The Perpetrator.

thank god for american public transit !!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

You get on the bus and then everyone does the Flintstones thing

New guy at work: “Oh, you were in the Army?”

Me: “Yeah.”

New guy: “Thank you for your service!”

Me: “It was bullshit. It’s all bullshit. You ever heard of Smedley Butler?”

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. …  I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

–Major General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corps

The Age-Herald, Birmingham, Alabama, September 12, 1913

it was a book from 2005 that never really took off until they put it in the Macy’s parade for some reason. the title being coercively named “A Christmas Tradition” seemingly made a bunch of parents panic and think they were withholding some beloved christmas tradition from their children, leading to the book and subsequent elf doll to receive its first ever surge of popularity. at that point it just started spreading through cartoon adaptations (creating the expectancy of this product from children to uphold Christmas Lore) and online memes showing the elf in silly locations. anyone who was a child from 2012-2014 will tell you that it literally appeared out of thin air one year.

a truly unique American christmas tradition fueled entirely by marketing and parents’ need to one-up other parents by proving how much more fun they are with their kids

as someone else in the notes also pointed out, the emphasis on this tradition is that the elf is “always watching you” and reporting everything you do to santa clause, but you aren’t allowed to interfere with the elf’s surveillance or touch him or else he loses his christmas magic, and you literally just murdered an innocent elf.

coincidentally the year Elf on The Shelf gained popularity was also the year Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents proving that the U.S. government has been surveilling everyone using invasive techniques regardless of criminality

Every time I get groceries I’m always appalled at how little you can get for like, $20. I was making banana pudding so I needed vanilla wafers but the brand name nilla wafers cost $4 a box. The minimum wage in my state is $7.25/hr. My friend put it really well when he said “imagine you work for an hour and someone hands you two boxes of nilla wafers and said ‘actually this is a bit more than what I owe you’”

How are some of y’all missing the point so bad. “Shop at aldi instead” “make your own food” “don’t buy brand name” “don’t buy unhealthy processed food” It’s not about the box of cookies. This is about how minimum wage pays peanuts and has stagnated for 12 years while the cost of living keeps growing. No one wants your financial advice about how to survive on beans and rice and frozen veggies. The smartest grocery list in the world is not gonna help you budget your way out of poverty. Please get a grip for the love of god

This dog I’m sitting grabbed an American flag out of someone’s front yard, shook it in his mouth like it was a prey animal, then carried it 10 feet before shitting on it

To be clear I have never been more proud of anyone or anything

HOSPITALS THINK YOU ARE STUPID

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Chris_Kyle_and_Chad_Littlefield

I had to look this up because I was just so shocked to read this. Like a year after he published his book praising all the glory of America and guns???? Someone voted for the leopards eating faces party…

Fun fact: two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are due to medical expenses.

American healthcare system be like

he’s not taking the news well

here’s how they made the brown m&m less fuckable if you weren’t able to notice the changes

Okay but this is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that it’s corporations driving the Culture War. Like, if M&M corporation just redesigned its characters, no one would give a shit. But if M&M corporation announces that it’s redesigning it’s characters *to reflect DIVERSITY* or something like that, then they know that they can count on conservative commentators to performatively lose their shit about Wokeness and how it’s infesting every aspect of the culture and how the communists are trying to trans your M&Ms; and even better than that, they know that they can depend on snarky progressives to make fun of the conservatives for this and say that they want to fuck candy mascots. And so a complete non-story will have legs for days and go viral by playing the tribes against one another.

Ok the guy with the net fucking killed me, I’m sure my neighbors heard me laughing.

School shootings. They don’t want you to hide guns.

This is where we are, folks. We’ve come to the point where they’re demanding that children carry all of their school supplies in hand so that they don’t have to do anything about the gun violence problem in this shithole of a country.

I love malicious compliance

HISTORY COMES FULL CIRCLE, HOLY SHIT I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY’RE STILL DOING THIS TO KIDS. 

They did this shit at my school way back when Columbine had just happened!

Naturally, we invented all sorts of bullshit ways to carry our shit, because what the fuck, we need backpacks. 

My favourites included: 

-Fishing rod with twine tied around two pencils and a small pocket notebook.

-Tons of people got those little clear plastic bags they have in grocery stores for fruit and shit, and used them as see-through pencil cases 

Note: THEY PROCEEDED TO THEN ALSO BAN THE BAGS AS “CHOKING HAZARDS”. WE WERE NOT THREE YEAR OLDS. OUR HEADS DIDN’T EVEN FIT IN THE FUCKING BAGS, AND BELIEVE ME, WE TRIED AS SOON AS THEY ANNOUNCED THE BAN, BECAUSE MOST OF US WOULD RATHER HAVE DIED THAN BEEN IN FUCKING SCHOOL BY THAT POINT. DID THEY THINK WE WERE GONNA STUFF THE BAGS DOWN OUR THROATS? CHRIST.)

-One kid dressed up like a priest and used the loose fabric of the cassock to carry three text books around all day. 

-Someone hollowed out a fucking loaf of bread, pretended to be French all day, and made a show out of pulling a ridiculous number of highlighters out of this fucking bread in the middle of class. 

Now that I think about it, I think that kid invented Panera Bread by accident. Y’know, the little bread soup bowls? This was that, but with highlighters instead of soup. 

Eventually, things escalated, and the principal called the police after he went to the parking lot and found his car broken into– Nothing was stolen, but there were about 5000 fucking backpacks stuffed in his car, to the point that the door wouldn’t even open.

I don’t know who did it, or what group of people did it, but they’re all fucking heroes because the next week backpacks were permitted again. 

the united states of america hates children

if it were not explicitly illegal to make kids work long hours, companies in this country would be scheduling 14 year olds with 8 to 12 hour shifts just like they exploit the adults they employ. the foster care system in this country is a nightmare. the corporal punishment debate feels like it’s never going to end; there are still parents who feel that they are ‘within their right’ to hit and spank their kids and there was a bill introduced to the house of representatives as recently as february of 2021 that has once again proposed ending corporal punishment in schools. nearly every private school in this country, except for those in new jersey and iowa, is still legally allowed to punish children physically. the public school system is a traumatizing mess with intense grading scales and attendance policies that aggressively punish kids of color, poor kids, disabled kids, and neurodivergent kids. the way federal funding for schools is determined in part by adequacy and ‘basic skills’ test scores makes me want to scream. every environmental health crisis has directly impacted developing children severely and the government doesn’t care enough to do anything about it. occurrences of gun violence in schools are so frequent that we have drills in every one of this country’s public schools, treating school shootings as though they’re as inevitable as severe weather or accidental fires.

this country seriously just fucking hates kids.

ty for stealing this one much appreciated

people in the notes suggesting it was "improper" for the juror to do this or that it "introduced bias" to the court proceeding 🙄 the ice agent in question accused a moc of assaulting him / resisting arrest. how is the agent being a white supremacist not relevant. what universe are you living in

As a member of the world’s SECOND oldest profession, I assure you this is just one of many ways the justice system is systematically fucked up.

For anyone who wants to know how to fact check something you are told while on jury duty without getting fined:

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”

There are a lot of problems with our legal system, and I think one of the biggest is that jurors aren’t educated about what they can and can’t do. Juries have a lot of power, if (and only if) they know how to use it.

Reblogging for that last post, because frankly, “what to do as a juror” is one of those things the schools should really be teaching us. Serving on a jury is one of the most powerful rights of citizenship and everyone should be educated in how to exercise it correctly.