I am a big gardener here in NC. I tend to squat when I work with stuff on the ground (just very comfortable for me). One day, as I was working on something, I felt this moving of the mulch under my rear end. And then those long claw-like fingers were reaching up – just creeped me out. Here we have VOLES and MOLES. I don’t really know difference. They don’t get cuter. And I’ve seen gardens which look polka dotted with all the holes. Tempting to shove the hose in some of those holes…but when you think about it: less holes? Drowning little creatures? Your call…
And yes, I got over it & still squat to work.
Candy corn is pretty awful.
==
I’m quite sure we handed out candy to youngsters at a friend’s house in 2002 or thereabouts. Since then, we’ve bought candy from time to time, but one person show up or nobody show up.
==
Heath Bars and Hershey’s (w or w/o Almonds). Not much else will do.
Israeli Laser weapon helps lower the cost of intercepting drones, and artillery.
“ Iron Beam can destroy incoming rockets, mortars, drones, and manned aircraft, and it has already proved its worth in the campaigns against Hezbollah and Iran. Israel plans for it to complement Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which use missiles to destroy threats to the Israeli homeland. In 5 to 10 years, Rafael chairman Yuval Steinitz predicts, “nothing hostile will fly in the air—no aircraft, no drones, no cruise missiles, no shells, no bombs—because the laser will completely clear the air of anything detected, anything seen.”
Western missile defenses are top-notch, but they are also expensive. The roughly 200 interceptors American and Israeli forces launched in June cost about $1.5 billion. This is certainly better than the alternative of hostile missiles raining down on civilians, but it is unsustainable over a long war. The Ukrainians have resorted to using shotguns and machine guns against Russia’s massive arsenal of drones to save their scarce supply of air defense missiles.
Iron Beam solves that problem. Instead of firing an interceptor—or in some cases, several—to shoot down a missile that costs a fraction of the interceptor, Iron Beam fries the incoming weapon with lasers at about two bucks a shot. In other words, air defense can be not only effective, but also cost effective.“
I think that Iron Beam is fascinating, and since the Israelis say it works, I expect it really does.
It may have been decades since the word Mole was in my mind. They are amazing creatures. From Wikipedia: their diet primarily consists of earthworms and other small invertebrates found in the soil. The mole runs are in reality “worm traps”, the mole sensing when a worm falls into the tunnel and quickly running along to kill and eat it. Because their saliva contains a toxin that can paralyze earthworms, moles are able to store their still-living prey for later consumption. They construct special underground “larders” for just this purpose; researchers have discovered such larders with over a thousand earthworms in them. Before eating earthworms, moles pull them between their squeezed paws to force the collected earth and dirt out of the worm’s gut.
I love candy corn. But only Brach’s.
Back in the 2000s I noticed a Gourmet Candy Corn subvariety emerging … for premium prices.
Somehow Gourmet Candy Corn hits my ear like Jumbo Shrimp.
Sundance: “Notes of Caution – The Story of Telemachus”
If MAGA is not careful, continued demands for the removal of leftist voices, will create a political outcome where Democrats will position as the party of tolerance and free speech. This is how they get out of the downward spiral they were in. This issue is partly how they will seek to regain their numerical position in advance of the 2026 midterms.
Richard Illyes, oof – I didn’t think moles were that sophisticated. Over a thousand! I don’t mind earthworms generally, but the thought of any storage of such numbers is gross. Fortunately, I guess, moles are blind and don’t have to worry about the visual impression.
Re: Riots in France
I guess Philip Sells had his ear closer to the ground than I do when a few days ago he posted cryptically about things about to happen in France.
Today they happened in and in large numbers and they morphed into riots. Well, since the French Revolution, the Street is practically a branch of government in France as much as the Press.
The numbers were large — 500,000 to 1,000,000 depending on who is reporting. So it is important in France’s current situation.
The TL;DR as I make it:
* The French budget deficit is close to 6% GDP and debt to 110% GDP.
* The French credit rating is falling and its interest rates are rising.
* Macron must do something, so he has been pushing France towards austerity measures.
* His latest comprehensive austerity plan was unveiled this past summer and will be implemented in 2026.
* The austerity cuts will hurt most people in France. Today’s protests are an attempt to get the government to back down or reduce the effects of the cuts.
* The protests are almost entirely left-wing. No French flags appear anywhere. Neither Le Pen’s National Rally Party nor the Yellow Vests (rural working-class) are backing today’s protests.
The French budget crisis is real. Macron is attempting to deal with it, but his popularity bounces around between 25% and 35%. I don’t like Macron much but IMO he’s not wrong here.
My only exposure to moles was a character in “The wind in the Willows” a velly, velly British children’s book which I loved when I was a small boy. Who knew that they’re an actual animal.
Us Badgers have always been fond of moles.
I think she is cute!
@ Paul – my first thought was also The Mole from Grahame’s classic book, which I love still. However, his anthropomorphism is not biologically accurate, as Mole could hear quite well. A mole also features in the fairy tale “Thumbelina.”
@ Richard Illyes – I’m glad the stories didn’t include some of the details you dug up.
@ Cindy – I did wonder if gardeners would be quite so enthusiastic about the little mole’s reintroduction to the wild as the nature preservers were.
We kill neither moles nor voles much to the unhappiness of my neighbor who kills both. We have a live and let live philosophy here.
We have these
The Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townsendii) is a fossorial mammal in the family Talpidae, and is the largest North American mole. It was named after the American naturalist John Kirk Townsend.[3] The name was selected at the request of Thomas Nuttall as a patronym to honor Townsend’s contribution.[4][3]
And
Townsend’s vole (Microtus townsendii) is a species of rodent in the family Cricetidae, the sister species of M. canicaudus.[3] It is found in temperate grasslands of British Columbia in Canada and in the states of Washington and Oregon in the United States.[1][4]
This vole can be 8 inches long or more and looks like a kid’s fuzzy slipper that has escaped the nursery.
We have neither moles nor voles or gophers in Hawaii but we have (on Oahu – another story) mongoose. They look really cute zipping across the road as you brake for them – but up close… Yowzaa! Vicious looking weasels!
Open Thread Sunday: No more moles? How about a raven?
The most serious threat to Putin’s regime is the vast disparity in prosperity between Russia and the nations on its periphery that have escaped Moscow’s rule.
Since 1990, the former Russian satellites that have joined the European Union have generated an almost 10-fold average increase in national GDP. By contrast, the national GDP of Russia itself and the non-EU countries on its western border have grown by just a factor of four over that same period.
And later:
Ukraine is, in effect, the tipping-point state. Once it joins the EU and generates economic growth comparable to the other former Soviet satellites already in the economic bloc, the gravitational pull of Ukraine’s prosperity will be irresistible for its three smaller neighbors.
For Putin, the implications of Ukraine’s prospective economic success are dire. The Russian public is so conditioned to view Ukraine as ethnically and linguistically similar to Russia that its prosperity would raise difficult questions inside Russia. If the countries are so much the same, the only plausible explanation for a radical divergence in their economic success would be the political and economic fundamentals of Russia itself.
These days, it’s quite a carnival on Carnival cruise lines.*
Why the hell would anybody want to try for a relaxing cruise, and take a chance on running into this?
P.S. It appears that Carnival has adopted a policy of offering very low cost cruises that last for only a couple of days–say, for instance, to the Bahamas for a day ashore and then returning to where they sailed from– and it looks like, perhaps, a package which includes free drinks?, and this is the result.
Belonging to the EU is not some secret sauce. The policy adjustments to improve the Ukraine’s economic performance can be implemented without EU membership.
==
Factor of improvement in real GDP per capita, 1990-2018, with the ratio of fuel and mineral exports to nominal GDP noted for a selection. For scale, the United States and Canada saw an increase of 1.5x over that time. At this time, the ratio of fuel and mineral exports to world GDP is about 0.04.
==
6.39x: Mongolia (0.62 as of 2022)
4.54x: Turkmenistan (0.70 as of 2000, DNA since)
4.39x: China
4.35x: Laos (0.22 as of 2022)
4.17x: VietNam
3.60x: Roumania
3.37x: Poland
2.95x: Montenegro
2.79x: Albania
2.49x: Hungary
2.25x: Azerbaijan (0.42 as of 2023)
2.19x: Slovakia
2.18x: Czech lands
2.13x: Kazakhstan (0.29 as of 2022)
1.99x: Russia (0.14 as of 2019)
1.98x: Lithuania
1.78x: Bosnia & c.
1.70x: Croatia
1.65x: Uzbekistan
1.63x: White Russia (0.11 as of 2019)
1.62x: Slovenia
1.59x: Estonia
1.54x: Latvia
1.45x: Serbia
1.43x: Macedonia
1.18x: Armenia (0.05 as of 2023)
1.02x: Ukraine
0.99x: Georgia (0.05 as of 2023)
0.92x: Tajikistan (0.10 as of 2023)
0.90x: Kyrgyzstan
0.69x: Moldovia
Banned Lizard, it would be rather interesting to see the Wachowskis’ facial expressions upon viewing that, in view of their… personal histories. Which surely adds to the inverse-transgressive nature of the parody.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
The mole is still cuter than a Naked Mole Rat.
https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.aat1320/full/rat_16x9-1644894861557.jpg
Video montage of black people supporting Charlie Kirk. A number of these seem to be not long after the shooting.
https://youtu.be/vMgBWbKs1As?si=3wVFLPsljyYsca_o
Fat electrician trashes candy corn at 11:00.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_8wpOhoGVs
I am a big gardener here in NC. I tend to squat when I work with stuff on the ground (just very comfortable for me). One day, as I was working on something, I felt this moving of the mulch under my rear end. And then those long claw-like fingers were reaching up – just creeped me out. Here we have VOLES and MOLES. I don’t really know difference. They don’t get cuter. And I’ve seen gardens which look polka dotted with all the holes. Tempting to shove the hose in some of those holes…but when you think about it: less holes? Drowning little creatures? Your call…
And yes, I got over it & still squat to work.
Candy corn is pretty awful.
==
I’m quite sure we handed out candy to youngsters at a friend’s house in 2002 or thereabouts. Since then, we’ve bought candy from time to time, but one person show up or nobody show up.
==
Heath Bars and Hershey’s (w or w/o Almonds). Not much else will do.
Israeli Laser weapon helps lower the cost of intercepting drones, and artillery.
“ Iron Beam can destroy incoming rockets, mortars, drones, and manned aircraft, and it has already proved its worth in the campaigns against Hezbollah and Iran. Israel plans for it to complement Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which use missiles to destroy threats to the Israeli homeland. In 5 to 10 years, Rafael chairman Yuval Steinitz predicts, “nothing hostile will fly in the air—no aircraft, no drones, no cruise missiles, no shells, no bombs—because the laser will completely clear the air of anything detected, anything seen.”
Western missile defenses are top-notch, but they are also expensive. The roughly 200 interceptors American and Israeli forces launched in June cost about $1.5 billion. This is certainly better than the alternative of hostile missiles raining down on civilians, but it is unsustainable over a long war. The Ukrainians have resorted to using shotguns and machine guns against Russia’s massive arsenal of drones to save their scarce supply of air defense missiles.
Iron Beam solves that problem. Instead of firing an interceptor—or in some cases, several—to shoot down a missile that costs a fraction of the interceptor, Iron Beam fries the incoming weapon with lasers at about two bucks a shot. In other words, air defense can be not only effective, but also cost effective.“
https://freebeacon.com/columns/laser-focused-what-iron-beam-means-for-israel-its-enemies-and-the-us/
H/t powerlineblog
I think that Iron Beam is fascinating, and since the Israelis say it works, I expect it really does.
It may have been decades since the word Mole was in my mind. They are amazing creatures. From Wikipedia: their diet primarily consists of earthworms and other small invertebrates found in the soil. The mole runs are in reality “worm traps”, the mole sensing when a worm falls into the tunnel and quickly running along to kill and eat it. Because their saliva contains a toxin that can paralyze earthworms, moles are able to store their still-living prey for later consumption. They construct special underground “larders” for just this purpose; researchers have discovered such larders with over a thousand earthworms in them. Before eating earthworms, moles pull them between their squeezed paws to force the collected earth and dirt out of the worm’s gut.
I love candy corn. But only Brach’s.
Back in the 2000s I noticed a Gourmet Candy Corn subvariety emerging … for premium prices.
Somehow Gourmet Candy Corn hits my ear like Jumbo Shrimp.
Sundance: “Notes of Caution – The Story of Telemachus”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/09/20/notes-of-caution-the-story-of-telemachus/#more-276237
====
Voles are mouse-ish; relatives of lemmings and hamsters. Moles are … moles (ugh). More like shrews.
Richard Illyes, oof – I didn’t think moles were that sophisticated. Over a thousand! I don’t mind earthworms generally, but the thought of any storage of such numbers is gross. Fortunately, I guess, moles are blind and don’t have to worry about the visual impression.
Re: Riots in France
I guess Philip Sells had his ear closer to the ground than I do when a few days ago he posted cryptically about things about to happen in France.
Today they happened in and in large numbers and they morphed into riots. Well, since the French Revolution, the Street is practically a branch of government in France as much as the Press.
The numbers were large — 500,000 to 1,000,000 depending on who is reporting. So it is important in France’s current situation.
The TL;DR as I make it:
* The French budget deficit is close to 6% GDP and debt to 110% GDP.
* The French credit rating is falling and its interest rates are rising.
* Macron must do something, so he has been pushing France towards austerity measures.
* His latest comprehensive austerity plan was unveiled this past summer and will be implemented in 2026.
* The austerity cuts will hurt most people in France. Today’s protests are an attempt to get the government to back down or reduce the effects of the cuts.
* The protests are almost entirely left-wing. No French flags appear anywhere. Neither Le Pen’s National Rally Party nor the Yellow Vests (rural working-class) are backing today’s protests.
The French budget crisis is real. Macron is attempting to deal with it, but his popularity bounces around between 25% and 35%. I don’t like Macron much but IMO he’s not wrong here.
My only exposure to moles was a character in “The wind in the Willows” a velly, velly British children’s book which I loved when I was a small boy. Who knew that they’re an actual animal.
Us Badgers have always been fond of moles.
I think she is cute!
@ Paul – my first thought was also The Mole from Grahame’s classic book, which I love still. However, his anthropomorphism is not biologically accurate, as Mole could hear quite well. A mole also features in the fairy tale “Thumbelina.”
@ Richard Illyes – I’m glad the stories didn’t include some of the details you dug up.
@ Cindy – I did wonder if gardeners would be quite so enthusiastic about the little mole’s reintroduction to the wild as the nature preservers were.
We kill neither moles nor voles much to the unhappiness of my neighbor who kills both. We have a live and let live philosophy here.
We have these
The Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townsendii) is a fossorial mammal in the family Talpidae, and is the largest North American mole. It was named after the American naturalist John Kirk Townsend.[3] The name was selected at the request of Thomas Nuttall as a patronym to honor Townsend’s contribution.[4][3]
And
Townsend’s vole (Microtus townsendii) is a species of rodent in the family Cricetidae, the sister species of M. canicaudus.[3] It is found in temperate grasslands of British Columbia in Canada and in the states of Washington and Oregon in the United States.[1][4]
This vole can be 8 inches long or more and looks like a kid’s fuzzy slipper that has escaped the nursery.
We have neither moles nor voles or gophers in Hawaii but we have (on Oahu – another story) mongoose. They look really cute zipping across the road as you brake for them – but up close… Yowzaa! Vicious looking weasels!
Open Thread Sunday: No more moles? How about a raven?
Can I pet that raven (Fable)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4FZH9JHnS8
I thought this was interesting read in the Review section of the WSJ.
Why Putin Can’t Afford to Let Ukraine Prosper
https://archive.md/AfPf7
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/why-putin-cant-afford-to-let-ukraine-prosper-9854e35e
And later:
These days, it’s quite a carnival on Carnival cruise lines.*
Why the hell would anybody want to try for a relaxing cruise, and take a chance on running into this?
* See the fun at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q9QCceQWqG0
P.S. It appears that Carnival has adopted a policy of offering very low cost cruises that last for only a couple of days–say, for instance, to the Bahamas for a day ashore and then returning to where they sailed from– and it looks like, perhaps, a package which includes free drinks?, and this is the result.
Neo (the other Neo; apologies to the Wachowskis) in a dangerous woke alternate reality – navigation by Morpheus.
Belonging to the EU is not some secret sauce. The policy adjustments to improve the Ukraine’s economic performance can be implemented without EU membership.
==
Factor of improvement in real GDP per capita, 1990-2018, with the ratio of fuel and mineral exports to nominal GDP noted for a selection. For scale, the United States and Canada saw an increase of 1.5x over that time. At this time, the ratio of fuel and mineral exports to world GDP is about 0.04.
==
6.39x: Mongolia (0.62 as of 2022)
4.54x: Turkmenistan (0.70 as of 2000, DNA since)
4.39x: China
4.35x: Laos (0.22 as of 2022)
4.17x: VietNam
3.60x: Roumania
3.37x: Poland
2.95x: Montenegro
2.79x: Albania
2.49x: Hungary
2.25x: Azerbaijan (0.42 as of 2023)
2.19x: Slovakia
2.18x: Czech lands
2.13x: Kazakhstan (0.29 as of 2022)
1.99x: Russia (0.14 as of 2019)
1.98x: Lithuania
1.78x: Bosnia & c.
1.70x: Croatia
1.65x: Uzbekistan
1.63x: White Russia (0.11 as of 2019)
1.62x: Slovenia
1.59x: Estonia
1.54x: Latvia
1.45x: Serbia
1.43x: Macedonia
1.18x: Armenia (0.05 as of 2023)
1.02x: Ukraine
0.99x: Georgia (0.05 as of 2023)
0.92x: Tajikistan (0.10 as of 2023)
0.90x: Kyrgyzstan
0.69x: Moldovia
Banned Lizard, it would be rather interesting to see the Wachowskis’ facial expressions upon viewing that, in view of their… personal histories. Which surely adds to the inverse-transgressive nature of the parody.