My Thawtz

What Makes the ‘Greatest Film of All Time’ So Great? By Jon N. Hall December 2016 ( WARNING: here lie embedded videos .) The first movie that I ever really studied is now regarded by some film critics as the “greatest film of all time.” I discovered it in the mid-1980s after reading a review by James Loutzenhiser, a Kansas City psychiatrist who moonlighted as a movie critic. The review was intriguing enough that I drove out to Watts Mill to screen the thing at the dollar cinema . And there, in that darkened low-rent little theatre began my long and unwholesome fixation with Madeleine Elster. With that first screening, I knew I had found something special. And soon after, the film ran on cable, so I taped it. That allowed me to screen it over and over again, until deep engrams were burnt into my young brain, leaving it permanently etched with the director’s dark obsessions. Mostly I watched my find on the weekends. I’d settle on a chilled libation and then settle in

Fun with Negation By Jon N. Hall July 18, 2019 Not, nor, neither, never, no, un-, in-, a-, il-, dis-, non- , and other means of negation are things without which thought, as we know it, could not exist. Please excuse that last “not,” but I just could not think of a way of not using it. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine that there are any earthly languages that do not have at least one word or prefix that negates. Could we understand an alien race of extraterrestrials that didn’t use negation? Our minds, mind you, depend, in part, on the ability to handle negation. Or am I not seeing something? Yet, negation, as with so many other fundamental and essential features of Mind on this planet, is often misused and abused. Since so many Earthlings have not entirely mastered it, let’s look at some forms and aspects of negation, and have some fun. In Zhouqin Burnikel’s May 8, 2017 crossword puzzle in The New York Times , “Not good” is the clue for 17-Across. As its answer is

Counting Foreigners in the U.S. Census By Jon N. Hall June 11, 2010 The federal government is currently conducting its decennial exercise: the census. Some may think the Constitution requires the feds to conduct the census in a certain manner. But there are only two iterations of the word “census” in the entire Constitution. One is in the 16th Amendment , which makes the census irrelevant to the income tax. And the other is in Article I, Section 9. 4 : “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” The enumeration (or “Census”) referred to is found in Article I, Section 2. 3 : “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct .” [Emphasis added.] As far as the original Constitution treats the census, that’s it. Notice there’s

The Senseless Census: A Solution By Jon N. Hall May 26, 2010 The original purpose of the census was apportionment -- the drawing of congressional districts so that each would contain roughly the same number of Americans. To do this, the census must count heads and get their addresses. This has not been a mystery since the advent of computers. Computers are used in statistical sampling. Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at UW-Madison, made an impassioned plea for using sampling in the census on May 1 in The Washington Post . It was titled: “The census will be wrong. We could fix it.” But in Department of Commerce v. United States House of Representatives (1999), the Supreme Court ruled against the use of sampling in the census. Justice O’Connor delivered the Court’s opinion : “The District Court below examined the plain text and legislative history of the [Census] Act and concluded that the proposed use of statistical sampling to determine population for