Quote of the Day in Consideration of Our Current World Actions

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

...all in the name of fighting Al Qaeda...

“ . . . what is far more fundamental is the defining American precept that a strong nation affirms its core principles most vigorously precisely when it faces external threats. We are a strong nation because we have adhered to the rule of law and our founding principles even as we defeated enemies far more formidable and threatening than a ragtag group of Islamic fanatics. Of all the radical changes which this Administration is attempting to bring about, the most threatening and corrupt is the notion that we need to fundamentally transform not just our system of government, but also our national character, all in the name of fighting Al Qaeda.”

Read the rest here: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/02/erasing-cold-war-from-history.html

Courtesy of my wonderful hubby...thanks, babe.

Cheney's Bad Day

Too much has been made of the Cheney story. But his statement to Brit Hume that Saturday was one of the worst days in his life--which he said with real feeling--is disturbing. Cheney has never made a similar statement about the war in Iraq, which he helped bring about. Did he not have sleepless nights after advising President Bush to go to war?

Perhaps he did and he has chosen not to talk about it on the assumption that it would be unmanly or a sign of weakness. But I suspect he did not have sleepless nights over Iraq. Like many policymakers he probably has trouble imagining the impact of his policies on real human beings. He has to physically pull the trigger on a gun and see someone fall for him to feel that he is responsible for an injury...

Rick Shenkman
POTUS from History News Network

Tuesday's sweet Valentine story

Couples really do look like each other:

Researchers set out to investigate why couples often tend to resemble one another. They asked 11 male and 11 female participants to judge the age, attractiveness and personality traits of 160 real-life married couples. Photographs of husbands and wives were viewed separately, so the participants didn't know who was married to whom.

The test participants rated men and woman who were actual couples as looking alike and having similar personalities. Also, the longer the couples had been together, the greater the perceived similarities.

The article attributes the similarity to similar experiences, facial expressions, and testosterone.
OK, that's not so romantic. Personally, I think it's 50 percent assortative mating, and 50 percent fat.

Posted at 14:16 on 02/14/2006 permanent link

does this mean I look like Art in drag??!!! Not good!

Cheney's idea of a sporting chance...

courtesy of Wilson's Almanac

Cheney's Canned Kill, and Other Hunting Excesses of the Bush Administration

Vice President Dick Cheney went pheasant shooting in Pennsylvania in December 2003, but unlike most of his fellow hunters across America, he didn't have to spend hours or even days tramping the fields and hedgerows in hopes of bagging a brace of birds for the dinner table.
Upon his arrival at the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets for the benefit of him and his party. In a blaze of gunfire, the group—which included legendary Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), along with major fundraisers for Republican candidates—killed at least 417 of the birds.

According to one gamekeeper who spoke to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cheney was credited with shooting more than 70 of the pen-reared fowl.
After lunch, the group shot flocks of mallard ducks, also reared in pens and shot like so many live skeet. There's been no report on the number of mallards the hunting party killed, but it's likely that hundreds fell.

Rolling Rock is an exclusive private club for the wealthy with a world-class golf course and a closed membership list. It is also a "canned hunting" operation—a place where fee-paying hunters blast away at released animals, whether birds or mammals, who often have no reasonable chance to escape. Most are "no kill, no pay" operations where patrons only shells out funds for the animals they kill.

Bird-shooting operations offer pheasants, quail, partridges, and mallard ducks, often dizzying the birds and planting them in front of hunters or tossing them from towers toward waiting shotguns. There are, perhaps, more than 3,000 such operations in the United States, according to outdoor writer Ted Williams.

For canned hunts involving mammals, hunters can shoot animals native to given continents—everything from Addax to Zebra—within the confines of a fenced area, assuring the animals have no opportunity to escape. Time magazine estimates that 2,000 facilities offer native or exotic mammals for shooting within fenced enclosures.

The HSUS worked hard to expose Cheney's shooting spree, and we were fortunate in persuading The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and other media outlets to cover the events of that day and our subsequent criticism.

Our criticism is simple to understand: Farm-raised pheasants are about as wary as urban pigeons and shooting them is nothing more than live target practice, especially when they are released from a hill in front of 10 gunners hidden below in blinds—as Cheney and his party were. Such hunting makes a mockery of basic principles of fair play and humane treatment, and the vice president should not associate himself with such conduct.

The private excesses of Cheney are bad enough, and worthy of The HSUS's rebuke. But it's the public policy excesses that are of even greater concern to me. Cheney's hunting trip strikes me as emblematic of the Bush Administration's callousness towards the earth's animals.

The administration's most outrageous proposal is its plan to allow trophy hunters to shoot endangered species in other countries and import the trophies and hides into the United States. The administration first floated the proposal a few months ago, with formal proposals subsequently published in the Federal Register, and President Bush is expected to make a final decision soon on the plan, which originated with his U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

For 30 years, the Endangered Species Act has provided critical protections for species near extinction in the United States. The act also protects species in foreign nations, by barring pet traders, circuses, trophy hunters, and others from importing live or dead endangered species. While we can't prevent the shooting or capture of endangered species overseas, we can prevent imports—thus eliminating the incentive for American hunters and others to shoot or trap the animals in the first place.

But with this plan the administration is seeking to punch gaping holes in the prohibitions, under the assumption that generating revenue through the sale of hunting licenses will aid on-the-ground conservation in foreign lands.
The plan is transparent on its face. It's not aimed to help species, but to aid special interests who want to profit from the exploitation of wildlife. No group is more centrally involved in this miserable plan than Safari Club International, the world's leading trophy hunting organization and an entity with close ties to the Bush Administration.

The 40,000 member organization of rich trophy collectors has doled out close to $600,000 in campaign contributions among GOP candidates in the past six years. President Bush appointed a former top lobbyist of the Safari Club to be the deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—again, the very agency promoting the plan to allow the selling off of endangered species to private interests.

The HSUS is not a pro-hunting organization. That said, we view certain types of hunting as worse than others. It crosses any reasonable line to support the shooting of some of the rarest and most endangered animals in the world. And it is beyond the pale to advocate for or participate in the shooting of animals in canned hunts—for birds or mammals.

President Bush met with leaders of 19 hunting organizations on December 12. While we expect him to endorse certain forms of hunting, he should in no way countenance the shooting of endangered species or the hunting of captive or pen-reared animals. If that's where these hunting groups want to lead him, he needs to resist their entreaties. He needs to stand up to these special interest groups and draw a bright line between certain types of hunting conduct.

Americans don't support this nonsense, and the president shouldn't either.

from an HSUS article
By Wayne Pacelle

New species found in Papua 'Eden'

The research group - from the US, Indonesia and Australia - trekked through an area in the mist-shrouded Foja Mountains, located just north of the vast Mamberamo Basin of north-western (Indonesian) New Guinea.
The team gathered the first photographic record of the Berlepsch's six-wired "lost" bird of paradise (Image: Bruce Beehler)

The researchers spent nearly a month in the locality, detailing the wildlife and plantlife from the lower hills to near the summit of the Foja range, which reaches more than 2,000m in elevation.

"It's beautiful, untouched, unpopulated forest; there's no evidence of human impact or presence up in these mountains," Dr Beehler told the BBC News website.

One of the team's most remarkable discoveries was a honeyeater bird with a bright orange patch on its face - the first new bird species to be sighted on the island of New Guinea in more than 60 years.

The researchers also solved a major ornithological mystery - the location of the homeland of Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise.

First described in the late 19th century through specimens collected by indigenous hunters from an unknown location on New Guinea, the species had been the focus of several subsequent expeditions that failed to find it.

On only the second day of the team's expedition, the amazed scientists watched as a male Berlepsch's bird of paradise performed a mating dance for an attending female in the field camp.
It was the first time a live male of the species had been observed by Western scientists, and proved that the Foja Mountains was the species' true home.

"This bird had been filed away and forgotten; it had been lost. To rediscover it was, for me, in some ways, more exciting than finding the honeyeater. I spent 20 years working on birds of paradise; they're pretty darn sexy beasts," Dr Beehler enthused.

The team also recorded a golden-mantled tree kangaroo, which was previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction.

Some of the creatures the scientists came into contact with were remarkably unafraid of humans. Long-beaked echidnas, primitive egg-laying mammals, were happy to be picked up. (Image: Stephen Richards)

from a BBC News article