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I’ve often argued that the Free Press is soft on religion, even more so than its MSM equivalent, the New York Times. The editor of the FP, Bari Weiss, is Jewish, and although it’s not clear to me exactly what she believes (is there a God?), you’ll never see her criticizing religion. Her partner, Nellie Bowles, converted to Judaism, (I believe you have to espouse belief for that–a double entendre), and I can’t remember ever reading anything antireligious or pro-atheism on the site. (I may have missed something.) And now the editors have recruited at least four more religionists as part of a long series about religion celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

There will be monthly paeans to religion for a year, and it may already have been going for a while.  One of the paeans is below: a long, tedious piece about how American required not only the Bible to attain equality of its citizens, but the Old Testament. It’s no accident, of course, that the author, Meir Yaakov Soloveichik, is an Orthodox rabbi.  (More rabbis to come!) The American experiment, he avers, involved the replacement of an earthly king with a heavenly one: God (Yahweh in his case). Well, maybe he was right, but in the end there’s no evidence for a God who makes us all equal. And religion, despite the rabbi’s claim, is waning in America, but the idea of equality remains.

Here’s the editors’ intro to the piece (bolding is mine):

Of all the radical ideas at the heart of the American founding, freedom of religion stands apart. Rarely in human history has a nascent nation rejected religious uniformity and bet instead on liberty, trusting that faiths can live side by side, peacefully and equally. In doing so, America didn’t banish faith, but made room for it to thrive in all its depth and diversity.

For this month’s installment of our America at 250 series, a yearlong celebration of the country’s big birthday, we’re spotlighting faith and how it helped build our nation. You’ll hear from Catholic magazine editor R. R. Reno on how his marriage to a Jewish woman drew him closer to God; from David Wolpe on two towering prophets of history; from Matthew Walther on the kaleidoscope of American religious life; and more.

Today, we kick things off with the great Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who explains why the flourishing of biblical faith in the new country provided the basis for American equality. For, he writes, “In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God.”—The Editors

If you subscribe, click below to read what the sweating rabbi is trying to say. If you don’t subscribe, well, you have an extra hour to do something fun:

The piece is not particularly well written, and I don’t think it makes its case, but I don’t want to waste time doing an exegesis of this. I just want to show how the Free Press keeps highlighting the benefits of faith—in this case historical ones—over and over again. And I’ll omit all the well-known stuff about the role of religion in the Continental Congress (objections to prayers, etc.) But here’s what the piece says about the Jewish foundation of Americ (all quotes are indented).

John Adams wrote that evening [in 1771] to his wife: “I never saw a greater Effect upon an Audience. It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning. I must beg you to read that Psalm.” A passage from the Hebrew Bible, describing a divine defense from one’s enemies, so united the members of the new Congress that it seemed heaven-sent.

For the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, this anecdote highlights the prominent role played by the stories, imagery, and ideas of Hebrew scripture in the American revolution. In contrast to Christian texts, which are devoted to describing a kingdom that is “not of this earth,” the tale of biblical Israel is all about a polity that is very earthly indeed. Thus, as Novak noted in On Two Wings, his account of the role of faith in the American founding, “practically all American Christians erected their main arguments about political life from materials in the Jewish Testament.” The story of the Jews offered early Americans a tale from which they could find inspiration in their own crisis.

It also offered another advantage. Focusing on Judaic texts allowed the revolutionaries to avoid exegetical issues pertaining to Christian theology. “Lest their speech be taken as partisan,” Novak added, “Christian leaders usually avoided the idioms of rival denominations—Puritan, Quaker, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Unitarian, Methodist, and Universalist. The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation.” As a means of uniting the diverse group, Novak continues, “the language of Judaism came to be the central language of the American metaphysic—the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race.” Psalm 35 would serve as a symbol of the fact that patriots across America could indeed pray together.

Here it’s not just religion that was the bedrock foundation of America, but Old Testament Judaism.  Of course, the vast majority of Americans when the country was founded were Christians, and presumably accepted the Jesus stories, but this shows how historians can emphasize some stuff as opposed to other stuff to make their case

And here’s how Thomas Paine, himself an atheist, nevertheless foisted “belief in belief” on Americans in his influential pamphlet Common Sense. “Belief in belief”—the view that it’s good for the “little people” (Americans) to believe in God even if the intellectuals don’t—seems to be the point of view pushed by the Free Press, and, to me, explains why they don’t publish articles that dismantle belief. But I digress.

Paine privately denied the reality of revelation and scorned scripture as fantasy. (He would later voice his views on religion in The Age of Reason, ruining his reputation in America.) But America was a biblically literate land, and with Benjamin Rush’s help, Paine wrote for his audience in Common Sense. The pamphlet—probably the most influential published polemic in the history of the world—changed the way in which Americans regarded their king and monarchy in general.

The essence of Paine’s argument is easy to miss today. In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God. “But where, says some, is the King of America?” Paine asks in Common Sense; “I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.” Not all patriots approved of the pamphlet; John Adams thought its arguments overwrought and exaggerated. But Paine spoke for the many whose own sentiments were evolving. Subjects who had once revered their king were beginning to conclude that the texts of ancient Israel pointed to a new way of seeing themselves.

The tale of America is not merely that of a break with Britain; it is equally a tale of a group of colonists who came to conclude that their equality derived from the monarchy of the Almighty.

There’s more:

But the fact remains that shorn of biblical faith, no cogent explanation can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Indeed, the other sources of antiquity to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philosophers of Greece and the statesmen of Rome—denied human equality and held a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve. As the Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter reflected in Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, to this day “faith in God provides a justification for the equality that liberal philosophy assumes and cherishes but is often unable to defend.”

This is bushwah. Of course a cogent nonreligious argument can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Read any ethical philosopher (John Rawls is one example), or read the article on “Eauality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where the word “God” appears precisely once, and only in a discussion of how Christianity espoused an equality of humans before God.

But even if this historical interpretation be true, as Americans become more and more either atheists or “nones” (those not affiliated with a specific church or faith), the rationale for equality would seem to have disappeared. It hasn’t, because we now base it on humanism, not religion. If you stopped someone in the street and asked Americans why all people are equal before the law, I doubt they say “because that’s what the Old Testament dictates.” They may mutter something about all men being created equal from the Declaration of Independence, but philosophers who give us a rational basis for equality rely not on Divine Command but on secular arguments.

At the end, Rabbi Soloveichik raises the new canard that the waning of religion in America has slowed. They make a great deal about the plateau shown below:

Europeans may wonder at the way our politics is consumed by a culture war that is linked to differences regarding religion, but these debates endure in America because, unlike the largely secular continent across the ocean that was once the cradle of Christendom, faith continues to matter to so many millions of Americans. Even the much-discussed contemporary phenomenon known as the rise of the “nones”—Americans who do not belong to a faith at all—seems to have slowed. Few Americans today know the final lyrics of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” but when God is invoked in our public life, it is meant to remind us of the unique way equality emerged in America, the way religion impacted how Americans came to see themselves.

As we mark America’s 250th anniversary, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the next decades will bring for our country. But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

Mind you, religiosity hasn’t reversed its long-term trend of decreasing; it just has hit a plateau.  Here’s a graph from the Pew article cited by the rabbi:

BUT that goes back to only 2007, and deals only with Christianity. (I bet Islam would show growth.) Let’s take a longer view, looking at Pew data from 1972 to about 2021.  Christianity has fallen nearly 30%, and if you looked way back to the turn of the 20th century, I bet you’d see a much bigger decline. The “plateau” touted above—believers never mention the long term—is just a small segment of the graph, and while religion may increase or remain static, that’s not the long-term trend. In the meantime, “nones” have increased nearly sixfold, and other religions just a tad. Nope, the rabbi’s huzzahs ring hollow.

Look again at the last sentence:

But looking back on the past, one prediction can be safely made. Religion in America has always defied the predictions of its demise, and on the 300th birthday of the United States, there will be citizens of this country who will rejoice in their equality—and thank the almighty monarch of America for it.

That’s bogus.  There are two predictions that can be made. The first is the rabbi’s obvious one: America will always have some religious people. Yes, faith is sadly still alive, and we’ll have to wait a few centuries until we become like Sweden or Iceland. But the more important prediction is that faith is waning. It ain’t dead yet, but it’s dying. Even so, Americans still espouse equality.

It’s time for the Free Press to publish some stuff about unbelief, its increase over time, and the reasons for it.

I couldn’t help myself. I asked ChatGPT to illustrate some early Americans worshipping God as a king. Not bad, eh?

A new theory of "dark photons" attempted to explain a centuries-old experiment in a new way this year, in an effort to change our understanding of the nature of light

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “repertoire”, shows the boys onstage, and once again Mo shows his characteristic flaw: behaving exactly in the ways he’s criticizing.

There’s a message on the site: “Merry Xmas from the boys.”

This is the penultimate of the two batches I have, so why not get your wildlife photos together instead of snoozing after that big Christmas feast? Today we have the final installment of Holiday Mushroom photos by reader Rik Gern from Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here is the final batch of mushroom pictures taken in northern Wisconsin last September.

I saved this batch for last and am a bit chagrined to send them because most of these pictures are of species I was unable to identify. I’ve been using iNaturalist, but it jammed up a few times. It would seem to identify the genus and species, but then I would get the infamous spinning wheel, which would persist until I exited the application. I thought it was recording the data, but later discovered that it wasn’t. I hope you will be willing to let your more knowledgeable readers weigh in on the species identification. [JAC: yes, please, if you know the species, do weigh in]

The cap on this mushroom has a woody look. This was the only example I ran across.

This one has nice, delicate looking gills. I think it might be a Destroying Angel  (Amanita bisporigera), but the pictures I saw showed some kind of flap on the stem which this specimen lacks.

Whatever this is, the small cap looks like a cookie dusted with cinnamon.

Something sure found this mushroom tasty!

This mushroom is in an intense tug of war with a thick spider web!

You can see from this image that the web is layered in three sheets.

I’ve see time lapse films of orb weavers weaving their webs, but I can’t imagine how this web was constructed.

Mushrooms are so often associated with psychedelia that I couldn’t resist closing this series by playing with a closeup image of the pores on the underside of the Chicken fat mushroom (Suillus americanus) to give it a trippy psychedelic feel.

Just as an interest in Photoshop led to an interest in photography, the thrill of having pictures on whyevolutionistrue alongside those of learned naturalists and scholars has piqued my interest in learning more about the world of fungi. I’ve been asking friends to recommend books that give a broad overview of fungi. Guide books only make my eyes glaze over and tie my brain in knots, as I don’t seem to have a good mind for that kind of detail, but I can grok the big picture when it’s presented well. There’s a book coming out in May called The Complete Fungi: Evolution, Diversity and Ecology by David S. Hibbit that looks fantastic. I have pre-ordered it, and thought some of your readers might be interested as well, so here is a link.

This will be the final reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme, a holiday them, or a or Hanukkah theme (we now have many Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have now acquired more than 65 photos for posting. (Note: do not send AI pictures like the one I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! It should be holiday-themed and have a few words about the moggy, including its name. Also your name of pseudonym. (No videos, please, as I can’t embed them.)

I’ll move the deadline forward to 11 a.m. Chicago time TODAY; Christmas Eve and Koynezaa Eve. Sorry, but I can’t accept late entries.

The cats will be posted on Christmas Day—tomorrow morning. It’s a great panoply of furballs!

Astronomers discovered a new moon of Uranus and hundreds of moons around Saturn over the past year, and there may be many more yet to be found

Researchers have created a new kind of 3D computer chip that stacks memory and computing elements vertically, dramatically speeding up how data moves inside the chip. Unlike traditional flat designs, this approach avoids the traffic jams that limit today’s AI hardware. The prototype already beats comparable chips by several times, with future versions expected to go much further. Just as important, it was manufactured entirely in a U.S. foundry, showing the technology is ready for real-world production.

From our immune systems to our microbiomes, if you're planning to make health improvements in the new year, having an eye on the numbers can help set you up for success

Mathematician Katie Steckles explains just why the proliferation of snowflake decorations this time of year is deeply annoying

The ideas presented in George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan's The Neural Mind are fascinating, but the writing is far less compelling

Focusing on the futuristic tech that appears in sci-fi without paying attention to the actual point of the story is a big mistake, says Annalee Newitz

The festive season is a period of social connection for many of us, but alone time can be equally enriching, says Thuy-vy Nguyen, principal investigator of the Solitude Lab

With the human family tree now more like a hedge and twice as many known moons, Bill Bryson talks to the New Scientist podcast about refreshing his 2003 bestselling book on science

Feedback's eyebrows are raised at tech millionaire Bryan Johnson's latest exploits, which involve Grimes, music, and hallucinogenic mushrooms

Careful slope monitoring prevented mass casualties in the landslide at Blatten, Switzerland, this year, but mountain communities may face a growing risk of disasters

More than 200 years ago, Count Rumford showed that heat isn’t a mysterious substance but something you can generate endlessly through motion. That insight laid the foundation for thermodynamics, the rules that govern energy, work, and disorder. Now, researchers at the University of Basel are pushing those rules into the strange realm of quantum physics, where the line between useful energy and random motion becomes blurry.

Growing evidence reveals that creativity is one of the best-kept secrets for boosting your health. From live theatre to a quick crafting break, here’s how to harness the power of art in your everyday life

Yesterday I wrote about the segment of CBS’s “60 Minutes” show that was removed from the schedule by news editor-in-chief Bari Weiss shortly before it was to air. It was about American detainees, accused of immigration violations, who were sent to a notorious and horrible prison in El Salvador, CECOT.  Here’s an excerpt of the NYT story on the incident:

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Ms. Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

It seems to me, and even more now that I’ve seen the show, that the reasons for taking it off there air were, as Alfonsi claims, not really editorial but political. Why would Weiss do that, though?  Perhaps because, she doesn’t want to incur the wrath of Trump, who doesn’t want the information in this show to be aired. There are several reasons why Weiss might have wanted administration pushback. First, the Trump administration approved the acquisition of Paramount (which owns CBS) to Skydance, and, after this, we can’t have CBS criticizing the administration.  Second, this year Trump sued CBS for airing an edited interview with Kamala Harris; Trump won and got $16 million. So there’s every reason to think that Trump would be really upset if CBS’s 60 Minutes criticized his administration, which is the show does implicitly. You can see that below.

Nevertheless, a fair number of readers here defended Weiss, arguing that Alfonsi did NOT ask enough U.S. administration officials to criticize the show. 60 Minutes did not, for instance, consult Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and “the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.” Weiss helpfully suggested that they ask Miller.  But, as you’ll see in the 14-minute segment, which was aired in Canada, the show did ask for comment from the White House. The response? Here’s what Alfonsi says in the piece:

“The Department of Homeland Sexurity declined our request for an interview, and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador.  The government there did not respond to our request.”

Now isn’t that enough asking? After all, the show asked the proper government agency to respond. That agency, DHS, referred CBS to the El Salvadorian government, which didn’t respond.  That is two asks, and to the right people. Isn’t that enough? How many bits of investigative journalism have you read that end with something like, “We asked X for a comment on this story, but we have gotten no response.”  Do you beef about them not having asked more people, up until they get a critical response?  No, I doubt it.  And the editors of this story were satisfied with that, as am I.  Weiss’s insistence that CBS keep asking people until someone in the Trump administration did respond critically constitutes micromanagement, and I fail to understand that this is justifiable grounds for pulling the story.

Before I make a few more comments, why don’t you watch the show? The links to the Canadian broadcast, apparently identical to the American one, are below, as “The Streisand Effect” has spread them all over the Inbternet.

First, from The Breakdown.  I’ve put the links to that site here, and you can watch the Canadian version by clicking on the headline below. The quality isn’t great, but you can certainly see the show.  It’s about the right length for a “60 Minutes” segment, being 14 minutes long (most are between 12 and 15 minutes). The site’s comment:

The segment apparently aired on Canada’s Global TV app and was shared by this Bluesky user @jasonparis.bsky.social. You can watch the entire segment below!

On The Reset, Yashar Ali also has a link to the full video; click below to access it (h/t reader Dave). THIS IS THE BEST AVAILABLE VERSION. That site says this:

The decision to pull the story was made by CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, and it triggered a firestorm within the network and, subsequently, in the public. Here’s some info on the controversy and when I update this story shortly, I will link to additional reporting, but I wanted to publish this video immediately as a version of it was taken down on YouTube.

It turns out that the network delivered the segment to Canada’s Global TV app (it has since been pulled).

As I understand it, this is only part of the overall story, but this 13-minute-long video— sent to me by a source —is what exists. [JAC: I have no idea what they mean by “part of the overall story”. If something more was there, I’d like to know what it is.]

(An earlier version of this story had a video that was filmed with someone’s smart phone, this is a broadcast quality version),

Click the screenshot below to access the video, scrolling down a bit after you get to the site:

I also found a good version of the entire show, including the controversial segment, at an archived site.

There’s also a YouTube version embedded within a MayDay discussion.  The CBS segment goes from 4:49 to 15:20, so it’s shorter than other versions. I have not checked to see what, if anything, is missing from the video below compared to those above.

Finally, this Bluesky post begins a series of five shorter posts that contain the segment. Again, I haven’t checked this one to see if it’s “complete,” at least compared to the first two above:

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog.xyz) 2025-12-23T01:28:12.219Z

So, what have we here? The piece is mostly about Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration from the U.S. to a horrible prison (CECOT) in El Salvador.  The purported reason was that they were terrorists or violent criminals. Most of the video is taken up with shots of the prison and interviews with Venezuelans who had been deported to CECOT and later sent on to Venezuela (and presumably freed there) in a prisoner swap.

CECOT is hell on earth, far worse than the Supermax prisons in the U.S.  The lights are on 24 hours per day, cells are overcrowded, there is no outside light or fresh water (prisoners say they drank water from toilets), the food is dire, and the El Salvadoran prisoners (presumably gang members) in CECOT will never get out again. They are treated like trash, and manhandled and beaten regularly. It is surely hell on earth.

Note that the people interviewed by 60 Minutes are not El Salvadoran gang members, but some of 252 Venezuelans who entered the U.S. illegally and were deemed suitable for sending to CECOT

CECOT, or Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, was constructed three years ago.  Wikipedia adds this:

With a capacity for 40,000 inmates, CECOT is the largest prison in Latin America and one of the largest in the world by prisoner capacity. In March 2025, the Salvadoran government accepted over 200 deportees that the second Donald Trump administration alleged were Venezuelan and Salvadoran gang members and incarcerated them in CECOT. Among them was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case received widespread media attention in the United States. The Venezuelans incarcerated in CECOT were repatriated to Venezuela in July 2025 following a prisoner swap involving El Salvador, the United States, and Venezuela.

According to the 60 Minutes report, the U.S. paid El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees, characterizing them as “heninous monsters: rapists, kidnappers, sexual assaulter, and predators”, and “the worst of the worst.” Were they? Human Rights Watch, quoted in the show, concluded that nearly of the Venezuelans sent to CCECOT “had no criminal history” save illegal entry into the U.S. They add that only 8 prisoners, or 3.1%, “were convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.”

But surely none of these prisoners deserve this kind of punishment, even if they were murderers! Yet the vast majority were guilty of no crimes save illegal entry. ICE’s own records were consulted and reviewed by 60 Minutes. Even having a tattoo was apparently sufficient reason to warrant a Venezuelan’s deportation to CECOT, but tattooes aren’t reliable ways to identify Venezuelan gang members. And don’t even ask about “the island”: a punishment cell in which prisoners were beaten every half hour. You may have seen the “commercial” with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (the department asked for comments!), showing a group of heavily tattooes prisoners, actually shows El Salvadoran prisoners accused of being gang members, not Venezuelans deported by the U.S. Here’s an AP video of Noem’s visit. The prisoners shown are El Salvadoran, most with tattooes indicating gang membership. But remember, even these baddies to not deserve to be in such hell.

The show then interviews a group of students at U. C. Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. These students investigated the prison and verified that the deportees’ stories were true and that the conditions for all prisoners “violated UN minimum standards for prisoners,” constituting violations of human rights.

Yes, there are two sides for every story, but I can’t see another side of this one: a side that vindicates what the Trump Administration did.  But have a look for yourself (I recommend the second link, the one from Reset). What is the other side?

It seems to me that Weiss was micromanaging this video on ideological grounds, presumably to soften its implicit attack on the Trump administration.  Taking this segment off the air because they didn’t ask the Administration for enough comments appears to me as dissimulation.

Judge for yourself.

A new discovery shows that messy, stray light can be used to clean up quantum systems instead of disrupting them. University of Iowa researchers found that unwanted photons produced by lasers can be canceled out by carefully tuning the light itself. The result is a much purer stream of single photons, a key requirement for quantum computing and secure communication. The work could help push photonic quantum technology closer to real-world use.

A new discovery shows that messy, stray light can be used to clean up quantum systems instead of disrupting them. University of Iowa researchers found that unwanted photons produced by lasers can be canceled out by carefully tuning the light itself. The result is a much purer stream of single photons, a key requirement for quantum computing and secure communication. The work could help push photonic quantum technology closer to real-world use.