More: Has the Oklahoma Atheist Been Saved? Belief Blog Blogs

Stand by. The Religious right assholes are either going to go apeshit about this or try to bury it. Please, feel free to tweet/retweet it to Bryan et al.

(CNN) - Just days after she announced to the world from tornado-ravaged Moore, Oklahoma, that she is an atheist, it looks like Rebecca Vitsmun has found salvation.

Not from the Lord, mind you, but from other atheists and friends of atheists.

An Indiegogo campaign titled “Atheists Unite,” launched late Thursday by stand-up comic Doug Stanhope, is raking in dollars to help her family rebuild. Less than 17 hours after going live, it met its 60-day goal of $50,000. A little more than an hour later, as we prepared to publish, donations were at $55,000 - and growing.

//Wonder how Fischer will react?

Go Atheists.

But also remember this. There are others who also need our help. So please, if you can, donate to them as well.

Charles. May I suggests an addtion to the Category selction. Natural Disasters

So all those crazy things he said can just be disregarded

As Democrats and the media continue to hammer Virginia lieutenant governor hopeful E.W. Jackson for his past comments on social issues, the Christian minister says he is battling what he calls the “mainstream media’s caricature” of him.

In an email sent to The Daily Caller this week, the running mate to Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli said “every one of those comments has a context and were spoken in my role as a minister, not as a candidate.”

So everything is okay, nothing to see here. Can’t you see he is the real victim in all this?
——
Highlights of his comments as a “Minister”:

Jackson on gays and lesbians:

Referred to gays and lesbians as “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.”

Said regarding homosexuality: “it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of.”

Argued that gays seek to “sexualize [children] at the earliest possible age” and use “totalitarian” tactics.

Claimed gays are hurting black women: “I’ve heard a lot of young black ladies that a lot of young black men seem to be gay. I’ve heard them complain about it, they say ‘so many of these guys are homosexuals’ and they are frankly frustrated by it.”

Demanded the reinstitution of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell : “The military has been decimated by this lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender policy that has now been implemented. It’s an abomination and it’s only going to weaken us militarily and they need to undo it,” warning that the policy’s repeal is a “disaster of historic proportions.”

Contended that homosexuality is “killing black men by the thousands” and said of gay rights advocates: “what they’re promoting is killing people.”

Called GLSEN founder and anti-bullying activist Kevin Jennings a “radical homosexual activist” who should have been “imprisoned” in a letter demanding he resign as head of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.

Said there is a “direct connection” between gays and pedophilia.

Jackson on Obama and Democrats:

Wondered how the Democratic Party “managed to hold on to black Christians in spite of an agenda worthy of the Antichrist.”

Proclaimed that “the Democrat Party has shown itself to be anti-Christian, anti-Bible, anti-family, anti-life and anti-God… We’re calling people to come out of the Democrat Party and not support candidates who represent its values and the rebellion that it represents against God. That certainly would include President Barack Obama.”

Claimed that Democratic Party supporters are “insulting their faith and blaspheming their God” by supporting a “coalition of the godless.”

Warned that ministers who support Obama “are going to have to answer to God” if they encourage “their congregations to support this abomination.”

Said Democrats believe “that the Bible is a lie and indeed they are saying that God is a liar.”

Argued that “liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that’s a fact.”

Maintained that Obama “seems to have a lot of sympathy for even radical Islam” and “clearly has Muslim sensibilities,” arguing that Obama “certainly does have a lot of affection and favor for Islam, that seems to be his priority…Christianity, I don’t really think about that with him, I really don’t, that’s a joke.”

Compared Democratic leaders to “slave masters” who make sure that black people who disagree with them are “punished.”

Insisted that Planned Parenthood “has been far more lethal to Black lives than the KKK ever was.”

Predicted that African Americans will “overwhelmingly” vote against Obama as a result of his endorsement of marriage equality and a move of God to “stir the hearts of His people” and push them against the Democrats.

Maintained that the President and First Lady are both Communist sympathizers who dislike America.

More: How California Is Debunking the GOP’s Obamacare Talking Points

This is some powerful stuff. I wouldn’t want to be an Obamacare repealing Republican asshole in a state that isn’t embracing the Affordable Care Act in 2014. Once small businesses learn that California (and other states embracing the ACA) are less expensive, they’ll flock out of the states that don’t.

Covered California, the agency tasked with constructing and maintaining the Golden State’s insurance marketplace, announced in a press release that rates submitted by 13 insurers for the 2014 individual marketplace were far lower than initially expected, ranging from a stunning 29 percent below the current average premium for small business health plans to only two percent above them.

For Californians who will gain coverage in the marketplace, that means affordable health plans with a minimum base of ten “essential health benefits,” including prescription drug services, mental health care, and maternity services. And the announced rates are even better for consumers considering that they don’t take Obamacare’s federal insurance subsidies into account. Depending on income, the average middle-aged Californian would pay anywhere from $40 to $300 per month for a mid-level “Silver” health plan on the marketplace. Younger, healthier Americans looking to buy bare-bones “Bronze” health plans would end up paying less than $170 per month — or even nothing at all — if they make less money and receive federal Obamacare subsidies.

29 per cent…hell, even a Conservative can understand what that means.

Spacecraft could determine their position anywhere in the solar system to within five kilometres using signals from x-ray pulsars, say astronomers.

Navigating in space is a tricky business. The usual method relies on Earth-based tracking stations to work out a spacecraft’s distance using radio waves, a process that is accurate to within a metre or so.

That’s fine for the radial distance, but tracking a spacecraft’s angular position is much harder because of the limited angular resolution of radio antennas. The current technology produces an uncertainty of about four kilometres per astronomical unit of distance between Earth and the spacecraft.

So for a spacecraft at the distance of Pluto, that’s an uncertainty of 200 kilometres and at the distance of Voyager 1, the uncertainty is 500 kilometres.

So a way for spacecraft to determine their own position accurately would clearly be useful.

Today, Werner Becker at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and a couple of pals have worked out the practical details for an autonomous spacecraft navigation system using pulsars signals. They say that technology being developed now would allow spacecraft to work out their position to within five kilometres anywhere in the solar system.

More: An Interplanetary GPS Using Pulsar Signals

Bioresorbable splint used for first time, successfully stopped life-threatening tracheobronchomalacia, case featured in New England Journal of Medicine

Ann Arbor, Mich. - Every day, their baby stopped breathing, his collapsed bronchus blocking the crucial flow of air to his lungs. April and Bryan Gionfriddo watched helplessly, just praying that somehow the dire predictions weren’t true.

“Quite a few doctors said he had a good chance of not leaving the hospital alive,” says April Gionfriddo, about her now 20-month-old son, Kaiba. “At that point, we were desperate. Anything that would work, we would take it and run with it.”

They found hope at the University of Michigan, where a new, bioresorbable device that could help Kaiba was under development. Kaiba’s doctors contacted Glenn Green, M.D., associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan.

The NASA Astrobiology Program has started the process of outlining future research directions at the organization. Roughly every ten years, the program updates NASA’s official Astrobiology Roadmap – a document that guides research and technology develop

ment across NASA and encompass the space, Earth, and biological sciences. This time around, the program is opening the process up to the wider astrobiology community and calling for the public to participate in decisions that will guide research funding and missions for the coming decades.

In May of this year, the Astrobiology Program launched the Astrobiology Future site (www.astrobiologyfuture.org/). The site hosts on-line hangouts and discussions, with each week dedicated to different scientific topics. This week kicks off with talks concerning the Early Evolution of Life and the Biosphere and Planetary Conditions for Life. The webinars begin today (Monday, May 20) at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. Video and transcripts from previous weeks are also available on the site, and there is still time be involved.

Road mapping history

The first NASA Astrobiology Roadmap resulted from a meeting of 150 scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center on July 20-22, 1998. The discussion focused on a set of fundamental questions that were developed at a workshop on astrobiology held in 1996. The group of scientists drafted a document that was designed to guide astrobiology research for the next 20 years (with a particular emphasis on the first 5 years). Since then, the roadmap has been updated with contributions from scientists and technologists selected from government, universities and private institutions.

The 1996 Astrobiology Roadmap outlined ten goals for research at NASA, and in 2008 this list was refined to seven:
Understanding the nature and distribution of habitable environments in the universe
Exploring for habitable environments and life in our own Solar System
Understanding the emergence of life
Determining how early life on Earth interacted and evolved with its changing environment
Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms and environmental limits of life
Determining the principles that will shape life in the future
Recognizing signatures of life on other worlds and on early Earth.

Each of these goals are expanded by objectives in the roadmap that directly inform how research funding is distributed by NASA. Previous versions of the roadmap are available from the Astrobiology Program website at: astrobiology.nasa.gov/roadmap

6) If husbands want more sex, women should do everything they can to give it to them. Focus on the Family’s marriage counselor Juli Slattery is blunt about: Married men need sex, and so wives who aren’t providing enough need to step up. While she claims she isn’t trying to guilt trip women into having more sex, she argues that sex is a physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational need men have. (Though apparently not when they’re single and can’t even fill this need on their own time.) “You cannot love him as a husband but reject him sexually,” she says, suggesting that regardless of the hold-up, women whose husbands want sex more need to find a way to provide it.

7) However, if wives want more sex, they should learn to go without. Slattery has very different advice for wives whose problem is that they want to get laid more, but have unwilling husbands. While you should move heaven and earth to drum up more desire for a husband who wants more sex, if you’re the undersexed one, you’re instructed to tell yourself “friendship, seasoned love, and shared history are often enough to maintain a marriage in which sex is no longer possible”. Men who want more sex are entitled to wives who try to provide it, women who aren’t getting any are told to be happy with “forms of physical affection that don’t involve the pressure of sexual intercourse, such as back rubs, holding hands, playful touching, and hugging”.

More: 10 Most Absurd Sex Tips From the Christian Right

PS - Just tested the new LGF Bookmark functionality - “saaweet”!

If you need further proof that Congressional Republicans are waging a War on Women, you need look no further than Thursday’s congressional committee hearing on H.R. 1797: District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill sponsored by notoriously anti-choice Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ8) that would criminalize abortions after the 20th week. There are currently 98 women serving in the House of Representatives. Not one of them was present on this panel. Not one female representative sat on the committee that will determine whether to make abortion illegal after the 20th week. The committee was comprised entirely of men, overwhelmingly white men. How telling.

This is a decision that reifies patriarchal control of women’s bodies, so it makes sense that white men of privilege sit atop their mighty throne, dictating what women can and cannot do with their own bodies. In a patriarchal society, women are expected to cede to men’s opinions and mandates, especially around maters of reproduction. H.R. 1797 cloaks itself in the guise protecting the “unborn” by using shoddy science and manipulative rhetoric in order to undermine women’s reproductive autonomy and reify patriarchal control of women’s bodies. If this weren’t the case, why would the panel be comprised solely of men?

More: Why Women Everywhere Should Thank This Republican White Male Anti-Choicer

House Panel Debating Whether to Legislate Women’s Lady Parts is Made Up of 8 Men

8 men

Republican members of the House are trying to push nationwide abortion legislation that would ban women’s access to the procedure after 20 weeks without any exceptions for victims of rape, incest or the health of the mother. The bill was (obviously) struck down by the Circuit Court of Appeals in Arizona for being unconstitutional on Tuesday, but Representative Trent Franks isn’t giving up his dream to legislate your lady parts. He organized a House Judiciary Subcomittee on Thursday morning to discuss the bill, but I guess everyone who has a uterus was busy that day? The picture above is what the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett encountered when she sat down to hear a panel set-up to debate the bill.

Remind you of anything?