regard­ing Voltaire.

If you do not have a Mac, you will prob­a­bly not appre­ci­ate the exquis­ite typog­ra­phy she man­aged to cre­ate, in pure HTML, with built-​​in MacOS X fonts. So here:

As observed in a note on the pro­por­tional nature of civil war­nal­ity:

See, when you live in Rummy’s fan­tasy world–black is white, defeat is vic­tory, war is peace, free­dom is slav­ery, and igno­rance is strength.

Bush’s Author­i­tar­ian Project, Part II (from Leiter):

The power to label indi­vid­u­als as “enemy combatants”—and detain them indefinitely—presents one of the most basic threats not only to ele­men­tal human lib­er­ties, but also to the demo­c­ra­tic order. Why? Because a gov­ern­ment that can sim­ply ban­ish its foes—and those it erro­neously seizes—from pub­lic sight sim­ply by label­ing them as beyond the pale is not a gov­ern­ment that labors under the rule of law.

Who, pre­cisely, can be con­sid­ered an “enemy com­bat­ant” and how the des­ig­na­tion is made remains ambiguous.…

In 2004, then Deputy Sec­re­tary of Defense Paul Wol­fowitz issued a def­i­n­i­tion of “enemy combatant”—but only for Guan­tá­namo detainees, who are believed to be all non-​​citizens. Under the Wol­fowitz def­i­n­i­tion, the gov­ern­ment has con­ceded in the course of dis­trict court hear­ings for Guan­tá­namo detainees, “a per­son who teaches Eng­lish to the son of an al-​​Qaida mem­ber” and a “lit­tle old lady in Switzer­land who writes checks to what she thinks is a char­ity that helps orphans in Afghanistan” would both be sub­ject to deten­tion as “enemy combatants.…

The mil­i­tary com­mis­sion leg­is­la­tion to be pre­sented today will likely speak to the scope of the term “enemy com­bat­ant,” but not the process for des­ig­nat­ing them—because the administration’s posi­tion is to press for as lit­tle process as pos­si­ble. The draft leg­is­la­tion con­tained a def­i­n­i­tion as haz­ardously capa­cious as the Wol­fowitz def­i­n­i­tion: some­one who “engaged in hos­til­i­ties against the United States” and has “com­mit­ted an act that vio­lates the law of war.”

At first blush, this appears to be a nar­row def­i­n­i­tion, con­tain­ing only those who in fact are impli­cated in some seri­ous crime. But any limit to that def­i­n­i­tion van­ishes upon closer exam­i­na­tion of the leg­is­la­tion. For one of the “war crimes” listed in the statute is con­spir­acy. Because con­spir­acy has long been crit­i­cized as a vague and open-​​ended con­cept that is amenable to abuse by pros­e­cu­tors, it has not tra­di­tion­ally been part of the law of war. The sit­u­a­tion at hand shows why. To allow indi­vid­u­als to be des­ig­nated “enemy com­bat­ants” based on the alle­ga­tion that they have some part of a ter­ror­ist “con­spir­acy” is to return to the Wol­fowitz def­i­n­i­tion. It is to legit­i­mate the deten­tion of the Eng­lish teacher and the lit­tle old lady in Switzer­land on the minimal—and entirely blameless—acts they committed.

on the floor. It is actu­ally water mixed with a rel­a­tively high pro­por­tion of Drā-​​no. Water I inten­tion­ally filled the kitchen sink with, in a mis­taken physics exper­i­ment aimed at “forc­ing” the crap that had backed up some­where down­stream to “slough away”, but rather demon­strat­ing that fill­ing two 10-​​gallon water reser­voirs posi­tioned above a con­nected floor-​​level dish­washer, with capac­ity two gal­lons, is a good way to slowly move eigh­teen (18) gal­lons of water onto the floor.

This offered in expla­na­tion of the lack of sapi­ent con­tri­bu­tions tonight.

Tid­BITS: Get­ting Things Done with Your Mac­in­tosh, Part 1:

The dan­ger to watch for is that most of us find it more stim­u­lat­ing to play with our orga­ni­za­tional soft­ware than to actu­ally do stuff. In the words of Mer­lin Mann, “Like a short-​​order cook, you want to stay focused on mak­ing sand­wiches, not on putting the orders into pretty piles.” Pick a sys­tem that works well enough to start; then, if you wish, make improv­ing (and per­haps rad­i­cally revamp­ing) your sys­tem a GTD project which you can pri­or­i­tize along with every­thing else. That way, you won’t fall into the trap of mak­ing pretty piles while the sand­wiches are burn­ing. I can per­son­ally vouch that I’ve used dozens of orga­ni­za­tion sys­tems and soft­ware pack­ages, read four score and seven books, and have lit­er­ally spent weeks writ­ing cus­tom File­Maker Pro data­bases which I later aban­doned. Try not to waste as much time as I did being “productive.“

(Via Ed Viel­metti.)