Dogma

Protesters demonstrate in support of abortion rights outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 3, 2022. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The more one reads Alito's opinion, the more one see dogma writ large.

To whit.

The missive is aggressive and self-righteous and reads like the greatest hits of those who disfavor the right to bodily autonomy. There’s the linking of abortion to eugenics, for example. “Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” Alito writes. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect.” The ahistorical comparison misses the fact that an individual choosing to abort their own pregnancy is not analogous to forced sterilization by the state to alter the American gene pool.

And there’s the claim that because the word “abortion” isn’t found in the Constitution, the right to it doesn’t exist. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito writes. This completely ignores the historical significance of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era addition meant to ensure individual liberty, including the right to decide whether and with whom to form a family. “Most Americans understand the plain truth reflected in these protections,” Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, said in a statement. “A person cannot truly be free, and is not truly an equal member of society, if they do not get to decide for themselves this most basic question of bodily autonomy.” Alito’s opinion, she said, “frighteningly bulldozes past the Constitution.”

As stated before in Something wicked this way comes/rev I, the word assume applies.

The expansion of abortion access after Roe reduced the overall birthrate by up to 11 percent. For teens, the drop was 34 percent; teen marriage was reduced 20 percent. Research has revealed that young women who used abortion to delay parenthood by just a year saw an 11 percent increase in hourly wages later in their careers. Access to abortion for young women increased the likelihood of finishing college by nearly 20 percentage points; the probability that they would go on to a professional career jumped by nearly 40 percentage points. All these effects, the economists noted, were even greater among Black women.

Getting a life also applies to this poor excuse of a justice using religion as a weapon to prohibit a woman's right to choose using god as the prime reason why it's the right thing to do.

A truly competent and evil bastard

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other members of Senate Republican leadership hold a press conference after the Senate party caucus luncheons at the Capitol on May 3, 2022. | Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO

A truly competent and evil bastard lurks in the senate, The Turtle, mastermind of the selection of far right justices including the 3 residing on the worst SC in history, is on the path of changing how law in this country will be conducted this way forward.

The Supreme Court’s draft majority opinion striking down Roe v. Wade couldn’t have happened without Mitch McConnell.

There’s a direct line from the Senate minority leader’s decision to hold a high court vacancy open in 2016 to the potential demise of Roe six years later. McConnell’s blockade of Merrick Garland, the Obama Supreme Court nominee who’s now attorney general, set the stage for a 6-3 conservative majority where Chief Justice John Roberts is no longer the swing vote on contentious issues such as abortion access.

Read the rest of this excellent Politico piece to see how McConnell made it happen. 

Roberts will also pay the price thanks to Citizens United, Greece NY and Hobby Lobby.

An orrery of black holes ...

An orrery of black holes, courtesy NASA, shows what happens when stars gets too close to its neighbor.

A new video from NASA shows what it looks like when a star is caught in the powerful gravity of a black hole. In these binary systems, the doomed stars spin around the black holes, which steadily suck up gas from them. The visualization illustrates the variety of these parasitic partnerships in our galactic backyard, including some particularly extreme examples—like MAXI J1659, in which the star completes a full orbit every 2.4 hours.

NASA showcases 22 of these systems, located either in our own Milky Way or in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a next-door galaxy that is around 160,000 light-years from Earth. 

A Wet Bulb moment looms ...

A farmer pours water on himself while working at a wheat farm in the Ludhiana district of Punjab, India, on Sunday, May 1, 2022. Credit: T. Narayan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

It's May 4th ...

Cities across the region broke monthly April records. Temperatures have topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit across much of the region and have jumped above 110 F in many areas. New Delhi saw temperatures climb above 110 F for several days on end.

In parts of Pakistan, the heat rose even higher. Jacobabad exceeded 120 F on Saturday, likely the highest temperature recorded anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere last month. The city of Nawabshah topped it the next day with a staggering 121.1 F, according to climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures around the world.

The city came close to beating its all-time record. On April 30, 2018, Nawabshah recorded a high temperature of 122.4 F — believed to be the highest reliably recorded April temperature ever observed in the Northern Hemisphere.

A web bulb moment looms. It's only a matter of time

A sling psychrometer. The sock is wet with distilled water and whirled around for 

a minute or more before taking the readings.

Wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which air can be cooled by the evaporation of water into the air at a constant pressure. It is therefore measured by wrapping a wet wick around the bulb of a thermometer and the measured temperature corresponds to the wet bulb temperature. The dry bulb temperature is the ambient temperature. The difference between these two temperatures is a measure of the humidity of the air. The higher the difference in these temperatures, the lower is the humidity. 

In other words ...

The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth (a wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed.[1] At 100% relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the air temperature (dry-bulb temperature); at lower humidity the wet-bulb temperature is lower than dry-bulb temperature because of evaporative cooling.

End result ...

Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F) – theoretically equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F), though the heat index does not go that high.[3]

Any questions? 

Something wicked this way comes/rev II

 Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg

Now that Roe v. Wade's in jeopardy, let's think birth control, the loss of privacy and LGBTO issues as the loss of a woman's right to choose eliminates a linchpin in protecting the 4th Amendment and, in indirect fashion, access to contraception and due process, two bete noirs of the religious right's fanatical attempt to control human behavior using god as the raison d'ete as why this is the right thing to do. 

To whit.

A draft Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade has progressives fearing the conservative majority could use the same reasoning to target LGBTQ, contraceptive, and other rights.

Other protections grounded in a constitutional right to privacy could be vulnerable to the same argument that they’re not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his draft opinion published Monday by Politico that would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe and 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decisions. The Supreme Court confirmed the authenticity of the draft in a statement Tuesday.

In reading Alito's opinion, the word assume reigns supreme as the right to privacy, according to him, is not a fundemental right even though the 4th Amendment clearly states it is.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What part of no does Alito not understand.

The Republic of Gilead beckons ...

The draft opinion is “a sweeping reassessment of constitutional law generally, not just as it relates to abortion or privacy, but it threatens to reverse a generation of constitutional rights well beyond those that involve sex and sexuality,” she said.

By taking aim at “substantive due process"—the idea that certain rights are so fundamental that they can’t be taken away by the states—the opinion calls into question “a wide range of cases having to do with police searches of your body, forced drug tests, police brutality cases,” she said. “A wide range of government misconduct also could be on the chopping block in terms of what the Constitution prohibits”.

Due process ... rather important as it not?

The Constitution states only one command twice. The Fifth Amendment says to the federal government that no one shall be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, uses the same eleven words, called the Due Process Clause, to describe a legal obligation of all states. These words have as their central promise an assurance that all levels of American government must operate within the law ("legality") and provide fair procedures. 

The bonnets that Handmaids wear are modelled on Old Dutch Cleanser's faceless mascot, which Atwood in childhood found frightening.[9]

2nd Witch:

By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes. [Knocking]

Open locks,

Whoever knocks!

[Enter Macbeth]

 Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1, 44–49

The new dark age begins ...

 

Protesters gather over reports US supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade abortion law – video

Roe is dead, thanks to Alito, the wannabe Jesuit inquisitor writing the initial majority opinion denying a woman's right to choose, aided and abetted by Thomas, Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, thus ushering in the opening salvo of a new dark age, not only for women but also for society as well.

Politico quoted Alito as saying: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

The justice adds: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices, the article added.

Yes, and lets thank religion as poster child for the worst SC in history thanks to the repugs. 

The Handmaid's Tale era looms.

Nature Never Sleeps

Nature never sleeps, this time, it's the wind, invisible until it impacts something, something most mysterious and profound. Enjoy.

Titan ... yet again

Similar to earth but colder, much much colder. :)

For years, scientists haven't been able to explain how these Earth-like landscapes — including sand dunes made of hydrocarbons — formed on Titan's surface. The Moon's sediments are theorized to be composed of solid organic compounds, which are more fragile than the silicate-based sediments found on Earth. That means they shouldn't be able to form such varied structures on the Moon's surface.

The Stanford team studied a type of calcium carbonate sediment called the ooids, which are found on Earth, in a bid to better understand how Titan's surface is so similar to Earth's. They found that it is likely down to wind, seasonal change, and sintering — the process of forming a solid mass of material through heat and pressure without that material melting.

"We hypothesized that sintering — which involves neighboring grains fusing together into one piece — could counterbalance abrasion when winds transport the grains," study lead Mathieu Lapôtre explained in Standord's statement.

Dragonfly awaits ...

This illustration shows NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft-lander approaching a site on Saturn’s exotic moon, Titan. Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will explore dozens of locations across the icy world, sampling and measuring the compositions of Titan's organic surface materials to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment and investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry.Credits: NASA/JHU-APL

To scale :)

Our solar system's planets are rarely shown to scale so, to rectify the problem, here are the 9 (Pluto's a planet dammit :)) in glorious color, complete with accurate rotation speeds keyed to each entity. :)

Sometimes it takes an animation on Twitter to truly comprehend – or at least begin to comprehend – the amazing diversity of worlds making up our Solar System.

Enter planetary astronomer James O'Donoghue from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He tweeted out a brief animation that starts off with the Ceres dwarf planet, and moves up through Solar System objects by size (including Earth), before closing by zooming out to take in the Sun.

Even if you know the relative size of everything in the Solar System, it's still quite a moment when Jupiter and the Sun swing into view – and you might never have realized quite how fast Jupiter spins relative to Earth either.

To scale works for me. :)

The Battle of Ridgefield

A fun project taping the 1777 Battle of Ridgefield where the Brits won a pyrrhic victory even though they outnumbered the Americans nearly 3 to 1. Reenactments are cool, folks are really dedicated to playing their roles to the hilt. Enjoy. I know I did. :)