Archive Listing
August 16, 2009 - August 9, 2009
Friday, September 26, 2008
A Break in the
Action
DON'T BE DEPRESSED. Yeah, everything's pretty dire this morning. A bank failure overnight, stock market poised for another plunge, and congress torn between passing a massive bailout package nobody wants and not passing a massive bailout package everyone sort of knows is necessary. But's it's also a fine comic moment. What must Obama be thinking about now? Isn't the clever young fox always supposed to be more agile and energetic than the old dog who's depicted in campaign ads as three-quarters in the grave? But so far, every time Obama thinks he's about to see daylight in the polls, Senator McDroopy looks to have been a step ahead of him all along. After the Berlin extravaganza, the obsolete old fleabag was waiting back home with a truly deflating set of viral video ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton. After Obama's Roman Triumph in the Denver coliseum, he marched grandly into the buzzsaw of the old hound's Palin gambit. And now, blessed with the Democrat heaven of an economic crisis that can be blamed on Republicans, Obama sprints out to the expected lead only to find that damned old dog has beaten him to the headlines yet again.
Is McDroopy going to "surprise him like this through the whole picture"? Your guess is as good as mine.
Okay. You are now free to resume being terrified and heartsick about the economy.
posted at
7:05 am
by
CountryPunk
Thursday, September 25, 2008
A Groaning Board of
Talent
From
the City of Brotherly Love Handles: The Phatty Phils.
METS-PHILS ROUND 2. I'm not going to name names, but Phillies pitcher Brett Myers is the size of a house. When he waddles to the mound, the whole ballpark shakes. The same goes for most of the rest of the staff. The pictures in the video don't do them justice. They were probably taken before the long season these guys have spent gorging out of sight in the bullpen. I can only imagine the cornucopia of food behind the screen -- like some medieval mead hall, no doubt, every trencherman with his own leg of mutton and brace of turkeys washed down with a hogshead of ale, every scraggly beard matted with grease and crumbs.
The banquet hall in the Phillies bullpen.
It's a wonder anyone can hear the phone ring when Manager Charlie Manuel calls from the dugout to ask one or more of them to push themselves away from the table. Watching them warm up is like witnessing a pod of whales stranded on some beach, heaving and snorting with painful effort.
Of course, eating yourself into a coma is a grand Philly tradition. Every year, the city celebrates the bitter end of yet another failed Eagles season with an event called the Wing Bowl, which features the same combination of massive food intake and bevies of buxom wenches. And only in Philadelphia could a major league game be threatened with cancellation because of concerns about the supply of hot dogs. So I'm not dismissing the whole gluttony thing out of hand. It has its place. But is that place really in the final stretch of a breakneck pennant race?
Is it really an accident that the three best pitchers on the team actually look like athletes?
Cole Hamels (14-10), Jamie Moyer (15-7), and Brad Lidge (40 saves).
Sorry. I probably shouldn't have said anything. Maybe I'm just jealous. Wouldn't it be great to spend just one night feasting with the titans of the Phillies bullpen? You bet it would.
posted at
7:41 am
by
CountryPunk
Dark Beams
"Giant,
massive structures much larger than anything in our... observable
universe"?
DARKNESS IS ONLY A HIDDEN DANCE. While the atheists are making their full-court press against religion and the belief in any god, their own scripture of scientific truth continues to encounter baffling enigmas concerning the nature of a universe they claim to understand but for a few niggling details.
But, as they say, the devil is in the details. Here are a few of the loose ends they haven't quite tied up to the satisfaction of what people in generations past would have called 'science.' There isn't enough mass in the universe to account for the way it operates. In fact, there isn't even half enough mass. Which physicists have decided to explain by positing a thing they call dark matter, which has never been seen because it's invisible and untraceable except by negative inference; unless it's there, their model of the universe doesn't make any sense. They have a similar problem with energy. There appears to be too much of it, more than can be accounted for by their assessments of where in the observable universe it might come from. So they posit the existence of dark energy, which is just as invisible and untraceable as dark matter.
Are you with us so far? Now, they have stumbled over another detail:
As if the mysteries of dark matter and
dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has
been discovered.
Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."
The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude...
Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies.
These clusters are conglomerations of about a thousand galaxies, as well as very hot gas which emits X-rays....
They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.
This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).
"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."
The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe...
A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.
In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble).
It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.
Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."
The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude...
Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies.
These clusters are conglomerations of about a thousand galaxies, as well as very hot gas which emits X-rays....
They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.
This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).
"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."
The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe...
A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.
In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble).
It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.
Let's be clear about what they're conceding here. The mathematical coherence of their cosmological model now depends on the existence of a permanently unknowable other-verse operating in accordance with undefinably different laws of physics. In other words, the only way our current cosmic logic remains logical is if we postulate a vast all-encompassing illogic we can never understand. (Was Moses really offering such a different deal?) They continue to call their formulations scientific. But casually incorporating metaphysics into physics proper without acknowledging the enormity of the leap entails its own kind of dark energy. They don't even have the good manners to wink as they execute their sleight of hand.
Fine. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just saying they've got a lot of big, invisible, magical, and unequivocally theoretical balls in the air that they have to keep juggling in the dark, so to speak, if they are to prevent their "science" from shattering into the chaos of a disastrous delusional fantasy. Dark matter. Dark energy. Dark flow. These are hardly details. They're enormous unaccounted for remainders in computations of cosmological long division that just aren't working out the way they're supposed to. And what is their argument for the existence of such immensely powerful forces and entities they've never seen and therefore can't, ahem, observe and measure? They just have to be there, because the scientists are pretty sure their basic theory about how the universe operates is correct.
Funny, but I expect the person who would best understand that kind of a logic-belief superposition is St. Thomas Aquinas. Given the belief, the logic is impeccable. And given the logic, the belief is thoroughly justified. It's called religion. Of course, this is a religion that is unique in one regard; it infers no moral imperatives from the universe it claims to understand so well.
I believe, though, that this is a lack which can be easily remedied. Cosmological physics rests on the observation of, thus far at least, four forces: gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. It would appear that our list of only three dark entities is one short of par. Permit me to suggest a fourth. Dark beams. These are lines of exceptionally powerful energy so finely concentrated that they are presently undetectable, hence invisible or "dark." But, just like the physicists, we can still prove they are there because of the well documented phenomenon of answered prayers. Dark beams arc across the universe to and from the elegant conjunction of dark matter, dark energy, and dark flow that scientists 'know' continuously alters the behavior of the physical (i.e., visible and observable) universe. We see dark beams at work when the routine predictions of science are confounded -- a brain-dead coma victim recovers, a hard-bitten fireman swears an angel protected him from immolation and led him impossibly to safety, the brief life of one man in a conquered province overthrows an empire and afterwards sets in motion the greatest explosion in the development of human imagination, knowledge, thought, creativity, and freedom in history..
These are not outcomes that can be explained by hard science or all the latter-day disciplines which claim to be sciences. They are the product of dark beams, which will one day make possible a unified "dark theory" which demonstrates that nothing works without the constant interaction between the raw physicality science seeks to measure and the much greater invisible aphysicality that sustains and makes sense of existence itself. And dark beams are the only shortcut that connects the physical universe directly with the aphysical universe. Hence the human association, throughout all the ages of of our species, of dark beams with the concept of the "divine."
Don't like it? Disprove it. In all likelihood, there's probably more voluminous evidence for my dark beams than for your dark matter, dark energy, and dark flows. And consider this: How scientific would all their formulations sound, particularly in the context of religion, if rather than "dark," they used as their preferred term "the unseen"?
Stew on that for a bit.
