Web Log for 5.10.26

In which the blogger attempts to pull herself together...Last Wednesday's post is long and will be out of sequence. Other posts? I'll focus on the new book reviews first because some people are waiting eagerly. Barring further cyberattacks, this Monday's butterfly study, Tuesday's Petfinder post, and Wednesday's book reviewer chat should be right on schedule.

Animals 

Behold our Official Icon of Those Who Want More Babies Now:

Tent caterpillars, all ten to thirty species of them worldwide (there's debate about their classification too), have some features in common: They're furry, and (to some eyes) cute. They're very social; in fact they depend on regular grooming by siblings to survive their furry juvenile days. They spin threads of silk almost constantly, usually building multilayered shelters in which they spend their first four caterpillar phases, always building at least temporary carpets and sunroofs, and congregating in these "tents." They use the threads to communicate--silk produced just after chewing up fresh healthy leaves smells appetizing and makes a trail for other caterpillars to follow--as well as to make tents and lower themselves cautiously from high branches to lower branches or the ground. They move faster, and seem more perceptive and curious about the world than most caterpillars do. They're peaceable, inclined to act on the theory that whatever is touching them is a friend and return its caress, which is actually an effective strategy to stop (most) tachinid flies from parasitizing them as well as to form some sort of bond with siblings. As if those features didn't give them enough survival advantages, most species are also naturally adapted to eat toxic leaves. 

(The ones shown here are Forest Tent Caterpillars, photographed by Carly Brooke, so full of cyanide their skins form blue spots. Though harmless to touch, they'd definitely make you sick if you ate them--so nature has conveniently provided humans with instincts that tell nearly all of us that we'd prefer not even to look at them while eating.) 

So tent caterpillars have very few natural predators and their populations just grow and grow. About every ten years it seems as if they're about to take over the world. They strip their host trees bare and cover the trunks with silk as they prowl about looking for one last leaf to eat, then start laying silken trails across the ground as they look for a new tree. This migration causes many caterpillars to separate from their families before they're ready and eat poorer quality food, resulting in unusual behavior like resting on walls instead of tree branches...(See photos documenting the behavior at Carly Brooke's post:

https://featuredcreature.com/tent-caterpillars-throw-epic-ugly-christmas-sweater-parties/ )

...and in fungus infections, diseases, and death. The caterpillar plague years are distressing to watch even for species, like humans, that don't care much about the caterpillars and, if we do, want to see fewer of them. They keep the caterpillars from becoming serious pests, but at a horrific price.

Many humans find these individual caterpillars cute. You can actually pick them up and stroke them and, if you have a steady hand and gentle touch, they like being stroked. They are pets. (Though they don't have any instinct to stay near you; after enjoying being pets for ten or twenty minutes they'll wander away.) Nobody, however, finds a mass of overcrowded tent caterpillars cute. (Probably the heightened crawling, scratching, and squirming behavior in the clump is motivated by hungry caterpillars sniffing at siblings to see whether anybody has found food yet.) If you're not fond of caterpillars, the mass is disgusting. If you are, you can see the little animals' distress, which makes a ball of squirming tent caterpillars even harder to look at than it is if you see them as something to throw into the nearest trash fire.

This much has to be said for tent caterpillars: They do show an increase in violent behavior, within the limits of their species' abilities, in plague years. They're just not capable of being very violent. A tent caterpillar dying miserably from fungus infection may bite, but, as it can't bite through human skin, only the caterpillar's body language shows a difference between its biting behavior and its friendly grooming behavior. Anyway tent caterpillars don't progress into sexual aberrations, domestic violence, cannibalism, or war. They just lie down and die young.

If we rush to start having more babies, to keep a Social Security system working forever in the way it can only work when there are a lot more workers than retirees, or just to feed the toxic greed some people seem to feel for grandchildren, then we're no more intelligent than tent caterpillars. So let's use images of overpopulated tent caterpillars whenever and wherever we come to "more babies now" whines in cyberspace. 

(If you're in a place where tent caterpillars are "swarming" in a plague season this year, please remind yourself and neighbors that the local population is in the process of CRASHING. It's just nature's way of reminding us not to have too many babies.)

History 

No link because I did not like the bloke's condescending tone, but something on the Mirror does bring the legend of Mansa Musa, the Richest Man in the World, into historical perspective...

Mali was not a kingdom in the sense that England, France, or Poland were kingdoms. It was like, well, Western Africa. People lived very simply on the land, cultivated food, slept in simple shelters (not rondavels, they had simple houses for the whole extended family group), and didn't have a lot of things to spend money on. They did, however, have so much gold in the ground that the stuff frequently washed up in streams, as in California in the 1850s. So they didn't bother to mine gold but some of them had noticed that, if they held on to a few nuggets long enough, eventually they might find someone who would take their gold in trade for something useful.

So, Mansa Musa was the "king" of a small tribe of people who literally had gold they didn't know what to do with. He enthusiastically embraced Islam and donated gold to start schools, but he did not personally preside over those schools and, if they lasted through his lifetime, most of them closed when the gold was gone. Other tribal "kings" who saw the benefits in gold and trade made alliances with him; those also lasted about as long as he did. Toward the end of his life Mansa Musa did load up gold on as many of his loyal subjects and their animals as he could muster (actual numbers are hard to substantiate, but there really was quite a parade) and go to Mecca, taking all the gold they'd been hoarding and splashing it about like people who were glad to get rid of the shiny rocks that, although pretty in the light, were heavy to carry across the desert. And then they all went back to cultivating their gardens all day and sleeping in their shacks all night, even if they did adopt the ideas of wearing clothes and studying the Koran. "I'm an honest man! Work's all I know!" might have been their theme song.

This accounts for the sudden disappearance of Mansa Musa's "empire" after the dear old man was laid to rest. Still, the story is nothing to sneer at. If Musa was more of a patriarch than a monarch as we use those terms, he was still a great one. The story does teach us that wealth is relative.

Information That May Be Helpful 

Someone Out There needed to know...

Posted by Pointman 12 Deplorable Garbage on the Mirror. Lens traces it to Carla Brown on Facebook.

Music 

"Green Onions."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY2Z0juP-ag

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Stratocles

Graphium stratocles is mentioned abundantly on the Internet, and most of those mentions come from sites that traffic in butterfly carcasses. This web site does not recommend paying for dead butterflies. 

There are three subspecies: Graphium stratocles stratocles, G.s. senectus, and G.s. stratonices. All were named early enough to be part of the tradition of naming Swallowtails after characters in literature. Stratocles was the name of two ancient Greek politicians. Stratonices is a masculine form of Stratonice or Stratonica, a Greek queen of Syria. (She was remembered for having married King Seleucus, who was older than she, and getting him to divorce her and let her marry his son instead after she had met the son, Antiochus.) Senectus was the Roman spirit of Old Age, a gloomy mythological figure said to hang around graves--the Graphiums are not notoriously attracted to carrion, but male Swallowtails do crave salt. More recent sources also list subspecies dodongi and pingi, as described by Page and Treadaway only in the present century.

Each subspecies is associated with some of the "thousand islands":

Graphium stratocles dodongi is found on Palawan.

G.s. pingi is found on Busuanga.

G.s. senectus is found on Luzon and Marinduque.

G.s. stratocles is found on Mindoro.

G.s. stratonices is found on Bohol, Dinagat, Leyte, Mindanao, Panaon, and Samar.

None of these subspecies seems to be uncommon or particularly endangered in its habitat. Photographs are scarce online, perhaps because this species mimics the look of some other butterflies who share its habitat, whose wing structure is quite different. 

Santibiologist, who posted this photo to Inaturalist, spent some time confirming its identity with other lepidopterists. 

There is little discussion, but a nice clear photo of the upper wings, of this species in 

https://pbh-butterflies.yolasite.com/resources/Butterflies%20of%20the%20Philippines%20A.pdf

Perhaps because other butterflies in the area are even more eye-catching, little is known about this species. From the fact that Rothschild claimed to have female carcasses and didn't describe any differences between them and the males, I infer that the wings of both sexes look alike. Rothschild also found the species so rare on Mindanao, in the 1890s, that he questioned whether reports of their being found on that island were accurate. 

Morgan Griffith on COVID Hearings

Breaking news from US Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

“Powerful cabal of scientists from within NIH helped draft anti lab-leak narrative.”

That headline about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was the headline that Co-Conspirator 1, generally believed to be EcoHealth Alliance’s former President Dr. Peter Daszak, feared would happen related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

EcoHealth Alliance is the company that got a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study bat coronaviruses. EcoHealth then gave some of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China to study bat coronaviruses.

Now, we know they feared the headline because it was at least in part true!

While every man is entitled to his defense in court, former senior adviser at NIAID, Dr. David Morens, was recently indicted for the concealment of documents that were supposed to be kept under the Federal Records Act and/or available under the Freedom of Information Act.

Allegations include Morens editing, making suggestions and in part ghost-writing articles to lead the world into believing COVID-19 came from nature, not from a lab leak. In my opinion, this was done in an attempt to help EcoHealth deflect criticism of its involvement with WIV.

So perhaps, it was not a cabal of leading scientists inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But there was at least one scientist within NIH, and others outside of NIH, who were involved. You can’t have a conspiracy with just one person.

In the 118^th Congress, I served as Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee as well as one of the lead Energy and Commerce Committee members involved with the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

During this time, I grilled key figures involved with coronavirus lab research in Wuhan.

Daszak was one of the officials I questioned in an official hearing.

When I pressed Daszak on EcoHealth’s reports, he lied to me! It was evident that he was not being completely transparent with Congress.

Shortly after that, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) formally debarred Daszak and EcoHealth!

I believe that my findings and investigations helped influence this HHS decision.

Now, the jury is out for Morens. Not only did Morens serve as a senior adviser to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, but he also worked closely with Daszak.

Emails show that Morens claimed he was a conduit between Fauci and Daszak.

In the indictment, Morens is listed as working with Co-Conspirator 1, who is generally presumed to be Daszak.

According to the indictment, behind the scenes, Morens worked with Daszak to restore a terminated federal grant and advise how to combat the theory that COVID-19 resulted from a lab leak.

To maintain the secrecy of their sensitive conversations, Morens used his own personal gmail account! He instructed Daszak to send all email replies to Morens’ personal email.

Morens’ personal gmail was used to disclose non-public information and evade or delay compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Federal records that Morens created, transferred and exchanged on his personal email seemingly included those concerning my oversight work of NIH and its grants related to COVID-19.

The private email also helped Morens “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1.

Who is Senior NIAID Official 1?

It is generally assumed to be Dr. Fauci.

If you dig deeper, the emails are even more alarming.

In one, Morens asks Daszak:

“…do I get a kickback?? Too much [expletive] money. Do you deserve it all? Let’s discuss…”

Daszak responded:

“of course there’s a kickback.”

Were these comments in jest? Perhaps.

Let me be clear. Bribery is not a listed charge in the Morens indictment.

Or maybe, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is dangling this email in front of Morens to persuade him to testify against Senior NIAID Official 1, who is generally presumed to be Fauci.

I do not know.

What I do know is that concealing information from Congress is a crime.

Additionally, encouraging people to tell Congress that COVID-19 was from a wet market in Wuhan, even when it was likely that the virus’ origins traced back to WIV thanks to research funded by the American taxpayer, is unconscionable!

Again, everyone is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.

While these texts and emails are damning, it is for a jury to decide if the indictments hold water.

But it is enough information to say the above headline was at least partly true.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at https://morgangriffith.house.gov/.

" 

Gentle Readers, the reason why you've not been seeing more of Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletters reposted here is that they come in the e-mail. I have a terrible time getting to anything in my e-mail, these days, that does not boil down to "Please buy my book" or "Please sell my book" or, in some cases, both. Too many people who should have stuck to their nine-to-five jobs decided to become writers during the COVID fiasco and most of them are still working on it. I remember years when I felt that leaving the city was keeping me from reading new books, and sigh.