“Men, there’s nothing to get excited about. The situation is normal; we are surrounded.”
– Capt. Dick Winters, 101st Airborne, Uden, Holland, 22 Sept 1944. (Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose, pg. 131.)
Monthly Archive for June, 2005
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today ruled that cities could seize private land — homes and businesses — for private development:
As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.
Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.
An interesting wrinkle: The city in question is New London, CT, site of the New London/Groton Submarine Base. This base is slated for closure, which will have a depressing effect on New London’s economy. How will this affect the commercial development at the center of this case?
In any case, I feel that this ruling is an incredible misreading of the public use clause (bold) of the Fifth Amendment:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Since when has private commercial development been considered for “public use”? Public use means roads, bridges, schools — not malls and offices. And certainly not “tax revenue”.
In the past, I have looked to the Judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, as a bastion of sanity in our government — certainly in comparison to the Legislative and Executive branches. My faith in the institution has been badly shaken today.
Instapundit has a succinct blurb summing up US immigration:
We have the worst of all worlds in our current immigration system — it’s demeaning, unpredictable, and contemptuous toward would-be legal immigrants, while being porous toward illegals.
Exactly.
The following phone conversation just occurred:
Coworker: “I want to buy a new video card.” [NVIDIA GeForce 7800, just released]
Wife: “You just bought a new card. [NVIDIA 6800GT, Dec. 2004] Play with that for a while.”
I just added a new image to the top of my blog. Isn’t it puuurrrrty? That’s sunrise over China, which I took during my trip to Hong Kong last year.
In writing about the latest outrages in Zimbabwe, Winds of Change discusses an interesting epiphany, which can be boiled down to this quote:
The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world.
Genocide is only one form of Tyranny of course, and as gunowners have said for a long time, “an armed population cannot be tyrannized.” This is exactly what Thomas Jefferson is talking about in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Throwing off the shackles of Tyranny is, by its nature, a difficult and bloody affair, and one that the People can successfully undertake only if they have Arms, as Tyrants are not apt to simply step aside when the People bring forth persuasive Grievances. This is why the Founding Fathers recognized the right of the People — what we today call a human right — to bear Arms.
Amendment II
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.
Have you ever wanted to shoot that virus-ridden, evil-doing box of electrons on your desk, but had second thoughts? These guys aren’t bothered with things like “second thoughts”…
(Be sure to check out the movie at the end!)
Update: For those of us who are offended by the American flag burning that happens every time Newsweek publishes a bogus article, these guys have a reply.
Throughout college, I drove a 1975 Pontiac Grand Prix. It was your basic 70s Detroit 2-door floatmobile, but it did have the big 455 engine. Apparently, that 455 made the car somewhat special, as only 7166 SJ-455s were built in 1975. Further, 1975 was the last year that the 455 was widely available; it was discontinued in 1976.
If I had realized at the time that the car was at least somewhat special, I probably would have treated the old girl with more respect. Instead, I cut off the vinyl top with a boxcutter when it began to peel, utilized a belt sander to blast away rust, and Ace Hardware spraypaint to patch up the resulting bare metal. I’m sure the engine wasn’t making anywhere close to the 200 HP/330 lb-ft. it was rated for, as the duct from the ram-air scoop to the air cleaner was missing. As a final indignity, I sold the car to my cousin, who didn’t bother to register it; he drove it unregistered for two years until it was impounded by Modesto PD. The fine to get the car back was greater than the car’s value.
Pages dedicated to the 1975 Pontiac Grand Prix are here and here.
I just stumbled upon this “customer spotlight” marketing brochure from TGS which I was involved with a couple of years back:
“HardCopy is a far superior solution for this type of output than the ‘traditional’ method of printing in standard Open Inventor—namely, using a SoOffscreenRenderer to render a bitmap to a file,” says [eengstro] of [eengstro's employer]. “The vectorized output from HardCopy is much smaller than the bitmaps produced by other methods, and scales up easily to large-format printers.”
Wow. I wrote that. Somehow, I feel… unclean.
I just observed the following telephone conversation between one of my coworkers and his wife:
Coworker: “Hello honey.”
Wife: “Hi. Did you know that Phil Jackson is coming back to the Lakers?”
Coworker: “Yes, I had already heard that.”
Wife: “Oh… you already knew?”
Coworker: “Yes…”
Wife: “Oh… ummm… well, that’s all I had to say. Bye.”
Coworker: “Bye.”
Phone conversation ends.
Coworker to me: “Sometimes I should pretend not to know these things.”
Indeed. Lesson learned.