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Lock him the fuck up.
Here are some of my favorite tweets on the latest charges.
This is so satisfying. Whatever happens next, we need to savor this moment. https://t.co/Xs8P1spAJT
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 15, 2023
Trump is not only indicted, his name is mentioned 193 times in the indictment, and the charges go out of the way to show Trump directly violated the law pic.twitter.com/XnimQyLzE6
— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) August 15, 2023
It’s wild to me that these Republicans really believe every former Trump judge, lawyer, employee, mistress, and campaign worker is lying, that all the evidence has been faked, and the media in a vast conspiracy, instead of simply saying, “Maybe the guy’s just a fucking crook.”
— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) August 15, 2023
The Trump Indictment count is now 91.🫨
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) August 15, 2023
Let's be clear.
Trump was NOT indicted by Biden, Clinton, Soros, Big Bird, Target, Wokeness, Disney, pride flag, CRT, or Barbie. Trump was indicted by private citizens—as the US Constitution requires. (And most witnesses were Republican).
say what you want about Fox but they reliably bring in the most brilliant legal minds on nights like this pic.twitter.com/2EEvXpG1Kp
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 15, 2023
RICO LAW pic.twitter.com/kyBJ756x13
— Mike Scollins (@mikescollins) August 15, 2023
The Racketeer pic.twitter.com/IswociKqXP
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 15, 2023
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Is this the current open thread?
I think so.
If there are only 25 comments, why is yours on a page by itself?
@Lumipuna
It seems to be!
Since it’s relatively quiet here, I’d like to post some lengthy musings on a personal nerdy interest.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with sabertoothed cats. Some of the following three-part monologue discusses things I’ve briefly mentioned here before. However, thanks to Twitter’s awesome paleo community, I was recently inspired to rehash the topic and study it further. I also posted this in the never-ending community thread at the Affinity blog.
ti;dr on sabertoothed cats: They hunted the mammoth, too.
(This might take some time, since we apparently now have a limit on repeat posting?)
(I tried to use the edit function to correct the spelling of “tl;dr”, but when pressing Save, I just got a notice saying I should slow down on my posting frequency. My next comment, posted as a test immediately after that, went into some kind of approval limbo, and now shows as time-stamped 1 hour later.)
Maybe I’ll just post a link to the Affinity thread instead. The relevant comments are numbered 21-23 in that thread.
TNET 48: Messer Duel (freethoughtblogs.com)
The smilodon is the official state fossil of California. (It beat the trilobite) There are a lot of them all over the state. Having seen skeletons, I would not have wanted to be one of the first Californians going up against one. Although they are extinct now, so I guess the humans did OK.
I really liked that sword fight video at the beginning of the thread!
I still call them Sabre Tooth Tigers. I imagine them fighting Brontosaurus. In the Dark Ages.
That was a great read though. I’ll have to see if there are any UK fossils. I have seen one in the Natural History Museum; but we could have nicked that from anywhere.
(News story here: someone has been arrested for stealing loads of things from the British Museum. You can imagine the comments)
More than 50 years ago, at a children’s Christmas party at my father’s workplace, my Christmas cracker had a Sabre tooth tiger ornament inside! I still have it. They were made by Wade, probably as part of a set relating to the Flintstones cartoon. It’s a cheerful little thing, and probably initiated my interest in sabretooths.
Alan – There are some UK finds from the Early and Middle Pleistocene. Indeed, H. latidens was first described from British specimens in 1846 by the famous Richard Owen, though it was initially included in the genus Machairodon, like many other sabercats ranging from Miocene to Pleistocene.
I just noticed this old blog post by the British zoologist Darren Naish, concerning the figurine from Isturitz cave (in southwestern France), the North Sea jaw (Netherlands) and some British finds:
Darren Naish: Tetrapod Zoology: The late survival of Homotherium confirmed, and the Piltdown cats
Naish is still writing fascinating new blog posts, currently at tetzoo.com. In a 2019 post on enigmatic European cave art, he leaned on the view that the Isturitz statuette is not Homotherium, however.
Naturally, there is no direct evidence of Homotherium, or Neandertals, or much anything else living in Sweden or Finland during the Pleistocene. The repeated glaciations in Scandinavian region have destroyed nearly all previous soil sediments, including in lakes and shallow seabed, that could contain subfossil/fossil animal bones or human archaeological remains. This is continuation of the erosion that has, over many millions of years, scraped away any fossil-bearing sediment rocks that formed in the region over the last billion years, leaving only the ancient Precambrian metamorphic bedrock. The bedrock itself is so solid there’s almost no caves that could’ve preserved bones or human artifacts under the glaciations.
Some evidence does exist, though – mainly of the woolly mammoth. They were apparently relatively common, compared to most other animals in northern areas, and had big sturdy bones that preserved easily.
Most of the Late Pleistocene (defined as being 130,000 – 12,000 years ago) coincides with the last ice age (115,000 – 12,000 years ago), which is formally called the Weichselian glaciation in northern Europe and by other names in other regions (I think Devensian in UK, Wisconsin in US). For much of this ice age, Finland is thought to have been mostly or entirely free of ice, covered with arctic tundra, or sometimes even forest in the south. Total glaciation took place at least 70,000 – 60,000 years ago (early Middle Weichselian) and again 25,000 – 12,000 years ago (Late Weichselian). In some nooks and crannies of the bedrock, patches of old soil sediment have survived from before Middle Weichselian, or even from before older ice ages. There is evidence of a beaver dam in one place, but no actual animal bones have been found in these deposits.
A few isolated mammoth bones and one reindeer antler have been found in secondary deposits in Finland, and dated to the milder period between 60,000 – 25,000 years ago. These were dislocated from their original deposits (likely peat bogs) by the Late Weichselian ice sheet and then deposited (probably not far away) in the till or gravel that formed in some sheltered spots between the ice and bedrock. This is a far cry from the unglaciated areas of Europe, let alone Siberia where the permafrost has preserved huge amounts of mammoth bones and the occasional frozen carcass. Nevertheless, it lends some support for the speculation that a rich subarctic-arctic fauna (and potentially even humans) did live in Finland during the milder parts of last ice age.
I like that sculpture. I am a big fan of Mesolithic art. The only thing I agree with Picasso on is that everything since has been derivative. But we can leant a lot about the megafauna of the time from cave art. Although I prefer the abstract stuff.
Over here, the ice sheets were more concentrated in the North. That has an interesting effect. The weight of the ice squished the North down. So now the ice has gone, the North is slowly springing back and the South is getting lower as the whole island pivots. That has an effect on sea levels.
This same process (inequal glacio-isostatic rebound) has had a huge effect on Finland and Sweden in postglacial times, since the terrain is relatively flat and the depression of land was rather strong around the northern end of Gulf of Bothnia, where the Scandinavian ice sheet was thickest. In southern Finland, the lake basins continue tilting from the northwest to southeast, occasionally switching to new outflow routes.
The interplay between glacio-isostatic adjustment, ocean level changes and the blockage of drainage basins by glaciers has had fascinating effects on landscape. For example, most of the North Sea and English Channel was dry land during the colder parts of ice ages, because much ocean water was tied up in continental ice sheets. But sometimes, during extreme glaciation, the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets merged together near the Shetlands and blocked the drainage of the North Sea region northwards. A huge glacial lake then formed, collecting water from rivers across much of northern Europe, and overflowed into the valley that was English Channel, and west into the Atlantic. Then, when the glaciers began receding and parted in the north, the lake abruptly emptied, leaving behind a giant arctic mudflat.
When this lake formed for the first time, hundreds of thousands of years ago, its violent outflow in the Dover Strait eroded the landscape by tens of meters, after a massive buildup of water in the North Sea basin, resulting in a giant waterfall. Prior to that, there was a low ridge running across the Dover strait that would be above the sea level even during interglacial times, such as now. In other words, Britain was separated from the continent by a huge glacial lake outburst.
I’m really fascinated by Doggerland. Or as I like to call it East East Yorkshire. Check the maps; it’s ours.
The trawlers have pulled up all sorts of interesting artefacts. Effectively it’s a genuine Atlantis. There was a whole country down there with a thriving community. All gone now.
But I like stuff like how the Thames, Siene, and Rhine were once just tributaries of one bigger river. And also the White Cliffs of Dover. They were originally an escarpment. They must have looked amazing jutting up from the landscape. I suspect they were a bit of a marker for people navigating.
Hmm, I’ve literally just had a thought. I wonder if that’s why so many neolithic monuments were originally faced with chalk. Like it’s a folk memory of how spectacular the cliffs were?
Oh, and there may also be an impact crater there. Silverpit.
The science suggests it’s more likely to be a salt collapse; but impact can’t be ruled out.
As the most common estimate for the age of the crater is about 65 million years, that throws up some intriguing speculation.
I love me some geology nerdism.
Regarding the original topic of this post, my brother watched the surrender live, and thinks that someone on MSNBC said that they didn’t actually measure Mango Mussolini’s height and weight, they were self-reported. But who are we gonna believe, him or our own eyes?
If I was in charge of that, I’d have had him clean off his face, comb his hairdon’t straight back and measured him without his lifts and on an honest scale. Honestly, just hose the mofo down and let’s see what he actually looks like.
Please resume your sabertooth and Doggerland discussions now. I’m enjoying them.
Since the topic of paleontology seems to have resumed: it’s a great misfortune that David went on hiatus just as this discussion surfaced on Tumblr. It begins with a mention of the Flat Earth trope (and how The Ancients™ knew better) with a passing reference to negligent toilet hygiene, veering into what initially seem to be harmless Fun Facts about mammoth genetics—only to take an abrupt right turn straight into the Manosphere Zone; this could’ve have been custom designed as WHTM fodder.
https://mondengel.tumblr.com/post/726366480230383616/people-today-with-access-to-more-raw-information#notes
@ FMO
I can’t claim to be an expert on evolutionary biology; but ‘feminism gave us wonky mammoths’ was not a take I was expecting.
@Alan: Indeed. And considering feminism as an idea and mammoths didn’t overlap, it deserves an extra WTF. Women hunted the mammoth, but they presumably killed them with spears and arrow, not feminism.
I love the roasting the replies gave him. I wanna be friends with the geneticist who explained it all AND came up with such fabulous insults. “self-satisfied jellyfish fellator” was my favorite.
For no contextual reason beyond my own compulsion to share it, here’s a hare in captivity heroically defending a fair maiden in distress. (Note that the setting is a wildlife rescue, meaning that the handler isn’t going to turn Slava into stew or a coat—but millions of years of instinct have given Justy no basis for comprehending that.)
Bigwig (and yes, I know he’s a rabbit) came instantly to mind.