#theory/idea

[is-not-a-bell]

Sleepy King

The Justice League Dark caught wind of a cult trying to summon the Ghost King. A being with power so terrible and great, that all of the chaotic Infinite Realms feared him. A true tyrant. Long ago it took the effort of ghosts equal to gods to seal him away into a permeant slumber.

And now this cult wishes to wake him and bring him to the living realm. It was a race against the clock to find the ritual site and all members were called on board, magic or not. Even Constantine looked stressed.

They did find the site.

But it was too late, the ritual was completed. The entire inner circle of runes glowed before being swallowed in a column of green light. The air filled with static and a ringing that made Supergirl crumble to the ground.

The light dissipated, but there was no great figure or being of pure evil. Instead there was a boy, a teenager. He laid on the ground curled up in his sleep. He was a ghost no doubt, dressed in regal clothing.

Despite this when he stirred, everyone froze. It seemed the cold hard ground woke him up. He got up slowly and yawned, revealing his sharp fangs. Once sat up he opened his bleary eyes to look around. He looked confused and tired, really tired.

"Where am I?" He mumbled. "I was trying to get some sleep." Constantine internally screaming, latches onto that last sentence. He glances over to Batman. He caught that last part too. Batman approaches calmly and crouches down in front of the boy king. Hardening his resolve, Batman takes on a gentle tone.

"Hey kiddo, sorry we woke you. Lets get you back to bed yeah?" The boy nodded in agreement. He pulled himself to his feet before looking around in a circle. "Where did my blanket go?" He asked rather sadly. Batman is quick to shed his own cape and drape it over him. "You can borrow my cape until we get you a new one." He nodded again, pulling the black fabric around himself.

John quickly summoned a portal door, while Batman led the King through it. John threw looks around at everyone. Everyone could tell he was mouthing the words. 'Find me a fucking blanket now'

Running on the logic of getting the king away from Earth, away from graves and the undead, that could give him power. The portal led to the Watch Tower.

Batman took advantage of the King's bleary state to send a base wide alert for all noncritical members to evacuate immediately. With a priority that death adjacent members leave first. "The stars are pretty." Bruce looked at the boy staring out the window in wonder. He almost looked like a normal kid, almost.

"Yeah they are, it's pretty late so we should get you back to bed." He nodded, going along with Batman's gentle coaxing.

He takes the boy to an unused bedroom. Making sure the room isn't dusty and that lights are dimmed. He glances back to see about a dozen different leaguers all holding blankets, one thought to bring extra pillows. The bed was pretty barren with only a single pillow and a thin bedsheet. So Bruce took a thick duvet, one of the fluffier blankets and a second pillow from his team before shooing them away.

The boy ended up keeping his cape, mumbling how it was warm. He tucked the boy in, before quietly exiting the room and turning off the light. He was pretty sure the King fell back to sleep before he even reached the light switch.

After the door shut, he made direct eye contact with John. "Constantine." They needed to figure out what the hell was going on.

[waffleslashermaster]

You’re not sly, bud

[chloesimaginationthings]

My FNAF 3 night guard theory,,

[wally-lake]

*Markiplier voice* WAS THAT THE BITE OF 87!?!?!?

Dunno wanted to draw how Michael + his friends/the bullies reacted after the chomp.

what a day that must've been for those kids

[marisashinx]

How long have they've been sleeping?

[frownyalfred]

Dragon bruce wane that hoards his many children and kids that arnt even his. On an unrelated note clark is wondering why kon and Jon are nowhere to be seen. Who knows🤷🏽‍♀️

Okay. Dragon Bruce Wayne, but the public/media don’t think he inherited the dragon shifter genes from his dad (notable dragon) and the recessive ones from his mom’s side (Martha was a very strong carrier) because he’s so calm in public and doesn’t appear to hoard anything. He’s smooth and charming with media at events, he shakes hands, he’s not twitchy or abrasive like some stronger dragon families are, especially the purebred ones. The Wayne dragon shifters all tended to be prickly in public, even Thomas. Especially when Martha was out of sight too long.

And so, the media writes him off as a non-inheritor, no shifting or dragon genes expressed. Which is strange, considering his parentage. Even Martha had some dragon tendencies as a carrier.

But then. Bruce starts adopting kids, and everyone slowly realizes that this is a dragon. He is the sum of both family lines in the best and worst ways. He is adopting a HOARD of children. He is reasonable about everything except two things: his children, and his city. It turns out, those are the only two things he dragons-out about. But when he does? Holy shit.

Bruce Wayne isn’t a dragon who happens to be in Gotham. He is THE dragon of Gotham. Gotham is his hoard, and god protect you if you touch his kids. All 78 of them running around under his broad wings.

[mountainfucker69]

@ whoever is styling armand next season. for your consideration

(the lace is from this 17th century venetian needlepoint that i found by chance while looking for public domain patterns)

[bioethicists]

i genuinely have no animosity towards ppl who get upset abt not being able to read academic texts + i do think we need to expand the pathways/methods of being exposed to critical concepts so that "sit + read for 2 hours" is not the only option.

however, as someone dx with adhd + incapable of sitting still for even a minute (actually right at this moment i am writing this instead of reading the book sitting open in front of me), i do feel like a lot of ppl do not realize that not all readings are designed to be read like a novel.

as in, it's ok + normal + good to need to reread a paragraph several times, to only read part of a book, to have to research or reference words or concepts in order to grasp the reading, to skip over large chunks of text which are not relevant to your expertise, to continue reading despite not understanding a concept. this is something 'neurotypical' academics do frequently + many of these texts, especially contemporary ones, were designed with this in mind.

there are many ppl with accessibility needs that are not being met by academic texts at this time! many texts (in my humble opinion) are unnecessarily complex in order to show off or hide the fact that they have no idea what they're talking about.

i still feel like many of the kneejerk reactions on this site are based on the assumption that their experience reading academic texts should be similar to their experiences reading a nyt bestseller, rather than a process of thinking, analyzing, researching, processing, returning. some of u are telling yourself that any challenges u face while reading are a result of some internal fault u have + not an expected + precious part of the experience.

[egophiliac]

YOU MANIFESTED THE TWEEL CARDS CONGRATS

YOU'RE WELCOME EVERYBODY!

seriously though I was probably like. 60-80% thinking we'd get at least one tweel for chapter 10. but I was NOT expecting it so soon! both of 'em! in August! a shame we're not getting a Coral Sea event after all...but I guess I can be resigned to that and ALSO excited for getting shiny sparkly glowing(!!!!) mertwins along with Azul fighting his inner demons and going right for the eyes! AHHHH I CAN'T WAIT

(also heeeey I recognize that rowboat... 👀)

[yoylefeet]

so we all know the npc jax theory but

what if he didnt know

aftermath

(i might make this into a comic if this gets enough attention)

edit its finally here

[juniemunie]

more deltarune sansnomaly cuz its feeding the ideas a lot

bonus:

[clownowo]

Sisters :]

[spottedgardeneelstan]

i know that binghe being extremely jealous isn’t “normal” or “sane” but i’m honestly on his side here. like his concerns that sqq will be stolen from him are pretty rational. i really think that almost every scum villain character, in the event that sqq would want to papapa with them, would agree almost immediately. sqq is the xianxia equivalent of helen of troy.

[chloesimaginationthings]

The true meaning behind FNAF princess quest

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ideas Lying Around

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TOMORROW (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND on WEDNESDAY (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).

Friedman was a monster.

But.

He had a hell of a theory of change.

When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.

Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.

But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.

Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.

Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.

These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity

In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.

Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts - those, it will swamp and sink).

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/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh