That alleged (has it been formally alleged?) dirty bomber Joseph Padilla is entitled to legal counsel might seem obvious, but U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey had to reach back to none less that Wittgenstein to undercut the government’s logic for trying to deny him access to a lawyer:

The government’s argument summons from obscurity an abstruse problem – that because no rule can determine its own application, it may appear that there can be no binding rule – that was picked apart on the philosophical dissecting table toward the middle of the last century by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and since has ceased to vex those inclined to contemplate such matters. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ? 198, at 80e (G.E.M. Anscombe trans., 3rd ed. 1958) ( But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.”)

(Link from Steve Aftergood, who characterized the judge as having written “triumphantly and with thrilling erudition.”)

From the Journal:

Rushing to war in Iraq would ignore the success of inspections in containing Saddam Hussein’s military machine, according to Paul Stokes, the retired Sandia National Laboratories weapons designer who headed up nuclear inspections in Iraq in 1994 and 1995.

In particular, Stokes noted the important distinction between chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Chemical and biological weapons aren’t good for much, he said, and nuclear weapons Saddam Hussein doesn’t have.

5:45 p.m. in the newsroom, with our network down – bedlam on deadline. Unsure when the geeks would get it fixed, we were starting to improvise with floppy disks, reconfiguring stuff as we went. High tension.

Into the midst of this came a barbershop quartet, singing birthday greetings to our copy desk chief. It was surreal.

Dave Mason sent me a note when I said I’d been reading Grahama Greene, saying I read too much science, and he was glad to see I’d been reading some fiction. Thing is, I picked it up from the library because I thought I’d been reading too much science, and thought I should read some fiction.

Dad suggested the book to me years ago with a chuckle over the amusing premise – a guy in the ’50s recruited to spy for the British in Cuba, makes up his “agents”, makes up his reports. He’s a vacuum cleaner salesman, and to tart up his reports, he sketches by hand the pieces of the latest vacuum cleaner model, adding a human for scale to make it look like some giant evil Cuban war machine.

It’s a dark and funny book, but the best bits were unexpected – the touching relationship between Wormold and his daughter, Milly, the bittersweet joy of being the father of a teenage girl, the darting in and out of her world, trying to know it while one still can:

He couldn’t afford the time not to love. It was as if he had come with her a little way on a journey that she would finish alone. The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him.

I have too many blogs already – Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere – a pre-existing publisher in the case of the Journal and Advogato, which provides a built-in audience. There’s comfort in that. The Nuke Beat’s just a hare-brained experiment, which may or may not work. But they all have something in common, which is me. There are times when, writing for one or another, I feel uncomfortable. Too much free software ranting is prolly a bad idea on the Journal blog, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable bragging about my incredibly smart and talented daughter on Advogato.
That’s why I decided to consolidate things here. By no longer hiding behind the skirts of an existing publisher, I lose built-in audiences, but that seems fine. I’ll still do the other blogs when my whim suits their audience (and in the case of ABQJournal, I get paid for that, which still amazes me). But if Tim Berners-Lee’s original idea of the web as a medium for both reading and writing has any meaning at all, this is it, so my Inkstain web site must reflect that.