My CMS The View from a New City

Today we visited the Wadi which Jesus used to get from Nazareth to the sea of Galilee.  We also visited sites believed to be where He delivered the sermon on the mount, and where he gave the sealing keys to Peter.  The day was so pleasant, it was not hard to imagine the Savior delivering the sermon on the mount to his disciples in just such a setting.

Epiphanies: Dan Peterson taught us that the word for faith in the bible should be translated as trust, as in trust in the Savior not as belief in some doctrine.  We trust Him to do right.  Also saw the dangerous looking thistles which could have given meaning to the statement to Paul, “why do you kick against the pricks.”

After reading the 18th chapter of 1 Kings last night, we visited Carmel today where Elijah challenged the priests of Baal to a duel to see whose God could consume an offering without the humans setting it on fire. The reading was a mere coincidence except that there is no such thing as coincidence.

The day started off with a visit to Caesarea and ended up in Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee. We visited Nazareth where Jesus spent his childhood, but it didn’t look much like the Nazareth of Jesus’ time, it now being a modern city.  But we also visited Zippora, right next door which is an archaeological site from the time of Christ. There we got a real feel for the conditions in which the Savior lived.  Dan Peterson made the point that this experience makes concrete to us that Christ was a real person who lived in a real place and a time certain.

Here we are in Tel Aviv.  On the plane from Prague the young father in the seat next to my wife told her that he was tired of vacationing after five days in Prague and would be glad to get home to Tel Aviv.  The views around Tel Aviv are not nearly as green as the landscape around Prague. What must matter is what you call home.

Coming to Israel requires that one demonstrate one’s bona-fides several times by producing documentation–passport, etc. It is as if the most important thing about a new birth is the certificate. The greatest miracle is that “there you are”, a human being in existence. The circumstances of your birth should be less important than the fact of your birth. I guess it simplifies things a lot to have a certificate that you exist, so people can ignore the fact that “there you are,” a miracle. As Sartre said, “existence precedes essence.” Essence, I suppose, is a mental construct. Existence is undeniable.

Right now I am in Prague, Czech Republic. We are traveling to Israel tomorrow.  Good thing I left the country.  If I had stayed in Utah, I would have died from hay fever.  Even now I continue to suffer, but much less so.  Something is in full bloom in Utah that doesn’t like me.

Had authentic German (or Czech) Swinebratten last night.  As I watched other guests at the restaurant drink their beer, I couldn’t help but think that the beer enabled the sociability they enjoyed and allowed them to tolerate life in an eleventh century town.  It probably had a lot to do with why they are still here, but who am if to judge.  No wonder the Gospel isn’t the rage here.

The town is certainly beautiful. Nothing in Utah like it.

Is one post a year enough? I have spent the last year transferring juristec.com from the Oracle Cloud to a server based application. In the Process I had to relearn Solaris and install a solaris server in the office. The program is now much improved, but still in development. To get a glimpse of it, click on Juristec.com on the front page of mmmimd.com.

I’m back.  Since the last post I have written and installed on the Oracle Cloud Service a collections program using Oracle ADF.  See it at Juristec.com. I have also recently moved to my new law office at 5383 South 900 East, Suite 206, Salt Lake City, 84117.

On October 30th I took the eleven-year-old scouts to see Judge Bruce Luebeck at his courtroom in South Jordan.  He showed us the courtroom and the holding cell where prisoners are kept while waiting for their case to be heard.  He explained that recidivism rates are very high.  He said that sixty percent of the defendants he places on probation fail to complete their term of probation without another offense.  My five scouts seemed to enjoy the visit.

When I was young I was anxious to excel. I remember thinking how great it would be if I could freeze the whole world for a period of time while I learned what I needed to get ahead, then unstop everything and demonstrate my amazing skill. Now that I am older–“old”– excelling doesn’t seem so important. Now I fret that everyone else isn’t progressing like they should. Maybe they were frozen for a time.

Have you noticed it? How often authorities elect to punish the entire population of innocent people to avoid doing a competent job of identifying the guilty. The security check at the airport is an example: every passenger must submit to the inconvenience and indignity of official groping and scanning to prevent the minuscule minority of terrorists from succeeding. I am frustrated every time I hear a policeman advise everyone in the population to prevent theft and burglary by making sure their houses and cars are always locked and their valuables kept out of sight; especially since, as a lawyer, I see first-hand what a poor job society does of handling the guilty once they are identified. I am aware of a large hospital chain that chose to avoid pursuing the small percentage of its patients who failed to pay their bills by allowing collection agents to grill every conscious incoming patient about their financial resources.

One of the many problems with this punish-the-innocent policy for preventing the guilty is the sheer inefficiency of it all. There must be better ways to achieve the desired result. Can’t we develop a smart bomb that will avoid all this collateral damage?

This all came to mind yesterday when I attempted to help Jeff and Vicky renew their state identification cards.  Jeff is my disabled son and Vicky is his more severely disabled wife.  At the counter, once their number had been called, Jeff presented his soon-to-expire state ID, his original birth certificate, and his original Social Security card and was granted a renewal. But Vicky over the years has misplaced her Social Security card, so she was only able to present her currently valid, picture, state Id, her original birth certificate, and an original document, issued by Social Security, that contained her name and Social Security number. Her renewal was denied because the only forms the bureaucrats at the drivers license division will accept to verify ones Social Security number are either an original Social Security card, a W2 or a 1099. Vicky will never be employed, so a W2 or a 1099 are out of the question. Vicky will now have to try to convince the workers at the Social Security office that she is who she says she is and get a new Social Security card before the drivers license division will grant her an ID. This catch 22 reminds me of a movie about Germany between the world wars called, “Der Hauptmann von Koepernick.” In Vicky’s case, their was no real question about her identity. But the bureaucrats and legislators who are bent on preventing any illegal alien from gaining a benefit they don’t deserve, have inflicted on every citizen the burden of preserving and presenting three specific, official forms of ID.

After two weeks of hard programing, today I finished the update of the program for Peterson and Nykamp Law. I will be installing it tomorrow and Monday. But the real event of the day was delivering Barry and Katherine Wade to the airport to begin their mission to Ghana. They were cheerful and enthusiastic in spite of all the Ebola panic that has been going around lately.