Alienation and Exclusion

     The campaign of 2016 was an education in the deep problems facing the country.  Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views.
      Alienation breeds a hysterical public conversation.  Its public intellectuals are addicted to overstatement, sloppiness, pessimism, and despair.  They are self-indulgent and self-lionizing prophets of doom who use formulations like “the Flight 93 election” — who speak of every problem as if it were the apocalypse.  Alienation also breeds a zero-sum mind-set — it’s us or them — and with it a tribal clannishness and desire for exclusion.  As Levin notes, on the right alienation can foster a desire for purity — to exclude the foreign — and on the left it can foster a desire for conformity — to squelch differing speakers and faiths.
      But going forward we need a better establishment, one attuned to Trump voters, those whose alienation grows out of genuine suffering.   The first task for this better establishment is to not make the political chasm worse . As the impeachment investigation proceeds, it’ll be important for us Trump critics to not set our hair on fire every day, to evaluate the evidence as if it were against a president we ourselves voted for.  Would we really throw our own candidate out of office for this?
       Over the longer term, it will be necessary to fight alienation with participation, to reform and devolve the welfare state so that recipients are not treated like passive wards of the state, but take an active role in their own self-government.
       It’ll be necessary to revive a living elite patriotism.  That means conducting oneself in office as if nation is more important than party; not using executive orders, filibusters and the nuclear option to grab what you can while you happen to be in the majority.
       It means setting up weekly encounters to help you respect and understand the fellow Americans who reside across the social chasms.
       Finally, it’ll be necessary to fight alienation with moral realism, with a mature mind-set that says that, yes, people are always flawed, the country always faces problems, but that is no reason for lazy cynicism or self-righteous despair. If you start with an awareness of human foibles, then you can proceed with what Levin calls pessimistic hopefulness — grateful for the institutions our ancestors left us, and filled with cheerful confidence that they can be reformed to solve present needs.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/

Light Pollution

The Problems of Light Pollution -- Overview

Light pollution: Any adverse effect of artificial light including sky glow, glare, light trespass, light clutter, decreased visibility at night, and energy waste. Light pollution is not only a hinderance to astronomy, but it also impacts us directly.
Light pollution:
    is a risk factor for cancer to people
    is a disturbance to animals
    is a waste of energy, resources, and money
    is a security risk to your property
    and obscures our view of the wondrous night sky.

Urban sky glow - the brightening of the night sky over inhabited areas. It is the "glow" effect that can be seen over distant populated areas. This light that escapes up into the sky is created by the combination of all light reflected off of what is being illuminated, from all of the badly directed light in that area, and from that light that is scattered (redirected) by the atmosphere itself from reaching the ground. This scattering is very strongly related to the wavelength of the light when the air is very clear (with very little aerosols). Rayleigh scattering dominates in such clear air, making the sky appear blue in the daytime.
http://cescos.fau.edu/observatory/lightpol.html