A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
The European Starling is an invasive species with a history of causing problems. According to lore, Eugene Schieffelin, Chair of the American Acclimatization Society, brought Starlings to America because of his love for Shakespeare and all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's works. It's a lovely story, but reality, and some fact-checking, tell us there may be a bit more to it.
"I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion"
Did this one mention of the European Starling in Shakespeare's Henry IV lead to one of America's most problematic invasive species? Even the most authoritative sources say it did, but some research reveals an ongoing - and so far unresolved - debate.
I'm being a good environmentalist by recycling the comment I left on the video.
I tell this story to my biology and environmental science students to begin my lecture on invasive species and linking it to Schieffelin's reputed love of Shakespeare makes a great hook. It's also the story that opens the episode of PBS's "Human Footprint" about invasive species, so I'm not alone. It even shows up in Netflix's "Ozark," just to give an idea of its cultural significance. While I've been familiar with the story, having read it in Reader's Digest more than 50 years ago, you managed to add details to it I hadn't heard, so, thank you, I learned something from you. It's always a good day when I learn something new.
I just lectured on this subject two weeks ago in environmental science, but will lecture on it to my biology students next month. I might show this video to them then. If I do, this will become another instance of blogging as professional development.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the nation saw fewer babies born in 2022 compared to 2021.
I quoted Vox last year, who wrote "2021 represents the first time since 2014 that the number of babies born in the US actually increased...But make no mistake: This is not a baby boom that is meant to last." I concurred, writing "I agree with Vox; this is likely just a temporary reversal of a long-term trend." So far, Vox and I are right.
Children are really expensive to raise in the United States. Economists say people may be taking that into consideration when deciding whether to have kids. Fertility rates dropped ahead of the Great Recession in 2007, suggesting having children may be an indicator of people's confidence about the future. Despite this, public opinion polling suggests that financial anxiety is not actually deterring Americans from having children. Watch the video above to learn why the birth rate is falling and what the Covid pandemic may mean for future fertility rates.
The U.S. is part of a global trend among wealthier countries for fewer births, longer lives, more older people, and slowing population growth or even outright decline, as the United Nations described in 8 Billion People And Counting: What Now? | World Population Day 2023.
The global population has reached 8 billion, what does this mean for the future of our world?
Dr. Rachel Snow of the United Nations Population Fund is here to answer your questions.
That is probably the most optimistic take on growing global population I've seen in a long time. It's certainly not gloom and doom. It's also very timely, as I'm teaching a unit on population right now. I might even show this video to my students tomorrow. Welcome to blogging as professional development.
Each year on July 11th, people across America raise a glass to mark National Mojito Day. The cocktail consists of white rum, sugar, lime juice, sparkling water, and mint.
#NationalMojitoDay
The Mojito is a traditional Cuban highball, and while rumored to be a drink favored by the author Ernest Hemingway, it’s never been proven. It seems the story behind Hemingway and the Mojito is a tall tale to attract visitors and to sell drinks. Isn’t every origin story behind a drink designed to sell more of the original anyway?
Instead of traveling to Cuba, I'm staying here in Michigan to celebrate with the 13 On Your Side (ABC 13 in Grand Rapids) feature Thirsty Thursday: National Mojito Day from four years ago.
Celebrate National Mojito Day with a delicious recipe and pairing ideas from 18th Amendment Spirits.
I had to look up the 18th Amendment. It's the Prohibition amendment. The owners have a sense of humor about their business.
“We’ve got to keep democracy growing, otherwise we’re constantly going to be lapsing back into these authoritarianism impulses that Donald Trump and his Party have unleashed upon us,” says Rep. Jamie Raskin on giving statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as an "offensive" response to Jan. 6.
Well said, Congressman. That's both a reason I agree with and a good foreshadowing for a related topic, Puerto Rican statehood, on Piña Colada Day next month. Stay tuned.
Follow over the jump for the update since last year.
Today is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Summer Solstice, so it's Souther, a holiday created by John Michael Greer and entrusted to me. He also designated the wombat as the animal mascot for the holiday.
Wombats are the heroes of the bush fires, the stealer of hearts, and the knights of the most adorable joust in the world.
I found this video to be even more informative and entertaining than I expected, although it's almost too cute for its own good. "Mortal Wombat...Fight!" LOL. While I anticipated Danielle Dufault describing the wombat's cubic poop, she surprised me by mentioning that engineers are studying how the wombat shapes its feces so they can imitate it in manufacturing. Consider this to be another example of "Nature knows best," one of Commoner's Laws.
By the way, Animalogic uploaded this video on July 17, 2020, the Friday after that year's Souther on July 12, 2020. I'm adding it to the rest of the coincidences around Souther, wombats, and ice cream that have occurred since Greer created the holiday and I started maintaining it.
The “Barbie” movie is one of the summer's most highly anticipated movies but it's sparking an unexpected controversy. A map, seen in the film, shows a jagged line off the coast of China that allegedly represents the country's disputed claim to the South China Sea. China claims that everything inside that jagged line is theirs but every other nation that borders the South China Sea disputes that. Now, Vietnam is banning the movie and the Philippines may follow suit. The movie’s producer says the map is only make-believe and was not intended to make any statement about the real world. Inside Edition's Alison Hall has more.
This seems like a tempest in a teapot, but the dispute between China and its neighbors, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, is deadly serious, as DW News explains in Vietnam bans 'Barbie' movie over map of South China Sea.
Vietnam has banned the movie 'Barbie'. The Margot Robbie starrer was due to be released there on July 21, but won't be released now. State media reported this was because the film included a map showing unilateral Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
Yikes! This explains why the U.S. and Philippines announced four new bases in the country this April. That's quite the reversal of policy after the U.S. abandoned Clark Air Base in 1991 and Naval Base Subic Bay in 1992. That happened because the end of the Cold War and the Philippines' people and government's irritation at the bases becoming attractive nuisances because of the American servicemen's appetite for vice. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, a story I tell my students, sped the process along. It looks like the rise of China as a world power and regional threat made the Philippines reconsider the advantages of a U.S. military presence. I don't know if that would ever happen in Vietnam, but stranger things have happened.
Speaking of stranger things, but unfortunately not the Netflix series, this has spilled over into domestic politics, as the Politico article shown in the "Inside Edition" video reported in GOP declares war on ... Barbie.
GOP lawmakers accuse filmmakers of pandering to Chinese censors. But Warner Bros. Film Group, which produced the movie, said Thursday the map is not intended to “make any type of statement.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who leads a select House panel aimed at countering the influence of China, said the map “illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors.”
“While it may just be a Barbie map in a Barbie world, the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict the PRC’s unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors,” Gallagher said in a statement to POLITICO. “I hope Warner Brothers clarifies that the map was not intended to endorse any territorial claims and was in fact, the work of a formerly plastic anthropomorphic doll.”
Warner Bros., in its own statement to POLITICO, said there were no geopolitics intended in “Barbie.”
“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group said. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
Oh, dear dog. Anything to generate outrage along with anti-China and anti-Hollywood sentiment.
"Barbie" beat "Oppenheimer," the runner-up, which it shares a release date with, along with "Dune: Part Two," "Killers of the Flower Moon," and "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One." That's a list of potentially great movies, all of which I expect to see nominated in future awards shows, including the Saturn Awards, which I vote for.
It has been a week of record-breaking heat around the world. The average global temperature on Wednesday hit 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit, matching the record-high set just on Tuesday. The grim milestones are the latest in a series of climate change driven extremes. Amna Nawaz discussed these events and what to take from them with Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University.
Mike Flannigan described how climatechange has contributed to the record Canadian wildfire season, which has affected tens of millions of North Americans, including me. During May and June, smoke from those wildfires has twice blown south into the eastern half of the U.S. and created unhealthy to hazardous air quality from Chicago to New York, with Detroit in-between. Last week, the smoke was thick enough that it matched the worst-looking air pollution I ever saw growing up in Los Angeles. I have never seen air quality this bad in the 34 years I've lived here. My students even asked me why it was happening. Unfortunately, they were my geology students. If my environmental science students had asked, I'd have used the smoke as an example of three of Commoner's Laws, everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, so there is no "away," and there is no free lunch. If the smoke returns, I might still.
Flannigan also responded to Amna Nawaz's question about whether the increase in temperatures was part of a natural cycle by pointing out that the Earth should be cooling, not warming. That's the same answer I gave in PBS Digital's Be Smart debunks 'The Biggest Myth About Climate Change'.
I have mentioned several times that I'm a paleontologist who studies Pleistocene fossils, particularly snails. What I don't mention is that I used data from the snails, clams, and plants of Rancho La Brea to reconstruct the late Pleistocene climate of southern California, so I'm quite familiar with natural climate change. That's why I was able to respond intelligently to Ed, the troll who was better than a spammer, when he snarked "Maybe you can tell us what the climate is supposed to be so we will know if it's changing too much."
Ed, actually, I can. The average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere should be almost two degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it is today based on the pre-1900 temperature trend, three degrees based on the progress of previous interglacials. If you want the reasoning and evidence, you will have to wait until I put together an entire entry with links; it will take more effort than a simple comment is worth. In the meantime, count your blessings that you stumbled onto someone who actually knows the answer to what you may have thought was a rhetorical question too hard to answer.
I'm repeating four facts the presenter shared. First, this week's records broke the one set in 2016, tied for the hottest year on record, which suggests that 2023 is on track to be the hottest year ever — so far. Second, she repeated that this is likely to be the hottest days in 125,000 years. Third, she listed the three reasons for the records, climate change, El Niño, and summer in the Northern Hemisphere; there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere and land heats up more than water. Finally, she mentioned a high temperature record in the Antarctic, which We Are Iowa Local 5 (WOI-TV) included in the description of Thursday was the hottest day on Earth, a record broken for the third time this week.
The warm weather even stretched to Antarctica, where temperatures across much of the continent were as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
That's four record average global high temperatures in a row. There's a reason why I wrote "and it's only Thursday" in the title of yesterday's post.
The last three days marked the hottest days the world has seen -- at least since official record taking began 44 years ago. Scientists though say they were likely the hottest days in centuries and that the record could be broken several more times this year. FRANCE 24's Andrew Hilliar explains.
Chris Hayes on the rise of the global temperature: "It's like going from a normal, 98.6 degree body temperature to spiking a 101.3 degree fever. At 101.3 degrees, you are pretty sick—and that metaphor is almost literal because the human body really struggles in high heat."
Bill McKibben's statement that these are the hottest days "since sometime during the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago" reminds me of what I wrote last year: "It's bad enough that we're on track for Pliocene temperatures at current rates of warming." The Sangamonian (in North America) and Eemian (in Europe) would be the first milestones on a temperature journey to 3.6 million years ago, a trip I hope we don't complete.
Speaking of milestones, I'm embedding a tweet from the Keeling Curve Twitter account showing a new atmospheric carbon dioxide record.
The Supreme Court wrapped up its business for the term last week, closing out a docket that touched on the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action in university admissions, student loan forgiveness, business services to LGBTQ people, religious liberty and the power of state legislatures.
It was another term with high-profile cases, coursing through the heart of some of America’s cultural debates. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses whether this year’s decision could ricochet through the political environment, as last year's decisions did. They also take stock of what more we've learned about a still quite new 6-3 conservative majority.
On the one hand, I think America dodged two bullets to democracy in the decisions about the Voting Rights Act and the "Independent State Legislature Theory." On the other, the court damaged access to opportunity in its decisions on affirmative action and business services to LGBTQ people. It also harmed a generation of Americans when it decided against forgiving (some) student loan debt. FiveThirtyEight's panel thought that last would have the biggest immediate political effect, since it hits people in their pocketbooks. They just weren't sure who would get blamed, the Supreme Court and through them the Republican Party, or Joe Biden, because he was unable to keep a promise through no fault of his own. He at least did something about it instead of merely promising and not following through.
In honor of 4th of July I thought this would be a great show to share with all of you. This show is a tribute to America and what 4th of July is all about. This one of my favorite shows and I am glad I get to share this with all of you.
Thank you for watching. I truly appreciate it. Happy 4th of July!!!
I shared a clip of this show in the very first drum corps 4th of July nine years ago. It's about time I shared the entire performance.
It wouldn't be one of my holiday posts without a drink recipe, so I'm sharing 4th of July Bomb Pop Margarita from Tipsy Bartender.
All of us should stay tipsy while drinking responsibly, while Skyy should stay appropriately silly for the holiday.
