You may have never heard of Shorter University, but I guarantee, you will. The small university with a student population of 1500 in Georgia has been trying to stem the tide of exiting faculty, outraged over the institution’s new contract.

This Baptist university is requiring faculty to sign a lifestyle pledge that condemns homosexuality, premarital sex, adultery, drug use and public drinking near the campus, not to mention a commitment to  join a local church.

Over 50 faculty have resigned so far, and an anonymous survey indicates only 12 percent plan to stay.

But the move underscores some of the injustices still on the books in the state of Georgia. For instance, it is not against the law to discriminate against gays in that state where the constitution also bans same sex marriage.

As for the administration of Shorter University, their stance is that the school commit itself to the “teachings of Jesus of Christ” in a very public way.

With news that OJ has hired a new lawyer this summer to appeal his criminal case in hopes of proving that his former lawyers did a terrible job, it brought me back 18 years to the media fiasco surrounding the murder of his ex-wife.

I was home playing with my 3-year old son when the football Hall of Famer took the LAPD on that fateful car chase. Like many Americans, I watched what is now considered the world’s most publicized criminal trial as it spanned nine months. Along with my father, I would sit riveted to the nightly assessments of the television lawyer talk show circuit. And like many Americans, my jaw dropped when he was acquitted.

But obviously that wasn’t the end of his criminal woes. OJ has been sitting in jail since 2008, working off his 9 to 33 year term for being found guilty of several felonies including armed robbery and kidnapping, in an ill-thought out attempt to retrieve some of the memorabilia from his illustrious past that he claims was stolen from him.

I have to keep pinching myself when I write this. Is this the same OJ Simpson who is considered in the top three running backs in NFL history? The gifted athlete with a decorated career that went on to parlay his fame into acting and branding himself?

Google him now and page after page is about OJ, the convicted felon. It’s intriguing to me, in a sad way, how he is not alone. So many gifted athletes have ended up broken and broke. Why is that?

Concerns for the singer’s safety has prompted officials in the capital of Indonesia to deny Lady Gaga a permit to perform in that country.

According to Reuters, Islamic groups find her singing style “vulgar” and have labeled her the “envoy of the devils’ child” and labeled her songs satanic teachings.

But apparently she has lots of fans in that country. 30,000 tickets have already been sold for her concert, leaving ticket holders in the lurch. Indonesia is a secular country with the world’s largest population of Muslims.

Gaga is hardly the first singer to grace the stage scantily clad. And while no one wants to step on anyone’s religious toes, the reality is that there are other religions in Indonesia.

MSNBC ran a perspective story the other day, which I found compelling. Back in 1950, if you made minimum wage, you would have had to work 56 hours to pay the average rent. Of course, minimum wage was 75 cents an hour, but gas was only 29 cents a gallon and my father bought the house I grew up in for $20,000.

Today, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, you will have to work almost double the amount of time–109 hours–to make your rent. Gas is now almost $4 a gallon and the cost of living has exponentially grown beyond predicted levels, with the cost of owning and maintaining your own home having skyrocketed since then.

Right out of college, I waited tables for about a year while I searched for work. I recall making about $2 an hour because our employer was exempt from having to pay us the then-minimum wage of $3.10 because we made tips. Working the lunch shift at the pancake house left me pretty lean financially. It was then it hit me just how much I would have to earn in order to be able to support myself. Talk about a bucket of cold water to the face.

That said, I don’t know how you can make ends meet much less raise a family, making only minimum wage, but apparently, over 76 million Americans do.

Would you buy your 7-year old a kiddie book proposing the world will end because we eat meat?

Well, the book called “Vegan is Love” does just that. And the author has found herself under attack by all kinds of groups, even fellow vegan and earth-centered movements.

The book depicts a pollution covered world, animals in despair living in cages and starving children as the result of a world where Big Ag rules and issues as complex as world hunger and factory farming can be reduced to simple, age-appropriate vocabulary and colorful illustrations.

Beside dealing with such complicated adult issues, the book is also a call to action–for 2nd graders–to start protecting animals by refusing to eat them. And as a result, create a happy world.

Full disclosure? I have no problem with the message since I agree with a recent study that points to commercial animal production, if consumption continues to increase at predicted rates and no changes are made to factory farming, as having a powerful negative impact on the planet, ecosystems and climate changes.

BUT–and it’s a big but–I am truly worried about the manipulation of children by reducing this complex topic to a simple derivative–don’t be mean to animals. While I completely concur with the belief that factory farming is alarmingly inhumane and doesn’t do much in the way of positives for us as a society or the planet as a whole, I don’t think programming children is playing fair.

That said, I also think it’s laughable that a FOX news psychologist would call it “the most disturbing children’s book” he’d ever seen. Makes you wonder how long it’s been since he read a kiddie book.

While the author truly believes in her message and waves off any of the criticism with the simple belief that fast food restaurants don’t find kids too young to market to so why should she? I beg to differ. Fighting fire with fire doesn’t smack kosher to me. It sends a mixed message.

Respect, as in tolerance of other ways of living including diet, is actually the best message to teach children. Especially in this time of so much judgment and intolerance.

And was handcuffed and thrown in an airport holding cell for it.

It’s not like the TSA officials asked him to strip down to his skin–they didn’t. It was a case of him being fed up with what he considers the sham of security at airports.

Refusing a pat down and a body scan, he left the TSA with the only other option–to use a nitrate detecting wand over his clothes to see if he was carrying a bomb or explosives. When the wand went off, Portlander John Brennan had enough.

So off came his clothes. Right down to his underpants, and yes, he even took those off, too.

Brennan made national headlines with his striptease claiming that the doings of the TSA is nothing more than theatre, and he was just doing his part to protect his civil liberties. Furthermore, he believes that the civil rights we give up aren’t worth the level of protection we gain from the TSA.

What do you think?

Erie like many other cities in America has banned texting while driving, as well as talking on cell phones while operating a motor vehicle.

But will it follow suit of a New Jersey town where texting and walking has been banned?

In the town of Fort Lee, police say that those who text and walk–mostly teens– run the risk of, well, being run over. So they’re handing out what is tantamount to jaywalking tickets to those who violate the rules of road by wandering into it without paying attention.

This year alone, 20 people were hit by cars because of not paying attention and texting while walking down the road.

The P.D. started handing out flyers warning pedestrians of the $85 fine, and so far, about 117 tickets have been issued.

I am not a fan of more laws, but enforcement of existing laws that are on the books for good reason, is another story. I am sure we all have seen people texting while walking. Unless you can do it by not looking at the keyboard, then it’s pretty impossible to walk and text at the same time and do both effectively.

Sort of like chewing gum and walking. Not, wait a minute–wrong analogy.

Have you seen the cover of Time Magazine? It’s got people buzzing.

The cover story is about attachment parenting which is comprised of three components: extended breastfeeding, a family bed and carrying children around in baby slings for as long as possible. While I didn’t really know about attachment parenting when my son was born, I confess to the first three. My son slept with us regularly until he was four and we moved him into his own room. I never carried in a baby sling because he was so long, it doubled him in two and I couldn’t get the hang of it. A stroller did just fine.

I do believe in breastfeeding, but even I had to stifle a a small gasp when I saw the cover the June issue. It’s of a child about 3-years old being breastfed by his mom, but the pose is what draws attention to the act. She isn’t holding him on her lap….he’s perched on a chair nest to her, standing up and latched on.

For the record, I nursed my son until well past the time my doctors recommend….he was about 28 months when he was weaned, and while I never did so in public, plenty of people weighed in on my decision. I do admit, the act had clearly gone well beyond the need for nourishment on his part. It was purely an emotional need for a long time, but I became acutely aware that even that changed along the way, and sometime around 2 years old, it just became a habit. I could have happily ended it much earlier. Nursing was infrequent at best, and I finally halted it entirely when I took a long weekend with some college friends, away from him. I came back and he was weaned. And we were both fine.

Though I am somewhat of an advocate, I am not a supporter of nursing past toddlerhood. I know in some cultures, children are breastfed well into childhood. I just can’t see the point. Of course, I have only my experience to measure it by, but I can’t understand why that is a good thing.

But that aside, what’s the point of the Time Magazine cover?

(Click here to see the cover.)

With obesity making headlines almost daily, prompting discussions about all things fat preventative, I want to weigh in–pardon the pun–on what I think a huge part of the problem is: SAD.

SAD stands for Standard American Diet, also called the western pattern diet, which is calorie-dense and nutrient poor. Americans rely heavily on sugars, refined flour and processed food, often times valuing convenience, ease of preparation, availability, appearance, aroma and taste over nutrition. It is low in fiber and often includes hormone and antibiotic treated meats and dairy, and a whole host of chemical additives, dyes and preservatives.

A popular concept or rule of thumb among those of us who push healthy eating as a lifestyle, is that the fewer ingredients there are in something processed, the better it is for you. Enter the Twinkie, which has 37 plus ingredients, many of which are polysyllabic and almost impossible to pronounce. Twinkies are reflective of a typical snack in a SAD diet.

Obviously, I am no expert. I hold no degrees in nutrition, biology, chemistry or any health-related field. But I do read–a lot. And I do eat, drink and live in this country where freedom of choice is a privilege and one that I am not ready to give up. So this isn’t about bashing fast food chains and what they serve, big agriculture or even biochemical giants like Monsanto that control a large portion of our food chain, or even trends in entertainment that glue children to a chair thanks to online gaming, video games and computers.

I have problems with much of it, but ultimately, it comes down to one thing: choice.  We as consumers still hold the power to decide what we eat. What frustrates me is the level of denial that so many live with about the longterm, detrimental effects of a poor diet, namely, one rich in processed and fast foods.

Buying power continues to hold sway over industry in this capitalist society of ours. I do believe that choices made on an individual level do impact the whole and when done repeatedly and with great intent, can have an long-reaching impact.

That said, next time you pick up a Twinkie, think about what goes into it. Click here to see it for yourself, courtesy of The Daily Beast and photographer Dwight Eischliman.

You’ve at least heard how the Mayan calendar ends Dec. 21, 2012. Depending on what you read, there are many interpretations of what this means, if anything at all. It could be as drastic as the end of the world or as simple as a shift in global consciousness or merely another day.

Now researchers are saying that the calendar doesn’t end. And those first two scenarios might not be the case at all.

An ancient mural (petroglyph) discovered in a recently excavated site in Guatemala–on the wall of a house overgrown by thousands of years of jungle–proves to be part of a ruined Maya city named Xultún, according to National Geographic.  The mural is the first of its kind discovered, and depicts among other things, several calendars based on the Mayan method of calculating. According to the article,

“For ninth-century Maya, tabulating astronomical calendars to predict times of plenty was akin to gauging the stock market today. The calculations include dates some 7,000 years in the future, adding to evidence against the idea that the Maya thought the world would end in 2012—a modern myth inspired by an ancient calendar that depicts time starting over this year.”

For those of you who’ve been living like there’s no tomorrow, I guess there will be.

You can read the entire story here.