William Shatner Reads Sarah Palin's Exit Speech
July 28, 2009 10:02 pm

Shatner recites the LSD poetry of Sarah Palin.

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If You're Not Angry, You're Not Paying Attention
August 1, 2009 4:26 pm

Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested earlier this week on his own front porch on a disorderly conduct charge after being mistaken for a burglar. The charges were later dropped.

You would think that the arrest of a man on his own property, a man who had already proven (via two valid forms of photo identification) that the property was indeed his own, would prompt nearly universal outrage. Conservatives and right-wing libertarians would be bothered by the property rights implications; liberals and left-wing libertarians would be bothered by the racial profiling implications.

But despite Gates' mainstream popularity, the right-wing blogosphere has been primarily silent. And the comments fields of the stories and blog entries about the Gates arrest reveal strong sentiments against Gates and in favor of the arrest.

The argument against Gates seems to be based largely on the idea that Gates, an unarmed 58-year-old, 150-pound man who walks with a cane and could barely speak above a whisper due to a severe bronchial infection, was "loud and disruptive" in his own home, to the point where it became necessary to arrest him.

Gates has been gracious, thanking the neighbor who called the police on him (believing her intentions to be sincere) and stating that he would be willing to forgive the officer if he offers up an apology--an opportunity that the officer has vehemently refused to take. Meanwhile, prominent NAACP critic Michael Meyers has accused Gates of "racial histrionics" for his purported failure to "cooperate" in a "courteous and calm" manner.

But Gates cooperated with police requests: He was asked to provide identification, and he did so. Asking for the officer's name and badge number, the offense for which he was ostensibly arrested, seems reasonable enough--certainly not "uncooperative," given that Gates had already been excluded as a suspect.

The idea that failure to show deference in one's own home should be an arrestable offense is not an idea that's compatible with any realistic definition of civil liberties, liberal or conservative. The arrest of Dr. Gates should offend all people of good will. The fact that it is being reduced to yet another standard two-sided political argument about an "issue" demonstrates, in clear and unavoidable terms, why we still need a civil rights movement in this country.

It also demonstrates why people who claim to be libertarians, but do not take the concerns of the black civil rights movement seriously, aren't really libertarians at all. A policy that allows police to arrest a black man on his own property for verbally asserting his rights is not a libertarian policy; it is a radically authoritarian policy, one that would be more at home in a police state than in a liberal democracy. If the black civil rights movement is concerned about this sort of thing, while the mainstream libertarian movement is not, then it's reasonable to ask who the real libertarians are in this country.

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Wake Up Call: Jeff Sharlet on "Real Time" w/ Bill Maher
August 1, 2009 4:58 pm

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Chart of the Day
August 1, 2009 7:48 pm

By Kevin Drum

This comes from a Research 2000 poll commissioned by Daily Kos. Apparently a majority of Southerners aren't willing to say that Barack Obama was born in the United States. That's some serious crazy.

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Comets, not asteroids, to blame for moon's scarred face
August 2, 2009 3:12 pm

Hazel Muir

Icy comets - not rocky asteroids - launched a dramatic assault on the Earth and moon around 3.85 billion years ago, a new study of ancient rocks in Greenland suggests. The work suggests much of Earth's water could have been brought to the planet by comets.

"We can see craters on the moon's surface with the naked eye, but nobody actually knew what caused them - was it rocks, was it iron, was it ice?" says Uffe Grae Jorgensen, an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. "It's exciting to find signs that it was actually ice."

Evidence suggests that the Earth and moon had both formed around 4.5 billion years ago. But almost all the craters on the moon date to a later period, the "Late Heavy Bombardment" 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago, when around 100 million billion tonnes of rock or ice crashed onto the lunar surface. The Earth would have been pummelled by debris at the same time, although plate tectonics on our restless planet have since erased the scars.

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Did an ice age boost human brain size?
August 2, 2009 3:18 pm

Bob Holmes

It is one of the biggest mysteries in human evolution. Why did we humans evolve such big brains, making us the unrivalled rulers of the world?

Some 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors' brains expanded from a mere 600 cubic centimetres to about a litre. Two new studies suggest it is no fluke that this brain boom coincided with the onset of an ice age. Cooler heads, it seems, allowed ancient human brains to let off steam and grow.

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C.S.I. NEANDERTAL: Homo Sapiens Fingered in Neandertal Cold Case
August 2, 2009 4:01 pm

Kate Wong

An experiment that involved shooting stone points into pig carcasses may have solved a 50,000-year-old stabbing.

An injury sustained by a Neandertal who died 50,000 years ago has puzzled scientists for nearly half a century. The individual, found at the site of Shanidar in Iraq and known as Shanidar 3, has a deep slice in one of the ribs, indicating that he was stabbed with a stone implement. The question has been: by whom? There are several possibilities: Either a fellow Neandertal or an early modern human did it intentionally, or the hapless victim himself or a hunting partner inflicted the wound by accident.

A forensic analysis suggests that the weapon wielded in a stabbing attack came from modern humans

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Will designer brains divide humanity?
August 2, 2009 7:13 pm

Andy Coghlan

WE ARE on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic "plug-ins" or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity?

This was the theme of a recent Neuroscience in Context meeting in Berlin, Germany, where anthropologists, technologists, neurologists, archaeologists and philosophers met to consider the implications of this next stage of human brain development. Would it widen the gulf between the world's haves and have-nots - and perhaps even lead to a distinct and dominant species with unmatchable powers of intellect?.....

......he evidence for this plasticity continues to grow. Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University in Denmark presented brain scans at the Berlin meeting showing that in people who meditate, the areas of the brain that control breathing are larger than the corresponding areas in people who do not......

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