Herman Cain unmasks super criminal Obama

The casual observer might think that years of deregulation pushed by Republicans allowed giant financial institutions to play Russian Roulette with the economy, that decades of tax cuts pushed by Republicans for the rich left our national savings account badly overdrawn and unable to cope with the consequences of massive unemployment, or that Republicans would enrage We the People by forcing us to cover trillions in business losses while profits were kept by the same priveleged few who created the mess. That just goes to show that you, sir or madame, are no Herman Cain!

“Wall Street didn’t create Obama’s policies … You can demonstrate all you want on Wall Street, the problem is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg and we owe Cain for pointing it out. Obama may be the most brilliant criminal genuis in history, just consider a few of the amazing jobs the right-wing assures us he has pulled off successfully …
[Read more…]

Willard Romney’s Mormon problem

The old joke among religious scholars is that so-called mainstream religions are just successful cults. But yesterday, according to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s pastor of choice Robert Jeffress, the definition was broadened:

Jeffress, who endorsed Perry and introduced him at the Values Voter Summit, claimed that one of the reasons who he’s opposed to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is because Mormonism is a “cult,” although he said he never discussed that issue with Perry.

The problem with Romney isn’t his religion, at least not with a majority of voters. The problem is he’s a Mormon running for pastor-in-chief in a primary dominated by fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic voters. [Read more…]

Website issues

We apologize for the intermittent slow loading speeds on the FtB site today. Our tech staff is working on tweaking the servers and we expect things to be back to normal any moment. In the meantime feel free to blame PZ Myers, or possibly Bill Gates, your choice.

I could really use a surrogate right about now

Speaking of the coming singularity, this article reminded me of something, but at first I wasn’t sure what:

in a series of experiments at Duke University Medical Center, researchers fitted two monkeys with electrodes in their brains and trained them to move a virtual arm across a computer screen to grab virtual objects and “feel” their different textures — all using only their brains. It’s the first demonstration of what the researchers call a brain-machine-brain interface (BMBI).

Then I placed it: the opening scene in Surrogates, where researchers had hooked up a living primate to a robotic arm. At age 50 I could already make great use of a nice athletic, near indestructible artificial body. How about you?

Of comet water and stardust

Ice crystals coming off of Comet 103P/Hartley

The idea that the atoms in our body were cooked in the cores of massive stars that ultimately blew their starry guts out has already fascinated me. Now, astronomers have added a related celestial twist: the water making up earth’s ancient oceans, some of which resides inside our present day bodies, probably came from a special group of comets which normally wander lazily around the edge of the solar system:

Earth-like water has been discovered in the small oddball comet Hartley 2, which the Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft flew by in November 2010. This comet originated in the disk-shaped Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, suggesting this is ultimately where much of Earth’s water came from.

What does earth-like water mean? [Read more…]

The Singularity approaches

Computer genuis Steve Jobs didn’t live to see the technological singularity he helped usher in, but it may be coming faster than predicted. Most futurists speculate the techno-singularity will be set off by the creation of hyper-intelligent machines with intellectual and problem solving capabilities as far ahead of their human creators as we are ahead of rabbits. Our only real hope to remain relevant in such a future would be to augment our own capabilities and/or integrate with our artificial counterparts.

IBM has announced they hope to reach one of the first major milestones on the way to the singularity within ten years:

Big Blue is working hard to make sure that the next decade is its biggest yet in computing advances, with projects in the works to create the world’s most powerful supercomputer and one with the same number of nodes as the human brain.

These future devices don’t have to be aggressive, Skynet is not inevitable, they may be downright helpful. It’s just that humans are made of atoms that they might be able to use for something else …

Steve Jobs dead at age 56

I remember the first time I heard the term personal computer: in a Radio Shack I used to hang out at and buy little electronics kits. My last one had been something called a binary counter, with four little lights that could add in base two. One of the staff who took the time to guide me on what I should consider for the next project, and more importantly, what I could handle putting together with my dad’s ancient soldering iron at age 12, told me about a new Heathkit coming out. My own computer. I eagerly told some friends about it later, one of them asked what in the world are you going to do with such a thing?

I couldn’t think of a good answer, then. Little did I know, at the same time Heathkit piqued my interest, a young Steve Jobs had already persuaded Steve Wozniak to build their first home-made device, and glimmers of an answer to that question was already in the process of growing into a groundswell  no one would have dared predict. In my opinion the best part of the revolution led by Jobs was that there’s a subtle, hard to define, yet overpowering and terribly democratizing effect of putting the power of computers into the hands of We the People.

Those two Steve’s would go on to change the world, for the better by most any measure. With his departure … it feels as though part of my youth has been taken. Maybe that’s why it saddens me, a lot more than I would have thought, that one of those Steve’s is now gone forever.

Tax the class-holes & Job Destroyers

How’s that for framing? Tax the class-holes that destroyed the economy and created the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and then demanded We the People bail them out with a trillion dollars, right before claiming they should have special privileged status to pay a lower tax rate than teachers and troops:

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said the surtax would raise $445 billion over 10 years, just about the amount needed to pay for the jobs bill. Mr. Reid said his proposal would “have the richest of the rich pay a little bit more” — “5 percent more to fund job creation and ensure this country’s economic success.”

Of course conservatives won’t go along with it, or even let it come up for a vote in the House. That’s fine: that’s the whole point of proposing legislation like this. To make it crystal freakin clear who’s on the side of 99% of us and who’s on the side of the Job Destroying 1%.

Scientists able to twin embryonic stem cells


A new paper in the journal Nature outlines how researchers were able to use somatic cell nuclear transfer to create new embryonic stem cells:

The achievement, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is significant because such patient-specific cells potentially can be transplanted to replace damaged cells in people with diabetes and other diseases without rejection by the immune system.

A rational person would think this would be welcomed by the usual suspects. No human embryos would have to be used. But alas, the usual suspects are idiots — they consider diverting a few embryos from the medical waste incinerator for research to be killing children — and will probably consider this cloning. And everyone brainless wingnut peon knows we have to keep the world safe from manimals and evil clones!

GOP trying to reclaim scientific integrity: good luck with that

The old saying goes, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me. Nowhere is this more acute than in science. Denial of reality is so endemic in today’s Teaparty GOP that simply recognizing the fact of evolution or the readings of super accurate thermometers managed by NASA climate scientists has become political suicide. Some in the GOP are reportedly, finally, trying to push back:

Former South Carolina GOP Rep. Bob Inglis, who lost his primary race last year in part because of his acknowledgment of the problem of climate change, is now giving speeches and lectures across the country about the need for conservatives to acknowledge the problem of climate change and work on solutions. He warns that the Republican Party will be branded “anti-science” if it doesn’t. He is bringing his message to conservative strongholds such as Federalist clubs and conferences of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The effort is duly noted, good luck, but the fact is the Republican Party has been branded antiscience for a long time and for a very good reason: they are anti-science. [Read more…]