Columbopossum - Columbopossum

Truth.

Source: Occupy Democrats

Hard to rise, and harder to fall: Poor college grads stay poor about as much as rich high school dropouts stay rich.

Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong

“Pine Forest In Winter”, c.1907, Koloman Moser.

Not a single pro-life person that I have met is truly pro-life. They’re pro-forced pregnancy. Pro-forced birth. Anti-abortion. Anti-choice. But not pro-life. Else, they would be in Ferguson holding signs. They would counter bullying as though, quite literally, our children’s lives depend on it. They would promote support for mothers, for poor children, for food stamps, for education. They would advocate for gun control, rehab programs, helping the homeless and sick, and suicide prevention. They would fight police brutality, domestic violence, gang violence, the death penalty, hate crimes, human trafficking, the prison industrial complex, every single war, and anything else that kills people. But they don’t. You’ve heard it all before, but I’ll say it again. Nothing—not one single element—of the so-called ‘pro-life movement’ is actually about protecting the living and extending the lives of people.

Death Sentence (via heroes-get-made, truth-has-a-liberal-bias, foulmouthedliberty)

Postcards for Ants: A 365-Day Miniature Painting Project by Lorraine Loots

This Guy Narrates People’s Lives Randomly In Public And It’s Hilarious [source]

Look at the difference: In 1977 I bought a small house in Portland Oregon for $24,000. At the time I was earning $5 per hour working at a large auto parts store. I owned a 4 year old Chevy Nova that cost $1,500. Now, 36 years later that same job pays $8 an hour, that same house costs $185,000 and a 4 year old Chevy costs $10,000. Wages haven’t kept up with expenses at all. And, I should point out that that $5 an hour job in 1977 was union and included heath benefits.

an anonymous online commenter on the current economy. (via han-nara)

me: its okay

anxiety: you did something wrong

me: what? no.... it's fine?

anxiety: is it?

me: uh, I... I don't know, is it?

anxiety: no

I have one job, and its a pretty simple job: I come in in the morning, and we look at the news, and I write jokes about it.  And then I make a couple of faces, and like a noise, and then it’s just ch-ching, and I’’m out the door. But I didn’t do my job today, so I apologize. I got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina.  And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run, or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could’ve pulled out of the spiral, but I didn’t.   And so I honestly have nothing.  Other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss that we do to each other, and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal, and that we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is… we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah.  That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind.  I don’t wanna get into the political argument of guns, and things – what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people who are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would have fit into our – we invaded two countries!  And spent trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives, and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different countries.  All to ‘keep Americans safe’!  'We gotta do whatever we can!  We’ll torture people!  We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe!’ Nine people.  Shot in a church.  What about that?  'Hey, what can we do?  Craziness is craziness, right?’ That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around.  And you know it.  You know that it’s going to go down the same path.  'This is a terrible tragedy.’  They’re already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack.  This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community.  It has stood in that part of Charleston for a hundred and some years, and has been attacked viciously many times, as many black churches have. And to pretend that, I heard someone on the news say ‘tragedy has visited this church.’  This wasn’t a tornado.  This was a racist.  This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater. I hate to even use this pun, but this one was black and white.  There’s no nuance here.  And we’re going to keep pretending like, ‘I don’t get it!  What happened?  This one guy lost his mind!’  But we are steeped in that culture in this country, and we refuse to recognize it, and I can’t believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity.  That’s racial wallpaper.  You can’t allow that.  Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina. And the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken over. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing: al Qaeda?  ISIS?  They’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.

JON STEWART, The Daily Show (via inothernews)