Month: November 2005
-
What I learned in the Marines
I wrote this the last week I was on active duty and left it on the unit bulletin board: Don’t Believe the Hype Damn the Man Make the Right Way your way Just Say No Do it right or don’t do it at all
-
Senators and their sports
In the latest round of “Doesn’t he have something more important to work on?” a Senator is making a professional sport more important than the war in Iraq, the deficit, the Katrina debacle, the un-ending war on terror, the CIA leak, the looming crisis surrounding pension defaults, the continuing growth in the number of middle-class…
-
What we mean when we say what we say
We say a lot of things in the rhetorical battles that seem to occupy the majority of a lot of people’s time in this country these days. If you listen too long, you might become convinced that there isn’t anything that we don’t disagree on. But if you listen closely, you might find some of…
-
Bring Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Private Security Firms (and the Executive Branch’s willingness to use them) are infringing upon the State’s Monopoly on Violence and Death, on the Constitutional power to Declare War, and their mercenaries are in the same legal status as the members of al Qaeda; combatants in a network-tribe with no particular loyalty to the United States.…
-
Blue Laws
I’m not sure what is more absurd – that Massachusetts has laws that prohibit stores from opening on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s or that the Massachusetts Attorney General is enforcing them. The AP story: Mass. investigates defiance of Blue Laws1 The absurdity of these laws, aside from their age (c. 1600s), is further emphasized…
-
Ancient Greek word of note
…the subject of the Charmides is, What is sophrosyne? – and that word cannot be translated by any one English word. The truth is that this quality, this sophrosyne, which to the Greeks was an ideal second to none in importance, is not among our ideals. We have lost the conception of it. Enough is…
-
‘Crimson Tide’ and Curveball
In the 1995 movie Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman plays an Ramsey, a salty old, Rickover-era U. S. Navy Submarine Captain who receives orders to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russian rebels who have captured a missile launch facility and the access codes for the nuclear warheads stored there. Denzel Washington plays Hunter, the Harvard…
-
Mission(s)
“We will lead the unified national effort to secure America. We will prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation. We will ensure safe and secure borders, welcome lawful immigrants and visitors, and promote the free-flow of commerce.” “To provide the military forces needed to deter…
-
17 Theses of the bit
-
The Monopoly on Death.
And will no one comment on the fact that an old man of your age, probably with only a short time to live, should dare to cling so greedily to life, at the price of violating the most stringent laws? Plato, Critias, 53d Plato’s dialogue between Critas and Socrates on the eve of his death,…