The US Supreme Court is going out of its way not to make significant decisions. In almost every major case of the last year, they have chosen to limit their decisions to borderline issues, then tossing the matter back to the district and appeals courts for further comment without examining the basic issue under discussion.
Compare this with Brown v. Board of Education [1954], that ended segregation in schools, under chief justice Earl Warren. Under Roberts, the current Supreme Court is an example of having a chief justice with no real backbone. He’s a swing vote, true – but how does a Chief Justice become just a swing vote?
Coney Barrett is a true swing vote who responds to her concept of what the law demands. That has pissed off Lump, but it is exactly what was said of her when she was nominated. Her religious peculiarities have masked this, but whether I agree with her decisions or not [as in most cases], I do see her following her view of the law, not of politics.
Neither the Roe or Dobbs decisions – nor any decision on abortion or other major health issues – should be decided by the courts, but by the medical community. But what happens when the entire social outlook is corrupted? Who is left to decide?
There’s no obvious or unequivocally true way to determine this, and if the administration decides to defy the courts and ignore the Constitution, what can those concerned effectively do?
Very little, immediately, but I trust in the youth of the world [not just this country] to form the new basis, once they see how fucked up the current situation is for their and coming generations.
There are no eternal truths, so how do we or they build a working middle truth? What do we pick as our guide or as our goal? And why should we do so – is it imperative to have a commanding vision?
At the highest level, there is no arbitrator, no basis for a universal set of ethics outside specific religious mandates. Decisions have to be made on the basis of what works to what ends.There is only fallible humanity, ever in the midst of its failed social evolution.
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Dream #6 (lucid)
A bunch of us are celebrating in a little restaurant, but I’m not feeling connected to anyone. Then they all leave and I am walking alone near 40th and Market Sts. in Philly (an area where many of my dreams take place). Someone I vaguely know gets out of a car. He’s wearing a tophat, has massive curly hair and a clown-like mouth, like Richard Basehart in La Strada.
We start walking together, odd stuff happening around us, and I mention it’s like my dreams. I reach down and feel the wet grass and say it’s all too real for a dream. A little later, the street ahead becomes an alley or a pathway, and I say, “Oh damn, it is a dream.” From then on, he and I talk about it being a dream.
I try to stay on the main roads, which keep changing to the lanes where I always get lost in my dreams. I turn 90 degrees, trying to find a way out of the dream, becoming pissed that I can’t turn it off.
Along the way, I invite him to visit us some time, then we talk about the fact he can’t do that because he isn’t real and has no way to talk to the real person he represents.
By this point, he’s become stocky, short-haired, with glasses, and I wonder why the dream would do that. I climb over a wall into an open area with low stone mounds a bit like gravestones, though it’s obviously not a graveyard. As I turn toward the street, a woman (my wife? my ex-wife?) comes up and tells me her father is dead and I need to come with her.
This is the trigger to wake up.
I started having lucid dreams only a few years ago, and never another one with such open discussion of it being a dream.
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Got the top of my head removed last week… well, a half-inch circle that included the whatever it is lump that’s the problem and likely cancerous [haven’t got a report back on the biopsy, but it doesn’t concern me much]. The lancing lady gave Linda a bunch of sophisticated bandages to change every 2 to 3 days – since I can’t get a clear view of the top of my head to do it myself – that include some newfangled collagen-infused gunk that teaches the cells around the edge of the circle how to regenerate the missing center. I really, really like this woman, one of the few medics at any level who seems genuinely concerned not just with some indefinite “patient welfare,” but with treating the patient as an individual human being. Great fun to joke with while she was prying my scalp loose.
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Ad slogan for the Bob Hope’s invention of a water-filled bra:
“Tanks… for the mammaries”
lickhaven 