a repository of information, tools, civil disobedience, gardening to feed your neighbors, as well as punk-aesthetics. the revolution is an unending task: joyous, broken, and sublime
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Latest Posts by solarpiracy - Page 2
The Pizzaburger Presidency
For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!
The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).
Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824
Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:
https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/
Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.
Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation
Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/
It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem
Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM
Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate
Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.
The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.
Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.
Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.
The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.
Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.
This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/
But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers
So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.
"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/
Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos
This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/
Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/
This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!
But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.
It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.
This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).
This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.
It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.
The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.
The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.
Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.
If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.
We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.
For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.
Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.
The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/
Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change
The phone rings just as Katrina Fingerson and Latoya McClary are about to leave to start their shift at the Goddard Riverside Community Center. It comes in on the line reserved for the 311 calls from concerned citizens and businesses who report homeless people on the streets, and the receptionist immediately starts scribbling down details. Male, pushing a shopping cart, clothes falling off, located at 39th Street and 3rd Avenue. The man falls into Fingerson and McClary’s territory –- anywhere from 42nd Street south to the water –- so he becomes their priority as they get in the car and drive uptown.
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
A forty hour work week is considered full time.
It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
Do yourself a favor. Learn to code. Here's how.
I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.
Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.
(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)
But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.
There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:
Novice
Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:
Dash - by General Assembly
CodeAcademy
w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)
Intermediate
Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:
Khan Academy
CodeAcademy - Ruby, Python, PHP
Difficult
If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.
Programming problems
Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems
Talentbuddy
TopCoder
Web Applications
If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.
Django Tutorial
I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.
Rails Guide
If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:
Cake PHP Book
Symfony 2 - Get Started
Yii PHP - The Comprehensive Guide
Conclusion
If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.
If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.
Best of luck!
Ken Liu talks about silkpunk in his latest novel:
“Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes as its inspiration the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from classical East Asian antiquity. My novel is filled with technologies like soaring battle kites that lift duelists into the air, bamboo-and-silk airships propelled by giant feathered oars, underwater boats that swim like whales driven by primitive steam engines, and tunnel-digging machines enhanced with herbal lore, as well as fantasy elements like gods who bicker and manipulate, magical books that tell us what is in our hearts, giant water beasts that bring storms and guide sailors safely to shores, and illusionists who manipulate smoke to peer into opponents’ minds.
The silkpunk technology vocabulary is based on organic materials historically important to East Asia (bamboo, paper, silk) and seafaring cultures of the Pacific (coconut, feathers, coral), and the technology grammar follows biomechanical principles like the inventions in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The overall aesthetic is one of suppleness and flexibility, expressive of the cultures that inhabit the islands.”
The war on drugs main consequence was to incarcerate huge numbers of people. There are 2,400,000 people in jail in the U.S. There are 7 times as many people in jail now as in the early seventies. About 1 in every 100 American adults is in jail. About half are there for drug offenses, many just possession.
It’s wild.
We tried prohibition with alcohol. It led to gang violence, people drinking poorly distilled liquor with methanol and getting sick or going blind, and so on. We tried it for ten years and were like, “Hey, maybe this just doesn’t fucking work at all.” And then we tried it with drugs.
Opium (not opiates, mind, but opium specifically) is the only drug whose usage decreased after prohibition, likely because other opiates including morphine and heroin were available. Everything else, usage has increased, and though most have peaked, none are close to their pre-prohibition usage status.
Prohibition has not made us safer and will not make us safer. Ascribing a level of rebelliousness to drugs, teaching kids lies about drugs that make them likely to doubt our word on all drugs rather than teaching them the actual potential harms and being honest, jailing people for ingesting substances on their own terms without harming anyone else (and again, if they do harm anyone else, they should be arrested for that, of course), not regulating the content of the drugs people buy and consume, pressuring people to hide their habits rather than seek help, forcing them into a position of isolation that progresses rather than impedes addiction, creating financial incentive for gangs to sell drugs and war over selling territory–none of these are things that benefit us. Responsibility for casual users and rehabilitation for problem users, honesty about all substances, proper education, healthy discussions, these are things that will make a difference.
A note to all college kids, So Microsoft word has default settings for papers.
If you search MLA, or APA you can get an entire paper template.
REPEAT: Microsoft word will Format your entire paper!
You never have to spend hours lining everything up again.
This is an illustration I did for the August 2014 issue of Popular Science Magazine. The assignment was to show a scifi take on human aging in the future. I wanted to do something relatively positive, so I drew a lady whose life has been been prolonged through cybernetic enhancements and augmentation, so she gets to spend time with her great-great-great-great grandchildren.
Thanks to AD Michelle Mruk!
I thought I’d post more Luc Schuiten because I am in love with his work.
I mean, look at this:
Isn’t it beautiful? Here’s what it looks like inside:
Here’s a 3D model:
Imagine if all that glass was solar-collector glass. It’s stunning and it would generate huge amount of energy.
I’m just going to sit and sigh over this for a while.
Christopher Gray, 21, a Drexel University junior and CEO/Founder of Scholly, has found a way to make finding those scholarships easier.
Gray himself has been very successful in finding scholarship funds. He is known as the “Million-Dollar Scholar” after being awarded $1.3 million in scholarships.
Over the past three years, Gray has also helped other families manually scour through databases, and figured, “Hey, I need something that can help. There has to be a faster way.”
Gray developed the answer in the form of Scholly, an app that uses eight specific parameters, like state, GPA, or race, to instantly filter through a deep directory of scholarships available for the prospective student.
“It’s extremely simple,” says Gray and that ultimately was the goal.
“The fact that it’s on the mobile (phone) really hits the audience,” says Soham Bhonsle, 21, a Scholly user and Drexel University senior. “It serves the need of its time. We want it on the go.”
Nicholas Pirollo, chief technological officer for Scholly, also offers that apps optimize searches compared to standard websites because they are more tailored to specific needs.
A recent study, conducted by Sallie Mae, shows that 39% of families used scholarship funds to pay for college during the 2012-2013 academic year and Scholly connects users with relevant scholarships in about five minutes. Scholly’s database is updated monthly to remove scholarships that are no longer available, add scholarships, and refresh deadlines.
There is money out there to go to school. Scholly has more than 10,000 downloads of the $0.99 app found in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Scholly’s costs are intentionally positioned at an affordable price to serve more people that need it and boast a potential big payoff.
“Pay 99 cents and you may get $5,000 or $6,000 in scholarships.”
Scholly helps put the power of funding your education in your hands.
It’s hopeful. Solarpunk doesn’t require an apocalypse. It’s a world in which humans haven’t destroyed ourselves and our environment, where we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of ourselves and our…
Resources for Male Survivors
I posted last week asking people if they knew of some good resources for male victims of sexual assault. Here is the list people came up with:
www.malesurvivor.org
www.violenceunsilenced.com
www.rainn.org
www.pandys.org
www.1in6.org
www.soulspeakout.org
Thanks everyone!
Most feminist U.S. president ever?
With President Obama, I KNOW my fave is problematic (drones, lobbyists working for WH, etc., etc.), but I believe that you would have to add up 3-5 other presidents to equal the good that he’s done for this country, especially on the topics of women and the LGBTQIA+ communities.
A LONG List Of President Obama’s Accomplishments (With Citations)
Updated! A List of 276 Accomplishments by President Obama so far… With Citations
Some great feminist Obama moments
If you aren’t totally quaking in your boots at the news of millions of bees dead, yet again, you’re nuts.
Tuebl.ca is my new most favoritest site.
for people who don’t know, Tuebl.ca is essentially a FREE AND AUTHORIZED ONLINE LIBRARY WHERE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD FREE .EPUB VERSIONS OF POPULAR BOOKS.
When I say authorized, I mean popular authors PUT THEIR BOOKS UP THERE FOR FREE BECAUSE THEY KNOW EBOOKS WILL GET THEM NEW FANS WHO WILL THEN GO ON TO BUY THEIR BOOKS.
I’m talking like John Grisham. Jacqueline Carey. Stephanie Meyers. Jeffrey Eugenides. FUCKING ANNA QUINDLEN. A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.
that’s just the start. seriously. try it out.
Source for more facts follow NowYouKno
A road has no special qualifiers. It connects point a to point b.
A street connects buildings together, usually in a city, usually east to west, opposite of avenue.
An avenue runs north south. Avenues and streets may be used interchangeably for directions, usually has median
A boulevard is a street with trees down the middle or on both sides
A lane is a narrow street usually lacking a median.
A drive is a private, winding road
A way is a small out of the way road
a court usually ends in a cul de sac or similar little loop
a plaza or square is usually a wide open space, but in modern definitons, one of the above probably fits better for a plaza as a road.
a terrace is a raised flat area around a building. When used for a road it probably better fits one of the above.
uk, a close is similar to a court, a short road serving a few houses, may have cul de sac
run is usually located near a stream or other small body of water
place is similar to a court, or close, usually a short skinny dead end road, with or without cul de sac, sometimes p shaped
bay is a small road where both ends link to the same connecting road
crescent is a windy s like shape, or just a crescent shape, for the record, above definition of bay was also given to me for crescent
a trail is usually in or near a wooded area
mews is an old british way of saying row of stables, more modernly seperate houses surrounding a courtyard
a highway is a major public road, usually connecting multiple cities
a motorway is similar to a highway, with the term more common in New Zealand, the UK, and Austrailia, no stopping, no pedestrian or animal traffic allowed
an interstate is a highway system connecting usually connecting multiple states, although some exist with no connections
a turnpike is part of a highway, and usully has a toll, often located close to a city or commercial are
a freeway is part of a highway with 2 or more lanes on each side, no tolls, sometimes termedexpressway, no intersections or cross streets.
a parkway is a major public road, usually decorated, sometimes part of a highway, has traffic lights.
a causeway combines roads and bridges, usually to cross a body of water
circuit and speedway are used interchangeably, usually refers to a racing course, practically probably something above.
as the name implies, garden is usually a well decorated small road, but probably better fits an above
a view is usually on a raised area of land, a hill or something similar.
byway is a minor road, usually a bit out of the way and not following main roads.
a cove is a narrow road, can be sheltered, usually near a larger body of water or mountains
a row is a street with a continuous line of close together houses on one or both sides, usually serving a specific function like a frat
a beltway is a highway surrounding an urban area
quay is a concrete platform running along water
crossing is where two roads meet
alley a narrow path or road between buildings, sometimes connects streets, not always driveable
point usually dead ends at a hill
pike usually a toll road
esplanade long open, level area, usually a walking path near the ocean
square open area where multiple streets meet, guess how its usually shaped.
landing usually near a dock or port, historically where boats drop goods.
walk historically a walking path or sidewalk, probably became a road later in its history
grove thickly sheltered by trees
copse a small grove
driveway almost always private, short, leading to a single residence or a few related ones
laneway uncommon, usually down a country road, itself a public road leading to multiple private driveways.
trace beaten path
circle usually circles around an area, but sometimes is like a “square”, an open place intersected by multiple roads.
channel usually near a water channel, the water itself connecting two larger bodies of water,
grange historically would have been a farmhouse or collection of houses on a farm, the road probably runs through what used to be a farm
park originally meaning an enclosed space, came to refer to an enclosed area of nature in a city, usually a well decorated road.
mill probably near an old flour mill or other mill.
spur similar to a byway, a smaller road branching off from a major road.
bypass passes around a populated area to divert traffic
roundabout or traffic circle circle around a traffic island with multiple connecting routes, a roundabout is usually smaller, with less room for crossing and passing, and safer
wynd a narrow lane between houses, similar to an alley, more common in UK
drive shortened form of driveway, not a driveway itself, usually in a neighborhood, connects several houses
parade wider than average road historically used as a parade ground.
terrace more common in uk, a row of houses.
chase on land historically used as private hunting grounds.
branch divides a road or area into multiple subdivisions.
College students can now get microsoft office for free
Just go here and sign up with your college email. You can install it on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on other mobile devices, including Windows tablets and iPads.
Tuebl.ca is my new most favoritest site.
for people who don’t know, Tuebl.ca is essentially a FREE AND AUTHORIZED ONLINE LIBRARY WHERE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD FREE .EPUB VERSIONS OF POPULAR BOOKS.
When I say authorized, I mean popular authors PUT THEIR BOOKS UP THERE FOR FREE BECAUSE THEY KNOW EBOOKS WILL GET THEM NEW FANS WHO WILL THEN GO ON TO BUY THEIR BOOKS.
I’m talking like John Grisham. Jacqueline Carey. Stephanie Meyers. Jeffrey Eugenides. FUCKING ANNA QUINDLEN. A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.
that’s just the start. seriously. try it out.
Ok cosplayers, it has come to my attention that a lot of you don’t know what this stuff is. Sit down and let me learn you a thing. This stuff here is called Frog Juice (there’s no real frogs in it). It’s originally for stuff like vinyl signs (my dad owns a sign company, so I grew up with this stuff), but it’s even more useful for a wide range of cosplay stuff.
Since it’s designed to protect outdoor vinyl signs, it can do a whole hell of a lot. It dries super fast (three minutes until it isn’t tacky) and shiny, so it’s perfect for anything that’s supposed to look like metal, ice, gems, etc. It’s incredibly strong and weatherproofs your stuff against ANYTHING, rain, snow, UV rays (so it doesn’t fade in sunshine), sleet, hail, whatever. It’s flexible too, so your foam will still bend and move with you without cracking. Not only that, but since it’s an aerosol, you can’t miss patches and it leaves no brush strokes, and it goes on so thin you can’t see it’s there. It doesn’t smudge, smear, scratch, or leave fingerprints, so your stuff can go a whole weekend at a con and still look brand new.
The kicker? It’s cheap, and a can will last you forever. I kidnapped this one brand new from my dad, and I’ve so far used it (in double coats, which is unnecessary, but I like to be on the safe side) on a full set of armour, three pairs of bracers, a top hat, pauldrens, two bows, and a pair of greaves. And there’s still plenty in the can. Did I mention it can also be used to seal foam in a single, flexible coat that can then be painted over, so you don’t have to spend two days messing with glue and whatnot?
TL;DR - If you need a foam sealer, a top coat, weatherproofing, or any kind of shiny finisher, GET SOME FUCKING FROG JUICE (the brand I use can be purchased here: http://www.signwarehouse.com/FL-CC-p-FL-FROG-12Z.html)
The DOJ’s report of Mike Brown’s autopsy. Death ruled a homicide.
Ferguson grand jury documents withheld (x)
More anger, action at Ferguson Commission meeting (x)
Ferguson book gifts grow; library donations over $350,000
Gov. Nixon declined 7 year old…
KU JOURNALISM MAJOR SHREDS “CASE” AGAINST MIKE BROWN
Shelby Lawson is a student at the University of Kansas, majoring in Journalism and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Lawson posted the following to her Facebook page:
“Alright y’all. I’d like to clear a few things up. This is a general address to the long list of misconceptions and inconsistencies and abuses of power that exist surrounding the killing of Mike Brown. I have researched these points and provided sources in case you wish to do some reading of your own.
-The most common misconception I’m hearing is that Mike Brown was significantly larger than Officer Wilson. This is incorrect. On page 198 of the official grand jury transcript, you can see that Officer Wilson testifies he is 6 ft 4 and weighs 210 lbs,the same size as Mike Brown.
(source)
-Mike Brown was NOT stopped because he was a suspect in crime. He and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped for jaywalking, as Darren Wilson testifies to on page 208 of his grand jury testimony.
-Mike Brown WAS fleeing from Officer Wilson when he was fatally shot. Wilson confirms this on page 281 of his grand jury testimony.
-Officer Wilson broke police self-defense protocol, which teaches to disarm and incapacitate rather than kill and teaches officers to go for body shots. Officer Wilson shot Mike Brown twice in the head, after he shot him four times in his arm and torso.
(source)
-Ferguson Police ignored protocol and refused to interview or take a statement from the eyewitness present from Officer Wilson’s initial contact with Mike Brown until his death.
(source)
-The forensic examiner broke protocol by failing to take crime scene photos. On page 95 of the grand jury transcript, she claims that this was because her camera had died, however, she goes on to describe how she immediately followed Wilson to the hospital in order to photograph his “injuries.”
-Forensic investigators broke protocol by failing to test Officer Wilson’s gun for fingerprints, since Wilson claims that Brown grabbed his gun and caused it to misfire. Page 39, grand jury transcript.
-Darren Wilson was then allowed to break protocol by washing the blood off of himself before it could be photographed, making it impossible to analyze blood spatter patterns and determine what position Mike Brown was in when Wilson first shot him. Wilson recounts this on page 10 of his official police interview.
(source)
-While Officer Wilson’s story of what happened that day has changed at least three times, six separate eyewitnesses, four of whom have never met each other, all have identical accounts of what happened. They were never interviewed by police.
(source)
-These eyewitnesses all agree that Darren Wilson was the aggressor and that Mike Brown was shot while surrendering, with his hands in the air and that his last words were “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting.”
-This is backed up by Mike Brown’s autopsy, which suggests that Mike Brown would have had to be in the hands-up position for the bullets to enter his hand and arm the way they did.
(source)
-Furthermore, in a press conference, the coroner who performed Mike Brown’s autopsy relays that there was no trace of gun shot residue anywhere on his body, proving that Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown grabbed his gun, causing it to misfire, is impossible and untrue.
(source)
-Ferguson Police lied about the distance Mike Brown was from Officer Wilson when he was killed. They reported it was 35 ft. but it was in fact 148 ft.
(source)
-Owner of Ferguson Market states that he did not call police to report a theft of cigars, that the theft had nothing to do with Mike Brown, and that the man on the security footage is not Mike Brown.
(source)
-The prosecuting attorney for the case against Darren Wilson has helped raise $600,000 in donations for Darren Wilson, creating a clear conflict of interest.
(source)
-The police department that Officer Wilson worked for prior to coming to Ferguson was disbanded after multiple instances of racial profiling.”
(source)
Source
Dec. 1 12:50 pm
Darren Wilson will not receive any further pay or benefits after resigning (x) (x)
“That bullshit jury was fixed” — Ferguson seethes in response to Darren Wilson verdict
14 teens killed by cops since Mike Brown
Long history of racial tension set the stage for Ferguson protests
STL Rams players show support for Ferguson protesters before game. Jeff Roorda and STL Police Officers Association (SLPOA) wants Rams players disciplined for “hands up” gesture.
Protest shuts down Interstate 395
Obama to meet civil rights leaders, police amid Ferguson protests
Lol it doesnt matter if a cop shoots two times or trillion times, you learn in police school if somebody is a threat for you, you shoot him till he stops moving...
Let’s take a moment to take your law apart and analyze it:
Darren Wilson chose not to carry a non-lethal weapon as well because it was not the most comfortable thing
furthermore
Mike Brown was unarmed
these are Darren Wilson’s so-called injuries (THEY EVEN TRIED PASSING OFF A BIRTHMARK AS AN INJURY)
Darren Wilson stopped Mike Brown for jaywalking, and he had no information about him supposedly robbing a convenience store. The store owner even said that nobody reported a robbery and he doubts that it was Mike Brown who shoplifted 48 dollar worth of items from his store. No matter what the police tells you, no matter if they claim Darren Wilson responded to a call, no matter how many witnesses they ignore, we still have the word of the store owner and his clerks, which they gave out publicly.
Mike Brown supposedly attacked Darren Wilson. Darren Wilson decided not to use mace that he said he had on him, but to shoot Mike Brown 6 times.
Unarmed Mike Brown was no threat to anyone. Even if he struggled for the gun, which I highly doubt, he was shot from a distance, which suggests he was running away. From my understanding, he was first shot in his forearm, from the back, while he was running away. Then he turned around and was shot in his upper arm, while he was still standing. He was shot in his chest while he was falling down and in his head, while he was already down. This was proven by Cyril Wecht, and if you do not know who he is, look him up. He worked many high-profile cases and is excellent in his line of work. Do watch his explanation.
Darren Wilson is a trained police officer. He was trained to work under pressure and to know how to react in such situations. He is in no way an inexperienced young cop (or a 5 year old) who could have reacted wrongly because he never found himself in a similar situation. He is a grown man who described Mike Brown as looking like demon to justify his actions.
An unarmed 18 year old child. It. A demon. Hulk Hogan. And he said he would do it again. He would shoot dead an 18 year old boy who was running away from him.
Throwing this in as well because it’s important and not enough people are talking about it.
Not to mention, Darren Wilson’s most vocal supporters, the KKK. And he’s being investigated himself about being connected to them in ways he shouldn’t have been.
Frank Ancona, leader of the KKK, admitted to speaking to law enforcement in Ferguson off the record. He tried to take it back afterwards, which only made it clearer that Ferguson police has been working with the KKK.
And in case you failed to read this anywhere else (624 black men if you do the math):
Even though it now has enough signatures, you can still sign this petition to bring Darren Wilson up on federal charges.
IN CONCLUSION
YOU DO NOT SHOOT UNARMED BOYS UNTIL THEY STOP MOVING THE LAW NEVER SAYS CONTINUE SHOOTING WHEN THE BOY IS FALLING DOWN AND DEAD ON THE FLOOR, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO INCAPACITATE HIM AND NOT KILL HIM
(all underlined text leads to other sources, do click on it)
EDIT: ADDING SOME NEWER INFO
A lot of the buildings being burned down and destroyed in Ferguson are owned by black owners. It’s the KKK’s work. A couple of looters aside, the actual protesters are not harming anyone or anything. Nothing is sacred to them.
THE GRAND JURY HAD AN OUTDATED LAW FROM ‘79 GIVEN TO THEM, INSTEAD OF THE ONE FROM ‘84
source
if you, like me, get so angry when discussing or debating current issues with ignorant/bigoted people that you can’t articulate your thoughts, here is a list of arguments i’ve seen so far defending darren wilson or going against the ferguson protests, with suggestions as to how to counter and links to helpful posts to support your argument:
1. “It’s not a race issue!”
Actual KKK waving a Confederate flag as they walk the streets of Ferguson, celebrating.
Darren Wilson might even be affiliated with the KKK
White Man waves a gun at children in a park, is taken into custody alive
More examples of double standards in favor of white people: James Eagan Holmes, various other (unnamed but fairly well-known) cases
2. “The officer feared for his life. It was self defense.”
Pictures of Darren Wilson’s oh-so-life-threatening injuries + full-body shot
Darren Wilson says he would do it again
Darren Wilson is 6’4” and 215lbs (needs source), in a vehicle with a loaded weapon. Mike Brown was an unarmed teenager walking down the street.
(Speculative) He got married while on leave, possibly so his wife wouldn’t have to testify if she knew something.
Wilson did not complete an incident report, which is a violation of protocol
Article about why Darren Wilson shooting Mike Brown was illegal no matter how you look at it
3. “Michael Brown stole from a convenience store. He was a thug and a thief.”
Statement from the store owner saying that no one called the police and nothing was taken
This is disputable and the time stamps on the video don’t sync up with the story.
The cigarettes he allegedly stole were paid for and there’s proof
Remind them that even if Mike Brown had done some petty shoplifting, that’s no reason for him to be shot six times in the middle of a street.
4. “The jury saw all the evidence, they know better.”/Something about insufficient/unreliable evidence.
“It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did” + only .0004% of grand juries fail to indict
All 4 eyewitness accounts of the murder in chronological order
Every piece of evidence in the case against officer wilson
Prosecutor supported Wilson, and other problems with the case
Remind them that even “people get charged with manslaughter when someone dies in a car accident” and Darren Wilson wasn’t even charged that
The National Bar Association and its president know the jury’s decision was bullshit
5. “The riots and protests are out of hand and unnecessary. It’s just an excuse to be violent and steal things.”
Video of protesters getting shot with (I think) flare bombs and tear gas by police. (warning: flashing lights and loud sounds)
Video of protesters quietly sitting down
Video of protesters peacefully but firmly chanting outside the supreme court
Video of the National Guard arriving with automatic weapons
Crips and Blood gang members preventing looters at the riots (from the first riots back in august)
Community working together to clean up the aftermath of the riots
6. “You can’t fight violence with violence, what would Martin Luther King say?”
“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots…..” -MLK
Remind them that as pro-peaceful protests as MLK was, he still got shot in the head.
If after all this, they’re still arguing in defense of Darren Wilson or the jury, just give up because there’s no way you can change the mind of such a complete fucking bigot.
Some masterposts I used that also have more information: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
If there’s anything I should add or fix, please let me know
Tweet 1: I can see a lot of people either avoiding Plan B & ending up pregnant or attempting to take multiple doses & getting sick.
Tweet 2: anyone w a credit card (not everyone, I know) can/should use ella ella-rx.com they’ll ship it overnight $45
SIGNAL BOOST. Ella is another form of emergency contraception/the morning-after pill. It’s more effective than Plan B and can be taken up to FIVE DAYS after your mishap, rather than three days. Please spread this around; with all of the anti-choice legislation flying about and how difficult it can be for some people to get Plan B even OTC (like minors, people living in small towns, etc.), this might be the only way a lot of people can get their hands on the morning-after pill.
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