The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision

I found a pretty interesting article from NASA that discusses the cosmic collision of the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxy. The event will occur billions of years into the future and give birth to new stars. Although the event is described as a collision, a cosmic merge is a more fitting term. According to NASA, this is not the end...

When Galaxies Collide
Let's look four billion years into the future. A group of our descendents stands with their teacher and looks up at a night sky ablaze with thousands of dazzling white stars. All of these new stars are being born, their teacher tells them, because of an immense cosmic event.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has collided with another galaxy, called Andromeda. Although the two galaxies are passing through each other at a million miles an hour, the whole process will take many millions of years to complete. And when everything settles down, the two galaxies will have merged into one.

The students fear that this may be the end of life, as they know it. But, their teacher reassures her class that there is very little chance of stars from the Andromeda galaxy hitting the Sun or the Earth. Even though the galaxies pass clear through each other, she says, stars in a galaxy are spaced very far apart.

They are like grains of sand separated by the length of a football field. The Andromeda stars simply pass by. But galaxies are more than just stars. They contain giant clouds of gas and dust. And, when galaxies collide, these clouds smash into one another. The clouds contain the raw materials needed to make new stars. It is the collision between clouds that has triggered a starry baby boom!
Source: NASA

Last Known Gay Holocaust Survivor Speaks Out

The Pink Triangles
“The way Nazis treated the ‘pink triangles’ is unspeakable,” Brazda told Têtu, referring to the emblem gays were forced to wear to signify their homosexuality. “They had absolutely no mercy.

The “pink triangles” not only had to suffer the ill treatments of the Nazis but also had to endure the homophobia of other prisoners. In the documentary Paragraph 175, which takes its name from the German Criminal Code provision regarding homosexuality, Pierre Seel, the only Frenchman to have publicly testified about his imprisonment for being gay, explains that "the weakest people in the camps were the homosexuals; they were at the very bottom.” Seel died in 2005.
Source: The Advocate

Life's Cycle of Judgment and Hate
The cycle of history repeating itself is crazy. And also the ignorance of people in general. For example, gay being a choice. When you're in a situation where you're killed for being gay, how do you rationalize it being a choice? Survival is a basic instinct.

The Curse of Ham

"In another area of human rights, many Christian clergymen advocated slavery. Historian Larry Hise notes in his book 'Pro-Slavery' that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He lists 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals." [James A. Haught, 'Holy Horrors']

In this groundbreaking book [The Curse of Ham], David Goldenberg seeks to discover how dark-skinned peoples, especially black Africans, were portrayed in the Bible and by those who interpreted the Bible--Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Unprecedented in rigor and breadth, his investigation covers a 1,500-year period, from ancient Israel (around 800 B.C.E.) to the eighth century C.E., after the birth of Islam. By tracing the development of anti-Black sentiment during this time, Goldenberg uncovers views about race, color, and slavery that took shape over the centuries--most centrally, the belief that the biblical Ham and his descendants, the black Africans, had been cursed by God with eternal slavery.
Source: Princeton University Press

Also Check Out
One Winged Angel - Sephiroth's Theme (Final Fantasy VII Advent Children)
The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam by David M. Goldenberg