Space is really, really big

In his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote that the Guide says that: “Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Although I am aware that space is big, evidence of its vastness still continues to surprise me. Just yesterday, I was listening to a news report about the launching of a rocket to study three of the moons of Jupiter. I was startled when they said that it will take eight years for it to get there. Somehow, the fact that Jupiter is part of the same planetary system as the Earth made it seem like a nearby neighbor, farther than the Moon but not by that much. But if the distance to Jupiter is so much greater than what I intuitively felt, you can understand why interstellar distances seem almost inconceivable.

It is hard to comprehend things that are outside our human scale: the vary small, the very fast, deep time, and deep space. We have developed methods to get some idea of what things are like under those conditions but they are still not intuitive.

The latest classified information leak

As soon as I read that the person alleged to have leaked classified information on the internet was a young, white, gun-loving religious person who had exchanged racist memes with his friends on a chat group, I felt that the Republican nutters would see him as one of their own and immediately come to his defense. These are, after all, the same people who treated Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of hero after he traveled to another state with an AR-15 weapon and killed two demonstrators protesting police violence. And sure enough, that is what has happened.

People have expressed surprise that a mere 21-year old member of the National Guard could have access to this kind of information.

The FBI has arrested a 21-year-old air national guardsman in Massachusetts suspected of being responsible for the leak of US classified defence documents that laid bare military secrets and upset Washington’s relations with key allies.
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Airman first class Teixeira was in the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard under the duty title of “cyber transport systems journeyman”, responsible for keeping the internet working at airbases. He joined the guard in 2019.

Teixeira is believed to have been the leader of an online chat group where hundreds of photographs of secret and top-secret documents were first uploaded, from late last year to March. The online group called itself Thug Shaker Central, made up of 20 to 30 young men and teenagers brought together by an enthusiasm for guns, military gear and video games. Racist language was a common feature of the group.

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Evangelicals put the Republican party in a bind

I wrote recently about how Republicans have dug a hole for themselves because their voting base, especially evangelical Christians, has taken the abortion issue to far greater extremes than the party establishment would like, in the process alienating many people who, while they may be uneasy about abortion, are even more disturbed about making it so hard to get that it becomes almost impossible for women to get one even in cases of rape or incest or the health of the woman.

Then there is the other problem that evangelical Christians present to Republicans in that while Republican candidates seek their support, evangelicals are not the majority of the voting population and getting their vote is not sufficient to put them over the top.

We see this dynamic play out in the first state to vote in the Republican nomination contest, which is Iowa. This has the format of caucuses where people gather together on one evening in winter to discuss and vote for candidates at public meetings. Such formats are favorable to those who are very committed and in the case of the Iowa caucuses, that consists of people like evangelicals. Already we are seeing a steady stream of Republican hopefuls going, or planning to go, to Iowa to pander to that group. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott have already made their pilgrimage.
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Republicans are failing at debt ceiling hostage taking

The deadline is looming for the debt ceiling to be raised to avoid the US government going into some sort of default, never a good thing. The early deadlines have already passed with some accounting devices being used to avoid default so far but June 4th is said to be the final deadline for getting the ceiling raised.

Republicans in the House of Representatives, ostensibly led by speaker Kevin McCarthy but actually by the nutter caucus of the party, have demanded that Joe Biden agree to negotiations on spending cuts before they will raise the ceiling. But Biden has said that while he is willing to negotiate on the budget, he will not do so as part of the debt ceiling. Biden has released his own budget and asked the Republicans to do the same before any negotiations can begin but so far they have not been able to come up with a budget that will satisfy the disparate elements of their caucus, especially the nutters who are now so dominant.

The problem for Republicans is that many of the programs they want to cut are those that the public wants to preserve.
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The waning of Trump’s influence

James Risen writes that there are many signs that Trump’s influences is waning. One of those is the fact that the US military is proceeding with the renaming of military bases that had been named after leaders of the Confederacy. Trump had vigorously opposed such changes, pandering to the racists in his party who view the Confederacy sympathetically. But now there are hardly any protests at the changes.

THE U.S. ARMY began to strip its bases of their old Confederate names last week, as Donald Trump faced a possible criminal indictment. The timing was hardly a coincidence.

Neither reckoning would have been possible if Trump were still president. Both have been winding their way through the government bureaucracy for the past two years since Trump left office and are now happening at the same time as part of a growing repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.
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After Trump was defeated in 2020, he vetoed legislation creating a commission to rename the bases, but Congress was finally able to override it. If Trump had been reelected, he almost certainly would have continued trying to obstruct the renaming efforts.
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THE RENAMING OF Fort Pickett last week prompted no protests and hardly a murmur of criticism, apart from a few nasty comments on the Facebook page of the Virginia National Guard, which uses the base. Indeed, the lack of outrage seems to be one more small sign that Trump’s power, and his ability to generate anger outside of his devoted base, are waning.

Trump’s mounting legal problems pose a more direct threat to his power and are a more personal form of reckoning. Although some Republican pundits and political figures have claimed that Trump will regain political strength by being indicted, the ex-president’s own fury at the prospect, which was on full display in Waco, reveals the truth: Trump is deeply afraid of ending up in prison.

He has spent his life exploiting legal loopholes and has often succeeded by outlasting his opponents. But his victories have mostly come in civil lawsuits when he was in business or while he was president and controlled the Justice Department. He has never faced the kind of legal peril that he does now.

The threat seems to be driving him even further around the bend than ever before. He now openly engages in full-throated conspiracy theories while inciting violence against his opponents; he held his rally in Waco knowing that it was scheduled in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound there, which ended with a deadly government raid and fire that has taken on deep symbolism among violent, far-right extremists.

It is hard to be confident about predictions of Trump’s demise since he consumes so much media space. But he gets that attention by resorting to more and more extreme claims and rhetoric. Someone who is more assured of his position would not feel the need to be so inflammatory.

The cruelty of solitary confinement

In a recent episode of the show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took on the issue of placing prisoners in solitary confinement, how it is extremely cruel, and how sometimes prisoners are subjected to it for punitive reasons for minor infractions.

I learned that the practice was started by Quakers, of all people, who thought that it might encourage thoughtfulness and penitence. I also learned that the average size of a solitary confinement cell is just 6ft by 9ft, which means that there are some that are smaller than that. Imagine being cooped up in such a small space for 22 or 23 hours a day.

What to do if you get bitten by a snake

Sri Lanka has a lot of snakes, many species of which, like cobras, are venomous. There is also a lot of folklore surrounding them and many of them likely originated as tales made up to scare the daylights out of children, like ghost stories. I vividly recall one story that was told about the Russel’s viper. The story was that if anyone in your household encountered a viper and killed it (and killing a poisonous snake was often the chosen method of getting rid of them), then seven other vipers would come to your home and they would hang like a chain from the rafters of the roof if your house did not have a ceiling or from a fixture, each one clasping the tail of the other, until they lowest one reached you where you were sleeping and bit you. Needless to say, that story was enough to give small children sleepless nights.

As children, we did not question the validity of this preposterous theory and the fact that it seemed like it required a lot of coordination and hard work by the vipers just to get at you when they could instead easily have have waited for you by hiding in the grass or under some furniture until you passed by before striking, even allowing for the improbability that there existed some kind of viper committee that organized these revenge attacks and recruited members to carry them out, like some kind of commando snake strike force. There was something so frightening about the idea of snakes slowly lowering themselves down from the roof at night while you slept that it banished any critical inquiry.
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Republicans choose abortion as the hill to die on

It has long been clear that Republicans were using the abortion issue as a vote getting strategy. That seemed to have worked for a while to rally especially the religious zealots to their cause. But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked. We see that with gun control measures. People in general approve of common sense gun control measures but Republicans are in the grip of the extremists so that now they cannot do anything at all, however reasonable, that might anger the extremists even if they say they want the right to openly carry bazookas and hand grenades in the streets.

What the Republican establishment seemed to have wanted is to place restrictions on abortion to make it very difficult to get while not blocking it entirely, because that policy of making it access harder seemed to have some appeal. They attacked the Roe v. Wade ruling by portraying it as allowing ‘abortion on demand’ (though it did not) and called for its overthrow. They got that result by packing the US Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings, and exulted over victory of their stealth strategy.

But the zealots essentially want to outlaw any and all abortions at any time and without any exceptions, even for rape and the health of the mother. These moves to so severely restrict abortion access are not popular as can be seen in how it galvanized voters to largely reject Republican candidates in the 2022 mid-term elections.
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