The Leading Cause of Death - the Cost of Velocity

It always makes sense to look closely at Death; after all, our lives depend on it.

The phrase "cause of death" is deceptive, and invites serious second looks. Most of us die of SHOCK, as a result of trauma or disease, in turn caused by negligence or micro-organisms whose impacts are aggravated by a pre-existing condition, and all of which occur naturally.

The world's leading cause of death among adults is "heart disease"; the pump stops, and for lack of circulation, death ensues. The leading causes of death among children under the age of five years old are neonatal causes (37%), respiratory infections (19%), and dysentary (17%). Malaria kills one million people (and disables 500 million) annually. (Reference: World Health Organization Report 2005).

However, second only to heart disease as the world's leading cause of death is...{drum roll}...TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS. Based on projections from the number of passenger miles and manufacturing data on trucks and cars, in 2008 it is almost certain that 1.3 million lives and $500 billion in damages will be suffered as a result of increasing traffic carnage. Most of this harm is preventable, but almost none of it will be, and very little will be compensated. Millions of people's lives will be altered forever in the course of mundane traveling.

The carnage is deliberate, anticipated, and certain: Get in a car, increase your risk of death and crippling injury. These casualties are entirely artificial, having little to do with insect vectors, disease, or biology. It has everything to do with marketing -- few people would replace their bicycle with a car except for an appeal to irrational hopes and the juvenile emotional appeal of velocity.

Is there any REASON to replace "fun" (horses, bicycles) with high-risk comfort (sitting in a luxurious lazy-boy recliner moving at 88 feet per second...)?

Is it reasonable to risk your life to go to work every day? Is it reasonable to risk your life to go shopping for non-essentials? In the United States, more people are killed annually on highways than were killed in the Viet Nam War with people TRYING to kill them in a twenty-year war. More soldiers today are killed on our own highways than are killed IN IRAQ.

I will never understand why the parents and families of the dead are not screaming for compensation from automobile manufacturers. The cost of velocity is not built into the products. The people who profit from the suffering are deaf, those who benefit are indifferent and ignorant, and as a society we have not moved into the Industrial Age; we are forced to live irrational lives.

Most of what we Believe is Not True; especially in Court

Repeatedly, studies have shown that everyone believes at least a few things were are false, many believe a lot of things which are false, and a few believe a lot of things which are false.

Lets look at Courts of law -- every day, two sides of a dispute or event are put forth. A remarkable number of contests simply involve a misunderstanding. A definition of a word, or a concept of "business" that means something different to people with different expectations.

Melvin Pollner, in "Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse" wrote that we build our sense of reality "inside a bubble" made up of beliefs and assumptions. Inside this bubble is what a person believes, a version of reality that may be shared, or not. Pollner, a UCLA sociologist, thought that all of these versions of reality were subject to negotiation.

What happens when the bubble ruptures?

Lonely, misunderstood, accused falsely, and in excellent company!

Another day of false accusations, and (no big surprise) the resurrection of battles lost at the threshhold of my career when Justice Gardiner first got wind of my "multi-professional" model for practicing law. Somehow the richness of my life, and the many victories since, all seem to pale against the pain of those old wounds, the crass and unjust misunderstanding of people in authority sitting upon laurels they do not themselves remotely deserve. So, to fight off depression, what to do? To walk in beauty. Fine. After a brutal and utterly imbecilic Deposition, I took the Razor out for a spin, or a "scoot" to be precise, along the cliffs above the long beach for which Long Beach is drawn. The sun was setting over the Queen Mary, the Spruce Goose hanger, and the rippling bay. A gallery of portraits was showing in the Art Museum. And all the lonely people walking by, smiling at the bit of fun an old man is having on his scooter.... Picked up dum sum for dinner with my wonderful family. Then to the library to indulge, on this day, this particularly horrid day with a contemptible life, entering into the JUNGLE again. Find the Darwin quote - the one where he says there are no words, no way to convey the sublimity of the great rain forest. Absorb those photographs, the pictures of things that will soon be no more. No More! So dear in being here, so scarce, so magical, so real to those who have the hope of conscious existence. I remember seeing, hearing and smelling the great domino tree-fall as the swidden farmers notched the trunks along the lee, then felled the giant, and it pulled down an acre, left to dry, and then the burning. We collected orchids and ants, never again ever found. Oh where is that Darwin heart when we still forever need him! So Darwin suffered the same. Hardly anyone to share on board a boat. The Captain was treasuring his soul to a jealous God, the crew was amused but saw no "use" - the crates and boxes were bilge at best. But then in lieu of a long-awaiting celebration, to be cast out of his church community on baseless lies? Then there were the whispered accusations -- kept Darwin from publishing, delayed his marriage/family, ruined his hopes for a small fortune. And as righteous as...even as Spinoza, similarly cast out of his community of Sephardic emigrants in Holland, quietly grinding and polishing his optics, unknown really even to his landlord living below. And the ETHICS published posthumously. As if we can wait for Death? Again, the loneliness, the isolation, the accusations, the injustice never redressed. What good company it is to be among those falsely accused! And to further enjoy almost complete anonymity. This I do not share with Darwin and Spinoza, of course, but it is my special badge. Anonymity is my reward for being thick, sick, homely and having such little and so singular a talent.... I have only one talent: To be able to recognize those we must appreciate, and to distinguish those who are imbeciles. I recognize Darwin and Spinoza, for example, as people around me today, and as giants who lived 200 and 400 years ago (give or take). This is my only talent, and it is so rare today, it can hardly be noticed. We are awash with pretenders to our offered arts of appreciation, and my peer group seems to fill all available leadership posts with imbeciles. The thought that it has perhaps always been thus is of little comfort.

Military Veterans are "homeless" and wounded

The Bush Administration has created a wounded and marginalized class of poor -- the Veteran's who once fought for Liberty. One in four homeless people in the United States is a Veteran--where they are only 10% of the general adult population.

The lack of medical and transitional support for Service-persons, abandoned people, is appalling. I lobbied in Washington DC - summer of 2007.

The Necessity of Impeachment - Saving the Constitution

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) sponsored a bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. Progress has been impeded, but not for lack of evidence. Pure "politics". Congressional leaders are clearly doing their best to avoid what the Cheney ideologues are probably promising them, "a bruising floor fight".

Here is a man responsible for an illegal WAR, and the Congress is afraid of a "floor fight"? Cheney has violated his oath of office to protect the Constitution, but do not the persons of Congress also violate their oaths to the same Constitution if they fail to root out the offense?

Interestingly, the majority of the People favor impeachment. LAT 11/8/2007 letter reporting 54% according to American Research Group, confirmed. Thus, although the "political" obstacle has stalled the process, it is only temporary.

The impeachment is necessary to remove and prevent this billionaire from continuing draw "public benefits". The criminal indictment should be right behind the impeachment, and a disgorgement of his war profiteering could go toward compensating his victims.

Injustice in Court - top to bottom injustice, racism - Play: "Dawn's Light"

"DAWN'S LIGHT; the Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi", a thoughtful one-actor Play by Jeanne Sakata based on the true story of the Nipponese student in Seattle who refused to turn himself into the internment camps set up for persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Hirabayashi was arrested, tried, and found guilty of violating the Enemy Alien statutes passed by the US Congress. He himself took the case to the Supreme Court, seeking to declare the law Un-Constitutional. He lost, the Supreme Court refused to question the "military necessity". However, 40 years later, proof being shown that the government had suppressed key evidence at his trial, his conviction was over-turned.

Are we learning from any of this? Our immediate past, proof that leaders lead us astray, and Courts cannot make decisions based on law, but instead cave in to racist prejudices. The "top" is not good at correcting error.

Smokers and the 20% plateau, raising $77 million for education

LAT 11/9/2007: "After declining for seven years, national smoking rates have remained steady at nearly 21% from 2004-2006" and not much change since hitting a plateau in 2002, from the significant drops in previous decades from 43% in 1965.

States like California that have restricted the marketing of tobacco products, primarily by taxing cigarettes (Proposition 99) to pay for health programs and education, have rates below 13%. This tax was $77 million in 2007.

We need a Milton (he did not blame the royalists when the republic failed, he blamed the people who failed to do what had to be done) to declaim our own inability to do what is good for us and not to do things that are bad for us. Why is this so difficult?

And where is the enormous amount of money going? Is it making a dent in Ignorance?

Neil Bush is subsidized by Federal Government

Once again, evidence that the Bush-Cheney-Rove cabal is illegally profiting from the Big Government it claims to despise, and which it now runs. They took over the Federal Government and then they direct funds to private entities which they themselves control. This is hypocritical because they got into office under color of "conservative" values. They claim to be limiting government expenditures. Instead, while in public office, they are creating their own private "entities" to which they funnel Federal money. These entities could not otherwise survive in the marketplace without government subsidy. This is "privatizing"? It is theft.

For example, look at the "educational" program these thieves have spent long hours designing. Neil Bush, the brother of George Bush, set up not one but a series of firms which in fact received money from the Federal Government through the "Department of Education". Neil Bush has absolutely no experience as an educator or education administrator. Yet, suddenly this entities, which have no other source of money other than the Federal Government, are suddenly being funded with millions of dollars of taxpayers' money.

This is a program which has no "educational" function or special expertise. It is a politically-motivated profit center.

This gets worse. The Department of Education is itself run by Bush appointees. The Inspector General of the Department is a Bush appointee. Now the Bush appointees are going to "investigate" whether the Department has appropriately spent the money it funneled into Neil Bush's "programs". They have set up their own putative "watch-dogs" to pretend to investigate themselves. They are not even looking at the "political" content of Neil's "education" programs -- IGNITE LEARNING INC.

The Trick of Writing

The auditory, and even visual, one-liner. The motto. The blurb. The trade mark phrase that "things go better with". People are working on their "language" skills. We look "it" up, and depend on "how you define it". Every commercial, a tidal wave which hunts you down and not content to find you, uproots and sells you. Every political wand, a spin-meister's spell. Every emotional outburst, an evolutionary scream for survival.

And all of this, all of "it", is manipulation. A trick. Every word is a haiku for a book for a colloseum for a universe for a god-packed Court of opinion. An under-hatted trick. Is there any REAL thing in a Word? Is there any REAL thing?

We obscure the dark with the light of words. We illuminate the ventilated with the blanket of vocabulary. Between the speaker and the speak-easy, a peep-hole of communication, of explosion, of re-birth, of coming out of the Cave in order to get drunk. The quarks and leptons of Nature are staggering into each others' charmed particulars.

All of this noise, filling up the broad-spectrum of analog digital dividings, and not a drop to think. So little time in an eternity of blink and bling. Between the ego and the cosmo, a kind of stuttering. All of this noise.

Has it been said already? Too much? Or not enough. Or?

It is true. This language is the boa of our constriction, and the bird of our release. Clad in scales and feathers, it haunts and liberates out thoughts. Positioned nowhere, released forever. Nos habebit humus, stardust. Like nothing so much as a metaphor.

Jonah Lehrer calls for a new way of seeing the world, and he accomplishes it

Jonah Lehrer is a 26 year old science journalist with a degree in neuroscience. BLOG: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/

His current book combines brain-science (a dynamic regenerating thing) with literature and the Arts, and is entitled PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST (2007). He traces the work of eight "artists" (Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Proust with his re-remembered and altered memories, Cezanne, Stein, Woolf, and Stravinski) against clinical brain studies. Like his "modernist" heroes, he urges us look at the world anew. And again. Anew. And in his discovery of science and art, in which fields he reposes equal confidence and demonstrates equal appreciation for their respective beauties, he is doing himself what he urges of us.

John Gray's apocalyptic vision of ironic animals

John Gray is a professor with the London School of Economics. He has 19 books under his belt, including STRAW DOGS (2002) and BLACK MASS (2007). My notes from those two:

Primitive versions of religion are replacing the secular faith that has been lost. Gray identifies the ways secularism promotes this crude religious way of looking at the world.

Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles.

What would politics be like if science was taken seriously? No one would appeal to mastery of our destinies, no one would speak of "the progress of mankind", an abstraction cast-off from Christian hopes.

"Good politics is shabby and makeshift, but at the start of the twenty-first century the world is strewn with the grandiose ruins of failed utopias. With the Left moribund, the Right has become the home to the utopian imagination. Global communism has been followed by global capitalism. The two visions of the future have much in common. Both are hideous and fortunately chimerical."

Perhaps government can manage the tragic contingencies of life.

When a liberal society wages wars to promote its values, it corrupts those values. This corruption is the Bush Administration using torture--which had been prohibited since the 18th century--to promote democracy. The Bush Administration stands almost alone in American History side by side with the enemies of liberty, both foreign and domestic: The Saudis of Arabia (a clan which took over Arabia) are funding the terrorist camps and schools and are close personal friends of the Bush coterie. The arms-dealing war-profiteers and "privatizing" pirates pillaging the public coffers from the domestic front are also Bush appointees. This is all in corruption, in war, against the liberal values of the Founders.

Religion is a symbolic phenomenon, like culture or language. People use it to make sense of their lives.

The Greek etymology for the word "Apocalypse" shows that the End of the world was not referred to. Rather, it means "lifting of the veil", in keeping with the secret writing (Leo Strauss) of the ancients in their priesthoods, conveying secret knowledge, an excluding claim to Truth. Reference JOHN "the beloved", as the author of the gospel which begins "In the beginning was the Word", and Revelation, which is filled with inscrutable meanings inside signs. Baffling to outsiders.

Gray thinks that resource stresses (climate change, scarcities) will inspire new devotion to apocalyptic and violent religions. His vision of the future is bleak.

Yet, wonderfully, on the last page of BLACK MASS he sees the ironic fact that Judeo-Christian-Islamic Religion, with its overstatements, and its utterly false hopes, "can help humanity see more clearly". The Myth, the "story", is a vision tool:

"In the Genesis story humans were banished from paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge and had to survive by their labours ever after. There is no promise here of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit has been eaten there is no going back."

Justice Delayed, Exxon Valdez, Oil Spill March 1989

Eighteen years ago, in March 1989, the Exxon Valdez tanker went aground off Alaska's Prince William Sound, and spilled 200,000 gallons of oil a minute. The trial, the inevitable replaying of disaster, the trial, took place five years later. The plaintiffs were the fishermen and natives whose livelihoods were destroyed by the spill. After months of trial and deliberation, the jury awarded 286 million, and in a separate proceeding, $5 billion in punitive damages. In 1994, Exxon quickly appealed the punitive award. Now, for 13 years the case has been on appeal. Now, the Supreme Court granted CERTIORARI (permission by a higher court to hear appeal). More delay.

Was it Gladstone who said that "justice delayed is justice denied"?

Cave Paintings - what we learn about the future

Nothing ever starts or ends, but it has roots before and casts a shadow ahead.

We know of more than 200 European caves with Paleolithic paintings and carvings. Of these, 85% are in Southern France and Northern Spain, a striking concentration. Only a dozen in Italy and only one has been found in eastern Europe - the Kapova Cave in the Urals.

This concentration has much to do with the Ice Age, but here is the bottom line: Food was plentiful, and life was much more pleasant than has sometimes been imagined by their descendants. We know that 20,000 years ago at Les Eyzies on the Veyzere, 400 to 600 people lived side by side under the protection of a half-dozen rock shelters known as "abri". Some demographic evidence indicates the population was even much larger when mega-fauna were ranging in the neighborhood. We have evidence of mass kill-offs. For example, at a kill-site in Solutre, the remains of 100,000 horses. In addition, Salmon filled the streams--and are depicted on the caves, dried and stored. A rich and varied way of life is depicted, and which we are only beginning to understand.

What is the significance of Lascaux ("Sistine Ceiling of the Cave"), Altamira, Chauvet (oldest, at 30,000), Les Tres Freres (6-part shaman), the riparian region of Dordogne and Vezere, the coast of what is now Basque country in the Franco-Cantabrian heartland, the dotted horse and dance prints of Peche-Merle, the 500 footprints of children deep in the dark passages of the Niaux, the underwater Mediterranean gallery of Cosquer Cave?

1. Ritual - evidence of use other than for subsistence function. No one needs to paint a great auk (flightless relative of razorbill) to catch one or eat its eggs. No painting of a bison or mammoth helped bring one to ground. However, the symbols helped recall the Memory, wove the Dream, and told the Story. The Story passed to the children attempts to intervene in the future, attempts to create a future, insure prosperity in an environment of change and surprise.

2. Dance - flat rock spaces and seating areas with fire posts and fat lamps. The mud prints. Footprints in dance lines.

3. Acoustics - some chambers perdured the echoing, for example, of clapping. The staccato thunder perhaps emulating the stampeding herds depicted of aurochs, reindeer and bison; Pictures of big growling cats and bears in acoustically "dead" ends that resonate low sounds without echoing interference.

4. Fertility - again the tie to the future. More female parts. The earliest are all female, vulvular. Rising again, rebirth images, pregnant. All. Female. In fact, there is a dearth of "weapons", of depictions of killing other people. It is all about nurturing and beauty. All.

5. Totemism - system of clan organization distinguished by objects or animals with special relationships. There is an alphabet of relationships. A Story telling.

6. Mythology - many of the creatures are indeterminate or mixed, half-man, half woolly rhinoceros and feathered creature, the dominance of sexual symbolism (and gravid) and the relative scarcity of the game animals.

7. Dreams. Walk-about in the darkness, following the guide-string, with the fire-flickered shadows telling the story. Direct invocation of memory, hopes, visions. The re-emergence as awakening.

8. Eye-lid visions. The color and shape-shifting seen on the closed eye-lid after exposure to the high contrast black bison on the white rock.

9. Pharmacology. In the last two years, scientists have re-appraised the sites in terms of What to look for in light of the discovery of a high-level technology in pharmacological preparations among hunter/gatherers in Sur America (the Ayahuasca experience), and our own measuring and detecting technologies. Now we are looking for drugs in all the cave places, and finding them in spades, or more specifically, in mushrooms and vegetation. Of the 38,000 mushrooms, some 20 are seriously hallucinogenic as well as poisonous -- requiring a "technology" to ingest safely and a culture to want to, or to find some purpose in doing so. The abundant paintings of unidentifiable creatures, the half-man creatures (for example, the famous 6-part "shaman" at Les Tres Freres), may be readily recognizable portraits of things encountered as a result of ingesting amanita muscaria, or a muscarin or psylocibin compound. There is no question that hemp was in abundance and was actually used in the caves -- in the making of a "guideline" to hold onto in the dark.

10. Absences. Note the complete absence of ANY indication of wars, or gangs bent upon attack or annihilation of other humans. Very few depictions of men. No caudillo or personality worship. No gods. No virginity. No gross inequality -- pharoah and serf. No Big Man.

Some people, our people, were squatting around a fire, waving skin-reflector-shields, echoing drums and hunting calls, bringing their sons and daughters to the Story, to their senses, and hoping for a bountiful future for their children...and here we are.

Dalai Lama, Armenian Genocide, moral outrage

>> The dictators of China are always pissed off at the West. Ironically, they are now falling all over themselves to emulate the individuals who give "capitalism" a bad name. China has now become the worst example of blind capitalism, out-westing the West, unleashing the forces of short-term greed and profit-taking at the expense of long-term values.

>> Bush, unfortunately, has deprived the West of any leverage with Moral Outrage. The West can no longer can speak for the victims of civil rights violations in China, with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib on our watch. How can "we" help the Tibetans when our own President is suppressing the Natives of the United States -- under the same tainted aegis of "national security"?

>> Dalai Lama. President Bush, now, is suddenly giving this saint a Golden Medal. Absolutely no event reasonably triggered this gesture, no new policy accompanies it, and it appears to be a diversion. Tragically, our Congress and Bush have done nothing to actually help the Tibetan people, not to mention other victims of persecution in China -- Islamic minorities, Christians, Falun Gong, etc.

>> Turkey/Christian Armenian Genocide. President Bush, now, is suddenly jumping on this "recognition" of 1918 Genocide -- while continuing to ignore more recent slaughters. Absolutely no event reasonably triggered this gesture, no new policy accompanies it, and it appears to be a diversion. Tragically, our Congress and Bush have done nothing to address the underlying dynamic, and the fact that Islamic Jihadists continue to threaten genocide from Israel to Darfur.

Self-fullfilling Prophesy: Poor Governance by Believers

As President, George W. Bush has the Duty to appoint officials to be "in charge" of various government agencies. He has deliberately appointed people who have The Belief that Government is Bad: They have no concept of "public service". The Bush nominees, without exception, have been poor performers in the offices they "occupy" -- whatever this occupation is, it is not public service.

By filling public offices -- AT THE TOP -- with people who have no concept of public service, Bush has almost single-handedly created a Quagmire of dysfunction.

Interesting Comparison: Years have passed since New Orleans was drowned in the natural, predicted, and well-documented arrival of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and we are now able to assess the role played by Government in that continuing disaster. Interestingly enough, armed BLACKWATER troops by the hundreds were occupying the streets of New Orleans immediately, during the storm, and weeks before FEMA forces and programs began arriving (if they have even yet been put into place).

Under Bush, there is no Governance. The public is left to the wolves, "protected" either by other wolves or by gates left unguarded.

TED Idea sharing - www.ted.com

Doctor/Researcher Hans Rosling with Gapminder Foundation developed animation software, Trendalyzer, recently acquired by Google. "Turns global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop." Global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and playful. Debunks myths.

Microsoft's Stephen Lawler and the Virtual Earth team, high resolution birds' eye view of 3d reality.

Jeff Han, built a high-resolution scalable multi-touch computer screen. Begins with a heat sensitive lava light, then turns into a photolight box he flicks photos across. New way to interact with machines without a mouse.

Stephen Petranek, former Editor of Discover, with 10 ways the world could end. How the universe works and could end suddenly. And of which we are in denial.

Steven Pinker, Harvard Linguist, with a brief history of violence.

Parable of the Rich Man.

A rich man was once content to live in his garden. Then poor people moved nearby to drink at his spring and pitch tents against the wall of his compound. When he was among these people, instead of helping them drink, or live in the shade of his wall, the rich man was no longer content with what he had. Now he wanted more. Everything he saw he wanted it, or ten of it. Not that he could use another spring or another wall, but he wanted all the springs, and more walls. He built more walls to keep people away from his walls, and capped the springs he could not use, buying all that he could buy.

Soon, all the buildings and springs in the area belonged to the rich man. Then the poor people moved away, and left to him everything the rich man owned. Now he wanted only to live in his garden. He had no use for the buildings and springs. He could only drink what he could drink, and could not enjoy even one compound when there was no one around who could see that he was the one who owned everything.

Retrieval of files and IRS standard

The Government Accountability Office ("GAO") issues reports on the Agencies of the Federal Government. This month the GAO reported on the IRS. According to the report, the IRS could not find -- could not locate -- 14% of the requested case files from two prior audits, and 19% of the randomly requested sample records. This is not a new problem, but what is new, is that it is much worse, and no one in charge at the IRS is recognizing (much less solving) the problem. THAT is what is new: the lack of leadership, the top-down collapse of infrastructure.

PRJ: Lawyers List - the notorious practitioners

Between 1965 and 1990, the number of lawyers in the United States increased from 300,000 to 800,000, at a rate more than four times the increase in the general population.

In the world today, are there too many lawyers? Or not enough?

JACQUES VERGES. Born on the island of Reunion, of a French father and Vietnamese mother, Counsel for the Terroristes. Clients include Pol Pot, Carlos the Jackal, Klaus Barbie, HJ Klein, Magdalena Kopp, the PLO, various African dictators, and perhaps partially, Saddam Hussein. Began his legal career by defending the beautiful Djamila Bouhired, a bomber who had been tortured and sentenced to death. Verges created the "rupture defense" -- instead of pleading for sympathy, he refused any negotiations, and provoked the French government into incidents that turned the tables. Bouhired suddenly embodied Algeria, and she was not executed. It launched Verges to the forefront of idealistic struggles, often ironically. In the 2007 Barbet Schroeder film TERROR'S ADVOCATE, he appears, under his own control, transparently sybaritic, arrogant, humorless, and relentless.

MELVYNN I. WEISS. Co-founder of a law firm specializing in large class actions, including several on behalf of victims of the holocaust. At age 72, in 2007 he was prosecuted by Federal criminal prosecutors for alleged kickbacks to people who agreed to act as plaintiffs in lawsuits against corporations. The victims, supposedly, are the corporate investors. Another class action attorney, a former protege, William S. Lerach, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy, and with five others, made a deal to squeal on Weiss. (Query: Since there appears to be no "crime" and no real victim, is this a Bush-prosecution? A direct attack on Class Actions by prosecuting Counsel?)

MEDIA PERSONALITIES WHO ARE LAWYERS: Julio Iglesias, John Cleese, Geraldo Rivera, Howard Cosell, George Mikan (basketball),

POETS WHO WERE LAWYERS: James Russell Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Wallace Stevens, Archibald MacLeish, Heinrich Heine ("The Book of Songs" 1927), Czeslaw Milosz .

NOVELISTS WHO STUDIED OR PRACTICED LAW: Scott Turow ("Presumed Innocent"), John Grisham ("The Pelican Brief"), Richard North Patterson ("Lasko Tangent"), Lisa Scottoline, Jules Verne ("2000 Leagues"), Earle Stanley Gardner ("Perry Mason"), Gustave Flaubert ("Madame Bovary"), Jacob Grimm ("Fairy Tales"), Harper Lee ("To Kill Mockingbird"), Victor Hugo ("Les Miserables"), Owen Wister ("The Virginian"), John Galsworth ("Forsyte Saga"), Louis Auchincloss ("The Indifferent Children"), Franz Kafka ("Judgment"), John Sanford ("Citizen of No Mean City"), Carolina Maria de Jesus (diarist),

PRIZE WINNERS WHO ARE LAWYERS:

Shirin Ebadi - 2003 Peace Prize. Iranian jurist, takes the position that Islam and elections and civil rights are compatible.

Hauwa Ibrahim - 2005 Eleanor Roosevelt Award. Nigerian civil rights struggle, within framework of Islam, confronting the mullahs of Abuja (northern Nigeria) who are failing to conform to shariah in persecuting defendants.

Peter Benenson - founder of Amnesty International, which received 1977 Nobel Peace Prize, and now has 2 million members in some 70 countries.

Czeslaw Milosz - 1980 Nobel Prize for literature.

MARTYRS - LAWYERS KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY:

Jean Dominique -- owner of Radio Haiti, and the subject of the very moving Jonathan Demme film, THE AGRONOMIST. Gunned down by unknown thugsin 2000, he said "you cannot kill justice."

Khamis Ubaidi - one of three defense attorneys killed while defending Saddam Hussein.

Members of the Pakistani Bar - Lawyers in Pakistan have been killed in the boycott of proceedings during the March 2007 standoff between President Pervez Musharraf and the suspended Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

Colors: The human eye is most sensitive to GREEN

IMPORTANCE OF COLOR

Among the eyes of Nature, the human eye is designed to distinguish colors. Cats eyes, for example are much better at detecting movement, the condor can see "death", and the dog can "read" our faces better than we can. But for colors, we seem to have the leading specimen eye. And among the colors, which ones do we seem most keen to observe?

More than any other color, we see green. Since color is a major quality factor to human beings, the fact that we are more sensitive to green than to other colors, must be significant. And what IS it about GREEN?

In terms of dialectic, it is not associated with an "opposite" -- such as "black and white", or "blue and red". It is not a primary color, but is the mix of blue and yellow. So why does our eye especially read for green?

THE "GREEN SENSITIVITY"

Is WHAT is green the important thing? -- the grass, the garden, the tree -- or is the prejudice merely the coincidence of the particular pigment or light wave to the shape of our eye? In all the perlustrations of color before us, in the parade of shade and light, is there an explanation for our green proclivity?

THE EYE

Because the sensitivity is indifferent to whether the green is pigmentation or wave length, solid or light, it is probable that our brain, not the naked physics of the peep-hole, the optic orb, is cue-ing the green. One test of this would be further experiments with creatures with eyes which are similar to human eyes -- such as squid, or even other primates. Do they have the same sensitivity, and can we test this differentiation? Squid live in an environment in which there is almost no ambient "green" light and few enough chorophylic plants, compared with the non-aquatic species.

GREEN THINGS

Assuming the brain is the organ which holds the sensitivity and is prejudiced in favor of the color green, is there anything about green things which explains the predisposition?

PLANTS. We do seem to take comfort in Gardens. It is almost an embarrassment how we putter in them -- and this is not simply explained as an association with our food sources. We rarely eat the foliage and flowers which populate our Gardens -- hanging and otherwise.

GRASS. The word for the color Green stems etymologically from "growing grass" -- compare CGerm/Goth "gronjaz". It is the color of growing, the fresh, young, unripe, immature and living forms. It seems curious that no fruit gets green with age, and meats which green do so because of new growth of bacteria and mold upon them. The primordial grassland, or open veldt, may at least partially be reflected in the origin of the word and its cognates -- greenery, greening, greensward, greenhorn (new ox).

EMERALD JEWEL. Emeralds are green, and are long and fondly regarded as the Queen of all precious gemstones. Emeralds adorned the Pharaohs of Egypt over 3,000 years ago, and Inka craftsmen worked it into their most prized jewelry. Of course, our attraction to a pretty rock would obtain no matter what its hue. As Beryllium with trace chromium, vanadium, and occasionally iron, Emeralds are also extremely hard -- making them an excellent jewel impervious to wear. Depending on Color, Clarity, Cut and Carat weight, they are more valuable by weight than diamonds, or any other stone. With respect to clarity, the natural inclusions in emeralds are often called ‘gardens’. These gardens -- the inclusions -- make the stone green, of course, since beryl is colorless. We draw from these green shades of jewels and gardens the descriptions of "enchanting" or "mysterious".

SHADES.

The human eye detects an extraordinary range of hues and shades -- 100's of thousands. Eye detection of green chromaticity appears to be scaled on par with other colors. This seems odd in light of the Color Chart, your rainbow of primary and secondary colors, and the Green Sensitivity.

Consider the various virescent Chlorochrous hues:

Bright or vivid green (emerald, smaragdine, day-glo, citrine);

Light green (apple);

Pale green (celadon, eau-de-nil);

Bluish green (teal, glaucous, some cerulean or sea-green);

Yellow-green (chartreuse, avocado, Kelly, leek, hunter, Nile, absinthe, pistachio,
verdegris, pea, grass, leaf, malachite, moss);

Gold-green (chrysochlorous);

Chrome-green (zinnober, viridian);

Gray-green (lovat, sage);

Blackish-green (olive, corbeau [raven-sheen], avocado, bottle, marine,
peacock, forest).

Dull green (olive, olive drab, )