Investigators are trying to figure out how it hap­pened that a com­mer­cial flight car­ry­ing 144 obliv­i­ous pas­sen­gers simply sped past its des­ti­na­tion last night––by 150 miles. Not only did the pilots miss their land­ing strip, they missed every attempt by ground con­trollers to con­tact them over the course of an entire hour. The excuse the pilots gave, after cir­cling back and land­ing safely but a little later than expected, is not very reas­sur­ing (from the Times.)

the pilots told the Fed­eral Bureau of Investigation and the air­port police that “they were in a heated dis­cus­sion over air­line policy and they lost sit­u­a­tional aware­ness,” the safety board said, citing infor­ma­tion from the Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Administration.

The good news is that the pilots even­tu­ally got their sit­u­a­tional aware­ness back!

So, just two screw-​ups, right?

I’ve been mean­ing to throw two or three cents into Michael Robbins’s inter­est­ing recent post on form and ide­ol­ogy. But the post is old now, and I think I might ramble on too long for a com­ment stream. Here’s a new post instead.

I’m not as famil­iar with the tra­di­tions of Marx­ist intel­lec­tu­al­ism (espe­cially of the cur­rent vari­ety) as are some around DE, so I’m happy to think of this as a set of ques­tions as much as a set of claims.  Still I think even I’m safe in saying that “form” and “ide­ol­ogy” are two words that one ought to be care­ful with. They are bloated and multi-​purposed and, well, mostly empty. While I’m inter­ested in Michael’s ques­tion about the con­nec­tion between form and ide­ol­ogy, I think we ought to be cleaner in posing it. (Not a crit­i­cism, Michael, just clar­i­fi­ca­tion: I know you were posing it in a bloggy way.)

Ask a room full of grad­u­ate stu­dents in hip glasses what form is and you will get a mess.

Apolo­gies to anyone who’s seen this already (it’s being passed around), but I want to do my part to make sure every­one gets the chance.

Here’s a logic map to help you make it through the mind-​blistering dis­play in Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) unmask­ing of a bill that pro­tects against “discrimination” on the basis of so-​called “sexual orientation”: homos; sex with ani­mals and dead people; pedophiles; Obama; the Negro Pres­i­dent issue broadly con­ceived; homos’ attack on lib­erty; homos and Hitler the Car­toon, the “ultimate hate monger”; homos.

When John Ensign is not attend­ing Promise Keeper meet­ings, or hold­ing forth against the threats that gay mar­riage poses to het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage, or cheat­ing on his wife with a mar­ried staffer, or fend­ing off that staffer’s husband’s black­mail threats, he occa­sion­ally falls into a revery of unwit­ting hon­esty from which the things that he and his col­leagues have been doing their best to con­ceal for months froth out. During dis­cus­sion lead­ing to today’s vote against adding a public option to the Baucus Sham Health­care Plan, Ensign sud­denly cleared the air (from the Times):

Senator John Ensign, Repub­li­can of Nevada, said he feared that a gov­ern­ment plan would prove so pop­u­lar it could never be uprooted. “Does any­body believe Con­gress would let this public plan go away once it has a con­stituency?” Mr. Ensign asked. “No way. Once it’s started, you will never get rid of it. Con­gress will sub­si­dize it more and more, allow it to grow and grow.”

And all this time I thought we were fight­ing to pre­vent the gov­ern­ment from taking from us every­thing that we hold dear.