So many ideas swimming in my head with these images....where to begin~!? These are adverts for the Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. They are delightfully tongue-in-cheek science and remind me that we are about celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, "On the Origin of Species". Wouldn't he be puzzled at these images? And I for one am thankful for an explanation of the origin of the platypus!
But seriously, this also brought me home with more gratitude than I can express for our new President. In less that a week by the power of the pen, Barack Obama has:
1) Brought an end to government secrecy.
2) Ended our insane use of torture--we are no longer Nazi's! (And don’t fool yourselves, to millions of Muslims around the world our tactics at GITMO and the clandestine prisons in Poland, Romania and God knows where else were seen as no different, no less evil and unGodly.)
3) Returned sanity and reason to our support of population control around the world. [No one likes abortion, but what those who use it as a moral litmus test fail to realize or accept is that a woman has a right to determine how to control the results of unwanted pregnancy. And while those pregnancies can continue to be reduced in our nation by education and contraceptives, in too many places in the world woman remain chattel. And in FAR TOO MANY other places they are used as instruments of warfare in which rape is an assault intended on enslaving, disenfranchising and (where HIV is a part of the equation) genociding enemies.
[These are many of the places that our Family Planning Aid money is going to. In these settings abortion can be the lesser of a myriad of evils. No one likes abortion, but abortion is not the worst thing that can happen to a potential life.
[I watched the righteous few wander around the Mall in Washington D.C. this past week protesting Roe V Wade's anniversary: Pasty-white middle class Americans who have never lifted so much as a finger to feed a starving infant in the poverty stricken corners of this world. Yet they are God's minions who know that abject pain and suffering is God's will for the innocent. They sadden me....but I digress. I warned you. I have many ideas swimming all around my giddy head tonight.]
4) Stem Cell science returns to America! Rejoice my beloved friend who is suffering from MS; rejoice all you living with ALS, rejoice all of us with Alzheimer’s in our genealogies. JUST BE HAPPY, science is back in vogue!
5) Rejoice planet earth. States can now decide how to regulate the befoulment of the air that their citizens breathe. Take that Federal Judges appointed by pro-corporation administrations.... I'm already breathing easier.
And so the Asian tapir has an elephant as a mother and a panda as a daddy...
Who knew?
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