The Retired Commodore

When you’re voting.

Be kind. Be compassionate.

Be smart. Be careful.

For them, this is a post-apocalyptic environment.

They’re just trying to survive in world destroyed by humans.

On May 26, 2023, a coyote mother in San Francisco carried her pups across several city streets in the middle of the day to get them away from the one thing in the city she would not risk, which was dogs.

Her den had been under a small cement building on an active construction site, surrounded by heavy machinery. Naturalist Janet Kessler, who has followed San Francisco’s coyote families for nearly 20 years, says the machines were loud but the fence kept dogs out. She has found other dens behind the fences of the city’s water reservoirs, on freeway shoulders, and one about 15 feet from a busy park walkway.

When the pups were six to eight weeks old, they needed more room. For weeks the mother visited a new site every night, about a quarter mile away across several streets, and dug hiding spots in thorny brush that dogs struggle to push through. Then she moved the litter in two trips, at about 11:45 a.m. and 12:20 p.m., when traffic was lighter and fewer dogs were out on walks. A witness saw her carrying a pup down the street by the scruff of its neck. Two years earlier, on June 1, 2021, the same mother had moved her pups the same way, Kessler said.

Kessler calls dogs the main threat to pups in the city. Coyote parents defend an area roughly the size of a football field around the den. When a dog comes too close, a parent arches its back, snarls and flicks its tongue, a warning Kessler calls messaging. If the dog keeps coming, the coyote darts in and nips at its back legs, the way a cattle dog moves cows.

The mother often watches from a sentry spot about 100 feet from the den. If a group of dogs chases her, she leads them away from the pups. The father patrols several times a day and rests within sight of the den without giving away where it is. When a den is discovered, the mother moves the litter to a backup den 500 to 1,500 feet away.

The same pattern shows up more than 1,000 miles north. In the winter of 2021, University of Alberta researcher Sage Raymond followed about 310 miles of coyote tracks through the snow in Edmonton and found 120 dens. They averaged about 280 feet from the nearest building. Coyotes had denned under tree roots, shipping containers, shopping carts and an abandoned flattened car, and some had built dens out of concrete blocks, scrap metal, tires and a discarded door. They favored steep slopes, which are harder for people and dogs to reach. “People don’t actually know they have a den, sometimes even in their own yard, until the pups emerge,” Raymond said. Her main advice was to keep dogs on a leash from April to July.

A UC Berkeley-led study of San Francisco’s coyote reports going back to 2006 found that many conflicts involved dogs, especially off-leash dogs, and that reports climbed from April to June, during pup season. Some of what people reported was a coyote following them and their dog to es**rt them away from a den. “People love dogs and also don’t really listen to the leash laws,” said researcher Christine Wilkinson.

Years ago, a family found coyote pups born under their porch and boarded up the opening. The parents could not get back in, and the pups died.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Sources: Coyote Yipps, Janet Kessler (2022, 2023) / Wilkinson et al., People and Nature, UC Berkeley / Raymond and St. Clair (2023), Journal of Wildlife Management / The Wildlife Society / CBC News

Blood lust and blood money

Bet they have no idea how many women played Peter Pan on Broadway.

High school senior Ana Mota landed the lead role of Seymour in her school's upcoming production of Little Shop of Horrors. A week into rehearsals, Grand Prairie ISD took away her part, saying a female student could not play the musical's male role and citing a 2023 Texas law that banned some drag performances. bit.ly/4jReuSj

Let us hope it stays down

Ukraine unplugs Russia's internet — three data centers gone in four days

Kyiv just pulled off what three years of sanctions never could: it reached into Russia and switched off the machine.

October 7–8: Ukrainian drones hit Yandex's data hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow. The facility housed two of Russia's three AI supercomputers — the machines that train Yandex's entire AI family. Yandex admitted on Telegram that the data center "stopped operating entirely" and said it cannot confirm whether the equipment can ever be restored.

October 9: the second strike — Kaluga, Yandex's biggest campus, partly knocked offline. Nine people were injured in the regional attack, and Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint confirmed it used FP-1 one-way attack drones, claiming several modules were "completely knocked out of action."

This morning, October 11: the third strike — a 50-megawatt data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow. Yandex confirmed "complete operational shutdown." The site housed Russia's most powerful supercomputer, Galushkin — a beast built on Nvidia A100 accelerators used for training neural networks.

The fallout inside Russia is staggering. Yandex's Alice AI assistant went silent. Music stopped mid-song. Video calls dropped. Taxis couldn't be ordered. Banking services failed. Users across Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia were locked out. A startup founder told Reuters his dating app — three years of work, 8,000 users — can't reach its backup database. Yandex shares fell more than 4% on the Moscow exchange in a single session.

And then there's the part that broke the internet: Cloudflare's metrics show bot traffic from the Yandex network collapsed to 0.4% of its previous peak. NetBlocks confirmed the second-wave network collapse. The troll farms — the automated outrage machines that have been flooding American and European social media with AI-generated rage — went dark with the servers. People across Threads, X, and Facebook started noticing the eerie quiet before the analysts did.

The irony writes itself. Russia had just threatened to give Ukraine a "digital detox" by bombing Kyiv's data hubs. Ukraine responded by unplugging Russia's tech backbone instead — and took Moscow's loudest megaphone offline in the process.

This is the new face of war: no tanks rolling through fields, just drones, servers, and silence where the propaganda used to be.

Of course…

https://www.facebook.com/share/1FZmDt8b4Z/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Texas health officials proposed eliminating the Children’s Autism Program, which provides reduced-cost therapy to eligible families, as part of a budget request to lawmakers.

🔗 LEARN MORE: kwtx.com/2026/10/12/texas-health-agency-proposes-eliminating-childrens-autism-program/

President Zelensky and the Ukrainians may have just liberated the internet.

If not, it's a really solid start.

President Zelensky on the sudden drop in online bot traffic after he bombed Russian bot farms over the weekend 👇

Think about this friends... this would be about 50' above deck.

"Marines in fighting top during the Barbary Wars"
Gouache cm 30x40 (Original painting for sale)

Pretty on point here.

We are loosing many, many things that can never be restored once they're gone.

A Utah canyon road project is now at the center of a federal lawsuit over history carved into stone.

Conservation groups have sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over plans to widen, straighten, and pave a winding dirt road through Gate Canyon. The project would create an alternate route for trucks transporting oil from the Uinta Basin.

According to the lawsuit, the work would require blasting canyon walls that rise about 100 feet, threatening at least 47 historic sites. Some of the inscriptions were left more than a century ago by Black U.S. Army soldiers known as Buffalo Soldiers, who helped build the existing road in the 19th century. Pioneers and freighters also left names in the canyon, including some written in axle grease.

The concern also reaches beyond Gate Canyon. The route connects to Nine Mile Canyon, a 46-mile cultural landscape often called the “world’s longest art gallery.” The canyon is home to more than 1,000 rock art sites with over 10,000 images, some dating to prehistoric times. These places are part of a much older Indigenous cultural record across the region, where rock imagery, travel corridors, and gathering places remain deeply important to many communities.

The groups bringing the lawsuit say increased oil truck traffic could affect this neighboring cultural landscape. They also warn that blasting could harm habitat for threatened Mexican spotted owls.

The lawsuit alleges that federal officials rushed the project’s April approval without adequate public involvement or legally required environmental and historic preservation reviews. Those claims have not yet been decided by a court. The Interior Department declined to comment to Reuters because the litigation is pending.

How should agencies balance transportation and energy development with the protection of cultural landscapes and historic sites?