Gravel’s Competition

By Patrick

David Weigel writes that Bob Barr is expected to announce his libertarian presidential bid on Saturday:

The Barr launch is getting to be an open secret among conference-goers. Advocacy Ink, the firm that handles Barr’s public relations, is advertising the speech to local and national reporters. Mike Ferguson, the de jure organizer of the conference, is scrambling to deal with a crush of new media requests.

"It doesn’t take much to put two and two together," said Ferguson. "You don’t do this unless you’re making the announcement."

Weigel also discredits the independent run rumor:

There is no truth to the rumor that Barr will ditch the party and run as an independent. "We’re on the ballot in 45 states," said one organizer at the conference. "Why would he throw away two years of work with the party to run an ego trip campaign with no ballot access? That story doesn’t make sense." Lisa Edelstein in Barr’s office also rejected the "independent" rumor. "If he does decide to run, he will run as a Libertarian candidate," she said.

The Divine Soil

By Patrick
In honor of naturalist John Burroughs’ birthday today, an except from his 1908 article:

It jars upon our sensibilities and disturbs our preconceived notions to be told that the spiritual has its root in the carnal and is as truly its product as the flower is the product of the roots and the stalk of the plant. The conception does not cheapen or degrade the spiritual, it elevates the carnal, the material. To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity, it is rather conferring divinity upon the body. One thing is inevitably linked with another, the higher forms with the lower forms, the butterfly with the grub, the flower with the root, the food we eat with the thought we think, the poem we write, or the picture we paint, with the processes of digestion and nutrition. How science has enlarged and ennobled and purified our conception of the universe; how it has cleaned out the evil spirits that have so long terrified mankind, and justified the verdict of the Creator: "and behold it was good." With its indestructibility of matter, its conservation of energy, its violability of cause and effect, its unity of force and elements throughout sidereal space, it has prepared the way for a conception of man, his origin, his development, and in a measure his destiny, that at last makes him at home in the universe.

Enforcing The Closet

By Patrick
The Pentagon tried to conceal Rodgers’ orientation and political participation:

A Wikipedia article about Maj. Alan Rogers, a gay soldier who was killed in January in Iraq, was apparently edited by someone in the Pentagon, who removed any mention that Rogers was gay.

The user on Monday redacted details about Rogers that appeared on the online encyclopedia site. Information that was deleted included Rogers’ sexual orientation; the soldier’s participation in American Veterans for Equal Rights, a group that works to change military policy toward gays; and the fact that Rogers’ death helped bring the U.S. military’s casualty toll in Iraq to 4,000.

Rob Pilaud, a patent agent and a friend of Rogers who attended the soldier’s funeral, restored the information to the Wikipedia article the next day. Pilaud was among Rogers’ friends who created the Wikipedia page.

Other posts on Rodgers here, here, and here.

Letting Go

By Patrick
Jason Zengerle on the continued banter over Richardson’s endorsement:

You’d have thought that the Clinton people would have wanted to downplay the Richardson’s endorsement of Obama. And, if they hadn’t squawked so much, I bet it would have been a one- or two-day story. But here we are, nearly two weeks after Richardson did the deed, and the press is still talking about it–because the Clintons won’t shut up about it. I don’t see how this helps Hillary. Seriously, the Clinton people should just let it go.

The whole Clinton apparatus is based upon a series of loyalties. As Josh Green reported after the Clinton shake-up in February:

… above all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else. This suggests to me that for all the emphasis Clinton has placed on executive leadership in this campaign, her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit.

This is why they can’t get over Richardson’s endorsement.

The Hard Words

By Patrick
According to Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, the earliest dictionaries only contained the hard words:

Johnson’s Dictionary contains many of these hard words, and for word lovers they can be delightful. There you’ll find nidification, meaning “the act of building nests,” and gemelliparous, “bearing twins.” Scrabble players will delight in words like ophiophagous (“Serpent-eating”), galericulate (“Covered as with a hat”), or decacuminated (“Having the top cut off”). But Johnson was not entirely comfortable with them: “I am not always certain,” he said, “that they are read in any book but the works of lexicographers” (preface, pp. 87–88). He was right. Consider the word naulage, which appears in nearly a hundred books in the eighteenth century alone. The problem is that every one of those books is a dictionary. They all tell us that naulage means the fee paid to carry freight by sea, but there’s no indication the word was ever used even by those paid to carry freight by sea.

The dictionaries were also notorious for stealing definitions from one another.   

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)