[The Royal Shakespeare Company's] Morte d'Arthur is, in spirit, chainmail-rattlingly close to the original. If the adapter Mike Poulton has made a little free with the details of the text, well, in that, too, he is faithful to his source. Sir Thomas Malory (the 15th-century knight convicted of robbery and rape who fought for and against his king) repicked and remixed the old British stories and French romances spun around the legends of Arthur and fitted them to the pattern of his own time.
So he did, although the charges of "rape" were only charges. Specifically, they were charges brought by the woman's husband -- the same woman on each occasion -- to which she refused to testify. A far more likely explanation, given the high words that Malory has for women and womankind throughout his famous work: she was his Guinevere, or La Belle Isolde.
Seems like a fine play. It's a pity I won't be where I could see it, while it is playing.
A judge in Austin, Texas, has ruled that school districts can't force a teacher to award a student a higher grade than he earned. "The districts argued that their policies prohibiting teachers from awarding grades lower than a certain number - typically a 50 - helped keep students from getting discouraged and dropping out of school." Teachers countered with the quaint argument that "the minimum failing grading polices were dishonest and didn't prepare students for college or the workforce." Surprisingly, this argument won the day.
Apparently, in 2009, while I wasn't looking, those kooky conservatives in the Texas legislature passed SB 2033, a law that forbids school districts from requiring its teachers to enter a set minimum grade for their students’ schoolwork. In some schools, the required minimum grade was 50, in others 60 or 70. The law passed unanimously -- then was routinely ignored in practice. El Paso I.S.D. at least told teachers to use their professional judgment in whether to award a minimum grade regardless of whether any work had been done. Other districts ruled that the law applied only to grades of assignments and tests, and not report card grades, although the actual practice intended to be addressed by the law was report card grades. Fort Bend I.S.D. (southwest of Houston) actually prohibited scores of less than 50.
The battles lines are drawn over whether it is more important to ensure that accurate information is made public regarding a school's progress in teaching specific information, or to prevent students from becoming discouraged and dropping out. The strong feeling among educators was that all doubts should be resolved in favor of avoiding discouragement. The educators already were struggling with a "new" law dating from 1995, which “required decisions on promotion or course credit to be based on academic achievement or demonstrated proficiency.” What novelties will these bomb-throwing anarchists come up with next?
When teachers complained that they were still being required to inflate grades, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott issued instructions to school districts that they would be required to comply with the 2009 law. In response, 11 school districts, mostly from the Houston area, sued.
One school administrator explained, "The purpose of it was to keep the kid from throwing his hands up and saying 'I'm failing so I might as well not go to school.'" I guess not much thought was given to persuading the kid to draw another lesson: "I'm failing so I'd better work harder unless I want to repeat this class in summer school."
In other news, Texas Democrats, discouraged by years of virtual one-party rule in that state, proposed a law to award 50% of the votes in an election to the candidate who is trailing in the race. Okay, I may have made that last part up.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment's protection of the right to bear arms is effective not only against incursions by the federal government, but also against incursions by state and local government.
As late as the 19th century, the Court typically held that the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government's power. More recently, the trend has been to extend the limitations to state and local government via the 14th Amendment.
Update:
Justice Alito wrote:
Chicago and Oak Park (municipal respondents) maintain that a right set out in the Bill of Rights applies to the States only when it is an indispensable attribute of any “‘civilized’” legal system. If it is possible to imagine a civilized country that does not recognize the right, municipal respondents assert, that right is not protected by due process. And since there are civilized countries that ban or strictly regulate the private possession of handguns, they maintain that due process does not preclude such measures. . . .
[T]he constitutional Amendments adopted in the Civil War’s aftermath fundamentally altered the federal system. Four years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, this Court held in the Slaughter-House Cases, that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only those rights “which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws,” and that the fundamental rights predating the creation of the Federal Government were not protected by the Clause. Under this narrow reading, the Court held that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only very limited rights. Subsequently, the Court held that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government in [the] decisions on which the Seventh Circuit relied in this case [to rule against gun rights in the decision now on appeal]. [citations excluded]
After the Civil War and the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the Court began to sort through which rights were so fundamental that no civilized society was imaginable without them. It found that freedom of speech was fundamental, but the right to a grand jury indictment was not. The standard then shifted to "whether a particular Bill of Rights protection is fundamental to our Nation’s particular scheme of ordered liberty and system of justice." Justice Alito concludes: "Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present, and the Heller Court [striking down a federal gun ban] held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right." In Heller, the Court found that handguns were the quintessential tool for defense of home and family.
According to HotAir.com, the entire American effort in 66 days has skimmed off 600,000 barrels of oil. The owners of a massive ship called the "A-Whale" claim that it can skim 500,000 barrels a day.
So where is the A-Whale now? In the Gulf? Not yet. It’s on its way there after being tied to a dock in Norfolk, Virginia, and won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
It does appear that some progress is being made on the Clean Water Act problems -- you, know, the bureaucratic decision that we should annihilate the Gulf in the name of enforcing an absurdly inapplicable Clean Water Act regulation just because no one in authority can figure out how to waive it -- though I can't quite tell if all we've done is let the skimmers in, or if we've actually started letting them operate as designed, which is to discharge partially cleaned-up Gulf water even though it doesn't meet drinking-water standards. According to a June 24 piece in the Daily Caller, the Federal On-Scene Coordinator announced quietly on June 18 that the U.S. now admits it needs the foreign help that has been offered since days after the oil spill began:
The European Union maintains a multi-faceted inventory of [oil spill recovery vessels] OSRVs. The Netherlands alone lists eleven ships that exceed this 9,400-barrel capacity, including vessels like the Geopotes 14 (pictured) that reportedly can pick up and contain 47,000 barrels at a time. That’s ten times larger than any U.S. ship we’ve been using.
The Daily Caller piece applauds this move, because it will reduce the time spent going back and forth with the dirty water. It notes, however, that the EPA still will prevent the skimmers from discharging the fairly-cleaned-up water, because it fails to meet the EPA wastewater-discharge standards.
During a hearing before Congress this past Thursday, several Democratic members of House accused the Administration of turning its back on those on the gulf coast by refusing overseas cleanup help. During Friday’s session of the Senate, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), George LeMieux (R-Fla.), and John Cornyn (R-Texas) joined together and introduced legislation that would temporarily waive the Jones Act to allow foreign marine vessels to assist with the oil cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico.
That's good to hear, and yay Texas, but it's still not clear to me that the EPA has backed off yet. Still trying to confirm.
Here's an anguished June 8 Facebook entry from a guy named Chris Johnson who identifies himself as a marine biologist clean water expert, somehow involved in the federal government, who has been frantically trying to work the back channels to solve this EPA-wastewater screwup. (He reports, by the way, that the standard in question is 5,000ppm, not 15ppm, or 99.5% purity, and I suspect he may be a better source than the run-of-the-mill journalists or even the Dutch guys who are their sources.) He confirms the misuse of EPA standards reported in the other articles and says, "I swear I am not making this up, as stupid as this sounds."
Turning to the question of what to make of this Mother of all FUBARs (a mistake?! or did he do it to us on purpose??!!), some input from various commenters at Patterico and HotAir:
I think it is incompetence but also a lack of motivation. If it had been someplace they love, they would have been motivated to overcome their incompetence.
I agree that it would have made little difference. It could be any one of the 57 states, even those speaking Austrian, and Obama would mull over what would Niebuhr have done ? The only thing that engages Obama seriously is a piece in Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone that is perceived as straying from the party line. The first thing an infant learns is the difference between “self” and “non-self.” Obama is still working on that.
There is a difference between “stuck on stupid” and “forged out of pure stupid”…
Tinfoil hats really not needed…Soros has his money in PetroBras…and they NEED platforms…..oil still gushing, ban still being appealed….you do the math.
This is a full-blown crisis with all the value attendant to that….destruction of the oil industry, punishment of red-state voters, demon[i]nization of private business, kowtowing to environmental nutjobs, opportunities for grandstanding and photo-ops, speech opportunities, $20 billion dollar slush funds, total dependence of the voters of Lousiana on the federal government, ability to smear the Brits on an hourly basis. . . .How is this ship going to improve the situation in any meaningful way.
And a final comment in a more practical vein:
A couple of questions I have:
The Jones Act does not influence operations beyond 3 miles from shore, as I understand it. Why is that even an issue?
Vessels at sea, picking up “wild” oil, are not under EPA jurisdiction, as far as I know. This would fall under the admiralty law…the law of salvage. Under what authority could anyone stop them?
Why the [h**l] doesn’t somebody seek an injunction against the EPA? Seems there are sensible judges on the Federal bench who would grant that in a heart-beat…
Why doesn’t somebody just go do this, and defy an effort to stop them?
In closing, just to destroy any lingering confidence you might have in federal environmental bureaucrats -- people I used to think were the good guys but who lately seem as crazy as a rat in a coffee can -- here's an article about applying EPA oil spill regulations to dairy milk. EPA regulations say “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria.”
I've been hearing about the U.S. government's rebuffing offers of foreign help to clean up the Gulf, but mostly in the context of the Jones Act problems. And there were those stories about stopping boats from laying out booms because they didn't have enough fire extinguishers or lifejackets, or about stopping the building of sand berms because of the possible impact on fish.
Now Instapundit has linked to an article in the Financial Post that shows the stupidity has reached hitherto-unguessed levels. Our environmental laws treat a skimmer ship as if it were a factory discharging wastewater:
Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill. . . .the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge.
. . . .Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.
It turns out that American skimmers have to suck up the dirty water and transport it back to port for later disposal, which severely limits their daily capacity.
Someone might almost think they want this to go badly.
Apparently, What They Need at the U.N. Is Softer Blankies
I've never been much of a negotiator -- probably that empathy thing you're supposed to have. Often I have almost no idea how other people come to their decisions. Here's some research on factors that may be creeping into the process under the radar.
Research psychologists at Harvard, MIT, and Yale recently reported that our judgments are surprisingly influenced by the texture of objects we're in contact with during or just before the decision-making process. For instance, interviewers judged job candidates as better qualified and more serious about the position sought when they were given the resumes on heavy clipboards. The heavier clipboards also were associated with interviewers' higher opinions of their own accuracy in judging candidates.
In the same vein, listeners to a story about a social interaction described it as harsher when they had been given rough puzzles pieces to assemble as opposed to smooth pieces. Similarly, they described one character's attitude in a story as more rigid or strict when they had been given a hard wooden block to hold, instead of a soft blanket. When participants in a mock bargaining session were seated in comfortable chairs, they turned out not only to be more flexible in their responses to successive offers, but also more likely to judge their opponents to be "more stable and less emotional."
Looks like we should be presenting our resumes on heavy, smooth, soft tablets. If nothing else, you guys might view your wives as less emotional and unstable if you'd take the precaution of settling into a comfy chair before listening to their complaints. No fair going to sleep, though.
I couldn't find a clip from the "Day of the Dolphins" where Fa and Bee explain that they like humans because they're smooth, like dolphins, not rough like sharks, so I went with this:
Nor is it just these Ivy League researchers who are into the new "tactile tactics" in social conflict. No one was surprised when researchers from the University of Minneapolis and the University of British Columbia concluded that shoppers were more comfortable on carpet than on hard vinyl tile. What was a little surprising is that the comfortable flooring had opposite effects on their purchase judgments, depending on how far away they were from the products on the shelves. Moderately distant objects were judged "more comforting" by the shoppers who were standing on soft carpet, by some kind of unconscious confusion of the tactile sensation of one object with the inherent worth of another. In contrast, nearby products appeared to suffer from comparison with the softness of carpet: a gift basket was judged "less comforting" when the carpet-treading shopper was very close to it.
I suppose the trick here is to present the gift basket to the object of your affections when she's moderately far away on a soft carpet, but don't put it into her hands until you're maneuvered her onto some challenging parquet. But if you want to bring out the big guns:
I don't know about you guys, but this video doesn't just make me want to vote. It makes me want to crawl over broken glass on my knees to get to the polls. "Rise, and rise again . . . ."
Not that the November elections give me much room to act as a Texas voter in a district that Ron Paul apparently owns for life, and not that I would ever miss even a petty local election for any reason. (For one thing, I'm an election judge -- I have to show up early and stay all day.) But I really want to see a Brobdingnagian turnout.
Plutarch.
I chose Nicias and Crassus as a follow up to Alcibades and Coriolanus because of the connection, as Nicias was general in Alcibades' disasterous expedition to Syracuse--and so the situation would be somewhat familiar.
Nicias was general on the expedition, but thought it a bad idea in the first place. Crassus, nortoriously got himself and his army destroyed in Parthia, on an expedition that many thought ill advised, but he went ahead with it anyway.
She sounds as if she may be expressing disappointment with the President. Obviously, he needs to fire and replace her in order to demonstrate that he is a strong leader, in command of the situation.
When you take an antibiotic, you expect it to kill your infection without hurting you. Lots of antibiotics take advantage of differences between your “eukaryotic” cells (cells with nuclei) and bacteria’s “prokaryotic” cells (no nuclei). A typical antibiotic will shut down protein synthesis in bacteria’s ribosomes, which are the fantastically complicated little factories in cells (about the size of a small virus) where proteins are built according to instructions delivered by RNA. Stop protein synthesis and the cell dies. Luckily for you, your ribosomes use a different construction process from bacteria’s, so the antibiotic doesn’t shut down your protein synthesis and kill your cells.
Castor Beans
Unless you ingest ricin, that is. Ricin is a protein found in the seeds of the castor bean plant (Ricinus communis). It messes up the protein synthesis in the ribosomes of eukaryotic cells, that is, nucleated cells, like yours and mine. In other words, ricin did to Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 pretty much what tetracycline does to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. There is a difference, though. Unlike the natural toxins in common antibiotics, which lock on one-to-one with their target molecules to disrupt bacteria’s protein synthesis, ricin jumps from ribosome to ribosome, shutting down one after another. As a result, a single molecule of ricin can kill a whole cell. This makes ricin one of the most toxic natural substances known, a thousand times as toxic as cyanide. A mere 75 micrograms can be a deadly dose in an adult human; one castor bean contains something like 1,000 micrograms.
Biochemists report recent progress in developing a ricin antidote and a ricin vaccine, but don’t count on them yet. Likewise, we may figure out someday how to target cancer cells with ricin, but for now it’s just bad news for all of your cells.
There are worse toxins than ricin, but few so widely available. Castor bean seeds are used in the production not only of the laxative castor oil, but also brake fluid, varnish, soap, and ink. Ricin is soluble in water but not in oil, so castor oil is OK from the point of view of health, if not of taste. But stay away from the bean pulp left over after castor oil production, and don’t eat unprocessed castor beans, unless you’re trying to cure Gaia of her human disease.
More cheerful news about poisonings throughout history here.
A piece on stoicism, which contrasts it to the products being generated by our own age:
Ours is not a philosophical age, much less an age of Stoicism. As Frank McLynn explains in his new biography of Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome's "five good emperors," commander of Rome's prolonged campaigns against the invasions of barbarian German tribes, and the last important Stoic philosopher of ancient days, our philosophers (academics) no longer profess to help the average person answer life's great metaphysical questions. Contemporary philosophers might contemplate such abstruse problems as whether mental properties can be said to emerge from the physical processes of the universe; what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for self-interest; where the mind stops and the rest of the world begins-not, perhaps, the pressing existential questions presented by the normal course of a human life.
Beyond the realm of professional philosophy, an ever-expanding tribe of self-appointed lay philosophers profess practical strategies for worldly success: how to win friends and influence, how not to sweat the small stuff, how to free ourselves from shyness, anxiety, phobias, poverty, extra pounds...
That part about university philosophers is mostly true as far as it goes, which is this far: Anglo-American philosophy departments. There is a lot of interest in broader questions in non-English speaking Europe, but there the problem is that they are mired in dead-ends.
That only means that the time is right for something new: a hailstone, or, if you like, a mustard seed.
Philosophy is more important than people understand, as the second article shows. It is on fertility:
Many conclude that if you value your happiness and spending money, the only way to win the modern parenting game is not to play. Low fertility looks like a sign that we've finally grasped the winning strategy. In almost all developed nations, the total fertility rate—the number of children the average woman can expect to have in her lifetime—is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children.
What, though, is being measured in these happiness surveys? People are asked how happy they are. Well, how happy are you? What am I asking you to evaluate? That is a question of philosophy.
What is a good life? The first article will point you in the direction of Marcus Aurelius' answer. If you can adopt his model, the question, "Are you happy?" means something entirely different than the question modern Americans hear you asking. They think you are asking them, "How do you feel?"
That shift in mindset has tremendous consequences. You decide to make it, perhaps, because you read a biography of Marcus Aurelius. Or perhaps you read some arguments about Aristotle, and how he defined happiness. Or perhaps you only watched Oprah, and stick with "How do you feel?" Whichever you do, you find that this decision -- an apparently minor preference for one way of thinking over another -- changes your life and everything about it.
Eric often says "Facta, non verba," and that is true as far as it goes. Some of the words, however, are necessary conditions for the deeds. If you don't have the thoughts, you'll never pursue the acts. You may never feel pain or know much by way of sorrow, and you may feel content. You will never, however, be happy.
An interview with Peter S. Kaufman, the President of investment bank Gordian Group and head of the firm's Restructuring and Distressed M&A practice.
They could cut loose BP America and it could be BP America that files for bankruptcy. My presumption is that it's BP America that's responsible for the spill. They can wall off the non-BP America assets from the Gulf -- which is about 50 percent of the company's net value --and try to reorganize BP America. That's likely to take a very long time, and BP would not make good on its promise for the 20 billion [in the escrow fund].
Or they could file all of BP, and do so in London. Wonder how well-received our government and legitimate Gulf claimants would fare in a British insolvency court?
Nearly half of American Adults see the government today as a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Adults see the government today as a threat to rights. Thirty-seven percent (37%) hold the opposite view. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.
The government is both a danger to individual rights, and a useful tool for protecting those rights. Making sure the danger isn't realized, and the tool is properly employed, is the whole proper business of government.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
![Castor_Beans](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKMU1EWCWBRLKa3D0lZhdJ1zOd_dSFZC_jmZWgG7QR82XAlksEqd1jEm7GuvGFTccP0YxokuEzfiTyaDA_9CLi-uydAc5gVN9QlwQU7NfDJtXdoNmzw9nlTmltzidDWN4vrJg72A/s320/Castor_beans.jpg")
