Patrick Carver over at Southern Appeal has a good question:
If the Administration was really lying about Saddam’s possession of
such weapons, why didn’t the Bushies plant the evidence? Why wasn’t it
arranged to have, say, the 101st "find" a cache of chemical weapons
somewhere in the desert?
Down yonder, a Canadian reader asks:
I’m not a lawyer or too familiar with the way the court system works down there.
Could someone please explain to me briefly what privileges and powers the Chief Justice has in your system?
The chief justice doesn’t have much more actual authority than an associate justice. Each justice, whether chief or associate, gets only one vote.
But in addition to having greater ceremonial gravitas and prestige, the chief justice has certain procedural duties. He chairs the meetings of the justices and thus (to some extent) shapes the discussion. If he is in the majority, he also by tradition assigns which justices write the majority opinion. These process-oriented powers may have helped notable chief justices like Earl Warren (let his name be stricken from the monuments) to significantly influence the results the Court put forward.
. . . someone comparing redstaters, Evangelicals, Christians in general, Republicans, Bush-supporters, or the Bush administration to terrorists, the Taliban, al-Qa’eda, Islamic radicals, or what have you . . .
Yesterday I mentioned that I would post an entry about the argument that U.S. action overseas will only inflame "the Arab street," recruiting more and more terrorists to fight against us. In other words, that we’re dealing with an unlimited enemy.
Not true.
One hates to say it, but like the Soviets before them, the Islamists do respect strength. Shows of strength in that part of the world make things better, not worse. They quiet rather than inflame the Arab street–at least in terms of its creation of more terrorists. What really makes new terrorists is showing weakness so that they think they have a chance of succeeding. Making it clear that they do not has a pacification tendency.
This isn’t just my conclusion. It is the conclusion of others, such as Bernard Lewis, the foremost Western scholar of Islam.
So I was watching this episode of DS9 where Dr. Brashir is whining about the fact he was salutatorian rather than valedictorian at Starfleet Medical (because, as revealed in another episode, he deliberately missed a question on a test [because, as revealed in yet another episode, he is a genetically modified human who didn’t want to blow his cover]).
And I get to thinking about the word valedictorian.
Obvious Latin roots.
Looks like it has the roots to mean "farewell" and "to speak" in it.
And, indeed, it does.
Latin: valedicere = vale (farewell) + dicere (to speak); to bid farewell.
A valedictory is thus a "farewell speech" and a valedictorian is the person who gives it at a commencement, usually the highest scoring student.
Then I started thinking about the word vale.
Where does it come from? Looks like an imperative form of valere. But what does valere mean?
"To be strong, to be powerful, to be healthy, to prevail, to succeed."
To succeed?
So "Vale!" might be translated as "Succeed!"
That’s (more or less) what Klingons say to bid each other as a farewell: Qapla’!
I wonder if on Qo’noS they call valedictory a Qapla’SoQ? (Qapla’ = success + SoQ = speech).
Probably the most combat-proficient student gets to give it.
So I was watching this episode of DS9 where Dr. Brashir is whining about the fact he was salutatorian rather than valedictorian at Starfleet Medical (because, as revealed in another episode, he deliberately missed a question on a test [because, as revealed in yet another episode, he is a genetically modified human who didn’t want to blow his cover]).
And I get to thinking about the word valedictorian.
Obvious Latin roots.
Looks like it has the roots to mean "farewell" and "to speak" in it.
And, indeed, it does.
Latin: valedicere = vale (farewell) + dicere (to speak); to bid farewell.
A valedictory is thus a "farewell speech" and a valedictorian is the person who gives it at a commencement, usually the highest scoring student.
Then I started thinking about the word vale.
Where does it come from? Looks like an imperative form of valere. But what does valere mean?
"To be strong, to be powerful, to be healthy, to prevail, to succeed."
To succeed?
So "Vale!" might be translated as "Succeed!"
That’s (more or less) what Klingons say to bid each other as a farewell: Qapla’!
I wonder if on Qo’noS they call valedictory a Qapla’SoQ? (Qapla’ = success + SoQ = speech).
Probably the most combat-proficient student gets to give it.
Bat Ye’or (a pen name meaning "Daughter of the Nile") is the foremost chronicler of Dhimmitude. The Dhimmi (THEM-ee) are the "protected" peoples in Muslim lands–i.e., non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians) who are "protected" by Muslim laws (to keep them from being killed outright by fanatical Muslims). The "protection," like protection from the Mob, involves extorting special religious taxes out of them to punish them for not being Muslim, as well as numerous forms of degradation, humiliation, and oppression.
HERE’S A PIECE BY BAT YE’OR ANALYZING ARAFAT’S LEGACY FOR EUROPE.
Bat Ye’or (a pen name meaning "Daughter of the Nile") is the foremost chronicler of Dhimmitude. The Dhimmi (THEM-ee) are the "protected" peoples in Muslim lands–i.e., non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians) who are "protected" by Muslim laws (to keep them from being killed outright by fanatical Muslims). The "protection," like protection from the Mob, involves extorting special religious taxes out of them to punish them for not being Muslim, as well as numerous forms of degradation, humiliation, and oppression.
HERE’S A PIECE BY BAT YE’OR ANALYZING ARAFAT’S LEGACY FOR EUROPE.
Robert Kagan has an excellent (if long) analysis of what he terms the "crisis of legitimacy" regarding the use of military power in the world today.
Kagan is the author of various works on geopolitics, including the excellent (short!) book Of Paradise And Power, which is the most insightful analysis of the current disconnect between the U.S. and Europe regarding the use of military force. He wrote it in the run-up to the Iraq War, and it sheds a lot of light on what was behind French, German, and similar European thinking.
It is also useful to help understand what European ecclesiastics were (and are) thinking on the subject. At the risk of oversimplifying, his basis thesis there is that the Euros have had it good for the last sixty years. American power helped stabilize Western Europe and keep it stable after World War II and allowed Europeans to neglect their defense interests. As a result, the Western Europeans have been living in an artificial paradise (historically speaking) created and sustained by American power. Now they have developed the idea that everything can be achieved through dialogue and process rather than through the use of force. After all, they’re living in a paradise (judged in historical terms by the absence of wars between their nations). They haven’t needed to use force for anything. Why should anyone else? Dialogue will do everything that needs to be done.
They’re also scared of the use of military force because they have so little themselves. The only power they have to influence world affairs today is through dialogue, not through military power. Therefore, they’re going to accentuate the former at the expense of the latter.
In his new online piece "The Crisis of Legitimacy," Kagan carries this last thought further. He explores the sudden change of standards Europeans have proposed (or imposed) on the legitimate exercise of military force in the last couple of years. It has only been just now that Europeans have proposed all of a sudden that one needs the approval of a corrupt and dysfunctional body like the U.N. before a nation can take actions it perceives as necessary to its self defense.
The Europeans who opposed the Iraq War on these grounds themselves have not applied this test to their own uses of force, but they want to apply it to us. And, Kagan argues, the reason isn’t hard to see. They don’t really believe that legitimacy is conferred upon the use of force by getting a consensus of nations to sign off on it. The real motive is baser: France and Germany want their blessing to be required for wars to be legitimate. The U.N.-confers-legitimacy argument is just a temporarily expedient smokescreen being used to try to preserve what influence on world affairs France and Germany still have or think they ought to still have.
Once the mask is taken from this duplicity, the natural American instinct is to dismiss the whole claim. But Kagan argues that we can’t totally ignore the issue of legitimacy in world opinion. The reason isn’t that we don’t have the power needed to ignore it. The reason, instead, is that we don’t have the internal political will to ignore it forever. And so he argues that a balance of sorts needs to be sought.
So right now I’m reading Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, in which the
definition of knowledge is discussed, and the edition I’m reading from
is a diaglot with English on one page and Greek on the other. The Greek
is a different dialect than I’m used to, but I can still make out a
good bit, and when I encounter an interesting word or phrase in
English, I’ll look over at the Greek out of curiosity to see what it is
translating.
I’m finding that the translation (by Harold North Fowler) is not as literal as I would have hoped. Oh, well.
But I ran across a funny.
At one point Theaetetus (a young man) is talking to Socrates (the famous philosopher) about one of his compansions, and he says:
It may seem easy just now, Socrates, as you put it; but you
are probably asking the kind of thing that came up among us lately when
your namesake, Socrates here, and I were talking together [147c].
"’Namesake’ . . . ?" I thought. "That’s an interesting word." So I
looked over in Greek for the phrase corresponding to "your namsake" and
saw that it was tO, sO, homOnumO, [little o is omicron, big O is omega, and comma is an iota subscript].
tO, is the dative form of the definite article (i.e., "the"), which Greek likes to throw into noun
phrases a lot more than English does, so this phrase is
literalistically "the your nameake."
sO, is apparently the dative form of the pronoun "you" in Plato’s
dialect (Attic Greek). From Koine Greek I’m used to the dative "you"
being soi.
homOnumO, is the word equivalent to "namesake." It’s also a dative form. I kind of wrinkled my nose for a second while I analyzed its meaning, then suddenly it hit me like a flash: Of course, that’s the Greek word for "namesake"! It makes perfect sense! There’s even an English equivalent!