A note for those of you who, like me, are rabidly and irrationally obsessed with fans of the show Firefly, there’s a new trailer for the movie Serenity available online. It’s much better than the first trailer. Go check it out!

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
– Bertrand Russell

“It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
– Ayn Rand

One of my favorite ways to amuse myself when I have free time is scholarly analysis of fiction and inane phenomena. Positive Liberty has a nice one on Recent politicolegal events in the Battlestar Galactica TV Series.

Dean Esmay has a post here with a political philosophy question coming out of my favorite TV series, Battlestar Galactica. (Thanks to the Unofficial Battlestar Blog for the pointer). Here are my thoughts on the legitimacy of [the military coup resulting in the arrest of] President Roslin.

[...] we know from early on in the series that Adama and Roslin have an agreement that “military decisions” are solely Adama’s to make. Roslin agreed to this, probably because she lacked the military power to refuse…

[...] Nothing inherent in political philosophy forbids the separation of the military and civil powers, so far as I know. But the whole problem demonstrates the absolute importance of subordinating the military to the civil power. As Hamilton writes in Federalist 74, “[o]f all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand. The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength; and the power of directing and employing the common strength, forms a usual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority.” In fact, among the charges against George III in the Declaration of Independence is that he attempted to subvert the principle that the civil power should control the military. This principle has become so much a part of our own Constitution that it is often said to be unthinkable that a genuine military coup could occur in the United States.

For those of you familiar with the storyline of the current series (which pretty much only borrows names and general roles from the old series, the plots are very different) it’s an interesting read, and a pretty entertaining brain exercise. I also highly recommend this series to people, it’s a wonderfully compelling story.

“Everywhere is in walking distance if you have the time.”
– Steven Wright

A big-time spammer in Russia was found beaten to death in his own home.

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.

In the past angry Internet users have targeted the American English centre by publishing the Center’s telephone numbers anywhere on the Web to provoke telephone calls. The Center’s telephone was advertised as a contact number for cheap sex services, or bargain real estate sales.

Pretty nasty. I certainly wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if this didn’t turn out to be the first of several spammers murdered. People get pretty damn annoyed by them.

(link via Warren Ellis)

“Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Aspen, Colorado and accused President Bush of damaging the economy by catering to the rich. Why was Hillary in Aspen, Colorado? Because she was catering to the rich.”
– Jay Leno

Harvey Jerkwater is calling for comics fanboys to identify where they stand on comic book issues.

Well, for the record, I would be NOV - no affiliation (HKC v. CSBGU) - YS - CIHI - NP, slighly DP - GSC=Grant Morrison.

The New Your Post has an interesting editorial defending the idea of an inquisition for judges with no real record of judicial philosophy to speak of.

REPUBLICANS can’t have it both ways. Either judges are fallible human beings, prone to substituting their own biases for sound constitutional reasoning at the clack of a gavel, or they’re cool-blooded automatons, applying the Constitution to specific cases in a way not dissimilar to old punch-card computers.

If they’re computers, a check of the specs should do just fine for vetting a nominee to the Supreme Court like Judge John Roberts (Harvard, check; appearances before the Supreme Court, check).

But if they’re human beings — as President Bush and many in his party have made clear when criticizing “activist judges” and a runaway judiciary over the years — then it matters quite a bit what a nominee actually thinks.

About Roberts, so far the American people have been told . . . not much.

[...]

[Boston University law professor Randy] Barnett points to possibly the most disturbing thing Roberts said during his confirmation to the appellate bench. Asked by Schumer about his judicial philosophy, he demurred, saying: “I don’t feel that I bring a coherent, universal approach that applies across the board.”

“If you put somebody on the court who does not have a way of reading the Constitution that constrains their decisions,” Barnett says, “then all the emphasis has to be on the personal and political views of the nominee . . . What else will guide them?”

Although I’m suspicious of many on the left in terms of this argument, (both because in my experience leftists are more interested in twisting existing law on its head to use it as a social engineering tool and because I don’t think people like Schumer would refrain from such an inquisition if the nominee had a lenghty and easily discernible record) it does seem to be the right argument here. A nominee we know nothing about is a crap shoot. People do deserve an idea of what we’re getting, especially since Roberts could easily serve a 25-year term on the Court. I suspect (or at least strongly hope) that I won’t object to what I hear, but he ought to say it anyway.

From the Guardian via Andrew Sullivan: Porn rots your brain and makes you an automaton!

According to Dr Judith Reisman, pornography affects the physical structure of your brain turning you into a porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an “erototoxin “, producing an addictive “drug cocktail ” of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin with a measurable organic effect on the brain.

Some of us might consider this a good thing. Not Reisman: erototoxins aren’t about pleasure, they’re a “fear-sex-shame-and-anger stimulant”. Reisman’s paper on the subject The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech has helped make her the darling of the anti-pornography crusade, and in November last year she presented her erototoxin theory to the US senate.

Right. Because any alteration to the physical structure of the brain is bad. The brain doesn’t restructure itself on a near-constant basis or anything like that.

[Reisman and her research team] foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically “damages ” the brain, that might open the floodgates for “big tobacco”-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to “subvert cognition” and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then “these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure “.

What’s more, people whose brains have been rotted by pornography are no longer expressing “free speech ” and, for their own good, shouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment.

How I enjoy watching people trip over the classic social science fallacies: natural does not mean good, change is not inherently bad, and people who study social science and don’t question their own moral presumptions wind up making nonsensical conclusions like this one.