Open Letter to JEB Bush

The Country does not want Washington to fix it.

Motion to Disqualify

A Motion to Disqualify has been filed.

And rejected.

Judicial Overreach

Federal:

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court legislated same sex couples can get married.

State:

In Kaaa vs Kaaa the Florida Supreme Court overruled a state statute.

Local:

In Florida's 18th Circuit, Judge Charles J. Roberts is demonstrating judicial run amok.  His court was described as having an illegal goal by the 5th District Court of Appeals.

Document no. 194 dated July 16, 2015, clearly demonstrates that he is a judicial problem.
His ruling violates several legal tenants and is inconsistent with his remanded instructions.

Fair and Equitable Distributions

Fair and equitable distributions in a no fault divorce should not "punish" anyone.

The law seems concerned about equity between spouses.

The law should not allow such actions as Judge Charles J. Roberts in Florida's 18th Circuit Court has been Ordering in one case, if not all his cases.

Preparing a "Fair and Equitable Distribution of Assets" should be done out of a court room with and by competent people.

Diane Baccus-Horsley and Charles J. Roberts have repeatedly demonstrated lack of the necessary competence.

Applying Kaaa vs Kaaa for Florida Lawyers

Just about everyone knows the “spreadsheet procedure” which resulted from the Kaaa vs Kaaa decision by Florida’s Supreme Court.

In brief, the passive appreciation is allocated according to the percentage of ownership established at the time of the marriage.  There is a big problem with any “reduction” necessitated by the mortgage being “serviced by marital funds”.  [The original opinion was very detailed in how to apply the decision but it was not implementable.  The revised opinion is much shorter but still confused about “reductions”.]

The “spreadsheet procedure” is a tool that can be used in Step 5 of the 5-Step Kaaa vs Kaaa procedure.

The Supreme Court’s decision is available at : http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/decisions/2011/sc09-967.pdf and an analysis can be found at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-supreme-court/1539758.html#sthash.Ab2WL9CT.dpuf

To a layman, the Florida Supreme Court seemed eager to find a basis for the lower courts to award a portion of the passive appreciation to the non-owner spouse.  Hurley P. Whitaker, esquire, informed me in 2007 that my spouse could not touch my premarital residence.

Quoting the decision:

“61.075 Equitable distribution of marital assets and liabilities.— . . . .

"(5) As used in this section:

“(a) “Marital assets and liabilities” include: . . . .

“2. The enhancement in value and appreciation of nonmarital assets resulting either from the efforts of either party during the marriage or from the contribution to or expenditure thereon of marital funds or other forms of marital assets, or both . . . . (Emphasis added.) 

“This language clearly provides that under certain circumstances, the appreciation of a nonmarital asset is indeed a marital asset. We reject Joseph Kaaa’s argument that passive appreciation is not encompassed by the language in this section, and we conclude that the passive appreciation of a nonmarital asset, such as the Kaaa’s marital home, is properly considered a marital asset where marital funds or the efforts of either party contributed to the appreciation. Such findings are to be made by the trial court based on evidence presented by the parties.”

On the bottom of page 7, the opinion states, “Moreover, we emphasize that the trial court must make a finding of fact that the non-owner spouse made contributions to the nonmarital property during the course of the marriage.”

Continuing on to page 8 “While these contributions need not be strictly monetary and may include marital funds or the efforts of either party, they must enhance the value of the property.”

“Because paying the mortgage is a prerequisite to enjoying the appreciation in value of the marital home, we conclude that principles of equity do not allow an owner spouse to receive the full benefit of the passive appreciation when the nonowner spouse contributed to the property, and marital funds were used to pay the mortgage. Such inequities must be balanced by the trial court making specific factual findings regarding the contributions of the nonowner spouse and the relationship of those contributions to the passive appreciation of the property.”

Determining an Award of Passive Appreciation

We now turn to the method that a trial court should employ as it determines whether a nonowner spouse is entitled to a share of the passive appreciation and calculates the proper allocation. We note that the trial court’s task in this regard is an extremely fact-intensive one, and there are certain steps that each court must take. First, the court must determine the overall current fair market value of the home. Second, the court must determine whether there has been a passive appreciation in the home’s value. Third, the court must determine whether the passive appreciation is a marital asset under section 61.075(5)(a)(2). This step must include findings of fact by the trial court that marital funds were used to pay the mortgage and that the nonowner spouse made contributions to the property. Moreover, the trial court must determine to what extent the contributions of the nonowner spouse affected the appreciation of the property.  Let's call this TWETCOTNSATAOTP. 

If the trial court does not "find" that the nonowner spouse's contributions affected the appreciation of the property in a positive manner, there is no passive appreciation to be distributed as a marital asset under section 61.075(5)(a)(2).

If the trial court does not determine to what extent the contributions of the nonowner spouse affected the appreciation of the property, the trial court has not completed its task.  

Fourth, the trial court must determine the value of the passive appreciation that accrued during the marriage and is subject to equitable distribution.  In simple cases, this will be directly related to TWETCOTNSATAOTP.   Fifth, after the court determines the value of the passive appreciation to be equitably distributed, the court’s next step is to determine how the value is allocated.

We approve the methodology in Stevens, which addresses the disposition of nonmarital real property assets and provides the following method for determining how the appreciated value is to be allocated:

 

If a separate asset is unencumbered and no marital funds are used to finance its acquisition, improvement, or maintenance, no portion of its value should ordinarily be included in the marital estate, absent improvements effected by marital labor. If an asset is financed entirely by borrowed money which marital funds repay, the entire asset should be included in the marital estate. In general, in the absence of improvements, the portion of the appreciated value of a separate asset which should be treated as a marital asset will be the same as the fraction calculated by dividing the indebtedness with which the asset was encumbered at the time of the marriage by the value of the asset at the time of the marriage. If, for example, one party brings to the marriage an asset in which he or she has an equity of fifty percent, the other half of which is financed by marital funds, half the appreciated value at the time of the petition for dissolution was filed, § 61.075(5)(a) 2, Fla. Stat. (1993), should be included as a marital asset. The value of this marital asset should be reduced, however, by the unpaid indebtedness marital funds were used to service.

Stevens, 651 So. 2d at 1307-08. Applying this language from Stevens to Kaaa, we note that the home was financed almost entirely by borrowed money that was repaid almost entirely by marital funds. Moreover, there appears to be ample evidence in the record of contributions made by Katherine Kaaa that affected the passive appreciation of the home’s value.

Since the Kaaa home was financed mostly by borrowed money which was repaid almost entirely by marital funds, it seems reasonable form Ms. Kaaa to share in the passive appreciation.

What about a home which was 80% owned, only the marital home for 18 months,  TWETCOTNSATAOTP is zero or negative, and paid its way as a rental property?

A Fair and Equitable distribution of assets is a right of all Floridians even for newly Single, Protestant Anglo-Saxon Males.

The Enormous Theorem

In the early 1960s, Group Theory was a way of describing several phenomena in a concise manner.

Morton Hamermesh's book is great.  Chapter 1 is "Elements of Group Theory".

The applications of Group Theory have moved to "Representation Theory".  The theory side seems to have evolved to Category Theory.

Category theory can be used to formalize concepts of other high-level abstractions such as set theory, ring theory, and group theory. Several terms used in category theory, including the term "morphism", differ from their uses within mathematics itself. In category theory, a "morphism" obeys a set of conditions specific to category theory itself. Thus, care must be taken to understand the context in which statements are made.

Morphism In mathematical category theory, a generalization or abstraction of the concept of a structure-preserving function.

In many fields of mathematics, morphism refers to a structure-preserving map from one mathematical structure to another. The notion of morphism recurs in much of contemporary mathematics. In set theory, morphisms are functions; in linear algebra, linear transformations; in group theory, group homomorphisms; in topology, continuous functions, and so on.

In category theory, morphism is a broadly similar idea, but somewhat more abstract:  the mathematical objects involved need not be sets, and the relationship between them may be something more general than a map.

The July 2015 issue of Scientific American on page 72 summarizes "Four Enormous Families" that contain all the finite simple groups.  An exemplar for completeness. 

1. 
   

The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions

1.  Recent standards for teaching science say that students should be taught "The Law of Unintended Consequences" before they graduate from high school.  The title combined with "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" suggest my views on the subject.

Systems Dynamics is an approach that applies to dynamic problems arising in complex social, managerial, economic, or ecological systems — literally any dynamic systems characterized by interdependence, mutual interaction, information feedback, and circular causality.

The field developed initially from the work of Jay W. Forrester at MIT.  His seminal book Industrial Dynamics (Forrester 1961) is still a significant statement of philosophy and methodology in the field.  Within ten years of its publication, the span of applications grew from corporate and industrial problems to include the management of research and development, urban stagnation and decay, commodity cycles, and the dynamics of growth in a finite world.   It is now applied in economics, public policy, environmental studies, defense, theory-building in social science, and other areas, as well as its home field, management.  The name industrial dynamics no longer does justice to the breadth of the field, so it has become generalized to system dynamics.    The modern name suggests links to other systems methodologies, but the links are weak and misleading.  System dynamics emerges out of servomechanisms engineering, not general systems theory or cybernetics.

System Dynamics has a chance of usefully handling the complexities of the Modern world.  However, Auerbach reports stated about that time that only 15% of Analysts could use PSL/PSA (which Tom Demarco described as the best Automated Data Dictionary System available at the time).  Systems Dynamics is inherently non-linear.

Newton developed methods to linearize things.  Human thinking does rather well in a linear world.  R. A. Fisher did some outstanding work concerning the Design of Experiments and tools for the analysis of experimental data. See http://dr2htay.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-design-of-experiments.html

Social scientists did a very poor job of understanding the system before the tried "to improve it".  Several problems were presented in Jay W. Forrester, "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems", 

Technology Review, Vol. 73, No. 3, Jan. 1971, pp. 52-68.  See http://www.constitution.org/ps/cbss.htm

2.  "Gall's Law"

Although dubbed Gall's Law by some, the actual quote is not labeled as such in the original work. The work cites Murphy's Law and the Peter Principle and is filled with similar sayings.

John Gall (born 1925) is an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics : an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall (1975, p.71)

This law is essentially an argument in favour of underspecification: it can be used to explain the success of systems like the World Wide Web and Blogosphere, which grew from simple to complex systems incrementally, and the failure of systems like CORBA, which began with complex specifications. Gall's Law is said to have strong affinities to the practice of agile software development.

Although the quote may seem to validate the merits of simple systems, it is preceded by the qualifier "A simple system may or may not work." (p. 70). 

One of the first systems designers to quote Gall's law was Ken Orr in 1981. Notable were the quotations of Gall's Law by Grady Booch since 1991.

Systemantics (a change in typography and underlining indicate that the title is better rendered as "SystemANTICS") is a commentary on systems theory and general semantics publications by such thinkers as Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Alfred Korzybski.

3.  Alfred Korzyski was the only one above unknown to me previously. Following the link, I find William Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939. He was 25 years old, and paid $40. His fellow students—there were 38 in all—included young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican member of the U.S. Senate), Ralph Moriarty deBit (later to become the spiritual teacher Vitvan) and Wendell Johnson (founder of the Monster Study). I used S. I. Hayakawa's book Language in Thought and Action as an undergraduate.

4.  Wiki's 1st para on Korzybski:

"Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory""

5.Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine's Ph.D. thesis and early publications were on formal logic and set theory. Only after World War II did he, by virtue of seminal papers on ontology, epistemology and language, emerge as a major philosopher. By the 1960s, he had worked out his "naturalized epistemology" whose aim was to answer all substantive questions of knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural sciences. Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy", a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to natural science and capable of justifying it. These views are intrinsic to his naturalism.

6.  Karl Popper versus Thomas Kuhn

I rejected Thomas Kuhn's stuff that was contrary to German Idealism.  I was in graduate school in the 1960s.  The Encyclopedia Britannica definition of "Physics" was basically the Hegelian dialectic applied to theory and experiment.  Seemed great to me.  I thought my rejection of Kuhn meant that I agreed with Karl Popper.  I'm revisiting this now.  What I thought  agreed with Karl Popper on was that assertions should be backed by (independently) verifiable evidence.  I have always been more interested in Metaphysics than "physics."  I  never shared the Logical Positivist's desire to do away with Metaphysics.  I am learning that Popper's focus was on distinguishing science from pseudo science.  That has not been a problem for me.  Physics, systems, and/or economics is the real world science and mathematics is the logical science.

7.  Charles S. Peirce

September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician,mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".  He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism. 

Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically.  A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven.

Jean-François Lyotard explicitly drew upon Wittgenstein's concept of language-games in developing his own notion of metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition. However, Wittgenstein's concept is, from its inception, of a plurality of language games; their plurality is not taken to be a feature solely of contemporary discourse. Lyotard's discussion is primarily applied in the contexts of authority, power and legitimation, where Wittgenstein's is concerned to mark distinctions between a wide range of activities in which language users engage.

Michel Foucault  frequently lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. 

Since its beginnings with Socrates, philosophy has typically involved the project of questioning the accepted knowledge of the day. Later, Locke, Hume, and especially, Kant developed a distinctively modern idea of philosophy as the critique of knowledge. Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain that the same critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal necessary conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed just contingent features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and temporal character of its objects) turn out to be necessary truths. Foucault, however, suggests the need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than asking what, in the apparently contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in the apparently necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his questioning is the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These purport to offer universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in fact, often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a particular society. Foucault's “critical philosophy” undermines such claims by exhibiting how they are just the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically grounded truths.

Foucault left clear instructions that there should be no posthumous publication of his writings that he had not published in his lifetime. His estate has obeyed, with one major qualification. Foucault is deemed to have published lectures that he allowed to be taped. This has, in particular, allowed print editions of the annual courses of lectures that he delivered at the Collège de France from 1970–71 through 1983–84 (except for a sabbatical year in 1980–81). This has made an enormous body of important material available. Some of it covers (although in a different way) material later published, but some presents ideas (for example, on ancient philosophy) that appear nowhere else.

9.  Jurgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere.

http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/publicness/habermas_structural_trans_pub_sphere.pdf

The Theory of Communicative Action (German: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) is a 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas, in which he continues his project set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences^[1][2] of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language."^[1] The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung)^[3] in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality,^[4] and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft),^[5] in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society and lays out the critical theory for modernity.^[4] After writing The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas expanded upon the theory of communicative action by using it as the basis of his theory of morality, democracy, and law.^[6] The work was the subject of a collection of critical essays published in 1986,^[7] has inspired many responses by social theorists and philosophers, and in 1998 was listed by the International Sociological Association as the eighth most important sociological book of the 20th century.^[8]