“We can’t look away from what is happening in Gaza”

In her Saturday newsletter sent out to Guardian subscribers that has the above heading, editor-in-chief Katherine Viner lays out a powerful indictment of Israel’s horrifying crimes in Gaza and the complicity of the US and other western countries that have allowed this to continue for so long. I am reproducing it in full, along with accompanying photographs. These were some of the photographs coming out that show small children with skeletal bodies as a result of Israel’s deliberate policy of starving the entire population. The first image is evocative of the Madonna and child of Christian iconography.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, an 18-month old child in Gaza who faces life-threatening malnutrition. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Mohammed, seven, and Zeina, 10. Their mother says the family has been ‘silencing our hunger with water’. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian

[Read more…]

“Died peacefully surrounded by family”

I have read the above line many times in newspaper reports of the deaths of celebrities, most recently that of Ozzy Osbourne.

A statement from the Osbourne family reads: “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given, though Osbourne had experienced various forms of ill health in recent years.

[Read more…]

Can AI treat loneliness?

Although I mostly live alone, I fortunately do not suffer from feelings of loneliness. That might be because I am an introvert, comfortable with solitude and being in my own thoughts and engaging in fundamentally solitary pursuits like reading and writing. It takes very little interaction with other people to satisfy my need for human companionship. But for those who thrive when engaging with others, solitude can be a real problem, leading to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness can also strike people when they are in the presence of others if they do not feel a sense of connection with them.

There has been some attention paid recently to the question of loneliness, with suggestions that its adverse effects go beyond just mental health.

A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Estimates suggest roughly half the US population over sixty say they feel lonely. The causes of loneliness among older people are not surprising. Friends and family die, and as their physical capabilities decline, people go out less less, engage in fewer activities, such that their social circle starts shrinking and they find new friends harder to make.
[Read more…]

ICE unleashes the sadism

I was sickened to read how people are being treated in ICE detention camps.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
…

Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.

“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.

Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers or adequate food.
[Read more…]

The killing fields of Gaza

While the events in Trump-world such as the Epstein files get a lot of attention in the US media, the real horror is what is happening in Gaza where it seems like Israel is engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Gazans. They are killing in large numbers the elderly, women, children. desperate people waiting for aid, first responders, medical workers, journalists, starving people trying to get food, people in cafes, any gathering of people, anyone else that they happen to feel like killing, and stops aid convoys trying to ease the suffering.

There used to be a time when the Israeli authorities would go through some form of ritual after each massacre of civilians, saying that it had been done inadvertently while they were seeking out militants. But that veneer of deniability had long worn thin and now they do not even bother, only saying it when they cross a fresh frontier, such as bombing a Catholic church. The Israeli government used to once boast that the Israeli Defense Forces were the most disciplined and ethical in the world. That was never true and is never true of any military. Any army of occupation inevitably ends up terrorizing the local population and the IDF is revealed to be just another army of cold-blooded murderers.
[Read more…]

The big unresolved question from the Scopes trial onwards

As I emphasized in my posts during the past week, the Scopes trial did not resolve any of the major legal questions involving evolution. But many of those questions were resolved in subsequent cases over the next 80 years, as I chronicle in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005

But there was one issue raised by the prosecutor in his defense of the Butler Act (that forbade the teaching of evolution) that is still unresolved and that is what is appropriate to teach children in public schools and who should get to decide it. Should it be the public through its elected representatives? Should it be educators? What should be role of subject matter experts?

In many countries, especially those with a national educational system, the answer is simple: the government does. In general, there is a ministry of education that sets the standards, curriculum, and even lesson plans and teachers are trained in it. There is no real basis for legal challenge and in theory they could decide to teach anything at all. In reality, public opinion acts as a major constraint on teaching nonsense. But in the US, education is very much a local affair, with each local community having its own school boards that determine these things, and these can vary widely. The state can set overall guidelines, while textbooks and standardized tests provide some measure of uniformity, but not much.
[Read more…]

The surprising impact of the Scopes trial

As discussed in the last three posts, as a purely legal matter, the Scopes trial was inconsequential, setting no legal precedent whatsoever. While the Dayton civic leaders achieved their goal of creating huge publicity around the trial, like all publicity stunts, the hoopla eventually died away, the crowds disappeared, and life went largely back to normal. The Butler Act that triggered the trial was quietly repealed only four decades later. The first major case involving the teaching of evolution was the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas in which the US Supreme Court struck down a law similar to the Butler Act that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the case that the Scopes trial sought to be and yet few have now heard of that case while the Scopes Monkey trial, as it has come to be known, is firmly embedded in the public culture.

How did that come to be?
[Read more…]

How the Scopes trial came about

As I discussed in my two previous posts, in strictly legal terms, the 1925 Scopes trial had little impact. But it was never meant to be primarily a legal issue. Right from the beginning, the whole case was designed as a publicity stunt and in that respect, it succeeded spectacularly. The newly created American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would challenge the 1925 Butler Act, passed in March of that year, as a violation of free speech and put out an ad saying that it would represent any teacher who was charged under it. A small group of Dayton civic leaders saw such a legal challenge a public relations opportunity and decided that such a case should take place in their city and quickly moved to ensure it, fearful of being scooped by other cities. They put the case on a very fast track, which is why a mere four months later, a lightning pace in the legal world, the Scopes trial took place.

In my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, I describe how the case came about.
[Read more…]

The Scopes appeal

As I said in my previous post, the Scopes defense team wanted their client to be found guilty of violating the 1925 Butler Act guilty so that they could appeal to the higher courts on the constitutional grounds that it violated free speech guarantees. This was why Scopes’s main attorney Clarence Darrow actually asked the jury to bring in a guilty verdict, which they were happy to do after just a few minutes deliberation.

The following extract from my book, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, describes the aftermath of the trial

The Scopes verdict was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Many people on the defense side, including the ACLU, tried to have Darrow removed from the defense team for the appeal since they wanted to bring the focus back to the issue of free speech and feared that Darrow’s strong antipathy to religion would result in that issue dominating once again. But Darrow and his allies outmaneuvered them and he stayed on.
[Read more…]