Brought F downstairs so as to let the others sleep, and been doing a little surfing via the terminal in the lobby.
Very good flight (once again, thank you, United Airlines); awful queue at immigration; long taxi ride; staying at Holiday Inn on Rhode Island Ave; had a little walk yesterday evening as far as Jury’s in Dupont Circle for family-friendly dinner. Sightseeing today will start soon. But I’ll see if we can get anothe couple of hours sleep first.
Interesting details — thanks.
I don’t object in principle to “legislating against sin” — people have opinions about what (if anything) “sin” is, and of what is and isn’t a sin, and those opinions make up part of their view of what the law should and shouldn’t address. My actual objection is to political programmes that include as a necessary step the assumption that at some stage lots of people will become better and more responsible through the sheer force of their wills. It’s the political equivalent of the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan. It doesn’t require a libertarian outlook to notice this.
The common Green expression of this seems to be the idea that we must try to convince people to perform small acts of environmentally-virtuous voluntary self-denial, and that somehow this will save the planet. Of course not enough people will, and it wouldn’t be enough even if they did. If the planet is to be saved, it’s going to come from large-scale rearrangements, not from enough people reusing their brown paper bags.