The world is not helping my depression

I wish I could avoid this, but the world keeps slapping me in the face with the horrors going on in Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Israel has decided that the northern part of Gaza, with over a million people living there, must be completely emptied within 24 hours before the tanks roll in and the white phosphorus comes raining down and the soldiers march in and clear out the region house by house. This, I presume, they consider a reasonable approach to a terror attack. Just as America considered devastating an entire country and killing hundreds of thousands of people a proper approach to a terror attack that Iraqi citizens had nothing to do with.

Israeli commanders have said they’re readying a ground invasion of the territory in a bid to end Hamas rule there. The militant group launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Saturday, killing more than 1,300 civilians and soldiers and taking scores of hostages.

Israel has responded with airstrikes and a siege. With exits to Israel and Egypt shut and food, drinkable water, medicine and fuel running low, the operations have effectively turned the densely populated 140-square-mile strip into a death trap.

No fuel has been allowed into the territory since the crisis began; many users, including the largest power plant, have run out or will soon. Nearly 1,800 people, roughly half of them women and children, have died in the bombing campaign, according to the territory’s health ministry. Another 7,300 have been wounded.

“Death trap” is right. This is another kind of terror attack against Palestinian citizens.

“The situation in Gaza has reached a dangerous new low,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told reporters. “Moving more than 1 million people across a densely populated war zone to a place with no food, water or accommodation when the entire territory is under siege is extremely dangerous and in some cases simply not possible.”

Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, warned that the order “does not alter Israel’s obligations in military operations to never target civilians and take all the measures it can to minimize harm to them.”

Nancy Okail, president of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, called the evacuation order “a license to kill. Because those who remain behind, it would be sort of a warranty to kill those who stay.”

The Norwegian Refugee Council, which operates in Gaza, said the demand to evacuate without clear guarantees of safety and return “would amount to the war crime of forcible transfer.”

Israel is planning to kill 2 million people, slowly and callously and brutally. The UN is posting alerts about what is about to happen.

Across the Gaza Strip, more than 2 million people are at risk as water runs out.

“It has become a matter of life and death. It is a must; fuel needs to be delivered now into Gaza to make water available for 2 million people,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General.

No humanitarian supplies have been allowed into Gaza for a week now.

Clean water is running out in the Gaza Strip, after its water plant and public water networks stopped working. People are now forced to use dirty water from wells, increasing risks of waterborne diseases. Gaza has also been under an electricity blackout since 11 October, impacting the water supply.

At the UN base in the southern Gaza Strip – where UNRWA has moved its operations- drinking water is also running out. Thousands of people have sought refuge there after Israel issued a warning to residents demanding them to leave their homes in the northern parts of the Strip.

Only in the past 12 hours, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. The exodus continues as people move to the southern parts of the Gaza Strip. Nearly 1 million people have been displaced in one week alone.

“We need to truck fuel into Gaza now. Fuel is the only way for people to have safe drinking water. If not, people will start dying of severe dehydration, among them young children, the elderly and women. Water is now the last remaining lifeline. I appeal for the siege on humanitarian assistance to be lifted now,” added Lazzarini.

I don’t know what to do. Do we just wait for the slow death of all those Palestinians, justified by the actions of a few terrorists? Just don’t ask me to ever support the criminal Israeli state ever again.

Friday the 13th!

I had bad news yesterday, with my granddaughter sick and canceling her birthday party, and my mother seriously ill in the hospital. Today, it’s a different story:

  • Iliana is fine, COVID tests came back negative, the birthday party is back on!

  • My mother was getting feisty, threatening to call a cab to take her home from the hospital, so obviously she’s feeling much better.

I guess Friday the 13th isn’t so awful, after all.

My students may disagree, since I’m spending the morning cheerfully polishing up an exam they’ll be working on over Fall Break.

Apologists for state-sponsored violence can fuck right off

I knew this was coming. We saw it before with 9/11, when any criticism of American policy in the Middle East caused an instant knee-jerk response: you’re siding with the terrorists! You must hate America!

You all remember the madness, which is still ongoing.

Now we have a new horrendous terrorism event that will be used to polarize people and trigger more extremism, the terror attack by Hamas in Israel several days ago. There is no doubt that this was terrorist extremism, unjustifiable and vile. Unfortunately, it’s already become a tool to excuse all of the horrors perpetrated by Israel. You know you can condemn both sides, right? Some people seem to think you’re either good or evil, with nothing in between.

Case in point: this comment on a post I made in which I condemned the violence on both sides. I guess you aren’t allowed to do that.

Any re-think of the verging on Jew-hatred comments here now?

Not that the disgusting Old Testament “eye for an eye” murdering Israel is and will do is in any way justified, not American support for it.

Hamas was never an organization worthy of any respect or trust: terrorists only interested in murder and revenge. oppressor of their own people as well, Muslim extremists of the most intolerant type and motivated by hatred,

Except for ISIL, there the worst of the worst. That’s what they’ve been and what they are.

I really do want to hear what you have to say about this now, PZ. You have more facts and have had time to cool down and evaluate it. The Gurdian certainly isn’t pro-Likud, or even pro-Israel.

Certainly, I’ll never associate with anyone who excuses this ever again.

Fingers crossed in hope.

There was no “Jew-hatred”. The political state of Israel is not synonymous with Judaism, but this is the most common criticism I see: if you dare to oppose the military actions of the Israeli state then you are anti-Semitic. It’s a disgusting tactic.

No one here has offered any “respect or trust” for Hamas. Hamas is not synonymous with the Palestinian people. Standing with the Palestinian people in their demands for autonomy is not excusing the terror attack. Opposing genocide is not making excuses for terrorists.

There certainly are people who excuse it, but not me, and not the majority of commenters here.

As a humanist, I do evaluate my choices in light of my principles, and those principles tell me that all people, Palestinian and Israeli alike, have the right to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Anyone who tries to deprive others of that right is in the wrong. At least I’m consistent in that belief, are the apologists for Israeli atrocities?

Mopin’ time

I had grand plans for this weekend. It’s our Fall Break, so it was going to be 4 days off…and I’m pretty well caught up on everything, so I’m not going to use it for grading. It’s also going to coincide with my granddaughter Iliana’s fifth birthday, so we were going to go to a birthday party!

I wake up this morning to dismal news: Iliana has COVID. She’s doing OK, but party canceled.

Worse news: my mother is in the hospital with serious pulmonary issues, serious enough that the doctors asked the family if they should put in do-not-resuscitate orders. If you’re a woman over 65 with a history of smoking, lungs are what’s gonna get you. She’s improving right now, but I am concerned.

I’ve made new plans for the weekend. I’m going to sit around and mope and worry.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not stand a chance of succeeding in his campaign for the presidency — he’s weird, he’s loony, he’s a crackpot. If he were a greedy sex-pest and liar, maybe he’d do better, but Trump has a lock on that niche. Now he’s running as an independent, which means Joe Biden is probably a bit relieved. Not that he had cause to worry, but at least the wacky anti-vaxxer isn’t tainting the Democratic ticket, and now maybe it’s Trump’s turn to be concerned.

Could Kennedy pull votes away from Trump? Trump’s campaign team certainly seems to think so, at least according to Shelby Talcott at Semafor. She reports that “internal campaign polling suggests his expected third party bid could draw more votes from Trump than President Joe Biden in a general election.” In their typical self-aggrandizing style, a Trump campaign member told Semafor they plan on “dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views.”

They may find that this is a more difficult task than their belligerent rhetoric suggests. Because the slice of voters Trump and Kennedy could be competing over aren’t defined by political beliefs that map neatly onto concepts like “liberal” or “conservative.” Instead, they’re fighting over the crank vote: People who are addicted to gobbling down kooky, bizarre and above all, false information. The QAnon crowd, in other words.

Splitting the crank vote and diminishing their ability to poison the election sounds like good news to me.

It’s also good to see the words of WB Yeats apply to the far right. Fracture away!

How’s your relationship going?

Have you been in a break-up? Miss your partner? Hate your ex-partner who has blocked you on all social media and want to rip into them? No problem, AI to the rescue!

Just feed all the texts you have stored on your phone into an app called Amori, and it will construct a simulacrum of them that you can talk at forever!

Our GPT-powered algorithm will analyze your text conversations with your lover or ex, providing you with some extra sassy relationship insights and a compatibility score to share with friends.

It’ll even simulate phone sex for you.

That’s not creepy at all.

For added verisimilitude, buy one of those inflatable sex dolls, tape a photo of your ex to its head, and run this app while you have a conversation with it.

One of the few reasons to read Xitter: Lee Cronin’s whines

Crank meltdown in progress. Leroy Cronin, who published that ridiculous “assembly theory” article in Nature has been struggling for the last few ways to cope with the ridicule coming his way.


Make a theory at the intersection of evolutionary biology, theoretical physics, complexity theory, & prebiotic chemistry = x 4 the ‘normal’ trolling fun. I love the virtue signalling & the fact they clearly have not even read the paper which is no excuse as it is open access.😂

‘Everyone who disagrees with me is a troll!’ is not the triumphant comeback you think it is. Yes, it’s a theory that combines a lot of disciplines, I agree. But has he considered that maybe the reason he’s getting so much pushback is that people who actually know something about each of those disciplines is saying that the authors don’t understand how the discipline works? I can say that his paper didn’t get evolutionary biology at all right, so now I’m wondering if he also got theoretical physics, complexity theory, and prebiotic chemistry just as wrong.


Gosh first the complexity theorists, then prebiotic chemists followed by the theoretical physicists, & evolutionary biologists. Is that all? Now the creationists are trolling me also. 🤷

I haven’t seen the creationists responding to assembly theory, but now I want to. Not hard enough to actually go digging, unfortunately.


Paradigm shifts involve 1) confusion & anger followed by 2) pronouncements on how obvious it is with the final 3) it has already been done or they thought of it before & it was trivial.

Yikes. The kooks always claim to be leading a ‘paradigm shift’ and start quoting Kuhn.

Here’s another famous quote, this time from Carl Sagan.

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

The fact that your ideas are laughed at is not evidence that you are correct.


I love critical feedback because it helps improve stuff & I also get excited when people get ‘triggered’ scientifically as it means something REALLY interesting is shifting. It ain’t pretty but it might accelerate science. #AssemblyTheory

Also, the fact that experts are triggered and reject your theory is not interesting, and doesn’t mean you’ve made a productive change in the world. Creationists trigger me too, that doesn’t validate creationism.


I’m happy to be wrong as I learn more. I like to be almost right occasionally so I can dig deeper. I also want to be bold & honest about it. Science is about taking risks, not beating people up that offend your world view.

No one is offended. No one is beating people up. Cronin is being told that his ideas are wrong, which is what we’re supposed to do.

He’s feeling resentful about being corrected, nothing more. Well, also there should be some shame at publishing such a crappy article in a prestigious journal.

Finally, he reposts something from a supporter:


Absolutely wild to open Twitter and learn that evolutionary biologists think the origin of life is either solved or a non-problem.

No one has said that. The origin of life is not solved and is most definitely a problem of interest. The catch is that assembly theory does not solve any of the problems anyone is wrestling with, and doesn’t seem to solve much of anything.

This is all reminding me of how Dr Wolfe-Simon reacted defensively to criticisms of her claim that life can substitute arsenic for phosphorus. Things got loud back in 2010, and she was insistent that she made a great discovery, but when was the last time you heard about arsenic life? The idea was dead within a year.

Let’s check back in Fall of 2024 and see how Cronin’s theory is holding up.

Kill them all, let god sort them out

I’ve heard this sort of call to action many times before. Here’s Marco Rubio with his solution to the Israel/Palestine problem.

I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic offramp with these savages. I mean, these are people, as you have been reporting and others have seen, that deliberately targeted teenage girls, women, children, the elderly, not just for rape and murder, but then dumping their bodies off in the streets of Gaza, where the crowds can then defile their lifeless bodies.
I mean, just horrifying things. And I don’t think we know the full extent of it yet. I mean, there’s more to come in the days and weeks ahead. You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.

“Savages.” “They have to be eradicated.” What a familiar sentiment! And what a deplorable perspective.

Notice that Tapper pointed out that a million of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are children, and Rubio just ignored that reality to call for their murder. I agree that the individuals who executed that horrific attack were evil people who need to be caught and punished, that there should be no forgiveness for their crimes, but that’s very different from pointing at an entire people, most of whom had nothing to do with the attack, and declaring that they all, women, children, the elderly, need to be eradicated. Wrong. They all deserve to live happy lives, a right they’ve been denied, and only the guilty need to be removed from civil society.

I’m just afraid that Rubio’s attitude is going to be popular among the right-wing fascists. When horrors are piling up on horrors, you don’t end the cycle by adding fresh horrors to the pile.

Signs of hope

About 15 years ago, Minnesota was dealing with a bunch of ignorant radicals who were packing school boards, and had even captured the position of educational commissioner in the form of Cheri Yecke. It was ugly. I was attending school board meetings that featured train of young earth creationists standing up to parrot nonsense…but, fortunately, we also had genuine grass roots people standing up to oppose them. We’ve still got wretched right wingers filling school boards, but at least I think we totally crushed the creationist insurgence here, and Yecke is long gone.

Now, though, the US (not so much Minnesota) is dealing with another group of astro-turfing assholes, Moms for Liberty. There are signs that they are getting desperate. Would you believe Moms for Liberty was trying to build a claque to attend a school board meeting? They were recruiting “talented clappers” to pack the audience.

It’s not working.

What’s happening instead is that the general public is getting fired up. They hate those arrogant Karens. They’ve recently won school board elections, but like the creationists, as word gets around, the public rises up and notices and starts firing back.

Most of the attendees saw that appeal as a minor victory, or at least as evidence that they were gaining ground in the battle for control over the school district — one of hundreds of similar battles unfolding all over the country. Yes, the Pennridge school board was dominated by far-right members, one of whom had been present in Washington for Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally-turned-riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Yes, at least five of the nine board members were linked to Moms for Liberty, a right-wing “astroturf” organization that has orchestrated a national campaign to remake public education along arch-conservative and anti-intellectual lines. But Pennridge board meetings for months had been dominated by outraged parents speaking out against the Moms for Liberty incursion and the board majority’s apparent agenda. Conservative forces were sufficiently worried about the optics, it appeared, that they were eager to pull in “talented clappers” from outside the community.

A tightly packed group of Moms for Liberty supporters did indeed show up, huddled together in a few rows of seats. Their mood could best be described as “glowering.” These were not exactly the “joyful warriors” that Moms for Liberty proudly proclaims fights on their behalf. That term would better fit the majority of attendees at Pennridge High that night, who needed no coaxing to whoop and applaud as one speaker after another took the mic, defending the basic freedom to read whatever books one wants, and denouncing the ahistorical and misleading curriculum that conservative board members wanted to force upon the district’s teachers.

This is news that gives me a little optimism. I think the public at large wants to do what is right, even as a minority of hateful, motivated scumbags exploit the system to secure some degree of power. Temporarily.