There are a lot of advantages to being rich. But one of the few disadvantages is the honest day-to-day input from friends, coworkers, and family we all take for granted. That simple feedback is often non-existent for the very wealthy. They could literally propose anything or say anything and there would be a line of people stretching around the block waiting to praise their insightful brilliance. That’s the sense I get with Herman Cain when I read stuff like this:

But Cain said the “offensive” criticism is just a familiar tactic to marginalize him. He suggested his status as a prominent black conservative makes him a target, but said the attacks will not succeed. “I left the Democratic plantation a long time ago. And all that they try to do when someone like me … the only tactic that they have to try and intimidate me and shut me up is to call me names, and this sort of thing. It just simply won’t work,” Cain said.

[Read more…]

After comparing President Obama to Hitler and subsequently issuing an apology, Hank Williams Jr has revealed his true feelings in the poetry of song — and he’s not sorry at all. The country music legacy has released a new tune with lyrics skewing the ‘liberal media,’ which in this case is the hopelessly liberal Fox and Friends, and attacking the President:

Williams told the AP he wrote the song Friday and recorded it in a Nashville studio later that day. It’s expected to be on iTunes late today or early tomorrow. The lyrics also say the U.S. is “going down the drain” and becoming “The United Socialist States of America.”

My guess is Williams hoped he would get his ESPN gig back if he feigned regret. That probably didn’t happen, freeing the racist imbecile up to express his true feelings. But one thing we can say for sure, whatever Williams may have said about being sorry, it was clearly bunk. He’s fallen hook, line, and sinker for extremist right-wing misinformation and he’s not the least bit sorry about it.

It’s big, it’s ugly, it’s legendary. It’s a tentacled alien monster with three hearts and a voracious appetite for living flesh. Meet the Kraken, or at least some circumstantial evidence for something like it:

There is no direct evidence of such a monster’s existence, let alone its intelligence. The entire tale is based on an untested hypothesis about a puzzling pile of bones that happen to belong to what were otherwise that era’s top marine predators: school-bus-sized ichthyosaurs. … When paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts visited the fossil site this summer, it reminded him of an octopus midden, the pile of debris this animal piles up to conceal the entrance of its den. And now McMenamin is saying that a giant kraken, twice the size of the modern Colossal Squid, drowned or broke the necks of these ichthyosaur victims before bringing them home for dinner.

That does sound a little thin. But we all want the Kraken to exist, or at least to have existed, you know, back a long time ago when it couldn’t bother us. So it makes a fun story.

Video re-editor and smear artist James O’Keefe has been spotted in the Big Apple. Speculation is he’s trying to cook up another hit-job, this time on the Occupy Wall Street movement now terrifying the Job Destroyers who tanked the economy and the classholes apologists who protect them:

Today Occupy Wall Street had an extra-special visitor, although one apparently not sporting his usual camera, nor the traditional 1970s pimp costume. Yes, right-wing scandal-baitor and shameless videotape re-editor James O’Keefe showed up in Liberty Plaza.

O’Keefe is a great exemplar of the long-winded point I was trying to make the other day in this post: conservatives invest long term to farm new liars and scumbags. [Read more…]

And by hot I mean zillions of electron-volts:

Looking for the Higgs boson? Try your Android phone. The most powerful particle accelerator in the world now has its very own app, free for download for anyone interested in cutting-edge physics. The app, created by scientists at Oxford University and approved by the European Organization for Nuclear Research aka CERN, offers Android users a peek into the research going on at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including a live feed into what particles are being smashed at any given moment. The imagery is shown with computer-generated 3D models that users can move to see any angle, and the app offers a tutorial for physics newbies to decipher the things they’re seeing. According the Android Market, users have already downloaded the app more 10,000 times.

It’s not often we get to see a truly grassroots movement form and grow before our eyes, but that’s exactly what may be happening with the Occupy Wall Street protest that began in the Big Apple. The map above shows the extent of planned protests all over America:

The movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” has spread far beyond its starting point in lower Manhattan. CBS News correspondent Bigad Shaban reports that it now has offshoots in 25 cities nationwide, and political leaders from both sides are weighing in. From D.C. to Alabama to Portland, demonstrators protest everything from corporate greed to joblessness to economic inequality.

[Read more…]

Presidential long shot Herman Cain doesn’t just have supernatural deities in his corner, he’s also “just like” another Biblical celebrity:

Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, told the Christian Broadcasting Network that God has been behind him since he decided to run for the White House.”I felt like Moses when God said I want you to go into Egypt and lead my people out. Moses resisted. I resisted,” Cain said in the interview.

Yes, a multimillionaire being asked for details on the economy or foreign policy by adoring voters and friendly media is exactly like being tortured and abandoned in a desert with no food or water. Anyone can see the eerie similarity. ::eyeroll::

One of the coolest objects for backyard astronomy is the Crab Nebula, shown above. High energy detectors have found its more than pretty: the nebula is firing off lots high energy gamma-rays:

Using the Very Energetic Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a group of international astrophysicists spotted gamma rays with energies exceeding 100 billion electron-volts emitted from the fast spinning Crab Pulsar supernova that was discovered in 1968. “If you asked theorists a year ago whether we would see gamma-ray pulses this energetic, almost all of them would have said, ‘No.’ There’s just no theory that can account for what we’ve found,” said corresponding author Martin Schroedter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

That’s a lot of energy, but a freshly minted, rapidly rotating neutron star like the pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula has a lot of energy to work with. Just a baseball sized meteor falling to the surface in that enormous gravity well would hit with the energy of a small nova. I’m sure scientists will come up with some fascinating explanations for the gamma rays soon.

There is a strange liquid substance falling from the sky in Texas. Analysis reveals dihydrogen oxide saturated with free diatomic Oxygen and Nitrogen, trace amounts of CO2, Argon, and a smattering of various hydrocarbons are present. I’m not sure what to make of it.