Of Voter Identification, Fraudulent Votes, and Closed-Out Voters

I hope you will all agree that increasing the stringency of voter identification requirements at the polls may prevent some unlawful votes, but will also result in some perfectly lawful votes not being cast, as voters, from various causes, do not get the right identification in their hands by election day.

What it seems, naively, should determine the policy for identification stringency is minimizing the sum of unlawful votes plus lawful votes that would otherwise have been cast but were not as result of the stringency. Naive or not, this is the voter identification policy test for which I will argue.

The 2nd Amendment Right to the Open Carry of Swords and Shoulder Launched Missiles

As everyone knows the Second Amendment is not about guns. The objects of the right it constitutionalizes are “Arms.” Swords, bayonets, and hatchets, as well as muskets, were the arms of the Revolutionary War. Current arms of individual use include body armor, hand grenades and shoulder rockets.

The fact that shoulder rockets are a tad dangerous and of little socially approved private use surely has some bearing on their constitutional status. A frank recognition of this fact will show the supporter of the open carry of large clip semi-automatics that his mode of constitutional interpretation is not so different from those who contend that the carry of said semiautomatic, and perhaps also of a Saturday night special, is outside constitutional protection.

Fear of Fascism and Fear of "Fascism"

I have both a fear of political and social trends reminiscent of fascism in the United States and Europe and a fear of overusing the word the word “fascism.” Much use at all, I think, would be overuse.

God and the Friendly Universe

The proposition that the universe is hospitable to human life, potentially supporting a teleological argument for God, is implausible at a first glance. So far as we now know with certainty, the universe is congenial to human life only on the rind of one minor planet of one among 10²¹ stars. Almost all of the real estate of the universe is distinctly hostile to biological organisms, and this will remain the case as a matter of the percentages even if the recent success in finding extrasolar planets turns up some that are good candidates for life.

A second glance, however, reveals some developments in theoretical cosmology that may seem to give currency to the old saw that God made the world for our use and enjoyment. Theists (and a few of the very few deists there are) draw our attention to the “fine tuning” of certain physical constants and initial conditions, a fine-tuning that makes the existence of life possible.

The Purpose of the Second Amendment Failed Long Since

The American colonies and the new United States were deeply distrustful of a standing army, a distrust inherited from their English Whig forebears. That is why the army and the navy were treated so differently in the Constitution.

Nothing is Certain – Cromwell's Rule

I here defend the proposition that absolutely nothing is absolutely certain, where certainty is understood as a flat 0 or 1 as a Bayes prior.

Pope Francis, Thomas Bayes, and the Existence of God

Should liberal atheists find their Bayesian level of rational credence in the existence of God to go up because of the election of the pope?  Should conservative theists find it to go down?