Asking what someone intended doesn't address the action or the consequences. A drunk driving home doesn't intend to kill a pedestrian, but that doesn't absolve the drunk from responsibility for that person's death.

Intent may seem justified, but it might just as well be a cover for another motive. John Woo might say he intended to do what's best for America or he might say he was doing what President Bush wanted him to do. That doesn't make twisting the law to fit a circumstance right.

The tautology that breaking the law - ostensibly to remake the law - to allow brutality is either the way of the world or is necessary to prevent many more people from being harmed is complete nonsense. If that worked, then the rule of law is indistinguishable from chaos. This cabal does not consider that people create the way the world is. A torturer is making the world unsafe, the world isn't making someone torture.

Injuring one to save many is a false hypothesis that leads to barbarism. It posits if getting information from a suspect at all costs is justified, then torturing a suspect's two year old might be the most efficient means to save some abstract number of people.

Lastly, intent is beside the point because our identity is as a free country, as a society with a justice system designed to force us not to do terrible things, to reach for something better than simply beating on each other. The devil is in the details. And we, the US, have quite a few devils to exorcise.

This show was only slightly better than the Emmys. Slightly better in the way diet cheese is better than soy cheese.

Jackman wasn't the problem, he's a great performer. He is a great performer who wasn't given anything to do. Didn't Luhrman watch any of the grand musicals that were flashing in the background? Obviously, no one producing the Oscars hired anyone who knows anything about stagecraft.

That was obvious with the pre-show interviews, where the musical director blathered a bunch of non sequitors and mentioned Benny Goodman a few times. Que? The mess of songs, each one forced into a key and beat that didn't suit it, was just mangled. On my TV/entertainment system the music was hard to hear and the overloaded stage made it nearly impossible to see the really badly choreographed dances.

It was great to see Sophia Loren, but the 5 person tribute for every individual award was tiresome, contrived and rang false. Does Halle Barry really care about Melissa Leo? Surely there's a better way to keep movie stars involved in the Oscars and thus keep the television audience on the lookout for their old favorites and keep the old favorites' careers alive.

The inner circle of high profile stars belied the "theme" inclusion. Equal access? Not so much.

You'd think that with all the talent in Hollywood someone might have looked for people who could put on a show.

Becoming a professional literary writer is one thing, maintaining that status is another. Without financial underpinning, which men get far more frequently than women, making a living as a writer is impossible. Without psychic and emotional support, writing about what one knows becomes writing about a limited world, say of the home or neighborhood. In other words, one ends up writing about limitations on living, the very thing adjudicators of literary merit disparage.

Male writers have women who do the wash, clean the house, make room for the artist to make art. Whether that woman is a wife or a housekeeper, these women supply the environment that allows not just time and place for self expression, but opportunity to leave that safe haven, have adventures, then return home.

Philip Roth, who never met a woman he liked, much less loved, gets to be called a genius and extolled as the writer of the great American novel. Yet, if he wrote about any ethnic group the way he writes about females, he would be castigated. If a woman wrote of men in the same small worlds as Roth does, she would be just a drab, overwrought housefrau, one of Hawthorne's damned masses.

While men from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace are held up as unfathomable literary stars, the ego and the time required to twist language into massive tomes - and to read them - is often not available to women. Women who try to gain and hold the power and prestige men have, in all professions, are disparaged for being unfeminine, attacked for wanting such a thing at the expense of children, husband and family. The desire to remake the world, that is, to join the political fray that redefines work - and writing is work - is seen as unseemly or just too big for women to handle.

George Elliot is much admired, but not Maryanne Evans.