ArbitraryValue

Ultimately the strong rule over the weak but even then it was considered in bad taste to do so without layering some abstract moral principles on top first.

I actually do believe in moral principles despite being facetious, and I think opposition to slavery is a very powerful principle. I'm a lot less impressed by preserving the union. Frankly I don't understand how it motivated ordinary northerners to fight. If they weren't abolitionists then why did they care whether or not the southern states seceded?

I'm not familiar with the specifics of their argument (frankly I don't really want to know) but the Constitution conspicuously lacks an exit clause.

Edit: If I had to argue for legal secession, I would say that people have a natural right to self-government, and therefore to secession if they feel that their interests are not represented adequately in the national government. A natural right cannot be abrogated even willingly and any agreement that purports to do so is invalid, in the same way that a person's right to self-determination prevents him from rightfully being made a slave in any circumstances, even if he were to willingly sign a contract to that effect. But that's probably not what they're going for...

The "secession was illegal" argument is hard to defend in a country that had illegally seceded from Britain less than a hundred years earlier. There were certainly reasons to oppose that particular succession but "illegal secession is, as a matter of principle, wrong" seems like a silly one to me.

Here's my boring American cheese story.

I remember when I was 6 and I was given what was called "processed cheese". (We were in the Soviet Union so we didn't call it American cheese.) I thought that the name meant that it was made from leftover pieces of normal cheese that had been thrown away and then recycled. After we came to the USA not long after that, pre-sliced American cheese was one of the cheap foods we ate a lot of. It tasted good to us because we were still in the stage where we thought that the variety of groceries available in the USA was marvelous. My grandma still likes it now.

The pageboy haircut: sexy but not so sexy that it can make a frog sexy. Or can it...

Not a good title (because that's not what his reasoning is) but a good article.

Kavanaugh warned that there is a “risk,” if the Court releases a majority opinion when the case reaches them on the shadow docket, “of a lock-in effect, of making a snap judgment and putting it in writing, in a written opinion that’s not going to reflect the final view.”

It's not an unreasonable argument in theory, but I think Kavanaugh is trying to have his cake and eat it too. If the judgement doesn't need to be explained because it's a sort of rough draft that may be significantly modified later, then the judgement should be made with caution and deference to precedent because it is, after all, a rough draft and making big changes without fully considering the consequences would be unwise. Therefore "We're temporarily limiting the President's powers to what they have traditionally been interpreted to be" wouldn't need an explanation but "We're temporarily approving a significant extension of the President's powers" does need one, and I'm not just saying that because the President is Trump. I get the poor consolation of being consistently disappointed as both Democrats and Republicans expand the power of the executive branch. (There is, however, a dramatic difference in magnitude - Trump is expanding executive power more than any president since at least FDR.)

I would be a fool if I gave all my money to a charlatan, and I'm no fool. That proves that Jesus IV is the real deal.

I seem to recall that there is a proverb about how doing this is a great idea. Or is it the other way around?

I actually failed my molecular biology course, and I'm still a little salty about that. I understood molecular biology. I didn't memorize stuff like the order in which subunits bind to assemble the pre-replication complex.

After ORC1-6 bind the origin of replication, Cdc6 is recruited. Cdc6 recruits the licensing factor Cdt1 and MCM2-7. Cdt1 binding and ATP hydrolysis by the ORC and Cdc6 load MCM2-7 onto DNA.

Note that they're numbered but the numbers aren't related to the order in which they act. I don't need to know that. No one who doesn't do research specifically on the pre-replication complex needs to know that.

(Excuses, excuses...)

I had an organic chemistry class in college where the average grade was a C. I was a chemistry major and I passed with a D. A couple of other would-be chemistry majors dropped the class. The professor actually told us that we were the worst group of students he had ever taught (and it was his last class before retirement).

I don't think he was a bad teacher, because I certainly was a bad student.

Also he talked about the need to cut down on burning fossil fuels, but less due to environmental concerns and more due to the lost opportunity to make plastics and other interesting substances out of them.

I write my texts like I'm writing a cover letter or a wedding invitation to flex on the less erudite and meticulous.