Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the right: “Cosmos,” Christians, and the battle for American science

Salon

The real reason conservatives are freaking out about Neil deGrasse Tyson: He's laying bare their worst hypocrisies

He's doing a fine job of it and it's about fucking time.

The religious right has been freaking out about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” for what feels like an eternity. And, while the theological complaints seem laughable for their rancor and predictability, it’s time we thought harder about what they represent, because the Christian right’s “Cosmos” agita actually indicates a far deeper problem in religious conservatism — the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.

Tiny brains, tiny aims.

The scientific consensus about global warming must be untrue, because, as Dr. Innes writes in “Left, Right and Christ,” the world is “not a glass ornament that we might accidentally destroy … we are not capable of destroying it, whether by nuclear weapons or carbon emissions.” [...]

He's right. We will not destroy the Earth. The sun will do that in about 5 billion years. We can, however, destroy life on earth as we know it.

There's a lot more to read in this piece and video too.

Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory" described religion perfectly as "Pre-enlightenment mythology" and I won't even try to improve on that.

"This is a country now at war with itself"

Charlie Pierce on the proliferation of gun violence.

This is a country at war with itself because its ruling elite is too cowed, or too well-bribed, or too cowardly to recognize that there are people who are getting rich arming both sides, because the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, so you make sure that it's easy for the bad guys to get guns in order to make millions selling the guns to the good guys. This is a dynamic not unfamiliar to the people in countries where brushfire conflicts and civil wars are kept alive because distant people are making a buck off them. In Africa, war is made over diamonds and rare earths. In South America, war is made over cocaine. Here, for any number of reasons - because Adam Lanza went crazy or because Elliot Rodger couldn't get laid - and the only constant in all those wars is the fact somebody gets rich arming both sides.
...

It is a guerrilla war, fought on darkened streets against children in hoodies brandishing Skittles, against children in cars who play their music too loudly, against evanescent fears and the ghosts born of ancient prejudice and cultivated dread. Its battles are sudden but, sadly, no longer surprising. The whole country is the battleground now because cynical people have made it so. Our movie theaters are our Wheatfields, our Peach Orchards, or our Bloody Lanes. A quiet college campus is the Hornet's Nest. An elementary school is Cemetery Ridge. Those are the killing zones. The enemy, we are told, is everywhere, and nowhere. This is the country that Wayne LaPierre, that malignant profiteer, talks about when he says, as he did at a conservative conference last spring:

Go read it if you want to. It makes me sick. And angry.

Wayne LaPierre gets paid when his masters sell guns to the bad guys. Wayne LaPierre gets paid when his masters sell guns to the good guys because of the guns he's already arranged to sell to the bad guys. Wayne LaPierre is the strange white man in the Congo who knows where he can get you some AK's. He's the shadowy fellow in the coffee shop in Kabul who knows where RPG's can be had, cheap. He's the well-dressed, silken-voiced operator, sipping his tea on a cool and breezy veranda outside of Bogota, who smiles at you and shows you on the map where you can pick up your order, because it is time once again for you to make war and him to make money. His look is the smooth and shiny black of the vulture's feathers. He feasts on the carrion of nations.

So that is Memorial Day this year, in a country in which its citizens are encouraged to make war on each other because not enough people care enough to stop it. There are more flowers in more places and there is no peace in sight, because we have chosen as a country to slake our appetite for it with blood. The dead are not honored in this war. Only the instrumentality of their murder is, god help us all.

Shorter: It's always about the Benjamins.

I like guns. I own guns. Shooting is a skill I learned in the Marine Corps. Shooting is fun. I pray to all the goddam gods that I never have to use one against another human being.

Memorial Day

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Same Republicans Outraged Over Treatment of Veterans Filibustered Against Better Health Care for Veterans in February
Including treatment for memory loss.

No memory loss - when the Veterans cease to be profit generators for the war profiteers and become overhead, it's time to cut back. It's just business. Grrrrrr...

Report: Climate Change Could Sink Statue of Liberty
Suggests moving it to Kansas.

Some irony is simply too horrid to contemplate.

AT&T to Buy DirecTV for $48 Billion
It's the perfect synergy of massive layoffs and world domination.

Austrian Bearded Drag Queen Wins Eurovision Song Contest
With her stirring rendition of “I'm My Own Grandpa.”

Now that's funny!

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Something a little different.

Published on May 17, 2014
Emmylou Harris' induction into the Ⓒⓞⓤⓝⓣⓡⓨ Ⓜⓤⓢⓘⓒ Ⓗⓐⓛⓛ ⓞⓕ Ⓕⓐⓜⓔ. [2008] Includes performances by Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, Lucinda Williams, Guy Clark, Sam Bush, Jon Randall, and Vince Gill.

I'm pretty sure 'Ⓒⓞⓤⓝⓣⓡⓨ Ⓜⓤⓢⓘⓒ Ⓗⓐⓛⓛ ⓞⓕ Ⓕⓐⓜⓔ' is 'Country Music Hall Of Fame'. :-)

Thanks to dahliacorona.

"Operation American Moron"

Heh.

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

From the "Latest Headlines" crawl:

Everybody 'madder than hell' about decades-old VA mess

Republican Party Finds Itself Divided as it Heads Towards 2016
Establishment far right wingnuts face strong challenge from tea party-backed ultra-fringe super-wacko nutcakes.

All Republican Candidates Climate Change Deniers
Until after the primaries.

Hmmmmm...I thought this was supposed to be irony?!

Rush Limbaugh's Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims Wins Children's Choice Book Award
Tells true story of courageous patriot who, while high on Oxycontin and getting hassled by airport security about his penis pump, saves our Founding Fathers from Feminazis.

REMINDER
We're living in the golden age of gilded ages.

Saturday Emmlou Blogging

This one was up some time ago and was taken down. I'm glad it's back up! A little wide, a little flat, but the tune's good.

Thanks to OldTyme TunesFour.

American Sacked* Spring

*To us mechanics, a spring that has lost its tension and is therefore useless is "sacked".

Operation American Spring warns of FEMA roundup, civil war, chemtrails

This is just getting too good! Note to the rest of the world that laughs at the U.S. becaue of these yingyangs and a good many of our politicians: A lot of us are laughing right along with you. If we didn't laugh at these idiots, they're so embarrassing we'd cry.

"A caller from North Carolina said he feared Obama would declare martial law and begin executing Christian citizens as a prelude to civil war."
...

“I’m so fed up with the tyranny I sold my jet ski,” the caller said. “I’m so fed up with the way the government is manipulating the water with the chemtrails, I’m afraid I can’t even use my jet ski.”

That guy obviously has no idea what the unburned oil in the exhaust from his 2-stroke jet ski does to the water. Yeesh.

“I didn’t see the Civil War,” she said. “But I’m from the South, and we’re still fighting it.”

You're still losing it too. Heh.

Much more, and if you look around the intertubes a bit you will find many more hilarious pieces on this #MajorFail.

Excerpt of the Day

From "Will Justice Scalia Ever Get Tired of Tasting His Own Ass?" at Political Garbage Chute.

By the time Scalia leaves this mortal coil, his entire career on the high court will be riddled with embarrassing decisions. These decisions will declare to all of history to come after us that he was a bitter, old bigot who used his enormous authority to hurt the average American time and again. Whether by gleefully and unapologetically giving corporations and Wall Street a wide open door through which they can enter and buy off our government wholesale, or by just as gleefully and unapologetically standing up for the rights of the bigots to write laws that hurt minorities, Scalia has been right there to make sure the elite get to keep their oligarchy, and his legacy will be forever tarnished for it.

Along with democracy.

Shit's Getting Real Out West

Charlie Pierce. with video.

It's really time for the Republican party, at the local, state, and party levels, to man up here, or else to say clearly that individual acts of seditious lawlessness are part of the party's basic philosophy of government. Maybe each Republican state committee can have an annual Calhoun-Davis Day Dinner.
...

Lyman said the much-publicized ride on the northern section of the 11-mile trail is less about the canyon specifically and more about public access to trails in general. "This is not about Recapture. It is not about ATVs. It is not politics, it is not economics," he said. "It is part of who I am. It is part of Blanding, and it is our culture, too. We don't not want to see groups come in and say these trails did not exist ... it was a thoroughfare since the mid-1800s."

Which is about when a big-government program called the U.S. Cavalry came along and cleared out all the natives so that, one day, Phil Lyman could help people dodge taxes and act like a jackass on weekends.

(And, of course, the local Native Americans objected, too, but they haven't been relevant since "the mid-1800s.")

This is an elected official, not some racist wrinkle-bag like Cliven Bundy. If you vote for Phil Lyman, you are voting for sedition. If you are Fox News, and you celebrate him, you are celebrating sedition. It is long past time for the Republican party to fish or cut bait on this end of movement conservatism. Either support the seditious philosophy of local control, or oppose it. But they shouldn't be allowed any more to use its energy during election years and then walk away after the votes are cast.
...

There far too much loose talk in respectable Republican circles about nullification, secession, and the crackpot theories of county government that used to be the exclusive ideological province of the Posse Comitatus movement. (There is also too much loose talk about impeachment, too, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of scrod.) Increasingly, there is no apparent fringe to conservative rhetoric, let alone any real limits. Somebody within that party has to step up and rein this lunacy in, or else embrace it publicly as the party's basic philosophy, or else euphemisms may not be the only things that die in those deserts.

I would be thrilled fucking shitless if it's the Repuglican't Party that dies in those deserts. Make their bleached bones a national monument to the death of right-wing stupidity.

Boxer On Benghazi

My Senator. Thank you, Babs.

You don't need a degree in political science to know that the House Republicans' latest "investigation" of Benghazi is a political witch hunt.

It was clear before the Republican chairman of the new Select Committee on Benghazi suggested he wants to put the administration on "trial."

It was clear before the House GOP rejected House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's offer to have a fair panel with equal representation from Republicans and Democrats.

It was clear well before the National Republican Congressional Committee and top Republicans began fundraising off this tragedy.
...

Republicans have only one goal: to turn this tragedy into a scandal. Their relentless campaign to use the events in Benghazi to score cheap political points ahead of the midterm elections is appalling.

This is Plan B since Obamacare is succeeding. Those idiots don't think, if such is the word, very far ahead.

Here's another thing the GOP won't be investigating -- the tragedy and scandal of more than 4,000 Americans killed in the Iraq War based on phony intelligence.

Between 1998 and 2013, there were at least 501 significant attacks against U.S. diplomatic facilities and personnel in 70 countries, which resulted in the deaths of 586 people, including 67 Americans. During the Bush administration, there were 166 attacks, which killed 116 people, including 18 Americans.

Those attacks were all terrible tragedies. The difference is that we never had a political party spend years exploiting them for political gain.

The New York Times had it right last week when they wrote:

"They won't pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration."

The Republicans' kangaroo court on Benghazi isn't just a waste of taxpayer dollars -- it's a national disgrace.

My 2¢: The only thing that will make these Repugs happy in their already-dead failed attempt to keep Hillary from being President is if a video surfaces of her with an AK-47 in either hand and a Quran in the other, wearing a hijab and ululating wildly, personally leading the attack on the Benghazi CIA facility.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

From the Latest Headlines crawl:

Supreme Court approves conversion of Jews to Christianity

China Considers Building Underwater Bullet Train to U.S.
Using American laborers in search of a better life.

Greece Ranked Most Corrupt Nation in EU
Roughly on a par with New Jersey.

99.5% of Wonder Bread's Political Contributions Went to Republicans
Who eat nothing but.

Helps make them bland and tasteless and makes them think they are eating real food. that esplains a lot.

Las Vegas One of Several Finalists for 2016 GOP Convention
Others being looked at: Macao, Dubai, Shanghai.

They forgot to add: Adelson to make final decision.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

No info but looks like "Later...with Jools Holland". Buddy Miller accompanying.

Thanks to StashPuppets.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

REPUBLICANS REOPEN BENGHAZI INVESTIGATION
Also want to take another look at Bobby Baker scandal, and why FDR sent a Navy destroyer to pick up his dog Fala in the Aleutian Islands at taxpayers' expense.

Papers From 1982 Reveal British Diplomats First Thought Reagan a “Bumbler” and a “Bozo”
Later, of course, they'd come to see him as a “bumpkin” and a “boob.”

Chance of City-Killing Asteroid Striking Earth Higher Than Previously Believed
Public urged to move to rural, uninhabited areas.

Charles Koch, in Wall Street Journal, Calls His Critics “Collectivists”
Term last used (but favorably) by Leon Trotsky.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Published on Apr 29, 2014
A Townes Van Zandt Song. Emmylou gave him his first big hit .1982

Thanks to orvsha.

Cliven Bundy: Clown Car or Trojan Horse?

William Rivers Pitt is soooo good!

Fox News, and especially Sean Hannity, immediately began hyping the story all day and night, elevating Bundy to the status of instant Founding Father. How could they resist? Here was a guy who denies the existence of the US government while riding his horse on federal lands with an American flag strapped to his saddle. Cognitive dissonance is the meat and mead of Fox News, and the dissonance in that one image was weighty enough to bend the very light (my em).

It took about two weeks for everything to go sideways.

First, Mr. Bundy delivered his now-infamous rant about Black people being happier picking cotton as slaves, a statement he doubled down on later by comparing himself to Rosa Parks before saying that if Black people didn't like his opinions, it's because "Martin Luther King hasn't gotten his job done yet."

Skreeeeeeech went the needle off the record. Every right-wing media personality and politician who had rushed to publicly embrace Cliven Bundy immediately fled his presence as if he was covered in Goliath tarantulas. I think there still may be a Hannity-shaped hole in the studio wall at Fox News.

His ardent gun-toting supporters at the ranch stood their ground...until a few days ago, when there was a sudden falling-out between Bundy's own ranch security - commanded by a man actually named Booda Bear - and a contingent of Oath Keepers who had come to the ranch because Jesus, or something. Their leader, one Stewart Rhodes, informed Booda Bear (God, I could type his name all day) that he had "intel" from a "source of intelligence of high value" that Eric Holder and the Justice Department were going to deploy a "hot drone strike" against the Bundy Ranch within the next 24 hours. Because of this, the fearless leader was forced to re-deploy his stalwart troops off the ranch and into hotels with room service back in town.

This did not sit well with Booda Bear, who told Radio Free Redoubt's John Jacob Schmidt, "This is a battle front in some sense of the word and to remove them is kind of, ah, that's some yellow curd, ya know, spineless backbone piece of shit maneuvering right there. He had pretty much said, 'Well, I need to pull my guys back so they can allocate resources to the exterior of the area,' meaning go into the next town and get hotel rooms, get showers, gamble, eat steak dinners, while we're out here on the battle front...and just so everybody knows, as Booda, head of security for the Bundy family, I can swear on the white skin that covers my ass there will not be an Oath Keeper - there WILL NOT BE AN OATH KEEPER allowed to set foot on the internal ranch property."

And so not with a bang, but with a Derp, solidarity at the Bundy ranch "battle front" fell to dust that swirled and eddied around the white skin of Booda Bear's ass.
...

...and note you well: here in America, you can point a high-powered rifle at federal officers and get off scot-free with your gun still in your hand. Sit down at a peaceful Occupy protest on the campus of UC Davis in California, however, and you get a gushing face full of Mace for your trouble...while the cop who sprayed you gets $38,000 in compensation for "anxiety and depression."

Far more insidious is the fact that, until he pulled his little "What, Me Racist?" number for all the world to see, Mr. Bundy's most dedicated supporters were a couple of billionaire brothers named Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers, if truth be told, could not give less of a damn about Cliven Bundy and his band of merry men, but until Bundy blew out like an old, racist tire, they were intensely interested in using him as the avatar for a fight they've been waging for twenty years: placing control of publicly-owned federal lands back into the hands of the states, so the states can lease or sell those lands to companies like Koch Industries for cattle grazing, mining, drilling, fracking, and lumbering.

Right now, those lands are protected from such activities, but the Koch Brothers were hoping to ride Cliven Bundy's cause to a massive land grab. The fact that Cliven Bundy upended the intentions of the Koch Brothers by being a racist idiot on television does not change their intentions one whit. They want to drill, to mine, to frack, and to profit off those lands that belong to us, for now.

So, as matters currently stand, Cliven Bundy can certainly be quantified as a human clown car. Do not, however, lose sight of the real story here: Mr. Bundy was also a Trojan Horse filled with Koch Industries drilling equipment until he blew it. Bundy may be gone from the news soon, but the Koch Brothers still want that land, because the world is not enough for guys like that, which is why, to no small degree, the rest of us can't have nice things like clean air and water that doesn't catch on fire coming out of the tap.

The moral of the story is that, to the Kochs and their ilk, it's always about the Benjamins and these wannabe militia goons are useful idiots to their ends.

The NRA has declared war on America

Ana Marie Cox at The Guardian. links at site.

Wayne LaPierre and Co are not out merely to defend the Second Amendment or Newtown or gun laws anymore. They want you to pay the price for freedom and they want their money now

...NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.

LaPierre's bleak vision is exaggerated dystopianism in service of sedition, a wide-ranging survey of targets that put justice against the intrusions of the IRS on a continuum with (as an advertisement he ran during his speech put it) workplace "bullies and liars".
...


You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be both winning and losing, alone but united, the minority but the majority. It is almost (almost!) as if Wayne LaPierre intended to mislead his audience with this whiplash oratory, intended to dizzy them into acceptance of his underlying message, which is almost disappointingly mundane: give us money. Give the NRA money. Give us money so we can create the legal environment that allows gun manufacturers to make more money so that they can give us more money.

Conspicuously absent from LaPierre’s list of grievances was any serious consideration of the economic system that might have a role destabilizing the society for which he pantomimes such concern. [...]
...

The problem with the NRA lies with the people who lead it.

No shit. I joined the NRA when I was in the service, in the days when you had to be sponsored ny an NRA member to join. My company commander sponsored me. I like firearms and the shooting sports and I enjoyed their magazine and that was about it.

I dropped my membership like a hot rock when the NRA went right-wing in the late '70s. It wasn't all that political before that.

It's WAY worse than that now. Now it's part of the "domestic enemies" that I swore to defend the Constitution from in my Oath of Enlistment which I never un-took.

BTW, there was a shooting near a town in Georgia today where folks are required by law to keep a gun. Where were all the "good guys with guns" anyway? Another right-wing lie perhaps? Or are they just afraid to actually go in harm's way and maybe get their AR-15 giant penises blown off?

Headline of the Day

This just in. Choices have consequences and words are choices. This is just a bitch slap to a billionaire but I'm down wid it.

NBA Bans Donald Sterling For Life

Fixer has chimed in on this and says he's impressed with NBA commissioner Adam Silver. So am I. Neither of us are basketball fans but we're interested in speaking truth to power.

Oh. the irony

Ironic Times

VATICAN: TWO POPES CANONIZED
In historic “Buy One, Get One Free” ceremony.

Bill Introduced in Congress Would Create National Park on the Moon
Already, the wait for a decent campsite is 6 months.

Claiming an Error, Feds Rescind Approval of Powdered Alcohol Product “Palcohol”
Seemed like a great idea, until they sobered up.

Those who'd rather mainline booze directly into their bloodstream are also in luck. Palcohol can be snorted!

What could possibly go wrong ... ?

Los Angeles Clippers Owner Caught Telling Girlfriend to Not Bring Blacks to Games
Clippers, with only J.J.Redick and Hedo Türkoglu available, lose to Golden State, 319-12.

Recent Book Proposes U.S., Canada Merge
We get oil, maple syrup, hockey players, they get Bible belt, high fructose corn syrup, baseball players.

War with Canada on the horizon...