Our Earth Is an Insignificant Dot in Space
The caption: The Earth and Moon as seen by the Cassini probe from Saturn’s orbit. All of humanity in one small dot in space.
A reminder of what Carl Sagan said about a photo of Earth from space he called the “pale blue dot,” which begins:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
It continues here.
My thanks to the reader who suggested this to me:
That a president tried to overthrow the government is not particularly surprising. Those in power have a natural inclination to remain in power, and this type of activity happens constantly in countries all around the globe.
Good advice to religious leaders: Don’t promote the mutual exclusivity of faith and reason.
Here’s where we are, folks.
Earlier today, I had the opportunity to ask some old prep-school chums about something I consider to be absurd: the U.S. Supreme Court’s considering the idea that the president of the United States should enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution.
I know absolutely nothing about the strategizing that must be going on inside the Republican party, but one has to think that some smart people realize that the GOP’s current course, MAGA/Trumpism, is not sustainable, and that an alternative must be developed and put into place.
What Glinda is saying here is true, of course.
In 2023, the United States received an 83 on a scale from 0 to 100 on the Freedom Awards, from an organization called “FreedomHouse.” That placed us #17 of the 200+ sovereign nations on Earth.
By the time the prosecutors in the RICO case in Georgia get finished with Guiliani, a license to practice law will be of no more value to him than a diploma in devil worship. He either flips on Trump and takes a plea deal in exchange for a lighter sentence (as others have done), or he stands behind the wanna-be dictator and goes down hard.
