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Breyer’s Pocket Constitution
Justice Breyer pulled out a pocket constitution at his White House appearance today. Turns out it was the copy that Justice Breyer received when he entered Harvard Law School in 1964. The copy is pristine — never opened, never thumbed through. None of the cases he heard at the Supreme Court ever required him to consult it. It will make a great exhibit in his museum display someday.
But to the shock of the audience, it turned out to be a living constitution. It leaped from the frail hands of the justice and went running around the room, nipping at the heels of the guests and reminding some of the dangerous, banished German shepherd Major.
To the relief of everyone and for the protection of the president, the Secret Service quickly removed the constitution from the room and the festivities resumed without further incident. The director of the Secret Service is considering whether the constitution will ever be allowed in the White House again, given the dangers it might pose.
Ambassador Nikki Haley believes America is the greatest country in the world, and she’ll tell you why. She thinks well of our society and people, while being clear that she has seen and experienced real racism and sexism and that socialism is making a troubling resurgence in popularity. In her account of her time in the Trump administration, Amb. Haley raises concerns, which she raised publicly while in office, about the arrogance of mere appointed officials, carrying no independent constitutional authority or accountability, while contending that the real Donald J. Trump is always willing to listen and respects respectful, professional, direct expressions of disagreement. Nikki Haley puts this all together in a slim, readable volume: With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace.
The 
Watching progressives analyze the 2016 election, I couldn’t help but recall the story of the young boy who undertook to experiment on a housefly. After offering the fly part of a cookie crumb, the young man then commanded, “Fly!” Well sir, the fly flew, circling the room and then landing back on the table in front of the boy, who then offered another cookie fragment as a reward. “Fly,” the boy again commanded, and again, the fly took to the air and circled the room before landing in the same location on the table. With a pair of tweezers, the child then pulled the fly’s wings off before again ordering it to “Fly!” But this time, the fly just stood there, prompting the lad to write in his little notepad: “When the fly’s wings are torn off, it goes deaf.”
“Scalability” problems arise in the context of certain kinds of manufacturing and industrial processes, as well as computer databases, start-up and growth-stage businesses, and some other kinds of complex systems. You can think of scalability in terms of Breaking Bad, which was basically a show about the problems and challenges of scalability. A high school chemistry teacher and his junkie wastrel former student attempt to scale up their boutique, small-batch blue meth business and turn it into a giant multinational conglomerate, while grappling with the attendant problems of production, distribution, administrative, financial, geographic and moral scalability. Hilarity and horror — in equal measure — ensue.
