Chart of the day

With the early week dedicated to budget talk (which I pointedly slept through to avoid) and the retarded (RAHM~!) budget freeze and today going to be largely taken up by the phony Republican budget that thinks it's a popular idea to gut and privatize Social Security, cut Medicare, while promising to end the deficit... in 50 years. So instead of jumping into that sad rabbit hole, I'll talk about the one budgetary thing I do like: increased science funding!


That's right, pending the interminable budgetary nonsense that Congress goes through, most of the governmental organizations that do sciencey type stuff will get more money. If you remember back to the Bush years, sciencey governmental organizations got money... but it was appropriated into programs that mandated they pray that God would solve the issues they were working on.

As I said this is all subject to the sausage making horrorshow that is the Congressional budget process, so things like Obama's idea to cut NASA's Constellation program might get scrapped and some science funding might get cut out in order to placate a bloc of Southern Senators who want abstinence education for cells that are considering mitosis and meiosis.

Still, everyone but the CDC gets more money. But that's a calculated decision. Given the current state of economic affairs, if a horrid Captain Trips super virus (like the one Sean has now) fans out into a global pandemic, do you really want to survive it? No. Hence the budget cut. So with this and the stimulus spending on science, it looks like it's a pretty good time to be figuring out stuff based on something other than an old book written by primitives. Unless the rapture comes. Then you're all heretics who caused God to pass His cruel judgment on us and I renounce your witchcraft.