#evil tax officials

[evil-tax-officials]

[ID: A screenshot of a news article headline reading: Priest of Love lost to Vampire Tax Collector /End ID] 

Original: 愛心牧師不敵吸血稅官 

Source: http://www.worldpeoplenews.com/people-voice 

[mephistopholes-brain]

2,977 civilians died tragically in 9/11, 343 being firefighters.

Since then it has been “Never forget.” for over 20 years, the US attacked and destabilized an innocent country, and white ppl have further pushed the narrative that Muslims and Middle Easterners are all “evil terrorists”.

Now, in less than 6 months the OFFICIAL death toll in Gaza exceeds 30,000, half being CHILDREN. At least 200 doctors have died and many were TARGETED by IOF soldiers. I have seen children dismembered, maimed, sniped, run over, crushed, starved, scalped, exploded, burned, and strung up on the side of a building.

I have seen men, women, and children desperately digging through the rubble to find their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, friends, lovers etc.

I have seen brave doctors run outside to save injured civilians while at extremely high risk of being shot by snipers.

I have seen a father carrying BAGS full of his children’s remains.

I have seen a young girl, no more than 9, with a leg, an arm, and a hand blown off while her scalp hangs from her skull.

I have seen doctors speak out against the cruelty and ethnic cleansing while surrounded by the bodies of those they tried to save.

I have seen hundreds of pictures of NICU babies who were going to die soon because the hospital was about to run out of electricity.

I have read the first hand story of a father who traded one of his children for one of his brother’s children so that if one group dies at least one of their children would make it.

I have read posts from lgbt+ KIDS talking about how they regret not kissing their crush because they just watched them DIE.

I have seen the public posts of IDF and IOF soldiers where they show off the underwear and lingerie they looted from the drawers of the Gazans they are massacring.

I have listened to the screams of mothers after hearing their child is dead.

I have watched a teen boy’s gaze harden into something cold and empty after his entire family died in front of him, leaving him completely alone.

I have seen an IOF soldier throw a father and his baby into a giant wood burning oven just for fun.

I have seen many children with shell-shock, shaking because their minds and bodies can’t comprehend the horrors they have experienced.

I have seen tanks run over women actively giving birth on the roads of Gaza.

I have watched oldest siblings, no more than 11, take on the responsibility of keeping their younger siblings safe. I cannot comprehend how incredibly stressful that must be.

A little 6yo girl was trapped for 2 weeks in a car surrounded by the dead bodies of her family as they rotted.

This is all done with American tax dollars while companies like McDonalds give free food to Israeli soldiers. We are quite literally paying for this. 20% of your work and hard earned money is paying for the genocide of innocent people in Palestine.

This is NOT a political issue. This is a human rights issue.

Pro-Palestine is Pro-Humanity.

[blughxreader]

Platonic Yandere!Batman x gn!Reader

Purge AU. Info on au. You receive your official government letter announcing a yandere's claim on you in tomorrow's Purge. Accompanying it are five crimson letters from the yanderes themselves. ~600 words

Dear [Name],

I want to take this first encounter to assuage your fears—you are in no danger.

The fear you must be feeling might be the most dreadful you’ve ever experienced, and I’ll forever regret it. While the monotonous bureaucracy of the Purge is taxing on everyone, it’s a necessary evil… Inside this letter, you’ll receive what brief explanation I can give you and, hopefully, comfort you in some capacity.

[Name], I’m your father, and this letter is my official and legal introduction. In the next 24 hours, I and your siblings will bring you home.

You don’t know this yet, but we met on a moonless evening many months ago. You were walking alone, trying to leave the emptying streets before Gotham’s evening crowd took hold of the city. I worried for you and decided to keep a close eye until you were home safely, but something about your demeanor kept my attention. How polite and unassuming, yet quick to navigate the streets you were. You drifted through the evening like a wayward spirit, eventually finding yourself in my heart and soul.

That chance encounter sent us spiraling down a destined path, one in which I never anticipated would lead to here. I never realized the grim darkness I had been living in until I experienced your light, and now, the day before our first meeting as father and child, the promise of eternal contentedness just beyond these 24 hours is almost too much to bear.

Your brothers and sisters are equally ecstatic. You’ll never be bored for a moment in your life moving forward, as the halls of our home are always thrum with the echoes of banter and excitement. I can’t promise it will be an easy life free from any sorrows, but your new family already loves you so, so dearly.

In time, I’m confident that you, too, will reflect on this event as the start of a better life.

However perfect your joining our family seems, I find myself asking how it came to this. How did I discover a soul as kind and lovely as yours? Despite all my failures and shortcomings, the world still crossed our paths and sent the merger of our lives into motion.

As a servant of justice, I’ve dedicated my life to protecting what is moral and just. I’ve spent decades refining my values and priorities, yet this has often left me at fragile crossroads between myself and my children.

I’m flawed. I’m imperfect. I don’t think I’ll ever be worthy of being your father. I need you to know these things before we meet, to save yourself from the inevitable misfortune that will strike us. Yet know this: there is not a force in this world that will keep me from you. I love you more than I love humanity, more than the Earth itself. I would defy the laws that govern the universe if it meant seeing you happy.

The world is dangerous and unpredictable. However inadequate I feel at protecting your light, I know you’re significantly more likely to fade from existence outside of my care.

To receive a crimson letter from the city a day before the Purge might be one of your darkest nightmares, and for that I’m sorry. With my heart, soul, and all my love for you, I promise to rectify the misery you and your biological family are experiencing. Please take comfort in the fact that you will be the most beloved and cherished person in the world.

I will give you everything. For your family’s sake, I hope they can rest easier with this knowledge.

Please remain put until we arrive.

See you soon.

Love,

Dad

Note... I love this self-hating old man. Damian's is finished and will be up soon! For more yandere batfam, visit my masterlist!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ticketmaster jacks us for billions so it can pocket millions

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Corruption is a system of concentrated gains and diffused costs: cheaters make a lot of money, and their victims each lose a little. The cheater has a much larger pool of money to spend on keeping the scam going, and the victims need to pay again to fight the cheater.

Actually, it's worse. The victim pays once when they are cheated, then, they pay a second time (in time and/or money) when they fight back against the cheater.

But in order to fight back effectively, the victims need to band together – it doesn't make sense for one victim to pony up to counter the cheater, because the cheater stole from a lot of people and can therefore spend far more than the victim lost and still come out ahead.

This is the third time the victim pays: they pay the "collective action" tax of locating other victims, agreeing to a common strategy for fighting back, and then coordinating with all those co-victims to keep the campaign up.

But actually, it's even worse. Because most corruption isn't just dishonest, it's incredibly wasteful. Corruption involves stealing ten dollars from you to make a dime for the cheater. The polluter who gives you cancer rather than cleaning up their industrial process costs you millions in medical bills – and maybe costs your family the lifelong trauma and expense of living with your death. They pocket an infinitesimal fraction of those costs. The rest is just wasted. They're setting your house on fire to spare themselves the cost of a match to light their cigar.

This is yet another way in which the deck is stacked in favor of corruption. A victim of corruption is placed in a condition of precarity and misery from which is it difficult to marshal a counteroffensive. The cheater, meanwhile, is made stronger and more comfortable by their corrupt activities. Immiserated victims must undertake the hard, ongoing work of acting together to be effective against the cheater. The cheater answers only to themself, avoiding the collective action costs that the victims pay every time they seek to act.

All of this is why we have governments. A government is (said to be) a democratically accountable way to meet the concentrated power of the corrupt with the concentrated power of the victims of corruption. Governments are many things, but they are especially a way of solving the collective action problem of enforcing the rules against cheaters. This is partially in service to justice – no one likes to be cheated, and a society of rampant and routine cheating is unstable and prone to collapse.

But it's also a matter of efficiency. While it makes a certain kind of selfish sense for the cheater to liquidate our dollar to make their penny, from a societal perspective, it's a catastrophe. Letting Wall Street slumlords corner regional markets in single family dwellings makes large amounts of money for their investors, but it costs those cities unimaginable amounts in public services as their housing stock decays, homelessness spikes, and schools and public services crumble for want of local taxes.

The paltry sums that Flint's creditors extracted by insisting on switching to a chlorinated water-supply that leeched lead out of the city's water infrastructure are crumbs compared to the vast, lifelong costs of giving an all the children in a city lead poisoning, to say nothing of the costs to the city as a city nor forever tainted by this unspeakably evil crime.

This is why inequality – and its handmaiden, monopoly – is so dangerous. The more concentrated private wealth becomes, the harder it is for the state to police, and the more likely it is that this private wealth will corrupt our officials. We see this all around us – for example, when Supreme Court justices receive lavish gifts from billionaires whom they later rule in favor of:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

Through the neoliberal era – the past forty years of billionaire-friendly Reaganomics – we've seen increasing concentration in wealth, coupled to increasing collusion between the wealthy and the government to protect the corrupt against the public. Think of the IRS's long decay, in which it turned a blind eye to increasingly blatant tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, while training its fire on working people who fudge a few bucks on their returns:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

Likewise, think of the governmental obsession with "welfare cheats," no matter what the cost to families who are kicked off food stamps and Medicaid:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/medicaid-enrollment/

All this in the midst of a corporate crime-wave that is not only unpunished, it's utterly unremarked-upon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

This emphasis on benefits cheating and indifference to corporate crime really highlights the drag that corruption places on a society's efficiency. Even if you believe that there's a lot of welfare fraud (there isn't!), the dollar in "undeserved" food stamps spent by a cheater costs society…a dollar. Meanwhile the dollar that a corporate criminal makes by skimping on workplace safety costs society thousands of dollars to care for the worker who is then maimed on the job.

This is very easy to see in the world of corporate environmental crime. The "social cost of carbon" measures the total cost of pollution: the injuries caused by marinating in fossil fuel extraction, processing and combustion byproducts; as well as the loss of life and property from climate events. These costs are blistering, so high that every MWh of renewable power we bring online saves us $100 in social carbon costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Governments that sleep on corporate crime are objectively governing badly. That's why the antitrust failures of every US presidential administration from Carter to Trump are so damning: they set the stage for later corruption that would not only be carried out on a larger scale than smaller firms could accomplish, but also for those large firms to corrupt the political process.

This is the Ticketmaster story. The superpredator that is today's Ticketmaster is the end-point of a series of ever-more corrupt mergers, waved through by every-more pliable presidential administrations. It was bad enough when Bush I allowed Ticketmaster to gobble up Ticketron in 1990. After all, the company had already proven itself to be a cesspit of corrupt, bullying activity.

The Ticketron acquisition kicked off a two-decade-long corporate crime-spree that produced a mountain of evidence proving Ticketmaster's nature as an inherently corrupt enterprise that acquired power for the purpose of abusing that power, at the expense of creative workers, the public, and the owners of venues:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

Despite this, the Obama administration waved through an acquisition that was obviously far more dangerous that the Ticketron caper: the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and the concert promoter Live Nation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment#History

After a decade and a half of vertical monopoly power – Ticketmaster/Live Nation controlling ticketing, promotion and venues – the company has grown from a dangerous octopus with its tentacles twined around the industry into a kraken that is strangling every kind of live event and everyone who earns a living from them. This has produced an ever-more obvious string of scandals, most notably the company's assault on Swifties:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

A combination of mounting public outrage (with Swifties at the vanguard) and the Biden administration's generational enthusiasm for smashing corporate power has led, at last, to a reckoning with the Ticketmaster kraken:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

Ticketmaster is a famously opaque organization. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on Chokepoint Capitalism, our book on monopoly and creative labor markets, we were able to speak on the record to insiders from every part of the industry, except live performance:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

As soon as we raised Ticketmaster/Live Nation with club owners and other events industry insiders, they'd go pale and quiet and tell us that they didn't feel comfortable staying on the record. TM/LN has a well-deserved mafia-style reputation for savage retaliation against snitches.

With the DOJ Antitrust Division chasing Ticketmaster through the courts, we're starting to get a rare, on-the-record glimpse of TM/LN's operations, as its internal documents find their pay into court records. In response Ticketmaster's spokesliars have embarked on an epic spin campaign, to "contextualize" these damning numbers and paint the company as a weak, low-margin business that has been unfairly set-upon by the bullies at the DOJ.

In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller offers a spectacular, must-read breakdown of these documents and the ensuing spin:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-ticketmaster-telling-the-truth

Stoller starts with Ticketmaster's insistence that it is barely profitable. Though this is true on paper, the numbers just don't add up. For one thing, anyone who's bought a ticket can see, printed on its face, TM's junk fees: "a 'service fee' without any obvious service [and] a 'convenience fee' that is anything but convenient."

Far more damning is a comparison between the price of a Ticketmaster ticket in the US vs the EU. The EU has legally mandated competitive ticketing, and the tickets there are far cheaper. A US ticket to see Taylor Swift will run you $2,600 – the same ticket costs $340 in the EU. As Stoller writes:

An American could fly to Paris, spend a few nights at a nice hotel, see a Taylor Swift concert, and fly back, for less than it costs to see that same show in the U.S.

How to make sense of this contradiction? How can Ticketmaster show such a low profit margin on its books but somehow end up costing event-goers such an absurd premium?

Start with the fact that Ticketmaster has three businesses, not just one. They sell tickets, but they also promote concerts (that is, front the money for personnel, travel and marketing), and they also own a bunch of the largest and most profitable venues in the country.

This allows them to play a shell-game that's very similar to (and possibly not actually different from) money-laundering, where money is shuffled between entities in order to shield it from creditors, suppliers or tax agents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed

But this presents a problem for Ticketmaster. They're a publicly traded company and their investors demand high returns. And unlike performers or venue owners, investors have power over Ticketmaster management. Keeping "margin per ticket" number as low as possible lets Ticketmaster minimize the revenue it has to share with the people who actually do the work and invest the capital in live performances. But for investors, they need to show another number, one that's as high as possible, to keep the investors happy.

That number is "Adjusted Operating Income" or AOI. While gross margins are the difference between the face value of a ticket and the sum remitted to the venue and the performer, AOI factors in all the other revenue TM/LN books from that ticket, like kickbacks. TM/LN's AOI is very healthy: it's 37% on tickets and 61% on promotions.

Those sums delight TM/LN's investors, and they express their joy through lavish executive compensation packages. CEO Michael Rapino is America's fifth-highest paid CEO, at $139m/year (that's eight times the Fortune 500 average). His sidekick Joe Berchtold is America's highest paid CFO, at $54m. The total AOI for TM/LN is $732m/year – and 19% of that is being paid to two of its execs.

But LN/TM has a third line of business: operating venues. The AOI for these venues is just 1.7%. If this were a normal, cutthroat business, you'd expect those same return-focused investors to insist on their handsomely compensated execs selling off that low-margin turkey. But nevertheless, TM/LN keeps those venues on its books.

When those execs talk to the public, they use the poor profit margins of ticketing and the poor AOI on venues to plead poverty: "how can we be a monopoly when we're barely scraping by?"

But when they talk to the investors who decide whether to pay them 800% of the S&P500 average, they are more forthcoming.

Keeping the margins low on tickets – and making up the money with kickbacks and other corrupt payments – means that potential rival ticketing firms can't afford to get into the business. Without the venue and promotion business, those rivals wouldn't be able to command kickbacks. They'd have to subsist on the rock-bottom margins that are competitive with Ticketmaster.

Likewise those venues: ownership of key venues lets Ticketmaster/Live Nation force out credible rivals in important markets, and keep new ones from emerging, because again, they'd have to make a living on that paltry 1.7% AOI (or the even lower profit margins!).

As Joe Berchtold, the highest-paid CFO in America, told an analyst:

I don't think Concerts AOI per fan is a logical way to look at it. I think if you look at how we've talked about our business, we've talked about our business across the multiple pieces. So you have to look at it, what's the concerts plus sponsorship plus ticketing AOI per fan.

Berchtold is paid roughly $26,000/hour. Those words take roughly 25 seconds to utter, so that's a $7.20 explanation, but it contains a wealth of information – it's basically the DoJ's case in a nutshell.

But Stoller points out a curious fact that isn't captured here. Remember when I told you that TM/LN's NOI is $732m/year? What I didn't mention is the company's gross revenue: $16.7 billion.

When TM/LN talks about how shitty their business is, and therefore they can't be a monopoly, this is the trump card. How could a company creaming off a mere $732 million off $16.7 billion in gross revenue be a monopolist with "pricing power"?

This is where understanding corruption helps clarify our understanding and cut through the bullshit. Corruption is vastly wasteful. In order to extract $732m from $16.7b, TM/LN has to engage in a lot of wasteful and corrupt activities. They have to bribe other key players in the system, spend vast fortunes on lobbying, and generally do a lot of unproductive things with their money.

This is concentrated gains and diffuse losses. In order to command the highest salary of any American CFO, Berchtold has to cook up and maintain this process. In order to earn his $139m/year, Rapino has to play mafia don and keep everyone is his supply chain sufficiently terrorized or sufficiently greased to maintain omerta.

These two men take home a fifth of Ticketmaster's net income because they possess a rare and valuable skill. They are able to obfuscate a corrupt arrangement, enrobing it in layers of performative complexity, until the average musician, concertgoer, or lawmaker, can't understand it. Any attempt to unravel it will induce a deadly, soporific confusion. The investment industry term for his is MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), the weaponization of complexity. A skilled MEGO artist can convince you that the pile of shit they're peddling is so large that there must be a pony under it somewhere.

Here's Stoller, de-MEGOfying the TM/LN story:

Live Nation has a giant capital intensive unprofitable division of putting on concerts, from which it skims for its real cash flow. But this leverage among different subsidiaries means that it has an incentive to push up the cost of concerts overall, not just for its own profit. This incentive operates in two different ways. One, since ticket fees are based on the price of a ticket, Live Nation seeks higher prices for tickets so it can move more cash to its Ticketmaster subsidiary. And two, since Live Nation itself gets rebates by overpaying for venues, it has the incentive to push up the cost of shows. No one can undercut Live Nation, as it’s a monopoly.

You might think that this is a lot of mental energy to expend on understanding live performances. If you're not trying to see Taylor Swift, does any of this matter?

It assuredly does. Understanding how Ticketmaster's shell-game works is critical to understanding the similar shell-games played by many other kinds of monopolists, who have wrapped their tentacles around all the other parts of our lives. As David Dayen and Lindsay Owens write for The American Prospect, the companies that avoided monopoly prosecution by ripping off suppliers have bled those suppliers dry, and now they're coming for their customers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/

From groceries to plane tickets, rent to cab rides, Amazon to Ticketmaster, we are living through the "Age of Recoupment," when the long con of lowering prices to secure monopolies flips enters it final stage: greedflating the shit out of customers, and using the monopolist's power over regulators to avoid consequences.

Today, everywhere consumers turn, whether they are shopping for groceries at the local Kroger or for plane tickets online, they are being gouged. Landlords are quietly utilizing new software to band together and raise rents. Uber has been accused of raising the price of rides when a customer’s phone battery is drained. Ticketmaster layers on additional fees as you move through the process of securing seats to your favorite artist’s upcoming show. Amazon’s secret pricing algorithm, code-named “Project Nessie,” was designed to identify products where it could raise prices, on the expectation that competitors would follow suit. Companies are forcing you into monthly subscriptions for a tube of toothpaste. Banks have crept up the price of credit, so customers who cannot afford price-gouging in their everyday transactions get a second round of price-gouging when they put purchases on credit. Expedia is using demographic and purchase history data to set hotel pricing for an audience of one: you.

When these companies end up in front of angry attorneys general, DOJ lawyers, or an FTC investigation, they'll use the Ticketmaster/Live Nation playbook to try and wriggle off the hook. They'll point to some barely-profitable (or money-losing) part of their business and say, "How could a monopolist possibly be running a business this shitty?"

If the DOJ makes its case against Ticketmaster, it will set a precedent, both in court and in policy circles, for understanding how a monopolist's corruption works. Monopolists aren't always businesses with gigantic margins. Like other criminals, their corruption can produce spectacular wealth and spectacular waste at the same time.

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/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

[nordickies]

What's your opinion on rusfin? And the time Finland spent in Russian empire

While I don't really vibe with "Russia/Soviet State" ships in general (RusAme, RusFra, RoChu, etc. are more of my thing), I don't really have strong feelings about RusFin one way or another. It's not quite as unbalanced or overused as some other Russia ships, I feel like? Plus, like I stated earlier, I kind of like the idea of Russia being disinterested in romance, at least in the traditional sense. I personally don't have an interest in exploring them as a serious couple in my writing; I just can't see them ever working out. They'd become too toxic at some point and it wouldn't be fun anymore. And I think they have enough to deal with each other even without romance getting involved

And I'll be honest: I have never focused on Russia's character, and I'm always a bit lost on what I'd like to do with him. How would I characterize him? I think all hws characters should be allowed to have nuance and let be individuals at the end of the day. So, I don't think Ivan is the manifestation of all the evil things in the world. To me, he's an extremely flawed person who is easy to blame and villainize. For many of the characters, he embodies the worst memories and moments of their lives. Surely this is the case for Finland, too, which makes their friendship extremely complicated.

I think Fin is quite naive at the end of the day and always tries to see the good in people. He values mutual trust more than anything, which can be an admirable trait but also makes him prone to ignoring warning signs. Fin, in his youth at least, was rather easily led, and he unsuspectingly followed others and their orders, counting on them to have his back no matter what. While his trustiness can backfire at times, with Russia, it might have been the right approach. Because right away, Fin managed to build trust with him and Ivan, being calm and respectful, expecting them to handle this new situation in a professional manner. Perhaps Ivan is used to people being terrified around him, giving his paranoia reason to doubt their loyalty. But he never had that problem with Finland, and they got along surprisingly well.

Historical context: When Finland was seized by the Russian Empire in 1809, the Grand Duchy got a pretty good deal in exchange for the Estates swearing loyalty to the Russian Tsar; Finland would remain an autonomous region in the Russian Empire, and it got to keep its Swedish constitution, laws, language, religion, and even the right to keep the taxes it collected for itself. Finns were also exempted from the Russian military. The reason why Finns got such a good deal came down to Tsar Alexander I wanting to avoid excessive fighting during the Napoleonic Wars (he only seized Finland to pressure the King of Sweden in the embargo against England to begin with). By making a good enough offer, the Finns, who had been getting tired of the Swedish monarchy's growing incompetence and turmoil, wouldn't fight back. Also, the Tsar was interested in westernizing his Empire, so Finland's western state structure was perfect for that. Finland's and Tsars' relationship was rather special in the Empire, and Finns were viewed as exceptionally loyal and cooperative by the state. Finns had an easier time remaining loyal to the Tsar due to their freedoms and autonomy status, which they sought to protect by subjecting. For example, Tsar Nicholas I abolished various autonomies and freedoms in his Empire during his reign; except in Finland. This was partly due to Finnish soldiers' voluntary participation in crushing the November Uprising in 1830. When the Tsar's officials criticized Finland's independent status in 1850, Nicholas had allegedly said: "Leave the Finns alone. Finland is my large Empire's only province that has not caused me a minute of worry or dismay during my reign." Nicholas was not the only Tsar who viewed Finland so positively. Most Tsars had a summer house in Finland, and many of them wrote about their time in Finland being some of the most serene they have ever felt. For example, in 1891, Tsar Alexander III shocked his court by deciding to travel through Finland via train instead of by boat. When the court opposed this idea, calling it unsafe, the Tsar called their worries nonsense, stating "I have never needed any guards in Finland."

During his time in the Empire, Finland tried his best to get along with Russia, never provoking him and more so trying to keep attention away from himself, just so he didn't accidentally upset him. Like the aforementioned references tell us, I think Ivan actually trusted Finny and felt comfortable giving him more responsibilities, which inevitably let Fin get closer to him. And while Fin was aware of Russia's flaws and his own privileged position, he surely was also grateful for the freedoms that he had been granted. As bad as it must have felt, he had more possibilities there than he did with Sweden.

Finland probably had his own place, and he was free to come and go as he pleased. He was allowed to join Russia's events and meetings, probably as some kind of assistant, which was crucial for Finland to learn how their job operated and all the responsibilities that came with it. Traveling around Europe from event to event also meant Finny could build his first diplomatic relations with other nations he had never even met before - and even put his own name out there to begin with. It was all new and exciting to him, which in return made him want to keep up the positive relationship

However, Russia's clear favoritism toward Finland would not go unnoticed, and I think that could create some unfair gossip at Finland's expense. People probably think Russia is never nice or does anything good without wanting to gain something from it, so Finland must have done something really special to get his position. Without a doubt, this would sour Finland's relationship with some other people around the house who wouldn't respect his "bootlicking" and respect for Ivan. In the worst case, Finland didn't even know such rumors were spreading about him initially, leading to confusing encounters. I doubt Russia had any intention of clearing such rumors. After all, he didn't suffer from such gossip himself; more than anything, he could use it to his advantage. Whenever he wanted to annoy his old enemy Sweden, all he had to do was wrap his arm around Finland or move him closer - Innocent enough for Fin to not consider it too weird but powerful enough to upset Swe, who couldn't do anything about it. I also think Ivan would try to manipulate Fin's thoughts and insecurities just like anyone else's, being one of the tactics to keep people dependent and loyal to him. He'd feed misinformed ideas to Finland about his past, painting Swe in a worse light than he actually was.

I can really only talk from Finland's point of view, but I doubt Finland himself would have had romantic feelings toward Ivan. I think he saw their relationship as purely beneficial, something to better his own status after living in someone else's shadow for centuries. But he still respected Ivan, at least in the beginning, and believed they could work it out as friends. But I could also see Finny being prepared to act passive to Ivan's potential advances - at least to a certain point, if it meant a more favorable position for himself. Finny can be more cunning than people give him credit for. So even if something had happened between them, I doubt it was genuine, at least on his part. But again, I really don't know if Ivan would even care or try anything.

But in the end, their mutual respect wouldn't last forever. There's no way Finland's and Russia's relationship didn't crumple during the Russification period from the 1890s onwards. Finny most likely lost a lot of his previous freedoms, and he wasn't going to accept it, becoming uncooperative and dishonest. Due to this, Ivan quickly lost his trust in Fin as well, treating him like everyone else around the house. Unfortunately for Ivan, by letting Finny get so close to him in the beginning, it had opened Finland the opportunity to learn all of his tricks. By having had so much freedom and experience in nationwork, Finny was ready to seek his independence as soon as possible, when the moment was just right.

I could always write more, but maybe this is a good overview of their situation during the Empire years specifically. The decades after Finland's independence have been their own rollercoaster entirely. Also, I think personifications' relations are way more complicated than drawing one-to-one comparisons between real-life emperors and people, but here the emperors' favoritism just somehow works for their characters? Anyway, I just really don't know where I'd like to take Russia's character, so I can only write from Finland's point of view here. You can come to your own conclusions and ideas, I suppose!

[residentfurry]

RESIDENT EVIL 2 TUMBLR

☂️parasolpharmacist8 follow

LMAO my boss really got into a shouting match with another colleague today, only good thing about this job tbh

🌈rocky-raccoon-is-gay follow

and these are the people we're trusting with our tax dollars? you could be saving the world how embarrassing

☂️parasolpharmacist8 follow

um? I'm literally just a paid intern what do you expect me to do lol

🌈 rocky-raccoon-is-gay follow

uh idk? your job? people like you are why the world hates umbrella 🙄

☂️ parasolpharmacist8 follow

I clean test tubes for a living.

🍑slUTtySally follow

cliCk mY linK fOr 😳 prETty pICs ->link

🌻residenttwallflower follow

truly unmatched website

35,098 notes

🐁birkinsworkins follow

I'm really going to fucking do it this time

74 notes

👮smexy-rookie follow

I'm soooo late to my job 😭 nothing bad will happen tho I'm sure

👮 smexy-rookie follow

outbreak

17,600 notes

🌈 rocky-raccoon-is-gay follow

LMFAO I checked back on that stupid umbrella employees blog and it's deactivated. serves you right bitch

38 notes

parasolpharmacist8-deactivated

don't feel. good

⭐olicepofficer follow

what the fuck

❌mister-ex follow

you didn't see shit

👮 smexy-rookie follow

what the fuck

❌ mister-ex follow

you're next

0 notes

🧠brainlicker follow

gonna be climbing on the ceiling above you. if you even care.

204 notes

🖤XxAshAngelxX follow

OMG I JUST got to see MCR in concert!!!! :p sqweeeee!!!!! if only one of my dad's bodyguards hadn't been blocking the view the whole time XD >-<

1045 notes

☁️cloudyday-nites follow

where is everyone lol my dash has been dead since like the start of October

🧟 olicepofficer follow

wraughrouhh

🧟 parasolpharmacist8 follow

waoughnhmomohm

🧟 rocky-raccoon-is-gay follow

wrrwaughh

🧟 cloudyday-nites follow

aautghmg

172,696 notes

🧒sherbearbirkins follow

mommy save me

0 notes

👮 smexy-rookie follow

guys I'm scared

💋red-dress-red-lipstick follow

don't worry

👮 smexy-rookie follow

okay ❤️ yay ❤️

14 notes

❌ mister-ex follow

can this stupid fucking twink stay still for one god damn moment

57 notes

🔥claireredfield follow

if youre a mom it's your job to take care of your kid FULL STOP. ESPECIALLY if they're sick. you don't just leave them to die

🌡️msbirkinsworkins follow

God you're so stupid. Don't you see there's bigger things at hand here

🔥 claireredfield follow

no I really dont.

6 notes

🌡️ msbirkinsworkins follow

you leave your child to suffer ONCE and everyone thinks you're the bad guy.

🔥 claireredfield follow

can you shut the fuck up please

🧒 sherbearbirkins follow

I dont. feel so goud mommy

7 notes

💋 red-dress-red-lipstick follow

just gonna borrow this

red-dress-red-lipstick-deactivated

oops lol I tripped

3 notes

🏖️ Umbrella-Official follow

WARNING

ALL STAFF SHOULD REPORT TO THE NEAREST ELEVATOR FOR EVACUATION. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

👮 smexy-rookie follow

KUNG

🔥 claireredfield follow

POW

🐭birkinisback follow

PENIS!

👮 smexy-rookie follow

uh oh

4 notes

💤kill-jill-bill follow

hey guys I just woke up did I miss anything

[the-owl-house-takes]

I absolutely hate the argument that Luz can be excused for her actions and people have no right to dislike her just because she’s neurodivergent. I struggled immensely in school both academically and socially in large to my own “neurodivergence”-can I just say I hate that word-but I was never so stupid as to think about bringing live animals and fireworks inside my school. The fact that Luz, the 14-year-old daughter of a veterinarian, saw a bunch of living, breathing animals and thought-‘yeah, I’m gonna use those as props! My book report is gonna be so cool! I surely can’t just use rubber snakes!’ Which probably why they were so damn aggressive! Because snakes only really bite and attack when they’re threatened, or stressed, or pissed off! Which really does not paint Luz as being a very caring or thoughtful person!

“But that’s the point! She needs to get better and she does!”-No she absolutely fucking does not. Instead of realizing that she can’t just run away and live in fantasy-land, the show again and again reaffirms that Luz can do no wrong, everybody else never should’ve felt angry about her reckless idiocy-because that’s what it is, idiocy-she gets to live out her little fantasy world and do whatever she wants. The way the show acts like the principal giving the summer camp pamphlet was some horrible evil thing, how could anyone do that? B I T CH LUZ IS FUCKING LUCKY that she weren’t expelled or arrested! She brought EXPLOSIVES WITH THE INTENT OF SETTING THEM OFF INSIDE A SCHOOL BUILDING. In an area of mass shoring fears and schools prohibiting anything can looks like or emulates(even if it is just a foam sword or something), Luz really should’ve just taken two seconds to think to at least leave the fireworks. Course at 14 I would think that a person who have the common sense for that to never be a thought.

And no, “neurodivergence” is not an excuse. It pains me when characters in media doing stupid shit and senseless(especially when it gets on the audience’s nerves) gets pinned on having autism or ADHD like it makes it okay, and that the character can’t be blamed or held accountable for it. Why do people hold those with these conditions to such low standards? When this happens, it feels like people are saying, “Yeah, this could’ve easily caused grievous bodily harm or death but they’ve got anxiety and autism, so we can’t be mad, they couldn’t possibly know better because they’re simply not on our level, they’re too stupid to understand!” Hell no. Stop giving excuses! The “I’m literally neurodivergent and a minor” attitude does not work in court!

And maybe if they understood this and actually challenged Luz on being very episodic on learning her lessons and that she did in fact run away to avoid consequences of her actions and reality won’t bend to her interests and she can’t treat everything like it’s a fanfiction instead of beating the dead horse with another dead horse about how Luz ““““helped”””” Belos when all she did was teach him one glyph and got used as bait by someone who she KNOWS tricked her. By that logic Lilith is just as responsible for Belos meeting the Collector as Luz is. Yeah she’s 14 but did it really have to stretch through the entirety of season 3?

Because season 3 is where I officially knew that Luz hadn’t learned a thing. The way the show frames the art teacher giving Luz the side eye like it’s wrong for her to distrust the kid who used the art supplies-that she probably paid out of pocket for-to infest the school with spiders and snakes and then would’ve blown it up if she hadn’t gotten sent to the principal’s office is so out of pocket. She has every right to view Luz with suspicion! People don’t tend to like others who make a mess in their areas with their stuff, shocker. I’ve already said a bit about the summer camp thing, but seriously, a summer camp that teaches teens about mortgages, how to manage a bank account and checkbook, do taxes, etc is literally the best thing Luz could’ve gotten out of that situation. She would’ve learned something many people complain wasn’t taught to them at a young age AND would’ve met people who she could easily befriended. Yeah, it’s boring and Luz probably would’ve checked out of the situation but it’s better than juvie! Also boring stuff is apart of life, it’s part of the way we can live the way we do because everything is easier said than done. Also with Camila, it’s a dumb retcon to have her not understand anime or Luz’s interests in Season 1 and 2 but a secret nerd who just got put down by the man in season 3. Like, Camila had to make a change with Luz, because 14 is not far from 18, and if Luz did do something stupid that ended up being a crime, she could very well be charged as an adult.

Then the whole ‘I just wanna be understood!’ Luz, honey, you’ve been surrounded by people who understand you and don’t get mad when you mess up, even if it’s spectacularly. Your girlfriend literally immediately told you she essentially wanted to spend the rest of her life by your side right after you got revealed as a liar which you promised you wouldn’t do anymore. Your best buds have always been on your side even when you’ve gone behind their backs. Your mom was sending you to that camp bc she had too, even though she originally believed it would expose you to kids with similar interests that could be befriended. And again, her hands were tied, because you were being reckless to the point of danger. But oh wait, it’s all okay now because you’re ‘understood’.

Not finding that happy balance where you can express yourself but not act like an idiot or endanger yourself and others, just some vague ‘understanding’ by an anonymous ‘them’. Do you mean everyone, all the time has to understand you the way Camila, Eda, King, Willow, Gus, Amity and Hunter do? Because that’s not how real life works.

And this isn’t a character hate-though I do hate the way Luz was finished-this is on the writers for not going through with the themes of Fantasy Vs. Reality they had going that could’ve taught Luz that balance and management; which in my personal opinion, would’ve been a better arc for a person with ADHD.

-

[omentranslates]

Trigun Maximum Chugai Grace Cafe Collaboration - I Translated the Website :3

Hi I saw someone on twt wanting this to be translated and that's literally all it takes to get me moving anymore so!

Anyways I translated all the food and drinks, I found the references they chose really cute except for the evil one lmao and I also included the unbelievably small print drink ingredients if you wanna try mixing them yourself!! 🫶

Also also, if you know how to use a proxy, there is actually some stuff here that overseas fans can get our hands on!! Under the cut to keep the dash clean!! Hope it helps!!!!!

Edit my dumbass forgot the original announcement link sjshsk IT’S HERE!!!

So, the menu

Going from left to right we've got

"Battle Sausage Spaghetti"

"As Many Salmon Sandwiches You Want"

"Love&Peace Donuts"

"Banana Sundae"

and on the bottom row

"The Perfect Meal Plate: Vash's Handmade Fried Rice and Salad" ((´༎ຶོω༎ຶོ`) o k )

"Particularly Wonderful Udon"

"Mille-feuille with Ceylon Tea" (i believe the first part specifies gateau mille-feuille but I went to episode one and checked the subs for what they had her say officially and they left the gateau off so I did too)

"Latte with a random character art"

Character Drinks!!!

The Bride Soda, which comes with a double-sided postcard of the sworn friends (very common nickname for Vash and Wolfwood in JP fandom and ig official uses it too)

So the soda is their proprietary thing, it doesn't say what flavor it is or if it has one, but the shotglasses come with a little bit of smoked oak syrup and black ceylon tea and you're meant to fill the rest of the glass with soda and drink it that way. And then the rest of the text is just information and disclaimers for customers that plan on taking the bottle home (I guess it breaks really easily that’s So. lmao).

Vash's Drink <3

strawberry syrup

carbonated water and lemon juice

yellow candied cherries (drained cherries) and ice

Wolfwood's Drink

crushed coffee jelly and cafe ice (ice made and flavored with concentrated coffee and fruit juice)

brewed iced coffee and gum syrup

blue curaçao syrup and carbonated water

experimental ampules filled with blue soda

the cigarette is full of light brown sugar you're meant to mix in before drinking

Knives's Drink

apple juice and round sliced apples

mint and ice (it looks like mint leaves but full disclosure they have blurred that kanji to all hell I have no idea)

Legato's Drink

blue curaçao syrup

grapefruit juice

carbonated water and a mint cherry

a lemon and ice

Collab Merch

(Overseas pay attention here!!!!!! ChugaiOnline is opening these to online orders so we can get them with a proxy, I'll leave their link at the end of this section!!!!!!)

I've also listed all the prices in yen here so you can convert them to your currency, and all of these are the prices including the listed Japanese sales tax. If you want to see the price without it, it’s just the other number on the image!

So they've got

Two way acrylic figure stands (the main stand comes with a ball chain, you can reference these on Amiami for what this kind of product looks like I'm prettyyyyy sure like they're called different but it looks like they go together the same way). Anyways this is a set of 6 and 1650 yen each, it looks like you get to choose which one you want but they don't have a deal listed for getting all of them.

Next to it are the buttons (also called can badges idk which one is more common over here), set of 12 (6 are regular and 6 are glittery variety). They are 550 yen per button AT RANDOM, THEY WILL GIVE YOU A RANDOM ONE, or a box with one of each all 12 for 6600 yen.

Below that is the polaroid collection, it's also a 12 piece set and you can get A RANDOM ONE, THEY DO NOT LET YOU PICK for 330 yen each or a box with all of them for 3960 yen.

The same exact deal with the plastic (like a vinyl material) postcards underneath, they're double-sided and come one for 660 yen each at random or the whole set for 7920 yen.

The calendar is for 2025 and is 1980 yen probably obvious but y'know

I would be so shocked if a proxy actually let you ship the Kuroneko sama cookie discs lmao but hey wtf they're 1080 yen.

The Bride soda is listed here because this is the same merch that will be sold in the shop but they specify elsewhere that it's not available for online order even in Japan you have to go to the cafe ;-;

Also this is just personal experience but a lot of proxies will not let you get like blind or random stuff like the buttons they don't let you pick which one, some of them will only let you get it if you're getting the whole box.

Annnnnnd online order special gifts!!

For every 3000 yen spent in merch (including tax) you will get a random postcard from this set!! There are 15 to collect, they are NOT divided into halves of the event, you can get any of them at any time or all at once!! However, you can't combine orders made at different times/by different people to get more and if they run out that's it. Altho fwiw I have never seen an event run out of these lol

The online order period will be from Friday, May 24th at 11 am to Sunday, June 16th at 11:59 pm (both JST) and items will begin to arrive (within Japan, proxies will have to handle our own shipping ofc) from August 2024 on a first ordered first shipped basis.

CHUGAIONLINE STORE (JAPAN)

Ok, this last bit is relevant to the in-person cafe experience so it's just for if you're curious about other cool things going on or you have a hobby of watching JP mercari like a hawk and wanna know what to expect!

Guests who reserve places at the cafe online will get copies of some of Nightow sensei's most prized sketch pages, they'll get 3 random ones! Like with the special gift postcards, there are a limited amount and this event will end when they're all gone.

And these are the coasters, guests will get one with every item they order off the food or drink menu at random (while supplies last)! The variety you can get is split between the former and latter halves of the event so there's something new to come back for even if you've already been once! (The first 12 days is on top and the last 12 days is on bottom)

They're also doing a wallscroll campaign!

They'll have these decorating the venue, and when the event is over a raffle will be held where the winners get to pick out a scroll of their choice!

OK I THINK THAT'S EVERYTHING RELEVANT HAPPY TRIGUN MANGA CAFE EVENT!!!!!

[underworld-park-offical]

KENNY: Aww shit.

TOLKIEN: What?

KENNY: I fucked up this water sort puzzle level.

TOLKIEN: I don’t…

TOLKIEN: I DON’T HAVE WATER SORT PUZZLE???

KENNY: Well.

KENNY: You do now.

TOLKIEN: Kenneth.

TOLKIEN: How much battery is left on my phone.

KENNY: Errrrrmmmmmm….

KENNY: …

TOLKIEN: Kenneth. Jason. McCormick.

TOLKIEN: If my battery is below 50% I am going to beat your ass.

KENNY: …

KENNY: …. 25%....

TOLKIEN: Right. That’s it. I’m beating your ass.

KENNY: WAITWAITWWAITWAIWTIATWW.

TOLKIEN: What.

KENNY: Please don’t beat my ass!

TOLKIEN: Give me one good reason to not to.

KENNY: UH- uhhhhhh….

KENNY: Craig!

TOLKIEN: What.

KENNY: He- He has a portable charger!

KENNY: 

CRAIG: Erm, Kenny, what the ACTUAL sigma, you fucking L rizz fanum tax.

CRAIG: Who the FUCK are you to spread these rumors about me?!

CRAIG: Literally canceling you on Tumblr rn.

CRAIG: Smh my head, this is SO not that that me espresso! 

TOLKIEN: Shut the fuck up, Craig…

CRAIG: Let me Mountain Dew it for ya. 

KENNY: Bro my ass is boutta to become grass in two minutes if you don’t give it to me!!!

CRAIG: Ok, and?

CRAIG: Skill issue.

KENNY: CRAIG, PLEASE!!!!

CRAIG: Erm, chat, do you see this loser?

KENNY: CRAAAAAAAAAIGGGGG!!!!

TOLKIEN: That’s it.

TOLKIEN: Kenny, c’mere.

KENNY: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

(WHACK BAM WHAM UUUUUWAAAAAHHHHHHHHH) 

CRAIG: Whhhh...

CRAIG: W--

CRAIG: Chat.

CRAIG: Chat what the flip.

CRAIG: What the actual sigma.

CRAIG: Th--

CRAIG: …

CRAIG: GUYS SHUT THE ACTUAL FREAK UP!!!!

CRAIG: THIS IS LIKE SO SUPER IMPORTANT THIS IS NOT SKIBIDI WHAT THE SIGMA.

CRAIG: IM GONNA ACTUALLY JEFF THE KILL MYSELF.

KENNY: OH WHERE WAS THIS ATTITUDE WHILE TOLKIEN JEFF THE KILLED ME???

TOLKIEN: Let’s be real, you brought that on yourself.

KENNY: No <3

TOLKIEN:

TOLKIEN: I’m surrounded by idiots.

STAN: WOULD IDIOTS BE TRYING TO ABDUCT YOU IN YOUR SLEEP????

TOLKIEN: Aaaand we woke up Shane Dawson.

TOLKIEN: Great.

TOLKIEN: Perfect.

TOLKIEN: Wonderful.

TOLKIEN: What next, the piss baby?

CRAIG: TOLKIEN THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO TALK ABOUT YOUR L RIZZ KAI CENAT ZERO GYATT!!

CRAIG: MY ARCH NEMESIS GREGORY_CUTIE_PIE_3RD.

CRAIG: HAS STOLEN MY ACCOUNT INFORMATION.

STAN: HE WORKS FOR THEM!!!

STAN:THE GOVERNMENT!!!! THE ALIENS!!! ALL OF THEM!!!

STAN: THE GAYS ARE THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL!!!

CRAIG: YEAH! THIS IS THE FAGS FAULT!

TOLKIEN: Oh my fucking goddd….

STAN: FAG? FEROCIOUS ANONYMOUS GOVERNMENT SPY!

STAN: IT’S CONFIRMED!!!

KYLE: Guys, it's Pride Month.

KYLE: Don’t do this right now.

CRAIG: EWWW!!!! FAGGOTRY!!!!

CARTMAN: Uhm? Excuse me? Your attitudes towards gay people is deeply offensive and completely unacceptable. How can you justify such bigotry and discrimination in this day and age? Everyone has the right to love and be loved without facing discrimination or hate from people like you. Your attitude perpetuates ignorance and division in our society. It's deeply disappointing to see such intolerance in this day and age. 

CARTMAN: I hope you realize the harm your beliefs cause and consider the importance of empathy and acceptance towards all individuals, regardless of sexual orientation.

TOLKIEN: Great, now you woke blue hair and pronouns.

CARTMAN: Wow, really? Is that the best you can do? Reduce my identity to my appearance and my pronouns? It's incredibly disrespectful and ignorant to dismiss who I am with such shallow labels. My hair and my pronouns are part of my identity, and they deserve respect. If you can't respect who I am, I am not interested in continuing this conversation with you.

CRAIG: This is literally why I hate fags. 

KYLE: Dude…

CRAIG: THE FAG IS POSTING UGLY ASS SELFIES ON MY BLOG!

CRAIG: TAINTING MY DAMN PAGE WITH HIS READING RAINBOW LITTLE WEE WEE!

CRAIG: BLUD LOOKS LIKE HE GOT A FUCKING GASTRIC BYPASS!

CRAIG: LIPOSUCTION HEADASS!!!

CRAIG: Guys I’m officially becoming demon-phobic.

CARTMAN: I'm genuinely taken aback by your racist remarks against demons. It's incredibly disrespectful and hurtful to demonkind, using them as a target for racism is not only absurd but also deeply insensitive. It's important to understand that such language perpetuates harmful stereotypes and can be hurtful to those who enjoy creative works involving demons. Please reconsider your words and think about the impact they can have on others.

CRAIG: Womp to the fucking womp.

CARTMAN: EXCUSE ME????

CRAIG: Don’t talk to me, I’m mewing rn.

KENNY: Lord have mercy.

KENNY: Please let my bitch of a sister fucking die.

KENNY: Dear god please. 

KENNY: If you love me, let me be an only child again.

TOLKIEN: Kenny what the fuck.

TOLKIEN: That’s your sister.

KENNY: And?

TOLKIEN: I doubt you’d actually let her die.

KENNY: Shit you right.

KENNY: She still owes me twenty dollars for that McDonalds I got her last week.

TOLKIEN: Okay, do you have anyone who can come get her outta there?

TOLKIEN: Not sure if it's a good idea to go out there with murderous, probably bloodthirsty demons running around.

KENNY: …

KENNY: …

KENNY: …

KENNY: …

KENNY: …

KENNY: …

KENNY: I know who to call.

SHITASS: snrrk nsnzznnzzzzzzzzzzz...,.

[  ♫ WE CAN GO GYATT FOR GYATT  ♫  ]

[  ♫ FUCK THAT, WE CAN GO RIZZ FOR RIZZ  ♫  ]

SHITASS: fhnfnhmmghfghg.

SHITASS: [yawn]

SHITASS: You’ve reached Captain Shitass, 

SHITASS: Unfortunately I cannot take your calls, but I’ll be available in the ‘morrow, no, before you ask, I don’t do balloons anymore.

SHITASS: Please leave a message after the be--

KENNY: Shut up, fecal failure, I’m not here to make you a birthday mascot. KENNY: We got some demon wranglin to do!

SHITASS: OH FUCKNUGGETS IS THE WAR COMIN???

KENNY: Don’t know, probably!

SHITASS: WHAT DO YOU MEAN PROBABLY????

SHITASS: ARE WE GOIN’ TO WAR OR NOT?

KENNY: Look babycakes, it's hard to guess if a big storm’s comin, but we ain’t takin’ no damn chances. KENNY: Besides, Karen still owes me McDonalds money.

SHITASS: Oh, this is over Donnie’s? Fuck yeah, I’m in. 

KENNY: Wait, really?

SHITASS: Uh, yeah!

SHITASS: I don’t fuck around when it comes to McDonalds.

SHITASS: Mcdonald’s is an important necessity to the American economic system. 

KENNY: Oh thank god. KENNY: After this, can we kill her? KENNY: Like actually?

SHITASS: Uh, yeah.

SHITASS: She’s a fucking cunt and I hate her.

KENNY: THANK GOD.

SHITASS: You wanna do it or should I?

KENNY: Oh I’d be fine with either, long as she dies. KENNY: Gets her outta my hair and me back to being an only child.  KENNY: Afterward, my life will be nothing but bliss. 

SHITASS: Aight bet.

SHITASS: By the way, where the fuck are you?

SHITASS: Usually you come over to my place with a loaded gun, pointing at me and forcing me to do a jester jig like a common peasant. 

KENNY: Haha. KENNY: Funny story.

SHITASS: Oh good robot lord, are you hiding in a bush to throw corn at me?

SHITASS: You’re not gonna tase my balls and yell “dance, peasant dance”?

SHITASS: You did that the LAST time you said you had somethin’ funny to tell me

SHITASS: Then you covered me in worms and rat shit as I mourned over my now broken balls.

KENNY: Nononono shawty it’s actually sososo funny.

SHITASS:Y’know, I can’t have children anymore, right?

SHITASS: So I feel like im inclined to not fucking believe you.

KENNY: Nononono It’s ACTUALLY funny.

SHITASS: I swear on robot jesus if you tase my ASSHOLE I will rip off YOUR balls!

KENNY: WOAHHH BUDDY! LET ME TELL MY STORY NO NEED TO MAKE IT GAY.

SHITASS: Kenneth aren’t we boyfriends?

KENNY: SHUT UPPPPP, Okay, so like.  KENNY: You know ouija boards, right? KENNY: And weed?

SHITASS: Of course I know what fucking weed is.

SHITASS: We rolled blunts with used tissues in the Walmart dumpster last week.

SHITASS: Mine tasted like blood and boogers.

KENNY: Oh yeahhhh! KENNY: Anyways. KENNY: We all got REALLY high one night, KENNY: And we decided to talk to a buncha ghosts, cuz that's what you do when you’re blitzed, ya know? KENNY: Then, Craig continued talkin’ to em after we all dipped cuz we didn’t wanna, y’know, DIE. KENNY: So now we’re all targets cuz his ass decided follower counts are more important than life.

SHITASS: Of course he did.

SHITASS: What a fucking idiot.

KENNY: RIGHT????

SHITASS: They know about the prophecy? Or like, about us? 

KENNY: Pssh, nah.

SHITASS: Thank god, let's keep it that way.

SHITASS: Anyone else with her?

KENNY: Craig’s sister I think.

SHITASS: Ew, there’s more than one??

KENNY: Un-fucking-fortunately.

KENNY: Kill ‘em, dung disaster, I love you.

SHITASS: Love you too, miserable cunt.

SHITASS: Welp,

SHITASS: We’re all gonna die.

(Edits made by @pissblanket)

[truth4ourfreedom]

HOW MUCH THE NRA AND THE 'EVIL' GUN LOBBY SPENDS EACH YEAR.

The popular narrative from prohibitionists is that the lack of legislative support for various gun control schemes is due to aggressive lobbying. The story goes that “blood money” from the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby efforts along with the firearm industry has a stranglehold on elected officials who are just pining to do “the right thing” but are being drowned out by all the cash.

How much money is actually spent by the NRA on lobbying? How does this compare to lobbying efforts from elsewhere?

Statista is a German online platform specializing in data gathering and visualization in German, English, Spanish, and French. The company provides statistics and survey results presented in charts and tables. Its main target groups are business customers, lecturers, and researchers, offering subscriptions to a database of companies in the same manner as Bloomberg L.P.

Statista’s data partners include the Federal Statistical Office, the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, the OECD, and the German Institute for Economic Research. Other partners include the Financial Times and Fortune. Financial Times Germany named them among the winners of the start-up competition, Enable to Start.

Major U.S. Political Lobbying

The big three in major U.S. political lobbying are Pharmaceuticals/Health Products ($357 million per year), Electronics Manufacturing ($180 million per year), and Insurance ($153 million per year.)

Major annual lobbying expenditures in the United States

www.statista.com/statistics/257364/top-lobbying-industries-in-the-us

Critical note: Statista felt compelled to add the following footnote to this chart:

The NRA and lobbying: One of the most famous lobbying organizations in the United States is the National Rifle Association (NRA), which lobbies lawmakers in favor of gun rights. However, despite this, it only spent around 2.2 million U.S. dollars on lobbying expenditures in 2020.

Apparently, they received so many inquiries as to why the NRA wasn’t included in that chart above they included the answer right underneath: the NRA spends a marginal fraction on lobbying compared to the actual big spenders.

NRA (bottom) compared to the actual big lobby efforts.

Gun Lobby Money:

The NRA typically spends a few million dollars per year on lobbying. From 1998-2022, the most the NRA spent on lobbying in a single year was just over $5 million. Most years it’s between 1.5-2.5 million.

www.statista.com/statistics/249398/lobbying-expenditures-of-the-national-rifle-associaction-in-the-united-states/

The National Shooting Sports Foundation also lobbies. In 2023, according to federal records, the NSSF spent the most in lobbying in its 60-year history: $5.4 million on federal lobbying, slightly more than the NRA’s all-time annual record amount.

Anti-Gun Lobbying:

Firearm prohibitionists claim there is some large grassroots movement to push for legislative restrictions. It turns out that many anti-gun organizations are astroturfing fronts funded as tax deductions by a small group of very wealthy donors. These “organizations” provide no services with all funding received as contributions.

As an example, “March for Our Lives” bills itself as a grassroots movement of young people working to restrict gun ownership under the guise of safety. In reality, this is a front group funded by a few dozen donors. According to public tax documents for March for Our Lives, the group is funded almost entirely by large tax-deductible donations in excess of $100,000 with less than 1% of all donations from people donating less than $5,000. Nearly 100% of “March for Our Lives” income is Contributions serving as a tax deduction for donors and no Program Services are offered. Contrast this to the NRA’s public tax records where nearly half of the income is from Program Services and about a third is from Contributions.

Lobby Money Breakdown

Pharmaceutical companies spend the most on lobbying, much more than any other industry or sector. Pharmaceutical companies spend more on lobbying than second and third place (Electronics Manufacturing and Insurance) combined. Novo Nordisk, the maker of the obesity drug Ozempic, has spent $10 million per year just to lobby for that one drug with their primary effort pushing for the passage of the proposed Treat and Reduce Obesity Act which would emphasize regular prescription by doctors to patients for Ozempic. That doesn't count the $100 million Novo Nordisk has spent in advertising this drug to the general public.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, appointed to the current Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, has declared that “obesity cannot be treated with exercise and good diet” and is pushing for more pharmaceutical interventions. This push is for drug interventions such as Ozempic. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Stanford had been a paid consultant for Novo Nordisk.

[evil-tax-officials]

[ID: A screenshot of a news article headline reading: Tax officials know the law and break the law in exchange for bonuses, which harms people’s human rights to pay taxes. /End ID] 

Original: 稅官為獎金知法犯法 傷害百姓的賦稅人權 

Source: http://www.worldpeoplenews.com/people-voice 

[thelreads]

Comparing this to the Twilight flashback arc, I think it's telling how it's the older people who keep saying war is bad. We couldn't see her age, but when rodacted was a kid hanging out before the first bombs fell, he was talking with an older lady who was selling croquettes and she was saying that she was part Ostanian and kids shouldn't want war.

We haven't gotten official stances from the Authens about the war, but Sigmund did "help rehabilitate wounded soldiers in Covenia." Plus, when Anya said he wanted world peace, he called Anya and all children treasures. Given that his work gave him a front row seat to the horrors of war, and he thinks children are treasures, I'd say he and Barbara are probably anti-war.

Now we have Mrs Anabel who is older than Martha, and even though Martha is already disillusioned with the war, it's still Mrs Anabel who is helping the Ostanian, not any of the younger people. We have no idea if Mrs Anabel has any connection to Ostanians other than that her daughter was killed by them--and yet she still stuck her neck out for an Ostanian soldier. It could have backfired really badly--what if Martha had decided to kill Westalians on sight, or what if her neighbors found out and killed her for harboring an Ostanian--but she still did it. I think it's the loss of her daughter that made Mrs. Anabel save Martha. Perhaps she saw Martha at the riverbank and thought of Martha's mother--perhaps she saw Martha at the riverbank and thought "what would have happened if someone came across my daughter like this?"

I don't think Endo is trying to say that all old people are against war or that we should always listen to old people, but rather that people who have life experience will probably think war is stupid. The Croquette Lady has family in Ostania so she knows that not all Ostanians are evil; the Authens saw how war affects soldiers, so they think of peaceful children as treasures; Mrs. Anabel lost her daughter and wanted to prevent another mother from feeling that pain. Even the Ladies Society: they were awful to the Town Hall girls, but I would be surprised if the women who set up a veterans memorial and lost their husbands to the war--the women who look up to Melissa who clearly regrets even being tangentially related to the war--would be pro-war. Donovan has likely never had a meaningful experience with anyone, let alone a Westalian. He never has, since he was a kid. And he was a rich sheltered boy who never interacted with anyone outside his tax bracket. So he doesn't have the experience to see why people want to stop war, even if it's inevitable.

I think Endo's idea was not to focus on age, but on maturity. Those people that are against the war are wise, they know that war is futile and horrible, and the easiest way to represent maturity is to make the character older. It is because of that we always see older people telling the younger ones to not strive for war, croquet lady to Babylight, Ms Anabel to Martha, Melinda to the town hall girls (because Melinda is older than them, she's in her 40s by my calculations)

Anya telling Sigmund that she wants peace brings him hot because finally, the younger generations are breaking free from this madness, and there's still hope.

[mariacallous]

accelerationist "leftists" on this site whenever uspol/elections is mentioned: genocide Joe has NEVER DONE ANYTHING EVER FOR ANYONE and ONLY EVER DONE BAD REGRESSIVE THINGS and he PERSONALLY gutted EVERY good thing I had going for me and then spit in my face. and ALL democrats ALSO have NEVER DONE ANYTHING EVER FOR ANYONE and BOTH PARTIES ARE IDENTICALLY THE SAME and we are ALREADY IN THE WORST FASCISM TO EVER FASC IT CAN'T GET WORSE THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS HARM REDUCTION IF THERE'S STILL HARM, and don't you dare post anything about any progress any democrats have ever made because it doesn't exist and if it did it's not important and helped no one, and don't you dare contradict me or post sources on anything good from the last four years, I'm just exercising my rights to criticize my officials with debunked disinfo and unhelpful bad faith generalizations and loudly tying moral personal worth to any meaningful participation in a rigged system, I can feel better about my tax-funded complicity and imperialist privilege if I pretend electoral abstinence absolves me and will bring the Revolution™, and I have to be seen having the correct performance or my friends will doxx me as a dirty liberal, I'm just a silly little guy, I'm just a dude, just giving my silly lil opinions, im not hurting anyone or changing anyone's mind, I'm just telling them they're horrible evil monsters for voting for the only viable non-fascist candidate and for prioritizing saving their neighbors and families over expecting 8+ decades of foreign policy to be fully reversed in under half a year, maybe trump wasn't that bad actually, we (you, not me, I'll wait till someone else gets it going) should just burn it all down anyway, there are totally other candidates if we just pray real hard, am i not allowed opinions???

[wonder-worker]

"Among their complaints [in 1460, the Yorkists] specifically blamed the earls of Wiltshire and Shrewsbury and Viscount Beaumont for ‘stirring’ the king [Henry VI] to hold a parliament at Coventry that would attaint them and for keeping them from the king’s presence and likely mercy, asserting that this was done against [the king's] will. To this they added the charge that these evil counselors were also tyrannizing other true men* without the king’s knowledge. Such claims of malfeasance obliquely raised the question of Henry’s fitness as a king, for how could he be deemed competent if such things happened without his knowledge and against his wishes? They also tied in rumors circulating somewhat earlier in the southern counties and likely to have originated in Calais that Henry was really ‘good and gracious Lord to the [Yorkists] since, it was alleged, he had not known of or assented to their attainders. On 11 June the king was compelled to issue a proclamation stating that they were indeed traitors and that assertions to the contrary were to be ignored." - Helen Maurer, "Margaret of Anjou: "Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England"

Three things that we can surmise from this:

We know where the "Henry was an innocent helpless king being controlled and manipulated by his Evil™ advisors" rhetoric came from**.

The Yorkists were deliberately trying to downplay Henry VI's actual role and involvement in politics and the Wars of the Roses. They cast him as a "statue of a king", blamed all royal policies and decisions on others*** (claiming that Henry wasn't even aware of them), and framed themselves as righteous and misunderstood counselors who remained loyal to the crown. We should keep this in mind when we look at chronicles' comments of Henry's alleged passivity and the so-called "role reversal" between him and Queen Margaret.

Henry VI's actual agency and involvement is nevertheless proven by his own actions. We know what he thought of the Yorkists, and we know he took the effort to publicly counter their claims through a proclamation of his own. That speaks louder than the politically motivated narrative of his enemies, don't you think?

*There was some truth to these criticisms. For example, Wiltshire (ie: one of the men named in the pamphlet) was reportedly involved in a horrible situation in June which included hangings and imprisonments for tax resistance in Newbury. The best propagandists always contain a degree of truth, etc. **I've seen some theories on why Margaret of Anjou wasn't mentioned in these pamphlets alongside the others even though she was clearly being vilified during that time as well, and honestly, I think those speculations are mostly unnecessary. Margaret was absent because it was regarded as very unseemly to target queens in such an officially public manner. We see a similar situation a decade later: Elizabeth Woodville was vilified and her whole family - popularly and administratively known as "the queen's kin" - was disparaged in Warwick and Clarence's pamphlets. This would have inevitably associated her with their official complaints far more than Margaret had been, but she was also not directly mentioned. It was simply not considered appropriate. ***This narrative was begun by the Duke of York & Warwick and was - demonstrably - already widespread by the end of 1460. When Edward IV came to power, there seems to have been a slight shift in how he spoke of Henry (he referred to Henry as their "great enemy and adversary"; his envoys were clearly willing to acknowledge Henry's role in Lancastrian resistance to Yorkist rule; etc), but he nevertheless continued the former narrative for the most part. I think this was because 1) it was already well-established and widespread by his father, and 2) downplaying Henry's authority would have served to emphasize Edward's own kingship, which was probably advantageous for a usurper whose deposed rival was still alive and out of reach. In some sense, the Lancastrians did the same thing with their own propaganda across the 1460s, which was clearly not as effective in terms of garnering support and is too long to get into right now, but was still very relevant when it came to emphasizing their own right to the throne while disparaging the Yorkists' claim.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

Arguably “Dubya” Bush was worse. He started the two forever wars leading to millions of deaths that continue to this day. Hey turned the entire Middle East and Muslim world against us. He, and his papa, shared secret intel with the Saudis and let them off the hook for their role in 9/11. He allowed the New Orleans area be wiped off the map and hired mercenaries to forcibly relocate the survivors across the country at gunpoint. Many families were split by this and some still haven’t been reunited.

He and his sidekick Darth Cheney plundered the economy and made billions for themselves by awarding contracts to Halliburton and other companies they were heavily invested in. He allowed the oil companies to price gouge to record levels and personally profited from it. He made us the laughingstock of the world and damaged relations with close allies. He illegally invaded Iraq which had no connection to 9/11. He allowed the creation of Al Qaeda in Iraq which had previously been prevented by Saddam Hussein. He caused the Iraqi civil war and caused the founding of ISIS and set the stage for the Syrian civil war. He labeled Iran and North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil which pushed them into pursuing nuclear weapons to protect themselves while funding our geo-political enemies.

His mismanagement caused our debt to soar to massive levels. He created an environment which rewarded businesses to outsource jobs to foreign nations. He allowed Karl Rove to bring GOP computer servers into the White House and started the massive misinformation war that Trump and the Republikkkans are using against us today. He allowed guns to flourish on the streets and black people to be treated like second class citizens. He ramped up deportations of individuals from countries he didn’t like. He created military crises (a la Putin) to bring the public to support him at election time and his party at midterms. He gave us the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. He created No Child Left Behind which was a war on public education whose goal was to give educational funding to shitty for profit charter schools and evangelical schools. He began the widespread practice of giving public dollars to non-governmental organizations, evangelical groups, to solve social problems with no oversight.

In fact he was directly responsible for bringing evangelicals into the Republikkkan camp by paying their pastors to preach pro-Republikkkan messages and anti-progressive messages. He started the widespread practice of privatized prisons which turned out horribly. His mismanagement caused the energy crisis, Enron anybody. His mismanagement Aldo allowed 9/11 to happen. They knew and Republikkkan insiders and officials took to flying private charters in the weeks before the attacks.

I could go on but I’m sure not too many are still reading this far down. Let’s conclude by saying without an idiot like W Bush the stage wouldn’t have been set for a bigger idiot like Trump. Trump could have been much worse but he was so inept and insane he gorged himself and squabbled with the press instead of giving the GOP oligarchs what they really wanted. Trump will be known for his massive tax cut for the wealthy and jamming neo-Nazi judges down our throats. Bush stole two elections, Trump mercifully wasn’t bright enough to steal a second.

[samkat10423]

Town Mayor

Right next door to Michael Moretti's house is this one - the home of the town mayor and his wife, the mob's attorney. My mayor was created by WebbyMom of the old Three Musketeers site. We were over on the Sims Daily forum and several members were creating sims for me to populate my cemeteries. Actually, I think they were supposed to be used to populate towns, but oh well. Anyway, I mentioned that I always used Sandy's mayor for my towns, because she had also created 'official' portraits that I could hang in public service buildings. So, Webby created Marshall Weston and as a bonus, his wife Trixie. Then she made some paintings of him - which are hanging in public buildings in this town.

So, the sim in the morning suit is Webby's sim - now named Costanzo. While the old due is the soon-to-be-dead Don Frederico. He originally came from Monte Vista and was the sim whose bio I used to create my mob family.

The blonde is Trixie, Costanzo's wife and the mob tax lawyer. The old lady on the end is Frederico's wife - also destined to live in the cemetery.

This is the 1st floor of their house.

While this is the 2nd. I also gave the 2 boys a dog - just because.

And this is Costanzo's older brother and the new head of the family - Don Salvatore Simcatti. As you can probably tell, this family has issues. Anyway, I used Nick Alto, Vita, and Holly for this family - then gave them their much wanted heir - a son. And because I'm nice, a mean-spirited cat who likes to scratch sims and an aggressive dog. Unbeknownst to Salvatore and Vita, their beloved son has no intention of following in the family footsteps. Which will be a huge disappointment for them, since they've already given up on their goody-two-shoes daughter. Salvatore is the emperor of evil in this town, while Vita is in the political career.