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Man pops 200 balloons in a record-breaking 11.83 seconds
UPI (archive.ph)
By UPI Staff
2023-12-28 18:33:53GMT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T7y1S5n4Jw (PreserveTube)
Dec. 28 (UPI) -- An Idaho man reclaimed a Guinness World Records title by using a nail to pop 200 balloons in 11.83 seconds.
David Rush, who has broken more than 250 Guinness World Records, originally set the record at 14.77 seconds by arranging the balloons in a line on a wall and running with the nail to pop them.
Rush's record fell to another record-breaker with a time of 12.1 seconds, leading him to plan another attempt.
He enlisted the help of some local students to tape the balloons to the wall of the school gym, and he said they had to use some creative problem-solving skills to make the balloon line even across the doorway and a fire extinguisher.
Rush missed one balloon on his first sweep, but was able to get it on his return run. He said having to go back for three more missed balloons in his final run cost him some time, but he still managed to recapture the record with a time of 11.83 seconds.
UPI (archive.ph)
By UPI Staff
2023-12-28 18:33:53GMT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T7y1S5n4Jw (PreserveTube)
Dec. 28 (UPI) -- An Idaho man reclaimed a Guinness World Records title by using a nail to pop 200 balloons in 11.83 seconds.
David Rush, who has broken more than 250 Guinness World Records, originally set the record at 14.77 seconds by arranging the balloons in a line on a wall and running with the nail to pop them.
Rush's record fell to another record-breaker with a time of 12.1 seconds, leading him to plan another attempt.
He enlisted the help of some local students to tape the balloons to the wall of the school gym, and he said they had to use some creative problem-solving skills to make the balloon line even across the doorway and a fire extinguisher.
Rush missed one balloon on his first sweep, but was able to get it on his return run. He said having to go back for three more missed balloons in his final run cost him some time, but he still managed to recapture the record with a time of 11.83 seconds.
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PS1gamenwatch
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>Christian Post (CP)
Lol, they're just adding to "All Christians are kid diddlers" jokes.
D_Tractor
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Wallace
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These Rules About Platforming Nazis Sure Seem Arbitrary and Incoherent!
ArchiveProfessional mediocrity Jonathan M. Katz has started a little bit of an echo of 2021-era media handwringing about what kind of content is allowed on Substack. You may remember that in early 2021, when Substack’s (now shuttered) advance program gave money to me and several other disreputable sorts - that is to say, writers who do not enjoy the approval of The Village - it kicked off a minor fuss about, like, male privilege or something. (These things are always a little vague.) Katz thinks Substack has a Nazi problem and should either aggressively prune every writer who doesn’t own a Kamala Harris t-shirt or else the company should be ostracized from the media community. This is a little funny in that it assumes that there will be a media community in another six months, which given financial trends is not a great bet. Mostly the piece just makes me very tired; The Atlantic is of course the perfect venue for such an essay, since 90% of the people who write there are elite liberal art grads who disappeared up their own ass twenty years ago and who derive the lion’s share of their self-worth from writing for a high-falutin place like that. The Atlantic published Frederick Douglass! But now I’m afraid it publishes David Brooks, and I think Spencer Kornhaber is chained to a desk somewhere, forced to churn out five pieces a day about how Beyoncé’s work constitutes a new Black dream imaginarium, or whatever else Tumblr thought six months ago. I’m not impressed, Jonathan, is the point.
Nevertheless, points must be made.
Wordpress? Really? The backbone of a vast portion of the written content on the web, and thus certainly a repository of far-right attitudes? Let’s not just talk about Wordpress run on private server space, let’s look at Wordpress.com, which is hosted by Wordpress itself. Here’s the blog West Hunter. I wouldn’t ever want to censor this blog because I wouldn’t want to censor any blog, but let me tell ya, that’s an ugly, ugly place! It’s been written by the late Henry Harpending, considered a white nationalist by the SPLC, and Gregory Cochran, a physicist who a) pushes race science and b) believe homosexuality spreads pathogenically. These are certainly the kinds of guys that Katz would want to force off of Substack, were they on there. Instead they’re not just using a Wordpress install, they’re hosted by Wordpress - which is frequently celebrated as a purer, more progressive alternative to Substack! Google’s Blogger service? Though he hasn’t written there for years, notorious race-science proponent Steve Sailer’s blog is hosted on Blogger. I’m sure there are many, many more examples for any given blogging service. What are we to conclude from the fact that so many prominent platforms are home to offensive content? That we just need to get much more aggressive about cleaning up the ol’ web, free expression be damned? No, I think the conclusion is that the problem is not with platforms, the problem is that the world is full of bad people who believe bad things. And it is so indicative of the liberal mindset to insist that there’s One Weird Trick to stopping the far right, like you can flip a switch and just turn of Nazism.
Analee Newitz had one of the most nakedly self-celebratory posts on this topic, thousands of words about how they are a more advanced moral being than the rest of us because they and only they pierced the veil and saw through Substack’s con. Newitz worked for years for Gawker Media, including in 2012, when the company published a video of a deeply intoxicated adolescent girl being raped on the floor of a stadium bathroom. When the woman and her father begged Gawker Media leadership to take down the video, they refused to do so and mocked her in internal emails. Why did that not violate Newitz’s sterling moral principles? I dunno! They also used to share a platform with Cochran and many other odious people. Why was that OK? Unclear! These people are never forced to confront their petty hypocrisy in that regard; Katz has been dodging these very basic questions for over a month now. Newitz makes this all a little more cute given that they still participate in Elon Musk’s “X,” which is chockablock with far-right perverts and which absolutely generates revenue based on their use of the platform. Why is that alright, but using Substack not alright? I have no idea! Neither do they! This is fun, I’m having fun.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...32902-f25c-47fb-a1ef-e523572ab265_498x278.gif
Here’s something called Matt Birchler, putting out the tip jar by celebrating himself for using Ghost instead of Substack. (Oh my God, you’re anti-Nazi? How did you ever become so principled and so brave? Teach me, rabbi!) But he acknowledges that you can simply host a Ghost install yourself and publish all the Nazi content you’d like!
I’m sorry to repeat myself, guys, but I must: we fought a war against fascism that killed 4% of the world’s population, and yet fascism survived. You can’t stop it by tweaking the terms of service. The only thing liberals know how to do anymore is to work the refs - to beg someone in authority to run in and enforce some sort of rules that, they’d like to imagine, secretly run the universe. This was stupid, entitled behavior ten years ago. But after the election of Donald Trump, it stands as something else, something darker. Do you remember the cry that rang out when Trump was elected and in the first years of his presidency? “This is not normal!” As if “normal” ever meant anything, and as if there was some benevolent clockmaker watching over it all who could adjust the dials and fix it so that our country was normal again. How on earth so many educated and successful professionals continue to believe that there is some celestial authority out there who will eliminate fascism if only we pass the right legislation, I cannot understand. Not one of us will live to see the elimination of fascism. Luckily, actual fascism is a tiny fringe ideology that has no power. Unluckily, mainstream conservatism, and its great enabler mainstream liberalism, are bad enough.
By the way, Jonathan, The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg, who helped lie us into the Iraq war and admitted in his book to abusing Palestinian prisoners when he was a literal prison camp guard. Great company you keep there! And, indeed, he is vastly more influential than any of the people you want to deplatform. You strengthened him and his position and the ideology he serves; you put money in his pocket. Does that feel good? Like you’re on the side of the angels? Sometimes, it feels like none of our hands are clean.
Nevertheless, points must be made.
- This will blow over and no one will remember it. Most people who read and write on Substack have no idea there is a controversy and wouldn’t care if they did. If 2020 proved anything, it’s that even the loudest controversies have a habit of suddenly dying down as soon as the news cycle changes. Remember when we were having a racial reckoning, and it was the most important thing ever, and then people were back to blogging about fast fashion and Squid
Game? I remember! - All of this is always panhandling first - everyone who’s ever performatively quit this platform or any other has been doing so to juice subscriptions or generate sympathy that could lead to a staff writer job. It’s one of the most aggressively, shamelessly self-celebratory genres I can imagine.
- A basic part of the point is that, as the past decade and a half proves, contemporary liberals have an incredibly expansive view of what a fascist is. I am a pro-choice, pro-reparations, pro-trans rights, pro-Palestinian, pro-redistribution Marxist, and I am routinely called a fascist by the kind of people who are pushing this line. I promise you that if Substack started banning “literal Nazis,” people would make an effort to include me - it’s happened before on other platforms - and if that effort arose, a lot of people pushing the “we’re only talking about literal Nazis” line would have no problem pushing for me to be deplatformed. Because it’s “only literally Nazis” but then “well Tucker Carlson is basically a Nazi” and then “well Sean Hannity is just like Tucker” and then “well Glenn Greenwald is shrill” and the next thing you know anyone who doesn’t have an Obama bobblehead on their dashboard is banned by policy from these platforms. (Maybe if liberals wanted people to take the fascist threat more seriously they shouldn’t have spent the past fifteen years calling everyone they don’t like a fascist.)
- You cannot censor your way out of extremism, and that is an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement. I highly recommend you click that link. The question of whether we should censor far-right figures off of the internet is irrelevant in the face of the fact that we can’t do that. As I point out in the piece, Germany and France have very aggressive laws against Nazism, and they have never stopped having a significant Nazi problem in their societies. Those laws don’t work! The flow of information cannot be stopped, especially in the era of the internet! We couldn’t shut down ISIS’s communications. China, both one of the most repressive and most technologically advanced societies on earth, have not been able to stop digital communications by activists and resistance groups. There will always, always, always be some sketchy server farm in Chechnya that will host these people, and there will always be Indonesian crypto exchanges with no physical address that will facilitate payments for them. If they can’t stop terrorists, I assure you that they can’t stop those “manosphere” frauds. Whatever hope of total control of information died the day some computer science professor figured out how to send ASCII porn to a colleague. What is it going to take for you guys to understand that there is no button to push marked “shut up all the Nazis”?
- Before malevolent doofus Elon Musk bought Twitter, it was a hive of self-impressed pussyhat liberals who had hegemonic control over the conversation thanks to Twitter’s sympathy towards their position; after he bought Twitter, it became a cesspit of anime racists and crypto scams, and those useless liberals are big mad that their clubhouse got taken over. Now a bunch of people who think they’re entitled to an audience have sat around for a year typing “Guys?…is anyone there?” into Mastodon and they’re really wounded about it all. I absolutely, 100% believe that Twitter’s demise has contributed to the urge to attack Substack. People who enjoyed pride of place on that version of the network are now looking to throw their weight around in the old style, not seeming to understand that without Twitter functioning as the organizing committee, the juice just isn’t there anymore.
- Can someone please tell me who the actual “literal Nazis” are? Katz does a lot more broad gesturing in his Atlantic piece than he does actually proving that there’s a problem or its size. Shouldn’t there be some effort to a) quantify this problem, b) compare it to the size of the platform as a whole, and c) determine if the problem is growing? Is this a crazy thing to ask?
Wordpress? Really? The backbone of a vast portion of the written content on the web, and thus certainly a repository of far-right attitudes? Let’s not just talk about Wordpress run on private server space, let’s look at Wordpress.com, which is hosted by Wordpress itself. Here’s the blog West Hunter. I wouldn’t ever want to censor this blog because I wouldn’t want to censor any blog, but let me tell ya, that’s an ugly, ugly place! It’s been written by the late Henry Harpending, considered a white nationalist by the SPLC, and Gregory Cochran, a physicist who a) pushes race science and b) believe homosexuality spreads pathogenically. These are certainly the kinds of guys that Katz would want to force off of Substack, were they on there. Instead they’re not just using a Wordpress install, they’re hosted by Wordpress - which is frequently celebrated as a purer, more progressive alternative to Substack! Google’s Blogger service? Though he hasn’t written there for years, notorious race-science proponent Steve Sailer’s blog is hosted on Blogger. I’m sure there are many, many more examples for any given blogging service. What are we to conclude from the fact that so many prominent platforms are home to offensive content? That we just need to get much more aggressive about cleaning up the ol’ web, free expression be damned? No, I think the conclusion is that the problem is not with platforms, the problem is that the world is full of bad people who believe bad things. And it is so indicative of the liberal mindset to insist that there’s One Weird Trick to stopping the far right, like you can flip a switch and just turn of Nazism.
Analee Newitz had one of the most nakedly self-celebratory posts on this topic, thousands of words about how they are a more advanced moral being than the rest of us because they and only they pierced the veil and saw through Substack’s con. Newitz worked for years for Gawker Media, including in 2012, when the company published a video of a deeply intoxicated adolescent girl being raped on the floor of a stadium bathroom. When the woman and her father begged Gawker Media leadership to take down the video, they refused to do so and mocked her in internal emails. Why did that not violate Newitz’s sterling moral principles? I dunno! They also used to share a platform with Cochran and many other odious people. Why was that OK? Unclear! These people are never forced to confront their petty hypocrisy in that regard; Katz has been dodging these very basic questions for over a month now. Newitz makes this all a little more cute given that they still participate in Elon Musk’s “X,” which is chockablock with far-right perverts and which absolutely generates revenue based on their use of the platform. Why is that alright, but using Substack not alright? I have no idea! Neither do they! This is fun, I’m having fun.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...32902-f25c-47fb-a1ef-e523572ab265_498x278.gif
Here’s something called Matt Birchler, putting out the tip jar by celebrating himself for using Ghost instead of Substack. (Oh my God, you’re anti-Nazi? How did you ever become so principled and so brave? Teach me, rabbi!) But he acknowledges that you can simply host a Ghost install yourself and publish all the Nazi content you’d like!
This is one of the most bamboozling, fundamentally morally-confused things I’ve ever read in my entire life, and I’ve read the Bible. Ghost is good because you can’t say bad things on Ghost, but also Ghost is good because you can… say bad things on Ghost if you want? The implied principle, that hosting the server space is fundamentally different merely licensing the software and collecting the fee, goes totally unexplained. From the standpoint of the actual far-right messaging, from the standpoint of the actual words and ideas, what on earth difference does it make who is hosting the content? The ostensible concern is that fascist publications a) offend decent people and b) help spread the fascist message, but neither of those problems is remotely addressed by the distinction of whose servers are doing the hosting. If the far-right message spreads regardless, how does using Ghost absolve you of anything? There’s been so much “Substack profits off of Nazis,” but Nazis are almost certainly hosting Ghost installs on their own servers and paying the $10/month too! What makes that $10/month more pure than the 10% of subscription fees Substack takes? What am I missing here? This is all so bizarre, so relentlessly confused, and it’s clear that guys like Katz do not have the slightest idea what exactly they’re arguing for morally. It’s just an impotent whine married to the recognition of a market opportunity, a way to curry favor with the laptop class. I find it vulgar.
I’m sorry to repeat myself, guys, but I must: we fought a war against fascism that killed 4% of the world’s population, and yet fascism survived. You can’t stop it by tweaking the terms of service. The only thing liberals know how to do anymore is to work the refs - to beg someone in authority to run in and enforce some sort of rules that, they’d like to imagine, secretly run the universe. This was stupid, entitled behavior ten years ago. But after the election of Donald Trump, it stands as something else, something darker. Do you remember the cry that rang out when Trump was elected and in the first years of his presidency? “This is not normal!” As if “normal” ever meant anything, and as if there was some benevolent clockmaker watching over it all who could adjust the dials and fix it so that our country was normal again. How on earth so many educated and successful professionals continue to believe that there is some celestial authority out there who will eliminate fascism if only we pass the right legislation, I cannot understand. Not one of us will live to see the elimination of fascism. Luckily, actual fascism is a tiny fringe ideology that has no power. Unluckily, mainstream conservatism, and its great enabler mainstream liberalism, are bad enough.
By the way, Jonathan, The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg, who helped lie us into the Iraq war and admitted in his book to abusing Palestinian prisoners when he was a literal prison camp guard. Great company you keep there! And, indeed, he is vastly more influential than any of the people you want to deplatform. You strengthened him and his position and the ideology he serves; you put money in his pocket. Does that feel good? Like you’re on the side of the angels? Sometimes, it feels like none of our hands are clean.
I love it when Freddie goes off on the swine.
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D_Tractor
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Man with no penis goes skinnydipping in Bass Pro Shops aquarium
Super-Chevy454
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The Washington Post lost 100 million per year.
Well, for licking the Dems boots for so long, as the Joker might said: "You get what you fuckin desserve".
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it seems the people know when you are pushing one-sided bullshit
Super-Chevy454
kiwifarms.net
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Yeah, and I won't be surprised to see the NY Times facing the same music soon or later.
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I Just Learned My Son Is a Webcam Model. Should I Be Troubled?
I Just Learned My Son Is a Webcam Model. Should I Be Troubled?
I Just Learned My Son Is a Webcam Model. Should I Be Troubled?
My son, who is in his early 20s, is a college student. He lives on his own, on a modest but ample budget. I have just found out that my son is a “model” on a pornographic streaming service. My initial reaction was shock, revulsion and shame. But the longer I think about it, the more I wonder, is there really anything immoral or otherwise wrong about what he is doing? He does it from the privacy of his home, alone, and seems to earn a substantial amount of money. If he likes what he does, is there any reason on my part to feel alarmed, ashamed, guilty or worried?— R.P.
From the Ethicist:
If your son were being paid for playing the piano, giving dance instruction or reciting poetry via livestreaming — other ways of using his body — nobody would raise an eyebrow, or purse a lip. Sex is seen as special. Viviana A. Zelizer, a sociologist and the author of “The Purchase of Intimacy,” argues that too many people have adopted either a “hostile worlds” model, in which the realm of market exchanges and the realm of intimacy are inherently at odds, or a “nothing but” model, claiming that on some level, all intimacy is transactional. She’s skeptical of both views, and plausibly calls for a finer-grained and suppler perspective. So how are we to think about “camming,” something that’s neither in-person prostitution nor traditional pornography but has features of both?
So far as I can see, your son is neither being exploited nor exploiting others. Some argue that sexual intercourse for hire is wrong, but it would take a separate argument to show that sexual display of this kind was wrong. Even when there’s no concern about exploitation, some social critics, focusing on the “sex” part of sex work, talk about deficits of authenticity and reciprocity. More to the point is the “work” part. Is a digital peep show the best and fullest form of human sexual intimacy? Nobody said it was. It is a performance, which is an asymmetrical activity. What’s really going on in the heads of performers isn’t the audience’s business; what matters is how convincing they are in what they are pretending to feel. A staging of “Romeo and Juliet” is not necessarily made better if the two principal actors are actually in love; real feelings may well get in the way of convincing performances.
If we agree that your son’s camming isn’t wrong, what explains your initial sense of revulsion? Part of your response might arise from the familiar intrafamilial squeamishness about sexual disclosures. That response, then, may have been connected not with what he was doing but with you, as his parent, knowing about it. (You might have reacted very differently if you learned that it was a friend of his who had this sideline.)
But you can also have prudential concerns. How would his prospects be affected if word got out about his webcam gig? Livestreams can be recorded and uploaded. Even if you think that erotic livestreaming is neither wrong nor shameful, it’s natural, as a parent, to worry about how others might react.
Still, your son probably has some sense of the risks and rewards here; he’ll have read up on it via Reddit or the like. Most people who freelance in the sex trade manage to compartmentalize the activity, as the sociologist Angela Jones explains in their book “Camming,” through the use of manufactured identities; they engage in “stigma management” not because they think it’s wrong but because they don’t want to be doxxed or harassed. Sex workers can be at risk of losing their jobs, housing and even children, if they’re identified as sexual performers I.R.L. And then — when they’re in the ordinary meat-space workplace, the realm of Excel spreadsheets and quarterly performance reviews — they may simply not want to be thought of as sexual performers.
There’s nothing hypocritical about compartmentalizing a cam gig. Pretty much all cultures — and subcultures — have ideas about modesty, privacy and discretion, and so understandings about the contexts where erotic display or simply nudity is appropriate. I’m reminded of the old (and doubtless apocryphal) story told about a group of Oxford dons who were sunbathing nude along a sheltered bend of the River Cherwell reserved for the purpose when a boat filled with women suddenly appeared. All the dons scrambled to drape towels around their waists, save for one, who draped his around his head. When his colleagues asked why, he explained, “I don’t know about you gentlemen, but at Oxford I am known by my face.”
Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/magazine/son-webcam-model-ethics.html
Bubbles
USAJan. 3
"If your son were being paid for playing the piano, giving dance instruction or reciting poetry via livestreaming — other ways of using his body — nobody would raise an eyebrow..." I basically agree with Kwame's response--the guy's an adult and nothing dangerous or illegal seems to be happening here--but I have to disagree with this ridiculous statement. By this framing, everything a human can do is "using [their] body." You're a doctor? Using your body! A judge? Using your body! (You sit in the courtroom, after all, and speak using your body.) Artist? Writer? Lab scientist? Ditto, ditto, ditto. There's an obvious difference between being a porn model and being a piano player. Don't confuse the issue by drawing an equivalency where there is not one. Extremely reductive take that undermines the rest of the response.
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Paul commented January 3
P
Paul
Cape CodJan. 3
Regarding the 20 year old college student who is earning money at a pornographic website. The young man should remember what I tell my children and grandchildren, everything posted on the Internet lives forever. So, if the young man is comfortable that everything he has posted will be available to a prospective spouse, in-law, employer, friend and family member then go for it. Were he my son, I would encourage him to stop.
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Metaphor commented January 3
M
Metaphor
OregonJan. 3
As recently reported by the Times, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and his wife (who worked in an unpaid position as an associate to the chancellor) were removed from their administrative positions by the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents after it was discovered that they had posted sex videos online. I don't agree with this decision, but it is a cautionary tale that employers may take punitive measures against employees who appear in sexual situations online, or may decline to hire such individuals in the first place.
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Sipa111 commented January 3
S
Sipa111
SeattleJan. 3
I wonder if the answer would have been different if we were talking about a 20 -something daughter performing similar sex work. Would there have been more focus on the exploitation of female bodies, that what shows up on the internet stays around forever and can damage relationships and careers for the rest of their lives? While the answer given may be theoretically correct, it also seems to be remarkably short sighted.
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A W commented January 4
A
A W
SFJan. 4
"Sex is seen as special." Because it is special. Nobody actually believes the nonsense about sex work being like any other work. Some say they do, but if you actually test them on it - for example, by querying their feelings on landlords trading accommodation for sex, or on whether sexual assault should be punished more severely as a separate crime from "normal" assault - you'll find that practically nobody actually believes sex is just another transaction.
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Original Cyn commented January 3
O
Original Cyn
NYCJan. 3
It may not be wrong, but it is rather pathetic. That’s my personal judgment call. Who’s providing the baseline “modest but ample” budget? Why does he need more? I guess I would want to know why my kid was doing this? Just for the $ or does he like it? How long does he intend to keep it up & am I financing the rest of his educational & living expenses? These things would matter to me. Online content, even live streams, can have a very long life. Putting this out there suggests poor judgment, simply given that others could see it in the years/decades to come & it may cause problems for him. I tell my daughter that her body belongs to her & what she does with it is up to her. And I mean it. But that’s not to say that there aren’t things she could do with it that would skeeve me out, disappoint me, & cause me concern for her future. This would be one of them.
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PS1gamenwatch
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D_Tractor
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Surprising everyone, Ricky Gervais won the first ever Golden Globe for best comedy special. All the other nominees were black and/or women.
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So he won by default
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New Jaguar breed dropped
Trail video
Article/LinkFor Immediate Release, January 5, 2024
Contact: Russ McSpadden, Center for Biological Diversity, (92 310-6713, rmcspadden@biologicaldiversity.org
Megan Southern, The Rewilding Institute, (520) 628-4318, tortuga@rewilding.orgSouthern Arizona Jaguar Video Confirms New CatTUCSON, Ariz.— A wild jaguar shown in a recent trail camera video from southern Arizona is a new jaguar not previously identified in the state. The images captured last month by a wildlife enthusiast and analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity confirm the eighth jaguar documented in the U.S. Southwest in the past three decades.
“Every new jaguar in Arizona is a moment to celebrate,” said Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “After being nearly wiped out these majestic felines continue to reestablish previously occupied territory despite border wall construction, new mines and other threats to their habitat. We’re extremely lucky to live near such magnificent creatures, and we’ve got to do everything we can to protect our shared landscape.”
The rosette pattern on each jaguar is unique, like a human fingerprint, and it enables identification of specific animals. The new video shows this jaguar is not Sombra or El Jefe, two jaguars who have roamed Arizona in recent years. Arizona jaguars are part of the species’ northern population, which includes the breeding population in Sonora, Mexico.
In 2023 a wild jaguar was photographed at least twice by federally run trail cameras in southern Arizona, but those photos were too blurry for its rosette pattern to be analyzed. It’s possible this latest jaguar detection is the same cat.
All the jaguars spotted in the Southwest over the last several decades have been male. It’s unclear from this latest video whether the jaguar is male or female.
“Whether male or female, this new jaguar is going to need a mate. Now is the time for us to have a serious conversation and take action to bring jaguars back,” said Megan Southern, jaguar recovery coordinator with The Rewilding Institute. “This new cat is just one of the many jaguars who should be roaming Arizona and New Mexico in a healthy population.”
Background
Jaguars are the third-largest cats in the world after tigers and lions. They once lived throughout the American Southwest, with historical records on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the mountains of Southern California and as far east as Louisiana. Jaguars virtually disappeared from this part of their range over the past 150 years, primarily due to habitat loss and historic government predator control programs intended to protect the livestock industry.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service first protected jaguars as endangered in 1972, but in 1980 the Service removed jaguars from the endangered species list. In 1997, in response to a Center campaign, jaguars were again protected as endangered. In 2014 the Center secured more than 750,000 acres of federally protected critical habitat for U.S. jaguar recovery.
In December 2022 the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce jaguars in New Mexico and designate more critical habitat in New Mexico and Arizona.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
The Rewilding Institute advances continental-scale conservation in North America and beyond, particularly the need for large carnivores, protected wildways, and a permeable landscape for their movements.
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Christmas Clickbait roundup:
Suspected cocaine bricks covered in barnacles wash up on Australian beaches (Archive)
Suspected cocaine bricks covered in barnacles wash up on Australian beaches (Archive)
Wild turkey cuts power to thousands of homes in Sacramento on Christmas Eve (Archive)
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Letitia James and 14 Democrat State Attorneys General Sign Letter Asking Biden Regime to Ban “Military-Grade” Ammunition for Citizens.
Yeah right, you'll still have your armed bodyguards in gated condominiums/high-end mansion....