SCROTUM: Supreme Court Reservoir of Thoroughly Useless Magistrates.

Burning Man: You're Fired!

In London (you may have heard) a highrise encased in flammable cladding to make it look nicer, while foregoing the installation of sprinklers in order to save money, lit up like a Tiki-Torch, toasting its inhabitants like marshmallows, there being, decades after The Towering Inferno was made, even as high-rise after highrise goes up around the globe, no plan, no known method, of either getting panicked people out nor firefighters in, to the top stories of such edifices. A world in which we regularly fire rockets not only at each other but into space, has simply never bothered to devise, or even consider, any means of rescuing apartment dwellers from the upper stories of a blazing skyscraper, because we secretly savor the spectacle of people throwing themselves in desperation from flaming buildings too big to scale and billowing with smoke.

In South Korea, the rate of cancer among women working at chip manufacturing plants is double that of the population, a fact known by its government when those plants were moved there, that being the reason they were moved there in the first place, a la Larry Summers' contention that a nation should export a good that it can produce more cheaply than other nations in exchange for goods it finds more costly to produce. If that "good" is carcinogenic, that only increases the economic benefits of dumping a load of toxic waste in said country, as it profits the more "advanced" country, whose workers have wrested healthcare coverage from their employers, who have responded by making health insurance, in less than a generation, even more prohibitively expensive than healthcare itself was, so the savings from that alone, not to mention the cheap wages and even cheaper tax liability, makes the cost of relocation worthwhile. If the industry kills off your own country's employees, well, they were still better off,  until they got cancer, than before. Or, at least someone, usually the government officials that welcomed the polluting industry in, is.

Meanwhile in Russia, Putin maintains that the public needs "to respect people’s religious feelings", even as he condones the religious-inspired attacks against those of a different sexual orientation than his own. Of all the groups in the world that have not only no respect for other people's feelings, but that condemn them out of hand, there are none so vociferous nor more vicious, than those with "religious feelings". They respect only their own "religious feelings" and would, as the history of Europe, the middle east, or anywhere else where secularism is squelched, exterminate or enslave all heretics, apostates, infidels, or whatever other name they wish to label unbelievers of their own brand of supernaturalist code of Dominance and Superiority, which is basically what all religious belief ever amounts to, despite their ritualized lies about the "Prince of Peace". Although it has not been commented on anywhere in our Free Press since the attack on secularism began during the Bush regime, every nation the US has seen fit to turn in to a failed state in the MENA:  Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, had all been secular states, and are all now in the throes of hate-fueled spasms of disintegration inspired by "religious feelings", a process started by the then-President Bush of the US who claimed that, "God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'."

We are still hemorrhaging men, money and mojo from the mayhem mushrooming from this madness. But not Belchtel. Not Lockheedless, nor Fluor the cuckoo's nest, Dyncorpse or Halliburden. All of them are still flowing with milk and money from bid-free contracts that siphon trillions of taxpayer dollars onto their balance sheets and into their profit margins and well-heeled investors' portfolios, all while worshiping at the altar of Free Market Enterprise as they fleece the same government in Washington they so excoriate to fatten the stretch marks on their bottom lines .

But, as the recently released documents on US involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government and installation of Iran's Shah's Shank and Henchmen  illustrates, the repercussions from government decisions that destroy other nations' governments can then be used to persuade the country that destroyed that economy and thus turned a state into our enemy for our Corporations' fun and profit, can still be used to persuade us that that country, and not he American Corporations that profited so handsomely from its disintegration, is our enemy. We still believe that CEO's and Chairmen of the Boards that conspire with our government officials to piratise public services as they  Flee enterprise like it's nobody's business, as they bribe and collude their way to capital formation of which the only point is self-aggrandizement, have our interests at heart, and the enemies of the people are only those outside its borders. Even as they ratchet up the misery index decade after decade with all the sangfroid of a scientist calibrating how much he can turn up the heat under the cauldron of hot water into which he's throw a frog .

And with this cavalcade of horrors visited upon us by those we elect to represent our interests as the backdrop, the SCROTUM has ruled  that there can be no accountability for officials' role "in ordering racial and religious profiling and abuse in detention, in violation of the detainees' rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments insofar as national-security policy is concerned."

But since the only continuity in government policy is that we are always at War, National Security policy is always concerned, so as per this ruling, the Constitution is null and void until such time as said war is won, which, even the SCROTUM isn't so far in the bag as not to know, is never.

So, together with Trump supporters who have been vociferously deriding the"Deep State", the only thing now left standing between us and completely arbitrary rule, the SCROTUM has ruled that courts should not interfere with sensitive functions of the Executive Branch, leaving the citizenry defenseless to the whims of our ersatz chief executive. This goes a step beyond the Imperial Presidency; it is as if they were colluding with the idea of rushin' it to the position of Tsar. So it appears that the SCROTUM has finally gone nuts, as this decision stinks about as much as one would expect, arising as it does from an organ of state pendulously swinging between a dick and an ass.