"Have you noticed that the left’s nightmare is a small town where everybody sees and comments on whatever you do..."

"... but they try to turn every place into a small town where everybody sees and comments on whatever you do?"

ADDED: And they love diversity, but they're hot to run you out of town for nonconformity.

Ronald Poppo, the cannibal's victim, the faceless man.

Video shows 3 bicyclists pedal past the naked cannibal attack. The attack goes on for 18 minutes.

I don't blame the bicyclists for not stopping to help. It would be heroic to stop, but getting away and calling 911 is all that is morally required. Do you disagree? I would not even stop long enough to figure out who was the one that needed help. Now, if the bicyclists casually observed the scene and moved on, that would be wrong.

There's also now an answer to the question I had: Why was the victim naked? The attacker, Rudy Eugene "pulls Poppo from the shade, strips off his pants and pummels him. He hunches over Poppo and appears to lie on top of him."

And here's an article about Poppo, whose sister thought he'd died years ago.

“I tried to reach him, and I just thought he killed himself,” she said. "We really thought he was no longer on this Earth."

So here was this poor, lost man. Before the attack, the word "faceless" could have been used figuratively to describe him. Now, having literally lost his face, he is famous. His face, in old photographs, is on the front page of the newspapers. What strange paradoxes. Lying in the street, with no one to care about him, he was suddenly "pull[ed]... from the shade" and into the bright light. He suffered a horrible attack, but before the attack, no one cared about him or gave him any thought at all. Now, everyone cares intensely about him. We want to know how he came to be lying there that day, how he suffered, whether he can be saved. The doctors and the nurses will lavish medical care upon him.

He lost nearly 80% of his face on Saturday when Rudy Eugene, 31, chomped away at his nose, eyes and face. He also lost one eye when it was gouged out, police said.

“He had his face eaten down to his goatee,” said Sgt. Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police. “The forehead was just bone. No nose, no mouth.”

The beard was not eaten. The crazed cannibal maintained possession of the sane person's distaste for hair? Perhaps when Poppo wandered the streets, that beard marked him as a homeless man, and outsider. And then the beard preserved a part of his face.

Antoinette remembered her sibling as “a very intelligent boy.”

“My mother always sent him to private schools, and I really don’t understand what happened,” Antoinette said....

He was remembered as a “nice guy” by his fellow classmates at Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious city school from which he graduated in 1964.

Stuyvesant isn't a private school, so it's hard to make sense of what the sister said. Maybe just that the place was exclusive. You have to do well on a difficult test to get in.

“The sad reality is there are many brilliant people who become schizophrenic and end up on the streets,” said a Stuyvesant classmate, Felix Freshwater, who became a pioneering plastic surgeon in Miami.

Now 65, Poppo used to sleep on a cardboard box across the street from the crime scene, often listening to a small radio, a homeless man named Andrew told the Daily News.

“He didn’t mess with anyone, and he seemed like a very educated man,” Andrew said.

Very sad.  I hope it's some consolation to the poor man that, after all these years, people do care about him. Here are some more details about medical treatment. The injuries are not life threatening, but the human mouth is full of germs, so the worst danger is infection:

[R]ebuilding of Poppo's face would happen in stages after doctors try to keep his wounds clean, salvage viable tissue and determine a plan for skin grafts. Protecting his remaining eye and maintaining an airway are priorities.

To keep the wounds clean, doctors use grafts of the patient's skin, cadaver skin or synthetic skin to cover the exposed bone or cartilage, said Dr. Blane Shatkin, a plastic surgeon and director of the wound healing center at Memorial Hospital Pembroke in South Florida....

"You would not just take this guy to the OR for a face transplant — you really have to go in a staged fashion. You save what you can and use what you have available first, don't burn any bridges and move forward slowly," Shatkin said. "And you have to see what he wants."

Psychological care is important to the recovery, and patients need to participate in the decision-making process, said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He performed a facial transplant on a Connecticut woman who was mauled by a friend's pet chimpanzee in 2009.

"I think the patient has to be able to cope with the injury and the trauma and needs to figure out what has happened. It often takes them weeks to understand what has happened," Pomahac said.

They have a man who hasn't coped with ordinary life, but he had his survival-level life on the streets for 30 years. In that, he's not much like the chimpanzee victim, abruptly thrown from ordinary life into abnormal life.

"The part I struggle with is how you undo two years worth of implementation..."

"It would leave tremendous uncertainty about what is the direction we’re going in and that uncertainty would obviously affect the patients directly."

Consider the argument — featured in the NYT — that it's too late to strike down Obamacare, because so much work and planning and money has already been sunk into implementing it. And yet some experts say that the"important dialogue that has happened over the last three and a half years" will make it "easier for Congress or the states to revisit the issue."

IN THE COMMENTS: John Althouse Cohen said:

Isn't there also an argument that the case isn't ripe yet because no one has been harmed? So it must be either too early or too late for the law to be struck down.

The big week of Obamacare oral arguments begins with "the most boring jurisdictional stuff one can imagine."

It's like "a kind of practical joke that the court is playing on the public," says Paul Clement (who represents the 26 states that are challenging the law). (Personal note: I teach the law school course Federal Jurisdiction, and this "anti-injunction" topic — by chance — is up for discussion this week.)

In the Supreme Court, the administration suggested that the justices appoint an outside lawyer to argue that the [Anti-Injunction Act] bars the challenges. The justices asked Robert A. Long to do so, and he goes first on Monday.... Mr. Long says the 1867 law is “jurisdictional,” meaning it forbids courts to hear suits even if, as here, neither side objects....

In the health care law, Congress called the required payment a penalty rather than a tax. But the penalty is contained in the Internal Revenue Code, and the health care law says it is to be “assessed and collected in the same manner” as a tax....

[Solicitor General Donald B.] Verrilli’s argument that the penalty is not a tax for purposes of the 1867 law is in potential tension with one he will make on Tuesday, that the mandate was authorized not only by Congress’s power under the commerce clause but also by its power to levy taxes.

It's not a tax whenever you don't want it to be, and it is when you do. That's the administration's argument! And that's what the NYT — in the linked article by Adam Liptak — calls "potential tension." (Cue the comments: This is why people hate lawyers.)

Mr. Verrilli argues that the name that Congress gave the payment required for violating the mandate in the health care law —a penalty, not a tax — matters for purposes of the 1867 law but is irrelevant in connection with the constitutional taxing power, where “it is the practical operation of the provision, not its label, that controls.”

See how easy it is to dissipate the tension? Why, it's an orgasm of tension relief! The old law refers to things designated a "tax," but Congress chose not to call the penalty a "tax." To call it a tax would have further inflamed the political opposition to the health care bill. Now that the bill has passed, however, we can coolly examine what it really is, and what it really is is what counts when the question is whether Congress has an enumerated constitutional power. It really is a tax, so it's within Congress's power to tax. That's the argument.

Isn't it fascinating how everything works to bulk up the power of Congress? Congress built political support by not saying tax when the bill was up for a vote, and it claims constitutional power by saying tax at the point when the Court is analyzing the bill after it is passed. What's most frustrating about this it's-not-a-tax-it-is-a-tax turnabout it that when the Court interprets Congress's powers, it exercises restraint, deferring to the political process, because that's where policy decisions are properly made. But  it was at the political, policy-deciding stage where Congress hid the reality of this massive new TAX.

But today is only about the Anti-Injunction Act, and it's key that the challenge is to the requirement that everyone buy health insurance and not just to the penalty that is imposed on those who don't meet the requirement. The requirement isn't a tax, even if the penalty is a tax. But it seems that the Taxing Power argument depends on the characterization that all we really have here is a tax, that the mandate is actually nonexistent. As I was saying the other day, that makes a lot of sense: The penalty is so small in relation to the cost of buying insurance that the requirement operates merely to define who owes the tax.

And yet, when Congress was passing the bill, the people never understood it that way. It was utterly hidden under an incomprehensible mass of text and propaganda. There was no transparency. It rankles to think that Congress could acquire this dramatic power by a monumental political deception. But will this shake the Court out of its usual position of comfy restraint? Perhaps we'll get a hint of an answer today, as the Justices react to the lawyerly contortions around the Anti-Injunction Act.

"5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)."

You already know what they are going to be, don't you? It's interesting to be able to think something while simultaneously knowing the opposite.

Perhaps that's a capacity that will make you happy.  And that might explain this.

The phony Catch-22 of conservative commentary.

"Unless you are wise and scrupulous, your efforts to debunk the popular mythos will only result in your ostracism and the diminution of your influence."

Dyslexia — "a bias in favor of the visual periphery" — is also an aptitude at grasping the whole picture quickly.

But:

Whatever special abilities dyslexia may bestow, difficulty with reading still imposes a handicap. Glib talk about appreciating dyslexia as a “gift” is unhelpful at best and patronizing at worst.

So then... the expression "differently abled" can only be used patronizingly. Because if you really meant it, that would be patronizing!

An amazing paradox!

10 Principles of Modern Design...

... from Dieter Rams (who was chief of design for Braun — the German manufacturer — from 1961 to 1995).

Oddly, I came away feeling that the 10 principles were all the same, and if that principle was simple functionality, the make that one thing into 10 is a violation of the principle itself. But then Rams wasn't purporting to dictate the principles of website content, so there really is no paradox.

It's not Lady Gaga unseating Oprah that disturbs me. It's Elton John and Bon Jovi in the top 10.

"The World's Most Powerful Celebrities"... according to Forbes.

We need better celebrities! It was bad enough back in the 80s when Elton John and Bon Jovi were the celebrities we had to settle for. But here they are. Still "powerful," whatever that means. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I really got the wrong impression of the speed of the flow of new celebrities into the popular culture.

Maybe this is why time has seemed to go faster as we (Baby Boomers) have gotten older. Or do you think it should be a reason why things should appear to be going slower? When nothing's happening and you're bored, time does seem to go slower. But uneventfulness also makes long stretches of time look shorter. It's a paradox. The paradox of the puzzling persistence of Bon Jovi and Elton John.

"There are many dimensions of opinion, such as people who think opinion is 2-sided and people who do not."

"People who think the previous sentence is a fascinating paradox and people who find it annoying."

"Reasonable gun control is one thing, this another. Chicago requires 1 hour on range for handgun permit but bars ranges."

A tweet, cited in a legal brief.

And all the nerds ask, what citation form was used? Answer: www.twitter.com/ adamwinkler, Aug. 16, 2010, 3:18 p.m. (citation omitted) (last visited Sept. 26, 2010). Is that properly Bluebooked?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor says: "the problem with every test is that you can find an exception that makes the application ridiculous."

Doesn't that just make you want to think of a rule that does not require an exception to avoid ridiculousness? Then aren't you intrigued by the paradox that you will have just come up with an exception to her rule (about the need for exceptions to avoid ridiculousness), and that will simultaneously support and undercut her rule?

Or you can just think about whether there should be a clear test for determining a corporation's "principal place of business" for the purposes of §1332 diversity jurisdiction or whether it would be better to use a multi-factor approach?