The SCOTUS' First Amendment Of Mastery and Dominion

How am I supposed to feel about a wedding cake with First Amendment rights? Isn't that stretching the Bill of Rights a little too far?

First, we learn that Americans have the political agency to dissent against authority of any kind, something Thomas Jefferson called "public freedom" in terms of speech, and the next thing you know, "Let them eat cake!" is the featured carny show over at the US Supreme Court. Some baker in Colorado claimed it was his preference to bar "the gay" from enjoying his "artistic services", cloaked his bigoted reaction against people he seems to believe are possessed by evil spirits, cloaked it all under the pretense of freedom of religion, and WHAM. Next thing you know, magic occurred in the Courtroom as a cake began to talk for the first time.

Let's follow the Book of Revelations here: "Signs and wonders". Oh yeah. The angels came down from Heaven to prove they exist by making a cake talk. Miracles! Mystery! Babylon!

I don’t know about anyone else who might not have bothered following that Supreme Court cakewalk/cake-talk fiasco, anyone who might not have cared all that much about some old guys in black hijabs (or whatever they're called these days) had to say about a person's freedom of religion in terms of couching Christianity in outright malevolence against an "outcast population". But when the Court’s Masterpiece Cake Shop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission drifted to my doorstep with a thud, to me it seemed miraculously reminiscent of how the now almost-forgotten Edgar Bergen and his infamously intelligent ventriloquist’s doll could probably have made a cake talk.  

“Cake!  Speak!”  

“Only if this is Hollywood!”  

"Is your name Charlie McCarthy?"

"No! I am Zardoz the Magnificent angel come 'round to strut my stuff!"

Ah yes, ventriloquists and their little wooden dummies. Charlie McCarthy to us boys in the Sixties was always entertaining. How did Edgar Bergen, the master of ventriloquism, make his mouth not move while talking in a funny, high voice, while he moved the little wooden jaw of an almost ridiculous-looking doll that always had something witty to say? Who was that wooden dummy? But a more pertinent question tothe contemporary dodge behind the First Amendment is this: Who made five SCOTUS members mouth the very words of, well, whom? Sure. The SCOTUS is not an entertainment conglomerate. SCOTUS doesn't seem to bother to nurse a sense of humor. At least, The Ed Sullivan Show, a variety show featuring an overly stiff host--Sullivan--presiding over all kinds of acts. Yes, acts. Acts that always mystified my family almost every Sunday night.  His “real big shoe…” almost always made my nine-year-old's understanding of a good Sunday evening of popcorn and some laughs. After all, since the following day was a school day, I had nothing better to do than watch some out-of-touch Las Vegas-style entertainers pretend to be the hottest thing in popular culture.

Worn-out shoes.

When you're nine, things like stodgy old nightclub performers living the good old days of, perhaps, Las Vegas' old Sands Hotel, a mob hangout, right there on television, seemed almost real. So this was the world of adultism I was to enter sometime in the future? I was far too young to comprehend what kind of values those entertainers were promoting.

For my mother and father, The Ed Sullivan Show was a nostalgic extravaganza. It was sort of a descendant of vaudeville and burlesque. Comedians. Singers. Stunts. Pet tricks. A little like what's going on the the Court now that ideological operatives pretending to be judicial make madcap decisions based on the concept that, whatever anyone does, if they do it in Jesus' name, it's A-OK with them.

Remember? Before the cultural revolution that began in the Sixties, everyone was God-fearing, honorable, loyal to the country, each individual a veritable receptacle of "the God within". As if keeping all the underbelly's nastiness and self-interested idiocy down where no one could see it on the surface or in public was the way to go. Right?

This strange phenomenon of old times good times as is now being forced on the American people by nostalgic for a past that never really existed--it matches perfectly with the cultural contradictions exemplified by The Ed Sullivan Show. This appeal to a fantasy past strikes me as ironic, given the period of change when a vast counterculture, which had been developing for at least two entire decades, began to bloom in the mid-1960s, ushering in a period of severe cultural change in the US, thus threatening nothing more than an old cultural order that had lost its verve in the eyes of many more people than those who were labeled hippies.

Some would call the rise of a countercultural value system, one that not only violated the precepts of the then-conventional wisdom but also called the old order into question; some would call it a non-violent revolution. Many young people as a vast mass community of wide-eyed entrants into the adult world indeed rejected many value systems of our parents to embrace something a little less sodden with hard liquor, abnegation and hardship. What was there to lose in any of that repudiation? Look: There my parents sat, beer soaked zombies on Sunday evening, practically hypnotized by Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Jerry Lewis, and a number of other performers guaranteed to give the American viewing audiences a little nostalgic thrill.

We could postulate that in effect what occurred in the Sixties was a direct result of the educational system's success, mainly because young people were a little more culturally tuned-in into the present day than were their adult parents, and, moreover, we were happy. We wanted a change. The old order had become moribund, rigid, a world of stiff-shirt wretches who were determined to live through their meaningless lives as employees or executives. Why shouldn't we have been dissatisfied with such prospects when we looked at our own potential futures? Even though the Cold War and a worldwide "death machine" did wreak horror in our hearts at times when relations between the US and USSR became strained, we sincerely desired to move away from such posturing as two imperialist empires faced off within the paradigm of mutual assured destruction.

Think of it: two giant meat-grinders grinding the humanity right out of the human race. And all over who controls the money.

But what does this long ago development of a cultural resistance to many of the contradictions of American cultural, social, and political life that was slowly showing its flaws and its obsolescence have to do with magic and a talking cake in need of First Amendment protections?

Let's go deeper here. What happens when the "death machine" (this is an actual term used by young people and rebellious anti-nuclear-war activists, especially in Britain, in the 1960s) tilted into drafting young men to fight what looked to us to be a pointless war in Vietnam? We already knew many adults of an older generation were dissatisfied and incredulous over our antics as a counterculture, and I can only imagine that among some of the more paranoid and reactionary adults fighting inside their minds for a status quo that meant stability to them, the draft would end the circus. For good. While at the same time, as a burgeoning civil rights movement began to gain steam in the mainstream, the people who needed the help of freedom riders and activists were being shipped off to Southeast Asia--while those directing that B-movie were, only naturally, swimming around in the unnatural suspension of a nostalgia for sooty dinner clubs, illicit sexual affairs covered over by pretense and the cosmetic, and slowly, from around 1965 forward into the early 1970s, rebellion against that mentality began to rise.

Yes, cultural change had created instability, threatening the status quo to the point that those overly dependent on both status quo and status itself were ready to backlash. Punch the hippie. Scapegoat people as "dirty, immoral, drug-addicted degenerates". Nixon called the frightened beginnings of a fifty-year-long backlash "the Silent Generation". You know: the one about to speak up, ready to remove the problem.

Yes, large factions of adult Americans, all of them strung out on tradition and sentimentality and the saccharine illusions that all was well in the USA before the hippies started rocking the boat, were alarmed at what they saw as sexual immorality. And even if those people had no compunction at all over drinking all night once the workweek was over, they were terrified their children would resort to a different intoxicant. The immorality? This was openly demonstrated by hippies and freaks--not covertly accomplished as intrigue, secrecy and a sort of elitism complete with private symbolism defined the old order. We saw the hypocrisy. And we rebelled against it all.

The motto I remember? "Tell it like it is!" That's right: don't cover all your creepy underbelly activities with a pretty carpet.

Ed Sullivan. He wasn't all opting for throwback realities. His variety show included people like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, most of all The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and The Animals, and other current popular music stars. My award for Most Eloquent Commentary on The Ed Sullivan Show belongs to Buffalo Springfield’s performance of “For What It’s Worth”.  Even in 1966, As Neil Young and Steven Stills overtly stated their opposition to an almost cult-like phenomenon some claimed was "conservatism", complete with its paranoia and alarm over "socialism", Stills in a leather fringe jacket and cowboy hat, Young playing awesome lead guitar. I thought this was daring.  I was impressed. Thus, I too could speak out. I could as we said "sound off". Sometimes I did. Sometimes I took the older generation to task for not appreciating a new break from the old.

For people too young to remember this, Buffalo Springfield was a sort of super-group where Stephen Stills and Neil Young teamed up with other pioneering musicians as what became folk-rock began to launch.  Musicians like Bob Dylan, who had been barred from Nashville, began to write country music that was a departure from honky tonk and cry-in-your-beer ballads. The Byrds took off. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and dozens of others were all giving Nashville the business. The Riot Act. A cultural divide was opening up. It wasn't so much as a laceration; rather it served up an alternative to another quite moribund music industry that was already in a backlash against what Joni Mitchell once called "the bloody changes".

Looking back at these developments, I can now clearly see how the paranoid myth surrounding the right's misunderstanding of a countercultural revolution resulted in fears that the counterculture was a socialist plot designed to break the country's spirit. Voices all over this issue became strong. Suddenly, the rightists had a brand new scapegoat: The hippies, the antiwar movement, feminism, and other groups that apparently did not meet the old codger muster as expected by Americans caught up in a stranger bowdlerization of old British Victorianism. That colluded or collided with an advance of Christian fundamentalism, and by the mid-Seventies the drive to return America to a glorious past that never was began in earnest.

Crazy, right? A backlash to the counterculture. I remember reading Robert Bork's reactionary and paranoid jihad against the counterculture, "Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism And American Decline", a 1997 book that accused The Beatles of generating communist revolution. But Bork, whose reactionary and often inflammatory viewpoints had led to his rejection for a position on the Supreme Court, was a sort of harbinger to what is now living inside a distortion, a funhouse mirror, the Court has become.

It's apparently really easy to ride a rocket to the sun. Make a whole lot of inflammatory noise about cultural changes you don't really understand, and some of the more credulous power brokers will either believe every word you say or will choose to instrumentalize and capitalize on your rhetoric in a bid for more power and more "liberty" toward the goal of politically unaccountable economic coercion. Think of Clear Channel's purchase of a large majority of FM radio stations--apparently to keep the boogieman down--changing many rock stations into I 💚 Radio. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Speaking of launching something tantamount to an ideological ICBM right at "the dreaded Liberals", the Court has demonstrated how easily it is to suggest that a false reality is actually the events that have occurred. The Roberts Court has a bad habit of instrumentalizing the First Amendment by qualifying almost every little thing as a First Amendment matter.  Sure.  The “cake artist” has a right to his beliefs about “the gay” and its supposed threat to maybe the Holy Bible, but should this mean the baker has the right to enforce is stultified and prejudiced bigotry as a commercial policy? It's one thing to make the claim one is truly a Christian; it's another to couch bigotry under the umbrella of the Bible.

Apparently, "Masterpiece" had a serious problem with making wedding cakes for gay weddings he did not find "bless-worthy in the eyes of God". I found this odd mainly because Jesus himself cultivated numerous outcasts as his disciples. He was a protector of the underprivileged and the outcast. Now many fundamentalist Christians are using two simple Bible verses to "prove" God hates gay people. What that amounts to is defending the literal interpretation of the Bible, a true example of a graven image. And money changing based on taking God's name in vain. And false pride. Arrogance. Hubris. And of course bigotry. All couched under the name of Jesus.

Many critics of the SCOTUS using the baker's First Amendment rights to have religious preferences show its equivalence to the "Whites Only" laws of the Jim Crow era. There are now public access laws on the books which prevent barring someone from one's business establishment due to race or other realities. And in fact, by opening this door to protect a fake Christian from "the gay" is a way for the fringe and factional groups that resist public accommodation laws to come roaring back into a world of all kinds of unjust discrimination. Worse, the simple idea that one is a professional should inform the baker's activities: As professionals, men and women often have to perform tasks they find unethical; especially in the legal field. Is it against your ethical standards to refuse to defend a Mafiosi in a court? Maybe you should try a new occupation if you think you can pick and choose on the basis of social discrimination.

Apparently, according to SCOTUS, the baker has a right to freedom of speech: and not to "say" anything that would promote activities that go against his beliefs that gay marriage is not something Jesus would approve of abiding. The little frosting letters "speak". Thus, the cake baker has compromised his values. Which are couched in bigotry.

How does this measure up to The Ed Sullivan Show? While for one thing it is far less entertaining than that Sunday night TV variety show, the SCOTUS decision tells us at least six of its Justices stand squarely in alliance with the loony scapegoating of liberation and resistance movements that sprang up in the Sixties as propounded by Robert Bork:

It's the Sixties that ruined us and brought the hordes of the gay upon us!

Simple scapegoating of "the enemy population" is not exactly covered by the Bill of Rights. Clamping down on what some might see as an incursion on "traditional morality" is nothing but a relic of a backlash that really began to manifest in the years leading up to the cultural tyranny called The Reagan Revolution. Clearly, six members of the Court simply cannot comprehend cultural, social, and political changes that somehow threatened the way of the world as they want it to be.

Yes, the baker has a right to speak in public against gay marriage. But he's also supposed to be a professional. And more, in order to have freedom of religion, all beliefs, both for and against any religion must be supported by courts and laws. Importantly, no religious belief--gays are the spawn of Satan, for example--should be allowed to publicly oppress others.

None of this stopped Justice Samuel Alito, a clearly homophobic ideologue who finds it quite convenient to mangle the First Amendment as a catch-all universal solvent with which to rid the world of the liberal democratic tradition.

It would be interesting if the Court saw that the one force in the US that amplifies the human animal's wantonness--capitalism--as a threat to democracy. But that won't hold with those goofs. Those goofs believe capitalism should be on top and that democracy must be forced into playing second fiddle to The Church of the Holy Wallet.

Right. Let's get baked on The First Amendment. That's some really primo dope, John Roberts.

"Cake! Speak out against the commie hippies!"

Buh.

What's seminally funny to me is that masses of young people who didn't want to go to Vietnam assembled under the First Amendment to dissent against the war machine, raising their fists, marching, carrying signs, and making a lot of noise. . .

. . . and this is seen by the SCOTUS (or connoted by it) as the greatest threat to the United States, ever. Childishness, defined.

Who knew making a fist and being resistant to the well-heeled zombie meat robots who stood to make billions off of killing innocent people engaged in a civil war would constitute a grave threat to the country? Yeah, maybe--only maybe--those protests constituted a threat to. . . .

. . . the advocates of The Ed Sullivan Show as de rigeur of American life. Some are still fighting what they see as a culture war. Change is much harder for those who reap many financial advantages by maintaining a moribund status quo. And when Justices mangle the Bill of Rights to "un-liberate" the American people to make way for those who would readily eat the world and cannibalize the United States for profits, they're not upholding any status quo or tradition beyond a cheap-o version of a monarchy. Those ideological ventriloquist dummies want an elite and "the mob" as the ideal for life in 21st Century America.

Great, SCOTUS! A ready-made bourgeoisie and a ready-made proletariat! No, equality and justice and the public interest do not really exist according to the ideologies of sham economics. Equality, to some goofs on the far right, amounts to socialism. As does justice. The public interest? Oh, that's an abstraction that doesn't exist in nature.

Here's something: Civilization also is an abstraction that doesn't exist in nature. And no, the economic exchange is not the founding principle of the civilized world. Language fills that role. And when a SCOTUS mangles the meanings of a founding document in order to fight a culture war designed to keep the nasty under the rug, something is wrong with the insides of the Justices' heads.

Clearly, the Supreme Court wants to clear the way for its main interest: the money.  This brings us around to the Court’s exceptionally weird Citizens United v FEC.  This is another episode of the Court's mangling of the meaning of the First Amendment's free speech provisions.

You've heard it: Money = freedom. The less noticed odd aspect of this is that, in the eyes of some of the Justices, freedom does not = money. If it did, I'd be wealthy beyond my dearest imaginings.

Talk about a "laff" fest: "laff", the old "la friendly fuck" of secret bar symbolism in the era of Dean Martin. When I first heard the announcement of the Supreme Court of the United States deciding that unlimited campaign funding is a matter of freedom of speech, equality for all be damned, I sat there before the TV simply gobsmacked at the clear-cut cluelessness sitting right there on the Court.  Money is freedom of speech when it’s shoveled via garbage truck into the federal campaign process?  And this is where the private sector has been given carte blanche in terms of wielding excessive power with no political accountability whatsoever.

There, Roberts Court: Hayek's "The Road To Serfdom", live on Stage Three of Bottomless Skin Dancers Today right now. They're all about promoting the top and ignoring the bottom: a classification system based on economic status.

I used to have long and interesting discussions with a man who described himself as an anarcho-capitalist. He's dead-set against "statism", the idea of organizing large groups of people into a legal and societal whole. Of course, "statism" is often used today by ideologues of the libertarian variety as an epithet: the idea of organizing in such a way, according to those two-legged prunes, is an ideology. While in the real world it's not. It is merely one way to organize large groups of people and do so fairly. According to libertarians and many right-anarchists such as Voluntarists, Agorists, and Anarcho-Capitalists, the state is "coercive" and thus "oppressive", and in tow with those weird interpretations, must be disposed of in favor of a "stochastic emergent order" where people somehow just automatically do the right thing and honor the freedoms of all others.

What?

I consider my friend, whose main claim is that "taxation is theft!", simply wants to live in a world where he has no obligations whatsoever that he hasn't personally approved of before he chooses to obligate himself. If the government so much as passes laws that obligate him to pay some income taxes, he goes out of joint on some kind of creepy bonanza of anger and paranoia. But he's a nice guy. A jazz drummer. As an aspect of what he likes--improvisation and what he takes for the freedom thereof--I can see how he'd like to universalize his "high" to encompass the entire world. I asked him once: OK. So you're high all the time. Doesn't that after a while become flat, the status quo? Doesn't that mean you need to find more of the high?

No answer. I'd ask him, for example, how freedom is an experience that can involve only the isolated individual within a paradigm of atomization, and he draws a blank--mainly because he confuses liberty, the state of affairs when one's actions and choices are left unobstructed, with freedom, a creature of the law whereby my freedom and your freedom have to somehow and reasonably relate so that both glean a mutual advantage. If it's all self-interest all the time, everyone is in pitch competition with everyone else. Not a happy place, I'd suspect.

So what happens when a faction of reactionaries who happen to be both exorbitantly wealthy and powerful as commercial interests are given absolute liberty to manipulate the entire polity, and the government, and thus "economize" the political? Suddenly, one group is nearly all-powerful, while the rest of us are in submission to the whims of the former. This is not democracy at all. This is not freedom either. Freedom, a creature of the law, can only be advanced through justice and equality. Even if there is a modicum of economic inequality that is propitious to the mobility and freedom of everyone.

But this is now the case: When billionaires like Charles Koch toss in $1 billion to the 2020 campaign; or when Sheldon Adelson, a casino owner, pitches in $250,000,000 to the 2022 midterms--who's going to have the advantage? In a political system where money has been allowed to drive campaigns, despite attempts to regulate and reform campaign expenditures, suddenly capitalism is top dog over a subservient population whose sum-total values have been subordinated under the rubrics of profit, power, and endless expansion.

No way to be free.

I'm only one person. I don't have an income large enough to be responsible for paying income taxes. In sum, I don’t have much of that monetized or "economized" freedom the SCOTUS has shoved down my throat, and down the throats of the other 350,000,000 adult Americans. I've never been interested in shackling myself to the dollar bill.  I didn't grow up with a great deal of money. And when I came of age--well, lookie there, I was a product of an anti-materialistic counterculture that at the time at least devalued materialism and money as ideologies hell bent for classism. To me, that way of looking at the world becomes subjection like a suit of lousy dress clothes. It's not a road to freedom or a way to escape serfdom, whatever that is supposed to mean to people like Friedrich Hayek of "The Road To Serfdom". 

As I am one person--I can't compete with Charles Koch or Sheldon Adelson. Suddenly, the playing field in the political theater has been rigged against my concerns, my needs, and my ideas of justice. Rigged toward what?

The making of money. That's just plain scary.  

A-OK?  Billionaires get to drop millions on the partisan candidate they believe will bow and scrape to their addiction to instrumentalizing the government? You mean Hayek wanted our politicians to enter the serfdom while allowing money monstrosities to run feral like packs of rabid dogs? Really?  I could use all kinds of nasty words here, and then sue John Roberts for telling me to shut my face.  Freedom of speech, baby.

Yes. Shut my mouth. That's the negative outcome of the Citizens United decision: those who can't afford it have had their freedom of speech abridged by ideological doggie boys on a Court who have the farsightedness of maybe a planaria worm or a knot of gnats. Economizing the political, as I've already mentioned, creates a two-class system, and a two-tiered justice system. That's great if you can afford it. If you can't, you have to lump it.

Why? Hayek said. . .

Strangely, but not too surprisingly, some pretty transparently fascist figurines like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri are all aboard with the creation of an elite from money and the subsequent abandonment of everyone else. Worse, real estate plutocrats like Harlan Crow of Dallas, Texas, invest heavily in intimidating a Supreme Court Justice--Clarence Thomas--with oodles of vacations, jet rides and money for his wive's Bimbo Flag Waver Squadron. As investigations into Crow's corrupt dealings open up, we're learning that Crow, a guy who presents visitors to his palatial mansion with statues of Mussolini and Hitler, was instrumental in pushing Citizens United through the Court.

Yup. It takes money, honey.

What's especially interesting to me is that Thomas, as a college student, was heavily involved in the socialist-flavored Black nationalist movement. And he's even commented that he's going to get after all the "Liberals" who've made his life miserable. No biggie. Stalin and Mao also hated the Liberals. Why? Because the Liberals took down socialism in the 1930s.

Shooting in the dark here may be of no consequence, but doesn't this look like Thomas is only a "conservative" in terms of instrumentalizing a weird drive to get all the Liberals off the planet while making way for what some political scientists call "leftist accelerationism"? That's just a thought, however. Accelerationism amounts to accelerating the conditions for revolution. We hear a lot about neo-Nazi accelerationism here in the US, the idea being these chumps want to accelerate the potential of an all-out race war. The leftist accelerationists want to so amplify capitalism's advance that it shuts down both Liberalism and the agency of the values that strengthen democracy. The idea being, of course, the creation of a bourgeoisie versus proletariat, pre-revolutionary state of affairs is "job number one".

That's the Stalinist approach.

But hey. Doesn't that sound an awful lot like what Citizens United is doing? And what about fascist fan boy Harlan Crow? Maybe he's too ignorant to know Lenin believed fascism is a condition that signals the pre-revolutionary condition.

Fools rush in.

In 2020, I donated ten bucks to the Joe Biden Presidential Campaign. That's what I could do. I was outmatched by Charles Koch to the tune of around $100 million to one. Freedom, Roberts Court-style.

But there's more to this weirdness. Many on the Court seem to believe Hayek was prophetic in his tirades against what he called "central planning". This sham economist believed central planning is the hallmark of socialism. Apparently, the proposed "democratization" of the workforce, otherwise known as "communal ownership" or even "state ownership of the means of production" do not fit into the game when Hayek tries to get his jerry-rigged, reactionary scheme to work. Of course, there are many types of "central planning". Hayek directed his ire at British Labour during the Great Depression and World War II. He didn't like it when the British government "corporatized" a variety of sectors--industrial, accounting, production, etc--into coordination with the dictates of a government trying to shovel its way out of depression or engage in a coherent stab at a war economy. He thus points to Nazi Germany, as "a different strain of socialism", in that Germany's similar tactics pulled the country out of a deep economic trough and then led to a powerful war machine. Or the Soviet version. Hayek points out the famous calculation problem: If there is no pricing mechanism, how can a centrally planned government economy figure out how to calculate production needs and quotas?

Apparently, only airheads like Harlan Crow can make those calculations. Like, good luck, Fried Rich. . . Hayek.

What many of Hayek's followers want to do is deconstruct the administrative, regulatory and social welfare states and thus self-regulate, privatize and uncouple government "interference" from the economy.

This is called LIBERTARIAN CENTRAL PLANNING. And this version of what Hayek warned against is truer to form of what he worried about: Self-interested ideological extremists dictating their self-interest-feeding ideas to all the rest of us. Central planning: the plan is to take the government/capitalism cooperative rivalry apart. And put capitalism on top. Just like any old fascist banana republic anywhere on earth.

Capitalist enterprises across the board centrally plan. The boss has to. Think, for instance, how a pizza parlor's manager has to calculate the number of staff he or she is going to need for a projected evening rush. Projected. An abstraction of what is suspected to happen. The manager calculates per past experiences with evening rushes, makes a staffing calculation, and then gambles it will meet the production and service needs of the pizza place. Or, let's say a huge fair is going to take place, a state fair where thousands from across a state are going to gather to celebrate, ride the midway, hit the tilt-a-whirl, eat fresh fried french fries and corny-dogs. . . yet no one knows with any real certainty how many or how few are going to come to the fair on any given day. Yes, planning has to deal with abstractions and statistics, facts and figures. How many attorney-client hours need to be allocated in the next month to meet the demands of a multi-million dollar case? But of course if the government is out to "control the economy", which isn't happening in the US at all, there is a problem in scale: the larger the need for, and the range and scope of planning, the easier the plan can go wrong. . . .

. . . as libertarian central planning is already going totally wrong. Those people have miscalculated quite badly. When libertarian principles at the state level are applied, suddenly, because businesses are almost constitutionally incapable of self-regulation, corruption on a wide scale filters through the economy. The libertarian excuse for a solution? Oh, right. If a company is behaving in a corrupt fashion, the all-known millions of consumers will know almost by instinct and will not longer consume the products thereof.

And certainly, even Bud and Cleata of Frogcrotch, Georgia, know all about the obscure details of free market capitalist enterprise. Count on it! Fat chance of that. And the US Supreme Court? Must be great to be an ideology-drunk extremist with a good government job these days, right John Roberts? Why do you believe your preferences are right, as in "the right", as in "right versus wrong"? Do you know what the widespread social experimentation with such principles have shown?

Abject failure. And police states.

Oh, there's that bugaboo again. Police states. The Roberts Court also appeals to the common law tradition, and pretends that if the federal government simply gives way to a value system that often is contradictory and inimical to the democratic value systems so carefully put into place two and a half centuries ago, it won't lead to a police state. Sure thing, SCOTUS. We can always expect self-interested money meat robots to behave responsibly in their relationship with all the people who aren't directly involved in "sales", right? That confidence game depends on a concept truly surreal: The vaunted Founding Fathers were so apt and capable they were infallible like the Pope, and thus foresaw the Industrial Revolution, foresaw all sorts of qualitative changes since 1776, and thus, we must rapidly create a necrocracy, what Thomas Paine called "rulership from the grave".

If Hamilton didn't say so, we can't do it. This is the spurious claim. That is so wrong it's amazing jurists on the highest court would buy into that. It's very weird when one long-dead person's freedom of speech is absolute, while mine has a price on its head.

Even weirder: When confronted with this eerie contradiction, Roberts and his fellow dingle-berries on the Court suggest it's not their problem. Per their interpretation, "the best course" involves tossing issues surrounding regulation and administration into the maw of an already gridlocked beyond sanity Congressional melee. In other words, if the political gridlock in legislative bodies is especially due to the inflexibility and rigidity of an "economizing" ideology, almost instantly the issue will be politicized and will become an issue ready-made food fight of epic proportions.

While reactionary private interests scam their way into more exorbitant, and undeserved, power over all of us. Sounds like a centralized plan to me, ding-bats.

One last thing here: What about the evangelical's big concept called Dominionism? This involves the pie-in-the-sky nonsense that, somehow, God has chosen this faction to have dominion over the United States. This means that the so-called "rights" of The Chosen will "trump" the actual rights of everyone else. This, sadly, is an unhappiness-causing variation of the old "divine right of kings", the summary principle against what the American revolutionaries fought. The idea that one group or one person has been given absolute power to rule over an entire country is nothing less than a demand by relatively powerless people to command all power everywhere.

Egocentrism: The little baby wiggles its fingers and mommy comes to feed the little baby, and hence, in the little baby's mind, the little baby has absolute power to make mommy appear.

Magic. But interestingly, this fits right into the idea of a moneyed elite. Joining forces with a doctrinaire faction of what might be called domestic Christian imperialism, the moneyed elite have a means to the end of judging all who dissent--to the detriment of anyone who does.

Sadly, we're on the road to totalitarianism if such trends as these continue unabated. Given that the laws of the US are all humbly based on opinion in a government based upon the principles of Reason, the idea of any group having absolute power is a mockery of the men who framed this government's laws. Worse, in Christianity, complete with its concept of Original Sin, one is guilty the day one is born and is not judged to be innocent until the day one dies. Remember? The US is all about being presumed innocent before proven guilty. And there is no rule for absolute rulership or some lawless nonsense backstopped by the myth of a supreme being's support for one faction against all the others.

How does a cake speak? How do the communion wafers speak? Isn't any speaking a matter of interpretation? What the cake said to me, and what it said to you, are two different things. It's unavoidable.

I looked at the speaking cake on TV. What did it say?

"Just keep me out of this, you idiot-heads!"

Come on. We need to listen to what the cake says.