01/04/2018
01/02/2018
Turtles are cute! How To Help Hatchlings If You Live In Boca Raton
https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005611362/how-largemouth-bass-suck-in-their-prey.html
From the New York Times.
Fire Cats: Highlighting A Great Petfinder Who Is A Night Owl
The Hunt for ‘Fire Cats’ Amid Northern California Ashes
By THOMAS FULLERJAN. 1, 2018
Jennifer Petruska, left, and Barbara Gray set a trap in Santa Rosa, Calif. Ms. Petruska is coordinating an effort to find cats lost during the wildfire. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — When a firestorm swept down the hillsides of Sonoma County, bringing terror to this tight grid of thousands of homes, dogs tended to rush to their masters.
But cats went in the opposite direction, ignoring the pleas of panicked owners and disappearing amid the chaotic evacuation.
Finding the missing cats that fled the October wildfires has been an impassioned quest for Jennifer Petruska, an animal lover whose home, pets included, was one of the few in her neighborhood to be spared.
Ms. Petruska has spent nearly every night since the fires tracking and trapping fire cats, as she calls them, the felines that for weeks have remained missing because of stubbornness, trauma, instinct, or a mix of all three.
Catching cats can be tricky in the best of circumstances but she and her team of volunteers have caught more than 70. They believe many dozens more are on the loose.
Pet Rescue & Reunification, as the volunteers call themselves, have set up night-vision cameras in storm drains and creek beds, where many cats went into hiding. Every evening at dusk they set traps baited with tuna and mackerel, checking them hourly until dawn.
Volunteers posted flyers of cats found in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
“If you want to catch a cat you have to stay up all night — that’s just the name of the game,” Ms. Petruska said as she prepared for another dark and cold round of cat stalking. “I’ve been a horrible insomniac my whole life, so it suits me.”
Coffey Park, the neighborhood where Ms. Petruska is focusing her efforts, may as well have been struck by a bomb. Well over 1,000 homes were leveled. Ms. Petruska and her team say they realize that with nearly 5,000 homes destroyed in the Santa Rosa area alone their effort is ancillary to the grieving and massive effort of reconstruction that is only just beginning.
The bleak landscape of charred lots is still teeming with creatures stealthily crawling throughout the night, mostly unseen.
Ms. Petruska says she knows there are still many cats on the loose because her motion-activated cameras capture them nearly every night, along with a parade of other nocturnal animals such as skunks, opossums and raccoons.
To the families who lost everything, recounting how Ms. Petruska helped recover their cats often brings tears.
“I just wanted my cat — that was the only thing I wanted back,” said Kelly Stinson, whose home in Coffey Park was destroyed. “I spent hours every single day looking for her.“
Barbara Gray, right, and her daughter Kelly searched through a burned property where cat traps had been set out earlier. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Ms. Petruska located Evy and after an evening of coaxing returned a day later and grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck
Sara Ratekin, a veterinarian who has treated many of the cats rescued by Ms. Petruska’s team, says the fires have shown the ability of cats to survive perilous circumstances. Captured fire cats often arrive in her office with burned paws, singed whiskers — and many pounds lighter than before the fire.
Unlike dogs, cats have an instinct to flee when they sense danger, Dr. Ratekin said.
“I can explain why they ran away,” she said. “But I can’t explain why they became so wild so quickly.”
In August, during the flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey, cats were spotted by rescue workers swimming or floating on furniture and debris trying to find high ground.
When emergency medical workers showed up at flooded homes, dogs would often greet them at the door, tails wagging, said Katie Jarl, the Texas director of The Humane Society of the United States.
If cats were still home they would often be hiding — and when discovered would need significant coaxing to leave.
A cat that was found at the Journeys End Mobile Park in Santa Rosa. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
”No matter if it’s fires or flooding, or any type of natural disaster, cats will often hide,” Ms. Jarl said. “It can be days or weeks before they re-emerge.”
To lure Santa Rosa’s fire cats back into domestic life, Ms. Petruska assembles personality profiles of each cat she stalks. One cat likes the sound of whipped cream fizzing from a can. She carries a can in her car. Another cat answers to the sound of the crinkling of a bag of a specific brand of cat treats. She carries the treats.
Unsurprisingly the most effective lure appears to be fish. Ms. Petruska soaks socks in the juices from cans of mackerel and hangs them from trees.
On a recent evening at dusk, she drove through the countless rows of burned out houses to a neighborhood near a small creek. In near freezing temperatures, she hauled a cat trap across the molten remains of a home, careful to step over pieces of roofing and other remnants jutting up through the rubble. She passed a random assortment of household items laid bare in the detritus — a solitary teacup, a blackened metal colander and the burned out remains of a washer and dryer — before setting up a metal trap.
By morning the trap was still empty. But she has persisted, working through the holidays.
Around 10 fire cats have been found without any clues as to their owners; they are being kept at Sonoma County’s animal services department.
She has found cats even after owners gave up the search. Cindy Fulwider fled her home in the early hours of Oct. 9 as embers the size of golf balls rained down. She was convinced that her cat, whom she calls Sweet Baby, had perished. Then she got a call five weeks after the fire from one of Ms. Petruska’s team.
“I really thought we would never see him again,” Ms. Fulwider said.
12/14/2017
11/02/2017
Health Care Enrollment Starts Today! ‘Til Dec. 15 Updated on Nov. 17th, 2017
The open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act runs from November 1-December 15. Several former Obama administration officials have published an online guide for volunteer activists to inform people about and encourage them to sign up for insurance, something the Trump administration is trying to prevent. Also see who is covered and how to take action with this Indivisible Guide.
ACTION: Copy these and Tweet! Or Print Out and Distribute as Cards!
PS: If you are a college firebrand, please reconsider your opposition to the idea of voting in 2018. This is not Left vs. Right. It is Life vs. Death.
You're educated enough. Your country needs you to VOTE.
08/03/2017
Open Source Voting Might be Good! Says NYTimes. Microsoft, I'm Talking to You
To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software
By R. JAMES WOOLSEY and BRIAN J. FOXAUG. 3, 2017
Although Russian hackers are reported to have tried to disrupt the November election with attacks on the voting systems of 39 states, the consensus of the intelligence community is that they were probably unsuccessful in their efforts to delete and alter voter data. But another national election is just 15 months away, and the risk that those working on behalf of President Vladimir Putin of Russia could do real damage — and even manage to mark your ballot for you or altering your vote — remains.
Since the debacle of the 2000 election (remember hanging chads?) American election machinery has been improved to reduce the chances of mis-tallying votes, outright fraud and attacks by hackers. These improvements brought with them a new concern: lack of software security. Most voting machines’ software can now be easily hacked. This is in large part because the current voting systems use proprietary software based on Microsoft’s operating system.
One post-2000 change — a useful one — was to move away from all-electronic touch-screen balloting, with no paper record indicating how someone voted. Nearly half of voters are registered in jurisdictions that use optical-scan systems that read marked paper ballots and tally the results. But one-quarter of voters still use direct-recording electronic voting machines, which produce no paper trail.
At polling places where voting machines don’t provide this backup record, there’s no way for election officials to run an effective recount if the electronics are hacked.
That’s why the National Association of Voting Officials is leading a movement to encourage election officials to stop the purchase of insecure systems and begin to use software based on open-source systems that can guard our votes against manipulation.
But there’s resistance to this obvious solution. Microsoft and companies that bob along in its wake don’t want their proprietary voting systems replaced by open-source software balloting systems, have aggressively lobbied against them.
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
Open-source software is simply software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. In the case of voting, open-source software systems would be overseen by public-private partnerships between counties and vendors.
Open-source systems are tried and tested. A majority of supercomputers use them. The Defense Department, NASA and the United States Air Force all use open-source systems, because they know this provides far more security. Every step in our voting process should use software that follows these examples.
Despite its name, open-source software is less vulnerable to hacking than the secret, black box systems like those being used in polling places now. That’s because anyone can see how open-source systems operate. Bugs can be spotted and remedied, deterring those who would attempt attacks. This makes them much more secure than closed-source models like Microsoft’s, which only Microsoft employees can get into to fix.
One reason for the software companies’ resistance is the belief that it’s impossible to make a profit from open-source software. This is a myth. Businesses that use open-source software still need all of the other things that software companies provide. Many major companies use open-source software in their products.
Open-source systems are already playing a role in some elections. New Hampshire has used them to allow disabled voters to fill out ballots online or on their phones, while Travis County in Texas, San Francisco and Los Angeles have allocated funds to move toward open-source voting systems.
If the community of proprietary vendors, including Microsoft, would support the use of open-source model for elections, we could expedite progress toward secure voting systems.
With an election on the horizon, it’s urgent that we ensure that those who seek to make our voting systems more secure have easy access to them, and that Mr. Putin does not."
R. James Woolsey is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Brian J. Fox, the creator of the Bash open-source software, is the lead technologist of the National Association of Voting Officials and the California Association of Voting Officials, which develop open-source voting systems for use in public elections.
06/04/2017
05/28/2017
05/03/2017
SCOTUS Say Officer Will Not Be Prosecuted for Murder of Alton Sterling!?
WTF!?
That is the worst, most awful unfair shooting I have ever seen. I almost don't want to have to tell you SCOTUS said it wasn't a federal crime, when the whole phenomenon violates the very Eighth Amendment, against Cruel and Unusual punishment. My heart goes out to all The families of young black men and women cut down this way.
Elsewhere, I thought Sandy Hook was gonna be a turning point and I thought wrong.
04/23/2017
The pre-Iraq War CIA director was intimidated by Cheney- not "Wrong on Iraq"
Republicans make a lot of expedient, disingenuous assumptions, slogans and buzzwords that they often know are not true but you'd be surprised how intelligent some otherwise upstanding citizens who have been brainwashed by
respected conservative news outlets, let alone the familiar cry of the '16 election that goes, "Fox News brainwashed my father!"
A good friend of mine doesn't give them credit for being sincerely hoodwinked.
To him if their actions affect institutions and are harmful to animals and people,
then their motivation or brainwaves behind it are immaterial.
But to be fair, he also believes in free speech, the right to believe as one does, and notably the ACLU has protected hate speech unless it were incendiary. Unfortunately these days there is a fine line between the two. When Sarah Palin had signs with gun targets on tue dem candidates she wanted to lose, and soon after AZ Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, that was a big inflection point. Ok getting to the point as another friend says my blog is just TMI! This is not Skimm(TM) here! I wish.
The CIA busts its butt to save us from terrorist attacks every day! As well as NYPD. There are many we never hear about although you can hear some if you sign up for NYC alerts by email and I believe you can find out what co,or code alert the USA is on and why. Uncer Obama at least you could. Don't know whether you still can.
The CIA in my experience is less overtly political than the FBI in its culture, at least accordng to my very limited experience of it.
Back to our story and our protagonist, George Tenet the director of the CIA, when Bush was preparing to go to war with Iraq.
Many in the CIA had doubts about the sources that were crying WMD in Iraq. They voiced their doubts. Then Cheney pulled Tenet aside and threaened him with a loss of access to facetime with The President(George W. Bush) unless he knuckled under and went along with the case to the world that Iraq had WMD.
There was no post-battle plan for restructuring the country in the aftermath.
Cut to Hillary Clinton, given only one night alone with a thousand or so-page write up of tue evidence for WMD in Iraq. The first ten pages are all making the case in the summary. If she uad read much further or for example to page five hundred, sue would uave seen that the thousand-page document was riddled with warnings and doubts about said foregone conclusion. And because of that she lost cred with the Left. She is a bit of a hawk(as evidenced by her supoort for the Tomahawk strike on tue Syrian missile base) more than not but no one has proven that the Iraq War was her idea, but everyone acts like it was. Other dems voted for it too and Obama had no vote, although he won largely by saying he was agaist it. Don't get me wrong. He was like the greatest president ever. My only caveat is that he expanded drone warfare and made us more enemies than friends among terrorist families, speaking of winning hearts and minds. How much did he? There are a couple of books which explore this:
'Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars', by Chris Woods and 'The Drone Memos' by Jameel Jaffer.
Just as credit where credit is due, so with truth and reconciliation.
South Africa had that but we in the US never have. It gives license to dictators like Vladimir Putin to say everybody's doing but Vladimir it's getting old.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Democratically elected governments are so far the least worst solution as befits the wellbeing of the whole world. Trump and Putin and some proTrump or AntiHillary voters were not thinking of Earth best interest.
Anyway, Tenet tried to say no to Cheney but was told to stand down.
Just like my husband is not interested in motivations behind harmful ideation,
my Aunt was also not impressed with a whole Agency of beaureaucrats knuckling down to Cheney. But many of them knew.
So, when Trump tried to discredit the investigation into his Russian business or even FSB ties by saying that the CIA is not impartial, and they were quote Wrong on Iraq unquote...that was just a desperate Hail Mary pass. Just like a student turning around an important behavioral critique aganst the teacher. If you have ever taught you may have been there.
Disclaimer. I do know that the CIA has fought many covert wars in our past, and has done regime change while, interfering in sovereign countries. It's just that
Trump only alludes to that history lesson when it is convenient to his business.
After all this dumbing down and race-baiting of the masses, now is a very odd time to cherry pick the facts and demonstrate that oh-by-the-way you have heard of history, after a whole campaign based on amnesia and know-nothing-ism. There is a book, 'American Amnesia'. Kind of goes without saying but glad someone did.
Ok, thanks for your time and see you next time, weekly reader!
Bibliography: My reading for this post was 'The One Percent Doctrine' by Ron Suskind ca. 2006, about the Run-Up to the Iraq War. I am not referring here to the also good, and more recent 'One Percent Solution' by Gordon Lafer, which is about what the rich and powerful, mostly corporations plan to do now that they have consolidated most of world wealth. Answer is to dismantle the education system. So far it looks like they have dismantled a whole hell of a lot of it already, if you look at things being what they are and how we got here.
Recent Comments