Ian Underwood

Ian Underwood is the author of the Bare Minimum Books series (BareMinimumBooks.com).  He has been a planetary scientist and artificial intelligence researcher for NASA, the director of the renowned Ask Dr. Math service, co-founder of Bardo Farm and Shaolin Rifleworks, and a popular speaker at liberty-related events. He lives in Croydon, New Hampshire.

Crimefighters

Every once in a while, even an Ivy League law professor can surprise you by saying something sensible.  For years I’ve been quoting Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School on the dangers of using judicial review to circumvent the formal constitutional amendment process:

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a public safety hazard don’t see the danger in the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.

Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to read this from Stephen Carter at Yale Law School:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce.  Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

Neither idea is new, but there are a lot of people who don’t seem to be willing to listen to an idea unless it comes from a ‘respectable’ source, so it’s nice to be able to quote these two.

What I’m waiting for now is an Ivy League endorsement of another idea that has been kicking around for a while, and whose time, I think, may finally have come:

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The dumbest argument in politics?

Now that a ‘red flag’ law (more precisely a ‘suspension of due process for gun owners’  law, although that would telegraph its intent too clearly) is being considered, it means we’re going to hear the following specious argument raised in its defense:  ‘Rights are not unlimited. For example, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.’

It’s amazing to me that an argument this dumb has managed to stay around for as long as it has.  Why?  Because it’s so easily refuted.

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Milk Cows Not Taxpayers

The Union Leader reports that Governor Chris (‘Bernie’) Sununu has ‘promised to create the New Hampshire Career Academy, a partnership involving community colleges, employers and local high schools that will enable motivated and capable students to get a tuition-free associate degree’.

So, is this part of the state’s court-mandated responsibility to provide an opportunity to get an adequate education? If it is, why stop at an associate’s degree? Why not have tuition-free bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees? But if it’s not, what’s the constitutional justification for it?  

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assault plastic

The Assault Plastics Bill

No, I’m not talking about ‘plastic guns’.  I’m talking about HB102, which would add ‘the distribution of single-use plastics to consumers’ to the list of things towns can regulate. The idea is to let towns ban the use of plastic bags in grocery stores, or plastic drinking straws in restaurants.  But ‘single-use’ covers a lot of ground. … Read more

Mr. Speaker, regarding the proposed changes to Rule 63…

Mr. Speaker… Let’s imagine that, at some point in the future, some other party has a majority in the House. And that party, having seen the Democratic party claim — as it does today — that there are no limits to what can be controlled via the House Rules, decides to push through some rules like:

• No women are allowed in the House Chamber.

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Rethinking Fairness in Education

Below is a picture of the current educational system. We put kids in school for about 1000 hours per year, for 12 years, and see what happens. At the end of that time, some may be taking college-level courses. Others may still be unable to read.

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Protecting the vote supply

The Red Cross Bloodmobile has an elegant procedure for dealing with people who shouldn’t donate blood, but who don’t want to have to admit that to their friends or employers.

You go in with everyone else, and fill out the forms, and if there is something that would disqualify you as a donor, they put a specially coded sticker on your bag, and someone else discards it later.

It eliminates the danger of embarrassment or discrimination beforehand, and it mitigates the danger of a tainted donation entering the blood supply.  It’s a great system.

I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t have something like that for voting.

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How to lose elections

I keep hearing that the GOP needs to get better at making use of social media, and the Internet in general.  And better at raising and spending money.

But looking at the mass of campaign literature in my burn box, it occurs to me that a party only needs things like web sites and social media pages and a ton of cash for mailings and yard signs if people don’t already know what it stands for.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty accurate description of the current state of the Republican Party.

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The 14th Suggestion

I’m amused to see people dragging out the 14th Amendment in response to President Trump’s suggestion that he’ll unilaterally end ‘birthright citizenship’ through executive action.

For example, a recent piece in Reason ends this way: ‘The original meaning of the 14th Amendment has been clear since 1866. If Trump proceeds with his unconstitutional executive order attacking birthright citizenship, he deserves to be laughed out of court.’

What the author fails to realize is that the words of the 14th Amendment aren’t any more meaningful, to the Supreme Court, than the words of the 1st Amendment, or the 2nd Amendment, or the 4th Amendment, or any of the other words in the Constitution.

Do we have laws, passed by Congress, abridging freedom of speech?  Yes.  Do we have laws infringing the right to keep and bear arms?  Yes.  Do we have laws allowing government agents to search people without probable cause?  Yes.  Do the words of the Constitution allow any of those?  No.  Has the Court unilaterally amended the Constitution to allow all of them?  Yup. 

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The Ikea Bill of Rights

I recently read about a psychological phenomenon called ‘the Ikea effect’.  Briefly, if you make something — or even just finish making what someone else has started — you value it more than if it’s already complete when you get it.  The work you put in gives you a sense of ownership.

When I saw that, it occurred to me that people don’t seem to value our Constitution, and in particular, our Bill of Rights, as much as they probably should.  And now I wonder if that’s not at least partly because these were handed to them, already complete.

And if that’s true, what might we do about it? 

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The War on Ants

You find ants in your kitchen, or in your bathroom.  What do you do? There are some obvious things to try: Interdiction:  You try to find out how they’re getting in, and block those entrances. Preemption:   You make food harder to find by keeping everything in airtight containers, cleaning up all spills immediately, and so … Read more

Psych Diving

In the documentary Free Solo  (now in theaters), you can watch Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without a rope — something that doesn’t seem possible even after you’ve just watched him do it.

Much of the film is about the reactions of the other people in his life, including his friends, who are making the film. During some parts of the ascent, they leave their cameras running, but have to look away because they’re afraid for Alex.

They’re afraid for good reason.  As one of Alex’s climbing partners puts it:  ‘Everybody who has made free soloing a big part of their life is dead.’

But his mother puts her own fears into perspective this way:  ‘I think when he’s free soloing that’s when he feels the most alive, the most… everything.  How can you even think about taking that away from somebody?’ 

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Voating Rites

Let me see if I have this right:  SB 3, which clarifies the process by which some people — mainly non-resident college students — can vote in New Hampshire, has been set aside (temporarily, at least) by a  Superior Court judge because these students might have trouble reading the new affidavit specified by the law, which apparently is written at too high a reading level.

Too high a reading level.  For college students.

Specifically, the new affidavit places an ‘unreasonable and discriminatory’ burden on those students because — in the judge’s words — it ‘reads like a statute’.

So a statute can’t be a valid statute… if it reads like one?  What are the alternatives?

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John Valera, Conscience of the House

When Herb Kelleher was starting up Southwest Airlines, he was asked which of the other airlines he regarded as his main competition.  Kelleher replied that Southwest wasn’t competing with other airlines.  It was competing with buses and trains.  A lot of people didn’t normally fly, and those were the people he wanted to turn into customers.

There are a lot of people out there who don’t normally vote, often because they don’t feel like they’re being offered a real choice.   (As Warren Beatty once said:  ‘We don’t need a third party, we need a second party.’)

But every once in a while, there is a real choice. 

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Actions speak louder than words

Isn’t it pretty to think that Scalia really believed this? 

But if you look, for example, at the 2nd Amendment, it says that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’.

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The Amended Amendment Procedure

I do solemnly swear, that I will bear faith and true allegiance to the United States of America and the state of New Hampshire, and will do whatever their Supreme Courts tell me to do, even when that conflicts with their written constitutions.

 

 

Article 100 of the New Hampshire Constitution outlines a few different methods by which that document can be amended.  But with election season upon us, and with school funding being such a hot topic, it’s worth taking a look at a method that isn’t included in the document itself, using Article 83 as an example.

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Take our advice, we’re not using it

chicken in street

David Hogg recently extended his long string of goofy comments by claiming that the AR-15 rifle can’t be a ‘self-defense’ weapon because it can be used to hit things that are far away.

Predictably, it got a lot of media coverage.  And predictably, it generated a lot of comments along the lines of ‘How can anyone believe something that is so obviously wrong?’

But really, this kind of idiocy is predictable too.  In fact, we’re going to great effort to cultivate it. 

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The Kavanaugh Compromise

Recent discussions regarding the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seem to have centered largely around two issues:  guns and abortion.

Judging from my own experience, conservatives tend to be both pro-gun and anti-abortion, while progressives tend to be both anti-gun and pro-abortion:

                   Pro-abortion    Anti-abortion
Pro-gun                            Conservative
Anti-gun           Progressive

So it occurs to me that the current juxtaposition of these two issues might represent an opportunity to make, albeit informally, a historic deal linking the two.  

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The Kavanaugh Amendment

stooges-at-blackboard

If the answers to constitutional questions are in the Constitution, then it shouldn’t matter at all who sits on the Supreme Court.  We should be able to replace any subset of justices, and the same questions should get the same answers.  They’re all looking at the same document, right?

You might be feeling some hesitation about that — doesn’t the Constitution have to be ‘interpreted’?  But consider what would happen if it were announced that from now on, officials would be free to ‘interpret’ the NFL Rulebook in order to get any outcome they want, so that the result of any contest would depend entirely on who was doing the officiating.

There would be riots, wouldn’t there? 

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