There's a lot of bastards out there!

It's a strange world made up of disappointments for the most part.

[divineofficial]

Dawn: “I hate this house, and I hate Christmas.” Dawn’s mother: “Not on Christmas.” John Waters’ Female Trouble starring Divine as Dawn Davenport, 1974

[alotofbastards]

‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’: A Portrait of Bourgeois Crisis

The film is ostensibly about finding the true spirit of the season amid a hellish, slapstick descent into suburban holiday dysfunction, but the film's "fun, old-fashioned Christmas" is remarkably steeped in wealth's economic markers, which I'll discuss in 2013 dollars.

[jirachi]

[stringerbells-deactivated202105]

[alotofbastards]

City Says Murdered Woman Should Have Known the "Risks" of Public Housing

In court papers filed on Thursday, city lawyers claim the family of a college student murdered in 2013 at an East Harlem housing project don’t deserve a settlement from the city because she should have known the “risks” of being there, the New York Post reports.

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

Police in North Dakota can now use drones armed with tasers

Police in North Dakota are now authorized to use drones armed with tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets, and other "non-lethal" weapons, following the passage of Bill 1328. Sponsored by Rep. Rick...

[alotofbastards]

NYC Spends Millions Jailing the Same Homeless and Mentally Ill People Over and Over

For New York City’s most frequently jailed people, the cycle probably goes something like this: You’re homeless, or mentally ill, or addicted to drugs. Maybe all three. Those three factors are so tightly wound together that it’s difficult to tell the causes from the effects. You get picked up for sleeping on the street, and police find a crack rock in your pocket, so you go to jail. A little while later, you get out, and a little while after that, you get picked up again. Back to jail it is.

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

Wendell Berry

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

The whole idea of this talk — if you take away nothing else — is this: the whole thing is made up. That’s it. And you can make it up different ways; and people have and do. And it changes. And it has nothing to do with biology or genetics. There’s a study of several decades of census records that found that twice as many people who call themselves white have recent African ancestry as people who call themselves black. This is not just a matter of folksy beliefs, or prejudice, or wrong ideas, though those things are all in the mix. This is a matter of law.

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

[alotofbastards]

Another revelation about C8 makes all of this more disturbing and gives the upcoming trials, the first of which will be held this fall in Columbus, Ohio, global significance: This deadly chemical that DuPont continued to use well after it knew it was linked to health problems is now practically everywhere. A man-made compound that didn’t exist a century ago, C8 is in the blood of 99.7 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as in newborn human babies, breast milk, and umbilical cord blood.