☕️ YES, THOU SHALL ☙ Friday, June 21, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Today could be a revolutionary Supreme Court day; Putin putting the band back together; NYT pushes sexual propaganda; Ten Commandments story blows up; weird hope for broken hearts; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s finally Friday! Whoosh! Today’s essential news roundup begins with news of no news: Supreme Court teases the country by hoarding the biggest decisions in a generation until the very last minute; Putin puts the band back together and media imitates Dr. Strangelove; New York Times pushes novel sexual and marital morality, again; Lousiana’s Ten Commandments law makes an even bigger story than I first expected, so let’s dig into the historical and Constitutional underpinnings a little and see if we can say something new and useful about this contentious debate; and unlikely space hair dryer heals broken hearts in frisky new medical study.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

👨‍⚖️👨‍⚖️ We begin with non-news, by noting that nothing interesting happened at the Supreme Court yesterday, a development packed with dire portent. Yesterday, Newsweek updated its Monday story headlined, “Supreme Court changes its schedule.” Originally, the Supreme Court had scheduled yesterday, Thursday, as its final opinion-issuing day of the term with two dozen to go. But this week it added a second day, Friday (today), perhaps as a sort of a bonus. Maybe they’re still polishing that last batch of orders. Or maybe they wanted to drop something late on a Friday afternoon, after the Justices and staff have safely left the building, and heading into a distracting weekend news cycle.

The current Supreme Court term is scheduled to conclude at the end of the month, which is next week. But even after the four that came out yersteday, there are still over 20 rulings left to be issued. According to Newsweek, 2024 is the ‘slowest’ rollout of orders since 1946. And the Supremes are hoarding some true whoppers, such as the paradigm-shifting, riot-starting, hopes-crushing Trump Immunity Decision.

Yesterday should have been the very last opinion outing day, and Court watchers were bracing themselves thinking here it comes.

But the Supreme Court teased us badly. Americans were left sitting on pins and needles when the Court released only four mostly uninteresting opinions. Four opinions that did not include any of the most eagerly awaited ones. On top of the Trump order, there are other blockbusters pending, like one that could drastically prune Executive Agency powers, a dire prospect that is really freaking out the fretful elite liberals, who are sleeplessly tossing on their pillows like gaffed salmon.

For example, to provide a little preview of what to expect if the Supremes do immunize President Trump to any degree: former Clinton lawyer Mark Elias — who now runs a democrat ‘election integrity’ nonprofit, ahem — hysterically predicted on X that this is it: “Thursday and Friday will be critical to the future of democracy.”

Democracy could be finally over within hours! You never know.

Another widely awaited decision is the Court’s opinion in the Murthy case, which I have previously labeled the most important civil rights case of our generation. You’ll recall this case concerns government agencies coercing social media platforms to censor Americans for misinformation and conspiracy theorizing during the pandemic.

All of them could burst out of the Supreme Courthouse today. Or the Court could announce another order day next week. Nobody knows. It’s going to be a very interesting Friday.

🚀🚀 We’re on a mission from God. Yesterday, the BBC ran a story headlined “Putin warns South Korea against arming Ukraine.” The Beeb reported on Putin’s extended revival tour, after the Russian leader hopped straight from North Korean treaty-making to visit Vietnam, another historic Cold War ally. You could say President Putin, like the Blues Brothers, is on a mission to put the old Soviet-era band back together.

The Vietnam development is interesting in its own right, but this isn’t the Proxy War channel. I usually don’t update you on every single geopolitical chess move. The reason I included this story was because the BBC accurately reported Putin’s comments explaining what he was up to, the reason, the driving force if you will, his motivation — which I’ve been predicting ever since Joe Biden’s final five neurons first conceived of the horrible idea of letting Ukraine attack sovereign Russian territory using U.S.-supplied weapons.

In a certain light, the Russians might see the U.S. policy as us attacking Russian sovereign territory ourselves, hiding behind a beard, or patsy: the comedic non-president, Martial Law Manager Zelensky. Here’s what Putin said yesterday:

Even though I’m just a lawyer, not a military expert, even I could see it. Whereas fumbling, bumbling media has been unable to connect those simple kindergarten dots for weeks now. Like the Blues Brothers’ blind Ray, the media is happy and ignorant unless somebody tries to steal its guitar, when suddenly and unexpectedly it turns deadly accurate:

In its article, the BBC encouraged South Koreans to respond by sending more weapons to Ukraine. In other words, escalate!

This new corporate media is so wild. An entire generation of reporters should be making their careers and winning Pulitzer prizes writing about topics like nuclear escalation, how world wars form, who started it, and who’s keeping it going. Most of all, how we should de-escalate! Even if only to save the climate, which would get a lot hotter if the nukes start flying.

But instead, what we get are rivers of bellicose ink. It’s all warmongering, 24 x 7, all the time, penned by people who’ve never known or been affected by war, not personally.

Not a single corporate media article has interviewed an expert on diplomacy or peace.

Weird! Pre-pandemic, peace and love were the media’s favorite topical darlings. Now, they’re more like Carrie Fisher’s furious but eerily cheerful character, the machine-gun-wielding ex-girlfriend Jake left at the altar. It’s like this whole generation of pugnacious press wants war.

The media seems to be possessed by an angry spirit of revenge. Revenge against Russia. Revenge against China. Just Revenge! It’s like some kind of spiritual restrainer has been removed or something.

Anyway, what do you think? Why is corporate media ignoring peace?

🔥🔥 Speaking of ill spirits, no wonder non-western countries are suspicious of us. The New York Times ran a deplorable ‘relationship-advice’ story yesterday with this titillating headine:

It hit all the media’s favorite themes. The author, Jason Bilbrey, began his journey in sexual decadence as a pastor. Unsurprisingly, the breakdown of his morals and his marriage began with his and his wife Corrie’s mutual rejection of God:

To the couple, who first met in a Christian college, God became an unfashionable lifestyle accessory, an out of date accessory to be updated with broad-minded, more in-vogue sexual morality. According to Jason, it began with playful debates over their lamentable lack of sexual variety in college. Queue the rainbow.

“Corrie,” Jason happily explained, “started identifying as bisexual, then pansexual, then queer.” The rest of the story was banal and utterly predictable. Without any consideration of their five-year-old daughter’s needs, Jason reluctantly agreed to Corrie’s suggestion to start dating. Eventually, they started swapping dating advice, agreed to remove their wedding rings, and then of course agreed to divorce.

The article ended by describing Jason’s newest live-in girlfriend, Tamara, with whom he has now, again, chosen monogamy. He looks forward to getting married, again, next year. At least, for now. Even better, he and Corrie remain best friends. Jason said his ex-wife Corrie will be his best man, er, best person, no, best man at the planned wedding.

That won’t be weird at all.

The totally un-selfaware article sounded more like a post-hoc rationalization. It was, in essence, a neatly packaged summary of Jason’s rhetorical excuses for his failed marriage, failed pastoral career, and failed spirituality. All justified by the happy ending—a new, improved wife, a lesbian best friend, and some murky kind of post-religious, rainbow-decorated, tolerant atheism. Again, with zero reference to how it all ended for the daughter.

Haha, the Times’ pro-polyamory story ran with the comments turned off. They don’t want to know what we think, because they know what we think. Even the Times’ liberal readers probably don’t want to hear about how delightfully Jason can dress up his pathetic life failures and poor choices.

But Jason’s amoral, Godless story made a good segue into the recurring topic of public morality. And so we must already return to the Ten Commandments story.

🔥🔥 Yesterday’s Lousiana Ten Commandments story grew legs, both in the media and the C&C comments, and starting springing through the public imagination. It was the top story on Google News this morning. Social media was abuzz. God must not enter the classroom! Here’s a sample of yesterday’s hysterical headlines. CNN:

The Daily Beast:

The Associated Press:

The New York Times (op-ed by David French):

Amidst the social media firestorm, here came January 6th anti-insurrectionist and revolting Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD):

Lockdown-loving maskaholic and Teacher’s Union president Randi Weingarten:

And, from our own C&C comments section, here was one thoughtful but passionate example selected at random:

Most C&Cers, like me, recognized the bigger spiritual battle: Restoring God to the classroom displaces evil entities currently roosting there. But recognizing not everyone shares that conviction, and that opinions on this topic are mixed, well-intended, and passionate, I will wade into the controversy just enough to make a few simple, uncontroversial points that should be helpful to both sides and hopefully will elevate the conversation.

Two quick points. First, America was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation. That is a historical fact. It should be undebatable. We can disagree over whether that fact is good or bad (my view, for whatever it’s worth, is that it is an unqualified good). But it is inarguable that, for the Nation’s first 150 years, in full view of the Constitution, during official business, Congress and our Presidents routinely prayed to and recognized the God of the Bible and His Son, Jesus.

Second, also historically, until 1962, when the Supreme Court first ruled school-sponsored prayer unconstitutional in Engel v. Vitale, it was common in many public schools to display the Ten Commandments and incorporate Bible readings or teachings into lessons. Again, this widespread acceptance of Biblical morality occurred during generations of Americans who lived closer in time than we do to the original drafting of the Bill of Rights.

Responding to one of the C&C commenter’s points: the truth is atheists, Muslims and Satanists alike all live in a historically Judeo-Christian country. Good, bad, or indifferent, that is a fact. In the public square, non-Christians may freely worship, without government interference, whatever gods they conceive. They can create their own religious schools and teach their own doctrines in any state in the Union. But they have no claim to any historicity of tolerance for their sacred texts in public schools.

Again, we can argue about normative issues, whether our Nation’s Christian history is good or bad, but the fact remains.

Let us observe another undeniable fact: the Supreme Court’s “separation of Church and State” jurisprudence arose during its renaissance in Constitutional interpretation, when the historically liberal Warren Court discovered the Constitution was a living document moldable by judicial decree. Ten years after banning school prayer, using the same flexible interpretive standards, the same ideological Court under equally flexible Chief Judge Burger would surprise the world by discovering the penumbral right to abortion hidden deep in the shadows of the Constitution’s living essence.

The infamous Warren Court: a bunch of old liberal white guys.

You might accept the left’s argument that striking school prayer was Constitutional progress. But by definition, flexible standards aren’t standards at all. The Court giveth, and the Court taketh away. In 2022, the present originalist Court, in its Dobbs decision, struck down Roe, holding that the 1973 decision was "egregiously wrong from the start" and that its reasoning was "exceptionally weak."

Again, setting aside the controversial normative questions over the rightness or wrongness of any of these issues, the core argument remains that the Constitution, as originally written, neither guaranteed the right to abortion nor prohibited Christian prayer in public schools.

That is a fact.

In our Constitutional system of government, all powers not expressly granted to the federal government in the Constitution were reserved to the states. Like the Ten Commandments, the Tenth Amendment is simple and straightforward:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Lousiana’s new law requiring posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is better described as a Dobbs-like challenge to the Warren Court’s flexible Constitutional interpretation of the Establishment Clause, which forbids the federal government from establishing any official state religion. Before 1962, it was widely understood that power, the power to establish an official religion, was reserved to the states. After all, the original colonies had been organized around different Christian religious traditions and worried the new federal government would put its then-tiny thumb on the denominational scale.

If you agree with me so far, then the debate isn’t truly about whether Louisiana’s new law is fair or intolerant. The real debate is over whether changing the Constitution’s original intent about a state’s right to decide its own religious matters requires a Constitutional Amendment rather than another new Supreme Court decision. But here we are.

Sorry to run the same Ten Commandments story two days in a row. But it seemed like the debate was off on the wrong foot, nearly everywhere, from the media’s moronic hot takes to the thoughtful pushback in the C&C comments section. As I opined yesterday, Louisiana has sparked a long-overdue debate, and I hope today’s addition elevates the discourse.

💉💉 Speaking of the BBC, it ran this awkward but encouraging broken-hearts headline yesterday: “‘Space hairdryer’ regenerates heart tissue in study.” In short, they used an erectile-dysfunction vibrator to create moderate but measurable improvements for patients whose hearts had been damaged during bypass surgery.

The article reported on a newly published study from the European Heart Journal, titled “Cardiac shockwave therapy in addition to coronary bypass surgery improves myocardial function in ischaemic heart failure: the CAST-HF trial.” I have no idea why the BBC called the shockwave device a space hairdryer, since it doesn’t come from space, doesn’t dry anything, and has nothing to do with hair.

Whatever. The sonic space device is already widely used to treat other conditions, like the aforementioned fecundal flaccidity, and for breaking up painful kidney stones before they push through the tender member.

In the study, 63 heart bypass patients either had their hearts gently vibrated by the space hairdryer, or got a “sham” placebo treatment. Maybe it dried their hair, at least. Anyway, a year later, about twice as many vibrated patients — 11.3% compared to 6.3% in the placebo group — rose to the challenge, and showed improved heart oxygenation. The shockwaved patients could also perform (walk) longer without resting, and reported a rising quality of life.

They did not measure whether the treatment was more effective when applied by an attractive nurse. The sonic miracle device can heal your broken heart, break up your kidney stones, and stiffen up your ED — all in a single session.

Jokes aside, the treatment is non-invasive, inexpensive, doesn’t require chronic meds, and showed no adverse side effects. Which probably means they’ll ignore it. But anyway, this study was welcome news for folks with damaged heart muscles, including millions of myocarditis-afflicted victims of the shots.

Faster, please!

Have a fantastic Friday! We’ll vibrate back here tomorrow morning for another essential news roundup, when hopefully we’ll have some good news to report from the Supreme Court. Don’t miss it.

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