Uh Oh, Teabaggers Ain't Gonna Like This

Those damn evidence-based bleeding-heart reality-testers are at it again:

Worried that public schools are failing to prepare students for a complex and changing world, educators unveiled new guidelines Tuesday that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States, emphasizing hands-on learning and critical scrutiny of scientific evidence.

Among many other changes, the guidelines call for introducing climate science into the curriculum starting in middle school, and teaching high school students in detail about the effects of human activity on climate.
The guidelines also take a firm stand that children must learn about evolution, the central organizing idea in the biological sciences for more than a century, but one that has rallied state lawmakers and some religious conservatives to insist that alternative notions like intelligent design be taught. 

Though they could become a focus of political controversy, the climate and evolution standards are just two aspects of a set of guidelines containing hundreds of new ideas...

That sound you hear is multiple heads exploding all through the South, in one Congressional district in Minnesota, in Wasilla, and throughout the lesser halls of Congress.

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Spokesman For Sanity

Yes, funding needs a fix; but placing it in the deficit argument makes no sense. When even Ronnie, who didn't understand much, gets it, it's time for the subject to change. To raising the cap on income subject to the payroll tax; not to diminishing benefits for those who need them the most.

All together now: let's hold our breath.

Lester Is More

This is a truth, so you'd think, that people of all political sensibilities could get behind. It's a bipartisan failing that it is the way it is. I'm not sure I share the professor's optimism, though, because, as the Tea Party teaches us, it's way too easy for the powers that be to bamboozle people into acting against their own interests by waving red flags of distraction in front of them. To get it right, people would have to elect representatives willing to take it on; and in enough numbers to make it happen. But unless the country follows my fanciful suggestion, it'll never happen; because the aggregation of the paranoid and mindless in just a few states is enough to ensure that nothing will change.

Bad as it already is, it'll only get worse.

Tom Tomorrow

Full cartoon here.

Beyond Repair

I'll assume President Obama would rather not have suggested the chained CPI fix for Social Security if he thought the more obvious solution would pass. I hope so, anyway. Because given the two ways to maintain solvency for that program on which so many needy Americans depend, it seems pretty obvious that the better option would have been to remove the limit on income subjected to Social Security taxes. Take the necessary money, in other words, from those who can afford it as opposed to those who most need it.

But that's not the way things work with today's Republican party. Reasonable isn't a word in their vocabulary. So what we get is a president, like an abused child who still thinks she can make daddy love her, offering compromise after compromise, pissing off his own party, raising the possibility that any Democrat who votes for his budget will get primaried, and that Rs will increase their majority in the House. Wanna bet: they'll also run against the very Social Security cuts that Obama gave them, because of their stonewalling. Rs aren't about governing; they're just about power plays and maintaining the status quo which works to the advantage of themselves and their backers.

The system no longer works. I don't know if it's because its intelligent designers never anticipated such recklessness by a major party and therefore the Constitution needs changing (which won't happen) or because the Republican party is irreparably broken (which won't change.) Either way, we're screwed. By the time things get bad enough that even teabaggers recognize their folly (a theoretical only) (the recognition part, not the bad part) it'll be far past too late.

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Sinner

(For a chuckle, watch to the end...)

He has several videos. This one (not the above) challenged me some, because I've always made a point of saying that for most people sexual orientation is not a choice: it's inborn. My claim, in addition to being based on science, is a response to those that insist homosexuality is a sin: since it is (I believe) an inborn preference and not a choice, if it's a sin, and if god has a plan, then god is pretty much a sicko, creating people to boil in hell. Of course, he does that to everyone who ends up there, right? Or isn't he the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving cat people say he is?

Sunday Column

Here's my latest column in our local newspaper. Timely.

My wife and I have been to New Orleans several times, and have always loved it. We spent three months in San Antonio before I shipped out to Vietnam, and, despite the ominous clouds, we had a great time there. Don’t know what the heck Florida is, but we’ve been there, too, and had fun. I have friends who are born Southerners; went to college with a bunch of them as well. Nice people. Decent, generous, smart. But dang! If we don’t cut the South loose, we’re not gonna survive as a country. Give ‘em a pat on the head, sign a couple of trade agreements, a treaty here and there for this and that. But get them the heck out of our country and its politics. Let them think it was their idea. Invite our folks who agree with them down there. Bring here the ones from there that don’t. Pay their fares, each way. Seriously. It’s manifest destiny. 

Sure, we have our share of nutjobs of all political stripes around here; and if Idaho had pontoons, I’d float it down there next to Texas. California probably deserves its reputation for creating its own reality. But I don’t think our legislatures would ever do what North Carolina’s just did: put forth a bill to create a state religion, effectively declaring the Constitution null and void. Yep, that’s what they did. 

Not coincidentally, I’ve just written about that: in our politics there are two different ways of looking at things (for one side, it’s more like ignoring than looking at), and there’s getting to be no path to reconciliation. The South will keep electing people like Louie Gohmert and Virginia Foxx and Paul Broun and Ted Cruz. And because our founders, despite misgivings about the masses, didn’t foresee such wanton disregard for reality, such rejection of the very foundations of democracy including education and an inquisitive press, our constitution gives to those people the power to gum up the works, no matter how few of them there are. 

Throughout the South, state legislatures are controlled by Republicans, of the type that want a bible-based theocracy; that see public education as a threat; that, while claiming distrust of government, believe it should peer into bedrooms, prevent voting by minorities, and decide whether science is allowed to be taught. Texas, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, has some sort of stranglehold on textbooks for the rest of the country. We need all the smart kids we can get; and refusing to let them learn about science, and teaching them made-up and made-down history is hardly the best way to achieve that. We can’t prevent Texas and Georgia from producing all the endumbed reactionaries they want: kids who’ll watch Fox “news” and be unable to separate truth from fiction, even if they wanted to, which they won’t. But that’s the kind of representatives they’re sending to Washington D.C. lately, and it’s killing us. 

It’s important to have steely-eyed and energetic discussions, disagreements over the best policies. But when the people elected from the South to engage in such matters are simply lunatics who, by their own descriptions, believe science is the work of the devil, that gay marriage will lead to bestiality and (not kidding here) gun control, how can there be any progress? When a Georgia Republican leader, following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan (who frequently confused movie plots with reality) claims straight people will fake gay marriage to get benefits (it was an Adam Sandler movie), how can you expect rational lawmaking from there? When their favored “news” source wastes precious information minutes every day on the Obama kids’ Spring break plans, and viewers rise up in outrage, on what basis is there to feel optimistic about our future? 

Based on the feedback this column gets (most of which is positive, I’m happy to say), it’s clear that impediments to reality-testing don’t end at the south side of the Mason-Dixon line. I accept that there’ll never be universal agreement on anything; nor should there be. But in these parts there seems to be at least a plurality of people able to start their minds in the morning with a certain level of rational thinking. Our southerly brethren and sistern? They live in another universe, where crazy congregates, and confusion collects like earwax. Surely they’d be happier without our influence on their worldview. It works both ways.

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Proof Positive

Long-time reader and occasional valued commenter PT took some umbrage over my recent post about brain differences between liberals and conservatives. I post the above with certainty that it'll set him straight.

I Really Hate These People...

I don't like hearing myself write that title, but how much crap from Congressional Rs do we have to take? Doing just what Rs demand of him, President Obama, royally pissing off liberals, has proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security. And their response? In the mouth of their tobacco-stained supposed leader? Derision. The opposite of engagement, of even the slightest acknowledgment of movement. He, and all of them in Congress from that sad excuse for a political party (and their mendacious mouthpieces on their propaganda network) are simply assholes. Truly. No kidding. By definition. They have no more concern for the country they claim to love than Mitt Romney did for the 47%. To them it's all a game of ego and self-aggrandizement. Governance is a swear word.

It's beyond disgusting. In their naked partisanship, their desire to besmirch Barack Obama at all costs, they reveal themselves to be the worst of American political reality. In a rational world, the very sight of   it would be so repulsive to any thinking voter that they'd have no chance of being reelected. In such a world there'd be bidets next to their toilets because even toilet paper would refuse to get near them. This is putrefactive scumbaggery at its most destructive. They stink up the place like my exam room when I drained pilonidal abscesses and cleaned up myself so my assistant didn't have to come in.

In my case, at least, we could open a window and leave the room vacant for an hour or so. In the case of Congress, Rs crowd in to inhale the odor and wallow in it.

I really hate these people, and it's too fucking bad.

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How Bills Are Made

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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In the world's (supposedly) greatest (supposedly) democracy, this is how legislation is done. What words are there? How have we sunk so low?

And, as surely as night follows day in the dictionary, it'll never change.

Would That We Could

Cake. Taken.

Here's why we're doomed. It doesn't matter how many people in northern states remain connected to reality: there'll always be the south. And they'll always elect people bent on dragging the country down, in the name of the bible. The way our country was designed, by founders who clearly didn't trust "the people" all that much but in no way foresaw how stupid, frightened, and regressive they'd become, such states have the power of prevention. As in sensible legislation. Qualified appointees. Effective budgets.

People who think this is right will do anything:

RALEIGH, N.C. — A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The legislation grew out of a dispute between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian.

Clearly, we need to cut those states loose. Invite the people from around here who like them to join them. Pay their fare. Establish trade, have a couple of treaties for this and that, but get them the hell out of our politics. Seriously. Until we do, we'll never get anywhere. And since we won't, we won't.

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Well, Sometimes These Things Happen...

Can't come soon enough, ask me...

(It's a soundless animation of the next few billion years, as predicted by some cosmologists. Best to stay indoors.)

It's Gonna Be Hard

It occurs to me that today will be particularly difficult for news junkies. Because nowadays it's become nearly impossible to tell a real news story from a joke. Especially when reading about teabagger Republicans and their representatives in Congress. Or in states.

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Debtbacle

For those who object when people claim George W. Bush is responsible for the major portion of our country's economic problems and debt going forward:

The final cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be between $4 and $6 trillion — and most of those costs have yet to be paid, according to a new study out of Harvard University. 

The report from Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes finds the Iraq and Afghanistan wars together will be the most expensive in U.S. history when long-term medical and disability costs for service members are factored in.
“The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come,” Bilmes wrote. 

The study says that the United States has already spent nearly $2 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that bill is only “a fraction” of the total war costs, Bilmes wrote.

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