Toyah

tonight i will be at the pacers/pistons game. that means very little to me, except that there will also be multiple other hillsdale alum at the game. jd rowland, jeff guy, jason t robey, and matt o'toole (and others?) represent the class of '02. other classes will also be represented, but they are clearly less important than the all powerful '02.

i have also entered into another fantasy baseball league. i now have 1 league with o'toole and company, and 1 league with the c-town crew. my brother, a mailman, named his team 'going postal'...my buddy, an indians fan, named his team 'sizemore does matter'...funny stuff.

espn radio has found its way to my computer. i also have launchcast and i watched the cbs online coverage of the tourney. my computer has been doing some real work recently.

I heard today while listening to Rush L. that the female senator from NY came out publicly speaking against the immigration situation and proposed policies of the current administration. Her attacks on the president suddenly seemed down right 'Pat Robertson-like' when she announced that the proposed policies of stricter border enforcement are un-biblical.
Interestingly enough, I just might agree with her, but my point of this post is not the wisdom of the policies. Rather, I ask myself, "what if Pat Robertson had made this public statement?". Wouldn't it be a lead talking point all over the media? I think so. I wonder if J. Leno will lead with 'Hillary jokes' tonight due to her revelations from above? I'll be tuning in to see, but I suspect that I'll be disappointed.

Secondly, I have to wonder where the esteemed Senator's biblical furor is when it comes to something eminently more clear in the scriptures, the murder of the innocent unborn. Perhaps her Bible was missing those pages, but luckily for us, Mrs. Clinton's version of the holy shrift includes a few particularly insightful apocryphal additions - the 11th Commandment: "thou shalt not propose a viable alternative.;" or the rest of the sermon on the mount: "blessed are those who throw aside my precepts when they inconvenience them. Blessed are those who occasionally use these words to support their socialist experiments."

I shake my head in amazement.

The last five Hardy Boys books arrived at my house today. I started reading them when I was 8 years old, wandering the stacks of the Loussac Library in Anchorage, Alaska. I started collecting them when I was 12 and had my first income (a paper route), although I was already starting to outgrow them. But I wanted to have all 58 of the originals. I bought 2 or 3 a month for a long time, then got distracted with other things and my collection languished for years, something over half done. After Debbie and I got married and got our budget sorted out, I had money for books and decided to complete the set, buying (again) four or five each month. Finally I have them all, plus the Detective Handbook. Only took 15 years!

last night i gathered up my massive pile of dirty clothes to go wash them. phil can probably remember my use of febreze to push back the time that i would do laundry (not to re-wear the clothes, just to keep them from 'rick'ing up the place). i was tempted to put all my clothes in the washing machine and then strip down to put the clothes i was wearing in the wash as well, but no. the 'mat was clean...non-smoking...had a mini play place for the kids...and the arcade games. i chose to spend coins in effort to get coins on super mario bros. the arcade version definitely drew my ire. there were extra enemies, holes in new places, coins where mushrooms should have been, an utter lack of extra guys (no 1up at 100 coins), and the joystick control was so foreign. needless to say, i did not rescue the princess. the blinking 'continue?' did not, however, coax any more of my precious quarters. i only had 9 minutes of wash left...a snooze-worth of time that i used for cruisin' california. one top 3 time and one bonus race later my washing was done and the dryer called. during the drying process i focused my attention on the wheel of fortune. i wondered if the clothes would be dry or if i would have to stay for jeopardy. there was no jeopardy, for my clothes were dry by the bonus round of trustee sajak's program. good times had by all.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court held (unanimously) that law schools must allow military recruiters the same access to their students that they allow to all other interviewers.

Unlike some cases, the reasoning is solid and easy to follow, even for non-lawyers like me. I especially like these (selective) quote:

The issue is not whether other means of raising an army and providing for a navy might be adequate. See id., at 689 (regulations are not "invalid simply because there is some imaginable alternative that might be less burdensome on speech"). That is a judgment for Congress, not the courts.

A military recruiter's mere presence on campus does not violate a law school's right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter's message.

In this case, [Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc.] has attempted to stretch a number of First Amendment doctrines well beyond the sort of activities these doctrines protect.

It's nice to see the Supreme Court acknowledging that there are some things which only Congress should determine, and also that the Constitution is limited in its protection for a given right. This, I think, is what conservatives have been working to achieve in the Court---not "conservative" decisions per se, but decisions which are not creative reinterpretations of the Constitution.

Now, here’s an odd book. The plot of the story is an adventuring surgeon/seaman, who is shipwrecked or marooned on every one of his voyages, and comes ashore on some strange, undiscovered land. Gulliver has the dubious honor of discovering Lilliput, where the inhabitants stand six inches high; Broddingnag, which is inhabited by giants as tall as a church steeple; Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib, the people of which are ordinary except that they are so philosophically absent-minded that they need servants to tap their mouths and ears to remind them to listen, or to speak; and the land of the Houyhnhnms, where horses are the dominant intelligent being, and humans are merely disgusting beasts of the field, barely useful for menial tasks.

The theme of the book, however, is clear: that mankind is really rather silly and stupid. The dimunitive inhabitants of Lilliput are divided into divisive factions of the High-heels and Low-heels, while the giant king of Broddingnag spent much time criticizing Gulliver’s description of his country (concluding that, “Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a Legislator.”). And when Gulliver returned from living among the peaceful and noble Houyhnhnms (the horses, that is), he was so civilized in comparison with his English neighbors that it was years before he could bear his wife to sit across the table from him.

Jonathan Swift is justly famous as a satirist, and probably more of Gulliver’s travels would make sense to me if I were better-versed in the state of England in 1735, when it was first published. But my general impression at the end was one of depression: he surely proved that mankind was stupid, ignorant, irrational, disgusting and unreasonable, but he proposed no solution.

No doubt many of us are ignorant and irrational, individually and in a body, but demonstrating that this is so is hardly useful, as a good many of us no doubt already know that. A more useful study would be an investigation into why people are the way they are, but there Swift has no answer.

On March 2, 1836, a convention of delegates meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos declared Texas' independence from Mexico and its dictatorial leader, President Antonio López de Santa Anna. The Texans had won a battle at Gonzales in October of 1835, but on March 6, 1836, the Texans were slaughtered by Santa Anna at the Alamo. Then, in a surprise attack at San Jacinto (museum) on April 21, Sam Houston and his troops routed the Mexican army and captured Santa Anna. The Lone Star Republic lasted until 1845, when it consented to annexation by the United States.





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