Awesome Photo: Thor’s Helmet Nebula

Thor's Helmet

This VLT image of the Thor’s Helmet Nebula was taken on the occasion of ESO’s 50th Anniversary, Oct. 5, 2012, with the help of Brigitte Bailleul — winner of the Tweet Your Way to the VLT! competition. The observations were broadcast live over the internet from the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This object, also known as NGC 2359, lies in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). The helmet-shaped nebula is around 15,000 light-years away from Earth and is over 30 light-years across. The helmet is a cosmic bubble, blown as the wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center sweeps through the surrounding molecular cloud.

Image: ESO/B. Bailleul [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

Awesome Photo of Inner Space

Big Brother: Feds Propose Tracking Black Boxes in All New Cars.

The Obama administration wants to know where you are at all times.

Federal regulators are proposing that new automobiles sold in the United States after September 2014 come equipped with black boxes, so-called “event data recorders” that chronicle everything from how fast a vehicle was traveling, the number of passengers and especially a car’s location.

While many automakers have voluntarily installed the devices already, the National Transportation Safety Agency wants to hear your comments by February 11 on its proposal mandating them in all vehicles. Congress has empowered the agency to set motor-vehicle-safety rules.

The Feds claim that regulators’ intentions are about safety, as the devices would trigger — for about 30 seconds — during so-called “events” such as during sudden breaking, acceleration, swerving or other types of driving that might lead to an accident. The data, which can either be downloaded remotely or by a physical connection, depending upon a vehicle’s model, can clearly be used to track your movements remotely and stored in a remote database allowing the Feds to maintain a permanent record of every place you have ever gone, the time and other people that were there at the same time.

Privacy advocates are raising the alarm bells, and want the agency to require data safeguards, including demands that data be anonymized, and to prohibit the marketing of it.  There can never be any guarantee of that with todays warrantless wiretaps.

“You should not think of this as being an opportunity to sell data to auto-insurance companies for risk evaluation. That’s a real possibility. Data is valuable,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Submit your comments to the National Transportation Safety Agency here. Your comments are a public record.

Australian researcher David Warren invented the black box in 1953 to record airline cockpit noise and instruments during flight to help investigators solve crash mysteries. It was only a matter of time before they would be required in motor vehicles.

The vehicle black boxes — which are either tiny standalone devices or part of a vehicle’s computer system — are to record speed, engine throttle, breaking, ignition, safety belt usage, the number of passengers, airbag deployment, and among other things time of the recording and sometimes a passenger’s location, depending on a vehicle’s model.

According to NTSA, as the National Traffic Safety Agency is known, the “event data recorders” will be ”used to improve crash and defect investigation and crash data collection quality to assist safety researchers, vehicle manufacturers, and the agency to understand vehicle crashes better and more precisely. Additionally, vehicle manufacturers are able to utilize EDR data in improving vehicle designs and developing more effective vehicle safety countermeasures. EDR data can also be used by Advanced Automatic Crash Notification (AACN) systems to aid emergency response teams in assessing the severity of a crash and estimating the probability of serious injury before they reach the site of the crash.”

Still, questions remain about the black boxes and data. Among them, how long should a black box retain event data, who owns the data, can a motorist turn off the black box and can the authorities get the data without a warrant.

For the moment, it’s the Wild West, with few guidelines.

“You have all of these entities that can collect and use this data without any bounds on how this data can be used,” Coney said.

Just 13 states have some regulations about the black boxes. Many of them demand the manufacture disclose the existence of the black box and some require a motorists’ consent for the black-box data to be viewed by others.

Clearly, the black boxes tell a story and that story can be recorded in a permanent remote database.

Timothy Murray, the Massachusetts Lt. governor, claimed he was traveling within the speed limit and wearing his seatbelt after he crashed a state vehicle last year. The black box in the Crown Victoria captured data that Murray was going 100 mph without a seatbelt.

How the government finalizes rules about the black boxes might set scary precedent for other technologies, according to Jay Stanley, an American Civil Liberties Union policy analyst.

“Will devices serve the consumer/owner, or some other powerful interest such as the government or big companies?” he asked. “We don’t want to drift into a world in which our own possessions are riddled with computer chips acting in the interests of others — watching us, controlling us, and possibly snitching on us.”

Hot Girls with Shotguns - Rule 5

Lean in to it...

Hot Pics of Hot Girls with Big Guns - Rule 5 Girls

Orwell's 1984 Cliffnotes (Sparknotes)

For anyone who is interested and not quite ready to read the book, the Sparknotes link at the bottom gives you the "cliffnotes" on the classic book.  I really enjoy reading the context section they provide also, it provides info on the experiences, times and mindset of the author.  Here is an excerpt:

1984 is one of Orwell’s best-crafted novels, and it remains one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian society. In Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, Orwell had witnessed the danger of absolute political authority in an age of advanced technology. He illustrated that peril harshly in 1984. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), 1984 is one of the most famous novels of the negative utopian, or dystopian, genre. Unlike a utopian novel, in which the writer aims to portray the perfect human society, a novel of negative utopia does the exact opposite: it shows the worst human society imaginable, in an effort to convince readers to avoid any path that might lead toward such societal degradation. In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the television had become a fixture in the family home, Orwell’s vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would be monitored ceaselessly by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly possible. That Orwell postulated such a society a mere thirty-five years into the future compounded this fear.


http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/summary.html

Is Kwanzaa a Hoax?

The Kwanzaa Hoax

William J. Bennetta

"Anywhere we are, Us is."
That looks like a line from an Amos 'N Andy show. One can easily imagine that it served as the motto of the Mystic Knights of the Sea, and that it was recited by such characters as The Kingfish, Andy Brown and Algonquin J. Calhoun.

In fact, however, the line that I have quoted is the motto of a real organization -- a real organization that was originally named United Slaves but now calls itself The Organization Us (or simply Us or US). It was created some 40 years ago, in Southern California, by a black racist who had begun life as Ron N. Everett but later had assumed the name Maulana Karenga. Karenga -- known chiefly as the inventor of Kwanzaa, a fake "African" holiday that he contrived in 1966 -- has enjoyed a truly colorful career. He was a prominent black nationalist during the 1960s, when his organization was involved in various violent operations. He was sent to prison in 1971, after he and some of his pals tortured two women with a soldering iron and a vise, among other things. He emerged from prison in 1974, and a few years later -- in a maneuver that even The Kingfish might have found difficult -- he got himself installed as the chairman of the Department of Black Studies at California State University at Long Beach. CSULB wasn't the only American university that got the racial willies during the 1970s and set up a tin-pot black-studies department, but CSULB (as far as I know) was the only one that hired a chairman who was a violent felon. Karenga is still working at CSULB and is still running The Organization Us, and he and Us are still promoting his proprietary holiday, Kwanzaa. Prentice Hall is promoting it too, so The American Nation displays a picture of "an American family's celebration of Kwanzaa" -- but The American Nation doesn't tell anything about Karenga, about his rules for carrying out a "celebration of Kwanzaa," or about his make-believe Africanism. Let me supply some of the information that Prentice Hall has hidden: Kwanzaa is supposed to be celebrated from 26 December through 1 January: It competes with Christmas and Chanukah while incorporating some echoes of both, e.g., gift-giving and a ceremony built around a seven-holed candle-holder that recalls Judaism's seven-branched menorah. Karenga has concocted some bits of lore, lingo, and mumbo-jumbo that are intended to make Kwanzaa look like something out of Africa instead of something from Los Angeles County, but his efforts have been feeble. If you scan The Official Kwanzaa Web Site, you'll read that the origins of Kwanzaa lie in "the first harvest celebrations of Africa," which allegedly "are recorded in African history as far back as ancient Egypt and Nubia" -- but there is no explanation of why any ancient Egyptians or Nubians might have held harvest festivals around the time of the winter solstice, and there is no identification of the crops that they harvested. Karenga's formula for celebrating Kwanzaa requires the use of two ears of maize -- but maize is a New World plant, and it wasn't known at all in ancient Africa. True believers can purchase ears of maize and other Kwanzaa equipment (e.g., candles and seven-holed candle-holders and straw mats) from the University of Sankore Press, a company in Los Angeles. This outfit evidently is controlled by Us and serves as Us's marketing unit. It isn't a university press, and its name is a mockery. The so-called University of Sankore was an aggregation of Islamic schools that flourished at Timbuktu in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. No University of Sankore exists today. In Karenga's Kwanzaa-lingo, ears of maize are called by the Swahili name "muhindi." In fact, all the objects that Karenga has worked into Kwanzaa have names taken from Swahili, which The Official Kwanzaa Web site describes as "a Pan-African language" and "the most widely spoken African language." The labeling of Swahili as a "Pan-African" language is rubbish. Swahili -- a Bantu tongue that includes many words absorbed from Arabic, from Persian and from certain Indian languages -- is spoken by some 50 million people (i.e., about 7% of Africa's population). Most of those Swahili-speakers are concentrated in eastern Africa, in a region that includes Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and a strip of Zaire. The language which is used most widely in Africa is Arabic; and indeed, Swahili was originally written in Arabic script. Kwanzaa is a hoax -- a hoax built around fake history and pseudohistorical delusions. By attempting to dignify and promote Kwanzaa in The American Nation, Prentice Hall has joined in a flim-flam.

AMSOC - FInal!

FORWARD COMRADES!

So this is a play on INGSOC from George Orwell's 1984 - A Novel about leftist government Tyranny. INGSOC was the acronym for English Socialism, so I created AMSOC - American Socialism. The Obama logo has the Big Brother eye in it, I decreased the transparency on it so that it pops more and I cleaned up some lines.  I used the Communist phrase of "Forward" just as the Obama administration does as does the Ministry of Truth: MSNBC.

 

This is the final version if you guys want to use it, just give me some cred!

Hot Girls with Big Guns - Rule 5 Girls

She is holding her big gun with her big guns...

AMSOC - FORWARD TOWARDS AMERICAN SOCIALISM

FORWARD COMRADES!

 

So this is a play on INGSOC from George Orwell's 1984 - A Novel about leftist government Tyranny.  INGSOC was the acronym for English Socialism, so I created AMSOC - American Socialism.  The Obama logo has the Big Brother eye in it, I probably need to decrease the transparency on it so that it pops more.  I used the Communist phrase of "Forward" just as the Obama administration does as does the Ministry of Truth: MSNBC.  It is still a work in progress. 

The Ring Revolver

Produced in the 1800's, the (probably French made) ring pistol is a perfect example of what was known as “la petite protectors”. The ring pistol once was one of the smallest killing devices ever developed.There doesn’t seem to be much info around regarding the practicality of the finger mounted firearm however, after a long search it appears some believe that: If it were fired, the smoke, flames, and noise would be considerable. The muzzle velocity would probably be so low that the powder burn would be worse than the bullet”

Smoking Hot Girls with Guns

Darling do you have a Baguette for me?