Random cat here probably has a better net worth than Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Liberals view the status quo (the underlying mechanisms of the government, economy and society) as sacrosanct, legitimate, that it just needs to and will allow itself to be tweaked a bit, that the rules must be followed lest we collapse into chaos.

Leftists view the status quo as widely illegitimate, that a vast multitude of the rules which society operates by are contemptible and functionally evil, and are willing to break the rules to meaningfully change society, that often the entire point is that breaking rules is the only way to establish newer and more just ones.

…

Liberals view Leftists as an extreme part of their fold because they often have similar goals.

Leftists view Liberals as often sharing goals, but as ultimately delusional, magical-thinking self righteous fools, as their methods of achieving these often similar goals are laughably naive, impotent and ineffective, thus functionally making them into conservatives.

=)

No, it expressly is not the role of American cops to protect people.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/do-the-police-have-an-obligation-to-protect-you/

In the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police have a general “public duty,” but that “no specific legal duty exists” unless there is a special relationship between an officer and an individual, such as a person in custody.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect. In its 1989 decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the justices ruled that a social services department had no duty to protect a young boy from his abusive father. In 2005’sCastle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the police for failing to protect her from her husband after he violated a restraining order and abducted and killed their three children. Justices said the police had no such duty.

It is only their job to ‘enforce the law’, which they are abysmally bad at.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-primarily-crime-fighters-according-data-2022-11-02/

In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.

Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example.

In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review, of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.”

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/08/20/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes/

In reality, about 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction. Therefore, the number of people police hold accountable for crimes – what I call the “criminal accountability” rate – is very low.

Police are agents of the state who are vested with the ‘legitimate’ monopoly on use of violent force within a state.

In a state that is overwhelming controlled by the wealthy, this means their primary function is to ensure the property rights of wealthy people.

Everything else they do is secondary or ancillary to that.

Police do not ‘reduce crime’.

Police have zero obligation to protect anyone.

What actually reduces crime? Actually protects people?

Lifting them out of poverty.

The sun is fairly low in the sky, just a bit to the right of the guy on the dirt path, whose shadow is almost but not quite straight vertical.

The guy casts a darker and more crisp, or less diffuse shadow because he is less translucent, or more opaque, than tree leaves, and because the total distance from the heighest tree leaves to the ground is greater than the total distance from his head to the ground.

The lines of the tree trunk and lamppost shadows all converge toward where the sun is, if extended toward it.

The illuminated square in the one tree’s shadow is likely a reflection from a window or some kind of metal fixture from a building or object behind the pov of the camera.

Probably the tree is shadowing the same area that a window in or near the building the picture is being taken from is illuminating.

A lot of universities with large campus grounds take the approach of observing the natural foot traffic wear patterns on grassy areas, and then build walkways where the most worn down parts are.

Its… pretty obvious.

If everyone is taking an alternate, non designed path… your design sucks, modify it to facilitate what people find more effective.

I remember being actively scolded by Republican former friends as heartless and cruel for openly laughing at the Herman Cain Award winners.

This is just as funny.

Her mother states that ‘she is smart, but didn’t have the luck of the Irish.’

… The Irish are a notoriously un lucky people.

She tells people to imagine walking a mile in her shoes.

… From the sound of it, if she tried to walk a mile in her own shoes, her heart would fail and she would die.

She apparently counts as a ‘business owner’ because she hired 3 other people to work for her as a debt collector, when she herself is in massive debt… and she directed her ‘firm’ to work for a doctor so that she could recieve under the table (likely illegal) medical treatment from the doctor.

This story is so absolutely absurd I had to check whether or not it was posted in nottheonion.

The amount of ignorance and gullibility, lack of self awareness this woman, lack of any kind of social conscience or morality that this woman, who just seems to credulously support a widely known criminal fraudster and is now worried said criminal fraudster may defraud the nation’s and thus her own healthcare… this level of suicidal stupidity is so astounding that I would absolutely laugh in her face if she told me this story in person.

Its like a vindictave 8 year old in an obese elder woman’s body.

She has no moral code, will do anything that benefits herself nonmatter how much harm it causes others, knows very little, and has the gall to throw a pity party when some of her actions lead to extremely obvious negative outcomes… for herself.

A just world would demand she suffers.

If she was a character in a children’s fable, she would obviously be contemptible.

Given her childlike comprehension of the world, this is an apt frame of reference.

She expresses no self awareness nor sense of responsibility, thus she is literally comically inept and evil, by her own childish standards.

Would you prefer we connect remotely?

Or can I come over to your place and manually connect my finger to your WPS button?

I think the less sexually charged interpretation would be that they are talking far more than they are eating.

Non main character humans would be rhubarb-rhubarbs.

No they come in a frozen bag and are microwaved.

Defense Councel:

Objection, lacks foundation, irrelevant line of questions, this line of questioning will soon call for speculation.

Judge: Sustained.

Prosecutory Counsel: Why?

Judge: Don’t make me hold you in contempt Mr. Toddler.

Anti-Charm Quarks, actively anihilating all Charms they come into contact with.

Also… some metaphor about the emotional intensity of the situation heating up so far that the eleCATron is now stripped from the nucleus, forming a plasma.

I mean we literally just saw the same kind of thing play out with Ukraine.

The West spent a long time giving them weaponry that could either only or mainly be used defensively, and then slowly over time gave them more and more potent weapons.

Its not like this is some revolutionary new idea.

The US could have started doing this after like month two or three of Israel carpet bombing Gaza, shooting up UN food/aid convoys…

But nope.

This is also unironically a strategy cops use when they are in a crowd being filmed and potentially unlawfully or excessively harming people.

Its the evolved version of accidentally blocking your body cam / forgetting to turn it on / oops the footage got deleted and its no ones fault somehow.

I have zero knowledge of … Smurf lore…

But could it just be the case that ‘female’ smurfs are sort of like self inseminating plants?

The last ‘matriarch’ passed away, or fled, and Smurfette is the only one capable of birthing another generation, but the ‘male’ smurfs could all just be ken dolls, sexually inert but societally useful as workers.

Then Papa Smurf is just the eldest remaining ‘male’ smurf.

The socio gender dynamics just happen to roughly emulate human society, but the underlying sexual structure of the species is dramatically different.

The males would then be interested in Smurfette mostly for the status of being beloved by basically the one they must all protect to continue their species, they would be as capable of sex as a Ken doll.

It would explain why they collectively really really want her to stay … which is still manipulative and controlling, but at least does not necessiate literal sex slavery. Just… non coital brood mare slavery.

Thats … at least a theory that afaik may not contradict with any lore (which i admittedly know nothing of) that allows for a sustainable smurf population that does not involve sexual abuse?

In a potentially post apocalyptic, billions dead kinda way, sure.

As a Seattle native, I now must inform you of the…

Seattle Street Samurai

As someone who once upon a time managed a black belt in Shito Ryu Karate…

This is pretty interesting.

Of course, the claimed history of many older martial arts are quite hard to verify historically, but basically modern Karate derives from Okinawans creating and teaching themselves a martial style to resist occupation by the Japanese.

Okinawa was once an independent island with its own traditions and government, until it was basically colonized / vassalized by the Satsuma Domain, under the Tokugawa shogunate, in 1609.

It is thus fairly ironic that one of the most well-known ‘Japanese’ martial arts lineages actually has its origin in what was once an independent state and people resisting Japanese control.

But this Togakure Ryu… apparently goes much further back, at least to the Sengoku period, about 200 years before Tokugawa, and is basically a branch of ninjutsu, with much more emphasis on swords, escape and evasion, and basically being a scout/spy.

I can see how that would be pretty applicable to a street mobster haha.

Karate was more designed as a means of a farming village resisting raids from much better armed and armored bands of Samurai and their underlings, either without weapons, or using their farming implements as weapons such as sai, bo staffs and kana, as the Japanese had banned the Okinawans from owning katanas.

A ninjutsu style would be much more apt for a mobster looking to occasionally rough up (or murder) people and then flee, as well as keep tabs on his domain hahah.