sheer potentiality

Someone holed up in a church tower and shot at police officers at a nearby courthouse. Google is all the fuck over it, but the first word I got was from frequent commenter Laurel, who prepared to return fire last night, and is probably mighty disappointed she didn’t get to.

Well, who do you think it was? A disgruntled college student trying to emulate Cho? A crazed white supremacist making a political statement? A mentally disturbed Iraq veteran who had one flashback too many? A distraught minister who decided to turn to violence after the death of Jerry Falwell? A charismatic cocaine dealer on the run from the law, making his last stand? The Pullman, Washington panty thief who stole $2000 worth of women’s underwear? All these people, and more, have a high probability of being in Moscow, Idaho, so I’m not entirely surprised this happened. Leave your theories in the comments?

Otherwise known as “legislating from the bench”:

I got into it on Slashdot again, someone claiming that the Constitution is “threatened by the Justices behaving like philosopher-kings finding new “laws” in the Constitution that the oafs in Congress should’ve passed (practice often derided as “legislating from the bench”)”. I have decided to post my reply (in an edited form) here.

People who complain about “judicial activism” or “legislating from the bench” remind me of whiny sports fans who blame the refs every time they lose a game. If a court ruling goes their way, no complaint. If a court ruling goes against them, it’s “judicial activism”.

First off, let’s be perfectly clear on one thing–most law in the United States is case law, i.e. law that is made by the precedent of judicial rulings. This allows the law to grow organically from case analysis rather than simply being handed down from Congress every so often. This is a vital feature of the system of common law we inherited from Great Britain, so if you have a problem with it, take it up with them. It’s also an inescapable consequence of stare decisis, the doctrine that future courts will rule according to the precedents set by past courts. But for stare decisis, court rulings would be unpredictable and arbitrary.

Having a strong judicial branch with the power to strike down what Congress and the President do also protects us from the tyranny of the majority. The civil rights rulings of the 1960’s are a perfect example of this–the “will of the people”, the laws Congress did pass, all this stuff you people claim is trampled by judicial activism, were in this case part of a horrifically evil system that oppressed people for no reason other than their racial origin. It was the Supreme Court, upholding the principles of the Constitution, which stopped this. For all your complaining about how the will of the people is subverted, you fail to recognize—quite often, when the “will of the people” is to restrict human rights, it needs to be subverted.

I’m not saying the Court never makes bad rulings–they clearly do, particularly in cases like Kelo. But majority rule makes bad decisions far more often, and it’s vital that there be some way to put majority rule in check in situations where it is clearly acting unjustly. And that will necessarily involve overturning what Congress and the President do from time to time.

I recently woke up from an interesting dream.

When this dream started out, I was some type of investigator—I think a rogue investigator—who was trying to locate some woman’s guard dog, because by capturing the guard dog we could then capture the woman. I don’t know why we wanted to capture the woman, but she was some type of stripper or prostitute who worked in a bad part of town.

The woman was someone I knew from high school, I think, but I can’t give a name. I highly doubt it’s anyone who has ever read this blog though.

At some point during this investigation, I signed onto MSN Messenger. Instead of two contacts, I had about five—including people I don’t talk to anymore. I could also see people’s MSN names, which I don’t have Adium set up to do.

In another part of the dream, I was a Japanese ship’s captain, and I was ordering a bagel with lasagna on the side. (I know this makes no sense, but whatever). Then the lasagna disappeared, but it turned out it was eaten by the crew during a trip into the past. Okay.

In the next part, I time traveled into the past to help some blond woman (possibly Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, or just Katee Sackhoff, or maybe it was some other girl from high school) on some type of mission. I don’t remember much, except she decided to go back a year, or live out a year during the past in order to accomplish the mission.

The final part of the dream took place during the Civil War. I was a Confederate from Missouri who spent all his time in a Virginia bar ranting about how Virginia and Missouri together could take on the whole world. (Except I pronounced it “Missoura”). Among other things I think I dumped out a bootful of Missouri soil onto the floor, or something. As far as I can tell I was well-accepted. Interestingly enough, I didn’t remember during the dream that Missouri didn’t join the Confederacy.

Is it just me? Seriously?

I mean, who was the person who said, “Let’s do a ‘Law & Order’ spinoff where all the cases are bizarre sex offenses!”? It’s kind of perverse. Of course, perverse things aren’t all that unusual. What is unusual is that the normal conservative, not-that-edgy audiences that watch “Law & Order” want to watch a show about violent and often disturbing made-up sex offenses every single week.

What’s this about? Does sex sell? Maybe someone realized that a good percentage of the population are victims of sex offenses, and want some way of working through that. And maybe lots of people watch SVU just so they can try and work out things that happened to them in the past. (Does that make NBC good, for providing this to those people, or evil, for exploiting those people to get ratings?)

Even more strangely, how many “Law & Order” fans (who weren’t raped or anything) watch SVU without it ever occurring to them how perverse the show’s premise is, kind of like kids who grow up eating Spam without ever realizing how weird and gross it is?

I seem to have lost a friend. I remember a quote: “It is sad to lose a friend. Not everyone has had a friend.”

My friend didn’t die, or disappear, or get abducted by Marxists. Perhaps she was never my friend to begin with. After all, our friendship was one of the few things I felt certain in, and confident of. If I couldn’t trust in that I don’t think I can trust in anything. I used to confidently think, and say, that we would always be friends, no matter what—that we would always stay in contact with each other. If I was so horribly wrong about one of the most obvious truths to my life, what am I right about? I can no longer trust anyone outside my immediate family. I can no longer let anyone become so important to me.

But the worst part is, there’s one less person in the world I can have a conversation with now. For me there have been few of those people in my life. Maybe some people have a surplus, and can stand to lose one or two.

So be it. This friendship didn’t have the best of beginnings, so I never deserved for it to last as long as it did. I’m not going to go into details, but suffice it to say that when I met this person, I was a different person from who I am today. Back then I was a rather awful person at times. I like to think I’m not so awful anymore, but it’s only in retrospect that I’ll know for sure.

But most people are rather awful at times, and a smaller majority are rather awful most of the time. And one can never really be sure when one has found a true exception. So it is wise to be reserved when dealing with people.

Well, I went to check my traffic statistics. As always, the search phrases for May are amusing. They include the following:

“prohibition era violin cases smuggling liquor”

Actually, I thought prohibition-era violin cases were for smuggling Thompson submachine guns. It probably hit my St. Valentine’s Day post of about a year ago when I suggested that it should be celebrated primarily as the anniversary of the eponymous massacre.

“are you free in the sense of being single or in the sense of being liberated?”

This surprisingly deep and probing question paraphrases part of my conversation with God.

“i keep getting random long lasting erections”

This probably matched my parody disclaimer. Um, and I don’t know what to advise. Except masturbating more often.

“unbifurcated garments”

Hooray! One of my favorite topics!

“why is it acceptable for women to wear pant but not for men to wear skirt”

Good question.

From April:

“cadbury eggs disgusting”

No! Cadbury eggs awesome!

“how to annoy a neighbor”

BY LEAVING YOUR ALARM CLOCK RUNNING FOR 30 MINUTES CONTINUOUSLY!

“become a gay prostitute”

I don’t know anything about that. But I do know that one way of getting out of blood donation is ” have sex with a gay prostitute from Nigeria since 1977 while high on intravenous drugs… while you were spending a cumulative total of three months or more in the United Kingdom (U.K.) between 1980, and 1996, while eating exclusively mechanically separated beef”.

“how much does the u.s. pay cuba for guantanamo bay”

2,000 gold coins a year.

“ticketmaster in the process of being printed”

As Mike Klein said, “that must be one fucking slow printer”.

Not only am I now a YouTube celebrity, apparently my blog has become the new location for the loosely controlled chaos of Jacqueline Passey’s comment threads. Alright, guys. If you’re going to start commenting over here, here are some simple rules:

• This is my blog. This is “sheer potentiality” on philwelch.net. You’re lucky if I update weekly. If there’s a thriving comment community I may be inspired to update more often. If I update more often, of course, I have a chance of cultivating a thriving comment community.
• There’s no ads on here and it’s going to stay that way unless traffic goes up enough to justify it. Note: I don’t keep track of my traffic. I easily could, but I just don’t bother.
• I delete comments at will. There is no policy about this because it is my blog and the policy is, I delete comments at will. The same policy holds for all site content. Any blog post and any other page on philwelch.net is edited or deleted at will. If for some reason I don’t want to be reminded of you,, the blog will read as if I never knew you. If burned bridges are rebuilt again, I might consider adding you back, unless of course you’re vindictive enough to burn them down again for no apparent reason. If you’re very observant you might know who I’m talking about here. But chances are no one reads my blog that closely.
• I don’t like pants much. Or haircuts.

Seriously though, most of you are okay. So welcome to sheer potentiality.

If you check out my video below, apparently I’ve been linked to in someone’s MySpace comments. I guess this means that, in YouTube terms, I’ve finally made it.

What is a cascading life failure?

A cascading life failure occurs when something goes wrong in one’s life, putting them into an obsessively bad mood that hinders their performance in other aspects of their life. This causes other things to go wrong, thus worsening the subject’s mood, thus causing other things to go wrong, and so forth. Susceptibility to cascading life failure can be a very significant personal flaw.