This Chick Right Here...

How many of you saw the interview Charlie Gibson had with Sara Palin last night? It's clear that this chick didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was and she tried to fake it on national TV as if she wouldn't be called on it. How can you call yourself a candidate for VP and not know what the Bush Doctrine is??? To bad her camp forgot to brief her on that ESPECIALLY since this was her first interview since it was announced that she was running for VP. If she didn't know she should have just asked Charlie to explain it to her, she couldn't have looked any crazier than she did by trying to fake it.....Lawd, some people. lol


Sarah Palin stumbles in TV interview

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, in her first interview since becoming the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has not been able to respond to a question about the Bush Doctrine.

Speaking at length with ABC interviewer, Charles Gibson, Palin was visibly stumped when she was asked by Gibson if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine.

Palin did not seem to know what Gibson was talking about.

Palin was clearly caught off guard when Gibson asked, "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?”

Seeking direction, and perhaps time to formulate her answer, Palin asked, "In what respect, Charlie?"

Initially unwilling to define the doctrine, Gibson said, "What do you interpret it to be?"

Palin asked, "His world view?"

Gibson said, "No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war."

Gibson finally informed her that it meant the right of "anticipatory self-defence."

The Bush Doctrine is a term used to describe several foreign policy principles of president George Bush, including the controversial policy of preventive war and the overthrowing of foreign regimes that represent a threat to the United States.

The Bush Doctrine was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Separately, Palin used the interview to reinforce the foreign policy of McCain, warning Russia away from aggression against its neighbours and generally supporting President Bush's approach to combating terrorism.

But she also put some distance between the Bush Administration and the McCain team. "There have been blunders along the way," she said.

Palin said the United States could not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons.

"As Americans, we do not have to stand for that," she said.

Big Bang experiment marred by suicide

WOW! .......That's all I can say....wow.

New Delhi - An Indian teenage girl killed herself because she feared that a massive experiment to re-create the birth of the Universe would herald the end of the world, reports said on Thursday.

Chayya Lal, 16, from the central state of Madhya Pradesh, committed suicide after watching television reports on how the particle-smashing test in Geneva could bring about doomsday, Indian newspapers reported.

She swallowed unidentified tablets on Tuesday and was rushed to hospital, but doctors were unable to save her.

Chayya's parents said she had spoken of her fears about the "Big Bang" experiment.

"Chayya had asked me a number of times whether the world would end as they were saying on television," her father Bihari told the Hindustan Times.

"We tried to divert her attention and told her not to worry about any great disaster," the Mail Today quoted him as saying.

The Mail said the local police inspector had raised doubts about the reasons for Chayya's death and had vowed to investigate.

The start of the underground test on Wednesday was hailed a success after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) designed to expose the secrets of the cosmos swung into action.

Scientists behind the project had earlier dismissed fears that it could create either a "black hole" whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth, or a theoretical particle called a strangelet that would turn the planet to goo.

When the machine is fully operational, scientists hope to fleetingly replicate conditions at the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7-billion years ago. - Sapa-AFP

Fabulously Observant: The 3 most important US Jews

SOURCE:

This month marks the 354th anniversary of the arrival of the first boatload of Jews to North America. To honor the birthday of the American Jewish community, I surveyed several dozen leading American Jewish historians about who they think are the three most important figures in American Jewish history. Twenty scholars responded, including perhaps the three leading figures in the field - Dr. Hasia Diner (New York University), Dr. Deborah Dash Moore (University of Michigan) and Dr. Jonathan Sarna (Brandeis University). Hebrew University's Dr. Eli Lederhendler and Tel Aviv University's Dr. Robert Rockaway participated, though the other major historian of American Jewry living in Israel, Kimmy Caplan of Bar-Ilan University, chose not to.

Interestingly, although 10 names were listed and 10 more were volunteered, it quickly became clear that American Jewish historians consider three men to be towering figures in the tales they tell.

Louis Brandeis was the most important American Jew. He was the first Jew appointed to the Supreme Court, and pioneered a uniquely American form of Zionism. Rockaway pointed out that Brandeis "made Zionism a respected American movement, and sold the idea to American Jews and non-Jews."

Prof. Lee Shai Weissbach of the University of Louisville said Brandeis's elevation to the Supreme Court "symbolized the opening of possibilities for Jews in American civic and political life." When Brandeis joined the court in 1916, anti-Semitism was so intense that one of his fellow justices refused to sit next to him for the official court photo.

For many years after Brandeis's appointment, particularly after Associate Justice Benjamin Cardozo retired and was replaced by Felix Frankfurter, there was a de facto "Jewish seat" on the Supreme Court. Frankfurter was replaced by Arthur Goldberg, who was replaced by Abe Fortas, after whom the tradition ceased. But both of president Bill Clinton's appointees, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer, are Jewish. In addition, president Ronald Reagan tried to appoint Judge Douglas Ginsburg, whose nomination was scotched because of accusations that he had smoked marijuana.

Two scholars offered important final descriptions of Brandeis: Dr. David Kaufman of the Hebrew Union College called him "the personification of American-Jewish synthesis," and Dr. Samuel Heilman of the City University of New York Graduate Center said Brandeis's involvement with the Supreme Court and American Zionism "put the lie to the dual-loyalty canard."

PERHAPS THE most important American Jew little-known to today's American Jews is Mordecai Kaplan. Kaufman called Kaplan "the key figure in the Americanization of Judaism." Jewish scholar and prolific author Jacob Neusner said Kaplan "thought through the issues of Judaism in a way that matched the American Jewish situation." University of Washington Prof. Noam Pianko praised Kaplan's "insights into the sociological basis of Jewish peoplehood."

Several key institutions in American Judaism which Kaplan pioneered endure. For example, Kaplan brought the bat mitzva to America, with his daughter Judith being the first to undergo that new rite of passage. He also helped innovate the Jewish community center movement, the so-called "shul with a pool" (the title of one of Kaufman's books). He imagined that a synagogue should be more than a place to pray - that it should be a place for the social, intellectual and recreational needs of Jews as well. Today's JCC's owe much to his ideas.

In addition, Kaplan's ideas became the keystone of today's Reconstructionist movement. The only major American Jewish movement in which God is not necessarily central, Reconstructionism emphasizes Kaplan's idea that Judaism is an "evolving religious civilization." Reconstructionism also experimented with the havura movement growing out of Kaplan's values.

Kaplan had an impact on every American Jewish religious movement - including Orthodoxy, as documented in Jeffrey Gurock and Jacob Schacter's A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community. At least two generations of Conservative Judaism's teachers and rabbis were influenced by Kaplan's instruction at the Jewish Theological Seminary's rabbinical school and Teacher's Institute. And Reform Judaism adopted Kaplan's saying that Halacha should have "a vote but not a veto."

FINALLY, 19TH-century pioneer of Reform Judaism Isaac Mayer Wise came in third place. According to Rockaway, Wise "put Reform Judaism on the map" in the United States. Working from Cincinnati, he established Hebrew Union College, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), and the Central Conference of American Rabbis. He trained hundreds of Reform rabbis, and in Rockaway's words, "made Reform the strongest Jewish religious movement in America."

The European-born Wise was one of the earliest American rabbis to push for family pews in the synagogue, a mixed choir and counting women in a minyan. He wrote a new prayer book entitled Minhag America (American custom), with the goal of uniting all American congregations. He was also an American Jewish press pioneer, publishing his own The Israelite (later The American Israelite) newspaper.

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Sparkle

Large Hadron Collider starts and we're still here

Im really teed off about this event, not so much that man is yet again trying to play God, but because this is a slick way to try and debunk the whole "creation" theory....to say that God didn't create the heavens and earth, but that there was a big bang. Scientists will go to any length to theorize what they don't understand. They want to prove that we exist because of protons clashing together causing a huge cosmic blast and we evolved into the humans we are today. Here's one thing they'll NEVER be able to figure out though....where did these protons come from? I guess they just WERE. It amazes me how they don't want to give GOD/the creator credit for anything. I guess we humans follow suit in all great works of art. The creator never get's recognized for his work until he dies and with God that'll never happen. As long as man lives, he too will live...because we are him and HE is we. WE are the God particle they're so desperately searching for.

Aaaah well here's the article, read on:

LAST night, physicists near Geneva switched on the largest, most powerful scientific tool ever built and the world did not vanish down a black hole, as alarmists had predicted.

Instead, the $US8 billion ($9.9 billion) Large Hadron Collider (see illustration below) successfully sent the first beam of protons -- members of a group of subatomic particles called hadrons -- hurtling around a 27km circular tunnel running beneath Switzerland and France.

The event caused sighs of relief from more than 2000 scientists from 150 institutes in 45 countries, including Australia, who had waited 14 years for the moment.

But their relief had nothing to do with lurking black holes, said cosmologist and theoretical physicist Paul Davies with Arizona State University in Tempe.

"The black hole threat was time-wasting drivel. Even had black holes appeared they would have immediately disappeared," he said.

The point of yesterday's exercise was to begin callibrating the more than 10,000 powerful superconducting magnets and four enormous detectors comprising the collider, run by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN

Once the collider is up and running scientists will use it to send proton beams around the collider in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light.

The ensuing collisions will smash the particles apart, helping physicists gain insights into the fundamental nature of matter.

"It's an exciting time because this new accelerator is providing us a window to a new regime of matter never studied before," said University of Sydney physicist Aldo Saavedra.

Along with scientists at Melbourne and Wollongong universities and WA industrial partner VEEM Engineering Group, Dr Saavedra has contributed to the development of the ATLAS detector which will be used to look for signs of new physics.

One of the first signs scientists hope to detect is proof of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first proposed in the mid-1960s by American physicist Peter Higgs.

The boson is central to the so-called Standard Model of particle physics as it explains how other particles gain mass.

But as Professor Davies says, the "goddamn" particle -- commonly known as the "God" particle -- has until now remained beyond the reach of technology.

"I am sure the 'Higgs' will be found, but if there's no 'Higgs' it would be really exciting because it would falsify the Standard Model and force a rethink," he said.

Professor Davies predicted that while confirming the Higgs boson could take two or three years, it may take mere months to detect "supersymmetry", the "bridge" between subatomic particles and fundamental forces like gravity, electromagnetism and weak and strong interaction.

Physicists also plan to use the collider to recreate conditions just billionths of a second after the Big Bang, which brought time and space into existence.

If so, they might unravel the mystery of the "dark stuff" making up over 95 per cent of the universe.

Astrophysicists believe the ordinary matter making up stars, galaxies, planets and the other stuff of space adds up to less than 5 per cent of the universe. The rest is "dark matter" and "dark energy"' about which little is known.