Rhinocrisy

Jesus, this blog has been dark lately. But rather than go kill myself out of despair, I’m going to lighten the mood with some cute animal pictures.

Observe this weirdo, the colugo. She’s native to Malaysia (or thereabouts - they cover a broad range in that whole Oceania region) and is otherwise known as the flying lemur.^* Colugos are arboreal and have a membranous flap of skin that allows them to glide astonishing distances between trees. Upwards of 50 meters! For some reason, this isn’t considered “flight”.

Taxonomically they’re difficult to place. According to some mitochondrial evidence, they’re actually close to higher primates, making them near relatives to humans just after the apes. However, this evidence is disputed, and other studies show that colugos should be an outgroup to primates. Meanwhile, morphological studies suggest they’re related to bats. Aggravating, isn’t it?

---

^* Contrary to the name, colugos are not lemurs at all. Actual lemurs only exist in Madagascar, even though everyone in India insists on translating langur (a kind of lanky monkey there) as “lemur”.

I am about to be ungainfully unemployed and flailing for interesting projects. (I guess I’m not qualified to work in a growth industry. I am thinking seriously about pawning my books and CDs and climbing gear and burrowing to a more overt dictatorship like Indonesia where you at least know the fricking rules.

Why would a hedgehog abandon the nation-ship that has nurtured him through his adult life? Because it is being run into the rocks. A few items of recent horror:

• A TV network devoted to abusing religious sentiment in order to manufacture new Republicans. (Their broadcast of this pornography is just one of their absurdities. Note that their top-billed station is this pack of lies.
• Fascism on the rise.
• My growing sense that everyone I know with a modicum of conscience is on psychiatric meds, perhaps to keep themselves from committing acts that are illegal to so much as write or link to on the Internet.
• My own gradually disintegrating sense of humor. What’s that? “What sense of humor?” Good question.

Some Congresscritter needs to read this.

JIM:   It’s incredible, because every energy supply model starts with the assumption that Saudi oil is plentiful. It’s inexpensive to produce and supply can expand to meet demand. I mean, whether you’re looking at the IEA or the USGS, that’s not necessarily the case.

MATT:  Yes. What’s interesting is that we’ve based all of this assumption on no data.

About 55 million years ago, after a long period of slowly warming global temperatures, a major jolt in the global temperature occurred over the period of a few thousand years. Why? Methane hydrates in the ocean warmed, releasing their trapped methane, which rose to the atmosphere, becoming a greenhouse gas, resulting in warmer temperatures and more released methane. Many species, in the ocean and on land became extinct; those that remained became dwarfs of their ancestors. (Earth’s residents at the previous super-massive extinction event which might have been caused by released methane weren’t so lucky.)

Why am I telling you this? Because methane is now leaking from the melting Siberian no-longer-a-permafrost. Not as much as when the methane hydrates melted, but then, we’re still releasing greenhouse gases of our own volition, enough to cover the difference. Oil is $66/barrel tonight and rising fast. If only this could have happened 30 years ago, it might have been in time.
Link