kablob17:

Fun fact, yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the first woman being elected to congress. (Jeanette Rankin, R-Montana, served two non-consecutive terms 1917-1919 and 1941-1943.)

jordanparrished:

So I’m concerned that people don’t realize just how messed up the situation at Standing Rock really is. The United States signed treaties acknowledging and agreeing that there are certain areas of land that were never ceded to them. These areas do not belong to the United States. They belong to a sovereign nation governed by indigenous people. The land that the Dakota Access Pipeline runs through is not part of the US. It is part of the Lakota nation. That means it is essentially a separate country.

Please imagine if the US wanted to build a pipeline from Washington to Alaska and they went through part of Canada to get there. Canadians protested, saying they have no right to be there and they’re destroying their water, and in response the USA sent militarized police to attack, harass, and harass these protesters, then arrested them for trespassing… on their own land.

That is what’s happening. This is an invasion, and the police are interfering on behalf of a foreign oil company.

whimslcott:

whimslcott:

whimslcott:

whimslcott:

whimslcott:

next time someone talks about welfare fraud, remember that if you’re homeless you’re not supposed to have food stamps and if you lose your home and don’t report it to DSHS so they can take away your food stamps that’s welfare fraud

when i was on ABD (aged, blind, and disabled benefits – the only cash aid available to disabled people while we’re applying for SSI, a monthly $197) literally all money you get can be deducted from these benefits. this means that if someone sees you digging through the trash for food and gives you $20 the government will only pay you $177 that month. if you don’t report that $20 it’s welfare fraud

astute readers might realise that there’s no way anyone in the country can be expected to live off of $197 a month, and that that would have to be supplemented by another source of income. and if that money is going to disappear as soon as that other source of income hits $197, it might as well not exist. you’re right!

when i was on ABD i had a patreon running that brought in a steady $13 a month. the person in charge of my case rounded up the amount of money i was getting to $15. i was penalised by $15 for making $13.

if you’re on SSI you can actually be penalised for having more than $2000 in savings. problem with that is that it takes often far upwards of a year from applying to actually be approved for SSI and once you do get approved the government sends you all the money you should have been getting over the past year or two or three or four. that amount is over $2000. you have a few months to spend it before it starts to count against you. 

or, if you’re not an idiot, you can buy a safe and stick it in there, but then you’re committing welfare fraud

in february the government admitted they made a mistake in cutting me off from SSI more than a year prior except i didn’t see any money until this month (september) because my dumb ass made the mistake of reporting one of the fundraisers i ran on here to make sure i didn’t die. the SSA requested excessive documentation of this (including things that didn’t exist like records of when i opened my paypal account) and found the documentation i did submit unsatisfactory three times, once because of the font size and twice because they claimed not to have received it. no attempt was made to communicate with me through any of this and each time i had to physically go to the SSA to find out what the deal was. it literally took 8 months longer for me to see any money because i was an idiot and didn’t commit welfare fraud

what-alchemy:

parentheticalaside:

drst:

freifraufischer:

Okay, let me tell you a story about Hillary Clinton.  She first made national headlines when she was something like 22 and the student graduation speaker at Wellesley College.  Now Wellesley is the most famous women’s college in the United States and at the time when women were not admitted to most of the Ivy League it was considered one of the top schools in the country for a woman to attend.  She used her platform to eviscerate the sitting Senator of Massachusetts, a Republican, for his support of the Vietnam War.  To his face because he was on the stage with her.

She was identified as a future leader of the Democratic Party from when she was in her early twenties.  After law school at one of the top law schools in the country she was hired as a staff worker on the Watergate Commission.  Now everyone in American politics in 1973 knew that the young people who worked on the investigation of Richard Nixon’s criminal activity were the future leaders of the Democratic Party.  

And from that moment, in her twenties, the American right decided to try and destroy her.  As an aside the right has spread unfounded rumors that she was fired from the Watergate Commission, the man who claims to have done it never had the authority to fire her and she worked on the commission until it closed down only leaving when all the staff at her level left, but facts have never gotten in the way of a good demonization of this woman.

She was one of the leading advocates for abused children and legal aid for poor people in the country in the late 1970s and 1980s when she was living in Arkansas and the narrative about her then was that she was the demon feminist who was masterminding letting children “divorce” their parents.  Because apparently there is never a circumstance in the minds of those on the right that a child might need to be emancipated from their parents or that children’s rights might be independent of those with the most power to control and abuse them.

When her husband was running for president she was attacked for her looks (and for the looks of her at the time twelve year old daughter).  Her career as a lawyer and as a law professor was used against her and the reason we have a “first ladies cookie recipe contest” every presidential campaign is because she had the audacity to say she was busy having a career and not baking cookies.  By the way this humiliating exercise is one she won both times when her husband was running and the magazine didn’t think that perhaps when she was running for president this little 24 year old personal attack exercise against her should be retired when she was making history.  Bill submitted the same recipe she won with in the 1990s.

And then the investigations started immediately.  

• She lost several hundred thousand dollars in an investment scheme and she was accused of insider trading.
• A personal friend committed suicide and she was accused both of having an affair with him and of killing him.
• She was routinely accused of sleeping with … basically any female friend of hers.  Because making someone a scary lesbian wasn’t yet out of fashion in the mid 1990s.
• She was attacked for trying to keep her family together as she was humiliated daily on national television.
• And she was attacked for being mad at her husband as she was humiliated daily on national television.
• They even attacked her cat because proper presidential families have dogs and it was clearly her witchcraft familiar.

The Republicans in congress have been launching fishing expeditions against this woman for the last 22 years and that’s not even counting the smear attacks that started in the late 1960s.  Today the Republicans in the House have spent more time and money investigating the attack on the embassy in Benghazi when she was secretary of state then was spent investigating the attacks on 9/11.  Ignoring that attacks on American embassies have occurred under every presidential administration for the last six decades and there were far more of them under George W Bush and for more people died in them under Ronald Reagan.

Oh.  And she was mocked in the late 1990s for daring to say there was a vast right wing conspiracy against her and her husband.  Because a woman should never acknowledge … you know… a provable fact.

So of course the average American voter has trouble distinguishing the truly horrific facts about Trump from the noise about Clinton.  We’ve been fed a steady diet of it for 45 fucking years with the express purpose of making sure this woman was never president of the United States.

The fact that she is going to be anyway isn’t a condemnation of my country.  It’s evidence of how strong and smart and resilient Hillary Clinton is.

Worth nothing that the email thing the Republicans are trying to hang her with? Her Republican predecessors (Colin Powell) set up their email the same way. The previous Republican president’s staff used a private server. This is literally “It’s OK If You’re A Republican” (IOKIYAR) in action. And the emails that are under investigation were never hacked. The Wikileaks crap is from the DNC hack, not from the State department.

The paid Russian trolls are still pushing the evil lesbian thing, btw, but the memes have shifted to paint her as a pedophile lesbian, because just “lesbian” isn’t enough to scare people anymore. And Trump keeps bringing up her husband’s infidelities because everything that happens in her life is somehow her fault (she stayed, so she’s a bad mother. If she’d left she’d be a disgrace who didn’t stand by her man).

Considering how many liberals dislike, disapprove of, or are suspicious of Clinton, it turns out devoting thousands of man hours and an incredible amount of money to discredit someone can be pretty effective! (Misogyny helps too.)

theironjackflint:

nobelshieldmaiden:

djrichiecee:

totalharmonycycle:

Why 4 FEET 8.5 Inches is Very Important

Fascinating Stuff …

Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

That’s an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So, who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

In other words, bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’,
you may be exactly right.

Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.

The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.

The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains
and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.

The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know,
is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature
of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!

Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.

Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it?

This is the single most mind blowing fact I’ve read on tumblr, every day is a school day-thank you.

Nice history lesson!

My daughter and I were just discussing this very subject.