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Trump's recent statements about using the military against the "enemy within" (e.g, the left, anyone who would have power over him, etc.) have prompted John Kelly, his chief of staff for much of his term, to say Trump repeatedly wanted to use the military against Americans when he was president, but lacked generals sufficiently loyal to him.Here's the full NYTimes interview, giftlinked (I've never...

Apple experts divide time into "before Honeycrisp" and "after Honeycrisp," and apples have never tasted so good.

The Bird Daughters is a short comic by Madeline McGrane about an unusual royal family's relationship to their duties. Have you even read any weird fantasy today? Now you can rectify that! Be advised: some gore.Via Str8aura on tumblr. The comic is also on the author's website, but i decided to use the tumblr link as the main one because it reads better there...

The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school. "But plowing billions of dollars into an approach with results ranging from neutral to regressive is deeply unfortunate, given that better alternatives exist. If the goal is to help low-income students and to train more primary-care doctors, targeted relief for low-income students or for people who go into primary care would work better than blanket subsidies." (Ungated...

A surprisingly potent technique can boost your short and long-term recall – and it appears to help everyone from students to Alzheimer's patients. When trying to memorise new material, it's easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform. Yet taking the occasional down time – to do literally nothing – may be exactly what you need. Just...

Native and introduced mice are quietly pollinating Australian plants, study shows. Flowers can be pollinated in a multitude of ways, and now a series of studies is showing just how big a role rats and mice play when it comes to Australian flora.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun spends some time unpacking the implications of sanitizing, softening, and aggressively commoditizing the originally absurdist, monstrous post-human Imperial war-slaves of the Warhammer 40K universe in: Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine

In a first-season episode of Boston Legal (Wikipedia, TVTropes), attorney Alan Shore (played with laser precision by James Spader) makes an absolute meal out of intimidating a prospective witness against his client. Here's is that scene, in all it's circa-2014 YouTube glory, with the added value of actor Will Radford in the comments describing how he portrayed the unfortunate target, and his experience filming...

I was hoping that Georgia Ray would turn out to be the John Berger of microscopy with her article in Asterisk Magazine about the historical trajectories of microbiology. Instead, the piece turned out to be a wonderful exploration of "biological dark matter" and the limits of human efforts to understand the tiny other beings that suffuse our planet. What we know now is that...

. . . in the fullness of his years (1928-2024) after a fall. In the 1970s, he developed a cheap and cheerful Petri dish test for whether 'chemicals' mutated bacterial DNA. That indicated that they might cause cancer in humans. "To Ames and Gold, that meant that the public should understand that a synthetic carcinogen is not always worth worrying about, compared to ones...

Machines of Loving Grace Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publishes a 14,000-word post on How AI Could Transform the World for the Better, detailing how the 5-10 years following availability of an "Expert-Level Science and Engineering" AI, or "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will play out advances in biology, (Amodei's specialty,) neuroscience, economic development, governance, and work and meaning.Amodei draws on Iain M. Bank's...

"I've been chasing after snakes my whole life" In 2017, biologist Mike Kirkland was tasked with putting together a three-month pilot program for python bounty hunters [...] And so he found himself with just six weeks to assemble his team. "We started by choosing twenty-five spirited individuals from the public," Kirkland recalls. He remembers reading Kalil's résumé: "She had martial arts experience, she had...

This wasn't just a rivalry between competitors. Matthews had been obsessed with Thomas Flohr, VistaJet's founder, for about a decade. Matthews and his AirX employees had been emailing, at times anonymously, with VistaJet suppliers, bondholders, ratings firms and journalists. He and his staffers raised questions about VistaJet's corporate structure. They called out its $4.25 billion in debt. And they portrayed Flohr as unethical and...

"Any trans person's story would be labeled as pornography... I think you can see where this is going." [A repost of a previously seen link since there has been a ton of new content posted since the last discussion! Also to amplify its timely and important message.] A bunch of comic book artists got together and made a Project 2025 summary comic, because 900...

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, cartoonist Chris Ware pens an appreciation of the great Richard ScarryVideo of an enthusiastic parent & their child reading a much-loved copy of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go A small gallery of Richard Scarry original art Scarry originals on Heritage Auctions

A storm surge on Tuesday has flooded the coastal town of Kotzebue in Alaska. Dr Kat Napaaqtuk has gathered some photos and videos to show the dramatic impact on local homes, including her father's house in 2022 and yesterday. Kotzebue, as Napaaqtuk writes, "is at sea level. It's surrounded by water on 3 sides." In the Arctic, that puts it on the front line...

Tasmania's convict records are part of the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register along with the convicts records for New South Wales and Western Australia.The Founders and Survivors Digitization Project is a dataset of life course history generated from the extensive collection of Tasmanian convict records between 1802-1853. The project involved "a mass-digitisation of over 100,000 images, manual transcription of the convict records,...

"She helped me lure him": How bird expert captured cockatoo stuck in supermarket for weeks. A cockatoo named Mickey became trapped inside Macarthur Square Shopping Centre at Campbelltown in Sydney's south-west last month. He "took up residence" at the Coles supermarket before he was captured by a local bird expert.

Think of it like a social media site, but for the dead. People can use it to "visit" the graves of their loved ones—in some cases, maybe even for the first time. But it's not just for mourning or nostalgia: The revelations held in cataloged graves have proven vital for everyone ranging from historians to journalists to your aunt who is really into your...

On the Thursday evening before the Thanksgiving holiday long weekend, the Review of the Federal Approach to Pandemic Science Advice and Research Coordination, calling for fundamental changes in how Canada handles medical information and manages public health in a crisis, was released without fanfare.Though delayed since at least May and published without a press release, news conference or announcement of any kind, Paul Wells...

You might have heard that ASMRer Gibi recently released a homemade ASMR version of the entirety of Shrek. Want to be part of a collaborate movie remake yourself? A Back to the Future collab was recently announced (Twitter, Tumblr) - but if that sounds like too much work, MSCHF recently started making their fourth frame-by-frame Free Movie: David Lynch's 1984 Dune film, for anyone...

This combination of the now-familiar and the new-unknown are among the various factors that come together to create the irresistible pull of these objects. This re-iterated fascination and the overwhelming desire that follows is central to my art practice. from Real Life Tetris [Art-Ctrl-Del]

Vision Video is a goth-pop band from Athens, Georgia. Gen-Xers like yours truly will find their sound to be very familiar as evidenced by their influences; the Cure, New Order, the Smiths, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, among others (I swear they could take a Time Machine and drop into my teenage years with nary a hitch). They also have a flair for horror movies....