Ukrainian Political Violence Spurred by Cultural Divide

At The Daily News Source, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by The Daily News Source and how it is used.

Log Files

Like many other Web sites, The Daily News Source makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons

The Daily News Source does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on The Daily News Source.


• Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to The Daily News Source and other sites on the Internet.


• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on The Daily News Source send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

The Daily News Source has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. The Daily News Source"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.

Ukrainian Political Violence Spurred by Cultural Divide

Midday open thread: Hate groups by geography, HTML as STD, submerged world cultural sites

• Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Crisis News:
  
  
  
  


• These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook March 4:
  
  

  What Would Jesus Shoot? Kentucky Baptists giving away 25 guns to attract converts, by Lefty Coaster
  

  Apple Tells Limbaugh and His Ilk to Stick Their Money Where the Sun Don’t Shine, by ProgLegs

  
  

  MUST-SEE: Stephen Colbert debunks Obamacare horror stories with special guest, by BruinKid

  
  

  
  

• Hate groups thick in the South, but the largest numbers are in California:

Eleven Southern states are home to more than 500 groups that promote hate speech, according to a detailed breakdown by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But it’s California that is home to the largest number of organizations that preach hate, the center found.

The SPLC tracks 939 active groups that promote racial, ethnic or religious segregation or hate. The eight types of hate groups the center has identified include white nationalists, black separatists, neo-Confederates, Christian identity, skinheads, Ku Klux Klans and neo-Nazis, along with a handful of miscellaneous groups.

• What getting older will do to you:

At 42, I see movies differently than I did as a kid. Ferris Bueller is now the story of a hard-working principal just trying to do his job.
— @JElvisWeinstein

• Thank Warren Buffett for those exploding oil trains:

We’ve written a lot about the dangers of shipping extra-flammable oil in flimsy rail cars that are prone to puncture and explode. Turns out you can blame a fair bit of the problem on billionaire investor Warren Buffett. As the Sightline Institute’s blog reports, “Arguably, he is the single most important person in the world of oil-by-rail.”

It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that oil trains get special treatment. After all, if a jet plane has a battery fire problem, regulators immediately pull it from service and will ground the entire fleet until the manufacturer makes modifications to reduce the risk of fire. If an auto regularly bursts into flame upon impact, the feds issue a recall and mandate retrofits for all the cars with the defect. Yet despite explosion after deadly explosion—and safety report after federal safety report—government regulators, at the urging of the industry groups that represent Buffett’s holdings, have allowed unsafe DOT-111s tank cars to haul crude oil and ethanol.

• 1 in 10 Americans think HTML is related to herpes:

A recent study found that many Americans are lost when it comes to tech-related terms, with 11% saying that they thought HTML — a language that is used to create websites — was a sexually transmitted disease. [...]

• 27% identified “gigabyte” as an insect commonly found in South America. A gigabyte is a measurement unit for the storage capacity of an electronic device. [...] • 23% thought an “MP3″ was a “Star Wars” robot. It is actually an audio file.
• 18% identified “Blu-ray” as a marine animal. It is a disc format typically used to store high-definition videos.

• Steve Stockman’s “uncampaign” ends in unelection:

The Stockman campaign defied convention, often spectacularly so. He made what the Dallas Morning News called a “rare public appearance” on January 14, and then he disappeared. He wasn’t seen for days, during which time he missed 17 consecutive votes and his House office refused to say where he was. Then his staff switched gears, revealing that he had been in Russia, Egypt, and Israel and chiding American reporters for not paying attention to a press conference he’d held overseas. He came back in time for the State of the Union, only to theatrically storm out midway through.

His campaign office was literally condemned. His staff, such as it was, refused to alert reporters to upcoming public events, which may have been because there weren’t any.

• Hundreds of world cultural sites headed for Davy Jones’s Locker:

According to a new analysis published in Environmental Research Letters, roughly 136 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 720 World Heritage Sites, including the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, the Tower of London, and much of Riga, Naples, Venice, and St. Petersburg, will be underwater within the next 2000 years. That’s assuming just a 3-degree Celsius temperature increase over that time period (a full list of the sites is available in the paper).

• $ 30 million worth of buried gold coins not a mint heist says agent for finders. Here is a comment from a mint representative saying the same. Here is a newspaper story about the robbery. Check out the date.

“We’ve got a crack team of lawyers, and trust me, if this was U.S. government property we’d be going after it.” Richard Kelly, who wrote a book on the San Francisco Mint, sees a further issue with the dates of the uncovered coins—they’re stamped 1847 to 1894, and he thinks ones taken from the mint would be dated nearer to 1901.

“We assume from the times and all the records that they were new coins [taken]. Back then, once coins were printed they flew out of the mint.”

• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it’s Joan McCarter day! Topics: Bachmann haz a sad about Jews; CIA watches their watchers; GunFAIL “Where Are They Now?”; AMA, minimum wage, immigration roundup; Reid vs Koch & Lindsey Graham’s Benghazi freakout.

Daily Kos

Midday open thread: Hate groups by geography, HTML as STD, submerged world cultural sites

The Cultural War Against Christians

Townhall.com:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was right to veto SB1062, which would have amended the Arizona Religious Freedom Restoration Act. 

The bill, per most interpretations I’ve read, would have given broad discretion to business owners, because of their religious convictions, to refuse to do business with anyone associated with homosexual lifestyles. 

Religious freedom is about protection of your right to practice your religion and not being forced to violate it.

However, the right to religious freedom does not mean the right to write-off and marginalize into non-existence a whole class of citizens whom you don’t like or agree with. 

Under Jim Crow, the problem whites had with blacks was not what blacks thought or did, but that they existed. These laws were designed to relegate one class of citizens to separate and unequal status, simply because of who they were. 

Such actions have nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with bigotry and racism. 

But, unfortunately, the failure of this poorly conceived Arizona bill will be misinterpreted. Some will incorrectly claim that this means it is not a violation of religious freedom to force a business owner to provide a product or service for activity that is against his or her religious convictions. That is incorrect. 

Would anyone question the refusal of a black vendor to sells sheets to the local Ku Klux Klan chapter? Or a Jewish merchant refusing to sell the poster board for a Neo-Nazi rally? Or refusal of a Christian video service to make a pornographic film? 

So why is it not perfectly clear that the religious freedom of a Christian merchant is violated if that merchant is forced to bake a cake or prepare a flower arrangement for a same-sex marriage which is not only as personally repugnant to that vendor as any in the cases above, but is also a clear and literal violation of the scripture that defines the faith of these individuals? 

And why is it that same-sex couples have such a hard time finding bakers and florists that are not offended by their wedding? Why do they wind up with such regularity trying to buy from Christian vendors? 

The reality is that the “gay rights” crusade is not about a struggle for justice but rather it is a cultural war. 

Homosexual activists understand the ongoing erosion of traditional values as a pillar of our society and use this opportunity to push Christian reality, once and for all, into the closet and to lock the door. 

The cultural script has been re-written such that Christians have been put in a position of either rejecting the precepts and prohibitions of their religion, or being faithful to them and being branded as against “equality.”

RELATED: The Ingrained Intolerance of Liberal Tolerance
Politik Ditto

The Cultural War Against Christians