Friday, December 30, 2011
Forecast of the Seer Freakangelus Rainbowian von Baskerville for 2012
Consulted my scrying tablet and checked the positions of Vesta, Uranus, Quaoar, and KB713256 I can say that, probably:
-Books on: Maya-2012-Revelation will be on top of the bestsellers at the end of the year, and then fill the "Three books for the price of one" baskets in 2013;
- There will be some politician investigated for corruption, some other politician will complain of having been misunderstood, and some will threaten to resign, but not for real;
- Whatever happens the economy, some banker or financiary consultant will ruthlessly take advantage of it;
- Yet another 1000 pages volume of some endless heroic fantasy saga will be released;
-The Nobel Prize in literature will be given to a not exactly famous third world author politically engaged;
-The Nobel Peace prize will be given to Ahmadinejad for refraining to nuke Israel,or some other undeserving person;
-They will discover yet another sports scam, and yet another scandal will break out for doping at the Olympics;
- Some fundamentalist bigoted defender of morality will be discovered with an escort in a compromising position;
-Astrologers, at the end of the year, will be shown wrong again.
Happy 2012 to you all!
-Books on: Maya-2012-Revelation will be on top of the bestsellers at the end of the year, and then fill the "Three books for the price of one" baskets in 2013;
- There will be some politician investigated for corruption, some other politician will complain of having been misunderstood, and some will threaten to resign, but not for real;
- Whatever happens the economy, some banker or financiary consultant will ruthlessly take advantage of it;
- Yet another 1000 pages volume of some endless heroic fantasy saga will be released;
-The Nobel Prize in literature will be given to a not exactly famous third world author politically engaged;
-The Nobel Peace prize will be given to Ahmadinejad for refraining to nuke Israel,or some other undeserving person;
-They will discover yet another sports scam, and yet another scandal will break out for doping at the Olympics;
- Some fundamentalist bigoted defender of morality will be discovered with an escort in a compromising position;
-Astrologers, at the end of the year, will be shown wrong again.
Happy 2012 to you all!
Thursday, December 29, 2011
The evil of anti-gay hate, from the blog of Michael in Notfolk
Global War Against the Rights of Gay People
While it is easy to become blinded to the larger world wide struggle for LGBT rights given the fact that many of us feel as if we are fighting a never ending war in both our home states (e.g., anti-gay Virginia, North Carolina were hate groups are pushing for an anti-gay constitutional amendment, and other states) and America. But sadly, despite our third or fourth class citizen status, those of us in the USA have it good compared to many in other parts of the world such as in Islamic nations and in Africa where American Christianists have been working in overdrive to export anti-gay hate and bigotry to the uneducated and easily deceived. Johann Hari an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post, wrote a column with Elton John a while back that sums up just how bad things are in many parts of the world where things are going from bad to worse. As always, religion is the underlying poison that fuels the hate and violence. Here are some column highlights:
There has been a strange hole in Western gay politics — until now. We have, understandably, been focused on our own national battles for dignity: to get married, and not get fired for being gay, or bullied into despair as teenagers. But while we were starting to win, millions of gay people were starting to lose — and lose badly. There are seven countries where the punishment for homosexuality is death, and the number is growing. In dozens more, gay people are being terrorized into the closet, or a prison cell, or the hands of a lynch mob, today, now. To pluck one example at random, this summer, a senior official in Ghana ordered gays and lesbians “rounded up”, and announced: “All efforts are being made to get rid of these people.” Imagine a thousand Matthew Shephards, lynched with the approval of the state.
In every human society ever recorded, some people — around 3 to 5 percent — have been sexually drawn to their own gender. It is as universal and as harmless a quirk as left-handedness. Yet somewhere along the way, a whole cluster of fears and paranoias furred around homosexuality. There were myths that gay people were subversives or pedophiles or enemies of an invisible deity. For a long time, these myths killed gay men and women in our societies — and now they are killing people just like us in swelling numbers abroad.
Among some people, there is an unspoken assumption that gay equality inches forward of its own accord — but in many countries, the situation is dramatically deteriorating for gay people. In Uganda, to name just one, there has been an attempt to reimpose the death penalty that has not yet been conclusively defeated. Campaigners on the ground warn that if the international pressure lets up, it will be reintroduced into parliament very quickly, and pass.
This doesn’t have to happen. None of this is fixed by nature. It’s patronizing and false to claim that poor countries are inevitably homophobic: in 2007, Nepal – a bitterly poor country — introduced binding legal protections for gay people. It’s equally patronizing to think that intensely religious countries are inevitably homophobic. Argentina is highly Catholic, but has legalized gay marriage.
The big human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have done some incredibly valuable work on individual countries, but nobody is even compiling a list of who across the world is in prison or designated for death just for being gay. What are their names? What are their stories? What support do they want?
A remarkable group called Kaleidoscope has been set up in London, with global reach and a simple goal. Any gay person running for her life, or any gay group banding together to be treated like a human being, will be given the support they need, in the way they want it.
But so far, most of the pressure flowing from the US and Europe has been in the other direction — supporting the murderous homophobes. A battalion of US evangelicals flooded Uganda prior to the move to reintroduce the death penalty for homosexuality, announcing that homosexuality can be “cured”, and gays were determined to recruit African children. For example, the Atlantic Monthly has revealed that one of Michele Bachmann’s closest advisors, Peter Waldron, is a close personal friend of the man who most aggressively promoted the bill to hunt down and kill all of Uganda’s gays.
Yet Bachmann’s advisor has not done anything to distance himself from this crazed hatred. On the contrary: we now know that Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, teaches and preaches the central idea behind the movements to hunt down gay people across the world: that homosexuality is a choice, and so gay people who persist with their sexuality are being willfully deviant.
There is a global war going on against the right of an entire group to fall in love. The US hard right is aiding the side of the persecutors and bigots. We need to aid the side of the people who want to live and love. That is the goal of Kaleidoscope.
This doesn’t have to happen ever again. . . . . if Kaleidoscope attracts the support they deserve, we believe we will live to see the day when gay people are able to embrace openly on the streets of Kampala and Kingston and Kandahar. Grab your jacket and your instinct for justice — the global Stonewall riot has begun.
For local readers not in the know, the Elton John Foundation has provided funding for the long needed LGBT Center in Norfolk. Until the horrors propelled by religion are defeated, we all must continue the fight and give out time, talent and treasure to opposing anti-gay evil. Donate to Kaleidoscope here.
While it is easy to become blinded to the larger world wide struggle for LGBT rights given the fact that many of us feel as if we are fighting a never ending war in both our home states (e.g., anti-gay Virginia, North Carolina were hate groups are pushing for an anti-gay constitutional amendment, and other states) and America. But sadly, despite our third or fourth class citizen status, those of us in the USA have it good compared to many in other parts of the world such as in Islamic nations and in Africa where American Christianists have been working in overdrive to export anti-gay hate and bigotry to the uneducated and easily deceived. Johann Hari an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post, wrote a column with Elton John a while back that sums up just how bad things are in many parts of the world where things are going from bad to worse. As always, religion is the underlying poison that fuels the hate and violence. Here are some column highlights:
There has been a strange hole in Western gay politics — until now. We have, understandably, been focused on our own national battles for dignity: to get married, and not get fired for being gay, or bullied into despair as teenagers. But while we were starting to win, millions of gay people were starting to lose — and lose badly. There are seven countries where the punishment for homosexuality is death, and the number is growing. In dozens more, gay people are being terrorized into the closet, or a prison cell, or the hands of a lynch mob, today, now. To pluck one example at random, this summer, a senior official in Ghana ordered gays and lesbians “rounded up”, and announced: “All efforts are being made to get rid of these people.” Imagine a thousand Matthew Shephards, lynched with the approval of the state.
In every human society ever recorded, some people — around 3 to 5 percent — have been sexually drawn to their own gender. It is as universal and as harmless a quirk as left-handedness. Yet somewhere along the way, a whole cluster of fears and paranoias furred around homosexuality. There were myths that gay people were subversives or pedophiles or enemies of an invisible deity. For a long time, these myths killed gay men and women in our societies — and now they are killing people just like us in swelling numbers abroad.
Among some people, there is an unspoken assumption that gay equality inches forward of its own accord — but in many countries, the situation is dramatically deteriorating for gay people. In Uganda, to name just one, there has been an attempt to reimpose the death penalty that has not yet been conclusively defeated. Campaigners on the ground warn that if the international pressure lets up, it will be reintroduced into parliament very quickly, and pass.
This doesn’t have to happen. None of this is fixed by nature. It’s patronizing and false to claim that poor countries are inevitably homophobic: in 2007, Nepal – a bitterly poor country — introduced binding legal protections for gay people. It’s equally patronizing to think that intensely religious countries are inevitably homophobic. Argentina is highly Catholic, but has legalized gay marriage.
The big human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have done some incredibly valuable work on individual countries, but nobody is even compiling a list of who across the world is in prison or designated for death just for being gay. What are their names? What are their stories? What support do they want?
A remarkable group called Kaleidoscope has been set up in London, with global reach and a simple goal. Any gay person running for her life, or any gay group banding together to be treated like a human being, will be given the support they need, in the way they want it.
But so far, most of the pressure flowing from the US and Europe has been in the other direction — supporting the murderous homophobes. A battalion of US evangelicals flooded Uganda prior to the move to reintroduce the death penalty for homosexuality, announcing that homosexuality can be “cured”, and gays were determined to recruit African children. For example, the Atlantic Monthly has revealed that one of Michele Bachmann’s closest advisors, Peter Waldron, is a close personal friend of the man who most aggressively promoted the bill to hunt down and kill all of Uganda’s gays.
Yet Bachmann’s advisor has not done anything to distance himself from this crazed hatred. On the contrary: we now know that Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, teaches and preaches the central idea behind the movements to hunt down gay people across the world: that homosexuality is a choice, and so gay people who persist with their sexuality are being willfully deviant.
There is a global war going on against the right of an entire group to fall in love. The US hard right is aiding the side of the persecutors and bigots. We need to aid the side of the people who want to live and love. That is the goal of Kaleidoscope.
This doesn’t have to happen ever again. . . . . if Kaleidoscope attracts the support they deserve, we believe we will live to see the day when gay people are able to embrace openly on the streets of Kampala and Kingston and Kandahar. Grab your jacket and your instinct for justice — the global Stonewall riot has begun.
For local readers not in the know, the Elton John Foundation has provided funding for the long needed LGBT Center in Norfolk. Until the horrors propelled by religion are defeated, we all must continue the fight and give out time, talent and treasure to opposing anti-gay evil. Donate to Kaleidoscope here.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Christmas' Comet, from Skymania
A brilliant new “star of wonder” is wowing people in parts of the world who have seen it appear in the east right before Christmas. The impressive spectacle is being put on by a comet called Lovejoy that amazingly survived a close brush with the Sun a week ago.
Since then it has grown a long, bright tail that rises before it above the eastern horizon shortly before dawn. The comet cannot be seen from northern countries where the Sun rises before it. But it looks magnificent from countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Posted by Paul Sutherland on December 23rd, 2011
A brilliant new “star of wonder” is wowing people in parts of the world who have seen it appear in the east right before Christmas. The impressive spectacle is being put on by a comet called Lovejoy that amazingly survived a close brush with the Sun a week ago.
Since then it has grown a long, bright tail that rises before it above the eastern horizon shortly before dawn. The comet cannot be seen from northern countries where the Sun rises before it. But it looks magnificent from countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The heavenly apparition came as a surprise to astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they watched it lifting up over the Earth. ISS Commander Dan Burbank was photographing lightning storms over the Pacific when he spotted the celestial visitor. He called it “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space.”
NASA have stitched his sequence of photos of the phenomenon into a must-see video. Another stunning movie of the brilliant comet against a sky rich with stars was taken from the European Southern Observatory’s site at Paranal in Chile, by staff astronomer Gabriel Brammer.
Last weekend, Comet Lovejoy skimmed just 140,000 km (87,000 miles) above the Sun’s surface, a close encounter that no one thought it could survive as it is around a third of the distance of the Moon from the Earth.
But far from being vaporised, the comet came through remarkably unscathed. It lost its tail, but swiftly grew a new one, many millions of kilometres long, as it headed away from the Sun again.
The comet, discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy from Brisbane, was the brightest that NASA’s sun-watching space observatory SOHO had ever photographed.
From the VLT video
A shot from the VLT video (G Brammer)
Robin Scagell, of the Society for Popular Astronomy said: “If there really was a Star of Bethlehem then it could have been a brilliant, fleeting comet like this one. It is a shame we can’t see it from the UK, but there are some fantastic pictures appearing on the web.”
Scientists believe Comet Lovejoy is just one fragment of a vast supercomet that broke up in the 12th century. The resulting debris, now orbiting in the solar system as smaller comets, is known as the Kreutz family.
Since then it has grown a long, bright tail that rises before it above the eastern horizon shortly before dawn. The comet cannot be seen from northern countries where the Sun rises before it. But it looks magnificent from countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Comet Lovejoy from the VLT, Chile from g br on Vimeo.
Posted by Paul Sutherland on December 23rd, 2011
A brilliant new “star of wonder” is wowing people in parts of the world who have seen it appear in the east right before Christmas. The impressive spectacle is being put on by a comet called Lovejoy that amazingly survived a close brush with the Sun a week ago.
Since then it has grown a long, bright tail that rises before it above the eastern horizon shortly before dawn. The comet cannot be seen from northern countries where the Sun rises before it. But it looks magnificent from countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The heavenly apparition came as a surprise to astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they watched it lifting up over the Earth. ISS Commander Dan Burbank was photographing lightning storms over the Pacific when he spotted the celestial visitor. He called it “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space.”
NASA have stitched his sequence of photos of the phenomenon into a must-see video. Another stunning movie of the brilliant comet against a sky rich with stars was taken from the European Southern Observatory’s site at Paranal in Chile, by staff astronomer Gabriel Brammer.
Last weekend, Comet Lovejoy skimmed just 140,000 km (87,000 miles) above the Sun’s surface, a close encounter that no one thought it could survive as it is around a third of the distance of the Moon from the Earth.
But far from being vaporised, the comet came through remarkably unscathed. It lost its tail, but swiftly grew a new one, many millions of kilometres long, as it headed away from the Sun again.
The comet, discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy from Brisbane, was the brightest that NASA’s sun-watching space observatory SOHO had ever photographed.
From the VLT video
A shot from the VLT video (G Brammer)
Robin Scagell, of the Society for Popular Astronomy said: “If there really was a Star of Bethlehem then it could have been a brilliant, fleeting comet like this one. It is a shame we can’t see it from the UK, but there are some fantastic pictures appearing on the web.”
Scientists believe Comet Lovejoy is just one fragment of a vast supercomet that broke up in the 12th century. The resulting debris, now orbiting in the solar system as smaller comets, is known as the Kreutz family.
YOU KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS WHEN...
-Bright, unnecessary lights illuminate the streets, worsening luminous pollution
(If He returns, He will need a *very* bright comet...)
-You are daily reminded of the number of shopping days till Christmas
-You hear cheesy commercials proclaim that Christmas is not really Christmas without the latest gadget for your laptop
-It's Christmas, so relatives that didn't care for you during the year extend to you their best wishes...which, knowing them,isn't saying much
-You HAVE to feel happy, even when you're exhausted after having searched in four overcrowded malls for that unfindable object someone wants for Christmas.
-You try to find a Christmas Card that's not banal, mawkish or silly for loved one...and you still haven't found it and it's Christmas Eve...
-You have to listen to your boss repeating the stale platitudes and old jokes he always tell at the office Christmas party
- You remember, hearing your children/nephew school recital, that Christmas is something other than just "things" to have.
Anyway...Merry Christmas Everybody!
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLYDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!
(If He returns, He will need a *very* bright comet...)
-You are daily reminded of the number of shopping days till Christmas
-You hear cheesy commercials proclaim that Christmas is not really Christmas without the latest gadget for your laptop
-It's Christmas, so relatives that didn't care for you during the year extend to you their best wishes...which, knowing them,isn't saying much
-You HAVE to feel happy, even when you're exhausted after having searched in four overcrowded malls for that unfindable object someone wants for Christmas.
-You try to find a Christmas Card that's not banal, mawkish or silly for loved one...and you still haven't found it and it's Christmas Eve...
-You have to listen to your boss repeating the stale platitudes and old jokes he always tell at the office Christmas party
- You remember, hearing your children/nephew school recital, that Christmas is something other than just "things" to have.
Anyway...Merry Christmas Everybody!
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLYDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
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