Synaesthesia--see Beetoven's Fifth

One of the most famous and glorious pieces of music ever!

Where is music? In the physical sounds? In the Platonic forms? In the structures in created by the sounds? 

This video helps us go beyond the sensual music...



This seems to me to be important for epistemology and metaphysics students. The empiricists say that what we perceive gives us true knowledge. But the experience of listening to (perceiving) music seems to raise a question: where is the music? Is it in the score we see here--the visual representation? If all we heard were the sounds without the structure, what then?

Does a musician hear more music than someone who does not know music theory?


Yikes. They are at it again.... From Ricochet.com

International Monetary Fund: Here's the Fix for Sovereign Debt—Pick Savers' Pockets

October 18, 2013

Lest you think this a nutty anarcho-libertarian conspiracy fantasy, let me begin by linking to the source document on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Web site:

Fiscal Monitor: Taxing Times (PDF)

Scrolling down to page 59 (page numbers in PDFs are somewhat labile, but it should be around there), we find in “Box 6”:

Box 6. A One-Off Capital Levy?

The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a “capital levy”— a one-off tax on private wealth—as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability.¹ The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair). There have been illustrious supporters, including Pigou, Ricardo, Schumpeter, and—until he changed his mind—Keynes. The conditions for success are strong, but also need to be weighed against the risks of the alternatives, which include repudiating public debt or inflating it away (these, in turn, are a particular form of wealth tax—on bondholders—that also falls on nonresidents).

There is a surprisingly large amount of experience to draw on, as such levies were widely adopted in Europe after World War I and in Germany and Japan after World War II. Reviewed in Eichengreen (1990), this experience suggests that more notable than any loss of credibility was a simple failure to achieve debt reduction, largely because the delay in introduction gave space for extensive avoidance and capital flight—in turn spurring inflation.

The tax rates needed to bring down public debt to precrisis levels, moreover, are sizable: reducing debt ratios to end-2007 levels would require (for a sample of 15 euro area countries) a tax rate of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth.²

1  As for instance in Bach (2012).

2  IMF staff calculation using the Eurosystem’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (Household Finance and Consumption Network, 2013); unweighted average.

So, target those who have saved for an uncertain future, their children's education, and retirement, spring it on them “before avoidance is possible” and persuade the rubes “it will never be repeated” as you pick their pockets.

Think about this as you scrimp to save or make contributions to a retirement account which the locusts may plunder when investors cease to buy their bonds.

Howie Carr on getting off'd

Writing about a protest on Guest Street against a Koch brother's sitting on the board of WGBH, Howie Carr recalls his own experience with the station. (Brattle Street runs into Harvard Square.)

To those moonbats who were out on Guest Street yesterday — including the one dressed in an Elmo costume — David Koch is not a political foe, he’s an apostate, a heretic.

So they have declared a fatwah against him.

Let’s face it, they’d like to burn Koch at the stake, except they’re worried about the carbon footprint it would leave.

“His point of view is a lie,” said one no-nonsense granny from the People’s Republic of Brookline.

Koch has a different viewpoint. Ergo, he lies. See, what these fruitcakes believe is that global warming, er climate change, 
is “settled science.”

Full disclosure: David Koch and I went to the same prep school. On the other hand, he’s worth $36 billion, and I’m not. But we’ve both had our problems at WGBH. The moonbats want to fire him from the board, and they once succeeded in getting me fired from Ch. 2 for the same crime he’s accused of, 
insufficient Political Correctness.

The Brattle Street brass were holding firm to keep me on the old Ten O’Clock News, right up until the Sunday Globe ran a column suggesting a boycott by all Ch. 2 contributors until I was axed. So you don’t have to tell me about celebrating diversity.

My eyebrows are still singed from when the bow-tied bumkissers tied me to the stake.

- See more at: http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/howie_carr/2013/10/carr_hey_elmo_get_a_job#sthash.gdy9nQib.dpuf


FW: A great poet on Cape Breton

Cape Breton

Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford, 
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand 
with their backs to the mainland 
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge, 
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa." 
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede 
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.) 
The silken water is weaving and weaving, 
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions, 
lifted and penetrated now and then 
by one shag's dripping serpent-neck, 
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse, 
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat. 

The same mist hangs in thin layers 
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland 
like rotting snow-ice sucked away 
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift 
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack-- 
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors, 
each riser distinguished from the next 
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge, 
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view. 

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast. 
On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers, 
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday. 
The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills 
like lost quartz arrowheads. 
The road appears to have been abandoned. 
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned, 
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior, 
where we cannot see, 
where deep lakes are reputed to be, 
and disused trails and mountains of rock 
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches 
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones-- 
and these regions now have little to say for themselves 
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward 
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing 
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets. 

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes, 
packed with people, even to its step. 
(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts, 
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.) 
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse, 
where today no flag is flying 
from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob. 
It stops, and a man carrying a bay gets off, 
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow, 
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies, 
to his invisible house beside the water. 

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts. 
The thin mist follows 
the white mutations of its dream; 
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks. 

Elizabeth Bishop

 

Step 1. Create a monstrosity. Step 2. Argue for the simplicity of Single Payer

Consider this story about the complexity of what they wrought.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/10/02/friendly-hands-from-overseas/

Could they have been serious? Am I being paranoid in feeling that the fall back all along was going to be single payer, so getting this right didn't matter.  And why can't we hire the unemployed of Detroit instead of those patient and polite Mumbai folks.

And what happens if a terrorist gets hold of these new smart records on every citizen?

Okay. I will take off the tin foil hat now.


Taoist Cosmology

At the center, Yin and Yang. These dichotomous energies (dark, light; centripetal, centrifugal; in, out) swirl endlessly, generating our ouniverse. Each is becoming the other. Note the solid and broken lines. These are used in “throwing the changes,” a form of divination as found in the I Ching. You used yarrow sticks and the patterns showed the state of things and thus could give advice.

 

This is how it grows and grows and grows


IRS rides 1884 'dead horse' law to defense of tax preparer rules

    By Patrick Temple-West

    WASHINGTON | Tue Sep 24, 2013 5:16pm EDT

    (Reuters) - The Obama administration on Tuesday defended its effort to regulate the tax return preparation business for the first time in U.S. history, basing its case largely on a 19th century law dealing with horses lost or killed in the Civil War.

    At an appellate court hearing on a challenge brought by libertarian lawyers challenging the administration, Justice Department Tax Division lawyer Gilbert Rothenberg said: "I hate to beat a dead horse, especially one from the Civil War era."

    But he explained that the administration sees the "Horse Act of 1884" as providing ample authority for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to regulate the tens of thousands of preparers who fill out millions of Americans' federal tax returns.

    A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard the administration's argument. Rothenberg said the IRS should be allowed to force tax return preparers - who are now unregulated - to pass a competency test and take annual continuing education classes.

    But the Institute for Justice, a libertarian advocacy law firm, disagreed.

    "Congress never gave the IRS authority to regulate tax preparers," said Dan Alban, an attorney for the institute.

    The case has broad implications for the industry, which includes H&R Block Inc, a few mid-tier companies and thousands of tiny, mom-and-pop firms.

    A decision from the judges is still months away. In oral arguments, the judges - all appointed by Republican presidents - gave no clear sign of how they will rule, yea or neigh.

    But they did question why the IRS was citing an 1884 law to justify trying to police tax return preparers in 2013.

    LEGAL REPRESENTATION AT ISSUE

    After the Civil War, many Americans brought war loss claims against the U.S. government, often for dead or missing horses.

    A post-war industry emerged of agents who would press war loss claims for a fee, usually a percentage of the claim collected. Soon, claim values were being fraudulently inflated.

    In response, the government started regulating these intermediaries, barring unscrupulous ones and certifying honest ones as "enrolled agents," a title that is still used today by people who represent clients in matters before the IRS.

    The IRS is arguing that tax return preparers represent their customers in much the same way that enrolled agents do, so the agency should be able to expand regulation to include preparers.

    But the Institute for Justice is arguing that tax return preparers do not carry out the same level of representation, but rather merely provide a paid service for clients.

    "Preparing a tax return is not a representative act," Alban said. "It is performing a service, certainly, but there's no representation."

    More than 78 million Americans in 2011 paid someone to prepare their tax returns. The industry posted estimated revenue this year of $9.4 billion.

    The Institute sued in March 2012 to block the IRS's regulations and won a district court ruling in January halting parts of the agency's program. The IRS appealed.

    KOCHS HELPED FUND CHALLENGER

    Based in Arlington, Va., the institute litigates over issues such as private school vouchers and eminent domain. It was begun in 1991 with funding from wealthy industrialists and conservative activists David and Charles Koch.

    Sabina Loving, a Chicago tax preparer, is the lead plaintiff in the case. She was not present at the oral arguments.

    Some of the tax experts who attended said the judges seemed skeptical of the IRS's argument. "Clearly, they were leaning toward Loving," said Don Williamson, a tax accountant and executive director of American University's Kogod Tax Center.

    "It looks like a good day for Mr. Alban," said Robert Kerr, senior director of government relations for the National Association of Enrolled Agents, a tax-preparers trade group.

    Kathryn Keneally, head of the Justice Department tax division, declined to comment on the oral arguments while leaving the court room.

    The case is Sabina Loving et al v. Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, No. 13-5061.

    (Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Leslie Gevirtz)

    But the harm to the Republicans is done already--mission accomplished

    by KHOU.com and Associated Press

    kvue.com

    Posted on September 19, 2013 at 9:33 AM

    Updated today at 3:36 PM

    Related:

    HOUSTON – A Texas Court of Appeals in Austin has overturned the conviction of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, attorney Brian Wice told KVUE sister station KHOU 11 News.

    DeLay, 66, was convicted in 2010 for his alleged role in a scheme to influence Texas elections.

    He was found guilty of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering after he was accused of helping funnel corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

    In documents released early Thursday, however, an appeals court said the evidence in the case was "legally insufficient to sustain DeLay’s convictions."

    "I’m very happy about it," DeLay said in Washington Thursday. "I’m so glad they wrote the ruling about it because the ruling says I never should have been charged, much less indicted."

    The court said all judgments against DeLay were reversed, and the former congressman was formally acquitted.

    For both DeLay and his critics, the process was frustratingly slow, due in part to some of the appeals court justices in Austin recusing themselves as well as DeLay’s successful effort to have a judge on the panel removed because of anti-Republican comments she made.

    DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison, but he stayed free while his case made its way through the appellate process.

    ___________________________________________________________________

    I remember thinking the evidence of crime pretty flimsy myself. Maybe I should be a Texas appeals judge...

    J'accuse Minnesota State Fair Officials--if the clown speaks true

    In these enlightened times, even "trained" journalists don't seem to bother with the factual summary--everything, instead, is commentary--or spin. Take for instance, the recent case of the rodeo clown who was banned from the Minnesota State Fair for life for wearing an Obama mask and asking the delighted crowd if they would like to see him kicked by the bull.  Rodeo clowns, we know, are supposed to get kicked by the bull or darned near, since their job is to divert the bull from the rider. But some took umbrage and outrage and then took to their high horses warning the Nation that Racism was afoot, if not disrespect.  When it was pointed out that Americans don't expect banishment for showing disrespect to politicians, the ground shifted and the objection was to the hint of inciting violence against a President. Does that pass the sniff test?

    Now the clown himself has given an interview. He says that the joke itself has been used for years, with masks of Reagan, Bush and Clinton. Now, it would be simple for a journalist to check his summary against facts--rodeo folk will know if the joke is hoary. And if so, the tempest in a teapot dies down, another canard bites the dust...or should.  And the officials who so hastily imposed punishment for speech will apologize and hang their heads in shame. But don't hold your breath...