Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

The willow is too close to the house.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

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Respite

Cake Pony Club (Respite Open Thread)

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[Thanks to Sister Golden Bear for sharing these in the thread below!]

The Onion’s revived print edition has some exclusive content that doesn’t appear online. Earlier this week, a subscriber shared a real gem on Bluesky:

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me.It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

— RM (@dorsalstream.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T16:21:41.584Z

It’s just delightful. “But I am bigger than the children” popped into my head yesterday when I was justifying eating a second scone for breakfast. What’s even more delightful is that the good people at Merrymac Farm Sanctuary in Vermont decided to see if this op-ed applies across all horses. Video after the jump:

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Respite: Antimatter To Go Edition

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I’ve got a ton of rage-inducing stuff in the pipeline which I hope to start putting up here and there soon. But I promised some respite, and I’m a content-generator of my (often deadline-missing) word, so here’s a bit of fun for your Wednesday afternoon.

Humankind has just witnessed its latest never-before achievement. Yesterday a truck hit the road within the CERN campus near Geneva. It was transporting very, VERY carefully a cargo created within that laboratory, Europe’s particle physics research center.

That cargo was antimatter. To be precise, that truck transported a grand total of 92 antiprotons, produced in a facility at CERN known informally as the antimatter factory.

Antimatter is just like the ordinary matter you and I are made of, but for one crucial difference: each of its particles has the opposite charge of its ordinary matter counterpart. An antiproton has a negative charge instead of the positive charge of the protons in the nuclei in every atom in our bodies/the universe, for example. (There are a handful of other reversed properties, but that’s the gist.)

One other thing: matter and its anti- counterpart really, REALLY don’t like each other. If an anti-proton comes into contact with a scrap of ordinary matter, it goes BOOM!—the two particles annihilate.

Respite: Antimatter To Go Edition

So antimatter is hard to make in a world full of the other stuff, and once created (which CERN does by ramming protons into metal targets and then capturing a small fraction of the anti-protons created in the flash of collision energy), is even harder to preserve.

To simplify a lot, the way to hang on to antimatter in this vale of tears is to trap it in such a way that it never comes into contact with its surroundings. Doing so requires extreme cold—four degrees K above absolute zero; as near a complete vacuum as technically achievable; and superconducting magnets to hold the antiprotons in a tight enough grasp to ensure they never strike the sides of the containment vessel.

This is not an easy task in a lab. Now imagine what it would take if an antiproton developed an urge for going.* The need to figure out how to transport antimatter arose because the CERN is an electromagnetically busy place, and some of the experiments researchers hoped to perform with antimatter couldn’t be done except in a much more pristine setting—which is being built in Dusseldorf, Germany, 700 kilometers from Geneva.

So the laboratory’s antimatter folks found themselves in the trucking business. Getting antiprotons to become rolling cargo involved designing a traveling version of the containment technology used in the lab. Today marked the first test of the system. A box truck set off on what accumulated into a half-hour, eight kilometer drive—a careful journey, topping out at forty-two kilometers per hour.

Antimatter is implicated in a range of fundamental questions, among them, why there is so much matter and so little antimatter in our universe (which is a good thing from a wholly selfish point of view; if the Big Bang had generated equal amounts of both forms of matter, as some calculations suggest it could have, then there’d be nothing in our neighborhood but the residue of the vast mutual annihilation of the two species of particles). So there’s a lot riding on the ability first to create a storable stock of antiparticles and then to get it into the right environment for ultra-precise measurement.

A five mile jaunt on a secured right of way is only the beginning. It will be a while yet before you can DoorDash an order of anti-hydrogen with some frites on the side. But it is amazing for all of that. Human beings have managed to reach into the realm previously reserved for action on a cosmological scale—and now the antimatter show has hit the road.

To put this another way: we just witnessed the Winter Olympics. We saw extraordinarily accomplished people do exceptional things. While almost every last person watching will never attempt, much less land, a quad axel or a 1620 rotation on a freestyle jump, it is thrilling to witness, to know it can be done.

Same here, learning of those 92 antiprotons made it out and back safely using machinery that is at the very limit of what humankind knows how to build.

More detail at the source for this post.

*Inevitable soundtrack. Inevitable alternate soundtrack.

Image: Joseph Stevens, Enemies, 1854

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Taking a Break from the News

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Let’s use this as a mostly open thread (even politics is fine, as long as it’s good news).

Taking a Break from the News 23

These are the sidebar pics from February.
The days are going by so fast.

On The Road - Beckya57 - Baja Blast 3
Photo by Beckya57 (2/18/26)

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Respite: At Play in the Fields of the LLMs

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ETA: This was written for Balloon Juice but is crossposted at Inverse Square.

So…

Just this week I learned that through my home institution I have access to a suite of LLMs, including all the usual suspects (Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChapGPT, Meta’s Llama, and Google’s Gemini. MIT’s come up with a very nice interface to interact with all this artificial talent, and I’ve spent a couple of hours this weekend taking some of them out for a spin. (I’m avoiding OpenAI’s offerings both as a trivial protest and because I don’t trust anything about that company.

So far I’ve enjoyed Claude the most (the Haiku 4.5 model, if you’re wondering). Gemini is interesting, if a bit finicky. But what made me howl was the encounter I just had with Llama, Mr. Zuckerberg’s contribution to the genre. Context: over the holidays I  had a conversation with a senior person at another magnificent 7 tech firm who’d just seen a colleague leave to go to Meta who was utterly dismissive of the company and relieved to be rid of anyone dumb enough (in his view) to basically end his career in top-tier tech by grabbing Facebook bucks. Spoiler: after what you’ll read below, I can see where my friend was coming from.

So here’s the setup. I’ve been asking the various models what I hope are zero-consequence questions, queries in which no one could possibly get hurt if the LLMs wing their way to utter bollocks. A typical ask: map out the logical structure Einstein used in his 1905 light quantum behavior. That one tended to get an initial poor answer based on the idea that the paper centers on the then-pressing mystery of the photoelectric effect–a common mistake for people as well as machines. Pressing the models led Claude in particular to a much more sophisticated account of the paper drawing attention to the way Einstein used arguments from thermodynamics to propose the necessity of understanding light as discrete packets of energy.

Respite: At Play in t

The paper was about this new “heuristic” [Einstein’s term] view of light, and the photoelectric effect appears only as one experimental support for that view. (Much more here.)

After three or four trips through the query engineering needed to get a useful result I’d found my way down the list of models at my disposal to Meta’s Llama.  I was bored with light quanta and so asked a different, much simpler question:

“When a stock is overvalued as defined by a price to earnings ratio a standard deviation or more higher than historical market norms for that company’s sector, what are the typical events or analyses that drive that share price back down to the norm?”

Llama gave me a very stock answer that would have been at home in a high school economics class, so I decided to become a little more pointed in my pursuit:

Given that analysis, how would you explain Tesla’s long run of share prices between one and two orders of magnitude over that of other and much larger and more profitable car companies, like Toyota?

What followed was…first unimpressive and then hilarious. See for yourselves below the jump:

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Fun Facts That the Rest of Us May Not Know

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As I was reading the discussion this morning about jars that are hard to open, I thought it could be fun to have a thread where we share some of the tricks that make life easier.  And then I got email this morning telling me that xylitol is now being marketed as “birch sugar”.

I’m sure you guys all know that Xylitol is extremely dangerous, and even life-threatening, to dogs.  It’s in peanut butter and some ice cream and other things one might be tempted to give a dog.

Xylitol is extremely toxic to dogs. Even small amounts of xylitol can cause hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), seizures, liver failure, or even death. Cats, ferrets, and horses do not appear to be at risk from ingestion of xylitol.

So then I thought, hey, let’s combine tricks of the trade and some fun (and possibly not so fun) facts that all of us may not know.

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Respite: Some Vaccine Good News

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Meant to get this up earlier, but life got in the way,  so I’m just going to post this anyway, just to give us some good news to chew on.

First up on what I guess we can call vaccine Friday: we can now immunize you against a whole bunch of nasty viruses all at once–if you’re a mouse.

Quick Respite/Reminder: Vaccines Are...Kinda Good, Ya Know

This is from the Nature summary of the research, which was published today in Science.

Imagine if a nasal spray could make you immune not only to the viruses that cause COVID-19 and influenza, but to all respiratory diseases. In a paper1published in Science today, researchers describe a vaccine that has done just that. When given to mice, the vaccine protected them for at least three months against multiple disease-causing viruses and bacteria — including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 — and even quelling responses to respiratory allergens.

What’s coolest about this (to my historically inclined mind) is that the research that led to this new “universal” vaccine began with an investigation of an old one, the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine. BCG was developed over more than half a century in Germany and France in an effort that began with the isolation of the bacterium that’s the pathogen behind bovine tuberculosis, and culminated with work at the Pasteur Institute that followed Louis Pasteur’s signature move of attenuating a disease-causing microbe until it could induce immunity without making the person receiving the jab sick. It became the first vaccine for tuberculosis in 1921.

Fast forward a century, and the mechanism of action in that vaccine–activating the latent immune system, which, as Liam Drew writes in that Nature summary, is an  “evolutionarily ancient system [that] has a much broader reactivity than does the adaptive immune system”–led researchers to this:

In the latest study, Pulendran’s team developed a universal vaccine that targets the innate immune system, with three components. The first two are drugs that stimulate specific receptor proteins that can activate innate immune cells, such as macrophages that reside in the lungs. [link in the original]

The third component stimulates a population of T cells, which are part of the adaptive immune system. Their task is to keep sending signals to the innate immune system to maintain its active state.”

The vaccine works a treat in mice, but, as the linked Nature news piece makes clear, there are significant hurdles to overcome to create a safe and effective human version. But even so, this is a necessary and genuinely exciting first step.

The second bit of good vaccine news–not so much “good” as “promising” or potentially valuable–comes from a very early human trial of personalized mRNA vaccines for triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly nasty and intractable form of disease in which the cancer cells lack targets for the three most common drugs for the condition.

A paper published in Nature a couple of days ago provided the results of a trial of a vaccine approach that in essence persuades patients’ immune systems to react to the drugs, using mRNA as the vector–or as the clinical brief summary put it:

We conducted an exploratory trial of these personalized vaccines to assess their feasibility, safety and mechanism of action, rather than clinical benefit. We genetically sequenced tumour cells and healthy cells from 14 individuals with early-stage, surgically removed TNBC and used algorithms to select mutations that generate neoantigens. For each participant, we manufactured a personalized mRNA vaccine encoding up to 20 neoantigens. Once administered intravenously, the vaccine reaches lymphoid organs, where T cells are taught how to recognize the mRNA-encoded neoantigens.

This trial was intended to test the feasibility of the approach, but it did have an impact on the patients involved:

Ten participants remained disease-free, and one participant died of unknown causes. Relapse occurred in three individuals, enabling us to gain insights into possible resistance mechanisms.

Again–very early work, miles to go before we sleep, and caution around any small scale cancer study is not just warranted but required. Still, another exciting first step.

In sum: A) science is so cool. And B) while this is a respite post, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that this is reason ∞ that RFK Jr.’s antivaccine crusade–and his anti-mRNA technology pathology in particular–is such a disaster. Both of the studies above are fine preliminary research results. They won’t mean anything if the next stages of the work don’t happen, and if the US scientific shut down continues for much longer, the basic science that won’t get done will prevent any new such leads to appear. Worse, the damage so far to ongoing research program is such that we’ve already lost potential advances in human flourishing.

So yes, this is all good news. But there’s a lot of work to be done to make it possible for more such promising outcomes to arrive down the road.

Happy weekend, everyone. The thread, as usual, is open.

[Crossposted at Inverse Square]

Image Zhu Zhenji, Mouse and stone, 1427.

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Respite: Writing That Makes You Go “Damn….”

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NB: This is a crosspost from Inverse Square–yesterday evening, in fact. (The world kinda collapsed in around me and I didn’t have the time to close the loop then.)

This has been a bad news day, at least for my particular obsessions. I’ll post in a bit about Trump’s King Cnut moment–today’s declaration that climate change ain’t a problem, and hence all US regulation that presumes it is will die. The decision to reverse the EPA’s endangerment finding about greenhouse gasses will be tested in court and may fail there (though the Corrupt Six on the SC are not, to put it mildly, jurists that inspire confidence in the rule of law). But the potential for truly awful consequences is there and I ain’t happy.

But…one of the things about being human is that other humans have lit candles against the night, and we can take joy in that light even though the darkness is there. So as I was thinking about this week’s respite essay it struck me that I imagined myself into being a writer long before I ever seriously applied ass to chair and took on the actual work required. And that imagining sustained me as I encountered the various ways the search for words becomes a tangled labyrinth in  which one struggles to find a path through.

What launched that imagining? Reading, of course, which is hardly a revelation–but in particular sudden moments in reading when the raw power of language suddenly manifested itself. So I offer this up in the hopes that y’all might use a break from present horrors and dwell in a moment when some aesthetic experience knocked the legs from under you.

Enough preamble…here’s the post:

————————————————-

I knew I had to be a writer long before I actually did the work…laying words down on the page and moving them about until I truly knew what I thought, felt, meant.

How did I know this?

Because of the way my body responded when I came across a passage that regardless of its content—the plot—would ring out, vibrating in my gut as much as my head.

I can remember a few of those moments now, half a century and more on. There was the time I was deep in the dumps at the end of my second year of college and for some reason picked up Middlemarch. School was over; this wasn’t for a course; I wasn’t a literature student. Just happened across a copy and for no reason I can remember decided that the thing I needed to do while feeling completely at right angles to myself was read a gazillion page nineteenth century novel.

Respite: Writing That Makes You Go "Damn...."

The passage that knocked me off my feet came when Eliot broke the fourth wall to demand the reader’s sympathy for Causabon as a person whose self-preserving myths were crumbling just as he needs them most. That short moment was brilliantly written and smart, emotionally and intellectually. My depression lifted—really, just about in the moment of my reading that page and a half. Why? Because I suddenly recognized that it was possible to use words as lenses through which to see the world in previously unsuspected ways.

Then there was that brief exchange in the middle of Rudyard Kipling’s Captain’s Courageous that, again, was only minimally involved in the plot, but still stopped me dead the first time I read that book as an adult. Here it is:

Boylike, Harvey imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined Disko’s peculiar stoop at the wheel, Long Jack’s swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel’s round-shouldered but effective stroke in a dory, and Tom Platt’s generous Ohio stride along the deck.

“’Tis beautiful to see how he takes to ut,” said Long Jack, when Harvey was looking out by the windlass one thick noon. “I’ll lay my wage an’ share ‘tis more’n half play-actin’ to him, an’ he consates himself he’s a bowld mariner. Watch his little bit av a back now!”

“That’s the way we all begin,” said Tom Platt. “The boys they make believe all the time till they’ve cheated ‘emselves into bein’ men, an’ so till they die—pretendin’ an’ pretendin’. I done it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my first watch—harbor-watch—feelin’ finer’n Farragut. Dan’s full o’ the same kind o’ notions. See ‘em now, actin’ to be genewine moss-backs—very hair a rope-yarn an’ blood Stockholm tar.”

There we all are: cheating ourselves into our grown selves—and so until we die, pretending…

Image upon image and a moment of insight that makes this book something very much more than just a Boy’s Own tale. Early on I didn’t take any lessons from it; all it did was make make me want to put pen to paper (keys to screen?). It was just so good it made my fingers itch with desire make anything even remotely as explosive.

One more. This is what I read when I was trying to write for my college newspaper a remembrance of my father on the tenth anniversary of his death. I was stuck. What to say about someone I’d last known when I was ten?

Then I read this:

Indirectly, though, he [my brother] was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.”

Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it.”

“Only then will you understand what happened and why.

“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

Respite: Writing That Makes You Go "Damn...." 1

That’s almost the end of Norman Maclean’s novella, “A River Runs Through It.” I read the whole story in one sitting. I literally could not put it down. It’s a beautiful piece of course, tightly written, plenty of incident, more than a little humor to leaven the foreshadowed tragedy. And what it says in lines quoted above was clearly relevant to the task I had found impossible before I played hooky with a little fiction, and an almost unbelievable straight shot afterwards.

But looking back, what that brief excerpt did to or in me was to see in the act of writing the most extraordinary power I could ever desire: the ability to make worlds, explore them, and in doing so, understand what happens and why.

So that’s it from me. How about you?

What encounters with art—any art, words, sound, image, movement, all of the above—have taken you out of yourself? Where do you go when you need a moment of joy, or a sense that we do have the power we need so desparately at the current moment in this vale of tears?

And yeah, this thread is open, as usual.

Images: John Singer Sargent, Man Reading, undated.

Edma Morisot (yup…Berthe’s sister), Fisherman by a river, undated.

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