IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO VOTE FOR BIDEN, THINK AGAIN

Let me start with a word about ageism. It's wrong and short-sighted. We octogenarians lived the history of the last eight decades. We know a few things you will never know which are helpful in a crisis. Give us a break. Most of you overreact to the small stuff. Trump is another matter. He is insane.

Two reasons to vote for Biden. He has a great team of intelligent, dedicated, resourceful, fair-minded, empathetic, patriotic, selfless men and women. Add the same for the military in spades. No one will do anything stupid. All issues important to the people will be addressed. You can have confidence that the ship of state will not run aground.

Then there are the Democrats. The party of the people, not just the billionaires. If I were a betting man, I would bet on them to have my best interests in mind. I certainly don't see that on the cult leader side. Who is more likely to have your back and improve your life? More likely? Democrats, hands down.

Most of the brainpower is not with the cult. Go with the winning team that actually may improve your life. And ask Trump what he did to make your life so much better. Oh. I forgot you are standing by to drink the Koolaide.

Personal

 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/spriggs-law-group_activity-7167708582170324992-Te6h?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

 

U.S. CONGRESS TO DO LIST

INCREASE MINIMUM WAGE 

STRENGTHEN ANTI-TRUST, ANTI-MONOPOLY LAWS

PREVENT STOCK BUY-BACKS                                                                  

MAKE INCOME TAX PROGRESSIVE AS IT WAS BEFORE REAGAN

ANTHOLOGY OF ARTICLES ON RELIGION

Here is a collection of articles on religion. 

https://wspriggs2.blogspot.com/search?q=religion

https://spriggslawgroup.blogspot.com/search?q=religion

 

GUESSING ABOUT GOD, BOOK 1

Guessing About God: Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief, Book 1  Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

David Madison (Author), Tim Sledge (Author), Seth Andrews (Narrator), & 1 more

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In this first book of his Ten Tough Problems series, David Madison shares three critical problems in Christian belief.

Problem One: God is invisible and silent. This fact forces humanity to rely on ineffective ways of knowing God — common knowledge, sacred books, visions, prayer, personal feelings, and theologians. But all these sources of God knowledge fall short as evidenced by a world of disagreement, not just between Christians and other religions, but within Christianity itself.

Problem Two: The Bible disproves itself. In Chapter 2, Madison narrows his focus down to the world’s most famous book. He shows how two hundred years of critical scholarship — something most Christians know nothing about — have revealed the Bible to be full of archaic ideas, moral failures, and contradictions. He makes a convincing case that all these flaws rob us of any confidence that claims of biblical revelation can be taken seriously.

Problem Three: We can only guess who Jesus was. In Chapter 3, Madison turns his magnifying glass on the four Gospels and finds them severely lacking in their attempts to provide a clear understanding of who Jesus was and what he had to say. These Gospels not only contradict one another, but when reviewed under Madison’s guidance, prompt the honest listener to request, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?”

Combining rigorous scholarship with engaging personal reflections, this book offers understanding and help for individuals struggling with tough questions about belief. And the most pressing question it provides for the listener is: How could a deity competent enough to create this Universe be such a massively poor communicator who leaves humanity Guessing about God.

©2023 David Madison (P)2024 David Madison

 

EINSTEIN ON SOCIALISM

 

Why Socialism?

By Albert Einstein

From Monthly Review, New York, May, 1949.

[Re-printed in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein]

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor -- not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production -- that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods -- may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call "workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production -- although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. In so far as the labor contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the "free labor contract" for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present-day economy does not differ much from "pure" capitalism. Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an "army of unemployed" almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE

"Those who love us will miss us."  --Anonymous

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

— Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)

Russell continues in the 1936 essay Do We Survive Death?

“What we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. What constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory and by certain similarities of the sort we call habit. If, therefore, we are to believe that a person survives death, we must believe that the memories and habits which constitute the person will continue to be exhibited in a new set of occurrences. No one can prove that this will not happen. But it is easy to see that it is very unlikely.“

“To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.“  

TELL US ABOUT YOUR FIRM

What was the legal profession like in 1960? Aside from carbon paper and whiteout, lawyering was a noble profession on par with medical doctors. There was no advertising, soliciting, or disclaiming accountability by any form of incorporation. You were permitted to send out one formal mailing announcement that you had opened your office. Nothing more. As they were called, the canons of ethics required you to avoid even the very appearance of impropriety or conflict of interest. You were required to represent your client zealously, treating him like he was your only client. Rule 11 had teeth. Filing frivolous lawsuits was career-ending. There was a hint of nobility in calling yourself a lawyer. All of that has devolved to today's loathsome practitioner. We who hinted nobility are the few, the mature nobility.

What was the best victory last year? The most prominent case we handled successfully last year was when we obtained a convenience termination on a contract the client emphatically wanted to get out of to avoid long-term losses and then recovered money that made the contractor whole.

UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN

The universe is indifferent, nay hostile to humankind. Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains.

https://fb.watch/q1_tteH1jk/

PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

“Until the eighteenth century science was included in what was commonly called “philosophy,” but since that time the word “philosophy” has been confined, on its theoretical side, to what is more speculative and general in the topics with which science deals. It is often said that philosophy is unprogressive, but this is largely a verbal matter: as soon as a way is found of arriving at definite knowledge on some ancient question, the new knowledge is counted as belonging to “science,” and “philosophy” is deprived of the credit. In Greek times, and down to the time of Issac Newton, planetary theory belonged to “philosophy,” because it was uncertain and speculative, but Newton took the subject out of the realm of the free play of hypothesis, and made it one requiring a different type of skill from that which it had required when it was still open to fundamental doubts. Anaximander, in the sixth century BC, had a theory of evolution, and maintained that men are descended from fishes. This was philosophy because it was a speculation unsupported by detailed evidence, but Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was science, because it was based on the succession of forms of life as found in fossils, and upon the distribution of animals and plants in many parts of the world.

A man might say, with enough truth to justify a joke: “Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don’t know.” But it should be added that philosophical speculation as to what we do not yet know has shown itself a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge. The guesses of the Pythagoreans in astronomy, of Anaximander and Empédocles in biological evolution, and of Democritus as to the atomic constitution of matter, provided the men of science in later times with hypotheses which, but for the philosophers, might never have entered their heads. We may say that, on its theoretical side, philosophy consists, at least in part, in the framing of large general hypotheses which science is not yet in a position to test; but when it becomes possible to test the hypotheses they become, if verified, a part of science, and cease to count as “philosophy.”

— Bertrand Russell, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)

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