my brain: click the ds game out and loose ur progress. come on. do it
me: how about no
while walking dog my brain: kick ur shoe off. see how far it goes me: :/
Oh my god, did you mean my life.
My brain: just let go with everything in your hands right now. Just drop it on the ground and see what breaks.
Me: dude, that’s my lunch.
These are lies. Peel your carrots if you're going to eat them. If you want, you can save the peels to go into a nice vegetable stock. But yes, peel your vegetables if you want to (and I do, because they taste better that way).
The skin of most fruits and vegetables are full of nutrition and fiber that you miss out on when you peel them, but when someone reaches for a peeler after picking up a carrot, beet, or parsnip, no one bats an eye. Put the peeler down—you don’t have to use it.
my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this
look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit
motherfucking australia
if there was a post to describe australia, this is it
wait.
you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?
that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?
fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?
wake up australia
That’s what birds do
They fly around and fuck shit up
Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country
Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit
It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.
Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do
yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes
why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.
My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.
no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange
what the actual fuck australia
I am pretty sure all of these Australia stories are a massive, globally-spanning trolling effort, and only the people who have visited the country are allowed to be in on the joke.
Nope.
Went there.
Parrots tried to take our car.
Came home IN A FUCKING HURRY.
Interesting thing about magpies - they’re not great at identifying individual humans visually, but if you make yourself identifiable in some way they’re usually open to reason. We used to have some very aggressive swoopers in our back yard - as soon as they realised that the humans *inside* the fence never bothered them and were the source of the delicious compost heap, they turned into flying black and white guard dogs who would viciously assault any passing stranger but never bothered anyone inside the yard. Several times they swooped at us when we approached from outside, then when we walked into the yard they would pull up and act incredibly apologetic like sorry ma’am I had no idea it was you I would never please don’t stop stocking the food pile.
There was another little group of magpies in the park who would attack any solo pedestrian but never bothered anyone walking a dog or pushing a pram, because apparently those were identifiable traits indicating a non-threatening human. In the spirit of inquiry, I started going out of my way to be polite to the magpies - carefully walking a wide arc around them when they were on the ground, etc - and emitting an identifiable call of ‘hello birdie’ before swooping season started.
I spent the next ten years crossing that park at least once a day and as long as I turned at the first flutter of wings and said ‘hello birdie’ to the magpie waiting to attack as soon as my back was turned, I was fine. Every time, the magpie would stare at me for a minute and then fly off to harass some other pedestrian because apparently the magpies and I, we were cool.
Parrots are a lot less open to negotiation, and the little bastards travel in flocks. Beware the parrots.
who has a discussion about Australian birds without at least MENTIONING emus??
come on people they’re 6’ tall anger and loathing on legs
they’re virtually immune to MACHINE GUN FIRE
Come on, that was ONE WAR. You lose one emu war and nobody ever forgets it.
marketing targeted at today’s youth is so strange because like, they’ve picked up on certain things, but they can’t string the parts together in a cohesive way. It’s like one of those shitpost generators. I mean, yeah, they understand that reaction gifs are a thing, and they understand that emojis are a thing, and they understand that tyler oakley is a thing. but they can’t drive the point home. that is not a proper reaction to finding the right emoji. it doesn’t make sense. they’re trying, really hard, but the nuances of internet youth culture still manage to escape their corporate grasp
Zohra Sehgal, a South Asian actress par excellence, actually spoke multiple languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and German. She is one of the earliest international actresses who came from an aristocratic Muslim family in India. When her father insisted that she get married, she outright said, ‘I don’t want to get married,’ and announced that she might become a pilot. In 1917 she went to a boarding school in Lahore, after which, in 1930, she donned a burqa and set off for Europe by road — crossing Iran, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. She trained as a ballet dancer in Germany. Zohra was quite blunt when it came to expressing her opinions. She was an agnostic and defied all the stereotypes about a “Muslim girl from a traditional family”. She was unbelievably bold and confident and was known for her mischievous humor. She earned immense respect in British TV at a time when people were not accepting of ‘diversity’ and even the Asian roles were played by white people.
When she had first arrived in Britain, “it was such that if we were sitting in the bus, the British did not sit next to us. Unconsciously in the minds of white people, there was a hesitation”. She defied cultural norms once more when she married her Hindu student eight years younger than her. She never felt welcomed in Lahore, so she left half her family in Pakistan
after 1947 Partition
and settled in Delhi where she taught a theater group. She raised her children on her own when her husband committed suicide at a young age. She was literally unstoppable and appeared consistently in British TV series like The Jewel in Crown, Mind Your Language and Doctor Who. She has acted in myriad Bollywood films and performed across Japan, Egypt, Europe and the US. She was a classical dancer, choreographer, cinema, theater and television actress whose career spanned over 8 decades. She was awarded Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan, some of the highest civilian honors in India. She was a fighter all her life, she even defeated cancer.
On her 100th birthday she said, “I want an electric cremation. I don’t want any poems and fuss after that. And for heaven’s sake don’t bring back the ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them. If they tell you that I am dead, I want you to give a big laugh".
Zohra aapa lived the life of a grand diva and passed away in 2014 at the age of 102.
“Oh, my burqa was of lovely silk and I was so glad I made petticoats out of it!”
Zohra with her husband Kameshwar Sehgal in 1945.
“What actually makes brings out your beauty is the radiance of being content and you can only be content when you are employed in something you love.”
“You see me now when I am old and ugly, in fact you should have seen me earlier — when I was young and ugly!”
Zohra at her 100th birthday was quietly humming “Abhi To Main Jawan Hoon” (I am still young) by poet Hafeez Jullundhri, as she attacked the huge cake.
“Life’s been tough but I’ve been tougher. I beat life at its own game”
She was in one of my favorite Bollywood movies, had no idea how bad ass this woman was…whoa!
THIS DR.LUKE IS SCUM AND SHE’S NOT THE ONLY WOMAN TO BE ABUSED BY THIS ASSHOLE
i just wanna add that she wore this dress as a big fuck you to him a few months after filing and it honestly was such an inspiration to me as an abuse survivor
I stopped at some shitty new store that opened in my town cause the mascot looked fucking ridiculous and from the second I walked into the horrible store to the moment I left nothing felt real. it felt like walking through a massive, interactive shit post and I hate it so much
OMG!!!! I went in this store the other day! This guy looks 100% like cartoon Albert Einstein and those freaking pictures were fucking me up
Am I the only one that’s a just a tiny bit pissed off that this is still an issue?
The Original Series wasn’t even in the general VICINITY of fucking around yo
How many shows these days would do this, and do it this way? These days, it would be all, “Ohh, we have to be sensitive and show the nuances of each side” and try not to make either side seem wrong. It wouldn’t be clearly spelled out, “pro-choice is right, if you’re against it you’re the bad guys.”
Jim Kirk is not here for your anti-birth-control, anti-choice, pro-death-penalty BS
Keep in mind this episode aired in 1969 – four years before Roe v. Wade.
James Tiberius Kirk was written and portrayed as a feminist and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Yep. That episode is exactly what you think it is: pro-birth control, pro-population control, pro-choice, and pro-women’s right to choose. And yes, Kirk, the supposed playboy of the spaceways, is in favor of all of the above.
Oh, god yes. And Angel's even worse. Gunn's first, what, years? on the show are so... badly written that, if you actually look at him as a single human being, and not a fictional character written by people who had heard about black people from their friends, you'd have to diagnose him as psychotic/dissociative AT THE VERY LEAST.
I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, heart and soul. But you know what would have made it even better?
If The First Slayer- a black woman- wasn’t referred to as “The Primitive”.
If Buffy didn’t make fun of the First Slayer’s hair.
If Buffy didn’t relentlessly mock Kendra’s -a Jamaican Slayer- accent.
If Chao Ahn- a Cantonese Slayer - wasn’t used as a walking punchline for not being able to speak English, ignoring how horrible it is to be isolated behind a language barrier.
If black characters didn’t almost always die almost immediately after being introduced (Kendra Young, Forrest Gates, Nikki Wood, Mr Platt, Mr Trick).
If different cultures weren’t repeatedly stereotyped and portrayed as demonic or savage (The Pack, Inca Mummy Girl, Dead Man’s Party, Pangs, Get It Done).
If there were realistically some Latino characters in Sunnydale, a town set in California, wherein which 37.6% of the population are Latino.
If there was just onepoc in the main cast during the show’s seven year run spanning 144 episodes.
I was talking to a friend the other day about HBO’s Togetherness. I was like, “It’s a show about white people.”
And he said “Oh, come on, they’re just people.” But if somebody says my show is about Asian American people, nobody bats an eye. If you think about what that says about the normative context of TV, white people are allowed to exist as just people.
Instead of using your intelligence to escape culpability, use it to consider the framework from which you speak.
There aren't enough food banks and emergency assistance centers to deal with this impending crisis.
If the government shuts down at the beginning of next month, people will go hungry. This is likely a feature rather than a bug of a government shutdown, as far as Republicans are concerned. It's one of the destructive realities of this despicable game they insist on playing.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides monthly food benefits to 45 million Americans, will go dark if Congress fails to pass a law funding government operations after Oct. 1, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program.
"If Congress does not act to avert a lapse in appropriations, then USDA will not have the funding necessary for SNAP benefits in October and will be forced to stop providing benefits within the first several days of October," a USDA spokesperson said in an email. "Once that occurs, families won’t be able to use these benefits at grocery stores to buy the food their families need."
The USDA had a contingency fund in 2013 that kept the program going during that shutdown. Thanks to budget cuts, they don't have that contingency now. While Senate Democrats are highlighting this problem, the guy in charge of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which has oversight, dismisses it and says the answer is simple—cut Planned Parenthood's funding. "The best way to ensure SNAP recipients receive needed support is to vote for the [continuing resolution]," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) says. "I’m prepared to do so, and if members are worried about SNAP funding, they should too."
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has begun preparing for a partial shutdown. As in 2013, agencies are being told to work out their plans for who gets to continue working—either because of things like contingency funds or because "they fall within an exception for protecting property, public safety or health"—and who will be sent home.
Host Vanessa Williams asked, “Some legislators are threatening to shut down the government over federal contributions to Planned Parenthood, even though no federal funds can be used for abortions. Should Planned Parenthood funding be cut off?” So much for “Describe your perfect date” softball questions.
In 1996, Congress passed a bill putting a time limit on food stamp access for those in need. The law forbade "Healthy, childless adults" from receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for more than three months in a three-year period, unless they had a job or were in a training program for 20 hours or more per week. Then-Congressman, now-presidential candidate and Gov. John Kasich co-sponsored the bill.
It was the first time Congress had implemented such a time limit, and the impact was extreme: About 1 million people would lose food stamp access under this law. When lawmakers pushed back, an important exception was added to "allow states to seek time-limit waivers for areas with especially high unemployment."
As governor of Ohio, Kasich has taken advantage of those time-limit waivers himself. While hypocritical—it was his idea to limit food stamps, after all—his use of the waivers is not the problem.
The problem is how his administration distributes them. According to Mother Jones:
"Ohio civil rights groups and economic analysts say Kasich's administration is using the waivers unequally: It applies for waivers in some regions of the state but refuses them in others, in a pattern that has disproportionately protected white communities and hurt minority populations."
Carly Fiorina, apparently emboldend by largely getting a pass from the traditional media for the massive lies she told about Planned Parenthood in last week's Republican debate and the massive lies about what she said she saw in the Center for Medical Progress's debunked videos, has decided she can get away with a little bit of video concocting of her own. According to a press release from Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), Fiorina's campaign created this fake video "in an attempt to support her lies."
Here are the five different pieces they mashed up together for their one-minute video, produced after she was widely called out for lying:
A photo of a Pennsylvania woman’s stillborn son, which was used without her permission and falsely passed off as an aborted fetus in an earlier video by the discredited Center for Medical Progress (which is behind the fraudulent video campaign).
Video from the discredited Grantham Collection, an old anti-abortion archive based in Florida. The video is likely not even a fetus. The Grantham Collection has been called out in the past for posting photos alongside totally false claims about what they are (such as a photo of commonly used sponge tongs found in most hospitals, which the archive claimed were a tool used to tear babies' limbs apart).
The audio from a video the Center for Medical Progress secretly recorded of a doctor in Colorado.
Video from a Center for Medical Progress interview with a woman who claims she used to work at an independent tissue research organization in California.
Audio from a phone conversation the Center for Medical Progress secretly recorded with a man who works at another independent health care organization in California.
Even with all of the editing and splicing Fiorina's team has done with the footage used in this video, "it doesn’t show what you have claimed," Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of PPFA writes Fiorina. "Simply put, the video you described at the debate does not exist, and the video you're now asking people to watch is not what you claim it is." Laguens asks Fiorina in the letter to take down the video.
That's unlikely to happen. Fiorina is getting a lot of mileage within the Republican base for this attack, and they don't give a damn if it's true or not.
“I empathize with people who were afraid that [the accent] was stereotyping, because for those people — who are pretty much all Asian-Americans — the only time that they saw an Asian character on television in a comedy was when that Asian person was a humor tool and not a person whose accent was merely one facet of their [character]. It’s a beautiful part of the story of immigration, so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t water it down to quell the fears — the fears that are based on the shitheads who used an accent as a humor tool. I’m not going to use those shitheads’ metric to determine the worthiness of my voice. If somebody has an accent, that often means they know more than one language, and I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I actually think that’s pretty fucking cool. Hopefully, we’re writing our own history, instead of trying to be accepted by the white American framework history. Because by trying to be accepted by that framework, we’re already putting them at a higher level than us — and they’re not. They’re not at a lower level than us, it’s just a different story. So let’s start telling our stories.”
In his first interview after the brutal and excessive assault, Mayfield opened up about what happened on that Stockton, California street and how he sees himself in spite of it all.
“I see myself as a great young man, successful in school. I feel traumatized. I was beaten and slammed on the floor."
Both Mayfield and the police also now confirm that he was not "jaywalking" as had been previously reported, but that he simply stepped into a lane adjacent to the sidewalk that was reserved for busses. No curb exists between the sidewalk and this lane and Emilio, according to eyewitnesses, stepped in the bus lane for about two seconds when he was confronted by an officer for doing so.
What's completely preposterous is attempting to rationalize how in the hell a 250-pound officer with his night stick drawn ended up on top a kid on his way to school because he stepped in the bus lane. This case is the epitome of excessive force and likely would not have happened to anyone other than a young black boy.
Serena Williams, the winner of 21 Grand Slam titles and arguably the greatest living female athlete, was understandably exhausted after defeating her sister and best friend Venus Williams in the U.S. Open earlier this week. So she wasn’t having it when, during a post-match press conference on Tuesday, a reporter had the gall to ask why she wasn’t smiling.
Williams looked down and gave an exasperated sigh before shelling out the best response an athlete has given in an interview since football player Marshawn Lynch’s “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” trademark phrase.
It’s 11:30. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t want to be here. I just want to be in bed right now and I have to wake up early to practice and I don’t want to answer any of these questions. And you keep asking me the same questions. It’s not really … you’re not making it super enjoyable.
Nervous laughter may have broken out in the crowd, but what Williams expressed wasn’t a joke. All women are expected to perform femininity at the cost of being their authentic selves in the public sphere. Williams had just experienced what was likely one of the most emotionally and physically draining matches in her career. Taking on your sister in a high-stakes game isn’t easy. She had told the Associated Press before her win:
She’s the toughest player I’ve ever played in my life and the best person I know. It’s going against your best friend and at the same time going against the greatest competitor, for me, in women’s tennis.
It makes sense that she would not be smiling ear-to-ear during the media conference. But it turns out no matter how insanely accomplished or famous you become, you will still be subjected to the innocuous-sounding but ever-so-pernicious “why don’t you smile?” interjection from those who feel entitled to make demands of women. Williams’ retort was her attempt at dismantling that sense of entitlement. For those who say the reporter’s question was a harmless jest, they should ask themselves if Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal would ever be expected to defend their stern or tired expressions.
And the problem exists not just in the image-heavy world of professional sports. On Wednesday, Apple did little to change the public’s perception of the tech industry as a sexist one. During a launch presentation in San Francisco, the first woman to be seen on stage at the male-dominated event wasn’t a keynote speaker or even a presenter, but a model in a magazine photo. Adobe’s director of design used her image to show off the Photoshopping capabilities of the new iPad Pro.
What did he decide to Photoshop one might ask? A smile onto her face. He could have altered literally any aspect of any image he wanted but decided instead to force a woman’s visage into a grin.
What happened at the tennis conference and the tech launch are symptoms of the same problem. Women, whether athletes or models, are often seen as products. They’re meant to be consumed and enjoyed, and expressions of personality — like not constantly grinning — distract from their role as ornaments.
It’s the reason projects like Stop Telling Women to Smile by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh have cropped up to address the microaggressions women face on a daily basis. Women don’t exist to smile for men and aren’t obligated to present a cheerful disposition to the world. To expect that denies us our humanity and only reinforces male privilege.
Anita Little is the associate editor at Ms., where this post originally appeared. You can follow her on Twitter.
Obamacare hasn't covered 16.4 million people in the past five years, the Obama administration now says. It's covered 17.6 million, beating expectations and Congressional Budget Office projections.
The revised total includes 15.3 million people who gained coverage through the individual marketplace or through Medicaid. It also includes 2.3 million young adults who gained coverage because they were able to remain on a parent’s plan until they turn 26.
The new data also puts the Obama administration ahead of the health insurance gains estimated by the Congressional Budget Office for 2015. The CBO had predicted roughly 17 million people would gain coverage by 2015, with the gains about equally split between the exchanges and Medicaid.
Health and Human Services (HHS) chief Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced the new figure Tuesday during a speech at Howard University Hospital, where she also highlighted the law's impact on black and Hispanic populations.
"This progress has been even bigger for people of color," she said, pointing to the 10 percent drop in the uninsured rate among black Americans.
No wonder Republicans have had to find a new obsession. Even they have to recognize that the number one goal of the law—expanding the number of people with insurance—has been achieved. There will still be fights in the courts, there will still be repeal votes and attacks on bits and pieces of the law, but the core of it is here to stay.
At this pace, 2015 is likely to be the deadliest year ever measured at the hands of American police.
In 2014, 1,106 people were killed by American police. We are currently on pace to break 1,200 for this year.
The problem is complicated, nationwide, nuanced, and deeply entrenched in the new American way of policing. No single policy will curb this trend and it is very possible these numbers may get worse for many years to come without drastic changes, including real consequences for police misconduct.
So, here we are. It's a mess. It's on our watch and we have to do something about it.
Below are the three biggest policy shifts are that could actually freeze or reduce this growing problem.
The ongoing feud between Donald Trump and the Club for Growth—the best feud of the Republican primary by far—is now multitudes better, which we pretty much knew would happen once CfG decided to spend $1 million in ads against Trump in Iowa. The only thing that's surprising in this is that it took Trump's lawyer a whole week to send this cease and desist letter to the group's president, David McIntosh.
Here are a few, very few, choice snippets, though it is very hard to do it justice in a fair use kind of way.
I am General Counsel to Donald J. Trump. We recently had the opportunity to view your television commercial entitled "Politician" together with your accompanying statements in the media concerning my client's views (collectively, your "Attack Ad") and, quite frankly, are dismayed by the depths special interest groups like yours will go to in an attempt to materially mislead the public for the personal benefit of you and your financial backers. […]
Simply stated, your Attack Ad is not only completely disingenuous, but replete with outright lies, false, defamatory and destructive statements and downright fabrications which you fully know to be untrue, thereby exposing you and your so-called "club" to liability for damages and other tortious harm. […]
[… ] your pitiful little group conveniently chose to leave that information out in a deliberate attempt to mislead the public into believing that it is reflective of Mr. Trump's current position [on taxes] […] This is the very definition of libel. […]
[…] it was only a few short months ago that you very openly and shamelessly attempted to extort Mr. Trump to the tune of $1 million in exchange for your political support. […] American politics at its worst. If that is not a "shake-down", I do not know what is. […]
The letter ends by giving the CfG the "one-time opportunity to rectify this matter" by: 1) stop running the ad immediately and immediately inform them in writing that it's happened, and promise that they won't ever lie about anything about Trump again in the future. No, really. If that doesn't happen, Trump's lawyer Alan Garten says, the wrath of Trump will fall upon their heads in the form of "a multi-million dollar lawsuit against you personally [McIntosh] and your organization for your false and defamatory statements and the damage you have intentionally caused to my client's interests as well as pursue all other remedies available to us at law or in equity."
CfG, your move. Please make it as much fun as this one was.
Democratic senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders joined striking workers at the United States Capitol Tuesday morning. The low-wage workers are employed by federal contractors to provide services in federal buildings, yet they earn less than a living wage and some even face weeks without pay when Congress is on recess. The workers are trying to get the pope's attention as he arrives in Washington, DC, with a group of them writing a letter asking him to meet with them:
We want you to know that even though we serve the wealthy and the powerful in the Congress, we earn so little that we live in utter poverty.
We sleep on the streets because we cannot pay the rent.
We go to bed hungry because we can’t put food on the table.
We endure sickness because we cannot afford health care.
We earn so little that we sacrifice our dignity to support our kids.
We work such long hours that our unborn babies have died.
We may be invisible to the wealthy and powerful we serve everyday – but we know we are worthy of a more abundant life as children of God.
"In my view, when we talk about morality and when we talk about justice we have to understand that there is no justice when so few have so much, while so many have so little," Sanders said in an emailed statement. "The time has come for President Obama and the U.S. Senate to end this injustice by requiring all contract workers to be paid at least $15 an hour with the right to form a union. The time has come to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour."
The pictures in these tumblr posts are all well and good, but it’s the user comments that really make them worth sharing… reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it … Continued
