News bits: Thoughts on SCOTUS; Bipartisanship; Some Christianity bits; Psi musings

Observers are in the process of dissecting what the end of the last Supreme Court term means. Most or nearly all of the radical right appears to be happy with how it turned out. Most non-extremists are not happy. Some are quite scared. Slate writes:

How to Sum Up This Supreme Court Term

Sherrilyn Ifill: I have so many thoughts rushing through my head that it’s hard to pick which one. But I think as a top line, it is calling me back to the very first opening session of the Biden Supreme Court Commission. .... we were doing this task of performing on this commission without seriously engaging the charge for change. And I think we see the consequences of that this year. Obviously, this was a devastating term, but I think really important for our maturation as a democracy in understanding that things are out of balance. And I think it’s time for us to take a very close look at the way in which we have allowed the mythology of the Supreme Court to set itself on top of our democracy, as opposed to being within our democracy.

Steve Vladeck: I’m going to pick a slightly provocative word, but the more I think about it, the better I think it is. The word of the term, for me, is arrogance. This is a profoundly arrogant institution, and I mean that in multiple respects. Arrogant from the sense of sort of picking and choosing the cases it wants in ways that are not necessarily advancing what the lower courts need, as opposed to the agendas of the justices. Arrogant in the sense of handing down decisions in major cases that really are punts, making you wonder why they took the case in the first place. Like what was the point of granting cert in Moore v. Harper if that was the decision we were going to get out of the court?

Arrogance in sort of turning its back collectively and individually on the idea that it ought to be accountable as an institution, and the justices ought to be accountable. Chief Justice Roberts’ letter in response to Chairman Durbin’s invitation to testify is, I think, actually one of the more important single documents of the term.

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From the Hypocrisy Files: There's a few things politicians on the two sides agree on. One is spending federal government money in their voting districts or states, even though they fought against the spending in the first place. The WaPo writes:

Republicans have cheered the arrival of new federal money to improve local roads, bridges, pipes, ports and internet connections, nearly two years after voting against those very investments

When the Biden administration awarded Alabama roughly $1.4 billion in late June to expand high-speed internet access across the state, its senior Republican senator rejoiced.

“Great to see Alabama receive crucial funds to boost ongoing broadband efforts,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville wrote on Twitter, without acknowledging the money originated in a law that he — and dozens of other Republicans — had voted against.

Nearly two years after Congress finalized the first in a series of measures to improve the nation’s aging infrastructure and combat climate change, some of the GOP lawmakers who originally tried to scuttle the spending are now welcoming it. They have privately courted newly available federal money to improve their local roads, bridges, pipes, ports and internet connections, and publicly celebrated when their cities and states have secured a portion of the aid.

Where's all that vaunted pulling one up by one's bootstraps family value? Darned Republican socialist communists.

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Bits about Christianity: A news source recently asserted that worldwide there are about 45,000 different Christian denominations. . . . . . That's a lot of denominations. One can wonder how many of those denominations believe their doctrine and dogma is the only way to live a truly Christian life and get to heaven.

Humans are social creatures and hard wired for spirituality. That usually manifests as affiliation with a formal religion like Christianity or Islam. Some federal courts suggest that even atheism is a religion: According to the Kaufman court, “when a person sincerely holds beliefs dealing with issues of ‘ultimate concern that for her occupy a place parallel to that filled by ... God in traditionally religious persons, those beliefs represent her religion.” So I'm a religion-adjacent person?

The WaPo writes about a Baptist pastor in rural Georgia who has increased church attendance by being inclusive. That includes inclusive of people that the aggressive, theocratic Christian nationalist wealth and power movement has publicly targeted for legalized oppression and discrimination. The WaPo writes: 

A small-town Georgia preacher fills pews by leaving no one out

At night, the worn sign looks like a beacon in the darkness out front of the modest, red-brick Mt. Hebron Baptist Church.

The tired, it reads. The poor. And huddled masses. Welcome home.

In this small town in the rural northeast corner of Georgia, it’s the kind of message that assures Teri Massey she is loved for being who she is — a message 180 degrees from the one she heard in the Baptist church where she spent her teens into her 40s, where her grandfather, father and brother all held leadership positions.

Teri Massey, right, with her wife, Elisa, on the front porch of their home in Elberton, Ga. They say that they returned to church because of how they were greeted and treated at Mt. Hebron Baptist Church.  

When Massey came out in 2004, shortly after meeting the woman she later would marry, the congregation in that other small Georgia town responded by campaigning to send her to conversion therapy and holding prayer vigils outside her home.

Ah, it's nice to see something good about at least some of American Christianity for a change. Apparently, not all Christians are supporters of the bigoted, cruel Christian nationalist brand of theocracy. So, who truly needs conversion therapy here, Teri Massey or the Christians who wanted to send her to conversion therapy?

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Musings about a hypothetical source of psi: Mainstream science rejects psi phenomena as not real. It is dismissed as a collection of alleged observations that are in fact mirages. Psi phenomena are the aggregate of parapsychological mental functions including dualism (consciousness residing at least partly outside of the brain-mind), extrasensory perception, precognition, psychokinesis, ghosts, demons, evidence of reincarnation or past lives, and etc. As far as I know, known forms of energy cannot explain psi. 

Some psi believers posit that some or all of consciousness comes to us via some form of energy akin to light waves or electromagnetic radiation. According to NASA, radio waves, gamma-rays, visible light, and all the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation can be described in terms of a stream of mass-less particles, called photons, each traveling in a wave-like pattern at the speed of light. So far, science has not detected signs of consciousness in regular light. If consciousness does reside at least partly outside the brain-mind, some other source of influence, usually posited as some kind of energy, probably has to exist.

One candidate for psi energy is dark energy. I don't know if that has wave properties akin to light or if wave properties are even necessary. Dark Energy is a hypothetical form of energy that exerts a negative, repulsive pressure, behaving like the opposite of gravity. 

Another is gravity waves (GWs), which were first detected in 2015. More recently, tiny GWs have been found to be flying around all the time. They stretch and compress us in little ripples of space-time. Humans and most everything else in the universe are a bit like a jello mold constantly being wiggled by tiny gravity waves. Since humans can now detect GWs to some limited extent, scientists can begin to probe them for signs of consciousness, presumably some discernable form of non-random wave pattern(s). Maybe GWs carry consciousness to the brain-mind somehow. Or maybe not.

A WaPo opinion piece by physicist Katie Mack comments on the tiny GWs: 

I’m a physicist. Last week’s gravitational waves 

announcement sent me reeling.

As a physicist, I’m used to knowing that an invisible world of particles and waves moves through the universe. I’ve made peace with being constantly skewered by neutrinos and cosmic rays. I blithely submit to X-rays at the dentist and to radio waves everywhere.

But a gravitational wave? That’s a distortion of space-time itself — a stretching and squeezing of the fabric of reality, a wave of deformation tearing through the cosmos, warping everything in its path. The monstrous denizens of the intergalactic deep reveal themselves not through the light they emit but by how they stir the space-time we share. When a gravitational wave moves through you, you are, for a moment, a different shape.

In June, for the first time, astronomers revealed they had picked up traces of a background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves. It was embedded in 15 years of data from naturally occurring cosmic metronomes across the galaxy.

These metronomes, called millisecond pulsars, are the spinning remnants of dead massive stars. They sweep beams of radio waves with every rotation, hundreds per second — and keep near- perfect time. Tiny discrepancies might be because of individual stellar idiosyncrasies or could be a sign that gravitational waves have changed the distance each pulse travels on its way to us. By monitoring dozens of pulsars, astronomers hunt for correlations in timing errors that are a smoking gun of passing gravitational waves.

And that’s just what they found.

The discovery is not going to revolutionize science in one fell swoop. For one thing, it is not entirely clear where the hum comes from, though it looks very much like what we expect from the combination of gravitational waves generated by all the supermassive black hole collisions across the cosmos. If it is, it’s a first step toward a whole new way of seeing the universe that will give us fantastic insights into the formation and growth of galaxies.

An artistic interpretation of an array of pulsars 

being affected by gravitational ripples in a distant galaxy

Darn those gravitational ripples