Clear skies with stars twinkling this Tuesday morning along California’s north coast, and for some reason, the outside environment feels warmer than inside my apartment.
Human skin and temperatures baffle the senses.

Tonight is President Obama’s state-of-the-union, and all the pre-jazz on the speech seems to indicate an economical crock-a-shit, or how to spin away from telling US peoples the great culprit is the GOP without making the piss-pants whiners cry in their mess kits.

(Illustration found here).

“It’s my party,
And I’ll cry in my mess kit,
I’ll cry in my mess kit…”

Ha! Above refrain sang in the tune of the old Lesley Gore song, which is better than shitting in my mess kit — i.e., taking a dump in the place where you eat.

And the GOP is indeed eating itself.

Yesterday, two big news stories kind of sandwiched the day — early was the news Pope Benedict is calling it quits after 600 years, or something like that, or the unrelenting guilt trip had reached the breaking point.
Under the name of Ratzinger for many, many years he handled stuff so unsavory he pushed it under the carpet. One victim of this rug push says: “We won’t miss this pope,” said Denef. He likened the Vatican’s treatment of the molestation disclosures to “mafia-style organised crime rings”.

Anyway, the other big news is North Korea’s apparent nuclear test, an act which is liken to a small, addled child playing with matches in a fireworks factory. But the world is crazed about it, like the Russians:

In a statement, Russia’s Foreign Ministry demanded that North Korea refrain from any nuclear missile program and adhere to U.N. Security Council guidelines.
It condemned the test as an affront to the community of nations: “It’s doubly sad that we are talking about the state with which our country has a long history of good neighborliness.”

WTF!

And in between all that jazzed-up poo-pa-pa was a bit about the US Tea Party origins. Although in a physiological, deep-down sense, the news didn’t seem so impossible and made a front for near-perfect logic, but was still a sad, even terrifying story.
This comes from a study published online last week in BMJ Tobacco Control, a high-impact peer-reviewed journal — unfortunately, the thingy is behind a $30 paywall, so I’ll quote from the abstract:

Starting in the 1980s, tobacco companies worked to create the appearance of broad opposition to tobacco control policies by attempting to create a grassroots smokers’ rights movement.
Simultaneously, they funded and worked through third-party groups, such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of AFP and FreedomWorks, to accomplish their economic and political agenda.
There has been continuity of some key players, strategies and messages from these groups to Tea Party organisations. As of 2012, the Tea Party was beginning to spread internationally.

And DeSmogBlog adds:

The tobacco/climate anti-science relationship was highlighted in Merchants of Doubt and has been noted by others.
Tobacco interests created many of the tactics and fostered the machinery inherited by other anti-science efforts.
Here at DeSMogBlog Fakery 2: More Funny Finances, Free oF Tax, Appendix F, showed the crucial problem for tobacco companies.
As per RJ Reynolds’ The Importance of Younger Adults, they needed to addict children to create lifelong customers, not adults.
Few start smoking after age 18, and later starters find it easier to quit, because addiction really is best entrenched while brains are still developing.
Higher cigarette taxes especially deter children from smoking, so they pose an existential threat to tobacco companies, to be fought at all costs, but hidden among larger groups.
…
It took decades, but they got that, including the costumes.
I’d guess few members of the TEA Party realize it was created to help the tobacco industry addict kids to behavior that will kill many, slowly.

Now you stand and wonder at all those dumb-ass, ignorant assholes out waving mis-spelled signs and clothed in silly-ass costumes — sad and terrifying.
And these are the way-chief climate change deniers, and, they’re aiding-and-abetting the death of a shitload of people — from the unborn to guys my age.
Now we understand why the future’s fairly bleak looking.