Is there a link?

Zelda - Link to the Past. I had so much fun playing Link Between Worlds.

I live in an extremely blue city in an extremely red state so I’ll be sitting in the fabled catbird seat.

Good. There was a scientific paper in the last week that didn’t fully discredit lab leak theory but made an extremely persuasive case—based on genetic analysis—that it was spread from bats to other mammals who were then hunted and brought to the wet market by randos.

Original paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867425003538

NY Times summary (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/science/covid-coronavirus-bats-genetics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.I08.JwTo.IDxqWwXodYVf

China (responsibly, to stop the spread) did cull some animals between the bat cave and Wuhan. No one who cares about science will ever say something with 100% certainty unless it breaks the laws of physics or whatever. And we’ll never find the pangolin (or whatever) someone sold at the wet market. But very little from scientists points to lab leak. It’s all political actors making that claim.

I, personally, grew up in the swamp so I just have a machete and pocket sand. And pocket glitter if it comes to that.

Once, but I don’t think it was aliens or supernatural or anything. I was walking home down embassy row in Washington, DC and we crossed 16th St near the White House, and we saw something that looked like a ball of lightening but that way too low to the ground. I asked, “Did y’all see that too?” and complete strangers agreed they did. There was no sound.

Obviously, in that neighborhood, you don’t assume “aliens!” or anything. It was weird to us civilians and I’m quite sure there’s a scientific or classified explanation. But it was definitely a “What the fuck was that?” moment for a half dozen strangers just walking down a busy street.

It didn’t move around or look like images of ball lightening, though it looked like lightening in a sphere in many ways. If it was some electrical explosion, we’d have presumably heard it. So, who knows? Governments and atmospheric conditions do weird shit sometimes.

Blue shell

The key scandal to me — I live in NOLA — is that the city council had tons of debates and put in place a process and limitations on facial recognition to limit false positives. But the new cameras aren’t city owned. A private company sells the cameras to businesses. Then, if a crime happens, the police call the company and ask if they “witnessed” anything. Then, the company basically texts officers a location if they think their facial recognition software spots the suspect.

And since we’re apparently the demonstration city (again) for a company, it’s no cost to taxpayers. Maybe that makes it no different from typical police work to you. But even if the product worked perfectly, and it likely doesn’t, I don’t like the idea of the NOPD secretly working overtime to find loopholes around laws and regulations.

And that’s before you get to collecting evidence for trial. Defense attorneys probably won’t have a hard time getting these cases dismissed unless there’s tons of other evidence.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk must have a lot of cases to handle since seemingly every far right case is filed in his court. We’re going to have so many judicial reforms to enact to bring back even the semblance of rule of law but add venue shopping to the list.

Later in the article, it talks specifically about the server-side archives being stored in plain text. That’s why the hacker was able to access messages. This isn’t about the local copies on phones.

When people started saying “The cruelty is the point.”, I was skeptical and thought there had to be other motivations that we just weren’t privy to. But every day brings more evidence that the “cruelty is the point” folks were right and I was just overthinking it.

Every person who legit supports freedom of speech made fun of the Harper’s letter and it ruined Harper’s reputation (to the degree it had one in the 2020’s) for a generation. I would guess fewer than 10% of the signatories signed it in good faith or knew they were signing something that people like Bari Weiss’s clownfraud ass were even asked to sign. She’s not a public intellectual. She’s a public buffoon.

We might need a few reforms to our economic model where the stupidest sociopaths alive get lots of money and teachers and nurses do not.

And people said Trump could never live up to Reagan’s legacy. He’s already half senile, making shady deals with cartels and despots, ruining the tax code, and trying to build a missile defense system that will never exist.

Maybe rejecting technology is the highest level of intelligence, grasshopper. 🧘🏼

Not for me, though. I’m on Lemmy because I can’t sleep. Do not print in the newspaper that I haven’t achieved enlightenment.

What the fuck does that even mean? Like Juan Manuel de Rosas era, Evita era, giant sloth and terror bird era, or some other era? Like, I love Argentina and have been to Buenos Aires and Iguazu Falls. It’s a beautiful country full of beautiful people. But what is the time period dumbfucks there have created some sort of lore around?

In the U.S., the right romanticizes the days of polio and scarlet fever and stupid wars and pretends it was basically the movie Grease. What’s the Argentine equivalent?

Good #lifehack I’ll have to try.

Ah, shit. My wife and I use Jif peanut butter and Knorr bouillon cubes in bed and I eat a Vaseline and Q-tip sandwich during my lunch break at least once a week. Can just one global conglomerate be ethical so we can enjoy life’s little pleasures?

I have bad news about the DNC being a functional organization. There’s a reason Obama setup a whole separate organization and actually won. Neera Tanden runs the Center for American Progress again despite fucking it up last time and everyone they put on TV is somehow the least charismatic 75 year-old centrist in the entire caucus who just says whatever.

The DNC and entire Democrat establishment could just not exist and more Democrats would get elected. Their learned helplessness expired in like 2003 and they’re still putting it in their coffee as if nothing went sour.

I like how he’s pissed off every major and micro-demographic. Prestige TV fans. Sports fans. Comic book fans. People who watch reruns of Bones at 2am to help them fall asleep. Old men watching Shawshank Redemption for the 300th time because they’d rather die than pay money for digital media. Probably horse girls, somehow.