The Supreme Court, in the final day of its term, today announced the results of DC v. Heller. At issue was a Washington, D.C. ban on possession of handguns as a class of weapons.

From the majority opinion:

Held:
1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
...
3. The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition — in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute — would fail constitutional muster.

Note that the first point affirms one interpretation of what has been the single most contentious point of debate among Second Amendment scholars: namely, whether the Second Amendment is — like the rest of the first ten Amendments — individual, or if it is collective in its scope: that is, whether it refers to the right of State governments to organize militias without Federal interference, or to the right of individuals to possess arms without governmental interference.

See also:

News on the Opinion

• Majority Opinion, DC v. Heller (pdf, 157pp)
• A Constitutional Right to a Gun, SCOTUS Blog
• Supremes Strike Down D.C. Handgun Ban, Wall Street Journal Legal Blog

About the Case

• Docket and Oral Argument, Oyez Supreme Court Media
• DC v. Heller, SCOTUSWiki
• DC v. Heller, Wikipedia

"I'm just really picky."

My standard answer to the many variations of "Why don't you have a girlfriend." I was at the lake with some church friends yesterday (written June 2007), including one woman who sees herself as an adoptive mother to me (not that that's necessarily a bad thing . . .)

When pressed to explain (and in the face of accusations that I was waiting for a Stepford Wife), I said something about wanting someone who would do the dishes and have deep intellectual conversations with me.

"You're not going to find someone who can have deep intellectual conversations that wants to do the dishes." That was "mom's" husband. She concurred.

I can't believe that. In fact, I categorically refuse.

Anyhow, the evidence is against it. Heck, if I believed that, I'd give up on the idea of marriage altogether and settle for various sushi and coffee dates (intelligent eye candy) for the rest of my life. Or suicide. Something like that.

Have feminists really won so much ground that even conservative Christians are believing the farce that housewifery¹ is a lesser task for lesser minds, and women who think are above it?

No. He's wrong². Simply because he has to be.

1. "Huswifery", by Edward Taylor. By a common synecdoche from the days when spinning and weaving were household tasks, Edward Taylor likened God's work in our lives to that of a housewife producing homespun cloth. The task of seeing the irony in this case I leave to you, gentle reader.

2. q.v. "High Standards and Perfect Sisters".

Download MicroID v0.1a

Sometimes I think my pages include more metadata than data. Ahh, well . . . at long last succumbing to the need to serve valid MicroIDs for each page of my own Blosxom installs (rather than simply for the first page), I bring you MicroID for Blosxom. MicroID will generate an arbitrary number of MicroID <meta> tags (for multiple claim emails) for your templating pleasure.

The difficulty with dynamic sites is that the MicroID contains the URL of the page signed, requiring pages to be signed on-the-fly as they're created. A precomputed MicroID for, say, the root level of a weblog, would become an invalid assertion over any other pages within.

For those of you who don't know, MicroID is a claim verification protocol allowing anyone with access to your email address to verify your ownership or control of your web pages. What it amounts to is the SHA-1 or MD5 signing of the page URL with your email address. Thus, you're able to attach your email address to pages, but only people who already know your address will be able to "read" it.

It's really no more secure in se than putting a <link rel="author" /> or any number of other semantic tags in your documents, as anyone who wants to could assert your authorship of an arbitrary document. However, it does provide a way for you to claim authorship without revealing personal details to anyone but the party you wish to convince. Thus the utility of MicroID is not in accountability (as it's too trivially forged), but in assertion of ownership.