Slow Drift to New Norms

The agenda moves so slowly that everything they are bucking for will eventually be fact, but no one will think it the least bit odd. It’s like a foxtail slowly digging its way under an unsuspecting dog’s skin, causing serious infection, with the poor animal having no clue it is even there.

I remember when I was a kid and first learned of a technique astronomers used to differentiate a planet from a star. Planets actually move, albeit very slowly to the human eye, stars do not move, so astronomers developed an ingenious method called blink comparison to spot this motion. By capturing photographic plates of the same star field days or weeks apart, they could load these images into a blink comparator, a device that rapidly alternated between the two. Fixed stars remained steady, but a planet, due to its orbit around the Sun, would shift slightly, appearing to jump back and forth in the viewer’s eye.

Why do I bring this up? Because it reminds me of how difficult it is to ascertain change if it is slow (i.e. a slow planet’s movement). Think of a growing plant; we can stare at one for hours and not actually see it grow. But rest assured, it does. There are some species that you can actually see their growth (some forms of bamboo and a plant named kudzu), but it’s tough. You get the picture.