What Else Is Near Ground Zero?

New Yorker Daryl Lang takes some photos of other structures and businesses in his neighborhood, including strip clubs, bars, McDonalds and curbside souvenir hockers, located the same distance from the Ground Zero site as the proposed Muslim community center:

What’s my point? A month ago, I wrote about my support for a group of Muslim New Yorkers—whom I consider my neighbors—and their right to put a religious building on a piece of private property in Lower Manhattan. Since then, the debate over the Park51 community center, inaccurately nicknamed the “Ground Zero Mosque,” has jumped from talk radio to mainstream conversation, and turned nasty in the process. Sarah Palin wrote that, “it would be an intolerable and tragic mistake to allow such a project sponsored by such an individual to go forward on such hallowed ground.”

Look at the photos. This neighborhood is not hallowed. The people who live and work here are not obsessed with 9/11. The blocks around Ground Zero are like every other hard-working neighborhood in New York, where Muslims are just another thread of the city fabric.

At this point the only argument against this project is fear, specifically fear of Muslims, and that’s a bigoted, cowardly and completely indefensible position.

I'm glad that Sarah Palin was able to put aside her disdain for big city liberal elitists long enough to tell them how to run their own town (for their own good, of course). As far as the outrage over the proposed community center located two and a half blocks away from the World Trade Center site being too close I still have three questions that no right-winger can or will answer: 1) How many blocks would then be far enough away to show proper respect for the victims on 9/11? 2) What system or formula did you use to arrive at that number? 3) Why would being even one block closer than the number you chose be so much worse? The reason these questions can't be answered is because this isn't about proximity to Ground Zero or respect for those victims, it's about not liking Muslims and conflating religious tolerance with national weakness to score cheap political points in an election year.

Picture Of The Day

An "Impeach Obama" van found on the streets of Chicago. Part of some "grassroots" citizen uprising concerned about communism or Hitler or some such equally horrifying historical happening coupled with a nonconcurrent fear based in total reality, no doubt. Straws are now being grasped at...

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Picture Of The Day

Time magazine's latest cover is causing some controversy in the blogosphere:

Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.

Now of course this photo is meant to be emotionally manipulative: how could you not feel sorry for this woman? What was done to her was truly reprehensible and horrible and I don't mind admitting that I would be quite happy to see something equally as horrible happen to her attacker in return. This sort of thing happens to women far too often in that part of the world and our troops are doing good work by trying to prevent further violence being perpetrated upon innocents. That said: do you consider this to be a form of exploitation? In their defense of running the cover Time claims that they neither endorse nor oppose the war effort but as I said, it's clearly meant to support an agenda of remaining in Afghanistan and I think this claim of objectivity would seem equally transparent if the cover photo featured the dead mutilated corpse of an American soldier instead.

We've occupied Afghanistan for nearly a decade now. Credible military experts and historians agree almost universally that it will be several more decades before any sort of functional civilized government will be able to run the country and maintain some semblance of peace in the face of Taliban aggression. As I've said before I see only two options for us in this war: either get out now largely on our own terms or else wait until a lack of money, troops and equipment slowly drains us dry before forcing us to leave in defeat. I'm sympathetic to the plight of people like Aisha and I wish the United States could stop all suffering on the planet through shear force of will but that's obviously logistically unrealistic and economically unfeasible.

So, how do we define "victory" in Afghanistan? Should we remain there indefinitely until it is achieved? Should we spend an infinite amount of money to achieve it? What about all of the other countries whose people endure equally appalling levels of suffering and cruelty, should we commit ourselves just as fully to achieving "victory" in those places as well? Should we truly become Team America: World Police? I think the short and inevitable answer is that we simply cannot, and I believe that President Obama was mistaken in doubling our military down on the war in Afghanistan. Just as important as striving to win a war is being able to recognize when that cannot be done, even if doing so leads to an increase in human suffering. That's a hard truth for Americans to accept but we must do so if we wish to avoid bankrupting our nation and retain the ability to help people around the world like the poor girl pictured above.

Stuff Hitting Other Stuff Very Slowly

A nice analog compliment to the digitally rendered physics fest from Monday:


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How cool is this?

This isn't our Sun. This other sun is 470 light-years away from our home. Its name is 1RXS J160929.1-210524, and the orange sphere near it has been confirmed today as an orbiting planet. The first photo of an extra-solar planet.

The photo was originally taken in 2008 by David Lafreniere and collaborators working at the Gemini Observatory. Scientists weren't sure about it being an orbiting planet until now, however. New observations have shown that the planet follows an orbit around the star 300 times larger than Earth's orbit.

The planet has eight times the mass of Jupiter, and has a much higher temperature: 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to the minus 166 degrees of the biggest planet in our solar system. Scientists believe this temperature is a product of the age of this star system, much younger than ours.

Far from throwing any light in planetary theories, this discovery challenges the current model. Lafreniere and his colleagues think the orbit is too large for the planet to form by core accretion. If that was the case, then the star system could be much older than is actual age.

The only thing that worries me about this: what if the inhabitants of that planet saw the flash from our camera? Now I'm not saying that we're due for an alien invasion or anything like that but we do have a black president: isn't that always when shit goes down?

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Everyone can relax: Mac's got this one. Sometimes all you can do is laugh. And drink.

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This is really starting to depress me. Might even drive a man to drink.

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I was reading about this story on my iPhone yesterday and I thought that this was totally Photoshopped but it's actually real:

This sinkhole appeared yesterday, May 30, in a street intersection located in Zone 2 of Ciudad de Guatemala.

A sinkhole is a natural depression caused by the removal of underground soil by water. This process can happen slowly, but sometimes the land just cracks open. In this case, it happened suddenly. The cause: Massive underground water torrents created by tropical storm Agatha.

Some people are calling it the Gate to Hell. I think it looks more like it was carved out by a space-based laser, a la Alien vs Predator.

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The cosmetic brand used by more magazines and photographers than any other.

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Well, at least we now know what we're dealing with down there:

This is what it looks like, four thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven feet down, when oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of thousands of barrels a day. (How many thousands? That’s not clear.) It’s a striking image, but, as with the ones we saw of the non-containing containment dome being lowered onto the leak a few days ago—looking like the house from “Psycho,” as drawn by M. C. Escher—it would be more appealing if it showed the leak being stanched. As it is, it’s just appalling.

So, what do we do now?

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Pictures Of The Day

This is what's known as a "trunk shot" in movies. Quentin Tarantino popularized it by using it in each of his films and it's usually the precursor to something really bad happening to whomever's in the trunk. Really bad.

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England is trying to choose a new Prime Minister today. This is how you vote:

Voters arrive at the Hare and Hounds pub which is being used as a polling station on May 6, 2010 in Corsham, England. Vote early. Vote often. Vote drunk!

So we fought for and won our independence from these guys a couple hundred years ago so I could vote in a Catholic church while they get to vote in their pubs. Somehow it lessens the victory.

[Update: Andrew Sullivan adds the following about Britain's electoral rules:

Yes, you can vote drunk and you can bring your dog with you into the polling booth. You are also fully entitled to scrawl on your ballot terms like "Fuck The System!" What a civilized place.

Have I mentioned that they get to vote in their pubs? Civilized, indeed.]

[Update II: One of his readers responds:

So those lucky bastards in Merry Ole England can vote drunk? At a pub, no less? While we poor unlucky bastards here in Indiana (who voted on Tuesday) can’t even BUY alcohol on election day

Alcohol is served in restaurants and bars on Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. and from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. on Sundays.

Alcoholic beverages can be purchased from private retail package stores, and beer and wine can be bought in grocery stores, convenience stores, and drug stores. No alcohol is sold on Christmas Day and Election Day.”

If you don't need a drink on both Christmas Day and Election Day you obviously haven't been living in America lately.]

Picture Of The Day

I can't believe that I've never seen this photo before:

After an oxygen tank exploded and crippled their service module, the Apollo 13 astronauts were forced to abandon plans to make the third manned lunar landing. The extent of the damage is revealed in this grainy, grim photo, taken as the service module was drifting away, jettisoned only hours prior to the command module's reentry and splashdown. An entire panel on the side of the service module has been blown away and extensive internal damage is apparent. Visible below the gutted compartment is a radio antenna and the large, bell-shaped nozzle of the service module's rocket engine. On April 17, 1970 the three astronauts returned safely to Earth.

I couldn't imagine what those three men must have felt during that harrowing experience. Astronauts are some of my favorite American heroes.

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Spill, baby, spill. Weak, dude.

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The Earth as seen from Mars:

This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004)

Dammit, I had my eyes closed. How about a heads up next time, Spirit?

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Albert Einstein's desk at Princeton, taken only a few hours after he died in 1955 but never published before last week. My own filing system is very similar.

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An erupting solar prominence leaps off the surface of the sun in one of the first images captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled "First Light" images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

"SDO is working beautifully," reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is even better than we could have dreamed."

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO's telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

Incredible. You can view more images and even watch some video of the same at NASA's official SDO press site here.

Picture Of The Day

Even if this is faked, I still like it. Note the amusement...

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[Update:
This obviously isn't faked, and I love it. Note the nerdiness...

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A closeup shot of the martian moon Phobos, snapped by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, which completed its most recent set of flybys on March 13. The photos received by the ESA as a result of these flybys represent the sharpest images to date of Mars’ largest moon. Cool.

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Just go ahead and forget everything you know about the word "awesome" because this painting of Batman fighting a shark with a lightsaber just redefined it.

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