(Barry) Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that. Besides, the people who care about the record book - serious fans - will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry.

Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.

The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.

Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska's governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.