YouTube says it will act to curtail the algorithmic recommendation of conspiracy theory videos. Via NYT:
YouTube provided only three examples of the types of videos that it would stop recommending: those promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, ones claiming the earth is flat or content making blatantly false claims about historic events like the Sept. 11 attacks.
Minnesota’s new state autism council has appointed at least two anti-vaxxers. Council member Noah McCourt says:
Even if it’s not something that’s discussed or that a policy is going to come out of, giving them this large contingency on this council is dangerous. It’s giving credence to a theory that’s false.
David Gorski responds to the idea that this council won’t deal with “causation”:
Of course, I don’t believe this for one second. Here’s why. Note the part about how the council is allegedly “all about how to deal and help those who are afflicted.” That’s basically code for adding autism quackery to the mix of “how to help” autistic people, and most autism quackery is based on pseudoscience claiming that vaccines cause autism.
Meanwhile, Washington state declares a public emergency over a measles outbreak, all thanks to the anti-vaxxers. But hey at least those kids won’t “catch” autism.
France imports imams. Kamel Daoud explains why:
It seems less risky to rely on an official imam from Algeria than to let a self-proclaimed imam emerge in a Paris banlieue, or suburb. For example, Algerian imams wishing to go to France must first undergo investigations. And as the Algerian government puts it, modestly, the “Algerian expertise” in internal security matters ensures quality vetting.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is already getting some (necessary) scrutiny over her coziness with Hindu nationalists, her trip to meet Bashar al-Assad, and whatnot. In an op-ed at RNS, Gabbard chalks all of this up to “religious bigotry.”
Pakistan’s Supreme Court is going to review its decision to acquit Asia Bibi of blasphemy charges, all while her lawyer, who had fled to the Netherlands because of death threats, is set to return.
Two new reports, from the Anti-Defamation League and the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, find that there is too much focus on Muslim Americans as potential terrorist threats, particularly at a time when most of the extremist violence is coming from white supremacists.
Dan Zak at the Post wrestles with the emotional toll of the imminent doom of climate change:
…here’s where you stop reading, because you have a mortgage payment to scrape together. You have a kid to pick up from school. You have a migraine. The U.S. government is in shambles. You’re sitting at your desk, or on the subway, and deep in the southern Indian Ocean, blue whales are calling to each other at higher pitches, to be heard over the crack and whoosh of melting polar ice. What do you even do with that?
Screw the epoch.
Anne Hathaway went on Ellen DeGeneres’s show to pretend to hawk a “citrus healing” treatment because she’s AWESOME. Via Insider:
Hathaway got the whole audience and DeGeneres to perform the ritual, holding the peeled clementines up to their mouths and making loud breathing noises.
“Do you guys feel a little bit better? Feel good?” she asked.
“That’s impossible, I made the whole thing up.” …
“I made the whole thing up, Ellen,” Hathaway said. “The takeaway of this is: Do not put something in your mouth just because a celebrity tells you to. You are free to throw your clementine at me now.”
Relatedly, Angela Lashbrook at The Outline looks at the wide variety of cold prevention products, like Emergen-C, zinc, and echinacea, and concludes that it’s all crap:
Until the common cold is eradicated, or at least until we have more, better research on the subject, the best thing to do is wash your hands and hope no one sneezes on you.
Cardinal Dolan of New York says he opposes excommunicating Andrew Cuomo over the state’s new abortion rights bill because excommunication “should not be used as a weapon.”
A blurry brown blob recorded from an extreme distance in the Utah mountains is obviously Bigfoot.
Quote of the Day
CFI Indiana’s executive director, Reba Boyd Wooden, writes a letter in the Indianapolis Star on SB 373, the bill that would wedge creationism into public schools:
Senate Bill 373 is another attempt to insert religion into our public school curriculum. There are a number of problems with this bill. I will address two of them. First, the teaching of origin stories in science classes even if “equal time” is given to various origin stories is still religion, myth, or folklore. The inclusion of these stories in a literature, folklore, or world cultures class would be sufficient to make students aware of these perspectives but they do not meet the rigorous standards for scientific instruction.
Teaching about religions as a part of a world cultures class would be good as religion plays a big part in the cultures from which they come. However, having a special class with emphasis on one religion is not needed and has no place in a public school. The promotion of one religion should be left to families and their chosen place of worship.
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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.