A new survey released by Yale University comes with good news and bad news on the state of scientific literacy in the US. This may be shocking to some readers — prepare yourselves! — the biggest political block in denial is the Teaparty wing of the Republican party. The study had some good news: all four political groups, which broke down in the poll as 39% Democrats, 25% Independents, 24% traditional Republicans, and 12% Teaparty Republicans, favored more research into renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and providing tax rebates for people who purchase energy efficient vehicles or solar panels.

But when it comes to the science and the solution, the Teaparty is out on their own limb. Majorities of Democrats, Indies, and Republicans support international efforts to restrict greenhouses emissions. Teaparty Republicans oppose this, 55% oppose it strongly.

When asked if global was even happening, majorities of Democrats (78%), Indies (71%), and even traditional Republicans (53%) were able to read the global temperature record above produced by NASA and answer yes. Only 34% of Teaparty Republicans could do so and 53% of them answered with a flat no, it’s not happening. And here’s the tragically funny part:

Even though their views are at odds with the vast majority of climate scientists, Tea Partiers are also by far the most confident in their beliefs — more likely to say they are “very well informed” and that they “do not need any more information about global warming.” Note that this dovetails with earlier research finding that when you give those dismissive of global warming more information, it only serves to harden their doubts.

The entire GOP, and possibly the nation, is being utterly controlled by a small minority of know-nothing, born again, right-wing zealots who are not just dead wrong, they’re absolutely certain they are right.

I watched the debate clowns last night, laughing out loud regularly, as each conservative government-employed poser took turns decrying government and proclaiming it must stay out of our lives (With the exception of policing uteruses, regulating birth control, decreeing who can and cannot marry, whisking people off to third-world shit-holes to be tortured without trial or due process, and covering the respective clown’s paycheck, healthcare, and retirement benefits of course). 

The very next question was if Obama could or should intervene in the price of gas. The answers were all, basically, yes he could and he should. Clown Bachmann said it this way “”Don’t forget the day President Obama took office, gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. It’s entirely possible for us to get back to inexpensive energy. The problem is energy is too high. Let’s have a goal of bringing it down because every time gasoline increases 10 cents a gallon, there’s $14 billion in economic activity that every American has taken out of their pocket.”

That’s a good point, our economy is critically dependent on energy prices. But I guess I’m confused here, or someone is anyway. What is the wingnut position on government? Should it stay the hell out of our lives, or should it be so intimately involved in every last detail that it controls the price of a gallon of gas at the corner store? This is the problem with people afraid of elementary logic. They’re hopelessly inconsistent. Subject any one of them to uncensored Q & A for five minutes and the poor candidate would be so tied up in knots of their own making that even the Great Houdini couldn’t get them loose.

Or maybe she just has a twisted sense of humor. It has not rained in large swaths of the very large state of Texas for a year, and this summer has been by far the hottest on record. It’s dry here, so dry that parts of the state are on fire or lay in smoking ruin. Our Governor, Tricky Ricky, sent out his vaunted rain proclamation in April and followed it up with a group rain dance in August. Since then a dozen tropical storms have formed, several becoming major hurricanes. It’s been an active season:

Nate is the 14th named storm this year, and comes three days before the climatological half-way point of the Atlantic hurricane season, September 10. A typical hurricane season has just 10 – 11 named storms, so we’ve already had 35% more than a whole season’s worth of storms before reaching the season’s half-way point. At this rate, 2011 will see 28 named storms, equalling the all-time record set in 2005.

Everyone of them has missed the Lone Star state by a country mile. There are currently three, count em three, Atlantic cyclones churning about and one of them, Nate, is a short drive away by local standards. It is forecast to hit the Texas coast. By the time it does, given the current sea surface temperatures and heat gradient in the gulf, Nate could easily be a major hurricane with rain bands extending into the drought-stricken central portions as far north as Dallas.

Will it? Maybe, hopefully, but if it doesn’t it’ll be even more evidence that Perry’s God doesn’t like him.

The title of the article is Texas Wildfires: Is Rick Perry being hypocritical asking for federal aid? Gosh, ya think?

This week, the administration gave seven local disaster declarations to specific Texas counties, but Perry criticized the federal government for not making bulldozers at Fort Hood available to firefighters in nearby Bastrop County. This after the Republican-led Texas Legislature cut volunteer fire department “assistance grants” for equipment like bulldozers by 75 percent this summer to help balance the state budget. In Texas, volunteer firefighters do 80 percent of the wildland firefighting.

Umm, yeah, cutting equipment used by a volunteer fire department and then implying a political rival is causing the problem adds up to more than mere hypocrisy, it is full blown lying out of your ass duplicity. So yes, Perry is being a hypocritical liar, but then so are all the Teaparty darlings. Michelle Bachmann has personally and professionally made out like a bandit on one federal program after another. Previous GOP nominee front-runner Millard Romney grew up the privileged baby boy of a career politician serving in the Nixon cabinet. Even Dr. Ron Paul, the father of the Teaparty movement, enjoyed federal aid and the benefit of federal spending before and after Hurricane Ike did billions of dollars in damage to his home district in 2009, without which his constituents would probably have called for his head. What’s more is this is normal, this is how our system of government works.

When conservatives need trillions to bail out idiot investment bankers or dole out no-bid energy contracts or hand out truckloads of hundred bills to corrupt officials and mercenaries in Iraq, worries about deficit spending evaporate like morning dew. But when an actual American taxpayer asks for help suddenly it’s a national crisis. Deficit hysteria is simply a convenient smoke screen for conservatives to cower behind anytime We the People dare ask for a portion of our own tax dollars to help blunt the cutting edge of disastrous wingnut policies.

Great segment on Maddow last night about where Mittens is getting his save-o-murica jobs program ideas from. One of his experts is the same guy who served in the Bush WH and who reportedly 1) pushed several Bush tax cuts saying they would lower the deficit, 2) predicted Iraq would be over quickly, and 3) went on to join Goldman-Sachs as a mortgage derivative cheerleader writing at one point these deadly financial mutations would “lend stability to the banking sector.” As noted before, there is virtually no failure so great that it cannot be richly rewarded in today’s corporate arm of the Republican Party.

Now the same asswipe is pushing Romney to propose, you guessed it, tax-cuts for the wealthiest Americans and massive deregulation for all corporate sectors. More of the same awesome sauce we’ve always seen from these strangely well-funded serial fuck-ups. But then right after that block, Maddow shows a shot of Romney getting all scientific, man, and whipping out his iPhone to use in a strained analogy between landlines and Obama. An iPhone, technology, dare we say science!

From which we now safely infer there may be flavors of science acceptable to the low information right-wing sheeple who may hold the fate of the nation in their clasped, praying hands. The one which studies particles and waves moving through substances and vacuum. Quantum mechanics.

Are the fundies really OK with quantum mechanics? It’s progress, if so, and we should be all for it. But I don’t think they’ve thought it through. Because not only is the field chock-full of metaphysical implications that do not bode well for cosmic creator entities, at least those which are purportedly both omnipotent and omniscient, it happens to prove the creation story in the bible dead wrong. Wrong by many orders of magnitude, as in 99.9999999999% wrong. As in the only thing standing between 100% wrong and Genesis is a flimsy barb-wire fence.

From quasars on the event horizon of the background radiation to the local group to Super Nova 1987A right next door in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the evidence carried on waves of visible and invisible light for an ancient universe interlock like the corners of Abe Lincoln’s freshly hewn log cabin. From radio waves flying through the air at millions of cycle per second to the frenzy of electrons boiling around the doped nuclei of commercial silicon by the trillions, the evidence for an ancient planet covers that same log cabin with perfectly joined Legos. Now add in the evidence from geology, biology, paleontology, etc.

It’s a lock. The earth and universe are billions of years old.

There was no creation event a few thousand years ago as described in Genesis. Therefore there could be no original sin by Adam and Eve. Thus, there would be no need to be saved from the consequences of it. And that’s pretty much the end of the line for all flavors of Abrahamic faith.

Recent genetic analysis has suggested that early, anatomically modern humans interbred with neanders to the north and a poorly understood hominid subspecies named Denisovans further east as soon as they bolted out of Africa. Now it looks like our ancestors may have been slutting around even before they left the continent:

Scientists focused on several markers to determine if a DNA sequence qualified as archaic. For instance, a sequence that was radically different from those found in a modern human population was likely to be ancient, as well as if an unusual piece of DNA stretched over a significant portion of a chromosome. The longer these sequences — known as haplotypes — are, the more recently they have entered the population. About 2 percent of contemporary African DNA may come from this early hominid lineage.

The image is of H. heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of both neanders and us, who may resemble the as yet unknown archaic homo the article refers to, and definitely resembles the guy in the cube next to me. That hominid tree leading to anatomically modern humans is going to end up full of cladistic bastards when all is said and done.

Seen above is the final resting site of the lunar excursion module Intrepid’s descent stage as seen by the sharp eye of NASA’s LRO orbiting above. To the far right is an old Surveyor spacecraft which landed a few years before to check out potential Apollo landing sites. To the left is Head Crater. And it’s all connected by what looks like trails!

What could the trails be?

You have to hand it to those nefarious NASA eggheads. Not only did they fake a landing on the moon, they actually left behind fake equipment and rows of footprints and moon buggy tracks between all these places to backstop their conspiracy!

A coworker collected these links and locations to aid those who lost their home and other possessions in the Texas wildfires. — DS

If you would like to drop off your donations locally, here is a list of places accepting donations at this time. Check back on KXAN or other local news sources regularly for new information on the fires and as additional drop off locations are being added:

· 3434 Yogi Berra Way in Round Rock by the Dell Diamond. You can also call 512-740-6096.

· Hill Country Bible Church NW is taking donations from 8am-8pm today. Bottled water, Gatorade, eye drops, nasal spray, hand wipes and individually-packaged snacks like peanut butter crackers, power bars, protein bars, etc. Address is: 12124 Ranch Road 620 North, Austin, TX. They are the hub and distributing supplies to the area fires. Questions? 512-331-5050.

· Gilda Grace Collections is taking donations of ANY kind, 1818 West 35th Street, Austin TX 78703.

There’s also an emergency notification system for cell phones through the Capital Area Council of Governments. Please visit this site to register your location and cell phone number. If there is ever an emergency in your area, you will be notified via text message.

For a movement that likes to humor itself on bold manly militarism and its tough-guy John Wayneshness, the extremist right sure does have a thin skin. After spending months of cutting benefits for the middle class, specifically among firefighters and other first responders hailed as heroes after 9-11 when it was so politically expedient, and harping on those dastardly government employees, we have a good old-fashioned right-wing freakout in full panic mode in response to this by a union official:

Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wing Monday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress “sons of bitches” and said union workers are ready to “go to war” with the tea party next year and “take out” Republicans at the ballot box.

That’s right, the SoB reference hurt the Teaparty’s feefees. Now they’re desperately trying to tow the media along as they work a connection to Obama in hope of turning it into an insult made by him at them. At which point fainting couches and smelling salts will be required. From which they’ll courageously rise to refer to anyone who disagrees with their plan to steal everything the middle-class has earned in the last century on behalf of the Paris Hilton class in the most vile terms possible.

If they can’t handle being called SOBs at a political rally, kinda makes you wonder how they’d handle being, you know, actually shot at by menacing brown-skinned terrorists.

 

A radar image snapped last week by the Cassini probe of the surface of Titan revealed an unexpected result, shown above, in the form of a large crater. This one is about a dozen miles wide and appears to be quite fresh. It’s not surprising to see craters on moons in general, especially in the vicinity of Saturn. The planet’s exquisite rings attest to the violent nature of the system. But finding a large impact marker on Titan is unusual because of the unique properties of Saturn’s largest moon and that got me to think’n.

Unlike every other moon we know of, Titan has a dense atmosphere, and unlike any planets we know of in the solar system, it has a defined terrestrial surface with material cycling through all three phases, solid, liquid, and gas in the way water does here at home (It happens to be methane and other hydrocarbons at a couple of hundred degrees below zero). The surface pressure is 50% higher than earth’s, far closer than any world we know of, so in all these respects Titan is the most earth-like object in the solar system. But the little moon’s gravity is only about one-seventh earth normal and the atmosphere extends outward much farther than our own. You know what that all means?

Only large objects make it to the surface, otherwise they burn up. But more importantly, Titan would be the most fun skydive in all the solar system! I am a skydiver, or at least I used to do it a lot, and the thought of that combo of thick atmosphere and low gravity would be a dream free-fall. A human body at Titan terminal velocity could almost land safely on the surface without a parachute, especially in one of its many lakes. I actually wrote up a sci-fi short story based around the idea but I could never get it to work. Maybe I’ll post parts of it here one day.