Fixer's Club 🇳🇿🇸🇪🇺🇸 @ekstraeks

stool pigeon, clay pigeon, pigeonhole — english is littered with the fossil record of a civilization that kept pigeons everywhere for centuries. the language remembers the partnership. the city forgot it and put up spikes

I think about this a lot because this was the type of thing that older men used to tell me all the time when I was in my early 20s when we would cross rhetorical swords. It really rankled me then. It was as if they were saying that what I had to say didn't matter because they had already considered my point of view, already knew what I was going to say and had dismissed it. At that time of my life I had strident political views and was a vegetarian and attended anti-death penalty protests and such things. I would buttonhole my blue collar coworkers and admonish them for their lack of activism against our oppressive masters. Everything was very clear to me. I felt very deeply that things needed to be fixed and that the world was imperiled. But having seen both sides, what I would say now is what changes is you gain more practical experience of the world as you move through life. You are surrounded less by impractical people the way you are in college, which is a sort of daycare you occupy while your frontal lobe develops. The median college professor is both impractical and rather inexperienced in the world, having made a bad economic bargain that constitutes their professional lives in pursuit of that rare sinecure called tenure. Many of them are out and out fools with personal lives in disarray. Naturally, ideals and theories appeal to them because such things are never tested in the laboratory of the real world. To paraphrase Robert Conquest, "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." But, in your early 20s, college professors still have this air of knowing because you are more inexperienced and impractical than even they are. In my youth, I viewed every issue with the lens of power because I lacked power. I was new to the world of men and felt like a kid trying to fight for space. I think for a lot of young men revolutionary feelings are tied up in this feeling of inferiority that older men have wealth and positions of authority they don't deserve, but one day you get there and it's just guys with mortgages trying to get a few things done so they can go home to their families.

‏ً @omgsidewalks

5 days ago

I just like how people say “you'll become more conservative as you get older” basically admitting it's a degenerative condition.

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Dr. Joseph Warren died on this day in 1775, and he might be the most important Founding Father you were never taught about. He was born in Roxbury, went to Harvard, and by his early thirties he was the most sought after doctor in Boston. He inoculated the Adams family against smallpox. He took on apprentices. He treated patients on both sides of the growing fight, redcoats included, because he was a doctor first. He was 34 and a widower raising four small children alone after his wife died in 1773. He was also the quiet engine of the entire revolution in Massachusetts. He wrote the Suffolk Resolves. He ran the Committee of Safety. He stood up twice to give the Boston Massacre orations, and the second time, with British officers packing the room to intimidate him, the story goes that he climbed in through a window rather than be turned away, then delivered the speech to their faces. On the night of April 18, 1775, it was Warren who learned the British army was about to march. He sent Paul Revere out one way and William Dawes the other to raise the alarm toward Lexington and Concord. There is no midnight ride without Joseph Warren. People have argued for two centuries about where he got his intelligence, and one long running rumor is that his secret source was close to General Gage himself. The next morning he didn't sit safe behind a desk. He rode out to the fighting at Lexington and Concord and got into the thick of it. A British musket ball came so close it knocked a pin out of the hair beside his ear. Three days before Bunker Hill, the Provincial Congress made him a major general. When he walked onto the hill on June 17, the officers there offered to hand him command of the whole field. He refused. He said he had come to fight as a volunteer, not to give orders, and he took a musket and went into the redoubt with the ordinary men, in the most dangerous spot on the line. The Americans held off two British charges. On the third, low on powder, they were overrun. Warren stayed to cover the retreat and was shot in the head. The British knew exactly who they had killed. They stripped him, ran him through with bayonets, and threw him into a shallow pit with another body. A British officer later bragged that he had stuffed the scoundrel into the ground. General Gage is said to have remarked that Warren's death was worth that of 500 ordinary men. Ten months later, after the British finally gave up Boston and sailed away, his friends went looking for him. The body was beyond recognition. The only reason they ever found him is that Paul Revere, a silversmith by trade, had once wired a false tooth into Warren's jaw with silver wire. Revere dug through the grave, saw his own work in the teeth, and knew. It is remembered as one of the first forensic dental identifications in American history. His orphaned children were nearly forgotten too, until people like Benedict Arnold, years before he became a traitor, chipped in money to make sure they were raised and educated. The most famous painting of the battle, by John Trumbull, isn't really about the battle at all. It's about the death of one man in the smoke. The doctor who could have commanded an army chose to die in the dirt as a private soldier. He was 34 years old. 251 years ago today. Remember him 🇺🇸

Thomas Michael Nicholas - "The Clearing Storm, Essex"

Joaquin Sorolla celebrates this birth of his daughter Elena, showing just the heads of his wife Clotilde and the newborn as they seem to waft peacefully in a sea of white, as gentle light spreads soft shadows (Mother, 1895-1900)

Desert Landscape, Harry B Wagoner (1889-1950), Undated

@BonafideKRS youtube.com/watch?v=EeEx_H…

“Here’s to the sunny slopes of long ago”

I was combing my way through the mess to take my nightly look at our sleeping children when I took a moment to survey the clutter. Each child had a book of nursery rhymes on their bed. The toy kitchen had been dragged over to the sleeping area where miniature pots and pans were brimming with an assortment of play soups and desserts. There was a full-scale war taking place on the nightstand, with tiny soldiers and Star Wars figurines. There were open notebooks boasting intricate drawings or lists of words that had been copied from favorite books. There were well-loved stuffed animals tucked in with their masters, each with a name and a special history. There were sagging blankets from a fort constructed by tiny but determined hands. Sometimes... rather than showing you where you're failing... a MESS can show you where you're winning.

Jeffrey T. Larson (Minnesota 1962), Yellow and Blue, 2005, Oil on canvas

The Sun by Edvard Munch, 1911

@Maccamnz Heartbreaking and monstrous. Some I wonder if they're fit to share in the earth. Some I wonder if they've got souls.

Silly. The child's name should of course link them to whoever's lineage possesses more land and favor with the king

Jill Filipovic @JillFilipovic

5 months ago

Less popular opinion: whether you’re married or not, the baby’s last name should be yours.

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there has been a british voice in my head saying "bit sad innit" for the past week and a half

Grave marker for a fallen soldier at the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn, in Montana

I once found my son had pooped on the side of the street and then covered each one with a rock from the neighbor's garden, then he went and got into the shower all on his own and had been there happily playing while I was roaming the neighborhood looking for him. And I'd not even noticed the rocks, just that he was seemingly missing.

Walking away from an explosion in slow motion is a cool thing to do no matter what species you are

Fox News @FoxNews

5 months ago

SHELL SHOCK: A tortoise narrowly escaped tragedy after a fallen heat lamp ignited her shed, with security footage capturing her scrambling to safety as flames raged behind her.

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