Since the 1940s, it has been fashionable among right-thinking, scientifically inclined people of the left to point out a certain unseemly fascination among folks on the extreme right with fluoridation of the water supply.

As sensible people know, fluoride is certainly a dangerous chemical, but on the scale it's used in municipal water it's a positive health benefit, allowing Americans to enjoy nice smiles into ripe old age while our cousins in the Old World spit their rotted teeth into the denture glass.  The joke reached its height with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, in which the anticommunist General Jack D. Ripper attempted to destroy the world in order to save it from fluoride.

As it turns out General Ripper didn't commit suicide at all.  He's alive and well, and working for the California Office of Environmental Health.

The CIC voted on May 29 to prioritize 38 more chemicals for possible listing as carcinogens.  Nine were designated as high priority, and these include fluoride (yep, the stuff the dentists use, Crest puts in its toothpaste and many water districts add to the water)…

After sixty years, the dream of rightwing fluoride nuts has been realized, and to think it's going to be done by the public health ministry in Sacramento.  Henceforth products containing fluoride, including toothpaste, will have to be labeled a carcinogenic health hazard.  While there's no evidence that Californians will suffer less cancer as a result, human nature being what it is, we can predict they'll suffer a lot more cavities.

Open wide and smile, California.

We've written harshly about the British nanny state in the past.  Perhaps too harshly, in retrospect.

Based on recent news, what the British people need is a national nanny, someone who'll prevent them from hurting themselves.

Talk of swine flu parties has emerged on Internet forums. The idea is that exposing a child to the H1N1 virus while it remains relatively mild will give the child immunity if the virus returns in a more virulent form later on.

So if little Ian comes down with the swine flu, little Graeme and little Neville are invited to Ian's house, where they can share blankets and postnasal drip in the hope that, like a milkmaid suffering cowpox in the 19th century, they'll be immune to the "smallpox" strain of swine flu that's sure to come.  Some day.

Of course, given enough time it's a certainty that the H1N1 virus will mutate not just into a "superflu," but a technologically advanced galactic empire of flu, ruling the pitiful descendants of British humanity from the orbital flu satellites.

In the meantime, here and now on the planet earth, the swine flu has killed hundreds of people already.  And the British government, understandably, is warning parents that it's a bad idea for parents to expose their children to influenza.

Will British parents heed this advice?  That's an interesting question.  As others have pointed out, in America our lawyer-driven "nanny culture" is responsible for all sorts of ridiculous warning labels, to the point where a case can be made that consumers are less likely to take real warnings about threats that matter seriously.  We may suffer from "warning fatigue."

In Britain on the other hand, the important job of protecting everyone from everything is not the work of lawyers, but the government and its employees, who seek to save the British people from pointed knives, Wi-fi in public, and in fact virtually everything except the government itself. And while we don't endorse exposing children to the flu, we have strong concerns about a government that seems to think it's the State's business to keep children from scraping their knees.

Eventually, Britain's "everything not compulsory is forbidden" ethos will catch up to it.  Can a people who live from cradle to grave in the warm arms of a government nanny look after themselves?  After years of Chicken Little, will the minority who consider it their personal responsibility to take care of themselves give up when the sky actually falls?

And probably moments before the attack of the Galactic Flu Empire.

They've all conquered France.

The French Government faces punishment for failing to look after its hamsters.

The European Commission has brought a case in the European Court for allowing the great hamster of Alsace, the only wild hamster in Western Europe, to decline to the point of extinction.

If found guilty, the French Government faces fines of up to €17 million ($37 million) or €68,000 for each of the 250 animals still thought to be living in the fields around the city of Strasbourg in the east of the country.

If this follows the lead of American class actions, the lawyers will get $36.999 million and the hamsters will each get a coupon good for 10% off of a box of Hamster Chow, redeemable in a store operated by feral cats.

Hamsters face indifferent Frenchmen, hostile farmers, hungry predators, and cruelly inventive six-year-olds with remote-control trucks. But hamsters — and all of God's creatures — should know that there are people out there who are never going to give them up, never going to let them down — even at great personal cost. Take Cass Sunstein, President Obama's nominee for "regulation czar." Sunstein's nomination has been held up because he has suggested that animals ought to be able to sue, with a little help from their human pals. (Via.)

Indeed, in his 2004 book, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Sunstein wrote: “I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.”

More specifically, he wrote: “Laws designed to protect animals against cruelty and abuse should be amended or interpreted to give a private cause of action against those who violate them, so as to allow private people to supplement the efforts of public prosecutors.”

This could not fail to be simply awesome for lawyers. Animals are similar to people in this respect: lawyers claiming to act on their behalf, without their specific informed consent, may actually not be. Were they Uplifted, animals might indeed throw off their chains and their ugly little knitted-by-old-women sweaters and demand that we stop eating them and stuff. But they might also say "Waitaminute. You say you're going to sue for me, but you're getting all the money? Bullshit, man, bullshit. C'mon, Trigger, we're going home." For that matter, it's difficult to imagine an animal who is not a reincarnation of Andy Kaufman wanting to have their litigation strategy dictated by PETA.

Moreover, there are only so many animals, but there is a virtually inexhaustible supply of hungry lawyers. Sooner or later the lawyers will move on. Hmmm . . . has the ficus retained anyone yet? Can you get me a meeting?

As I've said before, I'm a librophile-misanthropist. On average I like books more than I like people. Sure, there are exceptions. I rather like my wife and kids, and my dad. And I like my co-bloggers more than I like, say, the NetForce series, which is branded with Tom Clancy's name but isn't actually written by him, and since it isn't 1988, probably wouldn't be much good even if it were. But in general, despite my newfound love for e-books on the Kindle, I love real, physical, dusty books. We've got a huge number of kids' books from my youth, and even some from my parents' youth. It's a joyful thing when my kids ask me to read one of them to them, a connection between my childhood and theirs.

That's why the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act continues to enrage me and harden my abiding contempt for and mistrust of our government. As Patrick has documented before, independently and with reference to Walter Olson's spectacular coverage, the CPSIA is a won't-SOMEBODY-think-of-the-children clumsy overreaction to the lead-in-the-toys scare of a few years ago. The results? Well, small manufacturers and business that sell items for children are being crushed by the law's ridiculous requirements. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends that thrift, consignment, and resale stores throw out old books in order to comply with the law.

The government doesn't think old books are great and an opportunity to forge a connection with kids. The government thinks — without anything adults and free people would accept as a scientific basis — that old books are obsolete and even dangerous to our children. The government thinks:

Children’s books have limited useful life (approx 20 years)

You know, I worked for the government, and I know it's not staffed by aliens, but by fallible human beings like me. But I can barely acknowledge that someone who would say that shares a species with me.

Think that I'm exaggerating? I wish. Read this New Atlantis article about the impact of the CPSIA on books. If you are even slightly fond of the printed word, you will be enraged by Elizabeth Mullaney Nicol's story of how junk science, oh-please-think-of-the-children posturing, and willful political ignorance led to mass destruction of books and businesses.

Via.

In the gossip-driven feeding frenzy that keeps alive the tawdry tale of rising and declining wannabe John Edwards (now with video), the New York Daily News wins quip of the day :

Hunter had been hired by the Edwards campaign to videotape the candidate’s movements, but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform.

The commodification of sexual scandal is nothing new, of course, and in times like these more than ever the media are motivated to regard as "news" whatever will maximize sales.  Thus, there's a regrettable tendency to spew rather than eschew.

What's cheapened in yellowing press, beyond the players' tattered reputations, is a factor arguably worth conserving: the vitality of sexual allusion as a literary device.

For some of their puissance, these worthy tropes depend on indirection– a wink, a nod, a knowing glance.  But in a cultural milieu where everyone seems to say entirely too much altogether, and where even the king is in the altogether, it's hard for prose to play allusively without seeming turgid.

So it goes, too, with visual and spatial art.  Around 1920, that brash jokester Duchamp tagged a mustachioed Mona with a vulgar schoolyard pun.

Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1919 and then on and on.

(For the Gallically disinclined: reading the letters aloud in French makes one say "Elle a chaud au cul" — an observation unsuited to polite company.  French lends itself to this sort of pun, as a legion of Speak-and-Spell-wielding youth will testify.)

On a mission to shock the bourgeoisie, Duchamp kicked off a new wave in the longtime cheapening of time-honored bawd.  Just prior to this, but almost entirely without force in Duchamp's proto-postmodern context, was the sexual allusiveness of Degas:

Degas, Dancers at the Bar, 1900, Phillips Collection

So frequent were his graphical forays into the world of dance that a representation by Degas of some ballerina stretching thus, or adjusting her slipper, or otherwise assuming a complex or lyrical stance seems straightforwardly representational.  Similarly simple seem the shiny statuettes (by the seashore):

Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot, ca. 1900, Metropolitan Museum

We're in territory not far from Duchamp but several steps removed from the schoolyard.  In French, the expression "prendre son pied" (to take one's foot) means "to experience pleasure" and has the specifically sexual connotation of orgasm.  This erotic idiom is often used figuratively nowadays to express with hyperbole any sort of pleasure at all– Q: "Did you like the new Star Trek movie?"  A: "Ah oui, j'ai pris mon pied!".  (This is similar to the cavalier way English speakers toss around the suffix "-gasm", as in "Geekgasm".)

By way of this idiom, Degas invests some, and therefore all, of his graphical and plastic dancers with another layer of allusion to intensify the already erotic connotations of classical dance.  The indirection is not subtle, but it is somewhat less obvious and grating than "LHOOQ" since the foot-touching gesture makes literal sense on its own terms within the theatrical context: sometimes, a touching of the foot is just a touching of the foot.

This brings us, of course, to pirates.  How did it come to pass that "to take one's foot" became an idiom for orgasm?  Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system.  When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole.  The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty.  No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate's pleasure.  Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone's pleasure in anything, and eventually ended up a punchline in Amélie.  And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in our mother tongue suffered under the weight of too popular a press.  We've seen enough; it's time to close your eyes and think of English.

So let's insist that the media fanning the torrid flames of political passion and self-immolation avert their gaze from gossip.  Let's demand actual journalistic attention to news worthy of the name, even if the purveyors of parley have to trim their sales.

Eventually, you have to put your foot down.

A brief descent into the dorky world of role playing games. The Origins Awards (which can be quirky) just awarded role playing game of the year to Mouseguard (a game where the players are sentient mice in a three musketeers sort of world). This is significant (and pleasing to me) because the competition was a little game you might have heard of called 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Talk about David beating Goliath!

Mouseguard is based off a nicely illustrated graphic novel, and is a "story game." That is the mechanics of the game focus more on the shared story of the group than the individual characters. It is anathema to power gamers, but for folks like me who prefer the narrative aspects they are a beautiful thing. The Shab al-Hiri Roach (which I have previously discussed here) is  a great example of a story game.

Perhaps the antithesis of a story game is D&D 4e. In fact, the emphasis on story and role playing has been so watered down that the game bears more resemblance to a miniatures combat game than a roleplaying game. D&D has always been a more hack & slash sort of game, but past editions have not been nearly so naked about it as 4e.

Mouseguard winning this award (even with Origin's history of quirky wins) is a huge deal, and a great step forward for indie press games!

Please note: I seriously doubt any such win will happen at GenCon.

While many large corporations try to shun overt displays of wealth these days, well, they don't produce the profits that Blizzard Entertainment does, now do they?

Via joystiq, a photo of the newest decoration for Blizzard's Irvine California office.  Astonishingly vulgar, and yet astonishingly cool.

In the course of a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times, California State Assembly speaker Karen Bass laments that her fellow Californians enjoy the right to vote, to speak, and to petition their government for the redress of grievances:

How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature's work?

The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: "You vote for revenue and your career is over." I don't know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it's about free speech, but it's extremely unfair.

What Bass, a Democrat, calls "terrorist threats" against her Republican colleagues is what most Americans call the exercise of First Amendment rights.  It's one of those outdated traditions in American politics that any drooling troglodyte can communicate his displeasure to elected representatives.

In fact, I understand that under federal and California law, Bass herself might be subject to "terrorist threats" from her own constituents, people like my friend Ezra, who enjoys the freedom to call her office and say, "You vote to cut spending on the Greater Los Angeles Area Pacific Islander Parade subsidy and county calligraphy budgets, and your career is over."

Now a charitable person, a very charitable person, might assume that Bass is referring only to talk radio hosts as "terrorists" here, and that she actually meant to make some incredibly inept argument for the return of the "fairness doctrine" in radio.  Unfortunately Republican talk radio hosts also enjoy the right to engage in terrorism as Bass defines it.  A less charitable person might say that Bass was referring to Republican voters, whom everyone knows are poorly educated and lack understanding of the importance of tax increases in an economic crisis, or something, and that …

No I'm stumped.  There's no way to be charitable to Bass, the elected speaker of the California assembly, who just called voters who dare to complain to their representatives terrorists.  Her statement positively drips with contempt for the rubes she was elected to serve.  If only she could lock them up…

Well, maybe she can.  Buried deeper in the interview is this fascinating tidbit.

I do think that some fundamental reforms need to take place. I would be concerned about a constitutional convention, only because, as I understand it, if you open that door up, all kinds of things can be put on the agenda, like [abortion rights]. While we're trying to solve this budget crisis, we are also figuring out how to launch reforms that would address some of it.

But why not hold a constitutional convention Ms. Bass?  Sure, it might open up the door to things you don't like, but you're the California Assembly speaker.  You're one of the most powerful people in the state.  I'm sure you can finesse it, and get a brand-spanking new constitution which finally allows you to lock up those terrorists who dare to complain to the State.

And it would work too, if only it weren't for that meddling United States constitution.

Via Patterico.

I've mentioned before that I have an unstable relationship with the shows my kids enjoy watching. As they have gotten older, I am forced to admit that some amuse me and are not entirely intolerable. Phineas and Ferb is clever and has big chunks of dialogue and visual gags aimed over the kids' heads. Plus I laugh at the imbecilic expression on Percy the Platypus' face whenever he is posing as a normal non-secret-agent pet. And whoever voices the evil Prof. Doofenshmirtz is brilliant. In a similar vein, the Jimmy Neutron cartoon has a lot of quite funny gags aimed at adults.

The rest remains execrable. I do not hit children. However, should I ever be digitized or otherwise consigned to the world of cartoons, I shall promptly seek out Caillou and slap him so hard that my handprint will show up on his driver's license photo. And the mewling treacle-peddlers that surround Miss Spider make me reach for a big magnifying glass. Plus, any time there's a commercial for any live-action tween shows on the Disney Channel, I long for the days of reform schools.

Mark Sanford might now be the second happiest person about Jackson's death. The military in Honduras overthrew the elected president, Manuel Zelaya early Sunday morning, the first coup in Central America in 16 years. And, did it show up as big news? It did not. The Chronicle buried it in the World section, the Times buried it even further. My nightly news last night ran a 30 second story. Much more important that we know more about the world of Michael Jackson. Heck, even the US Soccer team and their (admittedly extraordinary) run at the Confederations Cup was a bigger story than the coup.

Zelaya is a leftist who was elected on a populist bill and worked to improve life for the Honduran poor. He was part of Chavez's ALBA block, but one of the saner members. His great crime was a referendum on the Constitution (largely written by 80s cold warriors) to allow the public into the revision of a new Constitution. Of course, Chavez used the same sort of trick to put himself into perpetual power so some grains of salt would not be begrudged here. But still.. The Supreme Court of Honduras (decidedly unleftist..) has basically overthrown the government under the guise of "protecting the Constitution."

Interestingly, it looks like an old shady character Otto Reich, might have been at least tacitly involved in the coup. You may remember Reich (a former ambassador to Venezuela and Bush Administration Central America point man) for his ham handed handling of the abortive coup attempt in Venezuela a few years ago. Reich (and other characters like John Negroponte) have been using Honduras as a US base of power in Central America since the 80s, and have enjoyed a progression of pliant administrations that depended on IMF & World Bank funds to keep solvent. I won't go into the Imperialist strings that are attached to IMF funds right now, but suffice to say that most liberal thinkers decry the effects of the IMF & World Bank on the developing world.)

The good news is that President Obama (and pretty much the rest of the World) denounced the coup, and refused to recognize the new regime. President Zelaya even attended a summit of Central & Latin American leaders where he was recognized as the legal President. I was actually a little surprised that the Obama Administration spoke so quickly, given our usual stance in Central America. The bad news is that this significant event is getting next to no notice. I think it's safe to say there won't be a lot of follow up stories on Honduras in the coming days. After all, we have Billy May's funeral to cover!

We're accustomed to people justifying restrictions on our personal liberty on the grounds that they need to protect our personal morals, or the morals of society at large. We're even more hardened to politicians restricting our liberty on the pretext that they need to protect our physical health and safety. These justifications are questionable both in the abstract (perhaps the former more clearly than the latter) and often in application to particular facts.

Neither, though, is as pernicious or objectionable as the Orwellian argument that it is necessary to restrict personal liberty in order to protect personal liberty.

Continue Reading »

via Instapundit, Roger Pilon proclaims that "In its opinion today in Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court came down solidly for upholding the equal protection of the law."

That's a puzzling thing to say in view of the fact that SCOTUS decided the case on statutory grounds (as Kennedy's decision makes clear) and punts on the Equal Protection question (as Scalia laments in his concurrence).

Don't epitomize till you've read the dang file!

In a more perfect world, it would be shocking that the Transportation Security Administration detained a comic book artist based on art he was carrying with him.

Sable wrote of his experiences: "Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley's Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening'. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.

"The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.

But I can't honestly say it is shocking, because shock would imply that I am surprised as well as appalled. But it is not, in fact, even a little surprising. We already know that our ability to fly without harassment is governed by people completely incapable of understanding Magritte's 80-year-old simple point:

That is to say, a depiction of the thing is not the thing itself. Hence we tolerate being bullied by people who feel that Decepticon T-shirts and pendant-sized "gun" charms are threats to airline security.

Freaking out over a comic book is the same. The fact that a person is carrying a modern comic book does not mean that the person poses a threat of taking over the plane via anatomically improbable women, ennui, and derivative dystopian imagery.

To be blunt, this idiocy continues because we tolerate it. And by "we", I must explicitly include myself. I told this story before:

Several years ago I flew to Oakland in order to appear in court in Santa Rosa, where my client was involved in a regrettable misunderstanding resulting from the government’s hasty conclusion that he had improperly possessed a firearm of the sort characterized by some as a machinegun. On the way through security in catching my flight, I was pulled aside for a search — perhaps random, perhaps not. The TSA agent opened my brief bag and dropped my case binder on the table. It flopped open to a page showing a full-color photograph of the alleged machinegun.

The three TSA agents assisting with my search fell silent.

“This,” I thought, “has long day written all over it.”

I got lucky — my TSA agents grasped the distinction between a thing and a picture of a thing in no more than 15 minutes.

SueEasy, despite the name, is not a woman of loose morals.  No, Sue Easy is a legal affiliate marketing site to which a number of law firms that specialize in filing class actions subscribe.  A matchmaker, if you will, between people who may have suffered trivial damages not worthy of an individualized suit, and the lawyers who want to aggregate their claims into big contingent fee payouts.

Sue Easy promises potential plaintiffs that it will help them:

TAKE THE POWER BACK!

And further promises them:

INSTANT LEGAL BLISS!

Sue Easy desribes itself thus:

SueEasy is an online application where you can file your complaints in a variety of legal categories.

For attorneys, Sue Easy promises to help them connect to clients through the power of "social networking" sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

I've had a number of concerns about Sue Easy since I discovered it earlier this week.

First, its marketing is deceptive, at least to the potential plaintiffs if not attorneys.  Sue Easy is not an online application where you can "file" "complaints" in a variety of "legal" categories.  These terms have very specific meanings.  "Filing" of a "complaint" means the the act of submitting a lawsuit to the clerk of a court, which brings the lawsuit into existence.  Any attorney knows that, but many laypeople do not.  A layman registering with Sue Easy may be lulled into believing that by typing his grief into a chatbox, he has "filed a complaint," meaning that he has sued the parties who caused his misfortune, when nothing could be further from the truth.  The only "online applications" that allow "filing of complaints," in the real sense, are federal PACER and similar state electronic filing systems.

Does that sound far-fetched?  Surely no one could be so stupid as to believe that by registering with Sue Easy, he has filed a lawsuit?

Well, consider that actual class actions have been filed on behalf of people so stupid as to claim that they did not know that "Crunchberries" aren't real fruit, and on behalf of people so stupid that they needed a written warning to know that setting headphone volume too high can impair hearing.  In other words, people who lack common sense.  In the case of Sue Easy, someone is making promises about legal matters, which all lawyers know are entirely outside the realm of common sense.  You need specialized training to think like a lawyer.

If I were the sort of person who files plaintiff class actions, I'd be looking at Sue Easy as a big, fat target.

Second, and this is for the lawyers, consider what Sue Easy means when it says it will help you to find clients through "social networking."

On Wednesday, after I had learned of Sue Easy's existence, I posted this update on the Popehat twitter account.

Received class action lawsuit settlment notice re Google books. Odd as I'm not a class member.

I actually didn't receive a settlment [sic] notice concerning the Google books class action at all.  I wrote that because I was curious as to how long it would take for Sue Easy to send me a message about all of the benefits of joining its network.  I predicted it wouldn't take long.

And sure enough, within 48 hours I received this unsolicited message from Sue Easy:

@Popehat Internet's Largest Class Action Database – Search, Join or Start your own Class Action. Protect your rights http://SueEasy.com

In other words, Sue Easy's sophisticated "social networking" strategy is the same old thing.  Sue Easy is a spammer.  I don't know whether a "bot" searched Twitter for my planted message containing the words "class action" or a hired monkey at a keyboard did it, but I didn't ask for Sue Easy's opinion about my good fortune in settling the Google books class action, and I didn't want it.

Moreover, even in 140 characters, Sue Easy's spam is deceptive.  While I actually could "start my own class action" (subject to certification and oversight from a court), most of Sue Easy's marks couldn't "start" their own class actions if their lives depended on it, and would be engaged in the unauthorized practice of law if they tried.

They certainly couldn't do it by registering on a website.

Sue Easy's site claims that an awful lot of legal firms, some quite prominent, are members.  These firms, apparently, have licensed Sue Easy to use their names and distinctive logos for its advertising.  These firms, apparently, are proud to be associated with a spammer engaged in arguably deceptive marketing practices.

For instance, prominent Los Angeles plaintiffs' firm Wasserman Comden and Casselman's name and logo are listed on the Sue Easy site.  Did an attorney from Wasserman Comden review and approve of Sue Easy's promise that I can "start" and "file" my own class action through a web page?  Did an attorney from Wasserman Comden review and approve of Sue Easy's "social networking" strategy, which involves bothering me with unsolicited junk spam through Twitter?

They must have.  They've given Sue Easy their name and logo.  As better lawyers than I have observed, when a law firm outsources its marketing, it outsources its good name, and its ethics.

It was because properly trained pigeons can distinguish good art from bad art.

To do this, adult human observers first classified several children’s paintings as either “good” (beautiful) or “bad” (ugly). Using operant conditioning procedures, pigeons were then reinforced for pecking at “good” paintings. After the pigeons learned the discrimination task, they were presented with novel pictures of both “good” and “bad” children’s paintings to test whether they had successfully learned to discriminate between these two stimulus categories. The results showed that pigeons could discriminate novel “good” and “bad” paintings.

For the love of God, don't let them watch prime time TV.

Via BoingBoing.