After some searches on my own blog, I can't find the complete instructions.
This is for Wool of the Andes worsted.
Chest: 40 inches.
Arm length: 20 inches.
Wrist: 7 1/2 inches around.
Neck goes over a head which needs a 7 1/2 size hat.
Using US size 5 circular needles with 24 inch tether:
Put on a slip stitch with a 6-7 inch tail.
Cable on 200 stitches.
For 8 rows, k2/p2 rib.
Switch to US size 7 circular needles with 24 inch tether.
For 90 rows, knit in the round.
At each underarm, put 10 stitches on holders; I tend to use a doubled-over length of a thinner yarn and loop the free ends through.
I center the underarms on the starting slip stitch on one side and then, of course, halfway around to the other side.
Replace those 10 stitches with 10 cast-ons (not cable ons).
For 55 rounds, knit the armholes BUT
For rounds 1-3
after the underarm, K1, K2TOG
knit to the other armhole minus 3 stitches
slip a stitch, knit 1, PSSO, knit 1
knit across the armhole
For rounds 4-55, knit and don't decrease at the armhole.
Turn inside out and knit together 23 stitches at one shoulder.
Turn right side out and knit to other shoulder.
Repeat the knitting together at the other shoulder.
Turn right side out.
Change to US size 7 circular needle with 16 inch tether.
Start k2/2 rib for 4-6 rows.
Bind off in rib.
Cut a 6-7 inch tail and sew the neck edge even with a tapestry needle.
Sew the bottom hem even with a tapestry needle.
Use duplicate stitch to fill gaps in where the shoulders join the neck ribbing.
Sleeves:
Using US size 7 circular needles with a 16 inch tether, move stitches from the holder to one of the needles.
Put a slip stitch on the other needle, knit the first stitch and pass the slip stitch over.
Now knit up the other 10 stitches of the under arm.
Cut up the middle of the armhole (the "steeking" to use a Fair Isle term).
Using a US size 4-6 crochet needle,
for every stitch around the armhole,
pick up yarn from the back to the front of the fabric and put it on your circular needle.
At the top of the shoulder pick one stitch through at the seam before continuing through the rest of the armhole.
Knit the first five stitches at the underarm.
Put a marker thread so you can do the decreases precisely in line.
Knit two rounds.
Knit 1, K2TOG, knit around to the underarm minus 3 stitches, slip stitch, K1, PSSO, K1.
Repeat the last two steps until you have knitted 84 rounds from the underarm.
Work your marker thread in and out at the midpoint between the two K1s to keep track of where you put decreases.
Switch to US size 7 double point (sock) needles, at least 7 inches long, using 3 to hold stitches and knitting with the 4th.
Knit 3 rounds and then decrease on the 4th round.
When you reach a total of 132 rounds from the underarm, count the stitches left on your needles.
You need 56 for your cuff.
If you have more than 59, do another 4 rounds and a decrease.
Then K2TOG as many times as needed for the 56 stitches of the cuff.
CHANGE TO US SIZE 5 DOUBLE POINT (SOCK) NEEDLES.
Do k2/p2 rib for 8 rounds on the cuff.
Bind off in rib.
Cut a 6-7 inch tail and sew the cuff edge even with a tapestry needle.
Wash, block and wear.
Working 6 hours a day, I can make a pullover in 2 weeks.
My back is about an inch shorter than normal, I learned that sewing tops for myself years ago.
The hem of this pullover sits a little below my hip bones when I stand and meets the back of my slacks when I sit.
I like my sleeves a bit long; the cuffs get pushed over my wrists against my hands and I feel warmer.
YMMV; adjust the length accordingly.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Friday, November 18, 2016
Fact-Checking the Torah -- our first commentary
We still don’t know why it was important for Brenton to translate the Septuagint into English. You might think it was because Septuagint was important to Christianity – but Jerome realized in the 400s CE that the Septuagint was a bad translation from Hebrew.
Clement and Justin Martyr (100s CE) don’t quote from Septuagint. They say things that sound like Septuagint, but aren’t; as with Qumran, they are Greek versions of scriptural material, but they are not the version Brenton "translated". Clement and Justin were trying to use Plato and other Greek writers to prove the value of Christianity to people who read classical Greek authors; the audience didn’t read Septuagint and quoting it would have meant nothing to them.
Then there’s Origen’s Hexapla. This collected six different Greek versions of Torah, with notes on the differences between them. Only the notes survive; in Field’s version (which is online), they are collated with the Septuagint to show what Origen was thinking about. Apparently the Hexapla wasn’t important enough to preserve intact.
Translators claimed to go back to Hebrew with both the English and French Geneva Bibles of the 1500s CE, and the King James Version, and so on. But since none of them had the faintest idea of modality or the other features of Biblical Hebrew known to 21st century linguistics, they actually translated in accordance with the received knowledge about Hebrew. That includes mistranslations like Ohozath in Genesis, as well as “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14, and “and.”
As long as people read translations – of ANY work – they are vulnerable to the carelessness, ignorance, and even willful errors of translators. As long as people claim to be experts when all they know are translations, so long will these people generate urban legends or cling to them. These incorrect translations play a role in almost every urban legend documented on this blog.
So if translations, which pretend to come straight from the primary document, cannot give good results, what chance do commentaries have, especially if they take their stand on translations? That’s what we’re about to find out when we look at Philo.
The first urban legend about Philo says that he used Septuagint. That’s a bad thing. However, his relationship to Septuagint is not one of unqualified faithfulness to the Greek. In particular, in his essay On Dreams I, lines 216-218, he discusses Lavan’s bargain with Yaaqov over the colors of sheep and goats. Philo uses some terms Septuagint doesn’t have and uses other terms the opposite of how Septuagint uses them. So when his commentators claim that such and such a phrase in Philo comes from the Septuagint, it better be exact in text and meaning, and somebody would do the world a real service by totting up how often that happens. Then they ought to compare it to how often the commentators cite to Septuagint when Philo doesn’t really quote from it. I would not be surprised if Philo says things that sound like Septuagint but aren’t.
But that doesn’t mean Philo’s commentary is useful for anything else but understanding Philo, as I am about to show.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- aspect and law
When you have learned trop, you will learn how to punctuate Biblical Hebrew and the meaning of lots of verses will get clearer. Now I’m going to whip you back to aspect again and show you how the relationship between Torah and Mishnah, the basis of Talmud, gets clearer.
In Midrash Halakhah Sifre on Leviticus, the introduction gives 13 principles used in Jewish courts to help judges make decisions. They are attributed to Rabbi Yishmael who was martyred by Hadrian about 132 CE, but most of them were known to R. Hillel the Great over a century earlier.
One of them, qal va-chomer is called a fortiori in western legal systems. If somebody does X and gets punishment Y, then if somebody else does 2X the punishment ought to be 2Y.
Where aspect comes in is tort laws and rituals.
Most tort laws like Exodus 21:18 start with an imperfect aspect verb; this is an action which the law knows happens sometimes and has decided is worth paying attention to because it has had bad consequences enough times not to be accident or coincidence. In this case, it’s y’rivun which you also know is an uncertainty epistemic; we’re supposing that the fight is intense enough for the law to get involved.
Such an opener is usually followed by a perfect aspect verb, in this case hikah. As soon as hikah happens, the fighting men become subject to the law. When the hittee nafal (perfect aspect) onto his bed, the laws of damages for battery kick in.
In the 13 forensic principles, this is a k’lal u-prat, a generalization followed by details. There are also cases where the details come first and then the generalization. The details govern what happens, but the k’lal in imperfect aspect defines what area of torts we are talking about.
The same is true for sacrifices. Ki taqrivu using the imperfect is followed by things like zevach shlamim which distinguish the rules from those applying to a sin offering. Then follow perfect aspect verbs about what parts of this zevach belong to the owner or how long he has to consume them.
And finally, there is the k’lal u-prat u-k’lal, ein atah dan elah k’eyn ha-prat. This is in Deuteronomy 14:22 where a string of imperfect verbs in the k’lal identify that in general, the distance to the tabernacle might be so far that food would rot on the way. Verse 23 starts with a sequential natatah and then there are perfect verbs about what to do with the money. Verse 26 opens with another sequential natatah and includes a string of nouns detailing what to spend the money on and then there’s an imperfect aspect tishalkha, what your “soul” asks you for. That generalization seals off the list of permissible things. It is followed by a perfect aspect akhalta. In other words, this money has to be used for food and drink. If you use it for hotel bills, you’ve violated the law. You have to bring other money along for that.
When you can recognize the aspects, the aspectless, the agentless binyanim, the punctuation of trop, and the use of et, then you can see how these things play out in Mishnaic legal formulas. It shows that Jewish law, like other common law codes, is much less haphazard than you might think.
Jewish classical literature is comprehensible, but most people have to leave their comfort zone to understand it for what it is: the record of JEWISH ideas backed up by Torah and the rest of Tannakh, which are recorded in the ANCIENT Jewish language and not in something that westerners have mis-labeled and misdescribed for centuries.
Speaking of centuries...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
In Midrash Halakhah Sifre on Leviticus, the introduction gives 13 principles used in Jewish courts to help judges make decisions. They are attributed to Rabbi Yishmael who was martyred by Hadrian about 132 CE, but most of them were known to R. Hillel the Great over a century earlier.
One of them, qal va-chomer is called a fortiori in western legal systems. If somebody does X and gets punishment Y, then if somebody else does 2X the punishment ought to be 2Y.
Where aspect comes in is tort laws and rituals.
Most tort laws like Exodus 21:18 start with an imperfect aspect verb; this is an action which the law knows happens sometimes and has decided is worth paying attention to because it has had bad consequences enough times not to be accident or coincidence. In this case, it’s y’rivun which you also know is an uncertainty epistemic; we’re supposing that the fight is intense enough for the law to get involved.
Such an opener is usually followed by a perfect aspect verb, in this case hikah. As soon as hikah happens, the fighting men become subject to the law. When the hittee nafal (perfect aspect) onto his bed, the laws of damages for battery kick in.
In the 13 forensic principles, this is a k’lal u-prat, a generalization followed by details. There are also cases where the details come first and then the generalization. The details govern what happens, but the k’lal in imperfect aspect defines what area of torts we are talking about.
The same is true for sacrifices. Ki taqrivu using the imperfect is followed by things like zevach shlamim which distinguish the rules from those applying to a sin offering. Then follow perfect aspect verbs about what parts of this zevach belong to the owner or how long he has to consume them.
And finally, there is the k’lal u-prat u-k’lal, ein atah dan elah k’eyn ha-prat. This is in Deuteronomy 14:22 where a string of imperfect verbs in the k’lal identify that in general, the distance to the tabernacle might be so far that food would rot on the way. Verse 23 starts with a sequential natatah and then there are perfect verbs about what to do with the money. Verse 26 opens with another sequential natatah and includes a string of nouns detailing what to spend the money on and then there’s an imperfect aspect tishalkha, what your “soul” asks you for. That generalization seals off the list of permissible things. It is followed by a perfect aspect akhalta. In other words, this money has to be used for food and drink. If you use it for hotel bills, you’ve violated the law. You have to bring other money along for that.
When you can recognize the aspects, the aspectless, the agentless binyanim, the punctuation of trop, and the use of et, then you can see how these things play out in Mishnaic legal formulas. It shows that Jewish law, like other common law codes, is much less haphazard than you might think.
Jewish classical literature is comprehensible, but most people have to leave their comfort zone to understand it for what it is: the record of JEWISH ideas backed up by Torah and the rest of Tannakh, which are recorded in the ANCIENT Jewish language and not in something that westerners have mis-labeled and misdescribed for centuries.
Speaking of centuries...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
Sunday, November 13, 2016
I'm just saying -- rating social media
So now I'm almost fully invested.
Blogger: 4 stars. Google and Microsoft have settled some of their differences and now, as you have seen, I can post pictures, something I couldn't do after Nov. 2014.
Spotify: 4 stars. Some of the functions are hard to figure out from the instructions but once you figure them out, they work.
Google+: 0 stars. Our models of what we want social media to do are exactly opposite. If you're following me on Google+, you'd be better off following me on Twitter or, since it appears to be merger bait, on Facebook or Blogger.
Pinterest: 0 stars. Another "exactly opposite". Clue for Pinterest users: when I google something, I filter out or ignore every link from Pinterest. It won't let you look at anything unless you have a Pinterest account. There are enough websites that have non-Pinterest alternatives and offer info I want, that Pinterest has NO interest for me.
Facebook: 2 1/2 stars. I'd be happier with Facebook if their help topic contents had kept up with how pages actually work. Everything I've used the Help function with, the instructions tell me to look for things that don't exist. For example, when it tells you to right-click, fuhgeddaboudit. You get the normal IE right-click menu.
I'm also disturbed by the stupid stuff that FB expects its customers to suck up. From bad security to an email dirty trick, and now being suckered into posting death messages for users who aren't dead, FB is behaving immaturely.
On FB I'm only posting links to Blogger, not full-up Blogger posts, because I can't find the Facebook instructions on how to control comments and I have no intention of feeding trolls and trash.
The FB model of protecting copyright seems to force you to identify groups first. I'm getting readership from all over the world, and I want it that way, so identifying groups is nonsense.
Twitter: 4 stars FWIW. This helped me increase pageviews by putting out "ads" in a separate forum. The text limitation hasn't hurt me; if I really want to let loose, usually on a news article, I go to the article. They usually allow comments. Twitter's biggest problem right now is fangirl bullies and trolls who need to be blocked until they grow out of it. If ever.
Now that Blogger's photo links have been fixed, Blogger wins hands down. I don't allow comments from anonymous readers, and I can turn moderation on and off at the flick of a button if the others get out of hand. Then I have the function for deleting trash comments, which is legal for non-government bloggers to do.
Lesson for using social media: know what you're after. Social media can ruin your brand lickety split unless you know what you have to do to protect yourself and invest the time.
Case in point. What was formerly the best news outlet with the widest interest and reach in the D.C. region, has slowly been turning into a victim of its own IT department. The IT department loaded the articles with flashy trashy video nonsense that had nothing to do with the article. The videos chewed up so much bandwidth that it was difficult to read the articles let alone comment. Comments dropped off except for the dedicated crazy people who, having no lives, were the only ones with the time to waste.
So the moderators were working overtime and there were still abusive, threatening posts, trolls and spam. And the bean counters decided to put a stop to that. They have switched completely over to Facebook with no moderation. Instead of the moderators not being able to keep up with the crazy people, there will be nothing but crazy people.
Another news outlet gets crazy people but there's a link to their help department. In recent attempts of crazy people to eliminate comments they didn't like, it was possible to tell the help department what to watch for and the craziness was halted. After that the discussion continued undisturbed.
And finally there are still people, years after social media was invented, who don't realize that
a) they never know who their readers are distributing their info to and
b) just because they delete something so they can't see it, doesn't mean it automatically disappears everywhere.
I have had to teach somebody I know that anything posted on FB can make its way to where it can ruin a career. It never happens immediately; Murphy's Law says it will always wait until it does the most damage.
I'm just saying...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
Blogger: 4 stars. Google and Microsoft have settled some of their differences and now, as you have seen, I can post pictures, something I couldn't do after Nov. 2014.
Spotify: 4 stars. Some of the functions are hard to figure out from the instructions but once you figure them out, they work.
Google+: 0 stars. Our models of what we want social media to do are exactly opposite. If you're following me on Google+, you'd be better off following me on Twitter or, since it appears to be merger bait, on Facebook or Blogger.
Pinterest: 0 stars. Another "exactly opposite". Clue for Pinterest users: when I google something, I filter out or ignore every link from Pinterest. It won't let you look at anything unless you have a Pinterest account. There are enough websites that have non-Pinterest alternatives and offer info I want, that Pinterest has NO interest for me.
Facebook: 2 1/2 stars. I'd be happier with Facebook if their help topic contents had kept up with how pages actually work. Everything I've used the Help function with, the instructions tell me to look for things that don't exist. For example, when it tells you to right-click, fuhgeddaboudit. You get the normal IE right-click menu.
I'm also disturbed by the stupid stuff that FB expects its customers to suck up. From bad security to an email dirty trick, and now being suckered into posting death messages for users who aren't dead, FB is behaving immaturely.
On FB I'm only posting links to Blogger, not full-up Blogger posts, because I can't find the Facebook instructions on how to control comments and I have no intention of feeding trolls and trash.
The FB model of protecting copyright seems to force you to identify groups first. I'm getting readership from all over the world, and I want it that way, so identifying groups is nonsense.
Twitter: 4 stars FWIW. This helped me increase pageviews by putting out "ads" in a separate forum. The text limitation hasn't hurt me; if I really want to let loose, usually on a news article, I go to the article. They usually allow comments. Twitter's biggest problem right now is fangirl bullies and trolls who need to be blocked until they grow out of it. If ever.
Now that Blogger's photo links have been fixed, Blogger wins hands down. I don't allow comments from anonymous readers, and I can turn moderation on and off at the flick of a button if the others get out of hand. Then I have the function for deleting trash comments, which is legal for non-government bloggers to do.
Lesson for using social media: know what you're after. Social media can ruin your brand lickety split unless you know what you have to do to protect yourself and invest the time.
Case in point. What was formerly the best news outlet with the widest interest and reach in the D.C. region, has slowly been turning into a victim of its own IT department. The IT department loaded the articles with flashy trashy video nonsense that had nothing to do with the article. The videos chewed up so much bandwidth that it was difficult to read the articles let alone comment. Comments dropped off except for the dedicated crazy people who, having no lives, were the only ones with the time to waste.
So the moderators were working overtime and there were still abusive, threatening posts, trolls and spam. And the bean counters decided to put a stop to that. They have switched completely over to Facebook with no moderation. Instead of the moderators not being able to keep up with the crazy people, there will be nothing but crazy people.
Another news outlet gets crazy people but there's a link to their help department. In recent attempts of crazy people to eliminate comments they didn't like, it was possible to tell the help department what to watch for and the craziness was halted. After that the discussion continued undisturbed.
And finally there are still people, years after social media was invented, who don't realize that
a) they never know who their readers are distributing their info to and
b) just because they delete something so they can't see it, doesn't mean it automatically disappears everywhere.
I have had to teach somebody I know that anything posted on FB can make its way to where it can ruin a career. It never happens immediately; Murphy's Law says it will always wait until it does the most damage.
I'm just saying...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
Friday, November 11, 2016
Fact-Checking the Torah -- "how did they translate..."
Because you should be asking a question, one that I’ve heard before.
How do Jews translate that pesky vav?
Wrong question. Biblical Hebrew was once a living language spoken on the street. That ended about 500 BCE.
The people who spoke Biblical Hebrew didn’t translate it. They understood the source of all the later translations, in the context of how they used the same words and grammar, in similar situations, when they spoke to family, friends, business associates, and courts.
They didn’t think of vav as and”. “And” is an English word and they are not reading English. English didn’t exist at the time. English became an official language in England between 1362 when King Edward III decreed that legal proceedings should be written in that language instead of Latin or Anglo-Norman, and about 1413 when the Chancery Standard made it the language of official government.
The Septuagint translators never spoke Biblical Hebrew; the Septuagint dates after 300 BCE. They probably didn’t know any Semitic language. By their time, Alexander had made all the parts of his empire a commonalty that spoke koine Greek. The Septuagint translators knew of “and” (kai) in their language, and since vav sometimes works as a conjunction, they translated it that way everywhere it appeared as a prefix. This suggests that they didn’t even consult experts in Biblical Hebrew; Deissman makes a similar point, as I already said But remember that understanding Biblical Hebrew at the time did not rest on lessons in grammar analysis; the subject didn’t exist. The oldest surviving (agh, that word again) book on the grammar of Greek itself was written in the 300s CE by a Roman. And he was trying to teach people who spoke Greek to read Latin; he only referred to Greek grammar as an analogy. Nobody analyzed Biblical Hebrew while it was the street language, and when analysis did take place, it was on the basis of comparison to Latin and using Latin terminology.
Things didn’t improve much for centuries, until the rediscovery of ancient Semitic languages like Akkadian. In the 20th century tools developed to provide absolute dates for the cultures that spoke them, and so did objective ways of examining the relationships between the languages. In the 21st century we are starting to throw off the shackles of outmoded ways of analyzing languages by looking into how they function in relation to how people think, as opposed to slapping familiar labels onto them.
The label you slap on morphology doesn’t define its grammatical function.
The translation you use for a word doesn’t define its meaning.
So if translations are such a problem, what about commentaries?
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights ReservedSo if translations are such a problem, what about commentaries?
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- "pausal forms"
And now that problem about trop. There’s an old concept called “pausal forms”.
Trop generally consist of disjunctive and conjunctive forms. The disjunctive ones divide verses. Etnach is one of them; so is sof pasuk, the trop at the end of a verse.
The conjunctive trop, conversely, mark sets of words that are included together as a subunit of a verse. Conjunctive trop, for example, are used with the words or phrases emphasized by et when it takes the vowel tseire.
The pausal forms concept says that disjunctive trop are associated with anomalous word forms. That is, the anomalous word forms in Torah appear where there are disjunctive trop.
Modern computerized tabulation shows this isn’t so. The so-called anomalous forms appear sometimes with conjunctive trop. It’s also true that not all occurrences of disjunctive trop are assigned to anomalous forms.
Now that you know more about Biblical Hebrew, you should be asking what words are called anomalous in Torah?
For example, Gesenius once categorized the word maen in Exodus 7:27 as a piel present tense that for some reason had been written without the usual prefix of mem. Surely that ought to qualify as an anomaly. Now that you know, however, that it’s an aspectless verb, used in a place which doesn’t suit an aspected verb, you know it’s not anomalous.
Likewise, since Gesenius said that the Jews didn’t know why they put nun sofit on the ends of some verbs, those ought to be anomalies. You know differently.
I’ve been going through Torah word by word for a couple of years now, digging into new concepts. I’ve kept track of words that really seemed to be anomalous. Out of about 80,000 words in Torah, I’ve come up with maybe 200 that are anomalous – not just “hapax legomena”, like mesheq used of Avraham’s servant, but grammatically different and impossible to analyze into any of the binyanim or other forms we use now, and with no clear pattern of use.
Now, it’s entirely possible that Torah has some words that are scribal errors, that the Masoretic scholars didn’t pick up on and include in their notes, but I doubt it.
Given that the ancestors of the Jews started developing Hebrew by 2000 BCE (which I will soon discuss on the Fact-Checking page), it’s more than likely that they had ways of saying things that were perfectly meaningful to them, not at all anomalous in the context of a millennium and a half of vernacular – but which turned up only once in the written record. It’s analogous to Axel Olrik’s recognition that in the history of any ethnic group, their narrators might have told any number of stories over their fires in caves and tents and huts – but a relatively small number survived the centuries to be put into writing. (I’ll discuss that next year on the Fact-Checking page.)
With the apparent anomalies in Biblical Hebrew, we might be looking at something as rare in the spoken language as pual is in Torah, but with just as distinctive a function – and we can’t tell what that function is because we only have one example.
The source for the concept of “pausal forms” was probably Arabic, which does have pausal forms. What have I been saying for 15 lessons, about westerners transferring terminology used for one language, to another where it turns out to be invalid? Well, this one got itself into a muddle and 200 years later, it is just now getting straightened out.
Bottom line: “pausal forms” is an antiquated notion based on an outdated understanding of Biblical Hebrew and invalid transfer of terminology. The seemingly anomalous forms in Torah might be examples of word forms that used to be well understood when the language was used every day on the street – but which we can’t understand now because all we have is the written record, and it doesn’t give us enough data to identify meaning.
One more point of actual grammar.
One more point of actual grammar.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Watching history happen
No, not the US elections. The Brexit thing. A Yank's view.
So first, the polls were run the way polls have been run for decades and Britain found out that the theory behind polls is nonsense. The results are shaped by how the questions are expressed and who is contacted, and if either one is skewed, the outcome of the vote will be the opposite of the answer in the polls. The voters vote on their concept of what the referendum says, not on the pollsters' concept.
Second, the government (Cameron) resigned. This is not how things usually happen in Britain. Usually a government resigns when it is defeated on a Parliamentary vote, or the margin of victory is so narrow that the future of the program depending on that vote is bad.
General elections, not referenda, usually return a majority in a given party and the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister. Without a majority, it is possible to form a coalition to keep government operating, but that is a creaky way to go about things. It takes a real disaster to make a British coalition government work well: WWI, the Depression, WWII. Cameron ran a coalition government and we all know how that ended.
No general election has been held since the referendum; the next scheduled one is May 2020. At the moment only one of the 650 Members of Parliament belongs to UKIP, the party that promoted Brexit. 86% of the members belong to the Conservative and Labour parties. The Scottish National Party has 54 MPs; the majority in Scotland voted against Brexit, giving more fuel to the Scottish independence movement. If all the parties with fewer members than SNP formed a coalition with UKIP, UKIP would still have fewer votes than SNP. If there was a general election and the UKIP member lost his or her seat, there would be nobody in Parliament representing the May government. That's not just unsatisfying, that's constitutionally questionable in Britain.
A new problem has cropped up. A Conservative MP who was in favor of Brexit has resigned his seat. He can no longer vote for Brexit or any other government program. This doesn't just mean one less potential vote for Brexit in Parliament. He might have been paired with a Labour or other MP who was against Brexit. Pairing lets one or both of them be absent when a vote is taken; the one who is present abstains from voting. Now the party whips have to find another pair for the remaining MP of the pair. How many pro-Brexit MPs are not already paired off? How much shuffling has to be done due to this resignation -- and many people will be displeased by the results of the shuffle? And in any case, there's an even bigger problem.
The UK equivalent of SCOTUS has just said wait a minute. Governments do not run on popular referenda. They run on Parliamentary votes. Parliament has never voted on this. Until it does, Brexit is not a done deal.
If the May government stands in the way of a Parliamentary vote or ignores adverse results, it goes against all of British history for the last 400 years. The reason Charles I was executed was to make it clear that the monarch doesn't control taxes, Parliament does. George V was forced to make so many peers early in his reign to make it clear that the Lords doesn't control government spending, the Commons does. It is not possible for any British government to carry out its programs with only a single MP of its own party because there's only one vote guaranteed in favor. (Vote against your party and you cut your political throat.)
The High Court also pointed out that the Brexit referendum was never legally binding; it was always only advisory in nature. This is the same situation as referenda in the US and also legislatural votes. People get emotional about an issue or it might be politically useful to vote a certain way, but it might be an embarrassment to the country in the sight of the world and it also can be unconstitutional. That's why SCOTUS was right to overturn DOMA just as it was right to overturn Jim Crow laws. For the May government to say that the High Court is wrong, shows that they are not capable of supporting the British constitution any more than they are capable of running British foreign policy or economics. In fact May has appointed a racist to be Foreign Minister and hate crimes are increasing in Britain, formerly a model of toleration. And we all know about the drop in value of the pound, as well as the recent tussle between the May government and "the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street".
So the May government using the referendum to argue that it has a right to act is useless. The basis for representative democracy is that there is always somebody somewhere who wakes up only when personally impacted and says "I didn't vote for that." Democracy is not about catering to every citizen. Societies are not formed by catering to every member. Every society defines its own norms and has a way of dealing with people and situations outside the norm. The norm in British representative democracy is that, as the representatives of the British people, Parliament has to cast the deciding votes on government programs.
The pro-Brexit organization failed to make that clear to their adherents -- or the pro-Brexit voters ignored it -- or they forgot it -- or it was useful to bury this detail to get the votes.
Now the people who didn't get the memo are becoming violent against the judiciary. The British are not yet used to having an independent justice system; it used to part of the Lords and therefore part of Parliament. It is not a perfect system, but it does reinforce the constitution, even when the constitution was never written down as in Britain. Under the old system, this violence would have been perpetrated against the Lords -- shades of Guy Fawkes!!! (Yesterday was Guy Fawkes Day in Britain.) Regardless of the target, it is terrorism, not democracy. It is banana republic behavior, not worthy of Britain.
The May government is not entitled to act on the Brexit referendum; everything adds up to that. They are not entitled to stay in position; there will come a day when the British voters throw them out as they have thrown out previous governments, even that of the famous Winston Churchill. So any whining about the High Court decision is just that: whining. Whining should not be tolerated.
It ain't over until the Mother of Parliaments sings... or votes...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
So first, the polls were run the way polls have been run for decades and Britain found out that the theory behind polls is nonsense. The results are shaped by how the questions are expressed and who is contacted, and if either one is skewed, the outcome of the vote will be the opposite of the answer in the polls. The voters vote on their concept of what the referendum says, not on the pollsters' concept.
Second, the government (Cameron) resigned. This is not how things usually happen in Britain. Usually a government resigns when it is defeated on a Parliamentary vote, or the margin of victory is so narrow that the future of the program depending on that vote is bad.
General elections, not referenda, usually return a majority in a given party and the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister. Without a majority, it is possible to form a coalition to keep government operating, but that is a creaky way to go about things. It takes a real disaster to make a British coalition government work well: WWI, the Depression, WWII. Cameron ran a coalition government and we all know how that ended.
No general election has been held since the referendum; the next scheduled one is May 2020. At the moment only one of the 650 Members of Parliament belongs to UKIP, the party that promoted Brexit. 86% of the members belong to the Conservative and Labour parties. The Scottish National Party has 54 MPs; the majority in Scotland voted against Brexit, giving more fuel to the Scottish independence movement. If all the parties with fewer members than SNP formed a coalition with UKIP, UKIP would still have fewer votes than SNP. If there was a general election and the UKIP member lost his or her seat, there would be nobody in Parliament representing the May government. That's not just unsatisfying, that's constitutionally questionable in Britain.
A new problem has cropped up. A Conservative MP who was in favor of Brexit has resigned his seat. He can no longer vote for Brexit or any other government program. This doesn't just mean one less potential vote for Brexit in Parliament. He might have been paired with a Labour or other MP who was against Brexit. Pairing lets one or both of them be absent when a vote is taken; the one who is present abstains from voting. Now the party whips have to find another pair for the remaining MP of the pair. How many pro-Brexit MPs are not already paired off? How much shuffling has to be done due to this resignation -- and many people will be displeased by the results of the shuffle? And in any case, there's an even bigger problem.
The UK equivalent of SCOTUS has just said wait a minute. Governments do not run on popular referenda. They run on Parliamentary votes. Parliament has never voted on this. Until it does, Brexit is not a done deal.
If the May government stands in the way of a Parliamentary vote or ignores adverse results, it goes against all of British history for the last 400 years. The reason Charles I was executed was to make it clear that the monarch doesn't control taxes, Parliament does. George V was forced to make so many peers early in his reign to make it clear that the Lords doesn't control government spending, the Commons does. It is not possible for any British government to carry out its programs with only a single MP of its own party because there's only one vote guaranteed in favor. (Vote against your party and you cut your political throat.)
The High Court also pointed out that the Brexit referendum was never legally binding; it was always only advisory in nature. This is the same situation as referenda in the US and also legislatural votes. People get emotional about an issue or it might be politically useful to vote a certain way, but it might be an embarrassment to the country in the sight of the world and it also can be unconstitutional. That's why SCOTUS was right to overturn DOMA just as it was right to overturn Jim Crow laws. For the May government to say that the High Court is wrong, shows that they are not capable of supporting the British constitution any more than they are capable of running British foreign policy or economics. In fact May has appointed a racist to be Foreign Minister and hate crimes are increasing in Britain, formerly a model of toleration. And we all know about the drop in value of the pound, as well as the recent tussle between the May government and "the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street".
So the May government using the referendum to argue that it has a right to act is useless. The basis for representative democracy is that there is always somebody somewhere who wakes up only when personally impacted and says "I didn't vote for that." Democracy is not about catering to every citizen. Societies are not formed by catering to every member. Every society defines its own norms and has a way of dealing with people and situations outside the norm. The norm in British representative democracy is that, as the representatives of the British people, Parliament has to cast the deciding votes on government programs.
The pro-Brexit organization failed to make that clear to their adherents -- or the pro-Brexit voters ignored it -- or they forgot it -- or it was useful to bury this detail to get the votes.
Now the people who didn't get the memo are becoming violent against the judiciary. The British are not yet used to having an independent justice system; it used to part of the Lords and therefore part of Parliament. It is not a perfect system, but it does reinforce the constitution, even when the constitution was never written down as in Britain. Under the old system, this violence would have been perpetrated against the Lords -- shades of Guy Fawkes!!! (Yesterday was Guy Fawkes Day in Britain.) Regardless of the target, it is terrorism, not democracy. It is banana republic behavior, not worthy of Britain.
The May government is not entitled to act on the Brexit referendum; everything adds up to that. They are not entitled to stay in position; there will come a day when the British voters throw them out as they have thrown out previous governments, even that of the famous Winston Churchill. So any whining about the High Court decision is just that: whining. Whining should not be tolerated.
It ain't over until the Mother of Parliaments sings... or votes...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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