IMO, The Most Beautiful Raptor in the World: The Harpy Eagle

My last Eagle post got me back onto one of the tracks of my youth, which is my love of Falcons, Hawks, and Eagles.

Sooooo, I did some surfing.

There are three contenders for, “world’s largest eagle”: The Golden Eagle, The Philippine Eagle, and the Harpy Eagle. It all depends on your criteria: Largest wingspan, longest body, or heaviest weight. Basically, they are all in the same size class, but the Golden Eagle is the most muscular and aggressive bad boy. Bald Eagles are positively timid by comparison. The Harpy Eagle, by contrast, is a fisherman, has a more slender build, and is ultimately probably the most graceful of all, not to mention the most beautiful.

When I was a kid we lived in Panama, and we used to see these birds around. God does some fucking magnificent work. Just look at those fish-grabbing talons!

Harpys don’t cruise around on thermals, they fly low and fast, so the wingspan isn’t enormous, and those trademark flayed-out wing-tip feathers are less prominent, but they could literally fly circles around a golden eagle.

Their beaks are slender compared to Bald and Golden Eagles too, but they do have dreadlocks, and that is just the shit.

Cool linky dinky: Number 1, and Numero Dos (From Guatemala!).

Dare Any Liberal You Know…

…to read this!

Via Glenn Reynolds (That shyster lawyer whose guts I do not hate).

Interesting bits:

“Globally fertility rates have been falling since the 1960s. What does this mean for the future? At the Transvision 2007 conference, Jerome Glenn, head of the United Nations’ Millenium Project and author of its annual State of the Future report, pointed out something what I’ve been saying for years—that the U.N.’s low variant trend appears to be the path that world population is following. If that trend holds, Glenn noted, that would mean that world population would grow to about 8 billion in 2050 and start declining to 5.5 billion in 2100. That’s a billion fewer people than currently live on the planet.”

That’s a pretty stupefying prediction I did not know about.

“Similarly, the amount of land needed to grow enough food to feed a person has plummeted from about one-and-a-quarter acres in 1950 to about half an acre today. Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, finds, “If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today’s cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia.”

Emphasis is mine, but you hardly need it. How many times have the moonbats you know brought up the Amazon Rain Forest in reverential tones of utter despair? So, we’re on track to save a bigger chunk of nature than that. Pretty fucking cool.

It’s a long article, but we’re Tizonians, not ADD-addled libtards. So, read the whole thing, and challenge a liberal to do the same.

Comment Stolen

and shake the tree and see what ideas come out of it.

Yep, that’s pretty much it – everything grows on trees. Money. Ideas. Alternative fuels. Just shake ‘em and watch the solutions fall out.

Meanwhile, the greedy capitalist pigs at pharmaceutical companies and such do things like “study” and “research” with “technology” that someone “invented.”

– Dave S.

That comment, off this thread at the Lair of Blair, is just perfect.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about it that’s perfect, but it just is.

And you’re all gonna believe me too, because Right-Wingers are all sheep who will believe whatever they’re told to believe, right? [/moonbat]

Barack Obama – a John Kennedy for our times…It’s getting a tad frightening, folks..

One man has captured the heart of the new America

It is hard to see who can stop Senator Barack Obama becoming the next President of the United States. He has built up an excitement such as no candidate has created since President Kennedy in 1960. He is, in my view, a better speaker than Kennedy. Like Kennedy, he combines personal magnetism with a strong appeal to American idealism.

Like Kennedy, he is young and speaks for the new generation of American politics. By ordinary political reckoning, 2008 ought to be the Democrats’ year. In 2006 they captured both houses of Congress in mid-term elections.

______________

Senator McCain is another matter. I am a McCain admirer; if I were an American, I would almost certainly vote for him. He has the key qualities a President needs – courage, intelligence, humanity, independence, experience of international affairs and sufficient self confidence to support the most intolerable role in the world. As a prisoner of war in Vietnam he was tortured and his behaviour was heroic. If one regards the security of the world as the supreme concern of the President of the United States, one would want John McCain to be the next President. He is probably a wiser man who knows more about war than any President since Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Yet the core argument of the Obama campaign is both powerful and timely. In American politics each generation looks for a renewal. That may come from either party; it is not simply a matter of a swing from the right to the left. In the first half of the past century it came from Theodore Roosevelt as a Republican and from Franklin Roosevelt as a Democrat.

Times UK

Israel kills terror chief with headrest bomb

NOTHING seemed very remarkable about the short, bearded man who mingled with other guests on Tuesday evening at a reception in Damascus, the Syrian capital, to mark the 29th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution.

Yet before the night was over he was dead in the twisted wreckage of his car and the inevitable assumption was that Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, had killed him with an ingeniously planted bomb.

The news spread rapidly that the dead man was Imad Mughniyeh, an elusive figure known as “the Fox” who had been one of the world’s most feared terrorist masterminds.

Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who spent years on his trail, said Mughniyeh was “probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across”.

Read on……Times UK

China ‘will make secret checks on backgrounds of Olympic visitors’

The Chinese government has been accused of carrying out secret inquiries on the backgrounds of athletes, officials and journalists going to this summer’s Olympics – so it can ban anyone who opposes the regime.Tory MEP Edward McMillan-Scott claims China’s Ministry of Public Security has drawn up a document detailing how people are to be assessed – and listing 43 categories to be kept out.

Any athlete, member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), journalist, sponsor or guest who has been on a peaceful demonstration in support of the independence of Tibet should be excluded, according to the alleged document.

Moral tangle: The Olympic stadium in Beijing, where authorities have allegedly called for visitors to be vetted over their past political activities

Also allegedly due for checks are representatives of the “host city for the next Olympics”, suggesting figures like London 2012 Games chairman Lord Coe and London Mayor Ken Livingstone will be screened for their political views on China.

The Beijing-based Public Security Ministry – responsible for policing 1.3 billion people – allegedly lists what type of people should be barred.

They include members of religious groups and terrorist organisations and sections of the media “who endanger the Olympic Games”.

A category entitled “China’s enemies” includes the families of people killed in anti-government protests, such as Tiananmen Square, “overseas hostile forces” and “individuals who disturb social stability”.

And listed under “separatists” is the Dalai Lama’s Government of Tibet in Exile and members of its affiliated organisations as well as “individuals who partake in parades, demonstrations and protest activities with the goal of breaking up nations”.

Prince Charles, a long-time supporter of the Dalai Lama, has already said he will not attend the Olympics. But under the alleged criteria he would be on the blacklist.

Journalists attract particular scrutiny, with bans to be extended to “staff of any foreign media hostile to the People’s Republic of China” and “staff of media who publish anti-communist articles and those who viciously slander the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government”.

The secret checks will also look out for “individuals who form unlawful religious groups”.

Mr McMillan-Scott, a long-standing critic of the Chinese regime, said last night that he had been assured the details were accurate and he believed them to be so.

They were passed to him by exiled members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a philosophical and exercise regime that has been persecuted in China since 1999.

Mr McMillan-Scott said: “There is absolutely no question in my mind that it is a genuine document. The Falun Gong have an incredible network of communications and they penetrate every area of Chinese life.

“This document epitomises the way the Chinese state operates against any form of dissidence, any form of nonconformist religion and any form of opposition to the established order.”

Erping Zhang, spokesman for Falun Gong in the USA, added: “The document came from inside the Chinese security bureau.

“Some people who are secret Falun Gong practitioners are in the security bureau. They passed us this information last year and we know it is genuine.

“We feel the Chinese authorities are politicising the Olympic Games. It should be a movement open to all individuals regardless of gender, race, religion or politics.”

IOC Director of Communications Giselle Davies said: “We can’t comment on this because we do not know the source.

“However, we have every reason to believe that the accreditation procedure will work as it has done in the past.

“We have had assurances from the organisers that the usual procedures will be followed, which would involve only the normal security checks and balances.”

Last week, The Mail on Sunday told how British Olympic chiefs were forcing athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record or face being banned from Beijing.

The controversial clause had been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbade them making any political comment about countries staging the games.

Just a day later, following an international outcry, the offending clause was dropped from the contract.

A British Olympic Association spokeswoman said last night she was unable to comment about the contents of the list but said: “At the Olympic Games it is standard procedure to carry out security checks on everyone attending, like competitors, IOC members and Association staff.”

A London representative of the Chinese government refused to comment.

Daily Mail UK

Famous Psychiatrist: Liberals are Clinically Insane

Restating the obvious, for many of us, but this article is well worth reading.

“Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”

For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.

“A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do,” he says. “A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do.”

BAM! as Emeril would say.

“The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind,” he says. “When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.”

Ouch! That ought to leave a mark.

Libtards also like to display their psychopathy for all to see. I especially like the, Read My Lips, No New Texan’s” sticker. He/she/it may hope to never see this in the rearview.

(If I had a photo editor, I’d have made it a mirror image. Any of you editors want to have a go?)

Challenge accepted!

Computer virus hidden in digital photo frames from China

An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects passwords for online games – and its designers might have larger targets in mind.

“It is a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence,” said Brian Grayek, who heads product development at Computer Associates, a security vendor that analyzed the Trojan Horse.

The virus, which Computer Associates calls Mocmex, recognizes and blocks antivirus protection from more than 100 security vendors, as well as the security and firewall built into Microsoft Windows. It downloads files from remote locations and hides files, which it names randomly, on any PC it infects, making itself very difficult to remove. It spreads by hiding itself on photo frames and any other portable storage device that happens to be plugged into an infected PC.

The authors of the new Trojan Horse are well-funded professionals whose malware has “specific designs to capture something and not leave traces,” Grayek said. “This would be a nuclear bomb” of malware.

Read the full article here for information on which items have so far been found to be infected and what you can do to protect yourself.

-via Instapundit and SF Chronicle

Barack Hussein Obama Wearing Bracelet of Fallen Soldier

“She gave me this wristband, which I’m very grateful for,” Obama told the Green Bay audience, halting and lowering his voice from his normally upbeat presentation. “I meet mothers and family members all over the country who are still mourning their children but are also thinking about the young men and women who are still over there and wondering when it will end.”

Tracy Jopek of Merrill, Wis., gave Obama the bracelet at a rally Friday night in Green Bay, and Obama was still wearing it Saturday as he campaigned across the state before Tuesday’s primary.

“My son loved this country very much, I love this country, but I don’t feel that staying in Iraq will vindicate my son’s death,” she said. “And it’s not over for us until this war is over. I just don’t want any more soldiers to die in vain for something that we can’t solve.”

—————–

I sympathize with you, Tracy Jopek. I really do….BUT men and women have died and will continue to die, over the unsolvable. War is NOT a new thing. The only way “war” will stop…..is for humankind not to exist. BUT…you see my dear lady, it will then be left to lower forms of life on this planet, to fight and die over the unsolvable.

You would be most welcome to try Tracy….First you must convince peoples, that share the middle name of the person you hope to be “Commander in Chief”, that their way is not the right way.

Convince these people that running planes into buildings OR draining marshes OR digging up desert sands for the purpose of putting thousands and thousands and thousands, of humankind that you have just killed, is NOT the right way.

Breitbart

Jesus, had to get up from my nice comfy bed, JUST to put this attribution in…I”m either conscientious or stupid and I know which one I’m leaning toward

.

UPDATE – 27 September 2008 by spot_the_dog:  The bracelet makes a cringeworthy appearance at the first Presidential Debate.