Of mice and marijuana. This is pretty funny.

Paul Orwin is thinking about writing a book. Go forth and offer encouragement and advice (sorry, blogspot link is FUBAR, as is often the case, but the post is currently at the top of the page).

Perhaps.

Judge for yourself.

They’re interesting posts from Baghdad, regardless.

[via Samizdata]

Cap Clueless has a long and interesting discussion on atheism today.

I knocked off a quick email to him, but then decided that it’s worth posting here.

He writes:

“Atheism” isn’t a unitary whole; it’s actually a collection defined by a negative, consisting of all people of all beliefs who do not think that there are any deities.

The wording here is precise, but inaccurate, in my opinion. It should really be “…people of all beliefs who think that there are no deities.”

As he describes it, it’s closer to agnosticism, or skepticism (I consider myself a skeptic, and a provisional transcendental materialistic reductionist).

Consider the two statements:

“I don’t believe there is a God.”

“I believe there is no God.”

One has a belief, the other does not. The latter is the position of what’s thought to be the true atheist (though the nomenclature is screwed up, because atheist should really mean no theistic beliefs, e.g. asexual, or amoral, and antitheist is the word we should use for someone we currently term an atheist).

There are some other interesting points in his post, relating to falsifiability and the utility of scientific models and theories, that I might expand on later, if I find the time.

David Warren isn’t optimistic about the current approach to peace in Israel. It bears too strong a resemblance to the failed Oslo apporach, and we have too many “partners” with a vested interest in seeing this plan fail as well.

Leonard David has a good overview of the Space Access conference a week and a half ago. It includes a couple wrap-up quotes from yours truly.

A sub-scale prototype of Walker’s ultimate dream machine is under fabrication. In this way, a track record of safety can be achieved, he said, while upping the height reached in bit by bit ballistics.

“I feel really good about the fact that I’m funding this project. There is no sponsor or investors. I don’t have anybody pulling my chain telling me what to do or where to go,” Walker said. “I figure if I survive this thing?I can just about do anything I want. If I don’t survive it, I don’t have to pay taxes anymore. So it’s a win-win situation,” he concluded.

Check it out.

Most aren’t going to want to download and read the entire ruling and dissents from this week’s 9th Circuit declaration that the right to bear arms isn’t an individual one, but it’s a very important one. It’s in direct conflict with the 5th Circuit’s decision in Emerson, which means that it will almost certainly go to the Supreme Court, which will finally resolve this issue, and hopefully restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place in the Bill of Rights, and make a legal hash of much of the existing federal gun statutes.

Along that theme, it’s worth republishing here Judge Kozinski’s eloquent dissent, which is a commentary not only on the issue at hand, but in some judges being “cafeteria constitutionalists,” broadly stretching some aspects of the Constitution far beyond any intent of the Founders, while completely ignoring others, according to their personal political predilections.

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases?or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. See, e.g., Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc), rev?d sub nom. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997). But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we?re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

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. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it?s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 6011-12; see also Brannon P. Denning & Glenn H. Reynolds, Telling Miller?s Tale: A Reply to David Yassky, 65 Law & Contemp. Probs. 113, 117-18 (2002). The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller?s weapon?a sawed-off shotgun?was reasonably susceptible to militia use. See Miller, 307 U.S. at 178. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller?s claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller?s test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

The majority falls prey to the delusion?popular in some circles?that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth?born of experience?is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks? homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341-42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went”). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

All too many of the other great tragedies of history?Stalin?s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few ?were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed?where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel?s mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:

“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.”

The sheer ponderousness of the panel?s opinion?the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text?refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel?s labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it?and is just as likely to succeed.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

Eugene Volokh has some thoughts on whether or not the case will make it to the Supreme Court. Bottom line: he doesn’t know–there are too many unknown factors that will drive the decision.

I heard this open letter to a generic tax’n’spend senator at the end of Cavuto’s show last week, but now it’s on line. My favorite bit:

I’d sooner trust the single mother raising kids, struggling to put food on the table with her money, than “you” with her money.

I’d like you to tell her to her face that she’d be irresponsible with that money.

That it’s reckless for her to spend some extra dough on her kids. Reckless for her to put a little extra cash in the bank. And reckless for her to treat herself and not you.

I’d like you to tell her she’s too ignorant to know what’s best.

I’ll tell you this, you tax-sucking, boondoggle-spending, pork-barrel-pushing fiscal pimp: she has more common fiscal sense in her pinky than you have in your entire rolodex of feeding-at-the-trough lobbyists.

That’s the wonderful last line of a wonderful essay by the highly redoubtable James Lileks on why an international criminal court, under current world circumstances, is a terrible idea.

That’s the name of a new on-line journal being touted by the folks at the National Review. It proclaims itself to be a journal on “technology and society.” It might be worth keeping an eye on.

The premier issue has an article about the vulnerability of our satellites, a subject on which I’ve previously opined, and will continue to do in the future.