A pair of gay penguins thrown out of their zoo colony for repeatedly stealing eggs have been given some of their own to look after following a protest by animal rights groups.
Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.
But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn’t fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance
Below is a piece that I posted on Huffingtonpost.com yesterday. About ten minutes after it went on line, the metropolitan editor of the New York Post emailed me about running it and it’s on page four in Saturday’s paper. The piece has reacted in a full range of opinion, from overwhelmingly positive to outrage. I’m trying to understand why some people are so upset. And as soon as I have a full grasp on this I’m going to publish again at Huffingtonpost.com and put it in my personal blog as well. (Thanks to Randy Marks)
via THE WAGES OF WEALTH.
One of the effects of the concentration on the lives of celebrities, who are often people of little obvious merit or achievement, is that it transforms ambition into daydreams. Constantly comparing your own life with the fairy-tale life of celebrities means that small but achievable ambitions appear trivial and meaningless; but actually civilization is maintained not only by major achievements and talents, but by the striving of millions of ordinary people. This is undermined, I believe, by celebrity culture
1. 1/3 of the total weight of all life in Monterey Bay is from gelatinous animals.
2. 3 minutes after a person is stung by a deadly box jellyfish, s/he may be dead.
3. 8 years after fast-reproducing comb jellies invaded in the Black Sea, they dominated it.
4. 20 to 40 people are killed annually from box jellyfish stings in the Philippines alone.
5. 100 foot-long tentacles may dangle from the Lion’s Mane Jelly.
6. 400 vast Dead Zones in world oceans are too polluted for almost all life except jellyfish.
7. 1,000+ fist-sized comb jellies filled each cubic meter of water in Black Sea jelly blooms.
8. 45,000 eggs may be released daily by a single jellyfish.
9. 500,000 people are stung by jellyfish in the Chesapeake Bay annually.
10. 500 million refrigerator-sized jellyfish float into the Sea of Japan daily during blooms.
via NSF – Jellyfish Gone Wild. Click on the Flash version for pictures
There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight.
What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments.
via Joseph E. Stiglitz on capitalist fools: About Us: vanityfair.com.
He is too busy to read much. “I’m embarrassed to say that since college” — Favreau graduated from Holy Cross in 2003 — “I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read back in the day.” As for speechcraft, while he says the speeches of Bobby Kennedy are his favorites, he also says Peggy Noonan is his all-time favorite speechwriter. He cites Ronald Reagan’s Pointe du Hoc speech marking the fortieth anniversary of D-day as his favorite of hers,
via Barack Obama’s Speech Writer – Jon Favreau Writes Speeches for Obama – Esquire
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Neither the incoming Obama administration, nor top planners in Beijing, will quickly forget the harsh lessons about reducing energy dependence taught in the last two years, even if prices now settle much lower.
China’s decision to raise fuel taxes will increase Saudi Arabia’s determination to stabilize prices at a much lower level than most other members of the organization are comfortable with, to try to limit the long-term damage to oil demand.
The kingdom’s worst fears about the long-term damage wrought by high and volatile prices are now being realized.
via In China, OPEC’s nightmare comes true: John Kemp | Reuters.