Happy 70th birthday to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Tom Gjelten at NPR reflects on the audaciousness of the document and reminds us that its existence is largely thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt.
The United States joins forces with our old buddies Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to thwart the adoption of the UN’s major report for the climate summit in Poland. As though to rub salt on the wound (or maybe carbon), the Post reports, “In Poland on Monday, the administration has arranged to put on a show promoting coal and other fossil fuels.”
The New York Times has the data on all the ways we’re failing on climate.
James Fields Jr. is convicted in the murder of Heather Heyer at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in 2017, when he plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters, injuring dozens of people and killing Ms. Heyer. He faces the possibility of life in prison, which somehow still doesn’t feel like long enough. The New York Times notes:
Instead of uniting the right, the rally’s purported goal, it empowered a leftist political coalition that vows to confront generations of racial and economic injustice.
In Skeptical Inquirer, Matt Nisbet explores the ideas of “ecomodernists,” those who view climate change as a “super-wicked” problem akin to war and poverty that can’t be solved, but managed in myriad ways, and that doing so calls for a more vigorous advancement of technology rather than a retreat from it.
At Religion News Service, S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate shows how the modern celebration of Christmas can be largely traced back to mid-19th-century New York City, where folks from Thomas Edison to F.W. Woolworth cashed in on the transition from a mass to “full-on frolicking.”
Faith-based adoption agency New Hope Family Services is suing in New York federal court to be allowed to discriminate against single and same-sex would-be parents. Because nothing says “new hope” like inflicting God’s wrath on orphans and the people who want to give them a loving home.
The Catholic hierarchy in Pennsylvania is totally serious about dealing with its predator priests, and by that I mean they are committed to keeping them on salary with pensions and keeping them from facing any consequences.
While sexually abusing kids is not enough to get the Pennsylvania Catholic Church to stop paying you, being a woman who gives birth out of wedlock totally is, as Harrisburg Catholic school teacher Naiad Reich is fired for just this reason.
Steven Salzberg puts us on the alert for the promotion of Russia’s “release-active drugs” (RADs), which are “simply homeopathy by another name.” I wondered when we’d see homeopathy attempt a rebrand.
MassResistance, a wingnut anti-LGBTQ hate group, admits it went too far during a Massachusetts ballot campaign in trying to convince voters of the “contrived” threat of men dressing as women to prey on girls, but only because they felt it wasn’t effective. Their new three-pronged approach:
[MassResistance] felt strongly that three important points were not being presented to the public: (1) the LGBT movement’s “civil rights” argument has no basis whatsoever; (2) that “transgenderism” is actually a mental disorder and a destructive ideology, and (3) this law forces people to accept an absurd lie — men can never become women.
Hemant helpfully paraphrases this as, “Their new plan consists of WHAT?!, WEIRD!!, and ?!??!.”
Illinois State Senator Paul Schimpf bravely calls for the removal of the Satanic Temple’s holiday display at the state capitol. Sure takes a lot of guts to go after the Satanists. Such courage.
David G. McAfee and Chuck Harrison announce the publication of their children’s book, The Book of Religions, an interactive book that teaches kids what components make up a religion, including Pastafarianism (of course).
At the Post, Neil J. Young reminds us that as much of a contrast the late George Bush was from Trump, he was no stranger to pandering to religious conservatives to get ahead. Like Trump, the religious right was initially skeptical of Bush, so he made his deals with the devil:
While Bush never fully embraced the religious right, he did cater to it from time to time, understanding how essential members were to his political fortunes. His choice of the conservative evangelical Dan Quayle as his vice president and his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court were both intended to appease religious conservatives. The religious right thrilled at these selections, though members also complained they were mere tokens designed to distract from larger disappointments. But Bush’s strategic courting of the religious right also laid the groundwork for its eventual takeover of the party.
David Gorski writes about the efforts to regulate for-profit stem cell clinics, those hawking cures they cannot deliver (and muddying the conversation about what stem cell research can accomplish).
Prof. Frances Arnold, one of this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prize for chemistry, made a point of stating that fears about GMOs are overblown:
We’ve been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. … Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.
Mars is a place. From the sensors on NASA’s InSight lander, we can hear that Mars has sounds! Which I know sounds obvious, but just trust me, this is really cool. Unrelatedly, from above, InSight looks like Mickey Mouse.
The Buffalo News notes the passing of Michael Moran, noting, “His family said that Mr. Moran ‘had a big personality, loved being with his extended family and was sustained by Unitarian Universalist and Center for Inquiry humanist beliefs during his final journey.'”
Quote of the Day
A cartoon from Married to the Sea:
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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.