Klinsmann wasn’t the answer, at least not on the sidelines. The changes he made on the player development side may pay dividends eventually, though.

I agree that replacing him with Arena was completely stupid, but I don’t know who else was available. The whole situation is fucked to the very core.

It was in Poland.

I simply don’t subscribe to that sort of ecological nihilism.

Biodiversity has value for reasons beyond my own personal interest in it. You can seek them out if you are interested as there are dozens of scholarly and layman’s articles about them.

As it is, I’m not going to shed tears for the deaths of Black Rats when…

The world is a less biodiverse place because of rats. Specifically Black Rats inadvertently released on islands.

I could not disagree more. If you value biodiversity, and I do, you cannot just let the mistakes humans have made propagate to the extent where they cause extinctions. You cannot just throw up your hands and choose to do nothing. This is especially true on an island, where it is actually easier to accomplish this than…

It’s more that it’s easy to prove presence of something (you can just find one and point to it) but really hard to prove absence, especially for a small or secretive species that can avoid detection.

That is more or less correct as to how it’s done.

This is not an assumption. Rats are unequivocally a disaster if you value biodiversity.

They don’t thrive anywhere else because they evolved on Lord Howe Island. There is no need to thrive anywhere else so I have no idea why you see that as a standard for “success”. That’s not how evolution or biodiversity works at all.

Again, there is absolutely zero reason to believe these species would be “doomed”…

I honestly can’t tell if you are really as ignorant as you seem or if you’re trolling me.

There is absolutely zero reason to think that the landbirds of Lord Howe would have gone extinct if not for the introduction of Black Rats to the island. Zero.

They did not lose an evolutionary battle. They were driven to extinction because human inadvertently brought rats to that island.

You ignorance about diversity…

A bug species that cannot live when there are rats around is in serious trouble in the world

Yes, they can kill every rat on the island. This is a strategy that has been effective on a great many islands in Australasia and the Caribbean. They even did it on the Galapagos.

You are absolutely not creating another ecological issue by removing the rats.

Yes, they are trying to return the ecosystem to its pre-rat state, which is impossible because rats and cats killed a bunch of species, but they can get as close as possible.

You don’t have much of an idea as to how evolution “really works”. The birds cannot mutate a “ratproof” egg if the rats eat every single one of…

Introduced means that the species is not native to Lord Howe Island. It arrived when humans arrived.

No species is being “punished” here. This is no morality play. The Black Rats on the island have no scientific value as specimens. Rats and cats (which have already been eradicated from Lord Howe) were enormously…

Zero things on Lord Howe Island depend on rats. We know this because people have been studying the native wildlife of Lord Howe Island for decades. The rats alone are directly responsible for the extinctions of 6 species of native landbirds on Lord Howe Island. This isn’t a desert island that no one knows anything…

The rats involved are probably Black Rats or Norway Rats, which are on the short list of the most destructive invasive species on the planet.

Rats are an enormous pest on islands for just about every reason possible. A lot of these islands also used to have seabird colonies until rats came along and ate the chicks and eggs. Removing the rats will allow the seabirds to come back to nest as well.

There is also a flightless rail and two species of endemic…

This is a Glaucous-winged Gull if anyone is curious.

(I realize no one is curious)

I still think W was worse that Trump has been, with the caveat that Trump could absolutely surpass him before 2020 comes along. Trump, for all his bluster, hasn’t really accomplished shit because he can’t get out of his own way. W and crew were devious as hell and actually accomplished something.

In general, I think…