This was a day of significant Battles. In 217 BCE, Hannibal pulled off the first recorded "turning movement" and the largest recorded ambush by the largest recorded ambushing force at Lake Trasimene. He wiped out over half of the opposing Roman army and sent the rest packing in disarray with minimal losses of his own.

In 1314, the Scots, under their king, Robert the Bruce, decisively whupped the English (under Edward II) at Bannockburn.. Though the war continued for 14 more years, this glorious victory is celebrated in song, verse, art, sculpture and multifarious toasts. Do not bring it up in the vicinity of any gathering of Scots unless you have a tonne of free time on your hands.

In 1340, Edward III, however, took command of the English fleet in a fleet engagement against the French at the Battle of Sluys, and defeated it in detail, capturing the vast majority of the French ships and killing between 16 and 20 thousand French sailors. The English thereby took command of the English Channel and enabled a troop landing that enabled them to besiege Tournais, but still didn't prevent French raids on English shipping. This was, for perspective, more or less the opening salvo in the 100 years war, so the complete and total destruction of the French fleet can hardly be deemed to have sped things up to any material extent.

In 1821, Simon Bolivar sewed up Venezuelan Independence, and thereby the creation of the Republic of Gran Colombia. with a decisive defeat of España at The Battle of Carabobo.

Not mentioned, among others: 1622 – The Battle of Macau, 1779 – The Great Siege of Gibraltar, 1813 – The Battle of Beaver Dams, 1859 – The Battle of Solferino, 1866 – Battle of Custoza, and so on; I'm sure that you get the picture.

John Cabot, actually an Italian, Giovanni Caboto, who had sailed out of Bristol, England on behalf of Henry VII of England, landed in Newfoundland, stepped ashore, met nobody, and returned to Merrie Engelongde. Not too much to tell about that particular voyage other than that he was the first recorded European since the Vikings to "explore" North America.

There are in the US, forever and a day, a sufficiency of censorious blue-nosed intellectual refugees from the Victorian era, and assiduous disciples of Thomas Bowdler, that the Supremes were yet again forced to dip their toe into the murky cesspool that is US obscenity law. (I call it that because it is one of the few things that I can think of that is truly obscene.) In today's first case, Roth v. United States, the court, much to the displeasure of Justice Earl Warren, held that the First Amendment doesn't protect obscene speech. The court then went on, as always, to utterly and completely fail to come up with an objective standard as to what the hell obscenity was or meant.

Though not as bad as Justice Potter Stewart's infamous threshhold criteria of "I know it when I see it." (Jocoballis v Ohio, 1964), the "definition" that came out of Roth, were it statute law, would be unconstitutionally vague. (Generally, broadly, a normal person must be able to know with certainty in advance of an act or action whether or not it would violate a particular statute, or else said statute is unconstitutionally vague.) Justice Brennan's holding in Roth gave us the appalingly uninformative "average person, applying contemporary community standards" test. WTF? How average? Height, Weight? IQ? Education? Religion? How the hell is somebody sitting in a dive bar in Vegas writing a pulp paperback on a laptop supposed to know what will fly in Winnemuca on any given day, let alone Macon, Georgia, Peoria, St. Petersburg, Weehawken, or Maine? I live in Alameda County, state of California, USofA. A jury of my "peers" at the county level could, statistically, be selected from a panel composed entirely of Lit. majors from UC Berkeley. It equally well could come from a panel consisting entirely of stereotypic blue-rinsed right wing extreme fundie Christian Reaganites from Livermore who still actively work to get such things as Tarzan and Catcher in The Rye banned at the local high school. I don't need to worry about Orange County or San Diego, 20 miles east is a whole different cultural universe. But Con. Law need not be internally consistent or coherent, so, censorship based on community standards it is. Like, gag me with a fuckin' spoon, Suzy Creamcheese.

Case number two, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is an odious decision. This declaration is simply my opinion of the outcome, I have never bothered to read it. Several previous decisions have amply shown that the current court decides cases on the basis of ideology. Thomas S. Kuhn once stated that the answer(s) one obtains depend upon the question(s) one asks. The current court is more than capable of asking only those questions which will lead to a preferred answer. A reading of the Syllabus for the above case makes it obvious that this is what happened here, and that the court, as it so often does in the case of what are essentially "blue laws", ignored the elephant in the room.

The court held that the federal government has no authority to regulate abortion, even though recognizing, in passing, that it does stick its nose into so-called matters of Health and Safety. I wont belabor the point that an abortion is every bit as much of a medical procedure as a tonsillectomy or vaccination or that the current crop of pharmaceutical abortificants are just as much medications as viagra is, though legitimate challenges to Dobbs can come from such reasoning. Instead, I submit that Dobbs reaches the proper conclusion, in part, and only in part, for all the wrong reasons.

As I pointed out last week, the court, in Abington School District v. Schempp affirmed that the first amendment applies equally to the states and the fedeeral government. Furthermore, Justice Clark citing Justice Black in Torcaso v. Watkins, stated:

"We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.' Neither can it constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can it aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs."

The "elephant in the room" is Ganesha, or any other god, goddess, religious idea, or belief, or practice or prohibition. I can eat all the ham I want and wash it down with milk should I see fit. Neither the feds nor any state can impose any restrictions upon me that are based solely upon some religion. The long and short of it is that there are simply no non-religious grounds for prohibiting abortions. Dobbs is wrong in concluding that there is no explicit or implicit right to an abortion. The right to an abortion is implicit in the right under the first amendment to be free from religion or any of its trappings as well as governmental imposition of any and all of the same.

On this day in history:

217 BCE - Hannibal beat the Romans at Lake Trasimene, one of the "Great Battles" of history.
0637 - The Battle of Moira (Ireland's largest)
1314 – The Battle of Bannockburn, a decisive victory for Robert the Bruce and the Scots.
1340 – The English destroyed the entire French fleet at the Battle of Sluys, ne of the great naval battles of history
1374 – There was a sudden major outbreak of St. John's Dance, a mass psychogenic illness, in the streets of Aachen
1497 – John Cabot landed in Newfoundland, the first Europeans since the Vikings to do so.
1597 - The first Dutch voyage to the East Indies reached Java.
1622 - Battle of Macau: the Dutch failed to steal Macau from the Portuguese
1779 - The Great Siege of Gibraltar began
1793 - France's first Republican constitution was adopted
1812 – Macron'sNapoleon's Grande Armée crossed the Neman, starting his invasion of Russia and becoming cannon fodder for Tchaikovsky

1821 – Bolivar's decisive victory at the Battle of Carabobo guaranteed Venezuela's independence from Spain.
1880 - First performance of O Canada, eh. But is it art?
1981 - The Humber Bridge, then the world's longest, opened for traffic
1932 - A bloodless revolution overthrew King Prajadhipok of Siam
1943 - The Battle of Bamber Bridge pitted racist white US MPs against black US soldiers
1947 - Kenneth Arnold saw 9 UFOs near Mount Rainier, the first widely reported UFO sighting*
1950 – The South African Group Areas Act formally segregated the races, creating Apartheid.
1954 - The Viet Minh hammered the French at the Battle of Mang Yang Pass
1957 – The Supremes decided Roth v. United States, one of a series of essentially inane rulings on "obscenity" **
1973 - Thirty two people were killed in an arson attack on a second floor gay bar, The UpStairs Lounge.
2004 – The New York Court of Appeals decided People v Lavalle, holding that the death penalty violated the state constitution.
2010 - Julia Gillard became the first female Prime Minister of Australia.
2012 - Lonesome George, the last known Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, died
2022 – In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not assign the authority to regulate abortions to the federal government, thereby returning such authority to the individual states. This overturns the prior decisions in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

* doing an estimated 1200 mph, no less

** Thus establishging a precedent for outlawing and punishing behavior one cannot define, a miserable farce of a decision.

Some people who were born on this day:

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

~~ Ambrose Bierce

1386 – John of Capistrano, hater, Inquisitor, and Saint. A classic combo, hence the missions in CA & TX.
1771 - Eleuthere Irenee du Pont, founded DuPont and made a fortune making gunpowder
1813 - Henry Ward Beecher, minister, accused adulterer, abolitionist, suffragest
1842 - Ambrose Bierce, author, essayist, journalist and lexicographer
1867 – Ruth Randall Edström, educator, peace activist and women's rights activist
1880 – Oswald Veblen, mathematician
1883 - Victor Francis Hess, physicist, discovered cosmic rays
1901 – Marcel Mule, classical saxophonist
1901 - Harry Partch, composer and music theorist who used just intonation
1904 - Phil Harris, singer, songwriter and actor
1911 – Juan Manuel Fangio, legend, still the best.
1912 – Mary Wesley, author
1917 - Ramblin' Tommy Scott, singer and guitarist
1917 - Joan Clarke, cryptanalyst
1929 - Carolyn S. Shoemaker, astronomer, comet hunter, co-discoverer of Shoemaker-Levy 9
1942 - Arthur Brown, singer and songwriter from a crazy world
1942 – Mick Fleetwood, drummer
1944 - Jeff Beck, guitarist and songwriter
1944 - Chris Wood, saxophonist, flautist
1945 - Colin Blunstone, singer and songwriter

1947 - Mick Fleetwood, drummer
1947 - Peter Weller, Buckaroo Banzai, Cavalier
1949 - John Illsley, singer, songwriter, bass player, and producer
1959 - Andy McCluskey, singer, songwriter, bass player, and producer
1960 - Siedah Garrett, singer, songwriter, and pianist
1961 - Curt Smith, English singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1962 – Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexican politician, first female president of Mexico
1967 - Jeff Cease, guitarist (black crows)
1983 – Gard Nilssen, Norwegian drummer
1986 - Solange Knowles, singer, songwriter, and actress

Some people who died on this day:

It is better to be feared than loved, for fear commands obedience.

~~ Lucrezia Borgia

994 – Abu Isa al-Warraq, skeptic, scholar, critic of Islam and all revealed religions as B.S.
1519 – Lucrezia Borgia, politician, archetypal Lucrezia Borgia.
1969 – Willy Ley, historian and author
2010 – Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist
2013 – Alan Myers, drummer
2014 – Eli Wallach, Tuco

Some Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:

World UFO Day
Bannockburn Day

Today's Tunes

World UFO Day

Juan Manuel Fangio

Ramblin' Tommy Scott

Arthur Brown

Mick Fleetwood

Jeff Beck

Chris Wood

Colin Blunstone

John Illsley

Andy McClusky

Siedah Garrett

Jeff Cease

Solange Knowles

Fred Anderson

Alan Myers

Other sides of Jeff Beck

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Ok, it's an open thread, so it's up to you folks now. So what's on your mind?

Cross posted from http://caucus99percent.com

Open Thread, Lake Trasimene, Bannockburn, Sluys, Arthur Brown. Jeff Beck, Chris Wood, Mick Fleetwood, Roth, Dobbs