Month: December 2009

Maggie Koerth-Baker flags a gorgeous but gruesome piece of nature footage:

From the "Cute Animals Devouring Other Cute Animals" file, I bring you this BBC video showing a mob of starfish ravaging the carcass of a seal pup. […] The video speeds things up with time-lapse photography, which only adds to the alien creepiness as you watch thousands of starfish (plus sea urchins and giant meat-eating worms) damn-near gallop across the ocean floor. How do starfish eat a seal? Glad you asked. Turns out, they latch onto the seal's side, pop their stomachs out through their mouths, dump digestive juices onto the seal flesh and then slurp up the dissolved "soup".

Bon appetit.

A pictorial timeline.

Matt Sigl sums up a decade of progress:

It is no small irony that Justice Scalia's stinging dissent in Lawrence V. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court court-case of 2003 that ruled the antiquated anti-sodomy laws still on the books in many states unconstitutional, provides the logical framework for same-sex marriage with ringing clarity. He writes:

Today's opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is "no legitimate state interest" for purposes of proscribing that conduct…what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising "[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution," ibid.? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case "does not involve" the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court. Many will hope that, as the Court comfortingly assures us, this is so.

This from a man who quotes Cole Porter Lyrics in official Supreme Court decisions. But Scalia's fears were not unfounded. The Lawrence V. Texas decision, announced the week of gay pride in a serendipitous coincidence, was the first domino to fall in a decade that saw a cascade of progress for gay civil rights, most importantly and most famously, the right to marry.

In 2001 The Netherlands (of course) were the first nation in the world to recognize same-sex marriage. In 2003 Ontario followed suit, with Canada granting universal marriage rights to all citizens in 2005. By the end of the decade seven different countries (including South Africa!) have full legal marriage for same-sex couples. Many others have newly enacted civil union laws. And in America, after the shackles of legal and institutionalized homophobia were loosened with Lawrence, same-sex marriage became, just as Scalia predicted, not a lofty dream but a logical necessity and social inevitability. Within six months of the Lawrence decision the ice had thawed enough to allow for the Supreme Court of Massachusetts to demand the that Bay State offer the same marriage license to all its inhabitants, gay or straight. In the culture war equivalent of the sinking of the Lusitania, the Massachusetts ruling promised a battle over gay marriage that would last years if not decades.

In another ironic twist for the Scalias of the world, the mass of media coverage on same-sex marriage, fueled by the right's hysterical response to the nuptials, only made gay people look more sympathetic. Here were women in white dresses, and men in tuxes, often with children in tow, kissing on city hall steps and sharing wedding cake. Weddings like any other. The wholesomeness of the images was almost comic. And yet, the defenders of traditional marriage keep repeating, ad naseum, as they attempted to enshrine discrimination into the U.S. Constitution, that these marriages were a "threat" to the very fabric of society.

The slow-jam remix (or the Dish's complete coverage of the Tiger Woods scandal):

An impressive amateur video from 1991 is long but worth a look.

Nicholas Ciarelli demystifies the democratic view of Wikipedia:

"The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia is that it's some emergent phenomenon—the wisdom of crowds, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing… like we're a lot of ants, working in an anthill," Jimmy Wales, the site's co-founder, has said. "It's kind of a neat analogy, but it turns out it's actually not much true." Wales examined the numbers several years ago and was surprised to learn that the most active 2 percent of users had performed nearly 75 percent of the edits on the site. […] This clique of users enforces Wikipedia's bewildering list of rules—policies covering neutrality, verifiability, and naming conventions, among other areas. It's not difficult for newcomers to run afoul of these regulations when they try to edit an article.

At the same time, these administrators undoubtedly play a critical role in maintaining Wikipedia's professionalism, volunteering untold hours to clean up vandalism and improve the quality of articles. And their apparent distrust of newcomers is not entirely without merit. "They're reflexively suspicious of everyone from watching people attack Wikipedia over all the years," says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who sits on the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia. "If everyone who works at Britannica were fired, the encyclopedia would become out of date and less useful over time as new articles weren't added, and old ones weren't updated, and would become considerably less valuable over time. But if everyone who really cares about defending Wikipedia didn't log in this week, it would be gone by Thursday."

A reader writes:

"Today on the Dish the coverage our relatively thin."

'Cause it's Friday and you're partying.

You guys keep me sane all week.

Yes, it was the Atlantic Christmas party last night. Chris had a good time. And he had to post at 10.02 pm.

To its credit, National Review once attacked those who refused to accept the prima facie evidence of Barack Obama’s birth certificate as proof of his eligibility to be president of the United States.

The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn’t.)

Now examine Sarah Palin’s precise point made Thursday night:

I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue ’cause I think there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.

One might expect NRO to write something – anything – to deal with the fact that the person they wanted to be vice-president has just embraced the conspiracy theory they have explicitly condemned.

You would expect it if the magazine were an intellectually honest vehicle for conservative thought and opinion, as opposed to a largely sophistic harbor for partisan propagandists and cranks.

A reader writes:

You wrote in response to a journalist reader who said that the McCain-Palin campaign simply refused to answer questions:

This is a democracy?

I'd say sure.

I'd argue that the McCain/Palin campaign lost a lot of potential votes because of decisions like their flat refusal to respond to reasonable questions or their announcement that Palin wouldn't do interviews unless the campaign was assured of "proper deference" (in a time of outrages, that one really got me). Proper behavior by candidates isn't what characterizes democracy. The ability of the electorate to hold those candidates accountable for their behavior and policies, as McCain and Palin were in 2008, is.