Engage psudo-science/fiction : So, when you decelerate out of FTL, aren’t you going to give off a lot of Cherenkov Radiation, and doesn’t the transition from hyperspace to realspace carry over a lot of tachyon/dark-matter particles that have to get shed from the ship in a ‘discharging’ action in the relative proximity to a gravity well? And the photons from our gravity well are simply trailing them behind the ship ship and triggering a refraction effect to make it look like a comet tail?

Ok, enough of that, but a boy can dream…

… What ever it is, its gorgeous, and I hope we can get better pictures of it, if not establish communications

Click here to see a larger version [nasa]

We have a pretty lousy history with Haiti, just as an example of the historical perspective …

An example from the site linked above…

How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent – there are two fire stations in the entire nation – and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for “nature” to finish it off?

Don’t blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets – with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers’ death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)

“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future”

- Paul Boese

This all came to light when she had the unfortunate timing of traveling internationally when some idiot tried to drive his car in to the Heathrow airport after setting it on fire.

So my mother, is pulled out of a customs / security line at the PHL international airport, and given two years of hell. (you can read the above blog posts, or search my blog for “deport” to get more of the story…) In the end, she was granted “relief” from deportation, and got to stay … But thats just the background to what I found today.

The Dec 25th attempted bombing of that airliner headed for detroit, by the “underwear” bomber has a lot of people scrathing their heads, and wondering what happened, and how it came to pass.

Me too.

Because I read this today at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31062.html and I wanted to choke some one… anyone….

And agencies did not trigger their own alarms by connecting clues about the suspect with other available data, which might have shown he posed a high risk. “Listmasters didn’t link up some of the data points that were vague but available,” a knowledgeable official said.

A U.S. intelligence official contended that the data points were too elliptical to be useful: “Abdulmutallab’s father didn’t say his son was a terrorist, let alone planning an attack. Not at all. I’m not aware of some magic piece of intelligence that suddenly would have flagged this guy — whose name nobody even had until November — as a killer en route to America, let alone something that anybody withheld.”

Ok, let me get this straight.

40+ years ago, my mom gets caught smoking some pot. Hell, the last 3 Presidents of the USA have admitted to doing as much, if not more. And they try to deport her when she gets off an airplane after being in France for a week or two, 2 years ago.

And this week, some guy, who.
1. Buys a 1 way airplane ticket
2. With Cash
3. Has no checked luggage
4. Is flying from places on the planet that are known to help traffic illegal cargo and persons
5. Has his own father report him to the US Govt warning that he might be a threat.
6. DOESN’T HAVE A PASSPORT
…

Gets on an airplane, and __stuff__ happens.

Really, and the govt is saying “data points were too elliptical”.

And depending on what and where you read, there’s even more bullshit information coming out about how this guy was a known person on what ever lists are being kept by our Intellegence community.

The breakdown is embarassing, disgusting, and clearly indicates how much of a failure the security response since 9/11 has been. Sure, maybe we’ve stopped some things from happening, that we may, or may not ever know about. But when I think about what happened to my mother, and compare it to this story… Like I said, I get angry.

To everyone, I wish the best.
Sincerely.

With love and appreciation to the people who have been in my life this year, and excitement for what happens next.

Amidst fading hopes for real reform on issues ranging from high finance to health care, economist Robert Kuttner and journalist Matt Taibbi join Bill Moyers to discuss Wall Street’s power over the federal government.

And they’re usually diamonds… so I wonder how many one armed african kids are behind them also.

*sigh*

This blog post at : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/11/incredible-vista-of-the-cosmos/ has done that to me today.

Here’s another phenomenal picture. It’s an amazing 2 x 1.5 degree field toward the center of the Milky Way, revealing about a million stars! It’s taken completely in the near infrared, just outside of what the human eye can see, and shows dust and stars mostly invisible in optical light.

Click here to see that amazing image, and fathom that most of it is invisible to our naked eye, but is there, sitting there, in our galaxy…

Yeah, tears in my eyes, at how amazing our existence is.