Now everything's a little upside down...

By -
I was watching Clear and Present Danger as my movie to fall asleep to. James Earl Jones is the dying director of the CIA, and he is lecturing Harrison Ford as to why, despite the dangers and difficulties, he had to push ahead and expose the corruption he had found.

Jones says, "When you took this job, you swore an oath. And not to me."

Ford nods.

"And not to my boss, the President."

Ford nods.

"You swore an oath to my boss's boss..."

Wow, I thought, a modern movie is really going to walk up the Great Chain of Being, and note that every ruler is ultimately responsible to...

"...the American people."

Doh!

Comments

  1. Silas Barta4:29 PM

    I thought it was to the Constitution ...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Samson Corwell12:47 PM

      Typically the reasoning is that the Constitution is a creation of the people.

      Delete
    2. gcallah1:55 PM

      Yes, I think so too. But I knew they weren't going there, because it would be weird to refer to it as a "boss."

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more