home of the brave

plain-dealing-villain asked: Even if you aren’t going to deliver it, please compose the arguments for at least one of the crazy Constitutional things and share it with us.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

  • If you’ll permit me to head the Committee on Detail, I bet I could sneak some coded messages into the text. You know you want to.

Our predecessors kept things a bit ambiguous as to how much weight we ought to give to their opinions on the floor. Filing a lot of the records of the debates away in the warehouse where they keep the Ark of the Covenant, Madison keeping his notes secret and then published them after everyone involved was dead, that sort of thing. Since you’ve already shot down my suggestion about requiring courts to interpret everything by the literal text which is written entirely in Lojban, I have an alternate proposal.

I know most of you take a dimmer view of sticking to original intent than I do. And I was expecting you to change that opinion now it’s your intent that’s in question, but congrats on your consistency I guess. Now. This is going to be an ongoing debate in the coming centuries. People looking back at the opinions of anyone who was in this room where it happened and using our opinions as proof of what we Really Meant. (Yes, that’s going to include me. The guy who just gave a six-hour speech about electing an aristocracy.)

But.

What if we made it completely impossible for anyone to say “the Founding Parents intended to put [X] in the document; therefore it must be the meaning of the law”? No one, and I mean no one, taking that seriously ever again. I can give you that.

Imagine: some future scholar, poring over the text because she’s in eighth-grade social studies and might get called on soon. And she notices that if you take the first word of the Preamble, the second word of the first clause, and so forth, it spells out a 419 scam. Or it says that da Vinci shot Kennedy, or gives ambiguous directions to a nonexistent buried treasure, whatever you like. I’m open to suggestions. In any case, your least favorite mode of interpretation will be dead. 

Plus, hidden messages are cool.

You know you want to.

Tags:

#home of the brave #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

wirehead-wannabe:

thelandofmaps:

[1200×912] Map of cryptozoological creatures for most of America’s regions
CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS!
thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

You should all move to the Midwest! We’re certified monster free!

DC: Congress.

Tags:

#home of the brave #so basically a lot of humans and plesiosaurs is what I’m getting from this #and also that I have still not forgiven my fellow Girl Scouts for ignoring me when I asked to be brought up to speed on this ‘Jersey Devil’ #instead just continuing on with their at best semi-penetrable conversation #about how we were in a cabin in the middle of the Pine Barrens and *anything* could *happen* #anything except learning what the fucking Jersey Devil is

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

image sinesalvatorem replied to your photo: Home! *flop* hooooome

Welcome back! I’m afraid I didn’t notice when you left…

I didn’t say much about it because…well, first of all it’s very hard to talk about going to Disney World without sounding awkwardly frivolous. It sounded awkwardly frivolous to me when Mom first said we were going. On the other hand, that “first said we were going” was two years ago. There’s been a fair few obstacles in the family’s path over those two years, and I saw the way that the thought of a Disney trip at the end of the tunnel kept Mom going. It was probably worth it for that alone.

(Especially when she managed to convince them to give us a whole bunch of Disney restaurant credits: one “snack” (roughly what you’d think it means, though it had to have a symbol next to it on the menu indicating you could use a credit on it) and two fast-food “meals” (entree, beverage, dessert, though you could swap out any or all of those three for any available snack) per person per day. She got all this for the low, low price of researching Disney enough to hear about the free-food promotion (that bit wasn’t really a price, as she enjoyed it), staying up most of one night to get in as soon as the deal opened, spending an hour and a half on hold while trying not to fall asleep, and promising to stay in a Disney-owned hotel and schedule our trip for mid-September, which is apparently a relatively bad time for them profit-wise because most kids have just gone back to school. Joke’s on them: we were going to go then regardless, and I think we were going to be in a Disney hotel too.

The portions in Disney, for the record, are very big, and our appetites (especially mine) are not so big, so it was rather more credits than we could actually use on the trip itself. We ended up bringing back about a hundred chocolate bars to eat at home later, as they were the least perishable tasty thing available for a snack credit.)

Also, I was taught as a young child that the fact that one is leaving one’s house unoccupied is a vulnerability that should be kept secret as much as practical until after it is over. Intellectually, I’m not convinced this is reasonable advice, but on more visceral levels I’ve inherited much of the paranoia of my native culture, and perhaps added some of my own.

Tags:

#we drove to Ohio and flew domestic to minimise security issues #(and indeed security issues were minimised by American standards) #this was my first road trip since getting a smartphone and oh my god it is *so much easier* when you have a decent GPS handy #Mom brought the usual printed Google directions but they were frequently inadequate #and the phone was there to the rescue #no more getting lost for two hours trying and failing to follow a detour! #if you miss a turn the phone’s directions will compensate rather than becoming near-useless! #GPS navigation is so great you guys #replies #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #food

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

argumate:

sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

The prediction market: 81% confident that we’re going to have a president that’s on its list.

I did not realize everyone was so confident in Deez Nuts or the overthrow of the US government.

original post

Why is Deez Nuts not on the list, though? Does argumate not love us? They’re not our real mom!

Why can’t I shake the nagging feeling that ilzolende and sinesalvatorem are working together on some nefarious plot to take over the market, possibly by winning the presidency themselves?

It’s the kind of thing a dystopian cyberpunk teen protagonist would do, after all.

Never let it be said that I’m not a dystopian cyberpunk teen protagonist. Get me a flight to the US and I won’t even need citizenship. I’ll be Benevolent Space Empress before you can say “border control”.

In other news, you just retitled my blog :p

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ozymandias271:

the US trans survey is now available! It is the followup to the single most-cited survey about trans people, and it looks like it’s going to present even better data about trans people and transphobia. 

If you are transgender, a crossdresser, nonbinary, or a person who has detransitioned, please take the survey.

Tags:

#gender #survey #signal boost #home of the brave

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

imperialmog:

The 4th of July, its the day that people put American flags outside their homes expecting a visit from Captain America who arrives in a sleigh powered by eight bald eagles giving fireworks, who then goes and has his birthday party.

Tags:

#home of the brave #seems legit

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

brendenfraser:

davekatiscanon:

4th of July. America vs The rest of The World

Tags:

#home of the brave #actually I’m pretty sure the fireworks-happy neighbours from down the street see it as an excuse to set off leftover Canada Day fireworks #or maybe they don’t actually need an excuse #they’ve been setting off fireworks since June 29th #it’s Canada Week I guess