entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

• Emily Bazelon interviews Ruth Bader Ginsburg about Sonia Sotomayor, women on the Supreme Court and in law, and feminism.
• The concept of software engineering is dead, only 10 years too late.  Now its shambling animated corpse will play out the string.
• Tim Kreider writes about outrage and separating it from more productive urges.
• Laura Blumenfend writes about the training that prospective Secret Service agents undergo.

Via vanmojo, a tale in two parts of legislative ignorance, intolerance, and irresponsibility.

• Via iayork, an interview with Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District case, and whose judgement was a thorough and scathing indictment of Intelligent Design. mmcirvin does this much better than i do. If i were king, i'd swap out Scalia from the Supreme Court for Jones right now.
• Via wolffire, an article about Biodynamics; i was under the impression that it was merely an alternative version of organic farming. I was stunned to find out just how insanely ludicrous it actually is. Needless to say, when i run a vineyard, i will not be calling any of these clowns for certification.
• Via someone i can't recall, climate scientists correct data that indicated that the oceans were cooling. This is a clinic in how science works. Feel free to print this out, roll it up, and whack the next global warming denier across the nose with it.

BONG HITS 4 JESUS

• Warren Ellis brings us a disturbing answer to a troubling question.
• iayork could've been the coolest Dad ever.
• E. Howard Hunt died three months ago, and talked about LBJ's involvement in the assassination of JFK.
• "I have a great idea.  Let's rebuild the Internet from scratch!"
• Baseball might be getting rid of its longest-used performance enhancer, but in the meantime, the one undetectable performance enhancer might not be all that enhancing.
• Fox News never fails to disappoint: "Could [Seung-Hui] Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?"
• The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has decided that the bit in the Second Amendment about "a well-regulated militia" was just fluff.  This is a complicated one, because i don't disagree with the decision, but i'm not crazy about the way they got there.  I wonder about how laws like Minnesota's Personal Protection Act can help Americans be responsible gun owners, and what the effect of these laws are (and, Seth, if you happen to be reading this, you're still a douche).
• This one's a real corker: Jundallah, a wholly owned subsidiary of Al-Qaeda, has been receiving carefully funnelled financial support from the United States and is fighting the Iranian government.  Follow all the links.  You know what?  Nothing surprises me anymore.  All of my predictions have come true.  At least we have the liberal media hammering the ... oh, wait, a Blue Angel crashed.  Sorry, where were we?

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Oh, and another question: why twenty dollars?

So is the decision in US v. Kelly Gould a stomping on the 4th Amendment? It seems to me that the officers behaved correctly in that case, but should that sort of assumption be made by default?

I'm trying to look for more information on this, but it seems very sparse or very partisan.

Georgia's House of Representatives banned genital piercings for women.

Amendment sponsor Rep. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, was slack-jawed when told after the vote that some adults seek the piercings.

"What? I've never seen such a thing," Heath said. "I, uh, I wouldn't approve of anyone doing it. I don't think that's an appropriate thing to be doing."

Todd McComb suggests that the Republicans should put on their thinking caps and craft an amendment that is worded strongly against "personal expression that defiles the nation's values", and thus ban gay marriage AND flag-burning at the same time. The trick will be to sell this as a necessary restriction of the First Amendment, because God knows we're not safe when there's married gays and flag-burners on the streets.

I must point out that this is one quiz result where the HTML wasn't written by a deranged monkey.

( i am the honorable mr. justice frank iacobucci's spleen )