Their duet will make your day

Mat and Savanna Shaw bring the beauty and the inspiration:

Well done, you two. And thank you!

Dennis Prager and The Princess Bride

"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

That's a line from the Dread Pirate Roberts (per William Goldman's wonderful script), but Dennis Prager would agree, and this fireside chat makes for thought-provoking watching and listening.

A reminder from Mr. Lewis

In one way, we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

-- C.S. Lewis

The wisdom of a wizard

Part of a dialog between pupil and teacher, before Hogwart's was a gleam in J.K. Rowling's eye:

"Sir, all these charms are much the same; knowing one, you know them all. And as soon as the spell-weaving ceases, the illusion vanishes. Now if I make a pebble into a diamond" -- and he did so with a word and a flick of his wrist -- "what must I do to make that diamond remain diamond? How is the changing-spell locked, and made to last?"

The Master Hand looked at the jewel that glittered on Ged's palm, bright as the prize of a dragon's hoard. The old Master murmured one word, 'Tolk,' and there lay the pebble, no jewel but a rough grey bit of rock. The Master took it and held it out on his own hand."This is a rock; tolk in the True Speech," he said, looking mildly up at Ged now. "A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world. By the Illusion-Change you can make it look like a diamond -- or a flower or a fly or an eye or a flame --" The rock flickered from shape to shape as he named them, and returned to rock. "But this is mere seeming. Illusion fools the beholder's senses; it makes him see and hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow..."

(From A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin)

Separation of Powers

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, from his book A Republic, If You Can Keep It:

"Who, after all, would hire nine people to write laws for a continental nation and then insulate them from any electoral accountability? Let alone pick for the job nine lawyers from fancy law schools, with a majority from East Coast urban centers? That sounds more like the monarchy the Constitution rejected than the republic it ordained." (p. 134)

"Legislators are responsive to their constituents and have institutional resources designed the help them discern and enact majoritarian preferences. Politically insulated judges come armed with only the attorneys' briefs, a few law clerks, and their own idiosyncratic experiences. They are hardly the representative group you'd expect (or want) to be making empirical judgments for hundreds of millions of people." (p. 157)

Hope for Netflix yet

"Anne with an E" is good TV, with top-drawer acting, writing, and cinematography.

Among other things, the show reminds me of "Little House on the Prairie," except that it has more verisimilitude than that show did.

I like the Canadian setting, because (as in the original Anne of Green Gables books), following late nineteenth-century lives on Prince Edward Island evokes for me the song "St. Anne's Reel," which I first heard played by a now-retired concert violinist named Charlann Gastineau, very likely at the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest in an early-Nineties gig with Phil Salazar when he helmed The Acousticats.

Years later I realized that the tune had also been covered by John Denver.

FWIW, nearby Cape Breton Island also has a strong fiddle tradition.

Stupid Supreme Court decisions

I'm no lawyer, but I can read, and I have opinions. This one is partly inspired by a book I'm reading now: Neil Gorsuch's A Republic If You Can Keep It.

Some of my thinking is also shaped by Mark Levin's Men in Black: How Judges Are Destroying America, although the Gorsuch book will assuredly age better than Levin's screed from 2005 has.

The Supreme Court's "Hall of Shame," (we got your stare decisis right here, pal) IMHO:

1. Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (companion cases tied for first in the "overreach sweepstakes," and handed down in 1973) -- In which the court used "substantive due process" to create a hitherto unknown and wholly unfettered constitutional right to abortion on demand.
2. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): In which the court decided that there's no such thing as an African-American, because black people can't be U.S. citizens.
3. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): In which the court affirmed racial segregation under the fig leaf of "separate but equal" posturing that only Justice John Marshal Harlan was willing to dissent from.
4. Korematsu v. United States (1944): In which the court decided that it was okay to place American citizens of Japanese ancestry in internment camps because we were then at war with Japan.
5. Ohio v. Roberts (1980): In which the court decided that the Founding Fathers weren't serious about the Sixth Amendment.
6. Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984): In which the court decided that whenever ambiguity in legislative language makes punting on controversy look smart, judges may defer to the judgment of federal bureaucrats who pinkie swear that they're policing themselves.
7. Kelo v. City of New London (2005): In which the court said it was cool for the government to take land from one private party and give it to another one.
8. Wickard v. Filburn (1942): I got this one from lawyer David Limbaugh, who mentions that this was a 'New Deal' case in which the Supreme Court sanctioned the federal government's regulation of purely intrastate activities under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn was just minding his own business, but the court screwed him over for the sake of letting the feds set limits even on localized wheat production.