Monthly Archive: June 2012

Kottke presents a list of really bad password requirements. I was reminded of this when I was informed of a 60-day limit for my password on a sports message board. Seriously, a sports message...

by Sean T. Byrnes One of the more amusing developments of Thursday’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act was the efforts of the nation’s aggressively self policed political movements try to either...

…when I read this. We do a lot of (a) and (b) here, I think. Which is great.

From The Splendid Table’s: How to Eat Supper (dish pictured on the cover of the book). I’ll be making this to take to a cookout this weekend. Dip some good bread in the leftover sauce...

Can we all just admit that it’s a silly bit of legal chicanery to say, “We aren’t commanding this action. We are taxing the failure to perform it”? You can also spare me the...

Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Jason Brennan Argues that Academic Constitutional Legal Theory is intellectually corrupt.

In a post, and then in a comment thread about the Electoral College, Ryan Noonan develops the idea that the original intent of the Electoral College was for informed, educated people of diverse backgrounds,...

In this post, my esteemed colleague Jason Kuznicki says: Rights claims are generalized moral claims about how humans should treat one another, whether in this society or any other. They are discovered, not created....

The Atlantic‘s Andrew Cohen pulls out some choice quotes from today’s SCOTUS opinion penned by Chief Justice Roberts: “The individual mandate, however, does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to become active in...

…you have to admit these people are fishing morons, or a crowd-sourced art project.

Below is a repost of something I posted on December 16, 2009, several months before PPACA was finally enacted.  As you will note, the post predicts the following: 1. Whether the mandate would be...

As anyone with access to the internet, cable TV or radio knows, the Supreme Court announced this morning that it is upholding Obamacare. As I write this, the opinions themselves have yet to made...

United States v. Alvarez — Ninth Circuit affirmed, the Stolen Valor Act is unconstitutional. Breakdown is Concurrence plurality by Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Ginsburg. Breyer and Kagan suggest that statute could be re-written to comply with...

I’m reading Akhil Reed Amar’s book, America’s Constitution: A Biography (on a blog recommendation from Peter Sagal), and it’s really excellent, like most everything Amar writes, says, or does. I just got to the part...

Thanks for being patient as I tinker. The Feed for this site should be working again, but I’m still running tests. Feel free to make this your happy afternoon open thread.

My Twitter friends won’t shut up about it: A German court has ruled that circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to bodily harm even if parents consent to the procedure… The case involved...

A big heat wave is supposed to hit the Southeast tomorrow. For a guy who is most happy in the winter months this is not something I am looking forward to. When I was...

My friends who have asthma are all complaining about how the air quality is totally wiping them out. When we first moved to Colorado Springs, we moved up to the Rockrimmon area. The houses...

  Wood and aluminum have similar strength to weight ratios. The greater thickness per given weight makes wood stiffer and more damage resistant in smaller scantlings. Aluminum is (with proper corrosion protection) lower maintenance...