#IR

[istandonsnowpiles]

Stop IV VI III

[lesmana-enterprise-ltd]

Coming Soon | LAIS House Dormitory and LAIS Polo uniform CC

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LAIS Navy Polo uniform CC

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DOWNLOAD to Enroll in Lesmana Arta International School now!

Sul Sul!,

The Lesmana Enterprise Co., Ltd. with Lesmana Arta International School

[starvows]

Realistic things that can happen in your IR

Feeling the shower run cold as it just begins heating up.

Getting annoyed or confused when someone pronounces your name weirdly or entirely wrong.

Getting a sore jaw or a stitch from laughing so hard.

Falling asleep after promising yourself you'd pull an all nighter.

Getting caught up in a conversation you're not really interested in or when you're late.

Randomly being zapped when you aren't doing anything.

Having days where everything you do feels boring for some reason.

Suddenly understanding a lyric in a song that you never understood before.

Panicking about losing something on your desk (like a pencil or a sheet) only to find it under your book a minute later.

Trying to take a picture of the stars or the moon or a sunset but it doesn't look as pretty on your camera.

Subconsciously licking your lips the whole day after realizing they're dry or chapped (I know you did as soon as you read that)

Stretching or yawning and accidentally making that frog-like noise.

The wind blowing your hair back in your face and you having to turn and face it just to fix it back up.

Hearing that one repetitive song on the radio.

Arguing with your friends and family — whether over little things or over blowups that last for days on end.

Forgetting to do certain tasks.

Picking at or chipping your nail polish or acrylics after just painting them or getting them done.

Having your pen run out at an inconvenient time.

Waking up and not feeling motivated to go to school, work, or duty.

Accidentally biting your tongue when eating or chewing nothing.

Your IR does not have to be realistic, but your experiences are real; and I personally don't like chasing after perfection.

[slutpoppers]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth

It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.

The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.

These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.

Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Beyond providing comfort to "Politically Exposed Persons" and "High Net-Worth Individuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats. These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun – and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.

To fight this "Boomerang Effect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities. They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.

When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups – they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors. Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights – provided they don't target the Russian state.

If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of organized copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK – the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence – Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep

They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab

They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair

Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent. The Golden Passports of the EU – available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese – offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the Khmer Riche – the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/

But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on diplomatic passports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).

All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have extensive properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).

This stuff works. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM Tony Blair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any kind of international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of commodities for sale in the UK to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).

The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.

But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, Gulnara Karimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited – and received – bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan. All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister. She and her husband Timur Tillyaev ran the Dubai-based SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque Scottish Limited Partnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets – a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.

Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador." She was a UNESCO ambassador and commissioned works of monumental art – and also sued the shit out of news outlets that reported factual matters about her family repressive activity at home. She organized AIDS charities in the name of Uzbekistan – even as her father was imprisoning a writer for publishing a book explaining how to have safer sex.

The second case-study is on Isabel dos Santos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries. Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.

Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" – a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm PLMJ. Her enablers are who's who of corruption-loving lickspittles: McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, and the Spanish BigLaw firm Uri Menendez.

Isabel cultivated a public facade of philanthropic giving and public spirited activism, serving as head of the Angolan Red Cross. She attended Davos and spoke at the LSE (she was also invited to Oxford, but her invitation was subsequently rescinded). On social media, she dismissed critics of her wealth and corruption as "colonialists," decrying their "racism" and "prejudice."

Isabel dos Santos's corrupt sources of wealth were finally, irrefutably exposed through the Luanda Leaks, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mapped the network of "top banks, management consultants and legal firms that were central to dos Santos’s operations."

Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world's greatest monsters would falter. It's a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

This point was reiterated by Abigail Disney, in a brave piece on what it's like to grow up subject to the oversight of these millionaires who babysit the children of billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

This is an important contribution to the literature. We naturally focus on the ultrawealthy individuals whose reputations and fortunes are the subject of so much attention, but without the TUSNs, they would be largely helpless.

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Colin (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_from_the_dome_on_Methodist_Central_Hall_(cropped).jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[nixnephili]

"Shiro"

Small interlude to the gore, giving you guys a bit of a break here..

This gentleman is known as Shiro, though that's not really his name.

He's a snake spirit from my original story, AFS.

He's also one of my friend's favorite so she insisted I post him when I asked..-

-Nix🌙

[mahoushoujoarchive]

Corrector Yui - The Official Art of Corrector Yui

[fragmentosadolescentes]

Si no te intereso, déjame por favor

Si no te intereso, no prolongues lo inevitable.

No juegues a construir un puente donde no hay río,

ni siembres en la tierra que no piensas cultivar.

Si no te intereso, déjame a mí el derecho

de sanar sin heridas nuevas,

de recoger mis piezas sin tus dudas clavadas en ellas.

No me retengas por costumbre,

ni me sonrías por compromiso.

La verdad, por más dura que sea,

siempre pesa menos que una mentira piadosa.

Si no te intereso, déjame por favor.

Déjame encontrarme,

libre del espejismo de un "tal vez".

Que en tu ausencia, pueda hallar mi presencia.

Prefiero una despedida clara

a una compañía oscura.

Si no soy lo que buscas,

déjame buscar lo que me busca a mí.

Pura maldad ❄️

[yoseiinine]

There's such a huge dissonance between what Kubo cares about and what fans convinced themselves he cares about. Do ppl think really Kubo is woke enough to give a shit about whether or not IchiRuki is pedophilia within the convoluted aging system he's created when he's literally sexualized high school girls and has Ichigo's dad marrying one all within the same 2-decade old manga? Hate IR all you want, it's not even canon. But trying to convince people that it's genuine pedophilia and taboo within the world of Bleach for a Shinigami and half-Shinigami to be romantically involved when Orihime canonically gets jealous of Rukia's impact on Ichigo multiple times begs a simple question: Did Kubo intend for Orihime to come off as gross for thinking the bond between an "elderly" woman and teenage boy could become romantic (and getting jealous), or does the arbitrary aging system not matter, and Orihime's feelings of inadequacy/jealousy were normal and valid?

[istandonsnowpiles]

The City of Silver Spring

[lesmana-enterprise-ltd]

WIP | Revival of The Windslar M-Train Station

Revival of a Monumental Project

Due to high demand, Lesmana Enterprise will be renovating the Windslar M Train Station to meet the latest standards of travel. Originally built in 1998 by Lesmana Enterprise in cooperation with the Windenburg Royal Ministry of Transport, the station serves as the terminus of the Windslar-Lykke line in the Windenburg High-Speed Rail network. This renovation aims to enhance passenger experience, modernize facilities, and ensure efficient connectivity for future travelers.

Easing your Travels

As part of the renovation, the Windslar M Train Station will be transformed into a modern transportation hub, equipped with state-of-the-art amenities. Passengers can look forward to a spacious café, a convenient capsule hotel for overnight stays, and premium waiting lounges. The Station will also feature digital information kiosks, luggage storage services, automated ticketing systems, and high-speed Wi-Fi to enhance the travel experience. Designed with comfort and efficiency in mind, this upgrade ensures that Windslar M remains a key gateway in the Windenburg High-Speed Rail network.

The Seraphim, the Legend of the Windeburg High Speed Rail Network

The Magnetschwebebahn-Serie A12 Seraphim (MSB A12 Seraphim), developed by Behr Technologies, is the latest advancement in high-speed rail travel. Designed for efficiency and comfort, this cutting-edge maglev train can reach a top speed of 510 km/h, ensuring rapid transit across the Windenburg High-Speed Rail network.

To enhance passenger experience, Lesmana Enterprise and Landgraab Electronics collaborated on optimizing the train’s interior, integrating ergonomic seating, ambient lighting, smart infotainment systems, and advanced climate control. With a focus on both comfort and luxury, the Seraphim sets a new standard for modern high-speed travel.

The Seraphim emits a unique and ethereal sound as it glides along the track. If you stand near the train (while stationary), you can hear the soft hum of its electromagnetic systems, resembling a choir in harmony—a phenomenon that inspired its name. This signature sound adds to the futuristic and almost otherworldly experience of riding the MSB A12 Seraphim. (*yes this is also true in game)

More Information

Windslar M-Train Station will come in two options.

Windslar M-Train Station building.

The Seraphim on a viaduct for photo op.

In Other News, Lesmana Enterprise is now on X!

Follow below link for more.

Sul Sul!,

The Lesmana Enterprise Co., Ltd.

[ladydaybreaker]

iNtersubJeCtiVe requital Uzi

So she's not gonna show up for a while (but she will!) but I wanted to draw her a bit. So...meet IR's Uzi, codenamed "Apollyon"

Yes, she totally did use a sharpie to draw the runes and Solver arrows on her arms and legs because she's a dramatic af Edgelord.

[instabileatrofia]

Untitled

I.S.A.

-

Do not remove the captions pls.

[a-page-full]

I’ve read two different fics that described a gender-nonconforming Iruma and a young Opera wearing similar outfits, and I just really wanted draw both of them

[pangeen]

" 11th April 2025 " // © Brendan Tynan