Excellent posts by Jen Gaspar and lapsang souchong. One of the comments in the article that really jumped out at me was Elena Ragozhina's remark that "everything was plain and grey and black and brown" before. My husband and I spent three weeks in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1994 and we were totally unprepared for the amount of color we found--some of the most beautiful and sumptuous uses of color we've seen anywhere in the world. There were grim, gray, blockish lumps of concrete that we were told Stalin erected (after tearing down some very beautiful architecture), but there were just as many historic buildings painted in salmon pink, mint green, gold leaf, midnight blue, lavender, and canary yellow. The subways were decorated with semi-precious stone such as malachite, alabaster, lapis, and rhodocrosite (materials taken from the buildings and churches Stalin tore down). And let's not forget where St. Basil's cathedral resides, one of the most fanciful and colorful pieces of architecture ever built. I have no doubt that many people's lives under communism and Stalin's preference for Mordor-like environments suffered aspects of what Ragozhina is talking about, but to say that everything was gray and brown before the most recent orgy of materialism is simply not true--an inaccurate stereotype that I'm surprised a Russian would want to propagate.

If the loss of chitinase-producing bacteria in the bats' digestive tract is in fact a major contributing factor to the bats' poor health and wasting disease, I wonder if the widespread use of antibiotics could also be of concern, along with pesticides. Not only are antibiotics over-prescribed for both humans and livestock (and then excreted into the watersheds), there are all kinds of antimicrobial products in the human environment now, from soap to socks to grocery baskets, for Pete's sake. As anyone who studies biology knows, substances, once introduced, have a way of getting anywhere and everywhere. There is simply no telling how many antibiotics and antibiotic-like substances are permeating our natural world at this point--and what the effects "downstream" might be.

By all means, put up a bat house in your yard, but DO NOT mount it on your house. Bat conservation organizations do wonderful things for bats, and I am a huge bat fan (have an inhabited house myself), but these organizations are remiss in not informing people about the risk of getting bat bugs in your house if you have bats living in or on your home. It cost us several thousand dollars to rid our home of bat bugs (practically indistinguishable from bedbugs, and just as creepy and horrible) from bats which had first roosted in our ceiling and then in a bat house that we were advised to mount on our house as an alternative roosting site for the bats. When we moved the bat house after the bats migrated (and after the infestation of our bedroom), we found the siding behind the bat house was crawling with bat bugs. Not all bats have these pests, but why take the chance? Just find a suitable spot for the house that is well away from your own.

@ Ken Erfourth

Hmm, interesting hypothesis. I suppose bat bugs could be a factor, if warmer temperatures overall are, in fact, encouraging greater populations of bat bugs. I understand that there is very little margin for stress in bats' fat storage during hibernation, that just disturbing a bat during hibernation could lead to the bat's death by causing it to burn more calories than it has stored for the duration. So, if bat bugs were feeding on hibernating bats in greater numbers, or even just taking a greater toll throughout the year, that could contribute to their vulnerability. I doubt that the bat bugs would be directly responsible for the holes in the bats' wings, but perhaps they could be contributing indirectly somehow. Bat bugs (like bed bugs) can survive for two days (at least) at temperatures below freezing, so warmer winter temperatures could be favoring their numbers. In a cave, temperatures are mitigated year round, but certainly in roosts outside caves, colder winters could have helped to control their numbers. This may well be a situation where several factors figure in to the problem; seems like it could be worth checking out this variable along with the others.

I don't always agree with your point of view, Cintra, but this article was brilliant. And you perfectly articulated everything that nauseates me about this cynical choice. What I don't get is why is she trumpeting herself as a pit bull (with or without lipstick, for Pete's sake). They're acting like the Democratic party is their enemy! I thought the terrorists were supposed to be their enemy. No, I guess it's Democrats. Their fellow Americans. It is nauseating AND scary. I myself am not a Democrat nor a liberal. Nor a Republican nor a conservative. I seem to find myself at the nexus where all of these beliefs systems meet, but one thing I feel that I am not is someone who is happy to turn a blind eye to the unbelievable amount of corruption that has taken place in the last eight years, along with the society- and economy-wrecking disparity between the classes and the complete trashing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I actually am proud to be the kind of American I used to think most Americans wanted to be. I hate the fact that everyone has become so partisan that people will defend THEIR candidate to the death, no matter how fascist or morally bankrupt, just because they're from THEIR party. And I hated the mean-spiritedness and backward-looking fervor of the Republican convention. Yes, Palin is no doubt a clever choice politically. But morally? Economically? Spiritually? Sexually?

Scary.