Reblog from my daily photo blog. 

circadianspew:

Whale Tale! 19/366

Brazilian PM 557: how the pregnancy registration law violates the privacy of women

via crookedtimber

nprfreshair:

valerierosegallaher:

The most epic New York Times correction EVER

Agreed.

(via nerdbadge)

Tea. Almost a year old. 3/366 

whitewhine:

Stephen Hawkins: Basically a useless retard. 

nerdbadge:

Major economic and fiscal principles missing from this bullshit:

• The national gov’t isn’t a household and we don’t want it to function like one.
• The debt is largely money we owe ourselves (google ‘Treasury Bonds’).
• We need the gov’t to spend money during economic downturns in order to stimulate employment, meaning money in peoples’ pockets which gets converted into consumption and, wait for it, increased tax revenue to deal with the debt issue at a time when we’re not reeling from a recession.

You want a Beyond the Thunderdome, everyone-for-themselves society? Then by all means, let’s prioritize a balanced budget over jobs creation, education, health care, or any of the other things necessary to grow a sustainable economy.

(Source: noeatinginthelibrary)

(Source: undercoverterrorist)

(Source: epic4chan, via munachao)

(Source: theashkaari, via pleezwatchthatchild)

I guess that’s one take on it. 

pussy-strut:

don’t believe you have rights

rights discourse has its origins in philosophically/legally shoring up the ability of white monied people to colonize, enslave, murder, rape indigenous people/women/people of color/poor people

human rights as they were originally conceived necessarily protected the people who stood to gain from the expansion of capital/settler colonialism

claiming rights, constitutional or otherwise, consistently fails in the face of the violent state apparatuses that “offered” us those rights in the first place

fuck rights

The US government has effectively admitted that it totally screwed up and falsely seized & censored a non-infringing domain of a popular blog, having falsely claimed that it was taking part in criminal copyright infringement. Then, after trying to hide behind a totally secretive court process with absolutely no due process whatsoever (in fact, not even serving papers on the lawyer for the site or providing timely notifications — or providing any documents at all), for over a year, the government has finally realized it couldn’t hide any more and has given up, and returned the domain name to its original owner. If you ever wanted to understand why ICE’s domain seizures violate the law — and why SOPA and PROTECT IP are almost certainly unconstitutional — look no further than what happened in this case. 

Afghanistan: A Video Portrait

Earlier this year, filmmakers Lukas and Salome Augustin traveled to Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif, intent on capturing portraits of daily life. Lukas had lived in Kabul from 2006 to 2008, working with a humanitarian aid organization called Operation Mercy, and he’d fallen in love with the place. When he returned this year with his then-fiancée Salome, he shot this film, in part as a tribute to his friend Gayle Williams, an aid worker who was killed by the Taliban in 2008. I normally post still photos to In Focus, in part because I love the ability to linger on a scene. But Lukas and Salome have a still photographer’s eye, and they’ve composed a very intimate series of video portraits of both the people and the landscape. The film lasts just under six minutes, so I invite you to take a few moments, relax, start the video in fullscreen mode, and let Lukas and Salome Augustin take you on a beautiful visit to the Hindu Kush.

animalstalkinginallcaps:

VINCE?

YEAH, HONEY?

AM I THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD?

WHAT? I MEAN, YES. OF COURSE YOU ARE.

OBJECTIVELY?

TO ME YOU ARE.

THAT’S NOT WHAT I ASKED, VINCE. AM I LITERALLY THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD?

I HAVEN’T MET EVERY GIRL IN THE WORLD, HONEY, BUT YOU’RE VERY PRETTY. SO MAYBE. CAN WE JUST GET BACK TO-

DO YOU WANT TO MEET EVERY GIRL IN THE WORLD?

NO, JESSICA. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO MEET MOST OF THE PEOPLE I WORK WITH. WHY DON’T WE JUST MAKE LOV-

BUT LIKE, IF WE WENT ON VACATION TO A TROPICAL ISLAND DO YOU THINK YOU’D FIND THE LOCALS WITH THEIR DARKER HAIR AND AMPLE BOTTOMS MORE PHYSICALLY DESIRABLE THAN ME?

HONEY, PLEASE. PLEASE. I THINK YOU’RE BEAUTIF-

DO YOU WATCH SEXY VIDEOS ON THE INTERNET WHEN I’M AT WORK?

GOD DAMN IT.

Republicans are calling for President Obama to jump into the deficit-reduction talks gripping Washington, reflecting the widespread view that the congressional supercommittee is now headed for a failure.

Lawmakers and congressional aides familiar with the deliberations say the talks have reached a hard impasse, with Republicans locked in an internal struggle over whether to agree to higher tax hikes to cut a deal.

“It’s hard to see us getting a deal unless he comes in at the last minute,” Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) said of Obama, who is on a nine-day trip to the Pacific and not scheduled to return to Washington until Sunday.
“We’re in the two-minute drill and closing in on a ‘Hail Mary’ and the quarterback is on the sidelines.”

First of all, President Obama is reachable by telephone. It’s the future! Secondly, he is not a member of the Joint Select Committee of Failing at Every Dumb Thing You Try, because it’s a made up of members of Congress, and the President of the United States is not a member of Congress. He is not a quarterback. The quarterbacks here are the two chairs of the Joint Select Committee on Punching Itself In the Groin, who are members of Congress, put in charge of this particular congressional endeavor.

And even though the Republicans are only pulling this “we need Obama’s help!” schtick now because they know a deal’s not likely to go through and they want to force Obama to assume public responsibility for the failure, so that he can then be blamed for triggered defense cuts and hating the military, the “WHERE’S OBAMA TO FIX THIS!” line, as usual, finds plenty of traction among the comatose anti-thinkers who comprise CNN’s Best Political Team on Television. David Gergen, for example, tweeted yesterday, “With #supercommittee near failure, where are men who want to be President? Where are GOP candidates? Where’s Obama? All AWOL.” Well David Gergen, Obama is not AWOL. He’s talking to world leaders, like presidents do, while he waits for Congress to finish its congressional plan on debt reduction that Congress is supposed to turn in. And this isn’t the job of Republican presidential candidates to fix, because they are not members of the Joint Select Committee on Punching Yourself in the Face either. Did you know that David Gergen is a professor at Harvard? Of government and public policy!

Are members of Congress aware of how miserable they sound when they resort to begging Daddy to finish their fourth grade diorama projects for them, the night before they’re due?

Honest question: why have Congress? Let’s just have a fascist system. These guys know that the public thinks that the President is personally responsible for all lawmaking. Even the media thinks that way. So fuck it, right? Give the president the powers that the public wants him to have.

(Source: jasencomstock, via sexartandpolitics)

Holycrapthisisjustamazing!