Just In Time

Goldenrod signifies that surrounding green will vanish as chill settles each evening.

• Joyous summer has been devoted to considering time, when considering anything at all.  What should I mine from the richness of past memories, how should I conduct my present, what is the best way to deal with fears of the future?
• Looked at in the broader view, the world continues to seem to spin out of control.  I try to encapsulate all fleeting news into a category of “entertainment.”  There has been an awful lot of such entertainment over the last few months. 
• At a small personal level, time has pushed its way to our forefront, as we once again encounter nearly instantaneous growth of a young grandchild.   We are amazed at how much had been forgotten about experiences with our own children way back when.  But such immersion in each fleeting moment, and the rapid changes of days and weeks, have been instrumental to my meditations on the nature of my own years.

Gentle chill rain highlights first leaves displaying autumn color.

• Einstein famously tied time, light, and space into relativity.  His theory does not match our  experience. Science declares each second equal to any other, but our perception ignores some hours, stretches other hours endlessly, and sharpens certain moments into near eternity.  We are left with nothing but memories of what we think happened as the clock ticked.
• We learn to not worry too much about time, take it for granted more than the air we breathe.  Yet without time, there is no existence.  In fact, a case could be made that life is unique simply because it cruises through time in a manner different than other matter.  Our consciousness of time undoubtedly is what truly separates us from other animals.
• We cannot manipulate time.  We can barely contemplate it.  A marvelous, mysterious, and integral part of our being.

Stormy sky along a deceptively quiet roadway shoreline.

• Time closely resembles Western conceptions of God.  It is mysterious, omnipotent, omnipresent, fractal, and unknowable.  It begins our lives, permeates them, and ends them.  The present forces itself into our consciousness of all we are and do.  It even includes the all-in-one inexplicable trinity of past present and future.
• An awful lot of religious arguments center on time.  If God is master of time, is there free will or is everything predetermined forever?  Can even time change the events that happen in time?  Even now, we debate what is fated, what can we change, what is overwhelming.

Asters indicate the season even without support of swift cool breeze.

• Science tries to pretend that each chunk of time is constant.  I wonder.  Was an hour in the Roman Empire the same as an hour watching news tonight?  I know my evening and morning hours pass differently.  Is my perception flawed, or is science missing something important?
• Science claims, for example, that exactly when a given particle decomposes cannot be predicted.  But maybe time, as well as the other properties of the universe, runs oddly at that level. 
• Science, in fact, has no meaningful logical grasp of time as anything other than the grand, mysterious, unknowable entity it has always been to human minds since the beginning of _ well, you know.

End summer, begin fall, late flowers and dry detritus, elements of reflection.

• If time were classically worshipped, its center would be “this moment.”  In spite of memories,  incredible vistas of eons opened by intellectual logic,  and imagining the future, each moment is all we experience.  Relentlessly.
• This moment is unique, and yet seamlessly embedded with all others.  It is the only element we can truly know of time.  It flows by and through and around and permeates our universes more surely than any physical phenomena. 
• Time remains so elusive that eventually we ignore its majesty, take it for granted, and just go along for the ride.  As indeed we must, to exist.  Like this essay, delving too deeply is basically futile.  And now, I turn from such useless philosophy to a glorious day before me, grateful for its length and breadth and, yes, for its infinite and unknowable mystery.

Why Kavanaugh doesn’t matter

Our hibiscus, like our mosquitoes, has had a very good year.

A lot of well-watered vegetation seems to be clinging to summer mode as desperately as I do, this first day of nominal autumn.

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• Republicans and their supporters are fighting an “any means justifies the ends” battle to shape the Supreme Court for “generations to come.”  That faith is misplaced.
• Not much need be said about the candidate himself, a smarmy product of elite male privilege, other than that his shallow mind is focused on two social “truth systems” advanced as holy writ.  About one of those, composed near the dawn of agriculture, little need be said.  The other _ our constitution _ was written by well-meaning rich men who had no knowledge of electricity, steam power, internal combustion, women’s equality, modern science, evolution, medicine, and so forth.  It is not bad, but each word is not so contextually immaculate that it need never be interpreted, as Kavanaugh rigidly postulates.
• The country is changing.  This is the last gasp of mean old white men and women, and a few scatterbrained younger folks who blame all their woes on something other than themselves.  In a few years,  the Republican Party will be one with the Whigs.  Their gerontocracy will crumble, before or after it destroys our current political system forever. 
• But no matter what, a social "blue wave" _ which will no doubt fragment but which will shift power _ is going to be out for blood revenge against the current batch of senile bullies and young “freedom” punks.  Lying under oath is the least of the real or imagined malfeasance which will end up impeaching any obstructionist judges in the politics of the near future.

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• I am creeping back into this blog, pictures and text.  During my self-enforced summer hiatus in composition I thought that maybe by cutting back on daily typing I would have more time for some other things.  It has not worked out that way.
• I miss my daily nature musing.  I miss trying to snap an appropriate picture.  It has been wonderful to let my mind clearly freefall, without conscious direction.  But, like all vacations, that gets a little boring after a while. 
• I should apologize, I guess, for the old geezer rants on politics and the perceived ruin of the world.  But if that is the fuel I need to restart, so be it.
• I’ve managed to preserve my daily morning handwritten journal, which has devolved into a diary of activities.  And the summer has been busy, with lots of babysitting, a few travels, and the usual round of walking, swimming, eating, reading, yardwork, and a lot of babysitting. 
• We shall see where this goes, if anywhere, but a journey needs to begin somewhere.

Supreme Court

Supreme Court

Authors of the constitution worried about mob rule and dictatorship.  For that reason they tried to set up a system of what has come to be known as checks and balances. 

Mob rule was to be curtailed by only allowing direct citizen elections for the house of representatives _  local voting qualifications determined by each state.  The senate was to be provided by state legislatures, and the president selected by a committee of wise men.   Assuming that these three branches would fight tooth and nail for power and money, the judiciary was provided as a non-elected referee.  Regardless of what originalists may fantasize, our current government does not resemble that designed by the founders.  Majority mob rule directly elects executive, senate, and house.

Federal checks and balances are now provided by three conflicting power centers:  (1) elected mob-rule formal government (president,senate, and house), (2) ongoing immense bureaucracy implementing accepted laws and rules, and (3) corporate plutocracy headed by the military-industrial complex.  The judiciary still tries to referee, but recently politics has become weaponized into strict party mob rule which threatens judicial independence.

Note that the number of justices is set by law, not by constitution.  There have already been attempts to “pack” the supreme court _ simply appointing new judges until a majority favoring the current mob is in place.  It is likely that packing will become commonplace over the next decades until a new consensus of political boundaries is reached.

Conservative principles used to mean something important about preserving individual rights.

An "originalist" who refuses to understand the founders' proper fears of executive power is no traditional conservative.  A "textualist" who does not understand that power centers now reside in massive international corporations never conceived of by the authors of the constitution is no traditional conservative.

And  a judge who believes eighteenth century beliefs should not be modified by the realities of modern technology, philosophy, and being should be rejected by real conservatives concerned about the imperial direction this country is suddenly rushing into.