FINALLY

A POST-TRUTH

CRIME DOCUMENTARY

This is horrible and reminds us once again that there is no legislation for how truthful a documentary has to be. Other jobs like journalists have colleges where you have to face consequences if you lie or manipulate information, but documentaries don't. That's how we get fake documents being used like this AI-generated images of a real person, and also all the liars on Discovery Max and the History channel spewing anti-science stupidity and pretending like it has any basis.

the sun literally sets and casts a golden hue over everything every single day and we fucked it all up and invented paying rent

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

A republican (=antifascist) militiaman says goodbye to his son in the Aragon front. Spanish Civil War.

Photo taken by a photographer who likely worked for the Comissariat of Propaganda, an institution created by the Government of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War to publish about life in the trenches and distribute antifascist propaganda.

Photo attributed to David Seymour. Archive: Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya.

From the desk of THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT intern, the TTPD Board Meeting agenda. 📜🤍

See you tonight.

No fucking way LMFAO

Temple of heaven, Minh Mang Tomb, Hue Vietnam

Saw this at the store the other day, and it made me really happy to see. Good to know some management cares about how respected their cashiers are.

Don't talk on the phone while you're checking out at a store. If the phone call is really that urgent, step aside and let someone else go first while you wrap up your phone call.

Cashiers sometimes need to ask questions, which makes you being on the phone an interference with their ability to do their job. It can also hold up the line if you're on your phone while checking out, creating an unnecessary inconvenience for those in line behind you. Overall using the phone while being rung up shows a lack for respect for both the cashier's time and other customers' time. Also many who talk on the phone when they're checking out wouldn't just be talking on the phone during any other type of interaction, so it can be taken as a sign that you don't believe cashiers deserve your attention as much as other people do.

Hey UK folks consider signing this one!

Worth a signature folks^^

Ember, lost and alone - A page spread illustration from my upcoming picture book "The Bakery Dragon" which you can pre-order now!

James I's chronicle titled Llibre dels fets ("Book Of The Deeds") is regarded as the first secular chronicle-autobiography attributed to a Christian king.

Some photos of the old Santa Maria Hospital's courtyard in the city of Lleida (Ponent, Catalonia).

Before building this hospital, the city of Lleida had 7 private hospitals, but no public ones. To fix this, in the year 1454 the City Council and the queen Mary of Catalonia-Aragon decided to build a public hospital that would bring together the 7 previous hospitals. The result was this beautiful building, which is considered one of the best representatives of civic Catalan Gothic architecture.

Like the rest of important buildings in the city, the hospital suffered damage as the result of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1715) and its catastrophic consequences for Catalonia. Like with many more public buildings all around Catalonia, when the Spanish troops invaded and Philip V of Bourbon was declared the king, the Hospital was confiscated for the Spanish army. Half of it remained a military hospital until 1854.

In 1915, it became property of the Lleida Province government, and it stopped being a hospital (by then, the building was outdated) and it became used for cultural purposes. In 1942, the Institute of Lleidan Studies (Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs) was founded and given this building as their seat, which continues until nowadays.

Source: Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs.

for anyone on the internet, but especially for people who frequent tiktok, Abby Cox has uploaded a video talking about the newest trend on tiktok: “face reading”. She specifically talks about how face reading is just another name for physiognomy (much like phrenology but for facial features) that has been used to centuries to uphold racism and white supremacy.

as always, these kinds of things often are made to seem innocuous, but at the same time can easily be debunked and established as racist and nazi rhetoric. so please please be aware of what you’re taking for fact online and what kinds of practices you are learning and how they are impacting and building dangerous biases.

don’t descend into nazi pipelines because you aren’t thinking critically and/or don’t want to be told you’re wrong and part of a traumatic system of white supremacy.

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

it’s funny, someone said I was “based” for calling the United States a foreign country, but…..that’s just what it is to the rest of the world! like it’s not a radical or provocative word choice, that’s literally just how the majority of people on earth view it

when in doubt, re-enter your middle school Les Miserables phase