curiooftheheart:

obelixetcompagnie:

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I’m posting it here for all to enjoy

I don’t speak French so thank you to the many, many, many people in the notes going “Wait that’s not ‘can it’ that’s 'Shut the fuck up’”

(via what-shitfuckery-is-this-ew)

liberalsarecool:

jilli1205:

Let’s go back to the year 2000 and the Bush versus Gore presidential contest. The hyper-close election came down to Florida where, at a key moment with a recount underway, Bush enjoyed a threadbare lead of 537 votes out of 5.8 million cast. Bush’s margin had been shrinking as the recount progressed, and Democrats were hopeful it would disappear. Enter the right-wing Supreme Court. In a startling 5-4 decision, the court halted the recount, handing the presidency to Bush. The decision was roundly condemned by nearly 700 law professors of different political views, who warned: “By stopping the vote count in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court used its power to act as political partisans, not judges of a court of law. By taking power from the voters, the Supreme Court has tarnished its own legitimacy.” (Disclosure: I drafted the statement!) Why did the court perpetrate this judicial coup d’etat on behalf of a candidate who’d lost the national popular vote by over a half million ballots? Because it was necessary to secure the succession. In 2000, the right wing dominated the Supreme Court, but just barely. With two justices in their 70s, the five conservatives feared a Democratic president would be able to shift the balance to the liberal justices. So the conservatives installed an illegitimate president and in return received two illegitimate right-wing justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The right-wingers used their continued ascendancy to enact the GOP’s political agenda. Defying long precedent, they invented a personal right to own firearms in the 5-4 D.C. v. Heller case, enabling a seemingly unstoppable epidemic of gun violence. In the 5-4 Citizens United decision, they emboldened corporations and the rich to corrupt our politics with floods of money. And in the 5-4 Shelby County case, they unleashed a war on democracy by crippling the Voting Rights Act. Now add Justice Neil Gorsuch. In February 2016, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died. Under the Constitution, President Obama had the right and obligation to fill the vacancy — and the Senate had the duty to consider his nominee, Merrick Garland. Instead, the GOP-controlled Senate spurned its constitutional obligations, refusing to even hold a vote on Garland’s confirmation. Over a year later, Donald Trump — another Republican president who took office after losing the popular vote — gained the presidency and appointed Gorsuch, who stole the seat that was Obama’s to fill under the Constitution. If these three had not been placed on the court through chicanery, we’d have a liberal majority instead of a right-wing supermajority — and we’d see major differences in our lives. We’d get better solutions to school shootings than putting bullet-proof backpacks on our children. The crushing burden of student loans would be lightened for millions. Our democracy would be less at risk, with voting rights protected and gerrymandering reined in.

Commit this to memory. #CivicsLesson

Shot at 50mm, F4? I think? And like 1/20s. Probably. I should check, but just looking at this makes me not want to bother with the technical details.

depsidase:

(via wilwheaton)

headspace-hotel:

What i’ve been learning thru my research is that Lawn Culture and laws against “weeds” in America are deeply connected to anxieties about “undesirable” people.

I read this essay called “Controlling the Weed Nuisance in Turn-of-the-century American Cities” by Zachary J. S. Falck and it discusses how the late 1800’s and early 1900’s created ideal habitats for weeds with urban expansion, railroads, the colonization of more territory, and the like.

Around this time, laws requiring the destruction of “weeds” were passed in many American cities. These weedy plants were viewed as “filth” and literally disease-causing—in the 1880’s in St. Louis, a newspaper reported that weeds infected school children with typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.

Weeds were also seen as “conducive to immorality” by promoting the presence of “tramps and idlers.” People thought wild growing plants would “shelter” threatening criminals. Weeds were heavily associated with poverty and immortality. Panic about them spiked strongly after malaria and typhoid outbreaks.

To make things even wilder, one of the main weeds the legal turmoil and public anxiety centered upon was actually the sunflower. Milkweed was also a major “undesirable” weed and a major target of laws mandating the destruction of weeds.

The major explosion in weed-control law being put forth and enforced happened around 1905-1910. And I formed a hypothesis—I had this abrupt remembrance of something I studied in a history class in college. I thought to myself, I bet this coincides with a major wave of immigration to the USA.

Bingo. 1907 was the peak of European immigration. We must keep in mind that these people were not “white” in the exact way that is recognized today. From what I remember from my history classes, Eastern European people were very much feared as criminals and potential communists. Wikipedia elaborates that the Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to restrict Jewish, Slavic, and Italian people from entering the country, and that the major wave of immigration among them began in the 1890s. Almost perfectly coinciding with the “weed nuisance” panic. (The Immigration Act of 1917 also banned intellectually disabled people, gay people, anarchists, and people from Asia apart from the Chinese…which were already banned since 1880.)

From this evidence, I would guess that our aesthetics and views about “weeds” emerged from the convergence of two things:

First, we were obliterating native ecosystems by colonizing them and violently displacing their caretakers, then running roughshod over them with poorly informed agricultural and horticultural techniques, as well as constructing lots of cities and railroads, creating the ideal circumstances for weeds.

Second, lots of immigrants were entering the country, and xenophobia and racism lent itself to fears of “criminals” “tramps” and other “undesirable” people, leading to a desire to forcefully impose order and push out the “Other.” I am not inventing a connection—undesirable people and undesirable weeds were frequently compared in these times.

And this was at the very beginnings of the eugenics movement, wherein supposedly “inferior” and poor or racialized people were described in a manner much the same as “weeds,” particularly supposedly “breeding” much faster than other people.

There is another connection that the essay doesn’t bring up, but that is very clear to me. Weeds are in fact plants of the poor and of immigrants, because they are often medicinal and food plants for people on the margins, hanging out around human habitation like semi-domesticated cats around granaries in the ancient Near East.

My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant’s young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as “poke salad.” Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.

In some parts of the world, it is grown as an ornamental plant for its huge, tropical-looking leaves and magenta stems. But my mom hates the stuff. “Cut that down,” she says, “it makes us look like rednecks.”

Lawns are bullshit.

shipsshipships:

sail-plan of the beauteous Bark Europa!

(via ltwilliammowett)

25 posts!

museum-of-artifacts:

3000 year old petroglyph of a man running away from a big snake. With erection. It is one of the many Rock carvings in Tanum, Sweden and was painted red so its easier for tourists to see.

Click for more artifacts

This man is not running away. Have they seen which end of a man the dick is? This is a man who is getting himself some snussy, and he is pumped.

graycatluna:

Hey, could you do me a favor?

Could you just RB this?

The little RB statistics chart is so pleasant and stimmy to look at and I want to see what it looks like when it gets really REALLY huge because it makes me think of some deep sea lifeform

inthisbehemothtyphoon: