Appeal
Almost two dozen members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, came together Wednesday to issue a resolution calling on the Obama Administration to strongly appeal the recent ruling by a Wisconsin federal judge declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional.
The members of Congress say they are willing to take the legal fight all the way up to the Supreme Court.
It was Congress in 1952 that designated the National Day of Prayer as a time to “turn to God in prayer and meditation.”
Now, it is current members of Congress who are trying to save the tradition.
“This decision is not representative of a vast majority of Americans regardless of their faith or even their non-faith,” Virginia Congressman Randy Forbes said.
Forbes, Chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, and Democrat Ambassador Tony Hall are rallying bi-partisan support for the National Day of Prayer in the wake of the Wisconsin ruling against it.
Every 140-character snippet of info you’ve ever shared publicly on Twitter will soon have a home next to the Declaration of Independence.Twitter and the Library of Congress announced Wednesday that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library.The purpose, according to a blog post by Library of Congress communications director Matt Raymond, is to document “important tweets” as well as gather information about the way we live through the sheer masses of tweets on the site.”I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data,” Raymond said in the post. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.”Twitter says it receives about 55 million tweets every day — amounting to billions of them since its inception.Only tweets from public Twitter feeds will be included, not those that have been set as private.
Dr. Mike Adams was on the academic fast track while serving the University of North Carolina-Wilmington as an atheist, but after the professor converted to Christianity in 2000, he alleges, the college put the clamps on his career.In a lawsuit against the university, Adams claims he was subject to unmerited complaints and “invasive” investigations following his conversion. Furthermore, he believes his application for promotion from associate professor to a tenured full professor was denied because his nationally syndicated columns were deemed too politically conservative by his leftist peers.”Christian professors should not be discriminated against because of their beliefs,” said David French, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Adams in the case. “Disagreeing with an accomplished professor’s religious and political views is no grounds for refusing him promotion.”U.S. District Judge Malcolm J. Howard, however, ruled against Adams last month, quoting a fellow professor’s claims that Adams hadn’t met minimum research and writing requirements and that his Christian, conservative writings were not “scholarly work by the measures of our discipline.”But Adams contends his scholarly output surpassed that of almost all of his colleagues and that the senior faculty’s real beef with him lies in the content of his convictions.
A leading free-market economist says it’s not a stable situation for a republican democracy when half of the citizens aren’t contributing to the cost of the government they’re benefiting from. J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says it is pretty noteworthy when a center-left organization like the Tax Policy Center is pointing out that an enormous portion of Americans are not paying any income tax.”When you’re in a situation where half the people are not paying taxes into the government, there’s very little check on the size of the government because people are getting it for free. That’s not a stable situation,” he notes. “The other part of it is we have to explain that what that means is these people are effectively on welfare,” he adds. “You’re getting services from the government and you’re not paying for it.”Foster says the country needs to explore tax reform ideas, but those ideas need to include making sure low- to middle-income Americans pay some nominal amount “just so they know they paid something into running their government.” The Washington-based Tax Policy Center estimates that about 47 percent of Americans will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions, and exemptions to eliminate their liability.
Behe
Eight years ago, biochemist Michael Behe wrote this open letter to the prestigious scientific journal, Nature:
Sir-
As a public skeptic of the ability of Darwinian processes to account for complex cellular systems and a proponent of the hypothesis of intelligent design, (1) I often encounter a rebuttal that can be paraphrased as “no designer would have done it that way.” …
If at least some pseudogenes have unsuspected functions, however, might not other biological features that strike us as odd also have functions we have not yet discovered? Might even the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye serve some useful purpose?
…. Hirotsune et al’s (3) work has forcefully shown that our intuitions about what is functionless in biology are not to be trusted.
Sincerely, Michael J. Behe
An Open Letter to Nature
Contrast that with Ken Miller’s now falsified claim in 1994: the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.
Although Miller won in Judge Jones’ Kangaroo Court, Behe has won where it counts, in the court of empirical facts. Behe has won the argument over the backward wiring of the eye (see the essay by medical researcher Michael Denton: Inverted Retina).
And Behe has scored a second victory in the debate over junk DNA. Although Nature may not have had Behe in mind when they wrote the following, it seems, the net effect is as if they have “written back” eight years later to Behe and affirmed his views while essentially trashing their poster boy Ken Miller the honest Darwinist.
In Human genome at ten: Life is complicated, we read: Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling. Researchers from an international collaborative project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) showed that in a selected portion of the genome containing just a few per cent of protein-coding sequence, between 74% and 93% of DNA was transcribed into RNA2. Much non-coding DNA has a regulatory role; small RNAs of different varieties seem to control gene expression at the level of both DNA and RNA transcripts in ways that are still only beginning to become clear. “Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naive,” says Joshua Plotkin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) is cautioning educators and expressing concerns on dealing with sexual orientation and gender confusion by sending a letter to every U.S. school superintendent. ACP president Dr. Thomas Benton sent the letter to the school districts. In that letter he refers recipients to FactsAboutYouth.com, a website that has been established to provide educators, parents, and youngsters factual information about sexual development. He encourages parents to go to the site, check out the facts, and start a dialogue with their school superintendent.”We feel like that’s where the movement towards a safer school environment will occur is by parents being
An Ohio college administrator recently lost her job after she wrote an article in her local newspaper against homosexuality. Now, Crystal Dixon, former associate vice president of human resources at the University of Toledo, is fighting back. “I wrote with no malice, no hatred in my heart. But I wanted to present another perspective on the subject and that was what was going through my mind,” Dixon said. “It never occurred to me that I would lose my job.On the morning of April 6, 2008 she woke up with a divine mandate, which was to respond to an editorial in the Toledo Free Press where editor-in-chief Michael Miller argued against gay prejudice, “based in religion.” He also advocated for domestic partner benefits for the Medical University of Ohio, the University of Toledo’s sister school.
Apple’s iPad will be available on April 3 and reports suggest that the product is off to a good start, with hundreds and thousands being ordered from Apple’s Web site. But the device has faced some criticism for lacking features such as a video camera, USB ports and support for technology called Flash that enables Web video.
But those technologies could be available in iPad alternatives reaching the market soon, including Neofonie’s WePad, Hewlett-Packard’s Slate, Notion Ink’s Adam and Innovative Converged Devices’ Ultra. These handheld devices have diagonal screen sizes from 7 inches to 11.6 inches and will be based on Google’s Android Linux OS or Windows 7.
Health Bill
ABC News’ Jake Tapper, Ann Compton and Sunlen Miller report:
Speaking volumes about how the votes are not yet there for health care reform, President Obama has decided to delay his trip to Asia. The president was due to leave for a trip to Guam, Indonesia and Australia on Thursday, March 18th, and return to Washington, D.C., on March 24th. The White House confirmed this morning that the trip will be delayed by three days. The president will now leave Sunday, March 21st, and return to Washington on Friday, March 26th.
White House officials and congressional Democratic sources say that while they believe ultimately the compromise House –Senate legislation will pass, as of now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., does not have the votes.
She needs 216 votes — a majority of the House which currently has 431 members — to pass the Senate bill and changes to the Senate bill. Anti abortion democrats led by Rep. Bart Stupak, D- Mich., have said they will not support the Senate bill since it has less restrictive language on abortion than the House bill.
Democratic congressional leaders had asked the president to delay his trip until the health care reform vote is over so as to personally appeal to House Democrats to vote for the bill that has consumed so much of his presidency.
Chinese Church An official from the Land Resources Bureau of Yaodu District in Linfen, China recently announced that a mega-church serving 50,000 Christians is to be torn down by the government.
The six-story main building of the Golden Lampstand Church towers over Linfen City where church leaders say the underground church is strong.
The $1.5 million facility has been the central location of an unregistered church network that is spread throughout the territory.
The military has been keeping people out of the building since the Chinese government seized it last year. Its confiscation came on the heels of the bloody attack and destruction of Fushan Church in September of 2009. Ten of Linfen City’s pastors have since been tried and sentenced to jail.
Now church members are calling on the global church to pray for their leaders and to protest the destruction of their church.
Skeptiod
Skeptoid podcast by Brian Dunning is an interesting debunker of commonly held misconceptions about a variety of subjects. While secular in nature Mr. Dunning does attempt to be fair to religious points of view from a materialists perspective. It is very interesting an enlightening. Podcast Reviews
Heinrich Hertz in Germany calculated that an electric current swinging very rapidly back and forth in a conducting wire would radiate electromagnetic waves into the surrounding space (today we would call such a wire an "antenna"). With such a wire he created (in 1886) and detected such oscillations in his lab, using an electric spark, in which the current oscillates rapidly (that is how lightning creates its characteristic crackling noise on the radio!). Today we call such waves "radio waves". At first however they were "Hertzian waves, " and even today we honor the memory of their discoverer by measuring frequencies in Hertz (Hz), oscillations per second--and at radio frequencies, in megahertz (MHz).
