Anti Bush music video by Kuwaiti singer Shams

Posted on February 8, 2007 by petrel41

Bush and Iraq war, cartoon

Shams (Arabic for “Sun”) is a popular female Kuwaiti singer who has just released a controversial song titled, Ahlan Ezayak (or “Hi! How are you!”).

This music video is called Shams – Ahlan Izayak.

Accompanied by a slick MTV-like video that lambastes George W. Bush and his occupation of Iraq, the song has become all the rage in the Middle East.

Shams croons in the Khaliji style, one of the most intoxicating and seductive genres in pop music today, and yet most Americans have not heard of it – even as U.S. soldiers sink ever deeper into Arab sands. …

The fact that Shams is Kuwaiti, a people who have been the biggest supporters of American policy in the Arab world, makes her video all the more inflammatory – an indication that the Kuwaiti/U.S. romance is over.

And indeed Ahlan Ezayak is a song about love gone sour, “Hi! How are you? – You think you’re so great, I never want to see you again!”

The video opens with Shams singing to a moronic looking digitized George W. Bush at a press conference held on the White House lawn.

The gathering quickly becomes an opportunity for the singer to publicly announce, “I’m not your relative, I’m not your sweetheart.”

The video then dissolves into a subversive montage involving the singer, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as Shams sings her song of broken love – “Whether you hurt my heart or adore it, I refuse you. Go buy yourself and get away from me.”

The surreal video depicts Shams confronting her veiled self in a police line-up, lying down in front of the White House on a wall made of letters that spell “GUANTANAMO,” cutting the strings of powerful marionettes (there’s Tony Blair!), and boxing in the ring with Condoleezza.

Even the Statue of Liberty can’t help but dance to that funky Khaliji beat.

There’s more, dare I say, “feminist” sentiment and rebel rage in this video, than in all of the current rock and hip-hop video’s of today put together.

Juan Cole on this: here.

Fossil horses show climate change 33 million years ago

Posted on February 8, 2007 by petrel41

This video is called Life in Cenozoic Times.

Reuters reports:

WASHINGTON – Details on the largest climate change since the age of dinosaurs come straight from the horse’s mouth, as equine teeth provide clues to how long, how cold and when the big chill was, scientists reported Wednesday.

Earth’s temperature dropped by 15 degrees F over a period of 400,000 years some 33.5 million years ago, the researchers said in the current edition of the journal Nature. …

Paleontologists have known for more than a century that many species went extinct at the transition between the Eocene and Oligocene, based on the fossil record before and after the shift.

However, they lacked the analytic tools to determine how much temperature change there was over how long a period, and exactly when it occurred.

Fossil research showed that creatures that might be at home in the tropics, like warm-loving crocodilians, roamed what is now Nebraska on the American Great Plains before the temperature transition.

After the transition, they were gone.

Scientists believe changes in ocean currents were to blame for the shift.

To figure out the details of what French researchers dubbed Grande Coupure — “big cut” — MacFadden and his co-authors examined the preserved teeth and bones of fossil horses and another cloven-hoofed mammal called an oreodont.