Obsidian Wings

A start of the week thread with an invitation to decloak

by liberal japonicus

Earlier, I suggested we have an open thread with an invitation to delurk. So here it is. Of course, people who aren't lurking are welcome as well.

Apple Blossom Time

by JanieM
I was going to write a post about grandmas, but it veered off into something else.

The Wikipedia entry on Samhain says this:

Wiccans believe that at Samhain the veil between this world and the afterlife is at its thinnest point of the whole year, making it easier to communicate with those who have left this world.

You might well ask why I’m thinking about Samhain in May, and there actually is a reason…

…connected to these lines from one of Bilbo’s poems, lines that float through my mind now and then:

I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.

Maybe it’s a side effect of getting older and being grateful for every new springtime I get to see, or maybe it has to do with living in Maine, where spring is the annual reward for making it through a season when twenty degrees feels like a heat wave. Either way, the weeks from early April till late May are my favorite time of year, black flies and all. (Black flies were put here by God, or the Universe, to remind us that nothing is perfect.)

The spring peepers wake up in early April and sing their hearts out every night, looking for frog love. Around the same time – though it varies wildly from one year to the next – the ice on the lake starts to sport a blue fringe, then gradually recedes until it is no more. By the third week in April the grass is greening, and in early May there's a perfect unmown carpet all over everything. Around the time when some people (in a hurry) mow the grass for the first time, the trees are budding out, and the whole world has a skim of greens, mostly pale and delicate, that evolves from one day to the next until the trees are in full leaf, if not yet at their full summer shades.

That's where we are in Maine right now.

I drove to town yesterday and was reminded yet again – every year is new! – that lilacs are everywhere. My theory is that the early European settlers in this harsh landscape didn't have time for flower gardens, but they liked lovely things as much as the next person, and lilacs and daisies were the answer to that. You could throw some lilacs into the ground and then neglect them mercilessly, and yet they'd survive and persist and give you a week or so of beauty – and that scent! – every year. Daisies of all kinds thrive here without a lot of care, so says a gardener friend of mine. And maple trees were here before you, and could be tapped to make syrup and strategically placed to make shade. So there was the stalwart trio of growing things on the old farmsteads: maple trees, lilacs, and daisies. They're everywhere, to this day.

Also: apple blossoms.

And that's where Samhain comes into it. I've been drinking in springtime over these weeks, as I always try to do, appreciating every beautiful day as if it will be gone tomorrow. And for some reason, that line about the thinning of the veil keeps popping into my mind. I didn't originally read it in a Wiki entry; it's probably a remnant of Starhawk's novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, or maybe of conversations with Wiccan friends I used to know. In any case, it's been popping up so relentlessly that I had to stop the other day and try to figure out why.

I think it's that for me the veil is thinnest not at Samhain, but at apple blossom time.

One of my grandmas lived her entire life in rural Ohio, and maybe it was her influence that taught me to tune in to the seasons in just the way I do. The seasons in rural Ohio track pretty well with the seasons in Maine, though they're offset a bit because the winters aren't so long there. But lilacs, maple trees, daisies, apple trees – they're all common to both landscapes.

My grandma lost the love of her life during apple blossom time in 1926, when my grandfather died of the ill health that had troubled him since his time in the trenches in World War I. She rarely spoke of him explicitly, but she treated apple blossom time as sacred, so that the very phrase carries connotations for me that can't really be put into words.

Here's the thing. At apple blossom time, I feel like I could walk around the corner and find my grandma as a young woman, going about her life in her usual hardworking, cheerful way. The day we moved into the old farmhouse in Maine I felt like I was walking into her movie. I wasn't, really, but I still get those echoes now and then, and they come most often in May.

The veil is indeed thin in the springtime.

KIC 8462852 Is At It Again

by wj

One of the ways we spot planets around other stars is by noticing the slight dimming which occurs when the planet comes between us and the star. And it's very slight -- which is why we only recently have been able to detect it.

Even then, mostly what we can find are rather large planets. For example, a planet the size of Jupiter coming between us and a (distant) start the size of the sun would result in about a 3% drop in brightness.

But then there's KIC 8462852 (aka "Boyajian's star", or more familiarly "Tabby's star"). This is one of those "clearly we don't know everything, by a long ways!" cases, because it dims by over 20%. We have no real clue what could cause that. As a result, we've got lots of wild speculations, but nothing that would even rise to the level of "theory."

And things are worse because the dimming is not periodic. So maybe not in orbit around the star after all. But then why does it repeat at all?

Just recently, it started to dim again. This has lead to a flurry activity among astronomers. Previous instances of dimming were detected after the fact, by looking as photos. This time, they hope, they can watch in real time, and gather a lot more data on what is actually happening. Fun times!

Please read this now

by liberal japonicus

I've never been one to say you must read something, I always assume that if I find something, folks a lot smarter than me (which is all of you) are going to find it as well. But for this piece in the Atlantic, entitled my Family's Slave, please read it.

I hadn’t come sooner to deliver Lola’s ashes in part because I wasn’t sure anyone here cared that much about her. I hadn’t expected this kind of grief. Before I could comfort Ebia, a woman walked in from the kitchen and wrapped her arms around her, and then she began wailing. The next thing I knew, the room erupted with sound. The old people—one of them blind, several with no teeth—were all crying and not holding anything back. It lasted about 10 minutes. I was so fascinated that I barely noticed the tears running down my own face.

 

We're Doomed?

by Ugh

I don't know what I think about Politico generally, they do some good reporting at times and other times it fits Charles Pierce's description as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac." That said, uh:

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The Deputy National Security Adviser to the President of the United States of America is "slipping" the President internet hoaxes in an attempt to influence his views in the direction she wanted and it would have worked if it wasn't for the meddling kids.  This is not confidence inspiring (other than perhaps they are such colossal fnckups it's holding them back).  Another horrific example at the link.

Of course Politico, instead of its staff grabbing their families and running screaming into the hills over the insanity, discusses this as Trump preferring an "open Oval Office with a free flow of ideas and inputs from both official and unofficial channels."  Alrighty then.  Politico is closer to the mark when they describe this sort of thing as a "seemingly endless Game of Thrones inside the West Wing."  More accurately, it's more like Mean Girls in the West Wing (I stole this but don't recall from where).

This is of course a direct reflection of our 45th President, who doesn't stand for anything but himself and can't remember what he said 3 minutes ago and/or doesn't care.  It struck me this morning that we are ruled by a needy, vindictive, narcissistic goldfish. If the hue fits...

Connections

by JanieM
Hypothesis: the following are all connected:

1. The impossibly rancorous political situation in the U.S.
2. The obscene level of wealth inequality in the U.S.
3. The increasingly scary stories coming out of the world of airline travel.

*****

People are a bad mood.

Fights on airplanes are both a tangible manifestation of and a metaphor for something larger.

What's the best Midwestern news site?

by Doctor Science

For the past decade or more, The Christian Science Monitor has been my parents' home page, as a reliable news source that's not The Usual Coastal Suspects. The site has now been redesigned to be mobile-friendly, sparse, and opinion-focused, which is NOT what my parents are looking for.

What they want:

• Basic what's-going-on national new summary so they know what people are talking about
• More news than opinion
• Excellent coverage of Midwestern issues and politics, especially Wisconsin and Illinois. My mother grew up in Wisconsin and had many relatives there, they met at UW Madison, then lived in Champaign-Urbana until I was 12 (Hiram Paley was one of their closest friends)
• Reasonably quickly-loading site
• None of those bloody pop-up autoplay videos
• Free or low-cost subscription

Anyone have any opinions or recommendations? I get my news from my social media feeds (I follow a lot of journalists on Twitter), plus I have a subscription to the Washington Post to support the work they've been doing. I cancelled the NY Times back in the fall, and they keep doing dumbass things that make me feel good about that decision.

So, where do you get your news? What's a good news site for my parents to keep as their home page?

Fantômas (1915) by Juan Gris. Fantômas was a popular fictional serial killer; Le Journal was a Parisian newspaper, at the time moving from being vaguely leftist-literary to conservative-nationalist.

Underappreciated Thought about Comey's Firing

--by Sebastian

I'm popping in because of all the crazy things going on with Trump, this may be the craziest one so far. 

All of the obvious things about Comey's firing are being talked about all over the place.  Rod Rosenstein's letter regarding Comey's firing is being treated as pretext, which is appropriate.  The main focus of the pretextual understanding is as a troll for Democrats--i.e. you said he was so bad, how can you whine about him getting fired now?  The main speculation for the reason behind the pretext involves the Russia investigations, which strikes me as appropriate too.

However there is a straight argument ties into the reason why this particular pretext was chosen over other possible pretexts.  Trump more than almost any President could REALLY use a revival of the idea that you don't talk about politically valent investigations while they are ongoing...

Comey, Comey, Comey!

by Ugh

Geez, I go out for a work conference and dinner and all this crap happens. Some thoughts/observations:

• Like the dessert topping/floor wax sketch, Comey can both deserve firing and his firing by Trump under the circumstances completely inappropriate
• While Trump remains the most important political actor in the country, Mitch McConnell is a close second, someone on twitter notes "none of this will matter until McConnell decides it will"
• How did all your machinations work out for you there James?
• If Trump nominates Rudy! we have truly become a banana republic
• I will repeat the criticism I made at the time of Comey's appointment (and Gates/Hagel): were there no qualified Democrats? There is no upside to these supposed bipartisan appointments

Good times.

The Opioid Epidemic Brings the Minority Inner City to the White Countryside

by wj

An article in the Atlantic included an interesting observation:

For many women, going it alone has meant poverty and loneliness, not empowerment. . . .

Places like Ross County that have been hit by manufacturing declines are the leading edge of the future Rosin describes. Joblessness makes men less desirable partners, theorizes the MIT economist David Autor, who investigated why marriage rates are declining in areas that have seen high shares of manufacturing job losses. In addition, there are just fewer men now in these places, which include much of the Midwest. Autor’s research shows that as men join the military, go to jail, or leave the area in search of work, women are outnumbering men. “The number of high-quality men whom you would want to marry is declining,”
[emphasis added]

Notice one thing. These factors (few men; especially fewer high-quality men] are exactly the ones which have lead to high numbers of single parents in the inner cities. That is, white working class areas in the rust belt are increasingly resembling the minority (specifically black) areas of the inner city. A rising number of men are gone, and the ones who are left are undesirable. Which means that women who want a family are having to get pregnant (without getting married) and become single mothers -- there simply isn't a viable alternative.

The interesting question becomes: Will this increasing similarity lead to increased sympathy and affinity? And if so, how long will it take for both groups to notice? My guess is that the recognition will be strongly resisted, even when it is pointed out. Which, I suspect, it will have to be, as it will not spontaneously occur to the involved.

Of course, the other question is, what can be done about it? The simplistic answer for the cities (stop locking up so many black men for drug offenses) doesn't seem likely to work -- men here are dying of drug abuse, not just going to prison for it. So what will work?