News of the Week for March 16th, 2025
News of the Week for March 16th, 2025
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry “Caesar!” Speak, Caesar is turn’d to hear.Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.Caesar:
What man is that?Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
A little mood music:
Happy π Day everyone!
Demonstrating that innovative thinking can save you decades of time, energy, and sanity, here is an explanation of how Isaac Newton revolutionized the number π!

In the name of stopping “price manipulation” and “price fixing”, an overreaching proposal has been introduced into the Nevada legislature. Introduced by the current state Attorney General and expected 2026 Democratic Gubernatorial nominee Aaron Ford, AB 44 bans, in part:
Manipulating the price of an essential good or service in this State. For the purposes of this paragraph, a person manipulates the price of an essential good or service in this State when the person, alone or in concert with others, intentionally engages in any fraudulent or deceptive conduct which is intended to and does cause the price of an essential good or service in this State, as compared to the price of comparable essential goods or services readily available in the 24 months immediately preceding the conduct, to increase in a manner that does not reflect basic forces of supply and demand.
This is very vague wording that would allow almost any appreciable increase in prices to be prosecutable if it were subjectively considered “deceptive” or outside what prosecutors consider the “basic forces of supply and demand”.
Do you trust the government to understand basic economics?
Stop laughing.

What happens when the Rule of Law and the Common Good conflict, in that strictly upholding the letter of the law causes a greater harm rather than prevent it, as would be the legitimate aim of the Rule of Law? This question is already addressed with the concept of “necessity” in the Common Law, and to various degrees in different jurisdictions, via what is often termed the “Necessity Defense.”
But this defense of the violation of the strict reading of the law is itself based in the Rule of Law and necessarily limited and generally requiring that the violation of the law, in order to be justified as necessary, must be the alternative to a worse violation of the law.
The same logic could be extended to an official or a member of the military who may need to take actions that exceed their orders or similar situations where failure to take such actions due to exigent circumstances.
But overall these are exception to the rule—not a refutation of the rule itself. If going beyond the limitations of the letter of the law is considered necessary, then it becomes incumbent on the person or persons who did so to nonetheless submit themselves to the law or authorities for judgement. By doing so, one does not elevate themselves above the rules.
What this does not do is justify ignoring the Rule of Law over some vague and amorphous “Common Good”. This is to relegate necessity of diverging from the letter of the law in order to protect the Rule of Law, into a false-dilemma fallacy that relegates the law as merely a suggestion to be superseded according to the whims of whomever can get away with it, or at least try to. An example of this is an attempt to invoke Thomas Jefferson to defend putting the “Common Good” over legal limitations and restrictions, with the specific example being the prosecution of Aaron Burr, who nonetheless was found innocent of Treason because the law, in fact, did prevail over Jefferson’s self-serving justification for his own actions.
There is a difference between exceeding the authorization of law due to exigent and dire circumstances in wartime or organized armed revolt, and using the purported “common good” as an excuse to rule by arbitrarily and/or capriciously to subordinate the law itself. Such excuses are the hallmark of the disingenuous Left who justify modern Cultural Marxist ideas of “society justice” by invoking St. Thomas Aquinas.

One of the most misleading, including self-misleading, things a person can do is try to hard to fit things into preconceived boxes and categories. This can be particularly treacherous in an intellectual sense when self-segregated into an echo chamber. Your humble author believes that even wrong viewpoints can be insightful and/or informative, and thus worth considering, if for no other reason than to refine one’s own views, or at least the arguments therefor. One such interesting idea that many, if not most, have contemplated is “sovereigntism”.
This political philosophy has been brought up by a Professor at Rutgers an opined upon by an exile from the Right. Your humble author does not completely agree with either, but both bring up ideas to mull upon, and both are worth a biblio-libation, so as to speak.
Specifically, the concept of “sovereigntism” is used to attempt to describe Trump and provide a historical basis for his positions. Trump is not really an isolationist, and though he doesn’t have a global or particularly outward looking governing philosophy, is more than willing to obsess over Greenland, Mexico, and Canada. The square to that circle is said to be found in the Lodge Reservations from a bit over a century ago.
News of the Week for March 9th, 2025
In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.
With foreign relations in flux in this day and age, let us look back at the era of détente with William F. Buckley, Jr. discussing the politics of Henry Kissinger with Kissinger himself.
Until next Friday.
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Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Mother Nature sure is contentious by proxy
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…

Nothing makes you more certain that environmentalism is anti-human as nature rights for forests being championed by the World Economic Forum.
“We must reshape the relationship between capitalism and life itself. A groundbreaking concept is emerging — bestowing legal personality upon forests, enabling them to act as legal persons in global discourse. . . . This approach can guide us toward a renewed dialogue. Our forests are not mere resources but as representatives demanding their rightful voice.”
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The proponents of legalized abortion style themselves as “pro-choice” and that the choice of a woman or girl to have an abortion is sacrosanct and must be protected. Of course, that “choice” seems to only be protected in one direction, particularly in Nevada. Even before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Nevada’s laws protected the right to an abortion such that the legislature was restricted from overturning that. But that protection wasn’t enough.
This past Fall, a measure to enshrine the most extreme procedures with full dearth of limits was passed by the voters, and will become part of the state’s Constitution when passed again, as seems likely, in the Fall of next year. But even that isn’t enough for some. A bill, AB 101, has been introduced to the Nevada Assembly the belies the use of “choice” by attacking pregnancy centers that do not perform or refer people for abortions by labelling them “deceptive” in that “health care” and “pregnancy” is presumed to be one and the same. It reads, in part:
- A health care facility shall not make or disseminate, or cause to be made or disseminated, to the public in any newspaper or other publication, in any advertising device, over the Internet or in any other manner a statement that the health care facility knows or should know is deceptive concerning any service that is or is not offered by the health care facility.
- For the purposes of subsection 1, a statement is deceptive if the statement includes, without limitation, assertions to mislead persons to believe that the health care facility provides a health care service that the facility does not actually provide.
The bill would empower the Attorney General, currently a Democrat planning to run for Governor in 2026 the power to punish a pro-life pregnancy center because they don’t offer “pregnancy” “healthcare” in the form of abortion services.
Even worse, it regulates (and restricts) the use of medication to specifically to stop or reverse the initial stages of an abortion, but not cause one.
Upon determining that prescribing, dispensing or administering a medication to stop or reverse an abortion meets generally accepted standards of the practice of medicine, the Board may, in consultation with the State Board of Osteopathic Medicine, State Board of Nursing and State Board of Pharmacy, adopt regulations authorizing a physician or physician assistant to prescribe, dispense or administer medication to stop or reverse an abortion. Any such regulations must specify:
(a) Each medication that a physician or physician assistant may prescribe, dispense or administer to stop or reverse an abortion; and
(b) The required procedures for prescribing, dispensing or administering a medication specified pursuant to paragraph (a) to stop or reverse an abortion.
It’s only a “choice” if you choose what they want you to choose.
The bill can be read here, or below: