Doggy Style

Scientists say dolphins should be treated as ‘non-human persons’

Dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps. Now, dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.

Yet, we humans kill around 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises each year.

Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, stated:

Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size. The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions.

Researchers have clearly shown that dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self, can think about the future, that they are “cultural” animals (that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another), that they can recognise themselves in a mirror and will use a mirror to inspect various parts of their bodies, that they have the ability to learn symbol-based language, that they can solve difficult problems, teach each other new behaviors, and cooperate with each other, which imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication. All of which make them more intelligent than most humans, obviously.

The cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins are so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain.” In addition, the brain cortex of dolphins has the same convoluted folds as human brains. The folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect.

All of this research-based evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them, according to Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights. He noted:

The scientific research … suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals.

BIG NEWS: Giving Up on the Death Penalty in the U.S.

The American Law Institute (ALI), which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system (the death penalty legal system) almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

According to one law professor:

[The American Law Institute] were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.

ALI has a membership of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It has historically provided the structure and coherence in a federal legal system related to the death penalty in the US.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, ALI created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976.

The ‘framework’ was an effort to make the death penalty less arbitrary. It proposed limiting capital crimes to murder and narrowing the categories of people eligible for the punishment. Most important, it gave juries a framework to decide whom to put to death, asking them to balance aggravating factors against mitigating ones.

However, a major study commissioned by the Institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness.

It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by judicial politics.

Roger S. Clark (Professor, Rutgers School of Law), remarking on ALI’s abandonment of their jurisprudential support for the death penalty in the US, noted:

What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for [the death penalty].

Samuel Gross (Law Professor, University of Michigan) said:

Law students who take first-year criminal law … will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.

Talk About Delusions! The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission Announces Their ‘Top 10 Christian Bashings’ in 2009

The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission [I love that name. These are the same people who called the original race-based ‘Anti-Defamation League’ a bunch of ‘Communist Radicals’!] has released its ‘Top 10 list of Anti-Christian Acts of 2009’ and they point the finger at Larry David, President Barack Obama, the Department of Homeland Security, but mostly at the Gay Community, and the oh-so-scary gay marching band that participated in the inauguration.

Said Dr. Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission:

It is arguable [I’ll say!] that anti-Christian hatred [with just cause!] has spilled over into material forms of persecution in 2009. Christians were killed and bullied for their witness [one ‘witnesses’ by murdering and bullying behavior?!], ministers and churches threatened with violence and vandalized for standing for marriage [really, for their homophobia, sexism, racism, cries for the elimination of others’ civil rights, and political nastiness], and Christians were fired for not compromising their faith [read: ignorant, superstitious belligerence and attempts at imposing their idiocy on others]. If these are not bona fide examples of persecution, then I wonder what more it might take? [how about re-education?]

Once again, proof that born-again, fundamentalist, right-wing Christians are truly delusional.

The list has been written up here on Andy Towle’s ‘Towleroad’ Blog.

from the Cartoonist Group

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary.

— George Orwell

The year 2010 will … be the first time in history that a majority of the world’s people live in cities, rather than in the countryside. Whereas less than 30% of the world’s population was urban in 1950, more than 70% will live in urban centers by 2050, according to UN projections. Lower-income countries in Asia and Africa are urbanizing especially rapidly, as agriculture becomes less labor intensive and as employment opportunities shift to the industrial and service sectors. Already, most of the world’s urban agglomerations — Mumbai (population 20.l million), Mexico City (19.5 million), New Delhi (17 million), Shanghai (15.8 million), Calcutta (15.6 million), Karachi (13.1 million), Cairo (12.5 million), Manila (11.7 million), Lagos (10.6 million), Jakarta (9.7 million) — are found in low-income countries. Many of these countries have multiple cities with over one million residents each: Pakistan has 8, Mexico 12, and China more than 100.

— Jack A. Goldstone, “The New Population Bomb,” Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2010.

The question is not how to get good people to rule; the question is how to stop the powerful from doing as much damage as they can to us.

— Karl Popper

The American Gulag

The United States, which has less than 5% of the world’s population, has about 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Between 1987 and 2007 — a mere 20 years — the prison population grew by nearly 300% (from 585,000 to almost 1.6 million), and one in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation — more prisoners and former prisoners and parolees than were incarcerated at any time in the Soviet Union under Stalin!

Much of that increase occurred in states — many with falling crime rates! — that had adopted overly harsh punishment policies, such as the “three strikes, you’re out” rule and drug laws requiring that nonviolent drug offenders be locked away.

These policies have been enormously costly in purely financial terms, not to mention their general societal cost to family relationships, physical and mental health, and labor and education markets.

According to the Pew Center on the States, state spending from general funds on corrections increased from $10.6 billion in 1987 to more than $44 billion in 2007, a 127% increase in inflation-adjusted dollars. In the same period, adjusted spending on higher education increased only 21%. The only areas of government that are more expensive are Medicare and total military spending.

In 2008, the explosion of the prison population ground to a near halt, according to data released last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, when 739,000 inmates were admitted to federal and state facilities, and only about 3,500 more than that were released. But, prison populations are only stable. They are not declining. And a huge proportion of those in prison are not violent offenders, or serious criminals.

Homophobic Evangelical Christian Americans’ Role Finally Noted in Uganda Anti-Gay Push

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The American Christian discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three born-again Evangelical, anti-intellectual, intentionally deceitful, homophobic Americans are finally finding themselves on the defensive, once again intentionally lying by saying that they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: A bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

Read the rest of this NYTimes article here.

Isaac Newton was born in England on this date in 1643, was a leader of the scientific revolution whose Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) is among the most important single works in the history of modern science.