Brilliant Op-Ed in the NYTimes today, arguing that the only solution to the Iraq/Afghanistan wars is to bring back the draft:
If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People’s Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it’s not worth your family fighting it, then it’s not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration’s handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.
For a good review of a bio of Russel Kirk, the “father of modern conservatism”.
…” Its foundation was the work of Edmund Burke, the British statesman who criticized the role of the Enlightenment philosophes in laying the groundwork for the French Revolution. In demanding that existing institutions be measured against abstract ideas of justice and equality (went Burke’s critique), thinkers had taken the first step toward turning society upside down, and plunging it into the Jacobin terror.
What Kirk extracted from Burke’s thought — and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot — was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able to provide a real measure of freedom. Reformers and revolutionaries might appeal to disembodied, universal concepts to justify changing the world, or to draw up blueprints for a new society. But for Kirk, what must be cultivated was not reason but “the moral imagination” — a resonant, if ambiguous notion that Mr. McDonald devotes much of his book to elucidating.
… “The individual is foolish,” wrote Kirk in The Conservative Mind, “but the species is wise.” We have inherited from the past “the instruments which the wisdom of the species employs to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites.”
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They’re adorable when clothed, hot when naked, one’s slightly bigger than the other, and men started to notice them when they hit 14. It’s a match made in heaven!
Buy your own Mary-Kate and Ashley t-shirt. (May be NSFW.)
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It’s definitely in the season, now, and despite Paris and Nicole= trying to ruin my first game of the year (pre-season, mind you) I am looking forward to Saturday night at the country end of a small Texas town watching the minor league boys knocking a few out of the park.
When you say “ground rule,” people visualize a one-hopper over the fence. Two bases. But that’s not really a “ground rule” because it’s a standard rule that applies in every professional ballpark in the land. That’s why Jon Miller (correctly) calls that sort of hit an “automatic double” rather than a “ground-rule double.”
Here’s an ESPN article covering some of the more bizarre ground rules.
For a long time there’s been a story going around that Fenway Park is the home of baseball’s only “ground-rule triple,” but that’s apparently some sort of urban legend. Fenway’s Green Monster is the home of baseball’s only in-play ladder, which extends from the upper-left corner of the old scoreboard to the top of The Wall.
Interestingly, that ladder is now superfluous. …
Today’s Reason: Making politics out of women’s health issues.
Women’s advocacy groups are up in arms over the treatment the Bush adminstration has given to scientific research and statistical data surounding women’s issues. Some of this is more evidence of using bad science to further an agenda but the rest of it seems to be a concerted reduction in focus on women’s issues.
At the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau Web site, the report said 25 key publications on subjects ranging from pay equity to child care to issues relating to black and Latina women and women business owners had been deleted with no explanation.
Key government offices dedicated to addressing the needs of women have been disbanded, according to the report. These include the Office of Women’s Initiatives and Outreach in the White House and the President’s Interagency Council on Women.
At the Pentagon, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services was slated to be dismantled but was saved after an outcry. However, the report said this committee now focused on issues such as health care for servicewomen and the effects of deployment on families, but not on equity and access issues.