David Bapst

Just fucking call his bluff. Oh, you're gonna send troops everywhere? Gonna do Zero Dark Thirty on random Chicago apartments? With what money, bozo?

Okay. Well, if Trump is going to attempt legal end-arounds like federalizing the NG of GOP states to send them to Dem states over the objections of governors and courts, I think the Democrats should just keep the federal government shut down indefinitely.

Trump Is Destroying One of America’s Oldest Traditions America has always had a strong aversion to seeing the military on the country’s streets. That is not stopping the current president.

Donald Trump’s deployments of the National Guard to American cities “are best understood as an effort to erode the nation’s sense that such use of the military is unacceptable,” Quinta Jurecic argues.

"if you take seriously that the President has managed at some level to enact his goals—have to engage in similar actions to prevent the military from acting as a center of power against your political prerogatives."

Trustee, Full Professor, Assistant Professor.

University general counsel, university trustee, university president

Petroleum geologist, marine geologist, paleontologist

Quartz, plagioclase, K-feldspar

Expert in a Dying Field The Breaking of the Bipartisan Military Consensus

Babe, wake up. I'm complaining about civil-military relations by making references to The Beths again.

othermeans.io/p/expert-in-...

Discworld QOTD, from I Shall Wear Midnight

Dear Journal, today I learned that Harry Turtledove apparently reads Secretary of Defense Rock, and it’s still a little wild for some reason when random people I follow for military history shit posts start quote replying each other on BlueSky…

Nine members of the Canadian Supreme Court sitting for a photo. They are dressed in red robes trimmed in white.

i had no idea this is how canada's supreme court dresses

Recent and early 20th century destabilization of the subpolar North Atlantic recorded in bivalves Clams reveal North Atlantic destabilization in the early 20th century and at present.

Congratulations Beatriz, Tim, Paul and team on this important new study! @gsiexeter.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

All these articles and thought pieces on the Compact being bad but few consider just how bad they are for university budget-lines. It’s almost satire. The financial constraints would hobble if not shutter many universities…

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/a...

We need some modern Blaschkas to make these in glass (or 3d printed resin) with LEDs as Christmas tree ornaments.

𝘊𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘶𝘮𝘢 𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘴𝘢𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘪, or the Saban crab 🦀, made its debut on ESPN College GameDay! This fossil is housed in UA Museums' paleontology collection under the care of the Department of Museum Research and Collections.

LEARN MORE: ➡️ bit.ly/46Mrhxm

Pentagon wants out of the grocery business, asks industry for proposals The move to privatize the military’s commissaries could lead to changes at 178 stores in the U.S., including 3 in San Antonio and 10 other Texas sites.

If this is going to blow up I should link the actual story

Oh my god. I cannot stress this enough, if they close the commisaries, there is going to be absolute bedlam.

Nudibranchs as pictured by a Japanese illustrator named Kumataro Ito, artist for the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition, 1907–10. More of his stunning images here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/k...

This really is THE issue - you've got a situation where Dems can sweat and bleed to get their stuff in a bipartisan bill, and Rs can nix it with 51 votes (or just impoundment).

That's new, and it removes the incentive to deal.

foraminifera

After Declining to Give Trump a Sword for King Charles, a Museum Leader Is Out

Very Trump-era story.
1. The sword has no meaning for Charles, but matters for the Eisenhower Museum.
2. Illegal for the museum to give away US property!
3. Trump makes no distinction between personal/public property.
4. The person who did the right thing was fired.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/a...

Quetzalcoatlus

You've heard of the book about the libertarian pterodactyl, right?

Oh, sure you have.

Everybody knows about Quetzalcoatlus Shrugged, by Ayn Randphorynchus.

The pattern on the back of this Nepenthes pitcher plant takes me back to playing MS-DOS games in the 90s.

A recent visitor had me scrawling on a white board like mad to explain this paper recently

Phylogenetic analysis reveals that Rhabdopleura is an extant graptolite A phylogenetic analysis of morphological data from modern pterobranch hemichordates (Cephalodiscus, Rhabdopleura) and representatives of each of the major graptolite orders reveals that Rhabdopleura ...

lol Mitchell et al.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

ICE arrested a U.S. citizen—twice—during Alabama construction site raids. Now he's suing. 'I got arrested twice for being a Latino working in construction,' says Leo Garcia Venegas, in a lawsuit challenging ICE raids on construction sites.

He's a US citizen. He was working at a construction site. He was carrying his identification in his pocket.

ICE tackled, handcuffed, and detained him anyway.

Then, less than a month later, ICE seized him again!

Fascism.

reason.com/2025/10/01/i...

Two bar charts from Neige et al., 2007, showing the amount of taxonomic work in the fossil record of a given invertebrate group, and the amount of cladistic/phylogenetic work, with the take-away being that cephalopods are relatively ignored for phylogenetics.

You mean this from Neige et al., 2007, which was specifically on how cladistic work has under-served ammonites?

(I find it interesting that apparently I couldn't remember this image's origin so rather than put it in the file name, I added text to the image...)