Wait, no, come back. I'm not going to describe it in detail ("Wait, I haven't gotten to the vampires yet!"). All I'm going to say is this:
It was, oddly, a continuation of the dreams which disturbed my sleep last night, but combined with another one of those dreams where I'm wandering through a progression of stages, trying to find my way back to something from earlier in the dream. I didn't get there, but something happened, and I found myself walking back toward the beginning of the dream, through the sets in reverse order, while a triumphant song played in the background. It was sort-of the end of a reality TV program, kind of, but not exactly.
I don't know what has happened, or how, but evidently my subconscious is making note of something good being completed. I certainly don't feel any different, myself.
Oh well.
* * *
So, "conservatives" are having marches against sharia and leftists are naturally protesting.
The reason is neatly summed up thus:
This is the kind of cognitive dissonance on display, here:
Leftists are for gay rights. Under sharia, gays are executed.I could go on, but I don't think I really need to.
Leftists are for womens' right. Under sharia, women have no rights at all.
Leftists are "sex positive", particularly when it comes to women. Under sharia, womens' genitals are mutilated to reduce or eliminate their enjoyment of sex.
Leftists are, like most people, anti-slavery. Under sharia, slavery exists in the world today.
Leftists are against pedophilia. (Well, mostly.) Under sharia, pedophilia is common.
Leftists are against capital punishment. Under sharia, most crimes are punishable by death.
Leftists are anti-rape. Under sharia, the victim is punished instead of the rapist. (Usually executed.)
Leftists are pro-abortion. Under sharia, abortion is prohibited.
Leftists are pro-contraception. Under sharia, contraception is prohibited.
One group of homosexuals understands what they get from sharia, but of course the larger LGBTWTFBBQ community--well, this quote explains it: "LGBT activists have reacted with fury, insisting the event is nothing more than the cynical hijacking of gay rights by the 'far right' as a cover for Islamophobia."
Sure, because obviously the "far right"--traditionally opposed to homosexuality--is going to use gay rights to push its agenda. It's not because sharia is a bad deal for gay people or anything, you know, and maybe a little islamophobia now would stand you guys in good stead against what you face if sharia comes here.
In the left wing, being leftist is vastly more important than anything else, though, which is why this kind of crap continues. Politics trump every other consideration.
* * *
Marxism is nothing but high school. He's right. Best response to marxists: "Shut up; adults are talking." Win.
* * *
How does a cease and desist order help? Guy uses unwashed clam shells to pave a private road. The unwashed shells have bits of dead clam stuck to them. The dead clam bits rot and make a hellacious stench.
"'It's like bodies decaying,' Sharon Moore, another local, added." No, Ms. Moore, it is bodies decaying. Clam bodies. "The town administrator has issued a cease and desist order, but at this time, the clams are still there, and continuing to decay."
"Cease and desist" what? A natural biological process? Stop using the clam shells? None of this makes any damned sense to me. People are idiots.
Give it enough time and the problem will solve itself, anyway.
* * *
"Ain't science a hoot?" Yes. Yes, it most assuredly is.
The post discusses some of the particulars of a prior post (the one that led to my discussion of digital stromatolite civilizations) and goes into detail on what kind of black hole would be needed to provide X much power for how long, using an on-line calculator.
The post ends with a discussion on the impossibility of CERN making a black hole and destroying the Earth. If the LHC were to rear back and pass a miracle, it might make a black hole amounting to a few times the mass of a proton. The writer starts, though, with a one-microgram black hole, which is "many orders of magnitude" heavier than a proton. (In fact, this calculator says a microgram is 5.978633202e+17 protons, which is not quite 600,000,000,000,000,000 protons. The LHC is powerful, but it is nowhere nearly powerful enough to do that.)
That black hole will decay (due to Hawking radiation) in an interval shorter than the Planck interval, which is the shortest interval necessary to measure any event than can occur in the observable universe.
Needless to say, it would not have enough time to absorb Earth.
* * *
Incidentally, one microgram of black hole, evaporating into radiation, in less than Planck time--let's be generous and say it takes a picosecond for that black hole to evaporate, which is thirty-four orders of magnitude (powers of ten) longer than the Planck interval is.
That black hole, evaporating in a picosecond, produces ninety billion terawatts of energy.
Hiroshima bomb: 60 terajoules, 15 kilotons
Evaporating black hole: 90 gigajoules, 0.215 kilotons
...it would utterly destroy the reaction chamber and everything around it. That's the energy equivalent of 215 tons of high explosive. It would be a big bang; 215 tons is eleven truckloads. So imagine the bang from eleven semi trailers filled with TNT.
It would not destroy a whole city, but a whole city block would not be out of the question. Certainly the LHC would not be colliding any large hadrons for rather a long time after that.
But Earth is safe.