A PACT*:

I make a pact with you, Alexis de Tocqueville -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a non-Straussian textualist father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
I still think Democracy in America is way overrated,
But Ancien Regime was pretty cool**.
We don't really have 'one sap' or 'one root,' but that's okay -
Let there be commerce between us.

*I'd be interested to hear what my mother thinks about their 'Rate this poem' feature on the page.
**except for all that stuff about taxes, which was a little boring

LINK: Again, making no claim to impartiality (and having spent a lot of time this morning with the relevant NYT article, which implies that it's unclear that anyone did anything illegal), the government has decided to spare KPMG, at least for now.

HE'S OBVIOUSLY NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION THIS SEASON: From SI.com on the Yankees picking up Mark Bellhorn (emphasis mine):

"The Yankees are one of the most well-known franchises in all of sports. Not everybody gets to play for them."

VARIOUS:

From earlier this evening:

Joel: Look at what I wrote on the lamp
Nick: Um, "dust me?'
[Nick looks at lamp, sees it says 'carpe diem']
Nick: A fish a day?

Also, on ridiculous names for school mascots:

"Blue (Wellesley), Brown and White (Lehigh), Cardinal (Stanford), Purple Pride (Nyack College): Institutions of higher learning should be more creative than rooting for a color."

But what if it's a superintelligent shade of blue?

ALSO MUSICALLY RELATED: Stylus has an excellent 'non-definitive guide" to 50s rock-n-roll singles. Good stuff.

LINK: Eternal debates: Diamond Dave or Van Hagar?

LINKS: A couple of thoughts on Christianity and politics. First, against the normally insightful Ross Douthat, writing here on the Intelligent Design movement, it seems to me generally wrong to think of Christians as people who... how to put this delicately... particularly care about whether or not holding some position 'damages' them in the long term, politically speaking. Even if you're of the evolutionist-and-Christian camp, presumably it's very clear to you why your Christianity has to come first, not your politics.

David Wayne speaks excellently to this:

"Ultimately the Christian worldview transcends the limited number of issues and platforms that political parties try to define us by and squeeze us into. Christians aren't to settle in on a limited number of "values" that will define us as a voting block but to embrace the whole truth of the whole Christian worldview, then let this truth guide us in all our decisions, including political ones."

YOUR COMPLETELY USELESS WEATHER.COM WEATHER DESCRIPTION OF THE DAY: as noted at 4:25 pm for Durham:

"Thunder in the Vicinity"

What on earth is that supposed to mean?

YOUR LATIN FUN FOR THE DAY:

"Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus."

-Horace, Ars Poetica, 9

translated in the very amusing book of Latin maxims I was given yesterday as:

"The mountain groaned loudly in great labor, then bore a tiny mouse."

slightly more accurately (but less amusingly):

"The mountains are in labor; a laughable* mouse will be born."

*'ridiculus' could also be 'droll' or 'amusing,' which makes me suspect this mouse could have a good second career as a comedian, or at least a decent dinner-party guest

LINK: There are a number of legitimate criticisms one can make of Christopher Hitchens, a number of ideological stands he takes that I can understand reasonable people dissenting with, and his politics in recent years have been such that one can probably apply, with various degrees of accuracy, a number of labels to them, but this isn't one of them:

"The anti-clerical side of Christopher Hitchens' curious brand of New World Straussism..."

I'm not sure what exactly 'Straussism' is (is it anything like Straussianism? Or perhaps just shorthand for 'Jewish neoconservatism?'), but I'm hardly sure it follows: even if one can produce some text of Strauss' which shares similar political sentiments to something Hitch has written, aren't there other, more proximate influences that are able to explain his political influences? I can't see the functional purpose of this, except to be snotty and disrespectful*.

*I happen to think the article that's being discussed is rather entirely off-base, and I don't really agree with much of anything Hitch says on organized religion, but I can still manage to separate out what I like from what I don't.