So in the last day or two, four Supreme Court Justices decided the following two things:

1. People who rape children cannot get the death penalty
2. The government has the right to keep all citizens from owning guns

Another judge, Kennedy, agreed on the first, but not the 2nd. I think I can point to these two things as reasons why our left leaning Supreme Court judges are far more activist than the right leaning ones. In the first, they are going against both legal and social precedent. I doubt there's any other time in our history where most people would have been against executing someone who raped a child. In the second, these four Justices decided to ignore the plain language of the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and what is judicial activism other than ignoring or reinterpreting the Constitution?

Woo hoo!! It's a wonderful day for freedom in the United States. The Supreme Court just handed down the Heller ruling, in which they have unequivocally affirmed that the 2nd Ammendment holds an individual right to own a gun. The key here is individual, not collective, and this complete gun bans like the one in D.C. are against the law, and people who falsly interpret the ammendment as applying only to militias are wrong!

After the Guatanamo thing the other day, I'm glad they got this one right. It was a 5-4 decision, I wonder who the weong vote was?

Obama criticized McCain's somewhat muddled energy policy, saying, among other things, that a $300 million prize fund to help give more incentive to companies to develop new energy sources and such is a waste because when JFK promised to put a man on the moon, he didn't just put out a prize, he organized the government to reach his goal.

Of course there's a salient point he neglected to mention. We are not still on the moon, and haven't been for decades. Based on his own analogy, I guess what Obama really wants is to put the power of the US government behind a short term solution that will be left in the dustbin of history inside of 10 years. McCain seems to be thinking longer term. But they are both pathetic so far.

You want scary? Read this. It's an article written by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and cosigned by several other mayors, and it sums up her opinion of the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on the DC gun ban. To sum up the Mayors' position, they think that local officials (i.e. themselves) should be the ones to decide who can and cannot have a gun.

That is scary, very, very scary.

I hung out by the pool all day yesterday. I don't use it as much as I thought I would, but having a pool sure can be nice. The landlord bought himself a Big Green Egg, and he used it for the first time yesterday to cook a huge hunk of lamb shoulder or lamb roast, or something like that, and it was super yummy! Cooked for like 5 hours at 250 degrees. I've never really used a Big Green Egg, apparently they can get up to 800 degrees, hot enough to sear a steak the right way, so I'm looking forward to trying that out.

In gym news, I broke two or three personal records yesterday. I started out with deadlifts, worked my way up to 281 lbs. I decided I was overthinking my form in previous deadlift sessions, so this time I got my self set, and then I just stood up, didn't worry about what was moving when, and it felt really smooth and strong, so go me! I also interspersed some sumo deadlifts, which are a wide stance variation of a standard deadlift, and something I've never done before. Sumos are easier on the lower back, and they felt very natural from the get-go. Since I never tried them before, and I guess I could call it a PR at 221 pounds, so that's where the "or" comes from in the first sentence of this paragraph.

After that I moved on to overhead presses. These have been very frustrating for me, it seemed like I was never going to move up from 115 or so. I added in push presses and jerks, figuring that handling higher weights than I could with a regular press would help the press. Of course there's also no end to the articles on various lifting websites that recommend this approach, so I can't claim any originality. Anyway, the point is that I set a new personal record of 135 pounds in the overhead press.

Today will be some overhead squatting, pistols, bench pressing (maybe go for a PR if there's someone handy to spot for me), seated cable rows (the only "machine" I use).... Maybe some heavy kettlebell swings. Monday is some sort of Crossfit workout. Tuesday I'm looking forward to doing the bear again, the clean, front squat, overhead press, back squat, overhead press to the front and all over again combo that I enjoyed so much a week or two ago.

It may seem like a lot, but I rarely spend more than 45 minutes at the gym, and the Crossfit workouts take much less time plus I don't have to drive anywhere. I've weighed around 185 lbs ever since a few weeks after getting back in the gym in February, but I haven't checked in a couple of weeks. I've definitely lost some waist size, but not enough. My eating habits fall far behind my exercise habits in terms of quality.

Just because I favor opening up domestic areas for oil drilling and I don't think we should destroy our economy to fight global wamring doesn't mean that I am not also in favor of seeking alternative energy sources and reducing the amount of toxins we put in to the atmosphere. For some reason, lots of people (mostly liberals) seem to think we can only seek alternative energy, or drill for more oil, not both. Those people are idiots.

Obama made a boo-boo in a speech, though I'm sure he doesn't see it that way. Anyway, he thinks terrorism should be handled as a crime, as it was in 1993 when the World Trade Center was attacked the first time.

I'm not so sure that it worked as well as he thinks. He seems to forget that legal action did not deter terrorists on 9/11. Nor did it stop terrorists from attacked the USS Cole.

On the other hand, we've had no major terror attacks on the US since 9/11 when the Bush administration stopped the legal recourse, and went after the bad guys with strength and righteousness.

There is no way to know whether 9/11 would have happened if we had treated the first World Trade Center attack differently, nor can I say if we would have had more attacks if Bush had rejected military action and used the court system instead. But if you do like going by results... Obama is championing a cause that already failed. Maybe he'll bring back meatless Tuesdays, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Edsel, too.

Me? I'd rather have a President who will bring back ideas that worked instead of ones that didn't.

Had a great day at the gym yesterday. I've been breaking personal records right and left lately, and did it again with the back squat. 275 pounds! The best I had ever done before February was maybe 225, but it had been years since I tried even that much. My deadlift PR is also 275, and deadlifts should be higher than squats, so I gotta work on it, maybe switch from standard to sumo style, might fit my levers better.

I've also been doing more and more Crossfit stuff, and been inserting Crossfit "approved" set and rep structures into my normal workouts. That's definitely been a boon. I've been espousing the virtues of Crossfit to a friend of mine, but he'd always basically ignore it. Yesterday he saw me watching some Crossfit videos online, as I was examining technique and getting workout ideas, and he got sucked in, actually saying "That looks like a lot of fun." And it is. It's tough fun, the kind of fun that will leave you collapsed on the floor for 15 minutes, but as exhilarated as you have ever been, and excited to do it again.

This is really cool. To sum up, a company in Silicon Valley eschewed the hardware and software their neighbors make their living on, and followed the money to fuel, and have now invented a microscopic bug that eats waste, woodchips for instance, and excretes crude oil. So far they have only managed small amounts, and are unsure if it will scale up to a system big enough to make a real difference in the world, but they are certainly hopeful.

There is something else significant to take away. The free market is doing exactly what free market advocates said it would do. While many people whine for the government to do something, other people saw dollar signs for anyone who could come up with a solution, and they are following the money to the possibility of solving our energy crisis. The free market does work! And the government is wasting our time and money talking about gas tax holidays and whether to strangle the oil companies which are owned by the pension plans and 401ks of tens of millions of average Americans, who will then become more dependent on social security, and thus the government.

And by the way, they also mention that it's greenhouse gas safe, in that the CO2 released is less than initially sequestered by the tree that is turned into wood for a house and then waste for the bugs to eat.

Go science! Go money! Go free market!

I've been reading a bit about the big Supreme Court decision that was handed down yesterday. Basically it says the US cannot hold detainees indefinitely in Guantanamo without Habeaus Corpus, which is basically the right to fight your detention in court.

Now I'm totally for that for US citizens. For non-US citizens detained as enemy combatants? Different story. It's not that I think these people should have no rights, but the US legal system is set up with a different threshold. When some US soldiers capture a terrorist, they don't have time to read him his Miranda rights, and fulfill all the things that, if not fulfilled, allow criminals to get off on technicalities. Do we really want to let a known terrorist go because a lawyer forgot to reveal some evidence to another lawyer, or because it's circumstancial evidence ("well, we saw the rocket come from that window, and when we got to the building, he was the only person within 100 yards, so it was definitely him"... "Yes, well you can't prove it was him, so he goes free"). I'm not sure that's a good idea, and I think that's what Scalia was hinting at in his strongly worded dissent. That and that the case seemed to be more about who gets to be in charge of detainees, the administration, or congress. And I'm usually against the idea of giving congress more control over anything, much less stuff having to do with war.

Today at the gym I tried something I've never done before.... The Bear. The Bear starts with a barbell on the ground in front of you. Clean the bar to the rack position, then do a front squat, then a push press, letting it down to your back, then a back squat, push press to the front, put it down on the ground. That's one rep, for the next, don't rest, as soon as the bar hits the ground, start cleaning it. Five reps is tough. I did five sets, raising the weight each time till I got to 133 lbs., but I only got three reps with that weight. Afterwards I was wiped out! The Bear is going to be a once a week thing now, it's just too awesome not to do regularly.

Wendy's, the fast food chain, is really pissing me off. Remember how one of the fast food places started asking everyone if they wanted to supersize their meals, and the other chains all started doing it? And after a while it was seen as assisting people in eating too much, because in this country, everything is the fault of some corporation, never a person for making their own bad decisions. Anyway, most of the chains stopped asking, but Wendy's did something a little different, something a little misleading, and, in my opinion, plain wrong.

So you get to the counter, you look up at the menu and see the price of your meal is $3. Great, so you order it, the cashier asks if you want medium or large, you say medium, and she says, "$3.89." Well how could that be, it says $3 on the menu, and you know the tax cannot be that much. Oh wait, in small print you see that the price listed is for small, and you ordered a medium. But medium is standard, isn't it? And the cashier didn't even ask if you wanted small, just medium or large, you didn't even realize small was an option, and you definitely didn't think the price that is in big, bold print on the menu would refer to a smaller than normal size. And hell, you ordered a #4 meal, and it says $3.

This is deceptive and just plain wrong. Wendy's needs to stop purposely misleading their customers.

I just opened CNN.com to see that Obama thinks the government needs to feed $50 billion to the economy to stimulate th\ings moe.

This is epically retarded, and there are two reasons. One, it won't do crap, there are systemic issues that $50 billion won't change, and more importantly to me, why take $50 billion from Americans just so you can give it back? Why is Obama saying tax cuts would be irresponsible (not sure, has he talked about rolling back Bush's cuts?), and then giving that money right back? It makes no sense, if he thinks the economy needs $50 billion, why doesn't he push to not take it from Americans in the first place? Simple, this way he and the government can be looked to as saviors, whereas if they just reduced taxes, they wouldn't get the same credit, since a lot of the press and a lot of the public get fooled by this sort of posturing.