That was another busy movie weekend. Two SF flicks, which had more in common than you might think (above and beyond both being surefire money losers): Equilibrium and Solaris. I was determined to catch Equilibrium, since I missed Below and am still annoyed about it. Equilibrium is only on about 300 screens, too. I’m really glad I did. It’s a sometimes awkward graft of a unique action aesthetic onto a fairly standard totalitarian dystopia, which somehow works very well. The backbone of the movie is the near future dictatorship we’ve seen before: it’s Farenheit 451 via Albert Speer’s Berlin. The director, Kurt Wimmer, gets it right. It’s almost as pretty as anything by Wim Wenders. ...

Why aren’t any US publishers publishing lines like this (original)? Or this (original), from the fantasy perspective. Wow. (No insult meant to Tor, whose reprint line is delightful; mild snide perhaps for Baen, since I’m still mournful about the Telzey edits (original).)

Bartleby.com is the best Web resource I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a solid, fast, all-in-one-place site with quality reference books ranging from the Columbia Encyclopedia through Strunk and White’s Elements of Style past Bulfinch’s Age of Fable to Gray’s Anatomy. Sweet. If that’s not enough, there’s also an extensive collection of verse, an equally extensive collection of fiction, and a big fat bunch of essays. Yeah, it’s all free.

I have just a little more on the Ninth Circuit gun control decision, to start off the morning. How Appealing pretty much sums it up here, here, and here. This is why he’s a practicing lawyer and I’m just an interested party. I was particularly interested in this SF Chronicle article (original), which talks about Judge Reinhardt and his approach to the law. It discusses what I think is admirable about the recent decision; namely, Judge Reinhardt’s tendency to confront cutting edge issues head on.

Via How Appealing: the Ninth Circuit today concluded that the Second Amendment confers no individual right to own and carry arms. (That link is a PDF.) I recommend reading the opinion if you’re interested in such things. I suspect the language and arguments presented therein will be core to the gun control debate for some time, at least for those who are pro-gun control. The argument seems to rest on the meaning of the phrase “keep and bear arms.” Judge Reinhardt’s opinion states that “bear arms” is a phrase used, historically, only in a military context. Quoting Aymette v. State, 21 Tenn. (2 Humph.) 154 (1840): “A man in pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms.” Given that interpretation, he further reasons that the phrase would be nonsensical if the phrase “keep arms” had a wider interpretation than the phrase “bear arms.” ...

Daily Kos has an excellent summary of Trent Lott’s recent comments on Strom Thurmond. I, of course, have Cliffs Notes: Trent Lott is our Senate Majority Leader. Strom Thurmond is the guy who ran for President in 1948 on a segregationist platform. Senator Lott’s comments include “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Possibly that New York Times article on the economies of China and India wasn’t so great after all. The New Republic has more. I’m going to take credit for wondering how much foreign investment has to do with the differences anyhow; NRO suggests that a lot of the apparent Chinese economic growth is simply due to the amount of foreign investment flowing into China. (Link via Electrolite.)

While I’m thinking about Volokh, here’s another National Review article he wrote recently. Executive summary: we shouldn’t worry about military discrimination based on sexual preference, because the military does so much good for us. Well. There you go.

Eugene Volokh has some thoughts on that Ninth Circuit decision. Not bad; this is more of a start. However, he fails to recognize that the states prrrrobably have the right to change their definition of militia with the times. He also doesn’t touch the question of what “bear arms” means. I’d really like to see someone quoting a contemporary usage of “bear arms” outside the military context. While I’m on the subject, here’s a Volokh article in the National Review. It doesn’t really address the Ninth Circuit decision, but it does have intelligent things to say about evolving standards. How Appealing comments on the article, somewhat snidely. Well, OK, it’s just a comment on the timeline.

The White House has approved executing US citizens as a matter of policy (original), as long as they’re working for Al Qaeda. Well, that’s interesting. The spin is that any such action will wait for Presidential approval. However, the White House is not saying that it must wait for Presidential approval — just that in practice it will. The underlying assumption is that the President has the right to authorize executions without court approval, under certain conditions. ...