Every Saturday Daily Kos published some of the funnier hate mail we get. Markos calls it the hate-mail-a-palooza. One of the best began with Dear Liberal Fuckstick. But this one received last week may be be another instant classic:

Bet your pretty pisseed off that Michelle Bachmann Won the Iowa poll?! you wanted to get your secret liberal plant Romneye to win so thst the election would be between two leftist assholes? Guess waht? Romney got fucking DESTROYED!! If you thinkthat AMERICAN consrevatives ar going to nominate some leftwing homo lover from TAXACHUSETS your seriousky fucking mistaken!!!
You keep attakcing Bachmann becuase your FUCKING AFRAID!!! Well guess what! Bachmann will win and you SHOULD be fucking afraid you fucking sissy little quer! your taxpayer funded “job” sucking cock for the goverment will be cut! your Special fucking tax breaks for faggots will also be cut! NO MORE TAXPAYER FUNDED ABORTIONS!!! NO MORE TAXES!!! Guess what DailyFAG? Fuck you DailyFAG!!! I bet your boyfriend Romney will let you suck his cock if you ask nicely! that shuld make you feel better! Yum yum romney-cock!!!!

No idea if it’s legit or something a friendly reader made up for fun. But it’s a good time to remind readers that bloggers here reserve the right to republish any email sent, typos and mangled sentences intact, right up to and including your email address.

Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to run on jobs, presumably the same jobs conservative economic policies demolished, but we all know facts and direct inference hold no sway on what was once the Grand Old Party. It turns out that the job picture in Texas is not quite as rosy as Perry would like to spin:

But there is a wider set of categories in which no one presumes to see Texas miracles. Those have to do with social issues such as Texas’ high rate of people without health insurance, high levels of poverty and lagging education levels. For example, of the five most populous states, Texas had the highest poverty rate in the 2009 census update, with 15.5 percent of residents below the income threshold.

Texas is doing slightly better than other states for two reasons: they’ve been swiping jobs from other states by dangling subsidies and tax breaks for wealthy business owners while offering terrible conditions for wage earners, and ballooning the roster of low level state employees (Neither one would work as a national job strategy, especially for a politician hell-bent on cutting government spending). The end result is an employment rate that’s a little better than the national average and a giant population of workers with no other option except near starvation wages.

I’m one of them. I’m living the “Texas miracle”. I work for one of the best software companies in America, I came with a college degree and 20 years of experience as an entry-level employee, mid level manager, and successful senior executive in the field I currently work in. I make about $24,000 a year and there are virtually no chances, at least where I work now, for a meaningful promotion any time soon.

Multiply me by millions of other Texans and you get the picture. There’s a lady with a master’s degree in electrical engineering who did her thesis on NASA solar panels working with me for the same hobby job wage. And we’re lucky, she and I are among a handful of temps, about a dozen out of 300, who worked a graveyard shift with no benefits — no health insurance or vacation time, not even one sick day allowed — and earned a full-time job with the client company that hired us on.

What’s it like to try and live on $1400 month take home at age 50? Millions of people do it, but I can’t. I end up drawing on savings built up over three and a half decades of hard work or depending on projects like this blog for a few extra bucks. Even then every month is a struggle. Minor car or computer repairs, a trip to the dentist, that’s all it takes and I’ll have zero disposable income for weeks, barely able to cover rent on my tiny studio apartment without dipping into a retirement account. It’s survival, and without expensive luxuries like kids, I’m able to survive better off than most. But on that kind of pay there’s no way to take on new car payments or cover a mortgage, much less contribute to retirement. All the things people need to be able to do to create sorely needed demand and knock the country out of this deep hole Bush Republicans dug.

The Texas miracle. Miraculous, why it sounds almost heavenly! Trust me, if this is heaven you don’t wanna see hell. This miracle feels a lot more like a curse.

Via the always excellent Digby, a fascinating, in-depth pair of articles from a regular attendee of Teaparty functions in the upper midwest confirm what I’ve observed more loosely among several friends in Texas and Florida. The Teaparty was quasi-independent of traditional Republican culture war dogma, at first anyway. But no more. That movement is long gone:

I concluded that trying to figure out what they wanted was a dead end because what they wanted was simply to complain—that the Tea Party “is not a group of listen and respond; this is a group of respond and respond.” Two years of Tea Party functions later, and I finally know what the Tea Party wants: A Christian nation.

Back in 2008 when AIG became the people’s insurance company, the ancestors of todays whacky teabaggers had already coalecsed around Ron Paul. The Texas congressman had carved out a niche for disaffected conservatives fed up with George Bush’s serial cluster-fucks. Especially Iraq, the biggest foriegn policy blunder since Vietnam.

Paul railed against foriegn intervention, and built up his credibility among younger voters by dismissing conservative opposition to gay rights and the endless, hopeless War on Drugs. By the time Bush handed Wall Street hundreds of billons in taxpayer dough and trillions in no interest loans, Paul was well positioned to capitalize on the GOP’s sudden affection for socialism — socializing the losses that it. And well they should have been. It was the biggest heist in history, where the very people who ruined the economy were rewarded with a trainload of cash which they promptly used to fund a generous round of bonuses for themselves. In 2008, after Obama won by a landslide, Republican was almost a dirty word. Conservative policies had failed on every level, in full view of the entire nation. That’s when the Teaparty as we know it was born, even the term Teaparty was coined in early 2009.

Then a funny thing happened. Key Teaparty leaders were bought out by traditional conservative money bags pushing traditonal conservative policies, those that didn’t cooperate were marginalized. In two short years the movement was completely coopted, the anger was expertly channeled away from GOP bank bailouts and constitutional violations, and focused back onto the usual on boogey-men of deficit spending, abortion, and Obama the Kenyan Marxist. The religious right walked right in, hand-in-hand with the usual suspects, apologetics in hand, and before you know it the same people who had been up in arms about bankstas and big government Republicans were lining up in droves to cut Wall Street taxes and enact the very same policies that fueled Teaparty anger in the first place. Most were whipped into such a fury they didn’t even notice the bait and switch.

The proto-Teaparty started out saying how much they loved the Constitution, a claim they stll make when they’re not trying to pass laws on what women can do with their uterus or who can marry who, leaving them with a sticky problem today. The religious right wants a sort of theocracy, a Christian nation, with a specific neo-medieval fundamentalist Protestant flavor of faith empowered above all others. Something that is about as Unconstitutional as possible. But they’re well on their way to getting around that obstacle by creating a comprehensive fake history, similar in some respects to the fake science of creationism, where democracy and the Constitution all derived from the Bible. A topic fellow FTB’er Chris Rodda covers brillianty at This Week in Christian Nationalism.

Watching what happened to a once semi-soveriegn movement that made some credible points over the last two years has made me appreciate my own rising star, the progressive netroots. Unlike the Teaparty, we were kept at arms length, or plain shut out, by nervous democrats after supplying a big part of the energy, money and votes that put them in power. There was a time when that stuck in my craw, politics can be ugly and so many democrats have no spine. But now I see some glimmerings of a silver lining: they were tricked and now they’ve been had. We got to keep our independence and our integrity, the Teaparty has already lost both. Along the way they’ve been made the scapegoats while the wealthy and powerful quietly harvested the economic and political benefits, leaving the vast majority of grass-roots activists who poured their heart and soul in to the original movement with absolutely nothing to show for it.

This is going to be a fun election season. TPM is reporting Teaparty darling Rick Perry told a questioner in New Hampshire “”Here your mom was asking about evolution. And you know, it’s a theory that is out there — it’s got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools. Because I figure–” … I have sympathy for politicians. It is grueling, they’re working crazy hours subject to endless hassle, and they have to be up and energetic all the time. So I can understand a gaffe. 

For the record, creationism is not taught in Texas K-12 schools. Outside of the occcasional fundamentalist teacher freelancing, it’s not taught in any public K-12 schools in the United States. Teaching creationism is illegal. It has been struck down several times, most recently in Edwards v Aguillard in 1987, and even ‘teaching the controversy’ was kicked in the ass in 2005 in Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District. In the latter case, a republican judge appointed by President George W. Bush, John E. Jones III, wrote a blistering response against the creationists. That’s a ruling Rick Perry should probably take the time to read before answering any more questions about evolution or science education in Texas or anywhere else.

The part about Texas teaching both sides may have been a gaffe, maybe, but Perry’s underlaying pseudoscientific view is sincere. He’s a religious opportunist through and through, a card carrying member of the anti-science right, who happens to be up to his eyeballs in extreme right-wing dogma for a very good reason: The man is competing for votes from social conservative voters, the kind of voter for whom scientific ignorance isn’t a shortcoming, far from it, it’s badge of freaking honor to be worn proudly and openly for all to see. This is the same guy who believes or pretends to believe — I’m not sure which is worse — that NASA is leading a global conspiracy to mislead the world about the global warming. Motivated by research grant money or some stupid shit. Perry is a clown, but he may prove to be a very dangerous clown.

The term singularity usually means the inside of a black-hole, the site of mysterious and as yet unexplainable physics. But it has another meaning in culture and science-fiction. The technological singularity occurs when artificial or biologically engineered super brains are developed that can solve complex issues mere humans can’t even frame as a question.

It’s the staple of sci-fi scenarios and speculation, where some futurists see the super brains as terminators and others view them as potential saviors. I was always partial to the idea that they wouldn’t have anything against humans — it’s just that we’re made of atoms they can use for other projects.
Good, evil, or indifferent, we may find out soon, because our friends at IBM are working hard to create the real HAL 9000:

IBM has developed a microprocessor which it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain. The system is capable of “rewiring” its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work. Researchers believe that that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn.

Maybe the picture above needs an update, two moons instead of one. At least that’s one explanation for some new findings which refine the Giant Impact:

The study uses new techniques and radioactive isotopes of lead and other elements to date the moon rock at 4.4 billion years old. What’s key is that this is a special type of rock that would have floated up to the moon’s crust soon after its theorized ocean of molten rock cooled. That supposedly happened soon after the moon formed as a result of a spectacular crash between Earth and a planet. The chunks that broke off formed the moon.

One possibility is the impact happened several hundred million laters than thought, another intriguing idea is that one or more moons formed which combined into the single moon we see today. That idea would be difficult to test without lots of lunar samples. But the stark differfence between the side of the moon familiar to all us as the Man in the Moon, and the far side unseen until the 1960s, does offer a that idea some preliminary support.

I was cleaning out some old email, have to make room for Zingularity stuff dontchya know, and I came across a message from a, ummm, fan I guess we’ll call them, accusing me of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Remember good old BDS?

T]he term indicates a belief that some extreme criticisms of President Bush are of emotional origins rather than based on facts or logic. The term has been widely adopted by other writers in the political arena.

Sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it?

The reason a lot of people came to dislike Bush, after he soared to lofty approval ratings in the aftermath of 9-11, was because of what he did. Some objected to the Iraq War, others were angry over tax cuts for zillionaires or the Katrina response. And of couse it was Bush and his GOP buddies who turned a budget surplus into a giant deficit and left the economy in shambles. There’s plenty to be angry about in there. But what struck me about it, agree or disagree with Bush’s decisions, these are all things that actually happened.

Contrast that with the reasons Teaparty bozos hate Obama. He was born in Kenya, he’s secretly a Muslim and trying to enact Sharia Law, he’s a socialist or a marxist or a terrorist who hates America. Obama is scheming to create death panels and kill grandma to save a few bucks on Medicare (The last one sounds a lot more like something the Teaparty would really propose these days). All complete nonsense of course, zombie lies and innuendo served up by wingnut freaks to stoke long simmering ideological and racial prejudice.

Uhuh, and we’re the ones with the syndrome?

Interesting segmenton Rachel Maddow tonight on the latest conservative brainstorm for cutting wasteful government spending, nuclear security, and a new documentary about a retired truck driver who put together a surprisingly plausible design for a Hiroshima type nuclear weapon.

It got me to thinking, there are a lot of people who think they know how to make a nuclear weapon. Odds are they’re deluded. While the basics physics are widely known, the details of building a working nuke are way more complex than most people realize. I know just enough to know I couldn’t do it, and I’d be willing to bet I know way more than most self-professed home nuke builders. Just to give a taste of what is involved, let’s break the hypothetical process up into three stages, design, prototype, and weapon.

The design relies on creating or obtaining weapons grade stuff — which is an article in itself. Fissionable substances are isotopes of uranium or plutonium in which a tiny percentage of the atoms spontaneously release neutrons traveling at the proper speed, what physicists call the correct neutron temperature. Too fast or too slow and the neutrons chip off the wrong kind of particles when they hit other atoms of the same substance. Just right and the neutrons knock lose more neutrons going at the right speed, which knock lose even more neutrons, etc. If enough of that substance is located in one small spot, free traveling neutrons will hit other atoms of the same stuff and the number of speedy little neutrons will grow until the reaction runs away with itself. In principle then our design is simple: you have half the critical mass in one hand and half in the other, you bring them together and, kaboom, you’re part of a mushroom cloud.

That brings us to the prototype, because the ‘hand method’ wouldn’t actually work. The two subcritical masses would be very hot, way too hot to hold (Not to mention radioactive as hell). But even if you were working in a shielded glove box it wouldn’t work. When those subcritical masses approach one another they get hot, fast. They go from red-hot to melting to gas to plasma in a micro second, in other words they get so so hot they’ll turn into blazing hot expanding gas and blow apart with the force of a stick of dynamite before the reaction can go super critical. The prototype will have to ‘weld’ the two masses together into one strong, solid chunk and this has to happen in an instant. Early prototypes did this by the collapsing sphere or gun method, illustrated right. It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, the traditional explosives must all detonate precisely, the pieces must fit together perfectly, they have to come together at the exact speed to be hot enough to mash together into a single piece but not so hot they turn into runny liquid or gas, and even then it doesn’t always work. This is a prototype device that may go off, but there’s also a chance it will create what weapons designers call a fizzle yield, producing a tiny fraction of the potential explosive power of a real nuke and creating a big dirty-bomb mess.

Which brings us to the final phase: weapon. To be a weapon the prototype has to be both reliable and secure. That means a lot of things, no doubt some of them classified. But two unclassified items, purely for illustrative purposes, are a neutron trigger and a tamper. A neutron trigger is a device which floods the interior with neutrons from another source just as the subcritical masses are uniting. A tamper is a heavy metal, like lead, that fills in around the forming critical mass and helps keep it in a small volume for a few moments longer by sheer inertia when it tries to expand violently as it approaches its boiling point. The advantage of additions like a trigger and tamper are twofold: they make the weapon much more reliable and they provide a separate, independent system which has to be armed for the weapon to work, thus giving an extra level of security. This is a weapon that detonates when you want it to and, perhaps more importantly for you Dr. Strangelove fans, does not go off when you don’t want it to.

Needless to say going from design to prototype to weapon takes a lot of research and money. And no, you won’t find reliable data on that technology on the internet despite what some people think they know — if my tax dollars are doing any good, what you should find is a bunch of misinformation! — with the possible exception of the occasional dumbass Bush WH officials who released some hard data conveniently written in Arabic while trying to backstop the invasion of Iraq. In short it takes a relatively wealthy country with a dedicated and educated professional workforce to do all that. Terrorists working in a cave aren’t likely to pull it off.

But stealing the components, or better yet an assembled bomb, is a different story. That’s what nuclear security agencies try to prevent. And that’s what these nutbags in Congress are toying around with defunding. The word idiot hardly describes them.

I use the word logic jokingly of course, as lack of logic has become a defining characteristic of the Teaparty Republicans. Remember, lo these many blog years ago, what set these guys off initially was Bush’s failures and the bank bailouts. But that was then, when they rallied around Ron Paul — a man who occasionally said some rational things — before they were bought out by the conservative business establishment. Consider for a moment just how far gone these clowns are now:

• With the exception of torture, wiretapping, and shipping suspects off to secret third-world shithole prisons without trial or due process, they’re staunch defenders of American liberty!
• The government should stay the hell out of the people’s personal business, and get serious about policing the people’s uterus and decreeing who can marry who!
• Deficits are evil; ergo we must elect the same bug-fuck crazy idiots who ran the debt through the roof and have never even come close to balancing the budget in 40 years!
• The economy is awful; the only solution is to reject policies with a proven track record of creating jobs and reelect the clueless know-nothings whose short-sighted greedy stupidity crashed the entire world and left us holding trillions in past due bills!
• The 9-11 terror attacks changed everything. Clearly the best way forward is empower the guys and gals who attacked the wrong goddamn country, to the tune of a trillion borrowed dollars, and penalize the party who shot bin Laden in the head at the price of a few million bucks without causing a single injury to the good guys!

(BTW I break into a rant and bust their sorry ass chops like this on Twitter at SAndrewDKos once or twice a week)

It just goes on and on. They have been almost perfectly wrong. Every thing they touch turns to shit. For example, we don’t have to debate what lowers the deficit or how best to neutralize terrorist kingpins, because recent empirical facts demonstrate precisely how to do that and more. But no, it’s the same old tired crap about shadowy conspiracies, trickle down dollars, and deregulation, always sticking it to the middle class and coddling the ultra rich. The latest epiphany being to steal Social Security and Medicare and toss them into the ravenous jaws of Wall Street for the benefit of a few dozen billionaires.

The results speak for themselves:  I can’t think of a single Teaparty idea that might work, hell I can’t think of one that hasn’t already been proven utterly disastrous. Their ideas are so internally inconsistent, so completely bereft of basic cause and effect rationale, that most of them can be debunked in 140 characters, or less, on Twitter. Sure, they have the passion, as the DC gasbags love to tell us, it’s just that they’re like an athlete who has speed and agility, but gets mixed up and runs full tilt for the other teams wrong endzone

There’s an old saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that standard the Teaparty is literally insane.

 

 

See that graph above produced by NASA? Rick Perry thinks it’s all made up so that scientists can keep struggling for a few research grants and teaching positions. Talk about projection:

“A substantial number of scientists [have] manipulated data to keep the money rolling in,” New Hampshire Union Leader editorial page editor Drew Cline quoted Perry saying on the stump in a tweet. Before that, Cline quoted Perry saying, “I do believe the issue of global warming has been politicized.”

Of course the real money is in the denial side, fossil fuel lobbysts. Any well known climatologist like Mike Mann or James Hansen coudld rake in millions if they were willing to sell out. Perry the Parrot is just repeating wingnut talking points. Nothing’s going to stop that. But you know what I don’t get? Instead of this bullshit song and dance about how NASA data is wrong and scientists are engaged in a ridiculous global conspiracy lasting decades, why not just tell the damn truth?

Because the truth is pretty simple: Yes, burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases, yes we may be raising the earth’s temperature, and if you don’t like that, then try using less freakin energy. Find ways to cut back on your carbon loading. Because that’s what’s causing this shit. Energy companies aren’t producing electricity for fun, they’re doing it because it’s profitable, because people buy it. We don’t burn oil and coal because they smell good, we use them because they the cheapest source of easily transportable energy available on the massive scale the world demands and without energy we’d be sleeping in the dirt.
Seriously, just a modicum of honesty like that would so refreshing.