Month: August 2025

A “nightmare” is a frightening or disturbing dream that often awakens the sleeper, causing feelings of fear, terror, or anxiety. Unlike bad dreams, nightmares are typically vivid and memorable, with strong emotions that can linger after waking. The Nation’s present nightmare is of such bizarre intensity as would exceed the most “eldritch” tales of H.P. Lovecraft or the horror stories of Stephen King.

The contextual nightmare scenario is so dystopian and bizarrely Kafka-esque as to engender cogent feelings of terror, disbelief, and the disquieting aesthetics of viewing highway “roadkill.”

In said thematic nightmare, we painfully observe the singularly frightening elements of (a) an orange-hair colored monster, (b) his selected cabal of disolute and degenerate assistants, (c) a hapless cult of lemming-like adherents, and (d ) the support of a dystopian, masked, violent horde of Gestapo-like police.

The hapless victims of the orange monster, in the nightmare scenario, are people (families or parts thereof), who offend against the Orange Ogre’s hatred for people, sufficiently objectionable and profoundly guilty of public appearance with tan colored skin; most especially, those egregiously guilty of intentionally and wantonly speaking Spanish in English-speaking America.

The hungry monster-protagonist possesses an insatiable appetite for destructively devouring institutions of higher education, governmental programs of empathic relief, such as Medicaid, Medicare, ubiquitous saluary health regulations, inclusive of those relevant to the ever increasing, potential armageddon of “Global Warming,” the institutional media and National Public Radio and Public Television, programs designed to assure equality of opportunity such as, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Americans With Disabilities Act (1990), “Affirmative Action,” “DEI,” and the essential relevance of the U.S, Constitution.

The monstrous protagonist of our appalling nightmare is bent on destroying the normative and existentially societally exigent concepts, including “truth” and verifiable fact, empathy, and human enlightenment, intellectual progress, indeed, the ubiquitously basic and civilizational moral compass. His all-consuming, reductionistic egoistical self-regard completely dominates the entire available space in his insular, reductive bubble, leaving little facility for the mature regard for anything or anyone au dehors such singularly reductive and neurotic mentality. Such an outre perspective dynamically promotes a lifestyle and a resultant governing style, patently in dissonance with basic humanism and limited hubristic self-regard.

The tragic sequelae of such an aberrant persona make such an orange monster unfit and emotionally incapable of sanely steering the ship of state and filling the role of an appropriate leader of the Nation and the Free World. The American Nation must awaken from this egregiously terrifying nightmare and effect a surgical excision of its nightmarish, cancerous invasion of our traditionally venerated, capable, and humanistic governance.

-p.

As Melissa Swine was exiting the Mall Cosmetics Store, she was greeted with a celebratory, “Happy Birthday” by her neighbor and close friend, Sara Epicac, who was shopping in the nearby shoe emporium. Melissa smiled in gratitude and responded: ” Oh, I don’t bother with birthdays; not since I reached 48.” The suggestion, implicit in the social response, was that growing older is a negative enterprise, to be disregarded and bravely endured. Analogous responses, ubiquitously articulated in age-similar social interactions, reveal an erroneous and jejune appraisal of the natural phenomenon of aging. The latter, in our perception, while a boon to the cosmetics industry, nevertheless, cogently and appropriately calls for appropriate and thoughtful reappraisal. It might be useful to discuss the subject of age in the ubiquitous context of “Birthdays.”

Birthday celebrations for the young are happy and loving events; family and friends, birthday cake, and presents are the traditional phenomena designed to make the child happy and personally assured of love and ratified personal identity. In our view, such events, in reality, are fundamental expressions of parental gratitude for the child, despite the overt appearance of child-oriented observances.

The perennial observance of Birthday parties, aside from the traditional cake and presents, is, in essence and metaphysical reality, a celebration of the continued existence of the relevant individual and an overt reaffirmation of the secure recognition of place in the family. As the child matures, the succeeding birthday celebrations reaffirm the continued existence of the celebrated individual in the loving familial entity and, notably, his personally evolving maturity. As to the latter, each succeeding birthday assures the maturing individual of his continuing aspirational progress to maturity and independence.

The introductory, fictional conversation between “Melissa” and “Sara” at the outset of this writing is intended to portray what we eternally perceive as a ubiquitous lack of understanding of life and the absence of maturity of perception of empirical reality.

Admittedly, growing old is ineluctably inclusive of the loss of physical prowess and observable changes from youthful to older appearance; nevertheless, growing older is not a toxic disease. The loss of natural prowess is valuably compensated, for contemplative individuals, by a singular increase in mature perspective and understanding of life and the world. Wisdom and experience bring empirical understanding to past dilemmas and insecurities

Age, for those who have led contemplative lives, is understood and revered analogously to the valued maturity of fine wine. With increasing age and experience comes the positive understanding of others and, notably, of oneself. Gray hair and changes in skin texture may be accompanying traits to an inner sense of mature perspective and wisdom, the invaluable concomitant of a “fulfilled life.”

In a few quick months, we will attain the age of 89, for which we are celebratively happy and grateful.

-p.

Our venerable 18th-century Founders, while prescient, could not have anticipated the current infestation of termite-like damage to the underpinnings of the edifice of their creatively constructed radical Democratic Republic. The tripartite design of its political architecture, each branch having requisite authority over the others, to assure the Nation’s proper governance, to achieve the intended “government, “By and for the People.” Empirical assurance of such constitutional democracy was afforded by the invested authority of the Judiciary branch, the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court of the United States (“SCOTUS”) was granted the ultimate authority to review and determine all issues arising, relevant to the proper stewardship of our constitutional Republic. Such assurance of constitutional propriety, dynamically supplemental to a mutual “Checks and Balances” authority of the three branches of the polity (“Separation of Powers”), was construed as a dynamically empirical guarantee of the stability of an intended “government,” by and for the People.”

The advent of a constitutional debacle, the proximate consequence of influential, wealthy, self-interested citizens in their excessive desire for power and further material riches, was not then temporally considered nor conceivable.

Until the unfortunate precedent-altering case of Gore v Bush (2000), the Supreme Court was the empirical cause for the consummate assurance, through its assigned responsibility of “Judicial Review,” of compliance with the provisions of the Constitution. Consistent with the basic concept of “Separation of Powers, any litigant aspiring to have his case accepted for determination by SCOTUS was mandated to present an application, known as a “Writ of Certiorari,” successfully demonstrating that the issues of the relevant case are not political nor have any indirect political resonance. The mandated proscription of politically impactful matters proved to be successful in the traditional maintenance of judicial objectivity, confining the determinations and findings of the ultimate Court of last (final) resort to its laudable duty of the objective determination of material legal issues.

The\ turning point represented by the Supreme Court’s acceptance and determination of the “political” case of Gore v. Bush proved to represent the morphing of a SCOTUS, unprecedentedly, to a judicial body, regrettably open to political influence, and shockingly, to instances of individual judicial corruption.

The politically infamous Taxpayer United case, erroneously accepted and determined by SCOTUS, in our view, opened the floodgates to a sustained mortal attack on democracy. The Court promulgated the anti-democratic proposition that a corporation may not be legally limited as to its political contributions. Money in politics has historically been the arch-enemy of democratic equality in its toxic impact on the significance of the individual citizen’s vote. The ensuing, profound distress at its profoundly negative impact on the democratic standard of the equal vote is only surpassed by its telling, sophomoric rationalization.

The High Court, in that unfortunate case, ruled that a corporation is a legal “person” and, accordingly, statutory limitations on corporate political contributions were an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech. Such evident stretch of reason and the plain inanity of the Court’s reasoning are demonstrative of the corrupt insincerity of the presiding Court. First-year law school freshman and every entrepreneur is aware that the statutorily created ability for a fictional status of”person” is solely related to a business entityvehicle of (having its origin in the time of Queen Elizabeth) that merely confers the requested status of a legally fictional “personhood” to corporate business entities, for the limited purpose of thereby limiting the individual liability of the entrepreneur ( N.B. debtors went to prison in Elizabethan England) and thereby encouraging new enterprise. The cocept is universally understood not to represent humanity.

Since every law school freshman and business entrepreneur is aware of the routine and statutorily permissible use of the vehicle of a fictional “person” in the context of corporate business, it is manifestly ineluctable that the eminent justices of SCOTUS, indeed, know it as well. This flagrant gift to the well-healed and influential corporate world constituted a mortal blow to the existential one-man, one-vote dynamic of our traditionally vaunted definitional democracy, and is sadly demonstrative of the decline of our Highest Court.

Rather than the designated existence and availability of an ultimate Court constituted for the rendition of just constitutional guidance, SCOTUS has thus tragically descended to the level of an unpredictable (and worse, corrupted) overseer of legal rectitude. The unpredictable acceptance of the influence of individuals, characterized by the collaboration of riches and influence, empirically led to the institutional decline of the High Court, and opportunistically availed the donors of the novel opportunity remunerative and otherwise, to manage Justices open to political and religious influence.

[ N.B. excluded from this reluctant critique are Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. The latter three Justices are demonstrably and admirably unwavering in their moral and principled dedication to constitutional rectitude, but unfortunately, are numerically outvoted by the other principally vulnerable SOCUS Justices.]

A traditional Supreme Court, evincing Justices emulating the venerable record of their traditionally venerable predecessors, would be a determinative buffer against the errant and outrageously un-American, autocratic policies of the extant shameful and dystopian Chief Executive and his menagerie of sycophantic followers.

-p.