Ooops, We Missed A Few

For some reason scientists are always amazed when they underestimate God's Creation. Whether you examine if from the mega- to the micro- or yacto-scale, it's bigger, it's faster, it's smaller, it's expanding; and we are continually confounded by the complexities of its simplest, most elemental components. From the Christian Science Monitor:

It's a cosmic embarrassment of riches – the universe appears to hold three times the number of stars many astronomers might have estimated only a year ago.

That's the implication a pair of scientists has drawn after measuring eight huge elliptical galaxies that they selected from two vast galaxy clusters located between 53 million to 321 million light-years from Earth.

With as many as 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, the result – if it holds up – implies an enormous number of additional burning gas balls out there, with intriguing implications for explanations of how stars and galaxies form and evolve, researchers say.

The cause of this huge revision of the stellar census are stars known as red dwarfs, literally the dimmest stellar bulbs on the shelf. These stars weigh in at no more than about 30 percent of the sun's mass.

Surveys of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, have found that these dwarfs outnumber sun-like stars by about 100 to 1, explains Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. But the dwarfs are so dim and other galaxies so distant that red dwarfs fail to appear when astronomers try to account for the stars other galaxies contain.

Overachievers
Scientists have tried to estimate the number of stars in the universe - as if they know how big the universe really is. What they can do is measure what is detectable to the human senses through instruments constructed by Man. And apparently that's not good enough. With this latest discovery, estimates for this number now range as high as 300 sextillion.

That's 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Even Goomba's waist falls a bit below that.

But my question always comes back to this: where did it all start? Our world views are strongly influenced by this foundational belief; is it all mere chance or is there a Creator - a Supreme Omnipotent Engineer who designed all we sense around us and beyond even what our pitiful imaginations can suppose?

If you believe in a Creator, then you have an immutable, immovable foundation that upholds the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as the Founding Fathers conceived them. If not, then you do not hold to the notion of inalienable rights because they can exist only as long as the governing authority deigns to let you have them. Mankind has existed under the latter for millennia and only for a relatively short while under the former.

But I digress, back to the stars ... and hydrogen.

Our own familar blazing orb, the Sun, is a medium sized yellow star that is approximately 870,000 miles in diameter. It's volume is 338,000,000,000,000,000 - 338 quadrillion cubic miles. It is 332,946 times as massive as the earth. NASA estimates that the Sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen every second.

If our own medium sized star runs through that much hydrogen in one second, how much hydrogen is needed to fuel 300 sextillion stars to burn for a second? For ten thousand years? A billion years? The numbers are beyond comprehension. And it is beyond comprehension how this mass, and a seemingly infinite amount more, came into existence in a twinkling ... by chance.

Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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Just another day at the New York Times

The Incredibly Fantastic

Adventures of Maureen Dowd

Click on the image for a better look.

My childhood hero died today

Here's the crime: He was never named to the Hall of Fame. There should be a wing in Cooperstown named just for this man. He was that good a ballplayer.

R.I.P. Ron Santo

Words For The Troglodyte Prophet and His Followers

Once in a while a politician will say something that makes a lot of sense because it is based on fact - truth.

Austrian MP Ewald Stadler finally speaks his mind on Islamic lies and propaganda. Listen to, actually read unless you speak German, the speech he gives before Parliment as he calls for the expulsion of the Turkish ambassador. The difficulties erupted after the ambassador criticized his host nation for refusing to integrate Muslims into Austrian society. The cheeky bastard should be tarred and feathered and whipped out of Europe.

Let us congratulate Nickie and the Nevada Wolfen for threading the needle between errant Boise FG's

The Wolfens' heroes even pause to recognize them in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body:

Tic Tac Toe ...

In keeping with the theme of video posts re: straight talk, manhood and such, I was taken back to the character of one Col. Jessup, USMC, of "A Few Good Men" fame.

Yes, Goomba Nation, the movie was weighted down with Hollywoood (I mean, there are no squids on the planet that look like Demi Moore ... nor are there many, if any, who have the cajones to talk to a Marine colonel like Tom Crews did ... for starters) plus some non-USMC sights and sounds that made it hard to watch in spots.

Also, the actual "Tom Crews" was a Marine and the actual case was an assault, as the "Code Red" was a beating in real life, rather than a homocide.

But that's the way it goes. Let's keep facts from getting in the way of a great story, shall we?

Still, I enjoyed the movie because it came out while I was on active duty and it featured the incomparable Jack Nicholson as Col. "The Truth" Jessup. Now, Hollywood aside, I have known some Marines like Jessup.

Here is the "lunch scene" for your viewing:

Skilled golfer sues over lost balls

Lana Lawless' suit puts gender in sports in spotlight again
USA Today

A basic tenet of modern athletics involves separation of the sexes. Yet that principle is increasingly being challenged on the court and in the courtroom.

Earlier this month, Kye Allums, a female-to-male transgender student on the women's basketball team at George Washington University, publicly discussed his decision to compete after coming out in a story first reported on Outsports.com.

The junior, 21, who once went by Kay-Kay Allums and has not had gender-reassignment surgery, is the first known transgender person to compete in Division I college basketball.

Allums' disclosure came on the heels of a legal challenge to theLadies Professional Golf Association's policy that its players be "female at birth." Lana Lawless, a 57-year-old transgender woman, filed a lawsuit Oct. 12 claiming the rule violates California civil rights law.

Loretta has something to say about this:
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When A Song Just Won't Do It

The brave men and women of our armed forces face unique challenges all over the world. Nickie's last post regarding the Baghdad All-Boy Bolshoi got me to thinking about a Youtube smackdown of the Iraqi police by an American soldier I saw some time ago. It is now posted for your edification and it is NSFW due to strong language.

This GI has clearly had enough from his charges and realizes that, unfortunately, just growing a pair sometimes isn't enough.

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Why we'll never leave Iraq... the challenge.

GAZA

If you rely upon legacy media for the news, you'd think that Gaza was some kind of killing ground upon which innocent Palestinians are regularly targeted by Israelis. But in Gaza, as in most places around the Middle East, the most prolific murderers of Muslims are other Muslims.

The following graphic screen-captures depict a mass execution of civilians in Gaza by members of the murderous gang of thugs known as Hamas.

Mass executions? Genocide? Apartheid?

Yes -- all of those things.

And legacy media is utterly silent.

Lining civilians up against a wall and executing them like the Nazis at Babi Yar.

And the typical separatist front groups, CAIR and the like, are silent on these events.

Should you do a search for "Hamas mass murder Gaza", you'll find plenty of references to Zionists killing innocents.

Or "apartheid".

Or terrorist-laden "Freedom Flotillas".

But let terrorists kill thousands of innocents in New York, or Mumbai, or Beslan, Madrid, London, Uzbekistan, Bali, Baghdad, Kashmir and dozens of other venues, and the media can't seem to determine what the attackers' motivation may be.

After all, it's not real news unless Israelis are involved.

This post was stolen from Doug Ross@Journal

Eat the Salad

How the nanny president sees himself -- and us
By KYLE SMITH
NY Post

What’s it like inside the Obama White House? A lot like what you’d guess from outside the Obama White House.

In “Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside Obama’s White House,” MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe, a writer sympathetic to the president, reports the prosaic backroom details of the White House struggles from early this year, but occasionally stumbles upon an off-the-cuff revelation that’s much more interesting.

One staffer was conspicuously overweight. The president, in an incident that Wolffe believes proves how caring the man is, took it upon himself to present the aide with a salad for lunch — “then listened to him protest that he could take care of his own health. ‘I love you, man,’ Obama said. ‘I want you to look after yourself. Eat the salad.’ ”

I love you, man. Eat the salad. That is the Obama presidency in a plastic see-through clamshell. (Hold the ranch dressing!) The president loves us. He knows what’s best for us. We should bow to his superior wisdom.

Jimmy Carter obsessed over the White House tennis court schedule. President Obama wants to be your life coach, guidance counselor and spouse, kicking your shins under the dinner table when you order chocolate cake instead of steamed celery.

The president has to deal with transnational terrorism, arms control, unemployment, the deficit, health care and limiting damage from the Joe Biden Gaffe-u-tron. Add in the possibility of North Korea throwing a nuclear tantrum, and it seems unlikely that Obama is going to have time to follow me into Wendy’s. Yet there he is, pushing for all restaurant chains to post calorie counts, as already required in New York. Like much of liberalism, this little nudge isn’t a terrible idea, but it does impose a cost on business with little apparent benefit.

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Winston Churchill - Prophet

Churchill in 1896

From the pages of the Australian Islamist Monitor, a young Winston Churchill speaks to us across a century of religious oppression:

A little more than 100 years ago, this was Churchill's view in 1899. The attached is a short speech, delivered by Winston Churchill in 1899 when he was a young soldier and journalist.

It probably sets out the current views of many but expressed in the wonderful Churchillian turn of phrase and use of the English language, of which he was a past master.

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!

Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.

It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome ."

Winston Churchill died in 1965 at the age of 90.

This picture of Churchill with Aristotle Onassis was taken in 1963.

Too Much Time In The Sun

The families of people who have suffered and died from skin cancer caused by excessive exposure to the Sun now have someone they can sue.

Spanish Woman Claims She Now Owns Sun

(AFP) - After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner -- a woman from Spain's soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property.

Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system.

There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.

"There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first."

The document issued by the notary public declares Duran to be the "owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, located at an average distance from Earth of about 149,600,000 kilometers."

Duran, who lives in the town of Salvaterra do Mino, said she now wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government and 20 percent to the nation's pension fund.

Have you or a loved one ever suffered from the ravages of skin cancer or sun burn caused by the reckless action of Ms. Duran and her out of control star? Has your car's paint job been damaged by the Sun? Your beautiful, custom-made livingroom drapes faded and deteriorating due to the incessant output of ultraviolet light? Tired of purchasing expensive prescription sunglasses? Then call call 1-800-SUE-DRAN!

Prepare for the onslaught of lawyers' television ads in 3, 2, 1.