A Few Bad Ass Young Women to Inspire You TodayAnd give you hope for the future

This post is all about Intelligence, Integrity and speaking out because you know you have to.

14 year old Rachel Parent debates Rude fucking asshole Kevin O'Leary on the issue of Genetically Modified Food

Rachel's website: http://www.gmo-news.com

What a sack of shit this old man is. What a hero Rachael is.



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11-Year-Old Yemeni Girl Speaks, Internet Listens

from Huffington Post

On Sunday morning, Reddit user Syd_G submitted a three-minute YouTube clip of 11-year-old Nada Al-Ahdal describing why she was running away from home to live with her uncle. According to a translation provided by subtitles (and more or less confirmed by several Reddit users), she starts off by saying:

It's true that I ran away from my family. I can't live with them anymore. Enough. I want to go live with my uncle. What about the innocence of childhood? What have the children done wrong? Why do you marry them off like that?

Four hours later, the video had been upvoted nearly 4,700 times (unusually high for Reddit) and began circulating in news stories across the world.

Details on the child's story are still unclear but her three-minute monologue on child marriage in Yemen is receiving rave reviews, and it's not hard to understand why: she speaks with excellent articulation and passion, and her eyes force the viewer not to break away from the screen.

Even if this was scripted as some have suggested, she is remarkably poised in describing her harrowing situation:

"I have managed to solve my problem, but some innocent children can't solve theirs, and they might die, commit suicide, or do whatever comes to mind."

Yemeni law holds that girls of any age are allowed to wed, and because of that, 52 percent of girls in Yemen are wed before the age of 18. However, the law also states that intercourse is prohibited until the child has reached puberty, a law that is ignored by many.

How generous of them.

In 2009, 10 year-old Nujood Ali successfully divorced after she was raped before the onset of puberty. Her case spurred action by the Supreme Council of Motherhood and Childhood, who proposed an age limit of 18 be set for marriage, which was knocked down to 17 when passed into law, and unfortunately, struck down the following day by parliamentary measures.

About Yemen, Sophie Ghaziri of Al Arabiya wrote in April, "Driven by poverty and a "traditional" way of thinking, girls under the age of eight can be seen in wedlock with children of their own by the time they hit puberty."

As Nada Al-Ahdal points out in her video, "There are many cases like that. Some children decided to throw themselves into the sea. They're dead, now."

This has long been a problem. Ghaziri highlights in her column that one in nine girls in the developing world will become child brides.

We can only hope that Nada's words will spur greater action by world leaders to halt the horrifying practice of child marriage and the human trafficking epidemic that feeds it.

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from Blindfold
The Girl Who Silenced the World For Five Minutes

Just twelve years old at the time, she seized her once-in-a-lifetime chance to tell every politician, businessman and journalist at the UN: “You are what you do, not what you say… I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words.” More than 21 million people have watched the speech on YouTube, where you can see that her address to silenced the entire plenary session. Severn’s young voice made it unmistakably clear why we all must take immediate action to save the environment.



Twenty years have passed and Severn is now 32 years old, married, a mother of two young boys and an outspoken activist for environmental justice. She has received the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global 500 Roll of Honour, published a book, studied ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, co-hosted a children’s television series that aired on Discovery Kids, and launched an internet-based think tank called The Skyfish Project which was integral to the creation of the “Recognition of Responsibility” pledge at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in August 2002.

On June 17th 2012, she returned to Rio de Janeiro to attend the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. When I recorded Severn’s speech three days ago at an event hosted by WeCanada and later met her for a short interview (coming soon), I was deeply inspired to see that she had stayed true to the same values she expressed so powerfully in 1992. Though her scientific education has made her statements more refined and her age has added experience and wisdom, her belief in the power of intergenerational love is still at the heart of her message.



“Twenty years on I come back to the same argument I made as a child with my presence at the summit. The strongest moral imperative that we have to act and change is our children. It is because of our children that we will bring back the connection between cause and effect, between choices, the global situation, between privilege and responsibility. In identifying our moral imperative lies hope and our hope is love – love for our children,” she said.

HELL Yes!

thanks, Amanda Charchian

Banksy Installs BP Ride at Brighton Pier in UK

from ECOpolitiology

Never one to shy away from a little controversy, Banksy, the famed UK street artist and subversive social commentator, took aim at BP this summer by installing a coin operated ride depicting a dolphin jumping over a spilled BP barrel of oil at the Brighton Pier on the south coast of England.

Photo: Banksy

Stupefied: The Glen E. Friedman Playlist

This playlist I created by request for a playlist blog Stupefaction, just went up, thought i'd share it with y'all.

I thought it would be cool to make one in chronological order...

Hit the YouTube window below the Bob Dylan song and it will play the rest of the playlist. I also added links to some leftover songs down below.

from Stupefied:

"If you’re inspired to do something, if you want to do something, if you have some kind of feeling that you should do something … then you should just do it; don’t let what other people’s preconceived ideas of good behavior, or whatever it is, limit you to thinking what you should and shouldn’t do." - Glen E. Friedman

This week's edition of the Stupefied Playlist© comes to us courtesy of Mr. Glen E. Friedman. Glen is one of my all time favorite photographers: As a teenager, he began shooting skateboarders in the mid-late 70's, and followed that by taking era-defining shots of the nascent hardcore and hip hop scenes - he's always been a music junkie. The great thing is that Glen was the same age as most of his subjects at the time he started - one of us! - and he's never stopped. His work is the perfect visual accompaniment to the musical artists & skateboarders he's shot over the years. Seriously, just hit play, and then open up this slideshow at his website & watch. Pure inspiration! He has so many great shots I won't even begin posting any here as there are too many to choose from.

About putting the playlist together, he said, "To be clear, picking 20 songs to me is a near impossible task [albums would have been much easier], bands that I love [Fugazi & Beastie Boys, to name only two] did not make this particular list - different day would be a different list."

This is obvious from the "extras" list of Glen's I've included below, and I must say, I understand. A huge thanks to Glen for the list.

01. Masters of War - Bob Dylan '63
02. Have Love Will Travel - The Sonics '65
03. Manic Depression - Jimi Hendrix Experience '67
04. I Want You (She's so Heavy) - The Beatles '69
05. 1969 - The Stooges '69
06. Move On Up - Curtis Mayfield '70
07. Let's Start - Fela Ransome Kuti '71
08. Lick and a Promise - Aerosmith '76
09. Teenage Lobotomy - The Ramones '77
10. New Rose - The Damned '77
11. E.S.P. - The Buzzcocks '78
12. California Über Alles - Dead Kennedys '79
13. Garbageman - The Cramps '80
14. Thirsty and Miserable - Black Flag '81
15. In My Eyes - Minor Threat '81
16. Public Enemy #1 - Public Enemy '87
17. Poetry - Boogie Down Productions '87
18. FUCK THE POLICE - NWA '88
19. C.R.E.A.M. - Wu-Tang Clan '93
20. We're In This Together - Nine Inch Nails '99

some leftovers
Annalisa - Public Image Limited
Achilles Last Stand - Led Zepplin
He Miss Road - Fela Kuti
Sixteen Again - Buzzcocks
Run-DMC - Live at the Fun House
Cold Gettin' Dumb - Just Ice
Saturday Night - Schooly D.
Verbs of Power - X-Clan
Fools Gold - Stone Roses
Bitch - The Rolling Stones
John Lennon - Imagine

V Is for Vegan: The ABCs of Being Kind New Children's Book from Ruby Roth

Great new vegan alphabet book for children.



check out author Ruby Roth on CNN when she was promoting her last book



and get this new book here on Amazon or get it signed from the author here.

Nice work Ruby!

‘THE BUS’ HASKELL WEXLER’S GROUND-BREAKING DOCUMENTARY OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON, 1963

from Dangerous Minds

This month marks the 50th anniversary of “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” when up-to 300,000 people took part in one of America’s largest rallies for human rights, showing their support for President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.

The event took place on August 28th, 1963, and the participants ended their march in front on the Lincoln Memorial, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech.

Delegations traveled from all over the United States, to show their support. Haskell Wexler, one of cinema’s most important and influential cinematographers (American Graffiti, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) traveled with the San Francisco delegation, filming, interviewing, and documenting the political and historical significance of this event.

This was actually posted to you tube by the Haskell Wexler himself!

Sunday Documentary series:Exit Through The Gift Shop

In Honor of the Wooster Collective 10 year anniversary show opening this week here in New York City.

check this out.

this shit went viral for a reasonBest of Vine so far . . .

bonus:

18 Year Old SkateBoarder and Graffiti Artist Dies after being shocked with a taser by Police

from The Huffington Post

WSVN-TV -

A Miami Beach teen died Tuesday after being shocked with a taser in the chest after police spotted him painting graffiti on an empty building.

Israel Hernandez, 18, was a skateboarder and artist who "wanted to change the world somehow through art,” his sister, Offir Hernandez, told the Miami Herald.

Miami Beach Police said they spotted Hernandez tagging an abandoned fast-food restaurant just after 5 a.m Tuesday morning near 71st Street at Collins Avenue.

A chase ensued involving "more than half a dozen" officers, according to New Times.

"During the foot pursuit, the subject encountered officers face to face... and ignored officers' commands to stop," MBPD Chief Raymond Martinez said in a statement. "In order to affect his arrest, an officer deployed his conducted electrical weapon (TASER)."

Hernandez's friends Felix Fernandez and Thiago Souza said they were serving as lookouts when he was spotted by police. They told WSVN officers shoved Hernandez against a wall, then high-fived as he lay motionless.

"That made me feel terrible inside. These cops are gruesome, and they don't really care," Fernandez said.

Chief Martinez said that when Hernandez showed signs of medical distress, Miami Beach Fire Rescue responded to the scene and transported him to Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

"The City of Miami Beach would like to extend their condolences to the family of Israel Hernandez," his statement concluded.

The incident remains under investigation, with autopsy and toxicology reports pending as Hernandez's family and the skateboarding and art communities mourn. He had recently launched his own line of skateboards, and had also shown his work in local galleries, according to the Miami Herald.

"He was always in our stores on one of his crazy self-shaped boards showing love," local skate shop MIA posted to Instagram. We lost a creative soul. You will be missed homie."

The microscopic world of corals [video]

Here's an amazing video from PBS Digital Studios' “Under H2O” series, with micro images of corals.

Corals are beautiful when seen through your own eyes in sunlight, but for scientists at the University of Hawaii, seeing corals in this manner is not enough. They are using a revolutionary new tool called a laser scanning confocal microscope to take photographs of corals that are one part art and one part science. In this episode, they take us along for a ride with this amazing new technology and show us corals in a way we have never seen them before.

thanks, BoingBoing

Watching Fox News makes people distrust science

A new study breaks down the media's effects on public perception of climate change
BY LINDSAY ABRAMS
from Salon

A "Fox & Friends" segment from January 2011 (Credit: Media Matters)

Now that science has more or less agreed that human-caused climate change is happening, some are devoting their efforts to figuring out how it’s possible that people can remain skeptics. Plenty has been written about the corrupting influence of conservative media, but a new study from researchers at the University of Arizona, George Mason, American University and Yale looks more closely at exactly how such programs manage to fuel their audiences’ denial.

Predictably, they found that the more exposed Americans are to conservative media, the less certain they become that climate change is happening. The problem, they discovered, isn’t just that programs like Fox News are sowing the seeds of doubt about climate change, it’s that they’re decreasing people’s trust in the scientists who say it’s happening. That’s 97 percent of them, for the record.

The researchers took a nationally representative sample of Americans who were quizzed, by phone, on their media diets and their belief in climate change on a scale from 0 (extremely sure global warming is not happening) to 8. They controlled for variables like race, income and education level. Almost 2,500 people were surveyed in 2008; 1,036 were reinterviewed in 2011. They also analyzed the climate change coverage across Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal during that period.

The study’s lead author, Jay Hmielowski, explained in an email that his team found a 13 percent decrease in the amount of trust between people who do not watch or listen to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh and the programs’ most loyal devotees. Those who watched or listened to left-leaning and mainstream news sources — CNN, MSNBC, NPR and network news — experienced the opposite effect: They were more likely to trust scientists and thus be more certain that global warming is happening. The researchers were able to show that this influence occurs over time, as the years of tuning in accumulate.

“I would say that our findings show that the attack on science seems to be working,” said Hmielowski.

How do Rush and friends do it? The study’s authors break down research demonstrating how conservative news outlets claim there’s a lack of scientific consensus about the reality of climate change. Studies have found, for example, that Fox News airs more stories about evidence that appears to disprove global warming or featuring climate change skeptics than stories that accept the reality of climate change. In so doing, write the authors, they “have served to marginalize scientists in general and climate scientists in particular.” Both liberal outlets like MSNBC and mainstream channels like CNN are much more likely to emphasize that global warming is real and caused by human activity.

Conservative news programs, the authors hypothesize, create a rapport with their viewers based on a shared ideology. “Because people’s knowledge of most scientific issues, including climate change, is relatively limited,” they write, “the salient values used to judge trustworthiness are likely to be general rather than specific (i.e. based on agreement and sympathy rather than on carefully reasoned arguments or direct knowledge).”

The researchers don’t seem to be giving members of the general public a lot of credit for our ability to digest information or form our own opinions. But, they explain, climate change is complex and difficult to directly witness. The news media, on the other hand, speaks our language, and is a much more pervasive force in our daily lives. Is it any wonder that it’s able to have such a salient effect on our biases?

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainability. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.

Dead WalMart Reborn As Library

from Boing Boing

A dead WalMart in McAllen, Texas has been remodelled as a library, making it the largest single-floor library in the USA. It's award-winning design makes excellent use of all that space -- two football fields' worth -- and includes an acoustically separated teen space.

The library even has an acoustically separated lounge for teens as well as 6 teen computer labs, 16 public meeting spaces, 14 public study rooms, 64 computer labs, 10 children’s computer labs and 2 genealogy computer labs. Other new features include self check-out units, an auditorium, an art gallery, a used bookstore and a cafe.

While you can still see hints of what the library once was in its sprawling shape and industrial ceilings, it seems like an entirely new space. According to PSFK, the library saw new user registration rise by 23% within the first month following the new library’s opening.

Abandoned Walmart is Now America’s Largest Library [Steph/Web Urbanist]

Charged With the Crime of Filming a Slaughterhouse

So-called "Ag-Gag" laws reveal the lengths to which the agriculture industry will go to keep their business practices secret.



from The Nation

On February 8, a 25-year-old animal rescue worker named Amy Meyer and a colleague pulled into a parking lot across the street from the Dale T. Smith and Sons Meat Packing Company in Draper, Utah, a suburb south of Salt Lake City. They crossed the street and stepped onto a strip of public land on the roadside, stopping short of a barbed wire fence that demarcated the boundary of the property of the slaughterhouse.

Across a small field, the building housing the killing floor stood in plain sight. Through two large open doors facing the road they stood on, they could see cows being led onto the plant’s disassembly line. Outside the building, a forklift was pushing a live cow—possibly a sick, “downer” cow, which are illegal to slaughter. Despite the fact that she stood firmly on public property and was not an employee of the slaughterhouse, when Meyer took out her camera and began to film, she set herself up to become the agricultural industry’s first-ever “Ag Gag” criminal.

"Ag Gag" laws are a species of state-level legislation that has been vigorously pushed by lobbyists over the last several years to criminalize and suppress the exposure of inhumane practices in animal agricultural operations. In essence, the laws protect the industry by making whistleblowers into outlaws.

Ag Gag laws take aim at camera-wielding undercover whistleblowers, whose videos have provided some of the few unvarnished glimpses the public has seen of where their food comes from—and it's not a pretty sight. Over the last half century, intensive, mechanized, indoor factory-style animal feeding operations have almost entirely supplanted the grazing pastures of traditional livestock farms. In processing plants, ever-increasing disassembly line speeds have increased the risks of injury to knife-wielding slaughterhouse workers, who tend to be poor, often undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America, while compounding the risk of some animals being skinned and dismembered while still alive.

Undercover videos have exposed the ugly realities concealed behind the walls and locked gates of animal agriculture facilities and put them on the evening news. The footage is graphic; the impressions they leave are haunting and indelible. Images from past undercover investigations include unwanted male chicks on an egg farm being casually tossed into a grinder alive, workers swinging sick or runty piglets by their legs and smashing their heads on concrete, and cows and calves being beaten in the head with crowbars (the first two abuses are standard industry practice). "Once you see them, you can't unsee them," says Matt Rice, Director of Investigations for Mercy For Animals, who traces his own conversion to animal advocacy to undercover videos he watched over a decade ago.

Their impact on a political level can be just as powerful as on a personal one: in the last decade, videos shot by undercover investigators and broadcast on national TV news stations have contributed to the phasing-out of the use of immobilizing “gestation crates” for pregnant sows in the supply chains of several major restaurants and retailers and their outright ban in nine states; the passage of a ballot initiative outlawing the use of highly constrictive battery cages for egg-laying hens in California; the passage of a separate California law banning the force-feeding of ducks to produce foie gras; a ban on veal crates in Arizona and moves toward their elimination in Ohio; and the exposure of the routine slaughter and processing of sick cows for beef, which led to the largest meat recall in US history.

The agricultural industry's response to this intractable public relations threat couldn't be more straightforward: make it illegal.

The first generation of what would later be known as Ag Gag laws emerged in the early 1990s in response to a much different threat posed by underground activists with the Animal Liberation Front movement. In Kansas, Montana and North Dakota, state legislators made it a crime to take pictures or shoot video in an animal facility without the consent of the facility's owner.

In 2002, the American Legislative Exchange Council—the conservative law-drafting organization behind Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law and Arizona's anti-immigrant SB1070—took the approach one step further. ALEC drafted a piece of "model legislation" for distribution to lobbyists and state lawmakers across the country in an effort to make Ag Gag into a national phenomenon. The model bill, called The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, proposed prohibiting activists from, among other things, "entering an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means with the intent to commit criminal activities or defame the facility or its owner." It also proposed the creation of a "terrorist registry" that would contain the names, addresses and photographs of those convicted under the proposed law.

In the last year and a half, at the behest of animal agriculture interests, ALEC's model bill—minus the registry—has been taken up as a template and passed in various iterations in Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Arkansas and South Carolina.

"The animal agriculture industry has nothing to hide," says Emily Meredith, Communications Director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance, an industry group that refers to organizations like the Humane Society as “extreme animal rights organizations.” "But there’s a difference between having nothing to hide and allowing activists—with a blatant agenda to put an end to the consumption of meat, milk and eggs—to gain access to family farms in illicit and fraudulent ways, take video, and then cut and run to later release that video under a big donate now button."

Some versions of ALEC's bill criminalize documenting abuses outright. Some make it a crime to lie about one's associations with animal advocacy groups on job applications for farm employment. Others require those who document abuses to turn any evidence over to law enforcement within 24-48 hours of recording it—a clever way of preventing activists from engaging in the weeks- or months-long investigations required to demonstrate systemic abuses.

Though the rules target animal advocates, the potential ramifications for civil liberties are broader. Ag Gag rules can as easily be used to inhibit agricultural employees from exposing unsafe or illegal working conditions as it can to silence animal advocates. And other industries are likely to lobby for similar protections against their own whistleblowers-in-the-making. Already, North Carolina's bill makes the falsification of employment application information for the purposes of whistle blowing a crime in any industry.

"Union members know firsthand how important it is for these workers to be able to document unsafe working conditions and other threats to workplace and food safety," says Mark Lauritsen, International Vice President and Director of the Packing Division for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents many slaughterhouse employees. "We are opposed to any government intervention that seeks to intimidate workers and investigators from shining a spotlight on the true conditions of America’s food manufacturing facilities."

"The laws are clearly directed at animal rights activists who threaten the profitability of factory farms and slaughterhouses, but their reach doesn’t stop there," says Rachel Meeropol, Senior Staff Attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights. For example, the North Carolina bill, she notes, "would criminalize not only animal rights investigations, but also an undercover journalist who applies for a job at a suspect plant in order to expose human trafficking or work safety violations."

As its public profile has increased, public opposition to Ag Gag legislation has grown, and the agricultural industry's path to enacting Ag Gag rules throughout the country has become more daunting. A February 2012 national poll commissioned by the ASPCA showed public opposition to the criminalization of animal abuse whistleblowers standing at almost two in three Americans. Ag Gag bills have been rejected or failed to gain traction in a raft of states in every region of the country from California to Wyoming to Tennessee. The term "overreach" comes to mind.

Amy Meyer's experience has become something of a symbol of that overreach, and an indicator of the limits of the agricultural industry's ability to suppress free speech. A few minutes after Meyer hit “record” on her camera, a truck pulled up in front of her. Meyer’s colleague hastily departed. Bret Smith, the facility’s operator and brother of Darrell Smith, the slaughterhouse owner who is also Draper's mayor, leaned over from the driver’s seat, filming her with a phone camera as she filmed him back. At first, he accused Meyer of trespassing, though she was plainly standing on the outside of the plant’s fence. Then he shifted tactics. “You cannot videotape my property from public property,” he said (this is in fact not what the law says). “If you read the rights here and the laws of Utah, you can’t film an agricultural property without my consent,” he continued. Smith called the police.

Within just a few minutes, seven squad cars pulled up. “The officers would all go to Brett Smith first and shake his hand,” Meyer recounts. “And then they would come over to me and treat me like a criminal."

An officer questioned Meyer about her identity and what she was doing there, even after affirming that she was not being detained and after she told him she did not wish to answer his questions. After some arguing over the legal basis for his questioning, according to Meyer, the officer claimed that a worker at the slaughterhouse had reported witnessing her and her colleague crossing over the fence, trespassing onto private property—a description at odds with the footage she shot that day. The officer told her she was free to leave, but that he would “screen charges of criminal trespass” on her.

Eleven days later, prosecutors filed charges against her for “agricultural operation interference,” a Class B misdemeanor that carries a maximum six-month jail term.

At the end of April, Will Potter, a journalist who tracks government suppression of environmental and animal rights activists, broke the story of "the first prosecution in the country" under an Ag Gag law. The story was picked up by local and national media outlets, bringing just the kind of public attention to the agricultural industry that ALEC's model legislation was designed to prevent. Within 24 hours, the charges were dropped.

Without the media attention the story garnered, Meyer may have been forced to defend herself in court. Had prosecutors pressed the case, the video footage, which is clearly shot from outside of the property line, may well have exonerated her. But future cases may have different, less favorable conditions.

On July 22, Meyer, Potter and several other groups and individuals filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Utah's Ag Gag law, which Meyer calls “a blatant violation of free speech and freedom of the press.”

In implementing Ag Gag laws, the agricultural industry has set a highly restrictive example that other industries may soon follow. With the precedent already set, lawmakers will see little reason to extend favorable treatment to one sector and not to every other. By then, prosecuting whistleblowers on behalf of corporations will be business as usual.

A severe drought in the Southwest is devastating crops and farm communities—and sending a warning about climate change.

Leighton Akio Woodhouse

Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone cont.

May be the best movie of the year...

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa - Official Trailer



thanks, Luke!

I guess it is possible, a kid can be a trickster and have good style...

Can't front on this...

Ben Nordberg Flip Video

WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE WHEN A 6.5 EARTHQUAKE HITS IN THE MIDDLE OF ‘FLY ME TO THE MOON’

“Fly Me to the Moon” interrupted by a 6.5 earthquake in Wellington, New Zealand. This occurred during the recording of a live album at 5:09 pm on July 21.



from Dangerous Minds

Johnny Rotten's Tour of London

from Dangerous Minds, I really enjoyed this old bastard ...

This is a wee treat: Johnny Rotten gives a guided tour of London, circa 2009. Full of his usual face-gurning, straightforward honesty and acerbic wit, Mr. Rotten explains his love of London is more to do with its people than the city itself. He also expresses his concern that London, like the the rest of the country is slowly doomed.

“It’s the Americanization of the universe, isn’t it? Sooner or later, Britain will become a shopping mall for American tourists.”

Of course, old men always like to talk about how things were better in their day, and yes, there is an element of this here, but Mr. Rotten’s spikiness and humor keeps things nicely ticking along.

The runaway greenhouse effect, how scary is it?

from National Geographic, via Boing Boing

Robert Kunzig, at National Geographic, interviews climate scientist and author Robert Hansen on the runaway greenhouse effect and its likelihood to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming. "What my results show is that if you put about ten times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as you would get from burning all the coal, oil, and gas—about 30,000 parts per million—then you could cause a runaway greenhouse today. So burning all the fossil fuels won't give us a runaway greenhouse. However, the consequences will still be dire. It won't sterilize the planet, but it might topple Western civilization. There are no theoretical obstacles to that."

Will Earth's Ocean Boil Away?
Yes—a billion years from now, as the sun gets brighter. But could we make it happen sooner through climate change?

In his book Storms of my Grandchildren, noted climate scientist James Hansen issued the following warning: "[I]f we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty."

Venus has a thick atmosphere that is 96.5 percent carbon dioxide, which keeps its surface at nearly 900°F (482°C). The planet's water boiled off to space long ago. Could that really happen on Earth, which is farther from the sun, and where the CO2 level is just now rising past 400 parts per million?

The key to the argument is a well-documented positive feedback loop. As carbon dioxide warms the planet through the greenhouse effect, more water evaporates from the ocean—which amplifies the warming, because water vapor is a greenhouse gas too. That positive feedback is happening now. Hansen argues that fossil-fuel burning could cause the process to run out of control, vaporizing the entire ocean and sterilizing the planet.

Respected as Hansen is, the argument hasn't convinced climate scientists who specialize in the evolution of planetary atmospheres. During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 56 million years ago, a huge natural spike in CO2 sent temperatures on Earth soaring—but life went on and the ocean remained intact.

"I think you can say we're still safe against the Venus syndrome," says Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago. "If we were going to run away, we'd probably have done it during the PETM."

In the past few years, however, physicists have been training supercomputers on the lowly water molecule, calculating its properties from first principles—and finding that it absorbs more radiation at more wavelengths than they'd realized before. In a paper published this week in Nature Geosciences, those calculations have rippled into a simple climate model. The paper's conclusion contains this slightly unsettling sentence: "The runaway greenhouse may be much easier to initiate than previously thought."

National Geographic asked the lead author, Colin Goldblatt of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, to explain.

In an earlier paper, published just last year, you wrote that "it is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger a runaway greenhouse."

Yeah—and I was wrong! I was plain wrong then.

What do you say now?

It used to be thought that a runaway greenhouse was not theoretically possible for Earth with its present amount of sunlight. We've shown that, to the contrary, it is theoretically possible. That doesn't mean it's going to happen—but it's theoretically possible.

What changed?

The models we had were underestimating the amount of radiation that would be absorbed in a water-vapor-rich atmosphere.

How does that connect to the runaway greenhouse?

Going back to absolute basics—the surface of the Earth emits radiation, and some of that radiation gets absorbed in the atmosphere by gases like CO2 and water vapor. This means less radiation can get out to space than if there were no greenhouse atmosphere. Or conversely, to get the same amount of radiation out to space to balance the energy you're getting from the sun, the surface needs to be hotter. That's what's happening now: Because we're making the greenhouse effect stronger, the Earth is heating up so it will come back into balance.

Now, if you put enough water vapor in the atmosphere, any radiation from the surface will get absorbed before it gets out to space—all of it, everything. Only the upper part of the atmosphere can emit radiation to space. So it turns out there's a fixed amount of radiation you can emit to space once you have enough water vapor.

It's like if you take a layer of tinted glass—one layer, you'll be able to see through. But if you stack up 10, 20, or 100 layers, you can't see through it.

So the runaway greenhouse effect happens when the amount of incoming solar radiation exceeds this fixed limit?

Exactly. It happens when you absorb more sunlight than you can emit thermal radiation. And what I've shown here, which is new, is that the limit on how much radiation Earth can get out to space is smaller than we previously thought. And the amount of sunlight that will be absorbed in a water-vapor-rich atmosphere is bigger than we previously thought. So the implication for the Earth now is that it is possible to absorb more sunlight than you could emit to space from a water-vapor-rich atmosphere.

But your model does not consider the moderating effect of clouds.

That's correct. You start off with the simplest model you can, and then you build in complexity. We've calculated the maximum amount of sunlight Earth will absorb and the maximum amount of thermal radiation it will emit. So the next step will be to do some modeling with clouds in, which will probably modify the answers.

Clouds reflect sunlight, but if you put them high enough in the atmosphere, they'll also have a greenhouse effect. On Earth today, the reflection effect dominates—clouds overall have a cooling effect.

What does your work say about Hansen's warning?

What my results show is that if you put about ten times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as you would get from burning all the coal, oil, and gas—about 30,000 parts per million—then you could cause a runaway greenhouse today. So burning all the fossil fuels won't give us a runaway greenhouse. However, the consequences will still be dire. It won't sterilize the planet, but it might topple Western civilization. There are no theoretical obstacles to that.

What does Venus teach us?

Because Venus is nearer the sun, it gets more energy from the sun than we do—it's like standing nearer the campfire. We think Venus experienced this runaway greenhouse early in its history. Venus's past is Earth's future.

The sun increases its luminosity slowly with time. At the beginning of the solar system, the sun was only 70 percent as bright as it is now. It's going to keep getting brighter. Given that the runaway greenhouse happens when there's more solar radiation absorbed than we can emit thermal radiation, it's just going to happen.

When?

In somewhere between half a billion and a billion years.

At the end of your 2012 paper, you suggested we might forestall that by moving Earth's orbit farther from the sun.

I put that in as a little joke—as a little nod to Don Korycansky, an astronomer. When Don first proposed that you could just move the Earth out with gravity assists from asteroids, he ended up on the Daily Show talking about it.

As a species we are technologically adolescent at the moment. If we get through adolescence, if we get through the next couple of hundred years alive, as a mature species who is not screwing up the planet that we live on, and then if you're talking about on timescales of hundreds of millions of years—how are we going to keep our planet alive? Then I think that's the kind of thing you might start to think about.

Incredible Online Gallery of High-Res Film Scans from Every Apollo Mission

The title sort of gives it away, but did you know that there is an online archive that contains high-resolution film scans from every Apollo mission? The gallery contains all of the incredible photos taken during each of the missions — from Apollo 1 all the way through Apollo 17 — with some 1,000+ photos from Apollo 11 alone. 

 The archive, officially the Apollo Image Gallery, was put together by the Project Apollo Archive by scanning photographs provided by the NASA History Office, Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center.

 Since all of these images were taken by NASA astronauts in the course of duty, they’re all Public Domain and free for you to browse through, download, share and use to your heart’s content.

Unfortunately, the website can be a bit of a hassle to navigate through — there’s no way to browse image after image in any sort of slide show format — but it’s a relatively small con when you consider the work it took to scan and bring all of these photos under one roof. 

From photos taken on the moon and in space, to press release photos and training exercises it’s all there in glorious high-resolution. Here’s a selection of images taken from all of the Apollo missions, complete with descriptions in the captions: 

 flight to travel beyond low Earth orbit.
These are just some of our favorites that we found while browsing the massive archive. There are literally thousands more where these came from. 

To check out the full gallery for yourself — or if you’d like to see any of the photos we shared above in beautiful high-resolution — head over to the Project Apollo Archive’s image gallery by clicking HERE.

The Worst Places To Live In The Universe

from POPSCI.com







When it rains on COROT-7b, it rains rocks.

HD 189773b, 63 light-years away, looks nice and Earthlike. But it's not. It's about 1270 K on its surface and it rains glass. Sideways.

read all about the fucked up places and cherish our own planet a little more after doing so. Here at Popsci.com

A One-Episode Show With a Lasting Impact on Hip-Hop GRAFFITI ROCK

ONLY A FEW DAYS LEFT TO SUPPORT 30th ANNIVERSARY



from the New York Times

By DAVID GONZALEZ

When it comes to hip-hop pioneers, years before MTV rapped, Michael Holman repped.

He first made his mark in the early 1980s as a journalist and filmmaker who documented the emerging urban blend of graffiti, rapping, D.J.-ing and B-boying. He took Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, to witness Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jay mixing beats at an open-air free-for-all in the maze of brick towers at the Bronx River Houses. That, in turn, inspired the British impresario to have Mr. Holman bring a hip-hop revue to the Ritz in Manhattan to open for Bow Wow Wow.

By 1984, Mr. Holman was the host of “Graffiti Rock,” a nationally syndicated television show that had him presiding over a sea of bobbing Kangol caps and swiftly moving, fat-laced Adidas sneakers, as the likes of Run-DMC had lyrical battles with members of the Treacherous Three, all set against a multicolored aerosol backdrop. People still talk about the show; Polish B-boys copied dance moves step for step. Rappers sampled parts of the show, as the Beastie Boys did on the intro to “Alright, Hear This.”

Mind you, it lasted only one episode.

“That was my tragedy. I was ahead of my time,” Mr. Holman said. “I had ‘trend-heimer’s’ disease. The station managers thought rap was a passing fad. Who knew where this was going to go?”

Actually, he did.

A conversation about pop culture with him crisscrosses the late 20th century, peppered with references to Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab Five Freddy and the Rock Steady Crew. It is not name-dropping, but a reflection of his wide-ranging interests in painting, music, journalism and film.

Since arriving in New York in the late 1970s, he has been adept at sizing up pop culture. Among his early friends and collaborators in New York was Basquiat, with whom he formed the band Gray. As he became part of the downtown scene, he grew curious about some of the uptown parties he had heard about from people like Fred Brathwaite, who would later gain fame as the host of “Yo! MTV Raps” in 1988.

“When I came downtown, part of the news I was spreading was about this new culture coming out of Harlem and the Bronx,” Fab Five Freddy said. “Michael was one of the first people I met on the scene, and I kind of introduced it to him. And he dove right in.”

Mr. Holman went from writing about the different elements of this early scene, in the East Village Eye and Artforum, to playing a pivotal role in its global spread when he persuaded Mr. McLaren, a British trendsetter, to check out one of Mr. Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation parties at the Bronx River Houses in 1982. Yet when Mr. Holman picked up Mr. McLaren at his Midtown hotel, they almost did not make it to the party.

“Remember the New Romantic movement with pirates and Indians?” Mr. Holman recalled. “Malcolm was dressed like a pirate, with a puffy blouse and these big pantaloons. I thought, there was no way we could go up there with him dressed like that.”

But they did.

“It was like something out of Joseph Conrad,” Mr. Holman said. “There were like 1,000 kids rocking to Bambaataa, and the beats were thumping off the buildings. These were the kids who were too young to go to Studio 54 or a Luther Vandross concert. They were junior high school kids. And Bambaataa had a captive audience.”

That encounter inspired Mr. McLaren to ask Mr. Holman to bring a hip-hop revue to open for Bow Wow Wow at the Ritz, which in turn led to a regular Thursday spot at Negril in the East Village. Two years later, “Graffiti Rock” had its exceedingly brief run.

“That show was seen by so many people who blew up in the ’90s, like Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest,” he said of younger members of his audience, some of whom went on to achieve success. “I knew in my heart when I was putting it together that kids his age, 10, 11, 12, that was the exact target market. He was not only the future, but the future of hip-hop.”

Mr. Holman still thinks the short-lived show has a future, which is why he is raising funds through Kickstarter to finish a 30th anniversary documentary on the making of “Graffiti Rock” and its vision of hip-hop’s various elements of art, music and dance.

He would especially like to remind well-off rappers like Jay-Z, who compares himself to Basquiat on his latest release, that it is not all ancient history.

“There is a part of hip-hop that did not become such a commercial success as rap did,” Mr. Holman said. “The other elements are still somewhat in the shadows of rap. But they’re part of an indigenous New York City culture that needs to be celebrated. We need to return rap to its roots, where it needs to be.”

SUPPORT MICHAEL -

30th Anniv. release of the first ever Hip Hop TV Show, "Graffiti Rock", & new Hip Hop documentary "Graffiti Rock: The Untold Story"

Great Video celebrating Mark Gonzales 15 years with Adidas

THE MONKEES: Complete Un-Aired TV Pilot from 1965

from DangerousMinds

When series creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider shot the un-aired 16mm pilot (something that would now probably be called a “sizzle reel” in show biz lingo) for The Monkees, the Pre-Fab Four weren’t even miming along to their own voices.

It starts off with some charming B&W screen test footage from Davy Jones and Michael Nesmith, then still going by his stage name “Michael Blessing” but credited here as Nesmith. (Micky Dolenz, however was called “Micky Braddock” then, as you can see above)

At 6:14, you can hear Boyce and Hart’s demo version of the show’s theme and a decidedly less colorful opening credit sequence. At 9:23, Boyce and Hart’s demo of “I Wanna Be Free” is heard while the group mime along. At 22:06 you see them and hear Boyce and Hart’s “Let’s Dance On” demo.

It’s (mildly, of course) jarring, to say nothing of the Monkeemobile being a broke-ass old station wagon…

In terms of the plot, it’s one of their typical, Davy with (literally) stars in his eyes over a girl story-lines. The pilot episode was remade properly for the NBC series (with the same pretty blonde actress for Davy to moon over) the following year as “Here Comes The Monkees,” episode #10. Again they used the B&W screen test footage, but at the end this time, and by then the group was at least miming along to their own voices.

The Science of Hip Hop with GZA (Part 1)

#RealTalk

from StarTalkRadio.net

If you think rap music is just about violence, then you’re about to have your preconceptions shattered. Columbia Asst. Professor of Science Education and hip hop culture expert Dr. Christopher Emdin joins Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice to explain how he uses rap to connect inner city youth to science. For instance, Chris says that Kanye West’s use of bullet sounds in a song can teach kids the physics of the Doppler Effect. But the soul of the episode comes from Neil’s interview with rapper GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan. They explore science as a creative muse, and GZA talks about the difference between how he thinks of his music and how fans relate to albums like Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). GZA talks about growing up in the ‘hood and how violence often is a choice. Part 1 ends with Neil and The Genius spitting a cosmic verse together, leaving us hanging for Part 2 next week.

Snow and Arctic sea ice extent plummet suddenly as globe bakes

from The Washington Post

Temperature difference from average during June around the globe (NASA)

NOAA and NASA both ranked June 2013 among the top five warmest (NOAA fifth warmest, NASA second warmest) Junes on record globally (dating back to the late 1800s). But, more remarkable, was the incredible snow melt that preceded the toasty month and the sudden loss of Arctic sea ice that followed.


NH snow cover extent difference from average April to May (NOAA)

The amazing decline in Northern Hemisphere snow cover during May is a story few have told, but is certainly worth noting. In April, hefty Northern Hemisphere snow cover ranked 9th highest on record (dating back to 1967), but then turned scant, plummeting to third lowest on record during May. Half of the existing snow melted away.

“This is likely one of the most rapid shifts in near opposite extremes on record, if not the largest from April to May,” said climatologist David Robinson, who runs Rutgers University Global Snow Lab.

The snow extent shrunk from 12.4 million square miles to 6.2 million square miles in a month’s time. By June, just 2.3 million square miles of snow remained in the Northern Hemisphere (a decline of 63 percent from May), third lowest on record.

“In recent years it hasn’t seemed that unusual to have average or even above average winter snow extent rapidly diminish to below average values come spring,” Robinson said.

Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover is in the midst of long-term free fall, similar to its relative, summer Arctic sea ice extent.

You may recall, late last summer the Arctic sea ice extent dropped to its lowest level on record, 49 percent below the 1979-2000 average.


Temperature difference from normal over the high latitude Northern Hemisphere over first 10 days of July (National Snow and Ice Data Center)

It’s not clear if 2013 levels will match 2012′s astonishing record low, but – with temperatures over the Arctic Ocean 1-3 degrees above average – the 2013 melt season has picked up in earnest during July.

“During the first two weeks of July, ice extent declined at a rate of 132,000 square kilometers (51,000 square miles) per day. This was 61% faster than the average rate of decline over the period 1981 to 2010 of 82,000 square kilometers (32,000 square miles) per day,” the National Snow and Ice Data Center writes on its website.

Despite this rapid ice loss, the current mid-July 2013 sea ice extent is greater than 2012 at the same time by about 208,000 square miles NSIDC says.


2013 sea ice extent (blue line) compared to average (black line) and record (dahsed green line). (National Snow and Ice Data Center)

Will 2013 close the gap? That depends on the weather, as the Arctic Sea Ice blog explains:

….the amount of easy-to-melt ice is starting to run out. Even though this year’s ice pack consists of a record amount of first-year ice [which melts most readily], the weather still plays an important role. . . .

. . . there’s no telling what could happen if the weather is very conducive to melting/compacting/transport for a week or two….

Jason Samenow is the Capital Weather Gang's chief meteorologist and serves as the Washington Post's Weather Editor. He earned BA and MS degrees in atmospheric science from the University of Virginia and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

check out all the graphs here at the original post in the Washington Post

"SeaWorld, ‘Blackfish’ and the Corporate Abuse of Captive Whales"

Big Marine Parks are Abusing Orcas… Here’s Why We Need to Evolve and Stop Enslaving Marine Mammals

by Amy Nicole from UltraCulture.org

At the end of the SeaWorld show, the crowd leaves and goes home. The trainers get into their street clothes, jump into their cars and drive home to friends and family. But Tilikum the orca, and others like him, cannot go home. Tilikum is left alone, floating motionless in a silent, barren, chemically treated concrete tank very far from home, perhaps looking up at the moon and feeling its tidal pull, perhaps dreaming of his family and what it would be like to swim and swim, without any walls or barriers. When the sun comes up, though, he will still be there. And when you’ve finished reading this, he will still be there.

Tilikum is an orca, or killer whale, that was captured in wild Icelandic waters in 1983 at age two. After being brutally taken from his matrilineal family group, Tilikum was sent to live in a sea park in British Columbia, Canada. There, a trainer accidentally fell into the tank Tilikum shared with two other orcas and was “tossed about” by the three killer whales, until her corpse was recovered by park staff. Tilikum was then shipped to Sea World in Orlando Florida, where he has remained, being forced to perform circus tricks for crowds and routinely having his sperm “harvested” for the park’s breeding purposes.

The Orcinus orca (genus name meaning “kingdom of the dead”) is actually part of the oceanic dolphin family, and is made up of the three subspecies: resident, transient and offshore. Residents are fish eating whales that stay with their mothers for life, in tightly knit family groups called matrilines. They gather with close family members in “pods”, which are four to five matrilines combined. “Clans” consist of a few pods combined, and “communities” are a group of clans. Resident killer whales never stray from their social structures and will only mate with individuals from different pods. Their vocalizations are complex and family specific, and share little with transient whales who eat marine mammals and have a completely different social structure, dialect and culture. 2 million years ago these subspecies parted ways, and genetic data shows that although residents and transients live in the same areas, they avoid each other, and have not interbred for 10,000 years.

That is, until the SeaWorld theme park decided they would take the sperm of a transient whale and artificially inseminate a resident whale. The resulting births were difficult. One mother refused to feed her baby and became aggressive with trainers and other whales. Another died while giving birth in a painful twenty-four hour labor. She was only twenty years of age, and this was her fourth calf, something unheard of in the wild, as resident whales only start reproducing at age fifteen, and spend up to five years with each calf.

Orcas normally swim up to 100 miles per day in the open ocean, spending most of that time with their families. In captivity they spend most of their time totally alone or grouped with unfamiliar whales with whom they share no ancestral, social or vocal similarities. The acoustically dead tanks are prison-like, and many orcas lash out and ram each other, as Kandu V did in 1989 at SeaWorld California, severing an artery in the process. She bled to death in front of the audience for 45 minutes, spraying blood out of her blowhole. It was the 4,332nd day of her captivity in a tank.



Nobody is This Stupid… Right?

I remember going to SeaWorld in Florida when I was a kid. I was initially excited to see the animals, but the shows seemed sad to me. It felt corny, canned and overdone. “Nobody is this stupid,” I thought, “especially the whales.” I could feel that even as an eight year old. Yet after decades of the orca’s documented physical, mental and emotional suffering, humans still insist on keeping and breeding killer whales in tanks to entertain ourselves. One must ask the question: Why? Why is it that the most fundamentally offensive and obscene ideas still persist in a culture that fancies itself sophisticated, scientifically advanced and fair?

These great beasts break their teeth trying to chew through crude metal grates we put up to keep them trapped. Their teeth are then drilled through to remove the rotten portions. Their mouths are washed out three times a day to prevent bacterial infections. Antibiotics are hidden in their frozen food rations. Many of them get the infections anyway and die. But we’re sophisticated, scientifically advanced and fair enough to have whale cum on reserve, that we gathered without their permission so that we can create new inbred whales for new monstrous “shows.”

And, oh, what shows they are. Seizure inducing lights, screaming guitar solos, and armies of trainers withholding food until the right tricks are performed on cue with the cymbal crash… that’s not an accurate portrait of ocean life. There’s something very wrong here if we as a species are just now getting around to realizing this is shameful. It illustrates, again, just how deep our species-ism is. How low we’ve sunk in the race to the bottom.



In Indonesia and the Philippines, people catch dolphins, put them into small tanks in pick-up trucks and drive them to parking lots as displays for the on-looking humans. The majority of the dolphins die from the shock. One particular story recounted how a dolphin gave birth in such a parking lot tank, and both parent and baby died. The people then went back to the ocean to kidnap another unlucky dolphin. We hear a story like this and are disgusted, yet we allow places like SeaWorld, Seaquarium or Marineland to exist. Why? Because they have fancier tanks? Fancier lights, seats and memorabilia? Or is it just better PR?

The Loneliest Whale in the World

Lolita was captured on a tragic day off the coast of Washington state in 1970. Workers from that incident recount crying as the screaming baby whales were lifted out of the ocean for the last time. One mother and four other adolescents drowned trying to free themselves from the nets and bomb blasts. The workers were told to slice them open, fill their bodies with rocks and anchors and sink them, disposing of the evidence. Miraculously, their bodies washed ashore months later. The public was outraged, but the Miami Seaquarium was happy to show off their live catch: southern resident killer whale Lolita and a male southern resident named Hugo, who was captured earlier. Since they were from the same family, they began calling to each other from their tanks, and were eventually put together. They became close mates, but Hugo would often ram the windows and walls of the pool out of frustration. After ten years he finally killed himself in this manner, trying to escape his prison cell.

Lolita, who was found bumping up against his lifeless body, was forced to perform the very next day. She has been alone ever since, and is now forty-two. Her pool is only twenty feet deep; yet she is twenty-two feet long, so her tail drags on the bottom of the tank when popping up to eat fish. Her mother and pod members who share her same dialect are still alive off the Washington coast, and have been awarded endangered species status. Lolita was omitted from this ruling, and there are lawsuits raging to free her. She has been called the loneliest whale in the world.

Due to his infamous 2010 attack on late trainer Dawn Brancheau, Tilikum was relegated to solitary confinement as well. SeaWorld claims he “got confused” and pulled her pony tail underwater, mistaking it for a toy. But Tilikum’s toys were all plastic, and Dawn didn’t merely drown: her scalp was ripped off, along with her left arm, and her vertebrae were snapped. Orcas have an instinct to hunt and kill, and they are being driven mad in these gaudy sea circuses.

A year after the incident, Tilikum was living each day isolated from the other whales, completely without toys, stimulation, or even a sunshade; he was seen listlessly bobbing for ten hours in a tank. As the “Believe” show went on without him, he floated by the gate of his pool looking out towards the other whales who were leaping and cavorting for fish. Although Tilikum may never get to go fully back to the wild due to his damaged teeth, he could clearly be released to a coastal sea pen that would allow some sort of semblance of normalcy. Yet the theme park refuses to retire him, preferring instead to extract his sperm for future captive cetaceans. This magnificent beast, 12,000 pound Tilikum, has been thrown under the bus by SeaWorld.

There are many other killer whales SeaWorld keeps hostage, knowing their pods still exist and they could go home. Release or rehabilitation is the only answer a sane, sophisticated and fair society should accept. Research has shown that female orcas can live up to ninety years in the wild, the males around sixty. Yet in captivity the average lifespan is less than twenty years, in some cases less than ten. Drs. Jett and Ventre, former SeaWorld trainers, assert, “a review of the scientific literature suggests that very little new knowledge is being generated as a result of orca captivity… The time has come to evolve beyond keeping killer whales confined in small, unnatural spaces, purely for entertainment purposes.”



In fact, things are looking quite grim for the marine theme park industry today: numerous trainer attacks and deaths, negative press, OSHA rulings, USDA-APHIS (Animal Plant Health Inspection Service) reports, and damning evidence from whistleblowers have all lined up against the sea circuses. In addition, numerous high profile documentaries (one, Lolita: Slave to Entertainment, on Lolita’s plight, and the other, Blackfish, are set to reveal more about Tilikum) have shown the world the slimy underbelly of marine mammal captivity. Even India has recently banned travelling dolphin shows. Public awareness is at a tipping point, and eco tours are allowing people the chance to see killer whales in the oceans of the world.

When a recording of a whale pod was played to captive members of that same pod, they all stopped moving in their tanks. The squeaks and calls, clicks and whistles were spelling out specific things for these whales. We have no idea what they felt when hearing their ancient dialect sung, but these hostages probably felt what other hostages have felt when seeing a video or hearing a tape of their loved ones.

Imagine you’re walking with your family in a park, when suddenly a UFO appears and brutally kidnaps you. Some of your family dies in the attack. You’re left wondering if these aliens are going to kill you. Instead, they put you in a mock up of a park, about the size of a room, and force you to do various physical tricks that you would normally do when playing with your family in a park. Over and over, for decades, you live like this while other aliens come to watch, sometimes to dine, sometimes buying stuffed dolls made in your visage. Sometimes they bring in other humans, but rarely do you speak the same language or get along. They take your sperm and make babies that you will never see, but that you know exist. If you had the chance, you could maybe break out—somehow get back home. You walk around your “park” day and night, dreaming of your home and lost family. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of the moon.

X - The Unheard Music (Documentary)

X: The Unheard Music takes long, detailed, and often funny look at the Los Angeles music scene of the late '70s and '80s and focuses on the group that critics deigned the leader of the underground pack. X: The Unheard Music combines live footage of the band and interviews with the four members (as well as their friends and families) with surreal music videos and montages of newsreel footage and vintage television commercials which help to illustrate the band's uphill struggle against the music industry. Their story rings true even today.

It's Still Fucking Hot

California version (1966)

It's Fucking Hot Here in New York

In 1969, Life magazine captured both the energy and the misery of a hot summer day in the city.
Here's some of the 31 Photos Of New York City In The Summer Of ‘69 found on Buzzfeed

CLICK TO ENLARGE