Like Mr. Drezner, I too find myself unable to achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to think that a multinational force, assuming it can somehow actually be assembled, would help the Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon issue.

This seems like typical political handwaving, where no one wants to do anything (probably for the best, at any rate) but they all want to make a grand gesture for peace. But let’s be clear — “peacekeeping” forces need guns. Peacekeeper forces, by the very definition of the word, need to be ready to use their guns on people who would break the peace. Is the UN going to fight Hezbollah? Is it going to fight Israel? Frankly, any force the UN sends in would lose (in different ways) to either side. So what does it mean when the ultimate authority (don’t laugh) that sovereign nations appeal to is revealed to be weaker (in will and capability) than either of the two sides it wishes to mediate between? One of whom isn’t even a country?

I suppose I should be thankful to the UN. As Drezner points out, no one is really willing to ante up with the manpower, so perhaps the world’s greatest bureaucracy has a purpose after all — giving world leaders a place to dither and bloviate — therefore avoiding greater mistakes.

You know what’s wrong with Gene Healy’s blog? It contains such fantastically condensed nuggets of wisdom that I can’t resist quoting entire posts:

What I love about Ilya Somin’s recent posts on libertarians and the Iraq War is that they’re so pristine. No mention of how things have worked out over the last three years, which contested claims turned out to be right, which turned out to be wrong. No mention of what’s actually happening in Iraq right now. It’s like discussing the wisdom of Evel Knievel’s 1967 jump over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace–without ever mentioning that ol’ Evel shattered his pelvis and femur, fractured his hip, wrist and both ankles and smacked his head hard enough to keep him in a coma for 29 days. “Some said Evel would surely make it if anyone would. Still others thought it was a damned silly thing to do.” Who’s right, who’s wrong, who can say, really?

I recently finished reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and loved it. It’s probably the most intellectually stimulating book I’ve read in several years.

I came across this interview of Jacobs from 2000, and I particularly liked this quote:

Everybody’s got a worldview whether they know they have it or they don’t. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what’s good, what’s bad, what will work, what won’t work, what’s noble, what’s ignoble, and so on…all through this filter… There are two ways you encounter things in the world that are different. One is everything that comes in reinforces what you already believe and everything that you know. The other thing is that you stay flexible enough or curious enough and maybe unsure of yourself enough, or may be you are more sure of yourself—I don’t know which it is—that the new things that come in keep reforming your world view. The same when you are writing a book. By the end of the book it is quite different than the way you thought it would be when you started the book—both in form and what it contains and what you think. Well, you tipped in a lot and you digested a lot—it wasn’t pre-digested in your view. And it changed what you thought and how you see things. And a lot of these people—what I am getting at—they learn something and they are so sure of it and it’s a terrible threat to them—an emotional threat. I don’t think it’s so much of an intellectual threat even. But an emotional threat that their whole worldview will have to go through that upsetting thing of being confused.

The world seems to have two types of people: those who recognize the dangers of confirmation bias and try to correct for it, and those who are oblivious to confirmation bias and get stuck in an ideological rut of some kind. I’ve increasingly come to find the latter class of people creepy. When you argue with them, it becomes obvious not so much that they’re wrong, but that they’re far more confident in their conclusions than is merited by the evidence available.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular correlation between this property and other aspects of peoples’ worldviews. Virtually every philosophy or ideology has its true believers and its empiricists. Libertarianism, unfortunately, is not immune. We have our share of outright cults, but we also have plenty of people who are simply far more confident in the correctness of certain libertarian conclusions than they have any objective basis to be.

Personally, I think a lack of mindless dogmatism is one of the most important traits of interesting people. I would much rather talk to a liberal or conservative who recognizes the limits of his own knowledge than a libertarian who has honed his ability to repeat libertarian slogans, but doesn’t have the first clue how to deal with evidence that contradicts his worldview.

… and it looks like the faculty will be handing out some F’s this semester. The economic ignorance on all sides (and CNN as well) is disappointing. Especially so, considering the hot topic — lower agricultural subsidies — is one that could lead to improving the welfare of some of the poorest segments in the world.
(more…)

It’s been easy to forget the last few years, but the president has this thing called a “veto.” If Congress passes legislation the president doesn’t like, he can use his magical veto pen to prevent it from becoming law.

This veto can be very useful. Among the things one might want to veto are assaults on the First Amendment, massive expansions of fiscally precarious entitlement programs, wasteful spending, wasteful spending, and wasteful spending.

But this president couldn’t be bothered with such trifling concerns. He wanted to save his veto pen for really important occasions, like making sure that nobody tinkered with his haphazard stem cell “compromise,” which holds that some stem cells are more equal than others. Because there’s no cause more important than ethical hair-splitting.

A new UN report says that over 3000 civilians were killed in June:

The death toll, drawn from Iraqi government agencies, was the most precise measurement of civilian deaths provided by any government organization since the invasion and represented a dramatic increase over daily media reports.

United Nations officials also said that the number of violent deaths had been steadily increasing since at least last summer. In the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.

This sharp upward trend reflected the dire security situation in Iraq as sectarian violence has worsened and Iraqi and American government forces have been powerless to stop it.

When you consider that Iraq is about 1/10 of the United States, that rate of death is equivalent to a September 11 attack twice a week.

It appears that the United States is increasingly reduced to protecting its own personnel from death and propping up the Iraqi government. The prospects for actually pacifying the population and establishing law and order seem to get more and more distant.

What should we do about this? I don’t have a good solution. But I think a good first step would be to stop smearing those who suggest we might want to start reducing our presence in the country as traitors. We may soon reach the point where civil war is unavoidable (or we may have reached that point already). At that point, it’s not obvious what the point of continued American presence would be. I would rather we not spill any more American blood than necessary forestalling the inevitable.

Jim Henley has a depressing explanation of the Bush administration’s strategy in the Middle East:

The glorious work of bombing Iraq free hasn’t, in fact, produced a model that anyone, Arab or otherwise, would want to emulate. It’s given Middle Eastern autocrats a bogeyman with which to frighten the children. You don’t want to try “democracy” and end up like Iraq do you? So the overall strategy gets modified, but not, perish forbid, in the direction of reducing our military presence in the region.

The reason why, as critics complain, the Bush Administration won’t “tell us what ‘victory’ means in Iraq” is because politics makes it impossible for them to answer honestly: Victory in Iraq now means that Iraq gets quiet enough to move off the front page while letting the US keep a sizable military presence in the country with which to intimidate unfriendly states in the region. Presently those are Iran and Syria. “Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy” can go by the boards. “Iraq the Model” is no longer the plan. Iraq the Airbase is. Iraq will get as much or as little democracy as more or less gets it out of the news. It will see as many American troop withdrawals as help quiet things down while still leaving enough troops in place to secure facilities that can be used as prepositioning for future wars in the region. The new “realist” America can also sacrifice “Cedar Revolution” Lebanon if necessary, because the Cedar Revolution is no longer the point.

You can see why the President and what passes for his brain trust won’t come right out and say this.

The Bush Administration and the Israelis remain obsessed with hostile states as the drivers of terrorism. Both have always assumed that if you just knock off the right leaders, you can make terrorism disappear or at least minimize it. The Bush Administration and Israel too figure that if they can take out Assad and the Mullahs, there’s no one left to “cause” terrorism. Under the old transformative paradigm there was the problem of assuring that better, freer societies emerged from the rubble. In the new, “realist” paradigm, that’s no longer a concern. If you think the problem is that the Syrian government is fostering terrorism out of a personalized evil, all you care about is getting rid of the personalized evil. So long as the next regime is too weak or too cowed to “cause terrorism,” it isn’t your problem whether it can actually run Syria, let alone run it effectively and humanely.

I think I agree with commenter #4: Occam’s razor says that the more likely explanation is that the Bush administration is just flailing around incompetently, because he has no idea how the hell to deal with this situation. I refuse to think that even Dick Cheney is crazy enough to think that what’s really wrong in the Middle East is that we’re only fighting wars in two countries instead of four.

This isn’t an administration with a track record of thinking about the long-term consequences of its actions or having a coherent overall strategy. My guess is that they’re pretty much just reacting to events as they come up, and don’t have the first clue what they’ll do if the conflict escalates.

As if the above quotation wasn’t depressing enough, Jim closes with this gem:

The final possibility is that events are coming faster than Washington’s ability to master them. In that case, we can give those unlucky captured Israeli soldiers in Lebanon the codenames “Archduke” and “Ferdinand.”

Lovely.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, my friend Radley Balko has a new study out about the barbaric lengths to which our government is going in its futile effort to stamp out consensual, non-violent behavior by ordinary Americans. Cato is also releasing an interactive map that graphically demonstrates the scope of the problem: there have been hundreds of botched or unnecessary raids, including 140 mistaken raids on innocent people, 40 of which resulted in fatalities.

I don’t know why I missed it originally, but Greg Mankiw, one of the few truth-tellers in the Bush administration between 2003 and 2005, has a blog. I particularly likethis post about economists and immigration:

The study of economics leaves a person with two strong impulses.

The Libertarian Impulse: Mutually advantageous acts between consenting adults should, absent externalities, be permitted. The ability to engage in such trades is how people in free-market economies achieve prosperity. When the government impedes voluntary exchange, it prevents the invisible hand of the market from working its magic.

The Egalitarian Impulse: The market economy rewards people according to supply and demand, not inherent worth. Markets often fail to provide people the ability to adequately insure themselves against the vicissitudes of life and accidents of birth. We should, therefore, look for ways to help those who end up at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Most economists feel both of these impulses to some degree. The difference between right-leaning and left-leaning economists is how strongly they feel each of them. Right-leaning economists have a stronger libertarian impulse, whereas left-leaning economists have a stronger egalitarian impulse.

Although some debates in economics come down to which impulse a person feels more strongly, on immigration the two impulses are reinforcing. The libertarian impulse says, let the American employer hire the Mexican worker, for it is voluntary exchange. The egalitarian impulse takes note that the Mexican immigrant is the poorest person involved in the situation, and he benefits from more relaxed immigration restrictions.

Here is a conjecture: Whenever a policy appeals to both the libertarian impulse and the egalitarian impulse, economists will offer a relatively united view, as they do on the topic of immigration.

Obviously, my libertarian impulse is stronger than my egalitarian impulse. But I also have at least a bit of an egalitarian streak, which makes it difficult for me to get excited about issues where the two impulses push me in opposite directions.

For example, intellectually, I think that tax cuts for the wealthy are good policy. High marginal tax rates are extremely wasteful, because they discourage wealth creation and encourage tax avoidance. But my heart isn’t in it. I won’t be heart broken if the Bush tax cuts aren’t made permanent.

In contrast, the issues that really get me pissed off are the issues where the two impulses coincide. Immigration is one such issue. The drug war is another. You might think these are all left-of-center issues, but I don’t think that’s actually true. I believe eminent domain falls in this category–eminent domain simultaneously increases inequality and reduces societal wealth. School choice is another such issue: school choice would make the education market more efficient, and it would also help poor children most.

I’ve been visiting Jim Henley’s blog since at least 2003. In that time, I’ve always seen a giant chicken staring down at the text. (See his black beak pointing down at us?) I figured that must be some kind of bizarre in-joke, or maybe Jim’s just weird.

Then at random today I happened to stumble across the about page and read, to my astonishment, that the chicken was, in fact, a dog turned on his side. Now that I look more carefully, it’s obviously a dog. Only took me three years to notice.

On the off chance that you’ve got 5 years without noticing Jim’s excellent blog, I encourage you to check it out. Personally, I think I’m going to need a few days to let the shock wear off before I visit his site again, but Henley’s site is one of the blogosphere’s gems.

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The use of xanax blue football is prohibited in some train company carriages.

Julian notes the decline of the libertarian “purists”:

If you talk to younger libertarians in particular, it’s just not clear that the rhetoric of “initiation of force” plays a very large role in their thinking at all, at least not as a fundamental political principle from which all else is derived. This is a point I suspect people who were involved in “the movement” in the 70s, say, really don’t yet appreciate fully: For a New Liberty is no longer required reading; there’s a significant chunk of the younger generation that, however radical they might be, have never cracked a book by Rothbard or Rand and might never. You can, I suppose, just stamp your feet and insist that such people are ipso facto not really libertarians at all, like a kind of extreme prescriptivist grammarian who knows that a word “really means” whatever Webster’s said it meant in 1806, even if everyone now uses it differently. This yields some pretty silly consequences: It entails that an anarcho-capitalist utilitarian whose ultimate criterion is aggregate happiness will not be a libertarian “really,” nor will a radical minarchist who takes a Rawlsian “basic structure” approach, where as someone who espouses far more moderate views might be, so long as his foundational principle is the NAP, however watered down for practical reasons. This seems like pointless pedantry: If Rothbardians want to argue that, really, all libertarians ought to prefer their version of the theory, let them argue that, rather than getting tangled in a tedious debate over what “libertarian” really means.

I think the early popularity of Rand and Rothbard in the libertarian movement can be explained by the seductive appeal of the “non-aggression axiom” to a certain class of people, namely highly rationalistic thinkers who value simplicity and consistency in their political philosophy. The Rothbardian view of libertarianism is a kind of ideological chainsaw: take any issue, and you can instantly determine what the right answer is. The guy who’s engaging in “force” is in the bad guy. It’s exciting to find a new ideological tool that allows you to slash and burn through ideological thickets to get to the “right” answer.

The problem is that the same conceptual elegance that makes Rand and Rothbard so compelling to 16-year-old boys makes it utterly unpersuasive to the vast majority of people, most of whom believe politics is too complicated to be summed up in one sentence. If you don’t find the non-aggression axiom compelling on first hearing it, you’re not likely to be persuaded by further argument.

The seductive simplicity of the Axiom absolutely cripples libertarians who try to persuade non-libertarians, because it renders them tone deaf. “I have a right to put cocaine in my body if I want to” is a killer argument if you accept the Axiom, but for the other 99 percent of the world it’s just a bare assertion. Of course, even most Rothbardians recognize this weakness and have learned to make consequential arguments (“Banning cocaine causes violence and corruption without actually reducing cocaine use very much”) but it’s hard for them to really distinguish a persuasive argument from an unpersuasive one when the rights-based argument is the one they really find persuasive.

I think the receding prominence of Rand and Rothbard is a sign of the growing maturity of the movement. There are now plenty of people who call themselves libertarians who were actually persuaded by empirical arguments. (I have to confess that I’m not in that category–I was a borderline randroid in high school) And those people are frankly a lot better at convincing normal people of the merits of libertarian policies, because they’re much more sensitive to how non-libertarians view the world, and are able to craft arguments that “normal” people find compelling.

Moreover, when you get into the nuts and bolts of public policy, you discover that a chainsaw can be an awfully blunt instrument. The world really is a complicated place, and while the non-aggression axiom usually points in the right direction, it’s rarely sufficient to give you any guidance of the details of good libertarian policies. There really are market failures, collective action problems, free riders, and holdouts. Government action really is needed to deal with those problems sometimes. And even if those problems could always be solved without government intervention, you’ve got the problem that we have a very non-libertarian government right now. Electing a libertarian Congress that will abolish a dozen federal departments isn’t a feasible political program. So if you want to advance liberty in the real world, you have to be able to come up with incremental improvements to the status quo. The non-aggression principle doesn’t provide any guidance on how to do that.

Fortunately, other libertarian thinkers, such as Hayek and Friedman, have offered flexible and comprehensive political philosophies that are better equipped to deal with the complexity of the real world. I think the ascendancy of Friedman and Hayek is a sign that the libertarian movement has begun engaging people in the real world and offering practical solutions to the problems facing the country. The Mises Institute, unfortunately, seems stuck in the 1970s.

Why the hell is Russia still in the G8? The G8 (originally the G7) is supposed to be a club of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies. Russia’s not wealthy–its GDP per capita is on par with South Africa and Chile, and barely half that of South Korea and Portugal. And it’s long since ceased to be liberal, and arguably isn’t a democracy any more.

As I understand it, the whole purpose of expanding the G7 to include Russia in the first place was to give much-needed support to a regime that was struggling to become a capitalist liberal democracy. The argument for kicking them out of the G8 seems just as strong now that they’re steadily sinking into autocracy.

Poor gamblers:

Casino owners in Atlantic City are counting the cost of a two-day shutdown caused by New Jersey governor Jon Corzine’s gamble to fix a $4.5bn (£2.4bn) hole in the state’s budget.

The city’s 12 gaming halls closed when 45,000 state employees, including casino inspectors, were sent home as politicians resisted Mr Corzine’s plan to increase sales tax. It was the first time since gambling was legalised in New Jersey 28 years ago that the popular casinos had gone dark…

Some bitterness remains about how the casinos were ordered to close their doors at 8am on Wednesday with many gamblers still at the tables. One card player told a local newspaper that he was $1,500 down when he was told to leave and was angry that he would not have the chance to win it back.

I wonder if, having lost several thousand more dollars in his efforts to “win it back,” he’ll be angry at his credit card company for not extending him additional credit for the big comeback that was bound to be just around the corner.

I have to say I found this baffling. Blac(k)ademic finds this picture offensive:

Now, I’ll certainly grant that it’s a weird ad. And it’s not obvious that it will sell very many PSPs. But racist?

There’s an interesting dynamic of groupthink here. Ezra’s commenters seem pretty evenly split about whether it’s offensive. The Feministing audience seems to mostly find it offensive, although there are several dissidents. On the other hand, the Blac(k)ademic audience seems to universally find it offensive. It seems to have self-selected an audience that’s more sensitive to allegedly racist images.

What none of them does is give a clear explanation of why it’s offensive. One of Ezra’s commenters says that the ad is “pretty clearly signaling racial dominance,” which I don’t think is clear at all. It might be “signalling” racial conflict, I suppose, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that the black woman is being dominated (the look in her eyes could be defiance, rather than fear). And even if the white woman is dominating the black woman, it seems silly to extrapolate any sort of broad social meaning from a single image. It’s quite a stretch to extrapolate from one white woman “dominating” one black woman to the implication that the ad is advocating that all white people dominate all black people.

Blac(k)ademic’s follow-up comment gets even sillier:

and no, just because the black woman is dominating the white woman, does not make it any less of an offensive ad. this brings up a whole bunch of nasty stereotypes of black women that i won’t even get into. i also noticed that in the second image, the white woman seems to fight off the black woman, while in the first image, the black woman just “takes it.”

So when a white woman dominates a black woman, it’s a sign of racial superiority and is therefore racist. When a black woman dominates a white woman, that calls up “nasty stereotypes of black women” and is therefore racist. Heads, you win, tails I lose.

It seems to me that charges of racism like this one are largely a self-fulfilling prophesy. I don’t think anyone would seriously contend that Sony was deliberately promoting the superiority of the white race in these ads. The primary reason people are offended seems to be that we’re used to being offended by depictions of race. If we look hard enough, we begin to see racism everywhere we look. And because arguments about race generates a lot of attention, every racial controversy further heightens our sensitivity to “racism.”

The result is that any discussion of race whatsoever becomes racially charged. A few months ago, a St. Louis talk radio host was fired because he meant to say that hiring Condoleeza Rice as the commissioner of the NFL would be a “real coup,” but accidentally said “a real coon” instead. Now, no one denies that it was a slip of the tongue. The sentence didn’t even make grammatical sense with the word “coon.” But that didn’t matter. If you start a racial controversy, you get fired.

Several commenters asserted that if a statement offends someone, that means the statement is offensive. That’s nonsense. Not only is it an empty tautology, but it also leaves the door open to intellectual bullying. If you don’t happen to find the same things offensive that they do, that’s not evidence that you have a different opinion: it’s evidence that you too are racist.

This doesn’t seem like progress:

Iraq’s government banned all political activity in its universities on Thursday to try to defuse sectarian tensions between Shiite and Sunni students and lecturers.

Baghdad’s two main universities are flooded with posters of Shiite clerics and arguments have often flared with professors and students from Iraq’s minority Sunni community.

“We decided unanimously in cabinet to ban all political activities inside universities,” Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki told a news conference.

“We want the universities to protect their curricula and their staff by preventing division and disputes,” said Al Maliki, in a decision that will be welcomed by Sunnis who fear they are becoming targets in an increasingly politicised education system.

We wouldn’t want divisions and disputes on a college campus!

In all seriousness, this might be a reasonable thing for the Iraqi government to do, especially if Sunnis are being killed on campus. But that, in turn, would seem to be a reflection of how poorly things are going over there. And if things are getting worse over there, as they seem to be, then “staying the course” might not be the best idea.

Compare and contrast this decision with this one.

Ezra Klein has an interesting article in the Prospect arguing that The West Wing was too nice to Republicans. I certainly won’t quarrel with his thesis–the Republicans certain do play hardball, and the Democrats were probably too nice to them in the early years of the Bush presidency. But I do think his penultimate paragraph is off the mark:

One could bemoan this, lamenting the exit of civility and the acceptance of trench warfare. But why? The Clinton era, which provided the inspiration for The West Wing, should not have proved a notably tense period. After 12 years of Republican presidents, Democrats had elected a leader who promised to banish that which was most controversial and inflammatory from the party. It was precisely the sort of performance that The West Wing’s Republicans would have cheered. And yet it was Clinton, after exiling Jesse Jackson and eschewing so-called “class warfare,” who gave rise to the ferocious Newt Gingrich and the hardliners of the Republican Revolution. Whatever goodwill and good faith he initially displayed was met with corresponding increases in partisan rancor and contempt. What explanation is there save that they smelled blood?

Bill Clinton was a centrist in many ways, but he rode into office on a plan to nationalize the American health care system. The Republicans responded by obstructing Clinton’s proposal, which they considered bad policy, and running on a platform that consisted of actual serious policy proposals. Whatever you think of it on ideological grounds, I think it has to be conceded that the Contract with America was a serious and substantive policy agenda. And for the most part, the Republicans carried through on it.

I just don’t think it’s fair to characterize the Republicans’ 1994 campaign, or the actions of the 104th Congress, as “partisan rancor and contempt.” Of course, some partisan rancor is inevitable in any political fight, and rancor could be found on both sides. Gingrich was routinely demonized by left-of-center pundits. But I think what distinguished the 104th Congress was the fact that it was unusually focused on policy substance. The nation had serious debates on a wide variety of subjects, including farm subsidies, welfare reform, term limits, tax reform, balanced budgets, Medicare, telecom reform, and lots of other subjects. Obviously, people on the left didn’t like what Republicans had to say on many of those subjects, but surely those debates were preferable to the orgy of lobbyist-driven legislation of more recent Congresses, no?

I think the viciousness of the modern Republican party is the fault of the people who replaced the class of ’94. Newt Gingrich was replaced by Denny Hastert in 1998. George W. Bush assumed the leadership of the party in 2000. And Tom DeLay took over for Dick Armey in 2002. And a number of the most principled members of the class of ’94 kept their term limit pledges and left the House in 2000 or 2002.

Gingrich and Armey led a caucus of libertarian policy wonks who cared about good policy and wanted to reduce the size of government. If anything, I think they were too naive about the political process and were out-maneuvered by a more skillful President Clinton. Bush and DeLay, in contrast, are cynical partisan hacks who care only about power. I don’t think it’s fair to lump the four of them into one camp.

Tim, I won’t contest your consistency arguments, but is the “don’t speak ill of the dead” rule justified in this case? Sure, they aren’t around to defend themselves – but Lay was a public figure and a convicted criminal. Different rules apply to people in both of those categories. Dead public figures will generally have motivated defenders, and convicted criminals have gone through a process that (usually) greatly increases our confidence in the truth of the accusations levied against them.

I assume, of course, that your only problem with speaking ill of the dead is the possibility of making false statements that then go unrebutted. Dead people as such would seem to deserve no more politeness than the living. Have at all of them, I say.

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Ken Lay is dead. I was just listening to Marketplace on the radio, and they had a longish interview with an energy industry journalist about what a sleazy guy he was.

Now, the standard story about Lay as a corporate scam artist may very well be true. But is his death really the right time for an extended Lay-bashing session? When other prominent people who caused misery during their lives die, it’s customary to paper over their faults and focus on their positive traits. I’ll bet anyone $100 that when Fidel Castro dies, he’ll get a treatment no harsher than the media’s treatment of Ken Lay.

And if Marketplace couldn’t find anything nice to say about Mr. Lay, couldn’t they have just shut up about him? Note his passing and move on to the next story. The man’s dead; what’s the point of raking him over the coals one more time?