Friday Ark #99 will grow over the weekend. Be sure to visit through Sunday for updates on all the animal news you can use.
Does it get better than a deer and a rabbit hanging out? And that last photo…
With the latest terrorist plot now uncovered, and knowing it included explosives made from liquids, aren’t you glad to know the Bush administration is working hard to protect you by trying to cut $6 million from a project targeted at “developing new homeland explosives detection technology. […] The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.” So that’s what he means by safer — as in NOT!
The Daily Show on the Middle East crisis. You have to watch this. It’s brilliantly hysterical.
Do you remember when the 9/11 attacks took place? Far too many Americans don’t. 30% of the US population doesn’t know what year it took place. 5% can’t even remember the month or day (which begs the question: how the fuck don’t you know what month and day on which the 9/11 attacks took place? how about 9/11, you stupid apeshit dicks!). I pity this country for its mass stupidity in damn near all matters.
Spectacular photos of lightning. [via Michael at Gay Orbit]
Hide the truth! Christians want museums to conceal fossils that clearly show the species ancestry of humans. “Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya’s national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man’s evolution from ape to human. Leaders of the country’s six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey’s ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing. The collection includes the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7 million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Dr Leakey’s team in 1984 at Nariokotome, near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The museum also holds bones from several specimens of Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the first hominid to walk upright, four million years ago. Together the artefacts amount to the clearest record yet discovered of the origins of Homo sapiens.” But let’s hide them anyway because our faith tells us they can’t possibly be true. “Hide the fossils!” How ignorant. [via Ed Brayton]
Yesterday’s APOD is a fantastic photograph of a Perseid meteor streaking through a sky filled with “moonlight and auroral glow.” Very cool.
From the American Psychological Association (APA) to those who believe themselves capable of helping a homosexual convert to heterosexuality: “The APA’s concern about the positions espoused by NARTH (National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) and so-called conversion therapy is that they are not supported by the science. There is simply no sufficiently scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed. Our further concern is that the positions espoused by NARTH and Focus on the Family create an environment in which prejudice and discrimination can flourish.” By the way, “[s]ome of the organizations advocating ‘conversion therapy’ [for gays] use methods that include exorcisms, repossessing a client’s Calvin Klein underwear because it is deemed ‘too gay,’ [and] taking Prozac and drinking Gatorade in an effort to make men more masculine…”
Breaking up with god: “So my spiritual director suggested I write a letter to this god I don’t believe in and tell him how I feel and what I want and get it out of my system. So I did, and it turns out I had a lot to say, most of it rather nasty. It’s not often I get to use the words ‘omnipotent prick’ in a sentence, and I feel better for having done so.” I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s a great piece. [via Amba]