Separation of Church & State is dead ... for now

Separation of Church & State is dead thanks to the Roberts court, particularly when Neil Gorsuch was put on instead of Merrick Garland, due to Mitch McConnell denying Obama's right to select a nominee, something that's been done by presidents since 1789. With that being said, the forceful dissent by Sonia Sotomayor explains, in passionate and eloquent ways, why the 1st Amendment, in the long view, is the most important amendment of the Bill of Rights the Founding Fathers wrote up for us rubes shortly after the Constitution was created in Philadelphia in 1787.

Sonia Sotomayor

Steely and unwavering, she began: “The United States of America is a nation built upon the promise of religious liberty. Our founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment.”

The crowded courthouse fell silent.

In upholding President Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, Justice Sotomayor continued, the Supreme Court had failed to “safeguard that fundamental principle.”

The question to ask now is, can we survive two +  years of Trump and the Robert's SC?

Words to live by ...

Words to live by ... without question. 

For what purpose? :)

Carved stone ball, Towie, Aberdeenshire by National Museums Scotland on Sketchfab

Some of the most enigmatic human-made objects from Europe's late Stone Age — intricately carved balls of stone, each about the size of a baseball — continue to baffle archaeologists more than 200 years after they were first discovered.

Such proposals have included the possibility that they were made as the stone heads for crushing weapons, or standardized weights for Neolithic traders, or rollers for the transport of the giant stones used in megalithic monuments.

One theory is that the knobs on many of the carved stone balls were wound with twine or sinew, which allowed them to be thrown like slings or South American bolas. Other theories describe the balls as objects of religious devotion or symbols of social status.

Here's a set of them.

Neolithic carved stone balls, Scotland by National Museums Scotland on Sketchfab

Just another mystery for us rubes to ponder in the year of our lord 2018. :)

Jovian Eye Candy/Rev XX :)

Just think of what we don't know, not only of Jove but also of the solar system, the Milky Way or the universe as a whole. Staggers the imagination doesn't it.

Regarding this pix, NASA's Juno never disappoints. :)

This image captures the intensity of the jets and vortices in Jupiter’s North North Temperate Belt. 

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:31 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:31 a.m. EDT on May 24), as Juno performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, the spacecraft was about 4,900 miles (7,900 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the gas giant planet at a northern latitude of about 41 degrees. The view is oriented with south on Jupiter toward upper left and north toward lower right.

Had to do another.

In a new paper published in Nature today, scientists from NASA’s Juno mission describe the ways in which lightning on Jupiter is actually analogous to Earth’s lightning. Although, in some ways, the two types of lightning are polar opposites.

While the revelation showed how Jupiter lightning is similar to Earth’s, the new paper also notes that where these lightning bolts flash on each planet is actually quite different.

“Jupiter lightning distribution is inside out relative to Earth,” said Brown. “There is a lot of activity near Jupiter’s poles but none near the equator. You can ask anybody who lives in the tropics -- this doesn’t hold true for our planet.”

Why do lightning bolts congregate near the equator on Earth and near the poles on Jupiter? Follow the heat.

Earth’s derives the vast majority of its heat externally from solar radiation, courtesy of our Sun. Because our equator bears the brunt of this sunshine, warm moist air rises (through convection) more freely there, which fuels towering thunderstorms that produce lightning.

Jupiter’s orbit is five times farther from the Sun than Earth’s orbit, which means that the giant planet receives 25 times less sunlight than Earth. But even though Jupiter’s atmosphere derives the majority of its heat from within the planet itself, this doesn’t render the Sun’s rays irrelevant. They do provide some warmth, heating up Jupiter’s equator more than the poles -- just as they heat up Earth. Scientists believe that this heating at Jupiter’s equator is just enough to create stability in the upper atmosphere, inhibiting the rise of warm air from within. The poles, which do not have this upper-level warmth and therefore no atmospheric stability, allow warm gases from Jupiter’s interior to rise, driving convection and therefore creating the ingredients for lightning.

Isn't science grand? :)

There's a storm coming this way ...

Crunching bits is a biggie in 3D graphics, crunching bits using voxels to model a tornado is something else all together.  Check this out, amazing says it all. The second clip shows how big these guys can get. Time killer to the max is the intent here without question. :)

Killing time intelligently is not a bad idea, right?

The man who would be king

His royal majesty, the Donald, is claiming powers beyond that of the Magna Carta by stating he could pardon himself if the need arises as he is above the law, not needing to obey his own rules.” a notion contrary to the 801 year old document stating that King John, England's most hated monarch, had to do just that when dealing with rebellious barons who wanted laws in place to protect their freedoms from any capricious acts that may come about by this weak and spiteful leader. (Sound familiar?)

Under the terms of the charter, the King, his plural self, granted “to all the free men of our kingdom, for us and our heirs in perpetuity” certain “written liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs by us and our heirs.” (Essentially, a “free man” was a nobleman.) One of those liberties is the one that had been demanded by the barons in Article 29: “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned . . . save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” 

King John

On June 4, 2018 ...

WASHINGTON — President Trump declared on Monday that the appointment of the special counsel in the Russia investigation was “totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!” and asserted that he had the power to pardon himself, raising the prospect that he might take extraordinary action to immunize himself from the continuing inquiry.

In a pair of early-morning tweets, Mr. Trump suggested that he would not have to pardon himself because he had “done nothing wrong.” But he insisted that “numerous legal scholars” had concluded that he had the absolute right to do so, a claim that vastly overstated the legal thinking on the issue.

In fact, many constitutional experts dispute Mr. Trump’s position on his pardon power, an issue for which there has been no definitive ruling.

Mr. Trump’s assertion that “numerous legal scholars” believe he could pardon himself ignores the one official opinion on the subject. In August 1974, just days before former President Richard M. Nixon resigned, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Mary C. Lawton, said in a memorandum that “it would seem” that Mr. Nixon could not pardon himself.

Any questions?