Horsing around
Moses Supposes
Running into this on my dash was like running into an old friend
Thats just what theater kids are like
What I’ve always loved about this bit is
a. this musical number comes completely out of nowhere, with no greater context than what this video captures; and
b. the language instructor clearly can’t hear the music. He’s not from Musical Theatre Land. From his perspective, a couple of twinkle-toed weirdos just randomly decided to physically abuse him for three solid minutes. This isn’t reading anything that’s not intended into the scene – it’s literally the central gag.
@thebibliosphere in case you need some ridiculous Singin’ in the Rain on your dash.
(P.S. I imagined you making the faces at the instructor and it was hilarious)
I can but aspire to the level of expressiveness Cosmo Brown has with his face.
This is it. The singular most uplifting video I’ve ever seen in my entire life. When Sam said there’s good in the world worth fighting for he meant this.
Okay but genuinely why is the no fly list a USA government secret. Shouldn't it be public knowledge anyways? Genuinely who benefits from keeping it secret.
The government benefits. Because the point of these mechanisms of surveillance, arbitrary detention and extra-judicial criminalisation is not, and has never been, to protect citizens. It's to fucking terrorize you all into compliance. The point of accruing power is accruing power. And to justify maintaining and expanding this monopoly of coercive power, you have to find targets and scapegoats. It does not matter whom, only that a sufficient number of "threats" keep them in business.
The creation of things like Homeland Security, TSA, No-Fly List, Patriot Act etc. were pretexts for the US government to target literally anyone that made trouble for them, including anti-war activists, civil rights activists, journalists, politicians and anyone the CIA got annoyed with for any reason. Unlike normal court-issued travel restrictions and bans, the No-Fly list is one based entirely on surveillance. People aren't told if, when and why they're placed on it, just that they suddenly can't board a plane once they get to the airport, or that the Feds show up at their door after they leave. It's a means arbitrary criminalization. Obviously, it disproportionately targeted and continues to target Muslim Americans and Muslim Canadians, but there was little space to prove it because the governments (Canada also has one) refuse to release the list.
Usually, arbitrary suspensions of fundamental human rights like this in democratic countries are limited to periods of national emergency or security crisis, like with martial law. Even then these temporary measures removing transparency and oversight for "the greater good" have drastic consequences the world over, esp for marginalized people, journalists and activists. The US No-Fly list otoh, has been in place for 21 years now. It's fascism in every conceivable way, chipping away at democratic freedom and normalizing the surveillance state. Cartoon villain shit that would have been considered politically outlandish at any point before Sept 11. The 2019 No Fly list that our catgirl hacker stole had 1.56 MILLION NAMES ON IT. What the FUCK. Do you actually think that that many people could be a legitimate threat to the country with the biggest military industrial complex in the world?
We've always known that a ridiculous number of people get placed on it entirely by mistake because these morons rely on fucking airline software to flag people. If someone has the same name as a weapons dealer, or it's just the result of a misspelling, random citizens suddenly find themselves placed on a goddamn terrorist watch list. No small amount of these "false positives" belong to Muslim children under the age of ten, even under five. That's right, literal toddlers on a terrorist watch list. Many of them are still fighting to get taken off it. Google "no fly list kids" if you want to feel like day drinking. All of this is still happening.
Protesting at your politicians' houses isn't enough. If y'all understood the scope of terrorism and fascism you live under every day, you'd be throwing Molotov cocktails through their windows. It's why the US government keeps throwing whistleblowers in prison and trying to lose the key.
No Fly List Kids - Wikipedia
https://href.li/?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List_Kids
Hey what the fuck
For some reason I can only find news articles about children placed on the Canadian No-Fly List. The No Fly List Kids is a Canadian advocacy group. The Wikipedia article mentions the children stuck in the US one, but my cursory Google-fu isn't turning up any but a 2010 NYT article.
However, here's what happens when you fight the US govt for years and are finally taken off of it – you get harrassed by other governments.
Maniar said that he didn’t have anything to tell them (Pakistani authorities). Frantically scanning his mind for something that could explain his situation to the ISI agents and get him out of this, he went back to the no-fly list letter. That one-page document, issued under the letterhead of the Department of Homeland Security, permitting him to fly and clearing his name of suspicions of terrorism back home, had been his ticket out of the nightmare of law enforcement harassment he’d been experiencing for years. But somehow the message that he wasn’t a threat hadn’t been communicated abroad.
Maniar tried with increasing desperation to explain the letter and how he had resolved his issues in the United States. As he was speaking, a black bag came down over his head.
...
In 2014, a major investigation based on leaked documents was published by The Intercept shedding light on how the terrorist watchlist was constructed. A 166-page document titled “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” exposed a covert program that blacklisted large numbers of people based on unchallengeable secret criteria. The watchlisting guidance revealed the levels of “derogatory information” that could lead to someone winding up on the list, exposing an opaque system with few checks and balances that was ripe for abuse. It was easy to get yourself on the list and suffer its consequences, but very difficult to know how to clear your name if you were actually innocent.
...
Handeyside added, the simple fact of sharing information with foreign governments suggesting that someone might be a terrorist can create enormous dangers for them: “To the extent that the U.S. government is using and sharing watchlist information at all, it creates serious risks. You can have a hell of a time clearing your name with the U.S. government but still be detained, targeted, interrogated, or searched very intensively abroad, based on information about you that is outdated or inaccurate.”
When it comes to the no-fly list specifically, U.S. citizens and permanent residents can now go through a legal process to remove themselves from the list. But even if they are cleared to fly, it remains possible that they could remain on other secret lists or that negative information about them could wind up persisting on databases maintained by foreign governments. The dangers of this could be very serious, particularly when individuals who have been watchlisted are traveling to foreign countries where legal protections are weak.
The entire watchlisting enterprise is predicated on the idea of guilt by association,” said Gadeir Abbas a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who represented individuals on the watchlist. “People are connected to others based on their associations, and based on those associations, potentially determined to be higher risk and subject to more scrutiny.”
It was that formula of guilt-by-association that got Maniar listed in the first place, trapping him in a web of problems from which there seemed to be no escape.
(Source)
How did this guy land on the No Fly List? He became friends with a British Muslim woman and talked to her about the Syrian war over WhatsApp. Her Facebook posts about Syria got flagged by British intelligence, who confiscated her electronic devices and flagged anyone she had been talking to. The Feds then started harrassing this guy.
I don't know whether he and his friend were posting pro-terrorist or edgelord shit about Syria or simply criticizing the West's responses to the war. These agencies are staffed by extremely paranoid personnel with military and police conditioning. In either case, it's the exact precedent established here that might well lead to your house getting raided for posting "ACAB" on Instagram. Reasons don't matter, because once you give a government the power and precedent to circumvent due process and suspend democratic human rights, all that's left is finding an excuse.
Not reading all that right now but maybe later
I learned in my political science class that all major famines in the 20th century and onward have been caused by oppressive groups or political situations restricting access to food, NOT natural causes like crop failure
For The Masses:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=380
http://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/
http://www.freebookspot.es/Default.aspx
no one coulda reblogged this a month ago when i spent 500
Look at KB coming through
Every time you see this, reblog it. There is always someone in college that will see this.
Look at what they’ve taken from us
i think about this one so fucking often i had to clip it
that was like watching someone very skillfully assembling a stained-glass window just to watch someone else dropkick it
Tik Tok is too stimulating. Too many thirst traps and interesting facts, I just keep scrolling and afterwards I have 3 new chrome tabs open, 2 more movies on my watch list and a note to buy vegetable glycerin on my to do list
5821969180069230989
A minecraft seed that has something deeply wrong with it.
This seed deserves special mention for having (at least) 13 ancient cities within 1,500 blocks of spawn. This is one of those seeds where they're more common than villages.
Right near spawn it becomes apparent that something is...not right about the mountains
at least, when you are confronted with THIS motherfucker unlimited. Note the level of the clouds.
For the uninitiated, terrain can only generate below y level 256. That flat plateau? Is at y=255.
Mountains are supposed to taper into peaks in Minecraft. This mountain looks like it was just chopped off at the height limit.
This whole seed is full of some truly dramatic mountains. This beautiful mountain range, for instance.
I checked out the seed on Chunkbase and found another area where the altitude seemed unexpectedly high, and traveled out there:
This range of stony mountains is by far the most dramatic terrain I have ever found. Like the mountain near spawn, these mountains also have weird flat plateau-like areas at y=254 or so, as if they were suddenly chopped off at the top.
It's almost like the game tried to create a much, much higher mountain, but was stopped by the height limit for terrain generation.
That's weird enough, but it doesn't really get creepy until you go underground.
This is underneath the mountains near spawn. That sculk growth is an expected thing to find under mountains, where the Deep Dark biome generates...but something's off here.
The Deep Dark biome is supposed to generate below y level 0, waaaaay way deep underground. But this sculk is all the way up at y=106.
That's not only over 100 blocks higher up than it's supposed to be, it's above the normal level of the ground! The surface in low lying areas in Minecraft tends to be around y=65-80!
The same weird thing is happening underneath the stony mountain range. The sculk growth has climbed far above sea level, when it's not supposed to do that.
Weird...
At the mountains of madness
Oh NOBODY'S going to be horny after this
my ankle is so fuckin horny tho
A victorian
I thought this was a bowl of instant ramen for a solid minute
I thought this was a
bowl of instant ramen for
a solid minute
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
The sequence of these reblogs is insane
Ah! My favorite tree!
Specifically the American Sycamore:
But "sycamore" refers to a different tree on every continent...
The European version is actually a kind of maple.
cc: Who thinks, uh, Watson is too heavy? Raise your hand if you think Watson is too heavy.
*short cut*
Does anybody think he’s too skinny?
audience member: no.
No? M'kay..So uh, I’m very proud of you guys. You get a 100 percent. Uh, he’s perfect
*upbeat music plays as it zooms in on the dog*
I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
RIPMedicalDebt was created by John Oliver to do that giveaway. They’re amazingly effective and efficient with donations
Can confirm! This is what happened to a lot of my college debt, I suspect. I don’t pay it, haven’t paid any of it, no one has called or asked me about it, and it has seemingly disappeared!
Just wanted to clarify that RIPMEDICALDEBT was not created by John Oliver, but it was the organization he partnered with to buy up medical debt! They have region specific campaigns or you can donate to the nationwide fund.
Could I... buy my own debt and forgive it??
i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 200 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken
this show has the best animation I’ve ever seen, Japanese or otherwise
what is happening
What the everloving fuck
It’s an ordinary day in an ordinary life.
when she punches the old guy I lose it every time
I don’t get the pepole who are like “what’s even happening” like it’s pretty obvious from the video if you watch it. that’s what going on.
maybe I need to watch more anime actually
Yes