ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 273

Humanist Lawyers Have Launched a Progressive Version of the Federalist Society

By Hemant Mehta

Here’s a really important development in the world of organized atheist activism.

On Thursday, the American Humanist Association launched what they’re calling the Humanist Legal Society.

I’d call it the atheist equivalent of the conservative Federalist Society: A way to identify, bring together, and support those in the legal professional who are dedicated to maintaining church/state separation, science-based evidence, civil rights (especially for marginalized people), and ethics in government.

You know… all the things conservatives no longer give a damn about.

“Many lawyers approach the world and the law from a humanist standpoint, but there is a need for them to have a way of organizing professionally as a group,” said the Society’s president, David Codell, a nationally recognized constitutional litigator who has served as counsel in many major cases involving LGBT rights. “The Humanist Legal Society will give humanist lawyers solidarity and resources that will make a difference.”

The HLS will be open to lawyers, judges, and law students who agree with its mission.

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Woman Tried to Treat Athlete’s Foot with Raw Garlic. It Burned Through Her Toe.

By Laura Geggel

A woman in England learned the hard way that it’s not safe to treat a foot fungus infection by covering it with slices of raw garlic, according to a new report of the woman’s case.

Instead of treating her athlete’s foot, the garlic severely burned and blistered the woman’s skin, ultimately landing her in a doctor’s office, the case report said. (Athlete’s foot is a skin infection caused by fungus.)

It’s not uncommon for people to turn to home remedies for medical treatment. Given that people have used garlic (Allium sativum) as a health treatment for thousands of years, it’s no wonder the 45-year-old woman decided to use raw garlic to try treating her fungal infection, which was affecting the nail on her left big toe and the skin around it, said case report senior author Dr. Kai Wong, a plastic surgeon at Oxford University Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust.

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3D image reveals hidden neurons in fruit-fly brain

By Jeremy Rehm

Scientists have produced a 3D image of a fruit fly’s brain that’s so detailed, researchers can trace connections between neurons across the entire organ.

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) display a suite of complex behaviours, including courtship dances and learning1. But understanding the neural networks that drive these behaviours remains a challenge. The data from this image, published on 19 July in Cell2, resolved the insect’s brain down to individual cells — revealing some neurons that have never been seen before. This offers scientists a new tool with which to study fruit-fly behaviour and allows them to compare the insects’ neural networks with that of other species.

Researchers cut a fly’s brain — roughly the size of a poppy seed — into more than 7,000 slices and shot a beam of electrons through the sample. A high-speed camera captured high-resolution pictures of each slice — a process never used before — generating roughly 21 million images that the team stitched together using custom computer software.

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Why Mariia Butina wasn’t the only Russian attending the National Prayer Breakfast

By Jack Jenkins

WASHINGTON (RNS) — The unsealing of an affidavit this week charging 29-year-old Mariia Butina with “conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation” was yet another bombshell in the investigation into what U.S. intelligence agencies describe as Russian attempts to influence American elections and politics throughout 2016.

But buried within the Justice Department’s affidavit was a peculiar detail: Butina, a Russian citizen living in the U.S., allegedly sought to influence U.S. officials not only through organizations such as the National Rifle Association, but also by exploiting the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event in Washington, D.C., that typically includes a speech by the president of the United States.

According to the affidavit, Butina intended to use the 2017 prayer breakfast as a way to gather a group of influential Russians in the U.S. to “establish a back channel of communication” with Americans. She allegedly described the list of Russian attendees to the prayer breakfast as “populated by important political advisors to Russian President (Vladimir) Putin, university presidents, mayors, and substantial private businessmen.”

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House votes to prevent IRS from punishing churches engaging in politics

By Brian Faler and Aaron Lorenzo

The House voted Thursday to make it harder for the government to punish churches that get involved in politics.

In a 217-199 vote, lawmakers approved legislation barring the IRS from revoking the tax-exempt status of churches that back political candidates, unless it is specifically approved by the commissioner of the agency.

The provision, buried in a budget measure setting IRS funding for the upcoming year, amounts to a backdoor way around the so-called Johnson amendment, a half-century-old prohibition on nonprofits getting involved in political campaign activities.

Nonprofits denounced the measure, and noted it came only days after the Treasury Department announced it was dropping requirements that most charitable organizations disclose their big donors to the IRS.

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India’s Battle for Same-Sex Love

By Sandip Roy

Five judges on India’s Supreme Court are hearing a challenge to a law that criminalizes homosexual sex — Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, introduced by British colonial authorities in 1861 and kept on the books in independent India.

The Indian government told the court, which began hearings last Tuesday, that it would leave it to the wisdom of the judges to decide whether Section 377 violates fundamental rights to life, liberty and personal security as long as it does not get into broader issues like marriage, inheritance and adoption. But these are inevitable. Menaka Guruswamy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs against Section 377, argued that it was love that needed to be “constitutionally recognized” and not just sex.

Social media and newspapers are filled with conversations and reports about Section 377, but L.G.B.T. life in India has long bypassed the law. Last week I got a message about “Pink Coffee,” a gay get-together at a cafe in Kolkata. A few weeks earlier, Varta, a local nonprofit, introduced an online database of L.G.B.T.-friendly therapists, doctors and legal aid providers in India. Days later I went to the regular gay dance party at a luxury hotel in the city.

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How the National Prayer Breakfast plays into the indictment of an alleged Russian spy

By Tara Isabella Burton

Last week, under the guidance of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the Department of Justice indicted 12 suspected Russian intelligence officers, accusing them of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. This week, arrests continued. Maria Butina, a Russian graduate student at American University and gun rights activist, was accused of “acting as an agent for a foreign government.”

Yet according to the Department of Justice affidavit, one of the most striking elements of Butina’s case was the venue she allegedly chose to exert influence: the National Prayer Breakfast, a longstanding Washington tradition. The event has been attended by every president since Eisenhower and has about 4,000 attendees — influential policymakers and foreign dignitaries alike — annually.

At the 2016 and 2017 events, Butina allegedly met with unnamed American officials and “very influential” Russians, and seems to have successfully attempted to broker meetings between figures in these groups.

It’s striking when you consider that something more insidious than prayer is understood to be taking place at the breakfast, according to Jeffrey Sharlet, an associate professor of literary journalism at Dartmouth College.

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More than half of white evangelicals say America’s declining white population is a negative thing

By Eugene Scott

Few demographic groups consistently poll more conservatively than white evangelicals.

On multiple issues, the most pro-Republican Party demographic group takes some of the most conservative positions on abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration.

But another topic where white evangelicals have repeatedly expressed their conservative views is diversity. And a recent poll is the latest reminder that large numbers of white evangelicals don’t view America’s increased ethnic and racial diversification as a positive thing.

More than half — 52 percent — of white evangelical Protestants say a majority of the U.S. population being nonwhite will be a negative development, according to the Public Religion Research Institute and the Atlantic.

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Hypocrisy, God, and the Originalism of Judge Kavanaugh

By Andrew L. Seidel

Brett Kavanaugh is an originalist in the mold of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. Originalism is one of the main reasons the Federalist Society approved him for its shortlist of judges and why the National Review endorsed him: he has “repeatedly taken conservative stands and fearlessly defended his textualist and originalist philosophy.”

But what does it mean to be an originalist? Despite its name, originalism is a fairly new judicial philosophy, rising to prominence about 30 years ago. It has plenty of critics, and for good reason, but rarely does an originalist judge demonstrate the hypocrisy of originalism as completely as Brett Kavanaugh did in a 2010 opinion involving atheists suing Chief Justice John Roberts over presidential inaugurations. To understand how hypocritical that opinion was, we first have to understand what it means to be an originalist.

What does it mean that Kavanaugh claims to be an originalist?

Originalist judges claim they are just sticking to the dry text of the Constitution, which doesn’t change except through a stringent amendment process. They claim to define the words in that text as the framers of the Constitution would have defined them at the time. In their mind, judges who don’t follow this philosophy are activists, legislating from the bench and harming our constitutional system.

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Jupiter has 10 more moons we didn’t know about — and they’re weird

By Alexandra Witze

Astronomers have discovered 10 small moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing its total to 79 — by far the most moons known around any planet. One of the finds is an oddball that moves in the opposite direction from its neighbours.

Together, the moons help to illuminate the Solar System’s early history. The existence of so many small satellites suggests that they arose from cosmic collisions after Jupiter itself formed, more than 4 billion years ago.

“They did not form with the planet, but were likely captured by the planet during or just after the planet-formation epoch,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. He and his colleagues announced the discovery on 17 July.

Sheppard’s team typically hunts for objects in the very distant Solar System, out beyond Pluto, and sometimes spots planetary moons during these searches. Last year, the group reported two additional Jovian moons. In this case, the scientists were looking for a putative unseen massive planet popularly known as Planet Nine. Jupiter was in the same part of the sky, so they were able to hunt for moons as well.

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