From Russel Kirk’s magisterial The Roots of American Order (pg. 413-4):

Self-governing from the first, the colonists asked only that they continue to posses the rights of all Englishmen, secured in Britain by the constitution. To be taxed only with the consent of their parliamentary representatives was the key to all other English political rights. The colonies having no members in Parliament, was it not reasonable that they should be taxed only by their own colonial representative assemblies?

In short, from the earliest times in America the colonial people had been a people separate from the British people, though linked to the British by willing ties of culture and friendship, and by common allegiance to a king. Rather than pulling down a government, the Patriots were defending their own prescriptive government against what had become an alien government. In their act of separating from Britain, Americans did no more than reassert a political autonomy, or independence, rooted in the North American continent ever since the landings at Jamestown and Plymouth.

Not to fight for something new, but rather to defend something old. In other words: We are all conservatives. Some of us just don’t realize it, yet.

Happy American Independence, everyone.

Several new posts by Bill Harryman. Check them out.

Photograph by Leah Bartholomay.

In order to get the following pictures up, I’m watching the living room become an anarchiststate.  Gorilla Munch cereal litters the rug, and my purse is being torn apart all the while Twyla is singing ‘Bikes bikes all over the town’ at the top of her lungs!

Little does she know of the plotting occurring below her!

He has indeed.

The currants and strawberries and pickling cucumbers are destined for Mason Jars…The zucchini for the BBQ and freezer…that is, if we don’t eat it all first. I was promised by a couple of cute farmgirls that this week they’ll have blueberries and raspberries. YUM!

This situation is far too rare.

Picture taken this past weekend.

Hi All!

I wanted to let you all know that Small Comforts, my most recently completed short film, will screen at the San Diego International Children’s Film Festival.

Saturday, August 23 @ 1:30pm at the San Diego Central Library in downtown.

A little bit of kismet since Aug 23 is Isadora & Oona’s first birthday!

So, if you happy to be in sunny San Diego in August…pop in for the screening (or tell any San Diego friends to do so)!

More on the fest here.

Love,
Hannah

p.s. This was the first festival into which I entered Small Comforts, and I’ve entered it into several more that I won’t find out about for several weeks or months. Fingers crossed Small Comforts plays in a festival near you!

p.p.s. I’ve also updated my website — but please pardon the pixie dust!

Stuff like this makes me feel that the libertarian cause for a truly American understanding of America that this blog proudly joins is not hopeless. A Gallup poll:

PRINCETON, NJ — When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

From On Firmness (v. 2-5):

[T]he wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself, he trusts nothing to fortune, his own goods are secure, since he is content with virtue, which needs no gift from change, and which, therefore, can neither be increased nor diminished. For that which has come to the full has no room for further growth, and Fortune can snatch away only what she herself has given. But virtue she does not give; therefore she cannot take it away. Virtue is free, inviolable, unmoved, unshaken, so steeled against the blows of chance that she cannot be bent, much less broken. Facing the instruments of torture she holds her gaze unflinching, her expression changes not at all, whether a hard or a happy lot is shown her. There the wise man will lose nothing which he will be able to regard as loss; for the only possession he has is virtue, and of this he can never be robbed. Of all else he has merely the use on sufferance. Who, however, is moved by the loss of that which is not his own? But if injury can do no harm to anything that a wise man owns, since if his virtue is safe his possessions are safe, then no injury can happen to the wise man.

Well, then.

A “law scholar” chimes in:

No matter how much the arguments in … Heller are dressed up in originalist garb, they show us that that living constitutionalism is alive and well.

It just goes to show you that intelligence as recognized and decorated by academia (Balkin is a professor at Yale law) doesn’t necessarily translate to common sense outside of academia. He says (technically, he asserts) that the decision to find that the 2nd Amendment means individuals have the right to own a gun is “judicial activism” and evidence that the U.S. Constitution is “living” (as term used as praise by progressives and as derision by conservatives).

Rubbish.

As Justice Scalia points out in his decision, “Nine state constitutional provisions written in the 18th century or the first two decades of the 19th … enshrined a right of citizens to “bear arms in defense of themselves and the state”. And the very nature of the language of the 2nd Amendment — “shall not be infringed”, akin to “shall make no law against” — shows again that the Amendment sought to protect a right that predates the Constitution itself. Else why insist to make no law?

The strategy of people like Balkin is common to progressives: take a complaint lodged by their opponents against their views, and pretend it cuts both ways. It is not liberal judges who practice judical activism. No, it’s all of them! Ha ha!

Again, rubbish. Judical activism, in the case of Supreme Court justices, means the making of laws through opinions untethered by both reasonable justification in the historical meaning of the words of the Constitution and the intended role of the Court as determined by the Constitution. Boiled down, judicial activism is making laws, per se, instead of merely interpreting the laws using the Constitution as a guide. Roe v Wade is classic judicial activism, since the Constitution says nothing about abortion, pro or against. Whereas Heller clearly is not making new laws, but interpreting the words of the Constitution, to clarify existing law with respect to owning guns.

The main thing is, it is impossible for justices who practice originalism and textualism to practice judicial activism. Unless you distort the meaning and import of “judicial activism” to suit your assertions, as Balkin does.

Update: More Balkin-like arguments from E.J. Dionne, which Ed Whelan completely knocks down.

Given how non-textual so many of the major Supreme Court decisions have been, I was surprised that Heller went the way it did. Of course, it is the right decision, but that didn’t mean it was going to happen:

I confess that I was one of the Second Amendment scholars who doubted that there were five votes on the high court to support an individual-right view of the Second Amendment.

I’m happy to be wrong about that, but there were only five such votes - demonstrating how narrow the margin was, and how out of touch the court is with the American public, which believes the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms by a 3-1 margin.

If, as some have been calling for, we had a “Supreme Court that looks like America,” this case wouldn’t even have been close. Ordinary Americans have generally believed that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” applied to, you know, the people.

It takes politicians, law professors (and, it turns out, four Supreme Court justices) to believe that a “right of the people” somehow actually doesn’t belong to the people at all.

Self-defense, including owning a gun, has everything to do with the relationship between Citizen and State. No one who claims to be in favor of individual empowerment can logically be against citizens owning a gun for purposes of self-defense, and family-defense.

Not that this will make much of a dent in the “compassionate” cosmopolitan, principled views well-meaning irrationality of “universal health care” advocates, but that the creator/designer of the “single payer” health care system in Canada is now disowning it (in favor of more freedom for the private sector; i.e., [gasp!] families and individuals) should count for something not small, shouldn’t it?

John Podhoretz, in light of DC vs Heller, the gun case just decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the level of intellect displayed by Justice Scalia:

In 17 remarkable pages of crystalline logic, Scalia destroys this argument, and in a most novel way — by arguing against the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, which follows it. And in a tribute to one of the West’s great logicians, Scalia makes continual and pointed reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s examination of the way arguments over the use language can be used to obfuscate rather than enlighten. Alice, our stand-in, is forever seeing through the silliness of the world around her by commenting on how nonsensical it is. So, too, Scalia:

Logic demands that there be a link between the stated purpose and the command. The Second Amendment would be nonsensical if it read, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to petition for redress of grievances shall not be infringed.”

You cannot, in other words, you cannot use the words of the first half of the Second Amendment to change the meaning of the second half — that prefatory clause can only clarify what follows it. It cannot logically reverse it.

All you can do is use well-meaning, but no less impulse-driven or irrational, incredulous exhortations like Chicago Mayor Daley: “Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?” If people so choose, Mr. Elitist, then, why yes it might. Such is the result of the so-awful thing we know as “liberty”. We are all so sorry if it makes you less powerful feeling. I shall shed a tear at some point maybe.

Seneca is among the most well-known Stoic philosophers. He is also rightly considered a Grammarian — one who attempts to discern, organize, and elucidate the basic principles at the heart of the human condition. I have just started his first volume of Moral Essays.

I decided to read Seneca because having absorbed more of Marshall McLuhan’s doctoral dissertation for Cambridge University, called The Classical Trivium, a tract that persuasively argues that the arena of the Humanities, past and present, would greatly benefit from complete overhaul in favor of a system that sees it as one of arguments between Grammarians, Dialecticians, and Rhetoricians (and a system sympatico with ancient wisdom and learning), it was clear that Seneca’s works are simply must-know material. Which would surprise no one with even a passing familiarity with Seneca.

And see here, how the first of his Moral Essays is called “On Providence” and takes up the problem of why bad things happen to good people. I immediately think of The Book of Job, and connect immediately that it and Seneca’s first essay are in conversation. If there isn’t a high school or college Humanities course that close-reads both works, and compares their insights and arguments, there damn well should be. But, if not, who needs college when we can do this ourselves on our own time. And, as fine artists, do up something aesthetic of what we find and reflect.

Hat tip Bill Harryman. Also added to the Americana channel of The Cathode Ray.