Wednesday, October 26, 2022

What's in the water?

Science post.  Michael Martin (BEST LIFE) reports:



Sharks may have some competition for the most terrifying occupant of the oceans. Scientists have discovered a 100-foot-long brine pool at the bottom of the Red Sea that kills everything that swims into it. There are just a few dozen deep-sea brine pools in the world. They contain so little oxygen and so much salt that they're "among the most extreme environments on Earth," says Live Science.




Found in just three bodies of water—the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea—they range in size from a few thousand square feet to nearly a square mile. But scientists aren't just interested in the pools because of their murderous tendencies. Deep-sea brine pools may lead to the development of new medicines and explain centuries of environmental patterns. They could even shed light on the origins of life on Earth, a new study says.



Staying underwater, Joe Fisher (UPI) reports:


Scientists studying the evolution of acoustic communication in vertebrates discovered that 53 species of sea creatures, once thought to be silent, have been communicating after all.

The study, published by scientific journal Nature Communications, says sea dwelling vertebrates such as turtles and lungfish audibly communicate. Unlike frogs and birds, their sounds are difficult to detect and infrequent.

Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, a PhD student at University of Zurich, Switzerland, initiated the study in hopes of confirming whether choanate vertebrates, which have a thinner or softer wall at posterior opening of the nasal cavity, all communicate acoustically. He discovered that these 53 species not only make sound, but they do so in connection to a desired action or response.


Turtles, for example, begin making sound when they are still in their egg, indicating they will hatch soon. This is one reason why they will often hatch simultaneously. They will also communicate when they wish to mate with a partner.



Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich's Paleontological Institute and Museum and lead author of the study, said their findings provide evidence of "acoustic abilities in several groups previously considered non-vocal."

He specifically pointed to turtles, which his team found show "broad and complex acoustic repertoires." Turtles will make sounds to indicate when they are ready to mate, he said, but they also communicate with each other long before that – before they even hatch.

"Sea turtles will sing from within their egg to synchronize hatching," he said in an interview BBC News. "If they call from inside, they all come out together and hopefully avoid being eaten."




One type of sea turtle, Natator depressus, otherwise known as the flatback turtle, was recorded making sounds that resemble croaks, scrapes and chirps. And the South American river turtle makes sounds while caring for its young, Jorgewich-Cohen said.








Can you hold your breath a little longer?  Mark Waghorn (THE TALKER) notes:

Octopuses evolved from shellfish, according to new research.

The eight-limbed creatures' mysterious origins have been traced back to a clam-like animal that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.

It looked like Argonauta argo - a species found in tropical and subtropical open seas.

Females have a protective, spiral casing which protects the eggs inside.

They resemble the commonly known pearly nautilus - a very distant relative which has a hard shell and thrives on the ocean floor.

The findings could help alien hunters. Octopuses are regarded as the closest thing to how alien life may have evolved.


For the AVATAR movies, Sigourney Weaver's learned to hold her breath for six minutes.  Hope it didn't feel that long with the above.

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Wednesday, October 26, 2022.  Cowards in Congress and homophobes in the court define the US while Iraq has a rare arrest and conviction in the murder of a protester.


Noted homophobe Cathy Miller of Bakersfield, California is being allowed to practice her homophobia and Georgetown homophobe and FOX 'NEWS' 'scholar' Jonathan Turley gets as close to jizzing as a man his age can over her court win.

Turley likes to present himself as a free speech advocate but every year with FOX 'NEWS' takes him further and further away from reality.  In his rush to celebrate discrimination, he loses whatever is left of his legal mind.


Idiot Cathy thinks she's an artist and idiots like Turley have encouraged her in that delusion.  She's a hateful person who doesn't know anything including her own supposed religion.

Idiot Cathy would be traumatized if she had to make a cake if it were for a gay couple getting married!!!! It would destroy her life.


Reality, she provides a service.  That's all she does.  This is not freedom of speech.


In the current climate where Jewish people are being attacked and many people have valid concerns about a revival of the KKK, we don't need more discrimination.  But Turley's on board with it because he's a homophobe.


You carry this nonsense out to the logical conclusion and you see how damaging it is.


You are stranded  because you ran out of gas and the only service station refuses to sell you gas because you're a gay couple and it would violate their free speech rights.  And let's expand it because that is what happens with hate.  So then some bigot gets to insist that their religion doesn't allow for interracial couples and then they're the ones denied service.  Or they insist that their faith means that they only sell to those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior so Jews, Muslims, et al will not be served.


No one's asked Idiot Cathy to attend a gay wedding.  She's supposed to be baking a cake.  That is her job.  But she think she can refuse service based upon what the customer does in bed.  It's discrimination, it's not free speech.  She can worship however she wants.  But if she has a business, she can't discriminate.


This is discrimination and lets invoke those two infamous words: "Slippery slope."  


You allow her to discriminate against gays and then you allow the next person to discriminate against mixed-race couples, against people based on their skin color, against people based upon their religion or lack of religion.


She bakes cakes.  I must have missed -- like she missed the part about the Good Samaritan -- the verse on "Thou shall not bake cakes for those you disagree with."  


And on Jonathan Turley, I hope your campus is taking a good luck at what you're inspiring in the comments of your website.  I hope they're seeing the effect that you are having.  I hope they're registering how you regularly issue cover-your-ass statements regarding January 6th or racism when you write about those topics but that you've fostered homophobia online by never feeling the need to even incldue the weak ass defense of "Naturally, I support the rights of LGBTQ Americans."  I hope they're seeing it because it won't be long before they've got a student complaining about your discrimination in the classroom because the two go hand and hand.


Some people are ridiculous and live their later years in fear.  Jonathan's made the choice to be one of those people.


From the embarrassment of Jonathan Turley, let's move to another -- Democrats in Congress.  Eric London (WSWS) reports:

 On Monday, 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to President Joe Biden suggesting the US negotiate with Russia to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The letter cited “the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation” and expressed concern that the war is forcing billions of people worldwide to suffer loss of access to food and other necessities.

On Tuesday, with the “catastrophic possibilities” just as great as the day before, the Democratic signatories—including all four congressional members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—withdrew their letter, repudiated calls for negotiation and pledged their full support for the war.

The reversal was immediate and total. In a statement published Tuesday, Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (Democrat-Washington state) called Monday’s letter “unfortunate” and apologized on behalf of the letter’s signatories for causing a “distraction” to the war effort. “The Congressional Progressive Caucus hereby withdraws its recent letter to the White House regarding Ukraine,” she stated. Not a single member of the caucus voiced any opposition to the reversal.

Jayapal did not merely withdraw the letter, she also committed the caucus to support the war until Russia is forced to capitulate. “Every war ends with diplomacy,” she wrote, “and this one will too after Ukrainian victory.” But according to the letter issued on Monday, if the Russian government lacks “a realistic framework for a ceasefire,” then the “risk of catastrophic escalation” will only grow. While the signatories wrote Monday that “the alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks,” on Tuesday they chose “protracted war” and accepted the risks.

Such is the reactionary dynamic of Democratic Party politics. This profile in political cowardice once again demonstrates that the Democratic Party, like its Republican counterpart, is nothing but a political pillar of American imperialism. It is a vehicle for prosecuting Wall Street’s reckless drive for world domination. Its “left” wing, represented by politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat-New York), is no exception.

These heroes of the upper middle class “left” are scrambling over one another to erase their signatures from Monday’s letter asking for negotiations. In a transparently false attempt to blame her subordinates, Jayapal (who claims to be a supporter of the rights of employees against employers) ignominiously said the letter “unfortunately was released by staff without our vetting.”

Many signatories employed the same phrases to explain that they no longer support negotiations, as though they were reading from a common script. Mark Pocan (Democrat-Wisconsin) tweeted, “I have no idea why it went out now. Bad timing.” Sara Jacobs (Democrat-California) said, “Timing in diplomacy is everything. I signed this letter on June 30, but a lot has changed since then.” Ilhan Omar (Democrat-Minnesota), who was endorsed by the DSA, said, “Timing is everything in public policy, letters are written to respond to a moment and in politics moments pass in the speed of light. In this particular case, the letter was a response to intel we were getting on the war and the pathway forward.”

Omar’s allusion to receiving “intel” in briefings from the CIA and Pentagon is further proof that the pseudo-left is an arm of US imperialism which “responds” to the demands of the military-intelligence agencies. The “intel” Omar and the rest of the Progressive Caucus received in the wake of Monday’s letter was that they must immediately withdraw it and reverse course, which they promptly did.


Here are four video reports on this nonsense.







Chris Hedges (SCHEERPOST) offers:

I have covered enough wars to know that once you open that Pandora’s box, the many evils that pour out are beyond anyone’s control. War accelerates the whirlwind of industrial killing. The longer any war continues, the closer and closer each side comes to self-annihilation.  Unless it is stopped, the proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine all but guarantees direct confrontation with Russia and, with it, the very real possibility of nuclear war.

Joe Biden, who doesn’t always seem to be quite sure where he is or what he is supposed to be saying, is being propped up in the I-am-a-bigger-man-than-you contest with Vladimir Putin by a coterie of rabid warmongers who have orchestrated over 20 years of military fiascos. They are salivating at the prospect of taking on Russia, and then, if there is any habitation left on the globe, China. Trapped in the polarizing mindset of the Cold War — where any effort to de-escalate conflicts through diplomacy is considered appeasement, a perfidious Munich moment — they smugly push the human species closer and closer toward obliteration. Unfortunately for us, one of these true believers is Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Putin is saying he is not bluffing. Well, he cannot afford bluffing, and it has to be clear that the people supporting Ukraine and the European Union and the Member States, and the United States and NATO are not bluffing neither,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned. “Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian Army will be annihilated.”

Annihilated. Are these people insane?

You know we are in trouble when Donald Trump is the voice of reason.

“We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in world war three” the former president said. “And there will be nothing left of our planet — all because stupid people didn’t have a clue … They don’t understand what they’re dealing with, the power of nuclear.”

 I dealt with many of these ideologues — David Petraeus, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland — as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Once you strip away their chest full of medals or fancy degrees, you find shallow men and women, craven careerists who obsequiously serve the war industry that ensures their promotions, pays the budgets of their think tanks and showers them with money as board members of military contractors. They are the pimps of war. If you reported on them, as I did, you would not sleep well at night. They are vain enough and stupid enough to blow up the world long before we go extinct because of the climate crisis, which they have also dutifully accelerated.

If, as Joe Biden says, Putin is “not joking” about using nuclear weapons and we risk nuclear “Armageddon,” why isn’t Biden on the phone to Putin? Why doesn’t he follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly communicated with Nikita Khrushchev to negotiate an end to the Cuban missile crisis? Kennedy, who unlike Biden served in the military, knew the obtuseness of generals. He had the good sense to ignore Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff and head of the Strategic Air Command, as well as the model for General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove,” who urged Kennedy to bomb the Cuban missile bases, an act that would have probably ignited a nuclear war. Biden is not made of the same stuff.



Turning to Iraq where the big story remains the theft of $2.5 billion.  Since that story hit the news last week, an arrest has been made of a man at the airport trying to leave the country.  Sinan Mahmoud (THE NATIONAL) reports:


Iraq's judiciary claims to have traced and seized “most” of the $2.5 billion embezzled from government funds in the latest corruption case that has shocked the country and drawn UN condemnation.

The announcement of the recovered funds was made by a senior judge in charge of the investigation on Tuesday.

The latest scandal, revealed earlier this month by a government minister, has caused a political storm in corruption-plagued Iraq and is being dubbed domestically as “the theft of the century”.

In the embezzlement, an amount of 3.7 trillion Iraqi dinars (almost $2.5 billion) was fraudulently paid to five companies by the General Commission of Taxes, an office within the Ministry of Finance.


In other legal news, RUDAW notes:


An Iraqi court on Tuesday sentenced a man to death by hanging for the killing of an activist during the 2019 Tishreen protests, reported the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council.

Prominent activist Thaer al-Tayeb was severely wounded when a sticky device attached to his car exploded while he was on his way back to Diwaniyah from Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on December 15, 2019. He was announced dead in hospital two days later.

“The al-Qadisiyah criminal court issued a death sentence against Kifah al-Kuraiti after the assassination in Diwaniyah province which targeted activist Thaer al-Tayeb,” read a statement from the Iraqi judiciary.

The announcement of the activist’s death prompted angry protesters in Diwaniyah to set ablaze offices of the pro-Iran militias of Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) and Badr, and further charged the hundreds of thousands of people holding mass anti-corruption protests in most Iraqi provinces.


THE NEW ARAB reminds, "More than 600 Iraqi protesters were killed and tens of thousands wounded during the demonstrations. Some activists died in targeted assassinations, including former government adviser Hisham al-Hashemi who was shot near his home in July 2020."  THE NATIONAL adds:


Although departing Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi has repeatedly vowed to seek justice for the hundreds killed, most of the deaths have gone unpunished.

Two people were sentenced to death last year over the killing of a teenager who joined the protests.

Last year, the UN warned that Iraqi activists were being killed with impunity.

“The rights of many victims and their families to truth, justice, redress and reparation have not been fully respected,” it said in a report.


As we wind down, let's note BROS which is now available in the US on streaming.  Justin Heo (USC ANNENBERG MEDIA) notes:


From the quick-witted angry comedian, Eichner, who is best known for “Billy on the Street” (2011), and filmmakers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow, “Bros” is a rom-com about two men who fall in love. And not to be dramatic, but “Bros” is literally the best gay film I’ve ever seen.

Eichner plays Bobby Lieber, a successful podcaster and chairman of a committee that is overseeing the creation of the first LGBTQ history museum. Bobby takes on the same charms as Eichner: He’s intense and cynical yet crass and self-deprecating. He’s a 40-year-old gay man who has never been in a serious relationship until he meets Aaron, played by Luke Macfarlane.

“Bros” is an easy watch with some familiar story beats. The jokes are hilarious in both its writing and delivery, with standout performances from Bowen Yang and Jim Rash. The comedy is smart, largely critiquing gay culture without mocking it, and pokes fun at infighting among the LGBT community, impossible beauty standards and the promiscuity of gay men.

[. . .]

At its core, “Bros” is a hilarious movie that packs a lot more heart than expected. When the movie is funny, it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious, and when it’s sweet, it’s tear-jerking. There’s something very emotional about seeing a relatable representation of gay men, and “Bros” makes me optimistic for the future of gay cinema, especially as it stands to impact many more queer adolescents by widening its audience and accessibility.









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