Narrative Rehearsal

Your phone screams at you and displays an urgent message. There is a button to dismiss it.

What this means:

"Here is a message the UK government has decided it is of vital importance the majority of the public are aware of immediately. You can only read it on the screen of a device which is actively making as distressing a noise as we can force out of it. The only way to stop the screaming to make it easier to parse what is on the screen is to dismiss the message."

A+ design.

But which arsetrumpet decided "EVERYTHING'S TOO DRY NO FIRES" was worth the _emergency alert_ system.

Phalera bucephala, otherwise known as the buff-tip moth, is a remarkable mimic that can easily disguise itself as a twig. This moth has a unique resting position that makes its body seem narrower and more cylindrical, and its wings are covered in silver patterns that resemble tree bark, while the buff-colored patches on its head and forewings mimic the appearance of freshly-snapped wood.

Above: three actual twigs and one buff-tip moth

This type of camouflage is also known as a "protective resemblance" -- a form of mimesis in which an animal can avoid being preyed upon by mimicking an unremarkable or inedible aspect of its environment. Many other moths are able to disguise themselves in similar ways, often mimicking dead leaves, twigs, moss, and/or tree bark.

Above: more photos of Phalera bucephala

The buff-tip moth is particularly adept at disguising itself, however, and the fact that it so strongly resembles such a specific object (not just a dead leaf or a piece of foliage, but a broken twig from a silver birch tree, in particular) makes this disguise seem even more impressive and unique.

Above: the photo at the top shows a buff-tip moth in its resting position, while the photo at the bottom shows the same species with its wings unfurled

It also tends to look like there's a weird little smiley face in the setae surrounding the moth's head, which is arguably even more striking, but for some reason none of my sources seem to mention that weirdness.

Above: the weird little smiley face on the back of the moth's head

This species is distributed throughout the British Isles, mainland Europe, and parts of Asia, with its range extending into Eastern Siberia.

Sources & More Info:

Wildlife Insights: Buff-Tip Moth Identification Guide

Butterfly Conservation: Buff-Tip

Wildlife Insights: Phalera bucephala

The Wildlife Trusts: The Buff-Tip Moth

Moth Identification: Phalera busephala

Encyclopedia of Life: Global Map of Known Occurrences for Phalera busephala

Insecta: Phalera bucephala

Lepidoptera and their Ecology: Phalera busephaloides and Phalera busephala

Journal of Ecology and Evolution: Strong Foraging Preferences for Ribes alpinum in the Polyphagous Caterpillars of the Buff-Tip Moth

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

In Scotland 'good conservation practice' and care for all native species includes eating venison. The big predators of the British Isles were wiped out centuries ago so the only 'predator' of deer is humans. Without managing the deer, their population would explode out of control, they'd eat everything in sight, wipe out a lot of incredibly important habitats and therefore wipe out a lot of other species and eventually over populate to the point that they starved and suffered themselves.

Deer also invade agricultural land and destroy crops and are involved in 74,000 car accidents every year and cause god knows how many issues on rail lines.

A huge amount of work and regulation goes into doing the deer cull as humanely as possible and a lot of research is looking at potential schemes for birth control but the population is large enough that Scotland only has closed seasons for females and all males of all species are open season all year round.

Source is Instagram user thatmodernlife. Per Reddit, this post was deleted quickly, and was captioned:

I also happen to specialise in gambling addiction (although I'm not practicing in that area right now), and all I could fucking think about was how these fucking apps were conditioning me in the same fucking way gambling apps do. To be constantly plugged in, consuming. To not even think about just picking it up and having a look. To feel bored when I wasn't watching them, to think about watching them when I wasn't watching them....

That shit is fucking evil.

I deleted it. I'm not exposing myself to that.

That shit will fry your dopamine/reward system so fucking bad you will never read a book or watching a movie again without it.

Love yourself and your potential enough to put that fucking shit away. Watch longer form things that require focus and engagement. Listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Read books. DO ANYTHING BUT CONSUME SHORT FORM CONTENT IN AN UNSTRUCTURED WAY.

If you MUST consume it (I'm sure people will be like 'but my classmates' or 'but my own channel'.... etc), do it in a siloed and structured way. 30 minutes between x time and x time on x day. Focus on it. Don't eat and do it. Watch each short form video to completion. Engage critically with the content. ANd never watch them first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

Important update as we hit paper 70. 

My best was the essay critiquing a paper about marks on bone during the Neolithic where the student had managed to imply that dogs could use knives and I wrote that unfortunately dogs do not have opposable thumbs.

I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now. We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure. but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.

All the way into my twenties a 'super hot week' in my city was 22C/71.6F. And chances were we'd get 2-3 days at that temperature and then it would drop below 20C/68F again for a while and most of the time 20C/68F was as hot as it would get.

In a super hot year there might be a week where it was too hot to wear trousers for more than a couple of days in a row and other than that it was the odd individual hot day. It would literally be the odd individual day where you had to open the windows because your house was too warm thanks to the sun/outside temperature.

This summer I kept my windows open for 6 weeks straight because it was too hot.

There's a hill in the middle of my city where the first memory I have of it burning is less than ten years ago. This year it went up in a major way and I thought 'oh, it's that time of year again'.

Our 'normal' is on a particularly dry year you might get the odd very small bit of forest or hillside that would burn and be contained within 12 hours. This year 25 square kilometres of the Cairngorms (internationally important moorland and forest home to 25% of the UK's rare and endangered species) burned for over 3 weeks. People got evacuated for a forest fire in a country that is internationally renowned for being cold and wet all the fucking time. People expect to be evacuated for flooding, not fires.