Important breakthrough in our understanding of bat whiskers

Every now and then, I’ll hear about someone who not only writes daily, but finds it easy to do so 99% of the time. I won’t say that I think such people are fantastical, but it’s an alien concept to me. I’m till quite proud of the daily posting I’ve achieved over the last year, and of advances I’ve made in my rate of fiction writing, but some days, well. Some days it don’t come at all, and these are the days that never end. So here I am, compelled by unholy pacts to post before I can sleep, and just… nothing appeals.

There’s plenty of stuff that I find interesting, but to write about? Less so. I thought about Democracy Now’s report on the Ohio train disaster (which you should check out), but I’ve posted about that two days in a row now, and this sentence makes a third. There are always little bits of research about how long coral can survive warming temperatures, or an advance in electrolysis efficiency, but on posts like that it keeps coming back to the same basic thing, we need to build the collective political power to enact real change. Some days, I just… can’t.

I’ll get back to that soon, I suppose, but right now it just feels a bit draining. Instead, let’s learn about bat whiskers!

The researchers worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute recording Pallas’s long-tongued bats—a South and Central American bat that has the fastest metabolism of any mammal—as they drank from hand-blown glass flowers designed for the study to replicate the plants the animals feed from. High-speed infrared cameras captured photos and video of the bats as they descended upon the glass flowers and navigated their muzzles and tongues into the “bloom” to eat the nectar. Feedings typically lasted between a half- to one second.

The researchers found that bats with clipped whiskers were less agile and accurate during feeding and flight than animals with untouched whiskers. The animals with clipped whiskers were held for a few days until the hairs regrew, then released back into the jungle. “Clipping the whiskers doesn’t reduce the bats’ ability to feed, they just do it a little less gracefully,” Amichai said. “If it were gymnastics, they’d get an 8.5 instead of a 9.8.”

See, this is the kind of animal research that has always appealed to me. Clipping whiskers is, I’m sure, deeply offensive to the bats, but it’s certainly not going to cause lasting harm, especially with the researchers ensuring their subjects have plenty of food available. It reminds me of when I helped make blindfolds for flying geckos so a fellow student could study their steering ability.

I have to admit, I never really gave much thought to bat whiskers, but for a creature that zips around shoving its head in floral tubes, it makes sense to have a facial perimeter alert system.

The role of long whiskers in nectar-feeding bats’ flight control provides new insight into the co-evolution of the bats with the flowers they feed on, Amichai said.

The majority of bats possess short whiskers not arranged in any particular pattern or direction. But the researchers found that whisker length in nectar-eating bats evolved at least twice, along with the evolution of their long tongues and faces, to help them better navigate the deep chambers of the flowers they prefer. In turn, the long reach these flowers require results in more pollen sticking to their pollinators and thus the broader proliferation of their kind.

The researchers plan to continue their work using higher-resolution images, flowers that move, interactions with predators and other expansions on the experimental model, Amichai said.

In the meantime, the latest study offers a fascinating glimpse into how nectar-feeding bats combine various forms of sensory information to navigate the world around them, Amichai said. Their world is a combination of scent, echolocation, spatial memory, knowledge of the seasons, and the physical sensation and equilibrium provided by their whiskers.

“I find thinking in these terms of switching back and forth between completely different ways to perceive the world—and seamlessly integrating their input—to be a mind-blowing concept,” Amichai said. Understanding how animals perceive and interact with their surroundings helps scientists develop better conservation strategies, he said.

“We are strange animals—we rely almost solely on vision and, to a lesser extent, hearing to perceive the world. As a result, we interpret other animals’ behavior in similar terms and that often leads us to completely misinterpret what they’re doing and why,” Amichai said. “Understanding the sensory world of other animals helps us see the world through their eyes and understand their behavior, needs, and challenges better.”

In the recently made Battlestar Galactica reboot, one of the human-form cyclons laments the fact that even though he’s technically a robot, designed and built (or grown? I’m not clear on that), because he was made “in the image of” humanity, his eyes can only perceive as much as a human might. Instead of being able to see the full grandeur of the universe, he’s limited by the imperfect meat of his body.

I sympathize with that. I don’t feel a particular need to examine the world around me with my beard, but I’d like to be able to get more information out of smells, or to be able to hear with more clarity or accuracy. Since I doubt I’ll be getting my dreamed-of cyborg replacement parts in this lifetime, so instead I’ll just have to muse on what might have been, down another evolutionary timeline.

Oh, to be a bat, flitting from flower to flower.

Researchers see good results from lower mowing intensity, and fewer pesticides

My posts about agriculture tend to lean one of two ways. The first is to advocate for a dramatic, rapid increase in indoor food production. That includes the various forms of indoor farming, as well as efforts to cultivate edible bacteria and microalgae. The second is that for the land that’s currently being used for farm, we shift to a form of ecosystem management much closer to what Native Americans did prior to the European invasion. Land Back should be part of that, of course, but the basic idea is to cultivate an ecosystem that’s full of useful and edible organisms, and to treat it as a community resource, owned in common by everyone, for everyone’s benefit. As always, the exact specifics of this approach will vary depending on regional and local conditions.

I get that just swapping over would feel like a big change to most people. We’re very used to what “farming” looks like, and it can be hard to trust that something like bacterial flour or rows of plants under LEDs would be able to feed humanity in our billions. Fortunately, while I’m more interested rapid, radical change, my philosophy for making the world better is one where every step along the way should come with its own improvements. My favorite example is probably the use of plant life to mitigate air pollution. There’s ample evidence that being around greenery improves both our mental and our physical health (not that those are really separate things). We’d get pretty immediate benefits from adding plants to the urban landscape. Those improvements to our health and wellbeing give us more power, through better health and saved money, to fight for the next step up.

That’s why, while the vision in my head may be some sort of solarpunk permaculture utopia, there are actually much smaller steps that we could take, which would have measurable benefits, both in terms of dealing with climate change directly, and in terms of improving ecosystem health. For example, this study lays out what seems to be a sort of intermediary step, designed to capture carbon, improve ecosystem health, and reduce dependence on pesticides and herbicides, with relatively little effort:

The researchers conducted two independent experiments at the University’s research facilities at the Ruissalo Botanical Gardens in Turku. In the greenhouse and common garden studies, the research team showed that the intensity of mowing has a great impact on pastures. By reducing the intensity of the mowing and cutting the plant higher, the overall yield of the pasture increased and the plants developed bigger roots. This indicates a higher atmospheric carbon sequestration into belowground storage.

What was surprising, Fuchs emphasises, is that the researchers found a detrimental effect of herbicide residues in soil on root growth regardless of the intensity of the yield harvest.

“This demonstrates a tremendous limitation to the potential carbon binding and storage belowground when soils are polluted by pesticide. Considering the vast amount of pesticides applied to agricultural fields yearly, we can conclude that the impact on soil quality is a major driver of limited root growth, carbon sequestration, and consequently plant resilience and productivity,” Dr Fuchs says.

The authors propose additional field studies to extrapolate their findings onto a field scale. Both studies conclude that climate change mitigation via optimising carbon sequestration and storage in soil can be achieved by reducing pesticides, which will facilitate root growth and improve plant resilience.

All over the world, cultivated grasslands are used as grazing pasture as well as for growing fodder that is turned into hay and silage. They cover large parts of the world’s agricultural land and have a tremendous potential for climate change mitigation through carbon storage. The plants use carbon dioxide as they grow, and some of this atmospheric carbon becomes bound in the soils.

“Consequently, understanding how pesticide pollution in soil and intensive management limit plant productivity is the key to optimising intensive grassland-based agriculture in a sustainable and climate-friendly way,” Fuchs concludes.

Oh yeah, it means better crops, too. Did I bury the lede? Maybe a little. They don’t really talk about ecosystem health, but I think it’s pretty easy to see how less intensive mowing, and less pesticide use would both have a “side effect” of improving the general health of the area.

I think we should be ending most of our animal agriculture, which would eliminate much of the need for grasslands as fodder, but we’re not going to get there overnight, and anything we can do to improve things now will make our lives just a little bit easier down the line. Of course, that only matters if this research actually leads to a change in practice. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? There’s something we could try to make the world better, but nobody in the aristocracy seems to feel like investing in it. That’s why I keep coming back to collective power and political change.

As I said at the beginning, the steps we take now can be both immediately beneficial to us, and beneficial to our ability to get bigger changes down the road. We’re not capitalists here at Oceanoxia, so don’t think in terms of “political capital”. The kind of power we on the left want to build isn’t something that’s lost when used. Each victory brings more people and power to the cause, and sets us up for an even bigger victory.

I think many of us are accustomed to witnessing a political and economic “ratchet” effect, in which Republicans use their power to damage things like the social safety net, and Democrats stabilize things, but don’t actually reverse the damage, or guard against further damage. I mean, the Dems do plenty of damage themselves, but we’re talking generalities. While we’ve made great advances in terms of civil rights (hence the current reactionary backlash), 9/11 ushered in a new era of authoritarian government power in the United States, coupled with a dramatic increase in the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the ruling class. It’s discouraging, and often horrifying to watch.

The one bit of hope I’m offering today is that we can, by working together, create our own ratchet effect, whereby we can increase our own power and happiness, and lay the foundations of a much better future than what currently looms on the horizon.

Thank you for reading! If you found this post useful, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

Household Chores and Sam Vimes’ Boots

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m reasonably certain that I have inattentive type ADHD. One of the ways in which it has affected my life, is that I have a hard time with housekeeping. I don’t feel like going into much detail on that, but one of the effects is that my kitchen knives have not been treated well, and need a great deal of care. Fortunately, I currently have the time to work on that, which is a luxury I do not take for granted. In fact, it relates to the expensiveness of poverty that we discussed the other day. Having a sharp knife is nice, and not everyone has the time to maintain them. Those with money can outsource that chore, but a lot of other folks just have to deal with dull knives, especially if they forget that there’s one sitting in water sometimes.

I also have another edged instrument that really needs some work, though I’ve kept it in much better condition. you see, while you were wasting your time with Gillette and other such disposable grooming instruments, I was studying the blade. Specifically I decided to buy a straight razor, over a decade ago, and learn how to use it.

The image is of a Dovo straight razor on a whetstone. It has a silver-steel blade (high carbon, no actual silver) and a little bit of gold plating ornamentation. The scales (the two pieces of wood forming the handle) are ebony. A little tarnish is visible in the hollow of the blade.

I’m not sure how much money I’ve saved, but given the price of Gillette blades when I stopped using them, I think it’s been at least a couple hundred dollars. This razor, if I take care of it, will keep working for the rest of my life, or close to it, but I had to have a couple hundred dollars to invest in a good razor and a good strop, and I also went for a nice brush. It’s the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness in action. I had the money and the time to buy this, and to learn how to use it.

I decided to work on it now, because after all this time, I also decided to buy another one, for a couple reasons. The first is just that alternating will make the edge last longer on both of them, and make both razors last longer. Hopefully I’ll get to will them to someone some day. The other reason is that it’s a bit hard to tell exactly how sharp my razor is. It works well enough, but I can feel that it’s dull, for a razor. The question is, how sharp is sharp enough?

There are tests, of course. The popular one is pulling out a beard hair, holding it by the base, and seeing if you can cut it just by applying pressure. If the razor’s too dull, it’ll just bend the hair over. But it’s also been a decade since I’ve shaved with a really sharp razor, and I’d really like something to compare to.

There’s also a luxury in having the time to rely on a razor like this. I’ve absolutely cut myself, especially when shaving around the ears, and rushing is generally not a good idea. It’s part of why I didn’t exactly fight to keep shaving my face when Tegan said she preferred a full beard – I had committed to something that was cheaper and more environmentally friendly in the long run, but a great deal more work.

I’m looking forward to the new razor – I don’t indulge in new stuff very often – and I very much want a world where everyone has the resources to save money like this if they want to.

I saved for a bit to buy the new razor, so I feel like I can afford it, but if you want me to feel even better about it, you can join my small but wonderful group of patrons. I don’t have a lot of benefits right at this moment, but I’m working on changing that.

Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about anti-Semitism.

Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about anti-Semitism

I know. Shocking. Who would have thought it?

Ben Shapiro has a history of performative outrage over “anti-Semitic” ideas like disagreeing with the far-right, genocidal policies of the Israeli government, or acknowledging that Israel has a big lobbying presence in the United States. He also has a history of ignoring or excusing actual anti-Semitism, like Trump’s conflation of all Jewish people and the nation of Israel or, more recently Joe Rogan’s claim that, and I quote, “”The idea that Jewish people aren’t into money is ridiculous. It’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza!”

I hope nobody reading these needs this explanation, but the idea that Jews are greedy is a very old stereotype that has been used for literal centuries to encourage hatred and distrust of Jewish people. Claiming that money is a part of Jewish culture the way Pizza is a part of Italian culture? Fucking hell, that’s like Ye West saying he thinks learning about Hannukah comes with “financial engineering”. In case it wasn’t clear, money is a part of most cultures I’ve heard of, and comments about Jews being “into money” are a bit rich, coming from a guy who got paid $200 million for his bigoted, reactionary podcast. Still, at least Shapiro condemned Ye’s antisemitism, and scolded Candace Owens for defending him. I know Rogan didn’t say that he loves Hitler, but surely Ben Shapiro would be upset by this, right?

Well, sort of.

See, Shapiro was bothered by it. If he wasn’t, why would have have had a private conversation with Rogan about it? But while Ilhan Omar, who did not say the same thing Rogan did, was worthy of condemnation even after she clarified her meaning and publicly apologized, Rogan was just misunderstood, and he gets a pass.

So, I think jokes are different than than, you know, actual honest observations. I did talk with Joe a little bit about this yesterday, and he was saying what I sort of suggested he was saying yesterday, which is everybody likes money and Jews are good with it. And, you know, again, that is a very different thing than, I think, how it came out on the air when Joe was talking about it.

I will say that there is a difference between making stereotypical comments and having a stereotypical worldview. When you talk about full damaging racism or antisemitism, it is actions that are tied to a full scale worldview that are truly damaging. Now, there can be prominent people who say things that then tie into that worldview or give credence to that worldview unintentionally by saying things. And that’s a problem. But the bigger problem is the worldview itself.

So, to take an example, if you make a stereotypical comment about Black people in a joke to a friend, is that good? No, it’s not good. It’s ugly and it’s bad and shouldn’t do it. Does that make you a racist for the rest of your life? No. It means you did a bad thing. It means you said a bad, racist thing. Does it mean that you even buy into a full scale racist world? No. And I think we’ve lost all nuance in this discussion. It’s true with antisemitism too. If somebody makes a Jewish joke, is that the same thing as somebody buying into a broad scale program with regard to Jewish conspiracy theory?

The reason why people’s radar went up when Joe said that is because when you say Jews love money, this does tie into a broader actual worldview about Jews, which is Jews are greedy and Jews are terrible, and they use their greed and horror in order to control world finance. And because they use their greed and horror to control world finance, they’re victimizing surrounding groups. This is, sort of, left-wing view of what Jews are – Jews are evil capitalist, predatory threats who are disproportionately successful because Jews are bad. Right, so, when you say things like Jews love money, it ties into that in one area. It can also tie into old-style religious antisemitism – the whole idea that Jews would sell out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver or stuff like that. You can see how it would tie into broader antisemitic worldviews. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that your comment was meant that way or that it does tie into that.

And I don’t think that the best way to fight racism or antisemitism is to fight these specific comments all the time. Or – you can mention them, you can point out that they’re bad and wrong. But to waste all of your ammo on that, as opposed to the broader worldview I think is a serious problem. It’s the broader worldview that needs to tumble down because that broader worldview sometimes allies itself with fellow travelers who believe things like capitalism is indeed bad, disproportionately successful people are bad and greedy, and that crosses streams of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that I suggested before. And now you have a real antisemitic movement. That’s really dangerous.

He didn’t mean it like that, guys. He just meant to say that Jews are good with money. Nothing wrong with that, right?

So yeah. Ben Shapiro doesn’t actually care about anti-Semitism. Huge, I know. Talking about conservative hypocrisy feels like beating a dead horse, but unfortunately this particular horse won’t stay dead. Hell, Shapiro even coined the term “JINO” – Jew In Name Only – to apparently distinguish between “good” Jews and “bad” Jews. It seems that how strongly he objects to anti-Semitic remarks depends on how friendly the person in question is to his cause (Rogan is pretty conservative on a lot of stuff), and how powerful the person is (Rogan is the biggest podcast host in the world, whereas Candace Owens works for Shapiro). The only principle to which he holds true, is his love of the hierarchy maintained by capitalism.

Biodiversity assessment shows 40% of U.S. ecosystems in danger of collapse.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I spent a couple years working as a field ecologist for the Wisconsin DNR. Most of what I did was catch snakes all over the southern half of the state (as part of a team), measure them, take metadata, and release them. For the garter snakes, we took DNA samples, and noted which subspecies they were. The purpose of this research wasn’t to discover anything new, so much as to assess the status of the garter snake population in that state. It was a fun job, I got to see a lot of the Wisconsin landscape, and it was neat to know that we were part of a larger effort. Not just in every state, but in pretty much every country, there are people doing the slow, daily work of counting organisms.

This is how the scientific community builds a picture, in data, of what’s happening in the world around us. It’s basically an ongoing physical check-up for the biosphere as a whole. Instead of checking temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and all that jazz, we check snake levels, and tree count, and do bug inventories. I’ve taken part in a few studies like this on different reptile species, and been peripheral to similar work on plants, birds, and insects. I sometimes run into people who’re incredulous that scientists can claim to know that a species is in decline, or that an ecosystem is falling apart, and I think it’s because they don’t realize that we really do have people whose job it is to go out into the middle of nowhere and just… count everything.

I think it’s rare that a study will literally count every tree in a forest, but they absolutely will get a representative sample. Designate strips of forest a couple meters wide and a few dozen meters long, and count every plant in that strip. Do it a hundred more times in different parts of the forest, and you get data that lets you form a sort of impressionist image of the forest’s health. Do it year after year, at consistent times of year, and you can see how things are changing. Unfortunately, the result of all that work is that we know that 40% of ecosystems in the United States are in danger of collapse.

“This grim assessment adds to the mountain of science showing that we’re creating an extinction crisis,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s suicidal of us to pretend that business as usual is more important than safeguarding the natural world we all depend on.”

The study is the most comprehensive to date on the status of U.S. ecosystems. It found that 51% of grasslands and 40% of forests and wetlands are at risk of range-wide collapse. Only 12% of U.S. lands are currently protected.

“Grassland loss is the biggest U.S. environmental disaster that gets the least attention,” said Curry. “Conversion of grasslands to suburban sprawl and pesticide-intensive agriculture is a primary reason we’ve lost 3 billion birds and why we could lose monarch butterflies and vital pollinators.”

Among animals, the evaluation found that freshwater species such as mollusks, crayfish and amphibians are the most threatened groups because of water pollution and dams. Insects like butterflies, bees and dragonflies are also highly imperiled, with 37% of U.S. bee species facing extinction.

For plants, nearly half of cactus species are vulnerable, making them the most jeopardized plant group. Around 30% of ferns and orchids are at risk, as are 20% of tree species.

“By taking nature for granted we’ve pushed natural systems to the brink of collapse,” said Curry. “We’ve been so neglectful for so long, but we can create a different world that doesn’t exploit nature and vulnerable human communities for never-ending sprawl and consumption.”

It’s not fair to say that nothing is being done, but as with climate change, if enough was being done, then we wouldn’t be at this point.

I think it’s worth discussing what “collapse” means, when it comes to ecosystems. It doesn’t mean that a blight falls upon the land, and everything dies, leaving only withered desert behind. I mean, that can happen, but even when it does, it’s not “the end”, but rather a shift to a new kind of ecosystem. The report itself describes collapse as involving

[…]a transformation of identity, loss of defining features, and/or replacement by a novel ecosystem. It occurs when all ecosystem occurrences lose defining biotic or abiotic features, and when when native biota are no longer sustained.

It might well be the end of the world for species dependent on the old ecosystem, but it’s both more complicated, and less final than what you might see in fiction. The problem is that a change like that can absolutely devastate connected human populations.

We’re worried about ecosystem collapse not just because we mourn the species lost, though I think we should do that, but also because we depend on those ecosystems, often in ways that most of us don’t even notice. I’ve talked before about ecosystem services – the myriad of ways in which natural ecosystems support all of humanity – and while the shift to a different ecosystem won’t necessarily remove all of those benefits, the loss in biodiversity will reduce them. During COVID, we’ve seen how our just-in-time supply chain fails in a crisis, and there’s no reason to think that that weakness is limited to our medical and medical supply systems.

As Dr. Curry says, trying to continue business as usual would be suicide for humanity. Well, most of it would be murder, since most of humanity has had little to no say in the course of events over the last couple centuries. The upside of this report is that “in danger” does not mean “doomed”. We’re on course to “doomed”, but we have the means and understanding to change course, if only we can disempower those working to prevent us from doing so.

If you want to get involved in this kind of work, look for “community science” or “citizen science” happening near you. Local nature centers or university biology departments are likely to have information. If you want to get involved in counteracting this, then look into stuff like pollinator gardens, seed bombing, and community groups that do trash pickup and tree planting and the like. The unfortunate reality is that our institutions have failed us, and are continuing to fail us. It may be that through organizing and hard work we can gain control of those institutions, but until then, doing what we can, where we can, with whom we can, can only lead us in the right direction.

 

Advocacy Groups Present Path to End Prison Profiteering

The law enforcement system of the United State is breathtakingly corrupt, cruel, and unjust. This is not a new claim, either in general, or on this blog. I personally want to work towards prison and police abolition. Many “offenses”, like drug use, don’t need to be offenses, and simply decriminalizing them would go a long way to reduce the “need” for a lot of our policing and prisons. Likewise, guaranteeing food, shelter, and health care would remove most crimes of necessity. Someone’s not going to steal coats or televisions to re-sell to avoid eviction if there’s no danger of being evicted. Someone’s not going to start making meth to pay for cancer treatment if there’s no requirement to pay. Sadly, while I’m sure many would say “that sounds nice in theory”, fewer are willing to actually work towards that, particularly within the halls of power. The enraging reality is that locking up and enslaving people makes a number of capitalists very wealthy at taxpayer expense, and at the cost of immeasurable suffering.

That’s why, while I support the effort to remove the profit motive from the USian so-called Justice System, I’m worried that those with the power to change things actively oppose that change. I know that Biden has made some noise about it, but he also played a major role in creating this problem in the first place, so forgive me if I doubt his intentions. Whether or not I turn out to be right, it’s important to make the case that doing it is possible. It can build the case for change, and if that change doesn’t happen, it can support the case for more radical action, in the face of a corrupt government that doesn’t represent the will of the people. All that being said, I’m glad to hear that a couple advocacy groups have released a “blueprint” for ending the use of private prisons in the United States:

To end the era in which prisons have become what Worth Rises executive director Bianca Tylek called “a business—one that is threatening our families, communities, and public safety,” the Biden administration must dismantle an industry that “has worked itself into every corner of the carceral system as incarceration has exploded over the past 40 years,” said the group.

“This is a pathway forward to a more just criminal legal system that does NOT put profits over people,” tweeted Color of Change.

The recommendations in the groups’ policy blueprint, Bearing the Cost, include:

  • Prohibiting for-profit healthcare in prisons, providing medications and hygiene products at no cost, and requiring better reporting on medical care;
  • Setting basic standards for food and commissary goods and preventing bundling of the services;
  • Making communication free and accessible and strengthening antitrust oversight;
  • Eliminating fees for money transfers and debit release cards and directing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to strengthen regulations for financial services for incarcerated people;
  • Conducting a comprehensive review of electronic monitoring of incarcerated people nationwide; and
  • Supporting the Abolition Amendment to end the use of unpaid labor in prisons.

“Over the last 40 years, the carceral system has grown into a vast network of corporations that use public-private partnerships to profit from the incarceration of our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and other loved ones,” said Tylek. “They have created a carceral crisis and collected the windfalls on the taxpayers’ dime while the rest of us suffered. This policy blueprint provides the clearest roadmap for fulfilling the promise of justice that the Biden-Harris administration made and many expect it to meet.”

The blueprint was released a month after Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 to empower federal regulators to ensure that charges for calls from correctional and detention facilities are “just and reasonable.” Currently, incarcerated people are charged as much as $9.99 for a cellphone call and $5.70 for a 15-minute landline call.

See, that last bit worries me – I don’t think there should be any charges for prisoners to talk to their families. Locking someone up, and then charging them for contact with the outside world is neither just nor reasonable. It feels more like an effort to force them into debt, in a society that seems to make it harder to get out of debt every year. Aside from the fact that constant debt payments and extortionate interest rates funnel a lot of money upward from the working class, debt also acts as an additional burden on people, making them more desperate for any income they can get, and therefor more likely to accept low pay and bad conditions.

I’ll just have to hope that my cynicism is unwarranted. It sounds like the communications act mentioned above is a step in the right direction, even if it’s not a big one, so I’ll absolutely take that as a win. Dismantling an entrenched industry is another matter entirely, but I’d love to see the Democrats prove me wrong about them by taking on that fight.

Video: Ze Frank takes on slime molds

It feels like the more I work on this story, the more I realize that focusing on keeping the number of books down will make it worse overall. So I guess I’m gonna be another white dude with a very long fantasy series. Anyway, here’s Ze Frank with some True Facts about the slime mold:

 

Contaminated eyedrops lead to blindness, death in United States

Several over-the-counter eyedrop products from Ezricare Artificial Tears, and possibly some other eyedrop brands have been contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria, causing eye infections across 12 states that have blinded several people, and killed one that we know of. The identification of the brand is from products that patients reported using. Ezricare was the most commonly used, but other brands have been mentioned. The CDC is currently only telling people to stop using Ezricare products. For those who might be effected, here’s what the CDC recommends:

Patients should stop using EzriCare Artificial Tears pending additional information and guidance from CDC and FDA. If patients were advised to use EzriCare Artificial Tears by their healthcare provider, they should follow up with their healthcare provider for recommendations about alternative treatment options.

Patients who have used EzriCare preservative-free artificial tears and who have signs or symptoms of an eye infection should seek medical care immediately. At this time, there is no recommendation for testing of patients who have used this product and who are not experiencing any signs or symptoms of infection.

Eye infection symptoms may include:

  • Yellow, green, or clear discharge from the eye
  • Eye pain or discomfort
  • Redness of the eye or eyelid
  • Feeling of something in your eye (foreign body sensation)
  • Increased sensitivity to light
  • Blurry vision

This strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa appears to be new to the United States, and both the CDC and FDA are investigating to figure out what happened. As I’m writing this, all reports point to 55 cases across CA, CO, CT, FL, NJ, NM, NY, NV, TX, UT, WA, and WI, with five people suffering permanent vision loss, and one death. It’s likely that the outbreak is worse than that, given that this is an early report, so again – if you use products like this and you start experiencing symptoms, get help – this is not something you want to just wait and see if it goes away, and the more advanced the infection, the harder to treat or to reverse damage done.

The big scare here, of course, is that this bacterium is, in the words of the CDC, extensively drug-resistant. This is a problem that has been growing for a while now. Experts did try to sound alarms on the over-use of antibiotics, particularly in the United States, but for the most part, they seem to have been ignored. The good news, and this is why you should seek treatment, is that one particular antibiotic called cefiderocol does seem to work on this strain. While there are millions of drug-resistant infections every year, and thousands of deaths, this seems to be the first outbreak linked to a contaminated product. Obviously the corporation is insisting that the link isn’t definitive, but it seems highly likely that more concrete proof will come.

Spread the word, and take care of yourselves and each other.

Musk Personally Suspended the Account of Left-Wing Journalist

When confronted with a fascist movement, it’s worth remembering that fascism, for all its populist trappings, serves the elite. That’s really where its power comes from. The people involved are genuine reactionaries, and monstrous people, but the movement is sustained and directed by the limitless wealth of the ruling class. It’s also worth remembering that fascists don’t really value anything other than power and victory, so they will happily claim the protections of “free speech” as part of their campaign to utterly eliminate that freedom. This is why it’s not surprising that Elon Musk, one of those at the very top of the ruling class, bought twitter promising to protect freedom of speech, and then immediately turned around and started banning people, including those he specifically said he would not ban.

Chad Loder is an anti-fascist journalist and activist, who exposed a member of the Proud Boys involved in the coup attempt of January 6, 2021, as well as the machinations of fascists like Andy Ngo. He was from Twitter back in November, as part of a larger pattern of catering to the far right. It always seemed likely that Musk, who has increasingly shown himself to be a reactionary man-child, was directly involved in this purge, but now it seems we actually have proof:

A leaked internal Twitter message appears to show that Elon Musk directly ordered staff to suspend a left-wing activist’s account on the social-media platform.

Bloomberg said it viewed a screenshot of the message in question, involving the account of Chad Loder, which read: “Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk.”

Loder, who uses they/them pronouns, describes themself on their Mastodon profile as a community activist, cybersecurity expert, and citizen journalist. Their investigation into the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 led to the arrest of a masked member of the far-right Proud Boys organisation who’d attacked police officers, The Intercept reported.

Musk has described himself politically as “somewhere in the middle” but encouraged his followers to vote Republican the day before November’s midterm elections.

This story’s publication resulted in an exchange between Musk and the prominent right-wing journalist Andy Ngo, who shared a series of screenshots purporting to show past tweets from Loder advocating violence. Insider couldn’t independently verify the tweets because of Loder’s account suspension.

In response to Ngo, Musk tweeted: “I don’t know this person at all, but explicit threats of violence obviously violate Twitter ToS,” or terms of service.

Loder’s account was one of several prominent left-wing accounts suspended by Twitter in November 2022.

Loder told Insider’s Sawdah Bhaimiya they suspected the suspension resulted from an “organized mass-reporting campaign,” whereby a right-wing group published a Substack blog with instructions on how to falsely report breaches of Twitter’s rules by particular accounts — with Loder’s profile listed near the top.

On Tuesday, Twitter reinstated the account of prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes, only for it to be banned again inside 24 hours.

In a since-deleted tweet in October, Musk promoted a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former house speaker Nancy Pelosi.

J.M. Berger, an expert on social-media extremism, previously told Insider: “I think he’s intentionally empowering right-wing extremists.”

Not only that, but I don’t think there’s any reason to expect that he will stop empowering right-wing extremists. Their agenda is both flattering to his ego, and helpful to his greed. I don’t know that messing with twitter will reshape the world the way he or his fans might wish, but at the end of the day, he’s still immensely powerful, and he’s still using that power to limit the reach of people whose opinions he dislikes. There’s not a whole lot we can do about this, directly, it can’t hurt to make sure it’s talked about as we keep working to end that particular kind of power altogether. It’s likely that much the next few decades will be shaped, for the worse, by the whims of billionaires. As that’s happening, it’s important to remember that no matter what they say, what they are doing is supporting the far right, and suppressing the left.

Boston has unveiled an… interesting new tribute to MLK Jr.

Many years ago, a big tree was cut down to make way for a playground in a town near where I lived. I think the tree might have already been dead, but that doesn’t matter a whole lot for this story. A decision was made to turn the wood from this tree into a sculpture, and an artist was chosen. Now, art is subjective, and there are plenty of people who see beauty where others do not. I also have a lot of respect for anyone who is making a living as an artist in a world that doesn’t exactly encourage that. That said, the resulting sculpture was… odd. It sort of looked like two or three large wooden balls, with an almost melted-looking blob-like slab of wood draped over them. From some angles it was like an abstract turtle, from others, it was just… abstract and globular. If memory serves, it came with a poem, on a nearby plaque, about uplifting angels or something.

The town for whom it was intended considered it, and decided to give it to my grade school instead. The principal at the time absolutely saw the beauty in the sculpture and put it out in front of the school, plaque and all. In time, he left, and not long after the sculpture was rehomed to the far bank of the school’s fire pond, almost in the woods. To my knowledge, it’s still there, having gracefully grown into its role as a mossy abstract turtle thing.

On a related note another artist, whose taste I do not share, was apparently commissioned to make a sculpture for Boston Common, honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King. The resulting work was just unveiled, and, well, in the interest of fairness, I’ll show you the best angle first:

The sculpture, called “The Embrace”, is of the arms of MLK Jr. and Coretta Scott King, hugging each other, as seen in a famous photo I’ll post and describe below. The sculpture is just the arms and hands. You can see MLK’s hands in the foreground complete with jacket and shirt cuffs on the wrists, both wrapped around Coretta’s shoulder, with her arm extending down and away from the camera, elbow on the ground. One of MLK’s elbows is also on the ground, and you can see a third piece of the sculpture, presumably Coretta’s other elbow, touching the ground further back, giving the sculpture stability. The whole thing is big enough that an adult can comfortably stand under it.

So, again, I don’t like it. I respect the skill and creativity that went into it but, well, it keeps reminding me of the blob-turtle from this post’s introduction. So first off, there’s the photo that inspired this work of art. It’s a black and white photo of MLK and Coretta Scott King hugging each other. MLK’s arms are around Coretta’s shoulders, and her left arm is on the side of his chest. Her right arm, not visible in the photo, is presumably either on his shoulder, or lower on his torso. He’s wearing a white dress shirt under a jacket with three buttons on the cuff, as shown in the sculpture.

 

I feel like the artist maybe didn’t fully consider the visual impact of the piece from all angles, because:

Ok, I can do this. The image shows Coretta Scott King’s forearms and hands, elbows on the ground, holding MLK’s arm and shoulder. You can see a beaded bracelet on her wrist, and a wedding band on her finger. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is standing in front of, and underneath where MLK’s shoulder would be, if this sculpture was of a whole person. Pressley, who’s a good sort as politicians go (I voted for her) is a bald Black woman wearing a long black dress under a long tan coat, with black leather boots that appear to have white soles/heels. In the foreground are two reporters with shoulder-satchels. The one closer to her is wearing a black coat, the one closer to the camera is wearing a beige coat. The problem is that MLK’s shoulder doesn’t LOOK like MLK’s shoulder from this angle. It looks like… well, a giant, curved eggplant. It’s a little lumpy, and because it’s so glossy, the reflections give it a degree of… apparent vascularity. Further back, where the torsos should be, you can see Coretta’s arms fusing together, along with MLK’s arms, into a sort of Cronenberg-inspired starfish kinda thing.

As long as we’re going to have heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. fits the bill pretty well. I don’t know if his talk of socialism and  wealth redistribution are, as is often said, why he was assassinated, but that would certainly fit the U.S. government position on those subjects. Personally, however, I don’t feel that this sculpture is the best way to honor him and what he stood for. Obviously, that’s not up to me, nor should it be. This is just my opinion, but it seems that this art is thrusting in the wrong direction.

As Tegan said to me, it could have been worse. There’s a history of bronze sculptures turning out to be disturbing monstrosities, like the efforts to sculpt Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo. The one thing I will say is that I’ll take a hundred more sculptures by whoever made this thing over any one of the remaining statues of slavers that are spread across the U.S. like a bronze-cast pox. I’d rather give that support to someone with a less… unique vision, maybe, but again, these things are rightfully not up to me.