And on its very first day hearing arguments, the notorious "first Monday in October," the justices heard a potentially momentous case out of a Boulder, Colorado state court. Plaintiffs in the state court dispute want to hold two big hydrocarbon-marketing concerns (Suncor and ExxonMobil) liable for their role in climate change and for obscuring that fact that climate change is underway from the general public. Samuel Alito has recused himself from the case, apparently because he is heavily invested in the petroleum industry. It is worth observing here that the plaintiffs do have a right to move forward with this dispute, according to Colorado's own Supreme Court. That court ruled that Boulder's state-law claims were not preempted by any federal statute. If the US Supreme Court does not reverse that, the Colorado court's decision stands. In this case, that means "tie goes to the runner," a 4-4 split in Alito's absence, which seems quite possible, ...
In his 1907 book PRAGMATISM, William James makes one use of the expression "cosmic weather," an expression he likely picked up from his friend Chauncey Wright, a Metaphysical Club member. James writes (in Lecture 3) that according to a certain materialistic view of things, all that happens in time is arbitrary and pointless, just the doing and undoing of cosmic weather. James uses it as a throw-off phrase, but tracing the idea back through Wright we can see that it had significance for Wright in the context of astronomy. Gravity draws bodies together, thermodynamics disperses heat from centers to margins. Coming together is balanced by coming apart. Great structures like galaxies come together, disperse, and come together again. There is no progress to it all, Wright thought. Astronomy, and cosmology, have changed a good deal since Wright's day, or James'. The general view now is that there is a progression (in an amoral sense), not just a lot of aimless cycles. Th...