Giant African pouched rats, also called Gambian pouched rats, are being used to sniff out landmines. Previously dogs were used; the rationale is presumably that rats are more expendable than dogs, and are less likely to attract the attention of Humane Societies. Rats also breed more rapidly and are cheaper, since regions infested with landmines tend to be in the world's poorer countries.
giant pouched rats
linked to at
giant pouched rats
It's the number of pheasants that seems to be getting to people here, not hunting itself. I am from a very urban area, not hunting country at all, but my father did a bit of goose hunting when I was a kid, and i went with him several times (I didn't get to shoot). Part of the experience is the discomfort (he can't do it now -- old bones don't go with 15 degree F for four hours in the blind) and the only intermittent gratification. We still fish fairly frequently, in warmer weather, and the result is similar: four hours in the boat, in a lake that is known to have bass, and you catch only bluegills, if that.
The easy shooting of 70 birds at one time resembles another kind of "hunting" some of the very rich do -- at shops at which we could only dream of buying anything, they buy large multiples of the same highly expensive item. "I'll have one in every color, please."
I wouldn't be happy with hunting the semitame Canada geese that have settled in on golf courses, public parks and office parks all over this mid-Atlantic region. There's a reason for the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel."
Trees are more valuable in the Middle East than most Americans can understand.
In Biblical times, the cedars of Lebanon were literal wealth. People in Roman Egypt valuated the woodwork (door frames and doors, window frames) of a mud-brick home separately, left the woodwork as legacies in their wills, removed it when the house was destroyed. Robbers specialized in stealing the woodwork.
Even today, when shipping is less costly and mechanical irrigation possible, people don92t build in wood in the Middle East: concrete has replaced the traditional mud-brick in modernized nations like Jordan and Iraq. (Concrete and mud brick structures also stay cool in the summer.)
Riverbend describes using palm wood for building furniture, etc.; it's poor quality compared to evergreen and deciduous tree wood.
But we Americans came as settlers to a continent literally covered (at least in the East and Pacific Northwest) with trees, and cut them down at will. Even now the anti-environmental mentality is "we can always grow more."
I wonder if the incidence of porn spam (e-mail, unwanted posts) is rising as the economy worsens.
I have a Hotmail address (call me an idiot and sucker, but I've had it so long that it would be more inconvenient to update all my contacts with a new one). More and more porn spam is landing in my Junkmail box. I don't post that often on blogs to cause this.
The mentality of porn spammers probably is that some people (maybe many people, despite all the warnings) can be counted on to open it, click, and buy, the way chocolate and donuts continued to sell during the Great Depression.
For some reason I have a vision of a giant inflatable figure of Tony Blair suspended in the fog. . . .above the crippled ocean liner of British government. That' what these mixed metaphors do to you.
The TSA's apparent bureaucratic bungling and spectacle of computerized idiocy and officious ineptitude is, I suppose, actually engineered by someone Higher Up, intended to frighten ordinary Americans into not attending antiwar protests or even signing petitions for fear they will not be able to fly on their next summer vacation or fly to their aged mother92s hospice bed.
I don92t actually think that the neocons have set out to become fascists and impose Fascism on America. That would require too great diabolicality on their part (movie villains) or too great doublethink (even their heads would explode).
I think that in the repression of civil liberties (as opposed to foreign policy) they are merely executing definitely shady and criminal but ad hoc and unsystematic strategy. Nevertheless, maybe you can achieve fascism inadvertently, a Third Reich acquired in a fit of absence of mind.
On Nicholas De Genova (upthread), the right-wingers are also distorting his degree of status and influence. Ph.Ds in the humanities and social sciences such as anthropology are overproduced and there are not enough teaching jobs for them, let alone tenure-track assistant professorships. Non-tenure track assistant professors are generally regarded as departmental cannon fodder, just up the evolutionary ladder from adjuncts, who are hired to teach individual courses. Many of these lower status academics (and graduate students who see their future) are becoming very politicized and bitter. I don't know De Genova's particular relations with his department or his psychology, but a non-TT asst. professor might well decide he or she had nothing to lose by speaking out, not identifying with the institution. Whereas full and long-term professors like Hobsbawm and Foner at Columbia (they are both Marxists) would weigh their words more carefully. De Genova may have been stressed out from overwork (the asst. prof. is expected to publish heavily and he has produced chiefly articles, as his Columbia CV shows) and didn't have time to reconsider his speech, especially since he was chosen to speak at the last moment.
I speak from a little experience, since I am a Ph.D. in classical history and have tried for three years to find a full-time academic job, to no avail. The right-wing ideologues disseminate an outdated view of academics as privileged, easy shoo-ins for tenure, college teaching being not "real work" and only slightly less sybaritic than Hollywood acting. This is *not* true. They furthermore never point to _their own_ ideologues and think-tankers, paid $150,000 a year by places like AEI and the Olin Foundation to write books that sometimes have no footnotes or documentation whatever, just the unsourced anecdotes right-wingers love. David Brock's _Blinded by the Right_ reveals this.
I am not condoning what De Genova said; I think his "million Mogadishus" remark was idiotic, and with friends like these, who needs enemies? But I wanted to explain the possible social context a little more.
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