Don't cross the streams!!

Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
--Ghostbusters (1984)

So two things.

1. I got the time wrong. It the LHC experiment was run at 5pm today.
2. The world didn't end!!

So apparently they only turned it on. They didn't do any exciting stuff like crossing the streams. Apparently they're going to do that in a couple of months. I don't know how many more 150ft marshmallow men we need, but I'd like to know those "scientists" check, double-check and recheck their calculations.

Here's a picture of some part of this machine. More at the link below....


Links:

• Pic from http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html
• Ask a Cern expert about black holes here.

End of the world?

Tomorrow morning, around 5am Australian Eastern Time, the propellerheads at the CERN laboratory in Geneva will be activating their Large Hadron Collider

A Large Hadron Collider.

What this means to non-nuclear physicists is that they are essentially turning on a machine that is 27km in diameter, and then "throwing" two particles at each other and watching them go boom. Why? well to "provide new insights into the mysteries of our universe."

There is apparently an infinitesimally small chance they might accidentally create a black hole. In Geneva. But don't worry, the men in the white coats and hard hats assure us that this has been "universally ridiculed by the experts involved in the project"

To commemorate life on earth, I present a YouTube sent in by a reader. Happy Life everyone! and if there's a world around tomorrow, I'll be sure to keep annoying you.

Sad sad Hippies

Via David Thompson:

Seriously, WTF?


Emotional Hippies - Crying Over Dead Trees - Watch more free videos


Can you imagine what these people could do if they invested half the time of this emotional masturbation, into say, thinking about ideas on how to live more environmentally friendly?

Just a thought, but can you imagine the same scene, with say, Russian speaking hippies? Chinese speaking? How about Farsi? Yeah, thought so.

Witness one of the many reasons why the West is dying.

Oh the Trees. Won't somebody think of the trees?

The Blogging Revolution

I was given this book to read and I struggled to get past the introductory chapter. Of the 50 sentences in the first four pages, 14 sentences contain the words Bush, George W Bush, the US president, universally with a sneering aside. What this means is that in a book allegedly about blogging in repressive regimes, the author wastes 28% of his space in the first four pages criticising Bush and the US.

An example:

"Bush believed that saluting and supporting dissidents around the world, men and womeon who battled petty dictatorships or autocracies, would 'achieve human rights'. That these autocracies were often Washington-backed was a truth conveniently overlooked by the president."

Really?!!? These conveniently undefined autocracies are often backed by the US government?!? Burma? China? Iran? Russia? I'm pretty sure that's news to them. Note also the use of sarcastic quotes ( ` `), they're like scare quotes (" "), but more cynical. And the entire chapter is liberally sprinkled with them.

China get's a mention, along with the "complicity of Western companies" enabling repressive censorship regime, and of course Bush's administration "spying on citizen's internet traffic" does as well, although surprisingly Brown governments' ability to spy on all electronic communications of UK citizens is not. That these things are true and are worthy of discussion doesn't change the fact that the way it is phrased is to suggest there is some equivalence between "real" repressive regimes and the US and of course, evil capitalism.

To whit:

"Sharafedin loved his nation [Iran] and it's people but railed against its hijacking by mullahs and extremists in Washington"

It's about this time I switched off. In Iran, bloggers risk imprisonment, torture and their lives to write things that the government does not want reported on, but the "extremists in Washington" respond to the daily attacks and critical blogs of it's citizens by...writing their own blog.

"I was determined to reclaim words such as 'democracy', 'human rights' and 'freedom', beliefs that have been utilised to justify years of violent policies designed to subjugate nations to US foreign policy interests and Western markets"

Aha! The BIG evil of "Western markets". I do believe that the irony of writing about reclaiming "'democracy', 'human rights' and 'freedom'" in a country where the author has all the above, is lost on our earnest little communist.

I believe Mr Loewenstein is a West-hating socialist (note the revolution themed book cover...I doubt red was coincidental choice), who despite his travels to really repressive countries, can't help viewing the world through Bush-hating glasses (probably because all the ills in the world are Dubya's fault, ya see?) It will be interesting to see how he and his ideological comrades will have anything to write about after November.

NEWSFLASH: Socialism died in 1989. Get over it.

Community Organizer vs Hockey Mom

Democracies often of provide tepid choices as nominations for leaders, and as a voter you have a choice between someone you don't want to vote for, and someone worse.

The current US election is fascinating in that finally they have some candidates with a bit of excitement. With the introduction of McCain's choice for VP, Governor Palin, people on both sides of the aisle are going beserk with a mixture of admiration, rage, fear and awe.

I'm not really one for nuance, and I'm decidedly pro-West in most situations. So for me, the choice between the Chosen One and an old white male, is not so difficult. I just look at the enemies of the Free World and see who they're Baracking for (pun intended), and I choose the other guy.

So it's really a no-brainer. When Hamas endorses Obama, any and all reservations I have for the other guy just...disappear. When Obama has to sack an adviser for talking to Hamas, I know I'm on the right track (no pun intended). And finally, when Iran starts repeating Democratic talking points re: Gov. Palin, well, I feel almost energised enough to start campaigning for the Republicans.

A regular contributor at Ace of Spades, Gabriel, put's it best:

"Let me put it this way. Do we want to elect men and women whose first response to a terror attack is to ask "Why do they hate us?" Or perhaps something more along the lines of "Don't we have a carrier group in the region right now?"

A little bit of perspective

Re: this story from The Australian

Instead of a profanity laden post which I really feel like writing, I have found some appropriate pictures of Taliban type activity, contrasted with comments from the article. Apologies for the graphic nature of the pictures. It was either that or a post with FUCK YOU ARSEHOLES!!! copy and pasted 100 times.

“To be honest, I am appalled that Australian soldiers have been implicated with such disgusting treatment of human beings,” he said.
“No human bring should be in any way placed in a dog pen.”
--Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Iqbal Patel

“For Australia to find itself keeping prisoners in dog kennels, dog pens, even overnight, is a big mistake,” he told reporters in Canberra. "
--Australian Greens leader Bob Brown

"The situation in Afghanistan was “very nasty” and the Taliban were ruthless and destructive, but they should not be kept in dog pens, he said."
--Australian Greens leader Bob Brown

Links:
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8742
http://retorika.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/taliban-sisi-gelap-kemanusiaan/
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/30/world/30policy.inline.ready.html

Debunking Georgia

(illustration source: The Red Primer)

The commonly reported story (which even yours truly repeated) was that the whole Georgian thing started when Georgia 'invaded' South Ossetia on the 7th August this year, however, would it surprise you to know that in fact it was Russia who started the whole thing on the day before?

"It wasn't about taking Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through that town to get onto that road to slow the Russian advance."

Read the whole thing.

Why is Georgia important? Because it is the resuming of the civilizational rift between superpowers since the Cold War. It is also bringing back to the fore the intellectual dishonesty of those that blame America and the West first for everything. You think Iraq was bad? Read the above article for heartwarming details on how the Russian soldiers watched while the irregular troops committed atrocities.

On the completely inadequate response from NATO and the West (which by the way, will have major repercussions down the track), Christopher Hitchens has this to say:

"It is now we, sunk in the banalities of democratic discourse, who stammer to find an apt form of words in which to defend and justify ourselves and our once-again menaced friends to the east."