At its December 9, 2010, meeting, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 8-2 to approve high school biology textbooks, despite the ongoing complaints of creationists objecting to their treatment of evolution. As NCSE previously reported, a decision on the textbooks, expected initially in October 2010, was deferred by the board, which sought a recommendation from its Textbook/Media/Library Advisory Council. On November 12, 2010, the council voted 8-4 to recommend the textbooks. Then, on December 7, 2010, a committee of the board voted 6-1 to move forward with the purchase, “over the objection of a crowd of people who wanted books that at least mention creationism or intelligent design or say that evolution is not a fact,” according to the Lafayette Daily Advertiser (December 7, 2010).

More here

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now that Mythbusters is on Roku and Netflix via various venues, I’ve been watching it. Previously I’ve only seen a few. They’re pretty good. And now, President Obama will be on Mythbusters: “The Discovery Channel has announced that the Commander-in-Chief will be doing a cameo on “Mythbusters” tonight. He’ll be asking hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to redo one of their projects.” *

Meanwhile, with the holidays fast approaching, you may need to find a good therapist. Lemondrop has a post on that.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s a great idea that I found on a new blog called Notes from the Pondonome, (which from the photograph in the blog’s banner must be some kind of remote church and graveyard near a river in South Dakota): It involves bacteria.

This is interesting. Well, the whole conversation is interesting, but it gets especially interesting around 6 minutes …

Question: … there’s this US Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning arrested and it’s alleged that he confessed in in a chatroom to have leaked …. 280 thousand classified us embassy cables. Did he?

Answer: Well, we have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, five days ago, with obtaining 150k cables and releasing 50. We have released early in the year a cable from the Reykjavik us embassy but not necessarily connected…

What is really interesting about this has little to do with Assange, Wikileaks or the cables, but rather, Human Nature. Obviously, WikiLeaks has the cables if not in hand at least in the bush at that moment, and Assange is essentially lying, or perhaps, telling the kind of white lie that a diplomat might tell on the surface while something somewhat different is going on underneath (and in teh cabalz!!!). And, as a human not trained by MI-5 to have ice in his veins when telling a lie, he spews …. SPEWS!!!! … the “tells.”

So, really, it’s more like:

Answer: glance to the side, swallow hard Well, we have denied receiving those cables. wiggle shoulder He has been charged lilting rise of voice, five days ago, avoid eye contact with obtaining twitch 150k cables and releasing 50 hard swallow. We have released cough cough early in the year um a cable from the grimace Reykjavik us embassy but not necessarily connected…bla bla bla

LOL

In any event, given the current impact that Wikileaks seems to be having, this older Ted talk which I have obtained from a source is worth a look:

“Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth’s lifecycle. And yet we’re being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in Earth.”

Or at least, I think he was trying to make a point, but I’m not entirely sure.

Continue reading Jew with a gun tries to make point, gets busted, is very creepy →

Just a quick note. As the Minnesota Governor’s Race recount proceeds, it became apparent, as many of us predicted, that Emmer’s standing in that context has moved in the wrong direction from his perspective. He will end up losing this race by more votes than had he simply conceded to begin with. It is now expected that Emmer will concede the race any moment now, which has apparently (though this is unofficial) prompted the Electio Canvassing Board to cancel today’s meeting at which the contested votes would have been examined.

This allows the Republicans to say “We lost by fewer than 9,000 votes” instead of “we lost by more than 9000 votes,” I suppose.

Elizabeth Edwards — who catapulted into the public eye in 2004, when her husband, Sen. John Edwards, ran for president and was John Kerry’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, has died, a close family friend tells NPR. She was 61.

Over the past few years, Edwards wrote two best-selling books, fought a well-publicized battle against cancer and saw her marriage crumble after her husband fathered a child with another woman.

NPR