Lagroht

Right, but if you want to depict a back-to-nature-environmentalist lifestyle as morally superior it of course helps your case if you depict a fascist-like corporation (a company commanding the army?) as the only alternative. An unprovoked attack on the innocent under a flimsy pretext is sure to provoke universal indignation, so the initiation of force principle violation to me seems the lever used to tilde emotions against large international corporations. In real live the unobtainium is of course oil and the Na'vi are the Iraqi's and the US government is an opaque entity controlled by the oil companies which are the pupped masters sending US soldiers to the attack under a false pretext. hmmm, that doens't exactly fit.....actually he realized Iraqi's aren't that in balance with nature themselves so he replaced them with rainforest Indians who see their forest and lifestyle destroyed by logging companies with large machines.

To me it seems like James Cameron is a 'deep ecology' adherent. These are the tenets of it, by Arne Naess and George Sessions: The eight-point Deep Ecology Platform at present provides the unifying principles of the deep ecology movement. 1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of life-forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. 6. Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. 7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.

Did anybody read this: http://www.amazon.com/Age-Rand-Imagining-O..._pr_product_top is it any good?

You oppose government force to restrict the freedoms of people who follow a doctrine which calls for the restriction of freedoms of others? A lot of the people who vote against the minarets are of a conservative; they want to keep their country the way it is, for some voter this means they want to keep it mostly Christian, for some it means they are afraid for their safety (especially gays and woman) or loss of freedom (everybody) in the future if they let immigration from Muslim countries continue. Note the hypocritical reaction by turkey: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe...,664641,00.html who is a member of the OIC, which tries to ban all criticism of Islam: http://www.internationalfreepresssociety.o...st-free-speech/

you probably live in some village; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_London

It seems the nationalists are gaining in political power about everywhere in Europe: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/29...ndum/index.html

I will stop posting in this topic now. I found this wikipedia page about the philosophy of time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_space_and_time) and I realize this isn't a trivial subject and actually is a much more fundamental topic to physics than I realized. Expanding my insights on the topic enough to be able to see how Newton, Einstein and their buddies relate to my current understanding of time would require serious time consuming study. I probably won't get to that anytime soon.

Ok, that kind of determinism. Don't you find it interesting how the position people hold on the notion of 'free will' is so important to determining their moral judgement?, I even have the impression the whole left-right political divide is roughly based on it (with the left leaning towards 'there is no free will, determinism' and the right to 'free will exists'). In my opinion the only sad thing about the right is that it seems to base its conviction that free will exists on some philosophical idealist grounds, which explains the union of the right with religion. I've posted some thoughts on free will in two other threads http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...mp;#entry165486 http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...mp;#entry189074 ...But I think I am getting off topic, I will stop posting in this thread, thanks for your responses.

On some level you have me convinced; in order to grasp 'simultaneity' you need to grasp 'non-simultaneity', which requires a grasp of sequential and parallel events. While a grasp of the concept of 'event' presupposes recollection of multiple occurrences of matter displacements. Those matter displacements are based on some criteria hold to be separate from from the rest of the matter displacements (because otherwise the whole of the universe would constitute one big event and the concept would be meaningless ) As a side note: the Dutch word for 'Simultaneous' is 'Gelijktijdig'. 'Gelijk' literally means 'Equal'. 'Tijdig' literally means 'Timely'. I now get the suspicion that I might be in the difficult position that I am trying to reason about development of awareness on the pre-conceptual level of awareness while I am forced to do this using concepts, which are obviously not yet acquired by a consciousness which doesn´t (yet) function on that level of awareness. But I do think it is relevant, an eagle for instance can perfectly deal with motion, when it falls out of the sky to the spot it predicted a moving mouse to be within the few second. Obviously an eagle has no concept of time. How can time be conceptual prior to motion if an eagle doesn't need a watch to kill a mouse? You can ignore that eagle stuff if you want, I am not fully serious there. At the moment I am content with the definition from the lexicon: 'Time is a measurement of motion; as such, it is a type of relationship'. I was sort of hang up on the notion that somehow time should be listed as a derived SI entry because I felt that it was a derivate of space and matter, since to my understanding relative motion of matter is what's gives rise to the concept of time. But it is the realization that this is irrelevant to commensurability that made me drop that idea. The units of time and matter are incommensurate and this justifies a separate entry in the SI base units list. I can imagine how you could choke reading that remark, I should have said 'higher level concepts'.

I guess a late response is better than never.... I seem to have utterly failed, I introduced the analogy to clarify what I mean with the terms 'unavoidable death' and 'conditional life', not to confuse the matter. I agree with what you say, I would also say 'unavoidable death' is part of just 'life'. how did she direct us?, is that explanation in some other text? I don't think the word 'purpose' applies to the complex self sustaining process called life, for it to have a purpose it would have to been designed for some utility outside itself. I think life is an end in itself. But I guess you are right if you taste a Darwinian favour in my argumentation, I am fully convinced genes matter, if they didn't monkeys would be designing spaceships. you are right about life being primary. It is just that once the first (reproductive) organism has come into being, subsequently you get this causal chain of life-reproduction-life-reproduction-etc... I don't exactly understand what you mean with genetic determinism... If I don't have genes for blue eyes I will not have blue eyes, that sounds like genetic determinism to me, but I suspect you refer to something else.... actually I was getting a little tired of writing that piece of prose when I got to that part, it was my 'you get the picture', wrap it up ending I know real life isn't so clean cut, people sometimes make bad choices, sometimes relationships fall apart, some people are poor, others infertile or have physical limitations that make it hard to find a partner, the list goes on and on. I like to limit moral judgement only to the choices people have concious control over and can reasonably be expected to predict the consequences of. (But I depart from this when ignorant people fail to see their stupid choices hurt others)

sorry, I didn't read you right

I tried to look up time in OPAR and IOE but I couldn´t find an explicit treating of the subject. OPAR doesn't even have an index entry called 'time'! I however found this entry in the Ayn Rand lexicon: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/time.html (also a little bit limited ) 'Time is a measurement of motion', 'The universe is eternal'. My training in physics is strictly limited to Newtonian physics and this seems to fit right in with it with it. But maybe I will run into trouble with it if I try to use it as a starting point for trying to understand Einstein's relativity theory I am not sure I am confusing, but I think you have correctly identified the difference in what we hold to be true ;-) You have me thinking here, because I think what you are saying is true!...I don't yet quite know how to unify this with my own starting point of reasoning about this. I start with for instance a snap-shot picture in my head of what a tabular rasa man would see when he would open his eyes for the first time on for instance a carnival where a roundabout is placed. The first image on his retina will be his starting point, a collection of entities; he has discovered simultaneity , in the next image his brain can identify entities will have changed position. He will have discovered motion. If he waits he will notice the roundabout having rotated a number of times, which he could count. When then some girl buys and eats an ice cream he can say; it took her 15 roundabout rotations to eat that ice cream. He will have discovered the quantification of motion; time. My concept of 'simultaneous' is derived from vision, not from a linguistic definition, when I look into my room I can concurrently, simultaneously see multiple objects, even when they are not moving. This makes the concept of simultaneity for me to be prior to both motion and time. well, just make sure you have fun doing it

Right, actually this is also said by saras. Are you saying you think she is in error with her theory?, I think the fact that she herself isn't an entrepreneur doesn't necessarily invalidates everything she says about the subject since she researched actual entrepreneurs. I also found some videos in which she explains verbally: http://bigthink.com/sarassarasvathy/saras-...eneurial-method

Thanks Jake, you cured me of wanting to change the SI system . I guess incommensurable is indeed the right criteria for the base units. Well actually I guess this is what makes me feel uncomfortable with the second, or time as a 'measurable' quantity for that matter. If you ask 'how does one measure 'change' as such?, I am tempted to answer; by inventing 'time' as a concept to refer to that. Do you agree that time is an human 'invention' that enables us to relate changes among the relative positions of matter more accurately than our unaided memories would allow us. I don't know for a fact what the mainstream opinion in science is on that, but I get the impression that time seems to be treated as more fundamental than that, something more implicit in reality as a given, not as a derivative. Your observation that you need to relate a repetitive event to another repetitive event in order to know that it is periodic is very true (and useful for me), but i don't agree that the concept of simultaneity is based on the concept of time. In order for me to know that 2 events occur simultaneous I only have to be able to observe them, to know that this simultaneous events repeat I only have to remember the previous occurrences (and maybe count). I do not exactly follow how you seem to require time before you can relate the change of the relative positions of entities with motion. I start my thinking about it with the perceptually given. When I see to 2 entities and their relative positions are changing I know this because I remember their previous positions. I call this motion. I only see time come in implicitly because of course a human has some capability to quantify the rate of position change (otherwise nobody could ever run into a field to catch a thrown ball). Now I think of it....maybe the first implicit unit of time is actually determined by something like the speed at which human neuron can discharge and reload or something like that :-)

Hi, It seems to me that time measurement with a clock is nothing else than counting how often a non-accelerating/decelerating object in a circular (or some other) trajectory passes through the same point. It only gives a frame of reference, it is a unit of constant motion. If I ask how fast someone runs, I get an answer back which tells me how many times some other event has occurred concurrently with the traversal of some distance by the runner. But time is included in the SI base units: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit This seems wrong to me, (intricism?), I would include time in this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_derived_unit Maybe someone with more advanced knowledge of physics can change my perspective...

If someone is a cook he can start his own restaurant or try to market one if his own recipes. If you are a mechanic you can open up your own garage and sell car parts with it or perhaps specialize in customizing cars. Some people just get rich with nothing other than doing 'buy low - sell high' over and over again. so I don't really agree with the notion that few people can create anything worth paying for; actually I think most entrepreneurs have no special domain skills or knowledge compared to average skilled professionals. I know someone who I actually do not consider very intelligent which makes good money with his own yacht painting company...surely anybody can hold a paint spray. I think the differences is one of principle; an entrepreneur always seeks his independence, he doesn't let the responsibility of determining what he should do to make money or how to find customers for is work lie with someone else but himself.

I recently did a little search on theories of entrepreneurship, because I am interested in how people get started with it. I know some people seem adapt at starting businesses and since I don't believe in magic I assume there must be something in the way they think that makes them decide, at the right moment, to go and do their thing. During my search I stumbled over the work of saras sarasvathy (a business professor). She actually interviewed a great deal of people who have started multiple businesses during their live and has based on that come up with here theory of effectuation. The paper from this link basically explains everything about it: http://www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf (she's preparing a book, but I expect it to essentially contain the same idea's, only repeated in different forms). She is not big on philosophy, but in some other writings she makes references to pragmatism, given her approach of just starting with existing means and knowledge and setting goals based on 'what you can do' and 'what you do know': and then augment or change your goals as you learn more or acquire new means while doing this, I think this is understandable. I think she creates an artificial dichotomy of effectuation versus causality. She artificially limits causality to a process of reasoning back on how to achieve final causes, while here effectuation is nothing else than reasoning forward based on efficient causes. Nevertheless I think she seems to be on to something, I am interested in anybodies thoughts on this.

Disclaimer: I am not a physicist. electrons and protons attract each other, by convention 1 electron has a charge of -1 and a proton has a charge of +1. (wikipedia: elementary charge) This attraction is a force, which can be denoted in Newton (force required to give 1 kg an acceleration of 1 m/s^2). 1 joule = 1 N * M, in other words the amount of energy to accelerate an object with a force of 1 Newton, over a distance of 1 meter. (of course if the actual object you apply the force is heavier than 1 kg you will not get the 1 m/s^2 acceleration, but if the object is in fact 1 kg, you will) and if you keep on supplying energy to fuel your force application you can express this in watts (1 w = 1 joule /s) now note that the charge of 1 coulomb equals the charge of 6.25 * 10^18 electrons and that 1 volt equals 1 joule / 1 coulomb. since 1 electron has a given charge, so do 6.25 * 10^18 electrons, but what can be different is the amount of force applied to them; this is determined by the existence of an equal or unequal amount of protons on the other size of the conduit; This is what determines the amount of potential energy of a given charge point. (in other words the number of joules per coulomb). "One Coulomb © is the amount of charge such that a force of 9.0×10^9 N occurs between two point like objects with charges of 1 C separated by a distance of 1 m." (from wikipedia) So if you look at 1 joule / 1 coulomb = 1 volt, what are we talking about if we talk about 14 volts potential difference between points A and B? I guess we talk about 14*6.25*10^18 joules of potential energy spread out over 6.25 * 10^18 electrons caused by a surplus of electrons at 1 of the points relative to the number of protons at the other point. In reality the point probably will not contain exactly 6.25 * 10^18 electrons, but are we only talking about a fraction (of joules per coulomb) which yields the same voltage. Also note that this indicates that given a fixed number of electrons in a given point the voltage associated with that point is strictly relative to any other point. Note how this makes sense, the number of electrons at a given point can not change due to a comparison with a random given point; only the attractive force of the point you compare with changes, it also explains how a high voltage can be harmless; if the charge (number of electrons) of a given point is low, no matter how large to force applied to them; if they start moving they will always produce a low current. In other words: the number of joules per coulomb of a given point is different given the charge of whichever other point you compare that point with. I guess the wikipedia definition is talking about the situation where 1 point has 6.25 * 10^18 electrons and the other has 6.25 * 10^18 protons. Apparently this generates 9.0×10^9 N of force. Quite massive, so in normal electronics we are talking about much lower potential differences.

I recently started reading some works of Frederic Bastiat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat) and I was very impressed. I also was impressed with how much his opinions on economy (not on god ;-) are in line with the opinions of Ayn Rand (no conflict of interest among men in Ayn Rand equals economic harmonies in Bastiat). I have found this page listing some of the works Ayn Rand read: http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/misc/read.html In this list are works of Henry Hazlitt, specifically 'Economics in One Lesson' is basically an applications of the lessons Hazlitt learned from Bastiat. I am not the first to notice some similarities: http://bastiat.net/en/about/influence.html I say, all hail to Bastiat!

Time, I am no professional so I do not have the time required for thorough research and analysis. thank you. I beg to differ. Ordinary English words don require such definitions, loads of common words are highly ambiguous. I think homonyms have no place in presenting something that requires very precise language. ah, no small hypocrisy after all, this might just be what I was looking for...thanks.

I have been wondering a bit about the fact that neither Ayn Rand nor the Ayn Rand institute has published an official dictionary of the concepts employed in presenting objectivism itself. It is explicit in objectivist epistemology that concepts need to be defined, so it would only make sense to apply the standards of objectivism to presenting objectivism itself. In fact when objectivism isn't presented based on a dictionary of concepts that can all be accounted for by explicit induction and which is logical consistent I think objectivist will always stay vulnerable to attacks of rationalists who are smart in dissecting the terminology employed. I have found the Ayn Rand lexicon: http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/ but I find this insufficient. It doesn't use genus-differentia and it is also not comprehensive. It is for instance not possible to find all concepts used by Peikof in The Ominous Parallels and OPAR. Personally I think the very least that would be required is a dictionary of nouns. I did find this site: http://objectivism101.com/IOP/Dictionary.html, but I do not consider it authoritative. I think it an official dictionary requires an official institute, this also gives contemporary objectivist authors the opportunity to express the fruits of their labour unambiguously.

Speech Geert Wilders New York, Four Seasons (Monday Feb 23, 2009) Thank you very much for inviting me. And – to the immigration authorities – thank you for letting me into this country. It is always a pleasure to cross a border without being sent back on the first plane. Today, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack all throughout Europe. Free speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural element of our existence, our birth right, is now something we once again have to battle for. As you might know, I will be prosecuted, because of my film Fitna, my remarks regarding Islam, and my view concerning what some call a ‘religion of peace’. A few years from now, I might be a criminal. Whether or not I end up in jail is not the most pressing issue; I gave up my freedom four years ago. I am under full-time police protection ever since. The real question is: will free speech be put behind bars? And the larger question for the West is: will we leave Europe’s children the values of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, or the values of Mecca, Teheran and Gaza? This is what video blogger Pat Condell said in one of his latest you tube appearances. He says: “If I talked about Muslims the way their holy book talks about me, I’d be arrested for hate speech.” Now, Mr Condell is a stand-up comedian, but in the video he is dead serious and the joke is on us. Hate speech will always be used against the people defending the West – in order to please and appease Muslims. They can say whatever they want: throw gays from apartment buildings, kill the Jews, slaughter the infidel, destroy Israel, jihad against the West. Whatever their book tells them. Today, I come before you to warn of a great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, slavery of women, the end of democracy. It is NOT a religion, it is an political ideology. It demands your respect, but has no respect for you. There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is built on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never alter. First, there is the Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect. Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about it’s goal. That’s a given. It’s fact. This is Europe 2009. Muslim settlers calling for our destruction, and free speech on trial. All this is the outcome of a sick and evil ideology, the ideology that is weakening us, the surrender ideology of cultural relativism. It believes that all cultures are equal, and therefore Islam deserves an equal place in the West. It is their duty, the left thinks, to facilitate Islam. This way the cultural relativists paradise comes within reach and we will all be happy, and sing kumbaya. The forces of Islam couldn’t agree more. Islam being facilitated by government is their agenda too. But they see it as jizya, the money dhimmis pay in order not to be killed or raped by their Muslim masters. Therefore, they happily accept the welfare cheque or the subsidies for their mosque or the money governments donate to their organizations. This is just one example of cultural relativists and Muslim settlers having the same agenda. There is another. Islam considers itself a religion and therefore we are not permitted to criticize it. The left agrees. Although it hated Christianity for decades, now that Islam appears on the scene, they suddenly change course and demand ‘respect’ for something they call a religion. Again we see the left and Islam having the same agenda: it is a religion, so shut up. This all culminates in a third coming-together: nor the left nor Islam is in favor of criticism. In fact, given the opportunity, they would simply outlaw it. Multiculturalism is the left’s pet project. It is actually their religion. Their love of it is so great, if you oppose it, it must be hate. And if you say it, it is labeled hate speech. Now here is something the Islam can agree on. This is the essence of my short introduction today: where the left and Islam come together, freedom will suffer. My friends, make no mistake, my prosecution is a full-fledged attack by the left on freedom of speech in order to please Muslims. It was started by a member of the Dutch Labour party, and the entire legal proceeding is done by well-to-do liberals, the radical chic of Dutch society, the snobbish left. Too much money, too much time, too little love of liberty. If you read what the court of Amsterdam has written about me, you read the same texts that cultural relativists produce. How low can we go in the Netherlands? About my prosecution, The Wall Street Journal noted: “this is no small victory for Islamic regimes seeking to export their censorship laws to wherever Muslims reside”. The Journal concluded that by The Netherlands accepting the free speech standards of, “Saudi-Arabia”, I stand correct in my observation that - I quote - “Muslim immigration is eroding traditional Dutch liberties”. Now, if the Wall Street Journal has the moral clarity to see that my prosecution is the logical outcome of our disastrous, self-hating, multiculturalists immigration policies, then why can’t the European liberal establishment see the same thing? Why aren’t they getting at least a little bit scared by the latest news out of, for example, the UK. News that tells that the Muslim population in Britain is growing ten times as fast as the rest of society. Why don’t they care? The answer is: they don’t care because they are blinded by their cultural relativism. Their disdain of the West is so much greater than the appreciation of our many liberties. And therefore, they are willing to sacrifice everything. The left once stood for women rights, gay rights, equality, democracy. Now, they favour immigration policies that will end all this. Many even lost their decency. Elite politicians have no problem to participate in or finance demonstrations where settlers shout “Death to the Jews”. Seventy years after Auschwitz they know of no shame. Two weeks ago, I tried to get into Britain, a fellow EU country. I was invited to give a speech in Parliament. However, upon arrival at London airport, I was refused entry into the UK, and sent back on the first plane to Holland. I would have loved to have reminded the audience of a great man who once spoke in the House of Commons. In 1982 President Reagan gave a speech there very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom. He introduced a phrase: ‘evil empire’. Reagan’s speech stands out as a clarion call to preserve our liberties. I quote: If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly. What Reagan meant is that you cannot run away from history, you cannot escape the dangers of ideologies that are out to destroy you. Denial is no option. So, what should we do? Is this a good moment for freedom-loving people to give in or to change course? To all-of-a-sudden start singing praise of Islam, or proclaiming there is such a thing as a moderate Islam? Will we now accept the continuation of Muslim mass immigration to the West? Will we appease sharia and jihad? Should we sacrifice gay rights and women rights? Or democracy? Should we sell out Israel, our dearest ally, and a frontline state of Islam? Well, my humble opinion is: No way, Jose! I suggest to defend freedom in general and freedom of speech in particular. I propose the withdrawal of all hate speech legislation in Europe. I propose a European First Amendment. In Europe we should defend freedom of speech like you Americans do. In Europe freedom of speech should be extended, instead of restricted. Of course, calling for violence or unjustly yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre have to be punished, but the right to criticize ideologies or religions are necessary conditions for a vital democracry. As George Orwell once said: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. Let us defend freedom of speech and let us gain strength and work hard to become even stronger. Millions think just like you and me. Millions think liberty is precious. That democracy is better than sharia. And after all, why should we be afraid? Our many freedoms and our prosperity are the result of centuries of endeavour. Centuries of hard work and sacrifice. We do not stand alone, and we stand on the shoulders of giants. Late December 1944 the American army was suddenly faced with a last-ditch effort by the Germans. In the Ardennes, in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler and his national-socialists fought for their last chance. And they were very successful. Americans faced defeat, and death. In the darkest of winter, in the freezing cold, in a lonely forest with snow and ice as even fiercer enemies than the Nazi war machine itself, the American army was told to surrender. That might be their only chance to survive. But General McAuliffe thought otherwise. He gave the Germans a short message. This message contained just four letters. Four letters only, but never in the history of freedom was a desire for liberty and perseverance in the face of evil expressed more eloquently than in that message. It spelled N – U – T – S. “Nuts”. My friends, the national-socialists got the message. Because it left no room for interpretation! I suggest we walk in the tradition of giants like General McAuliffe and the American soldiers who fought and died for the freedom of my country and for a secular and democratic Europe, and we tell the enemies of freedom just that. NUTS! Because that’s all there is to it. No explanations. No beating around the bush. No caveats. Our enemies should know: we will never apologize for being free men, we will never bow for the combined forces of Mecca and the left. And we will never surrender. We stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no stronger power than the force of free men fighting for the great cause of liberty. Because freedom is the birthright of all man. <<

back to topic: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world...ilders.intv.cnn

Protection against fraud, laws could force all information on the table in layman’s terms letting the individuals and firms make their contracts based on all relevant and comprehensible information. , of course the traffic cop analogy has its limitations....now I think of the harsh way I see the American police operate on TV (Dutch cops are not so quit to treating you as a criminal) I think maybe I shouldn't have used it . I don't know if in the USA you have the term 'death my guild', in the Netherlands we have. It is when you cause the death of a person by doing something you should have known could cause the death of that person, but you did it anyway. This is for instance if you drive like a maniac through a densely populated area and kill someone who was by accident crossing the street. In analogy I propose to add a new crime to the law books: fraud by guild. Because this is what I would label a lot of shit going on with the financial institutions right know.

this might contain some info: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/