Invitation to a Beheading

Well why not let's do the annual bird round-up now rather than attack the enormous pile of holiday dishes, eh! For the second year in a row I set a new personal record for species of birds counted in a year, with 146, up from 138. I said last year that 2024's record seemed to be mostly set through good luck, so to break it again I'd have to try harder and/or go more places. I guess I did very slightly more of both of those things, maybe had slightly worse luck than in 2024 (no shovelfaces in 2025, alas), but also gained a little more traction in picking out less-obvious birds. (The Merlin birdsong app is an absolute godsend for that, not because you can just let it ID birds for you--you can't--but because when it IDs something you can try to pick out what it's IDing, which is enormously helpful in learning what's making what sounds.) So since I can't think of any further ado to make off the top of my head, here's my top 15 of 2025 by number of checklists each species appeared on, with last year's position and number in the brackets:

1. Black-capped chickadee: 418 (1, 382)
2. American goldfinch: 356 (2, 323)
3. Blue jay: 338 (4, 300)
4. White-breasted nuthatch: 313 (3, 312)
5. Mourning dove: 229 (9, 163)
6. American crow: 224 (5, 230)
7. Common raven: 221 (6, 215)
8. Hairy woodpecker: 194 (8, 176)
9. Downy woodpecker: 192 (7, 186)
10. American robin: 147 (10, 142)
11. Song sparrow: 138 (12, 126)
12. Red-eyed vireo: 109 (14, 109)
13. Red-bellied woodpecker: 123 (-, 76)
14. Eastern phoebe: 90 (13, 111)
15. Eastern wood-pewee: 88 (-, 90)

Blue jays continue to move up, as now they seem to actually wait for me to deliver their daily peanuts, and mourning doves continue to rebound from their mysterious collapse a few years ago. I'm kind of surprised that eastern phoebe hung on in the top 15 as the pair that had been nesting in my shed for a number of years experienced a catastrophic nesting fail on their first attempt of the year and largely disappeared. Falling out of the top 15: purple finch, for some reason (or none, as my impression is they tend to wander and stick around wherever they happen to find food) down from 134 to 77, dropping from 11th place to 21st, and dark-eyed junco, down from 105 (which seemed a lot for a cold-season visitor) to 81 to drop from 15th to 17th. Red-bellied woodpecker did in fact crack the top 15 this year as I expected, since they've been gaining for a few years, and pileated woodpecker finished just outside the top 15 at 86. Two things going on with the woodpeckers: first, it seems like red-bellied woodpeckers are expanding northward, as I'd never seen one in my life until one down near Lake Ontario maybe six or seven years ago, and second, due to the derecho of 2023, the ice storm of 2025, and the ongoing emerald ash borer plague, there are a lot of dead and dying trees around here these days. Anyway, to fill in 18, 19, and 20, those would be mallard, grackle, and turkey vulture, which for some reason was up from 45 to 77. Top bird of prey was a tie between broad-winged hawk and red-shouldered hawk at 45; top warbler by a pretty wide margin was chestnut-sided at 44. Once again it is uncanny how close the members of the two pairs of common hard-to-tell-apart birds--crow/raven, downy/hairy--are to each other, and once again the two pairs occur back to back on the list.

New birds this year: northern harrier, peregrine falcon (once when I went looking for them where they're known to be in Kingston and saw one within minutes, and then again when we arrived in Detroit and there was one swooping around when we got out of the car), bay-breasted warbler, bank swallow, black tern (this was completely unfamiliar to me but turns out to be not all that uncommon), Bonaparte's gull, great egret (seen these at York and in Kitchener before but not since I've been counting birds), American pipit, northern shrike (first at the house and then within days by the river in town), redhead, and tufted titmouse, which was another one that was right where it was reported to be in Kingston.

Not a single bluebird this year, so, once again: maybe this'll be the winter I get around to making a bluebird box.

Gonna be hard to turn it around after that, but at least I won't be watching the postgame celebrations.

I dunno how this is gonna go given the beisbol but: time to get fueling!

Ironically this post of mine from 2011 turns out to be--I mean ironically because it's one of the I guess many in which I say out loud that I really don't know what I'm doing here--one of the more compelling points for the position that doing whatever I was (uh, have been?) doing in this thing over the years was (uh ... is?) not a complete and utter waste of time. (I mean of my time, no guarantees expressed or implied about anyone else's, quite the opposite in fact I'm sure.) Which is to say I'm glad to have this record that I was irritated by Mark Carney, for a vague mist of reasons that have a lot to do with why I will still never vote for anyone in his ballpark unless it somehow comes down to a stark choice between them and the outright bad shit to their right (which reminds me again what a horrendous idea separating the executive from the legislature turns out to be in practice: the economic events of the last week or so are awfully reminiscent of those that led to the lettuce's outlasting Liz Truss, but the American way of electing a king means cooler heads (!!--nice job brain if you somehow did that unconsciously on purpose) simply cannot prevail in their case), going on fourteen years ago. (It's also interesting to look back at that time and see that Carney in Canada was on the leading edge of a watershed in monetary policy: it turned out you could nail interest rates at 0 indefinitely and not cause significant inflation. It's also funny in that regard that my irritation with Carney had to do with his frustration that his low interest rate policy was having too much effect on the demand side, not by increasing inflation (except in housing prices; arguably Canada is still stuck in the Carney housing bubble) but by increasing consumer debt to dangerous levels, when what he was really after was to stimulate supply. And interestingly also you now see progressive economists like Jim Stanford arguing that raising interest rates has an inflationary effect, not only in an obvious way by raising the cost of carrying debt but in a, well, also obvious but traditionally underacknowledged way, namely by stifling supply across the board. Which is to say, I guess, everyone is a supply-sider now (although Stanford for a long time worked for the Canadian Auto Workers/Unifor, and no one in labour is so bought into the supply side of things as autoworkers.)) [ETA: one other funny thing about that 2011 post: the reference to savings accounts, which--in the sense meant there, which is the sense that "savings accounts" has had for most of the history of that term--are things that just don't seriously exist anymore. I keep thinking these days, this lately is (isn't it?) the first serious stock market decline in which most everyone who has "savings" has them largely in the stock market. That, you would think, would have certain practical implications.]

What I've been meaning to write up in here for a couple of months now is something on Foucault and neoliberalism, after finally having been compelled by uh all this to read his neoliberalism lectures from the late '70s. The basic points, at least off the top of my head right now, that I would want to address if I ever got around to it (beyond the meta-point that Foucault may not be the guy you necessarily want to get this history from; contrary to his reputation among people who know nothing about him he's an extraordinarily meticulous scholar, but he's also a rather extreme and meandering generalist (so much for "the specific intellectual" eh)) are these:

1. Neoliberalism in its roots is not the political morality, founded on a commitment to a certain conception of freedom, which it has manifested as since Thatcher and Reagan but a political economics, founded on (a) a skeptical epistemology of political economy (just like the more specific 20th-century "neoconservatism" with its "unintended consequences", with which "neoliberalism" was confusingly synonymous before "neoconservatism" was convoluted into meaning "supporting the Iraq war"), on which rests (b) the central practical principle that prices set by competition (not necessarily "free" competition, as freedom is sometimes in conflict with competition, such that the state has to intervene to ensure a sufficiently competitive economy--this finally explained to me why, as I learned to my puzzlement in the '90s, certain figures on the otherwise apparently libertarian right were in favour of things like antitrust laws) being the means to the most efficient production and distribution of goods and services in the interests of serving the prosperity of the state as a whole.

2. "There is no socialist governmentality." I suspect Foucault said this as a provocation meant to provoke something like "what about China" as a response from his students, but he also means it completely seriously, and while I would have to put some effort into unpacking what it means, it has shaken my view of what's possible in the "West" or whatever we are now calling whatever that is that we are calling something like that. There's a bunch of scholarship about whether or not Foucault himself became a neoliberal and a promoter, however ambiguously, of neoliberalism in the late '70s and clearly if that question were to be put to him directly, and he were to answer it directly, he would say we are all neoliberals now.

3. As a specific aspect of that Foucault addresses the question why Marxist arguments about the exploitation of labour have no purchase on labourers in the West: he says this is because they don't conceive of themselves as natural possessors of labour power forced to sell it for less than it's worth but as entrepreneurs who reap returns on investments made in themselves. I don't know that this is necessarily the right way of putting things at all let alone the whole story, but something like this is something.

The funny thing about points 2 and 3 is that they tie in directly to my first plan for my MA thesis on Foucault, about how socialist or whatever revolution in the West was impossible without a different kind of--in Foucault's term--subjectivation. Of course, as a 22-year-old theoretical political radical what I wanted to do was to figure out how to carry out that different kind of subjectivation. Which I'm pretty sure Foucault would have thought was pretty dumb.

No you fell asleep in my chair

The Does-Anyone-Know-What-Day-It-Is Edition!

You know the drill: time to get fueling!

But first: time to carve the muse....

Before it gets too far away: I concluded my Lenten bible-reading this year with the gospel of John and I noticed another one of those things that hit you like a hammer that's previously somehow gone right through you unresisted: the story of Jesus healing the blind man in chapter 9 starts with a bit where the disciples ask him whether the man himself or his parents sinned so that he was born blind, which is an obviously weird question that John misdirects you from, Plato-style, by having Jesus say neither, he was born blind so that the workings of God can show themselves in him. I've noticed the weird question before but what I hadn't noticed is that immediately before that, at the end of the preceding chapter, "the Jews" are about to stone Jesus because he has said, in response to their asking how Abraham could be glad to see him doing his stuff as he has told them Abraham is, "before Abraham was born, I am". This is one of several times in the gospel of John that Jesus invokes God's "I am" from the burning bush in reference to himself. The whole end of chapter 8 has to do with the wibbly-wobbliness of God-time, eternity, the time which not only God/Jesus but all who "believe" inhabit (another repeated phrase in John: "an hour is coming, and has come"), and chapter 9 picks right up again with that. (It goes on to have Jesus say that he has come to make the blind see and the seeing blind, and it turns out that being able to see is a curse (analogous to how people from Joshua to Paul say that being under the Mosaic law is a curse) because only those who can see can sin. Well... then.)

But absolutely the most Plato moment in the whole bible is when Jesus says to his guys in chapter 16 that he has spoken to them in "figurative language" (as the NASB translates παροιμίαις, which you could literally translate as "beside-the-ways") but "an hour is coming" when he'll speak plainly--and they immediately say, oh, now we know you're speaking plainly! Oh no, oh no, oh well.

Seems like about time for another bird round-up, so hey why not fly in the face of the current fashion of doing year-in-review things at least two weeks before the end of the year (I'm not sure to what extent Spotify is to blame for this but I am definitely blaming Spotify) and do a year-in-review thing of the actual year. (If we had an actual culture in our society we would be well on our way to instituting a year-end uh Saturnalia in which nothing you do counts because it's outside the scope of all years-in-review and so will never have officially happened.) Anywut, how about let's do my top 15 birds of 2023, by number of ebird checklists they appeared on (with their places on my last all-time top-15 round-up in brackets):

1. Black-capped chickadee, 351 (1)
2. American goldfinch, 330 (2)
3. White-breasted nuthatch, 270 (3)
4. Downy Woodpecker, 249 (8)
5. American Crow, 201 (5)
6. Hairy Woodpecker, 178 (6)
T7. Blue Jay, 167 (4)
T7. Common Raven, 167 (9)
9. Mourning Dove, 139 (7)
10. American Robin, 119 (10)
11. Red-eyed vireo, 101 (12)
12. Purple Finch, 97 (11)
13. Eastern Phoebe, 93 (13)
14. Chipping Sparrow, 83 (-)
15. Red-breasted nuthatch, 68 (-)

Birds in the previous top 15 not in this one: ruby-throated hummingbird (14) and dark-eyed junco (15), but they were 16th and 17th in 2023, right behind red-breasted nuthatch with 66 and 65, so. Song sparrow was 18th at 64, and then brown creeper 19th at 59 but coming on strong because I learned (sort of, I will have to re-learn) to pick out their songs and calls this year, and, y'know, they're creepy, so they're a lot easier heard than seen (although their creeping is pretty distinctive if you notice it--for some reason, unlike nuthatches, the smaller red-breasted ones of which you could otherwise easily mistake them for at a distance, they only creep upward).

Downy woodpecker jumped way up the list last year, and leapfrogged hairy woodpecker, apparently because they presumably randomly happened to nest near the house so were around consistently through the summer. Mourning dove continued to slide in the early part of the year but has started coming back lately to the point of becoming a near-daily regular again. Blue jays I'm guessing ebbed with their food supply; apparently it was a great year for acorns a couple of years ago--well, I guess 2020/21, before the dreaded moths-formerly-known-as-the-thing-they-were-formerly-known-as (which suffered a plague after wreaking most of their destruction in 2022 and were not a thing in 2023) showed up en masse--and there's lots of oak trees around here. Chipping sparrows, probably I've just gotten better at picking out their calls, but also maybe they've been randomly nesting around here more the last couple of years.

Birds I recorded on ebird for the first time in 2023: surf scoter, cliff swallow (in Detroit), least flycatcher, mourning warbler, willow flycatcher, magnolia warbler, Lincoln's sparrow, green heron (in Buffalo), bohemian waxwing, Cooper's hawk, and snow bunting. Of those, Cooper's hawk I had almost surely seen before but hadn't learned to ID (and specifically to differentiate from sharp-shinned hawk); there was a family nesting a ways back in the bush from the house last summer. Snow bunting I had definitely seen at least once before, before I was ebirding; bohemian waxwings I'd seen and IDed on two pre-ebird occasions. Of the rest, green heron is the only one I'd guess I'd never seen or heard before (and oddly for a heron it was in a tree when I saw it); surf scoter I think I may possibly have IDed once some years ago; the others aren't particularly rare so there's a good chance they've been around me without my having any way of knowing it.

So them's the birds, ayup.

I just realized I got confused about what year it is today and thought it's 2024. LOOK I'M BASICALLY 50. Why did I open this though, uhhhh... fuck I have completely forgotten, but at least I have switched to Mill Street Organic, please stand by.

The other day I re-read Stephen Mitchell's introduction to his translation (or whatever it is, maybe it's an actual translation, maybe he reads Hebrew, I don't know) of the book of Job... the thing I always remember about it is the idea that Satan disappears because Satan is assimilated back into God but it turns out that idea is Carl Jung's? And is sort of mentioned only in passing. Anyway the thing about Mitchell is--well, if you've heard of Stephen Mitchell it's probably something to do with Eastern philosophy. I first heard of him when I bought his tranlation (or whatever it is, I don't kthink it's an actual translation) of the Tao Te Ching some thirty years ago (it was probably ten years later that I bought Ursula Le Guin's not-translation of the Tao Te Ching, which familiarized me with the concept (Heidegger did it too, in German, of Chuang Tzu maybe?--not "published" and presumably never will be (ugh but when they run out of other stuff in his desk drawers they probably will), but given all the HEAVY HEAVY stuff we all know Heidegger says about language, isn't it amazing he produced versions of texts in languages he didn't read, maybe that might be some indication y'all oughta lighten up, I dunno), but it was only sometime in the last few years that I learned that Mitchell doesn't actually read all the languages of the books he produces "translation" of either. Um I got lost in the parenthesis there, sorry, I am drunk, uh... but where have we strayed to? Oh right: Mitchell I guess is basically Buddhist or something, anyway, he seems to be saying that the point of Job is that nothing matters, fucking Buddhist nihilism, EXCEPT: ... ??? ...that all of that tremendous suffering is exactly to demonstrate to Job that... THIS! WHAT???

I mean I still don't buy it. Fuck that. No really, fuck that. You don't need to go through all that to get to that point. Whatever paltry but soul-shattering painful shit I have gone through did not get me to that. I got to that when I was twelve years old or whatever lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. Seriously. And then I forgot about it, "in the grip of an ideology". And then I remembered again. And suffering DISTRACTS EVERYONE FROM IT. So fuck that shit.

But I mean I take the point, sure, maybe Buddhism has a point, I don't know, sure, maybe, I dunno. Fuck it though.