My name is
David Robins:
Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner,
libertarian (voluntaryist),
and student.
This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.
EOTech 512.A65/1; dead fridge
News, Guns ·Thursday November 12, 2009 @ 20:15 EST (link)
My EOTech 512.A65/1 "red dot" holographic weapon sight arrived today, and M-Pro 7 gun cleaner (32 oz. bottle—seemed the best value for money size that I could actually use) arrived yesterday. It had been delayed a long time: the first time the gun cleaner leaked and they returned the entire package; then they claimed they were out of that size, but managed to find a bottle and send it to me. I'd ordered both on October 20th.
I mounted the sight on my AR-15; it was quite simple, and just required a (provided) Allen key. Range test coming soon.
Our fridge gave out yesterday (maybe earlier?): we moved some dairy to the freezer but it was having trouble keeping things toward the front cold. They sent a guy to fix it in the morning, but they said they'd be there at 0900 and we had to call at 0930 when they hadn't showed yet, but they arrived right after that. We lost some milk, maybe some (formerly) frozen waffles, and some spaghetti sauce. We called the apartment office on the "It doesn't hurt to ask" theory, asking if they would compensate us for a claimed $30 loss; they said they'd give us a $50 credit. Color me generally impressed with Avalon at Bear Creek (Avalon Bay Communities, I suppose).
I stayed home for the fridge repair guy, and I was going to take Honey to school today since she's still feeling unwell, but she decided she hadn't studied enough for the test and would make it her dropped test in that class.
Books finished: Stock Market Wizards.
Cases in Constitutional Law #3: taxpayer rights further trampled
Law ·Thursday November 12, 2009 @ 00:48 EST (link)
[✓] Flast v. Cohen (1968): A federal taxpayer challenged the Education Act of 1965, under which Congress had spent about $1 billion, $60 million of which eventually went to religious schools. This would have been an excellent chance for the court to be consistent with Frotheringham, and rule against the taxpayer, or to use its power of judicial review to strike down any federal education legislation as unconstitutional, not being within the enumerated powers. Instead they found a way to wriggle around Frotheringham (which Harlan called out in his dissent), possibly due to anti-religious bias, passing the case back to the lower court to examine it on merit, but at least they reopened the door for taxpayer suits against unconstitutional spending.
[✗] Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United [for Separation of Church and State, Inc.] (1982): The Department of the Army had closed the Valley Forge General Hospital, and declared it surplus, to be sold by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). The property was appraised for $577,500 but the Secretary of HEW computed a 100% public benefit allowance, permitting Valley Forge Christian College to acquire the property "without making any financial payment for it", but requiring it to "use the property for 30 years solely for the educational purposes described in [their] application." The respondent is challenging the transaction ("conveyance") "on the ground that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment." Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we start showing favoritism to special interest groups!
To be consistent with Flast the court would clearly have to rule in favor of the respondent; and this would make sense: the government should not have been in the business of either acquiring (or managing) property not used for strict legislative function or for subsidizing private ownership of same. But they reversed the lower court's ruling in favor of Americans United, on the basis that Americans United did not have standing:
At an irreducible minimum, Art. III requires the party who invokes the court's authority to "show that the personally has suffered some actual or threatened injury as a result of the putatively illegal conduct of the defendant," Gladstone, Realtors v. Village of Bellwood (1979), and that the injury "is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision," Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Org. (1976). … But the "cases and controversies" language of Art. III forecloses the conversion of courts of the United States into judicial versions of college debating forums…. The exercise of judicial power, which can so profoundly affect the lives, liberty, and property of those to whom it extends, is therefore restricted to litigants who can show "injury in fact" resulting from the action which they seek to have the Court adjudicate.
The court claimed that this case was different from Flast because:
Unlike the plaintiffs in Flast, the respondents fail the first prong of the test for taxpayer standing. Their claim is deficient in two respects. First, the source of their complaint is not a congressional action, but a decision by HEW to transfer a parcel of federal property. Flast limited taxpayer standing to challenges directed "only [at] exercises of congressional power." See Schlesinger v. Reservists Committee to Stop the War [1974] (denying standing because the taxpayer plaintiffs "did not challenge an enactment under Art. I, § 8, but rather the action of the Executive Branch").
Second, and perhaps redundantly, the property transfer about which respondents complain was not an exercise of the authority conferred by the Taxing and Spending Clause of Art. I, § 8. The authorizing legislation, the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, was an evident exercise of Congress' power under the Property Clause, Art. IV, § 3, cl. 2. Respondents do not dispute this conclusion, and it is decisive of any claim of taxpayer standing under the Flast precedent.
Some precedents are perhaps better observed in the breach than in the observance, including this "test for taxpayer standing." The fact that the originating act was executive in nature does make the court any less able to rule on it if it violates the Constitution. Any taxpayer should have standing in any case involving the smallest amount of their money (despite the inconvenience to the court), and the presumption should be that spending less will redress the wrong by lowering taxes by the amount saved (even though in practice government tends to spend anything "saved.") While there are more egregious violations, stopping this gift of taxpayer money and requiring the government to sell the property for fair market value (and better still, remit the increase as at least a token tax reduction) would have set valuable positive precedent.
Three justices dissented and wrote dissenting opinions, holding that the Establishment Clause was written for cases of precisely this kind.
Since this concludes the first chapter (The Supreme Court and the Nature of the Constitution) and since I've been a long time finishing this entry, and the last case is somewhat long, I'll resume with chapter 2, The Legislative Branch in the next installment.
Books finished: The Knight.
Why are the looters so much more ambitious than the looted?
Political ·Tuesday November 10, 2009 @ 20:16 EST (link)
NS phrased this question: "Why are the looters so much more ambitious than the the looted? The government takes your money (and mine) and just gives it away! Doesn't that [upset you]?"
My answer to the first question is that groups that receive entitlements (redistribution, takings, other people's money), after a while, start to believe that they deserve them. They even believe things like their benefits are coming from the government (rather than their fellow citizens). That, dammit, society owes it (welfare, social security, farming subsidies, health care, etc.) to them! It's their right! (No, it's not: educate yourself about positive and negative rights; there are no rights that involve coercing someone else to do something for you).
But these special interest groups are well-funded. They have your money, after all. And they (usually an lobbying organization created for the group, like AARP, or La Raza, or the AMA) have one primary goal: increase their entitlements. And it's very easy for them to manipulate "their" people by saying their entitlements will go away. Scared people are one-issue voters, special-interest voters, one-dimensional voters. But then voting for a representative that will be empowered to take and spend your money is a one-dimensional—and Hobson's—choice anyway.
There are many such groups, all of which can be scared into voting for whoever promises (depending on the choices) to maintain or increase their entitlement.
The union of these one-issue voters that want handouts will vote for whoever promises them the most (see: Tytler).
The remainder—the few people that think theft is wrong, that voluntary trade is only moral economic interaction in a civilized society—isn't a majority so continues to get robbed.
As to the second question, of course it upsets me—robbery is initiation of aggression, which should not be countenanced. That's why I'm libertarian.
DVDs finished: The Dark Knight, Duplicity.
SCons: I am a convert
News, Technical, School ·Sunday November 8, 2009 @ 15:34 EST (link)
The make utility is venerable. It's also rather simplistic and somewhat crufty. The easy things are easy, but sometimes the hard things are impossible. Despite the many features added to the most common instance of the tool, make GNU make, it becomes inconvenient for all but the simplest projects. So I hunted around for something better for my UW compilers project.
At Hilton (c. 2004), I built a Perl tool—hmake, Hilton make—that leveraged the power of Perl, meaning that all hmake did was run the Perl program Makefile.pl if it was found, after minimal setup (I know CPAN distributions use Makefile.PL but uppercase PL seemed gauche and inconsistent). Makefile.pl was supposed to use the hilton::Make module and provide it a list of targets/dependencies, possibly including Perl code, which would be examined and built optimally depending on what had changed since the last build, just like make. Except hmake had Perl available to do complex target mappings (e.g. database definition files like gst_membership.cfg to perl modules like GstMembership.pm) which weren't possible with standard make. It could also do the usual install tasks etc.
SCons ("A software construction tool") (FAQ) has taken this to the next level. It is built using Python, not Perl, which is fine since I've been writing a few utilities in Python lately anyway, and the language is growing on me. It seems to be actively maintained and reasonably well documented (although apparently the (long) man page is kept more up to date); class documentation; there is also a wiki where I found several helpful nodes including one about the equivalent of make .PHONY targets, e.g., making scons run tests (replacing make test). And the source code is eminently readable; I was reading a fair amount of it figuring out how it all worked.
It is based around the concept of Builders, objects which produce target files from sources. They are very flexible, and it comes with a good number of useful defaults. I thought I would need to build flex and bison builders, but it comes with them, including analyzing the command-lines for --defines and --header-file and adding those to the target list. I did have to tweak it to understand that my scanner (.l) and parser (.y) files create C++ (.cc), not C (.c) files (I could have used use .ll and .yy, but I reject those on principle: the source is still the same type). I also added the Bison-generated location.h and position.hh files using a variant of this recipe. SCons already has an include-file scanner (no more messing around with gcc -MMD etc.), but needed to know how location.hh and position.hh were generated ("emitted" in SCons-speak) so it knew to build the parser before files that included those files.
I will not be using make in future projects unless compelled to. Call me a fan, and a devotee of scons, and kudos to the developers for a great tool.
Honey sick with 'flu
News, Technical, School ·Sunday November 8, 2009 @ 11:38 EST (link)
Honey had a bit of a temperature yesterday, but it got worse today: 100.9° and a bad cough; I picked her up some cough medicine and TamiFlu™ this morning. The cough medicine will make her sleepy, which should let her get some rest despite the wracking cough. We're not sure if it's H1N1 or regular 'flu. And I figure it's just a matter of time until I have it too.
I went down a bit of a rathole in my CSEP501 compiler project: I wanted to be able to replace nodes easily, without chasing references, so tried to use handles (pointers to pointers), but that led to a lot of hassle with my use of dynamic_cast<> and in other places too, so I used svn merge with a reverse revision specification to back out those changes. Lost some time, but learned a few things, and I'm still almost through type checking and propagation. Earlier I had a partner, but since I'm interested in building on a large number of extensions and he doesn't have the time for it right now, we agreed amicably last week to go our separate ways from project part three (ASTs) onward, and so notified the instructor.
I did some work on the torrent-mover to handle movies, and also wrote a scan option that's about equivalent to "Video Manager" in the MythTV menu: it recreates the (videometadata) database from video files present. I had a bit of trouble with Unicode characters in filenames: in particular, "à" came in as U+DCE0, which I found out is from the U+DC80-DCFF range, meaning a bad character (in the source encoding of the filename—probably taken as ASCII) which was put into the lower 8 bits when converted to a Python internal (Unicode) string. Replacing it with the intended U+00E0 fixed most of the issues. (Caused by the Law and Order episode "Folie à Deux.")
Books finished: Economics In One Lesson, Computer Science and Perl Programming.DVDs finished: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Sex Drive, Psycho, 12 Rounds, Prom Night, Changeling, The Bank Job, Fired Up!.
rTorrent patch, periodic torrent download
News, Technical ·Wednesday October 21, 2009 @ 03:58 EDT (link)
I patched rTorrent to fix a crash on setting a torrent to erase on finishing. There was an existing ticket, so I added my patch to it. rTorrent is an ncurses BitTorrent client that works well under GNU screen, but it's best features are a programmable API (XMLRPC over SCGI) and use of directory monitoring (drop a .torrent file in a directory, it'll start downloading) and status files (it can easily be set to create a symlink with the name of the torrent file + .finished, pointing to the download, when the download is complete).
rTorrent is the largest piece in automating weekly downloads of TV shows that we watch; the rest is a few scripts—Python, not Perl, to branch out a little. I also have a perl program that will rename and file downloaded episodes according to their names from epguides.com; I'll connect it up to auto-rename finished downloads. The other piece of the puzzle is the isoHunt JSON search API. Three programs need finishing:
grabber - given a search spec, such as "House S06E05", query isoHunt and return good torrents (removing listings with poor scores, too few S/L, possibly negative comments, or that aren't plain AVI files), downloading the best one and moving it to the rTorrent watch directory to start a download.
monitor - check the rTorrent watch directory for finished files; remove the .finished indicator and run the episode renamer on the target; add a symlink to a "new downloads" folder.
scheduler - given a show and its day/time, look it up on epguides.com to find the latest episode and run grabber. If grabber doesn't find anything, queue up the search to try again later. Cron jobs will be set to look for each show, and to periodically re-check for queued items.
ep - given a file (or show and series/episode), look up the episode name on epguides.com and rename the file appropriately.
Together this will be a neat little system and save a fair bit of manual work—which is a fundamental goal of computer science ("What can be efficiently automated?").
Update: The patch was committed in April 2010, six months after it was provided.
Books finished: Glenn Beck's Common Sense.
Second Amendment Day #4
News, Guns ·Sunday October 18, 2009 @ 20:16 EDT (link)
Once more (1 2 3) a group from Microsoft's MSgun group descended on the Sultan shooting pit. There was a pretty good turnout, and the rain which had been plaguing the area for the past few days held off and we even saw sun in the afternoon. It was a good day and as always a good time of solidarity, shooting, and suds (followup was at Redhook).
I finally (Saturday the 24th) got around to going through my photos, paring 807 down to 168, due to shooting several series trying to get the action shot. I have inserted a few I liked here and the rest can be seen using my thumbnail viewer (Tim, please don't hack it by filling up the log file—thanks :).
Kjell took video of the Mosin Nagant volley fire (you may need to be logged in to Facebook and/or be his friend to see it). Joe also took some photos, but as far as I know they're only available on an internal Microsoft share (I'll add a link if there is one, to his or anyone else's photos/videos of the event).
Books finished: Robert E. Lee On Leadership.DVDs finished: Transporter 3, Race To Witch Mountain, In the Electric Mist, The Last House On The Left, Taken, Haunting In Connecticut.
Cases in Constitutional Law #2: we're sorry for the inconvience of doing your job
Law ·Sunday October 11, 2009 @ 19:38 EDT (link)
[✓] Muskrat v. United States (1911): In this case the U.S. government attempted to use the court as a sounding board for distribution of tribal property among the Cherokee Indians, who had recently been admitted to citizenship. Chief Justice Taney ruled that the court could rule on only "cases and controversies", original or appellate as specified in the Constitution, a case being "a suit instituted according to the regular course of judicial procedure" (Marshall), and controversies meaning either the same as cases or referring only to civil suits (Field). There needed to be actual litigants with conflicting interests. The ruling closed the door on "this court… [being] required to give opinions on the nature of advice concerning legislative action,—a function never conferred upon it by the Constitution, and against the exercise of which this could has steadily set its face from the beginning."
[✓] Luther v. Borden (1849): The court correctly refused to interfere in a political matter, that of the charter government of Rhode Island (that restricted the franchise to certain landowners) against Thomas Dorr's popular government, judging it a matter for the state itself, and the executive and legislative branches, if interference from the federal government was necessary at all (in this case, it was not). Admission of the state into the original union, and seating of its congressmen, was held as tacit approval by the legislature of Rhode Island's (and Oregon's, in Pacific States Telegraph and Telephone Co. v. Oregon) "republican form of government".
[✓] Colegrove v. Green (1946): The court again refused to involve itself in a political matter having to do with the apportionment of congressional seats in Illinois: in 1946, rural areas were vastly overrepresented due to continued use of the 1901 apportionment despite much of the state population being now concentrated near Chicago. (Would that a later court had held itself to the same restraint regarding school districts as this court held itself to in regards to voting districts.)
[✗] Baker v. Carr (1962): This case was similar to Colegrove; it took place in Tennessee, which likewise had undergone a population shift but was still using apportionment based on the 1901 census. In this case, however, the court decided to interfere in states' business, under cover of the Fourteenth Amendment—a mess that was rammed through despite rejection by southern states after ousting carpetbagger congresses that had ratified it before passage. To a libertarian, apportionment of voting districts is almost entirely irrelevant since the non-aggression principle denies the state the power to initiate force or take property. However, a state's internal arrangements should remain its business and the Constitution does not allow for federal interference, as emphasized by the Tenth Amendment. While their actions are somewhat understandable—a vote in one county should have comparative weight to one in another—it was not under federal jurisdiction. From Frankfurter's dissent (with Harlan):
The court today reverses a uniform course of decision established by a dozen cases, including one by which the very claim now sustained was unanimously rejected only five years ago. The impressive body of rulings thus cast aside reflected the equally uniform course of our political history regarding the relationship between population and legislative representation—a wholly different matter from denial of the franchise to individuals because of race, color, religion or sex. …
… The Framers carefully and with deliberate forethought refused to so enthrone the judiciary. In this situation, as in others of like nature, appeal for relief does not belong here. Appeal must be to an informed, civilly militant electorate. … In any event there is nothing judicially more unseemly than for this Court to make in terrorem pronouncements….
This begins a "train of usurpations" done under the umbrella of the Fourteenth Amendment, that has continued until this day.
[✘] Frothingham v. Mellon (1923): A chance for the court to "show its quality": the plaintiff brought suit alleging that the effect of certain appropriations would increase her burden of taxation, an unjust taking without due process of law (violating the Fifth Amendment). The court failed here, by affirming the decision of a lower court that dismissed the suit, on the pretext that
[A taxpayer's] interest in the moneys of the Treasury… is comparatively minute and indeterminable; and the effects of future taxation of any payment out of the funds so remote, fluctuating, and uncertain that no basis is afforded for an appeal….
The administration of any statute likely to produce additional taxation to be imposed upon a vast number of taxpayers, the extent of whose several liability is indefinite and constantly changing, is essentially a matter of public, and not of individual, concern. If one taxpayer may champion and litigate such a cause, then every other taxpayer may do the same, not only in respect to the statute here under review, but also in respect of every other appropriation act and statute whose administration requires the outlay of public money, and whose validity may be questioned. The bare suggestion of such a result, with its attendant inconveniences, goes far to sustain the conclusion which we have reached, that a suit of this character cannot be maintained.
So they ruled against taxpayers having remedy for unconstitutional takings and apportionments because doing their job would inconvenience them, although with a few good precedents the envisioned flood is unlikely as lower courts would fall in line and the high court would then not need to hear cases of this nature. An individual can be prosecuted for larceny in any amount; why not the government, especially with the practical effect of the broad application actually stopping millions or billions of dollars of unconstitutional takings.
Cases in Constitutional Law #1: courts should be conservative
Law ·Sunday October 11, 2009 @ 14:39 EDT (link)
These cases are from the 9th edition of Cases in Constitutional Law by Cushman and Koukoutchos. I am not a lawyer, but I have read and understand the United States Constitution (and some related commentaries) and have a reasonable grounding in logic and history. None of these cases are beyond the grasp of the United States citizen, nor should any be reticent to call out unconstitutional pronouncements even if they come from the highest judiciary in the land.
[✓] Hawke v. Smith (1920): The Ohio state constitution had been amended in November 1918 to allow a referendum on (U.S.) Constitutional amendments if it was petitioned for by 6% of the voters within 90 days. When the state legislature ratified the 18th amendment ("Prohibition") on January 27, 1919, the requisite petitions were obtained within 90 days, and subsequently the people voted against ratification, but on January 29, 1919 the U.S. Secretary of State proclaimed the ratification of the amendment.
The case before the court was whether this Ohio law was in conflict with article 5 of the U.S. Constitution, which spelled out ratification procedures, in this case, by approval of two thirds of the legislatures of the states. The court found that it did conflict since "legislatures" clearly meant the Ohio general assembly and that it was not subject to review by referendum.
This is a reasonable decision since the state legislatures are granted the power to ratify. If Ohio wanted to allow the people to review a ratification decision, they would have to do it before they communicated the ratification to the U.S. Secretary of State. It's unreasonable to allow reversal after an amendment has been ratified (by the nation), although not unreasonable to allow a state to take back its ratification if the amendment has not yet become law.
[✗] Coleman v. Miller (1939): The court found that despite Kansas' earlier rejection of an amendment, it could still ratify it later, however it gave troubling indications that the reverse would not be true, which, despite historical precedent (the 14th amendment, which was rammed through by force) is patently ridiculous (the ratification process should not be a ratchet that only turns one way until the amendment has actually become law). The court also said it lacked jurisdiction to compel time limits on the ratification of amendments.
[✓] Marbury v. Madison (1803): The case established "judicial review" in the United States, meaning that courts could overturn unconstitutional laws. Marshall gave a splendid defense of the idea, which, while reasonable, opens a rather large and dangerous door for future abuses. In fact in this case admirable restraint was shown when the court found that the law allowing them to issue the requested writ of mandamus, which they felt was justified and could be issued by a lower court, was unconstitutional. This opinion also includes a well-referenced definition of "cases and controversies". It doesn't even introduce a new power, since once a court decides against a law, even without judicial review every subsequent case would be decided similarly, sometimes by lower courts following precedent, so it has the mere effect of saving the court's time, promoting stare decisis, while not completely closing the door for a future court to revisit an issue.
[✓] Eakin v. Raub (1825): This is where the authors begin to run off the rails a bit (which as we know inevitably leads to a train wreck). The particular case is not all that interesting; it is a minority state court opinion arguing against the power of judicial review determined in Marbury on the grounds of separation of powers and that, provided a law is passed according to constitutional procedure, it is not the judiciary's role to invalidate it, but to interpret it, and are not required to agree with it, with any fault due to unconstitutionality remaining with the legislature. I believe judicial review provides a reasonable check on legislative power; like any tool it can be used for good or ill and sometimes its presence is better than its absence, and sometimes not.
Returning to the original point, the liberal bias of the authors begins to show:
Undaunted by the experiences of the Roosevelt era, Attorney General Edwin Meese III, speaking for the administration of Ronald Reagan, in 1985 launched an all-out campaign to effect dramatic changes in constitutional law and underlying doctrine. He announced that in his opinion the only valid interpretation of the Constitution was one that reflected the values of the original framers and established a policy that no person would be nominated for a federal judgeship who did not subscribe to this point of view.
While the "intent of the framers" is one of the earliest techniques of constitutional interpretation, it tends to produce extremely conservative results by today's standards and has largely given way to techniques that more closely reflect the current needs of a modern society. Moreover, assuming it was the intent of the framers to have the document interpreted by the courts at all, it may fairly be argued that they did not intend it to be interpreted with the rigidity of a statue. As Justice Marshall emphasized in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), "We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding." Also, it is worth noting that even in the opinion that follows, Marshall does not rely on the intent of the framers for support. Pushed far enough, an interpretation based exclusively on "original intent" would virtually emasculate the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and could conceivably result in abandoning judicial review entirely.
The following points may be made in response. Meese's actions were necessary in light of Roosevelt's massive constitutional abuses with his fascistic regulation, government-supported cartels, and redistributive programs. By definition, a court should be conservative, i.e., "disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change." Its role is to interpret the laws, not to make new ones. Also by definition, the Constitution is a statute; article 6: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." As for Marshall's quoted comment, it is (due to the lack of context, not any fault of his) completely content-free. Finally, appealing to emasculation of laws whose reach has far exceeded their intended purpose is not a sympathetic line of argument.
DVDs finished: Edge, Trick 'r Treat, Orphan, Miss March.
New scope on the Ruger
News ·Friday October 9, 2009 @ 20:02 EDT (link)
Went shooting Wednesday, taking the Ruger 10/22 out for the first time with the scope (Bushnell Banner "Dusk and Dawn" 3-9x40). I was just shooting at fairly close targets in the SVRC pistol put (.22s are allowed; still a lot of fun. Since the scope is set for 50 yards the POI was low.
Found a new site—a kinder, friendlier version of FML (not linked, for language etc.; Google it if you're curious): My Life Is Average is pretty cool; random positive, somewhat banal, but interesting (voted on by readers) events from people's lives.
I got a Nerf N-Strike Maverick gun recently, and a pack of 30 extra darts; it's entertaining to shoot it at my apartment or office walls (or window). Passes time while compiling, or when the symbol servers are slow. I'd bought a different one, a single shot (reload after every shot), but returned it; this is a six-shooter with a rotating cylinder like a revolver, and is spring powered, requiring one pull of the slide per shot, and requiring a reload after the cylinder has been emptied.
I'm reading a Constitutional law book, so I'm going to make a few notes on the cases it covers in coming entries. Some other books I've been reading mention interesting (and fatally flawed) cases; The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed To Ask go over several well known bad cases that are clearly political and not really constitutional (e.g. Dredd Scott, which held that slaves and their descendants were not and could not be citizens, which was reversed by the 14th amendment, which, while necessary, was rammed through illegally and is abused these days to claim that children of illegal aliens are United States citizens; but I digress).
Books finished: The Politically Incorrect Guide To the Great Depression and the New Deal, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, Libertarian Nation.DVDs finished: V for Vendetta, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 6.
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