Stabbed in the back, man. I mean, who got this guy elected?
Seriously, a wise call by the administration on this issue. Given that it does put them crosswise with an important part of their base -- one whose continued goodwill they need very much -- it was a brave as well as a wise decision.
Betrayal
Betrayal:
John Stewart is Wrong
John Stewart is Wrong:
Stewart wasn't wrong, though, about his larger point.
Lancelot was a dragon slayer. He slew the dragon at the chapel near King Pelles' castle, on the occasion that he met Elaine (not the Lily Maid of Astolat, but the other Elaine, on whom he fathered Galahad).
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Chuck Grassley's Debt and Deficit Dragon | ||||
| ||||
Stewart wasn't wrong, though, about his larger point.
Honor Means What?
The Philosopher's Petition:
Honor requires that the strong be a friend to the weak. In this case, the weak would be the girl, now apparently a married woman. Insofar as she seems to want the matter dropped, to judge from the press coverage, one might argue that it could be honorable to follow her wishes and allow the matter to drop. I don't think you could argue, however, that honor requires you to do so; and at least for the district attorney in L.A., his honor is quite clearly involved in doing his office to the best of his ability.
The comment was directed at the Swiss courts, though: their honor, apparently, requires them to release Polanski instead of turning him over to the United States. Why would that be the case? The Holocaust has been proposed as a reason that Europeans feel that Polanski has to be protected; his mother died in it, and he himself survived in the ghettos. Perhaps the claim is that European honor is concerned with protecting those they failed to protect before; the Swiss courts should feel an obligation to prevent the arrest and deportation of a Jew to his tormenters precisely because the French were once complicit in helping to send their Jews to earlier torments.
Yet the cases are entirely different; we are not talking about genocide, but about a perfectly lawful proceeding resulting from a violent crime to which he pled guilty. Protecting the innocent is one thing; protecting the guilty is quite another. Honor cannot be concerned with protecting the guilty.
What I am left with is the sense that Mr. Levy believes that Polanski's contributions as an artist are so great that Polanski's own honor should place him above spending the rest of his life in prison. Honor thus requires releasing this great man; it is absurd that an incomparable artist should languish in prison like a common criminal. After all, he crafted such masterpieces as this:
If that's the argument to be made -- that it is his personal honor that requires he be released -- the philosopher should remember that Polanski's is not the only honor that must be considered.
The honor of a 13-year-old girl is not a small matter. For the lady she became, we might forbear; but for her as she was, he ought to be destroyed. If the Swiss courts hold their hand because of honor, let it be to honor her and her wishes.
Professor Althouse excoriates French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy for his failure to explain exactly why he feels that Roman Polanski should go free.
Even philosophers are sometimes free to write simple calls-to-action, but I do agree that it would be helpful if he explained some of his terms. I was particularly struck by this section:
We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.Honor requires it?
Honor requires that the strong be a friend to the weak. In this case, the weak would be the girl, now apparently a married woman. Insofar as she seems to want the matter dropped, to judge from the press coverage, one might argue that it could be honorable to follow her wishes and allow the matter to drop. I don't think you could argue, however, that honor requires you to do so; and at least for the district attorney in L.A., his honor is quite clearly involved in doing his office to the best of his ability.
The comment was directed at the Swiss courts, though: their honor, apparently, requires them to release Polanski instead of turning him over to the United States. Why would that be the case? The Holocaust has been proposed as a reason that Europeans feel that Polanski has to be protected; his mother died in it, and he himself survived in the ghettos. Perhaps the claim is that European honor is concerned with protecting those they failed to protect before; the Swiss courts should feel an obligation to prevent the arrest and deportation of a Jew to his tormenters precisely because the French were once complicit in helping to send their Jews to earlier torments.
Yet the cases are entirely different; we are not talking about genocide, but about a perfectly lawful proceeding resulting from a violent crime to which he pled guilty. Protecting the innocent is one thing; protecting the guilty is quite another. Honor cannot be concerned with protecting the guilty.
What I am left with is the sense that Mr. Levy believes that Polanski's contributions as an artist are so great that Polanski's own honor should place him above spending the rest of his life in prison. Honor thus requires releasing this great man; it is absurd that an incomparable artist should languish in prison like a common criminal. After all, he crafted such masterpieces as this:
If that's the argument to be made -- that it is his personal honor that requires he be released -- the philosopher should remember that Polanski's is not the only honor that must be considered.
The honor of a 13-year-old girl is not a small matter. For the lady she became, we might forbear; but for her as she was, he ought to be destroyed. If the Swiss courts hold their hand because of honor, let it be to honor her and her wishes.
Honor is a Gift:
...but it isn't 'a gift a man gives himself.' It comes from what he gives for other things.
Fine movie, though.
Oceans 13
Oceans 13:
"So... some guys I take seriously tell me you're a serious guy."
And what happens when you ignore the warnings of the serious guys?
Only this time it's not a casino. It's the wealth of the United States.
Fareed Zakaria loves serious people.
At the National Review's Web site, a debate -- an entirely serious debate among serious people -- broke out as to whether the speech proved that Obama actually wanted the world's tyrants to win, in the tradition of past intellectuals who admired Mussolini and Hitler. This is the discourse of American conservatism today: Obama is bad because he loves "death panels" and Hitler.Reminds me of the opening threat in the move Oceans 13.
There is a serious case to be made that it's not worth taking the United Nations seriously, that it's an anachronistic institution based on 60-year-old geopolitics and a platform for tyrants and weirdos.
"So... some guys I take seriously tell me you're a serious guy."
And what happens when you ignore the warnings of the serious guys?
Only this time it's not a casino. It's the wealth of the United States.
Competing Thoughts
Failure Means Success:
The counterargument -- I believe I heard Bill Clinton making it, once -- was that once the bill was passed, people would come to love the program. Perhaps, if our failure to understand it was the reason we hated the idea so much; but surely not by the 1994 elections, during which window even the greatest of such super-complex plans would still be bedeviled by confusion and disruption as people tried to figure it out and make it work. It seems to me that Democratic success would have increased the 1994 debacle, not lessened it.
I have tremendous respect for Megan McArdle, whose writings I've been reading since Elise recommended her earlier this month. She stated recently that she thought that some version of reform was almost sure to pass; even in the face of the new polls, she still thinks it's the way to bet. "But only if they move quickly. If it stretches beyond early November, I'd put the odds at less than 25%, unless they manage some surprise upset in the elections they look set to lose."
I'm going to bet otherwise, in spite of my respect for the lady. I'll bet that they can't ram the process through "quickly," because the will to do it isn't there. (Mickey Kaus was right about that). I'll bet further that the Democrats with concerns for their survival are going to want to find ways to delay the process until after those November elections -- after all, why not? It will give them a window into just how great the danger for them really is, and they can then make a more-informed choice.
The odds of health care reform passing look to me to be already below 25%. I don't think "Democrats" want it -- I think some progressives do. Unions now wonder about this whole 'tax Cadillac insurance plans' concept, since they've spent decades trying to set up such plans for their members; Blue Dogs are watching the heat index spike; the 'health insurance mandate' is going to be hugely unpopular (especially if it actually is passed -- the one group who still likes the idea of this plan are the young folks, who will have to fork over hundreds of dollars a year for something they don't need).
Then we'll rush on to cap-and-trade, which will... um, probably also fail, because it creates a massive tax on all Americans in return for "goodwill." 'What do I get out of this?' 'Well, the people of the world will like us better; and you get to feel good about saving the planet.'
The thing is, we've already extensively market-tested the idea that Americans will be willing to pay a premium for 'saving the planet.' If Americans aren't willing to shell out the extra cash for a Prius or a Chevy Volt versus a small gas-burner, they aren't willing to impose an across-the-board tax on every item they need for that purpose either. How many people shop at Whole Foods v. Wal Mart? There you go.
If the idea is that the government needs to step up and force us to do what we don't want, let me go out on a limb and suggest that these ideas won't be popular. Failure to pass these bills is the best thing that can happen to the Democratic Party -- and the country, as it happens.
It remains true that the most important public policy right now is deleveraging: reducing debt and obligations. This is the time to be cutting free of our runious debts, especially on entitlement spending. Just on retirement-entitlements, every American household already owes half a million dollars apiece. When the dollar collapses in value, it's going to be tremendously hard on every American family -- and it's because the government won't stop spending money, and won't stop making promises to spend money.
This isn't the hour for grand new schemes of progressivism. If they pass, they'll only hasten the collapse.
On the one hand, the polling continues to get worse:
Independents now oppose ObamaCare by almost than 3-1, 72%-26%, which is almost the same as the Republican split at 79%-19%. More tellingly, a majority of independents (52%) strongly oppose it. Fifty-nine percent of seniors oppose ObamaCare, with the aforementioned 46% strongly opposing and only 16% strongly supporting it. But the news gets even worse in the preceding age demographics, with majorities in opposition among voters in their 30s (57%), 40s (65%), and 50-64 (58%). Among the 40s, a majority are strongly opposed (54%).On the other hand, party insiders are saying, 'Hey, we can armwrestle this thing in!'
How can I be optimistic that Democrats alone can reform health care? Because these aren’t your parents’ Democrats. The single biggest reason, I believe, that the Democrats lost in a landslide in 1994 was because they failed on health care. More important, congressional Democrats believe it.It's important that they believe it, but is it true? I was around in 1994 too, and what I recall people being angry about was that Democrats were attempting a government-takeover of health care, not that they failed to achieve one.
The counterargument -- I believe I heard Bill Clinton making it, once -- was that once the bill was passed, people would come to love the program. Perhaps, if our failure to understand it was the reason we hated the idea so much; but surely not by the 1994 elections, during which window even the greatest of such super-complex plans would still be bedeviled by confusion and disruption as people tried to figure it out and make it work. It seems to me that Democratic success would have increased the 1994 debacle, not lessened it.
I have tremendous respect for Megan McArdle, whose writings I've been reading since Elise recommended her earlier this month. She stated recently that she thought that some version of reform was almost sure to pass; even in the face of the new polls, she still thinks it's the way to bet. "But only if they move quickly. If it stretches beyond early November, I'd put the odds at less than 25%, unless they manage some surprise upset in the elections they look set to lose."
I'm going to bet otherwise, in spite of my respect for the lady. I'll bet that they can't ram the process through "quickly," because the will to do it isn't there. (Mickey Kaus was right about that). I'll bet further that the Democrats with concerns for their survival are going to want to find ways to delay the process until after those November elections -- after all, why not? It will give them a window into just how great the danger for them really is, and they can then make a more-informed choice.
The odds of health care reform passing look to me to be already below 25%. I don't think "Democrats" want it -- I think some progressives do. Unions now wonder about this whole 'tax Cadillac insurance plans' concept, since they've spent decades trying to set up such plans for their members; Blue Dogs are watching the heat index spike; the 'health insurance mandate' is going to be hugely unpopular (especially if it actually is passed -- the one group who still likes the idea of this plan are the young folks, who will have to fork over hundreds of dollars a year for something they don't need).
Then we'll rush on to cap-and-trade, which will... um, probably also fail, because it creates a massive tax on all Americans in return for "goodwill." 'What do I get out of this?' 'Well, the people of the world will like us better; and you get to feel good about saving the planet.'
The thing is, we've already extensively market-tested the idea that Americans will be willing to pay a premium for 'saving the planet.' If Americans aren't willing to shell out the extra cash for a Prius or a Chevy Volt versus a small gas-burner, they aren't willing to impose an across-the-board tax on every item they need for that purpose either. How many people shop at Whole Foods v. Wal Mart? There you go.
If the idea is that the government needs to step up and force us to do what we don't want, let me go out on a limb and suggest that these ideas won't be popular. Failure to pass these bills is the best thing that can happen to the Democratic Party -- and the country, as it happens.
It remains true that the most important public policy right now is deleveraging: reducing debt and obligations. This is the time to be cutting free of our runious debts, especially on entitlement spending. Just on retirement-entitlements, every American household already owes half a million dollars apiece. When the dollar collapses in value, it's going to be tremendously hard on every American family -- and it's because the government won't stop spending money, and won't stop making promises to spend money.
This isn't the hour for grand new schemes of progressivism. If they pass, they'll only hasten the collapse.
Damned Lies
All That 'Death Panel' Talk is Nothing But Lies:
It'll make a difference to someone. Just no one who counts....pages 80-81 of the [Senate Finance] bill. There it says: " "Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."The flaw here is obvious, except to BigGummint people who are Simply Smarter Than You Are.
Is the doc in the 'top 10' because he's a crook? Because he has really, really, really sick patients? Because he and the patients live in a very high-cost-of-living area? Or some combination of the above?
Makes no difference to those who are Simply Smarter Than You Are.
Seriously?
Seriously?
'The safety of the children' is a fine excuse, until you notice how seriously the government actually takes its.
Wow.
Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.So, when did it become illegal to stand at the end of your driveway and talk to your neighbors for a few minutes every morning? Even if the neighbors you are talking to are children, how can that possibly be illegal?
The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors' kids, or face the consequences.
"It's ridiculous." says Snyder. "We are friends helping friends!" She added that she accepts no money for babysitting.
'The safety of the children' is a fine excuse, until you notice how seriously the government actually takes its.
President Obama's "safe schools czar" is a former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.No, I think I'll rely on my own judgment where my neighbors are involved. Thanks, but no thanks.
Disaster Continues
The Disaster Worsens:
Riding a horse in the Camargue in April, Nicolas Sarkozy bore “a vague resemblance” to President Bush on his Texas ranch, a French newspaper said. --NYT
It was bad enough when we were being out-cowboy'd by the Russians. We're now being out-cowboy'd by the French.
Sarkozy: “We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”It gets worse:
“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.
“Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.
“I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,” he continued, referring to Israel.
The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama’s resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.
“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons,” he said.
Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president’s disarmament crusade “naive.”
Update:
The Guardian has a neat little slide show of some of the pieces.
And another article here.
Somebody's select Fyrd got smashed, Maldon-like. I don't think this is some 'life-time' of hoarding--it's from a single campaign or battle.
"Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face."
I know a reason why Grim likes the middle ages so much.
Ah yes, the days when one decorated one's weapons with precious metals, gems and appropriate passages from Scripture.
As a side note, I was told over 20 years ago that the Anglo-Saxons were a much more wealthy society than anybody thought. And here we have some more proof, I think.
The Guardian has a neat little slide show of some of the pieces.
And another article here.
The gold includes spectacular gem studded pieces decorated with tiny interlaced beasts, which were originally the ornamentation for Anglo-Saxon swords of princely quality: the experts would judge one a spectacular discovery, but the field has yielded 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt collars, a find without precedent.
Somebody's select Fyrd got smashed, Maldon-like. I don't think this is some 'life-time' of hoarding--it's from a single campaign or battle.
"Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face."
I know a reason why Grim likes the middle ages so much.
The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire.
Experts say the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date to the 7th Century, is unparalleled in size and worth "a seven figure sum"....
...the most striking feature of the find was that it was almost totally weapon fittings with no feminine objects such as dress fittings, brooches or pendants.
"Swords and sword fittings were very important in the Anglo-Saxon period," Dr Leahy added.
"It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career.
Ah yes, the days when one decorated one's weapons with precious metals, gems and appropriate passages from Scripture.
As a side note, I was told over 20 years ago that the Anglo-Saxons were a much more wealthy society than anybody thought. And here we have some more proof, I think.
Antidotal History
Antidotal History:
The Times of London calls it "one of the most important works on the broad processes of modern world history to have appeared for years." Why? Arts & Letters Daily explains:
That racist domination was the true basis for the British Empire has been repeated so often we forget how deeply false it is. Enter historian James Belich...As an approach within the field of modern history, it's an earthquake. I shall have to try to locate a copy soon.
I keep saying it sounds better in the original German.
But hey, it is a snappy tune.
I keep telling people that you couldn't make this shiat up if you tried.
But hey, it is a snappy tune.
I keep telling people that you couldn't make this shiat up if you tried.
Newspaper apologizes
Newspaper Apologizes to Mrs. Palin:
You'll never guess why.
Today I must apologize to Mrs. Palin personally and on behalf of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner for the choice of words used on the bottom of Wednesday’s front page regarding her speaking engagement in Hong Kong this week to a group of global investors.Hm. Well, it's nice to see the apology, anyway. Civility and all that.
We used offensive language — “A broad in Asia” — above a small photograph of the former governor to direct readers inside the newspaper to a full story of her Hong Kong appearance.
To Arthur!
Two hundred and fifty years!
Now that's a legacy, boys. 'Cattle die, kin die,' but a good beer...
I Like The Headline...
...of this news story. The video is good too:
"The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous."
Well done.
Mass Sterilization
A Darker Whisper:
There is something wicked hiding here, but it is not yet clear just what it might be. Is it several small imps -- a small sterilization program, a love of eugenics, some racism, and a desire by later anti-Americans to over-tell a true story? Or is it a greater evil, which has somehow avoided our eye until now?
I should like to know more.
A woman who had fifteen abortions in sixteen years writes that she is worried about becoming the target of "fundamentalism." In reading her story, though, what jumped out were these lines:
Vilar's story is set against the backdrop of the American-led mass sterilization program in her native Puerto Rico from 1955 to 1969... [b]y 1974, 37 percent of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been permanently sterilized in that experiment.That is a claim I had never heard before. Here and here are a couple of '.edu' articles on the subject. There is a Wikipedia article on forced sterilization here. It states:
The United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics. The heads of the program were avid believers in eugenics and frequently argued for their program. They were devastated when it was shut down due to ethical problems. The principal targets of the American program were the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, people with epilepsy, and the physically deformed. Native Americans, as well as African-American women, were sterilized against their will in many states, often without their knowledge, while they were in a hospital for other reasons (e.g. childbirth). Some sterilizations also took place in prisons and other penal institutions, targeting criminality, but they were in the relative minority. In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states under state compulsory sterilization programs in the United States.We should be well aware of previous attempts by our government to "improve" us through health care at this time. I wonder, though -- 65,000 is a very small number compared to the "37% of all Puerto Rican women" posited by the article. Today, there are just under four million Puerto Ricans; of whom about half would be women; of whom about half would be in childbearing ages. That would be one million women, not 65,000.
There is something wicked hiding here, but it is not yet clear just what it might be. Is it several small imps -- a small sterilization program, a love of eugenics, some racism, and a desire by later anti-Americans to over-tell a true story? Or is it a greater evil, which has somehow avoided our eye until now?
I should like to know more.
Synthetic Biology
Synthetic Biology:
An article that should warm the heart of at least one of our co-bloggers, on the subject of remaking the world through science:
The theory of evolution explained that every species on earth is related in some way to every other species; more important, we each carry a record of that history in our body. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick began to make it possible to understand why, by explaining how DNA arranges itself. The language of just four chemical letters—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—comes in the form of enormous chains of nucleotides. When they are joined, the arrangement of their sequences determines how each human differs from all others and from all other living beings.The writers speculate that such technology could eventually end the energy crisis... assuming we don't end it first some other way. Still, the parenthetical note here is apt to strike you, as it strikes me, as extraordinary. The author writes:
By the nineteen-seventies, recombinant-DNA technology permitted scientists to cut long, unwieldy molecules of nucleotides into digestible sentences of genetic letters and paste them into other cells. Researchers could suddenly combine the genes of two creatures that would never have been able to mate in nature. As promising as these techniques were, they also made it possible for scientists to transfer viruses—and microbes that cause cancer—from one organism to another. That could create diseases anticipated by no one and for which there would be no natural protection, treatment, or cure. In 1975, scientists from around the world gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center, in Northern California, to discuss the challenges presented by this new technology. They focussed primarily on laboratory and environmental safety, and concluded that the field required little regulation. (There was no real discussion of deliberate abuse—at the time, there didn’t seem to be any need.)
Life on Earth proceeds in an arc—one that began with the big bang, and evolved to the point where a smart teenager is capable of inserting a gene from a cold-water fish into a strawberry, to help protect it from the frost. You don’t have to be a Luddite—or Prince Charles, who, famously, has foreseen a world reduced to gray goo by avaricious and out-of-control technology—to recognize that synthetic biology, if it truly succeeds, will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.Yet there are also notes about basement crystal-meth labs, and other negative uses of technology. "At the time, there didn't seem to be any need." Is there now? Should we worry more about the harm to be done, or the joy to be had?
Blessed w/ Rain
"Looks Like We'll Be Blessed With A Little More Rain!"
Weather report says it's going to rain every day for a week yet. We're all real happy about that, I can tell you.
The Etowah River is twelve feet high and rising, and it's said it will top fifteen feet high by tonight. 
Weather report says it's going to rain every day for a week yet. We're all real happy about that, I can tell you.
Real Story Too Much GOVT
Too Much Gov't:
The real story in this Gallup poll isn't the fact that a near-majority of Americans thinks government is doing too much. It's the third graph down: since the administration of Bush I, there has only been one occasion where more Americans thought the government was doing too little: late 2001-early 2002, that is, right after 9/11. The question had a different context in those days, but even then, it was a brief moment.
"The government does too much" is the consistent winner outside of the immediate context of the 9/11 attacks.
The other thing I find interesting is the question of whether the goverment has "too much," "too little" or "about the right amount" of power. The "too little" faction barely registers, ever, on the poll.
These are long-term trends in American thought that are encouraging.
Religious Humor
Religious Humor:
The second isn't really a religious joke at all, but an ethnic joke. It has nothing to do with doctrine, but is simply about being a minority among a majority. It's the same point that used to be made by black comedians, which is that blacks were once fully acceptable in American society if they were jokers or played in sports. Here, too, we have Mr. Stewart saying that he was accepted as a minority, but only because he provided some benefit to the majority -- humor, a place to plot pranks, free food.
The Colbert joke, though, is really funny. It underlines the oddity of the phenomenon that Israel's closest and most dependable ally is evangelical, even sometimes fundamentalist, Protestants in America. It even indicates the direction of the truth of that phenomenon, though of course -- being only a joke -- it doesn't adequately explain it.
You can enjoy such a joke even when it makes fun of you. This is described as a conservative joke:
I remember that once we had an occasion here -- I cannot seem to locate it in the archives, which are scrambled badly -- for telling religious jokes. Some of the best jokes I know are about religion, as they tend to speak to truths about disputes in doctrine or dogma that are really funny. One of my favorites is from the late, great Jerry Clower, who told the story of a couple who wanted to marry. The father would not accept the presumptive daughter-in-law, however, because she was not a Baptist but some lesser Protestant faith, and had only been sprinkled on her head rather than fully-immersed for her baptism.
The son offered his father a compromise: he would take the girl out into the river knee-deep with the Baptist pastor. The father refused; so the son came back and said his wife-to-be was ready to go neck deep. The father refused; soon the son said that his wife was prepared to go out into the river so far that only the top of her head was above water.
This, too, the father refused. The son replied, "See? I knew it was just that little spot at the top that counted anyway."
I thought of that when reading this piece by Christopher Hitchens on the jokesters of the day. His point is that liberal humor sneers at religion, but only when it is practiced by conservatives. Nevertheless, his examples are actually three very different types of humor. One of them is really funny:
One could actually write a whole article simply on the Franken-Stewart faction’s attitude toward religion. In their world, the expressions Christian right or Moral Majority are automatic laugh cues, and there is a huge amount of soft-core borscht-belt stuff like this (from Franken) on page 205 of The Truth:The first piece is merely sneering and hateful, as Mr. Hitchens says. It's not the least bit amusing, except perhaps in the sense that Mr. Frankin is suggesting that a woman might prefer his love to the faith in which she was raised. But people do, sometimes; I've known both men and women who converted to new religions in order to marry, and in fact, we started with a joke on that very subject. That joke was funny because it smiled at the underlying differences; this one was not.If it hadn’t been for Social Security, I never would have met Franni in Boston my freshman year, deflowered her, and gotten her to renounce the Pope. But I digress.And this, from pages 1 and 2 of Jon Stewart’s Naked Pictures of Famous People (his book America also carries a rib-tickling cover-line promise of Supreme Court justices posing nude) in a painfully unfunny essay/sketch titled “Breakfast at Kennedy’s,” set this time in Connecticut, at Choate:That’s where Jack and I bonded. I was the only Jew. My father ran the commissary so I was allowed to attend school there. My room, or the Yeshiva, as Jack called it (he really wasn’t prejudiced and would often defend me to the others as a “terrific yid”), was a meeting-place and a hotbed for hatching great pranks … I’m sure the ample supply of brisket and whitefish from Dad helped.And in a more goyish form from Stephen Colbert, by no means to be outdone, on page 56 of I Am America:Now, I have nothing but respect for the Jewish people. Since the Bible is 100% the true Word of God, and the Jews believe in the Old Testament, that means Judaism is 50% right.If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke. What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely “satirical” about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright...
The second isn't really a religious joke at all, but an ethnic joke. It has nothing to do with doctrine, but is simply about being a minority among a majority. It's the same point that used to be made by black comedians, which is that blacks were once fully acceptable in American society if they were jokers or played in sports. Here, too, we have Mr. Stewart saying that he was accepted as a minority, but only because he provided some benefit to the majority -- humor, a place to plot pranks, free food.
The Colbert joke, though, is really funny. It underlines the oddity of the phenomenon that Israel's closest and most dependable ally is evangelical, even sometimes fundamentalist, Protestants in America. It even indicates the direction of the truth of that phenomenon, though of course -- being only a joke -- it doesn't adequately explain it.
You can enjoy such a joke even when it makes fun of you. This is described as a conservative joke:
A driver is stuck in a traffic jam going into downtown Chicago .That's a funny joke! But is it a joke about President Obama, etc., or is it a joke about conservative reactions to them?
Nothing Is Moving north or south. Suddenly a man knocks on
his window.
The driver rolls down his window and asks, ‘What
happened, what’s the hold Up?’
‘Terrorists have kidnapped Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid,
Rosie O’Donnell, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. They
are asking for a $10 Million ransom. Otherwise, they are
going to douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. We
are going from car to car, taking up a collection.’
The driver asks, ‘On average, how much is everyone giving?’
‘About a gallon’
The Root of Freedom
The Foundation of Liberty:
A second question: Isn't it true that at least most of these things are strongly rooted in Christian teaching? I would call democracy the exception, given its pre-Christian, Greek rootsm and the fact that the Catholic Church for two thousand years preferred other forms; though the current Pope has strongly endorsed the American model.
As for Liberty: We've all read about the similarity between the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, composed at a monastery, addressed to the Pope.
In a sense, I suppose, that's the same question. One of the principles that Christianity has created is the idea of religious liberty: out of the Thirty Years War and its echoes, we decided that it was proper for men to sort out for themselves what to believe. So here we have an atheist who has decided that he believes both that Christianity is untrue, and that it is of irreplaceable value. That ought to mean something profound; but saying just what that something is may be hard.
Try.
In a book review on a new work treating the problems of immigration and Islam in Europe, a remarkable quote:
The author notes that even the prominent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is an atheist, has acknowledged that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."Discussion question: What does it mean if an atheist says this? Presumably he doesn't believe the positive claims of Christianity any more, but he believes in the positive results of Christianity in bringing about a moral world.
A second question: Isn't it true that at least most of these things are strongly rooted in Christian teaching? I would call democracy the exception, given its pre-Christian, Greek rootsm and the fact that the Catholic Church for two thousand years preferred other forms; though the current Pope has strongly endorsed the American model.
As for Liberty: We've all read about the similarity between the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, composed at a monastery, addressed to the Pope.
The deeds of cruelty, massacre, violence, pillage, arson, imprisoning prelates, burning down monasteries, robbing and killing monks and nuns, and yet other outrages without number which he committed against our people, sparing neither age nor sex, religion nor rank, no one could describe nor fully imagine unless he had seen them with his own eyes.Our conscience and our ideas of human rights are chiefly the product of Christian inquiry in the Medieval period, and reactions to that in the Renaissance. Our human rights organizations, when they chide America or other Western powers for violations of the laws of war, are pointing to a field of study that arose in the Peace of God and Truce of God movements of the Middle Ages, the protection of noncombatants being their chief intent. The Geneva Conventions are rooted in nothing so much as the laws of war that Thomas Aquinas and others developed, perhaps most especially the Doctrine of Double Effect.
But from these countless evils we have been set free, by the help of Him Who though He afflicts yet heals and restores, by our most tireless Prince, King and Lord, the Lord Robert. He, that his people and his heritage might be delivered out of the hands of our enemies, met toil and fatigue, hunger and peril, like another Macabaeus or Joshua and bore them cheerfully. Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
In a sense, I suppose, that's the same question. One of the principles that Christianity has created is the idea of religious liberty: out of the Thirty Years War and its echoes, we decided that it was proper for men to sort out for themselves what to believe. So here we have an atheist who has decided that he believes both that Christianity is untrue, and that it is of irreplaceable value. That ought to mean something profound; but saying just what that something is may be hard.
Try.
What Interns are For
A Shopping Trip:
The Aristotelian mean between the Clinton and Obama administrations on how to use your interns continues to prove elusive. The Clintons wanted them to do, ah, too much; and as for the Obamas...
Let's say you're preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don't have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?
Here's how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:
The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.
Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. "Now it's time to buy some food," she told several hundred people who came to watch. "Let's shop!"
Health Care: Homestretch
Health Care: Homestretch
That's before people have time to factor in this:
Still, this is the kind of extraordinary statement that might nudge the numbers. Of the 44% of Americans who at least kind-of support health care, a strong part are union members. Announcing that the plan is linked to a major amnesty effort is one of the few things you could do to undercut rank-and-file union members' support for the plan. It won't make any difference to the organizations themselves, who look at the unionized healthcare workforce as too great a good to pass up. For the average union member, though, the picture is a little different.
Going into the final push, things look good:
Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters nationwide now oppose the health care reform proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the highest level of opposition yet measured and includes 44% who are Strongly Opposed.So: total support is underwater even compared only to those Strongly Opposed. A clear majority is opposed.
Just 43% now favor the proposal, including 24% who Strongly Favor it.
That's before people have time to factor in this:
The Washington Times reports that Barack Obama has finally concluded that Joe Wilson was right, and that ObamaCare presents a big problem in handling illegal immigrants. Fortunately, the White House has found a solution to the problem. No, they’re not going to beef up enforcement or require identification before receiving subsidies and services. They’re just going to offer amnesty so that no one’s illegal anymore....The Rass poll shows that there has been a fair bit of stability in the polling numbers. One normally wouldn't expect them to change much, then, if they haven't changed much through the August protests, etc.
Still, this is the kind of extraordinary statement that might nudge the numbers. Of the 44% of Americans who at least kind-of support health care, a strong part are union members. Announcing that the plan is linked to a major amnesty effort is one of the few things you could do to undercut rank-and-file union members' support for the plan. It won't make any difference to the organizations themselves, who look at the unionized healthcare workforce as too great a good to pass up. For the average union member, though, the picture is a little different.
Trade It For A Dog
"We Could Trade It For A Dog":
It'd be an interesting exercise, to be sure. Perhaps the Good Lord might find it amusing, in which case I might yet have the chance to try it out. Give Doc your best, anyway, because he's very busy with his new job, house-hunting, and the baby-plans to boot.
And hey, Doc, cheer up: you can always marry her off to mine. (This is how those arranged marriages in other cultures happen so early, in case any of you ever wondered about that.)
Doc Russia considers the business of raising a daughter:
The best part about it is that from this day on, I can always whip that reference out. when Domestic-6 complains about how tiring taking care of a baby is, I can just say "Hey, *I* wanted to trade her for a dog." When our lovely daughter does something to upset me, I can turn to her and say "you see... *this* is why I wanted to trade you for a dog." Of course, she will run to mommy and whine that Daddy said that he wanted to trade her for a dog, and she'll ask my lovely wife if that was true, and there will be just enough of a pause as Domestic-6 ponders how to answer that question for her to wonder for a moment if it's true.While I did once think up a name for a daughter, in the days before it was clear we were meant to have a son, I don't know that I gave much thought to how I'd raise one. I have to admit that I don't think I'd do it very differently. Any daughter of mine would come up knowing how to fence and fight, sing and ride horses, shoot and tell the truth.
Now, while this may seem cruel and heartless (two of my specialties), the sad fact is thhat I do not think that I can raise my daughter as anything besides a tomboy, and that means giving her a thick skin. You see, the boys I seegrowing up maturingin her cohort today are not being raised (for the most part) as men. No, they are something else entirely. So, I must raise a daughter under the presumption that there will be few men (classical men, I should say) available to her. This means no helpless little girl. No delicate little flower. Don't get me wrong; I do want her to be feminine, well-groomed and beautiful. It's just that she is going to have to be the kind of woman who has to make sure that she doesn't mix up her Chanel No. 5 and her Hoppe's No. 9.
It'd be an interesting exercise, to be sure. Perhaps the Good Lord might find it amusing, in which case I might yet have the chance to try it out. Give Doc your best, anyway, because he's very busy with his new job, house-hunting, and the baby-plans to boot.
And hey, Doc, cheer up: you can always marry her off to mine. (This is how those arranged marriages in other cultures happen so early, in case any of you ever wondered about that.)
Sucks to be ya'll.
Sucks To Be Ya'll:
So today the President announced that we would not be building anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe. There were two reasons we had thought we would be: as a hedge against Russia, whose invasion of Georgia last year shows that it is ready to use military force against even US allies; and because such defenses would allow us to protect Western Europe against Iranian nuclear missiles, should they be developed.
Two other items of interest for today:
It is the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe.
The IAEA says Iran is definitely developing nuclear weapons.
Sleep well, Poland.
So, if they take our guns away, can we use swords instead?
They appear to work:
They appear to work:
Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo's house and taken two
laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and he heard noises
coming from the garage out back.The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn't run. He didn't call the police. He
grabbed his samurai sword.With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand, police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him, police say, the confrontation was fatal.
Bad Idea
You'd Think Someone Would Grasp...
I was over at one of our local primary schools for a martial arts event, and I saw what they did with the Obama speech. One of the teachers assigned a creative writing project that, I gather from the results, was something like:
'Imagine that President Obama announces that he has repealed the Bill of Rights. Write a letter telling him why he should keep it instead. Please explain which amendment is most important to you, and why.'
I noticed that the clear victor among 'most important amendment' for these Georgia children was the 2nd Amendment; the runner-up was the 1st Amendment, for its protection of religion.
I suppose I'll have to do my part as a good citizen and schedule a meeting with the principal, though, to express some concerns.
I don't really object to the idea of asking children to imagine the government violating the Constitution, and to think about what their duty as citizens entails if it does. That's good civics; it's something we should all think about, whoever is currently in charge in Washington.
However, it's very bad civics to fail to convey that the President has no power to repeal the Bill of Rights. The President is not involved in Constitutional amendments of any sort. They are formulated in Congress and ratified by the states; or they are formulated by a Constitutional Convention, once a supermajority of states has called for one. In the event that a President declared that he was suspending the Bill of Rights, then, a rather stronger response than a polite letter would be called for from the citizenry.
In the unlikely event that some President should make such a declaration down the road, I'd hate for today's children to come away thinking, "Oh, dear. Teacher said this might happen. I guess I'd better write a letter."
Meanwhile, if it's not the right time for the Feds to be trying to write curricula, it's probably also not the right time for asking the students to imagine that President Obama is about to suspend the Constitution. Tensions are a bit high right now, as some of you may have noticed. I like the concept of having people think about their duty as citizens to restrain government abuses, but it might have been better to formulate the exercise in a slightly more theoretical way. ("Imagine some future president...", etc.)
...that this is not the right time for this particular idea.
This week the House is scheduled to approve H.R. 3221, an education lending bill that CBO reports will increase the deficit by $50 billion. The bill includes a little-known provision to give the Secretary of Education $500 million - to be provided to to any entity he deems “appropriate” - to develop and disseminate free and “freely available” online courses....The school speech went over so well, I can't imagine why anyone would object to the Feds appropriating money to write curricula for students. By all means, full speed ahead with this new Federal action! Come on, folks, work with us.
Federal curriculum is contrary to longstanding government policy - and it’s unnecessary. For decades, Federal law has prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from exercising control over the “curriculum, program of instruction . . . or over the selection or content of library resources, text books, or other educational materials by any educational institution or school system.
I was over at one of our local primary schools for a martial arts event, and I saw what they did with the Obama speech. One of the teachers assigned a creative writing project that, I gather from the results, was something like:
'Imagine that President Obama announces that he has repealed the Bill of Rights. Write a letter telling him why he should keep it instead. Please explain which amendment is most important to you, and why.'
I noticed that the clear victor among 'most important amendment' for these Georgia children was the 2nd Amendment; the runner-up was the 1st Amendment, for its protection of religion.
I suppose I'll have to do my part as a good citizen and schedule a meeting with the principal, though, to express some concerns.
I don't really object to the idea of asking children to imagine the government violating the Constitution, and to think about what their duty as citizens entails if it does. That's good civics; it's something we should all think about, whoever is currently in charge in Washington.
However, it's very bad civics to fail to convey that the President has no power to repeal the Bill of Rights. The President is not involved in Constitutional amendments of any sort. They are formulated in Congress and ratified by the states; or they are formulated by a Constitutional Convention, once a supermajority of states has called for one. In the event that a President declared that he was suspending the Bill of Rights, then, a rather stronger response than a polite letter would be called for from the citizenry.
In the unlikely event that some President should make such a declaration down the road, I'd hate for today's children to come away thinking, "Oh, dear. Teacher said this might happen. I guess I'd better write a letter."
Meanwhile, if it's not the right time for the Feds to be trying to write curricula, it's probably also not the right time for asking the students to imagine that President Obama is about to suspend the Constitution. Tensions are a bit high right now, as some of you may have noticed. I like the concept of having people think about their duty as citizens to restrain government abuses, but it might have been better to formulate the exercise in a slightly more theoretical way. ("Imagine some future president...", etc.)
China History
History & Tourism in China:
When we were in Hang Zhou, we used to encounter Chinese tour groups occasionally. Hang Zhou was the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the site of a scenic lake called Xi Hu ("West Lake"), once home to poets and philosophers as well as the lords of the realm. It's certainly worth going to see if you happen to be in the area. It's about eighty-five miles southwest of Shanghai, linked by rail, so you could do it in three days or so.
(The photos at the link are carefully cropped so as not to show much of Hang Zhou itself, which -- excepting a narrow corridor along the lake and around the university -- is a classicly Communist city. I noticed right before we left that I had done the same thing, so I went back and took photos of all the trash, open sewers, and falling-down International Style buildings... someday, I should dig out those photographs and scan them, both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones.)
The Chinese Tour Group is characterized not just by the megabuses, but by a uniform. The tourist is issued a cap and t-shirt in a matching color -- usually bright red, but possibly bright yellow, in Hang Zhou. They are marched in formation around the city by a tour guide dressed in the same uniform, but distinguished by her megaphone. Important facts are shouted through the megaphone during the march around the city. It's really something to see.
One thing that struck me toward the end of the video was the remarks about China being the 'land for big dreams.' In a sense, that's really true, and it's the one part of China that makes me wonder if some of the China-boosterism has something to it. I don't expect China to overtake America in power, or equal American power, anytime soon; but it is certainly true that it's easier to try a "big idea" in China than here. That used to be America's strength, but it is gone now.
There are two reasons for this: America is expensive, so big ideas are harder to fund; and America is heavily, heavily regulated. Everything you might want to do is surrounded by laws and regulations, and the threat of lawsuits. None of that dogs the big dreamer in China; and his money goes about eight times as far.
Bill Clinton = Racist
OK, I Got It:
I wasn't that put off by Ms. Dowd's column, because... well, because it was Ms. Dowd. The NYT's rival, however, has this analysis of her piece today:
"For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both."Good point. What could possibly explain that? Racism, obviously.
Well, not the entire South. Bill Clinton is a southerner. Then again, he supported a white candidate against Obama, didn't he?
A Better World Through Piracy
A Better World Through Piracy:
My favorite lines, though:
What happened to that good old king-beheading sentiment after the English Civil War?
This pirate, too, began pistol-whipping Snelgrave, until some of Snelgrave’s crew cried out, “For God’s sake don’t kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man.” At this, the pirate left Snelgrave alone, and the one who had tried to shoot him took his hand and promised that “my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me.” ....Howard Pyle wrote, in his Book of Pirates, "[W]ould not every boy, for instance -- that is, every boy of any account -- rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament?" Apparently, it's more fun for academics, too.
What if [pirates] added up to a picture of working-class heroes? In 1980, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, wondering what became of the king-beheading spirit of the English Civil War, noted that when the monarchy was restored, in 1660, many radicals emigrated to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary idealism may have fallen like a lit match into the islands’ population of paupers, heretics, and transported felons. Elaborating Hill’s suggestion, the historian Marcus Rediker spent the following decades researching pirate life and came to believe that pirate society “built a better world”—one with vigorous democracy, economic fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and even health care—in many ways more praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snelgrave supported by slave trading. True, pirates were thieves and torturers, but there was something promising about their alternative to capitalism. Other scholars claimed pirates as precursors of gay liberation and feminism. But, as pirate scholarship flourished, so did dissent. In 1996, David Cordingly dismissed the idea of black equality aboard pirate ships, pointing out that a number of pirates owned black slaves, and warned against glamorizing criminals renowned among their contemporaries for “their casual brutality.”
My favorite lines, though:
A brisk, clever new book, “The Invisible Hook” (Princeton; $24.95), by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates’ leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit. “Ignoble pirate motives generated ‘enlightened’ outcomes,” Leeson writes. Whether this should comfort politicians on the left or on the right turns out to be a subtle question.A subtle point, indeed.
A Poem of Tournament
A Poem of Adventure:
From Sir Thomas Malory:
In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened but he found strange adventures; and so they rode, and came into a deep valley full of stones, and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream a fair fountain, and three damosels sitting thereby.And so did a young knight choose a lady of sixty years age; nor, when Sir Thomas Malory recounted it to his audience of bold knights and bold ladies, did that seem so odd a thing.
And then they rode to them, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was three score winter of age or more, and her hair was white under the garland.
The second damosel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head.
The third damosel was but fifteen year of age, and a garland of flowers about her head.
When these knights had so beheld them, they asked them the cause why they sat at that fountain? We be here, said the damosels, for this cause: if we may see any errant knights, to teach them unto strange adventures; and ye be three knights that seek adventures, and we be three damosels, and therefore each one of you must choose one of us; and when ye have done so we will lead you unto three highways, and there each of you shall choose a way and his damosel with him. And this day twelvemonth ye must meet here again, and God send you your lives, and thereto ye must plight your troth. This is well said, said Sir Marhaus.
NOW shall everych of us choose a damosel. I shall tell you, said Sir Uwaine, I am the youngest and most weakest of you both, therefore I will have the eldest damosel, for she hath seen much, and can best help me when I have need, for I have most need of help of you both.
A Poem of Torment:
Not that all these poems are sad. You may enjoy entry 40, a Welsh version of Tristan and Isolde, which ends differently from the tragedy you may have heard before.
From A Celtic Miscellany, entry 52. The poet is an Irish man called Uilliam Ruadh (which is to say, "Red William").
I am ensnared by the maid of the curling locks.A true picture, and one of many like it. Many of the poems of love, from Ireland and Wales and Scotland, reflect the values of the courtly love tradition quite highly.
Alas for him who has seen her, and alas for him who does not see her every day; alas for those trapped in her love, and alas for those who are set free!
Alas for him who goes to meet her, and alas for him who does not meet her always, alas for him who was with her, and alas for him who is not with her!
Not that all these poems are sad. You may enjoy entry 40, a Welsh version of Tristan and Isolde, which ends differently from the tragedy you may have heard before.
Enid & Geraint:
Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.
And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.
They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.
At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.
And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.
By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.
End cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.
Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.
Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.
And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.
And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.
His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.
And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.
Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.
And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.
They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.
At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.
And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.
By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.
End cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.
Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.
Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.
And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.
And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.
His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.
And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.
Up The Trail
Up The Trail:
Just a pretty afternoon ride in the late summer of Georgia. Nothing special about it; but the wife is aboard her new Tennesse Walker, which several of you admired recently. She has a fondness for "between the ears" shots, so here is one.
Some appropriate music, if you like your horse pictures with music:
Hm
ACORN:
Via Southern Appeal, I learned quite a bit about the kind of services ACORN can offer.
I'd like to believe this video was faked... because the alternative is believing that it wasn't.
Oh, and they're under investigation for vote fraud in Florida now, too.
Giving the Lie
I skipped the umpteenth rendition of the Obama-Health-Care speech -- either the twenty-eighth such speech, or the 121st, depending on how you count -- so apparently I missed something interesting.
In any event, there is actually one other way to resolve the issue short of combat, and it has occurred. The apology from the gentleman from South Carolina resolves the matters of honor at issue in the dispute, as long as the President is willing to let the matter pass. As Alexander Dumas put it, if a gentleman has apologized, he has done all he can do. He cannot grovel, after all, and remain a free and equal man. The apology is the ultimate offer to resolve things peacefully.
So the matter is resolved; but it was an interesting display. The last time we saw such a thing in Congress was 1856. The Civil War was still years away, but the tensions were building to the point that a split was coming.
UPDATE: Here's the video.
Actually, the gentleman from South Carolina was responding to provocation. The President had just finished accusing "prominent politicians" who spoke about the panels President Obama has actually endorsed of spreading "a lie."
Now, most of us reading this probably assume that he meant Mrs. Palin -- although, as she is retired, she is no longer a "prominent politician." It's highly likely that the Congressman from South Carolina, and many others in the room, took that remark as being pointed at them. Thus, the President was accusing them to their face of being liars.
Under those circumstances, Rep. Wilson's remark was no more than to give the President back what he had so freely offered others. It was entirely proper; and his apology, then, highly generous.
In an angry and very audible outburst, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, interrupted President Obama’s speech Wednesday night with a shout of “You lie!”This phrasing is not a "breach of protocol," as the NYT would have it, but part of another protocol. Kenneth S. Greenberg, scholar of dueling (and baseball, oddly enough; he had some interesting things to say on the intersection of those two things in the post-war American South), noted:
His eruption — in response to Mr. Obama’s statement that Democratic health proposals would not cover illegal immigrants — stunned members of both parties in the House chamber.
Only certain kinds of insulting language and behavior led to duels. The central insult that could turn a disagreement into a duel involved a direct or indirect attack on someone's word -- the accusation that a man was a liar. To "give someone the lie," as it was called, had always been of great consequence among men of honor. As one early-seventeenth-century English writer noted, "It is reputed so great a shame to be accounted a lyer, that any other injury is canceled by giving the lie, and he that receiveth it standeth so charged in his honor and reputation, that he cannot disburden himself of that imputation, but by the striking of him that hath given it, or by chalenging him to the combat."TigerHawk is thus right to wonder if restoring the duel would reinforce civility, because it is the duel that is involved here. It's also of note that a congressman from South Carolina was the actor, since the only other time that dueling forms were brought into Congress I know of was also by the South Carolina faction. I mean, of course, the caning of Charles Sumner, which was not a duel precisely because the South Carolina faction wanted to send the message that he was no gentleman (and therefore unfit for a duel, but only for a beating).
In any event, there is actually one other way to resolve the issue short of combat, and it has occurred. The apology from the gentleman from South Carolina resolves the matters of honor at issue in the dispute, as long as the President is willing to let the matter pass. As Alexander Dumas put it, if a gentleman has apologized, he has done all he can do. He cannot grovel, after all, and remain a free and equal man. The apology is the ultimate offer to resolve things peacefully.
So the matter is resolved; but it was an interesting display. The last time we saw such a thing in Congress was 1856. The Civil War was still years away, but the tensions were building to the point that a split was coming.
UPDATE: Here's the video.
Actually, the gentleman from South Carolina was responding to provocation. The President had just finished accusing "prominent politicians" who spoke about the panels President Obama has actually endorsed of spreading "a lie."
Now, most of us reading this probably assume that he meant Mrs. Palin -- although, as she is retired, she is no longer a "prominent politician." It's highly likely that the Congressman from South Carolina, and many others in the room, took that remark as being pointed at them. Thus, the President was accusing them to their face of being liars.
Under those circumstances, Rep. Wilson's remark was no more than to give the President back what he had so freely offered others. It was entirely proper; and his apology, then, highly generous.
The Great Leap Forward
大跃进:
1) This precise aspect of Chinese society, far from being praiseworthy, is what gave us arguably the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century. Given that this century also included the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, etc., even to be in the running is a dishonor of remarkable proportion.
The second world war caused at least twice as many deaths, but that was the result of global fighting over a large number of causes. The Holocaust was an act of explicit malice, but killed far fewer people. These 16.5-30 million lives were lost simply because a country's "leadership" made a decision on "critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 20th century."
The current Chinese government is a direct descendant of that previous one. While it is unlikely in this incarnation to force changes that cost millions of lives, neither can we so lightly pass over the graves of these people. To describe this quality as "a great advantage" of the Chinese system is obscene. I trust that Mr. Friedman will have the grace to be humiliated when he realizes what he has written.
2) Furthermore, as someone who has lived in China and traveled outside of the cities as well as to some of its cities, to industrial and to agricultural regions, it is absurd to suggest that China will be overtaking us in "clean energy" in any but the most symbolic ways. China absolutely depends on coal. There are days when you can see the smog stepping down in grades if you climb high enough. When I would wash my bedding, the water turned black.
Yet millions flock to those polluted cities because the alternatives in the countryside are even worse.
China's government isn't doing anything substantive about the pollution, and nor should they. These steps are mere propaganda designed to distract from China's absolute refusal to take the steps that would be necessary to actually clean up China.
Thank goodness those steps have fooled people so well, I suppose. The cost of switching away from coal and to a clean energy base would destroy the Chinese economy and cast hundreds of millions into chaos. The resources do not exist to make China clean while also avoiding another famine on the scale of The Great Leap Forward. God defend the Chinese people from such a decision as Mr. Friedman seems to want to advocate!
3) Finally, as to the propaganda of out producing us on electric cars: yes, it's true that China can decide to focus its resources on a given area, and that can allow them to outperform the United States in that area. If, that is -- if and only if -- it is an area we don't care about.
The United States' economic system is unimaginably more powerful than China's. If the Chinese autocracy decides to make a showpiece of electric cars, they could indeed outproduce us in electric cars, because Americans don't much like them or want them. If the American people were to decide that they did want such cars, however, that casual decision -- a simple switch in our preferences -- would result in a boom in the construction of such cars that China could never hope to match.
Doc Russia rightly explained why the Chevy Volt will fail. It's a simple essay in pictures: what GM promised versus what it delivered.
Promised:
Delivered:
You can see that he's right. That makes the point: the only reason China has even a hope of making a showpiece of this is that there aren't any electric cars Americans actually want. Change that, and you'll see some electric cars.
I know that Mr. Friedman has often written insightful things, so I don't wish to scold him too harshly or at too great a length. Still, this was an example of blindness both to the facts and to the moral history of China. We ought to wish for the decent, honorable people of China to enjoy a future of freedom more greatly resembling our own, than to wish even for a moment for a system that could give us our own Great Leap Forward.
China is better than us in some ways, says Mr. Thomas Friedman:
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand....There are three things that have to be said about this.
1) This precise aspect of Chinese society, far from being praiseworthy, is what gave us arguably the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century. Given that this century also included the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, etc., even to be in the running is a dishonor of remarkable proportion.
The Great Leap Forward (sometimes pejoratively called the Great Leap Backward) (simplified Chinese: 大跃进; traditional Chinese: 大躍進; pinyin: Dàyuèjìn) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturalization and industrialization. Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces. It ended in catastrophe as it triggered a widespread famine that resulted in millions of deaths."Exactly how many millions of deaths?" you might wonder. The figure is unclear, because the Chinese government -- to preserve social harmony, and public confidence in the government -- refused to admit it was happening at the time. Estimates run from about sixteen and a half million deaths, to upwards of thirty million.
The second world war caused at least twice as many deaths, but that was the result of global fighting over a large number of causes. The Holocaust was an act of explicit malice, but killed far fewer people. These 16.5-30 million lives were lost simply because a country's "leadership" made a decision on "critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 20th century."
The current Chinese government is a direct descendant of that previous one. While it is unlikely in this incarnation to force changes that cost millions of lives, neither can we so lightly pass over the graves of these people. To describe this quality as "a great advantage" of the Chinese system is obscene. I trust that Mr. Friedman will have the grace to be humiliated when he realizes what he has written.
2) Furthermore, as someone who has lived in China and traveled outside of the cities as well as to some of its cities, to industrial and to agricultural regions, it is absurd to suggest that China will be overtaking us in "clean energy" in any but the most symbolic ways. China absolutely depends on coal. There are days when you can see the smog stepping down in grades if you climb high enough. When I would wash my bedding, the water turned black.
Yet millions flock to those polluted cities because the alternatives in the countryside are even worse.
China's government isn't doing anything substantive about the pollution, and nor should they. These steps are mere propaganda designed to distract from China's absolute refusal to take the steps that would be necessary to actually clean up China.
Thank goodness those steps have fooled people so well, I suppose. The cost of switching away from coal and to a clean energy base would destroy the Chinese economy and cast hundreds of millions into chaos. The resources do not exist to make China clean while also avoiding another famine on the scale of The Great Leap Forward. God defend the Chinese people from such a decision as Mr. Friedman seems to want to advocate!
3) Finally, as to the propaganda of out producing us on electric cars: yes, it's true that China can decide to focus its resources on a given area, and that can allow them to outperform the United States in that area. If, that is -- if and only if -- it is an area we don't care about.
The United States' economic system is unimaginably more powerful than China's. If the Chinese autocracy decides to make a showpiece of electric cars, they could indeed outproduce us in electric cars, because Americans don't much like them or want them. If the American people were to decide that they did want such cars, however, that casual decision -- a simple switch in our preferences -- would result in a boom in the construction of such cars that China could never hope to match.
Doc Russia rightly explained why the Chevy Volt will fail. It's a simple essay in pictures: what GM promised versus what it delivered.
Promised:
Delivered:
You can see that he's right. That makes the point: the only reason China has even a hope of making a showpiece of this is that there aren't any electric cars Americans actually want. Change that, and you'll see some electric cars.
I know that Mr. Friedman has often written insightful things, so I don't wish to scold him too harshly or at too great a length. Still, this was an example of blindness both to the facts and to the moral history of China. We ought to wish for the decent, honorable people of China to enjoy a future of freedom more greatly resembling our own, than to wish even for a moment for a system that could give us our own Great Leap Forward.
Heh
This Should Work:
So you want to "regain traction" on health care/insurance reform. What does that mean? Well, it means you "lost traction" after a bruising month of town hall meetings, which proved that there was limited support for the idea of "reform," and a great deal of concern that it would ultimately hurt Americans. People are worried about it harming the elderly, those requiring chronic care, and that it will lead to rationing, and that it will imperil medical advancements by defunding innovation. A new suggestion to "regain traction," then, should address those issues.
Or, you could just add huge fines on every American family for noncompliance. No reason to think anyone would object to that.
Kill a Man - Marry the Widow?
Kill a Man - Marry His Widow?
In childhood, I remember having one of those books of random facts and trivia (I believe it was Felton & Fowler's Best, Worst, and Most Unusual) - which claimed to be telling me the ways of an African tribe, in which the penalty for murder was replacing the dead man; you had to do his job, assume his obligations, and marry his widow if he left one.
I've never seen it confirmed, but I've seen it used twice in comedies. One is in an early Abbot and Costello movie - The Winsome Widow of Wagon Gap (Costello's character travels to a western town that has this custom -he accidentally kills a bad man with a mean, mannish, and homely widow, whom he has to marry - on the strength of this deed, he becomes the sheriff, for one one dares to touch him - and he carries her picture instead of a pistol...). The other is in Gilbert and Sullivan - in one of the last two plays they did. (They'd always quarreled, and they broke up after The Gondoliers over an argument about carpets - but they got back together twice, and wrote two of their best but least-known plays.) This was The Grand Duke - subtitled The Statutory Duel - and here is a link to the song that explains it all. However, this recording is lacking the first couple of lines:
Time for searching around is very short for me - my new assignment carries a heavy guilt load. Does anyone here know whether such a custom ever existed?
In childhood, I remember having one of those books of random facts and trivia (I believe it was Felton & Fowler's Best, Worst, and Most Unusual) - which claimed to be telling me the ways of an African tribe, in which the penalty for murder was replacing the dead man; you had to do his job, assume his obligations, and marry his widow if he left one.
I've never seen it confirmed, but I've seen it used twice in comedies. One is in an early Abbot and Costello movie - The Winsome Widow of Wagon Gap (Costello's character travels to a western town that has this custom -he accidentally kills a bad man with a mean, mannish, and homely widow, whom he has to marry - on the strength of this deed, he becomes the sheriff, for one one dares to touch him - and he carries her picture instead of a pistol...). The other is in Gilbert and Sullivan - in one of the last two plays they did. (They'd always quarreled, and they broke up after The Gondoliers over an argument about carpets - but they got back together twice, and wrote two of their best but least-known plays.) This was The Grand Duke - subtitled The Statutory Duel - and here is a link to the song that explains it all. However, this recording is lacking the first couple of lines:
About a century since...listen to it all; but the upshot is that the prince replaced duelling with the simple draw of a card, and whoever draws the low card is legally dead, and the other man must "discharge his debts, pay all his bets, and take his obligations." (How this would square with Grim's view of duelling among our ancestors as expressed a few posts ago - the point being a man's ability to die for his position, whatever the facts of it - this I won't think about for now.)
The code of the duello
To sudden death, for want of breath,
Sent many a strapping fellow.
The then-presiding prince,
Who useless bloodshed hated,
He passed an act, short and compact,
Which may be briefly stated...
Time for searching around is very short for me - my new assignment carries a heavy guilt load. Does anyone here know whether such a custom ever existed?
Sober Men and True
"Sober Men and True"
Here (at 4:18), in that particular opera, we find the sailors in that opera about to be inspected by the First Lord of the Admiralty and hoping that they will be found "sober men and true."
Which, of course, brings us to Afghanistan.
I have never been a fan of General Order #1, having lived under it twice. If anything can justify it, though, it's German troops who give delayed and hung-over reports "that it was too dangerous to visit the blast site, four miles outside their camp, because they might get shot at." Were he here, I'll bet the Reverend Mr. Peabody would have some good words to say on the subject.
Since we were just speaking of Western songs, what about the ones they actually sang in the West? This is an occasion to mention another great character of old Tombstone.
Only a few of Tombstone's 4,000 residents were interested in attending church, which was usually held in a tent where the sound of honky-tonk pianos coming from the nearby saloons often drowned out the minister's voice.He went on, back east, to educate a boy named Franklin Roosevelt. In 1882, however -- a scant few months after the Gunfight at the OK Corral, and while the Earps were still waging war against the forces of the outlaws, the Democratic party and the county government -- he convinced saloons and gamesmen to fund a church, and partially with opera.
All of this changed on January 28, 1882 (just three months after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral), when the Reverend Endicott Peabody arrived in town.... He weighed around 200 pounds, enjoyed boxing and baseball, and worked out every day. As one contemporary said, "He had muscles of iron."
The Episcopal women had been trying to raise money for the church building fund by holding raffles, but progress was slow. The Reverend Peabody, who was not one to be easily intimidated, decided to solicit donations on both sides of Tombstone's "dead line."
He walked into a hotel casino, ambled up to a high-stakes poker game, introduced himself, and asked for a donation for the church. One player handed over $150 in chips— and promptly told everyone else to do the same. The local musical society put on the opera H.M.S. Pinafore and gave the proceeds to the church fund.
Here (at 4:18), in that particular opera, we find the sailors in that opera about to be inspected by the First Lord of the Admiralty and hoping that they will be found "sober men and true."
Which, of course, brings us to Afghanistan.
After a Nato airstrike killed as many as 125 people last week, General Stanley McChrystal was keen to get the situation under control — fast.The article asserts two things I know from personal experience: the Americans are banned from drinking under any circumstances, and the joke is that ISAF stands for "I Saw Americans Fight."
When he tried to contact his underlings to find out what had happened, however, he found, to his fury, that many of them were either drunk or too hungover to respond.
I have never been a fan of General Order #1, having lived under it twice. If anything can justify it, though, it's German troops who give delayed and hung-over reports "that it was too dangerous to visit the blast site, four miles outside their camp, because they might get shot at." Were he here, I'll bet the Reverend Mr. Peabody would have some good words to say on the subject.
Stray Western Winds
Stray Western Winds:
It's been a while since we had such music as in the last post; as it'd been a while since we had horse pictures. Other things have occupied my mind, but that doesn't mean the old beauty has faded.
Here are a few, that perhaps you have not heard in a while; or, perhaps, have not heard at all.
"Remember you the butterfly..."? And so do I.
Yeah, that's a different one, in spite of the similar graphic. Johnny Western is largely forgotten these days; but he did the Ballad of Paladin.
And a later piece:
Road to Kaintuck
Road to Kaintuck:
Some lovely ladies sing the old Johnny Cash classic:
But perhaps you've forgotten the original:
From the old days, when Kentucky was the Western Frontier, and the 'dark and bloody ground.' Not like today, when the whole world is ready to be.
Mainstreaming Nonsense
Mainstreaming Nonsense:
Nevertheless, I don't think I like the idea that membership in a minority position disqualifies you from service. What if you were part of the small cult who believed Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction? You would, in 2002, have been as directly in violation of the conventional wisdom as Birthers or Truthers; in violation of the opinion of intelligence services across the several free nations, and multiple US administrations.
You'd also have been right -- against the odds and all reasonable interpretations of the evidence, to be sure. Right, nonetheless. If by some circumstance we had not gone into Iraq in 2003, we would not now know that you were right. It would be hard to imagine that you could be.
"Fringe" movements do sometimes get things right that the majority cannot imagine to be true. This is an exercise in humility: to admit not only that we are not as wise as we think, that we might be wrong, but that most of us could be wrong, that almost all of us could be wrong, that all of us could be.
We could be. Even most of us. Even all of us. In fact, to me, it seems more likely than not that we are usually all wrong.
I've been trying to decide what to say about this essay on intelligence and education among conservatives. I value both qualities, certainly. I ought to want to endorse a call to them. And yet... what value is there in denouncing "Joe the Plumber," simply because he wasn't a genius? He never said he was a genius. He said he wanted to work hard and build his fortune, and he didn't care for the idea that then-candidate Obama wanted to "spread the wealth around."
Well? Shouldn't he be able to say that? If he was right about nothing else in his life, wasn't he right about that?
John McCain knew he was:
The essay with which we began bothers me still more as I see Ed Morrissey's piece today:
With the resignation of Van Jones for his 9/11 Truther flirtations (his version) or outright advocacy (which the evidence indicates) and the humiliation of the traditional media deliberately leaving themselves and their consumers behind the New Media on the story, the reaction will come, but not soon. Instead, we can expect the media to hold Republicans to the standards the conservative punditry imposed on Van Jones, and to be a lot more aggressive about it than they were with Jones himself.I have no beef for the Birthers, who have managed to interest me twice: once, when a friend sent me what he misunderstood and represented to me as a Federal court order stating that Obama had lost his citizenship; and again when the argument was laid out in its full form. It was on this second occasion that I realized how unjust the argument was: for it to hold, you have to agree to endorse the idea that an American citizen who is a woman cannot pass her citizenship to her son, if her husband is not also a citizen. Any child of mine should be an American, even if I had married a woman who was no citizen. If the law said otherwise, the law was wrong.
What exactly does that mean? In the next Republican administration, we can expect a great deal of scrutiny for Presidential advisers. For one thing, it means that no one who ever expressed public support for Birthers to get the benefit of the doubt. The two conspiracy theories are different, but they both are entirely speculative and imagine dark conspiracies at the highest orbits of power, and neither have any actual direct evidence for support.
Nevertheless, I don't think I like the idea that membership in a minority position disqualifies you from service. What if you were part of the small cult who believed Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction? You would, in 2002, have been as directly in violation of the conventional wisdom as Birthers or Truthers; in violation of the opinion of intelligence services across the several free nations, and multiple US administrations.
You'd also have been right -- against the odds and all reasonable interpretations of the evidence, to be sure. Right, nonetheless. If by some circumstance we had not gone into Iraq in 2003, we would not now know that you were right. It would be hard to imagine that you could be.
"Fringe" movements do sometimes get things right that the majority cannot imagine to be true. This is an exercise in humility: to admit not only that we are not as wise as we think, that we might be wrong, but that most of us could be wrong, that almost all of us could be wrong, that all of us could be.
We could be. Even most of us. Even all of us. In fact, to me, it seems more likely than not that we are usually all wrong.
"The Veal Pens"
"The Veal Pens":
Do you know what the term means in the modern political context? Why, it means that Obama values liberals for their value as shields. Shields for him, of course; for what else of importance is at stake in this administration?
Rasmussen has been wondering if Obama faces a 2010 primary challenge. Goodness knows he deserves one. I voted for Sen. Clinton in the last primary; I'd be glad to vote for Secretary Clinton in the primary of 2012.
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