Free Webinar – A Better Model For Political Discussions, Presentation by Pat Wagner

DISCOVERY: A BETTER MODEL FOR POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS
PRESENTED BY: PAT WAGNER
Tuesday, January 5, 2016, Noon–1 pm, Denver time

We have all observed that political discussions tend to bring out the worst in everyone, including ourselves, but is there a way to approach these conversations that will contribute to friendship rather than build enmity? Pat will explore this idea in her free webinar on Tuesday, January 5th, noon to 1 pm Denver time. It will be recorded and archived (also available free). Please join us for an hour of constructive and practical good will. And please forward this invitation to anyone you think may be interested. Thanks!

Pat writes, “Recent political campaigns destroyed lasting friendships, frayed family ties, and alienated neighbors and co-workers. Social media became a battleground of nasty diatribes, insults, and slurs. Is there a better way to talk about ideological differences? The Discovery Model is about listening and sharing with no intention to convince or win a debate. The point? To learn and grow while strengthening workplace, personal, and online relationships.”

Full description & registration info:
http://www.sieralearn.com/programs/discovery-a-better-model-for-political-discussions/

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Leif Smith, leifsmith@gmail.com
PO Box 9100, Denver, CO 80209-0100
303-778-0880 (main), 303-744-1855 (direct)
http://explorersfoundation.org
http://sieralearn.com

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Are We Living at the Intersection of These Two Stories?

The first story is Robert Heinlein’s The Year of the Jackpot.  A consulting statistician with the unlikely name of Potiphar Breen observes that many strange social trends are on a strong upswing.  One such trend:  young women removing all their clothes in public.  Potiphar sees one such disrobing in process, shoos away the police, covers the girl with his raincoat, then takes her home and asks her why she did it.  She doesn’t know.

Potiphar informs her that nine other girls have done the same thing, in Los Angeles alone, on that very day…and goes on to tell her that this is a small part of the overall pattern of increasing craziness that he is observing.  A man has sued an entire state legislature for alienation of his wife’s affections–and the judge is letting the suit be tried.  In another state, a bill has been introduced to repeal the laws of atomic energy–not the relevant statutes, but the natural laws concerning nuclear physics. Potiphar shows the girl (her name is Meade) the graphs on which he has plotted the outbreak of bizarre things over time, and notes that many different indicators, all with different cycles, are all converging in this very year.  Still, Meade wants to look at her disrobing episode on an individual basis:  “I want to know why I did what I did!”

“I think we’re lemmings, Meade,” Potiphar says.  “Ask a lemming why he does it.  If you could get him to slow up his rush to death, even money says he would rationalize his answer as well as any college graduate.  But he does it because he has to–and so do we.”  When Meade tries to defend free will–“I know I have it–I can feel it”, Potiphar continues with another analogy:  “I imagine every little neutron in an atom bomb feels the same way.  He can go spung! or he can sit still, just as he pleases.  But statistical mechanics works out anyhow.  And the bomb goes off.”

As Meade and Potiphar become romantically involved, Potiphar’s indices of bizarre behavior and events continue to climb. Transvestism by draft-dodgers has resulted in a mass arrest in Chicago and a gigantic mass trial–but the (male) prosecutor shows up in a pinafore.  At the All Souls Community Church of Springfield, the pastor has reinstituted ceremonial nudity.  Two weeks later, a hundred and nine other churches have announced the same policy.  California is suffering a major water crisis, but people continue watering their lawns as usual.  Hardly anyone is interested in the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions; all the excitement is about the revived Know-Nothing party.

Foreign affairs, too, are disintegrating into chaos…topped off by a nuclear exchange.  Meade and Potiphar manage to survive, and Potiphar’s cycle charts seem to indicate that things will soon get better…(read the story to see how it comes out.)

The fictional events of Heinlein’s Year of the Jackpot (set in 1952–it was written in 1947) don’t seem any more bizarre than the kind of headline stories that we are seeing every day in real-life:

College students cry ‘racism’ when served ‘culturally-incorrect cuisine’ in the cafeteria

The “Queen of YouTube, famous for eating cereal out of a bathtub of milk that she was bathing in , is granted interviews by both the sitting President and the leading democratic contender

Woman loses her job and is threatened with having her children taken away, because she let her three sons (11,9,and 5) play by themselves in a playground next to her apartment building.

Seven-year-old boy suspended from school for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun

Previously-male person selected as Woman of the Year

 

The second story is the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco.

Read more

Your Chicago Boyz Helpful Tip of the Day

Before heating frozen haddock fillets in your toaster oven, make sure to clean out the candle wax that dripped from the Hanukkah lamp you put in there for easy cleaning a few weeks ago.

Pro tip: A handful of sodium bicarbonate does a pretty good job on flames and you will not need to salt your food afterwards.

“A Critique of Two Left-of-Centre Views of the United States Constitution: Professor Akhil Amar & Professor Lawrence Lessig”

A new post from Seth Barrett Tillman:

Professor Akhil Amar (Yale Law School) and Professor Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law School) have both written on the scope of the Constitution’s office-language. Indeed, their individual views on the scope of the Constitution’s office-language are central to (some of) the leading theories they have each popularized.
 
[. . .]
 
Amar and Lessig cannot both be correct. At most: only one can be correct. We, the public, deserve a full, meaningful debate: not a cult—or, even, two well-placed elite academic cults—whose chief sacraments are omerta and humbug.
 
Will anyone—particularly those on the Left—step forward? Or will the many who have supported both Professor Amar’s and Professor Lessig’s views in this matter continue to support both, notwithstanding that these two views contradict one another?