What could have given the modern Republican party a spine, you ask? Well, it was those darn Black people of course! The Black Panther Party to be exact.

Long story short, the Panthers, in response to police brutality and systemic oppression, Panters urged Black people to arm themselves and to protect their own neighborhoods. They showed up to the state house with their rifles and handguns...

And faster than you can reload a fully automatic weapon, Reagan and the NRA were like, oh, Hell no! We need Gun Control! And that became the Mulford Act of 1967 which banned the open carrying of firearms. Go figure.

Bottom line, if it benefits the white supremacist power structure, this country can and will do anything. Big sigh. The hypocrisy is mind numbing.

And that's today's, The More You Know.

check out the original post for more: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv3f9TSnXHn/

this is just on ONE SINGLE POST. Out of the 300 people that liked the post, there were approx 20 self-identified former transtrenders. Out of that sample of cis teenagers, over 6% were former trenders. That is a lot for something yall claim never ever happens. 

And, the key word here is self-identified trenders. I am not calling them trenders, they are calling themselves trenders because that’s simply what they were. They labelled themselves trans because it was trendy, which is what a trender is. Trenders exist, and the sheer amount of personal accounts from former transtrenders is proof. 

180912 Taehyung’s Tweet

다시다시!!

AgainAgain!!

1) it was for mommies and daddies who were married;

2) it made me, my five year old sister, and my baby brother.

i learned everything i knew about sex from the internet while secretly browsing grownup sites on my 4th generation ipod touch i earned for doing so well at a piano recital. because of the nature of, you know, men and their internet porn, i learned that my sexual role as a woman was to be slapped and pissed on and tied up. i didn’t know what healthy sex was. i didn’t know it should be mutually consensual, or that it was okay to want sex with girls. i didn’t know that sex should be good for both people. i learned that sex would hurt, and that sex was about men and men only, and that i would be forced into sex whether i liked it or not, and that it was normal to have sex with big, burly, grown men as a teenager. i learned it was normal to cry during sex. i was scared of sex for so many years because of that, and the way i was exposed to sex at a young age led to the inappropriate and traumatic sexual encounters i had (occasionally with older people) later on in my teen years.

the day i got my first period, i was ten-and-a-half. i was swimming in the river with my best friend, and when i got out to go to the bathroom, i noticed brown blood on the inside of my mint-green tankini bottom. i knew what a period was, but i hid it from my mother in shame. she found out, eventually, of course. she told me, you have a woman’s body now, and if you have sex, you could have a baby. all i heard was, you have a woman’s body.

i started shaving my vulva when i was eleven, because i saw memes on memegenerator about how disgusting “hairy pussy” was. i wanted to be sexy. i was eleven years old, and all i wanted was to be sexy. it hurt, and it itched, and it made me uncomfortable, and i’d sometimes nick my labia with the razor, but i did it anyway, because i didn’t want to have a nasty, “hairy pussy.”

eleven was the age i first started getting pinched on the EL. i was an early bloomer: i had B-cup breasts already, and my menstrual cycle was regular enough that i could keep a calendar. i started wearing a full face of makeup to school and buying shorts that rode all the way up my skinny twelve-year-old thighs. i remember the day i stopped jumping off the swings the summer after fifth grade. skinned knees weren’t sexy. smooth, flawless legs were sexy, and i was a sexy girl. i was probably the sexiest little girl in the whole world. my parents hated it. they told me i was too young, but i knew the truth. my body was older, maybe 17 or 18, so my brain must be, too.

when i was twelve, i had a secret kik account that my parents didn’t know about. i used it to message strangers. i made all sorts of friends. i wasn’t stupid. i used a fake name. never showed my face. one of my friends asked me for a bra picture. i was a cool girl, right, i was sexy, so i sent him a picture of me in front of my bedroom mirror in my little white training bra with the blue butterflies.

sexy, he said.

that was all i wanted.

i’m not typing out all this bullshit because i think it’s something special. i’m typing it out because it’s not. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to my little sister. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to that little millie bobbie brown, sexiest actress at thirteen. i’m typing it out because i’m sixteen years old now, a girl in the eyes of the law and a woman in the eyes of men.

mothers, talk to your daughters. tell them to jump off the swingset and skin their knees. tell them to get dirt on their dresses. tell them that they’re a woman on their 18th birthday, not at ten-and-a-half on the first day of their menstrual cycle. the world is confused. the world is sick. if your daughters don’t hear about how to treat their bodies from you, they’ll hear it from the sick, sick world, and they’ll do the things i did.

let girls be girls.

People I once respected willingly choosing to source their news from Seungri fan pages. Why, because it’s easier? Because it reassures you? They’re spoonfeeding you their blind beliefs, you know, one recycled argument at a time. Facts don’t matter to them, only faith. They don’t use their heads; they hang off Seungri’s every word like it’s gospel. Never questioning him, changing their narrative when official statements from the authorities don’t align.

They will never accept the truth. They will always, without fail, find a way around it, pointing the finger at everyone else, reassigning the blame to whoever they can, whoever is most convenient for them… but never, never Seungri. These are not sources who you should be giving your trust.

You know who else doesn’t deserve your trust? Seungri.

Just like his devoted followers, Seungri is lying to you. He’s lying to us all. He’s not concerning himself with what we think right now, he is only focusing on how to get himself out of this. This is common in cases where people are facing criminal charges. This is to be expected. Denial is the default. We’ve seen it with his business partner, Yoo In Suk, we’ve seen it with all of Seungri’s friends. We’ve seen it with Yoochun too. They all caved and admitted guilt in the end, but only when irrefutable evidence was shown to them (and in Yoochun’s case, not even then). What makes you think Seungri is any different than the people he valued most? Who he spent so much of his free time with? Who he was still immersed in conversations with even as he was backstage with the rest of Big Bang?

Seungri is smart and stubborn as ever; he didn’t get this far in life by rolling over for anyone. He is not going to admit to anything unless he has to. To get a confession out of him, there can be no room for doubt. For this reason, I don’t think there’s a confession coming. I have no hope of him ever coming clean.

And this is where it’s up to us to piece together the evidence and decide for ourselves if we think this man is still worth our time.

I re-watched Radio Star recently, wherein GD commended Seungri for making himself cry on camera on Chinese TV – but only after making sure to glance over at the camera, confirming its location and position on him even as his eyes filled with tears. “Wow, he’s good,” he exclaimed, seeming impressed.

Seungri is a seasoned performer through and through. He knows how to work a crowd to his advantage better than anyone. That was his role in Big Bang, at least according to GD: “It’s like there are 4 members of Big Bang and an MC who can sing and dance with us.” You all remember that lengthy post I made not too long ago about his manipulative tendencies? He is playing you all. The police too. And he’ll do it as long as he has to.

I fought long and hard for him. I cried for him. I was flooded with rage on his behalf and acted on it, for weeks lashing out at all who doubted him, imploring the world to wait, wait and see.

I waited. I saw. And though it took time, I eventually accepted that he wasn’t worth fighting for – or waiting for – anymore.

He wants to be seen as a victim; that’s nothing new. What is new is his wish to be seen as an oblivious fool who didn’t know what his close friends and business partners got up to behind his back, whose chat messages are being taken out of context, who was only bluffing, who made a typo, who didn’t mean it. The classic “It’s not what it looks like!” And even with recently-acquired evidence suggesting that yes, it is what it looks like, he expects us to buy these crap excuses?

No, he expects the court to buy those excuses, because all he needs on his side is reasonable doubt. They’re not meant for us. He has to know how stupid he sounds, but he also knows it’s the only way he’ll walk away from this a free man. After all, in his own words to his criminal friends, “Korean law is shit. That’s why I love it.”

And yet his fans, in all their blissful ignorance, are still eating it up.

Oh, and all those women his serial rapist friends harmed? Who have found the courage to come forward, after learning for the first time what happened on those nights they couldn’t remember? After seeing themselves in pictures and videos, trapped in acts they never agreed to? Seungri has given us nothing that shows he ever gave a damn about them. But you know what he did care about? Keeping those vile friends of his out of trouble.

This is not a person who I’m willing to give even one ounce of my support going forward.

To his credit, Seungri himself saw the futility of trying to preserve his entertainment career in the face of mounting adversity that had become “too major”. It’s the one thing he did right: leaving when he did. His career is off the table and all that’s left to him now is his freedom. I wonder how long it will take his remaining fans – and those somehow still on the fence about him – to come to the same conclusion.

Until then, we are, and will be, a fandom divided. And to those of you who I once looked up to… I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

People don’t often look back on the early 1900’s for advice, but what if we could actually learn something from the Lost Generation? The New York Public Library has digitized 100 “how to do it” cards found in cigarette boxes over 100 years ago, and the tips they give are so practical that millennials reading this might want to take notes.

Back in the day, cigarette cards were popular collectibles included in every pack, and displayed photos of celebrities, advertisements, and more. Gallaher cigarettes, a UK-founded tobacco company that was once the largest in the world, decided to print a series of helpful how-to’s on their cards, which ranged from mundane tasks (boiling potatoes) to unlikely scenarios (stopping a runaway horse). Most of them are insanely clever, though, like how to make a fire extinguisher at home. Who even knew you could do that?

The entire set of life hacks is now part of the NYPL’s George Arents Collection. Check out some of the cleverest ones we could find below. You never know when you’ll have to clean real lace!

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5