Foundation

None of the local bookstores has Harry Turtledove’s American Empire: Blood and Iron in stock. It’s order, or nothing.

Yet another port out, this time baduK 0.1.1. (Yes, it’s a Qt app that has one of those too-Kute KDE Kapitalisations).

It’s not the most mature or robust app yet, but the author asked me to do it after seeing my work on qGo and I couldn’t resist. An incomplete, unix-based Qt and C++-using app is likely much easier to port than a MS Windows-centric Python app.

Academic Elephant takes the “UBL dead” rumor a step further, and wonders if this famous picture, taken by a combat drone, depicts UBL’s funeral.

We may never know. Not that UBL is all that important, mind you, being so well defeated, but it’s a political matter unfortunately.

I went to bed, not being able to stay up to 10:30 every night with the time I get up in the morning. And it appears I missed a much-needed showing by Dodger pitchers. Lowe went 7 for the win, Belmel was shaky for the old, but Saito came in, cleaned up Belmel’s mess, and finished off the save.

All that for no change in the Dodgers’ Wild Card and Divisional status:

* Leads Division and ^ Leads Wild Card

The anti-Barry Bonds reporters are going to jail rather than cooperate with an investigation into who the illegal leakers were.

Bully, as so many of Harry Turtledove’s US characters would say.

Just finished Harry Turtledove’s Great War series. I can hardly wait to dig into American Empire now, and I’m sure once that’s done I’ll be quick to start on Settling Accounts.

I think one thing that makes them just so gripping, is that because he keeps switching from one character to another, constantly hopping from one place to another all around the war in Canada, the USA, and the CSA, there’s never a slack moment.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Our Constitution has accumulated many amendments over the years. Some are beloved by all (like the 1st), some are beloved by some and hated by others (like the 2nd), and some are just followed without any controversy (like the 3rd).

One amendment has been shoved under the bus by all though. That one is the 9th, and I wish it weren’t so, but it doesn’t get enough respect.

I understand why the left denies and disparages the 9th amendment. That’s easy: they see ‘rights’ as alternately tools to be used by judges to achieve policy goals that cannot be won with elections, or as responsibilities of the government as a representative of classes of people collectively. That is about the only meaning the word can have with them, after all. Alien to them is the concept of an absolute natural order or, Sagan forbid, a deity-given order of how things are and should be.

So for them, such a broad amendment stating facts about the world, steeped in a concept of humanity that is contraindicated by their worldview, is nothing more than an “inkblot.” It’s easy for them to declare that, too. When you have a “living Constitution,” some parts grow beyond their text (1st, 14th) while others shrink (2nd, 9th, 10th, Article 1,…).

The right’s opposition to the amendment is harder to understand logically, though. We’re the steady opponents of judicial activism, determined champions of an enduring Constitution, and last supporters of textualism in Constitutional interpretation. Why, then, do some of us hop onto the bandwagon and declare the 9th to be “meaningless?”

Unfortunately I think the reason is emotional. We’ve been hit over the head so many times by an activist Judiciary finding excuses to use their self-proclaimed supremacy over the Legislature and the Executive, that we’ve forgotten that our view of rights is not the same as theirs. We see “rights” in a Constitutional law context and cringe just on reflex.

What we should be doing instead is upholding the 9th along with the rest, but with the constantly-needed reminder that rights and the role of the Judiciary do not change with the makeup of the Supreme Court. We ought not shy away from our otherwise-principled respect for the document as it is written, just because we fear runaway judges perverting it into a blank check for activism.

Judges can make us politically miserable with or without the 9th amendment. Does anyone actually think that the absence of the 9th would have made the Roe court go the other way? I don’t. So let’s not fall into the trap. The 9th amendment should be as cherished by proponents of a family and community-centered society, as opposed to a government-centered one, as much as proponents of limited government embrace the 10th amendment.

It appears to me that the 9th amendment lies in a blind spot of many rightists. So eager some people are to stamp out judicial activism, that they’re ready to declare the amendment null and void because it’s “poorly written” or whatever.

So much for only amending the document by the amendment process!

Today Greg Mankiw finds a paper that attempts to show what I’ve been saying all along about illegal aliens:

Using data drawn from the 1960-2000 U.S. Censuses, we find a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates. As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose.

Of course, I’d blame some of that on other disastrous Democratic policies, but I’m glad the idea’s out there.

There are those on the right who fling around baseless charges of voter fraud as freely as those on the left accuse Diebold of rigging elections.

This Voter ID bill is meant to appease them somehow, despite the fact that it does nothing to address the alleged Democratic machine conspiracies.

Oh, well.