Can you believe margot robbie did this stunt on her own without any wires while wearing high heels
we had to hear stories about fucked up shit jared leto was doing for a year for his 5 seconds of mediocrity while this woman was out here actually becoming a gymnast?????
In a test flight, Boeing took the thing where you draw using your GPS path to a whole different level. They drew the outline of a plane that spanned the latitude of the conterminous United States.
I think that one of my favorite things as a kid was right after a powwow my ma and I decided to go with her then fiance to an ice cream shop with some of our regalia and leathers still on. Out of nowhere a little girl comes out, points and yells:
“LOOK MOMMY! INDIANS!”
My ma without missing a beat turned around, pointed at her and screamed, “LOOK JEFF! A WHITE GIRL!”
Artist Nagato Iwasaki‘s lifelike driftwood sculptures are perfect examples of the uncanny valley — the feelings of revulsion and uneasiness one experiences from non-human objects that appear a bit too similar to real human beings. Japan seems to excel at this in areas like robotics technology, and indeed, the term “uncanny valley” itself was coined in 1970 by a Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori. Iwasaki takes this concept out into nature, blurring the line between flesh and wood.
installation at Mount Fuji, November 2008
Over the past 25 years, Iwasaki has been crafting these sculptures as part of a collection he simply calls “torso.” The sculptures themselves are life-sized at around 180 centimeters tall, or 5 feet 9 inches and made entirely of driftwood the artist collects in various locations in Japan. No one sculpture is exactly like another which makes them all seem like individuals with their own quirks and personalities. Descriptions of Iwasaki’s sculptures by viewers run the gamut from scary, unsettling, and imposing, to profound, intriguing, and otherworldly.
“Gathering bits of wood from here and there, like an insect building a nest, I create sculptures”
Iwasaki’s driftwood sculptures have been exhibited in installations both in Japan and abroad. They have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the Tokyo area for the past 25 years, and in 1996, a collaboration with fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto was included in that year’s Florence Biennale in Italy. A bit more recently, Tokyo-based indie rock band The Back Horn used Iwasaki’s driftwood sculptures for the cover of their 2008 compilation album. Though there is little written by the artist about his work, perhaps it is intentional as the sculptures themselves are powerful enough on their own.
maybe once every 3 weeks i think about how Chelsea manning snuck incriminating files past military security by putting them on a blank cd with ‘lady gaga’ written on it
what
“On January 5, 2010, Manning downloaded the 400,000 documents that became known as the Iraq War logs. On January 8, she downloaded 91,000 documents from the Afghanistan database, known later as part of the Afghan War logs. She saved the material on CD-RW and smuggled it through security by labeling the CD-RW media “Lady Gaga”. She then copied it onto her personal computer.“ from her wiki lmaoo she’s an icon
One of Washoe’s caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:
“People who should be there for her and aren’t are often given the cold shoulder—her way of informing them that she’s miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing “MY BABY DIED.” Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat’s eyes again and carefully signed “CRY”, touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don’t shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences.“ [23]
Washoe herself lost two children; one baby died shortly after birth of a heart defect, the other baby, Sequoyah, died of a staph infection at two months of age.
more about Washoe:
after the death of her children, researchers were determined to have Washoe raise a baby and brought in a ten month chimpanzee named Loulis. one of the caretakers went to Washoe’s enclosure and signed “i have a baby for you.” Washoe became incredibly excited, yelling and swaying from side to side, signing “baby” over and over again. then she signed “my baby.”
the caretaker came back with Loulis, and Washoe’s excitement disappeared entirely. she refused to pick Loulis up, instead signing “baby” apathetically; it was clear that the baby she thought she was getting was going to be Sequoyah. eventually Washoe did approach Loulis, and by the next day the two had bonded and from then on she was utterly devoted to him.
*information shamelessly paraphrased from When Elephants Weep by Jeffrey Masson.
Even more interestingly, after Washoe and Loulis bonded, she started teaching him American Sign Language the same way that human parents teach their children language. It only took Loulis eight days to learn his first sign from Washoe, and aside from the seven that his human handlers learned around him, he learned to speak in ASL just as fluently as Washoe and was able to communicate with humans in the same way she could.
now if y’all don’t think this is the tightest shit you can get outta my face
Next of Kin by Roger Fouts is an excellent book that tells the story of Washoe from her childhood through adulthood and raising Loulis, recounted by one of the leading researchers who worked with her for years.
imo he was being super salty about that tendency guys have to blame their anatomy for their bad choices
it’s like “oh i don’t want to be a creepo but my dick has a mind of its own” “well here’s a scissors fix your life”
or maybe, you know, have some damn respect, and don’t pretend you don’t have a choice of whether to be nasty
i think people have a tendency to take jesus literally when he was actually throwing shade, or to take things in this really smarmy martyrish way when they’re actually pretty snippy
i mean “turn the other cheek” sounds like being a doormat until you picture how it would play out: someone smacks you, and you turn and go “do it again, go on, take a swing buddy, does that make you feel better, do you feel like a winner now?” cuz you know what 90% of the time they will get curled up shame toes and shuffle off
tl;dr: no jesus did not actually want you to take a spoon to your eyeballs for babe watching, he wanted you to take responsibility for how you treat people
All of the actions Jesus told his followers to perform are actually passive-aggressive actions meant to oppose and resist Jerusalem’s Roman colonizers. Like,
turning the other cheek is actually a matter of forcing the Roman to either break proper slapping etiquette or to hit you properly- thereby treating you as an equal instead of someone he’s subjugating. If a debtor is taking all your possessions in court, you include the shirt off your back so his greed is causing you to commit public nudity. And when a soldier forces you to carry his equipment (as per the law of the time), you go the extra mile with him- literally carrying his bag beyond the distance that the law stipulates and therefore making the action illegal.
Context matters.
Jesus was a radical, rebellious, snarky twentysomething. Always remember that.
wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
Mugshot of a teenage girl arrested for protesting segregation, Mississippi, 1961.
Her name is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. Her family disowned her for her activism. After her first arrest, she was tested for mental illness, because Virginia law enforcement couldn’t think of any other reason why a white Virginian girl would want to fight for civil rights.
She also created the Joan Trumpauer Mullholland Foundation. Most recently, she was interviewed on Samatha Bee’s Full Frontal on February 15 for their segment on Black History Month.
Don’t reduce civil rights heroes to “teenage girl”.
Her great-grandparents were slave owners in Georgia, and after the United States Civil War, they became sharecroppers. Trumpauer later recalled an occasion that forever changed her perspective, when visiting her family in Georgia during summer. Joan and her childhood friend Mary, dared each other to walk into “n*gger” town, which was located on the other side of the train tracks. Mulholland stated her eyes were opened by the experience: “No one said anything to me, but the way they shrunk back and became invisible, showed me that they believed that they weren’t as good as me. At the age of 10, Joan Trumpauer began to recognize the economic divide between the races. At that moment she vowed to herself that if she could do anything, to help be a part of the Civil Rights Movement and change the world, she would.
In the spring of 1960, Mulholland participated in her first of many sit-ins. Being a white, southern woman, her civil rights activism was not understood. She was branded as mentally ill and was taken in for testing after her first arrest. Out of fear of shakedowns, Mulholland wore a skirt with a deep, ruffled hem where she would hide paper that she had crumpled until it was soft and then folded neatly. With this paper, Mulholland was able to write a diary about her experiences that still exists today. In this diary, she explains what they were given to eat, and how they sang almost all night long. She even mentioned the segregation in the jail cells and stated, “I think all the girls in here are gems but I feel more in common with the Negro girls & wish I was locked in with them instead of these atheist Yankees.
Soon after Mulholland’s release, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton E. Holmes became the first African American students to enroll at the University of Georgia. Mulholland thought, “Now if whites were going to riot when black students were going to white schools, what were they going to do if a white student went to a black school?” She then became the first white student to enroll in Tougaloo College in Jackson, where she met Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ed King, and Anne Moody.
She received many letters scolding or threatening her while she was attending Tougaloo. Her parents later tried to reconcile with their daughter, and they tried to bribe her with a trip to Europe. She accepted their offer and went with them during summer vacation. Shortly after they returned, however, she went straight back to Tougaloo College.
She ultimately retired after teaching English as a Second Language for 40 years and started the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation, dedicated to educating the youth about the Civil Rights Movement and how to become activists in their own communities.
I watched a YouTube video once (by a guy who’s name escapes me) about the importance of making sure the stories of white activists are told. His point was that it’s not about lavishing praise on them just because they were white and “woke”, it’s about letting other white allies see that others have come before them who were willing to sacrifice and do the hard work. This way they can see themselves in someone and realize that destroying inequality isn’t a fringe interest or just an “us vs. them” issue. It has to be ALL OF US.
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