That's pretty close to the actual law on the subject, leaving aside obvious exceptions like a Catholic priest can be fired if he becomes a Zoroastrian.

I think this is an underappreciated point. The "gorilla" version makes no damn sense. What could it mean? Maybe if Venus was relying on sheer power, the way Serena sometimes does, to overwhelm a small, light-hitting opponent, but that's not how the game was going.

I cannot imagine having sex with a 16 year old. Ugh. Really?

I used to imagine it all the time. But that was when I was between 15 and 17.

I doubt that any Philistines are going to make an issue of it. Besides, the Italians conceive of David as having been on their side.

We don't have statues of Rommel here in the U.S. We don't have statues of Admiral Yamamoto. We don't have statues of Benedict Arnold. We shouldn't have statues of Lee.

There comes a point where something is so f*****g obvious that there is no point in saying it just because some a*****e trumpets a related half-truth. Anyone who cares at all about what is true here knows what is true; anyone who doesn't won't be impressed by someone pointing it out.

Millenials do, in fact, suck. So did we.

It made my skin crawl and I'm a man. Why shouldn't it have made Hillary's skin crawl, and why shouldn't she say so? I would have turned around, told the sonofabitch to back off, and shoved him (even though he is several inches taller and considerably heavier), but then I'm never going to be President. Neither, as it turns out, was Hillary. Maybe she should have done it

"Don't be an asshole" can get most of us through most potentially sensitive gender- or race-charged situations. It's not that hard. And I'm an asshole.

There have been legal challenges to Ladies' Nights. I know of none that have been successful. The obvious purpose of ladies' nights is to stock the pond for the men.

Given what we think we know about physics and the size of the universe, there are two possibilities: (1) we're alone, and (2) we're not alone, but we'll never know. I'm not sure which is more depressing.

Aristophanes, if I recall correctly, was on the conservative side of Athenian politics, and made it pretty clear in his comedy. Vulgar innovators, as opposed to the established powers, have long been the target of choice for satirists. Remember the cop-out, suck-up ending to Tartuffe?

The advocates of each regional style of barbeque think theirs is the best. And they're all right. Here in NYC, which used to be a barbeque desert but isn't anymore, we don't have a regional style, though Texas and North Carolina seem to be the most commonly available. I think I've had them all except for Alabama white-sauce style and Kentucky mutton, and I'll eat whatever version you put in front of me as long as it's good.

Remember when it used to be a thing to condemn Obama for not using the Magic Phrase "Radical Islamist Terrorism"? And how pumped up Trump was whenever he used it?

My impression is similar, and I think it is most apparent in fields where you don't have good objective measures of quality and where you start your career -- or if you start it at all -- is more a function of connections and networks. A bright undergraduate who wants to be a journalist (some would say that's a contradiction) and a handful of clippings has a much better shot if those clippings appeared in the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News because he or she knows people who know people. Someone in the sciences, not so much.
If your field generally requires graduate education, where you got your undergraduate degree doesn't matter that much, within reason. The admissions offices at the elite graduate programs know that X State or some small regional liberal arts college is good, and if you have a sterling record there you'll beat out a middling Ivy undergrad.
But then the quality/connections-network issue repeats itself. A new Ph.D. in a hard science can point to real, measurable indicia of quality. A kid fresh out of law school can't. Is a middling Columbia Law graduate better than a Brooklyn Law Review editor? I don't know and neither do the BigLaw hiring partners. But guess who gets the easiest shot at what are regarded as the best jobs?

If we all worked very hard at something, we'd all become much better at it. We might become astonishingly better at it. If I had worked as hard at basketball as Lebron James, I'd have become an amazing basketball player, kicking a lot of ass at pickup games. But I wouldn't have gotten a scholarship to a major college program or gotten a whiff of the NBA. There is such a thing as talent. Lebron working half as hard as he does would still be a far better basketball player than I could ever have been, but if he had done nothing but sit around eating Cheetos while watching MJ play he wouldn't be anything.
There are people who are just "good at math." They'll pick it up faster and see deeper into it with ordinary effort. They're the ones who, if they work hard enough, become math Ph.D.s and solve Fermat's theorem. Few of us can aspire to that no matter how hard we work; but too many people give up on their pre-college math because they're "not good at math." It's true that they aren't as good as those who are "good at math," but they're plenty good enough, if they work at it reasonably diligently, to master what is taught through high school and, possibly, a bit beyond. We pay too much attention to talent, which is a real thing, and not enough to effort.

I've always wanted to bring back Zeus-ism and the Olympian pantheon. The world is run by a committee and all its members are working at cross-purposes. Seems to be the best fit to the facts.

"Dense urban centers" are dense because they have more people than rural areas. Acreage doesn't get a vote.

It's just you.

Whenever Ross Douthat -- who long ago revealed himself to be immature and lacking in honor on such matters -- writes about sex, I get the urge to slap him and say, "Shut up, kid. The grownups are talking."

It isn't easy to be more cynical than I am, but I think you have me beat. As I read Breyer, all he was saying was that if you can send a fire truck to keep the church school from burning down and killing the kids, and everyone seems to agree you can, you can pay for rubber matting in the playground to keep the kids from splitting their skulls when they fall off the monkey bars.
I have always thought that the Supremes will uphold vouchers anyway, on the theory that -- to use NYC examples -- if you give money (or its equivalent) to parents who can use it for either Horace Mann or Regis, they, and not the government, are deciding who gets it.

I generally dislike Breyer opinions (though not as much as I dislike Kennedy opinions) both when he's right and when he's wrong. So I was surprised to see him write something short and sweet, coming to what seemed to me the right conclusion for a simple and sufficient reason, and then shutting up. In some recent opinions, various Justices have tut-tutted their colleagues about saying or doing more than needs to be done or said to decide the case at hand, but then turn right around and spew when they feel the need to get something off their own chests.

As an old soldier once explained to me, unless you are willing to go to the point where you annihilate the other side, a war ends only when the loser says it ends. Only a handful of countries could cause the US even to break a sweat if we were willing to fight to the point of annihilation. But who would do anything to us that would justify a war of annihilation? What goal we could reasonably want to accomplish short of national survival would justify a war of annihilation? So when we get involved in discretionary disputes over which contending bunch of thugs runs what crappy country, if the answer to that question matters more to the thugs we don't like or their respective supporters than it does to us, we can't justify turning the crappy country into a parking lot and we eventually have to find a way to give up without looking like losers.

Cuz really, if you think about the state of play as it is right now, what do inner city black folk have to lose at this point?

The usual, and probably best, way to get an answer to this question would be to ask some of them.

How many ordinary people actually are armed? I don't mean there's a shotgun or a .22 somewhere in the house, I mean armed in a practical sense.