Indies Again

TCU. EC?

Whether you know it or not, many of your classmates are gay. Here’s an article from the student newspaper of TCU — Texas Christian University — in Fort Worth, Texas. After you read the article, answer this question: should Erskine follow TCU’s lead and create a campus Gay-Straight Alliance or LGBT organization? 

SGA approves support for campus LGBT community

Eric Anderson

Issue date: 3/4/09 Section: News

The Student Government Association House of Student Representatives unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday to support a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender resource center on campus.  

Su Harz, a junior social work major who introduced the resolution to the House, said the purpose of the resolution is to show that LGBT students have the support of SGA in seeking needed resources. Groups like the Gay-Straight Alliance for LGBT students already exist at the university, but the GSA excludes faculty and staff, she said. The proposed center would serve the entire LGBT community on campus.

Still drinking out of plastic bottles?

FDA says it's unable to regulate BPA As 'indirect food additive,' substance is exempt from scrutiny By Meg Kissinger of the Journal Sentinel Posted: Jan. 17, 2010 U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials say they are powerless to regulate BPA, although   they have declared the chemical to be a safety concern for fetuses, babies and young children. A quirk in the rules allows BPA makers to skirt federal regulation. "We may have to go after legislation to change it," Joshua Sharfstein, the FDA's principal deputy director, told the Journal Sentinel. The newspaper has been investigating the government's lack of regulation regarding BPA for three years.

Life is Dangerous — Then and Now

January 20, 2010 | 44 comments

Endangered Species: Humans Might Have Faced Extinction 1 Million Years Ago

A new approach to probe ancient regions of the genome suggests early human populations were scarce

By Carina Storrs   

 

ANCIENT DE-POPULATIONS: Genetic study reveals that populations of ancient humans were surprisingly small.  

New genetic findings suggest that early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction.

The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population—an indicator of genetic diversity—of early human species back then, including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens, was about 18,500 individuals (it is thought that modern humans evolved from H. erectus), says Lynn Jorde, a human geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That figure translates into a total population of 55,500 individuals, tops.

SC Shows Its Rear to the Nation Again

This time it’s our lieutenant governor and gubernatorial candidate Andre Bauer, who seems lost in a forest of prejudice and ignorance. Is it a coincidence that all the politicians who are causing SC national — indeed, international — mortification are Republicans? 

I think not.

Posted on Sat, Jan. 23, 2010

Bauer: Needy 'owe something back' for aid

By NATHANIEL CARY
The Greenville News

GREENVILLE - Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to   "feeding stray animals."

Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said.

SCOTUS

The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too

By Scott Klinger, AlterNet
Posted on January 22, 2010, Printed on January 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145323/

This week's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case removes all limits on large   corporations to finance and influence federal elections. In its ruling the court reverses a decades-old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaigns, and guts pieces of the popular McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation. In so doing the Court implicitly embraces a 125 year-old precedent in the case of Santa Clara v. Santa Fe, where the Court first developed the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, explicitly granting corporations the same political and civil rights granted to human beings (historian Thom Hartmann discovered that the principle originated with a corrupt court clerk who added it to the case summary, rather than with the court itself).

Hot Times in the Old Town Tonight

NASA: 2009 tied for 2nd-warmest year, 00s hottest decade too

By John Timmer | Last updated January 22, 2010 11:29 AM

As the past year's temperature data came in, it became increasingly clear that 2009 was going to be a very hot one unless something unexpected happened in the latter months of the year. Something unusual did in fact happen, but it only ended up shifting warm and cold air around. As a result, when NASA completed its analysis of 2009's surface temperatures, the year ended up in a statistical tie with a handful of others asthe second warmest on record.

According to NASA's methods, the warmest year on record was 2005, and 2009 shares the second-warmest title with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007. No surprise, then, that the past decade was also the warmest record, a finding that's far more indicative of climate change than any given year's results.

A timely article —

Here’s a timely article I ran across this afternoon.

Americans and Abortion: An Overview

Sept. 29, 2008

More than 35 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's historic Roe v. Wade(1973) decision granted a woman the constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy, abortion remains a controversial issue. Indeed, although the frequency of abortions in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest point since 1974, the debate over abortion continues to play a prominent role in state and federal politics.

Although Roe prohibited states from banning abortion until late in a woman's pregnancy, subsequent high court rulings allowed states more power to regulate the procedure. Today, there is an uneven patchwork of abortion laws around the country. For example, while 17 states provide public funding for all or most abortions that are deemed medically necessary, 28 states require doctors to provide a woman with some form of counseling about the risks of abortion and 24 states oblige a woman to complete a waiting period before having an abortion.

A Visit to the Creation Museum

Vanity Fair

RELIGION

God Created Mannequin. Left: Adam and Eve; right: hammering home a point.

Roll Over, Charles Darwin!

On the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s masterwork, the author visits Kentucky’s Creation Museum, which has been battling science and reason since 2007. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark: it’s a breathtakingly literal march through Genesis, without any hint of soul. Plus: Paul Bettany photographs the Creation Museum.

BY A.A. GILL

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL BETTANY

FEBRUARY 2010

It’s not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about. They could, though, if they were the bragging sort, brag about a quaint old optician’s shop that will make you a new pair of spectacles in an hour—by chance I am both shortsighted and had an hour to spare. As the nice lady gave my new lenses a polish, I asked her if she thought the eye was such a complicated and mysterious structure that it could have been created only in one inspired, farsighted moment by God and not by the blind trial and error of natural selection. “That kind of makes sense,” she smiled. But then, Galileo invented a refracting telescope and the church locked him up for pointing out that, as he learned by observing the rest of the solar system, the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Do you think that glasses might be the work of the Devil? She smiled again. “Would you like a hard or a soft case with that, sir?”

The Public School Question

1/19/10 

TEACHER WITH A BIBLE DIVIDES OHIO TOWN

by Ian Urbina

MOUNT VERNON, Ohio — Most people in this quiet all-American town describe themselves as devoutly Christian, but even here they are deeply divided over what  should happen to John Freshwater.

Mr. Freshwater, an eighth-grade public school science teacher, is accused of burning a cross onto the arms of at least two students and teaching creationism, charges he says have been fabricated because he refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his desk.

After an investigation, school officials notified Mr. Freshwater in June 2008 of their intent to fire him, but he asked for a pre-termination hearing, which has lasted more than a year and has cost the school board more than a half million dollars.

The Woman Question

Too many comments are getting too thin — last minute, slap-dash, not much there. That has to change. Serious comments only, please.

The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Religion and WomenBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 9, 2010

Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they   offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?

It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.