All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Darkspellmaster]

Influential conservative group: Trump, DeVos should dismantle Education Department and bring God into classrooms


No loose threads, everything ties together into one big knot.

I'm just....again you can't just do one "god' you have to cover all religions because then you have to turn the schools all into private evengelical schools and the various religious groups don't agree on various things.

Baptists are not Protestants,
Lutherans are not Episcopalians,
And then there are a verity of other evangelical groups that don't follow the same codes.

Also you have to consider the Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, wiccans, and other religious practices that happen here. I can't believe that they even think this will pass. No groups agree on how their own religion should be practiced. What makes them think they can even set this up?!

[Tami]

Ugh, the canned hunting thing reminds me of another reason why I can't stand Mike Pence and the Indiana GOP. Last year while he was still governor he signed into law a bill for Canned Hunting

This is different from the deer culls which are necessary due to over population. I was hit by a deer once at night. He ran right out of the dark and into my driver side door.

But canned hunting is where they breed them in captivity then when they're big enough they put them in a corral and you pay to shoot them. Many real hunters were dead set against it. The deer hunters frequently volunteer with the deer culls.

That's cruel and ridiculous.

[Tami]

I'm just....again you can't just do one "god' you have to cover all religions because then you have to turn the schools all into private evengelical schools and the various religious groups don't agree on various things.

Baptists are not Protestants,
Lutherans are not Episcopalians,
And then there are a verity of other evangelical groups that don't follow the same codes.

Also you have to consider the Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, wiccans, and other religious practices that happen here. I can't believe that they even think this will pass. No groups agree on how their own religion should be practiced. What makes them think they can even set this up?!

The Catholic Church it's self has a division between conservative/traditionalists and Liberal/Modernists who align with Pope Francis. I know the Jewish religion has their own divisions, and so on and so forth.

That doesn't even take into account Atheists and others who don't follow any religion all that much.

[ImprobableQuestion]

That's cruel and ridiculous.

It's exactly the kind of hunting psychopaths like Pence and the Trump spawn love. All the killing with none of the skill or mess. Maybe by the end of the term they'll have canned hunting for Muslims.

[Darkspellmaster]

Meanwhile with crazy stuff, the NRA backed a really crazy, stupid thing today...

What the actual....?! So are we going to kill all our wildlife? Seriously, do people think that The Zoo is a real thing that will happen? And if Alaska's residents feel this is cruel then they should have final say, that is their state and those are their wild animals.

[Darkspellmaster]

The Catholic Church it's self has a division between conservative/traditionalists and Liberal/Modernists who align with Pope Francis. I know the Jewish religion has their own divisions, and so on and so forth.

That doesn't even take into account Atheists and others who don't follow any religion all that much.

Bingo. It will confuse the heck out of kids in general, and no group is going to just allow one religion to be taught at school, this is a big reason why the whole seperation of Church and State needs to be done.

I would say that there should be a world religions class added for students to study and understand different sects and religions but, not to convert them or for one religion to be above other religions.

Then there's the whole issue of which bible you would use. King James or a more modern version, how much do you teach? Do you skip over the section about Lott and his daughters or do you teach that as well. It's honestly rather screwy.

And as you pointed out C/T and L/M issues, and which versions of those do you go with too because even those have breaks in them based on denomination (Dominicans, Franciscans, Redepterists, etc.) And yes you have to take into account the Atheists and those who are agnostic.

[InformationGeek]

Here's something you won't hear about from Trump, a white supremacist attack was avoided today folks!

Local news station WMBF reports that law enforcement officials on Wednesday apprehended a 29-year-old man named Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell, who bought a gun from an undercover FBI agent that he allegedly planned to use in an attack against the Temple Emanu-El Conservative Synagogue in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

According to the FBI, McDowell telegraphed his intentions to attack the synagogue during a series of anti-Semitic Facebook posts in which he expressed his desire to carry out a massacre against it “in the spirit of Dylann Roof.”

In January, McDowell told the undercover FBI agent that he wanted to attack a synagogue, but worried that he didn’t have the proper training to handle it as efficiently as Roof did when he murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

“I got the heart to do that sh*t, but I don’t have to the good training,” he allegedly said. “If I could do something on a f*cking big scale and write on the f*cking building or whatever, ‘In the spirit of Dylann Roof.’”

While McDowell didn’t tell the agent about any specific building that he wanted to attack, he did post a link to the synagogue’s website on Facebook in late December, which led officers to believe that it was a prime potential target.

On Wednesday, agents arrested McDowell after spotting him “holding a bag in the parking lot of the Hampton Inn in Myrtle Beach.” Agents found him in possession of the handgun and ammo sold to him by the undercover agent, as well as a marijuana cigarette and a cell phone.

[Tami]

Good to see the FBI is still doing it's job. For now.

[mojotastic]

I know we talk more about political news here but i will post it since this thread is also about news in general, this might be interesting for some.

"The dwarf planet Ceres may be capable of supporting life,dawn spacecraft discovers organic materials on its surface"

http://www.popsci.com/dwarf-planet-c...src=SOC&dom=tw


The Dawn spacecraft has detected organic compounds on Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The findings are reported today in Science.
Organic compounds are the building blocks of life on Earth. Today's findings, combined with the fact that Ceres has abundant water and maybe even internal heating, suggest that "that primitive life could have developed on Ceres," notes Michael Küppers, a planetary scientist with the European Space Agency, in a commentary in Science. Küppers wasn't involved in the research published today. It's important to note, however, that no evidence of such life has actually been found—even if Ceres has everything it would need in order to house a life form, there still might not be anybody home.
An international team of researchers detected the organics using the Visible and InfraRed Mapping Spectrometer on the Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since 2015.

It appears these organic molecules were made on Ceres, instead of being delivered by other space rocks crashing into the dwarf planet. The heat of such an impact would have destroyed the organics, and their distribution suggests they didn't come from an impact. Instead, the researchers suggest they may have been formed inside Ceres. However, scientists are still investigating how the molecules could have formed and migrated up to the surface.

This is the first time organic molecules have been definitively detected in the asteroid belt. The findings, together with the discoveries from Europe's Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, "provide evidence that complex organic molecules and even amino acids are ubiquitous on small bodies in the solar system and that water ice is abundant in the asteroid belt," writes Küppers.

If organics and water ice do litter the asteroid belt, it could explain how Earth got its water and the building blocks of life. Planetary scientists think that during the early days of the solar system, Earth was too hot for those things to develop, and may instead have received the molecules from incoming asteroids and comets.


Hopefully some day we will see those oceans under those planet surface.

[Tami]

Trump labor pick was singled out in inquiry over politicized hiring

Donald Trump’s new nominee for labor secretary oversaw the justice department’s civil rights division at a time when the division was widely attacked for making politically-motivated enforcement decisions, and he was personally singled out in an inspector general’s report for failing to closely supervise a subordinate who was accused of illegally politicizing the hiring process.

Trump’s new nominee, Alexander Acosta, is the dean of the Florida International University College of Law and the former US attorney for the southern district of Florida. He is Trump’s selection to replace Andrew Puzder, whose nomination flailed after accusations of alleged wrongdoing in his businesses and personal life.

But Acosta’s record is not without its own potential sticking points. From August 2003 to June 2005, Acosta served as the assistant attorney general in charge of the justice department’s civil rights division. During that time, the division was roundly accused of a lax approach to racial bias and voting rights and of taking the politics of a lawyer into consideration when hiring new attorneys and assigning or transferring cases.

Not as bad as the last guy, but still there are issues.

[skyvolt2000]

Question how was no immigrants for day go for everyone?

I forgot all about it. Until someone on the radio bought it up and then I realized when I went to lunch downtown in a plaza with plenty of eating places.

There was a Taco bell CLOSED. I didn't think anything of it until the radio mentioned what today was.

[Tami]

Vice Admiral Robert Harward turns down national security adviser job

Sources close to the situation told Garrett Harward and the administration had a dispute over staffing the security council.

Two sources close to the situation confirm Harward Harward demanded his own team, and the White House resisted.

Specifically, Mr. Trump told Deputy National Security Adviser K. T. McFarland that she could retain her post, even after the ouster of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Harward refused to keep McFarland as his deputy, and after a day of negotiations over this and other staffing matters, Harward declined to serve as Flynn’s replacement.

Thing is, we need someone in there who won't staff the NSC with Trump cronies.

[Tami]

I know we talk more about political news here but i will post it since this thread is also about news in general, this might be interesting for some.

"The dwarf planet Ceres may be capable of supporting life,dawn spacecraft discovers organic materials on its surface"

http://www.popsci.com/dwarf-planet-c...src=SOC&dom=tw


The Dawn spacecraft has detected organic compounds on Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The findings are reported today in Science.
Organic compounds are the building blocks of life on Earth. Today's findings, combined with the fact that Ceres has abundant water and maybe even internal heating, suggest that "that primitive life could have developed on Ceres," notes Michael Küppers, a planetary scientist with the European Space Agency, in a commentary in Science. Küppers wasn't involved in the research published today. It's important to note, however, that no evidence of such life has actually been found—even if Ceres has everything it would need in order to house a life form, there still might not be anybody home.
An international team of researchers detected the organics using the Visible and InfraRed Mapping Spectrometer on the Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since 2015.

It appears these organic molecules were made on Ceres, instead of being delivered by other space rocks crashing into the dwarf planet. The heat of such an impact would have destroyed the organics, and their distribution suggests they didn't come from an impact. Instead, the researchers suggest they may have been formed inside Ceres. However, scientists are still investigating how the molecules could have formed and migrated up to the surface.

This is the first time organic molecules have been definitively detected in the asteroid belt. The findings, together with the discoveries from Europe's Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, "provide evidence that complex organic molecules and even amino acids are ubiquitous on small bodies in the solar system and that water ice is abundant in the asteroid belt," writes Küppers.

If organics and water ice do litter the asteroid belt, it could explain how Earth got its water and the building blocks of life. Planetary scientists think that during the early days of the solar system, Earth was too hot for those things to develop, and may instead have received the molecules from incoming asteroids and comets.


Hopefully some day we will see those oceans under those planet surface.

I follow that kind of news as well. It's fascinating.

[mojotastic]

I follow that kind of news as well. It's fascinating.

It really is, just imagine a ocean full of life under those planets surface, the temperatures might cold since they probably dont get sunlight and the ocean is under ice but still there fish that can survive those temperatures, why not an alien fish?, also these kind of news allow us to see how beautiful and complex the universe is, that why i like and follow the news on astronomy.

[mojotastic]

Question how was no immigrants for day go for everyone?

I forgot all about it. Until someone on the radio bought it up and then I realized when I went to lunch downtown in a plaza with plenty of eating places.

There was a Taco bell CLOSED. I didn't think anything of it until the radio mentioned what today was.

I saw that on twitter too, it was trending during the morning for a while.