I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't received any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since grants are typically for 3 years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

In my 25-year career, I’ve never NOT had funding. I typically have 4 to 8 grants, which you need if you’re running an observation science program and have a technician, students, and postdocs.

French Senator Claude Malhure excoriates trump -

"A year ago, I compared Trump's presidency to Nero's Court. I was wrong – it's the Cour des miracles (it used to be well known slum in Paris inhabited by criminals and beggars).

A Turkish proverb says - when a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king, it is the palace that becomes a circus.

Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction."
😮
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXPD6bjrlXg
#UsPol
1/n

RIP James “Mr. Strickland” Tolkan

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/james-tolkan-back-to-the-future-top-gun-actor-dead-obituary-1235538497/

Who would have thought that ICE would recruit the wrong, trigger happy people, who would eventually shoot and kill innocent civilians… by recruiting on the disinformation platform X using actual Halo video game graphics and the headline “Destroy the flood”?

They were steering right for it.

a Christmas carol makes more sense from a Buddhist perspective than a Christian one

the actual mechanism of Scrooge's transformation is way more Buddhist than Christian

there's no salvation through grace, no acceptance of a savior, no forgiveness of sins through faith

what happens is he's forced to see clearly.

he witnesses the causes and conditions of his own suffering and the suffering he creates. he sees dependent origination in action - how his choices ripple outward, how Tiny Tim's fate is entangled with his own actions

The perfect snow plow name doesn't ex...

I stand corrected.

This from Wil Wheaton is lovely (and it opens with what is probably my favorite paragraph in all of literature)

Later in the piece he says this

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/12/this-is-such-a-painful-loss-my-heart-is-broken/