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From: News Corp Australia Network
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency along with the Centre for Disease Control, used a zombie outbreak scenario in 2012 to teach citizens to prepare for emergency.
Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead. Rick and his ragged band of survivors would – in event of a “real” zombie apocalypse – have an unbeatable hoard of allies in the form of nature’s birds, beasts and bugs, according to a US naturalist. Source: Supplied
FLESH is food and the fresher the better. It’s something the zombies know. Probably the only thing, actually.
But what about their own dead – or rather, undead – flesh?
It’s carrion.
And that’s good news for the hipster tribes who spend weekends dressing up as zombies while worrying just what they would/will do if/when Day of The Dead actually arrives. If they survive that initial frenzy, they can sit back and watch Mother Nature do the rest.
US National Wildlife Federation naturalist David Mizejewski has put the matter into perspective, stating this planet’s fauna would deal with such animated evil “brutally, and without quarter”.
DIGGING DIRT Pink fairy armadillos have claws so specialized for digging that they struggle to walk on hard surfaces.
Nicholas Smythe/Getty Images
Here’s an Internet bizarrity that you can believe in: the pink fairy armadillo.
It’s a real animal, the smallest armadillo species in the world. At about 100 grams, it would fit in your hands. It’s covered with “very fine, silky white hair,” says Mariella Superina of the CONICET research center in Mendoza, Argentina. And its hard outer covering, rich in blood vessels, can blush pink.
Full details of Chlamyphorus truncatus biology, though, might as well be a fairy tale. It’s known only from a dry, sandy swath of Argentina and spends most of its time underground. The pink fairy is so hard to spot that Superina and her colleagues are struggling to determine whether it’s endangered or not. She heads an international group of specialists now trying to assess the risk of extinction for the world’s 21 known armadillo species, plus their close relatives, the sloths and anteaters.
In 10 years of field work, she has never caught sight of the pink species in the wild. She has seen tracks made by digging claws and the diamond-shaped tip of its tail. After several meters, the tracks just stop where, she presumes, the armadillo disappeared underground. Locals, she says, “can track down any animal — except the pink fairy armadillo.” Occasionally someone captures one and soon panics about keeping it alive. These rare captives, she reports, usually live no more than about eight days.
Superina struggled to care for one such stray that couldn’t be returned to the wild. In 2011, she published a Zoo Biology paper largely about what it wouldn’t eat. In desperation, she discovered that it would slurp up a goop (consisting of milk, cat food and exactly half a banana) that had been mixed for a different species. The next stray fairy, though, wouldn’t touch the stuff. (Don’t even think of getting one as a pet, she says.)
During the eight months the goop-tolerant fairy lived in Superina’s home terrarium, infrared cameras recorded it moving below the sand surface. Biologists had thought the species “swims” through sand. No, Superina now says. “It was very funny — it digs and then it backs up and compacts the sand with its butt plate.” The video shows a pale, furry body digging and butting, digging and butting. The flattened round rear plate used in compaction is unique to fairy armadillos. This rare glimpse may have solved a paleontological mystery, too: Previously found rows of compacted earth discs that look like slumping sliced bread may actually be the work of ancient fairy armadillos’ butt plates.
As the world’s smallest armadillo, the pink fairy can fit on researcher Mariella Superina’s hand.
This sleeping armadillo was rescued from someone who tried to keep it illegally.
Unlike in most armadillos, the carapace of a pink fairy armadillo can be lifted partly up and has fur underneath.
Pink fairy armadillos use their flat rear ends to tamp soil as they burrow.
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Tea Party candidate and Libertarian Jules Manson just called for the assassination of President Obama and his children on Facebook, but I’m sure it was just a ‘misspeak’ (wink wink).
In an unnerving display of racism and violence today, this Ron Paul supporting libertarian, who ran for a seat on the City of Carson’s City council last march, and thankfully failed, wrote:
“Assassinate the fucken nigger and his monkey children”
What’s a fucken? Grammar ‘misspeaks’ aside, behold the world of Jules Manson (no relation to Marylin Mason, who apparently is a kinder, gentler person):
Examiner.com’s Michael Stone reports, “Manson argued that using the word “nigger” does not make him a racist.” Sane America would beg to differ.
Americans Against the Tea Party‘s Facebook page posted a screen capture of the offensive remarks and recived over a 100 angry and outraged comments in a little over an hour. The following is a small sample of those remarks:
sure hope the Secret Service and FBI get this creep, he is dangerous to everyone! We can thank the Republicans for this brand of extremism.
reported to secret service…who seemed interested enough to ask for the url and a screen shot
“And his monkey children” smfh. That part bothers me the most.
I’d like to see how Fox News will defend THIS!
I hope the FBI has seen what he has said and will be showing up at his door soon.
The best way to stick it to idiots like this is vote to re elect Obama and then Warren in 2016.
Manson will be running for Senate next year (I joke). The failed politician’s Facebook page has since been removed and he’s most likely in a fetal position on the floor sucking his thumb waiting for the Secret Service. Good luck on that.
Big thanks to Michael Stone
Jennifer LeClaire, who writes for the conservative Christian magazine Charisma, quotes Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), as saying “Gary Hall of the National Cathedral is sinning when he claims that opposition to homosexuality is a sin. This is counterfeit Christianity in action—transferring the guilt before God from those who are committing sins (of which homosexuality is one) to those who oppose those sins.” LaBarbera calls this an example of a new heretical ‘sin-affirming Christianity’ that poses a danger of spreading within the evangelical Church. Jennifer LeClaire adds that she thinks LaBarbera is “spot-on” and declares she is shocked by the kind of deception the Very Reverend Hall is perpetrating.
Yesterday (Oct. 22), Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (another hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) added his two cents worth in the FRC’s Washington Watch Daily Commentary. He compared the Very Rev. Hall to one of the “false prophets” from the biblical Book of Jeremiah: “they encourage those who do evil, and as a result, no one turns from doing evil.”
So what did Gary Hall say that has the Religious Right so upset? Here’s a sample:
“We must now have the courage to take the final step and call homophobia and heterosexism what they are. They are sin. Homophobia is a sin. Heterosexism is a sin. Shaming people for whom they love is a sin. Only when all our churches say that clearly and boldly and courageously will our LGBT youth be free to grow up in a culture that totally embraces them fully as they are.”
“It’s more than tragic—in fact it’s shameful–that faith communities, especially Christian ones, continue to be complicit in putting our children at risk and abetting the attitudes that oppress them, thereby encouraging the aggressors who would subject our children to pain, humiliation, and violence.”
And after same-sex marriages became legal in Washington DC earlier this year, Hall announced that the National Cathedral would begin to perform the wedding ceremonies.
New Australian Government Cancels the Future
The following is a comment from a Facebook friend, Shane C which he left under a topic I posted on Facebook yesterday; Victoria Rollison’s “Abbott is hiding from the future“. It deserves wider readership than the Facebook page could offer and it is my pleasure to post it here. You will agree that Shane raises some thought-provoking points. Here is what Shane said:
The Cabinet of the new Australian government has just one woman, no science ministry, only one member who takes scientists’ findings on global warming to be true (but who believes a future proof broadband network is not needed), and a particularly dense education minister who thinks advanced tertiary education is a privilege that only the rich should have.
This is a cause of great concern.
A number of breakthroughs in science and technology will start to emerge over the next five to twenty years. Some of the main ones will be breakthroughs in medical science, breakthroughs in materials technology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nanotechnology.
A number of consequences will follow which will include but not limited to; the cure for all diseases, not just cancer, resulting in very long life, the catch being that only the rich and privileged can afford it, automation of labour in all mining and heavy industry resulting in the sudden unemployment of all non-skilled labour.
Because of the exponential nature of technological development, the nations that develop the three key technologies first, AI (artificial intelligence), QC (quantum computing), and NT (nanotechnology) will rule the world. Their medical and materials technologies will be as to the rest of the world as current technological societies are to stone age ones.
Not only will the nations who get to the key twenty-first century technologies first have a gigantic economic advantage but access to advanced technologies will bootstrap their advantage even further because they will go on to develop advanced means to accessing space with AI designed, NT grown, single stage to orbit (SSTO) spacecraft that will be relatively cheap to produce and operate.
We could be looking at a twenty-first century that will be dominated by a few AI/QC/NT enhanced societies taking humanity’s first truly permanent steps out into space. Those nations that will be successful will be those who take scientific research seriously, provide the world’s best telecommunications infrastructure, and provide their populations with the best access to medical care and education.
And the new Australian government is not interested in any of this
.
