The Dish

Steinglass counters Harris:

How many Westerners can Sam Harris find who defend female genital excision? There basically aren’t any, and indeed the overwhelming majority of those who denounce female genital excision are secular Western leftists, precisely those whom Harris would presumably denounce as moral relativists. The defense of female genital excision is carried out by Muslim men and women who live in the countries where it is practiced. And here’s the key: Western governments have had no trouble whatsoever enacting or enforcing bans on FGM on their own territory, while Western anti-FGM activists have had only moderate and gradual success in fighting the practice through propaganda in the countries where it is practiced. And neither of those things would change one whit if we decided that we had some kind of science-based morality in addition to the Western rationalist secular moral tradition that has been getting along quite well over the past several hundred years.

I am a big believer in science. That’s why I think it shouldn’t attempt to generate knowledge in fields where it can’t generate knowledge.

328 Iraqis were killed in sectarian attacks last month – around the same number as in April 2009. Yesterday was particularly bloody with over a hundred Shiite deaths from Sunni or Qaeda terrorists. The world barely noticed, but this does not sound promising:

Today's attacks stood out from other spikes in bloodshed over the past year. They were marked by a large number of precise bombings and assassinations, in all corners of the country.

Allawi is warning of worse to come:

"This conflict will not remain within the borders of Iraq. It will spill over and it has the potential to reach the world at large, not just neighbouring countries. Now Iraq is at centre stage in the region. But it is boiling with problems, it is stagnant and it can go either way. I feel that we are not done and that the international community has failed this country."

Matthew Wald spotlights some cool innovation on the biofuels front:

The company, Joule Unlimited of Cambridge, Mass., has developed several patented gene-altered organisms that absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and combine these into hydrocarbons. The organisms – basically single-celled plants – live in a panel that vaguely resembles a solar photovoltaic one.

Julia Ioffe profiles Andrey Ternovskiy, the teen from Moscow who crated Chatroulette:

[Ternovskiy] sees school—and college—as a waste of time. “The last three years at school, I haven’t done anything,” he says. “I just can’t make myself. There’s so much interesting stuff in the world, and I have to sit there with textbooks?”

By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says.

Sitting in his carefully engineered workspace—a comfortable chair and two giant monitors placed at the precise distance that Wikipedia says prevents eyestrain and a humped posture—Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred per cent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”

Kottke highlights another paragraph.

"I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me," – Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Friedersdorf hopes for one:

In my experience, the average Tea Party adherent doesn’t have a blanket distrust of institutions — and far from it. He reveres the American military, imagines that American soldiers can successfully establish a functioning democracy in Iraq, doesn’t object when even a Commander-in-Chief he loathes invokes sweeping powers to fight terrorism, generally trusts the criminal justice system to effect fair outcomes, affords police officers the benefit of the doubt when they arrest Harvard professors or suspected drug dealers or especially suspected terrorists, believes that local government officials in Arizona can enforce federal immigration law without unduly impinging on the civil liberties of legal residents and American citizens, wishes that Christian churches played a more influential role in American life, etc. I don’t mean to imply that Tea Party attendees are uniform in their beliefs — there is more intellectual diversity than is commonly supposed — but what I’ve just described are all commonly held views.

Jesse Smith fears that footage and photos of oil-covered animals obscure the true horror of oil spills:

The image of the oil-soaked bird isn't powerful because it suggests the threat to the species, and the food chain, and the entire ecosystem. It's powerful because it's a bird, and it's covered in oil, and you know it doesn't want to be, and that it may be in pain, and that it is, at the very least, terrified. A dirty or dead bird — or turtle or shark or fish — is proof that an oil spill is bad news; if they weren't, the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee and CBS News and others wouldn't be working so hard to shoehorn them into their coverage.

Would an oil spill that lacked these oily animals be any less dangerous? No, but to know that you'd have to motivate your brain to read science news and dissect the infographics and maps. This is hard work. Pictures are easier. You see a dead turtle, and your heart thinks it understands just how bad this situation is. And if you don't, well, how bad can things be?

More images of injured and dead wildlife here.