Jul. 3rd, 2003

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Hey, does anyone else remember how some of the people who opposed an invasion of Iraq worried that it was a distraction from more pressing matters like North Korea and the hunt for Al Qaeda? And how war proponents like Donald Rumsfeld said, "Oh, pish-tosh!" (I'm paraphrasing.) "The American military can do more than one thing at a time!"
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, several West African countries, and Britain and France have called on the United States to take the lead in a peacekeeping operation in Liberia, which was established by freed American slaves in 1822. But the Pentagon is reluctant to stretch its military resources even thinner when it has more than 200,000 troops in the Persian Gulf region and about 10,000 in Afghanistan.
In case you're wondering what "even thinner" means:
The Army now has more than half of its 10-division active duty force assigned to Iraq. There is the equivalent of another division deployed in Afghanistan, and two to three are typically kept in reserve for a potential confrontation with North Korea. And, because the Army likes to keep three or four divisions training and preparing to eventually replace each division in action, the Pentagon at the moment has no troops to replace many of those on extended deployments in Iraq.
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Michael Kinsley:
So, we have two options here. We can add gay marriage to the short list of controversies—abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty—that are so frozen and ritualistic that debates about them are more like Kabuki performances than intellectual exercises. Or we can think outside the box. There is a solution that ought to satisfy both camps and may not be a bad idea even apart from the gay-marriage controversy.

That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, Dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I've got it: Privatize marriage.
He glosses over pretty much all the problems with this idea, but it's still an interesting read.
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I went to see The Philadelphia Story tonight at the Stanford Theatre. It struck me during the last scene, where those who should be united finally are, that the Katharine Hepburn I fell in love with out in the woods in Bringing Up Baby in Garfield Hall in my freshman year--as opposed to the actual flesh-and-blood human being with the same name--will never die. So that's something. Later I walked back to my car through California light.

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