I realized today, by giving the president protection from the law, the opinion also implies the court system, including SCOTUS is too incompetent to adjudicate.

In another country where we had actual jurists on the bench representing the highest council for 320,000,000 people, I'd expect them to be more than capable and willing to wade through the delicate nuances of any presidental action, and determine if criminal acts were justified in the service of the state. But Roberts essentially is admitting he and his associates are either too inept or too corrupt, and either way are not up to the task.

If the US democracy is to survive, we will not just need a constitutional amendment, but a complete judicial overhaul, and a federal election reform to restore power to elections and thus, to the people. Until all this happens, we are governed at gunpoint, rather than by consent.

So put away your fireworks. The nation is too unwell to be celebrated.

Bread outside the fridge spoils fast. Bread in the fridge lasts longer but is less fluffy. In this household we refrigerate our bread and then toast it lightly if we're going to eat it straight. Most of the sandwiches I make are toasted anyway.

So when I criticize Trump and MAGAs respond ORANGE MAN BAD they're asserting I have a bias so its not enough to just dislike Trump. I have to point out his behaviors, his characteristics, his policy decisions that drive my revulsion and public revulsion.

So when an alleged economics expert like Dave Ramsey says bearded man bad he needs to elaborate what specific notion of beard he doesn't like, or why he's wary of it. Otherwise we can just assume he's being partisan like a belligerent Dodgers fan.

No, we couldn't. The Democratic Party is nowhere near as bad as the Republican party, but it is still interested more in power over governance and is still pretty far right wing (in contrast to much of the industrialized world.

Since Carter, the DNC has added obstructions to the people choosing a candidate out from under them (curiously, what Trump did to the GOP in 2015-2016) because the people only operate as part of the primary vote. About 2000 principle party members (politicians and plutocrats) have votes with extra weight, so you'll never get an AOC or a Bernie Sanders or anyone else that is progressive and likes pushing hard on Green New Deal type policies.

In fact, when Occasio-Cortez primaried an establishment Democrat, the DCCC changed its rules to prevent future young progressives from taking seats from old establishment. (The DCCC undid their changes later, but only due to pressure from within the party.)

Progressives are the red-haired stepchildren of the Democratic coalition. They get to dine at their own table while the big boys sit at the grown-up table. Not because they have bad ideas, but because the rich campaign contributors don't like them much, and don't want to promote people who will push to install social security nets and election reform restoring power back to the public.

Curiously, it's these kinds of policies, social security nets that pull US families away from precarity (job precarity, food precarity, housing precarity, health precarity, etc.) that would pull us from the brink of autocracy, since the lumpen voters (those who can't deduce who serves their best interests) wouldn't be so desperate for change so as to elect a strongman Mussolini wannabe. If everyone weren't one paycheck away from hunger and homelessness, and working dead-end jobs, then Trump and Project 2025 would be getting far less traction.

So in this case, the Democratic party and the neoliberal ideology that directs them enables the rise of the transnational white power movement and the Christian nationalist movement. They are the Neville Chamberlain party and are going to feed us right into the hands of the GOP.

(That said, let us see if Biden finally takes up his newfound unlimited powers, say to assure that GOP anti-voter shenanigans in battleground states -- gerrymandering, voter suppression, misdirection, neighborhood disenfranchisement, intimidation, election tampering, etc. -- are watched for via our surveillance state and neutered in time, as well as any attempts of coups d'etat. Biden says he's counting on voters to exile Trump, but we know how critical voters have been hobbled. OR if Biden wants to be bold, he can use the US anti-terror machine to target, capture and detain critical participants in the capture and coup movement behind project 2025, say all the folks in the Heritage Foundation. We know who they are, and we know they've declared their intention to capture the federal government and repurpose it away from principle US values.)

Sadly, no. The entire Common Era (that is, the one defined by Christianity) has made sexual hang-ups the social norm throughout all of western society (and eastern, once we started trading there). Combined with the industrial revolution (which moved us away from livestock getting it on, which helped normalize sex), we don't know how to speak plainly without automatically painting ourselves as sluts and perverts.

It gets worse with the rise of far-right cultural identity movements like the transnational white power movement / Christian nationalist movement in the US, which intrinsically gatekeep and seek to prosecute anyone outside the mainstream norm, and tend to walk back sexual equality, including sexual liberty, suffrage and personhood.

That said, some places we're actually teaching consent to kids, starting outside sexual context (e.g. can I hug you? You can play with my toys if you like) and including these lessons all the way through adolescence, which might not only inform intimacy, but contracts and terms of service with commercial interests. In contrast those of us without consent training just learned to tolerate transgressions of our privacy and our rights because the serving companies held the power.

With the SCOTUS ruling of Trump v. United States (2024) fresh on our minds, and awareness of the nearness of tyranny, we expect autocracy and hard times ahead, but may emerge from it a more enlightened, more cooperative society who is able to speak more openly about our needs without being judged.

But it's going to get worse before it gets better.

So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I'm in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.

Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)

So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor's edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.

Lolita doesn't play out as a love story. Delores isn't precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores' age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.

And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.

But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls' physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn't really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.

Sexy times are not for everyone, I admit.

Queer is forever.

But I do like this:

Wiki-walk your way to anarcho-communism! Go redder than Lennin (or Lennon!) Start here!

Vlad is the one with the beard.

Quite the opposite, as it suggests that human societies behave to natural things as if they were supernatural. We're superstitious. It implies that all those things we might call god, are merely lightning in a thunderstorm behaving according to electrostatic mechanics.

I don't fear the Almighty, but I do fear militants who are determined to insist I do.

This to me, feels like a cute proposition for sex (as in getting freaky).

If there are higher dimensions, say the extra seven asserted by String Theory, then we have breadth (thickness?) along each axis that is non zero. The higher-order string theory dimensions (which communicate particle information like gravity) are tightly rolled up.

Brian Greene uses the metaphore of an ant on a wire who can move along the wire freely, but can't go far laterally. They may be so small that our quantum bits can't drift anywhere, so our liver doesn't abandon us drift along a high-level axis.

If there are flat higher level dimensions, then either a force or some kind of membrane would have to exist to keep our blood from leaking.

That said, when we have pure elements, or even pure minerals or chemicals, they retain the same density (mass to volume, sometimes affected by temperature) which suggests nothing is hiding away in other dimensions whenever we take measurements. If there is room along higher axes for unseen activity, it doesnt bug us enough to work out consistent properties.

Ten dimensions plus time in string theory.

I remember uneven wealth distribution was a bad thing even in pro-capitalism Economics 101 (macroeconomics), like this is the thing that will collapse your economy and cause death, disasters without response and eventually popular uprising.

FOX NEWS has, for decades now, been showing us our oligarchs don't care.

For most of us (like around 88% of the US population) you're closer to being homeless than you are to ever owning a home even a crappy apartment in the waste shadow of an industrial zone.

None of the girls were willing to be the one that wore green lipstick.

They're cute! I approve!

I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we're not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they're uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it's a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren't protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren't either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.