We're heading to a water park for the day, and I don't have any good ideas for a thread.

Concerns, calamities, and whatnot?

I'm extremely worried about public opinion. That somehow Trump will land on his feet, and all these horrible things - deportations and immigration rallies, kicking people off health care, destroying the university research engine of the country - will be met with a shrug, or lack of attention. That the generic voter lacks any sense of scale, and will draw lazy equivalencies between Biden and Trump, and never connect any dots.

It's all such a galling unforced error!! As a country, we didn't have to make our own lives shittier and less healthy and worse! We didn't have to vote for mass economic precariousness and stealth poisoning! There are so many real problems that need careful, actual planning and instead we're just razing everything to the ground. We've put the worst fucking people in charge and we're stuck with this, and we're only 1/8th of the way through this term.

Sorry, I know this is not a new thought in any sense.

Flock Cameras are license plate reader cameras that police put on intersections. Then if you're looking for a green minivan, you can run a query on all the data, and find out where it's been recorded over the last 30 days. Obviously this all hinges on having a big, nationwide database, which they do, and it's creepy. Neighborhoods and private organizations can put up these cameras and then share their data with the police, too. The ACLU does not like them one bit. They cooperate with ICE and are used to track down women who go out of state to have abortions.

Anyway, Austin is ending their LPR program, and Heebieville is on track to do something similar. This is how I've come to find out how exactly the nonexistent the guard rails are, especially once you've got a revenge-based federal administration in place.

It's just kind of shocking how little coverage this network of surveillance has gotten.

Just to have a dedicated thread. Probably should've done this already, I guess.

I'm still freaked out about my neck. I feel like it's a moral failing on my part, but I don't know exactly what my sin was yet.

Tell me about your aches and pains, and what you did to deserve this.

NickS writes: Two stories I read this morning, which are an interesting pair.

First, Doug Muir telling the amazing story of unusual evolution among Pacific Northwest newts and snakes (which I hadn't heard about, despite living in the area):

The simple version: the newt is in an arms race with the common garter snake, Thamnophis sirtalis. The garter snake is a small-to-medium sized snake that is common all over North America. It's a slim, elegant little creature that is usually found in or near water. And while it will eat pretty much anything it can catch, the garter snake particularly likes amphibians: small frogs, salamanders and newts. And in the Pacific Northwest, it really likes snacking on the Rough-Skinned Newt.

So the garter snakes of the Pacific Northwest have been evolving resistance to tetrodotoxin. (As you may recall, tetrodotoxin is the stuff that makes the blue-ringed octopus so deadly. It's produced by symbiotic bacteria that live in the newt's body, mostly on its skin.) And as the garter snakes evolve resistance, the newts have to evolve ever greater toxicity. And as the newts get more toxic... right. Feedback loop! That's the simple version.

Except this is biology, so of course it's not that simple.

And this frightening article about insect collapse:

[W]hat Janzen and Hallwachs are witnessing is a part of a newer phenomenon: the catastrophic collapse of insect populations in supposedly protected regions of forest. "In the parts of Costa Rica that are heavily hit by pesticides, the insects are completely wiped out," Hallwachs says.

"But what we see here in the preserved areas - that as far as we can tell, are free of even these destructive insecticides and pesticides - even here, the insect numbers are going down horrifyingly dramatically," she says.

Scientists in the US, Brazil, Ecuador and Panama have now reported the catastrophic declines of birds in "untouched" regions - including reserves inside millions of hectares of pristine forest. In each case, the worst losses were among insectivorous birds.

At one research centre - falling within a 22,000-hectare (85 sq mile) stretch of intact forest in Panama - scientists comparing current bird numbers with the 1970s found 70% of species had declined, and 88% of these had lost more than half of their population.

In 2019, researchers found that almost a third of US birds - about 3 billion - had disappeared from the skies since the 1970s. The losses, however, were not evenly distributed: those birds that ate insects as their main food had declined by 2.9 billion. Those that didn't depend on insects had actually gained, increasing by 26 million.

Heebie's take: The snake-newt article is so much less stressful than the insect one.