Mold and demons and shit. Nobody is totally sure. He’s been in and out of the hospital and even intubated according to his daughter.

Never discourage that phase, imagine if our population never grew out of questioning the world. Just don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know, maybe you will figure out why and can teach me someday.”

“Look man, shit just be doing what it does because it is what it is. If weren’t that way everything would be soup or darkness.”

Physics at any point when you ask “why” enough.

I don’t know if his pain is mental or physical, but when I saw him on an interview he seemed in pretty rough shape and talking a lot about the end of his life. Becoming quadriplegic is a massive risk to your lifespan and he’s already pretty old and in bad shape. We’re going to send him lots of thoughts and prayers. Tons even.

Reminder people: Dennis Prager was injured in a fall in 2024 and is now paralyzed from the shoulders down and has been suffering greatly. It would be EXTREMELY distasteful to delight in progress and victories for marginalized groups, as well as scientific advances in biology that gives benefits to such groups while he is literally forced to sit and watch for the remainder of his likely short life.

I mean, it would be like rubbing it in his face that his God didn’t protect him and between him and what’s happened to other major conservative figureheads like Jordan Peterson and of course Charlie Kirk, it might even shake his faith entirely if he were to see the world moving on and none of his predictions and proclamations coming to pass about divine judgement against LGBTQ+ people while he languishes in a wheelchair and a device to keep him breathing.

edit: also, while a female nurse literally keeps him alive, that must really feel awkward after he promoted how a women’s place is for childbearing and nothing else.

I do agree we need to respect them a lot more and make a much stronger public message that they’re not food and certainly shouldn’t be tortured and treated as inhumanely as we routinely do.

Yes, the mind of an octopus is unknowable, and it could be just acting on instinct.

As someone who studied a lot of neurology, I could make a very strong argument that much of our behavior, no matter how well-reasoned we think it is, no matter how complex it is, is actually also just a very sophisticated system for facilitating our instinctual needs. The brain has a very real tendency to post-hoc justify our decisions and actions so much that we never notice it, but if you start to explore it, you will realize really quick that a lot of what we do and think we’re choosing to do, are just products of very basic wants.

This isn’t to diminish either them nor us, only to say that whatever is going inside that incredibly ancient brain of theirs, it’s still a lot like us and needs to be respected as such.

And especially should not be farmed or eaten alive for clicks on youtube. We have made significant progress as a society reducing the barbaric practice of eating shark-fin soup and other exotic animal products, and made great strides in ending torturing sea mammals in amusement parks. We have to add octopus to this list of things we now know better about.

Octopus have feelings and are higher animals with unique personalities and ways of experiencing the world. They are curious, they are intelligent, they dream and seem to show emotions in a variety of ways.

And our last common ancestor didn’t even have a backbone. This fact alone should amaze us and give us hope for the greater universe - that we can share so much with something so very distant from us gives hope that if we ever do contact aliens, we might share more than we think.

Great now you just have Loss.

We have made the same mistake over and over again when dealing with conservatives, which is the assumption that they give a micron of a shit about definitions and facts.

They are not living in a fact-based world, and we resent them for that because they are benefitting from the science, facts and reason that has build the world they cherish.

But we can make far more effective arguments if we meet them on an emotional level in these debates. I’ve seen more progress made in debates by progressives asking them what they would do if their own son or daughter was gay or trans than all the graphs and statistics in the world.

Or at the very least, call them heartless, weird, child-hating, freedom-hating, etc.

Grok, is this true?

I am reminded of the detail in The Office where Michael Scott is stirring sugar into his diet coke.

Platypuses - Now have added echolocation, flight, extra limbs, and bioluminescence. Too many skill points to spend, no build guide.

Kiwi birds - Will have finally switched places, now they are large eggs that give birth to a smaller bird.

Armadillos - Form a union with pillbugs and turtles, finally get better pay and benefits.

Golden Retrievers - No change to perfection, now the dominant life form.

Giraffes - Short necks and really long legs.

Daddy Longlegs - Surprisingly, develop more balanced proportions and are called “Paternal Medium Legs” but are still quite horrifying and love to hide under your bed.

Zebra - More tasteful patterns, like a nice vellum eggshell with fine, elegant pinstripes and a watermark with floral trim.

Ungulates - Even MORE stomachs.

Cetaceans - why not even bigger?

Cephalopods - Starships and philosophy and tragic poems about how short life is.

Bivalves - even less brain, brain make feel bad, brain bad

Felines - Find and domesticate the nearest dominant life form

Murmurations of birds and schooling fish - Horrifyingly surreal swarm intelligences that can take the shape of things like pointing fingers and signs to communicate or a big pair of cartoon scissors that chase you.

A lot of genders are very unstable though. Some genders can be violently dangerous, prone to reactivity, or won’t even survive very long in the real world.

Us?

“If you arrest pedophiles, there won’t be pedophiles anymore.”

Did someone say that seriously? Who knows, but if I take a screenshot of the imagined dialogue, it will feel real and that’s what’s important.

They’ve been doing this for the last decade.

Step 1: Do something outrageous and horrible that hurts many people.

Step 2: Profit.

Step 3: Publish some kind of very timid, mild, barely visible retraction or admission somewhere that nobody will ever see or care about, knowing full well we live in an attention-span economy and you can literally buy whatever levels of visibility or invisibility as you want from media outlets.

It’s pretty much worthless to read media and news that isn’t by one of the very few remaining journalistic organizations, and even Reuters and AP have had issues.

I weep for the passing of truth and reality. I kinda thought we would go in the opposite direction a quarter century into the 21st millennium, but here we are. Reckon I’ll go down to the local alchemist and pick up some leeches and mercury to keep the miasma at bay and balance the ol’ humors.