I am happy to announce The Tedland Daily new Contributor, Amanda Read.
We have been working together on one of her sites The Luke Historians (found Here).
Amanda Read is a political and current events columnist for The Washington Times Communities and contributor to Unliberal. She is also a columnist for The Cross-Eyed Blog and Webzine, and has served as a contributing writer to The Girlhood Home Companion Magazine. You can find some of her writings at Awaken Generation and Sincerely Amanda, her blog at www.amandaread.com.
Amanda is the eldest of nine children and was homeschooled all her life until she began attending a state university shortly before reaching the age of 19. Because her father was a Russian linguist and foreign area officer in the U.S. Army, she took part in some of the multicultural experiences shared by most military children. The first ten years of her life were spent in Texas, California, New York, Germany, and Uzbekistan. The years since then have been spent in Alabama, where her father retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.
At the age of 13, she started a homeschool e-newsletter. Her first news article was about the debacle at the Alabama Supreme Court over the Ten Commandments monument, which ended up ousting the popularly elected Chief Justice Roy S. Moore. Miss Read was also intrigued by the events of the War on Terror, and she has been writing about politics ever since.
In 2004, her mother discovered the fascinating history of Dr. Harvey W. Wiley and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. After years of researching and writing, Amanda completed a full length historical drama screenplay titled The Crusading Chemist in March 2008 and completed a revision of it last year. She is currently writing the book Confessions of An Unconventional Scholar: A Student’s Treatise on Education and co-authoring a book with Lindy Abbott, both of which should be released next year.
Miss Read lives with her family and is majoring in History and minoring in Political Science in college.
It was a strange week for the loony strongman from Iran.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's six nights in New York featured a secret sit-down with militant minister Louis Farrakhan, heckling in a hotel bar, and a fear of being rubbed out that bordered on paranoia.
The president shared a hush-hush meal with Farrakhan and members of the New Black Panther Party Tuesday at the Warwick Hotel on West 54th Street.
The meeting of the podium smackers took place in a banquet room, where the fiery leaders presumably exchanged theories on what's wrong with the world.
On Thursday night, Sudanese diplomats trying to get in to see Ahmadinejad at the Hilton Manhattan East, on 42nd Street, squared off with security and a pushing match ensued. Two well-dressed women in their 40s came in, sat at the hotel bar and ordered drinks.
One of them caught the attention of the president's security detail, which had set up a station in the hotel lobby. She was soon surrounded by eight angry Iranians, who ordered her to leave. She refused.
A manager tried to calm things down. Suddenly, the woman stood up and pointed at the Iranians, yelling, "You stoned my sister! You're murderers!"
Paranoia was on parade at the Hilton the moment the president checked in on Saturday, Sept. 18. His team took six floors to themselves in the hotel's south tower, overlooking Tudor City, about 90 rooms in all. More than 20 were just for security.
Still, Ahmadinejad, who wore the same tacky suit and shirt all week, took every precaution. He never set foot in the lobby. Bulletproof glass was installed over room windows. When he left for meetings at the Iranian Mission, on Third Avenue, or the United Nations, he departed by an employee entrance, the path covered in a white tent -- a veritable tunnel to his vehicle. His head was covered with a white cloth. No one saw him on the street.
The entourage dined in but not on room service. Meals -- mostly lamb, shish kebabs, spiced ground meat and basmati rice -- were prepared by a Persian restaurant and carried in by Secret Service agents.
A source said the spicy grub made "the whole hotel stink like hell."
If you haven’t seen it, there is a video on Godtube, Youtube, and probably any other tube out there. It is of some preacher named Louie Giglio. He claims to have spoken to a “molecular biologist” from a “local university” who told him about the protein called laminin. This supposed molecular biologist told him that laminin is a cell adhesion molecule that “holds the body together.” Then, he shows his audience a “scientific illustration” of what laminin looks like. Here is basically what he shows the audience:
He goes on to say that this is confirmation of Colossians 1:17, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” So…because the “scientific illustration” of laminin looks like a cross, God is using science to remind us that Christ holds all things together. Just in case the “scientific illustration” doesn’t convince you, he shows you an electron microscope image of laminin. He shows this:
Now I have to admit that someone who knows little about protein chemistry could easily be taken in by such tripe. Thus, even though this video upsets me, I am not upset with the people who send me this video. Neither am I upset with Louie Giglio for talking about this in his sermon without really understanding it. Preachers talk about things they don’t understand all the time, including the Bible. Thus, it doesn’t surprise me that a preacher would talk about protein chemistry even though he doesn’t understand it. What bothers me is that Louie Giglio claims he got this information from a molecular biologist.
No molecular biologist who understands his field would EVER suggest that there is some spiritual connection to the shape of laminin. Thus, someone in this story is lying. It might be Louie Giglio. Perhaps he stumbled across this and invented the story of a molecular biologist to give it more weight. It might be the guy who came up to him claiming to be a molecular biologist. Perhaps that person was some student who really doesn’t understand molecular biology but saw a simplified drawing of laminin and wanted to impress Louie Giglio. Perhaps the person really was a molecular biologist, at which point the university that gave him his degree is the liar, as a degree means a level of competency that this person clearly doesn’t have. I don’t know who the liar is here, but I guarantee you, there is a liar somewhere, because any molecular biologist would know the following facts:
1. Simplified drawings are never accurate pictures of protein shapes. Proteins have several levels of hierarchy to their structure, and even the best three-dimensional representations of proteins are mere approximations. God’s engineering is far beyond the understanding of man. Thus, the way we visualize proteins is oversimplistic at best.
2. Proteins change conformations. That’s what they must do in order to do their job. Thus, they don’t hold to a given shape. Indeed, the electron microscope picture that Louie Giglio gives in his sermon represents just one possible shape for laminin. Consider this image, which contains two different electron microscope images of laminin:
It looks to me like the bottom one is the one that Louie Giglio used, rotated 90 degrees. This makes me wonder if he intentionally edited out the other image. In any event, the top one shows what any molecular biology graduate student would know: proteins change conformation in order to do their job. The shape at any given time is most likely transitory.
3. There are just as many (if not more) Satanic (or otherwise evil) shapes in the human body. Consider this: DNA is the molecule that contains all the information that determines who you are. Here is a simplified drawing of the detailed structure of DNA, getting rid of the helical shape and just concentrating on what makes up the backbone of the molecule:
Do you see the blue shapes? Those are pentagrams. They represent the sugar ribose that makes up the backbone of DNA. Indeed, “ribose” is what gives DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) the “ribo” in its name. Thus, the molecule that makes the backbone of DNA and gives it part of its name is a Satanic symbol. What does that mean?
It gets worse! In every nerve cell of your body there are potassium channels. They allow your nerve cells (like those in your brain) to conduct action potentials, which is what makes them work. Guess what those potassium channels look like? Here you go:
what does that look like to you? To me, it looks like a swastika. So the cellular structure that allows you to think is an homage to Hitler?
Obviously, there are a variety of molecules in creation. In an attempt to understand them, we draw simplified illustrations that allow us to learn something about their structure and function. To say that there is some hidden “message” in these shapes is just nonsense.
__________ If you haven't seen the nonsense video that Dr. Wile is talking about, here it is:
U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navanethem Pillay has agreed to consider the proposal, according to the OIC, a bloc of Islamic nations. Friday, September 24, 2010 By Patrick Goodenough
(CNSNews.com) – The Quran-burning controversy in the United States has prompted the Islamic bloc at the United Nations to revive its call for the U.N. to set up an “international monitoring mechanism” to track incidents of “Islamophobia.” Five years after establishing an “Islamophobia Observatory” of its own, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is now calling on the U.N.’s top human rights official to set up a comparable body at her Geneva office. According to the OIC, human rights commissioner Navanethem Pillay has agreed to consider the proposal.
At the U.N. Human Rights Council this week, OIC members are also seeking support for a resolution condemning Florida pastor Terry Jones’ abortive call to burn copies of the Quran on September 11. Introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC, the text condemns “the recent call by an extremist group to organize a ‘Burn a Koran Day’” and says it was among “instances of intolerance, discrimination, profiling and acts of violence against Muslims occurring in many parts of the world.”
When it comes to a vote -- before the Council’s session in Geneva ends next Friday -- the measure almost certainly will pass. The OIC controls more than one-third of the Council’s seats, and its resolutions are routinely backed by non-Muslim allies such as China, Russia, Cuba and South Africa.
Moreover, Western democracies which usually oppose OIC “Islamophobia” and “religious defamation” measures at the HRC – on freedom of expression grounds – will not likely do so in this case, having strongly condemned Jones’ threats earlier this month. U.S. ambassador to the HRC Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe wrote to Pillay in late August, deploring Jones’ threatened action and telling her that the U.S. “supports the full use of your office and moral authority to speak out against intolerance and instances of hate speech where they occur.”
By: Barbara Hollingsworth Local Opinion Editor 09/18/10 4:35 PM EDT
If the Left acknowledged sin, hypocrisy would be one of the most unforgiveable. But that’s exactly what hundreds of university faculty members – many in women’s and gender studies departments – were found guilty of during a recent experiment devised by a University of Illinois economics professor.
Prof. Fred Gottheil told Front Page Magazine that he compiled a list of 675 email addresses from 900 signatures on a 2009 petition authored by Dr. David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California, urging the U.S. to abandon its ally, Israel. Prof. Gottheil discovered that six of the signers, who hailed from more than 150 college campuses, were members of his own faculty.
“Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians?” he wondered. “I felt it was worth a try.”
The results? “Almost non existent,” he told Front Page editor Jamie Glazov. Only 27 of the 675 “self-described social-justice seeking academics” agreed to sign Gottheil’s Statement of Concern – less than 5 percent of the total who had publicly called for the censure of Israel for human rights violations.
The refusal of women’s studies professors to publicly condemn honor killings, or academic advocates of gay rights to speak out against the treatment of homosexuals in Muslim countries, is just about as hypocritical as it gets. Their loathing (dare we call it hate?) of the UN-created Jewish state is so deep that it “trump[s] their professional interests,” leading them into a “ideologically discriminatory trap of their own making,” Prof. Gottheil added.
“The academic Left may be just a little more sophisticated [than the non-academic Left] in their loathing of Israel, but scratch the surface and it’s all the same…It turns out that with all their professing of principle, they are sanctimonious bigots at heart.”
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/prof-calls-fellow-academics-sanctimonious-bigots-103207814.html#ixzz10IJipDFu
