For those of you who didn’t see any new posts yesterday, I did post them.  I’m not sure why they didn’t go up.  We’re trying to figure this out.

Also, please check out Regina Spektor.  I’m listening to her new album, Begin to Hope.  She’s fantastic!

And a great video too.

I’m not anti-military.  My dad was in the military.  I think a modern government has to have people with means of violence who can protect peace and democracy.  Civilian control of the military is crucial as well, along with not having military industry in bed with senators in bed with constituents in bed with the Pentagon to keep making weapons we don’t need.  But that’s another can of beans.

So.  I’m not ant-military.  But I am anti-lying, and I’m anti-picking-on-the-poor.  A friend of mine told me about a military recruitment in Pilsen, a predominantly Mexican and low-income neighborhood in Chicago: army recruiters came with Hummers and lots of video games: The kids played Madden Football and that was it.  The Military is just like that, right?  Video games and Hummers!

I know we need people in the military, and I know it’s got to be a hard sell, but then put in a draft.  Stop grabbing the poorest of the poor with misdirection and obfuscation and sending them off to fight a war we shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place.

So: my first instinct is not to trust private armies, which, in other times, were called mercenaries. But that’s not genteel enough for this–much more civilized–war.

But Blackwater is making a lot of people angry. This from TIME:

But Maliki offered his own solution on Wednesday, recommending that the U.S. embassy in Baghdad change the company it uses to provide security. “This crime has generated a lot of hatred in the government and the people against Blackwater,” Maliki told reporters. “For their own interests, the Americans should hire a new company to protect their people so they can move freely.” The Iraqi premier also ordered a full investigation into Sunday’s firefight. Maliki has made it clear that he will raise the subject with Bush during their New York meeting, saying he won’t tolerate “the killing of our citizens in cold blood.” A U.S. government report of the incident that first appeared on TIME.com, says that Blackwater guards shot back only in response to small arms fire. The company has said its employees killed and wounded armed insurgents, not civilians. Yesterday, Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior released an account of the incident that differed substantially from the U.S. report. The ministry said that Blackwater initiated the firefight, killing as many as 20 civilians.

Also from US News and this from the CSM:

Iraqis have long bristled at the presence of the private guards, who they claim are little more than mercenaries with little respect for Iraqi lives and less discipline than uniformed US troops.

An Iraqi police officer who works in Karada, a mixed sectarian neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, says the foreign private security firms act out of their own interests as they jet through the city and seem to pay little heed to the dangers they pose to average citizens on the street.

The officer says employees of the firms use overly aggressive tactics, crashing into cars and disobeying traffic laws and often rolling over gardens and hitting trees – and never stopping.

These guards do not have the kind of investment that soldiers have.  They are there for a check–and while I’m sure that they have lots of different motivations to be in Iraq, I would wager lots of money that a survey of soldiers in Iraq and private “guards” would reveal significantly different motivations.

Don’t Worry.  He still doesn’t believe in God.  But at least he’s prettier.  This is a hilarious article.

Men don’t wash their hands in the bathroom nearly as often as women do.  Not really shocking, actually, speaking as, well, a man.  But still.  Get on the ball!  Or, as it were, the soap!

“Guys need to step up to the sink,” said Brian Sansoni, spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association, which co-sponsors the survey and related education campaigns.

Frequent hand washing is the single best thing people can do to avoid getting sick, from colds and the flu to germs lurking in food, doctors say. And a recent Harris Interactive survey found 92 percent of Americans said they usually or always wash up after using the bathroom.

Give ‘em the vote guys.  Come on.  Andrew Sullivan has more.

Hey all you seniors in college!  You don’t want to get a real job next year do you?  Of course not.  Plus, why work for the Man right away?  You’ll have all your life to maintain the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed while doing a job you non-so-secretly hate.

Seriously, consider a volunteer year or even a series of years.  There are all sorts of options.  Teach for America (whose deadline is approaching) is just one of many excellent teaching programs that take exceptional graduates with no teaching experience and help them teach for a few years or, even better, for a lifetime.  Other programs include ACE out of Notre Dame, the New York City Teaching Fellows, and lots and lots of others–quite a few give you a free masters and allow you the salary of whatever you’d be paid as a teacher (which, let’s be honest, isn’t much).

Also consider a volunteer program.  I did Dominican Volunteers USA and it was great.  Quite a few of my friends did the Jesuit Volunteer Corp, but there are lots and lots of others as well.

Other great places for volunteer resources are Idealist and the Catholic Network of Volunteer Services.  Check them both out

The point is that if you’re young and don’t have to raise kids yet, do something that’s countercultural and exciting, something like living the Gospel values as fully as you can.  Be radical!  And maybe you’ll have the guts (and I’m looking for these guts too) to look the world in the face and stay living the Gospel, even after your 20’s are over.

More pop genetics on altruism and on loneliness.  I need to be clear here: I believe in evolution.  I believe that much of our personalities and temperaments are in our genes.  I believe that there are powerful biological incentives for everything I do, some of which I might rationalize as my free choice when, in fact, I was free to choose nothing–I just did what my body wanted me to do.

Fine.

But at the same time, I believe that human freedom does exist, and that a vast amount of my life is created by social structures, family, peer, and cultural influences, and, you know–and I know this is shocking–my own decisions.  So, if you’re going to write about genetics links to behavior, that’s fine.  And I’m sure it does exist.  But just be careful you make clear–genes influence behavior.  They do not determine behavior.  And there are a lot of other elements of life that influence behavior too.

Ross Douthat writes in reaction to an article by Rachel Donadio about the grand debates of what should or should not be in the literary canon.  I actually think, particularly for Americans, Morrison is critically important to read, and requiring a multicultural literature to reflect a multicultural country (and, well, world) seems blatantly important.

This did happen to some extent: As Donadio writes, “In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars … In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.” Obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing, but it wouldn’t be all that objectionable if most students at top-flight colleges were being required to read this group of authors; a week wasted on Sula seems a small price to pay for a student body that’s acquainted with Shakespeare’s tragedies. The trouble is that they aren’t. Instead of keeping requirements in place but compromising on their content, too many colleges - my alma mater included - rushed to embrace the “modes of inquiry” (or in Harvard-ese, “approaches to knowledge”) view of education, and then breathed a sigh of relief that they’d set aside the messy debates over whether there’s a Proust of the Papuans, while freeing their overspecialized young professors from the burdens of teaching survey courses. And that was how the canon wars ended - they made a desert, and called it peace.

There is the question of literary quality, and then also the question–which Charles Taylor tackles well in Multiculturalism–of whether a Tolstoy proper could come from the Zulus (Saul Bellow famously and allegedly said that he would love to read the Zulus if they ever produced a Tolstoy).  A Zulu genius (says Taylor) would not develop as a Russian one would, so he or she would not be recognized as a Tolstoy.  One would have to get to know that culture well enough to know if this work was brilliant or not.  So quality is a trickier subject.  But cultural inclusion, if for nothing beyond pragmatic purposes, seems a good idea.

Which is why the death of a canon is all the more lamentable–the “multiple modes of inquiry” tracks produce even more division in the professions, the academy, and the educated elite.  We need common experiences to unite us (even if it’s literature’s surrogate experience), and I don’t see why that couldn’t be reading about this one kid named Macon Dead III, and how he tried to fly.

An interesting article on religions fighting global warming, but more interesting, I think, as an example of a utilitarian reading of God from a science journal.  Why is religion not a complete waste?  Oh look!  It gets these religious folks to do religious things.  God as weapon; God as social improver; God as opium.  Whatever: it’s the same principle.  God only makes sense as a means.

God is an end though.  At least, that’s what I hope anyways.