Science: Conservatives are stupid

Synchronicity is fun.

As I compose this, the top three most-viewed Yahoo! News stories right now are:

“Low IQ and Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice”

“President Obama, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Share Tense Tarmac Moment”

“Arizona Gov. Brewer Gets Book Critique from Obama”

The first article begins thusly:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience. …

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact [with groups outside of one’s own] reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science….*

This is the image that Yahoo! News used with both pieces on Repugnican Tea Party Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s recent obviously orchestrated tiff with President Barack Obama on her home turf:

Associated Press photo

The caption for this news photo reads:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer points during an intense conversation with President Barack Obama after he arrived at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, in Mesa, Arizona. Asked moments later what the conversation was about, Brewer, a Republican, said: “He was a little disturbed about my book.” Brewer recently published a book, Scorpions for Breakfast, something of a memoir of her years growing up and defends her signing of Arizona’s controversial law cracking down on illegal immigrants, which Obama opposes. Obama was objecting to Brewer’s description of a meeting he and Brewer had at the White House, where she described Obama as lecturing her.

Indeed, who is this uppity Negro to be lecturing the white governor of Arizona?

Why Obama agrees to meet with Brewer at all escapes me, since she only uses any meeting with him as future campaign material — and now, to boost her book sales — by supposedly showing her fellow white supremacists in Arizona, the South Africa of the Southwest, how she so bravely stood up to the black president. (Except that he isn’t the legitimate president, right?)

To those Arizonans who believe that Jan Brewer — who appeared to be drunk or otherwise intoxicated or otherwise significantly neurologically impaired during her first and only gubernatorial debate in 2010 (after her incredibly horrible first debate performance she refused to participate in any more debates) — is a great stateswoman, perhaps she does look like some hot shit openly publicly disrespecting President Barack Obama.

To those of us who don’t suffer from intellectual deficiency — and who thus aren’t conservative — however, Jan Brewer looks like what she is: an old, racist, wingnutty hag, a stupid, braying jackass.

I’ve always disliked the term “conservative,” because the vast majority of conservatives are just abject fucking morons. “Conservativism” sounds like a legitimate political school of thought, when, in fact, more often than not it indicates severe intellectual deficiency.

I look forward to the developing science on this topic. (Of course, the wingnuts eschew science — science and facts have a well-known liberal bias, you know — so their feelings shouldn’t be hurt that much.)

—

*The LiveScience article is worth reading in full, and the money shot of the article, in my book, is the study’s psychologist’s essential assertion that to associate with groups that are different from one’s own is so mentally taxing that dipshits don’t even bother. This would, I suppose, explain the homogeneity of the red states and the red regions within the purplish and blue states: the dipshits huddle together in their ignorance and fear.

The Conversation (starring Scott Walker and ‘David Koch’)

Reuters photo

Power-drunk Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker gives what he called a “fireside chat” the night before a damning recording of him believing that he was speaking on the telephone with his billionaire campaign contributor David Koch was released. The recorded 20-minute phone conversation must be listened to to be believed (and you can listen to it here). The conversation is a window into Walker’s soul.

Not long after I wrote today about how a “Tea Party” ringleader of the Sacramento area had planned to plant “Tea Party” traitors disguised as labor-union members in last night’s pro-Wisconsin-labor gathering here in Sacramento at the California state Capitol in order to paint labor-union members in a blatantly false light, I read the news that Wisconsin Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker in a recently recorded telephone conversation told a left-wing website editor whom he had thought was his billionaire sugar daddy David Koch that he and his team also had considered doing the same in Madison, Wisconsin.

WTF?

The good news is that the “Tea Party” traitors are so unpopular right now that they’re resorting to underhanded tactics like this. I mean, if your position is strong, you don’t have to resort to dishonorably dishonest shit like this — stupid shit, too, shit that drunken frat boys would come up with. (Which, of course, is what the power-drunk wingnuts like Walker, this supposed “new generation” of Repugnican governors — and the literal drunkards, like John Boehner — are like.)

Scotty Walker is one wingnutty dipshit, and he cannot simply dismiss the revelations that were made public by the release of his recorded 20-minute telephone conversation with a man whom he thought was billionaire Koch.

In the recording, among other things, Walker also:

• States that he supports withholding the absconded 14 Democratic Wisconsin state senators’ paychecks and locking the paychecks in their desks on the floor of the state Senate in order to cause hardship for/pressure on the senators
• States that he supports pursuing felony charges against the absconded Democratic senators if labor unions have contributed to their food or lodging “or anything like that” while they have been out of state; “the attorney general’s office is looking into [this] for us,” he reports, adding, “Each day we crank up a little bit more pressure.”
• States that he plans to issue soon between 5,000 and 6,000 state-worker “at-risk” (for lay0ff) notices in order to put political pressure on his Democratic opposition (as state workers were just political pawns for Repugnican former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, they are the same to Walker, quite apparently)
• States that he is considering trying to lure the absconded Democratic state senators back to the state’s Capitol on false pretenses and then holding the labor-union-killing vote unbeknownst to them
• Relishes what he claims is the phenomenon of “stereotypical blue-collar worker type[s]” from the private sector going on the record against their unionized public-sector counterparts
• Talks about his plan to conduct a “fireside chat,” as though he were some great statesman (and, of course, the original “fireside chats” were conducted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose progressive politics were diametrically opposed to Walker’s backasswards, wingnutty politics)
• Very apparently compares himself to Ronald Reagan, whom he idolizes, and states that he admires Reagan’s firing of air-traffic controllers 30 years ago, which he calls “the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism,” because that supposedly showed the then-Soviets and the Communists that “Ronald Reagan wasn’t a pushover” — and refers to introducing his labor-union-crushing legislation as “drop[ping] the bomb” and “[changing] the course of history”
• Agrees to accept a trip to California sponsored by the faux Koch in return for his successful destruction (or at least crippling) of Wisconsin’s labor unions (“That would be outstanding,” he responds to the offer)

While Walker does indicate in the telephone conversation that his largest concern is the state’s budget and “doing the just and right thing” — as well as “getting our freedom back,” also, of course (cue screeching bald eagle!) — he also agrees with the fake Koch’s assertion that Wisconsin is “the first domino” and he proclaims, “This is our moment.” Which certainly points to a top objective of union-busting to me, as does his overall bravado and his interesting word choice throughout the recorded conversation.

But perhaps the most damaging aspects of the recorded phone conversation heard ’round the world are that (1) Walker was stupid enough to have the rather lengthy phone conversation with an impersonator in the first place — this raises significant questions about his intelligence and his judgment — and (2) that the phone conversation begins with the fake David Koch asking Walker to ask for an update on the situation in Wisconsin, and Walker dutifully gives him a long update like he is Darth Vader reporting to the Emperor.

After the recorded phone call’s wide release, it would be very difficult for Walker to deny that he answers to his big campaign contributors more than he does to the people of the state of Wisconsin — and that far above what’s best for the most number of people in the state of Wisconsin, the cocky-without-cause Scott Walker puts his own bald political ambitions — even casting himself as the next Ronald Fucking Reagan.

Wingnuts: Pollution is FUNNY!

At least ever since George W. Bush stole office in late 2000, right-wing fucktardation increasingly has come as less and less of a surprise to me, but still I am able to be surprised occasionally by the abject retards on the right.

Reportedly, the  Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences in Los Angeles, named after environmentalists Rachel Carson and Al Gore and set to open its doors next week, was built over several industrial storage tanks containing toxins that might pose a danger to the school. A nearby gas station also might pose environmental risks to the school.

The reaction of the right to this news?

Celebration.

“As construction crews worked through the weekend to replace the polluted soil [which scientists had said should make the school safe], the irony of [Al] Gore’s name sitting atop a deemed toxic site has proved irresistible to the right,” reports Politico, quoting one wingnut as having crowed, “You really can’t make this stuff up. As such, it’s quite fitting a school be named after these two radical environmentalists that could end up harming the very students that attend it.”

So the same bunch of assbites who support polluting corporations — it’s always been corporate profits over people and profits over the environment to the wingnuts — are relishing the fact that a school has been built over and near possibly harmful corporate waste because this will allow them to continue to poke fun at Al Gore.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

The punch line of this “joke” is that the right wing wants to deliver to us is a world that looks like something out of the uber-bleak film “The Road.” Or “WALL-E,” maybe.

But they’re not traitors or anything for wishing our continued environmental degradation so that they can, in their sick and twisted minds, score some political Brownie points.

Really — the fact that it’s hard to find an environmentally safe place on which to build a school is an occasion for laughter. And leading the chorus of laughter are those who support corporate pollution in the first place.

I fear not that our empire is dying, but that it’s already dead and rotting.

Global-warming deniers, go to hell

Reuters image (caption here)

Wingnuts actually assert that the melting polar ice cap is normal. We should feed the global-warming deniers to the dying polar bears.

While eating lunch with a friend today (Indian buffet — mmmmm) I overheard a stupid white male baby-boomer asshole (redundant) at the next table loudly pontificating that global warming is a hoax and that climate-change guru Al Gore has a low IQ.

When I read the weather reports on The Sacramento Bee’s website, sacbee.com, there are always fucktards who leave comments to the effect that if we’re having bel0w-average temperatures, then global warming must be bullshit. (I once responded that that’s like saying that a homeless person who suddenly is given a $100 bill no longer is poor; no, I pointed out, that person has had a spike in income, to be sure, but he or she is still quite mired in poverty.)

I often can’t tell if people are really so fucking stupid as to argue that a cooler-than-usual day means that climate change is crap or if they’re just pushing their right-wing agenda.

It is true that Sacramento has had a cooler-than-usual summer thus far. (I still recall the scorching July of 2006, so I’m grateful for our current cooler weather.) However, other parts of the nation have had hotter-than-normal temperatures this summer, and scientists say that, overall, the planet is heating up.

Reports The Associated Press today:

Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming, one day after President Barack Obama renewed his call for climate legislation.

“A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record,” the annual State of the Climate report declares.

Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, the report said its analysis of 10 indicators that are “clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable.”

Concern about rising temperatures has been growing in recent years as atmospheric scientists report rising temperatures associated with greenhouse gases released into the air by industrial and other human processes. At the same time, some skeptics have questioned the conclusions.

The new report, the 20th in a series, focuses only on global warming and does not specify a cause.

“The evidence in this report would say unequivocally yes, there is no doubt,” that the Earth is warming, said Tom Karl, the transitional director of the planned NOAA Climate Service.

Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at the National Climatic Data Center, noted that the 1980s was the warmest decade up to that point, but each year in the 1990s was warmer than the ’80s average…. But each year in the 2000s has been warmer than the ’90s average, so the first 10 years of the 2000s is now the warmest decade on record.

The new report noted that continuing warming will threaten coastal cities, infrastructure, water supply, health and agriculture.

“At first glance, the amount of increase each decade — about a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit — may seem small,” the report said. “But,” it adds, “the temperature increase of about 1 degree Fahrenheit experienced during the past 50 years has already altered the planet. Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying and heat waves are becoming more common and more intense.”

Last month was the warmest June on record and this year has had the warmest average temperature for January-June since record keeping began, NOAA reported last week….

So, whose word am I going to take? That of stupid white men who believe that Glenn Beck is the second coming of Christ, that Sarah Palin-Quayle is presidential material, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that Faux “News” is real news – or the scientists?

The reason that the right wing denies climate change is obvious: the Repugnican Tea Party supports the ultra-rich, no matter how much they threaten the continued existence of the planet itself – to criticize oil-spill giant British Petroleum is “un-American,” you know, according to Repugnican Tea Party candidate Rand Paul — and decreasing pollution as usual cuts into short-term profits, which is all that the treasonous corporations care about.

The corporations fund the right-wing “news” “media,” pumping billions of dollars into the right-wing propaganda machine, inducing dumbfuck Americans who can’t think for themselves that global warming is some sinister plot.

(What, exactly, this sinister plot is supposed to accomplish I’m not sure. Most sinister plots have sinister goals.)

A traitor is one who betrays his or her nation (you know, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney taking the nation to war based upon bold-faced fucking lies for the no-bid war profiteering of BushCheneyCorp subsidiary Halliburton). What do you call someone who betrays the entire fucking planet?

I’ll work on that, but in the meantime, I think that the corpses of the global-warming deniers would make a great alternative energy source. It would be a much, much better use of them than we’re witnessing now.

Assorted shit

If they’re right, what are they worried about?

AFP photo

Arizona’s two U.S. Senators, stupid white men John McCainosaurus and John Kyl, both Repugnicans, of course, have slammed the Obama administration’s filing of a federal lawsuit against their state’s planned illegal racial profiling against Hispanics, which is set to begin July 29.  

The Repugnican Party elite predictably are whining that the Obama administration today made official its lawsuit attempting to strike down Arizona’s unconstitutional and racist anti-brown-person law.

The federal lawsuit against the South Africa of the Southwest proclaims, in part, “In our constitutional system, the federal government has pre-eminent authority to regulate immigration matters. This authority derives from the United States Constitution and numerous acts of Congress. The nation’s immigration laws reflect a careful and considered balance of national law enforcement, foreign relations, and humanitarian interests.”

Yup. That’s a little civics lesson for the fucktards of Arizona.

Of course, the white Repugnican politicians in Arizona, such as the Borg Queen governor, Jan Brewer, and presidential loser Sen. John McCainosaurus, don’t actually give a fuck about the issue of immigration nearly as much as they just want an easy political target for their upcoming elections in November, and the relatively poor and powerless Hispanics are fairly easy to sacrifice on the bloody Repugnican altar. (It was gays and lesbians whom the Repugnican Party sacrificed for the dumbfuck vote in 2004, recall; this election year it’s the Hispanics.)

Brewer and McCainosaurus and their ilk also want to get Brownie (er, whitey?) points from their white supremacist supporters for symbolically having taken on the nigger in the White House by pushing an unconstitutional, reprehensible anti-immigrant law that they knew the White House would oppose. (Fuck you. You know it’s true.)

Bottom line is, when the economy tanks, the bleating masses start beating up on immigrants. That’s what happens around the world, and that’s what’s happening here in the “melting pot.”

Of course, the Repugnican elite are all too happy to have the uneducated, skinheaded Joe the Plumbers and Dale the School Bus Drivers blame the poor and the powerless brown-skinned for the nation’s economic nosedive instead of the real culprits, the filthy rich white crooks who have bled, and continue to bleed, this nation dry.

In any event, if the white supremacist Repugnicans (I know, redundant…) of Arizona are so sure that their new little law is constitutional, why do they blast the Obama administration for challenging it in the federal court system?

Surely if they’re right, they’ll be vindicated legally.

(But they aren’t, so they won’t be.)

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 Michael Steele, anti-affirmative-action poster boy?

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Party head Michael Steele probably could have gotten away with his history gaffe, but stating that the Afghanistan war, which his party launched and wholeheartedly supports, is unwinnable, probably is the last straw for the party’s first black chairman, who is the result of affirmative action gone wrong.

On Jan. 30, 2009, I blogged:

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that the Repugnican Party no longer is racist because the Repugs just selected a black man as the chair of the Repugnican National Committee.

Uh, this is the very same political party for which a white guy who also ran for the chairmanship included on his CD promoting his campaign for the party chairmanship the songs “Barack the Magic Negro” and “The Star-Spanglish Banner.”

And because Sarah Palin-Quayle is a female, that doesn’t mean that the Repugnicans suddenly are feminists, either. (Palin-Quayle, among other things, such as being a “Christo”fascist and a global-warming denier, is anti-choice.)

The selection of Sarah “Heartbeat Away” Palin-Quayle was just a knee-jerk Repugnican response to Billary Clinton; apparently women voters were supposed to have just flocked to Repugnican John McCainosaurus in droves because Barack Obama rather than Billary had won the Democratic presidential nomination.  

Just as Palin-Quayle was only a reflexive response to Billary Clinton, so new Repugnican Party chair Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, is only a reflexive response of the Repugnican Party to the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president.

Both Steele and Palin-Quayle are stupid white men on the inside, regardless of the color of their skin and regardless of what’s between their legs.

I once heard (in person) Al Sharpton say of Condoleezza Rice (I paraphrase): “Condoleezza Rice is of my color, but she is not of my kind.”

I’m confident that Sharpton would say the same of Steele.

Steele’s selection is indicative of the Repugnican Party’s desperation, not of its sudden redemption.

I stand by that rant, and boy, have things taken a turn for Steele.

Look how hard the Repugnicans had to hunt for a black guy within their party to counter the election of Barack Obama — the best that they could do, apparently, was a former lieutenant governor.

The Repugnicans long have wanted to dump the fumbling and bumbling Steele, but he’s held on thus far.

However, his recent remarks on the war in Afghanistan — that President Barack Obama started the war, which Steele deemed a war of choice, when, in fact, it was “President” George W. Bush who started the war in Afghanistan in October 2001, before his unelected regime launched the Vietraq War in March 2003, and that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, when the Repugnican Party supports the war because the Repugnican Party supports perpetual warfare for the war profiteers and for Big Oil and other corporate cronies — should be the good excuse that the Repugnicans have been looking for to dump Steele, which they’ve been reluctant to do up to now because they didn’t want to look racist.

Look, they cynically picked Steele because they’re racist.

Clearly the man is a dipshit who wasn’t qualified for the job but who met the main job requirement that his skin isn’t white. Steele’s selection as head of the Repugnican National Committee seems to have been the result of bizarre Repugnican affirmative action — bizarre because Repugnicans historically have trashed affirmative action as being the hiring or promotion of unqualified or underqualified non-whites or women over more qualified white men.

Pundits don’t expect Steele to be booted before the November elections, however. They do, however, expect him to lose his job in January, when the chairmanship of the RNC is up for grabs again.

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Does New Orleans need a mercy killing already?

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, The Associated Press reports today that now oil from the ruptured British Petroleum well in the Gulf of Mexico — Hey, is that thing still spewing oil? We don’t hear much about that anymore because they finally fixed it, right? Right??? — is seeping into Lake Pontchartrain.

My rather modest proposal is that we just nuke the holy living fuck! out of New Orleans right now!

Put them out of their misery, you know.

Give them the final relief of knowing that probably nothing worse could happen to them after that.

Just my own rather modest proposal.

God would have torched it sooner

Before and after: A gargantuan monument of Jesus Christ in Podunk, Ohio, was felled by Zeus’ thunderbolt last night, leaving only skeletal remains.

Associated Press photos

It would be sooooo tempting to read divine intervention into the destruction by lightning of the tacky six-story monument of Jesus Christ in Ohio last night.

I mean, the fiery demise of the “touchdown Jesus” is much more symbolic than are the things that the “Christo”fascists traditionally acribe to punitive divine intervention, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and AIDS.

But God, it seems to me, would have intervened a long time ago — the monument was erected in 2004, and I can’t see God letting that God-awful thing stand for nearly that long, so I’m thinking that this is the proof that there is no God that philosophers have been searching for for centuries.

But seriously, couldn’t the $300,000 that was spent on the “touchdown Jesus” have been used for much better things, like, um, oh, I don’t know — feeding, clothing and sheltering the poor? As Jesus Christ instructed us to do?

What about the Bible’s prohibition against idolatry?

And didn’t the story of the Tower of Babel teach the “Christians” anything?

Just sayin’.

Amen.

P.S. Of course, the wingnutty church vows to rebuild the monument. Jesus Fucking Christ…

Palin-Quayle on God, guns ’n’ grizzlies

Associated Press and Reuters photos

The 46-year-old Sarah Palin-Quayle pontificates in front of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention yesterday just before its cross-burning ceremony. Palin-Quayle’s juvenile, Valley-girl-like word choice, intonation and body language should come as no surprise, given that her main means of political communication is Twitter.

I would say that the 2008 presidential election never ended for Repugnican Sarah Palin-Quayle, who refuses to go the fuck away, but it’s more accurate, I think, to say that her 1984 beauty pageant never ended for her. Indeed, the former Miss Alaska pageant contestant (she lost that contest, too) reminds me of a former Miss California Carrie Prejean —

— who has gone on to become a right-wing politician two decades from now, replete with the cross pendants —

Associated Press photo

— that both Palin-Quayle and Prejean prominently publicly display as proof of their favor with God and Jesus.

Palin-Quayle is in the news yet again, telling the KKK-like National Rifle Association yesterday that surely President Barack Obama would ban guns if he could, and that it’s up to God’s warriors like she and the members of the NRA to prevent that God-awful scenario from happening.

Um, Jesus Christ probably would ban guns, but that’s another blog post…

Actually, Obama The Great Centrist never would ban guns* — he’s way too pussy to do anything radical — but the message that “President Sambo is a-gonna take away yer guns!” resonates well with the white-supremacist crowd that Grand Dragoness Palin-Quayle was addressing yesterday.

Probably even more ludicrous, though, than Palin-Quayle’s lie that the black president is after whitey’s arsenals is her assertion that she also made yesterday at another appearance that “mama grizzlies” — pissed-off Repugnican and other right-wing women, especially mothers, I’m guessing she means by “mama grizzlies” — are going to “rise up” and “take this country back.”

Aside from the fact that there aren’t enough far-right-wing women to hold a fucking Tupperware party, much less (much more?) take over the nation, I like the “mama grizzly” rhetoric, because this is what Palin-Quayle actually thinks should be done with grizzlies:

Yes, that is a photo of the wildlife-lovin’ Palin-Quayle in the governor’s office when she was governor of the Podunk State of the Great White North.

As Palin-Quayle is against women’s right to choose what to do with their own uteri, and supports the right wing’s subjugation of women in general, it is appropriate that she’s now blathering about her support of “mama grizzlies” when we have photographic evidence of the fact that she likes to pal around with grizzlies that have been slaughtered.

Indeed, like Cruella de Vil loved her Dalmation puppies, planning to make them into fur coats, Palin-Quayle thinks that mama grizzlies make great sofa covers.

You betcha.

P.S. Here’s a photo of Chatty Cathy Palin-Quayle at yet another event on Wednesday. I love the subtlety, don’t you?

Associated Press photo

*Indeed, The Associated Press notes:

Gun enthusiasts [that’s a nice, “professional” way of saying “gun nuts”] have trumpeted fears that their rights would erode under a Democrat-led White House and Congress, but President Barack Obama has largely been silent on issues such as reviving an assault weapons ban or strengthening background checks at gun shows. Obama also signed a law allowing people to carry loaded guns in national parks.