#ic;rachel

[victeux]

"What's happened since I was last here?" Chaewon asks. It's been a few months since she was last within the kingdom's borders, much less since she had a chance to talk with Rachel. She offers a nearly imperceptible but still warm smile. "I don't necessarily mean politically. I'm more interested in what has filled your days specifically."

@phantasmaw

Rachel looks at Chaewon and smiles faintly. It had been a while since their last encounter, but it was always nice to see a friendly face while on one of her daily errands. As of now, that happened to be buying a few fruits from the marketplace.

"Oh.. You know, I'm not one for seeking out much beyond my duties. I've been mostly.. attending to the needs of the princess and the court," the satyr replied, continuing to wander her way through the market grounds but mostly keeping her attention on the other. "I have been spending some time in the gardens lately. Being home, Desiree prefers.. Staying in her room, most of the time. So I have some free time to go there, until we leave again.." A few more moments of Rachel pondering her own response would pass before she continued, "Ah, and you? Have you had adventures?"

[sansaisms]

Arya never seemed to fit, no more than he had … yet she could always make Jon smile. He would give anything to be with her now, to muss up her hair once more and watch her make a face, to hear her finish a sentence with him. — Jon Snow III, A Game of Thrones.

[latenighttalkinqwp]

“DREW. THOMAS.”

bro i went to bed early and this is what i miss😓😓 everyone pls send me clips PLEASE🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

[vriska-martell]

— Sansa & Rhaenyra Parallels 🐺🐉

A Game of Thrones - Sansa I / The Princess and the Queen / A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII / So Spoke Martin: Good Queen Alysanne and Rhaenyra

[astrotruther]

🎀 Astro Observations 🎀

♪ "Fame is a fickle food" - Emily Dickinson ♪

This is not to berate anyone, just to remind ourselves that ultimately fame is meaningless. What matters most is your originality, creativity and humility. When you walk with the most authentic expression of yourself, the world will notice; and when you're doing the things that make you happy, public attention/ clout will be a mere secondary thought.

🕊 Having multiple squares to Uranus or Neptune could mean losing fame or in general falling out with your fans/ general public. Jojo Siwa has Uranus square Sun, Neptune square Venus/ Mercury.

🕊 Asteroid Fama (408) having no aspect to any planet. Also, having harsh aspects to Saturn/ Neptune. E.g. Addison Rae has Neptune square Fama & Mercury.

🕊 Fama harsh aspects to Sun could indicate losing fame over not acknowledging mistakes/ not apologizing.

🕊 Venus harsh aspects (particularly square) to Pluto: their halo effect might come down & their real self could be exposed somehow. Pisces Venuses who have skeletons in their closet could experience the same. E.g. Camilla Cabello has both these placements. Jennifer Lopez also has Venus square Pluto.

🕊 Venus square Uranus/ Chiron. E.g. Nessa Barrett; Rachel Zegler also has Venus square Chiron as well as Mercury square Uranus. On that note, I feel like Rachel received hate not because of what she said but the weird/ erratic way she said it. Gal Gadot was right next to her in every interview and no one targeted her. This is also a Mercury square Uranus thing. These people are very intelligent and have a unique perspective. To be in the public eye, they have to work on their speaking mannerisms and try to be more poised.

🕊 Neptune square North Node could eventually choose to be away from the public eye or they're forced out. Some people with this placement are those who are labelled cringe on social media. E.g. Charli D'Amelio, Kendall Jenner.

🕊 Remember that astrology is all about energies and how people integrate them within their lives. People with the above mentioned aspects could re-emerge in the spotlight if they work on themselves and their craft to create a unique identity. It's all about finding your niche and slowly perfecting it. E.g. Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Bob Marley & Jung Kook all have Uranus square Neptune and are the G.O.A.T. within their fields.

🕊 Bella Poarch also has some amazing placements for creative talent and long-term fame: Aquarius Sun & Venus, Pisces Moon, Libra Mars, Capricorn Mercury. Also, Mercury & Venus both conjunct her Jupiter, Uranus & Neptune! She needs a comeback with proper marketing, an efficient team and bring something unique to the musical landscape; she could most definitely escape the tiktok influencer curse.

P.S. Ice Spice making mid af music while having a Scorpio Moon should be illegal!?

Click daily to help Palestinians🍉🙏🏽: https://arab.org/click-to-help/palestine/

[damianwaynedefenseattorney]

walk with me now…

shane hollander and ilya rozanov….

[snowdancedreams]

Sansan 🤍

Lady Sansa Stark, daughter of Winterfell and now Lady of Riverrun, years after the defeat of the others, started a family like her siblings. She and her husband, Sandor Clegane have only been married for a few years now and have one child so far, Catelyn, currently four years old, their firstborn and heir. Direwolves and hounds from the Clegane’s Keep run free, some of them have grown up with little Cat since they were pups.

i’m kinda getting into sansan. i still love other sansa ships, but this is growing on me.

[ultrameganicolaokay]

Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville #5 by Joanne Starer and Natacha Bustos. Variant covers by (1) Stjepan Šejić and (2) Brandt & Stein. Main cover (3) by Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson. Out in January 2024.

"Fire and Ice’s salon has gone up in flames, and Smallville doesn’t seem far behind it. The villains in residence grow restless for bedlam and a better payday than they’ve had access to since joining Fire’s “rehabilitation program,” and even the locals have got a strange, almost possessed gleam in their eyes these days…"

[halcyon-autumn]

I didn’t really get how Liandrin was trying to recruit Nynaeve for the Black Ajah (if being a shitty teacher turned people into Darkfriends, the White Tower would be screwed) until I saw how effectively Ryma teaches Nynaeve. Ryma is patient and uncritical, and she connects with Nynaeve over something that she knows matters to her. She uses examples that she knows Nynaeve is familiar with, and she gets Nynaeve to channel pretty quickly (the channeling is uncontrolled but at least Nynaeve can embrace the source). Liandrin, meanwhile, just tried to piss Nynaeve off and praised her when she channeled in rage. Given how effective Ryma’s method was, I can only assume that Liandrin’s terrible approach was meant to make Nynaeve’s control issues and mental block WORSE.

If Nynaeve is angrier and less in control, if she NEEDS anger to channel - she’s more likely to end up isolated. And since the other teachers don’t subscribe to the “make her furious to get her to attack me with the Power” school of teaching, they won’t be able to get her to channel - ONLY Liandrin will. Nynaeve would be lonely and reliant on Liandrin, and even more bitter with the White Tower that keeps failing her - which would make it easier for her to eventually be recruited to the black ajah (or at least Liandrin thinks this is what would happen; Nynaeve would never).

Anyway Sheriam is bad at her job and never should have let Liandrin near a Novice or Accepted.

[thelesbianthespianposts]

every straight white YA “forbidden romance” wants what they have

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Union pensions are funding private equity attacks on workers

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

If end-stage capitalism has a motto, it's this: "Stop hitting yourself." The great failure of "voting with your wallet" is that you're casting ballots in a one party system (The Capitalism Party), and the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state would bill the families of executed dissidents for the ammunition used to execute their loved ones:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-the-Chinese-government-makes-the-families-of-executed-people-pay-for-the-cost-of-bullets

In end-stage capitalism, the dollars we spend to feed ourselves are used to capture the food supply and corrupt our political process:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And the dollars we save for retirement are flushed into the stock market casino, a game that is rigged against us, where we are always the suckers at the table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Everywhere and always, we are financing our own destruction. It's quite a Mr Gotcha moment:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Now, anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We are living through a broad, multi-front counter-revolution to Reaganomics and neoliberal Democratic Party sellouts. The FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division are dragging Big Tech and Big Meat and Big Publishing into court. We're seeing bans on noncompete clauses, and high-profile government enforcers are publicly pledging never to work for corporate law-firms when they quit public service:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/09/nein-nein/#everything-is-miscellaneous

And of course, there's the reinvigoration of the labor movement! Hot Labor Summer is now Perpetual Labor September, with 75,000 Kaiser workers walking out alongside the UAW, SAG-AFTRA and 2,350 other groups of workers picketing, striking or protesting:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

But capitalism still gets a lick in. Union pension plans are some of the most important investors in private equity funds. Your union pension dollars are probably funding the union-busting, child-labor-employing, civilization-destroying Gordon Gecko LARPers who are also evicting you from the rental they bought and turned into a slum, and will then murder you in a hospice that they bought and turned into a slaughterhouse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Writing for The American Prospect, Rachel Phua rounds up the past, present and future of union pension funds backing private equity monsters:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-10-04-workers-funding-misery-private-equity-pension-funds/

Private equity and hedge funds have destroyed 1.3 million US jobs:

https://united4respect.org/press-release/people-who-work-at-walmart-sears-amazon-formerly-toys-r-us-more-join-forces-together-as-united-for-respect-2-2-2-2-5-3/

They buy companies and then illegally staff them with children:

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1

They lobby against the minimum wage:

https://pestakeholder.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Insire-Brands-memo-on-15-wage.pdf

They illegally retaliate against workers seeking to unionize their jobsite:

https://www.hoteldive.com/news/dc-hotel-workers-enlist-us-representatives-to-fight-sofitel-union-busting/650396/

And they couldn't do it without union pension funds. Public service union pensions have invested $650 million with PE funds. In 2001, the share of public union pensions invested in PE was 3.5%; today, it's 13%:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B0vv26VEFmwtfw5ur6dSDMY8NftvZKij/

Giant public union funds like CalPERS are planning massive increases in their contributions to PE:

https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/newsroom/calpers-news/2023/calpers-preliminary-investment-return-fiscal-year-2022-23

This results in some ghastly and ironic situations. Aramark used funds from a custodian's union to bid against that union's members for contracts, in an attempt to break the union and force the workers to take a paycut to $11/hour:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-20/pension-fund-gains-mean-worker-pain-as-aramark-cuts-pay

Blackstone's investors include the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). The PE ghouls who sucked Toys R Us dry were funded by Texas teachers.

Then there's KKR, one of the most rapacious predators of the PE world. Half of the investors in KKR's Global Infrastructure Investors IV fund are public sector pension funds. Those workers' money were spent to buy up Refresco (Arizona Iced Tea, Tropicana juices, etc), a transaction that immediately precipitated a huge spike in on-the-job accidents as KKR cut safety and increased tempo:

https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.inspection_detail?id=1675674.015

Petsmart is the poster-child for PE predation. The company uses TRAPs ("TrainingRepaymentAgreementProvision") clauses to recreate indentured servitude, forcing workers to pay thousands of dollars to quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Why would a Petsmart employee want to quit? Petsmart's PE owner is BC Partners, and under BC's management, workers have been forced to work impossible hours while overseeing cruel animal abuse, including starving sick animals to death rather than euthanizing them, and then being made to sneak them into dumpsters on the way home from work so Petsmart doesn't have to pay for cremation. 24 of BC Partners' backers are public pension funds, including CalSTRS and the NYC Employees' Retirement System:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

PE buyouts are immediately followed by layoffs. One in five PE acquisitions goes bankrupt. Unions should not be investing in PE. But the managers of these funds defend the practice, saying they "facilitate dialog" with the PE bosses on workers' behalf.

This isn't total nonsense. Once upon a time, public pension fund managers put pressure on investees to force them to divest from Apartheid South Africa and tobacco companies. Even today, public pensions have successfully applied leverage to get fund managers to drop Russian investments after the invasion of Ukraine. And public pensions pulled out of the private prison sector, tanking the valuation of some of the largest players.

But there's no evidence that this leverage is being applied to pensions' PE billions. It's not like PE is a great deal for these pensions. PE funds don't reliably outperform the market, especially after PE bosses' sky-high fees are clawed back:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3623820

Pension funds could match or beat their PE returns by sticking the money in a low-load Vanguard index tracker. What's more, PE is getting worse, pioneering new scams like inflating the value of companies after they buy and strip-mine them, even though there's no reason to think anyone would buy these hollow companies at the price that the PE companies assign to them for bookkeeping purposes:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bstqfcskz9o72ospzlds/opinion/why-does-private-equity-get-to-play-make-believe-with-prices

To inject a little verisimilitude into this obvious fantasy, PE companies sell their portfolio companies to themselves at inflated prices, in a patently fraudulent shell-game:

https://www.ft.com/content/646d00f4-af5d-4267-a436-54fb3bc1697b

What's more, PE funds aren't just bad bosses, they're also bad landlords. PE-backed funds have scooped up an appreciable fraction of America's housing stock, transforming good rentals into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#wall-street-slumlords

PE is really pioneering a literal cradle-to-grave immiseration strategy. First, they gouge you on your kids' birth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Then, they slash your wages and steal from your paycheck:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3465723

Then, they evict you from your home:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/05/vulture-capitalism/#distressed-assets

And then they murder you as part of a scam they're running on Medicare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

As the labor movement flexes its muscle, it needs to break this connection. Workers should not be paying for the bullet that their bosses put through their skulls.

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/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[alemoncakelife]

“After I raise my armies, and kill your traitor brother, I'm going to give you his head as well.”

“Or maybe he’ll give me yours.”

[extraordinary-heroes]

Phoenix Resurrection The Return Of Jean Grey #4 (Cover art by Leinil Francis Yu)

[lesbianmaxevans]

Thony & Jorge || 3.04 Agua, Fuego, Tierra, Viento

[violinist-rachel]

do you like cats

"I love cats!"

"I actually volunteer at my local animal shelter once a week so I get to see them fairly regularly! Truthfully, I also happen to be mildly allergic to them but..."

"Worth- *achoo!* it- *achoo!* -!!"

[sprinklersart]

Kazansky siblings ft. Mav (+ some cringe thoughts on family dynamics under the cut)

Tom is Alicia Florrick eldest sister coded. He must be perfect he must not be a burden if he causes any issues at all it will rock the boat and he does not want yo rock the boat. If he excels he will stand out and be appreciated. He must be good. He cannot be perfect (gay) so he must be ya know? His parents have been on the precipice of divorce for a decade by the time he’s 17 (he’s been rooting for them to get it over and done with since he was 11). They don’t need any of his shit to deal with too. Sarah on the other hand is younger sister coded. She has her own shit going on. Unlike ice she didn’t realize divorce was on the horizon until it was right in front of her and an already rebellious streak was exacerbated. She’s an emotions first consequences second kind of person and can be a little selfish although can you really blame her? Amy is the true youngest sister but she’s got that bonus baby ten years younger than her siblings thing happening. Ice and Sarah are super different but have a forged in fire closeness. Amy is just kinda vibing outside of them. She grew up with her parents divorce being a done deal by her 6th birthday and thus in a much chiller environment. Ice left huge expectations and Sarah left none so whatever Amy did was good enough. She feels a little left out and left behind sometimes but only when reminded that she’s not like actually an only child. At 34 Ice is a USNA grad like his father with an exceedingly impressive career and huge things to come but with no wife or girlfriend to show for it. At 31 Sarah is finding her footing after a bit of a wild 20s with a nursing degree and job. At 22 Amy is going to grad school for writing thinking how lucky she is Sarah turned her back on the navy and rotc back then. It’s made her parents much more accepting of a theater degree.