Inside the Baby Mind (Boston Globe)

Excerpt from link:

The hyperabundance of thoughts in the baby brain also reflects profound differences in the ways adults and babies pay attention to the world. If attention works like a narrow spotlight in adults - a focused beam illuminating particular parts of reality - then in young kids it works more like a lantern, casting a diffuse radiance on their surroundings.

"We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children," writes Gopnik. "But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus."

(H/T Coast)

Frank Rich Drives the Point Home Again

Excerpt from link:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

That says it all, doesn't it?

Speeding Ticket Fail (YouTube)

This exceeded my expectations.

Interview with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Salon)

There are a lot of great parts to this interview. Here's a couple:

Is the aversion to milk or eggs about taking it from the animals, or how it is taken from them?

It's a combination. I feel that it's not ours to take. The milk is there for a calf, not for a human. We're the only species that drinks the milk of another species.

Think about it: You couldn't get within 100 yards of a wild cow to take milk. The bull would gore you to death. The cow herself would run away. They don't want to be milked. It's really a false conceit to say, "Well, they don't really mind." Of course they mind. It's just that we breed them to be docile, and we put them in stalls, and we make them artificially pregnant. It's totally unnatural.

Plus, it's not a good life for the cow. All they do is give milk. And when they're "spent," which is a terrible phrase, that means when they're not giving milk to their full capacity, we slaughter them.

Because they can't consent?

That's exactly the issue. They're not consenting. They have no choice in it. Look around you in a farm. There are fences everywhere. There are cages. These animals are not free. They can't come and go. They don't say: "Hey, that's not a bad deal. We'll go there for five years, and then they'll slit our throat. That's fair enough."

Another Fish Toon (Truthdig)

Mr. Fish Holiday Toon (Truthdig)

Stand By Me (David Johnson)

I swear I saw this on TV somewhere, but now it's online (Vimeo). Great stuff.

(H/T PolitiCook, Monkeyfister)

Black Vultures (Audubon)

Excerpt from link:

Black vultures are among the most resilient members of the vulture family, even though they are slightly smaller than their cousins, the turkey vultures. Black vultures can better tolerate human presence. While most turkey vultures migrate, black vultures are largely residents. The olfactory bulbs of black vultures are much less developed than those of turkey vultures, so they rely more on sight to find a rotting good meal. They tend to fly higher than the turkeys, spot other vultures circling over carrion, then soar in for the steal. And their smaller size is no impediment to their packlike scavenging techniques; black vultures will gather in large groups and drive turkey vultures off a prize find of carrion.

“They are extremely resourceful,” says Bildstein. While conducting vulture surveys in Central America, he has watched black vultures drag coconuts onto highways, wait for passing cars to smash the nuts, then eat from the broken shards.