America's Lack of Kids

An interesting article that looks at the declining fertility rate in the US and in other countries around the world.

For My Dad

I'm late posting this, which my dad would never have been. But I hope it can be overlooked.

I've never been able (within my memory) to call him "Daddy". It always seemed like kind of a wussy thing to say. (Note: My mom calls her father "Daddy" and since she is a woman who grew up in Texas that seems perfectly right and appropriate.) "Dad" works perfectly well for most things and he enjoys identifying himself as my "earthly father" when he calls.

It is to laugh

And thank God they didn't use Elmo.

Too Much Funny

Okay, I have to say that while I wasn't going to say anything about the Weiner flap outing expose scandal, I can't pass up the deliciously funny observation that apparently none of the self-described lesbians on the internet are actually lesbians. In fact, it might be the case that none of them are even women. Let this be a lesson to all of you.

TOS and EULA

Heh.

Scroll to #22.

Statistical Biblical Evidences

Joe Carter of First Things links to a very interesting talk given by Dr Peter Williams. This kind of thing is fascinating to me. I tend to agree that one will never find a perfect, knock-down proof of God's existence, and so arguing likelihood seems to me the best route to take.

And in the course of getting those links and investigating around I ran across a blog called Targuman, which looks interesting as well.

Philosophy podcast!

Woo! How exciting!

Okay, seriously, the blog is pretty cool and Glenn Peoples seems reasonable enough that I'm going to plug the podcast even before I've listened to an episode. I'm gonna download a bunch at once and listen to them on my way to work for the next few days. I still haven't gotten all the way through my Alvin Plantinga reader, but I do enjoy reading someone who can combine theology with serious philosophical chops.

And if you like his podcast, throw some coin his way. As he says, being a philosophy PhD isn't terribly lucrative outside the walls of academe.

"'A was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again."

Which about sums up the obit notice that David Pryce-Jones has on NRO for the passing of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. I wonder if this is common to all ages; that imagining that the great men of yesteryear are passing away and not being replaced by similarly great men of our own time? Surely this phenomenon at some point has some validity to it. All of history is not one extended climb into broad, sun-lit uplands.

At any rate, I've got some good leads on a bunch of new books.

About the Commerce Clause

[I apologize for the length of this post, or rather, for the lack of a "jump cut," as I believe it is called. I still haven't figured out how to do one.]

I love that clause of the Constitution. Incidentally, my favorite Stone Temple Pilots song is "Love Song." And when I drive across the country, to make the best time I take the.

Okay, so not everybody calls it "The Interstate Commerce Clause," but my brother seemed to be ignoring that that is a very important part of what the Framers wrote in the clause under moot.

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

It is a clause to allow the national congress to regulate interstate commerce (as well as international commerce and that with the tribes), not all commerce in the land. Not a moot point, especially in the matter of insurance, which in many states is confined to intrastate insurers by regulation. If Congress limited themselves to interstate commerce, we would not be having this discussion, and perhaps we would not have a $14 trillion+ debt, $70 trillion+ in unfunded liabilities, and calls to raise the debt ceiling still higher. "Congress shall make no law..." -my favorite words in the Constitution. Also on my Nice List: the 10th Amendment, which makes explicit what was to be understood about the enumeration of powers within the Constitution, to wit, that they are the only powers Congress and the President and the Federal Courts were to have, to the exclusion of all other powers or authority. In fact, hardly anyone in prison has so thoroughly or often broken the law as a junior senator or one-term president, let alone the life-long politicians. Should the penalty for breaking the highest law in the land be any less than the penalty for breaking a local marijuana possession law? If not, and I think not, Obama, almost everyone in congress, Bush, and most everyone who ever swore to uphold the Constitution should be in jail.

Economic Activity

So, my brother posits that all human activity is economic in nature and is verbose in defense of the idea. (Just scroll down if you don't believe me.) And it occurred to me today to wonder then what he makes of the Obama administration's defense of their health care legislation under the Commerce Clause based on their assertion that the purchase, or failure to purchase, health insurance is economic activity and thus a legal aspect for government regulation under the aforementioned clause.

Would my brother, in so many regards a libertarian, then think it licit for the government to regulate any and all activity since any and all activity is economic in nature?

I suspect that he'll argue that the Commerce Clause is over-interpreted to mean more than it ought, rather than back away from the contention that everything in the world is economic. In anticipation, let me ask as well whether the framers' intent with that phrase should over-ride the actual meaning of what was written? Commerce does have a broader application than "trade" or "exchange" such as was suggested by Bork.

67 Years Ago Today...

Today is the 67th anniversary of D-Day. Many major operations in World War II used the term "D-Day" to denote the day the operation would start, but only one of the operations was so large as to become the D-Day: Operation Overlord.

Lloyd Alexander Book Review Redux

I read another Lloyd Alexander book today and another couple thoughts about them struck me forcibly enough that I regret not mentioning them the first time around.

What is this video about?