“On Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee served tacos outside the Republican National Committee’s headquarters—a nod to a trendy new acronym spelling out “Trump always chickens out.” If the point was to push a slogan that works perfectly in one area (tariffs, where the president is constantly ramping up and backing down) and less perfectly in several others (immigration and general authoritarianism, where the president is running roughshod over the rule of law), then perhaps it was mildly successful. Still, the endeavor was most notable because of a comment from Vice President JD Vance: “We have,” he tweeted, “the lamest opposition in American history.” On this—and perhaps this alone—it’s hard to disagree with the vice president. […] America has never needed an effective opposition party as badly as it needs one now; instead we have the most feckless Democratic leaders of the past 100 years.”
“Like, we’re being taught by mainstream culture that getting an English degree is a waste of time, and that thinking about the meaning of stories will not prepare you for life in the world. This, in turn, comes from the assumption that the purpose of a college degree is as a qualification for a middle-class career — rather than a sign that you have learned something that has value in its own right. That you have gained critical thinking skills, of exactly the sort that studying literature would give you. If I were feeling extra snarky, I might point out that critical thinking skills would indeed be a drawback if you’re trying to get a career pumping up the A.I. hype bubble, but never mind.”
Seeing a lot of people claim that Elon and Trump turning on each other is like Alien vs. Predator, and I’m sorry, but I simply can’t allow this kind of rhetoric to go unchallenged. While Alien is a horrific monstrosity driven only by an innate urge to destroy, Predator actually has a complex code of honor, and neither of them have any particular hatred for women, making this comparison a total non-starter. This situation is obviously like Freddy vs Jason. As you’ll no doubt recall, the plot of that movie was that Freddy thought that he could turn Jason into his mindless servant, but Jason started to steal the spotlight from Freddy, making him feel weak and impotent. Don’t cite the classics if you haven’t studied them!
pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with “the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right” and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes “now consider the vast power of grief in this setup” it never really stops considering
The relationship between ants and aphids or other sap- feeding insects is pretty widely known, but these ants (probably Lasiusclaviger) rear their root aphids inside their nest, farming them for both honeydew and meat. The ants are pale yellow because they almost never go aboveground, and considering that they’ve been known to eat the “excess” nymphs of their massive aphid herds, they probably don’t have much reason to leave their nest at all.
Root aphids like these aren’t normally found outside Lasius nests, and unlike freeliving aphids they have a special organ for holding honeydew until it’s ready to be milked by an ant.
I found this scene under a sheet of scrap metal, with the aphids left in loose piles with few or no roots available to drink sap from. I’m guessing that the ants moved them under the sun- warmed metal to heat them up and speed their growth and digestion between meals, a trick many ants practice on their larvae.
Wild that ants have been farming probably longer than humans have but we just don’t really bring it up much
