From kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Fri May 1 12:58:15 2009 From: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu (Kenneth Ketner) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 11:58:15 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] New Walker Percy short story In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49FB2A27.90006@ttu.edu> Percy Fans: Perhaps Lapsometric research is indeed making progress -- see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8025454.stm -- Kenneth Laine Ketner Paul Whitfield Horn Professor Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism Texas Tech University Charles Sanders Peirce Interdisciplinary Professor Anita Thigpen Perry School of Nursing Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center MAIL ADDRESS: Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX 79409-0002 806 742 3128 Office email: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Office website: http://www.pragmaticism.net Personal website: http://www.wyttynys.net From kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Fri May 1 13:01:08 2009 From: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu (Kenneth Ketner) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 12:01:08 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Lapsometric Research Message-ID: <49FB2AD4.3050306@ttu.edu> OOOps, should have changed the subject line. Percy Fans: Perhaps Lapsometric research is indeed making progress -- see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8025454.stm -- Kenneth Laine Ketner Paul Whitfield Horn Professor Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism Texas Tech University Charles Sanders Peirce Interdisciplinary Professor Anita Thigpen Perry School of Nursing Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center MAIL ADDRESS: Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX 79409-0002 806 742 3128 Office email: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Office website: http://www.pragmaticism.net Personal website: http://www.wyttynys.net From wriddick at usa.net Sat May 2 16:38:09 2009 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 14:38:09 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] Lapsometric Research In-Reply-To: <49FB2AD4.3050306@ttu.edu> Message-ID: >Perhaps Lapsometric research is indeed making progress -- see: >http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8025454.stm I think you've got this problem turned on its head. The "better living through chemistry" crowd has screwed up matters not at the stage of lithium but at the stage before lithium. The list has been down this road before about ten years back when the molecules du jour were the then novel SSRIs, which turn out to have not only antidepressant qualities but also help the brain stave off the drop in neurogeneration as it ages [PMID 12726822]. These are great drugs if you need them (and respond) but a lot of people on the list pointed out that we ought to ask if we could pursue alternatives that kept us from getting the problems that need drugs in the first place. This side of the debate was, of course, talking about the moral dimension but I would point to still other bad decisions about chemistry in addition to that. I'm pretty sure lithium was the mood stabilizing wonder drug on which Percy based his heavy sodium spoof. There are other elemental wonder drugs. The Russians have done some interesting work on the life-extending properties of 25Mg2+ [PMID 16049349, 16043694]. Strontium improves bone health. Zinc and magnesium both have anti-inflammatory properties and our modern diets are pretty deficient in them, partly because of the way we strip fiber from grains in food processing. The reasons we use both lithium and fluoride are closely interrelated. Our teeth decay because we consume too little fiber and too much sugar. This is a consciously planned change in our diet brought about without any debate by the modern food processing industry. The solution for these rotting teeth isn't to stop subsidizing bad food with our tax dollars or use the tax system to properly price the cost to individuals for consuming these foods. We like these foods too much to give them up because chronic consumption trips our adrenal stress response, floods our arteries with insulin and glucose and releases dopamine on the same circuit stimulated by smoking and cocaine, albeit at a more moderate pace. No, we don't stop the bad behavior. Our solution for tooth decay is to chronically dose the population with antibiotics (in this case fluoride) to the point our soils are so contaminated we can't safely grow tea leaves in them. Fluoride is a real health risk. In addition to harming our bones over the years, it also damages our gut flora - like any chronically consumed antibiotic would. You can't get the medical community to admit this yet. You can get them to admit we take fluoride for its antibiotic properties. You can get them to admit we need friendly gut bacteria for a well-balanced immune system and you can even get them to admit that chronic antibiotic use is a bad idea. But you can't get them to go from point A to point C. There's a ton of money sprinkled on politicians to prevent that from occurring in public rhetoric. Despite the potential for profound effects, we have been experimenting on people's health with fluoride for more than half a century with no scientific data justifying our actions. Like legalizing transfats and declaring them safer than regular fats, government bodies just went out and did it - often to satisfy an unscrutinized interest group lavishing campaign cash on politicians. So we take fluoride unnecessarily to balance out other bad chemistry decisions we don't want to talk about. Lithium helps counterbalance another end of the sugar problem. Insulin resistance in neurons activates GSK-3beta - which lithium downregulates [PMID 18322101]. GSK-3beta causes chronic inflammation and contributes to epilepsy, Alzheimer's[1] and a number of other neurodegenerative conditions associated with diabetes, often increasing the risk for depression as the brain gets damaged and neurogeneration fails to keep pace. That leaves particularly vulnerable individuals contemplating suicide. In the case of lithium, adding it to the water supply at currently used therapeutic doses would pose problems including kidney damage and tumor formation. But we don't have good data on Japanese suicide rates a century ago so no one really notices what the modern diet has done. We just notice the lithium and we're surprised that such low amounts still have an effect. Why don't we notice the dietary changes? Aside from the data problem, we have a system that rewards blindness. Think about who funds most of this medical and nutritional research - drug and food companies. As Upton Sinclair said, "[i]t is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Even Warren Buffet - who understands the fraud in the banking system and has given Bill Gates tons of money for a medical-related foundation - owns Coca-Cola stock and eats fast food. A year or two ago, some people openly speculated about putting statins in the water supply. Again, we can't challenge the lifestyle assumptions that give us the cholesterol problem in the first place. Instead we think about putting people on dangerous drugs that can destroy our muscles and may cause Parkinson's. Guess what? Our water is already medicated. A certain amount of the drugs we consume - whether pot or a prescription - never really metabolizes and it washes back into the sewage for recycling. Water treatment systems aren't designed to process some of these molecules and the rest of us wind up reconsuming them in the recycled water, albeit at much lower than therapeutic doses exposing us to all sorts of poorly understood, complex, subtle effects. I'm knowledgeable on these subjects because I nearly succumbed to mercury poisoning when an amalgam filling cracked. I'm now severely autoimmune. Amalgams are yet another modern "innovation" in health care that people are simply exposed to with zero scientific data to validate their safety or efficacy. They were "grandfathered in" and it's widely acknowledged that they could never pass the FDA's contemporary approval process because of their toxicity risk. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin and, surprise, causes autoimmunity in lab animals. (We can't study the dose I was exposed to in people because that would be unethical...) Of course when I started reading Walker Percy as a teenager, I didn't think his themes about modern chemistry's abusive potential applied to me. At the time I didn't understand how I was sick or that I was at any risk. Percy wrote of how the Nazi's reliance on modern economic production methods represented a natural culmination of an evolving death culture. When the Nazis dispensed with God, their compassion decayed into pity and a search for salvation turned into a search for transcendence with the nation and nationalism substituted as the new religion. Their quest for efficiency lead to modernizing the old pogrom with Henry Ford-style assembly line death factories and Zyklon B to euthanize their scapegoats. Jews, gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and other culpable suspects in Germany's fall from grace were put out of their misery. Nazis bureaucratized it and applied modern institutions, thus showing that element of the modern drive with a purity never before witnessed. It was the zenith of a death culture that tried to eradicate all excuses for imperfection - essentially punishing man himself for the human condition. Man busy at work trying to perfect mankind - and having to get rid of other men to do it. Percy liked to zero in on willful ignorance - alcohol, drugs, ideology. Excuses provided irony and fodder for plot. But of course to spot the irony the reader must have at least a glimmer of self-awareness and thus a chance at being touched by the ghost in the machine. It was that predicament that came from being both a thing, an animal and having a soul. How do we live responsibly with our natural desires - our natural selves as biological entities as well as creatures? I never thought such questions would so preoccupy me. The things we will do to avoid acknowledging and paying for our sins. The bill does add up. I will never have affordable health insurance. My sin? Being a casualty of bad science. Being an error in the equation. Being an inconvenient victim of a very profitable set of businesses with rhetorical chinks they don't want exposed. I think about the people who don't have the education or the resources to survive what I did. They don't have the same chance to speak because they're largely crippled or dead. In most cases, they never get far enough to figure out want went wrong. They don't die with any answers. I never thought growing up, watching my parents fight the remnants of segregation in Baton Rouge I would find myself - white, well-educated and upper middle class - so discriminated against for circumstances beyond my control. My situation is not as rare as you think. I'm only rare in the degree to which I understand my own situation and I've recovered enough to be articulate about it. There are a lot of chronically ill people in my situation. Many of them are innocent victims of disease or crime. Many of the first responders on 9/11 had their lungs destroyed because the EPA lied about the air quality at ground zero. Then they got cut from their insurance because they suddenly had a "pre-existing" condition. Where is the compassion? (Nobody seems to want to talk about Michael Moore's movie, _Sicko_, they way they did Fahrenheit 911.) What's worse is that estimates say in 2001 more than 100,000 hospital patients alone died from avoidable medical errors. This doesn't even begin to tally up the deaths from outpatient treatment errors. We had a war on terror over 3000 deaths but never a war on error. Detroit has better methods for catching defective rivets than doctors do for catching their errors - because car owners have more secure property rights than patients do over our own bodies. We have a medical industry that goes to great lengths to avoid any responsibility for its actions. We may not line up people we don't like into gas chambers anymore, but we certainly have a very rational system that concentrates the victims of bad medicine into their own homes or hospices waiting to die, locking them away from public view while their family finances erode. Just like the Jews who got bussed out of sight, the chronically ill aren't out and about on the talk show circuit; our participation in life is limited by circumstance rather than by barbed wire and machine guns. It's not Auschwitz but it does happen. People get pumped full of schizophrenia drugs all because they have an intolerance to gluten that affects their mind and the doctor screwed up the diagnosis. People die of the flu because they get stuck in the hospital and become vitamin D deficient when the dumb orderlies won't take them out to get a little sunshine[2]. Patients recovering from open heart surgery can call down to McDonald's and eat more of the same food that clogged their arteries in the first place. Several members of the American Heart Association who advocated transfats as healthier went on to die of heart disease - in large part because they ate too many foods like margarine and our bodies can't process the artificial, hydrogenated oils the way we can saturated fat. How's all that for irony? But sprinkle some money on politicians and you can pretend it's not there. Or you can pretend it's all "free choice." (Don't even get me started on banking fraud; I tried to warn readers of this list in 2000 that Bush was going to be a disaster for the financial markets.) The guilty? Well, there are no Nuremberg Trials - I live down the street from a fellow who was an army typist at Nuremberg, by the way. In an age where six sigma supplies us with almost perfectly produced iPods, the guilty are stuck in the same system of bad food, defective diagnostics and poor quality treatments as the rest of us. When they get sick, these medical providers are so often in such deep denial they don't even know where to begin to help themselves. They can't believe that a chemical engineer has read the chemotherapy literature more thoroughly than they have or that a guy like me with an English degree understands autoimmunity and viruses better. They aren't much different from that astronomer in _Lost in the Ruins_ who knows what's going on 10 billion light years away but he doesn't know his wife might leave him down the street. They'd rather continue to live in blissful ignorance thinking the ex-cheerleader turned drug company rep would never slant the data to boost her sales. The Nazis did what they did to avoid responsibility, to avoid staring in the mirror and seeing their sins for what they were. People can't help making mistakes and you can't begin to have a chance of being saved until you admit that. The moral problems posed by existence never really go away. They just change form. We have choices at the polls those living in Nazi Germany didn't; then again - do we really? So point your lapsometer in the other direction. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, it ain't lithium, babe. 1. For those who haven't followed recent research, Alzheimer's appears to be a latent herpes (HSV-1) infection reawakening in the brain as the immune system ages. The result is a kind of type III diabetes for neurons. 2. Vitamin D levels are a greater predictor of susceptibility to the flu and vitamin D shots can be better at protecting from the flu than specific vaccinations [PMID 16959053]. Not that you'd know from any of the recent coverage of the flu. Vitamin D isn't a patented antiviral like Tamiflu and it doesn't buy ads for itself on network TV. From jp at jlarsp.com Sun May 3 12:37:44 2009 From: jp at jlarsp.com (John Pearson) Date: Sun, 3 May 2009 11:37:44 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Lapsometric Research In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Wade, Thanks for the extended post. And right on. Everything you say is true. John On May 2, 2009, at 3:38 PM, Wade Riddick wrote: >> Perhaps Lapsometric research is indeed making progress -- see: >> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8025454.stm > > I think you've got this problem turned on its head. The "better > living > through chemistry" crowd has screwed up matters not at the stage of > lithium > but at the stage before lithium. > > The list has been down this road before about ten years back when the > molecules du jour were the then novel SSRIs, which turn out to have > not > only antidepressant qualities but also help the brain stave off the > drop in > neurogeneration as it ages [PMID 12726822]. These are great drugs > if you > need them (and respond) but a lot of people on the list pointed out > that we > ought to ask if we could pursue alternatives that kept us from > getting the > problems that need drugs in the first place. This side of the > debate was, > of course, talking about the moral dimension but I would point to > still > other bad decisions about chemistry in addition to that. > > I'm pretty sure lithium was the mood stabilizing wonder drug on > which Percy > based his heavy sodium spoof. There are other elemental wonder > drugs. The > Russians have done some interesting work on the life-extending > properties > of 25Mg2+ [PMID 16049349, 16043694]. Strontium improves bone > health. Zinc > and magnesium both have anti-inflammatory properties and our modern > diets > are pretty deficient in them, partly because of the way we strip > fiber from > grains in food processing. > > The reasons we use both lithium and fluoride are closely > interrelated. Our > teeth decay because we consume too little fiber and too much sugar. > This > is a consciously planned change in our diet brought about without any > debate by the modern food processing industry. The solution for these > rotting teeth isn't to stop subsidizing bad food with our tax > dollars or > use the tax system to properly price the cost to individuals for > consuming > these foods. We like these foods too much to give them up because > chronic > consumption trips our adrenal stress response, floods our arteries > with > insulin and glucose and releases dopamine on the same circuit > stimulated by > smoking and cocaine, albeit at a more moderate pace. No, we don't > stop the > bad behavior. Our solution for tooth decay is to chronically dose the > population with antibiotics (in this case fluoride) to the point our > soils > are so contaminated we can't safely grow tea leaves in them. > > Fluoride is a real health risk. In addition to harming our bones > over the > years, it also damages our gut flora - like any chronically consumed > antibiotic would. You can't get the medical community to admit this > yet. > You can get them to admit we take fluoride for its antibiotic > properties. > You can get them to admit we need friendly gut bacteria for a well- > balanced > immune system and you can even get them to admit that chronic > antibiotic > use is a bad idea. But you can't get them to go from point A to > point C. > There's a ton of money sprinkled on politicians to prevent that from > occurring in public rhetoric. Despite the potential for profound > effects, > we have been experimenting on people's health with fluoride for more > than > half a century with no scientific data justifying our actions. Like > legalizing transfats and declaring them safer than regular fats, > government > bodies just went out and did it - often to satisfy an unscrutinized > interest group lavishing campaign cash on politicians. > > So we take fluoride unnecessarily to balance out other bad chemistry > decisions we don't want to talk about. Lithium helps counterbalance > another end of the sugar problem. Insulin resistance in neurons > activates > GSK-3beta - which lithium downregulates [PMID 18322101]. GSK-3beta > causes > chronic inflammation and contributes to epilepsy, Alzheimer's[1] and a > number of other neurodegenerative conditions associated with diabetes, > often increasing the risk for depression as the brain gets damaged and > neurogeneration fails to keep pace. That leaves particularly > vulnerable > individuals contemplating suicide. > > In the case of lithium, adding it to the water supply at currently > used > therapeutic doses would pose problems including kidney damage and > tumor > formation. But we don't have good data on Japanese suicide rates a > century > ago so no one really notices what the modern diet has done. We just > notice > the lithium and we're surprised that such low amounts still have an > effect. > > Why don't we notice the dietary changes? Aside from the data > problem, we > have a system that rewards blindness. Think about who funds most of > this > medical and nutritional research - drug and food companies. As Upton > Sinclair said, "[i]t is difficult to get a man to understand > something when > his salary depends on his not understanding it." Even Warren Buffet > - who > understands the fraud in the banking system and has given Bill Gates > tons > of money for a medical-related foundation - owns Coca-Cola stock and > eats > fast food. > > A year or two ago, some people openly speculated about putting > statins in > the water supply. Again, we can't challenge the lifestyle > assumptions that > give us the cholesterol problem in the first place. Instead we > think about > putting people on dangerous drugs that can destroy our muscles and may > cause Parkinson's. > > Guess what? Our water is already medicated. A certain amount of > the drugs > we consume - whether pot or a prescription - never really > metabolizes and > it washes back into the sewage for recycling. Water treatment systems > aren't designed to process some of these molecules and the rest of > us wind > up reconsuming them in the recycled water, albeit at much lower than > therapeutic doses exposing us to all sorts of poorly understood, > complex, > subtle effects. > > I'm knowledgeable on these subjects because I nearly succumbed to > mercury > poisoning when an amalgam filling cracked. I'm now severely > autoimmune. > Amalgams are yet another modern "innovation" in health care that > people are > simply exposed to with zero scientific data to validate their safety > or > efficacy. They were "grandfathered in" and it's widely acknowledged > that > they could never pass the FDA's contemporary approval process > because of > their toxicity risk. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin and, surprise, > causes > autoimmunity in lab animals. (We can't study the dose I was exposed > to in > people because that would be unethical...) > > Of course when I started reading Walker Percy as a teenager, I > didn't think > his themes about modern chemistry's abusive potential applied to > me. At > the time I didn't understand how I was sick or that I was at any risk. > > Percy wrote of how the Nazi's reliance on modern economic production > methods represented a natural culmination of an evolving death > culture. > When the Nazis dispensed with God, their compassion decayed into > pity and a > search for salvation turned into a search for transcendence with the > nation > and nationalism substituted as the new religion. Their quest for > efficiency lead to modernizing the old pogrom with Henry Ford-style > assembly line death factories and Zyklon B to euthanize their > scapegoats. > Jews, gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and other culpable suspects in > Germany's fall from grace were put out of their misery. Nazis > bureaucratized it and applied modern institutions, thus showing that > element of the modern drive with a purity never before witnessed. > It was > the zenith of a death culture that tried to eradicate all excuses for > imperfection - essentially punishing man himself for the human > condition. > Man busy at work trying to perfect mankind - and having to get rid > of other > men to do it. > > Percy liked to zero in on willful ignorance - alcohol, drugs, > ideology. > Excuses provided irony and fodder for plot. But of course to spot the > irony the reader must have at least a glimmer of self-awareness and > thus a > chance at being touched by the ghost in the machine. It was that > predicament that came from being both a thing, an animal and having > a soul. > How do we live responsibly with our natural desires - our natural > selves as > biological entities as well as creatures? I never thought such > questions > would so preoccupy me. The things we will do to avoid acknowledging > and > paying for our sins. The bill does add up. > > I will never have affordable health insurance. My sin? Being a > casualty > of bad science. Being an error in the equation. Being an > inconvenient > victim of a very profitable set of businesses with rhetorical chinks > they > don't want exposed. I think about the people who don't have the > education > or the resources to survive what I did. They don't have the same > chance to > speak because they're largely crippled or dead. In most cases, they > never > get far enough to figure out want went wrong. They don't die with any > answers. > > I never thought growing up, watching my parents fight the remnants of > segregation in Baton Rouge I would find myself - white, well- > educated and > upper middle class - so discriminated against for circumstances > beyond my > control. My situation is not as rare as you think. I'm only rare > in the > degree to which I understand my own situation and I've recovered > enough to > be articulate about it. > > There are a lot of chronically ill people in my situation. Many of > them > are innocent victims of disease or crime. Many of the first > responders on > 9/11 had their lungs destroyed because the EPA lied about the air > quality > at ground zero. Then they got cut from their insurance because they > suddenly had a "pre-existing" condition. > > Where is the compassion? > > (Nobody seems to want to talk about Michael Moore's movie, _Sicko_, > they > way they did Fahrenheit 911.) > > What's worse is that estimates say in 2001 more than 100,000 hospital > patients alone died from avoidable medical errors. This doesn't > even begin > to tally up the deaths from outpatient treatment errors. We had a > war on > terror over 3000 deaths but never a war on error. Detroit has better > methods for catching defective rivets than doctors do for catching > their > errors - because car owners have more secure property rights than > patients > do over our own bodies. We have a medical industry that goes to great > lengths to avoid any responsibility for its actions. > > We may not line up people we don't like into gas chambers anymore, > but we > certainly have a very rational system that concentrates the victims > of bad > medicine into their own homes or hospices waiting to die, locking > them away > from public view while their family finances erode. Just like the > Jews who > got bussed out of sight, the chronically ill aren't out and about on > the > talk show circuit; our participation in life is limited by > circumstance > rather than by barbed wire and machine guns. > > It's not Auschwitz but it does happen. People get pumped full of > schizophrenia drugs all because they have an intolerance to gluten > that > affects their mind and the doctor screwed up the diagnosis. People > die of > the flu because they get stuck in the hospital and become vitamin D > deficient when the dumb orderlies won't take them out to get a little > sunshine[2]. Patients recovering from open heart surgery can call > down to > McDonald's and eat more of the same food that clogged their arteries > in the > first place. Several members of the American Heart Association who > advocated transfats as healthier went on to die of heart disease - > in large > part because they ate too many foods like margarine and our bodies > can't > process the artificial, hydrogenated oils the way we can saturated > fat. > > How's all that for irony? > > But sprinkle some money on politicians and you can pretend it's not > there. > Or you can pretend it's all "free choice." > > (Don't even get me started on banking fraud; I tried to warn readers > of > this list in 2000 that Bush was going to be a disaster for the > financial > markets.) > > The guilty? > > Well, there are no Nuremberg Trials - I live down the street from a > fellow > who was an army typist at Nuremberg, by the way. In an age where > six sigma > supplies us with almost perfectly produced iPods, the guilty are > stuck in > the same system of bad food, defective diagnostics and poor quality > treatments as the rest of us. When they get sick, these medical > providers > are so often in such deep denial they don't even know where to begin > to > help themselves. They can't believe that a chemical engineer has > read the > chemotherapy literature more thoroughly than they have or that a guy > like > me with an English degree understands autoimmunity and viruses better. > They aren't much different from that astronomer in _Lost in the > Ruins_ who > knows what's going on 10 billion light years away but he doesn't > know his > wife might leave him down the street. They'd rather continue to > live in > blissful ignorance thinking the ex-cheerleader turned drug company rep > would never slant the data to boost her sales. > > The Nazis did what they did to avoid responsibility, to avoid > staring in > the mirror and seeing their sins for what they were. People can't > help > making mistakes and you can't begin to have a chance of being saved > until > you admit that. The moral problems posed by existence never really go > away. They just change form. We have choices at the polls those > living in > Nazi Germany didn't; then again - do we really? > > So point your lapsometer in the other direction. To paraphrase Bob > Dylan, > it ain't lithium, babe. > > 1. For those who haven't followed recent research, Alzheimer's > appears to > be a latent herpes (HSV-1) infection reawakening in the brain as the > immune > system ages. The result is a kind of type III diabetes for neurons. > > 2. Vitamin D levels are a greater predictor of susceptibility to > the flu > and vitamin D shots can be better at protecting from the flu than > specific > vaccinations [PMID 16959053]. Not that you'd know from any of the > recent > coverage of the flu. Vitamin D isn't a patented antiviral like > Tamiflu and > it doesn't buy ads for itself on network TV. > > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy From marcus at loyno.edu Tue May 5 08:21:46 2009 From: marcus at loyno.edu (marcus at loyno.edu) Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 06:21:46 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] "Lost Chapter" of Confederacy of Dunces acted out in court Message-ID: <4a002f5a.2f2.24e168.226@loyno.edu> I was recently thinking that Toole's world has evaporated, but then something like this pops into view. Marcus Smith Hemmed in over skirt, man sues by Gwen Filosa, The Times-Picayune Monday May 04, 2009, 10:50 PM Jeremy Don Kerr enjoys wearing a skirt in public. And he wants a federal court to ensure that a man can do so in peace. Kerr has sued the New Orleans Police Department in U.S. District Court over a May 2008 incident in which he says a uniformed officer threatened to arrest him for wearing a black pinstriped skirt, hemmed two inches above the knee, instead of pants to Municipal Court. "He followed me out of the courtroom yelling at me, he grabs me by the shoulder and pulls me around, " Kerr said Monday. "He had no right to ask me that question. You couldn't ask a woman, 'Why are you wearing pants?' " In a civil-rights lawsuit filed last month, Kerr describes himself as "a heterosexual male of Scottish ancestry" who was made a victim of discrimination by his choice of attire. He seeks a declaratory judgment saying that NOPD violated his rights and $1 in damages, along with court fees. In addition, Kerr wants U.S. District Court Judge Helen Berrigan to bar the NOPD from prohibiting anyone in the city "unfettered access to public facilities because of sex discrimination that is based on gender stereotyping." Officer Glen Tate demanded that Kerr explain why he was in a skirt, Kerr says, asking at one point if he was a woman. "He said, 'Are you going to make me arrest you and find out?' " Kerr recalled. "He threatened to take me out of the courthouse and put me in Orleans Parish Prison over a simple choice of attire." The NOPD hasn't been served with the lawsuit and hasn't answered the claim in court. Kerr, 37, a native of Lake Charles, left a college teaching career in the Midwest to return to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. He earned a doctorate in sociology, with a focus on criminology, at the University of Kentucky. Kerr began wearing skirts in 2003 after a friend suggested he'd look as if he were in a kilt. He prefers a skirt when dancing at clubs along Frenchmen Street or strolling New Orleans neighborhoods. He finds skirts more comfortable than pants, and wears them with button-down oxfords or T-shirts. Kerr wore a skirt to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. "The comments are overwhelmingly positive, " he said. "Women love it, people of all ages and all races love it across the board." He wears pants for his job selling scooters and motorbikes, he said. He has been kicked out of restaurants and barred from bars over his clothing choice, which he points out is a practice that began thousands of years ago. The New York and Paris runways in January featured men in skirts, dressed by designers Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs. "I'm a straight man, " Kerr said. "A lot of people seem to believe if I'm in a skirt it must mean that I'm gay. It's a choice in clothing style. One hundred years ago women could only wear dresses and skirts, and men could only wear pants." Kerr's alleged clash with the officer took place at Municipal Court on May 5, 2008, the suit says, when Kerr was appearing on a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace. The case was later dropped but required a second trip to the courthouse, Kerr said. This time, Kerr wore pants in case he ran into Tate. "I was scared, " Kerr said. "He was there." http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05/hemmed_in_over_skirt_man_sues.html From lowry.charles at gmail.com Tue May 5 09:22:59 2009 From: lowry.charles at gmail.com (Charles Lowry) Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 09:22:59 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] "Lost Chapter" of Confederacy of Dunces acted out in court In-Reply-To: <4a002f5a.2f2.24e168.226@loyno.edu> References: <4a002f5a.2f2.24e168.226@loyno.edu> Message-ID: > > Toole's world has evaporated? About two years ago, I had an Ignatius J. Reilly moment in New Orleans. I was in One Shell Square, the large, white office building on Poydras Street between Carondelet and St. Charles. About two floors below me, two soldiers from God's lost battalion, obviously a mother and son, entered the elevator. She was of ordinary structure and appearance, dully dressed, perplexed and confused by life and only moderately protected by the plainest of brown coats. He was large, to the point of hulking, oddly dressed in striped dress pants, obviously the bottom half of a forty-year-old suit. The ensemble was completed by a bright green tee shirt, a red plaid hunter's coat and white dress shoes. The story quickly became clear: she worked in one of the law firms or energy companies populating the tower. She did not feel well and called him to come to her place of work to make sure that she got home safely. In the elevator he berated her, savagely and publicly, for interrupting the scholarly productivity of his afternoon and for squandering their scant resources on bottled water when surely there were free water fountains all throughout her office. He accused her of confecting a fainting spell only to avoid cooking his supper. Momentarily, I expected, Big Chief tablets would begin to fall from the son's pockets as he railed about the disappearance from society of a proper appreciation of geometry and theology. I was disappointed in that expectation but nevertheless mentally calculated the distance from Poydras Street to Constantinople Street. Chuck Lowry Brooklyn, New York -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Wed May 6 01:53:14 2009 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 22:53:14 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] "Lost Chapter" of Confederacy of Dunces acted out in court In-Reply-To: References: <4a002f5a.2f2.24e168.226@loyno.edu> Message-ID: Surely this is fiction, Chuck. Great for a laugh during my May malaise. --Rhonda "You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." Walker Percy Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 09:22:59 -0400 From: lowry.charles at gmail.com To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: Re: [percy-l] "Lost Chapter" of Confederacy of Dunces acted out in court Toole's world has evaporated? About two years ago, I had an Ignatius J. Reilly moment in New Orleans. I was in One Shell Square, the large, white office building on Poydras Street between Carondelet and St. Charles. About two floors below me, two soldiers from God's lost battalion, obviously a mother and son, entered the elevator. She was of ordinary structure and appearance, dully dressed, perplexed and confused by life and only moderately protected by the plainest of brown coats. He was large, to the point of hulking, oddly dressed in striped dress pants, obviously the bottom half of a forty-year-old suit. The ensemble was completed by a bright green tee shirt, a red plaid hunter's coat and white dress shoes. The story quickly became clear: she worked in one of the law firms or energy companies populating the tower. She did not feel well and called him to come to her place of work to make sure that she got home safely. In the elevator he berated her, savagely and publicly, for interrupting the scholarly productivity of his afternoon and for squandering their scant resources on bottled water when surely there were free water fountains all throughout her office. He accused her of confecting a fainting spell only to avoid cooking his supper. Momentarily, I expected, Big Chief tablets would begin to fall from the son's pockets as he railed about the disappearance from society of a proper appreciation of geometry and theology. I was disappointed in that expectation but nevertheless mentally calculated the distance from Poydras Street to Constantinople Street. Chuck Lowry Brooklyn, New York _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail? has ever-growing storage! Don?t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_052009 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: