Postgraduate researcher. (Re)Blogging things I find interesting in politics, sexuality, and culture.
Fake it till you make it.
Something about bison
- BBC: Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to the BBC's Pallab Ghosh about what the Higgs boson is and why confirming its existence is so important for physicists.
- What I understood: Blah-blah-blah scientists confirm Highland Bison and everything we know about physics.
Newsweek Names Obama “The First Gay President”
Newsweek hopped on the colorful cover bandwagon on Sunday with the above image of Barack Obama dubbed as “The First Gay President.” Accompanying the bold headline is the President with a rainbow-colored halo. This comes only days after he announced his support for marriage equality in an ABC news interview.
Congratulations to Washington State for becoming the 7th state to embrace the freedom to marry! Watch Governor Chris Gregoire sign the bill into law at 11:30AM PST here.
By A Nearly 2 To 1 Margin, Cable Networks Call On Men Over Women To Comment On Birth Control — ThinkProgress.
Prop 8 ruled unconstitutional by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals!
(via logotv)
Wildlife vet Alex Lewis injects a mixture of dye and poison into the horn of this drugged rhino on Inverdoorn Game Reserve near Ceres. Picture: Matthew Jordaan
The horns of rhinos are being poisoned in hopes of deterring poachers and saving the species
The poison will not kill, but is designed to make anyone who consumes the ground-up horn feel sick. Most poached horn is smuggled into Asia where it fetches sky-high prices in the traditional medicine trade, although it has no proven medicinal qualities.
The horns were also injected with a bright-red dye that effectively defaced their interior, making them unusable as dagger handles or other ornamentation. Rhino horn has been used, particularly in Yemen, for dagger handles. The dye and poison combination was developed by Denel and has been designed to bind with keratin, the substance horn, hair and nails are made of.
The third part of the anti-poaching cocktail was barium, injected into smaller holes, which will show up on X-rays if the horns are smuggled through airport security.
Inverdoorn owner Damian Vergnaud, who was present throughout the operations that began before dawn yesterday, said yesterday: “I wanted to destroy the market value of the horns, and I hope other game reserve owners will follow what we’ve done. That way we can destroy rhino horn as a product. I think it will work if many people do it. I want everyone to know that we have done this to the horns.”
(via sosungalittleclodofclay)
Brian Nguyen, photographer for UC Davis’s student newspaper The Aggie, captured the events of yesterday’s protests from beginning to end, and was kind enough to submit them for publication here at The Political Notebook. Above are a selection of photos capturing the police in riot gear, arresting and pepper spraying the student protesters. What an intense group of shots.
You can follow Nguyen’s Flickr stream or follow him on Tumblr.
(via thepoliticalnotebook)
Postage Paid Protest of the Day: YouTuber ransackedroom — a San Francisco-based “poet, editor, and marketer” — has come up with a rather ingenious way ordinary people can support the Occupy Wall Street movement without ever leaving their homes.
It involves taking the business reply mail envelope that comes with most unsolicited credit card offers, and sending it back to the banks with a message inside that ransacked hopes will help open “a dialogue.”
He says:
This isn’t really about running up the postage bill on the big banks, although that’s a nice side effect. The real effect of this is to force banks to react to us.
If they start getting hundreds and thousands of weird responses to their credit card applications, well they’re going to have to have meetings. They going to have to develop new procedures and every hour banks spend reacting to us is an hour banks don’t spend lobbying Congress on how to screw us. It’s an hour banks don’t spend foreclosing on our houses.
So I think that that’s progress.
YouTube Comment of Note: “This supports the United States Postal Service also, maybe keeping several thousand postal workers out of the unemployment line. Good idea.”
[thanks mike!]
(via motherjones)
Service Members Challenge DOMA
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and Chadbourne & Parke LLP are filing a federal lawsuit today on behalf of several current and former active duty lesbian and gay service members challenging the denial of equal military family benefits. Despite implementation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal, the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) still prevents same-sex couples in the military from getting important benefits that their straight colleagues receive.
Benefits impacted by DOMA include military family housing, access to legal services, spousal relocation support, medical and dental benefits, military ID cards, visitation rights in military hospitals, survivor benefits and the right to be buried together in military cemetaries. The plantiffs in the case are seeking the same recognition, family support and benefits for their same-sex spouses that the military already provides to opposite-sex spouses of both current and former service members.
The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The Respect for Marriage Act – which has received bipartisan support – would repeal DOMA and ensure all married couples receive the full benefits of marriage under federal law.
How sweet it is.
Missing: Tons of US-Supplied Nuclear Weapons Material
We gave more than 17,000 tons of highly enriched uranium to 27 “friendly” nations. We lost track of most of it.
Does that mean we have to invade ourselves now?
(Photo: Ed Siasoco)
BREAKING: Rating Agency Downgrades US Credit Rating
“If we give your daughters and granddaughters access to birth control, they will instantly turn into wanton harlots with an insatiable sexual appetite, because you know women are always on the edge of nymphomanical orgiastic abandon. They’ll pick up the prescriptions, pop a pill, then bone the pharmacist, the stock boy, and everyone in line for the bus. Why? Because the birth control was paid for by the government.”
(via ucsunnydale)
