SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND is a book written by Yuval Noah Harari. I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert's THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY which C.I. had recommended so I asked her if there was another science book she could suggest and she steered me to this one.
There's a photo, right at the front of the book, that stands out. The caption reads, "A human handprint made about 30,000 years ago, on the wall of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France. Somebody tried to say, 'I was here!'"
And isn't that what we're trying to do? Like Joni Mitchell sang and wrote in "Hejira:"
Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tribute to finality to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
Life is fleeting and we want to feel we made a difference, that we did something that will be remembered and live on after us.
How did we get here?
From the first chapter:
About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.
About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atmos, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.
About 4 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.
About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
Doesn't that make you marvel over how much has come before you yourself ever set foot on the planet? It does me. And it was such an interesting book. It really made me think about everything -- little things, overall meanings, etc.
From WIKIPEDIA, here's a sketch of the author:
Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi]; born 1976) is an Israeli public intellectual,[1][2][3] historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[4] He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering.
Harari writes about a "cognitive revolution" that supposedly occurred roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators, aided by the agricultural revolution and accelerated by the scientific revolution, which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. His books also examine the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so".[5]
In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari surveys human history from the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens to 21st-century political and technological revolutions. The book is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class.
I liked this part:
One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow. Some researchers believe this was our original niche. Just as woodpeckers specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised in extracting marrow from bones. Why marrow? Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. You wait patiently until they're done. But it's still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals -- and you don't dare interfere with them -- scavenge the leftovers. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right -- and dig into the edible tissue that remained. This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo's position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis and only in the last 100,000 years -- with the rise of Homo sapiens -- that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences.
And it was good consequences. But it was also bad consequences. By leaping so much, we didn't have to learn what others on the planet had, we over did everything and have almost destroyed the planet completely.
The book details how racism gave way to culturalism as people needed to mask racism -- it was no longer, 'it's in their blood,' and instead became 'it's their culture.'
Let me quote one more time from the book:
In 1818, Mary Shelley published FRANKENSTEIN, the story of a scientist who tries to create a superior being and instead creates a monster. In the last two centuries, this story has been told over and over again in countless variations. It has become a central pillar of our new scientific mythology. At first sight, the Frankenstein story appears to warn us that if we try to play God and engineer life we will be punished severely. Yet the story has deeper meaning.
The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching. Unless some nuclear or ecological catastrophe destroys us first, the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds. This is something most Sapiens find extremely disconcerting. We like to believe that in the future people just like us will travel from plane to planet in fast spaceships. We don't like to contemplate the possibility that in the future, being with emotions and identifies like ours will no longer exist, and our place will be taken by alien life forms whose abilities dwarf our own.
I really loved the book and I strongly recommend it. I also recommend Wally, Cedric, Ann and Betty's joint-post tonight:
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Julian Assange has suffered still worse. He endured seven years of “arbitrary detention” in the Ecuadorean Embassy, deliberately trapped there through the machinations of British, Swedish and US authorities.
He continues to be arbitrarily detained in Belmarsh, on remand for over four years, some of that time spent in near solitary confinement. Together with a media campaign of vilification the whole process amounts, according to Nils Melzer, a former UN rapporteur, to psychological torture.
He faces charges in the US which carry a sentence of up to 175 years and he is likely to suffer prison conditions in the form of Special Administrative Measures that amount to torture.
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
•
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with documents containing evidence of U.S. war crimes. They included the “Iraq War Logs,” which were 400,000 field reports describing 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces “handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad.” They contained the “Afghan War Diary,” 90,000 reports of more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they also included the “Guantánamo Files” — 779 secret reports with evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantánamo Bay for years, and 800 men and boys had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Manning also furnished WikiLeaks with the notorious 2007 “Collateral Murder Video,” which shows a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter targeting and killing 11 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, as well as a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. The video reveals evidence of three violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.
This is the first time a publisher has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets. In December 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel signed a joint open letter calling on the U.S. government to dismiss the Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified military and diplomatic secrets. “Publishing is not a crime,” the letter says. “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
Let's turn to US . . .
A number of high-profile Jewish groups are denouncing Democratic presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false remarks that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people are “most immune” to Covid-19.
Speaking at a dinner in New York City earlier this week, Kennedy said “there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” according to video shared by the New York Post on Saturday.
“Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Kennedy said, adding that “we don’t know whether it’s deliberately targeted that or not.”
Ashkenazi Jews trace their roots to Central and Eastern Europe and represent a majority of the US Jewish population.
The American Jewish Committee told CNN in a statement Saturday that Kennedy’s “assertion that Covid was genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people is deeply offensive and incredibly dangerous.”
His latest remarks prompted a range of leading Democrats to speak out.
"These are deeply troubling comments and I want to make clear that they do not represent the views of the Democratic Party," Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeted on Saturday.
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida said Kennedy's claims boiled down to "vile antisemitic tropes and Sinophobia" and "insulted countless families who lost loved ones to the virus," while Rep. Ted Lieu of California pointed out, "Millions and millions of people died from COVID-19 worldwide, including Americans who were Jewish or of Chinese descent."
"If you still support the wacky, narcissistic, racist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., then that says more about you than it does about him," Lieu said.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey called Kennedy "a disgrace to the Kennedy name and the Democratic Party" in a tweet responding to the video.
"For the record, my whole family, who is Jewish, got Covid," Gottheimer wrote. "Speaker McCarthy and Jim Jordan should disinvite this antisemite from testifying before Congress and spewing his misinformation and hate."
Ken Frydman was at the table when Junior made the remarks and recounts what took place at THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:
Twenty five journalists sat at the large, square banquet table. Call me paranoid, but Bobby was looking directly at me when he made his wrong-headed assertion that the coronavirus had passed over the homes of Ashkenazi Jews.
The stunning moment was surreal and incomprehensible. But I’ve seen the video and heard the audio, so I know it’s true.
“COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” said Kennedy. “The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Sitting next to Kennedy at that moment was an Ashkenazi Jew, New York Post reporter Jon Levine. Check out his baffled expression on the video.
Contrary to Bobby’s hair-brained theory, I got the coronavirus. My son, brother, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, nephews, niece, cousins and friends also got COVID. My neurologist’s medical partner got COVID and died. Ashkenazi Jews all.
Bobby knows who I am. My wife, Liz, and I donated to his Riverkeeper nonprofit organization and watched him fly falcons at the Hudson River home of then-Gov. George Pataki. Bobby should also know that Frydman is a Jewish name of European ancestry. I’m not Sephardic. I’m fair-haired and light-skinned. That makes me Ashkenazi.
You’d think his campaign manager, former Ohio congressman and Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, and staff would’ve prepped Bobby about the probability of Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese journalists being in attendance. In fact, there was a Chinese reporter from the Epoch Times at the table.
That prep session wouldn’t have helped. Bobby knew what he was saying. He has clearly made a political calculation to forsake liberal Jews and, instead, play on the conservative side to Orthodox Jews like Mort Klein, president of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America.
Some of that money came from donors who have more recently supported Republicans. Kennedy’s campaign raked in at least $100,000 from donors who previously gave to committees associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former President Donald Trump, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal and state campaign finance filings. The analysis is based solely on Kennedy’s itemized donations, although he also raised more than $2 million from small-dollar donors, whose names the campaign does not have to disclose.
Such crossover giving is unusual, but Kennedy is running on a platform that includes opposition to efforts to vaccinate against Covid-19, which is increasingly resonating with the Republican base. Though there has been an uptick in vaccine skepticism in recent years, the biggest increases tend to be among voters who identify as Republican.
[. . .]
Among the donors who maxed out donating to Kennedy despite having recent histories of giving to Republicans is banking executive Omeed Malik, who Axios reported is hosting separate fundraisers for DeSantis and Kennedy in the Hamptons this summer.
Let's wind down with this from Alyssa J. Rubin (NEW YORK TIMES):
In one social media clip, a young Iraqi woman dances at a national soccer tournament. In another, she dances at her son’s birthday party.
A different post shows a Baghdad fashionista modeling clothes, including an outfit based on the Iraqi Army uniform.
A fourth features a young man in a black sweatshirt and pants interviewing a young woman, also clad in black, about her private life. It is one of several clips he has made of young people dressed in close-fitting clothes that strike conservative Iraqis as provocative.
A few months ago, the people featured in these clips were stars of Iraq’s booming social media scene. No longer.
They have been largely silenced by being tried, convicted and sentenced to time in Iraq’s overcrowded prison system because of new Interior Ministry rules against “indecent” or “immoral” content on social media.
This crackdown on social media is relatively new, but is of a piece with a broader campaign to silence, sideline or co-opt those who publicly question or criticize the government.
That wider effort traces its roots to the months of demonstrations in 2019 and 2020, when young Iraqis poured into the streets demanding an end to corruption, a reduction in Iranian influence in Iraq and a new era of openness. Those demonstrations eventually forced the resignation of the prime minister, who was supported by Iranian-linked parties in the government.
