#american failure

[blueskittlesart]

in the nicest and most non-confrontational way possible. i feel like some of you think that anything that isn't directly openly spelled out for you within a story is "missed potential" or "unexplored." like. sometimes there are implied narratives. sometimes the point is that you as the reader are supposed to think and draw your own conclusions and participate in the story. the writers not directly spelling every little detail out for you doesn't mean that the story is poorly written or missed its own plot details somehow. PLEASE.

[chitaqua-toast]

@amtrak-official mourns with us, I feel.

[queerism1969]

[simply-ivanka]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"I was thinking, yesterday, though, of how strange it will seem to be free again: not to have to line up for everything one does, not to be ruled by whistles and shouted commands, and to be cast once again on one's own initiative. I can understand how fearful and reluctant to leave some men become after really long periods in prison. When one has had one's whole life completely ordered down to the minutest detail, it becomes a fearsome thing to face the prospect of freedom and responsibility again. This, of course, lies at the heart of the total inability of the prison to accomplish the thing it is supposed to do. For men who need, almost more than anything else, training in self-discipline, it provides a complete system of rigid discipline externally applied. The result, of course, is to make the man even less capable of coping with the problems and temptations that come to him than he was to begin with. And the men who "adjust" to this unreal kind of life—who, in other words, are able to submerge completely their individual personalities in order to fit the prison-envisaged stereotype—are assumed to be those most ready to return to society, and therefore most suitable for parole!"

- Alfred Hassler, Diary of a Self-Made Convict. Foreword by Harry Elmer Barnes. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954 (written 1944-1945), p. 123-124.

[jenfoundabug]

Scorpion fail

Dune scorpion (Smeringurus mesaensis)

Death Valley National Park, California, US

[jangillman]

[milkbreadtoast]

(random) ngl before i started learning korean i felt like the worst failure of a korean but now i feel like the best failure of a korean (/j) HAHA

like im struggling to speak but least im speaking..!! I feel like I've restored an essential piece of myself that was missing...

[beauty-funny-trippy]

15 Times Donald Trump Promised to Implement a Health Care Plan — and Failed

The very essence of a Con Man is to keep making promises and excuses, with assurances that results will happen soon, but "soon" never arrives.

[cheemscakecat]

What happened to the BLU Meet the team

So I headcanon that BLU Team is a lot more distant, private, and professional than RED. Before Scout joined, Medic was the only one who knew Pyro was a woman and had somewhat befriended her. Soldier was the only one who bothered to talk with Spy of he didn’t have a medical issue.

So when the other director rolled up to BLU, Soldier and Medic were the only two who willingly gave an interview. And Scout got shoehorned into it as the youngest member [since Cheryl’s masked].

Soldier’s interview went the best. He basically said they weren’t fighting regular civilians, and weren’t tearing up a country over the gravel; they got to choose to fight without the same consequences of a “real war”.

Scout heard the director stupidly list things about him that he shouldn’t know, like his hometown and details about his early life. Things that he had to provide for his BLU paperwork, but this rando shouldn’t have. Pauling had to beg him to finish the interview since she couldn’t get the rest of the team to cooperate.

Now BLU Scout and Pyro are a developing power couple, and he has no romantic interest in Pauling; so his reason for finishing the interview was not fueled by love. Rather, he didn’t know what sort of punishment awaited her if she failed to get the interviews. He got her call over the phone about her yearly test where Admin sends assassins, and decided it would be better to throw her a bone than let her face Helen’s wrath.

He chose to go with the workplace drama angle since Spy always talks down to him for being the youngest. And kept the details as vague and optimistic as possible.

Medic’s interview was the reason why Admin abandoned the director shtick after this specific BLU team was told they were making a documentary for new hires. BLU Medic was deemed an expert during the respawn failure crisis and had to be present at failure sites, perform surgeries, and document in excruciating detail [per Archibald’s demands]. The director tried to get him to go into detail on the failure drama, and he refused.

“Those cases are classified. I am only permitted to show the footage to a patient’s teammates if there is a new, relevant respawn accident occurring. But the issue was resolved years ago, and I have not received clearance to share the documents and footage. Besides, I do not want to worry the new recruits if the failures are not a risk anymore.”

The director however, was very similar to the one sent to RED team and would not take that for an answer. He kept trying to goad Dr. Ludwig into giving him the gory details on respawn failures and the number of dead patients, to Pauling’s horror. She knew that either Helen or her mother had put that confidentiality policy into place, and it was not wise to break it.

The doctor suddenly looked to his right and jolted like he saw a ghost, and stayed distracted for about a minute before he managed to shake it off and give another curt refusal to defy the rules. That was one of the last things they recorded, the actual last being a forced assurance that times were much better now and the new recruits should not worry themselves about respawn.

Helen was never a good person. She used people for a living, including Pauling and Saxton Hale. But she was not stupid about it. She was good at reading people. And when she watched the footage of the Medic’s interview, it peaked her interest enough to go through her old files and revisit the respawn disaster.

83 mercenaries on both BLU and RED teams died before Jules Archibald and his lackeys were sufficiently threatened pressured into finding the actual solution. 179 other mercenaries were injured in some way by a respawn failure and lived to keep the tale a secret. And from the very first failure, this BLU Medic had been attempting to treat the mutilated mercs.

It was a special kind of person who would stay through Jules hmming and hawing about putting money and resources into finding the solution. With 262 total respawn failures concentrated in the Americas and no other Medics labeled experts and given clearance to operate, there was enormous pressure on this man. And it had cracked him somehow. He’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the hallucination caught on camera was that illness in action.

With the BLU medic being so loyal and so damaged mentally, Helen wasn’t willing to reveal her trick to BLU team as she had with RED. He was too valuable an asset for her to sour his allegiance to BLU and her Administration. There would always be someone like Redmond and Blutarch and Jules looking to cut costs, making a terrible decision like the one that caused the respawn crisis. Helen needed people with the heart and naivety to clean up those messes.

After she had managed to get Pauling to shut up and stop apologizing, she told her she had changed her mind about the rest of the interviews. She would instead rely on the spies around the world that were mining their teammates’ information and sending it to her, as she had been. And BLU team would never know the purpose behind the documentary director.

The director was not wise enough to stop asking Fritz to break his confidentiality contract. He just kept trying to make him spill the secrets. Ludwig hated talking about it, hated it back then and hated it now. He didn’t want to picture the death and gore that surrounded the respawn crisis.

The heartbroken and panicked teammates asking why he couldn’t save the affected patient, the mass departure of quitting mercenaries. Some of them were fearful of experiencing a failure and left before it could happen to them. Others had to quit because their injuries left their bodies scarred and weakened for life.

This director reminded Fritz of Jules’ middlemen that always had their noses upturned and asked endless questions. Stupid, weak men who never lifted a finger to help operate or prepare a cadaver for its funeral. Men who were too uninvolved to see what he’d seen and made excuses not to see the carnage with their own eyes.

His blood was about boiling when it appeared. It sometimes did, in the corner of his office, or his bedroom, or just barely in his peripheral view. But he wasn’t expecting it to be sitting so close it could have snatched him up. The demon.

Its skinny, black clad form was surrounded by black smoke, which was not unusual. What was unusual was that it was roiling like an angry sea and whipping in irritation like a cat’s tail. When the demon tried to play “friendly” and lull him into a false sense of security, the smoke was always slow moving like it was meant to look soft and safe to touch.

Even more alarming was the look on the pale, sunken eyed, stolen copy of his face that the demon wore. Its black eyes glittered maliciously with furrowed brows and stared into the director, as though it was trying to burn a hole through his face. Its mouth was set in a deeper frown that Ludwig had ever seen from it previously, jaw clenched in fury.

Fritz nearly jumped out of his seat when he turned and saw it hunching its shoulders like a panther waiting to lunge at the man across from them. Looking about as evil and dangerous as he had always known it to be. He was wise not to fall for its false gentleness.

The thing must have seen him move out of the corner of its eye, because it too smoothly turned its head and looked at him, abruptly softening its gaze. It was very little comfort that he knew it was an act, when that thing could easily get him if it decided to give up the deception and attack. The black eyed demon stared at him for an uncomfortable amount of time before the director saying “Hello-o? Anybody home?” drew it’s attention back towards him, looking surly and cruel once more.

Fritz choked out a final statement for his part of the documentary, trying not to let the pounding heart in his throat jump out onto the floor. By the time he was done, the demon had moved to the right wall and was staring at him with the more docile look. Stupid demon. Thinking I’m going to fall for that.

[nando161mando]

The American education system is a failure

[new-california-veteran]

So Biden is getting more undecided voters after the debate, but it was still a disgraceful, humiliating loss?? Make that make sense, lol.

[simply-ivanka]

‘Hypocritical’ Barack Obama - not Donald Trump - the US president who failed spectacularly on the world stage

President Trump performed well on the international stage, in pursuing his “American first” diplomatic strategy.

In May 2018, Trump made good on his campaign promise and announced he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement, which had established a set of debatable limits on Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon for at least the next ten or fifteen years.

When other signatories signalled that they would remain in the agreement, Trump put allies on notice that European countries would face American sanctions if they did business with Iran, forcing old friends to choose between Washington and Tehran.

Trump, then rebuking President Obama’s commitment to the first comprehensive global agreement to combat man-made climate, withdrew from the Paris Agreement, which had been negotiated in December 2015.

Preserving freedom of manoeuvre and energy independence, the Trump administration made it plain that it would deal with global warming and climate change in its own way.

No. 45 reckoned it was getting late in the game anyway, and that America was well-placed to deal with the remaining strategy of mitigation and adaptation.

Making a mockery of Obama’s policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea, which is shorthand for doing nothing at all, President Trump and North Korea’s Kin Jong-Un met in Singapore in June 2018, the first summit between the leaders of the US and North Korea since the end of the 1950-3 Korean War, to resolve the nuclear crisis.

While not determining exactly what “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean Peninsula would look like, Trump single-handedly took war off the table.

It was different, as well as potentially brilliant. See link below

https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-analysis/hypocritical-barack-obama-not-donald-trump-the-us-president-who-failed-spectacularly-on-the-world-stage/news-story/054c4abca1f6e81ad902bbcd41bd9dcb

[mousfri]

thinking about hannibal putting his clothes in rainbow order, but he uses one of those colour sensors to mark them all out on a graph so he knows they're all in exactly the right place

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

""That's right, pal," says Number Seven. "And take it in these shops. If they'd even teach a guy a trade - make him learn a trade you wouldn't mind. Then a guy would have something to fall back on if he felt like hitting the straight and narrow. But what do they do? They put you to work making automobile plates, or something that's only done in prisons; stuff you couldn't get a job at outside if you wanted to; and the machinery is all twenty years out of date; and the instructors don't know anything about up-to-date methods; and the materials you get to work with are so lousy that you can't learn to do decent work even if you want to. Here I am. I've been working in the shoeshop for five years. What good will that do me? In the first place, the work I'm doing is done by women and children outside; it don't pay any- thing; and if I tried to get away with the lousy kind of work I've been taught to do, I wouldn't last two hours in an outside shop. The print shop is the only shop in here where a guy could learn a decent trade; but Christ, there's only room for forty guys in that shop, and you have to be a high-school graduate to get in there. That don't do the rest of us any good. There's a thousand men here, and only room for forty or so over in the print shop. And not only that, but So-and-So was always threatening to close the print shop because it didn't show enough profits. That's all they think about here. They damn about us learning a trade; all they is having the industries show a profit!"

"And take a guy when he gets out of here," says Number Ten. "Times are lousy outside. Even guys who know their trades, guys that can get swell references, can't get a job nowadays. And if they can't get work, how in the name of Christ are we going to get it even if we want it? And the jobs you can get don't pay anything - not enough to live on. A guy might better be in here than out there starving to death. How the hell is a guy going to live on twenty-five or thirty bucks a week, especially if he's married?"

- Victor F. Nelson, Prison Days and Nights. Second edition. With an introduction by Abraham Myerson, M.D. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1936. p. 213-214.

[molliemoo3]

James when logan was struggling last year: webrought him up to early, we shouldve let him develop more

James now when logan is struggling: lets try and replace him with a driver who skipped f3, hasnt done that great in the 3 f2 rounds so far, and is too young, that'll fix things