The Blog at the End of the Universe

Israelis Prepare for War with Iran

Hoping Obama doesn’t get any crazy ideas.  

Just an excerpt from the article:

I asked a sidewalk passerby, a woman in her mid-20s pushing a baby carriage, what she thought of a possible government decision to bomb Iran. “They sit up there, they’re smarter than me, whatever they decide, I’ll support,” she said. A fellow of about 20 on a skateboard said: “I’m not for war, I’m against war. But if somebody is going to attack you, if your enemy is going to attack, don’t you think you have to attack him first, for the sake of survival?” I asked if he thought Iran would attack Israel first. “I don’t know, I’m not privy to all the information. But good luck,” he said, and skated off.

Reminds me of the United State’s mentality with 9/11.  Complete trust in the government, shoot first ask questions later morality, and blind faith that we’re inherently correct regardless of the outcome.  Hopefully people learn from our [America’s] mistakes.  Pre-emptive war is bad war, as if there is such a thing as a good war.

This clip from a certain famous film sums up my attitude of not only the Israeli people but also a good chunk of Americans regarding Iran.

More and More States Introduce Costly Anti-Immigration Bills

thenoobyorker:

leftist-linguaphile:

Just this week, a report out of the University of Alabama estimated that Alabama stands to lose $11 billion in GDP and nearly $265 million in state income and sales tax due to their extreme immigration enforcement law, HB 56. Utah’s copycat law HB 497 (temporarily blocked last year) has cost the state $85,000 to defend, according to government reports. Arizona lost $490 million in tourism revenue last year, $86 million in lost wages, 2,800 lost jobs and more than $1 million in legal fees in defending SB 1070.

the costs of getting the scary-brown-people out.

Wow, I have a deep and uneasy suspicion that the educational systems in those states will suffer to make up for the loss of revenues. It’s a circle of sadness.

(Source: political-linguaphile)

Rick Santorum's Campaign Sent Out Hanukkah Cards with Scripture about Jesus

Socially Awkward Ricky.  I think that could be a TV show.

Of all the things we can't have, is a sense of proportion.

Hey! You! Wanna feel insignificant? Read this from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and then check out the link in the title:

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet of Oglaroon, the entire ‘intelligent’ population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accesible outer branches.

In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those that are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.

Exotic though this behavior may seem, there is no life form in the galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it is a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.”

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain- since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation- every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula- for that was his name- was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex- just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I wish I were this clever.