links for 2010-06-30

Misunderstanding the role of the Court

Ann Coulter:

[L]iberals are raving about Kagan’s “skill at building a consensus … reaching out and building coalitions” — as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said last week.

It’s as if they’re talking about a governing majority in the Senate. Next thing you know, liberals will be complaining about a “do nothing” Supreme Court.

On MSNBC’s “Hardball” back in May, Sen. Klobuchar said: “We want to get some things done on this court.”

Get some things done? […]

The Supreme Court is not supposed to be “getting things done.” Durbin’s and Klobuchar’s statements reveal a massive misunderstanding of the role of the court.

Congress, as the people’s elected representatives, is supposed to “get things done.” If they don’t, that usually means the people don’t want those things done. It’s not the court’s job to say: “Hey, Congress, you forgot to enact this! Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.”
You don’t have to like her, but she’s got a point.

Knowledge of their characters and conduct

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.” –John Adams, Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

links for 2010-06-16

  • "JavaScript Blacklist is a simple extension for Safari 5 which blacklists scripts from a configurable list of domains. If a common "utility" script used by sites that you visit is annoying you, this will let you opt out quickly and easily."

    Better version of the tynt-blocker extension I linked to before.

links for 2010-06-13

  • "This extension adds an Amazon Search item to the context menu. To use it, just select some text on the page, right-click (or hold the Control key and click) and then choose 'Amazon Search' from the menu. Your selected text will be searched in Amazon."

links for 2010-06-12

links for 2010-06-11

  • "Project: AK-47 has only been operating in the United States for a year and a half, but it promotes and funds projects that have been directly working in Southeast Asia since 1994. The staff not only negotiate to demobilize child soldiers but provide everything they’ll need for a new life: shelter, food, clothing, trauma counseling, mentorship, education and, most of all, love. Programs even offer agricultural training to give youth the skills needed for employment in the country’s vital green tea farming industry. The staff is devoted to these youth until they become functioning adults, at which point they are facilitated into university, agriculture or other employment."

  • Dedicated to eradicating the concept of the "child soldier", Project: AK-47 has developed a line of socially responsible clothing to raise funds. All of the items in the store are sweatshop-free, and all of the profits go toward their rescue projects for child soldiers, and other children caught in the way of armed conflicts.

links for 2010-06-09

links for 2010-06-08

  • What makes Camera+ different is the Lightbox function. Photos taken through Camera+ are saved within the app first. You can edit and apply effects to photos without those photos being on the iPhone's camera roll.

Thank you, Lord, for books

Randy Alcorn:

No offense to ebooks and Kindle, which have their place, but there’s no substitute for a book that has an actual history, that takes up space on a shelf, that has been somewhere, strapped to the back of a bike, that was being read in a British boys’ school library while Lewis was still teaching at Oxford.

Thank you, Lord, for books. Not just the words, but actual physical books you can hold in your hand and touch and smell, and ponder where they have been and what lives they may have touched.