Random Thoughts

Not to be confused with eigenvalue.

And The New Yorker was born:

The Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

I am of course being unfair here to the New Yorker, which is a fine magazine to which I subscribe.  However, I do feel that they sometimes stray into this territory, especially when it comes to writing about current events that are outside their normal purview; good examples are the financial crisis or in a recent article about UAVs when they attempted to provide context on the laws of war.

A couple days late for the holiday, but this passage from Lincoln’s second inaugural address came to mind:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

We shouldn’t do this, but we should get our elected representatives to say so, not unelected judges.  And it should be our elected representatives, not judges, who decide how much people should be compensated in cases like this.  Unfortunately, by choosing to lobby the judiciary the New York Times is taking pressure off of where it needs to be — Congress.