New Ukrainian postage stamp

Approved but not yet printed.  Backstory at NPR.

NASA visualization of global warming

Coronavirus surging in China

Just a reminder that it isn't over:

China’s worst Covid-19 outbreak since the initial wave of the pandemic worsened Tuesday with a major factory city ordering production halts.

Recent outbreaks in 28 provinces have infected more than 15,000 people and stem primarily from the highly transmissible omicron variant, China’s National Health Commission said Tuesday, according to state media. China has 31 province-level regions.

Although the northern province of Jilin accounts for most of the cases, the latest outbreak has hit major cities such as the financial center of Shanghai and technology manufacturing hub Shenzhen.

Omicron is less lethal, but China tends to respond with autocratic lockdowns, which will have a ripple effect on the world economy.  Embedded image via Bloomberg.

Addendum: Also Europe -

A surge in coronavirus infections in Western Europe has experts and health authorities on alert for another wave of the pandemic in the United States, even as most of the country has done away with restrictions after a sharp decline in cases...

Germany, a nation of 83 million people, saw more than 250,000 new cases and 249 deaths Friday... The Netherlands, home to fewer than 18 million people, was averaging more than 60,000 cases the same day...

In the past two years, a widespread outbreak like the one now being seen in Europe has been followed by a similar surge in the United States some weeks later. Many, but not all, experts interviewed for this story predicted that is likely to happen.

I'm sure Americans will be willing to mask up again and isolate themselves in order to prevent a resurgent pandemic.  Not.

Materials unsafe for bird nests

Guidelines from Audubon:

[Advice] from Jennifer Gordon, executive director of Carolina Waterfowl Rescue, a center in North Carolina that cares for everything from donkeys to injured songbirds. Gordon says her team treats dozens of adult birds and chicks every year due to hazardous nesting materials. Based on her experience, Gordon advises staying clear of anything synthetic and providing only natural materials. But be careful, she says, because even some natural elements aren’t always safe for bird nests. Pet fur, for example, could be dangerous if treated with flea medicine.

Materials to Avoid:

Human hair: According to Gordon, human hair is a triple threat for birds: It’s long, thin, and strong. These characteristics can be a deadly combination, allowing the hair to easily ensnare a bird’s leg or wing and sever it. “You can wrap [hair] around your finger and cut your circulation off,” she says.

Yarn or string: Long strands of yarn and string can wrap around a bird. Hatchlings are particularly susceptible to such entanglements, Gordon says. Yarn in a nest can get caught around a baby bird and cut off circulation as it grows.

Dryer lint: Although it is popular to put out and seems like the perfect lining for a nest, dryer lint quickly loses its fluffiness and structure when wet. Dryer lint is unsustainable in the rain, crumbling and leaving holes in an otherwise solid nest.

Butterfly season has begun in Wisconsin

First sighting was yesterday, in Milwaukee County:

Not surprisingly, it was a Mourning Cloak, because they come out of hibernation and don't need to migrate here from down south.

See also: LOVE that banana! and Mourning Cloak guarding his garden.

Addendum:  The first butterfly in our yard appeared on March 20 this year, and was -  not surprisingly - a Mourning Cloak.

The free wi-fi password is...

I've written a possible answer in the first comment on this post, but several readers have come up with a better answer than mine (assuming that there is a typo in the equation as written)... (via)

Try it this way (yesterday):

Mask

A costumed demonstrator performs the song "Un Violador en Tu Camino," or "A Rapist in Your Path," with others, during a demonstration against gender-based violence on International Women's Day in Santiago, Chile, on March 7, 2022.  

One of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic.

Marie Antoinette's diamonds

I saw the Christie's press release many months ago -

Geneva - on 9 November 2021 Christie’s will proudly offer THE MARIE ANTOINETTE DIAMONDS as lot 1 of its live Magnificent Jewels Auction to be held at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues. Presented in their current form [a pair of matching bracelets], the 112 diamonds, originally belonged to Queen Marie-Antoinette of France (1755-1793)... 

Architectural Digest offered a followup that "the bracelets sold on November 9 for $9,353,855, far more than their initial $2,000,000-4,000,000 estimate."

This is a portrait of her daughter Marie-Therese wearing the bracelets -

Related: Marie Antoinette was a blonde.

Impressive college prank

In 1997 someone lodged a large pumpkin on a spire at the top of a tower on a Cornell University building, 173 feet in the air.  Nobody explained why this was done or even took credit for doing it, since the achievement jeopardized the health of students on the ground below, and there was fear of retribution. 

The prank was discussed at length 20 years later in an NPR article, and recently updated at the Cornell Daily Sun.  pic via

This is my rental flat in Kharkiv, Ukraine

In a followup to my post from last week, after some brief research I did go ahead and book a rental unit in Ukraine with no intention of visiting, in order to test out this method of providing a modicum of support to someone there.

There were of course lots of places available via airbnb; I opted for a unit in a city rather than a guest house in the country, and chose a low-priced one on the assumption that the funds would go to an individual or family rather than to a hotel or corporation.  I messaged the host to suggest they could offer the room to an internal refugee or use the funds for whatever they need.  I did receive a nice thank-you reply:

Thanks for the support. None of the refugees will want to stay in this flat - people are fleeing from such apartments. Therefore, the money will go to the purchase of the most necessary: food and medicine. Thanks again.  --Дмитро

Update: A brief video shows why residents and refugees are not staying in Kharkiv.

Refugee

"A portrait of a young girl, taken after she fled from Ukraine to Romania, following Russia's invasion, at the border crossing in Siret, Romania, on March 7, 2022."  

Credit Clodagh Kilcoyne / Reuters.  One of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic

Note:  today I added Ukraine as a new category in the right sidebar of TYWKIWDBI, and incorporated some old posts dating back to the conflict with Russia in 2014.

One Ukrainian refugee's story

There are (literally) a million stories now.  Here is one of them -

I’m a Python programmer and I work for a German company, and they helped me leave Ukraine for Poland. We left Kyiv in a small Peugeot 307 car. There were nine of us, me, my mum, my sister, our two husbands, four children and two big dogs, including an elderly German shepherd. It was impossible to move inside the car. We drove for 16 hours to a village about 140km from Kyiv...

Near the border with Poland there were a lot of cars and we couldn’t stay in the car for the next three – or five – days, so we decided to walk the last 17km to the border. We left at 4am – it was minus seven degrees... 

My dog is 12 and a half and she struggled to walk and fell down every kilometre or so and couldn’t stand up again. I stopped cars and asked for help but everyone refused; they advised us to leave the dogs. But our dogs are part of our family. My dog has experienced all the happy and sad moments with us. Mum’s dog is all she has left of her former life. So my husband, at times, carried our dog on his shoulders...

My husband couldn’t cross the border because of his age and the mobilisation order. He has gone back to the village to look after his mother and grandmother... All of them are in one little house without water. There’s no shop, no pharmacy, no water or food in the village and he and my sister’s husband are using firewood to heat the house.

My plan is just, I don’t know...

Her story continues at The Guardian.  Image (credit Alisa/Guardian community) cropped for size from the original at the source.

Kseniya Simonova - Ukrainian sand artist

 

The winner of Ukraine's Got Talent "recounts Germany conquering Ukraine in the second world war. She brings calm, then conflict. A couple on a bench become a woman's face; a peaceful walkway becomes a conflagration; a weeping widow morphs into an obelisk for an unknown soldier. 

Simonova looks like some vengeful Old Testament deity as she destroys then recreates her scenes - with deft strokes, sprinkles and sweeps she keeps the narrative going. She moves the judges to tears as she subtitles the final scene 'you are always near'." Consider also that she performs her art within the time constraints of a mix of prerecorded music. Very impressive. 

Additional performances here and here, and others searchable on YouTube.

Reposted from 2009.

The upside of dementia

Reposted from 2014.

Portending an "age of discord"

Excerpts from an interesting article in The Atlantic:

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions... The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem...

Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill...  In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do...

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement... Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as [he] foretold 10 years ago...

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful...

He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.

More at the link.  Embedded image cropped for size from the one at the source.