here are some sites that have reasonably priced crafty, handmade jewelry and stuff. i'll add more as i find them:
Buy Handmade
Lula Ballou
Etsy
Gnarled Branch
Kwoozy
Spectacled Sparrows
Junxtaposition
Crafty Ass Chick
Kwoozy
Working Thread
Surly-Ramics
Guanni Chocolates
Destination Unknown
Bucktooth Mama
Amy Carpenter
Iglublu
Daisy Janie
Lucky Accessories
Stitch Pixie
ZN Creative Arts
Peggy Li
Invisible Children
Snail Mail Creations
Indie Finds
Cupcake Shop
Indy Collective
One Good Bumblebee
Three Paper Pigs
Sugar Lily
Craft Revolution
The Storque
Friday, November 23, 2007
A Gesture With Meaning
marine matt morgan says forget about sending text messages to the troops. the texts don't get to any soldier but rather to a website that soldiers have to peruse, a website that not many soldiers know about.
instead, take action, he says. write a letter, draw a picture.
this is an excerpt from npr:
instead, take action, he says. write a letter, draw a picture.
this is an excerpt from npr:
As a Marine Corps officer stationed in Baghdad, I've always appreciated
getting letters while deployed abroad.
I recently received a letter from a second-grader named Kaitlyn. She had clearly worked very hard on the letter — there were eraser marks where a lowercase E had nearly gotten the better of her, and the I's were dotted by heavy black circles — but what touched me were Kaitlyn's simple questions.
What do you like to do when you're not fighting?
Do you miss your family? Will you ever come home?
I answered her questions as well as I could, but what Kaitlyn will never know is that the thing I appreciated most about her letter was what was missing from it. She did not have a corporate sponsor or Web site to go to for "more information" — just a little hand-drawn picture of the American flag.
Unfortunately, efforts such as Kaitlyn's are becoming the exception.
You see, if you happen to be watching professional football this Thanksgiving, you will probably notice advertisements promoting the newest way to send your thanks to the troops. Just pull out your cell phone and text a message. Patriotism has never been so easy.
The catch ....read the rest at npr. see kaitlyn's drawing.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
New Musicians Naive to Music History
that's the argument that this nyt columnist makes. that's what steven van zandt, of the bruce springsteen's e street band, said.
i don't think any musician worth his or her salt is oblivious to music history. the argument is bogus. music is more segmented and that's good.
but i do like the van zandt's idea of teaching music history in school. who wouldn't enjoy that class? here's an excerpt:
i don't think any musician worth his or her salt is oblivious to music history. the argument is bogus. music is more segmented and that's good.
but i do like the van zandt's idea of teaching music history in school. who wouldn't enjoy that class? here's an excerpt:
He (van zandt) argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn’t be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock.
And he says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of
their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are
writing songs.As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing
his language) stinks.He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.
It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.
If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.
And Van Zandt is doing something that isgoing to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.
Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Affluent Go Democratic
from the wall street journal: wealthy, and typically republican businessmen, are going democrat -- they need to buy the party of the moment.
republicans need to "rebrand?"
shallow.
i don't think it matters who the president is. it's the non-affluent who have the power to make change, if we're talking majority, but that's not going to happen because everyone aspires to be rich!
from the WSJ:
republicans need to "rebrand?"
shallow.
i don't think it matters who the president is. it's the non-affluent who have the power to make change, if we're talking majority, but that's not going to happen because everyone aspires to be rich!
from the WSJ:
Scott Reed, who managed Republican Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, sees three overlapping problems for Republicans among business leaders and high-income voters. One is desire to go with the winning side at a time when Democrats have captured Congress; a second is loss of confidence in the Bush administration's competence; and a third is "a sense that the leadership of the Republican Party is too beholden to a small group of self-appointed social conservative leaders."
In 2008, Mr. Reed adds, "Republicans have to go back to the basics and use the new presidential nominee to rebrand the entire party."
Death Penalty: Incentive or Revenge?
economists say the death penalty serves as an incentive to not kill. i don't think anyone who is about to kill another human being, or considering whacking somebody, sits down and says, well, if i do this i could get the death penalty. what does economics have to do with sociology or psychology?
the death penalty doesn't deter, it's revenge, an eye for an eye. plain and simple. it also means that at least one innocent person will wrongly be on death row because as we know, innocent people have already been put to death.
this from the NYT:
the death penalty doesn't deter, it's revenge, an eye for an eye. plain and simple. it also means that at least one innocent person will wrongly be on death row because as we know, innocent people have already been put to death.
this from the NYT:
To economists, it is obvious that if the cost of an activity rises, the amount of the activity will drop.
“To say anything else is to brand yourself an imbecile,” said Professor Wolfers, an author of the Stanford Law Review article criticizing the death penalty studies. To many economists, then, it follows inexorably that there will be fewer murders as the likelihood of execution rises.
“I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds,” said Joanna Shepherd, a law professor at Emory with a doctorate in economics who wrote or contributed to several studies. “But I do believe that people respond to incentives.”
But not everyone agrees that potential murderers know enough or can think clearly
enough to make rational calculations. And the chances of being caught, convicted, sentenced to death and executed are in any event quite remote. Only about one in 300 homicides results in an execution.“I honestly think it’s a distraction,” Professor Wolfers said. “The debate here is over whether we kill 60 guys or not. The food stamps program is much more important.”
Friday, November 16, 2007
UNLV Redeemed
so it wasn't a UNLV student asking a stupid question about clinton's preference for diamonds or pearls, it was CNN being stupid. turns out the student is really smart and wanted to ask a yucca mountain question.
this by way of LasVegasgleaner.com
this by way of LasVegasgleaner.com
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Do You Prefer Diamonds or Pearls?
update: UNLV redeemed. CNN stupid. See post
ah, yes, the question that should be asked of every presidential candidate. goooooo UNLV!
ah, yes, the question that should be asked of every presidential candidate. goooooo UNLV!
Why Obama is Going to Win
If there were one reason, it would be younger people are rallying to Obama. The youth vote will put him over the top.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Monday, November 05, 2007
U.S. Headed for Financial Ruins
you only need to look as far as your latest charge on that credit card. here's a great explainer.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The Master War Planners
they're at work bringing us war for the next 100 years. this from the Asia Times:
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Masters of war plan for next 100 years
By Nick Turse
Duane Schattle doesn't mince words. "The cities are the problem," he says. A retired marine infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s, he now serves as director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at US Joint Forces Command. He sees the war in the streets of Iraq's cities as the prototype for tomorrow's battlespace. "This is the next fight," he warns. "The future of warfare is what we see now." He isn't alone. "We think urban is the future," says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. "Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment." And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has a similar assessment, "We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years." Last month, in a hotel nestled behind a medical complex in Washington, DC, Schattle, Lasswell, and Hall, along with Pentagon power-brokers, active-duty and retired US military personnel, foreign coalition partners, representatives of big and small defense contractors, and academics who support their work gathered for a "Joint Urban Operations, 2007" conference. Some had served in Iraq or Afghanistan; others were involved in designing strategy, tactics, and concepts, or in creating new weaponry and equipment, for the urban wars in those countries. And here, in this hotel conference center, they're talking about military technologies of a sort you've only seen in James Cameron's 2000-2002 television series, Dark Angel. I'm the oddity in this room of largely besuited defense contractors, military retirees, and camouflage-fatigue-clad military men at a conference focused on strategies for battling it out in the labyrinthine warrens of what urbanologist Mike Davis calls "the planet of slums". The hulking guy who plops down next to me as the meeting begins is a caricature of just the attendee you might imagine would be at such a meeting. "I sell guns," he says right off. Over the course of the conference, this representative of one of the world's best known weapons manufacturers will suggest that members of the media be shot to avoid bad press and he'll call a local tour guide he met in Vietnam a "bastard" for explaining just how his people thwarted US efforts to kill them. But he's an exception. Almost everyone else seems to be a master of serene anodyne-speak. Even the camo-clad guys seem somehow more academic than warlike. In his tour de force book Planet of Slums, Davis observes, "The Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go ˇ [T]hey now assert that the ˇ®feral, failed cities' of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the 21st century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor". But the mostly male conference-goers planning for a multi-generational struggle against the global South's slums aren't a gang of urban warfare cowboys talking non-stop death and destruction; and they don't look particularly bellicose either, as they munch on chocolate-chip cookies during our afternoon snack breaks in a room where cold cuts and brochures for the Rapid Wall Breaching Kit - which allows users to blast a man-sized hole in the side of any building - are carefully laid out on the tables. Instead, these mild-mannered men speak about combat restraint, "less-than-lethal weaponry", precision targeting, and (harking back to the Vietnam War) "winning hearts and minds". The men of urban warfareTake Russell W Glenn, a thin, bespectacled Rand Senior Policy Researcher with a PhD who looks for all the world like some bookish college professor Hollywood dreamed up. You'd never guess he went to the army's airborne, ranger, and pathfinder schools and is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. You'd also never suspect that he might be the most prolific planner for the Pentagon's century-long slum fight of tomorrow. In Planet of Slums, Davis notes that the Rand Corporation, a non-profit think-tank established by the US Air Force in 1948, has been a key player in pioneering the conceptual framework that has led to the current generation of what's called, in the jargon of this meeting, "urban operations", or UO. Glenn, it so happens, is their main man in the field. He travels the planet studying counterinsurgency warfare. Of late, he's been to the Solomon Islands, where an island rebellion occurred in the late 1990s, the Philippines, where an insurgency has been raging for decades (if not since the US occupation at the dawn of the 20th century), and, of course, Iraq. He's co-authored well over 20 UO studies for Rand including, most recently, "People Make the City: Joint Urban Operations Observations and Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq" (publicly available in 86-page executive summary form) and the still-classified "A Tale of Three Cities: Analyzing Joint Urban Operations with a Focus on Fallujah, Al Amara, and Mosul". On the technological front, the Pentagon's blue-skies research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sent its grandfatherly-looking deputy director, Robert F Leheny, to talk about such UO-oriented technology as the latest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sense-through-walls technologies that allow troops to see people and objects inside buildings. While Leheny noted that 63% of DARPA's US$3 billion yearly budget ($600 million of it dedicated to UO technologies in the coming years) is funneled to industry partners, DARPA is only a part of the story when it comes to promoting corporate assistance in this 100-year-war growth area. The largest contractors in the military-corporate complex are already hard at work helping the Pentagon prepare for future urban occupations. Raytheon, L-3 Communications, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) - the 5th, 7th, and 10th largest Pentagon contractors last year, taking in a combined $18.4-plus billion from the Department of Defense - have all signed Cooperative Research and Development Agreements with the US Joint Forces Command, according to Berry "Dan" Fox, the Deputy Director of Science and Technology at its Joint Urban Operations Office. As you might imagine, smaller contractors are eager to climb aboard the urban warfare gravy train. At the conference, Lite Machines Corporation was a good example of this. It was vigorously marketing a hand-launched, low-flying UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) so light that it resembled nothing more than a large, plastic toy water rocket with miniature helicopter rotors. The company envisions a profitably privacy-free future in which urban zones are besieged by "swarms" of such small UAVs that not only peek into city windows, but even invade homes. According to a company spokesman, "You could really blanket a ground area with as many UAVs as you want ... penetrate structures, see through a window or even break a window," in order to fly inside a house or apartment and look around. DARPA'S Leheny also extolled hovering UAVs, specifically the positively green-sounding Organic Micro Air Vehicle which brings to mind the "spinners" in Blade Runner or, even earlier in blow-your-mind futuristic movie history, V.I.N.CENT from Disney's The Black Hole. This drone, Leheny noted, has "perch and stare" capabilities that allow it to lie in wait for hours before fixing on a target and guiding in extended-line-of-sight or beyond-line-of-sight weapons. He also described in detail another DARPA-pioneered unmanned aerial vehicle, the WASP - a tiny, silent drone that spies on the sly and can be carried in a soldier's pack. Leheny noted that there are now "a couple hundred of these flying in Iraq". In addition to endless chatter about the devastated "urban canyons" of Iraq and Afghanistan, the specters of past battleground cities - some of them, anyway - were clearly on many minds. There were constant references to urban battle zones of history like Stalingrad and Grozny or such American examples as Manila in 1945 and Panama City in 1989. Curiously neglected, however, were the flattened cities of Germany and Japan in World War II, not to speak of the bombed-out cities of Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps the Korean and Vietnam Wars weren't on the agenda because "restraint" and "precision" were such watchwords of the meeting. No one seemed particularly eager to discuss the destruction visited on the Iraqi city of read the rest
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Masters of war plan for next 100 years
By Nick Turse
Duane Schattle doesn't mince words. "The cities are the problem," he says. A retired marine infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s, he now serves as director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at US Joint Forces Command. He sees the war in the streets of Iraq's cities as the prototype for tomorrow's battlespace. "This is the next fight," he warns. "The future of warfare is what we see now." He isn't alone. "We think urban is the future," says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. "Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment." And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has a similar assessment, "We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years." Last month, in a hotel nestled behind a medical complex in Washington, DC, Schattle, Lasswell, and Hall, along with Pentagon power-brokers, active-duty and retired US military personnel, foreign coalition partners, representatives of big and small defense contractors, and academics who support their work gathered for a "Joint Urban Operations, 2007" conference. Some had served in Iraq or Afghanistan; others were involved in designing strategy, tactics, and concepts, or in creating new weaponry and equipment, for the urban wars in those countries. And here, in this hotel conference center, they're talking about military technologies of a sort you've only seen in James Cameron's 2000-2002 television series, Dark Angel. I'm the oddity in this room of largely besuited defense contractors, military retirees, and camouflage-fatigue-clad military men at a conference focused on strategies for battling it out in the labyrinthine warrens of what urbanologist Mike Davis calls "the planet of slums". The hulking guy who plops down next to me as the meeting begins is a caricature of just the attendee you might imagine would be at such a meeting. "I sell guns," he says right off. Over the course of the conference, this representative of one of the world's best known weapons manufacturers will suggest that members of the media be shot to avoid bad press and he'll call a local tour guide he met in Vietnam a "bastard" for explaining just how his people thwarted US efforts to kill them. But he's an exception. Almost everyone else seems to be a master of serene anodyne-speak. Even the camo-clad guys seem somehow more academic than warlike. In his tour de force book Planet of Slums, Davis observes, "The Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go ˇ [T]hey now assert that the ˇ®feral, failed cities' of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the 21st century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor". But the mostly male conference-goers planning for a multi-generational struggle against the global South's slums aren't a gang of urban warfare cowboys talking non-stop death and destruction; and they don't look particularly bellicose either, as they munch on chocolate-chip cookies during our afternoon snack breaks in a room where cold cuts and brochures for the Rapid Wall Breaching Kit - which allows users to blast a man-sized hole in the side of any building - are carefully laid out on the tables. Instead, these mild-mannered men speak about combat restraint, "less-than-lethal weaponry", precision targeting, and (harking back to the Vietnam War) "winning hearts and minds". The men of urban warfareTake Russell W Glenn, a thin, bespectacled Rand Senior Policy Researcher with a PhD who looks for all the world like some bookish college professor Hollywood dreamed up. You'd never guess he went to the army's airborne, ranger, and pathfinder schools and is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. You'd also never suspect that he might be the most prolific planner for the Pentagon's century-long slum fight of tomorrow. In Planet of Slums, Davis notes that the Rand Corporation, a non-profit think-tank established by the US Air Force in 1948, has been a key player in pioneering the conceptual framework that has led to the current generation of what's called, in the jargon of this meeting, "urban operations", or UO. Glenn, it so happens, is their main man in the field. He travels the planet studying counterinsurgency warfare. Of late, he's been to the Solomon Islands, where an island rebellion occurred in the late 1990s, the Philippines, where an insurgency has been raging for decades (if not since the US occupation at the dawn of the 20th century), and, of course, Iraq. He's co-authored well over 20 UO studies for Rand including, most recently, "People Make the City: Joint Urban Operations Observations and Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq" (publicly available in 86-page executive summary form) and the still-classified "A Tale of Three Cities: Analyzing Joint Urban Operations with a Focus on Fallujah, Al Amara, and Mosul". On the technological front, the Pentagon's blue-skies research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sent its grandfatherly-looking deputy director, Robert F Leheny, to talk about such UO-oriented technology as the latest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sense-through-walls technologies that allow troops to see people and objects inside buildings. While Leheny noted that 63% of DARPA's US$3 billion yearly budget ($600 million of it dedicated to UO technologies in the coming years) is funneled to industry partners, DARPA is only a part of the story when it comes to promoting corporate assistance in this 100-year-war growth area. The largest contractors in the military-corporate complex are already hard at work helping the Pentagon prepare for future urban occupations. Raytheon, L-3 Communications, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) - the 5th, 7th, and 10th largest Pentagon contractors last year, taking in a combined $18.4-plus billion from the Department of Defense - have all signed Cooperative Research and Development Agreements with the US Joint Forces Command, according to Berry "Dan" Fox, the Deputy Director of Science and Technology at its Joint Urban Operations Office. As you might imagine, smaller contractors are eager to climb aboard the urban warfare gravy train. At the conference, Lite Machines Corporation was a good example of this. It was vigorously marketing a hand-launched, low-flying UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) so light that it resembled nothing more than a large, plastic toy water rocket with miniature helicopter rotors. The company envisions a profitably privacy-free future in which urban zones are besieged by "swarms" of such small UAVs that not only peek into city windows, but even invade homes. According to a company spokesman, "You could really blanket a ground area with as many UAVs as you want ... penetrate structures, see through a window or even break a window," in order to fly inside a house or apartment and look around. DARPA'S Leheny also extolled hovering UAVs, specifically the positively green-sounding Organic Micro Air Vehicle which brings to mind the "spinners" in Blade Runner or, even earlier in blow-your-mind futuristic movie history, V.I.N.CENT from Disney's The Black Hole. This drone, Leheny noted, has "perch and stare" capabilities that allow it to lie in wait for hours before fixing on a target and guiding in extended-line-of-sight or beyond-line-of-sight weapons. He also described in detail another DARPA-pioneered unmanned aerial vehicle, the WASP - a tiny, silent drone that spies on the sly and can be carried in a soldier's pack. Leheny noted that there are now "a couple hundred of these flying in Iraq". In addition to endless chatter about the devastated "urban canyons" of Iraq and Afghanistan, the specters of past battleground cities - some of them, anyway - were clearly on many minds. There were constant references to urban battle zones of history like Stalingrad and Grozny or such American examples as Manila in 1945 and Panama City in 1989. Curiously neglected, however, were the flattened cities of Germany and Japan in World War II, not to speak of the bombed-out cities of Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps the Korean and Vietnam Wars weren't on the agenda because "restraint" and "precision" were such watchwords of the meeting. No one seemed particularly eager to discuss the destruction visited on the Iraqi city of read the rest
Sunday, October 07, 2007
"War on Terror" fuels evil doers
well, yeah. it's nice that the following story puts "war on terror" in quotes. what a silly little phrase it is.
LONDON (Reuters) - Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fuelling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday. A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Eat, Pray, Love
love this book. author Liz Gilbert will be on Oprah tomorrow.
it's a true account of Elizabeth's journey through India, Italy, Indonesia and herself. Italy is the eating. India is for the praying and Indonesia is for love.
it's a true account of Elizabeth's journey through India, Italy, Indonesia and herself. Italy is the eating. India is for the praying and Indonesia is for love.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
John Frusciante Solo
Introducing... Johnny!
I ate a lot of lemon heads
Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Smile sitting around here...
oh and cat stevens...
Jimi Hendrix still seems like the sort of purest form of a human being being one with their music
as far as success, i've never made any demands upon fate, I just take things as they come
i've been a big fan of playing guitar along with records
i don't believe in god or anything, to me god is a concept that helps people...i'm not really searching for anything...there seems to be obviously a deep intelligence that runs through everything... i think of it as the order of the universe....
i never write with school pencils. I also never write with pens....
I ate a lot of lemon heads
Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Smile sitting around here...
oh and cat stevens...
Jimi Hendrix still seems like the sort of purest form of a human being being one with their music
as far as success, i've never made any demands upon fate, I just take things as they come
i've been a big fan of playing guitar along with records
i don't believe in god or anything, to me god is a concept that helps people...i'm not really searching for anything...there seems to be obviously a deep intelligence that runs through everything... i think of it as the order of the universe....
i never write with school pencils. I also never write with pens....
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Reading Harry Potter All Over
who's reading Harry Potter from book one again?
i am.
it is a brilliant book series.
A&E biography J.K. Rowling:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qIJaIynFAHI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=A7syAIYyT6Y
http://youtube.com/watch?v=c39GO5_YoVk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UPlcGUVBnWA
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JGCyoXzW9WQ
i am.
it is a brilliant book series.
A&E biography J.K. Rowling:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qIJaIynFAHI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=A7syAIYyT6Y
http://youtube.com/watch?v=c39GO5_YoVk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UPlcGUVBnWA
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JGCyoXzW9WQ
Congrats to the Humans
Dolphin species a goner, thanks to you know who:
Charles Q. ChoiSpecial to LiveScienceLiveScience.comWed
Aug 8, 5:00 PM ET
The Yangtze River dolphin is now almost certainly extinct,
making it the first dolphin that humans drove to extinction, scientists have now
concluded after an intense search for the endangered species.
The loss also
represents the first global extinction of megafauna—any creature larger than
about 200 pounds (100 kilograms)—for more than 50 years, since the disappearance
of the Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis).
The Yangtze River dolphin
or baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) of China has long been recognized as one of the
world's most rare and threatened mammal species.
"It's a relic species, more
than 20 million years old, that persisted through the most amazing kinds of
changes in the planet," said marine biologist Barbara Taylor at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service. "It's been here
longer than the Andes Mountains have been on Earth."
In 1999, the surviving
baiji population was estimated to be as low as just 13 dolphins, compared to 400
known baiji in 1981. The last confirmed glimpse of a baiji was documented by a
photo taken in 2002, although unverified sightings were reported as recently as
2006. read the rest here.
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