If this gets independent verification it will mean that Einstein’s “theory” of relativity is WRONG:

Scientists around the world said on Friday the discovery of sub-atomic particles apparently traveling faster than light could force a major rethink of theories on the makeup of the cosmos, but the findings would first have to be independently confirmed.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is an extraordinary claim,” eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees told Reuters.

The CERN research institute near Geneva said measurements over three years had shown neutrinos pumped to a receiver in Gran Sasso, Italy, had arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than light would have done — a tiny difference that could nonetheless undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity.

“It is premature to comment on this,” Professor Stephen Hawking, the world’s most well-known physicist, told Reuters. “Further experiments and clarifications are needed.”

This has been “settled science” by consensus for nearly half a century, and has been out there for right at 100 years. And now, it looks like it’s incorrect and will have to be re-thought.

Will that make the Global Warming hysterics “rethink” their couple-of-decades consensus based on faulty/fudged data, incomplete-super-complex modeling and blow-hard money-making proponents like Al Gore?

Well . . . Pigs aren’t flyin’ outside my window, and Hell is still liquid . . .

Geez . . . I warned about this way back when! Now, the LA Times makes it official:

OnStar Corp., the General Motors communication service for drivers, may soon start selling customer data to other companies.

In emails sent to customers, OnStar detailed changes to its privacy statement that go into effect in December. Under the revised policy, the company may start collecting data from any vehicle equipped with an OnStar device and could share that information with credit card processors, law enforcement and others.

“We may share or sell anonymized data (including location, speed, and safety belt usage) with third parties for any purpose, which may prove useful for such things as research relating to public safety or traffic services,” the privacy statement said.

Wow, that’s neighborly of them. Bet your insurance company would really like to know how many times a year you drive 5 over the speed limit. The Obama boys might just like to know how many Tea Party rallies and meetings you’ve been attending. Yeseree Bob — OnStar to the rescue there, “Oh, ya betcha!”

So not to worry, this only affects us stooopeeeds that have a GM car or truck, right? Not so fast there buckaroo. Since July, Government Motors has been selling rear view mirrors equipped with OnStar functionality to all takers. And the funny, funny thing is, if you stop the service . . . they still can/will monitor you.

So, look for that little blue circle and punch it if you dare — you might just hear.

“Hello, this is OnStar — how can we f__K you today?”

With Obamanomics failing miserably, and Obamacare not even cutting in our here in the Granola State, the administration’s reelection efforts have come down to this: Attack Watch — a site where you can key them in directly to any attacks, smears, or complaints about our Narcissist-in-Chief simply by filling out a little form. How convenient.

Bill Whittle, eminent Conservative thinker/writer/video maker has a post that encourages all of us who are disappointed with the mighty Obama to turn ourselves in, and then make our own reeducation identity badges:

So, here’s the thing: anyone whose sense of civic duty compels them to report themselves, and then make their own ATTACK WATCH! graphic will get it posted here. That way, the President of the United States will not have to waste all of that time surfing the internet to compile his Enemies List: it will all be right here in one place for easy re-education assignments!

So, I did and here’s my badge:

Just to get you up to speed:

Oh well — better get my own self ready to eat all those dang peas . . .

In commemoration of this tragic, hallowed day I have posted thoughts and remembrances September 11th of 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. In last year’s post I finally achieved perspective of how to think about those that died on this day:

Photo Credit: Richard Drew, APOut walking the dog early this am I worked on a remembrance for this hallowed day. Of all the images that I could have picked the one at left, Falling Man, is the most illustrative. Each of the 2,977 who died that day met their fate alone, as individuals, meeting their maker one-on-one, no matter if large numbers of them perished in the same instant.

Death is the most personal experience one has after birth. For these fated 2,977, the radical Islamic jihadists that brought down the World Trade Center towers, who crashed a jumbo jet into the Pentagon, who tried, and failed thank God, to hit either the Capitol or the White House, took from them and their loved ones all that they could have ever been. From the rest of us, they took what ever innocence about the world we had left — at least from those of us that haven’t refused to grow up.

Truth be told, we ALL know some, if not far too many, who even yet refuse to be the grownup. Anyone that professes the belief that is we just make nice with the Islamic Jihadists they will leave us alone. If we support their economies and lift them out of 3rd World poverty they will stop preaching their radicalized religion of hatred for Israel and the West. If we just had a compassionate Commander-in-Chief that would show proper respect (bow down to one of their kings) and “apologize” to the Arabic world for all our “sins” against them by the evil “BushCo” efforts to root out and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban Jihadis we would never have to fear a repeat of 9/11/2001.

Guess someone over there in radical Islam land didn’t get the memo. Yesterday 77 U.S. troops were wounded by a Taliban truck bomb. In a real-life “24″ scenario our FBI and other agencies are looking for would be terrorists that want to remember this day in another way, with truck bombs on bridges and in tunnels in NC and D.C. — and two of those they are looking for are American citizens.

This day will play out and eventually just be over, just as September 11, 2001 eventually became 9/12 . . . and we hope and pray that no violence will interfere with the many ceremonies and rememberances planned for today. Still, I can’t get that image of “Falling Man” out of my head. It initially was shown everywhere, then mostly disappeared, as did the video of the “hundreds” who jumped, or fell, or were blow out of the buildings; who decided to decree their own manner of death instead of being burned alive. In September of 2009 Tom Junod wrote about this “censorship” in Esquire Magazine and ends with this:

Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn’t jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall.

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

To paraphrase Pogo, “. . . The Falling Man is US”.

Has Hell frozen over?

NY Times columnist Anand Giridharadas breaks ranks with the editorial flavor of the used-to-be-mighty Gray Lady and offers up some ideas about the emerging political philosophy of “will-she-or-won’t-she-run” Sarah Palin without resorting to snark and without berating her . . . too much.

Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it.

That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha.

But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.

Let’s be realistic and acknowledge that there doesn’t seem to be any way for Sarah Palin to become the “Great Uniter” of the American people. The Ivy League political establishment on both Left and Right either can’t stand her for her populist demeanor, or think her politics are too simplistic. On the far-Left, they simply hate her for her refusal to abort her Down’s-Syndrome-diagnosed fetus. But Giridharadas sees her in the light of one that is bringing to fore a union of those left, right and center who no longer trust the “big” institutions, both public and private: Sarah Palin’s ideas are gelling and resonating with those of us who believe the U.S. Constitution was crafted by the Founders to protect the “individual’s” rights over that of the “state”.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

Go read the article for his support of those three assertions. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to be super-hard-right wing-nut ideas, in fact, maybe even a wee bit 60′s counter-culture inspired? Certainly more small-”L” libertarian than regular GOP ideas.

Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?

Ol’ Okie didn’t walk through the pasture without gettin’ a little on the soles of his boots, and not being born yesterday we take kind words about Sarah Palin in the NY Times with several grains of salt. (Mixin’ them metaphors & hackneyed cliches like a pro — Oh, ya betcha!) Is this an attempt to help convince her to run, because “they” believe she can’t win against Barak Obama? Do they think that Palin could take out Perry if she enters the GOP Primary battle? Do they see a Palin run in this 2012 race the means for implosion of the GOP chances to retake the White House?

All good questions, huh? I’ll let the NYT finish this:

No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.

[Update] Ed Morrissey at Hot Air sees a bit o’ intrigue in this NYT presentation, not in its columnists section but its News section:

Something tells me, though, that the Times knew this all along. I’m guessing that their sudden interest in the substantive Palin has less to do with being shocked, shocked to find that she’s anti-establishment than in subtly encouraging her to jump into the GOP race, which they might see as a way to split Republicans and keep Barack Obama in office. That’s flawed, too, but having seen their subtle encouragement of John McCain and their disgusting smears of him as soon as he wrapped up the nomination in 2008, their sudden appreciation for Palin has me just a wee bit suspicious.

Yeah, me too . . .

Photographer: Kevin Herrera

Dateline: Santa Monica, CA

As of tomorrow, you can’t have your store merchandise given to you in a single-use plastic bag, and a paper one will cost you an extra dime . . .

They are making speed limits slower all over town and encouraging everyone to stop driving and move to bikes . . .

Restaurants have to send your leftovers home in paper boxes, even though they leak . . .

WE have an extra 1/4% sales tax, just because the city REALLY needs more of our money.

But . . .

It’s A-OK to show up on the 3rd Street Promenade in your Victoria’s Secret or Calvin Kleins in order to score some “free stuff”!

ANYTHING FOR FREE STUFF

Nearly naked shoppers rush into the Desigual boutique on the Third Street Promenade on Tuesday morning. About 150 people showed up in their underwear as part of a promotion. Those in undies were able to select two clothing items and take them home at no cost.

Gotta love the perv in the blue shirt with the camera . . .

From Bill Keller, Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890). Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.

But I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon (the text, not the Broadway musical) or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. It matters to me whether a president respects serious science and verifiable history — in short, belongs to what an official in a previous administration once scornfully described as “the reality-based community.” I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.

And I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed.

(Emphasis in the above is mine.)

Reminds me a lot of the type of rhetoric I heard as a kid when Jack Kennedy was the Democratic nominee. There were many in small-town Oklahoma who were worried that Kennedy’s “fealty” would be to the Pope and not to the constitution. Enlightened folks, like my parents, may have not liked his politics, but I never heard that crap spoken at my house. Now, it’s not the under-educated, but the over-educated elites among us that are terrified of someone with religious faith.

We sure have fallen deep down the rabbit hole . . .

Sarah Palin is making some big announcement in Iowa on Sept. 3rd, so I guess we’ll know pretty soon. Most commentators are calling this her first campaign commercial. If so, it’s a good one!

What can we say?

For a third night the city of London has been ravaged by rioting youths. Progressives attribute this to joblessness and the lessening of social services. I attribute it to thuggery!

We saw this happen out here in LA in the early 90s after the Rodney King verdict, when South Central erupted into chaos beginning with the severe, near fatal beating of Reginald Denny — who would have guessed it, but the man convicted of mayhem in the Denny beating (one of the “L.A. Four”) was arrested a few weeks ago on suspicion of murder.

I bring that to mind so as to say, it could happen here . . . again.

We saw near chaos conditions in Wisconsin over the Governor signing the bill ending collective bargaining by state workers, and now there are recall elections going on today as Progressives try to undue what the newly-GOP-controlled legislature has wrought in their efforts to bring fiscal sanity to their state government.

The civility of the Progressive movement and its members in Congress has also been on full display recently with the painting of the “Tea Party” folks as the “American Taliban”. Yes Virginia, those mostly white, middle to older aged protesters who gather in mass, make patriotic statements and promote fiscal responsibility, and then clean up after themselves before leaving are a force to be deathly afraid of — according to the main-stream media and Progressive commentators everywhere. Those nice, family-lovin’ SEIU members and New Black Panthers who shut down state government buildings with their protest and intimidate voters at the polls are folks to be revered and honored for standing up for the “little people”.

To fully understand what Progressives want for our country, just mosey over and read their proposed “Contract for the American Dream”, which is a total nightmare for anyone with any sense of fiscal responsibility. Regardless, good Lefties just can’t ever get enough of someone elses money, as witnessed by today’s Michael Hiltzik LA Times piece, “Political leaders unwilling to address economic fix: stimulus”:

A new economic stimulus package is needed to put people to work for state and local governments and on public initiatives that improve education, transportation and quality of life. Without it, Washington will be ignoring the lessons of the 1930s.
{…}
In short, although the private sector had not yet stepped up hiring and the Federal Reserve was tightening credit, the government stopped priming the fiscal pump and instead took water out of the bucket.

The result of the new austerity was the severe recession of 1937-38 — the double-dip sequel to the Great Depression. Congress and the Roosevelt White House responded with the most aggressive stimulus program of the New Deal period — stepped up public works construction and housing assistance, and a $3.75-billion relief program.

The new spending evoked shrieks of dismay from conservatives — Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia condemned the “present orgy of spending” and demanded a balanced budget and a ruthless purge of relief rolls. But it halted the recession in its tracks.

I thought that the position that Roosevelt’s spending was not what caused the end of the Great Depression, but for WW2 things would have remained pretty dour for a lot longer . . . might even have been the end of this great experiment. Hell of a way to clean up an economic mess, though — and not an option in this day and time of weapons of mass destruction.

Take another look at the photo above, and then think about the incidents at the Wisconsin State Fair over the weekend.

It’s obvious, for some out there among us, we’re only a gnat’s eyelash away from barbarism at any given moment in time. They don’t really need a reason . . . they just have to be in the mood.

This “we” forget to our peril . . .

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

We mourn the loss of 30 of our finest young men this past weekend, including 22 brave U.S. Navy Seals. May God be with them and their families.

ABC Channel 7 here in LA has a photo gallery of 20 of the fallen, with some personal information and recollections about each of them.