Illegal, Schmilegal...

[via Anne Zook]
A military lawyer in a desertion case may have won a battle and lost the war, so to speak:

After a 20-30 minute eternity that left us all in a stupor of disbelief that the war's legality had just been debated in a military court, on the record, and had lost, badly, the attorney for the prosecution sat down. And then the judge said, "I believe the government has just successfully proved that any seaman recruit has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal."

The point was supposed to be that military obligation to serve is irrespective of the legality of the war....

T.H. Huxley: Life as Chess; Education is not Optional

Brandon's right: Long but dead-on:

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least th names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a knight from a pawn?

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he enver overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paide, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satain playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in the picture, a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and I should accept it as an image of human life.

Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game....

We don't like to think of our lives as games. We don't like to admit that we do things in "real life" that are strategic and selfish. We do them, and we often have (and this is hard for many people to accept) more than one reason for doing something and we need to be not just right and good, but clever and competent to get where we want to go.

Bad and Good History

The Carnival of Bad History is very good.

The History Carnival^tm is coming shortly, and will reportedly be "gargantuan."
Update: It's here, and it's the biggest History Carnival to date. Historians, on the internet. Who knew?

Typical....

OK, I admit that it might be reading too much into little stuff, but this NY Times article about the President's personal aide, Blake Gottesman, just had too much stuff that rubbed raw wounds:

• First of all, the only reasons they're writing this is to "make nice" with the administration and fill time by answering a question that's been on "West Wing" viewers' minds for some time now: is there really a personal aide to the president? They do not, however, reference "West Wing" until nearly the very end of the article, and do not admit that the only reason anyone would care is because of the show. Useless, mindless, filler.
• Of course, he's a friend of the family. They never hire anyone who isn't a friend of the family. Couldn't trust 'em otherwise, apparently. Note that the other guy they interview, Joe Hagin, is a Deputy Chief of Staff and was Pres. G.H.W. Bush's personal aide. Ingrown, inbred, insular.
• The administration's penchant for deception and secrecy extends to trivia: the article points out that Mr. Gottesman lied -- "an inside joke," they called it -- when asked an entirely reasonable question about his actual work. Apparently the guy's got a "wicked" sense of humor, as long as it isn't at the expense of his boss.

What a waste. Not the article: the eight years.

"Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not...."

Sincerity is overrated....

Generally speaking, the Rabbis view insincere deeds quite favorably. The Talmud writes often that it is better to learn or perform good deeds insincerely, for insincere deeds lead to sincere ones (Pesachim 50b). Better to "do" -- study Torah out of not-fully-committed curiosity, or perform mitzvos (commandments) for reward or recognition. The doing itself is valuable, in fact invaluable. Good deeds themselves wield an influence on a person and touch the soul.

Confucius taught the importance of sincerity not as an inherent character trait, but as a result of study and training.

Quotations #060

"Order is the first requisite of liberty" -- Georg Wilhelm Hegel

"Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room." -- Blaise Pascal

"What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?" -- Immanuel Kant

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana, The Life of Reason

"Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill." -- Richard Aldington, The Colonel's Daughter

iPod is the new Nike/Gap/Cabbage Patch Kid...

"parents have to pick their battles"... how about teaching children the concept of "manufactured desire" and the distinction between "cool" and "in"...

Jewish Law on Stem Cells

[via a friend]
Short version: Healing is OK, as it is not "playing God"; improving species through crossbreeding (or genetic manipulation) is not OK, as it is "playing God." Abortion is OK, if it is to save the life of the mother (there's plenty of debate about what that means, but we'll move on) but not for any other reason, including saving the life of someone other than the mother. There's no reason why stem cells from adults or umbilical cords could not be used in healing; and since embryonic stem cells are not aborted, there's not much reason to think they are a violation of Rabbinic interpretations of Jewish versions of God's Law. In fact, there is some reason to think that the ability to screen embryos for genetic defects is a good thing, though I can't for the life of me figure out how that isn't "playing God."

I'm not a Rabbi, though.

Yawn. Yeah, you can read by listening

Audiobooks are books, too! You get pretty much the same thing out of listening to a book read as by reading it! Stop the presses! wait... stop the audio feed?

As usually, the Times doesn't ask the right people: the blind have been listening to books on tape for three decades, now, and on disks (there's even a special 17rpm speed for books) for decades before that.

Yes, it's really reading. It's kind of fun, honestly, the explosion of commercial audiobooks. The blind have benefited greatly from the new technologies. But that's just paving the cowpath, not exploring uncharted territory.

You WILL Go Blind

My mother never said it, but the generation before did, and we've gone to extraordinary lengths to prove them right: certain unnatural (i.e. artificial) sex acts can cause vision loss....