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it’s crazy to me that every seed in existence is a little chemical computer taking readings of temperature and moisture and minerals and all that to see if it’s able to grow yet and they’re doing crazy stuff like going into full dormancy and waiting for species-specific conditions etc etc and some seeds will do this in the size of a dust particle (see: orobanche) and some will pack in extra starch and food and do it in the size of a coconut or something… just dissected this flower seed at work that was a woody two-compartment capsule with one embryo per compartment, the whole seed a little smaller than a dime, and I swear to god it had a full soybean’s worth of embryo and food packed in there. it’s just unfathomable to me
sometimes a seed strikes me as being like a little spaceship with on-board life support and stuff. all that’s inherently certain about a seed’s existence is that its parents survived nearby, presumably, so if all goes well it’ll be set up for some kind of success falling where it falls, but ideally the seed won’t see those exact conditions, because being too close could also hurt the seed’s chances of survival… as could being too far away, like if it ends up in a different habitat or ecosystem and the right conditions never happen. The whole food-on-board strategy was a huge buff when they patched it in after ferns and other spore-bearing plants, but it’s still basically outer space, right? Just deploying a hundred ships to different planets in the same star system, hoping it’s not so different down there that it’s unsurvivable? like every seed is a chance and different plants are putting different amounts of food, effort, and strategy into those chances. so you get a million different seeds from a million different species and they all look and act different from the ground up. you know what I mean, man. you know what I’m sayin
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Type-A bureaucrat who professionally pushes papers in the Middle East. History nerd, linguistic geek, and devoted news junkie.
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Two days after his second inauguration, one of Donald Trump’s first actions of his second presidency was to pardon nearly two dozen anti-abortion extremists, who had violently and illegally barricaded reproductive rights clinics, in some cases injuring staff and patients in the process, and in others, stealing aborted embryos and fetal tissue. At the time, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northrup told Jezebel the pardons were a “get-out-of-jail-free card inviting anti-abortion extremists to step up their attacks on reproductive health clinics with impunity.”
Last week, MS Now reports that dozens of anti-abortion extremists, including some of those pardoned, met in Washington, D.C. to begin openly planning a renewed campaign of harassment against doctors and patients. The meeting was organized by Randall Terry—who previously founded Operation Rescue, an extreme far-right anti-abortion group that spent the better part of the 1980s and 90s terrorizing abortion clinics.
“We’re bringing [Operation Rescue] back,” one of the activists—who was once involved with Operation Rescue—told MS Now’s Julianne McShane. “We’re going to disrupt this country as much as we can.” Sick.
The extremists Trump pardoned had been convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law that was passed following a spike in violence against abortion providers, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn in 1993. In one case, 10 extremists were sentenced to five years in prison after violently blockading and invading a Washington clinic in 2020; in 2022, authorities found five fetuses in the home of Lauren Handy, who led the blockade.
On the same day as those pardons, Trump’s Department of Justice said it would be scaling back the enforcement of federal protections for reproductive rights clinics. Terry told McShane that he plans to revive Operation Rescue now that they don’t have to worry about the FACE Act:
Terry told MS NOW that he’s amassing a new coalition this year under a new banner and hopes to recruit “hundreds of people willing to be arrested” at abortion clinic protests. And this time, given the DOJ’s suggestion that it would not prosecute most FACE Act violations going forward, they’ll operate without fear of federal intervention or lasting consequences.“Under the Trump administration, we know that they’re not going to prosecute people for FACE violations, and we have people who are at least tepidly pro-life in the White House, in the Senate and in the House,” he said. “This is our window.”
Last week, he called on Bell and dozens of anti-abortion-rights activists to gather at a church, about a mile northeast of Capitol Hill, for a planning meeting. This shepherd had a new flock, and he gave them a new name: Rescue Resurrection.
But the DOJ isn’t throwing out the FACE Act—they’re just now using it instead to only protect places of worship from messaging they hate. Don Lemon, who was arrested on Thursday for covering a peaceful ICE protest at a church in Minnesota, was charged with violating the FACE Act. Before that, in September, the Trump administration sued pro-Palestinian protesters for demonstrating in front of a Jewish synagogue in New Jersey, stating that they had violated the FACE Act.
Present at the meet-up were five activists pardoned by Trump, former Operation Rescue members, and a number of activists under 25. For about 90 minutes, Terry pitched Rescue Resurrection to them, playing an AI-generated song about banning the abortion pill mifepristone, acting out a cringey skit in which he pretended he was a cop arresting protesters, and, of course, soft-launched his plan to potentially run for office in November. He said that to train the next generation of activists, he’d established training grounds in Memphis, Tennessee.
Operation Rescue used to handcuff themselves together outside clinics, and then dramatically slump when police tried to arrest them. But Terry told McShane that “there’s millions of dollars being squandered on inane, lukewarm, rehashed rhetoric” by anti-abortion groups, and that, this time around, they intend to escalate and get more intense.
Extremists freed, clinics abandoned, and a federal law repurposed to protect everyone except the people it was written for. Definitely sounds like the administration is protecting women to me.
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The Heritage Foundation — the think tank behind the infamous Project 2025 policy wishlist, which dragged down Trump’s most recent reelection campaign with its massively unpopular proposals — apparently has a new priority: rounding up the unmarried people and shipping them off to camps.
We’re not joking.
As NBC News reports, the Heritage Foundation is pushing the White House to pass initiatives to financially reward newlyweds, create deeper tax incentives for married couples, discourage online dating — paradoxically, it would seem — and even start opening government-run “marriage bootcamps.”
According to the Heritage Foundation’s framework, called “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the camps would serve as reeducation centers for unmarried couples.
“Successful completion of the program would mean that couples are ready to walk down the aisle at a communal wedding by the end of the bootcamp,” the organization’s screed declares. “The bride and groom would also be matched with a mentor couple to help them to navigate the highs and lows of early married life.”
There’d also be cold, hard cash involved.
“The most innovative aspect of such a program, however, would be to add a monetary incentive for couples to get — and stay — married,” the framework continues. “For example, each couple that completes the program could receive a ‘wedding bonus’ of up to $5,000 on their wedding day to be paid through foundations or private donors, not government funds.”
According to NBC, the total cost of the Saving America by Saving the Family initiative would be $280 billion over the next decade. As to whether taxpayers would pick up the bill, the Heritage Foundation’s documentation notes that the federal government has previously earmarked money for “marriage education programs.”
“A modest investment, I think, [which] will pay off tremendous dividends,” Heritage Foundation vice president of economic and domestic policy Roger Severino told NBC.
More on state oppression: Activists Say Ring Cameras Are Being Used by ICE
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I do not object to being bored if I am paid for it, but I never am paid for it. So many people have run up such long scores with me in this respect, and never paid me, that I will give no more credit. I must have cash down before I will be bored at all, but my figure is very low; so long as I get paid at all I will give people as much fun for their money, by way of letting them bore me, as anyone is likely to do.
— Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
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