Dark matter.
Dark matter structure.
Dark matter structure evolving into dark matter organisms.
Dark matter organisms evolving into intelligent dark matter organisms.

Since dark matter is believed to influence the shape of the observable universe (holding galaxies together, galaxy groups, etc, in fact the "missing" matter problem noticed by Zwicky is how we discovered dark matter in the first place) what would stop hypothetical intelligent dark matter organisms, organisms aware and intelligent enough to have discovered and observe regular matter...

from deliberately influencing us?

Posted by: CAC at 07:08 PM | Comments (175)
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OMFG You Can 3D Print Guns!!

No You Can't

We Must Ban This Now!

I Guess You Really Can't Quite 3D Print Guns

New Technology is So Cool - Except When It Comes to Guns

The Start of 3D Printer Control?

Web Sites Appear Full of 3D Printed Gun Designs

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:27 PM | Comments (477)
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So claims a theory that says there was some kind of conspiracy to move from AD 599 to 901 AD, and so calenders were just manipulated, and some historical figures (like Charlemagne) were invented out of whole cloth to fill in the missing three centuries of "Phantom Time." more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:42 PM | Comments (313)
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Pretty much every federal-power grab will be justified from here on out by claiming it's important for

Teh Economy;

or Teh Human Health.

Those two categories cover a fair amount of ground -- one, every human being on earth, and two, in case that last one didn't capture enough territory, Earth.

All part of the global movement of transnational progressivism and its creed, We Know What's Best for You and We Are Courageous Enough to Impose It on You.

Posted by: Ace at 03:19 PM | Comments (338)
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Never too early for a map.

more...

Posted by: CAC at 02:49 PM | Comments (124)
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Stuebenville's being "Otherized."

They're different from the media types in New York (or, rather, the media types in New York assume they are different, because they are not within 50 miles of them). Ergo, they can spin wild fantasies about them; they are The Other, The Foreign, The Alien, The Strange, The Strangers.

Ignorant, provincially-minded, and psychologically weak people are frequently fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of panicky rumors about Strangers on the Road.

Meanwhile there's some other football story going around -- star Notre Dame linebacker Burt Mantis -- that's not his name, but that would be a cool name for a linebacker, I think -- anyway, star Notre Dame linebacker Manti T'eo was either the victim of a long, involved hoax of a man posing online as a woman, or an active participant in creating this fictitious woman who then did not die of leukemia and therefore did not inspire Manti.

Warning: This story is more convoluted than it is actually interesting. Deadspin's story is a tick-tock of its detective work, none of which I care about, because I don't really think the story merits it.

Conclusion: This "woman" on Twitter did not exist. (Shockingly enough!) It is either a hoax with a victim or a prank or a hoax to gin up some publicity and money (though how the latter would work, I have no idea -- and why would a top NFL prospect need the incredibly small duckets that might flow from a Twitter personalty account?)

I rate it as two "Meh's" and a half a "Hmmm..."

Great Point... by David French, via Instapundit, on the David Gregory thing:

“Of course prosecuting Mr. Gregory would have been sad and — on many levels — absurd, but so is the law under which he would have been prosecuted. In fact, if absurdity were a defense to prosecutions or other adverse legal actions, an enormous swathe of our regulatory state would be swept away. Can we even speak of the rule of law as a meaningful concept when we combine an explosive regulatory state with near-absolute prosecutorial discretion?”

Exactly. Make nearly everything illegal -- so many things you could not plausibly prosecute even a third of it -- and then leave the decision to prosecute in the hands of the state prosecutor, who will decide whether or not to prosecute you based on your status as a Person Favored by the State or a Person Disfavored by the State.

And thus ends the rule of law. RIP.

Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (176)
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Some good news for a change.
The news here isn't that amateurs captured an image (or in this case two separate ones 25 minutes apart), it is the size of the instrument used.
Amateur astronomers Tom and Jennifer Polakis have imaged Comet ISON, currently magnitude 16.2 (that means don't bother looking for it yet) with just an 8" telescope. Any of you morons out there with a Skywatcher, C8 or Meade, with the right maps, camera, and tracking device, should now be able to "spot" it as well.

Don't expect a spectacular image when you click the link: it appears as a moving grey speck, as most comets this far out tend to do. But given its' potential, that little blob could be the start of something grand. (For clarity, ISON is coming November 2013 to January 2014, not to be confused with PANSTAARS coming mid-March)

Posted by: CAC at 01:20 PM | Comments (78)
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But thankfully-- she was trying to find an 400 year old painting of Christ to "fix" it, but never made it.

No.

That's not true.

I made that up. That's just me trying to be silly. That's what we call a "callback."

The rest of it's true, though.

Sabine Moreau wanted to pick up a friend from a train station in Brussels, 47 miles from her home in Solre-sur-Sambre, the Daily Mail reported. But her GPS gave her the wrong directions, which she followed.

On her way to Croatia, Moreau passed through Germany, Austria, and Slovenia. After two days of driving, she finally stopped and called home.

Meanwhile, Belgian police were about to launch a search for Moreau when her son found out where she was, according to the Mail.

Sabine Moreau is 67 years dumb.

I don't know about you, but when I set out to make a trip that should take less than an hour, I usually check a map after the first 24 hours of wandering.

Coming soon: "To Catch a Predator" producers confronted with an unexpected but plausible defense. "The GPS told me to drive three states over to this house," the man insisted. "The GPS also told me to buy condoms, Zima, and fireworks."

via @katherinemiller

Recalculating

Recalculating...

recalculating...

recalculating...

Big Ben, Parliament...

recalculating...

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (145)
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Political violence is terrible and we must vigorously condemn it where ever we even suspect it; thus is the rule for all those violent-minded Tea Partiers. We must make it clear to them that political violence is unacceptable. And those who don't make that clear -- opinion leaders on the right, for example, who don't condemn the idea of political violence upon command -- are aiding and abetting the violence, encouraging it through their silence, their tacit approval.

So: What then of the Silence of the Left, and the Silence of the Media, on political violence planned by the left? By their own terms they tacitly encourage it.

A man was arrested for planning to throw Molotov cocktails at Scott Walker at a public speech.

A search of the manÂ’s apparent Twitter account reveals deep sympathies for Palestinians, support for other liberal and far-left causes, and claims of previous felony charges. Smith has also expressed support for the newest leftist movement, which previous Occupy supporters are beginning to flock to, named "Idle No More." Less than 24 hours before being arrested, Smith stated on Facebook: "I'm in support of the Idle No More Movement."

What is "Idle No More"? Internet references so far are confined to an aboriginal peoples (that is, Indian) movement in Canada, but I'm pretty sure the US version of it means terrorism -- after all, if you are calling your previous protests a type of idleness, what would constitute no longer being idle?

Why, violent protest, of course.

I cannot repeat it strongly enough that the media, and the left, claimed the entire Tea Party and entire Republican Party was complicit in the shooting of Gabriel Giffords for not making it plain enough to a lunatic (who was not a Tea Partier, and in fact was more left-wing than anything else) that violence was unacceptable, thereby encouraging him.

Yet every time we have a left-wing terrorist in the news, the media does its level best to bury the story, and to pointedly not deliver the stemwinding condemnation of political violence they demand from their political opponents.

Again, by their own predicates, this is effectively an endorsement.

MikeyNTH quoted something in the last thread, "Fen's Law," which states that "The left believes none of the things they lecture the rest of us about."

I can only find a few references to that law on the Internet, but it seems to be deserving of greater exposure.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (211)
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It's a cherished belief among the artistic/faux-intellectual set that they are brave seekers of truth, and, furthermore, are comfortable with doubt. That is to say, they acknowledge that life is often confusing and knowledge is elusive, but they are brave enough not to dispel that doubt through fictions like (to their minds) religion and crude ideologies. They've even seized upon a (misused) philosophical term to explain the behavior of those they define themselves against, those who are so wigged out by doubt and ambiguity they seal their minds off from any information that contradicts their simple ideological storyline: "epistemological closure." Google it. Liberals love writing about it and accusing the right of suffering from it.

Meanwhile, they praise themselves by employing other neologisms to describe their elevated intellectual state, such as "integrative complexity."

Other flatteries they bestow upon themselves include the cherished notion that they seek information and art that "challenges" beliefs and assumptions, and are comfortable with -- nay, excited by -- such challenging art, and that they enjoy "nuanced" art full of contradictions and complexities unlike the inbred hillbillies who require very crude morality plays of white hats and black hats, where the author intrudes in a very ham-fisted way to explain what is Right and what is Wrong.

None of these things, of course, are remotely true, as continues to be demonstrated by the left wing continuing to bash Kathryn Bigelow for treating the issue of enhanced interrogations ambiguously; she's been forced (as Gabe noted earlier) to essentially write a defense of her film.

Her sin -- for which she's been repeatedly criticized, and denied an Oscar nomination for -- consists of not taking any strong position on enhanced interrogation in her film, neither repudiating it nor championing it. As I understand it, an enhanced interrogation is depicted in the film, in the general flow of events leading up to the execution of bin Ladin, but the interrogation is not shown as providing any crucial information towards that goal. Thus, her sin appears to be permitting audience members to infer that critical information resulted from the enhanced interrogation, if that was their inclination, rather than explicitly stating "This waterboarding resulted in no good information whatsoever."

As I understand it, her depiction of the enhanced interrogation also permits the inference that the waterboarding resulted in no good intelligence, and was therefore a moral sin which cannot even be redeemed by utilitarian ends-justify-the-means considerations.

So she found an point over which people can and do argue, and depicted it in that way-- as something the audience could argue about later.

In other words, she's being attacked for doing precisely what the left claims it's in favor of -- being comfortable with ambiguity and inference and multiple interpretations. And she's being attacked for not doing what the left claims it hates, and which only a blinkered right-wing religious robot would do: Inserting a ham-fisted shouting-voiced Moral of the Story in which the film makes it clear that Waterboarding is Bad, Always, and Don't Do Nothing Good, Ever.

The left is also contradicting their claim that they're just about "challenging assumptions" and above inserting crude overt political messages; Bigelow's leftist critics demand precisely that. They've decided that Waterboarding is Bad, Always, and Don't Do Nothing Good, Ever, and they insist upon "art" that faithfully regurgitates this political message upon command.

In fact, while there are some who do claim that Waterboarding is Bad, Always, no less an authority than former CIA director and lifelong Democrat and Clinton aide Leon Panetta says enhanced interrogations did in fact aid in the killing of bin Ladin.

Thus, while the left has chosen, as usual, to attempt to win an argument not by having an argument about implications and ethics but by denying facts (did you know, for example, that there were no Soviet agents in the State Department at all when Joseph McCarthy was claiming there were?), Bigelow has already nodded to their article of faith by keeping things ambiguous, but didn't nod further to claim that which appears completely untrue. That is to say, she met them halfway and avoided stating affirmatively that waterboarding led to important information, but she would not go all the way over to endorse their factually-false position that Waterboarding is Bad, Always, and Don't Do No Good, Ever, and for that she's being pilloried.

The left is extremely Stalinist and Orwellian about its blatant efforts to influence the future by rewriting the past. The truth seems to mean nothing at all to them; the "truth" is just a lie we mutually agree upon, they believe, so we might as well change history (and science) to make a Better Truth.

It's egregious. At the end of the day, no matter what your ideology or your background or your religious beliefs, the truth should mean something important to you, and honesty should be an apolitical virtue.

I'm beginning to realize something horrifying: The West seemed to win the Cold War, but in fact the Stalinists won where it matters, in the mind, and therefore, in history, or at least in history as we mutually agree it should be. The subversive left's project of fighting for Soviet Russia, employing all its viciously dishonest tricks and manipulations, continues unabated.

Someone Had to Say It:

In Soviet Russia, the epistemology closes you.

-- wooga

Well actually someone didn't have to say it; that was a pretty clever way to turn the phrase.

Posted by: Ace at 11:34 AM | Comments (278)
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