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HOW TO BE A RESPONSIBLE STEWARD OF PLANET EARTH


Creating a better world for all through social media activism

Monday, December 28, 2015

Short-tailed Green Magpie

The Short-tailed Green Magpie (Cissa thalassina) © Florian Richter

Magpie with the two chicks in the nest and fledgling

      Magpie with the two chicks in the nest and fledgling

Javan Green Magpie

The new future for breeding The Javan Green Magpie (Cissa thalassina)
The Javan Green magpie is a CRITICALLY ENDANGERED bird, endemic to West Java, which is quite unknown. Few are known on its biology as this species is now difficult to find on the wild. This carnivorous and secretive bird is an inhabitant from deep and evergreen forests and it is thought that the species will be extinct in a couple of years, due to intensive trapping. Unfortunately, this species receives no protection measures which increase the risk and the speed of its coming extinction.

Link: http://www.cikanangawildlifecenter.com/?page_id=543

The Short-tailed Green Magpie (Cissa thalassina) © Florian Richter




Short-tailed Green Magpie
Cissa thalassina
Passeriforme Order – Corvidae Family


DESCRIPTION:
The Short-tailed Green Magpie is endemic to the montane forests of Borneo and Java.
This is a striking bright-coloured magpie.

These pictures show the race Crissa thalassina jefferyi from Borneo.

Both adults are similar.

The adult is light green overall, yellower on the crown and the underparts.
On the upperwing, the primary coverts and the flight feathers are reddish-chestnut. Tertials are pale green with black-edged tips.
The uppertail is bronze-green with light green uppertail-coverts. The tail is graduated and relatively short. The outer tail feathers show whitish tips.
The top of the head is light yellowish-green. We can see a conspicuous black mask extending from the bill base, across the eyes and the head sides to the nape. The green feathers of the hind crown form a short crest above the black band.
The strong bill, legs and feet are bright red. The eyes are dark brown with crimson eye-ring in nominate race. 



Link: http://www.oiseaux-birds.com/card-short-tailed-green-magpie.html


Wednesday, December 23, 2015

IF by Rudyard Kipling

 
 
(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)
 
If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
 
Source: A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)






 Link: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772#


Four-legged refugees now prowl cities. Can we adapt?



The Province of B.C., Canada has a Cheetah on the loose...


Search suspended for cheetah spotted along highway in Kootenay area of B.C.

CBC.ca‎ - Joe Caravetta, a B.C. Conservation Officer Service inspector, told the CBC he is certain the public is no longer in danger, but the service still wants to hear from the public if the animal is spotted.

Bright Lights, Big Predators

Richard Conniff  DEC. 19, 2015




Credit Andrew Holder
IT was tea break one afternoon this past May, in a business park in Mumbai, one of the world’s most crowded cities. The neighborhood was chockablock with new 35-story skyscrapers adorned with Greek temples on top. On the seventh-floor deck of one building, 20-something techies took turns playing foosball and studying the wooded hillside in back through a brass ship captain’s spyglass.


They were looking at a leopard, also on tea break, up a favorite tree where it goes to loaf many afternoons around 4:30. That is, it was a wild leopard living unfenced and apparently well fed in the middle of the city, on a dwindling forest patch roughly the size of Central Park between 59th and 71st Streets. When I hiked the hillside the next day, I found a massive slum just on the other side, heavy construction equipment nibbling at the far end, and a developer’s private helipad up top. And yet the leopard seemed to have mastered the art of avoiding people, going out by night to pick off dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, rats and other camp followers of human civilization.

Welcome to the future of urban living. Predators are turning up in cities everywhere, and living among us mostly without incident. Big, scary predators, at that.
Wolves now live next door to Rome’s main airport, and around Hadrian’s Villa, just outside the city.

A mountain lion roams the Hollywood Hills and has his own Facebook page. 

Coyotes have turned all of Chicago into their territory. 

Great white sharks, attracted by booming seal populations, cruise Cape Cod beaches with renewed frequency. 

And in a kind of urban predator twofer, a photographer in Vero Beach, Fla., recently snapped a bobcat grabbing a shark out of the surf.

Predators are living among people partly because they have fewer alternatives. The land area consumed by cities and suburbs has increased substantially over the past century and the rate of expansion is accelerating. 
 
Worldwide, urban acreage will triple in the first three decades of this century, consuming an additional 500,000 or so square miles of land, much of it in areas that are now critical wildlife habitat in Africa, China and India. That leopard on a hilltop in Mumbai didn’t move into the city. The city rose up and engulfed its world.

Many species are also getting used to the idea that humans do not necessarily pose a threat. It helps that we no longer automatically shoot predators on sight, or put a bounty on their heads. Prey species like elk and deer have in many cases also learned to prefer cities and suburbs because the relatively open habitat provides a margin of safety from predators. Predators naturally follow. During moose calving season, for instance, grizzly bears frequent the backyards of Anchorage.

Are humans equally capable of adapting? Stan Gehrt, an Ohio State University biologist who studies Chicago’s population of about 4,000 coyotes, says complaints have tapered off as city residents have become accustomed to their new neighbors. The coyotes don’t bite or threaten people, though they can be aggressive toward dogs. (When there is a human on the other end of the leash, this can be alarming, he acknowledged. But dogs in Cook County, which includes Chicago, bite about 3,000 people every year.)

The situation in Mumbai is more complicated. The city’s 21 million people have encircled and encroached on a national park, where about 35 free-roaming leopards live. Mumbai’s leopards can of course kill people and have done so a half-dozen times since 2011. But one man who survived an attack at a village inside the park said his family had no plans to move out to the grim little high-rise flats the city offers as an alternative. It would mean too many bills and too little space: “Where will the chickens go?” Instead, people adapt, he said. “In the night the leopard is the king. He can go anywhere.”

The city at large has so far also held to the belief that the leopards should continue living where they always have. In the past when people spotted a leopard in the neighborhood, a wildlife biologist told me, they called park officials demanding its removal. But researchers there have demonstrated that removing and relocating leopards simply leads to more attacks, as the confused animals try to find their way in new territory, and as other leopards with less experience at negotiating human-dominated habitat take over their old territory. Now people phone demanding a workshop on how to coexist safely with leopards. Last month, the park issued a pamphlet of camera trap photos and names for all 35 leopards. (Your new neighbor is named “Mastikhor.” It means “mischievous.”)


If you are thinking, “Wait, that’s just nuts,” think again about the nature of risk. We have learned to protect and restore rivers in our cities, says Adrian Treves at the University of Wisconsin, even though floods sometimes destroy homes and drown people. We cherish trees on urban streets and in parks even though branches sometimes fall on our heads. For that matter, we let cars dominate city streets, though they kill more than 4,700 pedestrians in the United States every year (and many times more in India).

Rivers, forests and cars all justify themselves by being useful one way or another to humanity. What good are predators? Clearly, a lot of people struggle with this question, particularly certain philosophical sorts who preach the genuinely nutty idea that we should eradicate predators because they are cruel. But scientific research has repeatedly demonstrated that losing predators leads to a cascade of unintended (and often cruel) effects. Unchecked by predation, herbivores graze the habitat to bare dirt. The water table drops. Species vanish. Ecosystems collapse. Entirely apart from their ecological usefulness, we should value predators for their stealth, their skill, their speed. A world of sheep might sound like someone’s idea of heaven. But it would be a deadly dull place to live.
Couldn’t we at least keep the excitement out of our cities? That would require preserving large areas of habitat, and habitat corridors, in the countryside, and nobody appears to be willing to pick up that tab.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund, paid for from oil industry royalties, has served for 50 years as the nation’s single most effective tool for habitat protection. But Congress allowed it to expire for the past two months, then patted itself on the back for reauthorizing the fund on Friday — at half the budget Congress allowed in 1965. Make that seven percent of the original budget, adjusting for inflation. We seem to be incapable of leaving existing protected areas intact, especially as the human population quadruples from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 11 billion by the end of this century. Instead of celebrating the protected areas where the world’s last major tiger populations survive, for instance, India (population 1.2 billion) now seems intent on running highways through them.
So we should hardly be surprised that predators and people wind up living side by side in cities. Cities have always been the salvation of the homeless, the unwanted, the wretched and the despised. The difference now is that these refugees come to us not just on two legs, but on four.






Richard Conniff is the author of “The Species Seekers,” and a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 20, 2015, on page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Bright Lights, Big Predators.



Red-winged Blackbird



 he Music of Nature proudly presents "Red-winged Blackbird," a delicious
video portrait of a male in full song. The Red-winged Blackbird is
common across North America, breeding in marshes and meadows. Excited
males puff out their red epaulets (shoulder pads) as they sing.



© 2010 Lang Elliott






Thursday, December 17, 2015

Eating in Snow




Grazing in winter, Yellowstone National Park. They use their heads to clear out snow for the grass.



American Bison






Bison herd grazing at the National Bison Range in Montana






American bison k5680-1.jpg

Common Name: Bison
Also referred to as:
Buffalo, as well as American Bison, Plains Bison, Prairie Bison, Wood Bison and Woodland Bison
Genus species:
Bison bison
Recognized subspecies:
Plains Bison, B. b. bison; and Wood Bison B. b. athabascae


 
 Adult male (farther) and adult female (closer) with a background of rich autumn colors, in Yellowstone National Park 
Arturo de Frias Marques - Own work

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Bison_skull_pile-restored.jpg
Pile of American bison skulls to be used for fertilizer in the mid-1870s

 

Herd of Bison in Yellowstone National Park
Debeo Morium - Own work
One of the buffalo bulls looking back at me shortly after the stampede had passed me by in Yellowstone.



Bison fighting in Grand Teton National Park in Moose, Wyoming


American bison standing its ground against a wolf pack
Doug Smith - National Park Service [dead link]; available on the Wayback Machine. Used in Muro et al, 2011 -- this image is figure 1(d). The citation there suggests that it was not taken by the authors.
Mollies Pack Wolves Baiting a Bison.


Buffalo Hunt under the Wolf-skin Mask, 1832–33 oil 24 x 29 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Before they acquired horses in the eighteenth century, Indians developed ingenious methods to hunt buffalo on foot. One method was the stealthy approach in disguise. Since more than half the calves born each year died, bison tolerated the packs of wolves that took care of the carcasses. Buffalo were unprepared, however, for Indians in wolves' clothing, who approached "within a few rods of the unsuspecting group, and easily [shot] down the fattest of the throng."



Bison being chased off a cliff as seen and painted by Alfred Jacob Miller.
It is true that various Plains Indians would occasionally chase buffalo over a small cliff, but Miller probably never saw this scene and therefore exaggerated it a bit. The Indians, when they found a suitable bluff, would conceal themselves behind the rocks with hides. When the herd would start to move towards the bluff, the Indians would jump up from behind their rocks, shouting and waving the hides, keeping the buffalo moving toward the cliff. In later versions of this picture, Miller exaggerated the cliff even more. Had the Indians driven buffalo over such precipices, the meat would have been too badly smashed to eat and the bones would have been broken.

A wood bison around Coal River in Canada
Alan & Elaine Wilson; original uploader was Outriggr at en.wikipedia - http://www.naturespicsonline.com/; transferred from en.wikipedia; transfer was stated to be made by User:Serimayk.




The 1935 Buffalo nickel—this style of coin featuring an American bison was produced from 1913 to 1938.
The original uploader was Bobby131313 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.
1935 Buffalo Nickel, photo taken by user


 

First postage stamp with image of bison was issued US in 1898—4¢ "Indian Hunting Buffalo". Part of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition commemorative series.
US postage stamp, 1898. Designer: Seth Eastman - http://bison-stamps.narod.ru/info/usa1898.html
4-cent 1898 commemorative


The American bison (Bison bison), also commonly known as the American buffalo, is a North American species of bison that once roamed the grasslands of North America in massive herds.

They became nearly extinct by a combination of commercial hunting and slaughter in the 19th century and introduction of bovine diseases from domestic cattle, and have made a recent resurgence largely restricted to a few national parks and reserves.

Their historical range roughly comprised a triangle between the Great Bear Lake in Canada's far northwest, south to the Mexican states of Durango and Nuevo León, and east to the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States (nearly to the Atlantic tidewater in some areas) from New York to Georgia and per some sources down to Florida. Bison were seen in North Carolina near Buffalo Ford on the Catawba River as late as 1750. 

Two subspecies or ecotypes have been described: the plains bison (Bison bison bison), smaller in size and with a more rounded hump, and the wood bison (Bison bison athabascae)—the larger of the two and having a taller, square hump

Furthermore, it has been suggested that the plains bison consists of a northern (Bison bison montanae) and a southern subspecies, bringing the total to three.  

However, this is generally not supported. The wood bison is one of the largest wild species of bovid in the world, surpassed by only the Asian gaur and wild water buffalo. It is the largest extant land animal in the Americas.




https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Muybridge_Buffalo_galloping.gifhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Muybridge_Buffalo_galloping.gifhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Muybridge_Buffalo_galloping.gif
American bison galloping. Photos by Eadweard Muybridge, first published in 1887 in Animal Locomotion.






Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison



Monday, November 9, 2015

SeaWorld to replace 'Shamu' killer whale show in San Diego


Visitors are greeted by an Orca killer whale as they attend a show featuring the whales during a visit to the animal theme park SeaWorld in San Diego, California March 19, 2014.
Reuters/Mike Blake

SeaWorld said on Monday it plans to replace its signature "Shamu" killer whale shows in San Diego with displays focused on "conservation," after grappling with sagging attendance and years of criticism over treatment of the captive marine mammals.
Animal rights activists, pressing to end public exhibition of killer whales altogether, branded the SeaWorld announcement as little more than window-dressing designed to make continued display of the animals more palatable to the public.


 Read more at Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/10/us-california-seaworld-idUSKCN0SY27Q20151110#4PijlrXXUPP5F8FW.99


Tanzanian Police arrest 4 Chinese with 11 Rhino horns





CITES ‏@CITES Nov 8

Tanzanian Police arrest 4 Chinese with 11 #rhino horns
, among largest seizures

 http://goo.gl/qn25Yo pic.twitter.com/5hLufdO3CM

 


Monday, November 2, 2015

Inpiring Words

  • "If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed" (Carl Sagan)
  • "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
  • "The best way to predict your future is to create it" (Peter Drucker)
  • "Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend" (Napoleon)
  • "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born" (Antonio Gramsci)
  • "Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned" (Roberto Calasso)
  • "Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." (Miguel de Cervantes)
  • "The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error." (Karl Popper)
  • "The task is...not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees" (Erwin Schroedinger)
  • "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible" (Maurits Cornelis Escher)
  • "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" (Marcel Proust)
  • "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." (Albert Szent-Gyorgy)
  • "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible" (Maurits Cornelis Escher)
  • "A man wants what a woman has sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or own it outright (marriage in most societies)" (Andrea Dworkin)
  • "A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all" (Tacitus)
  • "God is a hacker, not an engineer" (Francis Crick)
  • "Not to be mad is another form of madness" (Blaise Pascal)
  • "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" (Oscar Wilde)
  • "We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience" (George Bernard Shaw)
  • "Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him" (Aldous Huxley)
  • "No one believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach" (composer Mauricio Kagel)
  • "To leave is to arrive and to arrive is to leave" (Yong-Kyun Bae)
  • "Hell is other people" (Sartre)
  • "There's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure." (Clay Shirky)
  • "... the death of the spirit which threatens every man unless he is conscious of the danger and has a real purpose which can keep it alive and enable it to thrust its way through the choking weeds and thorns to the air and to the sun" (Hugh Trevor-Roper)
  • "We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine." (Henry Louis Mencken)
  • "The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask" (Max Tegmark)
  • "I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universe" (Don Knuth)
  • "It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation." (Vladimir Putin)
  • "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" (Voltaire)
  • "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too" (Heinrich Heine)
  • "The goal of the future is full unemployment (Arthur Clarke)
  • "We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like" (Dave Ramsey)
  • "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" (Allen Saunders, 1957)
  • "To find something interesting you merely have to look at it long enough" (Flaubert)
  • "I'm a question mark guy in an exclamation point world" (Charles O'Meara, aka Chuck Vrtacek)
  • "The horse does not eat cucumber salad" (Johann Reis, the first sentence uttered in a telephone)
  • "Science is always wrong - It never solves a problem without creating 10 more" (George-Bernard Shaw)
  • "The world is but a canvas to our imaginations" (Henry Thoreau)
  • "There is no position so absurd that some philosopher has not held it" (James Fetzer)
  • "A little rebellion every now and then is a good thing" (Thomas Jefferson)
  • "It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter" (Herbert Hoover talking about the radio in 1922).
  • "In 3000 AD one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking in a few hours. But if the civilization of these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so." (Aldous Huxley in 1926)
  • "Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain." (Carl Sagan)
  • "Radio broadcasting is a sort of cleansing instrument for the mind just as the bathtub is for the body" (David Sarnoff at RCA in the 1920s).
  • "There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal" (Henry Ford)
  • "The entire Earth will be converted into a huge brain" (Nikolas Tesla, talking about the radio in 1904)
  • "Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism" (Walter Benjamin)
  • "Now the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room" (David Weinberger)
  • "Learn to appreciate what you have, before time makes you appreciate what you had" (Robert Downey)
  • "Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other" (Oscar Ameringer)
  • "Better to understand very little than to misunderstand a lot" (one-liner signature file on the internet)
  • "War does not determine who is right - only who is left" (Bertrand Russell)
  • "People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does" (Michel Foucault)
  • "There is something not-there there" (Terrence Deacon)
  • "I'm dying, but so are you" (Christopher Itchens, dying of cancer)
  • "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." (William Faulkner)
  • "Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly" (Dalai Lama)
  • "Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it" (Dalai Lama)
  • "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." (Mahatma Gandhi)
  • "I Seem To Be a Verb" (Buckminster Fuller)
  • "An optimist is someone who doesn't quite understand the problem" (Steve Kaufmann)
  • "When you are invited to a dinner, you are either a guest or you are part of a menu" (Guy Verhofstadt)
  • "If you torture statistics long enough, they'll eventually confess the truth" (Alan Simpson)
  • "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving" (Lao Tzu)
  • "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas - I'm frightened of the old ones" (John Cage)
  • "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn" (Alvin Toffler)
  • "Begin Anywhere" (John Cage)
  • "The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it" (Neal Stephenson)
  • "Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once" (John Wheeler)
  • "An investor who has all the answers doesn't even understand the questions" (John Templeton)
  • "The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line" (Borges)
  • "I have been everything and it is worth nothing" (Roman emperor Septimius Severus)
  • "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done" (Alan Turing)
  • "Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals" (Will Durant)
  • "Mankind's ability to understand and control the forces of nature greatly exceeds our ability to govern ourselves" (George Soros)
  • "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" (Upton Sinclair)
  • "We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom" (Edward Osborne Wilson)
  • "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding" (Khalil Gibran)
  • "The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting" (Charles Bukowski)
  • "Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed" (Samuel Johnson)
  • "I don't do drugs - I am drugs" (Salvador Dali)
  • "Love that is not madness is not love" (Pedro Calderon de la Barca)
  • "When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion" (Anthony Storr)
  • "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable -There is another theory which states that this has already happened" (Douglas Adams)
  • "If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians" (Warren Buffett)
  • "The world is a playground" (Indian-Persian poet Ghalib)
  • "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition" (Timothy Leary)
  • "You are all you've got" (Janis Joplin)
  • "Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent" (Eleanor Roosevelt)
  • "If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman" (Margaret Thatcher)
  • "Be like a flower that gives fragrance, even to the hand that crushes it" (Ali ibn Abi Talib)
  • "If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married" (Katherine Hepburn)
  • "When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping - Men invade another country - It's a whole different way of thinking" (Elayne Boosler)
  • "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper" (Camille Paglia)
  • "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun" (Katherine Hepburn)
  • "Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we act out a tragedy to enliven the boredom of one spectator whose applause has never reached a mortal ear" (Ciorin)
  • "O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small,/ Who by the dim lights of your twisted minds/ Believe you prosper even as you fall,/ Can you not see that we are worms, each one/ Born to become the angelic butterfly/ That flies defenseless to the Judgement Throne?" (Dante, Canto 10, Purgatorio)
  • "God doesn't vote" (Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti justifying his dirty political methods despite being a very religious man)
  • "If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours" (John Maynard Keynes)
  • "During my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it" (Margaret Thatcher)
  • "Wait and see" (Albert Einstein, answering the question what's going to happen to the universe?)
  • "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" (Lord Kelvin in 1895)
  • "Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now - They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are" (Bill Gates)
  • "There is a world market for maybe five computers" (Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943)
  • "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value" (French general Ferdinand Foch in 1913)
  • "Hell is the truth seen too late" (Thomas Hobbes)
  • "We inhabit a universe that is still inventing itself" (Peter Corning)
  • "No poem is intended for the reader, no painting for the beholder, no symphony for the listener" (Walter Benjamin)
  • "Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings" (Robert Burns)
  • "There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing" (Robert Burns)
  • "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" (Albert Einstein)
  • "Yvonne: Where were you last night? = Rick: That's so long ago, I don't remember - Yvonne: Will I see you tonight? - Rick: I never make plans that far ahead" (Curtiz's film Casablanca)
  • "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood - Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less" (Marie Curie)
  • "The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process" (Edward Bernays)
  • "Nature has all the answers, so what is your question?" (Howard Odum)
  • "There can be no true friends without true enemies" (Michael Dibdin)
  • "Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor" (the Pirate to Alexander the Great in St Augustine's City of God)
  • "The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be" (Lao Tze)
  • "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" (Benjamin Franklin)
  • "Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do" (Bertrand Russell)
  • "Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind (Bernard Baruch)
  • "The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order" (Alfred North Whitehead)
  • "Failure is the foundation of success - Success is the foundation of failure" (Lao Tze)
  • "Wer immer strebend sich bemuht, Den konnen wir erlosen/ Whoever exerts himself in constant striving, Him we can save" (Goethe, Faust)
  • "Let the beauty of what you love be what you do" (Jalal ad-Din Rumi)
  • "Every journey of 10,000 li starts with the first step" (Chinese proverb)
  • "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library" (Jorge Luis Borges)
  • "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal" (Albert Einstein)
  • "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new" (Albert Einstein)
  • "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice" (Deng Xiaoping)
  • "I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic" (JG Ballard)
  • "The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time" (Edward-Osborne Wilson)
  • "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do" (Benjamin Franklin)
  • "Truths are more likely to be discovered by one man than by a nation" (Descartes)
  • "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (James Joyce)
  • "He who follows another will never overtake him" (Michelangelo)
  • "The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred" (Balzac)
  • "Esse Est Percipi/ To be is to be perceived" (Bishop Berkeley)
  • "A believer is a stranger in this world" (Al-Hasan al-Basri)
  • "Change has rarely ever changed things" (Walter Sorrell)
  • "We've learned how to make a living, but not a life" (George Carlin)
  • "The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it" (Chinese proverb)
  • "There are no inevitabilities in history" (Paul Johnson)
  • "When goods don't cross borders, armies will" (Frederic Bastiat)
  • "A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong" (Stella Adler)
  • "While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die" (Leonardo da Vinci)
  • "While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one" (Jorge Luis Borges)
  • "The difference between me and a madman is that i am not mad" (Salvador Dali)
  • "All truth passes through three stages - First, it is ridiculed - Second, it is violently opposed - Third, it is accepted as being self-evident" (Arthur Schopenhauer)
  • "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life" (Frank Zappa)
  • "Show me a sane man and I will cure him" (Carl Jung)
  • "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" (Albert Einstein)
  • "Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary" (Blaise Pascal)
  • "Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans" (Ralph Nader)
  • "Revolutions are always verbose" (Leon Trotsky)
  • "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh" (Voltaire)
  • "Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something" (Anton Chekhov)
  • "You are mistaken if you think that your customer is paying you to have sex with him -He is also paying you to go away after the sex is over" (Anonymous prostitute quoted in a Leonard Shlain book)
  • "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it" (George Santayana)
  • "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" (Mark Twain)
  • "Men have become the tools of their tools" (Henry Thoreau)
  • "If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment" (Voltaire)
  • "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading" (Lao Tzu)
  • "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful" (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
  • "Everything should be as simple as possible - but no simpler" (Albert Einstein)
  • "Most books are about aspects of human knowledge - Few people write books about human ignorance, despite the fact that there would be much more to write about" (Piero Scaruffi)
  • "Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side: Hey! how do I get across? - Nasrudin shouted back: You are across!" (Popular Turkish tale)
  • "No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs" (Max Delbruck)
  • "There is no substitute for victory" (Douglas MacArthur)
  • "Somewhere something incredible is waiting to happen" (John Wheeler)
  • "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" (Carl Sagan)
  • "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" (H.L. Mencken)
  • "Ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti/ The one truth is called by different names by various learned men" (Rig Veda)
  • "God does not exist - He is being itself beyond essence and existence - Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him" (Paul Tillich)
  • "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing" (Wernher Von Braun)
  • "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day - Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" (Lao Tzu)
  • "I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use" (Galileo Galilei)
  • "The Brain is wider than the Sky / For put them side by side / The one the other will contain" (Emily Dickinson)
  • "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced" (Frank Zappa)
  • "Congressmen are like diapers - You need to change them often, and for the same reason" (Pete McCloskey)
  • "I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it" (John Coltrane to Zita Carno on seeing one of his improvisations transcribed to music notation)
  • "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" (Josef Stalin)
  • "The foolish ask questions the wise cannot answer" (Oscar Wilde)
  • "No one really knows enough to be a pessimist" (Norman Cousins)
  • "Life is a question in the form of an answer" (Piero Scaruffi)
  • "Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught" (Oscar Wilde)
  • "I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous" (former USA defense secretary Robert McNamara)
  • "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth" (Archimedes)
  • "We only had our brains to use as weapons against the Christians" (A Jewish friend, when i asked him why so many Jews became scientists and artists and writers - Contrast it with a very similar statement made by an Al Jazeera commentator regarding suicide bombers: The Arabs only have their bodiesto use as weapons against Israel and the USA)
  • "Sometimes the metaphors write themselves" (Eugene Robinson, 2006)
  • "All murderers are punished unless they kill in great numbers" (Voltaire)
  • "Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je d‚fendrai jusqu'… la mort le droit que vous avez de le dire/ I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (Voltaire)
  • "It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go" (Dolores Ibarruri La Pasionaria)
  • "There is a limit to human intelligence, but there is no limit to human stupidity" (Piero Scaruffi)
  • "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them - But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being - And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
  • "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement - The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth" (Niels Bohr)
  • "La lor cieca vita e` tanto bassa, che invidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte - Fama di loro esser non lassa; misericordia e giustizia li sdegna - Non ti curar di lor, ma guarda e passa/ Their pointless life is so low that all other lots they envy - Fame of them the world hath none; Mercy and Justice scorn them both - Ignore them, look ahead and pass them by" (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III)
  • "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time - And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death - Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more - It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing" (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5)
  • "Envy is blind, and she has no other quality than that of detracting from virtue" (Titus Livius)
  • "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject" (Winston Churchill)
  • "There are known knowns: there are things we know we know - We also know there are known unknowns: we know there are some things we do not know - But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know that we don't know" (Donald Rumsfeld)
  • "A scientist is someone who learns more and more about less and less, and ultimately knows everything about nothing - A Philosopher is someone who learns less and less about more and more, and ultimately knows nothing about everything" (Anonymous joke)
  • "Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?" (Groucho Marx)
  • "The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine" (Charles Townes)
  • "Time is the substance of which we are made" (Borges)
  • "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist - Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew - Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant - Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me" (Reverend Martin Niemoller, 1945)
  • "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think" (Adolf Hitler)
  • "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)
  • "Karl Radek: Vladimir Ilyich, where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: They will sell it to us themselves
  • "It is reasonable to expect that, with the favourable effects of time, and of European arts and sciences, [America] will become the most formidable power in the world" (the Venetian ambassador to Paris, 1783)
  • "Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together" (Gandhi)
  • "A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends" (Charles De Gaulle)
  • "Life is not a journey, it is a destination" (Piero Scaruffi)
  • "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies" (Groucho Marx)
  • "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we achieved neither" (Condoleeza Rice)
  • "We are not shooting enough professors" (Lenin)
  • "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist" (George Orwell)
  • "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (Mahatma Gandhi)
  • "I thank my parents for the greatest gift of all: poverty" (Robert Benigni)
  • "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it" (Winston Churchill)
  • "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking" (Martin Heidegger)
  • "You were born with wings - Why prefer to crawl through life?" (Jalal ad-Din Rumi)
  • "Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians" (Charles De Gaulle)
  • "You must be the change you wish to see in the world" (Mahatma Gandhi)
  • "This whole world Is one big prison yard - Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards" (Bob Dylan)
  • "The past is not dead - it isn't even past" (Christa Wolf, 1976)
  • "I think it would be a good idea" (Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization)
  • "God is dead - Nietzsche/ Nietzsche is dead - God" (Graffiti on Nietzsche's tomb)
  • "Philosophy has only interpreted the world - The real challenge is to change it" (Epigraph on Karl Marx tomb)
  • "It will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the Pacific" ( Thomas Jefferson)
  • "A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere" (Groucho Marx)
  • "Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created" (John Ralston Saul, 1992)
  • "The Army causes Taxes; Taxes cause Discontents; and Discontents make an Army necessaryLord Bath, 1749)
  • "To do is to be - Descartes; To be is to do - Voltaire; Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra" (Men'w Restrooms, Greasewood Flats, Scottsdale)
  • "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words" (Woody Allen)
  • "I play the notes, in order, as they are written - It is God who makes the music" (Johan Sebastian Bach)
  • "The first thing that we do let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI, II/4, Shakespeare)
  • "The difference between a psychiatric patient and a psychiatric doctor is that the former gets better" (paraphrasing a line in Vincent Minnelli's Cowbweb)
  • "Under no circumstances should a true Christian draw the sword" (Tertullian, 2nd century AD)
  • "The basis of government is jugglery - If it lasts and works, it becomes policy" (Caliph Al Mansur of Baghdad)
  • "The worst things are those that are novelties - Every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hell" (Prophet Mohammed, The Neglected Duty)
  • "shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi = the master is fond of licking lion spittle" (Chinese tonguetwister)
  • "I am who I am" (God to Moses)
  • "Jesus: I came into the world to bear witness to the truth - Pilate: What is truth?" (John 18:3438)
  • "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" (Hakuin)
  • "Four blind men gave four altogether contradictory descriptions of an elephant because one had been able to touch only its tail, the other its legs, the third its belly and the fourth its ears only" (Ancient Arab proverb)
  • "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty" (Winston Churchill)
  • "There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world" (Piero Scaruffi)
  • "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy" (Jorge-Luis Borges)
  • "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets" (Napoleon Bonaparte)
  • "Quote me as saying that I was mis-quoted" (Groucho Marx)






 Piero Scaruffi

 ( Back to politics | Back to history) | Back to me)

 History of Knowledge.

http://www.scaruffi.com/index.html

Link: http://www.scaruffi.com/know/matter.html


Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming


 

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming


Now a powerful documentary from the acclaimed director of Food Inc., Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim the science of global warming is "not settled" have also denied the truth about studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it.


 Link: http://www.amazon.ca/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942


Living with a black dog


 

Millions
of people around the world live with depression. “Living with a black
dog” is a guide for partners, carers and sufferers of depression. It
advises those living with and caring for people with depression on what
to do, what not to do, and where to go for help.

“Living with a
black dog” is a follow-up to “I had a black dog, his name was
depression,” which offers practical advice for coming to terms with and
overcoming depression.

Both videos were produced by writer and
illustrator Matthew Johnstone in collaboration with WHO, and were based
on books of the same name.

To view “I had a black dog, his name was depression,” please visit: http://youtu.be/XiCrniLQGYc

For more information on mental health, please visit: http://www.who.int/topics/mental_heal...

Disclaimer:
This video may contain links and references to third party-websites.
WHO is not responsible for, and does not endorse or promote, the content
of any of these websites and the use thereof.




Living with a black dog


 

Millions
of people around the world live with depression. “Living with a black
dog” is a guide for partners, carers and sufferers of depression. It
advises those living with and caring for people with depression on what
to do, what not to do, and where to go for help.

“Living with a
black dog” is a follow-up to “I had a black dog, his name was
depression,” which offers practical advice for coming to terms with and
overcoming depression.

Both videos were produced by writer and
illustrator Matthew Johnstone in collaboration with WHO, and were based
on books of the same name.

To view “I had a black dog, his name was depression,” please visit: http://youtu.be/XiCrniLQGYc

For more information on mental health, please visit: http://www.who.int/topics/mental_heal...

Disclaimer:
This video may contain links and references to third party-websites.
WHO is not responsible for, and does not endorse or promote, the content
of any of these websites and the use thereof.