ThePrettiestOne

Rachel Maddow said it best last night. She's no longer confused. Now she sees how the pieces fit together. Me too.

• Trump, pre-bankruptcies, financed his ventures the old-fashioned way, with bank loans. Then he defaulted, returned pennies on the dollar, and could no longer raise legit capital.
• At the same time, Putin and his cronies were ascending in Russia, and needed places to park their gains outside Russia. People like Trump were perfect. And they didn't have to worry about him defaulting because they had good enforcers that weren't available to legal banks.
• It's a win-win. Trump is the perfect front for money-laundering. A loudmouth self-promoting con-man. Decides to run for president. His mob friends suggest Paul Manafort would make a good campaign manager. Trump doesn't like to micro-manage, so he says sure, why not.
• Now it's time for the next-level management program for Trump. He has graduated from one of many western money-launderers to the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. The Russians had hacked the systems of both parties, now they knew what they would use the mail archives for. For the Democrats, they'd release the emails when they needed to change the focus away from some Trump misdeed, and for the Repubs they'd use the emails to keep them from "getting any ideas" about who was in charge.
• They contact Junior through Goldstone. He says Russia loves your dad, wants to see him elected, can we meet to discuss? Junior loves it. They get together. Seal the deal. The Russian rep doesn't talk much, asks what Junior and Kushner want. Manafort is sitting on both sides of the table (possibly unbeknownst to Junior and Kushner) but mostly on the Russian side, of course. BTW, you can be sure the Russians have a recording of what was said at this meeting.
• Follow-up meetings take place. They introduce people in both organizations to each other. There are lots of connections at all levels through the campaign. The tracks are not well covered. And of course Russians have copies of all the emails (as they had copies of the ones that just leaked). When Flynn was fired because he could be blackmailed that must have been a good laugh for Trump et al, because that was the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway, this seems to be "the arc" of the relationship between Trump and Russia. Both countries are now controlled by the mob. They don't care if we know. It's all pretty much out in the open and all that the Russians care about is that their money-laundering flows are turned back on. They don't care about the other things we thought they might care about. The US can do whatever they want. They just want to be able to continue to use American real estate as their piggybank.

PS: Looking forward, either the Russians get their way and can start laundering again, or they're going to make our lives ever-more-hellish.

notmusa:

i expect ill be able to solve a lot of my problems once my baby brain falls out & my adult brain grows in

wolvesdreamofnewdays:

thoodleoo:

• they’re all following this jesus nonsense instead of the old roman religion
  
• they only know what it’s like under the empire and not the glory of the res publica
  
• all of them want to follow weird greek fashions like writing poetry and growing beards instead of following the mos maiorum and wearing togas
• they’re all so used to this cushy “pax romana” nonsense that none of them want to conquer anything like their ancestors did, and they probably don’t even remember carthage
• they have no idea what it was like living before the common era
• have any of them ever risen up on their own to depose a king or stab a tyrant? i think not

Carthago delenda est , my dude.

wheeloffortune-design:

Two? Nope. You have FIVE, minimum.

• You take the apple
  
• You take the orange
  
• You take both
• You take nothing
• You take something else

And this works EVERYWHERE. 

“Are you with us or with them?”

• I’m with you!
  
• I’m with them!
  
• You both have good points!
  
• You’re all insane!
  
• I’m going with that other group over there!

“You need to vote Democrat or Republican!”

• Democrat!
  
• Republican!
  
• I switch depending on the leader and the issues!
  
• I don’t vote! 
• I vote for a third-party!

“Are you Christian or Muslim??”  

• I’m Christian
  
• I’m Muslim
  
• I think God is one and the same and follow good doctrines of both
  
• I’m atheist
  
• I’m Jewish
  

And it’s often more subtle

Like a salesperson handing you two products and pressuring you to buy one of them, making you forget that 

• You don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want to
  
• You can leave the store and buy something elsewhere
  

And sometimes it can be as important as

“Are you gay or are you straight?”

• I’m gay
  
• I’m straight
  
• I’m both? So Bi?
  
• I like no one, I’m ace. 
  
• I’m anything else, really, this is a spectrum and I define my own orientation.
  

So remember- If someone if pressuring you to pick between two choices, they’re probably trying to manipulate you by making you forget you also have another three options.

Tweet 1 source | Tweet 2 source

berlynn-wohl:

arandomguy163:

Its like the 80’s all over again, a remorseless madwoman runs the UK, a maniacal bastard runs the US, the world’s on the brink of nuclear war and all I want to do is listen to synthpop

star wars, ghostbusters, and mad max all pass the bechdel test now tho

theblackmanonthemoon:

your-fav-film-freak:

Yo.

Still one of the hardest bar I’ve ever heard

Three Dirks in Search of an Exit.

lesbiansandpuns:

weavemama:

weavemama:

I feel bad but this is so fucking hilarious

if anyone is lost, Donald trump jr literally just tweeted out evidence of him being involved with Russia. Something this journalist has been trying to find evidence of for months…… he is obviously in in shock 😂

he has continued to be hilarious

parskis:

ngl this has probably been my favorite headline of today

choochoobear:

dee-wood:

escalusia:

empress-of-awesomeness:

Someone: The modern world is INSANE!!! I wish I was born back in the good old days when everything was so much better and people had values!!! <3<3<3

Every historian: 

I just really wanna die from the plague

I wanna be burned at the stake as a heretic.

Well good news - both of those may soon be options again.

I Took A Panoramic Photo At A Concert And Lights Changed In The Middle Of It. This Is The Result

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I Took A Panoramic Picture Of Our Living Room. But My Cat Decided To Walk Through

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My Father-In-Law Having Fun With Panoramic Mode

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My Phone Has A Wide Selfie Feature Similar To A Panorama. You Need To Sit Still For It To Work. My Girlfriend Sneezed, And This Happened

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Failed Panorama Shot

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My Dog Is A Cerberus

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My Mom Moved During A Panorama. Troll Face Ensued

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Took A Panoramic Photo At A Museum And Ended Up Making It Look Like This Girl Has The Ultimate Selfie Hand

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Don’t Panoramic Photo And Drink

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The Creepiest Of Crawlers

What Happens When You Take A Panoramic Photo And Your Dog Runs Into The Shot

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Friend Tried To Take A Panorama Of Her Dachshund

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I’m Not Very Good At Taking Panoramas

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I Was Messing Around With Panorama In Class A Couple Weeks Ago, When This Happened

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My Kid Took A Panorama Photo Of Me That Went Horribly Right

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Panoramic Picture Error Results In Perfect Phantom Middle Finger

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Panoramic Of My Friend Gone Wrong

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The Lighting Changed As I Took My Panorama

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This Guy

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Taking A Panorama Of The Yard When The Dog Walked By

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“end Of The World”

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Panorama Fail

Panoramic Shot Gone Right

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Panoramic Photo Gone Wrong

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So I Tried To Take A Panorama At London Fashion Week

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tzikeh:

Movie came out in 1987. We had no idea.

nevaehtyler:

Cop: What agency are you with?

Aramis Ayala, the first African American State Attorney in Florida history: I’m the state attorney.

☕️☕️☕️

iguanamouth:

disconnect 

idashur:

scandiumsky:

ruff-tiger:

I don’t reblog often, but this comes straight into the message I’m trying to deliver, and is a beautifully shared experience. Just be yourself

“I realized the reason I was feeling so great is because I was comparing myself to yesterday’s Danielle, and today’s Danielle is better than yesterday’s”

I needed this

wilwheaton:

The minds that need to be changed, the minds that can actually *do* something about this, are the majority leaders in the House. And they aren’t listening.

nevaehtyler:

Poet Taylor Steele captures the problem with appropriating Black slang.

In her poem “AAVE” (which stands for African-American Vernacular English) Taylor Steele explains why appropriation of Black slang is the worst. 
African-American culture is being popularized on a daily basis and while Black people are judged and mistreated for using something they came up with ages ago, White people come off as cool and original when they use it.

Full video

#BlackLivesMatter

alyesque:

Fucking iconic

A California representative said he believes Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey constitutes obstruction of justice.

Russian hackers did more than just crack open the email accounts of the DNC and Democratic consultants. They also created a host of accounts in social media for the express purpose of spreading “genuinely fake news.” That aspect of Russia’s disinformation campaign is being singled out not only as the most effective part of their 2016 operation, but the greatest threat going forward. But to make it work, the Russians needed help from an American source.

Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Russia ultimately had thousands of human agents and many times more automated “bots” busily creating stories that slammed Clinton and boosted Trump. The stories that this cyber army stuck together were not tossed randomly onto the net. They were carefully and directly targeted, often hitting potential Trump voters in the states and districts where they were most needed. A fact noted by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

[Senator Mark Warner] “It’s been reported to me—and we’ve got to find this out— whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.

weavemama:

weavemama:

I feel bad but this is so fucking hilarious

if anyone is lost, Donald trump jr literally just tweeted out evidence of him being involved with Russia. Something this journalist has been trying to find evidence of for months…… he is obviously in in shock 😂

jigglypuffsvevo:

person: what’s up

me: not much but please don’t ask that every day because then i’ll have to start making things up because i rarely do anything

voidbat:

beka-tiddalik:

bitterlesbiangrandma:

bitterlesbiangrandma:

bitterlesbiangrandma:

I don’t think healthy people every really get chronic illness.

I have a friend I know from when we were both 6. She is the only person living nearby and so she saw me go from walking through limping to wheelchair on a daily basis. I keep her updated on my health even tho we rarely hang out anymore.
She was gonna come over yesterday and I had to cancel. She asked if I can’t hang out later that day. When I said i won’t feel better later, that if I feel that bad in the morning later will only get worse she got annoyed and “joked” that I’m just finding excuses. And I was surprised, she knows all about me being disabled after all? So, a bit taken aback, I told her it’s a normal thing for me.

“But you got the diagnosis now, aren’t you better?? I thought you’ll get better now”

She was honestly surprised and it made me realize a thing. They don’t get it. They don’t get that getting diagnosed only equals benefits like welfare or parking spot for us, and sometimes better pain meds but that is just like pushing luck. That it’s a forever thing. That that one day we felt good a week ago was just a bright spot and doesn’t mean we won’t need our aids anymore, cause chronic illness is not linear and will make a great comeback in next four hours, and the next good day is planned on when we’re 70.
Cause when abled people are sick, they get better. And our illness is just an excuse for them. And when we say we will never get better they think we’re being dramatic and pessimistic.
And I don’t think they’ll ever get it, cause to get it you need to live it.
And I want my friends to stay healthy and not go through hell.

This is definitely okay to reblog and abled people are encouraged to reblog cause maybe it’ll help others understand

Hello it’s me Lexa and this post is relevant again as I just had the
Legit Same Talk with someone and I exhausted my number of fucks to give

Oh my god I literally had this conversation with my mother an hour ago.

Mum: “So yeah, I was thinking that when I come down we could do visit an art gallery or a museum or something.”

Me: “I’ll have to see if I’m up for it, I’ve been going through a rough patch. I might not have the energy.”

Mum: “But you love art galleries.”

Me: “I know. What part of ‘it hurts to walk long distances now’ is hard for you though?”

lost a lot of “friends” when i ran entirely out of fucks and started responding to this kind of shit with the dictionary definition of “chronic” and “fatigue”.

I try to get my friends excited about the idea of just… I dunno, coming over to my house with their laptop so we can just sit together with Netflix and chatting as much as I have energy for and play games next to each other or something. It’s hard. I would LOOOOOVE to get out of the house and do all the partying and museums and such that I get invited to, I genuinely 100% would love that, but I can never know day-to-day what I’m even capable of. I’ve been blessed with a lot of understanding friends, but far more who have just… vanished.

copperbadge:

pride-of-themyscira:

annagetsthefabulousbabes:

sabotabby:

plasmalogical:

excess-of-cats:

megamanfour:

carnival-phantasm:

challenge accepted

No you don’t understand, we’ve had a massive surplus of cheese since the Great Depression. The national government was determined to maintain the dairy industry when our markets crashed and so they developed a policy of buying up surplus cheese that regular citizens couldn’t afford. 

We’ve been shoving the stuff into caves in Missouri because there’s so much of it we haven’t really had anywhere else to put it because you can’t just destroy cheese. You try to burn it and it melts. It’s so heavily processed that it doesn’t biodegrade, and it can’t be fed to animals or turned into anything else. Our only other alternatives would be to dump it into the ocean which we would absolutely not do ever since the whole medical waste thing or to launch it into space which is way too expensive.

In the 1980s Reagan began a government cheese program to distribute some of the excess to welfare and food stamps recipients. And since then we’ve had the Got Milk? campaign which was a government scheme to get the general public to consume more dairy products to help slow the stockpiling. (By the way, cow milk may not be as good for us as we’re led to believe. There’s a lot of debate in the scientific community about whether the hormones present in the milk might have a link to cancer.)

Our surplus cheese is also why so many restaurants put so goddamn much of it into absolutely everything. A division of the federal government known as Dairy Management heavily promotes any restaurants that push cheesy menu items, even as the DoA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion warns of the health risks associated with a cheese-heavy diet.

Basically the feds are conspiring to kill us all with dairy products because they got so buddy-buddy with the dairy industry in the first half of the 20th century that they’ve dug themselves into a hole and they’re paying Big Dairy too much to back out now.

this is the best news ive heard all year

Oh God, this explains why it’s so hard to avoid cheese.

(Well, I’m not in America, but I think our government has the same relationship with our dairy board.)

Okay, but Switzerland dealt with this problem by seriously pushing fondue. 

I bring a source

Cheese discourse for @copperbadge

SOMEONE GIVE ME A MAP TO THE CAVES I WILL SOLVE THIS PROBLEM

While the clear evidence that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election unfolds, don't forget that this did not happen in a vacuum. Don't forget that congressional leadership knew in 2015 that Russia was trying to hack the Democratic party.

Don't forget that the CIA was giving confidential briefings to leadership with information "indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president, a finding that did not emerge publicly until after Mr. Trump’s victory months later, former government officials say."

The classified briefings that the C.I.A. held in August and September for the so-called Gang of Eight—the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate and of the intelligence committees in each chamber—show deep concerns about the impact of the election meddling.

In the briefings, the C.I.A. said there was intelligence indicating not only that the Russians were trying to get Mr. Trump elected but that they had gained computer access to multiple state and local election boards in the United States since 2014, officials said.

Here's what CIA chief John Brennan told then Democratic leader Sen. Harry Reid in a private, classified briefing: "Russia’s hackings appeared aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the November election," and that "unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election." It's too incredible to believe that House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not get that same briefing, did not know that the CIA had solid enough intelligence that the Russians could possibly be in the Trump campaign, trying to influence the outcome of the election.

In September, intelligence officials had a secret meeting with the Gang of 12—including the House and Senate leaders and the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers’ committees on intelligence and homeland security. That meeting was intended to get leadership behind a "show of solidarity and bipartisan unity" publicly condemning Russia for interference.

neilarmstrong:

2017 mood

Last night, Kim Kardashian West posted a Snapchat story including a glimpse of what appears to be lines of white powdery substance on the counter behind her. Commenters have rightly noted that it looks a lot like cocaine (see lower right quadrant):

Read more...

While the subject remains taboo, most parents have a favorite child. The Wall Street Journal points to research that supports this—in one recent study, 75 percent of mothers confessed they felt closer to one of their adult children, while another report found that 70% of fathers and 74% of mothers acted on those…

Read more...