This man took so much longer to crack than I would have what a PROFESSIONAL
Plotting, scheming, etc.
This was filmed at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which rescues, rehabilitates, and releases orphaned elephants in Kenya (among other conservation efforts). Charity Navigator has given it a 4/4 star rating, and you can make donations here or “adopt” a baby elephant here.
THANK YOU FOR THIS IMPORTANT ADDITION.
I have enjoyed this video so much and am very happy to share ways to help the babies!!
That man held it in until he knew for a fact that they’d need another take anyway, and not a moment less.
Thinking about when I worked at a shitty restaurant + one night it was just me + 3 other women on closing shift, so some guy came in the back and waved a knife around, presumably for money but I’m not actually certain, bc he was met with the bartender holding a much bigger knife, a tiny teenager wielding a cast iron pan, an elderly woman holding up a crockpot of clearly boiling water, and me, turning on the meat slicer with eye contact for maximum effect. He left, but the moral of the story is not girl power or whatever, it’s just. Why the fuck would you threaten a room full of underpaid and sleep-deprived blue-collar workers surrounded by lethal weapons.
Even ignoring the quantity of workers or weaponry, I think there’s something special about specifically
(per many discussions about the status and equipment of the household armory, and our emergency home defense strategy: “Lure them into the kitchen”)
Read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” for an insight abut kitchen staff. Things may have calmed down since his day, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Besides the obvious attractions of the knife block, there’s the “I gotta get me one of these” comedic Flat Face-Smack with a cast-iron pan (here’s our smallest one, 5 lb 8 oz / 2.5 kg)…
And don’t forget the edge-on swing. Arms and legs and collarbones don’t like that, and a good one at the opponent’s forehead with proper follow-through might, just might…
Alternately there’s the meat tenderiser, whether metal or in our case wood. That second item is a repro 13th-century mace, however when it arrived from Arms & Armor, the Customs Declaration described it as a “kitchen masher”, so who are we to argue?
It lives on a pair of spring clips alongside the front door in case of an attempted house invasion by evil potatoes.
A cast-iron pestle is also good for tenderising joints (knuckles, wrists, elbows, knees) and this little one is just shy of a kilo, just over 2 lbs. …
Finally, any well-equipped kitchen is just the thing for conducting an interrogation, complete with that old technique of “Showing The Instruments”, perhaps along with a little demonstration using a sausage, a banana or a couple of nuts…
And the useful thing about all this stuff is that you can even cook things with them. Isn’t that handy?
It’s amazing to me just how good the Mormon church has been at hiding just how bad they really are from public view. Even the shit that gets spread around is the relatively harmless bullshit. They had a crazy prophet with magic glasses. They believe in god-mandated polygyny. They think everyone who is good enough will get their very own planet after the world ends. They wear magic underpants. Mormon men are all paladins.
Here’s one of the ones you hear less often:
See, like many other Christian sects, the Mormons really do believe that the existence of Christ obviates the existence of Judaism. Judaism was just a placeholder until the “real” church could be established by Jesus.
And the Mormons in particular believe, dead ass, that the entire inheritance of Israel has been given to them, because the Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when he was on Earth. They really do. They have this whole system where people are given a “divine revelation” about which of the Tribes of Israel they’re a member of (don’t worry, they decided that most people belong to the two tribes that are willing to “adopt” people. Only the most specialest boys and girls are members of the original ten).
Let’s sum up so far. The Mormons believe that they are the people of Israel, chosen and protected by God. If Jews want to get back in on that party, they can always repent and convert to Mormonism, the one true church to which God gave all the rights and blessings that were originally bestowed on Abraham’s house.
But it doesn’t stop there!
The Mormons also believe, in all seriousness, that all Indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a small group of Jewish people who left just before the fall of Jerusalem (~600 bc iirc). Their entire weird-ass extra bible is a chronicle of those people’s history in [unspecific part of America]. At the very beginning of the book, two brothers in the original family turn away from god, so they and all their descendants are cursed with dark skin, so that the good Nephites (who remain “white and delightsome”) will always be able to tell themselves apart from the wicked Lamanites.
So, you’ve got supposedly Jewish people running around the Americas. And the “good” ones are white, and the “bad” ones are brown. Then, ofc, Jesus comes to visit them (I guess supposedly that’s part of what he was doing during his dirt nap? Or possibly after he left again, it’s not clear), and they all convert to Christianity, which they think is clearly the natural evolution of Judaism. Well, at the end of the book, all of them become wicked, in a kind of weird pseudo-apocalyptic series of events. They are all cursed with dark skin, until such time as they repent for their ancestors sins and return to the gospel.
But of course, Mormons being the good and kind people they are, they want everyone to receive the blessings of God and be brought into the houses of Israel etc etc. And it isn’t the fault of those poor little Indigenous children that their distant ancestors turned away from God and became wicked.
So what’s the natural answer? Well, Mormons are real big on missionary work, as we all know. But apparently that wasn’t enough in this case.
Because the Mormon church has been one of the big players in abducting as many Indigenous children as possible, in order to indoctrinate them into being good Mormons, so that they can turn white again and be blessed. My mother remembers hearing talks about this in the 70s and 80s. The church literally had a “Lamanite Adoption Program,” where families in the church were encouraged to get as many Indigenous children as possible away from their families and not let them be reunited until they were fully assimilated and ready to go back and proselytize about how wonderful the church is.
The church leadership literally talked about how wonderful it was to see these children becoming whiter. Actually whiter. Like, saying that when they finally saw them with their families again, it was beautiful how much paler they were.
I’m pretty sure this program has been officially ended, but it doesn’t take a genius to speculate about who might be behind the curtains on the movement in the western US to gut the ICWA….
So yeah. Next time someone tries to tell you that the Mormons are just harmless weirdos, please remember that they’re an antisemitic cult that advocates for the forced assimilation of Indigenous children to help them escape the cursed brown skin of their ancestors.
AS SOMEONE WHO ESCAPED from this high-demand religion *coughcultcough* the above diatribe is a good introduction to the systemic rot beneath the pretty facade that is Mormonism
There’s a level of insidiousness to everything the Mormon church touches - from the predatory founder to the eugenicist beliefs to the present hoarding of wealth to their control of Utah/Idaho/Arizona politics
I could talk for DAYS about how fucking terrible this institution is to the people trapped within it (being born into a cult is a MIND FUCK) and the folks they consider “other”
Found another idiotic accounting mistake from my predecessor that I have to fix and I was like “WILL THE SPECTER OF THAT MAN’S INCOMPETENCE EVER CEASE TO HAUNT ME” and my coworker was like “Why do you talk like that”
ALT
