did i ever tell u guys that in fifth grade my class wrote a play bc we were studying ancient greece? it was called persephone and the (not so hot) heroes. i played demeter. basically, persephone got kidnapped by kronos and i strong armed hades into giving me 3 heroes from the underworld to get her back but they were actually terrible and i forget how she was actually saved but bottom line is that you wish you were my fifth grade class
this wasn’t little either, we used the town hall and we wore togas and shit
me as demeter
some lines (this was a joint effort of a bunch of greek-savvy 10/11 year olds):
athena: ‘im the goddess of wisdom but you don’t notice me telling everyone. i’m too smart for that’
-
aphrodite: is zeus chasing some mortal woman again?
athena: no this time he and hera have gone for marriage counselling
-
athena: we can ask hades to let them out of the underworld to help
aphrodite: he’ll never agree, he’s such a deadly bore (we made a fucking pun im so angry)
-
demeter: hades wont pick up. he’s too busy torturing the dead in tartarus
-
hades: i can’t undo the laws of death. just think of the paperwork.
-
aphrodite: the humidity is messing up my hair. it’s getting all frizzy
athena: is that all you care about?
aphrodite: no, it’s also messing up my dress
-
demeter: it’s so dark, and there aren’t any trees or flowers
hades: what do we need trees for, everybody’s dead
-
paris: yeah, and i can shoot straight! isn’t that right, achilles?
-
(hades enters)
paris: who are you? do we know you?
-
achilles: im mighty achilles
odysseus: im wily odysseus
paris: and im hungry paris
-
kronos: i really am awesome, aren’t i
-
aeton: one wrong move and you’re history
odysseus: fool! we already are history!
-
demeter: where are those mortals? i left them right there.
athena: are you sure? this isnt the first time you’ve lost someone.
I suddenly have the need for the entire screenplay, and to direct it at my college.
Years ago, you promised your firstborn to a witch. Since then, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to get laid. The witch is starting to get pretty pissed.
Y’all get together to discuss your options and she starts coaching you on how to get men because she doesn’t want to waste more magic on you without promise of payment. The more time you guys spend together the more you realize you have a bit of a crush on her. Soon you’re sabotaging your dates on purpose to see her again.
Long story short you fall in love and get married and do the sperm donor thing AND YOUR FIRSTBORN IS HERS BY DEFAULT and you live happily ever after. The end.
To the people in the comments saying the guy is doing this “just for show”
He’s not
With this kind of bird, they are VERY attached to their cages, so if you need to replace the cage, you need to the show the bird you’ve destroyed it so it will accept the new one. It’s upset bc the cage it liked is gone, but the cage was too small for it so it needs to be replaced. The bird is fine.
Thank you for explaining that! I’ve been wondering about this video.
That bird was livid!
that bird sound like a white frat boy who found out his momma cut off his xbox live subscription
Imagine that you’re twenty years old. You were born in 1996. You were five years old on 9/11. For as long as you can remember, the United States has been at war.
When you are twelve, in 2008, the global economy collapses. After years of bluster and bravado from President George W. Bush — who encouragedconsumerism as a response to terror — it seems your country was weaker than you thought.
In America, the bottom falls out fast. The adults who take care of you struggle to take care of themselves. Perhaps your parent loses a job. Perhaps your family loses its home.
In 2009, politicians claim the recession is over, but your hardship is not. Wages are stagnant or falling. The costs of health care, child care, and tuition continue to rise exponentially. Full-time jobs turn into contract positions while benefits are slashed. Middle-class jobs are replaced with low-paying service work. The expectations of American life your parents had when you were born — that a “long boom” will bring about unparalleled prosperity — crumble away.
Baby boomers tell you there is a way out: a college education has always been the key to a good job. But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. The college graduates you know are drowning in student debt, working for minimum wage, or toiling in unpaid internships. Prestigious jobs are increasinglyclustered in cities where rent has tripled or quadrupled in a decade’s time. You cannot afford to move, and you cannot afford to stay. Outside these cities, newly abandoned malls join long abandoned factories. You inhabit a landscape of ruin. There is nothing left for you.
Every now and then, people revolt. When you are fifteen, Occupy Wall Street captivates the nation’s attention, drawing attention to corporate greed and lost opportunity. Within a year, the movement fades, and its members do things like set up “boutique activist consultancies.” When you are seventeen, the Fight for 15 workers movement manages to make higher minimum wage a mainstream proposition, but the solutions politicians pose are incremental. No one seems to grasp the urgency of the crisis. Even President Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat — the type of politician who’s supposed to understand poverty — declares that the economy has recovered.
I know stuff like this has been a topic of conversation on my dash for years but this bit was a nice articulation:
Capitalism, in other words, holds less appeal in an era when the invisible hand feels like a death grip. Americans under 20 have had little to no adult experience in a pre-Great Recession economy. Things older generations took for granted — promotions, wages that grow over time, a 40-hour work week, unions, benefits, pensions, mutual loyalty between employers and employees — are increasingly rare.
As a consequence, these basic tenets of American work life, won by labor movements in the early half of the twentieth century, are now deemed “radical.” In this context, Bernie Sanders, whose policies echo those of New Deal Democrats, can be deemed a “socialist” leading a “revolution”. His platform seems revolutionary only because American work life has become so corrupt, and the pursuit of basic stability so insurmountable, that modest ambitions — a salary that covers your bills, the ability to own a home or go to college without enormous debt — are now fantasies or luxuries.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bush & the GOP put together an “economic stimulus” bill in response. It was (brace yourself) …
a huge tax giveaway to the rich. So grotesque a giveaway to the rich that even the Wall Street Journal acknowledged as much! Paul Krugman wrote:
“It was so extreme that when political consultants tried to get reactions from voter focus groups, the voters refused to believe that they were describing the bill accurately.” (NYT)
“Voters refused to believe.” Remember that. Now, fast forward to 2012 and the Romney/Ryan tax plan, which would have (brace yourself) …
slashed social spending to pay for giant tax cuts for the rich. Priorities USA, a Democrat super PAC, ran focus groups on it. Here’s what happened:
“When Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — & thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’, while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.” (NYT)
Again, when Republican economic policy is accurately explained to voters, they simply cannot believe it’s true.
Lots of people have used this as a kind of punchline, but I think it’s worth taking some time to think about it seriously.
Most people have other priorities & are woefully ignorant about politics. Research has confirmed this again & again. Boundless ignorance. Average people absorb politics piecemeal, through osmosis. What they generally see is a haze of pettiness, squabbles, and conflict.
Viewed from this distance, most people conclude that “politics” is hopeless, all politicians are venal, and the whole game is corrupt.
Unless you’re willing to put in serious time and work to suss out the details, “pox on both houses” is kind of the default destination.
So when voters are confronted by the idea that one party wants to take from the poor and the sick, in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, and the other party doesn’t, it simply doesn’t fit the hazy “both sides suck” model. It sounds like an unfair partisan attack. The truth about the GOP sounds like an attack on the GOP, so people dismiss it as such. It is a perverse form of immunity.
And here we come to the true, twisted genius of the decades-long Republican strategy. They have fractured trust in mainstream institutions, so there is no widely trusted person or institution who can tell the truth about the GOP in a way that will be broadly accepted.
There are no more trusted referees or arbiters, so the media is filled with “both sides!!!” yelling, with no way to resolve. In that atmosphere, everyone can just comfortably believe whoever is saying good things about “their side.” Epistemological bubbles.
Which brings us to this current tax bill, which is even more comically malign & grasping than past GOP budget plans. Any attempt
to accurately describe it sounds like a fucking comic book villain revealing their evil plot toward the end of the movie.
But it is surrounded, in the media atmosphere, by the exact same haze of both-sides charge-and-countercharge as ever. So your average citizen, just going on instinctual heuristics, isn’t going to believe an accurate description. It sounds too ludicrous.
An accurate (horrific) description sounds like what “one side” says, and we all know the truth is in the middle somewhere, right?
In this way, the GOP, whether through design or accident, has stumbled on a brilliant political strategy for advancing kleptocracy. They exploit public & media heuristics that make us highly averse to asymmetry. They exploit the folk wisdom of “both sides do it”.
They do their deeds right out in the open, trusting (accurately!) that a good chunk of the public won’t believe it is what it is.
Journalists understand the model of “finding & exposing hidden information” — the pre-internet-age core of journalism — but
they have not yet solved the dilemma of how to help the public focus on & understand already public information that is surrounded
by a fog of misinformation, bullshit, and distraction. This ludicrous tax bill is a real-time test case.
Can the media convey
that it really is as cruel & plutocratic as Dem critics are saying it is? Can they convey that the GOP has become something
more unhinged & venal than even its worst critics charge? I doubt it. I’m not sure there’s any economic policy that could break through.
Remember: “respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”
When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future by doing something small.
