The fallout from President Obama’s announcement Wednesday that he backs gay marriage:
- Nationwide polling shows support for gay marriage outweighs opposition, according to genius pollster Nate Silver.
- House Republicans voted to add an amendment to a $51.1 billion spending bill that prohibits the Justice Department from using taxpayer dollars in any future fight against the anti-gay rights Defense of Marriage Act. Which means the Obama administration’s hands are essentially tied as far as opposing DOMA.
- Mitt Romney toed the GOP line: “My view is that marriage itself is between a man and a woman.” He said Wednesday that he still believes states should be able to decide whether to offer certain legal rights to same-sex couples.
- In the first 90 minutes after news of Obama’s position surfaced, spontaneous donations to his campaign totaled $1 million.
- Some argue that Obama’s announcement is BS. “He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn’t believe they have a right to do so,” points out Aaron Cook, writing for Gawker.
- Log Cabin Republicans, the gay arm of the GOP, gripes ”that the president has chosen today, when LGBT Americans are mourning the passage of Amendment One, to finally speak up for marriage equality is offensive and callous.”
- Obama breaks his silence on Vice President Biden: ”He probably got out a little bit over his skis.”
- Jon Stewart throws a party on The Daily Show.
- The “Jeep Party” scene from Zoolander beats out the competition for the No. 1 GIF.
- Twitter — predictably — explodes.
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eHarmony.com boasts that 236 of its members marry each day, accounting for 2% of U.S. marriages. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
BullMp3-Free Mp3 downloads and Music search
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Victoria Woodhull Is Nominated for President of the US (1872)
Woodhull was a prominent US women’s rights advocate, suffragist, and owner of a weekly publication known for printing the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto. In May of 1872, she became the first female candidate for president when a group of suffragists formed a political party and nominated her, but because she was a woman many disputed the legality of her candidacy. What famous African-American was nominated to be her vice-president—possibly without his knowledge? More…
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Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26 year-old parenting blogger, offers her nipple to 3-year-old son Aram on the cover of this week’s Time magazine, to promote a story about attachment parenting, an approach that encourages parents to breastfeed and co-sleep with their children.
“To me, the whole point of a magazine cover is to get your attention,” says Rick Stengel, Time‘s managing editor. “From the moment that we started talking about this story as a cover possibility, it was like I couldn’t get out of the meetings. There was so much opinion and passion about it and discussion. What that told me is, boy, this is a story that people care a lot about.”
From here: hypervocal
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I wonder, how many people go to museums just to walk around and view the paintings?
River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaen Sibyl by Salvator Rosa (c.1655)
My featured artist today is the 17th century Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa. He was born in 1615 in the small hill town of Arenella above the outskirts of Naples. His father Vito Antonio was a land surveyor and had great ambitions for his son wanting him to become either a lawyer or take holy orders in the church and become a priest. With this in mind he decided that his son should be afforded the best education and had him enter the convent of the Somaschi Fathers, a holy order of priests and brothers. As we have seen in many biographies of artists, what the parents want for their children often differs from what the children themselves want and so it was the case for Salvator Rosa. During his studies he had developed a love of art and with the support of his maternal uncle, Paolo Greco, he secretly began to learn to paint. Rosa began his artistic training in Naples, under the tutelage of his future brother-in-law, Francesco Francanzano, who had trained under the influential Spanish painter, Jusepe de Ribera. It is also believed that after this initial training, Rosa trained with the Naples painter, Aniello Falcone, who was also at one time apprenticed to Ribera. Rosa greatly admired the works of Ribera and was influenced by them.
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How Sears, Roebuck & Co. midwifed the birth of the blues
Delta blues is as much legend as it is music. In the popular telling, blues articulated the hopelessness and poverty of an isolated, oppressed people through music that was disconnected from popular trends and technological advances. Delta blues giants like Robert Johnson were victims, buffeted by the winds of racism, singing out mostly for personal solace. The story is undoubtedly romantic, but it just isn’t true. “It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy,” B.B. King complained in his 1999 autobiography Blues All Around Me. “As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion.”
The tragic image of the blues that originated in the Mississippi Delta ignores the competitive and entrepreneurial spirit of the bluesman himself. While it is certainly true that the music was forged in part by the legacy of slavery and the insults of Jim Crow, the iconic image of the lone bluesman traveling the road with a guitar strapped to his back is also a story about innovators seizing on expanded opportunities brought about by the commercial and technological advances of the early 1900s. There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars. And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co.
Read more HERE.
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Smugglers Caught with Pills Made of Baby Flesh
Recent smuggling operations in South Korea lend a whole new meaning to the term human trafficking. Customs officials there have seized thousands of pills filled with the powdered flesh of babies and fetuses, which some believe can cure disease and boost stamina. Since August, the Korea Customs Service has foiled 35 attempts to smuggle the capsules into the country from China. Citing diplomatic concerns, officials declined to reveal information about who is producing the pills or how they are obtaining the human remains. More …
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Eric Berkowitz’s new book Sex And Punishment, out today from Counterpoint, is a fascinating survey of how legal systems over the millenia have attempted to regulate and police sex. In this excerpt, a discussion of the once-wide acceptance of same-sex unions between men in Europe of the Middle Ages.
Despite the risks, devotional relationships between men were common in Europe at the time, at least among the literate, and many of these affairs must have included sex at some point. Knights, aristocrats, and especially clerics left expansive evidence of their intense passions for male lovers, relationships that often ended in side-by-side burials. A letter from a respected monk–scholar in Charlemagne’s court named Alcuin (circa 735–804) to a beloved bishop shows how thick those relations sometimes became:
I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk, to be transported to you, how would I sink into your embraces . . . how would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears, and mouth but also your every finger and your toes, not once but many a time. While this epistle is unusually erotic, it reflects the intimacies that existed among men everywhere. Assuming, as we must, that at least some of these men’s sexual longings were fulfilled, the next question is the extent to which intimate homosexual relationships were tolerated. Love was one thing, sodomy another.
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If Steve Jobs’s life were staged as an opera, it would be a tragedy in three acts. And the titles would go something like this: Act I–The Founding of Apple Computer and the Invention of the PC Industry; Act II–The Wilderness Years; and Act III–A Triumphant Return and Tragic Demise.
The first act would be a piquant comedy about the brashness of genius and the audacity of youth, abruptly turning ominous when our young hero is cast out of his own kingdom. The closing act would plumb the profound irony of a balding and domesticated high-tech rock star coming back to transform Apple far beyond even his own lofty expectations, only to fall mortally ill and then slowly, excruciatingly wither away, even as his original creation miraculously bulks up into the biggest digital dynamo of them all. Both acts are picaresque tales that end with a surge of deep pathos worthy of Shakespeare.
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Ancient Egyptian art, 1,400 BC
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Vintage Mugshots from the 1920s [30 Photos]
William Stanley Moore – Photograph by The Sydney Justice & Police Museum
The Sifter recently stumbled upon an incredible collection of vintage mugshots housed by the Historic Houses Trust. Many of these intriguing photographs are also accompanied by a description of the person and the crime(s) they have committed. For example, the image above of Mr. William Stanley Moore was taken May 1st, 1925. The caption describes him as: an opium dealer operating with large quantities of faked opium and cocaine. Also a wharf labourer and associates with water front thieves and drug traders.
The images themselves are of excellent quality, beautifully composed and in many cases, quite artistic. Please enjoy this curated selection of 30 photographs along with brief descriptions of each when available.
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John Wilkes Booth (Born on this day in 1838)
Born into a family of famous actors, Booth made his acting debut at the age of 17. Touring widely, he soon became a wealthy celebrity, earning acclaim for his Shakespearean roles. However, he harbored deep Confederate sympathies and viewed President Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant. In April of 1865, he assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln had previously watched him perform. Twelve days later, Booth was shot and killed by a Union soldier. Who else had Booth conspired to have killed? More…
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Cybersecurity experts begin investigation on self-adapting computer network that defends itself against hackers
(Phys.org) — In the online struggle for network security, Kansas State University cybersecurity experts are adding an ally to the security force: the computer network itself.
Scott DeLoach, professor of computing and information sciences, and Xinming “Simon” Ou, associate professor of computing and information sciences, are researching the feasibility of building a computer network that could protect itself against online attackers by automatically changing its setup and configuration.
DeLoach and Ou were recently awarded a five-year grant of more than $1 million from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to fund the study “Understanding and quantifying the impact of moving target defenses on computer networks.” The study, which began in April, will be the first to document whether this type of adaptive cybersecurity, called moving-target defense, can be effective. If it can work, researchers will determine if the benefits of creating a moving-target defense system outweigh the overhead and resources needed to build it.
Read more HERE.
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A young woman who is not yet known as Marilyn Monroe with a partly assembled OQ-2 Radioplane target drone – Van Nuys, CA, June 26, 1945
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Ancient language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace
Archaeologists have discovered evidence for a previously unknown ancient language – buried in the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace.
The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ – mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world’s first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq.
Evidence of the long-lost language – probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran – was found by a Cambridge University archaeologist as he deciphered an ancient clay writing tablet unearthed by an international archaeological team excavating an Assyrian imperial governors’ palace in the ancient city of Tushan, south-east Turkey.
Read more HERE.
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Chinchorro Mummies
Dating to 6,000 BCE, the Chinchorro mummies of South America are the world’s oldest—a few thousand years older than their Egyptian counterparts. The Chinchorro mummification process evolved over centuries and typically involved removing the skin; stripping tissue from bone; replacing the tissue with ash paste, fur, or plant fiber; and re-covering the body with its skin. The face and other details were modeled in clay, and the body was painted. What was unique about the people who were mummified? More…
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Toronto Construction Worker: It’s Okay Guys, He’s Wearing A Helmet
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Carnivorous plants can have valuable allies in ants, benefiting from their feces and janitor, bodyguard and cutthroat services, researchers say. The carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes bicalcarata dwells in the nutrient-poor peat swamp forests of Borneo. It is not a very effective carnivore by itself — its pitcher-shaped leaves lack the slippery walls and viscous, elastic and strongly corrosive fluid that make those of its relatives such effective deathtraps. However, N. bicalcarata does apparently have unusual support on its side — the ant Camponotus schmitzi. The carnivorous plant has swollen tendrils at the base of each pitcher that serve as homes for the insects, and a food source in the form of nectar secreted on the pitcher rims.
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She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked. Luminousness can be a cover – in Hollywood, its own most perfect screen. Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding (no other actress is defined in quite these terms). Of what, then, is she the decoy? What does she allow us to see and not to see? Monroe herself knew the difference between seeing and looking. ‘Men do not see me,’ she said, ‘they just lay their eyes on me.’
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Choosing a beer in the summer is a delicate balance. After all, the last thing you want with a sweat-beaded brow is a motor-oil-thick stout; that’s just not very thirst-quenching. And, sure, you could tap open a can of light beer that’s as cold as the Rockies or Andes or Himalayas or whatever the color-activated label says. But you should know of another option, something in between too heavy and too light. One with the perfect balance of flavor and refreshment. Here are those, for the icebox.
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