Maureen Dowd writes of the dilemma of the powerful woman. Men, it seems, are scared off by them. So far, so good. But Ms. Dowd offers a theory about why they are scared off. They are scared off because they are only comfortable with "malleable and overawed" women, and high-achieving women are neither.

One has to laugh. Reading Dowd's piece, it is clear why men do not like high-achieving women. It is because they are snide and unpleasant in ways in which are simply unacceptable. That they are not called on it more is a product of the political correctness of our age and the fact that there is a simpler method: simply avoid them when possible. And, Lord knows, don't date them.

Consider this single column. In it, Dowd says that the world would be better "[i]f men would only give up their silly desire for world dominance," citing the Taliban and the Vatican as two ruinous manifestations of masculine desire. And that "[m]en, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women." In addition to being snide and condescending, they are apparently quite adept at whining:

"As soon as you [women] say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."

Dowd has a point: Who could resist such an appealing package of meanspirited carping, snarky sarcasm, and superiority, especially when it is all wrapped up with a sense of entitlement? What an appealling package it all makes. It must be, as she says, that the male logic of dating down is "bollixed up."

The estimable Kimberly Swygert, wielder of the only blog with a sharpener: Number 2 Pencil, has stretched a bit to get from talking about testing to talking about antisemitism (in the particular instance of a Seattle school.) She obviously knows she is stretching the point, but the error she makes (or seems to make) is a common one, and one that needs to be pointed out.

Ms. Pencil (Do you suppose she'd let me call her "Number"?) sides for the moment with the criticism that standardized tests do not measure "higher-order thinking." She points out that even students who have done well on such tests can be blind when it comes to politics and the ugliness of the attitudes they profess and leaders and causes they support. It is a cute point, but confuses a failure of the moral sense with a failure of cognition. It isn't that there is some fact with which these students have not been provided, or which they not understood. Rather, it is simply that they have failed to appreciate those facts. But such failure of appreciation isn't a failure of understanding in any non-moral sense.

It is a failure, to be sure, when one does not appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or the horror of a drug-deformed infant. But it is not a cognitive failure. Those who fail in these aesthetic ways may be able better than most to recite the facts and describe the features of what they fail to appreciate. And moral failures are precisely parallel.

To say that the failure is not cognitive is not to dismiss it. By no means. Our non-cognitive faculties define us quite as much as human beings as our cognitive faculties.

The blindness of the students Ms. Swygert discusses is repugnant; but it is our moral community those students have fallen away from, not our cognitive one.

Hoystory quotes with approval a letter from a former worker in a big three automaker engine shop which says that an increase in the CAFE standards of 3 mpg would cost years and billions. That's obviously nonsense. There are cars, lots of them, that get that kind of mileage (and better) now. To meet the higher standards would just require adjusting the production numbers, skewing them more toward those vehicles.

This letter writer is clearly imagining the difficulty of not changing the fleet of cars produced or purchased other than by raising their mileage. And *that* points a real difficulty with raising CAFE standards: It makes it harder for people to get the cars they want. (There are others, of course: questionable conservation impact as people drive more at lower cost, increased risks in collisions, etc., but technical difficulty is not among them.)

A few words about me may be in order. I am a philosophy professor at UC Santa Cruz, currently on leave to be a law student at Yale. My conservatism flows both from an appreciation of the limitations of human reason and from my belief in the moral order of the universe (see the passage from Chateaubriand below.) I am, in terms of information and news almost entirely a creature of electronic print. Web news and commentary, including the web versions of traditional big media outlets, are my window on the world. I'm starting this blog as an outlet for thoughts and perhaps a way of communicating. I'd love to hear from anyone reading this.

Palestinians as mass-murdering terrorists? Check.

Israelis as long-suffering warriors fighting for their survival with a more-than-strictly-advisable bow to international pressure? Check.

Europeans as morally blind appeasers, now with an antisemitic twist? Check.

So far, so typical. These roles have long filled me with disgust, and indignation. But to move me to real anger and bewilderment, it has taken something much more surprising than any of the above.

George W. Bush as a beltway bureaucrat reluctant to make moral distinctions between terrorists and victims?

The United States, my beloved country, taking as its official policy that a country’s right to use force for self-defense from continual terrorism is limited by (rather than provoked and encouraged by) the need for "stability" and "peace"?

What is wrong with us? Can we not see right from wrong here? Or can we see that what we do is wrong? In the first case we are not villains so much as fools. In the second we are both villains and fools. We are villains for acting contrary to what we know is right. We are fools for thinking that some larger purpose, to which we are sacrificing our duty to act rightly, forgetting that immoral action can never, in the long run, advance our cause, whatever it may be. The last paragraph of Frederic Bastiat's fabulous 1846 essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is not Seen" is a quotation from Chateaubriand's Posthumous Memoirs. Its point, and its utter truth, are worth remembering.

"There are two consequences in history; an immediate one, which is instantly recognized, and one in the distance, which is not at first perceived. These consequences often contradict each other; the former are the results of our own limited wisdom, the latter, those of that wisdom which endures. The providential event appears after the human event. God rises up behind men. Deny, if you will, the supreme counsel; disown its action; dispute about words; designate, by the term, force of circumstances, or reason, what the vulgar call Providence; but look to the end of an accomplished fact, and you will see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected from it, if it was not established at first upon morality and justice."

We have either abandoned our moral sense or been abandoned by it. Either way, I am more disappointed than I can say.

This will likely be a stupid, short-lived experiment. But, then, few will likely die or suffer as a result of it. And that's more than I can say for lots of other stupid experiments taken by people who, unlike me, should know better. This blog will largely be about them: the people and the experiments.