The 5th Commandment

Taking the Fifth:

I was looking at the Kagan email archives, which are an interesting project, when I was surprised to see the subject heading: "5th commandment." I hadn't gotten the impression that Dr. Kagan was terribly religious, so I clicked on it to see what the email said.

It's basically talking points on a bill allowing the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools. They are remarkably coy in the most disgusting fashion of D.C. politics. Note that this message was forwarded, not written, by Dr. Kagan.

Jose checked the Catholic Web page, and Thou shalt not kill IS the 5th Commandment, so John gets the VP's award for Faith-Based Person of the Week.

Here's a longer Q&A for the 10 Commandments question:

Q. will the President support the amendment passed by the House to let
schools post the 10 Commandments?

A. If the House were serious, they would have remembered the Fifth
Commandment -- Thou Shalt Not Kill -- and voted to make it harder for
criminals to buy guns.

So, will the President support the amendment? No, but neither will he admit that he's not supporting the amendment. Rather, he will cite the Ten Commandments as a means of undermining the movement to honor them.

Now that reminds me of something...



Now, there are definitely valid questions for Americans -- and even Christian Americans -- about how much of the Old Testament Law they are really interested in bringing forward into modern life. The honest position here is, well, the honest position: "I don't believe the Ten Commandments are a proper guide for modern America." That's a perfectly defensible position.

What bothers me is this pose of being the superior readers of scripture -- and in the Kagan case, by people who admit they had to look it up to be sure which one they wanted to name. Even in the Obama case, the claim is that "folks haven't been reading their Bibles." I'd bet against that claim proving true; but again, the pose is one of arrogant intellectual superiority.

Brain Blindness

A Blindness in the Brain:

There is a tremendously interesting series being written on "unknown unknowns" starting here. As of this writing only the first three parts are published.

The argument being advanced is that there are things we don't just "not know" that we don't know, but things we cannot know that we don't know. It starts with a few amusing stories, but turns on the question of whether a known neurological disorder is actually just a very obvious example of a general problem with our brains.

An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.”

So, not only do they not know that they are paralyzed, they cannot know it. And they cannot reason to it: their reason, far from guiding them correctly, is inventing plausible rationalizations that let them avoid recognizing the problem.

So much for the disorder. But what about more general life?

DAVID DUNNING: I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

But in part two, the question arises: does the disease being used as a model for this investigation even exist? And how would we know?

It's an interesting question, but it is a known unknown; the true unknown unknowns are what they're after. And those are, of course, very difficult things to pin down. Even incompetence is not a very good candidate. It is true that the same standard I would use to decide how to weld two pieces of metal (say) is the standard I would use to evaluate whether I was a good welder. But I am still able to reason to my incompetence at welding from the fact that I find that I have no standard for judging how to weld two pieces of metal; or how to turn on an arc-welder; or how to be sure I wasn't about to burn off my foot. I can very quickly reason to knowledge that I am not competent to be operating the welder, and need further instruction.

Yet apparently this is often not true, and it is interesting to examine why.

It is also interesting to speculate about the general thesis, which is that brain states can disable reason (or retask it to mere rationalization). This touches on the matter that St. Augustine discusses in "On Free Choice of the Will," where he asserts that it is necessary to believe before you can begin to understand. The choice to believe something, or not, alters the brain state; and it is obvious enough that this may open some new roads, and close off others. What is interesting is the reinforcement of Augustine's argument: the idea that, having not made the choice to believe, the road is invisible to reason. Would it not be true that, having made the choice to believe, other roads are closed and hidden? Reason cannot grasp that they exist, because when pointed in that direction it will merely reply, "I do not need a pencil."

That is troubling as well as fascinating as a concept, because it is impossible to know which side of that canyon one is on. This, too, becomes a known unknown.

Now, Turning to Reason, & Its Just Sweetness

Now, Turning to Reason, & Its Just Sweetness

Iain M. Banks is the Scottish author of a series of science fiction novels about “The Culture,” a society made up spaceships driven by artificial intelligences. I’ve sampled the novels and concluded they aren’t for me, but I do appreciate some of the many names the author has given to the sentient ships:

Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill
No More Mr. Nice Guy
Just Read the Instructions
Of Course I Still Love You
Serious Callers Only
Kiss the Blade
Funny, It Worked Last Time
Helpless in the Face of Your Beauty
You Would If You Really Loved Me
You’ll Thank Me Later
Poke It with a Stick
Hand Me the Gun and Ask Me Again
Lapsed Pacifist
Now Look What You’ve Made Me Do
Don’t Try This at Home
Now We Try It My Way
You’ll Clean That up Before You Leave
Now, Turning to Reason, & Its Just Sweetness
Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall
Stood Far Back When the Gravitas Was Handed out
Gravitas, What Gravitas?
Gravitas . . . Gravitas . . . No, Don’t Help Me, I’ll Get It in a Moment
Gravitas Free Zone
Low Gravitas Warning Signal
Absolutely No You-Know-What

Zombie Menace

The Zombie Menace:

At ForeignPolicy magazine.

Lebanese

The Lebanese Club:

An interesting article on Baghdad nightlife. It wasn't that long ago that there wasn't any -- except on dust-ridden nights, when it involved planting bombs and setting up rocket launchers. Much has changed in a short time.

Dayam

Now There's Something You Don't See Everyday:

This piece on McChrystal is extremely good journalism -- you have to respect the reporter who managed to get this kind of access, build this kind of trust, and put this together. This isn't how we normally talk in front of reporters; but maybe we should. If the American people understood that this is just how people talk after months deployed, this kind of reporting would not have the potential to be disruptive. Everyone would shrug it off as normal combat steam-blowing. I heard way worse stuff from commissioned officers about Bush than that he was "disappointing" -- and when they'd talk about the next level of higher command, O My God, what you'd hear!

It's not a big deal. This stuff is constant at every level. On the few occasions you'd run into serious friction over it, people understood and would say, "You've gotta eat with those guys" -- meaning, they understood that you had to feel certain things just because of where you were and what you were doing. You get mad, you blow steam, then you suck it up and do the job. The job gets done, and when the deployment is over we forget every complaint and spend the next fifty years going to each other's parties and raising toasts to the memories.

If people thought it looked like something else, it doesn't. That party in Paris reminds me of some of the best times in my life, and why should we expect it to be different?

The problem isn't what was said or done; it's that so few Americans understand why it was said and done. This shouldn't be shocking, and shouldn't cause a political incident. This is how things are when you're talking to soldiers and Marines; the reporter just shows them honestly. It's a pity our politicians have so little stomach for them as they honestly are, because they're the best men we as a nation know how to produce.

Painting them as perfect, as we so often try to do in the press, sets them up for failure when some reporter gets inside the guard. Maybe it's time just to let people learn what it's like.

A Great Pie

A Great Pie:

Friday we had pot roast (pork); Saturday I made pizza dough for homemade pizzas. Last night was chicken and potatoes. Today, with all the weekend cookery, there are too many leftovers in the refrigerator.

So I took the leftover pizza dough and made it into a pie crust, shredded the pork and chicken, and stuffed the pie with that and some onions and potatoes, and vegetables from the pot roast. It came out well.





There are several good ways of spicing such a pie, both savory and (odd to the modern taste) sweet. The sweet ones -- made with things like cranberries or currants, cinnamon and ginger -- are sometimes called "Great Pies," and were served at holiday feasts. The savory ones are more likely to be eaten today. The Scots have a version called the bridie that is very good.

A number of traditional recipies can be found here. If you like it, and you might be down in Louisiana in September, you might like to try the Meat Pie Festival. I haven't been myself, but it sounds like fun.

Free Speech as Patronage

Free Speech as Political Patronage:

Via Dad29, an exception is being made:

...restrictions on companies that received government bailouts during the financial crisis apply to businesses, but not unions: Under the DISCLOSE Act, General Motors can’t tell you who to vote for, but the United Auto Workers union can.

...

Government contractors with contracts of more than $7 million are not permitted to engage in express advocacy. Unions that receive their dues from the taxpayer-funded salaries of public sector employees face no such restriction.

The whole "campaign finance reform" bus was always an affront to the first amendment. The freedom of speech that the Founders most wanted to guard was political speech.

Apparently, that freedom of speech will be just another form of patronage for the party in power.

Border Issues

The Border Issue:

Will Senator Kyl stand by this claim, I wonder?



It's a remarkable claim to make, and he has to know that the President will deny it. It wasn't long ago that no one wanted to get crosswise with the President on questions like this, because he was the most popular politician in the world. If some Republican said X and he denied it, the Republicans feared the public would believe they were lying because of their essential good feelings for the President. Does this show that the numbers are so bad that they don't worry about that anymore? Or is it these numbers that Kyl is more concerned about?

This story appears to be evidence for a developing middle position between "the President's doing his best, but..." and "the Manchurian President is intentionally destroying America out of malice." According to the middle position, the President isn't trying to destroy America intentionally; but he is intentionally using his office to harm or punish parts of America, sometimes aggressively and sometimes through neglect of his duty. See here re: "McCain-voting Gulf states."

I have largely found this middle narrative unconvincing -- on the general principle that you shouldn't attribute malice where incompetence is an adequate explanation -- but Senator Kyl's claim appears to be support for the "middle-malice" position.

UPDATE: As expected, the denial has arrived. So far, the Senator is standing by his claim.

Testimonies

Testimonies

In 1952 the little-known brief novel “Testimonies” appeared in print. The author was Patrick O’Brian, who later would achieve considerable fame from more than twenty rollicking novels following the careers of a British Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars and his particular friend, a ship’s surgeon, naturalist, and sometime spy. “Testimonies,” a first novel written when O’Brian was in his 20s, is a wonderful book, though much different in tone from the beloved Aubrey/Maturin series, which was begun a full 17 years later. Here is its description of Joseph Pugh, an awkward, alienated, slightly ill ex-Oxford don’s discovery that he has fallen in love with his Welsh neighbor’s young farm wife, Bronwen Vaughan:

I was very simple I suppose. I had no idea that I was there at all until I was in love so deep that it was a pain in my heart. I had thought it was the pleasure of looking at her, the pleasure of joining that good and kind family circle (good in spite of the bad undercurrent that I suspected) and talking about country things to Emyr and the old man. Then one day it was upon me. I knew then what was the matter, and why nothing had seemed profitable but the evenings I spent there; she came in, just as I had seen her the first time, and my heart leaped up and I knew that Emyr was talking but I could not link his words together. . . . There may be things more absurd than a middle-aged man in the grip of a high-flung romantic passion: a boy can behave more foolishly, but at least in him it is natural.

“Testimonies” takes the form of a kind of inquest, though its nature becomes harder and harder to pin down as the novel gathers speed toward its conclusion. Here is Bronwen explaining how she saw Mr. Pugh:

Q. . . . I understand that he had many different ways, the other way of talking and behaving, but he was still a man like every other man, was he not?

A. No. He was not a man like any other man. He was the dearest man in the world for me. The difference in him was right inside, nothing to do with him belonging to other people. Without his gentry or his money or anything, if you put him by another man it was gold against brass. But to begin with it was just the ordinary difference that made me so slow and stupid. Unless he is wicked (which you can see at once) you do not expect a man like him to admire you.

New and used copies are available in hardcover and paperback at Amazon and alibris.

I'm feeling literary this weekend, so I'm going to quote an A.E. Housman poem here and recommend a book in the next post.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

. . .

This is the first poem I recall having anyone help me with in college, and I remember the professor pointing out to us the constant playing with "can" and "may." What strikes me now is the mournful tone about having to bear being all of 24 years old. I still like "Bear them we can, and if we can we must."

Fathers

Fathers

When I read a piece like this one, I almost think I'd be sorry if the New York Times went out of business. Richard Snow writes a lovely story about his father's WWII service. Obviously military service was not a big part of the family tradition, and Mr. Snow says of his very young self, "I knew he’d been in the war, but so had most of my friends’ fathers, and it made no particular impression on me: if I thought of his military service at all, it was as just one more civic thing that happened to grown-ups, like voting, or going to P.T.A. meetings, or spending a morning at the Department of Motor Vehicles." He also speaks of his civilian's perspective on the "subtle ways" that a war can "vex the spirit," particularly in the case of a man who obviously never set out to be a warrior. But the piece is entirely free from either condescension to the military or hackneyed notions about the evils of conflict. When Mr. Snow accompanies his father to meet an old comrade, who has brought a destroyer into New York Harbor, the little boy gets an extraordinary glimpse of a side of his father he'd never imagined, in the company of these "blue-clad demigods." He says, "My comfortable present swung like a door giving on the past." It's a short piece really worth your attention on this Father's Day.

I haven't any comparable stories about a father from a decidedly non-military tradition who nevertheless stepped up. The closest my own father ever came to military service was in the last months of World War Two, when the concentrated efforts of his superiors in the nuclear physics establishment nearly lost their long battle to keep him stateside on their team. At 25, he hadn't completed his training or begun the long work he did at Los Alamos after the war, but they still guarded their research assets very closely. He got as far as being placed on some kind of transport en route to enlistment before they pulled strings and recovered him.

Deaf in one ear, wildly nearsighted, and nearly crippled in one hand, he'd have made an outstandingly poor soldier not so much for these reasons as for the fact that he was practically the archetype of the way-out-there Mad Scientist, only loosely tethered to the earth or his society. Here's a story that's not about him, but could be: A physicist at the University of Texas was reputed to wander around the halls in an apparent daze, often reading. One day someone stopped him in the hall and engaged him in a brief conversation, during which they jostled about a bit, avoiding passing traffic. When they were finished, he asked, "Which way was I going when you stopped me?" "That way," answered his surprised interlocutor. "Oh, good," he answered. "Then I've had lunch."

My father died 15 years ago. I'll never stop missing him.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day:

Welcome to the 20th of June, Father's Day, which is a holiday of special importance here because it happens that certain birthdays and my wedding anniversary all fall on the same day. It's a major festival at Grim's Hall, about six months off of Christmas but with no religious aspects. It's a good day, the first day of summer, with the green of the forest at its heights.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945), "The Journey of Enid and Geraint " from: Idylls of the King.

The part of all that I share with all of you, however, is Father's Day. So, let's talk about that.

I read Colbert I. King's latest piece this evening. It's a pity that he didn't stop about halfway through the second sentence, because up until then he had a good point; there is no excuse for the poisonous piece that follows.

But let us ignore the poisons in his veins, and attend to the good point. Our President's other achievements and qualifications remain highly debatable a year and a half into his term, but one thing that is easy to admire is the family he has built. It's plain that he adores his daughters, and has a solid marriage to his wife. Whatever other disputes we may have with that man, in this matter I am pleased to speak well of him.

That's enough for today. Go and call your father, if you still may; or spend the day with him; or visit his grave, or his memory. It is no easy thing to be a father, and is indeed a great weight if it is undertaken with the seriousness it deserves. Not all bear it well, and none of us bear it as well as we might wish. The best gift to give a father is forgiveness, for those times he has not borne it so well; and respect, for those times he did.

Holiday concerts at the Met

I highly recommend seeing Chanticleer perform, for the Christmas holiday, in the Medieval Hall, where the beautiful creche is displayed every year (http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Christmas2005/images.asp).

 It is not to be missed.

Anonymous 4 is also quite good.

Time for that trip to New York City yet?

A non-ambush ambush

A Non-Ambush "Ambush":

Here's a third example to round out our series on so-called 'guerrilla' tactics in politics. This is an "ambush" interview only in the sense that it wasn't scheduled. It happened in a Congressional office building, following a meeting on the subject, by someone who was plainly identified as a reporter from a new media outlet with a known political agenda.



This kind of thing is perfectly OK with me. It's not an intrusion into the private lives of the individual; it's not a use of 'the rules' to undermine the system. And indeed, unlike the other two examples, we can see that our national dialogue is being advanced here.

So, here's the limit case for "what right looks like." You don't have to get on the Congressman's schedule. By all means any citizen should be able to ask their Congressman a question at town halls and through normal dialog, and new media reporters should also be free to talk to Congress in professional venues. This doesn't require jumping people on their way back from lunch, or traveling under the false flag of 'students working on a project,' when you're really acting as political operatives in the opposition. It's great to use your First Amendment rights to advance the discussion, not good to use them to shut down someone else's First Amendment rights.

The Congressman here is still a bit testy, but I think both he and the reporter are doing just fine. Politics is not a tea party, even when it's a Tea Party.

Exactly

Now This Is Exactly What I'm Talking About:

Andrew Sullivan cites this video, saying, "Finally, a way to respond to holy rollers, tea-partiers, Larouchies, Code Pink, Mormon missionaries, Farrakhanites, HRC fundraisers, at al" [sic].



I don't even know what political message was being advocated in the video, and I genuinely do not care. I do know that, far from being encouraged, this kind of disruption of civic free speech is an aggressive abuse to our democracy. Frankly, to put it in the words the President used just this week, I think this is the kind of thing that ought to put you in danger of having your ass kicked -- and kicked, not to charges or threats of charges of simple battery, but to the wholesome and wholehearted applause of the American people. The law should not oppose such kicking, and neither should we.

Any single gentleman who wished to escort this young man aside for remedial education would enjoy my approval -- so long as he took reasonable precautions to ensure that the harm done was passing, while the education was lasting.

Neo-Platonism & TV Analogy

Plotinus and the Television Analogy:

In our recent discussion on faerie creatures, T99 suggested that she had a Platonist model of consciousness. I was reading from Plotinus' fourth ennead today, in which he talks about the unity of all souls under his theory. Plotinus was the founder of Neo-Platonism, in the third century A.D. Here, for ease of reference, is the 'television model' for consciousness.

There's an alternative model of consciousness -- which I may have invented, although it's highly likely that someone else has achieved it separately -- that thinks about consciousness as a kind of signal that is part of the universe. This is opposed to the standard view of consciousness arising from chemical activity in the brain (a highly problematic concept: these same chemicals exist everywhere, but produce the experience of consciousness as far as we know only when arranged as a brain, and possibly only as a human brain).

In this sense, the brain is not creating consciousness, but interpreting something already present. The brain can be thought of as like an old-fashioned television, the kind that pulls TV signals from the air. Two such sets, tuned to different channels, will give you a completely different experience -- one of a football game, the other of a soap opera. Yet they are pulling from the same signal.

If a set grows old, the picture it offers begins to alter in certain ways; but it is interpreting the same signal. If it is damaged, the picture may become quite distorted -- but the signal is unharmed. If you unplug it, or it dies of age, or you bash it with a baseball bat hard enough, it may cease being able to interpret the signal at all. The signal is still there. You just have lost your means of interpreting and understanding it. (And even when you had that means, you were only seeing a small part of what was really there -- the one channel.)

On this model, then, what culture is doing is helping to "tune" our minds in certain ways. That would explain (for example) why a child who hasn't read 1,000 year old books might make a claim about an event (say a fairy) that harmonizes with those books. No one told her that story; she has simply been tuned, by genetics and culture, to interpret consciousness in certain ways.

That is compatible with the Platonic model you are suggesting, I think.

Now, Plotinus is not talking about a unified consciousness, but a unified soul -- indeed, consciousness poses a problem for him. How can two souls actually be one thing, if one is consciously experiencing pain and the other is not? He has an explanation for this which is similar to, but different from, the television analogy (which was obviously unavailable to him).

Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one body a hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand as represented in the centralizing unity.

In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would the souls feel as one.

We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same body escape the notice of the entire being, especially when the bulk is large: thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism.

Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the resultant sensation will be necessarily felt with any force upon the entire being and at every point of it: some transmission of the experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full impression on the sense there need not be.

The concept of 'tuning' was not available to him, but he is in some sense reaching for a similar concept, especially when he speaks of how one body may not be conscious of all its sensations at the same time. Apparently the view of the soul he suggests was influential with Freeman Dyson, and Schrödinger.

Another place of harmony with Plotinus is the idea we often discuss that aesthetics underlies ethics, which in turn underlies politics. As the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, "Plotinus' chronologically first treatise, ‘On Beauty’ (I 6), can be seen as parallel to his treatise on virtue (I 2). In it, he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to the first principle of all. In this respect, Plotinus' aesthetics is inseparable from his metaphysics, psychology, and ethics."

Of course, in thinking of beauty as being directed at something like a Platonic form (in fact, toward God), he is suggesting that the underlying root of beauty is the same for everyone. We appear to differ on particulars because, he says, we get hung up on sensible beauty; we ignore the inner beauty that we can see when we ignore mere physical beauty.

As to that, it's a principle that reminds me of our discussion of The Knight's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Guns: A Tale of Two Traditions

Guns: A Tale of Two Traditions

For a special day at school, a Rhode Island 8-year-old decorated a hat with patriotic themes, including camouflage, an American flag, and tiny plastic toy soldiers. The school banned the hat. “Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns.”

Hey, I'm just surprised they didn't object to the flag.

The Rhode Island principal explained that "the hat would be fine if the boy replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn't have any." (Post-modern soldiers, holding copies of U.N. sanctions, are available at enlightened toy stores.) The school felt that the toy soldiers were the equivalent of wearing images of marijuana leaves on t-shirts.

The director of the Rhode Island National Guard gamely stepped in and tried to talk some sense to the school: "The American soldier is armed. That's why they're called the armed forces," he said. "If you're going to portray it any other way, you miss the point." I imagine him speaking very slowly and calmly.

Here’s another approach to guns, inspired by news reports of a Presidential Internet “kill-switch” to be triggered by an “emergency measure or action" announced by the Department of Homeland Security. Glen Reynolds responded: “If they shut down the Internet, I’m getting out my gun. And I think everyone should take it as a signal to do the same — because one way or the other, it means the country’s under attack.”

My solution to the boy’s hat? Use a razor blade to cut the plastic weapons loose, and replace them with tiny nerf bats. But as Bruno Bettelheim noted, the reason boys play with tin soldiers is that it’s not much fun to play with tin pacifists.

Update: Once again, embarrassment works. This gives me hope for November.

How about a Complete Rollover?

How About a More Complete Rollover?

Sally Quinn's article making the rounds suggests that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden switch jobs. It's not impossible, if Congress were to confirm the swap.

Why stop there, though? The arguments for her being Vice President are better arguments for her being President. Or we could simply move everyone one spot over: Joe Biden to President, Hillary Clinton to Vice President, and Obama could resign to pursue other opportunities. A stint as Secretary of State might give him some actual experience that would improve his odds if he wanted to run for a second term as President when he was really qualified for the office; or, he could follow his heart and move on to become Secretary General of the United Nations.

I'm not sure I see the benefit to the nation of swapping the two lower jobs without addressing the core of the problem. If we can get some agreement on that, though, I'll be happy to support the move.

Great Headline of the World

Great Headlines of the World:

From Reuters today:

"Global Organized Crime Becoming New Superpower: U.N."

It's good to see some honest reporting about the U.N. for a change! And the first phrase of the article is also insightful. It quotes the "U.N. crime chief," who says:

"Governments must smash markets..."

The truth will out! What?