- Sups get it right, and do it unanimously. Of course “hate speech” is free speech.
- Now. Will the court please do away with qualified immunity for killer cops?
- Ten-year-old whiz kid invents a device to prevent hot-car deaths. Don’t know if it works, but the concept is pretty darned impressive for a grade schooler.
- The monastery church I visited had no pews — a subject that’s been an ongoing in-joke between me and the friend who set me on the path to go there. Then I stumble across an article on the very recent and unsavory history of church pews.
- If you v*te, the eejits who think they’re capable of running the world have just exposed your private data (not just your v*ter registration info) to every casual lookiloo or malicious hacker on the planet.
- The anatomy of a lie. (Via KitPerez)
- Kit also writes on “The problem with leading … and following.”
- The History Channel takes on the War on Drugs. While Jeff Sessions returns us to the Reefer Madness days.
- Ark park fails. Creationist blames atheists.
- Another thing drones are good for.
- I hope my mugshot looks better than these.
Concerning church pews, I was born and raised a Catholic and my family liked to sit towards the front of the church, which meant getting to church early enough to get those seats as it was first come, first served for occupying pews. As an adult, in my efforts to revisit the faith, I preferred sitting in the back of the church, better for quick get aways! 🙂 BTW, I did my duty and raised the kids as Catholics and they got the required sacraments, but I have since drifted away from the RC Church. I consider myself to be a Christian, but I don’t belong to any church. My youngest kid still goes to church, but is now an Evangelical Christian and attends a Baptist Church. My other kids are like me, Christians but non church goers.
Concerning Sessions’ attempt to return us to Reefer Madness days, I believe that I shared with you all a while back that I took to Twitter and tweeted Trump directly telling him that pot smokers are the least of his problems and requesting that he tell Sessions to back off and that it should be determined by the States and not the Feds.
I feel you, RV. I too was raised Catholic, and like Oscar Wilde have always been drawn to the “peculiar Christian magic” of the Catholic and Orthodox branches of the universal Vine. I have also drifted away from the Church in adulthood, due almost entirely to Disciplinary rather than Doctrinal differences, but the connection is still there.
Sessions is a… That Man.
That church pew article assumes that people only sit down when there’s furniture to sit on. I’ve been to many functions, religious and not, where there either wasn’t anything to sit on, or wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit. People sat on the floor. Or the ground, depending on location.
Nobody had to tell anyone to sit on the ground, it was a natural result of one’s legs being tired. No big deal. And if someone looked like they might have trouble with getting down or back up, they were offered first dibs on whatever furniture there was.
So why does the author assume nobody sat on the floor or ground before?
Interesting! I never heard of box pews. But when I was a kid getting dragged to Protestant churches I often saw something that was probably the box pew’s degenerate decendant – a well-to-do family could “donate” a pew with an annual pledge, which got their name on a plaque on the side of a prominent pew and – in some cases but not all, depending on the church, I guess – reserved that pew for members of that family.
Interesting article on church pews. I had a friend whose father (and grandfather) were custom builders of church fittings: pews, altars, etc. Beautiful stuff.
I was glad to see Justice Thomas raise the issue of qualified immunity, a completely judge-made doctrine which, in my opinion, has been grossly abused in recent years. I think his historical analysis is correct, and hope that an “appropriate case” arises soon. (I believe there actually is one brewing, as Prof. Baude notes.)
Thomas is my favorite Justice. I even preferred him to the late Antonin Scalia, brilliant as he was. Scalia occasionally (although not often) ran off the rails; Thomas almost never does.
I hate to disparage the kid’s idea, but having a nice wish and making a clay model doesn’t quite equal “invents” in my mind. There are some rather unfortunate physics he’s going to be facing if he thinks a little box like that is going to blow cool air.
I’m sure the young inventor has his heart in the right place, but the obvious cure for the “hot car” (or any other car) thing is not to leave children in cars – period. Of course it can be seriously inconvenient, but there really isn’t any other good solution. Babysitters are much less expensive than funerals.
I suspect that’s to alert the parents who “forget” their kid is in the car. I remember several high-profile cases where this was the excuse.
Or even people who leave their dogs in their cars in places that get unexpectedly warm, or who think they’re leaving for a moment, but get delayed.
Of course the cure for hot-car deaths is not forgetting dogs or kids. But that requires being perfect, never getting distracted, never making a mistake, never getting unexpectedly delayed. Nice if you can manage it.
At least a handful of hot car deaths have involved parents who thought the other parent had the child, people who were overwhelmed with errands, people who’d worked double shifts, and the like.
Like I say, I think it would be great… I just don’t see the physics working. Maybe something to automatically lower the windows a set amount when a certain temperature is reached would be more realistic.
I think you’d do better with an alarm that when the engine stops says, “Hey, there’s a baby in the baby seat!”
There’s already a gadget in the car that provides cool air, but the engine has to be running to operate it. Kent is right.
The other problem is it sounds like the alarm would activate whether there was a baby on board, or not.