harmonicminer

Missing: Milky Way’s smallest black holes

Larger stars are thought to explode with less energy than smaller ones, Fryer says. That means lower-mass stars that go on to form neutron stars would blast more of their outer layers away than higher-mass stars that become black holes. The extra material the higher-mass stars hold onto could then fall into the black holes, bulking them up. This could explain the dearth of the puniest black holes, he says.

It’s obvious why there aren’t many small holes. For the most part, people are busy digging even deeper holes for themselves, or else they’ve climbed out and are filling in the hole they started.

Here are people digging even deeper holes.

Byron York reports that Politically correct Portland rejected feds who saved city from terrorist attack

In 2005, leaders in Portland, Oregon, angry at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, voted not to allow city law enforcement officers to participate in a key anti-terror initiative, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. On Friday, that task force helped prevent what could have been a horrific terrorist attack in Portland. Now city officials say they might re-think their participation in the task force — because Barack Obama is in the White House.

Portland city officials are basically saying they’ll trust federal law enforcement and anti-terrorist agencies during Democrat administrations, but not during Republican ones. Really.

“[Mayor Adams] stressed that he has much more faith in the Obama administration and the leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s office now than he did in 2005,”

This brings to mind all sorts of possibilities.

How about if state and local governments run by Republicans simply opt out of federal redistributionist programs, during Democrat administrations?  Maybe Republican state and local governments that believe in low taxation should just refuse to cooperate with all federal attempts to collect taxes?  Maybe refuse the use of any local law enforcement cooperation?  After all, you just can’t trust those Democrats not to be wasting our money.

I think this whole concept has legs. 

Whenever they are in local or state political office, racist, bigoted Republicans, who are well-known to hate all minorities, should refuse all cooperation with federal civil-rights authorities, if the president is a Democrat.  After all, during Democrat presidential administrations it’s a near certainty that there will be over-zealous civil rights prosecutions. 

And then there are all those pesky federal education regulations.  During Democrat administrations, Republican led states should just sort of look the other way.

And here’s a good one:  red states should just refuse to enforce the crazier federal gun laws, or at least they should refuse cooperation with ATF during Democrat administrations, since ATF is bound to over-reach when ideological gun rights haters are in power. 

I think I’ve just scratched the surface here about the levels to which state and local non-cooperation with the feds could aspire.

I suppose we could call it un-civil disobedience.  But what I’ve described here is no more outrageous than “sanctuary cities”, or Portland’s decision during the Bush administration to jeopardize the safety of its citizens for the sake of sticking it to a Republican administration.

Or, as long as we’re talking about failure to discharge responsibilities according to a higher law, the Obama administration’s unwillingness to defend our borders (and, by extension, our citizenry) certainly seems to be a prime example.

You can’t take THAT onto an airplane!

Click the link, read it and weep.

Here is a handy list with names and faces of who has committed (or been stopped from committing) terrorist acts against Americans.

This is not to say that we should automatically distrust anyone with an Islamic sounding name or Middle Eastern appearance. 

But it is a reminder of the demographic from which the terrorists come, and it has implications for a great many things, among them TSA screening policy at airports.

Look at the photos.  Read the names.

The next time you hear someone say that “religious fundamentalism” is the problem, point the finger at them and say, “Liar.” 

Islamic fundamentalism is the problem.  Essentially all the terrorists come from that strata.  Everything else is the fevered imagination of Hollywood script writers who wish, more than anything else, that some white Christian Aryan types would blow something up, anything at all, so the left can broad brush all of Christian fundamentalism along with the Islamic terrorists.

Won’t work, of course,  There would have to be a bombing a week, for about a year, just to catch up with the last couple of years.

Vikings May Have Taken a Native American to Iceland

Ten years ago, Agnar Helgason, a scientist at Iceland’s deCODE Genetics, began investigating the origin of the Icelandic population. Most of the people he tested carried genetic links to either Scandinavians or people from the British Isles. But a small group of Icelanders – roughly 350 in total – carried a lineage known as C1, usually seen only in Asians and Native Americans. “We figured it was a recent arrival from Asia,” says Helgason. “But we discovered a much deeper story than we expected.”

Helgason’s graduate student, Sigridur Sunna Ebenesersdottir, found that she could trace the matrilineal sequence to a date far earlier than when the first Asians began arriving in Iceland. In fact, she found that all the people who carry the C1 lineage are descendants of one of four women alive around the year 1700. In all likelihood, those four descended from a single woman. And because archeological remains in what is Canada today suggest that the Vikings were in the Americas around the year 1000 before retreating into a period of global isolation, the best explanation for that errant lineage lies with an American Indian woman: one who was taken back to Iceland some 500 years before Columbus set sail for the New World in 1492.

Until now, the historical evidence has suggested that while the Vikings may have reached the Americas, they didn’t really engage with the indigenous population. “According to the sagas, the Vikings had troubles with the locals and couldn’t settle there, so they returned to Iceland,” says Helgason. “But if we’re right, it will mean they didn’t just sail there and come back. They had real contact with them.”

For now, the story of the lone American Indian woman taken on a Viking ship to Iceland remains a hypothesis. To prove it will require finding the same genetic sequence in older Amerindian remains elsewhere in the world – family members, as it were, of that 1,000-year-old woman who ended up so far from home. That sounds like a daunting task, but Helgason and his team hope that as news of their finding spreads, other geneticists will re-examine remains they have already studied for evidence of the same lineage.

Of course, all this proves to some people is that, like the Southern Europeans represented by Columbus, the Northern Europeans were just as evil, including apparent kidnapping and/or human trafficking.

Evil colonial Europeans.  Yes, that works for me.  Of course, being a good American, I think of myself as the descendant of one of those who escaped their evil clutches.

Here is Dennis Prager on California and the Titanic:California and the Titanic:

OK, riddle fans, here’s a toughie: What’s the difference between California voters and the passengers on the Titanic?

The passengers on the Titanic didn’t vote to hit the iceberg.

Most Americans understand that California is sinking. What is almost incredible is that it has voted to sink.

On Election Day, 2010 Californians voted Democrats into every statewide position (one is still undecided). This is the party that singlehandedly has brought one of the world’s greatest economies to near ruin. There may well be historical parallels to what Californians did — but I cannot think of any.

A listener called my radio show two days after the elections to tell me that his business is booming — thanks to Californians. His occupation? He’s a real estate agent in Phoenix, Ariz.

The middle class has begun to leave California. It is, of course, impossible for most members of such a large group to leave a state; few people leave their family, their friends, their job and their home except under the most dramatic circumstances. But this fact makes all the more noteworthy the exodus from California that has been taking place.

You have to wonder how many businesses and individuals would leave California if their friends and family could also leave, if they could find a comparable job elsewhere and if they could sell their homes without losing money. What you don’t have to wonder about is who would stay under those conditions. The state of California would eventually be left largely with those groups who voted Democrat in this election: rich liberals (such as those who live in Nancy Pelosi’s Marin County, in the bay area and in West Los Angeles); state and municipal workers (who vote Democrat in as direct a pay-for-vote scheme as a law-based society allows); those who rely on state and city governments for entitlements; and those Latinos who either fall into the last category or who unfortunately identify the Republican Party with anti-Latino sentiments because it opposes illegal immigration.

Those who believe in individual responsibility, the free market and personal liberty are a minority in California. We greet each other as Americans would greet each other meeting in a foreign country.

We watch as one of the greatest places in the world — with its extraordinary natural beauty, almost uniquely beautiful weather and agricultural abundance — wastes all of this as a result of having become a left-wing experiment. What is particularly saddening is to see a state whose success was achieved because it was a Mecca for the adventurous in spirit do everything possible to crush that spirit and drive away those who have it.

There is a silver lining here: clarity. Americans living elsewhere need not elect liberal Democrats to know what will happen if they do. They only need to look at California if they want to see what happens to a state governed by the left (and, for that matter, they can look at Texas to see what happens to a state’s finances when governed by the right).

The left and its teachers unions have ruined public education in California. The left and its public service unions have saddled the state with $500 billion in unfunded pension liability. California’s left-governed cities have set themselves up as “sanctuary cities” for those who have come into America illegally. And the left passes more and more rules governing the behavior of California citizens. Two examples: San Francisco just banned McDonald Happy Meals because they come with a toy and therefore entice children to eat fattening food; and the Democratic legislature has made it illegal for a California employer — even in a retail operation — to ask a male employee who comes to work wearing a dress to wear men’s clothing while at work.

And to render the Titanic analogy even more accurate, Californians voted to retain a law that was described by George Will as one “that preposterously aims to cool the planet by requiring a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2020.”

That law will ensure that California taxes energy use more than any other state. That, in turn, is guaranteed to increase unemployment and the cost of living in the state — one more reason businesses and productive individuals are leaving, but rarely moving, into California.

Environmentalist true believers have free reign in California. They have convinced a majority of the state’s voters to believe the increasingly absurd notion that human carbon dioxide emission is heating up the planet to temperatures so high that humanity and the earth will suffer cataclysmic consequences.

To return to our Titanic metaphor, the great difference between that ill-fated ship’s crew and California’s crew (its voters and the California Democratic Party) is that the Titanic’s crew did everything possible to avoid hitting the iceberg; California’s crew did everything possible to hit it. Perhaps they believe global warming will melt it before they get there.

Rio police targeting slum where gang based

Elite police units in borrowed navy tanks rumbled through a heavily fortified slum Thursday in an effort to apprehend drug gang leaders they blame for five days of widespread violence even as scores of armed youth fled the shantytown for a neighboring area.

Authorities say the gangs have erected roadblocks on major highways to rob motorists en masse, torched more than 40 cars and buses, and shot up police outposts, all to protest against a security program that has been pushing them from slums where they’ve held sway for decades.

The officers arrived under the cover of police helicopters and amid the constant rattle of high-caliber gunfire despite the gang members’ efforts to block access with burning vehicles.

But scores of gangsters were seen fleeing down jungle-covered hills, across an area known as “the green hell,” to a neighboring gang stronghold, the Alemao slum.

Is this impossible in the USA? Could things get this bad in our border cities and other border areas?

Well…. yes. If we let it happen.

We already have places where the federal government has placed signs warning civilians not to enter, areas along the US/Mexico border, in US territory.

The facts on how many terrorists the TSA has caught by “screening”:

In nearly a decade there is not a single report of a terrorist having been caught during the TSA screening process. No bombs have been discovered. No hijackings have been thwarted. For the TSA to claim it has made the nation’s skies safer is as absurd as the rooster taking credit for the sun rising each morning. Observant passengers have caught more terrorist-wannabes than the 67,000 TSA employees.

It is possible, I suppose, that some terrorist hasn’t tried a particular technique because they knew the TSA was there.  But global screening procedures applied to everyone can’t defeat inventive terrorists indefinitely.

What will TSA do when an airplane is finally taken down by an explosive internal to the human body that can’t be detected by any procedure the TSA now has, including body scans and pat downs?  Start xraying the internal organs and joints from head to toe of every passenger?

It’s only a matter of time until TSA has to take the approach that El Al takes.  The only question is how many people will die because of TSA refusal to profile before it is forced to change policy.  Does anyone think a determined suicide bomber would shrink from having the bomb inserted surgically?

Sadly, it is probably only a matter of time.

The problem with this, of course, is that most of us don’t look very good in abbreviated swim-wear. And airports are often cold. I’m not anxious to see most flyers in a bikini.

The last time I flew, the TSA guy confiscated my breath mints (the little breath assure capsules with parsley oil in them). They were foil backed, and that set off the scanner… and I suppose they might have been explosive or something. Or maybe the TSA guy was just an idiot.

You decide.