Did He Really Say This?

I didn't get to watch all of the Obama speech tonight, so I read the transcript which is apparently available through The Corner, and the New York Times. Besides the enormous amount of scripted boilerplate that is pretty much verbatim of what all democrats have been whining about since Bush took office, there was this one line that stuck out considerably as Mr. Obama was discussing his non-policy of foreign policy......

You know, John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won't even follow him to the cave where he lives.

Obama hasn't served in the military, and neither have several other great presidents, so I don't consider that a prerequisite for running for president.


However, I think it is the height of arrogance and contempt (not to mention UNTRUE) for Mr. Obama to claim that a guy who spent several years being tortured by the Vietcong is somehow afraid of going to a farking cave in Afghanistan.

Tonight On The Menu We Have.....

Sauteed Onion, Squash and Zucchini in Angel hair pesto pasta with Italian sausage....

Ingredients:
1 Zucchini
1 Onion
1 Squash
1 Bulb of Garlic
1/2 cup Pinenuts
1 Tbsp Green curry paste
1 splash Dave's Insanity Sauce
1/2 cup Olive Oil
1/2 pound Italian Sausage
3 Handfuls of fresh Basil
Angel Hair Pasta
2 tsp salt
Fresh ground Pepper
1/2 tsp dill
1/2 tsp thyme


Brown Italian sausage with some garlic and salt, and drain the fat. Take all the vegetables, curry paste, hot sauce, lightly chopped garlic, and sauté with the salt pepper and spices to taste. Take the basil, pine nuts, olive oil, three cloves of garlic (peeled), 1 tsp of salt and ground pepper to taste and mix separately in a blender.

Cook pasta, drain and get one big mixing bowl.

Combine pasta and pesto first, then fold in both the sausage and vegetable mix.

Serve with salad, garlic bread and beverage of your choice...bon appetit!

Bush Did Not Lie About Iraq..

The common mantra that we hear repeated by the Major News Media is that the war in Iraq is a disaster that was fought under dubious pretenses. As further evidence comes to light we can now safely state that neither of these statements are true. Currently, the situation in Iraq is vastly improving on a daily basis, and attacks on coalition forces were the lowest they have been in the last several months than since the war started. The idea that the war in Iraq is a "failure" or a "disaster" is in stark contrast to the reality on the ground. What is not a debate is if the people of Iraq are much better off without a psychopathic dictator running the country anymore. This is a guy who raped and pillaged his own people for the better part of 30 years, and relentlessly purged any dissent. A dead Saddam is a vast improvement for the lives of the Iraqi people.

And as far as the lies that supposedly "duped" congress in to voting for the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq, I just came across a post by Randall Hoven at American Thinker that once and for all demolishes any argument that Bush "lied" to force us to war.

Read the whole thing of course, but here is the conclusion from the article-

The True Story

The Bush administration did not lie. Saddam's Iraq was a threat to the US that demanded the use of military force. That was not just Bush's "cowboy" opinion; that was the written law, passed by huge and bipartisan margins in both houses of Congress. That opinion was supported by both pre-war intelligence and post-war intelligence.

Moreover, the "legal case" was solid and Iraq was given chance after chance after chance. The authorization noted at least 10 UN resolutions, spread out over a decade, to justify the use of US military force. The Authorization noted that "the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in ... Public Law 107-40." The Authorization noted Public Law 105-235 (passed under President Clinton) that urged the President "to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations."

The invasion of Iraq was arguably the most justified case of military action the US has ever taken in its history, based on national defense, validated intelligence and legal authority, not to mention morality. Articles of impeachment would have made more sense if Bush had not invaded.

That the exact opposite story is what a majority of Americans appear to believe, and a super-majority of non-Americans, is a scary thought. The truth has been sabotaged, and not by President Bush or his allies.

People should not be allowed to make the claim that Bush "lied" about taking us to war in Iraq, nor should they now make the claim that Iraq is a "dismal failure" based on the available facts and evidence.

They can make the claim all they want, but IT ISN'T TRUE.

YO! LHC Raps!

This is why nerds don't make hip-hop tracks. The following is a rap video explaining what is going down with CERN's Large Hadron Collider,..Yo.



17 days until the first beam is fired, yo...word.

A B612 Foundation Cameo: Ed Lu For The Win!

I was watching the History Channel yesterday and they were replaying "The Last Days On Earth" from 2006. The show is a documentary that has some amazing science for the first hour and a half followed by a thirty minute lecture on why none of what they mentioned in the first half matters if we don't stop global warming because things will get too crowded and there won't be any water to drink.

Yes, it gets that stupid at the end. Even Al Gore gets in to compare global warming skeptics with the Tobacco executives who lied under oath to a grand jury in the 1970's. Fortunately for Al, another scientist says something so ridiculous and offensive that Al's own hypocrisy can be ignored. Bill McGuire, a Professor from University College in London, makes the argument that those who are skeptical about global warming are just as bad if not worse than those that deny the holocaust.

Yes, really. The History channel, to their credit, has a discussion board where you can read various posts in agreement about how insulting and absurd this comparison is. ("Last Days on Earth" -Insulting)


The show does however have a nice bit about asteroids, which comes in at #4 on the list of apocalyptic scenarios. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a little cameo where he gives bits of essentially the same speech from this lecture. Again, Mr. Tyson clearly lays out the specifics behind asteroids and the threat they raise to humanity. One of my favorite points he always makes is how Hollywood always shows an asteroid strike as this dramatic explosion where people slowly watch this streaking ball of fire crash in to a building or something. The reality is that these asteroids are moving at several thousand feet a second, at essentially hypersonic speed. This means that anyone anywhere near close enough to see this object slam in to the earth will be dead before they really see anything hit. Astronaut Stan Love, also a contributing member of The B612 Foundation, describes during the show thusly-

"If you are anywhere in the let's say 1000 mile diameter area where you can see this thing coming down, the light and the heat coming off it would just burn you to death immediately".

Here's a link to the computer analysis of what this impact would look like from a thermal level Via the Sandia Labs-

But the quote of the weekend, which further typified why this show had so much potential that fizzled out was this quote from Astronaut and B612 Foundation member Ed Lu-

Narrator: "So what is humanity doing to address this deadly threat?"

Astronaut Ed Lu: "The number of people, worldwide, who are actively working on this problem, is enough to staff one shift at McDonalds. And that's about accurate."

It is well past the time that NASA and the B612 Foundation start planning a mission to Apophis to track and further detail our respective options for mitigating the threats posed by asteroids. U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher has been backing the efforts of the B612 Foundation, and this issue needs continual support.

We need more people than one shift at McDonalds.

Are you ready for some football?

So What Is Space Made Out Of?

Here is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.





There are an estimated 10,000 galaxies in this picture. Each galaxy, like our own, may contain millions to trillions of stars. Our own star, what we collectively refer to as "the sun" is this much bigger than the Earth.



Notice in each picture you see a lot of black stuff. That black stuff has a gravitational pull on everything in each picture, and for lack of a better term we have called it Dark Matter and dark energy, which put together make up 96% of the universe that is visible to us.

Now we are trying to recreate the conditions that allow us to observe dark matter/energy in the lab. It takes a big science experiment to make this happen.



Say hello to the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator complex intended to collide opposing beams of protons at a rate which will allow us to test theories about particle physics in ways that we haven't been able to try before.

Here's a picture timeline of the 25 some year history of the LHC. And here is the main page of the site complete with countdown to flipping of the switch and everything.

I'm fascinated to find out which theories about quantum mechanics are supported, and how they relate to the rest of the universe. Can you imagine if Newton were alive to see this today? It would be the equivalent of Darwin observing our completion of the human genome.

Neat time to be alive folks, that's all I'm sayin.

Oh, and ah TITANS!!!!!!!!

This One's For Me Sis

Stand and Deliver.......and whatnot......Thankyou Sis for staying sufficiently obscure.


We are both better off.

So A Lot Of People Ask Me.............

.......whaddaya think about the whole "Manny being a Dodger" thing.

I respond succinctly:

Have you ever had a job where you failed at what you're paid to do 2 out of the 3 times you do it, and then the company that fires you pays your new boss a $7 million advance for two months of your future employment just so you won't be around anymore?


Me neither.

Thanks for the Jazz-hands Manny. We'll miss you!

Bosox fans, Say hello to your new left fielder Jason "I-can't-believe-I'm-playing-for-the-BOSTONREDSAWX" Bay-


Bay triples, scores winning run as Red Sox clip A's in extras

So yeah, I think the current World Champion Boston Red Sox Organization will be just fine thank you.