Al Franken's opening statement from yesterday's Supreme Court confirmation hearing. About midway through Franken makes our terms clear when he calls out the real judicial activists. Franken oh-twelve?

Happy Canada Day. Let's celebrate with links.

* SEK considers Infinite Summer's weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary "generations." Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I've decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I've caught up to where I'm supposed to already be in the book.

* "Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial": just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.

* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world's least-fun summer camp.

* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here's Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.

* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.

* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)

* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it's been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I'm glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel's Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.

* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:

"Something worked very well," said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.

Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They've all got a few stories like this," he said. "Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call 'statistically improbable' cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it's not the only one."

Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to "be the Doubting Thomas," but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.

What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely "statistically improbable" from what is "genuinely miraculous"?

Excitement on the SCOTUS beat as the Court overturns the lower court Ricci decision in a 5-4 vote along the usual partisan breakdown. Since Sonia Sotomayor had been part of the Second Circuit's upholding of the original decision, now overturned, this decision will undoubtedly receive a lot of attention even beyond the usual contentiousness that surrounds affirmative action. I haven't followed the case closely enough to say much of anything about it—and to be fair it sounds like an especially hard case—though my gut reaction to any 5-4 decision from the Roberts court closely matches this take from conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru in the New York Times:

The debates on these issues are highlighting a deep inconsistency in the way my fellow conservatives approach race and the law. Many conservatives oppose Judge Sotomayor’s nomination because she does not appear to support originalism, the notion that legal texts, including the Constitution, should be interpreted according to the meaning that the informed public assumed them to have when they became law. We argue as well that judges should try to overcome the biases of their backgrounds in the name of self-restraint. But when it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint.

Where Ponnuru and I differ, of course, is in his belief that originalism as a judicial philosophy has any useful content whatsoever. I don't think it does; as I've said before, it's a rhetorical strategy, not a method, deployed when convenient and passed over when not.

I've decided to radically alter every aspect of my life from diet to exercise to procrastinative laziness, beginning today. Let's start with some blogging.

* I'm with Alex Greenberg: why were judges ever allowed to rule on cases concerning major campaign contributors? For that matter, why are jurisdictions still electing their judges? It's nuts.

* Also on the legal front: I'm beginning to suspect that "judicial activism" is just an empty buzzword designed to discredit court decisions the right-wing doesn't like.

* Almost seventy percent of Americans support allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military. What the hell is Obama waiting for?

* George Dvorsky on the top ten existential movies of all time. (Thanks, Bill!) It's a good list, but when your top ten list of existentialist film is missing The Seventh Seal it's time to consider whether limiting yourself to English-language film was a wise choice.

* Blogging wasteland: According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled. (Thanks, Steve!)

* Kids today have it easy; in my day, we had send professors corrupted files we'd made ourselves. And what happened to pretending to forget to attach the document? Too low-tech for you?

* 'Manufactured Controversy': A new report by Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of groups opposed to David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" and similar measures, argues that the entire movement is built on false premises and is designed to attack higher education.

* Enjoyed this from Boing Boing: lecture from Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky on evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality, arguing by analogy to sickle cell that schizophrenia is the hypertrophic result of genes that in isolation reward their holder with feverous religious certainty. I've become increasingly skeptical of attempts to map every feature of human existence onto genomic evolutionary pressure—and Sapolsky's lecture is much more speculative than empirical—but it's an interesting notion.

We're gonna need a bigger meme: Clarence Thomas and empathy, Samuel Alito and empathy.

I had no idea Republicans were nominating so many activist judges.