riley

GottaLaff , 1 day ago to random

Finally a #WompWomp in this case.

Via Katie Phang:

JUST IN: Judge #Cannon entering an Order denying #Trump's motion for a Franks hearing, but reserving ruling on the balance of his "Motion for Relief Relating to the Mar-a-lago Raid and Unlawful Piercing of Attorney-Client Privilege."

Cannon finds that Trump has not made the requisite showing that the search warrant affidavit contains "any material false statements or omissions." As such, he doesn't get a Franks hearing. #legal

riley , 1 day ago

@GottaLaff Hang on, how does she get to make factual findings in a jury trial?

riley , 1 day ago

@GottaLaff Ordinarily, even SCOTUS is supposed to remand to trial court for further factual findings. And in a trial court, the finder of fact is a jury, provided that the defendant remembers to check the box to demand a jury trial.

GottaLaff , 9 days ago to random

Thou shalt separate church & state, you power-hungry ChristoFascists.

“#Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry”

https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-ten-commandments-displayed-classrooms-571a2447906f7bbd5a166d53db005a62?taid=66731eff5988a9000164aaff&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter

riley , 8 days ago

@intothewestaway

Be careful what you wish for.

Here in Germany, grocery stops are closed on Sundays and public holidays. It can be quite an inconvenience for people who work on weekdays.

@GottaLaff

futurebird , 12 days ago to random

Exciting ant queen collecting trip in AZ. Why does it feel like all the coolest ants are in the South and South West. It's not fair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV1CkkkKbOM

riley , 12 days ago

@futurebird Is it known why colonies don't readjust? Is there some sort of neurological imprinting on local environmental conditions, for example?

riley , 12 days ago

@futurebird Some species of ants kidnap other ants and make them work for them. Do these ants have adjustment problems? Are there known variability to different ant species' ability to adjust to being enslaved?

futurebird , 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago) to random

How bad off would you be if you had just one genome?

An alien sends you through a transport device— on arrival every fungus, bacteria, mite, virus and plant has been eliminated from your body. You are now at the alien spaceport which is sterile, you can NOT acquire earth faunetta and floretta here. How sick would you be? Are you gonna die from this?

riley , 14 days ago

@stevegis_ssg There are real-life genetic disorders, mitochondrial wasting diseases, that amount to the mtDNA being sufficiently broken that mitochondria can't be replenished after birth. They take a couple of years to kill.

Awful diseases, but they're also exciting in the sense that some of these disorders can be permanently cured with a single-dose genomic medicine. We can't replace the broken mitochondria themselves yet, but their brokenness is often in them not being able to make a small number of very specific proteins; if genes for making these proteins were transplanted into nuclear DNA of a suitably chosen tissue, then, depending on the specific conditions, the availability of such a protein might be able to bypass the mitochondrial brokenness, and allow mitochondria to reproduce properly again.

These wonderful and life-saving medicines are usually priced in millions of dollars per dose, though, because capitalism. And in some cases, the dose must be administered very soon after birth, lest the slow mitochondrial depletion cause, say, irrepairable brain damage.

@futurebird @semitones

riley , 14 days ago

@stevegis_ssg Of course, if the alien's transporter is too clever for its passengers' good, it might undo such a therapy on the premise that the patched-up cells are "foreign".

@futurebird @semitones

riley , 13 days ago

@stevegis_ssg There are some organisms with ridiculously large genomes, so a premise for a SciFi story: these plants had to go through such an alien's Interstellar Seeding Teleporter in the distant past, and their DNA got packed together with their microbiome's many DNAs, just to make the trip.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/science/largest-genome-fern-plant.html

@futurebird @semitones

futurebird , 17 days ago to random

Lost in all the jokes about "I'd rather be electrocuted than eaten by a shark." -Trump

(It's right up there with "But let me tell you something that I found out: A werewolf can kill a vampire. Did you know that? I never knew that." - Herschel Walker Ah, yes, Republican wisdom!)

But lost in all the kerfuffle was another curious comment from Trump about sharks:

"I watched some guys justifying it ... They bit off the young lady’s leg ... These people are crazy."

So, about THAT. 1/

riley , 17 days ago

@futurebird Oh my. Pumpkin must have bitten off somebody's leg! :blobcatsweat:​

futurebird , 28 days ago to random

The verdict may not matter to Trump's base, but I do think there is a group of people it matters to who are being overlooked: the people who were already likely to vote for Biden.

A Trump acquittal would have sapped trust in legal systems and government further. It would fueled apathy. Hopelessness and apathy can reelect Trump.

riley , 28 days ago

@futurebird Well, but then there's the "I like the ones who didn't get convicted" faction.

Authoritarian followers are drawn to "legitimate" authority. A felony conviction is, to a subset of them, a strong signifier against one being legitimate as an authority figure.

The ones claiming him to be a martyr will be much louder than the ones turning away from him, though.

GottaLaff , 1 month ago to random

😏 Via Emptywheel: 1/...

Just for shits and giggles, someone like JaredEMoskowitz
should demand a hearing on why the FBI is so inept that--according to Trump--they attempted to assassinate him knowing full well he was not present for the assassination attempt.

I guess Jasmine Crockett will have to do the job, since she's on the Jim Jordan Weaponizes Congress Committee.

riley , 1 month ago

@GottaLaff :blobcatgiggle:​

Lucia , 1 month ago to random

The best thing about Linux is that it guarantees you will never have to wait on phone line for Windows customer support ever again 😂

Just enter your problem in your browser and it has probably already been solved and explained by a bunch of nerds on a forum somewhere who are getting impatient about solving such mundane problems for us less experienced folx.

But... Back before smartphones were invented (unless you count Blackberry) and my problem was no internet connectivity, solving problems was much harder lol.

riley , 1 month ago

@futurebird Putting out deliberately wrong condescension sounds kind of abusive, though.

@Lucia

GrimmReality , 1 month ago to random

"A handful of cretinous shitsacks who fully legalized bribery in America because they hold to an ideology that insists rich, conservative people are inherently superior and should have carte blanche to rule unfettered by laws turned out to also take fuck-tons of bribes, dismissed every suggestion they account for that because those suggestions came from lowly pleb scum, and materially participated in an effort to end democracy in America" sure feels like a plot twist every last person with critical thinking skills should have seen coming.

riley , 1 month ago

@GrimmReality Putting corrupt people in charge of laws exactly matches Pumpkin's practice of putting anti-education people in charge of education, anti-environment people in charge of EPA, and anti-tax people in charge of IRS.

18+ pluralistic , 1 month ago to random

Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is manufactured far from the company's Seattle headquarters, in a non-union shop in Charleston, South Carolina. At that shop, there is a cage full of defective parts that have been pulled from production because they are not airworthy.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

1/

18+ riley , 1 month ago

@pluralistic In other words, these unscrupulous executives were so bad at running a plane company badly that they didn't even know where all the bodies were buried.

benroyce , 1 month ago to random

I need the help of #mastodon #philosophers.

Why the f*** would #Putin try to coopt the legacy of Immanuel #Kant?

It's probably not a serious question. Maybe it's just a silly immature dunk on #Germany / #German pride. Or maybe there's something darker in Kant's writings that #Russia thinks supports recent #Russian behavior (I have no reason to believe there is, I'm just openly musing).

Either way it's certainly a bizarre new front in the conflict: #philosophy war.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/german-chancellor-accuses-putin-of-misusing-philosopher-immanuel-kants-teachings/articleshow/109561696.cms

riley , 1 month ago

@benroyce If you wrote in a dystopian YA book that an association of mothers of fallen soldiers was declared a foreign agent, literary critics would complain about it being an implausible plot device. But the real world dystopias are not constrained by plausibility.