Frankly my dear Beagles, I don't give a damn.

The question was not so much if you were guilty, as if you felt guilty, but I guess you answered that as well since you obviously feel no guilt.  Just as a thought experiment, why would you have given up the prize if you had found out that the game was rigged before you received it?  If it had been wrong before you accepted the prize, why was it not wrong after you accepted it?

Of course the carp will eventually get into the lake (I think there is some DNA evidence that they already have), it is just a matter of slowing them down.  And I have to tell you frankly my dear Beagles, I don't give a damn.  I don't boat, and I don't fish, and I don't even eat fish.

The commercial fisherman can teach people to love Asian carp.  I hear they are quite a delicacy.  And as for those asshole boaters, they can slow down so their boat doesn't make so much Goddamn noise, and what's their hurry, they're not going anywhere anyway, and half of them are dead drunk.  If a fish doesn't hit them, they'll probably fall out of the damn boat.

See now, if I knew that those upper great lakes people were charming liberals like myself, and felt that guilt which impels one to try to make a better world for everybody (even if that attempt doesn't go much beyond flapping their jaws on obscure blogs and almost always voting democrat), and thus they were interested in the problems of Chicago and trying to solve them, why then I could happily feel their pain, and I could get out there and make a spectacle of myself trying to get taxes raised so that we could build a great wall against the Asian carp.

But my experience on obscure blogs has taught me that they are a bunch of bible-quoting libertarians who feel no guilt because they are convinced that they have never sinned ftpotd, and whenever things get too morally messy, they just detach.  They have no concern with Chicago's problems, why should we have concern for theirs?

Again, if they were nice liberals, we could be assured that they would be helping us, and why not, since we would be helping them.  It is a great principle of human nature, nay, of humankind itself, that one hand washes the other.  But if one hand thinks it is already clean, it is not going to wash the other hand.

Now commences the weekend, and the following week a friend of mine is coming to town and in the middle of the week we will be going down to Indianapolis, so I may not be responding for the next ten days.  I will keep an eye out though, and if I can maybe I can get in a short response from time to time.