"“Presidential candidates should explain the criteria by which they would select judicial nominees.” A discussion from Mohler

“Presidential candidates should explain the criteria by which they would select judicial nominees.”

While that is certainly true in the more general level of all federal judicial nominees, when it comes to the Supreme Court these issues take on an unbelievable importance in terms of our current political pattern. That’s because both other branches of government have been increasingly deferential to the Supreme Court and a part of that is their own cowardice, especially when it comes to Congress. Congress has deferred acting on many big issues of public policy, including issues of tremendous moral importance letting the Supreme Court basically decide these issues and then on the other side of a Supreme Court decision, both of the other branches of government have been generally quite subservient to the Supreme Court and we’re looking at nine unelected human beings sitting on this court and thus five people, that is a majority of the nine, can decide and they often do decide some of the issues of greatest importance, issues in which the Congress and the president should indeed have a very important role as well as a very direct political accountability. The problem with the United States Supreme Court in that sense is that it is virtually impossible to hold the court to account. The only influence by and large anyone has, whether liberal or conservative on the court directly, is by the nomination process in terms of the appointment to the Supreme Court, and that can come only from the President of the United States. Though the United States Senate must give advice and consent and that is confirmation to federal court appointments made by the president, the reality is that the power of appointment and nomination comes exclusively from the President of the United States. So in one sense, every time we elect a president we are electing the future of the U.S. Supreme Court and that in this case is particularly apt with the 2016 presidential election with four of the nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court, either right at age 80 or almost there, or in the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually aged 82 already.

Leslie and her possible favourite book

At this point, as is so often the case, George Will gives a deeper analysis that also deserves our attention. He says that the justices of the court on the left and the right, the liberals and the conservatives are basically divided over how they understand that government is supposed to work, how they understand that courts are supposed to work and how they understand a document like the Constitution is to be interpreted and applied. He refers to these two different trajectories as the Hobbesians versus the Lockeans, he’s talking about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes on the one hand and John Locke on the other. He says that the Hobbesians are basically the group that favors big government and the expansion of government and they look at the courts primarily in terms of the process by which the courts operate. They want the courts to follow a process that comes out with the result that they intend and that they hope for and they strive for. The Lockeans on the other hand, are those who believe in a more limited government and they believe that the courts should be limited to operating on the basis of principles. Now this also gets to the fact that when it comes to reading the Constitution, the Hobbesian so to speak, suggests that the Constitution is a living document to be interpreted anew in a generation present without any particular accountability to what came before or for that matter, any particular accountability to the actual words of the Constitution. The Lockeans on the other hand, are traditionally the more strict constructivist, they are those committed to judicial restraint to the actual strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution that means the words are to be interpreted on the basis of their vocabulary and their grammar and the intention of those who wrote the words and ratify the Constitution in the first place.

Ron and his possible favourite book

When you look at those two trajectories you understand that the liberal wing of the court basically sees the court as a vehicle, as a mechanism of political change to get the country where they believe it should go. Meanwhile, the Lockeans, the more conservative on the court, they believe that the court’s role is rather humble, it is indeed to prevent government from overstepping its bounds and to make certain the government operates within the confines of the Constitution. So the 2016 presidential race in the United States will pit two political worldviews over against one another, but the worldview issues go far deeper than politics and furthermore, the American people will be electing an understanding of the courts and of the Constitution in terms of how they vote for president.

-Albert Mohler 

Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher's "lectures"

...Just before taking on CBS’s Late Night, Colbert famously said “To be a fool for Christ is to love.” I’m not sure I fully understood what Colbert meant by this until his Maher interview. Colbert could have resolved the tension with Maher in a different way. He could’ve laughed off the question of faith and made an easy Trump joke, but that’s not what he did. He embraced the tension. He entered into the foolishness... 

Rest at here, Mereorthodoxy. 

The false promise of ‘judicial restraint’ in America- George Will (or a study on the difference between Hobbeseans and Lockeans or Ron and Leslie)

From George F. Will and the rest at the Washington Post

...Barnett, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school, recently took to a place that needs it — the University of California at Berkeley — this message: “The judicial passivism of the Supreme Court has combined with the activism of both Congresses and presidents to produce a behemoth federal government, which seemingly renders the actual Constitution a mere relic, rather than the governing document it purports to be.” 

In his lecture “Is the Constitution Libertarian?” Barnett acknowledged that in many respects, American life “feels freer” than ever, and that we have more choices in living as we wish. In many other ways, however, the sphere of freedom is too constricted, and individual rights are too brittle, because for decades America’s Lockeans have been losing ground to Hobbesians: “The Lockeans are those for whom individual liberty is their first principle of social ordering, while the Hobbesians are those who give the highest priority to government power to provide social order and to pursue social ends.”

Not all Hobbesians are progressives, but all progressives are Hobbesians in that they say America is dedicated to a process — majoritarian decision-making that legitimates the government power it endorses. Not all Lockeans are libertarians, but all libertarians are Lockeans in that they say America is dedicated to a condition — liberty. It is, as Lincoln said, dedicated to the proposition that all people are equal in possession of natural rights."

Lockeans favor rigorous judicial protection of certain individual rights — especially private property and freedom of contract — that define and protect the zone of sovereignty within which people are free to act as they please. Hobbesians say the American principle is the right of the majority to have its way. Last year, 54 Democratic senators (including two so-called independents), Hobbesians all, voted to amend the First Amendment(“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech”) to empower majoritarian government to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political speech.

Lockeans say the Constitution, properly construed and enforced by the judiciary, circumscribes the majoritarian principle by protecting all rights that are crucial to individual sovereignty. Lockeans say the Constitution codifies the Declaration of Independence, which, in its most neglected word, says governments are instituted to “secure” natural rights... 

...And, Barnett argues, a nonpassive, properly engaged judiciary bears the burden of saying when the government has not justified its restrictions as necessary and proper.

So, Barnett says, yes, the Constitution — “the law that governs those who govern us” — is libertarian. And a Lockean president would nominate justices who would capaciously define and vigorously defend, against abuses by majoritarian government, what the 14th Amendment calls Americans’ “privileges or immunities.” 

Today, Democrats’ intraparty arguments are dull as ditchwater because they concern nothing fundamental, only how rapidly and broadly to expand Hobbesian government’s redistributive and regulatory reach. Republican presidential aspirants must be forced to join their party’s intramural arguments about the judiciary’s proper function. Then we can distinguish the Lockean constitutionalists from the merely rhetorical conservatives whose reflexive praise of “judicial restraint” serves the progressives’ Hobbesian project of building an ever-larger Leviathan.

G.K Chesterton on Humility

“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

- G.K Chesterton 

David Foster Wallace on Empathy Part 2

Obtained from the Wall Street (David Foster Wallace's commencement address before he committed suicide)  

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"... 

...Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. 

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. 

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water." 

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr

"Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

- Nicholas Carr, from the Atlantic's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Child’s Description Of Heaven During Near-Death Experience Specifically Mentions Book Deal - The Onion

NEW YORK—Speaking for the first time since waking from a medically induced coma following a devastating car accident, 8-year-old Aiden Miller recounted an extremely vivid near-death experience Friday that reportedly contained detailed descriptions of heaven, angels, and a six-figure book deal. “I was walking up in the clouds and met friends, and strangers, and all these famous people who talked with me about all kinds of things and brought up the possibility of selling the rights to my story to a big-name publisher,” said the second-grader, who attested that during the five-minute period in which his heart had stopped on the operating table, he ascended to a shining, golden paradise where he says he met with the archangel Gabriel and a literary agent who has helped a number of authors secure multi-book deals with lucrative worldwide book tours. “Jesus was sitting at the right hand of God and my grandfather was right there, and they looked at me and smiled at each other and said I should ask for an $80,000 advance with 10 percent of back-end profits.” Miller added that he felt a profound sense of peace and well-being when Jesus told him to go forth and seek a blockbuster deal for the movie rights.

The Contemprary Liberals Mindset?

"...Contemporary liberals increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good — one that clashes in some respects with liberalism's moral creed — is increasingly intolerable. 

That is a betrayal of what's best in the liberal tradition. 

Liberals should be pleased and express gratitude when people do good deeds, whether or not those deeds are motivated by faith. They should also be content to give voluntary associations (like religious colleges) wide latitude to orient themselves to visions of the human good rooted in traditions and experiences that transcend liberal modernity — provided they don't clash in a fundamental way with liberal ideals and institutions.

In the end, what we're seeing is an effort to greatly expand the list of beliefs, traditions, and ways of life that fundamentally clash with liberalism. That is an effort that no genuine liberal should want to succeed. 

What happened to a liberalism of skepticism, modesty, humility, and openness to conflicting notions of the highest good? What happened to a liberalism of pluralism that recognizes that when people are allowed to search for truth in freedom, they are liable to seek and find it in a multitude of values, beliefs, and traditions? What happened to a liberalism that sees this diversity as one of the finest flowers of a free society rather than a threat to the liberal democratic order? 

I don't have answers to these questions — and frankly, not a lot hinges on figuring out how we got here. What matters is that we acknowledge that something in the liberal mind has changed, and that we act to recover what has been lost."

The rest at theweek.com 

Seven Dangers to Human Virtue

The shameful hypocrisy of our double standards on religion - TheWeek.com

"...For an exquisite example of such reactions, take a look at this Times editorial, which declares that nothing can "justify" the Texas exhibit and other "blatantly Islamophobic provocations" because they inflict "deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims," "exacerbate tensions," and "give extremists more fuel." 

Maybe that's right. But then shouldn't the Times editorial board also denounce The Book of Mormon, the runaway hit musical playing just a few blocks up the street from the Times offices for the past several years? Strangely, I can recall no such denunciation, even though the play relentlessly and vulgarly (and brilliantly!) ridicules the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from start to finish. Why has the Times neglected to rise to the defense of the LDS against this blatantly Mormonphobic provocation? Is it only because Mormons don't resort to terrorism over ecclesiastical insults?...

..."It is easy to appreciate the dilemma Lynne Meadow, the Manhattan Theater Club's artistic director, found herself in, but it is impossible to approve her decision," wrote the Times in an editorial titled "Censoring Terrence McNally," explaining that artist freedom demanded she not capitulate to the critics. Instead, she should have opted for "standing firm and relying on the police for protection." 

That was 17 years ago. Is there any chance that standards have evolved since then — that the Times now simply cares less about freedom of expression than it once did, and that it would apply this changed standard equally to both Christians and Muslims today? Do we have reason to anticipate editorials denouncing the Christophobic prejudices of various cultural exhibitions and events taking place around New York City, along with calls to shut them down for fear of inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Christians? 

That certainly wouldn't make me happy. I'd prefer consistency in the other direction — in favor of a strong defense of free expression in nearly all cases..."

From Theweek.com

Dachsund Firework

Thomas Sowell on Greed

From economist Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed" (1995):

Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of "greed" is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people's money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largess dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described by the anointed as "greed" on the part of government or the clientele of government. . . . 

Families who wish to be independent financially and to make their own decisions about their lives are of little interest or use to those who are seeking to impose their superior wisdom and virtue on other people. Earning their own money makes these families unlikely candidates for third-party direction and wishing to retain what they have earned threatens to deprive the anointed of the money needed to distribute as largess to others who would thus become subject to their direction. In these circumstances, it is understandable why the desire to increase and retain one's own earnings should be characterized negatively as "greed," while wishing to live at the expense of others is not.

A New Theory of Distraction - The New York Times

"Another source of confusion is distraction’s apparent growth. There are two big theories about why it’s on the rise. The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us. In 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued, in an influential essay called “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” that in the tech-saturated city “stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention” turn life into “a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing.” (In the countryside, you have to entertain yourself.) One way to understand the distraction boom, therefore, is in terms of the spread of city life: not only has the world grown more urban, but digital devices let us bring citylike experiences with us wherever we go.

The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. The comedian Louis C.K. may be the most famous contemporary exponent of this way of thinking. A few years ago, on “Late Night” with Conan O’Brien, he argued that people are addicted to their phones because “they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.” (David Foster Wallace also saw distraction this way.) The spiritual theory is even older than the material one: in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”; in the seventeenth century, Pascal said that “all men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” In many ways, of the two, the material theory is more reassuring. If the rise of distraction is caused by technology, then technology might reverse it, while if the spiritual theory is true then distraction is here to stay. It’s not a competition, though; in fact, these two problems could be reinforcing each other. Stimulation could lead to ennui, and vice versa...

...The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon. It’s not just that we choose our own distractions; it’s that the pleasure we get from being distracted is the pleasure of taking action and being free. There’s a glee that comes from making choices, a contentment that settles after we’ve asserted our autonomy. When you write an essay in Microsoft Word while watching, in another window, an episode of “American Ninja Warrior”—trust me, you can do this—you’re declaring your independence from the drudgery of work. When you’re waiting to cross the street and reach to check your e-mail, you’re pushing back against the indignity of being made to wait. Distraction is appealing precisely because it’s active and rebellious.

Awkwardly honest cards say what you’re actually thinking on special occasions

Parents Clinging To Lone Religious Element Of Daughter’s Wedding Ceremony - The Onion

ROCHESTER, NY—After sitting through an outdoor ceremony officiated by the groom’s best friend, local parents Scott and Linda McNeil were clinging to the lone religious element of their daughter’s wedding, sources confirmed Saturday. “The vows they wrote for each other were nice, but the passage from Corinthians they used on the back of the wedding program was just beautiful,” said Linda McNeil, adding that she and her husband were both deeply touched by the inclusion of the biblical quote “Love still stands when all else has fallen,” which appeared beneath a verse from a Sarah McLachlan song. “I’ve always loved that passage, and it’s a part of the Scripture that really captures who they are.” McNeil then added that she knew the small image of a dove above the quote would have made her late mother very happy.


A Portlandia Wedding too below (found from Mbird.com)