Some More News: What Are The Real Dangers Of A.I.?

I have mixed feeling about the stuff that’s currently being marketed as “Artificial Intelligence”. To begin with, I believe calling it that was a deliberate choice to mislead people about the nature, power, and “coolness” of the technology. I do think it’s cool technology, and the main reason it worries me is that as with everything else in a capitalist society, it’s being used to further the interests of pathologically greedy capitalists, rather than the interests of humanity as a whole. We already have a vast number of marvelous labor-saving devices that really do work. Worker productivity has gone through the roof in recent decades, but rather than having higher paychecks and/or shorter hours, the benefits have gone to create a class of multibillionaires, while things have gotten harder for everyday people in a number of ways. As corporations use this “AI” to replace workers, keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to have a world in which labor-saving devices actually save us from doing so much labor.

Tremble and Behold: The Rare and Marvelous Irish Piano Spider!

PZ has been after me for Irish spider pictures, and I’m finally able to provide one. This spider narrowly escaped a horrible death in the machinery of a piano being tuned. Apparently, it sought shelter between the piano keys. I’m not sure what sort of spider we’re looking at, or whether it’s an adult or juvenile. Despite its best efforts, Tegan rescued it, transferred it to a plant, and got the best picture she could:

The center of this image is dominated by a spiraling plant tendril. Above it, a serrated leaf, and behind, more leaves, out of focus. Hanging down from the tendril, from an invisible strand of silk, is a tiny spider. It's near the bottom of the picture, is maybe a millimeter long, and appears to be a light tan color. Because of its small size, it's not perfectly in focus, and so it's difficult to see identifying marks.

The center of this image is dominated by a spiraling plant tendril. Above it, a serrated leaf, and behind, more leaves, out of focus. Hanging down from the tendril, from an invisible strand of silk, is a tiny spider. It’s near the bottom of the picture, is maybe a millimeter long, and appears to be a light tan color. Because of its small size, it’s not perfectly in focus, and so it’s difficult to see identifying marks.

Scrying the Wind: New Research Will Revolutionize Biodiversity Tracking

Much of the world around us is dying. We’re in the midst of a mass extinction event, driven by human activity, and at this point it’s unclear exactly how this event will compare to its predecessors. We don’t need an answer to that to know that it’s in our own interest to stop it, but I think that the effort to do so would be aided by a more accurate understanding of exactly what is going on. We measure the mass extinctions of the past by the fossil record- each event was discovered because a huge number of species simply stopped appearing, because there were no more of them to leave remains. We can’t do that for our present crisis, because it’ll be a while before our era has something that could be called a fossil record.

No, if we want to understand the full horror of what we’re doing to our world, we have to find a way to figure out what’s alive now, and track declines or disappearances, species by species. Once Upon A Time, the only way to do that was to go out and literally count individual organisms. A while back I posted about the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to determine the presence of alligator snapping turtles, simply by testing the water. Obviously, it’s a bit ridiculous to call the process “simple”, but it’s safer for scientists, less invasive for the turtles, and this technology means that instead of the time and effort spent laying hands on the organism in question, someone can collect water sample, label it, and send it to a lab. This might be bad news for those of us who like doing that kind of field work (certainly more than I like lab work or data analysis), but it’s great news for our overall ability to understand what’s happening in the ecosystems of which we’re a part. I called that process “scrying for turtles”, because while DNA testing isn’t magic, it sure as hell resembles some forms of it. You use powerful energies, dangerous potions, and complicated rituals, and you gain knowledge of what that water has touched, if you know the right questions to ask.

Well, it turns out we can scry the wind, as well as the water. More than that, it seems that we may even be able to ask questions of wind that was trapped in bottles, long ago:

In their new study, researchers including Clare, Allerton, and Brown along with Nina Garrett, York University Toronto, and first author Joanne Littlefair, Queen Mary University of London, tested whether airborne eDNA containing information about the local plant, insect, and other animal life is captured on filters as a by-product of regularly operating air quality monitoring networks that are intended to monitor heavy metals and other pollutants in the atmosphere. After extracting and amplifying DNA from filters sampled at monitoring stations at two locations in the UK, they found an astonishing record of biodiversity trapped on the filters.

Their analyses recovered eDNA from more than 180 different plants, fungi, insects, mammals, birds, amphibians, and other groups. They report that the species list included many “charismatic species such as badgers, dormice, little owls, and smooth newts, species of special conservation interest such as hedgehogs and songbirds, trees including ash, linden, pine, willow, and oak, plants like yarrows, mallows, daisy, nettles, and grasses, arable crops such as wheat, soybean, and cabbage.”

They also note that the filters had DNA from 34 species of birds. The data showed that longer sampling times captured an increased number of vertebrate species, presumably as more mammals and birds visited the area over time.

The researchers contend, based on their findings, that air quality monitoring networks have been gathering local biodiversity data in a standardized way and on continental scales routinely for many years but that “the ecological significance of these samples has gone unnoticed.” In some places, samples are kept for decades, suggesting that existing samples capturing ecological data over time already exist. With only minor changes to current air quality monitoring protocols, the researchers say that these samples could be used for detailed monitoring of terrestrial biodiversity, relying entirely on a network that is already in operation.

Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and it really feels like that applies to this sort of eDNA stuff. I’ve seen the work that has historically gone into environmental monitoring, and it can be brutal. Now, apparently, we can just ask the wind. To be clear – field work will still be needed. We’re able to get this much information from eDNA because people have already collected DNA samples from all those species. It may be that we’ll be able to discover the presence of new species this way, similar to how it’s possible to discover new bird species by pinpointing unidentified songs, but I think it’s likely that we’ll still need people to go lay eyes and/or hands on individuals to get the whole picture. That said, the amount that we can learn through this air sampling is almost certain to be revolutionary.

“The most important finding, to my mind, is the demonstration that aerosol samplers typically used in national networks for ambient air quality monitoring can also collect eDNA,” Allerton said. “One can infer that such networks — for all their years of operation and in other countries around the world — must have been inadvertently picking up eDNA from the very air we breathe.”

“The potential of this cannot be overstated,” Littlefair said. “It could be an absolute gamechanger for tracking and monitoring biodiversity. Almost every country has some kind of air pollution monitoring system or network, either government owned or private, and in many cases both. This could solve a global problem of how to measure biodiversity at a massive scale.”

The team is now working to preserve as many samples as possible with eDNA in mind. While the samples have already been collected, they say it will take a global effort to take full advantage of the biodiversity information they contain.

Because this is not magic, it will require a great deal of work to fully realize the potential that has been discovered here. DNA analysis may be quicker and easier, but the samples still have to be collected and analyzed. I don’t know how long it will be before we really see what this can bring us, but I find it very hard to believe that we won’t be hearing more about it soon. The technology for DNA analysis is everywhere, at this point, and scientists all over the world are going to be itching to get to work on this. Getting started on it will probably be pretty easy for most universities, because everyone already has almost everything they need.

Given the state of the world, I expect that a lot of the news we get from this will be somewhat dire. We’re going to get a lot of new information, but it’s not going to suddenly show that the mass extinction isn’t happening, and scientists just got worse at counting things or something. This won’t change the pre-existing need for rapid political and economic change around the globe, because having more knowledge ends up meaning little, if that knowledge isn’t put to work. That said, the movements for that change continue, and the information that comes from air monitoring stations will almost certainly be of use in that effort. It’s a scary world out there, but it’s not all man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. There are man-made wonders, too.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, 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 a place or character in that series!

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.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, 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 a place or character in that series!

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.