Dear Commons Community,

Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe, German Klaus Hasselmann and Italian Giorgio Parisi won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday for work that helps understand complex physical systems such as Earth’s changing climate.

In a decision hailed by the U.N. weather agency as a sign of a consensus forming around man-made global warming, one half of the 10-million Swedish crown ($1.15-million) prize goes in equal parts to Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, for modelling earth’s climate and reliably predicting global warming.

The other half goes to Parisi for discovering in the early 1980s “hidden rules” behind seemingly random movements and swirls in gases or liquids, which can also be applied to aspects of neuroscience, machine learning and starling flight formations.

“Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it,” the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement. “Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes.”

Hasselmann, who is at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, told Reuters from his home that he did not want to wake up from what he described as a beautiful dream.

“I am retired, you know, and have been a bit lazy lately. I am happy about the honour. The research continues,” he said.

The Academy said Manabe, who works at Princeton University in the United States, had laid the foundation in the 1960s for today’s understanding of Earth’s climate.

Hasselmann, it said, had developed models about 10 years later that became instrumental in proving that mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions cause rising temperatures in the atmosphere.

Parisi, who dialled into the media briefing announcing the winners, was asked for his message to world leaders due to meet for U.N. climate change talks in Glasgow, Scotland, from Oct. 31.

“I think it is very urgent that we take real and very strong decisions and we move at a very strong pace,” said the 73-year-old laureate who works at Sapienza University of Rome.

Work on climate changes has been recognised by Nobel prizes before.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the U.N. climate panel received the Peace Prize in 2007 for galvanizing international action against global warming, and William Nordhaus won one half of the 2018 Economics prize for integrating climate change into the Western economic growth model.

“Sceptics or deniers of scientific facts … are not so visible anymore and this climate science message has been heard,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said of this year’s award.

Congratulations to all three!

Tony

Max Boot

Dear Commons Community,

Washington Post columnist Max Boot lamented the GOP’s transformation into the “stupid-and-proud-of-it party” in his column published on Monday.

“In the 1980s, when I became a Republican, the GOP took pride in describing itself as the ‘party of ideas,’” Boot wrote. “But under (former President Donald) Trump’s leadership, Republicans have reclaimed their old reputation, dating back to the 1950s, as the ‘stupid party.’”

“What’s even more telling: This is not a source of shame or embarrassment for the party’s populists.”

Boot, who left the GOP following Trump’s takeover of the party, named and shamed a number of Republican lawmakers (and their inane and sometimes dangerous comments) as evidence — from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) Jewish space laser conspiracy theory to Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-Colo.) ridiculous “Imeach Biden” gaffe.

Unfortunately, the dumbing down of the GOP shows no sign of stopping, he argued.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

CNN political commentator Ana Navarro didn’t hold back yesterday on her assessment of Stephanie Grisham while discussing the former White House press secretary’s new tell-all book about her time in the Trump administration.

“I really can’t stand it. I find all of these, you know, late-developing conscience in people who served in the Trump campaign or the Trump administration repulsive,” Navarro said during an interview (see video above) on “CNN Newsroom.”

“And look, I know we like the tea she is spilling. I know we like the gossip she is spilling. And it’s not often that I agree with Trump supporters, but she’s got no credibility.”

Grisham, who failed to hold a single press briefing during her nine months as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, has worked with the Trumps since his 2016 campaign. After leaving her post in the West Wing in April 2020, she went on to serve as first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff. She resigned on Jan. 6 following the U.S. Capitol riot and just weeks before Trump was due to leave office.

She’s been in the headlines over the past week as she promotes her book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House,” which contains many unflattering details about her former bosses. During recent media interviews, she has criticized the former president and said she regrets enabling his culture of dishonesty, but many view her mea culpas now as an effort to rehabilitate her image. 

“Give me a break,” Navarro said of Grisham’s Jan. 6 departure. “By then, all of America knew who [Trump] was. She certainly knew who he was. By what she writes in the book, she knew who he was. He had been promoting the ‘big lie’ for two months by then ― and it took Jan. 6 for you to resign? I frankly see no redeeming quality in this woman or any of the Trump accomplices who now want to clear their names and want to make a buck.”

Navarro does not hold back!

Tony

David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian

Dear Commons Community,

It was announced yesterday that two US researchers won the 2021 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for work that unlocked the secrets of the sense of touch.

Prof. David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California in San Francisco, and Prof.  Ardem Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, were honored for their discovery of receptors in the skin that sense heat, cold and touch – making them crucial for survival. The work paves the way for a range of new medical treatments for conditions such as chronic pain.  As announced on the Nobel Prize website.

“The award, announced yesterday by the Nobel assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is worth 10m Swedish kronor (£845,000), to be shared equally between the winners.

Prof. Abdel El Manira, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute and member of the Nobel committee, said without the receptors we would not be able to sense our world, to feel the urge to pull our hand from a flame, or even stand upright. The discoveries, he said, had “profoundly changed our view of how we sense the world around us”.

“During the last year we have been socially distancing from each other, we have missed the sense of touch, the sense of the warmth that we give to each other during a hug,” he added. “And during a hug, these are the receptors that give us a feeling of the warmth, the closeness to each other.”

Through experiments that began in the 1990s, the scientists pieced together how nerve impulses are triggered in the skin so that temperature and pressure can be perceived.

Julius turned to capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli peppers burn, to identify sensors in nerve endings that respond to heat. Meanwhile, Patapoutian studied pressure-sensitive cells and discovered further receptors that respond to being poked and prodded.

Patapoutian missed the call from Stockholm because his phone was set on “do not disturb”. He was eventually reached when the Nobel committee got through to his 92-year-old father in Los Angeles. “I first heard from him, which was very special,” Patapoutian said.

The first breakthrough came when Julius and his co-workers created a library of millions of strands of DNA that corresponded to genes in sensory nerve cells. Through a painstaking effort that involved adding these genes to cells that did not normally react to capsaicin, they identified one gene that made cells respond to the burning compound. The gene allowed cells to build a protein, TRPV1, which turned out to react to heat perceived as painful.

Working independently of one another, Julius and Patapoutian went on to use menthol to discover a receptor for sensing the cold, named TRPM8, and a host of others activated by a range of different temperatures.

On the back of their success, Patapoutian and his colleagues set out to understand how cells respond to touch. Through more laborious experiments into 72 genes they hit on one that allowed cells to respond – with a small electrical signal – when poked with a micropipette.

The gene carried the blueprints for a receptor the scientists named Piezo1, after the Greek word for pressure. Soon after they found a similar touch-sensitive receptor, Piezo2, which had a critical second role of sensing body position and movement, or proprioception.

Prof Patrick Haggard, at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “Julius and Patapoutian have shown, in beautiful mechanistic detail, how the full range of different bodily sensations work. Their research brilliantly reveals how the different sensory qualities that we experience every day, such as temperature and touch, each correspond to a specific individual molecule or set of molecules embedded in the membranes of sensory neurons that are found throughout the body.

“Their work on temperature sensations is particularly thought-provoking. Temperature is a single physical continuum, but we experience it through two different sensory systems, one for warmth and one for cold, and each depending on a distinctive molecule.

“The idea that the sensation of cold comes down, ultimately, to the presence of the TRPM8 molecule is just fascinating: it’s about the closest scientists have got to a truly mechanistic understanding of our own conscious experiences.”

Congratulations to Professors Julius and Patapoutian!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, is set to testify today before Congress that the tech giant puts “profits before people” and that Congress should take action to regulate it. 

In written testimony released to reporters ahead of a Senate subcommittee hearing, Haugen — a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team — will say the social media company’s products “harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy.”

“​​The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people,” Haugen will testify. “Congressional action is needed.”

Haugen, who first revealed her identity in a “60 Minutes” interview (see video above) on Sunday, previously leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook research to lawmakers, regulators and The Wall Street Journal, which ran a series of articles called “The Facebook Files.”  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“I believe what I did was right and necessary for the common good,” Haugen will testify Tuesday. “But I know Facebook has infinite resources, which it could use to destroy me.”

The whistleblower, in leaking Facebook’s internal documents, alleged that the company downplayed the negative effects of Instagram on young girls and didn’t take harsh enough action against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation spreading on its platform.

She also alleged that Facebook didn’t do enough to stop misinformation spreading about the validity of the 2020 election, both fueling dangerous lies and providing a platform for pro-Donald Trump rioters to plan the deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people,” Haugen plans to say before a panel of the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday, according to the advance testimony. 

Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch said in a statement that the company’s “teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place,” adding that they “continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”

On Monday, Facebook and the apps it owns, including Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced a massive outage, preventing users worldwide from accessing the services. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) ripped the company in a Twitter post: “It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy.” 

“Break them up,” the progressive lawmaker added.

Ms. Haugen’s testimony may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets Congress to force Facebook to own up to its destructive policies.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled in favor of New York State to collect a $200 million surcharge imposed on opioid manufacturers and distributors to defray the state’s costs arising from the deadly epidemic involving the powerful painkilling drugs. 

The justices declined to hear an appeal by two trade groups representing drug distributors and generic drug makers and a unit of British-based pharmaceutical company Mallinckrodt Plc of a lower court’s decision upholding the surcharge.   As reported by Reuters.

The law’s challengers included the Association for Accessible Medicines, whose members include drugmakers Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Plc and Mallinckrodt, and the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, which represents wholesale distributors. 

The alliance’s members include the three largest opioid distributors in the United States, McKesson Corp, AmerisourceBergen Corp and Cardinal Health. They proposed in July paying $21 billion to resolve lawsuits accusing them of fueling the epidemic. 

Mallinckrodt filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 and has been seeking to finalize a similar, $1.7 billion settlement. 

The payments to New York were owed under the Opioid Stewardship Act, which Democratic former Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law in 2018 to address the costs the epidemic imposed on the state. 

The law marked the first time a state had sought to impose a tax or fee related to the epidemic on opioid manufacturers and distributors. Delaware, Minnesota and Rhode Island have since adopted their own taxes.   

The Association for Accessible Medicines and the Healthcare Distribution Alliance in separate statements expressed disappointment in the Supreme Court’s action. The alliance said it is evaluating its options and next steps. 

Opioids have resulted in the overdose deaths of nearly 500,000 people from 1999 to 2019 in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of an ongoing public health crisis. 

The New York law envisioned collecting $100 million annually from prescription painkiller manufacturers and distributors based on their market shares from 2019 to 2024, or $600 million in total.   

A federal judge in 2018 ruled that a provision barring the companies from passing on the costs of making the payments to consumers was unconstitutional and could not be severed from the rest of the law.   

The state appealed, but following that ruling New York enacted a new tax law that did not include the pass-through prohibition, limiting the case to $200 million in payments owed based on 2017 and 2018 market shares.   

The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2020 handed a victory to the state, ruling that the judge lacked authority to strike down the law. The challengers then appealed to the Supreme Court.   

The justices acted on the case on the first day of their new nine-month term. 

Good news for New York and other states who have had to bear the brunt of big pharma’s disregard for human life in promoting and distributing addicting opiod pain killers.

Tony

Kyrsten Sinema

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had an piece yesterday entitled, “Sinema Stars in Her Own Film” that analyzes what Senator Kyrsten Sinema wants as she toughens her negotiations with President Biden and colleagues in the US Congress.  Here is an excerpt:

“Just like the original Sphinx, the Phoenix Sphinx is blocking the way until those who would move ahead solve her riddle:

What does Kyrsten Sinema want? And why doesn’t she stick around to explain it?

Somehow, we have gotten ourselves in a perverse situation where Sinema and Joe Manchin rule the world, and it’s confounding that these two people have this much sway. As Hemingway wondered in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” what are those leopards doing at this altitude?

Sinema and Manchin are now directing what Joe Biden gets to do and deciding how his presidency will be defined. Some Democrats even worry that the recalcitrant pair could be helping Donald Trump vault back into the White House.

The duo has created such havoc on the Hill — with the fate of the whole country riding on what mood they’re in — that congressional reporters have come up with Bennifer-style nicknames for them, including Manchinema and Sinemanch.”

Dowd’s conclusion:

“One thing is clear, though. When Americans are hurting and everything is on the line, behaving like a sphinx is riddlesome — and disquieting.”

Indeed!

The entire column is below.

Tony

————————————————————————

The New York Times

“Sinema Stars in Her Own Film”

Oct. 2, 2021

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — Just like the original Sphinx, the Phoenix Sphinx is blocking the way until those who would move ahead solve her riddle:

What does Kyrsten Sinema want? And why doesn’t she stick around to explain it?

Somehow, we have gotten ourselves in a perverse situation where Sinema and Joe Manchin rule the world, and it’s confounding that these two people have this much sway. As Hemingway wondered in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” what are those leopards doing at this altitude?

Sinema and Manchin are now directing what Joe Biden gets to do and deciding how his presidency will be defined. Some Democrats even worry that the recalcitrant pair could be helping Donald Trump vault back into the White House.

The duo has created such havoc on the Hill — with the fate of the whole country riding on what mood they’re in — that congressional reporters have come up with Bennifer-style nicknames for them, including Manchinema and Sinemanch.

Democrats were irritated at Sinema — again — on Friday. Even as Biden traipsed up to Capitol Hill to try to rescue his F.D.R. dreams, Sinema flew back to Phoenix in the middle of nail-biting negotiations on the scope of Biden’s social policy bill.

Her spokesman said that she had a doctor’s appointment for a foot injury, but The Times reported that she was also slated to play footsie with donors at her political action committee’s dinner at a fancy resort.

The Times’s Jonathan Weisman got hold of an invitation to another fund-raiser for Sinema this past week with five business lobbying groups, many of which are fighting against the social policy bill.

“People who want to think they can understand her or get to her, let me tell you, you can’t,” one politico in her circle told me. “It doesn’t work that way with her. She doesn’t think in a linear process, like ‘OK, will this impact my re-election?’ She just beats her own drum. When she leaves in the middle of something and says, ‘I got stuff to do,’ it’s because she has plans. Sometimes, she’s just more interested in training for an Ironman. More power to her, man. It’s like watching a movie.”

The Arizona senator’s name is pronounced “cinema,” and it is apt because she sweeps — and sometimes, when the triathlete has a sports injury, limps — through the Senate like a silent film star.

“The Greta Garbo of Congress,” as one top Democrat called her.

Sinema rarely gives interviews and shuns the scrum of reporters at the Capitol. But she is not shy about drawing the spotlight, whether she is swathed in fur stoles, bedecked in pink, purple and mint-colored wigs, bedazzled in glittering stilettos. It is hard to believe that the Senate had a nutty sexist ban on sleeveless outfits on the floor. But the mandarins quit worrying about it for members once their colleague blithely turned the hallowed marble halls into an iconoclastic catwalk.

Sinema’s more conservative — and monochromatic — colleagues were agog at her stylings when she first ascended to the Senate — a moment when she was celebrated as the first openly bisexual senator. And they were appalled this past year when her fashion statements included presiding over the Senate in a pink sweater reading “Dangerous Creature” and when she put a picture on Instagram, following her defiant thumbs down on a $15 minimum wage, sporting a hot pink newsboy cap, matching oversized glasses and a ring that expressed the sentiment “Kiss off,” but in a more vulgar way. (Remember that this is a town so strait-laced, it was a sartorial scandal when President Barack Obama donned a tan suit.)

Sinema enjoys poking the bear, especially the more righteous wing of her party, but her allies cry sexism in the way she is treated by Democrats, compared with Manchin.

“I don’t think that in her mind, when she dyes the front of her hair purple or whatever she does, she’s trying to get press attention,” one told me. “Frankly, it’s just an expression of who she is.”

While progressives may disdain Joe “I’ve Never Been A Liberal” Manchin, they understand that he has a record as a conservative Democrat; Sinema is a puzzle to them.

What has caused the former social worker and Green Party champion who grew up in a gas station, a left-winger who supported Ralph Nader for president, to shift from progressive stances to more conservative ones? Is she unmoored in her politics, simply being opportunistic? What is the principle that is leading her to obstruct the party of her own president, who really needs a win right now?

“She doesn’t do interviews, she doesn’t answer questions, she speaks in vagaries, she doesn’t explain the core reason she’s opposed,” one member of the progressive crew on the Hill told me. “It’s hard to look at her actions and not conclude that the donations are part of the story. If she’s here to fight for corporate power and lower taxes for the wealthy and get more money for pharma executives, be on the level and say it.”

And why would a congresswoman go off in the summer of 2020 to take a paid internship at a donor’s Sonoma County winery?

One thing is clear, though. When Americans are hurting and everything is on the line, behaving like a sphinx is riddlesome — and disquieting.

Dear Commons Community,

I am pleased to announce that the latest in our series of books on blended learning research was  published last week.  Blended Learning Research Perspectives: Volume 3,  by Anthony G. Picciano, Charles, D. Dziuban, Charles R. Graham, and Patsy D. Moskal is available at Routledge/Taylor & Francis and at Amazon.com

Blended learning has evolved to be the new normal in most of education particularly at the secondary and post-secondary levels. With twenty-two chapters and 438 pages, this book represents the world’s most extensive compilation of blended learning research now available. More than fifty authors have published chapters on original blended learning research  in this volume.  Below is its table of contents.

Here is what some of our reviewers have had to say:

“If you missed Volumes 1 and 2, you’re in luck, since Volume 3 has arrived exactly when educators around the world are adopting a cacophony of blended learning approaches, activities, and analyses.”

―Curtis J. Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at University of Indiana, USA

“This volume, like its two predecessors, is a rich buffet of research reports and insights. But the last entrée is a dessert not to be missed, a concluding chapter that ties together many diverse strands as it speculates about the future.”

―George L. Mehaffy, Senior Advisor at Sova

“The first two volumes of Blended Learning: Research Perspectives were crucial roadmaps to the future of teaching and learning. This third volume is a beacon of light cutting through the COVID-19 clouds to show us the way forward once again.”

―Dale P. Johnson, Director of Digital Innovation in the University Design Institute at Arizona State University, USA

“Volume 3 in this series on blended learning both complements and extends the previous contributions and is essential reading for educators who teach, design, evaluate, and research in contemporary educational environments”.

―Gavin Sanderson, SFHEA, Program Director of the Graduate Diploma in Education Studies (Digital Learning) at University of South Australia, Australia

“The variety of topics covered in this book accurately mirrors the complexity facing education. Highly valuable reading for all involved in education.”

―Maria Zajac, Editor-in-Chief of E-Mentor and Certified Instructional Designer at SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or any of my co-authors.

Tony

————————————————————————————————————————————-

Table of Contents

Preface

Section I – Introduction and Foundations

Chapter 1: Introduction – Patsy D. Moskal, Anthony G. Picciano

Chapter 2: Exploring Definitions, Models, Frameworks, and Theory for Blended Learning Research – Charles Graham

Section II – Student Outcomes

Chapter 3: Neotraditional Students and Online Discussions:  What Do They Really Want? – Jeff Renfrow

Chapter 4: Blended Delivery Modes and Student Success: An In-Depth Exploration of How Different Levels of Online and Blended Course Taking Relate to Student Retention – Scott James, Karen Swan

Chapter 5: Scaling Course Design as Learning Analytics Variable – John Fritz, Thomas Penniston, Mike Sharkey, John Whitmer

Section III – Faculty Issues

Chapter 6: Highly Effective Blended Teaching Practices –  Cub Kahn, Lynne L. Hindman

Chapter 7: Blended Faculty Community of Inquiry Transforms Online Teaching Perceptions and Practices – Karen Skibba, Maria Widmer

Chapter 8: Impact Analysis of Ten Years of Blended Learning – Concepcion B. Godev, Jaesoon An

Section IV – Adaptive Learning Research

Chapter 9: Efficacy of Adaptive Learning in Blended Courses – Jeremy Anderson, Heather Bushey, Maura Devlin, and Amanda Gould

Chapter 10: Adaptive and Active: The Integration of Adaptive Courseware Through the  Lens of Blended Learning – Janelle D. Voegele, Raiza Dottin

Chapter 11: A Blended Learning Case Study: Geo Exploration, Adaptive Learning and Visual Knowledge Acquisition – Mark Jack Smith

Section V – K-12 Perspectives

Chapter 12: Competencies and Practices for Guiding K-12 Blended Teacher Readiness – Cecil R. Short, Courtney Hanny, Michelle Jensen, Karen Arnesen, Charles R. Graham

Chapter 13: Examining Peer-to-Peer Supports in K-12 Blended Academic Communities of   Engagement – Jered Borup, Shea Walters, Rebecca Stimson

Chapter 14: Intellectual Agency of Linguistically Diverse Students with Disabilities in a Blended Learning Environment – Mary Rice, Mark Stevens

Chapter 15: Multimodal Blended Learning and English Language Learners – Mark Stevens

Section VI – International Perspectives

Chapter 16: Negotiating the Blend – George R Bradford  and Anders Norberg,

Chapter 17: Blended Learning and Shared Metacognition: What’s the Connection? – Norm Vaughan

Chapter 18: Evidence-Based Blended Learning Design: A Synthesis of Findings from Four Studies – Ron Owston, Taru Malhotra, Dennis York, Jirarat Sitthiworachart

Section VI – Science and Health Research

Chapter 19: Blending Geoscience Laboratory Learning and Undergraduate Research with Interactive Open Educational Resources – Juhong Christie Liu, Elizabeth Johnson, Erik Haroldson

Chapter 20: Student Experiences Learning Psychomotor Skills in a Blended Doctor of Physical Therapy Program – Timothy Miller, Swapna Kumar

Chapter 21: Integrative Blended Learning: Theory, Disciplines, Application, Critical Thinking and Assessment – Paige L. McDonald, Karen S. Schlumpf, Gregory C. Weaver, Mary Corcoran

The Future

Chapter 22: Education and Blended Learning: Some Possible Futures – Charles Dziuban, Anthony G. Picciano

Credit Alex Wong

Dear Commons Community,

The Women’s March yesterday headed straight for the steps of the Supreme Court, and was part of a series of nationwide protests that drew thousands to Washington to demand continued access to abortion in a year when conservative lawmakers such as those in Texas and judges have put it in jeopardy.

Demonstrators filled the streets surrounding the court, shouting “My body, my choice” and cheering loudly to the beat of drums. As reported by the Associated Press.

Before heading out on the march, they rallied in a square near the White House, waving signs that said “Mind your own uterus,” “I love someone who had an abortion” and “Abortion is a personal choice, not a legal debate,” among other messages. Some wore T-shirts reading simply “1973,” a reference to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which made abortion legal for generations of American women.

Elaine Baijal, a 19-year-old student at American University, said her mother told her of coming to a march for legal abortion with her own mother in the 1970s. “It’s sad that we still have to fight for our right 40 years later. But it’s a tradition I want to continue,” Baijal said of the march.

Organizers say the Washington march was among hundreds of abortion-themed protests held around the country Saturday. The demonstrations took place two days before the start of a new term for the Supreme Court that will decide the future of abortion rights in the United States, after appointments of justices by President Donald Trump strengthened conservative control of the high court.

“Shame, shame, shame!” marchers chanted while walking past the Trump International Hotel on their way to the Supreme Court. Some booed and waived their fists at the Trump landmark.

The day before the march, the Biden administration urged a federal judge to block the nation’s most restrictive abortion law, which has banned most abortions in Texas since early September. It’s one of a series of cases that will give the nation’s divided high court occasion to uphold or overrule Roe v. Wade.

The Texas law motivated many of the demonstrators and speakers.

“We’re going to keep giving it to Texas,” Marsha Jones of the Afiya Center for Black women’s health care in Dallas, pledged to the Washington crowd. “You can no longer tell us what to do with our bodies!”

Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of Planned Parenthood nationally, told of women forced to drive many hours across state lines — sometimes multiple state lines — to end pregnancies in the weeks since the Texas law went into effect.

“The moment is dark … but that is why we are here,” Johnson told the crowd packed into Freedom Square and surrounding streets. With the upcoming Supreme Court term, “No matter where you are, this fight is at your doorstep right now.”

In Springfield, Illinois, several hundred people rallied on the Old State Capitol square. Prominent among them were the Illinois Handmaids, wearing red robes and white bonnets reminiscent of the automatons of Margaret Atwood’s classic tale and carrying signs that said, “Mind Your Own Uterus” and “Mother By Choice.”

Brigid Leahy, senior director of public policy for Planned Parenthood of Illinois, said just two days after the Texas restrictions took effect, Planned Parenthood saw the first women from Texas traveling to Illinois for the procedure, with more following since.

“They are trying to figure out paying for airfare or gas or a train ticket, they may need hotel and meals. …,” Leahy said. “They have to figure out time off of work, and they have to figure out child care. This can be a real struggle.”

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With a sign reading “Not this again” attached to a clothes hangar, Gretchen Snow of Bloomington, Illinois, said, “Women need to be safe and they need to not have to worry about how much money they have to be safe.”

On the West Coast, thousands marched through downtown Los Angeles to a rally in front of City Hall. Protesters chanted “Abortion on demand and without apology: only revolution can make women free!”

Kayla Selsi said she was carrying the same sign she has held in three past Women’s Marches. It stated, “If only my vagina could shoot bullets, it will be less regulated.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t retire this sign,” Selsi said. “Women’s rights are being taken away, and it’s highly affecting women of lower class.”

“I feel safer in California as a woman, but Texas is obviously going in one direction and it scares me that other states could go the same way,” she said.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke at rallies in Seneca Falls and then Albany. “I’m sick and tired of having to fight over abortion rights,” she said. “It’s settled law in the nation and you are not taking that right away from us, not now not ever.”

At an unrelated event in Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins called the Texas law “extreme, inhumane and unconstitutional” and said she’s working to make Roe v. Wade the “law of the land.”

She said she’s working with two Democrats and another Republican, and they’re “vetting” the language of their bill. Collins declined to identify her colleagues, but said the legislation will be introduced soon.

An opponent of women’s access to abortion called this year’s march theme “macabre.”

“What about equal rights for unborn women?” tweeted Jeanne Mancini, president of an anti-abortion group called March for Life.

The Women’s March has become a regular event — although interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic — since millions of women turned out in the United States and around the world the day after the January 2017 inauguration of Trump. Trump endorsed punishing women for getting abortions and made appointment of conservative judges a mission of his presidency.

With the sun beating down in Washington on Saturday, Ramsay Teviotdale of Arlington, Virginia — who when asked her age said she was “old enough to remember when abortion wasn’t legal” — was one of the few wearing the hand-knitted pink wool caps that distinguished the 2017 Women’s March.

Without Trump as a central figure for women of varied political beliefs to rally against, and with the pandemic still going strong, organizers talked of hundreds of thousands of participants nationally Saturday, not the millions of 2017.

Teviotdale said this does not lessen the urgency of the moment. “This Texas thing — no way can it stand. It’s the thin edge of the wedge,” she said.

The “Texas thing” is indeed a wedge in women’s rights!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by the award-winning writer and essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn.  In this book, she tackles philosophy, transhumanism, religion, and artificial intelligence.  She approaches each from a very personal point of view dominated by the fact that she went from being a Christian Fundamentalist and Bible-study student to an atheist.  Throughout the book, she reminds the reader that she no longer believes in God and uses her writing as an unbosoming.  She observes well modern humanity and sprouts kernels of insights into philosophical issues of mind versus the physical world in our tech-dominated society. God, Human, Animal, Machine requires a slow, careful read because of the complexity of the subject matter so be prepared to reread some of its material.  Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Interesting subject matter that requires the reader to think carefully about how the human condition is changing.

Tony

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New York Times Review of Books

The Fate of the Self in the Age of Clicks

By Becca Rothfeld

Aug. 24, 2021

GOD, HUMAN, ANIMAL, MACHINE
Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
By Meghan O’Gieblyn

Imagine sitting down to a game of Go, not in a cafe or a park, where you could banter with your adversary or discuss strategy with onlookers, but alone in front of a screen. Your opponent is not a person but an algorithm, AlphaGo, a program created by Google’s machine-learning subsidiary, DeepMind. Squinting into the cool glare of your monitor, you manipulate digital pieces. You touch nothing tangible: You are unable to scrutinize the expressions of your faceless competitor.

These, roughly, are the strange and surgical circumstances under which Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, was vanquished in a best-of-five match in 2016. As the essayist and cultural critic Meghan O’Gieblyn reports in her nimble new book, “God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning,” one former Go champion watched the game and exclaimed that AlphaGo’s winning maneuver was “not a human move.” It is not immediately clear how we, being humans, ought to react to such alien stratagems. We might be awed by the AlphaGo’s icy efficiency — but then, we might also wonder why anyone would bother playing against a computer. After all, many of us play games not primarily to win or lose, but also to enter into a community with other human players, or for the sheer pleasure of untangling conceptual knots. I don’t know why an algorithm participates in a Go tournament, or if it can be said to have what we would call a “reason” — but I know that most people enjoy games because they value the process, not just the outcome, of playing.

In this respect, games resemble most of our cherished ventures, almost all of which matter to us in part because they have some bearing on the texture of our inner lives. Yet many of the most powerful forces in the contemporary world conspire to deny the value — and even the existence — of experience that evades quantification. The architects of our digital landscape see people in terms not of personalities but of trackable clicks. “God, Human, Animal, Machine” represents a canny rejoinder to the bankrupt “philosophy of selfhood that has characterized information technologies since the early days of cybernetics — the notion that a person can be described purely in terms of pattern and probabilities, without any concern for interiority.” O’Gieblyn’s loosely linked and rigorously thoughtful meditations on technology, humanity and religion mount a convincing and occasionally moving apologia for that ineliminable wrench in the system, the element that not only browses and buys but feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self.

How, exactly, did we end up so intent on expunging qualitative experience from respectable inquiry?

Silicon Valley’s recent efforts to eliminate the first-person perspective are part and parcel of a much older quest for objectivity that O’Gieblyn traces back to the Enlightenment, which “was founded on the total irreconcilability of mind and matter.” If mind is insulated from matter, and science is strictly materialist, then the mind is placed beyond the purview of discussion. The result is disenchantment, the process by which “everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws.” We are left to inhabit “an empty carapace of gears and levers.”

The self is also a casualty of bad analogies. “God, Human, Animal, Machine” opens with an anecdote about how O’Gieblyn developed an affectionate attachment to Aibo, Sony’s $3,000 robotic dog. “It is impossible to pet an object and address it verbally without coming to regard it in some sense as sentient,” she reflects. But as we read ourselves into computers, we read computers back into ourselves, with disastrous consequences. As early as the 1940s, the pioneering cyberneticists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts were defending the “computational theory of mind,” according to which “the human mind functioned, on the neural level, much like a Turing machine.” In other words, the mind did not function like a mind at all: It functioned like a mechanism.

But as O’Gieblyn argues, the ghost still haunts the machine. The self resists exile, creeping back into even ostensibly materialist theories. Many of the tech-utopians who congratulate themselves most vociferously on their affinity with the Enlightenment subscribe to quasi-religious worldviews — a phenomenon that O’Gieblyn, who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family, is well equipped to analyze. Take, for instance, transhumanism, according to which “the evolution of the cosmos comes down to a single process: that of information becoming organized into increasingly complex forms of intelligence.” For those who see “processes as disparate as forests, genes and cellular structures” as forms of computation — as means of transmitting information — our world is re-enchanted. Everything is potent with significance, and history is a “process of revelation,” culminating in the elevation of humans into “‘post-humans,’ or spiritual machines.”

Perhaps the best way to fight transhumanism and ideologies like it is simply to inhabit our humanity as stubbornly as possible. “God, Human, Animal, Machine” is a hybrid beast, a remarkably erudite work of history, criticism and philosophy, but it is also, crucially, a memoir. O’Gieblyn knows that personal writing is “often dismissed as unserious or egotistical,” but her “I” is not the indulgent “I” of the confessional foray, nor the strident “I” of liberalism: It is the humble “I” of human scale and perspective. “The ‘I’ was not an expression of hubris but a necessary limitation,” she writes. “It was a way to narrow my frame of reference and acknowledge that I was speaking from a particular location, from that modest and grounded place we call ‘point of view.’” For all our posturing, beings like us could scarcely hope to speak from anywhere else.