TO BE FAIR, THAT’S BECAUSE HE’S A TOOL:

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

THEY SHOULD ALWAYS BE PLANNING TO BE AT WAR IN THE NEAR FUTURE. I MEAN, THAT’S THEIR JOB, NOT DEI OR MUSLIM OUTREACH OR WHATEVER. Still:

And maybe they shouldn’t alienate their biggest pool of potential combat soldier recruits.

#JOURNALISM:

JOHN LUCAS: Putting Lipstick on the Pig: Biden is unpopular but so is everybody. It’s not his policies. Thus sayeth The New York Times. “Democrats and the media (please excuse the redundancy) are in a nationwide panic over President Biden’s plunging poll numbers. But The New York Times, like the rest of the ancien regime nobility is constitutionally incapable of discerning the reasons why more and more people, as well as demographic groups that Democrats thought were in the bag for them, are rejecting Biden and his policies.”

Just spitballing here, but maybe it’s because those policies suck, and are harming the non-graft parts of America.

ORIGIN STORY: SUPERHERO, OR SUPERVILLAIN? Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins Into Human Cells. Here’s What Happened.

“Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades,” says molecular biologist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez, from the University of Wyoming.

“When you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades’ abilities to the human cells.” . . .

“When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism,” says University of Wyoming molecular biologist Thomas Boothby.

What shall we call that character? “Tardiman?” That just sounds like someone who’s always late.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Naked Truth About the Naked Arsonist. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have the arsonist who really couldn’t help herself, our first stolen ambulance story for 2024, and the zombie apocalypse comes to California because of course that’s where it starts.”

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: Is our love affair with Huy Fong cooling? Sriracha lovers say the sauce has lost its heat. “The hot take from die-hard Huy Fong fans is actually a not-so-hot take: They say the Sriracha they once relished no longer brings the same heat. And that bellyaching is quickly spreading across the internet as people conduct their own informal taste tests to measure Sriracha zing.”

For what it’s worth, I’m on my second bottle of Huy Fong since it became easily available again, and I haven’t noticed that it’s any less hot. But I never thought it was all that spicy to begin with.

But when Huy Fong was hard to find, I got into Momofuku’s Chili Crunch that really brings the heat.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Case for Marrying an Older Man. Long, and self-obsessed, but revealing — and not wrong — in its neotraditionalism.