Bird rarely seen in the United States sends people flocking to Virginia

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Bird rarely seen in the United States sends people flocking to Virginia

The red-flanked bluetail has appeared at a park near the Potomac River, marking only the second time the species has been seen east of the Rockies.

March 8, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDT


A red-flanked bluetail, seen Thursday, from Asia has shown up since early January in Great Falls Park in Virginia. (Photos by John McDonnell/For The Washington Post)

By Dana Hedgpeth

Barbara Saffir clipped a camouflage vest around her chest, hung her heavy, long-lens camera and binoculars around her neck, and stepped in her knee-high, red galoshes through wet leaves and mud under a dense early morning fog on the edge of the Potomac River.

{snip}

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Hope the poor thing manages to get back to its flock before it gets too lonesome. :( nt

[jfz9580m]

2. I am trying to get back to mine!

Last edited Mon Mar 9, 2026, 12:36 AM - Edit history (8)

Mentally anyway..I have not worked for more than half an hour at a stretch since Jan 2025 eppur_se_muova..it is killing me..

I have been on an extended leave of absence from work and smothered in a sea of stupidity since 2012. Today I shall work no matter what dammit. My brain has atrophied to the point where speech seems to be the sole function left and that not very competently.

I have a strong suspicion I sound like a left wing Trump or Palin and have been rummaging in my head for stuff acquired in my youth when I could actually read entire works of fiction in a few days. I used to find reading fiction at least easy prior to the last 14 years. I never appreciated it..now my ears are constantly pricked up..for god knows what..

I regret not having trained my attention and memory prior to this plague, which has caused both to deteriorate to a point where I am always on the alert, but too distrait to focus.

I protest this much stupidity. I post on DU in protest of stupidity as a self-styled shit work contribution, though not one of Graeber’s bullshit jobs. I vaguely view it as a sort of undefined voluntary duty lately.

It must communicate something about this putrid, vapid soup of rubbish information we are all awash in. And that is not seeing the world as one is rather than as it is! At this point there is a distinct possibility that it might at least be both. I was on the fence myself.
I don’t need other people’s stupidity. I have my own to contend with as is.

I have rights! This is stupid..I am not dammit..
Most people find science hard. That is not the same as stupidity that hobbles one wrt effort that requires long hours of concentration with some drivelling drivel with an unclear point beyond the enrichment of tech creep oligarchs, sleazy private equity owned hospitals and probably an assortment of the stupidest creeps ever.

I would never want to suggest that I would shirk important contributions to society like laying waste to all of one’s own resources to appease mediocre and piracy friendly corrupt technologists at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reliance, Tata, a contingent of unknown creepy little “indigenous” companies with no products or services beyond harassment (The little guys! We don’t need your imported American colonist creeps 😤! We have homegrown creeps! I am a patriot! Creep rights x100000! Creep rights are human rights!)

Now I must go and see how bad the damage to the old noggin is in way relevant to my actual field. I shall viciously abort all unsolicited tech later.

You are a scientist (presumably NIH funded) right? I have been avoiding my colleagues out of embarrassment and I assume they have a lousy time as is these days. I gift you this rant.

You can inform the NIH that Ol’jfz9580m generally protests everything and specifically any and all creeps or ai in the water…whatever the hell that means these days..it could mean something..or not..who knows? A confusing journey with no clear endpoint is the goal! There may be such thing as too open-ended..
The Cheshire cat had a point..
Absent explanations Ol’jfz9580m is paranoid enough to assume things are usually corruption, creeps etc.

You must inform the NIH eppur_se_muova that various dark foreboding warnings casting asparagus in all directions (except Google/Palantir and industry free parts of the NIH and Thackeray Wildlife Refuge..the one thing I found last year that gave me a glimmer of hope of contact with something scientific I would appreciate) were communicated to you.

I think that is called an early warning system communicating a general state of alarm anyway..lol..I laugh that I may not weep.

Seriously..this is an obscenity..that woman even has a TED tech talk:
https://www.brandeis.edu/magazine/2024/summer/inquiry/weapons-dragonfly.html

Between that and “civilian and health promoting” use of space like this:
https://remedianetwork.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/britains-sonic-therapy-listening-to-birdsong-during-and-after-the-first-world-war/

That is gross. I found that when looking for this awful promotional article on the BBC I read years ago shilling “bird song as a service” to cure the depression presumably caused by concepts like bird song as a service.
You get that right? I mean capitalism-yes!

But surely at some point when you offer people no actual damn services they want and destroy their attention span, like this is a marketplace model that looks suspiciously like outright robbery.
Who wants or needs this shit?

I feel this Phil Platt piece debunking “moonvertising” completely misses the point because it assumes that there is any form of actual logical thought process beyond smashing and grabbing and breaking everything:
https://vinepair.com/articles/rolling-rock-moonvertising-hoax/

Most people don’t know anything. I am sometimes the brightest person in some rooms eppur_se_muova..you have no idea how scary that is. Sometimes it is some technical prowess with absolutely no common sense or nothing at all.

The scientific community will hear extensively from me about throwing me to these idiots.
I don’t want “fall monitoring services”!
It is my god-given right to fall over if I choose to! Guns, god and falls!
I would fall over far less if I wasn’t angered about hosting some foul fall monitoring shitware at a cost to my sanity for the profit of people who should be in prison.
I mean..not that any of that happened.

Far be it from me to spread conspiracy theories about our fine industrialists (who outside of the marijuana industry that offers a non-carcinogenic alternative to bloody alcohol and must have its profits decimated by coupling with worthless creepy and criminal gaming and Reefer Madness documentaries without a side! Fair and balanced! Such a Trojan Horse), whom I trust from the bottom of my shallow heart to self regulate! I am gullible enough to not be suspicious of random people barely scraping by, but paranoid about these fine industries and Blackstone.

I may need help to recalibrate!

Eppur_se_muova? Anyone there?
I hate the MIT Media Lab and that creep Paradiso, Tegmark, that rogue’s gallery of creeps at Google, Thomas Insel, Alex Pentland, Ben Waber, Rosalind Picard, that edtech fraud Sebastian Thrun (there is a total creep who learnt english by watching sports and probably theft of data..okay that last is speculative..Ol’jfz9580m’s conversational skills mostly lean ..Oo Sheryl Sandberg another sleazebag..towards libel, slander and defamation).

Not to mention the set of rightly MeTooed hard (wrong word. Ol’jfz9580m’s mockery is a coy, nudging wink to these brainless parasites and asking for it..not vicious satire at all!) science perverts whose names shall be emblazoned on the sky as there is no reprieve where the scale of creepiness in the Epstein Files means these creeps can skate: that creep Walter Lewin (wtf is wrong with MIT? And they murdered Aaron Schwartz..who should not have killed himself..there is support out there..it is just people inside loony bins etc), Kanury S Rao, Geoff Marcy, Andy Rubin, Amit Singhal etc.

And Fei Fei Li, Peter Norvig, Christopher Manning are soulless, industry shills who peddle LLMs or Google.


This is all your fault! You guys with actual scientific muscle should have gone Straw Dogs on these brainless and creepy idiots. And when I tried to I was sent to the worst damn psych hospital ever, which no doubt will now claim it was a Rosenhan thing as a hedge.
Which is such bullshit. Honest psychiatry that isn’t profit but care driven, like all honest science is error prone as it is difficult.
Leave it to RetractionWatch and those braindead internet sleuths (who will gape at anything online failing at every imaginable metric of intelligence) to assail and torture publicly funded scientists promoting witchhunts while being silent about the predatory industrial forces that got us here.


And why does this thing’s autocorrect suggest DiResta? No! It may be a stereotype and Ol’jfz9580m is now stereotyping you eppur_se_muova as vaguely adjacent to Prof Ryan Williams (he is also from Alabama! You must be friends! Like me and all these creeps in these parts!) and a worthy recipient of these diatribes.
Yes he is a white male and as Christopher Ketcham pointed out it is clearly bigoted or Stockholm Syndrome or demeaning tribal rot to see people and go “That man doesn’t look stupid or creepy and he may be less embattled being white and male”.
Ol’jfz9580m herself fled here as it is easier to have some muscle in these parts as a nationalistic, fascistic Hindu supremacist..lol
I viciously caricature this society all the time.

Thanks to all this, I now actually have to reluctantly bend the knee online to the nearest thing on the right side of the aisle-TikTok bans and lawsuits against the cancer that is Google by any elected official over “our celebrities” and “our billionaires”. Balance! EarlG must be so sick of me..But I would never be able to stomach a Reid Hoffman or Mark Cuban. Even in these jokes of democracies, elected officials have to get elected..as of now anyway.

It is not influence operations so much as..they work when people have no real future and vote at random. I refuse to be held responsible if a right wing populist who will exacerbate climate change and cause a refugee crisis that is exploited by Ammon Bundy and Cato (“immigration made this nation great!” I exploit this human and expose them to the scorn of vapid morons or worse..I am a humanitarian!) and triggers the next hardcorer phase of this ongoing implementation of the Turner Diaries, but Armageddon flavored.

This is a stupid society and there is nothing anywhere it would not somehow manage to turn into something stupid.

It is not being a luddite to call this worthless trash bad science. The dumbest and creepiest and most useless implementation of technology does not have to be the only one.

I started ranting after I read Adam Becker..he is very cool and way too polite and I cannot afford this..
I like Ketcham aside from one thing..mob populism via the net of course perverts the real thing as it is chaotic and some of us just never know or meet people and never will.

Human nature is stronger than brainless use of force..but entrapment of sleazy hospitals and technology companies and the parts of the state that enabled or forced them as this disaster gets worse..that is a function Ol’jfz9580m is okay with and with this much surveillance and all by greedy, self serving narcissists at war with each other will someday potentially give scientists a trove.
And no amount of bs about deepfakes and so on can obscure the reality that if one wants to see what is real, it is easy.

Economics is not a real science..there are limits to growth and grinding austerity for the elderly, disabled and poor with gold toilets and islands for these parasitic billionaires and warmongers with this Idiocracy hobbling anyone else at every damn level..
I lost my mom to this worthless trash.
Fuck Blackstone and every tech company/defense contractor involved.

Constant exposure to kayfabe, WWE and viral videos obscures the point that herding these morons and entertaining and gratifying them with what a competent doctor or scientist could see is a call to stop promoting these things as fixes.
Yasha Levine, Christopher Ketcham and I have not had our organic intelligence destroyed to the point of ..
I am pushing back not repairing or ranting.
I will press charges but later.
But well…I am not a fraudulent “populist” like that Ilsa she wolf of the ss MTG..Doctors and scientists are cool (those Darwin Award candidates above aside). There is no way to scale up good work like Yan Lecun’s that would fit everything and absent explanations no sane person would fail to pushback. Western Europe is different from these shady scams in India.

That is the point of being a real person!! Tejas Thackeray is the only person aside from my small marijuana company and one vegan lady and my overworked oncologist I trust in these parts to have functioning brains in my book.

This was disgusting. The mindnumbing stupidity it takes to fail to recognize intense anger that is not insane. I joke because I am not Christian Bale..But man did I agree with him. Total garbage…all actual science/classical education are dying as these perverse cottage industries flourish.
I always wished I had had a better classical education..or maybe I should just have majored in physics not engineering. But even I had a better education than this trash.

No one in my family would buy this. Only the stupidest and creepiest Indians are in this and worse I see this cycle..first honest people are confused, alarmed and angry and then they get resigned to it..
What would result but this junk..

My mentor wouldn’t buy into this. He had sturdy common sense. We had a minor dust up because I was an entitled ass. But he would never think I was insane and I engaged in no misconduct and don’t want to be Captain Queeg to these parasites.