Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.
I joined the herd last week and started using Twitter. Ever since, I’ve been trying to come up with a name for the people who use it. Like a gaggle of geese, or a lamentation of swans. Because that’s just something I do.
There are a lot of people on there, spouting off about one thing or another. Sometimes it’s mundane, sometimes it’s poetic. Mostly though it’s illustrative of the phenomenon that may or may not have a scientific name yet, but has to do with the desire to tell other people about yourself and the relative ease with which this is possible thanks to El Internet. It’s why webloggers talk about their cats, and vloggers videotape their cats.
Charles Hope posted a link to a collection of aphorisms by Werner Erhard the other day, and one of them stuck out at me:
“I know that you know that I love you. What I want you to know is that I know you love me.”
We want to show people how human we are, how much we can love.
Anyway, my first thoughts about what to call Twitter users were along the lines of a “Trivial of Twitterers” or a “Trifling of Twitterers“. But digging a little deeper under the froth of Twitter activity led me to something more like a “Transport of Twitterers” or a “Thrive of Twitterers” or maybe even an “Indemnification of Twitterers“.
I found two old videos over the weekend. I will be posting some of the stuff over the next few weeks. I have no idea what is on both of them. Looks like some footage from our college days.
I realized that recording and posting a song takes all of 15 minutes, and I also realized that my voice used to sound a lot better when I sang more often. So here’s this: http://standards.bullemhead.com/
I occasionally read Stuart Taylor Jr.’s column “Opening Argument”, and occasionally agree with what he says. Today I especially agree with his assessment of D.C.’s unreasonable gun laws, as compared to individual states. Since D.C.’s gun laws are in essence the Federal Government’s, it is interesting to note the crime rate there. For a good case study of which gun laws work and which do not, you need only compare the murder/crime rate involving handguns in Washington D.C. vs any other state-controlled city.
Here is part of his column of Monday, March 19, 2007 titled “A Right To Keep And Bear Arms?“, reprinted here almost in full because in a while it will go under lock and key in the National Journal’s archives, which requires a paid subscription:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued the biggest gun control decision in decades on March 9, perhaps setting the stage for the biggest Supreme Court gun control decision ever. Rejecting the views of most other courts, Judge Laurence Silberman held for the 2-1 majority, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms” — not just to have guns when needed for service in now-defunct state militias. On this basis, the majority struck down the District of Columbia’s uniquely broad ban against having either a pistol or an operational rifle, even at home for self-defense against intruders.
“It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit
annoying us.”
— Judge Alex Kozinski
The decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, is right and should be affirmed. And contrary to a widespread myth, confirmation by the justices that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms would not invalidate reasonable gun control laws.
To put my own biases on the table: I don’t hunt or own a gun. I support reasonable gun controls but consider the D.C. law unreasonable. I had never fired a pistol until a recent vacation trail ride, when I missed a large target with all six shots. This amused my 19-year-old daughter, who scored five out of six.
Now to the Second Amendment. It states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
For decades, most courts and legal scholars have treated this as essentially a dead letter. Their reasoning goes like this: The amendment’s first clause means that its sole purpose was to guarantee each state a collective right to have self-armed private citizens available as a military force-in-waiting (militia) to fight off federal encroachments; therefore, the second clause protects no individual right; state militias long ago became defunct; so the Second Amendment is an inoperative historical anachronism.
Judge Silberman shreds this conventional wisdom in a 58-page opinion joined by Judge Thomas Griffith. In doing so Silberman builds on the work of a few leading scholars of diverse political persuasions.
“At first blush,” Silberman begins, “it seems passing strange that the able lawyers and statesmen in the First Congress (including James Madison) would have expressed a sole concern for state militias with the language of the Second Amendment. Surely there was a more direct locution, such as, ‘Congress shall make no law disarming the state militias’ or ‘States have a right to a well-regulated militia.’”
In addition, the opinion points out, the Framers vested in “the people” the rights protected by the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments as well as the Second. Nobody contends that those other provisions protect no individual rights; indeed, “the Bill of Rights was almost entirely a declaration of individual rights,” Silberman says. And the Supreme Court said in 1990 that “the people” means the same thing in the Second Amendment as it does in the First, Fourth, and Ninth.
The Founders’ language strikes another “mortal blow to the collective-right theory” in explicitly guaranteeing a right to “keep” arms, as well as to “bear” them, Silberman asserts: “‘Keep’ is a straightforward term that implies ownership or possession of a functioning weapon by an individual for private use.”
And while no other Bill of Rights provision includes a preamble clause stating its civic purpose, many state constitutions of that era did begin with prefatory clauses stating “a principle of good government that was narrower than the operative language used to achieve it,” Silberman explains.
Similarly, in the Second Amendment context, “preservation of the militia was the right’s most salient political benefit — and thus most appropriate to express in a political document” that was designed to assure “Antifederalist opponents of the 1787 Constitution [that] the militia system would remain robust.”
Silberman’s opinion makes a convincing case that the Founders saw the Second Amendment as codifying a natural right to “private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense [against] either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government.”
Written by Haven Gillespie and Beasley Smith, played by Adam Quirk.
Up in the mornin’, out on the job
Work like the devil for my pay.
But that lucky old sun has nothin’ to do
But roll around heaven all day.
Had a fuss with my woman, an’ I toil for my kids,
An’ I sweat ’til I’m wrinkled and gray,
While that lucky old sun got nothin’ to do
But roll around heaven all day.
Oh, Lord above, don’t you hear me cryin’
Tears are rollin’ down my eyes.
Send in a cloud with a silver linin’,
Take me to paradise.
Show me that river, Take me across,
wash all my troubles away
Like that lucky old sun give me nothing to do
But roll around heaven all day.
Happy St. Patty’s day. Booze and a guitar and a camera produces this sort of thing. My voice goes off-key. My poor guitar, I mis-finger her. She still loves me the next morning though. This song is Yellow Ledbetter.
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