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economics free goods See: Principles of Economics
The principles of economics cannot be boiled down to the motto TANSTAAFL
. . . for there is such a thing as a free lunch. I've eaten lunches that would have been thrown away as garbage had I not gobbled them down. The persons serving didn't charge me, and looked upon my gluttony as almost a favor I was doing them!
I know, I know: most things have cost. But not everything does. Not even every lunch.
That doesn't mean that repeating the wink-wink bad-grammar-phrase There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch at every drop in economics awareness doesn't have its uses. We should be more aware of costs. But TANSTAAFL is a more subtle statement (to the extent that its intended TINSTAAFL meaning is true) than some believe.
Why harp on this? Oh, because the most important book ever written on basic economic theory is available, free, on the Web. No charge. There are no out-of-pocket expenses associated with the download. It takes up only a small amount of space on your hard drive. Yes, downloading has some costs, and keeping a PDF on your hard drive does too. Maybe keeping it on your disk will require you to trash a porn picture (I suggest removing the one with the goat). But these costs are not what we were thinking about when we referenced, a few moments ago, the subject of a free good.
We meant, didn't we, free-of-price?
Actually, Carl Menger's Principles of Economics will explain to you a slightly different meaning of free good.
It's an important concept. Thinking clearly about it helps untangle an old paradox in political economy that crippled classical economics and allowed socialistic economists to sound convincing. With that old problem in the dustbin, more important problems can be cleared up, too.
If you've never read the book, download it. Start reading onscreen. Print it out. Whatever. Just read it. It's the best book on the subject. You'll have to think while reading it, so it's not exactly on the order of Miss Push-up's Ins and Outs. But the thought is fairly easy to follow. Menger, no prose stylist, nevertheless makes the issues as clear as a bullet-point presentation.
I bet that after you read it, you might even be willing to contribute to the enterprise that offers it up, freely, for downloading. Mention, if you do plunk down some money, that it was Carl Menger's book that made you
want to contribute.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 1, 2005 | permalink
war nomenclature See: Renaming and Rethinking America's So-Called Civil War
The victors write the histories, as the old saying goes. They also name the wars. On Instead of a Blog today I come up with better names for both the Revolutionary and Civil wars. I guess that makes me part of the resistance, the ongoing resistance to the victors.
In that spirit, I offer better names for our recent excursions into the Mesopotamian region. Gulf War I and Gulf War II won't cut it, in part because this second Gulf War isn't really taking place in the gulf region, but in Mesopotamia proper and in neighboring vicinities. How about these names?
Shortened, these would read The Iraqi Repulsion War, the Iraqi Containment War, The Iraqi Conquest, and the Iraqi Control War. These are all honest attempts at accurate names, though each is conceived from the perspective of the U.S. government. If the U.S. finally loses this last one, a renaming in favor of the victor would be in order. (Since the victor would probably be some vile Islamic fundamentalist coalition, the name would probably be The War to Shame and Repel the Great Shaitan.)
The first war was won handily; Kuwait's borders were reaffirmed, Saddam Hussein's armies repelled.
The second war was the somewhat fraudulently promoted containment of Hussein's Ba'athist regime. Though George Herbert Walker Bush refused to overthrow the Ba'athis regime, seeing as he couldn't conceive of a just mandate to do that, the second war grew out of attempts to keep the Ba'athists in line
and not continue to be a threat in the region. But deterrence was not enough for the allies. Incapacitation was what they were after. The sands and soil weren't sewn with salt, but the policy was not dissimilar. Very Roman.
The third war was won handily, too; U.S. forces marched in and brought an end to the Ba'athist regime, sent Saddam Hussein into hiding, and began the process of creating a new state. A few perceptive folk do not see this as a new war but a continuation of one long campaign begun with the repulsion of Republican Guard from Kuwait. I respectfully differ. The agenda of each war was different, so a distinct name seems apt. The first was mere repulsion after a border-crossing. The second was an attempt at incapication and containment. The third was an outright conquest. And . . .
The fourth war evolved out of the third. Particularly, from the American point of view, it was a defensive war against opportunistic attacks from old Ba'athist elements and (mostly foreign) Al Qaeda (and similarly conceived) Islamic terrorists.
Together these wars could be put under one umbrella. But since, I as I mention above, each has a different rationale, I prefer a different name for each. Better names than the ones I've chosen are certainly welcome.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 3, 2005 | permalink
musicology property Hear: Lou Harrison interview: KPFA
Lou Harrison (see link above) relates the story of Javanese or Balinese men sitting outside famous gamelans, whittling on bamboo segments to catch and duplicate the exact pitches of the gamelan's intonation. "Intonation kidnappers," he called them.
Funny, the things that people will treat as property. The intonations of gamelans varied. Walk a mile in Bali, and the intonation of the music can be wildly different. I can see treating the instruments of the gamelans themselves as property. Treating the music played as property, I suppose makes sense (it's now embedded in Western copyright law) if the audience has been duly notified. But the tunings? This makes precious little sense.
And yet Lou Harrison several times informs the listening audience that his colleagues have received permission to duplicate the intonations of this gamelan or that.
Ah, travel the world and witness different intonations — and different views of property.
Still, the men squatting outside, whittling on bamboo to get the right intonations — these seem to me to be acting as truly heroic musicologists! Just as was Mozart when he visited the Vatican, and stole,
by notating from memory, the secret score of Allegri's transcendantly lovely Miserere.
Without imitation, the arts would die. With too much imitation, the arts stagnate.
I'm not certain we have the right mix today. But I am pretty sure that theft of intonation is what makes a nation of a style. There should be no property rights to tuning schemes. Lou Harrison, whose Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Javanese Gamelan is one of the best fusions of Western and Eastern instruments, using Eastern intonations and scales and modes, did great work in his day by breaking down the barriers between cultures and their separate standards. He proved that we can all share standards, even when they differ.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 4, 2005 | permalink
fourfold cure,or tetrapharmakos, summary of Epicurean therapeutic philosophy
For years I've kept a running argument going with a fictional Epicurus. A real one would have worked much better, but Epicurus died of kidney failure millennia ago.
TWV: Surely, Sir, death is more than nothing to us!
Epicurus: Why do you say that? You are familiar with my argument.
TWV: Yes, but even though we de-systemize at death, and disappear as the people we once were, and thus ARE nothing and EXPERIENCE nothing, we . . .
Epicurus: De-systemize?
TWV: I've never held with your doctrine of spiritual atoms. I look upon human beings as systems. When the system falls apart, we die.
Epicurus: Aristotle argued something similar but . . .
TWV: Your differences with Aristotle and my differences with you on this don't matter. What matters is that we regard death as quite final, that nothingness is the key concept of death.
Epicurus: Fine. You were saying . . .
TWV: Even though we cease to exist, and being nothing can experience nothing, making death not a problem for us when we are dead, as living beings we cannot succeed in looking at it from that perspective.
Epicurus: Why not? It is the scientific one.
TWV: Because as living beings who evaluate options, and choose, we think in terms of counterfactuals all the time. Counterfactuals widen open the universe to us. Many counterfactionals are actual possibilities rendered fancy only because they are the results of options not taken, so to speak. (They are what would have happened had we chosen differently.) The options taken, chosen, in the past, lead to the present factuals,
that is, actual, existing things and persons and relations and situations. Now, it is as counterfactuals that we imagine our loved ones and ourselves living on after the fatal blow, the final breath, the deadly cancer. It is not a large human step to go beyond imagining possible counterfactuals to imagining impossible counterfactuals. I'll readily admit that all men are mortal, making immortality impossible. But that doesn't make the imagination of a longer life, a stretched mortality, and even a never-ceasing life really that much different than imagining a different method of constructing one's house. After the event, after the house is built, or the death arrives, the other imagined courses for events still linger in the imaginations of the living. And these imaginations are what make us human. So death cannot be nothing to us, because the opposite never becomes nothing as long as we live. Only in death is death not a problem. In life, it will be, until we die. Because we continue to imagine. And in our imagination, we live.
Epicurus: One of the great things about being dead, perhaps, is that such long, convoluted arguments will be no more, too.
Surely Epicurus wouldn't have said that last, flip line. Sorry, sage shade.
My conclusion? Though Epicureans will rightly not fear death, I think they can rightly shed a tear for the dead and the dying.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 6, 2005 | permalink
you are not true.
I never believed in Santa Claus. He was always a shared fiction
in my family, like Jesus is to Episcopalians. My parents would usually address one gift each to my sister and me as from Santa,
and we would turn to our parents and say Thank you, Santa.
It was oh-so-cute.
I early learned that most Christmas gifts are worthless, and many simply vexing. When you try hard to get the Perfect Gift, you usually fail. And there is nothing more annoying than the varying levels of regret detected from either giver or receiver. No, there is something far more annoying: the varying levels of white lies ('tis the season!) used to make the giver feel better for having given something not quite right.
To me, the capitalist aspect of Christmas — the focus on toys and gifts and such — is the part of Christmas I tend to hate. In our family, these days, we do a White Elephant Christmas, which is really a goofy send-up of the usual Christmas giving and receiving. As such it is the perfect sport for ironic Christmas revellers.
The religious element is far more interesting to me. Though the Nativity Story in Luke is scarcely believable, around it has built up a nice festival, so long as one centers on the Christian story and not the pagan nonsense about Santa Claus and reindeer and the like. The Christian story is lovely. The lyrics extolling it quite grand, the music, when modal, is a model of enchantment. Add good food and candles and the like, and you have a great celebration.
What can kill it for me, however, is all the Christmas Apologetics. Not Christian apologetics, Christmas. A festival is its own justification. To talk endlessly of the spirit of Christmas
is to try to breathe life into a decaying corpse. Too late. And to talk about believing
as if this were something magical in and of itself is something close to Tertullian's Revenge. What should we believe in? Why, Invisible Things, of course! Which ones? Why, the ones I tell you to, and no other. Oh, bother. The trailers for The Polar Express turned me off completely. It should have been called the Post-Christian Pagan Express. What utter bilge.
All the movies and stories about how great it is to believe against all evidence is one of the great embarrassments of post-Christian society. An ostensibly important issue — whether one should believe against evidence and suspicion in a Certain Person who will save us and give us eternal life — has devolved into the most ludicrous possible conundrum — whether one should believe against evidence and suspicion in a Certain Person who will give us lots of toys.
Santa Claus is the reductio ad absurdum of Jesus Christ. He is Christ for really stupid people. How Christians can stand this made-up fantasy character is beyond me.
This being said, you could guess my taste in Christmas movies is not standard. Movies like Miracle on 34th Street tend to annoy me; Prancer repels me. A darker movie, L' Arbre de Noël (The Christmas Tree), about a little boy dying of leukemia, is more my cup of tea. I remember from when I was ten years old. I'd put it on my Top Five List, except I've only seen in once; so it must be excluded, by my own rules.
Which is not to say that my favorite Christmas movies don't have a hearty helping of the absurd.
Top Five Christmas Movies
5. It's a Wonderful Life. Here we have a traditional film that has a lot of nonsense in it, but it's about an important, non-absurd theme: is everyday life worthwhile? What happens if you don't do great things? What if all your decisions amount only to a rather ordinay, humdrum life? This fantasy about an angel who turns around the life of a miserable middle-age small-town man remains a winner, even if it is full of logical and moral flaws. One of Frank Capra's best.
4. Scrooge. Dickens is the source of much of our cultural nonsense about Christmas. He helped secularize the whole holiday with his A Christmas Carol. But it is an effective sentimental tale, though full of philosophical flaws big enough to drive several brands of Christian theology through. It's so absurd, in fact, that the best version is the one that goes over the top
in musical format. The song Thank You Very Much, Mr. Scrooge,
and the scenes in hell are fun; the performances, especially Albert Finney as Scrooge, are wonderful.
3. Die Hard. Christmas-time is a great time for a caper. This one is a muderous caper, foiled by our hero, Bruce Willis. A classic thriller, and something more: one feels good about life after having seen a bad guy fall dozens of stories to his death; this does for the audience what the Angel Clarence did for Jimmy Stewart's hapless Bedford Falls lackey.
2. Bad Santa. Christmas, as celebrated in America, is a celebration of greed masked by haloes of ironic smiles. So the caper is a natural for satire on the season. And this caper lays the comedy on thick, as a year-'round alcoholic and lech takes a seasonal gig as a department store Santa, the better to steal the Christmas earnings. Like reverent Christmas stories, this one is about the spiritual growth of the title bad Santa. But it's not growth to altruism and standard-brand piety (as in It's a Wonderful Life), it's growth to the merest semblance of balance in life. This same progress happens from the other direction in the other major character in the film, a young doofus of a fat kid whose earnestness irks the cynical Santa. He, too, undergoes transformation, in his case into a self-sufficient little tough kid who can stand up for himself against the bullies. Lots of good, dirty fun.
1. Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis's hodge-podge of a book rightly vexed his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who objected to the story's kitchen-sink approach to fantasy writing. Father Christmas in a land ruled by a deific lion? The appropriate response would be that of Bad Santa's bad Santa: what the f---?
A land that is always winter and never Christmas
is good for the kiddies, though, and as little sense as the whole thing makes, Lewis's approach to storytelling throws in an Easter Theme, too. Why not? So this film is not only the best Christmas Movie, it's the best Easter Flick, too. It's remarkably faithful to Lewis's little book, and my only complaint was that, in trimming the story for the screen, the filmmakers took out the mystery of Aslan. Not like a tame lion,
is used over and over in the book, foreshadowing, in its way, the deific character of the beast. Still, the movie is superbly cast, from the kids to the great Tilda Swinton as Jadis the White Witch, the special effects are perfect and not in-your-face. Both the acting and the f/x simply move along the story. Sure, it's goofy. A mess. It makes no sense. Like Christmas itself.
I trust that the sequel and the prequel to the movie are being filmed simultaneously. Why wait for the kids to grow up for Prince Caspian? Why wait for Tilda Swinton to age for The Magician's Nephew? Come to think of it, why wait to produce The Horse and His Boy? The actors who play the aged Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy look fine right now, and are featured in The Horse and His Boy, which works not as a sequel to the first book, but as a parallel story.
My chief worry is the Creation scene in The Magician's Nephew, where Aslan sings the world into existence. Who will compose the music? (My choice: John Adams.) Can the voice of Aslan, Liam Neeson, sing?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 13, 2005 | permalink
Exeunt
I designed a card today, a sympathy card. Here is the smaller Web version:
I'm listening to an Einojuhani Rautavaara symphony on the stereo, too. It's that kind of day.
Oh, the beach picture came with my Macintosh computer. Grab anything near at hand to express what must be expressed.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 14, 2005 | permalink
surveillance rogue government See: Report: Bush eased spying restrictions
As everyone knows, Claude Rains had the most significant line in any movie ever about politics. He was shocked, shocked
that gambling was going on at Rick's Cafe American, blew the whistle, closed it down . . . and received his nightly winnings.
This is so apt it's now a cliche.
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania expressed his own shock at the news that President Bush gave the order to ease eavesdropping rules in 2002. He's going to hold hearings, he said. But on whom? What person in Washington didn't believe this was happening? The administration had been caught with its pants down, and was going to make up for it in excessive zeal to root out terrorists in our midst. How naive does one have to be to really be surprised by this newest revelation?
Sure, Specter is right: There is no doubt that this is inappropriate.
The government should have got warrants. For terrorism there are even sealed warrants available. But that wasn't underhanded enough for Bush and Company.
And, after 2001, Americans were mostly willing to go that route. Constitution, schmonstitution! That's the way it always in times of crisis. To expect anything else is to play the fool. I guess we're far enough away from 9/11/01 that Americans don't greet the news with a collective shrug. There's some righteous indignation, again. But given another attack, that won't last.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 16, 2005 | permalink
libertarianism obituary See: R.W. Bradford, RIP
He signed his name R. W. Bradford. He did not like his first name, Raymond, and always went by Bill. In addition to writing under his own name, he also wrote under two pseudonyms in his magazine: Chester Alan Arthur and Ethan O. Waters. He occasionally referred to himself, jovially in the third person, as R Dub.
He approached me with a job after we had an interesting conversation at a party in 1986. He was occasionally very, very kind to me. Once, after my first public speaking event, he whispered praise in my ear. It was a lie. Some lies are appreciated; others not. I've been remembering the good stuff more than the bad this past week.
Yes, it's been a week since Bill Bradford, the editor and publisher of Liberty magazine — and my employer from 1986 to 1999 — died of cancer. I've talked with a number of former workers in Liberty's metaphorical vineyard and not a few have said very negative things about the recently deceased. Never speak ill of the dead
is not a motto taken to everyone's heart. Indeed, Bill Bradford himself did not practice it, as anyone who's read his peculiar article-length obit for William P. Moulton, Bill's cousin and sometime friend, knows.
One friend was surprised that I expressed sadness at Bill's death. He himself was not in the least saddened, though he wasn't quite ready to dance upon the grave, either. Not quite.
Bill Bradford sure could polarize people.
As for me, I've many good memories. I miss both him and Kathy. Yes, Kathy survives him, but we've not spoken since I left Port Townsend in 1999. Why the rift? Why the distance? I'm tempted to say: None of anyone's business. But since my departure from Liberty was somewhat a public event in 1999, and Bill himself discussed the meaning of it with his friends and supporters, it seems acceptable for me to more than hint at what happened. My memories and rationales are mixed with something close to an honest evaluation in an article I posted to Instead of a Blog, today.
Bill managed some humor at the end:
The staff & board of directors have also tried to make longer plans for Liberty's intellectual prosperity and fiscal soundness. We have a pretty good handle on things and expect within a month or so to renew some of the activities that have been postponed because of my illness: for example, direct mail circulation promotion: how aboutBradford Dies, Liberty Reborn!as a headline?
The letter was misquoted in the Seattle Times obituary.
But despite his gallows humor, I remain a bit* sad. We had not communicated in years. Sometime back he sent me an email, but I was experimenting with a new email program and almost immediately lost it to oblivion in a database collapse (this was before I embraced OS X, natch). I took this as an omen, and did not write him again until it was too late, last week. Early in the week he had tendered his resignation as editor of Liberty, and on Thursday night (presumably before he received my email) he died. I did not learn of his death until Saturday afternoon. The previous night I had spoken to two of Bill's fans, Steve Buckstein and Keith Lofstrom. They both expressed sadness, also, at learning of Bill's fatal illness. And then we talked on. Such is the way of human life. Death, conversation, distant warnings, and then: one day each one of us slips out of existence. Bill actually faced his death, as people with terminal illnesses must. I'm told he did it with dignity. I guess I'm pleased for him, but I'd rather he not have had to endure it. Some tests just don't seem necessary to me.
But then, I'm not in charge of such matters. Regarding death, the buck most defintely does not stop here.
* The phrase a bit
is one I picked up from Bill. I haven't relinquished it, yet.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 16, 2005 | permalink
journalism integrity See: Op-Eds for Sale
Last year it was the scandal of the government paying columnists to shill Bush administration reforms. Now it's the scandal of a private individual paying columnists to shill his investment and business interests. Doug Bandow accepted moolah from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and found himself forced to quit the Cato Institute; Copley News Service has suspended his column.
The first case is doubly scummy, since the government shouldn't be in the business of sub-rosa persuasion, and columnists are expected to be independent — except, of course, of their listed affiliations.
The second, more recent case, is a bit more complicated. The trouble (if I understand Eamon Javers's presentation of facts correctly, and modern mores at all) is not that we expect columnists to be unpaid. We do expect them to be paid for their columns (though not all are; many op-eds are contributed by interested parties or paid think tankers, and the newspapers don't pay anyone a dime to print them). And we do expect them to be paid by their affiliations (though not all are here, either; some people are affiliated with institutions that accept their work as donations). What we expect of them is to have no hidden axes to grind, especially if the grinder pays them for it.
Yet so far I haven't become too worked up over the double-paid columnists. Why? Because I judge their work on merit, not on who pays for it. For instance, I prefer Tom Sowell to Walter Williams not because I prefer to Sowell's sponsor, The Hoover Institution, to Walter Williams's institution, George Mason University. I don't. I prefer Sowell because I think he's a better writer and more careful thinker. But I often disagree with Sowell very strongly. Why? It's not because I suspect that his imperialist bent is a result of his being a former paid member of the Marine Corps. It's because imperialist arguments just seem shoddy to me, indefensible. Such arguments usually seem more based on the hysteria associated with in-group/out-group antagonisms than what's best for our nation or the world. But on other issues I usually agree with Sowell. And it has nothing to do with who pays him.
I find Peter Ferrara's position mildly amusing, almost refreshing. He's unrepentant for having taken money from a lobbyist. After all, he never changed his opinion. He was just getting another source of funding. If a newspaper gets a new advertiser off of a full-page spread, one rarely hears much complaint. Just good business. A writer does it and everyone talks about the sanctity of opinion.
Further, politicians do this all the time. And there's apparently no stopping it. And with politicians the breach of trust issues should be far greater than any journalist's.
As a writer who's written both op-ed columns and advertising campaigns, I see more similarities than differences. Of course, you have to pay me to shill for Toshiba or Microsoft (which I've done in the past), but I've shilled for freedom for free. Still, I'd rather get paid, and I expect to get paid a lot for editorial work even for causes I believe in.
Caveat emptor, caveat lector. Buyer and reader both beware. Never be swayed by ad or op-ed just because an argument is presented to you. Judge for yourself. And on the merits. Not on who pays the bills.
Oddly, there are a lot of people out there who think that some positions can only be argued for by people paid to do so, or have some material interest in it. I once defended a town's business signage from regulators on the town's council with a letter to the local paper. An appreciative woman called me up. She assumed I was a downtoan business person. I wasn't. It's just that I prefer freedom of speech and property rights to totalitarian meddling by town councils — even when the result is, in some cases, ugly signage. It doesn't take a paid hack to have this opinion. And so I wrote it to the local paper. I would have been happy to accept payment from a consortium of downtown businesses, but hey . . . I wrote that one gratis. I expect careful readers to have dealt with my actual facts, comparisons, and logic, agreeing or disagreeing with the substance of my arguments. Those who dismissed me (as many readers no doubt did) as a paid shill for business, my reaction is simple: more fool they.
I've noticed that, generally, the further left you lean on the political spectrum, the more scandalized you are by who pays the bills. This suggests to me that leftists fear that beliefs are amazingly elastic, easily pressured by demand, by payment. Perhaps they, themselves, can imagine them changing their beliefs for monetary reasons, and revolt against the very notion in outrageous hysteria. Very odd. This is not my attitude towards ideas at all.
Now that I think of it, though, if I were a syndicated columnist, mightn't I be underpaid if all I accepted was payment from the syndicate?
After all, I've limited columns to write; I would only be writing one or two per week. It would be a given that I would only write what I believe; I'm no liar. But the decision to write about A rather than B? What decides that? My own preference? Why shouldn't that preference be influenced by outisde payment? Why shouldn't I be seeking funders to influence that basic decision, whether to write about A or B or C. The funders would be willing to pay, because my opinions would be known, my basic method would be known. So by paying me they would get more publicity. My opinions wouldn't be for sale so much as my decision to write on said subject.
I could put up a website, list topics, and let the bidding begin. Or perhaps I could just use eBay.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 17, 2005 | permalink
journalism politics See: The Quiet Man
The late Eugene McCarthy was an odd fellow, a politician with a sense of perspective, a sense of history, a sense of morality. Thanks to Clark Stooksbury for pointing out the memoir where this passage can be found:
Many felt McCarthy was talking down to them. Others found him belligerently obscure. I mean, exactly who was this Dreyfus and who ever won a presidential campaign by invoking Scipio Africanus?
Could you spell out that Roman name for us, senator?one reporter asked.Does it have acor ak?
You could look it up in Toynbee,McCarthy said — and then a reporter asked him how to spell that.
I never read much about McCarthy, though, as a kid I admired him. He perhaps influenced my general anti-war stance. I mostly new him as the author of the delightfully illustrated A Political Bestiary.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 19, 2005 | permalink
journalism libertarianism See: R.W. Bradford and Liberty
The passing of R.W. Bradford, publisher of Liberty, a magazine I helped him start years ago, has caused quite a bit of talk and banter in the email end of the Internet. Much of it is less polite than found on the Web.
One charge made against Bill, that I've recently read, is that he tended to suppress anti-Libertarian Party or at least pieces critical of the Libertarian Party. I had no memory of this. But then I began thinking. And remembering.
At the start of Harry Browne's first run for the presidency, Bradford postponed a piece of mine that challenged the rationale for Browne's run. It was a funny little Reflection, and it made an
important point. Bill later apologized for forgetting about it
until after the election, making it unusable when discovered.
My argument was that if Browne truly were the only hope of the party, as hosts of libertarians were saying, then if he got the same old low numbers as previous candidates, then it therefore followed that the Party should be abandoned as a falsified test.
Years earlier I wrote a Reflection making an original argument about the efficacy of the LP. I used some standard economic ideas to put the rationale for the LP in context. I used the basic ideas
differently than was common at that time. Bill rejected my piece because . . . (drum roll) . . . it would be better coming from Chester Alan Arthur,
the pseudonym he used for writing about politics.
Think about this. I write something. It seems original. He won't publish it, but says it should run under his pseudonym. Where do you get your ideas from, Mr. Bradford?
Why, I steal them from my employees!
Actually, he did not publish that argument. Apparently his malign declared intent to publish it as his own was just a way of shutting down my criticism of the Libertarian Party.
Years later, he would often ask why I didn't write more for Liberty. D-uh.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 20, 2005 | permalink
civil liberties conjecture See: Surveillance Outrage: Prediction
Brad Spangler thinks that George W. Bush's admission that surveillance has gone on without warrants means that the process — allegedly designed to be used only against terrorist suspects — has already been abused by the administration:
It wasn't laziness. The president had to keep approving the orders, repeatedly, every 45 days or so, as I recall from news coverage of this outrage so far. . . .
Not only has the President broken the law (not to mention trashing the Constitution and making a joke of his oath of office) . . . [ellipsis in original]
Not only has he over-reached to acquire powers dangerous, at the very least, because of their potential for political abuse . . . [ellipsis in original]
We can be reasonably sure that his administration HAS politically abused these illegal surveillance powers — already. It's the only conceivable reason they would try so hard to avoid doing the paperwork. Besides whatever other laws were violated by Bush giving those orders, the orders themselves are blatant evidence of far worse.
That's a likely explanation. I wouldn't be shocked if Spangler is someday proved right. But I can think of an even more likely explanation: Bush and Company are so dead set against the rule of law that any way around even the numb forms of legality strikes them as worth it. They hate the rule of law, these Republicans. So they find ways around it even when it doesn't make much of a difference.
It's just another knee-jerk example of authoritarianism. The Bush people took the first opportunity to go ballistic after 9/11/2001. They started talking about a never-ending war, a new kind of war. They made the way to torture suspects. They immediately found ways to circumvent the law. Why? Because they were just so concerned with American security? Nah. The means they chose were often ineffective; they proved uninterested in really trying to get Osama. What they really wanted to do was throw their weight around. They enjoyed the opportunity to display power, and act unconstrained by a rule of law. It's just the kind of people they are. In other words, closet totalitarian scum.
But since they hide behind an American people with their blood lust worked up, a people unencumbered with historical perspective, they will almost certainly get away with this.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 20, 2005 | permalink
Dick Cheney executive privilege See: Cheney's iPod Takes Top Priority on Extended Flight
ABC News tells the heartwarming tale of Dick Cheney's iPod. While reporters wished to use Air Force Two's sole outlet, Cheney used it to recharge his iPod.
This is about as far as I take executive privilege. But, Merry Christmas, you skunk, you power-mad advocate of dictatorship, it's your iPod . . . and Air Force Two is yours to use, in usufruct for a few years longer. Have at 'er.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 23, 2005 | permalink
Ayn Rand libertarianism See: Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
One of my very last tasks in R.W. Bradford's employ, years ago, was to work on his new publication, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Bill said he thought I would enjoy designing and laying out a new periodical; after all, I'd enjoyed such work with Liberty. I did enjoy designing the cover, as simple as it was. If I remember correctly, I used a Garamond font, a font family that Liberty's plain Palatino format avoided. For all I know, today's JARS cover may still be the one I sketched in 1999. I could check on an old hard disk and compare. But it hardly seems worthwhile.
I was not so thrilled with having to try to get the execrable Microsoft Word app to do the work of a book design program, something Bill wanted to use for the interior of the journal to save time.
But that's a story I need not recount.
It was hard not to see my last job for Bill Bradford as something of a kick in the teeth. As a favor to Bill's friend and colleague Stephen Cox, he was starting a journal devoted to Ayn Rand, the one figure above all in the libertarian movement whom I regarded as the éminence most grise. No, that's not quite right. She did not grayly hide behind others' cloaks; she was my bête noir, black as any vice could muster, beastly in her apocalyptic effect upon her friends and followers. Now dead, she was being honored with yet another journal, yet another institution. What I wanted was for her life and work to be mostly ignored.
It's not that she was a bad writer. It's that she was such a horrible human being, and her viciousness showed through in her essays, her argumentation, her very rationale for freedom. As arguments for capitalism, her writings impressed a lot of people. They were filled with belligerent, fighting words; they showed her contemptuous of enemies and even those who slightly disagreed with her; her characteristic tone was one of hysterical denunciation. But they were also haphazard constructions, basically rants thrown together by a person who at once praised and avoided clear thinking. The best words against her, I judged, were given to Gollum by J.R.R. Tolkien: Tricksy, false.
So there I was, after 13 years working for Liberty, with Bill Bradford opting to pimp for the queen of air and darkness. During those last few days on 1018 Water Street, Port Townsend, Washington, every moment I thought of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was a moment I was glad to be leaving.
I knew that I had lost. My desire to help the libertarian movement grow up had been thrown away to talk endlessly about a third-rate philosopher who, during her life, had bullied her followers and preened in history's mirror, as she glorified that shoddy ethical construct, egoism.
Now, I know: Chris Sciabarra and Stephen Cox, the main perpetrators of that journal, are intelligent men. I admire their work, despite much disagreement. I can't blame them, though I look upon their obsession with Rand as a prim Christian wife is apt to look upon her husband's obsession with anal pornography. It just seems indecent.
As hero worship, it's just plain weird.
Sciabarra's work, especially, is unfortunately hurt by his hero-worship. He came upon a great theme, the dialectic, and has done some important work helping libertarians break out of rigid little boxes of simplistic yea and nay. But his fixation on Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, in the two books I've consulted, spoiled any effective dialectical emprise. Rothbard was as dualistic a thinker as could be feared, and Rand scuttled her synthesis with numerous idiotic and limiting definitions and gambits. Sciabarra was right to focus on Menger and Spencer as early dialecticians in the libertarian tradition. Overshadowing these two with his books on Rand and Rothbard, however, amounted, I'm afraid, to giving up at the starting line.
Rothbard aped dialectic by explicitly trying to incorporate distinct intellectual traditions — and by changing his mind on strategy while trying to make the switches look rational. Rand is an especially flagrant abomination within the dialectical tradition. Her best points and interests are Spencerian, but she always simplifies them, grinds them down into shards of rhetoric rather than display them to shed increased light, a wider perspective. Her egoism in particular retreats from the dialectical complexity attained by Herbert Spencer in The Data of Ethics. But instead of expanding and clarifying, she simplistically embraces an anti-altruistic stance, making herself (and her parrots) look like simple-minded fools.
I confess: it's hard for me to take seriously anyone who takes Rand seriously as a philosopher. And yet I do.
Philosopher John Hospers's memoirs (Conversations with Ayn Rand
[Liberty, Vol. 3, No. 6 and Vol. 4, No. 1]) perhaps explain some of her attraction. She was quite a personal force, as was such an earlier dark magician, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Piercing eyes, quick wit, formidable commitment to arcane principles, these go a long way to befuddle even bright people, temporarily blind even quick-irised pupils.
But now she's dead. (As is, alas, Bill Bradford.) What excuse have her followers today? (And Hospers, let's remember, was never a philosophical follower of Rand; he always kept his own council. And she came to shun him for that.)
The libertarian movement has a lot of good ideas. But the continued admiration for Rand's work scuttles the development of a decent, rigorous and robust philosophy of society. Rand's continued prominence ensures that the libertarian movement will remain politically irrelevant and philosophically marginal.
Alas, members of my libertarian faction, the Null Rand League, are few. Won't you join today?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 24, 2005 | permalink
Aloysius,in Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (see: The Study of Counterpoint, Alfred Mann, translator, p. 139)
Ayn Rand libertarianism See: The Null Rand League
I thought I was horribly busy. And, hmmm, I do see a lot of chores left undone. And yet I found time, yesterday, to compose a new Instead of a Blog feature, the japing Null Rand League page. Today I posted it, as well as a longish memoir on this blog about another journal and its focus, whose influence I wish to nullify. Yes, I'm talking about Ayn Rand.
If I'm a libertarian, why would I wish to nullify
the influence of the one person whose work has, it is often alleged, done more than any other to further the ideal of liberty?
Well, she never influenced me, and she's always seemed more like a sick twist
(to quote John Turturro's character in Miller's Crossing) than a decent human being . . . in her philosophy as well as in her private life, I should add.
But it does lead to an interesting possibility: how often does vice lead to political passion, rather than virtue? Greed is a great motivator; and it is most often masked as an anti-greed
stance. Power lust, revenge, hatred, these also motivate many people, even some libertarians. Should I excuse?
But I really don't have enough time on my hands to solve this interesting problem. It's time to close this blog for the holidays. And get back to other work!
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 24, 2005 | permalink
James Branch Cabell literature See: The Cream of the Jest
James Branch Cabell's writings will probably always remain the choice of a small minority, a quantity of readers so minute that the word minority
would seem almost too extravagant.
I read The Cream of the Jest, first. I had heard about it because it was fantasy, and I read a lot of fantasy in my teenage years. But this book was a long way from Tolkien. It was even further from Le Guin, or Peter S. Beagle. It wasn't even all that close to Lord Dunsany, whose prose the Cream's jesting romance most resembled. Cabell was up to something different. And it was a glorious difference. Arguably, his was the first truly adult sensibility to offer fantasy that I'd come across — well, it and Lewis's Till We Have Faces, a book with what might be thought of as making the opposite point. The Cream of the Jest wasn't a fairy tale romance. It was a romp through time and memory and the cosmos. And it was a paean to connubial compromise. It was unlike anything else I'd ever read. It revelled in the romance of woman-worship, of visions of true love, of mythic kingdoms long past, and yet it was as firmly placed in this earth as a lightning rod. Teddy Roosevelt even appears as one of the comic characters.
The book was subtitled A Comedy of Evasion. In it, the hero, a middle-aged poet and romancer named Felix Kennaston, had found half of an amulet, and, when he would lie down in bed holding it, he'd dream of the witch woman, the ideal woman, Etarre. He first saw her in Poictesme, his fantasy realm, but then met her at propititious moments throughout history. And in each case, when he reached out to touch her she would vanish.
It's all a dream
is an infamous fictional device. In Cabell's hands it is not merely there to justify the fantasy for more realistic-minded readers. It helps make his primary philosophical point. Dreams are important, but it is in the flesh that we live, and find our the only instantiations of our dreams.
And yet . . . the dreams can be excruciatingly beautiful. Far more beautiful than the reality.
I just realized, today, that I've not read a Cabell book in at least a year. 2005 may be the only year of my adult life where I did not read a Cabell novel.
Of course, they are not novels. His book-length fictions are comedies, and are listed as such. Nearly every book has a subtitle indicating that word, comedy.
Not one is so designated as a novel. He made no attempt to bring in all the novelistic conventions and obsessions. He was telling droll tales, most of them in a fantasy context, and had at least one philosophical axe to grind in each tale. Of his comedies qua novels, I agree with Mencken: The High Place may succeed best. It has some of his best writing, and surely his best plot. But in it the immoral elements
that upset some readers and middle-brow critics of the period are at their highest, far more than in Jurgen. Even I felt a bit squeamish about the protagonist's machinations and murders. Thankfully, Archangel Michael and the devil (called Janicot
) step in to save the hero from himself. It's quite a romp.
Critics took Cords of Vanity to task for immorality, too. The main trouble with that book is not a lack of moral rigor upon the part of the characters, but a certain amount of tedium attributable only to the author, though the high point, the central joke, is quite amusing — a truly literary comeuppance for our literary rogue. Cabell's first book, The Eagle's Shadow, also got some flak for immorality, though the book seems tame by modern mores. By the time he wrote Something About Eve, the censors had given up; and critics who didn't care for Cabell began ignoring him, a tactic that ended up succeeding where lambasting and censorship had yielded more sales.
The place for new readers to begin, I think, is The Music from Behind the Moon. It's a short fairy tale, actually, sparely told in Cabell's langorous style (how is that possible? read to discover). It's one of his funniest as well as his most heart-rending works. Alas, it is the Storisende edition, his final revision, that's best. And not every printing takes that version. Still, if you can find it, read it. If you don't like it, you will not like anything else by him. Another short piece, a historical essay entitled The First Virginian,
is also worth reading as an introduction. Cabell himself made a novel out of the tale there told, The First Gentleman of America, one of the few Cabell books that would make a good movie. Try finding it, though. I dare you. Pretty hard to come by, in my experience. (I've got my copy. So there.)
I suspect that 2006 is going to be a year that I read again most of Cabell's work. And, perhaps, read a few of those books that I've avoided so far, titles such as These Restless Heads and The King Was In His Counting House.
But I'll probably start with The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck. It not only has the strangest title, it is surely one of his best efforts. It is also one of the few that is not fantasy.
And yet it is pure Cabell. As purely Cabell as is Jurgen, the book that got him in trouble and on the bestseller lists.
So when I define Cabell, I do not do like most readers, and describe him as a fantasist. He is a comedian of high genius. The Rivet and The Eagle's Shadow and Cords of Vanity and The First Gentleman of America and his retelling of the original Hamlet story, Hamlet had an Uncle, are all decidedly not fantasy. But they are very much of a piece with the rest of Cabell's oeuvre. He takes on death and the cosmos and the highest in human aspiration, writing perfectly. Of beautiful things. And some very nasty things. And laughs. Usually, however, with a tinge of sadness. Perhaps these words from a composer put it best:
I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don't know why, exactly. The book hurts me — tears me to small pieces — but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I've been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly . . . I don't know why I cry over it so much. It's too — something-or-other — to stand. I've been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face. . . . — Deems Taylor
Here are a few relevant pages on Cabell, available on the Web, that I'll return to:
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 27, 2005 | permalink
Narnia movies See: The Chronicles of Narnia on IMDb
Before I saw the recent Narnia movie, and on the basis of brief previews, I had thought that the voice of C.S. Lewis's great lion-god, Aslan, had been granted to Sean Connery. I was annoyed. I did not want to think of James Bond when I heard Aslan speak. One is supposed to be moved by Aslan, impressed. The idea of Sean Connery doing the Aslan vocalization left me shaken, not stirred.
Thankfully, Liam Neeson does the job. After hearing Aslan briefly in a preview, I had misattributed the vocalization. Still, I would have preferred a deep baritone opera singer to have taken the job. Why?
In The Magician's Nephew, the prequel to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Aslan sings Narnia into existence. My question is, can Liam Neeson sing?
I broached this subject at Christmas, at my family's gathering, and my cousin, Andrea Reinkemeyer, a composer, explained to me what they'd probably do: blend the vocalization using electronics and digital effects to make the singing voice of Aslan perfect, magical. They could use a musically illiterate actor, for that. Maybe.
So who would compose and arrange the music? Surely, it must be magnificent! It is creation music, after all. I immediately suggested my favorite living composer, John Adams, for the job. Einojuhani Rautavaara would do, too, now that I think of it.
Then I realized that Andrea herself is expert at electronics. (She teaches a class at Bowling Green in said media.) I told her she should apply for the commission.
Now I hazard a notion that's completely off the wall: the perfect music for the creation scene has already been written. By me. I composed a processional when I was a teenager — inspired by the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien and Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan.
It starts out very simple and slow, in the pentatonic, and becomes a chromatic fanfare, and then an elegant song in the acoustic scale. The finale rushes with big dissonant, quartal chords to a jubiliant G major blast. Arranged to sound less oriental than my initial conception — and with heavy use of electronics as well as full orchestra — I may have finally found a use for that piece. It's just gauche enough for the movies. It would still have to be sung by a digitally transformed Liam Neeson, or perhaps a baritone with a better voice — add a touch of French horn, Andrea! — and it might be just the ticket. By turns simple, exotic, romantic, exciting. Ideal!
Trouble is, though I say I've written it, that's something of a stretch. I never did notate the thing. As a teenager, my hopes of getting a concert pianist and full orchestra with plenty of percussion to play it was, well, low. And I've been very lazy when it comes to such notation jobs.
Still, I remember all the tunes, and most of the transitions. Besides, I could finalize it better now.
It just may be that I'm daydreaming a bit too much, today. I'm not a professional composer.
Whoever composes the creation music for The Magician's Nephew, it should be grand and mysterious music. It should be stirring. And even shake you, too. After all, it comes from Aslan, who is, we are told, not like a tame lion.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 28, 2005 | permalink
In the early '90s, I began experiencing bouts of extreme eye pain. Some lasted many days and were completely debilitating. Ongoing corneal erosion,
the doctors called it. The epithelial layer of the cornea would dislodge itself from the underlying layer, to much pain. Several treatments (called tattooing
) and a change of environment, and I'm mostly better now. Haven't experienced a long, memorable episode of this pain in at least a year. Most bouts last no longer than ten seconds, and I forget about them almost immediately. A doctor once told me that everybody has them, though most just last microseconds, not enough time even to register pain.
I woke up at about 10:15 AM, today, and now it's an hour later, and I still feel the pain. My right eye is closed, and tears stream out of it. This is not fun.
So why this morning?
Though just war theory has no doubt caused many tears over the years, I'm betting on the pizza.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 29, 2005 | permalink
You can't fool an honest man,which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men.
politics journalism See: Telling it like it isn't
Journalists get guidance from editors all the time, sometimes about word choice. For instance, in the '60s and '70s journalists were instructed to refrain from using certain terms, and told to use others. Woman
instead of a lady,
African-American
or black
instead of Negro,
and similar. These terminological changes were designed to give least offense.
Robert Fisk, in a recent column for the L.A. Times, complains about the editorial pressure over terminology regarding the Middle-East. The problem with switching settlements
for colonies
and security barrier
for wall
is that these new terms hide the crimes committed by Israel, the property rights crimes of taking away from Palestinians and giving them (or selling them) to good Israelis, thus expanding the colonial presence in the region.
An important point. If all words are euphemized, the great crimes cannot be described.
But Fisk blows it. He doesn't paint this as I've painted it, as a problem that editors and journalists have always had, and one with a long history. And he most egregiously errs in his first example. He quotes a journalist leaving the area, years ago:
I used to call the Israeli Likud Partyhe said.right wing,But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected.And so now, I asked?We just don't call itright winganymore.
Ouch. I knew at once that thesereaderswere viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.
Well, what does right wing
mean? I've even been called right wing,
and yet I do not support the state condemning of some property and giving it to other, favored, people. That's what Israel has been doing, in the name of nationalism. In the name of community development, it's done in America, too. And, generally, it's the right that opposes it. It is the more liberal
judges (whatever that means) who recently defended the practice in Kelo v. New London.
So what makes it right wing
in America to oppose land confiscation and redistribution to favored people, and right wing
in Israel to promote a very similar program?
Is it the nationalism? Is nationalism or colonialism per se right wing
? What about all the communist countries that did the same? This was the Soviet Union's chief means of keeping control of the Baltic states, after all. Was the Soviet empire right wing
?
Robert Fisk should have some inkling that the terms right
and left
are slippery indeed. And maybe some of the American readers who object to calling the Likkud right
are because, though they think of themselves as on the right,
they don't like being lumped in with the Likud.
Is this possible?
Or maybe they just know that what most journalists think of as obviously
right-wing is defined, by said journalists, to be bad. And they'd just rather not have to hear such goofy, biased political writing in international reporting.
Especially when it comes from unthinking hack journalists.
It may be that the editors have saved us a great deal of grief.
Now, about crimes in the Levant, and elsewhere, we must still try to come to terms with them. And Fisk may very well be right about the danger of euphemizing the reporters' terminology. But the suggestion that this is a new problem, or limited to the Middle-East, or occurs only to apparently favor the right
is absurd.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 30, 2005 | permalink
Uranus jokes See: Hubble finds new moons, rings around Uranus
Years ago, colleagues of mine were telling and concocting Uranus jokes. Venus may rhyme with penis, but Uranus has the best punning possibilities: yer Anus,
you know. (When I was a kid I tried to avoid these puns by deliberately mispronouncing the planet's name. I would accent the first syllable, or flatten the second-syllable vowel.) I can't remember the bulk of my friends' contributions, ten years later, but I do remember my two quips:
I'm worried about the rings around Uranus.
Did you know that Uranus is a gas giant?
The best Uranus joke, of course, is a true classic, beloved of teenagers throughout the English-speaking world, no doubt:
The recent discoveries using the Hubble (link above) have found two more small moons, in erratic orbit. Hey, I'm not making moon jokes.
That's not because I'm above making moon jokes. I just don't feel like making moon jokes.
Not, anyway, with Uranus staring me in the face.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | December 31, 2005 | permalink
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