ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 281

Einstein’s Theory of Gravity Passes Enormous Test on a Galaxy

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum

It would be hard to overstate how resilient the theory of general relativity has been. In its hundred-plus-year history, it’s managed to predict things far beyond the capabilities of 1910s experiments, and it withstands every new test scientists throw at it.

This time around, researchers flipped typical experiments on their head. Often, scientists look at how much an object bends the fabric of space itself to determine its mass. A new experiment reverses that idea, using an already-calculated mass to see whether the predictions of general relativity held up. Spoiler: They did. But interestingly, the finding could spell trouble for physicists hoping to solve certain other mysteries of the universe.

That mass can warp of the shape of space itself is a fundamental part of general relativity. Scientists have observed it repeatedly by looking at how heavy objects in space, like clusters of galaxies, warp the light passing around them. Scientists first spotted this during a 1919 solar eclipse, during which the blacked-out sun appeared to have slightly shifted the position of background star. They continue to spot this phenomenon today, and now know that heavy foreground objects can warp light so much that background stars and galaxies appear like a ring in the sky.

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Free to Drive, Saudi Women Still Must Take a Back Seat to Men

By Margaret Coker

With her bubble-gum pink hair and stylishly ripped jeans, Doaa Bassem goes a long way to redefining what it means to be a Saudi woman these days.

At age 14, she learned how to change the oil of her father’s car and dreamed of owning a classic Trans Am. Although she assumed she would be barred from driving the sleek, loud muscle car, she wanted the fun of taking the engine apart and rebuilding it.

By 17, she had entered into an arranged marriage. Within a year, she had given birth to a child, divorced, then remarried and divorced again.

Now, at 29, she is a single mother who works, lives on her own and plans to be among the first women who take to the streets on Sunday, the first day they will be legally permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy that is the last country in the world to bar women from driving. Ms. Bassem won’t be behind the wheel of a sports car, though. She will be riding a Harley.

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AL Supreme Court Judge Says He Wants to Make It Easy for SCOTUS to Ban Abortion

By Hemant Mehta

This is one of those stories that got virtually no attention yesterday because of all the Donald Trump-inspired chaos taking place, but you need to be aware of it.

Tom Parker (above) is one of the nine justices on the Alabama Supreme Court — all of whom are Republican — and he recently edged out his colleague in the race to become Chief Justice. That means he’ll be running against Democrat Bob Vance (who came ever-so-close to defeating then-Justice Roy Moore in 2012).

If Parker becomes Chief Justice, though, he has big plans, which he told Christian pseudo-historian David Barton on the “WallBuilders Live” radio show yesterday.

Parker argued that Trump was one justice away from having a 5-4 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. If that happens, the court will need the appropriate cases in order to overturn marriage equality and legal abortion, and Parker intends to give them those rulings on a silver platter.

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NASA can’t find most of the asteroids threatening Earth, but it has a plan

By Tim Fernholz

If the movies teach us anything, it’s that the US government has a small room with a few stressed-out bureaucrats worrying about every disaster that might arise. Volcanos? Absolutely. Pandemic influenza? You got it. Today, we heard from the killer asteroid team.

The bad news? NASA is not going to be able to find all the asteroids big enough to cause serious devastation on Earth by 2020—or even 2033. Also: For a hypothetical attempt to send a spacecraft to divert an seriously dangerous incoming asteroid, we’ll need a ten year heads-up to build it and get it to the asteroid.

The good news? They’re working on it. “If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, told reporters.

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Gay rights, climate change could disappear from Michigan social studies

By Lori Higgins

Potential changes to Michigan’s school social studies standards are stirring controversy because they remove references to Roe v. Wade, gay rights and climate change while trimming references to the role of the NAACP. The revisions also eliminate the word “democratic” from the phrase “core democratic values.”

Much of the controversy has centered on Republican state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, who has faced mounting criticism since Bridge Magazine published a report last week that described the revisions — of standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2007 — as having a conservative bent, thanks to Colbeck and several other conservatives who were part of the process.

Colbeck clearly influenced the removal of language on climate change, the removal of “democratic” from “core democratic values,” and a change in language from describing the U.S. as a constitutional democracy to a constitutional republic. He also insisted that if there were references to civil rights for gays and lesbians and other members of the LGBTQ community, that the department include language about religious freedom.

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The Christian Right Adopts a 50-State Strategy

By Katherine Stewart

If you want to understand American politics today, starting with the prospects for the 2018 midterm elections, you need to know Jim Domen. By the time he was in middle school, Mr. Domen knew he was different. His attraction to boys confused him. He knew it would shock his parents, born-again Christians.

“I tried to read the Bible, and I prayed to change the sinful desires,” Mr. Domen told a radio interviewer in 2013. He tried dating girls, but that didn’t work either.

When he eventually told his parents, they were “devastated,” he has said. They ordered him to seek treatment from a Christian counselor, but his attractions persisted.

For several years in his 20s, Mr. Domen has said, he had a relationship with a man. After the couple split up, Mr. Domen enrolled as a seminary student at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian university in Azusa, Calif., and it was there that his life changed at last. He met his future wife; took a job at the California Family Council, an affiliate of Focus on the Family, an organization that promotes “biblical” answers to America’s social problems; and worked toward the passage of Proposition 8, California’s 2008 statewide ballot initiative stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

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Why Hasn’t Trump Lost the Evangelical Vote? Ralph Reed Explains

[UPDATE 2:20 – The link has been fixed]

By Bari Weiss

On Wednesday, I had an online conversation with Ralph Reed, the head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. During the 2016 election, Mr. Reed was instrumental in getting out the evangelical vote for Donald Trump. His group, which has some 1.8 million members, says it will spend $20 million to turn out evangelical voters in the November midterm elections.

I interviewed Mr. Reed late last month at the Times Center and touched briefly on the question of how he squares his Christian values with support for the Trump administration.

I wanted to ask him more about that tension, about the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border, the president’s executive order — the news about it broke in the middle of our conversation — and more.

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Donald Trump Wants a ‘Space Force,’ But America Already Has One

By Brandon Specktor

In a meeting of the National Space Council yesterday (June 18), President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to get cracking on building a sixth branch of the U.S. military called the Space Force.

This ambitious project, which Trump has been teasing for several months now, would result in the first new branch being added to the U.S. military since the Air Force was created in 1947. But what exactly will this Space Force do? Who will pay for it, when will it launch and — most important — will it involve lightsabers?

None of that is really clear yet. Since first bringing up the idea for a Space Force in March, Trump hasn’t provided many concrete details about the project, save for some philosophical talk about recognizing space as “a war-fighting domain” and assuring “American dominance” there.

While this sort of language might conjure up images of interstellar laser battles or armadas of hovering battleships, the reality of American space security is far less scintillating. According to Laura Grego, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, space security mainly involves keeping other countries away from American satellites. 

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Evolution, climate change skeptics lose battle over Collier science textbooks

By Annika Hammerschlag

The Collier County School Board voted 3-2 on Monday to adopt a new batch of science textbooks after residents filed objections to more than a dozen of them.

Four Collier residents opposed some of the textbooks, making arguments ranging from unbalanced views of evolution and climate change to inaccurate racial depictions of science experts.

Board Chairman Roy Terry and members Stephanie Lucarelli and Erick Carter voted in favor of adopting the disputed textbooks. Erika Donalds and Kelly Lichter voted against them.

The slate of instructional materials was unanimously approved for adoption at the May 8 board meeting. Since then, four people submitted 220 objections to content in 18 textbooks. The overall theme of the objections was a lack of balance and context in references to evolution and climate change and the treatment of those topics as fact rather than theory.

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The White House Bible Study group that influenced Trump’s family separation policy

By Andrew L. Seidel

Attorney General Jeff Sessions ignited a public theological debate last week when he used the Bible, specifically Romans 13, to justify the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. border. He likely took his cues from the White House Bible Study (WHBS), a weekly Bible study for members of the president’s cabinet organized by Ralph Drollinger of Capitol Ministries.

According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, significant staff time and resources go into coordinating the Bible study every week. Documents also show that Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who defended the policy during a press conference Monday, is heavily involved with the WHBS. In fact, she’s the only cabinet official whose direct email address appears on the electronic invitations to the WHBS.

The day before Sessions’ remarks last Thursday, the White House Bible Study held a meeting centered on “The Importance of Parenting and the Course of the Nation.” The first paragraphs discuss “obedience to a nation’s laws” and cite Proverbs 28:4 and Romans 1:32[2] . (There are a number of spelling and Bible citation errors in the packet, including “1 Corinthians 9:27a,” as well as Romans 1:32, which may be a typo intended to cite Romans 13:2, the chapter Sessions used to justify the separation policy.)

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