Hubble Goes Extremely Deep

Hubble Goes Extremely Deep

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of their best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of our deepest-ever view of the Universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining ten years of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations taken of a patch of sky within the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over one million seconds of observation, the resulting image revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the Universe ever taken at that time.

The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive than the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, thanks to the additional observations, and contains about 5,500 galaxies, even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness that the unaided human eye can see.

Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to the Milky Way and its neighbor the Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do large, fuzzy red galaxies in which the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years as the stars within them age.

Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, and yet more distant galaxies that are like the seedlings from which today’s magnificent galaxies grew. The history of galaxies — from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like the Milky Way — is laid out in this one remarkable image.

Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits made over the past decade with a total exposure time of two million seconds.More than 2000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble’s two primary cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble’s vision into near-infrared light. These were then combined to form the XDF.

“The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program.

The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early Universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars far brighter than our Sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a time tunnel into the distant past when the Universe was just a fraction of its current age. The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang.

Before Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers were able to see galaxies up to about seven billion light-years away, half way back to the Big Bang. Observations with telescopes on the ground were not able to establish how galaxies formed and evolved in the early Universe. Hubble gave astronomers their first view of the actual forms of galaxies when they were young. This provided compelling, direct visual evidence that the Universe is truly changing as it ages. Like watching individual frames of a motion picture, the Hubble deep surveys reveal the emergence of structure in the infant Universe and the subsequent dynamic stages of galaxy evolution.

The planned NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope) will be aimed at the XDF, and will study it with its infrared vision. The Webb telescope will find even fainter galaxies that existed when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old. Because of the expansion of the Universe, light from the distant past is stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths. The Webb telescope’s infrared vision is ideally suited to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early “dark ages” of the Universe with light.

Image: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team [high-resolution]

Caption: Hubble Heritage Team

Grave Curiosities

Congress tweaks US video-privacy law so Netflix can get on Facebook

It looks like Netflix will finally manage to get the small change to US privacy law that it's been seeking for nearly two years now. Last night, the Senate passed a reform to the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA, that Netflix says it needs in order to integrate its services with Facebook.
Right now, the VPPA stops anyone's movie-rental history from being disclosed without specific written consent. Netflix expressed to its shareholders back in July 2011 [PDF] that the VPPA made it "ambiguous" how it could get consent from US users to allow a sharing function on Facebook. Given that online privacy has been a growing area of litigation in the past few years, the concern was warranted.
The reform bill that just passed, H.R. 6671, should clear up Netflix's concerns as well as those of other streaming-video providers that want to reach out to your inner over-sharer. It also shows the contours of what a Netflix sharing function, on Facebook or otherwise, might look like. The bill makes clear that: 1) consent for sharing video-watching history can be granted over the Internet; and 2) consent can be given for a whole period of time, up to two years, and doesn't need to be given every time sharing happens. It also specifies that the disclosure has to be in a "distinct" form. In other words, don't put it in the fine print. Consumers will be allowed to withdraw consent for sharing when they want to, on a case-by-case basis, or altogether.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) originally attached VPPA reform to a much larger bill that would force law enforcement to get warrants before snooping on e-mail, a change to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act long sought by privacy advocates. However, the video-rental-privacy part, which is relatively non-controversial, was stripped out of the ECPA bill so that it could be passed quickly according to Politico's Morning Tech (no link available).
The VPPA is something of an oddity in US law. It was passed after the 1988 US Senate debate over the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork, who failed to get Senate approval to join the high court, passed away earlier this week.
During the hearings, a reporter from Washington DC's alt-weekly City Paper acquired the nominee's video-rental history from Bork's local video store, and published a story based on his selections.
Bork's movie-watching predilections were completely unremarkable. They included 12 Alfred Hitchcock flicks; solid Americana like On the Town, The Wild Bunch, and The Right Stuff; and British costume dramas such as The Private Life of Henry the Eighth.
The story got Congress' attention, though. It resulted in the passage of the VPPA, one of the most thorough privacy laws passed by the federal government. Violating the VPPA entails penalties of up to $2,500 per offense.
Now that Netflix can be sure it won't run afoul of such penalties, we can all look forward to a Facebook newsfeed full of friends who broadcast every episode of television they watch.

Ask an inconvenient question...

And you know what the answer is....

Disease that Destroys Countries

It is a self perpetuating cancer that infects and kills its host.

Obama Wan Kenobi

The Barefoot Peckerwood: Zuckerburg: A Modern Day Joseph Goebbels

The Barefoot Peckerwood: Zuckerburg: A Modern Day Joseph Goebbels: via Infowars Facebook is purging accounts that carry pro-second amendment and pro-liberty information in a censorship purge that has ...

Chinese Knife Rampage

Hat Tip: http://itaintholywater.blogspot.com/

The Evolution Of The Batman Logo

 

 

Designed by Cathryn Laver from Calm the Ham, the graphic traces the evolution of the Batman logo from its earliest iterations in the comics of the 1940s through its use in Adam West’s delightfully campy TV take in the '60s, Frank Miller’s dark graphic novels in the '80s, and George Clooney and his nipple suit in the '90s, and ends with the multimillion-dollar Dark Knight films today. The genus is always quite clearly bat, but unique species abound.
Some are simplified illustrations of Batman himself--a few even including his masked mug--while others are stylized versions of the real thing. Some over the years have done double duty as the hero’s nonlethal weapon of choice, the Batarang. Others are decidedly less aerodynamic.
Laver says she drew inspiration from a similar, though less comprehensive image she saw on the web a few years back, as well as a YouTube video showing the icon’s transformation over the years. Her research into the comics and graphic novels turned up a surprising trove of designs, though as she moved into the movie-era and saw Batman becoming an increasingly multifaceted (and consequently diffuse) marketing and merchandise juggernaut, things became thornier. "It was tricky [deciding] which logos to feature as some were on the bat suit and others were the comic and promotional logos," Laver notes. "Quite interesting to see which was used where."

Red Hot Girls with Guns

China wants Obama to ban all firearms.

The Communist Party of China demands the U.S. should disarm. According to Chinese officials, the recent school massacre gave all to understand that one should not wait any longer. The country's leaders believe that the brutality of the Connecticut shooter will ensure the widest public support for arms reduction, Infowars.com reports with reference to China's news agency Xinhua.

Xinhua is, in fact, the press service of the current government of China. This organization is responsible for "the work of the State Council and for the reports of the Party on Chinese propaganda and public information services." In other words, Xinhua is a mouthpiece of Chinese leaders.

Thus, the Chinese government calls Obama "to use the tragedy as a reason to promote the law on the control of weapons." According to Chinese officials, now is the best time to act so, since the president has just been elected for a second term.

They also note that although previous similar shootings did not to any serious actions, the most recent tragedy may serve an important impetus to revise the system of arms control."

According to US-based activist and FBI informant Brandon Darby, "the current Chinese government killed from 40 to 70 million people during Mao Zedong's Revolution. Mao himself said that "political power starts in the barrel of a gun."

China and Obama want to remove political power from the American people and subjugate them to the will of Socialists, Communists and Marxists.

Russia considers banning assault teeth as young cannibal kills and eats 11 people to impress his girlfriend

Ok Russia is not considering banning assault teeth.  They understand that teeth are not to blame for this sick individuals actions. But clearly teeth are dangerous weapons, here is the story:

The police of the Volga region are about to complete the investigation of the criminal case, the materials of which can shock even those with nerves of steel. Twenty-three-year-old cannibal Alexander Bychkov is accused of killing at least nine people. The perpetrator was gutting corpses and eating the insides to impress his girlfriend.

The cannibal was killing homeless people. According to investigation, the killings and cannibalistic feasts were taking place presumably in the Penza region. The insane killer buried the remains of half-eaten corpses near the town of Belinsky, in the south-west of the region. To kill the homeless, the murderer used a common kitchen knife.

Human remains were indeed uncovered at places of burial during investigation. "In two cases, after the murder he separated the heart from the body to eat the human heart later," law-enforcement officers said. It was also reported that the perpetrator was eating the livers of his victims too.

The perpetrator "formed a negative attitude towards the people, who abused alcohol and lead a beggary, roguish lifestyle," experts said.

The cannibal would conduct meticulous preparations for his crimes. He carefully scrutinized criminal literature. Alexander Bychkov "developed a criminal plan, prepared a weapon and studied the examples of similar crimes committed by serial killers." He also mastered "various strategies and methods to conceal crime traces, including the bodies of the victims."

In January 2012, Alexander Bychkov broke a window of a hardware store, from which he stole money, kitchen knives and other items in the total sum of about 10,000 rubles ($300). The man was caught; police began to question him about the theft. However, the thief suddenly began to tell officers about the corpses, which he buried behind his house.

The cannibal's diary of crimes was found in his home. The man described all his crimes in detail. According to his records, Alexander Bychkov had killed 11 people, but the remains of two victims have not been found yet.

The cannibal was reading crime novels and watching crime TV shows. He was committing the crimes only during warm months.

Alexander Bychkov grew up in a dysfunctional family and was brought up by single mother. His childhood was difficult. The boy grew up and became a cowardly, but a cruel young man.

Psychologists say that Bychkov was committing atrocities to gain credibility in the eyes of his girlfriend, Svetlana. According to local newspapers, he said that the killings instilled self-confidence in him. He stopped being shy with his girlfriend, who would often criticize him for his softness and call him a doormat.

According to lawyers, if found sane, Bychkov may well expect a life sentence. Psychiatrist, PhD, Igor Yanushev, told Pravda.Ru:

"Such shocking crimes occur on a regular basis, even in much more socially advantaged countries than Russia. Foreign cannibals can be much more sophisticated in their perverted crimes than Russian ones. In Russia, believe me, cannibalism is much more prosaic, but its scale is more impressive. Every year, police catch several cannibals, and it goes about proved cases only. Usually, cannibals are mentally ill individuals.

"In most cases, cannibals get into medical, rather than penitentiary institutions after verdict. A person, when recognized mentally ill, undergoes compulsory medical treatment until he or she is healed - it doesn't last for life. After treatment, their case is reviewed again, and that's when they can face a criminal punishment.

"I personally know several cases when mental patients were recognized healed and were released to freedom right from the courtroom - the statute of limitations expired. They can be released to freedom, despite the fact that they may commit their hideous crimes in 80 percent of cases."

The Broken American Economy

The future is dystopic because the present is dystopic, we just do not know it yet because of epic manipulation by the fed and media malpractice by the Ministry of Truth American media.  When you think about where to invest your money to keep it safe, there is nowhere.  Now people who make their money on investing your money will tell you otherwise, but there is no safe haven.  Bonds used to be safe, they no longer are, there was a time real estate was safe, it no longer is, the stock market has become a pyramid scheme tantamount to gambling, Gold may be the answer but at the current high rates it is also scary.  When you think about it, prepping may be the safest option, you can always use the food, and good clean water will only become more important in the future.  It is a scary economic climate the world over.

I love Zero Hedge, here is a recent article on Fed mismanagement:




From Zero Hedge:
Monetary Malpractice: Deceptions, Distortions & Delusions

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/26/2012 - 12:04
By the Deceptive means of Misinformation and Manipulation of economic data the Federal Reserve has set the stage for broad based moral hazard. Through Distortions caused by Malpractice and Malfeasance, a raft of Unintended Consequences have now changed the economic and financial fabric of America likely forever. The Federal Reserve policies of Quantitative Easing and Negative real interest rates, across the entire yield curve, have been allowed to go on so long that Mispricing and Malinvestment has reached the level that markets are effectively Delusional. Markets have become Dysfunctional concerning the pricing of risk and risk adjusted valuations. Fund Managers can no longer use even the Fed's own Valuation Model which is openly acknowledged to be broken.


(you can find a link to zero hedge in my blog list)

Bug Out Location Porn

What would you do if you had a couple million dollars to spare?

If you’re a prepper, than you’d likely be looking to put yourself in a home like this one on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland.  At first glance, you wouldn't think much about it, other than it being a nicely built country home. It’s stylish with the architectural design based on Polish “cube” homes of the 1960′s:

If the world ever goes SHTF/TEOTWAWKI, it quickly transforms into an impenetrable maximum security safe house through the use of sliding walls, a roll-top door and a draw bridge.

The outer cube of the home is constructed with steel and concrete, and has an outer perimeter wall for added security.

Few details have been provided about the home’s interior, but we suspect that anyone who has gone to the trouble of building this ultimate prepper bug-out safe house would also have built a multi-level basement and perhaps even a secret escape tunnel or two. Our thinking is if you’re gonna’ blow a million or two on construction you might as well go full-prepper and throw in all the bells and whistles.

Dare to dream. The possibilities are endless when you have the money and your very own concrete and steel-reinforced survival cube.

(Photos: Aleksander Rutkowski/Robert Konieczny – KWK Promes)

Hat tip Jonny V and Tess Pennington

Mountains of Madness: Scientists Poised to Drill Through Ice and Into Antarctic Gothic Horror

Illustration: Simon Lutrin/Wired

What might lurk beneath Antarctica’s 5 million square miles of ice was the subject of speculation by sci-fi writers in the 1930s. One of the icy products this subgenre of Antarctic Gothic horror spawned is HP Lovecraft’s novella, The Mountains of Madness, in which scientists drill beneath Antarctica’s ice — only to discover horrid things preserved there. Now, scientists are finally enacting Lovecraft’s scenario: Over the next several weeks they are drilling into three subglacial lakes hidden beneath thousands of feet of ice in Antarctica.

What they will find as they sample the lakes and send cameras into their bellies remains to be seen. But one thing is already clear: Lovecraft was actually right about far more than his readers could have realized.

In Lovecraft’s story, a team of researchers from Miskatonic University flies into an unexplored region of Antarctica and bores through the ice. They discover fossil dinosaur bones with disturbing puncture and hacking wounds that cannot be attributed to any predators known to science. Soon after, they uncover the source of some of those wounds: fossils of a leathery-skinned beast with a “five-ridged barrel torso … around the equator, one at [the] central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five … flexible arms or tentacles.” The beast’s body is topped by a “five-pointed starfish-shaped” head.

The fossils aren’t quite dead.

As they thaw in the sun, the beasts reawaken. They slaughter 12 members of the expedition, carefully dissecting one of them and carting away another as a brown-bag lunch.

Two surviving members of the expedition find an ancient city entombed in the Antarctic ice sheet which once belonged to the beasts. There, they discover a disturbing truth: This race of five-armed Elder Ones had arrived from space over 600 million years ago. They spawned all life on Earth, including that destined to evolve into humans … in order to provide a source of food.

Lovecraft wrote Mountains of Madness at a time when Antarctica’s interior remained mostly blank. Airplanes had only just begun to venture inward from the coasts — Robert Byrd made his famous, first-ever flight over the South Pole in 1928 — and Lovecraft’s novella, written in 1931, echoes that expedition. It’s easy to smirk at Lovecraft’s five-armed monsters, described ad nauseam, including precise dimensions in feet and inches. It’s easy to conclude that Lovecraft tried too hard to invent something that was truly alien.

But the ensuing decades have shown that Lovecraft was right on one profound matter: Antarctica’s cold wastes do indeed preserve some very old things, some of them dead — and some, still alive.

Geologists exploring one end of the Transantarctic Mountains (perhaps Lovecraft’s “mountains of madness”) have found shreds of plants, dead for up to 20 million years, protruding from the gravel and fluttering in the wind. These mosses represent the last stand that plants made on the continent before being extinguished by endless winter. The subsequent cold and dry have preserved them from decay. Plop a bit of this moss into a bowl of water and its delicate leaves and stems inflate like soft sponges. The scattered twigs of southern beech trees that are found here still contain enough organic matter that they smolder and smoke if placed over a flame.

Not all of the deep-time holdovers are dead, though. Antarctica’s cold coastal waters preserve an ecosystem like no other Earth. Scientists call it Paleozoic, reminiscent of between 250 and 540 million years ago. It is dominated by echinoderms, the ancient phylum of animals including starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and lily-armed crinoids, whose bodies have five-fold symmetry — which brings us back to Lovecraft’s race of five-tentacled Elder Ones mummified beneath the ice.

“They sound like echinoderms to me,” said Richard Aronson, a veteran Antarctic marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology. “Hilarious.”

Lovecraft points out that his Elder Ones inhabited the deep sea before emerging onto land. He goes to great lengths to describe the holes at the top of their heads, analogous to the water circulation pores in starfish. The author may have been more correct than he ever knew.

Lovecraft wasn’t the first author, or the last, to tell of scary things in Antarctica.

In 1938, several years after Lovecraft wrote Mountains of Madness, John W. Campbell published Who Goes There — a novella that became the basis for two famous movies, The Thing from Another World, and The Thing, released in the 1950s and 1980s, respectively. And a century earlier, in 1838, Edgar Allen Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In this book, a ship penetrates deeper into the southern ocean than ever before: The ice eventually gives way to warm seas and subtropical islands, populated by hostile natives reminiscent of those described by early European explorers in the Pacific.

The seas surrounding Antarctica were little known when Poe published his book. But by the time Lovecraft wrote his novella, multiple visits had been made to the continent, forcing the monsters to retreat into the poorly mapped interior, and under the ice. It may be time for the monsters to retreat once more.

Image: NASA

A combination of ice-penetrating radar, seismic sensing, and laser altimetry has revealed well over 100 subglacial lakes hidden beneath Antarctic’s ice. Between now and the end of January, teams from the United States, Russia, and Britain are drilling into three of them.

The British team is preparing to drill into Lake Ellsworth, which sits beneath 10,000 feet of ice and has not seen the light of day for millions of years.

This week, a convoy of tractors will depart from the American-run base McMurdo Station. Those 13 tractors, towing 24 massive sleds of equipment and fuel exceeding half a million pounds, will cross 900 miles of ice before stopping at a nondescript spot 370 miles from the South Pole. There, almost in sight of Lovecraft’s “mountains of madness,” beneath 2,500 feet of ice, sits Lake Whillans, which has not seen daylight for 500,000 to a million years. Two kerosene-fueled generators, totaling nearly half a megawatt, will power a hot-water drill. Once activated in mid-January, that drill could bore an 18-inch-diameter hole into the lake within as little as one day.

At the same time, the Russians are drilling just above Lake Vostok, which sits under 12,350 feet of ice and has remained isolated from the outside world for up to 30 million years. The drillers at Vostok will extract fresh bits of ice, frozen lake water that gushed into the bottom of the borehole when the lake was first punctured last February.

The light that these explorations shed on Antarctica’s sunless waters will drive the monsters further underground.

The subglacial lakes will probably be found to harbor microbes, but much more. Finding those organisms will reveal plenty about life’s limits, particularly, about the ability of ecosystems to survive in places with minimal nutrients and without sunlight as an energy source. This will provide clues to what life, if any, could survive in liquid oceans that lurk beneath many miles of ice in other parts of the solar system, on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

The teams are sterilizing drill equipment to avoid contaminating the pristine subglacial ecosystems, using a combination of ultraviolet light, hydrogen peroxide, and water filtration. But their work is still bound to have impacts on the ecosystem of fictitious monsters.

Aspiring sci-fi horror writers needn’t necessarily forsake Antarctica altogether, says Reed Scherer, a paleontologist from Northern Illinois University, who is part of the team drilling into Lake Whillans. But monsters capable of ripping heads off or chasing down frightened geologists as they flee on snowmobiles will require more carefully though-out habitats. That kind of stuff requires a speedy metabolism. “In order for something to have a high enough metabolic rate that it would be scary to us, it would have to have heat,” says Scherer. Volcanoes sealed under the ice sheet could provide one possible niche, he says. “There’s lots of water and a heat source for things to have a high metabolic rate.” Aerial surveys of irregularities in the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields have revealed a handful of possible volcanoes beneath the ice of West Antarctica.

Monsters of the Lovecraft variety — the kind that will butcher a tenured university professor and take him along as camping provisions — might also find credible habitats on Europa or Enceladus, at least until space probes can disprove their existence.

But even as scientific insight banishes bone-crunching monsters from Antarctica, it could also lay the groundwork for new ones. Even just a little new information from the lakes could fuel a new generation of science fiction, points out Brent Christner, a microbiologist with Louisiana State University who will help to identify and culture whatever microbes are found in Lake Whillans this year.

Microbes could turn out to be the ultimate monsters in this scenario.

Jemma Wadham, a researcher at the University of Bristol in Britain, has determined that a large reservoir of methane may sit under Antarctica’s ice sheets, produced by microbes that have gnawed in the darkness for eons on the organic matter of dead ecosystems that were plowed under by glaciers. As warming causes those glaciers to thin, methane, a potent greenhouse gas, could seep up through the ice — billions of tons of carbon that could accelerate global warming in ways that models haven’t anticipated.

Drilling into Lakes Vostok, Ellsworth, and Whillans and measuring the gases, minerals, and microbes present there will help to test predictions of methane. Sci-fi writers inspired by the exploration of subglacial lakes may well make a new round of predictions about what Antarctica might conceal beneath its ice.

Some of those predictions will be wrong — others, like Lovecraft’s echinoderms, might one day turn out to be right.

• BY DOUGLAS FOX
• 12.27.12

Bug Out Location Porn

Hot Girls with Guns

The Ministry Of Truth

Given that MSNBC Anchors get called personally into the Whitehouse chambers and apparently coordinate message with Obama, MSNBC becomes an arm of the administration, or as in George Orwell's 1984, the official propaganda arm of the Regime, THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH.
The elements I use are the Big Brother eye in the Obama logo, the AMSOC slogan derived from the Orwellian INGSOC for English Socialism, the communist "Forward" slogan used by both the Obama Regime and MSNBC, and the Orwellian slogans, "Ignorance is Strength", "Freedom is Slavery" , "War is Peace" representing the DoubleThink concept of Orwell's 1984.
I also introduce formally the "ForwardThought" term into the newspeak dictionary for Tyrannical Governments.

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?

Report ThoughtCrime.

Only ForwardThought is allowed.  The Administration Thanks You!

10 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries

More Information About NewSpeak Is Here.

Awesome Photo: The Dust of Orion

Dust of Orion

 

This image of the region surrounding the reflection nebula Messier 78, just to the north of Orion’s belt, shows clouds of cosmic dust threaded through the nebula like a string of pearls. The submillimeter-wavelength observations, made with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope and shown here in orange, use the heat glow of interstellar dust grains to show astronomers where new stars are being formed. They are overlaid on a view of the region in visible light.

Image: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2 [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

Hot SteamPunk Girl with SteamPunk Gun

Leather -n- Lace

The President Knows...

Guns make him less Safe...

Obama Propaganda Poster

The Administration will protect you!

Taken from a Communist China propaganda poster which originally depicted the crushing of all things Capitalist, I removed the Chinese flags and replaced them with Obama logos with the Big Brother eye in the middle symbolizing the Orwellian lack of privacy and government spying that is currently occuring. Below the logo on the top right, I added the communist slogan of "Forward" that the Obama Administration uses along with at least one of their propaganda outlets . I added guns to the items being crushed by the worker representing the state confiscation of guns and the crushing at least one of our rights as Americans. The message on the top left intentionaly implies a threat if you do not turn in your guns. Always remember, Government = Force.

This is the future that we all need to fight against.

How the Progressive Media Covered Jesus' Birth

Large Roman Chariots Blamed for Killing the Dead Sea...

Hot Girls, Hot Guns - Rule 5 Girls

Traveling light can extend your range...

Bug Out Location Porn

Defend from high ground..

Dear Bob Costas:

Bob, don't be a libtard vapid dolt.

Winter Awesomeness

Obamanomics

Giving the Productive a Debt Sentence...

Doing What Is Right

Obedience = Submission

UK Preppers TV Show

Looks like the UK has a Doomsday Preppers show now too..

Merry Christmas Everyone

May everyone have the opportunity to spend time with the ones they love today.  Be tolerant of the family members that annoy you, and be generous in spirit to everyone.  If there are little ones, smile a little more for them, help to make this day magical for them, try to help to become the wonderful memories that they will tell their children about.  Continue your family traditions, become an example to your family of how to be a man or woman, strive to become a source of strength and wisdom to your family and friends.  Be a good person, a good citizen and be good to yourself.  Merry Christmas.