How do you know when Republicans feel they are in danger in the coming election?  When they provide most of the funds to get a Green Party candidate on the ballot in the hopes it will siphon votes from their Democrat competitor.  “Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli, making his first bid for statewide elective office [in Pennsylvania], acknowledged Monday that Republican contributors probably supplied most of the $100,000 that he said he spent gathering signatures to qualify for the Nov. 7 ballot.”  Underhanded?  You decide.

You’ve got to check out this video of a massive meteorite collision.  It’s a Japanese computer animation.  There are plenty of scientific problems with the video, such as lava on the meteor’s surface, an apparent lack of seismic devastation preceding the ejecta cloud, and lack of significant rebound material thrown into space.  Despite that, the video is equally fascinating and disturbing.  Oh, and the music is very cool.  [via Phil Plait]

Tangled Bank #59 is online with the best of the week’s science blogging.

Gosh, we’re setting such a fine example.  “Evidence collected on the deaths of 24 Iraqis in Haditha supports accusations that U.S. Marines deliberately shot the civilians, including unarmed women and children, a Pentagon official said Wednesday.”  It’s unfortunate that this is only one of several such cases from Iraq where evidence against U.S. soldiers is damning.  What has Bush done to our military…

The avian influenza news coming from Thailand is very bad indeed.  The entire nation has been declared an epidemic control area, 300,000 chickens at 78 farms have already been culled with a lot more looking suspicious, there are between 45 and 113 people currently suspected as being infected, 765 people are being monitored due to likely exposure and possible infection, at least six people are hospitalized with high fevers and related symptoms, and “[j]ust over the border, in Laos [a country lacking ‘the awareness or infrastructure’ to handle related problems], there is a new confirmed outbreak in poultry.”

Remember the whack creationists received in Dover, PA?  (I also mentioned this here as well.)  They tried slithering their superstitious nonsense into the school curriculum in Kansas, a battle between science and religion that has just ended.  No more metaphysical drivel masqueraded as science is what voters just made clear.  “Conservative Republicans who pushed anti-evolution standards back into Kansas schools last year have lost control of the state Board of Education once again.”  Describing evolution as “an age-old fairy tale” and “a nice bedtime story” that lacked any scientific support, anti-science theocrats were dealt a 4-seat loss on the board, a move which perfectly reversed their majority and handed education back to those who believe it should be factual instead of fictional.

Before you get your conspiracy-theory knickers in a twist, we’re not talking about that kind of lying.  But we are talking about significant lies nonetheless.  To wit:

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth…. It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

And what kind of lies are we talking about?  Well, they seem pretty major — and intentionally deceptive — to me.

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, got it right: “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described.”  And then: “[The evidence] told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

Sounds a lot like the Katrina response, doesn’t it?  They tell us what should have happened as though it did happen, yet the facts bear out a completely different scenario.  Ah, progress…

As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the last two thousand years by authors even of second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe would require a fanatacized mind that had entirely lost its power of judgement. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengance attributed to God in the Old Testament and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh hour and the episodes of Mary Magdalen and the woman taken in adultry. Historical investigations have revealed to us the origin and growth of the Bible. We know that by this name we designate a collection of writings as radically unlike in origin, character and contents, as if the Nibelungen Lied, Mirabeu’s speeches, Heine’s love poems and a manual of zoology had been printed and mixed up promiscuously, and then bound into one volume. We find collected in this book the superstitious beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, with indistinct echoes of Indian and Persian fables, mistaken imitations of Egyptian theories and customs, historical chronicles as dry as they are unreliable, and miscellaneous poems, amatory, human and Jewish-national, which are rarely distinguished by beauties of the highest order, but frequently by superfluity of expression, bad taste, and genuine Oriental sensuality.

— Max Nordau

I saw a news report last evening about the wheat and corn harvests (among others) in Texas.  Because of the extreme drought in our area, now rated as the worst possible, farmers have been devastated and are losing their crops to a degree not seen since the Dust Bowl in the early- to mid-1930s.  Corn is rotting on the stalk and literally crumbles when handled.  Wheat and other grains have simply withered in the ground and produced a tiny fraction of their normal yields, and what has been salvaged is not usable for humans.  This is the second year in a row for this kind of destruction, and many farmers are accruing debt that threatens to overwhelm them and put them out of business.

The likely result of this will be the need to import significant amounts of these crops in order to feed the American people.  Prices will go up.  Supplies will go down.  People will lose their livelihoods.

Add to that the extreme fire danger we have in the state.  Because the drought has been ongoing for two years already and shows no signs of abating, and because temperatures continue to be above normal, most of the state is a tinderbox waiting to be ignited.  Of course, some areas are already burning.

There is currently no serious hope for rain (wee chances here and there don’t help even if precipitation occurs).  We are significantly more than two feet (more than half a meter) behind on rainfall for the past two years.  Water restrictions are ubiquitous and range from stage 1 (e.g., no watering during the day) to stage 5 (e.g., no outside water use at all [including washing of cars], no new swimming pools, no landscaping, no refilling of swimming pools).  It would seem the situation will only get worse.  There are places where water is being turned off for those violating the restrictions because there is no room for error in water rationing.

And August is typically the hottest month…

[Update]: See my correction on Dallas’ water restrictions in this comment.  Thanks to xocobra for mentioning that.