The Wind-Up Nerd Chronicle

Other shitty things Reagan did:

1) He almost tripled the National Debt. And you need to see the difference with zeroes:

When Reagan took office in 1980: $909,100,000  owed.(909.1 billion)

When Reagan left office in 1988:  $2,601,300,000,000 owed. (2.6 trillion)

2) He raised taxes on the middle class and the poor ELEVEN TIMES while in office. 

3) Unemployment soared after Reagan passed his tax cuts for the rich, and it took decades to get back down again.

4) He turned the U.S. into an illegal weapons dealer.

5) He funded terrorists, helping create the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. From NewsOne:

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, U.S. funding of the mujahideen increased significantly and CIA Paramilitary Officers played a big role in training, arming and sometimes even leading mujahideen forces.

The CIA trained the mujahideen in many of the tactics Al Qaeda is known for today, such as car bombs, assassinations and other acts that would be considered terrorism today.

6) When his economic policies began wreaking havoc on the government, Reagan stole from Social Security–to the tune of 2.5 TRILLION–treating it for eight years as the private slush fund of himself and his rich friends. 

7) [T]he Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress.

So I baked him a cake.  Not like a Duncan Hines box cake either.  I made an angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries between the layers and lemon buttercream frosting entirely from scratch.  I was and still am crap at cake decorating, but pale yellow frosting with star shaped sprinkles on top looks pretty good no matter how uncoordinated you are.  Then I put on my nicest clothes, marched over, and apologised for not welcoming him to the neighbourhood sooner.

In recent days, jihadists killed 41 people at Istanbul’s bustling, shiny airport; 22 at a cafe in Bangladesh; and at least 250 celebrating the final days of Ramadan in Baghdad. Then the Islamic State attacked, again, with bombings in three cities in Saudi Arabia.

By Tuesday, Michel Kilo, a Syrian dissident, was leaning wearily over his coffee at a Left Bank cafe, wondering: Where was the global outrage? Where was the outpouring that came after the same terrorist groups unleashed horror in Brussels and here in Paris? In a supposedly globalized world, do nonwhites, non-Christians and non-Westerners count as fully human?

“All this crazy violence has a goal,” Mr. Kilo, who is Christian, said: to create a backlash against Muslims, divide societies and “make Sunnis feel that no matter what happens, they don’t have any other option.”

This is not the first time that the West seems to have shrugged off massacres in predominantly Muslim countries. But the relative indifference after so many deaths caused by the very groups that have plagued the West is more than a matter of hurt feelings.

One of the primary goals of the Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups is to drive a wedge between Sunni Muslims and the wider world, to fuel alienation as a recruiting tool. And when that world appears to show less empathy for the victims of attacks in Muslim nations, who have borne the brunt of the Islamic State’s massacres and predatory rule, it seems to prove their point.

“Why isn’t #PrayForIraq trending?” Razan Hasan of Baghdad posted on Twitter. “Oh yeah no one cares about us.”

Hira Saeed of Ottawa asked on Twitter why Facebook had not activated its Safety Check feature after recent attacks as it did for Brussels, Paris and Orlando, Fla., and why social media had not been similarly filled with the flags of Turkey, Bangladesh and Iraq. “The hypocrisy is the western world is strong,” she wrote.

https://fas.org/irp/threat/nctc2011.pdf

“In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.”

That’s from a 2011 report.

Things have not changed.

Muslims still account for the majority of the casualties in terrorist attacks, as they have for over ten years at least.

Aries: Schadenfreude. German – the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune.

Taurus: Cafuné. Brazilian Portuguese – The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.

Gemini: Verschlimmbessern. German – to make something worse when trying to improve it.

Cancer: Mamihlapinatapei. Yagan/Tierra del Fuego – The wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.

Leo: Kjæreste. Norwegian – A gender neutral term for girlfriend or boyfriend. It literally translates as “dearest”.

Virgo: Wabi-Sabi. Japanese – “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.”

Libra: L’ésprit d’escalier. French – is the feeling of finding the perfect retort too late, though it literally translates to “staircase wit.

Scorpio: La douleur exquise. French – the exquisite pain that comes from loving someone who will never love you back.

Sagittarius: Fremdscham. German – Embarrassment you feel on behalf of someone who is too dumb to know they’ve done something they should be embarrassed by.

Capricorn: Geborgenheit. German – the feeling that, when with a certain person or in a certain place, that nothing could ever harm you.

Aquarius: Koev halev. Hebrew – Empathizing with someone else so deeply that it causes your heart to ache.

Are you fucking kidding me? Like, no, Shakespeare wouldn’t tweet a sonnet cause 140 characters is a bit short for that. Wrong medium. But you know what he would have? A very active twitter FULL OF DICK PUNS AND YOUR MOM JOKES okay. (And probably also a blog for the sonnets and longer works, that cross-posts links to twitter anyway.)

“…

…

The

The bear?”

“Yes the bear”

“Will

Will there isn’t a bear in this play

Where did the bear come from”

“A PLACE

And he exits the play pursued by it

P A R A N O R M A L   A C T I V I T Y… G O V E R N M E N T   D E N I E S   K N O W L E D G E… T R U S T   N O   O N E.