The Dish

If by any chance you are a fundamentalist Christian, skip this post. You can't handle the truth. But if you're a believer that the family is as deep and as old as humanity itself, read on.

Carl Zimmer highlights a few findings from the Ardipithecus fossil research unveiled this week:

Those of you reading this post that have a Y chromosome have canine teeth that are about the same size as those of my XX readers. The same rule applies to the teeth of some other primate species. But in still other species, the males have much bigger canines than the females. The difference corresponds fairly well to the kind of social lives these primates have. Big canines are a sign of intense competition between males. Canine teeth in some primate species get honed into sharp daggers that males can use as weapons in battles for territory and for the opportunity to mate with females.

Men have stubby canines, which many scientists take as a sign that the competition between males became less intense in our hominid lineage. That was likely due to a shift in family life. Male chimpanzees compete with each other to mate with females, but they don’t help with the kids when they’re born. Humans form long-term bonds, with fathers helping mothers by, for example, getting more food for the kids to eat. There’s still male-male competition in our lineage, but it’s a lot less intense than in other species.

White and his colleagues  found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

Much more fascinating shit here.

"My honest view is that she would not be a winning candidate for president and if she was the results would be … catastrophic," – McCain '08 manager Steve Schmidt, on Sarah Palin.

Whatever happened to the subjunctive?

Absorbing the latest from the Iran talks will take time. First off: the reality-based caveats:

Most analysts had agreed coming into the talks this morning that the bare minimum for a successful meeting is an agreed framework for continuing the negotiations.  This (low) bar seems to have been met in today’s talks.

Enduring America's judges the talks a win for the Iranian government:

What it needed, even more than the disappearance of the sanctions threat and space for its nuclear programme, was the drama and spectacle of recognition to take back home.

I'm not so sure. Iran "agreed in principle Thursday to ship most of its current stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be refined for exclusively peaceful uses." This strikes me as big news. Greenwald's framing:

As is true for any tentative agreement with anyone, there is always the possibility that something could happen prior to compliance, but this was a deal reached after a single-day meeting.  Just consider that, as Hynd said on Twitter, the "Obama WH already got more from one buffet lunch with Iran than Bush WH did in 8 years of saber-rattling." 

Gary Sick is also optimistic:

By all accounts, instead of being a food fight leading to a total breakdown, the Geneva talks were serious, businesslike, and even cordial. The top U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State William Burns, had a one-on-one meeting with Iranian top negotiator Saeed Jalili, in which they reportedly talked substantive issues. That is something that had not happened in thirty years. During the latter years of the Clinton presidency, Iranian officials conducted desperate evasive maneuvers to avoid any direct contact with American officials, and during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, American officials did the same with their Iranian diplomatic counterparts. The orders on both sides to avoid official contact at risk of one’s professional career seem to have been relaxed, at least for this occasion.

A reader writes:

Reading the opinion, a link to which you posted. Page 14:

“He further explained that he was “detained by the American troops and thanks to God they are good example [sic] of humanitarian behavior.”

is heartbreaking.  No other word for it. I see that Worthington calls it “ironic” but I stand by my adjective.

“Thanks to God,” at least, that our system includes still a judiciary that could eventually set forth an opinion like this.  But look again, just look at what Fouad al-Rabiah, then 42 years old, father of four, wrote at the time to his family in Kuwait, from an Afghanistan overcome with war.

He was desperately trying to get back to them, and he was in prison, held by American troops.  And he said the American troops, thanks to God, are good example[s] of humanitarian behavior.

How many Muslims or Arabs, anywhere in the world, would say that now?

This is among the things Cheney and his utterly foul, despicable crew just fucking threw away, thinking that doing so would make us strong and safe.

Get angrier.

Matt Welch digs through Roman Polanski's memoir. 

Juan Cole busts ten myths about Iran. Number two:

Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.

I wonder what the equivalent would be for Israel, which you and I partly pay for.

Leonhardt parses.

The babies featured on this video are now commenting on it on YouTube. And the song never fails to reassure me as I wallow in the news every day.

Drezner provokes:

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of Jon Stewart's verbal skewering of Crossfire in particular and the whole genre of left-right cable gabfests in general.  Stewart said these kind of shows were "hurting America" because of their general blather and failure to ask politicians good, sharp questions. 

Stewart's appearance on Crossfire generated quite the navel-gazing among the commentariat, and played no small role in the eventual disappearance of Crossfire, The Capitol Gang, Hannity & Colmes, and shows of that ilk.  

So, five years later, I have a half-assed blog question to ask — did Jon Stewart hurt America by driving these shows off the air? 

If you're expecting a lengthy defense of the Crossfire format right now, well, you're going to be disappointed. My point rather, is to question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse. Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have…. Hannity. Is this really an improvement?

He's got a point, hasn't he?