Later On

Interesting:

Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins
by Ted Lendon

A review by James Carman

“The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable,” wrote Thucydides in his fifth-century BC chronicle of the Peloponnesian War. Most scholars have accepted his explanation for the causes of the three-decade struggle that reshaped the Greek world. Thucydides’ writings greatly influenced the thinking of 17th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes about how and why great powers come into conflict. Together, writes University of Virginia historian J. E. Lendon, Thucydides and Hobbes are “the progenitors of the theoretical realism that abides in today’s universities and think tanks.”

But Lendon demurs. He argues that the first 10 years of the Peloponnesian War are best understood not as a struggle between two mighty opponents for survival, but as an often petty contest over time, “which consisted of esteem by others and others’ confirmation of one’s lofty impression of one’s own merits,” with the rest of the Greek world occupying the twin roles of audience and judge.

When the war began, in 431 BC, Sparta, both because of its heroic defense against the Persians at Thermopylae earlier in the century and its frequently demonstrated prowess in land battles, possessed the greater time, and had allied itself with other land-based powers such as Corinth. But Athens dominated the seas and had acquired its own empire of tribute-paying islands. The resulting wealth had enabled the Athenians to build the mighty Acropolis as well as an impregnable wall that protected their port of Piraeus, and they hungered to be seen as Sparta’s equal.

Although the surest way to win such respect was to defeat Sparta on the battlefield, Pericles and other Athenian leaders knew there was little hope of that. Instead, Athens employed a strategy that the playwright Aristophanes later described as “one pot, whacked, kicking back in anger at another pot.” When Spartan forces marched into their lands, the Athenians refused to fight, and the invading warriors could only destroy the crops that lay outside the city walls. Athens, meanwhile, sent its dreaded triremes around the Peloponnesian peninsula, raiding and destroying coastal villages and harrying far-off allies of Sparta to whom the Spartans could not provide promised defense. Though each side worried at various points that its adversary was angling for a destructive advantage, the war was never about extermination.

Lendon is a gifted storyteller and military historian. His Soldiers and Ghosts (2005) is a rewarding journey through classical warfare from the Trojan War to the Roman conquests, and the ancient battles he reenacts with his University of Virginia students are regular campus spectacles. In Song of Wrath, he deftly explains how battles could turn as much on misapprehensions and chance as on bravery and superior skill. This was especially true at Pylos and Sphacteria (425 BC), where Sparta suffered its most ignoble defeat and — almost unthinkable! — surrendered rather than fight to the death. Lendon writes that “after that Sparta was merely playing for a draw,” which it achieved after besting the Athenians in several battles.

Although most histories of the Peloponnesian War encompass the intervening decade of uneasy peace that followed and Sparta’s eventual defeat of Athens at the great sea battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, Lendon ends his history with the Peace of Nicias in 421 BC, when the Athenians were up. “The Athenians won both the war itself and, no less necessary in a war of symbols, the simultaneous war to define victory and defeat,” he writes. In his view, the Athenians’ subsequent doom — including their devastating loss of more than 40,000 men who were killed or taken prisoner in a risky expedition to Sicily in 415-413 BC — was brought on only when they “began to look around for some mighty deed they could perform that would raise their rank in the eyes of the Greeks.”

Athens was not, of course, the last power that would overreach and sow the seeds of its own destruction, which is one reason why the world still seeks to draw lessons from this long-ago struggle. But today, Lendon says, the Peloponnesian War’s most telling insights may be about “international actors whose aims and actions the contemporary West finds it hardest to understand and manage: the wrathful ones… who seek revenge for ancient slights.”

James Carman is managing editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

Here’s what I’ve been blogging about:

That’s a one (US) quart jar, and will make about 2.5 cups of Worcestershire sauce. (The jar contains a lot of stuff that is filtered out: crushed ginger root, garlic cloves, cinnamon stick, chili de arbol peppers, cardamon seed, cloves, peppercorns, and so on.) I highly recommend making your own: it’s quite easy once you’ve gathered the ingredients, and of course tailoring it to your own taste is particularly appealing. Here’s the recipe.

Not Scalia or Thomas, that’s for sure. Ed Brayton has an excellent post on this story in the LA Times by David Savage:

One innocent man, from Arizona, was sent back to prison for raping a child when the Supreme Court ruled he had no right to evidence that would later set him free.

Another innocent man, from Louisiana, was convicted of murder and came within weeks of being executed because prosecutors had hidden a blood test that later freed him.

The two men were linked at the Supreme Court last week by Justice Antonin Scalia, who argued that criminal defendants have no right to “potentially useful evidence” that “might” show they were innocent.

Since the 1990s, the advent of DNA evidence has swept across the American criminal justice system and revealed that hundreds of convicted prisoners were innocent. Yet, throughout that time, the Supreme Court has shielded prosecutors from claims that they hid evidence that could have revealed the truth and has been reluctant to give prisoners a right to reopen old cases.

By a 5-4 vote Tuesday, the high court threw out a jury verdict won by John Thompson, the Louisiana man who had sued the New Orleans district attorney after he spent 14 years on death row for crimes he did not commit. In the past, the court has shielded individual prosecutors from being sued, even if they deliberately framed an innocent person. Last week’s decision protects a district attorney’s office from being sued for a series of errors that sent an innocent man to prison.

Advocates for the wrongly convicted denounced the decision. Prosecutors have “enormous power over all of our lives,” said Keith Findley, president of the Innocence Network, yet “no other profession is shielded from this complete lack of accountability.”

In Thompson’s case, at least four prosecutors knew of the blood test, eyewitness reports and other evidence that, once revealed, showed they had charged the wrong man.

“When this kind of conduct happens and it goes unpunished, it sends a devastating message throughout the system,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, a University of Maryland law professor. “It means more of these incidents will happen.”

Lawyers who represented the wrongly convicted also said they were shocked that Scalia would cite the 1988 case of Arizona vs. Larry Youngblood to bolster his opinion. More than a decade ago, after Scalia and the other justices sent Youngblood back to prison, new DNA tests revealed he was innocent.

Carol Wittels, the Tucson lawyer who fought to free Youngblood, said she found it “astounding” that the court would still cite the case as a precedent. “It was a horrible decision then, and I can’t believe they are still citing it, since so many people have been cleared with DNA evidence since then,” Wittels said in a telephone interview.

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered last week’s decision reversing the $14-million jury verdict for Thompson. Scalia wrote a separate opinion citing the Youngblood case, which came to the court in Scalia’s second year on the bench.

The case began when a young boy was abducted outside a church carnival and brutally raped. He said his assailant was a black man with a bad right eye. Youngblood was a black man from the Tucson area who had a bad left eye. The boy picked him from a photo lineup.

But in a crucial mistake, the police failed to refrigerate the boy’s clothing and several swabs. Though Youngblood protested his innocence, forensic testing in the early 1980s could not determine whether he was or was not the perpetrator.

After two trials, he was convicted, but a state appeals court ordered him freed because the police had “permitted the destruction of the evidence” he needed to prove he was not guilty.

But the Supreme Court ruled the police and prosecutors had no duty to “preserve potentially useful evidence” for a defendant. The vote was 6 to 3, with Scalia in the majority.

Youngblood was sent back to prison in 1993, served his full term until 1998, and was later arrested because he had failed to register as a sex offender.

In 2000, the Tucson Police Department agreed to conduct DNA tests that were more sophisticated than what had been available earlier. They pointed to the true perpetrator, Walter Cruise, a black man with a bad right eye who was then in a Texas prison serving time for two sex assaults against children. He pleaded guilty to the Arizona rape.

In last week’s opinion, Scalia cited the Youngblood case in arguing that prosecutors are not required to offer all the evidence that might free a defendant. “We have decided a case that appears to say just the opposite,” he wrote. “In Arizona v. Youngblood, we held that unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police,” the defendant does not have a right to obtain all “potentially useful evidence.” …

Continue reading.

And be sure to read Brayton’s post.

I realized today that I find it difficult to remember words if I know nothing of their etymology—somehow, knowing something of a word’s life story makes it easier to remember. So I went to Amazon and a Spanish etymological dictionary is on its way to me.

I’ll also need to find a good dictionary of Spanish synonyms. Synonomy is concerned with the distinctions among a set of words with overlapping meanings, so that you can learn the nuances of meaning. In other words, a dictionary of synonyms is useful because it distinguishes among words that mean almost but not exactly the same thing. I’ve used my Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Synonyms a lot, and I highly recommend it to people who prize accuracy in discourse. (I note that it seems to be out of print: pick up a good used copy while you can. Great book just to browse in, with surprises on every page.)

I really like Anki, the flashcard management and scheduling application (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, etc.—and it’s free!). I ran through flashcards daily over the break—you don’t want to skip a day, or the number of cards to review can get out of hand—and I noticed how some cards are becoming quite infrequent.

When you attempt a card, you can click one of buttons:

Again—Card will show up again in this session; you use this automatically for new words. The idea is to keep clicking “Again” until you get the card right, even if it ends up being the last card, so you get a new attempt immediately. By ending with a success, you are better able to remember the next time.

Hard—Card will show up soon. If you clicked “Again” and then get the card right, you click “Hard”. In that case the card shows up the very next day. But if on the next day you manage to get it right and click “Hard” again, it will probably show up in 2 days, then 3 days… The idea is that, even though it’s “Hard”, if you’re getting it right, the next encounter can be a little later.

Good—Card will show up, though not so soon as if you had clicked “Hard”.

Easy—Card will be scheduled to show up after a decent interval, depending on how you did on this encounter. For example, if this card is showing up after a week, and you click “Easy”, it will probably not show up again for two weeks. And if you click “Easy” again, the interval gets longer and longer. I noted this morning that I won’t see some cards again for 3 months. When I do see them again, if I miss and have to click “Again,” the interval drops sharply—to the next day possibly, and I have to keep getting it right in future sessions for the interval to become long. But even with a very long interval, I suspect I’ll remember those that are now easy: el día, el sol, el animal, el hombre, etc.

I make my cards with the front and back active, so that I see both the Spanish side and have to provide the English, and also the English side and have to provide the Spanish. So it acts like two cards, though I have to create only one card in the database: the program just shows me the card both ways.

And, of course, a given word might be easy one way (Spanish to English, for example) and difficult the other (English to Spanish), so the intervals for the two sides might diverge a lot. But the program handles all that for you.

Anyone who is tasked with learning stuff should investigate the Anki program. I will say that it is essential to watch the videos, and even then a certain amount of experimentation is needed to learn the program.

Cards can include hyperlinks, images, audio or video recordings, and so on. Fantastic program.

Tabula Rasa is an interesting shaving cream, and it does a good job. It’s quite firm, and the dark lavender has a nice fragrance. I got a fine lather using the Rooney Style 2, and then the Apollo Mikron with a still-good Swedish Gillette blade removed the stubble smoothly in 3 passes. A splash of the Klar Seifen, and I’m ready for class—if there will be a class. I don’t really know when Spring break ends, so I’ll go out just to check.

This post by Gretchen Koch is exactly right. I was hoping someone would make the points that she does:

Remember Terry Jones? Not the guy from Monty Python, but the Florida pastor who threatened to burn copies of the Qur’an last August in response to the building of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from where the World Trade Center used to stand? And the president actually got on television to ask him not to do it? And Jones responded that he wouldn’t, not ever?

He finally got around to burning a Qur’an about a week ago. Well, another pastor actually did it but Jones “supervised,” during a mock trial of the text in which it was apparently found guilty. And nobody much cared…until some angry mullahs in Afghanistan encouraged a crowd of 20,000 Muslims to “avenge” the burning. Which they did yesterday, by attacking a United Nations compound in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, killing at least twelve people, none of whom were American. Seven of them were United Nations workers from European countries, and five were Afghani. The crowd had attacked the United Nations building because they had been unable to find any Americans on which to vent their anger.

Mr. Jones, the Florida pastor, caused an international uproar by threatening to burn the Koran last year on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Among others, the overall commander of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, had warned at that time that such an action could provoke violence in Afghanistan and could endanger American troops. Mr. Jones subsequently promised not to burn a Koran, but he nonetheless presided over a mock trial and then the burning of the Koran at his small church in Gainesville, Fla., on March 20, with only 30 worshipers attending.

The act drew little response worldwide, but provoked angry condemnation in this region, where it was reported in the local media and where anti-American sentiment already runs high. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan condemned the burning in an address before Parliament, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Thursday called on the United States to bring those responsible for the Koran burning to justice.

A prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Qyamudin Kashaf, the acting head of the influential Ulema Council of Afghanistan and a Karzai appointee, also called for American authorities to arrest and try Mr. Jones in the Koran burning.

The Ulema Council recently met to discuss the Koran burning, Mullah Kashaf said in a telephone interview. “We expressed our deep concerns about this act, and we were expecting the violence that we are witnessing now,” he said. “Unless they try him and give him the highest possible punishment, we will witness violence and protests not only in Afghanistan but in the entire world.”

Mr. Jones was unrepentant. “We must hold these countries and people accountable for what they have done as well as for any excuses they may use to promote their terrorist activities,” he said in a statement. “Islam is not a religion of peace. It is time that we call these people to accountability.”

Do I need to list off all of the absurd elements in this situation? Maybe I do:

1. Both sides were blaming enormous groups for the actions of individuals. In Jones’ case it was the entirety of Islam for the acts of some terrorists; in the mob’s case it was the entirety of America for the acts of a small congregation of loony Americans. And in the mob’s case they not only decided to punish the group as a whole, but couldn’t even be bothered to make sure that the people they attacked were even members of it or that the property they destroyed was owned by members of it.
2. Had the three mullahs in Mazari-i-Sharif not encouraged people to take to the streets and commit murder, they almost certainly would not have done so. Just as with the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, none of this destruction would have happened had it not been for mullahs stirring up the anger of Muslims.
3. And yet, . . .

Continue reading.

If not, this little book will ease your progress. Link is to Cool Tools.

Michael Mechanic has an interesting article in Mother Jones on how our tax system is not working as we want:

In a Sunday press release calling on wealthy individuals and corporations to pay their share, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont offered a list of what he calls “some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.”

Sanders, you’ll recall, made headlines for his epic 8.5-hour speech/filibuster this past December, dealing with how Obama’s pending tax-cut deal with the GOP would be bad for America. The speech—published this month as a paperback simply titled The Speech—was in vain: Congress passed the deal, extending tax breaks not merely to the poor and middle-class, but to America’s richest people.

It also slashed the estate tax from 55 percent to 35 percent and exempted the first $5 million of an estate’s value ($10 million for a couple)—up from $1 million pre-Bush. In his speech, Sanders warned against this change, noting, “Let us be very clear: This tax applies only—only—to the top three-tenths of 1 percent of American families; 99.7 percent of American families will not pay one nickel in an estate tax. This is not a tax on the rich, this is a tax on the very, very, very rich. (Click here for our blockbuster charts showing just how rich the very, very, very rich actually are.)

If the estate tax—which Republicans have cleverly rebranded the “death tax”—were to be eliminated entirely (another GOP goal), Sanders says it would cost US taxpayers $1 trillion over 10 years. “Families such as the Walton family, of Walmart fame, would have received, just this one family, about a $30 billion tax break,” he said in the speech.

As one of few voices in Congress calling seriously for balance between cuts and new revenues, Sanders wants to close corporate tax loopholes and get rid of tax breaks for Big Oil. He’s put forth a bill that would impose a 5.4 percent surtax on household income north of $1 million, and earmark that money for deficit reduction. He estimates it would bring in $50 billion a year, whereas Congress’ recent tax-cut deal will add around $700 billion to the deficit.

So, without further ado, here’s Bernie’s tax-avoiders list. In this case, one of his staffers informed me, “refund” means “negative federal income tax liability.” If you have any quibbles with his facts, let us know in the comments.

1) ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. [Note: Our post last April reported that ExxonMobil was owed $46 million by the IRS.]

2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

4) . . .

Continue reading.

Interesting note from Richard P. Grant:

Few would dispute that good communication is essential to a happy and successful relationship. Even arguments might not necessarily be a bad thing–an air-clearing argument need not be destructive, and is probably more healthy than sullen silences. But recent work reported in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy now suggests that what partners discuss, or argue about, could be indicative of the health of a relationship 10.1080/0092623X.2011.547352.During recorded discussions between newlyweds the researchers noted how the participants behaved during conflict. While conflict itself, or even ‘negative behaviour’ (from the paper: “contemptuous, domineering, belligerent, defensive, and angry” behaviour) during conflict did not of itself predict a lower satisfaction with the marriage, negativity when discussing sexual issues did. 

R. Taylor Segraves, evaluating the article, points out that there are two conclusions for marital therapists: first, they should focus on sexual behaviour in newlyweds; second, the behaviour of the couple while discussing sexual matters should be noted.

It’s a small study (only 15 couples were interviewed) but if borne out implies that emotionally charged conflict (i.e. over sexual matters) could be a much stronger predictor of relationship distress than mere arguments about the mortgage, or what colour curtains go best with the carpet.

I was thinking about Pilates today—The Wife and I have a joint session today—and the role it was playing in my fitness program. I had been working on cardio-vacular fitness (the Nordic track) and on muscle strength (some weight training following Miriam Nelson’s program in Strong Women Stay Young), and more or less taking a pass on flexibility and balance—thinking that once I lost enough weight I’d work on those. (It seemed difficult to work on flexibility when I was encased in fat.)

Weight training builds muscle and strength, but it doesn’t really seem to address body systems the way that bodywork (Rolfing, Feldenkreis, Pilates, et al.) does. With Pilates, for example, I am working not only on strength, but also flexibility and balance, and the focus is on body systems and overall patterns of movement, which weight training more or less ignores except for being careful to use good form in working with the weights.

Pilates really seems worth seeking out.

I got my order from Smoke Fine Foods (warning: site is slow loading, possibly because the photos are at too high a resolution?) and I can’t wait. I’m cooking some of the smoked rice for lunch and kick myself for not ordering 4 bags instead of one.

A nice clean shave to start the week: terrific lather from the excellent teamwork of the Plisson Chinese Grey and the Klar Seifen shaving soap. Three smooth passes of the Hoffritz with a Swedish Gillette blade, a splashof Klar Seifen Klassik, and I’m ready for the day.

The computer is stymied by making the growth in possible positions per ply MUCH faster than in chess: first, because each player arranges his pieces as he wants at the start of the game—and in a neat bit of komi, Gold must arrange his pieces first, so Silver gets to see Gold’s arrangement before he (Silver) arranges his own pieces—an advantage—but Gold gets first move—also an advantage; and second, because on each ply (i.e., on each player’s turn), he gets 4 “moves” as we would normally say—moving 1 piece 4 squares, or 4 pieces 1 square, or any combination. So LOTS of possible positions for each ply, above and beyond all the possible opening positions.

The strength of pieces is monotonic—from strongest to weakest: Elephant > Camel > Horse > Dog > Cat > Rabbit. Interestingly, the size of the strength discrepancy between two pieces is (so far as I can tell at this point) immaterial: it’s a simply binary, stronger/weaker relationship, without any consideration of the degree of strength difference.

The move rules are simple: all pieces move exactly the same, which is one square orthogonally in any direction, save that rabbits (the weakest and most numerous piece, played by chess pawns) cannot move backward voluntarily. No diagonal moves, and diagonals (in effect) don’t count.

And no capturing, but the stronger of two pieces can push or pull the other—a notion that I think kids would understand from their own experience.

So it’s an up-close game, but since you can move as many as 4 pieces a turn, I would think it would have a broad strategy. What’s cool in the links below is that you can listen as one of the players goes over a world championship game. I don’t know the combinations he names, as yet, but still it’s possible to follow the general discussion, and I find it fascinating.

The instructional videos are succinct and informative. This whole list is from one page of the incredibly resource rich Arimaa site.

• Arimaa Tutorial (Flash version) – 500 KB
  • Watch this animation to learn the rules in just a few minutes.
• Arimaa Tutorial 2 (Flash version) – 1 MB
  • Aamir teaches Arimaa.
• 2009 World Championship Final Game
  • Video of Jean Daligault commenting on a championship game against Karl Juhnke.
• 2008 Postal Tournamnt Game
  • Video of Karl Juhnke commenting on a postal game against Ned Bent.

I really like the Mamma Chia drinks. I asked The Wife to pick me up a couple of the Cranberry Lemonade today: one I polished off when it arrived, the other as an after-dinner snack. Man! are they tasty!

I was sitting here, wanting another, when it hit me that I could easily make my own. I snagged the empty bottle and poured into it:

1/4 c chia seed
juice of 1 lime (and next time, I’ll use a Meyer lemon)
1/3 c pomegranate juice
fill the jar with white tea

It’s sitting in the fridge now, cooling while the chia seed soak. What a great drink!

UPDATE: Homemade is reasonably good, though not so good as Mamma Chia’s own. The chia seed tend to clump as they soak, so to avoid having to break apart the clumps with an iced-tea spoon as I did, I think next time I’ll just have seeds in to soak separately, in a container, and I can dip up some of the already soaked seeds to add to the drink.

I had mochi for the first time today. I got this sampler, and today cooked one 110-calorie square as the starch for lunch (which otherwise was a green salad with tuna). The Wife is an old mochi hand, and when I started describing what I was going to order, she said, “Sounds like mochi” (and I hadn’t given the name since I assumed it would mean nothing to her as it did to me—wrongo). So today I had one of the sprouted brown rice mochi, heating in a 450ºF oven for 8 minutes—not quite enough. Tomorrow I’ll try heating one in the skillet, with a little butter, which is how The Wife ate it.

I always love to try a new food.

It was much easier this time: I knew what to expect, which is to dump everything except the 1/2 c sugar into a pot and bring to boil and simmer for 15 minutes. In the meantime, melt the sugar and heat until it turns amber, then add to the cooking sauce at the 10-minute mark.

This batch is made with malt vinegar and Barbados molasses, as I mentioned. I also used 5 cloves garlic instead of two, 4 anchovies instead of one, and 3″ of crushed fresh ginger instead of 1 1/2″, and 8 instead of 2 chilis de arbol. I slightly increased amounts of some of the spices as well.

It will now age for 3 weeks. Really is worth doing, I think: easy to make, and extremely tasty.

PZ Myers reports on a disturbing nest of domestic terrorists:

The animal rights loons are ranting again. These people are simply terrorists, as you can see in this quote from their odious website.

Every time a vivisector’s car or home — and, eventually, the abuser him/herself — blows up, flames of liberation light up the sky.

They’re quite proud of taking the unconscionably violent position. And now, just to show how low they can sink, they have announced a new target: our students.

Debuting The Soft-Bellied Target and New Resistance Tactics: Bringing the War to the Student Body

When we attack professors, we can only expect limited gains. They are deeply entrenched in the holocaust, have vested financial interests, and enjoy a network of support and protection. Students, however, have no round-the-clock police protection, no access to the FBI, and no access to legislators. The weakest link in the chain is the student body. Vivisectors-in-training can be shut down with relative ease.

They also are the next generation and it is our responsibility to ensure that they are the last generation. Unless we intercede now, the students of today will be the mutilators of tomorrow. Conversely, there will be no animal torturers tomorrow if we effectively eliminate them today.

How are they going to target these students? With intimidation. They are bragging about one example now, a young woman named Alena who mentioned wanting to follow a research career who they harrassed into at least saying she would abandon her plans (who may be just saying that to shut up the crazies, and who may also be a phony stooge of the haters), and they have a list of ways they are going after our students.

1. By and large, students pursuing careers in research science truly want to help people, not victimize animals. Their indoctrination into the world of laboratory torture is slow, methodical, and deliberate. While they are being groomed, we are obligated to intercede and educate these young scientists with truth. As Alena admitted, “I was naive…I really just did not know about all this stuff.” And she is not unique.

2. Students also need to understand that making the wrong choice will result in a lifetime of grief. Aspiring scientists envision curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic. We need to impart a new vision: car bombs, 24/7 security cameras, embarrassing home demonstrations, threats, injuries, and fear. And, of course, these students need to realize that any personal risk they are willing to assume will also be visited upon their parents, children, and nearest & dearest loved ones. The time to reconsider is now.

3. Like all young adults, college students are acutely concerned with how they are perceived by their peers. They need to maintain a certain persona if they wish to continue to enjoy the acceptance of their community. This makes them infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity than their veteran-mutilator counterparts. When education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective. Abusers have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind and, if an abuser-to-be should fail to make the correct choice now, NIO is here to broadcast all of their personal information. Remember, young people document every facet of their personal lives online. In about 30 minutes, we were able to compile an impressive and comprehensive profile for Elena.

Notice that among the tactics they advocate are car bombs, injuries, and fear. These are home-grown terrorists, nothing more.

If they think professors are protected, wait until they scratch an innocent student, though — their obscure organization will instantly become a pariah organization, everywhere.

Little Miss Megs is a bit shaggy. She’s due for a pedicure, so I’m going to ask whether they can brush her. She is extremely cranky about this (and about getting her nails clipped) when I or The Wife try, so it’s necessary to get professional assistance.