[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just announced that a record-breaking number of endangered Florida panthers were killed in 2014.
What little habitat remains for this endangered species is under constant siege from development, oil drilling and mining. The development on their habitat creates a profound threat to their survival and led to the death of 33 Florida panthers last year.
The fragile Florida panther population can't afford such a devastating loss. But unless we act, it will continue as more developers and fossil fuel businesses request permits to build and operate on their land....
These majestic panthers once roamed throughout the Southeastern U.S. – from Arkansas to Florida. Now, fewer than 180 can be found in just three Florida counties.
As their habitat disappears, the panthers are forced to survive in smaller areas, leading to more aggression between cats as they try to protect their territory. [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff (accessed 2015 January 7). "Frequently Asked Questions about the Florida Panther."] And, as more development leads to more and more roads running through their habitat, even more are killed by cars: 76% of the Florida panthers killed in 2014 were hit by cars.
Each year Florida panther habitat has continued to shrink, but we can put a stop to it now. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has the power to grant critical habitat designation to the lands that are essential to the continued existence of an endangered species.
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| See it, soar it, save it |
As Bucknell’s de facto bat concierge, Dr. Lilley helps wild bats acclimate to life in captivity, a difficult task with an urgent spur. He and his colleagues are laboring mightily to understand white-nose syndrome, a devastating fungal disease that has killed at least six million North American bats since it first appeared in Albany a decade ago and that threatens to annihilate some bat species entirely.
Mass die-offs of animals may be increasing in frequency and – for birds, fishes, and marine invertebrates – in severity as well, according to a study of 727 mass mortality events since 1940.
Despite the ecological importance of individual mass mortality events, in which a larger than normal number of individuals die within a population, little research has been conducted on patterns across mass mortality events. The new study will help researchers better assess trends in mass mortality events and their causes, according to the authors of the paper in the Jan. 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It is the sense of Congress that Congress is in agreement with the opinion of virtually the entire worldwide scientific community that—
- climate change is real;
- climate change is caused by human activities;
- climate change has already caused devastating problems in the United States and around the world;
- a brief window of opportunity exists before the United States and the entire planet suffer irreparable harm; and
- it is imperative that the United States transform its energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy as rapidly as possible.
"From now on, no more Mr. Wise Guy." [Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald] Excerpt:
Dear Terrorists:"[Animated] Cartoon: Je suis Charlie." [40 seconds]
OK, you win. We surrender....
So you’ll hear no more cracks about Osama bin Gotten.
No one will ever again say you’re full of Shiite....
I even hear Jon Stewart is quitting The Daily Show to host a program on The Food Network, specializing in New Jersey cuisine. Mad magazine is going out of business and its famed mascot, the infidel Alfred E. Neuman, just became the latest journalist beheaded by ISIS. Bill Maher is teaching religious studies in Mississippi, Lewis Black is practicing Zen Buddhism and Stephen Colbert now claims “Stephen Colbert” was nothing more than a character he played....
"The Charlie Hebdo cartoons no one is showing you." [ProgNet]
"Islam’s Problem with Blasphemy." [Mustafa Akyol, NY Times] Excerpt:
The Paris terrorists were apparently fueled by the zeal to punish blasphemy, and fervor for the same cause has bred militancy in the name of Islam in various other incidents, ranging from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie in 1989 to the threats and protests against the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten for publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in 2005.
Mockery of Muhammad, actual or perceived, has been at the heart of nearly all of these controversies over blasphemy.
This might seem unremarkable at first, but there is something curious about it, for the Prophet Muhammad is not the only sacred figure in Islam. The Quran praises other prophets – such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus – and even tells Muslims to “make no distinction” between these messengers of God. Yet for some reason, Islamist extremists seem to obsess only about the Prophet Muhammad.
Even more curiously, mockery of God – what one would expect to see as the most outrageous blasphemy – seems to have escaped their attention as well. Satirical magazines such as Charlie Hebdo have run cartoons ridiculing God (in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts), but they were targeted with violence only when they ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad.
Of course, this is not to say extremists should threaten and harm cartoonists for more diverse theological reasons; obviously, they should not target them at all. But the exclusive focus on the Prophet Muhammad is worth pondering. One obvious explanation is that while God and the other prophets are also sacred for Judaism and Christianity, the Prophet Muhammad is sacred only for Muslims. In other words, the zeal comes not from merely respect for the sacred, but from militancy for what’s sacred to us – us being the community of Muslims. So the unique sensitivity around Muhammad seems to be a case of religious nationalism, with its focus on the earthly community – rather than of true faith, whose main focus should be the divine.
Still, this religious nationalism is guided by religious law – Shariah – that includes clauses about punishing blasphemy as a deadly sin. It is thus of vital importance that Muslim scholars courageously, even audaciously, address this issue today. They can begin by acknowledging that, while Shariah is rooted in the divine, the overwhelming majority of its injunctions are man-made, partly reflecting the values and needs of the seventh to 12th centuries – when no part of the world was liberal, and other religions, such as Christianity, also considered blasphemy a capital crime.
The only source in Islamic law that all Muslims accept indisputably is the Quran. And, conspicuously, the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept. Nor, for that matter, does the Quran command stoning, female circumcision, or a ban on fine arts. All these doctrinal innovations, as it were, were brought into the literature of Islam as medieval scholars interpreted it, according to the norms of their time and milieu.
Tellingly, severe punishments for blasphemy and apostasy appeared when increasingly despotic Muslim empires needed to find a religious justification to eliminate political opponents.
One of the earliest “blasphemers” in Islam was the pious scholar Ghaylan al-Dimashqi, who was executed in the 8th century by the Umayyad Empire. His main “heresy” was to insist that rulers did not have the right to regard their power as “a gift of God,” and that they had to be aware of their responsibility to the people.
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| Chancellor Angela Merkel has been removed |
JERUSALEM — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was right there next to the president of France on Sunday, marching through the streets of Paris for all the world to see — all the world, that is, except the readers of an ultra-Orthodox newspaper in Israel.
The newspaper, HaMevaser, altered a front-page photograph of the march to remove Ms. Merkel and other female leaders, setting off snickers and satire on social media.
Ultra-Orthodox publications generally avoid pictures of women for reasons of modesty, and their intended audience has been known to scratch women’s faces out of bus advertisements and to bar them from running for public office in their parties. But some people saw the deletions from the Paris photograph as a more serious sin.
“It is rather embarrassing when, at a time that the Western world is rallying against manifestations of religious extremism, our extremists manage to take the stage,” Allison Kaplan Sommer commented on a blog for Israel’s left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. She berated HaMevaser for “denying the fact that in the wider world, beyond the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, women do stand on the world stage and shape events.”
Healthy food is expensive and less readily accessible in poorer neighborhoods, and because corn is so abundant and cheap, it is added to many food products. "Dumping high fructose corn syrup into cheap foods, sodas, sports drinks and energy drinks is toxic to the body, causing epidemic metabolic diseases and a serious health crisis," [Dean Schillinger, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco,] said.Some more paraprosdokians – figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected:
To underscore the scope of the problem, he pointed out that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 1,500 American soldiers lost a limb in combat. In that same period, 1.5 million people in the U.S. [1,000 times as many] lost limbs to amputations from Type 2 diabetes, a preventable disease. "We have yet to mobilize for a public health war," he said, "but the time has come to do so."
- Behind every successful man is his woman, and behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.
- A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.
- You do not need a parachute to skydive; you only need a parachute to skydive twice.
Watch again this memorable scene from the film La Dolce Vita:
Ms. Ekberg had kept a low public profile in recent years. She did make an appearance in 2010 at a film festival in Rome, where a new restoration of “La Dolce Vita” was having its world premiere. In December 2011 it was reported that she was almost penniless, had no family to help her and was seeking financial assistance from the Fellini Foundation while living at a nursing home in Italy, her adopted country.
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| Gerald Ford & his wife, Betty |
The last time the Republicans held this many seats in the House, Ford’s Model A was replacing the Model T. There were only 16 Major League Baseball teams. And The Star-Spangled Banner had just been made our national anthem.
Our country has changed a lot since the 1930s. But you wouldn’t know it from reading Republicans’ policy agenda. They’re still demanding huge tax cuts for the wealthy, letting big banks run amok, and making things harder for working people.
Peaceful road. Ruta 40, Argentina:
It is more than 5,000 km (3,107 mi) long and crosses 20 national parks, 18 major rivers, 27 passes on the Andes, and goes up to 5,000 m (16,404 ft) above sea level in Abra del Acay in Salta.
Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, carries the designation M-1, so named because it was the first paved road anywhere.
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| Does this look like a good idea to you? A 1,000-lb bull and a man who weighs no more than 160 lbs? |
Iron clad contract:
This came about from the ironclad ships of the Civil War. It meant something so strong it could not be broken.
Some more things Albert Einstein said:
Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was fonded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.
- Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
- If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
- As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Remember the saying?: "Now it takes all night to do what we used to do all night!"? It's the same for most things in our lives. We may take longer, move a little slower, and stop and give a lot of thought before doing things we might have done without one second of thought when we were young.
Limerick of the week:
Christopher-Joseph Ravnopolski-Dean –
his name's a line of verse, it's rolling clean,
and his lines of prose are crafted well,
they excel in telling what they tell –
writerly flowing prose goes bold and lean.
| Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean |
Thank you, thank you! Florida panthers, Audubon FlightMap, bats devastated, mass die-offs, Bernie Sanders's amendment, Jon Stewart quitting The Daily Show, Charlie cartoons, Islam's problem with blasphemy, Israeli photoshopping, comparing number of amputations from war and from sugar consumption, behind every successful man, chalk Pandas, the sweet life while it lasted, cell-phone revolution, Gerald Ford, continual demand for tax cuts, etc., peaceful road, bullbaiting, iron clad, hand contracture, all night long!, in verse & prose....
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