John Oliver on executions

The program was especially powerful in making the case why the death penalty should be abolished. The practice is so shameful that the manufacturers of the drugs used in lethal injections have refused to allow them to be used for this purpose so states that implement the death penalty have resorted to extreme secrecy to hide the name of the companies that they have mange to persuade to give them the drugs.

The investigative team at Last Week Tonight have identified a company that is not an authorized drug manufacturer but is the secret supplier to states of one such drug.

What will Monday’s Trump trial bring?

On Monday, April 15th, the criminal trial involving 34 felony charges against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) for the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels is scheduled to begin. Since it is a criminal trial, SSAT is required to be present during it, unlike in the case of the previous civil trials involving the fraud case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James and the two brought by E. Jean Carroll which he chose to sometimes attend, mainly to vent his spleen to the media outside the courthouse.

SSAT has been trying his mightiest to get this next trial, like all his trials, postponed since his entire legal strategy is to avoid any conviction before the election on November 5th in the hope that he wins and can thus shut down all prosecutions. With his federal cases, he can simply order his attorney general to drop them. With the state trials, it is a little more complicated but he could argue that as a sitting president, he has some kind of immunity and that the trials should not go ahead until he leaves office. He is already arguing that, in the federal case over his handling of confidential documents, he has immunity and the US Supreme Court is going to hear that case and will not rule on it until June or July.
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Film review: Scoop (2024)

Back in 2019, Prince Andrew agreed to an interview with the BBC news program Newsnight in an effort to tell his side of the story about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had just killed himself in prison, and the allegations that Andrew had had sex with Virginia Giuffre, one of the many underage girls who were a constant presence in Epstein’s world.

Apparently Andrew was very pleased with how the interview had gone and felt that he had performed brilliantly. But it was widely viewed as a train wreck and a few days later, Andrew had been forced to relinquish his official duties and has not regained them since. It is thought that the interview is what persuaded Giuffre to sue Andrew, a case that was settled out of court in 2022, reportedly for around $16 million.
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Dennett’s somewhat dangerous idea

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has recently published a memoir and in a review Matthew Lau accuses him of pursuing a ‘dead end social Darwinism’. He says that Dennett has defended the idea of ‘adaptationism’, the view “that all features of an organism must be adapted for some good purpose.” This has been rejected by other scholars of evolution like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin who argue that some features did not come into being to serve a specific purpose but were instead accidental byproducts of the evolutionary process. Those two authors gave the image of the spandrels in cathedrals.

In architecture, spandrels are a structural byproduct resulting from the placement a dome on top of four rounded arches. The spandrels fill in the empty space where the arch stops touching the top of the dome, stabilizing the overall structure. In finished cathedrals they are frequently painted and otherwise beautifully ornamented, as in the four famed spandrels of the Cathedral of San Marcos in Venice, Italy, that depict the four biblical rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indue, and Nile).

For Gould and Lewontin, if we adopt the adaptationist perspective, we might mistakenly assume the San Marcos spandrels were initially formed to be part of the cathedral’s artwork and miss their origin as necessary structural byproducts.

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Voters seem to be wising up to the stadium con

One of the worst things about professional sports in the US is that the owners of teams extort local communities to foot the bill for fancy new stadiums by threatening to take the teams elsewhere if they do not receive massive taxpayer subsidies. Studies have shown that the economic benefits that the stadiums supposedly provide are often wildly inflated and in reality bring nowhere near the amount that the public puts up. The team owners have pulled off this scam many times but it looks like citizens are getting wise to this extortion racket and refusing to pay.
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A better formulation of the Golden Rule

We are most familiar with the form of the so-called Golden Rule that says that one should treat others as you would like others to treat you. That seems reasonable on the surface but it has the problem that how you would like to be treated may not be how someone else would like to be treated. Some time ago, I argued for a better form of the Golden Rule that says simply “Don’t be a jerk” because the standard form was too vague and too subject to idiosyncratic interpretations to be useful.

My formulation was not very elegant but it turns out that there is a better way of expressing the same sentiment that has been around for millennia. It also takes a negative form of the rule and says that one should not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated. This seems better because avoiding doing things to others that one would not like have done to you avoids many pitfalls, since it is not requiring you to do something to others.
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Arizona adds to the GOP’s abortion woes

The US has lots of old laws on the books that are terrible, reflecting the awful views that people had in the past. Many of these laws were not explicitly repealed but became inoperative when new laws superseded them. One of the things that the Roe v. Wade opinion did was to lay down a federal standard for when abortions are permissible, making many old state laws on abortion that had extremely harsh restrictions null and void. But with the Dobbs decision repealing Roe, the US Supreme Court removed that federal shield and now the old laws are resurfacing.

The Arizona supreme court dropped a bombshell when, in a 4-2 ruling, it upheld an 1864 law that made all abortions illegal whenever it was carried out and left no exceptions even for rape or incest. The only exception was to save the life of the mother.

An Arizona Supreme Court decision on Tuesday that could end virtually all abortions in the state puts the issue front and center in a 2024 battleground that will play a crucial role in deciding the next president and the Senate majority.

Democrats immediately pounced on the ruling, which will allow a law first passed in 1864 to go into effect. It permits doctors or others to be prosecuted for performing an abortion at any time unless the mother’s life is in danger and does not include exceptions for rape or incest.

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Jon Stewart blasts the Biden administration over Gaza

In a blistering piece on The Daily Show, he blasts Joe Biden and his administration for their hypocrisy in using high-minded language while avoiding doing anything meaningful to stop Israel from slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazans and laying their entire community to waste. He also focuses on something that is not being talked about much and that is how Palestinians in the West Bank are also being killed by Israeli forces and settlers and their lands taken, even though they had nothing to do with the October 7th attacks. It is clear that Israel is using those attacks to justify yet another land grab, even though those violate international law.

The return of a cicada swarm

Parts of the northeastern US are bracing for a cicada swarm when trillions of these creatures will burst from the ground when the temperature warms up a little more.

There are thousands of species of cicadas around the world but only 10 are considered periodical – having a life cycle that involves the juvenile cicadas living underground and feeding on plant sap for years before emerging en masse to the surface.

This year will see Brood XIX, the largest of all periodical cicada groups, emerge after a 13-year dormancy underground at the same time as Brood XII, a smaller group that appears every 17 years. The emergence will occur in spring, as early as this month in some places, and will see trillions of cicadas pop up in as many as 16 states, from Maryland to Oklahoma and from Illinois to Alabama.
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Cicadas choose to burst aboveground when the soil temperature hits a certain point – usually around 64F (17C) – and global heating, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is potentially scrambling this natural process.

Entomologists and cicada enthusiasts are excited about the prospect.

“It’s really exciting. I’ve been looking forward to this for many years,” said Catherine Dana, an entomologist who specializes in cicadas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “For the public, it’s going to be a really special experience.”
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For now, onlookers can still enjoy this rare burst of nature in their gardens and public spaces. “Sit back and be in awe at the spectacle,” advised John Cooley, a cicada expert at the University of Connecticut who tracks the emergences. “It will be over soon enough. Then think about where you will be in 13 or 17 years. It’s a time for introspection.”

I can’t say that I share that enthusiasm. My only encounter with cicadas was in 2004 when I was in New Jersey for a few days when the area was hit with a cicada swarm. Since that was twenty years ago, that brood must not have been part of the big 13 and 17 year cohorts associated with broods XII or XIX. But the swarm was large enough. These creatures that look like cockroaches were everywhere, making a terrific racket and you could not walk outdoors without stepping on them and squashing them, which was kind of gross. I am glad that I will be nowhere near them this time.

Trump chickens out on abortion

One measure of how Republicans are viewing with alarm that their extreme positions on abortion risks damage at the polls is that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), usually never shy about pandering to the religious and political extremists in his base, kept quiet about what his stance was on this issue for the longest time.

But he could not duck the issue forever and today his campaign issued a statement on his social media site Truth Social that was mealy-mouthed.

Donald Trump on Monday announced his belief that individual US states should decide the legality of abortion – and he declined to endorse a national ban on the procedure.

The former president’s stated position dashed hopes from anti-abortion groups that he would call for a ban on aborting pregnancies beyond 15 weeks.

“States will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both,” Trump said in a video post on Truth Social. “Whatever they decide must be the law of the land, or in this case the law of the state.

“Many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks, some will be more conservative then others. At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases your religion or faith,” he said in a four-minute address outlining his view of reproductive rights in the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022.

He added, “Do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.”

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