A Santa Claus at the KaDeWe department store in Berlin posed in front of a colorful Christmas tree Wednesday. (Michael Gottschalk/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images).A nice reminder that there's more than one possible outfit.
"An unhappy donkey has tape stuck to its coat in an attempt to transform it into a zebra. Due to Israeli blockades on the Gaza Strip, it has become impossible for a Palestinian zoo to import wild animals. So after the last two zebras died, the owner of the Marah Land Zoo painted and taped two donkeys into zebra lookalikes. The unfortunate creatures have become symbols of the blockade. It would cost over $40,000 (€26,600) to smuggle a genuine zebra from Africa, via Egypt, through secret tunnels built under the blockaded border. Whereas, the zookeeper told the Chinese Xinhua news agency, the donkeys only cost $700 (€470) each. Plus paint and masking tape, of course."Text and photo from Der Spiegel. The masking tape is of course a temporary measure for the coloration process. The final product is shown below in a photo from the Huffington Post.
With Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it’s not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.More at Counterpunch.
There’s another frightening parallel: Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who accomplished perhaps his single biggest legislative “triumph” – NAFTA – thanks to an alliance with Republicans that overcame strong Democratic and grassroots opposition...
To get a majority today in Congress on Afghanistan, the Obama White House is apparently bent on a strategy replicating the tragic farce that Clinton pulled off: Ignore the informed doubts of your own party while making common cause with extremist Republicans who never accepted your presidency in the first place...
For those who elected Obama, it’s important to remember the downward spiral that was accelerated by Clinton’s GOP alliance to pass NAFTA. It should set off alarm bells for us today on Afghanistan.
NAFTA was quickly followed by the debacle of Clinton healthcare “reform” largely drafted by giant insurance companies, which was followed by a stunning election defeat for Congressional Democrats in November 1994, as progressive and labor activists were lethargic while rightwing activists in overdrive put Gingrich into the Speaker’s chair...
Today, it’s crucial to ask where Obama is heading. From the stimulus to healthcare, he’s shown a Clinton-like willingness to roll over progressives in Congress on his way to corrupt legislation and frantic efforts to compromise for the votes of corporate Democrats or “moderate” Republicans. Meanwhile, the incredible shrinking “public option” has become a sick joke.
As he glides from retreats on civil liberties to health reform that appeases corporate interests to his Bush-like pledge this week to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, an Obama reliance on Congressional Republicans to fund his troop escalation could be the final straw in disorienting and demobilizing the progressive activists who elected him a year ago...
Throughout the centuries, no foreign power has been able to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, but President Obama thinks he’s a tough enough Commander-in-Chief to do it...
When you start in the center (on, say, healthcare or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease rightwing politicians or lobbyists or Generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.
It’s been a gradual descent from the elation and hope for real change many Americans felt on election night, November 2008...
Japanese marine researchers have found and successfully filmed the young fish at a depth of 528ft in Manado Bay off Sulawesi Island, Indonesia.
Video footage shows the 12.6-inch coelacanth, coloured blue with white spots, swimming slowly among rocks on the seabed for about 20 minutes.
A similar-sized juvenile was once discovered in the belly of a pregnant coelacanth. It is believed that their eggs hatch inside the female and the young fish are fully formed at the time of birth.
Coelacanths are commonly regarded as having evolved little from prehistoric times and were thought to be extinct until a living specimen was discovered in 1938 off the coast of southern Africa.
Found at the Daily Mail. Here are links for the Association for the Preservation of the Coelacanth and for the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme.
According to Straube, "minon" is a 17th-century variation of the word "minion" and has numerous meanings, including "servant," "follower," "comrade," "companion," "favorite," or someone dependent on a patron's favor. A minion is also a type of cannon—and archaeologists have found shot at the James Fort site that's the right size for a minion.Above that phrase are the letters and numbers "EL NEV FSH HTLBMS 508" interspersed with symbols that have yet to be interpreted.
The images on the tablet are difficult to see, because they are the same dark gray color as the slate (presumably enhanced in the photo embedded above), and they overlap. The colonists would have written on the tablet with a small, rectangular pencil made of slate with a sharp point. This would have made a white mark—and fortunately for archaeologists today, it also left a scratch...That report was written up in National Geographic in June. I've not seen any followup report as to the interpretation of the unusual phrase.
He hopes eventually to sort out the sequence of the images with the help of NASA, where scientists at the Langley Research Center are using a high-precision, three-dimensional imaging system similar to a CT scanner to help isolate the layers and provide a detailed analysis of the tablet.
In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter.I don't quite understand the science (which is further explained at Astronomy Picture of the Day); blogged primarily because of the beauty of the image. Click photo to enlarge.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin's seminal work, On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection. It is therefore fitting that the American Museum of Natural History has just unveiled Wallace's cabinet, which is now on display in the museum's Grand Gallery. It's a stunning piece, made of fine-crafted rosewood. The exterior, however, is no match for the interior. Nearly two thousand sorted and labeled beetles, moths and plants fill its drawers.I've included a photo of a sample drawer of moths. Other photos at the link show drawers of butterflies, beetles, shells, and seeds.
