Incident Report

On Thursday, March 20, 2014, at 0725 hours, I was crossing the parking lot on the west side of the Texas Department of Public Safety complex at 5508 North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, walking from the CapMetro Rapid bus stop to the front door of the A Building, when my right foot struck a parking curb stone and I fell forward striking my left knee, my right knee, my left hand, left shoulder, and left side of my face on the pavement, in that order. 

The parking lot is not lit; and like all of the other areas, is designed for vehicular, not pedestrian, traffic.

I reported the incident to the security guard at the front desk who told me to contact my supervisor.  After cleaning up the superficial but conspicuous wounds, I reported for work, and told my supervisor what happened.  At 11:30 AM, I was taken to a contract clinic for a drug screen and other medical inspections.  

I have not had a tetanus shot in over ten years.  However, the clinic was out of tetanus serum, so I rode with their driver to another site. 

The technician there gave me a sheaf of papers to sign. One of the pages said that DTP (diphthera-tetanus-pertussis) serum is contra-indicated for children over seven, for juveniles, and for adults.  I asked her about that and she replied that I was not getting DTP.  I asked to see the vial. She said that she discarded it into a secure bin.  I asked for the lot number and she gave me that. 

I was released at 3:30 PM and reported back at work.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Bloodless Corpse

Redshirts: Expendable in Fact and Fiction

How to Start Your Own Country

Long before admirers of Ayn Rand dreamed of creating their own “Galt’s Gulch” secret retreat, adventurers and utopians started or tried to start their own independent communities.  California’s Utopian Colonies by Robert V. Hine described many. However, a subtle difference separates those who dream of their own nation. How to Start Your Own Country by Erwin S. Strauss is a taxonomic review of several modern ventures. 

Realize, though, that an entire subset of numismatics is given over to micro-nations just because so many of these ventures are known from the 19^th century forward.  Many issued their own stamps, coins, and notes.  Indeed, the “Pine Tree Shillings” of Massachusetts, all dated 1652 because no king was on the throne, are evidence of that colony’s intention to make itself an independent nation, invading even New Hampshire (temporarily) and taking Maine from France (until relinquished to the USA in 1820).   Here in Texas, the local banner flies no higher than the flag of the USA, but can be much larger.  So, if you want to start your own country, you are not alone.

How to Start Your Own Country is a classic.  Published first by Loompanics in 1979, a second expanded edition was produced in 1984, copyrighted to the author and published under the banner of “Breakout Productions” though still geo-linked to Loompanics.  Strauss is best known to science fiction fans.  His father was a diplomat who got the family out of Nazi Germany before the ax fell.  Strauss grew up in Washington DC and claims a feel for the way diplomacy works.  He attempted his own “Jolly Roger” scheme to launch a gambling ship on the high seas, free of government interference, but abandoned it as ultimately unworkable. 

Obverse of "Republic of Minerva" coin.
Gold and silver.
The Republic of Minerva was defeated
by a boatload of natives with at least
one rifle.

To fund that venture, Strauss signed on as an engineer on an Alaska Pipeline in 1972.  Clearing the decks for that action, he sold his vitamin business to Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw.  His degree in electrical engineering from MIT was jeopardized when he was suspended for a year for contracting the publication of standard textbooks in Hong Kong so that he could undersell the campus bookstore, in part because he was not paying copyright royalties to the professors.  No one could be friendlier to libertarians and Objectivists – and no one could be harsher.  In one parody, he was cast as “Mr. Strauss” the “Mr. Spock” of a starship Free Enterprise: he is ruled by logic, and not influenced by emotion.

 Of all the ventures, Sealand was and is the most successful because they had a workable business plan.  As a “pirate radio” station they had a service to sell and an audience to sell to advertisers.  Contrary to that, many libertarians thought that just wanting to be free and gathering freedom-loving individualists would be enough to ensure success.  It was not, empirically never has been, and logically cannot be.  Most of this book consists of an anthology of tragicomic operettas of brave libertarians tripping over their shoe laces.

Except for Sealand.

That worked.

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How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World

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Pi in the Sky over Austin

Coming home at 6:30 PM, I looked up and saw a strange cloud formation... it resolved...  3 141592...

Five sky-writing aircraft from AirSign, a Florida aerial advertising company, will write out π, the Greek letter pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The calculation produces an unending series of digits, beginning with 3.141592. In a press release, the company said that its pilots will produce “several hundred characters” of the numerical sequence.  Tomorrow, the company explained, is March 14, or 3.14,  national "Pi Day."  Building on that, the company says the planes will begin their 90-minute writing process at 6:28 p.m. because “6:28 is pi times two, a number some believe is the truer reflection of the power of the circle.  (The Austin-American Statesman here.)

They circled twice continuing the expansion.

If you want a quick approximation, 355\113 = 3.141592... which is better than 22/7 = 3.1428...  and it has an order and symmetry that makes it easy to remember: 3 55 over 11 3: all the numbers are odd, 1-3-5: 355113 starts and ends with 3.  It's a piece of cake, well, okay, a piece of pie...

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Happy Pi Day 2013
Patterns in Pi

Morality and Ethics

Ayn Rand called her theory of egoism "Objectivist ethics." In her essays, she wrote mostly about morality and very little about ethics. She took the English language as she found it. Despite the fact that she knew perhaps four languages (Russian, French, German, and English), Rand did not delve into linguistic analysis. In other languages, "ethics" and "morality" do not exist as separate words. In English, we commonly use the words interchangeably, just as we do for "weight" and "mass" or "speed" and "velocity." When we have technical discussions, the distinctions become important. 

On the "Galt's Gulch" discussion site of the Atlas Shrugged movie producers, the question was posed, "Is Morality Absolute?" (Read all 100+ posts here.)  My response was that morality is absolute, but moral choices are not, or they would not be choices. Rand was very clear on why a rational, volitional being needs morality. 

YOU MUST CHOOSE SOME WORK.
The work you choose depends on who you are.
Who you are also determines your work ethic.

Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe could choose to fish, or plant, or hunt. But he had to choose. The fact of choice is a moral absolute. The content of the choice is not: it is contextual. In society, pursuing a specific career is a moral choice. Many options are available. The fact that you must choose something - even choosing to be a moocher - is a moral absolute. What you choose is not absolute, but contextual; and context determines what is objectively moral, regardless of the ethical implications. 

Ethics is social conduct. I look to the fact that ethology studies the behavior of animals without any presumption of "morality."   In academic philosophy, the confusion between ethics and morality prevented any rational discoveries. Generally, when considering egoism, academic philosophers ask if egoists can be moral. They assume altruism (as an absolute) and measure all conduct (ethics) against how nice you are to other people.  In Rand's doctrine, social conduct for an egoist begins with an assumption of benevolence towards others - and expectation of the same in return. Every day we all say "Thank you" to customers and suppliers. 

In that discussion in the Gulch, frequent poster khalling challenged me to explain the difference between objective and absolute. It was an important question, a point that often confuses admirers of Rand's novels and non-fiction, especially Atlas Shrugged. In that story, the Washington gangs and their coteries of looters and moochers deny the absolute: for them everything is relative, except their demands.  But Ayn Rand called her philosophy Objectivism, not Absolutism.  The objective is that which is empirically observable and rationally explicable.  The rational-empirical method depends on certain absolutes, and does discover absolute truths, but, largely, it is contextual, especially regarding human affairs. The standard of life is absolute; your choices for your happiness depend on your context. So does ethical conduct in society.

Completing a masters in social science, I took a graduate class in "Ethics in Physics." I found that technical societies for geologists, geographers, engineers of all kinds, have different statements of professional ethics. They all boil down to "be nice; do no harm." But they are all different in detail, and properly so. The work of a geographer is materially different than that of a geologist. 

RATIONAL-EMPIRICISM 

I also attended a seminar in the teaching of ethics to graduate students in counseling. As I recall, their statement of ethics runs 25 pages. Moreover, the point of the seminar was that to practice as a counselor - to practice ethically - you need to do more than attempt to apply the ethics document. Life is more complicated than that: the document is a guide. Ethical choices are highly contextual. 

I was working in transportation when a colleague suggested that I take a class in computer programming "so the people in data processing can't hand you a bunch of baloney." I took a class and liked it. I went to work as a programmer. On a project, no one wanted to write the user manual. Having published a few articles and two small books, I did the documentation. I became a technical writer. When the current recession started, I took a part-time job as a security guard. As the economy continued to slide, I needed a four-year degree to even apply for work as a technical writer, so I earned one in criminology. Those were all moral choices, but ethics had nothing to do with it. 

khalling wrote: "Ethics and Morality are blood brothers just like geometry and algebra can be expressed in similar ways." In fact, of course, blood brothers are genetically unrelated. Becoming blood brothers is more like a marriage ceremony. If you look at any modern textbook in geometry for mathematics majors, you will find no drawings. It is all algebra. I understand the point: proper ethical conduct in society depends on a correct morality of self-interest. As for the analogy to geometry and algebra, having re-read Introduction to the Objectivist Epistemology for a discussion on "Galt's Gulch", I now just started George Boole's Law of Thought - and I had a similar observation: reading Boole after Rand was like finding the algebra in geometry.

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The Public Good be Damned

On the "Galt's Gulch" website of the Atlas Shrugged movie producers, one of the regular writers asked about "Page 1069: What's Next?" (See here.) Everyone there knows that the paperback edition of the novel runs 1068 pages.  In other words, what indication (if any) suggests that the political agenda - or the wider philosophical program - of the strikers would be long-lasting?

The message of Atlas Shrugged is that the evils of taxation and regulation are the result of producers accepting an unearned guilt. If any previous generation had spoken the words of Rearden at his trial, d'Anconia at the reception, or Galt on the radio, the game of the looters and moochers would have been over. Only William Henry Vanderbilt is on record - and even so he was also proud of his philanthropy.

"In 1883, reporter John Dickinson Sherman questioned him about why he ran the limited express train: "Do your limited express trains pay or do you run them for the accommodation of the public?" Vanderbilt responded with: "Accommodation of the public? The public be damned! We run them because we have to. They do not pay. We have tried again and again to get the different roads to give them up; but they will run them and, of course, as long as they run them we must do the same." The interview was then published in the Chicago Daily News, but Vanderbilt's words were modified. Several accounts of the incident were then disseminated; The accounts vary in terms of who conducted the interview, under what circumstance and what was actually said. William received bad publicity and clarified his response with a subsequent interview by the Chicago Times. In that interview he was quoted saying: "Railroads are not run for the public benefit, but to pay. Incidentally, we may benefit humanity, but the aim is to earn a dividend." (Wikipedia here).  But an isolated instance is not enough to reverse a cultural trend. 

 Following Rand, many Objectivists claim to admire Ancient Greece, especially the Athenian Golden Age 480-400. But in fact, Athens itself was no friend of philosophy until after the death of Socrates, though it nurtured philosophy and art by attracting "metics", Greeks from other towns.Unable to speak in the Assembly, they wrote books and lectured in gardens. However, that launched a 500-year culture of open inquiry, learning, and exploration, both physical and intellectual. It was at Alexandria in Egypt that the word "cosmopolitan" was coined. No one was persecuted for questioning the existence of the gods, or asserting their own self-interest. Read about Aristippos of Cyrene. 

But it was not perfectly explicit or consistent. Merchants were still looked down upon. Slavery was accepted as an institution. Not the Cyreniacs, Hedonists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, Platonists, Stoics, or anyone else developed a consistent and complete philosophy of reason. But it lasted 500 years anyway. 

Rand's thesis was that once clearly articulated and demonstrated, the truths of Objectivism will endure like any other science.

Moreover, politics derives from ethics which rests on morality. In the story, Hank Rearden's oppression by the government is only the external expression of his exploitation by his family: his mother, brother, and wife all hate him - and he accepts their premises. That is most starkly evidenced in his own view (initially) of his romantic relationship with Dagny Taggart: he accepts the looters' view that sex is a base instinct - and that a woman must be protected from the shame of it.  Dagny, of course, has a more rational understanding.  

So, William Henry Vanderbilt's reply was salient, but not inclusive. It could not be: volition being as it may, we are born into our contexts; and he knew nothing of bobbed hair, bloomers, flappers, or women elected to the U.S. Senate.  So, even Vanderbilt could not articulate a post-Nietzschean egoism derived from Aristotle.  That mission is ours.

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Capitalist Culture 
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Freedom in an Unfree World

Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 2014

Bright young minds are always fun to be around. This was my third year judging the junior high school and senior high school entrants at our regional science fair.  This time, I also judged both upper and lower elementary school participants. My area is behavioral and social sciences.  I worked closely with a dozen other professionals as we judged about 70 junior and senior contestants. It is a learning experience for everyone. 

The Austin Energy Regional Science Festival website is here

I had the opportunity to review the works of several young scholars whose research made the awards. Among them were third, fourth, and fifth place middle schoolers Will Pasquarette ("How does the type of music affect the ability to recall a memory?"), Dara Christensen ("How does the sense of smell affect your memory?"), and Mark Holstrum ("Notetaking").  I also judged for seniors Katelynn Marsan ("Effects of Biased Verbal Instructions on Student Performance") and Saloni Gyani ("Alteration of Memory and Perception through Optogenetics"), who took first and second place honors.  Ms. Marsan also garnered a special Superintendent's Award. Ms. Saloni was recognized for a special award by the American Psychological Association.

But "85% of success is showing up," said Woody Allen.  Of the nearly 3,000 entrants, I saw only a few who were unprepared. Still, they showed up, saw the process, learned from their peers, and discovered what is expected. The requirements are not trivial. Students, parents, and teachers are responsible for many significant and official forms and filings; and more often, it is the adults, not the kids, who failed to address the details.  

This year about 800 junior and senior high schoolers
and 2000 elementary schoolers participated.

That speaks to several levels of challenge. Cream rises, and the winners are usually obvious by inspection; but the distance from first to fifth is short, and the gap from fifth to "thanks for showing up" is even narrower. One of the outstanding entrants in one of my sessions was bumped down twice by successive rounds of review by other judges. Nothing was wrong with the student's work. Others were judged to be better.  

Also, it is a fact that schools with fewer resources field fewer contestants. That said, one of my teams was shocked to find that one  student needed to know more about statistics, so she sent emails to all of the mathematics and science teachers in her school, and got no replies. She got better responses from UT graduate students: several of them showed her the math that she needed to teach herself.  

Public school, private school,
and home-schooled students all competed.

Another barrier is that sociology is considered the idiot child of the science family with the S in STEM being redundant of TEM. The truth is that social science education includes the scientific method as a rubric, expressly, consciously (even self-consciously), and repeatedly. Moreover, social scientists are taught the evolutions of the paradigms that brought us to our current state. The physical sciences seldom teach the scientific method explicitly. Worse, they deliver a product that is wrapped for consumption as if it were always this way. From Ampere to Gauss to Maxwell to Heisenberg, it is a straight line. They never learn the original statement of Ohm's Law - or that it was rejected by the scientific community for personal reasons.  (See "Is Physics a Science?" here on NecessaryFacts.)

So, while physics and astronomy, the chemistries and the engineerings all enjoy the benefit of judging by degreed professionals, the standards are not so strict in behavioral and social sciences.  

It is true that any literate and intelligent person can follow the judging forms.  The questions we ask and the answers we listen for are easy to understand.  The difficulties come from differentiating among the honored winners, first through fifth, and distinguishing them from the very many worthies who also showed up.  

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Science Fair Science Fraud (2013)

America Pawned is America Pwned

Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker. 
It does not matter which side
of the counter you stand on.

Pawn shops have taken one or two thousand years of criticism.  The bottom line is that they are resources for the community.  If you want to go into business, which would offer the best opportunity: a pawn shop or a lending library? That said, the fact that pawn shop have proliferated in the suburbs is a stark narrative not captured in government statistics about gross domestic production and unemployment claims.

A new suburban tradition

The fact is that the Reagan-Clinton years were the longest period of economic expansion in American history because America was involved in no large wars and no strong government programs.  Moreover, the House and Senate majorities were close and changed frequently, denying an "imperial presidency" to the White House.  All of that changed with the 21st century.  From the Dot.Com Meltdown to 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the so-called Mortgage Crisis and the Bush/Obama Bailouts - protested by Occupy and Tea Party alike - America and the world have suffered a long recession.

Can't tell a pawn shop from a bank.

Recessions are not necessarily bad.  The last "long recession" ran from the "Crime of '73" to the Panic of 1907.  Workers formed unions and agitated for the eight-hour day while farmers called for cheap silver money to pay off their debts.  In fact, prices fell because of increased productivity from industrialism, just as our "information age" lowered transaction costs.  Back then the new technologies were the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and typewriter. That did little to assuage the farmer or factory worker who found their incomes falling faster than the prices of the things they wanted to buy.  So, too, today, are suburbanites ready customers for pawn shops because their own real incomes have fallen because  the federal government tripled the money supply.

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Fossils and Behaviors

Sub-adult American alligator 

in Pearl River Delta, Mississippi. 

Photo by Kristine Gingras 

from the journal artlcle.

Crocodiles can climb trees.  "If crocodiles were extinct and you only knew them from fossils, you wouldn't be able to guess they climb trees because they don't have any physical adaptations," University of Tennessee researcher Vladimir Dinets told Reuters. "Assumptions based on fossils," he said, "can be far less correct than people think."
The article "Climbing behaviour in extant crocodilians" by Vladimir Dinets, Adam Britton, and Matthew Shirley appeared in Herpetology Notes (Vol 7:3-7; 2013), an online journal of Societas Europaea Herpetologica. 

"Extant crocodilians are generally considered to be predominantly or semi-aquatic. And, although the role of terrestrial activity in their natural history is increasingly recognized (see, for example, an overview of terrestrial hunting in crocodilians in Dinets, 2011), they are virtually never thought of as animals capable of climbing. Their non-arboreality is often taken for granted in various analyses of tetrapod limb evolution and behaviour of extinct Archosauria (see Birn, Jeffery et al., 2012, for a discussion of the subject and a bibliography)."

Reuters news story here.  

Original journal article here.

The article and the news story both state that this is not a discovery.  Crocodiles have been reported in trees by locals as well as by scientists in the field. The authors gleaned much of their data by convenience, surfing the Web for pictures. The climbers are overwhelmingly juveniles because they have high ratios of strength to body weight: strong claws and limbs; not much to lift. Fearsome as they appear and can be - death by crocodile is a reality for rural women in Africa - like most animals, they avoid conflict, dropping into the water to escape humans in boats who come within ten feet (three meters) or so.  The thesis of the article is that we admit some ignorance before speculating on the behaviors of dinosaurs.

  

Note that the primary investigator, Vladimir Dinets, has a broad range of interests (Wikipedia here; his own blog here).  He completed his doctorate at the University of Miami in 2011 studying crocodile behaviors, including coordinated hunting, and the use of tools. His publication in an online journal (with an essentially non-academic co-worker) also marks a kind of evolution.  The traditional peer review process of print journals has always been a trade-off between the screening out of crackpots and the exclusion of originality. Also, the long lead times were acceptable in the steam age.  Cyberspace is a new environment. We can share more, faster.  Of course, survival of the fittest in science still depends on empirical validation and falsifiable testing of rationally consistent claims. More subtly, we may well be living in a Renaissance time of broad personal achievements.  Scientists take cameo roles on television shows; and Hollywood actors have degrees in science. The co-authors of the article cited here footnote their marketing interests beyond the university. 

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Epigenetics and Evolution

The Origin of What?

Epigenetics

Biohackers

Epigenetics and Evolution

The mechanism of evolution has not been discovered.  No consistent theory exists. Random mutations adapting to changing environments was the first suggestion.  When subatomic radiation was discovered, that became a proposal.  Now, epigenetics may indicate another, more powerful, model.  

Darwinian evolution does not explain the lack of intermediate forms. Scientists have bombarded fruit flies and mice with every radiation known and produced no new species.

Jason Head, assistant professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences,
at the University of Nebraska Lincoln
holds a fossil and fossil cast from the jawbone of
Barbaturex morrisoni, a large ((2 meters; 30 kgs) lizard
that coexisted with mammals in southeast Asia
40 million years ago. (Press release here.)

Epigenetics is the study of how environmental factors affect the expressions of genes.  We know that we share something like 90% of our DNA with yeasts - and yet we are very different from them. We know that strawberries have not a double helix, but a quadruple helix - yet they are not "superior" to us double helix lifeforms.  
  

A series of prehistoric creature illustrations demonstrates
the evolution of mammals through the ages.
More fact than fiction, these wild characters followed transitional Jurassic period animals
that sported mammalian skull traits and reptilian teeth.
A more familiar design, humans, mark the present.
- National Geographic, "The Rise of Mammals"

Random mutations adapting to changing environments is a (partial) explanation. Radiation seems to create such mutations, also. Epigenetics offers another aspect of understanding. It seems that the mechanisms of process are inherent in all life, but the millions of components are active or inactive according to causes we may now be coming to understand -- given that in 50 or 100 years some other engine will be discovered. 

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The Validity of the Senses

On the “Galt’s Gulch” discussion board for fans of the movie Atlas Shrugged, username Maphedus asked an old question: “How do we know whether our senses are being deceived or not?”  The easy answer is the that the primacy of reality means tautologically that reality is the primary experience: you know because you know; it is irreducible.

On a different tack, I would ask why the senses of bees, birds, and beavers are reliable for them, but ours are specially cursed?  Like them all, we, too, evolved on Earth and adapted to its changing environments. Our senses are in and of the world.  Moreover, we invent and construct transducers – telescopes, microscopes, electroscopes, spectroscopes – that extend and enhance our senses. Would you suggest that the rings of Saturn and the nucleus of a paramecium are not real?

The Outer Limits: "The Brain of Col. Barham"
is housed in a vat. Nonetheless, he adapts.

Mephesdus framed his question in some detail: "How do we know what reality is? Through our senses? If that's all it takes, then how do we know whether our senses are being deceived or not? Doesn't the existence of hallucinogenic drugs prove that our senses are not always reliable? What about optical illusions? And then there are aspects of reality which are imperceptible to our senses – how do we deal with that?"  And further, in our private discussion, he amplified his concerns: “There’s a philosophical thought experiment called "Brain in a Vat" which I think is very intriguing, and relates directly to the idea that our senses are supposedly reliable. … A variation on the "Brain in a Vat" thought experiment is presented in the sci-fi movie The Matrix, where the entire world is really just a computer program.  …  I also seem to recall an excerpt from Barbara Branden's biography of Ayn Rand, titled The Passion of Ayn Rand, in which Ayn Rand was in a hospital after surgery, heavily medicated, and a street lamp outside was casting a shadow across the window, and Ayn Rand thought it was a tree. When Barbara Branden corrected Ayn Rand, telling her that it was a street lamp and not a tree, Ayn Rand became extremely irritated at Barbara for daring to suggest that her senses could not always be trusted.”

As far as I know from second-hand reports, hallucinogenic drugs do not alter perception to the point of invention.  No one has reported something that was not “there” only that what they reported was distorted or otherwise processed into something else.  Teenage friends of mine said that the front grills of automobiles looked like animals.  They did not claim that animals seemed to exist where no animals were found.  This supports the facts that we evolved to perceive. While various roots, shoots, herbs, and berries variously prepared can affectively change our mental processes, the facts of reality are not alterable.  That is why they are reality, and not the products of our (altered) consciousness.

 

Paramecium: real or artifact of misperception?

The “Brain in a Vat” paradox is another sophistry.  We could also ask: “How do we know that we are not really angels and rather than just corporeal husks in which the consciousness of angels have been entrapped?”  In order to answer either question, you would have to be “outside” the question, able to see the vats, the Matrix, or the entrapped angels.  Moreover, in the movies of the Matrix triology, very many unresolved paradoxes would plague any inhabitant.  Agents can take over any entity, as when Smith became a helicopter pilot.  Did the pilot never go home to his wife? Will she and the kids and the air traffic controllers and the commanding officer and their bunkmates all not wonder what happened?  We do not have such problems with reality because reality is real.

“Ayn Rand on drugs” is compelling to contemplate.  In truth, she was on Benzadrine.  But certainly in the hospital scene, the question was not the validity of her senses per se but of her mental processes.  The shadows were whatever they were, but it was her interpretation of them that defined them.  From Plato’s Cave to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the “stuff” is unarguable; what we make of it is highly debatable.

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The Weatherman Songbook

"Some of the best things in life are free
if you can steal them from the bourgeosie!"
To the tune of "Money", last month, I sang the old lyrics for a cashier at the Wheatsville Co-op.  

When Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn came to Eastern Michigan University to speak to the New Students for a Democratic Society in 2010, I was there. Bill did not recognize me. He did not really know me even though I was at the Flint War Council, but I was two generations older than everyone else. He seemed to know that he might remember me, but I did not introduce myself.  

He was amiable and cordial, as is his nature.  In fact, that is a point noted by my Objectivist comrades in a discussion about recent debate between Ayres and Dinesh D'Souza.  Myself, I guess it is a toss-up because I perceive D'Souza as a mystic, the antithesis of Christopher Hitchens, whom he also debated.  The enemy of my enemy is whatever.

These are the songs as I remember them from the Flint War Council, December 30, 1969.

The best things in life are free
If you can steal them from the bourgeosie
Communism! That's what we do.
Communism! That's what we do.

Rockefeller's sure acting big.
One of these days' were gonna off that pig!
Communism! That's what we do.
Communism! That's what we do.

Red Party

To the tune of "Dream Lover"

When we were young we went astray

With no Red Party to lead the way.

Red Party is coming soon.

We kicked the radish out last June*

Because we need

a Party

to lead the Fight

We need Red Party! so we can 

learn to struggle right.

*Double entendre: 

The social democratic parties of Europe (like the Democratic Party of the USA today) are "red on the outside but white on the inside." (Just ask any Occupier or WTO Protestor.) Weatherman SDS declared itself sui generis at the June 1969 central committee meeting.  Even more here.

Weatherman (to the tune of the Beatles' "Nowhere Man")

He's a real Weatherman

Tearing up the motherland

Trashes banks,  [something else], kills pigs, and everything.

Knows just what he's fighting for:

Victory in people's war

Isn't he a lot like you and me.

Weatherman Machine

(Beatles "Yellow Submarine")

We all live in a Weatherman Machine

Weatherman Machine

Weatherman Machine

....

And our friends are all in jail

Many more of us

Are out on bail

(chorus repeat).

But it was a short-lived romance. When they went underground, I did not.  When the Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol, the New York City Police Command Center, and other targets, I felt nothing. The revolution was over and history left them behind. It was a point made to me in the fall of 1969 when Weatherman attacked Chicago with their "Days of Rage" - another place I was not at that time.  Someone who had been at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August 1968 asked me rhetorically why SDS was not at Grant Park.  Actually, Tom Hayden and many others were, but not the Weathermen.  As true radicals, they denounced the protests at the DNC as mere reformism and refused to participate.  So, they held their own party, a year later. 

After Ayres and Dohrn spoke at EMU, I wrote two letters to the editors. One was printed in the Ann Arbor News.  The other ran in the Eastern Echo.  I reminded them that they had been terrorists and had not retracted their positions.  Ayres's memoir Fugitive Days was published immediately before September 11, 2001, which was bad timing; and his publication tour was abandoned. President Barack Obama was ten years old when the Weather Underground began its campaign of terror. By the time he entered college, the party was over and the veil of history had softened the edges of propaganda by deed.