It actually takes political skill to be a really good panderer, and as the Secessionist has demonstrated this week time and time again, he just doesn’t have it.

Tonight is the peak night of the Perseid Meteor shower! It is one of my favorite things of the whole summer, the night when you either stay up really late or get up really early, go to some darkened field and watch little flecks of fire streak across the sky.

Now, not everyone can get out of their Mega-City to watch this yearly occurrence; but not to worry, the guys at NASA will hook you up! That is what we have at the top of this post a live composite of the meteors that have streaked across the sky.

Say what you like about the things the the US is no longer great at, we still are the Big Dogs when it comes to building and running long term space missions. Today the Opportunity Mars Rover finished a two year trip to the Endeavour Crater. There it will look for signs that water persisted on the surface of Mars for long periods of time. Not bad for a probe with a 3 month estimated mission life, eh?

A moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large. That was the goal of the confidence men who sold us a false and destructive view of our own natures. So successful were they that many progressives (and most Democrats) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

Our most important a task involves replacing the deceitful view of humankind with the new – and true – picture of cooperative, empathic and complex human being (we can, obviously, be selfish, cruel and violent – but that’s not all we are).

When Willard let it slip last week that he agrees with 90% of the world’s climate scientists about global warming, I was wondering how long it would take before the Two Minutes of Hate would commence.

Well, it’s arrived.

Actor Colin Firth is credited as an author in a new study on the brain and politics. The Academy Award winner appeared as guest editor of Britain’s Today show and asked scientist Geraint Rees, from University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, to scan the brains of politicians from Britain’s two leading political parties, Labour and Conservative, to see if there were differences.

Sometime today, the US Army Corps of Engineers will open the Morganza Floodway in Louisiana for the second time in its history. The object is to divert some of the huge flow of water coming down the Mississippi away from the usual path that streams past Baton Rouge and New Orleans into the Mississippi delta, and into a largely agricultural region of Louisiana instead. It’s a Hobson’s choice, where agricultural fields and various small towns will be flooded in order to help save many the lives and livelihoods, and communities of millions of Louisiana residents nearer to the Mississippi’s regular pathways.

This is Katrina in reverse, with the water coming from the north rather than from the Gulf. Let’s hope the lessons learned from flooding in the past that led to the creation of the floodways will help, and that the post-disaster recovery efforts that failed so spectacularly with Katrina have been improved this time around.

Attention media: since Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are running as the True Devout Catholics of the Republican Party, could you please ask them what their response is to this Papal decree?

We had a massive solar flare this week, starting on Tuesday — the biggest since December 2006 — and the chart you see here indicates the possibility that some auroral activity may be visible tonight as far south as Indianapolis, Indiana. You might not get a spectacular light show, maybe just a shimmer you can’t define, but it will be more than I can see under this cloud cover.

The Beatles — Across The Universe. Leave our tiny planet and travel millions of light years while enjoying the Hubble Telescope’s magnificent images.