Dr. Steven Taylor at Poliblog has a commentary on the comic book logic being used by some who believe the students at Virginia Tech didn’t act enough like “men”.

Dr. Stephen Taylor, the proprietor of PoliBlog, has frequently posted in a manner that belies his “conservative” labeling that has been apportioned to him by others. He is indeed a conservative by the traditional meaning of the word, suspicious of change and wishing to preserve the currently existing ways and means of governing, but he strives and often achieves an objective view of how recent actions by the United States government may not coincide with the principles we claim underly our system.

Here is a good example

Mike Nifong is an actor in a portion of that governmental system who was both oriented towards providing security to his community and towards his own political ambitions. Indeed, he no doubt thought (as most politicians do) that his job was an honorable one that could be furthered by his own political power. As such, he clearly got caught up in his own personal ambition and one would assume that he thought that he was doing the right thing in regards to prosecuting persons he thought were guilty of serious crimes (although it is certainly possible that he cynically pursued the Duke case knowing that his targets were innocent).

In any event, the case underscores that members of the government, even in a democracy, can overzealously pursue their policy goals and when those policy goals are linked to issues of security (whether we are talking about crime or terrorism) the outcomes can be disastrous if the power held by the government is inappropriately applied.

Indeed, the potential for abuse grows as the power to act is concentrated in the hands of one actor or a small number of actors—as was the case here and explains, at least in part, why I have often written about executive power.

I encourage you to read his entire post.

Kurt Vonnegut has died.

His epitath is best summed up by the repeated line from Slaughterhouse Five:

So it goes.

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
   -Stewart L. Udall (1920 - )

Think about it in the context of the past 6 years, and how the United States has behaved when faced with the tactics of terror.

…but holy cow!!! Of my last 100 referrals, 95 of them have been from the Google Images search page. A lot of them seem to be hits on my photos from when I lived in France.

Somehow I got on the list at Google for having a good set of images, I guess. Too bad I can’t make money off of them, or even find a good way of keeping people from stealing my bandwidth to add insult to injury when they use my photos without permission.

OK, annoying blog navel gazing over now.

Violence isn’t always evil. What’s evil is the infatuation with violence.
   -Jim Morrison (1943 - 1971)

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
   -James Thurber (1894 - 1961)

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
   -Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Pain causes us to make bad decisions.

The fear of remembered pain being resurrected can lead to disastrous decisions.

I get more Technorati hits because of my Flying Spaghetti Monster image through inline linking than anyone linking directly to my posts. I’ve had some of my photographs inline linked without credit as well, which I find rather insulting given those photos are the direct product of my creativity. In other words, people are stealing my bandwidth and hosting space that I paid for to put images on their blog. At the moment, it’s not a bandwidth issue; Random Fate has been idle enough lately that I’m nowhere near hitting any kind of bandwidth limit. It’s the principle of the thing, though, especially for my photographs when they are put up uncredited.

I’m considering discussing with the person who runs my host how we can set up to block the inline links. Man, I hate it when people just take stuff without asking. All it would take is a simple email, and I’d give permission as long as they credited my site.

Twelve years ago, in the midst of a life change the extent of which I had no conception, I started to work at my current location. I would write “my current employer” but the company has undergone so many major changes in the past five years (spinning off from the parent company to be an independent public company, being taken private by an investment group, having the investment group announce they wanted to go public, it is definitely NOT the same company I started with 12 years ago, even though I have an office in the same large cubicle farm.

In that twelve years, there have been more than a few layoffs, almost continuously from within a few months of my start date. Despite that uncertainty coupled with the strains from my divorce, the first four years or so that I worked here had a high “fun factor” because of the people who I worked with or, if I didn’t work directly with them, were in the general vicinity of my cubicle. There were many people with distinctive personalities that if not always pleasant were consistently challenging and interesting.

In other words, fun…

Really.

However, just like the physical process of erosion, the toll imposed by the exigencies of the past few years has washed away those who may have interesting personal characteristics but ultimately are judged to be “not in alignment” with the corporate mission.

I’m still trying to figure out how I keep dodging the “redeployment” bullet. It’s not as if I devote any energy at all to making friends and influencing people. Instead I’m argumentative, I poke holes in every sanguine presentation I see, and I warn against the worst rather than cheerleading the optimists.

At this point, I seem to be the sole survivor of the misfits. The fun factor in the job faded long ago with the continual losses of work-friends.

Once the fun factor is gone, it is just a job.

Sigh…

I don’t think that this one is necessarily true, although it has some wee bit of veracity in it:

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
   -Dr. Samuel Johnson

This one is, though:

The unexamined life is not worth living.
   -Socrates