There is a proposal to award medals for “Courageous Restraint.”

Really?

To paraphrase Patton: No dumb poor bastard won a war with courageous restraint; he won a war by making the other dumb poor bastard being courageously restrained.

Is that really the behavior we want to encourage in our military? I didn’t even join the military — where’s my medal for courageous restraint?

We should instead encourage more productive behavior — like maybe a medal for “Courageous Face-Shooting.” That’s a medal you get for shooting lots of the enemy in the face. I’m pretty sure that’s more along the lines of how you win a war; at least, it works really well in Call of Duty.

Glenn Greenwald actually stumbled onto a pretty telling point: When conservatives put up Supreme Court nominees, those nominees don’t have any problem talking about the conservative agenda of being a strict constructionalist. When liberals put up a nominee, that nominee does everything he or she can to keep from talking about her judicial philosophy. Has any liberal nominee ever actually said, “I’m just going to make stuff up based on what I think is right so we can avoid that whole democracy thing on my pet causes.” That’s what all the liberals judges do, but they know not to say it because all that will do is enrage the average American.

To the average American, they don’t know any other way to treat the Constitution than being a strict constructionalist. It says what it means and that doesn’t change. You don’t act like Nicolas Cage and find some hidden code in the Constitution and say, “It looks like the Founding Father hid gay marriage in here all along!” But liberals know their ideas are hated and they are never going to be able to pass an amendment, so they’ve made this whole bizarro world legal philosophy where black is white, up is down, and there is no individual right to firearms despite the Constitution explicitly saying so. This all seems very smart to them but very moronic to everyone else, and they’re at least conscious enough of that fact to try and seem normal in confirmation hearings.

It’s hard to find people with the humility to just read what’s there in the law and not strive to be that famous judge who made up popular new rights. I really the think the Supreme Court was the least well thought out part of the Constitution. Here’s my suggestion for an extra check and balance: Have that any Justice who is found to have just made stuff up be executed for treason. While maybe we need extra smart people to write all those opinions no one but other law professors read, any idiot can tell when a judge just totally made something up that isn’t anywhere mentioned in the Constitution. And altering the Constitution like that is pretty much treason, so execution. So, judges, make sure you very carefully explain exactly where in the Constitution (and not anywhere else) your opinion came from, and that answer can’t always be “the Commerce Clause.”

A UN report says that a third of animals in the world are at risk of extinction. I’m not sure why, but I’m guessing it has to do with the environment. The environment has been nothing but trouble since we discovered it.

So, should we be worried? I’m not so sure. In this economy, we’re running out of money and resources, so maybe it’s time to start looking into doing some harsh cuts on the flora and fauna. A third seems like a lot, but have you ever looked at all the types of animals out there? Most of the species you’ve probably never even heard of. It really seems like the number of species in this world is a place we could afford to do some cuts. Like, do you know we have four types of echidnas? Exactly how many different kinds of egg-laying, spiny anteaters do we need? I’m going to go with zero.

So instead of freaking out any time a species is about to go extinct, we need to ask ourselves: “Do we actually need that animal for anything, or is it just taking up space and hogging resources?”