I’m probably the only person apart from Jonathan Adler’s mom who enjoys the Volokh Conspiracy’s Sunday Song Lyric feature.  This ain’t no music blog, but we all have to start somewhere.

The song presently stuck in my head is “Crazy Man” by the duo of Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean, working together as Freakwater.  The song comes from the 1993 album “Feels Like The Third Time”.

Freakwater got lost in the shuffle of alt country in the 1990s, perhaps because they were a little too “alt” to appeal to much of the crowd that listens to Wilco today.  Perhaps they were a bit too rustic.  Perhaps because they were women, and most alt country fans are sexist pigs.  Even the women.  Or perhaps because while their music was all sweetness and light, their lyrics read like the unpublished poetry of Edgar Allen Poe.  Witness: Crazy Man.

I heard that your daddy was a crazy man
Left your mama standing with a dishrag in her hand
Snuck out through the back way, let the screen door slam
It’s hard to find the words to say, you don’t give a damn!

You said that you never saw your mama cry
Maybe she was sneakin’ around with another man on the sly
I have met your mama and she’s crazy too
You got more from her than just your eyes of blue!

All the words have been spoken
All the bridges have been burned and the promises broken
It’s not hard just to have a little baby!
And I won’t have far to go when I go crazy

All the words have been spoken
All the bridges have been burned and the promises broken
It’s not hard just to have a little baby
And I won’t have far to go when I go crazy

I look into your eyes and I think I see
Picture of me smiling, with a baby on my knee!
There in that old photograph you never change
Like the last time that I saw you when you looked so strange

All the words have been spoken
All the bridges have been burned and the promises broken
It’s not hard just to have a little baby
And I won’t have far to go when I go crazy

And here’s a video of Freakwater performing the song, recorded in 2008.

I’m enjoying a brief break to eat (for the first time today – at 4pm) and wanted to share a few thoughts about games. Sadly, I’m going to have to skip photos and links for now. The short version is that I might not ever have had more fun. The sheer number of esoteric games and people eager to play them is incredible.

I’ve been lucky enough to play just about every game I wanted (and bought several of them as well). So far a surprise favorite is Tobago. A deduction game where you are building treasure maps piece by piece. It’s heavier than it seems and can be quite cutthroat. I really enjoy it and picked up a copy.

I still haven’t had a chance to play dungeon lords, but I bought it & read the rules. I’ll definitely be playing it tonight. It looks great and has been very popular at the con.

The best moment of the con was the chance I got to play Basketboss an auction game about building a basketbAll dynasty. It’s a great game with some very innovative mechanics, and I love the theme. Sadly, it was not ready to be sold at the con so I had to be satisfied just getting to play it.

All of a sudden-in one of the most serendipitous moments I can remember someone walks by with a copy of the game and asks if anyone wants to buy it because he already has one. Needless to say, I was all over it.

Sorry I can’t write more, but Stronghold a game of siege warfare is beckoning to me.

Let’s start with my patent bias: I’m a California taxpayer.

Yesterday University of California students protested proposed tuition hikes, engaging in tried and true protester stuff like taking over buildings and linking arms to block people and shouting slogans and stuff.

University officials said the $505 million to be raised by the tuition increases is needed to prevent even deeper cuts than those already made because of California’s persistent financial crisis.

Protesting students said the hike will hurt working and middle-class students who benefit from state-funded education.

There’s no dispute that California has a huge budget crunch, created by a combination of a shitty economy (and therefore reduced tax revenue) and out-of-control spending. There’s no dispute that the UC system is facing deep cuts as a result, and has to find the money to operate somewhere.

What these students seem to be saying is that it ought to come from me — the taxpayer. Someone explain their point to me in short words that even a dumb guy can understand — is there some way to spin their argument as something other than “gimme your money or we’ll disrupt things?”

That’s what I suspect when I see this infuriating clip at Below the Beltway in which Huffington blathers on about how Beck’s advocacy might fall into an exception to the First Amendment akin to the famous (and usually incorrectly cited) “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” analogy.

Make no mistake: I don’t find it particularly difficult to imagine Beck someday reaching the point where he’s openly advocating imminent and likely violence sufficient to bring him under the Brandenburg exception. I could see him doing it either to pander to audiences and whip up ratings, or because he’s actually just that nuts. But whether you think Beck is an artist in the tradition of Andy Kaufman or a genuine extremist, nothing he’s said has come close to falling within any applicable First Amendment exception. The only proper response to him continues to be return speech in the marketplace of ideas, including but not limited to argument, ridicule, and various forms of shunning including boycotts.

Huffington’s argument plays directly into Beck’s hands — it could hardly be any better for him if he’d scripted it himself. Beck’s position, and that of his media counterparts, depends upon the assertion that conservative ideas are constantly in danger of censorship. Usually Beck and his ilk support this argument by conflating criticism and censorship — as when Sarah Palin suggested that journalists threatened her First Amendment rights by suggesting that she was engaging in negative campaigning. But here Beck can point to Huffington as an example of a media figure openly suggesting that his speech falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. She’s putting money in his pocket.

Given Huffington’s long record of feckless nonsense, I suppose I should not be surprised. Note, for example, her creation of that notorious graveyard of good sense The Huffington Post, the citadel of crystal-fondling anti-science, where a guest column by Roseanne Barr or Rosie O’Donnell can actually improve the average quality of argumentation. But still. She’s an old pro at political rhetoric. What was she thinking?

There are few arguments than I despise more than the assertion that one can only be really black/white/Asian/Latino/whatever if one accepts/believes/supports a given proposition. This week, it’s deeply flawed human being Jesse Jackson making that argument:

“We even have blacks voting against the healthcare bill from Alabama,” Jackson said at a reception Wednesday night. “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”

And it’s not like this is something new. Bill Clinton nominated a candidate for Attorney General who wrote that black Republicans could only be “descriptively black,” and didn’t really count as black representatives.

I accept that race is largely socially constructed — that is, what it means to be white/black/Latino/Asian in America is not inherent or absolute, but based upon society’s collective views of ethnic groups. That’s why so many arguments about President Obama are so very, very silly. Some folks like to emphasize, for instance, that his mother [ed: not father. I'm a dummy.] was white — as if that means the racial invective against him is 50% milder, or he would find it 50% easier to get a cab in New York. The same goes with arguments that he is the son of a recent African immigrant, not a descendant of slaves — as if that means he (or anyone so situated) faces less discrimination and hatred.

In other words, I accept that labels like “black” and “white” carry more meaning than simply skin color. That does not make it excusable, however, to set out to create a litmus test for membership in an ethnic community. When I hear words like Jackson’s, I hear echoes of the cries of “race traitor” and “nigger lover” that were once directed at whites who supported civil rights or the fundamental humanity and equality of all races. The notion that one has a racial duty to think a particular way is deeply pernicious. For one, it erodes credibility and makes us all simply a reflection of our skin color. If you conclude that of course I oppose affirmative action because I am white, there’s no point in engaging me on the topic. If I believe that naturally you support government-run healthcare because you are black, there’s little chance that I will consider the arguments you may muster on the topic — even though your intellect, your experience, your innovation may make your arguments better than others.

Minority groups frequently complain — and not without reason — that the Democratic Party takes them for granted, like the needy, clinging date you can always call at the last minute on Saturday even if you treat her like shit all week. But when leaders like Jackson use rhetoric like this, they are asking the Democrats to take them for granted. They are sending a clear message: “we expect members of our community to toe your party line, Democrats, and if they stray from it, we will tell them ‘you are not one of us.’ Have no fear that any of our leaders will look for another political home — if they do, we will tell the world that they are not really black.” Of course Democrats will take you for granted if you invite them to do so. Of course the polity will dismiss your votes are racially determined if you punish dissenters with rhetorical expulsion from the race.

If Jesse Jackson wants to push health care reform, he ought to argue it on its merits. When he acts like this, all he is pushing is the notion that skin color is the sum total of our outlook. That’s not helpful to anyone — except, of course, people whose power depends on the politics of race.

Hat tip: Patterico.

That appears to be the logic the National Park Service is following in placing a bust of Stalin at the national D-Day Memorial:

William McIntosh, president of the memorial in Bedford, Va., insisted “the function of this sculpture is not to honor Stalin.”

According to McIntosh, it’s an educational sculpture.  Kids coming to the memorial will learn all about the six million dead at Stalin’s hands in the Ukrainian famine of 1933.

And Stalin’s forced deportation of every man, woman, and child in Chechnya to Siberia.

And the Gulag prison system.

And the thousands who died building the White Sea Canal, which led from nowhere to the arctic circle.

And the Katyn forest massacre.

And the genocide of the Volga Germans.

And the show trials of 1937.

Or maybe they won’t.  It’s not as though Ukrainian and Chechen Americans have a powerful political lobby anyway.

The web tells me that I am not the only person out there disappointed by AMC’s remake of the classic 1960s British spy / sci-fi / conspiracy theory television show The Prisoner.  I’m a fan of AMC nonetheless.  In addition to Mad Men, which with the possible exceptions of HBO’s Bored To Death and NBC’s Thirty Rock is the best thing currently on the tube, AMC has generously made each and every episode of the original Prisoner available for viewing on the web.

At one time I’d planned to blog my way through all of the original Prisoner programs, but of course life and work got in the way of that overambitious project.  My thoughts about the original show, and why you should watch it, were blogged and can be found here.

Shorter version:  The Prisoner may not be the best television show ever made, but it is the best anyone’s done on the universal human emotions of fear, self-doubt, and paranoia.  You need only read the news to understand the extent to which these emotions dominate our world today.

Many don’t understand it or turn away from it in disgust despite its garish colors, friendly surf music soundtrack, charming setting, and humor, because television giant Patrick McGoohan’s masterpiece is as close as anyone’s ever gotten to putting Franz Kafka on the tube:  Franz Kafka mixed with Ian Fleming.  That’s the show’s premise: what if James Bond went off the reservation?  What would They do to get him back?  How would he resist?  And in fact, aren’t They doing the same thing to us all.  Like Kafka, the show is best viewed as an allegory for the world.

You can watch the entire original series by clicking here. It won’t just take your Friday afternoon.  It will imprison many afternoons and evenings to come.

When you become a parent, you realize that the most innocent or unreflective things you do can scar your kids for life and turn them into socially stunted and emotionally crippled mock-adults, suited only to become shambling hobos, circus freaks, lawyers, and bloggers.

It gets easier once you shrug and decide to lean into it. Certainly your conversations with them get more entertaining. I’ve learned not to be worried that my son has concluded based on my teachings that Jesus has infravision and that the apostles were elephants. (Don’t ask.)

But when it comes to screwing up kids, I’m an amateur. d’Armond Speers [sic] is a professional.

d’Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life.

. . .

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

This would make an excellent serial killer origin story. Really, I can’t think of a way to mess up a kid more. Maybe if you only taught him English phrases like “please give me a swirlie immediately” and “yes, I am a catamite.”

So QaQ ta’pu’, d’Armond. Your actions will please our co-blogger Ezra, who is always looking for ways to make libertarians blanch and say “well, shit, even we wouldn’t allow THAT.”

We expect to find odd things on the internet. It’s a given. It is, arguably, the entire point of the internet.

But we expect to find it in less familiar precincts. We don’t expect to from zero to surreal just by visiting the familiar or the banal — the CNN, the weather.com, your personal home page.

Or Google.

Yet Google is, increasingly, bizarre, even before you clink on any of the freaky links it spits out for you. Case in point: Google’s auto-complete feature, which offers you popular searches based on the letters you have typed into the search bar so far, increasingly suggests that the internet is made up exclusively of dadaists and deviants. (As if you didn’t know).

Have no idea what I mean? Visit Autocomplete Me, where they offer some of the best examples.

Alan Gura, perhaps the most audacious lawyer in America, is at it again.  Fresh from his victory in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court agreed with Gura that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, Gura is back before the Court, arguing in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment should be enforced against lesser governments, in this case the city of Chicago and the village of Oak Brook, wherever that is.

But this is not a gun post.  This is a questioning post.

What does this phrase mean to you?

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States …

If you follow typical Popehat reader demographics, you’re an American between the ages of twenty-five and forty, and have at least a bachelor’s degree.  You may well have attended law school.  You may be a lawyer.  If that’s the case, you were taught that the phrase, drawn from the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, means …

absolutely nothing.

The “Privileges or Immunities” clause, in Justice Black’s words describing another amendment, is “an inkblot” on the Constitution.  That’s what the Supreme Court decided, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873).   While Slaughterhouse, interpreted narrowly, decided the question of whether the city of New Orleans could grant one person a monopoly on the butchery of cattle, the route the Court took in getting to that decision was essentially to void what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment considered its key clause, forcing the states to provide all citizens of the United States all of the rights protected by the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Those are all of the rights that concern most of us.

The big rights, freedom of religion, speech, from warrantless search and seizure, and, in one case presently before the Court, the right to keep and bear arms.

Leaving aside the Bill of Rights, do you even know what your rights, as a United States citizen are?  Your rights under the Constitution before the enactment of the Bill of Rights?

Let’s see.  There’s the right to use navigable waters of the United States.  There’s the right to enter an American embassy or consulate abroad.  There’s the right to sue in federal court (assuming your case meets narrow federal jurisdictional requirements).  And there’s the right to visit the federal mint.

Slaughterhouse teaches us that “privileges or immunities” does not mean “rights,” though clearly it did to the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment, and to everyone else at the time.  Everyone except a small majority on the Supreme Court, who were grabbing for a brass ring of their own: to deny newly freed citizens the right to sue over violations of civil rights and liberties in southern states.  Meaning that the south could continue to deny black “citizens” equal treatment, even though they’d lost a war over that point.

Which the south promptly did.  Plessey v. Ferguson is the spiritual progeny of Slaughterhouse.

And Slaughterhouse stands as good law to this day.  The enlightened courts of the 20th century got around some of Slaughterhouse’s worst aftereffects, holding through the doctrine of “selective incorporation” that “substantive due process” (a phrase that is not as some have called it an oxymoron, but is still linguistically and legally speaking, absolute nonsense) protects American citizens from state abuse of some, but not all, of the Constitutional rights guaranteed by amendment, like speech, trial by jury, little things like that.

It’s fair to say that most of the Constitutional law of the 20th century has been a dishonest attempt by the Court to rectify its dishonesty in 1873.

But the remedy is as dishonest as the disease.  As Gura shows in his brief before the Supreme Court, according to any dictionary or thesaurus of the day, “rights” meant “privileges” meant “immunities”.  The terms were circular.  The “privileges or immunities” clause wasn’t meant to give all Americans the freedom to enter a mint.  It meant to protect all Americans from state abuse of their Constitutional rights, including but not limited to those set forth in the first ten amendments.

If Gura is successful, if he can convince the Court to overturn Slaughterhouse, the immediate result will only be that cities like Chicago will have to regulate gun ownership in a sensible manner, rather than outright banning it.  But that will only be the immediate result.

The long-term result may be something difficult to foresee, with results reaching far, far beyond whether honest citizens in Chicago can own pistols just as the criminals do.

It could be a small revolution.

The Hat’s gonna get a little less Liberal for a few weeks, as I am off to Texas to attend Boardgamegeekcon and then spend Thanksgiving with family Deep in the Heart (actually, in Amarillo, which is sort of the Appendix of Texas..) I’m looking forward to trying out a bunch of the new releases (especially Dungeon Lords – which looks like a boardgame version of Dungeon Keeper, the new Agricola expansion, BasketBoss – a basketball team management sim and Carson City – although that’s really because I am a sucker for tile laying games) and playing a lot of old favorites. It’s gonna be a great several days, that’s for sure!

Theoretically, I have the ability to post to the Hat from my iPhone, and I might try to toss up some random thoughts about games (or maybe just list games I played at the end of each day..) during the con. But, don’t get your hopes up. After all, gaming is more fun than typing.

Have a great Thanksgiving one and all, and I better not to return to find out you dang Libertarians have sold naming rights to the Hat.

On Sunday I went to the Coliseum Flea Market in Oakland (about a block from where the Raiders were playing – let me tell you, if anyone actually went to Raiders games parking would have been worse than the hellish it already was.) It takes place on the grounds of an old drive in theatre (with the super cool old snack bar still intact) and has goods ranging from amazing produce to almost definitely stolen bicycles to churros to assless panties. Yeah, it’s like the home for stuff the dollar store won’t sell. And yet, it’s also awesome.

Among the random things I found there, one stood out. So much so that I bought two of them. They’re splat balls. You throw them at a hard surface and they splat apart, and then immediately reform into their original shape. I am not ashamed to admit that I bought several. Watching this egg hit the floor & shatter into a gooey mess and then slowly reform was like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. I loved it!

Flea markets are a strangely dying breed. Despite tough economic times, they are slowly disappearing. That’s a shame, because wandering a flea market is a fine days entertainment even if you don’t find any splat balls.

Iain Murray, who generally writes about conservative politics (he’s one of the more libertarian, hence better, writers at National Review’s The Corner blog) has a secret: he loves old-school pen-and-paper roleplaying games.

If your mental image of “National Review writer” involves a young man from Nantucket wearing a blazer, fraternity pin, and high-tiders as he hoists the jib aboard the good ship “Inherited Fortune,” prepare to have your preconceptions busted.  Murray appreciates the goodness that is first and second edition Dungeons and Dragons, and agrees (with me anyway) that Greg Stafford’s Runequest is one of the finest RPGs ever created.  I just wish he’d cover my personal favorite, Marc Miller’s Traveller.  The blog is even written in campaign-form.

As perhaps the most prominent weblog in America that covers in equal measure law, politics, board and roleplaying games, and the merits and demerits of various swords for zombie decapitation*, we must encourage this sort of thing.

So visit Murray’s blog, the Rune Under Water, and read about the horrible vengeance the Trolls of Pavis have in store for the Lunar Empire.

*(Ours is a very small field.)

In the post below, Patrick points to Joel Rosenberg’s excellent Blawg Review about the United Nation’s International Day of Tolerance.

What does the United Nations consider tolerant? Well, tolerance apparently means not criticizing censorship, even in the most mild terms, and even in forums devoted to debate. That’s apparently why in the course of the U.N.’s Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, U.N. goons forced panelists to remove a poster that contained an unflattering reference to China’s censorship policies.

The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many,” Ahmed reported.

The poster promoting ONI’s forthcoming book, “Access Controlled” was removed by the IGF’s organizers because a sentence in the poster apparently violated UN policy. The sentence in question reads, “The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous “Great Firewall of China” is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.”

That, naturally, was intolerant of China, whose differences we must celebrate.

To anyone who has been paying attention, it comes as no surprise that the U.N. continues to push values of “harmony” and “cooperation” over values like freedom of expression.

Via Boing Boing.

When we’re told we must condone the intolerable.

Joel Rosenberg at Windypundit has what we can already proclaim the week’s must-read blogpost and one of the best Blawg Reviews of the year:  a special celebration of the United Nations International Day of Tolerance.