If this is to be an ongoing thing let me propose they be titled:
"Annales Mali Insania"
ok but you have to first explain the joke to me.
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.
Looks like we will get the DC military parade.
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.
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.)
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.
den of Harvard
I think they call it a man cave.
He was in Arrested Development, not Superman.
13: Dean Cave
Shorthand version of an eternal headline in the Trump II era.
(But also pretty universal any time.)
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.
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.
18: where did you see the apology?
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.
20: It's circulating in various screenshots, presumably originally posted on twitter. Here's someone's screenshot on BlueSky.
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.
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.
Wait, sorry, not in Canada but in the northern U.S. Wish I could edit comments.
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.
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.
Really I think the question of whether these are "real" dire wolves is less interesting than the actual results of the gene editing.
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.
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.
How does this affect Dungeons and Dragons?
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.
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.
And the info that was supposed to be leaked to Putin went to a deli in Put-In-Bay.
I just saw my first and second Tesla with the logo steamed off. Or the same one twice.
Would it be manly to pay for the manly tariffs out of my man purse? Please mansplain the manswer to me, a man. Amen.
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.
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.
"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.
Inside of you are two wolves. They aren't as closely related as you might think.
These guys trying to introduce dire wolves into Alaska would be very entertaining.
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.
Ha, even the Times reporter is on Team Not-Dire-Wolf.
"My Celtic ancestors probably exterminated the dire wolf so I feel a responsibility to bring it back" is some impressive romantic pseudoscience.
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?
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.
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.
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.
lurid's priorities are definitely correct.
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.
I had to check, but to my surprise and delight I remembered how to do a a href.
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.
||
CODECO's modus operandi--favoring the use of bladed weapons during attacks--delays alert times, making rapid intervention more challenging.|>
Ah yes, there it is, at the bottom of the page. I hate their website so much.
Full diagram here. Have I mentioned that I hate this website?
Further down that page:
An international team of 50+ scientists examined 46 dire wolf remains for viable DNA and were able to recover 0.1% of the genome.
Our team examined the two most promising dire wolf samples, uncovering 55x more DNA to expand on the findings of the international team.
So, 5.5% of the genome. That's an impressive increase! Not exactly "de-extinction" though. (They mention different numbers elsewhere in the same infographic[!], so who knows how reliable any of this is. It's the most detailed explanation I've seen of what they actually did though.)
Apparently Colossal posted a diagram of the dire wolf skeleton that's riddled with mistakes in the labeling.
It's spelled "labelling".
Relations with the Russians are, according to Vice-Admiral Rune Andersen, chief of the Norwegian Joint Headquarters, "professional and focused". The two sides wish each other a Happy Christmas in a typed message across their line.So the Russians have to go first. Norway knows how to deal.
Bring back cave bears and cave lions. We've grown to arrogant as a species in their absence.
not having even looked at the paper but having seen a photo of the creature, you can't convince me it's not a DOGGO. Bring treats.
If they were *really* shady they would have chosen Romulus, Remus, and Arya.
"Bring back cave bears and cave lions."
Or just work on creating dire versions of everything. An aurochs would basically be a direcow, so that's already under way. Felis sylvestris would be a direcat. But we clearly need direrabbits, diresheep, direbadgers and direstoats.
49: Chimpanzees and humans share about the same percentage of genes and, IIRC, something similar may have occurred in the lineages of chimpanzees and humans
See here for additional links.
Humans are essentially direchimps.
But not in a cool, awesome way.
https://youtu.be/oIEhVE2kQgQ
So great. I just wish they'd kept on using mostly sign language.
74: if anything, chimps are direhumans. Not bigger, but far stronger and fiercer.
Cauliflower could be profitably rebranded as "direcabbage".
With his trusty sidekick Direpence.
73: this is always everyone's first thought, in this case followed by: great, so if chimps go extinct we're good to go editing 20 human genes, mostly for body hair and bulk, and voila!
So hey, teo, I'm still back at the paragraph in 49 but obviously all the communications here are not at a professional level, even if the science is more robust (which I doubt, frankly). They tell us 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." Okay, so when did the gray wolf and dire wolf diverge? "[T]he 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." WTF. How can it possibly be more closely related to gray wolves than to, say, coyotes? This seems like complete bullshit plus, in passing, an interesting finding about actual dire wolf origins that might be consistent with the work started in 2021?
I think we all know where this is headed, though: a shiba inu with 20 gene edits. DIRE DOGE.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by...
90 doesn't seem completely implausible. If the dire wolf is a hybrid of Xenocyon and some sort of wolf-like ancestor, and if there are no surviving members of Xenocyon's lineage (which there aren't) then logically the dire wolf's closest living relative must be close to the other ancestor - the one that is close to wolves and dholes and jackals.
Allowing billionaires to genetically engineer carnivorous animals seems bad
Spike is going to shit a brick when he learns about Crufts.
"That? That's a corgi. Sort of dog. The Queen used to breed them."
SPIKE: (flees in incoherent terror)
According to wikipedia (which may not be up-to-date), you're right in 90 that Dire Wolves are equally closely related to wolves, coyotes, jackals, dholes, etc. See the family tree here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canina_(subtribe)
Worse. They've been at it for centuries. Gaze, if you dare, on the pitiless face of the Hounds of Absolute Monarchical Power!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalier_King_Charles_Spaniel
92: I'm questioning how the closest relative of the dire wolf can be a gray wolf, which is itself quite closely related to other Canis species. The closest relative of the gray wolf is the domestic dog. Gray wolves and coyotes can and do hybridize. I don't see how a dire wolf can be closer to a gray wolf than it is to a coyote given all the other information here. (Constant hybridization with Beringian wolves and so on? No idea.) It doesn't seem plausible to me. But it is a serendipitous fact if you want to make a genetically modified cool-looking wolf and you already know how you want to do it.
Could we stop pretending we don't know the difference between selective breeding and genetic engineering?
I think the issue here is about "the" not about "closest." Dogs and coyotes are also a closest living relatives of the dire wolf.
The grey wolf has the advantage of also being morphologically similar, so makes more sense as a starting point than a chihuahua would, but yeah, I don't think there's any sense in which it's *the* closest relative, it's just *a* closest relative.
makes more sense as a starting point than a chihuahua would
Chihuahuas are pretty dire already, so further work in that direction seems unnecessary, not to mention unwise.
At some point I was reading up on how much pre-columbian dog DNA has survived to the present, and chihuahuas are one of the main candidates for still having a reasonable (but still small) pre-columbian ancestry.
90: I think UPETGI's interpretation in 100 is probably correct, and the claim could be more clearly stated as "grey wolves are one of several modern species that are equally closely related to dire wolves, and no more closely related species have survived to the present." They're putting a spin on it to justify using grey wolves as their basis for the genetic engineering but it could still be true in that sense.
That would be consistent with the findings of the 2021 paper. Their time of diversion estimate and the stuff about hybridization is different but that's the sort of thing you would expect newer research with more robust data to find.
The UX is, to be blunt, dire.
Maybe this is the game they're playing. "No, no, you misunderstood. We just said we created some wolves that really suck. Just terrible wolves."
100,103: Not disagreeing, just emphasizing: it's just straightforwardly wrong to claim the gray wolf is *the* dire wolf's closest relative, and wrong in a way that a responsible phylogeneticist would not stumble into. The closest relative is that whole other clade, or at least would have been when I was current on phylogenetics 20 years ago.
re: 102
My brother-in-law has a Xoloitzcuintli, which is another pre-Columbian breed. The Mexican hairless ones. I think the actual DNA content is quite low, though.
His is a surprisingly athletic, powerful looking dog.
Fox News is direCNN.
Microsoft Office is direGoogle Drive.
Teams is dire Skype (and is now tearing its throat out).
Noem may be a horrible person, but she's done something most Democrats would need dare. Pointed a gun at the head of an ICE agent.
||
I know no one seemed super interested in the non-Chotiner side of the theologian interview I shared the other day, but here's a longer piece in the Guardian about anti-empathy discourse on the Christian right. Fascinating to me in general, and (somewhat embarrassingly) I didn't know the history of the word.
|>
The article in 24 has been updated:
New evidence about the phylogenetic place held by dire wolves was reported in April 2025. Colossal Bioscience announced that DNA extracted from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull yielded more complete genomic data for the species and suggested it was the result of hybridization between two ancient, now extinct canid lineages. ... The research was not yet peer-reviewed at the time of the announcement.
There is a new article as well:
The results, Shapiro says, show the dire wolf was the result of hybridization between two ancient, now extinct canid lineages. Dire wolves' closest modern relatives are wolves, coyotes and dholes, and the new findings suggest they share 99.5 percent of their DNA with gray wolves. That finding is set to be detailed in a paper that will be posted to the preprint server arXiv.org. (Such preprint studies have not yet been peer-reviewed.)
It is about to experience dire peer review.
Apparently, that's not how it's pronounced.
Oh cool, I went to grad school with the paleoecologist who's calling the Colossal dire wolf a "designer dog" in the new article.
That new article helps clarify things a lot. I'm glad to hear they are eventually planning to publish this somewhere. It's genuinely interesting research for understanding dire wolf genetics regardless of the cloning part.
And you got people like CBS out there trumpeting the full monty:
The dire wolf, which went extinct 12,500 years ago, revived by biotech company
A number of paragraphs in you learn there are skeptics.
There have been links to legal opinions on Bluesky, and for some reason I find that font hard to read. But those are very small images. Is it better at full size on an iPad or do I need to print them? I should get new reading glasses over my contacts. Finding the progressives are too strong.
Finding the progressives are too strong.
A lot of people are saying that about BlueSky, but I really like it.
Apparently, Trump is now giving 2 hours speeches. Like Chavez or something.
Anyway, at least Keystone leaked in North Dakota, not Nebraska.
I have to say that the dire wolf does not look significantly more dire than a normal grey wolf. It's like five cm higher at the shoulder. Weak.
Now a giant panda is a pathetic animal in almost every way but if you put it next to a normal panda, you notice the difference!
When I awoke the dire wolf, six hundred pounds of sin, was grinning at my window, all I said was, "Come on in."
112:
From the many years I spent being bored as an Anglican I remember exactly one piece of dogma, because they read it out at the service literally every week, which they presumably did because it's the one thing a Christian needs to remember at least well enough to misquote on a web magazine:
Jesus said, love the lord your god, and love your neighbor as yourself; in these two commandments are contained all the law and the prophets.
John W Compton, a professor of political science and author of the 2020 book The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors.
Anyone read that?
I have to admit there was one way I underestimated Trump. I assumed his stupidity and dementia would mean other world leaders would just take advantage of him. That's in part true, but I forgot that his sadist and bully instincts were still intact. His humiliation of Netanyahu over tariffs, claiming US ownership of Gaza, and forcing him to listen through how Germans were nicer to Jews than Hamas was was, well,...[insert German word for the pleasure derived from watching one asshole humiliate another asshole who thought he could easily manipulate the first asshole through symbolic brown nosing.]
Also see Elon Musk and Elise Stefanik.
And lest I forget, also potentially Iranian nuclear talks, which would be the most satisfying thing of all.
At this point, I may support Iran in a US/Israeli-Iran war. Iran's leaders suck but they seem to have saner foreign policy.
131: Congratulations on remembering the main point better than all the loud Christians.
The road crews don't even want to pickup a dead deer here. I can't imagine getting them to remove a hippo.
Which is floating in a lake full of crocodiles.
In which context, it's kind of impressive that the actual bottleneck they have is a shortage of excavators.
Surely the crocodiles are not so much part of the problem as part of the solution.
If America still has a biowar lab someone should ask them if crocodile stomach acid can handel anthrax spores.
Or if crocodiles can even catch anthrax - I think it's just mammals and maybe birds?
Report from DOI is that in his "introduction" speech today Burgum mentioned the dire wolf thing and gave it high praise as the kind of thing Interior would be into. Tied in a very stupid way to the Endangered Species Act, about which he had more stupid stuff to say.
Overall report on his speech is that it was deeply insulting to staff, rambling and Trump-like. He was bringing "humility" to the department...
The humility was not his attitude, it was for the staff to not be such know-it-alls. Also AI will get be big in solving global warming, so no going after AI now for climate change reasons.And solar suffers a catastrophe every night when the sun goes downso cannot rely on that.
solar suffers a catastrophe every night
Gosh, I'm sure that nobody before him thought about that or did anything to look for a solution.
Burgum is giving Ford a run for his money in the Worst Doug competition.
147.3 - I dunno, my late, greatest generation father, a veteran of the Pacific War, would have declared MacArthur the hands down winner, so far ahead that no one was even in second. I think many of his peers would have agreed and were overjoyed when MacArthur finally faded away.
For thinking he was Truman's commander? Or for things during WWII?
He was a good shogun, I think.
My "contact" is fairly tapped in politically, but was surprised at just how bad and Trumpy the speech was--stupid, arrogant, bullying, and rambling. Their wishful view of Burgum coming in was
1) Touted as a less "extreme" possible Trump VP pick (contrasted at the time with Noem or Lake)
2) Western state governor, so probably at least conversant with matters of interest to DOI.
I an not that familiar with Burgum's specifics, I guess 2) was probably "conversant" and hostile to DOI. But I also suspect all of these already bad people in the Trump admin are getting to live their worst version of themselves as they try embrace the Trump/Musk/Stephen Miller/Vought zeitgeist of the administration. Rubio is an example.
149: I assume during WWII. Pacific vets I knew regarded him as a vain showboat, more concerned with his image than the best strategies and well-being of the troops.
Jeez. Aren't you going to quibble at least?
153: Who's the worst Mossy?
Mos Def seems pretty chill, for a rapper who came up in the 1990s. Mossadegh is probably the most consequential, but I don't know enough to say good or bad.
Doug from The Coolies' second album seems pretty bad, but then the internet tells me about various criminals named Doug, including at least one serial killer. Also he's fictional.
The Douglases were lords and earls and such in lowland medieval Scotland, so I'm sure there was plenty of killing and other crimes, though on a retail or at least artisanal scale.
As far as causing deaths, MacArthur's certainly the leading Doug, by virtue of having commanded an army in industrial warfare. I don't know enough about the campaigns to say whether he made good strategic choices. I guess I can quibble by saying that the well-being of the troops is not always the best strategy (cf. Zhukov, Georgy-not-Doug).
Who else would be in the running for Worst Doug?
I imagine Douglas Haig oversaw a good deal more dying, though AFAIK his military reputation has improved with time.
155:
With the help of his kinsman Thomas Dickson, son of Earl Richard Keith and Castellan of Douglas Castle, Douglas and his small troop were hidden until the morning of Palm Sunday, when the garrison left the battlements to attend the local church. Gathering local support, he entered the church and the war-cry "Douglas! Douglas!" went up for the first time. Some of the English soldiers were killed and others taken prisoner. The prisoners were taken to the castle, now largely empty. All the stores were piled together in the cellar, the wine casks burst open and the wood used for fuel. The prisoners were then beheaded and placed on top of the pile, which was set alight. Before departing, the wells were poisoned with salt and the carcasses of dead horses. The local people soon gave the whole gruesome episode the name "the Douglas Larder."
157: Yeah, now that's the kind of artisanal hand-crafted murder that you don't see much of anymore. Douglases were also involved on both sides of the Black Dinner, inspiration for GRRM's Red Wedding.
156: ooh, I had quite forgotten about him. Two million British casualties. Yes, there's your industrial scale.
159: How in the Tommy Franks did I forget him? Burgum is going to have to really up his game to stay in the running here.
Really depressed by this press conference with Trump and Bukele. Just completely thumbing their nose at the rule of law.