Tweaked the Blog’s Look

Well, as you can see, I changed the look slightly.  It’s still basic, but I liked this theme because it was wider and I liked the colors.  It seemed easy on the eyes.  But by all means sound off if in the comments if you like it, hate it or whatever.  That is especially true if you are having difficulty viewing it for any reason.  I want to hear that, because I definitely don’t want to cause that kind of problem.

As you can see, I also added sharing buttons to the bottom of each post, if you are inclined to use that sort of thing.

So if you have any suggestions on how to improve the site, let me know.  I am thinking it would be cool to add a logo, but then I have to, you know, come up with a logo.

Actually, come to think of it, I do know of one thing I did once for work.  Maybe I can do something similar.  Let me think on that...

Update: And I have created a logo.  Yeah, I guess when it comes to graphic design... I'm a pretty good lawyer.  Still I think that is pretty good when grading on a curve and it does give it some distinction.  And feel free to sound off on what you think about it.

Update (II): Btw, if you are using an iPhone, I can see that Blogger is by default shunting you into a "mobile" version of the site that looks basically alright, but it does lose the logo.  I am still figuring out this stuff, so let me see if I can control that by any method.

The International Humanitarian Community Reduced To Absurdity

Now before I dig in, let me point out that there is a strong difference between the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross.  My understanding form years of news reports is that basically the American version is relatively sane and doesn’t get itself into stupid politics (but, dear reader, feel free to correct me I am wrong), and is truly separate from the international version.  And I suggest you bookmark the pages I refer you to and tuck them away to bring up the next time someone talks about the latest International Red Cross Report complaining that we are not being sufficiently nice to terrorists, so you can remind everyone what a bunch of bedwetting ninnies these people really are.

You see the International Red Cross is considering action to protect a group that has been horribly abused for years.  And the most horrific thing about it is that the persons committing these gross violations of human rights law are often shockingly young.  We are talking sometimes kids as young as three years old committing horrific atrocities.

So what is this poor oppressed group that the IRC is considering intervening on behalf of?

Stop With the Single-Site Apps! (A Rant)

This isn't supposed to be a profound post, but sometimes you just feel like getting something off your chest.

Okay, so about a month ago, I made the leap to the iPhone. Basically my Blackberry turned into a hockey puck and while I had been loyal to that company for years I was kind of annoyed that it just died on me, so I was interested in something else. And looking around at the cell phone store, I found that the iPhone cost exactly as much as several options, so I surrendered and got the iPhone. And for the most part I have really liked it. I can't tell you how it stacks up compared to the Droid or anything like that, but I can instantly see why Blackberry is in trouble as a company. Compared to the iPhone, the Blackberry is just plain slow. And I will add that the iPhone works better as a phone. The Blackberry gets no reception my office; the iPhone does.

But there is one annoyance I have to deal with all the time: single-site apps. Like I would go to Cracked.com and every now and then they ask if I would like to download the app to view their site. The same with the Daily Caller and about five other sites. Somehow they can tell I am using an iPhone and they think I need an app for every site.

Hey guys, I already have an app for viewing your site. It's called Safari (in other words, the standard web browser). And personally I would rather not fill my phone with 5,000 single site apps. I want that space for Angry Birds, okay?

So stop asking.

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By the way, I have to say this Siri thing is kind of a d-ck move by Apple. Let me get this straight. A bunch of smart people create this voice activated app for the iPhone. It sells really well. Then you guys decide you like it so much you make it a built in feature on the iPhone 4s, and then you take away that app from everyone else. I mean, as I understand it, if you owned Siri before, Apple took it away from you. I think they gave their customers wet willies while they were doing it. And all of this to make people want to buy your new phone to get back what you already had and so you can have advertisements that make people think that Siri is a new feature of the 4s, when in fact it is an old feature that you have taken away from your prior phones.

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Follow me on Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and alerts when there are new posts.

Sanity Prevails on the Morning After Pill (But So Does Raaaaacism!)

This is a day old, but still of interest. For a few years it seemed like RU-486, a.k.a. the Morning After Pill was going to be made over-the-counter for all women in the current administration, a position I found incomprehensible. I mean let's put aside completely whatever one feels about abortion. Love it or hate it, let's ignore that moral component and focus solely on the issue of the woman's health.

I mean let me personalize this because it is personal. Early in my marriage, my wife was pregnant. We were very happy, so much so that I had a name picked out if it was a girl within a week and pretty soon we told her family the good news. And you know, in this Filipino culture it's an even bigger deal than it is in the culture I come from. And then literally the next day she miscarried. We probably are never going to have children, except very likely by adoption.

And you see, that is what an abortion is, an artificially-induced miscarriage. And having seen what an awful experience it was—I mean wholly apart from the emotions surrounding the loss of her baby, it was a real physical trauma and the hormonal shifts were rough—I am extremely skeptical of the claim that any woman should be getting an abortion without at least a doctor's prescription. But what the FDA proposed was beyond the pale. Right now a woman over the age of sixteen (meaning seventeen or older) can obtain the drug over-the-counter, while girls who are younger than that had to obtain a prescription. The FDA recommended changing the rule to allow all girls to obtain it over the counter and to the credit of Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Health and Human services, she overruled the FDA. And one need only read from the official press release to see how morally incomprehensible the FDA's position was:

The average age of the onset of menstruation for girls in the United States is 12.4 years. However, about ten percent of girls are physically capable of bearing children by 11.1 years of age. It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age. If the application were approved, the product would be available, without prescription, for all girls of reproductive age.

And asking a girl who is only eleven years old to deal with a drug like this without any guidance from a physician seems insane. Again, putting aside what you think about abortion, and I suppose what you think about girls having abortions without their parents' consent, an eleven year old girl is just not ready to handle those kind of weighty issues.

Seventy Years Ago On This Day, a Day That Shall Live in Infamy...

...Pearl Harbor was attacked.  The reality is that on this day a struggle began that decided the fate of the free world.  We are free and possibly alive today because of the sacrifices they made.

So take a moment to contemplate their sacrifices and pay your respect.  If you are inclined to do so, I would suggest giving to the Wounded Warriors Project.

And remember the lesson our grandfathers paid for with blood to learn.  Evil exists.  Sometimes we have no choice but to confront it.  And evil can only succeed if good men do nothing.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronworthing.

Oh Noes! The Spouses and Families of Every Supreme Court Justice Engages in Corporate Speech!

You see, last Summer Martin Ginsberg, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's husband, passed away.  So the other Supreme Court spouses got together and wrote a cookbook in tribute to the late Ginsberg, because apparently he was a great chef.  It's called Chef Supreme and can be purchased at The Supreme Court Historical Society gift shop, here.

 

The Supreme Court Historical Society's website gives you its background here stating that

 

The Society, a private non-profit organization, is dedicated to the collection and preservation of the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. Incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1974, it was founded by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who served as its first honorary chairman. 

 

(Emphasis added).  So there you have it, every single spouse of the Supreme Court has engaged in corporate expression, except Martin Ginsberg for obvious reasons.  And in turn according to certain Weinerish theories of recusal that means the next time a corporate expression case comes up, all of those justices have to disqualify themselves. And lest you think that this means that it would become a court of one (Ginsberg), I will note that the Blog of Legal Times states that "[f]ollowing the recipes, the book includes lengthier tributes and photos from Ginsburg's children James and Jane as well as other longtime family friends."  So there you go, no Supreme Court Justice is qualified to sit in any corporate speech case again (at least until we get new members).

 

Orrrrr…  we can recognize that those silly theories were just that: silly.  A rooting interest by a spouse or child is does not justify disqualification.

 

And it's also a good excuse to devote a whole post to promoting a very good legal geek gift and this organization seems to be a perfectly good charity.  I might even give the book to my wife as a laugh.  I mean while I am a law geek and a history geek, my wife is a cooking geek, and this is a law and cooking geek book.  So its geek convergence!

 

Follow me on Twitter @aaronworthing.

First Obama Blamed Bush for His Failures, Now He Blames Al Gore!

[I am trying Blogger's feature allowing me to post by email, so bear with me if something goes horribly wrong.]

 

That was my first thought when I heard that Obama is now blaming the internet for high unemployment:

 

"Layoffs too often became permanent, not part of the business cycle. And these changes didn't just affect blue collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the internet," President Obama said at a campaign event in Kansas.

 

You can watch video of that, here.

 

By the way, Mr. President, they've had internet-based travel planning for years, long before you became President.  For instance, over eight years ago I brought a woman to New York City on memorial day weekend and booked the whole thing on those kinds of sites.  I never talked to a person, even when I canceled my first reservation and found a new one, mid-trip.

 

And at the end of the weekend, I asked that woman to marry me and is my wife to this day.

 

So Mr. President please stop pretending you know anything about business.  You're just embarrassing yourself.

 

(And yes, I know someone made a similar joke at Insty.  I could say it's a case of great minds thinking alike, but honestly I think it's more like it's an obvious joke.)

 

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By the way, a cool and true story.  While I was up in New York there I was able to get free tickets to see Yakov Smirnoff do a one man show, As Long as We Both Shall Laugh.  We originally got three tickets on the hope that a friend of mine who lived there could come, but she couldn't come so we gave the ticket back to the box office and told them to sell the seat.  Smirnoff's show was actually really nice.  You might joke that his career was one of the victims of the fall of the Berlin wall, but really a good comedian can find humor in any situation, and is not limited to one bit, although it was his signature bit, obviously.

 

But it was a very charming performance where he likened getting married to becoming a citizen of a new country.  The whole time he is surrounded by two life-size replicas of the Statue of Liberty and at the end the lights come down for a moment and suddenly one of the statues is alive, and he dances with her and dips her, like she is his bride.  Yes, you know, how they did it, but like I said, it was really charming.  The spirit of that moment is captured in this poster for the show (from Yakov's site):

 

 

But here's the cool part.  So the whole time he is pretending to draw a portrait of his two children as sort of a running thread in the performance.  Mind you, I am convinced he can draw pretty well, but um…  most of the drawing seemed to happen when you couldn't see, if memory serves.  And then at the end he told us that this night his real children were actually there and they stand up...  exactly one seat away from the two of us.  Literally if we gave away a different ticket, we would have been sitting right next to them the entire time.

Silence is Not An Option

I am probably not the only one to observe that child actors, seem to be uniquely messed up as a group.  I used to think it was mainly a case of them getting too much too soon.  They are not only fabulously rich but it often upsets the natural order of things in the parent-child relationship.  For instance, how many times have your parents said to you, “as long as you live under my roof, you will do as I say!”  Now imagine you are Mylie Cyrus and in fact you paid for your parents’ house.  It doesn’t work quite as well, now does it?

I even tossed around briefly the idea that we should ban the use of child actors entirely (I mean, outside of school plays and the like).  It wouldn’t even be complicated: all we do is apply the child labor laws to the acting profession.

But that doesn’t really work, because in effect you are destroying freedom of expression.  How can Steven Speilberg, for instance, depict this in Schindler’s List...

...without employing child actors?  Yes, we don’t lose much if they can no longer be in schmaltzy Hallmark dramas, but there is no reasonable way to distinguish between speech we value and speech we don’t, so we have to allow all of it.

But that doesn’t change my misgivings about this sector of Hollywood and there might be an even darker reason why child actors are so often so screwed up.  In a recent article, the authors mention several high-profile cases of child molestation on Hollywood sets and then they write this:

Feldman, 40, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, unflinchingly warned of the world of pedophiles who are drawn to the entertainment industry last August. "I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia,” Feldman told ABC’s Nightline. “That's the biggest problem for children in this industry... It's the big secret.”

About Comments...

You know, if I was going to allow comments it would help if I told Blogger I was allowing comments...

Which is my roundabout way of saying I (stupidly) didn't have it set up to accept comments and I believe now it is fixed. Thanks to the commenters at Patterico's who alerted me to the problem.

Back at my Home

Well, it was over a year ago that I first announced that I would be guest blogging over at Patterico’s Pontifications and basically the responsibility of keeping this blog up left me to neglect this one.  Well, Patrick has decided that he wants his blog to be more his personal expression again.  Bluntly I can very profoundly understand where he is coming from.

Still it as a downright fun year.  I got several Instalinks and several other internet giants said really nice things about me.  I even got to post more than a few times at Big Government and Big Journalism, which is just cool.

So it is back here, at my home where I get completely liberated but enjoy a smaller audience.  Such is life.  Today, I just have run out of time, but I will be posting on a regular basis here and tweeting it at @AaronWorthing when I have a new post.

And a new thing...  comments!  Woo-hoo!  Now certain stalkerbois need not apply but pretty much I want to hear the feedback from anyone who bothers to read this site.  And I will probably change the name slightly to "Allergic to Bull" just so people will be less reluctant to link here.  I have not decided whether I will continue to cuss like a sailor in the posts.  Hey, if you have an opinion on that, why don't you tell me how you feelabout that?  Or just say "Hey, Aaron, I am here."

So, take a look around and I will have more to come very shortly, like hopefully tomorrow evening.