A new video pours out all of the lies about birth control that I've ever heard. Amy Phillips Bursch reports at Alternet. Here are the first three lies:
When women use the birth control pill, they are no longer desirable to men. Women who use contraception have to dress all naughty to get male attention. The World Health Organization has classified contraception as a Class 1 carcinogen.
There's a new generation of little cameras out there, and I took the plunge. I've been looking for a powerful zoom, but I didn't want to lug a big camera around. Then I noticed that several camera makers have come out with some extraordinarily small cameras with big zooms. I went to a couple of areas stores and looked at several of them, including the Canon SX260 and the Panasonic Lumix ZS20. They were both impressive looking, but I eventually went to Costco where I purchased the Sony HX10V for $260. It looks like a run-of-the-mill compact camera until you turn it on and use the 16x optical zoom. I don't quite understand how the engineers figured out how to get the 2" of zoom lens to protrude from a 1" camera body. It's quite an impressive work of engineering.
How well does the zoom work? I've tested it out at the Forest Park Grand Basin. The first photo is looking toward the St. Louis Art Museum without any zoom. The second photo, shot while standing in the same spot, is with full zoom. Click on the photos for more detail (these are lo-res versions of the images--the camera max is 18.2 mega-pixels).
This is going to be fun for shooting wildlife and many other types of shots where you don't want to distract the subjects. And the camera easily fits in a pocket, and it's loaded with many features above and beyond its magical zoom lens.
No Zoom
Full Zoom
Sony touts this camera's ability to take low light shots with good reason. This final image was a hand held shot of my street taken at midnight. I'm really impressed that the camera took a sharp photo in this very low light. I took this shot on full automatic--the camera recognized this to be a low light shot and automatically compensated.
If Iran had a nuclear weapon, would it use it? Of course not. That would be suicidal. Then why do the United States and Israel fear that Iran might create a nuclear bomb? That is the question Glenn Greenwald asked and answered today:
That Iran will use its nuclear weapons against the US and Israel is rather obviously the centerpiece of the fear-mongering campaign against Tehran, to build popular support for threats to launch an aggressive attack in order to prevent them from acquiring that weapon. So what, then, is the real reason that so many people in both the US and Israeli governments are so desperate to stop Iranian proliferation? Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that is what is intolerable. The latest person to unwittingly reveal the real reason for viewing an Iranian nuclear capacity as unacceptable was GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the US's most reliable and bloodthirsty warmongers.
Jonathan Granoff of Reader Supported News points out that Reagan Republicans had a different attitude toward weapons of mass destruction than modern day Republicans:
Listening to today's candidates --at any level -- one would not know that, historically, Republicans have been instrumental in advancing arms control, nonproliferation, and nuclear disarmament. That is, until the recent Bush administration. In fact, active Republican leadership was essential in obtaining the Biological Weapons Convention, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and the Chemical Weapons Convention, to name but a few. However, the current Republicans running for offices, both high and low, have forgotten this legacy of success in making America and the world safer based on the US value of the rule of law.
Check out this stunning artwork Marcus Ruegels made using liquids and high-speed photography.