Via It Ain't Holy Water
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Here is something you will never ever see Obama doing once he leaves office
Barack Obama is touring Africa, touching politically correct bases and posing for photo-ops as his foreign policy goes up in flames. Via InstaPundit, we learn that coincidentally, George W. Bush is in Africa too. Among other things, Bush has helped renovate a women’s clinic in Zambia. That is, he has helped personally, not by giving gaseous speeches.
The folks there must be simply amazed that a man who once wielded so much power has personally come half way around the world to help their cause. I'm sure the local politicians are put to shame by his example.
Are alien 'star engines' detectable in exo - planet data?
In 1948, astronomer Fred Zwicky, the esteemed co-discoverer of dark matter, speculated that “fusion jets” could be used by a future civilization to navigate our sun and solar system planets through the galaxy. He suggested that pellets of fuel could be fired into the sun to produce explosions that would push the sun along like firecrackers exploding in a tin can. But where to go?
Zwicky thought that the entire solar system could reach Alpha Centauri in a few thousand years.
Forty years later, physicist Leonid Shkadov proposed that far advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might harness the energy output of their sun for interstellar migration. They would use a “stellar engine” — no need for fusion motors here. Simply construct an immense spherical mirror that reflects some of the star’s radiation back onto its surface.
To work, such a stellar engine would have to be a megastructure, millions of miles across (shown above). The bad news is that a planet might have to be dismantled to make such a monstrosity. The good news is that such megastructures — if they exist — should be detectable with today’s telescope technology.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
In the El Dorado National Forest, the brownshirts that work for the Forest Service are behaving so badly that the local sheriff has revoked their right to operate in his county.
Via Free North Carolina, this story makes my blood boil.
"The sheriff’s department says they’ve received more than 50 complaints from people just out enjoying the woods when they were stopped by an overly aggressive forest service officer.
It appears this exploding confrontation between Sheriff John D’Agostini and the U.S. Forest service may come down to guns, and the right to carry them, and whether U.S. citizens are allowed to bring them onto federal land.
Cory Ward is an avid outdoorsman who frequents the El Dorado National forest. But he’s concerned this paradise could turn into a police state.
“I have felt intimidated,” he said.
He’s got a long list of complaints against federal officers who patrol the forest.
“They want to know what you’re doing here, where you’re going, do you have any firearms on board.”
Apparently, going to the woods just to have fun is now a reason to stop and interrogate.
Apparently, going to the woods just to have fun is now a reason to stop and interrogate.
Over the decades, I have burned a barrel of powder in that forest, and there is nothing suspicious or wrong with that. To start questioning people aggressively like this is an effort at intimidation, and the sheriff is right to call the feds on it.
The Forest Service supervisor who runs these out of control officers should lose their job, along with the Sturmabteilung wanna be's that he/she is employing.
As we approach the 4th of July, Roger Simon asks whether Americans are in a pre revolutionary state of mind.
I'm inclined to say we are.
Beginning with Ted Kennedy's amnesty of the 60's, I believe, and continuing through the present, where our own government is importing whole villages of Somalis to America, the nation is seeing their political elite replace the electorate that they don't like with a strange new one that they do.
The finances of our country are being perverted to support a huge and growing underclass that has no work ethic, and expects the government to use it's enormous power to tax to support them, even to the extent of purchasing them cell phones.
Every branch of government seems to have been militarized, and every branch of government seems to be looking into our most private decisions, and tracking our every move.
Roger Simon puts it this way:
Beginning with Ted Kennedy's amnesty of the 60's, I believe, and continuing through the present, where our own government is importing whole villages of Somalis to America, the nation is seeing their political elite replace the electorate that they don't like with a strange new one that they do.
The finances of our country are being perverted to support a huge and growing underclass that has no work ethic, and expects the government to use it's enormous power to tax to support them, even to the extent of purchasing them cell phones.
Every branch of government seems to have been militarized, and every branch of government seems to be looking into our most private decisions, and tracking our every move.
Roger Simon puts it this way:
"We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game.
And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood.
It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American Gestapo, asking not just to examine our accounting books but the books we read. What could be more totalitarian than that?"
"No one knows how many have given up looking for work while crony capitalist friends of the administration enrich themselves on mythological clean-energy projects.
In fact, everywhere we look on this July Fourth sees a great civilization in decline. And much of that decline can be laid at the foot of the incumbent. Especially his own people, African Americans, have suffered. Their unemployment numbers are catastrophic, their real needs ignored while hustlers like Sharpton, Jackson, and, sadly, even the president fan the flames of non-existent racism.
Tahrir Square anyone?
Indeed, but I see the rot as starting in earnest in the 60's, with LBJ's Great Society, and exponentially accelerating with the election of the current resident of the White House.
However, with the current electorate dumbed down and packed with what are in truth "Americans" in name only, and our institutions perverted to serve the interests of the elite, can the situation be saved without a revolution?
That's for us to find out, I guess.
Monday, July 1, 2013
A taste of the coming police state.
Over at Plan of the Day, a story of police abuse from his little corner of Pennsylvania.
"Less than a week after a tiny Pennsylvania borough announced the hiring of five new police officers to keep the community “safe,”, a group of at least seven officers barged into a woman’s home uninvited, kicking down a bedroom door before handcuffing her, then rummaging through her personal items, all because they were looking for her landlady – whom hadn’t lived there for years."
What did the police want her for? Back property taxes.
And there's video:
Since when do a pack of cops get to demand entrance to your house, without a warrant, to apparently arrest someone for back property taxes? Cops with too much time on their hands.
You can bet that when the order comes from the authorities to come and confiscate your guns, or arrest you for something you said (which, by the way, is the purpose behind hate speech laws), they won't be as nice as these guys were.
"Less than a week after a tiny Pennsylvania borough announced the hiring of five new police officers to keep the community “safe,”, a group of at least seven officers barged into a woman’s home uninvited, kicking down a bedroom door before handcuffing her, then rummaging through her personal items, all because they were looking for her landlady – whom hadn’t lived there for years."
What did the police want her for? Back property taxes.
And there's video:
Since when do a pack of cops get to demand entrance to your house, without a warrant, to apparently arrest someone for back property taxes? Cops with too much time on their hands.
You can bet that when the order comes from the authorities to come and confiscate your guns, or arrest you for something you said (which, by the way, is the purpose behind hate speech laws), they won't be as nice as these guys were.
It's a dry heat
It's supposed to get up to 110 today, so I thought I'd post a cool, cool swimming hole picture, where those of us around here would love to hang out.
Dan Collins erupts with an epic rant.
A savory taste:
"So, 17 million Egyptians, give or take, took to the streets to protest the incompetence and nastiness of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, and the Worldwide Leader in News (as well as other broadcast outlets) and such online outfits as Politico had nothing to say about it all day long—a day when they had nothing new to report from the ridiculous George Zimmerman trial. Why the reticence? Because Dear Leader had helped to install it, one can only suppose, and is now in Africa, where US television networks also didn't report South Africans demonstrating against Obama himself in the streets and receiving stun grenades and rubber bullets by way of response. At Weasel Zippers, a poster apologized for using Iran's state TV footage of the protests, because Western news outlets were ignoring them, by and large. Those protests took place notwithstanding Obama's announcement of a $7 billion US taxpayer commitment to expand African power generation capacity, days after Obama unilaterally had announced he was driving up the cost of power in the US by reducing its availability. A leaked Libyan security memo, if it is genuine, claimed that the Benghazi attack was arranged at the behest of Egyptians, including Morsi, according to perpetrators in the government's custody, whom our President had solemnly vowed to track down, apprehend, and punish, fueling speculation that a hostage swap was behind the incident. A Cairo protest outside the US Embassy earlier on the day of the Americans' death was used as evidence for the lie that the Benghazi atrocity had begun as a copycat protest over a YouTube posting of a trailer for the absurd Innocence of Muslims movie, with which the administration had nothing to do."
Go over there and read it all.
"So, 17 million Egyptians, give or take, took to the streets to protest the incompetence and nastiness of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, and the Worldwide Leader in News (as well as other broadcast outlets) and such online outfits as Politico had nothing to say about it all day long—a day when they had nothing new to report from the ridiculous George Zimmerman trial. Why the reticence? Because Dear Leader had helped to install it, one can only suppose, and is now in Africa, where US television networks also didn't report South Africans demonstrating against Obama himself in the streets and receiving stun grenades and rubber bullets by way of response. At Weasel Zippers, a poster apologized for using Iran's state TV footage of the protests, because Western news outlets were ignoring them, by and large. Those protests took place notwithstanding Obama's announcement of a $7 billion US taxpayer commitment to expand African power generation capacity, days after Obama unilaterally had announced he was driving up the cost of power in the US by reducing its availability. A leaked Libyan security memo, if it is genuine, claimed that the Benghazi attack was arranged at the behest of Egyptians, including Morsi, according to perpetrators in the government's custody, whom our President had solemnly vowed to track down, apprehend, and punish, fueling speculation that a hostage swap was behind the incident. A Cairo protest outside the US Embassy earlier on the day of the Americans' death was used as evidence for the lie that the Benghazi atrocity had begun as a copycat protest over a YouTube posting of a trailer for the absurd Innocence of Muslims movie, with which the administration had nothing to do."
Go over there and read it all.
Kinda cool.
What would it look like to orbit a black hole? Since the strong gravity of the black hole can significantly alter light paths, conditions would indeed look strange. For one thing, theentire sky would be visible, since even stars behind the black hole would have their light bent to the observer's eye. For another, the sky near the black hole would appear significantly distorted, with more and more images of the entire sky visible increasingly near the black hole. Most visually striking, perhaps, is the outermost sky image completely contained inside an easily discernible circle known as the Einstein ring. Orbiting a black hole, as shown in the above scientifically-accurate computer-created illustrative video, will show stars that pass nearly directly behind the black hole as zipping around rapidly near the Einstein ring. Although star images near the Einstein ring may appear to move faster than light, no star is actually moving that quickly. The above video is part of a sequence of videos visually exploring the space near a black hole's event horizon.
Via APOD
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