Fears over pornography

In a long essay, Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of History at the University of Delaware, writes that there is a persistent belief in the US that viewing pornography is harmful. While that belief has remained largely constant over time, what has changed are views about what kinds of erotica causes harm, what form the harm takes, and who is harmed, whether it harms those involved in the creation of it or those who view it or both.

Currently, the danger is perceived to that to young people and as of January 19th of this year, 19 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia) have age requirement verification requirements for adult-content sites. But not qll sites are complying. Some, especially one of the biggest sites Pornhub, have simply chosen to not provide access to people from those states.

Pornhub put up a firewall rather than comply. If nothing else, the move increased traffic to VPN (virtual private network) services, which provide users with unfettered access to Pornhub regardless of their location by securely connecting to a remote server. The given reason for requiring age verification – that pornography harms the minors who view it – is the latest salvo in a centuries-old American debate over erotica.

These state-level conflicts in the US emerged amid an international push for age verification on adult sites. In 2014, Mexico enacted an age verification law. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed late in 2022, imposed several restrictions on Pornhub and other large pornography sites, including age-verification requirements. A similar measure in Britain, the 2023 Online Safety Act, took effect in January 2025. France, which already required age verification in an earlier law, recently blocked four pornographic sites (Pornhub was not among them) from operating within its borders after finding that the sites failed to check users’ ages adequately. Members of the Canadian House of Commons continue to debate the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, which would require age verification. There, as elsewhere, civil libertarians warn that these laws fail to define ‘sexually explicit material’, and raise serious privacy concerns. Pornhub is challenging the laws on multiple fronts.

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Killing science in the US

The benefits of science to society are extremely significant. The so-called scientific revolution has driven much of the medical and technological benefits that we currently enjoy. But many of those those benefits were arrived at slowly and over long periods and thus can become invisible to the general public and targets for ignorant policymakers, such as the one depicted in this cartoon.( I used this in my book The Great Paradox of Science to help make this point.)

Over at Pharyngula PZ has a post about how the situation for science in the US is dire and he is not exaggerating. One of the ways The Trump gang is doing that is by imposing ideological blinkers on what kinds of research can be done. It has frozen all funding for research pending review to see if it “aligns with the new administration’s priorities”. What that looks like in practice is to comb through all the research grants and proposals to look for words like African American, race, gender, minorities, sexual violence, diversity, equity, or any other keyword that they can think of that suggests any attempt to improve the situation of any group other than white affluent men. And of course, anything that is remotely concerned with addressing the problem climate change is going to be cut.
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Sri Lanka’s recovery fueled by women

I have written before about recent positive developments in Sri Lanka where the corrupt nepotistic looters who ran the country into the ground for decades and treated it and its coffers as their own playground to do with as they liked, were thrown out of power, first in a presidential election in September where the leftist candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake (known as AKD) defeated two members of the old guard. He then immediately dissolved parliament and called for new elections and in November his party won 159 of the 225 seats, with 62% of the vote.

He appointed a woman Harini Amrasuriya, a sociologist, as prime minister. Amrasuriya is the first woman who is not the wife or daughter of a top politician to hold this position in South Asia. The two of them are making big changes.

Two years after Sri Lankans rose up and cast out a political dynasty whose profligacy had brought economic ruin, the country is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention.

Anger has steadied into a quieter resolve for wholesale change. Through a pair of national elections last year, for president and for Parliament, the old elite that had governed for decades was decimated. A leftist movement has risen in its place, promising a more equal society.
…

Some of the earliest actions have included ending the V.I.P. culture around politics. Gone are the long motorcades, large security details and lavish mansions for ministers. The president has slashed his traveling entourage. The prime minister’s compound, which under its previous occupant buzzed with the activity of over 100 staff members, now has a library-like quiet, as Dr. Amarasuriya works with a staff of just a dozen.

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Nothing is too big or petty to be a revenge target for Trump

Trump has been on a revenge spree aimed at pretty much anyone and any organization, big or small, that he thinks in some way opposed him before, whether that is real or imaginary.

In the latest move, he has fired the national archivist, presumably because of that organization’s tole in the classified documents scandal in which he was involved. The thing is that she wasn’t even in that position at the time.

Trump dismissed Colleen Shogan as the archivist of the United States, White House aide Sergio Gor posted on X Friday night.

Trump had said in early January that he would replace the head of the National Archives and Records Administration. The government agency drew his anger after it informed the justice department about issues with Trump’s handling of classified documents. Shogan, the first woman in the post, wasn’t the archivist of the United States at the time the issue emerged.

In 2022, federal agents searched Trump’s Florida home and seized boxes of classified records. He was indicted on dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. A judge dismissed the charges, ruling the special counsel who brought them was illegally appointed. The justice department gave up appeals after Trump was elected in November.

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The great egg heist

This story is a little strange.

Police in Pennsylvania are hunting for thieves who stole 100,000 eggs from the back of a trailer, amid a US-wide spike in the price of eggs that has triggered panic-buying in some shops.

The eggs were lifted from the back of Pete & Gerry’s Organics’ distribution trailer on Saturday at about 8.40pm in Antrim township, according to police. There have been no arrests yet.

“We’re relying on leads from people from the community. So we’re hoping that somebody knows something, and they’ll call us and give us some tips,” Megan Frazer of the Pennsylvania state police told the Associated Press.

“In my career, I’ve never heard of 100,000 eggs being stolen. This is definitely unique,” said Frazer, a 12-year veteran of law enforcement.
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‘Arab Americans for Trump’ change their name

After Trump’s announcement about taking over Gaza and expelling all the people living there, they now want to be called ‘Arab Americans for Peace’.

A group that played a key role in Donald Trump’s voter outreach to the Arab American community alongside his allies is rebranding itself after the president said that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip.

Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, said during a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that the group would now be called Arab Americans for Peace.

The name change came after Trump held a Tuesday press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

“The talk about what the president wants to do with Gaza, obviously we’re completely opposed to the idea of the transfer of Palestinians from anywhere in Historic Palestine,” Bahbah said. “And so we did not want to be behind the curve in terms of pushing for peace, because that has been our objective from the very beginning.”

Don’t say that you weren’t warned. You may have been for Trump but he was never for you.

David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises

Since moving to Monterey, I have been playing bridge a couple of days a week and the club has some people who love going on cruises and have done so multiple times. Then there are those (like me) who are mystified as to its appeal and would not do so even if the high cost were not a problem.

When I ask the cruisers what the appeal is, they talk of the good food that is constantly available and the variety of entertainment that is offered. But its seems to me that you could eat at good local restaurants and go to good entertainment events where you live at much lower cost and space them out for greater pleasure, rather than cram them all into one week. They also give as an appeal the fact that being on a cruise is like living in a floating hotel that takes you to different locations for sightseeing with you having to unpack only once in your cabin. I can see that constantly packing and unpacking as one goes from hotel to hotel while traveling could become tedious but hardly seems worth being stuck on a boat for a lengthy period where there is the constant risk of seasickness, not to mention epidemics of viruses. Who can forget the horror stories such as the Norovirus and Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships from a few years back?

I have been on long ship voyages (three in fact) but that was back in the days when I was a young boy, prior to jet planes, when this was the main mode of transport for long distances from point A to point. B, not for going on a round trip back to the starting point. My trips between Sri Lanka and England were on big ships but they were not luxury liners though they did have things to entertain people so that they did not go bonkers by being constrained for two weeks in a small space. So maybe any desire that I might have had for a long sea voyage has been satiated. Anyway, to each his own, and I figured that if these cruises satisfied the needs of others, that was fine even if I could not fathom their appeal.

But then I came across this essay by David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises that appeared in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Titled Shipping Out, it had two features. It described in acute detail what life on a luxury cruise is like and it also gave me a clue as to what their real appeal might be.
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The danger of breaking the government

There has been a lot to be concerned about the moves by Trump and his cronies with shaking up the government. But perhaps the most disturbing is Elon Musk demanding, and getting access, to the government’s Office of Personnel Management as well as the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. These are not policy-making bodies. They are like the Human Relations and Accounting departments of a business. They hold important and confidential information but work in the background and if things are running smoothly, you don’t even know they exist.

As one of the people who works for the federal government writes:

Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.

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Is Trump staging a retreat from US empire?

Trying to make sense of the whirlwind of activity that has characterized the last two weeks is not easy. Trying to find any sense or pattern in Trump’s actions that are not due to revenge or self-interest or sheer vindictiveness may be an exercise in futility. But Ryan Grim writes that a French writer Arnaud Bertrand has gained a following by arguing that what we are seeing is a retreat by the US from its global hegemonic ambitions to accepting its status as that of a regional power.

Here is how Bertrand puts it:

Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order – brought to you by America itself. Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of ‘allies’: they don’t want—or maybe rather can’t afford—vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests. You can either view it as decline – because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire – or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage. In any case it is the end of an era.

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