Life List: Squirrel?

I’ve mentioned before that when I hear a bird call I don’t recognize, it often turns out to be an american robin.  They don’t get enough credit for the variety of their vocalizations, I think.  Other times, an unfamiliar call will turn out to be a damn squirrel.

American grey squirrels have gone invasive in Europe.  Sorry about that.  Prehistorically, as continents have come together and pulled apart and come together again, there have been “biotic interchanges,” which initially result in massive reductions of biodiversity.  That is to say, many native organisms go extinct in the face of invasion.  I don’t remember the mechanism for it – why some alien species become overly successful – but it’s a sad affair, for people who like to see the world populated with unique and interesting creatures.  Right now?  Humanity has created the biggest biotic interchange since Pangaea, in addition to all the other ways we’re causing an extinction level event.

So Death to Squirrels?  I don’t know.  Ecology is all triage now, in an endless war, with no support from anybody with the resources or authority to make a real difference.  Fascist amxrika just voted “fuck it, burn the world to ashes,” so we’re left with the usual acting locally, but thinking globally?  All I’m thinking is this:  If nothing is ever done about any of this ever, what will nature do about it?  Because something will live through it all, especially if we don’t…

Eh, that was totally not what I meant to be talking about.  Squirrels, amirite?  They’re remarkable creatures.  So powerful, so well-adapted, so cute.  They live fast, they die young, but while they’re around?  Squeakin and sneakin and shriekin.  They get that nut, whether you want them to or not.

I don’t know a lot about them, but here are a few things…

Douglas’s Squirrel:  There’s a smaller species of squirrel that tends to stay in more densely forested places than your greys.  They have a dark stripe on the side and a less prodigious tail, charcoal on top, apricot orange underneath, but otherwise look very similar to a grey.  I don’t know much about them, didn’t even imagine we had all that many squirrel species locally, until I saw these ones in the West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way.  My husband thought he was seeing baby squirrels in the trees, but when we got a better look, they were clearly small-size adults.  One got pissed off at us and yelled from the walkway railing.

Flying Squirrels:  Supposedly we have flying squirrels here, ghostly colored things with huge dark eyes, capable of gliding really long distances between trees.  I’m guessing they’re high canopy adapted and might not live outside of old growth forests, but if they were around?  I’d never see one unless it fell out of a tree dead and I happened to see it in the moment before any number of beasts gobbled it up.

Black Squirrels?:  Driving from where I live up toward Canada, right as you get close to the border, you’ll see more black squirrels in people’s yards.  A morph of grey squirrels, or of a different species?  I think I’ve seen the answer before, but not curious enough to look it up again.  Just noteworthy to me because 99% of the squirrels we see are very samey here.

Chipmunks:  One reason I pushed for a honeymoon in the Olympic National Park was a childhood memory of going there with YMCA summer camp and seeing a chipmunk.  Only time I’d seen one in my life, in a quiet moment when all the other kids were off hootin’ and hollerin’ somewhere else.  Chipmunks are just another squirrel, but the stripes are cool.  The Olympic Peninsula has its own species.  We did see some, up on Hurricane Ridge, but I suspect these were not the unique local boys.  I dunno.

Cracked-out Squirrels:  There’s a tiny urban park in Seattle, near the homeless shelters and such, near the junction of Pioneer Square, the International District, and Downtown.  Last I saw it, there’d be a hundred plus homeless people resting there at all hours of the day.  My husband used to work across the street from it, and one time, passing through on the way to a bus, he had a squirrel charge him like it was going to attack.  On squirrel crack?  We don’t know.

Squirrels vs. Woodpeckers:  Northern flickers are the most common woodpecker in squirrel territory, and we’ve seen them squabble.  It’s mostly verbal, and the squeaky barking of the squirrels is what led ultimately to this post.

Dead in a gutter:  One time my home boy Bad-Moustache-Having Guy had a big-ass iguana that got out all the time.  It liked to climb trees.  One time it went missing for months, before it turned up dead in a neighbor’s rain gutter.  I didn’t see it, but I have to imagine it was sun-bleached and mummified.  One time my husband saw a squirrel sprawled out, utterly inert, near the gutter on a rooftop.  The squirrel remained there for hours, presumably sad and dead.  Then it randomly got up and took off.  Funny to imagine one having a lazy sunday, basking on a rooftop, but apparently this is a thing.  On some cold days you can see them resting on tree branches near the trunk, tail curled over their back.

Anyway, as noteworthy inhabitants of the predominantly birdy realm, they get a bird post.

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Life List: Caspian Tern

I can’t say a lot about terns because I’ve almost never seen them.  This will be a short one.  Remember when I saw a great blue heron take a dump in breathtaking detail at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge?  On the same trip, I had a shitty long-distance view of what I took for seagulls – but they were weird.  Imagine a seagull with a raspy screeching cry and a bright carrot-orange beak, still flying in the usual seagull way, over the water.  Now imagine those weird seagulls would occasionally dive for fish, like an osprey or kingfisher.  Fucked up, right?

Those were caspian terns.  I was too far away to see the black cap on their heads, but based on where and when we were, it had to be them.  Some years later – 2024 in fact – I heard their call while visiting the rose garden at Point Defiance, and glimpsed a small group of them flying through the treetops.  More recently, they were one of the short list of suspects for a bird sighting I’ve never been able to get solid about.

That’s all you get, because that’s all I got.  Share tern stories below?

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Life List: American Crow

I admit, Australia has America beat, in the category of evil genius super-bird species.  There are hella parrots there and corvids too.  But our reigning champ of world-beating nasty little punk emeff gangster birds does well for itself.  So well, it’s been mentioned in most of my posts about other birds thus far.  The american crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, is the number one bird species in tha land.  Maybe some others have them outnumbered by a bit – smaller, mouse-like species – but crow numbers are still massive.  You can’t go a day without seeing or hearing crows.  In my little suburban town, some flocks can rival groups of pigeons and starlings.  Hundreds within line of sight, possibly part of a posse running to the low thousands.  I don’t think it was like this when I was a child.  There was a population boom in the mid to late nineties, I think?  And maybe there has been another one since then.

They’re numerous, they’re strong enough to bully, they’re conspicuous, they’re noisy, and they’re smart.  I find this interesting because if you look at them next to the other corvids of the area – steller’s jays and california scrub jays – they look like clumsy cowardly scruffy losers.  The jays are more well-groomed and light on their feet, fast and maneuverable enough in flight that they feel more secure in their ability to get away from a predator.  But who wins?  A thick-bodied, big-brained generalist animal.  It’s like comparing humans to gibbons.  Lesser apes have prettier colors and can run circles around us, practically fly through trees – but we still win.

Crows are us and we are crows.  They’re our heirs apparent, I think.  When it all goes to hell for us, their populations will suffer, but they’re too cool to fall.  Just waiting in the parking lot for our time to end, so they can pick our bones clean.  Ravens have more of a rep as portentous birds of doom, but they’re afraid of crows.  They know who’s winning.

But maybe crows aren’t as impressive as they seem.  In my region a girl famously began a relationship of commerce with the birds, trading treats for random objects.  Basically, crows are on a path to learning capitalism, and thus following in our footsteps.  Bad birds.  It’s the company they keep.  It was discovered by scientists in Seattle that crows can recognize human faces for years, in an experiment that involved wearing dick cheney masks.  When the masks were flipped upside down, the crows would flip their heads to process what they were looking at.  Clown behavior.  Don’t look up to humans, guys.

American crows look most similar to Europe’s carrion crows – blacker than a blackbird, around a pound, rude little dudes.  Once I was at a ferry terminal and saw some behaving in a way I hadn’t noticed before.  The slightly smaller crow had a brownish cast to its feathers, and seemed belligerent, bossing the blacker one around for food and attention.  Subject to human prejudices and armed with just enough knowledge to mislead myself, I assumed the smaller one was a female, the larger one male.  Like when a conventionally attractive and smooth dude has a gf who is a bug-eyed goblin, witch cackler, cigarette dripping off her lip, grabbing her crotch in public.  You know the type.  But no, the smaller one was baby, the smoother one was probably mom.

Probably, but crows are very sociable beasts.  Not as wild as acorn woodpeckers whose default social arrangement is a multi-parent polycule, but who feeds baby crows?  Everybody, including cousins and older siblings.  Baby crows start with a pink mouth and a voice like a kazoo, the mouth turning black and voice filling out with maturity.  When I hear that kazoo call, I always think, that’s a pinkmouth.

Some experiences I and others have had with american crows:

Balcony clods.  When feeding birds on the balcony of my old apartment, we observed the crows were too fearful to descend onto the balcony floor, only landing on the railing.  Meanwhile, smaller birds with better acceleration would land wherever they pleased.  It’s like how cats will be very brave around dogs that are on the far side of a fence or window.  They just don’t look like they’re so much larger than jays that they should be less adroit, but they are.  They can’t move as fast on land, can’t take flight as quickly.  Not even close.  Earlier I analogized it humans:gibbons::crows:jays:.  Another one that would fit is crow:jay::wolverine:marten.  These wolverines can fit a lot of peanuts in their throats.

The Killer.  I once saw a lone crow murdering a starling on the roof of a barbershop.

The Murder.  I once saw a murder of crows take a not-quite-fledged pigeon out of a nest and start killing it in the drive-thru at Del Taco.

The Harasser.  I have seen mobs of crows harass bald eagles and red-tailed hawks more times than I can easily recall.

Seal Food.  Visiting a rose garden at Point Defiance, near the zoo in Tacoma, we saw a crow with something large and shiny in his grip.  It was a chunk of fish we figured was almost certainly stolen from pinnipeds in the pokey.  A hot score.

Tool Use.  I’ve seen a crow with a tool so perfect I wondered if it it had fashioned the thing itself.  It was a short, clean, sharp stick, like a length of a food skewer that had been broken off, and it was held just right in the beak to function like the beak of a northern flicker, punching holes in wet sod to let tasty bugs and worms out.

Rain Birds.  When it rains out, crows are not fazed at all. If anything, they become more active at ground feeding, snatching all the earthworms that come to the surface.  The robins try as well, and maybe this is my imagination, but they seem just a touch more cowardly about the elements.

Salty Dogs.  There was a named subspecies of crow in the PNW that was demoted, not considered distinct enough.  The chief supposed difference was greater comfort in a coastal biome.  There’s a little state park we like to go to with a rocky / sandy beach and some scratchy grass.  A little creek there runs out of the woods and into Puget Sound, and the crows like to play in it, to bathe, and to glean food of some kind.  Oh, and they like to soften stolen potato chips by dunking them in the water.  Those crows are scruffier than usual, with weirdly clumped feathers and patchiness.  They seem like scurvy old scalawags.  We call them salty dogs.

Mimicry.  Crows hardly ever do mimicry that we can recognize, at least, not in our company.  But they can do it, and sometimes, they seem to enjoy it – learning a single sound and repeating it just to show off.  The one time I’ve noticed this was in a ghetto of Federal Way, where a single crow liked to make this sound somewhere between a cat and a baby.  I’d write it out as “mmBAHdul.”  It was much more musical and soft than their usual noises, leading me to wonder how good they could get at mimicry – and also what the hell it was imitating, of course.  I can’t tell crows apart 90% of the time, so in having a signature sound, this one did a good job of making its personal identity known.

Funsters.  When my husband was a kid, he saw crows messing with a piece of loose shingle on an apartment roof.  Not only did they keep coming back to flip it around, they’d go get friends to come back and check it out together.  Charming.  His mother likes to tell about how she saw one get a big worm on a rainy day and seemingly do a happy dance.  Was it just trying to shake the worm to death?  Hopping in surprise at how big the thing was?  Or do they dance for joy?  I don’t know.

Revenance.  Last but not least, sometimes when a soul dies with some unfinished vengeance type business and Jeet Kune Do skills, a crow brings their soul back from the land of the dead, to kong foo some jokers into moist chunks.  Did you know that The Crow was always a rip-off of a way worse Charlie Sheen movie called The Wraith?  The comic artist used the names of the killer gang directly, and the filmmakers reproduced that plagiarism without knowing.  True shit.  The Wraith was kinda fun tho.  It had pre- Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn in it – blonde.  Audrey Horne fans cry blood now.

Anyway, crows.  Ready to clean your skull when you die.  Give it up smooth; ain’t no telling when they’re down for a jack move.

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Time to Form a Third Party?

More than usual, I’m amenable to hearing arguments in favor of abandoning the dems for a third party. If it was done on a large enough scale and fast enough, it could end-run the two-party stranglehold. If you do it on election eve 2028, bad timing. If you got way better than Green numbers well in advance, with a sufficiently bad-ass campaign, it might not be that hard to make a better showing than Harris, next time out. Her numbers were that miserable. These are radical times; radical things may happen.

I don’t have much to say on this right at the moment, and I know the conversation could get acrimonious, but if you can keep it civil, please speak your piece below. As much as I’m “vote dem or die” when there is no viable alternative in sight, it feels more possible than it has in a while that we could all just dust those fools off and do something else.

With dems acting the way they are now, we can be fairly assured of ten to forty years of fascist rule. If they changed their tune tomorrow I’d be open to hearing it, but they’ve been signaling a right-wing turn. What if we had somebody else, another party that wasn’t a fucking piss-take?

I will immediately return to “vote dem or die” if we get closer without a crushing success in building a replacement, so this is idle fancy. But get fancy with me for a minute.

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Life List: Eurasian Starling

I’ve never been to Eurasia, but Eurasia has come to where I live. Like humans from my ancestral gene pool, just, boom, are you really supposed to be here guys? No? Make yourself at home I guess? The most aggressive and destructive invasive bird species in my region, if not the entire USA, is the eurasian starling.

Knowing that – knowing that they will bully diminishing native species out of their nests to pump out more soldiers for the unending murmuration – I have occasionally harbored an urge to kill large numbers of them. Use their shiny little feathers to make very fancy coats. Turn their skulls into ring ornaments. But not anymore. Now I think of them more like the Lystrosaurus that became the dominant land animal in the wake of The Great Dying. When the smoke clears on this man-made extinction level event, the only life we have left will be the fittest survivors. And here they are.

Starling experiences. I saw one being murdered by a crow. Heard a squeaking sound and cast about for it. On the roof of a little barbershop, a single starling was being stabbed to death by a single crow. Each time the bigger bird’s beak came down, another squeak. Score one for native species.

In college I was eating lunch with this William Shatner-looking dude at a fancy fish restaurant on the Seattle waterfront. Gulls, crows, starlings, and house sparrows were everywhere. Shatner was distracted for a moment and a starling stole one of his pieces of fried fish. Starlings are bigger than most LBBs but smaller than the average thrush, so this was no mean feat. The fish piece probably weighed as much as the bird. Years later at a fish and chips place on Green Lake, I saw starlings all around, and knew what they were there for.

One time at the mall in Federal Way, I was walking behind it, near the big power line towers. I heard a buzz and crackle and thought there might be an issue with the towers, but looked up and the majority of that sound was coming from little beasts. I used to ride the bus with a Russian lady who told me their word for them was something like “staretsya.” I was surprised it had “star” in it.

They’re great mimics, but they do sound tinny, like a tape recorder. Their cousin the common mynah is sometimes kept as a pet, and there is a very cute video of one in Japan that knows how to say “I understand!” (“wakarimashita!”) in a bitchy voice – a hilarious lie. One time when me and my husband (then boyfriend) were walking to the bus stop in the morning, I mentioned their mimicry and he did a wolf whistle at a flock – which was instantly returned by one of them. Only time I’ve heard their mimicry so overtly. I think most of the time they’re doing natural calls, or imitating other birds, and city sounds. It’s all a burbling staticky wash.

Starlings are drab for birds in their family. Any number of starling cousins look way more flashy. But still, they’re pretty cool. Powerful iridescence. Dots (the stars?), lil light brown streaks. When they fly, they look like fighter jets. They’re amazingly adroit for mid-size birds, like they’re evolving toward hummingbird powers. They are, of course, famous for flying in excellent synchrony, in flocks that move like undulating scarves on the wind, called murmurations. The more birds, the more impressive it looks. And unfortunately, we have no shortage of them.

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My Day Job is Threatened by AI, and I Don’t Care

I can’t talk much about my day job on here. It’s nothing exciting or wild, but you know, there are a million boring reasons why that’s a good idea for lots of people. My day job is a kind of social work / bureaucracy type thing, where in a call center environment I help people with issues related to social programs.

This is the most emotionally and intellectually challenging job I’ve ever had, and the more emotional a call gets, the more likely I am to make mistakes on the intellectual side. Gotta be a cool-ass customer. When you’re in a tight situation and you’re talking to a bureaucrat, you want to plead with them to see you as human, so they give you a good deal. That is a mistake. Convey the seriousness of your situation accurately but try not to make the bureaucrat genuinely sad for you, because their job is complicated as balls and they are more likely to make mistakes that fuck you over if they are not thinking clearly.

People make mistakes, because of emotional and intellectual challenges like this. Administering laws and policies related to multiple programs federal and local and the interactions between them, it’s a snarl of contradictory shit driven by the conflicting political imperatives of “having bare minimum human decency” and “never give anybody a nickel they didn’t break their body in half for.” AIs make mistakes because their intelligence is alien and simplistic, their relationship to their output about math rather than true understanding. Between humans and AIs, who makes more mistakes?

Humans, are you fucking kidding me? The public will benefit by everybody in my position being replaced with AI.

If this is done with wisdom, which hardly seems likely given the Klown Kar Kabinet, it will move in stages. First people like me will be able to use internally trained AIs to seek the policy and procedural information we’ll need to handle a call. In parallel, there will be an automated phone AI to handle easier things if people are willing, thus getting its training in. When the AI looks good enough and enough people are willing to use the automated system, it should graduate to having bureaucrats like me take responsibility for all critical inputs, for the reasons of checking hallucinations, fraud caused by bad actors manipulating silly bots, and to have a human that can be held to account for bad mistakes. Lastly, if you can go a few years with an acceptably low rate of failures for the system, you let the AI take over completely, and only retain a small core of highly trained humans for support.

The biggest risk to the program I think is “AI whisperers” that can talk the bots into accepting con jobs. Another significant risk is the system being programmed with bad values, discriminating against callers on various grounds. Something I didn’t know well before I took this job is that some cisgender women sound like men on the phone – especially older black women – and you cannot reasonably judge age by a person’s voice. Some people young enough to be my child sound like seventy-year-olds, some eighty-year-olds sound like me. The pitch and grit in a voice can give you a clue, but you need more than a clue to judge if a voice on a line belongs to a person of a given demographic. I could see misguided anti-fraud measures causing bots to treat trans women and black women like they’re con artists, to speak nothing of the risks others have noted in AI being used by insurance companies like (see image in my sidebar yo). But my employer does not have the profit incentive of private business, so the last should, in theory, not happen.

In a country with reasonably funded social services, you’d have a large contingent of standby people waiting to take over during system outages, who can spend all day studying the ins and outs of the policies, get to where they can do really well in the edge cases where their involvement is necessary. But the US will never be that country, so the AI will be an excuse to downsize everyone like me into the streets.

I’m the resident pro-AI weirdo on a typically anti-AI leftist blog network. How do I feel about it? If the public is better served by bots, bring on the bots. I’ll have to desperately work three jobs to pay my mortgage, I’ll feel the pain really badly. But if the public is better served by bots, they deserve what better helps them – especially if it’s more economically efficient, allowing those social programs to make the best use of their limited funds.

I will have to eat shit on that deal. I don’t imagine this is going to happen until several years from now, but like I said earlier, who knows with these clowns? Maybe I eat these words around the time I’m eating my hat to survive, but from where I stand now, I say do what’s best for the most people.

Likewise, I find it impossible to believe that we can’t develop a self-driving car that makes fewer mistakes than a human. When that happens, the haters should maybe acquiesce to the good of saving literally tens of thousands of lives a year with AI. Call me wacky.

In a sense that last one is a strawman. Many AI detractors are situationally OK with the tech, and could be moved by common sense and hard numbers, on a case-by-case basis. That’s fine. The same way I’m glad there are anti-death penalty absolutists working to make the world a less nasty place, even while I don’t have very strong feelings about it, I’m OK with there being a reflexively anti-AI contingent that looks for all the possible failings of such systems and hectors The Man about it.

But I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of jobs that AI is going to kill over the next decade, and society is going to have to figure out what to do about that. Because if a human can be *reasonably* be replaced by an AI, increasing the benefit to society, that should happen. Even if I’m wrong about that? It’s going to happen, and the problem is worse – because we’ll be unemployed with essential services administered by a pyramid of flaming cybertrucks.

Good luck to everybody, whatever the future brings. Perhaps I’m a little unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities.

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Life List: American Robin

He rocks in the treetops all day long, rocking and bopping and singing his song.  Does it sound like tweedlydeedlydeet?  Not exactly, but it’s more variable than you’d expect.  Many times when I’ve heard an unfamiliar bird call or seen a bird flying in some strange way, it turned out to just be another american robin.  Bitches should be called migratory thrushes; they are not real robins.  But they are ridiculously successful animals in North America.  I wonder if blue sky posts can embed in wordpress ok.

actually I think democrats should move 2 the right & just become republicans and republicans should become giant skeleton monsters and giant skeleton monsters should become giant skeleton monsters that pee wasps

— birdrightsactivist (@probirdrights.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 11:05 AM

Anyway, american robins have the worst fucken theme song ever.  But they are respectable beasts.  I like the white ring around their eyes, helps them stand out from the dark hood, looks expressive.  The yellow beak and feet.  The red breast, very cool.  Give them a hand.  Yes, the song they sing around March 1st through most of the year, that sounds like a horror movie soundtrack, and one time my home boy Clark heard one singing it at three AM, but you gotta respect the hustle.

Sometimes I see about a dozen of them in a flock.  I think they’re more likely to posse up during migrations, but I’m no expert.  My dad said he used to see flocks more like a hundred, back when he was a youth, and remembered particularly watching them get drunk on rotten fruit.  The sixties, maaan.

Our robins get worms.  Not those ones.  Probably those ones too, but they eat mad worms.  I’ve heard invasive European earthworms are an ecosystem-crushing omnipresent disaster in the USA.  But I wonder, is their presence part of why migratory thrushes are so successful?  American robins and crows love the hell out of those things.  It’s every day.  Early birding.  Early worming.  Rise and shine, and by shine, I mean jerk a stretchy pink-grey freak out of a lawn and eat it.

USian robins are a bit smaller and much more graceful than USian crows.  The crows have a shambolic walk, and can only comfortably go faster by switching to a hop.  Robins run so smoothly their body doesn’t move up and down at all – just legs furiously wheeling beneath them, like Shaggy and Scoob.  I’ve dubbed it “the robin run,” but it’s not too unusual of a small bird gait.  It’s the crows that are especially maladroit.

Where do they migrate to?  They migrate, but they’re here all year.  But sometimes they do look like they’re going somewhere.  My guess is that in winter I’m seeing alaskans and canadians, and in summer i’m seeing guys that winter in california.  I don’t know.  They get around, like so many beach’d boys.  I’m getting bugged flying up and down the same old strip, I gotta find a new place where the birds are hip.

Why did I ever listen to the oldies station as a youth?  Big mistake.  This article is over, man!

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Eccentricities

I can talk a little shit about people in my life on here because they all have reasons for not reading any of it.  Reasons are reasons and I take no offense, plus the freedom to talk that shit has some use.

There’s a cognitive feat that even many single celled organisms are capable of: responding to a sensory stimulus in a binary way.  See light, move towards.  See dark, move away.  I live with a full-fledged human being that utterly fails at a task this simple, probably by making it more complicated?  I don’t understand how.

In her case, it’s backing up a car.  With a backup camera.  That camera affords her the possibility of forgetting everything she ever learned about driving, about left and right, and simply moving the wheel in the direction that makes the car go in the desired direction.  It’s comparable to a video game less sophisticated than Pong.

There are two circumstances that occasionally come up in our lives which require backing up, and she avoids them at all costs.  One is going to the dump to get rid of garbage in excess of what the man will pick up from our curbside.

She was so bothered by this, I offered an alternative.  You can illegally dump this garbage, say, in a dumpster behind a random business, but I am not going to ride shotgun if you do so.  My husband said, hey, you can do that at your sister’s condos.  Unlike ours, they have shared dumpsters.  I mentioned there was a slight possibility she could get busted for it.

She instantly hatched a zany scheme to make it look like our excess trash actually was her sister’s, thereby dodging that unlikely ticket.  This only emphasized the eccentricity for me:

She crafted a macchiavellian plot to avoid culpability for a very minor crime she was very unlikely to catch punishment for, all to avoid a cognitive task that could literally be performed by a protozoan.

That’s a lil funny.

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Mandate of Heaven, Evil Edition

Some prominent dems have signaled willingness to work with the repugnant.  Should they?  Or should they just stonewall and annoy, as much as is possible from minority positions?  I don’t know.  Yes, everything the nazis have said that they desire is literally evil, the kind of stuff that should be opposed by all decent people with everything they have.  On the other hand, this is what the US wanted.  The nazis have a mandate.

Literally speaking, it isn’t what the people actually wanted, right?  All the polls say those positions would fail if given simple majority polls of all people in the US.  But that isn’t how things work.  You have to vote.  This is the thing about red state people saying “my vote doesn’t count”:  Yes, it doesn’t decide the election, but it helps set the tone of the national conversation.  By not caring enough to show up, you said, “nazis, fuck it, take it all.”  Now they have, and they will get to goose step all over our asses, for as long as they can stave off self-destruction.

And it will have to be self-destruction, because without earth-shattering numbers of people voting blue next time, it will be impossible to break through the wall of voter obstruction they are going to erect the second they take office.  We know americans are too bitchy provincial and lazy to make that shit happen, so we are officially at T minus X days til more than a decade of fascist rule.

So what do you do, as a non-genocidal body filling the loser seat on Capitol Hill?  Oppose and obstruct as much as you can, or play some kind of ball?  If one of the ball-players manages to wheedle the fascists into being 2% less deadly to innocent people, that’s worth doing.  It will be degrading, humiliating, frustrating, and tragic to behold, over and over and over again.  So much failure ahead of them.  But still, some lives might be saved?

Any dems with that in mind are going to have to pick their battles.  Obstruct on some days, play ball on others.  It’s just how it is now.  At many times over the last few decades, it’s the way it has been – only now it’s a lot worse, and going to stay that way.  Meanwhile, smarmy anti-voting anarcho-fools will point to AOC signing off on some reprehensible bill as proof they’re all out to get you, even when it was the best thing she could do to eke out a better chance of survival for her constituency.

America didn’t want fascism, but didn’t know enough or care enough to stop it, and they will not have a choice next time around.  So for those of us who are vulnerable, it’s all about picking our battles.  For some, that will mean never coming out of the closet, leaving the country, shining stormtrooper boots on monday and trading illegal art on tuesday.  For some, it will mean joining La Résistance.  For many, it’s going to be some combination of the two.

At some point you’re going to be forced by circumstance to play nice with your mortal enemy.  (Black people have to do this every time they get stopped by a cop.)  Don’t let it defeat you, in your heart.  Keep keeping on, my friends.  Eventually, we’ll get through it.  And if we don’t live long enough to see the other side, we can still live well, in whatever ways we can find.  Power on.

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Sorry, I never explained the title.  It’s kind of obscure to most of us in the USA.  There is a concept from part of Chinese history that overlaps with mythology, that you can win the blessing of rulership from Heaven itself, if you get a cool magic artifact or whatever.  I half-remembered that when I thought about our incipient theocracy.  The dominionists threw a little lasso around the foot of a golden toad, and now they can ride behind him as he leaps across the night sky, raining despair and violence like sweat as he goes.  Blessed be.

Life List: Bald Eagle

When I first moved to a homeless shelter in Seattle as a child, I was given a book about wildlife.  Our Magnificent Wildlife, by Reader’s Digest books.  The cover was dark brown, with the lovely face of a bald eagle in profile.  The articles inside gave me some interesting bits of information, might have informed my worldview in some respects.  I do think they overemphasized the threat to animals posed by poaching – the number one enemy has always been greed, from colonialism to capitalism – thus giving lil me an outsized hatred of poachers.  In my mind they were white dudes in khaki pith helmets with elephant rifles.  Shit do be more complicated than that.  Still, that book was the first place I ever saw an illustration of a slow loris.  Love those guys.

Getting away from the topic.  Other than that book cover and images in media, I never saw a bald eagle until a certain zoo visit around age ten – and then only through the narrow slats of a fence.  My first wild sightings were much later, which makes sense – the population still had a lot of recovery to do, after depletion from the pesticide DDT thinning their shells.  Something I also read about in that book.

Now I know.  That eagle cry you always hear in Hollywood output is actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk*.  Bald eagles sound like the seagulls who get bullied by other seagulls for being too effeminate and silly.  Bad seagulls, leave those apex predators alone.  Incidentally, bullying is the easiest way to spot a bald eagle in the open.  Unless you’re in an area with a weak presence of corvids, you will hear the cawing of crows and see them fly aggressively, before you notice they’re doing so to harass a bald eagle.  The only times I’ve seen a baldy that wasn’t being tormented by crows was when the eagles had a flock of their own, or they were at some lonely altitude, far above the earth.

Bald eagles are known to join claws and plummet out of the sky, as a daredevil courtship maneuver, I think?  My dad said he saw some doing this over I-5, and they almost got hit by a car when they neared the asphalt.  It was visiting my dad, in a brief window of time when he lived on an Indian reservation in Snohomish County, that I got my best view ever of a bald eagle, perched briefly in a tree that had been stripped of all its low branches.  I also saw one even closer, more briefly, as it flew above his back porch there.  Majesty, yo.

In Alaska they are numerous around landfills and fisheries, seen as pests.  It’s easy to find video of this on youtube.  Big flocks, kinda cool.

Bald eagles are the symbol of Amurrica.  Love it or leave it, pal!  Hey, where are you going with my DDT, I need that…  Gotdam renevuers.  What was I saying?  Bald eagles are not very rare anymore, and that’s nice.  Look upon them and feel some type of way about where you are.  And wonder how long it will be before the tumorous-organ-in-chief mandates all factory farms switch to eggshell-destroying pesticides again.

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*I never recall hearing red-tailed hawks make that sound, as many times as I’ve seen them, until this year, when we went to a mountain on the Olympic Peninsula for part of our honeymoon.  At high altitude, they love to belt it out.  Only other soaring birds up there were ravens, that I saw.  Ravens surely harass raptors like crows do, but I didn’t happen to see it.  Probably because they don’t have as large of flocks.