Dear Kitty. Some blog

From Wikinews:

US Naval officer temporarily relieved for “possible supremacist activities”

March 31, 2007

On March 7, 2007, the US Navy has relieved Lieutenant Commander John F. Sharpe of his duties pending an investigation into allegations that he was involved in supremacist activities.

Sharpe served as public affairs officer for the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which is currently undergoing repairs in Newport News, Virginia.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says Sharpe runs the Legion of St. Louis and IHS Press, organizations that allegedly espouse anti-Semitic views.

Apparently, Lieutenant Commander John F. Sharpe, on the far Right fringe of Roman Catholicism, like Mel Gibson, has links to infamous Republican politician and neo nazi David Duke.

If, instead of being a racist, Sharpe would have been gay, he would probably not have become a sailor of the lowest rank, let alone a Lieutenant Commander.

Ant-semitism at US Air Force academy: here.

From Think Progress blog in the USA:

The Marine Corps is investigating charges that Cpl. Matt Sanchez — a right-wing activist who was discovered to be a former gay porn star and male escort — “solicited more than $12,000 from private organizations by asking them to fund a deployment to Iraq he never made.”

From Xinhua news agency:

Former Dutch PM slams incumbent government on Iraq war

Former Dutch Prime Minister Dries van Agt on Friday criticized fellow party member and incumbent prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende for blocking an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Dutch involvement in the Iraq war, Dutch news agency ANP reported.

Van Agt, who served as Dutch prime minister from 1977 to 1982, said in radio program Argos that the new Dutch cabinet led by Balkenende is “putting a muzzle on Parliament.”

Opposition parties led by the Socialist Party have been demanding an enquiry into the development of events which led to Dutch involvement in the Iraq war in 2003.

The 76-year-old former leader of the ruling [conservative] Christian Democratic Appeal called on Balkenende not to stand in the way of debate.

“Better late than never,” said Van Agt.

Van Agt criticized the Dutch involvement in Iraq in April 2004.

He said at the time that Netherlands should withdraw as soon as possible.

He said the war was being waged without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council and the presence of the Dutch troops in Iraq was illegal.

The Americans and British should never have invaded Iraq, he said, adding that U.S. President George W. Bush was disregarding international rule of law entirely.

Photos on action for investigating Dutch government on the Iraq war: here.

This video from the USA is called: Seymour Hersh on planned invasion of Iran.

By Sandy English:

History cut off at the pass: Zach Snyder’s 300

31 March 2007

300, directed by Zach Snyder, screenplay by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

Zach Snyder’s 300 is abominable, and the comic book by Frank Miller (with Lynn Varley) that it is taken from only a little better. It’s deplorable, but not astonishing.

In a culture where torture, militarism, and porno-sadism all too often fill up film, television, and computer screens, 300 is hardly shocking or even the worst example of an ignorant and needlessly violent film.

In Snyder’s work, the Spartans live in a city where boys are inured to pain from a young age and grow up to be fearless, obedient soldiers. Leonidas (Gerard Butler) is their king. As a boy, armed only with a spear, he killed a wolf-monster. …

Various characters wriggle in ecstasy or are hideously deformed. Walls are mortared with corpses. Body parts are lopped off, and blood that resembles ink flies everywhere.

If this were all the film did, it might be ignored. The problem is that it trivializes an important moment in history.

Snyder especially approaches the Persian-Spartan battle with a lazy and smirking attitude. …

Visual images can depict history with great emotional force and even move the viewer to action.

Think of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii or The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons.

To show the French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century the tragic necessity of sacrifice for a great social cause, David painted the Romans engaged in struggles to found their republic in a series of semi-mythical wars against the oppression of the Etruscan kings in the sixth century BC.

To be most effective and affecting, however, historical images depend on some knowledge by the viewer of the events that they portray.

David’s viewers were often educated men and women who had read the stories about the struggle to establish the Roman Republic in Livy’s histories, often in the original Latin.

The paintings brought to life events they were already familiar with and revealed what was essential in those events for modern times. …

Why, after all, treat the Greeks who in 480 BC died to prevent an invasion by the Persians? Simply because it was a good fight? Or because men were courageous on the battlefield?

Neither Miller nor Snyder seems to have a penetrating view of who the Spartans were and why the battle of Thermopylae was significant.

They certainly search for reasons. In the film, the dark, monstrous Persians represent an inhuman, Asiatic tyranny. (Is it entirely coincidental that modern-day “Persia”—i.e., Iran—is presently in the sights of the American media and political establishment?)

The Greeks are fighting for “Reason” and “Freedom.” In Miller’s book, one reads, “Howling barbarians. The armies of all Asia—pledged to crush the impertinent republics of Greece to make slaves of the only free men the world has ever known.” …

In the absence of historical understanding, events can become surrounded by the most banal and clichéd notions. Chapters in Miller’s book have titles like “Honor,” “Duty,” “Glory” and “Victory.”

These ideas are hackneyed and empty and quickly become filled with militarist sentiment.

Historical reality is richer, more complex and ultimately a far more fertile ground for a film or a graphic novel.

The Spartan soldiers came from a unique society, even among the ancient Greeks. The Spartan was a member of a ruling military class.

He underwent relentless training and exposure to the elements because his social class was in a constant state of war with a much larger group of oppressed helots, Greek-speaking serfs, whose labor the Spartans exploited.

See also here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

US neoconservatives and ancient history: here.

By Kate Randall:

A Guantánamo detainee has charged that he was tortured into confessing to a role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 41, a Saudi national of Yemeni descent, said he faced years of torture following his arrest in 2002 and that he fabricated stories to satisfy his captors.

Detainee Al-Rawi free at last: here.

By Peter Symonds:

The sham trial of Australian detainee David Hicks at the Bush administration’s prison camp at Guantánamo Bay is drawing to a close.

Yesterday presiding judge Colonel Ralph Kohlman formally convicted Hicks on one charge of “providing material support for terrorism”, and released the details of a plea bargain that will return Hicks to Australia to serve his jail term.

The deal provides for a maximum of seven years, but all but nine months have been suspended.

The strenuous efforts to dress up proceedings cannot disguise the fact that the entire affair is a legal charade designed to justify the Bush administration’s phony “war on terror.”

The plea bargain itself smacks of a dirty deal between Washington and Canberra. One of its key aims is to bolster the fortunes of the Howard government in upcoming national elections later in the year by wiping the issues of David Hicks and Guantánamo Bay off the political agenda.

Free speech in Australia on Hicks issue? See here.

From Living the Scientific Life blog in the USA:

In the past few years, China has become famous for the number and quality of bird fossils from the Early Cretaceous that have been discovered there.

This week, another such discovery has been reported by an international team of Chinese, American and Japanese scientists.

Their discovery of 120-million-year-old fossilized footprints made by a roadrunner-like bird in Shandong Province, China, was published in the European journal, Naturwissenschaften.

The bird that made these tracks was named Shandongornipes muxiai in honor of the teen-aged daughter, Muxia Li, of team member, Rihui Li, a geologist at the Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology.

“It is a huge surprise to find evidence of a roadrunner-like species darting around beneath the feet of Cretaceous dinosaurs,” said Martin Lockley of the Dinosaur Tracks Museum, University of Colorado at Denver, and senior author of the study.

These ancient birds and feathered dinosaurs have changed our understanding of bird origins and evolution.

But it is not known whether representatives of contemporary bird groups existed 130 million years ago.

“Whether or not there were any representatives of modern bird groups in the Cretaceous is currently the subject of a lot of debate,” said Jerry Harris of Dixie State College of Utah.

Harris was part of the team that recently described the very modern-looking, duck-like bird Gansus yumenensis from similarly aged rocks in China.

He was invited to join the Shandongornipes research team because of his expertise on Chinese bird fossils.

“But as research progresses, we are finding more and more evidence that some Cretaceous birds were very similar, though not identical, to modern birds.

Shandongornipes is another surprising, but very welcome, example,” Harris added.

“If the tracks had been found in very recent deposits in North America, we would have assumed they were made by the well-known roadrunner,” said Lockley.

“But finding them in the Cretaceous of China, long before even the nearest relatives of roadrunners had evolved, makes us call them ‘roadrunner-like’.”

Organisms that live in similar ecosystems and have similar natural histories often evolve matching anatomical structures — a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.

For example, dolphins (mammals), sharks (fish), and the now-extinct ichthyosaurs (reptiles) all evolved analogous body shapes because that shape is ideal for rapid swimming.

Similarly, the bird that made the Shandongornipes tracks probably converged on a roadrunner-like body shape and likely exhibited similar behaviors.

Our modern roadrunner, Geococcyx, is a species of cuckoo and, like all cuckoos, has two forward-pointing and two backward-pointing toes, a condition known as zygodactyly that is also evident in Shandongornipes tracks.

From the Cape Argus in South Africa:

South Africa: Researchers Ring City Hadedas in Search for Secrets of Their Success

March 30, 2007

John Yeld
Cape Town

Talk about an exclusive fashion statement! About 32 youngsters are strutting their stuff in Cape Town, sporting exclusive jewellery - rings that are all the rage.

Exclusive and a fashion statement if you’re a bird, that is, and in particular if you’re a young Hadeda Ibis.

This large, raucous, and unmistakable species is a relative newcomer to Cape Town.

The birds are naturally most common in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal and were first recorded in the Western Cape in the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade had established themselves firmly in the city.

Researchers Res Altwegg and Doug Harebottle, at the University of Cape Town’s Avian Demography Unit, have been trying to understand this migration and last year appealed to human residents to help them find the Hadedas’ nests.

Harebottle said the Hadedas, whose loud “Ha-ha-hah” or “ha-de-dah” reverberates through the suburbs - usually at first light as they leave their night roosts - normally breed from late July to November.

Large trees, such as pines, are often used as nest sites, although these birds also use small trees or bushes on islands in wetlands, and they are also known to nest in suburban gardens that have suitable trees.

“Hadeda numbers have been on the increase in the Cape Town Metropole since their arrival 20 years ago. But why have they become such a successful species here and in perhaps many other cities in South Africa?” said Harebottle.

Ibis species of North America: here.

Scarlet ibis: here.

From the Cape Argus in South Africa:

South Africa: New Wasp Species Creates a Big Buzz

March 30, 2007

John Yeld
Cape Town

It’s a case of “Latin meets Khoisan” with the formal description of a new wasp species found on the Table Mountain chain.

The parasitoid wasp has been named Pycnostigmus hoerikwaggoensis in honour of Table Mountain National Park’s Hoerikwaggo hiking trail network, between Cape Point and the city, which is currently being established on the mountain.

Appropriately, details of the new species were released today to coincide with the formal opening of the second overnight camp on the five-night, six-day trail option, at Silvermine.

The first camp to be established, at Orange Kloof above Hout Bay, has already proved a hit and is fully booked at weekends for months to come.

A Khoisan [see also here] word, Hoerikwaggo means “mountain in the sea” or “sea mountain”, and it was the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape’s name for Table Mountain.

The wasp was named by Simon Van Noort, curator of entomology at the natural history division of Iziko-South African Museums.

The discovery of the insect, on Constantiaberg, was made by Van Noort in 1994, but it was only recently that he was able to investigate it scientifically and conclude that it was a new species.

And he has literally thousands of other wasp specimens preserved in jars of ethanol on a multitude of shelves in a cold-room at the museum - including others from Table Mountain and elsewhere in the fynbos system, as well as many other places in Africa - that are all waiting to be scientifically described, identified and named.

“The scary thing is that we may be losing species to extinction faster than we can describe them,” Van Noort said.

The newly described species was originally collected as part of a project to document wasp species richness in what is formally called Mesic Mountain Fynbos, the dominant vegetation type on Table Mountain.

Van Noort explained that his description of this species had been undertaken in collaboration with Matt Buffington of the US Department of Agriculture, and that together they had described seven new wasp species in the sub-family Pycnostigminae.

See also here.

This video is called Bush, Iran and Somalia.

From Al Jazeera:

An Ethiopian helicopter has been shot down in Mogadishu, as fighting continued for a second day in the streets of the Somali capital.

One Mogadishu resident was reported on Friday as saying the helicopter was still burning after it went down in a residential area near the airport.

Gunfire has also been reported near the presidential palace.

“The helicopter looked like a ball of smoke and fire before crashing,” said Ruqiya Shafi Muhyadin, another resident who saw the helicopter roll over in the sky before crashing.

It reminds one of “Black Hawk Down“.

Not the anti Somali racist Hollywood war propaganda movie; but the reality, when US troops withdrew from Somalia after much bloodshed.

Update: here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

Political trials in Ethiopia: here.

During the Vietnam war, United States construction workers, nicknamed “hard hats”, deservedly or undeservedly, had a reputation of supporting that war.

Well, today, with the Iraq war, even Fox News of super warmonger Rupert Murdoch (see also here and here), has to admit that construction workers’ views on George W. Bush’s war are rather different.

From Think Progress blog in the USA:

Boehner booed by construction workers’ union.

Fox News tells the story:

House [Republican] Minority Leader John Boehner was booed on Wednesday at a construction workers’ union legislative forum for saying the United States needs to fight the war in Iraq or face terror attacks at home.

“Who doesn’t believe that if we just pull out of Iraq and come home that the terrorists won’t follow us here and we’ll be fighting them on the streets of America?” Boehner, R-Ohio, said to members attending the AFL-CIO’s Building & Construction Trades Department’s legislative forum.

Apparently, most in the crowd don’t believe it.

Boos from the audience grew louder as Boehner continued, “This is a, ladies and gentlemen, this is a serious fight.”

Just like with Merle Haggard, people that the media might expect to be pro Iraq war, do not live up to that expectation; certainly not if the discredited old 9/11-Iraq connection lie is wheeled out by Bush supporters like Boehner.