paulgorman.org

< ^ txt

Mon Aug 31 06:00:01 EDT 2020 ======================================== Slept from eleven-something (or later?) to six-something. Took a long time to fall asleep. Partly cloudy in the morning then clearing. Highs in the upper 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Twenty-minute walk in the morning. Cool and sunny. Work ---------------------------------------- - Close old work orders for phase six migration Done. - Ask Jim to record IVR messages for CR, HS, RP Done. - Concatenate non-migrating work order fields for phase six migration Done. - Look at bedroom and bathroom count for Yardi unit types at HS Done. Fixed, even. - 2 PM Fifth Third call Done. - Add new users at LT & SB Done. Twenty-minute nap at lunch. Home ---------------------------------------- - Play with Gemini proxy (code name rasa35) Done. - Go to bed early https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/high-tech-tracking-reveals-birds-movement-beyond-migration-180975673/ > For Kirtland’s warblers, migration isn’t as simple as getting from point A to point B. The small songbirds, easily recognizable for the contrast between their yellow bellies and the dark-streaked feathers above, have long been known to spend the winter in the Bahamas before striking west for their breeding grounds in the pine forests of Michigan. > What ornithologists didn’t know was that many of these birds keep making long trips even when they arrive at their breeding grounds. > The new study, published in Current Biology, was designed to detect how conditions where the birds spend their winters affect the birds’ chances for survival and reproducing during migration and the breeding season in mid-May. To find out, Cooper fitted more than 100 warblers with tiny radio tags weighing only about a third of a gram, which is less than the weight of a raisin. Signals from the tags are picked up by a network of telemetry receivers called the Motus Wildlife Tracking System. The network is the closest biologists can get to actually following along with the birds as they flit along their migration route. > What Cooper and co-author Peter Marra found, though, wasn’t as simple as one big round trip. Once the birds arrived in Michigan, many of them started making long trips to different spots within the breeding area. The trips ranged anywhere from three to 48 miles, and most of the traveling birds were those that weren’t breeding that season. > “We think the birds were flying around looking and listening for nestlings and fledglings, noting areas where they heard a lot of them and thinking ‘This is a good place to breed next year because others were successful here,’” Cooper says. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting > It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that's unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free. > I think a lot of that comes out of the civil rights movement. The popular understanding of the civil rights movement is that it was successful when it was nonviolent, and less successful when it was focused on Black power. It's a myth that we get taught over and over again from the first moment we learn about the civil rights movement: that it was a nonviolent movement, and that that's what matters about it. And it's just not true. > A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community. It is true and possible that there are instances historically when businesses have refused to reopen or to come back. But that is a part of the inequity of the society, that people live in places where there is only one place where they can get access to something [like food or medicine]. That question assumes well, what if you're in a food desert? But the food desert is already an incredibly unjust situation. There's this real tendency to try and blame people for fighting back, for revealing the inequity of the injustice that's already been formed by the time that they're fighting. Not that they're entirely wrong, but Detroit paid a steep price, and I'm afraid we're seeing significant white flight from other cities now. Looting seems like a Pyrrhic victory. Servings: grains 5/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: cucumber, banana, coffee Lunch: orange, wrap with egg and avocado Dinner: Cheetos

< ^ txt