| s-401
| Trying to conquer the world. |
| s-402
| I'm gonna conquer — I'm gonna conquer you. |
| s-403
| Probably. |
| s-404
| Ooh. |
| s-405
| He's giving you some problems over there. |
| s-406
| He is indeed. |
| s-407
| Go for that one. |
| s-408
| Go into Europe. |
| s-409
| Get Europe. |
| s-410
| Oops. |
| s-411
| You won't attack me yet. |
| s-412
| I think I'll stop there. |
| s-413
| Hmm. |
| s-414
| I only have uh, that many cards, so ... |
| s-415
| How many cards you have? |
| s-416
| You only have two. |
| s-417
| Just two. |
| s-418
| So you can't have a set. |
| s-419
| When do you get — h- — when do you get cards though? |
| s-420
| I don't understand that. |
| s-421
| Every time you take over a country you get cards. |
| s-422
| What row? |
| s-423
| Attack with the twenty-two. |
| s-424
| Press twenty-two, attack. |
| s-425
| Wow. |
| s-426
| Look at that. |
| s-427
| Oh, see look, you just got all of his cards. |
| s-428
| Press okay. |
| s-429
| Bonus? |
| s-430
| Oh my God. |
| s-431
| Fuck. |
| s-432
| Fuck. |
| s-433
| Fuck fuck fuck. |
| s-434
| Oh man. |
| s-435
| Look at that. |
| s-436
| Twenty-seven. |
| s-437
| Twenty-nine. |
| s-438
| Th – twenty-one two three four five six seven eight. |
| s-439
| Twenty-eight. |
| s-440
| Don't you fucking attack me. |
| s-441
| You ass. |
| s-442
| You asshole. |
| s-443
| Two — hmm. |
| s-444
| I'm tired. |
| s-445
| We'll hear argument first this morning in Case 22-506, Biden versus Nebraska. |
| s-446
| General Prelogar. |
| s-447
| ORAL ARGUMENT OF GEN. ELIZABETH B. PRELOGAR ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS |
| s-448
| Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: COVID-19 is the most devastating pandemic in our nation's history and it has caused enormous disruption and economic distress. |
| s-449
| Over the past three years, millions of Americans have struggled to pay rent, utilities, food, and many have been unable to pay their debts. |
| s-450
| To head off immediate harm for student-loan borrowers, two secrataries across two administrations invoked the HEROES Act to suspend interest and payment obligations for all Americans with federally held loans. |
| s-451
| But, if that forbearance ends without further relief, it's undisputed that defaults and delinquencies will surge above pre-pandemic levels. |
| s-452
| So Secretary Cardona again invoked the HEROES Act to provide a measure of loan forgiveness to ensure that this unprecedented pandemic does not leave borrowers worse off in relation to their student loans. |
| s-453
| The states ask this Court to deny that vital relief to millions of Americans, but they lack standing to seek that result. |
| s-454
| They principally assert harm to a separate legal person, MOHELA, that could sue in its own name but has chosen not to do so, and the states' asserted harms to their tax revenues are self-inflicted and indirect. |
| s-455
| The states' bare disagreement with this policy is not the sort of concrete injury that Article III demands. |
| s-456
| On the merits, the states say the Act doesn't authorize the Secretary to ever forgive loan principal. |
| s-457
| But the Secretary's interpretation of this text is not just a plausible reading; it's the best reading. |
| s-458
| Congress expressly authorized the Secretary to waive or modify any Title IV provision in emergencies to provide financial relief to borrowers. |
| s-459
| Loan forgiveness is a paradigmatic form of debt relief, and the Secretary acted within the heartland of his authority and in line with the central purpose of the HEROES Act in providing that relief here. |
| s-460
| To apply the major questions doctrine to override that clear text would deny borrowers critical relief that Congress authorized and the Secretary deemed essential. |
| s-461
| I welcome the Court's questions. |
| s-462
| General, is this a waiver, or is it a modification? |
| s-463
| It's both a waiver and a modification, Justice Thomas. |
| s-464
| This appears at JA 261. |
| s-465
| That was the decision document that the Secretary signed where he said, I hereby issue waivers and modifications of multiple provisions under Title IV of the student loan program. |
| s-466
| And then that language was repeated in the Federal Register notice that actually implemented that program and constitutes the final agency action that the states are challenging here. |
| s-467
| Well, could you explain then -- in -- in -- in other provisions, there is express language as to cancellation, and, of course, there isn't here. |
| s-468
| So would you take a minute to explain how a waiver or modification amounts to a waiver -- to a cancellation? |
| s-469
| Of course. |
| s-470
| So the Secretary identified various provisions in Title IV that govern the terms and conditions of student loans and also govern discharge and cancellation in other circumstances, as your question suggested. |
| s-471
| And I think the straightforward way to think about how the verbs map onto the Secretary's action is that he waived elements of those provisions that contain eligibility requirements for discharge and cancellation that are inapplicable under this program and then modified the provisions to contain the limitations that he had announced as part and parcel of announcing this loan forgiveness. |
| s-472
| Now you had suggested that there's no express statement in the HEROES Act to discharge loan principal, and that's true, but the relevant and operative language here is the provision that says the Secretary is empowered to waive or modify any Title IV provision, and so the HEROES Act isn't enumerating any of the various forms of relief that have long been authorized and implemented under this statute. |
| s-473
| I don't think anything can be read into the fact that there's no express reference to particular forms of relief because Congress was trying to broadly cover the field and ensure that the Secretary had the tools to respond to the national emergency with whatever relief might be necessitated. |
| s-474
| But, in an opinion we had a few years ago by Justice Scalia, he talked about what the word 'modify' means, and he said modified in our view connotes moderate change. |
| s-475
| He said it might be good English to say that the French Revolution modified the status of the French nobility, but only because there's a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm. |
| s-476
| We're talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans. |
| s-477
| How does that fit under the normal understanding of 'modifying'? |
| s-478
| So, of course, I recognize that in MCI, Justice Scalia's opinion adopted a narrower understanding of that term, but I don't read that opinion to set forth a universal meaning of 'modify, 'no matter the statutory context. |
| s-479
| And, here, of course, we have a broader phrase, 'waive or modify.' |
| s-480
| It's undisputed and the states aren't contesting that the ordinary meaning of 'waive' means to eliminate an obligation in its entirety. |
| s-481
| And I think, if you look at that phrase in the context of the statute, that means that 'modify' has to mean making a change up to the point of wholesale elimination. |
| s-482
| It would be really strange for Congress to say you can eliminate obligations altogether or tweak them just the littlest bit, but you can't do anything in between. |
| s-483
| Well, but it's 'waive 'particular regulatory or statutory provisions. |
| s-484
| That's right. |
| s-485
| That to me suggests a much more focused use of the word. |
| s-486
| Well, it's 'waive or modify' paired with the authority to do that with respect to any Title IV provision. |
| s-487
| So I think that that is the – |
| s-488
| It doesn't say waive -- modify or waive loan balances. |
| s-489
| To Feel Happier, We Have to Resolve to the Life We Evolved to Live |
| s-490
| By Arash Javanbakht |
| s-491
| #science #health #advice #food #research #history |
| s-492
| When humans had to hunt for food, they had to move more. |
| s-493
| Sedentary lifestyles have made humans far less active than they need to be. |
| s-494
| “Hunting Wooly Mammoth” by http://cloudinary.com is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| s-495
| When we have to give a talk to a group of people, we feel anxious and experience the bodily fear responses that do not make sense now: The system is not meant to function in this safe context. |
| s-496
| As a psychiatrist specialized in anxiety and trauma, I often tell my patients and students that to understand how fear works in us, we have to see it in the context where it evolved. |
| s-497
| Ten thousand years ago, if another human frowned at us, chances were high one of us would be dead in a couple minutes. |
| s-498
| In the tribal life of our ancestors, if other tribe members did not like you, you would be dead, or exiled and dead. |
| s-499
| Biological evolution is very slow, but civilization, culture, society and technology evolve relatively fast. |
| s-500
| It takes around a million years for evolutionary change to happen in a species, and people have been around for about 200,000 years. |