Your references are way too obscure for my simple mind.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Apparently, in El Salvador, they have vaginal inspectors to check women for abortions.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

No idea where you're coming from, but as a sometime Berkeleyian, enrolling at U Cal Berkeley is hard to do. Very competitive to get in and you better bring cash with you. Govt. don't pay for much of it.

I seriously doubt you've ever visited our fair city cuz it's got a lot of charm and you'd be hard pressed to find any evidence that it's the liberal/hippie mecca some people believe it to be.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

poster is reffering to a post by Howitzer regarding a youtube video of a bike accident in Berkley................

Salty - no personal attacks on this forum please, keep it above the belt. Thanks,
C.

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Chris
2007 E550 4Matic - 61,000 Km - Iridium Silver, black leather, Sport package, Premium 2 package
2007 GL450 4Matic - 62,000 Km - Obsidian Black Metallic, black leather, all options
1998 E430 - sold
1989 300E - 333,000 Km - sold
1977 280E - sold
1971 250 - retired

"And a frign hat. They gave me a hat at the annual benefits meeting. I said. how does this benefit me. I dont have anything from the company.. So they gave me a hat." - TheDon

I'm not surprised....

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

Yea ok. I'll lighten up. I won't mention anything about that Merc that fell off the trailer either.

However, I do remember driving through UCB a while back with my windows down and they tossed in a diploma. By the time I got around the block I had 3 PhDs from various schools of study.

I mean at Purdue at least I had to go to a few parties and such

I've heard talk such as this before. Typically from someone who hasn't been to college, and sees little value in advanced education.

Kind of sounds like ole Cap'n Carageous to me. It is definitely someone who has been here before.

Damn. I figured this would come around to haunt me in my later years. 9 years, 5 at Purdue, 2 at MIT, 3 at W&M all gone - just gone.

Well that's ok. I was looking for a release. I dream of the freedom of riding on the back of a trash truck on something. Just think of it – hair blowing in the breeze, cooled by the summer air, martini naturally shaken from the ride. Not a care in the world, $55/hr and my cell phone is quiet. No emergency L2 come-to-the-office at 1:00AM for a security breach. Ohoh – sorry to drift off there, I woke up when my wife burned my clothes and made me take a bath.

Say - what kind of bicycle you got?

I have a Mercian, an Atala, and a Diamond Back. But I wasn't anywhere near California with any of them.

Knowing Right and Wrong
Is morality a natural phenomenon?

Alex Byrne

8 “Two things,” Immanuel Kant wrote in the late 18th century, “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we meditate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within.”

The awesome starry firmament inspires plenty of controversy—about the composition of dark matter, for example. But a lot is known: the sun is composed of hydrogen and helium, the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years distant, and so on.

There’s also plenty of controversy about moral law. Should we give much more to charity than we actually do? Is torture permissible under extreme circumstances? Is eating meat wrong? Could it ever be permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five? But, again we know a lot. Throwing good taste out with the bathwater for the sake of a clear example, everyone knows that boiling babies for fun is wrong. Boiling lobsters is a matter that reasonable people may disagree about, but as far as boiling babies goes, agreement is pretty much universal. Babies suffer when boiled—they are not like the worms that live near undersea vents, who are partial to scalding water. If something goes without saying, it’s this: one ought not to boil babies for fun.

Apart from filling the mind with admiration and awe, the starry firmament and the moral law together fill the mind with a problem, which Kant’s remark obscures. The quotation suggests, misleadingly, that the astronomical and moral realms are wholly separate—the former is “above” and the latter is “within.” But they aren’t: as Moby correctly sings, “We are all made of stars.” The heavens and human beings are composed from the same physical stuff, and are governed by same physical principles. The starry firmament isn’t really “above”—it’s everywhere. We, along with lobsters and the rest, are part of it.

Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts.

But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.

This problem is sometimes traced to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume, writing half a century before Kant, complained of an “imperceptible change” from “the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not” to propositions “connected with an ought, or an ought not.” “This change,” Hume said, is “of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

The natural world contains plenty of facts concerning what is (or is not) the case: babies suffer in hot water, boiling water is hot, Virginia will drown if no one pulls her from the River Ouse, and the like. But how do we get from these facts to what ought (or ought not) to be the case—facts that are “entirely different”? As the philosopher Simon Blackburn puts it in his Ruling Passions, “the problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”

Responding to this problem, Judith Jarvis Thomson observes in Goodness and Advice, “became the central task of Anglo-American moral philosophy in the century just past.” The problem is not one in ethics, like the issue of whether we should give more to charity than we actually do, but rather is about ethics or morality. It accordingly belongs to that branch of philosophy called “meta-ethics,” which started in earnest when G.E. Moore published Principia Ethica in 1903, and which has been flourishing ever since.

Before touching on some of the high notes, as well as looking down a few blind alleys, what about Kant? He did, after all, write numerous very long sentences on both the starry firmament and the moral law. But it is no easy matter to bring Kant’s views to bear on the problem as we have stated it, and in the juggernaut of contemporary meta-ethics he has not been in the driver’s seat.
The task before us is to try to squeeze morality into the “disenchanted” natural world; as Blackburn says, this “is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order.” One might object that this is to stack the deck: these ground rules exclude the obvious source of morality, namely God. Although Kant himself did not hold that morality is of divine origin, the view is suggested by his phrase “the moral law.” Human laws (“Thou shalt not smoke in bars”) are made by humans; who else could have made moral laws (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ox, nor his ass”) but the Supreme Lawgiver himself?

This “divine command” theory of morality has the rather alarming consequence that—to borrow an aphorism Sartre attributed to Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov—if God is dead, everything is permitted. The more fundamental difficulty, however, was pointed out by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. Do the gods love good things because they are good, or are good things good because the gods love them? Surely the former—if Zeus, Uranus, and the rest started loving pointless suffering that would not make pointless suffering good. No doubt God, if there is one, enjoins us to avoid pointless suffering, but that is not why pointless suffering is bad. It is bad anyway—that is precisely why God enjoins us to avoid it.

Divine-command theory can be watered down in various ways and in recent years has experienced a minor revival; even diluted, it remains a fringe position. A considerably more popular suggestion is that moral facts can be squeezed into the natural world with no effort at all, because moral facts are actually natural facts in disguise. And if this is right, Hume was completely wrong. “Ought” does not express “a new relation or affirmation”: an “ought” turns out to be a kind of “is.”

more at: http://bostonreview.net/BR32.2/byrne.html

I haven't read the whole piece yet, but I will. But, i've read enough to be highly suspicious of the author's view of Hume. The author is correct that Hume is famous for articulating the 'naturalistic fallacy', that an 'ought' cannot arise from an 'is'. However, this does not in any way mean that Hume does not think morality is natural. Hume and his close friend, Adam Smith, argued that our moral values are rooted in our sentiments (emotions?). So the is/ought problem seems to me to be about how externally imposed 'duties' are not natural, but not that morality itself is not natural. For both Hume and Smith, morality is a natural part of our existence as social animals.

Now, I've read it. I think his conclusions are not too far from the conclusions that Hume and Smith reached, even though Byrne presents Hume as a skeptic. Smith certainly thought that 'moral facts' were not like biological facts, obtainable through an objective examination of the physical world. Smith thought morality arose because we imaginatively put ourselves in the minds of other people who are experiencing the world and responding to it with feelings. We imagine these feelings and then compare these feelings to our own, developing ideas about which feelings are appropriate and which are not, modifying our own feelings in the process thru judging negatively or positively the feelings of others.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Did I post this previously? My apologies if I did, but I thought it was pertinent, if not directly on point.

B

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The Incredible Shrinking Father
Kay S. Hymowitz

Artificial insemination begets children without paternity, with troubling cultural and legal consequences.

Here’s a Delphic riddle for our times: When is your father not your father? Answer: when he’s a sperm donor. Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. An unmarried woman in her early thirties decided that she wanted a child and asked a friend to be a sperm donor. He agreed, one thing led to another, which led to a syringe of his sperm, which led to the birth of twins. The mother says that she always intended to raise the kids alone and never wanted the friend involved in their lives. The donor says that he planned to be the twins’ father in name and practice. There is no written contract. What does the contemporary Solomon do?

Well, in a Kansas trial court, Solomon rules that without a contract the twins have no father. The man who provided half of the children’s genetic material has no more relationship to them than does the taxi driver who rushed their mother to the hospital when she went into labor. Now, assuming that the supreme court upholds the decision, the state of Kansas can celebrate adding two more fatherless children to its population, and Mom can rejoice by dressing her twins in bibs—available over the Internet—proudly announcing: my daddy’s name is donor.

You’d think that we had enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births (over a third of all children are born to unmarried women, and, in most cases, the fathers will fade from the picture) and divorce (the average divorced dad sees his kids less often than he takes his car in for an oil change). But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination. This may sound a tad overheated. After all, AI has been around, by some accounts, for over a century. And the number of kids born through the procedure each year, though steadily growing, remains quite small relative to the millions of babies conceived, as we can now say completely without irony, the old-fashioned way.

But aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists’ technology and all the lawyerly contracts can’t take human nature out of human reproduction.

In the middle of the twentieth century, artificial insemination seemed as family-values-friendly as Dr. James Dobson himself. If a woman had trouble conceiving, doctors would inject her husband’s sperm directly into her uterus. Or, if the husband’s sperm count was low, physicians would enlist the help of medical students willing to provide their sperm. AI was rare, producing 5,000 to 7,000 American babies a year.

It was also hush-hush. Doctors often kept no records or they signed false birth certificates, and they firmly instructed patients to tell no one, especially the kids. Most children conceived through AI during that era probably went through life unaware that Dad was not a biological relation. From today’s vantage point, the approach seems typical of a time too enamored of family secrets and overly cowed by medical authority. Yet if the mid-century approach to artificial insemination was excessively protective of the feelings of infertile men and failed to grasp that family secrets have a way of unraveling rather messily, it also recognized, as did the culture at large, that a child needs both clarity and an intact home.

That recognition began to weaken as technology, economics, and a liberalizing social climate worked together to expand AI into brave new territory. First: technology. By the mid–twentieth century, scientists figured out the science of cryo-freezing cattle sperm; by the late seventies, they had perfected techniques that could store the more delicate labor of men. This innovation led to the expansion of that peculiar contemporary entity, the sperm bank, and that in turn led to the transformation of AI from a fringe medical procedure to a consumer business. Freezing enabled sperm banks not only to weather but also to benefit from the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Bankers can freeze a man’s sperm for six months—the time that it can take for HIV to show up in the blood test of an infected individual—and then do a blood test on the donor before putting the product on sale, making frozen sperm safer than fresh.

Then: market economics. In his fascinating new book, The Genius Factory, David Plotz describes the 1980 origins of the Repository for Germinal Choice. Widely known as the “Nobel Prize sperm bank,” because (supposedly) it specialized in the seed of Nobel laureates, it was one of the earliest banks, and the first to treat would-be mothers as customers rather than as patients. The founder, an eccentric millionaire eugenicist named Robert Graham, marketed his stable of studs through brochures touting such qualities as “beautiful teeth,” “happy and radiant personality,” and, of course, a dazzling IQ. Today’s sperm banks—often mighty enterprises compared with the corner-store operation that was the Nobel bank—provide lengthy online catalogs of donors, containing basic stats like height, hair, eye color, and education. If donor #305 has the right coloring and smarts to be your child’s father, you can make sure that he’s the one for an extra fee, by buying his psychological test, his baby photo, an audio interview with him, and perhaps even the sperm bank’s notes from his intake interview.

And finally: a changing social climate. The increasingly sophisticated, market-driven technology eventually joined forces with what I call the “unmarriage revolution”—that is, the decoupling of marriage and child rearing—and extended itself to single women and lesbians. As early as the seventies, a small number of lesbians were bypassing the medical establishment by procuring the necessary body fluid from male friends or acquaintances, and buying a mason jar and a turkey baster from the local hardware store.

Now they’re more likely to go to the sperm store like everyone else, especially since a 2006 American Society for Reproductive Medicine Ethics Committee report calling for equal access to fertility treatment for gays, lesbians, and singles. These days, anyone can buy sperm: married couples, gay couples, and single women; women on the AARP mailing list, women barely out of college, 40-year-old women who have tried desperately to find husbands and have no other hope of becoming mothers, and 20-something women who—well—just want to, that’s all; rich and famous women like Annie Leibovitz, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Cheney; and divorced third-grade teachers who live in modest two-bedroom condos and are fed up with men. Whoever. The California Cryobank, the country’s largest, estimates that about 40 percent of its customers are unmarried women. The Sperm Bank of California says that two-thirds of its clientele are lesbian couples. Most professionals believe that about 1 million American children are the progeny of sperm donors—the large majority of them anonymous—with 30,000 more boosting the ranks each year.

Subtract the children born via AI to infertile married couples: that’s still a lot of fatherless kids.

More at: http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_artificial_insemination.html

SOUNDS LIKE BUCKWHEAT.

TOM W

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.