Author: nick

So, another motherfucker took a shot at the president; another bored kid with a gun and an iPhone looking for immortality in all the wrong places. The desperate details are less important than the fact that this was the third attempt against our current and former president since his last presidential campaign less than two years ago. The man seems to attract bullets the way he does rape allegations and even some of his committed enemies are beginning to freak out. The general consensus among both Dempublicans and Republicrats alike is that everybody needs to tone down the dialogue. That,…

Of the many indications that Donald Trump’s Iranian adventure has spun out of control, perhaps the most telling—and significant—is the demand from members of Congress that the U.S. acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal and its unchallenged status as a longtime member of the nuclear weapons fraternity. The current initiative, led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and supported by more than a score of House Democrats, calls upon Washington openly to discuss Israel’s nuclear doctrine and capabilities in order to “hold Israel to the same standard as other countries and provide transparency on Israel’s nuclear capabilities, ending decades-long ambiguity.”  “We are,…

Randy Barnett and I are nearing completion of the Fifth Edition of our Constitutional Law casebook. We are still waiting for the last batch of cases from June to finalize a few chapters. Our last edition was published in 2021. Needless to say, a lot has changed, though much of the book remains the same. Still, this experience has reinforced the difference between how students are taught constitutional law, and how practitioners see it on the ground. In the classroom, we read the landmark decisions that changed the law of the land: Bruen laid down a rigorous test to review…

What Can We Learn From House Republican Polling? Source link

Enough about the merits of Danco. Let’s talk about the formatting.  Usually when an opinion has one footnote, it is not numbered. Rather, there is simply an asterisk. But when there are two or more footnotes, they are numbered. Justice Alito’s solo dissent has two footnotes. But they are not numbered. The first footnote is an asterisk and the second footnote is a dagger. What happened? This is a solo dissent, and there is no majority opinion. It’s not likely Alito had to reply to some argument raised by another Justice. Maybe Justice Alito wanted to use a dagger note? I’m…

The video is horrifying, though it is the kind of horror now synonymous with the behavior of Israel, its military, its armed settlers, and society that has been conditioned to see the ‘other’ as subhuman. Yet, this was not the typical viral video that emerges almost daily from occupied Palestine. The victim, this time, was not a Palestinian. She was an elderly French nun. On May 1, footage surfaced from Jerusalem showing a 36-year-old Israeli man running behind a French nun – a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research – and shoving her violently to the…

The story we’re being sold about the Iran war is simple: it’s limited, it’s working, and it’s almost over. The reality sounds a lot more dangerous when you slow down and ask the questions leaders keep skipping: What’s the strategy? What’s the end state? And why is the United States fighting without Congress putting its name on a declaration of war?   I’m joined by Dan McKnight, US Army veteran and the leader of Bring Our Troops Home, to break down how “short war” talking points can hide the same structural failures that defined Iraq and Afghanistan. We dig into…

Who Will Win the House? The Scales Are Shifting Source link

AI Is Incapable of Poetry Source link

Only then do we realize that by optimizing profit and efficiency, we’ve also optimized systemic failure. In my essay AI, Money, Human Nature and the Problem with Problems, I refer to boundary conditions but didn’t offer a thorough explanation of the role this concept plays in understanding not just how the world works but more importantly, how things break down. Boundary conditions define what the system needs to function. The more complex the machine / system, the greater the number of conditions. For example, a car needs a source of power, fuel, tires, control mechanisms, seats, and so on–hundreds of components are required for the car to function…