Month: June 2009

More on the Unrest in Iran

 

An Enemy of the World

The Islamic Republic regime in Iran is vividly revealing itself as an enemy of the entire world.

“Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei’s police and the Basij militia are using violence and terror to suppress the Iranian people at home. His terrorist proxies fire missiles at Israel while torturing, maiming, and murdering Palestinians. He sponsored a violent coup d’etat against the elected government in Beirut last year with his Hezbollah militia. He sponsors a terrorist insurgency against the elected government of Iraq, while his fanatical proxies shoot and kill American soldiers. A car bomb cell belonging to the regime’s Lebanese franchise was recently arrested in Azerbaijan, and more cells were rolled up in Egypt. Terrorists sponsored and encouraged by him and his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, have murdered civilians from Argentina Japan.

The regime’s only allies in the world are terrorist armies and Bashar Assad’s Baath Party state in Syria. Assad himself, like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, is a pariah among the Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Azeris, and Israelis who make up the region.

Iranian civilians risk violent beatings and worse by the thousands for standing up to the regime in the streets and treating it as the enemy it clearly is. There is no better time for the rest of us to do so, as well, especially since such gestures carry far less risk for us. The Pasdaran have no divisions in Washington, Paris, or London…

Amazing videos and photographs from Iran – (links thanks to Infidel753 and Dave at Israellycool).

Go see the Moon movie!

This weekend we went into the city to see “Moon”, an intelligent, thoughtful film that explores the effects of isolation in a near-future high tech world. After the film, the director, Duncan Jones, had an impromptu chat with the audience. Quirky, fun stuff like that is one of the reasons we love New York City.

Election riots in Iran

Michael Totten: Iran on Fire (continuous coverage)

Oppressive governments that face ferocious resistance in the streets often don’t last very long. The Islamic Republic regime has been durable so far, and reports of its imminent demise have been premature, but there is only so much it can withstand.

[Video of thousands of Iranians marching in the streets chanting “Death to the Government.”]

Fausta’s Blog Open revolt in Iran: Photos and video

Iranians Protest, Government Cracks Down by Ardeshir Arian at Pajamas Media

Iran Violence: Protests Erupt, Riot Police Launch Crackdown: Nico Pitney at The Huffington Post

Warp drive is a possibility

..but it still needs some work:

Warp Drive Engine Could Suck Earth Into Black Hole

June 11, 2009 — “Star Trek” makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole.

“Warp drives are so far the best case scenario to attain faster-than-light travel,” said Stefano Finazzi of Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies. This paper “makes it much harder to realize, if not almost impossible, warp drives.”

In normal physics, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s theory of relativity forbids it. In normal space any object approaching the speed of light will increase in mass exponentially, and require an exponential increase in the amount of power needed to propel it forward.

warp

There are two exceptions to this rule however. The first is what’s commonly called a worm hole, a bridge connecting two different parts of space. A ship crossing this bridge would move at below light speed, but still arrive before a beam of light that would have had to go the long way around.
space station

Warp drives are the second and more appealing option. A ship can’t move through space faster than the speed of light. But with enough energy, space itself can move faster than the speed of light.

Known for the Mexican physicist Michael Alcubierre who originally developed the idea in the 1990’s, an Alcubierre warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of energy in front of the ship, like a giant cosmic wave a space ship could surf. That particular section of space can travel faster than the speed of light in the surrounding space, and anything on or in that bubble will accelerate with it.

Finazzi and his colleagues propose creating this bubble of space-time by using a massive amount of “exotic matter,” or dark energy. (Exactly how this bubble would be created is still a mystery.) According to their calculations and simplified, it would take a huge amount of energy to create the bubble, and then increasing amounts of energy to contain the highly repulsive dark energy.

Eventually the energy would run out. The bubble would rupture, with catastrophic effects. Inside the bubble the temperature would rise to about 10^32 degrees Kelvin, destroying almost anything on the bubble.

Anyone watching the ship nearby wouldn’t be much better off.

“We know that the warp drive will be destabilized,” said Finazzi. “But we do not know if it will in the end explode or collapse to a black hole.”

A question of priorities

In A Tale of Two Murders at PJ Media, LaShawn Barber says:

Which received more front-page headlines, statements of outrage, condemnation, sympathy, and resulted in apologetic genuflecting: the murder of a 67-year-old man who made his living as a late-term abortionist or the murder and wounding of two young military recruiters on duty?

What do mainstream media and liberal bloggers find more newsworthy: a white, anti-government, schizophrenic “Christian” who murdered the notorious Dr. George Tiller or a black, America-hating, anti-military Muslim who murdered William Long, a young soldier?

Unfortunately, Barber is not looking at the larger picture. More than two heinous, ‘lone’ politically-linked murders have been committed recently:

* Jim D. Adkisson murdered two church members in a liberal Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee on July 27, 2008. “It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.”

* Richard Poplawski gunned down three Pittsburgh police officers on April 4, 2009. Poplawski, a white supremacist, was a member of the ‘Stormfront’ community who believed that Jews control America. He also believed that the government was going to take away his guns.

* Joshua Cartwright killed two sheriff’s deputies in Florida on April 25, 2009. Cartwright’s wife said her husband “believed that the US Government was conspiring against him. She said he had been severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”

* Scott Roeder, freeper, member of the “Sovereign Citizen Movement”, contributor to “Prayer and Action News” (a magazine promoting the idea that killing doctors who perform abortions is “justifiable homicide.”) killed abortion provider George Tiller in his church May 31, 2009.

* Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, Islamist zealot who studied with Wahhabists in Yemen murdered Pvt. William A. Long and wounded Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula.

* James W. von Brunn, a white supremacist, 9/11 truther, Obama birth-certificate nutter, Ron Paul supporter and Freeper shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum

In addition, here are two horrific crimes that were prevented by our government:

* Four African-American converts to Islam, all of whom converted to Islam in prison were arrested by the FBI just as they attempted to bomb two Riverdale synagogues, in the Bronx and a New York National Guard air base in Newburgh, New York where they lived and attended a mosque.

* Harold “Hal” Turner, whose views have been labeled racist, anti-Semitic and anti-government, was arrested on a warrant obtained by Connecticut’s Capitol Police Department after he urged readers to “take up arms” against two lawmakers and a member of the state ethics office.

“Lone” Islamists like Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad and the Newburgh bomber wannabes are part of a larger, political organization that has been at war with the United States (and with most of the world) for decades. This organization is a known quantity. We know who the leaders are (Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistani Intelligence, Iran, Syria). We know where the foot soldiers are trained (camps in the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan). We know who their ideological representatives are in the US (CAIR, MAS, etc).

“Lone” activists like von Brunn, the groups that support, fund and ideologically encourage them are currently under investigation, and under more scrutiny because we do NOT know as much about them. Because this is a new (and violent) trend, it’s getting more attention.

Republicans were formerly known for their condemnation of terror. After 9/11, when the conservative movement considered itself to be a ‘big tent’ kind of thing, condemning terrorism was the first priority.

What are conservative priorities now? People who contribute to online sources like Free Republic should be keeping a sharp watch out for nutters like von Brunn, and they should be demanding government (and media) investigations, not condemning them. Responding to these criminal acts with moral equivalency arguments and obvious distraction techniques will not help the GOP win any elections.

After 9/11, Muslim ‘activist’ groups complained more about America and the media’s “bias” against Islam than they did about bin Laden. The first priority of these special interest groups was to cry about media bias. They didn’t pour into the streets to protest against bin Laden, they didn’t demand that the FBI should investigate extremist centers in Muslim communities.

These Muslim groups were condemned for this reaction, for good reason.