- When so many generations of Americans went to battle and
fought to keep their country free and their fellow citizens safe, this is
unquestionably what they had in mind. People like Stratford, Conn. resident Joseph Sincavage understand what freedom of
speech and freedom of expression are all about: flying their Nazi flag. That’s
not even a metaphor; Sincavage literally flies a flag representing the
tyrannical regime responsible for the attempted extermination of an entire race
of people and the systematic murder of 6 million Jewish people during World War
II. He began flying two new flags on the side of his home this week and
alongside the familiar red, white and blue of the American flag, he reps the
Third Reich with the red Nazi flag with a white circle in the middle containing
a swastika. "Yes, I want my country's flag obviously, yeah," Sincavage
said before turning his focus to the Nazi flag. "That I'm flying as a form
of protest against President Obama's policies and administration.” That’s
right, he opposes the policies and practices of the current president of these
here United States, which is fine, and he’s choosing to do so by finding the
most hideously and offensively inhumane gesture possible, which is not fine.
Oddly enough, one of his neighbors has a little bit of a beef with Sincavage’s
gesture. John O'Grady lives across the street and says the Nazi flag does not
belong in a neighborhood where the stars and stripes are everywhere. "Well,
I really don't feel like the flag should be flown. It's kind of
anti-everybody," O'Grady said. "Well, my first assumption would not
be that he's against Obama. It would be that he's against America and everybody
else.” Making Sincavage’s genocidal gesture all the more peculiar, he served
four years in the Marine Corps. His neighbors called police about the flag, but
the town’s attorney informed they that there is nothing illegal about it. Sincavage
has vowed to keep the flag flying until Obama changes his ways. In other words,
it’ll be around until he dies or Obama leaves office in 2016…………
- The Los Angeles Lakers are officially the desperate boyfriend
getting all emotionally needy and begging his unhappy girlfriend not to leave
him. Soon-to-be free-agent center Dwight Howard is reportedly all but out the
door after just one season in L.A. and the team is throwing its body in the
proverbial doorway to keep him from walking out. At the center of their efforts
is a massive banner on the side of Staples Center on Wednesday with a photo of
Howard and one message: "Stay." It is the first of "six or
seven" billboards the Lakers plan on putting up in "various key
locations" in order to try to convince Howard that he doesn’t hate playing
for them. A second billboard above Hollywood Boulevard with the same message
was also unveiled, according to team spokesman John Black. Both signs are
adorned by the hashtag "STAYD12," hoping the message catches on
through social media. Plans for a full-page advertisement in the Los Angeles
Times are in the works as what Black described as a "company-wide
initiative" agreed upon by both the basketball operations and business
side of the Lakers. Unfortunately for the team, their ability to pay Howard
more than any other team is possibly their only bargaining chip left. He
reportedly hates playing for current coach Mike D’Antoni, who just completed
his first year of a three-year deal and has been backed by the front office to
return next season. The team pointed to its efforts to woo players such as
Shaquille O'Neal as a sign that their overtures to Howard aren’t unprecedented,
but taking out billboards to beg just comes across as pathetic. At least it’s
not THIS GEM that the city of Cleveland put together to convince LeBron James
to stay when he became a free agent in 2010, but it’s still desperate. Should
Howard elect to leave, the top contenders for his services are expected to be the
Houston Rockets , Dallas Mavericks , Atlanta Hawks , Golden State Warriors and
Cleveland Cavaliers, all of whom can offer Howard a four-year, $87.6 million
contract………
- I love gooooooooooold. Those words definitely rang true
for South
America's Wari civilization and archaeologists at a dig in Peru found evidence
of that fact Thursday. In a project supported by National Geographic, archaeologist
Milosz Giersz of the University of Warsaw in Poland and his team discovered gold
and silver riches from more than a millennium ago. The riches were found in
what is believed to be the first unlooted tomb of the Wari civilization. All of
these sparkly wonders were unveiled at a news conference at the El Castillo de
Huarmey archaeological site, 75 miles north of Lima. The tomb itself dates back
to an era between the year 700 and 1000 and could illuminate the history of the
mysterious Wari, a culture that predated the Incas. "We are talking about
the first unearthed royal imperial tomb," Giersz said. Along with the
silver and gold, the mummies of three Wari queens were discovered along with
the remains of 60 other individuals, some of whom may have been human
sacrifices. Giersz and Peruvian archaeologist Roberto Pimentel Nita led the
project, which was carried out in secret to prevent looters from crashing the
site. Grave robbers have thieved plenty of valuable items from the 110-acre
site over the past few decades, but the Wari mausoleum is tucked so deep
underground that it went un-pilfered. About three years ago, the archaeologists
involved with the project studied aerial photography of the region and spotted
traces of a subterranean structure, sitting on a ridge between two large
adobe-brick pyramids. Giersz and his team dug through a pile of rubble in September
and unearthed an ancient ceremonial room with a stone throne. They pried up piles
of loose stone and found rows of human remains, buried in a seated position.
The three queens were found in three side chambers, accompanied by their
treasures: more than 1,000 artifacts were recovered, including gold and silver
jewelry, silver bowls, bronze ritual axes, an alabaster drinking cup, knives
and weaving tools made of gold. Even with the find, little is known about the
Wari, other than the fact that they ruled a wide region of the Peruvian coast
in the eighth and ninth centuries and loved beer……..
- Even Mick Jagger can learn a little something about rock
and roll. As the iconic Rolling Stones frontman and his bandmates prepare to headline the
Glastonbury Festival on Saturday night, Jagger admitted that he has been
watching videos of the past four years' Glastonbury headliners to get ready for
the gig. “Festivals are great to be at, but not always the easiest things to play,”
Jagger said. “You've got to really work at that bit, but I think it's going to
be a lot of fun.” He went on to say that the band have been putting a lot of
thought into their set list and have been grinding away in rehearsals because festivals are such
a challenge. We're looking forward to it and I'm thinking about the set list for the
day and how we're going to deal with it. You've got to try and make sure the
first number really cooks... gets everyone confident,” Jagger added. “If it
doesn't, you've got to put it behind you. So that first number's got to be
something you're super confident with. It's no good doing a slightly unknown
number that the audience isn't going to deal with." Because of the gravity
of the Stones headlining the festival’s biggest night, the BBC will broadcast
and hour of their set. After the first hour is shown on television, the
remainder of the performance – which will run for a total of two hours and 15
minutes – will be seen by festival attendees only, followed by a large
fireworks display. According to festival organizer Michael Eavis, the event’s
Pyramid Stage area has been extended to make sure the site doesn't become
overcrowded during the band’s set………
- The mysteries never cease in outer space. Sometimes, those
mysteries don’t even involve whether Axl Rose is so fat that he could break the
concept of zero gravity in the great beyond. The NASA probe Voyager added a
dose of mystery to the space world recently when it r passed into a bizarre and
unanticipated cosmic hallway between the bubble of space under the sun’s
influence and whatever lies beyond. Voyager has been rumbling along the same celestial
highway since September 1977 and moved past Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and
1980, respectively. It eventually ended up an a path that led toward
interstellar space and is still on its way toward that space. NASA and those
working with it on the project have been surprised at the data the probe has
sent back of late. “The results of the measurements from Voyager have been
surprising us not just since last August, but for about the last 2.5 years,” said
astronomer Stamatios Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics
Laboratory. Late last year, scientists thought Voyager 1 had finally passed
beyond the heliosheath, the outermost region of space touched by the solar
wind, a stream of charged particles continuously flowing the sun. Then on Aug.
25, Voyager wandered into an uncharted region of space marked by the sudden disappearance
of particles from the sun and the sudden rise of particles emanating from
interstellar space. “As far as we could tell there was absolutely no solar
material in the vicinity of the spacecraft and there hasn’t been since then. At
the same time, the cosmic rays coming from outside the system started to
increase. We all thought at the time that, by God, we were probably out of the
solar system,” Krimigis added. There was also the mystery of the magnetic field
Voyager measured, which was still aligned like the sun’s, and an abrupt rise in
the strength of the magnetic field. Factor in confusion over why the cosmic ray
particles were not evenly distributed and some of the brightest minds in
astronomy were confounded. The best theory so far is that Voyager is in some
sort of foyer where particles from inside and outside the solar system can
easily flow, but which is not quite yet in interstellar space. The phenomenon
has been dubbed he “heliosheath depletion region.” Scientists also have no idea
how much longer it will take Voyager to reach the next and presumably last leg
of its journey into interstellar space…….
No comments:
Post a Comment