News bits: Christian nationalists hate atheists; Climate change technology; The failing rule of law

The Friendly Atheist reports about an atheist unfriendly Oregon state lawmaker trashing Muslims and, gasp!, evil atheists: 

Oregon lawmaker tries to walk back comment 

that atheists are unfit for public office

State Rep. E. Werner Reschke now says he was “grossly taken out of context.” He was not

State Rep. E. Werner Reschke made the comments earlier this month during an interview with Jason Rapert, the Christian Nationalist who now runs a group called the “National Association of Christian Lawmakers.” Reschke serves as the Oregon “chair” for NACL.

Rapert asked a softball question about why Christians needed to get involved in government, and Reschke’s response was telling for all the wrong reasons. Instead of saying Christians had a spiritual duty to shape society (or something like that), he argued that certain non-Christians were unfit for public life and didn’t deserve to be in positions of power.

He began by saying he admired the supposed Christian faith of the Founding Fathers before segueing into the people who shouldn’t be in government:

… “Those are the type of people that you want in government making tough decisions during tough times,” Reschke continued. “You don’t want a materialist. You don’t want an atheist. You don’t want a Muslim. You want somebody who understands what truth is and understands the nature of man, the nature of government, and the nature of God.”

“If you don’t understand those things, you’re gonna get things wrong,” he concluded. “In Oregon … we have a lot of people who are godless, unfortunately, leading the way and it’s the blind leading the blind.”

He’s not subtle about his feelings. He doesn’t believe atheists or Muslims are fit to hold public office—the former because they have no religion and the latter because they’re the wrong religion.  

In a statement to Oregon Public Broadcasting, Reschke said his words were “grossly taken out of context.” But he didn’t bother clarifying what he actually meant to say.

As an atheist, my fee-fees are hurt. (sad face 🥺 aww) I was gonna run for president. . . . OK, now I’m over it. 😊

I guess Reschke, also known to his friends as the Grinning Liar, believes that in his infallible knowledge of God, he can lie to us and say he did not say what he said. Funny how it was “taken out of context” after it blows up in his face. That’s how it always works with these arrogant, shamelessly lying Christian nationalist scumbags. I can smell the Grinning Liar’s moral rot all the way down here in SoCal. Now, let me tell you how I really feel . . . . . 

One can only wonder who Grinning learned this fine rhetorical tactic from. Oh yeah. My bad, I forgot:

A peanut in the gallery observed: Anyone who believes they can telepathically communicate with an extradimensional eldritch being is unfit for public office.

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The NYT reports:

It’s come to this. With Earth at its hottest point in recorded history, and humans doing far from enough to stop its overheating, a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists are proposing a potential fix that could have leaped from the pages of science fiction: The equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space.

The idea is to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming. Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2 percent of the sun’s radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries.

To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about a million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina, Dr. Rozen said. A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun’s light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth, he said.

It was 1989 when James Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggested a “space-based solar shield” positioned near a fixed point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point One, or L1, some 932,000 miles away, four times the average distance between the Earth and the moon. There, the gravitational pulls from the Earth and sun cancel each other out.

A fully operational sunshade would have to be resilient and reversible, Dr. Szapudi said. In his proposed design, he said 99 percent of its weight would come from the asteroid, helping offset the cost. It would still likely carry a price tag of trillions of dollars, an amount that is far less than what is spent on military weapons, he said.  

“Saving the Earth and giving up 10 percent of your weapons to destroy things is actually a pretty good deal in my book,” Dr. Szapudi said.

Here, one can see the price we pay for not being politically able to deal with climate change. If there had been a carbon tax put in place decades ago, significant money would be coming in to help accelerate research and other efforts to reduce climate change, assuming congress didn’t just piss the money away on crap. That’s always a concern when government is corrupt and incompetent. A pox on our failed two-party political system.

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A long article that WaPo published (here not paylled off) and other recent news items collectively give off a vibe that the criminal lawsuit against DJT in Georgia is on the verge of collapse. It seems that prosecutor Fanni Willis has screwed the pooch by being in a sex relationship with an outside prosecutor she brought in to prosecute Trump. The WaPo article comments:

In a bombshell legal filing on Jan. 8, Roman’s attorney alleged that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D), who is heading the prosecution, is in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, an outside lawyer she hired for the case. While Wade’s firm was receiving more than $650,000 in public funds, Wade — who has been embroiled in a messy divorce — was paying for vacations with Willis in the Caribbean and elsewhere, according to Roman, who alleges that Willis improperly benefited.

Roman is a radical right authoritarian activist and professional political dirt digger. Maybe the Georgia case will fall apart, but it is still too early to know. At this point, there is still too much the public has not been made aware of. I just get a real bad vibe from what has happened and is happening now. Radical right authoritarian state legislators are just itching to quash the lawsuit and this gives them an excuse. A news source in Atlanta reported: 

2 Georgia senators propose changing Georgia law to void Trump’s charges 

Brandon Beach, Colton Moore want to amend Georgia’s RICO statute to prohibit prosecuting some racketeering charges. 

The legislation would be retroactive and therefore apply to Trump’s case. On Monday, Georgia House members passed a bill reviving a commission with powers to discipline and remove prosecutors, a move Democrats warn is aimed at disrupting Willis’ prosecution.