Even the pearls you clutch are glistening white

I tend to be on the cranky-about-affirmative-action end of the liberal spectrum, so if even the reactionary N. Merrill is peeved about some race issue, it must be awful. Yet I am peeved.

And the proximate cause of the peevishness is the way in which pundits have talked about Obama’s search for Souter’s replacement. See here and here and here for examples.

Three obvious thoughts, stated here only because I’m surprised and annoyed by the inanity of the pundit conversations so far:

Child abuse.

Ron Paul’s son is named Rand? Apparently. I can’t believe nobody told me this.

“Now, I want some California wine….”

It’s a great irony (perhaps sufficiently remarked on by historians, perhaps not) that one of the principal architects of the American West was a Vermonter—Justin Smith Morrill. I just came across a Morrill item that—unusually, as I do not think he was much for humor—made me smile, just a little.

Perkins, Stern sent Morrill “by Express … four cases of our wines, which we beg you to accept”—why? Because they had “noticed the very sensible and praiseworthy position, which you have taken upon the taxation of American wines.”

Morrill replied, “Now, I want some California wine, though not quite so much as 4 cases just now, but I am quite able to pay for all I need and I cannot accept of any [sic] wine from you in view of your interests and the positions I hold. If, however, you will send me a bill of the wine forwarded, at your usual prices, I will take it, and at once remit the amount…. Of course I think we ought and can largely increase the California wines and the best way to do that is to make them better and cheaper in our markets than similar foreign wines.”

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Correspondence from the Morrill papers, December 1865.

Memory as a remedy for evil.

For the last in this spring’s speakers series, Tzvetan Todorov will talk on whether memory is an adequate remedy for evil: do our injunctions not to forget, do our truth and reconciliation commissions do us any good?

A renowned and accomplished scholar whose more than twenty books include major contributions to intellectual history among other fields, Todorov received the 2008 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences.

As always, these talks are free and open to the public.

EXEUNT ALL. Including HERO AGENT.

I haven’t posted at all regarding the torture memos because I’ve been far too angry to write much more than expletives or “seriously?”  But here is something poorly reasoned from the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit*: that we need to be able to torture because one day, we might catch Osama, he might tell us that he knows where all of the bombs are, and Obama won’t let us beat him up in order to save American lives….

A response,one that contains no ventings of spleens, after the jump.

Are we like you? I can’t be sure.

Compiling a three-disc Britpop collection and calling it Common People? Practically de rigeur. Doing same without a single song by Oasis or Blur? Guaranteed to make the hipsters happily adopt swaggering aggro postures.

Yet, though they’ve omitted the two most predictable bands, they’ve picked the more predictable songs for the other bands. These are choices one can understand, though one does want to mention Divine Comedy‘s “National Express” and Stereophonics‘s “I Wouldn’t Believe Your Radio” as perfectly acceptable alternatives.

Still, lots of good stuff there. I guess anyone who cares to, can treat this as a Bérubé-esque Arbitrary but Fun Friday thread. The first person to mention C*ldpl*y is banned.

Also, the 1990s are history, aren’t they?