The Dish

A reader writes:

1.  I believed that we would quickly go in, take care of business (toppling Saddam?), clean out any WMD, and get out.  I thought our casualties would be light and our commitment short-lived and inexpensive.  I though it would scare the crap out of Syria, Iran, whoever, and that it would be cheap and easy, so I went along with it. I was complacent (and complaisant?) and didn’t complain about how we got there. I remember thinking "now that the administration has put us in this position (with threats and such), we have to go in. Oh, well."

It’s the "oh, well" that bothers me now. I’ll never say that again.

Nature porn for Glenn Reynolds and other second amendment fans.

"She’s one of the best-known women in the world. She’s been in the White House for eight years. She’s a senator from one of the largest states. And 60-plus percent of the Democratic Party wants somebody else," – former senator, Gary Hart.

Russia opens a front in the climate change resource wars.

New research suggests that the gap between man and animals is, once again, narrower than many have thought. In the lab, mice clearly show something that can only be called empathy. Money quote:

It’s tempting to explain empathetic behavior in animals that we believe to have only rudimentary cognition, such as mice, by arguing that the sight of a suffering fellow mouse simply evokes an automatic fear reaction. This study undermines that explanation by showing that mice showed empathetic reactions only with cage mates; the mice seem to go far beyond being frightened by injury to accounting for whom the injured party is — friend, family, foe, stranger. This response is a significant step toward human-like social feeling — toward caring for acquaintances more than for strangers, just as our empathy for someone who is hurt differs depending on whether the person is a foreigner, a national compatriot, a school chum or an immediate family member.

A scientific beach-read.

Ken Silverstein spies what he says are "court bloggers" in a program originally dubbed, according to one source, as "Surrogates Operation." He updates with this:

Before these bloggers start to complain that they’ve done nothing wrong, I’d like to ask how they would feel if a group of handpicked, administration-friendly liberal bloggers had done the same thing during the Clinton years. I believe they would have objected vociferously–and I would have agreed with them. No one, on any side, should let themselves be used to spread the administration’s gospel. At least not anyone who can pretend to journalistic standards.

I’m not sure I’d be as upset. The Pentagon has a policy of appealing to partisans under this administration. Hence the Petraeus-Hewitt interview. It doesn’t help sell the policy to those who don’t already agree with it. But we’ve discovered that the Bush GOP is uninterested in persuasion. It’s interested in mobilization. The only problem is that the core group they are mobilizing keeps getting smaller and smaller.

A Richard Dawkins dating service. South-Park-bait. (Hat tip: Er, Seed.)

A fascinating wrinkle of history:

The dramatic increase of people to populate the new urban spaces of the Industrial Age may have had one other cause: tea. The population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century neatly coincided with the mass adoption of tea as the de facto national beverage. (Imports grew from six tons at the beginning of the century to eleven thousand at the end.) A luxury good at the start of the century, tea had become a staple even of working-class diets by the 1850s. One mechanic who provided an account of his weekly budget to the Penny Newsman spent almost fifteen percent of his earnings on tea and sugar. He may have been indulging in it for the taste and the salutary cognitive effects of caffeine, but it was also a healthy lifestyle choice, given the alternatives.

Brewed tea possesses several crucial antibacterial properties that help ward off waterborne diseases: the tannic acid released in the steeping process kills off those bacteria that haven’t already perished during the boiling of the water. The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust. Physicians observed a dramatic drop in dysentery and child mortality during the period. (The antiseptic agents in tea could be passed on to infants through breast milk.) Largely freed from waterborne disease agents, the tea drinking population began to swell in number, ultimately supplying a larger labor pool to the emerging factory towns, and to the great sprawling monster of London itself.