— ‘Hard wired for cultism’: Mike Johnson’s gushing praise of Trump leaves observers stunned

Any political figure in the history of the country that he can remember?

Teddy Roosevelt got in boxing matches, AT the White House.

Jimmy Carter BUILT houses.

ULYSSES S GRANT WON THE CIVIL WAR AND MANAGED SOMEHOW TO CONTROL SHERMAN.

I.... sir..... I.... my brain hurts. Read a book.

Doomsday prepping isn't about actual preparation. It's about the middle-aged man's power fantasy where all his hobbies and hang-ups turn him into the most badass and important man in the world.

These people were ready for an SHTF (shit hits the fan) where survival meant hunting, fishing, and living in the woods while the city folk begged them for help.

They weren't ready for an a SHTF where survival meant listening to scientists, staying at home whenever possible, and being basically considerate to people around you.

I mean look as a hunting, fishing, rural dweller who actually lived off grid in the woods for several years with only a small solar power system, hauling water, and a wood stove for heat - most of em aren't preparing for that apocalypse either. The one they want is the one one where they're allowed to shoot brown and black people. "People coming out of the city" that they will need to supposedly defend their bunker from using deadly force is a dog whistle for shooting POC.

You can tell what their priorities are because they spend their time buying freeze dried food, guns, and ammunition and going to the firing range and not, say, buying seeds and livestock and learning to raise food and make their own soap etc.

Like rationally if you believed society was going to collapse and be over forever I don't know about you but I would be less concerned with my collection of astronaut ice cream and guns and more concerned with a garden full of food (including grains and starches) that I had selectively bred to be well adapted to my local conditions and a barn full of productive dual purpose chickens and also sheep and goats.

They're not prepping for the collapse of civilization. They're hoping someone institutes The Purge.

Their idea of the apocalypse is also what they've seen on tv. It's Walking Dead and Mad Max. It's not war or plague or famine or natural disaster. You know the actual civilization ending events human have faced for as long as there have been humans.

Having to explain to one of these guys that humans have done world ending scenarios before and survived them by working together baffles them. It never occurs to any of these ppl that if you shoot the person who knows how to make cake you don't get cake anymore and if you enslave the person who makes cake (which you're right is what they really want) then you get shitty cake.

And hate to say it, but as we've seen, in actual civilaization ending scenarios people like that are a self fixing problem.

TIL in 1896 a temporary, one-day city was named in Texas called Crush, where two locomotives were to be smashed head-on for purposes of spectacle. It was, for a few hours, the 2nd largest city in TX with 40k attendees. The collision caused engine boilers to explode, resulting in death and injuries.

via reddit.com

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush,_Texas

you could just do shit back then

texas is still like this

The guy who organized the event was legitimately called William Crush (nominative determinism). Immediately after the incident he was fired from the Katy railroad, but they quietly rehired him three days later when there turned out to be little in the way of public outcry.

"Well There's Your Problem" Did a truly fantastic episode about it:

highly hightly reccomend

For some reason, it never occurred to me that Project Gutenberg would have public domain old cookbooks. This is BRILLIANT. There’s a 1953 cranberry recipe pamphlet and a suffrage cookbook from 1915 and a translation of Apicus’s guide to food in Imperial Rome and a whole bunch of other fascinating old cookbooks, many pre-1800. Treasure trove!

I love you for sharing this!!!

For more old cookbooks, Michigan State University has 76 of their historical cookbooks scanned and searchable at Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

For even older recipes, check out Gode Cookery.  They list medieval and Renaissance cooking instructions and translate the recipes for you into measurable amounts and all.

I have have have to mention Miss Leslie. I learned so much about cooking from that book, even if a lot of it is outdated.

Also, Forme of Cury is great fun, if you can muddle through the Middle English (Gode Cookery has translations and adaptions of some of the recipes from this).

I’ll always take an opportunity to remind people of Barkham Burroughs’ Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, which also contains recipes

The hardship of planning an elaborate fic about Jason and his crime lord-ing is figuring out how tf to run a crime empire with morals. Oof.

Some ideas from Batman comics itself and yakuza stories

Focus on cleaning up his underlings and underbosses after winning the power struggle first coz that will take a long time to enforce new rules and break old habits if he wants to overhaul the empire

Starting with Jason's character that he won't sell drugs to kids or extort prostitutes and cracking down violently on those who do, until he can slowly phase the drug dealing out

Provide more chances of protection money extension and debt payment compared to other crime boss, even providing alternative solution, so he can still appear harsh while not cancelling old rules

Alter the focus of robbery and money laundering to strip the corrupt rich people of Gotham from their power and redistributing wealth

In yakuza stories they tend to have loyal underlings who the main character saved that end up following and enforcing his ideal, even if they look and act like a thug

Most of the thugs are uneducated small time felon that can be reeducated and have their violent tendencies refocused on something else

Jason can appeal to their needs and wants to make them work for him instead of their previous bosses, if they're on the opposing sides

An easy way is having rebellious underling or underbosses that wants to return to the good old days of actual crime, or rival bosses that's way worse than him

Refocus the violent thugs or even hire assassins to clean up traitors within the empire instead of innocents

Criminal empires tend to have innocent fronts so you can also have it be a better education and rehabilitation program than Gotham prison or asylum, and if the mafia board members ask, say it's a front while showing off to the Waynes at the same time

(Don’t mind me I’m just here taking notes 📝)

Organized crime also operates legitimate (looking) businesses to launder money through. Ie. "This isn't drug money, it's income from this restaurant/laundromat/carwash etc. Here's the receipts Mr IRS. I'm a taxpaying citizen just trying to make an honest living!" he lied.

What business would Jason run? Some yakuza ran orphanages as tax shelters. The Black Panther Party bulk-purchased books then sold them individually to fund their programs. I like the idea of Jason getting a fuckton of books n the cheap then selling them on the cheap to promote literacy, while laundering money through that business.

I’ve also said this elsewhere, but gonna repeat: he patrols the cops. Follows them around and if he spots them engaging in brutality, well…the cops and press and Bruce would definitely demonize him every time a cop goes missing or gets the shit beat out of them, but he keeps his territory safe for EVERYONE.

If he's trying to help the neighborhood on the side...

Restaurant offering good food for cheap prices. Leftovers gets handed out to the homeless at the end of the day.

Grocery store could work the same way.

Daycare center. Daycares are stupid expensive in the US afaik, and reliable childcare would let parents get better legal jobs.

Car repair doubling as a chop-shop for the cars of rich assholes (hello Batmobile tires!). Cheap car repair is also good for the community, since having transportation is critcal for getting many jobs.

Some kind of entertainment place (strip club maybe?) that doubles as a brothel on the DL. Give the working girls a safe place with security ready to throw out any assholes. A cheap hotel/motel could work the same.

((Furiously compiling notes 📝))

Historically most gangs started in places and communities where cops would not go, or where dangerously corrupt.

Extortion of protection money doesn't start as extortion it starts as insurance and investigation. If the bodega is paying you protection money they're not just doing it so your guys won't rob them they're doing it so that if ANYONE robs them you will find out who did it, and you will do something about it because the cops sure as hell won't. And by do something I mean find the fucker and put him on the ground because nobody fucks around in your territory. And maybe Vinnie at the bodega is having trouble paying his rent so you buy the building and instead of protection he's paying you rent yeah? and maybe instead of $500 a month or whatever it is You tell him you'll take just under an equivalent value of cartons of smokes this month and call it even yeah Vinnie? (this by the way makes Vinnie complicit in your criminiality because now he has to cook his books to hide the cigerettes yeah?)

The illegal (read untaxed) selling of booze and cigarettes is still an ongoing problem in many both urban and rural areas btw: If you wanted a way to diversify Hood's operations and move him away from the harder drugs hand rolled/stolen cigarettes and bathtub gin/moonshine might be a way to do it. Besides Batman stories are always at their best when there's a hint of the old school gangsters in it. And let's be honest Batman popping open a crate of expecting to find heroin or oxys and instead finds cartons of Malboros is a hilarious mental image.

The chop shop idea is great, especially if he has bounties. "Steal this asshole's car" or "Steal this type of car". Also if it's a personal vehicle you can alot of ID info out of registrations. Use the registration info to hack a bank account and just skim.

If there's isn't a shitty dying high school in/on the edge of the Narrows I'd be shocked so he have him fund the vocational programs. After school clubs, the idea about selling books to make money as well as encourage literacy (Jason also seems like the kind of troll that would make sure a good chuck of it comes from banned book lists). The mechanic class kids who show real promise get jobs at the mechanic shop covering the chop shop, kids in the art class get money to paint murals his gang can hide their tags in. Free breakfast and Lunch programs. Etc

A free clinic he aggressively enforces as a neutral zone and makes damn sure his guys know is a neutral zone. Needle exchanges.

Going back to the free breakfast and Lunch programs food is a fantastic way to create loyalty even in unexpected places. We have documented instances for example that, in certain towns in the Americna West when miners where injured and couldn't work the local brothel, and their favorite workers there seeing to it that groceries where delivered to the men's wives. Also eating together builds inter connected bonds in humans -it's one of the fastest ways to make us pack bond. You could have Red Hood literally hold dinners for his guys with him sitting at the head of the table. Even if he doesn't eat (depends on how you wanna do the mask situation) make him literally-clearly- 'the founder of the feast'.

Just some ideas. Hope it helps!

(I really wanna read this fic!)

Concept: Vampire character that represents strengthening ties to humanity and the natural world instead of dividing them

Vampire gets HEAVILY invested in eco conservation because they *can't* just shrug it off as the next generation's problems

A vampire that goes around eating oil tycoons and clear-cut logging CEOs and climate-denying politicians because their childhood village is a dirt pit now and the animals they saw growing up have become endangered

Immortal guys who anonymously donate huge sums of cash to wildlife preserves that oversee forests they used to hunt in

Fellow who, instead of succumbing to the boredom and waste of infinite time, has become feverishly obsessed with making sure this one specific species of snail will still be around in another hundred years

5000 year old woodsman who can still mimic the calls of extinct birds, who still remembers the mating calls of mammoths and wooly rhinos and wild horses

Ancient vampire who can still vaguely recall a cave somewhere with her whole family's hand prints in it, and not sure of it's precise location, keeps the whole area void of human activity so it doesn't become a tourist attraction

Vampire archeologist who digs up their old friend's remains and has the figure out how to prove, with evidence, how they know exactly who they were and what they looked like

Immortal anthropologist who reconstructs a face from a skull only to realize that they'd met them before a long, long time ago

Can you imagine?

I would weep. I would cry so hard. Delicate brushes, on your hands and knees for ages uncovering inches of bones bit by bit. And then you realize oh. OH I knew I knew this cemetery I knew those mountains how did I forget what I knew...

And I would weep.

Imagine being an archeology student and in the middle of the a dig one of your colleagues lays down next to a skeleton and falls to pieces crying.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Client in 1912: My daughter's getting on that ship. Now, they claim it's designed to be unsinkable, but you and I both know that's an impossible claim. A dangerous claim. One that could put many in harm's way. Is there anything you can do?

Nate Ford: All right. Let's go steal a Titanic.

Literally the thing that could have saved their lives is if they didn't speed. No seriously, the Titanic was several days ahead, the captain was showing off. He had no way of know but if they were going normal speed, instead of pushing the engines the iceburg would have drifted by by the time they got there. And they weren't where they where supposed to be, so it was harder to find them. All Nate would have to do is slow them down (or massively speed them up I guess but the engines where already being pushed) Hell even slowing them down enough there where at that spot in daylight, thus making the iceberg easier to spot and avoid would be useful.

I'm looking back at random things I was taught as a kid by various adults and media and. did nobody bother to factcheck anything? was that just not an option or

Could you please name one?

swallowed chewing gum takes years to digest, blue veins are blue bc deoxygenated blood is blue, fossil fuels are made from dinosaurs, feeding bread to birds is fine, mice like cheese, carrots are good for your eyes, cleopatra was a sultry seductress, bulls can see the color red, corsets were uncomfortable and caused deformities, glass is a slow-moving liquid which is why old window panes are uneven at the bottom, tomato juice gets rid of skunk smells, young einstein failed math class, eating before swimming increases your risk of cramps and drowning, cracking your knuckles causes arthritis, iron maidens were used as torture devices, the earth's core is molten rock, and basically anything at all whatsoever to do with the myth of thanksgiving

they said name ONE-

bats are blind, diamonds are made of coal, the dark side of the moon is dark, the sun is yellow, lightning doesn't strike twice, columbus landed in the u.s., medieval europeans believed the world was flat, piranhas eat human flesh, goldfish have no long-term memory, porcupines can shoot their quills, people often swallow spiders in their sleep, wolves howl at the moon, humans only have 5 senses, sore muscles are caused by a buildup in lactic acid, and rust causes tetanus!

actually imma just leave this here

My favorite one is probably carrots because not only is it wrong for a period of time it was official government propaganda.

The children are learning about the US Civil War. I can’t say it’s going well. (On the bright side, they’re very clear about slavery. We’re solid on that front. It’s the actual war we’re having trouble with.)

“Ms. T, why would his parents name him that?”

I frantically flip through the possible Civil War leaders they could be referencing. “… Well, you know how Stonewall got his nickname, and we’ve talked about Tecumseh, so there’s Sherman, and -”

“No, not them.” They roll their eyes at my ignorance, then pivot back to the point at hand. “That other guy. Useless.” As this describes a number of Civil War leaders, I blink uncomprehendingly at her. “You know, Ms. T, Useless. Useless Grant.”

“Um. … Well -”

Another child raises their hand. “Ms. T, I don’t understand number three.”

Number three is a question about the Battle of Bull Run, asking for explanations about a Confederate victory despite Union advantages. “What paragraph are you looking in?” I ask in a monotone, because I’ve been fielding this question all day.

The student points at the correct paragraph, even focuses in on the quote about Jackson holding off a Union advance. “It says Jackson and the men ‘screamed like furries,’ Ms. T, but why would that help?”

I cough. I cover my mouth with both hands. “That’s ‘furies,’ sweetie,” I inform them, still wheezing. “Like they’re insane with anger,” I elaborate, deciding to skip describing actual furies at this point in time. “Not … not like furries.”

So, here’s how the war is going, one week in: Useless Grant has been made general of the Union forces, but a bunch of furries are preventing him from gaining much ground.

I mean... that ain't far from really.

Listen if the study of ancient humans doesn’t make you at least a little bit emotional idk what to say.

I started crying today at the museum because they had reconstructed the shoes of Otzi the iceman.

Either he or someone he knew who cared about him made these shoes out of grass and bear skin and twine and he was wearing them when he died over five thousand years ago.

And a Czech researcher and his students did reconstructions of these shoes and wore them to the same place where he died to test them out and they were like yep! These shoes are really cozy and comfy and didn’t give us blisters while hiking!

Is that not just the coolest shit ever????

(Quietly, with love) We will remember your bread, we will remember your dog, we will remember your shoes

(Quietly, with anger) We will remember your copper

Guys. Guys. This is what material history is about.

Keep your great men. Keep your epic battles. Tell me about your shoes.

[image description: screencap of a tweet and reply tweet. Tweet by wanye @wanyburkett: People have kind of a silly and simplistic conception of their family tree beyond their first-grandparents. You have 8 great-grandparents and 16 great-great-grandparents. What does it mean to say you're "from" somewhere? Even just going back that far you have 16 separate paths! Reply tweet from @EduardHabsburg: Buddy, let me tell you bout MY family tree /end id]

Ohhh that is a brave man.

Pierre Fouché. 1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück, 2020.

Rayon chords from a World War II parachute.

PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944, photo by Horace Bristol

Why is he in a fire fight with no pants?

I know this is a very famous photograph but why does he have no pants?!

I'm not be a prude i literally want to know the location of his undies.

Funny what a little bit of Holocaust denialism will get you trending with.

Also, worth noting that calling it "Holocaust denialism," as Aye and Alejandra Carabello (and myself) have, is not hyperbole.

JK Rowling is denying that trans people were targetted by the Nazis, and promoting the tweets of known anti-trans activists screeching that any insistence that we were is "the LGBTQ+ lobby" revising history. That is, by a 2022 ruling on a case regarding similar tweets by the Regional Court of Cologne, (translation) "a denial of Nazi crimes."

She is, by German court precedent, quite literally engaging in an element of Holocaust denial.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the Nazis' destruction of both gay and trans culture in Germany, Germany had a sympathetic gay and trans health clinic in the early 1900s. The Nazis destroyed it and burned literature studying homosexuality, gender noncomformity, and what we now understand to be transgenderness or transexuality. This took place only 3 months after Hitler came into power.

In addition to homosexuality, crossdressing was illegal under the Hitler regime even though trans people had (albeit limited) rights prior to his rise to power. And before anyone says it, the trans holocaust victims we talk about weren't misidentified crossdressers, drag artists, or gender-nonconforming people. One trans woman, Liddy Barcroff, died in a concentration camp for her "crossdressing" after telling arresting police “my sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.” The queer community, all of us, suffered huge losses both in individuals and in education and understanding during the Holocaust. Denying any part of that is offensive and dangerous.

It's also important to add that the founder of that institute was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a gay Jew. This allowed Nazis to claim that Jews were promoting homosexuality to "destroy the family" and weaken the white race.

You know, pretty much exactly what Republicans are saying now, just in dogwhistles.

hey my history of drag post becomes incredibly relevant!