The new Common Core standards for K-12 education has become the latest battleground for people who are trying to hold back the tide of good education because of fears that it will not support religious dogma, anti-science ideology, and conservative political history. In Ohio, A Republican state legislator Andy Thompson is introducing legislation to do this.
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The brutal murder of a journalist James Foley by the ISIS militants has rightly been widely condemned. But in doing so, president Obama was being disingenuous when he said that “No faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day.”
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We learn that the notorious Los Angeles Police Department has in two separate incidents just nine days apart shot dead a young Hispanic man and a young black man, sparking protests there too.
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Anyone who has seen a James Bond film will likely remember the iconic opening sequence in which Bond, viewed through a gun barrel, strides from right to left of the screen and halfway through whips out his gun and shoots in the direction of the viewer, accompanied all the while by the familiar theme music with its memorable guitar riff.
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It looks like the Ninth Gay Games held in Cleveland went off without a hitch and everyone had a good time. There had been some apprehension that Cleveland did not have the long history of LGBT acceptance and hence athletes and tourists may not feel welcome. But that fear proved unfounded.
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… be prepared for surprising things to happen.
PZ Myers had an interesting post on a topic that I have long been intrigued by and that is how when breeders selectively bred silver foxes purely on the basis of a trait by which they are more tolerant towards humans, the animals change physically too, such as their ears becoming more floppy and their snouts shorter, similar to the way that we believe that wolves in the wild evolved to become the dogs we now have.
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Ryan Deveraux of The Intercept describes what happened the day that he and another reporter were picked up and arrested by heavily armed police driving around in armored cars as they were covering the protests. It is a riveting account. If this can happen to two white journalists, one can imagine what might happen to young black men.
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Another football season is about to start and we have the Washington DC football team owner continuing to stick with its current deplorable name despite increasing disapproval and the decision by some reporters and media outlets to refuse to use it. I hope that this football team, like my hometown Cleveland Indians whose racist logo is also contemptible, lose every single game or at the least, never make the playoffs. At the moment, the Indians are well on the way to another season of well-deserved mediocrity and I couldn’t be happier.
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