Of the present generation. WHY is Fox putting a known racist on our news to attack a pre-eminent African American Scientist?
Neil de Grasse Tyson, about whom I've diaries before, is a hero to my son, who is twelve years old.
My son is totally excited to see the finale of COSMOS! (I don't want to do network advertising, so look it up if you want to see it)
Even though it is on Fox and the commercials are so pornographically violent they almost make me vomit -- I still let him watch it because I want him to catch the cosmological buzz .... the same wonder and excitement I got as a very young child watching the few episodes of Lost in Space that came to me in the small town Midwest. Then there was Star Trek that even my mom would watch with us. She though Captain Kirk was a hoot. And later the Next Generation with Captain Picard and all the fabulous crew.
Don't mistake me for a Trekkie. Nothing like that at all. But fascinated by the possibilities presented by an expansive view of space!
This is an entirely central part of U.S. and World History.
Our history of the present is to situate ourselves more clearly as the marvelous blue marble within a vastness so utterly infinite and unknowable that. . . ... ...this is a way to develop a lot of exciting possibilities and for me speaks centrally about anthropogenic global warming.
antropogenic means man made. That means we are causing the destruction of massive numbers of lives in our country and around the whole world.
I've blogged about that before in a previous diary.
Here I just want to say that having a racist try to take down Neil de Grasse Tysons is just absurd. It is part of that portrait of America that is just NOT MY AMERICA.
Not My America is Below the Fold
Not my America: racism, open carry, mass murders, mass carnage in films and video, immigrants arrested and penned up in concentration camps, religious fanaticism of any type, religious fundamentalism being the most dangerous military scourge of our era,
Imaging the Globe not just as a realm of geo-politics or geo-economics (the first and completely illusory refuge from politics) but also one of geo-LIFE. Geologists and geographers have successfully claimed the "geo" prefix. I like both those fields, but I'm thinking of one slightly different, one that is about the law of the bio-sphere as a humanly articulated law that governs humans in their political and economic capacities within the context of other known laws (normally conceived of as the "natural" world and therefore as "hard science" or possibly social science).
What I mean is that we need to work on bringing the law of the state into alignment with laws of the cosmos. Or, that is, with such knowledge of the cosmos as we have available to us from our best and most perspicacious of the learned.
I said it first & I'll repeat it: we need to work on bringing the law of the state into alignment with the laws of the cosmos. Among those laws seems to be something that dictates that actually livable planets consist, for all practical purposes at this time, of ONE. The Earth. Call it Home and Take Care of it. (TM & copyright preserved).