Republicans: Rioting the night after their team lost the NBA finals.

That my latest analogy to explain this madness. Republicans are still terribly, terribly pissed off because their team lost the NBA finals, aka Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential elections. They still cannot accept this reality, so they are really, really upset, and just to show everyone how upset they are, they are storming their own city (the U.S.A.) and proceeding to set cars on fire and throw anything they can find through plate glass windows. It won't stop the reality that their team lost, but it feels SO... DARN... GOOD!! It doesn't matter that those same people have to live in this country in the future. They are just out to show how awful it is that Obama is the president.

I hope that these white, elderly Tea Party types are really happy when they discover that their Social Security checks, the ones that they are either currently depending on or will in the very near future, are going to be for less than they were if they hadn't thrown their hissy fit.

(To be fully fair about this, that photo is from Vancouver, in Canada you know, after their team lost the NHL finals. But I thought that basketball is a bit more relevant of an analogy than is hockey, and a picture of a riot is a picture of a riot, regardless of the place or circumstances.)

America is like that guy in the movie, “Memento.”

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

There’s nothing like hyping a totally imaginary threat to get people worked up right before an election.

This approach has been the staple of the Republican Party for quite a while now. But it seems to me that, for such an approach to really work well, your “threat” that you are pumping, the one that only Republicans can save the country from, should at least have a hint of plausibility to it. Otherwise, it would seem that people would either ignore you or laugh at you.

This one from Newt Gingrich (from Washington Monthly) really takes the cake, it is so jaw droppingly stupid.

[P]erhaps the former House Speaker's loudest applause [at the Values Voter Summit] came when he weighed in on the controversial Islamic center and Mosque proposed to be built near Ground Zero, declaring, "We as Americans don't have to tolerate people who are supportive of violence against us, building something at the site of the violence."

"This is not about religious liberty, if they want to build that mosque in the South Bronx, frankly they need the jobs," he continued. "But I am totally opposed to any effort to impose Sharia on the United States, and we should have a federal law that says under no circumstance, in any jurisdiction in the United States, will Sharia be used in any court to apply to any judgment made about American law."

I won’t even go into the extreme effort being made by the wingnuts of this country to equate Islam with the crazy people who carried out the attacks on the World Trade Centers. That’s ridiculous. I could just as easily equate Christianity with Timothy McVie’s attack on the government building in Oklahoma City. Same thing, right?

But that’s not the point here. Gingrich, after setting up the table with a totally false equivalency, then makes an even more ridiculous jump to building a “mosque” (which it isn’t) to trying to impose Sharia Law on the United States. This is such a threat, in Gingrich’s mind, that he thinks we should have a federal law to prevent such an imposition of law based in religion.

My first response was, what the hell is he talking about? Is this a threat? Is anyone saying this at all? But then, don’t all our laws already have something like that as their basis? We have the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federal Code of Regulations, we have more laws than we can shake a stick at. They are all written down and cannot be just brushed aside, no matter what anyone would like to try to replace them with. They must be amended, each in their own particular way. Does Newt actually believe that some federal judge or something is, all of a sudden, going to just make a ruling and impose a system of law based on the Islamic religion on the United States? Does he really think it is that easy? He must, because he apparently thinks we need a new federal law to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I can’t believe this person was actually the Speaker of the House. Either he has absolutely no idea how the federal government actually works (which, I suppose, may be possible) or else he has decided that he is going to cynically try to hype up a non-existent threat to try to get the right wing base voters so scared of Muslims they are almost ready to crap in their pants. I just find this so pathetic and immoral. Gingrich knows that this isn't even a remote possibility, and yet, there he is, in the national press, saying this kind of disgusting crap.

Why is this man still considered a credible politician? A national press with any sort of self-respect would have called bullshit on this guy long ago. Yet, he continues to show up on television and hold press conferences where his insane ramblings are duly copied down by a willing press.

But I think the thing I am most disappointed in is that many of the people in this country actually believe this disgusting crap. A very large percentage of this country are perfectly willing to let themselves get manipulated and stampeded by very cynical and crass politicians. This country has willingly given up our ability to work in the realm of facts and logic. The United States is becoming the ultimate Skinner Box. Push a button, watch the freakout.

(Sorry for the light posting of late. I have been on a couple of business trips, back to back, and it took me some time to get prepared for them. I'll try to do better in the future.)

I would have never thought that BP wouldn't have a way to plug a gushing underwater oil well that was already figured out.

Incredible. "Hey, who would have thought that this could happen?" Well, anyone with any sort of engineering background or even a vivid imagination. Anyone who has ever watched any cheesy "scientific experiment gone horribly wrong" B sci-fi movie from the 50's or 60's, that who. This sort of reminds me of a rather old but apparently very rare sci-fi film called "Crack in the World." Some scientists get the brilliant idea to turn a rocket upside down and shoot it INTO the earth. I forgot the point of this little experiment. It all goes horribly wrong and the resultant hole starts a large crack in the ground (hence the name of the film). Actually, two cracks start. Panic ensues. Calamity results. The two cracks eventually come around and merge. The result is that it was like an apple corer had been applied to the Earth. A large chuck was forcibly ejected and, viola! It became another moon.

Oops.... Sorry about that. Certainly didn't see THAT one coming.

O.K., silly analogy. I just am an old sci-fi film buff, so almost everything reminds me of a movie these days.

But what kinds of black belt morons do these people have to be to do something that, in retrospect, looks as dangerous and prone to accidents as it turns out it is without any sort of backup plan?

Unfortunately, that seems to be the way our society is evolving. Risks are not considered. To consider risks and have contingency plans is to "plan for failure." I was actually told that once at a previous job. Anything that anyone can imagine automatically becomes "the plan", which will be wildly successful.

Balls. People have forgotten that life itself is a dangerous business. Pushing the technological envelope in ways that haven't been tried before (such as drilling to such depths in very deep water), by definition, is a dangerous business. To not recognize some possible but somewhat likely outcomes other than the one that you really want to occur is to be blind. Stupid. Idiotic. Which about sums up my feelings about our current society.

People with an alternative reality.

The title, I believe, is an apt description of many conservatives these days. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that there will always be differences of opinions and there is more than one valid viewpoint to any particular issue. I am also of the opinion that this country is in dire need of two political parties. The caveat to that last one is, however, that these two political parties, while they are not expected to agree with each other on particular points of policy, are expected to find common ground with each other so that issues can be worked to the betterment of all the American people. Currently, this is not true, as one of the main political parties has been taken over by people who are unable to accept reality.

I will attempt to explain my point. It rather well documented these days that conservatives desire to make events and situations in the world palatable to them in order to make everything that occurs in the world support their peculiar worldview. To whit:

• President Obama is a socialist and a terrorist-sympathizing Muslim who was not born in the United States and is therefore unfit to be president.
• The only reason Barack Obama was elected president is that he is black, because black people always will vote for a black man and white people only voted for him because they felt guilty.
• Healthcare reform is an effort by the government to take over the country’s healthcare system and, by the way, will kill old people.
• The census is a government plot to put conservatives into interment camps.
• Any bad press for any Republican is proof of a liberal media.
• Fox News really is fair and balanced.
• Sarah Palin really didn’t quit halfway through her term as governor of Alaska.
• Global warming is a myth.
• There really were WMD’s in Iraq and Saddam Hussein was indeed responsible for 9/11.
• Torturing suspects is patriotic, provides useful, actionable information and, if given a chance, Jesus would have supported torturing suspects as well.
• All Muslims are terrorists, regardless of whether or not there has ever been any direct proof against each individual, but white Americans who are upset with the duly elected government of the United States, who are upset with the IRS and fly small airplanes into federal buildings are now some sort of folk hero.
• The residents of New Orleans were scum and deserved to have their homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
• If you don’t teach teenagers sex education, they won’t have sex.

But wait, there’s more. Conservatives are not content to limit themselves to viewing current events through their special “conservative” lens. They also insist on rewriting history in order to make it more palatable. I suppose this is an effort to use “history” to “prove” the correctness of their current position.
• Woodrow Wilson caused the Great Depression.
• The American Civil War was not about slavery and was a direct result of “northern aggression.”
• Joseph McCarthy was a hero and deserving of praise.
• Thomas Jefferson was not influential in determining the course of the government of the United States.

And, of course, there’s religion…
• God and Jesus hate gay people.
• Christianity is older than Judaism.

It goes on and on. I could write a lengthy post about each and every one of those items above. Many others already have. My point here should be more than obvious. Conservatives these days have devised their own reality. Hard core conservatives live in a universe where their facts are not the same as everyone else’s facts and are, in reality, 180 degrees in the opposite direction most of the time. When they are confronted with proof that their views are incorrect, they have absolutely no problem with discounting that proof because their “facts” show them to be correct.

This is why there cannot be and will likely never be any cooperation or even understanding between the left and the right. We are operating on two totally different planes. We might as well be inhabiting two alternate but parallel universes. Instead of one being made of matter and the other composed of anti-matter, our universe is made from facts and theirs is composed of anti-facts. Two totally separate realities, each one self contained, but will anniliate each other when they come into contact.

That is what is going on in the United States today, and frankly, I see no way to ever alter it. Pandora’s Box has been opened and it is not going to be closed without a severe disruption to the time-space continuium.

Warning: You may not want to click through some of the links I have provided. They go directly to the anti-fact universe.

Ya gotta read the fine print these days.

All the important details in our society today seem to be hidden in the fine print. It's the obvious or really unnecessary crap they tell you about.

Mars moon Phobos

Photo from Bad Astronomy.


That's a very cool photo from the European Mars Express. There should be more very interesting photos in the near future, as the closest approach to Phobos will be on March 3 (which is actually today, the day I am posting this).

I am very intrigued by the parallel grooves on Phobos. The text from Bad Astronomy says that the current thinking is that they are cracks due to a previous collision. That's not really what they look like to me. And I am not sure they would all end up being parallel like that. It looks like to me that many items were orbiting so closely to the moon that they actually begin to touch the surface and cut grooves into the surface before those items (perhaps debris from a previous collision or encounter) eventually came to rest on the surface. Whatever those are, they certainly are interesting. The entire presentation looks like a misshapen potato that has been put in one of those do-dads that cuts curly fries out of the potato by rotating the potato along the major axis and putting a cutting tool on the surface while its rotating, but the process came to a halt right after the cutting surface just grazed the surface.

Boy, was that a deeply scientific explanation or what?