kateoplis:

To Save Some Species, Zoos Must Let Others Die | NYT

Ozzie, a lion-tailed macaque, will never father children. Lion-tails once flourished in the tops of rain forests in India, using their naturally dark coloring to disappear into the height of the jungle. Though there are only about 4,000 remaining in the wild, not one among Ozzie’s group here in St. Louis will be bred. American zoos are on the verge of giving up on trying to save them.

As the number of species at risk of extinction soars, zoos are increasingly being called upon to rescue and sustain animals, and not just for marquee breeds like pandas and rhinos but also for all manner of mammals, frogs, birds and insects whose populations are suddenly crashing.

To conserve animals effectively, however, zoo officials have concluded that they must winnow species in their care and devote more resources to a chosen few. The result is that zookeepers, usually animal lovers to the core, are increasingly being pressed into making cold calculations about which animals are the most crucial to save. Some days, the burden feels less like Noah building an ark and more like Schindler making a list.

(Source: arousable)

kingstonhonkers:

potatobeenz:

You get home from a long day at work and turn on the TV. It’s been a long week, so you think to yourself- maybe i’ll take the family to a movie on Saturday. Maybe we’ll even go on a vacation soon! We could visit museums and go to plays and see all sorts of fun attractions. 

When you turned the TV on, nothing happened. There are no actors to entertain you. 
When you went to the movie theater, nothing was showing. There were no advertisements to tell you that anything was showing, so you went to the theater to find out. Nothing playing. There is no one to film and create movies for you. Well at least your vacation will be fun, right? Not like there will be any plays to see and there won’t be anything in the art museums. 
Well at least you have the shack you are living in that you made out of cardboard and sheets.

Not like you could find an architect to build you a house with all the money you’re making as an engineer. 

I must disagree. What you are saying, in essence, is that all artists are Fine Arts majors. All photographers are Photography majors. All actors are Drama and Theatre majors. Those majors are only declared useless because of the sheer proportion of people that can’t make a living off of it. With such subjective topics, having a major in it isn’t much use, is it? When we look at Broadway stars, actors, how many of them majored in theatre? Ron Howard, Spielberg, did they major in Film Studies? Majoring in the fine arts doesn’t make you an artist, just like majoring in Engineering doesn’t make me an engineer.

When I attended Conan O’Brien’s event last week, there was a quick video presented at the very beginning by the Video Production Club. Club shirts, backstage passes, “fancy” DSLR’s hanging around their necks. A few of these people are majoring in Film. So what did they put together for this momentous occasion, an event celebrating Sixth College’s 10th birthday? Nothing very impressive, to be scathingly blunt. It was probably made with Final Cut Pro X, but had the quality of something made in Windows Movie Maker. It didn’t feel as if they (did more than one person work on that?) put any passion or work into it at all. 

See, the thing I take out of these “Useless Majors” things that have been popping up all over nowadays, is not the topic itself is useless; I love film, I love photography, I love the work that my friends put into their art. It is the major itself that is useless. There are people out there that take it upon themselves to defend such a major as if it were their life. By criticizing the Film major, am I, by proxy, criticizing Kevin’s film work? By criticizing the Fine Arts major, am I criticizing artists? Of course not! If you think that, you think wrongly and you should feel bad. The thing I take out of these “Useless Majors” is that the major itself is well… useless. It says so in the title. My Engineering major is preparing me to be an engineer. It’s doing a pretty good job of that. Does a major in Fine Arts prepare you to be an artist? Does it prepare you for those blocks that inevitably happen to artists? Does it prepare you for beautiful inspiration, for creation, for the power that you could potentially hold in your hands? Absolutely not. And in that, the major is useless.

No one ever said anything about artists themselves being useless, architects being useless, actors being useless, designers, videographers, photographers, being useless. 

And there’s my two cents. 

(Source: swyhis)

kateoplis:

NYC Dept of Records debuts its online photo database: 

Manhattan Bridge, 1908

amythuta:

Disney with a dark side, I like it.

climateadaptation:

A very different, and very cool type of northern lights, via Chet-Apichet NASA SDO

(Source: lovenhonor)

thedailywhat:

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

[kony2012.]

imfallinginandoutagain:

REBLOG. EVERYONE. Joseph Kony is the world’s worst war criminal. In 1987 he took over leadership of an existing rebel group and renamed it the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The LRA has earned a reputation for its cruel and brutal tactics. When Joseph Kony found himself running out of fighters, he started abducting children to be soldiers in his army or “wives” for his officers. The LRA is encouraged to rape, mutilate, and kill civilians–often with blunt weapons.

The LRA is no longer active in northern Uganda (where it originated) but it continues its campaign of violence  in Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and South Sudan. In its 26-year history, the LRA has abducted more than 30,000 children and displaced at least 2.1 million people.

What is the goal of KONY 2012?

Invisible Children has been working for 9 years to end Africa’s longest-running armed conflict. U.S. military advisers are currently deployed in Central Africa on a “time-limited” mission to stop Kony and disarm the LRA. If Kony isn’t captured this year, the window will be gone.

We are taking action to ensure these two things:

1) That Joseph Kony is known as the World’s Worst War Criminal.

2) That the U.S. military advisers support the Ugandan Army until Kony has been captured and the LRA has been completely disarmed. They need to follow through all the way and finish what they have started.

Why are we making Joseph Kony “famous”?

Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice. In this case, notoriety translates to public support. If people know about the crimes that Kony has been committing for 26 years, they will unite to stop him.

Secondly, we want Kony to be famous so that when he is stopped,  he will be a visible, concrete example of international justice. Then other war criminals will know that their mass atrocities will not go unnoticed or unpunished.

(Source: writeyourlifexxx)