I had to pause the video and squint to identify the bird our cardinal is chasing away. Thought at first it was the hummingbird who sips from the feeder several times a day, but no, it’s one of the Mexican house finches that used to visit the feeder. Guess we know now why we haven’t seen them for the last couple of weeks. Bossy bastard, that cardinal!
p.s. The cardinal has a mate as well, but she hasn’t been around lately either.
A while back I speculated that the Air India crash will turn out to have been caused by a dual-engine power failure of some kind. Per the latest news, it appears the fuel cutoff switches to both engines were moved, at some point during the takeoff sequence, to the cutoff position. Switches like that, with potentially fatal consequences if inadvertently moved, are normally covered by safety guards; the switches on the 787 also require the pilot to grasp and lift them individually before moving them from “run” to “cutoff.” No idea so far which crew member did it, or why … and it has now been revealed there was a third person in the cockpit, occupying the jump seat behind the pilots. No airworthiness directives have been issued to other airlines operating 787s, a strong indication there was nothing wrong with the aircraft or its design, and that whatever happened resulted from human error.
Any time I wanted to see antisemitic propaganda or racist hate-fanning, all I had to do was visit Twitter or TikTok, but these days Facebook and Instagram are also infested with it. It’s possible that Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, monitors my occasional visits to Twitter and TikTok and is simply feeding me what it thinks I want to see more of, but I believe the fact of the matter is that Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and there’s just a lot more of that stuff on social media than in the past, when people had a sense of shame and kept their nastiest impulses under control. The spike in antisemitism is particularly worrying.
But back to Facebook and Instagram, which most of us still (but wrongly) think of as relatively safe spaces in the hellscape of social media … if they go down the same path of enshittification as Twitter and TikTok, whatever will we do? Go back to writing letters to friends and family in order to stay in touch?
Questions we’ll all be answering soon enough. God, these are stupid and hateful times.