LotR: same old thing?

Go get ’em! The LP responds to the notorious infamous “if you buy dope you’re supporting terrorism” spot with this newspaper advertisement. (Thanks to Ananda, who credits Declan McCullagh.)

Pet peeve nº 17000: false precision. When you write “boosts . . . by 17,000 percent” do you really expect anyone to divide the original number (if it were available) by 100, multiply it by 17000 and add it back? Do you really expect me to believe that the increase is known to be neither more than 17005% nor less than 16995%? Would it be harder to write “171-fold”?

The funniest example I’ve seen of pseudo-precision was a package of sandwich-bags marked “25% free! 32 for the price of 25.”

What made 1861 such a hot topic in the blogs of late? Douglas Turnbull wrote:

So yes, there may be a Constitutional case for a state’s right to secede from the Union, but the Southern states did not secede just to show they could, to demonstrate the proof of the abstract principle of states rights. They seceded because they felt their pecific right to slavery was in danger from Lincoln and the North, and then used the argument of states rights as a justification. I really don’t see how anyone can plausibly deny the primary role that slavery played in the decision of the Southern states to secede.

An argument has been made that the issue of slavery was a proxy for Southern sectional interest, rather than the reverse.

Northern population was growing more rapidly than Southern. (Lincoln was the first president elected without a single Southern vote.) Southerners called for the extension of slavery into the new Western states in the hope that Western senators would tend to align with the South. When the crunch came, “a threat to the sanctity of our distinctive domestic institution” made a better sound-bite than “the increasing irrelevance of our votes.”

This view is bolstered by the facts that Congress proposed an Amendment protecting slavery – and that this gesture did the Union cause little if any good: none of the seven(?) preceding secessions was reversed, and four more followed.

My housemate was talking to a physician this morning (didn’t say why) and mentioned my snoring. The physician imitated the sound of sleep apnea, and it sounded (I’m told) exactly like a noise that I make.

She suggested I have my uvula removed. But, if memory serves, my old acquaintance H.J.N.C.Andruschak had that done and it did not affect his snoring.

Such an operation also would impair my (unrealized) ability to speak Arabic or Eskimo.

xearth is among my favorite toys. I set it to look down from the Moon; right now the Earth is completely black, which means the Moon is full.

Office lottery in ancient Athens.

In short, the lottery – and the great Iron Age pachinko machine that was its finest expression and most powerful tool – made the first democracy what it was. Together, the system and its technology enabled Athenians not just to recognize but to live what Aristotle, in his Politics, considered one of democracy’s defining principles: “ruling and being ruled in turn.”

Amendment XVII to the U.S.Constitution removed a bit of diversity – and thus a layer of sanity-checking – from the Federal legislature, by making both houses elected in the same way. If indirect election had to be replaced, better to replace it with something else entirely; lottery is the obvious choice.

I thought the “. . . Not!” construction was new when Wayne & Garth used it, but here it is in the mouth of Archie Goodwin:

“We know she didn’t kill her husband. Either you thought she had and probably still do, or you killed him yourself. If the former, your feeling for her has got a smudge. If the latter, you did a swell job, not, handling it so that she gets the credit for it.”

“Death of a Demon” by Rex Stout, published 1961 as part of Homicide Trinity.