Author: NewMexiKen

A Constitutional Law Scavenger Hunt With A Serious Purpose

Law professor Michael Froomkin says, “Read The US Constitution, and the Amendments then take the quiz…” of 25 questions.

Some of these questions are very easy (although even in those cases, the answers may surprise you); some only appear to be. Others are inspired by real and difficult cases; a few illustrate doctrines of constitutional interpretation, some more controversial than others. And perhaps one or two don’t have answers, or at least not answers that everyone agrees to.

Unless you are a Constituional scholar, NewMexiKen does think it is necessary to read the documents before tackling the questions in any serious manner.

Now I have Phobiaphobia, the fear of phobias

Phobias are irrational, intense fears of specific objects or situations. Many people are terrified of heights, insects or snakes. Some are scared of flying, water or blood. Then there are lesser known phobias such as parthenophobia, fear of virgins, and homiliophobia, fear of sermons. In this contest you will depict lesser known phobias by showing ordinary objects or situations as seen in the mind of the person who is scared of them. The scarier the actually harmless object or situation appears in the image, the better. (i.e. a doorknob shaped like a gun, a man trapped in a household refrigerator, or a woman running away from a bookshelf that’s hurling books at her.)

The rules of this game are thus: Depict an irrational phobia.

Click to see the photoshopped entries at Worth1000.com

Link via Boing Boing

The Ides +2 of November

Our guv, Bill Richardson, is 58 today.

Judge Wapner is 86. Raymond Babbitt sends his greetings.

Ed Asner, who will always be Lou Grant to me, is 76.

Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), artist Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986), Field Marshal Edwin Rommel (1891-1944), Governor (of New York) Averell Harriman (1891-1986) and U.S. Air Force General (and George Wallace running-mate) Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) were all born on this date.

I was going to refer to this as the Ides of November, but learned the 15th was the Ides only in March, May, July, and October. In the other Roman months, including this, the ninth month, the Ides was the 13th. By the way, NewMexiKen has been watching the HBO series Rome and I’m pretty sure something bad is going to happen to Julius Caesar just as it did to Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood. History has a way of eliminating the most interesting character.

Oatmeal From ’70s Still Tastes OK

This from Wired News:

Next time you feel compelled to clean out the pantry, don’t feel bad about putting it off.

A lot of the old food that’s gone beyond the manufacturer’s expiration date could still be edible for years or decades longer.

Such are the findings of food science researchers who recently subjected a panel of human tasters to samples of really old food. They discovered that artifacts like 20-year-old dried milk and 28-year-old rolled oats were still perfectly edible and sometimes even tasted OK.

At least some readers of NewMexiKen think that all oatmeal tastes like it’s 28 years old.

The ceaseless repetition of key sound bytes

Dan Froomkin sums up the current state of political affairs:

But Bush’s argument is deeply flawed. Far from being baseless, the charge that he intentionally misled the public in the run-up to war is built on a growing amount of evidence. And the longer Bush goes without refuting that evidence in detail, the more persuasive it becomes.

And his most prized talking point — that many Democrats agreed with him at the time — is problematic. Many of those Democrats did so because they believed the information the president gave them. Now they are coming to the conclusion that they shouldn’t have.

Like other Bush campaigns, this one will inevitably feature the ceaseless repetition of key sound bytes — the hope being that they will be carried, largely unchallenged, by the media — and virulent attacks by the White House on those who dare to disagree, even going so far as to question their patriotism.

You got that right, Champ

Ali and Loser

“U.S. President George W. Bush playfully pretends to box against Muhammad Ali, who responds by circling his finger to indicate the president is crazy to offer a fight, after Bush presented Ali with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

One Well-Read Home Has Some New Pets: 1,082 Penguins

It is the Land of Enchantment and Kathryn Gursky is enchanted with classic literature. This from The New York Times:

Rushing to evacuate her home as a forest fire lapped at the edges of this high-desert town in May 2000, Kathryn Gursky took with her just one book, a British edition of “The World of Pooh,” by A. A. Milne, bought when she and her husband were vacationing in Dorset some 11 years earlier.

When she returned to Los Alamos after the fire, Ms. Gursky, a 49-year-old former librarian, found that the rest of her 2,300-volume personal library had burned, along with her house and everything in it.

Thousands of scorched tree trunks still range up the hillside across the street from Ms. Gursky’s new home here, but inside the house, her library is well on the way to recovery. In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000.

Blogroll

I’ve been working on the concept and format for quite a while, but today I am finally unveiling the new NewMexiKen Links Page — “A Page of Links to Some of the Web Sites and Blogs Referred to by NewMexiKen.”

This new page (reached in the future by the button in the sidebar under the random Sweetie photo) is very much going to remain a work in progress, as I am always finding new web sites I like and deciding that others are no longer interesting or useful. This is especially true of blogs. As the lists lengthen or shorten, and the categories come and go, I will have to move things about some I’m sure, but I’ll try and respect your kinetic memory.

I read nearly all of the blogs listed via RSS. I find that’s the only reasonable way to see what’s new at dozens of continually updating sites. I find RSS less useful for newspaper and magazine sites, though most publish much of their content that way. I guess I still like browsing a busy, complex site much in the way one browses through the pages of the dead-tree versions of these publications. Futhermore, these large publications (The Huffington Post and Slate are two web-only publications to which this also applies) publish far too many items to sort through via RSS. Better to glance quickly at a page and see if anything stands out.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Intelligent Evolution

NewMexiKen wonders how many of those who oppose Darwinism have ever read his works — and for that matter how many of those who oppose creationism have ever studied the Bible. In an introduction to a new collection of Darwin’s major works, famed biologist and author Edward O. Wilson takes an intelligent look at Darwin and the debate. The entire piece is well worth your time (not long) if you’re interested in this important, continuing issue in American life. Here’s an excerpt:

Thus it is surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rocklike conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 percent that accept the prophecies of the Book of Revelation as truth, and yet in more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious Right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as “only a theory” rather than a “fact.”

Yet biologists, particularly those statured by the peer review and publication of substantial personal research on the subject in leading journals of science, are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably firm evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.

On This Date

… in 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Franklin died in 1790.

… in 1940, the Disney film Fantasia premiered.

… in 1977, the comic strip “Li’l Abner” ended.

… in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was dedicated.

Whoopi Goldberg is 50 today; Chris Noth 49.

Pants on Fire

Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus begin their report in Saturday’s Washington Post:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

But then, truth is just a technicality.

The Right Way in Iraq

John Edwards in Sunday’s Washington Post:

I was wrong.

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told — and what many of us believed and argued — was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn’t make a mistake — the men and women of our armed forces and their families — have performed heroically and paid a dear price.

He concludes:

America’s leaders — all of us — need to accept the responsibility we each carry for how we got to this place. More than 2,000 Americans have lost their lives in this war, and more than 150,000 are fighting there today. They and their families deserve honesty from our country’s leaders. And they also deserve a clear plan for a way out.

New Mexico to have float in Rose Parade

New Mexico Float

A sketch of the float via The Albuquerque Journal.

Additional information from AP via The New Mexican:

New Mexico’s float in the Tournament of Roses parade will feature a familiar lineup: Indian artists, flamenco dancers, a Buffalo Soldier, Smokey Bear — and Gov. Bill Richardson [and his wife].

… the 55-foot-long flatbed trailer with more than 30,000 roses will carry a depiction of the plaza at Old Mesilla flanked by artisans representing Navajo, Apache and Pueblo Indians displaying their wares against scenery ranging from high desert to alpine forest.

The $165,000 cost of the float will be offset by $25,000 apiece from the Santa Fe Opera and the Albuquerque Tricentennial, and $10,000 each from Acoma Pueblo and the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center…

What Time Is It in Indiana?

Several states* have two time zones. Why is it so difficult for the folks in Indiana?

What Time Is It in Indiana?, article in Sunday’s New York Times

* Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Idaho and Oregon. In addition, for seven months of the year the Navajo Nation goes on daylight time and the remainder of Arizona does not.