Governor Rick Perry has released some details of a flat-ish tax plan which critics say weakens Social Security, complicates the tax code and raises tax for the vast majority, but, to no one’s surprise, heavily favors the super rich and multinational corporations. One of the weirder features the plan creates a parallel tax code. That detail and others already have some conservative economists panning the plan widely: [Read more…]
Come on, Rick Perry, this is ridiculous: [Read more…]
This artist's concept illustrates an icy planet-forming disk around a young star called TW Hydrae, located about 175 light-years away in the Hydra, or Sea Serpent, constellation. Courtesy NASA/HSO
The translation of the constellation Hydra is Water Serpent, and astronomers now know the name is strangely appropriate for at least part of the formation. [Read more…]
These two infrared images were taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 and 2009. They show a faint object moving through space together with a white dwarf. The brown dwarf, named WD 0806-661 B, is the coldest companion object to be directly imaged outside our solar system. Credit: Kevin Luhman, Penn State University, October 2011
I don’t know what it is about brown dwarfs, but I just love these things. Maybe it’s the thought of a bunch of cold bodies wandering unseen, up to now anyway, through interstellar space:
Luhman classifies this object as a “brown dwarf,” an object that formed just like a star out of a massive cloud of dust and gas. But the mass that a brown dwarf accumulates is not enough to ignite thermonuclear reactions in its core, resulting in a failed star that is very cool. In the case of the new brown dwarf, the scientists have gauged the temperature of its surface to be between 80 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit — possibly as cool as a human.
Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove
Anthony Watts announced he’s taking the weekend off. But TPM has the back story up on their front page with the header “Climate Change Deniers Abandon ‘Befuddled Warmist’ Physicist Who Came Around On Global Warming”. Specifically that’s Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist who now seems to accept the consensus that the earth is indeed warming:
Muller didn’t reject climate science per se, but he was a skeptic, and a convenient one for big polluters and conservative anti-environmentalists — until Muller put their money where his mouth was, and launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, in part with a grant from the Charles G. Koch foundation. After extensive study, he’s concluded that the existing science was right all along — that the earth’s surface is warming, at an accelerating rate.
It struck me reading some of the comments on Watts’ site that he may feel he’s in a real bind. That he has to stick by his guns, even when they run dry, because accepting the facts will deprive him of traffic and threaten his livelihood. As a veteran professional blogger I sympathize, but I also challenge that premise. I can think of at least two big successful blogs, Balloon Juice and Little Green Footballs, where the blogger switched gears dramatically based on evidence, and not only did they both survive, they both prospered. Maybe Watts should give his readers some credit, maybe they actually value honesty? More on this later.
The Wall Street super congress may be facing an impasse, and you know what that means? It’s getting to be that time of year again!
The super committee — an outgrowth of an August budget deal that also raised U.S. borrowing authority — has until November 23 to craft a deal, with the full Congress facing a December 23 for final action. If there is a failure on either end, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion would start in 2013.
I can think of nothing that would further depress the US economy, especially ahead of what already looks like a dismal holiday shopping season, than We the People being forced yet again to endure lectures about debt and deficits from the very same political and corporate deadbeats who not only piled up a mountain of debt, but who created debt so utterly foul and toxic that We the People had to buy their debt and bail them out faster than a freshman caught maxing out daddy’s gold card in Mexico. Remember that when Thanksgiving rolls around in a few weeks and this becomes all the rage.
Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove
The Anthony Watts saga continues, sadly, as the popular skeptic blogger seems to be struggling, and so far failing, to face the facts he ostensibly helped produce. Take the first bullet point in a list of things he does and does not agree with, recently posted on his site:
The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention – it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question.
Anthony is terribly confused and that’s a charitable take. [Read more…]
Wall Street job destroyers and class-holes take note: A UC Irvine evolutionary biologist who made a killing in the vineyard business, shows the opposite of the cancerous greed-and-ignorance-are-good sentiment with a whopping $10 million donation to science, his community, and his adopted country:
Francisco J. Ayala, who was once a Dominican priest in his native Spain and who is known for taking on creationists in books and lectures about evolution, said the gift is a way of showing “gratitude” for his 24-year career at UCI.
Watch this video and you too … will have absolutely no fucking clue what Herman Cain’s policy on abortion would be. That’s because he has no friggin idea either.
In a somewhat strange statement issued by the Romney for not-Romney campaign, Mittens criticizes Obama for getting out of Iraq as promised on the 2008 campaign trail:
“President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women,” Romney said in a statement.
Maybe Romney visualizes soldiers hanging out on an embassy rooftop or clinging for dear life on Huey skids. I’m not sure. But the transition sure looks to be pretty damn orderly and most important of all, it hasn’t happened yet. So it’s more than a little puzzling how it could be an astonishing failure already.