(Illustration found here).

Even out into the middle of the week, the shitstorm off Todd Akin’s revelation on Sunday of a female’s ability to ward off unwanted sperm still plays hard and heavy in the media — and not only in the US, but across the dying planet where he’s become known as the “rape-gaffe congressman.”
Eve Ensler, author of the “The Vagina Monologues,” writing from the Congo where she is assisting the near-immeasurable number of rape victims there: “Mr. Akin, your words have kept me awake”…imploring him to imagine someone “violently, hatefully forcing themself into you so that you are ripped apart.”
Or this in the UK’s Telegraph: “Todd Akin’s remarks on rape don’t tell you what conservatives think about sexual assault. They don’t tell you much about anything, other than that Akin is an idiot.”

In the US, however, Akin’s bullshit is part and parcel of the GOP.
The Republican platform is pure rape of normal life.
And the whole right wing force is literally kiling the rest of us — denying climate change when the whole planet is consumed by record-high temperatures, drought, floods, the Arctic in a meltdown (the region now at the 400 ppm of CO2), and on and on…
Leading to extinction of everything, including us humans.

In this context came a justifiable rant from Treehugger:

Indeed.
And this magical thinking doesn’t stop with abortion.
Consider the many outrageous things politicians (mostly Republican, mostly male) have said about women, science, climate change and the realities of the world we live in.

• Of course, we have Akin’s ridiculous statement about rape and pregnancy, which, as Mother Jones highlights, is not the first time a Republican has made such a claim. This voodoo science goes back decades on The Right.

• Upset that a science panel had predicted dangerous sea level rise, Republicans in North Carolina voted this summer to make it illegal for scientists to predict sea level rise. Really.

• Last week, Kentucky Republicans complained that the national ACT exam standards should be changed to not test on evolution, because Kentucky students tested so poorly on the subject.

• This Spring, Tennessee passed a law that allows climate change denial and creationism to be taught as science.

• Louisiana’s Republican-led school voucher program spends taxpayer money on schools that teach all sorts of crazy bullshit. Dinosaurs and humans co-existed, dragons are real, etc.

These are just a few examples from the last couple weeks and months.
This stuff has been happening for years and has become so normal, that it takes something truly crazy like Akin’s statement to cut through and become a topic of discussion nationally.
I was shocked to learn that Akin is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Not surprisingly, Akin holds no degrees in science or technology.
This guy helps lead our nations science and technology policy.
Let that just wash over you.
How are we ever going to solve a global crisis like climate change if we have such ignorance polluting our government and politicians intent on ensuring our education system raises a new generation of science illiterate citizens?

Not only do we have this crazed approach to the science of climate change, the deniers were fast and footloose with the US Energy Administration report earlier this month which indicated  the nation’s CO2 emissions were the lowest in two decades.
The report cited three factors for it: A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use; a decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices; and reduced gasoline demand.
GOP liars took up the chant.
Media Matters explains:

But Fox is ignoring the confluence of factors and touting the decline as a triumph of the free market.
A Fox Nation headline today declared: “Free Enterprise Makes the Air Cleaner.”
On Varney & Company, Fox Business contributor Charles Payne said: “The free market, cleaning up our air.
“Says a lot about the free market, doesn’t it?”
And on Money with Melissa Francis, Fox Business reporter Tracy Byrnes called the EIA report “proof that free markets can work better than government overregulation.”
Byrnes went on to ask her guest why carbon dioxide emissions — which are not “poisonous” or “inflammable” — are even a problem in the first place…
An Investor’s Business Daily editorial today echoed these arguments, saying that “[t]he free market, it seems, does it better than the EPA.”
It added that “[f]racking will save the earth before anything like cap-and-trade or the Kyoto Protocol — an inconvenient truth indeed for environmentalists.”

There’s a HUGE HOWEVER, however — Media Matters continues:

However, one of the other factors behind the drop in emissions — the unusual weather — may mean this trend won’t continue.
Six months from now, when all the energy data from this past summer is available, it’s likely this summer saw higher carbon dioxide emissions than the past couple of summers, [Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s A.J.] Simon said.
The reason, the power needed to keep much of the nation cool during a summer that featured the warmest month on record — July –for the continental United States.
This may represent an even longer-term trend, he said.
Climate scientists expect global warming to bring more extreme weather, including more hot days and more heat waves.

From Earth First!:

Teetering on the dire precipice between existence and annihilation, time is running out for the Royal Bengal tiger, the Great White shark, and Victorian koalas.
There are reports that species in Brazil’s coastal rainforest are disappearing faster than scientists can keep track of them.
This is owed in part to the ripple effect of extinction, creatures toppling off the planet in a chain reaction.
But perhaps the most brutal and rapid decline is coming for the world’s oceans, with scientists predicting a cataclysmic period of mass extinction currently upon us, the ramifications for which will in turn be our own demise. From 1900-2010, freshwater fish species in North America went extinct at a rate 877 times faster than the rate found in the fossil record, while estimates indicate the rate may double between now and 2050.
Even the diversity of our communication will not be spared from the inevitable collapse wrought by industrial capitalism, with half of the world’s languages suffering a projected die-off in our lifetimes.
The end product of our modern civilization is thus the ultimate silence.

One consolation is that these GOP assholes will soon be hated and vilified by everyone, including their own children and grandchildren when climate change’s box of horrors becomes well-beyond obvious and the real-bad shit hits the fan.
Of course, by then it will be all too late.

“When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.”
— “Requiem” by Kurt Vonnegut