Magnificent Seven of JttM,

By now you should have received your invitation to my hitchin’. In case you only read digital text, it will be on August 1st in Tulsa at the University of Tulsa chapel. That is a Saturday at 2:30pm. There is also a website . The “save the date” link is sure to delight.

Since all of you are fairly far away, I don’t expect a full showing, although Mohsen has confirmed his attendance. Obviously, I would be thrilled if you can make it. Even more thrilling would be your presence at the bachelor party festivities which will probably take place on Thursday, July 30.

If you want to get in on that action, please shoot an email to my friend Michael. Some of you might remember him. He and I grew up together and sweat it out in the Hump Dump our sophomore year while you guys were luxuriously lounging on the Brain’s futon in Holcombe. He uses gmail; roadbikr is his handle.

As for the wedding, if you are planning to come and need a place to stay, two of the dudes in the party have extra bedrooms, and I have extra floor space and air mattresses.

Sorry to hijack JttM for my personal uses. I’ll try to keep future posts up to snuff. Thanks!

The Fayetteville Athletic Club (a/k/a F.A.C. or the FAC (pronounced “fak”)), the place where I spent a large chunk (and best part) of my teenage years, is unhappily featured on the front page of the New York Times business section.

Wow this little tidbit was cool in a story I was reading on the right whale having a great breeding year. Check it out:

It was the first time researchers had successfully sedated a large whale of any type, according to NOAA. To do so, they had to use two cups worth of tranquilizer and a foot-long needle. Two drops of the concoction would be enough to kill a person, said Jamison Smith, NOAA’s large whale disentanglement coordinator.

Amazing!

Violating basic principles of humility and tasteful web design, could it be that it features his robotic, yet annoying, vacant, eaglelike visage four times ?… (In addition to his menacing silhouette?!?)

Bonus link: HanniDate, which reminds me of JttM’s brief fascination (too brief, really) with Objective Ministries.

Bonus bonus link: Eagle goat drop.

I heard about these lil’ guys on NPR today. They are led by a 15-year old Californian whose parents wrote a book called “How to Raise a G-Rated family.” What he’s started is a fire of foregoing foulmouthedness akin to the flames which occasionally sweep into his periphery of his Pasadena neighborhood.

Kid’s now writing a book about it all.

As you can well imagine, he’s been cursed out quite a bit since beginning all this - by phone, email, physical face, you name it. NPR even played a harrowing death threat. But he’s “ain’t fazed” by all that bullying, he told Jay Leno. He just keeps on a-flippity-flappin’ those arms and rapping his message home.

If you look at the facebook page of the rap video below, notice how all comments have been disabled.
I’d imagine no less than 150,000 would have written something disparaging about the piece by now.

Don\'t CUSS!!!!

The next time someone tells you that they prefer the judicial “conservatism” or “modesty” of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, because it limits the discretion of unelected judges, please kindly them refer to these justices’ recent opinion in Herring v. United States, No. 07-513, decided today. Because they’re wrong.

The Exclusionary Rule is a well founded doctrine of constitutional law. Generally, the Exclusionary Rule provides that any evidence obtained as a result of a 4th Amendment violation is inadmissable at trial. End of discussion. No judicial analysis or interpretation required. (Well…, I’m simplifying this a bit.) The Rule serves as the only deterrent against governmental violation of the 4th Amendment rights. Without the Exclusionary Rule, evidence obtained as a result of a unconstitutional search or seizure could be admitted against you.

In Herring, the conservative wing plus Justice Kennedy determined that the Exclusionary Rule is not absolute. Rather, judges must engage in a fact-intensive, case-by-case balancing test. Under the Herring decision,

To trigger the exclusionary rule, police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.

The effect of this open-ended standard is, of course, to subject the Exclusionary Rule to substantial judicial discretion and personal bias– the exact opposite of what the conservative wing purports to espouse.

As of Friday at about 10:00p.m. I am an engaged gentleman. Not necessarily engaged in political discourse, discussions involving the word “nanoscience”, or a grappling match. No, I’m engage to be married.

Her name is Lauren Vanderlip, and she’s a 2L at Oklahoma Law. We met via my friend Amira, who some of you may remember from UA.

Since we both have friends strewn across the globe, we’re recording a short announcement/introduction video this weekend to send out. I’ll keep you posted once it’s posted.

We haven’t set a date yet, but I suspect some time next summer.

We’re thinking CO for the honeymoon* so Ben’s roommate density theory is panning out. I guess that would make me an orbiting electron.

*Yes, I know that I’m basically Zach Johnson, Jr. Going to a Big Ten university for grad school, marrying a girl named Lauren, honeymooning in Colorado. I’m sure dancing on ice and drunken blog posts are soon to follow.

Many have decried the proposed government bailout currently being rammed down our collective throat as “socialism”. I want argue the opposite, however: that the proposed government bailout is really fascism. Let’s agree that socialism is roughly defined as the government command and control of private business, and fascism the command and control of government by private business.

In tax circles, the “Wall Street Rule” refers to the de facto rule that, given any transaction or investment for which the tax treatment is unclear because of the absence of IRS guidance, after enough investors have developed expectations of a given tax treatment, the IRS will not upset those expectations even though it is under no legal obligation to do so.

Thus, the Wall Street Rule is a rule under which private business effectively usurps the IRS regulating function by dictating the tax treatment of a certain investment or transaction and “forcing” the IRS to concede to such treatment.

The behavior of the stock market over the past few days seems to be another instance of the Wall Street Rule in a slightly different context. After two days of grievous losses, stocks rebounded spectacularly on last Friday, just on the rumor of a possible bailout. And today, after news that both Democrats and Republicans, for populists and libertarian principles respectively, sought to stymie or modify the proposed bailout, stocks again dived.

Thus, the stock market have painted our Congress into an untenable corner. The market has developed an expectation that Congress will approve an unfettered bailout, and quickly. If Congress fails to deliver, stocks will plunge, and Congress will be left holding the political bag. Congress, understanding this, is therefore forced to pass the bailout Wall Street has come to expect. And so you have fascism: private business usurping the legislative function of Congress to get the bailout it wants.

I just saw this frightening post over at Downloadsquad

Basically, the bill allows the DOJ to sue copyright infringers on behalf of the content owners (i.e. movie studios and record companies). JttM Legal Experts, is there any precedent for this? Seems crazy/scary to me.

More on bill S.3325 here

What did Fox News expect when it decided to report live on location in the middle of a “leftist protest” in Denver? How about a mob spontaneously chanting “F#$% Fox News” on air!

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Bonus link.

My boys at Fox ‘n’ Friends are back at it: this time they’re trafficking in rumors regarding a couple of NYT staffers as retribution for publishing a “hit piece” against Fox News.

And as if the usual Fox ‘n’ Friends histrionics aren’t amusement enough, the show’s producers decided to Photoshop the pictures of the two offending NYT employees before splashing them on the screen (photos linked here and here). As NYT describes it,

“Mr. Reddicliffe looked like the wicked witch after a hard night of drinking, but it was the photo of Mr. Steinberg that stopped traffic when it appeared on the Web at Media Matters side by side with his actual photo. In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with. “

But here’s the cake-taker: Fox News doesn’t deny that they doctored the pictures. “A spokeswoman said … that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.”

Lizzie pointed out to me today that the one true Museum is in Kentucky and focused on explaining Creationism to kids. This only confirms what I already thought, money can buy kids souls and I need more money to build my own museum on how I created the earth in late November 2003.

At one point, the Creationist history lesson takes a divisive turn, interrupted with a detour into, literally, “Sin City.”

Broken windows look into broken secular homes, where screens display all-too-common scenarios of Godless teenagers getting pregnant, drinking, smoking marijuana. Sounds like a hell of a party to me, but apparently it’s the work of Satan, and it’s all because of the poison of evolutionary science, which is unsubtly illustrated in a laughably melodramatic scene where the giant wrecking ball of “millions of years” is shown smashing into the side of a church:

Anyway way I highly recommend you read and watch the videos on Demon Baby Blog, he went to the museum and took loads of pictures and movies. Pretty scary trip.

These people are fiercely indoctrinating their children, spawning new generations of fanatics who believe themselves engaged in a culture war with the world at large, and want to discredit science and change our laws to get their way. Being in a culture war with drug use and teen pregnancy is one thing, but when you set your cross hairs on science - that which is the foundation of every aspect of our modern lives, and the key to advancing our civilization and preserving our planet - suddenly religious tolerance has reached its limit.

Depending on which day you catch me, I say that I have 3 or 4 goals in life, one of which is to seek the abolition of customary or English system of measurements in the United States. Like day-light savings time, it seemed like one of those no-brainers: the only reason it sticks around is because of (i) cultural inertia, (ii) an anti-intellectual, anti-Europe streak that runs through the American psyche and (iii) old people.

But for the first time, I’ve come across a reasonable argument in favor of the English system:

The metric system is based around base 10 numbers. Why? We have ten fingers, so our counting system is based around base 10….. With only two factors, two and five, it’s a bitch to subdivide measures. Why couldn’t we have twelve fingers? Twelve is a beautiful number—breaking down into factors of two, three, four and six. Ahhh! Grab a ruler and try to measure a third of foot. Easy! Try to measure a third of a meter. A total pain in the ass! Nothing like an infinite repeat (33.3333333333333333333333333333333333… cm) to ruin a perfectly pleasant day.

That’ s kind of a good point– not enough to make me think we should keep the English system around, but maybe enough to demote its abolition as a all-time life-goal.

What’s not to love about this story:

1) That a group of white men in Indiana feel compelled to dress up in Nazi regalia to celebrate the birthday of Hilter? (Note the festive Happy Birthday sign on the front of the podium.)

2) That a Republican candidate for Congress spoke at the event (pictured)?

3) That he justified his appearance by likening Nazis to black people? (”I’ll speak before any group that invites me. I’ve spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta.”)

This article is it’s own punchline. Just sit back and enjoy.

H/t Slog.

Have you ever wondered why you are not a pro footbal player? Here’s the short answer. Meet 21 yeard-old Vernon Gholston, a defensive end projected to be picked up in the first round of this year’s draft. He’s 6′3″ and 266 lbs. He jumps like Lebron James (42″ flat-footed vertical), can pump iron like Hulk Hogan (can bench 225 lbs 37 times), and his peformance in the running tests will be better than some of the running backs drafted, including his 40 time of 4.57 seconds.

Boo asked me to post this, its an awesome video talking about how the last West Wing election is very similar to the Obama McCain match up and why that is. Very interesting on how they basically predicted the type of candidates we would see. Or maybe that those are the only types of candidates we see and its a cycle.

Boo:

As a HUGE fan of the West Wing (at least when Aaron Sorkin was writing it) I find this utterly amazing…

I just got back my local Democratic caucus. And in many ways, it felt like I was in a third-world country. Read the rest of this entry »

This picture is from GoogleMaps. It’s my dad. Parking his white Honda. Near his house in Chicago. Somehow, someway, as he was paying the street meter, GoogleMaps captured his image. It’s incredibly creepy. While performing a banal task of daily life, near his home, my father’s picture was captured and uploaded to a public website, without his knowledge or consent. What’s creepier yet, is that at a separate address, GoogleMap also captured my father’s picture as he was unlocking his front door (for privacy reasons, I won’t post that link here). Gentlemen, it’s time to break out the fake mustaches (in case you’re wondering, my dad’s is real).

As a gimmick, the Democratic debate last night was sung entirely in improvisational doo-wop. If you missed it, then you missed quite a show. This NYT photo captures Clinton during her brilliant solo regarding health care reform.

If you’re having a hard time coming up with a gift idea for the Republican feminist in your life or if you just want a good laugh consider, the 2008 Great American Conservative Women Calendar. (Thank you DrudgeReport, and your hilarious cast of advertisers!)

I joke not.

Rather than swimsuit pinups, this calendar features conservative women modeling “the latest professional styles”, like sweater-clad Michelle Malkin busy, blogging away on her laptop. The calendar is a suggested $25 or FREE if you have an active university email account. Send your orders to kmccann@cblpi.org. And god bless America.