The Supreme Court Quoted Spider-Man In a Ruling

A Spider-Man comic— specifically, "Amazing Fantasy No. 15: Spider-Man"—now has a special place not only in the hearts of America's nerds, but also in Supreme Court precedent.

The Court very rarely overturns its own precedents—even though it can and even when doing so would have helped out a guy who just wanted to make a few bucks off the Spider-Man toy he invented.

And to explain that principle, Justice Elena Kagan on Monday turned to the superhero himself, officially citing the comic book in which Spider-Man made his debut. "What we can decide, we can undecide. But … we should exercise that authority sparingly," Kagan wrote.

"[I]n this world, with great power there must also come—great responsibility," Kagan added, attributing the line to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in the 1962 comic.

Specifically, the Court said Marvel—the creators of Spider-Man—did not have to keep paying royalties to the inventor of a toy that, in the Court's description, "allows children (and young-at-heart adults) to role-play as 'a spider person' by shooting webs—really, pressurized foam string—'from the palm of [the] hand.'"

The inventor, Stephen Kimble, patented the toy. Then he tried to sell or license the patent to Marvel—the creators of Spider-Man. (Kagan: "Kimble met with the president of Marvel's corporate predecessor to discuss his idea for web-slinging fun.")

Marvel passed, but then started selling its own, similar product, called the Web Blaster. Kimble sued, Marvel settled, and Kimble received a royalty for future Web Blaster sales.

"The parties set no end date for royalties, apparently contemplating that they would continue for as long as kids want to imitate Spider-Man (by doing whatever a spider can)," Kagan wrote Monday.

Kimble's patent expired in 2010, and Marvel wanted to stop paying him royalties. The Supreme Court has previously said that companies in Marvel's position can quit paying royalties when a patent expires. Kimble asked the Court to overrule that decision, arguing that it's stifling innovation.

The Court, led by Kagan, declined. It's a big deal to overturn a precedent, Kagan wrote, and this case didn't rise to that standard. Even if patent law does discourage innovation, she said, that's Congress's problem. In the meantime, the law clearly limits patent protection to 20 years.

Or, in Kagan's, words, "patents endow their holders with certain superpowers, but only for a limited time."

We had biscuits today.  My helpful six-year old starts to get the butter.  "We don't need it, we'll use this instead," I said, putting down a trial batch of honey butter I had just made, on the theory that old-fashioned snack food had to be healthier than modern commercial snack food.

"What's that?"

"It's a surprise.  Try some and I'll tell you what it is."

"I don't what that!  I want the regular!"

"Have a taste."

He licks my finger.  "I don't like that!"

He keeps protesting as the honey butter gets further down the table and more used up.  Finally he cries, "Oh, all right!", flounces to the end of the table, and gets his biscuit slathered.

By the time he's set himself back down in his seat, the biscuit is gone.  "I like that!  Can we have that all the time?"

That may be a new turnaround time for new foods.  As for the rest of the family, a three-way arm-wrestling contest nearly broke out between my husband and my teenage daughters over the last drop.  I think this one's a keeper.

My husband met an old friend from high school last week in the small Mississippi town where they'd grown up 32 years ago . They chatted about their classmates from the white, middle class private school they had attended. Slightly less than half of the men had graduated from college and gone on to get jobs in business, teaching, and civil engineering. Slightly more than half of the men had not gone on to graduate from college. They were all dead, mostly from drugs or suicide. 10% of all the men in their class had committed suicide in the last five years. His friend noted that more men had died from their class than had died so far from his parents' class -- and his parents had graduated at the height of the Vietnam War. While the women had done slightly better, there had been fewer children born to the members of their class than had been in their class. It was a sobering experience.

People really are good, and our first reactions are selfless:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-probe-human-nature-and-discover-we-are-good-after-all/

There are people who will tell you that the Christian Church(es) never change.  If I'm in a good mood I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and try to figure out if they're naive, moronic, or lying.  I lived through the 180-degree transformation of one of America's largest and oldest Protestant denominations from their days in the early 1970s as the second most liberal church in America into a leading player in the reactionary American Fundamentalist Movement in the 1980s.  As a devout, Jesus-loving  child, I sat on my pew and watched the faith tradition I loved utterly demolished from the inside, to be replaced by an evil twin who championed the opposite of everything I had taught while all around me people laughed, cheered, and patted themselves on the back for the "good" job that they had done.

To say it left me a bit sanguine is like saying a tidal wave is a bit wet.

Most people today are astonished to hear that the Southern Baptist Convention was ever liberal; the Fundamentalists have done a very good job of burying the body and getting rid of the evidence.  But a few people have told their stories of the Takeover; this is mine.  It's about the church that used to be, the church that it became, and the three steps (not to mention a lot of pokes, shoves and outright trips) that led me to leave.

It's also my attempt to detoxify myself from the whole poisonous experience.  I have every right to be hurt, angry, and bitter over what happened.  But I choose to lay my burden down here and not carry it any longer.  To allow it to continue to hurt me would be to let the bad guys win, and I don't believe in that.

While I know many of my peers became atheists as a result, I would ask commentators to refrain from wholesale theist-bashing in the comments.  I'm all too aware of how hard it has become to find a church where one can have a positive religious experience in the wake of the Fundamentalist Movement, but I'm not yet ready to completely give up on the concept.

Shall we get started?

Part 1:  Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery
Part 2:  That Old Time Liberal Religion

Brighteyes finished the diagnostic tests (TABE) for the GED.  At 15, she aced every section except for writing.  She's finally starting to understand that my insistence that she write wasn't just Mommy being mean, but a skill she needs to master as well as she has the other skills.  Yay!

At 13 and 15, we decided the girls were old enough to start watching The Big Bang Theory this winter. They love it. (It doesn't hurt that we know/are people like that either.) My husband wants a copy of the Friendship Algorithm for his classroom. He says his students need the advice. I haven't got around to mentioning exactly how often it's re-run though. I don't want them watching it for 6.5 hours a week.

My husband is continuing to catch up on his literature.  He thought Welty was nice, but she waited until her very last story to say anything substantive.  Salinger, while technically a better short story writer than Welty, bored both of us to tears.  Like far too many Modern writers, he assumes that his "universal" experiences will continue to be so for every future reader, when in fact neither of us knew what he was talking about half the time.

Needing a break he turned to Lovecraft's fantasies, which are flawed but more substantive than I first gave them credit for being.  The very first Lovecraft story you read tends to be intriguing, but unforuntely they're all just rewrites of the same story, and only a couple stand out.  There's many writers I can say that about, but Lovecraft is the only one I know where you could take entire paragraphs from one story, insert it into another story, and not even disturb the flow.

Lovecraft's stories always made me want to give the writer a good swift kick in the shins for the way he glorified the fear of "things man was not meant to know/do".  As a child growing up right after the Civil Rights Movement I heard my fill of "things man was not meant to know/do" before I learned to read.  The "don't do thats" always hid a deep well of racism, sexism, homophobia, or some related form of good old identity hate.  It was not worthy of the least amount of respect, let alone the histrionic levels of terror it was supposed to engender.

But I was wrong and Lovecraft was right.  Demolishing the old justifications for institutionalized hatred did indeed cause a grotesque, shambling monstrosity to crawl out of the sewers and threated to destroy all life on Earth if we don't immediately stop all progress and worship at it's hideous feet.

It's called the Tea Party.

I stared angrily at the scale.  Where had all my hard work gone?

Four years ago I started an exercise program to get my body back in shape.  Two years of steady, constant exercising later, I was feeling fit and fine -- so fit, my subconcious deemed me able to handle a huge heap of repressed childhood horror.  The next two years were taken up with nothing but repairing damages done to my mind and my soul.  The work was so intense I could do nothing else.  Some days just making it out of bed was all I could manage.  In the process I've lost all the fitness progress I made over the previous two years.  My weight is back up and my stamina is nonexistant.  Physically I'm right back where I started.  I've got all this psychological stuff seen to  but -- I know the metaphor of life being a great big spiral but I don't need it to play out so literally, darn it.

At least there's nothing else hidden in the recesses of my mind.  There are still things I have trouble talking about, and one thing I can't out of respect for the privacy of another, but I doubt there's any more long-repressed unpleasantness waiting to erupt.

Unfortunately it wasn't just my body that suffered.  It was also two years out of my relationship with my children.  Now I have to sync up with them and repair that.  That  hurts.  Even the parts of it that aren't difficult still hurt.

Quests of self-discovery have a higher price tag at my age.

"Have you ever heard of people saying, “this feels like it’s happening to someone else” or something to that effect? Now I can completely relate to that. I kind of feel like. Well, I don’t know exactly how to quantify it. It’s a new sensation.  Extremely weird, but not entirely unpleasant." - my newly-discovered maternal half-sister

"I have to admit, this is incredibly awkward, but I am happy to get to know you." - my newly-discovered paternal half-sister

"That is a picture of your grandmother.  If you want to know what she looked like when she was younger, look in the mirror.  You look just like her." - a great-uncle

"Who the Hell are you, where did  you come from, and what's this nonsense about a Promised Land?" - the Canaanites

I waited a week for my biological mother to call my biological father, then picked up the phone and called him myself. Guess what?  She hadn't called yet.  I told him she had given me his name, and that I was their daughter.  He was upset for a long time.  Not angry or anything, just reliving old traumas.  He has two younger children with his wife, so I now have gone from one sibling to five.  Our relationship is -- awkward.  He feels guilty but won't say it.  I could give  him every reason to feel guilty, but I don't want to drive him away so I won't say it either.  Upshot:  there's a lot of things unsaid.

The next day my birth mother called my birth father and talked to him.  They affirmed for each other that they had done the right thing by me and felt really good about it.

Nobody asked me my opinion.  I didn't give it either.

His wife is disabled.  I don't know if she's been told that I'm back.  She went to school with my biological mother, so I don't see how she couldn't know about me being born.  But maybe I'm still supposed to be a modern-day secret.

A few weeks after that was my mother's family's reunion.  I had been invited back in the spring, and since then, as curiosity about me grew in the family, had morphed into the star attraction.  The week before I was so excited I didn't sleep a wink.  One morning I poured sweet tea over my breakfast cereal.

More people showed up than had come in ages.  Some were genuinely curious to meet me, others just wanted to see the curiosity, still others came for the food.  But for the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who had my nose, my hair, my height.  That did some good.

None of the immediate family was there, it was all cousins.  My mother had begged off at the last minute in spite of being provided with free transportation, claiming she had forgotten she had a medical test scheduled on that day for a rather severe condition.  But one woman looked like a photo of my mother had looked ten years ago and dressed like I do when I'm feeling good, so there's that.  I made her uncomfortable telling her that, so we didn't talk again.

I was connected to the attendees through my maternal grandmother.  I was told to solicit stories about her, but when I did people laughed uncomfortably and changed the subject.  Apparently her name is still used as a synonym for a bossy woman.  Pity, we might have gotten on well.  Or at least had some memorable arguments.

And that's where things stand.  My parents are relieved to find out that I am alive and well, but uncomfortable with me, our situation, or both.  Some people are glad to get to know me.  Others don't know what to make of me. Still others wish I had never been born.  For others I'm a curiosity.

It's a complex, delicate negotiation adoptees find themselves in, trying to place themselves within the context of the actual people in our biological family.   Unfortunately the stesses that come from being an adoptee lead to a lack of validation of our feelings and an inability to connect with others.  My people skills are essentially nonexistent.  Thus, the very skills we need the most in reunion are the very ones we have the least.  That hurts.

Dealing with all this proved very painful.  I spent most of the summer and into fall as a walking basket case.  The pain has gradually subsided, although it flares up on occasion, such as when I  come across mention of an interesting relative who died before I could find them.  My distraction of choice has been Animal Crossing New Leaf; I don't even want to look up how many hours I've logged in on that.  But the time I spend with it is slowly diminishing.  I'm still terribly absent-minded though.  It's hard to read for any length of time, or remember anything.  And I really shouldn't be trusted with any handheld electronics other than my 2DS.

But painful as it has been, I'm still glad I did it.  Most of the relatives I've met have been pleasant, and even the unpleasant people are easier to mentally grapple with than phantoms.  Wrestling with facts, even painful ones, is so much better than wrestling with nothingness.  In that slot at the back of my head labelled "Where I Came From" there is now information, not half-formed guesses.  That is huge.

It's just that the nature of the (entirely artificial) situation is like walking into a room where you are going to be the guest of honor at a party through a door that has a bucket of mop water perched on top of it.  I have to get through the door, and there's no way I can avoid the dirty water.  I don't like that, and I'm not too happy about the people who set it up, and the fact that they didn't mean to set it up isn't going to keep me one speck cleaner.

But one big mystery remains.  How did I come to be -- me?  What parts are biology, environment, and sheer will?

I'm a fairly standard-issue female INTP (brainy, absent-minded, socially awkward, fanatically honest and obsessed with the truth), albeit generously leavened with developmental trauma.  Except there's nothing standard about female INTPs, at 1% - 2% of the population we are more rare than hen's teeth.  In spite of genetics, they don't seem to be any more common in my biological families.  While they may be in hiding (we are introverts after all) it appears the last one before me came of age in the Great Depression.  So, IDK, is there something latent in the genes that only manifests as INTPs under extreme stress?  Do we only appear **drops voice dramatically** "When the Need is Great"?  DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!

Great theory, except for the fact that female INTPs are the least popular personality/gender combination on the planet  (Really, people.  That dreadfully underestimates the damage an S dedicated to an evil cause can do.)

I'm being maudlin.  That's not going to help.

Whachu mean by that?  It helps me deal, so chill!

**deep breath** Get it together now....  My thoughts are whirling around like fish in a bubble net.

Still, it's a valid question.  How much of my obsession with the truth comes from something in my genes and how much is from being so thoroughly lied to at such a young age?

And if it is something in my genes, is it something hard-coded in, or something emergenic, that depends on a randomly occurring combination of traits and/or circumstances?  Is it just -- one of those things?

"One of those BELLS that now and then RINGS,

It was just one of those things."

 I don't know the answer.  I know more than when I started out, but nothing definitive in that regard.  Typical.

Gradually more of my internal CPU is starting to kick free of this conundrum and show up for other work.  This is great.  "Hey Brain, long time no see!  How have you been?  I've missed you!  Tell my creativity I miss her as well!"  There's still a few more posts on this topic that need to be made, but I'm ready to move away from it being the bulk of my attention.

(And not a moment too soon, my house looks like it's auditioning for Great Expectations.)

And I don't want to sound too surly, most people I've met have been wonderful.  I'm just not used to having so many wonderful relatives!

Now I have to figure out what to do with all these extra people in my life.  Y'know all those feel-good movies that end with the curmudgeonly hermit making a ton of new friends?  Notice how they always roll the credits before they show how he copes with the sudden jump in social stimulation.  Why is that?  :P