[Trigger warning for the election, sexual assault] 

Welp. 

So yeah, that went horribly. Trump won, the GOP took the Senate, and at the moment the House could go either way, but as I write this the GOP has the edge. If they take all three branches of the government things will be exceptionally dire, like the Reichstag is on fire kind of dire.

Trump has said he’s open to putting RFK JR. in charge of the nation’s health, which is such a terrible decision it’s like, well, putting RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s health. There’s no metaphor that’s as bad as the actual statement. Alito and Thomas, rumored to want to retire, can now do so safely knowing the GOP will put clones in their seats. The FDA will be slashed, the Department of Education may get shuttered, and Project 2025, Satan’s list of GOP genie wishes, will be implemented.

It’s entirely possible, and I’d say likely, that America as we knew it, flawed as it was, will be gutted from the roots up. We won’t be a democracy anymore, but a fascist dictatorship. And if you think I’m being hyperbolic, Trump himself has said exactly this.

My friend Chuck Wendig wrote a short essay that sums up how I’m feeling decently well; it’s a doom post and it doesn’t hold back. 

But I’ll note that it sums up how I feel right now. Tomorrow is another day. I don’t know what we can do — I’m hoping activists and people familiar with resistance speak up so we can get an idea of what can be done — but I’ll do what I can. If and when I find out more I’ll be sure to post it here on BAN.

After all, there’s been some light in the dark. My old home states of California and Colorado voted blue, bless them, and my new/old home of Virginia did as well. Democrat Tim Kaine was re-elected to the Senate over the far-right Hung Cao. My own district unfortunately elected a GOP Representative, but I pretty much expected that. Still and all, I’m proud of my three states.

And I’m proud of all the people, many of whom are good friends, who went out and gave their all to elect Harris. They made calls, they wrote letters, they posted videos, and they tried their damnedest to get as many blue votes out there as they could.

And it may be tempting to blame this group or that, this candidate or that one, for failing. But the numbers make it clear: the majority of American people looked at a felonious rapist and said, “He’s my guy.”

In the end it’s exactly what Black people, especially Black women, have been telling us for so, so long: America is a deeply racist, misogynistic country. Millions of us would rather elect a barely sentient mass of hatred than an incredibly competent woman of color who would actually help them and vastly improve their quality of life. 

I’m sad for my country, so so sad. And I don’t know how we’ll get out of this; it’s not just another election, but a sea change in how this country will be run, possibly for decades. I won’t blow smoke here or give some Pollyanna-ish Candide everything-will-be-all-right-in-the-end speech. It may not.

But if there’s any hope it’s in the half of the country that rejected the hate, rejected the greed, rejected the fear, rejected the lies. I don’t know how this will go, but I will hold on to that hope. It’s the only thing I can do right now, but it’s also the right thing to do.

Hey, how about a spectacular image of a spiral galaxy to help clear your brain?

That’s NGC 1559, a spiral galaxy roughly 35 million light-years from us. It’s about 25,000 light-years wide, so much smaller than our 120,000 light-year-diameter Milky Way.

The image is mindboggling, isn’t it? The red fuzzies you see all through are regions of active starbirth, huge clouds of gas heated by newborn massive, luminous stars. These stars blast out ultraviolet light that has so much energy it strips the electron from hydrogen atoms, ionizing them. As the electrons then recombine with the protons, they emit light in very specific wavelengths. One of these is at about 656 nanometers, in the red. That specific wavelength is called H-alpha for historical reasons, and is very common in spiral galaxies and nebulae in our own galaxy.

You can also see dark dust lanes filigreed throughout. Dust is made of rocky or sooty molecules created when massive stars die; they turn into red supergiants and blast out huge amounts of these materials. The grains are opaque to light, so they look dark in silhouette.

This gorgeous Hubble Space Telescope image is a combination of ten different filters across several different observing projects, which is pretty cool. Astronomers don’t like to throw out data, so it’s possible to find old observations in the archive and reuse them.

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