Company suggests a "courtesy remittance"

I have been a State Farm customer for 60+ years, ever since my first car and apartment.  Recently I've noticed a change in their billing policy.  I used to get statements for the car, house etc a few weeks before they were due.  This week I received correspondence regarding my car insurance, including an enclosed "courtesy remittance slip."  It states quite clearly that this is not a bill, but I can use it to make a payment before the next bill arrives.

My next payment is due in two months.  I ran the numbers.  If I keep my funds in my credit union and wait to pay this in November, I will gain a dollar or two, which is not big money.  But if you multiply this by the approximately 100,000,000 policies that State Farm services, it becomes a useful chunk of change for the corporation.

This is all legal.  It's not predatory or manipulative.  But it adds to my growing dissatisfaction with American corporate business policies.  Am I being unreasonable?

Screed

 “To the people of the United States of America: you realize that you are being seen by the rest of the world as no better than Russia, no better than China? You’ve threatened Canada, threatened Greenland, invaded Venezuela, and starved Cuba. You’ve caused untold pain around the world. The Strait of Hormuz and the blocking of oil supplies has brought countries to their knees. Now your president is saying that he’s going to make the Strait of Hormuz American territory? Have you people lost touch with reality? While he sits in that chair, the American people are responsible. Go a little further and have a look at the way you are allowing him to treat your sailors: The disrespect he showed the bodies of your servicemen that came back. The way American citizens are being treated on the street. You are allowing it. The people of Iran rose up, and thousands of them were killed. You sit back and watch this man prey on the rest of the world. Disgraceful.”

Not my words, but I agree with them.  Attributed to a "Martin Bella" somewhere on "social media."

I'll add the etymology of "screed" so we can learn something today:

From Middle English screde [and other forms], a variant of shrede (“fragment, scrap; strip of cloth; strip cut off from a larger piece; band or thread woven into fabric; element, streak”) (whence shred (noun)), from Old English sċrēad, sċrēade (“a piece cut off; paring, shred”), from Proto-Germanic *skraudō (“a piece, shred; a cut, crack”), from *skraudaną (“to cut up, shred”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut off”). The English word is cognate with Old Frisian skrēd.  Doublet of escrow, scroll and shred.

Used in this post as "A speech or piece of writing which contains angry and extended criticism. " 

When I saw this headline (and other versions of it on other news sites), I went ballistic.  I'm an old English major with an enormous vocabulary, but even with those credentials I don't think if I spent all day I could find enough words to express how deeply I despise this utter catastrophe of a president.   

Fortunately I have something saved up, copied from Facebook several weeks ago.  I didn't post it here because I do try to keep the conversation civil, but now the gloves are off.  And anyone who comments on this post expressing support for Trump will get a perma-ban. 

Heck, I might as well add this -

I always thought he was Netanyahu's bitch, but maybe Putin is more likely.

Two images of an extrajudicial killing

Hats off to the Minnesota Star Tribune for posting this pair of images side-by-side.  I had seen the photo on the right and wanted to use it for the blog because of the extraordinary clarity of the image, but couldn't find a source to explain how such high resolution could be generated by citizen cellphone cameras.  The Star Tribune explains:

A widely shared image of federal agents surrounding ICU nurse Alex Pretti as one agent holds a gun to the back of his head appears as real as it does horrific.

But a closer look at the photo reveals a headless agent. Such bodily distortion is a red flag that an image used artificial intelligence. In this case, AI enhanced a low-quality screenshot of a bystander video, digital forensic experts said.

It’s the latest altered imagery from Minneapolis to make the rounds online during the federal government’s immigration enforcement surge. Other digitally manipulated images circulated after Renee Good’s killing by a federal agent. The White House also shared a fake image of activist and attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, edited to make it appear that she was crying during her recent arrest for disrupting a church service. Video from the arrest showed there were no tears.

AI-enhanced and manipulated images are a new obstacle in the court of public opinion. Their proliferation online is eroding trust and inflaming divisions...

The AI image of Pretti’s killing is more nuanced than many, Farid said, because it combines something real with hallucinated elements.

In court, the edited image would never be admissible as evidence. But in the court of public opinion, an image that is based in truth but fabricated can make for difficult debates.

If someone calls out a friend for sharing the AI-generated image of Pretti and says, “This is fake,” for example, someone can argue that the person is siding with federal agents when really the person is only pointing out the image is digitally altered...

“The real poison here is not AI, it’s social media,” he said. “AI is just supercharging it. But if people could make these fake images and fake videos and there was no delivery mechanism, I mean, honestly, who cares? The problem is not the content itself. The problem is that these social media platforms eagerly absorb it and amplify it because it’s good for business.”..

At the very least, he advises people to slow down, think critically and look closely at images before spreading misinformation. He said images are made in an instant, often to provoke strong reactions and sow discord.

This article makes important points and should be shared widely.  The top right image will be labeled "fake" to imply altered facts, but the manipulation was done for visual clarity.  The photo of Nekima Levy's arrest was changed to present an alternate reality:

When I first saw it I assumed it was being distributed by a right-wing rag; I was deeply disappointed (but not surprised) that it came from a White House source.

We live in difficult times where visual (and auditory) information can be skillfully manipulated in an effort to manipulate our understanding.  Be careful out there.

Note:  Please limit your comments on this post to the use of artificial intelligence, not on the Alex Pretti killing per se.

Updated Monopoly cards

Watching the World Series... from a hotel bed

"The only hotel in North America to be found in a major league sports and entertainment venue, the Toronto Marriott City Centre has 348 pet-friendly guest rooms, including 68 that look right out into the stadium."

A recent Bloomberg article offered some observations regarding the monetary aspects of baseball'w World Series:

Sam McDadi, a real estate agent and holder of three tickets behind home plate  [will] attend Game 6 himself and bring two friends, despite receiving offers of as much as C$30,000 ($21,415) per seat. But he admitted to being tempted by that amount, especially when he bought his tickets for about C$3,000 each...

For those with smaller budgets, the cheapest available ticket for Friday’s game on the resale site StubHub was around $1,280 as of late Thursday night Toronto time...

Other businesses are also cashing in. The Blue Jays’ home stadium has an unusual feature: a Marriott hotel with 55 field-view rooms. Those went on sale Tuesday morning starting at C$8,500 per night for Games 6 and 7 and sold out immediately, according to a hotel executive. As of Thursday evening, Marriott’s booking site showed rooms available — because of canceled reservations — for around C$12,000 for Friday night...

...financial firms that have corporate boxes at the stadium will use access as a reward system. For anyone lucky enough to get an invitation, “it means you’re a good client, a good customer.”

There are all sorts of lines of commentary I could offer, depending on whether I'm wearing my sports-fan cap or my "elderly grumpy woke person" hat.  With regard to both of those hats, I'll note that every player on the field is not only a millionaire, but earns several million dollars every year, and they are battling to decide who will become the bigger multimillionaires.  

But the big transfer of wealth goes from the general public to the corporate overlords who control the business.  It's generally agreed that everyone is entitled to spend their money any way they please, and if someone chooses the World Series rather than sending funds to World Central Kitchen, they can do so.  But it feels oddly disturbing that this is what our world is evolving into.

Embedded mage and excerpted text from Adventures All Around, where there are more details about these rooms.

The Trump administration's opposition to cage-free eggs

In 2012 fewer than 10% of the egg-laying hens in the US were cage-free. Instead the vast majority were raised in enclosures that longtime animal welfare campaigner Josh Balk describes as “the size of a home microwave.” By then, Balk had been pushing his cage-free agenda for the better part of a decade, starting as a recent graduate of George Washington University working with students on their successful petition to remove eggs from caged birds from a campus market in 2005. Less than two years later, more than 100 college and university dining systems had joined the cage-free movement, despite a then-40% price premium over regular eggs...

But the real turning point came in 2015. That year packaged-food companies including General Mills and Nestlé, as well as restaurant giants Cheesecake Factory, Starbucks, Subway and others, announced their own plans to achieve 100% cage-free egg status... The Golden Arches then beat its own timeline, announcing in February 2024 that it was sourcing all its eggs from hens that could spread their wings and walk around outside the confines of teeny-tiny metal cages...

California passed Proposition 2 in 2008 in a landslide—with 63.5% of voters choosing to require that all egg-laying hens in the state, as well as pregnant pigs and veal calves, be housed in quarters that let them stand up, fully stretch limbs, lie down and turn around. Nine other states, including Arizona, Massachusetts and Michigan, have since passed similar measures. The year after Prop 2 passed, the California legislature mandated that as of 2015 all eggs sold in the state—the most populous in the country—would meet the Prop 2 standards...

“There is a lot of talk about cage-free, but are people actually buying them?” he asked. Data from NielsenIQ offers a clear answer: yes. At US retailers, unit sales of eggs labeled “cage-free” were up about 16% for the 52 weeks ended on June 28. Pasture-raised eggs, a category that goes even further than cage-free, were up even more, at 25%. Unit sales of eggs overall were up a mere 1.6% in the same period...

Now the Department of Justice is stepping in with a lawsuit against the state of California that it says will protect residents from the “real harm” caused by its “rogue” cage-free egg commitments and the ensuing higher prices, as USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in a press release. “Thankfully, President Trump is standing up against this overreach,” she said... Although the suit blames cage-free laws for higher prices in the state, there’s widespread agreement within the industry that price spikes have been a direct result of bird flu, not cage-free eggs...

More information at the archived article from Bloomberg.

Scalpers selling appointments for drivers' licenses

"Scalpers have been known to buy and resell hot tickets for big-name music acts or sporting events, like Taylor Swift concerts and the Super Bowl. In Florida, some were using the same tactics for a less glamorous pass: a driver’s license appointment in Miami-Dade County.

The county tax collector’s office announced on Monday that it had “uncovered a network of appointment scalpers” benefiting from access to motor vehicles offices by “hoarding free appointments and reselling them for a profit.”

The scalpers found so far have not been punished, because the practice was not illegal, but there is already an effort to change that and make it a civil offense...

The scalpers booked the appointments by using bots and fake accounts, and then resold the appointments for $25 to $250, the office said...

Residents have been forced to book their appointments online weeks or months away, only to stand in lines that often wind out the office doors when they arrive."

More information at The New York Times [gift link].

Stem cell transplants for dogs

Excerpts from the transcript of an As It Happens podcast:

A couple in Nova Scotia are desperately seeking a match for their five year old Goldendoodle Lucy, who was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma. Her life expectancy is between six months and a year with standard treatments like chemotherapy. But Stéphanie Gauvin and Tim MacIsaac are saving up for treatment in Washington State, which includes a stem cell transplant and immunotherapy for Lucy. That could cost as much as a hundred thousand dollars. Fortunately, their pet insurance will cover most of it but what they really need now is a stem cell match.

This story was added to the podcast to assist the dog owners in their quest to find a biocompatible stem cell donor.  But I have questions about the appropriateness of the situation.  

I am gobsmacked that pet insurance would pay huge $$ for a stem cell transplant.  I think pet health insurance should pay for immunizations, dental cleanings, blood tests, medications, and minor surgery.  When coverage is extended to something like this, the result inevitably must raise the cost of pet insurance for everyone in the program, perhaps pricing such out of the budget of modest-income owners.  If owners want something like this for life extension on a pet, perhaps a GoFundMe appeal could be set up to supplement the basic health insurance.  Seeking opinions from readers on this.  

Voter intimidation, plain and simple

Via the conservativeterrorism subreddit, where it is noted that no official government correspondence ever has a handwritten address, and this:

The barcode stamp at the top means this can be tracked. Stolen from another user:

Report to your postal inspector - seriously. They don’t f around. It may sound like a joke - it is not. Don’t ever f with mail.

https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/threatening-letters-and-cyberbullying#:~:text=Report%20threatening%20letters,Scam%20Article%2005.28.2024

Report threatening letters Keep any letter that attempts to scare, threaten or extort you in any way, and report it to the Postal Inspection Service by calling 1-877-876-2455.

This is the ethos of MAGA-world

"An Ohio sheriff’s lieutenant has apologized – and been merely reprimanded – after authoring social media posts boasting about how he would refuse to assist people who voted for Democrats during Tuesday’s elections and would require proof of a person’s voting choice before providing aid.

John Rodgers, a veteran lieutenant with the Clark county sheriff’s office, reportedly posted on Facebook that he would consider a person’s voting record when responding to calls for service in his jurisdiction, which includes the city of Springfield that has recently been at the center of conservative conspiracy theories, according to the Ohio news outlet WHIO. 

In a series of posts, Rodgers reportedly wrote: “I am sorry. If you support the Democrat Party I will not help you.”

In another post, he reportedly said: “The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party, and I will not help you survive the end of days.”

And in another, WHIO reported, Rodgers indicated people would need to “provide proof of who you voted for” if they asked him for help."

Text and image from The Guardian.

The complex definition of "genocide"

During the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb fighters took roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys to predetermined sites before killing them and throwing their bodies into mass graves. In a vast landscape of murder that, as the judges acknowledged, included horrors like the systematic torture, rape and beatings of Bosnians in detention camps and the expulsion of thousands of non-Serbs, this episode alone appeared sufficiently genocidal to the judges. Only there did the perpetrators explicitly display the dolus specialis, or specific intent, “to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such” required for a killing to be considered an instance of genocide. Killings elsewhere in Bosnia may have been war crimes or crimes against humanity — acts that were equally grave — but the decision argued that wherever there were any other plausible reasons for why the killings took place, the court could not rule that genocide definitively occurred. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh of Jordan chastised his colleagues for failing to appreciate the “definitional complexity” of genocide by interpreting the intent requirement so narrowly...

Ever since the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944, by combining the Greek word genos, meaning “race or tribe,” with the Latin cide, or “killing,” it has been pulled taut between languages — Greek and Latin, legal and moral...

After years of contentious deliberation and diplomatic negotiation, the [United Nations] convention limited genocide to five categories of acts: killing members of a group; causing group members serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children from one group to another; and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Each one of these acts could constitute genocide only if and when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group...

To invoke “genocide” is to immediately conjure up the memory of the destruction of the Jewish people and its associated architecture of murder: concentration camps and deportation trains, ghettos and gas chambers. This relation has at once augmented genocide’s moral force and undermined its legal uses. The Holocaust is viewed both as the awful standard against which all modern atrocities must be measured and as a supposedly unrepeatable catastrophe to which they must never be compared. The Genocide Convention effectively enshrined this paradoxical understanding of the Shoah and established a nearly impossible bar for genocidal intent based on its example. As a result, international courts have rarely recognized more recent mass killings as instances of the crime, and peoples seeking to have their suffering recognized as such have been bitterly disappointed...

Not long after it was adopted, genocide allegations began to flood diplomatic channels. In 1951, the American Civil Rights Congress presented a paper titled “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations, arguing that the United States was indeed guilty of genocidal actions against African Americans...

The strict legal interpretation of genocide has meant that courts might never recognize many of the worst atrocities of the past several decades as genocide. These include but are not limited to the killing of some 300,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan, the murder of more than a million during the Nigeria-Biafra war, the Iraqi government’s mass deportation and killing of an estimated 100,000 Kurds in the late 1980s and the Yazidi massacres by ISIS in 2014. If Lemkin were alive today, he would most likely recognize the Chinese effort to indefinitely detain, re-educate, imprison and torture Uyghurs, and to destroy their mosques, confiscate their literature and ban their language in schools, as precisely the kind of cultural and physical genocide that he hoped his convention would eliminate. While China is a party to the Genocide Convention, it has refused — like the United States, France and Russia — to recognize the jurisdiction of the I.C.J., shielding itself from the court’s authority...

Yet in its remarkable parsimony, the 2007 ruling also reinforced the status of “genocide” as a somewhat inscrutable and unimaginable crime, underscoring the gravity of the offense while establishing such a high bar for genocidal intent that it would become virtually impossible to hold states responsible. It effectively meant that unthinkable atrocities could fail to satisfy the convention’s requirements if they were not accompanied by an overt statement of intent to wipe out an entire people, such as the written plan for a “final solution” that the Nazis adopted at the 1942 Wannsee Conference...

I'll stop excerpting from The New York Times article here out of professional courtesy, preferring to send readers to the original, which I want to have linked here for future reference.  And I'll close the comments because the answer won't come from our Comments section.  What I want is for everyone to recognize the complexity of the term and the problems with its application to the real world.

Jon Stewart ruthlessly skewers "performative patriots"

"Let the people eat"

A plea from Jose Andres expressed in a public essay:

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

Copied in toto from the New York Times, with apologies for not excerpting, but without embarrassment because these words need the widest possible distribution.  Boldface highlights added by me for the TL;DR crowd.

Photo from the World Central Kitchen report about opening kitchens in Gaza.  

There is a donate button on that page.

In the United States, politics fills a "moral vacuum"

In a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic, David Brooks postulates that in this country politics has expanded to fill a "moral vacuum."  Herewith some extened excerpts:

Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive...

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.

For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). “Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.”

If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education...

These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures... The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste...

And then it mostly went away...

If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.

According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren’t lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.

The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.

Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.

Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.

If The Atlantic is behind a paywall for you, the September 2023 issue will be at your library.

Society without God

I don't remember where it was I ran across a review of this book (probably Harper's or The Atlantic), but it sounded interesting. Now that I've read it, I have to say that I was not at all disappointed; it is very thought-provoking and a worthwhile read.

The book is Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, by Phil Zuckerman (New York University Press, New York and London, 2008.) The author lived in Scandinavia (mostly in Denmark) in 2005-2006 and while there conducted tape-recorded interviews with hundreds of people, asking them about their religious beliefs (or, more commonly, the absence of such).

Here's the premise of his book:

“First of all, I argue that society without God is not only possible, but can be quite civil and pleasant. This admittedly polemical aspect of my book is aimed primarily at countering the claims of certain outspoken, conservative Christians who regularly argue that a society without God would be hell on earth: rampant with immorality, full of evil, and teeming with depravity. Well, it isn’t. Denmark and Sweden are remarkably strong, safe, healthy, moral, and prosperous societies…”

He's careful not to extol the absence of religious belief as preferable for a society, while arguing strongly that when religious belief (or dogma) is absent, society can crank along just fine. Herewith some excerpts and some of my notes from the book -

p. 6 - “…their overall rates of violent crime – such as murder, aggravated assault, and rape – are among the lowest on earth. Yet the majority of Danes and Swedes do not believe that God is “up there,” keeping diligent tabs on their behavior… In fact, most Danes and Swedes don’t even believe in the very notion of “sin.” Almost nobody in Denmark and Sweden believes that the Bible is divine in origin. And the rate of weekly church attendance in these Nordic nations is the lowest on earth…”

p. 8 – religion hasn’t disappeared from Danish or Swedish culture altogether… the majority are still tax-paying members of their respective national churches, prefer to get married in church, and baptize their children. But overwhelmingly they participate in these Christian rituals out of a sense of cultural tradition. They pay about 1% of their annual income in taxes to support their national church because “that’s what one does.” One pastor asked couples he was marrying why they chose to get married in church. Out of 200, only 10 mentioned God – the rest said they were just following a tradition “with a white dress in this old church.”

p. 10 – Most Danes strongly believe in reason – 82% accept Darwin’s theory of human evolution (one of the highest proportions in the world).

p. 10 – "When they say they are “Christian” they are just referring to a cultural heritage and history. When asked what it means to be Christian, they said 'being kind to others, taking care of the poor and sick, and being a good and moral person.' They almost never mentioned God, Jesus, or the Bible in their explanation of Christian identity. When I specifically asked these Nordic Christians if they believed that Jesus was the Son of God or the Messiah, they nearly always said no – usually without hesitation. Did they believe that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he rose from the grave? Such queries were usually met with genuine laughter – as through the mere asking was rather silly.”

p. 104 – Most people express “benign indifference” to religion, think church buildings are nice, services at Christmas are lovely and pastors are decent and thoughtful men. Religion to them (Lutheranism) is harmless and innocuous and it helps some of their fellow men. And Jesus must have been a nice guy, and the Bible has good stories and admirable ethics. They are not anti-religion, as some outspoken atheists in the U.S. are.

p. 110 – Notes the decline of religion in many western countries. 100 years ago 100% of Dutch belonged to a church, now only 40%. France baptism rates have fallen from 91% to 51% 1958-1990. Several possible reasons why –

a) in some countries (Denmark), one church has monopoly, so no competition, no proselytizing, no effort to attract new members.

b) when people feel secure, they have less need for religion. Danes have food, jobs, housing. Poverty has been essentially eradicated, life expectancies are high, medical care excellent, crime limited.

c) working women have less time for religion

d) lack of need for cultural defense. During conflict people often rally around a church as around a flag (cf Irish Catholics and Protestants). Might change as Muslims immigrate.

e) education levels are typically high in countries where religion is less important. In the U.S. belief in resurrection of Jesus, Virgin Birth, existence of Hell correlates inversely with college education. Denmark and Sweden have 99% literacy rates for adults.

p. 160 – re baptism. “ “For most parents… the religious aspect is of minor importance, and the church ceremony is just part of the ritual. They use the christening ceremony as an excuse to have a party to introduce their baby to their relatives and friends.” The undeniable fact is, almost everyone who witnesses, enjoys, and engages in the baptizing of babies in Denmark and Sweden doesn’t actually believe in the literal existence of sin or the devil, the deliverance from death, or eternal salvation as promised by God. I doubt if even most Danish and Swedish pastors truly believe it.”

p. 170 – Compared to Denmark, the U.S. has much more immigration and more varied ethnic groups who take refuge in religion as a mark of their identity. Also the church is separated from the state (in Denmark and Sweden church is supported by state and by taxes). “Whether the framers of the Constitution intended it or not, the First Amendment has actually played a significant role in helping to keep religion alive and well in this country” (by preventing a monopoly). U.S. has religious pluralism to an extreme degree unlike anywhere else on the planet. Religion in U.S. aggressively marketed. Also Americans much less secure – has highest poverty rates of all developed democracies.

This was not a truly “scientific” study, and the number of interviews cannot guarantee that a true cross-section was interviewed, or that observer bias by the author didn’t influence the responses or the interpretation. But it’s not meant to be hard science. It’s an observational study, a compilation of anecdotal observations, by someone who has thought long and hard about the subject. I find his hypotheses and conclusions to be quite logical, but of course my own biases may be at work there. The book will not change the opinions of those who feel strongly that religion is important and crucial to a society, but it should at least provide some food for thought. It is well written and easy to read; if you're in a hurry, just skip the prolonged transcriptions of the interviews and jump to the conclusions of the chapters, and you should be able to finish it in an evening or two.

Reposted from way back in 2009 to accompany an adjacent post.

Pregnant in Alabama

From a report in The Guardian:

In March 2021, sheriffs in Etowah county, Alabama, arrested Ashley Caswell on accusations that she’d tested positive for methamphetamine while pregnant and was “endangering” her fetus.

Caswell, who was two months pregnant at the time, became one of a growing number of women imprisoned in the county in the name of protecting their “unborn children”.

But over the next seven months of incarceration for “chemical endangerment” in the Etowah county detention center (ECDC), Caswell was denied regular access to prenatal visits, even as officials were aware her pregnancy was high-risk due to her hypertension and abnormal pap smears, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday against the county and the sheriff’s department. She was also denied her prescribed psychiatric medication and slept on a thin mat on the concrete floor of the detention center for her entire pregnancy.

In October, when her water broke and she pleaded to be taken to a hospital, her lawyer says, officials told her to “sleep it off” and “wait until Monday” to deliver – two days away.

During nearly 12 hours of labor, staff gave her only Tylenol for her pain, the suit says, allegedly telling her to “stop screaming”, to “deal with the pain” and that she was “not in full labor”. Caswell lost amniotic fluid and blood and was alone and standing up in a jail shower when she ultimately delivered her child, according to the complaint and her medical records. She nearly bled to death, her lawyers say...

Data suggests the county is the national leader in arresting women under the guise of protecting their fetuses...  The group logged 649 cases in which women in the state were arrested or faced other criminal consequences in the name of protecting their fetuses or to punish actions that authorities said endangered their pregnancies.

Alabama's fears about "gay" literature

“Read Me a Story, Stella” is a children’s picture book about a pair of siblings reading books together and building a doghouse. However, because the author’s name is Marie-Louise Gay, the book was added to a list of potentially “sexually explicit” books to be moved from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library (HCPL) system.

Gay’s book has never been “mistakenly censored,” according to Karen Li, publisher at Groundwood Books, which publishes Gay’s books.

“Although it is obviously laughable that our picture book shows up on their list of censored books simply because the author’s last name is Gay, the ridiculousness of that fact should not detract from the seriousness of the situation,” Li said in a statement.

More discussion at AL.com.   A somewhat-related incident has occurred for TYWKIWDBI.  Blogspot has been censoring my posts.  I'll write about this in a separate post either tonight or tomorrow.

Allegations about Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo may be unfounded

Excerpts from "See No Evil", published in Harper's Magazine, March 2023:

From a November discussion on the Eyes Left podcast, between Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran, and Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay.

mansoor adayfi: As you know, Guantánamo was created out of the legal zone, out of the legal system. Torture was the mechanism of Guantánamo. Torture, abuse, and experimenting on prisoners. We went on a massive hunger strike in 2005. And there was force-feeding. It was torture.

I saw a fucking handsome person come in and he said, “I’m here to ensure that you are treated humanely.”

mike prysner: It was Ron DeSantis?

adayfi: Yes. And, “If you have any problems, if you have any concerns, just talk to me.” We were drowning in that place. So I was like, “Oh, this is cool. This person will raise the concerns.” But it was a piece of the game. What they were doing was looking for what hurts us more so they could use it against us. In 2006, when DeSantis was there, it was one of the worst times at Guantánamo. The administration, the guards, all of them were the worst. They cracked down on us so hard. When they came to break our hunger strike, a team came to us. The head of the team, he was a general. He said, “I have a job. I was sent here to break your fucking hunger strike. I don’t care why you are here. I don’t care who you are. My job is to make you eat. Today we are talking. Tomorrow there will be no talking.” The second day, they brought piles of Ensure and they started force-feeding us over and over again.

prysner: For those who don’t know, Ensure is a thick milky nutritional shake mainly marketed on daytime television to elderly people. It is very hard to drink.

adayfi: Yes, and Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And he was watching. He was laughing. Our stomachs could not hold this amount of Ensure. They poured one can after another. So when he approached me, I said, “This is the way we are treated!” He said, “You should eat.” I threw up in his face. Literally on his face...

prysner: It was well deserved. A JAG lawyer at the time, he would have been well aware this was a violation of international law. There is no question that it was torture.

adayfi: They used to restrain us in that feeding chair. They tied our head, our shoulders, our wrists, our thighs, and our legs. They put some kind of laxative in the feeding liquid. We were shitting ourselves all the time. Then we were moved to solitary confinement—really cold cells. It was like five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day. You can’t possibly handle it. They just kept pouring the Ensure. In one week, they broke all the hunger strikers. And he was there. All of them were watching. They also used to beat us. And if we screamed or were bleeding out of our nose and mouth, they were like, “Eat.” The only word they told you was “eat.” We were beaten all day long. Whatever you were doing—they just beat you. Pepper spray, beating, sleep deprivation. That continued for three months. And he was there. He was one of the people that supervised the torture, the abuses, the beatings. All the time at Guantánamo.

prysner: So Ron DeSantis was actually supervising torture, beatings? He was supervising these force-feedings?

adayfi: I’m telling Americans: this guy is a torturer. He is a criminal. He was laughing. And he was there to ensure we were treated humanely.

prysner: He was laughing?

adayfi: Yes, they were looking at us, laughing because we were shitting ourselves. I was screaming and yelling. When your stomach is full of Ensure you can’t breathe. And you are throwing up at the same time. I was screaming. I looked at him and he was actually smiling. Like someone who was enjoying it...

prysner: So he basically was gathering intelligence to tell the interrogators what it was that was impacting you most so they could do it more.

adayfi: I remember when we were talking about the noise in the night. We were talking about the vacuums, the generators, the fans, and everything. And they brought more stuff.

prysner: You told DeSantis this and then they increased the noise?

adayfi: They increased the noise. And also the food, for example. We told him we don’t eat meat. What the guards did after that is they mixed all the food with meat.

More at the link.  This is unlikely to come up at the Republican debate this week, so I'll present it here.  The mic is open for your comments; please keep them civil.

Addendum:  Related onnline articles from the mainstream media -

The Guardian, April 2023 "questions haunt the Florida governor"

Rolling Stone, July 2023 "documentary about this has been cancelled"

Forbes, June 2023 "Showtime pulls show about this"

The Hill, April 2023 "DeSantis fumes, calls this 'totally bullshit'"

Addendum:  DeSantis' military service came up during the debate, during which he said he was deployed "with the Navy SEALs."  The Daily Beast clarified that..

"DeSantis also spent time during his JAG career stationed at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was an assistant urinalysis coordinator."

Addendum September 24: "A former prisoner’s story of mistreatment at the hands of Ron DeSantis made headlines. But The New York Times found no evidence to back it up... an examination of military records and interviews with detainees’ lawyers and service members who served at the same time as Mr. DeSantis found no evidence to back up the claims. The New York Times interviewed more than 40 people who served with Mr. DeSantis or around the same time and none recalled witnessing or even hearing of any episodes like the ones Mr. Adayfi described."  More information at The New York Times.

"Should brain-dead women be used as surrogate mothers?"

Incredibly, this question (posed by a Norwegian philosopher and originally published in the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics) has now become a topic for discussion and debate on Fox News.

Those interested can read about this at Jezebel.