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Sunday, October 31, 2004

Did i have a nice weekend, you didn't ask?
Well let me tell you about my weekend.
Thursday my lawyer's office calsl and says my birth certificate has (finally) arrived.
Being lazy, i say i'll be in tomorrow to get it, so tomorrow, friday, i go in and the secretary doesn't know where it is cuz the paralegal didn't tell her.
So i could go to the bmv to try to get my ID.
So when i drive the ten miles to walmart and go to the prescription counter
(which was closed when i got there thursday night)
they won't let me fill my vicoden scrip because i don't have a government issued picture ID.
Wednesday I had two teeth taken out. I'm not sure it was the right two, cuz something still hurts, but also the holes where the teeth were hurt.
nuprin, aspirin, acetominphin, not doing anything, and i'm out of cheap wine.
So i'm sitting here in pain. That's how my weekend went.
Happy november. It's about to get worse.. looks like 4 more years.
mood: ROWR

at amazon i found the first 5 pages of a heinlein story.
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/index.html
the baen books version of the menace from earth looks tantalyzing - it could have a story i haven't read; most likely i've read them but just don't remember them by title.
this is a placeholder for me to go find that link.
hey that's neat I didn't know citizen of the galaxy was dedicated to fritz lieber. i'm on page 257 of the three of swords, the fafhrd and the gray mouser saga.

harsh mistress

hmm what's this?
http://www.vintagelibrary.com//scifi/rah/index.cfm?source=116

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=alt.fan.heinlein&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&sa=N&tab=wg






Saturday, October 30, 2004

hobbitses

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

mostly what i've been doing for the last few months is reading books about kennedy,
which i tell myself is research for a book on lbj i'm going to write someday.
but the book i was reading today, [no it's not fred saberhagen's, it's fritz lieber i think] book one of fafhrd and the grey mouser, has no such excuse attached. i lost track of time and was late to a closing but the deal closed and i made exactly what i need to pay rent for a year, so that's some validation of my current approach of not working too hard. i am gradually getting ready to get back to work in some small ways, kind of easing up to it. i have some stuff that i need to do but have been putting off, and some stuff that i'd like to do if i can find the energy. i'll get started on that any day now, right now i'm on the chapter that introduces the grey mouser...

Monday, October 25, 2004

http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=N3NKWQ1HA7UB9LT4G1DCH8NHTKR5CBE1&sitetype=1&did=4&sid=28658&pid=&keyword=school§ion=prints&title=Back+to+School&whichpage=59&sortBy=popular"

surprise: new yorker prefers kerry.

Sunday, October 24, 2004

i thought about linking to alternative hippopotomus, cuz it's a cool name, but he's a bit too shrill.

Saturday, October 23, 2004

fame!
will baude at crescat quoted my whales post below. (i still don't have permalinks working right, so readers are driven here instead of the entry about a page down.)
earlier this week one of my other blogs was quoted by rick hasen.
feedback like that could get me blogging again regularly.
my most recent blog is called tahoeblog.blogspot.com which is a strange name for a blog about lbj; lbjblog is taken and i ended up not after all starting a blog for a tahoe land owner's group that is concerned about takings.

UPDATE: The Arbitrary Aardvark weighs in:

Wales have persons and are persons. Individual wales make up the cetacian community.
Cetacian-American community?
The court is simply indulging in dredd scott style bigotry.
If you prick us, do we not bleed?


thanks will. if reminded, i might drop you a line with my secret plans about how to take over yale with a study group called "bull and scones."

update: i'd been pondering how will chanced on this post; is he a very loyal reader, or does he search the net for posts that mention crescat? but i think i've got it -
at heidi's blog i left a comment about the relative standing of whales and chickens.
i don't know if he's seen my other comment at some blog somewhere, about the standard of review in valeo.
for more about whales, howard at how appealing had three entries together, one about oysters, one about the illinois judicial election ad ban story that i've been following, and then the whales case. i was thinking of quoting all that with a clever caption but didn't think of one.

update sunday:
Whales versus Wales:
See, i'm from Duluwure, which is next to Murulund, and had a dialect in which
"W" and "Wh" sound the same. Unaccented syllables get the schwa sound - i don't know if blogger can display the schwa character, the upsidedown e.
I am vaguely aware some people pronounce these as distinct sounds, but for me and my people it's just another arbitrary spelling convention.

Back to my book, which in this case is John Kenneth Galbraith memoirs, far less dull than i was expecting.


Friday, October 22, 2004

hat tip volokh.
Appropriately, these two cases are likely to be resolved in accordance with I Kings 3:16-28. ("And [O'Connor] said: 'Fetch me a sword.' And they brought a sword before [O'Connor]. And [O'Connor] said: 'Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.'").

i'm depressed these days, but not so much so that i can't laugh out loud now and then.
a guy i know, ken falk, has done 12 of these 10 commandment suits, so am viewing the case with interest.
come to think of it, i also know the plaintiff in one of ken's suits, a jeff adkins (atkins?) Jeff is a sweetheart, but he gets a might testy. i'm guessing he rubbed some people the wrong way bringing a 10 commandments case in salem indiana.
i'm not aware that they still burn witches, but the first time i went down there, we went past a horse and buggy, onto a a dirt road, through a cornfield, to a log cabin, where the meeting was held. god plays real big down there, and the nuances of keeping god and the state seperate sometimes get lost.
another time jeff and i were both interested in running for vice-chair of the indiana libertarian party, so we settled it in the usual manner: we went to kentucky and arm-wrestled for it, he won.

if the article is correct (and it may have been joking) the questions presented include whether the lemon test should be scrapped; that makes it an even bigger case.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

not so much fame as shame:
i seem to have consistently misspeled whales in this post, quoted at crescat.
oh well, only a few hundred thousand people read crescat. or not.
i do not tend to run a spellchecker on my blogs, and one might not have caught "wales" anyway. the aardvark wails.

cetacean community:
http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2004_10_21.html#004592
9th circuit screws up a standing case.
granted the case is a little fishy:
some lawyer sued on behalf of wales.
venue in hawai'i is proper.
the court has jurisdiction at least to determine its jurisdiction.
the court says that under article III the wales could have standing if the statute provides for it.
the statute gives standing to "persons" and "individuals."
Wales have persons and are persons. Individual wales make up the cetacian community.
Cetacian-American community?
The court is simply indulging in dredd scott style bigotry.
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
As an aardvark, i'm offended.
This is not tounge in cheek, some may insist on thinking so.
I was surprised the statute was written that way, but as written, the whales have standing.
Majors v Abell, (IN 2003) was, largely, about when is a person a person.
Here, the whales are people, or at least persons. As an aardvark i'm personally offended by the court's specieism.
I agree with will of course that there are issues of how the lawyer established representation.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

I'm slowly easing my way back toward being online alot.. little things like plugging in the speakers and the webcam, and not being able to get the printer to work, and putting a heater in this room, and not doing much else besides read books on kennedy.
Back when I used to blog here a lot, many posts were will baude related.

In that tradition, will and others mention the alabama amicuses. Not amici, amicuses. I think. Multiple amicus briefs anyway. The one, about executing 16 year olds, says about what i would expect alabama to say. I think it actually cuts the other way. The senseless murders by these kids, while horrible, are the kind of dumb shit things teen boys do. Dad wouldn't let me have the truck, so i shot him and stabbed him.
Gee, do I get to use the truck now? These are the sort of behaviors most people grow out of. No that's not it. Most people grow out of -thinking about- these kinds of behaviors. Now, I might agree its ok to kill kids who kill. Usually by the time the case gets that far they in their 30s and no longer killers, so we kill the grownup to punish the kid he once was. I think rehnquist's take is that it's not obvious that the constitution requires such a rule. I am confused as to why the missouri court did not refer to the missouri constitution, but then it's been along time since i've read the lower court opinion (and even longer since i've hung out much with the missouri supreme court; I didn't really meet anybody besides the judge I interned for.)
All this is prolog. The really interesting brief is alabama on ashcroft v (raisch), the pot growing case.
I just gotta guess that troy king, alabama AG, was in his fedsoc chapter in law school. Here we have Alabama making classic state's rights arguments in asituation where nobody can say it's code for racism. Or can they, will they?
The case is about the oakland pot growers coop, busted by the feds.
Volokhian conspirator Barnette, or is it the other guy, is on the case.
I would be remiss in discussing this case without mentioning my friend Peter McWilliams. www.petermcwilliams.com or is it org. Peter was the author of "Aint nobody's business if I do" about drug prohibition generally. It's free online as are his other books, although the one about how to grow pot is gone now. Peter was killed by the feds for growing pot for medical marijuana patients in california. I'm not sure it was these same patients, but the same set of people. His grow was legal in california, passed by voter initiative. He was outspoken about it, very. Peter had cancer and aids when i met him, as well as depression. We smoked a joint together at a gay libertarian function in dc where he had given the keynote speech. Currently, I am not using pot to handle my depression, which is why i'm not handling it - i'm pretty much disabled by depression these days, which is why the blogging is light. I don't advocate pot for those who don't need it - the side effects are severe. But peter needed it, to be able to take his aids meds without puking them back up - that's what he died of, drowned in his own puke, trying to take the meds that were keeping him alive.
As a condition of pretrial probation, he wasn't allowed to have pot. Jail was killing him quicker - he wasn't getting his meds. So the feds killed him. This case is about whether their doing so was unconstitutional.
My father died of cancer after a two year struggle a few years back.
Being a republican, I don't think he would have taken pot if I'd offered - my brother and I discussed it later.
So this is my sad life right now. I sit here and read amicus briefs and they remind me partly of the big exciting themes we studied in law school - this could be the case that narrows or overrules wickard v filburn - but also they remind me of personal tragedies that are too stressful for me to really cope with, so I can't focus well enough to write amicus briefs on my own. I've done some brief writing before, and I'd like to do it again, but I can't seem to do it well enough to get paid to do it, so I have to worry about money. I am looking at a possible warehouse part time thing starting next year sometime, that would, if I could hold the job long enough, let me eat and pay rent and still have time to do a little litigation on the side. That's if things go well. Another path is I try to get on disability, and then do a little volunteer work here and there. For now, I have a thing in the morning so I need to try to get some sleep. I'm guessing sleep won't come easily tonight. Luckily this book on teddy kennedy is dull so that might help.
See, this is why I don't blog here anymore - it's too whiny. But I had a nice laugh out loud moment reading the alabama brief where it makes fun of wickard.
I guess this would be a better blog entry if I had links to those briefs. Maybe i'll add those later; they are of course in the dreaded .pdf format. I've upgraded all the way to a P2 and it still doesn't like .pdf's much so I have to go reboot.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

new computer, new cable modem, maybe i'll start blogging again one of these days. especially once winter comes on and i'll want to hole up here and avoid real life. right now i'm doing that with books. mostly books about kennedy, but yesterday i reread "the others", one of gordon dickson's childe cycle dorsai novels. all for now.

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