We’ll Always Be Wrong
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 16, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
WELL.
SO.
First, um, how are you? Yeah? Oh, I'm fine, fine. You know.
Ahem.
Right.
So.
Okay.
Do Electrons Dream of Sheepish Androids?
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 15, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
We thought it might be helpful to take a moment to think about what our underlying philosophical principles can offer us in a time when grotesque, atavistic hyper-racism is sucking up so much national oxygen. We put out a kind of informational release, looking back on some of the foundational writings of modern secular humanism, and of CFI's founder Paul Kurtz in particular. ...
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When You’ve Lost GoDaddy…
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 14, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
I don't think I could have predicted when I started The Morning Heresy that I'd start work on a Monday in order to provide a kind of This Week in Nazis. Yet here we are.
As you no doubt know, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, instigating violence with peaceful counter-protestors, and one even plowing his car through a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. A helicopter crash also took the lives of two state troopers, H. Jay Cullen and Berke Bates.
Scratching, Licking, and Chewing
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 11, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Apparently Trump got ahold of a wackadoodle national security memo from former NSC staffer Rich Higgins that made all sorts of bizarre claims about the "political warfare" being waged against the president by "‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans." Foreign Policy has the whole thing, and reports:
The memo calls out those pushing for rights “based on sex or ethnicity,” which is a “direct assault on the very idea of individual human rights and natural law around which the Constitution was framed.” It also says that “transgender acceptance” is “denying a person the right to declare the biological fact of one’s sex.”
Favorite and Memorable Investigations
A Skeptic Reads the Newspaper with Benjamin Radford
August 10, 2017
I was recently asked "What are your favorite investigations and what made them memorable?"
Haunted Buffalo Asylum
Investigative Briefs with Joe Nickell
August 10, 2017
Among Western New York’s allegedly most haunted sites stands the architecturally acclaimed H.H. Richardson complex, begun in 1871 and opened in 1880 as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. Its two 185-foot towers rose from a four-story structure originally flanked on either side by five stepped wards, with its female wing being completed in 1895. Based on the humanitarian philosophy of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, the asylum was intended to provide curative hospitalization for the mentally ill. Crowded by a surge in patients, its occupancy was eventually exceeded by the thousands. In 1927 half the grounds were lost to a college, and more were claimed by modern buildings in the late 1960s.
The Patagotitan in the Room
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 10, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
BuzzFeed wanted to know what was really in the supplements hawked by Alex Jones on Infowars (Goop for men!™), so they had an independent lab test them -- in triplicate -- and the results are not surprising. While they more or less contain what they claim to contain, and seem to be safe, they don't actually do anything.
Here's something Infowars and Goop may want to look into: The eggs of parasitic worms (specifically, Trichuris suis, the pig whipworm).
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This is an Amazing Soufflé
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 09, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Despite the best efforts of our president, life on Earth has not yet been extinguished. But, you know, give it a day. Besides, Pastor Robert Jeffress says, "God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un," and that he may use "whatever means necessary." Well, if we're sure that God is cool with it...
And here's a thing. You knew Carl Sagan was pretty damned smart. But did you know he was a prophet?
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The Old Fringes
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 08, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Please imagine now that I am dressed in a silver wig and oversized glasses, not unlike one Sophia Petrillo/Estelle Getty from The Golden Girls. Actually, exactly like that.
Picture it: Earth. 517 A.D. The Year of the Consulship of Agapitus and Paulus. The Byzantine Empire is in tumult, Aryabhata is figuring out the planet's axial rotation, and the people of Illyria are blissfully unaware of the earthquake that will soon destroy the city of Scupi...
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RFID of the Beast
The Morning Heresy with Paul the Morning Heretic
August 07, 2017
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
And we're back. I returned home from my vacation literally 12 hours before starting this post, so I'm a little out of step with what's going on in the news. Here's a stab at catching both you and me up.
Our own Joe Nickell gets a big profile with a lot of fantastic young-Joe photos in the UK's Daily Mail.
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