The great escape

C.S. Lewis on how unnatural it is to be a gentle hero:

The knight is . . . not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. . . . 

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another.  It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson.  It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. . . . 

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections -- those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be "meek in hall", and those who are "meek in hall" but useless in battle -- for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed.  When this disassociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair.  The ancient history of the Near East is like that.  Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilization.  Then they become civilized themselves and go soft.  Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. . . . 

The ideal embodied in Launcelot is "escapism" in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.

~ Present Concerns, "The Necessity of Chivalry" (1st published in Time and Tide, Aug. 1940).

Fly Abatement

This is a fantastic idea. There are always flies around a horse farm, and fly abatement is one of the things we spend a fair amount of time (and some money) dealing with. It's necessary, but never fun... until now.

Manolo loves the shoes

I wear the same pair of shoes 365 days a year, but it doesn't prevent my enjoying Manolo's Shoe Blog.  What could be more charming than elegant, expensive shoes that someone else buys and wears for my entertainment?  Today The Manolo gives thoughtful advice to a reader who wishes to spiff up her husband:

The Manolo frequently gets the plaintive missives from the women who wish to restyle their men folk into something more put-together, something less sloppy, rustic, disastrous, and/or menacing.   “Manolo,” they frequently cry out, “my husband dresses as if he were Larry the Cable Guy’s younger, messier brother.  Please help.”

This is not a problem I encounter. If anything my husband probably is shaking his own head in forlorn sympathy.  The Manolo suggests discrete gifts and praise for the significant other, but personally, I rather like a man who is sloppy, rustic, disastrous, and/or menacing.  I distantly admire one who is well put-together, but as a kind of pet:  someone I'd want to pair with one of the women who would wear those fabulous shoes.  We would watch them gambol in the yard, perhaps put on dance music for them.

The Manolo also showcases Helen Mirren this week, a stylish, intelligent actress I always enjoy watching at work.  I just borrowed a copy of "The Queen" from a friend and found it a first-rate production with a fine screenplay.  When Tony Blair first visits the Queen, he is awkward and abashed but a bit full of himself as the youngest PM ever.  The Queen calmly notes that he is her tenth Prime Minister.  The first was Winston Churchill.  Like Churchill, Blair was destined to ride high then be dashed on the rocks, but the Queen is still there.

A Surprising Turn in the Quest for El Cid

Another book I've been reading lately -- I tend to read several at once -- is Dr. Richard Fletcher's The Quest for El Cid. The first five chapters dig into Spanish history as at that time, chiefly the Islamic portions but with some introduction to the Christian kingdoms that were clinging to the mountainous north. Then suddenly Chapter Six begins thus:

While the caliphate of Cordoba was in its death-throes and Fernando I was learning the art of government in Castile, another struggle was being played out several hundred miles to the north. In the summer of 1030 Olaf Haraldson, the recently ousted king of Norway, tried to win his land back from the regents who were governing it in the name of the great Canute, ruler of Denmark and England. Olaf was defeated and killed at the battle of Stiklestad... he was to be venerated as a saint, St. Olave [sic]. In the battle he had been aided by his young half-brother Harald, son of a member of one of Norway's many princely dynasties, a chieftain known as Sigurd Sow.

Yes, I know this story very well. I once wrote a poem about Sigurd Sow. It was part of a novel I wrote in China -- never published, and almost lost, but that a dear and beloved friend of mine happened to keep a copy.

This is another of the old poems, in the form of a drapa. A drapa is a flokk with a refrain, so that it was sometimes called a draepling. It was a high form of Norse poetry fit for extolling the father of a great king; but Sigurd Syr, as he was known in the Heimskringla, was not a great warrior. How to praise him in the old Norse terms?

This is a rather technical form, and the references are obscure if you aren't versed in Norse mythology and the older sagas. Still, not many try the drapa these days, so it may be of interest to some of you.

Rare the good king not a killer,
wise sleeper in his stronghold.
Ox-slain Egil Yngling
the Thing-thrall put to fleeing:
A dead king never dreaded.
When Old Starkad came to Sweden
Haki then Hugleik's land claimed. --
Where now is the hall-holder...

Aun, always the weak-slayer,
his sired he'd Odhinn offer;
He ran before Upsala's chieftain.
But Yngvar's son, Anund the Breaker,
Took the war-shield only
slaying his father's slayer.
Rare few are remembered wiser --
...the kingdom-ruler of wisdom?

One remembered is Sigurd
stepfather to the Digre,
father of the Hardrada,
Old lord of the northhold.
Shade from his hat, that broad-brim,
we remember as rain without thunder. --
Where now is the hall-holder,

Nothing with him dragons wanted,
Nor warriors who disdained golden
Grain. Loved him thrall and bonder:
He cared for cattle, but battle
He found empty of the glory
That forever draws the fighter.
No man’s thralls were freer. --
The kingdom-ruler of wisdom.

More from Mr. Steyn

From "Don't Cross the Forces of Tolerance," about the quivering sensibility of the leaders of Boston and Chicago in the face of the outrageous preference of Chick-Fil-A's president for first wives and Biblical principles:

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster's head left in Mr. Cathy's bed was all just a misunderstanding.  Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston's Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective.  As the Boston Herald's Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death.  The mayor couldn't have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi.  Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi's position on gays is in a state of "evolution":  He can't decide whether to burn them or toss 'em off a cliff.  "Some say we should throw them from a high place," he told Al-Jazeera.  "Some say we should burn them, and so on.  There is disagreement . . . .  The important thing is to treat this act as a crime."  Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded:  There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one?  In Mayor Menino's Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he'll run your homophobic ass out of town.  But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he'll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony. 

* * * 

But political winds shift.  Once upon a time, Massachusetts burned witches.  Now it grills chicken-sandwich homophobes.  One day it'll be something else.  Already in Europe, in previously gay-friendly cities like Amsterdam, demographically surging Muslim populations have muted Leftie politicians' commitment to gay rights, feminism and much else.   It's easy to cheer on the thugs when they're thuggish in your name.  What happens when Emanuel's political needs change?

A Recommendation: God and Logic in Islam

I want to take a moment to praise a book I have been reading recently. It's a new book by a professor at Indiana University named John Walbridge, entitled God And Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason.

In his introduction he writes that he had three readers in mind: the educated Westerner who may not be fully aware of Islam's intensely rational and scholastic history, but only of the Islam they see on the news; the Muslim reader who is troubled by the crisis of his faith; and the scholar of Islamic studies. He asks these readers to be patient with each other's needs -- the Islamic scholar with the careful spelling out of terms, for example, or the Western reader with the brief history of Western philosophical thought and its effect on modern politics in the West.

His second chapter -- entitled "The Diversity of Reason" -- is surely the chapter that ought most to require my patience, and yet I found it to be extremely insightful reading. I don't think I've ever read such a successful attempt to explain the roots of the clashes in the modern West in concise, brief strokes. The whole chapter is fourteen pages long, and well worth reading even for the educated Westerner who is well aware of the history and accustomed to studying it in much greater detail.

Neither was I disappointed in the rest of the work, which touches on an area I am becoming more and more interested in as time goes along. In any case, for those you seeking a good book for understanding the intellectual tradition of Islam, I must recommend this as an excellent introduction to the subject. Those of you who do not need an introduction, but are ready for more advanced thoughts, will likewise not be disappointed. Well done, Dr. Walbridge.

Poor Mann

Michael ("Hockey Stick") Mann has reached the questionable conclusion that it's a good idea to sue Mark Steyn for defamation, thus setting up a public court battle over the truth of Steyn's allegations concerning ClimateGate.  The quarrel grows out of Steyn's quotation from, and partial agreement with, an attempt to equate Prof. Mann with Jerry Sandusky, not on the subject of pederasty, but because the Sandusky affair calls into question the value of any internal investigation of the ethics of a poohbah at Penn State.  Mann, you may recall, was formally investigated by the university in the wake of ClimateGate, a scandal that earned him the affectionate nickname of "Piltdown" Mann on AGW-skeptic sites.  He received, if not a glowing vindication, at least a dim one -- an acquittal on three counts and a hung jury on the fourth.  Given Louis Freeh's harsh assessment of Penn State's ability to police itself in the context of the Sandusky scandal, it's natural to wonder how vigorously the same university was prepared to scrutinize Mann's affairs.  Penn State has not demonstrated a courageous willingness to embarrass any of its media stars or cash cows in the pursuit of doing what's right.

Mr. Steyn engaged in a bit of apophasis by quoting from another author's harsher article, then stating (without much conviction) that he didn't approve of its excesses in equating the two scandals.  He is a humorist, and given to dramatic and ironic expression.  He set a trap for Mann, who can't complain about the implicit equation of academic fraud with child molesting without continually drawing attention to the linkage himself -- which he's already begun doing, and on Facebook, yet.  Without this squawking, how many people would even remember that Mann was at Penn State, like Sandusky, and that he once was cleared of academic fraud by a university panel?

I look forward to Mann's attempt to prove that Steyn said anything untrue about his scientific data management, a process that, complete with testimony under oath and discovery of emails, may be better calculated to shed light on the controversy than any prior internal investigation.  What's more, as Pundit/Pundette pointed out, the last guys who sued Steyn for defamation not only lost, they set in motion a process that got the underlying Canadian libel statute repealed as an abuse of the freedom of speech in that country.

Mission Accomplished

"We tried our plan.  It worked."

Well, I guess it's a question of what the plan was meant to achieve.

It's been borne in upon me that to associate the President with dishonesty or failure is irreducibly racist. (To dip even further into the crazy punchbowl, try this theory.)  So I will take him at his word, and believe he was successful on his own terms.

An Interview with Women in the All-Army Military Combatives Tournament

The Army military combative program is a strange sort of martial art: it is designed not to hurt people. I talked to Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill about that some years ago when he was the top NCO for MNF-I; he is currently the CSM for ISAF. I asked him about the move to a system based on Brazilian sport jujitsu, which has rules designed less to simulate combat than to prevent injury. Here's what he said:

I can't really say that I can recall an instance where -- at least during my watch and probably, you know, months leading up to my watch -- that a service member had been required to use combatives. So their hand-to-hand training, I mean, it is -- it is there if needed.... you know, a unit that conducts combative training, they kind of go into the training knowing that they're going to have some soldiers injured -- and, you know, hopefully not seriously injured, but someone that's going to probably miss some training hours within the next, you know, few days because of sprain, pulls or things like that.

And that comes from, you know, it comes from a number of things, but mostly from just working something that you haven't worked in a while, or not learning how to fall, because we've got to teach you how to fall before you start doing flips and kicks. So yes there is a concern about the loss of training time due to injuries sustained doing combative training.

If the intent is to increase confidence and avoid crippling injuries, the program must be considered a success. One area where it has really boosted confidence is for female soldiers, because there is no separation in competitive class by sex. There is separation by weight, so women don't end up fighting men who are much larger than they are, but that is all.

Several women who fought in this year's tournament were interviewed by Sports Illustrated, and talk about their experiences and thoughts on the issue of men and women in combat, and in combatives. It makes for interesting reading given our occasional discussion of the issues. The women seem to be strong advocates of not dividing the sport by sex, and appear to be commonly more put-off by men who won't fight them equally hard than by men who try to beat them down. Yet -- SI says "perhaps because of" their experience fighting men in their weight class -- they aren't interested in joining the infantry.

Perhaps because of their fighting experience, female competitors express nuanced views on the roles of women in combat. "If we can meet the demands, if there's absolutely no changing the standards, there shouldn't be an issue," Carlson says. "Do I see myself breaking down that barrier? No, I don't."

De Santis, who finished her five-year service with the Marines last January and is pursuing a professional MMA career, says her experiences as an instructor make her hesitant to advocate placing women on the front lines with the Marine Corps. No woman had been able to complete a specialized, seven-week, hand-to-hand combat course at the Martial Arts Center for Excellence. "I'm a female fighter and I'm all about female rights but I've pushed myself to my limits and beyond," she says, "But [men and women], physically, they are two different body types. To offer up, to force females into that [combat] field, isn't a good idea. But on a positive note, I see it progressing. I see more women trying to focus and learn in the mixed martial arts."

De Santis is right about the body type difference. With weight equalized, more of the male body will be muscle and bone. That's something that she's had to come up against directly. I wonder what answer they would get if they asked the men who fought these women the same question.

I've taught women martial arts -- not sport stuff, but killing stuff -- and trained with female students while learning new arts myself. I am neither one of those who won't hit them, nor one who tries to crush them. I think you owe it to your training partner to give them the full benefit of the training, but we didn't break out by weight, either, so some restraint was necessary to avoid gratuitous injury. I try to give them as much as they can handle and a little more, so they get the full benefit of the training, but aren't forced out of the program by injury and remain encouraged to continue.

All the same, I don't think you can argue with this statement from Staff Sergeant Spottedbear, a female drill instructor:

"Imagine what it's like whenever a female gets in the arena with a man and she starts to lose," says Larsen. "It's a fight. He's on top of her, punching her in the face. You have to be hardened to the idea -- you have to really believe -- that women can be treated equally to be able to put up with that. To accept that as the cost of equality."

I have to admit that I've never punched a woman in the face or the head, but that's part of the restraint issue given the weight and muscle differential. You can really hurt someone that way. I have struck women in the head with training swords, though, because the fencing mask is adequate protection.

I have punched other men in the head, and it's really satisfying when you land a good blow and they roll on the floor. I have to admit that I don't think I'd enjoy it if it were a woman I'd just hit. My commitment to equality, I suppose, doesn't go as far as equally enjoying punching them!

Living Voices

The interest in 'social networks' has provided new evidence that several powerful ancient epics were based on real people. The Iliad, the Beowulf and the Tain Bo Cualinge, unlike many more modern stories, seem to capture real social dynamics. (Hat tip: Lars Walker.)

What about the gods, though? Were they real too? A new treatment for schizophrenia is based upon the idea that they were.

Jaynes was a psychology professor at Princeton, back in the days before psychologists had walled themselves off from literature, when he noticed that the gods in the Homeric epics took the place of the human mind. In the Iliad we do not see Achilles fretting over what to do, or even thinking much. Achilles is a man of action, and in general, he acts as the gods instruct him. When Agamemnon steals his mistress and Achilles seethes with anger, Athena shows up, grabs him by the hair, and holds him back. Jaynes argued that Athena popped up in this way because humans in archaic Greece attributed thought to the gods—that when the ancient kings were buried in those strange beehive Mycenaean tombs, when social worlds were small and preliterate, people did not conceptualize themselves as having inner speech.

Jaynes did not think that the role of the gods in the Iliad was a literary trope. He thought that people who did not refer to internal states used their brains differently and—the cognitive functions of speaking and obeying split across their unintegrated hemispheres—actually experienced some thoughts audibly. “Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips?” Jaynes asked. “They were voices whose speech and direction could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.”

The treatment, by the way, is for people who experience these voices to talk back to them, and see if you can cut a deal with them. It turns out to be the case that, at least in some cases, you can: and when you try, instead of being destructive, the voices often become friendly and even helpful.

Now that makes for an interesting -- and rather daunting -- prospect. If Jaynes were right, you could learn to hear voices: you could meet the old gods. Or the old demons.

The Love of St. Sebastian

You have probably never heard this song, unless you've heard it here before.  I have never seen the film to which it pertains.  The movie is so rare that a VHS copy runs over seventy dollars.  I wonder if it isn't the most beautiful piece that Ennio Morricone ever wrote.



It isn't one of his more famous pieces, but it is one of his odes to the love that a man bears a woman.  The closest competitor in beauty I can find is his song for the love man bears to God.



He wrote a great deal more, but I find nothing so fine as these two songs of love.  Even the Overture to this work with which we began is not so powerful as the love song -- though it has its moments.  But the chief moment is the premonition of the love theme:



Of course, he's most famous for this:



But that may have been a distraction from the true thing.

At Bob's request, in honor of the gallant men who gave their lives in the Aurora theater. 

The endless I.O.U.

During the 2008 campaign, the Net began a tentative reverberation around the concept of "socialism," which had been an unfamiliar theme in recent presidential contests.  The early reaction was often the print equivalent of blank stares, as many people took a moment to look the word up in the dictionary.  I recall many discussions of whether President Obama's goals, whatever each writer guessed they might be, actually lined up well with the classical definition of socialism.

Over the last four years, the controversy has developed a louder drumbeat.  More and more writers decline to split hairs over the precise definition of socialism and instead concentrate on the relative merits of centralized vs. dispersed control over economic decisions, as well as the central question of how a society most fairly rewards the contributions of its members.  Ann Althouse is hosting a discussion of the issue this week.  One of her readers demanded to know whether she truly thought Obama was a socialist.  She replied that it was a question of whether his policies were leading in that direction, rather than whether his convictions met a doctrinaire definition.  Other readers are chiming in with methods of describing the spectrum, using the "You Didn't Build That" argument as part of their base.  As one noted, it's important to look at the traditional functions of business owners and to examine to what extent government is usurping them.  Business owners decide which products they will push and at what price.  They hire the workers they need and make their own determination of what price they need to pay to get and keep the workers they want.  When the government sets prices, when it subsidizes products it approves of, when it orders consumers to buy products, when it mandates wages and benefits, when it interferes in business-labor negotiations, when it bails out business failures, when it invests directly in failing businesses and picks new executives -- then government may not technically own the means of production, but it's swallowing up the function of owners bit by bit.

The "You Didn't Built That" controversy is inspiring a fresh look at how the members of a society reward each other.  Everyone knows that a commercial transaction in a complex society doesn't take place in a vacuum.  The most rugged free-market individualists acknowledge the importance of law and order to support a secure and predictable commercial system.  Wealthy families are not sending their young heirs to Somalia to get in on the ground floor of profitable trade opportunities.  Roads and bridges are a good thing if you want to get your products to willing buyers.  Every factory owner depends on supplies and labor to develop into marketable products.  But does that mean our system will work best if the factory owner shares more of his profit with whatever group we think is most under-rewarded this season?

The free-market system appears too mercenary for many tastes, because it rests on the assumption that no one should get anything without paying for it.  The socialist system, though, is even worse:  it assumes that we should all pay for the same things repeatedly.  The business owner somehow scraped up initial capital (by saving it, or by persuading others to save it and risk it on him) and spent it to build his plant and hire his workers.  It's not as though he passed the hat and asked his neighbors to provide him with their time and goods out of fellow-feeling.  If his business was successful, he asked people to part with money before walking out the door with whatever useful product he put out -- but he did part with a valuable product rather than taking the purchase price at gunpoint.  He used the public roads and courts and schools, but those had previously been built with taxes on businessmen like himself, and taxes continue to supported the ongoing costs of operation.  Must we all be taxed to pay for this valuable infrastructure, and then still listen to complaints that we're getting it for free, and that we owe and owe and owe for the privilege until the day we die (and even then our estates owe)?  Must employers pay wages and still feel an undischargeable debt to their workers, or society in general, for the value of the goods they produce?

That's what's wrong with the "You Didn't Build That" speech.  We actually did build that, or at least we've already paid our share of inducing other people to build it.  It's not the government's place to keep charging rent on infrastructure forever, just because its origins are diffuse.  Citizens did it, if not directly then by funding a collective program to do it via government.  There is no outstanding bill to pay, no debt of gratitude coming due.  We all need to pay enough taxes to support whatever useful things the government is doing if we want them to continue.  We don't all owe an extra duty to pay taxes in order to compensate an amorphous body of people who "got us where we are" and are now presenting a new bill for the same old service.

The Feud Over Nothing

We've been following this feud for some time here, so you may be interested in the latest salvo.

The most interesting part of the article to me is the question of an adequate definition of "nothing."  I don't think the one they propose is actually adequate.  If you shrank the universe to radius zero, there would still be fourth-dimensional extension -- that is, the universe would have been.  If you compress the time as well as the space, so that the universe in this sense never was as well as isn't anywhere, you've still got the potential for it to have been:  after all, it was, before you started shrinking.

True nothing needs to be an absence of potential, not just an absence of actuality.  It may be that there never was (in the more usual sense of the phrase) an absence of potential; if so, there was never nothing.  Existence is then necessary:  even if you reduce the universe to "nothing" in the sense the author means it, something still exists.  That field of potential still exists.

But why is there something and not nothing?  That was the original question, and all we've accomplished is getting back around to agreeing that there is something.

Heroes

Heaven knows I'd love to be writing a post about how women rose to the occasion for heroism in the Aurora movie theater.  The fact is, four young men really did.  Now is not the time for querulous feminists to discount those excellent men's sacrifice by referring to examples of moral heroism from women in the past.  Yes, Harriet Tubman is inspiring.  No, I'm not persuaded by the argument that, in holding up the young heros in Aurora for admiration and denigrating the fellow who ran and left behind his girlfriend and their child, we're being unfair and perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Just One Minute puts his finger right on it, I think, when he quotes the bit about how we all hope we're sitting next to a Todd Beamer on the airplane.  No, honey, some people are aspiring to be Todd Beamer, not sit there and wait to be rescued by him.  If you're going to be a feminist, that's the standard you have to hold yourself to.  Otherwise you join the ranks of the guy who ran like a rabbit and left his girlfriend and child behind.

Muddled missions

The USDA has a brilliant new initiative to heal the planet.

I have a better plan:  abolish the USDA.  It doesn't seem to have any idea what its mission is any more. Is it supposed to ensure reliable food production?  Fix prices?  Subsidize corn?  Promote food-stamp dependency?  Combat obesity?  Reduce the carbon footprint?  It's lurching around at cross-purposes.  Bury it at midnight, I say.

Stomp the (Right Wing) Girl!

She made a racist joke! Well, if "African" is a race... which it isn't, really... and if it's derogatory to suggest that people feed mosquitoes, which they kinda do.

However, she does support a right-wing political party. So, you know, destroying her life is entirely appropriate. Just like describing those "Anglo-Saxon" remarks by an unnamed adviser as evidence that the Romney campaign is based on "white supremacy." (Are French people white? I guess not, since they don't much care for "Anglo-Saxon" approaches to problems.)

But, hey, maybe this is an entirely proportionate response.  After all, getting into the Olympics isn't a big deal. I hear you don't even get paid for it.

UPDATE:  Apparently even corporations get this treatment.  And that works... for now.  But I wouldn't expect it to work for long.

Another Round on Gun Control

President Obama said today...

I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers and not in the hands of crooks. They belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.

You mean like Chicago, which is more deadly for Americans than Afghanistan? Has been for a while; I was in Iraq when the murder rate for Baghdad dropped below Chicago's. Got lots of gun control in Chicago, too.

You know how we made Baghdad safer than Chicago? We put a lot of guys with assault rifles to walking the streets.

They could be soldiers, but they don't have to be. A properly trained citizens' militia would do a lot for bringing order to Chicago. If you want to talk about the Second Amendment, let's talk about that. Why do you want to take from the ordinary, honest citizen the capacity to protect himself, his family, and his neighborhood? Why don't you empower him instead?

Department of Circular Reasoning Department

From Politico via HotAir, this gem of an explanation from David Axelrod.  Polls show a public impression, by a 2-to-1 margin, that Obama is running a more negative campaign than Romney.  Axelrod explains that that's only because Romney is running ads accusing Obama of negative campaigning.  Now I guess we'll need a poll to determine which campaign is using ads more critical of the other's ads.

In other brilliant-campaign-strategy news, the Obama campaign is explaining that his "you didn't build that" speech didn't really say that, thus ensuring that millions more voters will view clips from the actual speech on infinite loop for the next week or so.

An Old Poem

I found a poem in an old journal tonight, one I wrote when I was still just beginning to compose. At that time I was interested in the Old Norse forms, which alliterate instead of rhyming.  It was composed in honor of my wife, imagining her as a fairy maid encountered in a wild wood, besought for a bride.

Creature, you crossed my way
Careful as a hart,
Music of the high wood.
Magic is this forest,
Magic your merry eyes,
Moon-silver, pine-green,
Ah! Long-neck, lithe and faerie,
Lustrous as sun-stroked stone.

Frost-Fearless, what
In your fine hands
Speaks of seams,
Sewn garments shining,
Or beasts made boldly,
Brought from cold clay
And fed with fire?

Wild Quest! Wait, Lady,
Wander with me,
Be faithful, stay:
Though far we fare
Our wandering home
Will linger at last.
For your rest I'll raise a tower:
Raise, and make it mine.