Not enough to repeal it, his outlook and constituents demand this lie

Administration wants DOMA overturned as unconstitutional

Ah, that over-worked equal protection clause, again.

Like inter-racial marriage, abortion, and so much else, they want gay marriage protected not only from the people but from future action by even the federal legislature, as well as from any state or inferior government.

See this.

Anyway, bound by the constitution to see that the laws are faithfully executed, does this seem quite proper for a president careful of his oath?

And when the shoe is on the other foot what will liberals and Democrats say?

Meanwhile, I doubt that even the most candid, honest, and clear-sighted conservative court would dare overturn Loving.

And how refuse this, really, without doing so?

We have never had an honest constitutional jurisprudence.

The balderdash began with John Marshall.

Can people be trusted to keep their engagements?

6 leaking tanks are Hanford nuke site's latest woe

Even governments?

Even in matters of life and death?

Silly question, isn’t it?

And what do you suppose is the moral of the tale, regarding humans, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power?

Natural born killers

Possibility Two

The episode dramatically assumes a fictional, clear, and strong tie between the so-called “warrior gene” and criminal sociopathy.

Testimony to the popular credibility of sociobiology and the behavioral significance of genetic endowment.

Not that a public convinced sexual orientation is considerably more nature than nurture is likely to doubt that.

“All men are created equal”

Obama a marker on post-racial path

The Declaration of Independence

“All men are created equal”?

What does that mean, exactly, even ignoring the embarrassing notion, best neglected, that this is a self-evident truth?

Neither taken individually nor in groups are all men – all humans – equal with regard to everything, or even merely everything that matters.

Neither in their acquired skills nor in their natural endowments, and again neither as individuals nor as distinct racial or other, smaller, population groups.

Men are larger and stronger than women, and only a fool would deny this is nature as well as nurture.

And men are more violent than women, too; and this is likewise rightly attributed to both nature and nurture.

Jews are smarter than gentiles, and for a very long time this has been attributed, at least in part, to the intelligence-killing genetic impact of millennia of monasticism in Christian lands, during which intelligence was simply bred out of the Christians.

As for the apparent natural intellectual inferiority of American blacks to those of Africa as well as to the euro-whites of America, it has been said that only the less bright Africans were taken as slaves, survived the passage, or survived and were allowed to reproduce under slavery.

Analogous explanations have been offered for a sometimes suspected inferiority in intelligence of American euro-whites to the whites of Europe.

I am not aware of any like explanation for the like inferiority of American Indians to American whites or East Asians.

In any case, only fools, fakers, and those who wish to be deceived claim none of this is real, or none of this is nature and all of it is nurture.

Too, no one thinks all individuals are in fact or by natural endowment equal with respect to special or especially noteworthy talents or abilities.

Mozart began composing at five and wrote an opera at twelve, if I recall correctly; I can barely whistle a tune.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was making ground-breaking discoveries in math in his teens.

Saul Kripke taught himself Ancient Hebrew by age six and had read all of Shakespeare by age nine.

So what, after all, is the significance of the Declaration’s ringing claim that all men are created equal?

Despite being propaganda intended for the wide public of the time, it was not a demagogic rejection of the obvious diversity of human endowments and achievements.

It was not even a rejection of the idea of natural inequalities of races or nations.

It was and is a rejection simply and solely of hereditary differences of power, status, authority, rights, or privileges.

It was and is a rejection of caste.

It was a rejection of monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, and slavery.

It was a demand for republicanism and popular government.

That, at any rate, was the intention of the 18th Century, of the Age of Enlightenment, honestly construed.

It was not quite a demand for government of the people, by the people, and for the people – an idea that, despite bluster and boilerplate and probably not excepting Lincoln, no one really takes both literally and seriously.

The Gettysburg Address

Government by the people?

Actual democracy?

Many are the reasons both obvious and weighty against it, not the least compelling being that the exercise of political power is a full time job.

And another, too, is decisive, all by itself: the people are often malevolent and at all times and in all nations vain, willfully ignorant, impulsive, egoistic, gullible, and stupid.

Whereas, though it’s a matter of degree, their betters are generally only vain, egoistic, and often malevolent.

A sensible person would want to make a government more democratic only in order to give the many a chance to protect themselves from the predations and indifference of the few, managing for themselves a better share, so far as they are capable, of the benefits of civilization and social life.

And always in despite of the awful vulgarity of mass politics and mass culture.

Hence, by the way, a crucial function of the system of representation is and has always been to ensure those with their hands on power were not as bad as the people as a whole, and so would not rule as badly.

To keep the rabble out, in other words.

Not a perfect mechanism, no.

But something.

When to look back

The Dawn, aphorism 317 The judgment of the evening

To be borne in mind on considering the eternal return of the same.

Good advice for serial killers

The Dawn, aphorism 278 The gracious memory

And inveterate pederasts, serial rapists, and habitual criminals of all sorts!

Nietzsche no racist? No nationalist? No anti-Semite?

To my knowledge, no one has gone so far in sanitization as to claim Nietzsche was no sexist.

But there are now feminist “approaches” to his work and feminist “readings” that I have not read and likely will not read; so I cannot say for sure.

Still, since Kaufmann’s day it has become common for his readers, translators, interpreters, and writers of notes, commentaries, and introductions to say Nietzsche was no racist, no nationalist, and no anti-Semite.

Not really.

And despite what the unwary, incautious, or uninformed reader might take to be evident indications to the contrary in his work.

So they say.

But, just as a man is not apolitical for having failed to write a book on political justice, he is not an anti- or even non-racist for having refused to gush with enthusiasm over Chamberlain’s silly Teutonism.

Nor does that make him an anti- or non-nationalist (German, ethnic, or of any sort), either, "good European" though he may sometimes have claimed to be.

Nor is he a philo-Semite, an anti-anti-Semite, or even a non-anti-Semite for having rejected or despised the mass political and cultural phenomena of 19^th Century anti-Semitism.

Be your own judge.

See these aphorisms in The Dawn.

272 The purification of races on racial purity and mongrelization.

241 Fear and intelligence on the intellectual inferiority of blacks to whites.

334 The charitable man on the Jews.

Why, the PC lynch-mobs who forced MSNBC to fire Pat Buchanan and The National Review to get rid of John Derbyshire would have spared no effort to force publishers to refuse Nietzsche’s works as soon as they had got the scent, had they lived back in the day.

Nothing of Nietzsche’s would have won a National Book Award or ever come out as a Princeton Notable Book, you may be sure.

So who doesn’t think he’ll run for it?

Pistorius granted bail

Talk about a miscarriage of justice.

This was an abortion.

Well, didn’t you think something was up?

Papal resignation linked to inquiry into 'Vatican gay officials', says paper

I personally thought it had to do with the recent pedophilia scandals and the pope’s role in cover-ups and evasions of prosecution.

But maybe not.

I don’t find this Guardian story makes it clear just why or how the pope’s resignation is supposed to have been related to the alleged secret report, the gay clique, or blackmail.

No doubt the Italian press will have more for us, later.

A gentler – OK, less frank – way of saying, “It’s the class war, stupid!”

Why the 'Hip' Young Republicans Can't Change Their Party (or Themselves)

But a better title for Joe Conason’s article might by “Why it wouldn’t matter if they did make these changes.”