Via Instapundit, here's ThreeBadFingers with a transcript of a talk given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He comes across (to me!) as straightforward and funny, and he clearly explains his philosophy of Constitutional interpretation. There's also an undercurrent of begging for help -- almost as if he's saying "Don't force on me this job of making moral decisions; I didn't come here to do that. Give me a court full of originalists and we will fairly interpret the text of the Constitution and laws, and take back the moral aspects of lawgiving -- put them in the legislature where they belong!"

Here are my favorite quotes:

Though I’m a law and order type, I can not do all the mean conservative things I would like to do to this society. You got me.

The Bill of Rights is devised to protect you and me against, who do you think? The majority. My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk.

What a calm and sensible fellow that Eugene Volokh is. First, he puts forward his belief that criminals who commit particularly heinous crimes should be executed in a particularly heinous fashion; then he responds to his critics with calm and reason; finally he publicly retracts his original position and credits the critics who changed his mind.

I'm perpetually torn on the question of capital punishment. On the one hand, it disturbs me that capital punishment is something the US has in common with states like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. When I was in Lithuania I visited the former KGB headquarters, now turned into a museum/research facility for people who are looking for traces of their missing relatives. At that point I was completely viscerally convinced that capital punishment should be abolished in the US.

But on the other hand, when I look at individual cases where capital punishment has been applied -- like McVeigh or Kaczynski or even the Rosenbergs -- I have to concede that capital punishment is sometimes appropriate. And if I were on a jury for one of those cases, I would probably decide for capital punishment.

But I still don't like the idea that there is an employee of the state whose job title includes "executioner." And I am pleased that Eugene backed away from his initial position in support of adding another title to that -- "torturer". I don't think it belongs in our society.

This week had last EV1s being crushed, and a fuel cell motorcycle being announced. The turning of a tide?

There were a couple interesting points in the article, eg questions as to whether GM could legally crush a vehicle on which taxpayers have paid an incentive. The idea is the taxpayer is buying something, a public good in avoided emissions which they will receive over the life of the vehicle, so premature scrapping of the vehicle destroys something that the public has already paid for. Seems like a good argument against incentives, better to just tax emissions. There was also more shots fired in the argument over how many customers there were. I have to admit that I believe neither side in the battle. GM's arguments for scrapping the rest (safety, reliability, liability, availability of spares) would apply just as well to a '55 'Vette, yet somehow GM never felt the need to collect and crush all of them. And the EV1 is, by all accounts, a quite nice example of a vehicle based on lead-acid technology. Acceleration and handling like a Ferrari, fast enough for the open highway, gas up free for life, decent range (for an EV). There were mistakes, eg the inductive charger paddle, which certainly looks cool, but you can carry a lot more current through a metal-on-metal contact, which is important if you want to gas up quick. The styling is also questionable: if you're going for sports car performance and parameters (2 seater), you should probably look and be priced like one. The Venturi avoids these problems.

Fuel cells, I dunno. That bike isn't on the market, it's just a prototype, and it's certainly not the first prototype fuel cell two-wheeler (Aprilia, Honda, ...). Fuel cells would be nice if: you've got lots of hydrogen, and found a way to store it, and you somehow got the cost down to less than that of my house. Advocates assure the public that prices will soon drop, and perhaps they will. But to me, a fuel cell looks a lot like a battery, except that it's made out of platinum, and battery prices certainly don't drop by 50% every year like silicon chips. Plus they are underpowered (note the 1 kW fuel cell on a 6 kW bike, except that the 6 kW sustained bike can eat twice that for short periods under load), so you need batteries anyway.
If you like the concept, though, they aren't that hard to build. If you want to build one yourself, start with a battery electric bike. Buy an Etek off of Ebay (~$300), it's a clone of the Lemco used in the bike in the article. The controller will be maybe $1000. Batteries will depend on your donor bike, your expectations, and your budget. It'll be < $1000 for lead-acid, up to something like 10x for lithium. Add a fuel cell later to slow charge your batteries. Or add an ICE generator.