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As hard as I try, in the privacy of my own being, not to get caught up in the scathing absurdities of the moment — e.g., the presidential election, America’ looming fascism, our love of money and war (to name a few) — yikes, here I am, caught up in it all.

And all I can do is reach for a larger truth . . . peace will prevail, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And it so quickly feels like a cliché. Welcome to cynicism!

I swat at it, push it away, but it’s always there. So calm down, I tell myself. I’m doing so right now. In the context of a Biden blank stare and a looming Trump presidency, here I am, reaching for a sense of hope and transcendence — a sense of belief, a sense of joy, that humanity is evolving, that the present is just a necessary flicker in our becoming.

During this past week, more evidence has emerged that Israel allowed the attacks of October 7th to happen, that Israel military enacted the Hannibal directive which allows them to kill their own soldiers and citizens rather than allow them to be taken hostage, and that the propaganda regarding dead babies and rape stories are not true.

Additionally, the Lancet reports that by “applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”. This is 8% of the population.

(The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also one of the world's highest-impact academic journals.[1][2] )

I love Bernie Sanders. By most measures, he’s the greatest senator in the last 50 years. I was very glad to be a Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. But when Bernie screws up, his progressive base should say so.

Rulings by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court favor Trump and right-wing, anti-democratic interests and values, threatening to upend an already weakened American democracy. The right-wing bias of the court goes back to Trump’s successful nominations of three reactionary justices to the court while he was president. As it stands now, there are six right-wing justices on the court and 3 “liberals.” 

In one of its most disturbing recent rulings on June 2022 the court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 law that gave women the right to an abortion. The story of this ruling is told in masterful detail by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer in their book, “The Fall of Roe, The Rise of a New America” (publ. 2024). 

In this post, the contention about the court’s right-wing bias is exemplified by three recent Supreme Court rulings dealing with expanding gun ownership rights, deregulation, and presidential immunity.

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Bump Stocks

Supreme Court Rejects Ban on Gun Bump Stocks

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