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The Birds of Pandemonium – Michele Raffin

by Myrna Posted on May 7, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Birds of Pandemonium

Michele Raffin

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


“Michele Raffin has made an important contribution to saving endangered birds, and her book is a fascinating and rarely seen glimpse behind the scenes. The joy she gets from her close relationships with these amazing animals and her outsized commitment to them comes through loud and clear in this engaging and joyful book.” —Dominick Dorsa, Curator of Birds, San Francisco Zoo Each morning at first light, Michele Raffin awakens to the bewitching music that heralds another day at Pandemonium Aviaries—a symphony that swells from the most vocal of over 350 avian throats representing over 40 species. “It knocks me out, every day,” she admits.  Pandemonium Aviaries is a conservation organization dedicated to saving and breeding birds at the edge of extinction, including some of the largest populations of rare species in the world. And their behavior is even more fascinating than their glorious plumage or their songs. They fall in love, they mourn, they rejoice, they sacrifice, they have a sense of humor, they feel jealous, they invent, plot, cope, and sometimes they murder each other. As Raffin says, “They teach us volumes about the interrelationships of humans and animals.” Their stories make up the heart of this book. There’s Sweetie, a tiny quail with an outsize personality; the inspiring Oscar, a Lady Gouldian finch who can’t fly but finds a way to reach the highest perches of his aviary to roost. The ecstatic reunion of a disabled Victoria crowned pigeon, Wing, and her brother, Coffee, is as wondrous as the silent kinship that develops between Amadeus, a one-legged turaco, and an autistic young visitor. Ultimately, The Birds of Pandemonium is about one woman’s crusade to save precious lives, bird by bird, and offers insights into how following a passion can transform not only oneself but also the world. “Delightful . . . full of wonderful accounts of bird behavior, demonstrating caring, learning, sociability, adaptability, and a will to live. Its appeal is ageless, her descriptions riveting, and her devotion to the birds remarkable.” — Joanna Burger, author of  The Parrot Who Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship “A remarkable book. Reading about the birds of Pandemonium will make you laugh and cry; it will make you see more clearly the need to take care of our planet; and it will confirm that one person with a passion can make a difference.” —Jeff Corwin, nature conservationist and host, Animal Planet “ The Birds of Pandemonium touched me deeply . . . This book is about reconnecting with the nature of birds, and the nature of ourselves.”  —Jon Young, author of What the Robin Knows

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The Birds of Pandemonium – Michele Raffin

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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science

by CWVAdriann Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

Four years ago, Michele Bachmann slammed Rick Perry—then the governor of Texas—for his executive order mandating HPV vaccinations. “I’m a mom of three children,” Bachmann said during a GOP presidential debate. “And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong.”

Bachmann, who at the time was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, expanded on her allegations the next day. “I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Fla., after the debate,” she said on the Today show. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects.” (Watch it above.)

Bachmann’s suggestion that the HPV vaccine is dangerous was completely false. “There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement,” explained the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The 2016 campaign is just around the corner, and even though the Iowa caucuses are nearly a year away, we are already being inundated with dubious claims from potential candidates. Frequently, those claims touch upon issues related to science. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve heard Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioning vaccine safety, potential candidate Ben Carson suggesting immigration could be spreading disease, and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) claiming that global temperature data had been “falsified.”

Enter Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which operates the nonpartisan Factcheck.org. Founded in 2003, Factcheck was one of the first websites devoted to refuting misleading assertions about US politics. Last month, Factcheck launched Scicheck, a new project that evaluates the scientific claims made by politicians. In just a few weeks, Scicheck has countered inaccurate statements about issues ranging from climate change to the economic impact of the Human Genome Project.

On this weeks’ episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, I asked Jamieson what inspired her organization to focus on scientific issues. She credits Bachmann.

“When Michele Bachmann in the last election made an allegation about the effects of…a vaccine, in public space on national television…the journalists in the real context didn’t know how to respond to the statement as clearly as they ought to,” explains Jamieson. “The time to contextualize is immediately. That should have been shot down immediately.”

So when the Stanton Foundation approached Factcheck to offer funding for a new initiative, the group decided that what it needed to do was hire “real science journalists” with the expertise to refute false claims and to get those corrections “into the bloodstream of journalism more quickly,” says Jamieson. “That’s how it happened. It’s thanks to Michele Bachmann.”

But Jamieson is keenly aware that it isn’t enough to simply rebut inaccurate claims in real time. One of the key challenges facing science communication is that voters frequently get their news from highly ideological media outlets that sometimes misrepresent the scientific consensus on controversial issues. This has contributed to substantial gaps between what the general public thinks and what scientists think on a wide range of issues, from evolution to the safety of genetically modified foods. To combat this problem, Jamieson recently proposed a new communication strategy called LIVA, an acronym that stands for leveraging scientific credibility (L), involving the audience (I), visualizing the data in a dynamic way (V), and creating relatable analogies for the reader (A). This method has shown promise in shifting people away from their partisan lens and helping them to better understand science. It even seems to work with one of the most polarizing scientific issues of all: climate change.

In Jamieson’s recent study, self-identified conservatives were shown a misleading article from Fox News with the headline “Arctic sea ice up 60 percent in 2013.” Part of this group was then shown additional information using the LIVA method, contextualizing the decades-long downward trend in sea ice and leveraging the credibility of NASA’s measurements. In the end, study participants who were subjected to the LIVA method were more likely to agree with the scientific consensus of a long-term decline in sea ice.

Gary L. Gehman/Annenberg Public Policy Center/PNAS

Jamieson is optimistic that these new science communication methods and sites like Scicheck will improve the overall political discourse. She has hired veteran science journalist Dave Levitan to lead this effort at Scicheck. And while it’s too early to tell if it will be successful, Levitan hopes that his work will make politicians “think more carefully when they talk about science.”

To listen to my entire interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, click below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science

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This Restaurant Is Trying To Be The Worst One on Yelp

by Delmar8501 Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Botto Bistro wants to be the worst-reviewed restaurant on Yelp. Fed up with the site’s alleged manipulation of consumer reviews, owners David Cerretini and Michele Massimo have been offering a 25 percent discount at their Bay Area Italian eatery for each excoriating Yelp review, the Richmond Standard reports. Here are some recent entries from Botto Bistro’s Yelp page:

Yelp has for years been accused of soliciting money from mom-and-pop restaurant owners in exchange for hiding negative customer reviews. In response to a lawsuit over the alleged practice, a court recently ruled that Yelp has the legal right to manipulate reviews and engage in “hard bargaining”—practices restaurant owners have called extortion. Yelp denies that it accepts money to alter or suppress reviews.

According to Inside Scoop SF, Yelp’s only response to Botto Bistro has been a boilerplate email from its customer service division (see below), to which the restaurant sent a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder:

Inside Scoop SF

Source: 

This Restaurant Is Trying To Be The Worst One on Yelp

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A Political History of "True Blood"

by RoderickHaswell Posted on June 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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“How progressive of him.”

That was one of the first sentences that Bill Compton (played by Stephen Moyer), a nearly two-century-old vampire, ever uttered to his one true love Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) in the HBO series True Blood. The two were briefly discussing her friend, Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell), and his support for the Vampire Rights Amendment (VRA), which would endow vampires with the same Constitutional rights identical as other Americans:

This was the first conversation, political or otherwise, that Sookie and Bill ever had. This exchange is from the pilot episode, which aired in late 2008, and it was an early hint that the True Blood crew would regularly inject political notes into their blood-and-sex vamp saga, to the point that each season can arguably be read as its own political allegory. With the seventh and final season premiering on Sunday, here’s a look back at some of the show’s political greatest hits:

1. The whole thing is really about gay rights and civil rights:

In the True Blood universe, vampires are—along with being sexy and dangerous—an oppressed minority. The struggle of mainstream, generally peaceful vampires to gain acceptance in American society is routinely paralleled with the fight for gay rights and marriage equality. Here’s a shot from the opening credit sequence that shows a “God Hates Fangs” sign—drop the “N” and it’s an obvious reference to the Westboro Baptist Church‘s infamous placards:

Screenshot: HBO

In 2010, GLAAD declared True Blood the most gay-friendly series on TV: “Thanks to its large cast (and often sexually ambiguous vampires), HBO’s True Blood is the most inclusive program currently on television, featuring six regular and recurring LGBT characters,” according to organization’s 2010-2011 “Where We Are on TV” report.

2. Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann inspired the fifth season:

Season five features an insurgent group of fundamentalist vampires called the Sanguinistas, who are itching to instigate a civil war within the global bloodsucker community. According to True Blood creator Alan Ball, this violent, theocratic vampire movement was inspired by none other than failed 2012 Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

Here’s Ball, talking to TheWrap about how he mapped out the season, and how the two politicians inspired his vision of vampire terrorism:

For me the jumping off point was watching the Republican primaries, watching Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and asking what would it be like to have a theocracy in America—which is way more terrifying than any fictional monster could ever be…What’s terrifying is how many people agree with Santorum.

“A lot of right-wingers would like to see a theocracy in America,” Ball said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

3. “The Obamas” are an anti-vamp death squad:

The fifth season also introduced the Obamas, a gun-fetishizing, anti-supernatural band of thugs. As they roam around killing vampires and other supernatural beings, they hide their faces behind Barack Obama masks:

Screenshot: HBO

4. The final season appears to reference the devastation of Hurricane Katrina:

The new season finds Sookie’s hometown of Bon Temps, Louisiana, at the center of a new war between humans and a band of infected, extra-ravenous vampires. Some the town’s residents take matters into their own hands, raiding the local police department’s cache of firearms. “We’re here for our guns that are a part of our Second Amendment right not to be fucked over by our government!” one of the spooked citizens says.

An investigation brings the Bon Temps cops to another community that has been slaughtered by the same group of roving vampires. They find this in the decimated town:

Screenshot: HBO

The federal government did not act to save these people, and failed to answer Bon Temps’ cries for help. This should remind you of something else that happened to Louisiana some years ago.

5. There’s a politically powerful church that drives the anti-vamp-rights agenda:

The Fellowship of the Sun is based outside of Dallas and aims to wage a holy war against all vampires. The church also cuts TV ads to counter pro-VRA forces in Congress. “Children see this lifestyle, and maybe they want to imitate it,” says a woman in the following political ad:

6. The Louisiana governor is pretty much a vampire-hating Hitler:

In the sixth season, Gov. Truman Burrell (Arliss Howard) oversees a major crackdown on the state’s vampire population. His policies—death camps, terrible medical experiments on vampires—take a cue from the Nazis. For the record, BuzzFeed’s Louis Peitzman raised a fair point about this last year: “Here’s the real problem with True Blood‘s civil rights allegory: In this case, the so-called bigots are right. Their discrimination of vampires is reasonable, because all of their fears about vampires are true.”

Anyway, here’s a clip of one of Burrell’s speeches, in which he announces the closure of vampire-owned businesses and encourages Louisianans to buy guns and ammo:

Source article – 

A Political History of "True Blood"

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