(But please use asterisks if and where necessary — not because it will make the responses any less offensive, because that might not be an option, but because I’ll hopefully be asleep when this goes live and I won’t be able to rescue any responses from Limbo)
Free Speech Zones, which were a real thing and not a plot element in a particularly ham-handed dystopian novel.
The phrase “hidey hole.”
Watching a budget surplus become a massive deficit that was bigger than it even looked because the White House was just like, “Okay, we’ll just not put the wars on the books and just ask for more money for those every few months.”
The sheer number of times Alberto Gonzalez said, “I don’t recall,” to Congress regarding war crimes and human rights violations.
“…now watch this drive.”
Mission Accomplished.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” “yellowcake uranium,” Condoleeza’s “mushroom clouds” fearmongering, and all the other bullshit we were fed to get into Iraq.
The President of the United States said so many stupid things that there were one-a-day calendars consisting of an individual quote for each day of the year. They didn’t all have the exact same quotes.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
And then we went to war.
“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.” - George W. Bush, 2006 State of the Union
Okay, that’s the best one.
Bush watched that Batman Beyond splicing episode and had nightmares for a week
was it hidey-hole? i thought it was spider-hole.
Yeah, it was spider-hole
I think my favorite was how we un-ironically referred to a whole set of countries as the “Axis of Evil” as if that phrase gives us some kind of meaningful understanding of their geopolitical role and isn’t borrowed straight out of a mediocre made-for-TV superhero movie.
And then there was:
We literally got a terrorism forecast on the news every morning like it was pollen. So many of the things that happened, if they were in a dystopian novel, people would be like, “That’s way too goofy and ridiculous to actually happen in real life,” and yet they did.
Not only was the terror threat system real, but it was often raised and lowered based entirely on how panicked they wanted us to be. Famously they raised the level for no reason during the 2004 election.
Also, “Free Speech Zones” looked something like this:
It was literally a cage.
I genuinely forget that people, even within my own age group, has forgotten the Bush era since they were teenagers and below the voting age at the time, and so forgot how fucking horrifying it was.
I love this shitty right-wing meme for two reasons:
1) They think the movie is named after the year it took place in.
2) Spartans had a ludicrous amount of gay sex. It was encouraged by the commanders as a way of building unity. Newlywed Spartan wives shaved their heads and wore men’s clothing to make the transition to sex with women easier for their husbands. It was just that gay.
OKAY BUT LEMME TELL YOU A THING. THE GREEKS THOUGHT THAT WEARING PANTS WAS FOR SISSIES AND THOUGHT THAT THE PERSIANS WERE WEAK FOR WEARING LEG ARMOR INTO BATTLE. SO ACTUALLY THE GUYS ON THE BOTTOM WERE MANLY IN THE ANCIENT GREEK AESTHETIC.
when guys are like “girls over [relatively low weight] shouldn’t wear [revealing article of clothing]” a lot of the time they are trying to get women above that weight to say “OH REALLY?” and post a picture of themselves looking good in that article of clothing. It’s a creepy power play designed to prey on both women’s confidence and their insecurities and trick them into posting revealing pictures of themselves for the sexual gratification of men who they otherwise wouldn’t have given the time of day. It’s a sleazy pick-up artist tactic. It’s negging. When you see an all-too-common post that’s like “bigger girls shouldn’t wear bikinis” and the response is him getting “owned” because a woman replied with pictures of herself looking beautiful, he’s not getting owned at all, he’s getting exactly the result he was hoping for. They’re basically saying “You sure showed me by sending me, a huge sexist creep, a picture of yourself in a bikini! PLEASE don’t send me nudes, I don’t know if I could take the humiliation!”
The scary thing is that I’ve had a guy admit this to me. He said something about “fat girls always have ugly tits”. I am fat and a girl. I said “no, they don’t.” He said “prove it”. When I made it clear that a) I had nothing to prove, b) why the fuck am I gonna care about some beanpole-in-a-meme-shirt’s opinion?, and c) I wasn’t EVER gonna send him shit, he went crazy. Straight up admitted that the technique always worked blah blah, I must have been a dude pretending to be a girl blah blah, and basically had a temper tantrum till I blocked him.
So 100% guys that do this are garbage and even if they’re not, remember that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
Scientists invented fabric that makes
electricity from motion and sunlight.
To create the fabric, researchers at
Georgia Tech wove together solar
cell fibers with materials that generate
power from movement. It could be
used in “tents, curtains, or wearable
garments,” meaning we’d virtually
never be without power. Source
Y'all are fucking idiots. Clean energy will NEVER be enough to replace the energy we have now. We’d have to tear down DOZENS of forests just to fit enough windmills and solar panels to get even a QUARTER (probably less, tbh) of the energy we can produce now.
Yeah, sure, when they’ve already calculated that a few square miles of panels in the empty ass Arizona desert could power the whole nation. But ok, fracking and the diminishing petroleum supply is worlds better.
Nevermind that windmills are often most efficient off the coast. There they take up no land, impact no trees, don’t pollute the water, and are conveniently located where winds are often strongest anyway.
And solar panels can literally be built into roofs of buildings and in empty areas like deserts. The sun strikes the Earth with the same amount of energy in an hour that our civilization uses in a year.
But yeah, it would be impossible for us to ever have enough energy from clean sources.
Durr hurr technology is bad and I would rather light shit on fire than have clean energy
I can also testify to the Arizona desert being empty ass. And the California desert. And the Nevada desert.
The fact that anyone can believe a limited amount of dinosaur oil is more plentiful and efficient than moving air or fucking sunlight is proof that entire populations can be completely brainwashed.
Welcome to big oil. They have a hold on the US and Canadian governments and neither are willing to admit it.
We rally around our beloved Stan Lee @therealstanlee today with the passing of his dear wife Joan. Always good humored, always his cheerleader, and a brilliant writer, herself. May she rest in God’s peace.
#RIP #JoanLee
Of course the prisoners don't get as angry when they have cats. You only have to look at a cat to know that you'll NEVER be able to attain the level of anger that they hold back every day of their lives, and just give up on the whole idea completely. Honestly, it's kind of the perfect asshole-buddy system.
“When I got my first cat, it changed me. There is something about holding a cat that makes your anger melt away. And if someone does something that upsets me—I have to remember my cat. I can’t keep my cat if I get into trouble.”
“I asked if Major Cabanaw had concerns for the safety of the cats. “Of course, we always want to ensure the safety of the cats, and the staff is great about keeping an eye out for them. But mostly, it’s the offenders keeping them safe. I have never once seen an offender kill his own cat. We screen them to be sure they have no history of animal abuse. But I’ll tell you this, there was a guy killed in here because he had spit soda pop onto someone else’s cat.””
Wow.
Cats now control the prisons. They now have an army.
This post went exactly where I expected. Well done.
So cats now rule prisons… let´s hope they won´t get possesed by demons
Eight months ago Melania Trump announced she would take on cyberbullying as first lady of the United States.
Today, some of the nation’s most prominent anti-cyberbullying experts told Mic that neither they nor any of their colleagues in the field had been contacted by Trump or anyone from her staff.
“It’s one of the many mysteries of the 2016 presidential campaign,” Larry Magid, CEO of ConnectSafely, “Why she chose to put herself in a position where she is taking on the very issue that her husband is so publicly guilty of is just bizarre.”
After her stated commitment, Magid told Mic he reached out directly to Trump to work with her on how she could be an effective combatant of cyberbullying. However, he said he heard no response from either the first lady or anyone from her office. Read more (7/7/17)
Rachel Maddow did a BIG SCOOP on Thursday night, and we think it’s a pretty big fuckin’ deal. To cut to the chase, somebody (she doesn’t know who YET) used her “Send It To Rachel” tool to send her something that looks like a highly classified document about collusion between Donald Trump and Russia, but is actually a FORGERY. WHOA IF TRUE, right? Maddow said Thursday that if this thing was real, it would be “not only a smoking gun, but … a gun still firing proverbial bullets.” But it’s not, again, because it’s a BIG FAKE ASS DUMB FORGERY.
What this means is that somebody out there (somebody close to or in the Trump administration maybe?) is sending out fake documents, to try and fool the media into reporting actual fake news about the Trump-Russia collusion story. Or, as Maddow put it, somebody is sending “carefully forged documents to try to discredit news agencies reporting on the Russian attack on our election, and specifically on the possibility that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians in mounting that attack.” Damn.
How convenient that would be for the Trump regime, to get the media to report fake stuff, and then be able to expose that fake stuff as fake stuff! What a splendid way to punch the media in the face and make people stop trusting its reporting, don’t you think?
What’s fascinating about this weird forgery is that it appears to have been copied off the highly classified document NSA contractor Reality Winner sent to Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept. Remember how The Intercept published a bombshell on Monday, June 5, that Russians had specifically targeted voting machine manufacturers and election officials during their 2016 cyberwar against American democracy, and that they got further than anybody ever knew? Greenwald and his coworkers immediately got on Twitter that day to shit all over their own story, because Greenwald And Associates are 100% JOURNALISM CERTAIN the Russia story is all lies. We sure did make fun of Glenn Greenwald that day, for being a shithead loser who used to be an actual journalist before he fell in with fuckheads like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Also, remember how the FBI was able — when The Intercept verified the document by sloppily Snapchatting it to the NSA and thus burned its source — to immediately figure out where it came from and who printed it out, because of markings left behind by the printer, and because of how the page had obviously been folded? Maddow found the EXACT SAME MARKINGS and the EXACT SAME CREASE on the document she got. Forgery detected! (Later in the segment she explained that there were several other screwy things about the document, including that it actually named a high-up American citizen/Trump campaign person. According to the intelligence experts Maddow consulted, this type of document, if real, wouldn’t name an American all willy-nilly like that.)
Also strange is that Anonymous McWhoever sent “The Rachel Maddow Show” this fake document the very same week as The Intercept published its bombshell. Here is a screenshot of the timeline:
So on Saturday, June 3, Reality Winner goes to jail, because the Intercept, in vetting the document she sent, managed to expose her as the leak. According to the metadata on the file received by Rachel Maddow, it was created at 12:17 PM on June 5. Later that afternoon, The Intercept published its story. So …
Who sent it?
To be clear, the forged document was created before the Intercept published the real document it was based on. So unless Donald Trump’s 400-pound hacker on the Jersey Shore (no not Chris Christie THAT’S NOT FUNNY and we doubt he’s that good at computers) was working overtime that day, nobody would have been in possession of the original used to create the forgery besides Glenn Greenwald and the reporters who published the story in the The Intercept, the NSA, and the FBI. (Reality Winner could probably not send Maddow the document from #jail.)
Did the document fall into the wrong hands at the NSA or the FBI, after The Intercept sent them the document to vet it? Did Greenwald or somebody else at The Intercept make this forged document for Rachel Maddow in Paint? Did they leak it to somebody who did? Was this the penance Greenwald had to pay his comrades Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Vladimir Putin, for being a bad boy and letting his website publish something about real Russian 2016 election hacking? We are just asking! Because considering the timeline, there are very few suspects here.
Is this a longshot? Maybe, but we really wouldn’t put anything past Glenn Greenwald, because he is quite unpleasant!
The implications of this are alarming. They didn’t fool Rachel Maddow (because Jesus fuck, what paste-eating moron actually thinks they are smarter than she is?), but we understand why they tried. She’s been on this Russia story since the beginning, and she’s hellbent on finding the truth. We bet, considering how treasonous the Trump-Russia crimes probably are, that knocking Rachel Maddow off the scent and busting her credibility would be at the top of any of these motherfuckers’ bucket lists.
Maddow ended her segment by noting that in the past few weeks, both CNN and Vice have had to retract Trump stories for being poorly sourced. The CNN story was specifically about the Trump-Russia scandal. Maddow recalled how Dan Rather’s evening news career ended because of a poorly sourced story about George W. Bush’s (lack of) National Guard service. The larger story was true! But because Rather was taken in by some shitty fake documents, the story was relegated to the #FakeNews pile, where it died an untimely death.
Wouldn’t Donald Trump, who screams “FAKE NEWS!” 24 fucking hours a day about REAL NEWS, just love to be able to do that to journalistic pursuits into his possibly criminal gay love affair with Russia? Wouldn’t Putin love it?
Watch out, journalists. These fuckers are playing a dirty game.
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North Carolina’s legislative session formally drew to a close at the end of last week, and thanks to GOP inaction, rape remains perfectly legal in the state.
But lawmakers will return to Raleigh in August and September to take care of some unresolved business, like overriding Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes (Republicans have a veto-proof majority in both legislative chambers) and redrawing state legislative districts to remedy the current unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered ones. (This is how Republicans keep those veto-proof majorities.)
But one thing they’re not addressing in the upcoming sessions and just couldn’t make time for over the past few months: closing a loophole in the state’s sexual assault statutes that prevent someone from being charged with rape for continuing to engage in a sexual act after a partner revokes consent to that act. This loophole has prevented prosecutors from pursuing charges in two rape cases since December.
You read that right. Thanks to a 1979 court decision, “no” doesn’t actually mean “no” in North Carolina if you say it after you’ve already said “yes” to sex.
A Democratic state senator introduced legislation in April to remedy this very real but eminently fixable problem. The bill is simple and straightforward, and you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand it. In fact, why take my word for it?
§ 14-27.37. Withdrawal of consent.
a) A person who initially consents to vaginal intercourse is not deemed to have consented to any penetration that occurs after the person withdraws consent during the course of that vaginal intercourse. A person may withdraw consent to engage in vaginal intercourse in the middle of the intercourse, even if the actual penetration is accomplished with consent and even if there is only one act of vaginal intercourse. The withdrawal of consent must be clearly communicated in a way that a reasonable person would understand to constitute withdrawal of consent.
(b) A defendant who continues the act of vaginal intercourse after consent is withdrawn is deemed to have committed the act of vaginal intercourse by force and against the will of the other person.
Meet Chewy, a 3-month-old Chihuahua who was found injured and left alone inside a Las Vegas airport. But before you judge his owner, just be aware that the doggie was left with the following heart-breaking note…
Show Full Text
“Hi! I’m Chewy! My owner was in an abusive relationship and couldn’t afford me to get on the flight. She didn’t want to leave me with all her heart but she has NO other option. My ex-boyfriend kicked my dog when we were fighting and he has a big knot on his head. He probably needs a vet. I love Chewy sooo much — please love and take care of him.”
Luckily, one kind person soon found the doggie and took him to Connor and Millie’s Dog Rescue. That’s where the founder of the shelter, Lindia Gilliam, first learned Chewy’s story.
“My heart dropped to my knees,” Gilliam told The Dodo. “I didn’t hesitate to accept him and instructed my foster to immediately get him to an ER.”
Gilliam says this shows the difficult situation of pet owners in abusive relationships. “This is a very overlooked issue as a whole,” Gilliam said. “We also wanted to try and get the message to Chewy’s mom that she did a brave thing and that he is safe and will have a great life.”
Wow, Republicans really DON'T get how the world is supposed to operate. (I know, I am a terrible person.)
On Wednesday, KFOR News reported that Republican Oklahoma State Senator Bryce Marlatt was named a suspect for allegedly sexually assaulting a female Uber driver, according to a recent police report.
In class today, Trump was somehow brought up and someone said that Trump was a neo-nazi and my professor was like, “Trump hasn’t ever said he was a neo-nazi” and another kid said, “I was still gay before I started calling myself gay!” and realized what he said and he looked just mortified but it was the greatest response to anything I’ve ever heard
When trump makes you so angry that you ram down the closet door to call out some bs
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. (…)
There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments.”
- Ruth Hubbard, The Political Nature of “Human Nature” (via kuanios)
This is the weirdest episode of Leverage, hands down.
Hobby Lobby — home to glitter glue, crepe paper, and distress paint — was also apparently in the business of acquiring ancient Mesopotamian relics. However, the crafty retailer says it didn’t quite understand all the ins and outs of the whole “importing artifacts from Iraq” process and has agreed to forfeit thousands of items, including clay cuneiform tablets, that the federal government says were smuggled into the country.
The TL;DR Version
• In 2009, Hobby Lobby President Steve Green met with artifact dealers in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the purchase of thousands of clay artifacts. • The dealers claimed these artifacts were legally obtained and provided documentation indicating that they were not looted from sites in Iraq, which would be a violation of U.S. law. • An expert hired by Hobby Lobby advised the company’s top lawyer against the deal, saying there were indicators of high risk and red flags of potentially looted materials. • Hobby Lobby nonetheless went ahead and paid $1.6 million for the artifacts. • The packages were shipped to Hobby Lobby with inaccurate shipping labels that misstated the contents, value, and country of manufacture. One package had a listed value of $300 but was actually worth $84,000. • Hobby Lobby has agreed to forfeit thousands of items that had not already been seized by the government, and to pay $3 million.
According to court documents [PDF], Hobby Lobby began acquiring historically significant manuscripts and other rare items in 2009. The money spent on these purchases was approved by the retailer’s president Steve Green, says the DOJ.
In 2010, he and a hired consultant traveled to the United Arab Emirates to look at artifacts that two Israeli dealers were offering for sale, including 1,500 cuneiform tablets, 500 cuneiform bricks, 3,000 bullae (clay balls that have been stamped with a seal), 35 envelope seals, 13 extra-large cuneiform tablets, and 500 stone cylinder seals.
Hobby Lobby told prosecutors that the dealers who were selling these artifacts had provided documentation declaring that the various items had been “legally acquired” in the 1960s by a father of one of the dealers, that the items had been moved to U.S. in the 1970s and then taken back to the UAE to show to the Hobby Lobby president. They gave the retailer the name of a Mississippi-based, purported “custodian” of these items, but the DOJ says this had never stored any of these items.
An expert in cultural property law advised Hobby Lobby’s top lawyer about the risks associated with items that originated in Iraq or neighboring countries, as they are “likely to have been looted.” In fact, he specifically named “cuneiform tablets” as a red-flag item, noting that a fuzzy import history of such an item could “lead to seizure and forfeiture of the object,” and that there are potential criminal risks involved with importing looted artifacts from Iraq.
The DOJ says this expert’s memo was never shown to the Hobby Lobby president or “anyone involved in the purchase and importation” of the tablets and other items.
And so, in Dec. 2010, Hobby Lobby’s president agreed to pay $1.6 million to purchase thousands of artifacts from one of these sellers, who had already sent at least one containing as many as 23 pieces. The items — and other subsequent packages — were not formally declared to Customs, despite being over the maximum value threshold for informal entry, and the shipping label on the package merely described them as “ceramic tiles” or “tiles (SAMPLE).” Some packages did accurately describe the contents, but inaccurately described the country of origin, says the DOJ.
In Jan. 2011, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detained multiple FedEx shipments, containing tablets and bullae, coming from the UAE and heading to Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma City. The first one had a shipping label that described the contents as “hand made [sic] clay tiles (sample)” that had been manufactured in Turkey and totaling only $250 in value. The DOJ says the actual value of this one package was more than $14,000.
Two days later, another box of supposedly Turkish tiles samples was detained by CPB, which determined that the package was actually worth in excess of $84,000 — 280 times the declared value of $300.
The government notified Hobby Lobby of these and other seizures in March 2011. Two months later, the company actually petitioned CBP for the release of the artifacts, providing the provenance documents they received from the dealers; documents that ultimately turned out to be wildly inaccurate.
Now Hobby Lobby has agreed to acknowledge its failures in doing proper due diligence on these purchases. The detained items will not be given over to the retailer, and Hobby Lobby will forfeit approximately 450 tablets, 3,000 bullae, and 144 cylinder seals. Additionally, the company will pay $3 million.
In a statement on its website, Hobby Lobby’s Green admits that “We should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled.”
The retailer says it “imprudently relied on dealers and shippers who, in hindsight, did not understand the correct way to document and ship these items,” and stresses that “At no time did Hobby Lobby ever purchase items from dealers in Iraq or from anyone who indicated that they acquired items from that country.”
Hobby Lobby defends the idea of acquiring these artifacts, contending that “Developing a collection of historically and religiously important books and artifacts about the Bible is consistent with the Company’s mission and passion for the Bible,” and that the retailer had hoped to preserve the purchased items and make them available for scholars to study.
“We have accepted responsibility and learned a great deal,” says Green. “Our entire team is committed to the highest standards for investigating and acquiring these items. Our passion for the Bible continues, and we will do all that we can to support the efforts to conserve items that will help illuminate and enhance our understanding of this Great Book.”
