News bits: Crackpots with guns look for targets; Clueless MSM stooges; Mars science

From the Armed Radical Right Crackpot Files: The AP writes:

Former President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform what he claimed was the home address of former President Barack Obama on the same day that a man with guns in his van was arrested near the property, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in revealing new details about the case.

Taylor Taranto, 37, who prosecutors say participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, kept two firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition inside a van he had driven cross-country and had been living in, according to a Justice Department motion that seeks to keep him behind bars.

On the day of his June 29 arrest, prosecutors said, Taranto reposted a Truth Social post from Trump containing what Trump claimed was Obama’s home address. In a post on Telegram, Taranto wrote: “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s.”

It's good to see patriots patrolling the streets looking for traitors to murder. ☹️

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From the Clueless MSM Files: A chart that Axios published shows just how jaw-droppingly clueless the MSM still is about what the Republican Party has become over time.

Based on a statistical model that seems way 

out of synch with modern reality

In my opinion, the 0 line should be 

~1 or 2 units to the left, i.e., 

there's no way in hell that the Roberts 

and Kavanaugh radicals are centrists

On multiple occasions I have mentioned the Overton Window and how decades of radical right propaganda has intentionally dragged it far to the right while smearing and slandering Democrats and liberals. The Overton window identifies the ideas that define the range of acceptability of governmental policies. In this view, politicians usually act only within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window.

A 2017 video by Vox

Why blatant lies are effective

The video shows how things that used to be considered and shunned fringe crackpottery in the GOP, now controls and dominates among party elites and has dragged the Window far to the right. Most rank and file supporters of the Republican Party and its dominant ideologies simply do not believe they support authoritarian capitalist autocracy-plutocracy or Christian theocracy. If they understood what they supported, most would probably back away if the Democrats had not been so badly smeared and slandered by decades of divisive, distrust-fomenting radical right propaganda. 

From what I can tell, there are now two major Overton Windows in American society. One is the center to center-right, mildly pro-democracy Democratic Party and its supporters and the other is the extreme right, authoritarian anti-democracy Republican Party and its supporters. 

We live in interesting times.

Arendt on the effects of totalitarian propaganda

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Mars update: Ars Technica writes:

InSight lander

Mars has liquid guts and strange insides, InSight suggests

Wobbles in its rotation are difficult to explain without a liquid core

Mars appears to be a frozen expanse of red dust, gaping craters, and rocky terrain on the outside—but what lies beneath its wind-blasted surface? NASA’s InSight lander might have discovered this before it took its proverbial last breaths in a dust storm.

Whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid has been long debated. While there is no way to observe the Martian core directly, InSight tried. Its seismometer, SEIS, was the first instrument to find possible evidence of a liquid core. In the meantime, its RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) instrument had been measuring minuscule changes in the planet’s rotation as it orbited, “wobbles” in its axis caused by the push and pull of the Sun’s gravity.

“Our analysis of InSight’s radio tracking data argues against the existence of a solid inner core and reveals the shape of the core, indicating that there are internal mass anomalies deep within the mantle,” write the researchers behind the instrument in a study recently published in Nature. 

RISE works by transmitting radio signals to Earth. By tracking changes in these signals, researchers can detect extremely small changes in its location relative to our receivers. These changes are caused by wobbles in Mars’ rotation called nutations. The distance and direction in which the axis moved because of these nutations can be used to infer information about Mars’ internal composition.