Boycotting Israel as a stance for justice is going mainstream – Israelis can no longer pretend theirs is in an enlightened country. When it comes to Israel's abuses, governments around the world have offered nothing but lip service; while dozens of countries face US, EU or UN sanctions for far lesser transgressions. Finally, some respected personages are stepping up. Professor Stephen Hawking's laudable decision to withdraw from Israel's Presidential Conference in response to requests from Palestinian academics is one example. When we look back in a few years, Hawking's decision to illuminate Israel’s misbehavior towards Palestine may be seen as a turning point – the moment when boycotting Israel as a stance for justice went mainstream and became an acceptable, even necessary, stance by the civilized world at large. The goal is to build pressure on Israel to respect the rights of all Palestinians by ending its occupation and blockade of the West Bank and Gaza Strip; respecting the rights of Palestinian refugees who are currently excluded from returning to their homes just because they are not Jews; and abolishing all forms of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. There can be no going back to the days when Palestinians were silenced and only the strong were given a voice. There can be no going back to endless ‘dialogue’ and fuzzy and toothless talk about ‘peace’ which is only a cover for Israel to continue to entrench its colonization. For more than two decades, under the oppression of this now-obvious ruse, Palestinians have tried to engage in internationally-sponsored ‘peace talks’ and other forms of dialogue, only to watch as Israel has continued to occupy, steal and settle their land, and to kill and maim thousands of people...

Recently a 93-year-old man was arrested by German police for allegedly serving as an Auschwitz death camp guard and being complicit in the mass murder of prisoners. Hans Lipschis was taken into custody after authorities concluded there is ‘compelling evidence’ he was involved in crimes at the camp while there from 1941 to 1945, the German prosecutors office said. Lipschis has acknowledged being assigned to an SS guard unit at Auschwitz, but maintains he only served as a cook and was not involved in any war crimes. However, the case is being pursued on the legal theory that a person who served at a death camp can be charged with accessory to murder because the camp's sole function was to kill people. Well, well, well. What about a gun manufacturer who builds and sells weapons which can only be used to kill people? Specifically, handheld pistols and semi-automatic assault rifles. That is their sole function; only to kill people…nothing else. Those aren’t sporting or hunting weapons, just people-killers. I suggest we include the gun manufacturer as an accessory to murder in any indictment where a murder was committed using one of those killing machines. His actions directly contributed to the murder – just as much as if he had conspired with the murderer himself to take someone’s life or if he had...

It just occurs to me that a lot of the motivation for the pro-gun gang has to do with peer acceptance. I saw a video of Sarah Palin this morning and she was working the crowd in her unfortunately familiar way, encouraging the gun owners to ‘never give up the fight’. Rounds of applause filled the air and she got that stupid self-satisfied grin on her face again. I suddenly realized that a good portion of what keeps these gun advocates cranked up is the warm glow of acceptance they get from the like-minded pals they hang around who’re making derogatory comments about the anti-gun folks. It’s quite a common thing actually; started back at school in childhood when being one of the ‘in-crowd’ was so desirable. Unfortunately, there have been many disastrous crusades throughout history initiated and fueled by just such desperate (and often unreasoning) cluster-fucks. Today’s pro-gun crowds are really a very loud, very frightened, well-armed group...

In quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle is an assertion that precise measurements of a particle’s position and its momentum (velocity) cannot be made simultaneously. For instance, the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. The original heuristic argument that such a limit should exist was given by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, after whom it is sometimes named the Heisenberg Principle. Historically, the Uncertainty Principle has been confused with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems. For example, the act of illuminating an object with a beam of light changes the object somewhat from what it was before the light hit it. It has recently become clear that the Uncertainty Principle is...

Here in Colorado, voters recently legalized the private use of marijuana. One of two states in the union to do so. While I don’t recommend the use of the drug (I was a fierce user for 25 years myself, but finally quit), I respect the voters’ decision. Unfortunately, now the Colorado government is trying to affix a tax on the weeds’ sales, somewhere around 30%, I think, and they are employing a bit of a sneaky tactic aimed at overturning the popular voting results which permitted legalization. By levying a 30% tax on marijuana sales, they’re claiming they’ll have to send the proposal back onto the ballot for another vote, this time to approve the tax. If voters don’t approve the tax, then sales would once again be illegal. While I don’t approve of marijuana use (it inhibits the desire to learn – I speak from personal experience so don’t try to challenge me on this, every user is stuck in the same t-shirt he was wearing the day he smoked his first joint), I deplore underhanded political scheming designed to thwart the will of the people. The recent debacle of air traffic controllers and the resulting delays in airline schedules because some idiot in Congress attached a rider to a budget bill which virtually paralyzed the nation’s air traffic (no doubt in hopes of getting his own favored attachment...

The recent defeat of the background check legislation in the Congress demonstrates the impressive amount of sway the pro-gun lobby holds. The full list of those Representatives who voted either for or against the bill is published on my Facebook page located at this URL: (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Craig-Conley-Science-Fiction-Books/202808783114912).

If you’re interested in controlling the absurd gun trade in the U.S., then I recommend not voting to return any of those fellows who voted ‘Nay’ for another term in Congress. The Pro-gun boys voiced their loudest objection to it with the assertion that it would allow the Federal Government to create a ‘list’ of guns in the United States. Well…so what? What’s wrong with that? The only people I know of who wouldn’t want the government to know they had a gun are the criminals. Good law-abiding citizens shouldn’t care if the government knows...

RX J0822-4300, often referred to as the ‘Cosmic Cannonball’, is a radio-quiet neutron star currently moving away from the center of the Puppis A supernova remnant at over 3 million miles per hour (~0.5% the speed of light), making it one of the fastest moving stars ever found. Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe the star over a period of five years to determine its speed. At this velocity the star will be ejected from the galaxy a few millions of years from now. Although the Cosmic Cannonball is not the only ‘hypervelocity star’ discovered, it is unique in the apparent origin of its speed. Others may have derived theirs from accomplishing a gravitational slingshot around the Milky Way's suspected supermassive black hole (named Sagittarius A). Current theories which try to explain...

We’re all familiar with the three ordinary states of matter, solid, liquid, and gas. In water, these are readily identifiable as ice, liquid water, and steam (or water vapor). Throughout the Universe there are places where pretty much every element in the periodic table exists in one or another (or all three) of these states. Even stuff we normally associate as solid, like Iron, exists as a liquid in the core of planets and as a gas in the heart of stars. Water, at low enough temperatures, is as solid as steel and just as hard. On Titan, Saturn’s moon, Methane (which is normally a gas here on Earth) is liquid because of the low temperatures there. Hydrogen, the lightest of all gases becomes liquefied and finally a metallic solid under the high pressures and temperatures at the core of massive Jupiter. All the heavy elements which are created in a supernova explosion are, for a brief moment, gases – regardless of their melting or sublimation points. A fourth state of matter, called plasma, has the properties of both a liquid and a gas. Heating a gas may ionize...

Water is a chemical compound with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one Oxygen and two Hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. On Earth, 96.5% of the planet's water is found in oceans, 1.7% in groundwater, 1.7% in glaciers and the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland, a small fraction in other large water bodies, and 0.001% in the air as vapor (clouds formed of solid and liquid water particles suspended in air), and precipitation. Only 2.5% of the Earth's water is fresh water, and 98.8% of that water is in ice and groundwater. Less than 0.3% of all fresh water is in rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere, and an even smaller amount of the Earth's fresh water (0.003%) is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products. Much of the Universe's water is produced as a byproduct of star formation. When stars are born, their birth is accompanied by a strong outward wind of gas and dust. When this outflow of material impacts surrounding gas, the shock waves that are created compress and heat the gas. The water is produced in this warm dense gas. On 22 July 2011...

Lately the NRA fellows have been asserting that we should arm school personnel in order to stave off violence. They’re literally ‘up in arms’ (pun intended!) about not restricting the assault weapons and magazine capacities. Making quite a furor with our elected representatives in Washington…urging them to vote no on President Obama’s gun-control proposals. Perhaps they’ve forgotten about the nuclear arms policy of the Cold War…MAD…Mutual Assured Destruction? Remember that, guys? If our enemy gets a bigger bomb, then we must get a bigger bomb than they have; if they have ten, we must have twenty, and so on. After a while, even governments began to realize that this was not a sane path. They instead began to disarm. Human annihilation became too easy to stumble into…too easy to, in a moment of unreasoning rage, fire weapons which would kill and destroy human beings. The only sensible solution was, in the end, to disarm – destroy the nuclear weapons, dismantle them...

One of our spacecraft took a startling photograph of the Earth and our Moon as it orbited the planet Mercury recently. The image was startling (to me, anyway) because it showed the two bodies as very nearly the same size and very close to one another. Clearly we are a double-planet system. Of course, these doubles are quite common in the Universe. Many stars are binaries. It seems as though when two massive bodies come close to one another, they prefer to orbit rather than to crash into each other. They dance rather than merge. In our case, the Moon exerts a considerable gravitational tug on the Earth. We’re made mostly of water, but the Moon’s pull causes tides that are of considerable proportion. In addition, the ground under our feet is stretched and strained by the orbit of so massive a body so close above us; we get volcanoes aplenty from those stresses. Other bodies within our Solar System, particularly the single loners, are relatively inactive volcanically, they’ve settled down from their initial formative epoch and are now...

The Colorado cinema shooter, James Holmes, is now facing the death penalty for massacring all those people in that theater. The prosecutor’s want to seek the death penalty, claiming that justice for James Holmes is death. I believe that that’s too quick and easy for the little prick. It doesn’t give him enough time to twist and turn on the spit for what he’s done. I believe having to live with the thoughts about what he did echoing within his head for a good long lifetime is more just. No matter what psychiatrists may assert, we all know what we have done…it may be buried deep inside, but it does not ever go away. What we do, after all, is what we are. It defines us completely. Think about this fellow, in prison for such a very long time, desperately trying to avoid the moment when he will die because he knows full well how many people he killed – some of them so innocent, like the little four-year old girl – and worrying about what will happen to him if there’s an afterlife. He will live in agonizing torture for...