I think you're conflating several batshit insane religious nutjob theories. I've heard some Mormons for example suggest that black people suffered from slavery because they were descended from Cam, Noah's youngest son who was cursed for ridiculing Noah who was the one who got drunk and naked in his tent.

The part about the lost tribes of Israel I've seen comes from certain evangelical groups as a justification for America's westward expansion (and the death and destruction for American Indians that came with it). Basically Jacob, the ancestor of all the Isrealites, promised his favorite son Joseph that his own sons, Manassas and Ephraim, would give rise to great nations of their own. Flash forward a couple thousand years and somehow these two lost tribes of Israel go on to found England and another group of them breaks away and founds a little country called the United States of America. So basically according these groups, WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) were destined for greatness by God because they are a lost tribe of Israel. This was a hugely mind-blowing idea when I first heard it at age twelve.

The point of all this nostalgia for a more superstitious time is that the same people who are coming up with all these crazy ideas are the same people who are trying to make Creationism sound scientific. And a lot of them are perfectly nice, friendly people so it's not like you want to (or even can if they're family) cut them out of your life. Eventually mocking them with tales of Flying Spaghetti Monsters gets tiring and you just find yourself talking about sports.....

You've just described the prevailing attitude during the Jim Crow era.

Since private companies began offering health insurance as a form of compensation in lieu of higher salaries. So yeah, your company is not actually paying for your medicine, it's paying for the insurance that pays for your medicine. That's the way health insurance works in the US. Now that may be a bass ackwards way of doing things but it is how they get done these days. The argument here is about what this health insurance should cover.

If we had a single payer system, this would not be a problem. But we don't, so we have a million bean counters out there asking "do we really have to pay for that?" And now the bean counters have been joined by prudes saying, "hey! We can't get laid, why should we have to pay for you to sleep around?"

But even the First Amendment does not guarantee an absolute freedom of any and all religious practice. Just ask a polygamous Mormon. I very much doubt that a Jehova's Witness surgeon who refused to preform blood transfusions could use the First Amendment to prevent the loss of his medical license. And just to be facetious for a moment, human sacrifice used to be rather popular with some religions and while I am not a lawyer, I think I'm pretty safe in concluding that the First Amendment would not protect anyone trying to bring back this practice. A less facetious example would be animal sacrifice which actually does come up as an issue from time to time - usually with bored prisoners looking for an excuse to sue the prison by "converting" to satanism or voodoo.

This issue is somewhat similar in that health insurance is a form of compensation. Allowing the Catholic Church to dictate that say, a receptionist who is not Catholic but who works at a Catholic institution, cannot spend any part of her paycheck on condoms because they are a form of birth control and the church opposes birth control would strike most people as a violation of the rights of that receptionist. So why should health insurance be any different? If she pays for condoms out of her own pocket, she's doing it with money she earned working for a Catholic institution. If she gets birth control pills from her health insurance plan, that's still money that she has earned working for a Catholic institution. In both cases, the church should have no right to dictate how she should spend the money which she has earned.

I always figured it was a table you could buy at Ikea.

The Egyptian protesters who used Twitter and Facebook to organize protests that drove two dictators from power say "hi."

Of course they're features. They are very important features for Facebook's real costumers. [1] Advertisers.

[1] Even though you have a Facebook account you are not a customer of Facebook. You're its product.

And I'm one of those millions of users even though I can't remember the last time I actually posted something on Google+ or even looked at it. And as somebody else already pointed out, the only reason a lot of Google+ users have an account is because Google goes out of its way to foist Google+ on users of its other services. And since when does a service have to be a failure for Google to abandon it? *cough* Reader *cough*.

Having said that I doubt that Google will end Google+ any time soon. At this point Google+ is to Google what Internet Explorer is to Windows. You may not like the former but if you want to use the latter, you're going to be stuck with the former anyway.

Maybe if you could run both Windows and Android apps at the same time. Oh wait. I can already do that with the Blue Stacks app that came with my Asus laptop. Or at least I could until I realized how pointless it was and uninstalled it.

Well it's been suggested that some of the Supersymmetric particles might be an explanation for Dark Matter which does appear to exist. Other than that, I'm not sure that Supersymmetry has much going for it these days.

More accurately, The Standard Model is the best theory we have right now but it's incomplete since it doesn't account for gravity and has a lot of parameters that are just there without a good explanation for them. Supersymmetry is an idea that is the basis for a lot of people's pet theories because it helps explain a lot of what the Standard Model does not by bringing in a lot of extra particles.

Those particles, if they exist, make other particles like the electron behave just a little differently than they do under the Standard Model. And this experiment provided evidence that supports the Standard Model and rules out a number of Supersymmetric pet theories. Whether or not it will rule them all out remains to be seen.

Fine, we'll install WINE along with apt. They'll never know the difference.

Well once someone owns nearly everything as Mr. Ellison does on the island of Lanai, is the distinction between government and the one super wealthy individual in question really that distinct anymore?

Well once someone owns nearly everything as Mr. Ellison does on the island of Lunai, is the distinction between government and this one super wealthy individual really that distinct anymore?

At least at the grocery store you can get beef, beer, and potato chips. Now try getting that from the NSA.