The horror in Gaza keeps getting worse

A state of famine in Gaza, if not already present, is imminent. The government of Israel is deliberately starving to death an entire population of two million people by limiting the amount of food aid to well below the levels necessary to maintain even basic levels of nutrition. The soldiers at the checkpoints for trucks to gain entry into Gaza delay the trucks for inordinate lengths of time and often turn them back for the most trivial of reasons, such as having scissors in medical kits, absurdly claiming that these could be used as weapons. A “clear pattern has emerged” of Israeli obstruction of aid trucks, which suggests that deliberately creating famine conditions is now official policy.
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Trump posts bond, gets a stricter gag order

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has managed to post the reduced $175 million bond set for him by a panel of the appellate court.

According to a court filing, the $175 million bond he and the other defendants posted Monday was provided by Los Angeles-based Knight Insurance Group. The filing didn’t specify which assets Trump used as collateral for the bond.

Knight’s president, Amit Shah, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking information about the collateral.

Here is some information about the company that paid the bond. It is also not clear what fee the company charged SSAT.

Meanwhile Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the hush money criminal trial that is due to start in New York City on April 15th, has stiffened the gag order barring SSAT from attacking people after he attacked the judge’s daughter.
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TV review: 3 Body Problem (2024)

My recent two posts on UFOs and the possible existence of life emerging on other planets in the universe generated quite a bit of interest. Those interested in this topic may enjoy the new series just released on Netflix that deals with this. I recently finished watching all eight episodes (each roughly an hour long) of this show.

It deals with a group of five friends who were together at Oxford University and were all the proteges of a physicist Vera Ye who herself was the daughter of an accomplished Chinese physicist Ye Wenjie, whose father, also a physics professor, was murdered by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for teaching Einstein’s theories. While remaining good friends, the careers of the five have diverged. Two of them (Jin Cheng and Saul Durand) are hotshot physicists, one (Auggie Salazar) is the chief scientific officer of a nanotechnology company. One (Jack Rooney) dropped out to start a snack company that has made him very wealthy, while the fifth (Will Downing) became a physics teacher, feeling that he did not have what it takes to be top-rank research scientist.
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How you can support Freethoughtblogs

This network of blogs does not have paywalls and does not have annoying advertisements. The bloggers do not get paid, doing what they do just for the love of it. We also do not have a technical support staff. But running an online site, however lean it is, does have unavoidable costs, such as paying for servers and the like. So where does the money come from to pay for such things?

Basically, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula, one of the founders of the network, does it as a labor of love. He does have a Patreon account and the money that people donate to that account helps to defray the costs.

So if you can afford to give something however small, please go to that Patreon site and make a contribution.

Thanks!

Why we should not have people routinely carrying guns

If you believe the gun fanatics, we are all safer if we carry guns around with us because then if someone starts shooting, then you or others with guns can shoot them first. The problem with that logic is that when people go around carrying guns, they are tempted to use them to resolve conflicts that could have been settled amicably or with at worst a fistfight. The latter, while undesirable, usually does not end up with someone dead or seriously injured unless the beating is carried to an extreme. When there is a crowd, others will usually step in to stop it. But when guns become involved, bystanders will understandably flee the scene or lie low..

We see another example of what can happen when people unnecessarily carry guns around when last night, seven juveniles between the ages of 12 and 17 were shot outside a mall in Indiana because a conflict arose among them.
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Bigots will seize upon anything to advance bigotry

March 31st is the day that has been designated Transgender Day of Visibility and president Biden made an annual proclamation to that effect. The date is an international recognition that has been around since 2009. The White House routinely issues proclamations such as this to recognize various things, and this one was one of 11 that were issued on March 29th.

But this year, March 31st is also Easter Sunday and so bigots have shrilly proclaimed that the date of the visibility day was deliberately chosen by the White House so as to be an insult to Christianity.
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The Trump stock bubble

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to be about to receive a huge financial windfall at exactly the moment when he most needed it, when he is facing a multitude of huge fines as a result of losses in sexual assault and fraud cases.

The windfall comes in the form of a merger between his social media company Trump Media & Technology Group (that is behind his social media site Truth Social) and a financial shell company, Digital World Acquisition. That combined company went public and as of Friday, it had a market capitalization of close to $8.4 billion, with SSAT’s share being around $4.9 billion.
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Woman charged with murder over abortion sues prosecutors

In Texas a woman who was charged with murder for self-managing an abortion, and spent two nights in jail before the charge was dropped, is now suing the prosecutors for $1 million.

The lawsuit filed by Lizelle Gonzalez in federal court Thursday comes a month after the state bar of Texas fined and disciplined the district attorney in rural Starr county over the case in 2022, when Gonzalez was charged with murder in “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion”.

Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortions are exempt from criminal charges.

The lawsuit argues Gonzalez suffered harm from the arrest and subsequent media coverage. She is seeking $1m in damages.
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According to the lawsuit, Gonzalez was 19 weeks pregnant when she used misoprostol, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. Misoprostol is also used to treat stomach ulcers.

After taking the pills, Gonzalez received an obstetrical examination at a hospital emergency room and was discharged with abdominal pain. She returned with bleeding the next day and an exam found no fetal heartbeat. Doctors performed a caesarian section to deliver a stillborn baby.

The lawsuit argues that the hospital violated the patient’s privacy rights when they reported the abortion to the district attorney’s office, which then carried out its own investigation and produced a murder charge against Gonzalez.

Cecilia Garza, an attorney for Gonzalez, said prosecutors pursued an indictment despite knowing that a woman receiving an abortion is exempted from a murder charge by state law.

Prosecutors would had to have known that even in Texas, women could not be charged for receiving an abortion but they decided on charging her with murder anyway, in what seems like a purely vindictive effort to frighten other women who may seek to terminate their pregnancies using legal medications.

Surprising results in probability

Following an interesting discussion on my post on UFO cults about the likelihood of life having emerged somewhere in the universe, I thought that I would explore some non-intuitive results in that case and others involving probability.

I have mentioned before that it is hard to get an intuitive idea about probabilities and that it is easy to get led astray. The Gambler’s Fallacy is one example. In that case, when the outcome depends on the roll of the dice or where a ball on a roulette wheel lands, people tend to think that, in the case of the latter, several blacks turning up in a row makes the next outcome more likely to be red. This is not true because each event is independent of the others. It does not matter how many blacks turn up in a row, that does not change the probability of the next one. Many a gambler has been ruined by thinking otherwise.
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Shock win for Democrat in Alabama, and Kari Lake admits defaming election official

There is an old political saying that ‘all politics is local‘, meaning that candidates for office needed to emphasize their local connections and highlight local issues in order to connect with voters. This was especially true for down ballot races that were for seats in state and local elected bodies. While national issues sometimes entered the discussion, they tended not to be front and center.

Not anymore. Nowadays, national issues are driving pretty much all elections, tending to overshadow local issues like infrastructure projects. As a consequence, local races are now viewed as venues for testing national issues. Hence the shock result in an Alabama state house race is raising eyebrows.

Alabama is a solid red state and the house seat had been comfortably won in 2022 by a Republican David Cole by a margin of 54-46% over Democrat Marilyn Lands. But Cole had to resign after being found guilty of voter fraud. (Is anyone surprised snymore that the party that shouts loudest about voter fraud seems to regularly produce people who actually commit it?)
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