.
> Subsequently, reserves in Quebec and the Maritimes were created in a variety
> of ways, including lands set aside by the Catholic Church or lands
> purchased by the Government of Canada.
>
> For much of the rest of Canada, more clearly defined constitutional and
> legal bases for settling aboriginal claims exist. Following the conquest of
> Quebec, what is known as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued by King
> George III to establish a boundary between the colonies (including Canada)
> and Indian lands.  The latter generally lay west of Quebec (excluding
> Rupert's Land) and the Appalachian Mountains (in what soon after became the
> United States). Whites who had settled in Indian lands were asked to leave
> (whether they did so or not is another question). On their lands, as defined
> in the Royal Proclamation, Indians should not be "molested or disturbed".
> Purchase of the lands could only be made by the Crown. If Indians wanted to
> sell their lands, they could only do so if via an assembly for the purpose.
> Only specially licenced whites could carry on trade with the Indians.
> Rupert's Land was excluded from the Royal Proclamation because it was
> already under Royal Charter held by the Hudson's Bay Company.
>
> The Royal Proclamation was reinforced in western and northern Canadian lands
> by negotiation by the 1870 Order in Council by which the Northwest
> Territories (originally the North-Western Territory, which then included the
> prairies) and Rupert's Land were admitted into Confederation. It again
> recognized aboriginal title and provided that such title could not be
> extinguished except by negotiation with the Crown. However, the precise
> legal meaning of this OIC, and what requirements and limitations it imposes
> on government in settling aboriginal claims, is a matter of some ambiguity.
>
> More recently, Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution Act (1982) recognizes
> two sources of Native rights.  One is treaty rights, which consist of land
> ownership, harvesting, and limited environmental and wildlife management
> rights. It should be noted that Metis and non-status Indians are included as
> native people in the Constitution Act along with Indians and Inuit.
>
> While recognition of aboriginal rights has a long history in Canada, it is
> only recently that government dealings with these rights has been a process
> which might be termed "reasonable" or "fair and equitable". Initial rounds
> of treaty making in Ontario in the 1820s were essentially land grabs.
> Reserves granted to Indians at the time were small because they were viewed
> as being places of transition into assimilation. The "numbered treaties"
> which were signed with Indian people in western Canada beginning in
> approximately 1870 were negotiated with a people who had no options but
> acceptance of the government's terms.  Their n

Re: Canadian Indian Claims

[Ray E. Harrell]

Victor, I think I answered all of this in my post to Brad.

I think that it is strange for economists to mix responsibility
for felonies up with financial responsibility for illegality in
the observance of valid contracts between large political
and corporate entitites.   Even an artist such as myself
can separate the two.If someone comes afterwards and
joins a company that has committed and benefitted from
an illegal act then the company still owes the debt and
if that late comer is a part of the company and is benefitting
from that relationship they also owe a part of that debt.

Why is that so hard to understand?   It feels a little
slippery when one flows so easily between corporate
and individual responsibilities.  It is the government's
responsibility to repay their citizens for any loss due to
their illegality at another time, not the people who were
victims of that illegality.   Valid contracts also have
nothing to do with old battles and wars won and lost
although the Irish have been fighting that one out for
400 years and as I told Brad, Columbus was able to
come to America because the Spanish resisted the
Moors and others for 700 years until they were finally
strong enough to reclaim their rights and land.

Victor, it just makes more sense to me for us to deal
with these issues in a way that doesn't create a 700
year wound that will eventually destroy what has been
built.  What makes you think that we have any shorter
memories than the Spanish?  Spain was a multi-cultural
society much like the U.S. before the Castillians kicked
out the Moors.  The Basques are still alive and fighting
the Spaniards over things that the Spanish did to them
that was as stupid as the Moor's and Jews mistakes
in Spain.   And today the Jews are fighting the same
issues in Israel that happened to them.  It just has to
stop someplace and ignoring the debts is not the way
you do it IMHO.

Ray.

Victor Milne wrote:

> If any value including justice is made an absolute with no limitations, we
> end up with a mess of insoluble complications, and much of what is
> ultimately solvable benefits the lawyers far more than the victims, as Ed
> Weick notes.
>
> Is there such a thing as collective guilt? Are all whites legally liable to
> compensate all Indians for the undoubted injustices? Or do we sort it out on
> the basis of family history? Ed makes a good case that his Central European
> ancestors had nothing to do with exploiting the first nations. I suppose I
> could do the same. My German great-grandfather was certainly not a very
> successful exploiter; in the mid 1870's he was in the workhouse (Victorian
> workfare) at Berlin [Kitchener], Ontario, and so poor that he literally sold
> my three-year-old grandfather to a prosperous merchant who wanted to adopt
> him.
>
> Even if we go with collective guilt, we find messy situations that cannot be
> sorted out.
>
> Do we prosecute the descendants of Danes for the extirpation of independent
> Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the eighth century, which same Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
> were founded by driving out the Celts?
>
> Do the modern Italians have to make reparations for the damn near successful
> Roman genocide against the Jews under Vespasian (68 A.D.)?
>
> Do the modern Jews have to make reparations (and to whom?) for the multiple
> genocides against Palestinian tribes in the Old Testament period? To cite
> just one example of many, God is presented as ordering King Saul (ca. 1010
> B.C.E.) to commit a genocide against the Amalekites: "This is what the Lord
> Almighty says, '...Now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy
> everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and
> women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." (1
> Samuel 15:2-3) As is well known, the Old Testament records that God deposed
> Saul because he failed to carry out this order to the letter. However, the
> genocide was completed in the expansionist reign of King Hezekiah (720-692
> B.C.E.) "They [families from the clan of Simeon] killed the remaining
> Amalekites who had escaped, and they have lived there to this day."
>
> All this is NOT meant to suggest that we can ignore Indian land claims or
> the claims arising out of the World War II Holocaust. It is meant to suggest
> that striving for absolute justice creates more problems than it solves. In
> justice as in medicine we need to do a kind of triage, ignoring the cases
> which are past help, dealing first with the most serious cases which can be
> remediated (but probably not fully healed) and leaving to the end the minor
> cases.
>
> Victor
>
> - Original Message -
> From: Robert Rosenstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: July 29, 1999 10:13 PM
> Subject: Re: Canadian Indian Claims
>
> | If there is no such thing as obligations to past generations, then the
> | idea of History is nullified. If an action such as a genocide has no
> | force after a given number of years, then

Re: Canadian Indian Claims

[Ray E. Harrell]

 I said:

> > First, it is NOT the issue you are describing.  It is the abrogation of

> > legal contracts that were ignored by
> > looters and brigands who found their way into the
> > government.  Many of those people's children today
> > are living off of the fruits of that theft.
>

Brad replied: Opening up Pandora's box  (snip)

> The issues here seem to me complex, but simply
> punishing Nazis' children or people who bought
> houses on putative former Indian territory,
> thinking they had clear title,
> doesn't seem to me to be the answer.

Nor do I.  But the Germans evidently disagree since
they have paid reparations to survivors families.   They
obviously agree with Kant or maybe he was just clearly
within the best ideals of their culture.  But the best we
get from the Christians is an "Oops, it was bad and we're
sorry about that."   I believe the answer to be found in
Governments protecting their citizens by paying their
debts.   In the case of the Black Hills which is more
to the Lakota than Jerusalem is to the Jews, I think
there is only one answer and that is to become Hitler or
to get out and let them have their sacred lands.  They
are just as stubborn as the Spanish.  The Lakota
have the only Amnesty International recognized political
prisoner in American Prisons.   And the government is
turning him into a poet and a Mandela.   Self destructive.
They one the only war against the U.S. then the
government took the Lakota General Red Cloud to the
East Coast and showed him the masses of populations.
His response was like an American when China entered
the war in Korea.  "They are like the leaves on the Trees."
It broke him but not the Nation's spirit.  Poor they are but
not of spirit.   It will ultimately be the American people
who lose that one.  It always seems that the war is
hopeless.

Although when my Grandfather bought a
mountain top in Tennessee and started a Cherokee
community there, where the people  spoke
Cherokee and functioned like a small corporation,
there was a lot of resistance from the locals.

It was
illegal to practice our religion until 1978 when Congress
wrote the Freedom of Religion Act for Native Americans,
but my Grandfather had found a way around it by forming
and incorporating a church called the "Temple of the
Great Spirit."   From Tennessee he spread it out to the
seven surrounding states and made it possible for all
Indian people to use the structure as a legal protection
from the law. (What's in a name?)

But this is a much
longer story so let me just say that the family of a local
powerful Senator in Tennessee connected to the Railroad
"discovered" coal on that mountain and also discovered
an older title to the land that my Grandfather's legal
title search had not.  Of course they simply strip
mined everything and my Grandfather lost his
community, his home and his business.  He had
a store and restaurant along the local highway.
He was a Master Chef who had been one of the
chefs for the Shoreham Hotel in Washington.  He
lost that too to the lawyers in the fight.

So my point here Brad is that the system is not
challenged when a White Man loses his land to
such a thing.  They just say that the right to private
property and deeds is supreme.  And it is too bad
for the individual.  That was what they said also
about my Grandfather.  But when it is an Indian
claiming an older deed that is different.  You should
read the front page articles, I'm sure they are still
searchable on this year's NYTimes about the
mineral royalties owed to our people in Oklahoma.
They pay out five bucks a month for a working
oil well on Indian property because the oil companies
can lobby the government or they just drive their
trucks up to the spicket and steal it.  So your
complaints ring more than a little hollow to me.

> Brad said:
> If one wishes to enlist the aid of the
> children of the exploiters in helping bring
> about conditions of more *universal* justice,
> it seems to me that they [the children of the
> exploiters] need to see themselves as benefitting
> from the solution, *as well as* helping the
> victims.  And, again, I think the ultimately
> nihilistic notion of *blood feud* (and related
> consepts) is relevant here.

Blood feud is between individuals, families or clans
not governments.  This is an issue of sovereign
governments.   When in the government it is called
"rule of law."

> Brad said on jobs:
> It seems to me that the issue is how to
> minimize the cases of *anybody* losing a job to anybody
> else.  The only problem I see here is similar to
> that of two [wo]men lusting after one [wo]man:
> In thos cases where a job can only be done by one
> person, then some people will necessarily be
> disappointed (astronomers may face this problem
> in "getting time" on the best telescopes, e.g.).

Corporate jobs are notoriously over-staffed and inefficient.
I have had people working for corporations spend many
hours on projects that they sold to me, using the
corporation

Y2K

[Ray E. Harrell]

I've been listening to the government on Y2K committee.
Maybe Nostra what's his name had something.

The don't have any idea and they are doing nothing.

REH

Re: Forwarded mail....

[Ray E. Harrell]

Isn't California where they have been trying to pass
tort "reform". Sounds like a good thing to get in a
suit before that is done.  I can think of all kinds of
possibilities for damages based upon good Samaritan
principles.   And I'm just a civilian.

REH

Michael Gurstein wrote:

> -- Forwarded message --
> Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 10:26:01 -0400
> From: Henry Milner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> I received this on another listserve.What can one say?
> 
> Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1998
>
> In California, more than 600 lawyer hopefuls were taking the
> state bar exams in the Pasadena Convention Center when a
> 50-year-old man taking the test suffered a heart attack.
>
> Only two of the 600 test takers, John Leslie and Eunice Morgan,
> stopped to help the man. They administered CPR until paramedics
> arrived, then resumed taking the exam.
>
> Citing policy, the test supervisor refused to allow the two
> additional time to make up for the 40 minutes they spent helping
> the victim. Jerome Braun, the state bar's senior executive for
> admissions, backed the decision stating, "If these two want to be
> lawyers, they should learn a lesson about priorities."
>
> Information about Inroads-L
> The Inroads WWW Site is located at: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~inroads/
> To post to the INROADS-L list, send e-mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
> To unsubscribe, send e-mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" with the
> following in the body of the message: unsubscribe inroads-l
> Questions for the list owners to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
> *

Re: Canadian Indian Claims

[Ray E. Harrell]

Ed,
If the reverse were to happen today.  If a virus came
from space or if global warming carried something
toxic to Caucasions, Blacks and Asians and 93 %
were wiped out with the main survivers being those
with Native blood who then went on a looting
rampage stealing everything in sight.  Taking credit
for the good things that the immigrant races had
done and harassing the Metis because of their
weak genes.

And when they began to feel a little guilty they
included articles of clothing, pieces of
religion and other pieces of immigrant regalia in
their lives to "honor"  the immigrants.  They
put up great museums to the quaint ideas of a
Henry the Ford and a Milton the Freedman talking
about how mistaken they were about the weather,
the cultivation of food, the life of all species
and the Circle of the World, but how clever the
immigrants were with mechanical things.

With great debates over whether the Westerner's
mechanical creativity really existed or was simply
a physical projection of their ignored and degraded
human consciousness trying to break through
by manifesting itself as external ideas.  A sort of
soul's "attention getting" device.   It was said that
the simple result was that their cultural systems
modeling in their brains would not allow the soul's
message to get through.  Instead it turned the soul's
plea for help into a way to make money.  (Forgive me
Kurt V.)  That their creativity was not really true that
it was not only a failure of consciousness but an external
conceit a clever abuse of inner resources.

The indigenous people marveled at the "surprising"
even "shocking"  greatness of Beethoven, Mozart
and Shakespeare in spite of the inadaquacy of their
languages, the simple primary colors of their science
and philosophical concepts.   They marveled at so
many words for so little thought.

Of course they generally rejected their creativity for
the simple reason that it would call into question
too many presuppositions about the Indian Creator
being real, good or even worthwhile if he wiped out
so many.  So it must have been the immigrant's problem.
Retribution for such simple-minded brutality, such
unwillingness to understand the power of thought in
the creation of the world.  Their long search for a
physical "First Cause" a "Big Bang" was really the
lack of understanding of time and the necessity to
grow within the cycles of their own lives.  A simple tie
to physicality without understanding.

And then when that inevitable immigrant recovery began
to happen putting pressure on the conscience of
the average Indian who pressured their government
forcing them to decide that some recompense
had to be made for the looting and theft,  for the stolen
children, the abscounded "cultural capital", the historical
lies...  When that finally happened,  all negotiations
were conducted from the basic premise of "who
really were the successful ones" and "why the
unsuccessful were dependant upon the successful
for even their existance as a people."   Of course
there was no return of children.Olive skinned
white children placed with mixed couples were left
to wonder about their heritage in the midst of the
propaganda.   Beautiful black Russian children were
treated with pride while their white siblings were a
cause for shame and separated from their families.

Those who were less were used as skeletons for
the medical schools with their fat boiled off by
Native soldiers anxious for the promised reward
offered for complete immigrant skeletons.   With
special prizes for non-infected books, their religious
Icons, their thousands of Italian shoes all for the
special museum to the forgotten immigrants.

So when they finally came to their senses and
began to redress their wrongs, they couldn't quite
go all the way.  They were unwilling to recant the
terrible bigotry by some of their best children's
writers who had cried for the complete annihilation
of all immigrants at the beginnings of the plague.
"Sad though it was" they advocated the "necessity" of
making sure that the virus did not mutate and
infect Indian people .  Their advice was ignored but
lay beneathe the Native consiousness like an
incestous event that no one acknowledged..
knowing of the cycle of life and the return of bad
to those who gave bad, secretly they were afraid.

When questioned about this return of evil for evil
given, one of their economists said:

>We know that this is a great sadness for all of
>we two leggeds.  But there has been much that
>has been washed away by the sands of time.
>Everywhere, even among the immigrants, we
>two-leggeds have done the best we can in returning
>the balance to the Earth Mother.  It was not our
>vengence that wrought this great misfortune on the
>immigrants but our Creator caring  for those who love
>the Earth Mother and follow His ways.  We only
>follow the justice and law of the Creator, nothing
>more.   We are not responsible for what led to this
>injustice.  The world is not fair.  This is

Re: Canadian Indian Claims

[Ray E. Harrell]

Too bad they can't assess liability for lost families,
intellectual capital, land use ideas etc.  It seems to
me that you are using the rules of a divorce without
separating.

Better you start with the ideas of justice
and the rule of law as defined by both groups.  The
truth is that one group has the power, just as with
the Kurds or the Bahais in Iran, and the other group
doesn't even exist except as a continuing image and
a tumor in the empathy of those who continue to
benefit from the injustice.   The problem with such
tumors is that they either make the person inhumane
or they eat at the identity until something terrible
happens that releases the toxin.  Something
like a Holocaust, a Nuclear war or a plague to
give the dominant population the same experience.
Often such unconscious functions are masked by
contemporary economic, religious or political myths
and the prove tenacious and impossible to stop even
when the conscious story is removed.  The
unconscious is rarely probed for a whole culture.

I've always felt that the story of Noah was an example
of a culture doing that.  Noah of course was furious
for some deep unknown reason.  A reason so deep
that he had to spend some time back in the water
contemplating the meaning of his unconscious
connections with his spirituality.  At one point Jesus
said that someone would have to go back inside
his mother's belly (the water) before he could change
those motivations.   But after the catharsis, plague,
war or whatever things change.

After that they go on, just as the Romans did with
the Etruscans.  The Christians have a history of
absorbing groups like this and maintaining certain
images.  That is not unlike the Iroquois who rescued
a nation that they had defeated and nearly destroyed.
The took in the survivors and incorporated their
ceremonials into their own tradition.   That kept
them from feeling bad I guess.  It worked for the
Church with the Mithrians and the Italians with the
Etruscans.   The Pope's hat is Mithric and the
bull fight is the old ceremony to kill the bull which
they then hung above the door to let everyone
walk under while they received the power in the
blood from the slain bull.   The Spanish and the
French have kept the fight but I think the French
no longer kill the bull.

Regards,

REH

Ed Weick wrote:

>  In a posting yesterday, I made the point that in Canada "we've
> tried to deal with it via an Aboriginal claims process which is
> intended to define and make explicit the Aboriginal rights
> entrenched in our Constitution as these apply to particular
> groups.  This is not a fully satisfactory process since it
> applies mainly to Aboriginal people who did not come under treaty
> during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries and whose
> rights have not therefore been defined.  These people are
> considered to have 'outstanding claims'."  This is known as the
> "comprehensive claims process". I should have mentioned that
> there is a parallel process for Indian people who have treaties
> but can make the case that certain provisions of their treaties
> have not been honored or have been violated.  This is the
> "specific claims process",  One specific claims case with which I
> have some familiarity deals with lands in Saskatchewan.  The
> Indian Bands of Saskatchewan signed treaties in the 1870s well
> before Saskatchewan became a province in 1905.  Lands and
> resources were not transferred from the federal government to the
> Government of Saskatchewan until the 1930s.  They were
> transferred on condition that the Province fulfill all
> outstanding land-related treaty obligations.  The Province did
> not do so.  The result is a recent, and I would surmise, still
> continuing step-by-step, band-by-band, process of determining how
> much additional land the Indian people are entitled to and how
> much monetary compensation this might require in lieu of land. Ed
> Weick

Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors ed & keith

[Ray E. Harrell]

First:

Ed Weick wrote:

> Ray,
>
> I do accept your point, but I was not concerned with the arts when I used
> the term 'romanticize'.  I simply meant that one must avoid portraying
> aboriginal Americans, or any people, as having a special wisdom or
> nobility -- as being "the noble savage".

The Noble Savage was a philosophy of Rousseau.  He
was primarily talking about the educational practices of
the Iroquois which was far superior to the European
practices which considered the child as a little adult
with a vindictive spirit which had to be broken in order
to become civil.  That is now emerging again because
they have that dualism virus.  Saints or sinners,
virgins or whores and all that rot.

Rousseau who was a composer/violinist , writer, and
a terrible parent himself, changed the educational
practices of Europe from caning to what it is today.
Maybe out of guilt for his own children abandoned
to the foundling home?  (see Mike Hollinshead's latest
book)

Meanwhile in America the European practice of
sending children to prison is reviving.  That is not
Indian and has always been an anathema to us.

The "Law of Blood" the traditional law of the
Southeastern peoples is more just but also includes
familial responsibility more than current law.   An
interesting read in this law thing is Rupert
Ross's "Returning to the Teachings, Exploring
Aboriginal Justice"  (Canadian) or "Fire and the
Spirits, Cherokee Law from Clan to Court" by the
Oklahoma Cherokee Rennard Strickland.

As the current dominant culture here slowly erodes
justice into litigeousness, the Law of Blood is
re-emerging and groups of private cultural police
are becoming more viable.   This happened with the
Italians, and the Hispanics and is happening now
with us.  I view this with alarm, because it is a
breakdown of the social contract.  The dominant
culture has used the police to batter and abuse
our people and today holds Leonard Peltier, a
Lakota man illegally brought from Canada with
fraudulent FBI documents and tried by crooked
government agents simply because they had to
"settle the score" when two of the agents abusing
the traditional elders were killed as a result of
their actions.   Amnesty International
lists Peltier as the only political prisoner in America.
I don't agree that he is the only one  but he certainly
is one of the reasons for the breakdown of authority
amongst minorities in this country.

Our people have very long memories.  Life seems to
mean more to us than most since we don't forgive and
forget.  We believe that theft of children, land, mineral
rights, religion and opportunities are not forgiven when
a man's children or grandchildren still benefit from the
original theft with no recompense to the victims.

Even the German government and now the Swiss
banks are paying the descendants of the Holocaust.
That is an honorable Cherokee thing to do.

But if I may be allowed to say this once more:

1. There was nothing noble about the child rearing
practices of Europe compared to the Americas.  The
real expert on this is Mike Hollinshead on this list.
He has done marvelous research on this and has
written about it.

2.  The same is true of city and private sanitation practices.
When the Nova Scotia reconstructed old Louisburg they
included the smells and the poor sanitation.  The Micmacs
refused to stay overnight in the original town because it
made them sick.  Also no self respecting deer would
come within a hundred miles of that smell.  So the
Micmacs could starve if they absorbed that "human"
smell.

3.   Indian farming practices have changed the way the
world looks at food.   That food freed the beast in the
European breast to move large armies while being able
to feed them.   It was the potato that traveled with the
armies of Europe.  The potato and the discovery of
canning was what made it possible for Napoleon to
reach Moscow.

Without it they would have had to
pillage their way there and such practices were what
so destroyed the countryside that armies in the past
were never helped by the peasants.  The potato changed
all of that.  The Incas developed over 200 varieties of
potatoes in their agricultural science.   I've already mentioned
long fiber cotton which before the Aztecs was considered
the clothing of Kings in Europe.  After Cortez, the common
soldier could wear a cotton shirt.  Much lighter and less
abrasive between the legs than wool.   Could march further.

4.  Indians had a whole life just the same as Europeans
but you make a basic mistake.

If I may put it into another more artistic
context.   In the 19th century there were thousands of
opera houses and companies across America, grounded
in their communities and supporting both local talent and
touring companies.

Today there are a few hundred who only present two to
three productions a year where there were formerly
thousands of vital full time ones.  Only now, as a result
of a change in the way historians look at what is valued,
is that information a

Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors second of II

[Ray E. Harrell]

This is a long document.  If you are not up for it,
then accept my apologies and skip it.  REH

Well Ed and Keith, if I don't answer these things then
people believe they are true.   And there is a lot of
just plain old economic paternalism in your post.

Consider how there is very little systematic consistency
in economic thought.   When systems are consistent
within themselves that is  the beginning of their
usefulness.  Of course too much consistency makes
"stale" also.   But an inner coherency is the beginning
of knowing whether a system will be coherent with reality.

The wars of the 20th century have been between competing
economic systems.  I believe when "conversion" is the
only solution, (sort of a philosophical monopoly as the
only answer), then the system is immature.  There is an
inner insecurity and inconsistencies within the system itself.
Capitalism's biggest nightmare was when the "simplicity of
Communism as the only competitor" gave way to "terrorist"
complexity.

Once again we are in the merchant wars of the 18th century
with the same language being used as was justification for
defeating the Chinese Emperor and making opium addicts
of millions of Chinese.

Keith, what I hear you saying, applied to the Chinese
situation, would be that destroying China's sovereignty in
order to open their market to opium was all right in the
ultimate scheme of things.  Is that correct?

I would say when systems  are so immature that they
must convert other systems, to the monopoly of their idea,
they have a very low probability of non-destructive,
holistically wise action.

(after reading Ed's most recent post)

Yes Ed, the Aztecs worshipped those same destructive
Gods also.  And their Pochtecas (export businessmen)
didn't function all that differantly from ours, while
Huitchilopoctli and Tlaloc were the gods paralleling both
Darwin and agriculture.

They did abuse their neighbors, as you pointed out,
in their immaturity and their neighbors did march against
them but it is a mistake to say that was what
turned the tide against them.  It is also a mistake to believe
that the brutality of the Aztecs appalled the Spanish
Christians.   You can't put tongues in cheeks on paper.
The "night of tears" proved the Spanish and their allies
could not win the war by military means.  It was what
William McNeill pointed out about the 98% number for
smallpox that swung the balance in the direction of the
Spanish.When the warriors met for healing in public
ceremony, unarmed, the four hundred Spaniards
slaughtered them as they had done earlier with the
Cholulans.   Because they were sick they
couldn't fight back.

They were not as weak normally as the priests of
Cholula but the illness destroyed the entire infra-
structure of the city.  One should never forget that
You are speaking of people who would run to the
coast for fresh fish, would fast for nine days
without food or water (I know its hard to believe but
again it is well documented).  A people whose soldiers,
(not the ones who fasted), could run anyplace in the entire
empire in a couple of days.   So there has been a lot
more research done since your sources put the pen to
paper.

For example, much has been made, in the past of
their failure to use wheels and their lack of an
animal to pull a cart if they did.  That this held the
Aztecs back technologically.   They knew of both
the Llama and a cousin that could have served.

The people of Mexico refused to use the Llama because
it had hooves that tore up the soil.  They didn't use wheels
for anything but toys for the same reason.  The soil was
and is sandy and very thin top-soil but when the Spanish
arrived they saw a virtual paradise.

It is only since the horse and wheel became a part of that
environment and the church banned the Aztec farming
methods with plants like Amaranth that the system
collapsed and much of it is desert today.

I would also say that in the "stories" about
the farming methods of the forest dwellers (called
"slash and burn") they also have been ignorantly
maligned.  You never read about the way that
the fields are returned to the forest over a fifteen year
period with deliberate plantings of
forest healing plants that will feed and heal the hunters
at a later time.  Villages are moved every fifteen years.

No one talks about the farming methods of the peoples
of highland Peru either where the Science Times of the
NYTimes pointed out several years ago that their
canal method of raised fields enriched by fisheries in
the canals had the greatest yield per acre and per
worker of any fields in the world .  But it is hard to do and
does not fit well with Western cultural beliefs. The same
reason commercial wild rice is so awful.  They insist on
cutting the stalks when they harvest it and so it never
matures.

The French "raised fields" use some of the same methods.
Since the Iroquois have traditionally used the same I
would be interested in knowing whether the French learned
it from them or may

Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors I of II

[Ray E. Harrell]

Ed,

Your comments about romantic are confusing
to me as an artist.   Romanticism has a highly specific
meaning to me.   Emerson for example was a romantic,
does that mean that his observations are untrue or
untrustworthy?   The root of the word in Art goes back
to the Greek duality of Dionysus vs. Apollo.

Dionysus defined form from content while Apollo
defined content from form.  Frank Lloyd Wright
who developed an organic architecture, build from
the ground where it sat,  allowed the form to proceed
from the meanings of the surroundings.

In Japan, the surrounding content of an earthquake
prone area demanded a new form built upon the specific
needs of that area.  The building survived the earthquakes
of the region because Wright was a romantic.  He paid
attention to the content and let the form flow from its needs.
Sometimes he failed, like at Falling Water where it seems he
didn't put in enough steel in the cantilever but on the other
hand the contractor added steel and made Wright's design
heavier so who knows?   But in the Johnson's Wax building
and the Price Tower as well as the Imperial Hotel, he
succeeded brilliantly.Not bad for a romantic.

Romanticism appreciates the power of nature and its
basis as the root of all human creativity.  The Environmental
movement is a Romantic movement with the economic
monetarists being a classical one.

Beethoven was the beginning of romanticism in music
and was followed by Brahms, Wagner, Wolf, Schubert,
Schumann.  "One of a kind" those folks.   Ives was a
Romantic as well.  Romantics consider tradition to be
a part of the scene that the art must spring from.
Phillip Johnson is a romantic while Mies Van der Rohe
was not.  A romantic can appreciate both Johnson
and Mies while it is difficult for that to flow the other
way around.   So I love Mozart although I find him a little
tight assed at times.  I would prefer a little more
complexity but then I have Schoenberg and Puccini
for that.   As well as the southern drum but more about
that in a post that I have spent time thinking about.

Henry Ford was a classicist.  He made his functions
to fit his forms.  They had to be simple clean and elegant
like a production line.   The real point here  is that mass
production and economies of scale are classicist while
a one of a kind masterwork is romantic in impulse even
if it is classicist in form.   Artists body form forth from
perception of the beat of the world and the shapes of the
environment for their own sake.  The meaning of that form
found in its use is secondary to the truth and exceptional
quality of that moment in time and space.   That is at its
root romantic even if the result is "form defining meaning."
So the gist of all of this is that Dionysus without Apollo is
like a body with only one hand.  The reverse is true as well.
So perhaps it would be good to have a romantic economist
or two to fill out the synergy.

That is a pretty good definition of  the natives whose
language speaks the opposite of English.  Lame Deer
said the only Europeans who could understand us were
their artists.  I tend to agree but add those others who
have built the discipline to think like artists.   Artists,
like traditional Indian Peoples are concerned  with
mirroring first the balance of the world.

I don't mind
being called a romantic although I'm pretty good with
form as well.  That is why I am a teacher and have both
company and students with success.  I have taken
students the classicists have said were too "damaged"
to sing and presented them in the great halls with
successful careers.  My art master was a great black
voice teacher who taught Paul Robeson and many of
the greatest singers in America.  Roberta Flack was
his last success before he was murdered.  He was a
romantic.  I feel honored to be considered in the
tradition of seers that he represented.

The rest of this post is from a friend on another list.
lt presents an interesting form.

REH

===
If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100
people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would
look something like the following.

  There would be:

  57 Asians
  21 Europeans
  14 from the Western Hemisphere, (both north and South)
  8 Africans
 52 would be female
 48 would be male
 70 would be non-white
 30 would be white
 70 would be non-Christian
 30 would be Christian
 89 would be heterosexual
 11 would be homosexual
  6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth
and all 6 would be from the United States
 80 would live in substandard housing
 70 would be unable to read

Re: US Naval War College & Y2K

[Ray E. Harrell]

Most interesting.  Sounds like an old artist's maxim,
"you either can do it or you can't."

Now how do you learn to do it?

Is it the small bits of information like numbers,
writing or other academic standards arrived at
through the necessity to teach mass education to
massive groups of people?  Or is it the large
synergistically derived experiences from the
kind of ensemble processes that take members
of small groups into a greater universe in their
thought?

I suspect the most massive failure, of which
Hubbell's flaw was the harbinger and Y2K is the
most inclusive effect, is in the education of the
business disciplines.   The perceived truth is
and was that the market was like a machine that
is self regulating if you remove external regulations.

Warfield's discussion of the cause of the Savings
& Loan scandal was the failure of economists,
political theorists, self-serving businessmen and
both Reagan and the U.S. Congress to COMPREHEND
the results of their actions.   A failure of competence.

Now one will say that economics is an exact
science but cutting that mirror for Hubbell was.  What
could have possessed the businessmen and scientists
involved in that process to believe that they could get
away with putting such a flawed mirror into orbit?  One
could also say that NOT putting it into orbit could have
scuttled the whole project but that is just the politics of
funding.  It does not address the issue of why the mistake
was made and why they didn't rectify it with the second
mirror that had been cut as a back-up to the first.
Incompetence and greed.

So much for competence rising to the surface of
competition.  That is obviously too complicated
a situation to be so simply explained.   There is such a
thing as incompetence and there is, in spite of western
science's love of simplicity (they call it "elegant") such a
thing as "over simple."

Which brings us to Y2K.  The report says that it will demand
the kind of excellence in thought that is required of a concert
pianist or a member of the Super 300 International Opera
Ensemble.  Considering that it is considerably easier for almost
anyone to finish a physics degree( when compared to the millions
who train and apply for that group of 300 chosen from worldwide
competition and judged by the openness of public performance)
one would think there would be more American physicists.

But Americans  have  found that physics is too hard for
a people whose role in the world is to create
consumption and we are now  hiring Chinese and
Russian physicists and pretending surprise when others
have the bomb as a result.   I think this is the reason that
Clinton let it go on for so long.  How surprising to find himself
once more blamed for doing what TJ Rogers and the other
genius businessmen of silicone valley had been urging all
along.  Now they are super-funding the governor from TEXAS!
They didn't want American physicists, they were too
expensive, better to have a leaky Russian or Chinese.  Better
still to have a Democrat to blame that on before you flood the
market with Russian immigrants.

(By the way, it is only the Russian scientists who come
cheap.  Their artists are hard bargainers and many have
priced themselves out of the market to the American
Singers good fortune.)

So I find the Naval report to be too optimistic.  I think
the seductive power of cafe talk on the web and a general
impulse to laziness portends something much more
serious than just incompetence.

Instead I think it smacks of a "Doctor making his
patients sick with medicines meant to cure them so
his practice will continue."  That for me is the gist of
most of this future of work talk.  I don't think much of
the intent of most human endeavor.  Especially the
"free" market.

So I believe that the money will continue to define the
difference between classes and that psychology and
political intrigue, politely called connections,  will have
a great deal more to do with the future than just not
knowing how to stop mistakes.

(Remember it is only poor Indians whose mother's
drank that have fetal alcohol syndrome.  The NY
City elite   and their group all admit to drinking
themselves silly while Diana was pregnant and yet
their children write books and work in business
and academia.   That probably is because Indians
were "less immune to European alcohol" or
it means that we have mentally compromised folks
running the country because of family ties.  Will it
change?  Not as long as the "French drink.")

But I hope the report is true, however I fear that it is
just another instance of military projections.

Wars are easy, they destroy things to make it necessary
for their replacement and stimulation of jobs.  Sort of like
building your hospital in the middle of Tornado Alley like
Oral Roberts has done in Tulsa.  Sooner or later probability
will overcome hope and wishful thinking.   It probably comes
from not having to earn all of those donations that built his
school and teaching hospital in the fir

Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors

[Ray E. Harrell]

Hi Kieth,
You misrepresent my stand on tradition.It is certainly more complex
than you all are making it.  I am sending this post from a list on the Daily
Oklahoman forum on the movie The Tin Drum.  A movie that the local Christians
and constabulary have removed from the shelves of video stores as being
child pornography.I'm sure that some on the list have heard these stories
before, but the point about the adaptability of Native peoples in good ways
when left to our own devices is a good one to make again.  Remember it
is a long way from the lead and zinc mines on the reservation to singing in
Carnegie Hall and teaching students who sing in every major hall in America
and Covent Garden and La Scala in Europe as well as Lincoln Center here.
I would challenge the non-natives to make such change from their traditions.

REH

Daily Oklahoman Forum on the Tin Drum movie  July 25, 1999

to the list:

I have been thinking about two things from this list.

1. has to do with the idea that Americans spring from a
superior historical morality. And should protect that "morality"
from such films as "The Tin Drum".

2. that we have accurate history in our libraries about
the morality of the past. Does this Tin Drum issue spring
from a desire for a return to a "superior morality" from
our forefathers in the past? Could the absence of such
works as the Tin Drum have stopped the recent violence
in the Public Schools? Are our histories about the past
including the morality, truly factual?

In both cases the answer in my experience is no. I have
put together some vignettes that you probably would not
find in most libraries controlled by the current political
climate in Oklahoma, although I'm sure Carl Albert would
have been well aware of them.

Consider the following seven moral blunders that cause
violence.

- Wealth without Work,
- Pleasure without Conscience,
- Knowledge without Character,
- Commerce without Morality,
- Science without Humanity,
- Worship without Sacrifice,
- Politics without Principle.

- Gandi

I would like to say that I enjoyed your discussions today as I read through this
list.
What seems missing in all of this is Oklahoma's moral relationship to past
history with the Indian people. I am amazed how over the last two hundred years,
people
have been making these same arguments except instead of about "a movie they
haven't
seen" it is about a people that they didn't know.

About Indians before 1838 in Oklahoma and Blacks not a hundred years later in
North Tulsa.  So many false statements come from ignorance. It seems that we
would learn. Consider the current beliefs that Indians are "tribes" or
"Hunter/Gatherers"
and not nations or not the people who gave 70% of the staple foods of the world to
the
world from their agricultural technology. Some of the following can be found in
old
books in the library but much of this is as exotic as China to the people in the
Oklahoma educational system today.

In the 1820s the Cherokee nation mirrored the federal government and the men had a
"coup" over the
women. Up until that time we had two governments. One red and one white. The red
was the war
government and was in power during times of national conflict. The White was the
peace government
and was in power during all of the other times. Only a woman could declare war and
call out the Red
government. Only the Clan Mother's could pick the Chiefs who were members of the
council in both
governments.  Lineage was from the Mother and the women owned all of the property
with the
exception of the man's work implements and clothing. The children were a part of
her clan and they
were responsible for their upbringing. The wife's elder brother was the teacher
for the children. The
incest taboo was total and so the Aunts and Uncles were much more connected to the
children in the
instruction capacity than the actual parents. At a certain age they left the
parents home and went for
instruction to the home of the elder brother where they were given advanced
instruction.

In the 1820s this all changed. In 1827 we held a constitutional convention and
drafted a Constitution.
The following was written by my Father's graduate history advisor at Okla.
University in the 1930s. At
that time my father was hiding his heritage because if it had been known that we
were Indian, my father
would have been legally a minor under the law and he would have had no freedom to
his property, his
children or his religion. But that is another story. This is what Dr. Dale had to
say about the Cherokee
Nation in the 1820s:

>"By this time (1817) the Cherokee had made great
>progress in civilization. Contact with missionaries,
>white traders, and others had taught them much of
>the white man's civilization. Many of them had
>beautiful homes, plantations with broad, well tilled fields,
>much live stock and numerous slaves. Not a
>few were well educated, while intermarriage with the
>whites had produced a considerable group of
>mixed bloods of rare

Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors

[Ray E. Harrell]

How's your library Keith?

The issue with all of this is that it is inaccurate.  I grew up
in an indigenous community.  My sister is Aleut and an
actress with the likes of Peter Brook, Andre Serban etc.
has played Clytemnestra with them, helped bring a Aleut
Antigone from Upik to New York City and critical acclaim.

There is a lot of misery and most of it has to do with the
private sector of non-indian society.  They preach and sell
laziness.   It is easier to live in a pre-fab house than to deal
with snow but it is not necessarily smarter.  It is also easier
to become an addicted consumer surrounded by a culture
that raises buying to a sacred act.

We have a wonderful piece from Alaska written by the
winner of the Lerner and Lowe Award on Broadway from
a prize winning book about the Inuit on a rock in the
Bering Sea called King Island.  They had made both
Christmas and the Native Religion a part of their lives
and one year they carried their long boat over the
thousand foot rock to the other side of the Island to
save Christmas.  It was threatened by the ship bringing
the Priest and supplies being cut off by the ice.

David Friedman and Deborah Brevoort wrote the book
and music and presented it to a group of Broadway
folks.  One person found great problems with the fact that
there was so much positiveness in the work and thus
no "conflict."  I caught her at the elevator and explained
that the Inuit consider positiveness as essential to
keeping the blood flowing so the body won't freeze.

There is a famous song of the Inuit sailor cut off from
the land by a 100 mile iceberg broken away and
pushing him out to sea.  It begins with "The great sea
has cast me adrift" and describes the situation and
ends with "and fills my heart with joy."   His discipline
would not allow him to take the negative route.

She informed me that she knew better because her
husband had spent a couple of weeks in Alaska.

What could I say?


REH






Keith Hudson wrote:

> Regarding Ed Weick's latest contribution:
>
> 
> What is sad about 'progress', or whatever one wants to call it, is that
> something is gained but something is also lost.  Some fifty years ago, the
> Inuit of northern Canada still lived migratory lives on the land.  An
> anthropologist friend told me that on northern Baffin Island, where he
> spent a year among them, they had some seventy different words for snow.
> Inuit now live in fixed villages.  They still venture out in hunting
> parties, but do not spend nearly as much time on the land as they once did.
>  Many young Inuit can barely speak their language, let alone name snow in
> seventy different ways.  In our Indian villages, I've seen old grannies
> scold children in the native language, which the children no longer
> understand, and besides, it's alright to ignore old grannies now.  At one
> time, it was strictly taboo.  The gains have been many.  The ill-mannered
> children stand a much greater chance of survival to a ripe old age, being
> educated (as we understand education) and earning a good living than their
> ancestors of even a generation ago.  Yet much that is irreplaceable has
> also been lost.  That is the price people pay, usually without knowing it,
> for something they think we are getting without any real idea of what it is.
> 
>
> I'm not so sure about all this.  I used to think the same as Ed.  I think,
> now, that this point of view romanticises our ancestors. I rather think
> that if their society had been as natural/stable/satisfying as is often
> implied then it would have been a great deal more robust when faced with
> modern society. True, in many places, indigenous society and modern
> settlers both needed the same land and couldn't possibly co-exist, but in
> many other places the original culture could have survived more or less
> intact if they'd wanted it to.  Instead, when faced with all the gewgaws
> and temptations (including strong liquor) that modern man had to offer,
> then most indigenous societies folded up quite quickly -- voluntarily, as
> it were.
>
> For better or for worse, we recreate society much as it was before whenever
> we have passed through technological/economic change. OK, we might well
> lose picturesque customs and metaphors (such as 7 or 70 different names of
> snow -- and it's important for scholarly reasons that records are kept of
> these), but we recreate new ones which are equivalent. In England during
> the last couple of centuries the typical medieval village has entirely
> disappeared and there has been much wailing and nashing of teeth about its
> demise. But in its place today a vigorous and attractive new type of
> village is emerging -- together with modern equivalents of ancient customs.
>
> The important features of man and society are not the customs and
> ceremonials but the fact that we are at one and the same time a creature
> that is capable of being both viciously cruel and selfish but also helpful
> and altruistic (a for

Re: War, Confucious and the CBD

[Ray E. Harrell]

Ed,

I am a private entrepreneur who must examine
everything in order to survive, however you could
help on this if when you say:




> Hi Ray,
>
> I won't comment on Marx or Keynes except to say that your library book has
> wronged them both.

1. you explained what you meant about the economists(Marx and Keynes) since you
are one.   I realize how arrogant it is of me to do this but please accept a
civilian's questions.  What form of massive government spending is sustainable
over a number of years at great  cost to the average citizen and yet remains
popular?   A defensive war perhaps?

Keynes = government spending and where does the government spend more? in a war
that
demands life and death loyalty or prison?   Not many would be as blatant or
passionate in their questions as we civilians, but perhaps there is a bit of
peasant good sense at work here.  yes?


2. on the other hand, I want to share a story I was taught in college.  My music
history
course in college taught us that all music began in monody (single melody)
evolved through
a parallel melody called parallel organum and became counterpoint and then
melody and harmony.  It began with church chants and ended with symphony
orchestras moving out of
tonality and into the brave new world of complicated atonality.   It makes
perfect sense if the
world is only Western and began to sing 1500 years ago.

Out of one million years of human  music and expression, no body questioned that
this history made ancient music out of music that was less than one thousand
years old.But then the world got smaller and all of those communist
universities began to explore the lead of Bela Bartok who became an expert in
Hungarian "folk" music and wrote his own modern music around aesthetic ideas
found in the  folk music.  These same ideas were atonal and polytonal and
thoroughly up to date but they  were truly ancient.   The communist universities
went out into the back country and listened  to peasant women singing and
improvising atonal music while they cut the hay in the fields.   They played
games that were as sophisticated as the most sophisticated modern music and
they had been doing it for God only knows how long.

But the point here is that although the  official story made sense in the
limited context of Europe and the church, it was inaccurate.   They didn't even
acknowledge the gift from the Gypsies with music that traveled with the Jews
and blossomed into some of the 19th centuries most interesting and complicated
scores.  No, instead you got the simplistic jargon that ultimately made both
Jews and  Gypsies simpletons and parasites on the "true" aryan musical tree.

But that wasn't true  either.  In fact they found those original church chants
being sung in Yemen by Jews that had  been separated from the rest of the world
since before 2,000 years ago.  So the chants  were Jewish!After WW II the
Jews became the excepted international group in the West  while the Gypsies were
outcasts.  (They had to register with the police in New Jersey simply  to travel
and their banks were constantly raided and robbed by the police in the U.S., see
the  "Romany against the city of Spokane" over this and other issues of
prejudice)

Even though the Gypsies lost 75% of their population in Dachau, there is only
one Gypsy  representative to the Holocaust museum in Washington and they had to
fight for that.   On the  other hand, although many of the original Communists
were Jewish in Russia, the  Russians embraced the Gypsies and made outcasts of
the Jews.  Gypsies had their theaters  and were found in all of the performing
arts organizations.  They also were able to  travel freely from one country to
another while the Jews were actually prisoners in their own  homes if they
wanted to leave the country.

My point to this story is that it was based upon models in the minds of people
in the East  and West and very little of it is based upon historical fact.
Wish, but not fact.

Now let us take your economic story.   I can give you a lot of facts on this
because I found  that my research didn't match the official stories and so I had
to dig.  Both Lawrence W.  Levine and Richard Crawford have written studies on
much of this and I would recommend  them for their erudition into the social
contract that has created the current mess.

I don't
have time to fill it out and they have done it better than I anyway.  Levine's
Eliot Norton  Lectures at Harvard are called "Highbrow/Lowbrow, The Emergence of
Cultural Hierarchy In  America"  Harvard pub. and Crawford's work is described
in the latest issue of the NEH  Humanities magazine.  He is editor for the NEH
for the forty volume series of Music in America and  is just finishing an
earthshaking new American musical history textbook for University use.  It  will
churn the butter.   What I, of course like, is that he has documented the same
discoveries that I have also made, but not from the place of the performer but
of the scholar.

Re: War, Confucious and the CBD

[Ray E. Harrell]

Robert,

My library book on Keynsian economics says basically
the same thing.   If your economy is in trouble start a war.
(I can hear the apologist's keyboards rattle, "Marx
wasn't an economist and Keynes didn't mean it.")

One of the things that no one would consider (because
it doesn't fit, into the "exploiters as progressives" mode),
would be to return to the greatest use of Iron in the
19th century.   Turn those swords and old automobiles
into piano frames!

We have such "ideas" about giving (or not)  money
away to that 40% or so of the population, that will not
have the regular (exploitation and pollute) jobs, that
we would rather argue about the meaning of drudge
work than to come up with work that delights the eye,
caresses the ear and makes the idea of tearing an
eye from the socket or an arm from the shoulder acceptable
only in a play.  Better crime in the street from abused
populations or war to lower that population and offer
puberty rites than to have a play and self reflection on
that brutality.   Better to have a burial then have
Wilfred Owen rise at the end of his poems and take
a bow.

Yes Brad, these are sacrifices that are like
the ones you deplore.  But the real sacrifice would
have been to have this poet home writing about culture
in the way he wrote about war.  He could have written
the 20th century version of Blake's economic
observations:

"Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death.
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy, & dance & sing.
They think they have done me no injury"
And are gone to praise God & and his Priest & King
Who make a heaven of our misery."
==
Brutality is not legislated away or solved by repression
in children.  It should be played out on the stage, not
the stage of life, but the stage where people, both professional
and amateur, can act the great lessons of life and explore
the meanings of the composers and poets, the great
ideals of their history, their present and their dreams.

Since no one seemed to like my last post on this,
I will let it go.  I have much to do but I find this all very
discouraging and more than a little cowardly on the
part of those who are at present doing the "naming
of the valuables" in society.  So I go into lurking with
a little Chinese wisdom from a dialogue with
that great futurist Confucius:

If it happens that one entrusts you
with the government,
what would you do first?

"I would begin with correct definitions!"

But that is far afield,
Why should the Government bother?

"When the names are not correct,
then the language does not fit.

When the language does not fit,
then the actions will not be complete.

When the actions are not complete,
then civility does not blossom.

When civility does not blossom,
then authority falters.

And when authority falters
then the people do not know were
to put their hands and feet.

Therefore the wise scholar gives names
such that language becomes possible,
And uses language in such a way that
wise action becomes possible. "

==
"Giving meaning to words is a creative act
leading to manifestations in the real world"
  Winfried Dressler
==
A public leader needs to be

> 1. ...in possession of the cultural inheritance.

and needs to be qualified to

> 2. ...participate in the contemporary world.
> 3. ...contribute to the civilization of the future.
John Warfield
===

As for Michael's Brain Drain, (CBD)

America is currently filled with Canadian Culture and
performing artists bringing millions of dollars back into
the economy of Toronto in particular and Canada
generally.It has worked for America's balance of
trade payments, I suspect that a smaller country and
a smaller population will benefit even more.

However Canada has decided to go on the same
"profit as the only value" binge that is currently
infecting America's heart and brain.  So the Canada
Council, that jewel of North America, is probably on
the way out, in which case you had better be prepared
to compete with the giant to your south in the
entertainment market place.  Remember what happened
to that wonderful Canadian "share the profits between
projects" producer Garth Drabinsky.   He met American
"profit is the only value" shareholders and they crashed
his empire.   It isn't pretty.

There are a lot more of your people working
in Nova Scotia and around your country in the culture
industries than ours are here, primarily because of
what was an enlighted attitude on the part of the
Canadian people.  Where America gives less than a
dollar per person to subsidize the arts, the last time
I looked, Canada gave several dollars per person
and Hollywood 

Re: Jim Stanford (was Re: Charles Leadbetter)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Steve and Tom,

I think you are both missing the point.  This (FW)  is all
fantasy.  What kind of world would you imagine for
the future of human endeavor (work) and

1. How is it built from the past?
2. How does it play out in the present?
3. What kind of world do you imagine it would be in the
future?

COMPLAINTS ONLY MAKE YOU FREEZE TO DEATH
IN TIMES OF NEED.

All this DOWN stuff about people working for big
governments, schools, corporations as well as the lonely
heroic individual entrepreneur are really,  just "stories."

We are given the vacant "super wealthy" and strategic
work lives as villains.   Not very good ones.   Unless it
is the  "Strategic"  of the latest game which these
"patrons" call "Strategic Giving" which means that they
try to trick their neighbors into giving both shares and
then count their non gift as  non-taxable "profit."
Of course the gifts aren't taxable either.

They say that it develops character.   And they write books
about character and family values but run at the first
sign of significant sacrifice.   But its not much better on
the noble poor side either.

You should see the poor folks hide (just like the
super wealthy) when they have to confront "character"
development in a Tennessee Williams play.   My
company gives  $120,000 in scholarships for the development
of significant work.  Much of the time we are dealing
with personality problems around being "taken care of."
No wonder Tennessee Williams rots at the gate to their
minds.

MONEY IS THE ANSWER?

Both top and bottom thinks they can  purchase
excellence without any personal pain.   They use
words like education and medical "consumers" as
if "purchasing" voice lessons will give them the will
to struggle with the great abstract performance works
of Western  culture.   Better they should buy a computer
and try that valley in California.   No one has pointed
out that the rich man couldn't complete his college and
that this fact may have something to do with the
problems with his systems.But he has LOTS of money
so it MUST be OK. As they say in the movies, you
won't know until he has finished this life, whether it worked
or not.

They do come to the art lessons and fantasize about
acting in the movies but then "act out" their fantasies,
fail and then run home to mama. (real work)

But I must inject here, there are those who will not
give up their dreams and they practice until they can
accomplish those dreams, no matter how emotionally
painful the task, but most just run away when it gets
emotionally complicated.

In today's world there are the abandoned  (down-sized)
rejected souls, who once rehired will now make sure
THAT unpleasantness never happens again and if they
can "stick it" to the ones who "did it"  then better still.

YES THIS IS ONE OF THOSE "I'VE BEEN THERE" POSTS.

I've been there.  I've had four ensembles, taking five years
each to develop, fail because a company member decided
to opt for their vision of success apart from the company.
I was the management dream of every "worker."  Provide
the pay, team and venue for the best possible training
and then split.   So much for Eva's noble worker.  Hunter/
Gatherers they were,  just like Cortez.   (At one point it
was even over a new opera on Quetzalcoatl.   They said:
"Nothing significant could come from an opera about
those losers!")

They walked away with my "intellectual capital" and the
other member's time and effort and used it for their own
"individual advancement."   It rarely worked for them but
that didn't matter.   The team collapsed as an ensemble
and become the collection of free lance people that you
have everywhere.   You can't free lance someone into a
long term team, a real ensemble.  Ensembles grow
like a body and a flexible person is no more adequate
for an ensemble than an artificial limb will substitute
for the real thing.   So as MIT asks, is it possible to have
a Learning Organization in today's flex climate?  Good
question, perhaps important for the future.

MIRRORS AS THE MEANING OF LIFE AND WORK

The economists on this list have said that economics
is just analyzing what is there.  A "mirror of economic
reality" so society can make informed decisions.  Not a
bad purpose but mirrors are without intelligence.

Art also makes the same argument.   Many creative
artists say that they are just giving the people who
they are.  It happened the other night with the Netherlands
Dance Theater when they destroyed a ballet with
simulated bombs showing the destruction of Yugoslavia
by NATO at Lincoln Center.

They were just "mirroring existence."  Creating a destruction
that shocked the audience and benignly letting them know
the meaning of the bomb's finality in the  war, but they
forgot the other part of the mirror.   A part so obvious that
even a newspaper critic noticed it. (not cool!)  The mirror
is truth but the other half of Western Art is Beauty or the
"Ideal."   In Shinto it is a mirror and a stone, I am told, but
the poi

Re: Charles Leadbetter -- the End of Unemployment

[Ray E. Harrell]

Chris, that's not cynicism, that's business.  One of the
reasons they can downsize so easily is because of the
excess they hire.   All of these exercises with numbers,
hours, and work weeks are just more of the same.  The
size of the company separates you so much from those
who truly control the tasks that waste is rampant.  After
a 13 year experience with academia, I decided not to
trust my work to anyone other than myself and my own
close colleagues.   My wife on the other hand worked
both as a manager and as an expert flexible for several
of the world's larger companies.   I was amazed at how
little she really needed to do to complete her job.  She
loved it however and always gave more than the system
required and ultimately cared about having.  I'm glad that
she is now my GM.   I'll take all I can get.

REH



Christoph Reuss wrote:

> Brad McCormick wrote:
> > I worked on a big educational website (just a
> > lot of HTML an Javascript -- pretty "simple"
> > stuff, as computer programming goes!), where,
> > every time Netscape came out with a new
> > "maintenance release" of their web browser, it
> > was time for me to find out how it would
> > cause my application to break "this time", so
> > that I'd expect to spend from a few hours to
> > a few days getting back to where I had been
> > before.
>
> Well, that's how the guild of programmers makes sure they'll _never_
> run out of work.  Micro$oft is the master of this particular "art" of
> "creating" work (and income!).  I know of a big corporation that
> first migrated all their applications from DOS to Unix, and a few
> years later "back" from Unix to Windows.  Some "smart" programmers
> got really rich of this back-and-forth (or rather, forth-and-back!),
> without "creating" anything -- just migrating the same applications.
> Another big company is now desperately looking for some "genius" to
> "sidegrade" their 600 PCs from Windows 95 to Windows NT (talk about
> "industry standard"!) -- to later "backgrade" to Windows 00, probably.
>
> If other industries would finally "learn" this art, it could be the
> end of unemployment. ;-)
> (Who will *pay* this idling nonsense is a different question, of course.)
>
> Cynically yours,
> Chris
>
> ___
> CORPORATION, n. --  A miniature totalitarian state governed by an unelected
> hierarchy of officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech,
> equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.
>   --==(The Cynic's Dictionary)==--

Re: Rifkin - some final words

[Ray E. Harrell]

LEADERSHIP AND COMPETENCY
I have typed in portions of an article by the complexity scholar
John Warfield with his permission to share.   I think it bears
on the pedagogy of the first part of leadership, the ability to
see the levels of complication connected to the team's
incompetencies including a statistical tool for grading levels
of complexity and the likelihood of success given the make-up
of a team.   I also believe this is essential in any discussion
on the future of work, including my profession.

Warfield comments on the value of accurate data and the
wise use of such in this paper on "The Great University."
He says that the Great University should be concerned
with three things:

1. Putting the learner in possession of the cultural inheritance.
2. Qualifying the learner to participate in the contemporary world.
3. Qualifying the learner to contribute to the civilization of the
future.

I believe that these are essential to any discussion of the future
of work, jobs or anything that moves forward in time and space.

I'm typing in a section of this excellent work for your examination.

>From "THE GREAT UNIVERSITY"  1995
by John N. Warfield,
Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences
George Mason University, Va.

"This leads me to the thought that whenever someone makes
a generalization, (intended to apply to a broad subspectrum
of life), its validity is likely to depend on its space-time
span.   If I say something that has been valid for most of ...
36 normal lifetimes, it carries some weight, even if it
has not been valid for a few recent years.  And if I say
something that has been valid largely for the western
world, it carries some weight, even if it is not valid for
the Orient, or for other parts of the earth.   And yet we
seldom bother to attach space-time spans to our utterances.

These ideas introduce my first theme, an Information Scale
Proposition (P1):

Importance of Scale.
SCALE IS IMPORTANT IN DEALING WITH INFORMATION
(P1)

If something has been valid for 36 lifetimes, it is reasonable
to suppose that we have incorporated beliefs and habits drawn
from that period of time.  But at the same time, it can well
be that if we look at the past few decades, i.e., at less than
one lifetime,   those beliefs and habits have been superseded
by new possibilities, even if we are not tuned up to recognize
them.

And there is another aspect of this Information Scale Proposition.

If the information goods with which we deal are constantly
constrained by the necessity to package them into a small
space-time scale, e.g., pages 8 1/2 x 11 inches in dimension,
or into a time interval of 50 minutes, or onto an electronic
monitor with a screen 14 inches in diagonal, or in a one-page
memo for management (which is all they normally want to
examine, no matter what the topic may be, assigning equal
weight to corporate-survival material and rest-room keys),
or in a 2 minute news flash, we must raise the question as
to what is inherently being divorced from our purview by
the iterative presence of hundreds or thousands of small-scale
events.

This brings us to a second Information Scale Proposition (P2)

Miscalibration:
BECAUSE EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IGNORE SCALE,
INDIVIDUALS BECOME SERIOUSLY MISCALIBRATED
IN TERMS OF INDIVIDUAL COMPETENCE. (P2)

Repetitive exposure to severely limited information scale;
accompanied by repetitive reinforcement of human
performance at that scale; engenders gross miscalibration
of human self-competence and produces gross, ingrained
insensitivity to the impact of information scale; accompanied
by a bias in favor of small-scale packages.

In simple English, this is what I am saying: in education, students
are exposed hundreds of times to small-scale information packets;
and they are tested hundreds or thousands of times on their
ability to repond to or reproduce such small-scale packets, or
inferences based on a few of those small-scale packets; and if
they do well in most of these instances, they begin to build and
to internalize as habitual behavior the idea that everything they
encounter in life is encompassed in packets of that size.  They
become totally insensitive to the idea that some things that they
encounter are well beyond the range of their experience and
capacity.  They are totally unequipped to know that those large-
scale phenomena which they encounter lie far beyond their
individual, life-trajectory-llimited, span-of-immediate-recall-
limited experience and capacity."
==
Warfield gives several examples, I will limit it to one due
to the time pressure on you and my typing. REH.
==

"Some of you are sensitive to financial disasters.  The recent
savings and loan crisis in the U.S., which was precipitated by
foolish large-scale legislation enacted by Congress in 1986,
is a prominent example showing the impact on taxpayers of
enacting legislation that dealt with a situation beyond the
natural span of individual mastery, causin

Re: Rifkin, The End of Work/The End of Jobs

[Ray E. Harrell]

Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:

> Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> >
> > Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> >
> > > Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> [snip]
> > I'm reminded of a friend doing research on fish behaviorat the New York
> > Museum of Natural History.   He is a
> > psychologist and quit the team because he said that he
> > had no way of knowing what the intent of the behavior
> > was that he had been given to document.  How the team
> > believed they knew but had no way of truly knowing.
>
> Psychologists in general miss the *one subject they could validly
> study*: Each of them doing a case study on whatever he or she
> happened to be doing at the moment.  That could simply be
> breathing (or belching), or it could be being-in-the-
> middle-of-a-multi-million-dollar-grant-funded-project-to-study-some-
> aspect-of-[whoever's: e.g., welfare recipients, school children,
> clerical workers, etc.]-behavior. *Not*: Studying the
> welfare recipients, school children, clerical workers, *per se*,
> but studying the activities in which the psychologist is
> here-and-now engaged in, in the lived experience of "studying".

But the historians have not, thank God.   That great scholarLawrence W. Levine
wrote a whole book answer to Allan
Bloom's inept but popular polemic "The Closing of the
American Mind".   The future will record Levine's superior
documentation but the present is closed to his facts.   The
University of Chicago has this great reputation for punctilious
scholarship, but what Levine documents is a riot of opinion
and anecdote with very little genuine scholarship.

I wonder Brad, has anyone ever done a study on all of
this Chicago scholarship as a "second city sibling envy"
expression?   Or maybe it fits more the anger of the good
child who did not leave home.  Leo Strauss gravitated to
its environment and Bloom said:
>"When I was fifteen years old I saw the University
> of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed
> that I had discovered my life  The longing for
> I knew not what suddenly found a response in
> the world outside."

> In my opinion, this may be the greatest *intellectual* (as
> opposed to *material*!) tragedy of
> the 20th Century.  Edmund Husserl clearly set forth the
> problem and the path to its solution, ca. 1935, in his
> _The Crisis of European Sciences..._ (Northwestern Univ. Press,
> 1970), and there are numerous others who have made more
> or less the same point, more or less well (Susanne
> Langer, Gregory Bateson, C. Wright Mills, the
> best "industrial sociologists" such as Philip
> Kraft..., Robert Lynd...).

I like Bateson and some Langer but have never been muchdrawn to Husserl.

> (snip)
>
> Alas likely also little what *both* makes them feel good *and* does good
> for others ("win-win" behavior)!  I am not a "fan" of
> *sacrifice*!  (snip)

Well Brad, in my work "sacrifice" means to make sacred
and only that which is truly sacred would keep us in this
wonderful creative profession and economist damaged
business.

REH

Re: FW Clinto poverty tour - comments (fwd)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Having grown up on the reservation which was the number one
toxic waste dump in America (Super-fund), where the houses
just dropped into cave-ins with people in them and where
the largest Indian nation West of the Mississippi River
and who had owned the state of Arkansas (correct pronunciation
Oogapah) was down to 200 people with four language speakers
left on the earth,

I have a feeling for Clinton or any President
visiting Pine Ridge.   Since the Oogapah are Southern Sioux,
what they called the River Sioux, it is appropriate that Clinton
raised and nurtured in the land of the ancient Oogapah should
visit the small country where their Northern relatives are still
held in a ghetto prison.   (Yes I can hear it now: "They don't
have to stay, they could move into the city ghetto and really be
alone."  Right!)

Pine Ridge is a place where Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is
rampant and where they die young or end up on death row
(as in California).   Unlike the Fetal Alcohol Syndromes
from the last generation in New York who now teaches in
the nations colleges and inhabit the board rooms of the
family corporations.

"Yes dahling,  Diana and Lional did drink themselves silly
while she was pregnant but only the poor children deserve
to be  labeled and subject to the 'rule of law.'   After all
why should we care when THOSE STATES in New England
have so MUCH incest.  They just ahre that way you know!"
(No, it doesn't make sense, why should it?)

So I was grateful that this pragmatist who was abused because
he didn't share the rigid orthodoxy of the Milton Friedman
Kulture Revolution.  A man who knew how to "tack" as they
say in sailing or "switchback" if you are a climber, finally had
the political power to visit Pine Ridge.   I do not consider him
to blame for the legal bills of his underlings or his playmate. I
do not consider their treatment moral and frankly blame those
who weat the label of cultural rigidity and bear the subpoenas.

The people who complain about the Sioux have never been
there and have on more than one occasion expressed to me
the opinion that they (the Sioux)  deserve what has happened
to them.  An opinion worthy of  Julius Streicher.  But that is
just my opinion.

REH




S. Lerner wrote:

> Excerpt from The Jobs Letter (with permission). So subscription info below
>
> V O I C E S
> --
>
> ON THE CLINTON POVERTY TOUR
> " In a recent speech, Clinton compared himself to Franklin
> Roosevelt. Both of them, he said, were "people who were
> progressive, people who try to change things, people who keep
> pushing the envelope.
>
> "The difference is that Roosevelt was acting at the start of his
> presidency in a time of economic crisis, and was almost entirely
> willing to try any means that worked to achieve his ends. Clinton, by
> contrast, is acting at the end of his presidency in a period almost
> bereft of economic crisis, and will only try those means that pass
> muster with the stock markets..."
> -- Martin Kettle, Washington Diary, The Guardian
>
> "It's positive, and long overdue, that Clinton is addressing these
> issues, but to be saying that you want to deal with poverty while
> you're calling welfare 'reform' a success is rather disingenuous.
> While the US welfare rolls have dropped sharply, studies indicate
> that many have simply joined the ranks of the working poor. They
> now have jobs that are paying below poverty wages, without
> benefits or affordable child care; moreover, states have been
> 'forgetting' to tell them that they are still eligible for Medicaid and
> food stamps ..."
>  -- Mimi Abramovitz, Professor at the School of Social Work at
> Hunter College and author of "Regulating the Lives of Women"
>
> "It is good that Clinton is going out and calling attention to these
> issues, but some of the suggestions are flawed. If you build a base
> of incomes and social and physical infrastructure, then business
> activity develops, but if you throw business activity in a region where
> that does not exist, then you have a sweatshop phenomenon. What
> is needed is housing assistance, public services, money to improve
> schools and the environment, and income support such as through
> the earned income tax credit and a higher minimum wage."
>  -- James K. Galbraith, professor at the LBJ School of Public
> Affairs,
>
> "If it wasn't for NAFTA, hundreds of thousands of jobs would not
> have left the U.S., creating more poverty. If there were minimal
> protections for migrant workers, then we wouldn't have the depth of
> poverty that we have. If North Carolina, where I live, wasn't a 'right to
> work' state, people could do collective bargaining and have the
> guarantee of organized workplaces. As it is, they can be fired at will.
> What you have now are people who are afraid of losing jobs, so
> they don't push for better conditions and safety at their
> workplaces..."
>  -- George Friday, a member of the Grassroots Policy Project and
> a low-income activi

Re: Rifkin, The End of Work/The End of Jobs

[Ray E. Harrell]

So at the end of the last century we had the "end of the
frontier" and now we have the end of "work", "jobs",
whatever,  for the end of this one.   I suspect a valid
case could be made for what John Warfield calls
"small information envelope" type of thought which
creates a kind of subconscious fear of the whole.

What I hear Rowe, Rifkin and others saying is that the way
in which we look at these things is not practical enough.
Rowe's comments about the ivory tower of economics
resonated well with me because I belong to an "illegitimate"
profession, which even Rowe linked with prisons (entertainment).

A profession which even though it has rescued the country's
ass in balance of payments and has a better record of humane
treatment of it's unions and workers then the current crop of
flex fanatics, is still considered (in what seems an orgy of
Calvinist polemics) illegitimate.   How is the market less of a
gamble than any other gambling?   We had a former member
of this list who was confused by his son being able to make a
living as a gambler in the casinos. (something claimed impossible
in a profession claimed only worthy of the "addicted")

I can imagine that the gambling industry with other forms of
entertainment given the kind of support in the country's
churches and synagogues that the Wall Street Journal recieves
with its credo of creative greed, might, just might do better
at providing a living than anyone could possibily believe in
this climate.

After all, their thought is both ignorant and wrong about
homosexuals and it was not so long ago that they were
blaming their Jewish population for murdering Jesus.
Who is to say that they aren't wrong about the above economic
values as well?In Rowe's article Fallows is quoted as
documenting the ethno-centricity of the North American
economic values.  That also resonated with my experience.

To bad there are no Italians on this list.  Their whole
country would be illegitimate as a culture, people, history
and economy in this climate of "prisons, gambling and
entertainment" discussion of jobs.   But wait, has anybody
looked at their country's size, natural resources relative
to GDP lately?   It is not unusual to hear Italian businessmen
make the point that
North America is only successful because it is rich and not because it is
smart.   Do they have a point and can they document it.
The only thing we read about the Italian government in our press
is that they change alot and allowed an elected female
prostitute to urinate in Parliment.

How COULD they be
so successful, and then there are the Japanes with their
high unemployment.   4% according to the NYTimes recently.
Zilch natural resources, a huge population, earthquakes and
no more land than California.  Do they have the same beliefs
about economics and sex as the North Americans?  I don't
think so.

Instead I would suggest that Frederick Jackson Turner was
on to something with his Frontier theory as motivation, but
that his imagination was too limited.  Space, for instance,
can be a tremendous frontier to challenge the human spirit.
Consider what it would mean if tomorrow it was discovered
that there was absolutely no possibility of space travel.
Such a limitation on the human spirit of adventure would
probably doom the species.  Not unlike  Ursula LeGuinn's
planet where the human colonizers went crazy because the
local inhabitants killed all of the human women and declared the
men a protected species for the purpose of study with no
possibility of escape from the ultimate death of their species.

As for the "they will discover a way out if we just believe and
persevere" line of argument, I would point out the disaster of
that type of thought in the Nuclear Power and waste situation.

Maybe we should look back to the founding fathers of the
Western world and consider that human potential and exploration
is a worthy reason for working and that it deserves to be supported
by the society and valued as the highest goals of the culture.

Germany exists not because of the Marshall plan but because
they could replace Hitler's picture with Beethoven's and still
believe in their worth.   Right now in Oklahoma, the German
that made that point, Gunter Grass, is on trial as the state,
Calvinist Kulture, has made the "Tin Drum" illegal as child
pornography.After that they will go after the rape scene
in Bergman's Virgin Spring and then Fellini's Amarcord.  They
have jobs and big houses and lots of tornados to keep the
construction industry feeding the GDP, but to what purpose?

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




Michael Gurstein wrote:

> One thing seems to be overlooked in the "end of work" argument--both
> pro and con.  While the evidence is still unclear as to whether
> there is a net positive or negative impact of technology on the number of
> jobs, there seems little doubt that technology is having a significant
> impac

Ian Richie 2.

[Ray E. Harrell]

Objective history, that grand imagined jewel of the Western
literary world was given a lesson in Oklahoma last month
when the Thunderbeings sent 78 tornados to remind we
informationed folks that new is "great."   That only the
mountains last forever and that the development of individual
and community knowledge is the only possible real meaning
of life.

I asked my Aunt about Morris, the little town where my
grandparents are buried and where 98% of the town was
lost to the thunderers a few years back.   She said, its sooo
beautiful.Everything is new now. But will America
be comfortable when everything is lost.  What will be the
carrier of the knowledge now that the songs are banal and
the singers are so fragile?

REH

TECHNOLOGY
History: We're Losing It

They told us digital data would last forever. They lied. How
do we save the past before it all disappears?
By Arlyn Tobias Gajilan

First-time parents Michele and Steve Brigham of New York
can't imagine life without their 6-year-old daughter, Courtney—
or the family camcorder and camera. Like
millions of other parents, the Brighams have videotaped and
photographed their daughter's first breaths, first steps, first
birthday and dozens of other events in a rapidly growing
library of more than 1,800 minutes of videotape and 3,000
photographs. "It may seem excessive," admits Michele.
"But I think Courtney will appreciate it all when she grows
up." Unfortunately, she might have nothing to look at. By
the time Courtney turns 30, sunlight may have faded most
of her color childhood photos, and in the off chance that
the tiny VHS-C videotapes featuring her many firsts survive
decades of heat and humidity, there probably won't be a
machine to play them back on.

Home videos and snapshots aren't all that are at risk.
Librarians and archivists warn we're losing vast amounts
of important scientific and historical material because of
disintegration or obsolescence. Already gone is up to 20
percent of the data collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory
computers during NASA's 1976 Viking mission to Mars.
Also at risk are 4,000 reels of census data stored in a form
at so obscure that archivists doubt they'll be able to recover it.
By next year, 75 percent of federal government records will be
in electronic form, and no one is sure how much of it will be
readable in as little as 10 years. "The more technologically
advanced we get, the more fragile we become," says Abby
Smith of the Council on Library and Information Resources.

For years, computer scientists said the ones and zeros of
digital data would stick around forever. They were wrong.
Tests by the National Media Lab, a Minnesota-based
government and industry consortium, found that magnetic
tapes might last only a decade, depending on storage conditions.
The fate of floppy disks, videotape and hard drives is just as
bleak. Even the CD-ROM, once touted as indestructible, is
proving vulnerable to stray magnetic fields, oxidation,
humidity and material decay. The fragility of electronic
media isn't the only problem. Much of the hardware and
software configurations needed to tease intelligible information
from preserved disks and tapes are disappearing in the name
of progress.  "Technology is moving too quickly," says Charlie
Mayn, who runs the Special
Media Preservation lab at the National Archives.

He speaks from experience. In the 1980s, the Archives t
ransferred some 200,000 documents and images onto optical
disks, which are in danger of becoming indecipherable
because the system archivists used is no longer on the market.
"Any technology can go the way of eight-track and Betamax,"
says Smith, whose own dissertation is trapped on an obsolete
5e-inch floppy. "Information doesn't have much of a chance,
unless you keep a museum of tape players and PCs around."
That may not be such a farfetched idea. Mayn's temperature-
controlled lab in the bowels of the National Archives houses
many machines once used to record history. In one room,
archivists are resurrecting the 1948 whistle-stop oratory of
President Harry Truman; the give-'em-hell speeches were
recorded on spools of thin steel wire, an ancestor of reel-to-
reel tape recordings. Though some of the wires have rusted
and snap during playback, Mayn and his team are busy
"migrating," or transferring, what they're able to recover
onto more stable modern media.

Unfortunately, migration isn't a perfect solution. "Sometimes
not all the data makes the trip," says Smith. Recently the
Food and Drug Administration said that some pharmaceutical
companies were finding errors as they transferred drug-testing
data from Unix to Windows NT operating systems. In some
instances, the errors resulted in blood-pressure numbers that
were randomly off by up to eight digits.

So what's to be done? "That's a question no one really has
an answer for," says Smith. A good way to start is to separate
the inconsequential from the historic, and save on simple
formats. Making those decisions w

Ian Richie

[Ray E. Harrell]

 Report from the NYTimes 7/14/99

Report Says Profit-Making Health Plans Damage Care

July 14, 1999

Related Articles
Issue in Depth: Health Care

Forum
Join a Discussion on Health Care Reform


By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON -- Patients enrolled in profit-making health
insurance plans
are significantly less likely to receive the basics of good
medical care --
including childhood immunizations, routine mammograms, pap
smears,
prenatal care, and lifesaving drugs after a heart attack -- than
those in not-for-profit
plans, says a new study that concludes that the free market is
"compromising the
quality of care."

The research, conducted by a team from Harvard University and Public
Citizen, an
advocacy group in Washington, is the first comprehensive comparison
of
investor-owned and nonprofit plans. The authors found that on every
one of 14
quality-of-care indicators, the for-profits scored worse.

But because the researchers favor national health insurance, some
questioned their
findings.

"The market is destroying our health care system," Dr. David U.
Himmelstein,
associate professor of medicine at Harvard University Medical School
and the
study's lead author, said in a telephone interview. "We have had a
decade or more
of policies aimed at making health care a business, and they have
failed."

Investor-owned health plans, which are typically made up of loose
networks of
doctors, have come to dominate the American medical landscape in
recent years.
These plans, offered by companies like Aetna, U.S. Healthcare and
Cigna
Healthcare, last year covered 62 percent of all patients in HMOs, as
compared to
26 percent in 1985. Yet most research on quality of care in HMOs has
focused on
traditional nonprofits, among them Kaiser Permanente, in California,
and HIP, based
in New York.

The new study, which appears this week in the Journal of the American
Medical
Association, analyzed quality-of-care data from 248 investor-owned
and 81
not-for-profit plans in 45 states and the District of Columbia. These
plans provided
coverage to 56 percent of all Americans enrolled in HMOs in 1996, the
year from
which the patient information was drawn.

Among the findings: In profit-making HMOs just 63.9 percent of
2-year-olds were
fully immunized, as compared to 72.3 percent in nonprofits.
Lifesaving beta-blocker
drugs were given to 59.2 percent of heart attack patients in
for-profit plans, but 70.6
percent of patients in nonprofits got the drugs. Diabetes patients
were less likely to
receive annual eye exams to prevent blindness in profit-making plans;
the figure was
35.1 percent, as against 47.9 percent in nonprofits.

The investor-owned plans fared worse, the authors said, even when all
other factors,
like location of the plan, and whether the doctors were employees or
members of
networks, were taken into account. While the study had certain
limitations -- it did
not examine patient outcomes, for instance -- the authors, who paid
for the research
themselves, said the data were the best available.

The study is being published just as the Senate is embroiled in a
divisive debate over
how to protect patients' rights and regulate HMOs. While the authors
say the timing is
coincidental, the work is already influencing the discussion. In a
statement released
Tuesday, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who is pushing for HMO
regulation,
said the research "contains strong new support for HMO reform."

But representatives of the insurance industry, which opposes
regulation, argue just
the opposite. They say the study demonstrates that, even at their
worst, health
maintenance organizations provide better care to patients than
fee-for-service
arrangements that were common 10 years ago.

"The best conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that
managed care is
improving the quality of health care for those Americans that are
covered by health
plans," said Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for the American Association
of Health
Plans, which represents both for-profit and nonprofit plans.

Ms. Pisano also accused the authors of confusing "analysis and
ideology."

Himmelstein did not dispute that he has a bias. "My bias is that
for-profit HMOs kill
people," he said.

But Eli Ginzberg, a health care econo

Re: Digital Monoculture

[Ray E. Harrell]

Hi Tom,
Sitting here with a computer that more resembles a "Hot
Rod" and that makes me very sorry not to have taken the
auto mechanics course that my mother insisted upon and
I resisted.   Sitting here with a machine that is not made
by a big monopoly or with a decent warrenty.  A machine
that the small businessman, who sold it to me at an inflated
price and then went bankrupt, had promised service and
quality for four years.  A machine that I must now spend
time learning how to be an electrician, a mechanic and a
programmer.   A machine that takes more time then I can
spend working on it.

I never worked on "hot rods" I bought new cheap cars so
that I could spend time with my dates or traveling the country
rather than sitting in the shop.   The question today is whether
developing new art is more important than learning the inner
workings of this mongrel.

So next time I will buy Dell or Gateway or some other big
company product that has a more "economie of scale"
attitude and will take less of my time.

Those Russian airplanes are coming in at half the
price and have a lot of goodies on them with less
attitude.

Does it work?   That should be the answer before,
will it sell?

up with monoculture!

REH







Thomas Lunde wrote:

> What to me is surprising is the failure to recognize that the natural
> structure of capitalism is towards monopoly.  Monopoly is attained and
> maintained by the concept of profit.  Mergers, stock ownership, credit, all
> fall to those who have been the beneficiaries of large consistent profits
> which give them the surplus to absorb more of any given market area or
> product area or as in the case of stocks, holding massive amounts of wealth,
> much like a cow that can continually be milked.  There is no social benefit
> to this, no moral value that can be extrapolated from this, it just is a
> nice byproduct of a system design.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde
>
> --
> >From: "Cordell, Arthur: DPP" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Subject: FW: Digital Monoculture
> >Date: Tue, Jul 6, 1999, 2:01 PM
> >
>
> > While not directly related to FW, this seems sufficiently interesting to
> > pass along  FYI
> >
> >  --
> > From: Gary Chapman
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: L.A. Times column, 7/5/99
> > Date: Monday, July 05, 1999 10:30AM
> >
> > Friends,
> >
> > Below is my Los Angeles Times column for today, Monday, July 5, 1999.
> > As usual, please feel free to pass this around, but please retain the
> > copyright notice.
> >
> >
> >  --
> >
> > If you have received this from me, Gary Chapman
> > ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), you are subscribed to the listserv
> > that sends out copies of my column in The Los Angeles Times and other
> > published articles.
> >
> > If you wish to UNSUBSCRIBE from this listserv, send mail to
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED], leave the subject line blank, and
> > put "Unsubscribe Chapman" in the first line of the message.
> >
> > If you received this message from a source other than me and would
> > like to subscribe to the listserv, the instructions for subscribing
> > are at the end of the message.
> >
> >  --
> >
> > Monday, July 5, 1999
> >
> > DIGITAL NATION
> >
> > Troubling Implications of Internet's Ubiquity
> >
> > By Gary Chapman
> >
> > Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times
> >
> > Early last month, institutions around the world were crippled for
> > several days by a new computer virus called the ExploreZip Trojan
> > horse. A Trojan horse, in computer jargon, is a nasty software
> > program that hides inside a file a user is likely to want to see or
> > open.
> >
> > The ExploreZip virus -- more accurately, a computer "worm," which
> > spreads more automatically than a virus -- affected machines running
> > Microsoft's Windows operating system and Windows application
> > software. Computers throughout the world were shut down, including
> > some at Microsoft and other large corporations as well as the
> > Pentagon.
> >
> > The ExploreZip worm was a more debilitating version of the Melissa
> > virus that struck Windows machines earlier this year. Because of the
> > apparent vulnerability of Windows-based machines, some computer
> > experts have started to use the metaphor of a "monoculture" to
> > describe our current computing predicament.
> >
> > The word "monoculture" comes from ecology and biology, another
> > example of the merging of biological terms with computer jargon, like
> > "virus" and "worm." In ecology, monoculture refers to the dominance
> > or exclusive prevalence of a single species or genetic type in an
> > ecological system -- a state typically regarded as pathological and
> > dangerous. Agricultural monocultures, for example, are highly
> > susceptible to blight, soil depletion, disease and other disasters.
> >
> > In computing, the recent use of the term has referred to the
> > widespread dominance of Microsoft produc

Re: Media / Oral Literacy

[Ray E. Harrell]

Brad, I too suspect that we are closer on these issues then
it seems.  Rather a matter of syllabic emphasis.  Your's is
more academic with mine seeming at least to be more from
the practical practice.  I don't appoint a hierarchy to either
nor do I mean to say that I'm not academic or you are
impractical.  Instead I feel it to be a point of emphasis..

Consider,


> Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> >
> > I've been away so I'm not sure whether this is old turf or not
> > on this issue.
>
> (Ditto)
>
> >
> > 1. As a performing artist who deals with the meaning of words
> > on the stage I find literacy useful in three ways.
> > a. as a substitute for a poor memory
> > b. as a way of transmitting rudimentary information
> > over a distance or hiding information from an "enemy."
> > c. as a separate art form that contains its own rules
> > apart from every day life and emotion.  I put the
> > internet in this last catagory.
>
> These are, of course, contentious issues.  The argument has been
> strongly put forward that literacy changes persons' mode
> of oral behavior and the inner experience thereof
> (see, e.g.: Singer of Tales (Harvard Studies in Comparative
> Literature, 24) Albert Bates Lord / Paperback / Published 1981 --

I've used the book for years in my teaching but the book beginsnot with the analysis
of literature but a discussion of performers
and performance.  The act of per-form-ing is a synergistic
dialogue that transcends the particulate linearity of literacy.

Most societies that developed literacy, especially the glyphic
ones, did not want to develop forgetfulness or lose the
holistic nature of verbal performance dialogue.  Just as we
still teach arithmetic to children instead of simply using
calculators, they had rules for what was written down and
what was only committed to memory.   Plagues and Diasporas
elevated literacy because of the fragility of the lives of the
rememberers.   I come from a society that brought out that
process only in the 1830s due to the pressure of European
society on our culture.  We did not want to lose everything.
So we wrote it down but in a new syllabury that not everyone
could read.

> I confess to not having read this book but only reading
> *about* it in Walter Ong's writings).  When literacy
> "infects" a society, the craft of the poet changes
> radically.

One might consider the poems of Robert Lowell on theone side with e.e. cummings on the
other.

> Previously, his tales (e.g., the Iliad) were
> the encyclopedia of the people, and the integrity of this
> information was protected by long apprenticeship and complex
> mettical (etc.) patterning of the material.

An interesting metaphor.  I'm not really sure what it meantto the Greeks.

> Now the people
> have an encyclopedia, and it's not "cost effctive" for people
> to either learn the craft or listen to its practice.

I don't understand this either.  The theater, movies, operasare all alive.  The issue
is not the "encyclopedia" (creative
material) but the performance of such.  Live versus "canned."
Movies are productive in the economic value sense, while
operas are not.   Small rock ensembles can play to big crowds
with technological enhancements.   That makes money, symphony
orchestras do not.  It seems much more about economics than
the value of the encyclopedia.

Anyway it is not the same in
Europe.  They still perform the encyclopedia live and on stage.
They used to hire America's performers to perform their works
after WW II.  Even Germany.   Now they have grown their own
and American performers have no place to go to perfect their
craft.

> Another
> point (among many): Literacy brings the advent of "objective
> history".

Nonsense!Where?

> Texts change much less fluidly than oral culture,

So do scientific ideal states, but they don't exist in
reality.   That does not however, keep them from being
useful.   I suggest the same for written language.  False
but useful.

> and, in a primary oral culture, one did no9t need a Stalin
> to rewrite history, because the poets always knew which
> way the wind was blowing, and anything that dropped out of the
> poetry the poets sang was irretrievably gone.  Ets.

In Tenochtitlan, they didn't hesitate to change the writtentext but if you changed a
word or missed a pitch or rhythm
in the performance, you were fodder for the Gods.  They
took their verbal history seriously.   You seem to be equating
reality with Europe.  A problem with literacy.

> >
> > As far as information is concerned there is a different
> > connotation for every single word that is stressed by
> > the voice in a sentence.
>
> Of course, and I will agree w

Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Christoph Reuss wrote:

> Ed Weick replied:
> > How beautifully smug!  I  understand that your bankers made quite a lot of
> > money from the gold and jewelry that the Nazis took from death-camp victims.
> > Europe, if you read its history, was a cesspool of wars, repressions and
> > mass exterminations.  And it was Europeans who brought diseases and
> > enslavement to the Americas, accounting for the destruction of civilizations
> > and the deaths of perhaps 100 million people.  I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
> > get into this one, but on reading the above self-congratulatory puffery, I
> > just couldn't help it.  But perhaps I misunderstood.  Perhaps you intent was
> > some form  of comic irony.
>
> Basically my smug description of Europe was a parody of Ray's smug
> description of America (or vice-versa for the negative descriptions).

I have no idea how you could see
anything that I have written as defending the history of
European Americans on this continent past present andI am quite cynical about the
future as well.

The gist of my post was threefold:1. I stated that an issue (such as the one
described by the Yugoslaveconomist from Toronto)  which is "listed" , "described'
and
"understood"  rarely creates change and is not an
answer too whatever the problem is.   It is simply an inadequate
process in my opinion.   I said:

>So you have to come up with a better script than "Describe
>the history",  "list the atrocities" and everyone will "understand"
>and thus change!

2. The problem that economist Chussudovsky mentioned is not
new but is a common process that springs from the belief that
financial, i.e. economic value, constitutes real value in the
world.   In that sense every economist who preaches economic
value above community morality or the growth of the human
consciousness or spirit is a collaborator in what Chussodovsky
is complaining about.   I simply do not believe that this value
system can end in anything other than human conflict and death.

I used Wagner as an example because his own continual
harassment by bankers and others who refused to pay him
royalties (an Intellectual Capital issue) while reducing him
to a pauper in relation to his need for Physical Capital both
for common needs and the productions of his work has been
used and abused by people on all sides of the political,
religious and cultural spectrum.   The greatest composer and
theoretical mind of the 19th century was forced into prison
and ran from country to country while writing his greatest
works.   There were 3 and 1/2 million refugees washing
across the face of Europe as the economists and aristocracy
played their games.   The king of Bavaria said that he would
have executed Wagner for his philosophical support of the
Democracy movement in Dresden where he was being paid
a pittance for masterworks and conducting as well.

All to say this is not new.   Nor is it old for people like my
sister to be abducted by a government and sent thousands
of miles from family, friends and culture to a school to
drive the Indian out.   Or for Gypsy children, like the Bolshoi
ballerina studying with me at present, to be abducted by the
Swiss government and put with Gadje families who were
supposed to drive out the culture from their genetics as well.
Luckily for the ballerina she was first in Russia and later
Denmark where her talent was honored and she received
exceptional instruction rather than being put in jail for
"stealing children" or some other lie.

I said:
>Don't you know all of those Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and
>Mahler songs dealing with the European people on the other
>side of those bankers?

3. And finally I said:
>Goodness is not cultural and neither is greed or evil.
>(I wrote about the church in my last post so I don't
>consider it to be an answer either.)  But the issue of
>living together is one that we must solve and doing it
>creatively must also happen or we are doomed to be
>replaced.

(by another species.)


> Then again, your above criticism misses the point as it talks of the
> (distant) past, whereas my comparisions referred to the present
> (according to Ray's appeal to "live in the present").

Not a bad idea, "truly living in the present" although I can't findthe phrase in
that post.  Perhaps you could post what you are
referencing as I am in this case.  That would make it simpler.

> [And much
> could be said about the role of US bankers in nazi/other wars.]

I agree and you could list Henry Ford as well.

Lest you believe that I am against Europeans or the Swiss in
particular, I would say that it may be true that a Swiss person
saying what I have said would be expressing those feelings.

However, in my case as I have said over the years on this
list that you should not mistake passion for a curse.  I have
taught voice to wonderful Swiss students and one of my favorite
teachers sang in Zurich at the opera for many years.   I
seek only solutions and discussion.  I do not have the answers
but I do have m

Re: The Jobs Letter No.99 (14 May 1999)

[Ray E. Harrell]

S. Lerner wrote:

> >From: "vivian Hutchinson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> (snip)
> >FROM JOB TO PROFESSION
> >by Andrew Kimbrell
> >
> >*The word job in English originally meant a criminal or
> >demeaning action. (We retain this meaning when we call a bank
> >robbery a "bank job.") After the industrial revolution took hold in
> >18th-century England, the first generations of factory workers felt
> >that wage work was humiliating and undignified. Angry about being
> >driven from their traditional work on the land or in crafts, they
> >applied the word job to factory labour as a way of expressing their
> >disgust.
> >
> >*Even today many of us avoid the word job, preferring more
> >upscale terms like occupation or career to describe what we do for
> >40-plus hours each week. Yet the older meaning of these words
> >also reveals something about the nature of work.
> >
> >Occupation originally meant to seize or capture. (It is still used in
> >this sense when, for instance, we speak of the German occupation
> >of France during World War II.) What an apt description of how jobs
> >take over our lives, subjecting us to the demands of outside rulers.
> >The original meaning of career fits well with the role we play in the
> >speeded-up global economic rat race. In the 19th century, career
> >meant "racing course" or "rapid and unrestrained" activity.
> >
> >*In searching for ways to put meaning back into our work, we
> >might want to revive the term vocation (from the Latin for "voice" or
> >"calling"). Today, however, "having a vocation" or "answering a
> >calling" usually means embarking upon a religious life--an
> >unfortunate narrowing of the concept.
> >
> >We all deserve to be involved in work to which we have been
> >called by our passions and beliefs. Following a vocation can lead to
> >a profession--literally, a "public declaration" of what we believe and
> >who we are. A profession is what our work should be, but so rarely
> >is ...

This and the excellent follow-up employment statistics posted
by Sally is a heartening development in that it understands
the importance of language in these issues.  I wrote an
article to the FW list about these same definitions based
upon my dictionary library that traced the history quoted
above and suggested the same need to deal from a place
of vocation rather than jobs in the discussions on this list.

I am often told by economists that I should just change
jobs if I wish to have more capital, a good health plan,
education for my child and a retirement.  As the above
states, a vocation is a calling based upon who one is with
the "doing" flowing from that being.  The whole set of
concepts, on an inter-personal level, that underlie today's
economic  structures are against the idea of vocation.

Instead we are dealing from a place similar to roles
in a movie where a director picks characters, who may or
may not be trained actors, for their "type" as a person
rather than their skill in a vocation.

"Types" can be
developed quickly and with the help of a behavioral
type of acting class and a good therapist (to help in accepting
not quality, as in elevated skill, but "quality" as in a
set of personal characteristics)  a person can market
their person as a product of a certain type.  If they are
not successful, the answer is not to develop new characteristics
under their product name but to rename themselves under
another set of characteristics.   Possible until public
recognition becomes too developed in which case they are
marketed as advancement in their skills when all it is really
is the imagination of another director who sees them differently.

They are the quintessential short term employees (AGILE) or
flexibles.A movie, a play or a performance in a  bar is still
called a "job" and is treated by the American society as temporary
employment, which it is.   Movies pay well, while bars pay poorly
but thinking in systems will show that the formula is the same and
is the same formula being used by UPS for a large portion of
their workforce as well as Micro-Soft.

The whole idea of re-engineering is an entertainment industry
model.   That also throws into question the figures on employment
since such short term employment only tells whether someone
is being paid for work at that particular moment in time casting
doubt on the relevance of job figures from month to month much
less year to year.   But I've said this before as has Mike
Hollinshead.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that the New Zealanders are alive, well
and asking what I consider to be pertinent questions about the
future of their work.

I'm also delighted that Sally has forwarded the post.

REH

Re: temps get postive court decision

[Ray E. Harrell]

When the regular business organizations and wall street
became involved in Not-for-profit companies, in this
case recording projects a few years back, for the purpose
of having a business write-off as well as hiding funds, the
Congress passed a law which made such practices illegal.

It hurt all of the regular artists who had been able to
save a little money for project capital by having a Not-
for-profit designation.   A NFP company designation
cost for incorporation went from between 100 to 200
dollars to 1800 dollars while a for profit company
was under five hundred.   All because the purpose of
a "for profit" company is to find ways to use the law
to avoid paying taxes and having the mental attitude
that such a practice is not irresponsibility but responsibility
to company and shareholders.

This Micro-soft issue will probably drive more Entertainment
companies abroad to do their work.  As noted in the NYTimes
article you posted.   Edward Deming's lectures published in
1995 stated that the Arts and Entertainment business in the
U.S. was the highest export sales of any American business.

One out of the five largest Entertainment Media companies
in the world is American owned while only three out of the
seven largest movie companies are American owned.

Much is made of the fact that American Entertainment spans
the globe and American culture is considered a big threat in
many places.  So abroad, American media is considered big
tough business while at home it is considered a threat to the
"real Judeo-Christian" culture of America.

Meanwhile,
American business can't wait to imitate its use of "flexibles"
and the free lance situation that all of us in the performing arts
have to struggle with.  The situation that makes the average
actor make $5,000 a year in his profession and the average
musician (trained practically from birth with his family's private
money) $15,000 a year.Most of the trained artists do not
even qualify to be listed as such by the U.S. Department of
labor because they make most of their income waiting tables,
working in bookstores or teaching school even though their
talents, training and mastery is in the performing arts but
they don't have "jobs"!

This is then exacerbated by the influx of State trained and
State developed performers from the old Soviet Empire.  The
spotty training and limited experience of most Americans is
not competitive with such high quality instruction and experience.
As a teacher I have directly experienced the difference in the
quality of professionals who come for coaching.

This is also the dream of Cypress Semi-conductor's CEO T.J.
Rogers who wants to undercut American trained computer
program workers by hiring directly from the former Soviet
Empire in the same way that American artists
are unprotected.

The official word is that American's are
not hired because they are inferior.   Much like the story that
says the Arts are so poorly supported here  because they
are not popular as if "like" had nothing to do with ignorance.

So we have a lousy situation, but America and the courts will
make the free lance situation for us even less tenable by making
Bill Gates and other's immoral stance in a factory venue illegal.

That in turn will probably make the TRULY Virtual companies
that come into existance for a single project and then fold,  the
movie business, act as if they were permanent.   That will drive
up costs so radically that there will be NO movie work for any
American in the United States.   Terrific! considering that we do
not use up natural resources and create nothing but pleasure and
a raising of consciousness in the population.  Dumb!

How about some genuine conversation on these kinds of issues?

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Cordell, Arthur: DPP wrote:

> This could have postitive implicaitons.
> 
>
> COURT SAYS TEMPS DESERVE EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
> A federal court of appeals has ruled that about 10,000 temporary workers at
> Microsoft are entitled to take part in the discounted stock-option plan the
> company offers to regular employees. Industry analyst Rob Enderle says,
> "This is a broad decision, and it applies to all businesses.  If you've got
> a temp worker putting in 20-plus hours a week, you better start considering
> him or her like you would a part-time worker" -- and provide employee
> benefits.  The ruling indicated that a temporary worker can be considered a
> "common-law employee" if the person's work was controlled not by the
> placement agency but by the company for which the work was being done.
> Microsoft plans to appeal.  (New York Times 14 May 99)
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/biztech/articles/14soft.html

Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I)

[Ray E. Harrell]

>

Chris you said:

> Greetings from a multi-cultural European country
> that had _2_ short (defense) wars in the last 500 years
> (but I guess this can't be read in your informative NYT),

 What country is that?  Where does it get it's wealth?  Do
they immigrate people to America?   If so, why?  Does any
of my tax money pay for their education or settlement?
What are the various cultures?

REH

The triumph of science

[Ray E. Harrell]

I intended to post the article about the movies running to Canada
but Arthur beat me to the punch, so how about this article about
how logical and scientific we are and how up to date out
blessed institutions happen to be.   Several years ago it was
noted in the NYTimes that the head of major companies who
graduated from Ivy league schools  had a very high rate
of racisim in their ranks.

REH


New York Times

May 11, 1999, Tuesday National Desk




A New Turn in Defense of Affirmative Action


By STEVEN A. HOLMES

All over the campus of the University of Michigan, the signs of a
racially
and ethnically eclectic student body abound.

The student union is home to the Asubuhi (''morning'' in Swahili)
Multicultural Lounge. The bulletin board outside lists 49 ethnic
organizations. In the cafeteria, Pedro Cox-Alomar, a black Hispanic
junior
from San Juan, P.R., shares breakfast with his buddy Karl Benkert,
white,
from rural Michigan.


The university's officials say it is no accident that racial and
ethnic
minorities account for more than 25 percent of its 36,000 students,
a
statistic that makes this the most diverse of any large institution
of
higher learning in the Midwest. The mix results from aggressive
recruitment
of minorities and, in some cases, advantages to black and Hispanic
applicants in the highly competitive admissions process.

Disproportionate advantages, contend some critics, who note that
for
example, the admissions point system gives more weight to being
black or
Hispanic than to getting a perfect score on the Scholastic
Assessment Test.
(The university points out that far greater weight is given to high
school
grades than to either of those factors.)

The institution's policy is now the target of two lawsuits by a
total of
three rejected white applicants, all turned down, they say, because
of
their race. So has the University of Michigan become yet another
front in
the war over affirmative action, following the rollback of
race-conscious
admissions policies at universities in California and Texas.

But what distinguishes the Michigan case is the university's
full-throated
counteroffensive: the marshaling of statistical evidence of the
benefits of
racial diversity.

Unlike California and Texas, which defended their policies with
only
anecdotal evidence, Michigan has compiled data, on its own students
and
others, showing that among other things, people who were exposed to
a
diverse student body while in college are more likely five years
after
graduation to work in integrated settings, live in integrated
neighborhoods
and have friends of another race.

Patricia Gurin, a professor of psychology and women's studies at
the
university, concluded in one report that five years after
graduation,
whites who had attended colleges with the most diverse student
bodies
experienced the greatest growth in active thinking processes, in
motivation
to achieve and in intellectual self-confidence.

''Our research confirms what we have experienced firsthand as
educators:
that diversity enhances learning,'' said Lee Bollinger, the
university's
president. ''Encountering those who are different allows our
students to
learn about each other's similarities and differences and to
destroy
stereotypes.''

The nature of Michigan's defense stems from an emerging strategy by

affirmative action's supporters to make an empirical case for it,
rather
than a purely anecdotal or intuitive one. The university's research
follows
a survey issued last fall by two former Ivy League presidents,
William G.
Bowen of Princeton and Derek Bok of Harvard, that was based on the
records
and experiences of 45,000 students over 20 years at 28 elite
colleges
around the country. The Bowen-Bok research concluded that
affirmative
action policies at those colleges had created the backbone of the
black
middle class and taught white classmates the value of integration.

Lawyers for the Michigan plaintiffs maintain that however noble the
idea of
creating a diverse university, Michigan is blatantly discriminating
against
whites to achieve it. They allege violation of the Constitution's
equal-protection guarantees, among other protections.

''I think that discrimination always hurts someone,'' said one
plaintiff,
Barbara Grutter, a 45-year-old mother of two who was rejected by
Michigan's
law school in 1997. ''I don't know how we can have a country that
says
discrimination is wrong and yet have all these exceptions.''

The suits -- one against the law school, the other against the
undergraduate college -- were filed in the Federal District Court
in
Detroit and will be argued in the fall. They have drawn the
attention of
civil rights groups, opponents of racial preferences, hundreds of
colleges
and universities, and the Clinton Administration, which has filed a
court
brief defending Michigan's admissions policies.

The plaintiffs are represented by the Center for Individual Rights,
a
Washington law firm that got a Federal appeals court to overturn an

admi

Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I)

[Ray E. Harrell]

To Futurework,  Sally, Arthur, you can cut this if you wish but
I have decided that a serious talk from the heart and from our
lives about the future life and death issues that face us, all provide
an opportunity that should not be missed.  Michel's posts to me
have convinced me that, for me, it would constitute fiddling
while Rome burned, so to speak.His post is readily available
on the net and if you need the address it is:

On Kosovo:  http://www.transnational.org/features/crimefinansed.html
On the break-up of Yugoslavia: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html


So Michel,

This is a very old story.  My people were much richer and
obviously (from your description) smarter then these you
describe and yet the same scam was worked on them in
the 1830s by the European Americans.  The same scam as
run by the economist banker running Serbia.

The same story with the Jews and Gypsies
during Hitlers reign and when Hitler said that he was following
a Western European script used in the U.S., everyone ignored
him.   And then there are the kulaks.  So what is the answer?

You keep mentioning Ponzi schemes but the market itself must
continually expand or collapse, that is a type of Ponzi Scheme
on a much grander scale.  i.e. if no one bought stocks and bonds
then the market would collapse and the last one to buy just before
the stocks contract is always left holding the bag.

Also your terming  what seems to be a family
type "crony"  business structure as "organized crime"
seems suspicious.   How does this relate to their traditional
societal structures?Crime is always a relative term.
Think of England and America in the Boxer rebellion when
the West was using. well you know the story.

So you have to come up with a better script than "Describe
the history",  "list the atrocities" and everyone will "understand"
and thus change!

There is very little to suggest that this didactic approach has
ever worked out side of the dictatorship of the guru or
master teacher.And I don't think that the messiahs or
master teachers can help much here.Too many adults.

So what are you suggesting?  How about the Albanians and
Serbians make a decision to live together and support each
other?Don't take any garbage from the outside and like
France after W.W.II declare a moratorium on national debts
and build their infrastructure so that they have the power to
rule their own lives?   Again like the French.

This is not Rome, it is both less brutal and no one is going
to take them to Hollywood to be fed to Arnold Swartzenegger's
pet lion.

One point in all of this is that as an immigrant New Yorker
I am prone to cynicism around the ability of
Europeans to live together, (one war every 25 years for
the past 1000 years).  e.g. From the usefulness of the window
shutters in Geneva, with the guns and one month food
supply required by law in the basement, to the doors on
new apartments in Milan that are made of steel with
steel rod bolts going in four directions to keep out marauding
armies.

You see I live in NYCity and we take a rather jaundiced
look at people who gather together to kill their neighbors or
steal their homes.   We know that bankers and economists
have been figuring out ways to do just that ever since those
first banks in Portugal that funded opera off of the pillaging
of the Hunter/Gatherer Spaniards and Italians financed by
Lisbon bankers.  Of  course the English were later but worse.
So what is new in all of this?

Why are you surprised?   I am shocked that you
are surprised when you are European and this is your history.
Don't you know all of those Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and
Mahler songs dealing with the European people on the other
side of those bankers? Wagner was thrown in debtors jail
and barely escaped with his life.   He thought the bankers were
Jewish and wrote nasty things about Jews but the real power didn't
stand in front of the tanks like the Jews, they hid and blended
into the crowd with the other white faces.

But Wagner too wrote plenty about the economists in his
Ring of the Niebelungen,  he was mistaken and simple minded
in believing that this was cultural.  So are the Serbs who use
"culture" as proof of their correctness.  As a matter of fact
Wagner's music always fits uncomfortably with the kind of
macho rape and pillage of all warfare.  When the Narragansetts
watched the Puritans (their allies) burn to death the Pequots,
(their enemies) they turned away wondering out loud what
the point of such carnage was even on enemies.   Although
pre-Wagner's Walkyries I can just hear their howls above the
men, women, children and even dogs that burned to death
in complete silence.  A silence so intense that it was said
that the killers cried.

Goodness is not cultural and neither is greed or evil.
(I wrote about the church in my last post so I don't consider it to
be an answer either.)  But the issue of living together is one that we
must solve and doing it creatively must a

Re: Lawyers charge NATO Leaders

[Ray E. Harrell]

s another chance.

My Father said  that I had to make peace for my own soul.
That, indeed, was the reason I am here on this earth.
So I did.  I live with my neighbors of every hue, gender
preference, religion and political party.  I argue but I
do not steal or force them to follow my ways.  My company
works to preserve the ways of all peoples who are now in this
place.   We give over $105,000 a year in training scholarships
to Indians, Gypsies, Jews, Blacks and European Opera singers.

But as my Father also said I am not to take abuse from anyone or
allow my family to be abused.

In Europe they are eating each other, here we are feeding each
other.   Milosovic went to Dayton and was forced to see another
way.   Dayton a hotbed of Serbs living with Croats living with
Slovenians, living with Bosnian Moslems living with Montenegrins,
living with Macedonians, living with Albanians from Yugoslavia.

Tito would have drawn and quartered
Milosovic and his crew but there is no Tito left in Yugoslavia
and when Milosovic left Dayton he went home and they allowed
him to continue in his Provencial ways.

As their magnificent City is sacked, they will hate for another
thousand years never bothering to move outside and relate
to the great ideas and art of the West.  They could have had
it.  It was starting in some very profound thinking coming from
Yugoslavian artists at the end of Tito's life, but that is dead
and the hicks have won.

How do I know this.  I let Slovenian Artists in my company from
Tito's time.   At the invasion of Bosnia they kept repeating "but
these people are my brothers, how could we do this?"

I agree!

So Chris, I have to get to work.  My company is in need
at this time but if you have other questions I will try to
answer them but my time is short and I write this only
because we have always been generous with one another.
Something that I appreciate.

Regards

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




Christoph Reuss wrote:

> On Sat, 08 May 1999, Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> > I am proud to be Native and an artist.
>
> Why, then, did you work in the Army in Washington during the Vietnam war ?
> By doing this, you supported the same Army that destroyed your people, to
> destroy another people.
>
> Chris

Re: Lawyers charge NATO Leaders

[Ray E. Harrell]

Michel,

I have written you in the past about my admiration for your IMF
analysis of the Yugoslav breakup but since that time have spoken
with my Slovenian relatives.  They are not upset.  They are quite
happy to be separate from it all.   They also seem happy to give
up their universal health care in order to become Entrepreneurs.

I think that's nuts but they haven't lived under the chaos here as
of yet.

As for your statement about war crimes consider the following
anecdote.A student of mine has a Romanian hairdresser.
She is very upset about the bombing and blames the U.S. that
now gives her a home.   She admits to lying about atrocities
in Romania in order to get asylum here.  In Romania she did
not have a great selection at the super market and her husband
beat her while she had no recourse to divorce.  She also couldn't
complain about the government without retribution.   I learned the
same during the Vietnam war working in the Army in Washington,
D.C.   I have also learned the same here in many places when
atrocities have been pointed out to the local constabulary.  Not
to be comparing their fear to mine but hunger can cause a great
deal of fear and I certainly don't consider America's poor to be
free.   She would have been poorer and just as married in Italy
for example.

On the other the Romanian claims that she had a better
apartment than I have in NYCity and a steady salary
which no artist has here, also universal health care
and was educated.  But she lied about her "terrible life" as a
professional in order to come here and become a hair dresser
and leg waxer free to complain about the government.

I am confused.  She is no different from the
Yugoslavs around Dayton or Youngstown.  They complain and
complain to get here and then when we believe them and act
on their complaints then our representatives are war criminals.

Should they simply be returned because they lied?  Should
they be stripped of their possessions to pay for the lost lives
and the cost of following up their advice?   The most visably
hawkish of American government officials have come from the
Balkans and Poland in the last generation or so.

Belonging to a religion (traditional Native American)
that has been persecuted by every type of
Christian over the last five hundred years I have little sympathy
for those who will not live with their neighbors in an atmosphere
of tolerance.  If history is to judge, the Moslems have had
their Jihads but they also practiced religious tolerance in many
more of their societies than the Christians.  The only light in
this century that has come from the Christians has been Black
and South African.

It was the Sioux Holy Man who went to Bosnia with the
Sacred Calf Pipe to pray for peace.   We waited
many years for the great religious leaders of Europe in the
last century.  They never came.   It was also an artist who took
his Cello and played in the middle of the sniper's nest and shamed
the world in Bosnia.   I am proud to be Native and an artist.
Both my people and profession have taken their stand for both
peace and forgiveness.

You are an economist.   I have read all of your posts and admired
much that you write but I do not see a way out in them.  Only
blame.   If that is the case, then why are you here?   What right
do you have to this land.  Your home is elsewhere.   Were you
run out?The only ones who belong here are the ones who
create significant hope.   Litigious hokum is no substitute.

I am confused about this, could you suggest what to do with the
immigrant and non-immigrant Albanians in Kosovo?   The
complaints about language coming from the Serbs could be
the same complaints made here against hispanics or the language
wars conducted that eradicated most of the Native languages
in America.   Kosovo could be Quebec if Canada had acted
like the Serbs in Bosnia and now Kosovo.

We all have our
Jerusalems and as a member of the First Nations here, you are
living in mine and you are living on my land.   Does that give
me the right to hate you at all costs?  Maybe, but it seems like
a useless thing.   A waste of the genius that we all carry within
us.  An insult to the Creator of us all.

Perhaps you misread the unconscious hate carried within the
breasts of Americans who fought and died in the last two
world wars that began in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
They may very well be saying simply "not again, let's stop the
Bastards before they do it again."   I'm not saying that it is
so but it makes about as much sense as any of the rest of the
rhetoric that I hear these days.

Ray Evans Harrell,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Michel Chossudovsky wrote:

> PRESS RELEASE MAY 7, 1999
>
> LAWYERS CHARGE NATO LEADERS BEFORE WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
>
> A group of lawyers from several countries has laid a formal
> complaint with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
> against all of the individual leaders of the NATO countries and officials of
> NATO itself. The group, lea

Re: Creating Community Wealth

[Ray E. Harrell]

So I bought a computer through a local business, (across the street).
Paid much more, expecting good service but his service turned out
to be more expensive than Gateway or Dell and the computer has
defective parts.  I leased it (bought it on time) and in four years will
have paid more than I used to pay for a Plymouth.

The computer store went out of business after fifteen years due
to the impossibility of servicing his debts (translate didn't pay
the rent).   The service contract is moot while the warranty
guaranteed by his dealer turned out to be a Chinese firm
that conveniently doesn't speak English and refuses to return
my calls.  Address?  P.O Box.

So what does all of this mean.  Economie of Scale?  Well
maybe not, I should tell you about my Emerson Air Conditioner
sold by a super store. (don't ask)   So my point is simply that
things are more complicated than the pseudo scientific (translate
economic) theoretical structures allow for in their stories.

I'm reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright's  "Usonia" which turned
out to be a slum while his great cantilevered Masterpiece at
"Falling Water" is now falling down because he didn't put
enough steel inside the cement.   So you can't beat competence
and you always pay for it and ideals are just that, ideals and
not reality.

First, a small town is not a city.  My anecdotes happened
in a neighborhood in NYCity ten times the size of my hometown
in population.   Wright was wrong about small towns and wealthy
folks in the forest.

In my anecdotes the population is largely rental and so is very
mobile with little personal capital to make people behave
economically as opposed to owning a house in a small town.
But "economics" is rarely equipped to take such personal issues
as "community size interactions" into account" (of course they
always register size differences but their sophistication is put
to shame next to the product analysis and consumer targeting
of today's businesses).

As I think about the last statement I am reminded that business
has a conflict of interest in stimulating such sophistication from
government and thus claims that academia and the government
"can't" do it.   "If you want the job done wrong just ask the
government" is the operative script, however they are right since
neither academia or government is willing to show a sophistication
as to the practical basics of the issues.  Both government,
academia and business simply act like capitalists and
communists and argue that the two are so exclusive as to be
impossible together.   The Chinese will probably make fools of
them all.

But if we may consider the small community and if I am once
more delve into personal anecdote illustrate the points.  Communists
talk cities while Capitalists talk towns but both are lying
through their teeth and both is just rhetoric.

So mcgl I should tell you about your ideals which were my
Fathers.  They are not bad but they demand someone with
political power overseeing the workings of the system.  My
Father did it because he was Superintendent of Schools and
considered that what was good for the community was
essential to the funding of the schools.

Unlike your ideal community we were on an Indian Reserve
where there were no local taxes to support the schools.
Everything came from the state and national governments.
But that contribution  from the state was dependent upon
population and so his job was dependent upon the health
of the community, as for the federal government, you had
to know how to "work" them.   So he did a lot of volunteer
work (translate pro bono) outside of his regular job description.

He was active politically & he built the town park from
contributions that he solicited from the local "Lion's Club"
were he was a member.   He taught valuing tradition through
such little things as building the park on the sand lot where
Yankee star Mickey Mantle had gotten his start.

He strengthened the local vocational programs in the schools and
gave the students jobs on the custodial staff while having them do
community R & D (mapping housing subdivisions for the future)
for grades, (they were paid for the custodial work).

He developed a sense of community pride and volunteerism
in all of the graduates.  All of this on a reservation determined
by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection as the
number one Super Fund Toxic Waste site in the country (worse
even than "Love Canal" which instigated the super fund concept).
It was thoroughly undermined by lead and zinc mining.

He used a partnership between the government (schools) and
the town businessmen within the bounds and balance of good
sense.His stress was upon the cooperation between individuals
and the belief that everyone gained from meaningful work and
that they deserved to do it and be paid for it.  But "in kind"
services were the oil that greased the community and kept people
strong on pride and belief in their ability to succeed.

His job, the leadership role,  was a 24 hour a d

[Fwd: [Fwd: fyi: Fox Pictures destruction of Thailand (fwd)]]

[Ray E. Harrell]

Subject: Fw: [Fwd: fyi: Fox Pictures destruction of Thailand
(fwd)]
>Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 20:13:30 -0400
>X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1160
 >> > >On a recent trip to Thailand it
was discovered that 20th Century
>Fox
>> > is making a movie called "The
Beach" on Phi Phi Leh Island, a
>treasured
>> > >National Park in Thailand. Portions of
the film, which stars
>Leonardo
>> > >Di  Caprio (Titanic-fame), will be
shot on Maya Beach on the
>island
>> > of Phi Phi  Leh. This is one of the
most beautiful, unspoiled
>islands in
>> > the Pacific and it is being destroyed to
meet Hollywood's
>perception of
>> > >paradise.
>> > >
>> > >The film company has already bulldozed
large portions of the beach
>> > >and removed much of the natural
vegetation (Giant Milkweed, Sea
>> > >Pandanus,  Spider Lily and other
beach grass) in order to widen
>the
>> > beach to
>> > >accommodate a football scene. Fox plans
to replace the native
>> > vegetation
>> > >with 100 non-native coconut palms to
create their "paradise."
>Local
>> > >Thai activists feared that removing the
natural vegetation would
>> > create
>> > >serious erosion, and they were right.
The beach has already been
>> > >eroded and now locals are very worried
about how much of the beach
>> > and bay
>> > >will remain after the monsoons.
>> > >
>> > >Phi Phi Leh Island is supposedly
protected as a National Park and
>> > >is key to the local tourist economy.
Thai activists report that
>> > Thailand's
>> > >Royal Forestry Department violated
their own regulations and were
>> > >bought off by 20th Century Fox, who
paid the government Bhat 4
>> > million.
>> > >Local activists are enraged that the
government would cave in to
>> > Fox's
>> > >demands and that their concerns were
ignored. Activists are not
>> > opposed
>> > >to filming on Maya Bay, but want the
island to be filmed as-is. A
>> > >lawsuit has been filed, but an
injunction to stop further
>destruction
>> > of the
>> > >island was denied.
>> > >
>> > >The local Thai people have tried
everything, from the courts to
>> > blockading
>> > >the beach, to protect their island.
They need our help.
>> > >  Please help the people of
Thailand by:
>> > >  1)   Passing this
message on to everyone you know.
>> > >  2)   Signing the
petition below.
>> > >
>> > >Please sign the petition and forward to
someone else. If your name
>> > >is #50, #100, #150 and so on, please
send the petition back to:
>> > >[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >  PETITION:
>> > >  TO:  Andrew McDonald,
Producer "The Beach"
>> > >
>> > >We, the undersigned, will not see your
film "The Beach" and will
>> > encourage
>> > >our friends and family to boycott the
film unless you cease and
>> > desist from
>> > >destroying Maya Bay by removing the
native vegetation and planting
>> > coconut
>> > >palms. Maya Bay is already a paradise
and does NOT need
>Hollywood's
>> > >unnecessary alterations.
>> > >
>> > >  1) Bryony Schwan, Missoula,
Montana USA
>> > >  2) Laura Scherubel, Missoula,
MT, USA
>> > >  3) Claire Emory, Ovando, MT
USA
>> > >  4) Carol Hett, Sheridan, WY
USA
>> > >  5) Sue Nackoney, West
Yellowstone, MT USA
>> > >  6) Anna R. Mosqueda, Sacramento,
CA, USA
>> > >  7) Barbara Warner, Lebanon, KY
40033
>> > >  8) Nancy Ellen Smith, Woodstock,
GA USA
>> > >  9) Kathy Richmond, Vice
President,Friends of the West,Clayton,
>ID
>> > >  10) Scott Edgerton, Missoula,
Montana, USA
>> > >  11) Chuck Pezeshki,
Director,Clearwater Biodiversity Project,
>Troy,
>> > ID
>> > >  12) Ward Klemer, Seeley Lake,
MT, USA
>> > >  13) Aaron Coffin, Missoula, MT
USA
>> > >  14) Bruce Herbert, Seattle, WA
USA
>> > >  15) Eric Stewart, Eastpointe, MI
USA
>> > >  16) Lambert Rochfort,
Bellingham, WA, USA
>> > >  17) Anne Munier, Prince George,
BC, Canada
>> > >  18) Alexa Pitoulis, Prince
George, BC, Canada
>> > >  19) Seth Oldham, Prince George,
BC, CAnada
>> > >  20) Becky L'hirondelle, Prince
George, BC, Canada
>> > >  21) Keya White, Prince George,
BC, Canada
>> > >  22) Nicole Gagnon, Prince
George, BC
>> > >  23) Mirco Muntener, Prince
George, BC, Canada
>> > >  24) Keely Hunter, Prince George,
B.C., Canada
>> > >  25) Heather Lamb, Ottawa ON,
Canada
>> > >  26) Eric Lamb, Vancouver BC,
Canada
>> > >  27) Jana Heilbuth, Vancouver BC,
Canada
>> > >  28) Dawn Cooper
>> > >  29) Shani Cote-Patch
>> > >  30) Danna Schock
>> > >  31) Glenn Sutter
>> > >  32) Mark Segstro
>> > >  33) Barbara Segstro
>> > >  34) Pierre Mineau, Research
Scientist, Canadian Wildlife
>> > > 
Service,Ottawa,Canada
>> > >  35) Chip Weseloh, Wildlife
Biolog

Re: [n5m3-debates] Let's Bomb Turkey, A Modest Proposal (fwd)

[Ray E. Harrell]

Franklin Wayne Poley wrote:

> Good questions and the ones parliamentarians are paid to talk about. I'm
> not sure if I agree with the use of Canadian Forces or not in Yugoslavia.
> How could I decide except on some very basic emotional level unless we are
> told by Parliament what the PRINCIPLES are in this and related issues? Any
> guesses as to why they avoid such a discussion?
> FWP.
>

 For the same reason that most commercial art is crap.  It's dangerous
and you  could lose your constituency.   We are doing a show about
Women of Spirit at a Catholic college here and they have a very
interesting menu for the conference.   The head of the school said
that we should speak the truth and so four of our women artists
searched their souls and are telling their stories through words
and music.  It is very moving and very strong and one of the
women is a lesbian who was forced to become Episcopalian.
She is a wonderful artist and her story is poignant.  I'm not sure
whether any one will be offended and I hope not but the point is
as you said: "what the PRINCIPLES are in this and related issues..."

Another is a black woman with a white Englishman who was
her father and a black mother and the singer is a Jewish
convert.  She also happens to be a Wagnerian soprano who
must deal with Wagner's anti-Semitism and racism.  She
says that the Creator made her voice and that she will not
allow Wagner to keep his genius for his racist, anti-semitic
buttocks.  Genius is neither individual or cultural but is
from the Creator and belongs to all.  So this mixed blood
African American Jewish woman rescues the Creator's
gifts from a bigot who should have learned from his own
potential.

The other two are less exotic but just as powerful as they
explore what it means to be a Mother and a Diva with the
other dealing with the rejection for telling the truth about
what the feminine perspective is often really about in this
world these days.  As she sings, "We all live on borrowed
time."

So why should we expect politicians in this world to go hungry
or miss all of those wealthy parties?   If they did that, they wouldn't
be politicians but artists!


Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Brochure cover

[Ray E. Harrell]

To the list:
I sent Mike Gurstein, and a couple of others, a "graphic" cover to my
company brochure, that the list server won't support


>Hello folks,
>
>I hope this doesn't load up your memory too much.  It is the front
>of a new brochure that I have done for my company. Being an
>individual entrepreneur is not so easy some time and I hope that
>this will serve as a note on what has been happening with the
>company and the various facets of the company as they move out into
>the International arena.   The projects are either company projects
>or projects prepared in company for outside work.  Let me know if
>you have a problem with it or if you like it.  Yes that is me in
>the lower RH corner with the stick.
>
>REH
>

and he replied with a question.

>It looks good Ray...
>
>It sure makes me want to look inside to find out what the connection is
>between all the items...


Hopefully this reply will illuminate the graphic that is missing.   Anyone
whose computer would support a GIF or JPEG graphic and would like
to see it, just let me know and I will send it to you.

Ray Evans Harrell,

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the comment on my brochure.  The cover graphic is an
illustration of the work that we do in production, private study and
group workshop.  It is a visual sketch of the work that I have developed
since I founded the company 21 years ago in New York City.   The
through line for the graphic is that we either:

1) directly produced the work, (e.g. Carmen, City of Gypsies, the CDs etc.);

2)  served as subsidiary function by providing talent and training them
directly to complete their job (e.g. Pocahontas, King Island Christmas,
Juan Darian,  CDs etc.);

3) or we are training/managing them (e.g. Beverly Hill, Darcy Dunn,
Elaine St. George) in both private and workshop situations.

4) Many of the people also received Magic Circle grants for upkeep
study on these projects when their salaries were insufficient to pay
those expenses.

Some of the new and marvelous works, like the Juan Darien at Lincoln
Center and the Serban Greek Trilogy at LaMama have been, and still
are,  under such insufficient  contracts and have had such radical new
vocal techniques requirements that we have, over the 21 years of our
existence,  paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in work grants just to
keep the singers from being damaged by the work  requirements and
poor pay. That is our (the Magic Circle Opera) commitment to the Art
and to the preservation of the singer's abilities.

Even in the 19th century great composers like Wagner and the Varismo
composers in Italy  left ruined lives, for a couple of generations, in the
wake of their compositional breakthroughs.   Adequate salaries at the
time, and much study, eventually led to techniques that included the works
of these musical giants in the vocal skills of the average trained singer.
But the cost was great and the ruined voices littered the administrations of
the opera houses of Europe.   The blame was usually placed on the singer
and his "gifts" rather than the composer, the singer's fiscal resources and
the teaching of the day.

John Warfield lists these three necessities for success in complex
situations: the performer must have the TIME, the RESOURCES and
ACCESS to the technical Information before even the most simple task
will lose it's complexity.   These poor singers of the past were well
paid and they certainly had more time available to them than the jet-plane
sopranos of today.  But their access to the information was inadaquate
and so the physical failure rate was high.   Today the reverse is true.
New works suffer in the present from little rehearsal time and poor
fiscal resources but have the finest information access of all.
Unfortunately, the inadequate time and fiscal resources usually
preclude the ability to use that information in an efficient manner.

Compositionally, the technical problems for the performer of complex
works, is still true today.  However, unlike the past, modern economic
issues of "Productivity" ("profit" not "relationship to quality"), require
that labor costs be reduced, and kept at many times less the real dollar
value of salaries of the past, for these practitioners of modern culture.
As economist Robert Frank pointed out in last week's Op-Ed NYTimes,
even the middle class which is ahead in real dollars can't keep up
because of the subsidiary costs around quality of life issues.   For the
performing artist these issues have grown as well.   This precludes their
being able to have families and a normal life and still pay for the requisite
work study to protect their voices.The normal factory worker's
response to low pay dangerous work is to be conservative and protective
in their actions; however, the addition of the element of a  constant
audience, with the requisite need for second by second approval, precludes
any such conservatism on the part of performing artists.

On the other hand successful, highly paid traditional o

Re: [n5m3-debates] Let's Bomb Turkey, A Modest Proposal (fwd)

[Ray E. Harrell]

This is obviously more complicated then people are willing or able to
explore on
the net in second languages.   As you know my daughter's mother is
Yugoslav and I
have writen about this before but I have a lot of trouble trusting much
of this
writing today, so I would rather think more long term and about how we
can all
imagine living our worklives in the future.

Many of the problems that we have today are built around the inabilities
of
various professions and peoples, to imagine a world that exists beyond
their
own narrow confines.   I have found the latest economic models to be
hopeless
and inhuman on that account.   Better to consider Cornell economist
Robert
Frank's ("The Winner Take All Society") Op-ed in last week's NYTimes
about the lies being put out by revisionist economists on the effects of
the
huge desparity between the wealthy and the rest of us.   A point that is
rampant
in the Art's and Entertainment business and now is becoming the model
for
flexible, virtual business practices.

I have often pointed out the parallel on this list.  But now Frank is
publishing papers on it.  I believe that the general public and most
Academic faculties as well, are totally unprepared for this coming
world.
Imagine a physicist who must after six years consider becoming a doctor
for six years and then move to another profession.  Six years is the
time
span that the local consultant types are quoting for not only job
changes but
profession changes as well.   Chaos?   Just look at the movie business!
The only security there is your ability to bargain for very high
salaries
combined with a very powerful union which spreads the wealth.   Is it
any wonder that Ronald Reagan, the former head of the Screen Actors
Guild brought this virtual private model to the fore in government?
Chaos
has always been the model for his business world.

How can you project the future if you are unfamiliar with the underlying

systems that are at work and have no idea of the places where the system

is in practice?   Is it all just opinion and math fantasy?  You have to
study
the people and the history as well as their cultural prejudices.

Frank quoted the salary of the NYPhilharmonic to me as an example of
a good art's salary until I reminded him that they were at the top of
their
profession making less than the average lawyer.  Will lawyers be happy
with stockbrokers being the only work that is valued?

This inability to identify with one's neighbors and to feel a group
responsibility
is the root, IMHO of the genocide on all counts being perpetrated in the

Balkans at the moment.   Today the Balkans, tomorrow Texas or Nova
Scotia?


Ray Evans Harrell

Michael Gurstein wrote:

> Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 01:22:21 -0700
> From: Daniel del Solar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Gene Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [n5m3-debates] Let's Bomb Turkey, A Modest Proposal
>
> there is much to be done.   daniel del solar
>
> Let's Bomb Turkey
>
> ARTHUR HOPPE
>
> Monday, April 5, 1999
>
> OUR LEADERS say we must keep on bombing Kosovo to save
> the Kosovars from being killed by the Serbs instead. People of
> good will can't help but applaud our humanitarian efforts, but I
> think we should stop bombing Kosovo and start bombing
> Turkey.
>
> The Serbs may have been kicking the Kosovars around lately, but
> Turkey has been oppressing the Kurds for nigh on 80 years.
> True, the Turks may not have slaughtered as many innocent
> citizens in recent weeks as the Serbs have, but over the years the
> Turks have built up a pretty darned impressive record of executing
> dissidents, burning villages and driving peasants into exile. Some
> will say that we can't stand idly by while 2 million Kosovars are
> being hounded by the evil Serbs. Nonsense, we are very good at
> standing idly by. Look how idly we stood by when the Hutus
> were hacking to death 800,000 Rwandans. Of course the
> Rwandans were not only black, but had no oil fields to speak of.
>
> Instead of bombing Kosovo in the humanitarian spirit, I say we
> should make diplomatic protests to Belgrade. Diplomatic protests
> worked just as well in punishing oppressors in China, South
> Africa and Latin America as did our bombs in Vietnam, Libya and
> Iraq. From all accounts, all our bombs have accomplished so far
> in Kosovo is to drive the Serbians into committing more and more
> atrocities.
>
> But if we must bomb someone to save our national honor, I say
> we should bomb Turkey. First of all, great big Turkey is easier to
> hit than tiny little Kosovo. Second, there are 25 million Kurds to
> save with our bombs -- more than ten times the number of
> persecuted Kosovars.
>
> To be sure, there are a few obstacles to bombing Turkey. For one
> thing, she's our staunch NATO ally. That means the Kurds who
> are fighting for freedom are not freedom fighters. Our State
> Department has officially labeled them as terrorists and rightly so.
> As you know, a freedom fighter is fighting for independence fro

Re: [Fwd: Re: charging you more for the internet]

[Ray E. Harrell]

I just talked to my Congressman's office and they said that it wasn't true,
that there was no bill or plans for one to do such.   Where did this come
from?Who is this webmaster?Are we encountering another piece of
libertarian nonsense meant to disrupt the flow of information in triviality?
For a smaller population than the Green party in the U.S. they get almost as
much coverage as the regular Republican Party.  Like the candidate Huffington
they are almost totally a cyber party.  Virtual nonsense.

REH

Rob Robinson wrote:

> Subject: Re: charging you more for the internet
> Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:28:26 -0800
> From: Rik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Organization: Pacific Bell Internet Services
> To: Allison Saviano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Anne Stockman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Anneliesel LaFlamme <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  "[EMAIL PROTECTED] Dakota" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Beth Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Caroline Caldwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Chaz Bowie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, East West Printing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Express Litho/Jimmy-Mike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Gloria Rusch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  GrunonGazette john chandler/peter brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Harry Prongue <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, herb Jung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Jewish Com Cron/Los Altos Neighbor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  John Novello <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, kingprinting <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  LA Times Ads Lisa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Larry/David Rice <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  LB biz journal direct to printer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Lisa & Pat Mead <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Long beach Biz Journal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  "Marcelina S Stockman (Aunt Mary" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Mike Riley Metacreations <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Mike Stockman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Musical Theatre West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Nancy Franzon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  NEW LA Times eric <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  "Nita, Sam, Angie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  "O.C. Register Ads Sharon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Press Telegram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Randy & the Mosi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Rob Fainberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rob Robison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  StacyLauren laurendesign <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Steve Halley Carpenter Center <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Tony Copolillo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>  Uncle Jack & Aunt Jane Stockman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> Do something Quickly, write!
>
> Date: Wednesday, March 17, 1999 5:01 PM
> >Subject: Internet Access Charge!
> >
> >
> >>In a message dated 3/17/99 11:40:14
> AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> >>
> >>< weeks, Congress is going to vote
> >>on allowing telephone companies to
> charge for Internet access. That >
> >>means, every time we make a long
> distance e-mail we will receive a >
> >>long distance charge. This will get
> costly. Please visit the >
> >>following web site AND Complain to
> your Congressman. Don't allow >
> >>this  http://www.house.gov/writerep
> >>Pass this on to your friends. It is
> urgent! I hope all of you will
> >>pass this on to all your friends and
> family. All of us have an
> >>interest in this one.
> >>PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW
> TODAY BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!
> >>Please Help and don't let this happen.
>
> >>WEBMASTER DARKSINS
> >>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>ICQ# 22445383

Re: Democracy & sociocybernetics

[Ray E. Harrell]

Thanks Mike,

I would appreciate your discussion of the material I wrote.   I feel that it is
relevant for discussions of the future of work,  just as many management groups
are exploring those very same structures in work processes today.I'm not
referring to the plastic shamans of the "Fast" magazine variety, although
everyone has to begin somewhere, but to the works of people like Peter Senge
whose whole concept of Business Organizations that learn as organisms are based
on both European performing arts ensembles and  Native American ceremonial
structures that have succeeded in many of the openly hostile physical
environments, the desert Southwest for example where Senge gives credit and the
American Classical Performing Art's Market where only 2% of those trained are
successful.   Senge wants to know what it is that makes that 2% succeed where
the other 98% become successful in less rigorous fiscal professions. He
relates it to the ability to analyze structure and to realize the relativity of
structure while deliberately creating a stable foundation that will make human
existence have meaning.

Senge's colleague Donald Schoen also used many of these same structures in his
"Reflective Practitioner" theories for both business, education and health
care.On the other hand, the computer/futurist folks seem IMO  thoroughly
grounded in simple behavioral psychology.

A point made by  the NYTimes reviewer  on the
site of Hans Moravic's book.I
haven't read the book so I won't comment except on the Moravic response which
was to identify the reviewer as a philosopher and not a computer person and
then to claim that he didn't understand the issues. That is what we used to
call in raising my daughter the "distract and divert strategy" from questions
that we didn't want to answer.  From E. Dyson to T.J. Rodgers everything
that I have read by these folks ignores the basic issue that the reviewer
asked.   Once you transfer consciousness to a computer and kill the organism
does the soul of the person continue in the computer?   The answer of the
computer person is that the behavior of the original continues and so is
yes.As a performing artist I find that strange. I would never say that
the performance of a Beethoven Sonata  by Franz Liszt was the same as that same
sonata performed by Ludwig himself or made the player inhabited by Ludwig's
consciousness.Underlying processes can be used by individuals and
groups but this does not negate the uniqueness of the original or the human
soul.
Both Moravic and Daniels seem to be saying, along with the French, that "you
work to live as you wish" and not "live to work as you wish."The purpose of
work being to create leisure.   That is not hunter/gatherer as they seem to
imply at their sites but has been a part of English thought throughout most of
the Industrial Era.I'll leave that discussion to Mike Hollinshead since he
is the historian on this but I believe I'm correct on this.

As a musician used to working with synthesizers, (the second keyboard is always
the slave to the first)  I would call their robot computer structure more
slave/master than father/son.Once you have slaves machines to do your  mass
production "jobs"  then you are more in the mode of the Greek than the
Hunter/Gatherer (as the modern souls imagine Hunter/Gatherers). I still
state that as an Indian who grew up on a reservation in Oklahoma and whose
relatives have been involved in "Indian" work processes for many generations
that the whole concept of  Hunter/Gatherer is Paleolithic and bears little
resemblance to anyone I have even known or heard about through the "Moccasin
telegraph."   There are people today who are work for themselves, as I do, but
this is in terms of free lance work.

The same was true of the English before their  families "imprinted" on the
factory "whistle". The factories hired the whole families because the
fathers would only work until they had money and then would go fishing.
That still happens in Italy,  Spain and the Hispanic cultures.   I don't
believe that they are Hunter/Gatherer. I also don't believe that these
folks making these myths up are thinking "systems."

This slave/master system, I contend the computernics are advocating,  is not a
bad thing.The Greeks used it to create philosophy and great art.   However,
on the computer "futurist" sites I've seen, they don't even include art and
culture much less philosophy.But then they speak of the disappearance of
"work" but an examination of the root of the word from the beginning English
dictionaries will show that they do not mean "work" but "jobs."   Might we not
call this working in order to become lazy? Not loafing ala Veblen or "play"
as with learning a difficult work performing art but just "lazy."That is
also the reason that I believe they can only imagine humans withering away and
giving in to th

Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads

[Ray E. Harrell]

Thomas;

First, leisure is overated.   Second, freedom without significance and
discipline is slavery.  Third, jobs are new but work is from the beginning of
time and Fourth, poverty and hunger are overated as a stimulus for creativity or
anything else except rage and murder. I've seen them all.

REH

Thomas Lunde wrote:

(snip)

> It was the last sentence that resonated within me.  I have long felt that we
> deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment.  I enjoy
> immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure of
> following my impulses.  Work and employment destroy those natural human
> attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be indulged
> in after worshipping at the alter of employment.  Biologically, I think we
> are not workers, but livers of life.  I for one, welcome a future of leisure
> and indolence.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde

Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.

[Ray E. Harrell]

A little fun from one of my favorite writers on science, life and attitudes.

REH



Questioning the calendar

A skeptic confronts the millennium
   By Stephen Jay Gould


Feb. 26 —  We have a false impression, buttressed by some
famously exaggerated testimony, that the universe runs with
the regularity of an ideal clock, and that God must therefore
be a consummate mathematician.


GALILEO DESCRIBED THE COSMOS as “a grand book written
in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles and other geometric figures.” The Scottish biologist D’arcy
Thompson, one of my earliest intellectual heroes and author of the
incomparably well-written Growth and Form, (first published in 1917
and still vigorously in print, the latest edition with a preface by
yours truly) stated that “the harmony of the world is made manifest
in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of
Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical
beauty.”


THE DIVINE MATHEMATICIAN
Many scientists have invoked this mathematical regularity to
argue, speaking metaphorically at least, that any creating God must
be a mathematician of the Pythagorean school.
For example, the celebrated physicist James Jeans wrote: “From
the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the
Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.” This
impression has also seeped into popular thought and artistic
proclamation. In a lecture delivered in 1930, James Joyce defined the
universe as “pure thought, the thought of what, for want of a better
term, we must describe as a mathematical thinker.”

MYSTERIES OF THE CALENDAR
Why do we base calendars on cycles at all? Why do we recognize a
thousand-year interval with no tie to any natural cycle?

If these paeans and effusions were invariably true, I could
compose my own lyrical version of the consensus. For I have
arrived at the last great domain for millennial questions —
calendrics. I need to ask why calendrical issues have so fascinated
people throughout the ages, and why so many scholars and
mathematicians have spent so much time devising calendars and
engaging in endless debates about proper versus improper,
elegantly simple versus overly elaborate, natural versus contrived
systems for counting seconds, minutes, hours days, weeks,
months, lunation, years, decades, centuries and millennia, tuns and
baktuns, thirish and karanas, ides and nones.

SIGNIFICANCE OF 1,000
Our culturally contingent decision to recognize millennia and to
impose divisions by 1,000 upon a solar system that includes no
such natural cycle, adds an important ingredient to this maelstrom
of calendrical debate.

If God were Pythagoras in Galileo’s universe, calendrics would
never have become an intellectual subject at all. The relevant cycles
for natural timekeeping would all be nice, crisp easy multiples of
each other — and any fool could simply count. We might have a
year (earth around sun) with exactly ten months (moon around
earth) and with precisely one hundred days (earth around itself) to
the umpteenth and ultimate decimal point of conceivable rigor in
measurement.

But God, thank goodness, includes both Loki and Odin, the
comedian and the scholar, the jester and the saint. God did not
fashion a very regular universe after all. And we poor sods of his
image are therefore condemned to struggle with calendrical
questions till the cows come home, and Christ comes round again
to inaugurate the millennium.

NATURE’S SYMMETRY

Oh, I don’t deny that some corners of truly stunning
mathematical regularity grace the cosmos in domains both large and
small. The cells of a honeybee’s hive, the basalt pillars of the
Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland make pretty fair and regular
hexagons. Many “laws” of nature can be written in an
astonishingly simple and elegant mathematical form. Who would
have thought that E=mc2 could describe the unleashing of the
prodigious energy in an atom?

But we have been oversold on nature’s mathematical regularity
— and my opening quotations in this essay stand among the worst
offenders. If anything, nature is infinitely diverse and constantly
surprising — in J.B.S. Haldane’s famous words, “not only queerer
than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

BLOODY-MINDED NATURE

I call this “bloody-minded nature” because I wish to specify the
two opposite domains of nature’s abject refusal to be
mathematically simple for meaningful reasons. The second domain
forces every complex society — as all have independently done,
from Egypt to China to Mesoamerica — to struggle with
calendar-making as a difficult and confusing subject, not a simple
matter of counting.

Many questions about the millennium — Why do we base
calendars on cycles at all? Why do we recognize a thousand-year
interval with no tie to any natural cycle? — arise directly from these
imposed complexities. Any adequate account of our current
millennial madness therefore requires that we understand why

Re: Democracy & sociocybernetics

[Ray E. Harrell]

Hi Mike,

This is a very interesting post.   I find it the most interesting in how
you are traversing the path of traditional Native American Plain's Myth in
your forms.   The net for example is the traditional form of Spider Woman
and is considered essentially feminine in nature.

Amongst the Plains Peoples, powers are not hierarchical in the order sense
but singular centers of expertise given by the Great Mystery  to
individuals.   Otherwise everything is the same for everyone.   Everyone is
a teacher, artist, hunter, planter etc. although there are certain areas
that relate to talent or  gender because of the principle of parallel
images.   i.e. if someone seems to embody more an external process then
common sense would seem to say that  they have more potential expertise in
it.   You have also defined the structure of war and art in Plains Indian
societies.Structures that have more to do with power and games in their
societies, than death and destruction.They are, like virtual AGILE
companies, temporary and task oriented.

Michael Spencer wrote:

> Steve Kurtz wrote:
>
> > I argue...that hierarchies...have always existed and will most likely
> > continue to do so despite any structural changes invented & applied.
>
> To which Victor Milne replied:
>
> > I don't see animal behaviour as being such a simple matter of
> > dominance and hierarchy as people are supposing.
>
> and Steve wrote again:
>
> > Who ever said anything about "simple" or "model"?
>
> Forget "simple".  I think the issue is whether or not hierarchy is
> some kind of underlying principle that structures things as they are,
> more or less in the way that, say, electromagnetism is such a
> principle.

The wolf pack is and that is the reason that the Wolf was the dominant
focus for the form of a war party in almost all of our societies.  It
is not something that you put on or take off easily.   Amongst some more
urban organized societies the Wolf Clan is the war clan that takes over
when a war is imminent.   I could make a case for Churchill being the Chief
of the War Clan in English WW II government.   When the war came, the peace
government was replaced by the war one and when it was over Churchill was
unceremoniously defeated to get back to the peace government.

Amongst my people that was called the Red (war) and the White (peace)
governments and they existed simultaneously with one being out while the
other was in.   Only a warrior woman could call the Red government into
being, but this is more specific then I should be and you probably are
interested in, but the parallels are interesting and may very well be
primal human in form and function.

> I don't think it is.  Hierarchy is a way in which we structure
> artifacts -- things, such as computer programs or navies, that we
> create in order to simplify the management of them.  It's also a way
> in which we structure or ideas about things, our intuitive or formal
> models, because it makes things easier to keep track of.

By this last statement are you referring to expertise or what is popularly
called "complexity theory" these days?

> There's an interesting 1945 paper by Warren McCulloch entitled "A
> Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets."  It
> notes that there are experimental observations along this line:
> given A, B and C, if these are presented pairwise -- A&B, B&C, C&A --
> a subject will often choose A over B, B over C and C over A.

I don't understand this.   Is the subject human?   If so,  does this not
relate to the original alphabetical pattern contained in the memory of the
subject?   That would make the form subjective would it not?For
example:  When Sequoia invented the Cherokee syllabury, being an Indian
scholar rather than a European, he included some European Alphabet symbols
in his system but gave them different sounds and orders.   That meant that
any child learning the system would not relate it to a European
intellectual space but to a Cherokee cultural space.   In their case I
doubt that the relationships WM described  between  A & B in a European
sense would be asserted in the Cherokee system.

It seems that the issue is learned order that is then related in the above
fashion.Do you see this differently?


> McCulloch, a polymath whose main interest was in trying to figure out
> how it is that a few pounds of neurons can engender mind, described
> how such heterarchical preference was immanent or implicit in neural
> structure.

Seems learned to me, unless he is saying that all knowledge is learned with
no genetic talent element.  Even if so, I don't understand why he would say
something so obvious.He seems to be comparing the structure of mind to
the structure of a crystal, but a learned one in the human sense.   i.e.
learning or education is the implicit "order" of the human neurons.I
would agree with that in both meanings of the word "order".Still seems
obvious although we do say that enlightenme

Re: Democracy & sociocybernetics

[Ray E. Harrell]

Me too.   I used to breed dogs.   I had Collies first then Shelties, Miniature
Schnauzers and Bichon Frises.  Many times the behavior of an animal can be
traced to an owner and the environment he created but this is not always the
case.   Especially with the smaller inbred species there have both physical and
behavioral problems that come from the stress placed on the genetic history just
from normal life.

I find cultures placed in unusually stressful situations to often be the
same. I may not know the cultural cues of some people but that doesn't mean
that they are wrong for having them.That also means that it can be dangerous
for me at times if I don't know those cues and vice/versa. The Russians that
lived where I used to have a cabin had a real thing about lines.There was
never a line invented that they couldn't crash.There, we would wait in line
for up to an hour and someone would walk in and step to the front when I wasn't
watching.   They of course knew to watch.   I learned quickly and I also had to
do it with an attitude that would have been the grounds for a gunfight in
Oklahoma. Communism had nothing to do with it as a system except the fabled
commissary lines might have.Things are not always as simple as they seem on
paper or in theory.

Stay strong and be observant,

REH

Victor Milne wrote:

> Just a comment on animal behaviour. I am not an ethologist, but we have a
> herd of 18 horses. I don't see animal behaviour as being such a simple
> matter of dominance and hierarchy as people are supposing.
>
> The most aggressive animal in our herd is the shortest, a 13.2 hh pony
> gelding (with a very massive frame). However, he never bothers the old herd
> leader, who at age 30 spends most of his time dozing in the sun and just
> growls a bit if the "kids" in the herd crowd in when he goes to the feeder.
> Curiously the very aggressive pony can be totally cowed by a certain small
> mare, two inches taller than him but much slighter. In turn a usually gentle
> Arab gelding succeeds in bullying the small mare, but the Arab is totally
> intimidated by the pony, so we have a strange dominance triangle. The
> biggest animal in the herd--my 16.1 thoroughbred gelding which I use for
> long distance competitive riding--is also the biggest wimp of all. All the
> males are gelded, so I presume that testosterone levels are about equal.
>
> My point is that if a simple model of dominance does not apply very well to
> equine behaviour, it's certainly a mistake to extend it to human behaviour.
>
> Live long and prosper
>
> Victor Milne & Pat Gottlieb
>
> FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website
> at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/
>
> LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE
> at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Steve Kurtz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: list futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: February 25, 1999 6:02 PM
> Subject: Re: Democracy & sociocybernetics
>
> >Eva Durant wrote:
> >
> >> The bully tend to be the biggest puppy, the one with
> >> the most expendable energy. Even in dogs,
> >> aggressivity is "taught" by the human
> >> who replaced the role of the alpha.
> >
> >Above is another example of internal inconsistency. The bully pup is
> >aggressive independently of human interaction; and aggressiveness,
> >dominance, & hierarchy exist apart from domestication.
> >
> >> Even bull-terriers in a strong-controlled
> >> but peaceful environment tend to grow up
> >> docile.
> >
> >I've no data, but my personal experience agrees - within a range, of
> >course.
> >
> >> You say we should not attempt democracy because
> >> no animals live that way?
> >
> >Strawman.
> >I never said or implied that. I argue, like Ed does, that hierarchies and
> >ranges of human (& other) behavior have always existed and will most likely
> >continue to do so despite any structural changes invented & applied. It
> >makes democracy somewhat irregular at best. But I'm not advocating
> >dictatorship, just realistic expectations if humans plan to peacefully
> >narrow the gap between rich & poor.
> >
>
> [snip]

Re: Democracy(TM)

[Ray E. Harrell]

To the list:

I tried sending a picture but obviously that doesn't work.  I guess it's just
"too big",  I mean too much memory for the list or servers.Anyone who wants
one just ask and I will try sending it to you.   Eva, did you get the picture?

Now as for Eva, Ed, Jay, Arthur, Sally, Mike and the rest,

The problem with this for me is the same as Paul Robeson.   I worked with one of
his teachers and he was a great man.  One of the great artists and heroes of the
20th century.It was not his politics that was so much the problem, anymore
than was Picasso's, but the whole concept of " intellectual value" abroad in the
society in his time and this time still.

A best selling book by a female judge says it best:   "Beauty fades, dumb is
forever." But what constitutes smart?A scientist on the basketball court
with professional players would make dumb moves as would the reverse.
Robeson was a great singer and a great political hero for an America that was
brutal, crude and banal but he failed to see the same in the Soviets and the
relatives of his intellectual friends in Moscow who were murdered by Stalin,
never forgave him.

The split between Jews and Blacks began there but the Black collaborationists
who abandoned Robeson in the U.S. maintained the fragile coalition for a time
longer until more progress could be made.   The Crow Priest "Plenty Coups" had
done the same sixty years earlier when he also signed a loyalty oath while
"Crazy Horse" was murdered for being intractable.So who was right?The
hero Robenson, under illegal  "house arrest" in the U.S. for seven years
protesting the lynchings and apartheid refusing to sign an unconstitutional
loyalty oath so that he could perform around the world,  or the men who
cooperated with Macarthy?We have a similiar issue with Elia Kazan and the
Oscars.

And they love to call this a Judeo-Christian society.   If I were either I would
protest or certainly not admit to it.

It is said that the CIA gave Robeson a drug, that causes paranoia, at a party in
Moscow and the effect was that he slit his wrists effectively stopping his world
tour of socialist countries and not embarrassing the U.S. powers.   The Russians
cooperated by giving him shock treatments and practically destroying the man.
Beauty is fragile but dumbness is cantagious.All of this was on Television
tonight.This great artist was a national treasure but dummies who stumble
over diamonds and can only use them to kill rabbits were emulated in the last
couple of  centuries and are emulated still.   Yes those same bunny killers are
the ones who call us Hunter/Gatherers and even finally got it into the Am. Her.
II American Dictionary. There is a problem with "knowledge" especially when
you can simply  define your competitor out of existence.Only the latest is
real because there is a problem with remembering.

In tomorrow's NYTimes there is an article about the scientist businessmen in
Silicone Valley using their technical expertise and money to effect the
political  landscape in California for the Libertarians.   Most are young and
beautiful but their causes will outlast them and are truly dumb.   Even the
article quotes them as having very short attentions spans.   (Cocaine can cause
that also.) So the left is dumb and the right is dumb. Jay there had
better be more than just right or left or this ship WILL  sink.

Robeson was trapped.White America patted themselves on the back for
"letting" him become who he was but did not ask why they were not up to his
standard.   It also never occurred to them that this world class artist could
have happened anywhere at any time.   America had nothing to do with it.It
just destroyed his health and ultimately killed him.The country that
criticized the KGB even monitored his medical charts in the hospital with the
FBI.   What should worry the folks here is that the Black folks are not
forgetting this stuff. Even Harry Belafonte came across like a historian
tonight.They were an impressive group of people.

On Nightline tonight there was a program about a study in how the White medical
establishment treats blacks differently even when they are middle class, have
good health insurance and are productive. In effect they were saying that
the Black community is being robbed of its productive members by poor medical
care in major hospitals all because of  Doctor's attitudes about who they
value.  (Yes we've seen this before!)

The study  will be in the New England Medical Journal for those of you who
believe this is hokum.   I'm only reporting. ( It took an act of Congress to
get the secret sterilization's of Indian women stopped in Government hospitals
in 1977.  The month the bill was passed there were 1,600 done anyway.  So it's
not all that much hokum or maybe hohokum either. )

Koppel on Nightline didn't ascribe the inferior care  to a belief  in White
Supremacy by the Doctors but in simple atti

Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.

[Ray E. Harrell]

Eva,

This is for you, your husband and the list:Bill Tall Feather is the Elder on
our council and we celebrated his 94th birthday on Saturday.   Today I finally
figured out how to e-mail a picture and so I hope this works for you all.

As for Democracy and Power, I think that you need both.   I have mentioned our
traditional situation on this list ad naseum so I won't mention it again.   I
would say that a society that is not built around various expertises as well as
their pedagogical level presents several problems for me, not the least is
safety.Witness  Chernobyl and Three Mile Island where the scientists could
design a workable plant but not a worker who could run it.

Around these issues of safety I would rather have the old "Clan Law of Blood" or
traditional law of the Cherokee Nation which ascribes responsibility for the
collection of the debt of responsibility to the Clan of anyone hurt by another's
irresponsibility.   You could buy anyone's responsibility off by paying
reparations to the injured and their Clan, as long as it didn't include death.

For any infraction other than a death, if the criminal could make their way to
Chota, the City of Peace and convince the citizens to allow them to stay they were
given sanctuary.They had to stay at least a year until the "Friends Made
Ceremonial," the most sacred of all ceremonials when forgiveness asked for, must
be given.  During that year they were rehabilitated and earned their forgiveness
and freedom.

Death was only payable by another death with the exception being that the
relatives of someone who was accidentally killed could be paid by the killer's
Clan giving someone  from their own Clan to that the deceased Clan who would take
up the responsibilities of the one killed.   Or if the deceased was despised then
the killer's Clan could be released by the simple payment of goods but if one of
the deceased's relatives objected then a life was met with a life.

You need not take the life of the killer, in fact any member, male, female, adult
of child would do.This may seem harsh to you folks but murder was not
committed very often in the old nation.   Since anyone would pay for the sentence,
escape was impossible and Clans disciplined their own members before they lost
more valued members to the law.   They thought better of it before they would do
it.

That is far from the situation today,  in fact there is now a 150 year feud going
on because those who took the European legal model & signed a treaty which killed
one third of the nation in a death march.   Those who went on the march demanded
the Law of Blood while those who signed the treaty hid behind the U.S.
Cavalry. It is still going on. We have at least as long a memory as the
Irish and the Yugoslavs.We believe in the rule of law.

Anyway Bill Tall Feather has lived his life by practicing the disciplines of the
traditions and when I offered to pay for a massage on his birthday, he refused
politely saying that he could take care of his own body.   Maybe I should give up
massages myself.

REH