Hubble, giver of blog hits

Thanks to a spike in hits today on Hubble posts, I’ve gone and found that NASA released more Hubble images taken since the telescope’s recent upgrade. The first is one of the most recent images (and may as well just be a close-up of a past release). The second is older, but not blurry and generally ugly.

Update: I’m not sure if this one has just been released, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far.

Thought of the day

I despise most political correctness. Listen, it’s a bad thing to be mentally compared to a retard. We understand a retard to be someone who is unable to cognitively operate on a level anywhere near the average. That is not the fault of the retarded person, but it is still obviously a bad thing to not have any actual mental defect and still be comparable to such a person. And clearly the term gets bandied about far more broadly than as it pertains to intelligence. A case can be made against that use, perhaps. But if you get in fights, abuse drugs, or otherwise do generally stupid things, you’re a frickin’ retard.

And let’s just say “black”. Not “African-American”. Black. It isn’t accurate, but it really isn’t meant to be accurate. Neither is “white”. And what really gets me is that plenty of black people aren’t from America. “African-Canadian” isn’t a term anyone hears very often and the reason is that it’s just superficial political correctness. No one is thinking “I’m representing what and who this person is when I say ‘African-American.'” No. People just internalize the term as being socially acceptable.

And let’s just say “Indians”. Say “Native Americans” if a distinction is really needed, but “Indians” shouldn’t be offensive. Yeah, Columbus thought he was in India and the people he saw have vaguely similar skin color to what he would have expected. It’s an understandable mistake given the context. The fact that it gave birth to the Indian meme should not be viewed as a big deal. The term is not derogatory and was never intended as such.

This thought of the day is a 3-fer.

Even Google coddles these crybabies

It turns out Google doesn’t want to offend all the Muslim crybabies out there. Go search “Christianity is”, “Buddhism is”, “Judaism is”, “Atheism is”, and any number of other religious or religiously-related terms. You’ll see a whole slew of nasty suggestions, the most benign (aside from the few positive ones) being “a lie”. Now search “Islam is”. Know what you get?

Nothing.

This is just another example of someone or a group coddling Muslim crybabies. Of course, the coddling isn’t out of concern for the feelings of Muslims, but rather out of fear of being attacked. For Google, it might just be criticism, but with these whackaloons, it doesn’t take much to set of the crybaby alarms. There isn’t much to stop violence from erupting over something as insignificant as Google suggesting Islam is “a lie”.