blue after hours

So it looks like the literal fascist takeover has begun (this was published July 18, 2020).

Trump's federal jackboots are testing the waters in Portland. Where is next?

The ACLU is fighting them in court, but we all need to expose this and do everything we can to stop them before it's too late.

I’d like to point out that the continual and constant message of the protesters in Portland has been: defund the police, make them accountable for their actions, stop predatory policing of Black people. It is largely organized and lead by local Black organizers.

Sources As of July 19th/20th 1 2 3

me: [sweats nervously]

person: their passive and individualistic mindsets keep us from violently organizing against the ruling class

this is opabinia. the absolute magnum opus of evolution. when the body plan was revealed at a presentation, the entire audience laughed. and for a while, nobody knew what ecological niche it could possibly have filled. however, the finding and analysis of opabinia revealed a wealth of information about the diversity of early life on earth.

opabinia has an extremely unique body form, with a hollow proboscis, 15 body segments, and five eyes. “how the hell did this happen?” you may ask. the same question was asked by paleontologists studying the cambrian explosion. and the answer was very important to our understanding of the first major diversification of animals.

the researcher whittington, who introduced the modern design of opabinia, stated that it, along with other cambrian creatures, didnt “fit” into any modern taxonomic groups. this hinted at something important; early life was unusually experimental, which meant that it was possible that unusual evolutionary mechanisms were at play at the time.

stephen jay gould (one of the most important paleontologists of all time) wrote that

I believe that Whittington’s reconstruction of Opabinia in 1975 will stand as one of the great documents in the history of human knowledge. How many other empirical studies have led directly on to a fundamentally revised view about the history of life?

We are awestruck by Tyrannosaurus; we marvel at the feathers of Archaeopteryx; we revel in every scrap of fossil human bone from Africa. But none of these has taught us anywhere near so much about the nature of evolution as a little two-inch Cambrian oddball invertebrate named Opabinia.

(from a wonderful life, which he wanted to call homage to opabinia)

Bull Sharks