Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
He got it exactly right:
It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 349 (2003) (SCALIA, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is precisely this understanding — the correct understanding — of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law. By adopting it, they did not simultaneously offend it.
Even taking this Court’s sorry line of race-based admissions cases as a given, I find the question presented only slightly less strange: Does the Equal Protection Clause forbid a State from banning a practice that the Clause barely — and only provisionally — permits?
As is so often the case with such hotly contested arguments, there are really two issues here; a specific one and a broader one. The specific issue is: Could a state be constitutionally prohibited from passing statutes, or amendments to their own constitutions, against race-based preferences? Or do they have the authority to do such a thing?
And the broader issue is: What has happened to our national wherewithal for logically noodling out such things, if this is even open to question? This is the curse of the information age; we seem to have a “neural net,” of sorts, spanning the entire nation, which has been lately invaded and torn-up by a busy flock of “Yeah But” people. Like moths attacking fine and cherished garments in a neglected closet, they’ve been chewing cavernous holes in our logical fabric, insisting that important and fundamental building-block definitions don’t mean what they mean, and in fact, mean the exact opposite of what they really were intended to mean.
They think they’re getting there, to Planet Opposite, by arguing cleverly, but they’re not even making the trip by arguing honestly. Their arguments and rebuttals, in many instances, don’t even make sense. Much of it seems to be based on nothing more than “Well this has been working for us for quite awhile, and we shall feel peeved if it does not continue to.” It is the shrill whine of people who have never been saddled with the burden of making anything actually work; in fact, much of the time when they prevail, they prevail because someone else simply ran out of patience, and opted to go get something productive done rather than continue to be annoyed.
Those who have other things they need to go do, then, are treble preoccupied — with standing up for reason and common sense; with trying to get something useful done; and, with wrestling the seemingly never-ending question of whether ignoring the one of those, and concentrating all of one’s energies on the other, might or might not be the right way to go.
Who loses? The country. The one thing that cannot be reasonably denied about where our energies and attention should be going, is that we ought not be wasting such resources arguing about whether two and two make five, or whether X equals not-X. We live in an age in which we have machines that can sort those out, millions of times in a fraction of a second. It’s a tragedy that the humans whose lives are supposed to be made easier by such machines, are compelled by warped internal desire, and external circumstances, to burn off such vast, great portions of their lives trying to settle the same silly things.
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