Saturday, May 26, 2007

One More Reason to Hate the Immigration Bill

You have to get permission from Homeland Security to get a job. We already have to put up with way to much intrusion on our privacy and loss of liberties. This bill will not only sell out the American people, it will seriously screw us over in other ways. If they want to get so serious about stopping future illegal immigration, why can’t they do so now without giving millions of people a free pass? I they want to give people who are here a chance to work legally, why should they get citizenship? Why not just give them work visas, but they still have to follow the rules?

The way these morons in the government look for ways to disenfranchise the people they work for (us), while at the same time patronizing millions of lawbreakers is almost unbelievable. Except thisis nothing new. We really need to punish anyone who in any way shape for form supports this bill. They need to be out of power pronto and never return.

There are plenty of reasonable ways to check for illegal immigrants without punishing and robbing Americans of their liberties. 

Nature Vs Human

Nature always wins.

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Think Positive

I posted a link to this on my blog last year, but since that blog got wiped, this is worth revisiting. We are constantly bombarded by negativity. The press is almost vampiric in its endless sucking of our faith in the future. It pounds us with relentless fear and doom prophecies. But the facts of where we are going is entirely different. Things are getting better everywhere. And this trend has been happening since the early 1960s. This has been due to globalization, countries switching to market-based economies and the slow eradication of dictatorships. Much of this has also been due to rich countries helping the poorer ones. Yet, if you listen to the press they tell us we’re destroying the world. That development is bad. Industrialization is killing the planet. Etc, Etc.

This is largely the propaganda of people who wish we could all adopt socialism. But the fact is, there are good reasons why China, Russia, Vietnam, etc. switched to makrt based economies. Things work a lot better when peple have the freedom to start their own businesses and trade freely. Government bureaucracies get in the way of human progress. They rarely help.

The facts are entirely different The same goes for environmentalism. We have made great strides in cleaning up the environment in the last 30 years. But if you listen to the media and the usual leftist hacks, we’re destroying the planet.  The truth is, we’re constantly improving our technology and looking for new ways to manage our resources. We are already doing a lot of the things we need to and we’re moving toward where we need to be in a lot of important areas.

Don’t let the negativity drones depress you. Most of them are either liars or ignorant of the facts. We are doing good work. Things are getting better for the human race. 

The Pyramids are Made of Concrete?

“What started as a two-hour project turned into a five-year odyssey that I undertook with one of my graduate students, Adrish Ganguly, and a colleague in France, Gilles Hug,” Barsoum says.

A year and a half later, after extensive scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group finally began to draw some conclusions about the pyramids. They found that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate mineral.

The stones also had a high water content—unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau—and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.

The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in nature. “Therefore,” says Barsoum, “it’s very improbable that the outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a natural limestone block.”

More startlingly, Barsoum and another of his graduate students, Aaron Sakulich, recently discovered the presence of silicon dioxide nanoscale spheres (with diameters only billionths of a meter across) in one of the samples. This discovery further confirms that these blocks are not natural limestone.

Very interesting. But not impossible. The Romans had their own version of concrete also. We’ve learned over the years that the ancients were much mroe advanced than anyone thought. 

Bwahaha!

Friday, May 25, 2007

The Black Hole of Mars

Another mystery on the Martian surface. What is it? It’s lmost perfectly round. 

Whoa!

Saturn backlit by the sun. Amazing. Clck image to enlarge. 

REVIEWS

Pirates of the Carribean: At the World’s End: It’s a fun, but convoluted mess. Not very engaging despite all the action because there are so many things going on you’re supposed to absorb, you lose track of the plot line amid all the myriad plot threads dangling about. Basically, they rescue Jack Sparrow from a surreal kind of hell, using a Chinese map to various magical realms. Then they get all the pirates together to fight Davy Jones and that British Admiral bad guy from the last movie. I have a feeling it will play better on repeat viewing like the last one did for me. Very spectacular looking, though. Chow Yun Fat is great as the Chinese Pirate Lord. Unfortunately, he has little screen time. They leave room for a sequel, of course.

28 Weeks Later: If you enjoyed the last one, this is a worthy follow up. Set after an American military team tries to repatriate British survivors to their island after all the zombies are presumably dead, a survivor is found who may or may not be immune. Things go south really fast. My problem with these movies is the military is portrayed, generally, as cruel bad guys. This time, at least, they had a couple good soldiers, but please. I don’t like the anti-military mentality of these films, but I like them over all.

Somewhere, a Farmer Needs a Cow

After this heated exchange, Rosie won’t be back on the View. Now if they could just can that Bette Midler-looking bitch.