My old biology teacher used to say, “evolution only works as well as it needs to.” Rabbits digestive systems are so inefficient they have to eat their own shit just to get enough nutrients. Hyena clitoris are so large they sometimes suffocate their offspring during birth. You’re mouth is full of vestigial molars that will likely require surgery in your lifetime. None of those things matter, as long as your genes are successfully being passed down effectively

Panda’s have a digestive system that’s not well suited to their diet, and they’ve adapted to that mostly through behavioral changes. Since they don’t have kind of stomachs that efficiently digest plant matter (like a cow’s four-chamber stomach), they’re constantly hunting for different types of bamboo to get the nutrients they need. They eat young bamboo shoots of one species in the spring, then migrate to higher elevations to get the shoots of another. Both shoots lack calcium, so they migrate again in late summer to get more mature plants calcium-rich leaves.

One weird physical adaptation they’ve developed is in their pregnancies. They mate in the springtime, but fetuses require lots of calcium to develop, so females embryos basically get, “paused,” neither developing or dying, until later in the season when they have more calcium in their diet.

Anyway, I guess my point is that evolution did fix the pandas digestive system to work with plants. It’s just that, like most of evolution’s fixes, it’s a solution that’s barely held together by duct tape and hope, and it could fall apart at any minute.

Yeah, but Pandas aren’t herbivores, they’re vegetarians. They’re too slow and clumsy to actually hunt prey, so the only thing they can catch is bamboo (which is the fastest growing plant, so I guess that’s something…sort of…). Anyway, the point is, Pandas as a species are from a family of predators, and they would absolutely eat meat if you gave it to them.

Birds? No. Though, even on the side they do often have a tilt toward frontal in a lot of predatory birds. It could be argued…

Birds of prey absolutely have their eyes positioned on the front of their heads. It’s most obvious in owls, since they have the largest eyes and wider faces, but all of them have front-facing eyes for binocular vision.

Scientists: One desperate plan we are considering to combat climate change is a series of gigantic mirrors to deflect sunlight away from the planet.

These assholes: OK, but what if, like, the opposite of that?

The Late Mr. Kent. One of the best episodes of the series. He finds evidence that a death row inmate is innocent, gets, “assassinated,” by the real killer (which also destroys the evidence), and has to find a new way to clear the man/catch the real killer while also seeing how the people close to him deal with his, “death.” And, boy, that ending.

Yeah, the bloated police state and anonymity of most real estate moguls makes this is logistically impossible. That being said, the reaction to the United Healthcare CEO’s killing and the number of ICE, “assaults,” that can’t get grand jury indictments makes me think this spirit is still alive.

The cat’s body language (ears forward, tail completely up) says it is unafraid and interested. In the last panel, it is, “bunting,” using the scent glands in it’s head to mix it’s scent with it’s owner, essentially marking it as it’s family. So, yeah, that cat is having a very emotional reunion.

Rabbits’ digestive systems are so inefficient they have to eat their own shit to get enough nutrients.

It’s the same attitude. People who disregard traffic laws to drive faster think everyone is causing the problem, without thinking about how their driving affects everyone else. The guy who gets up and grabs his bag first doesn’t think about the 5 other people in the row who have to wait to get their bag, or that there are 50 rows of people that are all trying to do the same thing.

Fair enough. Most people mean, “If everyone drove 85 in the 55, ignored safe following distances, and didn’t waste time signaling and checking their blind spots, there would be no traffic.” Those people are not correct.

This is the same line of thinking as, “if everyone drove like me, there’d be no traffic,” (a phrase used exclusively by terrible drivers).

I don’t use A.I. because I’ve had nothing but negative interactions with A.I. Customer service bots that fail to give adequate responses, unhelpful and incorrect search result summaries, and, “art,” that looks like shit hasn’t made me want to sign up for ChatGPT or Gemini. For most people, this isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that the product isn’t worth paying for. Stop framing people that don’t use A.I. as luddites with an ax to grind just because tech bros spent billions on a product that isn’t good yet.

Yeah, it definitely looks like the tray was hastily slapped together in photoshop, but I think the tub and woman are AI. I could be wrong, but the perspective on the tub doesn’t seem right, and she looks uncanny.

More like, “The AI program we used to generate this slop has no idea what a women do in the bathtub, or that humans don’t drink wine and lattes simultaneously, and it can’t even maintain a consistent perspective around the edge of the tub.”

By the numbers, probably Mississippi. Lowest life expectancy, highest infant mortality rate, second highest poverty rate…being ranked 39th in education actually seems to be a bright spot for them.

the only way to Democrats made their way back to the whitehouse was with an entirely new generation/brand of democratic politics under Bill Clinton, which embraced free trade and deregulation (i.e, the “third way”). So far, progressivism has not won in the way that this new brand of liberalism has.

This is a little too simplistic. First, it’s important to note how weird the 1992 election was. It was the first time in modern history that an independent candidate had a legitimate shot at winning; in fact, Perot was leading in the early polls, and very well could have taken the presidency if he hadn’t mismanaged his campaign, dropped out, and then re-entered the race. While he was somewhat centrist, he held a lot of populist and progressive positions like Medicare for all, assault weapons bans, opposition to NAFTA, and criticism of Reagonomics. Clinton ultimately won, but that probably had more to do with the 1990 recession than anything Clinton did, and, again, he very well could have lost to Perot’s platform had Perot been a more competent campaign manager.

As for the failures of the progressive message after that point, I don’t think that’s true, at least when looking at Presidential races. Obama governed as a centrist, but he campaigned as a progressive, promising Wall Street regulation, home owner bailouts, and universal healthcare. He abandoned all of those goals early on, but they are still what got elected, and he even made income inequality the focal point of his reelection campaign (which he again abandoned immediately upon reelection).

While Biden would never be called a leftists, he was a savvy campaigner, and he correctly read that the country wanted a progressive candidate in 2020. He leaned heavily on his strong pro-union history and had Sanders help him craft a highly progressive platform to run on. To his credit, I believe Biden did earnestly try to pass that platform, and it’s failure wasn’t do to a lack of desire. (He also funded a genocide and refused to step aside despite his advanced age, so fuck him, but the point is he got elected on a progressive platform).

Now let’s look at the presidential losers. Al Gore, a centrist technocrat, lost to Bush (sort of). John Kerry, a moderate war hero, lost to Bush. Hillary Clinton, who made the centrism of her husband’s presidency the cornerstone of her campaign, lost to Trump. And Harris (who, granted, was cobbling together a campaign at the 11th hour) ran a campaign of tepid centrist reforms and lost resoundingly to Trump.

So, tl;dr: Bill Clinton was the only candidate who won on an openly centrist campaign, and that was a very unusual election. The two other presidents, while also being centrists, won in progressive campaigns, while explicitly centrist Democrats lost.

Yeah, I’m not happy about the Switch 2, but the amount of cope is unbelievable. I’ve seen multiple people claiming, “the Wii U sold out a launch too,” even though the Wii U sold worse than the Wii on opening weekend. The sales might still fall off a cliff in a month, but breaking the PS4’s record for launch sales is not a great sign.

These days he looks more like this:

Uh, you OK? That was a borderline SI statement.

Yeah, I do remember that the series ended with him being given the opportunity to become God (AKA the narrator of the show), and him turning it down, creating a universe without God, which appeared to make everything the same but without narration. I assume that was related to the cosmic energy? Fun idea, but, to bring it back to Theseus, his continued consciousness despite his physical transformation into energy implies the existence of an intangible part of his being (AKA a soul) that continues beyond his human brain. If we ever prove that transporters are teleporting our souls, I’ll happily use one. Otherwise, they are 100% suicide booths.