August 31, 2002
Poetry
A TOPICAL HAIKU:
(Click the link and scroll down to see the picture.)
| Drifting toward the earth
| Like cherry blossom in Spring,
| Bush's numbers fall.
(With thanks to Mike O'Hare for advice on natural history and scansion.)
Posse Comitatus
MAGNA CARTA, IT AIN'T: The Administration's effort to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act in order to get the military more fully involved in homeland security seems to have hit a brick wall. Maybe that's a good outcome. But let's not get too misty-eyed about the Posse Comitatus Act as some sort of sacred tradition: that was the law that ended Reconstruction and ushered in the era of Jim Crow.
August 30, 2002
Rave On:
All right-thinking people know that Joseph Biden's proposed "RAVE Act" is a piece of mean-spirited foolishness. But here's an argument that, once again, all right-thinking people might just possibly be wrong.
Incentive Management
DUKENFIELD'S LAW OF INCENTIVE MANAGEMENT: W.C. Fields said, "If a thing's worth winning, it's worth cheating for." Designers of incentive-management systems ignore that principle at their peril. What high-stakes school testing and stock options for CEO's have in common.
On Preventive War
ON PREVENTIVE WAR: Going to war with Iraq might be a terrible idea -- I think it probably is -- but you couldn't really call it "unprovoked," could you? Or have we suddenly decided that France shouldn't have resisted the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936?