I have been fortunate to work in the courts in Canada and the United States. In both countries I have been very impressed with the knowledge and character of the judges who I have observed. There have been rare exceptions to this. Overall my experience has been exceedingly positive.
I had a moment to reflect on this when a middle eastern man reminded me that we are truly fortunate in Canada to have judges who are experienced, trained, honest and just.
“In the middle east my business covered several countries and the nature of my business meant I was involved with the courts, legitimately, not criminally. The courts and the judges there are are generally corrupt. I’ve had a chance to compare. It’s a bit like hockey and soccer. Soccer, you know the game is fixed. Maybe not as bad as wrestling but fixed nonetheless. Alll those players falling down is just too convenient. If hockey is fixed it’s not so apparent. Not with the players anyway. Maybe occasionally the refs."
He went on to say,"In the middle east, if you want to murder someone and you don’t involve the judge in your plan he’s likely to consider it a personal affront. You see you’re supposed to speak to him first. He’ll tell you how much he will need to get you off. He’ll then say it’s okay to murder. The police will catch you. You will appear in court. But then the judge, if he’s been paid off properly, will find some way to let you go free. If you don’t include him at the outset and just murder someone and show up in court, well, that’s just inconsiderate. You can still go free, if you pay the judge. But the cost will be double or triple what it would have been. That’s for disrespecting the judge. Disrespect is the most serious crime. That’s what I mean when I say the middle east is corrupt."
I personally don't know if this is 'true'. It's certainly reflects what so many have told me.
I remember an experience when I was sailing along the coastal towns in Mexico. I had to pay for a local license and visited the judge in his office. The license was only a matter of a few hundred dollars but I’d brought a wad of pesos. When I pulled it out of my jean pocket, the judge literally jumped out of his chair and began closing the blinds so no one could see in.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, taking the money.” “My predecessor was totally corrupt and wouldn’t do anything without his palm being greased. I took this position on the basis of cleaning up the corruption. You can’t imagine how bad it would look for me if someone looked in and saw a gringo giving me this great wad of cash. I’m sure you understand."
I thought him a brave man knowing how many people of integrity are killed in government position by drug and arms traffickers.
I laughed though and said I did understand. But really I didn’t. Canada just never was that corrupt in my experience. Perhaps my concern is that when I was growing up we could leave our houses unlocked. I lock everything in Canada today.
I knew that if I wanted anything to be done in Asia when I was there I had to give a little ‘incentive’ to the person serving me. It was like the hotel staff in New York City and Paris. Hong Kong, Tokyo, and LA, this 'tip' thing may well be just 'big city' . Hotel staff stand and wait clearing their throats until I pay them, leaving me feeling somehow 'unsophisticated' because I don't know the latest 'palm greasing percentage' or situations where this is warranted.
A supervisor in provincial government services told me how frustrating it was these days constantly watching the new immigrant employees. “They simply can’t believe that we don’t get money on the side for every government transaction that we do. I’ve had to stop them repeatedly and even get them to give back money. They’ve actually complained that they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of getting a government job if they’d known how little it was going to pay. “In our country,” they say, "the salary is just the base pay. All the real money is made in the extras" I have to tell them over and over again that’s called ‘extortion’ in this country. Of course Trudeau’s ‘pay for access’ makes them not believe me. They tell me that Canada is multi cultural and wink. It’s becoming a problem but only for me."
A professor of political science explained to me that we don’t have ‘baksheesh’ in the west like they do in the east but “institutional backsheesh’ is alive and well. Our taxations schemes and various other formulas are used to reward or punish industries or companies. That’s what all the ‘lobbies’ are for, regulations that favour their clients. It's the foundation of the corruption in Ottawa and Washington and all government cities in Europe. Brussels is the absolute ground zero of this explosion in corruption.
In Communist Countries judges routinely convicted prisoners of conscience and sent them to the Gulag or the Psychiatric wards. As a member of the Psychiatrists against Political Abuse of Psychiatry and Human Rights Associations it's always amazing to see the endemic corruption in communist countries that seem to glossed over or completely ignored by the our mainstream media. The 'missing persons of Argentinia' were a fraction of the numbers that still go missing in China.
You are considered a criminal or psychotic if you question government or say anything against Marx. As a godless political system it takes as much offence to any questioning of Marx as the Muslims do when you question Mohammed or state the simple truths about Islam. The judges in communist countries were all corrupt, individually and collectively. Communism, a committee dictatorship, was like other dictatorships, corrupt to the very core.
I did pro bono work with Mr. Dugald Christie, the amazing lawyer who set up the pro bono services in the British Columbia. We attended church together and he really was a hard man to say no to considering his impeccable character. Indeed I never did say no to him. But all the pro bono work I’ve done has sure got me in a lot of hot water with government. There’s usually an unspoken and often political reason for a person being without support. Dugald Christie argued that the cost of legal matters in Canada was such that the middle and lower classes simply couldn’t afford the process. This was outside the domain of the judges and more a reflection of the political system.
The judges in Canada, as I’ve already said, have all individually with rare exception been stirling characters. We are very fortunate and I do hope that we can remain so with all the pressures on them these days from the Dark Side. I don’t think we appreciate the judges as much as we deserve because Canadians compare them in general against some ‘idealized’ standard.
I’d not exchange our Canadian or the American judges I've known for any judges in other parts of the world even the little I do know of them. Certainly I'd not want to face judges in dictatorships like most of the UN member countries or the communist countries, or South Americas, and definitely not most of Africa and increasingly in more countries in Europe where corruption stories are rife. Definitely I don't want to face judges in the middle east. This may be in part because I've seen first hand and heard first hand the stories of rank abuse physically and sexually from patients who've had that misfortune.
We simply are very fortunate in Canada to have the judges we have. We really should acknowledge it .
Showing posts with label judges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label judges. Show all posts
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Generalization, Discrimination and Discernment
There is always just me and the other. I can call the other 'God' or I can call the other "it'. When I'm afraid I tend to think of the other as "it' whereas when I'm filled with love I think of the other as God.
To discriminate against certain people I must consider them in a group rather than as an individual. So I might think "Jews are bad". Hitler thought that. It would be convenient if the world was just black and white. Jay Lifton described the black and white world of war politics. Us and them. But reality isn't like that. I know really great Jews and only a couple of really bad Jews. One of my favourite and closest mentors was Dr. Jack Hildes. He sits right next to Dr. Carl Ridd in my heirarchy of most influential humans on my life.
The Klu Klux Klan said blacks are bad. My childhood doctor was a black man. He was good. My Chicago friends are black and they're good. I know one incredible asshole who is black but he's probably the 'exception that proves the world".
I've Indians in my family and we grew up together summers hunting,fishing, hiking and doing stupid boy things. Like competing pissing off docks and seeing who could fart loudest. They're great guys. But I've heard people say Indians are bad.They're wrong.
They are as wrong as the people who say whites are bad.I'm white and on my worst day I've only been half bad though others say I exaggerate. Mostly like most people I'm doing my best to be good.
Psychopaths aren't inherrently 'bad'. They just lack compassion, are so afraid they don't know the depth of their cowardice and can think of no one else but themselves because of their poverty and isolation of spirit. Because of this they do bad things.
Sociopaths are groups that are at variance with the larger group and generally don't feel that the laws apply to them but are happy to be 'takers' and break the rules. They're not bad. They're more often sad. Like racoons in the chicken coup. If you're raising chickens and have taken it upon yourself to provide and protect chickens and their chicks then you simply have to keep out the racoons or kill the ones that get in. It's not so much 'good or bad' but just business. Darwin had something to say about this but one does all they can to avoid killing because its wasteful unless of course you like eating racoon. Personally I prefer chicken.
Alot of people are fooled into believing that individuals in groups are bad because they perceive the group to be bad. Hence we have the term 'banksters' which I use to refer to bad 'bankers'. But my banker, Lloyd, was a great man. He helped me immensely when I needed help. Nigel Ferguson wrote about money and banks and did a fine job of dispelling the ignorance that so quickly falls prey to paranoia. There's a lot of paranoia being parlayed about as reasonable these days.
I like to lump beaurocrats into a group and blame the problems of Canada for instance on too much dead weight in administration. I like to knock administrators too. I do this and should be more ashamed of myself for it. I'm actually an administrator in my own company and frankly I'm not very good at it. So here I am questioning those well above my pay grade when I haven't got my own affairs well in order. My brother is an administrator and I highly admire his organization and ability to 'account' for his finances in a way I never had. He was the kid with the piggy bank growing up. Later he'd have a filing cabinet in his bed room. He counted his pennies and the dollars took care of themselves. I'm still struggling to balance my cheque book. I know too that those who are most critical of the money managers and administrators and bankers probably themselves are least competent with managing their own affairs. I know alot of great 'spenders' who think everyone else should 'give' to them.
We tend to blame others. We tend to externalize problems.
I like to blame lawyers alot too. The trouble is I've got a whole collection of lawyers as friends. I went to school with some really great girls who became lawyers. These girls were the best thing next to home made pie. Really good people and they worked their lives as lawyers. So how can lawyers be bad. Obviously some can but not all.
I know a judge today that couldn't find his ass with both hands. He's as stupid as the stupidist person I have ever met. He has no respect for money and was either intentionally or unintentionally acting utterly naive about corruption. He was so stupid I was left with the impression he just had to be utterly corrupt because I couldn't imagine a judge as stupid as he was. He was an exception to prove the rule too. I've lunched with judges and known judges personally I would have trusted my dog with. I don't trust my dog with just anyone and these men and women were the finest sort of people I could hope to meet snywhere. And one bad judge doesn't spoil the barrel.
I've met three prime ministers, have a friend who is a congressman, know a few senators and several more politicians personally. They are all individually extraordinary and wonderful people. No doubt they have their moments. As kids they probably competed in fart contests too.
I even know a good feminist and I think all feminists lack a sense of humor, take themselves too seriously, externalize all their problems , do more harm than good, are very angry and self centered. The trouble is my feminist friend is a relative saint and her work for international women is as admirable as my other friend who works with a spy agency trying to keep terrorists from blowing up innocent people taking a bus to work.
I don't like communists either except that my communist friend is one of the funniest brightest most loving persons in the world. They are as troubling to me as my radical right wing friend who goes off the deep end when they get in the same room with the commie, the two of them almost at each others throats unable to speak or act civilly if the topic of politcs comes up. Leave that out of the equation and the two are the best neighbours I know.
Generalizations are a way the mind tries to reduce the complexity of the world down to sound bites and bits that the little human mind can handle. The littler the mind the littler the bite sizes. Discrimination depends on ignorance. It depends on generalization. It's driven by fear.
Discernment is the operation of love which says that I don't want a 3 year old driving the car but I can have Johnny who is 14 driving the tractor because Johnny is mature for his age and the rule about what age a person should drive is a generalization. In a public space I will agree to such generalizations but in a private space I will use discernment to arrive at the judgements I need to make mostly about individuals, not groups.
I like to think Discernment is God centred too. And by the way people who don't love dogs should be lined up and shot with toy water guns and beat with wet noodles till they see the truth.
To discriminate against certain people I must consider them in a group rather than as an individual. So I might think "Jews are bad". Hitler thought that. It would be convenient if the world was just black and white. Jay Lifton described the black and white world of war politics. Us and them. But reality isn't like that. I know really great Jews and only a couple of really bad Jews. One of my favourite and closest mentors was Dr. Jack Hildes. He sits right next to Dr. Carl Ridd in my heirarchy of most influential humans on my life.
The Klu Klux Klan said blacks are bad. My childhood doctor was a black man. He was good. My Chicago friends are black and they're good. I know one incredible asshole who is black but he's probably the 'exception that proves the world".
I've Indians in my family and we grew up together summers hunting,fishing, hiking and doing stupid boy things. Like competing pissing off docks and seeing who could fart loudest. They're great guys. But I've heard people say Indians are bad.They're wrong.
They are as wrong as the people who say whites are bad.I'm white and on my worst day I've only been half bad though others say I exaggerate. Mostly like most people I'm doing my best to be good.
Psychopaths aren't inherrently 'bad'. They just lack compassion, are so afraid they don't know the depth of their cowardice and can think of no one else but themselves because of their poverty and isolation of spirit. Because of this they do bad things.
Sociopaths are groups that are at variance with the larger group and generally don't feel that the laws apply to them but are happy to be 'takers' and break the rules. They're not bad. They're more often sad. Like racoons in the chicken coup. If you're raising chickens and have taken it upon yourself to provide and protect chickens and their chicks then you simply have to keep out the racoons or kill the ones that get in. It's not so much 'good or bad' but just business. Darwin had something to say about this but one does all they can to avoid killing because its wasteful unless of course you like eating racoon. Personally I prefer chicken.
Alot of people are fooled into believing that individuals in groups are bad because they perceive the group to be bad. Hence we have the term 'banksters' which I use to refer to bad 'bankers'. But my banker, Lloyd, was a great man. He helped me immensely when I needed help. Nigel Ferguson wrote about money and banks and did a fine job of dispelling the ignorance that so quickly falls prey to paranoia. There's a lot of paranoia being parlayed about as reasonable these days.
I like to lump beaurocrats into a group and blame the problems of Canada for instance on too much dead weight in administration. I like to knock administrators too. I do this and should be more ashamed of myself for it. I'm actually an administrator in my own company and frankly I'm not very good at it. So here I am questioning those well above my pay grade when I haven't got my own affairs well in order. My brother is an administrator and I highly admire his organization and ability to 'account' for his finances in a way I never had. He was the kid with the piggy bank growing up. Later he'd have a filing cabinet in his bed room. He counted his pennies and the dollars took care of themselves. I'm still struggling to balance my cheque book. I know too that those who are most critical of the money managers and administrators and bankers probably themselves are least competent with managing their own affairs. I know alot of great 'spenders' who think everyone else should 'give' to them.
We tend to blame others. We tend to externalize problems.
I like to blame lawyers alot too. The trouble is I've got a whole collection of lawyers as friends. I went to school with some really great girls who became lawyers. These girls were the best thing next to home made pie. Really good people and they worked their lives as lawyers. So how can lawyers be bad. Obviously some can but not all.
I know a judge today that couldn't find his ass with both hands. He's as stupid as the stupidist person I have ever met. He has no respect for money and was either intentionally or unintentionally acting utterly naive about corruption. He was so stupid I was left with the impression he just had to be utterly corrupt because I couldn't imagine a judge as stupid as he was. He was an exception to prove the rule too. I've lunched with judges and known judges personally I would have trusted my dog with. I don't trust my dog with just anyone and these men and women were the finest sort of people I could hope to meet snywhere. And one bad judge doesn't spoil the barrel.
I've met three prime ministers, have a friend who is a congressman, know a few senators and several more politicians personally. They are all individually extraordinary and wonderful people. No doubt they have their moments. As kids they probably competed in fart contests too.
I even know a good feminist and I think all feminists lack a sense of humor, take themselves too seriously, externalize all their problems , do more harm than good, are very angry and self centered. The trouble is my feminist friend is a relative saint and her work for international women is as admirable as my other friend who works with a spy agency trying to keep terrorists from blowing up innocent people taking a bus to work.
I don't like communists either except that my communist friend is one of the funniest brightest most loving persons in the world. They are as troubling to me as my radical right wing friend who goes off the deep end when they get in the same room with the commie, the two of them almost at each others throats unable to speak or act civilly if the topic of politcs comes up. Leave that out of the equation and the two are the best neighbours I know.
Generalizations are a way the mind tries to reduce the complexity of the world down to sound bites and bits that the little human mind can handle. The littler the mind the littler the bite sizes. Discrimination depends on ignorance. It depends on generalization. It's driven by fear.
Discernment is the operation of love which says that I don't want a 3 year old driving the car but I can have Johnny who is 14 driving the tractor because Johnny is mature for his age and the rule about what age a person should drive is a generalization. In a public space I will agree to such generalizations but in a private space I will use discernment to arrive at the judgements I need to make mostly about individuals, not groups.
I like to think Discernment is God centred too. And by the way people who don't love dogs should be lined up and shot with toy water guns and beat with wet noodles till they see the truth.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Goudge Inquiry and Expert Witnesses
The paper, The Goudge Inquiry and the role of the medical expert witnesses" by Hon. Frank Iacobucci BComm LLD and Graeme Hamilton MA JD, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal Jan 12, 2010, is really a good read. At first glance it looks like the judges who were caught making very bad judgements based on the fashionable in it's day opinion of celebrity pediatric forensic pathologist Dr. Charles Smith were just trying to pass the blame the way beaurocrats always do. Obviously the judgements were foul and the judges don't want to be accountable. Better to blame the doctor. In a pinch, everyone blames the doctor these day. Doctor's take an oath to do no harm, are ethical and moral to a fault and invariably get caught holding the bed pan.
However, the article is far far more than this. It points out the difference between the European model of judisprudence and the American and Canadian one. There judges study science whereas here lawyers are supposed to. It follows that an expert witness would be encouraged to make their statements in a way which the lowest common denominator of general knowledge, the judge in this case, acts in a sense like 'lay person' or a general 'jury', not necessarily one of our peers. I couldn't help wondering how Einstein or several of my most erudite colleagues, the true geniuses of medicine might respond and remembered the story about the Japanese bike factory.
Everyone knows that the instructions that came from the finest Japanese bike factories were terribly poor so someone was sent to ask why that was. It turned out that the person who wrote the instructions was useless making bikes so was given the task of explaining them. That's the truth throughout science and cutting edge intervention. I remember reading Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions when it first came out and struggling desperately to understand his point on paradigmatic shift in scientific fads. How could a man today who understood the idea that man's behaviour caused global warming was a crock explain this position and the experiments that prooved it to anyone today. It's like suggesting blacks shouldn't be slaves. Easy today when one is a President. But a truly hard sell scientifically when black Africans were selling their lesser cousins to great hymn writing white ship's captains.
The paper actually humbly asks for doctors to help judges. So what first comes across as typical beaurocratic arrogance of the trumped up arts students protected by sheriffs with guns sitting on high chairs turns out to be a paper of rather impressive wisdom. Damn, if these two gents don't Solomon me with their words.
Despite the fact that I'm naturally as predjudiced against lawyers as I am against proctologists I couldn't help but think this was a quite a brilliant bit of writing. The Goudge Inquiry was a very good thing in deed.
The reason I looked askance at the paper midway was that it laid out reasons for the courts to 'control experts'. When one remembers that we are the experts the thought that some scurvy taiser weilding demigod should be talking 'control' is likely to raise the shackles. Yet the arguments are pretty solid when one considers a colleague who is a particular ass and how these rules would apply to him as well as oneself. Not such bad ideas, in that context.
The first reason is that 'impressive credentials' can sway juries, judges and even lawyers. Secondly the "justice system's pursuit of truth is not absolute, it is attenuated where necessary to ensure fairness or preserve the integrity of the administration of justice. Third, courts aren't particularly qualified to judge the reliability of expert testimony. "Lawyers and judges often lack even basic scientific literacy."
I was in a court where a psychologist report was the most ignorant and biased report I'd encountered in my life. I was asked to respond to this ass wipe that no clinician of any self worth would have put forward. The report I responded to excluded information from all the senior most informed specialists and presented his own opinions of matters far outside his level of knowledge and expertise based on his incredible stupidity regarding psychiatric diagnosis in general and particular. Arriving at his own diagnosis he then went on to recommend treatment which has no validity for the condition which he claimed the patient had at variance with the leading authorities on the matter in the psychiatric community. Finally he had the effrontery to recommend an impossibly costly treatment given by psychologists when the patient had seen and been treated successfully by a half dozen of the finest psychiatrists. The devilry in the court room was sulphuric but the judge was utterly ignorant apparently of what a buffoon the psychologist was making him out to be. The judge was as ignorant of the Masterson as the psychologist was but the psychologists mockery of the legal system was beyond the capacity of the judge to see, his being utterly ignorant of psychology and psychiatry as he couldn't see that he was being lead down the proverbial garden path by a man who is an embarrassment to science yet holds a position in which his damages to clients are akin to the poor judgements surrounding the cases of Dr. Charles Smith. In this case Dr. Charles Smith remains in place till the future Goudge Enquiry investigates the expert witness of psychologists like the one I encountered.
Yet in contrast, Iaccobucci and Hamilton acknowledge their own limitations and quite frankly I'm left admiring judges for having to make such hard decisions in such a public manner when a clinician such as myself would rather just use occam's razor to cut through R. D. Laings knots. Iacobucci and Hamilton win hands down with utterly reasonable arguments that derail all my passionate responses to their desire to control the likes of me. Were they around when that silly stupid deceitful like smegma of a psychologist was pulling his pants down and showing his bum to the judge I'd have been more than pleased. Instead I was left apologising to this upstart immoral mental midget for questioning his parentage.
It is the duty of the court to decide matters of 'fact' . Except for that one occasion I have always entered courts as an expert witness realizing that I have only one 'perspective' like that of a camera angle in a film and I'm really interest to hear what the judge finds given that he is in a position to look at clips from all the different camera angles.
The judge meanwhile is ignorant of a few centuries of scientific debate and how that psychologist wanted to take us all back to the sun revolving around him as the centre of the universe denying all manner of research on diagnosis , evidence based research and quite willing to accept in court a grade student science project than the latest national and international research. Meanwhile no one is about to the tell the emperor he has no clothes and that the psychologists is not his friend. It's the judge who actually has a different perspective from the expert witness and it's not for the expert witness to speak to the ultimate decision of the court but rather to inform the court as best as possible of the material of his or her specialtiy and sub speciality.
The higher the IQ of the expert, the closer and more radical the scientific evidence is, the greater the researcher the expert is, all of these will affect the ability of the expert to convey to a layman like the judge what's really important in the research area. It's no wonder that we say the top of the class doctors make the best researcher whereas the bottom of the class doctors make the most money. The average doctor is closer to the average layperson. They commune and grok each other whereas the genius immunologist is going to have serious difficulties simplifying a field thats advancing daily to a man who may or may not wear a wig and a jury that may know nothing more about juries than that they might not have been intelligent enough to find a way to get out of jury duty.
Watching the OJ trial at length I was quite struck that no one in the whole LA Police Department or the Judiciary of the day understood that DNA evidence was not like a 'fingerprint. It took the expert witness days to get anyone in that court room to grasp that 75% of a fruit fly DNA is the same as OJ's. What was horrifying and frightening for me watching the discussion of the glove by the detectives was that obviously 'all' the cases that had involved the DNA before OJ really deserved to be re tried regardless of the cost. Prior to the OJ trial it seemed obvious that no one in law enforcement had a clue as to the genius and true value of DNA and it's appropriate use. What is so exciting in Canada is the Canadian Judiciary had the Gouge Inquiry and Dr. Smith's cases were reviewed. Thanks to that we're all able to learn for the benefit of those who come next.
The final recommendations for expert witnesses were refreshing and informative
- express opinions only on matters within their expertise - I am credentialled and certified as a family physician, a hypnotist, a psychiatrist, have special interest in community medicine and public health, am a psychotherapist and psychopharmacologist, an addiction medicine subspecialist, a wilderness medicine expert , minister of divinity, blue water cruising ships captain and solo offshore navigator, motorcyclist, ball room dancer, folk guitarist, big game and bird hunter, a lecturer and a few other things . I'm known locally, provincially, nationally and internationally with the degrees and awards I've received from all these levels of jurisdiction. But despite my apparent expertise I know diddly squat about flying planes, sitting all day as a judge and not laughing or farting loudly, how to grow genetically engineered wheat, whether the F35 is a better plane that the Chinese knock off, how women do that thing with rolling their eyes, or whether the Canucks are a better hockey team than the New York Yankees are a ball team. If I am being asked as an expert witness about some aspect of my clinical practice I probably would help everyone involved if I limitted my comments to the topic at hand despite my desire to wax poetic about the superiority of Harley Davidson cruisers over the Yamaha cruisers.
- expert witness should be explicit about facts, reasoning underlying and relate this to relevant literature - in reports expecially all one is being asked to do is remember that english 101 course and how to write a paper. It's not really that different from a 'review article' in a scientific journal with less emphasis on literature search and academic fashon and more on the actual experience of the expert witness and why he sees what he does. I often find myself talking to lawyers like I would to colleagues in other specialities. The lawyers I commonly work with these days are highly informed about the specifics of the debate in scientific terms because they have their own money resting on the outcome. When my patients get hit in the head and go from being professors of mathematics to being unable to add and subtract I think that the bullet that hit them in the head was associated with the change in function. I can't say for sure as someone might argue invisible aliens probed my patient at just that moment by an act of God but based on my 36 other cases like this I'm pretty sure it was the bullet wound had a primary relationship.
-expert witnesses avoided using scientific jargon - I had to laugh at this though. I hated learning scientific language too but when I'd learned it I knew there was no 'ordinary words ' for a whole lot of scienfic reasoning and ideas. The utter and grossest of failures of the legal profession to develop a 'plain english' set of laws and legalese that has any real reference to the world reflects how utterly impossible such a task is for lawyers and judges. Knowing the overwhelming limitations mentally that this collection of folk have every expert in their field would realize that they are talking to an imbecile, speak very slowly and don't use words bigger than 'marmalade'. Reading any of the legal documents that are associated with a new Mac or PC program gives everyone some idea of the inability utter inability of the legal profession to be 'timely' and 'relevant' yet they want us to talk to them like,well, like we talk to 'students' and 'teen agers'. Naturally the greatest researchers and best of the best won't be 'communicators' as such.
The greatest neurosurgeon in Canada who was called in on the Kennedy shooting let me assist him in neurosurgery for a few months. He was one of the greatest minds I've ever been priviledged to be near but he rarely spoke, was almost autistic, definitely would have been called aspergers, and yet was the greatest neurosurgeon in Canada. I get to be an expert witness because I'm not as good as he is. If you can't do, you teach. If I'm not working in my office and I'm off at the courts I'm actually in 'teacher' mode. I'm relaying my information like the Japanese bike explainer. I'm not doing what I'm best at which is the field I'm expert in.
I"m a clinician though and have devoted my life to convincing people to do what they don't wnat to do. "You have to stop drinking, Mr. Jones, the blood you're throwing up with the booze is because the booze is killing your stomach lining." "Doctor, I just don't get it." "Mr. Jones, your drinking is killing you. "I don't think so Doc, my dying is ruining my drinking". But rather than consider another routine daily discussion from my office I'm used to discussing medicine with people
The judges I know save one or two have been really really smart and though they can act really stupid I realized long ago that they want things explained simply not as much for themselves as for the other people in the court. Chretien was one of the smartest and most clever men in Canadian history. I am not commenting on his politics when I say this. What I'm saying is that I don't of anyone who pulled off acting stupid better than he did. Apparently Honest Abe Lincoln had a similar way of communicating. An Indian saint said, "he is a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom'. Experts aren't being called in to 'show off'. They're there to help the courts. Judges have been incredibly helpful by asking me to clarify and simply things that I can to the benefit to all involved. I've been insensitive to people in the court by not speaking simply and clearly when this was possible.
Expert witness identified any opinion that is qualified or where there was controversy. - I didn't get this until I realized again that lawyers and judges and most lay people don't grasp that science is about 'hypothesis' and everything we know in science today we expect to be overturned by science tomorrow. In contrast the law like religion tends to lack the utmost humility that governs all science. Arts students have to run about being 'humble' because the world of money and power and politics is about being 'best' and competing and American Idol. Science is in contrast for the humble. When I read a legal judgement today I can often find the same discussion in my favourte text of Plato or for that matter in the Old Testament. There's nothing new in human behaviour. Caligula made Jerry Springer look like a choir boy. In science though no one before walked on the moon or had a cell phone or saw what the brain looked like under a electron microscope. The Chinese had fire crackers when Confuscious was laying down his beurocratic laws but there wasn't any hydrogen or neutron bombs back then. What the arts are always asking scientists to do is 'slow down', let us on your space ship. And we really should respect them because as yet no scientist has given us all the benefit that the latest age old poem by a new young rhymer gives us. Everything is qualified in science. We know that judges decisions are made based on the amount of flatulance they're holding on any particular day. The decisons of the stock exchange are affected by sunny days or rainy days. If a lawyer has hemorrhoids he's not going to be top of his game on a day when the judges dog got put down. Science is controversy. 75% of what is published in the very best medical journals in the world is proven wrong in less than one year.
Just consider 'global warming'. I'm all in favour of it being in Canada, without grandchildren and wanting a few more days of summer every year. Luddites abound. As for psychiatry we have to deal with scientologists and psychologists who like to make judges look stupid and go out of their way to destroy the respect the court works so hard to achieve. There are those in psychiatry who believe everything is fate and genetics while others like myself say the 'dingo et the baby' if I see a dingo running off with a baby' whereas my academic colleague insists dinghos don't eat babies becuae the dinghos in his experiment didn't eat the babies offered up by mothers of scientologists.
The trouble with this for clinicians is that by the time we actually recommend a treatment we have ruled out upwards of 100s of possibilities. The teaching on the decision making of experts in an attempt to get junior doctors up to speed faster is fascinating research. To date the importance of 'pattern recognition' is profound but he courts and beaurocracies in general are afraid of 'pattern recognition' The symphony conductor has a very hard time explaining why he knew the 3 rd violin was out of tune especially if the judge is tone deaf .
Yet that's what the big boys want. It's really kind of them to say too. Because if we really want to help our patients then commonly we have to help the judge to do just that. Also the courts are there to help us all and do. And in Canada the judges are collectively a pretty good sort. Canadians are blessed to be in one of the greatest countries in the world and part of what has gone into that has been the tendency of our courts to make relatively good decisions in the very toughest of times.
I do work for insurance companies and have no difficulty appreciating their need for the courts. The average person doesn't know how bizzare and calculating the malingerers and sociopaths and psychopaths are . All manner of people self inflict wounds and want the insurance companies to pay them for this. The courts are there and good judges are there to stop this criminal behaviour. Equally insurance companies love to take money and hate to pay it out and were it not for lawyers and judges some of these mega wealthy corporations would have denied patients the little left to them after a horrendous accident.
I don't have a better answer to the courts. I liked working with elected judges and I think it will be more interesting when scientific basics are required study for all lawyers and judges. With the increasing immigration into Canada of people from scientifically advanced countries there's going to be increasing demand on the education system to be more relevant and practical. As much as I love poetry it doesn't pay the heating bill and untill I can convince all Canadians to drive SUVs to lower our collective heating bill I'm going to have to depend on the practical applications of science to improve my life at the lower levels and more universal levels of Maslow hierarchy. Canada can't afford to carry so many ignorant people as a consequence of the failing of education system and beaurocracy to get out of the middle ages and come into the 19th century.
At the same time doctors who are by default expert witnesses can't afford not to read the wisdom of the likes of Frank Iacobucci and Graeme Hamilton. I am very thankful these two fine gentleman have taken the time to help doctors.
Expert witneses
However, the article is far far more than this. It points out the difference between the European model of judisprudence and the American and Canadian one. There judges study science whereas here lawyers are supposed to. It follows that an expert witness would be encouraged to make their statements in a way which the lowest common denominator of general knowledge, the judge in this case, acts in a sense like 'lay person' or a general 'jury', not necessarily one of our peers. I couldn't help wondering how Einstein or several of my most erudite colleagues, the true geniuses of medicine might respond and remembered the story about the Japanese bike factory.
Everyone knows that the instructions that came from the finest Japanese bike factories were terribly poor so someone was sent to ask why that was. It turned out that the person who wrote the instructions was useless making bikes so was given the task of explaining them. That's the truth throughout science and cutting edge intervention. I remember reading Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions when it first came out and struggling desperately to understand his point on paradigmatic shift in scientific fads. How could a man today who understood the idea that man's behaviour caused global warming was a crock explain this position and the experiments that prooved it to anyone today. It's like suggesting blacks shouldn't be slaves. Easy today when one is a President. But a truly hard sell scientifically when black Africans were selling their lesser cousins to great hymn writing white ship's captains.
The paper actually humbly asks for doctors to help judges. So what first comes across as typical beaurocratic arrogance of the trumped up arts students protected by sheriffs with guns sitting on high chairs turns out to be a paper of rather impressive wisdom. Damn, if these two gents don't Solomon me with their words.
Despite the fact that I'm naturally as predjudiced against lawyers as I am against proctologists I couldn't help but think this was a quite a brilliant bit of writing. The Goudge Inquiry was a very good thing in deed.
The reason I looked askance at the paper midway was that it laid out reasons for the courts to 'control experts'. When one remembers that we are the experts the thought that some scurvy taiser weilding demigod should be talking 'control' is likely to raise the shackles. Yet the arguments are pretty solid when one considers a colleague who is a particular ass and how these rules would apply to him as well as oneself. Not such bad ideas, in that context.
The first reason is that 'impressive credentials' can sway juries, judges and even lawyers. Secondly the "justice system's pursuit of truth is not absolute, it is attenuated where necessary to ensure fairness or preserve the integrity of the administration of justice. Third, courts aren't particularly qualified to judge the reliability of expert testimony. "Lawyers and judges often lack even basic scientific literacy."
I was in a court where a psychologist report was the most ignorant and biased report I'd encountered in my life. I was asked to respond to this ass wipe that no clinician of any self worth would have put forward. The report I responded to excluded information from all the senior most informed specialists and presented his own opinions of matters far outside his level of knowledge and expertise based on his incredible stupidity regarding psychiatric diagnosis in general and particular. Arriving at his own diagnosis he then went on to recommend treatment which has no validity for the condition which he claimed the patient had at variance with the leading authorities on the matter in the psychiatric community. Finally he had the effrontery to recommend an impossibly costly treatment given by psychologists when the patient had seen and been treated successfully by a half dozen of the finest psychiatrists. The devilry in the court room was sulphuric but the judge was utterly ignorant apparently of what a buffoon the psychologist was making him out to be. The judge was as ignorant of the Masterson as the psychologist was but the psychologists mockery of the legal system was beyond the capacity of the judge to see, his being utterly ignorant of psychology and psychiatry as he couldn't see that he was being lead down the proverbial garden path by a man who is an embarrassment to science yet holds a position in which his damages to clients are akin to the poor judgements surrounding the cases of Dr. Charles Smith. In this case Dr. Charles Smith remains in place till the future Goudge Enquiry investigates the expert witness of psychologists like the one I encountered.
Yet in contrast, Iaccobucci and Hamilton acknowledge their own limitations and quite frankly I'm left admiring judges for having to make such hard decisions in such a public manner when a clinician such as myself would rather just use occam's razor to cut through R. D. Laings knots. Iacobucci and Hamilton win hands down with utterly reasonable arguments that derail all my passionate responses to their desire to control the likes of me. Were they around when that silly stupid deceitful like smegma of a psychologist was pulling his pants down and showing his bum to the judge I'd have been more than pleased. Instead I was left apologising to this upstart immoral mental midget for questioning his parentage.
It is the duty of the court to decide matters of 'fact' . Except for that one occasion I have always entered courts as an expert witness realizing that I have only one 'perspective' like that of a camera angle in a film and I'm really interest to hear what the judge finds given that he is in a position to look at clips from all the different camera angles.
The judge meanwhile is ignorant of a few centuries of scientific debate and how that psychologist wanted to take us all back to the sun revolving around him as the centre of the universe denying all manner of research on diagnosis , evidence based research and quite willing to accept in court a grade student science project than the latest national and international research. Meanwhile no one is about to the tell the emperor he has no clothes and that the psychologists is not his friend. It's the judge who actually has a different perspective from the expert witness and it's not for the expert witness to speak to the ultimate decision of the court but rather to inform the court as best as possible of the material of his or her specialtiy and sub speciality.
The higher the IQ of the expert, the closer and more radical the scientific evidence is, the greater the researcher the expert is, all of these will affect the ability of the expert to convey to a layman like the judge what's really important in the research area. It's no wonder that we say the top of the class doctors make the best researcher whereas the bottom of the class doctors make the most money. The average doctor is closer to the average layperson. They commune and grok each other whereas the genius immunologist is going to have serious difficulties simplifying a field thats advancing daily to a man who may or may not wear a wig and a jury that may know nothing more about juries than that they might not have been intelligent enough to find a way to get out of jury duty.
Watching the OJ trial at length I was quite struck that no one in the whole LA Police Department or the Judiciary of the day understood that DNA evidence was not like a 'fingerprint. It took the expert witness days to get anyone in that court room to grasp that 75% of a fruit fly DNA is the same as OJ's. What was horrifying and frightening for me watching the discussion of the glove by the detectives was that obviously 'all' the cases that had involved the DNA before OJ really deserved to be re tried regardless of the cost. Prior to the OJ trial it seemed obvious that no one in law enforcement had a clue as to the genius and true value of DNA and it's appropriate use. What is so exciting in Canada is the Canadian Judiciary had the Gouge Inquiry and Dr. Smith's cases were reviewed. Thanks to that we're all able to learn for the benefit of those who come next.
The final recommendations for expert witnesses were refreshing and informative
- express opinions only on matters within their expertise - I am credentialled and certified as a family physician, a hypnotist, a psychiatrist, have special interest in community medicine and public health, am a psychotherapist and psychopharmacologist, an addiction medicine subspecialist, a wilderness medicine expert , minister of divinity, blue water cruising ships captain and solo offshore navigator, motorcyclist, ball room dancer, folk guitarist, big game and bird hunter, a lecturer and a few other things . I'm known locally, provincially, nationally and internationally with the degrees and awards I've received from all these levels of jurisdiction. But despite my apparent expertise I know diddly squat about flying planes, sitting all day as a judge and not laughing or farting loudly, how to grow genetically engineered wheat, whether the F35 is a better plane that the Chinese knock off, how women do that thing with rolling their eyes, or whether the Canucks are a better hockey team than the New York Yankees are a ball team. If I am being asked as an expert witness about some aspect of my clinical practice I probably would help everyone involved if I limitted my comments to the topic at hand despite my desire to wax poetic about the superiority of Harley Davidson cruisers over the Yamaha cruisers.
- expert witness should be explicit about facts, reasoning underlying and relate this to relevant literature - in reports expecially all one is being asked to do is remember that english 101 course and how to write a paper. It's not really that different from a 'review article' in a scientific journal with less emphasis on literature search and academic fashon and more on the actual experience of the expert witness and why he sees what he does. I often find myself talking to lawyers like I would to colleagues in other specialities. The lawyers I commonly work with these days are highly informed about the specifics of the debate in scientific terms because they have their own money resting on the outcome. When my patients get hit in the head and go from being professors of mathematics to being unable to add and subtract I think that the bullet that hit them in the head was associated with the change in function. I can't say for sure as someone might argue invisible aliens probed my patient at just that moment by an act of God but based on my 36 other cases like this I'm pretty sure it was the bullet wound had a primary relationship.
-expert witnesses avoided using scientific jargon - I had to laugh at this though. I hated learning scientific language too but when I'd learned it I knew there was no 'ordinary words ' for a whole lot of scienfic reasoning and ideas. The utter and grossest of failures of the legal profession to develop a 'plain english' set of laws and legalese that has any real reference to the world reflects how utterly impossible such a task is for lawyers and judges. Knowing the overwhelming limitations mentally that this collection of folk have every expert in their field would realize that they are talking to an imbecile, speak very slowly and don't use words bigger than 'marmalade'. Reading any of the legal documents that are associated with a new Mac or PC program gives everyone some idea of the inability utter inability of the legal profession to be 'timely' and 'relevant' yet they want us to talk to them like,well, like we talk to 'students' and 'teen agers'. Naturally the greatest researchers and best of the best won't be 'communicators' as such.
The greatest neurosurgeon in Canada who was called in on the Kennedy shooting let me assist him in neurosurgery for a few months. He was one of the greatest minds I've ever been priviledged to be near but he rarely spoke, was almost autistic, definitely would have been called aspergers, and yet was the greatest neurosurgeon in Canada. I get to be an expert witness because I'm not as good as he is. If you can't do, you teach. If I'm not working in my office and I'm off at the courts I'm actually in 'teacher' mode. I'm relaying my information like the Japanese bike explainer. I'm not doing what I'm best at which is the field I'm expert in.
I"m a clinician though and have devoted my life to convincing people to do what they don't wnat to do. "You have to stop drinking, Mr. Jones, the blood you're throwing up with the booze is because the booze is killing your stomach lining." "Doctor, I just don't get it." "Mr. Jones, your drinking is killing you. "I don't think so Doc, my dying is ruining my drinking". But rather than consider another routine daily discussion from my office I'm used to discussing medicine with people
The judges I know save one or two have been really really smart and though they can act really stupid I realized long ago that they want things explained simply not as much for themselves as for the other people in the court. Chretien was one of the smartest and most clever men in Canadian history. I am not commenting on his politics when I say this. What I'm saying is that I don't of anyone who pulled off acting stupid better than he did. Apparently Honest Abe Lincoln had a similar way of communicating. An Indian saint said, "he is a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom'. Experts aren't being called in to 'show off'. They're there to help the courts. Judges have been incredibly helpful by asking me to clarify and simply things that I can to the benefit to all involved. I've been insensitive to people in the court by not speaking simply and clearly when this was possible.
Expert witness identified any opinion that is qualified or where there was controversy. - I didn't get this until I realized again that lawyers and judges and most lay people don't grasp that science is about 'hypothesis' and everything we know in science today we expect to be overturned by science tomorrow. In contrast the law like religion tends to lack the utmost humility that governs all science. Arts students have to run about being 'humble' because the world of money and power and politics is about being 'best' and competing and American Idol. Science is in contrast for the humble. When I read a legal judgement today I can often find the same discussion in my favourte text of Plato or for that matter in the Old Testament. There's nothing new in human behaviour. Caligula made Jerry Springer look like a choir boy. In science though no one before walked on the moon or had a cell phone or saw what the brain looked like under a electron microscope. The Chinese had fire crackers when Confuscious was laying down his beurocratic laws but there wasn't any hydrogen or neutron bombs back then. What the arts are always asking scientists to do is 'slow down', let us on your space ship. And we really should respect them because as yet no scientist has given us all the benefit that the latest age old poem by a new young rhymer gives us. Everything is qualified in science. We know that judges decisions are made based on the amount of flatulance they're holding on any particular day. The decisons of the stock exchange are affected by sunny days or rainy days. If a lawyer has hemorrhoids he's not going to be top of his game on a day when the judges dog got put down. Science is controversy. 75% of what is published in the very best medical journals in the world is proven wrong in less than one year.
Just consider 'global warming'. I'm all in favour of it being in Canada, without grandchildren and wanting a few more days of summer every year. Luddites abound. As for psychiatry we have to deal with scientologists and psychologists who like to make judges look stupid and go out of their way to destroy the respect the court works so hard to achieve. There are those in psychiatry who believe everything is fate and genetics while others like myself say the 'dingo et the baby' if I see a dingo running off with a baby' whereas my academic colleague insists dinghos don't eat babies becuae the dinghos in his experiment didn't eat the babies offered up by mothers of scientologists.
The trouble with this for clinicians is that by the time we actually recommend a treatment we have ruled out upwards of 100s of possibilities. The teaching on the decision making of experts in an attempt to get junior doctors up to speed faster is fascinating research. To date the importance of 'pattern recognition' is profound but he courts and beaurocracies in general are afraid of 'pattern recognition' The symphony conductor has a very hard time explaining why he knew the 3 rd violin was out of tune especially if the judge is tone deaf .
Yet that's what the big boys want. It's really kind of them to say too. Because if we really want to help our patients then commonly we have to help the judge to do just that. Also the courts are there to help us all and do. And in Canada the judges are collectively a pretty good sort. Canadians are blessed to be in one of the greatest countries in the world and part of what has gone into that has been the tendency of our courts to make relatively good decisions in the very toughest of times.
I do work for insurance companies and have no difficulty appreciating their need for the courts. The average person doesn't know how bizzare and calculating the malingerers and sociopaths and psychopaths are . All manner of people self inflict wounds and want the insurance companies to pay them for this. The courts are there and good judges are there to stop this criminal behaviour. Equally insurance companies love to take money and hate to pay it out and were it not for lawyers and judges some of these mega wealthy corporations would have denied patients the little left to them after a horrendous accident.
I don't have a better answer to the courts. I liked working with elected judges and I think it will be more interesting when scientific basics are required study for all lawyers and judges. With the increasing immigration into Canada of people from scientifically advanced countries there's going to be increasing demand on the education system to be more relevant and practical. As much as I love poetry it doesn't pay the heating bill and untill I can convince all Canadians to drive SUVs to lower our collective heating bill I'm going to have to depend on the practical applications of science to improve my life at the lower levels and more universal levels of Maslow hierarchy. Canada can't afford to carry so many ignorant people as a consequence of the failing of education system and beaurocracy to get out of the middle ages and come into the 19th century.
At the same time doctors who are by default expert witnesses can't afford not to read the wisdom of the likes of Frank Iacobucci and Graeme Hamilton. I am very thankful these two fine gentleman have taken the time to help doctors.
Expert witneses
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Christie Blatchford and the Mutiny in the Canadian Courts
I just read Christie Blatchford's Comment, "Minimum jail time tests court's powers' in the National Post Saturday Feb,18, 2012. It was very informative. It seems that the courts are in 'mutiny' against the elected parliament and elective legislature. Thanks to the wit of Christie Blatchford we see the the pout and tongue sticking of the big girls and big boys of the courts wagging their ears at prime ministers and premiers. Now what will we do? Personally I think we should call in the 'military judges' to set the matter right. It's pretty obvious that there is civil disobedience in the courts. Troudeau brought the tanks out against the people. So isn't it time that Stephen Harper and Christie Clark bring in the military to address the overt and covert 'strike' of the courts using all manner of passive aggression, slow down, and misinformation, and babble gook to literally defeat the elected governments of the day. Christie Blatchfords suggest that the judges run for office but I'd rather see them 'elected' if they are going to act above the law.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Global Police State
A friend said that there is no longer any reason to run away. "There's no place left to go." Corruption and police abuse occur locally but are also global. Whether it's overt or covert isn't as important as the fact that 'geographical solutions' no longer seem likely to be any more than lateral displacements.
The true nature of the police is to 'serve and protect'. Their success stems from their close relationship with the community they serve in. Further they are most successful when they represent the community ideals. The fact remains that a fraction of all individuals are simply ferral and lack darwinian advancement to be able to consceputalize society at all. These are the psychopaths. Psychopaths object most to being put in jail with other psychopaths. They thrive on victims. A good police service is like the sheep dogs that serve the shepherd.
What is problematic is when the police serve tyranny or are politically at variance with the majority aims of the people. Further, police are distinctly different from the military. The military's function is to find the enemy and extingquish the threat. The paramitarization of the police is a concern because of the paranoid devision which results. Military need an group enemy whereas police theoretically don't.
Organized crime today is becoming for some a 'blue collar' police force acting where the 'white collar' police force has failed. Russia is described as in bed with the mafia and Japan has long cohabited with the Yakuza. Gangs provide an order out of disorder. There's a history of gangs and unions that speak to the service this misled groups have in adressing chaos. 'Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal alot and they make you king, ' was a saying of Dr. Johnson, the english political critic.
Meanwhile bullying was a means of gaining power whereas killing might cost one the power that threat and extortion gained. Southern writer Carl Hiaasen has quipped that the only things a southern politician can't do, all else being acceptable, is "being caught with a dead girl or a live boy "in their bed. There's a blurring of the boundaries which has given rise to various privatized 'security' forces and increased powers for 'private police'. Meanwhile in the school teachers are all on about 'anti bullying' which was once the 'private boys school learning grounds' for next generation leaders with hazing as central.
During the 30's in Germany and Europe as a whole there was a time of great spirituality and a time of eco awarenss.The great nudist and nature movements thrived between wars and prior to the development of the great police states of Communism and Nazism. It is both exciting and concerning that we are faced again with a time of great spirituality and eco awareness.
Today we have a soldier on trial for releasing secrets that Wikileaks passed on to the people. The 'secrets' showed the corruption in the high places of governemnt. Naturally this corruption undermined the 'police' themselves in North America. 9-11, the OJ trial, and countless other events have eroded our faith in the 'purity' and 'honesty' of leadership. At the height of the Goldman Sachs, Franny Mae and Freddy Mae debacle there were cocaine drugged executives whoring with high class prostitutes.
Locally a new 'watchdog' has been brought in to 'police' the 'police' yet hundreds break all manner of law defiantly squatting ('occupying '- note the military language) in public parks and 'disrupting traffic' because they like to. The normal police are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Increasing all over the world police are faced with containing 'protestors' in increasing 'civil war' like scenarios. Yet if they 'act' in day to day scenarios they will be scrutinized and if they avoid acting to catch criminals they will be playing it 'safe'. It's a confusing time to be a police man or woman.
The 'police' state depends on the judiciary. Increasingly there's 'centralization' of control and judges demanding that there be no criticizm of them while increasingly there's a demand, much like with 'wiki leaks' to film proceedings. The Vancouver Riots court cases are due to be televized. Not "Judge Judy' by any means, thank God, but a return to Solomon without the exclusivity and dark corridors. Meanwhile Philip Slayton's book, Mighty Judgement , How the Supreme Court Runs Your Life has been published to show Canadians just how free Americans are compared to Canadians who behaviour politically fluctuates from silliness and irrelevance to abject vassal stateship.
Meanwhile as Christians we believe that God is in control of all aspects of life including politics and law though Jesus did say that a different ruler ruled the world before his death by the judges and police of his day was supposed to change things. Hitchens died recently and was famous for saying if the religious felt their homes were in the afterlife and heaven why were the religious organizations, be they Christian, Catholic, Moslem or Jewish so intent on acquiring land and power in this world.
The paradox has always been that we are 'gods that shit'. We have minds capable of imagining peace on earth especially at Christmas but our bodies war with the very idea. Freud was afraid of the "id' and the unconscious, according to Jung and Milton Erickson who felt the unconscious was to be embraced.
The police state is all about the rational limitting the unrational to all extents and purposes. Historical 'rationality was the domain of man and irrationality the domain of women." This resulted in the quip that the heart has reason that the minds does not know of. Yet in British Columbia, though half of the lawyers graduating are female, two thirds leave law rapidly because they apparently are so excluded that the law society is now finally attempting to make more room in it's irrationally rational corridors for the rationally irrational sex. World War I was the war to end all wars and confirmed that the 'age of reason' had culminated in the most unreasonable of behaviour.
I for one am a healer. I'm on the side of motherhood and children. I think Dad's a bit over the top at times still I love him dearly. It's balance I love best. I'm a student of Freud but love Jung and Milton Erickson. I believe that all the gold and bullion put into the hands of the controllers with first the failed war on Drugs and now the war on Terror would best be divided with those in education and medicine. I think theres a place for prevention and enforcement but I think that we're way over the top with tanks in police forces.
I think it's time to win hearts and minds and if we did that we'd have a global police state that 'served and protected' rather than tended more and more to the para military.
In Canada we all have to re think Troudeau despite my personal love for his red carnation. His calling tanks into the streets of Montreal may well have been the greatest failure in our history. Perhaps the resurrection of the Canadian Liberal Party could phoenix from a re think of that sad moment in Canadian history.
I want to believe and see God in charge and know that I am safe in the hands of the Lord. I want to know too that my leadership isn't lying and stealing while smiling like Robert Hare's 'Snakes in Suits'. I would have more faith in the future if countries like Canada lobbied on behalf of Julian Assange of Wikileaks. We need to support authority but we can't stand for tyrrany.
Of course if Obama declares a state of war with China then we will have to accept 'loose lips sink ships' but until then we need to here and now to accept a Global Police State but work together to ensure that it's role remains 'to serve and protect'. My friends says, "there's no place left to run to." Of course, I'm following the latest Mars expedition with keen interest.
The true nature of the police is to 'serve and protect'. Their success stems from their close relationship with the community they serve in. Further they are most successful when they represent the community ideals. The fact remains that a fraction of all individuals are simply ferral and lack darwinian advancement to be able to consceputalize society at all. These are the psychopaths. Psychopaths object most to being put in jail with other psychopaths. They thrive on victims. A good police service is like the sheep dogs that serve the shepherd.
What is problematic is when the police serve tyranny or are politically at variance with the majority aims of the people. Further, police are distinctly different from the military. The military's function is to find the enemy and extingquish the threat. The paramitarization of the police is a concern because of the paranoid devision which results. Military need an group enemy whereas police theoretically don't.
Organized crime today is becoming for some a 'blue collar' police force acting where the 'white collar' police force has failed. Russia is described as in bed with the mafia and Japan has long cohabited with the Yakuza. Gangs provide an order out of disorder. There's a history of gangs and unions that speak to the service this misled groups have in adressing chaos. 'Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal alot and they make you king, ' was a saying of Dr. Johnson, the english political critic.
Meanwhile bullying was a means of gaining power whereas killing might cost one the power that threat and extortion gained. Southern writer Carl Hiaasen has quipped that the only things a southern politician can't do, all else being acceptable, is "being caught with a dead girl or a live boy "in their bed. There's a blurring of the boundaries which has given rise to various privatized 'security' forces and increased powers for 'private police'. Meanwhile in the school teachers are all on about 'anti bullying' which was once the 'private boys school learning grounds' for next generation leaders with hazing as central.
During the 30's in Germany and Europe as a whole there was a time of great spirituality and a time of eco awarenss.The great nudist and nature movements thrived between wars and prior to the development of the great police states of Communism and Nazism. It is both exciting and concerning that we are faced again with a time of great spirituality and eco awareness.
Today we have a soldier on trial for releasing secrets that Wikileaks passed on to the people. The 'secrets' showed the corruption in the high places of governemnt. Naturally this corruption undermined the 'police' themselves in North America. 9-11, the OJ trial, and countless other events have eroded our faith in the 'purity' and 'honesty' of leadership. At the height of the Goldman Sachs, Franny Mae and Freddy Mae debacle there were cocaine drugged executives whoring with high class prostitutes.
Locally a new 'watchdog' has been brought in to 'police' the 'police' yet hundreds break all manner of law defiantly squatting ('occupying '- note the military language) in public parks and 'disrupting traffic' because they like to. The normal police are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Increasing all over the world police are faced with containing 'protestors' in increasing 'civil war' like scenarios. Yet if they 'act' in day to day scenarios they will be scrutinized and if they avoid acting to catch criminals they will be playing it 'safe'. It's a confusing time to be a police man or woman.
The 'police' state depends on the judiciary. Increasingly there's 'centralization' of control and judges demanding that there be no criticizm of them while increasingly there's a demand, much like with 'wiki leaks' to film proceedings. The Vancouver Riots court cases are due to be televized. Not "Judge Judy' by any means, thank God, but a return to Solomon without the exclusivity and dark corridors. Meanwhile Philip Slayton's book, Mighty Judgement , How the Supreme Court Runs Your Life has been published to show Canadians just how free Americans are compared to Canadians who behaviour politically fluctuates from silliness and irrelevance to abject vassal stateship.
Meanwhile as Christians we believe that God is in control of all aspects of life including politics and law though Jesus did say that a different ruler ruled the world before his death by the judges and police of his day was supposed to change things. Hitchens died recently and was famous for saying if the religious felt their homes were in the afterlife and heaven why were the religious organizations, be they Christian, Catholic, Moslem or Jewish so intent on acquiring land and power in this world.
The paradox has always been that we are 'gods that shit'. We have minds capable of imagining peace on earth especially at Christmas but our bodies war with the very idea. Freud was afraid of the "id' and the unconscious, according to Jung and Milton Erickson who felt the unconscious was to be embraced.
The police state is all about the rational limitting the unrational to all extents and purposes. Historical 'rationality was the domain of man and irrationality the domain of women." This resulted in the quip that the heart has reason that the minds does not know of. Yet in British Columbia, though half of the lawyers graduating are female, two thirds leave law rapidly because they apparently are so excluded that the law society is now finally attempting to make more room in it's irrationally rational corridors for the rationally irrational sex. World War I was the war to end all wars and confirmed that the 'age of reason' had culminated in the most unreasonable of behaviour.
I for one am a healer. I'm on the side of motherhood and children. I think Dad's a bit over the top at times still I love him dearly. It's balance I love best. I'm a student of Freud but love Jung and Milton Erickson. I believe that all the gold and bullion put into the hands of the controllers with first the failed war on Drugs and now the war on Terror would best be divided with those in education and medicine. I think theres a place for prevention and enforcement but I think that we're way over the top with tanks in police forces.
I think it's time to win hearts and minds and if we did that we'd have a global police state that 'served and protected' rather than tended more and more to the para military.
In Canada we all have to re think Troudeau despite my personal love for his red carnation. His calling tanks into the streets of Montreal may well have been the greatest failure in our history. Perhaps the resurrection of the Canadian Liberal Party could phoenix from a re think of that sad moment in Canadian history.
I want to believe and see God in charge and know that I am safe in the hands of the Lord. I want to know too that my leadership isn't lying and stealing while smiling like Robert Hare's 'Snakes in Suits'. I would have more faith in the future if countries like Canada lobbied on behalf of Julian Assange of Wikileaks. We need to support authority but we can't stand for tyrrany.
Of course if Obama declares a state of war with China then we will have to accept 'loose lips sink ships' but until then we need to here and now to accept a Global Police State but work together to ensure that it's role remains 'to serve and protect'. My friends says, "there's no place left to run to." Of course, I'm following the latest Mars expedition with keen interest.
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