no favors

Posted on Friday, 2003 February 21 by Anton

Demons in a death penalty case – Ellen Goodman writes in the Boston Globe about the peculiar practice of forcibly medicating mad prisoners.

I am particularly struck by the ruling in Ford v. Wainwright that it is “cruel and unusual punishment” to put to death someone who was mentally incompetent – so incompetent that he didn’t understand his fate or the meaning of death or why he was condemned. I agree that it’s cruel to kill someone without letting him know why; but, y’know, if I were about to die but too addled to know what ‘die’ means, I think I’d rather be left in that state than have it ‘mercifully’ explained to me.
Continue reading →

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I’m just askin’

Posted on Friday, 2003 February 21 by Anton

When was the last time street protests had any effect on US policy?

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“Your Name Here”

Posted on Thursday, 2003 February 20 by Anton

The ultimate generic industrial film, built around every script and visual cliché. I’ve just begun scratching the surface of the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral movies. (Link from two–four, who really doesn’t need to use such large type)

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1861 and all that

Posted on Thursday, 2003 February 20 by Anton

Roderick Long writes in Shades of Grey (and Blue):

To their joint discredit, both Union and Confederacy waged war against the principle of free association. Southern rebels claimed the right to exit the Union, but hypocritically denied slaves the same right to exit the plantation.

President Lincoln, for his part, stated plainly that his “paramount Object” was “to save the Union,” and “not either to save or to destroy slavery.” If there had been no slaves, Lincoln would have sought to crush secession anyway. (And with conscripted troops!)

North and South alike, then, championed compulsory over free association. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Civil War was an unjust war on both sides.

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new Ninth Circuit gun case

Posted on Thursday, 2003 February 20 by Anton

Though Nordyke v King follows the Ninth Circuit’s gross misreading of US v Miller (1939) in its Hickman ruling, it’s interesting because Gould’s concurrent opinion says:

I join the court’s opinion, and write to elaborate that Hickman v. Block, 81 F.3d 98 (9th Cir. 1996), was wrongly decided, that the remarks in Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F.3d 1052 (9th Cir. 2002), about the “collective rights” theory of the Second Amendment are not persuasive, and that we would be better advised to embrace an “individual rights” view of the Second Amendment . . . .

Our panel is bound by Hickman, and we cannot reach the merits of Nordyke’s challenge to Second Amendment. [sic] But the holding of Hickman can be discarded by our court en banc . . . .

As Comedian points out, this judge was appointed by Clinton!

This raises an interesting procedural point of which I was unaware: this panel could not challenge Hickman because it was only three judges, not the full Circuit Court of Appeal. (How often does a Circuit sit en banc?)

Posted in constitution, weapons | Leave a comment

maybe it’s a sex metaphor

Posted on Thursday, 2003 February 20 by Anton

Okay, I can understand Viagra, breast enlargement, Herbalife, mortgages — but why do I get so much spam for Norton Utilities?!

Posted in spam | 1 Comment

letters on sticks

Posted on Tuesday, 2003 February 18 by Anton

Ian Frazier visits a typewriter wizard (Atlantic Monthly, 1997). Martin Tytell has stories to tell about converting typewriters for other alphabets:

There he received his hardest job of the war – a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. . . . The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor’s Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin’s original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.

(Link found at Jonathan Borwein’s Quotations Page, which is mostly about the sciences)

Posted in language, technology | 1 Comment