Candidate For Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever: Harry Blackmun

  • Yes I know, the competition for the title of Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever is stiff. A decent rogue’s gallery of candidates might include , for example, the likes of William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, and William Brennan. There may be a good case to be made for any of those, and plenty more.

  • But none of them has the distinction of having authored Roe v. Wade. So for today, permit me to make the case for Blackmun.

  • Blackmun did not author any large number of important Supreme Court decisions. One might surmise that his colleagues did not trust him with the tough ones. If you wonder if that might be true, try reading the Roe decision.

  • In any event, the Roe decision by itself is a strong qualification for the Worst Justice Ever award.

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Progressive Utopian Vision Versus The Constitution

  • It’s already been a bad week in the Supreme Court for progressive shibboleths. Just today, the key provision of New York’s gun restriction regime — under which the authorities had discretion to deny you a gun permit if they thought the reason you gave for wanting one was not good enough — got struck down under the Second Amendment.

  • For what it’s worth, I’ve long thought that that provision was obviously unconstitutional, and that the Second Circuit’s decision upholding it was not a good faith application of existing Supreme Court precedent. In practice, the authorities denied almost all requests for gun permits except from politicians, big political donors (to Democrats) and celebrities. The decision has caused a good deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth over in the precincts of the Left.

  • And there’s plenty more to come. Without doubt you are already familiar with the case involving Mississippi’s abortion law, likely to spell the end of the long reign of Roe v. Wade.

  • But today I’m going to focus on another high-impact case, West Virginia v. EPA. This one was argued back in February, but the decision still has not been issued. They tend to issue the decisions in the most important cases at the very end.

  • In the West Virginia case, there is significant potential that the Supreme Court could significantly rein in the regulatory assault that the Biden Administration is currently waging against the fossil fuel industries, and maybe some other regulatory assaults as well.

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Amazingly, Buzzfeed Readers Don’t Realize They Did This to Themselves

Amazingly, Buzzfeed Readers Don’t Realize They Did This to Themselves
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Some Thoughts on Netflix’s Support for Free Expression

  • A month or so ago, Netflix CEO Ted Serandos took a lot of criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community for saying Netflix was going to support its creators’ right to free speech.

  • Serandos’s response to employee complaints included sending an internal memo last month stating that if employees had a problem with Netflix’s “breadth of content,” then perhaps they should find a job elsewhere.

  • In an interview with Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, published May 28, Serandos stated that standing up for free expression “wasn’t hard” because a creator like Dave Chappelle is “by all measure, the comedian of our generation, the most popular comedian on Netflix for sure.”

  • Evidence suggests Serandos is receiving market signals that his audience is most interested in the content he’s being warned not to publish.

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Hydrogen Is Unlikely Ever To Be A Viable Solution To The Energy Storage Conundrum

  • What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem that electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and sun can’t keep an electrical grid operating without some method of storing energy to meet customer demand in times of low production.

  • These times of low production from wind and sun occur regularly — for example, calm nights — and can persist for as long as a week or more in the case of heavily overcast and calm periods in the winter.

  • If the plan is to power the entire United States by wind and solar facilities, and if we assume that wind and solar facilities will be built sufficient to generate energy equal to usage over the course of a year, we then need to do a calculation of how much storage would be required to balance the times of excess production against those of insufficient production in order to get through the year without blackouts.

  • The challenge of getting through an entire year could require far more storage than merely getting through a week-long wind/sun drought, because both wind and sun are seasonal, producing much more in some seasons than others.

  • Previous posts on this blog have cited to several competent calculations of the amount of storage needed for different jurisdictions to get through a full year with only wind and sun to generate the electricity.

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Do Additional Gun Control Laws Have Much Potential To Reduce Gun Violence?

  • May 2022 brought two more in what seems like an endless series of mass shootings: On May 14, a gunman in Buffalo killed 10 people at a supermarket; and only a few days later on May 24 another gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

  • As is usual with these things, gun control advocates promptly seized the opportunity to demand that politicians “do something” about the gun violence. The “something” to be done as always consists of enacting more gun control statutes, on top of those that already exist.

  • But do additional gun control statutes really have the potential to make any significant dent in the existing level of gun violence? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

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