ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 420

Charity helping Yazidi survivors of Isis sexual slavery shut down

By Emma Graham-Harrison

Kurdish authorities have shut down a key charity that was supporting women and children from the Yazidi minority who survived Isis sexual slavery.

The decision to abruptly close Yazda leaves more than 1,200 women and children without material, psychological or social support, charity officials and human rights activists warn.

It may also complicate a programme to take some of the most vulnerable women and girls to Canada for resettlement, because Yazda was expected to be involved in the screening and identification of those in greatest need of protection, Canadian media reported.

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Dutch electric trains become 100% powered by wind energy

By Agence France-Presse in The Hague

All Dutch electric trains are now powered by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said .

“Since 1 January, 100% of our trains are running on wind energy,” said NS spokesman, Ton Boon.

Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting January 2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy.

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Donald Trump and the Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracy Theorists

By Laurie Garrett

Things are getting down and dirty now. And millions of lives are at stake. I cannot possibly state strongly enough how dangerous it is that President-elect Donald Trump has embraced the notion that vaccination is the cause of autism.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a celebrated vaccine skeptic, met with Trump on Jan. 10. Speaking to reporters outside Trump Tower in Manhattan after the meeting, Kennedy said he will chair a commission “on vaccine safety and scientific integrity” at Trump’s request, because, “we ought to be debating the science.”

(One news organization, the Guardian, later reported that the Trump team denies Kennedy will lead such a commission, but offered no other explanation for why the environmentalist was summoned to meet with the president-elect.)

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What People Don’t Criticize About Sen. Jeff Sessions, But Should

By Herb Silverman

In 1986 Jeff Sessions, current nominee for attorney general, was nominated and rejected for a position in Alabama’s district court, primarily for having made racially insensitive remarks. There are differences of opinion over whether Sessions was then and is now a racist, which is why he is aa controversial nominee whose record is being carefully examined by civil rights activists.

People do change over time. Former Ku Klux Klan members Hugo Black and Robert Byrd served honorably in the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Senate, respectively. Has Sessions changed? Perhaps, but I’m troubled by his 2015 statement calling the removal of the Confederate flag from public buildings as attempts to delegitimize the “fabulous accomplishments” of our country. Even after the June 17 massacre of nine African-American worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina by a white racist who revered the flag as a symbol of white supremacy, Sessions said he was no fan of any attempt to erase history, recalling his own family’s role in the Civil War.

I watched a C-SPAN discussion on January 9 with Steve Flowers from Alabama, a strong supporter of Sessions. He said Jeff Sessions is not a racist, using as evidence that Sessions is a former Eagle Scout and a very religious Christian. This reminded me of another religious Christian from my state who influenced national politics for decades—former segregationist Strom Thurmond.

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Question of the Week – 1/11/17

What if you were the only atheist in Congress: What issue or piece of legislation would be your top priority?

Our favorite answer wins a copy of A Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins (no repeat winners).

And please don’t forget to send in your submissions for Question of the Week! You can suggest a question by emailing us at QotW@richarddawkins.net. Please remember this is for “Question of the Week” suggestions only, and answers to the Question of the Week should be submitted through the comments section on the Question of the Week page  Thank you!

Climate change may shut down a current that keeps the North Atlantic warm

By Rachel Becker

Both Europe and North America are warmed in the winter by currents circulating in the Atlantic — but climate change threatens this source of warmth. If the Earth warms too much, it’s possible that this current could collapse entirely, new research says. That would mean frigid winters for countries along the North Atlantic, expansion of the sea ice in the Greenland, Iceland, and Norwegian seas, and a shift in rainfall across the world.

The current is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and it’s like a conveyer belt that brings warm water from the tropics to the the cooler reaches of the North Atlantic. There, the water loses its heat to the atmosphere. Because water gets denser as it gets colder, it sinks. This lower band of cool water circulates back to the tropics where it warms and repeats the process all over again. If you’ve ever watched soup boil up, spread, and then sink, it works kind of like that.

“It is a major player in the climate system, important for Europe and North America. So it’s a big deal,” says Tom Delworth, a scientist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved in this recent study. The AMOC is the same current that collapsed and triggered an icy apocalypse in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow (featuring Verge favorite Jake Gyllenhaal). “It wasn’t quite accurate in the science, but that’s okay, it was entertaining,” Delworth says.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s 2017 plan to visit all US states hints at political ambitions

By Olivia Solon

Mark Zuckerberg has given more weight to the idea that he could move into politics with the announcement of a statesmanly personal challenge for 2017.

In previous years the Facebook CEO has learned Mandarin, pledged to run at least a mile each day and built a virtual assistant called Jarvis to control his home. This year he wants to have visited and met people in every state in the US. He’s already visited about 20 states, which means he has to travel to about 30 states by the end of the year.

“After a tumultuous last year, my hope for this challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they’re living, working and thinking about the future,” he said in a Facebook post announcing the challenge.

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A Cleveland Clinic doctor spread anti-vaccine views. He’s not alone among MDs.

By Julia Belluz

Over the weekend, a Cleveland Clinic doctor’s anti-vaccine blog post sparked a social media furor, prompting the prestigious medical center to issue a statement reaffirming its trust in vaccines.

In an op-ed on Cleveland.com, entitled “Make 2017 the year to avoid toxins (good luck) and master your domain,” Dr. Daniel Neides, the medical director and chief operating officer of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute, questioned whether vaccines have contributed to a rise in neurological diseases like autism and ADHD and argued that ingredients in them are harmful to newborns.

“Does the vaccine burden — as has been debated for years — cause autism?” he wrote. “I don’t know and will not debate that here. What I will stand up and scream is that newborns without intact immune systems and detoxification systems are being over-burdened with preservative and adjuvants in the vaccines.”

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Why Christians Are Disproportionately Powerful in Congress

By Emma Green

The 115th Congress is back in session, and at least one thing looks the same as usual: 91 percent of its members identify as Christians. This proportion has basically remained constant for more than five decades, as long as this kind of data has been available, according to a new study from Pew Research Center. What has changed is the U.S. population: Only 71 percent of American adults identify as Christians.

Some religious minorities, including Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, are slightly underrepresented in Congress relative to their population sizes in the United States, while others, including Jews and Mormons, are slightly overrepresented. But these groups aren’t the source of the demographic mismatch between Congress and the rest of the country. The Americans who are vastly underrepresented in Congress are those who don’t identify with any religion at all: Only one member of Congress, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, says she is religiously unaffiliated, while 10 others declined to state their affiliation in surveys and interviews with CQ Roll Call.

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Life Driven Purpose, pgs 62-63

“Thomas Jefferson was a deist, living just like an atheist with no religious practices, but believing there had to be some kind of starter god or impersonal force that got everything going. The deists were the pre-Darwinian freethinkers, lacking a model for the origin of life. But Jefferson got it right about instincts, anticipating the theory of evolution by many decades. Charles Darwin famously wrote: “It has, I think, now been shown that man and the higher animals, especially the Primates, have some few instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations, – similar passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity; they practise deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule, and even have a sense of humour; they feel wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees. The individuals of the same species graduate in intellect from absolute imbecility to high excellence. They are also liable to insanity, though far less often than the case of man.” Scientists today continue to prove that Darwin and Jefferson were right. We are discovering that the same “moral instincts” are found in other animals, though to different degrees, as Darwin noticed. All species have evolved instincts that enhance the survival of their genes – they wouldn’t be here otherwise – and this often involves behavior that is cooperative, altruistic, and sacrificial. Frans de Waal, in his book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, gives many examples of nonhuman animals acting compassionately. Altruism is an evolved behavior that does not rely solely on having a “higher” brain that can construct formal moral philosophies. Chimpanzees will sacrifice for each other. They will lag behind to help a wounded companion, licking their wounds, putting their own lives in danger to protect a weaker individual. They work together cooperatively. they hug and express emotions of love, gratitude, sorrow, and empathy. Chimpanzees are primates like us, but altruism also occurs within species less closely related to humans.”

–Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose, pgs 62-63

Discuss!