Tuesday’s Theme Music
Mood: recoffeefied
Tuesday, July 2, 2024, begins with a cool breeze talking to me as quiet coddles the area and black coffee takes my throat. It’s a peaceful and relaxed moment, diametrically opposed to the world exposed on the world wide web.
The cats are fed. They washed themselves and bedded down in outside locations for a while. It’s 70 F as I write but the expectation is for an 88 degrees F high. Sunshine is ruling without much challenge from clouds, and it’s a blue, unscathed sky.
My ankle is improving. Most striking to me is how it felt as I walked. Slightly off-balance and hitched to me, others often said, “You don’t seem to be limping.” Maybe they didn’t see it but I felt it. Yesterday was the first time that I felt like I walked using my usual stride.
Also, received my blood test results, and they all look good. Nothing worried my PCP, so nothing is worrying me.
I have been reading political news, especially concerning the qualified immunity bullshit being ladled on Donald Trump by the Roberts Supreme Court. If the GOP wins in 2024 and Trump is POTUS again, a lot of bad shit will probably go down in the U.S. I mean, much of it already began under his first efforts to undermine progress. Then the SCOTUS issued its Dobbs ruling and stripped women of their right to decide what to do when pregnant. Right wing states piled on. So, if the GOP wins, history will write that the Roberts Supreme Court was a noble instrument in guiding the United States to a benevolent theocracy ruled by a Christian white patriarchy.
But if the Democrats prevail, the Roberts Supreme Court will be called out as corrupt and misguided. Honestly, look at how these self-professed conservative originalists pulled immunity for the POTUS out of their asses. Where in the fucking U.S. Constitution does it say anything about the POTUS enjoying qualified immunity? Nor does it address abortion, but these right-wing miscreants are as hypocritical and unethical as anything ever seen in any nation in the last two hundred years. Yes, I have little faith in them.
I agree with Robert Hubbell’s assessment, that we — progressives, like the progressives who started the nation — will eventually prevail. He wrote, “My only hopeful comment is that the decision is so bad it will not stand. Like Dred Scott (enslaved people are not citizens and not entitled to judicial protections), Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding segregation), Koramatsu v US (upholding the Japanese internment camps), today’s decision will be overturned and remembered as a mark of shame on the Roberts Court.”. Then he opened his comments section for anyone to weigh in. There are some solid, re-affirming comments in there. Some uplifting, motivating comments. If you need a kick of positive energy, as I did, go to his site and read some. They’ll help.
Just as a final aside on that, I’ll mention that besides the three rulings that R. Hubbell listed, I’ll include the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a decision that will someday be overturned as wrong and another mark of shame on the Roberts Court. May that day come soon.
For today’s music, I’ve turned to the late Tom Petty. “I Won’t Back Down” came out in 1989, while I was stationed and living in Germany with the U.S. Air Force. I immediately took to the song and its declarations.
Well I know what’s right
I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin’ me around
But I’ll stand my ground
And I won’t back down
h/t to Genius.com
The song is filling my morning mental music stream (Trademark immune), and it’s a good thing.
Be positive, stay strong, and Vote Blue in 2024. Coffee has rehabilitated my brain, so here’s the music. Cheers
Monday’s Theme Music
Mood: bumgry (bummed out and angry; could be depgry – depressed and angry)
Julying if you say you didn’t realize June was over. Yes, that’s a feeble attempt at levity.
It’s July 1, 2024, and Monday, a day which will go do in infamy, perhaps, with the SCOTUS rulings. It’s 70 F now, sunny under a preternatural blue sky sky, and feels like 82. Today’s high will crank us into the mid 80s. But we’re sailing into the hundreds by mid week and then look at residing in the upper 90s thereafter. Little relief will come at night as temps hang around the neighborhood of high sixties to low 70s. This will be a bake off.
Over to the SCOTUS ruling on Trump’s immunity, it was as bad as Democrats fucking feared. The skewering of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights continues under MAGA Republican influence. Depressing as hell to witness this, to be part, unable to do much except vote and protest. I continue to blame Mitch McConnell for manipulating Senate procedures and blocking Democratic nominees to the Supreme Court. I hope he rots in fucking hell.
I’m just full of bellyaches today. No wonder that I have Talking Heads and “Road to Nowhere” from 1985 in my morning mental music stream (Trademark sent down).
Coffee has been consumed. Here’s the music. Enjoy the “joyful look at doom.” See you later.
Friday’s Wandering Thoughts
On a whim, I looked up an old film, Kelly’s Heroes. A tale of American soldiers in WWII and their efforts to steal NAZI gold from a French bank behind German lines, it starred Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Carroll O’Connor, and Donald Sutherland, with several other names in supporting roles. While it was released in 1970, it was based on a Guiness Book of World Records entry on ‘the greatest train robbery’ in history. The 1984 book, Nazi Gold — The Sensational Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery — and the Greatest Criminal Cover-Up by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, tells the whole story.
I never knew. And now I do.
Wednesday’s Theme Music
Mood: Sumstalgia
Another lovely summer morning has slide into place. We shall call it, “Rumplestiltskin”. Naw, we’ll stick to the usual boring but useful process and call it Wednesday, June 26, 2024. Like many a newborn, it’ll be marked but what happens during its short life.
It’s 65 F now and the cats are cooling it in favorite cooling-it spots after eating brekkie. 81 F may tempt the temp measuring devices but the weather cards tell us it ain’t s’posed to be too hot today. My breakfast of kumquats, blueberries, passion fruit, almonds, brazil nuts, and a bagel has been consumed, and I’m loading coffee into my system as cool breezes gambol in through the windows.
Two songs are occupying the morning mental music stream (Trademark refreshed). Snippets of one entertain the neurons, and then the other pops in. One song is “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fightin'”, an Elton John song of some repute. It was featured in a dream where I was playin’ the six-stringed instrument and singing it, performing for a packed place. I had strikingly huge arms in this dream, and kept looking at them in mirrors from different angles, thinkin’, “Boy, that looks strange.” With those aspects all that’s remembered of the dream, it deserves a prefix like ‘mini’ or adejctive like ‘brief’ before it.
The other song has some Sting softly songing “I want my MTV,” and then those drums and other things start up and we go full-fledged into the Dire Straits hit, “I Want My MTV”. MTV offered memoriable shows and ideas but now it’s a fading phenom as MTV.com now says ‘that page does not exist.’
Started in 1981, I was on Okinawa during its early years. I was familiar with it because a friend and co-worker had friends recording MTV for him and sending the videos to him so he could watch them on VHS while he rode an exercise bike in his living room. I watched a little but became bored sitting there as they tried to entertain us with music news and music videos. Many videos were interesting but it didn’t induce me into wanting to waste the day watching them.
Of course, MTV gave us Comedy Central, which begat “The Daily Show”, which often saved us when faced with political insanity.
The first music video played on MTV was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. But the second was Pat Benatar with “You Better Run” so that’s our theme music today.
Stay strong and be positive. Let’s freshen the coffee and start rolling this day up the hill. Vote Blue in 2024. Here’s the music. Cheers
The Basis for Law
A good friend of mine, Herb, is a retired Yale professor. Hailing from Louisiana, he also has a lifetime of passionate progressive activism behind him. As part of his next act, he’s trying to help establish an online local news, Ashland.news, working with a handful of others. In accordance with that activity, he also publishes opinion pieces.
This week, Herb took on his home state’s misguided efforts to post the ten commandments in every school classroom. Louisiana proponents of that effort claim that the ten commandments are the basis of law in the United States. Without saying, poppycock, Herb points out that isn’t so, focusing on the Supreme Court building to help establish his point. It’s not a long article and I invite you to read it, but these are the gist of Herb’s position.
I would welcome opposition to publicly sponsored display of the Ten Commandments on historical and moral as well as Constitutional grounds. I would (and now will) argue that as a code of justice the Ten Commandments are rudimentary, and they were not especially formative of U.S. law.
In a National Public Radio interview, Dodie Horton, who sponsored the mandatory display bill in the Louisiana senate, contended, “Our laws are based on the Ten Commandments. In fact, without them, a lot of our laws would not exist.” Which laws might she mean (the interviewer didn’t ask)? It needs no voice from a thundercloud to teach us not to murder, steal or bear false witness. No society can tolerate such actions because they destroy social cohesion.
Hebrew society wasn’t even the first to write down these prohibitions. The Code of Ur-Nammu antedates the Book of Exodus by at least a millennium. In it, murder, rape, robbery and adultery are capital crimes. A somewhat later and more famous Mesopotamian code, ascribed to Hammurabi, has 282 laws and regulations addressing a wide range of social and economic interactions. A portrait of Hammurabi in marble relief is included in the frieze on the south wall of the U.S. Supreme Court chamber.
The figures in that frieze and its continuation on the north wall point to the many sources of our laws. Reading the south frieze left to right: Menis (from ancient Egypt), Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus (ancient Sparta), Solon and Draco (ancient Athens), Confucius and Augustus Caesar. Reading the north frieze from left to right: Justinian, Muhammed, Charlemagne, King John (because he signed the Magna Carta), Louis IX, Hugo Grotius, William Blackstone, John Marshall and Napoleon.
We don’t have legal documents from all these figures, but most of them represent legal developments that were formative for us. Pace Ms. Horton, were there no Ten Commandments, our laws would look no different than they are, but they are unimaginable without the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), the codification of Roman law under the auspices of the 6th century CE Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. An even more formative influence was William Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” of the 18th century. It’s the best-known description of the doctrines of the English common law, which developed separately from Roman law.
If Republicans were more interested in facts instead of myths, they would know the facts as Herb laid them out. Unfortunately, they’re too busy suborning the U.S. Constitution and its foundations and forcing their religion on everyone else to bother learning facts.
Old History
When the Humans had finally done so much to anger the rest of the Universe’s civilizations, they were relocated. The small solar system which was now home to Humans had few planets and was part of a Forbidden Realm. Magic was cast over it to keep the Humans from leaving the solar system. Magic also kept them from communicating with others.
But worse things were done to Humanity. They were stripped of learning about their heritage. As far as they knew, they’d always existed on the third rock from the sun. Perhaps, though, the most malignant curses put on Humanity gave them a short life span and aged them quickly. Then, finally, they were kept from knowing the truth about death.
So it would be until the Forbidden Realm was breached and another race came to Earth. Unless Why could stop them.
Happy Anniversary!
June 16th, as Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, is the anniversary of the Watergate break-in of 1972. She provides a succinct recap of that time in history. President Nixon was eventually impeached for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress, and and then resigned before he could be tried, blaming the press on the way out. Then she brings it home to May 30, 2024, when Former President Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 criminal counts by a jury of his peers, confirming that no one is above the law.
Ms Richardson is a strong writer and that recap comes at a needed time. While the Supreme Court wrestles with the question of Presidential immunity and Trump’s supporters insist that his prosecution was politically motivated, this history lesson reminds us that we’ve wrestled this dragon before.
Monday’s Theme Music
Mood: sprummery
Today’s lifestyle is delivered to you by Monday. “Monday: always the best way to start a week.”sp
It’s 68 F and June 10, 2024. Continuing the sprummerish lead up to summer, we expect a high of 87 F. The sky presents no signs that 87 F won’t happen. Clouds are boycotting the area morning. The bluest skies are clear above the southern forested pinnacles.
I was reading the Frank Luntz piece about undecided voters and how Trump’s 34 guilty verdicts affected their voting decision. I was struck by the fact that several blamed it on President Biden. Makes no kind of fucking sense in a sane world. But to further the insanity, they suggested, what if Trump appeals his decision and wins that appeal?
Yes, quite a ‘what if’ idea, isn’t it? But it needled me to think, well, Jesus, if President Biden is so powerful that he can influence a state’s legal system and find twelve citizens that he somehow forces to call a guilty verdict, why in the world would this powerful individual not also have the appeals system sewn up? Because anyone with a tenth of an active working brain knew that Trump would appeal if found guilty. So that avenue would need to be covered, too.
Of course, several of these geniuses also speculated that it’s not much of a crime and that ‘they had been out for Trump’ since 2016.
Idiots.
Glad to get that rant out of my blood.
Also, to those who thought that they were ‘out to get Trump’, have you not followed Trump’s legal issues for the past forty years or more? Really, can you wake up and think a little?
Of course, one individual also kept saying, “It’s about the economy for me,” and was worried about inflation. He should really read some history about how we arrived at our current price levels.
Relating to nothing, BTW, did you see the news that Target, Aldi, Walgreens, and other retaillers were announcing price cuts because heir high prices were driving away customers? Really makes me fucking wonder how and why they’re suddenly able to announce that, hmmm?
Today’s music comes by way of a dream. I was awake at 5:27 this morning. Don’t know what awoke me. After hearing what sounded like four small-caliber gunshots, I checked on my floofs. Tucker was in but Papi was out on the back patio. He seemed to be watching something invisible to me but rushed in as soon as the door was ajar. As far as the shots go, morning silence resumed as if it’d never happened.
So back to bed I went, and to a dream. As I remembered it, I recalled that there was a comment made by my sister-in-law. We were at her wedding. She was marrying a guy I’d never met. Weirdly she was really tall, towering over me by about thirty inches. Anxious to get out of there, she said, “I want this done. I’m worried about the weather. Remind me to tell Becky (her daughter), I need to get through everything before the weekend.”
Okay. I brooded on that a bit, but The Neurons launched 10,000 Maniacs with “Like the Weather” from 1988 into the morning mental music stream (Trademark under the weather). I found this lovely live version. Such a mellow and reflective song.
Got my coffee soothing The Neurons. Stay positive, be strong, and Vote Blue in 2024 for a saner, cleaner world. Here’s the music. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 