How You Know You are Watching A Sci-Fi Movie

It turns out that Sci-Fi is not the most creative of genre's. There are several ways to tell you are watching a Sci-Fi movie:

6. There is a woman in command, or desiring to be.

5. There is a human-alien baby on the way.

4. The technical expert is a handicapped black guy.

3. The enemy first appears to be some hideous creature that was the result of experimentation, but in the end, the true enemy is corporate greed.

2. At the end of the show, there are only two survivors, a man and a woman, who started out at each other's throats, but are now romantically involved.

1. There is some actor who used to be famous working with a bunch of bad actors you have never heard of before.

Lowest Price Guarantee

You've heard those stupid commercials, "We will beat our competition's price or it's free!"

It is usually some loud-mouthed cheesy local merchant who is so overly excited about his product that he should be restrained and medicated. So, most of us just probably tune it out.

But if you stop and think about it for a second it becomes even more stupid (or is that stupider?).

Does anyone actually think they could get something free? "Our price is $100. Our competitor is selling it for $99. We can't afford to sell it for $99, so we have to give it away free." Yeah...right.

The Trouble with Precedent

In the debate surrounding the appointment of Roberts to the Supreme Court, there is a lot said about precedent. Indeed, it seems to be one of the fundamental arguments any time the courts come up in discussion.

The basic idea is that judges should respect the rulings of previous judges to help provide continuity of law and apply the law similarly to different cases. That all sounds good, except that precedent has been raised to such a level that it is treated as law itself.

Take the Roe vs. Wade decision, for example. It is often referred to as "the law of the land" or "settled law." In fact, it is not law at all. It is merely a court decision. The court cannot legitimately make law. So they play a semantic game and call it "precedent." Then they proceed to treat the precedent as the law of the land. If we had treated precedent so highly in the past, slavery would never have been abolished, since there was a Supreme Court decision validating it as legal.

The latest tactic of those who would transform our culture is to say that any judge that would go against precedent is an "activist judge" "legislating from the bench", a definition that is 180° from reality. Their oath is to the Constitution, the law, not to precedents of other men. By doing this, they have not just raised precedent to the level of law, but have actually superseded law with precedent. In such a world, the only true law is written as opinions from the bench.

A precedent is only as good as the logic in the original decision. And since the logic of so many court decisions are upside-down from the laws they claim to interpret, there needs to be a lot more questioning of those precedents. We need to return the law to the highest point.

Precedents must be evaluated in the light of the law, not the other way around.