In Barrett’s e-mail, which was posted on a Boston television station’s Web site, he declared that if he had “been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”

Barrett used the “jungle monkey” phrase four times, three times referring to Gates and once referring to Abraham’s writing as “jungle monkey gibberish.”

He also declared that he was “not a racist but I am prejudice [sic] towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they say is freedom but it is merely attention because you do not get enough of it in your little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers.”

The guy should be excused for the sheer poetry of it: “little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers”… brilliant!

Consider the following scenario: You want to buy a house with a big kitchen and a big yard, but there are only two homes on the market–one with a big kitchen and a small yard and the other with a small kitchen and a big yard. Studies show you’d be about 50% likely to choose either house–and either one would be a rational choice. But now, a new home comes on the market, this one with a large kitchen and no yard. This time, studies show, you’ll make an irrational decision: Even though nothing has changed with the first two houses, you’ll now favor the house with the big kitchen and small yard over the one with the small kitchen and big yard. Overall, scientists have found, people and other animals will often change their original preferences when presented with a third choice.

Not so with ants.

Click on link for the rest of the fascinating experiment.

This is a collection of news/analysis clips that includes recordings from the 911 and dispatch calls. Of note:

1. The officer did not have cause to enter the house based on the 911 call.
2. The account of the 911 caller differs from the report filed by the officer Crowley.

From the voiceover: the officer is cleared of wrong-doing. Sure.

An Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper was suspended Wednesday for five days without pay following a highly publicized scuffle with a paramedic in Okfuskee County in May, according to the Highway Patrol.

The incident, which was caught on dash-camera and cell-phone video, showed Trooper Daniel Martin pulling over a Creek Nation ambulance for a traffic-stop violation. During the incident, Martin is heard repeatedly using profanity and twice getting into a scuffle with one of the paramedics.

Both paramedics and family members of the patient in the ambulance informed Martin several times by there was a patient inside, but he did not allow the paramedics to continue to the hospital while the video continued.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrested. Seriously, Cambridge?

Preeminent scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who holds one of 20 elite professorship at Harvard University and has hosted several PBS television programs was arrested in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday at his home. According to an Associated Press report, police responded to a call about “two black males”:

Cambridge police say they responded to the well-maintained two-story home after a woman reported seeing “two black males with backpacks on the porch,” with one “wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry.”

By the time police arrived, Gates — the 58-year-old director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and one of the “two black males” — was inside the house, which he leases from Harvard. He’d just returned from a trip to China, had found the front door jammed and entered through the rear. The police report says that he initially declined to come outside and show an officer his identification, allegedly saying, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?”