Stop Frame

I tried to read Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (pdf here ). Needless to say, I got a terrible headache. The more complicated the judicial reasoning -- the more twists and turns a Court makes to support its ruling -- the more likely it is that the Court is going astray. In Plessy the Court went on and on about equal protection, rights, policies, etc., and then declared that separate was, indeed, equal. That decision stood for over 50 years, until Brown v. Board of Education said, "Er, no, no it isn't." By comparison (not just to Plessy but to ther lousy Court rulings), Brown is inspirational in its brevity. I thought of that as I read the majority's reasoning that a Federal statute lawfully enacted by Congress didn't mean what it said, it actually meant something else, which conveniently allowed the Court to proceed. US Supreme Court jurisdiction is subject to regulation by the Congress (see US Constitution, Article III). Ex Parte McCardle is the classic case, and the fi...

I mean, haven't you ever wondered? If Roe is "settled" law, if a woman's right to choose to have an abortion is clear and given in the US Constitution, why does it remain the #1 hot button political issue? Because Roe is not settled law. Because such a right doesn't exist in the US Constitution. Oh, and because abortion supporters are chickenshits. Oh, and anti-abortion members of Congress are also chickenshits. Am I being blunt? Roe is not settled law because no judicial decision ever is. During recent Senate hearings, we kept hearing about "super precedents". There is no such thing. Stare decisis , the rule of precedents in our judicial system, is a guideline and nothing more. Any past decision is subject to challenge if either the underlying facts or law have changed. For example, in Roe , one of the underlying facts had to do with viability, when a fetus could survive outside the mother's womb. Anyone keeping an eye on the medical science kno...

Now this is funny.

Your Linguistic Profile: 75% General American English 10% Dixie 5% Upper Midwestern 5% Yankee 0% Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I may be late to the party, but still...

I give up, I surrender. Once upon a time I might have had the energy or inclination to put up with all of this, but not now and not today. Maybe if I strike it rich and can spend a week or so tinkering with an operating system (ah, the days of old...sans riches, that is) I'll give it another go. But for now... Bye bye, Ubuntu . Bye bye, Linux . Obviously I'm more in love with the concept of Linux (in all its assorted flavors) than with the reality of living with Linux (in any of its assorted flavors). I frankly loved working with the WindowMaker interface (window manager, in technical terms), but that's all. What brings me to this conclusion was Ubuntu Linux Dapper Drake, v6. I had previously tried Breezy Badger (v5) and was impressed but not won over. But with Dapper, Beta 2, I really got excited. Somewhere along the line I tried a live CD and everything just worked. Cool. I used Partition Magic to open up some room on my laptop and installed the beta. Everything just wor...

Find your own pose !