#International Agreement

[saxafimedianetwork]

Somaliland's Firm Stance On Implementing MoU With Ethiopia

By reasserting its sovereign right to int'l agreements, #Somaliland demonstrates its preparedness to engage with the global community on its own terms, safeguarding its autonomy & pursuing its #NationalInterests, particularly the #MoU with #Ethiopia

Continue reading Somaliland’s Firm Stance On Implementing MoU With Ethiopia

[xtruss]

The US Sent Cluster Munitions to Ukraine But Activists Still Seek to Bolster a Treaty Banning Them

Backers of an international agreement that bans cluster munitions are striving to prevent erosion in support for it after what one leading human rights group calls an “unconscionable” U.S. decision to ship such weapons to Ukraine for its fight against ...

— By Jamey Keaten | September 5, 2023

Police officers look at collected fragments of the Russian rockets, including cluster rounds, that hit Kharkiv, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Dec. 3, 2022. Backers of an international agreement that bans cluster munitions are striving to prevent erosion in support for it after what one leading human rights group calls an “unconscionable” U.S. decision to ship such weapons to Ukraine for its fight against Russia. Advocacy groups in the Cluster Munitions Coalition released their latest annual report on Tuesday Sept. 5, 2023. AP Photo/Libkos . The Associated Press

Geneva, Switzerland — Backers of an international agreement that bans cluster munitions are striving to prevent erosion in support for the deal after what one leading human rights group calls an “unconscionable” U.S. decision to ship such weapons to Ukraine for its fight against Russia.

Advocacy groups in the Cluster Munitions Coalition released their latest annual report on Tuesday, ahead of a meeting next week of envoys from the 112 countries that have acceded to or ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The treaty prohibits the explosives and calls for clearing areas where they litter the ground because they harm and kill many more civilians than combatants,

A further 12 countries have signed the convention. The United States and Russia are not among them.

Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch, who has long championed the 15-year-old convention, says the coalition was “extremely concerned” about the U.S. move in July, after an intense debate among U.S. leaders, to transfer unspecified thousands of 155mm artillery-delivered cluster munition rounds to Ukraine.

More than 20 government leaders and officials have criticized that decision, the coalition says.

Hoping to avoid defections from the convention, Wareham says supporters hope signatories will “stay strong — that they do not weaken their position on the treaty as a result of the U.S. decision. And we don’t see that happening yet. But it’s always a danger.”

U.S. officials argue that the munitions — a type of bomb that opens in the air and releases smaller “bomblets” across a wide area — could help Kyiv bolster its offensive and push through Russian front lines.

Photo: Sergei Supinsky/AFP Via Getty Images

U.S. leaders have said the transfer involves a version of the munition that has a reduced “dud rate,” meaning fewer of the smaller bomblets fail to explode. The bomblets can take out tanks and equipment, as well as troops, hitting multiple targets at the same time.

But Wareham cited “widespread evidence of civilian harm that (is) caused by these weapons. It was just an unconscionable decision.”

The report says civilians accounted for 95% of cluster munition casualties that were recorded last year, totaling some 1,172 in eight countries: Azerbaijan, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Myanmar, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. The monitor noted efforts in places like Bulgaria, Peru and Slovakia to destroy their stockpiles of the munitions in 2022 and earlier this year.

Children made up 71% of casualties from explosions of cluster-munition remnants last year, the report said.

It said Russia had “repeatedly” used cluster munitions in Ukraine since President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine in February last year, while Ukraine had used them “to a lesser extent.”

Washington’s decision “is certainly a setback,” said Wareham, “but it’s not the end of the road for the Convention on Cluster Munitions by far.”

[tenth-sentence]

If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, participate in the race for armaments and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists – Appendix B: The 'Franck Report'" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[protoslacker]

This is not a situation of waging war according to the laws of war and the Geneva Convention — this is a completely different philosophy of war where civilian lives are disregarded entirely.

Pavlo Kovtoniuk quoted in an article by Stephanie Nolen in Japan Times, originally published in The New York Times. In global conflict zones, hospitals and doctors are no longer spared

[musictooth]

Strikes to the groin are discouraged, if not flat-out prohibited in muay Thai which I think is hilarious considering that's what Vegas does in ep 10 as if saying he's not playing by the rules.

[geminisee]

The last twelve months were the hottest twelve months ever on record.

x

“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

- António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations

[tomorrowusa]

Hitler observed the Munich agreement for less than 24 weeks. And the invasion of Poland began just over 11 months after Munich. Appeasement is not the road to peace.

Ethnonationalist dictators are not interested in the rule of law – including international law. That's usually how they got to be dictators in the first place.

Putin violated a host of international agreements and treaties when he invaded Ukraine. That includes the United Nations Charter, the 1975 Helsinki agreement, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. And all through this war, Putin has been violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which went into effect in 1951.

Anybody who believes that Putin would adhere to any future agreements on Ukraine has to score in the top 1% of the population for gullibility.

[paintingformike]

me trying to explain why i think mike is gay and is aware that he’s not in love with el cause he has feelings for someone else since atleast the end of season 3, but he also doesn’t know the feelings attached to the painting are will’s yet and he was consciously lying in the monologue by trying to follow what will told him in the van (giving el the courage to fight on by emphasizing her abilities as a superhero, something that makes her different and “better” apparently!) cause he thinks that’s the only way to save el...so the painting is a plot device for byler to get together (and mlvn bones cause it made mike misunderstand what el truly needed, leading to his words not being enough for el to win and save max in time) but not in the sense that mike fell in love with will’s feelings for him or the person behind the painting, just that it was used to show who’s always been the right person for mike based on compatibility and understanding and true unconditional love, and for him to realize that things aren’t hopeless and his feelings are requited once he finds out the full truth behind the painting cause without it he would’ve continued forcibly conforming due to societal expectations and pressure, and trapping himself in a loveless relationship because of his fear of losing el and hurting her

[misscammiedawn]

Sometimes I make little bets and agreements with myself over the smallest things. Like 'okay, we'll get up when the cat isn't on our lap anymore' or 'next time YouTube throws on an ad we'll make a cup of coffee'

Which is all fun and games until the trigger never comes and you're stuck in limbo wishing you hadn't made a binding pact that has tethered you into the space between spaces. Certainly you could break the pact. But an agreement means something, dammit!

This is normal human behavior, right?

[wonder-worker]

Friendly reminder that Francesco Coppino and Prospero di Camulio, contemporaries who were literally getting their information from predominantly Yorkist circles, were both explicitly clear that it was Henry VI who decided to surrender Berwick to Scotland.

Camulio: "King Henry has given away a castle [town] called Berwick, which is one of the keys of the frontier between England and Scotland." Coppino: "[Scotland has] received from the same Henry the town of Berwick, on the frontiers of Scotland, which the Scots have long claimed as their right from the English, as the excellently well furnished guardian of their frontiers, and the place to which King Henry repaired as an asylum after the battle."

The idea that Margaret of Anjou was principally involved in the surrender, or that she was the one who actually made the decision, is based on nothing but assumption. Two direct contemporaries, both speaking of ongoing events as they unfolded, who were both getting information from Yorkist-held England, both clearly believed it was Henry who was responsible for this course of action. Neither of them mention Margaret. Sure, you can argue that it was merely rhetorical, and that they were simply automatically attributing such an important decision to the King rather than the queen - but rhetoric is nonetheless extremely important and helps us understand how historical figures were perceived at the time. Margaret's enemies would surely not have hesitated to broadcast her involvement had it actually been true, and Coppino in particular had shown no qualms about criticizing her in favor of the Yorkists before. If she was genuinely believed to have been responsible, and if the Yorkists were actually claiming that she was at the time, I see no reason why Coppino or Camulio would not have emphasized her role in their letters. What these samples instead indicate is literally the opposite: that their contemporaries - probably including the Yorkists who were putting out the information that Coppino and Camulio reported - actually believed that Henry was the one making the decision. I think it's a very large and very unnecessary stretch to go against actual evidence and claim otherwise by placing the responsibility on Margaret instead.

Additionally, these small samples may also reveal what people at the time - once again including the Yorkists - actually thought of Henry's role in the war on a broader level, away from direct Yorkist propaganda which would obviously and perhaps understandably seek to de-emphasize it: namely, that Henry was perceived as the one making decisions and deciding the courses of action for his own side.

Source: Excerpts from the Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Milan

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How tech does regulatory capture

If you want to know which industries have the most influence in DC, study the trade deals struck by the US Trade Representative, whose activities are the most obvious manifestation of American corporate power over state. Take the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). As David Dayen notes, this treaty is a kind of Big Tech wishlist:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-04-18-big-tech-lobbyists-took-over-washington/

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/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

The USTR’s playbook has changed over the years, reflecting the degree of control over the US government exerted by different sectors of the US economy. Today, with Big Tech in the driver’s seat, US trade deals embody something called the “digital trade agenda,” a mix of policies ranging from limiting liability, privacy protection, competition law, and data locatization.

The Digital Trade Agenda is a relatively new phenomenon. A decade ago, when the USTR went abroad to twist the arms of America’s trading partners, the only “digital” part of the agenda was obligations to spy on users and to swiftly remove materials claimed to have violated US media monopolies’ copyright. But as the tech sector grew more concentrated, they were able to seize a greater share America’s trade priorities.

One person who had a front-row seat for this transformation was Wendy Li, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, who served in the USTR’s office from 2015–17, and who leveraged her contacts among officials and lobbyists (and ex-lobbyists turned officials and vice-versa) to produce a fascinating, ethnographic account of a very specific form of regulatory capture. That account appears in “Regulatory Capture’s Third Face of Power,” in Socio-Economic Review. The article is paywalled, but if you access it via this link, you can bypass the paywall:

https://pluralistic.net/wendi-li-reg-capture

Li’s paper starts with a taxonomy of types of regulatory capture, drawn from the literature. The first kind — the “first face of power” — is when an industry wins some battle over a given policy, triumphing over the public interest. Li notes that defining “public interest” is sometimes tricky, which is true, but still, there are some obvious examples of this kind of capture.

My “favorite” example of horrible regulatory capture is from 2019, when Dow Chemical — working through the West Virginia Manufacturers Association — convinced the state of West Virginia to relax the limits on how much toxic runoff from chemical processing could be present in the state’s drinking water. Dow argued that the national safe levels reflected a different kind of person from the typical West Virginian. Specifically, Dow argued, the people of West Virginia were much fatter than other Americans, so their bodies could absorb more poison without sickening. And besides, Dow concluded, West Virginians drink beer, not water, so poisoning their drinking water wouldn’t affect them:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/14/the-real-elitists-looking-down-on-trump-voters/

This isn’t even a little ambiguous. Dow’s pleading wasn’t just absurd on its face — it was also scientifically bankrupt — there’s no evidence that being overweight makes you less susceptible to carcinogens. And yet, the state regulator bought it. Why? Well, maybe because chemical processing is WV’s largest industry, and Dow is the largest chemical company in the state. Regulatory capture, in other words.

The second kind of regulatory capture is the “revolving door”: when an executive from industry rotates into a role in government, where they are expected to guard the public interest from their former employers. There’s some of this in every presidential administration — think of Obama’s ex-Morganstanley and ex-Goldmansachs finance officials.

But while Obama and other “normal” pols sketched their corruption with a fine-tipped pen, making the overall shape hard to discern, Trump scrawled large, crude, unmissable figures with a fisted Sharpie. Remember Scott Pruitt, the disgraced Trump EPA who wanted to abolish the EPA? Pruitt was was such a colossal asshole that even the lobbyists who’d been bribing him with free housing actually evicted him:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/politics/pruitt-trump/index.html

After Pruitt resigned in the midst of chaotic scandal, he was succeeded by his deputy, Andrew Wheeler — a former coal lobbyist:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/climate/scott-pruitt-epa-trump.html

That’s the “second face of power.” What’s the third? It’s taking over the shape of the debate, getting to define its axioms. Think of the reflexive idea that government projects are “wasteful” and “inefficient.” Once all players internalize this idea, the debate shifts from “what should the public sector do?” to “which private-sector entity should the government pay to do this?” Anyone who says, “Wait, why doesn’t the government just do this?” just gets blank stares.

We can see this in the cramped and inadequate debate over the SVB bailout; apologists for the bailout insist that it was necessary because if SVB’s depositors had been forced to take a haircut, every large depositor in America would pile into Morganstanley, making it so “too big to fail” that it could tank the nation.

This is probably true — but only if you discount the possibility of establishing a public bank. Public banks are hardly a radical idea: America had nationwide public banking through the postal service until 1966:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/15/socialism-for-the-rich/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Li summarizes: “the first face of power is measured through the winner of the game, and the second face of power can be understood as the referee. The third face of power is the field, the rulebook, and agreement that there is even a game at all.”

It’s the creation of this third face that Li’s paper dissects — the creation of “Type I” ideas that form the unquestioned assumptions for all other debate. Sociologist call these ideas “schemas.” Li describes two ways that the tech industry changed the schemas used in trade negotiations. First, schemas are changed through “knowledge production” — creating reports and data.

Second, schemas are embedded through “recursive institutional reproduction” — a bit of unfortunately opaque academic jargon that is roughly equivalent to what activists call “policy laundering.” That’s when an industry can’t get its way in its home country, so it leans on trade reps to include that policy in a treaty or trade deal, which transforms it into an obligation at home.

In tech policy, the Ur-example of this is the DMCA, a 1998 digital copyright law that has profoundly changed the way we relate to everything from online services to our coffee makers. The origins of the DMCA are wild. In 1991, Al Gore kicked off the National Information Infrastructure hearings — AKA the “Information Superhighway” project. One of the most prominent proposals for the future of the internet came from Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton’s Copyrigh tCzar. Lehman had been the head of IP enforcement for Microsoft, and he had some genuinely batshit ideas for the internet, like requiring a separate, negotiated copyright license for every transitory copy made by RAM, or a network buffer, or drive cache:

https://www.wired.com/1996/01/white-paper/

Gore laughed Lehman out of the room and told him to hit the road. So Lehman did, scurrying over to Geneva, where he turned his batshit ideas into the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). Then he raced back to DC where he told Congress that they had to get on board with those UN treaties. In 1998, Congress passed the DMCA, turning a failed regulatory policy into a federal law that endures to this day.

That’s “policy laundering.” Lehman couldn’t get his ideas though the US government, so he rammed them through a UN agency, converting his proposal into an obligation, which Congress duly assumed.

The Digital Trade Agenda triumphed by both knowledge production and recursive institutional reproduction (AKA policy laundering). Under Obama, trade officials created the Digital Trade Working Group in consultation with industry, through the US Chamber of Commerce. This group worked with the US International Trade Commission (USITC) — a quasi-governmental research body — to produce copious reports, testimony and data in support of a focus on “digital trade.”

In particular, they inflated the value of digital trade to US officials, convincing them that getting wins for the digital industry would have an outsized impact on the US economy. This is reflected in the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that was negotiated in the utmost secrecy, in hotels all over the world surrounded by armed guards, where neither the press nor activists were welcome.

TPP represented a kind of farcical wishlist for America’s corporate giants, including the tech sector, and it looked like a done deal — until Trump. Trump unilaterally withdrew from TPP, so the tech industry’s reps simply tacked around TPP. They took everything they’d wanted to get out of TPP and crammed it into the USMCA, Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA. This makes perfect sense — corporate America’s priority was TPP’s policies, not TPP itself.

Li’s paper doesn’t just document this shift, she also gives us interviews with (anonymized) officials and lobbyists who speak frankly about how this happened behind the scenes. For example, a former Commerce official turned tech lobbyist describes how he lobbies his former coworkers: “Sometimes, [meetings are like] hey, let’s grab lunch, let’s grab coffee, and catch up. And half of it is about our kids, and half of it is about this [work related issue]. We’ll have a formal meeting [with government officials], but obviously we chitchat before and after. Because we’re human. So, a lot of it is just normal human interaction, right?”

This social coziness lets lobbyists position themselves as “stakeholders,” which legitimizes — and even requires — their participation in policymaking. As a trade negotiator says, “So to get your handle on a problem, you’ve got to pull the right people together, and you’ve got to sift through all the various ideas, so we obviously have a lot of regular interaction with companies [. . .] I spend a lot of time with the companies trying to understand their business model, try ing to understand how they interact with the governments in different countries, and then of course, socializing it within the building.”

Once lobbyists are “stakeholders,” they get to define not just what position the US takes — they get to define which positions can even be considered. As a trade negotiator says, “[Lobbyists aren’t] coming in and spouting talking points. They’re not giving us draft text because we haven’t gotten to the text phase yet. The way these meetings go is, generally we provide an update on what is happening and what approach we’re taking. The remainder is usually devoted to companies talking about their particular interests, and inquiring as to whether and how their issues are being addressed in that forum.”

That’s not just winning the game — it’s defining the rules.

Li’s paper is a fascinating tour of the sausage-factory and a close examination of the gunk that litters the factory floor. That said, I think there are areas where she drops policies and fights into neat categories that are much messier. For example, Li contrasts the rules in TPP with the rules in ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a failed international treaty from 2010.

Li characterizes ACTA as being an anti-tech proposal because it imposed copyright liability on tech companies, which would have raised their costs by forcing them to police their users’ speech, items for sale and uploads for copyright infringement. But that’s not quite right: ACTA was much broader. First, because “counterfeiting” doesn’t mean what you think it does: in an international trade agreement, counterfeiting concerns itself with all kinds of totally legitimate activities.

For example, Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on every part in an iPhone; no user ever sees these parts. But Apple uses the presence of an Apple trademark on these tiny components to lodge trademark claims with US border officials in order to block the importation of parts harvested from dead iPhones, as part of the company’s war on repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/30/80-lbs/#malicious-compliance

Likewise, companies like Rolex and Cartier have national subsidiaries in countries all over the world with the exclusive license to sell their goods in each country. These companies then claim that, say, an official Mexican Rolex watch becomes a counterfeit Rolex the minute it crosses the US border, because Rolex Mexico doesn’t have the right to use Rolex International’s trademarks outside of Mexico.

Asking tech companies to police “counterfeits” isn’t just about stopping knockoffs — it’s about letting multinational corporations control all secondary markets for their goods, giving them total control over repair and used goods.

Beyond that: creating an affirmative duty for platforms to police their users’ uploads and speech for copyright infringement is one of those things that not only won’t prevent copyright infringement (beating filters is easy for dedicated copyright infringers), but it will also compromise users’ speech (because filters are rife with false positives) — and it will hand eternal dominance to the largest tech firms (both Youtube and Facebook support mandatory filters, because they’ve spent hundreds of millions on them, and know that their small rivals can’t).

ACTA wasn’t a way to “punish” tech to make life better for media companies — it was a way to shift some of the oligarchic control of both tech and media around, while shoring up its dominance. Yes, parts of the tech sector hated ACTA, but it died because millions of people campaigned against it.

And of course, ACTA got policy-laundered into law in 2019, when the EU adopted the Digital Single Market Directive and created a filtering mandate, ignoring the largest petition in EU history and the people who marched in 50 cities. That was recursive institutional reproduction in action all right.

Likewise, TPP can’t be understood as the tech sector sidelining the entertainment companies — because both of them rallied for the parts of TPP that feathered all their nests. For example, the entertainment sector and the tech sector both love rules against reverse-engineers (like Section 1201 of the DMCA), which make it a felony to unlock your books, music, games and videos from the store that sold them to you and take them with you to another player.

Tech loves this because it gets them lock-in — if you break up with Amazon, you have to kiss your Kindle and Audible books goodbye. Media loves it because it gives them control — DRM stops you from recording Christmas movies between Feb and Dec, when they come free with your streaming service, and that means you have to pay-per-view them in December, when you want to watch them.

In other words, the Big Tech and Big Content’s policy fights aren’t so much about which policies we get — they’re about who gets to profit from them. They both want the same stuff — no taxes, no unions, no minimum wage, no consumer rights, no privacy — but they each want to hoard the benefits from that stuff.

Both tech and media love “IP” — not in the sense of “copyright” or “trademark,” but in the sense of “any law that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

In USMCA, it wasn’t just the “Digital Trade Agenda” that made it into the final agreement — it was mandatory DRM laws, massive copyright extensions, and the evisceration of fair use and its equivalents in Mexico and Canada:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#la-ley

There’s another important factor missing from Li’s analysis of the rise of the Digital Trade Agenda: monopoly. Tech used to be composed of hundreds of competing firms that hated each other’s guts and were incapable of working together. The entertainment industry, by contrast, was already hugely consolidated and able to lobby effectively as a body.

That was hugely important in the Napster Wars, when international copyright proposals like the Database Right and the Broadcast Treaty were popping up at the UN and in country-to-country trade deals. While the tech industry was competing to give users a better deal, Big Content was able to solve the collective action problem and come up with a common lobbying position, getting nearly identical (and absolutely ghastly) tech bills introduced in dozens of state legislatures at once:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030425210736/https://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/states/200304_sdmca_eff_analysis.php

The rise of the Digital Trade Agenda is downstream of tech industry consolidation, the orgy of mergers that saw the internet transformed into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Li’s taxonomy of regulatory capture is useful and important, and it’s complimented by an analysis of failures in antitrust enforcement. Market consolidation has produced firms that are more powerful than the governments that are supposed to keep them honest. When the teams have more power than the ref, the game will never be fair:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

The tech industry aren’t really adverse to the entertainment industry, at least not where it counts. They are all part of the business lobby, whose regulatory priorities are broadly shared, even if they disagree at the margins. Dayen describes how the Digital Trade Agenda is playing out in IPEF, the treaty with more than a dozen Pacific Rim countries: “It would prohibit governments from reviewing or prescreening algorithms for violations of labor law, competition policy, or nondiscrimination statutes. It would bar limitations on data flows or storage. And it would treat policies that have greater impacts on the large tech firms as illegal trade barriers. These terms could block signatory countries from writing laws that take on any of these issues.”

Those aren’t tech priorities — those are corporate priorities. The success of the “Digital Trade Agenda” isn’t just because tech grew up and started lobbying — it’s because the things they lobby for are the things every business wants: no labor protection, no antitrust, no privacy.

That’s the “schema” that matters: the bedrock assumption that job of US trade policy is to make sure that workers and residents abroad have no rights, with the obligation on America to dismantle the few rights that remain intact in its borders to satisfy the “obligation” it actually insisted on.

Later this week (Apr 20/21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference.

This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: The Milky Way. Standing to the left of the frame is a giant ogrish figure, a top-hatted, cigar-chomping caricature of a capitalist. He emerges from behind a silhouetted tree, towering over it. With one white-gloved hand, he is yanking a golden, dollar-sign-shaped lever at a control box. With the other hand, he disdainfully dangles a 'big blue marble' image of Earth from space. The starry sky is partially blended with a green-on-black 'code waterfall' effect in the style of the Matrix movie open credits. The ogre's eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Andy (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Milky_Way_and_Andromeda_Galaxies.jpg

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

[seventh-district]

this song ain’t got no right to be scratchin’ my brain as much as it does

[cainite-bite]

Im sorry but this trend of "stay at home girlfriend" that's being glorified is the saddest fucking thing.

First of all never let anyone control your finances and solely rely on another for that because if they leave you're stuck with nothing. If they die you are stuck with nothing. If they are abusive and you need to get outta dodge you got nothing. Never let anyone have that power over you whether man or woman or literally anyone else.

2ndly it's also sad to say you cook, you clean, you wash the literal smudged underwear of some schmup, you're doing the full time work in their place and all for nothing but to get to call yourself "girlfriend". You don't get paid, you don't have the same tax benefits that you might have from marriage, you can't hop onto their insurance, you don't get anything because you're stuck with a person who doesn't view you as anything more than a live-in bangmaid with little value outside of that because they know you got so little self worth that you allow yourself to get used as a doormat.

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: May 22

"And So It Goes” Billy Joel cover by Jennifer Warnes

[follow-the-white-loth-cat]

"Then you're no better than the Empire" - Rebels S3 E13 (Ezra talking to Saw)

"I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them" - Andor S1 E10 (Luthen)

I really really hope people don't pit Rebels and Andor against each other because together they are so interesting, two sides of the same story, getting at the same themes but in totally different ways.

Does anybody really have an answer to this philosophical question anyways, whether the ends justify the means? I'm not sure we can say who is right, only that it takes everyone in the Rebellion to ultimately overthrow the Empire

[anaalnathrakhs]

argh you just know there’s something a little shady under that whole retirement situation :))))