@elodieunderglass these are lovely decorative friends and make me think of you. Also, I am stunned by the artistry and creativity that went into making them.
They are enchanting, and I’m so grateful to see them!
Bugs Bunny could singlehandedly defeat Thanos by dressing up as a TSA agent and setting up a metal detector in the middle of the battlefield saying that all metal objects must be removed if you want to pass on through now stick around for my 2,000 word essay on just how effectively he would convince The Mad Titan to comply
“For shame, doc! Dontcha know we got other folks waiting?”
(Thanos looks behind him and sees dozens of Bugs Bunnies dressed as angry yelling travelers with huge bags of luggage. Thanos rubs his neck guiltily and begins sliding off the gauntlet)
I felt compelled
I don’t think I’ve seen such a finely crafted Looney Toons joke in over two decades. Bravo.
President Donald Trump once again
unleashed what’s become his presidential hallmark: a bizarre, winding,
threatening press conference, this time following his White House
meeting with Democratic leaders Friday to try to break the impasse
causing the government shutdown.
In a long, meandering briefing
in the Rose Garden, Trump told reporters the partial shutdown now
heading into its third week could go on for months, even years, if
Democrats don’t give him the $5.6 billion he’s demanding to build a
U.S.-Mexico border wall. The Democrats have steadfastly refused. The
shutdown has affected some 800,000 federal workers — 420,000 of them forced to work without pay — since Dec. 22.
“This is national security we’re talking about,” Trump said. “We’re not talking about games.“
When asked if there was any “safety net” for workers going without pay as the shutdown continues, Trump responded: “The safety net is going to be having a strong border.”
Trump
also floated another way he could get his wall: declaring a state of
national emergency over border security to build it without
congressional approval.
If y’all are curious as to why I get so militant about the politics well it may or may not have something to do with the fact that the president of America is a wild man who believes things he himself made up and who talks about dissolving his own government and installing himself as a dictator as if it ain’t no big deal.
“I could do it if I wanted” indeed. Those words probably gonna haunt my dreams tonight ngl
The safety net for furloughed employees is a strong border? Is Mexico going to pay their wages like they’re going to pay for the wall?
Those employees include hospital staff, emergency services, and other staff of critical support structures. This is going to kill people, if it hasn’t already.
Impeach the bastard.
LOCK HIM UP
TSA screeners are working without pay and some are not doing their jobs properly. A growing number are involved in an informal sick out, causing longer lines.
We already have a shortage of air traffic controllers. One in five are eligible for retirement. If a significant number of them choose to retire rather than stick out the shutdown, we will have a long term problem, especially as the new apprentices in training are also likely to quit.
They have also furloughed all aviation safety inspectors, although they’re being called in without pay as needed.
Tl;dr - if you don’t have to fly right now, don’t.
Other effects: Affordable housing contracts are not being renewed. Nobody has been turned out onto the streets yet, but landlords are cutting back on maintenance.
If the shutdown passes January 20, while food stamp recipients will get money for February (early), they may not get it for March.
FEMA will not have funding after January 31. Some people are still waiting for roof repairs they now won’t get.
The Coast Guard has almost no money left, which, oh! That affects border security. Hey, drug smugglers? All ya need to do is get in a boat. It will also affect safety.
Tl;dr - yes, people are going to die, and we may have a major air disaster. Or another terrorist attack. And more drugs getting into the country.
Yet, 75% of Republicans still support the wall…over American lives.
FDA is stopping inspections on a lot of food types, when we’re already having people sick and dying over lettuce. The FDA workers that are still working are doing so without pay.
Manufacture crisis > declare emergency > seize power = dictatorship
“Capitalism is oppressive because I only get 3-4 hours of free time a day”
Ok, here’s a thought, and bear with me here: increase your value on the market place so you earn more $/hr so you can choose to work less hours.
And don’t tell me you can’t do that because you can learn practically anything online for free or from library books.
A primer on poverty, free time, and choosing to earn more money.
1. The United States is second only to Nicaragua in blaming poor people for their poverty. So, congratulations you libertarian you! You’re expressing the call of the fucking herd, participating in a dumb chorus, and are not representing the light of social, practical, intellectual difference. Fully one quarter of your herd feel poor people are responsible for the own poverty in spite of the overwhelming facts pointing out the opposite. (x, y) One of the reasons for such an exaggerated fiction is that US and UK people work some of the longest and strangest hours in the world. That’s all of us, not just the poor. (x) Our fictions are bound to be more exaggerated.
2. Owners and bosses make so much more money than the average employee that the exaggeration of unearned ambition (see Adam Smith, Part I, Chapter II, here) that’s been a problem in capitalism since its inception is much more exaggerated and problematic today. It’s understandable why you want to imply poor people don’t want to work, although the opposite is the solid truth. Capitalist society values work more than equality, and so even the poorest and unhappiest people are willing to work long and strange hours. We have to address how the division of labor works to promote a sense of fairness about income inequality.
3. We use vague words like inequality to address fairness. Fact is, we can address value very specifically. Workers don’t earn anything approaching appropriate compensation for the hours they work, while owners and employers are earning much more than they’re actually worth, in spite of working similar hours. (x, y) The fact is that, for some reason, we permit some people to say they are worth more than others. Likely, this is a result of the form cooperation between employee and employer takes in capitalism, where employees sacrifice earnings for a number of promises, such as safety at work, access to forms of insurance, compensation for injury, and provided tools and resources. I know from experience that Americans believe bosses pay out of pocket for these “materials”, but the truth is labor produces them. Without labor, we’d have zero wealth creation. That’s a fact. It makes sense to complain. If we’re not going to be compensated more fairly, then we should get more time away from work.
4. I’ve addressed in another post how talking about “wealth” instead of “value” helps generate momentum for the fiction that the long hours rich employers work and the amount of wealth capitalists possess prove they’ve earned their status and wealth. It’s not true. It never has been true. Simple analysis will illustrate that. Just look at the data gathered about work. It’s easily accessible these days. On the other hand, one needs analysis plus social engineering to be able to argue wealthy people have earned their wealth while poor people haven’t earned it yet. Your hero von Mises had to compose a social theory of human action that insists it’s best to think of people as consumers and business owners rather then employee and employer for just this reason. It’s easy to talk about choices, freedom, and liberty when we’re addressing bosses and consumers and wildly wealthy elites. To be antisocialist in a capitalist society insists one must agree about a few conditions before making any arguments about social equality and identity. The theory comes not from metaphysics but from social engineering; in other words, it’s propaganda.
5. But facts are facts. In 2012, for example, the majority of able-bodied poor worked. (x) Year in and year out, the poor work. And they work hard–multiple jobs, night and day, with little sleep. Look we all know that money earned is worth more to the poor than the rich; another way to put it, poverty is expensive. Spending to sustain healthy life takes all of our money. Wealthy people can afford to spend money on investments and entertainment. They tend to lead happier lives for obvious reasons. (x) The link shows that the wealthiest people in the US receive much more of their income from wages than the poorest people do.
6. Something in the assumed rationale in your claim above tells me you think that people earn more money because they have some skills associated with their social status and pay that poorer people lack. That’s simply not the case. We know that a college degree, for example, is worth less if the student and future employee is born poor and worth more if born wealthy. (x)
We can say, without a doubt, that spending what little leisure time we have away from work “bettering” (part of the capitalist myth about social mobility is that we can choose to become better) ourselves is not necessarily going to do anything to increase our value in the workplace.
7. I’m going to give you a little wake up call for your notion that people can choose to become more wealthy. It’s certainly true in the past that much of the wealth in the US was earned rather than inherited. And this only makes sense because much of the wealth (money and value) has been only recently created via economic booms (and recoveries from busts). There wasn’t massive accumulations of wealth to bequeath in the recent past. (Caveat: for a very small, minority of Americans there always has been great wealth and that was inherited. We’re not addressing them.)
We know wealth is an accumulation of excess income over expenditures over time. Wealth inequality is on the rise, all over the world. Thus, we know that these days, and even more so in the days to come, as wealth inequality rises, more people will begin inheriting wealth rather than earning it.
Choosing to be better becomes even more of a fantastic myth.
8. Finally, it’s an intellectual cop out to claim people can educate themselves for free. I’ve been teaching for close to twenty years. Much of the education that future employees exchange for better wages involves learning achieved from within institutions that engage different learning communities and wherein people can make various valuable social connections that permit them referrals, aid, cooperation, and affiliation, all of which costs a lot of money.
!!!!!
when are y’all gonna learn to stop dick riding the rich…if taking a shit on you would make them more money they would do it
adulthood is just a constant struggle of, “man, i want cookies for breakfast, but I also recognize this is a bad nutritional decision. On the other hand, the only one who can stop me is me. i know that fucker’s weaknesses. i could totally take me in a fight.”
There’s probably a German compound word for that feeling you get at 2am when you’re single in your mid twenties and the creeping doubt that you’ve somehow missed your only chance at love because you didn’t meet someone in college and now it’s too late
The german word you are looking for is ‘Torschusspanik’
I think we need to talk about how dangerous softboy nerd sexual predators are. Every single time I’ve been creeped on or taken advantage of in college it wasn’t by a drunken jock fratboy. It was by a soft anxious nonthreatening nerd boy whose strategy was to get compassionate girls to feel sorry for him
Men who say they’re Rick’s when they’re all actually Jerry’s.
this is the first time i have seen this show referrenced to make i good point, and let me just say that it is about damn time
lmao on the edinburgh zoo site it says “there is a daily penguin parade at 14:15 but it may be cancelled last minute as it is a voulntary parade, we do not coax the penguins with food, and they may not want to go out” lmao anarchopenguinism
this is the cutest goddamn thing i’ve ever heard
I saw the penguin parade. It was a very slow parade, because the
pingüinos take their sweet time and aren’t very fast walkers to begin with.
can I volunteer to be a penguin
I feel like the world needs to know the context of the edinburgh zoo penguin parade, becausr I’ve been going there my entire life and I only found out about this the other year.
So a while back (I can’t remember exactly when but I think it was some time around the 40s/50s), a bunch of penguins escaped. A keeper left the gate open so a bunch of penguins just… followed them. And the people loved it. Look at these adorable birds outside their cage just following that guy around! So they get all the penguins back inside and realise that none of them really ran off, they just followed the keeper and went back inside and crowd thought it was amazing, so why not make it a regular thing? Get enough people there that if one of them goes to make a run for it (which at least one has in the past), they can’t get past the people, and let the ones who want outside have a little wander. So every day, they get a crowd, they open the gate, and whatever penguins want to get out can go, waddle about, squawk at people, and then hop back inside.
Also, one of those penguins is Brigadier Sir Nils Olaf III, Colonel-in-cheif of the Norwegian King’s Guard. This isn’t really related to the parade at all, I just love the fact that there’s a penguin in the Norwegian army
Reblogging with Brigadier Sir Nils Olaf III inspecting his troops.
