Just so everyone knows, there was a shooting in Squirrel Hill today which is a predominantly known Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh and they attacked a synagogue.
I’ve made many posts about this but rn I’m exhausted and scared so I thought I’d communicate in memes. My donation goal and progress is in my description.Reblogs would be met with my eternal gratitude.
Just finished the last class this semester! I had the most unproductive semester ever… though I got some of the nicest comments about the folders which made my day a lot better.
(1.5 Hour draw inspired by Milt Kobayashi and a photo)
“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.”
This article is a bunch of numbers and data and it doesn’t really paint a very vivid picture of the problem.
So here’s an example that I assure you is 100% real.
My dad works on boats. Not in any capacity that makes a lot of money (he basically inspects their fire systems), but he gets to set foot on the luxury yachts of the most mindblowingly wealthy people on earth. People who have so much money they have to invent new and absurd ways to even spend it. People who barely work for a living because they have so much goddamn money they spend most of their lives in perpetual vacation having other people manage anything of importance while their “bootstraps” are nowhere to be found.
And I don’t mean 30-60 foot fishing boats, I mean the REAL luxury yachts, for which 150 feet counts as a smaller size. It’s fairly common for them to be around 180ish feet, more rarely as much as 200. Boats personally owned by individual people that have helicopter landing pads (plural) and more. These are floating super mansions that these people own for fun.
Most of them are huge, incompetent assholes who wouldn’t last a day in the rest of the world without people sucking up to them because of their money.
But this is about what one guy, one STUPIDLY RICH jackass, has come up with as a way to spend a tiny fraction of his money.
Persian rugs are like, the stereotype of a priceless artifact that is impossible to replace. Anywhere you see one on display there is enormous care taken not to damage them or to allow people to touch them. Some of them are well over a thousand years old, and while it’s possible for modern textiles to produce similar designs, the real ones are fragile, in limited supply, impossible to replace, and very expensive.
Every couple of years this guy buys one, has it cut into the correct shape, and gets it installed as carpeting – to be walked on – in one room on his yacht. After it wears out it gets stripped off the floor and thrown away, and he buys a new one.
Priceless, irreplaceable artifacts that cost millions of dollars each are disposable, temporary carpeting for these people. And this is not the richest person my dad has ever worked for. Nor is his the biggest or most expensive boat.
One of them has a yacht with a huge, multimillion-dollar setup on the back for his personal luxury submarine.
The ultra-wealthy are too goddamn rich. WAY beyond even what people who think they know what rich looks like would ever imagine.
Girls pose by a jail that recalls the witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Photo taken in 1945.
I recently learned that the water in Salem was contaminated with the fungus from which LSD is derived and a legitimate theory for the whole thing is that everyone in the town was tripping balls
This might be the greatest thing ive ever seen on the internet
We did a whole massive thing on this in history. I believe the fungus in question is called Ergot and it’s terrifying. It makes your muscles spasm so when they had seizures that was the reason, not because they were possessed. One woman had to be strapped to her bed, she was seizing so bad. And, like ‘theybuildbuildings’ said, it had the same effects as LSD; as soon as you touch it, let alone consume it, it messes with your entire system. The worst thing is, you practically always had a bad trip. Many complained about bugs crawling under their skin or monsters emerging from the shadows to scratch and bite at them until they were screaming. It was a horrendous thing and the worst part is, Ergot is still around. It grows on crops and, if your wheat isn’t properly treated, it can be eaten and you’ll most likely experience the same as the women of Salem.
god i love history
This is hella cool and almost correct…
The effects on the people of Salem were probably from consuming bread with the fungus in it, not from contaminated water. And apparently rye is way more commonly affected than wheat. In fact, often the members of the clergy were able to afford nicer bread made from wheat and thus were not as commonly affected.
You don’t go on a spasm-y trip just by touching it. You have to consume it for weeks, which results in chronic poisoning. ( If you stop eating it early enough, you may recover. So when people suffering from these “demonic possessions” took refuge in churches and stopped eating low-grade rye bread they were sometimes miraculously healed.
More interesting facts:
Ergot poisoning can result in convulsions & hallucinations, or it can cause gangrene, depending on which group of active alkaloids are present. (Horrifying, either way.) It killed a lot of people in Europe in the Middle Ages.
In Europe, often there was a strong correlation between wet summers (which provide ideal conditions for ergot) and reports of witchcraft/ possession. And in Norway and Scotland, records of witch persecution are only found in areas where rye was grown and used to make bread.
And I just learned right now that one author dude translated the word “Beowulf” as “barley-wolf” which could indicate a connection to ergot. The LSD-like effects could be a valid explanation for stories of Old Norse warriors going into the a sort of trancelike battle rage.
(this is exactly the kind of stuff my herbology medicinal plants class is about, it’s so cool omfg. we had a lecture on ergot last week.)
Sunshine and Shit Jokes 