subterranean homesick alien

Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a 'national tragedy'?

stfuconservatives:

“So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.

This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.”

One of the people who got shot was an antiviolence blogger. Somehow we aren’t seeing massive solidarity for New Orleans or the entire city going on police lockdown to find the perpetrators. Two reasons: 1) This mostly affected Black people, and we all know how much the media and the police give any fucks about Black people in New Orleans; 2) This was a gun crime, so we can’t criticize it because GUNS ARE FREEDOM!

Wait what…? I hadn’t even heard about this! The fuck.

posted 17 hours ago with 5,382 notes

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scroturn:

i get really offended when someone doesnt sit next to me but im also relieved they didnt sit next to me

this is the most accurate thing i’ve ever read

posted 2 days ago with 159,793 notes

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135541

"If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness."

A phrase that was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during WWII by a Jewish prisoner (via loveyourchaos)

posted 2 days ago with 112,011 notes

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distant-traveller:

Hubble finds dead stars “polluted” with planetary debris

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.
The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.
Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.
Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, a major ingredient of the rocky material that forms Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System. This silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the stars. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which then funnelled the material inwards.
The debris detected whirling around the white dwarfs suggests that terrestrial planets formed when these stars were born. After the stars collapsed to form white dwarfs, surviving gas giant planets may have gravitationally nudged members of any leftover asteroid belts into star-grazing orbits.
Besides finding silicon in the Hyades stars’ atmospheres, Hubble also detected low levels of carbon. This is another sign of the rocky nature of the debris, as astronomers know that carbon levels should be very low in rocky, Earth-like material.
This new study suggests that asteroids less than 160 kilometres across were gravitationally torn apart by the white dwarfs’ strong tidal forces, before eventually falling onto the dead stars.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)

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