Re: General politics thread

1

Kobe!


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 7:55 AM
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Sceond!


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 7:59 AM
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3

If this is to be an ongoing thing let me propose they be titled:

"Annales Mali Insania"


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 8:16 AM
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4

ok but you have to first explain the joke to me.


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 8:29 AM
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Not a joke, just a pretentious-sounding Latin title meaning something like "chronicles of evil craziness."

Fitting, n'est ce pas?

Or others may come up with something better in the vein. Or you could just keep it American.
Or you could go on a boat. Or make a hat. Oh the things you could do.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 8:45 AM
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Looks like we will get the DC military parade.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:04 AM
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7

Marvel is so 2022.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:05 AM
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Continuing the "what were the money guys thinking" discussion from the Kitchen Sink thread:

Bill Ackman is sad:
I don't think this was forseeble. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:29 AM
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Since they're all just numbers, Trump is now threatening an additional 50% tariff on Chinese goods, on top of the previous 34% and the standing tariffs before that. So we're in the 106-130% range now... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/economy/trump-china-tariffs-threat.html . (And, of course, even their 34% retaliatory tariffs mean that what little we were selling is now disadvantaged against everyone else.)


Posted by: Mooseking | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:49 AM
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8: Jeffrey Flier the former den of Harvard Medicql School who seemed to be all in on anti-wokeness and anti-dei was best yds with Ackman on twitter. Flier was pretty horrified at the thought of RFK Jr. at HHS even before all the terrible NIH cuts, but Ackman kept saying that RFK had a lot of interesting things to say.
I don't know how it was possible for him to delude himself that much.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:50 AM
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den of Harvard

I think they call it a man cave.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:53 AM
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12

Dean


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:55 AM
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13

Dean Cave.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 10:00 AM
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14

Who used to play Superman.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 10:03 AM
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Batman, surely.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 10:10 AM
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He was in Arrested Development, not Superman.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 10:11 AM
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13: Dean Cave

Shorthand version of an eternal headline in the Trump II era.

(But also pretty universal any time.)


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 10:18 AM
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Bill Ackman has now apologized to Lutnick for saying he had a conflict of interest (being "long bonds") and recast his anger as frustration. Called onto the carpet, presumably.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 10:39 AM
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18: Not sure about Lutnick on that front, but one would have to be a Frenchman or a fool an idiot or a mainstream journalist to believe there has not been a lot of insider trading re: timing of economic policy announcements.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 11:02 AM
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18: where did you see the apology?


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 11:26 AM
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21

Soon we'll all be required to have a "tariff jar" at home and every time you utter the name of another country, you have to put money in the jar. Exact amount is adjusted on a daily basis and failure to keep up with the rates will incur a fee. Every week you have to bring your jar to a central collection site.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 11:37 AM
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20: It's circulating in various screenshots, presumably originally posted on twitter. Here's someone's screenshot on BlueSky.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 11:40 AM
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23

It's hard to fully express my ambivalence about the billion dollar de-extinction startup. I hate fucking everything about this on an ethical, practical, and ideological level, and I can barely read about it without fits of rage, AND YET I also want to see all the footage of giant fluffy murder puppies.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:04 PM
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23: Important context on that.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:17 PM
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This is political, by the way. It involves money, hubris, a Texas-based company breeding designer wildlife in Canada, and creatures named Romulus, Remus, and (wait for it) Khaleesi. Like Trump, the CEO seems to have made an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast (not linked). ("Rogan seemed to agree with the rhetoric before randomly launching into an anti-trans rant and telling Lamm that 'the problem is not the scientific community, the problem is weak men.'")

24: wait, that's what I thought! Hang on, let me review the bullshit.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:26 PM
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Wait, sorry, not in Canada but in the northern U.S. Wish I could edit comments.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:28 PM
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27

Here we go, from the NYT article:

Dr. Shapiro, who joined Colossal in 2024, was part of the team that first retrieved dire-wolf DNA from fossils in 2021. But that work recovered only traces of genetic material. At Colossal, she and her colleagues decided to search for more dire-wolf DNA, hoping to better understand the biology of the extinct species -- and perhaps revive the animal.
"It was the simplest path to get a predictable result," Dr. Shapiro said.
The team took a fresh look at dire-wolf fossils, using new methods for isolating DNA. This time they hit the jackpot, discovering a wealth of genetic material in two fossils -- a 13,000-year-old tooth from Ohio and a 72,000-year-old skull from Idaho. The dire-wolf genomes allowed Dr. Shapiro and her colleagues to reconstruct the history of dire wolves in greater detail.
Dire wolves turned out to belong to the same lineage that gave rise to the wolves, jackals and African wild dogs living today. The dire wolf split off from the main branch about 4.5 million years ago. Subsequently, about 2.6 million years ago, dire wolves interbred with other species, including the ancestors of today's gray wolves and coyotes.

So that directly contradicts the 2021 Scientific American claim that "Although canids such as wolves and coyotes often create hybrids, dire wolves apparently did not do so with any other canids that remain alive today. Perri, Mitchell and their colleagues found no DNA evidence of interbreeding between dire wolves and gray wolves or coyotes." Let me see if I can find papers. I fucking love carnivores, sorry for the derail.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:34 PM
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The author of the piece in 23 and some other science journalists on Bluesky have been dismissing the dire wolf thing because they're so distantly related to grey wolves. My read of the Times article in 22 is that they're being maybe a little too dismissive. It sounds like Colossal's research involved reconstructing a whole genome, which would be a significant update to the 2021 research. It sounds like that research led them to conclude that the relationship was somewhat closer, with a more recent branching date and some evidence of interbreeding since then. Kind of a judgment call if that is close enough for these to be considered "real" dire wolves.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:39 PM
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Really I think the question of whether these are "real" dire wolves is less interesting than the actual results of the gene editing.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:41 PM
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Here's the 2021 article. I can't read the whole thing, but the abstract does say they "sequenced five genomes" so it's not clear exactly what the difference is from the more recent research.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:47 PM
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So on the one hand, the Colossal people could have found more sequences to analyze than the 2021 article that Scientific American worked off. But on the other hand, that conclusion on the dire wolves being distant from modern canids is the last thing Colossal wants for its bottom line, surely.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:51 PM
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32

How does this affect Dungeons and Dragons?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:51 PM
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28: Okay yeah, that's what it is. Shapiro (now at Colossal) and Meachen were co-authors on the 2021 paper, have since done additional research, but have not published that research yet according to the NYT, so we can't yet evaluate. It sounds like they got better data using novel extraction/sequencing methods from two of the samples from the 2021 paper. As far as being real dire wolves or whatever, they've obviously created a hybrid (duh), and it's interesting if natural interbreeding did occur and yielded results maybe a little like the test-tube animals here. Consequences for human gender unclear.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 1:53 PM
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Ah yes, I should have remembered that all the real information is in the Supplementary Materials these days. Looks like there was quite a lot of missing DNA in the 2021 analysis. It would be interesting to see what they did to recover more this time.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 2:01 PM
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35

Semen stealing.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 2:05 PM
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36

genomic auto-correct


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 2:29 PM
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37

Speaking of auto-correct...


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 2:38 PM
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38

And the info that was supposed to be leaked to Putin went to a deli in Put-In-Bay.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 3:03 PM
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39

I just saw my first and second Tesla with the logo steamed off. Or the same one twice.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 3:04 PM
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Would it be manly to pay for the manly tariffs out of my man purse? Please mansplain the manswer to me, a man. Amen.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 3:15 PM
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At the protest on Saturday one sign was like "Tesla Owners Against Musk" and promoted some web storefront with decals that looked like Tesla but were a different made-up brand name.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 3:23 PM
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Can't wait to hear that a coming Tesla software update does two things: 1) detect Teslas that aren't displaying the Tesla logo, 2) brick those Teslas.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 3:32 PM
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Yessssss:

"I was born far too late to see now extinct Ice Age species such as dire wolves and mammoths. Long ago, my Celtic ancestors probably lived among those animals in northern Europe and may have had some role in contributing to their extinction. I never thought I might live in a time when we have the science to bring back those species and restore them to selected sections of their former homeland. I have a dream that some time in the near future I can go back to Alaska, or a similar place in Northern Europe or Asia, and see those extinct species that have been brought back thanks to science. When that happens, I will begin to study the behavior of dire wolves." - Rick Mcintyre [age 75?], author and internationally recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on wild wolf behavior, and Colossal Conservation Advisory Board Member.

I might be done now. We'll see.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 3:57 PM
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44

Inside of you are two wolves. They aren't as closely related as you might think.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 4:00 PM
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These guys trying to introduce dire wolves into Alaska would be very entertaining.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 4:11 PM
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No, I want it all. I want this guy to train them with a Celtic cave harp. Anyway, the press release has more (pseudo?)scientific data:

Colossal extracted ancient DNA from two dire wolf fossils: a tooth from Sheridan Pit, Ohio, that is around 13,000 years old, and an inner ear bone from American Falls, Idaho, around 72,000 years old. The team deeply sequenced the extracted DNA and used Colossal's novel approach to iteratively assemble high quality ancient genomes, resulting in a 3.4-fold coverage genome from the tooth and 12.8-fold coverage genome from the inner ear bone. Together, this data provided more than 500x more coverage of the dire wolf genome than was available previously.

Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 4:18 PM
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Ha, even the Times reporter is on Team Not-Dire-Wolf.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 4:38 PM
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"My Celtic ancestors probably exterminated the dire wolf so I feel a responsibility to bring it back" is some impressive romantic pseudoscience.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 4:41 PM
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lourdes is literally sitting next to me trying to talk about actual politics and I can't shut up about dire wolf genetics in real life either. I can't make the picture come together from these fragments:

Colossal's computational analysis of the reconstructed dire wolf genome revealed several unknowns of dire wolf evolution. Previous work could not resolve the origin of dire wolves, leading to speculation that jackals may be their closest living relative. Analyses of the high quality dire wolf genome, however, revealed that the gray wolf is the closest living relative of dire wolves - with dire wolves and gray wolves sharing 99.5% of their DNA code. Interestingly, the analysis also revealed that dire wolves have a hybrid ancestry, which helps to explain the previous uncertainty. Colossal's analyses indicated that the dire wolf lineage emerged between 3.5 and 2.5 million years ago as a consequence of hybridization between two ancient canid lineages: an ancient and early member of the tribe Canini, which may be represented in the fossil record as Eucyon or Xenocyon, and a lineage that was part of the early diversification of wolf-like lineages including wolves, dholes, jackals, and African wild dogs.

Did that last part get garbled into "about 2.6 million years ago, dire wolves interbred with other species, including the ancestors of today's gray wolves and coyotes"? Is it plausible to get from that hybridization to 99.5% match with (modern) gray wolves? I'm so confused. Also, we're hurtling towards a constitutional crisis?


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 4:57 PM
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49: Something is definitely garbled there but I'm not sure what. I wish they had actually published something in a serious journal so it would be possible to tell exactly what they did and how it relates to previous work.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 5:05 PM
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Apparently, the Cybertruck resale market is so bad that buyers are using Lemon Party to force Tesla to take them back. I don't know how that works, but I guess Tesla's sales force is young and clicks on links.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 5:07 PM
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just saw a skeet on Bluesky that said "It's hard to explain for anyone who didn't live through it just how much the vibes right now are like 2003." Made me think of how we all got started.


Posted by: k-sky | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 5:10 PM
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k-sky!


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 5:11 PM
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k-sky!


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 5:30 PM
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lurid's priorities are definitely correct.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 6:43 PM
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It feels much more chaotic than 2003 did. I believed Bush would obey election results and I am certain Trump will not leave when his term is up. But I also think he might die suddenly. It feels stupider and meaner and more random than 2003 to me.


Posted by: Megan | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 8:21 PM
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I had to check, but to my surprise and delight I remembered how to do a a href.


Posted by: k-sky | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:00 PM
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If it's 2003, why is DOGE dismantling the department that protects us from WMD? We don't want the answer to come in the form of mushroom price gouging.


Posted by: condoleeza "have you seen the price of" rice? | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:41 PM
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||

CODECO's modus operandi--favoring the use of bladed weapons during attacks--delays alert times, making rapid intervention more challenging.
|>


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 04- 7-25 9:49 PM
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