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Deep in the heart of crazy

I spent Thanksgiving through New Years in Texas and Florida, and you lucky readers in Maui cannot really comprehend how ignorant and crazy the people there are. But this may help.

Geniuses harassed by morons

The death today of Charles Townes, one of the men who introduced lasers into our lives, reminds RtO that the malefactors of the national security state did their best to prevent it.

Focus, a site that covers optics and photonics, has the story of Gordon Gould, who eventually shared in the patents on the laser:

Gould needed money to build his laser and proposed the project to the Pentagon. He was exceptionally good at impressing the military scientists, who imagined the laser as a “death ray” and consequently provided him with more funding than he had originally asked for. But there was a problem: Gould had been related to some communist propaganda activities and the Pentagon could not allow a potential Soviet spy to work on a project that had become classified, despite the fact that this was his own project. Gould was neither authorized to know the results of the experiments he proposed, nor given the security clearance to physically enter the building where they were being performed. TRG, the company for which Gould was working, even had to refurbish the building to allow Gould to go to the bathroom without violating security!

Focus does not say so but national security state goons seized Gould's laboratory notebooks and it was decades before he got them back. Wikipedia has more about this, though even it does not relate that the morons of the right seized the notebooks. I suppose Gould should have been glad they didn't kill him to keep his brain away from the commies.

Ironically, or not as the case may be, the commies were just as capable to figuring out light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation as the capitalists and two of them shared the Novel Prize with Townes. 

By the way, the "communist propaganda" was Gould's mildly left political views. But rightwingers do not now and have never believed in liberty of conscience.

Lucky we live Maui

Since I live in Maui, where weather forecasts have only slight utility and I don't often look at them, I was unaware until today (hat tip: Little Green Footballs) that there are malicious weather sites that, apparently, bamboozle and frighten the bejabbers out of millions of people.

Why? The story does not really explain why, although the subject running the hoaxes seems to share a number of characteristics with sovereign citizen and Tea Party types.

Nut graf:

 False weather forecasts do real harm to the public as they degrade trust in trained meteorologists who produce valid, accurate forecasts. When the public sees a hoax about a major hurricane or catastrophic blizzard that doesn't exist, the vast majority of readers don't think to corroborate it with other sources and check the validity of the article in question. They take the hoax for face value, blame real meteorologists when it doesn't pan out, and their trust in scientific forecasts drops. Kevin Martin is at the forefront of the hoaxer movement, and his actions are single-handedly responsible for hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people receiving false weather information on numerous occasions.

What, people read nonsense on the Internet and swallow it whole? Say it ain't so! (Although, if you recast that paragraph from meteorology to climatology and make the false claim the one that we are having more and bigger storms, then the heartfelt plea on behalf of scientific integrity loses its oomph.)

Well, there are lots of crazy people out there, and while RtO most often points at the rightwing ones, it is well to remember that there are other, even crazier kooks out there.

I was reminded of that yesterday when I went to the post office to mail a box of rocks (no, really). As I left, a respectably dressed man about my age held the door for me, announcing a "free doorman service." He seemed a little unclear on the concept: I could have used a doorman as I walked in with the rocks but didn't need it going out emptyhanded. But the reason became apparent.

He was one of a small group of protesters? activists? patriots? something or other? offering to recruit me to a mighty movement to forestall the coming war between America and the BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, China, India). I hadn't even heard we were going to war.

A label on his placard explained all (well, much): LaRouche.com. Are they still a thing? Apparently they are.

"I think you're crazy," I told him, and, pointing to the LaRouche.com label, "and I know he is."

"You're crazy," he said.






It was a standoff.


As I drove off, I saw his compadre's sidewalk display, with posters indicating that Obama is another Bush (and I thought Jeb was the other one) but offering hope if America would turn to the 3-point program of LaRouche. The first two points escape me, but the third was "nuclear fusion."




Is that still a thing?

It's difficult to label the LaRouche movement. It is fascist in its embrace of the fuhrerprinzip, but unlike conventional fascists not in Catholicism or monarchicalism. So it is not left, but I would not call it rightist either.

But for sure crazy.

Oops! Democrats can count backwards

The line this a.m. on the talk shows was that Sen. Joni Ernst had avoided the curse of the State of the Union response speech and, while she did not ignite her tinder-dry base, at least avoided embarrassing herself.

The pundits spoke too soon. In fact, Ernst's lie about wearing breadbags over her one pair of shoes was subjected to merciless mockery by the leisured Democrats class, who noted that during Ernst's girlhood the president was not Franklin Roosevelt but -- wait for it! -- R. Reagan.

Few, if any of the mockers, though, had any experience of either living on a farm or living in Iowa during the Reagan paradise. So, as sometimes happens, instead of restating the obvious, I will have to reveal it, de novo as it were.

In fact, the Reagan years were terrible for Iowa farmers and the much more numerous members of the UAW, who were losing their jobs, homes, farms and, too often, their lives (by suicide) during those golden years. (It was a bad time, too, for slaughterhouse workers and residents of small towns generally. But it was a golden opportunity for the gaudier class of con artists. My favorite was the one who claimed to represent a Saudi shiekh who wished to give struggling Iowa farmers loans of a million dollars each -- which did not have to be repaid! -- and the con artist could arrange to deliver this loan for an upfront fee of only $30,000. A good many of those struggling farmers found the money even if they did not love their little girls enough to buy them shoes.)

So, I can believe that the Ernst family could have been under financial stress when she was a schoolgirl. But I cannot simultaneously believe she was also castrating pigs in her one pair of shoes, unless she was wearing bread bags then, too.

Ernst really did step in it. As one commenter said, everywhere she goes from now on, protesters in bread bags will follow.

You read it here first

Ebola subsided rapidly in Liberia, primarily because people change their behavior when experiencing a deadly epidemic that spreads rapidly -- something they do not do with slowly-developing infections like AIDS.

Hysteria about cases increasing either linearly or exponentially in West Africa or rapidly in America or Europe was silly. Knowledge of past epidemics (which could have been obtained by reading RtO) would have damped down the panic.

Unless, of course, there was a political motive for scaring the citizenry.

Another rightwing lie

One of the many things that rightwingers believe that isn't so is that the Great Society programs were a failure.

Now, Mitt Romney is not as far right as some in the Republican Party, but he's on board here. In the Washington Post, he is quoted as saying

 As with others in his party, he raised the issue of social mobility and the difficulty of those at the bottom from rising into the middle class. He cited former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty half a century ago. Johnson’s intentions were good, he said, but his policies had not worked. He argued that Republicans must persuade voters that conservative policies can “end the scourge of poverty” in America.

Let's forget for a moment that just two years ago Romney's sympathies for the downtrodden were invisible -- moochers, he thought of them. Takers.

Mitt and I are the same age but have had different experiences. Mitt was a rich kid in the richest part of the Midwest, prep school and all that. I was a  lower middle class kid in the Deep South. I suppose Romney may have passed by poor people, but he never saw them. I did. I lived and worked alongside them. I knew people -- adults -- who had little education raising families on minimum wage jobs (another rightwing lie -- minimum wage jobs were only for schoolkids).

And there were other people that I did not work alongside who were much worse off. They worked for far less than minimum wage, and not often, had next to no education. I could see them. I talked with them sometimes.

There are still people like that, but millions of their children escaped. Went to college. Got hired for good jobs that don't require college, like selling cars. The Great Society was a big success. It did not succeed everywhere with everyone, but all you have to do is walk through an airport terminal  and look at the travelers and you can tell -- if you remember what that scene would have been like 50 years ago -- that the American economic success fable is now reality for many more people than it used to be.

It wasn't trickle down economics that did it. In fact, the residue of intractable poverty in our great cities is due mostly to the offshoring of the steppingstone jobs that launched generations of Americans -- native or immigrant -- toward the suburbs and (for rightwingers) self-satisfied narratives of their own superiority.