Photo credit AP, via The Telegraph's Pictures of the Day.
21 April 2011
Rose petal-covered road in Pakistan
Photo credit AP, via The Telegraph's Pictures of the Day.
"Teacup dogs"
Found while writing that post about white tigers, but I didn't want to blog too many depressing things in one day. I had not heard of these dogs before (though our household does have one tiny "runt" cat.
p.s. - if you Google teacup puppies for sale, you get over a half-million hits...
The word "Teacup" has been used to merely describe the size of a puppy, meaning it is very small and will probably be under the standard size which is 4 to 7 pounds for the Toy Group, Yorkshire Terrier breed. We cannot imagine anyone wanting anything smaller than that! Their bones are VERY fragile and can be broken by jumping off of a couch, falling off of a bed, being stepped on or worse.More information at Bark Rescue.
Many breeders, while tacking a whooping price on a puppy, "claim" to breed so called "teacups" as if they were a breed all their own. Don't be fooled! They are NOT a breed of their own. If a breeder says they specialize in "teacups" RUN, RUN, RUN for the hills! Most "TEACUP" puppies are in reality, a premature puppy.
Most females are bred on the ninth through the fifteenth day of their heat cycles. Eggs can be fertilized for up to 72 hours after any of these breedings. Therefore, it is possible to have puppies conceived up to a week or so younger than the puppies first conceived in a litter. However, when the first puppies conceived are mature and ready to be born, labor starts and all the puppies will be born, no matter when they were fertilized.
Some of the problems that may be encountered are both genetic and congenital in these tiny babies and the list is a long one...
There is no such thing as a "tea cup" Yorkshire Terrier, Maltese, Poodle, or any other breed for that matter. They simply do not exist. "Tea-cup" is just a marketing ploy given by unethical and unscrupulous breeders to drive up the price of their puppies!
So called "Teacups" fetch anything from $1000 to $10,000! This is ridiculous and shameful! There are a lot of chronically, unhealthy puppies because unscrupulous breeders and puppy mills are inbreeding... They take the little teeny, tiny Yorkies and they breed 2 1/2 pounders with 3 pounders ... well, they’re playing with genetics. You should NEVER breed a female of any breed less than 5 pounds.
PLEASE educate yourselves before buying a tiny puppy whether it is a Yorkie or any other breed. You could be in for months or years of heartbreak not to mention staggering veterinarian bills!
p.s. - if you Google teacup puppies for sale, you get over a half-million hits...
Japanese tsunami debris heading toward the United States
The image above shows the calculated distribution of debris two years from now; a series of six images are at Good's environmental blog. The International Pacific Research Center offers a nice animation of the process.
What might be in the debris? How about strongboxes full of money?
Safes are washing up along the tsunami-battered coast, and police are trying to find their owners — a unique problem in a country where many people, especially the elderly, still stash their cash at home. By one estimate, some $350 billion worth of yen doesn’t circulate...
As workers and residents pick through the wreckage, they are increasingly stumbling upon cash and locked safes... Goto couldn’t specify how many safes his department has collected so far, saying only that there were “several hundreds” with more coming in every day.
World military expenditure, 2010
Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, via The Dish.
World military expenditure is estimated to have been $1630 billion in 2010, an increase of 1.3 per cent in real terms. This represents the slowest annual rate of increase since the surge in global military expenditure that began after 2001. Between 2001 and 2009, the annual increase averaged 5.1 per cent in real terms.
The increase in 2010 is almost entirely down to the United States, which accounted for $19.6 billion of the $20.6 billion real-terms increase. Excluding the USA, the total in the ‘rest of the world’ barely changed in 2010, increasing by a statistically insignificant 0.1 per cent...
Even in the face of efforts to bring down the soaring US budget deficit, military spending continues to receive privileged treatment. President Obama’s FY2012 budget announced a 5-year freeze on non-security-related discretionary expenditure, but military spending, along with other security spending such as intelligence and Homeland Security is exempt.
Reptile trafficking
Acting on a tip-off, police intercepted the bus in a northern province bound for Buenos Aires... "A passenger came onboard with 40 snakes, plus what he had in the boxes" in the bus luggage hold, said ranger Daniel Chersich, warden of Santa Fe province... The trafficker had loaded them with 444 boas, vipers and other snakes; 186 endangered tortoises; 40 lizards, and an armadillo. The smuggler, who was arrested, boarded the bus in Santiago del Estero, where he had spent three months trapping various species in the bush with the intent of selling them.Source, via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.
Skyscrapers reach above the clouds
"Spillionaires"
The BP well blowout in the Gulf has drifted off the front pages of national media coverage. This past week the Washington Post featured an article explaining how people are getting quite rich as a result of the spill and the subsequent cleanup efforts.
To show how the money flowed, ProPublica* interviewed people who worked on the spill and examined records for St. Bernard Parish, a coastal community about five miles southeast of downtown New Orleans.*ProPublica is a non-profit corporation based in New York City. It describes itself as an independent non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. In 2010 it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Those documents show that companies with ties to parish insiders got lucrative contracts and then charged BP for every possible expense. The prime cleanup company submitted bills with little or no documentation. A subcontractor billed BP $15,400 per month to rent a generator that usually cost $1,500 a month. Another company charged BP more than a $1 million a month for land it had been renting for less than $1,700 a month....
The economic benefits rippled throughout the gulf. In the six months after the spill, sales tax receipts, a key measure of economic activity, rose significantly in eight of the 24 most affected communities from Louisiana to Florida. In only one community, in Mississippi, did receipts dip significantly.
Sales tax collections from Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish rose more than 71 percent. And St. Bernard had a bigger jump than anywhere. That parish collected almost $26.8 million in sales and lodging tax receipts in the six months after the spill, almost twice as much as over the same period in 2009. Flush with cash from cleanup and claims, many fishermen bought new boats and trucks. Sales at the nearest Chevrolet dealer rose 41 percent...
The $20 billion compensation fund that BP and the federal government set up in August would run for three years, pay people who could prove damages from the spill and in theory avoid costly court battles... The system didn’t differentiate between fishermen who got cleanup jobs with BP and those who didn’t. The amount people received for their initial six-month emergency claims was based on the paperwork they submitted, not their actual losses.
One man who earned $67,000 in 2009, fishing crabs and hunting a swamp rat called nutria, got $100,000 for his six-month claim. That was on top of $90,000 for working on the cleanup and $20,000 he received in initial BP claims. In the eight months after the spill, he made $210,000, more than three times his 2009 income...
Felesia Carter, a manager at St. Bernard’s only off-track betting parlor, said customers were gambling away claims money. Her business was so good, she said, that employees worked overtime.
Hypertrichosis
Photo credit: Bronek Kaminski/Barcroft Media.
20 April 2011
"Cowboys and Aliens" teaser trailer - updated
Based on a graphic novel from Platinum Studios -- the publisher of the original "Men in Black" comic -- the title is so straightforward one might assume that it's a joke. But as the just-released trailer shows, this movie isn't playing the concept for laughs. It has some seriously big names behind the camera, including director Jon Favreau ("Iron Man"), producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and executive producer Steven Spielberg. And it has two of the toughest leading men of their generations -- Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig -- in the starring roles...Looks interesting. For more information, see the article at Yahoo!
Addendum: I posted the above over a year ago. Now the studio has come out with the official trailer. It's slightly different:
Why do liberals keep going to war ?
An article at AlterNet discusses the "slippery slope of humane intervention" -
Liberal hawks never seem to learn that you can't get healthcare, decent schools and less unemployment by bombing smaller nations. Military adventures trump domestic rehab every time. We Americans have a very long history – going back to Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba and Woodrow Wilson in the first world war – of progressives going to war for the best, most irreproachable, humane, idealistic reasons, whether that meant saving Belgian babies from fiendish Hun bayonets or rescuing Benghazi civilians today.
It's extraordinary to watch progressives like NBC's Rachel Maddow, the New Republic's John Judis, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, Juan Cole and many others cheerlead the "Obama doctrine" of humane intervention – that is, meddling militarily at "low cost", usually ending in disaster for all concerned. Such liberal war hawks have serious records of fighting for good domestic causes. But what a disconnect!...
We are no longer an infinitely rich country. Our bridges, dams, pipelines and roads are falling apart. Our people are on food stamps and can't find work. Spilling our money on the desert renders it positively reasonable to cut, slash and degrade – that useful military euphemism – help for the poor and middle class...
The arithmetic is brutal. Each Tomahawk cruise missile fired from a sub, ship or land costs roughly $1m, and we've probably shot over 200 of them onto Libya... The Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Libyan operation costs the US between $100m and $300m per week, so we're heading toward the $1bn mark even if, as advertised, we pull back marginally....
The iPhone tracks all of your movements
Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.More information at the Guardian source.
The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program.
For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010...
"Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and couldn't find any," said Warden. "We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this."..
The fact that [the file] is transferred across [to a new iPhone or iPad] when you migrate is evidence that the data-gathering isn't accidental." But they said it does not seem to be transmitted to Apple itself...
The iPhone system, by contrast, appears to record the data whether or not the user agrees. Apple declined to comment on why the file is created or whether it can be disabled...
Apple can legitimately claim that it has permission to collect the data: near the end of the 15,200-word terms and conditions for its iTunes program, used to synchronise with iPhones, iPods and iPads, is an 86-word paragraph about "location-based services".
Paul Ryan and Medicare
Excerpts from a July 2010 article in Wisconsin Interest:
One day as a 16 year old, Ryan came upon the lifeless body of his father. Paul Ryan, Sr. had died of a heart attack at age 55, leaving the Janesville Craig High School 10th grader, his three older brothers and sisters and his mother alone. It was Paul who told the family of his father’s death.
With his father’s passing, young Paul collected Social Security benefits until age 18, which he put away for college. To make ends meet, Paul’s mother returned to school to study interior design. His siblings were off at college. Ryan remembers this difficult time bringing him and his mother closer.
Within months, Paul’s maternal grandmother moved into the house. She suffered from Alzheimer’s, and it often fell on young Paul to care for her, including brushing and braiding her hair. Ryan credits his father’s death and the care of his grandmother as giving him first-hand experience as to how social service programs work...
Ryan’s critics have been hammering at a provision of his Roadmap that would fundamentally alter Medicare by injecting market forces into the program. Ryan would provide individuals under the age of 55 with a voucher worth $11,000 per year when fully phased in. The voucher would then be indexed to inflation and be increased for those with lower incomes.
White House budget director Peter Orszag, while acknowledging Ryan’s plan would address the nation’s long-term fiscal problem, argues that health care costs will rise faster than the value of the voucher. Saying Ryan’s plan only saves money by “shifting a lot of the risk and expected cost onto individuals and their families,” Orszag believes too many policymakers—Republicans as well as Democrats--will find that solution objectionable.
Ryan calls this the most “fair and accurate” criticism of his plan, but says that it’s impossible to keep funding health care expenditures at the current rate of increase. He says the Obama plan deals with the problem by rationing care. “My plan gives individuals control to put market pressure on providers to compete,” he says.
Ancient gazelle "killing zones" documented in Syria
It was slaughter on a huge scale. Hundreds of migrating gazelles would be funnelled into enclosures where they could be butchered en masse.More information at the link. I also found additional photos and descriptions of the structures here and here. The "technology" is quite reminiscent of the North American "buffalo jumps" (see also here), which I've bookmarked for future blogging, and of the ancient fishing weirs found worldwide.
It has long been suspected that the enigmatic stone structures that dot the Syrian landscape were involved in harvesting gazelles. Built perhaps as far back as 10,000 years ago, these structures display converging pairs of low stone walls.
When British air force pilots first flew over them in the early 20th Century, they dubbed them "desert kites" because of their characteristic appearance from the air...
Drs Bar-Oz, Melinda Zeder and Frank Hole describe in PNAS the discovery of a large deposit of gazelle bones at the site of Tell Kuran, near the town of Hasseke in the Khabur Basin. This killing pit is very close to a number of desert kites and contains thousands of gazelle parts. "It is manifest that these remains are from a catastrophic hunting episode - a full herd was killed," said Dr Bar-Oz...
Whereas the limited activities of ancient hunter-gatherer societies may even have nurtured herds, preventing them from getting too big and damaging the landscape, this systematic removal of whole breeding groups would have rapidly reduced gazelle numbers in the Khabur Basin.
And with kites spread right across the Near East, with large arrays in Jordan in particular, the impact on what was once an abundant wild ungulate must have been profound.
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