As you probably know, the Mueller snooze-a-palooza didn’t quite rock the world, but I feel obliged to point out one sad irony of the hearing, that Rep. Devin Nunes of all people would attempt to play the part of the reasonable skeptic, and try to claim of our turf:

Welcome, everyone, to the last gasp of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory. … The Democrats have argued for nearly three years that evidence of collusion was hidden just around the corner. Like the Loch Ness monster, they insist it is there even if no one can find it.

HOW. DARE. YOU.

This is good news: Netflix is doing a five-part documentary series based on Jeff Sharlet’s jaw-droppingly depressing and outrage-inducing 2009 book The Family. This is long, long overdue.

New Point of Inquiry episode! And look who the guest is! Julia Sweeney!!! Cool, right? And she’s gonna be at CSICon in October. ALSO COOL.

Jim Underdown’s latest “Ask the Atheist” column is quite a ride, as he tries to correspond with a very angry person who is certain they have telekinetic powers.

Rep. Ilhan Omar writes an op-ed in the New York Times on Trump’s attacks on her and the “send her back” chants from his adoring fans, and what they mean for actual religious liberty:

The president’s rally will be a defining moment in American history. It reminds us of the grave stakes of the coming presidential election: that this fight is not merely about policy ideas; it is a fight for the soul of our nation. The ideals at the heart of our founding — equal protection under the law, pluralism, religious liberty — are under attack, and it is up to all of us to defend them. …

… The idea — explicitly expressed by this president and enshrined into law by executive order — that people from certain Muslim-majority countries cannot enter this country is not just bad policy; it is a direct threat to liberal democracy. The chants of “Jews will not replace us,” shouted at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017 by white supremacists, whom this president tacitly accepted, are a direct attack on the values of religious freedom central to the founding of our nation.

The Brookings Institution is doing a project looking at the American right and its attitudes toward Muslims, and through a set of interviews with Trump supporters, George Hawley finds that their anxieties are multifaceted:

Although many subjects expressed nativist, exclusionary, and Islamophobic attitudes, their language was typically less hyperbolic and extreme than what comes from the White House and from many conservative media outlets. …

… These conversations indicated that anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States are driven by a broader turn toward nativism, rather than a specific animus toward Islam. Although many of these subjects expressed overt prejudice towards Muslims, none of them indicated that their opinions on Islam were central to their political belief systems. The September 11 terror attacks are no longer apparently salient, and with no recent history of Islamic terrorism on that scale, the issue no longer ranks as highly on Americans’ list of concerns. Most subjects in this study suggested that the United States should not allow a greater number of Muslims, but this was just one element of a broader desire to reduce immigration.

Here’s a positive thing you can do for religious liberty (again, the real kind, not the license-to-discriminate kind): Tell your Member of Congress to support House Resolution 512, which says, “blasphemy laws are inconsistent with international human rights standards, as they protect beliefs over individuals and often result in violations of the freedoms of religion and expression.”

Jessica Grose at the New York Times looks at why new parents turn to alternative medicine for their babies, and it’s really about fear:

Dr. Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that the so-called “first-scratch-on-the-new-car phenomenon” can at least partly explain why parents may be eager to use “natural” rather than evidence-based mainstream remedies on their kids. He remembered that feeling when his son received a hepatitis B vaccine within his first 24 hours of life — even as a doctor who knows that vaccines are safe and effective, he could empathize with the irrational fear of marring your perfect, vulnerable newborn.

The Chicago Tribune profiles Linda Godfrey, an alleged “expert” in cryptozoology who seems to dwell in a space between skeptic realism and credulousness. Oh, and this is what she says about reports of non-cryptid (aka real) animals in places they oughtn’t be:

In cryptozoology circles, we call them OOPs — out of place animals.

Here’s a cool thing about living in 2019: People’s Nest doorbell-camera-things catching meteors flying across the sky.

Gizmodo asks who will protect us from meteors and asteroids and whatnot crashing into Earth. The answer is of course Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow Mark Boslough! I’m mostly right:

“If you look at the consequences, they could be enormous. We’re talking about potential city killers, impacts that can wipe out an entire continent or even cause civilization to collapse. But the probability is extremely low. It’s the classic low-probability, high-consequence problem,” Mark Boslough, adjunct professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico, told Gizmodo. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.”

Define “a lot,” because I definitely worry about it more than I ought to, given my capacity to do anything about it.

Remember the “In No God We Trust” banners in Fort Worth? They were there to promote a seminar by the Metroplex Atheists, which is covered here by the Texas Observer. David Brockman writes:

The strong turnout suggests the religiously unaffiliated, who now account for nearly one in five Texans, are coming off the sidelines and making their voices heard in a state long dominated by conservative Christians.

Braden MacBeth writes at Science-Based Medicine to debunk some myths about electroconvulsive therapy perpetrated by the anti-psychiatry movement. The gist: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not a documentary.

I rely on Google Alerts for much of what goes into The Morning Heresy, but sometimes I get a false positive. This one is interesting, as a result for “Skeptical Inquirer” sends me to a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about inmates dying from overheating 81 years ago, and references “a skeptical Inquirer reporter.” You see? Kinda neat. And then you realize that, holy crap, people were being baked to death, and it might be happening now too:

A spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Prisons said about 1,000 people were jailed at the Detention Center during last weekend’s heat emergency, and that ice water and fans were available at all times. She could not provide an estimate of the staff there.

“The prisons tend to be an intensifier of whatever the weather is,” said Allen Hornblum, who taught literacy in Philadelphia jails through the 1970s. “If it was 95 outside, it was 105 inside where I taught my classes.”

More things to be depressed about in regard to climate change, via The Atlantic:

Absolutely nothing resembling modern-day global warming has happened on Earth for at least the past 2,000 years, a new study published today in Nature confirms. Since the birth of Jesus Christ, the climate has sometimes naturally changed—some parts of the world have briefly cooled, and some have briefly warmed—but it has never changed as it’s changing now. Never once until the Industrial Revolution did temperatures surge in the same direction everywhere at the same time. They’re doing so now, the study finds.

Drawing on a huge database of climate-recording objects from all over the world—including tree rings, cave formations, and ancient pollen trapped in lake mud—the study concludes that 98 percent of Earth’s surface experienced its hottest period of the past 2,000 years within living memory. That uniform heat spike “is unprecedented over the Common Era,” it says.

16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg tells politicians what’s what:

The science is clear, and all we children are doing is communicating and acting on that united science. … Just for quoting or acting on these numbers [about climate change], these scientific facts, we receive unimaginable amounts of hate and threats. We are being mocked and lied about by members of parliament and journalists. … You don’t have to listen to us, but you do have to listen to the science,” she said. “That is all we ask, to unite behind the science.

The guy who found the ruins of the Titanic, Robert Ballard, is now going to look for Amelia Earhart. Godspeed.

Quote of the Day

Astronomer Kelsey Johnson writes at Scientific American about our hopes and dreams about alien life in the universe, and then crushes those hopes and dreams. I’m mostly kidding. She looks at Fermi’s Paradox (essentially, “um, so, where is everyone?”) from a few angles, positing this:

[Perhaps] life has formed and evolved elsewhere. Maybe lots of times. But it doesn’t exist now. There are lots of ways the universe could kill us, for example a major asteroid impact. If we were sufficiently technologically advanced, however, I give us a fighting chance. Or we might kill ourselves off. This is where Fermi’s Paradox gets really depressing. We are in our technological adolescence, by which I mean we are smart enough to destroy ourselves, but maybe aren’t smart enough not to do so. It could be that any civilization that becomes sufficiently technologically advanced is doomed to destroy itself.

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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.