Video: Casual Geographic Takes On The Biggest Weasel

Well, today was a long day, but New Grange was interesting, and I put my name in the lottery for this year’s viewing of the Midwinter sunrise, so I have a very small chance of getting to see that this year, which would be neat, even if it does mean being up before sunrise. I want to work on other things with the energy I have left, this evening, so instead you get another casual geographic video.

I’ve always liked the weasel family (Mustelidae), partly because they’re all pretty cute, and partly because they are, as a group of creatures, apparently unable to feel fear. Pretty much all of them have a reputation for attacking animals much larger than themselves, and while they do clearly have sense of self-preservation, it often doesn’t seem like it. The honey badger is probably the most “viral” of the lot, for its resistance to venom and its willingness to attack just about anything, but the reality is that while I don’t know if the others have any venom resistance, they all act like they do.

Case in point, the giant river otter. The rest of my family got to see some of these when my parents were visiting my brother’s family in Peru, and I’m very jealous. Remember how I said that mustelids don’t seem to have a sense of self-preservation? Part of the reason why giant river otters are endangered, is their willingness to approach humans. In general, approaching humans is a bad idea, especially if you aren’t one of them. Anyway, with all that as an introduction, let’s find out why Casual Geographic thinks they’re war criminals:

Death by otter already sounds ridiculous, but add in their squeaking, and you’ve got an incredibly surreal murder-machine.

Greetings from County Kilkenny

I’m out of town this weekend, and while I do have a cheap laptop so I can work, most of my time is dedicated to doing stuff with my parents. I’ll probably share some pictures from our trip at a later date, but as you’re about to see, my phone’s camera is… sub-standard right now.

When I posted about our trip to Bull Island, PZ expressed his dismay at the lack of spider pictures. This is cause, in large part, but the fact that after an update a few months ago, my phone’s camera lost the ability to focus on anything. I can do selfies, and I can do a fisheye panorama, from a distance, but everything else is consistently out of focus.

This means, unfortunately, that until I’m able to get a new camera, fix my phone, or get a new phone, I’m dependent on other people’s equipment for photography. On my way home the other day, I took this picture of a local fox, and it’s about as good-quality as I can expect, for trying to take a picture of something that was actually pretty close:

The image shows a red fox, framed by two wavy tree trunks, one of which is covered in ivy. Its fur is the typical orangey-brown, and it's sitting with its left side to the camera. Its head is turned to glance at the rude human who's pointing things at it, and there's a bush in the background that contains another fox, which you cannot see. The two were apparently having some sort of interaction that was interrupted by my presence. The whole picture is a bit out of focus.

The image shows a red fox, framed by two wavy tree trunks, one of which is covered with ivy. Its fur is the typical orangey-brown, and it’s sitting with its left side to the camera. Its head is turned to glance at the rude human who’s pointing things at it, and there’s a bush in the background that contains another fox, which you cannot see. The two were apparently having some sort of interaction that was interrupted by my presence. The whole picture is a bit out of focus.

For those from my home continent, Ireland has no skunks, possums, or raccoons, so the foxes seem to fill all of those niches in and around Dublin. They’re everywhere, and while they keep their distance, they’re entirely used to humans.

Today, we went to the Kells Priory, which was neat, and then to a B&B with a lovely view, which gives me an opportunity to demonstrate my phone’s capabilities when it comes to landscape photography:

This photo shows the garden in which I'm writing (the clump of bushes by the right edge of the photo seems to have a nest of baby birds in it, who make a racket every few minutes), and a big ol' hill across the river valley. The hill is mostly pasture land, dotted with a few cows and sheep, but there are trees between the pastures, and what looks like a forest of very evenly-sized pine trees along the ridge, which makes me wonder if they're intended to be lumber. To the left, near the edge of the ridge, you can see a lone wind turbine. The clouds overhead are a little patchy, letting through glimpses of the evening sky and its colors.

This photo shows the garden in which I’m writing (the clump of bushes by the right edge of the photo seems to have a nest of baby birds in it, who make a racket every few minutes), and a big ol’ hill across the river valley. The hill is mostly pasture land, dotted with a few cows and sheep, but there are trees between the pastures, and what looks like a forest of very evenly-sized pine trees along the ridge, which makes me wonder if they’re intended to be lumber. To the left, near the edge of the ridge, you can see a lone wind turbine. The clouds overhead are a little patchy, letting through glimpses of the evening sky and its colors.

You can tell that livestock is a big thing in this area, because you can smell cows and sheep everywhere. I thought I heard a lone donkey, echoing across the landscape, but upon further listening, I think it’s just a cow with opinions about something.

So, when it comes to spiders, I’m kinda limited to the ones my camera can pick up at a distance, so if Ungoliant crests the ridge while I’m here, you’ll all get a picture of that, presumably just before I die horribly.

Smoke and Sweat: City Design in a Warming World

There’s a concept in urban design, called the “15 minute city”, that has been gaining a lot of traction in some circles. The basic idea is that everything a person needs in their day to day life ought to be within 15 minutes’ walk from their home. That means jobs, groceries, doctors, and so on. This tends to come with limitations on car use within those cities. One proposal I’ve heard is that people can drive around cities on ring roads all they want, but if they drive across the city more than a set number of times, they have to pay a fine. People on the right, of course, have folded this into their all-encompassing theory of how everything is a conspiracy, but that’s not actually the point of this post. The point of this post is that the 15 minute city concept, while a fantastic idea, may be too little, too late.

I’ve got a few points that I make repeatedly, and in different ways. We need to do more than we’re doing. We need to move food production indoors. We need to bring plants into our cities more. We need to end profit-driven overproduction. We need to start building enclosed cities.

It’s that last one I want to talk about today, in light of the Nova Scotia wildfires, and the dangerous and dramatic air pollution they have caused in the United States. To begin with, I don’t mean building a glass bubble over our cities. To me, that seems like a terrible idea, and utterly impractical. No, what I want has more to do with tunnels and building layout. When I moved from the US to Glasgow in 2019, I had to fly into Germany, drive to the Netherlands, and take a ferry out of Rotterdam to get to Great Britain. Because of the rules around traveling with pets, we had to spend a couple nights in Frankfurt, so that we could go to a German vet to vet our pets. The Airbnb we stayed at was a family’s extra bedroom, and what caught my attention was the fact that their grocery store was literally in the same building as their apartment. When Tegan and I needed to get supplies for our drive to the coast, all we had to do was go downstairs. Add in a connected subway system, or even enclosed walkways between buildings (underground or otherwise), and suddenly people might not need to go outside for days or weeks at a time.

In my youth, the very concept would have horrified me. In many ways, it still does. While I’m nowhere close to being the outdoorsman I once was, I value time outside, and I value being able to see wildlife. The idea of deliberately designing a world in which people never need to go outside is disturbing. What’s far more disturbing is the fact that this is the direction in which we must start moving, if we want to survive.

Normally, when I talk about this kind of urban redesign (folks in the country will need other solutions, and we absolutely need to invest resources in helping them), the danger in question is heat. The rise in global temperature has, predictably, led to a rise in lethal wet-bulb conditions. Basically what that means is that the combination of heat and humidity mean humans can no longer cool themselves by sweating. It just doesn’t work. That means that pretty much anyone can develop lethal heat stroke pretty quickly. I like Wikipedia’s breakdown of this:

The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked (water at ambient temperature) cloth (a wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed.[1] At 100% relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the air temperature (dry-bulb temperature); at lower humidity the wet-bulb temperature is lower than dry-bulb temperature because of evaporative cooling.

The wet-bulb temperature is defined as the temperature of a parcel of air cooled to saturation (100% relative humidity) by the evaporation of water into it, with the latent heat supplied by the parcel.[2] A wet-bulb thermometer indicates a temperature close to the true (thermodynamic) wet-bulb temperature. The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached under current ambient conditions by the evaporation of water only.

Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F).[3]

This isn’t a matter of sucking it up and living with the heat. It’s a matter of humans being physically incapable of living with the heat. All humans. If it’s just moving between nearby air-conditioned buildings, most people would be fine, but I’m not so sure about they very young, the very old, and folks who’re sick or have disabilities. This is also very much tied to the manufactured crisis of homelessness. Being unhoused is already incredibly dangerous, and while there has been a decline in lethally cold conditions (faster than the rise in warm ones), the overall rate of warming is on the rise, and it’s a lot easier for someone without shelter to stay warm on a cold night than to cool down on a hot day.

The heat and humidity are not, however, the only things that we need to consider.

As most of you are no doubt aware, Nova Scotia is burning, and a huge area to the south of those fires is being smothered by the smoke, with New York City getting the most attention:

The image shows an NYT headline reading: "Swaths of North America Are Shrouded Under Unhealthy Air", with an image below it captioned, "View of Manhattan, via EarthCam". The image below is a compilation of four photographs of the Manhattan skyline. The first, at 10:02am shows the city pretty clearly, with a bit of haze in the air. At 11:56am, the whole scene has a dingy yellow tint, and details like tower reflections in the water are no longer visible. At 12:53pm, the dingy yellow has taken over, and Manhattan is little more than a silhouette of its skyline. At 1:53pm, the silhouette is still there, bit the air is now a deep, orange color.

The image shows an NYT headline reading: “Swaths of North America Are Shrouded Under Unhealthy Air”, with an image below it captioned, “View of Manhattan, via EarthCam”. The image below is a compilation of four photographs of the Manhattan skyline. The first, at 10:02am shows the city pretty clearly, with a bit of haze in the air. At 11:56am, the whole scene has a dingy yellow tint, and details like tower reflections in the water are no longer visible. At 12:53pm, the dingy yellow has taken over, and Manhattan is little more than a silhouette of its skyline. At 1:53pm, the silhouette is still there, bit the air is now a deep, orange color.

People are being urged to stay indoors as much as possible, and to wear masks to help filter out the smoke. I remember when COVID hit, Rebecca Watson mentioned that she already had masks, because California has been getting this same treatment over the last decade. Now I’m wondering how many people in NYC were prepared for this crisis because they’re still masking for COVID. Make no mistake: people are being sickened and killed by this.

But this goes further than just a couple reasons why people might need to remain indoors. Heat and air pollution are not separate, as the former often makes the latter far worse. If it weren’t for the smoke, New York would be having a pretty normal time of it, with a today’s high being 72°F/22°C, but what if this was happening at the same time as a heat wave?

High heat and air pollution are each problematic for human health, particularly for vulnerable populations such as older adults. But what happens when they hit at the same time?

We examined over 1.5 million deaths from 2014 to 2020 registered in California – a state prone to summer heat waves and air pollution from wildfires – to find out.

Deaths spike when both risks are high

The number of deaths rose both on hot days and on days with high levels of fine particulate air pollution, known as PM2.5. But on days when an area was hit with a double whammy of both high heat and high air pollution, the effects were much higher than for each condition alone.

The risk of death on those extra-hot and polluted days was about three times greater than the effect of either high heat or high air pollution alone.

The more extreme the temperatures and pollution, the higher the risk. During the top 10% of hottest and most polluted days, the risk of death increased by 4% compared to days without extremes. During the top 1%, it increased by 21%; and among older adults over age 75, the risk of death increased by more than a third on those days.

[…]

There are several ways the combined exposure to extreme heat and particulate air pollution can harm human health.

Oxidative stress is the most common biological pathway linked with particulate air pollution and heat exposure. Oxidative stress is an imbalance between production of highly reactive molecules known as reactive oxygen species, or ROS, and the body’s ability to remove them. It’s been linked with lung diseases, among other illnesses.

Antioxidants help clean up these molecules, but particulate air pollution and heat disrupt this balance through excessive metabolic ROS production and lowered antioxidant activity.

Our research also showed that the effects of particulate air pollution and heat extremes were larger when high nighttime temperature and pollution occurred together. High nighttime temperatures can interfere with normal sleep and potentially contribute to chronic health conditions such as heart disease and obesity, and disrupt how the body regulates temperature.

Older adults may be more susceptible to effects of extreme heat and air pollution exposure, in part because this stress comes on top of age-related chronic health conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic lung disease. Impaired body temperature regulation in response to heat can also occur with aging. And older adults may be less mobile and therefore less able to get to cooling centers or to medical care and be less able to afford air conditioning.

We have reached a point, with the warming of this planet, where survival will increasingly depend on things like air conditioning and air filtration. Both of these things cost energy, and if we are using fossil fuels to generate that energy, then we will be making the problem worse, simply by trying to survive it.

This is why it was so important that we transition away from fossil fuels before it got to this point – not just because it might have helped us avoid a great deal of needless death and suffering, but also because we’ve always known that rising temperatures would mean rising energy demand from things like air conditioning. What’s more, our current grid can’t handle the power demands of a heat wave, resulting in power failures that place many more people at risk.

We’re at this point thanks to decades of procrastination by our so-called leaders, and they seem committed to continuing that procrastination until they die, while working to ensure they’re replaced by people who’re likely to continue that pattern. Without drastic action, and a real change in direction, it will keep getting worse, and there is no limit to how much worse it can get. Because there is no limit to the greed and callousness of the rich, we need the power of an organized working class to have any shot at building a better world. That will come through community organizing, and workplace organizing. Neither are easy, but until we have the ability to bring the system to a halt, those who’re enjoying the ride will keep on going forward, driving us straight to hell.

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Bones in the Sand: A Trip to Bull Island

My folks are in town for a week – the first time I’ve seen them since I left the US in 2019! We’re doing a variety of things while they’re here, but today we went to Bull Island. It’s basically a sandbar that was created when Dublin put up a seawall to help keep river silt out of the harbour. It has become a pleasant dune habitat, with some decidedly marshy bits.

For those who can't see, the image shows tousled grass in greens and browns, with a watery patch that reflects the gray sky in the middle. There are a few shrubs, maybe a couple meters tall, in the upper third of the picture, to the left. In the background you can see smoke stacks in the harbour, and a few small mountains in the distance.

For those who can’t see, the image shows tousled grass in greens and browns, with a watery patch that reflects the gray sky in the middle. There are a few shrubs, maybe a couple meters tall, in the upper third of the picture, to the left. In the background you can see smoke stacks in the harbour, and a few small mountains in the distance.

There were a number of birds there, but I only got one halfway-decent picture of a hooded crow that was watching our progress.

The picture's focus leaves it feeling a bit impressionistic, but it shows a crow with a dark gray breast, neck, and head, and black on its face and throat. Its head is turned to the side to get a good look at us. Despite the poor picture quality (sorry!), the bird stands out well from the green background.

The picture’s focus leaves it feeling a bit impressionistic, but it shows a crow with a dark gray breast, neck, and head, and black on its face and throat. Its head is turned to the side to get a good look at us. Despite the poor picture quality (sorry!), the bird stands out well from the green background.

Along the way, we noticed a hole in a dune. It looked like a burrow for something, but though we had guesses, we weren’t sure what it was. A little further on, we found this hole.

In the middle of the picture, you can see one rabbit foot, fur and all, with a bare leg bone still attached. Next to it is the rabbit's spine and pelvis, both notable, because like the leg and foot, they are not attached to any rabbit. In the background, the ominous opening of a predator's lair!

In the middle of the picture, you can see one rabbit foot, fur and all, with a bare leg bone still attached. Next to it is the rabbit’s spine and pelvis, both notable, because like the leg and foot, they are not attached to any rabbit. In the background, the ominous opening of a predator’s lair!

I respectfully stepped around the little boneyard, and got a closer shot of the burrow entrance. There wasn’t any notable smell, which was surprising. The two most likely culprits would be foxes or badgers, both of which tend to stink up their homes a bit. After further inspection, we found other burrows in the same great big grassy mound, which sounds more like a badger, but Wikipedia doesn’t think there are any living on the island. Further study needed? Edit: Upon further research, it seems foxes will actually live in groups of three or four adults, and they do leave prey carcasses around their homes. I guess it was just wishful thinking. Foxes are neat and all, but all I need to do to see one is go for a walk after dark around where I live. Badgers, not so much.

The burrow is sandy, which makes sense on an island made of sand. It seems clear that its structural integrity depends on the roots of the grass growing on top of the hillock. You can see grass, and some yellow flowers in the foreground, as well as one pink and white flower near the bottom left corner.

The burrow is sandy, which makes sense on an island made of sand. It seems clear that its structural integrity depends on the roots of the grass growing on top of the hillock. You can see grass, and some yellow flowers in the foreground, as well as one pink and white flower near the bottom left corner.

We attempted to take a picture to show the scale of the hillock, but because Tegan was standing on the trail, which ran right next to it, it came out looking like she was sitting in the grass, taking a picture of my father and I just standing around.

You can't tell, but this picture was taken from a trail at the base of the hillock we suspected of being a badger set. The camera is around 1.6 meters off the ground, with the hillock being about the same height from the trail. You can see me standing, facing to the right, and my father, further back, facing to the left. Dad's standing a bit higher up, looking down at one of the set's entrances. We're both wearing broadbrim leather hats (good for keeping sun off faces), and also I'm wearing a dark blue shirt, a multi-coloured vest, sunglasses, and a black backpack. Dad's wearing a jacket and a blue and white shirt.

You can’t tell, but this picture was taken from a trail at the base of the hillock we suspected of being a badger set. The camera is around 1.6 meters off the ground, with the hillock being about the same height from the trail. You can see me standing, facing to the right, and my father, further back, facing to the left. Dad’s standing a bit higher up, looking down at one of the set’s entrances. We’re both wearing broadbrim leather hats (good for keeping sun off faces), and also I’m wearing a dark blue shirt, a multi-coloured vest, sunglasses, and a black backpack. Dad’s wearing a jacket and a blue and white shirt.

If you want me to be able to take better-quality pictures, or feel I should be less worried about my finances, consider giving me money at patreon.com/oceanoxia

Are both sides the same? Yes, but also no.

I do not like the Democratic Party. As an institution, they are corrupt and disingenuous servitors of the upper class, who will demand party unity one moment, then support the loser of a primary over the winner, the next. They claim to care about issues like climate change, but continue expanding fossil fuel extraction, well past the point that will totally destroy humanity. They claim to care about student debt, but refuse to actually do anything about it. They claim to care about reproductive rights, but support anti-choice candidates, and every time they came into power over the last half-century, they insisted that abortion rights were safe, and it wasn’t the time to codify them into law.

For 50 years they did that, in the face of an open campaign to do exactly what has now been done.

I do not like the Democratic party, but- they are still better than the GOP. Not on everything, of course. They’ve been full partners in the long history of attacking left-wing countries, and supporting some of the worst dictators and war criminals on the planet, for example. But even on the issues I listed in the paragraph above, they are better than the GOP, in a very material way.

I mention that because a lot of people on the left, at least online, insist that there’s no difference, and that the Democrats only serve to stabilize the ways in which the Republicans make things worse. Obama’s use of drone warfare comes to mind, as does the continued abuse of children at the southern border. There are issues on which you can absolutely make that case. The thing is, though, they are not the only issues at play. Minnesota is probably the best example right now. The Democrats there are not perfect, but look at what they’ve been up to, and tell me you’d ever get any of it if the GOP was in power there.

The problem, as I see it, is that those people on the left are still stuck on individualism, and on the fantasy of achieving revolutionary change within the infrastructure of a representative democracy. For the first part, I get it. The Democratic Party fights hard to avoid any kind of real working class power in the United States, and voting for them implies that I’m OK with that. I’m not OK with that, I just consider those feelings to be less important than the increased safety or wellbeing that can come from the policies that Democrats do support. I don’t believe souls exist, so I’m not particularly concerned with “tainting” mine. For the second part, well, I understand why people think that way, but I think that they are wrong.

Take the Green Party. I know some people see them as spoilers, and I’m willing to believe that some people fund them as spoilers, but they do actually have a strategy for change, based on the rules of the electoral system in which they exist. The goal of a Green Party presidential candidate, at this stage, is not to get them into the White House, but rather to win at least 5% of the vote. That, under the current rules, would qualify them for official recognition as a national party, and for federal funds for future campaigns. Once they get there, they’ll have a much easier time spreading their message, and increasing their vote share to become a real power for change in the United States. It’s a plan for long-term change, within the rules that currently exist, it’s actually pretty reasonable. Further, I feel I should say that the folks I’ve seen associated with the Green Party in day-to-day life tend to be more politically active than average, working to make the world better.

I do, however, have a couple problems with that strategy.

The first is that I think it is naïve to assume that the rules won’t be changed. I’m sure many Greens don’t assume that, but would say that if that does happen, that injustice will bring them more support and attention. That might be true, but I’m not convinced. My bigger problem is that we are running out of time. I’m a big fan of long-term thinking, but not if you don’t account for what’s going on outside of the electoral rules. Remember, their plan is to get 5% of the vote, and work to grow from there. They wouldn’t need a majority to influence policy, and force coalition-building, but it would still take them time to build support, and make any significant changes. What’s more, every time they fall short of the mark, they have to wait another four years for another shot, and we are running out of time. The global temperature is rising fast, and as capitalism reaches crisis-levels of wealth concentration, authoritarianism is rising as well, with the rich beefing up their goon squads to hold on to their wealth and power.

We need revolutionary change, and that cannot come from within an electoral system designed to prevent such change. To me, “revolutionary change” means a change to the political and economic system on a scale that is generally associated with a successful revolutionary war. It does not mean change achieved through war. I do not want war. I don’t think anyone who sincerely wants the world to get better does want war. My preferred method would be some form of general strike – bringing the country to a halt, until corrupt rulers are replaced, and laws are changed. The degree to which there ends up being violence will depend pretty much entirely on the people who currently hold power. They have a long, and uninterrupted history of using violence to crush movements for change, and I see plenty of reason to believe that they would use lethal force to prevent a left-wing movement from succeeding in its goals. When I wrote my neglected direct action post, I used a shield as a metaphor, because I think that any effort at real systemic change will be subjected to violence, and I believe that people have a right to defend themselves.

So, if voting won’t get the change we need, why vote at all? Well, because it can get smaller changes, that will save or improve lives in the short term, which is a thing worth doing in itself. There’s a sort of freedom in realizing that the system is so corrupt and entrenched that voting will never bring the change I want to see. It means that I don’t have to pin all my hopes on a candidate, only to feel betrayed when they fall short of my expectations. Sure, I still get disappointed or angry when bad things happen, but my hope comes from the work that people are doing to organize, and to take direct action. It’s not a guaranteed win, of course, but by organizing around smaller-scale problems, like working conditions or local laws, we build the capacity to work together on much larger problems.

This started out as me just posting a video, but then I had things to say. Beau of the Fifth Column posted a video responding to someone who was having trouble seeing a difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and he said a lot of stuff that I agree with. It’s not surprising, considering that he’s been influential in my own political thought over the last couple years. It can be difficult to look at the world as it is, and not get sidetracked by all the complexity and horror, and I think Beau does a good job breaking it down.

Corporate-Backed Research Highlights Need for Public Funding

There are a lot of changes we need to make, if we want to get control of how we affect the non-human parts of this planet. One of my favorites to talk about, partly for aesthetic reasons, is filling urban landscapes with plant life. While doing so isn’t enough by itself, and brings its own problems, it would improve the lives of city-dwellers in a number of ways, especially while there are still cars about. With that as my standing opinion, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that my eye was caught by a university press release claiming that “plants remove cancer-causing toxins from air“.

A ground-breaking study has revealed that plants can efficiently remove toxic petrol fumes, including cancer causing compounds such as benzene, from indoor air.

The study was led by University of Technology Sydney (UTS) bioremediation researcher Associate Professor Fraser Torpy, in partnership with leading plantscaping solutions company Ambius.

The researchers found that the Ambius small green wall, containing a mix of indoor plants, was highly effective at removing harmful, cancer-causing pollutants, with 97 per cent of the most toxic compounds removed from the surrounding air in just eight hours.

They go on to talk about the health problems caused by air pollution, which would be fine, normally, but when this research is explicitly in partnership with a corporation that’s trying to sell a product, it starts to come across more like fearmongering to drive sales. I want to be clear – I have no particular reason to doubt this research, on the face of it. They put their “green wall” in a sealed chamber with some car exhaust, took measurements, and got clear results. This is far from the first time that research has pointed to plants as a way to filter out air pollution, and so I’m certainly inclined to believe it, but…

This is also the exact result that a company trying to sell a product would want to get, which makes it all but useless as anything other than an advertisement. Even if it does end up in a peer-reviewed journal (it’s not right now, as far as I can tell – you have to give Ambius your email to get a copy of the report), nobody of good will can entirely trust it, and if it were included as part of a case for change, anybody of bad will could point to the blatant conflict of interest, and use that to derail the whole effort.

This is why public funding is so important, especially in a capitalist society. Between advertising and propaganda, it’s already hard for a lot of people to figure out what’s going on, and that confusion is wonderful for con artists, whether they’re trying to get a few bucks out of people, or trying to drive humanity to extinction for more oil money. We need clarity, right now, and while I’m sure that the business in question is trying to do well by doing good, this doesn’t help.

Presenting: Mister Elegance

This, Dear Readers, is Mister Elegance. For those who can’t see, he’s a mostly black cat, sitting hunched over with one hind leg (with a white foot) stuck forward a little awkwardly. You don’t notice it much when he’s walking, but when he sits, that leg always sticks out oddly. I call him Mr. Elegance, because he’s always making a leg.

It is exceedingly clever.

This, Dear Readers, is Mister Elegance. For those who can't see, he's a mostly black cat, sitting hunched over with one hind leg (with a white foot) stuck forward a little awkwardly. You don't notice it much when he's walking, but when he sits, that leg always sticks out oddly.

Mr. Elegance is one of a few cats (and foxes) that wander through my little corner of Dublin, and while most of them seem to have homes (keep your cats indoors, if you value your ecosystem), I get the impression that Mr. Elegance is on his own in the world. In this next picture, you can see him trying to get a grip on a misshapen toilet paper tube.

The cat's leg is still stuck out, but now his head is sideways on the moss, as he tries to get a good angle on the cardboard tube

He likes to hang out on the roof of my shed, which is right outside my window. It’s covered in moss and twigs, and gets some sun during the day. I put some catnip in the cardboard tube, and tossed it down onto the roof for him. In this next picture, you can see that he’s gripping the tube in both front paws, and biting it very ferociously.

He first showed up a couple years ago. We already have one cat, who doesn’t play well with others, and it’s a small flat. We also can’t really afford another cat, so we have to settle for being friendly, and supplying drugs. In the next picture, he’s rabbit-kicking the tube, but his face looks a little bored.

There was a period of almost a year when we didn’t see him around, and we worried about him. I suppose it’s not good news for the birds, but I was glad when he showed up again. In the next  picture, he’s dropping the tube, and looking up at me, looking down at him.

After he’d gotten his fill of catnip, he settled down for a nap, still sticking that leg out.