We'll Take It, For Now

  Tonight, Democrat Doug Jones beat Pedophile Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race. It was a close, but satisfying victory. Do not lose sight of the fact that it was so close. The Republican party is wallowing in hate, fear, and lies, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
  Our nation will soon be facing its greatest Constitutional challenge since the Civil War, as the Trump investigations tighten around him. The corrupt Republican party is attacking the investigations and doing all they can to slow the inevitable conclusion. How they react when it comes, and when Trump melts down, will decide the fate of the nation.
  Trump, alone, can not stand against the tide of justice, but, for now, he isn't alone; the GOP and its leadership are with him. I think that it is too soon to say if tonight's election results are a trend. If they are, then even the craven Republican party will eventually abandon him.
  Donald Trump cares only for himself. He will stop at nothing to prevent his own downfall. If it comes to it, he will throw his own children to the lions in order to save his own skin. It is obvious to me that the recent decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem was calculated to distract from the Russia investigations. It is worse than that, however. I believe that the decision was calculated to increase the odds of terrorist attacks against American targets. Trump cares nothing for human life; he is a man without empathy: a sociopath; his entire career is proof of that. In Trump's mind, dead Americans are merely another tool for his own protection.
  The day will come when the president stands alone against the entire weight of American justice. And eventually, justice will triumph, as it always has. The only question is the cost. Trump already seems unstable. What will he do when finally cornered? Trump still holds the nuclear codes. What price will we have to pay?  

Crossing the Bar

    Sunset and evening star,
         And one clear call for me!
    And may there be no moaning of the bar,
         When I put out to sea,

    But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
         Too full for sound and foam,
    When that which blew out from the boundless deep
         Turns again home.

    Twilight and evening bell,
         And after that the dark!
    And may there be no sadness of farewell,
         When I embark;

    For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
         The flood may bear me far,
    I hope to see my Pilot face to face
         When I have crossed the bar.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

For Faith, and the sadness of farewell.

Breathing Space

  Today, Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel to investigate the Trump- Russia connection. He is a man of great integrity and strength, who stood up to George W. Bush's trampling of the Constitution after September 11th. He will need every bit of that strength now as he confronts Trump.
  Everything that we've seen, so far, is but the tip of a filthy iceberg of corruption and possibly treason. I don't know how this will play out, or how long it will take, but I can say this: The American Republic can take a deep breath. There is time for this to go wrong, and there is no telling how Trump will react, but we've taken a step in the right direction.
  Since Trump still has the backing of his base, and since the right-wing is ridiculing the move, it is too soon to expect the house and senate leadership to move against their president. Still- the process is started. I can't help but think of Churchill's famous words: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Why Science?

  Carl Sagan said it best: The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
  And science will explain it.
  For all of the accomplishments and breakthroughs, for all of the achievements and feats of genius, for all that we have thought and wrought and learned due to science; it is, itself, merely a by-product of our insatiable curiosity and stubbornness. We not only must ask why- we have the indomitable will to find the answer, the will to satisfy that curiosity if it takes a thousand generations. All that we have, all of civilization, everything that we take for granted in our world, is a legacy of the curiosity and stubbornness of untold generations.
  Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
  We all stand on those shoulders.
  But now the entire world is in danger of being tripped up by dwarves.
  Alone among the nations of the world, the United States has an entire political party dedicated to the muzzling of science and the enthronement of mythology and irrational argument.
  That party is now in power.
  By preventing action by the most influential and powerful nation on earth; by muddying the waters of rational argument; by using all of the vast resources at their disposal to slow the response to climate change, they may doom all of humanity to oblivion.
  Sea-level rise, if unchecked, will cause mass-migrations on a scale never before seen in human history. Rising populations, (an additional two billion people are expected to be born by 2050) will be fighting for less land and scarcer resources as drought and warming affect food production. Nations will be struggling against nature for their very existence.
  Nations will be struggling against each other for their very existence.
  There's the rub.
  Mass migrations in Europe and Asia, over several centuries, helped to topple the Roman Empire. European civilization took centuries to recover from the interregnum. And no one back then had nukes.
  The competition for dominance among the world's great powers has long threatened the annihilation of our species through nuclear war. Climate change, all by itself, has the potential to end civilization as we know it; add politics and nuclear weapons, and we may very well see the wars that will end the human race.
  Climate change isn't coming. Climate change is here. Everything on earth depends on how we react, right now. Maybe we can even do it. Maybe, just maybe, we can find a solution. If, that is, we still have the will and the stubbornness that got us this far. If, that is, we use science.
 
  This post is dedicated to everyone, all over the world, who marched for science and for the awareness of climate change over the last two Saturdays of April, This post is especially dedicated to my colleagues in the Sarasota, Florida March for Science. It was an honor working with you.

 The quote is, of course, from the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan
 

Vive La France!

  Tonight, Emmanuel Macron has won the French election. He beat the fascist, Marine Le Pen, by a good margin, in spite of a last minute hacking attempt by the Russians. So tonight, thanks to the French People, Vladimir Putin is as isolated on the world stage as he was yesterday.
   Unfortunately, he still has that cock-holster in the White House on his side.
  We have to fix that.

Still a Dream

On this day in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
On this day in 2017, a racist is President of the United States.
We still have much further to go.
We will get there.

Quote of the Post

"A laid up steamer was a dead thing and no mistake; a sailing-ship somehow seems always ready to spring into life with the breath of the incorruptible heaven; but a steamer, thought Captain Whalley, with her fires out, without the warm whiffs from below meeting you on her decks, without the hiss of steam, the clangs of iron in her breast- lies there as cold and pulseless as a corpse."
Joseph Conrad, The end of the Tether, novel

Quote of the Post

"It has always been the fate of republics to be destroyed by faction."
Abraham Lincoln

We managed to squeak one by in Abe's day. Let's hope our luck still holds.

Quote of the Post

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, novel

Quote of the Post

"There is the courage of the sword, and the courage of the word, and the courage of the word is rarer."
Ursula K. LeGuin, Voices, novel

On the Inauguration of Donald Trump

             The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
  William Butler Yeats

Quote of the Post

"You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. but I just kept pushing."
Rene Descartes, quoted by Sal Khan at Khan Academy

Descartes makes me feel a bit better about my own shortcomings. (A little-tiny bit.)

I saw this quote during one of Khan's lectures on algebra. I can't remember which one, just now, but I promise to correct it.

Quote of the Post

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'"
   Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn, short story

Fans of Ray Bradbury (and we are legion) know the immense depth and richness that make his stories unforgettable. I've read The Fog Horn perhaps a half-dozen times over the last forty years. It is always as fresh as a slap on the face.

  If you need a list: The Martian Chronicles; Dandelion Wine; The October Country; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Fahrenheit 451; The Illustrated Man; A Medicine for Melancholy and, The Golden Apples of the Sun, which contains the story quoted above. This is a just a partial list, but it should get you started.