29 July 2023 As followers may recall, I always believed that the Russian Army was less than enthusiastic about Putin’s war — which is one reason he and Shoigu had to use private armies — and that eventually military opposition would break out which would have to depose Putin or be crushed by him. But I draw no hope whatsoever from Prigozhin’s so-called rebellion or the purge of military figures who have criticised the conduct of the war, since all of them are even more fascistic than Putin and his military
3 August For the last couple of months, I have been reconditioning old entomological storage cases (one probably Edwardian), and sorting out a set of 417 butterflies caught sixty years ago in British North Borneo (today Sabah, Malaysia) by a friend who was a licensed naturalist for Singapore’s Raffles Museum (today Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum). I relaxed 180 of them when, aged fifteen, I was given them, I set those on special boards, and stored the rest carefully, but I feel now is the time to put
Parthenos sylvia lilacinus Butler, ‘The Clipper’