The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Freaking Constitution.
After the Constitution was passed, James Madison yelled at the other Federalists until they agreed that yeah, we promised we’d add a bill of rights to get New York on board, maybe we should get on that. They proposed twelve amendments. Ten passed.
Proposed amendment number two was one of the boring ones. What it says is that when Congress passes a law changing its pay, that can’t go into effect until after the next election. A good rule to have, but not exactly earth-shakingly important. There were thirteen states, and only seven voted for it, so it didn’t pass. (Um, amendments need three quarters. They weren’t just that bad at counting.)
Pause.
Like, a lot of pause.
Cut to 1992, and it gets its thirty-eighth ratification, making it the law of the land.
(Actually it was the thirty-ninth. Kentucky had ratified it in 1792, but everyone forgot.)
What happened in between? Well, a couple of states ratified the amendment as a pointless expression of We Are Very Angry At Congress. (Which is, like, the default state of being for state legislatures and American citizens in general, so I don’t know how it didn’t pass in the first place faster than you could say “opposite of progress.”) But mostly it was a ten-year campaign started by some guy in Texas who wrote a paper on it for law school.
He got a C. Something about “unrealistic.” And now he’s personally responsible for getting an amendment added to the U.S. Constitution by sheer force of rules-lawyering. (Not even regular-lawyering! He did it by writing a bunch of letters about his favorite piece of trivia!)
Anyway, 1992 was also the year Congress passed a Cost of Living Adjustment act. Couldn’t take effect until ‘94, of course, but now their pay goes up automatically unless they suspend it. Gotta respect ‘em; they know this loophole business too.
Tags:
#this is beautiful #it probably shouldn’t be beautiful but it is #home of the brave #fun with loopholes
Okay friends today we are gonna learn about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty field from the air
there’s a building under that weird lump
that’s cool! That’s really cool! But not cool enough
At some point somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as units”
holy fucking shit!!!
the British had used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting them
okay time to get into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever, that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof radio”
the last couple of days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code, and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist” when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’ fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a lot of noise
the ghost army had special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix tape
step 4: fuckin partying!!!
see the thing about impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit, the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than anything I could ever write:
On another occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said ‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
The Ghost Army of WWII is a great book. There is also a documentary called The Ghost Army that may still be on Netflix. These guys were awesome.
Tags:
#history #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
Is that why I’ve seen barely anybody talking about this show? Because the Americans haven’t seen it yet?
Well. That explains a lot.
Tags:
#now that I think about it #the one person I know (other than my mom) who has mentioned actually watching it #is Canadian #well #okay then #ClassDW #home of the brave
TOASTYSTATS: Did the US election influence fanfic production?
I’ve heard some folks talking about using fanfic to cope with/distract themselves from the recent US election (I’m in this camp, though I’m not ignoring the real world), and others, like the hosts of @fansplaining, discuss not being able to focus on fandom right now. I wondered which of these impulses was currently stronger overall in fandom.
TL;DR: as of two weeks following the 2016 election, there’s been a big post-election spike in fanfic production on AO3 (~30% increase) – which is unusual for this time of year. Though, of course, correlation is not causation – there could be some other cause(s) at play. And while some people may be turning to fandom for distraction, there’s a bigger increase in ‘Angst’ than ‘Fluff.’
I gathered daily data from AO3 for the pat 5 years in order to compare this year to past ones. I figured even if we did see a spike or a drop in fanworks, that might be normal following an election – or just normal for November. The past 5 years have the benefit of containing another presidential election, as well as a midterm election and two off-years. I looked at the total amount of fanworks produced in each of the two weeks leading up to the US election, and in each of the two weeks following it. (If you look at the above graph, 0 on the x axis is Election Day – Nov 8, 2016.)
Based on the above graph, we can see that most years have a fairly flat production rate surrounding the election. 2016, however, departs strongly from this pattern with a 32% increase from the two weeks leading up to the election.
@adzolotl says that “nj is in new england” is my worst opinion
what the hell is new england if not THE STATES THAT ARE CALLED “NEW” AND THEN A PLACE IN ENGLAND
I could go for Greater New England, but then I was raised in New Jersey by parents from Massachusetts, so I expect I have a stronger connection to New England than most New Jerseyans.
(Sometimes I go for “both part of the Northeastern Mega-City”, which may or may not be the same thing as Greater New England.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #home of the brave #my home away from home
Remember: Do not move to Canada in response to this election.
Move to Florida. To Ohio. To Pennsylvania. We need you there for Warren/Booker 2020.
Here is a fact that it seems like a lot of people don’t know, and which is relevant to the decision: in America, you do not lose your vote if you move out of the country. Even if your move is permanent. Even if you were a minor when you moved away. Unless you renounce your citizenship–note that most countries will let you hold up to three citizenships simultaneously, and Canada in particular is perfectly happy to let you keep your American citizenship while becoming a Canadian citizen (if you don’t already have three, and if you do it presumably doesn’t have to be the American one you give up in exchange)–you retain voting rights indefinitely. Jurisdiction-wise, you vote as if you still lived in your most recent American residence.
(People who are American citizens only through their parents and have never actually lived in the country may be able to vote depending on where their parents lived: states vary. Check out the website linked above for details.)
I don’t know what happens if you move to a swing state just to establish it as your voting jurisdiction, then move to Canada. I don’t know if there are any consequences if the government catches you at it, and I don’t know how likely they are to catch you. Anyone interested in doing that should look into it further. But at the very least, if you already live in a swing state, you don’t have to choose between voting there and leaving the country. You can do both.
I mean, you do lose going door-to-door canvassing and whatnot, I suppose. But people planning on moving to Canada because of Trump who wouldn’t have done it anyway are probably doing it because they expect to be in danger if they stay. Staying in a dangerous situation in order to go canvassing is…well, if you want to do that, you do you, but it seems above and beyond the call of duty to me.
Tags:
#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog #this is the third post I saw on Tuesday which #appeared to be written under the assumption that People Like Me do not exist #I’m responding directly to this one because its People Like Me #is ”people whose relationship with the American government is like mine” #and our existence is an external fact that I can point to #the others were ”people whose minds work like mine” #which is much harder to prove and much likelier to lead to goalpost-moving #”we totally believe you exist! we were just using universal language for rhetorical effect! stop derailing!” #and for all I know maybe they’d mean it when they’d claim they were being rhetorical by pretending I don’t exist #let’s just say I’ve been feeling that authoritarianism post again lately
it’s like a horrible reverse rapture and I know if I eat all the ice cream I’ll have a sugar crash and my teeth will hurt and I won’t be able to sleep but I want to eat all the ice cream :-(
*hides*
To be perfectly honest, my first thought when Mom knocked on my bedroom door this morning to tell me Trump had won was “goddammit, JT is going to lose their mind”. (In part because of trying to help you keep your mind last night, but still.)
*hugs* I love you, please stay safe, and if ever you flee to Canada, I will be the first to welcome you home.
Tags:
#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog
I would suggest that there is no harm in knowing exactly what you have to do if you had to move to Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, England etc. on short notice, if you are worried about this.
It is useful to have these things computed ahead of time in emergency situations.
A lot of people actually have procrastinated on leaving real dystopias because figuring out how to move and then moving is an effort-intensive process.
If you’re concerned that you might be forced to move, setting aside a day to work out the details of how you would do this and writing it down would
(1) likely relieve some vague feelings of unease attatched to thoughts like “I might have to leave if things start to get really bad.”
(2) make “I can just leave, I know how to do this” a more available response to the thought “things look like they are getting kind of bad”
dear everyone who is panicking about world war 3: do you want a hug?
I, too, offer hugs.
Tags:
#home of the brave #election 2016 #normally I don’t go on Tumblr first thing in the morning #but I knew there would be a post-election support group and I thought I might be able to help #(honestly not sure how much help I need myself)
Brinens and Things 