New victim group created: the dead.

I maintain that some of the greatest fools in history are alive today and working in government, so it is hard for them to shock me from that direction.  Today, I'm shocked.

Prosecutor certain convict abused more than three corpses

"We'll never know" how many victims there are, Deters said, "because [the disgusting accused insane person] doesn't know. We probably won't (ever) know the scope of his abuse."

Sparing us all the disgusting details, I'd like to point out the following.  You can abuse a person, you can abuse an animal, but you cannot "abuse" a corpse.  Its dead.  Corpses are defiled, not abused. 

A corpse cannot be a "victim".  Its dead. You can't victimize meat. Corpses are interfered with, desecrated, possibly even profaned, but not victimized. 

This concludes today's pissed off rant.

The Phantom

Toldja.

I hate being right.

The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.
...

Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

"I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum." Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.

Novel excuse though, banning rifles in the USA reduces criminality in Mexico.  These guys really will say any damn thing, won't they? 

Well kids, it is ON.  The other shoe will be a national gun registry.  You may be sure the BATF is even now at work busily copying all those yellow sheets y'all filled out when you bought whatever.  Hidden away in the 100 pages of the Porkulus Maximus will be a couple hundred million to pay for that.  Count on it.

TODAY is the day to start burning up the phone lines, email and snail mail to your congresscritters.  Dig in my American friends, hold that ground.  Make them fear for their re-election, particularly those coming due in two years.  Say the name Al Gore to them.

Remember my friends, gun bans are not about controlling crime.  They are about controlling -you-.

The Phantom

Something constructive for a change.

A brief tour of the news sites this morning reveals that lots and lots of people are becoming very alarmed at the things coming out of Barry's Clown Circus, aka the White House.today. 

Good.  Finally.  Nice of y'all to show up, what took ya?

Anyway, now that the viewing with alarm has kicked in, The Illustrious Phantom shall look further afield for some hopeful signs and useful information with which to lift the bruised spirits and salve the abraded nerves.  I found a few things of note today for future development of keen things which will help dig out the economy.

First up, superconductivity. 

Writing in the journal Nature Materials, Dr Alan Drew from Queen Mary's Department of Physics and his colleagues at the University of Fribourg report on the investigation of a new high temperature superconductor, the so-called oxypnictides. They found that these exhibit some striking similarities with the previously known copper-oxide high temperature superconductors - in both cases superconductivity emerges from a magnetic state. Their results go some way to explaining the mechanisms behind high temperature superconductors.

This is very interesting, because it is new physics regarding how electricity moves.  Superconducting wires and batteries would solve a tremendous number of existing issues in resources, transportation, blah blah blah.  Which an enterprising company could make a major buttload of money selling.  Nice.

More superconductivity, this time a bit more general discovery:

Together with three colleagues Professor Peter Oppeneer of Uppsala University has explained the hitherto unsolved mystery in materials science known as 'the hidden order' – how a new phase arises and why. This discovery can be of great importance to our understanding of how new material properties occur, how they can be controlled and exploited in the future.

 

There are several materials that evince a clear phase transition in all thermodynamic properties when the temperature falls below a certain transitional temperature, but no one has been able to explain the new collective order in the material. Until now, this has been called the hidden order.

This is a bit more profound, they've elucidated the actual mechanism that makes a material change phase with temperature.  Its a computer simulation, but having done that experimental proof becomes possible.  I look forward to hearing that somebody proved or disproved this.

Finally, a new application of previous discoveries in materials science.  Guns!  According to this month's Guns and Ammo magazine, Ruger Inc. has released their newest invention: a plastic framed revolver.  G&A has a whole spread on the newest .38 Special snubbie concept, including a test drive.  The barrel remains steel, crane, cylinder and upper frame are aluminum, but the handle frame and trigger area are all polymer plastic.  They claim non-painful recoil due to special handgrips and the energy absorbing qualities of the polymer frame, which if true is quite an achievement.  Normally snub nose revolvers -hurt- when you shoot full power rounds in them.  You hear BANG "Ow!" at the range.  The high pressure +p rounds are frickin' torture.  So if Ruger has managed to tame that, they will sell a whole lot of these little guns, thereby lifting up the economy and making Barry's Clown Circus look bad.  Awesome.

From superconductivity to anachronistic revolver designs in one post.  Where else can you get that but The Phantom Soapbox?  ~:D

The Fabulously Nonsequitorial Phantom.

Why I don't like Obama and the DemocRats.

Today, I read this.

Simulating molecular motions provides researchers with information critical to designing vaccines and helps them decipher the bases of certain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, that result from molecular motion gone awry.

In the past, researchers needed either supercomputers or large computer clusters to run simulations. Or they had to be content to run only a tiny fraction of the process on their desktop computers. But a new open-source software package developed at Stanford University is making it possible to do complex simulations of molecular motion on desktop computers at much faster speeds than has been previously possible.

"Simulations that used to take three years can now be completed in a few days," said Vijay Pande, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and principal investigator of the Open Molecular Mechanics (OpenMM) project. "With this first release of OpenMM, we focused on small molecular systems simulated and saw speedups of 100 times faster than before."

OpenMM is a collaborative project between Pande's lab and Simbios, the National Center for Physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures at Stanford, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health. The project is described in a paper that was scheduled to be posted online Feb. 3 in the "Early View" section of the Journal of Computational Chemistry.

And having read it, I thought "Here's some guys working hard at digging up the Truth about the universe.  Way to go!"  This project will lead to some serious breakthroughs in medicine and organic chemistry down the road.  Awesome.

Then later, I read this:

Obama is the Democrats' Great Communicator, our Ronald Reagan. It's fitting that his highest priority will be reversing the tax and spending priorities Reagan enshrined as a new American compact almost 30 years ago, and reviving the notion of government as an engine of capitalist growth -- not merely the safety net provider, but the catalyst for organizing our public resources around what makes the economy strong. We've been arguing at the margins during these last two years of pain: Government should regulate more, or less. Tax rates should be higher, or lower. But there's a dangerous civic illiteracy in our country about what the larger role of government in a modern economy is, or should be, and I don't think Obama will ultimately prevail if he doesn't start to take it on.

Intrigued, I delved further.  What is it that Obama is supposed to be communicating to us illiterate dumb asses?  How is the government the "engine of growth"?

He quotes Robert Reich: The bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but the underlying problem began much earlier -- in the late 1970s, when median U.S. incomes began to stall.
...<snippage>...
What happened to the money? According to researchers Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, since the late 1970s, a greater and greater share of national income has gone to people at the top of the earnings ladder. As late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more than 20 percent. But the rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle class and the poor do -- after all, being rich means that you already have most of what you need. That's why the concentration of income at the top can lead to a big shortfall in overall demand and send the economy into a tailspin. (It's not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation's income.)

Obama's supposed to be telling us "the rich people took it all".  That's why we're broke?  You've gotta be kidding me, you think we are all this dumb.  Wow.

Then the two things link together in the pack rat nest of my mind, and I realize this is why I don't like the DemocRats in general and Mr. Obama in particular.  They could be working hard finding Truth and using it to improve life like the OpenMM guys.  But they aren't.  What they are busy doing is promoting jealousy and hatred between people and lying about things.  I hate that.

BTW is you want your hair to stand on end, google up Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.  Read some of that, you'll see what kind of communistic nightmare the Obammer in Chief has in store for the poor bastards of America.  It's going to be a rough four years, my friends.

This... could be bad.

Iran launches a satellite

The launch of the Omid satellite, meaning Hope, was timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution and United Nations talks aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear programme.

"Dear Iranians, your children have put the first indigenous satellite into orbit," said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a broadcast on state television.

"With this launch the Islamic Republic of Iran has officially achieved a presence in space."

The launch has highlighted international concerns that Iran will use domestically developed space technology to develop intercontinental nuclear missiles.

Concerns. No, really? They don't need to "develop" anything anymore, I'd say the thing is in production.

If you can put a satellite in orbit you can put a nuke in Europe off the same missile. Mr. Amadinnerjacket, the Wild Eyed Fruitbat of the Middle East, has got his sweaty little finger on a big red button kids. Ain't that great?
It will be interesting to see how the Surrender Monkey Brigade handles this. Will they wait to be bombed, or will they go with a "disproportionate response" kinda thing?

I bet Mr. O-bama is wondering why he sighed up for this gig right about now.

-update!-

The Great One speaks! "The United States will use "all elements of our national power" to deal with Iran, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday after Tehran said it had launched a satellite into orbit."

That's diplomatese for "Smarten up or we will nuke your sorry asses".

The Phantom