Roger O Green

The Constitution is difficult to amend

Justice John Paul Stevens explains that gun control initiatives are not necessarily contrary to the Second Amendment.

Nothing is more fundamental in our democracy than our right to vote. “We are witnesses today to attacks on that hard-won right… Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP… reminded us that our votes were paid for with blood.” So, of all the Supreme Court decisions in the last couple of years, the one gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was among the most troubling. What Happened Next in These 8 States Will Not Shock You.

Therefore, I was slack-jawed when some guy wrote: “The Democrats have had a dream run in the Supreme Court over the past 6 years until now.” In response to all of the failings of the Court over decades, a writer suggested five ways to reform SCOTUS, which will NEVER happen.

Speaking of “will never happen”: From Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, by former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens. “The politics of the Second Amendment became the focal point of the gun debate. Gun supporters argued against the federal government’s claim that background checks and limitations on certain firearms should be put in place through public policy. In this excerpt, Justice Stevens explains that gun control initiatives are not necessarily contrary to the Second Amendment and that it is Congress’ responsibility to pass sensible legislation to prevent future tragedies.”

Something I hope will happen: a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, challenge corporate power, and eliminate unlimited campaign spending. There are a number of state and local resolutions supporting it. But it’s very difficult to amend the Constitution. Even if the US Senate passes such legislation, I sincerely doubt the House will any time soon.
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xkcd explains the First Amendment (strong language). To that end, Arthur explains the difference between fascism and free speech. And, I’d say, it isn’t just progressive gays dumped on the “fascist” end of the spectrum, but the “feminazis” (pretty much anyone who owns up to being a feminist) and the “race baiters”/”race hustlers” (usually defined as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barack Hussein Obama.)

Also, when a hospital worker is fired over remarks on her Facebook page – “urging police to ‘purge’ protesters in Ferguson, MO by ‘mowing them down with machine guns,'” This is NOT a violation of the woman’s Constitutional rights. “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…” This applies to the states too, per the Fourteenth Amendment, but it does NOT apply to the hospital.

AND the woman doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about the Ferguson protesters’ First Amendment rights.
Or, for that matter, their Fifth Amendment right NOT to be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Or their Sixth Amendment rights to a “speedy and public trial.”

Jaquandor loves this quote from the court case section of the film Amistad; for more info re the actual 1839-1841 case, read here.

Can We Have Bipartisan Agreement To Stop Complaining About Presidential Vacations?. I’m less irritated than bored by this. Especially from Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal kvetching about Obama, when she used to work for Ronald Reagan, no vacation slouch.

J is for Jentacular

My favorite thing to drink for breakfast is half orange juice, half cranberry juice.

Dan, you said this was a breakfast blog. THIS will REALLY be a breakfast post!

I had read somewhere in a list of weird words that jentacular was an adjective meaning “pertaining to breakfast.” But as I looked at other sources, it appears to mean, “Of or pertaining to a breakfast taken early in the morning, or immediately on getting up.” There’s even the word “antejentacular” meaning to eat breakfast BEFORE getting out of bed. Breakfast in bed, I imagine.

The majority of dictionaries do not include the extended definition, so I shan’t either, except to note that I usually get up before I’m hungry. I wake up when the CATS are hungry, which is around 4:30. I feed them, work on the e-mail, blog for an hour or so, and sometimes go back to bed when The Wife’s alarm goes off, usually around 5:30 during the school year.

Breakfast is often cold cereal. I have written EXTENSIVELY about cereal, so I need not get into that, except to note that the great thing about cereals, and the weird thing, is that one brand or other is often on sale, and usually have lots of coupons in the newspaper, so I seldom pay full price.

In the winter, and even in the colder days of autumn and spring, we often have oatmeal. Not only is it warming, the oats, but I also gather, are good cholesterol fighters.

The first thing I ever made on our gas stove when I was eight, give or take, was scrambled eggs, using a cast-iron skillet. Teflon non-stick pans did exist then, but we never used them. For one thing, in the early days, they were far too expensive.

On weekends, we usually have either pancakes or waffles, with whatever fruit we have available. One of our indulgences is that we like real maple syrup and use it far more often than the store-bought concoction. (I’ve expressed my mixed emotions over Log Cabin syrup.)

As I’ve mentioned a few times, my favorite thing to drink for breakfast is half orange juice, half cranberry juice. When it’s cold, I drink tea, but, and I know it’s a mortal sin, I’ve ever gotten into drinking coffee.

What do YOU like for breakfast?
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Coffee and the brain. Plus What does caffeine do for us?

ABC Wednesday, Round 15

U2, Bob Crewe, Fab Four, plus more

Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs.

If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know I can have some strong opinions. But with the U2/Apple thing, I feel ambivalent. On one level, I’m oddly entertained by people freaking out over Apple’s forced iTunes download of U2’s new album, and wonder if it’s just a first world problem. I particularly loved how it ruined someone’s “carefully curated collection.” I’m impressed how well the secret was kept, with the release date of the next U2 album still unclear to the media as of last month.

Then there’s the Why U2? contingent epitomized by this quote: “It’s true that Apple’s wine-drinking, plane-flying user base probably overlaps with U2’s cool-dad core audience more than most bands.” Ah, U2’s not cool enough; here’s the album should have given away instead, and maybe they’re right. Fortunately, I’ve read plenty of suggestions about how to delete it.

The result of this apparent misstep is that the album, Songs of Innocence, is crap. 24 hours after release, it was deemed the worst U2 album ever, as though one could decide something like that so quickly. I still haven’t hear the thing, so I have no opinion.

The bulk of the criticism, though, has to do with lack of choice in the matter, that was fascistically foisted upon millions of users. Maybe that’s true, I dunno. Read the Rolling Stone article about the event.
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Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs. There are nice pieces by Rolling Stone and Dustbury.
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Without much effort, I keep finding Beatles-related stuff, some e-mailed to me, for some obscure reason.
*1964 – the menace of Beatlism
*their 1st US TV Appearance?
*Someone Uploaded the Entire ‘Beatles’ Cartoon Series to YouTube – it’s not “long-forgotten” by me
*Kids React to the Beatles.
*Apple scruff Lizzie Bravo: the girl who sang with the Beatles
*It Don’t Come Easy by George Harrison
*Paul McCartney ‘Early Days’ behind-the-scenes blues jamming.
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Jay Z Steps Up To The Plate To Argue That Tiny Music Samples Are Unprotected By Copyright As TechDirt said, Good for him.
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Early Simpsons: a hymn by I. Ron Butterfly.
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Arthur points to the drinking song that we sing when we present the US national anthem. No, it isn’t that easy to sing either. I’ve been REALLY liberal when people do the Star-Spangled Banner (Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Jose Feliciano are all fine with me, but Rosanne was not). I hear it as a swing version myself.

Oh, here’s version (of SSB, not the drinking song) by niece #1, Rebecca Jade, if I’m doing that FB embed thing correctly:

Post by Rico Curtis.

Vanilla ice cream

Was it a pacifier? Was it a message to us that, as long as we obeyed the rules, we could still be occasionally rewarded with just enough to keep us patriotic and loyal?

Things remind me of other things, all but forgotten.

One of the most peculiar items I came across recently was this: Black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow south – except on Independence Day.

The memory of that all-but-unspoken rule seems to be unique to the generation born between World War I and World War II.
But if Maya Angelou hadn’t said it in her classic autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I doubt anybody would believe it today.
“People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.”

I’m told that Thomas Jefferson, writer of the document associated with that day, was so addicted to vanilla ice cream that he arranged for vanilla beans to be transported in diplomatic pouches while he was serving in France and their revolution was going on.

Why then this ODD rule? The writer Michael W Twitty wonders:

Was it a pacifier? Was it a message to us that, as long as we obeyed the rules, we could still be occasionally rewarded with just enough to keep us patriotic and loyal?

But perhaps it is pointless to ask for more than context.

That article reminded me of a totally unrelated story, except that it did involve ice cream. Growing up in Binghamton in upstate New York, I was usually the only black kid in my class.

One day in fifth or sixth grade, we were going to get ice cream that came in these little paper cups. We used wooden spoons to eat it. I was out of the room when the voting on the decision on flavors – vanilla or chocolate, was being made.

When I came back to the classroom, I was asked what I wanted, and I said “Vanilla.” The whole class moaned; EVERYBODY else, probably 15 white kids, had picked chocolate. They were disappointed that it had not been a unanimous choice. But I didn’t particularly LIKE that brand of chocolate, as I thought it tasted chalky.

I wondered if chocolate had been a consensus choice, with the kids who thought “I don’t care” going along with the majority. In any case, this made me feel really uncomfortable because it made me feel different when, for the most part, I felt like one of the group. Don’t think it was specifically racial, probably not in their minds, though it may have rattled a bit in mine.

But the earlier story above made my choice of 50 years ago, somehow, a little more OK.

Passwords: is my email leaked?

I’ve changed the passwords on my blogs.

From Yahoo:

You can use a site called, appropriately enough, “Is my email leaked?” if you’d like to check the status of your Gmail, Yandex, or Mail.ru account. The site itself is safe, and you can even give a shortened version of your email address with asterisks if you’re concerned.

So I checked out my Gmail address. The password was one I used to have on that account, though I had changed it after some previous widespread security breach. But it still was the password for both my primary blog and my TU blog.

I’m afraid of being THIS guy:

Permanent link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/936/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. — **Permalink to this comic: http://xkcd.com/936/ Work licensed under a Creative Commons License.**

Yeah, yeah, I know the poor password mantras; bad on me, though the current advice is more nuanced. In any case, I’ve changed the passwords.
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Just this week, we got a form from the Daughter’s school asking if she wanted to participate in some dental program, which we declined because we have dental insurance. The form asked for her Social Security Number, which we declined to provide. since it is in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule.

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