"How long halt ye between two opinions?"

I Kings 18:21

The effort to generate regulations proved to be a very lucrative and satisfying one. If nothing else, at least paper never crashes. Thus, there was no longer the aggravation of the people from the test lab incessantly pointing to still another failure. Actually, the experience in writing the failure reports had proved to be excellent training for writing rules and policies, and there still remained several senior individuals who had the good fortune to have been on leave of absence during the final cataclysmic flight period and were thus still available at Daedalus to recall all the way back to the original proposal effort. Best of all, it became clear that the regulations which were now pouring forth would need to be updated periodically so that a degree of job security was guaranteed which was never enjoyed back on the old invisible airplane project. But as the words flowed and good times prevailed, a few unspoken doubts began to arise, particularly among the old-timers, as to how effective the new rules would actually prove to be in legislating problems out of existence. Somehow, most had the familiar ring of the semiannual solution of the decade that they had been hearing about for years to the problems which had been bedeviling the system for centuries.

Abigail Adams once remarked, "We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." Law XLIX canonized the fact that we similarly...