Some important pictures
Losing my mind remembering that pic chelsea manning posted of the extremely undercover and not at all obvious fbi agent who was tailing her after her release
what kind of sixth sense do american have to recognize fbi agents that easily
to paraphrase her, its always the shoes.
americans please explain to a foreigner, he looks like some random dude to me
1. They all have the same haircut, almost everybody in law enforcement and the military have the same haircut due to regulations.
2. They all wear the same shoes. Same boots, and same overpolished dress shoes.
3. They act different. Shifty eyed and always on their own.
4. They’re kinda really bad at their jobs. I’ve encountered plenty of “undercover” cops outside of bars that ask questions no regular person in their right mind would ever ask. “How are you getting home?” “Who did you come here with tonight?”
5. America is a police state on a budget. Most officers are poorly trained, fbi agents require a 4 year degree (I think), but lord knows how much training they actually get. And the dumb kids from your high school always become cops.
It’s always the dense as a brick kid, with something to prove that becomes a cop. The kid that mouth-breathed and couldn’t chew gum and walk at the same time.
Their shirts are never form fitting so they can conceal a weapon and cuffs.
Always look at the watch, it’ll be expensive but in neutral tones (uniform standards strike again).
They will always sit where they can see their target and the nearest exit.
They will have a partner who is less obvious but wil point a recording device (phone or camera) at you. Check elevated positions, it gives them the clearest view to track you and keep an eye on their partner at the same time.
One time when i lived in phoenix, I was driving home through residential streets from Panda Express on April 20th and there was a 40something year old white man standing quite literally in the MIDDLE of the fucking road wearing a brand new straight from the store weed jersey (jersey #420 with a big pot leaf), a wornout old raiders hat, regular-fit straight leg jeans, and cop shoes. This man proceeded to try to wave me down to stop since I was driving slowly (again, residential neighborhood) and as he did so fully yelled “You buying bro? You buying? 420 bro 420 you buying?”
I almost choked laughing so hard. I couldn’t stop myself from just yelling “NO THANK YOU OFFICER” as i drove by him.
for the past 60 years law enforcement, military, and even literal espionage/intelligence based organizations have assumed that rigid conformity to dress code was more important then actually training how to go undercover, blend in, or understand what the fuck theyre doing
largely because the ‘we are infallible’ mindset is too strong for them to consider they might not be doing very good
shoutout to the two “undercover cops” who were at my school to monitor the student body for a week, acting like “substitute assistants” and literally all of the kids immediately recognised them as cops and everyone would address them only as “officer” which annoyed the hell out of them because “we aren’t cops” like sir you literally have your badge in your back pocket and a taser what fucking substitute assistant would have an actual police badge and a whole ass taser??
Just a casual reminder that this is what secret police are. Like, this is the literal definition. Police who are (badly or otherwise) pretending to not be police.
i know this has eight billion notes already but i love sharing these images
This thread reminds me of this story lol
From Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
*sweeps all of my AU ideas under the rug* why must I be called out this way?
I….
I would like to report a murder. My own.
The main issue with modern DC comics isn’t that the stories are garbage narratively it’s that the stories they publish tell us that love is a weakness rather a strength.
I’m not even talking about romantic love here. Bruce is now consistently written as an abusive father, Talia’s been reduced into a compassionless copycat of Ra’s, Kory’s basically been lobotomized for the sake of over-sexualization. Like these are all characters where love is one of their defining features, and they’re being written in a way that takes away that part of them. So many interactions and team ups feel static because there’s literally no emotion behind them.
Novel idea but maybe characters should actually LIKE each other.
EVERYONE SURE IS POPPING OFF IN THE TAGS TODAY HUH GOOD JOB BESTIES!!
just saw bindi irwin got engaged and apparently her fiance is american. she’s 21 and they’ve been dating for 6 years. I wonder if his family lives in aus/works in conservation because imagine just being a random 15-year-old tourist at the zoo and having a meet cute with steve irwin’s daughter lol
apparently that’s exactly how they met. bindi just happened to be giving tours the day his family visited. love is unreal. how is this not a teen romcom yet
It gets better. Terri is also American and met Steve Irwin the same way, by chance at the Australia Zoo, in 1991. Terri was devastated when he immediately offered to introduce her to his girlfriend Sue, until Steve called Sue over and a dog came bounding up.
Multi-generational love at first sight.
My favorite part of the story of how Steve and Terri met is that it was literally love at first sight. He saw her in a crowd and froze. Which was a bad thing, because he was sort of wrestling a crocodile at the time.
Aussie fairy tale
Well imagine it from Terri’s perspective. She sees a guy wrestling a whole-ass crocodile for funsies and just immediately goes “HIM”
No that’s a perfectly understandable response
Reminder that Iraq broke two UN resolutions and as a result the US invaded them, bombed their cities, looted their natural resources, reformed their entire government, killed and tortured so many innocent people in the duration of an 8 years illegal occupation.
Meanwhile Israel has broken 65 UN resolutions in this month alone and they’re literally not facing any consequences whatsoever from the international community, in fact, the same US that invaded Iraq has declared their support for them and said that they will keep sending them 3.8 billions in aid like they do every year.
I think that one of the funniest things about the “Earth is a death planet and human’s are space orcs” posts and stuff is that that’s literally a major plot point in Animorphs. Like, the aliens in the series frequently comment on how there is just an extremely excessive amount animals with unique ways to kill or maim you on the planet, and that humans, despite looking fragile and weak in comparison, are scary as shit because they’re stubborn and ruthless and refuse to stop even when any sane species would have given up ages ago. Like there are aliens described as “walking salad shooters” with bladed spikes shooting out all over their bodies, and then you find out that all of that is just so they can harvest tree bark to eat and a whole army of them can be disabled by a single skunk. It is described in loving detail all the different ways a house cat can fuck you up, and don’t even get me started on actual predators and the damage they can do when a ridiculous stubborn, reckless, and creative human brain is what’s controlling them. The alien invaders comment about how they’re going to have to basically kill off 90% of earths species once they win the war because the planet is so damn excessive about this whole ‘murder animals’ thing, and sometimes they’re even like “you know, in hindsight, this is not nearly as easy as we assumed it would be”
I want to see Ax learning people do in fact inhabit areas of the world with wild tigers and how they discourage attacks.
<They must have some very effective technology to deter such creatures.>
“It’s a mask.”
<I’m sorry, what>
“A mask. You wear it on the back of your head. Tigers prefer to attack from behind, so if they can’t tell front from back it confuses them.”
<And…..and this works?>
“Sometimes. Sometimes they just attack from the side instead.”
<…….but…..why–how– why would humans live in those places then?!>
“Well it’s not so simple. Humans have been pushing into tiger habitats for a long time. It’s why they’re endangered.”
<I should think, if they’re sharing territory with tigers!>
“….The tigers, Ax. The tigers are endangered. Not the humans.”
<…..>
Boy has to go curl up with this bit of information for a while. Earth is a death world but it does have cinnamon buns
I never really got around to adding this since I basically forgot about this post, but anyway.
So humans look fragile and helpless because we don’t have sharp teeth or claws, we’re not the fastest animals, we’re only so strong, and so many other metrics we rate dangerous predators by we don’t score very well.
But humans’ greatest evolutionary feature is our ability to throw.
I’m not kidding. The fact that we can pick up a rock and hurl it hard enough to break a lion’s skull is not an incidental thing we can do. There was actual evolution adaptation to our shoulder joints for us to do that. There is a reason a lot of our sports involve throwing a ball (basketball, baseball, American football, rugby). Swinging a sword or a hammer or an axe is all a version of a throwing motion.
People miss the point in David vs Goliath that because David was small and Goliath was huge that David was the underdog. Goliath took a rock to the skull at probably more than 100mph. A simple leather sling transforms a human throwing arm into a miniature trebuchet, so David brought the Bronze Age equivalent of a gun to a knife fight.
Simple things like slings and pointy sticks make humans remarkably capable of killing most things. Arguably our entire history of making tools goes back to making sharper sticks, adding stone tips to make spears, using blunt rocks to make hammers, which could be used to help make sharper spear tips… Yeah the wheel was big discovery. Fire was a big discovery. But our first ever tools were sticks and stone that we used to break bones.
A gang of humans with spears could bring down a mammoth, and we were so good at it that we altered their migration patterns and ultimately drove them to extinction. Giant sabretooth predators couldn’t keep up with us. A species of wolf figured out it was easier to eat our garbage than try to compete with us.
The concept of soft doughy humans is a remarkably modern outlook, an artifact of a self-domestication. Before we invented agriculture, we were the scariest things on this planet, a race of bipedal predatory apes with binocular vision spearing and bludgeoning everything they could find.
The throwing thing was also brought up in Animorphs, specifically in The Andalite Chronicles. When Loren, Elfangor, and the future Visser Three wind up in a weird pocket dimension type thing, Loren beans the Visser in the face with a rock. This causes Elfangor to comment on how amazing humans are at throwing things, and it causes Esplin to utter quite possibly my favorite line in the entire series:
«So. You propel rocks at me! You’ll be very sorry you ever propelled a rock at me, human.»
<Is the game about hitting people in the face with rocks?>
“Not usually.”
I BELIEVE somewhere in the series, Ax asks what “throwing” is, because Andalites have knife tails and did not need to evolve that. But yes, there is no better word for “throw” that Esplin has. “Propel.”
i want to go into this for another second, just because this is really cool to me.
“Chimpanzees are incredibly strong and athletic, yet adult male chimps can only throw about 20 miles per hour—one-third the speed of a 12-year-old little league pitcher,” said George Washington University researcher Neil Roach, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral scientist in the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, also affiliated with the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. “When humans throw, we first rotate our arms backwards away from the target. It is during this ‘arm-cocking’ phase that humans stretch the tendons and ligaments crossing their shoulder and store elastic energy. When this energy is released, it accelerates the arm forward, generating the fastest motion the human body produces, resulting in a very fast throw.”
an adult male chimp is absolutely capable of tearing a human apart. we stand a lot taller than our cousins but pound for pound, they can turn us into hamburger. HOWEVER, when it comes to throwing something, we beat the strongest chimps before puberty.
the average throwing speed of a major league baseball pitcher is 91mph. fastest recorded speed is currently 101.5mph.
roman slings did as much damage as bullets, and could completely destroy a skull. and that’s not even going in to javelins and spear-throwers.
humans are really good at projectiles.
I saw another one of those posts going around about how hiring cleaners is immoral and I just want to scream into the tumblrs for a second.
I have employed a cleaner ever since I got post natal PTSD. They used to come once a fortnight, but after my second child was born they came once a week. They’ve been with us for more than ten years now. They come every week and do one hour of basic cleaning - they vacuum, dust, clean the bathroom and mop the floors. That’s it. It’s one hour and it does SO MUCH for me because it means I tidy up for them. I make the house CLEANABLE which my depressed and adhd ass would not do unless I knew someone else was coming in to do something for me.
Also I pay them. Well. I pay them more per hour than I got as a teacher when I first started work. A LOT MORE. I recognise that they have travel and material expenses, and I put their pay up every year to accommodate for inflation.
They’re amazing people, I consider them friends, we chat a fair bit when they come to do their jobs if I happen to be at home, we exchange presents on significant holidays.
They keep me SANE.
If you treat workers well, NO WORK IS IMMORAL. My cleaners get paid well above minimum wage, obviously enjoy their work and are fulfilling a need. Is it a luxury need? Yeah. But guess what? I have disposable income and this is a luxury I choose to spend it on. Because I fucking hate cleaning, and I wouldn’t do it properly or consistently even if I didn’t.
So fuck off telling me what I can and cannot spend the money that I’ve earned on. I’m not Jeff Bezos, and if I was I would treat my employees as well as I treat my cleaners.
I’m going to keep screaming about this until people understand that all labour is valuable and skilled labour, and that nobody’s job is inherently bad so long as they are treated with respect and paid a fair wage.
That’s why we don’t demean sex work, either. Because work is work, and labourers are labourers, and shaming people’s jobs does nothing to help them to get the salaries and respect they deserve.
Stop discouraging people to fire their cleaners and start encouraging them to pay their cleaners handsomely with benefits. JFC.
#honestly starting to suspect that the anti-cleaner discourse is coming from SWERFs#because if they can make one group’s employment shameful they can do it to another#and we know how these *ERF types operate (via @burnitalldowndarling)
YEP! This is exactly what I’ve been suspecting, too. Same concern trolling bullshit in a shiny, new wrapper. If a SWERF can get their foot in the door by pushing everyone to agree that it’s inherently exploitative to hire a cleaner, it makes disseminating all their anti-sex work talking points infinitely easier in the long run.
I do not really trust the motives of anybody negating the argument that work is work.
For depressed people and anyone else suffering from mental health, summoning the ability to get out of bed is hard enough, being asked to clean on top of that is even worse.
I recommend that some of these people (Swerfs) go and watch videos of professional cleaners because assuming that it’s just ‘woman’s work’ couldn’t be further from the truth and is in itself sexist to think that.
But if I lived alone, I would hire someone as well because I would have the income to do that, but not the mental ability to get myself to clean because work drains me completely.
