Routine Revelations

Dear Constitutional Fundamentalists, Supreme Court Justics and conservative Republicans. How do you reconcile the claim that the government cannot mandate vaccines on the basis of protecting the public good because of your right to decide what happens to your body, a right apparently not natural and not explicitly in the Constitiution according to SCOTUS, and your claim that the government can mandate that a pregnant woman give birth to a baby?

I mean, there is liikely going to be another pandemic in the future that could result in millions of dead people due to the inactions of others, either we, all genders, all races, all humans, being equal, have the right to privacy that provides us the right to decide what happens to and inside our bodies, or we do not. You cannot have it both ways.

Or is it that we are not all equal and thus do not deserve equal protection under the law?

May the fourth be with you

Looks like we need a Constitutional Amendment that guarantees the right to privacy.

Is recognizing rights of citizens in the United States a bad thing? My understanding of the United States Constitution is that its purpose is to prevent the Federal government from becoming tyrannical by narrowing its power to enumerated rights. The Constitution does not exist to define the rights of citizens and I am pretty sure Madison did not imagine that the Bill of Rights defined the only rights of U.S. citizens. Therefore it seems to me that the very act of removing rights from citizens through declaring that SCOTUS decisions granted rights not provided for in the Constitution is the exact opposite of an originalist understanding of the Constitution. Roe v. Wade restrains the Federal government from taking a women’s right of autonomy over their own body, a right by the way that many of been claiming is the reason why things like “mask mandates” and “vaccine mandates' are not constitutional.

Striding down the Riverwalk wearing purple

Happy Friday!

Does free speech = trolling?

Update: Everything is back up. Some server components of the Scripting News hosting infrastructure are down, for example my Old School blog is not reachable. Browser shows an error message saying the server refused connection. Watching attempt to access with the browser console open shows a message about a deprecated package. The problem affects LittleOutliner.com and my.this.how, which is where I am hosting my now page.

A day of warm sunshine does everyone and everything good.

Finally warm enough to put on shorts and go outside.

Finally some warm weather! Alpha tree is enjoying the sun too.

I think Abraham Lincoln would be mad that for what was sacrificed years ago is simply being tossed aside today.

A couple of Easter survivors. I don’t know wild turkies well, but I assume that this is a couple. The picture doesn’t do the beauty of the feathers shining in the sunlight of the front one justice.

Mother nature wishing me a happy birthday

Day 1 of lap 57 around the sun does not have as nice weather (it is snowing) as lap 56 but is a great day none the less.

“As the climax of Holy Week and the story of Jesus, Good Friday and Easter address the fundamental human question, What ails us? Most of us feel the force of this question—something is not right. So what ails us? Very compactly, egoism and injustice. And the two go together. We need personal transformation and political transformation.”

Finished reading: The Last Week - What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg 📚

Last year nearly all of the flowering trees near us were blooming but this year most only have buds. However, the first tree to normally bloom has started but has a way to go.

Unlike Axios, I don’t think Musk’s desire for Twitter is as a tech mogul, instead his is simply wearing his billionaire hat. I think the wealthy like Musk are concerned about the negative reputation toward and potential cancel culture of the wealthy. Owning Twitter assures he can’t get kicked off the platform no matter what he writes, so he can freely write things like how bad a wealth tax would be. In other words, owning Twitter is about controlling the narrative for Musk. Also, if Musk owns Twitter Trump will be back on Twitter.