What would Jesus do with leftovers? ... and other small talk

Getting the Christ out of Christmas

What would Jesus do with leftovers?This year, our holiday fight was over a Whole Foods pumpkin pie we weren’t going to eat. (Our dinner guests had brought a chocolate cheesecake for dessert.) I said I’d donate the pie to a local women’s shelter. My brother wanted to take the pie to his church potluck the next day. 

I got self-righteous, and my brother got defensive: I said the most clear message of the gospels is that Jesus calls his followers to share what they have with the poor—in fact, he commanded his disciples to sell all their possessions and give the money away.

My brother said that was for a particular people at a particular time. And there are people in his church who struggle to put food on the table, and he was worried there wouldn’t be enough for lunch tomorrow.

No Time Left To Adapt To Melting Glaciers

When glaciers begin to shrink in size, they generate "a transitory increase in runoff as they lose mass," the study notes.
However, Baraer explained, the water flowing from a glacier eventually hits a plateau and from this point onwards there is a decrease in the discharge of melt water. "The decline is permanent. There is no going back."

         In a related story  
         NASA: Climate Change May Flip 40% of Earth’s Major Ecosystems This Century


On debunking myths ... The Familiarity Backfire Effect 

To debunk a myth, you often have to mention it — otherwise, how will people know what you’re talking about? However, this makes people more familiar with the myth and hence more likely to accept it as true. Does this mean debunking a myth might actually reinforce it in people’s minds?

The Dishwasher Wars

When phosphates were banned, the detergent category got vicious.

Chaplain Mike on David Lose's The Absurdity of Christmas 

There is something so winsome and utterly human in David Lose’s words. I don’t have to have all the answers. I don’t have to be afraid of doubting. I don’t need to fear when things don’t make complete sense, when I can’t explain everything. “I believe; help my unbelief” has always been the most honest prayer, I think.

 Republicans keep shooting themselves - and us - in the foot with their doofus voter ID legislation the party still doing its part to make us the land of the free and the home of the stoopid.

A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations. 

Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.

On Nietzsche: Stranger in a Strange Land

As a teenager, Friedrich Nietzsche was fascinated by America. 

"The American way of laughing does me good," he wrote after reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "especially this sort of sturdy seaman like Mark Twain." 

In the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson he discovered a "brother-soul" who kindled his lifelong passion for truth-seeking. Despite making his name as the greatest anti-democratic thinker of his age, Nietzsche believed that America was a land of free spirits, unburdened by the weight of the European past.