From Twitter:
There's a huge amount to this, but right now, Americans would rather rip each other apart than work together. We've elected a global joke, look to an imaginary past as a reality, and are headed into third world status as a result.
From Twitter:
There's a huge amount to this, but right now, Americans would rather rip each other apart than work together. We've elected a global joke, look to an imaginary past as a reality, and are headed into third world status as a result.
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Flannery O'Connor
Extension denial leaves Wyoming ranch owner a week to convince SCOTUS to hear corner crossing case: Eshelman has until July 16 to state why the court should consider the corner-crossing conflict between public access to public land and private property rights.
Rancher owner?
Well, yes, he owns a ranch. But a working owner he is not. He's a pharmaceutical industry titan.
In a more just society, frankly, he wouldn't own the ranch at all. It'd be owned by those who actually derived a living from it.
Also of interest, Iron Bar Holdings, the petitioner, is represented by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP of Denver, with Robert Reeves Anderson as counsel of record. The respondent is represented by a local Wyoming firm. I note this as there's no reason that the common attorney bullshit claim "I'm only doing my job" really ought to hold, for civil litigation. If you run into a Colorado attorney in Wyoming, ask them who they work for. if they work for this outfit, tell them to go home, we don't want them here.
For that matter, if you are a Colorado user of public lands, as they want to take part of what you own, there's no reason to accommodate them with a seat at the table, literally. "Want a cup of coffee sir? Drive to Texas. . . ."
At the trial court level, Iron Bar had been represented by Gregory Weisz, who is a Wyoming attorney. He's left private practice and is with the AG now. A lawyer with his firm took his place, but the case was well developed by then, and in the appeal stage, so they really had no choice.
So, what am I saying. Well, I'm saying that people who don't derive their income principally form a ranch, ought not to own it. And I'm saying that by representing carpetbaggers, you are a carpetbagger. The old lawyer bromides about serving the system are BS. Regular people, including other lawyers, don't have to excuse your choice of clients when you are taking on a plaintiff. It's not like being assigned a defendant.
There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President. We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.
New York State Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Trump, in something that's supposed to be a jest, posted a photograph of himself dressed as a Pope, no doubt generated by the onrushing curse of our age, AI.
I'm not going to post it.
This should serve as as warning to Trump supporting Catholics. Trump, who received widespread Evangelical Christian support and who has housed an faith advisor office in the White House which is staffed by a rather peculiar Evangelical pastor, shows no signs at all as taking religion seriously, and never has, but he is comfortable with coopting it. In spite of that, and this was inevitable, he doesn't mind mocking the oldest and original Christian religion.
That tells you what you need to know.
I've long held that a real Christian can't be comfortable with either of the two major US political parties or with their recent leaders. Only the American Solidarity Party comes close to being a party Christians can really be comfortable with. The presence of Catholic politicians at the forefront of either party does not change this. Biden advanced the sea of blood objectives of the infanticide supporting Democratic Party. J.D Vance has supported the IF policies of the bizarre Trump protatalist agenda and that's just a start. The Church has rarely attempted to hold Catholic politicians directly to account for reasons known to itself.
Before the Trump regime concludes, this is going to get worse. Trump will conclude that he doesn't need Catholics for anything, because he does not. A religion which is catholic, ie., universal, by nature will not ultimately be comfortable with a political philosophy which aggressively nationalist and nativist. This, indeed, has been the history of Catholicism in the US, with it only being after the election of John F. Kennedy that things changed.
Some will claim, of course, that this means nothing and its just Trump trying to be funny. That's politically disturbing enough, as Trump is already an embarrassment to the country. But those who think this should ask if Trump would have dared to depict himself as, for example, an imam. . . not hardly.
Trump's insult is offered as its safe to offer it. As has sometimes been noted, anti Catholicism is the "last acceptable prejudice". Trump offered this insult as it fits in nicely with his contempt for Christianity in general, but more particular, for his contempt for the Church, something that fits in nicely with the most extreme of his Evangelical supporters.
Catholics need to review the meaning of The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus. We're part of something larger, and once we surrender to something smaller, we need to be cautious. We can expect to be mocked and held in contempt, and if we aren't, there may well be something wrong with our witness.
But we don't have to accept the situation, nor tolerate it, where we do not need to.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The founders of the Republic didn't want to keep a large standing Army, which they regarded, rightly, as a threat to democracy. The early land defense of the country, therefore, relied on state militias, which had the added ability to take on local problems without the necessity of a Federal army having to intervene. After all, keep in mind that one of the cited reasons for the Revolution is that the English had kept large bodies of armed troops in the colonies.
Standing armies are always a problem and the current era might very well be starting to demonstrate that. Throughout the nation's history it usually didn't have large armies save in times of war, or leading up to war. But since the onset of the Cold War it has. Even now, in the post Cold War era, the Army is enormous compared to what it had been before World War Two.
Anyhow, the Second Amendment doesn't exist so that average people can take on a tyrannical government. It exists so that states can take on the British, basically. That hasn't stopped at least three decades of firearms owners being schooled in the thought that they might have take up arms against the government, with those claims uniformly coming from the right, although in the 1960s, there were those on the left who argued with some justification that oppressed minorities should arm to protect themselves.
Now, all of a sudden, I'm seeing anti Trump Conservatives suggest that the Second Amendment's clauses have what I've already noted as a mistaken view. That shows, I think, how far down the road of chaos we've gotten. We haven't seen anything like that since the Civil War.
Moreover, there's some discussion going on in the military right now over what the duties are of military officers if they are ordered to take an illegal action. To some extent I think you can argue they already have been, with the Trump administration declaring the public lands along the Mexican border to be military reservations, but that actually has a long history. At any rate, Angry Staff Officer, whose blog we link in here, has put up two items recently on the military duties to disobey illegal orders. The Space Force has had one commanding officer relieved for criticizing J. D. Vance's territorially aggressive statements, something I'm sure she knew would occur when she made them. While we'd have to see what would actually happen, I suspect there's a lot of back barracks discussions going on amongst officers about the point at which they refuse to obey an illegal order from Trump.
Trump is a disaster, bringing the worse instincts in people to the top, and excusing them. This will get worse, and worse, if the 25th Amendment doesn't come into play. The man is an stupid, ancient, narcissist who may very well be bordering on insane. If Congress acted now, and truth be known a near majority likely grasp it and are too chicken to do anything, the situation could be salvaged.
Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken. : Roads not taken. I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective. Given that, I can'...