Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense. - John Leonard

In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.

Military people have a heavy investment in rules against torture, not only because we want to protect our own POWs from reciprocal brutalities, as a former general counsel for the Department of the Navy explains here, but also because war is so terrible that it desperately requires any limits anyone can agree on, any gesture toward dignity, any mitigation suggesting civilized scruple. There isn’t even persuasive evidence that torture makes its victims tell their secrets, instead of saying whatever we want to hear. From an international leader in the cause of human rights and democratic values, the U.S. has turned into an unaccountable bully.

When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.