More links — search sheet music
Wirkman Netizen, version 2.0, was a mostly self-scripted, non-automated online journal, presented in addition to (if not instead of
) the lengthy ruminations on the author's longer-running essay site, Instead of a Blog.
The menu below also directs the reader to other sites and offerings by the very same writer.
Current site motto:
Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance.
Archives for the blog formerly known as Designated Semiotician,
by month:
Wirkman Netizen,May 2005, June, July, August, September — October left intentionally blank — November, December, January 2006, February, March, April, May, June — July left intentionally blank — August, September, October.
Below you will find blog content
in scroll order, not the usual blog order. Only the current month of this blog is in the usual blog order. Why? Blog order, though it now seems natural for current content, remains vexing (to me) when dealing with archival matter; ancient scrolls seem better organized than modern blogs. Top posting
made perfect sense in e-mail, and so it evolved in the blogosphere. But it is very counter-intuitive, even clumsy, to begin at the bottom of a page, go up and read down, and then scroll up some more, read down, repeat ad nauseam, just to achieve a temporal flow to a series of writings. Hence my bucking blog trend and archiving past blog entries in the ancient scroll order — which turns out most natural for the modern Web browser. I have more explanations of what I'm doing below.
wine non-alcoholic See: FRE DETAILS
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
| | |
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
Bach hymnody See: 178 Chorale Harmonizations Of J.S. Bach: A Comparative Edition For Study
I guess it's no mystery why Protestant Christianity has forsaken its cultural roots, turned its back on the great artistic achievements of its early years and now revels in today's popular culture with a fervor worthy of a sybarite in a whorehouse. I'm sure many would argue that modern Christendom in general has turned its back on the best in its spiritual message too, only to revel in warmed over feel-good messages of a startlingly simple nature. But the artistic culture is the more palpable. Almost any cultivated person can tell the difference between the old hymnody and the new choruses
that get sung in Protestant churches.
This morning I awoke to compose a simple two-part quasi-non-folk song (hey: I'm folk
too). A lovely little melody with a simple, elegant counter-melody, but since the night before I was studying Bach's four-part chorales, I have to say I know that against which it pales.
I've been listening to Bach cantatas, recently, which contain some amazing harmonizations of old hymns. What is astounding about Bach's is that they are so beautiful, so obviously great. The four-part harmonizations are masterpieces in themselves. Their extended settings, in the cantatas, are brilliant, some of the best music ever composed by anyone anywhere.
And yet most people have not heard them.
Most people, after all, aren't Lutherans. And since these works were part of Lutheran liturgy . . .
But it doesn't follow that other denominations of Protestantism couldn't use these great works in church services. Most churches, of course, couldn't afford all the professional singers and instrumentalists for the full-blown cantatas. But they could use he hymns themselves, as harmonized by Bach. Congregations could sing the English translations of the old German hymns, and the organist or pianist could play Bach's incredibly good harmonizations.
It's possible. And yet there appears to be no clamor for this. It appears that the most complete English-language version of these hymns is not easily available. At least, it isn't listed on Amazon (I found the citation for it here):
The four-part chorales of J. S. Bach, with the German text of the hymns and English translations, edited with an historical introduction, notes and critical appendices by Charles Sanford Terry. London, New York, Oxford University Press [1964], xxv, close score (539 p.) facsims. (incl. music) port. 27 cm.First published 1929. Reprinted (with a new foreword) 1964.
Bach, who composed to the glory of God,
has his work now studied and reverenced mainly by musicians. Christians, who could carry on his legacy, ostensibly to the glory of God,
have little interest in doing so. When I was a kid, the church I attended sang some of the old hymns with gusto — masterworks such as Holy, Holy, Holy
— but generally preferred to sing later works as Power in the Blood,
a revival hymn with all the musical sophistication of She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain When She Comes.
Nowadays the bulk of evangelical Christians don't even sing hymns. They sing little ditties with titles like Deep and Wide.
I'm sure this tendency to sing little ditties to God can be justified by reference to scriptures. That old Christian standby, of the lofty being confounded by the lowly, the wise by fools, the knowledgeable by the ignorant, the tasteful by the tasteless, will work handily here.
But it doesn't change the fact that most of what now gets sung in evangelical churches is tasteless, childish, and rather trashy. All of it, when not very old, tends to be very, very simple.
Still, simplicity can sometimes be amazingly effective. The old German hymns, before their Bachian harmonization, are often simple constructions (though many do change key midway, something a modern folk song
won't do). And hey: just this morning I composed something utterly simple.
And yet my two-part harmonization included a major seventh interval on the downbeat, and a minor key tonic to the second voice while the primary voice sung in the major throughout. All it needs to start a renaissance in Protestant artistry is a set of maudlin lyrics and we're ready to rock-n-roll.
Oops. No. Rock-n-roll is gutter euphemism for sexual intercourse, and you'd think that would be enough to keep Christians from too close a union with that popular tradition. But you'd be wrong. Still, is there any hope for a revival of artistry in Protestant Christianity?
I have a sister who composes folkish-like songs of a reverential nature. They are usually more complex than the little ditties now popular in churches. They are actual songs, and because their lyrics often follow the ancient structures of certain psalms, they show a quirky form not exhibited often in the Deep and Wide
oeuvre.
Her daughter is a talented musician who married another talented musician who now works in a church somewhat in the manner that Bach did. He composes original songs of a folkish, semi-popular nature. And they are far more harmonically complex than the standard Christian rock trash, or the bulk of ditty songs for church singing.
I wonder if they can possibly succeed in the marketplace.
But he does succeed in his church, so that may be enough.
As for me, my own compositions tend to be only a little more complex than my nephew's, if pandiatonicism, bitonality, and neomodalism count for complexity. But he's a trained musician, and my amateur efforts remain fairly uneven. Needless to say, they certainly never to reach up to the level of Bachwerke.
Predictably, I still have trouble understanding why today's churches wouldn't buy hymnals with all of Bach's chorales translated into English. I bet the words would be acceptable. If not better than the ditties now sung, theologically and morally. And the music: it would be easy to sing the main melody, and wondrous to learn the harmonies.
But hey: that's none of my business. I'm one of the ones confounded by the tasteless. I'm by no means doing the confounding.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 4, 2006 | permalink
Martinu viola See: Sonata for Viola and Piano by Martinu
The violist apologizes for the jumpy camera and poor sound quality . . .
. . . but I just like the music. Gotta love Bohuslav Martinu, the composer with one of the most distinctive sounds of the last century.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 5, 2006 | permalink
punctuation apostrophe See: names of punctuation marks
A girlfriend of mine once quipped, one night as we parted, that we wouldn't see each other again till we have faeces.
She was making a joke at the expense of one of my favorite novels.
It wasn't her only one, either. My classmates at the time (this was years and years ago), made fun of my carrying around a copy of Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. They pronounced it TIT-us groan. Ha-ha. But my girl was smarter. She saw the sexual pun: Tightest Groin.
These ribaldries came to mind by way of almost random neuronal firing when I realized that I'd missed the premiere of the new TV show 'Til Death. I wanted to see it because . . . I was annoyed by the apostrophe. The logo for the show starts with the first inverted comma, not an apostrophe.
This is an illiteracy that I don't expect from writers in the Gutenberg dimension . . . though smart people throughout today's post-literate society no longer understand apostrophes, that is certain. The error is rampant. It exists because word processors have been programmed to treat a typed apostrophe following a space as the beginning of a quoted passage, per Britain's inverted comma
method of punctuation, rather than as an apostrophe.
I could blame this on Microsoft, but I've noted it in other word processing programs, too. Word is not the only word in modern typographical error.
But this doesn't excuse anyone. Since the words until and till both exist as synonyms in the language, the very use and existence of until's contraction is an illiteracy.
Critics generally despise the new show, so perhaps the illiteracy in the title can be taken as a natural sign of the show's artistic failure, too.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 17, 2006 | permalink
Everybody's so touchy. Thankfully, some are less touchy than others.
Gore Vidal can write what amounts to a satyr play of a novel making fun of Christianity, and Christians yawn. They won't squawk until a major studio makes a movie of it.
The Pope, on the other hand, quotes Palaeologos II, who charged that Muslims are given to violence for religious reasons, and little platoons of Muslims object, committing violence for religious reasons.
Voltaire once quipped that he had made but one prayer to God, to make his enemies ridiculous. "And He granted it." Well, it seems the Pope may have echoed Catholic-hatin' Voltaire's prayer, because none are more ridiculous than offended Muslims. What a bunch of benighted fools. And knaves.
It's not that the statement isn't argumentative, and a challenge to Muslims:
Show me what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
It's that people confident of their beliefs shouldn't be so offended by those who disagree. This is a sign of weakness, really.
I grew up knowing that many of the beliefs I had been taught offended others. Though I came to disown many of those beliefs, I got used to offending others, and to holding beliefs at variance with the general opinion.
Early on I saw that a free society was built on ignoring a whole lot of offenses. And I realized that everyone should learn to be less touchy.
Liberty should not be abridged in cases of offense. Liberty should not be abridged even in cases of harm, as such. Liberty should be abridged only in retaliation and defense against those who've abridged liberty first. Offense is subjective (so is, even, the concept of harm
).
Fanatic Muslims don't believe this. But then, neither do most Americans. It's no wonder that Americans have trouble defending themselves. They don't know where to draw the lines.
The funniest thing about the Palaeologos statement is not how its verification seemed echoed in the reactions of too-touchy Muslims, though. The funniest thing is that its defense of free conscience goes to the heart of Orthodox Roman Catholic Christianity, which came to repudiate free conscience, and came to believe that coercive powers should force people to convert. This was St. Augustine's late-in-career conversion, his conversion to coercion as a means to bolster up the faith, especially in his fight against Donatists. And this fell very easily into the hands of murderous Catholic hierarchy, and later to Protestants, too, for whom it took years and years of bloodshed and torture to realize that freedom is a better system than tyranny, even tyranny allegedly blessed by a worshipped deity. The man in the tall white hat may pretend that the institution that he heads has been righteously freedom-minded for the majority of its years, but he would be lying.
I don't pretend to let all opinions drip down my back, like water off a duck. I will argue vigorously against some; I will mock others. And I will even take some personally. I cannot help but feel some reservations against people who I believe badly. People who will not think. And I am especially wary of people who demonstrate values that are inherently illiberal, who believe that coercion is a fine way to regulate others' thoughts and feelings as well as a means to defend against their possible aggressions and usurpations. I prefer liberty. And this has consequences.
And a person who says he's going to kill me I will indeed treat as a dangerous threat, because his words are commitments to violence. But a person who merely says that their god will torture me for my mere incredulity? The appropriate reaction to such nonsense is not an attack. It is a scoff, a laugh.
And if they are offended at my derision, tough.
Further, a person may scorn those I admire, asserting that, say, Epicurus was an egomaniacal dogmatist, Aristotle a ponderous fool, and Herbert Spencer a fanatical ideologue. My response will be not to burn down his meeting hall or destroy his printing press. I might ask my scornful interlocutor for some reasoning or evidence for such strange opinions. Or I might just as well shrug him off as miseducated dogmatist and foolish ideologue of a most foul stripe. Either of my responses is better than today's trendy Muslim response, a characteristic reaction that solidifies, in more civilized Western eyes, our negative opinion of their stupid, vile religion.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 20, 2006 | permalink
The Witch of Coös
The
wreckage was so serene, so peaceful. It's removed now. But yesterday it lay at the edge of a clearing like the carcass of a defeated animal. But not even the bear around here are of such size. Long past, before the Clovis hunters moved through the area, perhaps there were land giants of this size. The tree stands above it, as if a mourner. Of course, the tree is likely itself to die soon. It had taken root in the stump of a long-dead tree, and its roots encircle the stump, sucking out what nourishment it can. But the stump is decaying. It cannot hold forever. It will crumble, and the mourner will fall upon the ground where the metal saurian rolled into place — unless a wind blows it backwards. I'm betting on the forward fall.
This land giant was brought down by gravity. Imbalance. A swing of the arm when it was too high? The operator isn't sure. It happened so fast. That he survived is almost surprising; such accidents are often quite bad. He got off with tendon trouble in his wrist, which I have, too. But I fell down a flight of steps over two months ago. The Destroyer of the Metal Saurian probably feels worse than I do, now. But he's far more fortunate, since he risked far, far more.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 25, 2006 | permalink
Rev. Mackerelin The Mackerel Plaza (1958), by Peter De Vries
What are the greatest works of ancient literature, pre-Iliad? My mind is drawing a blank. Off the top of my head, I can only think of three that I've enjoyed, and the last is pretty lame:
Gilgamesh and Jonah contain great title characters. The Gilgamesh accounts are slightly more impressive in having a fascinating secondary character, Enkidu, and a great wise man figure, Utnapishtim. But the Gilgamesh story has a completely different air about it than Jonah's story, in that the former does not have a comic dimension; the story is all adventure and tragedy; it's mythic through-and-through. Jonah is more a wry fable. Alas, I remember Sinuhe’s story — an interesting travelogue, certainly — but not his character at all.
I guess my clear preference is for Jonah. Other examples of Hebrew literature don’t strike me as anywhere nearly as literarily exceptional. Later works, such as Koheleth, fascinate not only for their beauty, but for their odd take on religion. It’s by no means an orthodox work, but it is so beautiful and so supportive of religion that orthodox Jews and Christians have usually included it as scripture.
But of course it is no more orthodox than Republican neocons are Christian. The difference is of kind as well as of emphasis. An orthodox believer believes in God (or so he thinks) because He exists and He is Good; Koheleth supported theistic belief and practice because, in this messy world of ours, it seems to pay.
But not much.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 30, 2006 | permalink
reallife. They are part of it.
I cook like I play the piano: mostly by improvisation. The best improvisations become the occasional score, or recipe.
Last night I shelled a batch of fava beans. My brother-in-law gave me a handful a few weeks ago, and somebody left some in a freebie bin at the local store the next day. I grabbed another handful. And last night, while watching TV, I shelled them.
I ended up with a half a bowl of beans. Now what? Improvisation, that's what.
First, I took about a third of a brick of butter and placed it in a small, cast iron frying pan. I added no small amount of hot curry spice. I shook the curry over the beans directly, too. I began heating the pan with the butter, and when it had melted (mostly), I added the beans. And lots of salt. And then some cayenne pepper.
I stir fried this for a while. It didn't look right, though, so I added two slices of onion, diced. Stir fried that for awhile.
The butter and curry had made a sort of paste. But these were beans, so I decided they needed extra heat. So: in goes about a cup of water. Maybe only three quarters of a cup. I put on a cover for a while.
Now I grew impatient. I wanted to eat the beans. But it was all too liquid at this point. So in goes a half or full cup of spinach cous cous. Instant cous cous. On goes the lid. Off goes the pan from the element. in less than five minutes? Done to my taste.
It wasn't bad at all. A fava bean cous cous curry dish. Very nice. Tasty. Fresh. Probably even nutritious.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | September 30, 2006 | permalink
biological naturalism.Mental events and processes are as much part of our biological natural history as digestion, mitosis, meiosis, or enzyme secretion.
apothegm elision See: Armstrong got Moon quote right
Oh, how wrong I was! Well, not wrong when I was young. Wrong recently, on this blog:
I remember the moon landing, when I was a kid. I watched the first moon walk, and heard Armstrong make his instantly famous proclamation, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. I remember thinking, what does that mean? because while he distinguished between man and mankind, he didn’t place an article before man to carry the distinction through. As he said it, it was preciously close to gibberish.
He later confessed that he meant to say One small step for a man, but forgot to say the a. Oops. You only take the first step on the moon once. But better a verbal slip than a physical one.
The available second-hand recordings show his mistake. Think he’s looking for better recordings to prove it all the more clearly?
Now, new analysis
is said to show that the elided a was not elided at all, but merely obscured by static:
Ford said that Mr Armstrong completed the whole phraseone small step for a mantoo quickly to pick up every syllable he said.
But the audio analysis was able to find the signature of the missing word, he said.
So now books of quotations can make the famous apothegm grammatical and rest assured that the corrected version is indeed the historically spoken version as well.
A friend of mine recently said he had never been bothered by the original statement. I still wonder about that. It always bothered me. And the current news article makes clear the reason why: without the missing
a
, the meaning of the quote is lost. In effect, the line means: That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.
Well, it is good to know that Neil Armstrong did not suffer from dysarthria, a pathology in his case escusable, one would think, by a one-of-a-kind momentary insanity, a lunacy derived from being the first sentient being ever to step upon the Moon.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | October 2, 2006 | permalink
The State,Journal des Débats (September 25, 1848)
libertarianism Democratic Party See: The Case for the Libertarian Democrat
Markos Moulitsas, the blogger behind The Daily Kos, presents, on Cato Unbound, The Case for the Libertarian Democrat.
As a libertarian who loathes the Republican Party (though not necessarily all Republicans, or even Republican politicians), the case seems made for me.
Except that it doesn’t seem made for me.
Why? Well, Moulitsas’s harping on corporations and corporate power strikes me as silly, at the very least. It’s a distraction. I’d say a subterfuge, except that I suppose Moulitsas is sincere. It’s just hard to believe that anyone can get caught up in such obviously narrow and short-sighted obsessions.
Yes, he’s right that the industrial part of the military-industrial complex has too much influence on American foreign policy, as well as defense and offense preparation. But complaining about corporations is not the way to stop it. Unhooking Americans from their silly dreams of world domination and the belief that we somehow should
be invulnerable even while continually meddling in foreign lands would put the kabash on this. Nothing else will.
And that’s an ideological matter.
And it is an ideological matter regarding that I don’t see Democrats as quite capable of confronting. After all, world domination has been a post-war obsession for a long time; the role of world policeman
has been relished by both parties for ages. America’s two-party system, and its two major parties, will long choke on the hallucinations we’ve had ever since the Japanese woke up the Sleeping Giant. The giant never stopped dreaming. But, since awakened to its world stance, most visions have not been sense data, but hallucinations. The next wake-up will, perhaps, wake us up truly. But it will probably be too late. We are addicted to our dreams, and the giant will likely descend into narcoleptic fantasy soon after.
And as far as other corporations, yes, many do abuse the system. There are corporate polluters, I readily acknowledge. But let’s face it, anyone who drives a car is a polluter. The way to gain control over the problems of pollution is with general laws that don’t allow for legislated special privileges. But the Democratic Party, as any other successful party, is a party of coalitions. Favor is the name of the game.
Besides, Democrats are notorious for their business/government
partnerships, for special tax breaks to big businesses, and for generally running roughshod over small businesses by favoring heavy regulations and import/export restrictions best suited to promoting bigness at the expense of littleness, all in hopes to increase tax yields overall. This is modern Democracy in action, and the Democratic Party is in it thick, at least as thick as Republicans are. And they often pride themselves as pioneers of such nonsense.
There's an even more basic issue here, though. The general modern attitude towards government, accepted by nearly every coalition member, and as encouraged by both parties, is: exempt me; stick it to the other guy.
That is: the continual attempt by everyone to live at the expense of everyone else.
I don’t see the Democratic Party as a solution to this perverse folly of modern politics. I see it as a historic source for this nonsense, and as an enthusiastic continued supporter. To suggest otherwise is to spit into the wind and expect a clean face.
I may vote Democrat with increasing frequency in the upcoming years. But even if Democrats gain new ground, I don’t expect much more from their successes than new arrangements of the seating on a boat heading for a very large iceberg. America the Titanic seems doomed. The likeliest scenario, barring a new political enlightenment, and subsequent revolution, is a decline, a fall, a painful expiration of the American Empire, and of the Republic from which it grew.
Nothing Moulitsas wrote encourages me that his favored folk would do anything to stop this descent. Why? The real engine of American Folly is firmly bipartisan. It is an idea. And it is instantiated at the deepest levels of our current political system. It will not be dislodged simply by switching parties.
But then, it will also not be dislodged by any continued loyalty to the vile Republicans, either. For libertarians there is no easy political solution.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | October 2, 2006 | permalink
This Scherzo Is A Jokefrom Charles Ives’s Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano, second movement title
It’s amazing how little I’ve accomplished recently. I’ve been sleeping weirdly the last few days: too many dreams crowding each other out for attention. Now, today, feeling sick most of it, I’ve forgotten them all.
For nourishment, I’m emulating Epicurus: I’m eating cheese.
I’ve been messing about, this week, with iPods and iTunes. Several thoughts spring from this preoccupation:
La Reineis the best of his Paris symphonies.
Riu, Riu Chiu.Use only the repeated first words, sans comma, in the search field.
La Folia,the greatest tune to have the greatest number of great variation sets! The usual suspects are there, but the second on the list I called up has a version with a sitar in it! In a very different treatment, composer Conrad De Jong had fun with it, it sounds like. But where’s Rachmaninoff? (Search for Rachmaninov + Corelli.)
Trauer); and, with much pleasure in contemplation, the only Tibor Serly piece I’ve found in years, his Viola Rhapsody. The recommendations iTunes has made are apt: more Stravinsky, Milhaud’s La Création du monde, Shostakovich string quartets, Hindemith’s delicious Kammermusik, and yet more Stravinsky. Way to go iTunes!
TrauerSymphony, J.C. Bach’s D minor harpsichord concerto, William Bolcom’s Commedia for (Almost) Eighteenth Century Orchestra, and Martinu’s Sinfonietta La Jolla. What a concert!
I got a jury notice summons in the mail today, for Tuesday. I was still contemplating this when I listened to my messages when I arrived at my office. A female voice advised me that the jury duty for that day had been taken off the schedule. In this county, they like plea bargains. I'm assuming that's what happened, the accused plead out. I'll read about it in next week's paper, no doubt.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | October 7, 2006 | permalink
Pacific Decadal Oscillation(PDO) in 1996 while researching connections between Alaska salmon production cycles and Pacific climate (his dissertation topic with advisor Robert Francis). Two main characteristics distinguish PDO from El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO): first, 20th century PDO
eventspersisted for 20-to-30 years, while typical ENSO events persisted for 6 to 18 months; second, the climatic fingerprints of the PDO are most visible in the North Pacific/North American sector, while secondary signatures exist in the tropics — the opposite is true for ENSO. Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century:
coolPDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while
warmPDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990’s. Shoshiro Minobe has shown that 20th century PDO fluctuations were most energetic in two general periodicities, one from 15-to-25 years, and the other from 50-to-70 years.
holidays celebration See: Leif Erickson Day
I go to the post office; it’s closed. A sign on the door explains the mystery: It’s Columbus Day.
I hadn’t noticed any big celebrations. The lack of civil servants working that day somehow didn’t register. Until I went to mail a letter.
These little holidays are becoming easy not to notice. One has to ask: are they worth noting?
Columbus Day is a national holiday, first celebrated as an official, state-sanctioned holiday in Colorado in 1905, and as a national holiday since 1937. It is now held on the second Monday in October. Some people are more negative than ambivalent about the day, seeing as how Columbus practiced slavery and was none to nice to natives.
Is it worth noting that this year Columbus Day fell on Leif Erickson day? Leif Erickson almost certainly discovered America long before Columbus . . . if long after the inhabitants he found on American shores. Since 1964, presidents have declared October 9 as that Viking’s day of observance.
But what am I supposed to observe? That much of government action is inoccuous and ritualistic? That the Vikings were a daring lot? That they didn’t see much use for America, and thus postponed the great European land grab? I mean, the march of civilization?
In his proclamation, our president explains: I call upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs to honor our rich Nordic-American heritage.
Whew. I’ve now done my part.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | October 9, 2006 | permalink
economics time See: Did Phelps Really Explain Stagflation?
I was reading Frank Shostak's Mises.org daily article, on the new Nobel Laureate in Economics, and was again struck by a common classical theme, in the passage Shostak quotes from James Mill:
When goods are carried to market what is wanted is somebody to buy. But to buy, one must have the wherewithal to pay. It is obviously therefore the collective means of payment which exist in the whole nation constitute the entire market of the nation. But wherein consist the collective means of payment of the whole nation? Do they not consist in its annual produce, in the annual revenue of the general mass of inhabitants? But if a nation's power of purchasing is exactly measured by its annual produce, as it undoubtedly is; [...]
My question does not have to do with the main gist of this argument. It's about that word annual.
I've seen it a lot, in Adam Smith, in the Mills, in other classical writers.
And it seems like pseudoscientific handwaving to me. Why not monthly? Why not fortnightly? Why not by the decade? (Because the adjective decadal
sounds unduly pompous?)
Businesses and individuals obviously differ in their time horizons and planning schedules. They expect some things to come to fruition before others; beyond a certain point they don't economize much at all. But those points and schedules are different. The annual
business in classical economics seems simply to lump all time elements into a handy pot and then forget about it. Whereas (it seems to me) the real business of explaining economic systems and events would be to see how those different plans and time-period considerations coordinate.
I can't think of an Austrian critique of this argumentative ploy, or explanatory agenda, or whatever it is. That is, I can't think of one that directly attacks the common classical use of the "annual" time period in its analyses.
I'd be much appreciative of references to critiques - or defenses - of this quasi-obsession with "annual." My reading of classical economists is that this is not a fully developed thought. I could be wrong.
My reading of Mises is that the common obsession with "annual" is kind of goofy. Here's a passage from Human Action:
Public opinion, governments and legislators, and the tax laws look upon a business outfit as a source of permanent revenue. They believe that the entrepreneur who makes due allowance for capital maintenance by annual depreciation quotas will always be in a position to reap a reasonable return from the capital invested in his durable producers' goods. Real conditions are different. A production aggregate such as a plant and its equipment is a factor of production whose usefulness depends on changing market conditions and the skill of the entrepreneur in employing it in accordance with the change in conditions.
But that is not quite as pertinent as I'd hoped to find in.
As an experiment, re-read the passage by Mill with the word annual
excised. Have we lost anything important?
When goods are carried to market what is wanted is somebody to buy. But to buy, one must have the wherewithal to pay. It is obviously therefore the collective means of payment which exist in the whole nation constitute the entire market of the nation. But wherein consist the collective means of payment of the whole nation? Do they not consist in its produce, in the revenue of the general mass of inhabitants? But if a nation's power of purchasing is exactly measured by its produce, as it undoubtedly is; [...]
It seems that by adding the word annual,
a new element of complexity is added that wasn't needd to explain the concept. And, if it is necessary — if time is neceessary to explain Say's Law, then annual
mishandles thave very concept, sweeps under the rug the real complexity of time.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | October 10, 2006 | permalink
I just got back from a candidate’s forum at the local Grange. It was interesting to witness the real, deep and brewing disagreements that fester at the local level. Though I am quite used to seeing major conflicts at national level politics, more heat in my little county is devoted to local issues. This was something of a revelation for me, for I am one of those people who perhaps too often neglects local issues.
The assessor’s office race was particularly uncomfortable. I like the current assessor. She’s very professional. But she did admit to making a few big mistakes, and she said took responsibility
for them. How does one take responsibility for big mistakes of this kind, as an elected bureaucrat? I can think of only one way: by stepping down when voted down.
Unfortunately, I’m not at all sure her opponent can solve the problems she espies in the local property tax situation, however. This makes me hesitant to vote for her and against the one who admitted significant error. I simply don’t know how I’m going to vote here. Property taxes have always struck me as one of the worst forms of taxation, and this race and the issues it raised merely confirmed my opinion.
For me the most interesting race is between two Finnish-Americans, Dean Takko, a Democratic bureaucrat appointed to the legislative position and now running for, well, re-appointment (this time by voters), and Tim Sutinen, a Republican businessman taking a longshot against the suave player, Takko.
Takko is very centrist, very much a player in the game of government. He railed against how badly written most voter initiatives have been in Washington state, but said that he still supports the process. I asked him, since he supported this institution of populism, whether he supported term limits. He does not. He said how bad it was when Oregon experimented with them, losing such able legislators. He said that he still has a lot to learn about the position. Sutinen scoffed, fully supporting term limits. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly remember his quip. Something about anything you have to learn in more than two terms isn’t worth knowing. He was amused and adamant.
Behind me, the county commissioner from my district whispered in my ear: We have term limits already: they’re called elections!
In front of me, Takko explained that without experience, bureaucrats and lobbyists run the legislature.
I respectfully disagree with my neighbor, the politician seated directly behind me. Public offices have terms. Going up for an election, that’s not a limit. The possibility of not being re-elected isn’t a limit; it’s a limitation. A real limit is not being able to run. Two terms and a limit is what I want. In too many seats, powers of incumbency almost guarantee re-election (this is especially the case for U.S. House seats). So the possible limitation disappears in a general culture of incumbency, which I believe corrupts politicians.
I've supported term limits for executives and for legislators for many years now. I’m not sure about county commissioners. Still, two terms seems about right. (My preference for term limits is not necessarily the one put into law in those states with term limits. For instance, I believe, for one house of a bicameral legislature, in a two-term in, two-term out rule: you can serve two terms, but not run for any position in that house again until two terms have passed; for the other house, a different set might apply . . . but since for states i support proportional representation for the other house, perhaps term limits are irrelevant for such a body, I don't know. For the U.S. Senate, I support two six-year terms, then limited out; for the House? The two-term in/two-term out rule.)
I rather disrespectfully disagree with my representative, Mr. Takko. He gave the standard rap that newbies are too inexperienced not to be run circles around by bureaucrats and lobbyists. This, I think, is demonstrable poppycock. The biggest opponents of term limits, outside of legislators themselves, are lobbyists and state employee associations. It’s not because they don’t like being in charge. It’s because they get more power by the insider power structures that evolve in unlimited-term incumbent-dominated legislatures.
Of course, the real reason Takko doesn’t like term limits is for the same reason he doesn’t like the run-of-the-mill voter initiatives. He thinks professional politics is a good, well-run institution, and that the general sweep of politics and policy over the last 100 years has been, on the whole, good. People who support term limits suspect that most of what legislatures do in their professional capacity is bad, or at least not very good. So, with less getting done, less harm is getting done. Term limits has an ideological component. The more you believe in growing the size and scope of government, the less likely you will support term limits.
Takko dismissed such limits vehemently. I then asked him if he supported unlimited terms for the presidency. The audience erupted in laughter, and he admitted that would be going too far.
Takko is a very good politician. Very smooth. And he represents the center very well. Like me he is of Finnish descent. We probably don’t have much else in common.
Sutinen started his speech in high patriotic mode, against taxes and regulations. He moved to America from Finland to be free of Scandinavian socialism, and made no bones about it, or about opposing the general gist of Americans sliding, he feared, to the Left.
He is far from polished, but he is quite passionate. We don’t have much in common except our first name. He shortened his name from Timo to Tim for the campaign. For everyday life, I prefer Timo, and try to get people to use it more than they’d like. But I like him. He seems to be a good father.
I didn’t have the occasion to ask my best two questions to either set of state candidates:
I asked Takko that first question in private, a few months ago. He quickly changed the subject. Very smoothly. I barely even noticed he had changed the subject!
Neighbor-over-the-hill Krist banged the gavel and gave order to the event. The local lepidopterist Bob Pyle asked very good questions, and with grace and good locution. Someday I’ll speak as well in public. That day was not today.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | October 10, 2006 | permalink
reform democracy See: Trust the voters — stop Florida’s Amendment 3
Approaching midnight last night, I wrote about term limits. And yet later I dreamed of music. Why? Earlier in the day I’d written to my cousin that I believed, somehow, that tritones resolved only out
to the nearest interval of a sixth. But of course tritones also resolve in
to a major third. I had written too hastily; forgotten what I’d known. So I dreamt of music and composition and the accommodations made to pure theory in the practice of four-part harmony writing. Sweet dreams. With discords.
Now that I’m awake I’m back to thinking of term limits and citizens’ initiative rights, which I had rather loudly supported at the Grange meeting. That is, a very differnt type of discord is now on my mind, with very different avenues for resolution. Since I’m thinking of democracy, no avenue of resolution is perfect. In particular, while thinking of my Washington state rep. Dean Takko and his hatred of Things That Limit The Good That Professional Politicians Do, I turn my attention to Florida.
Readers of Paul Jacob, the organizer of U.S. Term Limits and a columnist for Townhall.com, are familiar with the arguments for and against term limits and citizen initiative. Last Sunday’s column from Jacob, Trust the voters — stop Florida’s Amendment 3,
learned of yet another Florida political imbroglio. We learn that the legislature there had planned a double whammy this year: gut term limits and the voter initiative at the same time.
But they decided to hold back on term limits, and risk going after the initiative alone.
That is, they aim to recast the initiative by requiring a supermajority vote for passage of citizen-initiated law.
Jacob makes at least
