I used to really dig these things

If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the 70s, 80s and even well into the 90s, there is a very good chance that you have more than a passing familiarity with the hateful, frightening and just plain bizarre “Christian” comics produced by one Jack T. Chick.
Chick’s twisted message, infused with his peculiar style of fervent, the-end-is-near Fundamentalist Christian insanity, by virtue of appearing in what most parents considered to be innocuous “religious” comic books, enjoyed a long period of widespread cultural popularity. Chick tracts were distributed in Sunday schools, summer camps, motel lobbies and bus stations all across America. There have been over 750 million of them sold!

There can only be one reason such deranged literature was allowed in so many places: Adults never read them. If they had, they’d have been utterly horrified. (My own mother gave me dozens of these comics when I was a kid. I’m sure in her mind they were better for me than the Marvel of DC comics I was reading. LIttle did she know that she was actually providing me with!)

Personal note to "everything in the medicine has expired"

" Dude, I am having a blast."

Zombie security check

Thank God.

Murkowski Upset Erases Alaska Seniority In The Senate
Am I the only person who thought it was absurd for a state with a operating budget smaller then Poughkeepsie should steer national policy?

Weird, but cool.

Star wars characters as Samurai

 

Word...

Dennis Hopper, dynamite death chair

In 1983 Dennis Hopper went to Rice University in Houston, Texas ostensibly to screen his latest film Out Of The Blue. But little known to anyone other than Hopper and a handful of his buddies, Hopper had another agenda entirely. While he did indeed screen his movie, Hopper had actually come to Houston to blow himself up.
After screening Out Of The Blue, Hopper arranged to have the audience driven by a fleet of school buses to a racetrack on the outskirts of Houston, the Big H Speedway. Hopper and the buses arrived at the speedway just as the races were ending and a voice was announcing over the public address system “stick around folks and watch a famous Hollywood film personality perform the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act. That’s right, folks, he’ll sit in a chair with six sticks of dynamite and light the fuse.”
Was famous Hollywood personality Dennis Hopper about to go out with a bang?
Hopper apparently learned this stunt when he was a kid after seeing it performed in a traveling roadshow. If you place the dynamite pointing outwards the explosion creates a vacuum in the middle and the person performing the stunt is, if all goes according to plan, unharmed.
After bullshitting for awhile with the crowd and his friends, a drunk and stoned Hopper climbed into the “death chair’ and lit the dynamite.
Rice News correspondent describes the scene:
Dennis Hopper, at one with the shock wave, was thrown headlong in a halo of fire. For a single, timeless instant he looked like Wile E. Coyote, frazzled and splayed by his own petard. Then billowing smoke hid the scene. We all rushed forward, past the police, into the expanding cloud of smoke, excited, apprehensive, and no less expectant than we had been before the explosion. Were we looking for Hopper or pieces we could take home as souvenirs? Later Hopper would say blowing himself up was one of the craziest things he has ever done, and that it was weeks before he could hear again. At the moment, though, none of that mattered. He had been through the thunder, the light, and the heat, and he was still in one piece. And when Dennis Hopper staggered out of that cloud of smoke his eyes were glazed with the thrill of victory and spinout.

motorcity moron

Bonehead rocker and borderline (?) psychopath Ted Nugent is in the news again for making racist statements onstage in Dubuque, IA. No surprises here. None whatsoever:

Musician Ted Nugent made racially tinged remarks throughout his show Thursday night at the Mississippi Moon Bar in the Diamond Jo.
Within a few minutes of starting, Nugent commented on the race of his audience and the city of Dubuque.
“There’s a lot of white people in this crowd—I like that! (Dubuque) is a white town.”
Nugent also pointed out at least one audience member and questioned his race.

Harold Lloyd rocks....

8 foot 7-inch-tall George Auger, 29-inch-tall Princess Wee Wee and an unidentified three-legged performer, all of the Ringling Brothers Circus, pose with 5 foot 9-inch-tall Harold Lloyd on the set of Safety Last. C. 1923.

I am sure this was all covered by private insurance

I'm not making a tired funny! Dick Cheney's new implant—a ventricular assist device—needed 'cause his heart is screwed, "leaves most recipients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart's own pulsatile beat."

Of course, this presumes he had a pulse in the first place. (I know, I know, that's the bad punchline you were waiting for.)
I'm not making a tired funny! Dick Cheney's new implant—a ventricular assist device—needed 'cause his heart is screwed, "leaves most recipients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart's own pulsatile beat."

Of course, this presumes he had a pulse in the first place. (I know, I know, that's the bad punchline you were waiting for.)

coolest sign ever

Not that it matters, but it is a fact...

Federal Tax Burdens for Most Near Their Lowest Levels in Decades

With April 15 approaching and many people focusing on what they owe in taxes, Americans may be surprised to learn that federal tax burdens for most income groups, particularly middle-income households, are near their lowest levels in decades — and were low by historical standards even before the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
Most income groups paid a smaller share of their income in federal taxes in 2006 than in any year before 2003 for which we have data. The drop in tax burdens was driven largely by a pronounced fall in individual income tax burdens that, for most income groups in 2006, approached their lowest levels since 1979

right on!

ahh, yeah....

Are liberals smarter than conservatives?

By COLIN HORGAN


A story making the rounds in the last few days has a fairly contentious assertion: that liberal-minded people have higher levels of intelligence than those who identify as being conservative. It’s not an entirely new suggestion, but this time, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics has tried to tie the theory to evolution.
He posits that, “We are designed to care only about people we associate with.” In other words, we have a kind of default setting that, at a base level, makes us associate with family and friends, or those in our immediate community. Fair enough. It continues:The ability to think and reason, he says, evolved to deal with occasional but serious problems such as fires caused by lighting strikes, flash floods or severe droughts that threatened starvation. He terms these phenomena as evolutionarily novel.

As time passed, more of the elements of our lives fell into the “evolutionary novel” category, Kanazawa says. People who are more intelligent, he argues, are better able to consider these novel elements and decide, for example, that liberalism, atheism or monogamy are things they want to subscribe to.

Liberalism, caring about millions of total strangers and giving up money to make sure that those strangers will do well, is evolutionarily novel,” Kanazawa says

something heroic about this

08.13.2010


02:47 am



Topics:

Music

Wayne Cochran was the baddest motherfucker to sport a platinum blond pompadour in the history of rock and roll. He was the honky doppelganger to the hardest working Black man in show business. But, the booze, the pills, the nightsweats, the trembling heebeegeebees and soul twisting demonic machinations of the Devil’s music drove him into the cold stiff arms of suicidal despair. Some men cannot handle the Hermetic heaviness bestowed upon them, the alchemical fire scorches and blinds them

If I only had the time...

Steampunk Stilt Walker at Labyrinth of Jareth
Guestblogger Liz Ohanesian is a Los Angeles-based journalist who covers music, manga, art and more for LA Weekly.
Photo: Josh "CuriousJosh" Reiss/LA Weekly, Labyrinth of Jareth 2010
Labyrinth of Jareth is an annual two-day masquerade ball in Los Angeles. The theme revolves around faeries and goblins. Costumes, or formalwear and a mask, are required. I wrote about Shawn Strider, who organizes LOJ, for LA Weekly's LA People issue, and have blogged about the event on Style Council a few times (most recently, today).
LOJ has a massive cast and crew. All throughout the night, there is a DJ spinning on the dance floor, stage shows and interactive performances throughout the venue. There's a storyline that links everything together, but if you're going as an attendee you won't know exactly what's happening. If, however, you're following LOJ on Twitter throughout the event, you might get some clues.
This year I went to LOJ on the first night of the masquerade, called Goblin Clockworks, with photographer CuriousJosh.There were a lot of people who stood out at the party, but the stilt walker in the above photo—dressed in what looks like a steampunk giant robot costume—

If you have ever been to Buffalo. You would understand.

Weird
Gary Korkuc Found Marinating Live Cat In Oil, Peppers: Cops
Email Comments 64 BUFFALO, N.Y. — Police say a traffic stop led to animal cruelty charges after they found a live cat "marinating" in oil and peppers in the trunk of a car.

Buffalo police say officers heard the cat meowing when they stopped 51-year-old Gary Korkuc of Cheektowaga to ticket him for running a stop sign Sunday night.

They say they checked the trunk and found 4-year-old Navarro in a cage, his fur covered with oil, crushed red peppers and chili peppers.

Police say Korkuc told them he did it because Navarro was ill-tempered. Korkuc was charged with cruelty and released; his phone number isn't listed.

ha ha hahahahaha

GQ: Woman claims to have been kidnapped by Rand Paul, forced to take bong hits


GQ quotes an anonymous woman who claims to have been kidnapped and forced to take bong hits during her college years by Tea Party spokesdouche and segregation apologist Rand Paul (famously humiliated a few months back by Rachel Maddow):

He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot." After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. "They told me their god was 'Aqua Buddha' and that I needed to bow down and worship him," the woman recalls. "They blindfolded me and made me bow down to 'Aqua Buddha' in the creek. I had to say, 'I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.' At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no

A different time.

yikes.....

The Apocalypse is Near: Justin Bieber's 3D Biopic Announced

I as a rule don't speak through the blog. I don't traffic in clever musings or inspired insight.
But, there is going to be a biopic published that will sell easily five hundred thousand copies about a young man whose claim to fame is a swept forward hairdo.
 When Herman Melville who wrote longhand arguably the first great American novel died. They had him listed in his obiturary as "Henry".He suffered a mental breakdown, caught pneumonia, and died broke in 1832.
I'm just saying.

i don't like this.

Telenoid R1 minimalist humanoid robot

Researchers from Osaka University have teamed up with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) to develop a minimalist humanoid robot that recreates the physical presence of a remote user.
Named “Telenoid R1,” the teleoperated communication robot measures 80 centimeters (31 in) tall and weighs 5 kilograms (11 lbs). The portable machine features a soft silicone body that is pleasant to the touch, and it uses 9 actuators to move its eyes, mouth, head and rudimentary limbs.
Data is transmitted between the user and robot via Internet connection
The Telenoid R1 robot is designed to add an element of realism to long-distance communication by recreating the physical presence of the remote user. The robot’s actions mirror those of the remote user, whose movements are monitored by real-time face tracking software on the user’s computer. Users can also transmit their voice through the robot’s embedded speakers.

Telenoid R1 with Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University)
The Telenoid R1 is endowed with only the most basic human features — just enough to recreate the physical presence of the remote user, according to robot’s creators. The robot’s androgynous and ageless look makes it suitable for a wide range of users, whether they are male, female, young or old.

I find this strangley attractive.

Food company Morinaga has a new product on the market: a canned milkshake drink that tastes like their famous pancakes! Yum.

Just because I want to post it...

I'll let you know...

DIY Kitty Crack: ultra-potent catnip extract

Mark Frauenfelder at 4:20 PM Thu

In this Instructable, talbotron22 shows how to make "Kitty Crack," an ultra-potent catnip extract containing nepetalactone, catnip's active ingredient. One pound of catnip yielded 143mg of nepetalactone.
A note about safety. Yes, it is safe to use this extract on cats. I have looked into it, and there are a number of studies (very interesting in their own right) using pure nepetalactone on cats in experiments trying to figure out why it causes them to go bonkers. The upshot is that it's pretty safe. In the last of the references below, the LD50 of nepetalactone was determined to be 1550 mg/kg (about the same as aspirin), meaning you would have to force feed your average 5 kg cat ~8 grams in order to cause it any harm. So as long as you are reasonable

Rule Britannia

Transvestite had sex with dog in English castle moat
From Britain's Daily Telegraph:

The cross-dressing man was caught with the animal in the dry moat of King Henry VIII's Pendennis Castle overlooking Falmouth Bay in Cornwall. ... As the two ladies spotted the cross dresser he ran away. Later one of [their] dogs chased after the man; by the time the women had caught up, the man was having sex with the pet. Castle staff then restrained the man while police were called.

Some s**t you should know about the "Reagan miracle"

In fact, much the opposite. In 1982, Reagan agreed to restore a third of the previous year’s massive cut. It was the largest tax increase in U.S. history. In 1983, he raised the gasoline tax by five cents a gallon and instituted a payroll-tax hike that helped fund Medicare and Social Security. In 1984, he eliminated loopholes worth $50 billion over three years. And in 1986, he supported the progressive Tax Reform Act, which hit businesses with a record-breaking $420 billion in new fees. When it came to taxation, there were two Reagans: the pre-1982 version, who did more than any other president to lighten America’s tax burden, and his post-1982 doppelgänger, who was willing (if not always happy) to compensate for gaps in the government’s revenue stream by raising rates. Today, a truly Reaganesque leader would recognize (like Reagan) that the heavy lifting was finished long ago; last year, for instance, taxes fell to their lowest level as a percentage of personal income since 1950. And he would dial back the antitax dogma as a result.

 In doing so, a 21st-century Reagan would free himself up to finish a bit of business that his predecessor never got around to: reducing the federal deficit. In the 1980 campaign, Reagan pledged to do three things if elected: lower taxes, win the Cold War, and curb government spending. But in his haste to achieve the first two goals, he abandoned the third. On his watch, federal employment grew by more than 60,000 (in contrast, government payrolls shrank by 373,000 during Clinton’s presidency). The gap between the amount of money the federal government took in and the amount it spent nearly tripled. The national debt soared from $700 billion to $3 trillion. And the United States was transformed from the world’s largest international creditor to its largest debtor.

Hiyaaaaa!!!

Muggers chase victim into crowd of ass-kicking ninjas




Cory Doctorow at 7:18 AM Sat

Three street-muggers in Sydney, Aus chased a visiting med student down an alley and took his iPod and phone. Unfortunately for them, the alley they chased him down was next to the local ninja martial arts school, and a student ninja was lurking in the shadows. He got his teacher, and five ninjas stole out into the night and kicked ninjed the muggers' asses.
Kaylan Soto, a sensei with 30 years' Ninjutsu training, and three of his students raced out of the dojo towards the startled attackers. All five crusaders were clad in the ninja's traditional, all black uniform.
''We would have been just a silhouette,'' one of the ninjas, Steve Ashley, said. ''It was probably the worst place in Sydney where they could have taken him.''
Mr Soto said it took the three assailants a few moments to realise what was going on. When they did, they shot off. ''You should have seen their faces when they saw us in ninja gear coming towards them,'' he said.

Perfect for Congress

Robot eats sewage for energy... and craps too

David Pescovitz at 11:19 AM Fri
Researchers are developing a synthetic stomach for a robot so that it can eat food for power. Developed by the Bristol Robotics Lab, the Ecobot III is not the first robot that employs a microbial fuel cell that uses bacteria to "digest" food as a fuel source. But it is the first that has a system to crap out the waste. Apparently, its current diet is processed sewage containing "minerals, salts, yeast extracts and other nutrients." Eventually, they hope to feed it flies. From New Scientist:
"Diarrhoea-bot would be more appropriate," Melhuish admits. "It's not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets." Even so, he says, it marks the first demonstration of a biomass-powered robot that can operate unaided for some time.
The key to getting this gut to work, says Ieropoulos, is a recycling system that relies on a gravity-fed peristaltic pump which, like the human colon, applies waves of pressure to squeeze unwanted matter out of a tube.

can you dig it?

Skydiver to jump from edge of space

David Pescovitz at 10:25 AM Tue

In 1960, Colonel Joseph Kittinger jumped out of a helium balloon at 102,800 feet in the name of science, setting the world record for the highest and fastest parachute jump. Later this year, an Austrian daredevil named Felix Baumgartner hopes to beat that record by more than 3 miles, also by stepping out of a balloon. From Space.com:
"Right now, the space shuttle escape system is certified to 100,000 feet," said the mission's medical director Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon. "Why is that? Because Joe Kittinger went there. You've got a lot of companies that are vying for the role of being the commercial space transport provider for tourism, for upper atmospheric science, and so on. These systems, particularly during the test and development phase, need a potential escape system, which we may be able to help them provide with the knowledge we gain."
A team of aeronautics experts recently led Baumgartner through a week of testing meant to illuminate any possible weaknesses in his equipment and to familiarize him with the skills needed to navigate the conditions expected to assail him as soon as he opens his vessel door.

Only a few feet above ground in a capsule dangling from a crane on Sage Cheshire Aerospace test grounds in California, Baumgartner practiced exiting and stepping off his hot-air balloon. Even a slight stumble during this step could cause dangerous alterations in his in-flight position only moments later, as well as reduce his chances of actually breaking the sound barrier

I'mmm baaack....

Spent a couple days in nyc walking a manuscript around. People treat you walkin around with a manuscript like you are walkin around with a dead cat. Curious at first. Get a little closer and the won't make eye contact. It's healthy, helps keep things in perspective.

Robot lifeguard. How neat it this!!!!

EMILY the Robot Lifeguard is a motor-powered flotation device that uses sonar to locate drowning persons. Human lifeguards control the device remotely from shore, but it could be independent as soon as 2011. Lifeguards can also communicate with the victim via EMILY's on-board camera and speakers. Although EMILY currently patrols only Malibu's Zuma Beach, famous for its excellent surfing conditions and occasional rip currents, 24 more beaches will soon employ the device, according

Sometimes I feel, I mean literally, not figuratively, that my head will explode.

According to new Internal Revenue Service data announced last week, income inequality in the U.S. is at its worst since the 1920s (before the Great Depression). The top percentile of wealthy Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, up from 19% in 2004, while the bottom 50% of wage earners earned 12.8% that year, down from 13.4% a year earlier.


More interesting are what the views are from within investment banking circles on why the economy acts differently than it used to as wealth is concentrated in a level seen in the States similar to only the 1920s. Below is at least part of the report; a quite fascinating read - I've also attached at the bottom of this post an entry in the Wall Street Journal Blog section from January 2007 - which does a quick summary of the report's findings/opinion. I vaguely remember reading about this at the time, but now in retrospect - after what has happened in the financial system - it is interesting from a totally different prism.
[sidenote: 1 bit of humor - Citigroup listed "financial crisis" as one of the threats to the plutonomy status quo. Oh, irony.]

Now that it has become clear that unlike the 1930s where this historic concentration of wealth was reversed for a good 4 decades post crisis, that this time around a financial crisis is actually serving to concentrate wealth even further, it might be helpful to readers to see how the entrenched money thinks on how to benefit from it. Basically the same way you'd invest in feudal Europe in the 1400s - avoid the peasants, stick with the lords. I don't see this changing anytime soon - as I said in 2007, in time you will not want to have anything to do with the bottom 80% of the country; it won't be a fun place to be. [Dec 8, 2007: Do the Bottom 80% of Americans Stand a Chance?] I think in the nearly 2 years since written, the fissures I spoke about have already begun to widen considerably.

I smell fix...

Hot dog eating ex-champ Kobayashi arrested in Coney Island


Some unexpected news from Takeru Kobayashi, the ex-Nathan's hot dog eating contest champ, this 4th of July weekend: instead of partaking in the competition, Kobayashi showed up as a spectator but stormed the stage in rage after his nemesis Joey Chestnut took the championship again. He was charged with resisting arrest, trespassing, and obstructing governmental administration. He's won the contest six times in the past, but didn't take part this year because of some snafu with the contest organizers — apparently they wanted him to sign an exclusivity clause that would prevent him from doing other competitive eating contests without their permission, which sounds kind of shitty to me.

Just cool

NASA: Robonauts on Moon By 2013




Xeni Jardin at 12:15 PM Thu









This week, NASA announced plans to "land an operational humanoid robot on the moon in 1,000 days." The contractor of choice? Armadillo Aerospace, founded by gaming godfather John D. Carmack (Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, etc.).

Feeling clever?

According to an article about Thomas Edison in the current U.S. News & World Report (October 11, 2004), he had an encyclopedic memory and expected job applicants to have a similar knowledge. The test he administered to every job job seeker had 150 questions; each test was tailored for a specific job. Some of the things college graduates were expected to know:




1.What city in the United States is noted for its laundry-machine making?

2.Who was Leonidas?

3.Who invented logarithms?

4.Where is Magdalena Bay?

5.What is the first line in the Aeneid?

6.What is the weight of air in a room 10 by 20 by 30 feet?

7.Who composed Il Trovatore?

8.What voltage is used on streetcars?



Cabinetmakers had to know:

9.Which countries supply the most mahogany?

10.Who was the Roman emperor when Jesus Christ was born?



Masons were asked:

11.How many cubic yards of concrete in a wall 12 by 20 by 2 feet?

12.Who assassinated President Lincoln?



Edison did not demand perfect scores-merely 90%, which has been likened to having an IQ of 180. Out of 718 college men Edison tested for jobs, only 10% got a "fair" or passing grade. Edison said, "Only 2% of the people think, as I gather from my questionnaire." Magazines, which loved running stories on Edison's employment test, gave Edison pop quizzes with similar questions on a variety of subjects. He average 95

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

But A 1.5 trillion unfunded high end tax cut is fine

RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits?




ANGLE: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. And what we really need to do is put people back to work. So if you want to ease people back into work, what we need is an unemployment benefit that pays part. You know, you go to work, you have something of a safety net, in unemployment. But just to give them full unemployment benefits and then extend those for two years or more gets them not only out of the working class but it also depreciates their skills, so they're not actually able to go out and compete in that workforce, so what we really want, is we want something that stimulates a group of people to go back into what we know as that free market

knock me over with a feather

Fox News advocates shutting down public libraries

Cory Doctorow at 10:44 PM Wed
When I give talks to library groups, I always finish by reminding librarians that they're powerful advocates for fair use and privacy, because "you look like a total jerk when you criticize librarians."
Case in point: this Fox Chicago piece proposing that Illinois shut down its library system:
But keeping libraries running costs big money. In Chicago, the city pumps $120 million a year into them. In fact, a full 2.5 percent of our yearly property taxes go to fund them.
That's money that could go elsewhere - like for schools, the CTA, police or pensions
One of the nation's biggest and busiest libraries is the $144-million Harold Washington Library in the Loop. It boasts a staggering 5,000

The Lord made Texas so everyone else could be smug about something..

 What’s the matter with Texas?

Congressman Joe Barton’s bizarre apology to BP last week is only the beginning. Ditto the newly released Republican Texas State Party Platform ably solidifying its worst stereotypes—calling for the re-criminalization of sodomy and making gay marriage a felony. Since the election of President Obama, the GOP’s Lone Star State delegation has developed a singular record of wingnuttery.
“Stepping off into secession,” said one statewide candidate, “may in fact be a bloody war.”
It’s almost like the conservative contingent from the great state of Texas is trying to embarrass their fellow citizens while providing Democrats with a one-stop-shop oppo file, in terms of nationalizing the campaign. In the last year alone, we’ve seen six members of the Texas Republican delegation—John Carter, John Culberson, Louis Gohmert, Kenny Marchant, Randy Neugebauer and Ted Poe—decide to sign-on as co-sponsors of the ‘Birther Bill’ snaking its way through the Congressional fringe, making them half of the bill’s total support.
We’ve heard Rep. Randy Neugebauer scream “baby killer” at Congressman Bart Stupak after he voted for health-care reform.
We’ve seen Rep. Louis Gohmert take to the House floor to denounce hate crimes legislation by bringing bestiality and necrophilia into the debate: “If you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then that’s not something that could be held against you ... which means that you’d have to strike any laws against bestiality. If you’re oriented toward corpses, toward children. You know, there are all kinds of perversions, what most of us would call perversions, some would say it sounds like fun, but most of us would say were perversions and there have been laws against them and this bill says that whatever you're oriented toward sexually that cannot be a source of bias against someone.”
And Texas Rep. Lamar Smith told a group of college students that “the greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack…The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias.” That quote will sound great if we’re attacked again.
Texas Governor Rick Perry rode to victory over the Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson despite—or because—he invoked specter of secession at Tea Party rally, saying: “There’s a lot of different scenarios,” he said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? Texas is a very unique place… When we came to the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.” His Tea Party backed challenger Debra Medina went even further, making nullification a core campaign plank (“stepping off into secession may in fact be a bloody war") before imploding over 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Even the Texas Board of Education has been getting into the fun—last month they voted to reconfigure the state social studies curriculum with a conservative ideological agenda, complete with favorable mentions of Joe McCarthy and Phyllis Schlafly. Board member Cynthia Dunbar got the meeting off on the right foot by offering a pre-vote prayer for “a Christian land governed by Christian principles.” Not coincidentally, Creationism has also been making a comeback.
To be fair, it’s not just the Republicans who are getting a bit loopy from the Texas summer heat. The Democrats have a full-fledged Lyndon LaRouche-ite named Kesha Rogers nominated for Congress in Tom DeLay’s old district, running on a platform summed up by the sign she holds up at a busy inter-section: “Save NASA. Impeach Obama.”
America needs Texas sane, or at least not completely deranged. It’s is the second largest state in the nation, a place of beauty, pride and barbeque, the home of icons of independence like Sam Houston, Lyle Lovett and Molly Ivins. It was Ivins who described Texas politics as “the finest form of free entertainment ever invented” and “better than the circus,” but this year the fun under that particular big top is looking more and more like a freakshow, and the clowns are starting to scare the kids.
John Avlon's new book Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America is available now by Beast Books both on the Web and in paperback. He is also the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.

WTF

White House guts bill that would rein in CEO salaries; you can stop them


Aaron Swartz has the news of how the White House is trying to gut a piece of legislation (passed by the House and the Senate) that would be key to reining in CEO compensation in large corporations: The current financial regulation bill -- in a provision passed by both the House and Senate -- would change that by allowing shareholders with 5% of the stock to come together and propose additional names for the ballot. But the White House is trying to gut this proposal at the last minute, and they've done it in an incredibly sneaky way -- they removed the letter s from the end of the word shareholders.

Now instead of shareholders whose stock adds up to 3% coming together, you have to be a single shareholder with 5% of the stock all by yourself. And for most big companies, there just isn't anyone like that. Take GE, for example -- its biggest shareholder only owns about 3.4% of the company.
So by removing a single letter, they managed to make this provision completely

Right on, Krugman

Economic reality versus ideology: spending cuts and recovery

Cory Doctorow at 9:59 PM Sun

In this week's New York Times column, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman debunks the idea of heavy government cuts as a way to economic recovery:
The key point is that while the advocates of austerity pose as hardheaded realists, doing what has to be done, they can't and won't justify their stance with actual numbers -- because the numbers do not, in fact, support their position. Nor can they claim that markets are demanding austerity. On the contrary, the German government remains able to borrow at rock-bottom interest rates.

So the real motivations for their obsession with austerity lie somewhere else.
In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple: They're eager to slash benefits for those in need, but their concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can't afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion.

more reasons to be off the grid

Share Comments 683 Earlier this month, NASA warned that as the Sun wakes up from its "deep slumber," a massive solar storm could wreak havoc on our electronics, from satellites to the electrical grid, causing damages up to 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina.

But the Sun isn't the only threat to our electronic lifeline. National Geographic explorers the risk and consequences of the "electronic Armageddon" that could be caused by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) bomb.

An EMP bomb, National Geographic explains, is "a bomb that's designed to go above the atmosphere and release huge amounts of energy," some of which in the form of gamma rays. Such a weapon would cripple electronics, but not kill people.

"In less than a billionth of a second, the electrical intensity on Earth's surface would become so hot that microchips would fry, power lines would overload and the electric grid would collapse," says National Geographic, describing . "Everything with microelectronics in it would stop: your car, your computer, the subway. There would be no electricity."



Learn more about what would happen if an EMP bomb were ever detonated in the video below, then find out more about

This for a odd reason makes me hopeful.

The seed vault, built to protect the world's food supply in the event of a global crisis, is located on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago. It was built high enough to avoid rising sea levels, and deep enough into the mountain to be able to withstand a nuclear explosion. The vault is kept at a constant temperature of zero degrees.

knock me over with a feather

Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance?", was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records. The campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi's payment as "PERSONNEL SVC/EQUIPMENT."

The payment on Oct. 10 made Ms. Strozzi the single highest-paid individual in the campaign for that two-week period. (There were more than two dozen companies that got larger payments than Ms. Strozzi). She easily beat out Mr. Scheunemann, who received $12,500 in the first half of October, and Ms. Wallace, who got $12,000

way to go.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann won the Best Writing award for his tribute to his mother Marie. "A Baseball Fan Named Marie" aired two days after his mother's death.

wonderful....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a "nightmare well," according to internal documents released Monday.

The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation's worst environmental disaster

This could save you life! (really it could.)

HOWTO remove a stripped screw with a rubber band

Cory Doctorow at 11:08 AM Sun

In theory, this looks like a pretty good way to cope with a stripped screw: use a bigger screwdriver and insert a rubber band between the tip of it and the screw-head to give you some traction. Never tried it, but it looks sound