File:Through the Looking Glass (52262289223).jpg

This was a fun image to stage, with a bit of a “long game” approach: the mantis is a captive specimen since it was born, I suppose you can almost call it a “pet”. I feed it flies I catch in the house, and I’ll release it once it reaches adulthood. Until then, I’ll periodically use it in photographs like this. Mantises are particularly well suited for this type of image because their nature is to sit perfectly still and await their prey; they are an ambush predator.

The water droplet was placed with a hypodermic needle on a dandelion seed, and the whole stage can be seen in this behind-the-scenes image: <a href="https://donkom.ca/bts/_1091740.jpg" rel="noreferrer nofollow">donkom.ca/bts/_1091740.jpg</a> . Two flashlights, one illuminating the flower in the background and one the petal and mantis in the foreground. The position of the lights is critical, such that very little light directly illuminates the dandelion seed. A few strands catch the light, but it would be a major distraction of they were all bright white. In this setup, the petal is acting like a lighting flag to create a pocket of shadow on the seed itself.

While I sit in my studio and I tinker with these sunflowers, I cannot escape mourning the heroes in Ukraine. This past week has been particularly miserable. Putin’s forces tortured and murdered 50 Ukrainian POWs in a deliberate thermobaric explosion and went on to blame Ukrainian missile attacks. The Russian Embassy in the UK tweeted “The fighters of Azov deserve to be executed, not by firing squad, but by hanging, because they aren’t real soldiers. They deserve a humiliating death,” – which they claim was said by a couple in Mariupol, backpedalling to find a way to speak terrorism and blame someone else.

There’s no other way to say it: Russia is a terrorist state. Latvia and Lithuania, both NATO members, have made official declarations to label Russia this way, and it can have a dramatic effect on public policy. At the extreme, such a declaration can mean zero diplomatic relations, zero trade, and zero travel / tourism allowed. Why haven’t more countries done this? Well, it’s complicated.

If Germany wanted to officially label Russia a state sponsoring terrorism, it would inherently need to halt all dealings that would benefit that terrorist state – including the purchase of oil and gas. Much of Europe isn’t ready for that yet, as making such a declaration would cause intense socio-economic strife. But what about other nations – the United States? Canada? Australia? All countries that are directly supporting the efforts of Ukraine to fight for its sovereignty, and are not critically dependent on Russian energy… it’s time. Make it official: call Russia a terrorist nation. As citizens of these countries, we should write to our elected officials to push this message harder. If you’re wondering how to help Ukraine amidst the continued conflict, that’s a great place to start.

What’s to come next? I am reminded how “expensive” a city like Moscow is to run. It’s more than 700km from international waters and has infertile soil. No other city of its kind exists, and the reasons for its existence is somewhat evil. Russian culture and politics create a “wealth vacuum” in the western republics. For example, if you’re the manager of mine, you don’t live in that community. You live in Moscow. None of the benefits of higher income make their way back to the community, no economic growth, no expensive real estate. The republics stay impoverished and uneducated as Moscow rules. You can draw parallels to the government and society depicted in The Hunger Games.

Cut off the exports of natural resources and you cut off the wealth. In a country where the primary GDP comes from an exploitative energy sector, the funds required for the current Moscovian lifestyle would disappear. During the Roman Empire, Rome was largely fed by Northern Africa. When Rome fell in the Fifth Century, the area was largely abandoned because the area itself was not able to sustain the population. It would be nearly a thousand years through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance before the population of Rome would become significant again.

This image is titled “Through the Looking Glass”, so here we are – my prediction. If the world cuts off all trade with Russia, Moscow will become unsustainable almost immediately. There will be a popular uprising across all economic classes, and Russia will fall. With a despot at the helm, it will not fall gracefully, but rather writhing and screaming. The exact happenings at this point are uncertain, but the fall of the Soviet Union may give us some clues. There were a lot of “ASSRs” – Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics, and according to the constitution of the USSR they could hold referendums to leave the union. Many of these are now republics within Russia, others became their own sovereign nations.

Republics within Russia may wish to break apart to form smaller nations around pockets of natural resources. Take a look at Tomsk Oblast, as an example – a region roughly the size of Poland. The average salary of a person in this region of Siberia is around USD$700/month, roughly one third of comparable wages in Moscow. Tomsk, however, extremely rich in oil and gas and home to Tomskneft, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the nation. My gut feeling here is that if Moscow falls, the oligarchs will decentralize, forming smaller nations based on ethnicity/culture but also around the corporate power and republic/oblast borders currently in place. This will be unstable for a very long time, but Russians would then be fighting amongst themselves.