January 13, 2016::End of the day round-up (pg 2)

Ben Carson: Gays And 'Secular Progressive Movement' Are 'Beating People Down' Over LGBT Rights

"The way it works now is they target you and they have all kind of hate speech ridicule, if there’s a way they can bring action against you they will do that, try to ruin your life," the retired neurosurgeon stated, somewhat from experience. Students at Carson's prestigious Johns Hopkins University petitioned in 2013 to have him removed as commencement speaker after his outrageous anti-LGBT comments.

"Look at all the people who because of their religious convictions and their belief in what the Bible says have lost their livelihood and they’re put in jeopardy over the gay marriage issue, when in fact this is supposed to be a country where you live and let live," Carson continued.

Atheist parents take on Christian ‘Good News Club’ with ‘Better News Club’

The group, consisting of atheists, humanists and skeptics, announced its own after-school program: a Young Skeptics club featuring science, logic and learning activities.

Young Skeptics is being sponsored by a volunteer-led group calling itself “The Better News Club.” Its members come from the Atheist Community of Rochester — the same group whose leader offered the first atheist invocation before a town meeting in Greece, N.Y., after the Supreme Court ruled in May that public meetings could begin with sectarian prayers.

Both clubs are based at Fairbanks Road Elementary School in Churchville, N.Y.

The Better News Club and Young Skeptics operate under the assumption that “it’s more important to teach children how to make belief decisions for themselves, rather than accept claims presented to them without thinking critically about those claims,” according to its mission statement.

As Hemant notes, Dawkin's statement in question was made 24 years prior to the 2013 publishing of Dahlstrom's book,,,



The $58 Million Frivolous Lawsuit Against Richard Dawkins is Finally Over

The lawsuit was filed by Karl L. Dahlstrom, a self-proclaimed “modern Renaissance man” who wrote an anti-evolution book called The Organized Universe in 2013. That book offered “scientific proof” that Darwinism was a hoax. To no one’s surprise, the experts were not convinced.

Dawkins, of course, has made a career out of explaining evolution to the masses — and he gets noticeably frustrated by people who trot out the same faulty arguments against evolution time and time again.
And that was the source of conflict.

In 1989, Dawkins wrote in a New York Times book review that “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”

Dahlstrom was convinced that the “somebody” Dawkins referred to in that statement was him.

I have a "strange" fascination with non-traditional music. Although my preference is old time jazz (no vocals) and early swing, stuff like klezmer music is just fun to listen to.

60 Years Later, A Wild, Baffling Recording Finds A Modern Spark

The Brothers Nazaroff are remaking the disc with a tribute release called The Happy Prince — though the group, which comprises klezmer musicians from three continents, is a lot more polished than their inspiration. Michael Wex, author of the best-selling book Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, says he was taken aback when when he heard the original 1954 recording. "My my initial reaction to it was, 'How the hell did this get recorded?'" he says. "It sounds like the Yiddish-speaking janitor and a bunch of his friends at Folkways broke in one night, and just sort of seized the equipment and started playing songs."

I am a sucker for a good lentil chili or curried lentils over rice. Being that I do not eat beef (maybe 3-4 times a month if that), lentils and chic peas (hummus) are a substitute protein for me. Whether I would go so far as to call them a "superfood", - eh, prolly not,,, I eat em cuz I like em and they're cheap.


Seeing that there may be an added benefit to the overall environment of the planet is a added bonus

With Twice The Protein As Quinoa, The Pulse Might Be The Year’s New Hot ‘Superfood’

“I don’t know if I could be any more excited about this category of food,” Tim McGreevy, CEO of the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council, told ThinkProgress. “This recognition is terrific for the industry and pulse farmers, but overall it’s important for the world. We have to have more focus on these crops.”

Beyond their nutritional characteristics, pulses are unique in the plant kingdom in that they fix their own nitrogen in the soil, meaning that growing pulses requires little to no added inputs from synthetic fertilizers. Nitrogen fertilizers, when applied to soil, release nitrous oxide as a byproduct, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to agriculture’s carbon footprint. Excess nitrogen can also be washed away during storm events, making its way into streams, rivers, lakes, and bays where it encourages algal blooms and dead zones that can be destructive to marine ecosystems.
,,,
Still, the pulse industry will need to overcome some key barriers before lentils and beans can reach the superfood status of things like quinoa; perhaps the most pressing issue is that most consumers either don’t know what pulses are, or are unaware of their environmental and health benefits. Currently, O’Neill said, most of the Montana’s pulse crop is exported, either to India or Mexico. In the United States, the majority of demand for pulse crops comes from garbanzo beans, which are used in hummus. But O’Neill and McGreevy both hope that the spotlight given to pulses by the United Nations increases both public interest in the food, as well as public funding for crop research.