Oh, all right, this isn’t really news but it was news to me.
There is a fire pit from Apokolips on earth!
Well, not quite, but it’s not far from it.
Derweze underground is rich in natural gas. In 1971, during a drilling, geologists accidentally found an underground cavern filled with natural gas. The ground on which the drilling rig was placed collapsed, leaving a large gaping hole exposed with a diameter of about 50-100 meters. To avoid poisonous gases coming out of the hole, it was decided to let the gases burn. As of 2009, gases in the underground cavern are still burning without interruption. Locals have named the cavern The Door to Hell.
So there is a rational explanation for the place, but don’t you half wish there wasn’t? If the dolphin’s foiling a pirates was the comic booky thing I’ve ever seen, this eternal fire pit is the most comic booky place. Of course, if this place was out of a comic book, we’d be seeing demons climbing out of it or our heroes being thrown into so maybe it’s all for the best.
Hey, look at this CristianNewsWire and Robert Peters, President, Morality in Media:
Connecting the Dots: The Link Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders
It most certainly is not my intention to blame the epidemic of mass murders on the gay rights movement! It is my intention to point out that the success of the sexual revolution is inversely proportional to the decline in morality; and it is the decline of morality (and the faith that so often under girds it) that is the underlying cause of our modern day epidemic of mass murders.
OK, now let’s look at a couple of myths.
Myth #1: The United States is becoming less and less moral.
Bullshit. First of all let’s note that expanding rights for women and racial minorities has been taken place at the same time as the expansion of rights for gay people. Does anyone one want to come out and say our more racist/sexist society of the past was more moral than the one we have now?
Second, if the US were becoming less moral and more likely to become murders, certainly, we’d see a rise in crime in general and murder specifically while the gay rights movement has been growing. So let’s take a look at the truth from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics:
Those charts don’t suggest that the US has become more criminal, less moral lately do they? If anything, one would have to say that the US has become more moral lately. So if Robert Peters wants to connect the dots, shouldn’t he be finding that gay marriage and gay rights have increased morality and decreased crime?
Myth #2: Christianity makes people more moral.
You can see in this entry of my blog that religion does not seem to be connected to morality in the US. There we found that when compared to the least religious states in the US, the most religious states in the US:
rape was 2.3% more frequent.
robbery was 13.3% more frequent.
violent crime was 16.0% more frequent.
property crime was 22.8% more frequent.
murder was a whopping 27.9% more frequent.
And the trend continues throughout the world. Below is an excerpt from a Slate article by Steve Chapman entitled Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammo:
The United States is the most religious of all the industrialized nations. Forty-four percent of Americans attend church once a week, compared with 27 percent in Britain, 21 percent in France, 16 percent in Australia, and 4 percent in Sweden. Yet violent crime is not less common in the United States--it's more common. The murder rate here is six times higher than the rate in Britain, seven times higher than in France, five times higher than in Australia, and five times higher than in Sweden. Japan, where Christianity has almost no adherents, has less violent crime than almost any country. There are a few advanced nations that have high rates of church attendance and low rates of violent crime--Ireland, Italy, and Belgium--but they're the exceptions.
Within the 50 states, there is no evidence that a God-fearing populace equals a law-abiding populace. The Bible Belt has more than its share of both praying and killing. Louisiana has the highest churchgoing rate in the country, but its murder rate is more than twice the national average. The same pattern generally holds in the rest of the South. Tom DeLay's Bible-toting state of Texas has a murder rate triple that of Massachusetts, which is "ungodly" enough to have elected two openly gay members of Congress. New York, the very symbol of godless depravity, is perfectly average when it comes to extralegal slaughter. In Washington state, where Sunday morning slugabeds are more common than anywhere else in America, murder is 38 percent less common.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Christianity causes crime. I’m just saying there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that it prevents crime. And let’s go further and say that there doesn’t appear to be any connection between adding gay marriage to a society and an increase in murder.
What we might be able to find is a connection between irrationally fearing gays and being willing to lie about them.
A woman dropping off churchgoers at a nursing home on Sunday was shot by an arrow in the Bronx! Really! An arrow in 21st century New York!
How the hell does something like that happen? One of the answers below is the real one!
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It was bound to happen once Bullseye became the new Hawkeye.
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Some dick was showing off with his friends and shot the arrow through his fence and didn’t bother to see what happened with it even after hearing the woman he shot screaming.
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Oops! Roy “Speedy” Harper's aim is off for ... umm ... some reason.
You can probably guess which is the real answer, but if you’re anything like me, you had a more colorful (green? red?) answer in mind when you first saw the story.
An enormous pod of Dolphins foiled the plot of Somali pirates, and it isn’t the plot of an Aquaman comic! Are you kidding me? Seriously, this is the most comic booky thing I’ve ever read. I can hear Aquaman saying, “See? I told you I wasn’t useless!”
Thousands of dolphins block Somali pirates
BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhuanet) -- Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday.
The Chinese merchant ships escorted by a China's fleet sailed on the Gulf of Aden when they met some suspected pirate ships. Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants when the pirate ships headed for the China's.
The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.
China initiated its three-ship escort task force on Dec. 26 last year after the United Nations Security Council called on countries to patrol gulf and waters off Somalia, one of the world's busiest marine routes, where surging piracy endangered intercontinental shipping.
China's first fleet has escorted 206 vessels, including 29 foreign merchant vessels, and successfully rescued three foreign merchant ships from pirate attacks.
About 20 percent of Chinese merchant ships passing through the waters off Somalia were attacked by pirates from January to November in 2008, before the task force was deployed.
A total of seven ships, either owned by China or carrying Chinese cargo and crew, were hijacked.
Tianyu No. 8, a Chinese fishing vessel with 16 Chinese and eight foreign sailors aboard, was captured by Somali pirates on Nov. 14 and released in early February.
The second fleet of Chinese escort ships arrived at the Gulf of Aden on Monday to replace the first fleet.
(Xinhua and Cri contributed to the story)
Remember that scene in the Swamp Thing where our hero caused that tomato from that crook's sandwich to sprout inside of him, killing him in a really disgusting manner? You do if you read it! Creepy!
Yeah, well some guy in Russia has a spruce sprouting from his lungs. Really!
Russian doctors find tree growing in man's lung
MOSCOW, April 13 (RIA Novosti) - Surgeons in Russia's Urals Region were staggered to find a 5-centimeter high spruce growing inside a man's lung, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported on Monday.
The discovery was made while Artyom Sidorkin, 28, from the Urals city of Izhevsk, was undergoing surgery.
Sidorkin had complained of extreme pain in his chest and had been coughing up blood, doctors suspected cancer.
"I blinked three times and thought I was seeing things," Izhevsk surgeon Vladimir Kamashev told the paper.
Medical staff believe Sidorkin had somehow inhaled a seed, which later sprouted inside his lung. The spruce, which was touching the man's capillaries and causing severe pain, was removed.
"It was very painful. But to be honest I did not feel any foreign object inside me," Sidorkin said.
My Groups
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Gay Vox Updated: 3 minutes ago
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Atheists Updated: 1 hour ago
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Comic Book-ers Updated: Nov 6, 2009
