Source: https://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2018_08_19_archive.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 03:13:18+00:00

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Warning: There's no deeper meaning to this post. No metaphor, no life lesson. It's literally just an explanation of why I've been going to bed ridiculously late even as I've largely aged out of that life stage. I'm not even sure why I wrote it. But it's done now, and up on the blog it goes.
I've always been a bit of a night owl. As I've aged, though, that quality has mellowed -- at least a little bit. Instead of going to bed at 3 AM and waking up at 1:30 PM, I think my natural sleep cycle is closer to 12:30 AM and 10:30 AM (as I said: a little bit).
But one change in my life has thrown this mellowing process for a loop: Contact lenses.
For most of my life, I didn't wear glasses or contacts. The former I picked up only in my mid-20s. After moving to Berkeley, my vision kept getting worse, and I assumed I needed a new prescription. But it turns out that I actually have a degenerative eye condition (that sounds way worse than it is) called keratoconus. Long story short, instead of having nice round corneas, mine are football shaped.
Keratoconus can't be corrected effectively by glasses. Indeed, it isn't really corrected by normal contacts. So a short while after arriving in Berkeley, I was prescribed new, specialty contacts called scleral lenses. They're larger than regular contacts, and basically function as replacement corneas. In fact, for insurance purposes scleral lenses are technically characterized as a prosthetic. That's right: I have cyborg eyeballs. Fit a Google Glass into those puppies and I can go full Terminator.
Anyway, I digress. By and large, I love my contacts. Aside from being able to talk about my robot eyeballs, scleral lenses are amazingly comfortable, surprisingly easy to put in and take out, and they correct my vision all the way back to 20/20 (my naked-eye vision right now is ... well, it's not 20/20).
There's only one downside: They're ruining my sleep cycle.
The reason is straightforward and almost obnoxiously banal: You don't sleep in scleral lenses. You take them out each night, put them in a cleaning solution (which neutralizes over the course of six hours or so), and pop them back in every morning. It's not a hard process, but it does require that I be in front of the bathroom mirror and do a bit of manual finagling. And once I do it, I pretty much can't see anymore, so I'm done for the night. I can't read, or watch TV, or do anything that requires more than a modicum of sight.
In practice, that means I can't drift off to sleep while doing other things. I used to like reading in bed until I got tired, then just drowsily placing the book on my nightstand and falling asleep. Now I can't do that -- I have to physically get up, walk to the bathroom, pry two pieces of glass out of my eyes, place them in the cleaning solution, and then go back to sleep. That peaceful drift off to sleep is ruined.
As a result, going to bed is a commitment. When I take my contacts out, I am basically locking myself in to not doing anything but sleep for at least the next six hours. Which means I better be done for the day. If I crawl into bed and I'm not feeling tired, well, I can just sit and stare at the blurry ceiling.
As a result, I stay up until I'm absolutely, positively sure I will want to do nothing but fall asleep. And that mentality comes pretty late in the evening. The time when I might feel ready to wind down with a nice book or some light television is considerably earlier than the time when I've got nothing on my agenda but passing out immediately. So I end up staying up much later than I otherwise would have.
And that's how contact lenses ruined my sleep cycle.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has said that Judge Kavanaugh told her he agrees with John Roberts on Roe v. Wade: It's "settled law".
Is this another episode of "how gullible is Susan Collins"? Almost certainly yes. But it also offers an opportunity to at least a plausible avenue whereby Roe could not formally be overturned but could functionally be killed off.
Justice Kennedy provides a model. He was part of the trio of Republican-appointed justices who "saved" Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Also in that case, he and a court majority upheld virtually all of Pennsylvania's substantive restrictions on abortion rights (striking down only the spousal notification requirement). And after Casey, Justice Kennedy continued to vote to permit pretty much any abortion restriction that presented itself to the Supreme Court even as he never came out and said "Roe v. Wade is overturned."
It's easy to imagine a similar trend basically eroding Roe into dust. Casey and Roe each offer rhetoric for the Court to latch onto. Roe explicitly acknowledged that the value of protecting fetal life was an important governmental interest. Casey, for its part, allows abortion to be banned at any point prior to "viability", and advances in medical technology have steadily pushed that date back. Just as Casey announced a new gloss on Roe while still reaffirming its "core holding", it's not hard to imagine a Kavanaugh-centered court suggesting that Roe is intact so long as some women in some states (generally, liberal states where abortion rights are democratically-entrenched) can access it, and that there is no conflict with Roe or Casey's "core holdings" when women can still access the morning-after-pill.
Basically, what'd we'd get in this world is a studied avoidance of actually overturning Roe while still permitting various state-level restrictions which make abortion functionally impossible to obtain. The net result is a world that's observationally equivalent to Roe being overturned, but Roberts and Kavanaugh get to pat themselves on the back as respectful of precedent.
And the thing is -- this sort of move is a John Roberts special. Yes, the Roberts court isn't afraid to explicitly overturn precedents when it has to (e.g., Janus or Citizens United). But what it really loves to do is "distinguish" precedents it dislikes in ways that virtually obliterate the old holding. Gonzalez v. Carhart, upholding a federal "partial-birth abortion" ban while somehow not overturning Stenberg v. Carhart (which struck down a virtually identical state ban), is maybe the keynote example of this move.
I still think the most likely result of a Kavanaugh confirmation is Roe gets (formally) overturned. But the Roberts Court has ample tools at its disposal if it wants to bury Roe without actually killing it. The idea that conservative jurists actually need to utter the words "Roe v. Wade overruled" to effectuate their abortion agenda is almost certainly a myth.
UPDATE: Okay, so it turns out Leah Litman did this, but better.

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