Video: The Weimar Fallacy

With the rise of fascism in the United States, a lot of people have been comparing the current era to the Weimar Republic, in the years prior to Nazi rule. I think it’s a reasonable comparison to make, and I’ve made it myself. I think there are things we can learn from studying that history, but it’s also worth remembering that 21st century US is not, in fact Weimar Germany. The Three Arrows video I posted last August goes into both similarities and differences, and it’s definitely worth a watch, but I like the Lonerbox video below, as an explicit discussion of the differences.

I’m used to thinking of the United States as a young country, and in some ways it is, but it’s worth remembering that as states claiming to be democracies go, it’s quite old. The band Rammstein put out a song called Deutschland a little while back which made the point (among other things) that for all Germany can trace its history back for centuries, it seems like it’s always a very young country. Germany as we know it today is younger than I am, and it was preceded by the era of a divided East and West Germany, which was preceded by the Nazis, which was preceded by Weimar, which was preceded by the empire, each being not just a different regime, but in many ways a different country. To quote Deutschland, Germany is “so young, and yet so old.”

This video digs into what went on during the short years of the Republic, and how, in many ways, it’s nothing at all like what’s happening in the US today.

Potential Pollinator Hints at New Frontiers in Froggery!

If I asked a random person to name a pollinator, most people would probably default to “bees”. This is perfectly reasonable. Bees play a huge role in human life, and the decline in wild bees has rightfully caused a great deal of alarm. Today, however, we’re going to step back from the horrors of the world, and instead look at remarkable news from the wonderful world of pollination. Die-hard fans of plant sex will already be aware that pollinators come in all shapes and sizes. There are plenty of insects other than bees that pollinate, and a number of birds and mammals, but I have to admit that until today, I had never heard of a frog acting as a pollinator!

The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira

The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira

On rainy nights on the verdant coastal plains outside Rio de Janeiro, groups of tree frogs sometimes gather around the pearly white flowers of the milk fruit tree. But while most tree frogs are on the prowl for night-flying insects, one species is after the sugary nectar in the flowers. The tiny, orange Xenohyla truncata’s sweet tooth might make it the world’s first known pollinating amphibian. And the discovery adds to growing evidence that we need to broaden our understanding of which animals act as pollinators beyond the well-known birds and insects.During a visit to a spot near the Brazilian town of Armação dos Búzios in December 2020, researchers witnessed a group of the frogs—commonly known as Izecksohn’s Brazilian tree frog—feeding on milk fruit. The stomach contents of museum specimens had previously shown that the species is one of the few amphibians in the world to eat fruit, says team member Carlos Henrique de-Oliveira-Nogueira, a biologist at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. The researchers saw one of the frogs wiggle into a flower in search of nectar, then emerge with pollen clinging to the secretions on its moist back. This led them to suggest that the amphibians might play a role in carrying pollen from bloom to bloom, aiding the tree’s reproduction. The team’s findings recently appeared in Food Webs. “Some species are photographed in flowers, but nobody’s ever seen a species interacting with a flower,” de-Oliveira-Nogueira says.

So far, they haven’t proved that the frogs do pollinate, but they have shown that the potential is there. To me, it seems more likely than not that these frogs must pollinate the plants at least sometimes, whether or not they play a major role in the milk flower’s continuation as a species. Apparently testing that is the next step, as the researchers plan to enclose flowers in cages to exclude frogs. If the caged flowers don’t get pollinated, then either they depend on the frogs, or there’s something else that’s frog-sized or bigger, that the researchers haven’t considered. I’m holding out for a snake, because that would probably be the weirdest option.

There are also questions about the frog’s back secretions. Do they interact with the pollen, beyond providing a sticky surface? As the researchers say, they could actually be damaging the pollen, in which case, maybe the caged flowers will do better? Or maybe they damage the pollen, but the plant still depends on the frogs, despite that. I expect we’ll probably hear more about this in the future. Not only is this a potentially exciting discovery, it also gives a great excuse to post pictures of frogs in flowers.

The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog's bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.

The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog’s bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.

Video: Two minutes

I’ve already shared my opinion about the murder of Jordan Neely, and I haven’t really learned anything since that has changed it in any meaningful way. I’m glad that the killer is being charged with manslaughter. While I think what Penny did should be considered murder, I think it would be hard to convince a jury that he made the deliberate choice to just murder Neely.  Manslaughter, on the other hand, should be relatively easy to prove.

But if when you think about what happened, and what counts as “justice”, I think this is a useful perspective to keep in mind, and watching it will only take you about two minutes.

Hey everybody! They figured out why the temperature’s rising!

I hope you’re all sitting down as you read this. As some of you may have heard, the planet’s temperature has been rising recently, and according the very wise Bloodsucking Monster Lobby, we just can’t possibly know the cause. As you all know, I’ve just been so unsure what to say about all of this. Well, thankfully, the good folks at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute seem to have figured it out. It turns out that humans are the ones doing it! More specifically, it’s the stuff we’ve been burning for energy!

New research provides clear evidence of a human “fingerprint” on climate change and shows that specific signals from human activities have altered the temperature structure of Earth’s atmosphere.

Differences between tropospheric and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as a fingerprint of human effects on climate. This fingerprint, however, neglected information from the mid to upper stratosphere, 25 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

“Including this information improves the detectability of a human fingerprint by a factor of five. Enhanced detectability occurs because the mid to upper stratosphere has a large cooling signal from human-caused CO2 increases, small noise levels of natural internal variability, and differing signal and noise patterns,” according to the journal article, “Exceptional stratospheric contribution to human fingerprints on atmospheric temperature,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Noise in the troposphere can include day-to-day weather, interannual variability arising from El Niños and La Niñas, and longer-term natural fluctuations in climate. In the upper stratosphere, the noise of variability is smaller, and the human-caused climate change signal is larger, so the signal can be much more easily distinguished.

“Extending fingerprinting to the upper stratosphere with long temperature records and improved climate models means that it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured trends in the thermal structure of the Earth’s atmosphere,” the paper states.

“This is the clearest evidence there is of a human-caused climate change signal associated with CO2 increases,” according to lead author Benjamin Santer, an adjunct scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

“This research undercuts and rebuts claims that recent atmospheric and surface temperature changes are natural, whether due to the Sun or due to internal cycles in the climate system. A natural explanation is virtually impossible in terms of what we are looking at here: changes in the temperature structure of the atmosphere,” added Santer, who has worked on climate fingerprinting for more than 30 years. “This research puts to rest incorrect claims that we don’t need to treat climate change seriously because it is all natural.”

Jokes aside, this is important research.

I don’t know if this is the piece of climate science I wished more people knew, but it’s up there. See, if the warming was caused by an external source, like solar activity, or cosmic radiation, then the upper atmosphere would be warming as fast, or faster than the bits nearer the surface. If, on the other hand, the warming is due to greenhouse gases, then the extra heat is being trapped here. That means that less heat reaches the outer atmosphere. If the climate scientists have been right all these years, then the outer atmosphere should be cooling, and shrinking. We’ve had evidence that this is happening for a bit now, but the clearer the picture, the harder it is to refute, and this research plugs some holes in the existing data:

Although these earlier studies considered global-mean temperature changes in the middle and upper stratosphere, roughly 25 to 50 kilometers above Earth’s surface, they did not look at detailed patterns of climate change in this layer. This region can be better studied now because of improved simulations and satellite data. The new research is the first to search for human-caused climate change patterns – also called “fingerprints” – in the middle and upper stratosphere.

“The human fingerprints in temperature changes in the mid to upper stratosphere due to CO2 increases are truly exceptional because they are so large and so different from temperature changes there due to internal variability and natural external forcing. These unique fingerprints make it possible to detect the human impact on climate change due to CO2 in a short period of time (~10 – 15 years) with high confidence,” stated co-author Qiang Fu, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.

“The world has been reeling under climate change, so being as confident as possible of the role of carbon dioxide is critical,” said co-author Susan Solomon, Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The fact that observations show not only a warming troposphere but also a strongly cooling upper stratosphere is unique tell-tale evidence that nails the dominant role of carbon dioxide in climate change and greatly increases confidence.”

Santer said that although it is intellectually gratifying to be able to extend fingerprinting higher up into the atmosphere to test the prediction by Manabe and Wetherald, it is also deeply concerning.

“As someone who tries to understand the kind of world that future generations are going to inhabit, these results make me very worried. We are fundamentally changing the thermal structure of Earth’s atmosphere, and there is no joy in recognizing that,” Santer said.

“This study shows that the real world has changed in a way that simply cannot be explained by natural causes,” Santer added. “We now face important decisions, in the United States and globally, on what to do about climate change. I hope those decisions are based on our best scientific understanding of the reality and seriousness of human effects on climate.”

It’s honestly pretty remarkable the degree to which, by the time I started paying attention to this stuff, climate scientists really did know what was going on, and the “rebuttals” of the corporate-backed denial campaign have all turned out to be bullshit. Maybe I’m being too generous, but you’d think they’d get at least something right, right?  Apparently not.

I’m with Santer on not finding joy in this information, obviously. We already knew the house was on fire, and while it’s nice to have more details on the exact nature of that fire, they won’t matter much in the long run if we don’t take steps to put it out. It’s hard not to feel like every new piece of research that comes out, only really serves as another piece of evidence to be presented at a trial of our “leaders” that will never come. There was no reasonable doubt as to the cause of climate change, immediately prior to the publication of this research. There was no reasonable doubt, if we’re honest, when I was born almost 40 years ago.

That’s why this climate blog focuses so much on politics, and social justice, and organizing – because our biggest lesson of the last 50 years must be that simply having the facts on your side is not enough, even if we’re risking human extinction. Most of the world is already on our side, in wanting more action. When it comes to the powerful few who stand in our way (and their servants), persuasion is a waste of time. We can convince them after we win.

Video: The “Darwin’s Finch” of Mammals

So, last April, I posted a video about tenrecs. They’re neat little creatures that live in Madagascar, that I’ve like since I was a kid. I’m not certain, but I think I first read about them in the magazine Ranger Rick. When I say “like”, I think it’s worth noting that I mean in an aesthetic sense. If I “liked” them by learning about them, I probably wouldn’t have made this post.

I’ve always thought of tenrecs as insectivores – basically a form of shrew, but given their location, I suppose I should have known better. It turns out that they’re in the very, very small group of placental mammals that have a cloaca (apparently some actual shrews have one, which I also did not know). One way in which they’re very different from shrews, is that they have a slower metabolism, which means that while some shrews can starve to death within a 24 hour period, tenrecs, presumably including ancestral tenrecs, could survive the 400 kilometer sea journey from mainland Africa to Madagascar. I called them the “Darwin’s Finch” of mammals in the title, because since arriving on that island, they’ve branched out into a surprising diversity of body forms and ecological niches. The upside of neglecting to learn everything about organisms I like, is that I get to keep learning cool new facts about them, and take some of you along for the ride!

Gardaí Look Away as Fascists Commit Arson

When the pandemic hit, there was a sort of pause on the independence marches and rallies that Tegan and I had joined in Glasgow. Through a combination of habit, introversion, ADHD, and some version of irritable bowel syndrome, I haven’t gone out a whole lot since then, and while I’ve been getting out a bit more in recent months, I’ve not gotten back into activism. I also haven’t put in the time and effort to learn about Irish politics. I was aware that there were fascists around, but it didn’t feel like the same kind of problem it was back in the US. In my first couple months here, I scraped off all the stickers they had put up on signposts around town, but they have yet to be replaced. I had also noticed the hashtag “Ireland is full” trending on Twitter pretty regularly, but I had also seen one guy claiming credit for that, and outlining how he went about using bots and the like. Add in my effort to make a living through writing (I’d love to see more small donations at my Patreon), and it was easy to become a bit complacent.

Well, now I’m paying attention. and working to catch up.

Last night, a bunch of right-wing extremists held a hate rally against maybe a couple dozen asylum seekers who, lacking real housing, had set up an encampment near the relevant government office. After counterprotesters left, the Gardaí, Ireland’s national police force, apparently wandered off while the encampment was set on fire. The residents had been evacuated earlier, because of the danger, so as far as I can find out, nobody was hurt in the fire.

There are a number of refugees in Dublin from Ukraine and elsewhere, waiting on their asylum applications, and while some are in hotels, a sizable number are not, and have joined the city’s population of unhoused people. They’re being used as scapegoats by the far right, as usual, who blame them for crime, and a shortage of homes and jobs in Ireland. These are all real problems, of course, but with a number of vacant buildings around Dublin, including apartments, it’s not the immigrants causing the problem – it’s a system that values profit over human life.

That perspective isn’t encouraged by capitalists, of course, and it’s downright repugnant to people on the far right, so they lie, preach hate, and attack those with the least power to fight back. From the day before yesterday:

Asylum seekers living in a makeshift Dublin city campsite are ‘afraid for their lives’ after several violent attacks.

Video footage emerged on social media this week showing a violent scuffle at a shanty town housing International Protection applicants, which has appeared in the capital in recent weeks.

And last night the Garda Public Order Unit, along with dozens of gardaí, attended the scene of another protest at the site.

They stood between a group of anti-refugee demonstrators and counter-protesters who chanted ‘refugees are welcome here’.

The stand-off continued for around 90 minutes before gardaí escorted one group away.

Despite the strong garda presence at Sandwith Street last night, a spokesman for the force said: ‘We have no reports of any incidents from this location.’

The incident comes after people living in the makeshift camp, and volunteers at the Sandwith Street site, were on high alert yesterday afternoon following a confrontation between the residents and anti-asylum protesters on Thursday.

One of the residents was struck in the face and sustained bodily injuries after being hit with part of a metal fence.

The camp has been targeted numerous times in recent days, and more protests are expected later today.

At around lunchtime yesterday afternoon, a small number of men and women confronted the inhabitants yet again.

One homeless man from Bolivia said that he arrived at the camp earlier on Friday.

However, the 31-year-old man, named Jhonnes Dante Valverde, admitted being very nervous about being targeted by protesters.

‘I don’t understand why so many people want to attack us,’ he said. ‘All we’re trying to do is build a community for protection because we have nowhere else to go. We’re not bothering anyone and yet there are people who want to force us out.

‘Yes we’re afraid for our safety and even our lives, but my only priority now is to take everything day by day.

‘It’s very hard because I’ve sent nearly 70 CVs all around the city and haven’t got any answer,’ he said.

One volunteer who did not want to be named believes the asylum seekers’ safety is at ‘a huge risk’.

‘They’ve already injured one man here, but if they stormed the place, no one would have a chance.

The image shows Bolivian asylum-seeker Jesus Benitez-Gamez, standing near one end of the encampment. It's a dead-end alley, lined with abandoned buildings. On each side, makeshift shelters have been set up, along with furniture. At the far end, there's a blue tend standing by a fence. From Extra.ie: Jesus Benitez Gamez, an asylum seeker also from Bolivia, said he's more concerned for his child's safety than his own. Pic: Michael Chester

The image shows Bolivian asylum-seeker Jesus Benitez-Gamez, standing near one end of the encampment. It’s a dead-end alley, lined with abandoned buildings. On each side, makeshift shelters have been set up, along with furniture. At the far end, there’s a blue tend standing by a fence. From Extra.ie: Jesus Benitez Gamez, an asylum seeker also from Bolivia, said he’s more concerned for his child’s safety than his own. Pic: Michael Chester

As you can see, it’s a pretty tidy setup, and very clearly out of the way, and not causing any problems. As quoted above, they’re forming a community for the same reason as most homeless people – they’re subject to violence and harassment, and there is safety in numbers. Hell, it’s the same reason all of us form communities – because life is better working together, than trying to go it alone.

None of that matters to fascists, of course, so last night, they held another rally. There were anti-fascist activists there, using their bodies as a barricade between the fascist mob and the asylum seekers, but they were severely outnumbered, and not being allowed to leave. It appears, based on tweets from one of the mob’s leaders, that the Gardaí may have agreed with the mob that if they let the antifascists (and presumably any refugees with them) leave, they’d look the other way while the fascists “removed the tents”

The image is a tweet by one Gavin Pep (@PepGavin) that reads, "Credit to the gaurds they asked us if we got the people to let the anbtifa crowd go home they would let the lads down the lane to remove the tents true to there word they do a good job in an awkward situation caused by the government #MakeIrelandSafeAgain #irelandisfull. Underneath is a reply from "Joanne/@summerblu" saying, "In reality the guards are sick of the illegals aswell" Spelling mistakes included for accuracy.

The image is a tweet by one Gavin Pepper (@PepGavin) that reads, “Credit to the gaurds they asked us if we got the people to let the anbtifa crowd go home they would let the lads down the lane to remove the tents true to there word they do a good job in an awkward situation caused by the government #MakeIrelandSafeAgain #irelandisfull. Underneath is a reply from “Joanne/@summerblu” saying, “In reality the guards are sick of the illegals aswell” Spelling mistakes included for accuracy.

I think it’s worth mentioning, for those who don’t know, that Ireland’s population hasn’t yet recovered from the Great Famine, so we know for a fact that there is room for more people than currently live here. There may well be a housing shortage, beyond the artificial one caused by greedy landlords, but there is zero question that the housing situation is solvable. I don’t know enough about recent Irish politics and history to say what’s going on for certain, but this problem certainly feels familiar to what I’ve written about back in the US.

So, the refugees and the counterprotesters left, and the cops apparently left as well. As a result, these peoples homes and belongings were burned by a fascist mob, apparently with permission from law enforcement:

For those who can’t see it, the tweet contains a video showing the same dead-end alley as in the picture above, with the tents and furniture all in flames.

From what I can tell, the Gardaí were there or nearby, when the fire was started, and multiple people reported the arson attack, and were apparently ignored. What’s more, the fascists held another march today, celebrating the attack from last night:

As I said before, there is a real problem here, and the one thing Gavin got right is that the government is to blame for its continued existence, as well as the larger problem of homelessness. Poverty is a policy choice, and in capitalist countries, it’s almost always maintained for the benefit of those who exploit others for profit. The fascists have no solutions, and at least for the leaders, they want no solutions. If every immigrant left Ireland tomorrow, they’d find new scapegoats, like non-white Irish citizens, or Travelers.

The reason the far right is able to gain so much ground, is that liberal governments also don’t have a solution to these problems, because they’re too wedded to capitalism to actually solve the problem, and so it continues, and other problems like fascism feed on it and grow.

Until June, I’m still primarily focused on the novel, but I’m paying more attention to what’s going on around me, now, and I’ll be writing more about this.

The Birds are Shrinking!

When I was getting my biology degree, I was very much focused on ecology. Life on this planet is a complex, shimmering web of interaction and interdependency; pluck one strand, and the whole world vibrates. As organisms, we all affect both each other, and also the abiotic world around us. Some species, like humans, have bigger effects than others, but the reality is that you cannot study one organism without, at least in part, accounting for the others that live around it.

Later, when I was working as a curriculum developer, I wrote climate science lessons that viewed the issue through an ecological lens. See, while there was still mainstream “debate” over whether the planet was warming, wildlife around the globe was already actively responding to changes that a lot of people either didn’t notice, or were able to dismiss in their own minds. By focusing on ecosystems, we were able to show, over a decade ago, that the planet was warming, and that the effects of that warming were already measurable in the wildlife around us. I still think it was a good project, but the US public education system has little room to try new things, and is utterly clogged with testing. Add to that the difficulty in getting funds for this sort of work, and it’s hard not to feel like we were doomed from the start. That perspective on climate change, however, is still useful.

At the time, a lot of the research we were looking at related to changes in migration timing, ecological mismatch, and species range shifts. More recently, scientists have been tracking changes in body size and shape, driven by the warming of our planet. The latest example is a study showing that birds, at least in the Americas, are getting smaller, with longer wings:

The study combines data from two previously published papers that measured body-size and wing-length changes in a total of more than 86,000 bird specimens over four decades in North and South America. One study examined migrating birds killed after colliding with buildings in Chicago; the other looked at nonmigrating birds netted in the Amazon.

Though the two datasets are nonoverlapping in both species composition and geography, and the data were collected independently using different methods, the birds in both studies displayed similarly widespread declines in body size with concurrent increases in wing length.

Now, a new analysis of the combined data has revealed an even more striking pattern: In both studies, smaller bird species declined proportionately faster in body size and increased proportionately faster in wing length.

“The relationships between body size and rates of change are remarkably consistent across both datasets. However, the biological mechanism underlying the observed link between body size and rates of morphological change requires further investigation,” said U-M ornithologist Benjamin Winger, one of the study’s two senior authors, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and an assistant curator at the Museum of Zoology.

Both the Chicago and Amazonian studies attributed the reductions in species body size to increasing temperatures over the past 40 years, suggesting that body size may be an important determinant of species responses to climate change.

Birds hitting buildings is actually a serious problem, with around one billion killed every year in the US alone. It’s also helpful for science. I worked in a natural history museum in college, and part of my job was turning dead animals into study specimens. This was not taxidermy – that’s a whole art form in itself, and if I attempted it, my work would probably end up on Bad Taxidermy. No, what I did was skin them carefully (mostly birds), treat the skin, and stuff it with cotton wrapped around a wooden dowel, creating a sort of a preserved bird on a stick. These specimens are kept in drawers, so that they can be studied, and most of them came from people bringing in roadkill or window-killed birds. Natural history museums basically have libraries of dead plants and animals, along with data about them, that allow us to study the past, and compare it to what’s going on now. It’d be best if we could cut down on the death, but in the mean time, we might as well learn from it, right? I don’t miss the smells, though.

Getting back to the point of this post, the researchers also discussed the implications of the faster change in smaller birds:

It could be that smaller-bodied birds are adapting more quickly to evolutionary pressures. But the available data did not allow the U-M-led team to test whether the observed size shifts represent rapid evolutionary changes in response to natural selection.

“If natural selection plays a role in the patterns we observed, our results suggest that smaller bird species might be evolving faster because they experience stronger selection, are more responsive to selection, or both,” said co-senior author Brian Weeks, an evolutionary ecologist at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Either way, body size appears to be a primary mediator of birds’ responses to contemporary climate change.”

So, if larger-bodied birds are responding more slowly to global change, what’s the prognosis for the coming decades, as temperatures continue to climb?

“Our results suggest that large body size could further exacerbate extinction risk by limiting the potential to adapt to rapid, ongoing anthropogenic change,” said study lead author Marketa Zimova, a former U-M Institute for Global Change Biology postdoctoral researcher now at Appalachian State University.

“In contrast, the body-size effect on evolutionary rates might increase persistence of small taxa if their rapidly changing morphology reflects a faster adaptive response to changing conditions.”

It’s important to remember the broader context in which this is happening. Specifically, the fact that bird populations are declining dramatically. It’s kind of neat to see natural selection in action like this, but it’s important to remember that this isn’t birds “changing their body sizes”, it’s the death or decreased reproductive success of birds that, in this case, are too big, or have wings that are too short. What I said about squid and lizards last October applies here as well:

When the average limb length of a Caribbean anole population changes, that doesn’t mean that we’ve got the same number of lizards and they all just have different legs. It means all of the ones with different proportions died. If you lay tens of thousands of eggs at a time, like the squid, then your population can probably bounce back pretty quickly if a few of you adapt to changing conditions. For those of us who reproduce more slowly, a drop in population like that means that it will take that much less to kill off everyone that remains.

If bird populations were stable as this change took place, then I don’t think there would be much cause for concern, but they’re not. They are adapting to climate change, but combined with habitat destruction, pollution, and pesticides, that may not be enough for many species. The world is changing around us, and every species on the planet is responding to it, ourselves included. Whether we are able to survive will depend on how quickly we adjust, and how much we do to slow down the warming. At the moment, it’s not looking good.

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: Are Giraffes OP?

I’m focused on finishing the first draft of my current novel this month, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll have a few more days on which I end up not having much of a blog post. All of this is to say, I’m going to leave you with Tier Zoo, to explore the question of whether or not giraffes are overpowered.

Video: What Does It Mean To Be Indigenous?

If you care about the environment, or justice for the ongoing crimes of colonialism, you probably hear about the various Indigenous groups around the world, and how they tend to be on the front lines of the fight to stop the greed-fueled destruction of the only planet we’ve got. At one point or another, it may have occurred to you what “Indigenous” actually means – who counts as “Indigenous”, and who doesn’t? As Andrew Sage points out in the video below, while we can define a plant or animal as “indigenous” based on whether it was introduced to its habitat by humans, how does that work for us? We “introduced” ourselves to every habitat on the planet, except a small part of Africa, and it’s commonly accepted that there are Indigenous people on every continent, so what “counts”? Is it a matter of heredity? Of culture? Of lifestyle?

I don’t think there’s a clear answer, and even if there was, I’m not the person to propose it. Andrew approaches as a theory question, examining relationships with land and between people, history, and more. Check it out, and if you like his work, consider supporting him on Patreon.

Austin Police Association Demonstrates the Problem with Reform

A few days ago, voters in Austin Texas overwhelmingly decided that they wanted more civilian oversight of their police department. I’ve often heard Austin described as an oasis of progressiveness, and this vote seems to support that. Even in progressive cities, police still tend to operate with little to no meaningful accountability, and so a people in Austin set about trying to change that. As the movement supporting the change puts it:

Under Austin’s current oversight system, the police are responsible for investigating themselves. Prop A will ensure that investigations include civilians with fact-finding ability.

Prop A will ensure any future police contract contains strong oversight provisions to hold police accountable and deter misconduct like excessive force.

Prop A will ensure that accountability and oversight are required in every police contract, bringing stability and predictability to the oversight system and focusing bargaining on pay and benefits.

Court settlements related to police misconduct cost city taxpayers almost $20 million last year and millions more just last week. Prop A will reduce those costs by ensuring there is a strong deterrence for misconduct.

At the same time, the police proposed their own changes, and really managed to demonstrate how much they’re in tune with community concerns:

Prop B is Even Worse than What We Have Now.

  • It eliminates anonymous complaints. Currently anonymous complaints allow police officers and the public to report misconduct without fear of retaliation, and they are doing so.
  • The civilian oversight system will not have access to information about every incident or complaint, and will not be able to actively participate in classifying or investigating complaints.
  • It expands the felony prohibition on membership on the oversight panel to include people with certain misdemeanors as well.
  • The only way the city will be able to strengthen oversight will be through the police contract and with agreement by the police union, a system that has failed residents for decades now.
  • In testimony FOR legislation to block all civilian oversight systems in Texas from unfettered access to information about incidents, APA President Thomas Villareal said, in no uncertain terms, that civilians should have no role in oversight of police.

Still, the voters spoke overwhelmingly, with 79% of voters supporting Prop A, and 80% of voters opposing prop B. That means that, according to law, Austin will now have greater civilian oversight of police, and greater accountability when it comes to police misconduct. In response, the Austin Police Association has demonstrated why cops aren’t workers, and cop unions are in direct conflict with the interests of the working class. See, a union protects its workers against abuse and overreach by bosses, but in the case of a police union, they’re protecting the police from us. Police unions work to ensure that, as enforcers of the rich and powerful, they are not accountable to the peasantry. With that as context, what do you think the APA had to say about this change in law?

The Austin Police Association is aware of the election results and is taking immediate action to determine the city’s intentions regarding the implementation and enforcement of the illegal provisions contained in Prop A. The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women. The APA continues to prioritize negotiating a long-term contract; however, we will not be forced back to the table under a structure in which a new city ordinance attempts to unlawfully interfere with the statutory rights associated with the meet and confer process. We look forward to finding these answers so that we can get back under a long-term contract that allows for our police department to recruit hire and retain the best and brightest people who wish to serve this community in a law enforcement capacity.

Get it? Law and order means that the cops are the law, and we follow their orders. If we try to reign them in, our authority is, by that very action, illegitimate. They pretend to care about the rules that nominally govern society, but when they lose, that pretense evaporates.

This is why police reform doesn’t work – because the police actively work against it every step of the way, and like it or not, our society gives them a huge amount of power and deference. To take another example, requiring officers to wear body cameras doesn’t really do any good if they keep turning them off or hiding footage when they don’t want a record of what they’re doing. These people are a problem for society, and it’s pretty clear that when it comes to democracy, they think they know better. We’ll see how their efforts to avoid oversight play out in the coming months, but even if they lose every legal battle they pick, I fully expect cops to continue acting as if they are personifications of the law, rather than servants of it. They are a class of people set above the ordinary rabble, and they value that privilege and power more than anything. I’m willing to bet that for a great many of them, that power is what drew them to the profession in the first place, which makes them the worst possible people to have it.

Despite my pessimism, I do hope that Prop A is enforced, and that it makes a difference. Police are out of control in the US, and while I think that some of that is inherent to the nature of their job, abolishing them is going to be a long-term project. Anything that reduces the harm they cause in the short term has my support.