rmcnabb

"The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say." -Bilbo Baggins in "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien "The noble soul has reverence for itself" -Friedrich Nietzsche > "Violence never settles anything." > "So? I'm sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that" -Lt-Col. DuBois Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

First, it depends on what emergency services we are discussing. Emergency medical care is not a government function and if someone doesn't have insurance he must rely on charity. This would probably not be a major problem. Since most hospitals don't want to turn away someone having a heart attack they would probably work with charitable groups to provide for such situations. Of course hospitals and ambulance services would have to coordinate closely with police for some emergenies. I think that if you are a victim of a violent crime through no fault of your own and you require medical attention, you could reasonably expect the government to pay for it since the government failed to properly protect you. If there is a communicable disease involved in the medical emergency then the government could be involved since it is a matter of public health. If you have a comunicable disease that is a serious health threat to others the government could require you to get treatment and/or quarantine you an the basis that you don't have the right to expose other people to the disease. This is even more obvious today, when terrorism via biological weapons is a concern. As for fire departments they could be run by insurance companies but I see two problems with this. First, somethimes fire is an act of force(arson) which the government should protect you from. It is not always clear what caused a fire initially so the government could reasonably decide to just fight all fires on the premise that they will have to fight some and it doesn't make sense to say "Oh, this is a grease fire, not arson. We have to leave, you can wait for the private fire department to arrive." The second problem is that a fire will not neccesarily be confined to a singe piece of property. There could be a lot of confusion if a fire breaks out in a house that is not covered by insurance while others around it are. There might be multiple insurance companies for various houses in a neighboorhood and this could lead to unneccesary and counterproductive duplication of effort. These problems might be soluble, but right now I would favor keeping fire departments as part of the government. The final set of emergeny services that I can think of are those involved with a major disaster (e.g.- tsunami, hurricane, easthquake). In this case I think the government should deliver any emergency services that it can since the immediate goal in such sitation is to avoid a massive loss of life. If supplies of food and water need to be delivered quickly to an area the military might be the only organization equiped to do it. Also, the lack of such services could lead to violence when thousands of people find themselves in lifeboat type sitautions. The government would have to deal with that violence so they might as well just do what they can to prevent the situation from arising.

I agree with this. If his theory is wrong, it should certainly be refuted. I don't recall Falco saying anything like this. I remember quite clearly that he said his arguement was not that they couldn't possibly paint this perfectly freehand, but rather that if they were painting freehand there would not be the exact imperfections that he pointed out. I also don't believe he ever suggested that they couldn't draw or paint. As I understood it, he argued that these were techniques they used sometimes, not in every painting. And, moreover, my impression was that these techniques were used only in sketching, not in the actual painting.

Yes, I just found his name and it was Falco. As I said, I don't have enough knowledge of the subject to determine whether the theory is true. But I don't think it constitutes an attack on the reputation of these artists. If they did use optical aids in some places, as Falco claimed, that doesn't diminish their accomplishments. After all, it's not as if painting suddenly becomes easy when these techniques are used. It would just be another tool to help make their work better.

Hello, This is my first post to this forum. I've been reading things here for several months. This subject caught my eye because I recently saw a talk on this by a physicist (I have a PhD in physics myself). I can't comment on the art history aspect of the debate, but some of the points he made based on optics seemed compelling. He showed that a number of paintings had imperfection that were consistent with the use of optical aids, for instance lines that were a bit curved and focal points that changed across the painting. He stated clearly that his arguement wasn't, "this is to perfect to be done by hand" but, "if it were done by hand it wouldn't have these exact imperfections". He didn't argue that every painting was done this way, in fact, some of the evidence he presented had to do with discontinuities where he believed the artist had gone from an optical aid to freehand drawing within a work. I don't know how much different his ideas were from Hockney's and I certainly won't claim to be absolutely convinced from just a single 1 hour talk. But, his arguements were reasonable and he backed them up with examples in paintings he showed. He even made some comparisons to modern techniques for spotting faked photgraphs. What I can say with certainty, is that I did not walk out of that talk thinking that these painters were a bunch of frauds who just used tracing and paint by numbers. Rather, I thought that they were gifted artists who developed a set of useful techniques for improving their sketches and paintings. It didn't seem to be an attack on their genius, but further testament to it.