Dear Readers:
While humans are busy slaughtering each other in various wars, the animals of Chernobyl are getting ready for winter. These animals are lucky, because they get to live in a restricted zone where very few humans are ever seen. Without man’s presence, Nature is thriving. I think that should tell us something important!
Anyhow, here are some photos. All of these stories are from the Ukrainian site STRANA.RU. We’ll start with the uglier animals and work our way up to the cuter ones. So, first on the menu: Here is a raccoon, caught in the act of preparing for winter:
As one can clearly see, the raccoon (Russian yenota) is fat, well-fed, and has a thick and glossy coat. Quite a specimen of health! The racoon is a constant feeder and scavenger, it will eat rodents, birds, eggs, frogs, beetles, fish, berries, and even grains, if it can get them. Clearly, this raccoon is thriving in the Chernobyl Nuclear Radiation Exclusion Zone.
Next: here is a lynx, also caught (with startled, glowing eyes) in the act of preparing for winter:
The lynx (Russian rys’) is the only member of the cat species which is suited for freezing weather and does not mind the snow. As winter approaches, her fur thickens. Moreover, she has a fine layer of fat just beneath the skin. She maintains this layer by persistent hunting, as winter approaches. She is patient and can lie in wait for over an hour, waiting for prey to appear. She is fast, she can outrun a rabbit and is not fazed by the latter’s nimble maneuvers.
Next in the line-up: We have the so-called Przewalski’s horses, also known as Mongolian Wild Horses (Russian Przhevalsky loshad’), they are steppe animals, and a special breed (different chromosomes from regular horses). Just take a look at these beautiful, untamed, wild creatures, living free in a habitat that suits them perfectly:
Notice the beautiful fall foliage on the Chernobyl trees. The horses themselves, with their golden hues and short dark manes, embody the tragic beauty of autumn.
And last, but not least, check out this magnificent roe deer:
This young buck is more than ready for the winter. He already has his rack in position.
In the world there are only two basic types of roe deers (Russian kosul’): Siberian (Asiatic) roe deers; and European deers. In the past, scientists did not even realize that they were different species, as they are so similar. However, the Asiatic brand is bigger and heavier, the length of his body can reach up to 150 cm and the his mass up to 60 kilos.
What we see in the Chernobyl Zone are the European roe deers, they are smaller and more delicate in their appearance. Their beauty and grace astounds everyone. The male of the species wears a small but decorative crown of antlers.
In conclusion: Thanks to man’s folly, these wonderful animals have a chance to live free and out in the wild, as Mother Nature intended.
Awful Avalanche 
“The lynx (Russian rys’) is the only member of the cat species which is suited for freezing weather and does not mind the snow. ”
Snow leopard, clouded leopard, Siberian Tiger, puma….
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Siberian breed cat. (i.e. “cat” in much of Russia) Plus the Norwegian Forest cat.
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Plus the tabby who lives down the street! (Don’t blame me, blame the author.)
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Did you see that new brouhaha about the article that finally details how NATO scuttled the March 2022 negotiations to end the war?
Here’s the full text:
https://sonar21.com/how-the-chance-was-lost-for-a-peace-settlement-of-the-ukraine-war/
So now the talk is of “negotiations” again.
Of course:
1. The reason “negotiations” are even talked about now is that Ukranazistan has been completely defeated despite all the NATOstani weapons poured into it. If Russia had actually, as repeatedly prophesied, been on the verge of collapse, no negotiations would ever have been mentioned.
2. A secondary objective has been realised: the Imperialist States of Amerikastan has reduced Europistan into not just a political but economic colony. In the absence of the long desired fragmentation of Russia, this is a consolation prize.
3. Elensky cannot “negotiate” now. Having thrown away a golden opportunity to stop the war at its inception in a way that would see Ukranazistan regain all its (post 24 Feb) lost territory without a shot while preserving its nazi regime, it now has lost four more oblasts and will likely lose more. Half a million Ukrainian men have been killed or crippled. Millions have fled abroad who have no plans to return. What’s left of his country is up to the gills in debt. If he “negotiates” now he will be eliminated by his own nazi cohorts, that is, if the enraged family members of the conscripts dragged off the streets to be murdered in the meat grinder don’t rip him to pieces first.
4. All this talk of “negotiations” ignores one somewhat important fact: Russia will no longer negotiate anything short of a Ukranazi surrender. Russia has no reason to negotiate anything short of a Ukranazi surrender. Russia has been told to its face, in a way that not even the neoliberal Atlanticist Putin can ignore, that it had been led up the garden path in Minsk II, and that any “negotiations” will only mean another fake “agreement”. And since Russia is now clearly winning, why should it negotiate?
Also of course, if the article is accurate, Putin’s betrayal of the LDNR would not only have been absolute, he was even agreeable to “discuss” the status of Crimea and Sevastopol. Once again Russia was saved by her enemies.
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Putin wants peace (мир). He should better want the world (мир).
As in other times, Russia has been aroused despite itself from slumber into a terrible rage. It is as if prodded by divine energy into doing the really dirty work of breaking tyrants. The Russian political top has commented in various ways over the last year+ on this situation, as if Russia as been dragged out again to clean up peoples God tires of.
Aside from this, do recall that a month into the SMO Russia was in fact coming face-to-face with the fact that while they’d gotten close to maximalist effect for their first effort, it had in fact failed to immediately collapse the political situation in Ukraine. Russian special forces had come perilously close to Bankova in Kiev, but ultimately failed to push that domino. They’d grabbed critical nuclear and biological sites and secured Crimea’s water source, as well as the land corridor, but were spread too thin for the work that needed to be done after shattering Ukraine’s air and armor forces.
Russia needed to reorganize just about everything, while fighting hard domestically and internationally to avoid the kind of public chaos the West wanted to provoke. It was perhaps not a close battle but it was a battle in what increasingly looked like a WW3 the rest of the world wasn’t fully awake to–and neither were the Russian people, yet.
So. Yeah, Putin would have cut and run to hit pause on the war and buy time, if he could. Instead, he got a really good deal for Ukraine tossed in his face, and the West owning everything wrong since then in front of the RotW, an expensive series of step-ups in a shorter period of time for Russian society, industry and expertise (think back to early media efforts, hmm?), and a range of allies ever more fully coming online as the masks fell off the West’s collective horrible face.
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In parts Canada raccoons are urban residents. Toronto raccoons relocated to the wild would likely feel much like a 19th C Russian aristocrat exiled to Irkutsk.
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If the aristocrat was accustomed to enjoying his meals from a garbage bin!
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“with the uglier animals”
I give a shit if you call a human animal ugly or beautiful. As a member of the species you are entitled to, especially if it comes to the selection of a suitable breeding partner.
But to my thinking, we should refrain to apply our measure of subjective assessment to other species. They just are, fill their niche in the environment and go about their business.
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I am a bit hypocritical here. I personally never use the term ugly to describe an animal, but however use the term beautiful. I find beautiful and took care of tarantulas, and we had dogs, horses, cats and even mice as pets. And lots of different species we used for food production, including rabbits, goats, to ducks and turkeys and others in between.
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You think tarantulas are beautiful?! Ewwww!
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A rather longish explanation how one can change:
I used to be a Grade A +++ arachnophobe until through some unexplained process our two person family became suddenly a four person one. I had promised myself if that should ever happen, I would not pass on this trait, which I know now through personal evidence, is not inheritable.
So the inevitable happened, my kids growing up on 75 acres of bush country, 1/2 km from the next neighbours all around, were familiar with everything that walked on four and six legs, or flew around. One day my daughter came running to me, opened her hand and exitedly told me to hold that big spider she just had caught…..after I regained consciousness, I managed to hold that spider in my hand, and carefully placed it back into hers.
The course of further developments was quite logical, now being known to my kids as someone loving spiders. My son presented me when he was thirteen, bought with his money earned through doing chores, a black, tree climbing, Caribbean black avicularia, and presented it to me exitedly to have found the perfect present….again, upon regaining consciousness, I went and found a glass container for insects I had, as part of my previous life as a lab tech, repurposed to use as a vase.
I prepared it with some long piece of bark, and some moss as substrate to receive the spider, and a piece of wood to cover the container. I did all of this on the coffe table, of course unobserved, to hide my trembling.
I wanted to transfer the spider, as large as my palm, from the temporary smallish box supplied by the pet store, without touching it to its new home. The spider thought differently. It took a jump onto the floor, and obvously unhurt. I stood straight up in panick, the spider somewhat lost on the floor, looking for something to climb up upon.
The only think the tarantula saw that was of any reasonable length…..was of course this thing in front of her, somewhat looking like suitable tree trunks: my legs. While I was thinking how to get the spider off the floor, she took a run and up my legs, covered in jeans, she went, right up to the belt line.
After I again regained consciousness, there was nothing else to do but take this big thing, bigger than any spider I had previously encountered, into my hands without hurting it, and set it into its home.
This was the end of my arachnophobia, I fell in love with an animal that is now beautiful to me, having handled and observed them, and wound up with more tarantulas, one a very fierce orange baboon spider I never would touch because of her quite potent bite, not deadly but painful, of a beautiful colour and unrestraint wildness.
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Wow! that is an amazing story, peter. I can’t imagine myself going through such a journey, but I am glad that you and your kids are so in touch with nature. It’s kind of fitting that yesterday, in the world, was “Steve Irwin Day”, I saw that on google. Steve was also a guy who loved everything that breathed of life.
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They’re not just beautiful (I don’t think so) they’re also edible! (not recommended for Moritz to click, even in his new brave mode. Assuming I coded the sly link correctly so it works.)
In case I muffed it, because WordPress has changed its commenting interface again, as Brennan noted, here’s the raw link:
https://differentville.com/romdeng-eating-spiders-cambodia/
And since I got myself started, let me tell a tale about “Spider Town” in Cambodia. It’s a tourist trap, like “South of the Border” on the North/South Carolina state line, only with revolting things you eat. It’s on the highway between Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat. A pullout with lots of stalls selling cooked tarantulas, tiny frogs, bird embryos and giant water bugs that resemble enormous cockroaches. Tour groups pull in and the guides get Westies to buy and eat these things. I went on a group bicycle tour through Cambodia and Thailand in 2017 and that was one of the things our Cambodian-speaking guide led us to. Everybody else in the group was game to have a bite of these hideous things when we got back in the tour van. I was the only one to refuse, despite the “don’t be a chicken” jeering from my fellow riders. I’m game to eat lots of things — I and the other guy in the group were the only ones who went to a daggy-looking roadhouse with the guide to have food seasoned “Thai hot” in one town while the rest dined at the white-tablecloth restaurant at the nice hotel where we were staying — but I draw the line at spiders, frogs and bugs.
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Ewwwwww!
By the way, I also draw the line at spiders.
But I have been known to eat frogs legs (they’re French, so very classy, and taste just like fried chicken, if prepared properly).
Normally I won’t eat bugs, but I also eat a certain French delicacy called escargot. Do snails count as bugs? I won’t eat regular slugs though, only slugs with a shell on their back. Prepared in butter and garlic.
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“…the tragic beauty of autumn“
Nice line !
And speaking of tragic, looks like the WordPress Comment section interface has changed ones again; how many times is that in the past 3 months? The code writers at WordPress need to get a real job!
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Another day, another interface… yawn…
I decided to stop fussing about it, and just accept that life is absurd.
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To me all animals in their natural forms are beautiful, with the exception of animals whose genes have obviously been changed by radiation or other human influences. Is there any news about animals in the Chernobyl Nuclear Radiation Exclusion Zone that seem to have had their DNA changed? Many nations bordering on the Pacific are now wondering when strangely shaped fish will begin to appear due to Japan’s massive dumping of water from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. I think ocean fishing is a major industry in the Russian east, which is close to Japan. Any news about strange fish from there?
A personal wish: I hope Ukraine will soon become a Fascist and Nato Mental Radiation Exclusion Zone.
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“Japan’s massive dumping of water from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima.”
Do the frigging math and see the concentration of tritium in the volume of seawater, the major radiating component with a 12 year halflife and a low energy beta emitter. Scared about nada, the typical dreck the journos spread to scare the unwashed.
I worked several years with tritium labelelled substances for research, including as a test volunteer, and have a bit of an idaea about radioactive substances.
Japan will release 0.06 grams of tritium into the Pacific each year, that is – 60 milligrams, into an ocean with about 1 x 10^9 x 7.14×10^8 tons (if I got the notation correct, 1×10^9 tons in a cubic kilometer of water, and about 714 million cubic kilometers of water in the pacific)…huuuu, scary eh?
Imagine that, 60mg into 7.14 x 10^17 tons – we all should be scare of our wits now, drooling with fear an spouting gibberish..the one the journos do.
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Come on, peter, don’t be abusive, it’s a legitimate fear for ordinary people who aren’t specialists in this area. I was worried about Fukushima too. But I’m not a drooling coward. (At least, I think I’m not, I just worry about everything…)
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It is only cowardess if you give into that fear, without doing the reasonable thing to investigate further, somehow still believing a press, that the last idiot by now should have learned is mostly if not always either lying, not completely telling the truth or falsifying evidence to fit the narrative that the government and its various agencies want you to believe.
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But hey, Spiderman, not everybody even knows how to even start doing an investigation, if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Like, I never even heard of tritium. But you, with your knowledge, you could educate us in a nice kind of way, like a nice person, just sayin’…
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Ok, I just read too many comments by folks who are scared and are again, like in Covic times, completely in line with the MSM, or in this case even some scaremongeringg independents: similar to the whole Covid BS, where ones Dr. brother seem to be knowing a lot more than a certified epidemologist like John Ioannidis(https://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-151/) and even Bernard of MoA fell for the hype severely, not to mention the Saker and many others who bought the BS.
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I get it. Covid has warped us all, to the point where tempers flare.
And sometimes it’s hard to tell if people are being willfully herd-like, or just normal silly-millies, as in pre-covid!
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Peter, then why have China, South Korea, and Japanese fishermen protested so hard and long? And I’ve read several online articles that included interviews with genuinely concerned scientists who questioned the release of the plant’s water. There seem to be two legit sides to this debate. Moreover, the electric company that runs the Fukushima plant is famed for its bad planning and cronyism with government officials, leading to poor oversight and lax environmental protection policies. I also constantly get letters from Japanese environmental groups about the possible dangers of the release. I have never studied physics, and I have no way of judging the technical details of this issue by myself. I don’t believe anyone who writes here at Avalanche is lazy or cowardly or irresponsible.
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“Peter, then why have China, South Korea, and Japanese fishermen protested so hard and long?” That is quite funny, considering the reality:
“The Fukushima water discharge will contain only harmless tritium and is not a unique event. Nuclear power plants worldwide have routinely discharged water containing tritium for over 60 years without harm to people or the environment, most at higher levels than the 22 TBq per year planned for Fukushima.
“For comparison the Kori nuclear plant in South Korea discharged 91 TBq in 2019, more than four times the planned Fukushima discharge and the French reprocessing plant at La Hague discharged 11,400 TBq in 2018 into the English Channel, more than twelve times the total contents of all the tanks at Fukushima, again without harm to people or the environment.”
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/
One reason could be economic competition, as I found a study hyping the dangers, was funded by Chinese interests. And Korea is of course a competitor to Japan. Just checking the scale of dilution of the water, should raise alarms of the validity of the claims made.
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PS: Botulinum, the deadliest poison known so far, is lethal at a dose of -10^7g to a person of average weight. So, anyone who believes that a dilution of any toxin past 1×10^9, that is 1 part in a billion, still can be toxic, is either a believer in homeopathy, or just (polite mode) uninformed about how dilution works.
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Homeopathy is the Tinker Bell of therapies, it only works when people believe that it works.
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With the American Taxpayer forced to shell out for the Israeli war bill “The Biden Administration is refusing to condition any military support to Israel on a reduction of civilian casualties”
Leading inquiring minds to want to know, what has Israel in store for it’s neighbors? Fair enough..yeah? Let’s let the Israelis speak of their plans, their not shy about it:
At the start of this week, Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “What we are doing in Gaza, we can do in Beirut.”
Israeli Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter: “This is going to result in a Gaza Nakba 2023… that’s how it’ll end.”
And the beat goes on…
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I know! The Israeli leaders have made it UBER clear what their intentions are towards the Palestinians, and basically all Arabs in general. Which is why it’s so hysterical when the pro-Zionists go out in the streets to demonstrate in D.C., whining, “Why does everyone hate us so much?” I feel like trying to explain to these morons, “Because of the way you ACT, you murderous idiots!”
It’s like Charlie Manson, “Why is The Man trying to put me away?”
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More like Charlie Manson saying:
“…hey folks, it may be US taxpayer money funding the murder of Sharon Tate but…gosh darn it, I gotta do it my way…how dare you criticize my methodology…now, back off”
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But then adding a self-pitying, “I still don’t understand what everyone hates me!”
Why Charlie boy, we either hate you for your freedoms or we hate you because you’re beautiful, or because we’re prejudiced against guys with greasy hair… It can’t have anything at all to do with your actual deeds…
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It is all about the money, nothing to do with religion, ethnicity, just who controls the oil and gas and maybe other minerals:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/21/palestines-forgotten-oil-and-gas-resources
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/everybody-wants-gazas-gas
https://unctad.org/news/unrealized-potential-palestinian-oil-and-gas-reserves
Which of course means the Palestinians are superfluous to the project, and hinder development for the sole benefit of the Israeli population.
Which of course means, as Jonathan Cook (https://jonathancook.substack.com/) said: there are no innocent civilians in Israel. This does not justify their murder, but they all benefit from the supression and displacement that has been ongoing for years in Gaza and the Westbank.
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Gotta disagree a bit on some stuff, a few points;
1] I saw Jimmy Dore last nite saying it was all about the methane offshore…dunno, the eastern Med coast has been known to have large pockets since the mid aughts…why the delay?
Well, could be that after Biden’s handlers blew-up the Nordstream pipeline and the with price of natural gas in Europe tripling in two years time there is now a market for the stuff? Definitely like Hillary in Libya…so possible but, honestly, many Jews in Israel view Palestinians the way Nazis viewed Jews so hate as a motive can’t be ruled out as a reasoning for a “final solution” to be imposed upon Palestinians.
2] Conquering Lebanon has been on Israel’s menu for a long time…since at least when that terrorist Begin [the real kind, not our fiendly neighborhood political cartoonist] came to power. It too has oil and gas offshore so, multiple motives. However, having seen Israel’s behavior towards non-Jews the Christians have decided to not support Israel this time around. Israel openly expressing ethnic hatred towards non-Jews can have it’s consequences. If the Biden’s handlers think Israel & the US can cakewalk through Lebanon and Syria they are wrong…assuming my favorite “back-stabbing-buddy” Erdogan doesn’t side with the US & Israel…and that slimy bastard is capable of anything.
3] “Master Race” and “Chosen People” are synonyms, those who subscribe to such a belief [singular-intended] will go to exactly the same extremes…if not restrained by external forces. They have no internal moral compass. Or, as my father once said; with some men, they can only understand one thing…a well placed bullet. This isn’t money alone, it may motivate some but, for the majority of Netanyahu supporters, it’s all about being a member of the “master-race”.
4] There are Jews I know, some living in Israel, who think Israel’s empire building and overt expression of racism [the real kind, not the imaginary shit being sold to Americans] is effing nuts. Collective guilt/punishment is not a natural American way of thinking, it’s the type of thinking that belongs to the community that extols the existance of a “Master Race”/”Chosen People”…many of whom, will naturally gravitate to DC/London/Jerusalem.
5] Russia needs to pick up the pace in Ukrainia, the world is being set afire while Russia is preoccupied.
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OMG — the radiation mutated that lynx to evolve frickin’ laser beams where its eyes should be!!!
The glow in the foreground of that image — what the hell did it just set on fire? The photographer?!? It’s the dry-land version of a Dr. Evil shark! Only these Chernobycats have double-barrel deathbeams instead of the single-ray lasers attached to the heads on the sharks. All of Eurasia is doomed. Fortunately for North America, the laserynxes won’t be able to slink across the Arctic Circle. And not just because there will soon be no ice up there at any time of the year, due to Global Boiling. Even if ice was there, the laser eyes would melt it and the lynxes would fall into the drynxes. Where they might get eaten by sharks. Sharks eating mutant catamounts with laser eyes — what could possibly go wrong?
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Fortunately for the lynxes, the sharks aren’t there any more, they all got swept up in a giant SHARKNADO. Which carried them all the way to Paris and spat them out onto the tourists at the Eiffel Tower. Sharks with laser beams raining down and just munch, munch, munch, all the way down.
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