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Courtney
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ap64:
Can somebody tell me something? Why does Skeletor look like he’s jerkin’ dicks in EVERY GIF I FIND OF HIM???
I can’t I unsee this
Gotta do something to keep your sexy, well toned henchmen around.
After the January 7 attack on the the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the American Booksellers Association announced via press release that it was "exploring the logistics" of bringing copies of the magazine to US bookstores. This week, Broadway Books and Powell's both sent out announcements that they'll be stocking the January 14 commemorative edition of Charlie Hebdo, thanks to the ABA, which, making good on its word, has provided a limited quantity for sale in indie bookshops.
In a press release sent today, Powell's CEO Miriam Sontz touted Powell's history of support for free speech in the decision to stock the magazine, saying, "In 1989, Powell's made the decision to continue to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, even though a religious edict had been issued that called for the author's death. The first amendment is at the heart of Powell's values... As booksellers and citizens, we are sometimes called upon to uphold this principle. This is one of those times." The statement also specified that proceeds from copies of Charlie Hebdo purchased at Powell's will go to a relief fund for the families of the victims of the attack, on the French crowd-funding site Leetchi.com. So far, that fund has raised over 150,000 euros.
Broadway Books' announcement, made earlier this week through their newsletter, took a more pragmatic approach, emphasizing the importance of free speech while clarifying that, "We are selling these editions not necessarily because we agree with everything expressed in the magazine nor because we think it is always in good taste, but because we believe at our very core that freedom of speech demands at the very least that people not have to risk their lives merely because someone disagrees with what they say in print or how they express it."
There’s a new map of entrepreneurial hotspots in California, and it’s here to show you where the "real" Silicon Valley is. By coding startup characteristics and looking out companies' success six years down the line, researchers at MIT say that they were able to map out exactly which areas of California have the highest entrepreneurial quality, as well as identify which characteristics tend to typify companies that "make it big."
"We are able to ‘find’ Silicon Valley."
"There’s a lot of interest in entrepreneurship" in the US, says Scott Stern, an economist at MIT and a co-author of the study published in Science today. "And one of the key implications of our study is that we started disentangling the difference between simply starting a new business, and the kind of new businesses that have the potential for significant job creation and growth."
Based on the researchers' model, the best indicators of entrepreneurial quality were characteristics like a company's name. Companies that have short names containing words associated with technology tend to grow better. Businesses that aren’t named after their founders also tend to do better over time. In addition, the model showed that corporations are six times more likely to do well compared with companies that aren't incorporated. The same goes for trademarks; companies with trademarks are five times more likely to grow than nontrademarked businesses. Patents are also important indicators of entrepreneurial quality, Stern says. "We basically combined the novel use of getting at the details from a business registration with a predictive algorithm."
Silicon Valley, according to Google Maps
San Francisco Bay Area map of estimated entrepreneurial quality by ZIP code. (credit: RJ Andrew)
The researchers were also able to map entrepreneurial quality for each ZIP code in California. The resulting map presents a continuous mass of "high quality" entrepreneurship in the south of the San Francisco Bay Area, that goes from just east of Google to Millbrae and Burlingame, as well as in the area around Market Street in San Francisco, and close to Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore Labs. "This provides a unique characterization of Silicon Valley," says Jorge Guzman, an economist at MIT and a co-author of the study. Thanks to this method, "we are able to ‘find’ Silicon Valley."
Moreover, the economists found that areas around research centers — around universities like UCLA and Caltech, for instance — tend to present small pockets of entrepreneurial quality. "And thats kind of a novel finding," Stern says. Others have attempted to measure entrepreneurship in the past, but they mostly did that by looking at the number of new businesses that popped up in a given area, Stern says. "There has never been a consistent, realtime method that would allow someone to distinguish between types of companies in a systematic way." That said, the characteristics identified in the study aren’t supposed to provide an explanation for a given company’s success. They are merely indicators of entrepreneurial quality, he says — "it’s not a causal relationship."
"There has never been a consistent, realtime method... to distinguish between types of companies in a systematic way."
To reach these conclusions, Guzman and Stern identified new business registrants that appeared in California between 2001 and 2011. Of those startups, they removed those that were headquartered outside California. Then, they took 70 percent of the companies and coded each of them for a series indicators, including whether or not the companies had patents and how a company’s name was constructed. Using that information, they developed a model that asks what initial characteristics are present in companies that end up having "meaningful growth outcomes" within six years of foundation, meaning companies that are acquired by other businesses or that go through an initial public offering in a fairly short amount of time.
Businesses that aren’t named after their founders do better
Developing the model and identifying these indicators wasn’t enough, however; the researchers had to test the model to make sure it was accurate. To do that, they took the remaining 30 percent of their startup pool, and applied their algorithm based on how those companies looked when they were founded. This gave the researchers an initial quality score. Then they looked at what happened to those companies six years down the line. They found that 75 percent of the firms that were acquired by another company or that went through an IPO within six years of their foundation had received an initial "top-tier" quality score. Stern says the algorithm is a very good predictor of how companies grow.
The model developed by Stern and Guzman is limited by the fact that it relies on external characteristics, however — indicators that outsiders can quantify. All the stuff that’s going on under a company’s hood remains hidden from the algorithm.
Los Angeles Basin map of estimated entrepreneurial quality by ZIP Code. (Credit: RJ Andrews)
Estimated entrepreneurial quality by city. Each bubble represents a city in California, with the size of the bubble proportional to population. The color of each bubble varies with the percentile distribution according to the scale at the bottom. Each row is a distinct geographic region in California. (Credit: RJ Andrews)
Stern says that he plans to look at other states. The researchers would also like to identify other indicators of entrepreneurial quality. For example, they would like to know what role venture capital — early-stage funding — plays in entrepreneurial quality. The economists will also investigate if crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter participate in translating initial entrepreneurial quality into long-term growth. "Finally, we can examine the impact of various other aspects of founders of companies on growth outcomes," Stern says. "For example, there are differences between men and women, differences in terms of sector, and in terms of people who have been founders before, versus people who haven’t."
Once it's perfected, the method will "provide policy makers with the ability to track and assess their efforts to enhance entrepreneurial ecosystems in a new way," Stern says. Municipalities and states that want to increase entrepreneurship need to get a pulse on what’s happening in their area, Stern says — and this work could help them do just that.
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submitted by magenta_placenta [link] [4 comments] |
firehoseMWIP
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/04/rock-band-doctors-cancer/22810531/
'The occasion is the World Cancer Day theatrical release of a documentary called No Evidence of Disease. That's also the name of the band, which usually goes by N.E.D. The film, which follows the band members and their patients, will be shown at 43 Regal Cinema locations. At least one gynecological oncologist will be at every screening for a post-show discussion, director Andrea Kalin says.
"The band's music is the sound track for a movement," one that aims to give ovarian, cervical, uterine, vulvar and other gynecological cancers the kind of attention captured by breast cancer in recent decades, says Kalin, a filmmaker at Spark Media in Washington, D.C.'
firehosevia Kara Jean
#twolanguagesinVermont
Here’s a sweet little story of Democracy in Action. A bright eighth grader writes to her state legislator with an idea for a law: Vermont doesn’t have an official Latin motto, so why not adopt one? And for that matter, make it a reference to history? Neato!
So state Sen. Joe Benning — a Republican who was actually trying to do a good thing, which he has probably learned to never try again — introduced a bill to adopt the motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat.” — May the fourteenth star shine bright.” Because Vermont was the 14th state, see? Benning noted that when Vermont briefly minted its own currency, it was engraved with “Stella Quarta Deccima,” so the phrase had real historical cachet.
And then Burlington TV station WCAX put the story on its Facebook page with the headline, “Should Vermont have an official Latin motto?” and all Stupid broke loose when morons thought that Vermont was knuckling under to a bunch of goddamned illegal immigrants.
Charles Topher at “If you Only News” collected some of the worst of the over 600 comments from some of the geniuses worried about protecting ‘Merca from the invading Latin hordes:
Oh yes, there’s more:
And a bit more:
We are happy to report that Dan Zucker up there is actually parodying all the derp, as we’ll see in a moment.
Finally, there was the genius who wrote, apparently without a trace of irony, “Hell No! This is America, not Latin America. When in Rome do as the Romans do!”
Happily, since the news first broke, the literate smartasses have flooded into the WCAX Facebook comments, which now feature a few better replies:
Of course, several people replied to this by excoriating the writer for criticizing the sacred Marine motto.
Dan Zucker popped up again to explain in pure Palinese:
romans is italians. they is not the probelms. we keep boardars closed to chinese who take jobs from russians which is why they speak latin to virus imunization autism shot in the kidney like black lungh subura honey tuna.
So there. A few more:
We’re betting that, like Olivia McConnell, the kid whose proposal for South Carolina to adopt a state fossil almost crashed and burned when creationists decided the declaration should insist that the fossil was no more than 6000 years old, the anonymous 8th grade Latin student in Vermont has learned an important lesson about Democracy in America: It is conducted by morons.
firehosevia Rosalind
Belgian artist Stijn Eeckhout was curious what would happen if he put a camera flash in a person’s mouth, so naturally he had to try it. As his photos show, the flash transforms a human face into a ghoulish glowing skull, if only for a fraction of a second.
photos by Stijn Eeckhout, GIFs via PetaPixel
via PetaPixel
firehoserunning on Yahoo, which has online rights to SNL's
firehoseA+ gif
New design, better performance, and much better cloud syncing are coming to your Mac
Today, Apple revealed more information about the long-awaited Photos app for Mac, a complete revamp of how you organize, edit, and share photos and videos on the Mac. It fully replaces iPhoto and brings a lot of the ideas Apple debuted on the iPhone and iPad to the desktop, including refined edit tools, automatic organization based on time and location, and integrated iCloud backup.
We got a chance to spend some time with a "developer seed" version of Photos, which is available to registered developers starting today. A final version will be available with an update to OS X later this spring, and a public beta should also be available sometime before that. Even though the Photos app we used was not yet finished, we're quite impressed with what's here, and it's clear that this is a pretty giant leap forward over iPhoto.
The biggest and perhaps most obvious change coming with Photos is an entirely new design that better fits in with OS X Yosemite. Apple has brought over many of the same organizational systems from the iOS Photos app, including automatic collections based on location and time. If you've been using Photos on iOS for the past couple of years, you'll feel instantly at home on Photos for Mac. The new design offers more room to show off your photos, and the navigation tools are all at the top of the window, like many other native Mac apps on Yosemite.
Photos is much faster and more responsive than iPhoto ever was
But even more impressive than the new coat of paint is just how fast Photos is. iPhoto was often criticized for choking on large image libraries, but Apple says it built Photos to handle large and growing photo libraries, since people are taking so many more photos than they used to before. From our experience, it seems that Apple's efforts have paid off: the new Photos app effortlessly scrolls through thousands of photos, and you can quickly page through your collection, marking images as favorites. It supports all of the trackpad gestures you'd expect — two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, and rotation — and performance is really fast and smooth, at least with the demo photo library we tested on a new MacBook Pro.
There are also some really nice details, like a "loupe" mode that lets you preview images when you mouse over them. All of that contributes to making Photos much more enjoyable to use and a more modern experience than iPhoto ever was. We'll have to see if those performance improvements hold up once we have thousands of our own photos in the final version later this year, but we're crossing our fingers that the days of managing multiple libraries just to keep their size down are in the past.
Photos' other new big feature is its deep integration with iCloud Photos. While it was possible to sync photos to iCloud Photos with iPhoto, it always felt like a tacked-on feature and wasn't very easy to use. That's completely changed with Photos; it's easy and painless to back up all of your photos and videos to the cloud and then access them on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad wherever you are. All of the photos you take with your iPhone are available on your Mac and vice versa. Gone are the confusing and arbitrary limits to how many photos could be stored in the cloud with Photo Stream. Photos will now just use the storage available in your iCloud account. If you're not paying anything, that's capped at 5GB, which is frankly not very many photos, but Apple has paid plans with up to a terabyte of cloud storage.
The old My Photo Stream will be converted into an album when you opt in to iCloud Photos, but opting in is not required, and those that don't can still use My Photo Stream with its traditional limits. iCloud Photos will store full-resolution versions of your images on Apple's servers, but you can opt to have device-optimized versions delivered to your iPhone and iPad. There are many other ways to back up your photos from your phone or tablet, but Photos is the easiest solution we've seen to integrate images on your computer into the cloud.
Photos makes it easier than ever to get images from your Mac into the cloud
In addition to syncing all of your photos to iCloud, Photos will also sync any edits you make, so you can tweak a photo on your Mac and see those edits reflected on your iPhone moments later. The editing tools in Photos are all new, as well, based on the basic editing tools already available in iOS. On the Mac, they are more powerful and can do some really interesting things — the auto crop tool will automatically straighten and crop a photo according to the rule of thirds based on its horizon line, for instance.
The new Light slider will intelligently adjust six different parameters at once when you move it, letting even the most novice photographers tweak their photos without destroying key details such as highlights. (More advanced photographers can also manually control the parameters, like exposure, highlights, and shadows.) The new Black & White slider emulates various filters and film stocks, giving more range to black-and-white images than was possible with iPhoto. There are also basic retouching tools baked in, so removing a mole or dust speck doesn't require a jump over to Photoshop, and Photos offers eight one-click filters for Instagram-like effects.
Though the new editing tools are much better and easier to use than before, it's clear that Apple is targeting them mostly at novice users, not the advanced photographers that might have used Aperture in the past. Pros will find many of the editing tools too simple, and Photos' way of automatically organizing photos will likely break many photographers' workflows. Photos does still support RAW files, and those files can be stored in iCloud and synced across devices, but at this point it's not as powerful of an editor or organization tool as Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom. There's room for Apple to improve upon this from what we saw, but it appears that the company's goal with this app is to make it easier for everyone to manage and tweak their photos, not to satisfy the particular needs of pro photographers.
At this point, Photos is geared toward the novice, not the typical pro
To that end, Apple is still offering the Projects section in Photos, which lets you build and order photobooks, calendars, panoramic prints, and more from the photos in your library. The interface and tools have been refreshed and updated and are easier to use than they have been before, again to appeal to the novice user or someone who just doesn't have the time to micromanage their photo library.
Apple is seeding a version of Photos to registered developers starting today, with a public beta planned for the near future. The rest of us will be able to use the app later this spring, when it's included in a forthcoming update to OS X Yosemite. If what we've seen so far is anything to go on, Apple Photos offers a lot of potential, and it should make a lot of Mac users quite happy.
2015 isn’t just the year that we’re all supposed to get hoverboards and power laces—it also marks the beginning of the classic anime Neo Genesis Evangelion, in which a group of teenagers must save the world from the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that occurred fifteen years prior. Thankfully our teenagers today don’t actually have that problem, but that hasn’t stopped fans from trying to recreate an iconic part of the show—AKA, that part where the spear of Longinus gets stuck into the Moon.
While the spear shares a name with the the Christian relic used to pierce Jesus’s side during the crucifixion, in Neo Genesis Evangelion lore (and feel free to correct me if I’m getting this wrong because I have not seen the show yet, I KNOW I AM SORRY) it’s actually a powerful extraterrestrial artifact that can penetrate forcefields generated by Angels—the godlike monsters ravaging the Earth—and by Evangelion, the bio-machines humanity creates to combat them.
To celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary, as well as the year when the events of the show actually take place, fans in Japan are hoping to send a small 9.5 inch titanium alloy replica of the lance to the surface of the moon aboard a small US-built rocket. All in all the project would take 100 million yen (or $850,000 USD) to complete, so a crowdfunding campaign has been launched on the ReadyFor website.
Already the project has made 33,935,000 yen from more than 800 contributors, and has the support of Google Lunar XPrize competitor Hakuto, asronaut Naoko Yamazaki, and Battle Royale II actress Natsuki Kato. It has until April 5th to hit its goal, but it’s already a third of the way there, despite apparent concerns from commenters that the heavy Christian overtones of the series might cause backlash—at least, according to Agence France-Press (who, let’s be real, is probably trying to stir some shit):
“Wouldn’t it trigger the fury of the Pope? Can we really do this? Oh, I am worried,” one comment on the crowd-funding website reads.
“I am against this. Please don’t do this. I cannot be more worried about my children now after the Islamic State named Japan as a target,” wrote user Shizuka Yasuda.
Awww, it’s okay, friends. I know American Christians can be kind of terrifyingly ridiculous at times, but trust me, the Pope is, like, the chillest dude on the planet. Go forth and kill all giant monster angels you want, he’ll be fine.
(via Phys.org, Crunchyroll)
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By Graham Smith on February 5th, 2015 at 6:00 pm.
Ubisoft have some strange habits, one of which is setting two teams to make two games in the same series simultaneously – one destined for next-gen consoles and one for the ‘previous’ generation of consoles. Even more strange, the presumably lower budget latter often turns out to be better, as is reportedly the case with Assassin’s Creed Rogue [official site]. Where Assassin’s Creed Unity‘s Parisian streets were littered with bugs, Rogue more simply followed up on the ship captaining of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Now we know when it’s finally coming to PC: March 10th.
Assassin’s Creed has bent itself towards real estate management and tower defense and a dozen other sub-genres, but Black Flag’s seafaring combat is one of the few that makes sense. While Rogue doesn’t appear to have that game’s same jaunty sense of sunshine and frivolity, it does have the same combination of freerunning stabs and freebooting cannon fire.
The PC version also comes with a new feature in the form eye tracking input. If you’ve got the right kit – a SteelSeries Sentry, apparently – then gazing to the right or left of your monitor will cause the camera to pan. Or, as the press release puts it, “will pan to accommodate the exploration of this new visual territory, creating an ‘infinite screen’ experience.”
Infinite screens, golly. Here’s its launch trailer from November last year:
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Courtney
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"Here’s the thing. Your career won’t take care of you. It won’t call you back or introduce you to its parents. Your career will openly flirt with other people while you are around. It will forget your birthday and wreck your car. Your career will blow you off if you call it too much. It’s never going to leave its wife. Your career is fucking other people and everyone knows but you."
Amy Poheler - Yes Please
firehosevia THANKGODYOUREHERE
firehoseA 14-year-old from Argentina spoke about the tablet he uses and the plain-spoken pope asked, "Is it difficult...I don't have one."
Pope Francis Says He's a 'Dinosaur' With Computers NBCNews.com Pope Francis — who once declared the Internet is a "gift from God" — confessed he's a technological "dinosaur" during a Google Hangout with special-needs kids on Thursday. One of the youngsters asked the pontiff if he likes to take pictures and upload ... and more » |
firehosehopefully teaching acrobatics to kids
WBZ reports on the punishment agreed to by the guy who did a flip over the tracks at Park Street in December.
firehoseall carriers suck forever
Mary Bauer of Addison, Illinois, is like many people a frustrated Comcast customer. Her cable TV service continually kept shutting off, and she says 39 Comcast technicians visited her home over several months to try to fix the problem.
Then, she stopped receiving her monthly bill. After four months without a bill, she called Comcast to ask how much she owed. A new bill was sent, but not to “Mary Bauer.” Instead, the bill was addressed to “Super Bitch Bauer,” according to a report on WGN in Chicago yesterday.
“This is a disgrace to me, a disgrace,” Bauer said. “Why are they doing this to me when I pay my bills?”
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
firehoseDARREN SPROLES
ThOR hates sports beat
The Eagles' running back opened up to SB Nation about his own struggles with stuttering and using that experience to help others.
Darren Sproles has a debilitating stutter.
It started when he was about 6 years old, and he learned very quickly how to hide it. He spent his teenage years avoiding public speaking. When he got to Kansas State University and had to speak to the media, he responded with one-word answers. He does his best to stay away from on-camera appearances, and even though he has learned how to control his stutter, he still keeps his answers short when speaking to unfamiliar people. He knows which words to avoid -- ones that start with the letter "B" tend to give him trouble -- and he hurries interviews in an effort to be done with them as quickly as possible.
"It's frustrating," Sproles said last week, discussing his stutter. "I have to stop and then I have to pretty much just breathe. That's the main thing, just breathing."
Throughout Sproles' interview, it becomes clear what his triggers are. When discussing movies or music, he speaks without a hitch. But when asked directly about his stutter, he gets nervous he starts using those breathing techniques to get through certain words and phrases. He maintains eye contact, but still cuts his answers short when he feels a stutter coming.
Sproles is addressing his stutter publicly in an effort to help kids who are dealing with the same struggle that has kept him largely silent until now. He is a part of USA's NFL Characters Unite documentary, a film designed to pair football players who have faced challenges with children going through similar difficulties in an effort to address issues with bullying, prejudice and discrimination. The running back was paired with 16-year-old Sheila Smith, a high school student who has been teased for her stutter so often she decided not to speak at all in school to protect herself from bullying.
"I was teased every day," she said in the documentary. According to the filmmakers, she has become increasingly anti-social and refuses to participate in school activities. "It's a difficult thing to have to deal with in life."
Sproles spent time with the teen as cameras followed, giving her advice and encouraging her to not let the stutter get in the way of life experiences. Smith admitted her fear of speaking to people was preventing her from pursuing her love of fashion design, so Sproles introduced her to the fashion program at the Philadelphia YMCA and helped her design an anti-bullying t-shirt. He also introduced her to a local fashion designer, who has a stutter, to encourage the teen not to give up.
Throughout the afternoon, sitting side-by-side designing their t-shirts, Sproles noticed when Smith was talking about fashion, she didn't stutter.
"I feel like I got a gift," said Smith. "Now I can do stuff that I haven't been able to do."
During his interview with SB Nation last week, Sproles admitted being a football player helped him avoid the pain of bullying that Smith felt. While some kids would mimic his stammer, most left him alone.
"The only thing that gets me now is when there's a camera in my face or when I get nervous. That's when I stutter," said Sproles. "At home with my wife and friends, I don't stutter. It's crazy."
Being on camera in a documentary is a potential trigger for him. He almost turned down the offer to appear in Characters Unite, but he realized that not every child going through the same difficulties has the advantage of sports to help them avoid bullying. That, along with some wise words from his wife, Michelle, encouraged him to overcome his fear of being on camera in order to help Sheila.
"I didn't want to do it because of [my stutter]," said Sproles. "But my wife talked me into it. She said, 'You can't keep running from the camera. Just do it. The whole world knows you stutter. It is what it is.'"
Then he paused for a minute and nodded.
"She's a smart woman."
The 4th Annual NFL Characters Unite Documentary airs Feb. 6 at 7 p.m. ET on USA Network.
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stop praising men for doing mediocre shit that women are expected to do and never fucking get thanks.
idc if you do the dishes. idc if you cook. idc if you do ya baby’s hair. you’re already supposed to do that shit.
firehosevia Russian Sledges ("pope is still catholic")
Pope Francis gave his blessing on Wednesday to a referendum that would ban marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples in Slovakia, which will be voted on this Saturday. “I greet the pilgrims from Slovakia and, through them, I wish to express my appreciation to the entire Slovak church, encouraging everyone to continue their efforts in defense of the family, the vital cell of society,” Francis said during Wednesday’s general audience in Rome. “For first time in Slovak modern history the Catholic Church is heavily involved in political campaign,” said Martin Macko, executive director of the LGBT rights group Inokost. The Slovak referendum follows the success of a similar ballot measure in another Catholic-majority Eastern European country, Croatia, which adopted a ban on recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples in December.As I reported in October 2014, this weekend's referendum is being pushed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, who filed a local amicus brief even though Slovakia had already approved a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in June 2014, earning lavish praise from Brian Brown. The coming vote would essentially affirm that ban and widen it to include any recognition of same-sex relationships. Two related bills on the ballot would ban same-sex couples from adopting children and allow parents to withdraw their children from sex education classes.
As was to be expected, the sodomist pressure group inside the European Parliament is furious. While they had no problem with narrow parliamentary majorities redefining marriage to include same-sex “marriages” in France, Spain, and other countries (usually without the matter having been discussed in the preceding electoral campaigns…), they abhor the idea that ordinary people should have their say on the matter. Sophie Veld, a Dutch MEP and leader of the homosexualist and pro-abortion lobby, described the forthcoming referendum as “distasteful”, thereby betraying her own rather selective adherence to human rights and democratic procedures. We, however, are looking forward to the outcome of this democratic vote.Buzzfeed notes that the local Catholic Church is being evasive about their role in the referendum:
The leadership body of the Catholic Church in the country, the Conference of Slovak Bishops, has walked an awkward line around the referendum. On the one hand, the bishops have given full-throated support to the proposal, including endorsing the referendum in a televised mass and pastoral letter on Feb. 1. The conference also appears to have solicited funds to support the Alliance for Family through a page on its official website. On the other hand, it has bristled at the suggestion that the referendum is the creation of the church. “The referendum itself is an initiative of civil society; it’s not primarily of the church,” said the conference’s spokesman, Father Martin Kramara, in an interview with BuzzFeed News.Per Slovakian law, at least 50% of all registered voters must cast a ballot in order for a law to be valid. That rule reportedly gives local LGBT activists some hope and they are urging Slovaks not to vote at all rather than vote against the three proposed bills. But with Pope Francis now aligning himself with some of the most powerful US-based anti-gay hate groups, that tactic may prove futile, particularly because of Slovakia's small population.
firehosevia Jakkyn
Nine out of ten doctors agree, anti-vaxxers are morons. The tenth doctor also agrees. So does the eleventh, twelfth and the War Doctor. The Valeyard could not be reached for comment.
We are now selling these brand new phone cases! Designs include Bunnies Monolith, Cornelius Snarlington, Dungeon Divers and more. Check ‘em out.
![goat-mcase[1]](http://amultiverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/goat-mcase1-450x346.jpg)
