Archive for monkeys
Clown-Jazeera. More guns and bad news.
We the Scary Arab Clowns admit to taking some satisfaction in being right, but the misery that you and your people are going through bring us no joy. With that being said, we wish you peace and equality with the rest of the third world.
U.S. unemployment will approach 10 percent as the country endures its worst recession since World War Two, leaving more than 13 million Americans jobless, according to a Reuters poll of economists.
We admit to joy that there are less billionaires than there were before.
The financial crisis is taking its toll on the world’s richest people, wiping 332 names off Forbes magazine’s “rich list” of world billionaires.
Just 793 people can now lay claim to a place on the list, but on average they have lost 23% of their wealth.
Sadly, the wealthy feel this crisis the least:
Nearly 291,000 properties in the U.S. got a foreclosure filing in February, the third highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began tracking the data in January 2005.
Hawaii had 537 foreclosure filings in February, up 59.3 percent from January and up 275.5 percent from February 2008. There were 337 foreclosure filings in January and 143 foreclosures in February 2008.
And the poor and desperate will continue to murder each other in increasing numbers:
Police in Texas say a man shot and wounded his estranged girlfriend and then killed her mother and her son before killing himself in a home in a Fort Worth suburb.
Police say the shooter was found dead of a gunshot wound inside a home in North Richland Hills on Tuesday night.
and not just in the USA
A 17-year-old in black combat gear killed 15 people in southwest Germany on Wednesday in a shooting spree that started at his former school.
But there is good news too: Monkeys in Thailand have learned how to floss and are teaching their offspring, so when we humans disappear, the next species will have good dental hygiene.
TOKYO (AFP) – Thai monkeys have been observed showing their young how to floss — proof primates teach offspring to use tools, a Japanese researcher said Wednesday.
“I was surprised because teaching techniques on using tools properly to a third party are said to be an activity carried out only by humans,” Professor Nobuo Masataka of Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute told AFP.
His research team observed seven female long-tailed macaques and their offspring and monitored how often the mothers cleaned the spaces between their teeth with strands of human hair, in a colony of 250 animals near Bangkok.
The study found that the frequency of teeth-cleaning roughly doubled and became more elaborate when the infant monkeys were watching, suggesting that the females were deliberately teaching their young how to floss, he said.
“The study is still at the hypothesis stage,” Masataka cautioned. “We would like to shift our focus to the baby monkeys to check whether the mothers’ actions are effectively helping them learn how to clean their teeth.”
Popularity: 1% [?]
The Obama Emergency, Got Guru?, Feces throwing primates, and Galileo was a crook.
I’ve hijacked a wifi connection at the Chelsea Int’l Hostel and so I’m going to use it for all it’s worth. Here are a few of the stories I find interesting today.
Apparently, Bush considers the Obama Inauguration an emergency Altruism? Maybe yes, maybe no. I won’t be here to find out.
Bush said that an emergency exists and ordered federal aid to supplement the $15 million in federal funds already appropriated for the event.
Boing Boing today has a list of ‘folk theories’ that allow people to be roped into guru cults:
• The folk theory of everything being connected
• The folk theory of ancient wisdom
• The folk theory of holiness
• The folk theory of sex being a loss to the spirit
• The folk theory of harmful technology
• The folk theory that only the heart knows what is true
They lifted it from Guruphilic
And a feces throwing primate is causing havoc in Florida, i’m in NYC, so you know it isn’t me.
And finally, it turns out that Galileo was not the first to look through a telescope. That wasn’t me either.
Englishman Thomas Harriot made the first drawing of the moon after looking through a telescope several months before Galileo, in July 1609.
.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Can humans be a part of nature?
How can humans be both a part of nature and apart from nature?
What is nature? Is there anything that is not a part of nature? In our modern society we like to classify things as natural or man-made, thus we signify that things made by human beings are not a part of nature. Human made objects are considered to be outside of nature while bee-made objects such as honey or wax are considered to be inside of nature. This distinction has never made sense to me. While it is possible to create a system of typology in which human beings exist outside of nature, I completely reject the notion that in a universal sense, it is possible for humans or human activity to be anything other than a part of nature. Just as the honeycomb and the deer path are a part of nature, so are the superhighways, satellites, and plastics created by human beings.
I do not argue that all nature is good. Clearly a species of grazing animal arriving without the aid of human beings to an island where they soon obliterate a unique species of grass is not a good thing for the grass. I would argue that in the same sense, human beings pulling carbon from the depths of the earth and converting it into carbon that affects the atmosphere of the planet is not a good thing for many of the species involved (including humans), however, it is a part of nature.
Part of the reason that human beings have had such an adverse effect upon the planetary systems that they exist within is because humans have deluded themselves that they are not a part of nature. In this process, humans became convinced that the rules that apply to other systems within nature do not apply to human beings. Humans are no different in their destruction than chimpanzees with sticks who destroy anthills, it is simply a matter of the scale of destruction which sets us apart. We have used our complex brains to figure out how to exploit nature as if we exist outside of it rather than to figure out how to coexist with it from within.
We are as subject to the rules of nature as any other species on our planet. When it rains we get wet, when it is too cold we freeze, and when it is too hot we die. Our ability to deal with temperature is perhaps more complex than a dog that grows a thicker coat in winter and sheds its hair in summer, but again, it is a matter of scale. The coats we wear are not connected to our bodies but they are the extension of our bodies into the time and space determined by nature. We, as pointed out by Julian Steward, are subject to the complex cause and effect relationships of nature. Thus, it is impossible for human beings to exist outside of nature. A semantic argument may be able to be made, but so long as nature affects us and we affect it, we are a part of it. Our bodies and processes function within the cycling of decomposition. Within our bodies exist a multitude of organisms that we would perish without. There are also huge segments of nature that would perish without us fulfilling our part within the grand system. One could argue that these components that rely upon us are not natural, but since they are also dependent on the cause and effect of nature, this argument is moot.
The existence of culture, fire, rituals, or other human attributes do not set us apart from nature. They are a part of nature. Nature is rarely balanced. If it were, it would not be natural.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Marijuana Wins, Babylon Revisited, and Neverland changes hands.
Three stories I find to be worth reading today.
1) Pot Wins in a Landslide: A Thundering Rejection of America’s Longest War
3) Michael Jackson gives Neverland to corporation
And one for the kook files:
Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship
Popularity: 1% [?]
The Colonel in Tijuana and Monkeys working in a restaurant.
And Monkeys working in the food service industry.
Watch the video.
Popularity: 1% [?]
