This is a painful read, and an important reminder that we have not yet finished with the excesses that began in the months after 9/11.

I have defended men and women on death row for nearly all of my thirty years as a lawyer, and have represented people caught up in the excesses of the “war on terror” since very shortly after that war was launched. For more than a decade, I have been counsel for Zayn al-Abedin Muhammad Hussein, known more widely as Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was the first person immured in a “black site,” the clandestine prisons operated around the globe by the CIA from early 2002 to late 2006. He was the first prisoner to have his interrogation “enhanced,” and the only person subjected to all the DOJ-approved interrogation techniques, as well as a number that were never approved (including, for example, rectal rehydration). The infamous torture memo was, in fact, written specifically to legitimize Abu Zubaydah’s torture.

At the time of his capture and for years afterward, government officials took great pains to demonize Abu Zubaydah in order to justify his abuse. “The other day,” President George W. Bush announced at a Republican fundraiser in April 2002, “we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah. He’s one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He’s not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.” Various senior administration officials described Abu Zubaydah in comparably colorful terms.

These pronouncements, however, are not what set the torture scandal into motion. For that, we can thank a “psychological assessment” written by unnamed CIA officers and faxed to John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who was the lead author of the torture memo. This document described Abu Zubaydah as “the third or fourth man in al-Qaida” and “a senior Usama Bin Laden lieutenant” who had been “involved in every major al-Qaida terrorist operation” and was “a planner of the 11 September hijackings.” He “managed a network of [al-Qaeda] training camps,” “directed the start-up of a Bin Laden cell in Jordan,” and “served as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts, or foreign communications.” He was also alleged to be “engaged in ongoing terrorism planning against US interests.” For good measure, he had supposedly written the organization’s “manual on resistance techniques” and had a particular expertise in thwarting conventional interrogations. It was this assessment that provided Yoo with the “facts” needed to legalize the unlawful and rationalize the unthinkable.

*

The “facts” recounted above to justify this torture were all false. Abu Zubaydah was no lieutenant to Osama bin Laden. He held no position in al-Qaeda, senior or otherwise. He had no part in September 11 or any other al-Qaeda operations. He did not operate a network of al-Qaeda camps, open an al-Qaeda cell in Jordan, or manage al-Qaeda’s external communications. He did not draft any resistance manual, for al-Qaeda or anyone else, and had no special expertise in resisting interrogations.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/28/the-innocence-of-abu-zubaydah/

When the World Happiness Report announced recently that Finland is the happiest country in the world, we Finns reacted the same way as we have reacted to other top rankings in various international comparisons: we criticized the methodology of the study, questioned its conclusions and pointed to the shortcomings of Finnish society.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. When the World Economic Forum ranked Finland as the most competitive economy in Europe in 2014, the chief executive of the Finnish Chamber of Commerce, Risto Penttilä, felt obliged to write an opinion piece for the Financial Times where he tried to prove that the results couldn’t be right.

This time it is my duty, as a Finnish expert on well-being research, to explain why the happiness of the Finns has been greatly exaggerated.

More particularly, I’ll argue that there are four separate ways to measure happiness—and depending on which one we choose, we get completely different countries at the top of the rankings.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/finland-is-the-happiest-country-in-the-world-and-finns-arent-happy-about-it/

Egg nods vigorously

Psssssst. Hey kid.

Wanna see the inside of a leatherback sea turtle’s esophagus? pic.twitter.com/8bZHo5FprN

— Dr. David Shiffman 🦈 (@WhySharksMatter) September 23, 2018

New York Times provides an extensive and comprehensive picture of what we know so far about Russia, Trump, and the 2016 election:

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html

The single best way to increase voter turnout?

Abolish the polling place.

A century ago, the direct election of senators sounded audacious, too. But in six states, it’s already true that more than 12 million voters don’t need to traipse to polling places on Election Day or apply for absentee ballots.

The U.S. Postal Service delivers our ballots automatically, several weeks before each election. Voters can mail their marked ballots — sometimes even postage paid — or take them to one of hundreds of official ballot collection sites.

Since most voters choose the latter option, vote-at-home is a more accurate label than vote-by-mail. At many locations, voters can also receive replacement ballots, update their voter registration and get language or other assistance. For those so inclined, some sites still have voting booths.

Oregon rolled out its system in 1998 after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure. Washington finished its county-by-county approach in 2012, while Colorado’s first vote-at-home election took place in 2014. Voters today also enjoy this system in 27 of Utah’s 29 counties and more than 40 counties in North Dakota, Nebraska and California.

Oregon and Washington weren’t battleground states in 2016. But even so, had every state matched our 80 percent turnout of active registered voters, 15 million more votes would have been cast nationwide.

Vote-at-home shines even brighter in lower-turnout midterm and primary elections. Both Oregon and Colorado exceeded 70 percent turnout in 2014 among registered voters, compared with the national average of 48 percent.

Source: Opinion | Voting at Home Will Help Save Our Democracy

This warrants a bit of skepticism, because neural networks are extremely good at finding spurious signal in random noise, but very cool if true!

Plenty of animals communicate with one another, at least in a general way—wolves howl to each other, birds sing and dance to attract mates and big cats mark their territory with urine. But researchers at Tel Aviv University recently discovered that when at least one species communicates, it gets very specific. Egyptian fruit bats, it turns out, aren’t just making high pitched squeals when they gather together in their roosts. They’re communicating specific problems, reports Bob Yirka at Phys.org.

According to Ramin Skibba at Nature, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds. The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-translate-bat-talk-and-they-argue-lot-180961564/

Not better than the arms I was born with — but getting closer 🙂

Manami Ito is not only a talented musician, but also a Paralympian swimmer and the first nurse in Japan to have a prosthetic arm. She represented Japan at the 2008 and 2012 Paralympics, receiving 4th and 8th place in 100m breaststroke, and currently travels the country with her violin performances. The above video was taken on September 2, 2018, when she performed Thread by Miyuki Nakajima at the Takarazuka City General Welfare Center in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan.

Source: Manami Ito Performs a Violin Solo With a Customized Prosthetic Bow Arm | Colossal

Imagine going on a first date with someone whose perfume drives you wild. But when you lean in for that first kiss, you realize your suitor is actually nothing more than a writhing mass of parasitic blister beetle larvae.

This is the plight of the burrowing bee.

You see, sometimes when a male bee is buzzing along the sand dunes, he smells what appears to be a female’s pheromones. Mating is highly competitive in these species, so it pays for the male to buzz in and have a look.

Unfortunately for him, blister beetle larvae have evolved the ability to create chemicals that make them smell like a female burrowing bee. The critters even boost the profile of their scent by crawling up a strand of grass and forming a bee-sized ball of baby beetles. These larvae are known as triungulins, for their feet, which have three claws that resemble grappling hooks.

When the male bee attempts to mate with this decoy, the triungulins latch onto him with their hook-like claws and tackle him to the dunes below. Eventually, when the male flies off in search of a real female, he does so with a horde of hitchhikers attached to his fuzzy body. The larvae then latch onto the female and ride her to a burrow.

There, she lays a single egg and deposits a ton of pollen and nectar. But those nutrients may not make it to the baby bee, because the triungulins gobble them up first before transforming into adults.

Source: Sex, Lies, and Grappling Hooks: Meet the Parasitic Blister Beetle

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Dancing office chairs 🙂

I’d really like to see a video of it interacting with visitors, but haven’t found one as yet.

Source: Gagosian on Instagram: “#UrsFischerPLAY: Conceived by Urs Fischer with choreography by Madeline Hollander, “PLAY” is now open to the public! You have until October…”

Also more info at: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-urs-fischer-9-office-chairs-dancing-gagosian-join

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion.” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

Will Durant, The Story Of Civilization, 1935

Caveat: I haven’t read the book, and know little about Durant; I just ran across the quote and found it interesting to consider from the vantage point of 2018.