This 22 May 2017 shows a flock of rooks on the roof of a shed.
Jacques Westerveen made this video in his backyard in the Netherlands.
Rooks on roof video
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Daily Archives: May 22, 2017
Real Neat Blog Award, congratulations to 12 nominees!
Late in 2014, I made this new award: the Real Neat Blog Award. There are so many bloggers whose blogs deserve more attention. So, I will try to do something about that 🙂
It is the first award that I ever made. I did some computer graphics years ago, before I started blogging; but my computer drawing had become rusty 🙂
The ‘rules’ of the Real Neat Blog Award are: (feel free not to act upon them if you don’t have time; or don’t accept awards; etc.):
1. Put the award logo on your blog.
2. Answer 7 questions asked by the person who nominated you.
3. Thank the people who nominated you, linking to their blogs.
4. Nominate any number of bloggers you like, linking to their blogs.
5. Let them know you nominated them (by commenting on their blog etc.)
My seven questions are:
1. Where do most visits to your blog come from?
2. What is your favourite sport?
3. What has been a special moment for you so far in 2017?
4. What is your favourite quote?
5. What was your favourite class when still at school?
6. Anything you had wished to have learned earlier?
7. What musical instrument have you tried to play?
My nominees are:
5. Stories
7. Book Time
10. Festival Reviews
11. cries from an unkempt garden
12. #ADPhD
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Film March of the Penguins 2, review
This December 2016 video is the French language trailer of the new film by Luc Jacquet, L’Empereur. In English March of the Penguins 2: The Call. It is a sequel to the earlier March of the Penguins documentary.
On 21 May 2017, I went to see this film about the life of emperor penguins in Antarctica.
The film concentrates on one penguin couple in an emperor nesting colony. They fall in love (for birds it is important that their partner is their own choice, not ‘arranged’ like often with caged birds, according to recent research). They have an elaborate mating dance, which makes it easier for them to recognize each other later among the thousands of penguins in the colony.
After the female lays an egg, she has to transfer it to the male’s feet to keep it warm. Then, the egg has to roll across the ice. If that takes too long, the cold may kill the embryo. Then, the hungry female leaves for months to feed in the ocean, which she reaches after a long and arduous walk. The male meanwhile tries to keep the egg alive; not easy during winter storms.
Then, a baby penguin is born. Its father does not have much food for it. Everything depends on the return in time of the mother. When she arrives, the father will transfer the baby to the mother’s feet for keeping it warm. Like transferring eggs, this is risky: the vulnerable young penguin should not be on the ice for the transfer for too long.
Now, the hungry father can leave to the ocean to feed, and find food for the baby. He sometimes, to get there, has to walk scores of kilometers, sometimes a hundred (depending on ice extent), across difficult areas with steep slopes, pointed rocks and fracturing ice. Later, the young penguin becomes so big, needing more food, that both parents have to go to the ocean together, instead of one staying with the youngster.
Finally, the emperor penguin son will have to walk to the sea himself. First, his mother leaves. He follows his father for a few miles; then, he is in a group of young penguins all wanting to go the ocean they have never seen.
The film has spectacular views of the penguins swimming underwater, up to 600 meter deep.
There are not many other Antarctic animals in the film. No whales (most not dangerous, but killer whales are a danger to swimming penguins). No seals (leopard seals are a danger to swimming penguins). A fleeting view of a snow petrel flying past (not named). The bigger relative of the snow petrel, the giant petrel is named and shown trying to catch a young penguin; which fails. The only other penguin species nesting as far south as emperor penguins, the smaller Adelie penguin, is shown a few times, including in a quarrel on the coast with young emperor penguins hesitating whether they will swim in the ocean for the first time ever.
The film does not go into how climate change may damage emperor penguins, except in its last sentence, saying that emperor penguins have lived for millions of years, and will continue for millions more ‘if we [humans] behave ourselves’. Maybe a bit surprising, such a short mention, as director Luc Jacquet in 2015 made the film La glace et le ciel (English: Ice and the Sky) about global warming, focusing on French Antarctic researcher Claude Lorius.
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Donald Trump, United States media and wars
This cartoon is about Saudi money to ISIS, aka Daesh, in Syria and Iraq.
By Bill Van Auken in the USA:
Trump’s speech in Riyadh signals US escalation against Iran
22 May 2017
Riddled with hypocrisy, clichés and absurdities, President Donald Trump’s speech Sunday before an assembly of monarchs and despots in Saudi Arabia spelled out an agenda of escalating US militarism throughout the Middle East and a buildup in particular toward war with Iran.
Hailed by a fawning American media as “presidential”–supposedly eclipsing for the moment the crises and factional struggles engulfing the administration–the speech was reportedly drafted by Stephen Miller, the extreme right-wing ideologue credited with being the chief architect of Trump’s abortive executive order banning people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the US.
Much in Trump’s half-hour address echoed the speech delivered by Barack Obama in Cairo eight years earlier. Both presidents declared their desire to reset US relations with the Middle East, while absurdly posturing as leaders of a pacifist nation seeking only good for the region and offering to head up a united struggle against “violent extremism.”
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Like Obama before him, Trump had no interest in dealing with who brought Al Qaeda and similar forces in, as the historical trail leads directly to the CIA in Afghanistan and US imperialism’s longstanding support for right-wing Islamist organizations and terrorist groups as a counterweight to left nationalist and socialist influence in the Arab and Islamic world. Jointly, the US and Saudi Arabia continue to fund and arm such forces in their drive for regime change in Syria.
Both speeches were laced with flowery tributes to Islamic culture. Trump noted in particular how impressed he was with the “splendor” of Saudi Arabia and the “grandeur” of the palace in which the so-called Arab Islamic American Summit had been convened.
What separated the two addresses were the different shifts in strategy by Washington. While Obama sought to repair the damage done by the Bush administration’s criminal war in Iraq by offering a new face for US imperialism, Trump traveled to Saudi Arabia to make clear his administration’s break with his predecessor’s policy of seeking a rapprochement with Iran based on the 2015 nuclear deal. He adopted an openly confrontational stance toward Tehran.
“Above all, America seeks peace–not war,” Trump proclaimed, in what stood out as the most blatant of the many lies in his brief address. The reality is that US wars in the region have killed millions over the past decade-and-a-half. And the thrust of the US president’s visit to Saudi Arabia, his first stop in a nine-day foreign tour, is the preparation for new and even bloodier conflicts.
This was made plain by the principal agreements forged between Trump and the Saudi monarchy, which included a $110 billion arms deal that incorporates the option to purchase $350 billion worth of weapons over the next 10 years.
The arms agreement “supports the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the entire Gulf region,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, told reporters in Riyadh, “in particular in the face of the malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats which exist on Saudi Arabia’s borders on all sides.”
In his speech, Trump painted Iran as the principal state sponsor of terrorism, accusing Tehran of providing terrorists with “safe harbor, financial backing, and the social standing needed for recruitment,” and fueling “the fires of sectarian conflict and terror,” all charges that could be leveled, with justification, against his Saudi hosts.
He portrayed the US cruise missile attack on Syria last month–followed just last week by the US bombing of a pro-government militia in the southeastern part of the country–as part of a wider struggle against Iranian influence. He went on to call upon “all nations of conscience” to “isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism and pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve.” That he was speaking in Saudi Arabia, a brutally repressive absolute monarchy, just two days after more than 70 percent of Iranian voters participated in a sharply contested election, did nothing to blunt Trump’s call for regime-change.
He specifically praised Saudi Arabia and its allies for having “taken strong action against Houthi militants in Yemen”. The near-genocidal Saudi war has killed some 12,000 Yemenis, while destroying basic infrastructure in the Arab world’s poorest country, leaving over 7 million people on the brink of starvation and unleashing a cholera epidemic that threatens a massive death toll.
In March, US Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis issued a memo calling for stepped-up US support for this criminal war, in which the Pentagon is already supplying intelligence and logistical backing to the Saudi bombing campaign.
Part of the weapons deal signed by Trump involves the shipment of precision-guided munitions that had been cut off in a highly limited gesture of disapproval of Saudi tactics in Yemen by the Obama administration, which itself concluded over $100 billion worth of weapons deals with Riyadh. Also included in the new deal are tanks, artillery, helicopters and other weaponry that can be directly funneled into the slaughter in Yemen.
In addition to his speech and the signing of arms and investment deals, Trump participated in a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Saudi-led coalition of Gulf oil sheikdoms. Trump administration officials have raised the objective of using the GCC as the foundation of a Sunni Arab version of NATO directed at military confrontation with Iran.
Beyond the drive to militarily confront Iran, a principal regional rival of US imperialism in the Middle East, and the huge profits that Saudi arms purchases reap for the US military industrial complex, there are broader strategic considerations in the US turn toward a closer alliance with Riyadh.
Some of these issues were outlined on the eve of Trump’s trip in a piece published by the influential Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies and authored by Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Pentagon adviser. First among them is, according to Cordesman, “the continued level of US dependence on Saudi help in securing the stable flow of Gulf oil.”
While US imports from the Gulf have fallen sharply over the past quarter-century, Cordesman cites “indirect dependence” in terms of the impact a disruption in oil exports would have on global energy prices and the world capitalist economy. In particular, he points to the dependence of Asian economies on Gulf petroleum exports.
If the United States failed in “providing power projection forces and arms” to the region, he writes, its principal global rival, China, might fill the void. “China may not yet be ready to try to assume the role, but the entire South China Sea crisis would pale to near insignificance if China became the de facto guarantor of Gulf stability.”
Cordesman continues: “The real-world nature of US influence and power in the Pacific would be cut massively, China’s leverage over other major Asian economies like Japan and South Korea would be sharply increased, and the potential rise in tension between China and India–and cut in India’s relative position–would have a massive impact on the balance of power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean.”
In other words, the turn toward closer relations with Saudi Arabia and the related Gulf oil sheikdoms is bound up with US imperialism’s mounting conflict with China, which it has identified as the principal challenge to the drive for American global hegemony. Washington is determined to dominate Asia, including China, by maintaining the military power to choke off the region’s energy imports.
The fact that the sclerotic House of Saud, one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, has become a lynchpin of Washington’s imperialist strategy, not only in the Middle East but globally, is a measure of the crisis of American and world capitalism.
Oil revenues, which account for fully 90 percent of the kingdom’s export earnings, have been cut nearly in half since 2014. Last month, the government was forced to reverse itself on austerity measures that hit the military and public employees over fear that declining living standards and rising unemployment are creating the conditions for social revolt.
In the predominantly Shia Eastern Province, the center of the kingdom’s oil production, security forces laid siege to the town of Awamiyah, a center of resistance to the regime, during the week preceding Trump’s visit. Combined with the failure of the Saudi bid to topple the Assad regime in Syria by supporting Al Qaeda-linked militias and the regime’s inability to retake Yemen from the Houthi rebels, the deepening domestic crisis is creating the conditions for revolutionary upheavals against Washington’s principal ally in the Arab world.
Will Trump agree to the Pentagon’s permanent war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? Here.
This video from the USA says about itself:
Warfare State at War with Trump Over Russia, as Trump Plans Warfare Against Iran in Saudi Arabia
22 May 2017
Norman Solomon joins Paul Jay on Reality Asserts Itself discussing the Trump/Russia affair and plans to isolate and perhaps attack Iran.
By Patrick Martin in the USA:
Washington Post and New York Times urge pullback on calls for Trump impeachment
22 May 2017In editorials published simultaneously for their Sunday editions, the New York Times and the Washington Post called for caution in the anti-Trump campaign they have been spearheading with claims of nefarious connections between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government.
The Times editorial, headlined “Watergate? We’re Not There Yet,” cites comparisons between the crisis of the Trump administration and the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon 43 years ago, only to suggest that impeachment or forced resignation is not yet the order of the day.
After repeatedly slamming Trump as a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a threat to US national security, including the publication last week of an editorial with comparisons to Watergate, the Times now counsels the Democrats to proceed cautiously and avoid “distraction.” It advises leveraging the official investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, along with the continuing decline in Trump’s poll numbers, to “win back a majority next year in at least one house of Congress” in the 2018 mid-term elections.
The Washington Post editorial similarly suggests that the anti-Trump campaign “will require time,” both for newly appointed special counsel Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, and for the various House and Senate committees investigating alleged Russian intervention into the 2016 election.
The Post editorial, under the headline “It’s time to focus—finally—on running the country,” demands that the Democrats “talk about something other than impeachment in the coming weeks,” and that Republicans “face the task at which they have so far failed: governing responsibly.”
The Post is more explicit about the social and class policies underlying the campaign over alleged Trump-Russia connections. It demands action on health care to reduce “uncertainty among the insurers upon which the system relies.” In other words, the two big-business parties must contain their mutual mudslinging and get on with the pro-corporate austerity measures demanded by the financial elite.
Similarly, Congress must “pass a new budget and raise the debt ceiling.” It must carry through “tax reform,” which means cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, while making sure that such actions “cannot result in higher deficits.” In other words, tax cuts for the rich must be paid for by slashing social programs for working people.
Last but by no means least, the editorial cites concerns about Trump’s foreign policy in relation to North Korea, Syria, the Islamic State [ISIS], Iran, Russia and “other hostile powers.”
Neither newspaper attempts to square the intensity of their onslaught against the Trump administration, particularly over the past two weeks, with their current declarations in favor of caution and biding one’s time.
The situation could shift quickly, but the editorials from the Times and the Post reflect a broader pullback from immediate calls for impeachment and references to Watergate from within the media and political establishment. In recent days, prominent congressional Democrats such as Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, have called talk of impeachment premature.
These developments underscore the fact that there is no democratic or progressive content to the opposition to Trump from within the political establishment and the capitalist state. The Democratic Party and the media are not concerned with having a fascistic-minded president and an administration packed with corporate CEOs and generals dedicated to waging war, tearing up social programs and organizing a further redistribution of wealth to the rich. On such matters, there is far more that unites the ruling class than divides it.
What are the considerations driving the warnings about proceeding too rashly on the question of impeachment?
First, the central concern of Trump’s opponents within the ruling class since his inauguration has always been to force a shift in policy, particularly foreign policy. On the US war in Syria, the maintenance of the NATO alliance and, above all, aggression toward Russia, Trump was deemed to be not on message by the dominant factions of the military and intelligence apparatus.
The president has already sought to appease such concerns by ordering a missile strike on Syria, followed last week by a US bombing raid on a pro-Syrian government militia and approval of a Pentagon plan to escalate the US intervention in Syria, Iraq and northern Africa.
There are related concerns that a perpetual crisis at the center of the American state and a protracted impeachment process pose a threat to the international standing of the United States and the overall interests of American imperialism.
Second, there are the concerns outlined by the Post that a full-scale impeachment crisis will derail the administration’s program of corporate tax cuts, deregulation and the gutting of social programs upon which Wall Street has been banking and is determined to see pushed through. This was the message sent by the financial markets in last week’s huge one-day selloff. That the message was received was indicated by the announcement the same day of the appointment of a special counsel to take the political faction fight in hand.
Third, there are fears that a full-scale constitutional crisis and fratricidal struggle within the ruling class can create an opening for an independent intervention by the working class. Under conditions of mass disaffection from both political parties, rising social anger and a general discrediting of all official institutions of power, the destabilization of the political system has potentially revolutionary implications.
The appointment of Mueller, who headed the FBI for 12 years, under both Bush and Obama, puts the Trump administration under the effective receivership of the intelligence agencies, with the constant threat that if he steps too far out of line, he could quickly be faced with criminal charges. References to the formation of some sort of caretaker regime have begun appearing in the press. A Post op-ed column by Dana Millbank devoted to celebrating the anti-Russian campaign as a heroic journalistic exploit, while acknowledging that it was made possible by systematic leaking from the military-intelligence apparatus, concludes by describing Mueller as “a regent, if you will, to protect against future abuses.”
All of this underscores the completely reactionary character of both factions of the ruling class, whatever turn the crisis might take in the days and weeks to come. It demonstrates the political dead end of subordinating the struggle against the Trump administration to the Democrats, whose opposition to Trump is entirely different from and hostile to the concerns and interests of millions of workers. They must intervene on the basis of their own, socialist, program and perspective.
This 20 May 2016 video from the USA is called The US Is Waging A ‘Massive Shadow War’ In Afríca.
A report in Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post accuses the Pentagon of operating a multi-billion dollar slush fund which it has accrued over the past seven years by overcharging the armed forces for the cost of fuel purchases. The $5.9 billion it has built up since 2010 has been used to fund military operations in Syria and Afghanistan, effectively avoiding any of the budgetary oversight requirements necessary to obtain additional funding from Congress: here.
WHAT TRUMP’S BUDGET MEANS FOR MEDICAID “President Donald Trump’s budget proposal, set to be unveiled on Tuesday, will include cuts to Medicaid and propose changes to other assistance programs for low-income citizens.” [Reuters]
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Stingrays on video
This video says about itself:
17 March 2017
Jonathan visits the world-famous “Stingray City” in Grand Cayman with world-renown marine artist Dr. Guy Harvey to learn about Dr. Harvey’s research on Stingrays and how they cope with massive numbers of tourists.
JONATHAN BIRD‘S BLUE WORLD is an Emmy Award-winning underwater science/adventure program that airs on public television in the United States.
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British Labour leader at rock concert
This 20 May 2017 video from England is called Jeremy Corbyn – Onstage at The Libertines / Reverend & The Makers
By Peter Lazenby in Britain:
Libertines make time for hero Corbyn
Monday 22nd May 2017
THOUSANDS of music fans on Merseyside were given a surprise visit by Jeremy Corbyn at the weekend.
Mr Corbyn took to the stage at the Wirral Live charity concert on Saturday at Prenton Park, Tranmere Rovers’ football ground.
The crowd of about 20,000 greeted the Labour leader with cheers and chants of “Jezza” and “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.”
Gig-goer Laura Cullen tweeted: “I’m watching The Libertines and actual Jeremy Corbyn has just rocked up on stage. Now that’s how you do politics.”
The Labour leader praised Sheffield band Reverend & the Makers, who had just played before the headline set by the Libertines — for supporting the Hillsborough campaign and the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.
He also took a swipe at rich Premier League football clubs, urging them to pay a fraction of their income to fund sports for children and people with disabilities.
Mr Corbyn said: “And it’s also about young people and music and what they can achieve, Merseyside and its history of music is the music capital of our country.
“What I want is every school to have the money for every child to learn musical instruments.”
He asked the crowd: “Do you want health, do you want housing, do you want care, do you want a society coming together — or do you want selective education and fox hunting?”
The crowd reacted to the Tories’ alternative with boos and Mr Corbyn said: “That’s absolutely the right answer: leave the foxes alone.”
An estimated 6,000 supporters also turned up for a rally in the marginal Wirral West constituency, which is held by Labour.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 