Polls! Hope Hicks and gun nuts

Yes, I've got two, but on Twitter, though I may post one of them here later.

The first is: What's the over/under on how long it takes Mueller to indict Hicks now that she's leaving the White House? (She may not have a huge amount to spill, but she surely has something beyond "white lies." And, she can provide a non-paper trail of the routines of not just Donald Duck but the whole Trump family.

OK — Hope Hicks is resigning from the White House. What's the over/under on how long before she's indicted?

— @realDonaldTrump (@SocraticGadfly) February 28, 2018

There's your voting options. Click the link to go vote.

The second is: With Trump (for now) calling for a 21 and over sales restriction on guns, even to the point of calling Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Regurgitated Santorum) afraid of the NRA, what happens "in the street"? Do the MAGA-heads go ape shit? Do they stay quiescent and/or explain it away by motivated reasoning? In either one of the options, does Steve Bannon see this as an opportunity to stir up some "Look at me" shit himself, or does he stay quiet?

So, will the #MAGA heads explode in anger if Trump sticks to his "21 to buy guns, etc." to the point he called Pat Toomey afraid of the NRA? Will Bannon jump in? https://t.co/vkdKAQxHV6

— @realDonaldTrump (@SocraticGadfly) February 28, 2018

There you go for the visual version. Again, click the link to go vote.

The gun nuts poll, and tweet, was inspired by a tweet back to me. A MAGA-head, now muted, accused me of being "nasty." I had tweeted that the shot(s) fired in a Dalton, Georgia, school by a teacher should — for logically-minded people — put the kibosh on arming teachers in schools.

Said MAGA-head responded by saying that school shootings were all the fault of gun-free zones, that said person probably wasn't gun-trained, and a third critique which was no big deal.

I of course called bullshit on the gun-free zones. People do mass shootings at schools because there's a lot of people there. If they're from the same school themselves, they do it out of crude revenge for bullying or something as part of it.

But, as Texans know, Charles Whitman lit up UT from the tower long before gun-free zones existed. The Las Vegas shooter targeted a concert, which surely didn't allow guns although not being an official school gun-free zone, because that's where the people were.

As for the idea that the teacher likely wasn't gun-trained, I responded that since we didn't even have a name yet, there was no way of knowing that. I offered the counterpoint that the teacher could be a military vet, among other things.

At most mass shootings, or similar things, like ongoing sniper attacks, no, the people firing the guns know just what they're doing. And how to handle the guns they're doing it with.

Oh, and said person, before I hit the mute button (thanks Brains) had earlier in their Tweetline, said something about "gun grabbing." I made sure to remind them, that bullshit and more aside, Obama never did that in eight years and to stop it.

See, THAT's the deal, as I also told said person. Wingers expect libruls to discuss and debate — as long as libruls unilaterally disarm first. Unfortunately, academic libruls like Arlie Russell Hochshield gave them that idea.

I said "Homey don't play that gane."

Oh, and given that a site like Red State, though not Erick Erickson himself (yet?) is calling out Trump, this over his treatment of Sessions, a MAGA-sized split could happen.

Are atheists more charitable? Maybe, maybe not

I was kind of sorry to see Skeptic's Dictionary author/editor Bob Carroll to post a link to a site that made that claim on less-than-rigorous evidence.

Atheists, non-believers, secular humanists, skeptics—the whole gamut of the godless have emerged in recent years as inarguably the most generous benefactors on the globe. 

Inarguable, eh? It would be one thing, and possibly bad enough, to say that was an arguable claim. But, to say it's inarguable is even worse. The site goes on.

The current most charitable individuals in the United States, based on “Estimated Lifetime Giving,” are:
1) Warren Buffett (atheist, donated $40.785 billion to “health, education, humanitarian causes”) 2) Bill & Melinda Gates (atheists, donated $27.602 billion to “global health and development, education”) 3) George Soros (atheist, donated $6.936 billion to “open and democratic societies”)
A century ago, one of the USA’s leading philanthropists was Andrew Carnegie, atheist.

Sorry, but, this sounds like cherry-picking. Picking out the top couple of individuals, and noting their religious belief, is different than general research polling. Gates and Buffett are the two richest people in America, as well as being atheists. (If they are. Many "famous atheist" websites either don't have them or list them as agnostic.) Beyond that, and also per the post, there are relatively few "secular" aid charities, so a place like Kiva will likely attract a higher concentration of secularists. It's no big deal for secularists to outraise Christians there. Similar might be true at a place like The Heifer Project.

Arthur Brooks, at Hoover, claims the religious are more charitable even to non-religious charities. However, Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy shoots down his methodology.

Some people like Brooks claim that the religious invest more time in charities, too. Well, religious, or non-religious but moral-based charities (like pro-life groups) expect that. Certainly, explicitly religious groups do.

This all said, the little I can find on this question to "settle" it one way or the other.

Of course, that gets back to the link Bob Carroll posted. Since there is little evidence one way or the other, it's an unsupported claim. And, per the comment below, and knowing that Bob Carroll IS a good skeptic and is NOT a Gnu Atheist, I don't know why he posted this link in the first place.

UPDATE, Dec. 12: Moneybombing one particular charity is another reason we should be wary of claiming atheists are more charitable than the religious. From networked atheists deciding whom to moneybomb, an unscientific poll, being selective about charities, follows like clockwork.

If moneybombs really meant anything, Ron Paul would have been elected President three years ago. And, per the story being reposted on Facebook, I'm surprised to see that even non-Gnu atheists who also identify themselves as skeptics "liked" the post.

No, 42 percent of people do NOT go to church

For decades, poll after poll has said somewhere from 40-43 percent of Americans go to church on the average Sunday. It's actually HALF that, about 20 percent.

Pollsters have long known that on some things, most notably on racial preference issues, people will, well, they'll lie to an anonymous pollster on an anonymity-guaranteeing poll, producing the answer they think they "should" give to society.

So, rather than ask, "did you go to church in the last week," pollsters instead did a more extensive time-use set of questions, starting with pollees' Saturday nights.

And, with that, a lot of people didn't remember a Sunday activity called church.

That said, the Slate author is right that the ultimate question is, WHY is religiosity so tied to American identity, so much that many people lie about it?

I'll start it with Jan. 20, 1981, and Ronald Wilson Reagan and the Religious Right.

If any man lied about his religiosity, it's him. And, the Religious Right abetted this for ultimately nefarious ends, of pushing the idea of America as a Christian nation.