DAVE KOPEL: The Right to Arms In The Living Constitution.
Archive for 2009
December 19, 2009
TOM MAGUIRE: “A recent Rasmussen poll showed that the US is about as skeptical about man-made global warming as they are about Obama’s health care, so Obama is on the precipice of two pre-Christmas ‘successes.'”
UP TO 70% OFF on holiday toys.
PAYOFF: Ben Nelson Gets a Basket of Goodies, Senate Democrats Get 60 Votes For Health Care Reform.
Also paid for: Bernie Sanders. Why not? It’s your money they’re buying votes with, not theirs.
UPDATE: Thoughts from Prof. William Jacobson.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan McArdle: “No bill this large has ever before passed on a straight party-line vote, or even anything close to a straight party-line vote. No bill this unpopular has ever before passed on a straight party-line vote. We’re in a new political world. I’m not sure I understand it.”
Obama won. But will this cause people to treat the bill as illegitimate, leading to tax revolts or worse? Or will people grumble and go along?
Plus this: “We’ve just increased substantially the supply of unrepealable, unsustainable entitlements. We’ve also, in my opinion, put ourselves on a road that leads eventually to less healthcare innovation, less healthcare improvement, and more dead people in the long run.” And that’s from an Obama voter.
HOW UNDERCOVER COPS get suspects’ DNA. “And this is one of the main reasons that biometric identifiers are so very risky… You can protect the PIN for your debit card by shielding the keypad when you enter it, but how do you keep counterfeiters from getting your DNA for authenticating the debit-card of the future? We throw off fingerprints, DNA, hand-geometry impressions, gaits and other biometrics at a titanic rate, and there’s no way to stop, short of spending all your time in a hazmat suit.”
BAD DEAL FOR DOCTORS, worse deal for patients.
DIPLOMATIC PROBLEMS with asteroid deflection.
AT AMAZON, lightning deals.
AN AVATAR REVIEW from Knoxville reader Marlon McAvoy:
Thought I’d offer the tiniest possible back-backlash to Avatar, after taking the nieces to see it yesterday on the really big screen.
Oh, it’s stupid. It’s so relentlessly, ubiquitously stupid that my b.s. sensors burnt out early in Act I and left me free to enjoy the spectacle. We had to sit third row from the front, which was too close, but there were some beautiful vistas and swooping scenes that occasionally felt more like a ride than a movie. I’ve got a 65″ TV at home and will buy this in BluRay whenever the price dips below retail. Can’t wait to see a good movie at this level of tech!
But as regards the outcome of the Avatar “war”: obviously a consequence of interstellar travel is that it physically restructures the brain, so as to make kinetic weapons delivered from high orbit an impossible concept. Sort of the way that Star Trek’s warp technology wiped the very idea of “seatbelts” from human consciousness.
Heh.
UPDATE: A less positive review, from Christopher Althouse Cohen.
ANOTHER UPDATE: a pan from John Podhoretz. “The movie is nearly three hours long, and it doesn’t have a single joke in it. There is no question that Avatar is an astonishing piece of work. It is, for about two-thirds of its running time, an animated picture that looks like it’s not an animated picture. On the other hand, who cares? . . . The real question is this: If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention? The answer is, unquestionably no. There’s no chance anybody would even have put it into production.”
POLL: Iraq War A Success: “Here’s a final set of numbers from our new NBC/WSJ poll that we find fascinating: 57% say the Iraq war has been successful, versus 40% who say it has been unsuccessful. It’s a reversal from July 2008, when 43% said Iraq was successful, and 53% said it was unsuccessful.”
Yeah, but that was when there was a lot of election-related propaganda. Now that’s dissipated, being no longer useful.
TRANSPARENCY! The health care bill no one can see. “Harry Reid has yet to present a final health care reform product to his colleagues. Not that anybody would understand what’s in it anyway.”
JACK BAUER INTERROGATES SANTA CLAUS.
MAGNIFICENTLY SILLY: $25,000 worth of communications gear in a $500 car.
IN THE MAIL: From D.B. Grady, Red Planet Noir.
DARK MATTER: “An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.”
OUR ANGRY PRESIDENT: “Does it concern anyone else that anger is the only emotion that President Obama has displayed in public over the last month? . . . . How does someone so ‘cool’ get angry so often?” Anger is depression turned outward.
Plus, body language. “This is a photo from Obama’s own Flickr site, so it presents Obama as Obama’s people want him to be seen.”
More on body language here. “So if this photo of Obama leaning way over to stress his point isn’t technically a bow, who do you think in this picture out of Copenhagen is doing the selling/pleading — China’s Wen Jiabao or America’s Democrat president?”
IT’S OFFICIAL: Saab To Be Wound Down.
CLIMATEGATE: Washington Post: On environment, Obama and scientists take hit in poll. “As President Obama arrives in Copenhagen hoping to seal an elusive deal on climate change, his approval rating on dealing with global warming has crumbled at home and there is broad opposition to spending taxpayer money to encourage developing nations to curtail their energy use, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”
THE ASTEROID THAT WILL ALMOST HIT THE EARTH.
Any number of undiscovered near-Earth objects could one day careen into the Earth, and there is a lot of talk here at the American Geophysical Union meeting about tracking them. So far, though, only one discovered object has seemed even mildly likely to hit our planet.
That asteroid is Apophis, a 900-foot asteroid. Calculations released on Christmas Eve 2004 appeared to show that there was a greater than 2 percent chance the asteroid would hit the Earth in 2029. The asteroid appeared ready to give the Earth its closest shave since astronomers began looking for such things. It was judged a 4 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale for a short time, the highest rating any near-Earth object has received.
As it turned out, more precise observations brought the risk of collision down to just 1 in 250,000, but the scare sparked greater interest and study in the fields of asteroid detection and defense.
As it should.
CAN WE PLEASE STOP IT WITH THIS “marinating in Andy’s cerebral juices” metaphor?
LORRIE GOLDSTEIN ON COPENHAGEN: “It has everything to do with some of the world’s most corrupt dictators and regimes extorting billions upon billions of dollars from the developed world — us — which they will then spend not on reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), but in any way they please.”