theweaselking | Aug. 23rd, 2005

Aug. 23rd, 2005

Utah National Guard break up a legal, insured rave - and when the crowd do not resist and begin to disperse quietly, they release dogs, fire tear gas, and begin beating anyone taking pictures and confiscating the cameras.

They didn't get them all.

Hey, look, eyewitness accounts and the official version in the Salt Lake City Tribune, courtesy of (surprise, surprise) Fox News Channel 13.

But, hey, just watch the video.

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war."

Pat Robertson calls for the murder of a foreign head of state - the democratically elected Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela.

"without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

With video.

In a Canton, Ohio high school, 65 of the 490 female students are pregnant.

This is not an unusual number for this city.

Guess how much money this school board has, and how hard they have to work to keep the schools open and moderately safe.

Guess whose sex-ed program was scrapped due to screeching ignorant fundie whining.

Guess what they replaced it with in order to get bare-bones funding to keep the school open?

Ralph Fisher: the only professional boxer to win a match lying on the mat unconcious after his opponent knocked him out.

Clashing colonies of sea anemones fight as organized armies with distinct castes of warriors, scouts, reproductives and other types, according to a new study.

The sea anemone Anthopleura elegantissima lives in large colonies of genetically identical clones on boulders around the tide line. Where two colonies meet they form a distinct boundary zone. Anemones that contact an animal from another colony will fight, hitting each other with special tentacles that leave patches of stinging cells stuck to their opponent.

David J. Ayre from the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Rick Grosberg from UC Davis have previously taken individual anemone polyps from separate colonies and studied fighting strategies one-on-one. But that's like trying to understand two armies by taking a single soldier from each side, Grosberg said.

Now, the researchers have been able to study two entire colonies as they clash.

When the tide is out, the polyps are contracted and quiet. As the tide covers the colonies, "scouts" move out into the border to look for empty space to occupy. Larger, well-armed "warriors" inflate their stinging arms and swing them around. Towards the center of the colony, poorly armed "reproductive" anemones stay out of the fray and conduct the clone's business of breeding.

When anemones from opposing colonies come in contact, they usually fight. But after about 20 or 30 minutes of battle the clones settle down to a truce until the next high tide.

It's not just polyps along the border between two clones that clash. Polyps three or four rows away from the front will reach over their comrades to engage in fights, Grosberg said.

Differentiation into warriors seems to depend on a combination of signals from enemy stings and the genetics of the colony. Different colonies react differently to similar signals, explaining why different clones are organized into so many different kinds of armies. But borders between colonies can remain stable for years, even though the two colonies organize their armies in different ways.