The right to bear arms

The Supreme Court is going to take the Washington DC gun control case. A DC citizen took DC to court claiming that he had a right to keep a loaded piece at home and the DC anti gun ordinance outright bans ownership of handguns and requires long guns to be stored unloaded and disassembled. Case lost the first time, but won on appeal. Now the Supreme Court has stepped up to decide if "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means you can keep a loaded gun in your house in case of burglars.
The newsies have hyped this as the case of the century. I wonder. In actual fact American citizens believe they have a right to keep a gun in the house, and in the car and in the cash drawer and other handy places. I doubt they will give up this quaint colonial custom anytime soon, no matter what the court rules.
So the Supreme Court can rule two ways on this one. They can rule that the 2nd Amendment means what it says. This will please the vast majority of ordinary citizens and outrage the chattering classes. Or they can invent a penumbra or something, rule that the 2nd amendment is "inoperative" , turn the vast majority of citizens into lawbreakers, and make the chattering classes happy.
If the court has two brain cells firing, they will rule that the 2nd amendment means what it says. But they are nine lawyers, and lawyers are dumb as rocks, so it's anyone's guess what the ruling will be.

There oughta be a law, (Pt 2)

Defacing a good old movie on TV with those channel icons oughta be illegal. Even worse are those full motion mini advertisements. Having your videotape of some favorite movie covered with advertising graffiti takes much of the simple pleasure out of watching the flick.

There oughta be a law (Pt 1)

Actually there oughta be a law making telemarketing a death penalty offense. That's fantasy, but we could make a law forbidding ringing my telephone and failing to answer when I do pick the phone up. Often as not, after going to the trouble of answering the phone, the line is dead and stays dead. Lets demand the telemarketer not disturb us unless they can furnish a sales pitch rather than a dead phone line.

Tomorrow Never Dies

How have the Bond movies fallen? 40 years ago Bond gets an Aston Martin DB5, a real car. Q spends some time checking 007 out on the machine guns, the ejector seat and so forth. Fast forward 40 years and we have the same scene, the Q briefing 007 for the new car. But, instead of something hot, Bond gets a 4 door luxury sedan, painted gray no less. Jeez, what a come down from the Aston Martin.
Then for the big chase scene, we have James driving the thing by remote control from the back seat using a trackball on his cell phone. Yuck, Gross. You gonna drive a car, lets do it right, from the drivers seat, using the wheel. For extra points use a decent 5 speed manual transmission and a clutch. Skip the slush box.

You gotta strike back

Fox news was discussing Kerry and the swiftboaters again. Lot of happy talk, but the newsie failed to mention Kerry's major mistake. Kerry failed to reply to the Swiftboater's charges. Speaking as a typical voter, I never heard Kerry denounce the charges made against him. Silence gives assent. I was prepared to believe that all the noise was a bunch of soreheads, backed with Republican money, trying to derail Kerry's campaign. But when time went by and Kerry didn't come out on TV and deny all the charges (smears) against him, then I began to think maybe there was some truth in the swiftboaters position. When the election was over, it was clear the swiftboaters had done Kerry a lot of damage.
Plus, us veterans usually stick together. It was surprising to hear old shipmates (boatmates?) trashing a member of the outfit 35 years later. Seemed to me, and many others, that young Lt Kerry must have been a real pain-in-the-tail officer to attract so much venom after such a long time. I served as officer in Viet Nam, and 40 years later I have good warm feelings about all the guys in my old outfit. I cannot imagine any one who served with me, dissing me, either behind my back, or in public. Just won't happen. The fact that it happened to Kerry makes you wonder what sort of leadership qualities he really had.
Same thing happened to Mike Dukakis back in '88. The Bush campaign ran the "Willie Horton" ad against him. Showed an ugly and vicious looking convict walking round and round a revolving door while the voice over explained that this ugly bastard committed some awful crime while out of slam on furlough. Dukakis never replied. There were a lot of things he could have said, many of them convincing. But he didn't strike back, and us voters were left with the impression t he the Duke was soft on crime.
When they diss you, you gotta speak up. Silence gives assent.

Why doesn't any one write science fiction anymore?

Back in the 1950's and '60s a wonderful group of writers, Heinlein, ,Clarke, Asimov, Smith, Anderson, Piper, Norton, Schmitz, Van Vogt, De Camp, Leinster, Reynolds, and others poured forth an endless stream of really good science fiction, both short stories and novels. The old masters are mostly/entirely dead now, and their living replacements are few, only Pournelle, Niven, Stross and Brin come to mind.
Demand for science fiction is still there, strong enough to keep the old masters in print, but little new writing is making it to the bookstore shelves (or to Amazon). The big box book stores have only four categories for fiction; Science fiction/Fantasy, mysteries, romances, and "everything else". Judging from the shelve space allocations, the Science Fiction/Fantasy category is selling as well as any of the others, but the new books are all fantasy, no science fiction. The fantasy writers work hard, but few-to-none of them compete well with Tolkien.
One difficulty for a science fiction writer is the advance of science and technology. After 1968 no one could write another "first trip to the moon story". The first interstellar faster-than-light travel stories were published before Einstein published special relativity, which rules out faster-than-light travel. Although faster-than-light drives persist in movies and TV, they faded out of science fiction stories by the 1980's. In short, science and technology advances have over run or ruled out of action many fruitful subjects for good stories.
Perhaps we need to broaden the definition of science fiction. For instance Tom Clancy's numerous thrillers are really science fiction set only a few years into the future, instead of the more traditional decades.

US House outlaws "Predatory Lending"

New thought crime, "Predatory Lending". Sounds worse than loansharking. Congress wanted to be seen doing something about the sub prime mortgage scam. Sometime around 1990 or so someone on Wall St invented the "mortgage backed security". This was a brokerage house IOU "backed" by home mortgages that channeled the interest yield on a home mortgage to investors (rather than to the lending bank) . The brokerage house bought home mortgages from the issuers (banks) and did some legal magic to wave a thin coating of "backing" over the IOU's. The sub prime crisis currently rocking Wall St occurred when investors discovered how thin the coating really is AND that the mortgages are going into foreclosure at a much greater than expected rate.
The bad effect of this financial wheeling and dealing is the willingness of banks to grant mortgages to shaky borrowers, backed by inflated property evaluations. Once the issuing bank could sell the mortgage, they stopped caring whether the mortgage would default in the future, and lending standards were lowered, a lot. The new house bill proposes to penalize lenders for granting mortgages that the borrowers won't be able to pay.
Mortgage lenders used to be fairly tight in the granting of a mortgage, because should the borrower default, the lender gets hurt. When the borrower defaults (misses enough mortgage payments) the lender seizes the house. Unfortunately for the lender, the repossessed house rarely sells for enough to make the lender whole again. In many cases the house doesn't sell for years. The lenders all know this, it's been true since Shylock's time, and so they used to make sure the mortgage was less than the price of the house, so the borrower had to put a significant sum into the house. This weeded out a lot of destitute buyers. They also checked for inflated house prices and insisted that the borrowers income be 4 to 5 times the mortgage payments. Best to avoid doing a shaky ("sub-prime") mortgage than risk the losses from a default.
Now that the issuers no longer care should the mortgage default (no skin off their nose) Congress proposes to outlaw the granting of mortgages that the borrower might have trouble repaying. Boy what a lawyer's delight. Prosecutors and defense lawyers can have a field day (and collect handsome fees) arguing about the soundness of this or that mortgage deal.
Better would be to outlaw the sale of mortgages. Make sure the man granting the mortgage has a real stake in the soundness of the mortgage, i.e. his bank gets hurt when the mortgage defaults. Presto, end of problem, the banks go back the the lending standards they used before the "mortgage backed security" was invented.