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 Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| The Random Number Gods have once again conspired against me by continuing some of yesterday's theme. I normally avoid HuffPo, but I was unable to resist this article from two months ago: More And More People Suffer From 'Chemophobia' â And MAHA Is Partly To Blame  The fear tactic strikes a nerve with both conservatives and liberals alike. Hereâs what you need to know. If youâve ever muttered to yourself, âI should really get the organic peaches,â or âI need to replace my old makeup with âcleanâ beauty productsâ or âI really want to buy the ânon-toxicâ laundry detergent,â you may have fallen into the chemophobia trap, an almost inescapable phobia thatâs infiltrating lots of homes. I have never, not once, muttered or even thought anything resembling those phrases. The closest I ever came was "You know, I really ought to stop eating Twinkies." Chemophobia is complicated, but, in short, itâs a distrust or fear of chemicals and appears in many of aspects of life from âchemical-freeâ soaps and ânaturalâ deodorants to vaccine distrust and fear-mongering about seed oils. Everything is chemicals. Every soap, every drink, every morsel of food, every article of clothing, every folksy treatment for whatever ails you; it's all chemicals. And natural, however you might define it, isn't always good. I'm hardly the first to push back on this. This article expands on a thing you might have seen where someone lists all the chemicals in an apple and uses it to supposedly trick an anti-vaxxer. I should warn you: while that link is educational and interesting, the author puns more than I do. Oh, sorry, that warning came too late, didn't it? Ain't I a stinker.Next time you find yourself thinking, "natural is good; artificial is bad," please remember that tobacco is natural. Appealing to the left, it was seen as counter-culture and opposed the âevil market forces,â said Timothy Caulfield... On the right-leaning side, chemophobia appears as a distrust and demonization of things like studied vaccines and medications and the pushing of ânaturalâ interventions, âwhen those have no regulatory oversight compared to regulated medicines,â Love noted. So they're against what doesn't have regulatory oversight, but vaccines have regulatory oversight, but *head explodes* Chemophobia leads people to believe that synthetic, lab-made substances are inherently bad while ânatural substancesâ â things found in nature â are inherently good, and that is just not true, Love said. I've said it before, as recently as yesterday and so far back that I can't even remember. But it's nice to see it from someone else, even in HuffPo. But I'm not the only one trying to shine a light into the darkness here. There's even a name for it: Appeal to Nature, a subset of the naturalistic fallacy.The article eventually goes into this. Then: At the core of chemophobia and appeal to nature fallacy is also a âromanticization of ancestral living, when, in reality, we lived very poorly, we died very young and often suffering and in pain,â Love said. The past, with no exception, sucked. The future might suck, too; we can't know, and that's a good thing, because it enables us to keep up some semblance of hope. What I know for sure is that I wouldn't be here to gripe about it if it weren't for "artificial" chemicals and modern medical science. Some people might consider that a good thing; I do not. If someone on social media says that a certain ingredient is harming your kids, youâll be scared and want to make lifestyle changes. If someone claims your makeup is bad for you, youâll also be scared and want to make changes. This is, therefore, a very effective advertising technique: Brand X contains chemical Y. So buy my Brand Z, which is completely Y-free! âThe reality is, our brains want simple. They want black and white,â said Hardy. That statement is, ironically, simplistic. We make choices all day long, which makes categorizing things, like food, as âgood or badâ appealing to our minds, Hardy said. Here in reality, everything's got its benefits and risks. But like I said yesterday, humans are utter shit at risk assessment. If youâve ever fallen into the chemophobia trap without knowing, you arenât alone. Itâs complicated and nuanced, and the science is, at times, messy. This is also true. I've pushed back before on questionable studies and reports on science. I expect to continue to do so. âSo, it all just becomes slogans and wellness nonsense,â along with the peddling of unregulated, unproven supplements (that are basically just untested chemicals), Caulfield added. I don't have an inherent issue with so-called "natural" products. That is, while I object to the marketing, some of them may very well be effective. We don't know, though, because many supplements don't have to go through the rigorous testing that, say, vaccines do. And, many of the people who claim to be so concerned about chemicals then profit from the sale of unregulated supplements, Caulfield said. Which rephrases what I said up there. Whether someone has conservative or liberal views that fuel their chemophobia, the fear of chemicals is dangerous. And, itâs, sadly, more prevalent than ever, Caulfield said. I deliberately avoid getting political in here, and I really don't want to get into the "both sides are bad" argument. Hell, even the idea that there are only two sides is oversimplifying things, which, well, didn't we just rail against that? The side I'm on is science and knowledge. I'm not perfect in that regard. Neither is science. But it's the best tool we have right now, and the benefits outweigh the risks. |
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