The Week in Links

Older people's brains are more gullible.  Does this explain Mitt Romney's fanbase?

Atheism on the rise in Texas.  The Houston Press interviews vlogger Aron Ra and others at the Texas Freethought Convention, and give a little history of Texas atheism, including the Freidankers, German free-thinkers who settled in the Hill Country (which Austin is part of) in the 19th Century.  (I always wondered about the German names for towns!  Boerne, Kerrville, New Braunfels and Gruene among them)

The National Audubon Society holds an annual Christmas Bird Count.  It's an annual count of bird populations at about Christmastime, not a count of Christmas birds.   The Great Backyard Bird Count is in February.

Hemant Mehta (a.k.a. The Friendly Atheist) writes in the Washington Post about the experiences of non-theistic high school students.

California moron calls atheist attempts to insist on compliance with the First Amendment "unconstitutional."  She doesn't seem to have read the Constitution, though.  Typical.

Atheists Anonymous, support group for oldsters in California.  No, they're not giving up atheism, just being treated like dirt.

Election post-mortem from Pew:  White evangelicals weren't turned off by Romney

Evangelicals want to abolish electoral college.  Gore would have been the winner over their idiot Dubya, so I can't see why.  Maybe they want attention if they live outside of a swing state.  Who wouldn't want nonstop robocalls and endless TV and radio commercials for months on end?

Notre Dame has decided to be more gay-friendly.  And in Germany, gay pedophile priests have been shown to be psychologically "normal," at least according to a study put out by one church.

Hindu schools in Nepal borrow from the Catholic practice of making students classless with uniforms, in the mass prayer day.  (That was what my Catholic friends always said justified having uniforms, though everyone seemed to know who the rich kids were)

A West Point senior leaves the school because of religiosity on campus.  He wrote “I do not wish to be in any way associated with an institution which willfully disregards the Constitution of the United States of America by enforcing policies which run counter to the same,” Mr. Page wrote in his letter of resignation.

Meanwhile, in India, the courts have decided not to force religion on children, or at least one.  

Tonight is the beginning of Hanukkah, or Chanukkah, or Channukkahhh...

Charity Link Round-up page

Check out my new list of charities that I feel confident don't include prosletyzing in their work.

I didn't list secular charities like Freedom From Religion Foundation, because there are lots of lists like that on the web.  There's so much begging for charity money this time of year I decided to look into which ones I would want to donate to... assuming I had disposable income.

Feedback & suggestions welcome, though if you have a boatload of criticisms or ideas of how I could do it better if I had another thirty or so hours to spend, then do it yourself and send me the link.

Sad News for Eagle Watchers

This year I became enthralled by the nest-cam in Decorah, Iowa, that watched a clutch of American Bald Eagles from egg-laying to fledging.  I learned that last year the Raptor Resource Center that runs this project had put a transmitter on one of the babies and I checked periodically to see her progress on their map.

This year, the first baby eagle (D12) died from electrocution on a power pole near the nest soon after fledging.  It was shocking because of the suddenness, but also because it was a bird that I "knew."  The team posted about electrical poles' danger to birds, especially large raptors.  With their large wingspan, there's more chance of a bald eagle being electrocuted.  A group inspired by D12's passing worked to make poles in the area safer for the fledglings.

Last week another of the clutch was found dead from electrocution:  D14 had been equipped with a transmitter and was being tracked like his older sister.  He was found in Iowa at the foot of an electrical pole.

The sad blog post is here:  http://raptorresource.blogspot.com/2012/11/112712-d14-announcement.html

The previous year an eagle (D1) was fitted with a transmitter, and she has returned to her natal home after summering in Canada.  Her survival seems even more miraculous fortuitous after seeing what happened to two of the three eaglets from this year's nest.

A raptor-safe power pole is amazingly simple to make.  I hope more people will be inspired by this new tragedy to make their area poles safe:

Links

Wasn't going to do a link round-up this week but a few things caught my eye:

The Religion Clause blog has a list of the religious mentions in the proposed Egyptian constitution.

Leesburg, Virginia is Ground Zero in the War on Christmas again.  I can't say I support the atheists on this one.  One Leesburg official (who was apparently in a coma on 9/11/2001) called atheists "fanatical terrorists."

Can Islam be a force for good in climate change?

Can Islam be gay-friendly?

Robert Schuller & his family have to survive on less than a million dollars after the bankruptcy of their Crystal Cathedral ministry.  Oh boo hoo  Maybe they should pray to win the lottery.

A priest named Schueller pisses off the pope by wanting women to be ordained & questioning celibacy.  It's too bad he isn't also a pedophile.  The pope would have ignored him.

Former Episcopal priests are turning Catholic, and for these guys it's okay to be married priests.  (similar to the rule in Eastern orthodox churches).   How does the vatican wrap its head around its head?

Presbyterian parishes are leaving the denomination to join a more conservative version.   Would Calvin be proud?

Religion gives me a headache.  It's no wonder fundies look so glassy-eyed.

Bill O'Reilly says Christianity is not a religion!

What a ninny! (or pinhead)

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

Minute Physics added some art to Neil DeGrasse Tyson's answer to the question:

Nuttery on the Left: The Anti-GMO Hysteria

One of my friends shared this piece of shit video on Facebook.



 This "Health Ranger" is also the perpetrator of Natural News:  http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/NaturalNews  Curiously, this guy also happens to believe every other food myth of the radical left:  raw food diets, "alternative" medicine, and whatever hits his fan from day to day.

My friend is a sucker for a lot of this stuff.  Like me, she went into a field that didn't require a background in the sciences.  Unlike me, she isn't ashamed of her ignorance and fails to use her intelligence to make up for her educational lacunae.  I know quite a few people like this.  They're smart but not schooled in the sciences or practiced in true skepticism.  My friend claims to be "skeptical" when in reality she's just suspicious.  Not the same thing at all.

The anti-GMO movement is particularly irksome to me because it paints all genetically-modified foods with the same tainted brush of suspicion. It would be one thing if they claimed that specific strains of GMO corn affected the environment, or that peanut allergies are due to one specific variety of peanut. But no, they don't differentiate between products.  It's all suspicious.

And rather than go to pubmed and read up on the research themselves, they let crackpots like "The Heatlh Ranger" tell them what to think.  Some "skepticism" there.

Here's what I found by searching pubmed:  There is a possiblity that crops grown to be impervious to roundup may have residual roundup on or in them, which may affect endocrine functions in mammals (rats are the only animals studied so far).  That's pretty much it.

There are issues that could indeed make GMOs bad, but there are also potential advantages too:

• Higher yields means less hunger and less land used for crops
• Hypo-allergenic crops can be developed
• Sterile plants won't invade natural areas
• More nutritious crops can be developed
• Crops that make it to market reduce waste

Not to mention, everything we eat is already genetically modified, through selective breeding and hybridization.  Nothing we eat, from the banana (hear that, Kirk Cameron?) to the cow, is as it was originally found in nature.

And speaking of nature, this is the source of the anti-GMO hysteria:  the naturalistic fallacy.



In some people, it borders on the religious.  They revere their romanticized natural condition without really knowing much about actual nature.  They believe in the magical power of food to make them live forever, or at least until 100.   They pass along whatever their leaders say without questioning it.  And they reject all alternate explanations for even obvious myths.

I have encountered many varieties of "food nazis."  They demonize particular foods and insist that everyone else should follow their advice on healthy living.  (The Nazis were big health nuts, we often forget)   They don't want the rest of us to enjoy an omelet because they ignorantly believe that eggs cause high cholesterol (they don't).  Or they have never been fat and they believe they know what foods fat people should eat (no long-term studies of diet have shown more than modest temporary weight loss).  Or they think killing animals for food is unnatural for humans (we evolved as omnivores, not vegans).

They mean well, so you can't smack 'em.  So you have to rant in a blog post.  So I did.