H-Shear and H-Slavery have renewed the debate over whether the Constitution was a pro-slavery document in ante-bellum America. It's an old argument that dates from the period. Caleb McDaniel weighs in on it with"Pro-Slavery Constitution" at Mode for Caleb. Debaters tend to talk past each other, he claims, because underlying the issue is a series of other questions that reveal the inadequacy of a simple pro-slavery/anti-slavery polarity.

In two posts,"Iran and the Bomb" and"Consequences of Absolutism," Taylor Owen argues that the Bush administration's confrontational rhetoric has compounded the problem of Iraq's nuclear aspirations. At Oxblog, Patrick Porter is more pessimistic about what consequences would have flowed from a more irenic American attitude toward Iraq in 2003.

At Chapati Mystery, Sepoy declares"I Declare I." Send him some love.

You take a blogger who blogs about the fact that he doesn't blog very often, in part because he's about to reproduce. He suspects, however, that he is the clone of some prior, more productive, geek-form. Or, maybe, it reproduced him retroactively. Really, it's all very complicated, but Rob MacDougall explains it in"The World is Bound By Secret Knots" at Old is the New New. Both he and Scott McLemee are channeling Athanasius Kircher (1601/02-1680 CE), the proto-Cliopatrician, whose legacy is renewed by The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.
Update: Seriously, Rob is getting communications from the dead!