Is Marriage Unconstitutional?

This began as a comment at The Conservative Sociologist in response to her reaction to the GMM (Gay Marriage Movement).  She isn't opposed, but finds the logic and media presentation to be flawed and annoying - she writes an interesting blog, you should check it out.

What I said was:

What I rarely see discussed is the unconstitutional nature of government regulated marriage in the USA.

In English Common Law (the law of the land when what would become the USA was still British colonies) the State is the Church and thus there is no conflict between the governments regulation and sanction of an expressly religious ceremony. The US Constitution explicitly forbids government sanction or recognition of religion. On its face, this would seem to make (federal of a certainty and arguably state as well) government involvement in marriage unconstitutional as a matter of constitutional prohibition.

Making this all so much about anything other than the gender of either participant is the acknowledged transfer of ownership of real property (to include at least one of the participants for the historical purists amongst us) that is part and parcel of the religious ceremony in contention. I don't know about a crisis necessarily, but it is certain that no government will waste an opportunity to claim taxes and fees so I don't expect the Supreme Court to take up this issue any time soon.

Of course, anyone seriously advancing this argument can be certain pretty much everyone will have the knives out in response ... literally; virtually all of human society bases property rights and law on this explicitly religious arrangement, whatever particular religion may be the facilitator.

To be constitutionally consistent in the USA, marriage would have to be strictly a religious commitment and property rights associated with that arrangement would have to be explicitly made a contractual and entirely separate agreement between the involved parties, whether part of a civil union type contract or otherwise.

I think we can take it as a given that the GMM will be among the most fervently opposed to this question ever arising.

Marriage as it is commonly practiced in the US is an historical relic from a time when the state and church were functionally combined; the US constitution explicitly forbids state and religious union (I know that's not a direct quote).  The US Supreme Court has a history of straining social camels through the constitutional needles eye, so that isn't a realistic objection.  If all that be true, to be constitutionally consistent shouldn't we either amend the document to grant explicit exception to the "no established religion" prohibition regarding the institution of marriage or write a law that makes formal the distinction between the religious commitment of marriage and the issue(s) of property rights and inheritance and all the rest?

Along with everybody else (to include Mrs. [and Mr. for all of that] Supreme Court Justice), I think it a given the gay folks amongst us will be just as much up in arms about such a ruling as pretty much everybody else will be; they are the stars of the marriage movement at the moment, in this circumstance they aren't any different from their parents and that can't be what equality is all about can it?

I expect this is all built on very shaky constitutional ground and has long since been resolved, but it applies an interesting filter to the questions surrounding marriage nonetheless, I think.

Further (Retail) Evolution In Action

Last month, I wrote about a rumor public accusation that Amazon.com was getting out of firearms-related product sales.  As part of that, I communicated with Amazon's customer relations staff and received the following reply:

Hi William,

I'm Amanda Nix of Amazon.com's Executive Customer Relations team. Jeff Bezos received your email and asked me to respond on his behalf.

We appreciate your feedback and have forwarded it to the correct team internally.

Thanks for choosing Amazon.com.

Regards,

Amanda Nix
Executive Customer Relations
Amazon.com

Now, I am very definitely not calling Ms. Nix anything remotely like a fibber based solely on my own cynicism regarding Jeff Bezos' reading habits, but ...  :)

Subsequent to that email exchange I have noticed several examples of this type of semi-specific link to Amazon.com's continuing to offer a product line-up that specifically caters to firearms shooters interests, without any sort of obvious exterior motivation for the notice (a topically related holiday or other public event for example).

Causation?  Correlation? Wish-fulfillment fantasy?

Other than the last (all too possible) suggestion, I can't say - and Jeff remains conspicuously enigmatic on the question, but as an exercise in strategy this offers an excellent example of the principle of defeating an attack via indirect (and less expensive) means.

By having arguably the most influential individual Amazon.com affiliate periodically make note of an otherwise unremarkable retail product offered by Amazon.com (and there may well be others; I don't keep track of Jeff and the gang's sales metrics per se), Amazon.com is able to apply the sales leverage generated by its affiliate program directly to its advertising needs of the moment at no additional cost beyond that intrinsic to the affiliate program structure itself.

Sun Tzu would approve, I think.

Which leads me to conclude that this understated-but-determined support of peoples beliefs deserves recognition.  With that in mind, I propose that this April 15th, we who participate in gun ownership acknowledge Amazon.com's refusal to bow to political (or other public and private) pressure to abandon our market interests by purchasing something gun-related from Amazon.com on that calendar date. 

I expect most firearms shooters at least are familiar with the concept of April 15th being BAG (Buy A Gun) Day by now; I first learned of it from Kim du Toit's now-defunct blog some 10-or-so years ago.  The idea being to deliberately correlate exercising our freedom to own a firearm with the (for Americans anyway) mandated federal income tax filing date.  In similar fashion, I think extending this notion to include Amazon.com this year would be an excellent means of recognizing their willingness to continue serving our market interests just as they have historically done.  Steadfast support deserves its own reward, I suggest.

This doesn't have to be a special purchase, or even especially large financially; just be sure you submit an order on April 15th and include something gun related along with all the rest.

Worth doing?

If It's Good Enough For Tam ...

... I'm going with some "away game" content too.

Rand Simberg has a post up about the Aurora, CO shooter reportedly having converted to Islam while in prison.  He says:

And no, I don’t really know what kind of conclusions to draw from this, about either him or Islam.

Not only did I have the rare opportunity to be the first commenter, the snark almost wrote itself:

“… I don’t really know what kind of conclusions to draw …”

I think we can reasonably conjecture that we now know which prison gang successfully recruited him into its ranks.

 Which prompted this question; if Pope Francis were to re-instate the Ordo Templari specifically to advance the strategy of actively converting from within the worlds prisons, would that have the effect of organizing inmates into a "union" of peace-enforcing warriors for Christ?  Further, how would these men (and presumably women too) be successfully embraced into the non-incarcerated Church upon their release from prison?  Would this have the effect of countering the criminal gang dominance of prisons?  How well might this influence extend into the "street" cohorts of the worlds established crime organizations?  Might this be an effective counter to jihad being advanced through prison populations?

Riddle me that, Padre.

Habemus papum*

So the Porteneo gets the new kicks.  He's going to need every bit of that famed Jesuitical casuistry - and maybe an assist from the Greek pantheon - to get through all he faces next.  The sainted Francis likely wasn't put off by the sight of a broom and shovel, so who knows, maybe this latest one is just the man to clean out the Pauline stable.

Not being one of your team as it were I don't have a dog in this fight, but well done you anyway, Jorge.

Now go show us how it's done.  :)

* I suppose this will be the most common blog post title for this date, but I wrote mine before I read Peters so I'm keeping the title as is.  I have to say, while Peter offers much more detail, and an opinion informed as only an active insiders can be, I think our general first impressions and expectations regarding Pope Francis are quite similar given the fact I have never shared in the Catholic faith.

In Which The Question Is Asked, What's Up With Those Gun Guys?

Via Instapundit I learned of this article in The Atlantic by Dan Baum titled What Liberals Need To Understand About 'Gun Guys'.

Formatted as a Q&A interview, Mr. Baum asks and answers:

At one point in your trip, you switched from open carry to concealed carry. What was that like?
In some ways I really liked it. It's physically uncomfortable, it's heavy and it digs into you, and you have to be very conscious of your clothing to make sure you're not displaying it, because you really don't want anyone knowing you're carrying it. But it kept me vigilant. You really have your shit together when you're carrying a gun. You never forget you're wearing it. Maybe cops who've been wearing a gun for 30 years forget they're wearing it, but I certainly never did, and I wore it for about 18 months.
It also made me really calm. When you're wearing a gun, you do not get upset if someone takes your parking space, or if someone cuts you in line. You have this quite noble sense of being the sheepdog, being the protector. And I liked that.
But then you start wondering -- what is my responsibility here? It's really complicated. Say you're in a shopping mall and somebody starts shooting. What do you do? If you run away, are you like a doctor who doesn't respond when someone starts choking in a restaurant? If you're wearing a gun, do you have an obligation to run towards the sound of the guns?

To answer Mr. Baum's question, No Sir, you have no obligation to "run towards the sound of the guns" simply because you are carrying a complimentary tool yourself.  You may or may not have a moral/legal/ethical responsibility to live up to the American urge to "do something" in an emergency, but simple ownership of a potentially useful tool doesn't automatically infer obligation to do so directly.   BTW, your choking comparison isn't really apropos as a choking person offers little if any direct physical danger to any but those in immediate close contact; a shooter does.  You have the potential ability to effectively and (more) safely respond to a shooter if you are yourself wearing a gun, but that doesn't automatically translate into obligation/responsibility to do so.

Later in the piece he asks/answers:

Nick Kristoff wrote a column in the New York Times about a gun standoff that was the result of a disagreement over a goose. He argued that instead of preventing conflict, guns actually escalate it. What's your response to this?
I think we are all too cavalier with our guns. I fault both sides, really. The NRA and its handmaidens want us to believe that the whole problem is criminals, and they will not take responsibility. We need to lock guns up. Training should be better. And I think the anti-gun side needs to show gun guys more respect and needs to summon gun guys to respect themselves more. I think we all need to take this more seriously. We have 300 million privately owned guns in this country. Let's really talk about how we can be safer.
Joe Nocera at the Times runs a daily tally of gun killings. He's not running a daily tally of how many people defend themselves with guns. For one thing we don't know about it most of the time. David Hemenway at Harvard is very pro gun-control and he thinks it happens about 80,000 times a year. If that's true, that means that guns are saving 10 times as many people as they're killing.
I call for my fellow liberals to approach gun owners with respect. These are the people who understand guns, these are the people who can help us figure out how to be safer around guns. Instead, you drive them into a defensive crouch by calling gun culture the problem.

I suggest the phrase you're tip-toeing around Mr. Baum is: as a political issue, gun control is more about "control" and less about "guns".

A final observation; Mr. Baum asks/answers:

At the end of this trip, did you feel any less conflicted about your place in the gun world?
No. I still don't really belong in either camp. If you watch the reaction to the book when it comes out, you will see that. I'm no less a Democrat than I was, but I am more attuned to the gun guy complaint -- "I am over-managed and I am under-respected as a citizen and a human being." I think the right has a point there. We need to stop fearing capable, empowered, independent-thinking individuals.

Mr. Baum associates guns and gun ownership with "conservatives" and fair enough, lots of my gun-owning friends are actual conservatives politically.  That said, I believe the attitude Mr. Baum closes his article with is more aligned with the libertarian political attitude than it is with the conservative view point. 

I heartily endorse his final words; We need to stop fearing capable, empowered, independent-thinking individuals.  Indeed Sir, indeed.

Making Work = Job

There is an on-going lament about "Where have all the jobs gone?" or variations on that theme.  The single most common aspect of the question seemingly being that "job" is a tangible item which some diffuse other retains control over and to whom you must apply in order to be paid for work performed.

In the now-past Industrial Revolution there was a quite deliberate truth behind that belief.  Welcome to the 21st century.

One of the most widely occurring and historically repeated models of attaining economic self reliance is that of the story teller.  In the modern world, this most often takes the form of being a writer of some niche application or expertise; technical manuals or instructions, computer code, science fiction (some overlap in those three, I think), poetry, screenplay, music and on and on.  This post is about making that sort of work into an income producing job for far more of us than is ordinarily believed possible, and Jobster is its name-o.

My Second Time Shooting IDPA

Lock & Load (under "Where I Shoot" over on the right there) sponsors an IDPA club and held a rare Sunday afternoon match today.  Even though I'm not properly a member (the whole works second shift thing gets in the way), this is my second try at it.  I don't try for "fast", but focus on accurate - and abiding by the competition rules (which seem about evenly divided between straightforward safety and trying to dull Occam's razor).  Let's just say, if the shooting stage requires you to shoot from behind cover, they mean behind.  You can expose your gun and as much of your head and hands to the target as is putatively necessary to shoot the target - and I fully understand the reasoning - but it is truly not a shooting stance most ranges will be happy to see you trying in the ordinary course of a casual range date.

As I said, I don't get the opportunity often, and I really appreciate the actual club members acknowledging my entirely accidental Mozambique shooting weak-hand at a rocker target (pivots back-and-forth across the shooter's field of view), but the IDPA claim that physical fitness isn't a requirement must pertain to membership eligibility only - you don't have to be a Conan body-type, but us Louie Anderson body types bring our own unscored level of difficulty to the thing let me tell you.

It was great fun and I look forward to having another go at it someday again.  If you like shooting, give IDPA a try.

UPDATE 2/19/13:

  Sunday17Match/Feb

February 17, 2013

Most Accurate: William Brown SSP - Unclassified 124.68 (13)

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5

Match Score

--Penalties--
PD NT PE FN

CDP - Sharpshooter
1 Bohman, John 87.58 27 0 0 0 14.28 (7) 30.52 (7) 10.29(0) 19.67 (6) 12.82 (7)

ESP - Expert
1 Walker, Jim 68.52 21 0 0 0 9.76(3) 22.61(6) 10.72 (3) 13.06(4) 12.37 (5)

ESP - Sharpshooter
1 Prater, Steve 84.44 36 1 0 0 12.56 (5) 23.28 (8) 13.92 (11) 20.99 (5) 13.69 (7)

ESP - Marksman
1 Prater, Jackson 95.78 36 0 0 0 12.38 (0) 35.40 (8) 17.83 (16) 14.34 (0) 15.83 (12)

SSP - Sharpshooter
1 Sanchez, Bob 83.67 24 1 0 0 11.05 (2) 30.06 (14) 12.30 (5) 19.37 (0) 10.89(3)
2 Quates, Robert 84.07 18 0 0 0 10.27 (2) 25.70 (0) 13.30 (14) 17.20 (1) 17.60 (1)

SSP - Marksman
1 Cundieff, David 104.91 50 0 0 0 13.71 (4) 33.33 (19) 15.63 (11) 23.95 (7) 18.29 (9)
2 Endres, Jack* 122.81 21 0 1 0 17.29 (0) 43.54 (5) 17.88 (10) 24.15 (0) 19.95 (6)
3 Trimble, W.P. (Mose) 133.30 48 1 0 1 16.51 (4) 37.76 (6) 16.35 (13) 39.84 (15) 22.84 (10)

SSP - Unclassified
1 Brown, William 124.68 13 1 2 0 19.46 (0) 41.69 (1) 14.14 (8) 29.63 (0) 19.76 (4)
2 Barton, Neal 165.78 72 0 3 2 23.95 (6) 52.98 (22) 13.98 (10) 47.66 (12) 27.21 (22)

Key to Penalties:
PD =
NT =
PE = Procedural Error. Each adds 3 seconds to your score.
FN = Failure to Neutralize (no hits in the 0 or -1 zone) Each adds 5 seconds to your score.
Hit on Non Threat target. Each HNT adds 5 seconds to your score.
Target Points Down. Each point down adds 1/2 second to your score.

Key to Abbreviations:
CDP = Custom Defensive Pistol, such as 1911. Must be .45 ACP with maximum magazine load of 8 rounds
ESP = Enhanced Service Pistol, single action or SA/DA such as H&K P7 or CZ-75 or Springfield XD
SSP = Stock Service Pistol, double action or 'Safe Action' such as Glock or SIG
ESR = Enhanced Service Revolver, rimmed or rimless ammo, full moon clip, power factor of 165,000
SSR = Stock Service Revolver, rimmed case ammo, no full moon clips

 I had no idea ...

(Retail) Evolution In Action

I read at The Firearms Blog that Amazon.com may be removing shooting sport-related items from their customer fulfillment inventory.  I sent the following message to the Amazon.com PR email link just now:

Dear Sir/Madam;

 

I have today read reports that Amazon.com will no longer be willing to meet some of my retail purchases, to wit, firearms-related items like scopes, sights, slings and other such shooting sport enhancement products.  If so, I will be taking my admittedly meager business elsewhere, to an undoubtedly less satisfying transaction process, but one that doesn't blatantly dispise my purchasing preferences.

 

Amazon.com has a perfect right to make such a business decision (if in fact the company actually has done), but so too do the individual customers Amazon relies upon to complete the sales transaction process.  I do not wish to take my paltry business elsewhere, but decline to continue dealing with any business that openly despises my beliefs and, indeed, one of the fundamental  principles upon which the USA was founded.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

William Brown, Amazon.com Prime customer

Despite my having misspelled "despise" in the original, I hope the company's spokesperson's response is as serious - if more literate - than my inquiry. 

Life As A Series Of Second Acts

I don't ordinarily go into much in the way of personal detail here; frankly, it's no one else's business and mostly too crushingly mundane and boring to anyone not required to slog through it.  Then there are days like today ...

Pushing hard on 4am this morning, it having been several years since the last time I tried, I typed in my son's name on my Facebook page search engine ... and this time he had a Facebook page of his own to discover.  When I finally rolled out of bed shortly after the crack of noon (hey!  I work the evening shift; gimme a break) and fired up the computer, there amongst the usual spam was a Facebook "Friend" confirmation from him.

I keep reading how Mark Zuckerberg can be an asshole and such, but he has my thanks all the same.

I confess I don't quite know what to do with the car now that I finally caught the bumper, so to speak.  Duncan has his own life and family in which I have no place; I think it would be rude and boorish of me to assume anything about how he and I might accommodate each other in our lives now, I only know I so very much want to do so.

As a beginning, I am writing this post as a means for he and I to re-discover each other that isn't constrained in the same fashion as Facebook is (which I don't use other than as an easy means to keep up with my daughter and her family's doings anyway).   He isn't the little boy I remember (he has a daughter of his own now) and I'm not the (same type of) fool who wandered away from him either.  Finding out who we each are and where and how we can fit together again is all unknown yet, but this is what classical strategy is really for - advancing position into the unknown in mutually reinforcing and beneficial ways.

Mostly I don't spontaneously break out in tears though.

You deservedly call another man "Dad" son, but I hope one day to have the opportunity to introduce you to the rest of your family and see where we all go from there.

Hey Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?

So, the other day Captain Capitalism (AKA: Aaron Clarey) (Yes, it's on Kindle too ... sigh) posted a video he made about the Federal Reserve and whatever else it was that was clogging up his spleen.  Since his spleenic ventings are typically entertaining/interesting (for a given value of either you understand; YMMV), I watched - and then felt compelled to ask:

Query (because I really don't know); isn't GDP the Gross Domestic Product? If so, what influence does foreign based contribution to US stock markets have on market valuation that doesn't reflect in the formal GDP valuation? Or does it?

Cappy is ranting about decreased GDP with increased stock value; if the stock value includes input from non-domestic sources, wouldn't that be the expected result?

I ask because, since so much of US manufacturing business (and heavy industry generally) has been exported/off-shored/pick-whatever-euphamism-you-like, wouldn't a lack of growth in domestic financial indicators (which are what contribute to determining GDP) with simultaneous growth in domestic stock valuations driven by foreign capital investment result in pretty much just what arouses Cappy's ire?

I don't remember where off-hand, but I read recently (like, in the last few days) that Mexico is financially no longer even remotely deserving of the appellation "third world country" as it is now ranked as the 39th largest economy in the world.  That doesn't mean that at least a third of the country's territory isn't still a third world shit-hole as a practical matter, but there's a first-world pantload of money swirling around through the rest of the place apparently.

And somebody there seemingly wants to invest some of that in something other than amateur pharmacology, impromptu eugenics and surreptitious import/export.

My thinking is that Mexican (and Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc) money going into the US stock market ought to tend to drive up stock valuations irrespective of the rest of the US economic fraud manipulation activity also occurring.  The very idea of the Federal Reserve Bank being anything more than Congress and the Treasury Department's ATM machine and safety deposit box for temporary cash surplus occasions is just an invitation to larceny, so I understand the impulse to shout "The Federal Reserve Doesn't Produce Anything!", even though I have to say the Fed has a well-established track record of producing a faux debt that the US .gov insists we the tax payers have to honor which, however physically insubstantial it might be, is very definitely (some)thing.

I have also read that, "the universe is about 90% hydrogen and 10% helium; all the rest is basically a rounding error".  Speaking for my own portion of that fractional error, I wonder if there isn't possible a mathematical formula that is based on a measurable universal standard - say, the elemental number of hydrogen fer instance - and that this figure could be the known metric by which a stipulated quantity could be determined.  This measurable, known quantity could then be the basis for calculating a standardized valuation.  That being determined, any monetary issue (currency, regardless of source) could then have a universal monetary valuation calculated based upon the issuing country's floating (but serially measurable to a universal standard) GDP as that is mutually stipulated to reflect.

No such thing as fiat currency is even possible if all currency can be valued by a universal (and importantly, fixed and untamperable) standard.

All that aside, I do wonder if my basic observation about stocks and GDP is at all correct.  Wadda ya say, Cap'n?