Dream Oven, 33rd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Elektra): Today, on this very day, the Supreme Court, which can always be counted on to make horrendous decisions, just gave the Stable Genius another gift. Federal courts are now weaker, and the Constitutional checks and balances fade even further.
Of the 100 or so executive orders the Stable Genius signed since January 2025, lower courts have issued 25 injunctions to temporarily stay ("pause") the orders if they were deemed to cause immediate and irreparable harm to individuals. Today, the Supremes (Keg-Stand Cavanaugh, Amy Boney Carrot, Samuel Vergogna, et al) ruled that the injunctions should only apply to the jurisdiction of that particular court, not the entire country. They further stated that this will apply only when the injunction is "too broad," meaning the ruling is highly open to interpretation. Since the case was about birthright citizenship, the ruling will also allow the possibility of a person being a legal U.S. citizen in one state, say Massachusetts, and not in another, say Texas.
Centralization of power is a common strategy for authoritarian governments, especially if the institutional change is done in the context of nationalist viewpoints where ethnic groups are painted as the root of societal problems. They are also often implemented when the public is distracted by alarming or controversial topics, such a international conflict or polarizing social issues.
If you're looking for Biblical portents of the end of the world, and last month's earthquake in tectonically-stable, trailing-edge Georgia wasn't enough, consider yesterday's meteor in the Atlanta sky. A loud, rolling rumble (I mistook it for thunder), a sudden flash, and a white streak in the sky. It was confirmed by NASA to be a meteor entering the Earth's atmosphere around 12:30 pm nearly 50 miles above Oxford, Georgia, east of Atlanta.
The fireball traveled southwest at roughly 30,000 mph before disintegrating and unleashing energy equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT, possibly leaving scattered fragments in South Carolina. The Guardian reports that a possible fragment pierced a house's roof in Henry County, south of Atlanta, all the way through and cracked through the laminate flooring to the concrete.
Imagine that homeowner having to convince his insurance company that he and he alone was the sole victim in the entire universe of this meteor. Imagine the meteor, after traveling through the infinite vastness of space for hundreds of millions of years, to have the incredible good luck, the one-in-a-trillion chance, of landing somewhere it was noticed by a sentient being. How happy it must have been! Somebody noticed!
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