You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2013.
What is democracy about these days? Looking to the North American model to the south of Canada, one begins to worry that idea of responsible, accountable government is a sadly antiquated notion. Bill Moyers and his guests detail what is happening in Washington. Revolving doors, “dark” money, influence peddling – a veritable laundry list of bad ethical practice is the norm, and the public good is but a memory.
Take the time, gain some insight and arm yourself with the knowledge of what is happening in what was once a great democratic nation.
This happened in February of this year on Lake Michigan.
“Weighing in at up to 50 pounds (22 kilograms) each, the ice spheres are a winter weather phenomenon resulting from wind and wave action along the shore, according to reporting by NASA‘s Earth Science Picture of the Day. Small fragments of floating ice act like seeds, with layers upon layers of supercooled lake water freezing around them as the balls churn in the waves. Wind then pushes the ice concretions onshore.”
I sometimes complain about the landlocked status of my home here in Alberta, then I see stuff like what is pictured below, or what happened in Manitoba and I think to myself, “hmm…not so bad here after all.”
Ice Wall in Manitoba
Sometimes the most basic of points are the most effective. Join Superman and Batman as they fight evil, god style!
I’ll just let Foamy do the talking..:) Yes, and you people know who you are…the positive ones…I see you scuttling toward the back.
I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for popular astronomy shows. How amazingly small and insignificant our place is in the Universe is always humbles me when I am reminded of the fact. It is a humility I wish the religious minded among us could understand, instead of wasting time and energy faffing away on their sky daddies and magic books.
Anyhow, here is a 24 minute exploration of the cosmic phenomenon known as black holes, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. :)
“Our Milky Way may harbor millions of black holes… the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there’s evidence of something far more ominous. A breed of black holes that has reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. Just how large, and violent, and strange can they get?
A new era in astronomy has revealed a universe long hidden to us. High-tech instruments sent into space have been tuned to sense high-energy forms of light — x-rays and gamma rays — that are invisible to our eyes and do not penetrate our atmosphere. On the ground, precision telescopes are equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere. They are peering into the far reaches of the universe, and into distant caldrons of light and energy. In some distant galaxies, astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time are being shattered by eruptions so vast they boggle the mind.
We are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe: On the shapes of galaxies, the spread of elements that make up stars and planets, and ultimately the very existence of Earth. The discovery of what causes these eruptions has led to a new understanding of cosmic history. Back in 1995, the Hubble space telescope was enlisted to begin filling in the details of that history. Astronomers selected tiny regions in the sky, between the stars. For days at a time, they focused Hubble’s gaze on remote regions of the universe.
These hubble Deep Field images offered incredibly clear views of the cosmos in its infancy. What drew astronomers’ attention were the tiniest galaxies, covering only a few pixels on Hubble’s detector. Most of them do not have the grand spiral or elliptical shapes of large galaxies we see close to us today.
Instead, they are irregular, scrappy collections of stars. The Hubble Deep Field confirmed a long-standing idea that the universe must have evolved in a series of building blocks, with small galaxies gradually merging and assembling into larger ones.”
Just in case you were not clear on what the friend zone is. Many thanks to Angels and Angles for the definition.
——
As defined by urban dictionary, the friendzone is…
“When you are expected to support a girl you really like while she searches for a smarter, richer, and more handsome boyfriend. There is little you can do without feeling like a dick. All in all, one of the meanest things a girl can do, whether they mean it or not.”
and ”The perennial location of nice guys everywhere.”
Although this hypothetical situation could work both ways, friendzone is almost always applied to a man who is rejected by a woman. Therefore, there is something inherently unequal, something inherently sexist about the term “friendzone”. But what and why?
From my experience, this is what friend zone is. A “nice guy” pursues a woman, but isn’t forward with his intentions from the get-go like, say, a “jerk”. The woman is pleased to see a man who is interested in her not as a sexual object but as a human being and wishes for things to stay that way. The man is not satisfied with seeing the woman as a human being because being “expected to support a girl” is a bad deal if she’s not putting out.
Before I delve into the sociological aspects of this, I just want to point out that ”friendzone” is no more pleasant for a woman than it is a man. First, that is to say unrequited love works both ways, but the person who doesn’t return affections is considered mean only when she’s a woman. And second, what option does the woman have in a traditional “friendzone” situation? Just stop talking to a close friend to avoid “leading him on”? In high school, I found out my best friend of 2 years liked me. Having to tell him I didn’t feel the same way and being immediately ex-communicated via Facebook status (“Thanks for wasting my time”) was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Were our two years of friendship invalid because I didn’t want anything more? Was all our time together really wasted because there was no hypothetical pay off?
Guys who do this and claim to be “nice guys” are the worst misogynists because of their sense of entitlement toward a woman. They make investments in property and expect their dividends. They are fake friends. They are selfish. And they will jump at the chance to vilify you and victimize themselves when their attempts at manipulation don’t work. Clearly, “friendzone” is the remnant of a phenomenon that has plagued women since the beginning of time: women are not independent creatures. Our love lives exist only in the context of a man’s desire. When we make independent decisions, we are subject to a host of derogatory terms. “Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”. “Friendzone” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “no”
The friend zone is bullish** because girls are not machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.”
It is nice to see Anti Citizen X set the record straight when the religious attempt to cloud the waters with their babble. Need the arguments to subdue an “absolute truther” here they be.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…