This 19 February 2020 video says about itself:
Tiny Guillemot Chick’s Treacherous First Flight | BBC Earth
Guillemot chicks have to take a daring first flight from their cliff-edge nests to the open ocean. Dangers lie between; can they evade the hungry Arctic foxes below?
This 20 February 2020 video from the USA says about itself:
Bloomberg vs. Democracy (w/ Tim Black & Justin Jackson)
BLOOMBERG TERMINAL Mike Bloomberg emerged from behind the shield of a $300 million-plus advertising blitz on Wednesday night for his first nationally televised Democratic debate. The result wasn’t pretty. The media and financial services mogul got pummeled over his record of allegedly sexist comments and behavior, his racist policing practices, his failure to release his tax returns, his support for Republicans, and his efforts to buy his way into the Democratic primary. [HuffPost]
BLOOMBERG: MY TAXES ARE TOO COMPLICATED Bloomberg claimed during the debate that releasing his tax returns to the public would be complicated and take “a long time.” “Unfortunately or fortunately, I make a lot of money and we do business all around the world and we are preparing it,” the billionaire, who is self-funding his presidential campaign, said. [HuffPost]
THE REAL ELIZABETH WARREN STEPS UP Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been playing nice, and sliding steadily downward in the polls. But that all changed at Wednesday’s debate. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ’fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians’,” Warren said in her opening comments. “And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” [HuffPost]
WARREN TACKLES BLOOMBERG AGAIN Sen. Elizabeth Warren continued to lambaste billionaire and fellow Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, saying she had written a simple contract he could sign that would release dozens of women who filed sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits against him and his company from their nondisclosure agreements. [HuffPost]
What exactly is an NDA? Here’s what to know before you sign.
BLOOMBERG CLAIMS WOMEN EARN THE SAME AS MEN AT HIS COMPANY. THEY DON’T. At Wednesday night’s Democratic primary debate, as Michael Bloomberg took a bludgeoning for the mistreatment of women at the company that made him a billionaire, he said: “In my foundation, the person that runs it’s a woman, 70% of the people there are women. In my company, lots and lots of women have big responsibilities. They get paid exactly the same as men.” Bloomberg’s company disclosures prove the claim that women are paid equally to be false.
Bloomberg is a Climate Change Con Man: here.
This 20 February 2020 video in German is called Nazi Terror in Hanau.
Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:
The attacks on two water pipe cafés seem to lead to a major scandal. That says Holger Schmidt, terrorism expert at the German broadcaster ARD. “The Bundesanwalt (the highest public prosecutor) already received a letter in November with extreme right-wing views written by the perpetrator. But nothing happened to that.”
The attacks were carried out by a 43-year-old German, named Tobias Rathjen, according to the German newspaper Bild. Nine people died, according to the mayor, all people of foreign origin. The perpetrator then shot his mother and killed himself.
Rathjen had a weapons license as a sports shooter. “His gun license was not re-examined after the letter”, says Schmidt. “That’s remarkable.” …
It is certain that he had extreme right-wing sympathies. …
Earlier this week and the end of last week, four members of the terror group “Gruppe S.” were arrested. “Everyone thinks of a connection with that group,” says the terrorist. “With those arrests, detailed plans were found for attacks on mosques.” …
The investigation in Germany now focuses mainly on all contacts of Tobias Rathjen, Schmidt says. “And then comes the question: who are responsible that this could have happened?”
This 20 February 2020 video is called Germany Shooting: Far-right extremist carried out Shisha bars attack: Nine killed at two shisha bars.
Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:
The attack on two shisha bars in the German city of Hanau is not isolated. It is a consequence of the growth … of right-wing extremism in Germany, two experts say to the NOS. …
The German public prosecutor believes that the man had a terrorist motive. …
He then studied business economics at the university in Bayreuth, where he graduated in 2007. …
R. has been a member of a shooting club in Frankfurt since 2012. In 2013 he received a weapons license. He was allowed to own two weapons. …
He wrote: “Certain people from my own country have contributed to the fact that we now have national groups, races and cultures among us who are destructive in every respect”. He also writes that certain nations “must be destroyed completely“. …
The attack in Hanau is the third major attack in a short time in Germany with a right-wing radical background. CDU politician Walter Lübcke was shot by a right-wing extremist last June. In October a heavily armed man with explosives tried to invade a synagogue in Halle. When that failed, he shot two people dead on the street. …
[Political parties like the AfD] “feel little responsibility for attacks, but after a jihadist attack they are quick to blame the whole of Islam for violence,” says [journalist] Sterkenburg. “They should take a more critical look at how their political ideas inspire the ideology of attackers such as this perpetrator in Hanau.”
‘XENOPHOBIC’ SHOOTINGS IN GERMANY LEAVE 10 DEAD Shootings police attributed to a xenophobic motive killed at least nine people and the suspected gunman, and wounded five others in the German city of Hanau. The shootings took place at two hookah bars in heavily immigrant parts of the southwestern German city near Frankfurt. [HuffPost]
This 18 February 2020 video from South Africa says about itself:
How Not to Wake Up a Female Leopard
We often hear the saying that we should let sleeping dogs lie, but we never hear the same being said about leopards. After this video, maybe we should change that…
Pieter van Wyk, a 34-year-old game ranger in Mala Mala Game Reserve was in awe when he, along with a guest, witnessed this spectacular sighting of a leopard stalking and eventually chasing a leopardess. He excitedly sent the footage through to LatestSightings.com, elaborating how it is always an amazing experience to see just how stealthy a leopard can be! And how fast!
‘We had just left camp on our afternoon safari. We’d viewed a lioness with four cubs close to our camp before moving off to follow up on a female leopard that had been found with a buck in the morning. When we approached the area of the female, we saw a male leopard walking towards the female! After a while, he had finally spotted the female…’
‘Initially, we felt a collective feeling of excitement, seeing two adult leopards in the same sighting. Then it got rather humorous’ he went on to explain:
‘The female had been watching the male and then decided to take a nap. He then started stalking towards her as if she had not seen him, inching closer, and closer… The suspense grew as he got nearer to her, and she was seemingly unaware’.
As witnessed in the video, the leopardess got quite a fright upon her rude awakening. He went on to tell how ‘after being chased up the tree, the female watched the male move towards her meal. She eventually descended from the tree and moved off. It later became clear that there wasn’t much left of the buck, certainly not enough worth defending or hanging around over’.
This 1978 video from Britain is called Gang Of Four – Damaged Goods (Music Video).
By Erik Schreiber:
“What we think changes how we act.”
Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill dead at 64
19 February 2020
Andy Gill, the guitarist and founding member of the British post-punk group Gang of Four, died on February 1 of pneumonia at age 64. By consciously avoiding the conventions of rock guitar playing, Gill developed a distinctive musical style that incorporated clipped phrasing, repetition, harmonics, percussive effects and feedback. His lyrics, often influenced by Marxist ideas, offered pithy observations of social, economic and political reality. Through Gang of Four, Gill influenced generations of musicians, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine.
Gill was born in Manchester, the United Kingdom, in 1956. Manchester had been a center of textile manufacturing in the nineteenth century and for many years, the city was home to Friedrich Engels, who conducted research there for his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. A century later, Manchester’s industries were harnessed to provide equipment for World War II. But by the time of Gill’s birth, the city’s cotton and heavy industries were in decline.
During his childhood, Gill became a fan of British and American rock groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground, as well as funk musicians such as James Brown and Funkadelic. When Gill’s cousin showed him how to play the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” on guitar, it sparked his desire to become a musician himself. The punchy rhythms of British band Dr. Feelgood were a later influence on him.
Thanks to a grant that paid his tuition, Gill attended a private school called Sevenoaks as a teenager. There he befriended a schoolmate named Jon King. The two were exposed to contemporary abstract and conceptual art and began to develop a degree of intellectual sophistication. In the late 1970s, they both went to Leeds University to study art. There the two started playing music and writing songs together.
Gill’s time at Leeds coincided with a period of increasing wealth inequality, high unemployment and strikes. To suppress and divide the working class, the British ruling class promoted reactionary forces such as the National Front and the British Movement, a neo-Nazi group founded in 1968. When the leader of the British Movement was separated from the rest of his group during a march in Leeds, Gill and King chased him down an alley.
A travel grant allowed Gill and King to spend time in New York, where they became regulars at the punk club CBGB. At the bar, they often saw and spoke with musicians such as John Cale of the Velvet Underground and Joey Ramone of the Ramones. These experiences gave Gill and King the confidence to form their own band.
Back at Leeds University, Gill and King (who had become the singer) enlisted bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham to form Gang of Four. The name referred to a faction within the Chinese Communist Party that had gained power during the Cultural Revolution which began in 1966. After Chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the group was accused of being counterrevolutionaries and arrested by the regime. “Obviously, with the name Gang of Four, there’s a certain element of irony, and it’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek,” Gill told Perfect Sound Forever. “That’s part of why that name works. But I don’t think there was any political awareness at that stage.”
Gill and the others worked hard to develop a distinct musical identity for their group. Rather than playing loud chords like other punk guitarists, Gill played repetitive, staccato lines and left room for moments of silence. He encouraged Allen and Burnham to strip rhythm to its rudiments and build a new, unconventional sound. The result was syncopated, spare music that incorporated elements of punk, funk and reggae without fitting neatly into any of those genres. “You could tell by listening to Gang of Four music that punk had happened. But it definitely wasn’t punk music,” Gill told Perfect Sound Forever.
The band’s best known and most widely acclaimed album is its 1979 debut Entertainment! In deadpan lyrics seemingly intended to provoke critical thought, the songs analyze topics such as commodification, the “great man” theory of history, gender roles and alienation. The song “5.45,” for which Gill wrote lyrics, describes how television news coverage made guerrilla warfare in Latin America seem remote and unreal. “Watch new blood on the 18-inch screen / The corpse is a new personality.”
A tour of the United States influenced the band’s second album, Solid Gold (1981). “Capitalism in Britain has more things obscuring the basic social and economic structures,” Gill told Perfect Sound Forever. “In America, you get more of the bare bones—the social relations and economic structures are more clear.”
In the bleak “Paralyzed”, the first song on Solid Gold, Gill examines the bourgeoisie’s propaganda for capitalism. “Wealth is for the one that wants it / Paradise, if you can earn it,” Gill says with flat affect. The song also portrays the bewilderment of a worker who has absorbed this indoctrination, but is laid off when he is no longer needed:
My ambition’s come to nothing
What I wanted now seems just a waste of time
I can’t make out what has gone wrong
I was good at what I didMeanwhile, the brute and mechanical rhythm seems to reduce the speaker to a statistic.
After reading a feminist pamphlet, Gill wrote “Why Theory?” “We’ve all got opinions / Where do they come from?” the song asks. “Each day seems like a natural fact / And what we think changes how we act.”
For their third album, Songs of the Free (1982), Gang of Four used backup singers and approached a more conventional pop style. Gill described the album as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, saying that the tactic was aimed at subversion. The wry “I Love a Man in Uniform”, which satirizes machismo and criticizes militarism, was a hit in the UK and the US. But when the conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began active hostilities against Argentina in the Falkland Islands, the BBC forbade disc jockeys to play the song.
The band’s fourth album, Hard (1983), received negative reviews, and the band broke up after its release. Gill began producing music for artists such as the Stranglers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, INXS’s Michael Hutchence, and the Futureheads. Over the years, Gill and King intermittently reformed Gang of Four with other musicians and released new albums, often to mixed reviews. When King decided to quit the band for good, Gill kept it going. Its last album, Happy Now, was released in 2019 and included a song about Ivanka Trump.
During Gill’s college years, currents of Marxist revisionism still had significant influence on left-leaning artists and intellectuals. Gill was exposed to the ideas of the Situationist International, which, rather than promoting revolutionary socialism, staged “situations” in an effort to dispel social alienation and reawaken what its members considered authentic desires. Gill also had encountered the ideas of the Frankfurt School of philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. …
Overall, Gill and Gang of Four did not reflect the pessimism and irrationalism of these trends. They consistently rejected escapism, confronting social reality in a critical manner. Rather than accepting contemporary conditions as natural or foreordained, they sought to understand their deeper origins in history and class relations. Although their analysis was at times cursory, their critiques of capitalism, militarism and sexism were entirely healthy. Gill’s work stands in marked contrast with that of popular musicians who only ever engage with social and political issues in an unserious way, if at all.
This 2012 video from the USA says about itself:
Florida’s Pleistocene Mammals
During the Pleistocene epoch, Florida was a wild place….even wilder than it is today. Mastodons, sabertooth cats and giant ground sloths roamed the peninsula in large numbers.
From the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany:
Reconstructing the diet of fossil vertebrates
The ratio of special zinc isotopes in dental enamel provides information about the diet of mammals in prehistoric times
February 17, 2020
Paleodietary studies of the fossil record are impeded by a lack of reliable and unequivocal tracers, currently making it impossible to determine the exact timing of dietary changes or, often, even the species involved. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz have now tested a new method, the isotope analysis of zinc isotopes from the tooth enamel of fossil mammals. They found this method to be well suited to expand our knowledge about the diets of fossil humans and other Pleistocene mammals. The method proves especially useful when it comes to differentiating whether prehistoric mammals had mainly animal or plant-based food on the menu.
Information on what our ancestors ate is based mainly on carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of the structural protein collagen in bones and dentin. Nitrogen isotope analysis, in particular, helps scientists determine whether animal or plant food was consumed. Since collagen, like proteins in general, is not easily conservable, this method cannot be used to examine vertebrate fossils older than about 100,000 years. This timeframe is even often reduced to only a few thousand years in arid or humid tropical regions like Africa and Asia, which are considered key regions for human evolution and are therefore of particular interest to science. New methods — such as zinc isotope analysis — are now starting to open up new research perspectives.
Zinc isotopes serve as indicators for food type consumed
The researchers analyzed the ratio of two different zinc isotopes in the dental enamel of fossil mammals that had only recently been discovered in a cave in Laos. These fossils date from the late Pleistocene, more precisely from around 13,500 to 38,400 years ago. In 2015, in the Tam Hay Marklot cave in northeastern Laos, scientists found fossils of various mammals, including water buffalos, rhinos, wild boars, deer, bears, orangutans and leopards. “The cave is located in a tropical region where organic materials such as collagen are generally poorly preserved. This makes it an ideal location for us to test whether we can determine the differences between herbivores and carnivores using zinc isotopes,” says study leader Thomas Tütken, professor at the JGU’s Institute of Geosciences.
First study with zinc isotopes on fossils shows preservation of food signatures
Zinc is ingested with food and stored as an essential trace element in the bioapatite, the mineral phase of tooth enamel. Thus, zinc has a better chance of being retained over longer periods of time than the collagen-bound nitrogen. The relevant ratio is derived from the ratio of zinc 66 to zinc 64: “On the basis of this ratio we can tell which animals are herbivores, carnivores or omnivores. This means that among the fossils we analyze, we can identify and clearly distinguish between carnivores and herbivores, while omnivores are expected to be in between,” says Nicolas Bourgon first author of the study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and PhD student in Tütken’s research group. Lean meat contains more zinc-64 than plant food does. Carnivores, like the tiger, will have a smaller ratio of zinc-66 to zinc-64, as compared to herbivores, like the water buffalo.
In order to exclude alteration from external sources on the samples, the fossils were also examined by the team of Klaus Peter Jochum at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. No changes were found when comparing the concentration and distribution of zinc and other trace elements of fossil tooth enamel with those of modern animals using laser ablation ICP mass spectrometry.
Time horizon to be extended to over 100,000-year-old fossils
The zinc isotope method has now — for the first time — been successfully applied to fossils. “The zinc isotope ratios in fossil enamel from the Tam Hay Marklot cave suggest an excellent long-term conservation potential in enamel, even under tropical conditions,” summarize the authors. Zinc isotopes could thus serve as a new tool to study the diet of fossil humans and other mammals. This would open a door to the study of prehistoric and geological periods well over 100,000 years ago. In the future, the next goals are to apply this method to reconstruct human dietary behaviours. The researchers also want to find out how far back in time back in time they can go, by applying their new method to fossils of extinct mammals and dinosaurs that are millions of years old.
This 20 February 2020 video says about itself:
Germany shooting: Suspect posted videos online days before the attacks – BBC News
A suspected far-right extremist carried out the attacks on two shisha bars in western Germany, killing at least nine people, officials say.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said there were many signs the attacker in the city of Hanau had acted out of racism.
Federal prosecutors are treating the case as terrorism. Some of those killed were believed to be of Turkish origin.
Dutch NOS radio says that all people murdered (except the perpetrator’s mother, making the total number of murdered people ten) were immigrants, some of them Kurdish; including at least one woman, a 35-year-old pregnant woman.
The 43-year-old suspect killed himself, police say. He was found dead at his home along with the body of his mother.
Local media have identified the suspect as Tobias R, a German citizen. The Bild tabloid reports he had a firearms licence, and that ammunition and gun magazines were found in his car.
The attack comes amid growing concerns about far-right violence in Germany.
https://twitter.com/Nabertronic/status/1230383917884149761?s=20
NOS radio reports that gunman Tobias R also attacked refugees from Arab countries on the internet. He wrote ‘certain nations must be exterminated if they cannot be expelled from the country. … Therefore, I said that the following peoples must be completely destroyed: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the entire Saudi Peninsula, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines. And that would only be the rough cleaning. After that, there has to be a fine cleanup, which affects the remaining African countries, South and Central America, the Caribbean’.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 