Star Trekking

US scientists find potentially habitable planet near Earth

US astronomers said Wednesday they have discovered an Earth-sized planet that they think might be habitable, orbiting a nearby star, and believe there could be many more planets like it in space.

Nearby in what sense? There are no stars, besides the sun, nearby. Maybe closer than other stars but in human terms they may as well be on the other side of the universe. The closest star is Proxima Centauri and it is 4.22 light-years away from Earth, that's something close to 5.88 trillion miles per year or 24.8 trillion miles away. The planet they are talking about is 20 light-years away. No one is going there any time soon. And by its description, it's not much of a planet anyway. They are just making a fuss about nothing.

I don't mean to sound down on things like this but I see it as people looking for eternity in the wrong place. It's interesting to see what is out there, no doubt, but there is no saving of the human race to come out of it. This is where we live and this is where we must work it all out. There is no escaping.

Blowing in the Wind

No to Cape Cod Wind Farms. Yes to Whaling Ships!

As John Droz. Jr., an authority on wind power points out, "Wind energy was abandoned well over a hundred years ago, as it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning more modern needs of power, even in the late 1800s."

The people who advocate for ridding ourselves of modern conveniences and the power required to use them don't think about what it was like before we had them, the unsanitary conditions of roads without cars and the number of animals required in place of each car and truck, the food and water they require. The time needed to care for them.

What about cooking and the fuel required for that, how many trees would need to be cut down for each family? How much carbon released by each "stove" cooking with that wood, and the particulate pollution that each would release. Don't forget what would be required to heat our homes in the colder months. How much time would be required to cook and heat our homes?

That's barely scratching the surface, the effects would be far reaching and in more areas of our lives than we can imagine. We and the environment are so much better off now. We can improve, sure, and we do improve constantly, but anyone who says we should go back to living without our modern fuels and conveniences is just plain not thinking clearly at all. Or they have another agenda.

The Mob Wants Your Soul

Callie is very talented and just put out her first album, Zen Garden.



Don't let them take it away.

The Church of Pride

Good sermon. I like this guy.



Sermon by Jim O'Brien of Church of God Cincinnati and Lexington

Big Environmentalism

Fundamental Change

Obama Again Omits 'Creator' When Speaking of 'Inalienable Rights' Cited in Declaration of Independence

Just seven days after he sparked controversy by omitting the word "Creator" when he closely paraphrased the passage from the Declaration of Independence that says all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” President Barack Obama again omitted the Creator when speaking about the "inalienable rights" that “everybody is endowed with."

Obama is fundamentally wrong for America.

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Guantanamo Bay rations detainees' ice cream portions

Detainees’ diets at Guantanamo Bay have been a controversial issue for some time and now the U.S. prison is said to be rationing ice cream.

The frozen dessert is allegedly being tightly measured, with only one ice cream allowed for each of its 147 detainees.

One ice cream for each detainee?!! What kind of sick, twisted people are we?!!

We Know What's Up

Doctor Zero answers Sen. Kerry's assertion that "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on..."

We Are Paying Attention

The Tea Party is a large and growing movement that rejects the premise that a morally and intellectually superior government should be given endlessly expanding power over every aspect of our lives. We reject a media-approved narrative that holds the State blameless for its misdeeds, or gives it unlimited credit for its good intentions. We are competent and compassionate enough to manage our own lives, and address our problems through willing cooperation with our neighbors.

We're not lost in incoherent anger because we misunderstand a reality only Democrat Party leaders can see clearly. On the contrary, we realize that an insane level of willing blindness is necessary to ignore the evidence of their abject failure. You've got to be pretty stupid to think Barack Obama's only problem is that he's not superhuman enough to fix the "mess George Bush left him" two years ago.

How Will They Know She is the One to Contact?

UN to appoint Earth contact for aliens

The United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.

Take me to your leader first contact czar.

The Great One

Mark Levin speaking at Hillsdale College.



Wake the hell up.

Quote of the Day

We didn't understand that, however much he may love us, God allows his children to be wounded.

--Tony Woodlief, Somewhere More Holy

Hat Tip: Ann Voskamp

Tyranny Is as Tyranny Does

Speaking of religion, it occurred to me the other day that Islamics and liberals have a great deal in common. For one thing, they regard everyone who doesn’t share their beliefs as not merely mistaken or foolish, but as evil infidels. For another, both groups want their respective governments to impose and enforce their beliefs on everyone. The major difference is that only one of the groups is honest enough to call it Sharia Law.

--Burt Prelutsky

Nanny State Update

German restaurant in hot water over giant schnitzels

A German restaurant operator has run into trouble with local tax authorities because he makes larger-than-average schnitzels -- or veal cutlets -- for his customers in a working class section of Saxony.

Gerhard Kaltscheuer said his giant schnitzels are popular in the town of Hammerbruecke and he sells about 70 dishes per day. He said tax officials told him they believe he sells 200 portions daily based on the amount of raw material he purchases.

And of course they want him to pay taxes based on the higher amount. Must feed the Nanny State machine.

Netflix CEO Insults Americans and Canadians

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings knocks Americans in a Canadian interview.

Asked if Americans would notice and ask for the same discount Netflix is giving Canadians - currently $7.99, it's $8.99 in America - he replied:

How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world? It's something we'll monitor, but Americans are somewhat self-absorbed.

On a related note: Netflix Hires Actors To Pose As Fans At PR Event

Things backfired at a Toronto street celebration after reporters discovered that actors hired by the Netflix had been given written instructions to give media interviews gushing about the video subscription service's arrival in Canada.

The actors also were urged to fill a variety of stereotypical roles, including "mothers, film buffs, tech geeks, couch potatoes," according to the one-page handout given to them.

Yeah, he thinks Canadians are stupid, too. Yes, we noticed.

Protesters, or Sheep

Common Sense Analysis of Political Correctness Run Amuck

Mollifying Muslims, and Muslifying Mollies by Mark Steyn

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn't burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama's famous "teaching moments"? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where's the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don't line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d' before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it's Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for "respect" and "sensitivity" toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don't have a thing to say about it.

The Unseen Sea

Quote of the Day

"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."

--Gandhi

Fish in a Barrel?

Not me, thank you.

The Six Million Dollar Fish

We can build whatever animal you want to eat, say scientists

"This is perhaps the most studied fish in history," he said.

"Environmentally, this is a very sustainable technology."

The company has several safeguards in place to allay concerns.

All the fish would be bred female and sterile, though a small percentage may be able to breed.

They would be bred in confined pools where the potential for escape would be very low.

Are they just taking dialog from Jurassic Park? Human beings have an uncanny ability to rationalize anything in order to get their heart's desire. Yes, scientists, too.

Underground Grilled Cheese

Article here.

I've never had grilled cheese with apples. Hmmm.

They Know Better Than You and They Don't Trust You

UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

Don't think for a second the IRS wouldn't love to do this. Keep voting for progressives and they just might get it done in the U.S.

Quote of the Day

When a man's ways please Jehovah, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.

--Proverbs 16:7

Addendum to When Men Forget God

A Natural Law Lesson for Obama

When We The People allow the government to grant us "rights" such as health care or education, we are now making the government the purveyor of our rights, instead of our Creator. If you think this is okay, you are a fool and there is a box car or relocation camp waiting for you or your descendants someday

When Men Forget God

Obama drops 'Creator' from Declaration quote

President Obama removed the reference to the "Creator" from the Declaration of Independence when he quoted a portion at a meeting of the Congressional Hispanic Congress.

Obama said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

But the the actual quotation is:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Quite a significant misquote. He left out the most important part, without "by their Creator," the rest of the quote is left blowing in the winds of change. Of course, that's the idea. If these concepts were just pulled out of a hat by the writers of the Declaration - endowed by the government - then they can be easily dismissed by the government and the re-writers of history. Alas, forgetting God is not new to the tragic human experience.

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

--Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Obama is a symptom of a greater problem as the American people have been moving away from God for quite some time now.

Dreams From His Father

How Obama Thinks by Dinesh D'Souza

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

Quote of the Day

Obama's god is government. His Christ is Saul Alinsky. His Bible is "Rules for Radicals." His congregation is shrinking.

--Neal Boortz on Twitter

On Killing Bees

Can You Watch to the End?

I honestly have no clue how anyone could do that. I can barely watch it.

Banned for Life

A BRIT teen who sent an email to the White House calling President Obama a "p***k" has been banned from America FOR LIFE.

Maybe if we taught illegal immigrants to say "Obama is a p***k," the federal government will do its job and close the borders to illegal crossing.

911

Have You Forgotten? by Gabe Suarez

This was neither an accident, nor as some agenda-driven politicians call such things today, a man-made disaster. Look at the images again my American friends, my Christian and Jewish friends. Look hard.

Who wants to name the enemy? Who wants to risk being thought as insensitive, intolerant, an islamophobe, or worse, a racist? Is that worse than forgetting...or pretending to forget America?

Amen, Brother

Separate the wheat from the chaff

Any so-called religion that commands death to non-believers is not worthy of being recognized as a religion. Any person who believes his religion gives him the right to kill another person who chooses a different religion is either sick or mentally deficient, and should be the object of pity.

America is Headed in the Wrong Direction

The Eternal Flame of Muslim Outrage

Shhhhhhh, we're told. Don't protest the Ground Zero mosque. Don't burn a Koran. It'll imperil the troops. It'll inflame tensions. The "Muslim world" will "explode" if it does not get its way, warns sharia-peddling imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Pardon my national security-threatening impudence, but when is the "Muslim world" not ready to "explode"?

At the risk of provoking the ever-volatile Religion of Perpetual Outrage, let us count the little-noticed and forgotten ways.

A lot of people defending the right of Muslims to build a mosque at Ground Zero are motivated by fear, although they would never admit to it, and for the same reason they are appalled that someone is planning to burn Korans. Both parties have a legal right to do what they want to do and both parties are wrong to do it. But fear of Muslim violence is the reason so many are outraged by the Koran burning and defending the Mosque building. It's so obvious. It's sad.

This whole Koran burning threat was to make a point and the point has been made.

Americans are fearful. We are no longer the home of the brave. We have to respect Muslims who are offended but when we are offended we have to suck it up. We have to give, give, give, while they take, take, take. We are slowly giving up our self-respect, our ideals, our way of life out of fear of Muslim violence.

There cannot be mutual respect because there is no respect coming our way. We don't respect ourselves and it shows.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie!

You Keep Your Mouth Shut, or You'll Get Cut. Haha - I Like to Scare

Why are Liberals so Violent?

But as George Washington said, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master." Government is force. It is violence. Every dictate of the government is backed up with people with guns who job it is to force compliance.

Those who want to expand government, by definition, want to expand the use of force to achieve their goals. It should therefore come as no surprise that liberal individuals and groups are inclined to use violence to further their goals even outside the domain of government.

This also might explain why most liberals are opposed to the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It explains why they keep insisting, long after the courts have ruled otherwise, that the Second Amendment only protects the power of a state to arm itself independent of the Federal government. The explanation is that they see the willingness inside themselves and those they associate with to use violence and they fear it. They believe they, and everyone else, might use violence in an unethical manner if allowed the tools and the opportunity. They believe in the wisdom of “the central committee” to temper the violent impulses they believe the individuals to have.

This might also explain why liberals accuse the others of violence tendencies. They are projecting the worst fears about themselves onto their opponents.

"They talk about me like a dog."

I heard Obama say that recently and my first thought was, "I like dogs." If I disapprove of what you are doing or did not like you I would not talk about you like a dog. A pig, maybe. Or a cockroach. Not a dog.

A post at Vox Popoli brought home the reason this didn't sound right to me.

To me, the most interesting aspect of this is that the first negative thing that sprang to mind when Obama wanted to express how people were badmouthing him, he thought of "a dog". That is not a normal American expression. One works like a dog, one is as loyal as a dog, one is dog-tired, whereas the negative forms tend to utilize the term "bitch" instead. Using dog in this perjorative sense is much more common in the Arab world.

It seems to me that this is, in addition to demonstrating Obama's inability to withstand legitimate criticism, an example of his Indonesian Muslim upbringing showing itself in a moment of stress. This doesn't mean he is a crypto-Muslim, but it is rather yet another indication of his essentially foreign perspective. In support of this interpretation, I would note that while I have seen many distinctly negative terms applied to Obama since he first launched his presidential candidacy, I have never read nor heard of him being referred to as "a dog".

All I can say is yes, it makes sense.

Once Upon a Time ...

Political Fables By Thomas Sowell

If we are going to talk about "the policies that created this mess in the first place," let's at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems-- all in the name of "change." Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

Ain't Skeered

Just know better.

Why the Right Fears Transforming America -- and the Left Seeks It by Dennis Prager

Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. That is not correct. We fear transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about "fundamentally transforming" something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not.

Well said.

Computer Problems

I started having problems with Windows update shortly after I upgraded to Windows 7, Windows update would take forever to install updates. When I shut down the computer it would say installing updates, do not unplug, etc, but it would never finish. I could leave the computer for hours on end and it would still say that.

It got to the point that I just shut off Windows update so I didn't have to bother with it. Then I came across this video:



I downloaded his program and ran it, and now Windows update works like it should. So, thank you Britec09. I don't want to link directly to the program, the link is in the description of the video. Click on the video to go to the YouTube page. If you are having problems with Windows update, give it a try.

Love Bed Bugs?

Thank the EPA!

America Goes Buggy for Bed Bugs

The truth you will never read elsewhere is that there are pesticides that will rid the nation of this massive bed bug population explosion and they will do so rapidly. Can you imagine an end to the current bed bug infestations just about everywhere in say, a month?

The problem is that the pesticides I have in mind are not available because the EPA has removed them from use by either pest control professionals or consumers.

Fun Facts about Bed Bugs

Bad Faith at Ground Zero

Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day.

"The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."

--Barack Obama

From Out of the Mouth of Obama:

Now, who is it in high public office in Washington who seems most determined to hide at nearly any cost the most basic documents we would ordinarily expect to see from a president?

* His long-form birth certificate
* His kindergarten records
* His Punahou School records
* His Occidental College records
* His Columbia University records
* His Columbia thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament
* His Harvard Law School records
* His Harvard Law Review articles
* His University of Chicago scholarly articles
* His passport records
* His medical records
* Complete files and schedules of his years as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004
* Obama's client list from during his time in private practice with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard
* Illinois State Bar Association records
* Baptism records
* Obama/Dunham marriage license
* Obama/Dunham divorce documents
* Soetoro/Dunham marriage license
* Adoption records

More on those records here.