Hubble.

In the Daily Telegraph a collection of the best from the Hubble Telescope. Here are two of them.

The spiral galaxy M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile. Seen in silhouette against a bright bulge of stars, the cosmic dust lanes give it a hat-like appearance, suggesting the more popular name, The Sombrero Galaxy

M74: The Perfect Spiral. If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces, M74 presents a gorgeous face-on view

Apart from having stupid leaders, what an age we live in. What would Copernicus or any of the old time scientists have made of this. It would be a good use of time travel to take these photos to them and record their reactions, that’s if doing so didn’t get you burned at the stake.

David Warren on Shamanism.

Both, alike, confuse words with things, and imagine by manipulating words they can manipulate reality. They believe things like public order and safety just happen without human intervention — that they grow on trees, like money. And that the source of all evil is the unfair distribution, of money in particular. They are given to magical invocations when things go wrong, and to other behaviour that would be more clearly identified as shamanistic, were it not instead identified as “liberal” and “progressive.”

Unable to fathom the mysterious reality of evil, and its contamination of all human nature, they create scapegoats who can be blamed for any disturbance of their peace, and then ritually cast them out. For instance, when suddenly impinged upon by terrorists, or by bank failures for that matter, they consult the entrails of birds (or equivalent), and select “Bush” and “Cheney” to be demonized, assigning them qualities worse even than those of the perpetrators of such things. Then a shaman, named Barack Obama, is selected for his charismatic personal qualities, to purify the public domain.

Read the rest here.

In Passing.

Time for something amusing.

Well I think it is!

………………………..

When I was young [here we go - Ed.] there was this expression, ‘When one door closes, another one opens.’ I heard on the radio this morning yet again, ‘When a door closes, a window opens.’ How do these things get started and how come people just say them without a thought that they are meaningless, in this case because doors and windows even metaphorically have different functions?
Another one is ‘To have your cake and eat it too’ which only makes sense in its proper form which is, ‘To eat your cake and have it too’.
Even when using stock phrases, to not be conscious of what you’re saying renders them and the point you’re making meaningless.

………………………….

Here in Toronto, the Liberal La La Land of the North, each year a survey is conducted by the city to determine the number of homeless people here with a view I suppose to ‘better serve their needs’, in other words to justify getting more money to provide jobs conducting a survey on the number of homeless people here. You won’t believe this:

TORONTO — The city is giving $100 pre-paid Visa cards to people who agree to pretend they’re homeless when Toronto conducts its needs assessment of those without shelter.

In an e-mail sent out last week to different social agencies and individuals, city employee Monica Waldman said they are looking for “tons” of people to sign up to be “decoys” on April 15, the night scheduled for the city’s second homeless head count.

“Decoys are essentially ‘faux’ homeless people for quality assurance purposes in this research,” she wrote. “As a decoy, you would need to come to a 30-minute training session and then be deployed to various sites throughout the city where you will wait to be approached by the research volunteers.”

Say no more!

……………………

And something to think about, The New Humanism by Roger Scruton the British conservative philosopher.

The family in which I was raised was, in the matter of religion, typical of postwar England. There was no objection to the children receiving Christian instruction at school, and performing there a daily act of worship. There was no objection to chapel and Sunday school—indeed, provided these institutions were gloomy enough, my parents thought, their children could only be improved by them. But the home was a religion-free zone: no grace before meals, no prayers at bedtime, and the Bible wedged firmly on the shelf between the Oxford Dictionary and Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War. Our parents called themselves humanists. They had been raised as Christians, but had lived through the Second World War and lost faith in the God who permitted it. They regarded humanism as a residual option, once faith had dissolved. It was not something to make a song and dance about, still less something to impose on others, but simply the best they could manage in the absence of God.

Read the comments too.

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Don’t remember if I posted on this before [it's getting late!] but anyway, Thank God America Isn’t Like Europe …….Yet, by Charles Murray is worth a little of your time.

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. The nations of Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their “child-friendly” policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. They are countries where jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And with only a few exceptions, they are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

Call it the Europe Syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. Afterward, a few of the 20-something members of the audience came up and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and they saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality that goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

That isn’t sad, it’s downright depressing. The depth of people’s stupidity is inversely proportional to their comfort level.

………………….

Barack Obama is a Terrible Bore by Michael Wolff.

He’s cold; he’s prickly; he’s uncomfortable; he’s not funny; and he’s getting awfully tedious.

Yep, that’s him all right.

Why Not?

Someone e-mailed me this:

This was an article from the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?”

I thought this was the BEST idea.

I think this guy nailed it!

Dear Mr.President,

Patriotic retirement:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force;

pay them $1 million a piece severance with stipulations:

1) They leave their jobs. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.

2) They buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.

3) They either buy a house or pay off their mortgage- Housing Crisis fixed.

All this and it’s still cheaper than the “bailout”.

What We Need.

More of this sort of thing.

Zee will like it.

Lara.

Took this one today of Lara in low light hence the slight movement [slow shutter speed] and the grain [high ISO] but things like that don’t necessarily matter, I kinda like it. It was mostly the light from the computer monitor actually. And that’s the full frame by the way, it hasn’t been cropped. Cropping is a useful tool but should be used with care. Henri Cartier Bresson, the dean of photojournalism, said he never cropped a photo. It does make you more aware of your framing while taking the pics.

Ron Silver

I have always found it odd to find myself saddened by the death of a stranger. Ron Silver was a man I very much appreciated, an agile and brilliant thinker and one of the few politically palatable personages out of Hollywood. Though far to the left of me, he was a man willing to wrestle ideological demons, not quietly drink the kool-aid.

Yet, I didn’t know him, had nothing invested in him and still, I feel that I have lost something, though it be something that was never mine. Odd thing how one becomes attached without any idea an attachment has formed…
An interview before the election finds him terribly weakened and physically diminished, but his spirit is still a burnished and thriving thing, as I imagine it is, even this moment.

This……..

……..is what a city gets when it elects a Democrat mayor for 48 years.

One would think people would have learned the lesson by now, wouldn’t one?

H/T Dr. Sanity.

Paul!

I’m being too serious lately, though not in my real life, two little kids are a great antidote to that malady. So for a little change, one of my favourite jokes, one that’s much better told than written but I have no choice here.

Jesus, high on the cross at the beginning of the third day is very weak. In a faltering voice he calls, ‘Paul’, ‘Paul’.

Paul at the back of the crowd hears him and answers, ‘Yes master, I’m coming’, and starts pushing his way through the crowd. This annoys people, they punch and kick him as he shoves his way through leaving him bruised and bleeding.

‘Paul’. ‘Paul’.

‘Yes master, I hear you, I’m coming!’ He arrives at the front of the crowd where a line of Centurions bar his way. He pushes past them but not without being beaten to the ground by their spear ends and shields.

‘Paul’. ‘Paul’.

Paul drags himself painfully to the foot of the cross, ‘I’m here, Master, what is it that I can do?’

‘Paul. I can see your house from up here’.

OK, since you liked that one so much here’s another!

Jesus was walking along the shore of Lake Galilee one morning when he came across a crowd of shouting people. He asked what was going on.

‘We have this woman who was taken in adultery and we’re going to stone her to death’.

Jesus became very angry and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He raised his arms and the people fell silent.

‘Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone’.

There was silence. Then a little old woman came forward, picked up a rock and smashed it in the woman’s face, leaving the blood pouring down.

Jesus looked at the old woman and said, ‘You know ma, you don’t half pee me off sometimes.’

Yep, Those Elite Newspaper People are Dumb.

From the comments on a post at Knox News.

The problem with newspapers (and I’m a former newspaper editor and publisher) is that you folks think we can’t detect when your news columns are being used to foist your agenda on us.

We’re much smarter than you think we are, and that you think we’re dumb merely reveals your arrogance. So, while we are not necessarily cheering your demise, we’re snickering because you’re getting what’s coming to you.

We see you bashing conservatives, while liberals committing similar sins go un-commented upon. We’re not stupid. We know that you are the “deciders” about what’s news and what’s swept under the rug. You tell us often enough.

So, we’ve moved on. Opinions are a dime a dozen. I can find myriad voices online to feed me my opinion back to me. If you think I’m going to pay money for yours, you’re sadly mistaken. Your just one voice amongst thousands of them out there. Why should I pay good money for your opinion?

You also forgot that half your advertisers are conservatives who have decided maybe they don’t want to fund your little Democrat Party Propoganda sheet any longer, and so they’ve found other more creative ways to spend their ad budgets.

If you tell people to f*ck off enough times, they eventually will, taking their ad revenue with them.

Good luck in your retirement. I suspect that if it took you this long to finally detect the desire amongst your few remaining subscribers for “just the facts” that it’s far too late to save you.

Succinct.

Found the following at Powerline, it’s by mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein.

Many of us who work in finance are even more horrified by what we see than the lay public appears to be. Some of us spoke publically for years about the dangers posed. Others published papers or books to spread the word. Curiously, however, our country’s laws would not even permit average families to voluntarily invest in those hedge funds that profited from this crisis by, for example, shorting subprime mortgages.

Accordingly, we don’t believe that citizenship in the United States should now hurriedly be converted into forced participation in an unaccountable secretive national hedge fund which buys lousy assets at inflated prices from banks mismanaged for personal profit by multi-millionaires, and makes non-consensual capital calls on uninformed, captive, financially unsophisticated families.

If these government actions were put to the Supreme Court, would they be deemed illegal?

All You Need To Know.

H/T American Thinker.

Time for Some Optimism.

I think I’m over the shock of Obama’s election but not the disbelief that so many, and so many otherwise intelligent, people were willingly taken in by him. Unless before too long Obama has a Damascus moment and throws all his fellow ideologues and his ideology under the bus disaster lies ahead. But that disaster will mark the end for a long time of the liberal disease that has infected the land, the damage done will be repaired eventually just as the damage of five years of war against Germany and Japan was repaired. It will take longer because you can’t destroy the liberalism in the manner of the WW2 enemies, but then again, maybe not, Americans are a prosperous resilient people and once they understand that the disaster that Obama brought about was deliberate and for hidden reasons of imposing an alien ideology that has failed wherever it’s been tried their anger will be intense, no less so in those who ‘believed’ all the hope and change hokum.

William Rusher’s final column, he is 85, shows an old man’s wisdom and perspective on the current debacle that America has unaccountably and willingly brought about.
He ends thusly:

So, I am basically an optimist for the future of the United States. Historically, its deepest roots are moral, grounded in the Anglo-American religious tradition. When we act as a nation, we tend to act in that tradition, respecting what we recognize as its obligations. The result is that our actions have generally been just and courageous. We have not always lived up to our highest ideals, but we have seldom slipped far below them. It is impossible to know what challenges will confront the United States in the years ahead, but there is reason to believe that we have within us the resources to meet and overcome them.

There have been bad Presidents before of course, but I don’t think any of them set out deliberately to impoverish America in order to impose what anyone with half a brain knows is a failed ideology and in order to leave her unable to meet the challenge of the deadly totalitarianism that is Islam. One wonders at his motivations, Islamism, Marxism, Messiahnism, seem almost inadequate to fully explain the idiot ideology he suffers from. An overarching thought that takes them all in as useful tools in his scheme to bring down the US is that he is simply anti-American because he isn’t an American, he is an alien, and this is what he has managed to hide with the help of the aforementioned -isms and the help of the useful idiots of the MSM.

In Passing.

Did you know that EUtopia is in big trouble? Well excuse my schadenfreude but it couldn’t happen to a more stupid bunch of people and just in time to show the US what is in store if they follow the Pied Piper of ‘Ham’-elin blindly down the river and don’t forget what happened to the children of Hamelin after the ethically challenged people didn’t pay the piper.

…

Barbara Kay who writes in The National Post, the best of the Canadian newspapers, [there isn't much competition] wrote this week about ‘Peace Studies’. Worth reading the whole thing but here is an excerpt:

Peace, peace, peace. In vogue as never before. Yes, “Peace Studies” is very hot, even though, unlike “Renaissance Studies” or “Canadian Studies,” there is no actual subject to analyze. Peace is not a “thing” or a place or a related series of events. Just as dark is the absence of light, peace — warm or cold — is essentially the absence of war. The rest is opinion and commentary.
Yet Peace Studies has become a huge academic industry over the last 40 years. The name is benign — what could be more worthwhile in principle than studies that claim to further what all of us desire? — but its allegedly disinterested agenda is anything but.

Peace Studies programs — the “idealistic” school of conflict resolution as opposed to the realist schools of military studies, geopolitics and the like — began as a response to the threat of nuclear armageddon during the Cold War. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis accelerated their growth. Then the further upheaval of the Vietnam War prompted lavish donations from foundations like the Institute for World Order, which gave the movement academic security and political respectability.
But Peace Studies hasn’t produced practical prescriptions for managing or resolving global conflicts, because ideology always trumps objectivity and pragmatism.

Academics, idiots with brains.

…

Funny Picture.

…

An article about the research into the genome of Neanderthal Man is amazing. It reminds me of what I found so fascinating about the sciences when I was a schoolboy.

Resident Hussein Obama; Resident Bloody Liar

LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR

I have a very packed schedule and can’t really blog much. Nothing new to say really. With Hussein Obama it is pretty predictable; another day, another lie, another knife in America’s back. It would take a freaking library to catalog all the blatant manipulations and deceptions perpetuated by the mulatto metrosexual currently dirtying up the oval office.

Behind the gauzy, post-partisan halo the establishment media has painted around the cover-boy visage of Barack Obama lies one of the most cynically calculating pols in living memory. He promises to abide by campaign spending limits — except when he won’t. He won’t hire lobbyists — unless he makes a dozen exceptions to the rule. He’ll run a transparent government, posting everything on the web — except when it is inconvenient. He’ll say he’s bipartisan — except when it comes time to actually deal with real substance. And he can no more disown his pastor than he can disown his white grandmother — unless the pastor embarrasses him again, of course.

Obama has a certain maneuver — the “smile broadly for the audience while he sticks a shiv in you” — down to a fine art
(Source)

• Live Fact Check
  
• Latest OBAMANations
  
• Obama LAUNDRY LIST OF LIES
  
• Obamalies.net
  

May the harm Obama perpetuates against America come back to him and his 1000 fold. Cursed be the name Obama.

Going Barack-wards.

The best comment I’ve seen on the Obama speech is at Powerline by Scott, Paul,and John

From Scott’s:

He has confidence in his ability to peddle the faith. His confidence exceeds that of such hucksters as Father Divine, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammi Bakker, or Elmer Gantry. He says our day of reckoning has arrived. Yet it is a judgment from which He exempts Himself. His day of reckoning awaits.

It’s a Mad, Mad World.

Another nutty Obama appointment.

Pregnancy provokes a welter of feelings, physical and emotional. But does anyone really think of pregnancy as slavery? Apparently so: Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Yale-educated and ACLU-trained, Johnsen already has done one tour of duty at OLC. She spent nearly six years there during the Clinton administration (1993–98), the last two as acting chief. OLC, a critically important agency, is the administration’s lawyers’ lawyer. Staffed by graduates of top law schools who are then polished by elite judicial clerkships, it authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy. OLC’s credibility is derived from its reputation for apolitical, academic discipline — its commitment to informing policymakers of what the law is, rather than what staffers believe the law should be. Johnsen is, for that reason, a poor fit: She is an ideologue, and an unabashed one.

Her bizarre equation of pregnancy and slavery was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was her considered position in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court. At the time, she was legal director of NARAL (then the National Abortion Rights Action League, since renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America). The case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, involved a Missouri law that did not ban abortion but restricted the use of state funds and resources for abortions. It’s an obvious distinction, but one without a difference — at least according to Johnsen. Any restriction that makes abortion less accessible is, in her view, tantamount to “involuntary servitude” because it “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].” In effect, a woman “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she contends, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.

Where do all these assholes come from?

From the UK Telegraph

Terrorist suspects claiming unemployment benefits
Terrorist suspects placed under control orders restricting their movements are being paid unemployment benefits after promising to seek work in Britain.

Too many Western governments have gone soft in the head.

As a counterbalance to such idiocy, see this extremely interesting story of a British female ‘tree hugger’ who was invited by General Odierno to shadow him as he carried out his duties. As a bona fide tree hugger she hated armies and the US equally, but in the end came to admire both Odierno and the US Military.

I’m saving this post from American Thinker for all the people I run into who think Bush [of course] and Wall St are responsible for the financial crisis. The icing on this particular cake is that it’s from the NYT before Bush was elected.

For All The……….

……..whiners, complainers and malcontents who think they are hard done by, this should be compulsory reading.

And The Anchoress says, ‘Yep, I Miss Bush’.

Couldn’t Resist.

Stole this from Dr. Sanity.

My latest comment on Still Muttering.

I am still optimistic for the long term, after all what was it, 58 million Americans didn’t want Obama in spite of the hype, not hope, that ran his campaign and more millions will have their eyes opened as Obama stumbles ineptly along, but two years is a long time for he and Pelosi and co to have free run of the hen house, there might not be many chickens left to supply us with eggs by then. The worst part of the Socialist agenda is, as they’ve been doing in UK, to have as many people employed in government or dependent on government as possible, guaranteed voters for them. As they say, if you take money from Peter to pay Paul, you can always rely on Paul’s support.
I love gentle intelligent people like you, you’re the best and it would be nice if we were all like you, but there are nasty people out there, from Socialists who think they know better how everyone should live to the barbarians with their Sharia law and they have to be fought with a clear eyed vision of what’s at stake and what must be done to defeat them.
Dr Sanity had the best summary of Obama I’ve seen, she listened to part of an Obama speech and said the gist of it was:
On domestic policy: I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.
On foreign policy: Peace in our time.
O is a bigger danger than the bumbling Carter, since he knows what he’s doing. See Alinsky for that.

Our Black African Leader.

JAU at Still Muttering has a hope that maybe Obama will accomplish some good. What she writes is good and makes sense if it didn’t concern Obama. My comment:

This guy Obama is either an empty fool or a Marxist ideologue, my guess is both. I can’t help thinking black Kenyan Marxist father and then looking at all the disastrous black leaders Africa has had since independence, Mugabe being just the latest, and I see unbelievably one of them as President of the US. Hope all you want but there is a disaster in the making. Obama has been nurtured and funded by Soros, his mentors from his early years were Marxists, his mother and father were. If in the debacle to come the Democrats are purged of the hard left who have taken over the Party then at least some good will come out of it, but at such a price.

To re-enforce that I linked to this column, America, What Have You Done, of the always wonderful Melanie Phillips. She concludes:

And how did the 44th President react to the growing public dismay over the mess he was making? He threw his toys out of the pram — or perhaps that should read, he got into the pram. For he fled the scene of the disaster and sought the company of seven year-olds instead. As the Telegraph reported:

‘We were just tired of being in the White House,’ he told a group of excited seven-year-olds before discussing Batman and reading them a book.

Tired of being President – after two weeks!

Tax cheats, pork-barrel politics, ancillary child abuse, incompetence, chaos, treachery and infantilism. America – what have you done?!

Should just mention that ‘Still Muttering’ in one of my favourite blogs, a daily read. I love that her grandfather was concertmaster in Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra.

Update.

Those of us who are a little more aware than the average person of the underlying agenda of the ‘bankrupt America’ movement spearheaded by Soros and his protege Obama aided and abetted by the Democrats know that we are headed for dangerous times. Some like ‘The Doctor is In’ can articulate the danger in a way that would be on the front pages of our newspapers were they not part of the conspiracy or just as likely ignorant of the consequences of what they do.

Those who live by certain conviction of a divine and beneficent deity, upon whose absolute principals lie the foundations of all moral behavior and societal harmony, may tolerate the corruption of secular man who rejects such notions, having as they do a clear-eyed understanding of the fallen nature of man. The secular, on the other hand, can broach no such tolerance: secularism is instead an aggressive and metastasizing malignancy which, while speaking tolerance, seeks only the extermination of that which by its very existence stands as a condemnation of their views. For to be religious, moral, ethical, and grounded in the consequential absolutes which transcend and measure the heart of men is to stand as an intolerable affront to the notion that man alone is the measure of all things.

Do go and read it all.

via Alan Sullivan