{"id":3010,"date":"2021-09-04T21:00:18","date_gmt":"2021-09-04T21:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=3010"},"modified":"2021-09-04T21:10:10","modified_gmt":"2021-09-04T21:10:10","slug":"saturday-4th-september-2021-day-537","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/09\/04\/saturday-4th-september-2021-day-537\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday, 4th September, 2021 [Day 537]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those ‘nothing’ like days – there was some autumnal sunshine and a few clouds but it felt neither warm nor cold. Having said that, I was very pleased that we got the lawns cut yesterday evening because my neighbour and I concurred that when the weather is a little muggy then the grass seems to grow much faster. So it always a source of satisfaction to look over our\u00a0communal green area \u00a0between our houses (sometimes nicknamed ‘Meg’s Meadow<\/em>‘) and see that is always has a particularly tidy appearance the day after mowing. We walked down to the park as normal and I left Meg in the company of the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society<\/em> (aka known as our University of Birmingham friend and a\u00a0mutual friend with whom we tend to discuss geopolitics at the drop of a hat). After we had set the world to rights (I think we were looking at the world from the perspective of a Russian submarine captain who surfaced near the Arctic Circle and for whom the actual map -and mental map- would\u00a0have been a Russia surrounded by hostile forces – America, China. Europe.) You really need to look at a globe looking down on it to fully appreciate the point we were trying to argue. Anyway, having discussed our little geopolitical problem for today, I went off to\u00a0collect our newspapers. There I handed in a little bit of card to exactly tell the newsagent when our subscription to The\u00a0Guardian runs out and I have to remember to destroy my\u00a0remaining vouchers and not to use them. So it will be ‘The Times<\/em>‘ during the\u00a0weekdays, the Sunday Times<\/em> on Sundays from now on and I will read the Guardian \/Observer<\/em> online. On our way home, we bumped into one of our Catholic friends whose wedding anniversary is practically on the same date as ours and we discussed some of the transport arrangements for the joint dinner which we are going to enjoy together with even more\u00a0friends whose wedding anniversary is also proximate. Then it was home for a somewhat\u00a0delayed lunch nd we had a generally quiet Saturday afternoon. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Each Saturday, we attend our local church for the 6.00pm service and tonight was no exception. We chatted for a little while outside the church and\u00a0informed our priest that on Thursday we\u00a0would have been married for 54 years and that we were married by a member of Jesuit religious order in the Church of the Holy Name just besides\u00a0the Catholic chaplaincy in Manchester. Our new priest has quite a sense of humour which can occasionally be liberating when he quipped that ‘None of the marriages conducted by the Jesuits are now regarded as valid<\/em>‘. So we got home and treated ourselves to a meal of\u00a0strawberries and ice-cream which was bought on Thursday but we had been saving until\u00a0<\/span>tonight. Meg and I made ourselves made ourselves a little miserable by looking at ‘Today at the Test<\/em>‘ (which just coincides with the time we are\u00a0ready to eat) only to see the English bowling put to the slaughter by the Indian batsmen who seemed to have found just the form they needed when it was needed to win the match (probably) and the series (probably)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As I was getting up this morning, I heard a report from America which almost made my blood run cold. One of the enduring legacies of the Trump administration was to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with (really) conservative judges and I think the present balance is about 6 conservative to about 3 liberal. As Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, then a 40-year old could serve for about 40 years until they die \u00a0and so the\u00a0balance of the\u00a0<\/span>Supreme Court far\u00a0outweighs a\u00a0presidential term of office (4 years in the case of Trump) Now that a really\u00a0conservative Supreme\u00a0Court is in place the\u00a0Pro-Life ,anti-abortion Christian\u00a0Right can try and get passed the most draconian legislation that they can rely upon not being overturned. A new law has been passed in Texas which allows<\/span>\u00a0anyone anywhere to sue anyone connected to an abortion in which cardiac activity was detected in the embryo as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before most women even realise they are pregnant. This means that any ‘bounty hunter’ can sue anyone connected with an abortion (e.g. a texi-driver taking a pregnant women to a clinic) for about $10,000 which they can then keep. This has the effect of almost, at a stroke, abolishing any abortion (even for\u00a0victims of rape or incest). Normally legislation as\u00a0draconian as this would be declared\u00a0unconstitutional by the\u00a0<\/span>Supreme Court – by not intervening when they could and before the law comes in force, the Supreme Court has\u00a0effectively condoned\u00a0the\u00a0type of legislation, which then be \u00a0‘cut-and-pasted’ into laws\u00a0anywhere where the Republicans\/fundamentalist Christian\u00a0Right have a majority (many of the states in the whole of the USA)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Today was one of those ‘nothing’ like days – there was some autumnal sunshine and a few clouds but it felt neither warm nor cold. Having said that, I was very pleased that we got the lawns cut yesterday evening because my neighbour and I concurred that when the weather is a little muggy then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3010"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3014,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010\/revisions\/3014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}