#anti monsantos

[void-tiger]

Getting friends into voltron is “DON’T. Seriously. Well okayyyyy but here’s the tea.”

[no-gods-no-masters-tshirts]

[dooplissss]

'our food is all organic and has no GMOs!' it could use some gmos if i'm being honest

[transmechanicus]

40k is great bc they will have disease infected super soldiers invade worlds that are the Monsanto wet dream of environmentally destructive crop cultivation administered by legions of anti-grav harvesters. Then they’ll send dudes on horseback into this caustic hellscape with fusion explosive jousting lances to solve the problem. If this does not work the whole planet will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb that has been sanctified with a decade of continuous religious ceremony. This will cause an entire army on the other side of the galaxy to abruptly starve in 3 generations, causing 164 worlds to be stripped of life by Giant Bugs or Omnicidal Robot Mummies. The paperwork all this generates is the life’s work of an entire city and if anyone forgets to carry a 1, they will all be executed with the same severity as if they had pissed on the Golden Throne. Holy shit dude.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Capitalists hate capitalism

As the Marxist agitator Adam Smith once said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Smith understood that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, “competition is for losers,” or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with “wide, sustainable moats.”

These anti-capitalist capitalists love big government. They love no-bid military contracts, they love ACA subsidies for health insurance companies, they love Farm Bill cash for Cargill and Monsanto. What they don’t love is markets.

Case in point: pharma giant Merck. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes a provision that allows Medicare to (finally) start (weakly) negotiating the prices it pays for (a tiny handful of) drugs. If you’re scratching your head and wondering if you understood that correctly, let me assure you, you did: the US government is currently prohibited from negotiating drug prices when it bargains with pharma companies.

In other words: Medicare simply pays a pharma companies — whose products build on billions in publicly funded basic research, whose taxes are reduced by billions in research credits, whose patents are backstopped by billions in enforcement — whatever it demands.

To do otherwise, you see, would be socialism. Markets are “efficient” because they “discover prices” through bidding and selling. In the case of publicly purchased drugs, the price that Uncle Sucker “discovers” is inevitably “a titanic sum” or possibly “add a couple more zeroes, wouldya?”

Enter the IRA. Starting in 2026, Medicare will be permitted to negotiate the price of ten (10) drugs. The negotiations will use the prices of other drugs from the dysfunctional, monopolized market as a starting point and go up from there. The negotiations go on for three years, and there are multiple stages where pharma companies can hit pause with court challenges:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-05-11-regulators-bungling-drug-price-reform/

The system will not consider the prices that Medicaid or the VA (which are allowed to bargain on prices) pay. Nor will it consider the prices that other governments pay — the US is alone in the wealthy world in offering the anticapitalist price-taking posture when dickering with the pharma companies.

But this isn’t enough for Merck. They are suing the Biden administration over the IRA’s drug pricing plan, arguing that it is an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/06/merck-sues-biden-administration-over-medicare-drug-price-negotiations.html

Merck is represented by Big Law firm Jones Day, who made their bones by representing the RJ Reynolds from smokers with lung-cancer, arguing that the smoking/cancer link wasn’t scientifically sound. That’s not the only fanciful argument they put before a judge: Jones Day also represented Trump in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election (they also hired Trump’s counsel Don McGahn as he exited the White House’s revolving door).

As Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect, Merck’s argument is that the “fair market” value of its drugs can only be discovered if its single largest customer — Medicare — simply pays whatever Merck demands of it:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-06-08-merck-negotiating-drug-prices-unconstitutional/

They explicitly denounce the idea that a powerful buyer should use its market power to extract price concessions from sellers like Merck: “leveraging all federal insurance benefits (amounting to over half of the prescription drug market) to coerce companies to abandon their First and Fifth Amendment rights is a quintessential unconstitutional condition.”

Rebutting this argument, Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said, “negotiating for the best price is as American as apple pie. Since when is competition in this American system a bad thing? Why should we be the patsies around the world and pay the highest prices for medicines?”

The irony here is that Merck itself is a very powerful buyer. Whether negotiating commercial leases, raw materials or wages, Merck is ruthless in extracting the lowest prices it can from its suppliers. The company attained its massive scale the old fashioned way: buying it. By drawing on its nearly limitless access to the capital markets, Merck bought out dozens of its competitors:

https://mergr.com/merck-acquisitions

Anticapitalist investors funded these acquisitions in the expectation that Merck would be able to use its market dominance to pay suppliers less, charge customers more, and use some of the resulting windfall to corrupt and bully its regulators so that it could buy still more companies, charge still higher prices, and impose crushingly low prices on still more suppliers.

The IRA’s drug-bargaining provisions are extraordinarily weak. When they were first mooted in 2021, I talked about how Democrats were caving on muscular drug price controls that would benefit every American (except a handful of pharma shareholders):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/18/bipartisan-consensus/#corruption

They did so despite wild, bipartisan support for imposing price discipline on Big Pharma, and ending the 300% premium Americans pay for their drugs relative to their cousins abroad. 95% of Democrats support strong price controls; so do 82% of independents — and 71% of Republicans:

https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2021/11/healthcare-affordability--majority-of-adults-support-significant-changes-to-the-health-system.html

No one believes Big Pharma’s scare stories about how this would kill R&D: 93% of Americans reject this idea, including 90% of Republicans. They’re right — nearly all US basic pharma R&D is directly funded by the federal government, with pharma companies privatizing the gains:

https://khn.org/news/article/public-opinion-prescription-drug-prices-democratic-plan/

Despite the fact that really whipping the shit out of Big Pharma would be both popular and good for America, the Dems’ final version of pharma bargaining is a barely-there nothingburger where ten drugs will become slightly cheaper, after the next federal election. This is called “political realism” and it’s a fantasy.

The idea that limiting drug controls to the faintest, most modest measures would make them easier to attain was obvious nonsense from the start, and Merck’s anticapitalist lawsuit proves it. Merck will settle for nothing less than total central planning — by Merck. For Merck, the role of the federal government is to wave through a stream of mergers culminating in Merck’s ownership of every major drug; patent extensions for these drugs to carry them into the 25th century and beyond, and unlimited sums paid for these drugs on Medicare.

Given all that, there would have been no downside to the Dems passing an IRA that subjected the drug companies the same modest, commensense, market-based discipline we see in Canada, or the UK, or France, or Germany, or Switzerland.

But that’s not the IRA we got. Instead of defending a big, visionary program in court, the Biden admin is facing down Jones Day and Merck to defend the most yawn-inducing, incrementalist half-measure. What a wasted opportunity.

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/2023/06/09/commissar-merck#price-giver

[Image ID: A caricature of a businessman with a money-bag for a head and a stickpin bearing the Merck logo, standing atop a pile of bundled $100 bills. At the bottom of the pile, a frowning, disheveled Uncle Sam offers up a $100 bill.]

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

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

[dailyanarchistposts]

Biotechnology and the future of humanity

Animals Are Commodities Too

Under slavery human individuals are owned, are property. Under capitalism workers aren’t owned but they have to sell their labour/time/creativity because capitalists own everything (land, the means of production, transport and communication etc) that would enable people to live outside of wage labour and the market place. Now, instead of individuals owning non-human animals as part of their subsistence, corporations are claiming the right to ‘own’ whole species of animals. This process of patenting life can be traced back to the 1980 US Supreme Court ruling, which stated that a GM bacterium (modified to digest oil) could be patented. Not just that one bacterium of course but the whole, created species. In 1985 the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled that GM plants, seeds and plant tissues could be patented. Now the corporations can demand royalties and licence payments every time farmers use those plants or seeds. Monsanto holds a patent on (i.e. owns and rents out) all GM cotton and soya. Patents have been granted on biological characteristics of plants as well. For example, a patent has been issued to Sungene for a variety of sunflower that has a high oleic acid content. But the patent covers the characteristic as well as the genes that code for it, so any plant breeder who achieves the same result by traditional methods could be sued.

In 1987 animals joined the biotech market place when a Harvard biologist patented ‘oncomouse’, a GM organism (mouse) predisposed to develop cancer for use in medical ‘research’. By 1997 40 GM ‘species’ of animal had been patented, including turkey, nematodes, mice and rabbits. Hundreds of other patents are pending on pigs, cows, fish, sheep and monkeys among others. In 1976 a leukaemia patient named John Moore had his cancerous spleen removed under surgery at the University of California. Without his knowledge or consent some of the cells from his spleen were cultured and found to produce a protein which could be used in the manufacture of anti-cancer drugs. The estimated value of this cell-line to the pharmaceutical industry is $3 billion. In 1984 the California Supreme Court ruled that he was not entitled to any of these profits.

A US company called Biocyte holds a patent on (owns) all umbilical cord cells. Systemix Inc has a patent on (owns) all human bone marrow stem cells, these being the progenitors of all cells in the blood. The worldwide market for cell lines and tissue cultures was estimated to be worth $426.7 million to the corporations in 1996. Not only cells but also fragments of DNA can be patented (owned) in this way. Incyte, for example, has applied for patents on 1.2 million fragments of human DNA. The logic of this is that ‘genes for’ particular diseases such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes, various cancers etc could become the property of pharmaceutical companies who could then make huge profits on tests for such genes and genebased therapies. There is no space here to get into a lengthy criticism of the reductionist idea that individual genes simply map onto well-defined physical traits underlying the whole theory and practice of GM. It’s enough to say that research into patenting (owning), for example, a supposed’ breast cancer gene’ is of little benefit to humanity if it is true, as some scientists have estimated, that 90% of breast cancers are unrelated to genetics but are triggered by environmental pollution, diet and lifestyle factors. So what’s new? Capitalism, indeed class-society in general, always seizes the living and turns it into profit and power, declares ownership where previously there was only life: from the enclosure of the commons to the seizing of millions of human beings from Africa to be slaves to the current looting of tropical biodiversity for use in the biotech labs.

[tangibletechnomancy]

Saw someone earlier say that the popular millennial/early gen Z reaction to AI tech is very comparable to Gen X-ish's reactions to GMOs, and...I can no longer find that post but I can't help but feel that to be true on a lot of levels.

As stated in that post, both technologies have their very legitimate problems - with GMOs, it's Monsanto being fucking evil and trying to monopolize plants and food, or GMO herbicide resistance being used so that major corporate farms can saturate the land with said herbicides without any short-term financial damage to the companies as if it doesn't harm the environment; with AI, it's any form of automation always appealing to the most abusive of corporate greed - but both ended up whipped into a dogmatic fervor about something completely not only irrelevant but made-up and reactionary ("GMOs are all POISON, nature knows best ALWAYS!" - which led semi-directly to the antivaxx movement btw / "it doesn't matter how different it is from the input taking inspiration from existing works the WRONG way is PLAGIARISM, you're rewarding LAZINESS, and REAL ART vs. FAKE ART is totally an objective distinction that can be made and certainly not at all a fascist talking point, and I want art made by HUMANS, the humans running these programs to express something from their human brains don't count!"), completely ignoring that GMOs have reduced world hunger and given us valuable conservation tools, and AI is giving people - real people, not machines - more expressive capacity, serving as a valuable research tool into what kinds of things people tend to associate, justly or otherwise; and even being used to augment human judgment for things such as reviewing biopsy results, finding cancers that otherwise may have gone unnoticed for months or even years longer. In fact, many opponents will full on deny any of these benefits - "what good does reducing hunger do if we haven't eliminated it completely AND we're feeding people POISON? In fact, why should I even believe that really happened in the first place!? if you wanted laypeople to be able to read these studies you wouldn't have made them so complicated, you CLEARLY have something to hide!" the anti-GMO warrior asks; "I don't believe those people who are so severely disabled that they couldn't draw or write without AI REALLY exist, your meditation on the nature of data doesn't COUNT, I don't care how many hours you spent on that piece you're TOTALLY being lazy, and I refuse to believe anyone who points out that it's not a copy-paste machine because you CLEARLY have an AGENDA to lie" the anti-AI reactionary claims. Both hold to a belief that ignorance is a virtue, and even TRYING to understand the Bad Side is tantamount to shoving orphans into a wood chipper.

But I'd take it a step further and say that AI is serving a similar sociopolitical purpose in that it's drawing a line in the sand and asking progressives at a certain stage in life - mostly from the ages of 25-35 - "are you willing to acknowledge nuance around subjects that are new and scary to you, or are you going to give into that fear and treat ignorance as a virtue because there ARE undeniably bad things about this and therefore EVERY bad thing you can imagine about it must be true?" Both serve as, essentially, an acid test - will you declare that it's IMPOSSIBLE to be reckless with GMOs, that Monsanto DESERVES to have sole control over the world's food supply because ~they've done so much good~, or that all GMOs are EVIL POISON and GOING TO KILL US ALL and they're also TOTALLY the reason we're all FAT now which is THE WORST thing a person can be? Or are you going to acknowledge that Monsanto is fucking evil, but GMOs as a whole are a complex thing that can, indeed, be created and marketed in some pretty evil ways, but also have the potential to save countless lives? Will you declare that AI is True Sentient AI, the cyber-utopia becoming real; that everything ChatGPT says must be true and OpenAI is our best friend, or that REAL art by HUMANS is going to be destroyed forever and anyone who benefits from AI is inherently evil? Or will you acknowledge that AI, while it has its drawbacks in the form of corporate overpromising people and compromising information reliability by doing so, on top of the perennial labor issues that come with automation and other potential abuses, also has the capacity to dramatically improve and even potentially save lives? Will you work to save the good WHILE rejecting the bad, or will you insist it needs to be shoved in either the good box or the bad box - probably the bad box, if you're an adult?

The answer, I feel, says a lot about the ideological trajectory someone has chosen for their adulthood.

[southernspiritnorthernheart]

I’m trying to take back my autonomy and privacy in my digital life. I’m now down to trying to empty my iCloud Drive, and boy does it fight me!

I’ve never had privacy stuff in OneDrive or Google Drive, because I’ve never trusted Microsoft or Google. I’ve had Dropbox for so long I did trust them in the beginning, but it was easy enough to rectify on a fast internet connection.

But I did trust Apple under Jobs. And then went along for longer than I should under Cook. The company is now a DEI hellhole fully compliant with Big Government and anti free speech and liberty (like Google and Microsoft).

So I’m emptying my drive. It’s slow to download. Some files don’t download at all. I’ve definitely lost, and am continually losing, data, but I’ll take that hit.

My goal is to be well below 200 Gb by New Years and that that will be Apple services only (Photos, iMessage, backups etc). I will then whittle this down too in 2025 as quickly as I can financially speaking.

My digital goal for 2025 is to build my own mini-cloud, on my own mini-server, switch most of my computing to Linux and Open Android, and be done with it. Im tired of being used as a cash cow by Big Tech, Big Corp in general, and Big Government.

In terms of things there are a few that are important for Liberty. Computers is one. Guns another. Cars a third. Cheap energy would be a fourth these days. And this is on top of the more ephemeral and philosophical ones of free speech and privacy etc.

It’s time to wake up and realise that no glitz and glamour in the world can hide the fact that Microsoft, Google and Apple are nothing but exploitative entities in the same way Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Monsanto, Nestlé, the Federal Reserve, governments, Washington, Brussel, London etc etc and so on and so forth, are. They do not have your best at heart. And though it hurts to admit. They probably never really did. At least not since becoming “services” focused and “data driven”.

[thoughtsofthegirlwiththecurl]

Having watched Jurassic World Dominion, it is very fun to look at (Sam Neill and Laura Dern can absolutely still get it) and makes bafflingly little sense narratively.

Like...just to start, what's the bad guy's motive? I mean, when there is a bad guy (and not just rampaging dinosaurs), in all the other movies it's pretty transparently naked capitalism. But Dodgson claims that isn't his motivation, but then......doesn't give another reason?? Like I thought maybe it would end up being that he had some genetic disease he wanted to cure before it killed him, but....nope. He also has....a lot of irons in the fire. His company is into rescuing dinos but also buying them off the black market but also bioengineering dinos themselves but also serving as the Monsanto of this universe but also bioengineering bugs and engaging in monopolistic sabotage but also working on human genetics but also doing some light human trafficking on the side. I mean capitalism is probably his actual motive, but what does HE think his motive is? He goes to great lengths and expense to kidnap Maisie and have her brought to his facility and then makes no effort to lock her up (the bad guy in the last movie at least locked her in her room) and, after she escapes, makes absolutely no effort to catch her and even goes so far as to strand her in the tunnels where it's highly likely she'll be eaten and her DNA lost forever. (Side note, I do very much enjoy that it's the same Dodgson who pays Dennis at the very start of the first movie.)

What the hell is up with Ramsey? Why does Dodgson just let him walk away?? Why does he decide to flip in the first place? Why is Ian Malcom working for Dodgson when he has been SO stringently anti-dino in all the other movies? Owen worked with raptors for ages in (before) the first movie and in the end can kind of get them to do what he wants for a brief period of time; how the heck did Santos train her dinos to run a target down with single-minded determination, ignoring their own injuries?

Finally, why does this movie feel more like a Star Wars movie than a Jurassic Park movie?

[reasonandempathy]

What to do with 10 trillion dollars

I spent way too much time actually answering a reddit question of "How would you spend 10 trillion dollars if you needed to in 20 years. You will die after 20 years." So, I figured I'd share it here.

With only $10 trillion dollars you can't stabilize greenhouse gases or get rid of fossil fuels, which are 13t and 44t respectively. I'm using a variety of sources, so don't expect citations.

I did slightly overpay for things, strategically, partially because I can only imagine doing the things I would do would make it more expensive than it would otherwise be. You'll see.

I'm presuming I don't get assassinated.

What you can do (I did the math) figures are in Billions:

Personal (2.44/10000):

1.44 on remaking 8 games as mid-line AAA games (I chose Legend of Dragoon, FF8, Witcher 1, and the Legacy of Kain series).

.214 on 50 years of housing and buying yourself a $130,000,000 home in NYC. Includes taxes, maintenance, and furniture.

.15 on household staff for 50 years, with at double the normal pay

.000327 to put 3 kids through the best pre-k and best college in the country

.664 setting up each of those 3 kids with their own equivalent home and staff setup

Public Service (4303/10000):

Big one out of the way. 2500bn in lobbying/buying up American politicians to enact structural reforms I want to see. You would think this would be way too much, since the presidential election in 2020 only had 14.4 in it. This amounts to averaging 250 in spending every election cycle, even off-year. I counter with the global commercial banking market having a market cap of 2800 in 2023. The defense industry is almost 480. Health insurance in the US is 1600. This is an expensive, long-drawn fight. This is likely the single most important thing on the list. Anti-corruption measures, labor rights, pro-democracy reforms, including ultimately making it illegal for other people to buy more elections.

a cumulative total of 1803 spent on:

curing the most common cause of blindness worldwide

eradicating polio, rabies, elephantitis, malaria, world hunger, COVID19 issues, Water + Sanitation access, extreme poverty, homelessness in USA, Canada, and UK (I looked for China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Egypt, and Pakistan but couldn't find real numbers),

protecting the Amazon rainforest

Corporate Fixing (5692/10000):

Buying up and changing (converting to Co-Ops, converting to non-profits, dissolving, or something in line with those:

Meta

Amazon

Disney

JP Morgan Chase

Lockheed Martin

Delta

Alphabet

Asda

Tesco

Nike

The Weinstein Company

United Airlines

Shein

EA

BP

Bayer (side-note: they own/are Monsanto now)

De Beers

Vonovia Real Estate Developers

DLE

Ubisoft

Ikea

Shueisha

and Viz Media

It leaves me with 1.4bn left over. I'm comfortable with saying an additional billion would likely be used up administratively as things get a bit more expensive than I thought they would.

Honestly, I could likely blow it on close friends and family who need it. If you have an issue with the house spending being for 50 years instead of 30, that can just be shuffled around a bit to include more people in my personal life to meet the same number.

Leaving me with 470 million to spend elsewhere in the next 20 years. Expensive vacations, nice cars, donating to "smaller" issues as I see worthwhile, giving family and friends money for their ventures/dreams, etc. make me think it wouldn't actually be hard to lose track of that much money in those many years.

Hell, if I want to I can probably spend a million bucks on food a year just for my family. Probably more, if I actively try to do so.

[ms-hells-bells]

What's your opinion on Greenpeace? All I've heard is people hating on them and saying they're terrorists or something but all the criticism I've heard is about them not supporting nuclear energy (which obviously we should all be against because why would you want people to be irradiated so many years in the future and causing cancer lol) but maybe there's some genuine criticisms too? I don't know much about Greenpeace but you always seem very intelligent so I was wondering what your opinion on them is.

from what i've seen, people hate greenpeace due to industry propaganda, since they use disruption tactics. they'll put their boats dangerously close to illegal fishing vessels, or commercial boats suspected of overfishing, to block them from continuing to trawl. they disrupt oil rigs, chain themselves to trees to prevent deforestation, expose water contamination and an ag lobbying, etc. then there is also the anti nuclear thing, but that started from literal ocean nuclear bomb testing, and marine life and even surrounding island communities were extremely affected. so i completely se why they simply do not trust humanity to appropriately handle nuclear sources and nuclear waste.

the one legit criticism i have seen is their blanket anti gmo stance. not just because gmos can be patented, and poor communities are completely screwed over, because companies like monsanto give them a bunch of free gmo seeds to use, but it's modified to not produce more seeds or regrow, and because they didn't use their previous non gmo crops, they have no seeds left from those to continue crop planting after a year, and are forced to buy more seeds that they often can't afford, and starvation occurs. they are anti gmo in even helpful cases, like modifying rice to have essential vitamins that people in third world countries are widely deficient in. and believe in old dated information, like that gmo crops increase the use of pesticides, when more current research indicates more towards the opposite, non gmo uses more pesticides.

also, like many leftist organisations, men have overtaken a lot of it to turn it into a general anti government, pseudo-anarchist group, where they love the power and platform they get and spout bullshit.

but people rarely criticise those, they just feel uncomfortable when someone acts in an inconvenient or perceived 'radical' way, so attack it to make themselves feel more secure in their own morals and inaction.

new zealand is surprisingly a bit friendlier to greenpeace than we should for a fishing and animal agriculture nation, but due to the terrorist bombing of their ship by the french government in new zealand, and resulting death of a man, we are pretty protective of them.

[void-tiger]

Sorry this is late but you are so right in the tags (the memes for post se8 au one)!!! Like Kuron didnt deserve any of that shit both in canon and story wise. Like there is doomed by the narrative and then there is whatever this was, like freaking Haxus was given a moment of silence and Allura reminding Zarkon of his shit was treated as more morally wrong then this. And just half the reason i have this au is because i want Jiro to be angry about this like he deserves. Like he did nothing wrong but my good he should have, he deserves to bite people. He 100% deserve to be angry at Shiro and Allura (and Keith. Keith was the one most assertive that he was Shiro, Keith was the one that basically got him killed. Jiro is taping up Keith and Haggars and a bunch of other people's pictures on a dartboard and throws darts at it as stress relief as we speak)

Ohh I am SO angry at Keith.

“The Black Lion Roared! It claims Keith as BP!”

NO, fools. The Black Lion wants to save the damn clone who quite literally threw his bayard away—at Allura; if anyone was “next in line” it should’ve been her. We all know it. Mir practically animated it that way in addition to him wiping the floor with them but nobody actually got hurt. HELL even while possessed he gave them TIME to Get The Fuck OUT. And Allura had to blow up her castle to fix Lotor’s Major Fuckup, anyway. He could’ve easily crippled the paladins or Voltron by killing them Right Then or taking the bayard or Black Lion with him.

He didn’t. He’s literally playing 3D chess in a split second—while possessed—and he largely goes unsung, anyway.

He keeps the showdown against Keith largely in Keith’s Favor and deliberately missing shots and destroying the cloning facility (rip to the clones. They are innocents in this too.) and. Keith still nearly gets himself killed, anyway.

Black Lion’s the one to save Jiro when he’s finally close enough in-range for the Lion to sense him—despite them not having a true Lion-Paladin bond.

Black Lion saves Shiro (and Green Lion saves Pidge) VERY early on.

Black Lion saves Shiro again—while being the most damaged by that S1 Fight against Zarkon and Haggar—by teaming up with Keith very briefly (then has to go offline again; they need a Castle Pickup.)

Black Lion saves Shiro by uploading him—you mean to tell me a Teleporting Lion who clearly adores THIS Paladin and does not come back online until Every Single Character (save Coran) tries bonding with it would just Lose his body like that? NAH. That’s NOT how the scifi tropes for transporters or transporter delays/accidents even work.

As horrific as it is, if the issue was really Shiro needing a body verses Black Lion wanting to save a clone trying so hard and loving so much, too, um. [gestures at It’s Raining Men errr Shiro Clones.] Black Lion had options. I am not a fan of this particular fanon fix. Those clones deserve a chance to live, too. BUT it does point out the even more obvious flaw in what actually happened canonically.

Buuuuuut, Monsantos didn’t care about that. They just wanted their Officially Bastardized Version Of Keith to be their grimdark edgelord BP self insert. (Oh, and make Allura their Narrative Tool to do it.)

-

…soooo…yeah. Jiro deserves to be fucking pissed at Allura, Shiro, the paladins, and especially Keith.

Shiro has every right to be upset with Jiro. (Misdirected, sure. But, imo he’s allowed to be imperfect without getting villainized for it, y’know? Trauma and processing trauma and healing isn’t tidy whatsoever.)

(And Allura should NEVER have been used by the writers for what happened. Or framed as “just as bad as the galra! Teehee!!” in s8, apparently—I staunchly refuse to watch it.)

[no-gods-no-masters-tshirts]

[rebeleden]

Where's Obama?!? Amid Dems Anti-Biden COUP The Former Prez Has Been Quie...

CC CIA MONSANTO BILLIONAIRE BANKSTER DRONE HOBAMA

STOP NAZI VANILLA ISIS BILLIONAIRES

[thoughtlessarse]

A group of activists has asked the organizers of the Keti Koti commemoration in Amsterdam not to let Tweede Kamer president Martin Bosma lay a wreath at the commemoration of slavery this year. According to the activists, united in the Coalition for a Dignified July 1 Commemoration, the PVV parliamentarian has a history of racist remarks, and his inclusion in this emancipation event is a violation of a day that is significant for the Afro-Caribbean and Indigeneous-Caribbean Dutch. “July 1 is a significant, almost sacred day for Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous-Caribbean Dutch people. We reflect on the history of who we are, from the injustice done to our ancestors to the injustice that still exists in today’s society,” the coalition, represented by spokespersons Glenn Helberg and Marisa Monsanto, said in a statement sent to NL Times. “Asking our community to tolerate Bosma’s presence there crosses a line. It is not possible to separate the function from the person Bosma, with his racist beliefs.” According to the coalition, Bosma’s history of public racism spans 20 years. “He makes derogatory and racist remarks about Afro-Caribbean Dutch people. He denies the ongoing impact of the slavery past on contemporary society in the form of discrimination and exclusion. He has spread racist ‘replacement’ theories, referred to the commemorative year as ‘slavery whining,’ and spoken of ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘propaganda and indoctrination’ concerning the slavery past,” the coalition said.

continue reading

[fcb4]

If this reflects your only exposure to endtimes/eschatology ie LeftBehind, Late Great Planet Earth, A Theif in the Night, Chick Tracts etc. Then you’re probably on edge today. Maybe not, but probably.

America has had a wild fascination with apocalypse, armageddon, prophecy and the anti-Christ. It’s at a fever pitch in many circles.

Lately these subjects have been surrogated in the womb of internet teachers that bring suitcases of conspiracy theories. Rothschilds, Illuminati, One World Order, Bill Gates, UN, Medical industrial Complex, alternative this and that..the bad seed is taking root all over.

It’s making many people rich because fear sells. Every post you linger on or click puts money in the pockets of someone. The algorithms rule peoples minds. Folks think they are scrolling freely but tech is paving the roads you think you’re driving.

Much of internet life is self-fulfilling prophecy. Reading, watching, clicking, etc bends every future search or read back in on itself. You attract more of what you digitally touch. Your devises learn and serve up various versions of your perceived desire and tastes.

You become the mind puppet to the mind puppet masters whether charlatans or well meaning rabbit hole tumblers.

Discernment is desperately needed in this hour. People’s relationships, bank accounts, mental health, spiritual equilibrium, church stability, biblical sanity, political perspective and personal productivity are all impacted by these matters.

The red-pill becomes the black-pill and the Matrix gets exposed to be produced by directors or “handlers” that have a worldview and social-moral vision completely at odds with a biblical world view. It’s not liberty but slavery and those thinking they are riding the Nebuchadnezzar are actually being slipped into the goo of a pod meant to feed you endless supplies of distracting mind funk while draining you of actually living the life God saved you to enjoy.

When my pastoral advice to focus on caring for one’s family instead of losing oneself in these fantasy worlds is rejected as unbiblical, I know things are going off the guardrails.

Yes times are complicated and concerning but that’s been true for many cycles of history.

CS Lewis “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things-praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts-not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

So…please for the love of the book of Daniel and all things red dragon, stop.

The internment camps and black helicopters didn’t pan out, the blood moon phased, and Gorbachev’s birth mark wasn’t the sign. The Euphrates water level isn’t the barometer, the vaccines didn’t have nanotechnology, your dogs microchip isn’t the precursor and your not going gay from drinking tap water.

Jesus is Lord over all, even…pedophiles, Monsanto, microplastics, the Ozone, 5G, Apeel, fighting age males crossing the border, Michelle Obama’s sexuality and Presdential elections.