George Budd @Gbudd@qoto.org

They won't come right out and say, I'm glad that (horrible thing) happened to that Black person/woman/man!

They will not do this.

What they *will* do is say 'He was no angel!' and scour our pasts to find that one time in 1st grade when we put gum under the table.

What they will do is talk, /to each other/, in coded language. To let the other racists, whether they know they are or not, that they are not alone in their beliefs.

That their beliefs, their uncomfortable beliefs that Black people are inhuman and subordinate and ghetto and violent savages, *are* actually valid. Their beliefs that White people are totally innocent and unbiased and the real victims, actually, of reverse-racism.

Their beliefs that their hatred of Black people is Black people's own fault.

It's our fault they hate us.

It's our fault they want to do to us the things they want to do.

They will argue with you until they are blue in the face without ever addressing anything you say because they also need to believe you are wrong about everything. Even more than that, they need to believe they are more right than you about everything.

Helped a mate out with some yardwork today, went inside for lunch, hey how long have you had that grandfather clock, oh yeah that hasn't worked in ages...

Made bedroom eyes at that damn thing all afternoon, finally turned to my mate and said CAN I HAVE A GO ON YER CLOCK and my god, working on clocks is So So Nice

Here’s one of mine:

I always hide my home address with black electrical tape on my ID cards. Because most of the time when I show my ID there is no need to reveal my home address.

Once at the liquor store the cashier noticed it and questioned me about it. After I explained, she said she thought that was smart and that she was going to start doing the same.

Completely unexpectedly, I felt I had indirectly helped someone improve their safety and privacy with something so simple to do. It warmed my heart and made my day 🥰

#Caturday #Coronation

On the BART this morning (6.30 am), Benson and I got on a car with a guy having some kind of mental break on it. He was loud, talking and shouting to himself. He made weird sounds. He was disruptive.

And you know what?

No one killed him.

Benson and I gave him a wide berth; I kept an eye on him in case he tried to approach my dog.

But he was alive as he rode the train.

The mentally ill, the indigent, the broke down folks - they all deserve to survive a train ride.

Jesus christ, America.

#blacklivesmatter

Look at the Homestead Act 1862—it gave white people lots of land and economic power.

Look: white enslavers of Black people in the US were paid COMPENSATION after enslavement *nominally* ended in the US

Look at the GI Bill—gave white military men $/jobs

In other words…LOOK.


#BlackMastodon #Mastodon #history #usa #reconstruction

I have to let you all in on something.

At this point in my career I’m privileged to mentor a lot of young people, especially veterans and college students. And every so often they’re like really excited to meet me and say they would like to be like me. This totally blows my mind because they go to like MIT, Stanford, or Purdue ….and they’re usually in the second year of a PHD and they run their cybersecurity competition team and speak 9 languages or something….

I was a TERRIBLE youth. Yea, I eventually went to DePaul which is respectable and I have three okay undergrad degrees - merely because I had no choice but to enlist at 17 and the military kicked the crap out of me. I went to community college first the hard way around. I almost didn’t graduate from high school. I was a miserable, unhappy, uncool gnc goth kid who hacked computers and swore a lot. Those schools would have .blown their noses at my application and probably banned me from the campus for being a delinquent.

What I want to say is if you’re one of those rock star young people, I’m super impressed by you, and you’ve picked one hell of a role model. Keep it up, and don’t burn out.

If you’re that totally screwed up teenager, though, I might not get to see you at awards ceremonies and touted by the top professors at cons, but you can make it too. Even if nobody is ever in your corner.

#ELI5 Why is water see through?

I'd never thought about it like this. Wow.

Michael Penn's video on defining the natural logarithm as the integral of 1/x got me thinking about how this was slightly mysterious to me when I first encountered it in high school. Usually, the integral of x^(n-1) is x^n/n (plus a constant). But n = 0 is this weird exception. How could you get from an unpromising expression like "x^0/0" to the natural logarithm?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbPwgre2Vs

I'm mad. Someone showed me this link:

https://www.mathartfun.com/

And now I'm broke. 😡

But, I have to do some research (playing with toys) to figure out this lesson idea I have that involves various weighted dice-- and they have a lot of really fun dies. Well, if I like this lesson idea I'll make the school buy me the next batch. Purchase orders are such a drag.

Rather than Republicans thanking me for my service on Veterans day I would rather they keep their hands off of the benefits I earned during that service. Veterans earned benefits, Your corporate donors didn't .
@housegop

I'm barely a suicide survivor. It's not that I never felt that way again, it's more that I understood that the darkness passes. Hope all reading this know it too. Let's all stay alive together.