If I were Pope Gregory’s advisor, I’d urge this: all months to have 30 days until the first (or last) of some month falls on a solstice or equinox; thereafter, alternate 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 30¼.

Unrelated link: Questioning 7/4

One occasionally hears that the upcoming election is especially important because the incoming President may have to fill umpty-leven vacancies on the Supreme Court. To remove this jackpot effect, I had the idea of letting the President appoint one member to the Court during each term of Congress, irrespective of vacancies. The size of the Court would thus fluctuate; but how much?

It so happens that there have been 110 such appointments, and the present Congress is the 110th! So I worked out what the numbers would be if the same Justices had been appointed in the same order, one at a time on March 4 of odd-numbered years (when the terms of the President and Congress began until Amendment XX), and resigned or died when they did in real history.

There are some anomalies, of course: thirteen Justices left the Court before I have them appointed (J.Rutledge in 1791, T.Johnson in 1793, Ellsworth in 1800, Moore in 1804, Sanford in 1930, Cardozo in 1938, Byrnes in 1942, W.B.Rutledge in 1949, Vinson in 1953, Minton in 1956, Whittaker in 1962, Goldberg in 1965, Fortas in 1969).
Thus the number reaches -2 in 1800, and does not consistently stay above zero until 1813. It peaks at 10 in 1857, 1859, 1861, 1879, 1887; then declines again, reaching 3 in 1922 and 1925; rises to 7 in 1937; falls to 1 in 1942, 1946, 1949, 1954, 1956; zero in 1957, 1958, 1962, 1969; goes negative in 1971; peaks at 8 in 2005; and is now 7.

In real life, the Court was created with six seats in 1789; expanded to seven in 1807, to nine in 1837, and to ten in 1863; cut back to eight in 1866; and expanded for the last time to nine in 1869.

Roderick Long (1993): How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked – Until Government “Fixed” It

Hey, I’m a fictional character! Dr. Anton Sherwood, “an older man in a tweed suit”, appears in The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld, a novel about which I know nothing else. (I searched for my name, as one sometimes does, this time looking for ones that aren’t me.)

When they say “we’re fighting them in Iraq so that we don’t have to fight them at home,” what do they mean?

I’m imagining wannabe-terrorists throughout the Moslem world moaning, “I’d like to go to the Great Satan and blow shit up, but I can’t get past that cursed roadblock in Baghdad!” . . . but that’s just silly.

Is Iraq vital to terrorist logistics? Almost as silly, but maybe the War Party has got enough of the People convinced of it.

One other interpretation makes sense to me: that “our” forces are in Iraq to provide the terrorists with a more convenient and conspicuous target.

Assuming that the next President is unlikely to be a Republican, it occurs to me that the Republican establishment could give Ron Paul the nomination in order to let him, and by extension the noninterventionist cause, take the blame for losing the election. But I’m not convinced that They are devious enough and organized enough to pull that off.

Since Somalia’s state collapsed in 1991, life expectancy has increased by two years, vaccination rates have increased, deaths from measles have dropped by close to a third, telephones and radios have multiplied . . .

I wish I’d said that:

The golden apple in Somalia is the expectation that there will soon be a central government. As long as there is that expectation, the clans must fight over who will control it.

(Wait, I did say something like that, circa twenty years ago, about Lebanon.)

Most of the article (cited by Perry Metzger) is about the traditional system of law.

Mike Linksvayer has “One question for temporary dictator applicants”: What will you do to reduce the power of the presidency? Mike admits,

I’m afraid I’d have a hard time providing a specific non-lame (and not pie-in-the-sky) answer myself, but what I’d want to hear are specific structural and cultural changes that would make it more difficult for the president to act in an unchecked manner.

I suppose a President can appoint judges who take the Ninth and Tenth Amendments seriously, but in the long run the only non-revolutionary answer is institutional dispersal of powers. I have a couple of suggestions.