So your excuse is, "War crimes committed in the past in other places like Afghanistan and Korea were not called 'genocide' or properly prosecuted, so we should ignore these ones too and not call a spade a spade?" That's . . . pretty sad. Some of us would actually like the international community to learn from mistakes made in other conflicts.

Dude. Indiscriminate murder of, and depraved indifference to the survival of, civilians is a bad look no matter what word you use for it. It's pretty clear at this point that the current government of Israel would like to see all Palestinians dead, and is willing to act on that desire whenever they think they can get away with it. That's what makes it (attempted) genocide. The fact that they're currently not attacking the West Bank and not making sure they get 100% kill count in Gaza is not the point and has more to do with plausible deniability than anything.

Whether never being born is or is not better than a brief and miserable life is the kind of thing philosophers like to argue about—a question to which there is no generally accepted answer.

In my experience, that's a good way to overextend yourself and end up becoming nothing to no one as a result.

This too shall pass. Granted, it might take a while, though.

According to TFA, "a marine ecologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada" said it "contains no biological material", which would rule out the most usual globster suspects (rotting whale chunks), and presumably most foodstuffs (so it isn't actually dough). Someone else tested it and discovered that it was not a congealed petroleum-based lubricant or fuel. That leaves a lot of possible suspects. My guess at this point would be a chemical product that was jettisoned by some dishonest corp as being contaminated or unfit for purpose, and broke up into chunks in the water. 🤔

There are many more, too, although the number of pages they index is widely variable. Here's a list.

I guess he wasn't naked at the time (camera was hijacked too, according to the article).

And people wonder why I go out of my way to obtain equipment that doesn't have a bloody app or connect to anything.

Taiwan has urged its citizens to “avoid non-essential travel” to the mainland as well as Hong Kong and Macau after China unveiled guidelines in June detailing criminal punishments for what Beijing described as diehard “Taiwan independence” separatists.

I'm surprised that hasn't always been the recommendation—it isn't like Taiwan has had a good relationship with China since the establishment of the two countries' current governmental setups.

We've known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.

Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That's (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).

I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They'll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.

Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We'd be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn't have that specific issue.

Would everyone who is surprised by this please raise your hand? . . . That's what I thought.

Y'know what's worse? When there's no dot. Worse than that, it's an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒