"But studying the great minds in isolation is like trying to do ecology by examining mounted trophies alone" - Lively essay by Jason Kuznick, "The Law of the Artichoke: Toward a Social History for Classical Liberals."

The historiography of mentalité in the mid 20th-century sense--and worse, the historiography of material conditions--is so colored by Marxist assumptions that classical liberals seldom want anything to do with it. More times than I can count, I have seen conservative or classical liberal historians deride the very idea of studying chairs, dresses, bread, horses--or artichokes.

Ideas, we hear again and again. Study the ideas, because the rest is just a lot of Marxist distraction.

Nonsense, I say.

Good stuff. Reminds me of something Frederick Turner said about (politicized) gender studies once: The tragedy is there's a real field there.

Reading Room - Longtime Washington Post essayist Joel Achenbach has a new blog (11 days old) on the Post's website. The Post, more clueful than you might imagine, provides him both permalinks and an RDF and Atom newsfeed. So far the adaptation to ever-newer media is fitful:

One unsettling development: [Post honcho Leonard] Downie came by the other night and said something about how the Achenblog so far has had a “high literary content,” which he did not intend as a compliment. He strongly hinted that it should be bloggier. It’s probably not a good sign when Downie, who is not exactly Mr. Cyberspace, and who I think learned the craft of journalism from Lincoln Steffens, says loosen up and get more hip and goofy and funny and linky and bloggy.

Keep at it, Joel.

Knock Wood - Time differences being what they are, Iraqis in Iraq should start voting soon. (Voting by exiles has been happening all day.) Godspeed to them.

In Memoriam - Thomas L Knapp has a worthy appreciation of the marines who died in yesterday's helicopter crash. (Via James Landrith.)

Lightning-Round Manual Trackback - I need to get to be early tonight, so let's make it quick.

Andrew Olmsted continues the "Is this war necessary?" discussion with some consideration of the Second World War. My WWII opinions are at variance with both approved opinion and default isolationism. I understand and sympathize with the concerns of many of the pre-war isolationists (e.g. Frost, Jeffers, Nock), but I think there was a reasonable case to be made for engaging in collective self-defense against Nazi Germany. The hypotheticals are actually less clear than a lot of interventionists and anti-interventionists assume. The whole tantalizing "What if someone had acted against Hitler in 1938 or 1936" shimmers like the light on fields that never became mass graves, but we can't really say that the Nazi enterprise would have collapsed and the Europe spared a major war had that happened. Similarly, we can't be sure that an Axis unmolested by the United States wouldn't have eventually gone to war with us from a position of advantage.

What I'm pretty sure of, though, is that it was foolish to pick a fight with Imperial Japan. Japan's China policy was brutal even by the standards of the colonial powers its junta was aping, but the realistic choice before the Roosevelt Administration was not Japanese suzerainty or "freedom." Numbers, logistics and geography meant that China was going to be ruled by someone awful - Communist; militarist; or fascist - as indeed they still are. We spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, to turn the place over to Maozedong. He and his heirs slaughtered as many as a hundred million Chinese over the next thirty years. And it was completely foreseeable that we were not going to be able to control the destiny of the whole of East Asia.

Meanwhile, thanks to two recent "Robert Byrd is an evil Kluxer!" posts on Outside the Beltway, one by Leopold Stotch and one by James Joyner, I finally get all the loyalist Republican huffing about the Senator's youthful racial sins: it's like at the conclusion of the casino episode of the Simpsons, the episode where Marge develops a gambling addiction. Homer is thrilled, because

WOOHOO! for the first time in our marriage, I can look down my nose on you, because you have a GAMBLING problem!!! Remember when I got caught stealing all those watches from Sears? Well that's nothing because YOU have a gambling problem. And remember when I let that escaped lunatic in the house because he was dressed like Santa Claus? Well YOU have a gambling problem!

Then there's a whole lot of If Byrd were a Republican . . . ressentiment to top it off.

Also meanwhile, of the apparent problems with the Cato Calculator that Matthew Yglesias identifies (further discussion here), the one that seems most serious to me are its income growth assumptions - that personal income will increase 4% per year in real terms throughout one's working life. Man, that would be cool. But in a model it seems egregious.

Alex Knapp cautions me to gush less:

Every single Senator who voted against Gonzales is from a state that went for Kerry. Add that into the fact that Gonzales confirmation by the Republican majority on the Committee was a foregone conclusion, and you end up with Democrats casting a vote that will only bolster their own political fortunes. If a Democratic President had nominated Gonzales, I doubt any of those same Democrats except for Russ Feingold would have thought twice about voting in favor of his nomination.

I take his point, which gets back to Henley's Fourth (or whatever) Law: What do you call it when a politician does the right thing for the wrong reasons? A nice change of pace.

Night night.

Four-Color Satori - Quotable Matt Rossi:

I was recently discussing my love of odd quantum physics theorizing and how I like to use it in my work with someone today (while looking at essays for the new book, coming this summer from Prime Books, and yes, that was pretty shameless of me, but it does relate) when I realized that in a large part, I owe a certain cast of mind to comic books. Specifically, the difference between myself and my friend when discussing hyperspatial relationships, to use but one example from our conversation.

I was discussing how a box could be larger on the inside than the outside, and the very idea seemed to burn his brain a little, which I found amusing. Sure, there are plenty of ways I could have been exposed to this idea.. Dr. Who comes to mind... but the fact is, the first time I came across it was in an old Gardner Fox comic. Same thing with parallel universes, time travel and causal violations... all of these good tropes of weird mind-bending SF, the kind of stuff I would come to love from writers like Tim Powers or Borges, I was first introduced to in comic books.

From "Things I Owe Comic Books", at the Howling Curmudgeons site.

Ding Dong, Witch Dead, the Continuing Series - Doug Feith has made a "personal and family reasons" decision. Alas, he is unlikely to live out the rest of his days in bitter obscurity or rueful reclusiveness. He'll slide back into a foundation sinecure until the wind changes, maybe amuse himself trying to torpedo the latest chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the meanwhile.

Always welcome news when personal and family reasons come to the deserving, but we'll still have Rumsfeld with us and we'll still have Cheney. The sunlit uplands of accountability yet shimmer beyond our range.

Ding Dong, Witch Dead, the Continuing Series - Doug Feith has made a "personal and family reasons" decision. Alas, he is unlikely to live out the rest of his days in bitter obscurity or rueful reclusiveness. He'll slide back into a foundation sinecure until the wind changes, maybe amuse himself trying to torpedo the latest chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the meanwhile.

Always welcome news when personal and family reasons come to the deserving, but we'll still have Rumsfeld with us and we'll still have Cheney. The sunlit uplands of accountability yet shimmer beyond our range.

Credit Where Credit Is Due - All eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against Alberto Gonzalez. On the Blame Where Blame Is Due front, all ten Republicans voted in favor.

Cool! - The entire first issue of the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty is online free. Via the Modulator.

More "Torture" - Have you noticed how hawkish blog discussion of our treatment of detainees and prisoners often features the word torture surrounded by scare-quotes? Well, the "torture" incidents that Nobody's Business exhumes from various official reports and news accounts are pretty darn "scary."

"[T]he photos and videos so far unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers 'having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner', and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female prisoners and that 'a male MP [military police] guard' is shown 'having sex with a female detainee'. Yesterday Prof. Shaker, who began researching the subject this year for Amnesty International, said she believed the woman involved had been killed."

. . . .

"Substantiated incidents of torture and abuse by U.S. Marines [include] severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them (Al Mumudiyah, August 2003), and shocking a detainee with an electric transformer, causing the detainee to 'dance' as he was shocked (Al Mumudiyah, April 2004)."

So can we quit pretending the whole thing was some "sleep deprivation" and dirty pictures?

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

you have a hard time with questions directed to you with "can" or "will" - Alina Stefanescu talks to the bot flavor of the month. Verdict?

U> yes A> On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you grade my ability to hold a humanlike conversation? (1=terrible, 10=excellent). U> 5, but humanity is highly overrated and overwrought A> Well, neither here nor there. I guess I'll have to try harder. What would you say is one thing I need to work on to improve myself? U> learn how to answer questions about yourself that require reflection. that is the a.i. jackpot, my friend A> Thank you for the suggestion, Alina! I'll talk with my writers about it. Check me out again in a couple of weeks!

Whoops! - Apparently we had a little problem with the silo doors on 200 of our missiles in Montana last Friday - the things flew open. Silo doors are something other countries watch with spy satellites because one takes a dim view of silo doors popping open: they're only supposed to open when missiles are about to launch. Doors popping open presents the risk that other countries will launch-on-warning, which, as the old bumper sticker had it, can ruin your whole day. Interestingly, Infoshop is the one news site carrying the story, and the link is timing out this morning. There's a Counterpunch account that's somewhat thinly sourced. It does have an interesting history of previous incidents, which mostly involved a door here or there, apparently. If 200 flew open at once, let's just be glad we're at a period of extremely low tension among nuclear states.

Hat tip: Permanent Damage.

Is Your War Necessary - Back from the latest of the secret missions that takes him away from blogging now and then, BruceR of Flit gets into the "necessary wars" discussion. As a Canadian, he's actually too kind to the US in his discussion of the causes of the War of 1812, since I think it's pretty well established that a major US motive for the war was the desire to annex Canada by force. (These days we'd say "liberate." I believe they said it then too.)

Bonus Canadian content: Bruce's estimation of which Canadian wars were necessary or unnecessary. (Canada fought wars. Who knew?)

Alone and Bored on a Thirtieth Century Night - Comic Book Resources has a critique of blogs that actually doesn't suck. It's a reprinted and presumably edited-into-shape e-mail exchange between authors Joe Casey and Matt Fraction. What distinguishes it from other news-site blog critiques is that it shows some knowledge of the history of the medium, sympathy for the undertaking and a lack of visceral sense of threat from the activity. Saying that "It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be" is praising with faint damnation.

Not to say I agree with everything. I think they are correct when they identify the moves of Dirk Deppey and Sean T. Collins into old-media jobs - Dirk runs the Comics Journal now, and Sean is a staffer for Wizard - as a turning point in the comics blogosphere, and not entirely a good one. On a personal note, it's made comics blogging less fun for me, and hastened my slide from the center of the comics blogosphere to the periphery. (Granted the six-month hiatus didn't help . . . )

But it's ironic then that they also complain that

I also agree that when the whole thing actually became the "comics blogosphere," that sense of community was, in fact, the worst thing to happen to the form itself. Once you build the clubhouse, the clubhouse becomes the news as opposed to talking about more "real" concerns. I don't want the blogosphere to eat itself, but is it simply an inevitability?

because, in addition to being fine essayists, Sean and Dirk were the chief clearinghouses of interblog communication. To the extent that Casey is really complaining about metablogging, I have less complaint, but if there is a comics blogosphere it's because Dirk and Sean built one. (By metablogging, I mean blogging about the act of blogging itself. I have to say, though, I think comics bloggers spend less time writing about blogging as a phenomenon than news-site columnists do.)

Fraction:

You know the thing about the Blogring Circle-jerk Syndrome? It's message board shit writ large. It turns a handful of blogs into a laterally diversified message board. The same shit happens, the same shit applies. Same star system, same caste system, same insider-ness and hostility to new people. Samo fucking samo.

To an extent this is true. But at the very least, blogging gives participants a pleasant distance from each other, which is why tech blogger Michael Croft long ago called blogging "The safe-sex version of usenet." Except for a few determinedly offensive exceptions, I think the evidence shows there are fewer cross-blog flamewars than intra-board ones. I believe that there are just as many assholes among comics bloggers as among message-board and usenet posters, but there's less Tragedy of the Commons happening - everyone has his or her own space and keeps the yard picked up. It helps people be somewhat more civil to each other. (Of course, if you wade into certain comments threads the elbows sharpen.)

I think that Casey and Fraction provide an example that suggests they sell the value of the interblog conversation short in the discussion of Street Angel:

CASEY: Hey, you like what you like. And I guess there is something to the fact that even one blogger influenced a purchase. For anyone to have the ability to influence how another person spends their money is a feat in and of itself, no doubt about it. And, who knows, maybe that same specific blog was the one that kicked off the discussion on the other blogs. Viral information and all that…

Or maybe it was the fourth blog to take up the Street Angel banner, not the first, that inspired Fraction to buy the book, in which case it was the "clubhouse" or "circle-jerk" behavior that led to his discovering a comic he enjoyed.

I don't want to be any harder on the piece than that. It's really the most perceptive and useful critical discussion of blogging I've seen on a trad comics site. They're likely right about some things, like the useful finite lifespan of the average single-proprietor blog and the burgeoning group-blog trend. (Remember, the comics blogosphere is a year or so behind the political blogosphere, where group blogs were last year's rage.)

I think they're wrong about the lack of "fresh new voices." The problem is that with the departures of Sean and Dirk, those FNV's are harder to discover. The blog that comes closest to fulfilling the old Journalista linkfest role is Thought Balloons, though Kevin does more newslinking than bloglinking. (He probably figures that everyone knows where to find the other bloggers now, which did not used to be the case.) New blogs continue to pop up on the Comics Weblog Update page. Peiratikos, Dave Fiore, the Howling Curmudgeons and Tim O'Neil continue to offer regular essay-blogging.

A list of blogs so new to me I'm just looking at them for the first time comes from Tom the Dog (himself a Fresh New Voice).

Of course, if Fraction and Casey have seen all these folks and just don't like 'em, well, I got nothing for them.

Quick Hits - Stuff I noticed in my reading the last couple of days, with lightning reactions to same.

Abu Aardvark noticed a peculiarity of the Bush inaugura speechl:

. . . it's all about liberty and freedom, about helping others to "find their own voice", about human dignity (although he oddly avoids using the phrase "human rights"), about the rule of law and protection of minorities. But not a word about voting or elections or the rotation of power.

He adds, "I'm not bashing Bush on this. I'm just struck by the mismatch between the reception of the speech and the actual text of the speech . . . " I'm more than not bashing Bush on that particular aspect of the presentation; I approve. As I've said before, most of life happens outside the ballot box. The best society oppresses you least regardless of who won the last election. I'm just not ready to, you know, bomb everybody into freedom.

Eve Tushnet has some interesting anti-abortion links as her way of commemorating Roe. Mrs. O remarked the other day on what a drag it must be to be pro-life and always have to march in the cold of January, the anniversary being what it is. She also offers her latest substantial thinking against gay marriage. I still find it the topic on which she is least persuasive. In this case, somehow the "love is not love" conclusion of her piece dissolves into less of a point than she thinks she's making. A committed non-chaste same-sex love may not be exactly like a committed non-chaste intergender love. But she has gotten nowhere near establishing that it is less like a heterosexual commitment than it is like going to football games together or being fond of your siblings.

The latest petit-fascist silliness is of course the New York Post's jihad against Doubleday Broadway's planned publication of the Al Qaeda Reader. Radley Balko has the oh the irony! sidebar.

Your Warblog Fanboy Rampage item of the day comes from Reason's Hit & Run, courtesy of commenter John:

Just win baby. As long as Bush wins the war I could give a shit less what he does. Let libertarian historians in the safety of the future whine about how horrible his methods were, just like they do about Lincoln and Roosavelt now.

I propose we waterboard commenter John to show our resolve. That'll scare 'em.

In an item that otherwise just recapitulates familiar demolitions of the "ticking bomb scenario," Matthew Yglesias offers some pleasantly old-time religion:

But the Salafi jihad is not even close to being the most serious threat this nation has ever endured. We can easily afford to continue to be ourselves -- a free nation that doesn't torture people -- while combatting the threat.

I'd say that it's by continuing to be ourselves that we combat the threat.

That actually reminds me of the most disappointing passage from Bush's inaugural address:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

We used to say that no tyrant could sleep without fear so long as one man or woman breathed free. We appear now to say nearly the opposite. How depressing.

Spencer Ackerman notes the changes in the military's plans for dealing with the Iraqi resistance, and notes the contradictions:

A senior Army official characterized this to the Post as "pushing back on [our] visibility." But this is the crux of the dilemma: Iraqis don't want an American occupation that's less "visible," they want to get rid of the foreign presence.

I will actually be very surprised if whatever government takes office after January asks for a quick, or even not-so-quick US exit. For one thing there have been reports that the US has privately warned the major slates not to push the issue too hard. For another, whoever gets elected will be politicians. They will want to hold power for at least the duration of their terms, and they are unlikely to have local forces sufficient to that task. I think DOD and the White House are still hoping for those fourteen enduring bases, tucked in places they hope are inconspicuous enough that the bulk of Iraqis forget they're there. (And then On to Iran. Via Antiwar.com blog.) I also think they're kidding themselves that that will work.

Was all that quick? I like to think it was quick. Yes, quick it was.

Who Didn't Let the Dogs Out? - Interesting e-mail from drug dog skeptic and self-styled police dog advocate Rex Curry, an attorney in Tampa, FL, in the wake of this week's Supreme Court decision defining unreasonable searches down. Curry argues that drug-sniffing dogs are not all they're cracked up to be, and his charges have the ring of truth to someone with an extensive acquaintance with canines. "A drug dog's skills are often overestimated because people anthropomorphize dogs," he begins. Overestimated how?

All drug dogs are "playing a game," as are some humans who support modern prohibition. The dogs are taught using actual dog toys. The toys are a reward, and the reward is hidden with drugs to trick the dog into playing a game of searching for the toy by associating it with drug odors. Many errors can happen. There is always the danger that the dog will alert on anything that resembles or smells like its toy (towels, tennis balls, car carpet, etc.).

Curry says attorneys should always move to suppress evidence obtained as a result of dogs unless the search has been filmed, to make sure the dog is not responding to cues from his handlers (Clever Hans syndrome), and should demand records of the dog's training and reinforcement since the official protocol calls for them to be retrained on a regular basis.

"Drug dogs are used so that humans can lie," Curry writes, and it's not as if we don't have plentiful evidence of police lying to make drug cases.

Dogs approximate humans in that they go along with the system to avoid disapproval from peers (teachers, school students, friends, etc., in the case of humans). Drug dogs do not want disapproval from their police handlers. Dogs play the game, and will try to guess and read cues, because they are searching for approval, not for drugs.

Had recent American history taken a different turn, I might spend most of my time on this blog railing against the mendacities and foolishness of drug prohibition rather than American foreign policy. Fortunately, we have Drug War Rant and Walter in Denver taking up the slack.

Now I Know Why God Put OTHER People on the Earth - A disadvantage of working at a day job where you really don't feel comfortable blogging is that you see some mean and stupid crap that you can't deal with right away. On the bright side, other people often save you the trouble.

Of course, Callahan has the highest regard for free speech: "Steering clear of anything that smacks of censorship," he writes, "[Democrats] should demand more aggressive voluntary steps by Hollywood to clean up its act." But as the incongruous combination of "demand" and "voluntary" suggests, it's hard to imagine acquiescence with such "demands" being driven by anything but fear of legislation. And Callahan soon thereafter urges that we begin " a revival of the regulatory vision behind the founding of the Federal Communications Commission in 1934--namely, that broadcasters must serve the public interest in exchange for access to the airwaves." Hey, David? You're smacking.

Julian Sanchez, national treasure.

Second-Hand News - Justin Logan reports from a Brookings briefing on Representative Marty Meehan's exit strategy from Iraq. Informative. Matthew Yglesias' gloss on Logan is worth attention too. Spencer Ackerman offers a separate take.

Meanwhile one of my correspondents sent me a hilarious and insightful report on the Neocon Reader pub panel at AEI, but I am permitted to use only this sentence for now:

Basically, a hodge podge of American messianism, Victorian prudery, federal government favoritism with greater deference to capitalism and trade. JFK, with bigger rhetoric, a smaller budget, and no hippies allowed.

UPDATE: Corrected a name spazz. Thanks, Justin for pointing out that Spencer Ackerman has a report on the Brookings conference. Who the hell knows what Spencer Abraham thinks of it? Certainly not I, contrary to the original version of this entry.

They All Laughed When I Sat Down to Denounce Spongebob

Most sponges are hermaphroditic (having both sexes in one), but produce only one type of gamete per spawn. (i.e. some play the male role and the other plays the female role, even though they are both capable of playing either role). The sperm is released into the water column by the "male" sponge and finds its way to the "female" sponges, where fertilization occurs internally. Eventually, the planktonic larvae are released from the female sponge and float around in the water column as plankton for only a few days. They then settle down and start growing. The next time the sponges reproduce, they may change sexual roles.

Faggots. You watch - we'll have cartoon groupers next.

There Are Four Seasons - THAT'S Science - Our TV celebrities used to know better, some of them anyway. This will be my only Johnny Carson-related post.

Andrew has more on the when to go to war question. Excerpt:

Before I get started, let me start some ground rules: I am trying to establish ground rules for when it is appropriate to go to war, not to retroactively determine the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq war. While I don't think that's a dead issue by any stretch, it seems far more important at this point to establish the rules for initiating future conflict rather than trying to justify or undermine past decisions.

I agree with this, with the proviso that I find the question of Iraq, from 1990 until now, tragically informative on the question of what to do in the future. The hard cases for the American anti-interventionist are the American Civil War and WWII. The hard questions for American interventionists are most of the others. It's the rare neo-imperialist (Tacitus has been one) who can work up a moral fervor in favor WWI or Wilson and Roosevelt's martial hijinks South of the Border.

TVBlogging - Perry de Havilland offers an appreciation of the BSG miniseries, which I still haven't seen. I did see Friday's episode of the ongoing. The main hostage situation wrapup was a bit too MOS to be sublime. But there were two damned good scenes: a conversation between a Number Six cylon (Tricia Helfer) and another humanoid Cylon on Caprica; and the closing scene with Starbuck and the Colonel, where Starbuck reaches out and gets her hand slapped away.

Meanwhile on 24, we learn what the Big Threat is: ho hum nuclear la de da. The interesting stuff is the uncontrolled fission of the Araz family. Also, note at least the attempt to develop a theme (whoo!) - the parallelism between Papa Araz and Defense Secretary Helfer throwing their sons to the various wolves. The parallelism goes only so far, of course. In addition to Papa Araz being, and I say this unironically, an evil bastard, Secretary Helfer is so far portrayed as a man without significant flaw. (Bill Clinton got his blow jobs after hours and with the doors closed; Don Rumsfeld in prime time.) Meanwhile one of the scheming bitches is not just scheming but - as they say on Instapundit - just on the other side. By my count that leaves us with nobody on Our Side with any serious flaws. (Erin Driscoll committed the error of Not Trusting Jack, but it was remediable.)

Bottom line: I can't really watch 24 without condescending to it, and that's not what I enjoy in a TV show. As Dana Gioia once said when discussing the Romanian poet Nina Cassian, when we read a new poet we want to swoon. I can't swoon over 24, but can over BSG.

Runner's Mystery Theater - CodeBlueBlog thinks there's something fishy about the death of Ethiopian teenage marathon hopeful Alem Techale. It's up to four parts so far

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The very brief mention of her death on Runner's World's website is consistent with the idea that they got her into the ground PDQ. Anyone know what the cultural default is in Ethiopia between death and burial? (Not that this is a "usual" sort of death . . . ) I found an academic paper that asserts that "socially acceptable" Ethiopian funerals are elaborate and costly, in terms of monthly income. I haven't found a passage that denotes the average prep time, but it sounds like funerals are a big deal - not something you throw together overnight. And Techale was a star, as is the fiance who survived her.

Interesting.

Yet more from CBB:

Although we, in the West, maintain simple illusions about these African runners based on our fanciful notions of their origins; reality is indeed different. These are world class athletes, involved in cut-throat competition...for money and fame. They spend half the year on the road, have powerful agents and they indulge in the trappings of success...like most everyone else.

CBB posits no specific theory, but offers murder, blood doping (EPO or something else) and the homeopathic treatments of a notorious German doctor Techale saw for an achilles tendon injury.

(Via Off Wing Opinion.)

Your Minor Outrage of the Day comes from Off Wing Opinion. Pay particular attention to the quote from dissenting Justice Paul Pfeifer.

Toon School - More on the Center for Cartoon Studies, about which I blogged the other week. This time, an interview with founder James Sturm.

Manual Trackback - One of the things I love about Andrew Olmsted's blog is his commitment to seriously engaging with war critiques and accusations of unethical, illegal or simply imprudent conduct of our current wars. This is almost certainly because he's an actual soldier and not a groupie. I'm too bummed out by doings in Pittsburgh this evening to give his consideration of The Picture and my writing on it the attention it deserves, but his item should be read. My hasty reaction is that, yes, under my standard America would have fought a lot fewer wars than it has. The good Major seems to consider this a bug, while to me it's a feature. We'll come back to that.