Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

This Is True

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Ironically, modern surveillance states are baffled by people who change countries (Cory Doctorow).

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Sorry About the Snow

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

No, I don’t mean the climatic conditions you may be experiencing while I endure temperatures of 75-85 degrees Fahrenheit (24C-30C) at mid-day here.

I mean the symbolic stuff that fell on the blog today.

It seems that the Jetpack plugin I use has a snow setting and that something turned it on. The story of how I turned it off is a cautionary tale of a little knowledge being dangerous. Ignore the rest if tech talk bores you.

First thing I did was look at the code being served up by the blog. And sure enough, there was a call to a “holiday-snow” module in Jetpack. I turned to Google, which on what turned out to be a careless reading told me I should see a control in the Jetpack configuration settings. So I went to the (very extensive) Jetpack control menu and looked for a snow toggle. No luck.

Worrying it might be a hack I logged into the blog’s server and confirmed that there was in fact a jetpack module of that name sitting deep inside the code dropped in by jetpack.

Since I vaguely remembered running snow on purpose some time in the past, I started to worry that maybe I had hand-coded the call to the snow module. This is a bad practice, one I abandoned long ago for the much cleaner and safer method of using child themes, but maybe it was so long ago…? But, no, all the grepping I tried found no hard-coded calls to the holiday snow routine.

So after wasting a lot of time on this, I went back to Google. There I found that Jetpack works differently on wordpress-hosted blogs (the snow toggle is where you would expect it), and on self-hosted blogs like mine. In those cases, the plugin adds a snow toggle into the Settings > General menu of WordPress, completely separate from the Jetpack > Settings menu where all of its other options reside. I think that’s sort of sneaky, and uncalled for, but if I’d read the instructions I found the first time a little more carefully, I’d have saved half an hour or more.

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

John Roberts for President

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

He could be the savior the GOP Establishment is looking for.

One of the storylines in the current GOP Presidential campaign is that the party establishment has been looking for its candidate.  It was supposed to be Jeb!, he of the $100 million war chest, but he’s cratered. Meanwhile Trump and Carson sucked out the oxygen of the others.  Rubio is still in the tryout phase, and apparently the powers that be are not sure if he has the necessary gravitas, or even any at all.

Things are so bad that stories about the Establishment wanting to draft Romney keep popping up.  Romney polls well in New Hampshire. But I don’t think he’ll do well in the general election, for the same reasons Romney lost last time.

No, what the GOP needs is a fresh face.  Someone articulate.  With gravitas.  With no baggage.  And great conservative credentials.  Who is pro business.  Who won’t scare the horses.

And what better person could fit all those criteria than Chief Justice John Roberts?

Yes, a few die-hards may be angry that Roberts cast the deciding vote to keep ObamaCare alive, but many will forgive him after he guides the Court to strike down the remaining vestiges of affirmative action (Fisher v. University of Texas), to undermine labor unions by destroying their budgets (Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association), to kill Obama’s immigration policy (United States v. Texas (docket 15-674)), and to impose new restrictions on abortion (Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole). If all that that wasn’t enough, Roberts might even be able to say that as a Justice he had to apply the law on ObamaCare, but as President he’d work to repeal it.

Of course, the Chief would have to step down temporarily from the Court, but after he helped create a new Republican majority, surely Roberts’s GOP successor as President would appoint him to the first available opening.

Good thing that when the Chief Justice said recently that he would not run for President he did not take a Sherman.

Then again, Roberts is pretty smart. He may figure he has more power where he is.

Posted in 2016 Election, Law: The Supremes | 2 Comments

Jotwell Makes ABA’s “Blawg 100” List

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Blawg100HonoreeBadgeHappy to learn Jotwell got selected by the ABA for its 9th annual Blawg 100 list.

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Seems Like a Big Deal

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Quantum entanglement achieved at room temperature in semiconductor wafers – phys.org.

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Sounds Like a Plan

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Michael Froomkin

Mark Graber wirtes,

I have been thinking of declaring myself a candidate for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States. The centerpiece of my campaign will be opposition to the Pythagorean Theorem. This has got to be a winner in Republican circles, where candidates are judged by their capacity to challenge basic science. Besides something called the Pythagorean Theorem is clearly foreign inspired and un-American.

(There’s more!)

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