A Curious Little Blog

I came across a news headline yesterday that interested me:  " The NRA Just Scored One Of Its Biggest Victories In Years ."  I hadn't heard anything about this, so I checked out the article, which is on ThinkProgress.org so naturally it isn't going to like anything that benefits the NRA.  What interested (and, I'll be honest, irritated) me was not the content of the article but one phrase that says a recent Supreme Court decision "expanded the scope of that [the 2nd] amendment significantly — effectively creating a whole new area of constitutional law more than two centuries after the Bill of Rights was ratified." Stop the presses!  The radical Supreme Court has dared to radically expand the meaning of a Bill of Rights amendment!  You might think that the author was a Constitutional originalist, imbued with deep respect for the Constitution as written, sceptical of those who want to modify it with the times.  I don't actually know the author'...

I have been watching TED talks on YouTube recently.  I should immediately qualify myself that many of them are "TEDx" talks, which are just licensed events that aren't organized by the same company, so they don't carry quite the same caché.  There is so much buzz around TED, and the videos I have watched have all had several million viewers (I think I started with a list of 50 of the most popular ones), that I thought there must be something really interesting or useful about them.  With titles like " How to Make Healthy Eating Unbelievably Easy ," " How to Retire by Twenty ," and " How to Learn Any Language in Six Months ," it is easy to be seduced into thinking there is valuable information here.  I have a normal scepticism about outrageous claims, so I don't really expect to accomplish any of these things myself, but I did hope I would learn some valuable techniques from them. I have been disappointed.  I had the idea that the t...