MattSh
MattSh's JournalElmer Fudd, Wildlife Photographer
If you grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, you probably know Elmer Fudd as the hunter whose life mission is to capture or kill Bugs Bunny. But did you know that Fudd’s character originally started out as a wildlife photographer? In the first episode featuring Fudd, he’s actually a photographer trying to shoot his bunny nemesis with a camera rather than a hunter trying to shoot him with a gun.
The Phoblographer writes that the episode originally aired back in 1939 and is titled “Elmer’s Candid Camera.” It depicts Elmer Fudd as a guy who’s trying to get into the art of wildlife photography.
After getting all his camera gear together, Fudd goes out into the wild to make pictures. He then runs into Happy Rabbit, an early character that went on to become Bugs Bunny. As Fudd tries to capture a perfect shot of the rabbit, the bunny begins to foil the shots and torment Fudd.
-----> http://petapixel.com/2015/10/20/elmer-fudd-was-originally-a-wildlife-photographer/
Apparently can't post a DailyMotion video on DU, so here's a link to DM.
http://dai.ly/x20s0n7
A history of sugar – the food nobody needs, but everyone craves
It seems as though no other substance occupies so much of the world’s land, for so little benefit to humanity, as sugar. According to the latest data, sugarcane is the world’s third most valuable crop after cereals and rice, and occupies 26,942,686 hectares of land across the globe. Its main output – apart from commercial profits – is a global public health crisis, which has been centuries in the making.
The obesity epidemic – along with related diseases including cancer, dementia, heart disease and diabetes – has spread across every nation where sugar-based carbohydrates have come to dominate to the food economy.
So at this time, it pays to step back and consider the ancient origins of sugar, to understand how it has grown to present an imminent threat to our landscapes, our societies and our health.
Stepping back
Human physiology evolved on a diet containing very little sugar and virtually no refined carbohydrate. In fact, sugar probably entered into our diets by accident. It is likely that sugarcane was primarily a “fodder” crop, used to fatten pigs, though humans may have chewed on the stalks from time to time.
-----> http://theconversation.com/a-history-of-sugar-the-food-nobody-needs-but-everyone-craves-49823
Aung San Suu Kyi & Myanmar's 'Muslim-free' election - Al Jazeera English
Aung San Suu Kyi has appeared in at least two different threads today, so I'm sorry to report...Myanmar's main opposition party, led by the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, deliberately bypassed Muslim candidates ahead of the November election, a senior party member told Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the source said Suu Kyi ordered an "Islamic purge" in the National League for Democracy (NLD) to appease growing anti-Muslim sentiment fuelled by hardline Buddhist nationalists.
Not one of the NLD's 1,151 candidates standing for regional and national elections is Muslim, despite there being around five million Muslims - or between 4 and 10 percent of the population - in the country.
There are also no Muslim candidates in the military-backed, governing Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) running in what has been billed as the country's first free and fair general election in 25 years.
In the run-up to the vote, local election commissions reportedly rejected dozens of Muslim candidates with authorities denying that their parents were citizens, claims which many of the shunned candidates denied.
"I think Suu Kyi is a bit concerned about the Ma Ba Tha, so it became an Islamic purge here," said the source.
-----> http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/10/myanmar-muslim-free-election-151024182312301.html
Syria’s Christians | Erico Matias Tavares | LinkedIn
The world is witnessing the destruction of Syria, a country with a rich history going back millennia. But there is one significant minority that faces total annihilation if the radical factions prevail: Syria’s Christian community.
Syria has played a crucial role in Christianity right from its very start. Paul is said to have been converted on the road to Damascus. There are important Christian landmarks there, some built by pious saints and daring knights over centuries. Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, can still be heard in some parts of the country.
Most importantly, there are 1.8 million people – 10% of the population – of various Christian denominations who now live in constant fear. That community has played a leading role in Syrian society and economy, which is why their (limited) civil rights had always been protected by the ruling dictators.
That is all changing now. In areas taken over by the Islamic State and other hardliners, Christian men have been murdered or abducted with their wives and children held hostage. What is left of their communities must convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face execution. The same has happened to other unfortunate Christians in Iraq, so the outcome is highly predictable.
-----> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/syrias-christians-erico-matias-tavares
Look what our Saudi friends are up to this time...
Saudi prince held after seizure of two tons of amphetamines at Beirut airport - TelegraphA Saudi prince has been detained at Beirut airport in Lebanon after two tons of an amphetamine drug popular with Syrian rebels was found on a private jet.
Prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz and four other men were held after what was described as the biggest ever drugs bust at the city’s main Rafik Hariri International Airport, according to local media and security sources.
They were allegedly "attempting to smuggle about two tons of Captagon pills and some cocaine", a security source was quoted as saying.
Captagon is a brand name for the widely used amphetamine phenethylline.
-----> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/lebanon/11955937/Saudi-prince-held-after-seizure-of-two-tons-of-amphetamines-at-Beirut-airport.html
21 Things You Never Noticed About 'It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown' | Bustle
Halloween is coming, and that can only mean one thing — no, I am not talking about Pumpkin Spice Lattes (even though those are delicious). The impending return of All Hallow's Eve means it is time for the annual viewing of the fall classic It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! My most recent re-watching of the Halloween-set Charlie Brown flick has put the film in a totally new light. It turns out that It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is weird, and not at all how I remember it as a child.
And I watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown a lot growing up (I think we all did). The Charlie Brown special is as integral to Halloween celebrations as pumpkin carving and candy corn. Even if you aren't a Charlie Brown fan, you watch it because it's tradition, and traditions have to be upheld or the world will plunge into chaos (or at least that is what my mother says when she forces me to pose for the annual family Christmas card). If my mom says it, then it must be true — so everyone must watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown this fall, or else the ties of society will surely crumble.
Here are the weirdest things I noticed while re-watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
.....
4. What is this?
How did this scene make it into a children's program? This looks like Charlie Brown and the Really Bad Acid Trip.
5. Lucy Is A Hot Mess
Lucy went out of her way to put paper around her pumpkin carving work space and then she totally disregards aforementioned paper and puts the pumpkin mush directly on the carpet. What is wrong with this girl?
10. Who Gives This Much Candy?
No child receives this much candy from one house at Halloween. This is just total craziness.
-----> http://www.bustle.com/articles/119185-21-things-you-never-noticed-about-its-the-great-pumpkin-charlie-brown
The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp - The Huffington Post
On Jan. 18, 2013, as the sun went down, Jeff Lockhart Jr. got ready for work. He slipped a T-shirt over his burly frame and hung his white work badge over his broad chest. His wife, Di-Key, was in the bathroom fixing her hair in micro-braids and preparing for another evening alone with her three sons. Jeff had been putting in long hours lately, and so the couple planned a breakfast date at Shoney’s for when his shift ended around dawn. “You better have your hair done by then,” he teased her.
As he headed out the door, Jeff, who was 29, said goodbye to the boys. He told Jeffrey, the most rambunctious, not to give his mom a hard time; Kelton, the oldest, handed his father his iPod for the ride. Then Jeff climbed into his Chevy Suburban, cranked the bass on the stereo system he’d customized himself, and headed for the Amazon fulfillment center in nearby Chester, Virginia, just south of Richmond.
When the warehouse opened its doors in 2012, there were about 37,000 unemployed people living within a 30-minute drive; in nearby Richmond, more than a quarter of residents were living in poverty. The warehouse only provided positions for a fraction of the local jobless: It currently has around 3,000 full-time workers. But it also enlists hundreds, possibly thousands, of temporary workers to fill orders during the holiday shopping frenzy, known in Amazon parlance as “peak.” Since full-timers and temps perform the same duties, the only way to tell them apart is their badges. Full-time workers wear blue. Temps wear white.
That meant Jeff wore white. He’d started working at the warehouse in November 2012, not long after it opened. It was the first job he’d been able to find in months, ever since he’d been laid off from his last steady gig at a building supply store. By January, peak season had come and gone, and hundreds of Jeff’s fellow temps had been let go. But he was still there, two months after he'd started, wearing his white badge. What he wanted was to earn a blue one.
-----> http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/life-and-death-amazon-temp/
Clinton Syria Fact Check: "Safe Zones" = "Ground Troops"
During the first Democratic presidential debate, the following exchange took place between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders about US policy in Syria: [my emphasis]
CLINTON: ... And, to -- provide safe zones so that people are not going to have to be flooding out of Syria at the rate they are. And, I think it's important too that the United States make it very clear to Putin that it's not acceptable for him to be in Syria creating more chaos, bombing people on behalf of Assad, and we can't do that if we don't take more of a leadership position, which is what I'm advocating.
SANDERS: Well, let's understand that when we talk about Syria, you're talking about a quagmire in a quagmire. You're talking about groups of people trying to overthrow Assad, other groups of people fighting ISIS. You're talking about people who are fighting ISIS using their guns to overthrow Assad, and vice versa. I'm the former chairman of the Senate Veterans Committee, and in that capacity I learned a very powerful lesson about the cost of war, and I will do everything that I can to make sure that the United States does not get involved in another quagmire like we did in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country. We should be putting together a coalition of Arab countries who should be leading the effort. We should be supportive, but I do not support American ground troops in Syria.
CLINTON: ...Well, nobody does. Nobody does, Senator Sanders.
Clinton's claim that "nobody" supports sending US ground troops to Syria was fundamentally misleading, because whoever calls for the US to establish a "safe zone" in Syria - as Clinton did in her previous utterance to which Sanders was responding - is calling for "ground troops."
This fact was made clear by a well-publicized exchange in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on September 16 between Sen. John McCain, chair of the committee, and General Lloyd Austin, head of US Central Command ["CENTCOM"], in which McCain pressed General Austin to say that he favored establishing "safe zones" in Syria and General Austin refused to do so, on the grounds that a "safe zone" would require a "ground force." The video of the exchange is here. The full video of the hearing is here.
-----> http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33299-clinton-syria-fact-check-safe-zones-ground-troops
Cursed: Take A Journey to the Scary Side of Geography
By Simon Worrall, National Geographic
PUBLISHED SUN OCT 18 08:27:23 EDT 2015
Most of us avoid frightening or unpleasant places when we travel. But when Olivier Le Carrier found himself caught in a storm on board a sailing ship in the Bermuda Triangle, his interest in the dark side of geography was aroused. In Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide To Dangerous And Frightful Destinations, he takes us on a tour of some of the world’s most benighted places, from the Gaza Strip to a giant garbage dump in the Maldive Islands and Amityville’s House of Horrors.
Writing by email from his home in Paris, he describes what constitutes a cursed place; how buried under a suburb in Tunis is a place where thousands of children were slaughtered; and why he calls a Russian naval base in the Arctic “ the antechamber of hell.”
Most writers explore enticing and beautiful places. Why did you decide to write a book about horrible ones? Perversity? Masochism?
Neither! The idea of writing a book on cursed places came to me when sailing in the Bermuda Triangle. The first time I crossed it, was during a sailing race from Florida to the Bahamas. I was 19. Horrendous storms plagued me all night—the sky was constantly lit up by lightning, there was deafening thunder with gusts of winds assaulting me on all sides. Having heard so much about the mystery of this area I had to agree. It really was strange here.
Since then, I have sailed on a regular basis in the area. I’ve come to realize that storms in the Bermuda Triangle are basically no worse than elsewhere. However, I wanted to understand the facts behind the stories of disappearing planes and ships. After researching and reading as many records as I could find, I was struck by the mismatch between the reputation of the area and the reality. This led to my desire to investigate other places to see how these legends arose and what truth there is in them.
-----> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151018-bermuda-triangle-gaza-strip-amityville-ngbooktalk/
The Problem of Abuse is the Greatest Challenge the Web Faces Today.
This article is nominally about Twitter, but it sums up a number of things that are wrong in the world today. IMHO. And DU is not immune, either.
Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium
Abuse does not arise in a vacuum. A healthy mind does not (need to) abuse. Abuse is created of trauma, and it is the traumatized mind which abuses. Whether to externalize, bury, escape its anger and frustration — the abused mind must purge it’s hurt in some manner, or risk being broken, split apart by it entirely.
But the troubling fact is this.
We have created an abusive society. We have normalized, regularized, and routinized abuse. We are abused at work, by the very rules, norms, and expectations of our jobs, at which we are merely “human resources”, to be utilized, allocated, depleted. We are abused at play, by industries that seek to prey on our innocence and literally “target” our human weaknessses. And now we are abused at arm’s length, through the lightwaves, by people we will never meet, for things we have barely even said. We live in a society where school shootings are the rule, not the exception, where more people will have taken antidepressants than not…and now one where nearly everyone will have been abused on the web…for a random, off-hand, throwaway comment, an idle thought, something trivial, unremarkable, meaningless.
This is an age of stagnation. Of broken dreams and thwarted expectations. What is stagnating is not just “the economy” — but us. Our possibilities and potential, the lives that we should be living. That is what is creating a great cycle of violence. Stagnation is abuse. And we are its victims. We have been cheated not just of our savings, retirements, jobs, social contracts — but of what all those free us to be: ourselves. But we are also, in our anger and despair, its enforcers. Endlessly, at least on the social web, picking on, bullying, squabbling with, decrying, outraged at, one another…for nothing that means anything at all. The abused become the abusers.
That is the great megatrend which the social web is part of: the abusive society, a great stagnation cresting into a wave of anger. Do you think I overstate my case? Then step back for a moment and consider the rise of right-wing extremist parties across the globe. It is fuelled by the resentment and frustration of stagnation. And that anger and frustration, whether it is perpetual outrage, or the passive aggression of bitter irony, is perhaps today’s defining culture feature. We abuse one another, having been abused ourselves.
-----> https://medium.com/bad-words/why-twitter-s-dying-and-what-you-can-learn-from-it-9ed233e37974
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Gender: Do not displayHome country: USA
Current location: Former USSR
Member since: Wed Oct 25, 2006, 02:04 PM
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