Huh.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.

Hey! I’m a scientist who works with gene editing and can def give you more context on the gmo babies! tldr it’s unethical and Not Great, but basically there’s been an (unenforceable) international moratorium on gene editing humans since 2015. It’s maybe illegal, maybe just advised against in China. The university, hospital, and government are all denying knowledge of it tho, which makes this super shady. (1/?)

Here’s the thing: gene editing has been used in therapy in humans, but 1. patients give full consent and 2. cells are removed from the body, CHECKED, double-checked, then put back in, because gene editing can have off-target effects and we want to avoid those, and 3. only cells that can’t be inherited are edited, so that an individual is only giving consent to alter their own body, not their children and/or the general gene population. NONE OF THOSE THREE HAPPENED IN THIS CASE. (2/?)

It’s extremely unclear if the parents knew what was happening, other than that the dad was HIV+ and the research was supposed to prevent the kids from getting HIV. (There are a LOT of cheaper and more accessible ways to do this than gene editing). So far, the scientist hasn’t proven that he checked for (or prevented) off target effects - but we do know one of the kids is a mosaic, meaning only SOME of her cells were altered. This could be really bad for her health, we literally don’t know (3/?)

This guy waited until he had produced human beings to make his announcement, didn’t consult the public, other scientists, or regulatory boards, and sprung the announcement RIGHT before the human gene editing conference - which signals that he did this for his own sake, not for science. He’s set a dangerous precedent and potentially damaged the public perception of gene editing, not to mention endangering those children (the edit made them more susceptible to West Nile). So. Fuck that guy. (4/4)

……👀

this is…quite literally the wildest shit like i understand the incredible temptation to try something just to see if it could be done, every scientist understands that, but holy shit dude what the fuck? 

New favourite example of pragmatic ambiguity: 

and the mounted krogan head in Celene’s library in the Winter Palace

None of those are problems that you solve by telling people to vote but more angrily than you told them last time. 

If you’re a U.S. citizen, you deserve to vote. Democracies don’t actually rely on citizens to be perfectly informed. “Everyone votes, and if you think things are on the right track they vote for the party in power and if they think things are on the wrong track they vote for the party out of power and if they want a divided government they vote for a divided government” is enough to make our system work. But indifference isn’t enough to make our system work. 

You can look up your polling place here. If you don’t have a good way to get there, check if Uber or Lyft is offering free rides to the polls in your area.

One of the powerful things democracy can do is aggregate everyone’s gut. You probably have a gut feeling about whether the last two years have made this a society you are more proud of, or a society you are less proud of. Even if the only thing you feel competent to evaluate is that, you are competent to evaluate that, and that matters. 

A lot of things are awful right now. But they’ve been worse. We clawed our way here from there, and we’ll keep working on it.