As a follow up to my previous post on this topic titled “Ugandas Death Dentence Legislation for LGBT Peoples and the ‘Christians’ Who Counseled Them Towards This End ” – I just recently found this link from WATCH: RACHEL MADDOW INTERVIEWS UGANDAN MP DAVID BAHATI, AUTHOR OF THE ‘KILL THE GAYS’ BILL. It is actually is disturbing to know that this sort of blind zealotry still exists. I do really know that it does, but it really saddens me to hear of it. Please take the moment to watch it. Something interesting to note is that I do not think that this interview would have happened if MR. Bahati knew that Rachel Maddow was a lesbian.
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If you have not followed California’s Prop 8 trial please take the moment to watch the district court appeal which should give you an ideal and a great summary as to what this is all about and both sides’ views. One of the places it is available is via C-SPAN and it all starts at noon (CST). There is also a live BLogging of the district court appeal available at Prop 8 Trial Tracker in case you cannot watch the video at work… like me.
Please watch/read it. This really matters.
The 2:00pm announcement from NASA today is they have found the first life Form that uses arsenic as a genetic building block. This will change much in science. Science fiction has said such things were possible for many, many years, but this is the first evidence of it.
The Science Daily article Life Built With Toxic Chemical: First Known Microbe on Earth Able to Thrive and Reproduce Using Arsenic has the info.
I came upon this really interesting article in Science Daily titled “Pregnant Mother’s Diet Impacts Infant’s Sense of Smell, Alters Brain Development“. It says that a baby’s sense of smell is affected by what foods the mother eats while pregnant. This makes a lot of evolutionary sense. If the mother is consuming certain foods then it must be good for the baby to have a predilection to consume and have desires for this food as well. This is an effective way of helping to ensure that the baby will want eat the food that is available in its future food sphere. However, this horrendously backfires when the mother is an alcoholic or has a horrible diet to begin with allowing the potential to pass a desire in the baby for a similar life style. =(
If you are currently pregnant please keep this finding in mind…. think of the children.
I came upon this link for something called Sugru, which seems to be a silly putty like silicone material that dries and sticks allowing you make changes or additions to fix up your stuff. Very interesting and affordable if you are into that sort of stuff.
Here is a really neat rebuttal to John McCain’s antagonistic and ever-changing stance towards repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell titled It Gets Worse PSA by Jon Stewart of the Daily show:
Here is the “It Gets Better Project” and other associated It Gets Better videos on You Tube to which Obama, Jewel, Chris Colfer from the Glee cast, Prince Poppycock from America’s Got Talent, Zachary Quinto from Heroes and the New Star Trek movie, and many, many more participate to show their support for gay children who are suffering and may potentially commit suicide due to ignorance, intolerance, and bullying.
Also, Cindy McCain and some Hollywood friends create An Anti-Bullying Message From the NOH8 Campaign.
Our children need to know that they are loved and that bullies are not the norm, or even right for that fact. The rest of the world, especially once you get out of high school, is not necessarily filled with ignorant assholes. Shocking and hard to believe, I know, but there you go. Please watch these and spread the word, for this is a really important topic.
I found this interesting link Green Float concept: a carbon negative city on the ocean @ Gizmag (Nov 2010) detailing a floating green city concept that would exist near the equator. This is a very fascinating design.
The American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) published a video collage covering the journey Towards overturning California’s Proposition 8. Please watch it.
I ran across this article titled ‘Khosla, Gates Are Betting On EcoMotors’ Engine Technology to Transform Autos Into Cleaner, Cheaper, and More Powerful Machines‘ detailing this new engine from Eco Motors International which sounds like it could really make a difference. There is nothing like smaller, lighter, faster, better, cheaper… is there.
I ran into this article titled “Does Language Shape the Way You Think?” that talks about how the vocabulary of your native tongue can affect how you conceptualize and relate to the world around you. I have heard of this before in reading about linguistics, but since I found an article on it I thought I would post it for everyone. It is fascinating stuff.
In light of the ignorance spewed here by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, below, I feel compelled to publish the following excerpt while Dr. King rolls in is own grave in embarrassment and furious anger.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail (more info at Wikipedia) that is quite pertinent to todays gay-rights movement:
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We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
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Here is an update to my original post titled “Are you bored?“…
Let me guess. You are Bored. Let boredom bother you no longer with these free educational courses available online. If you find yourself saying that you are bored or overhear someone say that they are, slap them, and then point them henceforth:
- MIT Open Courseware
- California Open Source Textbook Project
- Textbook Revolution
- An open source Linear Algebra Textbook
- Quantum Physics Summer School from Bureau 42
- Open Textbook Repository
- A list of open source Math textbooks
- Get a Free College Education Online from Life Hacker
- Complete Works of Charles Darwin, The
- Dummies.com
- Library of Congress
- World Digital Library
- Dummies.com
- How Stuff Works?
- Project Gutenberg
- Wikipedia
- 10_power_tools_for_lifelong_learners (Open Culture)
- Khan Academy (You Tube)
Are you still Bored?
Take a look at the Live BLogging of the Closing Arguments for the Proposition 8 trial via Prop 8 Trial Tracker. I have been very patiently waiting for this day.
You can find my previous comments on the Prop 8 atrocity them here if you are curious.
Here is an interesting article titled “Why I finally joined a church” on Salon about why a family finally joined a church after not having gone for so many years, and why they chose a Unitarian Universalist church.
