cognitive dissident

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The DNC has launched an Exxon-McCain website (h/t: Mike Allen at Politico) in response to McCain's tire-pressure-gauge stunt:

Game on, eh?

It looks to be an interesting three months until Election Day...

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Copland, Aaron: What to Listen for in Music (New York: Signet Classic/Penguin, 2002)

What to Listen for in Music, a 1957 revision of the 1939 original, is Copland's attempt at making serious music more accessible to the lay person. While sometimes idiosyncratic, Copland does an impressive job at remaining impartial about what music is being listened to while being quite sympathetic to contemporary classical music:

Most people seem to resent the controversial in music; they don't want their listening habits disturbed. They use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be used as a soporific. Contemporary music, especially, is created to wake you up, not put you to sleep. It is meant to stir and excite you, to move you--it may even exhaust you. But isn't that the kind of stimulation you go to the theater for or read a book for? Why make an exception for music? (p. 199)

I have often observed that the mark of a real music lover was an imperious desire to become familiar with every manifestation of the art, ancient and modern. Real lovers of music are unwilling to have their musical enjoyment confined to the overworked period of the three B's. (p. xxxi, Preface)

Copland wrote this long enough ago that "the three Bs" referred to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms; today, one might as well be referring to Berlioz, Bruckner, and Bizet. Or Bartok, Britten, and Bernstein. (Or even Berg, Berio, and Boulez.) Alan Rich has added a foreword and an epilogue to help bring the book up to date, but it is the mark of a classic that it is still relevant after the passage of half a century.

Copland discusses the "four essential elements of music" (rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone color) in a suitable manner, and follows up by describing the sonorities of the orchestra's instruments and the compositional forms common to the orchestral repertoire. This book is excellent throughout, and I can't think of another volume so accessible for an orchestral neophyte. Copland closes with these words for the listener:

Music can only be really alive when there are listeners who are really alive. To listen intently, to listen consciously, to listen with one's whole intelligence is the least we can do in the furtherance of an art that is one of the glories of mankind. (p. 219)

It's unusual to read a book that so strongly pushes the reader to put it down and listen to music, but that's what Copland has done with What to Listen for in Music. Read it, and then open your ears.

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Writing at God Is for Suckers!, KA debunks the Decalogue-is-the-basis-of-American-law myth, based on this article by Richard Carrier. As he notes, we owe far more to Solon (and to English common law, which also predates Christianity's introduction into England) than to Moses, but the Right's historical revisionists can't possibly admit that. Jefferson made a similar observation when confronted with the Religious Right of his day:

"For we know that the common law is that system of law which was introduced by the Saxons on their settlement of England, and altered from time to time by proper legislative authority from that time to the date of the Magna Charta, which terminates the period of the common law...This settlement took place about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century; the conversion of the first Christian king of the Heptarchy having taken place about the year 598, and that of the last about 686. Here then, was a space of two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and Christianity no part of it...that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians...we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." (letter to Thomas Cooper, 10 February 1814)

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Today being the fourth anniversary of the first Swift Boat Liars for Bush advertisement that sunk John Kerry's 2004 campaign, Obama's campaign would be well advised to fight back harder against the foul Rovian smears emanating from the McCain camp. The airwaves are already being polluted with misinformation
(McCain's "canceled a visit with wounded troops" and "he's the biggest celebrity in the world" ads), Swift Boat liar Jerome Corsi is defiling bookstore shelves near you with an error-ridden anti-Obama screed, and our email inboxes have been under steady assault for months with tall tales of Obama being an unpatriotic Muslim socialist. Lori Robinson of FactCheck has written a great article about the (largely conservative) email chain letters with their "false, misleading, utterly bogus, and completely off-base claims:"

Snopes.com has been investigating e-mail and other urban legends since 1995, and the site's founders, Barbara and David Mikkelson, have written articles about 31 e-mails about Barack Obama and Hillary (and Bill) Clinton. Only two e-mails were completely accurate. While a handful had elements of truth in them or couldn't be verified, the vast majority were flat-out false.

Another writer who debunks rumor and lore is David Emery, author of About.com's Urban Legends page. He lists seven e-mails about Hillary Clinton and five about Barack Obama. His verdict: 12 false and misleading, 0 true.

We have yet to see e-mails about John McCain, and Emery notes a decidedly anti-Democrat tilt to the bulk of the e-mail chatter.

The GOP's minions are only getting warmed up for the campaign season, so here are some resources to help you separate truth from fiction:

Fact Check
FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)
Fight the Smears
Media Matters
Snopes

update (11:16pm):
Over at Liberal Values, Ron Chusid quotes Obama responding to the GOP's distribution of tire pressure gauges as a mockery of his sensible suggestion to save gas by keeping our tires properly inflated:

"Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant."

Even better than Obama's response is Chusid's analysis:

Maybe the Republicans really do take pride in being ignorant. Just consider the types of things many of them think. Some still believe there was WMD in Iraq or that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attack. Some are ignorant of science and believe that intelligent design or creationism is a valid alternative to evolution. Some also demonstrate their ignorance of science by believing that the scientific consensus on climate change can be ignored because they don't like the findings. Some are so ignorant of our own history that they are unaware of the intent of the founding fathers to create a secular government with separation of church and state. Some are so ignorant of economics that they really think that all tax cuts will pay for themselves and do not realize that this is just a con used by those who want to pay lower taxes at the time without regard for the fiscal consequences. The really ignorant ones believe all the conservative smears against Obama, just as they believed the Swift Boat Liars and other smears against John Kerry in 2004.

Obama really is on to something in this response. Without ignorance we couldn't even have the current Republican Party.

Today's GOP: proudly carrying the banner of anti-intellectualism.

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Russian novelist and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89. Although awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, Solzhenitsyn did not receive his award until being charged with treason and exiled from the Soviet Union upon publication of his magnum opus The Gulag Archipelago several years later. Solzhenitsyn's undelivered 1970 lecture meditates on capital-A Art, with this wonderful passage:

It is we who shall die - art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.

Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly.

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Sapphocrat has a spectacular (and I do not use that word lightly!) piece at Lavender Liberal (h/t: Buffy at Gaytheist Agenda) about the terrorist attack on the Unitarian church in Tennessee, and the Right's denials of culpability:

The right has already begun and will continue to claim that Adkisson is just a crazy nut, is not really a conservative (or is actually a liberal), that his stated motive of carrying out right-wing ideology means nothing, and that it is "inappropriate" to discuss politics in relation to such a heinous crime. But they are wrong on all counts. While Adkisson's money problems surely caused him to snap, it was the words of the right's loudest voices and brightest stars that gave him the justification for his rampage. [...]

Let's just call this what it is: the right wing openly, proudly, loudly, and repeatedly advocates violence against liberals and Democrats. In fact, they are paid millions to do it and are given national platforms to spread their message. You cannot say that liberals and Democrats actively and purposefully want to destroy the United States and equate them with Nazis, Al-Qaeda, and the Ku Klux Klan, then claim that you don't want them to get hurt.

Now the right will claim that it is the left that is hateful and violent and that the left is "just as bad" or worse. To that I say: Prove It.

There's much more to read in Sapphocrat's lengthy post; this excerpt is only one of many stellar passages. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This paper on "Ann Coulter and the Problems of Pluralism" by Samuel Chambers and Alan Finlayson (h/t: Patrick Appel, subbing for Andrew Sullivan) defines Coulterism as "a distinct form of political-performance-action that exceeds the imagined rules of 'proper' public speech" and suggests that, despite being "one of the most important political developments of our time," it nonetheless "tends to be too easily dismissed by liberals:"

Furthermore, we contend...that Coulter and her ilk in fact succeed in a political critique of mainstream political liberalism in America and that the failure of liberalism to recognise this fact lies at the heart of many of its problems - be they conceptual, electoral, ideological or governmental.

How is Coulterism's critique to be considered a success? Indeed, in what respects does it actually function as a critique? Chambers and Finlayson answer obliquely later in the piece:

Every time a Coulterist remark causes outrage or anger, every time it succeeds in causing offence and every time it garners the accusation of having 'gone too far' [...] this reaction provides evidence not of the failure but of the success of the Coulterist polemic. For it shows that the polemic has effectively put into question what had previously seemed settled and habitual.

This is less a substantive critique of liberalism than a deliberate effort to continue moving the Overton window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window further to the right. This is borne out by the authors' later observation that "The genius, if we may call it that, of Coulterism is that in playing the political game in this way it extends and rewrites the rules to trap those who most believe in them." Chambers and Finlayson also write that:

"it is not only extremely easy but also terribly tempting to dismiss Coulter as a minor media-made irritant, a flaky extremist or just another pundit. And Coulter has, of course, been accused of deliberate distortion, selective misquoting and outright falsification (Franken 2003). But all five of her books, from her 1989 indictment of Bill Clinton through to Godless, have topped the New York Times' best-seller list."

This is a non-sequitur. The sales figures for Coulter's books have nothing to do with her numerous distortions, misquotations, and falsifications (which are quite solidly proven, and not just by comedians). Pretending that they do is a way of side-stepping the issue, or--even worse--pretending that that the facts don't matter if a book sells well enough. Chambers and Finlayson prefer to focus on Coulter's style rather than her (lack of) substance:

While liberal theory is preoccupied with rational deliberation and the ultimate neutrality of justice, Coulterism speaks in angry, aggressive, mocking and emotive terms - all the while rejecting any pretence of neutrality. Coulterism remains gleefully, fiercely partisan while denouncing liberals as the partisan ones. And this is not simply - or certainly not only - an irrational challenge to liberalism.

It is this inversion of reality that we liberals find so difficult to comprehend--the politically powerful posing as the powerless, the economic elites pretending to be populists, the media mavens complaining of censorship. As a liberal, I have no qualms about "giving up on a normative pre-judgement of Coulterism as clearly 'out of bounds' or simply 'wrong' in a moral sense," although it would greatly trouble me to give up basic rules of non-contradictory argumentation and truthfulness. Issues of decorum can be easily dealt with, but offenses against rationality itself are more problematic.

I don't despise Coulter because she's abrasive or offensive--that's her shtick, after all--but because she's full of shit. As the authors write, "Coulter wants a dirty fight; perhaps we should respect her wishes." I believe that I've already done so; see here and here for the most recent examples.

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Hart, Mickey & Fredric Lieberman. Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music (Petaluma, CA: Grateful Dead Books, 1999)

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart has assembled (along with Fredric Lieberman) a wide-ranging book of quotes about music, interspersed with reflections from Hart on his long and continuing career. Hart quotes philosophers and poets, composers and conductors, and more than a few fellow musicians on various aspects of music and its magic. Hart barely scratches the surface of the subject in his two hundred pages, but he shares some brilliant insights along the way. Here are my favorites:

"It took me twenty years of study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?" (p. 38, Miles Davis, when an audience member complained that she didn't understand what he was playing; from Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, p. 244)

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." (p.46, Berthold Auerbach)

"Music sobs for you. It laments, it rejoices, it explodes with vigor and life." (p. 159, Anaïs Nin)

Whether you are a musician or an inquisitive listener, you will probably find some thought-provoking words in Hart's compendium.

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Moore, Alan & Brian Bolland. Batman: The Killing Joke (The Deluxe Edition) (New York: DC Comics, 2008)

In honor of the new Dark Knight film--featuring Heath Ledger's final (complete) film role--I revisited a classic from the Batman comics canon: the Alan Moore/Brian Bolland tale The Killing Joke. The newly recolored hardcover "Deluxe Edition" may seem unnecessarily extravagant at $18 for a 46-page story, but its brilliance outweighs its brevity. Van Jensen's ComixMix review says:

The Killing Joke is without question one of the greatest encounters between Batman and his nemesis, and the real reason is that the story serves both as a zenith for the Joker's depravity and for his pathos. [..] It makes a Joker that's more real, and more terrifying.

The Killing Joke isn't nearly substantial enough to be classified as a graphic novel, but it's a very successful short story and a great example of what talented creators can produce within the comics medium. (This edition also includes an 8-page Batman tale, "An Innocent Guy," from Batman: Black & White. Bolland wrote, drew, and colored this story; it fits well with The Killing Joke, and helps add a little more bang for the buck in this slim volume.)

I read the new Killing Joke side-by-side with the original version, and noted a few minor artistic revisions: the yellow oval around the symbol on Batman's chest is gone, and Bolland admits that "every page has something slightly different on it from The Killing Joke of 20 years ago" (such as the inclusion of a new background figure in one of the panels--can you find it?). Heidi MacDonald discusses the coloring at Publishers Weekly, and Jon Haehnle has several well-chosen recoloring comparisons here. My favorite compare-and-contrast example is this one from the Joker's origin sequence:

While John Higgins did a dramatic job with the original colors, Bolland goes for more contrast (and for bleeding eyes, as many observers have noted):

I'm largely a fan of the newer, more subdued color scheme, although Higgins' more expressive work on the original wasn't bothersome either then or now. Bolland's scene-to-scene transitions remain some of the best I've ever seen, being almost uniformly excellent. Here are the two transitions (pp. 6-8) which bookend the Joker's flashback from his purchase of a dilapidated circus to an incident with his wife about a failed nightclub gig:

After she consoles him, the Joker snaps back to the present:

The first and last panels of the story are identical, which ties the story together nicely. (I wish the Deluxe Edition had preserved the original use of the rain-puddle image on the endpapers, rather than using sickly green.)

Is The Killing Joke the perfect Batman/Joker story? No, although it's one of the best I've ever read. Batman's reaction on the last page nearly ruined the ending of the story for me, seeming quite out of character. <SPOILER> A silently dismissive response from Batman would have been more appropriate and would have echoed the tale's opening in a very intriguing manner. However, doing so may have required changing the story's title.</END SPOILER> The overall excellence of the rest of the book is still thrilling and explains why I--and, apparently, many others--still hold The Killing Joke in high esteem since its initial release two decades ago.

I would have more trouble believing that it's really been twenty years since The Killing Joke came out, but the Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum tale is fifteen years old, and the Frank Miller/David Mazzuccelli Batman: Year One story is a decade old. (For reference, Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns is 22 years old; without the reinvigoration of the Batman franchise provided by it--and, of course, by The Killing Joke--we may not have seen the 1990 Tim Burton film or any of its successors.)

The legacy of Bob Kane lives on!

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The current issue of Dissent has more than the usual share of high-quality articles. Lew Daly's "What Would Jefferson Do?" (pp. 59-66) nicely explains the folly of conservatives' claim that the limited government favored by Jefferson and the other Founders would be a laissez-faire plutocratic paradise like that promulgated by the Cato Institute and their cronies. While proving his case, Daly noted the following:

Indeed, as a proponent of public works and social investment, Jefferson openly celebrated the collective benefits of taxing the rich. In an 1811 letter to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, he wrote," Our revenues once liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, &c., and the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rice alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings." Today such a view is called "class warfare." Jefferson called it democracy. (p. 65)

Another gem is this passage from Kevin (Liberalism for a New Century) Mattson, from his multiple-book review "Has Conservatism Cracked Up?" (pp. 108-111):

"What makes conservatism so unpalatable today is its [sic, the] inability of its adherents to accept responsibility for the results of their own ideas and the consequences of their political theories. The conservative mind dreads having the historical tables turned on it. Since 1968, conservatives have blamed liberals for a failed track record--arguing, for example, that the Great Society didn't tackle the problem of poverty and sometimes exacerbated it. Now with the track record of George W. Bush plain to see, conservative intellectuals fear liberals can return the favor." (p. 111)

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If you enjoy the snark of Demotivators calendars, then check out some-e-cards for their great reinventions of normally-bland e-cards (h/t: Rebecca at SkepChick). Here's a SFW sample:

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While researching the Knoxville terrorist attack, I visited the Unitarian Universalist Association website and discovered that the late Randy Pausch (obituary and book review) was a member of the UU Church. Here's a snippet from a Q&A:

UUA.org: What is your religious background, and what is it about being a Unitarian Universalist that attracted you to this faith?

Pausch: I was raised Presbyterian and attended church regularly until I was about 17. I like the fact that [Unitarian Universalism] appeals to reason and thought more than dogma.

He mentioned having been a Presbyterian in his book, but--unless I missed it--he didn't mention the UU Church.

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As children were staging a performance of Annie for the congregation Sunday morning at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church (Knoxville, TN), terrorist Jim Adkisson burst into the sanctuary and began shooting. Like other like-minded terrorists (Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, Eric Rudolph) Atkisson was consumed with hatred for "the liberal movement" (according to the as-yet-unreleased note found in his vehicle) and decided to take manly and decisive action against the liberal UU congregation, killing two people and injuring seven others before (finally) killing himself.

The Knoxville News Sentinel suggests that Adkisson's perception of reality was skewed rightward by the wingnut books (Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly) that were found in his apartment:

Adkisson targeted the church, [Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve] Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

Adkisson told Still that "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."

My condolences go out to the Knoxville congregation, their extended families, and their liberal allies in Tennessee.

links:
Tennessee's GLBT newspaper Out & About has more information
so does RawStory

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"Step right up and see the one, the only, the stupendous, Pika-cooch..."

Who thought this was a good idea? (h/t: Bay of Fundie)

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pausch, Randy. The Last Lecture (New York: Hyperion, 2008)

In The Last Lecture, noted CMU professor Randy Pausch tells the story behind his famous last lecture, paralleling much of the lecture itself as he does so. (Despite the repetition, perhaps the only way to improve this book would have been to include a DVD of the lecture.) Pausch's recent death propelled his book The Last Lecture over several others in my to-be-read stack; reading it was a sadder experience than it would have been just a little while ago, but that is more a testament to what Pausch wrote than the time in which I read it. Indeed, his sentiments may outlive the rest of us much as they did him.

The Last Lecture isn't a depressing tale of surgery, chemo, and radiation, but rather a celebration of living well in a limited time--Pausch writes about achieving our own dreams and enabling those of others. One needn't be staring down the barrel of a terminal disease to get a great deal out insight from this book, and I have more praise for it than perhaps any current best-seller I've ever read. In a book filled with wisdom about life, love, and parenting, it is difficult to highlight just a few representative passages. I will confine myself with one that spoke deeply to me, these words on the importance of maintaining an inquisitive household:

...my dad had an infectious inquisitiveness about current events, history, our lives. In fact, growing up, I though there were two types of families:

1) Those who need a dictionary to get through dinner.
2) Those who don't.

We were No. 1. Most every night, we'd end up consulting the dictionary, which we kept on a shelf just six steps from the table. "If you have a question," my folks would say, "then find the answer."
The instinct in our house was never to sit around like slobs and wonder. We knew a better way: Open the encyclopedia. Open the dictionary. Open your mind. (p. 22)

A world filled with dream-achievers such as Mr Pausch would be an immeasurably happier place; spend some time with his book to find out why. (But watch his lecture first!) After you've read The Last Lecture, share it with someone you love.

links:
Randy Pausch on Wikipedia
CMU's Entertainment Technology Center
Alice Project
Pausch's role in JJ Abrams' upcoming Star Trek film

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Vonnegut, Kurt. Armageddon in Retrospect (New York: Putnam, 2008)

Consisting of a thirteen previously unpublished pieces, Armageddon in Retrospect is the first Vonnegut collection to appear since his death last Spring. This is only the third of his books I've read (A Man without a Country and Slaughterhouse-Five being the other two), so I can't claim to be an expert on Vonnegut's writings. Armageddon in Retrospect is an interesting book, but not an essential one.

The book leads off with Vonnegut's first letter home after his POW experiences in Dresden, followed by a commencement address from 2007. The remaining eleven pieces are short stories that deal with various aspects of war and the bellicose mentality. While Armageddon in Retrospect is enjoyable, I didn't find any of the selections compelling enough that their absence from his published oeuvre would have constituted a great loss. The following sentiment, though, is as fitting a capstone for Vonnegut's career as any:

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him.
It was music.
I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization. (p. 233)

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This interactive Venn diagram from Slate shows the power of information design to illuminate the Bush scandals:

Very well done...bravo!

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Famed professor Randy Pausch died this morning; here's his obituary at CNN.

Several million people have heard the story of his "last lecture" at Carnegie Mellon in the face of a pancreatic cancer death sentence garnered him national attention. I can't recommend Pausch's insights highly enough; he's not maudlin or mawkish, but meaningful in ways that touch on deep issues seldom discussed in public. His book The Last Lecture is still on the best-sellers list, where it has resided since its release in April. I haven't finished reading it yet, but these words from his lecture are my Quote of the Day:

"We're not going to talk about spirituality and religion, although I will tell you that I have experienced a deathbed conversion; I just bought a Macintosh. [laughter] I knew I'd get 9% of the audience with that..."
(Randy Pausch, at about 2:30 in the video of his lecture)

I offer my condolences to his family, friends, and former students.

links:
Randy Pausch's website
The Last Lecture

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Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The third issue of Lapham's Quarterly, "Book of Nature," has the expected environmentalist voices (Emerson and Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey, and--of course--Al Gore) along with a few surprises: Pliny the Younger's description of his famous uncle's death in Pompeii (pp. 36-7, Letter LXV to Tacitus, online here), Jack London's reportage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (pp. 47-8; the full article is online here), passages from Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and extracts from Lucretius and Newton. It is in the breadth of its selections that Lapham's Quarterly truly shines; I know of no comparable magazine.

This section of Montaigne's "On Cannibals" (p. 52, online here) is my Quote of the Day:

"...every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason, than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things."

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