Quote of the day – Sean Carroll:
In reality, of course, Sotomayor is simply telling the truth — a cardinal sin in law as well as politics. In law and politics, and for that matter theology, we are presented with a sacred text of one form or another. And we are supposed to pretend that the text has a One True Meaning — we may, of course, argue at great length about the proper procedure for divining what that meaning actually is, but admitting that the text is inherently ambiguous (or even contradictory) is not allowed. We need to act as if the authors of Leviticus and the Framers of the Constitution were trying to say something very clear about contemporary debates, if only we had the interpretational acumen to figure out what it was.
Which is why, as much as I enjoy the rest of the world of human endeavor, science will always be my true home. Our job is to interpret the natural world, which really is unambiguous and non-contradictory, if only we can make sense of its behavior. Other fields have a professional obligation to pretend that there are right and wrong answers, but we actually have them. Yet another way in which being a scientist is so much easier than other jobs.
Sotomayer would make Six of Nine Catholics on the SCOTUS. I’ll leave it to someone else to photoshop her face onto Jeri Ryan’s body… and add the cyb-brow.
The Economics of Distributism III: Equity and Equilibrium (I have a number of quibbles with this post… but some of the thinking in it is conspicuously absent in our culture… My angle on it is that wages eventually have to be pegged to productivity, and productivity has to be pegged to sustainability, economic and environmental… otherwise, DISASTER).
Speaking of which, this is old news, but… The End of the American Dream? has this nice graph:
I’ve seen a similar graph extending back to the 1940s… during most of the last century wages seemingly tracked productivity nicely. That was before “Union” became a dirty word.
Fareed Zakaria wants to know: does Iran really want the Bomb?
Quotable on the Prop 8 ruling:
I don’t know enough about the law to judge whether this decision is legally supportable. But I know this: It is a gross miscarriage of justice. And my greatest fear is this: Even if Proposition 8 eventually gets overturned by yet another ballot initiative (which I expect it will, sooner or later), that miscarriage of justice — the precedent that it’s okay to amend the state Constitution to discriminate against a particular class of citizens as long as that class is feared and despised by the majority — will linger on.
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