Rick Perry was the man with a bullseye on his back going into the debate last Thursday night. If the results of the straw poll conducted in Florida after his dismal debate performance are any indication — watch that clip above starting at about 1:30 and you’ll see the Texas Governor almost appeared drunk or noticeably medicated when responding to some questions — he’s been taken out:

Cain carried 37% of the vote, Perry 15% and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney 14%. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum was at 11%, Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 10% and former House speaker Newt Gingrich at 9%. Trailing far behind were former Utah governor Jon Huntsman and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, at 2%.

It’s a real toss-up who my conservative friends secretly fear most with nukes, Sarah Palin or Herman Cain, not to mention Cain is an abrasive idiot, the rest of the field has other problems with one exception. That leaves Mittens as the most likely GOP candidate and that’s not a good thing. Romney could actually win.

Don’t anyone kid themselves that conservative voters will stay home in protest, afraid of the Mormon or the moderate in Mitt Romney. By the time the election rolls around, Romney will be portrayed in the wingnut parallel universe as a fire-breathing, second coming of Ronald Reagan and Obama will be Pol Pot and Josef Stalin rolled into one. Perry would be lot easier to beat in the general, and a HELL of a lot more fun to cover, but any more showings like that and his star will fall from the sky.

For those who don’t know, two weeks ago I broke my back. Technically it was a rib-back break; the joint between the bottom floating rib and the thoracic vertebrae was cracked. It was a hairline fracture, nothing was displaced meaning no need for a cast or a brace. The injury caused some complications, the most severe of which was a hemothorax — bleeding into the chest cavity — which required a chest tube and several days in the hospital. Even heavily medicated the pain was extraordinary.

I’m lucky, not just that there’s no permanent injury like paralysis, but the company I work for provides health insurance for its employees. They pay 100% of the premium, I pay zilch, which means my effective wage is really a couple of hundred bucks higher than my monthly take home. Moreover, it’s incredibly good insurance. Time and time again the docs treating me remarked on that. I didn’t have to wait for any approvals for expensive tests like CAT scans, if I needed it, I got it right away and the results were available immediately.  

The downside in modern corporate America is in attendance policies. A year ago I was just-a-temp for the same company I work for as a full time regular employee now. Had this accident occured then, when I had no insurance or sicks days, not only would  I be in hock to the tune of 50 grand right now — assuming I got the same degree of care which is debatable — I would have been fired while in the hospital. As is I managed to stay just under the threshold of my employer’s point system. No consequences at all for the missed time. Had I been out one more day, or if I miss another day for any reason over the next six months, well I’m not sure exactly what happens but consequences kick in and escalate from there on for any more missed time.

I was in the hospital for almost a week, went to home for a few hours, and then right back to work full-time, nine hours a day. I could have taken a half day or two without getting fired, but that would have pushed me past the threshold where consequences come into play. I chose to avoid that, my decision and all, but it came at one hell of a painful price and whole jug of narcotic painkillers. If there was any other way I’d have taken it

It strikes me through this ordeal that our system of healthcare is fucking insane.  It’s completely reasonable for a company to expect its workforce to show up, and the company I work for probably compares favorably to others in that regard. But loosing a job when you’re going to need money and/or health insurance the most serves no one. It means the docs and hospital probably won’t be paid,  and it means bankruptcy and misery for the patient.

More accurately, John Cole fucking nails it:

How do you have a sensible policy debate with people who reject basic facts? It’s like trying to debate members of a cargo cult- the modern GOP carry the crosses but have no idea what it means to be christian. They talk about free markets, but have no understanding of economics. Just say deregulate and tax cuts a lot, and MAGIC WILL HAPPEN. Evolution? LIES! Climate change? LIES! Modern Medicine and vaccines? LIES! KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!

So true. They’ve been vaccinated against reality. The modern dominionist right isn’t just demonstrably dead wrong on just about everything I can think of, they’re absolutely convinced they’re right. And a sizable chunk of them are complete assholes about it. They’ll sneer at expertise, roll their eyes at empirical facts, hold events in recent history in contempt, all while parroting the latest ginormous whopper with a wild-eyed certainty and abrasive arrogance rarely found outside of the most fanatical religious cults.

The tragedy is the movement and celebrities they support with such fanaticism exploit them like no other. The Sarah Palin’s and Newt Gingrich’s who pretend to run for office so as to fleece the very people who defend them vigorously against those of us trying to pry the marks free of wingnut grifters and religious fraudsters. I can only wonder what future historians will make of it.

First a short atheist prayer: ‘Ahh sweet Friday, prince of days, deliver us from the evils of the workweek even as we, each in our own way, deliver ourselves from sobriety.’

This past week was the longest of my life. See, in modern corporate America, low-level employees like me are subject to strict attendance policies. Which means that I could either go almost straight from the hospital to work, nine hours a day, no half days or anything like that, with a freshly broken back-bone and a partially collapsed lung, or risk running afoul of that policy. I chose the former, and believe me it came at a damn painful price.

More on Neutrinos on Speed, this time from Sean Carroll, blogging at Cosmic Variance, who actually knows a thing or two about high energy physics (Plus he had that cool graphic above which begged to be swiped). Sean’s take sounds to me like a healthy skepticism:

I don’t mean to impugn the abilities or honesty of the experimenters, who are by all accounts top-notch people trying to do something very difficult. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment; at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence. … This isn’t one of those annoying “three-sigma” results that sits at the tantalizing boundary of statistical significance. The OPERA folks are claiming a six-sigma deviation from the speed of light. But that doesn’t mean it’s overwhelmingly likely that the result is real; it just means it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the result is simply a statistical fluctuation. There is another looming source of possible error: a “systematic effect,” i.e. some unknown miscalibration somewhere in the experiment or analysis pipeline. (If you are measuring something incorrectly, it doesn’t matter that you measure it very carefully.) In particular, the mismatch between the expected and observed timing amounts to tens of nanoseconds; but any individual “event” takes the form of a pulse that is spread out over thousands of nanoseconds. Extracting the signal is a matter of using statistics over many such events — a tricky business.

Back in my stock-broker days I had a great business partner who happened to a giant Warren Buffett fan. He had read all about the Sage of Omaha, could recite the stories, and given the field we worked in and Buffett’s success in it, that admiration was well placed. But my old partner was also a raging Limbaugh listener and a staunch social conservative. So I wonder where he’d be these days what with Buffett joining forces with a Kenyan Socialist to tax the job creators of America. Would he be swayed by Buffett’s advice to tax the rich more, or would he be among those now demanding the Sage’s tax returns as part of an intimidation campaign?

The Hill reports big names in Congress are starting to say Buffett “needs to reveal his finances if his views on tax rates are going to serve as the basis for Obama administration policy.” NRSC chair John Cornyn (TX), who took the call to Twitter Thursday, explained to ABC News that knowing how Buffett makes his money could change the way people view the so-called “Buffett Rule” that President Obama …

What a great idea. From now on whenever a politican says anything about the rich, the rich have to pony up records to back up what the politicians is saying. I’m all for that. When Eric Cantor says we can’t tax rich people or corporations because they are the job creators, I’d love to see all their raw data on finances, taxes, and workforce changes so that experts can sift through them and see if Cantor’s claim holds water. But on Buffett, well, here’s the hilarious thing: these clueless wingnut idiots apparently didn’t bother to make the most cursory check before firing off their not-so-veiled threat:

Warren Buffett has already made his 2010 tax return public. Appearing on Charlie Rose last month, the billionaire investor brought his tax return along to prove his point about the Buffett Rule, which has become the centerpiece of President Obama’s new plan to raise taxes on the super-rich.

Now this puts the Teaparty in a bind. Buffett is a self-made billionaire and therefore pretty close to a deity in the micro-brains of the extreme right. They’ve already taken a big chance by possibly angering one of their demigods. Do they now apologize at the altar of Wealth, or engage in the usual goal post hyper-drive and demand more documents while proclaiming the ones made public a forgery?

Scientists have reportedly clocked a subatomic particle going faster than the speed of light in a vacuum and that’s something that, according to observation and theory, should not be possible. The report originated at CERN:

Scientists at the world’s largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That’s something that according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity – the famous E (equals) mc2 equation – just doesn’t happen. “The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research …

That’s a healthy, skeptical attitude and my amateur guess, for what it’s worth, is this will turn out to be a false reading. Neutrinos are exceedingly difficult to detect. They’re teeny-tiny, like electrons, but have no charge and rarely interact with ordinary matter. There are scads of neutrinos streaming through your body right now and you’re none the worse for it.

Given how famously difficult neutrinos are to detect, it seems more likely that the error is not in the Theory of Relativity — the body of knowledge underlying all of macro space-time — but on the method[s] used to measure the transit time of the ghostly particles. Still, scientists will try to replicate the results and determine if the effect is legitimate or an artifact of observation.

Astrophysicists are examining the possibility for a rather dramatic explanation for the enigmatic Dark Matter thought to comprise a significant fraction of the mass of the universe. While the leading idea for Dark Matter is a WIMP – Weakly Interacting Massive Particle – the particles being sought here make WIMPS look like sissy’s:

These collisions would not destroy the black hole or the star. Although their characteristics are uncertain, Kesden and Hanasoge’s simulations posit that primordial black holes could have masses of 1018 kilograms (a million trillion kilograms, about the mass of a largish asteroid), which is too small to destroy a star as they pass through. “The black hole is like a very dense bullet passing through the Sun, which is like a fluffy feather pillow,” says Kesden.

Would a black hole with the mass of a mountain moving through the earth (Or a human body) be noticeable? I have no idea, but it sure seems like it should.

Posting may be a bit light most of today as I deal with non blog chores. And pain, lots and lots of pain, from the grand injury two weeks ago. But here’s a few interesting science-y stories and I’ll probably throw a few more in over the course of the day:

• Astronomers are said to be pleading for the James Webb Telescope to be funded. Good luck with that given that some politicians are insisting we can’t even afford disaster relief.
• A nearly priceless moonrock that was missing for decades has turned up, mixed in with other articles and papers left behind by Bill Clinton when he left the governor’s office in 1980. Cue conspiracy moon landing conspiracy theorists, or can this be tied to Obama’s Kenyan birthplace somehow?
• Speaking or Things From Spaaaace … a NASA satellite is expected to burn in around Friday afternoon, but no one knows where or exactly when. But a chunk of it would be worth some dough. Good luck space junk hunters!
• Lastly, on a depressing note, the fossil fuel indsutry and the forces of ignorance they have assembled are winning:
  

  Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, jumped 45% between 1990 and 2010, and reached an all-time high of 33 billion tons last year, the European Commission reports.

A controversial execution has been postponed in the state of Georgia this evening. Troy Davis has narrowly escaped death just a few minutes ago while courts consider issuing a formal stay. But his immediate fate is still in doubt, the execution could reportedly move ahead at anytime:

The last-minute decision caused confusion outside the prison in Jackson, Georgia, where family, supporters and civil rights campaigners broke into celebration as they believed the court had granted Davis a stay of execution. But it quickly emerged that the delay was only temporary, while the justices considered whether to issue a stay.

The case has become a lightning rod for capital punishment for several reasons. Eye witnesses have recanted, most of the jury which convicted Davis has since said they would not have asked for the death penalty had they known facts now in evidence.

My own opinion is there are situations where the death penalty is appropriate, or at least defensible. The idea the state would strap someone down and kill them is a little creepy, it harkens back to a more barbaric time not all that long ago, and I sympathize with those who object on purely moral grounds. Nevertheless, I could be persuaded to make exceptions. If the suspect confesses and provides information that only he or she would know, like Ted Bundy for example, I could support it. So in principle maybe I support the death penalty. But not as as its practiced in the real world. The flaws in the criminal justice system are simply too well documented, too frequent, and too great.

Eyewitnesses and police make honest mistakes, the career benefits for DAs who clear cases or the political ramifications for governors can cloud judgement. We know sometimes corruption or negligence can result in conviction of the innocent. We see this over and over again in cases big and small. The idea that it could never happen in a death penalty case because the safeguards are perfect is ridiculous. Considering the finality of death, there’s no way I could go along with capital punishment in the vast majority of cases, and given the stakes that just seems like it ought to be a no brainer for anyone.

A new study from Baylor University clarifies something that’s been bothering me for a while: how is it that supposedly rational people are not only able to ignore or deny recent history when it comes to the disastrous conservative policies that destroyed the economy, but insist the only way to reverse the widespread failures they produced is to implement them again? It’s the cliché definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Now we have a hint: for many wingnuts it’s part of their religion:

About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith … “When Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann say ‘God blesses us, God watches us, God helps us,’ religious conservatives get the shorthand. They see ‘government’ as a profane object — a word that is used to signal working against God’s plan for the United States. To argue against this is to argue with their religion.”

One has to admire the flexibility of the extreme right-wing godbots. For staunch absolutists their vision of morality and ethical behavior is as malleable as warm cheese. Not long ago merely criticizing the government for any reason was tantamount to insulting the troops. Harsh criticism directed at senior cabinet officials was considered an act of treason against the Commander-in-Chief in a time of war. In just two years this same group has been retrained to hate the government and believe God himself is an enemy of big government, taxes on the rich, and any kind of regulation — at the federal level only of course.