The Origin of Stuff

This is not my prompt list, but I honestly can’t remember where I found this list when I wrote it out on paper to work on as it was a while back. If anyone knows, please send me a message and I’ll give credit or delete this post entirely.

Introduction

Complicated

Making History

Rivalry

Unbreakable

Obsession

Eternity

Gateway

Death

Opportunities

33%

Dead Wrong

Running Away

Judgement

Seeking Solace

Excuses

Vengeance

Love

Tears

My Inspiration

Never Again

Online

Failure

Rebirth

Breaking Away

Forever and a Day

Lost and Found

Light

Dark

Faith

Colors

Exploration

Seeing Red

Shades of Grey

Forgotten

Dreamer

Mist

Burning

Out of Time

Knowing How

Fork in the Road

Start

Nature’s Fury

At Peace

Heart Song

Reflection

Perfection

Everyday Magic

Umbrella

Party

Troubling Thoughts

Stirring of the Wind

Future

Health and Healing

Seperation

Everything for You

Slow Down

Heartfelt Apology

Challenged

Exhaustion

Accuracy

Irregular Orbit

Cold Embrace

Frost

A Moment in Time

Dangerous Territory

Boundaries

Unsettling Revelations

Shattered

Bitter Silence

The True You

Pretense

Patience

Midnight

Shadows

Summer Haze

Memories

Change in the Weather

Illogical

Only Human

A Place to Belong

Advantage

Breakfast

Echoes

Falling

Picking Up the Pieces

Gunshot

Possession

Twilight

Nowhere and Nothing

Answers

Innocence

Simplicity

Reality

Acceptance

Lesson Learned

Enthusiasm

Game

Friendship

And if the title pictured above isn’t enough for you, this fantastic article published by the Scientific American can be found here.

Here is an excerpt from it:

❝ Led by Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery, the army set out on 2 November 1932, determined to gun down a group of 50 birds in the district of Campion. They moved in formation behind the birds, and the birds answered their organised assault with inspired chaos, scattering themselves in all directions to minimise the casualties. But despite their best efforts, says Johnson, “the first blood in the bizarre ‘Emu War’ had thus been drawn by the Australian army."

It was game. on.

Two days later, the emus had their revenge. Concealed gunners sighted 1,000 emus nearby, and waited patiently for them to make their way over.At point-blank range, says Johnson, the soldiers open fired, felling maybe 10, 12 emus. But then the machine-gun jammed. The emus scattered once again, having delivered 1,000 of their fluffy hides into the hands of the soldiers before snatching almost all of them back just as quickly. The media had a field day, quoting one of the recruits as saying:

"The emus have proved that they are not so stupid as they are usually considered to be. Each mob has its leader, always an enormous black-plumed bird standing fully six-feet high, who keeps watch while his fellows busy themselves with the wheat. At the first suspicious sign, he gives the signal, and dozens of heads stretch up out of the crop. A few birds will take fright, starting a headlong stampede for the scrub, the leader always remaining until his followers have reached safety.”

The army tried gunning them down in moving trucks, but found they couldn’t aim properly at their speedy foes. A lone victim rendered himself a nuisance all the way to the end, his corpse getting tangled up in the vehicle’s steering equipment, which caused it to veer off and destroy half a length of somebody’s fence.

"On 8 November, it was reported that Major Meredith’s party had used 2,500 rounds of ammunition - twenty-five per cent of the allotted total - to destroy 200 emus,” says Johnson. "When one New South Wales state Labor politician enquired whether ‘a medal was to be struck for those taking part in this war’, his federal counterpart in Western Australia, responded that they should rightly go to the emus who ‘have won every round so far’.”  

On the flip side, send 😶 [or " o__o " ] for my muse's reaction to seeing someone flirt with yours.

Let me elucidate this issue for some of you people who have just jumped on the bandwagon of “F*** THE POLICE!!!” and “COPS ARE GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT AND EVEN IF THEY’RE RULED INNOCENT, IT’S CLEARLY THE BROKEN SYSTEM SO WE’RE GOING TO PROTEST, RIOT, AND BURN DOWN OUR OWN THINGS THAT SOME PEOPLE IN OUR COMMUNITY HAVE WORKED ALL THEIR LIVES TO HAVE, LIKE PLACES OF BUSINESS!!!” without having your facts straight, or really, without even waiting for all of the facts:

This is exactly the same problem that the very ones protesting complain about. Because they are taking a whole group of people, and they are lumping them all together, and they are doling out judgement upon all of them, in all situations, all of the time.

Here’s what people as a whole don’t seem to understand.

A taser or pepper spray doesn’t always incapacitate someone hyped up on drugs. Shooting someone in the knee or somewhere else that’s been deemed ‘non-lethal’ by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about (because, for the record, anything can be lethal), well that doesn’t always stop a person. Especially someone who’s too messed up at the time to feel or process the pain, or someone so determined to cause pain. They’ll just keep coming. 

If you can subdue them long enough to get cuffs on them, great. Might take a few officers depending on how drugged up, or sometimes even just how high their pain threshold/tolerance is or if they have enough adrenaline going to not feel pain.

And then there’s some people who just don’t listen to what the police tell them. They charge the police, with a knife, with a gun, with a heavy stick, it. doesn’t. matter. 

Because all it takes is the officer being on the ground, all it takes is that officer getting into a struggle that they won’t win, getting their firearm taken from them, and then THEY are the ones dead. Not the perpetrator they were trying to apprehend, and I don’t care how ‘angelic’ their families say they were. There have been plenty of those cases disproven lately through video footage, but you don’t see that on the news stations because it doesn’t fit the current narrative.

There are instances, whether the general public believes it or not, when the police officers’ lives are in peril, and they have to make a choice: do you pull the trigger? Anywhere you shoot could prove fatal, immediately or through complications is the only divider there. In essence, you are deciding: me or them? Adrenaline racing, heart pounding, raise the gun and fire. Sometimes it’s survivable; sometimes it’s fatal.

But bad guys don’t hesitate in that moment.

Cops that hesitate to pull the trigger in that moment of life or death get killed. Cops who don’t have the heart to pull the trigger it if it comes down to it, get killed. 

Then it’s their families with a loss when they were just trying to help people and serve their communities. That’s what you don’t hear on the news as often. Guess it’s not “controversial” enough to merit attention, unless of course it’s several at once being picked off by a coward of a sniper in Dallas while the police––the very people that were being protested that day––were trying to save the very people protesting them. Which FYI, was the deadliest day for law enforcement since SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, y’know, after which we celebrated our law enforcement and other first responders for the risks they were willing to take, for the fact that they were willing to and that many did give up their lives so that others could live, that many left behind families so that others could return to theirs.

So, no thank you, I will not sit here and listen to or read or watch on the news, all this rhetoric about police as a whole being racist, and I will not sit by passively as crowds of people scream, “F*** THE POLICE!!! PIGS IN A BLANKET!!!! WHAT DO WE WANT? DEAD COPS! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!!!” Or as these crowds throw Molotov cocktails into police cars or into police stations or into completely unrelated places of business. You have a right to PEACEABLY assemble, not to act like a mob in a monster movie. You have a right to state your opinion but that doesn’t mean that it’s fact, and it doesn’t mean that nobody else has a right to state their own or to rebut without being crucified.

I don’t condone or support dirty cops who kill just because they think that they can, but those are very few and far between. Most shootings are good cops who end up killing, too, and they shouldn’t have to be dragged through the mud because the last thing they wanted to do was shoot anybody.

But, regardless, the public and news media demonize them while they already deal with the consequences because they always wonder, “did I screw up?” “Were there any other options?” Sometimes there just aren’t in the case of the police, and people need to understand that.

All instances of a police officer firing a weapon should be looked at, within the police department, as to whether it was clean shoot or not.

But it shouldn’t be a matter for the public until it’s ruled as an actual act of malice or prejudice or whatever else, because the public doesn’t deal with the dangers or the responsibility every day. They don’t tell their families goodbye, and leave with the absolute and constant uncertainty of whether or not they’ll be back home after their tour.

Ultimately, police are a type of soldier. They’re the front lines at home. Sure there are some bad cops, but there are some bad everybody last time I checked. Don’t demonize all cops for a few, like all soldiers were demonized in Vietnam for a few. 

And to be perfectly clear, why don’t we all just step back for a moment and remember that there are bad apples in every profession. Teachers, doctors, priests, the list goes on and on. But we don’t demonize all of them for what a few have done and continue to do, do we? We don’t protest them in the streets. We don’t burn down businesses because any of them have done something wrong.

The police officers are making a huge sacrifice and laying their lives on the line every single day so that other people––who AREN’T making the commitment or taking on the BURDEN––can stay safe, and most people have no idea, they haven’t even the SLIGHTEST understanding of what that’s like. Which should maybe be kept in mind next time it’s on the news about a cop firing a weapon, whether it’s a fatality or not. 

So how about, before jumping to conclusions, you follow the established method of our legal system and allow the cops to be innocent until proven guilty? How about everyone refrain from pointing fingers until the verdict is in? How about if you have such a damn problem with cops, you go work their job instead? You get a badge and a gun and every danger and responsibility that comes with that and you walk the streets in their shoes, and you fix the damn ‘problem’ instead of being a part of it by rioting and making threats and destroying things simply because you can or supporting this anti-cop mentality.

Here’s a thought to summarize: 

Just act like a decent human being with respect and compassion and understanding and common sense.

That moment when you realize that Captain Cold(’s actor) was Mariah Carey’s love interest in two music videos: 

It’s Like That  and  We Belong Together.