Super7 has released a “Silver Screen” variant of its Creature from the Black Lagoon ReAction Figure for $20. Standing 3.75” tall, the retro-style toy has five points of articulation and features black-and-white paint deco. It’s packaged in a 1970s-inspired aquarium box.
We are now accepting submissions for our 9th and penultimate issue, WEREWOLVES VERSUS: SUBURBIA! We want short stories, artwork, comics, and even songs about lycanthropes in the land of lawns and malls, backyard pools and corner stores, domestic bliss and the reinforced cage in the basement.
Assemble at East New York Amazon Facility, 2300 Linden Blvd. at Essex St., Brooklyn
Six thousand (mainly Black) Amazon workers in Alabama are fighting to unionize against billionaire Jeff Bezos’ anti-union, anti-workers’ rights company. Their victory can change the conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers.
In the tomb of Princess Ita, daughter of Amenemhat II, this dagger was found in her coffin, together with a collection of jewels that included bracelets, anklets a necklace, and the remains of a belt.
The pommel is in the shape of a light crescent of lapis lazuli. The hilt is beaten gold and is inlaid with disks of lapis lazuli and green feldspar. The disks are inlaid with diagonal crosses of thin gold and between the disks are curvilinear squares inlaid with light brown carnelian. The elegant bronze blade is mounted in the solid gold shoulder and attached by three gold rivets. The tongue of the bronze blade and the shoulder strap fit exactly into the hilt.
The form of the blade is Phoenician in origin, and the patterns on the handle were common in Crete. It has been suggested that the dagger was imported from Byblos in Phoenicia or from Crete, or was manufactured in Egypt by a foreign craftsman at the royal court.
From the Tomb of Princess Ita next to the pyramid of king Amenemhat II at Dahshur. Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty, reign of Amenemhat II, ca. 1914-1879 BC. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. JE 31069
This just made me realize that news articles always portray poachers as people from the area who killed them for money. But if they’re not being killed when people can’t travel there, then it’s not anyone from the area doing the killing. Makes me wonder how many of the “poachers” were actually trophy hunters from Europe or the US.
ALL OF THEM
In reality, probably not many of them. If any.The modern narrative of who’s poaching and where animal parts end up is very much entrenched in the pulp novels of the 20s and 30s. Most people think of poachers as either a Percival McLeach/Negaverse Steve Irwin/old white guy with a mustache… or as a poor African. But the reality’s a lot more complex and the media’s bad at picking up on it for a lot of reasons- largely because people hate nuance and don’t understand the difference between illegal poaching (always bad) and legal, regulated trophy hunting (complicated. sometimes bad. sometimes good. depends on the situation, the reality of where conservation dollars are coming from, and whether or not you believe one animal can or cannot be sacrificed for the good of the species.)
So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all. When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.
The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies.
They’re selling the horns in Vietnam.
Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdf
Nat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.
The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel.
(Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the
majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money,
dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight
to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well…
No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers.
Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed. I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.
I know this deviates from the point of the post, but do people see Steve Irwin as a poacher? That was never his role and his whole tagline was “wildlife warrior”
I wrote this when I was super sleepy and forgot that the whole world wouldn’t be familiar with the negaverse concept from Darkwing Duck. Think like… evil opposite Steve Irwin, a guy who’s as enthusiastic about killing animals as Steve was about protecting them, and you’ve got the concept I had in mind.
