I didn't realize that California had no control over the amount that it taxes its residents. Whether it be the sales tax, income tax, or property tax, why can't California raise taxes and cut spending to get its budget back in order? I simply don't know why this is the problem of taxpayers in the other 49 states.

Yes, I realize that California has an amendment to its constitution that limits property tax increases. Again, that's a problem that the people of California can remedy in relatively short order. Effectively you're asking people across the U.S. to subsidize dysfunctional behavior and keep property taxes artificially low for California residents.

Everyone who supported this egregious crime against the American taxpayer should now be officially forbidden to complain about any of the following (that's you too, Mr. Leonard):

- slow economic growth

- high interest rates

- inflation

- a weak U.S. dollar

And finally:

- No announcements of surprise will be allowed when the same people who got us into this mess expect us to bail them out again in a matter of years or even months. It will again be urgent and a matter of life and death. The only thing that will have changed is that the dollar amount will be even bigger.

Okay, I'll bite.

Your point about the age of consent being somewhat arbitrary is, contrary to your protestations, neither new nor original. The law draws all kinds of bright lines demarcating when one thing becomes another. That's what the law has to do.

To use your point, I can't go into the Army and be killed in Iraq when I'm 17 either. On the day I turn 18, I can enlist. Replace 17/18 with 20/21, and I can drink alcohol. The cops may not pull me over if I'm speeding modestly, but they most certainly will if I'm going 15-20 miles over the speed limit.

Your argument could just as well be used to lower the age of consent for sexual activity, which you will find to be the case in many European countries. There are obviously some 16-year-olds who are more mature than some 18-year-olds - and for that matter, maybe even some 80-year-olds - but the point is irrelevant. The law can't be written for individual idiosyncracies. For better or worse, our society has decided that people are (except for drinking) adults at age 18, and makes them free agents at that age. In most times and places in the vast sweep of human history, people were effectively adults at far younger ages than 18. To imply that people can't make rational choices at that age is profoundly condescending to intelligent young people everywhere.

We get it. Porn offends your moral sensibilities. The answer to that is obvious: you don't have to consume it. But the poorly reasoned diatribes are really rather ridiculous, and just a thinly veiled attempt to try to assert the superiority of your own moral sense over that of others by force of law. It's authoritarianism, whether you admit it or not.

I'm serious. If you're investing in a 401(k) or retirement account, your bond allocation has likely grown huge due to the drastic declines in the equity market. I've been buying 100% equities for the better part of a year now. Yes, I've taken a bath, but I'm not going to be able to touch this money for another 20 years, so I couldn't care less what the market does this year or next.

Buy low. Sell high. The only way to make money in investing is to do what everyone else is afraid of doing. Fear creates opportunity.

Our gross national debt as percentage of GDP is already higher than it was in 1940, after seven years of social spending by the Roosevelt administration. Although this figure skyrocketed during WWII (to pay for the war), the U.S. emerged in 1945 as virtually the only developed economy that hadn't been destroyed. Thus, we were in a unique position to dominate the globe economically and reap the benefits. Those days are long gone.

The upshot is: we have to be careful about the debt. The notion, as Mr. Conason suggests, that we just fire up the printing presses at the U.S. Mint and manufacture more money, betrays a rather pronounced ignorance of economics. Unless you are untroubled by runaway inflation and a declining dollar, this is a potentially disastrous idea.

Yes, we can reallocate the deficit spending we already engage in - away from imperialist misadventure and toward infrastructure and social spending. That would be welcome. But I'm afraid that, like countless others who have come before us, Americans love their empire. The choice is much starker today than it was in the 1960s: it's either guns or butter. Not both.

And it's hard to dismantle something you won't admit you have. When I hear both Obama and McCain uttering pious sentiments about how the U.S. won't "allow" Iran to do this or Russia to do that (as though it's up to us to police the world), that's your tax dollars still going to the military-industrial complex, not to bridges and healthcare.

One of my favorite novels last year was a big, brash swashbuckler called "The Religion" by an Englishman named Tim Willocks. It's set in the 16th century during the Battle of Malta, when the Turks wanted to conquer the island to serve as a launching pad for an invasion of the European mainland. It's also supposed to be the first in a trilogy. So, to Ms. Miller's point, perhaps the tradition isn't completely dead in the West?

Well-written historical fiction is a great pleasure, taking us someplace we could never go ourselves - the past. The work may not be a completely faithful recreation of it, of course, but hopefully a reasonably close facsimile.

I find high-art fiction to be mostly pretentious, and written more for the peculiarities of politically correct university faculty sensibilities than for any casual reader who isn't averse to learning something but who also wants to be entertained.