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http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-simpsons&episode=s05e12
Springfield! Springfield!
The Simpsons
Bart Gets Famous
I didn't do it.
- [ Cricket Chirping ]
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/national-debt-hits-19-trillion/article/2582097
WASHINGTON Examiner
National debt hits $19 trillion
By PETE KASPEROWICZ 2/1/16 4:23 PM
The national debt hit $19 trillion for the first time ever on Friday, and came in at $19.012 trillion.
It took a little more than 13 months for the debt to climb by $1 trillion. The national debt hit $18 trillion on Dec. 15, 2014.
That's a slightly stepped-up pace compared to the last few $1 trillion mileposts. It took about 14 months for the debt to climb from $17 trillion to $18 trillion, and about the same amount of time to go from $16 trillion to $17 trillion.
The federal government has been free to borrow as much as needed for the last several years. Years ago, Congress passed legislation to increase the debt ceiling to a certain level of debt, and borrowing had to stop once that limit was hit.
But increasingly, Congress has instead allowed more borrowing by suspending the debt ceiling for long periods of time. That allows the government to borrow any amount it needs until the suspension period ends.
Back in November, the debt ceiling was suspended again, after having been frozen at $18.1 trillion for several months. As soon as it was suspended, months of pent-up borrowing demand by the government led to a $339 billion jump in the national debt in a single day.
Under current law, the debt ceiling is suspended until March, 2017, meaning the government can borrow without limit until then. Obama is expected to leave office with a total national debt of nearly $20 trillion by the time he leaves office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake
Makemake
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Makemake (minor-planet designation 136472 Makemake) is a dwarf planet and perhaps the largest Kuiper belt object (KBO) in the classical population, with a diameter that is about 2/3 the size of Pluto. Makemake has one known satellite, S/2015 (136472) 1. Its extremely low average temperature, about 30 K (-243.2 °C), means its surface is covered with methane, ethane, and possibly nitrogen ices.
Makemake was discovered on March 31, 2005, by a team led by Michael E. Brown, and announced on July 29, 2005. Initially, it was known as 2005 FY9 and later given the minor-planet number 136472. Makemake was recognized as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in July 2008. Its name derives from Makemake in the mythology of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island.
History
Name
The provisional designation 2005 FY9 was given to Makemake when the discovery was made public. Before that, the discovery team used the codename "Easterbunny" for the object, because of its discovery shortly after Easter.
In July 2008, in accordance with IAU rules for classical Kuiper belt objects, 2005 FY9 was given the name of a creator deity. The name of Makemake, the creator of humanity and god of fertility in the mythos of the Rapa Nui, the native people of Easter Island, was chosen in part to preserve the object's connection with Easter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism
Paganism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paganism is a term that developed among the Christian community of southern Europe during late antiquity to describe religions other than their own
Throughout Christendom, it continued to be used, typically in a derogatory sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Finder
Terrestrial Planet Finder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) was a proposed project by NASA to construct a system of telescopes in space for detecting extrasolar terrestrial planets. TPF was postponed several times and finally cancelled in 2011. There were actually two telescope systems under consideration, the TPF-I, which had several small telescopes, and TPF-C, which used one large telescope.
History
In May 2002, NASA chose two TPF mission architecture concepts for further study and technology development. Each would use a different means to achieve the same goal—to block the light from a parent star in order to see its much smaller, dimmer planets. That technology challenge has been likened to finding a firefly near the beam of a distant searchlight. Additional goals of the mission would include characterizing the surfaces and atmospheres of newfound planets, and looking for the chemical signatures of life.
The two planned architectures were:
Infrared astronomical interferometer (TPF-I): Multiple small telescopes on a fixed structure or on separated spacecraft floating in precision formation would simulate a much larger, very powerful telescope. The interferometer would use a technique called nulling to reduce the starlight by a factor of one million, thus enabling the detection of the very dim infrared emission from the planets.
Visible Light Coronagraph (TPF-C): A large optical telescope, with a mirror three to four times bigger and at least 100 times more precise than the Hubble Space Telescope, would collect starlight and the very dim reflected light from the planets. The telescope would have special optics to reduce the starlight by a factor of one billion, thus enabling astronomers to detect faint planets.
NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were to issue calls for proposals seeking input on the development and demonstration of technologies to implement the two architectures, and on scientific research relevant to planet finding. Launch of TPF-C had been anticipated to occur around 2014, and TPF-I possibly by 2020.
In May 2004, both architectures were approved.[citation needed]
According to NASA's 2007 budget documentation, released on 6 February 2006, the project was deferred indefinitely.
In June 2006, a House of Representatives subcommittee voted to provide funding for the TPF along with the long-sought mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter that might harbor extraterrestrial life. However, as of April 2007, actual funding has not materialized, and TPF remains without a launch date.
Congressional spending limits under House Resolution 20 passed on 31 January 2007, by the United States House of Representatives and 14 February by the U.S. Senate have postponed the program indefinitely.
More recently, in June 2011, the TPF (and SIM) programs have been reported as "cancelled".
http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie8.html
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
RIKER: It is one of the pivotal moments in human history, Doctor. You get to make first contact with an alien race, and after you do, everything begins to change.
LAFORGE: Your theories on warp drive allow fleets of starships to be built and mankind to start exploring the Galaxy.
TROI: It unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible when they realise they're not alone in the universe.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/24/news/pope-francis-visit-vatican-catholic-church/
CNN Money
Vatican Inc.: 5 facts about the business of the Catholic Church
by Ahiza Garcia @ahiza_garcia
September 24, 2015: 7:45 AM ET
The Catholic Church is the spiritual home to 1.1 billion people around the world. It's also a big business that handles billions of dollars.
Here's how it makes money and how it spends it.
1. The Vatican Bank has $8 billion in assets
The Vatican Bank, which has about $8 billion in assets, has often been at the center of scandal and corruption since it was founded in 1942. Pope Benedict began the process of cleaning the bank up, and Francis has continued that work.
Vatican Bank accounts are only supposed to be held by residents of Vatican City and church personnel. But according to Gerald Posner, a Vatican bank scholar and the author of "God's Bankers," these accounts were often awarded to powerful Italian officials looking to stash money without paying taxes.
The bank closed over 4,000 accounts to weed out corruption and currently has a total of 33,400 accounts.
The bank, formally known as the Institute of Works of Religion, has made progress, but still has a long way to go in becoming more transparent.
2. The Vatican had over €1.1 billion off its balance sheet
The Vatican is a separate entity from the Vatican bank, and underwent its own clean up last year.
When it released its 2014 financial statements in July, the Vatican said it had more than €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) in assets that weren't previously on the balance sheet.
The Vatican has two main entities. The Holy See, which governs the Catholic Church and the Vatican City State, which governs Vatican City.
The Holy See reported a deficit of €25.6 million ($27.9 million) in 2014, even though it received over €50 million from the Vatican Bank. Its biggest expense last year was paying its 2,880 employees a total of €126.6 million.
The Vatican City State is responsible for running the Vatican Museums and in 2014 had a surplus of €63.5 million -- nearly double what it was the year before.
3. The Sistine Chapel is for rent - kind of
In October 2014, the Sistine Chapel was rented out for the first time to the automaker Porsche.
Forty Porsche fans paid $5,900 to attend a gala under Michelangelo's famed painted ceiling as part of Pope Francis' Art for Charity project.
Whereas the average visitor is permitted only a short stay in the chapel, for fear of damage to the frescoes, the Porsche guests were treated to a private choral concert and a dinner in the exhibit.
Although money did change hands, the Vatican still contends it isn't renting out the chapel.
"The Sistine Chapel can never be rented because it is not a commercial place," Vatican spokesman Monsignor Paolo Nicolini said.
Instead, he described it as being "visible" for private groups.
But don't try booking the chapel for your birthday or wedding anytime soon -- events are limited to art-related functions.
4. It costs how much to become a saint?!
It's not cheap to get a priest canonized. To wit: The Our Lady of Victory National Shrine & Basilica in Lackawanna, New York, has raised over $250,000 in an effort to canonize its former priest, Father Nelson Baker.
The funds cover the publication of materials about Baker, prayer cards, communication between the church and the Vatican, travel costs for visits to and from Rome and the fees of a canon lawyer.
The cost of canonization can vary greatly depending on the length of the process and the specific evidence needed to prove that a candidate is qualified for sainthood.
The church first appealed to Rome to have Baker canonized in 1987. The case was approved in 2011, but Our Lady of Victory still has to prove that Baker performed miracles.
5. Tourism in Vatican City has tripled under Pope Francis
Tourism under Pope Francis has nearly tripled since he replaced Pope Benedict in March of 2013.
Over 12 million visitors have flocked to the Vatican for events featuring Pope Francis. And those figures don't even include the attendance for Pope Francis events that were held outside of the Vatican -- that tacks on another nearly 13 million visitors.
Pope Benedict received some 20.5 million visitors during his tenure from 2005-2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
Christ myth theory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism or simply mythicism) is the hypothesis that Jesus of Nazareth never existed; or if he did, that he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels. The Christ myth theory contradicts the mainstream view in historical Jesus research, which accepts that there are events described in the gospels that are not historical but which still assumes that the gospels are founded on a basic historical core.
Different proponents espouse slightly different versions of the Christ myth theory, but many proponents of the theory use a three-fold argument first developed in the 19th century:
that the New Testament has no historical value
that there are no non-Christian references to Jesus Christ dating back to the first century
that Christianity had pagan or mythical roots.
Notable proponents
20th century
During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity, often drawing on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament, and limited their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q source. They also made use of the growing field of religious history which found sources for Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults, rather than Judaism. Joseph Klausner wrote that biblical scholars "tried their hardest to find in the historic Jesus something which is not Judaism; but in his actual history they have found nothing of this whatever, since this history is reduced almost to zero. It is therefore no wonder that at the beginning of this century there has been a revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth century view that Jesus never existed."
The work of social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer has had an influence on various myth theorists, although Frazer himself believed that Jesus existed. In 1890 he published the first edition of The Golden Bough which attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief. This work became the basis of many later authors who argued that the story of Jesus was a fiction created by Christians. After a number of people claimed that he was a myth theorist, in the 1913 expanded edition of The Golden Bough Frazer expressly stated that his theory assumed a historical Jesus.
In 1900, Scottish MP John Mackinnon Robertson argued that Jesus never existed but was an invention by a first-century messianic cult. In Robertson's view, religious groups invent new gods to fit the needs of the society of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Interferometry_Mission
Space Interferometry Mission
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Space Interferometry Mission, or SIM, also known as SIM Lite (formerly known as SIM PlanetQuest), was a planned space telescope developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in conjunction with contractor Northrop Grumman. One of the main goals of the mission was the hunt for Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of nearby stars other than the Sun. SIM was postponed several times and finally cancelled in 2010.
In addition to hunting for extrasolar planets, SIM would have helped astronomers construct a map of the Milky Way galaxy. Other important tasks would have included collecting data to help pinpoint stellar masses for specific types of stars, assisting in the determination of the spatial distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way and in the Local Group of galaxies and using the gravitational microlensing effect to measure the mass of stars.
The spacecraft would have used optical interferometry to accomplish these and other scientific goals. This technique collects light with multiple mirrors (in SIM's case, two) which is combined to make an interference pattern which can be very precisely measured.
The initial contracts for SIM Lite were awarded in 1998, totaling US$200 million. Work on the SIM project required scientists and engineers to move through eight specific new technology milestones, and by November 2006, all eight had been completed.
SIM Lite was originally scheduled for a 2005 launch, aboard an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). As a result of continued budget cuts, the launch date was pushed back at least five times. NASA had set a preliminary launch date for 2015 and U.S. federal budget documents confirmed that a launch date was expected "no earlier" than 2015. As of February 2007, many of the engineers working on the SIM program had moved on to other areas and projects, and NASA directed the project to allocate its resources toward engineering risk reduction. However, the preliminary budget for NASA for 2008 included zero dollars for SIM.
In December 2007, the Congress restored funding for fiscal year 2008 as part of an omnibus appropriations bill which the President later signed. At the same time the Congress directed NASA to move the mission forward to the development phase. In 2009 the project continued its risk reduction work while waiting for the findings and recommendations of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, Astro2010, performed by the National Academy of Sciences, which would determine the project's future.
On 13 August 2010, the Astro2010 Decadal Report was released and did not recommend that NASA continue the development of the SIM Lite Astrometric Observatory. This prompted NASA Astronomy and Physics Director, Jon Morse, to issue a letter on 24 September 2010 to the SIM Lite project manager, informing him that NASA was discontinuing its sponsorship of the SIM Lite mission and directing the project to discontinue Phase B activities immediately or as soon as practical. Accordingly, all SIM Lite activities were closed down by the end of calendar year 2010.
Mission
Planet hunting
SIM Lite would have been the most powerful extrasolar planet hunting space telescope ever built. Through the technique of interferometry the spacecraft would be able to detect Earth-sized planets. SIM Lite was to perform its search for nearby, Earth-like planets by looking for the "wobble" in the parent star's apparent motion as the planet orbits. The spacecraft will accomplish this task to an accuracy of one millionth of an arcsecond, or the thickness of a nickel viewed at the distance from Earth to the Moon. Titled the Deep Search, the planet hunting program is intended to search approximately 60 nearby stars for terrestrial planets (like Earth and Venus) in the habitable zone (where liquid water can exist throughout a full revolution (one "year") of the planet around its star). The Deep Search is the most demanding in terms of astrometric accuracy, hence the name, Deep Search. This program will use the full capability of the SIM Lite spacecraft to make its measurements.
Development
Planned launch
The launch date for the SIM Lite mission was pushed back at least five times. At the program's outset, in 1998, the launch was scheduled for 2005. By 2000, the launch date had been delayed until 2009, a date that held through 2003; though some project scientists cited 2008 in late 2000. Between 2004 and 2006, contractor Northrop Grumman, the company designing and developing SIM, listed a launch date of 2011 on their website. With the release of the FY 2007 NASA budget, predictions changed again, this time to a date no earlier than 2015 or 2016. The delay of the launch date was primarily related to budget cuts made to the SIM Lite program. The 2007 change represented a difference of about three years from the 2006 launch date, outlined in NASA's FY 2006 budget as being two years behind 2005 budget predictions. Other groups predicted dates matching officially predicted launch dates; the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (formerly the Michelson Science Center) at the California Institute of Technology also sets the date at 2015. As of June 2008, NASA has postponed the launch date "indefinitely".
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64913
The American Presidency Project
George W. Bush
XLIII President of the United States: 2001 - 2009
Remarks to Military Personnel at Fort Carson, Colorado
November 24, 2003
The President. Thank you all.
Audience members. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 2:12 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Monday 02 May 2016
