Raining and kind of gloomy this morning on California’s north coast — the weather isn’t the only passing fancy that sucks.
Reality and fiction are apparently one and the same nowadays.

A shitload of people running this planet have major mental problems: Sociopathy is a personality disorder that manifests itself in such traits as dishonesty, charm, manipulation, narcissism, and a lack of both remorse and impulse control…“you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around the janitor’s office.”

So many parts of this world are currently coming apart at the seams, one wonders at how we function at all.

(Illustration found here).

Case in point was what those so-called legal shit-for-brains Supreme Court jurists tried to do yesterday — white-wash history, with an emphasis on white.
Amy Davidson at The New Yorker:

Roberts was scornful of the idea that Congress had thought much about what it was doing when it took those votes.
He did not explicitly repeat his fellow Justice Antonin Scalia’s assertion, made in the oral arguments for the case (which I wrote about at the time), that Congress was a weak hostage to racial politics.
(Scalia had explained that Congress voted the way it did “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”)
Instead, he called Congress “irrational,” and seemed dismayed that Congress didn’t see, as he did, a country transformed by a sixties-era magic wand: “We cannot pretend that we are reviewing an updated statute, or try our hand at updating the statute ourselves, based on the new record compiled by Congress.”
…
What that record shows, she (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a scathing dissent) wrote, is that, although things have gotten a lot better, they have done so because of constant and still necessary vigilance: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The regions covered by the part of the Act that was struck down, Section 4, have, in recent years, been twice as likely as those not covered to have proven violations under other sections of the Act.
One of the covered states, Mississippi, responded to the ruling with a press release about how the implementation of a voter-identification law, held up by preclearance, “begins today.”
The V.R.A. also has a mechanism for allowing jurisdictions to “bail out” if they can show that they’ve gone ten years without violations: “Nearly 200 jurisdictions have successfully bailed out of the preclearance requirement, and DOJ has consented to every bailout application filed by an eligible jurisdiction since the current bailout procedure became effective in 1984.”
…
Ginsburg made another point: that “racial polarization in voting” makes the Act more relevant than ever.
In other words, if one party sees that another attracts more minority votes—and we have seen this—it can have a motive for playing with the laws and moving polling stations to suppress turnout, a motivation that has to do with power rather than with simple, crude, racism.
This is why the Roberts vision of transcendent American niceness is inadequate.
Eight months after a Presidential election that saw bitter fights over voter suppression, it is highly odd for the Court to be calling such concerns quaint.
Roberts does concede that there is still racial discrimination, and that it might even be a problem for voting—he just treats it as something that has dissipated like a mist, thinly and evenly distributed in the American air, not needing the “extraordinary” measures of the V.R.A.
And we are not done with history yet.

Born and raised in the deep south, I know that life continues there the same as it has for the past couple hundred years — racism is so imbedded within the framework of living, most people don’t even pay attention, or even know it’s happening all around them.
The Paula Deen shit-storm is a prime example — a deep-fried, “yes, of course,” she’d used the notorious “n” word in the past, but haven’t in a long, long time, of course.
Back in the good, old days, maybe:

During a deposition where she swore to tell the truth, Ms. Deen recounted having used a racial epithet in the past, speaking largely about a time in American history which was quite different than today…
…[Paula] was born 60 years ago when America’s South had schools that were segregated, different bathrooms, different restaurants and Americans rode in different parts of the bus.
This is not today…
…To be clear Ms. Deen does not find acceptable the use of this term under any circumstance by anyone nor condone any form of racism or discrimination.”

What a crock — of bullshit.
As a single parent who raised five kids near-about by myself, our household was a crazy mix of fun and work. However, all the kids — four girls and one boy — knew there were a couple of lines they (or I) never crossed. There was no lying, and no use of some words — one set was the use of ‘god‘ and ‘damn‘ together, others were never using the “n” word for African-Americans (or the “b” word for Latinos, or the “c” word for Orientals), but pretty-much everything else was good to go.
We did sometimes have some motherfucking, sonofabitch conversations/arguments, I tell you.

Nowhere, though, like the psychopaths who call themselves Supreme Court justices — they’re fucking nuts!