World News Korner

Courtesy of CNN:

It seems that McDonald's has finally realized how tone-deaf its internal employee resource website was. It has shut it down.

The final straw? A tip on the site to employees to avoid McDonald's fare.

A graphic on the site shows a meal with a cheeseburger, fries and drink under the caption "Unhealthy choice." Next to it is a picture of a sub, a salad and water under the caption "Healthier choice."

The fast food giant found itself again having to deflect unwanted attention from its internal site this week after CNBC reported that McResource ostensibly advises McDonald's employees to not eat at McDonald's.

"Fast foods are quick, reasonably priced, and readily available alternatives to home cooking. While convenient and economical for a busy lifestyle, fast foods are typically high in calories, fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt and may put people at risk for becoming overweight."

Visitors to McResource Line on Wednesday were greeted with this statement: "We are temporarily performing some maintenance in order to provide you with the best experience possible. Please excuse us while these upgrades are being made."

McDonald's confirmed the site had been taken down in a statement posted on its website. "A combination of factors has led us to re-evaluate and we've directed the vendor to take down the website. Between links to irrelevant or outdated information, along with outside groups taking elements out of context, this created unwarranted scrutiny and inappropriate commentary. None of this helps our McDonald's team members."

You know I am not actually a believer in karma per se, but you have to admit that this is pretty awesome.

You may also remember that in the recent past McDonald's gave employees economic advice that suggested they get a second job in order to make ends meet, or return purchases.

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Courtesy of AlterNet:

Conservatives have not read the Bible.

The Right has successfully rebranded the brown-skinned liberal Jew, who gave away free healthcare and was pro-redistributing wealth, into a white-skinned, trickledown, union-busting conservative, for the very fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are astonishingly illiterate when it comes to understanding the Bible. On hot-button social issues, from same-sex marriage to abortion, biblical passages are invoked without any real understanding of the context or true meaning. It’s surprising how little Christians know of what is still the most popular book to ever grace the American continent.

More than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible. So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to data from the Barna Research group. Surveys show that 60 percent can’t name more than five of the Ten Commandments; 12 percent of adults think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife; and nearly 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A Gallup poll shows 50 percent of Americans can’t name the first book of the Bible, while roughly 82 percent believe “God helps those who help themselves” is a biblical verse.

So, if Americans get an F in the basic fundamentals of the Bible, what hope do they have in knowing what Jesus would say about labor unions, taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, and food stamps? It becomes easy to spread a lie when no one knows what the truth is.

The truth, whether Republicans like it or not, is not only that Jesus a meek and mild liberal Jew who spoke softly in parables and metaphors, but conservatives were the ones who had him killed. American conservatives, however, have morphed Jesus into a muscular masculine warrior, in much the same way the Nazis did, as a means of combating what they see as the modernization of society.

The problem with all of this is that the only people who can wrestle Christianity out of the hands of the conservatives are those more liberal folks who actually live their lives as they believe Jesus had intended for them to.

The problem with that is that, as far as I can tell, the more reasonable members of Christianity are kind of a pansies when it comes to confrontation or fighting for what they believe.

Hell if this were my religion that was being poisoned like this I would be standing on a pile of conservative bodies looking to assholes to add to it. But then again I have anger issues.

Actually right now the more liberal, more Christian if you will, Christians have a rather powerful ally on their side.

In fact with the Pope on their side THIS might be the best time ever for those who actually understand and embrace the teachings of Jesus to take back their religion and kick the science denying, under privileged abusing, conservatives out of THEIR religion.

Let them find their own religion. I hear Scientology is always recruiting.

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As I think most of you know I was raised by a single mother and did not have a father figure around for most of my formative years.

My male role models were Mannix, Little Joe Cartwright, and Captain James T. Kirk.

I learned that men did not show emotion, treated women like something temporary to be used and then cast aside, and that violence was the solution to just about everything.

On the other hand my mother's instruction was to not grow up to be like her most recent boyfriend who broke her heart or turned out to be an asshole.

That did not give me much to work with in the real world.

I did the best I could, but boy did I screw up a lot. Especially in high school.

However, after many missteps and wrong turns, I eventually grew up to be a more or less sensitive guy, who likes movies, working with kids, and talking about religion and politics.

I do not hurt women, I do not drink to excess, and I do not carry a gun (Or a phaser) to make myself feel masculine.

In the end my mom turned out to be my best role model simply by demonstrating that strong women should not threaten the egos of strong men, that raising children is not something that only woman can do well, and that our self worth should not be measured by what we have, but rather by what we give to others.

No way am I perfect, but I am far better than anybody ever thought I would turn out to be when I was a young boy. And today when I teach young boys what it is to be a man, there is no talk of competition or violence, but rather of responsibility and respect toward others.

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Courtesy of Politico:

A single missing suffix among thousands of lines of programming code led a public school teacher in Washington, D.C., to be erroneously fired for incompetence, three teachers to miss out on $15,000 bonuses and 40 others to receive inaccurate job evaluations.

The miscalculation has raised alarms about the increasing reliance nationwide on complex “value-added” formulas that use student test scores to attempt to quantify precisely how much value teachers have added to their students’ academic performance. Those value-added metrics often carry high stakes: Teachers’ employment, pay and even their professional licenses can depend on them.

The Obama administration has used financial and policy levers, including Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, to nudge more states to rate teachers in part based on value-added formulas or other measures of student achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has credited D.C.’s strong recent gains on national standardized tests in part to the district’s tough teacher evaluation policy, which was launched by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. But teachers have complained that the results fluctuate wildly from year to year — and can be affected by human error, like the missing suffix in the programming code for D.C. schools.

“You can’t simply take a bunch of data, apply an algorithm and use whatever pops out of a black box to judge teachers, students and our schools,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said this week. The AFT and its affiliates have signed off on contracts that use value-added measures as a significant portion of teacher evaluations — including in D.C. — but Weingarten called the trend “very troubling” nonetheless.

The problem in D.C. stemmed from “a very small typo” inserted into complex programming code during an upgrade earlier this year, said Barbara Devaney, chief operating officer of Mathematica Policy Research, the private firm that holds the contract to calculate value-added scores for the district.

God I am SO tired of this teacher evaluation crap!

The conservatives have been trying to break the public school system for decades and it seems that they have almost achieved their goal.

Public education is the backbone of our democracy and our progress as a nation, and as Americans we should be defending it at every opportunity.

Oh an by the way that Michelle Rhee woman is a fraud, just read what research professor on education Diane Ravitch had to say about her and her methods.

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Merry Christmas. pic.twitter.com/XaN5kz5uiL

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 25, 2013

Of course there will be SOME people who will even find something offensive about this lovely couple.

But hey, you can't please everybody!

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Wow that was...really creepy.

Hey kids time for a little Christmas fear mongering to frighten you into voting for the guy with ties to domestic terrorism, the AIP, and the Tea Party, craziest bunch of political saboteurs this country has ever seen.

I can hardly wait until this next 2014 political season when Miller really gets out there and starts running for the GOP Senate nomination. I have so MANY surprises in store for him.

By the way I started growing a beard a week before Thanksgiving and my magnificent facial foliage makes Joe Miller look like a prepubescent wannabe.

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Courtesy of Politico:

“Recently, we learned our governments working on concert have created a system of world-wide mass surveillance, watching every thing we do,” Snowden said a video for the British Channel 4.

Snowden said “1984” author George Orwell had warned us of such surveillance.

“The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us - are nothing compared to what we have available today,” Snowden says on Channel 4 which has been broadcast alternative Christmas messages for many years. “We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.”

Clad in a black blazer and pink button down shirt, Snowden continued, saying that a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy.

“They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought,” Snowden said.

He added that the conversation occurring now will determine the level of trust citizens can place in their technology and governments.

“Together we can find a better balance. End mass surveillance. Remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.”

I think like a lot of you have had a hard time with my conflicted feelings over Edward Snowden.

However whether the respect the methods that he used or not we can no longer ignore the fact that what he did will have a significant impact on how our country, and really ALL countries, gather intelligence.

I have talked to a couple of my own intelligence gatherers and the majority of them see nothing wrong with how the NSA gathers data, and that until there is significant proof they have misused that information there is no reason to ask for a change.

I am not quite so ready to give up all of my privacy, nor do I think that gathering everybody's phone phone numbers, e-mails, and online information will do anything really to keep us safe.

The very least that can be said about Edward Snowden is that he pulled back the veil of secrecy surrounding how our own government spies on us, and the most that can be said is that he will be remembered as a hero.

Either way, ultimately he accomplished what he set out to do.

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