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Showing posts with the label Constitution

DOBBS for Dummies (Part 5 of 5: Respect)

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Start here . OK, this is a tough one. Looks like we made it.  5 of 5, or should I joke?  6 - 3. No joke. In this Series Finale of Dobbs for Dummies, we talk about "RESPECT FOR THE COURT," and the impact that this decision has had and will have on American governmental institutions, law, and civil discourse. Not to mention millions of lives in utero . As an officer of the court, I am essentially ogligated to be honest, transparent, and fair to everyone involved in this legal debate. It is settled for now, and I say that presuming we maintain a constitutional republic and not surrender to barbarism. Perhaps we should just end it here , and going forward each of us can just figure shit out on our own. Thanks, Dad . © 2024 Roy B. Santonil

DOBBS V. JACKSON for Dummies (Part 4 of 5: "Stare Decisis")

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Hello friends, and welcome back .  I pretty much stopped writing since January. When your precious, charming, lovely, smart, witty daughter gets married and buys a house, you had better be there to help them make transition, or you have no purpose in life. I also got a part-time job at my true habitat, a local municipal golf course, so 2023 was a bad year for this web logger. Still, in the past year, I have managed to cross off a couple of items on my musical bucket list, and learned the guitar solos to Hotel California and Kid Charlemagne .  Maybe it's time to start posting videos? Our legal journey can be summarized, so far, as follows: the Dobbs decision is a resultant of two primary vectors. These vectors are moral force and social experience .  Applied through Reason during the course of Time, our common law system arrived in 2022 at a place where logic could lead, where apolitical imperatives could survive, a place where -- after 50 years in the jurisprudentia...

DOBBS V. JACKSON for Dummies (Part 3 of 5 : "Rights")

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Play it safe. A brief review --  Part 1. Conscience is annoying.  Jiminy Cricket represented that part of an incomplete persona, the part that relentlessly tweaks our moral compass. He irritates our inchoate spirits, urging us, never stopping until that moment you take a chance, opening your heart to being "real." Conscience is self-knowledge. With it, you objectify yourself, and you recognize the possibility that, " Hey, maybe I can expend some energy thinking a thought, maybe two, maybe more - discerning whether certain propositions, certain thoughts, words, and actions are inherently right - or wrong. " Part 2. Culture , on the other hand, is one of the primary exogenous forces that shapes the thoughts, feelings, and to be sure, significant opinions affecting humanity. It lends credence to the rules under which we choose to live.   To minimize the impact of art, music, literature, architecture, animation, language, sports, etc., on human experience, will lead i...

DOBBS V. JACKSON for Dummies (Part 2 of 5 : Culture)

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Start here . Welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.  To review Part 1 ( link ), you may recall it ended with a bit of time travel. You were led to an obscure Commentary written 38 years ago in a law school newspaper. The writer spoke from the past about how Roe v. Wade had weak, and more likely non-existent, constitutional underpinnings. He asserted that Conscience is the true final arbiter of moral questions that society attempts to answer through legal sophistry. That writer has been doing honest homework on those issues, sustained by a steady diet of locusts and honey, so plentiful in the wilderness of legal unemployment.  Such is the price for honest legal opinion.  Such is the price for sticking to your guns. But today, it is, finally, water under the bridge.  The river has run its course. As Thomas Paine put it, "Time Make More Converts Than Reason." Fortunately, you have not been triggered by my past comments enough to have me assassinated, just because I t...

DOBBS V. JACKSON For Dummies (Part 1 of 5: Conscience)

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Start here . I'll admit it. Three months is really too long of a break between blog posts.  Or has it been only two? It feels like a lot more than a trimester has passed since we last ventured into these post-Muskian Twitter Senior Citizen Cyber-rants. And another thing, why "a trimester?" It just seems so random.  Nothing is random. Hello Boomers and friends of boomers. ( Technically, I am NOT a boomer, but that is another issue for another time .) It's A Mestery Do you remember when trimesters were only a quarter? (Shutup, Dad) . On this day in 1973, legal use of the term "trimester" began costing us innocent lives, silenced hearts, and tiny ripped limbs. Until last summer's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Center for Reproductive Health 597 U.S. ___(2022) , the number of human embryos aborted surpassed 63 million.   63,000,000 is a lot of dead babies.  : ( sad face They coined that word -- trimester -- to serve as the skele...

"One Thing Leads to Another" -- The Fixx -- Reach the Beach (1983)

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Start here . For you lawyers, do you recall this classic case study from Torts class?  Palsgraf vs. Long Island Railroad Co. 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928) is legendary because Judge Cardozo's analysis of proximate cause reinforced one of the basic elements required in order to plead a valid cause of action for liability on the grounds of negligence. But back to my point, since I refuse to walk back into those weeds planted in my brain during those hellish indoctrination rituals called "law school" and "bar exam."  Let it suffice to say that chasing Truth down rabbit holes is a journey full of surprises, and you never know where gritty, honest research will lead you. The Newtonian paradigm is gone. Quantum Mechanics and the Butterfly Effect are real things. Dark Matter and String Theory rule science.  For now. I simply wanted to discuss the problem of Factions in a large republic ( link here! ).  But, in a momentary lapse of reason, during the course of my s...

Slaves to Faction

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I đź’“WRITING   Start here . “By a faction , I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison Break it down, nerds.  If not, we will know how it feels to be thick as a brick.  So I had a nice two-week travel break, thanks.  I got to see the kids. I got to visit one of the oldest lighthouses in United States -- Beavertail. I also got to revisit a "road not taken" by taking pictures at the gate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis.  And last but not least, I found another topic that interests me. These next few weeks, I will talk about the heavy conflicts in the political realm, circa 2022. Social life is so fractured, yet, it isn't as if great minds haven't thought of these social problems before. It may be good to review the...

Right On Cue - A Retrospective

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 OR . . . as the red-hatted hordes CHEERING for NASCAR driver bRANDON BROWN would say . . . "Right on, Q!" Start here .  Welcome back boomers (and kids) to another edition ... uh, addition, ... or is it merely a rendition?  OK, enough bull about Durham . . . So, a great French comedian once said,  "Zee timing, she eez evereething."    I Think, Therefore I Drink Based on that, I think once a week should be the proper dosage of this comic relief, plus or minus a paragraph or two. If you could just help me calibrate it . . . if you don't mind . . . that would be great. We are hunkered down in the Carolina Piedmont, stocked up with white bread, toilet paper, and almond milk. We got hit by a full inch of snow and sleet, just before MLK Day. Then we got hit again just this weekend.  And the NFL isn't rigged. Hmph. I can hear my Yankee friends laughing scornfully at the Southern facade, the genteel, neurotic, Prince of Tides machismo , panicked at the prosp...