Bursting through a consequentialist hedge, with the most lethal weapons he can find, does the madman come.

Three dozen murders at a premier university, Virginia Polytechnic Institute: that can't be ignored by the sensible mind. To appreciate the event, however, isn't necessarily to understand it. When pallbearers are called for unexpectedly, and because of something atrocious, philosophy is naturally taken to, as well — but possibly as a compulsion, even an indulgence. The question to be resisted, unless one means to give succinct, narrow answers, is that which begins with the word "why."

An affluent South Korean; decadal resident alien; bright enough to study, abroad, literature in another language — the murderer? Well, he wasn't thinking like most of us. Malice can be explained, or repressed, as readily as hunger. Mass shootings committed by youths, a modern phenomenon, are the work of the same temperament that has always been responsible for acts of cold blood.

That the pleasure in harm is widely incomprehensible should brace, not bewilder. The record of the crime is now under the weight of condemnation, the names of the dead announced, witnesses expounding with portraits of heroism in those spare moments. Eudaemonia is thataway; here, savagery is called wrong, and that is the best we can do.

One of nature's clerics preaches without incardination — that is what hurricane specialist William Gray said, four days ago, of the man both formerly vice president and sedately minded. "For someone of his stature, he's a gross alarmist." Al Gore, Gray protests, "doesn't know what he's talking about."

Richard Lindzen, meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as uncharitable to Gore's liturgy. Immaculate truth as Lindzen understands it confers "no such thing as an optimal temperature," and even if there were one, the industrialized world's own average rising far above it, "meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing."

Meanwhile, outside the tropics: after the first weekend that I heard, on the radio, a baseball game called on account of snow my local team, the Cleveland Indians, rescheduled the beginning of their regular season for a stadium in Wisconsin. Groundskeepers at Jacobs Field were slow in shoveling the diamond.

Climate worry isn't science. It's impassioned, hallucinatory sentiment. Happily, it may soon meet reason, and then its end. Where anecdote once happened to corroborate the claim, glances out the window nowadays reveal skies darkening, brightening; and temperatures rising and falling commensurate to the seasons. Yes, it gets too hot and too cold, then snow or rain falls on entirely the wrong day of the year, but to call weather mutable is to call it normal. Lurid possibility no longer acceptable for censure, a demand for proof is going to be made, and the "global warming" shamanists have none to adduce.

Madame Speaker? One first shy of where Nancy Pelosi must have wanted to be. The majority party's doyenne traveled to Near Eastern capitals this last week, and for that had to at least try on the title of Madame Emissary.

While packing, Mme. needed to untangle herself from controversy over her short tour. The Bush administration didn't want Pelosi to go to Syria because, explained a representative, "to have high-level U.S. officials going there to have photo opportunities that [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad then exploits" dragged American foreign policy in a direction the White House considered backwards. The speaker thought this was unfair. "It's interesting because three of our colleagues, who are all Republicans, were in Syria yesterday and I didn't hear the White House speaking out about that."

True, members of both parties from a Congress restless in the president's second term have pilgrimaged, several of them stopping in Damascus to patronize the man whose totalitarian regime endures seven years after the death of its founder, resisting the Westerly democratist push. Pelosi, who is politicking all the time, should know why she was singled out. Straying legislators have received the administration's open disapproval, including Republican Arlen Specter when he, in December, accompanied three Democrats. But as the frequency of these trips increased so did the profile of those taking them. Ranking senatorial committee membership doesn't compare to tertiary executive standing. The Damascene audience of three congressmen preceding the speaker might be identified as Who?, Who? and Who?, whereas one familiar with just a dozen Washington names probably knows Nancy Pelosi.

Once overseas, the emissary practiced grandma diplomacy. She was photographed wearing a native bonnet; then shaking hands with a nice, smiling man who lives in the watchtower of a police state. And then she misspoke to a degree of international incidence, with an artlessness that almost charmed. Talks with the nice, smiling man "enabled us to communicate a message from Prime Minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks." Mr. Olmert issued a correction to the world, insofar as Israel was waiting for Bashar Assad to enjoin Syria's terrorism, thus far from ready.

Some press accounts did not report this contradiction. Others assuaged Syria's blameworthiness by placing it at the end of an accusation of Bush's. "The White House accuses," but, you know, maybe not rightly. That Damascus extrudes fascism, of course, wouldn't be an assertion but an acknowledgment of asseverated fact, as if the weatherman were to accuse stratus clouds of supporting rain.

Propitious were two news items coming from Iraqi Kurdistan in the same week: the first, by Patrick Lasswell, was about an old torture facility in Suliamaniya known as "The Red Building"; and the second, a dispatch from correspondent Michael Totten, among the Peshmerga, on Kurdish soldiery. The Assad state regularly tramples its populating Kurds, and as Pelosi's itinerary skipped Baghdad, the speaker's magniloquent determination that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace" was a peculiar and consequential choice for recognition.

A murmur about the illegality of the tour has gone up, and will probably quietly go back down. Since the average resident of San Francisco is agog over any insult to Washington, and something near a national majority shrug their shoulders at the why and when of deploying consuls, the speaker will be, after this trip, neither unelectable nor irrepatriable. Still, in her peremptory summons to an American ally, and her silence on the crucial provinces in northern Iraq, Nancy Pelosi made obvious the loyalties that would be most highly valued, two years from now, by a Democratic president.

Historical precedent is one reference when trying to assess the last fortnight. Her Majesty's sailors were snatched in allied waters by Iran and were at least legally maltreated, drawing a response from London that generosity defined as forbearance. Today, it was announced that all captured hands would be let out.

Only one event can be precisely compared: that being the last time Britons were seized out of turn by Iranians, which was just under three years ago, captivity lasting only three days. The 1979 Khomeinist mobbing of the American embassy in Tehran and the 1982 Falklands War are germane to the belligerent nation and injured nation: the first, a kind of inaugural ceremony for a brutal theocracy; the second, a stultifying lesson to Argentina in the extant duties of a protector. Noted in passing, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis may most plainly show what elected men are willing to go to war over and if so, when.

Dissimilarities are obvious. Tony Blair has at his command nuclear weapons but is not John F. Kennedy, either in terms of obligation or temperament. Iran's compass is a regional one, widened through insidious, rarely overt, actions. And from what the public has seen of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letters, Tehran's title may have all the ebullience of Nikita Khrushchev but none of the penmanship.

A cursory summation of the crisis — Kennedy discovers atomic weapons in Cuba, confronts Moscow and occludes Soviet convoys, Moscow accedes and strips Cuba of its arms — deludes. The White House was reluctant to believe that the Soviets would solve their problems with intercontinental ballistic delivery by placing limited-range missiles about one hundred miles from the United States. Kennedy would remain dubious for six weeks, from late August to mid-October, until photographic proof was brought to his bedside study.

The president was only, if ever, resigned to the eventuality of striking Cuban launch pads if Moscow could not be castigated into a rescission. He contemned Curtis LeMay and the general's stolid preparation for aerial bombardment, in Richard Reeves' biography telling his staff of the military, "If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong." There was deliberation, vacillation, in the Oval Office. A naval blockade and stateside mobilization came to be the favored policy. John Kennedy disregarded protocol several times, withholding reply to the enemy's targeting of U2 flights and even the fatal downing of one of the surveillance craft airborne over Cuba.

At the end of two weeks, a couple of days before Moscow's salient would be sheared off by American warplanes, the Politburo's concession, under pen name Khrushchev, was sent over the radio. From Reeve's account, John F. Kennedy likely thought of his threat of force as more of a bluff — the Soviet yield was peripety, a miracle.

Reeve's own summation was that the president "could not risk nuclear war or even send troops to die" for the subjects of contention. American victory was not unqualified. Missiles in Italy and Turkey, depicted as little Cubas off a Russian coast under the tint of moral equivalence as well as Khrushchev's own fervid correspondence, were soon after removed. Their strategic function was maintained as they were superseded, but a certain political and moral penalty was paid. Up to and during the confrontation, the president was braced by the country's support. A year earlier, nearly nine in ten Americans wanted the army in free Berlin, war or not; and welcomed Washington to devise new atomic weaponry even if Moscow was still abeyant.

In October 1962, a majority in the United States wanted a blockade, but not an invasion of Cuba. John Kennedy had a minority party rebuking him for not acting sooner or more firmly, and still navigated limits other than those self-imposed. Today's Blair government is burdened with complacency in politics and culture, restrained by low martial strength, and meanwhile continues its attendance at most fronts of the war. As of this morning, all sailors will return alive.

Although the prime minister is suffering invective, it isn't clear whether charges of pusillanimity spring from something more than pique. If Tony Blair and his American ally will keep the atomic bomb from Tehran, and the decisive moment is still years ahead, then Iran's harassments will be ignored. Attacking the Khomeinists for those unfortunate fifteen would have duly satisfied patriotism; justice, too. What about strategy?

Will he act for the sake of utility? Or cooperation? Science News magazine reports, as noted by a resourceful John Derbyshire, that contemporary magazine Nature will publish experiments conducted by neurologists to better understand the vitality of empathy in ethical judgment — with especial focus on that operation in a damaged brain. "The researchers propose," wrote Science News, "that prefrontal damage dilutes emotional reactions to harm that one inflicts on others. People with such damage thus solve moral dilemmas by following social conventions for helping as many folks as possible and hurting as few as possible, rather than by considering personal feelings."

What seemed to diminish the study's comparison of sentimentality and reason, however, were both the familiarity of scenarios and the narrow margin outside of sensible choices. One example, holding the power to prevent or acquiesce to the stilling of a child, was a suppressed and disfigured memory of MASH's Hawkeye, unforgettable through a blubbering Alan Alda — so one might have the wrong kind of vicarious experience. Another example begged what logical or sympathetic action would justify, all things the same, committing manslaughter of five instead of one.

I was reminded of a situation once posited by Glenn Reynolds. If you were in 2005 New Orleans and urged to evacuate, but had transport space so limited that bringing along the family dog meant forgoing vital supplies or even your neighbor, would you leave Rover to a watery end? Reynolds, in his famous dispassion, stated that he would place the life of man well over man's best friend, and received a swell of letters from indignant readers.

But the hypothesis was a good one; it provokes in a way that others couldn't. So in John's case: if Long Island were about to become a shoal and Boris didn't fit in the Derbyshire car, would he — ? Step back. Are dogs people? They aren't. Can dogs swim? They can. May lost dogs be replaced? Nominally, by all means. That is, anyway, subjectio the mind deploys in an argument with the heart, an argument it will on average lose.

War fronts — across the world, in Afghanistan but primarily Iraq — are more events in process that receive, from the broader left and the established press, a fictive treatment. Conditions of the campaign in Iraq, reasonable as relative to other American wars but arduous in the contemplation of the United States today, still run apart from the place as portrayed by the newsman.

Without a luculent narrative, consequent to the postmodern press and the form of war itself, those who are curious search for ways to quantify the action in the Near East. Statistics are one of the more scientific attempts; and two of the latest surveys, which have been emerging from Iraq since almost immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, reduce the statewide impression of Iraqi insouciance or malice to an illusion. Two-thirds of one respondent sample prefer to be as they are now — period.

See, if you read the paper or watched the broadcast networks every day you might instead remark, if the topic came up, that people over there miss the placidity of totalitarianism. Error can lead to certain numbers, but the polls match others, and so the conclusion might be that we do not quite have an idea of how awful life was in Ba'athist Iraq; or how distilled the essence of freedom remains amid shifting scenes of violence. Who knew about this? Or do Iraqis simply not watch the news?

This same week columnist Christopher Hitchens resubmitted his vote as a minister of intellect: Yes, depose Hussein and equip the Iraqis for civil governance. As part of his apologia Hitchens ran through several trick questions. Was President Bush headstrong; had Hussein obviously divested himself of physical WMD; might Hussein have still disarmed and reformed; was Hussein opposed to Near Eastern and Islamist terrorism? Answers: No, no, no, and no. Easy work, if only the foregoing premises, the trick questions, weren't conceivable to between thirty to sixty percent of the American population.

Earlier this month freelance military embed Michael Yon asserted that what independent writers and political participants invest in remonstration against the press "might be better spent ignoring the irritant and offering alternative sources, in view of how critical any and all media coverage is to shaping public opinion which in turn determines the outcome of this war." He then mixed metaphors, holding this dispute responsible for "friendly fire casualties."

Returning to the first picture in words, Yon is well-meaning but mistaken. Mass media whose operators are supposed to be impartial to what they record and report — used instead for the dissemination of falsehoods, often deliberately — is a vector, what it injects into the body public not an irritant but a pathogen. Knowledge itself becomes variolate with untruths that are first acceptable and then contributive to wider perceptions, be they philosophical, epistemological or empirical.

Why does Michael Yon refer to mainstream war correspondence in the third person? Many people believe what they incorrectly think to be right not because they want to persist under challenge, but because they haven't enough reason to reject their primary sources.

A headline from over the weekend read "Gonzales' Hold on Job Grows Uncertain." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales let go a number of Justice Department prosecutors, resulting in anathema from congressional Democrats and solemn coverage from the press. What Gonzales is impelled to do is probably a) beg forgiveness, b) reinstate the fired lawyers, c) resign, or d) all three. Only probably, because I have not read any articles on the subject edited in the major newsrooms.

There is no need to do so. I know that the prosecutors are political appointees, chosen and installed by attorneys general who were themselves appointed by an elected representative; and so would not have been employed according to the competitive standards, or under the elaborate protections, of classified public employment. Serve at one's pleasure, and cause for hire is just as subjective as that for dismissal. Gonzales could have handed each and every prosecutor in the building a pair of bongos, asked the ones unable to play the percussion solo from "Wipe Out" to leave — and would have violated only etiquette, maybe taste.

But the press has interpolated into the business of an attorney general a practically legal obligation to keep lawyers who are competent and assigned to politically sensitive investigations, and there isn't any. By avoiding this, I have missed out on bad information about the civil service and an example of disingenuous journalism. Inquiring newsreaders would be best informed if they read the story of the story: found in opinion magazines and columns, authored by writers who know that they are, as affirmed editorialists, being read with scrutiny.

What to call, if we were to define them, Rudy Giuliani's manner and bearing? Yesterday, National Review's John Derbyshire tendered a neologism, "SOBness." Amusement aside, the lexicon can in fact supply a word, one that I found some time ago but kept from speech and writing because it is used by no one and, appearing slightly antique, defensibly so. The word is "hardihood." It denotes, says Merriam-Webster, "a resolute and self-assured audacity [or disregard for prudence or convention] carried to the point of insolent impudence [or boldness that, intentionally or not, offends]."

Giuliani, a man of hardihood? He was a prosecutor among whose noted quarry were mobsters; as a mayor of the city with deeper foundations than the site of two seminal American documents and the current seat of the federal government, promulgator of change where thought to be intractable. Crime and poverty in New York City fell under his municipal tenure, and if Giuliani was responsible, his managerial idiom — confrontation, repudiation, etioliation of standing political interests — must be credited.

The question can be answered by inference, too. Leftists regard Republicans who are affable as half-witted, and Republicans who are assertive as autocrats — so if the habitual response to George Bush or Ronald Reagan is "dumb," Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani have drawn out, respectively, Time magazine's 1994 cover beholding "the politics of anger," and this one documentary portraying the former New York mayor as a tyrant.

A greater demand for scrutiny of what was said by the yet-exploratory presidential candidate in public or private has produced stories from rightists, now. However aspersive, unless all of them are false it is unlikely that, personally, Mr. Giuliani is a very nice man. For probity, he has marital infidelity and acrimony in a past that might well be attributed to callousness.

Rudy Giuliani, if he runs, will not try for the papacy; and though primary caucuses may not admit an adulterer, the Oval Office has never been the professional residence of naifs. Pertinent, then, is if Republicans want a candidate who is, among other qualifications, more fluent and consistent with the foreign missions of the sitting president than the sitting president, who can seem pretty dispirited these days — and if the balance of an electoral majority will vote for hardihood.

A day or two before NASA announced its firing of Navy captain and astronaut Lisa Nowak, Florida police made public a series of e-mails traded between astronauts Bill Oefelein and Colleen Shipman. Bill and Colleen were having a romance shortly after Bill and Lisa had one that was an affair, and if it were possible to osculate through alphanumeric code, these electronic letters were a wholehearted effort.

Officials also released interrogation transcripts. In one of them, Miss Shipman told of the assurance Oefelein gave her on the woman with whom Oefelein used to tryst. Shipman was worried that Nowak might try something desperate and foul — like what Nowak, in fact, seems to have tried — and she told police that Oefelein "said, 'No, no, no, she's not like that. She's fine with it, she's happy for me.'"

Two conclusions to draw. First, that Bill Oefelein, in all testimony of the English language, is a breezy adulterer. Second, that it has been a very long time since Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee took a photograph of themselves seated behind a table with a model Command Module as centerpiece, each man's head bowed and hands pressed together in supplication, and sent a print to manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Joe Shea, inscribing "It isn't that we don't trust you, Joe, but this time we've decided to go over your head."

That the three astronauts would be killed soon after, in a cockpit fire during an innocuous communications test, consigns the photograph to augury. But it was a joke and, everybody says, Gus' idea — played by men, on men, who were involved in a common effort for most of the time, going home when they could to their wives.

Against the tarnishing adage that some work should only be undertaken by men, as brothers, lies the fact of women undertaking, qualifying and in many cases thriving. But then the workplace is now where a lot of fooling around goes on, and the more critical the job the less margin for error in people who love and, where applicable, attempt kidnapping or murder. Disregard the absurd: Lisa Nowak could not have tampered with a shuttle to send her rival and six collaterals hurtling toward a Himalayan peak, or sought reassignment to the right crew to push the interloper out an airlock. One still has three astronauts not as fixedly dedicated to their mission as another three, Gus and Ed and Roger, who weren't exchanging love notes during Gemini or the onset of Apollo.

There are properties of human physiology that the epochal leap into spaceflight hasn't expunged. Apostles of millenarianism, weighing this failure of the latest age, will decide whether man's transfiguration is as ever maintained yet to come, or not to be.

Men of science, prepare your laboratories. Two Democrats who want to be President of the United States transform when they travel to the American south, enter churches and sermonize on electoral politics.

Speech of the afflicted takes on a distinct character. Rhoticisms are dropped, so the last syllable of words ending in "ar," "er" and "ore" become respectively "ah," "uh" and "oh." Senator Barack Obama exhibited this symptom and a second one, locution as if impersonating Jesse Jackson, when he named himself heir apparent to the civil rights movement. His first visit to Selma, Alabama was a homecoming, Obama said, "When people ask me whether I've been to Selma before" — last word rhyming with "Dafoe."

The senator did not talk like this before his return and accession to, presumably, King's throne. However, Obama's affectation convinced. Hillary Clinton's own adenoidal bray, suggesting Edward G. Robinson, did not. The title Clinton chose at Selma's First Baptist Church was "beneficiary," maybe the equivalent of a foreigner made duchess by marriage.

Another sign of an alteration is the suffusion of Biblical themes in one's language. Obama, in Selma on Sunday, invoked Moses fourteen times. In front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the Friday preceding, to distant sons of the prophet, zero times.

Also strange is the reconstruction of time. The 1960s, and inequitable conditions before then, occupy both the past and the present. Obama retold the stories as if his life antedated them, even though he was, in as many words, consummation "of the movement." Progress, yes? Or progress, no? Will providential men forever be in need?

More, the style of remonstrance contradicts. Obama chided, "I don't know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs was something white," and he omitted the "g" from "conjugating," at the very least. Why use adventitiously poor diction when rebuking the use of poor diction? Is it — because the uncouth or uneducated need to be understood, or respected, even while they remain in error? Should we sit down with the unresponsive student, settle on two plus two equals five, and then slowly work to four?

Preliminary diagnosis: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have visited a population suspended in caricature, and have contracted an acute, complacent vanity. No Americans to meet and court in Alabama, as such. Democratic executive aspirants are busy "gathering Negroes," evidently finding it quaint, practicing the near obscene.