Star Trek + Social Commentary (context in the captions)

my brother had a brilliant idea that i wanted to share with other people who have four-legged family members: he trained our two cats to go directly to the door when they hear the fire alarm.

obviously at first the fire alarm sent them scrambling for cover, but he started slowly by giving them treats whenever it went off, when someone burned food or forgot to open the fireplace flu. he then progressed to calling them to the door to offer treats immediately after the alarm went off. and it actually wasn't too long before the cats voluntarily started going to the door upon hearing the alarm.

i think this was genius because in the event of a real emergency we know exactly where the cats will be and we will not have to waste precious time trying to find them to rescue them. i think this method would work equally well with dogs and probably other free-roaming pets such as rabbits, ferrets, etc. and i certainly encourage others to give it a shot!

Happy “Sherlock Holmes Can Legally Be Nice To Women,” day to all those who celebrate.

Making sure we’re using the right ‘disrespecting women’ Holmes here.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It’s performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.

This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what’s good and bad.

Saw this article linked on twitter yesterday and…. yeah. YEAH. 

That little girl is going places

I know more about economics than AOC and my knowledge on economics is on a high school level. Its actually embarassing how little she knows about this shit. But hey, expecting a socialist to know about economics is like expecting a fish to know what a desert is.

Much of the ocean is a desert

You know what? Let’s use the allowance example again to make it even clearer.

Let’s pretend we have an allowance tax bracket with a 70% tax on money received after a certain point. To keep things simple, we’ll make the limit $90.

If a kid does chores and earns $10 in allowance, they get $10. They’re not going to be affected by the 70% tax.

If a kid does chores and earns $50, they get $50. They also aren’t in the 70% tax bracket, even though they make five times as much money as the kid making $10.

If a kid does chores and earns $100 in allowance, then they’re in the allowance tax bracket with the 70% tax.

$100 minus $90 is $10. This is the part that’s going to be taxed 70%.

70% of $10 is $7.

So the kid getting $100 in allowance will have $93 after the 70% tax takes its share.

Now, I’d never impose such a thing on actual kids. All of this is a thought exercise.

But if it were real, the kid making $10 and the kid making $50 would probably be kind of mad if the kid getting $93 was bitching about being short $7.

Also, can we talk about how taxes are used to pay for things for the benefit of society - roads, schools, libraries etc. so to further the above example, the parents aren’t just pocketing that money themselves just to be mean and selfish, they might use it to pay for a Netflix subscription that the whole family can watch.

PROGRESSIVE TAX ISNT FUCKING RADICAL we study it in highschool economics class for fucks sake

I own a book that should not exist.

I collect old books. Mostly turn of the century stuff published between 1870 and 1920. My parents did too. They emassed a collection of books somewhere in the thousands. They got them out of abandoned houses, at auctions, as gifts and at every antique store on the east coast. My dad cleaned out his house after the divorce and I got some of the books. I planned to keep the good ones and hopefully sell some of the ones I didn’t have room for. For the past several days I have been researching the different titles and publishing dates to see how much they’re worth, usually it’s somewhere between $15-$50 so I’m not getting rich off it any time soon. I encountered this book:

Beautiful, right? Screams late Victorian period opulence. Definitely keeping it. I check for an owner’s name or little note on the title page, I love books that were Christmas gifts long ago. Instead I find this:

A gift for a student as an award for her academic success. From either 1875 or 1895. Very fucking cool. I search for the Chatsworth Institute of Baltimore Maryland in hopes that I am holding a significant piece of history in my hands. No such Institute has ever existed in Baltimore, none. Not historically, not currently. There is a Chatsworth school in Maryland but it’s a contemporary public school. I cannot find record of this school anywhere online, there is nothing left behind, it must have been a formal school to afford to give awards. There should be some trace of it. It’s like this book came from an alternate universe.

Let’s go to the title page:

Beautifully illustrated by a W Cunston or W Gunston. Neither name being up anyone. The name of the author of this book is nowhere to be seen. The publisher is London based and mostly published childrens books (including the words of Beatrice Potter) and that is the only concrete fact I can get. Googling “Eilon Manor” and “The Four Sisters” brings up very little. I sift and I find a book called Eilon Manor published in 1863. Like Baptista, it’s an incredibly boring piece of literature for Victorian young women. The author is listed as D. Richard, no first name, no gender, no location. D. Richard does not seem to exist either.

I cannot find any other copies of Baptista a Quiet Story. I cannot find D. Richard or W. Gunston. I cannot find a publishing date on this book. It is truly as though it slipped out from another parallel dimension.

Both of my parents confirmed they’ve never seen this book in their lives, it was not in the house when they moved in, they don’t remember buying it or rescuing it from an abandoned building. They have no idea where it came from. This is me right now:

It’s possible that the records of that school went missing. Or were destroyed for any number of reasons. 

As for why you can’t find anything about the book itself... is interesting.

I was able to find some results on the book. This website didn’t have a ton of info, but at least listed a bunch of other books by the author. It’s also mentioned in several books on google, like “the monthly packet of evening readings″, it’s listed as being one of the books “Bell and Daldy” publish in “The Spectator, volume 37″

The author also has a wikipedia page (albeit a sparse one); “D. Richmond” is Frances Charlotte Ryder. She was born in 1838 and died in 1868 (which is why her last book was published in 1868). She married William Culley Stobart and had two sons and two daughters before she passed away.

Comparing the rotations of objects in the Solar System. Just look at them lol.✨🪐

Halloween is over. Put away your bog witch and get your bog himbos out.

“Bimbo (bog himbo)”

Elephant says thank you after herd crosses road

UPDATE: I told this to my dad and he almost threw his tablet across the room

@blahblahblahetcetc

How to protect yourself during stampede

this isn’t the usual thing I’d share on my stupid nerd blog, but this is SO important. I was nearly crushed in a crowd like this once. It was terrifying because you have NO control over the panicking mass of humans around you. you are just at the mercy of all this chaotic force. this is a real thing that can happen very suddenly! it did happen in the news recently! My situation was, the olympics was happening in my city, I was on my way home from school, and a crowd of people suddenly flooded into the street around me. in seconds it went from, busy-city-street-crowded, to, wtf I can’t even move crowded. I was so pressed against the backpack of the man in front of me, my feet lifted off the ground a moment. People were climbing lamp posts, signs, bus shelters, trees, everything to get up out of it. it was like the street became an ocean of people, and all the people’s survival instincts were making them dumber. everyone was yelling. no one knew how to solve it. police, fire fighters and medics saved us by breaking the locks on the inside of the mall we were trapped next to. a huge group flooded into the building, releasing a bit of the pressure on the people outside. I was in that group that got in.

We were trapped in the mall awhile. Because the olympics was on, they had big screens in a few sitting areas of the mall that would normally be showing the games. but now the coverage was focused on this crowd surge. They showed a helicopter shot of the building we were now in, totally surrounded by colorful dots. a solid mass of humans with no space between.  I know someone was partially trampled and needed medics, because I saw that, but i don’t know the statistics on who else was hurt, hopefully no one killed! I don’t know if these methods can definitely save you, but they might give you a better chance. so watch and share!

Sharing to my own stupid nerd blog for the same reason, this is SO IMPORTANT. Human crushes are one of the most unexpected ways to die. People go out to a show or a sports game, and make it there, but they never come back. Other strategies include staying away from large obstacles (like fences) that you could get crushed against, and doing your best to stay above the crowd. Try to climb onto something if you can.

And also — not to get nitpicky with deadly tragedies, but they’re called “human crushes,” not “stampedes.” It’s an important difference in description and also in respect. The deaths usually happen because the victims are pinned together in a tight space, they can’t breathe (as in the video) and they suffocate. “Stampede” doesn’t convey what actually happened to those people. The crush that happened in Seoul recently wasn’t because people “stampeded,” it was because they couldn’t move at all and they suffocated. But calling it a “stampede,” you’d think it was the people themselves that ran over each other, like wild animals. It’s disrespectful and untrue.

Horrifyingly, the victims of many human crushes have been blamed for their own deaths, which are usually purely accidental or due to criminal mismanagement from authorities. If you’re in a mental place to read about tragedies and police corruption, check out the Hillsborough Disaster, in which 97 people died due to the incompetence of the police, who then blamed everything on the victims: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

@uncle-jingo

here's a more in-depth article on how to do it

Apparently the press learned nothing from the AIDS crisis.

they learned everything from the aids crisis and THEY ARE DOING IT ON PURPOSE

🤠🤠🤠🤠

(Link)