Currently, there are 12,000 cases of cyclosporiasis throughout the USA. Bobby Brainworms insists it is all under control and contained (within the boundaries of the USA, no doubt). Add to that the highest cases of measles in 20 years, and also the new joy of salmonella in a million eggs, listeria in soft cheeses, botulism in baby formula, and e. coli in frozen blueberries, all courtesy of your Explosive Diarrhea Forever President.
But that's not what I want to talk about.
I read a book titled Ripples of the Cosmic Ocean by Dagomar Degroot. An environmental history of Our Place in the Solar System. The book covers the usual facts about planets and a history of our discovering what we know. I was a little disappointed, as I was expecting to find out new information about the solar system, like the conditions of various regions within the atmosphere of our star. (The part outside of the solar corona and extending throughout the Solar System).
We have a picture of empty space around us, but our solar system is a busy place swarming with all sorts of things, and cooking and chilling in all sorts of interesting storms and eddies and currents and magnetic swirls within a solar atmosphere that extends way past Pluto.
It is similar to how we view ourselves on Earth, walking around on land or occasionally floating on ocean. We forget we are these funny little ape shaped bugs living at the very bottom of an ocean of air, razor thin as it appears from space, building intricate cake decorations resting on top of an icing of crust, with a beautiful layered chocolate cake of mantle covering a cream or caramel core of incandescent iron. Not just mere land sea and air, but party and parcel of a magnificently complex and terrifiying thing called our planet.
I was hoping to read about that. Alas, no. One thing caught my mind though, and I'll just quote it:
Across the newly formed United States, for example, congregations that adhered to traditional, evangelical Protestantism had dwindled, owing both to the fearsome toll of the Revolution and the steady tide of westward migration. Protestant ministers feared the obvious disinterest of the new federal government in promoting Protestantism, and perceived a steady decline in its prospects. They responded with the Second Great Awakening, a wave of impassioned preaching and conversion that, ironically, fractured Protestant congregations and provided fertile ground for unorthodox beliefs.
With the Awakening in full swing, in 1832 the Baptist preacher William Miller caused a sensation when he declared tha the Second Coming of Christ would occur on October 22, 1844. The timing could not have been better. The 1832 apparition of Biella's comet sparked widespread predictions of Earth's destruction when calculations by German astronomer Heinrich Olbers suggested that Earth would pass through the comet's poisonous tail. In early 1843 the shocking apparition of a comet bright enough to be seen during the day seemed to vindicate Miller's prediction that the world would end the following year. The comet's appearance encouraged a wave of apocalyptic millenariansim. When the comet faded and Christ did not make his scheduled return, the "Great Disappointment" that followed would lead a new denomination, the Adventists, to proclaim that a process would be set in motion that would culminate in the Second Coming.
This strange period took what was otherwise a dusty old Iron Age death cult and made it exciting again, with proper encroachment into secular and politcal spheres. All that nonsense about the Rapture, Flat Earth, etc. came from that, and is now part and parcel of the MAGA movement.
This is not to say that comets alone caused MAGA, racism is the primary cause. But still, funny how all that nonsense comes from quasi-informed superstition.
