Judge Andrew Napolitano on WikiLeaks and exposing government lies.
August 8, 2010
July 1, 2010
Ha! Great Right/Left skewering by The Onion.
“Dad’s great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head,” said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. “He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn’t even know that it guarantees universal health care.”
via Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be | The Onion.
June 30, 2010
Big surprise. The position Sonia Sotomayor espoused in her Senate confirmation hearing doesn’t jibe with the dissent she joined in McDonald v. Chicago.
I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller.
vs
In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense.
(via Hit & Run)
June 28, 2010
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here.
Richard Dawkins
I think about this almost every day. Consequently it irks me that the increasingly clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” has been epitomized in popular ontology. We are each the winner of the universe’s ultimate lottery, and our response is “It must be a game. Who has some cheat codes?”
Atticus — first months
By popular request, some more photos of Atticus, ranging from 8 weeks old back to his birth day.
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- Matching blue polos
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- Big yawn
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- Happy
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- Not now. Sleeping.
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- Snuggle queue
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- Funny dream
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- Naptime
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- So serious
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- Hanging with Dad
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- Grandma Macy, and cousin Indy
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- With cousin Indy (4 months older)
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- With Papa Jake
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- Super powers
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- Mommy nap
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- In hand
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- Giving me attitude
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- Tagged
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- First family portrait
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- Meeting Mommy
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- Checking vitals
June 5, 2010
Christopher Blizzard nails what is wrong with Apple’s “HTML5” demos which use browser sniffing and Safari- and Webkit-specific tech to exclude other browsers with good HTML5 support.
The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.
Indeed. While the new stuff that HTML5 enables is exciting, the most amazing part is that the spec attempts to describe how a parser should implement these features in enough detail that two different browser vendors can follow the spec and end up with a parser that works the same (for the most part) as one created by another team who also followed the spec.
Epic score for the third “Inception” trailer
If you haven’t seen the third trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming summer movie Inception, give it a watch.
The movie looks great — part The Matrix, part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, part Dark Knight, from what I can tell — but the production values of this trailer are sublime. Well-paced, with a healthy “whaa?” factor. Best of all, the music is absolutely epic. The score is called “Mind Heist” by Zack Hemsey.
It has elements of obvious tribute to Hans Zimmer, who composed the score for the film, but seems a bit edgier than Zimmer’s work. I’m rather obsessed with movie trailers and commercials as works of art. They are micro capsules of art and emotion that have to engage and move you in an impossibly small amount of time. Music can play a huge role in that feat.
May 17, 2010
Timothy Sandefur reviews John Yoo’s Crisis and Command in California Lawyer Magazine. Spoiler: it’s a trainwreck.
So are presidents the judges of their own authority, up to the very moment when they are impeached?
For Yoo, the answer seems to be yes.
USA Today is wrong about taxes
Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950 – USATODAY.com
Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found. Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports.
Uh, that is complete bullshit. Social Security taxes alone are 12.4% (employer pays half) of up to $106,800 of gross income. Medicare is 2.9% (employer pays half) with no ceiling. If I calculate the tax burden that I personally pay (so not including the fact that everything I buy is price-inflated from upstream taxation), I pay at least 35%. In fact, every dollar I’ve earned so far this year is going to be paid to the government… it is only in mid-May that I’m allowed to start keeping any for myself.
M. Atticus Jaquith — “Atticus”
Our first child, M. Atticus Jaquith (“Atticus”), was born at 4:56pm on April 26th, 2010.
Vitals:
- Boy
- 6 lb, 11.4 oz
- 20 1/4 in
- Dark hair
- Blue eyes
- 2 dimples!
He’ll go by Atticus — named after Atticus Finch, the principled and stoic character from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The “M” stands for Michael, my father’s name. We really liked the name Atticus, and also wanted to work Michael into the mix. We thought Michael Atticus sounded better than Atticus Michael, ergo the call-him-by-his-middle-name business. This will matter years later as we have to “full name” him when he gets in trouble.
Some more shots:
Sarah did great. She was induced three weeks early due to blood pressure worries. Her pressures are coming down, as expected, now that he’s out. He’s very sleepy, but can be roused for temporary bouts of alertness. He doesn’t cry much… so far he’s content to just chill out. We’re both very fond of him, and very excited about all of this!