Alito

Re: Uncle Sam

His recent behavior set off a teeny alarm in my lower brain stem. There's a L&O episode that bears directly on Uncle Sam's corruption. The DAs and the trial judge are at loggerheads for most of the episode, which culminates with the DAs, defendant's lawyer, trial judge, and Chief Administrative Judge meeting to hash out the conflict in the latter's office. It ends, more or less, with this exchange:

Judge Nathan Marks : You expect me to sit there like a lump, while he springs surprise witnesses? Half-baked appeals, revised indictments? To turn my courtroom inside out - to win a case he should have lost the first time! Chief Administrative Judge : Nathan - you're not supposed to care who wins, remember?

Ah, yes. Impartial jurisprudence.

God and Man

Well, we've lost another Rand acolyte. I can't say it upsets me.

The obit starts by ascribing to Boaz, "reasonable, radical libertarianism", an oxymoron if ever there were one.

"You learn the essence of libertarianism in kindergarten," he wrote in "Libertarianism: A Primer," a 1997 book that was updated and rereleased in 2015 as "The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom." "Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises."

Not too surprsingly, he actually favored the ultra version of Social Darwinism of those who're convinced that they are the uber menschen, and deserve to keep whatever they can steal and can waste The Commons without penalty.

Summing up his holistic view of individual liberty, Mr. Boaz told The Times in 1984, "I don't think it's any of the government's business to protect people from themselves, whether it's seatbelts, cyclamates or marijuana."

If so, then the law should be: if you get hurt by using/abusing any of these, or if your use of these hurts others, then in the former case you get only the remediation you can pay for from you own pocket, and in the latter case you pay to fix those you've hurt. If you can't you go directly to jail. In sum: there are externalities for most every act that humans do, and the libertarian should absolutely support forcing the individual to pay for their externalities. They don't.

Most of the bad things people do are bad largely because such behaviors impose costs on innocent others. Too bad libertarians don't care about those costs.

Church and State

David French is, by no means, my go-to guy in the NYT op-ed universe. Far from it. Which is why his recent essay hits home. So many homes.

There's been a running battle within the Southern Baptists for years over Purity, but not until this essay was I aware of similar within the Presbyterian flock. But, it ain't so simple: French deals with the PCA, which is not the majority/plurality sect here in the USofA. But, it is described as 'evangelical' in the wiki page.

So, what made me read French's essay? Well... he's feeling a bit of regret.

I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.

But, as he says: "The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination". One might wonder whether it is strongly in the lineage of most Presbyterians? That would be for another essay. According to the wiki list, the PCA isn't small within the Presbyterian orbit, actually among the largest sects, and there are many. One might surmise that they are of-a-mind with other evangelical Presbyterian sects with regard to The Orange Trickster and racism and such?

The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.
The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn't adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia.

If ya ain't White, ya ain't Right. Out of the mouth of The Orange Trickster.

Thought For The Day - 11 June 2024

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts go gaga whenever Project Veritas duped some left-leaning group. Now that Uncle Sam has been outed in spectacular fashiion, just with an unedited recording of his corruption; well that's so not fair. Eat shit and bark at the moon, motherfuckers.

Onan

So the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts in Congress have decided, yet again, to yank us back millennia, not mere centuries, with the blocking of the right to contraception. Note that it wasn't all that long ago (1965) that the Supremes said not getting knocked up was OK. Of course, Uncle Clarence and Alito and the rest want a mulligan on that.

What the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts won't admit is that the case of Onan from Genesis (if we make the wild-ass assumption that biblical texts are true histories of actual events - boy howdy), has been contorted by Them into a prohibition on contraception It ain't no such a ting.

Onan's crime is often misinterpreted to be masturbation but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

IOW, pull out, pull out!! We're gonna crash!!!

So, of course, what the hell is 'levirate marriage'? Back about 4000 BCE when the events of Genesis are asserted to have occurred, it meant that a guy was obligated to fuck his dead brother's wife. Now why would that be codified in a religion or society? My take: way back then there were a whole lot fewer folks on the Pale Blue Marble, who were constantly warring over resources, land, slaves, and such. Out fucking your neighbors was a Prime Directive. The need for soldiers and farmers and just surviving adults was the most important thing. No cunt should go to waste. This estimate puts global population at that time at 60-ish million. No refrigerators or iPhones or vibrators.

The ensuing years of much fucking puts us at ~8 billion mouths to feed, and a signficant depletion of arable resources with which to accomplish that. Dry fucking is a Good Thing, these days. Well, if you really, really want to leave your kids and grandkids and further more than just a burnt out cinder of a marble.

Thought For The Day - 4 June 2024

You've been following the kerfuffle around Carter and Clark, yes? It seems that the, mostly white and male and (not quite as dominant) straight, sports bloaviators have been busy doing what dey doo. Yes, Dawn Staley runs a thug basketball program. Yes, Carter is one such thug (although not of South Carolina). Yes, I expect Geno to hang up his spurs soon [guess not] because he 100% favors elegant hoops, and I expect he's had enough.

What's truly silly is that the white, male, straight girls' hoops pundits view Clark as the First Great White Hope for the WNBA!! The truth is that Geno has been churning them out for decades. Yes, the WNBA seems more gay than the general population, but who's counting? Breanna Stewart, aka Stewie, was a better player as a rookie than Clark, so far. So, all in all just get over it. What will kill pro girls' hoops is the thug version.

There is precedent, of course. There most always is. Consider the case of the NHL. Two or three decades ago, the old line, "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out!!", still rang true. Since then, and I don't know the weight of each, the influx of highly skilled (skating and stick) European players and league clamp down on fighting has turned pro hockey into a wonderous sport to watch. Scoring is a bit higher than soccer but much the same structurally, and thus much of the play is pointless, but it is fun to watch, and even the occasional viewer (just the playoffs for me, naturally) can, after a few games, get the trick to goal scoring. As they say, you never know when a defense will break, and the puck screams through the five hole.

If the WNBA continues on the road of 'rivalry' and 'confrontation' and such stupidity (Angel Reese), it becomes little different from Pro Rasstling. The NBA faces the same risk, although without the patina, so far as is commonly known, of LGBTQ. Play a skilled, elegant game and folks will watch. Go the way of Rasstling and only the sub-GED crowd will put it on the teeVee.

And, let us not forget McHale's clothesline of Rambus, and the entirety of Ron Artest. The NBA got over it, at least for a while. It seems to be heading into Rasstling land, as well. Too bad.

Stewart averaged 18.3 points per game, 9.3 rebounds per game and 1.8 blocks per game by the end of the 2016 season.
-- the wiki

[Clark] was awarded the WNBA's Rookie of the Month in May, averaging 17.6 points, 6.6 assists, and 5.1 rebounds per game during that month.
-- the wiki

By The Numbers - part the fifty fourth

From time to time, I have a look at the level of the Quabbin Reservoir, since it's the source of water for Boston and a rather significant number of neighboring towns (much of the territory inside 128). I do this so I can laugh at the stupidity of the MARF^™(party like it's 1115) crowd over-building in the Desert West; not just McMansions with endless lawns, but golf courses and semi-fabs, too. So, that's the table going back to 2005, and you'll see that the lowest level was 79.1% of capacity in 2017.

I grew up in the Western, aka Forgotten, part of the state through the mid 70s, and we (which is to say most of New England) had only one lengthy period of low water (as far back as records go, of course) from our reservoir (in the same general area as Quabbin, which also ran low) in the mid 60s.

Over a hundred years ago, people had the foresight to build really robust systems that are still in service today.
-- Josh Schimmel

Not like the MARF^™(party like it's 1115) crowd who prefer to take and waste, of course. I recall reading some Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts years ago complaining about what is now labeled DEI, and opining that if such continued, 'we'll all look like Brazilians!!', aka Beige. Funny thing is, those Desert West Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts have been doing the industrial equivalent of slash and burn for decades, just like Brazilians.