I’ve noticed some peculiar bad craziness coming from a couple of the paragons of the right wing in the United States. It’s been endemic with a lot of these loons for some time now, but this week it’s taken a more apocalyptic turn. I’ll cite two examples, Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck.

First, Matt Drudge, who tweeted these cryptic tweets this week:

Do you get the feeling God is no longer watching over America?

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) June 11, 2013

WE ARE EXPERIENCING A SHIT-STORM OF UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) June 13, 2013

After those freaky tweets, he gives some sage advice to the “survivors.” What the survivors survive? It’s wholly ambiguous. Unless it’s something religious, which it probably is.

Survivors need to: Raise your spirituality. Raise your integrity. Raise your nutrition. Raise your physical health. Raise your consciousness

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) June 13, 2013

And today, Glenn Beck went Full Metal World End on his radio show. He’s flying his fundamentalist flag real high in this clip:

Youtube Video

Clip courtesy of Right Wing Watch.

Bad craziness, indeed.

Here’s a disturbing story out of Josephine County, OR. A woman calls 911 to report that her abusive ex is trying to break in to her house to hurt her. 911 dispatcher says “Sorry, no cops, can’t afford…”

seattle.cbslocal.com

“Uh, I don’t have anybody to send out there,” the 911 dispatcher told the woman. “You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”

The woman told the dispatcher that Bellah previously attacked her and left her hospitalized a few weeks prior to the latest incident. The dispatcher stayed on the phone with the woman for more than 10 minutes before the sexual assault took place.

“Once again it’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any law enforcement out there,” the dispatcher said, according to Oregon Public Radio.

The woman responded: “Yeah, it doesn’t matter, if he gets in the house I’m done.”

From the CBS News Affiliate in Denver:

denver.cbslocal.com

DENVER (CBS4) – One time presidential candidate and Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo says he’s backing out of a promise to smoke marijuana.

The promise involved a documentary where he was caught on camera saying he’d smoke pot if Amendment 64 passed in Colorado.

Tancredo supported the amendment because he thought the marijuana prohibition policy was ineffective. He said he’s backing off the bet because he doesn’t want to set a bad example to his grandchildren.

My respect for this man was going to increase a good lot if he made good on the bet. Now? He’s still a weasel politician who has it out for anyone not white and wealthy. His record as a politician speaks for itself, he’s a hateful little man.

Furthermore, he could have set and example for his grandchildren by teaching them that cannabis consumption is for adults and that adults can responsibly consume the stuff and not turn into amoral scuzzballs.

Heard about the sad news tonight when I was driving home from work.

rollingstone.com

This is probably one of my favorite songs that he sang, just devastatingly beautiful. The Mothers of Invention - Anything featuring Ray Collins on lead vocals: Youtube Video

RIP Ray Collins

theatlantic.com

Conor Friedersdorf from The Atlantic reports from Aspen:

In his Wednesday talk, [world renowned mountaineer David] Breashears predicted that the images he’s producing will have a huge impact on the next generation and its attitudes toward climate change. “The data doesn’t resonate. There is no imagery that corresponds to what we see in the charts,” he said. But detailed, high resolution imagery of faraway glaciers and the ways that they’re losing ice over time?

He believes they’ll prove uniquely persuasive.

Check out the pictures and judge for yourself. George Mallory took the upper photograph, 91 years ago. David Breashears took the lower photograph from the exact same location, in 2009.

Related: littlegreenfootballs.com

wunderground.com

This doesn’t bode well for teleskiguy and his friends. You see, I don’t want the world turning into an uninhabitable desert wasteland. I want snow to ski on! But, as Jeff Masters reports:

Spring 2012 in the contiguous U.S. demolished the old records for hottest spring and most extreme season of any kind, said NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on Thursday. With the warmest March, third warmest April, and second warmest May, the March - April - May spring season was 5.2°F above average—the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record for the contiguous United States. What’s truly remarkable is the margin the old record was broken by—spring 2012 temperatures were a full 1°F above the previous most extreme season, the winter of 1999 - 2000. All-time seasonal temperature records are very difficult to break, and are usually broken by only a tenth of a degree. To see the old record crushed by a full degree is a stunning and unparalleled event in U.S. meteorological history.

I was witness to the great dry-out out here in the inner mountain west. Record low snow totals at the ski areas were the norm this year. It didn’t snow a single day December 2011 in a lot of places. Peak flows of the rivers from spring snow melt occurred a month, sometimes two months ahead of normal schedule (usually they peak mid-May, this year it was mid-April or end of March, depending on the drainage). Could it be because of anthropogenic global warming?

Granted, last year’s winter was exactly the opposite of this year’s winter in terms of snowfall. You could ski all summer in some places during the great 2010/2011 winter, which saw places like Alta, UT receive 800 inches of snow in a single winter. I have to wonder sometimes.

news.sky.com

Pakistan has blocked Twitter over “blasphemous content” on the microblogging website, according to a senior government official.

The site had reportedly refused to remove tweets promoting a Facebook competition involving caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous.

“This has been done under the directions of the ministry of information technology. It’s because of blasphemous content,” Mohammed Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), told Reuters.

“They (the ministry) have been discussing with them (Twitter) for some time now requesting them to remove some particular content.”

I found out about this and tweeted this bilge:

Pakistan has barred Twitter from its 177 million citizens due to “blasphemy.” How will they find out about stupid shit? bit.ly/Ju1uHl

— Charlie Vogel (@teleskiguy) May 21, 2012

Not to say that Twitter is nothing but worthless crap, it isn’t. But it can be if you want it to be.

Update: Pakistan has restored Twitter.

ca.news.yahoo.com

Via Dangerous Minds:

This really happened today: Somewhere ‘in the middle of Ohio,’ the aptly named New York-based indie rock band Here We Go Magic picked up film director John Waters who had stuck out his thumb on an interstate highway ramp.

From the AP:

Two election front-runners, a former foreign minister and a moderate Islamist, squared off Thursday in the Arab world’s first ever presidential debate, trading barbs over the role of religion and how to bring democratic reform to Egypt.

Egyptians crowded around television sets in outdoor cafes for the four-hour debate, aired on several independent TV channels — a startling new experiment for Egypt after nearly 30 years of authoritarian rule under President Hosni Mubarak, ousted last year after a wave of protests.

[…]

At one Cairo coffeeshop near Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the protests that brought down Mubarak, supporters of either candidates broke out in claps and cheers when either candidate hit on the other’s perceived weakness— scenes of public support mostly seen in Egypt only around football games.

Youtube Video

The most definitive visual proof I’ve seen that our planet is warming at an alarming rate. AGW deniers can’t deny science.

nature.com

A seven-year photographic record of the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound on Alaska’s south central Pacific coast has been made into a striking time-lapse video that documents the glacier’s rapid ice discharge, and is helping researchers to understand how tidewater glaciers contribute to sea-level rise.

The video — assembled by the glaciologist William Pfeffer from the University of Colorado Boulder — shows large chunks of ice splitting off from the terminus of the main glacier and flowing out to sea. The glacier began to retreat rapidly in the early 1980s after being relatively stationary for well over a century. By spilling some 150 cubic kilometres of ice into the ocean, the glacier’s terminus has retreated by roughly 20 kilometres.

Pfeffer began taking regular photos of the glacier’s terminus in 2004. He has now assembled hundreds of images into a movie to animate glacier flow, which he presented at the International Polar Year 2012 scientific meeting in Montreal, Canada, on 25 April.