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God Is Up To Something Mary Lindow So? God Is Up To Something Fresh In This Season! ALL OF US ARE INDIVIDUALLY SOMEHOW BEING LED BY THE FATHER! ALONE...INTO QUESTS OF THE HEART. He is testing us sorely to see if we long for any power from the pull of glory, revelation, or any spiritual insights. I TRULY SEE HIM TESTING US ALL IN DEEPER REGIONS OF OUR SOULS THAN WE EVER DREAMED EXISTED. THIS THING HE IS DOING! IT IS A PRECISION OPERATION THAT "LASERS" AWAY EVERYTHING FRAUDULENT, EMPTY, AND EMBELLISHED! HE IS DRIVING US LOVINGLY TO SIMPLICITY, LOYALTY,...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR EVERYBODY who is anybody seems to have decided that the American high school is responsible for the failings of American students. The Bush administration, many governors and even Bill Gates have now called for radical reforms. Reflecting this growing consensus that the high school is, in Mr. Gates's words, an "obsolete" institution, the governors of 13 states have pledged an overhaul of the high school system, and more are expected to jump on the bandwagon of reform. Let's slow down here. American education is famous for inspiring crusades, and the history of the 20th century is littered with...

I Am The Change Susan Cummings I AM the Change. I AM the Opposition. I AM the Answer. I AM the Change, and it comes forth from My Plan for you. I told you that I was coming forth and shaking all things. Everything is going to change, including you. Nothing is going to be left that is not affected by My dealings and administration of this change. Everything will be removed from it’s place. Nothing will stay in it’s foundation or base, as all things are under My scrutiny and My hand. Every work will be made manifest, and...

An influential federal advisory group plans to recommend in the next few weeks that all newborns be screened for 29 rare medical conditions, from the well known, like sickle cell anemia, to diseases so obscure that they are known to just a handful of medical specialists and a few dozen devastated families. But while no one argues with the idea of saving babies, the proposed screening is generating fierce debate. The dispute centers on how useful the test findings would be. Would going ahead with the full list of tests result in more good than harm, physically and emotionally? Or...

Urging a major shift in U.S. policy, some health experts are recommending that virtually all Americans be tested routinely for the AIDS (search) virus, much as they are for cancer and other diseases. Since the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the government has recommended screening only in big cities, where AIDS rates are high, and among members of high-risk groups, such as gay men and drug addicts. But two large, federally funded studies found that the cost of routinely testing and treating nearly all adults would be outweighed by a reduction in new infections and the...

Jesseka Davis vowed last spring to do her best on Missouri's standardized tests, but filling in the ovals became too tedious. “I was bored. I filled in A, B, C, D,” said the junior at Oak Park High School. “Why try hard on something that doesn't really affect me?” Davis and her parents, Debi and Greg Davis, say she is a much better student than her standardized test scores show. “We don't put much stock in them,” Debi Davis said. “I don't think it's an accurate assessment of her skills.” Fair or not, test scores are how Davis' school and...

Teachers who failA survey of certification-test scores yields alarming results More than half a million Florida students sat in classrooms last year in front of teachers who failed the state's basic skills tests for teachers. Many of those students got teachers who struggled to solve high school math problems or whose English skills were so poor, they flunked reading tests designed to measure the very same skills students must master before they can graduate. These aren't isolated instances of a few teachers whose test-taking skills don't match their expertise and training. A Herald-Tribune investigation has found that fully a third...

WASHINGTON (AP) — At least a dozen cases of lasers being beamed into aircraft cockpits since Christmas in Cleveland and other cities are being investigated by the FBI. Advertisement The lasers can temporarily blind pilots. A cluster of incidents received wide attention between Christmas and New Year's Day, and the FBI says at least four more have occurred in the past week. Authorities have continued to rule out terrorism. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta was briefing reporters Wednesday about the issue at the Federal Aviation Administration's aeronautical research center in Oklahoma City. Mineta was expected to announce new measures for alerting...

Newspaper investigation digs up evidence of schools cheating on standardized tests Associated Press HOUSTON (AP) — A newspaper investigation has found evidence that a Houston elementary school celebrated for its high test scores obtained at least some of its success from cheating. "You're expected to cheat there," said Donna Garner, a former teacher at Wesley Elementary who said her fellow teachers instructed her on how to give students answers while administering tests. "There's no way those scores are real." The Dallas Morning News investigation also found evidence of cheating at two other schools affiliated with Wesley. Wesley, which has been...

THE ACADEMIC CONNECTION Correction Appended Last December, medical school researchers went to a professional meeting in Puerto Rico with a sense of urgency. Federal drug regulators were reviewing unpublished data from their studies on the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents to see if the drugs increased suicide risks. The group included many of the researchers whose published positive findings had helped persuade doctors to prescribe antidepressants like Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac to young patients. Now, faced with growing safety questions, the researchers had been trying for months to gather all the test data about those and similar drugs...

WASHINGTON - A religious liberties lawsuit brought by a Satan worshipper, a Wiccan witch, a white supremacist, and an adherent of an ancient Viking religion is drawing the impassioned support of major national religious groups as it approaches a hearing before the Supreme Court. The case is potentially the most important religious liberties case on this year's docket, impacting how far a state can go to accommodate the religious practices of its citizens and whether Congress can require states to be more accommodating. The case was filed by a group of Ohio inmates - Jon Cutter, J. Lee Hampton, John...

Link post: access the thread and get your Merry Christmas (Island) greeting using the link below -- and post any discussion and commentary there, of course. Geology Picture of the Week, December 19-25, 2004: Merry Christmas (Island)

The reason it's named Christmas Island is as one would expect: it was discovered on Christmas Day 1643 by Captain William Mynors. Click for double size: And since this is Christmas Island, the posting would not be complete without a couple of pictures of its most famous annual event:

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 15 - Once a week in the shadow of City Hall, a leaf blower blasts air into tubes, lifting up a big bright yellow tent. A line of the homeless, addicts, the mentally disabled and people who say they are "in transition" wait, seemingly oblivious to the cold. They shout to one another good-naturedly. A passer-by might think that someone is offering a free trip to a climate where flamingos preen. In fact, the tent is part of a demonstration project by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that takes rapid H.I.V. testing to city streets....

The Red Rooster III was 90 miles out of San Diego on an afternoon in July when it came across a fisherman's dream, a school of albacore tuna. Suddenly, the charter boat's skipper, John Grabowski, saw a rod flying in the air as a passenger, a 72-year-old man, seized up with a heart attack. Mr. Grabowski ran to get the portable defibrillator kept on board. Shocked with the device, the man appeared to revive, but more shocks were needed. They never came. The device signaled that it was out of power and failed to work again. A replacement battery did...

"The devil made me do it." That age-old excuse for sin, a way to deny personal responsibility for one"s actions, is no longer fashionable. As I wrote in a Creation magazine editorial "Evolution made me do it!" in June 2000, nowadays, whether it"s homosexuality, infidelity or whatever, it"s become, "My genes made me do it." And, because the blind forces of evolution are supposed to be responsible for shaping our genes, that rapidly translates as, "Evolution made me do it". Thus the title of the abovementioned editorial, which pointed to a Time magazine cover story that proclaimed "Infidelity? It"s in...

With his condition deteriorating from Parkinson's disease last year, Steve Kaufman gave up making improvements to his home in Algonquin, Ill. "I couldn't even hold a nail stable," he recalled. Earlier this year, after taking an experimental drug in a clinical trial, Mr. Kaufman built new kitchen cabinets and an outdoor deck. He was so steady he could walk across a narrow piece of lumber like an Olympic gymnast on the balance beam. The drug, however, is no longer available to Mr. Kaufman or other Parkinson's patients in clinical trials. In June, its developer, Amgen, announced that the drug, which...

For years, people like Thomas Sowell have argued that affirmative action regularly places Black students into schools for which they are not educationally qualified, that in so doing it dooms them to less challenging courses and failure. In debates about affirmative action , the performance of Black students on SAT tests is rarely mentioned. It should be. It is not only supportive of his arguments but the most damning evidence of the inadequacy of the urban school systems from which most of these students come. According to the College Board, 1,877 African American students nationwide scored higher than 1300 out...

Our competitive American nature makes it difficult to be out of first place in the world for long. But that’s where we have been in education and we’re doing something about it legislatively. One of the hallmarks of the new national “No Child Left Behind” legislation, written to improve education, is the measurement of student academic achievement. To fulfill this new mandate every State developed rigorous achievement standards and enlisted professional testing companies to prepare subject matter test questions. These tests purport to measure current status and learning growth that validates the States’ standards. Every student at specific grade levels...

What if doctors had a new way to diagnose heart disease that took only seconds and provided pictures so clear it showed every clogged artery, so detailed that it was like holding a living heart in your hand? In fact, that new way exists and is coming into use in scattered areas of the country, and there is wide agreement that it will revolutionize cardiology. The scans can largely replace diagnostic angiograms, the expensive, onerous way of looking for blockages in arteries, and can make diagnosis so easy that doctors would not hesitate to use them. They are expected to...