Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Please don’t feed the bears.

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

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

We’re not going back!

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Bark louder, little dog.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

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Late Night Open Thread: Tales of the Jagoffwagon

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Late Night Open Thread: Tales of the Jaggoffwagon
 
A little schadenfreude, as we gird up for the work week…


(Optimus Prime, Transformer)

Elsewhere in the Cybergork Universe:


Responses from a whole bunch of snarksters…

didn’t even flag the load smh

Maybe he didn’t think he would actually get far and was just proving his concept?

They didn’t come out before he started driving, so why would you expect that to change just because he drove? Checkmate, moran!

I’m mostly thinking how lucky it is they fell out *before* they got on the highway.

I wonder if there are connection points for straps in the bed? I’m guessing not.
ok, I looked it up. It’s got tie-down connection points, this guy has no idea he needs to use them.

After seeing what happened to the bumper of a cybertruck when a guy tried to pull half the load it is rated for, my guess is the tie-downs are secured by an Elmer’s glue stick.

HE’S IN THE PRO PARKING. 😂

Getting laughed at by the contractors, I hope 😉

That’s Trex, plastic decking boards. Slippery stuff.
Yes, I’m pedantic.
Anyway, great stuff! 10/10 no notes.

In conclusion…

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Late Night Open Thread: Telegram, for Mr. Musk

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Adam has already written about Durov’s arrest in France, but I’m curious about Musk’s latest intermittent FREEZE PEACH!!! outburst in connection with the Telegram bust. Per Fortune, via MSN.com, “Elon Musk calls for release of Telegram founder Pavel Durov as arrest sparks debate whether X owner may be next”:

… The spectacular arrest of Pavel Durov on the tarmac of Paris’s Le Bourget airport just after his private jet touched down on Saturday elicited an intense debate over where exactly the boundaries of protected free speech end and the rule of law begins.

Durov is being held in France initially without formal charges, but authorities could accuse the Telegram founder of failing to police illegal content and commerce conducted via Telegram.

Musk’s X is likewise in the crosshairs of European policymakers, with the EU Commission recently reminding him of its failure to observe the Digital Services Act that requires large platform owners to systematically clamp down on false and misleading content.

The entrepreneur, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, called on France to “free Pavel”, warning his arrest signalled dangerous times ahead for democracy.

“The 2nd amendment is the only reason long-term that the 1st amendment will be upheld,” he added, referring to the constitutionally-protected right in the United States to bear arms and exercise free speech…

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Good Non-Political News

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Hey everyone! Proof of life here. My book MS is in (and accepted!*). I just sent off the final (I hope) illustration list to both the design department and the picture researcher. So maybe…just possibly…I might be able to do the odd post here.

I got lots of thoughts about our political adventures, most notably that while I’m having as much fun with furniture fetishist Vance, this remains an existential fight, as Trump says the quiet part out loud: if he wins, this is our last election. But there are better front-pagers (and commenters) on this beat, so I thought I’d try to get some less immediately obvious takes on these times we’re living in.

And why not attempt to restart some bloggery with some decent news.  Biomedicine has been spinning off some amazing results lately.  Here are two that will do so much to relieve human suffering…

First: fascinating new insights on lupus:

A new study about the underlying mechanisms of lupus presents a novel way to potentially treat the autoimmune disease…

The study’s findings raise a “compelling idea” for a novel way to treat lupus, said Deepak Rao, a rheumatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the senior authors of the study.

The linked WaPo article is a good explainer. The TL:DR is that the research team–a collaboration between scientists at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Northwestern University–identified a specific mechanism within certain T cells that could produce the disregulation of the immune system that creates the damage associated with lupus. The work is VERY preliminary, but if the causal account holds up, the details of that mechanism suggest a way to address the disease at the cellular level.

Which is to say: clinical benefits, if any, are a long way off. But lupus is a wretched disease, and creating a detailed molecular account of the disease process is a crucial foundational step towards being able to treat and hopefully reverse its effects.

Second: this is just cool…

NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a very intriguing rock on the surface of Mars.

An arrowhead-shaped rock observed by the rover has chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. To be absolutely clear, this is not irrefutable evidence of past life on Mars, when the red planet was more amenable to water-based life billions of years ago. But discovering these colored spots on this rock is darn intriguing and has Mars scientists bubbling with excitement.

As the reporter, Eric Berger emphasizes, this isn’t a discovery–yet.  Dots on a rock do not in themselves admit the conclusion that microbes once lived on Mars.

Good Non-Political News

They could be–but the limit of what can be gleaned at this distance is, as Berger writes, “The distinctive colorful spots, containing both iron and phosphate, are a smoking gun for certain chemical reactions—rather than microbial life itself.”

To go further, chunks of Mars have to make it back to earth. Sample return is a hugely challenging mission. I hope it happens in my lifetime. But whether or not it does, this is still at once a delightful possibility and, in some sense, a work of art. Perseverance serves no practical purpose. It was made and it performs because enough of us find the attempt to understand nature beautiful in the same fashion that any other gift to our senses and our minds can satisfy.

And here, alas, is where politics reenters the conversation–at least for me. Science is valuable because it contributes to human flourishing. Often in the most obvious, material ways: coming up with a cure for lupus would be a big deal, changing and saving lives. And it can be fun, provide joy, prompt deeper thinking and feeling, as Perservance’s off-roading demonstrates. Neither happens unless as a society we are willing to spend a ton of money on curiosity (the human impulse, not that other Mars hot rod).  Supporting science in DC has historically been a pretty reliably bipartisan affair–but that’s increasingly no longer true.

The range of threats a Trumpist GOP poses to the science and the research capacity of the US is beyond the reach of this late night post; I know the commentariat has all the expertise needed to fill in that story.

For now, let me not harsh the mellow too much. Hairless bipeds remain capable of doing great things. We can enjoy them.

G’night all. This thread is as open as will be the first 7-Eleven on Deimos.

Image: Hendrik ter Brugghen, Mars Asleep, 1629

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: To Boldly Go

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Sunday Morning Open Thread 15

*Excellent* message discipline from Rep. Shontel Brown!

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Fly Me to the Moon

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Fifty-five years! Way to make some of us feel old…

The cosmos is providing a full moon for the 55th anniversary of the first lunar landing this weekend, and plenty of other events honor Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s giant leap.

Aldrin, 94, the last surviving member of the Apollo 11 crew, headlines a gala at the San Diego Air and Space Museum on Saturday night. He’ll be joined by astronaut Charlie Duke, who was the voice inside Mission Control for the July 20, 1969 moon landing.

Museum President Jim Kidrick couldn’t resist throwing a bash “55 years to the day of one of the most historic moments in not only the history of America, but in the history of the world.”…

… [Y]ou can explore all things Apollo 11 on a special website by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

If nothing else, soak in the full moon Saturday night into Sunday morning.

Here’s a rundown of some Apollo 11 tributes…


BOLD PAC

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Always Look on the Bright Side

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Just nine more sleeps till the start of the Paris Olympics!


 


Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Always Look on the Bright Side
 
Speaking of J.D. Vance shifty-eyed critters wearing too much eyeliner…

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Late Night Open Thread: But Can A CyberTruck Serve Briefly As A *BBQ Grill*?

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Lol. The "Cybertruck will act as a boat" but, if you drive your brand new Cybertruck with 26 miles on it in a tiny bit of water, not even reaching the cabin, your insurance company may total the car as not worth the cost of repairing your $100k dumpster on wheels.
electrek.co/2024/06/24/t…

[image or embed]

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick.bsky.social) Jun 24, 2024 at 1:20 PM


(Another commentor added “Maybe he meant it will act as a boat in that the best two days with it are the day you get it and the day you get rid of it”)

Albert Burneko, at Defector — “I Would Like To Put Lunchmeat On The Cybertruck”:

I saw my first Tesla Cybertruck in person a couple weeks ago. I’d driven my family into an outer satellite town of D.C., well outside our normal circuits, and there it was, around the corner from us in a parking garage. It looked dumpy and top-heavy and cheap. You could spot its poor assembly at a distance: the weird uneven gaps between panels, the way light angled off the front and rear doors differently because they were misaligned and not even uniformly finished. While I was walking toward it, a whole other person happened by, spotted it, and erupted into giggles.

It was a bright, blazing hot afternoon. I did not touch the Cybertruck, but I did find myself wondering how hot its amazingly shabby-looking stainless steel body panels might be just then, or later on, when its owner took it home. I thought of the stainless steel propane grill my father-in-law used to have, and how just lifting the lid of that grill on a sunny day could blister your fingers. The thought came to me all at once, whole and fully crystallized, that I would like to slap a big ol’ slice of bologna onto that Cybertruck.

I did not think about this further, because it’s an insane thought to have. But a few days later, driving my kids home from a soccer game on another broiling sunny afternoon, we spotted another Cybertruck headed down our street, less than a mile from our house. It looked like shit. It looked far worse than the one in the relatively dim parking garage. The bright sunlight did those ugly brushed panels no favors: You could pick out, even headed the opposite way at 35 miles per hour, all the very many places where the light glanced off it irregularly, absorbed or refracted unevenly by a zillion oily fingerprints. It looked water-stained. It looked like a toaster for a divorced giant. Once again I found myself consumed by the idea of plopping a nice pink slice of mortadella on that sucker.

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