From Gauche:

Stealing is not intrinsic to being in jail — indeed, the two are not logically related at all.

That seems like an enforcement problem. If every citizen thought stealing = jail or stealing = punishment then logic would say we would have a much lower crime rate. The problem is that most potential criminals think stealing = free stuff.

From E.D.

Is the murderer responsible for his punishment? Yes. In that sense he brings that punishment upon himself. Should the punishment be death? I would argue, no. Should there be punishment? Yes, but not the death penalty.

We're in agreement that the murderer is responsible for the punishment he receives. We're just in disagreement over what that punishment should be.

Let me put it a different way: If I turn on a stove and you knowingly put your hand on the burner, you have burned yourself. I simply provided the means of doing so. In that respect, the state merely supplies the stove (law) and the thief applies his hand to the 'flame of justice' if you will. By saying the state imprisons the thief it seems to imply the responsibility for his imprisonment lies not wigth himself for committing the act, but with the state for establishing the consequences of said act.

Gauche,

If thr law says, "Steal from someone and you will spend a week in jail," do you dispute that the thief put themself in the jail cell?

As for E.D. 's dilema, i understand it. As a Catholic I am supposed to take a consistently pro-life position, regardless of political affiliation. I simply do not lump capital punishment and abortion together.

We all have laws we don't like E.D. If as a concerned citizen you are trying to change said law to the best of your ability, I don't think that makes you complicit. Staying in the U.S. and doing nothing perhaps would.

As for fighting conscripts, yes, that is a tough call.

E.D. , Gauche,

By my reckoning, if the law says the pre-exsiting punishment for murder is death then the convicted murder has killed himself. As for soldiers, E.D. specifically mentioned Iraq so I was thinking of the all-volunteer U.S. military.

In all of this there is the matter of continuity and compromise. It always strikes me as odd when I listen to these conservatives who oppose abortion but cheer-lead the war in Iraq, or who chatter on about the value of life and then condone the death penalty.

The conservative arguement, which I support, is that the murderer and the foreign soldier have free choice. The fetus does not.

The way I see it this question comes down to one question: is personal experience an obstacle or an asset to a judge? If we argue that experience is an obstacle (bias) then I could see the point of just trying to load the court up with a diversity of experience to counteract one another.

I'm actually more troubled by the notion of personal experience being an asset i.e. the 'empathy' question. This implies that a black judge is a better judge on racial matters, a judge who grew up poor on poverty issues, etc. I don't like that. One, it undermines our justice system and two, it negates the purpose of lawyers. While I am no legal scholar I have listened to a lot of cases being argued before SCOTUS. One of the things that is unique about cases brought before panels of judges is the arguement process. It is the job of the counsels to effectively present the case and interpret their legal position. If done correctly, personal experience should be irrelevant. To the contrary, a lack of experience may be an asset in listening to these arguments.

I don't have a problem with Sotomayor admitting she has biases. I just don't want to hear her say that makes her a better judge.

The treaty was certainly a contributing factor, but there was also post-war inflation and then a world-wide Depression. If the arguement is that we don't have to crush enemies and instead should just offer them more pleasant treaties...I guess I would question how pleasant it was for Germany and Japan after WWII. Germany being split in half and both being placed under occupation couldn't have been that fun.

After WWI Germany still had an intact army and a viable infrastructure. That's why people like Hitler found the terms of Versailles to be so outrageous. After WWII Germany and Japan were completely and utterly destroyed and they also had a very hungry Soviet Union breathing down their necks. They needed us more than we needed them. That wasn't the case in post WWI Germany.

From Chris:

post WWII (West) Germany and Japan were integrated by re-building the society.

Wouldn't the logic then be that in order to help 'rebuild' you first have to destroy? The arguement has been made for a long time that at least part of the reason why Germany was so bitter is because they didn't suffer the destruction that France did.

The completely cynical answer is that WWI didn't really 'end'. The armistice was severely flawed and the period between the wars was just one German treaty violation after another. In some ways it is analagous to post Desert Storm Iraq, although obviously Part II played out much differently in the second case.

I think if WWII showed us anything it is that the only way to really prevent your enemy from harboring resentment and waiting for revenge is to kick the snot out of them so bad that the thought of fighting again is seen as insanity.

The official line from the White House this morning was that his speech today was supposed to position him as an intellectual, non-partisan voice on security issues.

The moral of the story is an old one. Obama could advocate the exact same policies as Bush but because they come from his mouth they are going to accept. In fact, Obama is already moving beyond Bush by considering preventive detention.

I've long argued a similar point Will. Once Obama was elected he gained access to information that would probably make most of our heads spin (insert Hollywood image of Area 51 and the JFK assasination here). I think that's at least in part the reason he has pumped the brakes on the torture witch hunt. I suspect he knows that we DID get some actionable intelligence from some of the interrogations and for many Americans that will be enough to close the book on the question of torture necessity.

I don't think college is the only path by any account. It is one path. Another is technical training. Companies are hungry for skilled workers such as machinists, welders, etc. Another would be to join the military or the Peace Corps and learn some skills there. There are plenty of paths, but if we're talking about the subject of this post....I think a liberal arts education is beneficial.

Perhaps the best skill I developed was not my writing ability or my research ability or my ability organize information... it was establishing myself as a 'lifelong learner'. I've been out of college for 6 years now and I am not bragging when I say I think my knowledge base has probably doubled. College established a real hunger for knowledge and technology (God bless the Internet) has facilitated that.

There was a great article at The American Scene the other day where we discussed how the Internet is changing the way we process and store info. (http://theamericanscene.com/2009/05/11/your-brain-is-an-index) A college education prepares us for that IMO.

I majored in history and anthropology, both liberal arts fields. I felt like I got a pretty good education even though I was at a 'good, not great' institution. After trying to make a living as an archaeologist for 3 years and tiring of working a second job to pay the bills, I started looking for another career. I now work for a very large Fortune 500 company in finance. Why? Because only about 10% or less of our workforce have degrees. Those two lines on my resume have translated to thousands of dollars in additional compensation. For better or for worse, a lot of employers respect a degree, regardless of the subject matter.

Just anectdotally I can tell you from working with and interviewing other employees that just about anyone with a degree brings certain basic skills that non-degree holders often lack. Public speaking, writing skills, the ability to explain things in sufficent detail to others.... these are skills developed in a liberal arts program. I would take a degree holder 9 times out of 10. That's not bias. that's just good business.

I have to admit I enjoyed all of Brown's novels. i've always had this unique ability to enjoy even mediocre prose as long as the story is action-packed. I suppose it comes from a childhood filled with comic books. I also read a lot of Brad Thor and Vince Flynn who write at roughly the same quality but pack in so much action you can't help but enjoy the books.

I happened to have read Angels & Demons just a couple of months before Pope John Paul II passed away. I appreciated the incite into the process to select a pope and all of the ceremony surrounding it.

For all of the anti_catholic criticism, as a Catholic myself one thing I have always loved is the richness of our institutions and ceremonies. I think Brown's books celebrate that to a point.

I think that if you look at previous administrations you will find they broke the law in a variety of ways in the interest of national security, torture just being one example. Al Gore is on record as supporting illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists under Clinton. Are we to really believe they were treated with kid gloves after we got them?

Democrats have been pressing for a truth commission and/or prosecutions of something that we all know was probably also done under previous administrations. Justice cannot be selective. It's like asking Lady Liberty to lift her skirt but to stop at her ankles. I think the GOP is correct in pointing out that this is much bigger than one administration and one party.

As I have repeated many, many times, the best way to prove this is about more than one last pound of flesh from Bush and Co. is to go back to 1947.

E.D. - That's probably about the best analogy you could make. Like I said, they're good kids, just a little too serious about what they are doing.

I was a Boy Scout for many years, but never an Explorer. Most of the Explorer troops are attached to police departments, fire departments, etc. The kids in them get uniforms that make them look like the real deal. They carry walkie-talkies, etc on tool belts to make them look even more officials. They often work special events directing traffic or whatnot. In my experience they are alsmost always good kids but they are the kind that are 'hangers-on' to these organizations and maybe have a little bit too much fantasy involved.

With a district level curriculum you pretty much ensure kids are rarely exposed to anything outside of that district and that includes cultural institutions as well as kids in other places. It creates a very myoptic view of the world.

I don't think they are better per se but I think from a logisitical perspective they make a lot more sense. As someone who helped write teaching programs for several historic sites and museums, I can tell you that under the current standards you really can't appeal much to school systems outside of your immediate area because it's too difficult to keep up with everyone's curriculum. With a national curriculum a museum in Nebraska could host online tours for kids in Deleware and know they were meeting specific components of their curriculum. A shared curriculum would make inter-state collaborations between teachers and classrooms much easier. With the level of communication and technology we have in this country it's actually kind of ridiculous not to go this route and take advantage of the possibilities.

There's also the possibility of a blessed side-effect where ID is killed for good.

E.D. - Yes - there are lots of distrcits. That's where a national curriculum would be a very good thing.

E.D. - My company employees thousands of people in hundreds of different roles. Somehow we calculate how to give merit raises to all of them yearly. There are what, maybe a dozen different possible sujects a highschool teacher could teach. We can't come up with 12 different assesment tools?