Departure from Iraq

Today the Iraqis are voting in a US controlled election. In an interview three days ago with New York Times correspondents, President Bush is reported to have said "that he would withdraw American forces from Iraq if the new government that is elected on Sunday asked him to do so, but that he expected Iraq's first democratically elected leaders would want the troops to remain as helpers, not as occupiers."

The elected leaders won't ask for a US withdrawal any time soon. They are identified as collaborators with a foreign infidel army of occupation. Their only authority is today's election, and the authority for today's election is our military force. They know that if that force leaves they will all be dead within a week.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that "President Bush said on Saturday that the U.S. mission must keep going to help the new government get its footing." I hope Bush knows what that really means. I know the Iraqis do.

Property tax reform

Whoa ho! AARP New Jersey writes in Grassroots Update (which I got in today's mail) that "New Jersey's property taxes are out of control." You have to know that a few years ago New Jersey drastically cut its income tax rates, especially in the upper brackets. That put a heavier burden on the local property tax. Now, as they wrote, many "older New Jerseyans" with low incomes and high-valued homes are being squeezed beyond their ability to pay.

AARP New Jersey wants to fix that by putting a limit on the property tax bill depending on ability to pay. making the property tax look more like an income tax. Next, somebody will want to make the income tax look more like a property tax. Or replace the income tax with a sales tax, but make the sales tax look more like an income tax, which is an idea I've seen floated.

The obvious fix is to reduce the property tax burden by raising the income tax rates that were lowered a few years ago. Is our political system so screwed up that it's politically impossible to do the obvious?

Marriage amendment

Somebody asked me a question yesterday about the proposed "Marriage Protection Amendment" (or whatever they're calling it now), which is supposed to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. The question was, how would it apply to intersexed people, that is, someone who is not clearly either a man or a woman? According to KindredSpiritLakeside about one person in 2000 is ambiguously sexed. This is not about sexual preference, but sexual appearance.

I'm the wrong person to ask that question. I'm not a lawyer. Logically, I supppose that amendment would allow anybody who is legally a man and anybody else who is legally a woman to marry each other, but I'm no expert.

More to the point, the marriage amendment is a bad idea. Amendments to the US Constitution should deal strictly with the structure, function, and powers of the federal government. The one amendment that dealt with behavior, the 18th (which prohibited "intoxicating liquors") had such awful unintended consequences that another amendment, the 21st, was needed to repeal it. We need a slogan: "No More Prohibitions!"

Marriage as we know it is an entanglement of church and state. It's a holdover from the Middle Ages, when Church and State were two aspects of the same "establishment." The Church promoted the divine right of kings, and the State defended the Church. The clergy performed marriages, and the law recognized them. In the US today, the local government issues a "marriage license," but the marriage does not actually happen until a member of a state-authorized clergy "performs" it, or unless a "civil" marriage (evidently, from its name, a special and perhaps lower class of marriage) is performed by an authorized government official.

Legally, marriage used to be a license to have children, or even a license to have sex. But over the past century, the law has changed. It no longer regulates what goes on between two consenting adults in their bedroom, and has become more open-minded about how many people of what kind it takes to raise children.

The state should get out of the marriage business altogether. "Marriage" should be a concern of the "church," and the "state" should concern itself with "civil union." Marriages can be performed by whatever clergy (or substitute for clergy) the people involved want, but the law should have no concern with those ceremonies. For purposes of insurance, inheritance, and other legal matters, the state should recognize civil unions between any two (or maybe even more) people who want to live together and form a permanent family.

Art, good and bad

Went to a concert last night, Oslo String Quartet. They started off with Grieg's F major quartet, written in 1891. Or rather, half written; he wrote only the first two movements, out of an intended four. According to the program notes, he had writer's block. The music was OK, but it didn't engage me. I can understand why he didn't finish it: he didn't have anything to communicate.

Next on the program was the obligatory work of contemporary music: the U.S. premiere of Arne Nordheim's "Five Stages," written in 2001. All dissonance. It's as though composers in the twentieth century decided that there was enough pretty music, and henceforth music had to be ugly. Needless to say, I didn't like it.

After intermission they played the Sibelius quartet called "Voces intimae," written in 1909, 18 years after the Grieg quartet. I was immediately engaged. There was a musical theme, musically developed. The composer had something to communicate, and did so.

Let's get serious. Art is communication. There are (at least) two phases (which may in fact overlap): inspiration and execution. In the inspiration phase, the artist gets an idea. It doesn't have to be an idea that can be put into words (if it could be written in words, the artist wouldn't have to paint it, or compose it, or whatever). It can be simple, but it mustn't be trivial. And then in the execution phase, the artist communicates it. Art is not the solitary expression of an artist's feelings, like laughing, screaming, or vomiting. It's the movement of feelings from the mind (heart, soul, whatever) of the artist to the artist's intended audience. The key requirement in this phase is craftsmanship. The artist must know the tools and techniques and painstakingly apply them to create the intended effect. Slapdash won't do.

I think Picasso is overrated. It's as though painters, like composers, decided in the twentieth century that there were enough pretty pictures and henceforth all pictures had to be ugly. But his "Guernica" is successful, because the ugly picture communicates an ugly idea. The disconnected image fragments accurately represent the chaos of a village being bombed.

Not only art, but science, mathematics, and other activities also require inspiration to produce an idea and craftmanship to convey it. Darwin's "origin of species," and Einstein's paper on special relativity, both convey essentially simple ideas with meticulous craftsmanship. In politics, the Republicans understand the importance of inspiration and craftsmanship; the Democrats either don't understand it, or don't have what it takes to put it together.

Undersea foolishness

A US Navy submarine was reported to have run at full speed ten days ago into an undersea mountain that was not on the charts. Blame immediately was cast on the people who did not update the chart after a satellite image taken five years ago indicated that a mountain was there. But was the chart really wrong? The part of the chart shown in The New York Times didn't show that there was a mountain there, but on the other hand it didn't show that there wasn't a mountain there either. In the region where the collision occurred, the chart showed no soundings, no contour lines, nothing but a reported spot of discolored water. That area was clearly uncharted.

If the chart had shown a mountain, that area should obviously have been avoided. If the chart had shown that there was not a mountain there, the sub crew would have been justified in proceeding full speed ahead without sonar, as they did. But because the chart showed no information there at all, they should have proceeded with caution, which they didn't.

Too many people have a tendency to believe that every question has an answer. Ignorance is intolerable to them. If they don't see a mountain, they will either conclude that there is no mountain, or (if they want a mountain) they will insist it's there even if it's not. They can't accept the fact that nobody knows whether or not there's a mountain there. (I'm using "mountain" as an illustration; think of other examples.}

I like the song that goes "I'll never know what makes the rain to fall; I'll never know what makes the grass so tall," because in spite of that admission of ignorance, the singer says "I'll get along as long as a song is strong in my soul."

There's a difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge (vs. ignorance) consists in how much you know. Wisdom (vs. foolishness) consists in how much you realize you don't know.

Bloginning

Today is the first day of the rest of my blog. Already I'm grouching, because blogging is supposed to be easy, but it turns out there are a lot of things to do in the setup that, as a newbie, I haven't figured out yet. More later.