Update 8 AM EDT: Tropical Storm Franklin is born. At this time the system is forecast to pose no threat to land.

Update 5 PM CDT: The NHC now classifies the system shown in the upper left as tropical depression 6. With winds of 35 mph is is only 4 mph away from the 39 mph threshold required to earn the name Tropical Storm Franklin.

Update 3 PM CDT: The National Hurricane Center has upgraded the disturbance at the upper left to a 60% chance of tropical cyclone formation over the next 24 hours. The next two Atlantic storm names in the 2011 list are Franklin and Gert.

Hurricane season officially began weeks ago, but Mother Nature is now delivering. The image above from the National Weather Service shows no less than four disturbance with the indicted possibility of developing into tropical cyclones. The bottom right two represent classic Cape Verde storm systems capable of producing major hurricanes which could threaten the US and the Caribbean.

I worry most about my friends in and around DC. It’s a huge population center and the last time an organized storm clocked the region was Hurricane Isabel. The storm reached category 5 at one point, but weakened and struck the coast of North Carolina as a category 2 on Sep 18. Even so Isabel was the costliest and deadliest storm of the 2003 season. After the record breaking monsters of the 2004 and 2005 seasons, and the catastrophe of Katrina, residents elsewhere may have become complacent about less powerful storms. This is a mistake.

I sat through half a dozen moderate hurricanes a few years ago in Florida including Jeanne, Francis, and Wilma. The latter at one point was the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin, although it weakened considerably before crossing the Florida peninsula and hitting my town. Cat 2 storms are nothing to take lightly. It’s loud! The wind screams and growls, your house will sound like it’s sitting on a driving range, staccato rapid fire as debris smacks in, punctuated by regular bangs shaking the place like a cannon shot as larger chunks crash in. The walls and ceiling breathe, there is no power, no Internet, no phone, no water. Windows are boarded up; you sit in sweltering, humid darkness listening to pieces of house peel off with absolutely nothing to do but contemplate the state of your homeowner’s insurance.

Update from Mr Upright in comments:

I sat through Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma as well (in Jupter, FL). That year I promised my wife I’d start looking for jobs elsewhere. It’s not that we couldn’t handle the storms. We had impressive damage, but fared better than many. It’s because those were *moderate* storms. I didn’t want to be around for an Andrew.

The aftermath is even worse, days without basic utilities, eating out of cans, roads tricky or impassable, forget about showers, you can’t flush the toilet without a bucket of water (So, fill up your bathtub). I remember at one point surveying my backyard after Francis and noticing a frayed powerline drooping off a leaning pole and snaking through the battered yard. It looped right into a giant puddle … which I then noticed with alarm was the same one I happened to be standing in, both barefeet planted solidly in mud. If that line had been live I probably wouldn’t be.

Point being, even a so-called minor storm is potentially dangerous and guaranteed miserable. Should a hurricane take a bead on you this year, it’s best to get the hell out-of-town. If you don’t have someplace inland to go for a few days, make sure you have a good week’s worth of food and water, batteries for the lights, and whatever medicine you might need. And, if it’s a category 3 or higher, don’t kid yourself, these things can kill you a bunch of different ways. Either leave or head for the local storm shelter.

Like millions of people I’ve paid plenty into Social Security and Medicare. A back of the envelope calculation gives a figure of well over $100,000 into Social Security and tens of thousands into Medicare. I’ve been paying in since 1976 right up until today; insurance actuaries could figure out the present value of that investment to the penny. Best I can do is a rough estimate of the present value — the lump sum of money required now to secure those benefits in the future if I used a commercial insurance company — and that works out to around a quarter of a million dollars.

You know, if someone really wanted to compromise that, the best way to do it would be to offer a cash buyout, maybe 50 cents on the dollar. Plenty of cash strapped Americans would have no choice but to take it. But for some bizzare reason certain politicians and pundits seem to think we’re raring to hand it over for absolutely nothing in return.

Point being, that’s a nice chunk of change! And I’m counting on it, because at the half century mark I’m way too old to start over again. But I rarely if ever hear anyone mention the cold hard cash value that millions of folks like myself have committed to these programs. Worse, no one ever points out that the only way reducing benefits helps the budget deficit — short of eliminating the programs when they stop running a surplus — would be if we cut expenses but keep charging employees and/or employers full boat. I’d like to see the poor sonofbitch who runs on that idea.

When I brought this up to a Teaparty friend the other day, who like all the others oddly swears they were the one in a thousand who objected to Bush’s profligate deficit expansion, her response was, “That’s what you get for trusting the government”. But it’s not the government who’s trying to screw me out of my bought and paid for annuity and irreplacable healthcare, it’s almost entirely conservatives exemplified by the very same fucking Teaparty. And yeah, duh, I don’t trust them and that’s saying it nicely. Whenever wingnuts prattle on about the horrors of raising taxes on zillionaires to repair the trillions in damage done by Republicans, I’m always reminded of that great episode of South Park where the boys download music from the Internet and a Dickensian figure takes them on a tour of what horror ensues for wealthy musicians: “Not a Big Deal?” That would work fine if adjusted for Social Security and Medicare: ‘If employees insist on getting the benefits they paid for fair and square, David Koch might be forced to use a personal jet with no remote for the surround sound system!’

Bottom line, my vote is a pretty simple calculation: I’ll vote for whomever preserves my benefits the best (At present it happens to coinincide with the political ideology that most values science and reality which is sweet icing on the cake). If someone wants to steal my money to pay for dumbass wars and tax cuts that didn’t work, I’ll vote against them in a heartbeat. And if the choice is between the lesser of two evils, that’s an easy call for me. It ought to be an easy call for anyone.

The Texas Observer has several rather creepy articles out on soon-to-be Presidential contender and current Gov Rick Perry. One is called A Wingnut & A Prayer:

On July 17, Apostle Tom Schlueter, the leader of the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, told his Arlington congregation that: “He’s [Satan is] going to go after us who are the army okay? Matter of fact that was interesting because the article that was written, it said Gov. Perry and his army of God and I thought, ‘That’s interesting, they got that right.”

I’ve heard of The Family, I’ve heard of the Moonies, but I’ve never heard of the New Apostolic third-awakening Movement prophets deal. Rachel Maddow had a great segment on this last night — it gets quite surreal about 3 minutes in — introducing the latest creepy right-wing nut jobs posing as religious authorities coming soon to a ballot box near you. The scary thing? I think they really believe this shit:

I got this image from Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog. Doesn’t that look like the Deathstar floating over a soon-to-be-obliterated world?

It’s actually the largest satellite of lovely ringed Saturn, called Titan, with the much smaller moon Tethys floating high in the foreground.

Just like the earth, the sun has north and south magnetic poles. And just as the earth’s poles flip every now and then, the sun also undergoes regular magnetic reversals. But whereas the earth’s cycle takes thousands of years to complete, the solar magnetic cycle only takes about 11 years. It happens the sun is just now stirring from its quieter phase, a sort of solar nap, which lasts two or three years and has been particularly deep this last time around. The sleeper has awakened:

The solar flare began at 3.48 am EDT and was recorded an X6.9 class on the three class scale used to measure the strength of solar flares. The recent solar flare is three times larger than the previous flare of this solar cycle — the X2.2 that occurred on Feb. 15, 2011. The weakest flares are rated C-class, medium sized flares are M-class while the strongest type of solar eruptions are rated X-class. Solar activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year sun weather cycle.

That’s a big event. It’s not coming towards us, space is big and the earth is tiny, but if it were it could mean big trouble. The last time a really large coronal mass ejection hit our planet was in 1859. The flux induced current in nascent communication systems, taking out entire telegraph networks, and created the most powerful heavenly display’s ever recorded:

From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale

 The first battle of the 2012 election season is being fought today, in 2011. The state of Wisconsin is holding 6 recall elections today. Up for grabs are half a dozen state senator seats, the recalls were fueled by protests and anger over Republican Gov Scott Walker’s policies. Sites to follow results, which will not begin streaming in until polls close at 8 PM Central Standard Time (CDT), can be followed here. My colleagues at Daily Kos will also be updating results as fast as they come in. @WeRWisconsin will be live tweeting on Twitter.

(AP results here, and they’re starting to move fast)

The races are, in no particular order other than district:

• District 2: Robert Cowles (GOP) 58% vs Nancy Nusbaum (Dem) 42%       93% of precincts in
• District 8: Alberta Darling (GOP)49% vs Sandra Pasch (Dem)  51%              63% of precincts in
• District 10: Sheila Harsdof (GOP) 58% vs Shelley Moore (Dem) 42%         98% of precincts in
• District 14: Luther Olson (GOP) 52% vs Fred Clarke (Dem) 48%                 100% of precincts in
• District 18: Randy Hopper (GOP) 50% vs Jessica King (Dem)  50%                 87% of precincts in
• District 32: Dan Kapanke (GOP) 45%% vs Jennifer Shilling (Dem) 55%    82% of precincts in

Update: told AP called D 18 for King. Seems awful close to be calling that one … but if so it’s a race for control between Darling and Pasch. Holy Crap!

Democrats need to win at least three of these elections against the GOP incumbant to gain control of the WI Senate. And even in the event democrats do take three senate seats, there are two recall elections against incumbant democrats in the weeks ahead. Winning three seats — in districts mostly drawn by the GOP and held by them for years — and not losing any next month is a tall, tallorder.

 

Wow, the dems took two seats and scared the pants off a couple more incumbents. I guess I’ve grown pessimistic in my old age.

Little did you know, the whole time the fossil fuel industry and their various enablers were busy as bees deflecting and denying the growing consensus of climate science, they actually had a noble motive. Just like an iceberg, the majority of this brilliant scheme was invisible to the uninformed eye.

Satire aside, this might actually work if things get really dire:

A French engineer has come up with an unusual solution for drought: Towing icebergs down from polar regions to solve chronic water shortages in the Horn of Africa, where more than 12 million people are currently living without clean water. George Mougin, 86, first proposed the idea as an engineering graduate in the early 1970s. Together with Saudi prince Muhammad al-Faisal and polar explorer Paul-Emile Victor, Mougin formed the company Iceberg Transportation International …

Satire back on: It’s all incredibly obvious, isn’t it Mandrake? Fluoridated water sapping and impurifying the precious bodily fluids of billions? Western industry loads carbon into atmosphere, global warming creates polar amplification and the cryosphere warms dramatically. The Arctic ice cap shrinks, southern ocean currents change, massive bergs approaching the size of small states calve off, Greenland glaciers quicken their relentless march to the sea adding more floating reservoirs of pure fresh, unfluoridated water. And, when the shifting climate becomes severe enough to start depriving the world’s poorest nations of that sweet elixir of life, when the rainwater is turned off and the fresh water that once drained freely into crystal clear streams from magnificent glacier and snowy mountaintop disappears, philanthropists step in and save them with the water ice finally liberated by our mighty sages of industry from their ancient icy fortresses of solitude.

And we science minded, reality-based writers and researchers and activists had to try to screw it all up by revealing the rise in global temperatures before the plan could mature. Shame on us.

And what’s more, she loves me (Warning, Politico link ahead):

Rick Perry intends to use a speech in South Carolina on Saturday to make clear that he’s running for president, POLITICO has learned. According to two sources familiar with the plan, the Texas governor will remove any doubt about his White House intentions during his appearance at a RedState conference in Charleston. It’s uncertain whether Saturday will mark a formal declaration …

Well of course it’s not the announcement. This is the announcement that an announcement may be coming. The next announcement will announce the date of the announcement, the announcement after that will confirm or postpone the announcement date. This is how things are done politically these days. It gets maximum press and maximum contributions.

NASA just completed awarding 30 contracts for cutting edge and, in some cases, risky research projects. NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, handed out the $100,000 grants for visionary proposals covering everything from power systems to the growing problem of debris in space:

The winning proposals were chosen from a field of hundreds based on their technical merit and potential impact, as well as their scientific team and cost estimates. “The ones being selected today really were the cream of the crop,” said Jay Falker, NIAC program executive. He said they involved new concepts that hadn’t been investigated before by NASA.

I think one of the coolest is the 3-D “printer” concept:

3-D printers that could crank out parts for spacecraft and space stations – from wrenches to screws – all while in orbit is becoming one step closer to reality. A company called Made in Space has completed a successful testing period of two 3-D printers on multiple NASA flights, with a scaled-down wrench becoming the first-ever tool printed in partial zero gravity.

We had a strange, strange problem here at FreeThoughtBlogs over the last day and a half. The spirit of a dead site rose again to haunt our new server. I believe Blogfather Ed has exorcised most of the poltergeists from our virtual home now. Remaining spectres could cause posting to be a bit light today and tomorrow. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. 

 

And now for a quick test post, from the always delightful Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:

Bachmann, who apparently wasn’t kidding, believes raising the debt ceiling — i.e., authorizing the Treasury to pay our bills — caused the downgrade. She also doesn’t understand what a “blank check” is — how can it be blank and be worth $2.4 trillion? — or the effect it had on the process. The fact is, nothing contributed more to the downgrade than the approach adopted by Michele Bachmann and people who share her truly ridiculous worldview.

It’s funny, it’s witty, and it’s true. One can envision Bachmann and her willfully ignorant ilk saying thewill soon speak of the 5000 countless lives lost in Obama’s Iraq adventure.