No more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together

My Sunday viewing was episodes 3 and 4 of the series Cosmos hosted Neil DeGrasse Tyson. This may seem like I jumped into the middle of things, but I did watch episodes 1 and 2 back in September last year. I have this series on DVD, likely a gift back in 2014 when it was released. Episode 3 is about comets. Back when humans first began to watch the sky they learned that from the positions of stars they could keep track of the year – when to plant, when to harvest, etc. So something strange, like a comet, interrupted the order of the sky. And that could only mean bad things were coming. We get a bit about the Oort cloud, where comets originate. Then the story turns to Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton. The story is that Halley sought out Newton to codify the motions of things acted on by gravity into mathematical equations. It was Halley that got Newton’s book published. Then Halley put Newton’s equations to work. No, Halley did not discover the comet that bears his name. What he did was comb through all the historical accounts of comets and, using Newton’s equations, figured out their orbits, which were a long, thin ellipses. Then Halley figured out that several sightings were the same comet reappearing every 86 years. The predicted the comet would return in another 50 years. He included the time of year and the part of the sky where it would appear. And was proven right. And comets lost their meaning as a sign of doom. I saw Halley’s comet when it came in 1986. For nearly all of the month or so the comet was visible the night skies in southeast Michigan were overcast. Towards the end of that month I heard the University of Michigan astronomy department was opening their viewing facilities northwest of Ann Arbor. I went. The sky was clear. A lot of other people had shown up. Some people I knew also showed up so I waited in line with them. By this time the comet was far enough away that it was no longer visible with just the eye. After the sky got fully dark each person was allowed about 15 seconds to peer through the eyepiece of their telescope. I got my turn well after midnight. What I saw was a faint smudge of light. Episode 4 is about the nature of light, its spectrum, and the spectral lines created by different elements absorbing different wavelengths of light, leaving lines in the spectrum. Along the way there is a discussion of the rules of science, such as: Learn from the results of an experiment. The episode also discussed how science was prized in the Arab world and kept alive. Eventually Europe was ready to accept science as part of the Enlightenment. My feeling of the series (I’ve finished disc 1 of four discs) is that it explains its topics well. And its recreation of various phenomena (especially in space) is stunningly beautiful. Many visual effects companies are listed in the credits. So why do the animated sequences, such as scenes between Newton and Halley, look so primitive? I finished the book The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. The title is taken from the Bible in a story that appears in at least two of the gospels. Here is the version from Luke: 8-58:

A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and birds of the air devoured it. And some fell upon the rock; and as soon as it sprung up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up and bore fruit a hundredfold.

Later verses explain the parable. Ideas are thrown about. Some are discarded immediately. Some are explored for a while but don’t take root. Some are beaten back by competing ideas. And some are carefully cultivated and bear fruit. No, the Bible doesn’t call the seeds “ideas.” The book was written 30 years ago. It is very much a dystopian story. Butler said she had taken the condition of the country in the early 1990s and projected the prevailing forces out to their logical end. She then set the story in ... 2024. As in next year. At the time it was published critics declared it to be farfetched, especially in such a short timeline. They said civilization can’t collapse that quickly. More recent critics, with the benefit of 25 years of history, said: Oh, that’s how. I’m not a fan of dystopian novels. But last summer NPR reported on an opera version of the story presented at Lincoln Center. And despite the dystopian setting it sounded quite hopeful. So I bought the book. At the start of the story Lauren is a black girl, 15 years old. She and her family live in a walled neighborhood of about a dozen houses somewhere north of Los Angeles. It’s walled because the world outside is quite brutal. She and the older children have lessons in how to use guns and a younger brother is quite annoyed he isn’t old enough for that yet. But this is a society in which protecting oneself and loved ones with a gun is vital. Her father, the neighborhood pastor, is also a college professor, so must go out every day. For those that do go there is always the fear they may not return and their body may or may not be found. They only call the police when the situation is worth the cost and even then getting actual help is unlikely. Some communities are opting for corporate ownership to keep them safe. Lauren’s dad refuses that opportunity, seeing the company doesn’t pay enough to afford company housing, so the people become indebted and enslaved. Lauren is smart enough to see her community’s situation is not tenable in the long term. She plans to escape, to head north. She wonders if she’ll be allowed to cross the fortified border into Oregon. In the time before she is 18 she prepares herself and tries to prepare her community. Close to her 18th birthday disaster strikes and she is forced to flee, and she starts her journey north. As she walks with the hordes of people fleeing the region she gathers a community of fellow travelers willing to help and protect each other. They search for a place to live and begin a new life. Lauren is a hyperempath. When she sees someone hurt she feels their injury. So when she has to shoot someone she wants it to be a quick kill, otherwise she’ll be overcome by their pain and no longer able to protect her companions. Lauren is also disillusioned by religion and creates her own, though she describes the process as uncovering. She calls in Earthseed. A primary understanding is God is Change, one can shape God, and through that one is also changed. One should be open to and embrace change. The theology is laid out in a series of sayings, like this one that matches my understanding of hierarchy and supremacy:

All struggles Are essentially Power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially Power struggles. And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.

I don’t think the book describes this theology well beyond that it guides her to build a community. Perhaps her theology will be spelled out more in the sequel The Parable of the Talents and it looks like I’ll have to get that one. Silly Season 2023 is over as Silly Season 2024 continues (Republican debate this evening, which I’ll ignore). So there are election results with much to celebrate. In Michigan the two Democratic House members running for city mayor both won. That leaves the House membership tied between the parties. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will be scheduling special elections as fast as she can. David Nir of Daily Kos Elections has some national results. The big news is that Ohio voters approved an abortion rights amendment to their state constitution. When it was called with 36% of the vote it was ahead 59%-41%. That’s just under the threshold Republicans tried to impose in August, an effort that voters rejected. This amendment reestablishes the framework under Roe v. Wade and renders moot a six week ban held up in the courts. I think this is the seventh voter led protection of abortion rights to be put on state ballots and the seventh to pass. Efforts are underway for similar amendments in six other swing and red states. In Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin ran on getting a 15 week abortion ban passed. He hadn’t accomplished that yet because Democrats controlled the State senate. He and Republicans worked to flip the Senate to have the control they needed. Nir reported it was the House that flipped, putting both chambers in Democrats’ hands. That ban has no chance now. And Youngkin’s hopes of being a Republican candidate for president in 2028 now has little chance. Nir reported that in Kentucky Democrat Andy Beshear won another four year term for governor with a healthy margin of 53-47. He had highlighted his opponent’s support for a total ban on abortion. Being competent in the job and guiding his state through several emergencies (including COVID) helped too. I sense a trend here. Abortion rights still drive elections. And Republicans don’t get they’re losing because of it. Nir reported Democrat Dan McCaffery won a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court with a healthy 53-47 margin. Democrats hold a 5-2 margin on the court. It’s important because the court heard a lot of election disputes and likely will again next year. Moms for Liberty, the far right group with a goal of banning books from schools, ran lots of candidates for local school boards. Laura Clawson of Kos discussed that MFL candidates may not be easily identified, though an MFL endorsement is a good hint. This year about 65% of their candidates lost. In an update Clawson included a tweet that linked to a spreadsheet listing a few winners and lots of losers. An Associated Press article posted on Kos on Monday talked about the heat in our national political struggles:

The principal flashpoint: school board meetings. And not just here. A long tradition of doing prosaic but vital work has sunk into chaos and poisonous confrontation across the United States. The lower rungs of democracy are cracking.

The article then discussed Virginia, where nearly 600 school board seats were open. The seats are officially non partisan, but political parties and their aligned groups have been aggressively involved, wanting a national say in local school decisions. An AP article reported Gabe Amo is the first black candidate to be elected to Congress from Rhode Island. This is a blue seat, so the battle really was at the primary, which he comfortably won. He’s the son of Ghanaian and Liberian immigrants. He served in both the Obama and Biden administrations and in the administration of Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo. He’s part of the state’s transition away from its Italian-American political hierarchy. He’s for preserving Social Security and Medicare, for abortion rights, and for a ban on assault-style guns. Sounds good. Alas, Democrats didn’t win everything. Another AP article reported Republican Tate Reeves won a second term as governor of Mississippi, though it was “unusually competitive.” Bill in Portland, Maine in a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a few appropriate quotes from Franklin Roosevelt.

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

Dartagnan of the Kos community compared two media articles. The first appeared in the Washington Post, written by Molly Hennesy-Fiske. It is yet another story written by a “journalist” going to a diner and talking to “real” people. This diner is in Speaker Johnson’s home town of Shreveport, Louisiana and the people all proclaim how wonderful he is. And the author assures us how down-to-earth these people are. Yeah, we’ve read similar articles many times. The second article is by Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic. His focus: Why are we cherishing the knowledge of these people? Yeah, they have definite opinions about how foreign aid should be spent, but they’re way off on how much money that is. Most Americans think foreign aid should be no more than 10% of the budget. They think they are calling for a decrease in foreign spending. But foreign aid is actually about 1% of the budget, pretty much a rounding error. So getting to 10% of the budget would be a massive increase. Dartagnan concluded:

Still, Nichols expresses a viewpoint most of us can relate to: With foreign aid such a critical issue at a critical time, it would be far more useful for the media in this country to educate those diners rather than writing the same article endlessly.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Thomas Zimmer writing for “Democracy in America” on Substack and his look at the same WaPo article.

The reason to dwell on this piece is not that it is uniquely awful, or that the author is singularly inept and/or disingenuous. If only! On the contrary, this reporting is indicative of pathologies that characterize too much of mainstream political journalism and the political discourse in general: A tendency to launder and normalize extremism for a broader audience, an impulse to accommodate and naturalize power, no matter where it resides – and an inclination to perpetuate ideas that form the bedrock of the ethno-religious nationalism that has galvanized behind Trump.

Dworkin also quoted Ian Dunt, also writing on Substack and about Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Berlin believed that the world is composed of competing values: Hedonism, tradition, freedom, control, equality, hierarchy, whatever. They exist in cultures, which prize certain values above others. They exist in people, who do the same. And they exist within the beating heart of each individual. We all want things which cannot be put together. Maybe we value family but we've fallen in love with someone they disapprove of. Maybe we're a Ukrainian who wants to fight for their country but whose father is sick at home without anyone else to care for him. Berlin warns you to be wary of those who say that there is a right answer to these questions. He warns you to distrust those who say there is a future utopia where these difficulties have been conquered. They cannot be conquered. Life is composed of inevitable tragedy: the tragedy of competing values. There will never be a happy ending. It will never be solved, because humanity cannot be solved.