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wine non-alcoholic See: FRE DETAILS
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On the face of it, there’s nothing more goofy than alcohol-free wine.
But I am an addict to carbonated beverages, and could use alternative drinking options. So the appearance of fre®
at the local grocer seemed worth a try. Alcohol-free wine. Well, .5 percent alcohol. But it tastes like a white zinfandel. Without the bite. And without carbonation to upset my stomach.
It’s refreshing. At 70 calories per serving, it’s not a diet drink, but hey: can’t have everything. About a quarter juice, it still has rather low nutritional value. But, as an alternative to my Coked-up lifestyle, it’s a new weird habit waiting to flower.
Of course, drunkards and snobs would scorn such drink. I am neither a drunkard nor a wine-snob. Iris Murdoch’s sage advice about never losing the taste for cheap wine is a most sensible gloss on ancient Epicurean wisdom. But alcohol is a psychoactive drug, and I have little interest in regularly imbibing such. Besides, being drunk or even tipsy? Highly over-rated. (Perhaps it should be fortified with vitamins and given to derelicts; would they notice? Probably when they sober up.)
There is some solace in faux-wine, besides the advantage of not turning one’s brain into mush. It tastes different from both juice and wine, and as such is special, something to look forward to
or savor when things go awry. And, with a DVD-writer just gone down, I need solace.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 1, 2006 | permalink
vote fraud vulgarity See: Citizens find critical security issue with Sequoia
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Ah, the reach-around
!
I avoided wrestling in high school; grappling with men was no fantasy of mine. So I was unaware of the wrestling term reach-around.
When I watched Full Metal Jacket, eons ago, the term came at me not as a readily understandable double-entendre, but as a vulgarity, also readily understandable (well, to everybody but Kubrick).
Now, Sequoia Voting Systems, the third-largest voting system vendor in the U.S.
gives us a new meaning for the term:
1. Go to the back of the voting machine. Press and hold the yellow activate button (about 3 seconds). Release when the screen sayswaiting for next voter.
2. Press and hold the yellow button again until the screen sayschange to manual activation?
3. Touch theYesbutton on the screen.
4. At that point there will be a message on the screen that saysManual activate voting enabled(this is just displayed briefly)
5. Next message will readWaiting for the next voterWhen you see that you touch the message that saysstart votingorresume votinglocated in the lower right of the screen The AVC Edge is now set up for poll worker activation mode.
Here is the sequence:
If it’s regular voting (as opposed to provisional)
a. Once you’ve touched the start or resume the "waiting for next voter" appears
b. Activate the ballot by pressing and releasing the yellow activate button
c. Activate the correct party for the voter AND press the yellow activate button using the keypad on the display screen
d. Select the voter’s language if appropriate
e. Vote. (Once the voter has completed voting and cast their ballot. Prepare the Edge for the next voter. If the next voter is a regular voter repeat step B and D above.
You can now vote as many times as you want to.
How do you rig an election? Give it the ol’ reach-around!
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 2, 2006 | permalink
homosexuality hypocrisy See: Just a massage, pastor says
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I’d never heard of Ted Haggard before he was outed. Apparently, he’s one of those few evangelical leaders to be soft on gays though hard against gay marriage. His lover, a male prostitute, outed him, incensed at the man’s [alleged] hypocrisy of opposing gay marriage . . . while carrying on a proscribed homosexual affair.
Haggard, of course, denied engaging in sexual acts with the gay male in question, admitting only to receiving a massage.
He did admit to buying methamphetamines from the man, but he claimed to not using them.
I catch just a whiff of the Clintonian I smoked but never inhaled
excuse.
But it may be true. Years and years and years ago, I had LSD in my fridge for about six months before I threw it away. I just could never find a day I wanted to devote to a drug. I may also have had a little fear: I could not be sure about the strength of the particular dosage. Unregulated by market honesty, the illegal drug market is no way to get your kicks. Haggard probably knew that. He was a family man, known to be a cautious man.
I don’t really believe him regarding the massage, however. Mike Jones, the masseuse, advertises his services as with the pleasure of the man in mind,
and poses in the nude to promote such services. Almost certainly Haggard paid for and received the happy ending.
The more I think about it, the less I like this Mike Jones. He had a confidential relationship built up, and he destroyed that confidentiality. Almost certainly the revelation did his cause no good. Haggard had to quit his position with the National Assn. of Evangelicals, and the backlash against all things homosexual will probably continue amongst evangelicals.
Further, I don’t see the hypocrisy. There’s no hypocrisy in secretly getting one’s rocks off from a whore and opposing gay marriage. You think it’s a sin, and you give in. Prostitutes have been servicing the clergy and priesthood for millennia, usually without making too big a deal of this relationship. They are in the sin biz, men of the cloth
in the righteousness biz. Both businesses are fraught with moral danger.
Jones is probably one of those folk who don’t believe there’s anything wrong with what they do. But his lack of empathy to his clients who do feel somehow wrong in buying his services is amazing in its callousness.
And, I suspect, it will not do his business much good . . . unless it amounts to a pitch to the guiltless sector of his potential clientele.
I’ve no idea which market sector is bigger: guiltless clients for homosexual services, or guilt-ridden ones.
Being neither, and not having studied the issue, my lack of knowledge is unsurprising. But I still harbor lingering ill will towards the man who outed Haggard. Disloyalty to clients is unprofessional, and ought not to be regarded with praise.
As for Haggard, I’ll let others pray for him, others worry. I don’t really care about him, despite the fact that he does seem to have been one of the better of his ilk.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 4, 2006 | permalink
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Conservatives often argue that pre-modern philosophy is superior to modern philosophy. Traditionalists and religionists do so because their favored pre-moderns accepted the supernatural, and such ideas as piety, as a given, and elaborated their ideas to conform to these preconceptions. Neoconservatives of the Straussian stamp realize that religion is a sham, but believe it to be a necessary sham for the masses, and hold that the key to philosophy lies in the distinction between exoteric ideology and esoteric mysteries and disciplines.
My take? I ask, which pre-modern philosophy? I find the esoteric/exoteric distinction inevitable when confronting Plato, whose writings are confused jumbles of contradictory intentions and follow-through. Aristotle is far more reliable, of course, but he by no means exhausted inquiry, and was wrong-headed on a multitude of points. The Hellenists varied widely, and are fascinating, but each school erred in distinctive and interesting ways, and none provide us pitch-perfect standards to allow one to to say pre-modern philosophy is superior to modern philosophy.
I can’t sing that song. It’s out of tune, when tried.
With so much error amongst the ancients, some modernist trends have to be seen as improvements. But there are many moderns (and post-moderns), too, so here, again, taking sides is just another kind of folly.
Since it is the folly of philosophical partisans, perhaps it should be spelled pholly.
For the record, I judge both the traditionalists and Straussians idiotic. Both take the wrong view towards philosophy, ancient or modern. Both seek foundations in others’ writings. Instead, we should make of the ideas and arguments of all philosophers, past and present, as starting points for our own inquiries, where we supply the foundations.
Of course, some foundations work better than others. I am a biological naturalist with a healthy regard for value diversity. Because of this, my main purchase in ancient philosophy is with the Epicureans, and in modern times finds support in the work of Herbert Spencer, C.S. Peirce, George Santayana, John Searle, and many others.
The most disappointing aspect of reading philosophy, ancient or modern, is a continaully shifting nomenclature. Take the fact-value dichotomy, a staple obsession of British-American philosophy. I’ve witnessed philosophers shift their definition of fact
within the same paragraph. The true nature of the dichotomy is lost on many, because they have not clarified their terms. Consider this:
| subjects relate to objects . . . | |
| truth relation | . . . through signs, which in propositional form are said to be factual or true when the sign sets guide one reliably through the causal and revelatory aspects (and conceptual levels) of the things signified, false if not |
| value relation | . . . through actions (chosen behavior), which reveal importance or preference in case of chosen objects, unimportance or disutility if not chosen or deprectated or avoided |
The difference between these two types of relationships (between subjects and objects) is profound. But, as near as I can make out, the pre-moderns barely grasped it as a problem and certainly did not elaborate any robust solution. Moderns have grasped the problem, here and there, and even made some headway, in both Continental and British-American traditions, but no completely satisfactory position has gained hold anywhere, near as I can make out. Each tradition — empiricist, pragmatist, phenomonelogical, etc. — has made advances, but in each the advances have not dominated the traditions.
And since I consider the epistemological and the axiological to be among the most important issues of philosophy, and since no previous philosophy has persuaded a vital contingent anywhere of the most promising perspective, I look upon those who debate pre-modern
and modern
in philosophy as missing the point.
It is towards a future philosophy that we must work. The ancient, the modern, the post-modern . . . these are merely what we must sort out before the real work is done. My allegiance is towards some as-yet-undeveoped future philosophy.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 7, 2006 | permalink
the organization of bookkeeping and control of those concerns, in which the capitalists have already been expropriated, and of all other economic concerns.Even so Lenin is far from realizing that an entirely new problem is here involved which it is impossible to solve with the conceptual instruments of
bourgeoisculture. Like a real politician, he does not bother with issues beyond his nose.
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
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An old song runs on about how Black is the color, of my true love's hair.
An old Smothers Bros. parody turned it into Black is the color, of my true love's hair.
The punch line? Only her hair dresser knows!
This came to mind while writing something off-page (if not off-color): My Hair Is Cosmic Latte!
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 9, 2006 | permalink
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I heard tell, today, of hurricane-force winds to sweep through the area where I live this very night. With all the trees around here, that means I can expect the electricity to go, the house to get cold, my office to get frigid, and me become unable to do much of anything for a day or two.
Last night the weather was fine, so I trekked to Astoria to see a local performance of Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16th. I had never read the play, nor seen it before. It was a hoot watching the varying grades of local acting talent tell this goofy story.
And goofy is indeed the right word. Did Rand ever repudiate it for its Nietzschean
(code word for criminal/anti-libertarian) theme? I don’t know; and I’m not going to waste my time, now (before the storm), reading the Objectivist literature on this particular gimmicky play.
Instead, I’ll render my verdict. The author of this play was a piece of work herself. She enjoyed rape fantasies. She wanted to worship callous, brilliant men. Her idea of justice, in this play, is absolutely ludicrous. Well, perverse. In effect, she defends criminality when committed by men with self-esteem
blah blah blah. Her dead paragon, it turns out, was a Skilling type of business fraud. And she insists that the jury (selected from the audience) determine the accused’s guilt or innocence on the basis of their values, on whether they can conceive of someone as depicted by the accused.
She does not mention such legal niceties as burden of proof
or beyond reasonable doubt.
Her moralism, a peculiarly twisted judgmentalism, complete with contempt for shared standards of law, is what she puts forward, in the mouths of her two lawyers.
What a crock. Were I on the jury, I would’ve pronounced the accused not guilty by reason of reasonable doubt. But she was obviously guilty of other crimes, such as cooking the books of her lover for years. Oh, and since she dropped a body some fifty storeys down to the concrete of New York’s pavement, she was also guilty of littering.
Rand, too, was guilty of a sort of littering. She threw out her emotional trash, out to the public . . . as if she were doing some great moral service. Instead, she merely proved herself to be a major sick twist.
My opinion of Rand going into the play was not very high, from the perspective as a moral philosopher and public intellectual. But as a perpetrator of campy melodrama, she did offer a, uh, unique vision.
I’m glad I never met the bitch, though. That was one writer you didn’t want to entangle yourself with.
Oh, and on the issue of capitalism and libertarianism. Rand repeatedly denied being a libertarian, and I’ve always had to reluctantly insist that she was one, despite her egotistical not-named-here
protests. But on the basis of The Night of January 16th, I’d have to say there’s not a teensiest portion of libertarianism here. This is a celebration of individual criminals and everyday, ordinary heedless selfishness against all notions of individual rights.
It is the very opposite of libertarian literature. It is, instead, something of a defense of the parody version of the Robber Baron. If Rand never repudiated this play, then I may grant her her wish: she was not a libertarian. She was a knave.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 12, 2006 | permalink
Gauthier and Libertarianismpaper delivered at the Conference on Value Inquiry, April 1999
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This classsic graphical illustration of the usual flow of political benefits
. . . 
was reversed in the last election, right?
Only to be reversed again, almost immediately, of course.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 14, 2006 | permalink
Milton Friedman Jack Williamson
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Milton Friedman died, and I've nothing special to say . . . but to honor his memory, noting that his Free to Choose television series, and his book Capitalism and Freedom, had some influence on me, for the good, many years ago. A sad day for some good people (his family), and for his many admirers.
My first encounter with the man was oddly foreshadowed by the television series M*A*S*H. There, early on, appeared a character named Dr. Milton Friedman. Later on the same actor, playing the same character, is referred to as Dr. Sidney Friedman. It was only several years later that I figured out why: it seemed the character unnecessarily confused Americans with the real man named Milton.
I've heard that Milton himself complained. I've no knowledge that this is true, though. After all, he named his son David, and David is often confused with many other David Friedmans. (Hmmm. Maybe it was because of the confusions surrounding the several David Friedmans that Milton became concerned. Economists are known — unlike most other humans — to learn from experience.)
Jack Williamson died a few days earlier. An older nonagenarian, he garnered fewer obits. But I've long honored Williamson for his work, for freedom, too.
I've long thought that Jack Williamson's book The Humanoids has been unjustly deprecated. It is a chilling little book, and its theme — being over-run by well-intentioned robots out to save us from ourselves
always struck me as, well, a very apt metaphor for modern so-called liberal socialism. Every day, on the news, on the Net— whenever government is called upon to protect us from our own vices or folly — I feel the humanoid touch.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 16, 2006 | permalink
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It’s raining again. Pouring, as they say. I got soaked when I left home for work around noon, just walking to the car. Tomorrow I drive to Seattle in aid of a friend who’s heading for the hospital. I, chauffeur. Through a rainstorm, apparently.
I spent the morning finishing The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine. What a fascinating book. It was great to come across Richard Carlile, again, the author of Every Woman’s Book. But he was only one of many odd characters who somehow touched the bones of the deceased author of Common Sense.
Paul Collins, the book’s author, is very good. His research into the ways and byways of forgotten history amounts to pure delight. Unfortunately, though his prose is always steady, he has an organizational preference and comic sense that I’m not so smitten with. He often begins sections with his recounting of what’s happening today, as he lives and sees and researches. And these sections begin, almost everyone of them, in the thick of whatever thicket he’s writing about. It can be very confusing. I’m sure he does it for some situational drama and humor, but mostly I found these excursions unnecessarily confusing. But the confusion vanishes after a paragraph or two. Still, this style of presentation is not to my taste. Oh, well. A fine book, otherwise.
Talking on the phone with a friend, he mentioned a book that was just published, and he thought I might like it: The Android’s Dream. An sf book written for Philip K. Dick fans, Amazon lists a provocative grab-bag of characteristic key phrases: gecko man, sentient species, Evolved Lamb
. . . Yes, I might like it.
Rainy weather is perfect book-reading weather. Stay in bed and read. This is the greatest of all indulgences, and it seems almost perverse, in its own way. But hey: if I didn’t read, I’d be of no use in my profession. So I read. It’s part of my job. And every editor is a reader. A writer (even so humble a one as yours truly) is also a reader.
Since the death of Milton Friedman, last week, I’ve been trying to remember whether it was from Friedman, or from some other libertarian, that I first heard of the penny circle game. What? Here’s how I remember it:
It’s an illusion that we all get better off. Do the math like an economist, and you quickly see how the con is made. But people do tend to get taken in. Indeed, it’s easy to get caught up in the game, and many players are likely to object to stopping the game, for fear of coming out behind somebody else . . . despite the fact that most who play come out further behind than they would have had they never started the play.
Government, without strict limits, is really just another example of the grifter’s art, a magic trick. The Penny Circle Game illustrates this better than more sophisticated argumentation can.
But did I learn this from the late Milton Friedman, or someone else? I didn’t see it mentioned in quick searches at the Free to Choose site.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 19, 2006 | permalink
Coin flip decides election,The Wahkiakum County Eagle, December 7, 2006
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