There have been a spate of reports of pastors of megachurches getting caught doing things that Jesus would not do. Consider Mark Driscoll, head of the Mars Hill Church, that is actually (if you can believe it) franchised out like McDonalds to 15 different locations. He has got into trouble because of revelations about his shady behavior and he has advised his followers to not believe what they read about him on the internet.
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The Daily Show exposes the hypocrisy of the US government in that, while calling for an end to hostilities in Gaza, it is also rushing more weapons and ammunition to enable Israel to replenish the weapons stocks it has used up in the massive bombardment of Gaza so that it can keep bombing at the same high rate if the current ceasefire should break down. The assault has already resulted in the deaths of more than 1,800 Gazans of whom nearly 400 are children.
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Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept have a detailed analysis based on confidential documents that they have received that about 40% of the 680,000 people on the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database have no recognized terrorist group affiliation. The TSDB is the ‘watch list’ that the government uses and one can land up on it merely if some government agency somewhere decided that you are suspicious.
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The new film Boyhood has got rave reviews all around. I have not seen it as yet and so was interested by this article by Los Angeles Times and NPR film critic Kenneth Turan who was not overly impressed with it, thinking it merely OK and somewhat gimmicky.
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We already know that the CIA’s use of a fake anti-vaccination program in Pakistan to try and find Osama bin Laden has caused the entire polio vaccination campaign in that country to become the target of the Taliban who have used that appalling strategy to portray all vaccination campaigns as potential CIA plots and even kill heath workers in those programs..
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In the urban areas of Sri Lanka, schools tend to be mostly single-sex K-12 and among the boys’ schools there were intense sporting rivalries. During those games, boys would show their support using generic cheers that were common to many schools. These cheers originated long before my own time and likely had been around for (I suspect) at least a century. One of them was used when your team had suffered a setback and was meant to show that this was not a cause for concern. It consisted of the following verse set to music.
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The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper talks to a group of idealistic young college newspaper journalists who seem to have no idea of what the future world of digital news holds in store for them.
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The word ‘scientist’ is so common and seems so appropriate now that it seems hard to imagine that it is not only of relatively recent coinage but that its introduction was controversial for almost a century. I came across an interesting article that outlined the history of a disputed term that has now become a coveted title.
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The organizers have released a list of the speakers, topic, and times for this conference that is to be held over the Labor Day weekend (August 29-31) in Pittsburgh. You have to reserve your hotel room by August 8 to get the conference rate.
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The Salt Lake Tribune writes about a private educational outfit that fired one of its employees because he wrote a blog post about the use of ‘homophones’ (words that sound the same while having different meanings and even different spellings) because they were afraid of “creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.”
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