Standards

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

- John Ruskin

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via Cyanide and Happiness

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A unionized public employee, a Tea Party member and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches over and takes 11 cookies and then says to the tea partier, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

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Obama Won't Go to Court Over Defense of Marriage Act

via NationalJournal

President Obama now believes that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and will no longer defend the 15-year-old law in federal court, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

Symbolically and substantively, his decision represents a major advance for gay rights and presages a significant shift in how the government will handle questions about equality for gays.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the president has concluded that, given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.”

Holder said that Obama concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, which defines “spouse” as a member of the opposite sex, “fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the president’s determination.”

[read on...]

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'bout damn time we got over that DOMA crap.

wildcoyote

Debloons

Forgotten 80s Nintendo Games

via CollegeHumor

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Stuff You Should Know:

PIRATES

via The Smoking Jacket

As fun as it is to think that piracy is all about butt sex and grammatically hilarious jargon, it turns out the pirate game has a little more meat to it. Here are ten things you need to know about our favorite frilly-shirted rascals of the sea.

(Click on the picture or link above)

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wildcoyote

Dragon-tamer

5 Real Deleted Bible Scenes In Which Jesus Kicks Some Ass

via CRACKED.com

The Gospels that made it into the Bible pretty much skip from the birth of Jesus Christ to his adulthood, but there are other documents that chronicle the adventures of Jesus Christ: Boy Wonder. They're part of something called the New Testament Apocrypha, a series of books deemed unfit for inclusion due to concerns over the message they'd send or, in some cases, the number of faces they'd melt with their sheer awesomeness. Most of the stories are pretty normal fare -- healing lepers and raising the dead -- but some are so insane that we learn that the answer to, What would Jesus do? is Whatever the hell he wants.

[Read more!]


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Clearly, Jesus should have been in Mortal Kombat.


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Funny "God Hates..." Signs
via 12 Hilarious "God Hates..." Signs

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wildcoyote

Multipass

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Pop Icons in a Different Light
via ICanHasInternets

Go check out the website, there are many more!
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wildcoyote

Fixation

via XKCD

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jedi tiger stupid panda waffle kicker!

wildcoyote

Fantastic

via Fantastic Mr. Fox

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a fantastic way to celebrate my 100th post, no?

wildcoyote

Galilei

THE SUN, WITH ALL THE PLANETS REVOLVING AROUND IT, AND DEPENDING ON IT, CAN STILL RIPEN A BUNCH OF GRAPES AS THOUGH IT HAD NOTHING ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE TO DO.

- Galileo Galilei

via How To Cope

Dominion

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

Contagious

I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

- David Lynch

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via Perry Bible Fellowship

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via Astronomy Picture of the Day

Clouds, Birds, Moon, Venus

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via Huffington Post

US Snowstorm Seen From Space: Wild Weather Captured By NASA

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wildcoyote

Atrocities

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

- Voltaire

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Former Minutemen member faces murder trial

via CNN.com

Brisenia Flores arrived in her rural Arivaca, Arizona, home with her parents, Raul Flores and Gina Gonzales, on the evening of May 29, 2009.

Gonzales testified that four people knocked on the door, claiming to be law enforcement and border patrol. They said the house was surrounded because they had information that the family was harboring fugitives. Gonzales said her husband opened the door and allowed them inside, but they knew immediately that the people entering were not law enforcement at all.

Gonzales says that after a short struggle, the tall man shot her husband several times in the stomach and chest before turning the gun on her. She was shot in the leg and fell to the floor when she heard her husband choking on his own blood. She says he could hear the gunman reassure Brisenia, who was awakened by the blasts of the weapon, that she wouldn't be hurt.

Gonzales says her daughter began to question why her mother and father were shot when the gunman reloaded his weapon. "I can hear her say 'Please don't shoot me,' " Gonzales said, wiping away tears and sobbing.

The gunman paid no attention to her pleas and fired two shots into Brisenia's head, causing the girl to fly back on the couch, Gonzales recounted. She said she could hear her daughter struggling to breathe as the intruders began to steal items and leave the home. Gonzalez made her way to a weapon her husband kept in the kitchen and called 911.

Flores and his young daughter, who just minutes before had been sleeping peacefully on the couch, were both dead.

Prosecutors say Forde, a vigilante anti-illegal immigration activist, was not only the woman described in the home but was also the ringleader of the home invasion and murder.

Forde was once a member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps before being removed from the group for what members described to CNN as unstable behavior.

Saying the federal government has failed to secure America's borders, the Minuteman group took the job on itself and claims that its mission is to employ "civil protest, demonstration, and political lobbying" in protecting borders.

She formed a splinter group, Minutemen American Defense, and patrolled the Arizona-Mexico border armed with weapons. She led protests about the dangers and criminal activity along the porous border.

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still think Fox News has no effect on its listeners?

enough said.

wildcoyote

Booyakasha

via Poodwaddle.com

Paripatetic

Large Magellanic Cloud, bright Canopus and Sirius rise behind Moai Piro Piro
from   Los Cielos de Chile, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

by Stephane Guisard

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”


- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King


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Ophiuchus!? What now?
via Sagan's Brain

6th century zodiac wheel, Beit Alpha, Israel

It was widely reported that not only is Ophiuchus a new sign that we'll all have to learn to live with, but that the precession of the Earth's axial rotation has, over a few millennia, shifted our view of the sky so that the Sun is no longer in the same apparent position along the zodiac as it was thousands of years ago, when this version of astrology was concocted.  In other words, people with birthdays in late March have traditionally been considered Aries, but today the Sun is really in Pisces at that time of year.

This story is just so silly in a variety of ways.  For one thing, it wasn't actually news.  The Earth's precession doesn't happen overnight, and astronomers haven't just discovered it (read this discussion of the problem by Phil Plait way back in 2008)..  In the words of Sam Cooke, it's been a long time coming.  Then there was the panic and irritation that the traditional signs are all wrong (HuffingtonPost cleverly examined the Earth-shattering consequences of this shift).


Soon after this news, astrologers came to the rescue.  Nothing to fear, they said.  The Ophiuchus shift only applies to Sidereal Astrology, not Tropical Astrology.  Most believers probably don't know the difference, but don't worry, we westerners typically believe in Tropical Astrology, which is unaffected.  "Ophiuchus only affects those who were born 2009 onwards. If you're born before 2009, the sign stays the same."  That's a relief.


The signs originated from the constellations, but are not the same thing. The signs are composed of 12 equal subdivisions of the sky, each 30 degrees in extent. The constellations are not laid out in such an orderly fashion.


There are thirteen astronomical constellations that cross the ecliptic. Whenever you refer to the zodiac use the number thirteen and name the constellations of the ecliptic (see Table #l). If someone complains that these are not the right constellations, just point out that all constellations are arbitrary and strictly artificial. The ones we use are the official constellations of the International Astronomical Union.

So, if Ophiuchus occupies more of the ecliptic than Scorpius, why is it not in the astrological zodiac instead of Scorpius? Ancient astronomers did not place Ophiuchus on the ecliptic; it is the modern construction of official constellation boundaries that gives it so much territory across the ecliptic. Since they are rather arbitrary boundaries, it doesn't make much difference. Most likely, it's because Ophiuchus is not a particularly bright constellation, while Scorpius is a very bright, vivid group of stars that really does look like a scorpion.


It remains to be seen whether the new dates for the 12-sign zodiac will be adopted, whether we'll keep the dates as we have come to know them, or whether we'll switch over to the new 13-sign zodiac.


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Stars over Templo V, Tikal

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wildcoyote

Isis

Siouxsie Sioux - Into A Swan

from Mantaray (2007)

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Isis 

by Nigel Quarless

via MixedBagMythography

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wildcoyote