#Global Anti-aging Products

[aimarketresearch]

Anti-Ageing Products Market Size, Share, Trends, Global Demand, Growth and Opportunity Analysis

Anti-Ageing Products Market report is an important manuscript for every market enthusiast, policymaker, investor, and market player. The market research and analysis conducted in this report assists clients in forecasting the investment in an emerging market, growth of market share or success of a new product. In addition, this business report endows with a delegate overview of the market where it identifies industry trends, determines brand awareness, potency and insights and provides competitive intelligence. Report contains strong and weak points of the competitors and analysis of their strategies with respect to product and  industry. Anti-Ageing Products Market is the most established tool and hence used widely to generate market research report.

With the complete understanding of business environment that is best suitable for the requirements of the client, Anti-Ageing Products Market business report has been generated. Businesses can also achieve insights into profit growth and sustainability programs with this market report. Market drivers and market restraints explained in this report gives idea about the rise or fall in the consumer demand for the particular product depending on several factors. This market document contains all the company profiles of the major players and brands. Each of the topics is properly elaborated with the in-depth research and analysis for generating an absolute Anti-Ageing Products Market survey report.

The global anti-ageing products market was valued at USD 42.88 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 67.83 billion by 2029, registering a CAGR of 5.90% during the forecast period of 2022-2029. In addition to the market insights such as market value, growth rate, market segments, geographical coverage, market players, and market scenario, the market report curated by the Data Bridge Market Research team includes in-depth expert analysis, import/export analysis, pricing analysis, production consumption analysis, and consumer behavior.

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Anti-Ageing Products Key Benefits over Global Competitors:

The report provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Anti-Ageing Products Market trends, forecasts, and market size to determine new opportunities.

Porter’s Five Forces analysis highlights the potency of buyers and suppliers to enable stakeholders to make strategic business decisions and determine the level of competition in the industry.

Top impacting factors & major investment pockets are highlighted in the research.

The major countries in each region are analyzed and their revenue contribution is mentioned.

The market player positioning segment provides an understanding of the current position of the market players active in the Personal Care Ingredients

Table of Contents: Anti-Ageing Products Market

1 Introduction

2 Global Anti-Ageing Products Market Segmentation

3 Executive Summary

4 Premium Insight

5 Market Overview

6 Anti-Ageing Products Market, by Product Type

7 Anti-Ageing Products Market, by Modality

8 Anti-Ageing Products Market, by Type

9 Anti-Ageing Products Market, by Mode

10 Anti-Ageing Products Market, by End User

12 Anti-Ageing Products Market, by Geography

12 Anti-Ageing Products Market, Company Landscape

13 Swot Analysis

14 Company Profiles

Critical Insights Related to the Anti-Ageing Products Included in the Report:

Exclusive graphics and Illustrative Porter’s Five Forces analysis of some of the leading companies in this market

Value chain analysis of prominent players in the market

Current trends influencing the dynamics of this market across various geographies

Recent mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships

Revenue growth of this industry over the forecast period

Marketing strategy study and growth trends

Growth-driven factor analysis

Emerging recess segments and region-wise market

An empirical evaluation of the curve of this market

Ancient, Present, and Probable scope of the market from both prospect value and volume

Some of the major players operating in the anti-ageing products market are

Shiseido Company (Japan)

Johnson & Johnson Private Limited (India

Unilever (U.K.)

Amway (U.S.)

Procter & Gamble (U.S.)

L’Oréal S.A. (France)

Revlon Group (U.S.)

Beiersdorf AG (Germany)

Natura & CO (South America)

Conair Corporation (U.S.)

Yves Rocher (France)

Kao Corporation (Japan)

Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (U.S)

AVON PRODUCTS (U.K.)

OLAPLEX (U.S.)

NEOSTRATA COMPANY, INC. (U.S.)

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[thoughtlessarse]

Nestlé, the world’s largest consumer goods company, adds sugar and honey to infant milk and cereal products sold in many poorer countries, contrary to international guidelines aimed at preventing obesity and chronic diseases, a report has found. Campaigners from Public Eye, a Swiss investigative organisation, sent samples of the Swiss multinational’s baby-food products sold in Asia, Africa and Latin America to a Belgian laboratory for testing. The results, and examination of product packaging, revealed added sugar in the form of sucrose or honey in samples of Nido, a follow-up milk formula brand intended for use for infants aged one and above, and Cerelac, a cereal aimed at children aged between six months and two years. In Nestlé’s main European markets, including the UK, there is no added sugar in formulas for young children. While some cereals aimed at older toddlers contain added sugar, there is none in products targeted at babies between six months and one year. Laurent Gaberell, Public Eye’s agriculture and nutrition expert, said: “Nestlé must put an end to these dangerous double standards and stop adding sugar in all products for children under three years old, in every part of the world.” Obesity is increasingly a problem in low- and middle-income countries. In Africa, the number of overweight children under five has increased by nearly 23% since 2000, according to the World Health Organization. Globally, more than 1 billion people are living with obesity.

continue reading

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The unexpected upside of global monopoly capitalism

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TODAY (Apr 10) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Here's a silver lining to global monopoly capitalism: it means we're all fighting the same enemy, who is using the same tactics everywhere. The same coordination tools that allow corporations to extend their tendrils to every corner of the Earth allows regulators and labor organizers to coordinate their resistance.

That's a lesson Mercedes is learning. In 2023, Germany's Supply Chain Act went into effect, which bans large corporations with a German presence from using child labor, violating health and safety standards, and (critically) interfering with union organizers:

https://www.bafa.de/EN/Supply_Chain_Act/Overview/overview_node.html

Across the ocean, in the USA, Mercedes has a preference for building its cars in the American South, the so-called "right to work" states where US labor law is routinely flouted and unions are thin on the ground. As The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson writes, the only non-union Mercedes factories in the world are in the US:

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-04-08-american-workers-german-law-uaw-unions/

But American workers – especially southern workers – are on an organizing tear, unionizing their workplaces at a rate not seen in generations. Their unprecedented success is down to their commitment, solidarity and shrewd tactics – all buoyed by a refreshingly pro-worker NLRB, who have workers' backs in ways also not seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

Workers at Mercedes' factory in Vance, Alabama are trying to join the UAW, and Mercedes is playing dirty, using the tried-and-true union-busting tactics that have held workplace democracy at bay for decades. The UAW has lodged a complaint with the NLRB, naturally:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/alabama-mercedes-benz

But the UAW has also filed a complaint with BAFA, the German regulator in charge of the Supply Chain Act, seeking penalties against Mercedes-Benz Group AG:

https://uaw.org/uaw-files-charges-in-germany-against-mercedes-benz-companys-anti-union-campaign-against-u-s-autoworkers-violates-new-german-law-on-global-supply-chain-practices/

That's a huge deal, because the German Supply Chain Act goes hard. If Mercedes is convicted of union-busting in Alabama, its German parent-company faces a fine of 2% of its global total revenue, and will no longer be eligible to sell products to the German government. Chomp.

Now, the German Supply Chain Act is new, and this is the first petition filed by a non-German union with BAFA, so it's not a slam dunk. But supermajorities of Mercedes workers at the Alabama factory have signed UAW cards, and the election is going to happen in May or June. And the UAW – under new leadership, thanks to a revolution that overthrew the corrupt old guard – has its sights set on all the auto-makers in the American south.

As Meyerson writes, the south is America's onshore offshore, a regulatory haven where corporations pay minimal or no tax and are free to abuse their workers, pollute, and corrupt local governments with a free hand (no wonder American industry is flocking to these states). Meyerson: "The economic impact of unionizing the South, in other words, could almost be placed in the same category as reshoring work that had gone to China."

The German Supply Chain Act was passed with the help of Germany's powerful labor unions, in an act of solidarity with workers employed by German companies all over the world. This is that unexpected benefit to globalism: the fact that Mercedes has extrusions into both the American and German political spheres means that both American and German workers can collaborate to bring it to heel.

The same is true for antitrust regulators. The multinational corporations that are in regulators' crosshairs in the US, the EU, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea and beyond use the same playbook in every country. That's doubly true of Big Tech companies, who literally run the same code – embodying the same illegal practices – on servers in every country.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has led the pack on convening summits where antitrust enforcers from all over the world gather to compare notes and collaborate on enforcement strategies:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

And the CMA's Digital Markets Unit – which boasts the the largest tech staff of any competition regulator in the world – produces detailed market studies that turn out to be roadmaps for other territories' enforces to follow – like this mobile market study:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

Which was extensively referenced in the EU during the planning of the Digital Markets Act, and in the US Congress for similar legislation:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2710

It also helped enforcers in Japan:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And South Korea:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-considers-505-mln-fine-against-google-apple-over-app-market-practices-2023-10-06/

Just as Mercedes workers in Germany and the USA share a common enemy, allowing for coordinated action that takes advantage of vulnerable flanks wherever they are found, anti-monopoly enforcers are sharing notes, evidence, and tactics to strike at multinationals that are bigger than most countries – but not when those countries combine.

This is an unexpected upside to global monopolies: when we all share a common enemy, we've got endless opportunities for coordinated offenses and devastating pincer maneuvers.

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/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

[intuitive-revelations]

The near future in the Doctor Who universe sure gets dire doesn't it? Especially if Mad Jack / Roger ap Gwilliam is still part of history.

I thought I'd have a bit of fun listing things out, combining as many sources as possible. Turns out he fits in shockingly well with what we know. There's a lot missing here or cut out, and for obvious reasons it's very UK / Europe focused, but nonetheless:

[ID: Scene from The Christmas Invasion showing Harriet Jones on BBC News. The news ticker reads "PM HEALTH SCARE", "Unfit for duty?", and references a "SECRET GOVERNMENT MOLE" and a quote: "BLOOD ON [HER HANDS]".]

2006-2021 (obviously the past now, but still noting for the resulting temporal and political butterfly effect) - In the original timeline, Harriet Jones remains Prime Minister for 3 consecutive terms, presumably 15 years assuming no snap election was called, referred to as a 'golden age' [World War Three]. The Tenth Doctor deliberately changes history to cause her deposal [The Christmas Invasion], leading to numerous disastrous terms in the meantime, including those of Harold Saxon [The Sound of Drums et al.], Brian Green (who tried to appease the 456) [Children of Earth], Boris Johnson (an auton host of the Nestene Consciousness) [Rose (novelisation)], and Jo Patterson (responsible for deploying cloned Dalek defence drones in the UK's streets) [Revolution of the Daleks].

[ID: Scene from Revolution of the Daleks. A 'defence drone' Dalek is used to support anti-riot police in a test, dispersing protestors with mock tear gas.]

2010s-2030s - The European Union gradually integrates further, eventually becoming the European Zone / Eurozone, a global superpower which competes with the USA through the 21st century. The UK eventually forms part of the bloc [Trading Futures].

It's likely that Harriet Jones's deposal led to this and related events being delayed or erased, with Brexit (driven by, among others, one of Jones's successors in the new timeline) reducing european unity. Most notably, Ramón Salamander's rise to power occurs now not in the 2010s [The Enemy of the World], but in the 2030s [Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World]. There are other events that are seemingly delayed by ~20 years by changes to the timeline, including future events like the dictatorship of Mariah Learman [The Time of the Daleks, Trading Futures], and yet also possibly past events like the death of Queen Elizabeth II [Battlefield, The Longest Night et al.], which may suggest something else (eg. the Time War) may be responsible.

~2030 - During a time of rising global tensions [73 Yards], Ramón Salamander convinces a group of scientists in an underground shelter endurance experiment that nuclear war has broken out on the surface. They are convinced to generate artificial "natural" disasters to fight back against the enemy. Between this and ongoing climate change, several global food sources collapse as a result, including Canada and Ukraine's corn and flour production [The Enemy of the World].

2031 - Tensions culminate in the "Great Russian War". Despite posturing, not a single nuclear weapon is fired, at least by NATO [73 Yards]. This may be later considered World War III [Trading Futures].

~2032-2035 - Following the war, tensions rise again, now between the Eurozone and the USA [Trading Futures], possibly in reaction to actions (or lack thereof?) taken by NATO during the war [73 Yards]. Both send separate peacekeeping forces to conflict in North Africa. Meanwhile, Italy is engaged in civil war [Trading Futures].

[ID: Scene from The Enemy of the World, showing Ramón Salamander.]

Over the decade, Ramón Salamander rises in power in the World Zone Authority, using his patented "Sun Store" satellite technology to aid the growth of crops by controlling sunlight over agricultural regions. In the background, he murders and blackmails officials to place loyalists into powerful positions, with the goal of ruling over the World Zone Authority as a dictator. Salamander's treachery is later discovered and he disappears [The Enemy of the World].

2037 - 2042 - Several militia declare wars of Independence from the USA. Notably, Phoenix, Arizona is destroyed in a terrorist attack. While the country largely persists after the conflicts, some territories seem to successfully secede - with, for example, a Montana Republic seemingly being in existence in 2054 [Alien Bodies].

2038 - The World Zones Accord is signed. This is later considered to have reduced the United Nations to a 'joke' compared with the World Zone Authority [Alien Bodies]. Given the extensive power it gives to the WZA, this was likely originally part of Salamander's plan, but due to his disappearance he is not around to reap the rewards [The Enemy of the World].

2039 - A group of Mexican astronauts studying minerals on the Moon go missing [Kill the Moon].

~2030s - 2040s - The Earth begins to experience major climate change effects, including "appalling storm conditions" which harm agriculture [The Waters of Mars]. The ice caps melt and flood much of the Earth [K9] with nations like the Netherlands ending up entirely flooded [St Anthony's Fire]. Some regions experience corrosive acid rain [Cat's Cradle: War Head, Strange Loops]. One summer sees Britain experience a 22 week drought. At this time, the Eurozone closes its borders to millions of North African and Baltic Sea refugees [Hothouse]. This time period may be known as the "Oil Apocalypse" [The Waters of Mars].

[ID: Scene from K9 Episode 13: Aeolian. Big Ben stands in the middle of a colossal storm of wind and rain.]

With Earth's ecosystems collapsing [Davros], humanity begin to realise it's facing extinction [The Waters of Mars]. An artificial cooling agent is spread in the atmosphere to semi-successfully combat the effects, but leads to dramatic side-effects, including freezing some areas of the globe. This is known as the "Great Cataclysm" [K9].

2041 - A three-human team, including Adelaide Brooke, lands on Mars for the first time [The Waters of Mars]. However, with this accomplishment, and increasing turbulence on Earth, Humanity gradually loses interest in space exploration [Kill the Moon].

Before 2045 - Around this time, the UK falls into a dictatorship ruled by the "Director", head of a military council that has allegedly (secretly?) controlled the government since 2028 [Britain Protests]. It is possible that this Director was previously the "Minister of War" for previous governments [Before the Flood].

2045 - The World Zones Authority evolves into a World Government, with Nikita Bandranaik being elected President. The UK is not part of the organisation [This is 2065].

2046-2050s - The Director is overthrown [Down with the Director] and the rest of the government "collapses in shame" [73 Yards]. Some of the revolutionaries celebrate now being "masters of [their] own country" [Down with the Director]. Despite the hopes of the World Government for international integration, this nationalistic streak continues.

[ID: Scene from 73 Yards. Roger ap Gwilliam, with an Albion Party ribbon on his chest declares victory on BBC News, live from Kennington High in London. Headline reads "LANDSLIDE VICTORY FOR ALBION PARTY: Majority of 92 predicted. Roger ap Gwilliam declared Prime Minister."]

Roger ap Gwilliam is elected Prime Minister, with the far-right nationalistic Albion Party gaining a majority of 92 MPs [73 Yards]. While his government does take the step to officially join the World Government senate [Down with the Director], he seeks greater independence from other nations. One of his first actions is to expand the UK's nuclear arsenal, purchasing missiles from Pakistan and withdrawing from NATO. In his term, the world is brought to the brink of nuclear war [73 Yards], likely in the pre-2050s "Euro Wars" [The Time of the Daleks].

In this time, the "Department", a (private?) multinational security organisation is born, based primarily in the UK. They gain broad powers, which they use to control populations with propaganda and use of "CCPC"s: robotic law enforcement notorious for their surveillance and brutality. Despite its recent revolution, the country is rendered practically a police state [K9].

[ID: Scene from K9 Episode 1: Regeneration. CCPCs, hulking police robots, march down a dark alley.]

2049 - The Moon starts to dramatically gain mass, causing massive tides on the Earth, flooding entire cities. In a last ditch at survival, humanity plans to try and destroy the Moon using an array of nuclear bombs. Despite the people of Earth being offered the vote on what to do by turning off their lights, it appears the decision is made on a national level, with lights going off grid-by-grid. Nonetheless, the Moon is allowed to hatch, leaving behind a new less massive egg "moon" with minimal further destruction [Kill the Moon].

[ID: Scene from Kill the Moon. The Moon hatches in the background, as the TARDIS stands by the sea.]

Humanity's interest in space exploration returns [Kill the Moon], starting a new space race. Among these projects, Australia begins constucting a space elevator, Spain a project called "SpaceLink", while Germany and Russia each begin a series of new Moon missions. The Philippines are rumoured to be planning their own landing on Mars [The Waters of Mars].

~2050 - The UK Government (ap Gwilliam's?) is couped once more, by General Mariah Learman. With the King's permission, elections are suspended for at least a couple years, with her ruling over a "benevolent dictatorship". She is later abducted and forcibly mutated by the Daleks [The Time of the Daleks]. Despite the previous description, her promotion of Shakespeare in schools is remembered as the only good thing about her rule [Trading Futures]. (Note: As mentioned prior, it's likely that Learman's rule may have been delayed as Salamander's was. This is suggested by the mention of her in Trading Futures, set seemingly ~2030s or earlier, despite The Time of the Daleks taking place around the 2050s.)

~2050s - The Gravitron is built on the new Moon. This is used to artificially control the tides and weather [The Moonbase]. It likely also is intended to study and monitor the new Moon for future changes [Kill the Moon].

[ID: Scene from The Moonbase, giving an external shot of the base.]

2058 - 2059 - Bowie Base One is established: humanity's first colony on another planet and an international collaboration between the UK, USA, Russia, Germany, Turkey, South Korea, Lithuania, Australia, and Pakistan. One year later, it is mysteriously destroyed in a deliberately triggered nuclear explosion. In the original timeline, there were no survivors. However, after the interference of the Time Lord Victorious, the true story is eventually told on Earth. Regardless "a veil of darkness" sweeps over the planet over the next few years. [The Waters of Mars], as international tensions heat up once more... [Total Eclipse of the Heart].

[ID: Scene from The Waters of Mars, showing an internet news website. Various articles appear focused on the Bowie Base One incident, including "SURVIVORS STORY - BROOKE SAVED EARTH", "THE MYTHICAL DOCTOR", "BROOKE'S HEROIC ACTIONS SAVE EARTH", and "HOW THE COUPLE ESCAPED MARS". The feature image shows the two survivors: Yuri Kerenski and Mia Bennett.]

2060s - The "Great War" breaks out on Earth, involving every country on Earth. This is likely World War IV. Details are vague, but it ultimately ends in a ceasefire, when it's realised the conflict is risking Earth's habitability [Total Eclipse of the Heart].

[astrstqr]

☆˙˖ DESIRED REALITY !

things i script for my modern dr. lmk if you want more

⬭ racism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, islamophobia, anti semitism, misogyny, global warming, climate change, overconsumption, overpopulation, deforestation, habitat destruction etc., used to exist, however they currently do not and will never suffer from them again.

⬭ everyone is treated equal

⬭ no “pro-life”

⬭ people are allowed to have abortions no matter what age they are

⬭ women products are free such as pads/tampons and birth control

⬭ everyone is educated on problems happening around the world

⬭ health care is free

⬭ natives are seen as the founders of America

⬭ south, west, southeast, & central Asians are seen too + people know Asia is not just the east

⬭ having guns are illegal unless your job requires you to have one and there is no other way to get a gun

⬭ periods last a day and are very light

⬭ covid-19 doesn’t exist

⬭ plastic surgery is normalized , isnt look down on but people rarely gets it unless necessary

⬭ children of any age are not sexualized in any form or shape

⬭ in public bathrooms the toilet is always clean, people don't knock on the stall you are in, there is always toilet paper, always soap and a hand dryer

⬭ the Chinese government isn't so harsh & gives the citizens freedom

⬭ people of color’s cultures are RESPECTED, & not appropriated

⬭ foster care takes treats kids nicely

⬭ nobody harms animals and kill shelters are not a thing

⬭ all country leaders are good and honest people

⬭ human trafficking does not exist

⬭ the government never watches you through your phone

⬭ trump never ran for president

⬭ no world hungers

⬭ no one is homeless, and everyone has a home

⬭ world peace

⬭ women and men are equal

⬭ it’s easy for people to make money

⬭ all sickness has a cure

⬭ bullying does not exist

⬭ black history and pride month still exist

⬭ the government isn't greedy and take care of their people

⬭ every country has money, food, isnt poor, etc. etc.

⬭ no toxic parenting

⬭ the Sewol ferry never had an accident

⬭ school shooting doesn’t exist

⬭ minimum wage is $15-$20 an hour

⬭ crimes are punished with justice in mind

⬭ history is recorded correctly

⬭ people can start driving at 15

⬭ Korea is not conservative

⬭ Korea doesn’t have an unrealistic beauty standard

⬭ Korea never divided, it is united and free. But south of korea is like the city part and the north is like rural part

⬭ pollution does not exist

⬭ earth air is clean and easy to breathe no matter where you are

⬭ no acid rain, urban sprawl, ozone layer depletion

⬭ allergies do not exist

⬭ the world is more colorful and not dull looking

⬭ coral reef still has it color

⬭ no water in unwanted places

⬭ grass is always green

⬭ if the population increases the planet gets bigger to produce resources to accommodate the growing population. it doesnt effect the mass of the earth or the gravitational pull

⬭ global warming doesn't exist

⬭ humidity doesn't ruin hair

⬭ the library of alexandria was never destroyed

⬭ apple pencils work on iPhone

⬭ everything is wireless, and nothing needs a cord

⬭ line is always short in stores and restaurants

⬭ buildings and renovating don’t take longer than a wee

⬭ you can book a hotel with being 18 or older

⬭ traffic is always fine

⬭ netflix have more of a large selection of things and dont remove shows/add shows no one wants

⬭ spotify is free

⬭ the switch have a web browser

⬭ tv companies still make tv shows similar to the 2000s and early 2010s , just updated to keep up with the times

⬭ the sims franchise lore is linear throughout the series

the open world features from sims 3 is still present in sims 4

sims 4 is like an updated and better version of sims 3 keeping all the features from the sims 3 (still including everything that is already in sims 4)

non of the games have bugs

every expansion pack etc is just added to the game as an update and no one has to pay for it

⬭ cheap jewelry doesnt tarnish

⬭ washer/dryer cycles are 15 mins

⬭ in the show dancing dolls everyone was treated equally and was never fake to each other.

⬭ people actually do the theme for the met gala and it’s always unique

୨୧⠀˙⠀⠀˖⠀ world aesthetic & vibe

[iamthekaijuking]

Gigabash character overview: Gigaman

You probably saw this one coming since I’ve repeatedly emphasized the importance of Ultraman for inspiration when Passion Republic Games was making Gigabash, it only made sense they’d make their own Ultraman! With all the fun cheesiness that comes with it.

Gigaman is the combo heavy speedster of the roster, with quick flurries of punches and great combo potential. He also has a few aerial moves as well, making his anti-air game really good. Gigaman also has a block breaking punch that can stun opponents as well. His single ranged attack can bounce off of buildings, and ricochet several times. It helps that he deals reduced damage to buildings as well (destruction of public property isn’t a good image for a hero after all), meaning those buildings stay around longer, so use them while they’re still around!.

Something fun about his ultimate is that if you don’t hit any buildings when you use it you can hear a crowd of people cheering you on, so don’t hit public property if you want to keep your fans happy!

Design

In some ways there isn’t much to talk about. I mean Gigaman is an Ultraman expy. He does have a few specific references though.

One of his skins is named Multi-Type, a reference to Ultraman Tiga, and another skin is yet another reference to Ultraman Belial.

Gigaman also has a dad bod, and this is because he actually was retired for 8 years but suddenly came back in modern day, so he’s let himself go a bit and age is catching up to him. But I think he’s still got it. One of his skins depicts him in his prime.

Here’s some concept art. I think my favorite is the shirtless one with G plastered on his face, it’s so stupid looking.

Lore

Gigaman is very secretive over who he is so let’s cover what we do know before getting to the implied stuff.

Around the 80’s a teenage Gigaman would make his first appearance in the San'ya district of Tokyo to defend it from a kaiju. And for around 30 years, up until 2012, he would defend Japan against monsters. This also meant that Japan didn’t need to rely on the Global Titan Defense Initiative.

Gigaman made sure that people were safe… and that he entertained them while he was at it. Every single time he appeared he brought something new to the table; a new technique, catchphrase, or move. Every time he showed up it was exciting. While he definitely liked the attention, he primarily did it all to spread hope to people. Showing that underneath all his showmanship, Gigaman is truly a humble dude.

Of course, when the person defending your country from monsters is a 132 foot superhero who likes posing for the camera, it’s understandable that there might be fanaticism. Indeed, there was a time when Japan was overflowing with “Gigamania” and a movie called “Rise of Gigaman” was even in production during this period.

Eventually though Gigaman would retire in 2012. He was getting around middle age at that point, and he couldn’t keep fighting kaiju forever. But this didn’t last long, and in 2021 he would come out of retirement to help the world deal with the new rise in kaiju activity.

Few other things to note are that Gigaman’s power is tied to the Giga Core and he personally knows Dr. Otama Kazuo, and even knows the inner workings of Thundatross, meaning he was present for its development.

So… is Gigaman a human who can transform into a kaiju, or a humanoid kaiju who can speak and understand technology and culture? There is some implication that it might be the former. His lore files follow a reporter trying to uncover his identity and his findings led him to the San'ya district and eventually Kamikuzu Orphanage, which was packed with orphans at the start of the first kaiju crisis in the 70’s. Sadly only a few were ever actually selected to receive formal education. There was one kid named “Sho” though, who was a big Gigaman fan and skipped class whenever he appeared. It’s possible that Gigaman is this “Sho” but there’s no confirmation. Sho would probably be in his 50s by now, and presumably so is Gigaman. Also I’m wondering, did Dr. Otama grow up in the same orphanage?

Sadly there wasn’t much to talk about this time, but I think we can all appreciate Japan’s masked hero. He’s certainly the first to come to my mind when people say “Ultraman expy”!

[coffee-kitchen]

Is Coffee Healthy? Discover the Science-Backed Health Benefits of Coffee:

Coffee is a beloved beverage for millions around the world, but beyond its rich flavor and energizing effects, you might wonder: Is coffee actually healthy? The answer is a resounding yes. Numerous scientific studies have revealed that coffee offers a wide range of health benefits, making it more than just a tasty morning ritual. Let’s dive into the science-backed health benefits of coffee and discover why this popular drink is good for you.

Rich Source of Antioxidants Fighting Free Radicals: Coffee is packed with antioxidants, which play a crucial role in protecting your body from oxidative stress and free radical damage. Antioxidants help neutralize harmful molecules that can contribute to chronic diseases and aging. In fact, for many people, coffee is the largest source of antioxidants in their diet, surpassing even fruits and vegetables.

Enhances Brain Function Mental Sharpness: Caffeine, the primary active ingredient in coffee, is a well-known stimulant that can improve various aspects of brain function. It works by blocking adenosine, a neurotransmitter that promotes relaxation and sleepiness. As a result, caffeine enhances cognitive functions such as memory, mood, vigilance, and reaction times, helping you stay sharp and focused.

Boosts Physical Performance Exercise Efficiency: Coffee is often consumed by athletes and fitness enthusiasts before workouts, and for good reason. Caffeine increases adrenaline levels in the bloodstream, preparing your body for physical exertion. It also mobilizes fatty acids from fat tissues, making them available for energy. This leads to improved physical performance, endurance, and strength, making coffee an effective pre-workout drink.

Supports Heart Health Cardiovascular Protection: Moderate coffee consumption has been linked to a lower risk of heart disease and stroke. The antioxidants in coffee help reduce inflammation and protect the cardiovascular system. Additionally, regular coffee drinkers have been found to have a reduced risk of heart failure and other heart-related conditions, making coffee a heart-healthy choice when consumed in moderation.

Reduces the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Blood Sugar Control: Type 2 diabetes is a major health concern globally, but coffee may help reduce the risk. Research indicates that coffee drinkers have a significantly lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, thanks to the bioactive compounds in coffee that improve insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism. This protective effect is observed with both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee.

Protects Against Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Health Preservation: Coffee consumption has been associated with a reduced risk of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The caffeine and antioxidants in coffee help protect brain cells from damage and support the production of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which are crucial for maintaining brain health. Regular coffee consumption may lower the risk of developing these conditions by up to 65%.

Lowers the Risk of Certain Cancers Cancer Prevention: Coffee has been linked to a lower risk of several types of cancer, including liver and colorectal cancer. The antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties of coffee help protect cells from DNA damage, which can lead to cancer. Studies suggest that regular coffee drinkers may reduce their risk of liver cancer by up to 40% and colorectal cancer by 15%, highlighting coffee’s role in cancer prevention.

Promotes Longevity Living Longer: Given coffee’s protective effects against various chronic diseases, it’s no surprise that it’s also associated with increased longevity. Several studies have shown that coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death from all causes, particularly from heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers. By incorporating coffee into your daily routine, you may be supporting a longer, healthier life.

Improves Mental Health Mood Booster: Coffee isn’t just good for your body; it’s also beneficial for your mind. Regular coffee consumption has been linked to a lower risk of depression and may even reduce the risk of suicide. The caffeine in coffee can boost the production of mood-enhancing neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, helping to improve your mood and overall mental well-being.

Aids in Weight Management Metabolic Boost: Coffee can help with weight management by boosting your metabolism and increasing fat burning. Caffeine stimulates thermogenesis, the process by which your body generates heat and burns calories. This effect, combined with coffee’s ability to suppress appetite, makes it a useful tool for those looking to lose weight or maintain a healthy body weight. Conclusion So, is coffee healthy? The answer, supported by a wealth of scientific research, is a definite yes. Coffee offers a wide range of health benefits, from protecting your heart and brain to boosting your physical performance and mental well-being. While it’s important to consume coffee in moderation to avoid potential side effects like jitteriness or sleep disturbances, incorporating a daily cup or two into your routine can be a simple and enjoyable way to enhance your overall health.

[lakinza07]

Lakinza: Your Guide to an Effective Korean Skincare Routine

In the realm of skincare, the Korean Skincare Routine has garnered global acclaim for its effectiveness and thorough approach. Lakinza, a leading name in skincare, offers a comprehensive guide to mastering the Korean Skincare Routine, ensuring you achieve flawless, radiant skin. Whether you’re new to this routine or looking to refine your existing regimen, Lakinza provides the tools and knowledge needed for an optimal skincare experience.

The Fundamentals of the Korean Skincare Routine

The Korean Skincare Routine is celebrated for its multi-step approach, which prioritizes hydration, protection, and targeted treatment. Lakinza’s guide to the Korean Skincare Routine emphasizes the importance of each step in achieving and maintaining healthy skin. This routine involves a series of steps designed to cleanse, exfoliate, tone, and nourish, ensuring that your skin remains balanced and glowing.

Step-by-Step Process of the Lakinza Korean Skincare Routine

Lakinza’s Korean Skincare Routine involves several crucial steps:

Double Cleansing: Begin with Lakinza’s oil-based cleanser to remove makeup and impurities, followed by a water-based cleanser to thoroughly cleanse your skin. This step is essential in the Korean Skincare Routine to ensure that your skin is completely clean and prepped for further treatment.

Exfoliation: Exfoliation is a key component of the Korean Skincare Routine, and Lakinza provides gentle exfoliators that help to slough off dead skin cells. This step enhances the effectiveness of subsequent products and promotes a smoother, more radiant complexion.

Toning: Lakinza’s hydrating toners are formulated to balance your skin’s pH and provide an additional layer of hydration. Toning is a vital part of the Korean Skincare Routine, as it prepares your skin to better absorb the products that follow.

Essences and Serums: In the Korean Skincare Routine, essences and serums are used to deliver concentrated active ingredients directly to your skin. Lakinza offers a range of essences and serums designed to address specific concerns, such as brightening, anti-aging, and deep hydration.

Moisturizing: To lock in moisture and keep your skin hydrated throughout the day, Lakinza’s moisturizers are an integral part of the Korean Skincare Routine. Proper moisturizing helps maintain skin elasticity and radiance.

Sun Protection: The final step in the Korean Skincare Routine is sun protection. Lakinza’s sunscreens provide essential protection from harmful UV rays, safeguarding your skin from premature aging and sun damage.

Why Choose Lakinza’s Korean Skincare Routine?

Lakinza’s Korean Skincare Routine stands out due to its commitment to quality and innovation. Each product is meticulously formulated to deliver maximum benefits, ensuring that your skincare routine is both effective and enjoyable. By following Lakinza’s guide, you can achieve a radiant complexion and maintain long-term skin health.

Conclusion

Embrace the transformative power of the Korean Skincare Routine with Lakinza as your guide. By incorporating Lakinza’s expertly crafted products into your daily regimen, you can elevate your skincare routine to new heights, achieving the glowing, healthy skin you’ve always desired. Discover the perfect Korean Skincare Routine with Lakinza and enjoy the benefits of radiant, well-nourished skin.

[solarpunkbusiness]

Kaffe Bueno and the Upcycled Beauty Company are at the forefront of a growing movement that promises to beautify personal care with circular business models committed to utilizing raw materials to their highest potential.

Denmark-based Kaffe Bueno is focused on turning waste from one particular commodity into high-quality beauty materials: Coffee.

In 2019, Kaffe Bueno launched KAFFOIL — the world’s first upcycled, coffee-based ingredient for the personal-care market — which some in the industry have dubbed “the new argan oil.” Since then, the company has attracted major capital infusions from the Danish Innovation Fund, Paulig Group and global biorefinery leader Borregaard to scale operations.

The brand’s two primary ingredients, KAFFOIL and KAFFIBRE — a natural exfoliant developed to replace plastic microbeads — can now be found in the products of over 20 brands worldwide. KAFFOIL alone was used in Nivea’s Naturally Good face cream; in Sinatur Hotels’ RENLI, an in-house toiletry and skincare label made from the hotel’s spent coffee grounds; and Givaudan’s anti-aging oil, Koffee'Up.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Links Roundup

The interwebs had so many interesting things to read this week! Here’s a links roundup of a few. 

Hurricanes Becoming So Strong That New Category Needed, Study Says

Where else would we start but at The Guardian, with an article about how much bigger and more intense the biggest, most intense hurricanes (and other cyclones) are becoming. You might call it doom and gloom, but the climate–adjacent scientist in me finds some weird satisfaction in seeing that, yes, retaining extra energy within the climate system because we’ve overinsulated it by adding extra greenhouse gas to the atmosphere is having spectacular effects. Honestly, we need to get our act together about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero ASAP (40 years ago would have been better). 

Should More British Homes Be Built Using Straw?

The BBC website had an interesting article about adding straw–packed panels to the exteriors of buildings (generally as they’re being newly constructed, given the size constraints) to improve their insulation. The straw is packed so tight that it’s fire resistant but not so tight that it doesn’t trap air inside the stuffing, thus serving effectively as insulation, vastly reducing how much you need to heat or cool a building. At the moment, here in Germany, they use thick slabs of Styrofoam, which release horrendously toxic fumes if the building catches on fire. Straw sounds like an interesting, non–toxic, sustainable alternative, especially if you consider how much waste straw is generated every time crops like wheat, rye, and even oilseed rape (Canola) are harvested. The main catch is that production of the panels would need to be scaled up quickly enough to matter in our fight against further climate change by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings at a comfortable temperature. 

A US Engineer Had a Shocking Plan to Improve the Climate – Burn All Coal on Earth

This article, also on the BBC website, is about the opposite of trying to save energy, and it’s a quick history of our attitude toward anthropogenic global warming. Turns out, the sort of people who don’t want to admit it’s real today were the sort of people who used to think it would be great to burn all the fossil fuels to take the edge of the chillier aspects of climate. Bonkers. These were probably also the people who liked to think that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would totally boost plant growth, and therefore crop yields, on a major scale. Also bonkers. 

Can Slowing Down Save the Planet?

The New Yorker published an interesting review of the book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, in which the Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito lays out the case for “degrowth communism”. He argues that green capitalism won’t be enough to save the planet—and us. It just looks good from a certain vantage point right now because it pushes the environmental and social costs of resource extraction and good production into the Global South. This allows consumers in the Global North to remain blissfully ignorant of the damage they’re (we’re) doing with their (our) unsustainable lifestyles and obsession with continuous economic growth. 

How Craftivism Is Powering 'Gentle Protest' for Climate

Back to the BBC for a fun article about “craftivism”. I’d never thought about this before, but it’s actually a thing that has touched almost all of our lives, even if we’re all thumbs with a terrible sense of aesthetics. Who hasn’t walked past a street pole or statue encased in guerilla knitwear? Even I knitted a pussyhat to wear to an anti–Trump demo on inauguration day (although I didn’t knit a pink one because I would rather die than wear pink, except utterly ironically). And—although perhaps I’m revealing my age here—who hasn’t seen at least a few squares of an AIDS quilt? On the whole, I think it’s good that people put their crafting skills to good political use. Otherwise—and this may be an unpopular opinion—our need to continually craft is just an extension of our unsustainable overproduction and overconsumption of goods. Everyone I know who knits (including myself) has already made more sweaters, hats, scarves, socks, and baby blankets than they can wear out in a lifetime and yet we keep on knitting. 

A Big Idea for Small Farms: How to Link Agriculture, Nutrition and Public Health

NPR had a great article that fits with our current podcast episode on regenerative farming with Solarpunk Farms. A literally existential crisis that we’re currently failing to tackle is that of how we grow food. The whole agricultural system is messed up from top to bottom. Food’s too cheap (and many people aren’t paid enough to be able to pay the real price of food, which is a whole other enormous issue). Because of this, farmers are pissed off and dependent upon subsidies from the governments they’d increasingly like to overthrow. Meanwhile, they’re frantically farming so intensively to try to bring in enough income that they’re destroying what’s left of our natural world. Their farming practices are degrading soils and polluting our air and waterways with fertilizers and petrochemical pesticides, destroying adjacent ecosystems and driving numerous species of plants and animals (including insects and other key invertebrates) to extinction. Related to this, we’re eating too much of the wrong stuff (meat, highly processed foods) and not enough of the rights stuff (fruits, nuts, seeds, and vegetables). Enter the solution: nutrition incentive programs that make it possible for people with lower incomes to obtain fruits and vegetables from smaller, regenerative farms. It’s a win for public health, a win for fruit and vegetable farming, which isn’t subsidized the way corn, soy, and wheat farming is, and it’s a win for the small percentage of food producers fighting not to be swallowed up by the Big Food companies who’ve all but monopolized the production of the food we eat. 

Tractor Chaos, Neo-Nazis and a Flatlining Economy: Why Has Germany Lost the Plot?  

Having started at The Guardian, we’ll bring things full circle and end there with a look at the situation here in Germany. Lots of us are increasingly concerned about the rise of the far right and... perhaps still flying under a lot of people’s radar... that angry farmers are going to end up ushering in the Fourth Reich. The op–ed says it all, while trying to maintain a sense of humor about it. As with so much else in the news these days, it makes you want to scream that we have more important things to be doing right now—that matter for the survival of billions of people—than withdraw into the hermit crab shell of authoritarianism. Their easy answers and general denial of the problems that need solving will only make life even more miserable for most people and allow all our existential problems, like widening wealth inequality, environmental devastation, and increasingly catastrophic climate change, to escalate even further before we begin dealing with them. 

Sci_Burst

To end on a happier note, here’s a shout out about Sci_Burst, a fun podcast from Australia about “science, popular culture, and entertainment”. They even have an episode on solarpunk. If you’re all caught up with us (including with all the extras on our YouTube channel), our feelings won’t be hurt if you give them a listen. 😊

[risnabeaute]

༘˚⋆𐙚｡⋆𖦹.✧˚"Beauty Product Manufacturers and Eco-Friendly Cosmetics”༘˚⋆𐙚｡⋆𖦹.✧˚

Hi beautes! 👋🏻 🎀. I want to share one of my opinions and research from what I found that Beauty Product Manufacturers and Eco-Friendly Cosmetics” are really important. Skin irritation and allergic responses are less common with natural and oleochemical substances. Sustainable products are made from naturally occurring substances that humans have been utilizing for centuries: plants and animals. These ingredients have therapeutic qualities and are free of synthetic, poisonous chemicals and artificial colors. Take glycerine, an organic byproduct of palm oil. Cosmetics, medications, and soaps all employ the clear, non-toxic liquid. Glycerine retains moisture well since it is a humectant, which makes it a great moisturizer. By enhancing the body's hygroscopic properties, glycerine helps the skin to absorb and retain water. It can be put anywhere on the body because it doesn't cause irritation. It works well as an anti-aging component.

Because The average Asian or American is thought to use 100 kilos of plastic every year, with over half of the plastic generated going toward single-use disposable products. Typical suppliers of environmentally friendly cosmetics include: Natural oils, including avocado, coconut, and olive oils. Plants used in agriculture, such soybeans and corn. Environmentally friendly formulas are the foundation of eco-friendly cosmetics, which are then produced and packaged using eco-friendly procedures. Ingredients that are made from natural substances are used in the creation of these "green," sustainable cosmetics. Eco-friendly beauty products can be an excellent choice for people with sensitive skin since, in addition to being good for the environment, they are typically made of natural and organic ingredients.

Additionally, harsh chemicals are likely to be absent from eco-friendly cosmetics, which lowers your chance of skin damage and flare-ups. Harsh chemicals are also probably not included in eco-friendly cosmetics, which lowers our chance of skin damage and flare-ups. Consumers nowadays are more concerned with social and environmental responsibilities and have a developing global consciousness. The softer environmental impact of sustainable products is one of their key advantages. There are new reports every week about massive garbage floating in the water or risky carbon outputs. Conventional cosmetics include several dangerous substances called petrochemicals that harm both our bodies and the environment. Customers seek organic, low-polluting items as we grow more conscious of the environment. How are we gonna make the world change? so here’s the tip that you should know:

1. Recognizing Ecological Natural beauty

The following are a few of the most well-known, eco-friendly, sustainable cosmetic brands and their offerings: Native:

-Native uses natural, organic components to make its deodorants. Native's brand is based on "easy-to-understand, nontoxic ingredients." Herbs like castor bean oil, coconut oil, and shea butter are generated from oleochemicals.

-Burt's Bees: From modest beeswax candles to a massive empire of lip products, Burt's Bees has emerged as a global pioneer in sustainability. The company uses natural and organic components in its cosmetics and personal care products, and it follows a "no-waste" manufacturing philosophy. They use beeswax, herbs, and botanical oils to create their well-known goods.

- Blissoma: Specializing in skincare, Blissoma provides a vast selection of green skincare products divided by skin type and need. Their preservative-free cosmetics use natural components such as fruit enzymes, Vitamin C, organic herbs, and cereals.

The job Manufacturers of cosmetics have a rare chance to emphasize corporate responsibility by focusing on green cosmetics. Going above and beyond with sustainable sourcing or packaging can have a big influence, in addition to the good effects green marketing can have on a company's image. A business assumes responsibility for its effects on economies and world health when it ramps up its sustainability initiatives. A company can earn authority and respect from suppliers, customers, and other distribution chain participants by assuming corporate responsibility for its manufacturing.

2. The Effect of Modern Beauty Products on the Environment

The Intensity of Resources and Waste Production: - Sourcing of Ingredients: Resource-intensive procedures are a major part of the manufacturing of traditional cosmetics. One such component that contributes to habitat loss and deforestation is palm oil, which is widely used in cosmetics.Packaging Waste: Take into consideration the chic plastic cases that hold your go-to lipstick or moisturizer. A major contributing factor to the worldwide plastic pollution problem is that these containers frequently wind up in landfills or the ocean.

Toxic ingredients included in many traditional cosmetic products, including parabens, phthalates, and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, contribute to chemical pollution and water contamination. In addition to endangering human health, these pollutants contaminate rivers. Ecosystems that are aquatic are impacted by the chemicals we rinse out of our hair or wash off our makeup, which ends up in rivers and oceans. - Tiny plastics: Small plastic particles called microplastics are present in toothpaste, exfoliating scrubs, and some shampoos. These particles are non-biodegradable. Microplastics can harm marine life and possibly make their way into our food chain when they amass in water bodies. Part 3: Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change - Distribution and Transportation: Cosmetics are produced all over the world and distributed extensively. Storage of some goods (such serums) in a refrigerator also adds to the energy usage.

For example: Parabens. - Toxic Substance: Preservatives including methylparaben, ethylparaben, and propylparaben are frequently found in skincare and makeup products. On the other hand, they may increase the risk of breast cancer and cause hormone imbalance. - Alternative: Look for natural preservatives like vitamin E, rosemary oil, or grapefruit seed extract, or choose items that are labeled "paraben-free".

3. Producing Your Own Eco-Friendly Items

Do-it-yourself Beauty Recipes: - For a calming and purifying effect, mix oatmeal, honey, and chamomile tea to make a mild face cleanser. For a luscious and nourishing treat, combine shea and cocoa butter with your preferred essential oils to create a moisturizing body butter. Shake some lemon or orange peels into some apple cider vinegar to create a revitalizing and pleasant citrus hair rinse. Sustainable Packaging Options: To cut down on plastic waste, put your homemade beauty products in reusable glass jars or metal tins. Take into consideration giving empty containers from completed commercial cosmetic items a new lease on life.

Be healthy always, love 🎀🪞🩰🦢🕯️

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eliza Mondegreen

Published: Mar 7, 2024

How does a professional organisation respond when a scandal breaks? Some issue smooth denials, leaving not so much as a seam for critics to pick at. Some finger bad apples. Others dare to admit faults and strive for transparency. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) took a rather different tack, issuing a bizarre statement this week in response to the publication of files exposing malpractice at the organisation.

WPATH President Dr Marci Bowers begins by marking the territory (“We are the professionals who best know…”) and appealing to authority (“widely endorsed by major medical organizations around the world”), before moving on to distort the conflict (the WPATH files are not, in fact, a bid to “de-legitimize” anyone’s identity). The stray comment about the shape of the world attempts to paint critics as anti-science, the equivalent of flat-earthers.

Bowers then asserts that “gender, like genitalia, is represented by diversity”, which sounds like the sort of meaningless twaddle Google Gemini cooks up. Bowers wraps up by twisting the stakes (patients “deserv[e] healthcare”) and minimising the scope of the organisation’s work (“small percentage of the population… [that] will never be a threat to the global gender binary”), a plea in effect: leave us alone!

The statement is nonsensical because the brief was impossible. WPATH needed to speak simultaneously to two entirely different audiences — the world outside and the organisation’s own membership — who needed to hear entirely different things.

For decades, the field of gender medicine has insulated itself from scrutiny and criticism. The public and policymakers were never supposed to get a glimpse into the inner workings of the field. They were supposed to defer to the “experts” and not look too closely at what they were being asked to support.

The WPATH files look much too closely, shining a spotlight on risks and uncertainties and harms so specific that they will be difficult to forget: patients with tumours, patients whose ages and developmental delays and serious psychiatric conditions mean they could never meaningfully consent to the interventions they underwent, patients who regret being sterilised because they now want children. These files provide fuel for policymakers seeking to regulate youth gender transition and patients trying to sue. The fallout is just beginning.

WPATH’s members, on the other hand, need to see this brutal exposé as a devious plot against a noble cause. WPATH has been preparing its membership for just such a faith challenge for years, instilling an embattled mentality. For years, the organisation’s conferences and events have promoted the narrative that gender clinicians are a misunderstood and persecuted vanguard within medicine who will be vindicated in the future but must suffer heinous accusations in the here and now.

Over the years I’ve spent researching gender medicine, I’ve come to see the field’s obvious harms as a product of enculturation. Becoming a good gender clinician means overcoming one’s reservations and doubts about the interventions provided in service of the cause.

Unlike medical practice in other areas — such as diabetes management or cancer treatment — the field of gender medicine has no objective markers of illness to go by, only the patient’s testimony that her body as it is is unbearable and must be changed. At WPATH’s 2022 conference in Montreal, I heard the same story over and over again: clinicians standing up and telling their fellow believers how they overcame their doubts. A plastic surgeon felt uncomfortable the first time a patient asked him to perform a “nullification” surgery, which removes all external genitalia. In a twisted recapitulation of the hero’s journey, the surgeon then worked through his reservations and now performs these extreme surgeries on a regular basis and encourages his fellow surgeons to follow his example.

The doubts gender clinicians recall are eminently reasonable: they wondered if pre-teens could really consent to sign away their future fertility. They worried about their patients’ troubled pasts and what role experiences of abuse and trauma played. They wondered if some of their patients would accept their bodies if given the time or change their minds months or years down the road. Then they “did the work” and came to see affirming a patient’s current gender identity as a moral imperative.

When I hear stories like these, I see clinicians who — at first contact with the field of gender medicine — knew better. Whether gender clinicians can return to the basics of their medical training and reconnect with their moral intuitions remains to be seen. But the damage they’ve done in the meantime is on full display.

[mariacallous]

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan—As the Taliban consolidate Afghanistan’s status as a nexus for much of what is bad in the world right now, from crimes against humanity to the wholesale export of drugs, guns, and terrorism, a bloodthirsty old warlord popped up at a recent meeting of the putative opposition to declare war as the only hope of getting their country back.

There are two paths to Afghanistan’s freedom, Ismail Khan, aged in his mid-70s, told the gathering in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan: jaw-jaw or war-war. Negotiating with the Taliban has never worked, he said. Which leaves war as the only option.

Dushanbe just hosted the second road edition of the Herat Security Dialogue, which until the fall of Afghanistan’s old government used to be held in its namesake city. The gathering was meant to be a chance, more than two years after the Taliban re-took control of Afghanistan, for various opposition groups to come up with a plan to fix the country’s troubling trajectory. 

Instead, it produced infighting, factionalism, and worrisome ideas for what might come next. It’s a sad indictment of the dearth of ideas among anti-Taliban opposition figures, who seem incapable of transcending personality cults and personal ambitions to put the future of their blighted country first. At regular meetings, often funded by think tanks and democracy organizations, they put their rivalries on display, while consistently failing to make room for generational change or take responsibility for their role in the collapse of the corrupt and inept republic. Rahmatullah Nabil, a former head of Afghanistan’s security services during the republic, bemoaned the “three lacks”—lack of clarity, vision, and consensus—among the opposition, and the world at large, that have allowed the Taliban to entrench their power.

Evidence of the Taliban’s brutality toward the Afghan population and their threat to global security has been piling up in these two years. Multiple U.N. agencies have reported on the Taliban’s persistent abuses of human rights, production and export of heroin and methamphetamine, and support for terror and jihad groups across the region and even as far afield as Europe; the Hungarian government says the Taliban are involved in people smuggling to raise money for terror. In a neighborhood bristling with nukes, Nabil suggested the Taliban could try to acquire their own, if not for use then for profit. 

The lack of international attention on Afghanistan’s renewed terror threat is laying the groundwork for what Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director of the Berlin- and New York-based Counter Extremism Project, called a “back to the future” repeat of the atrocities committed by al Qaeda, with Taliban collusion, in the United States in September 2001.

Some of the countries that supported the Taliban’s return to deal a blow to the United States are learning that to their peril. Pakistan, which supported the Taliban to thwart India’s ambitions for regional leadership, has suffered from multiple terror attacks by Kabul’s affiliate, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, meant to wreck the Pakistani state. 

Tajikistan, always wary while pragmatic, also understands the Taliban threat, having thwarted several attacks just this year, seizing weapons, ammunition, religious material, and cash. The Taliban deploy suicide bombers and an affiliated anti-Tajikistan extremist group, Jamaat Ansarullah, to their shared border regions.

But with the Taliban entrenched, and international organizations hamstrung, what are the options? Speaking to Foreign Policy, Schindler said the United Nations faces a bind: On the one hand, it’s in “a virtual hostage situation,” depending on the Taliban for the security of its employees in Afghanistan, while facilitating the delivery of tens of millions of dollars in cash purportedly to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, “but for which it has real challenges to account for after the Taliban have taken possession.” A new U.N. “self-assessment” offers nothing fresh for a post-Taliban future.

Few answers were forthcoming in Dushanbe. Khan, wearing his trademark white salwar kameez and a black-and-white scarf on his head, basked in rock-star status and posed for selfies in the lobby of the five-star hotel hosting the conference. Khan was seized by the Taliban while leading a ragtag militia in Herat and now lives in Iran. Asked if Iran had allowed him to attend this year’s summit to signal to the Taliban a growing impatience with their intransigence, Khan demurred. 

Selfie-hunters aside, many at the conference were dismayed by Khan’s presence, seeing him as the embodiment of the failed old guard. 

“If he comes back, I see that as no different to the current situation,” said one delegate who wouldn’t allow his name to be used. “He killed a lot of people, then for 20 years he was watched closely. The Americans kept him under surveillance, with drones; they controlled his impulses. Without that, he will be the same as before. And that’s not good for Afghanistan.”

Khan was ostensibly representing the High Council of National Resistance, a coalition of warlords like Abdul Rashid Dostum; a former vice president, Atta Mohammed Noor; and other regional and ethnic figures who fled the Taliban’s blitzkrieg and who’d like nothing better than to reclaim their money, property, and prestige. 

But Khan’s presence ensured that Ahmad Massoud, the once-popular leader of the National Resistance Front (NRF), was a no-show, even though he lives in Dushanbe. His aides said he was busy; he granted audiences for a select few. Many young Afghans who had hopes in him as a future president now see little more than a cult of personality to mirror that of his father, the former Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Following America’s lead, most Western governments will not support armed resistance against the Taliban. Reluctance to return to war in Afghanistan is understandable, Schindler said, but “you could reach out to opposition groups and make sure that when they convene everyone turns up who should be inside the tent to facilitate the emergence of an alternative vision for Afghanistan beyond the Taliban regime.” 

As it is, he said, “it’s always this faction, that faction. Some don’t turn up because their rivals do turn up. How is this of any use? We have seen this before, for more than 20 years. Now no one has any excuse.” 

Undaunted, the opposition talking shop is on the road again this week, for a third get-together in Vienna. NRF spokesperson Ali Maisam Nazary, fresh from Dushanbe, said they still plan to finalize there or elsewhere a strategy for a post-Taliban future.

[occknow]

An essay on labor market frictions, international trade, and uncertainty Economics and Finance.

The labor market is a central institution in any modern economy. If the market does not function satisfactorily, willing workers will remain unemployed for too long, and many workers will occupy positions that are unsuited for them. Moreover, firms will not appear, grow, or close at the optimal rate. At the same time, the labor market is characterized by pervasive regulation. Across nations, the labor market is subject to minimum wages, hiring and bring restrictions, compulsory collective bargaining and arbitrage, limitations on the number of hours, anti discrimination clauses, curtailments on work by age and by gender, etc. Moreover, substantial differences in labor market flexibility persist even within groups of countries with similar income levels.

The purpose of this paper is to studying the role of labor market frictions and its interaction with international trade and uncertainty, the relationship between uncertainty and the business cycle.

When uncertainty increases, the value of a job match declines as the option value of waiting increases. Unemployment goes up, making it harder for unemployed workers to find jobs. The decline in employment drives the marginal product of capital downward, which triggers fall in capital investment. Uncertainty also makes economic agents cautious about decisions like employment, which adjustment costs can make expensive to reverse. Thus, it gives rise to a contractionary real option-value effect. In this, real options apply to key decisions: hirings, firing and firrm entry.

How Can Taxes Help Ensure a Fair Globalization?

As productivity can quickly revert, firms become more reluctant to separate from their workforce, all the more so as they pay firing costs. The decline in total employment drives the marginal product of capital downwards, which triggers a fall in capital investment. Firm dynamics have an impact on job creation and separation decisions, and vice versa. We find that increased uncertainty generates real exchange rate depreciation, current account surplus and reduces the stock offirms in the economy.

Over the past decades, trade liberalization has led to a significant trade expansion. In developing countries, job creation resulting from trade liberalization has mainly taken place in the informal economy. The novelty of this paper is to focus on the interactions between the choices to participate at the international trade and the induced labor reallocations between formal and informal activities.

However, trade expansion and higher levels of economic activity do not necessarily imply higher employment quality and better working conditions. The essay show that trade liberalization boosts economic activity and employment in both the formal and informal sector. In the emerging economy, in the medium run, trade liberalization ultimately induces more firms to export, thereby increasing labor demand and real wages. As in the developed economy, this leads to high share of exporters and informality in emerging economy.

In the long run, when the developed country has reached its long-run level of iceberg costs, in the emerging country trade expansion is still ongoing. In the emerging country, revenue growth is now driven by iceberg cost reduction which takes place only in the emerging country and still generates growth gains.

An easy way to promote formal employment is to reduce the payroll tax paid by firms. An alternative solution might be implementing a "budget-neutral" tax reform, consisting in increasing the consumption tax to fund the cut in payroll taxes. An advantage of this strategy is that the consumption tax has a larger base, it is easier to collect and more difficult to evade. The tax reform is country-specifc. The most important point is certainly the fact that the tax reform allows the welfare of the unemployed workers to increase, despite the large initial loses induced by the jump in the consumption tax.

This essay show that trade liberalization boosts economic activity in both developed and emerging countries. However, the paper find that trade liberalization is associated to higher informality, which ultimately implies less job security and lower employment quality. Policy makers should consider placing a high priority on promoting job quality and income equality. Policy interventions should follow a comprehensive approach that rests on three pillars: increasing the benefitts of formality, decreasing the costs of formalization and improving enforcement methods.

Tax policy interventions should go hand in hand with more effective social protection systems and labor laws. Extending unemployment benefits to all workers in the formal sector including those working part-time and/or on temporary contracts, could prevent unemployed from looking for an informal job. Another step to enhance the quality of existing jobs is intensifying labor inspections in those sector where the incidence of informal work is higher.

The effects of uncertainty shocks can vary across countries, depending on their structuralcharacteristics, policy reactions, etc. This paper tries to focus on the role of LMIs in the transmission of uncertainty shocks. Under irreversibility and uncertainty, rms become more reluctant to lay workers off. The role of other country characteristics is ambiguous.

@occknow

[thefirstknife]

Oh, hey. One of the heist dialogues has Ana, Elsie, and Osiris talking about Nefele Stronghold.

Yes! Here.

Elsie: Submind fragment compiling...

Osiris: I have seen this term more than once in the data feed. What is "Nefele Stronghold"?

Ana: That again? Ikora's spies turned up that name around the same time Mars came back, but it was scrubbed from Rasputin's archives.

Elsie: I've never heard that name either, but "stronghold" designations were only used for colonization projects, or... anti-extinction vaults.

Osiris: This is promising. Perhaps additional clues await in the information we've already collected. Someone tell Saint I'll be in my study.

Really good confirmation that "strongholds" were about colonisation projects which ties into the whole story about Soteria from the dungeon and how she ended up crashing into Neptune, which directly confirms Neomuna's creation.

Obviously, Osiris and co don't have all the same details that we do right away, which is why Osiris is informing us that he has to go to his study immediately. Essentially without the knowledge we got from the dungeon, this would still be impossible to fully confirm and also impossible for the characters in-game to understand, but with these two combined, they'll figure it out in time for Lightfall.

It's not entirely clear what "anti-extinction vault" is. My first association is the Global Seed Vault (also dubbed "doomsday vault"), a real thing that exists:

The Seed Vault provides long-term storage of duplicates of seeds conserved in genebanks around the world. This provides security of the world's food supply against the loss of seeds in genebanks due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, war, sabotage, disease and natural disasters.

Basically, it's a vault that hosts seeds of various plants from all over the world which makes sure that, in the event of any disaster of any kind which threatens to destroy the environment, we have a backup of all plants needed for food production to re-seed the planet. It's located in the Arctic to make sure that the seeds remain safely stored in the event of a catastrophic power failure; the ice would then preserve the seeds naturally.

Given that we have this now, it's not a stretch to imagine that people would do the same in the Destiny universe, especially in the Golden Age. It's basically one of the first instincts really, to make sure our knowledge is preserved for the future, in case of a disaster. This is an absolutely fascinating concept to me and one that I would fully expect for Destiny to mention in some way; humanity in Destiny was already concerned with our longterm safety and envisioned a lot of different colonisation projects that tie directly with finding a place for humans to live in should the Solar system become uninhabitable for whatever reason.

This seems to be playing with that concept. I wonder if they plan on mentioning that again.

Some non-canon stuff from my obsession with this below:

The mention of anti-extinction vaults and what they could possibly mean is also really exciting to me because I've assumed their existence... in a Destiny tabletop RP I led almost 3 years ago!

I often talk about that one niche lore mention of how Antarctica is gone in the present day of Destiny and the presumed idea that the continent was sunk in the Collapse. Well, for my Destiny RP with my friends, I wanted to explore that. I needed a reason for my players being there in the Collapse, so, inspired by the Global Seed Vault, I envisioned a similar vault being buried in Antarctic ice, but much bigger in scope.

Mine was a Braytech facility and it did not just hold seeds, but a record of all life and knowledge on Earth; genetic material of animals, seeds from plants, archives and libraries. I also connected the work of the vault to the Exodus program and had the vault equipping Exodus ships with packages of Earth life and knowledge for colonists to take into their new worlds.

My reasoning for Darkness going out of their way to completely erase the entire continent off the face of the planet is that they wanted to make sure all of our history dies with us. It knew what we had hidden there and it knew that the destruction had to be thorough.

It was a cool RP! Everybody died!

The graphics I made for the players:

IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when Beyond Light came out 9 months after this and the missing pages from Clovis' logbook had the following:

I cannot believe that I actually find it tiring, but the sheer scale and passivity of the Vex constructs infuriates me.

Imagine stumbling upon an inscription in the desert: "I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works. Or don't. I really don't care."

I think I also similarly lost my shit when I heard this line about anti-extinction vaults in the game. There is still time for Bungie to completely confirm a thing I invented 3 years ago as canon. This is how me getting more content about Antarctica being sank by Darkness can still win.

[mayasinghal]

Writing on the Walls:

A Socially-Distanced Ethnography of Asynchronous Communication

Son looked in vain for children. He couldn’t find them anywhere There were short people and people under twelve years of age, but they had no child’s vulnerability, no unstuck laughter… It wasn’t until he caught the downtown A that he saw what they had done with their childhood. They had wrapped it in dark cloth, sneaked it underground and thrown it all over the trains. Like blazing jewels, the subway cars burst from the tunnels to the platforms shining with the recognizable artifacts of childhood: fantasy, magic, ego, energy, humor and paint. -Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981, 215)

So many things begin and perhaps end as a game, I suppose that it amused you to find the sketch beside yours, you attributed it to chance or a whim and only the second time did you realize that it was intentional and then you looked at it slowly, you even came back later to look at it again, taking the usual precautions: the street at its most solitary moment, no patrol wagon on neighboring corners, approaching with indifference and never looking at the graffiti face-on but from the other sidewalk or diagonally, feigning interest in the shop window alongside, going away immediately. -Julio Cortázar, “Graffiti” (1983, 33)

In April 2020, about a month after Boston began Covid-19 social distancing protocols, posters appeared around my neighborhood in Allston, stuck to mailboxes and streetlights. On brightly colored paper, bold printed lettering read, “Meat markets cause pandemics,” referring to allegations that Covid-19 originated from human-animal contact in a meat market in Wuhan, China. A few weeks later, I took a walk around the neighborhood and noticed that someone had written on the left side one of the posters in black Sharpie: “This is anti-Chinese racism.” On the right side, in the same black Sharpie handwriting, it said, “We have them here too.”

It was not immediately clear why the poster should be construed as anti-Chinese racism. Maybe the Sharpie scribe was reading the sign as referencing racist tropes about Chinese people eating varieties of meat jarring to Western ideas of morality and health (for instance, dogs and bats). I also wondered what the commentator meant by “We have them here too.” We have pandemics here, too? We have meat markets here, too? And, what is the importance of “here” versus “there” in racialized reactions to global events? The Sharpie scribe seemed to emphasize the xenophobia central to anti-Chinese racism: that there is some fundamental, inheritable Chinese-ness that marks all Chinese people and practices as inherently blameworthy for problems between China and the rest of the world.

These posters disappeared shortly after I witnessed this graffitied commentary. They were replaced by pig head illustrations bearing the caption, “Animals are not products.” A few weeks after these posters went up, I found another poster glued on top of them. It showed two Black children, climbing on the Lincoln Memorial with large red letters that stated, “Black liberation is human liberation” (Fig. 1). It was June 2020, not more than a month since an African American man, George Floyd, was murdered by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, prompting Black Lives Matter protests around the world. Recalling histories of legalized enslavement in which Black people were sometimes treated as commodities, the “Black liberation” poster challenged the “Animals are not products” one it was placed over, highlighting tensions between animal rights and human rights. Certainly, environmental degradation, climate change, and pollution disproportionately impact communities of color around the world (Nixon 2011; Taylor 2014). And, many indigenous approaches to animal studies argue that decolonization must be a multispecies endeavor that accounts for Native peoples’ relationships to the environment and land (Struthers Montford and Taylor 2020). However, in practice, white environmentalists and animal rights activists often use concerns about non-human species to legitimate violence against people of color or prioritize non-human species over people of color (Kosek 2006). The juxtaposition of these posters raises questions about the status of arguments for animal liberation when predominately African American populations are still legally enslaved and otherwise financially exploited in the US prison system.

Throughout the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I saw several of these graffitied exchanges about human and animal rights on walks around my neighborhood. While animal rights posters are somewhat ubiquitous around all of the college campuses I’ve been to in the Northeast, I was struck by the extent of these asynchronous conversations that took place on my neighborhood’s walls during the pandemic. In this essay, I want to think through the content of these discussions: human and animal rights in the context of the pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives, and Stop Asian Hate. I also want to think further about the form of these discussions, about doing socially-distanced ethnography by reading writings on the walls.

Fig. 1: A poster reading “Black liberation is human liberation” on top of posters that read “Animals are not products” (June 2020)

Wall Art

In the epigraph to this essay, taken from her 1981 novel Tar Baby, Toni Morrison describes New York City in the 1970s from the perspective of Son, an African American New Yorker returning to the city after a long absence. In the face of poverty and mass incarceration, Black people in the city do not seem to Son to experience childhood anymore: “There were short people and people under twelve years of age, but they had no child’s vulnerability, no unstuck laughter” (Morrison 1981, 215). They seem to be missing the kind of freedom, but also the innocence and helplessness, associated with childhood. This idea parallels a common claim from law enforcement officials guilty of using force against unarmed African Americans who insist they feared for their lives during encounters with young Black people they perceive as having the size, strength, and prowess of grown men. However, unlike law enforcement officials, who have sometimes used graffiti as evidence of local criminality, Son sees childhood in graffiti. For Son, 1970s New York is jarring, filled not only with new fashions, but, he thinks, new kinds of gender- and racially-ambiguous people: “beautiful males who had found the whole business of being black and men at the same time too difficult and so they’d dumped it” and “black people in whiteface playing black people in blackface” on TV (Morrison 1981, 216). Stunned by these changes, Son searches for signs of normative life stages: children and old people. When he finds no old people either, Son clings to his recognizable sign of childhood: graffiti. Graffiti, for him, is a public display of things that cannot be communicated publicly or embodied in other forms, a material vestige that he collects, almost archeologically, as proof that these new New Yorkers are still human.

Julio Cortázar similarly treats graffiti as an illicit method for communication under repressive conditions in his 1980 short story “Graffiti.” Going further than Morrison in this regard, Cortázar depicts a conversation through layered public art, similar to the postering that I discussed, shown in Fig. 1. Set in the context of authoritarian rule, an allusion to Argentina’s military junta in the 1970s, two graffiti artists navigate a prohibition on street art and increasing “disappearances” of people in the city. The narrator writes in second person to a male artist who makes chalk sketches on walls when one day, he finds a sketch next to his done, he is sure, by a woman. The narrator explains: “You couldn’t prove it yourself, but there was something different and better than the most obvious proofs: a trace, a predilection for warm colors, an aura” (Cortázar 1983, 34). This logic and evidence prime the reader for the interpretive and imaginative relationship the artists develop. Their art becomes a call and response, building on each other’s meanings to develop a visual language between the two of them: “if he didn’t look at it closely, a person might have said it was a play of random lines, but she would know how to look at it” (Cortázar 1983, 35). Cortázar doesn’t describe most of the drawings in detail—focusing simply on outlines or colors. However, the climax of the story is told with pointed emphasis on the art:

At dawn on the second day you chose a grey wall and sketched a white triangle surrounded by splotches like oak leaves; from the same café on the corner you could see the wall (they’d already cleaned off the garage door and a patrol, furious, kept coming back), at dusk you withdrew a little, but choosing different lookout points, moving from one place to another, making small purchases in the shops so as not to draw too much attention. It was already dark night when you heard the sirens and the spotlights swept your eyes. There was a confused crowding by the wall, you ran, in the face of all good sense, and all that helped you was the good luck to have a car turn the corner and put on its breaks when the driver saw the patrol wagon, its bulk protected you and you saw the struggle, black hair pulled by gloved hands, the kicks and the screams, the cut-off glimpse of blue slacks before they threw her into the wagon and took her away.             Much later (it was horrible trembling like that, it was horrible to think that it had happened because of your sketch on the grey wall) you mingled with other people and managed to see an outline in blue, the traces of that orange color that was like her name or her mouth, her there in that truncated sketch that the police had erased before taking her away, enough remained to understand that she had tried to answer your triangle with another figure, a circle or maybe a spiral, a form full and beautiful, something like a yes or an always or a now. (Cortázar 1983, 36)

Particularly when the woman is arrested, the conversation becomes clearer. For the first time in the story, the reader is given descriptions of the drawings, but the narrator also provides the interpretations. Where the graffiti at first was a sign of the presence of others, the public life available even under authoritarian conditions, when the other is taken away, the communicative capacities of graffiti become even more clear.

Later, the man returns to the spot the woman had been arrested: “There were no patrols, the walls were perfectly clean: a cat looked at you cautiously from a doorway when you took out your chalk and in the same place, there where she had left her sketch, you filled the boards with a green shout, a red flame of recognition and love, you wrapped your sketch in an oval that was also your mouth and hers and hope” (Cortázar 1983, 37). The patrols somehow miss this sketch, and it stays up for a long time. In the last scene of the story, the man returns to his sketch and sees a reply:

From a distance you made out the other sketch, only you could have distinguished it, so small, above and to the left of yours. You went over with a feeling that was thirst and horror at the same time; you saw the orange oval and the violet splotches where a swollen face seemed to leap out, a hanging eye, a mouth smashed with fists. I know, I know, but what else could I have sketched for you? What message would have made any sense now? In some way I had to say farewell to you and at the same time ask you to continue. I had to leave you something before going back to my refuge where there was no mirror anymore, only a hollow to hide in until the end in the most complete darkness, remembering so many things and sometimes, as I had imagined your life, imagining that you were making other sketches, that you were going out at night to make other sketches. (Cortázar 1983, 38)

In this final scene, the narrator is revealed as the woman artist, after her arrest. The torture she endured has broken down her sense of self (“there was no mirror anymore”), so instead she narrates her past through the eyes of another artist who represents her hope and lingering sense of community, of social life. Through a tale of layered artworks, Cortázar treats graffiti as a form of public discourse when public discourse is limited. Where scholars often focus on graffiti as a way of communicating marginalized ideas, Cortázar’s story takes it up as a way of preserving public space and public fora. The comparison of the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in the US, to an Argentinian dictatorship is problematic, not least because the US has not had mandated lockdowns. Still, the pandemic has occasioned state and municipal strictures concerning public congregation. Cortázar highlights the ethnographic importance of attending to how layered graffiti can function as a kind of artistic conversation, especially when considering how people develop socially distanced spaces of interaction.

Police and Pigs

During Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and 2021, some protestors brandished severed pig heads, playing on “pig” as a slang term for a police officer. These expressions of outrage at police violence were quickly taken up by some animal rights organizations and condemned as “hypocrisy,” “protesting against rights violations while violating the rights of others.” Meanwhile, other animal rights activists argued that it is anti-Black to focus on how Black people use dead animals to protest oppression instead of the much more serious violence against animals perpetrated by racist institutions. The layered “Animals are not products” and “Black liberation is human liberation” graffiti (Fig. 1) index these debates about real and metaphorical pigs, emphasizing the pig head in the middle of the “Animals” poster. Not only are the rights of real pigs put into tension with human rights, the rights of Black people specifically, but also the pig head becomes a representation of police, bringing these human and animal rights into greater conflict.

Animal rights and human rights, particularly those of African American people, have often been placed at odds with each other. For instance, in 2018, actress Tiffany Haddish suggested that she would not stop wearing fur until the police stop killing Black people. “So sorry, PETA!” she added in an Instagram video. “Don’t be mad at me. Be mad at the police.” The implication of this joking “protest” was that white people often seem to prioritize animal lives over Black lives; therefore, by threatening animal lives, Haddish might force white people to address police murders of Black people.

Similar arguments about people caring more about animals than African American people have been made about pets being rescued after Hurricane Katrina while many Black New Orleanians died. An analogous claim centers on the football phenom, Michael Vick, who was incarcerated on dog fighting charges, while police officers (and some civilians) accused of murdering African Americans have frequently been acquitted (Kim 2015). Yet, the utility of these comparisons is not always obvious. In fact, as Bénédicte Boisseron has argued, “The ‘America-likes-pets-more-than-blacks’ attitude… is symptomatic of a system that convulsively pits blackness against animality, forcing blacks themselves to engage in a battle over spared likeability” (Boisseron 2018, xiv). Furthermore, these comparisons also obscure real concerns about the status of animals, given anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation.

On the other hand, animal rights activists have often compared the plight of farm animals to chattel slavery to argue the injustice of animal treatment (Boisseron 2018). These analogies are troubling, not only because they recall racist comparisons between Black people and animals. As Claire Jean Kim writes:

Analogizers claim to be connecting and avowing, but in many cases they seem to be instrumentalizing the other cause in question or treating it as a means to an end. The analogizer does not connect x and y in the sense of exploring them as independently significant and conjoined logics. Rather, concerned to validate x, which is her true focus, the analogizer seizes upon y, which already enjoys some measure of social validation, and posits x =  y. This exercise seeks to transfer the legitimacy and social importance of y to x. (Kim 2015, 285)

In short, by comparing the experience of enslaved African people to animals, this analogy “suggests that the Black story is a triumphalist one of overcoming racism, thus bolstering white fantasies of colorblindness and postraciality. It succinctly repackages and falsely truncates the story of anti-Blackness to serve the present purposes of animal liberation” (Kim 2015, 285).

Perhaps it is these regular implications of “postraciality” by animal rights movements that so frequently prompt people to respond to animal rights postering with graffiti about racism and slavery. In February 2021, on another walk around my neighborhood in Allston, I found a poster advertising a documentary about animal abuse papered over with an image of George Floyd, the man whose murder by police prompted the Movement for Black Lives in 2020 (Fig. 2). A few months later, a little north, around Harvard Square, I saw posters depicting a cow strung up after slaughter with the caption “Stop lying to your kids about their ‘food.’ ” On top of them, someone had written in Sharpie, “Socialism is slavery” (Fig. 4). However, the fact that graffiti about animal rights is often read by other graffiti writers as having implications for communities of color certainly also has to do with how racism references animals, from comparisons between people of color and animals to allegations that communities of color endanger animals or enact particular cruelty against animals (Kim 2015; Boisseron 2018). Shortly after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, an art director for the brand Lululemon posted a link to a shirt depicting “bat fried rice” with the words “No thank you” on the sleeves, referencing allegations that Covid-19 originated from Chinese people eating bats (King 2020). In the context of these prevalent forms of Sinophobia, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, the exchange about anti-Chinese racism on the “Meat markets cause pandemics” poster reads into a statement about vegetarianism a whole history of associations between Chinese people and forms of meat consumption deemed “cruel and transgressive” (Kim 2015). Still, other graffiti discussions about veganism and racism begin from links that seem much less apparent.

Fig. 2: Poster showing George Floyd placed over an animal rights poster (text illegible)

Fig. 3: A similar animal rights poster as the one visible in Fig. 2, advertising a documentary called Dominion

Fig. 4: Posters showing a picture of a cow hung upside down with the words, “Stop lying to your kids about their ‘food.’” Several of the words have been crossed out in Sharpie. In pencil, someone has written “Who’s lying” on one poster. Another person has written in Sharpie, “Socialism is slavery,” which another person has crossed out in Sharpie.

If These Walls Could Talk

In October 2020, a couple months after I found the “Black liberation” poster, I saw a more extensive discussion on another set of animal rights posters. On a mailbox, someone had placed two posters of roosters with the words “Go vegan” coming from their mouths. One respondent wrote in black capital letters, “End human suffering first.” In the same handwriting, “This is cringe” was written next to the rooster, suggesting that the poster is problematic and “cringe-worthy.” Another person then added in black marker, “You can’t buy tofu and vegetables because someone else is suffering?” Yet another person added a profane statement, playing on the rooster or “cock.” Still another person, in white marker, wrote, “I don’t like ppl [people] who can’t write words.” The second poster was colored black except for the rooster to obscure the “Go vegan” statement, faintly visible under the marker, and someone added in reddish ink, “BLM,” or “Black Lives Matter,” coming from the rooster’s mouth in its place.

Fig. 5: “Go Vegan” posters with annotations and redactions

This exchange highlights another kind of graffiti debate concerning animal rights and human rights through revision, or what Christina Sharpe might call “Black annotation and Black redaction.” For Sharpe, the most familiar work of annotation and redaction takes the form of violence against Black people: captions included with photographs of Black death and suffering and redacted government files about Black activists, for example. Through “Black annotation and Black redaction” (emphasis added), Sharpe proposes a radical reappropriation of these editorial tools. They are “ways to make Black life visible, if only momentarily, through the optic of the door” (Sharpe 2016, 123). Sharpe uses the examples of the annotations on the second autopsy Michael Brown’s family requested after he was murdered by police officer Darren Wilson in 2014 and her own redactions of a New York Times article to highlight the voice of the Black girl who was its subject. She argues that through these Black annotations and redactions, we see the lives of Black people beyond how they are portrayed by the state.

In the example of the mailbox “Go Vegan” and “Black Lives Matter” graffiti, the Black annotations and redactions make visible Black people who may or may not have been there before. As one of the graffiti writers asked, “You can’t buy tofu and vegetables because someone else is suffering?” Or, as Boisseron has asked, “Why should the black become so blatantly visible against the animal rights backdrop?” (2018, xix). In part, in October 2020, Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police were still central in the national conversation about social justice, and communities of all kinds were organizing under the slogans: “X for Black Lives.” As such, one reading of the annotations and redactions here is that it places animals in solidarity with Black people. Where, in the first poster, the rooster is meant to highlight the animal lives at stake in “going vegan,” through Black annotation and redaction, the rooster becomes an animal arguing for Black lives. Perhaps part of the appeal of this message, too, is that the animal rights posters I saw never highlighted how the environmental impact associated with farming animals impacts communities of color. Instead, I only saw comments on the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic as a whole (“Meat markets cause pandemics”). By avoiding how animals and people of color are connected, not merely compared, these posters invite people to write back to them—to paper over them, annotate and redact them—to highlight the diverse groups implicated in any project concerning animal rights.

Open Letters

I want to suggest another genre to make sense of this form of political graffiti: the open letter. Laurence Ralph, in his 2020 book The Torture Letters, experiments with the open letter as a form of ethnographic writing by writing open letters to a variety of people and groups affected by the cases of torture by police officers in Chicago between 1972 and 1991. Ralph writes that his method of “ethnographic lettering”—

includes three ways of layering field research. First, it transforms research “subjects” into “interlocutors” during the research process by focusing on the projects they are already invested in as a way to explore broader social problems; second, it includes exchanges with interlocutors in the research and writing phases of the project; and third, it positions one’s interlocutors and the communities they want to address as the primary audience for the ethnographic material that will ultimately be produced. (Ralph 2020, 192)

This method, he explains, is indebted to James Smith and Ngeti Mwadime’s Email from Ngeti (2014), which is written through the authors’ email correspondence; however, Ralph writes, “As I have written to a host of dead people, others who had no interest in responding to me, and to another group who did respond but whose responses are not included in this book, my idea of exchange is much more expansive than Smith and Mwadime’s approach” (Ralph 2020, 199). Ultimately, Ralph explains that his method of “ethnographic lettering”—and letter writing generally—requires an invested audience and “a sense of voice and a sense of purpose” (Ralph 2020, 199). Certainly, these criteria apply to any form of writing, but Ralph’s book of open letters does highlight the uniqueness of the open letter as a genre of writing.

If a standard letter’s audience is the named addressee, an open letter’s audience is not. It is possible, but not necessary, for the open letter that the addressee will read it. The audience of an open letter is the public, who is recruited to witness the writer speaking toward the addressee. Written in the second person, Cortázar’s story, “Graffiti,” functions similarly to an open letter as well. The reader is positioned as a witness to the narrator speaking to the artist she addresses as “you.” Similarly, the creators of the original animal rights graffiti posters need not ever return to their pieces for the graffiti commentators’ discussions to be effective, as the point of these layered posters, annotations, and revisions is to register disagreement or offer an alternative perspective rather than to change the original writer’s mind.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, open letters have also been an important mode of public art and activism in more official capacities. In response to anti-Chinese violence by people who blamed China for the pandemic, people around the country began “Love Letters to Chinatown” projects. Inspired by the first Love Letter initiative started by the Wing On Wo Project in New York’s Manhattan Chinatown, Pao Arts Center in Boston collected its own set of love letters to Boston’s Chinatown, which they translated into English and Chinese and posted around the neighborhood. Many of the letters are addressed to Chinatown as a whole, while others are addressed to specific shops and restaurants that people hold dear. First shared online and then posted throughout Chinatown, these open letters become part of the street art landscape of the neighborhood—ways of communicating support to a neighborhood particularly hard-hit by the pandemic, often by people who are no longer frequenting Chinatown’s streets due to public health concerns. Projects like these are fascinating ethnographic sites in themselves to consider the innovative ways that people have found to conduct public dialogues in public space, despite social distancing requirements. In conjunction with the graffitied conversations about animal rights and racial justice, these open letters shape how I read the possibilities of street art as a kind of letter writing. Rather than seeing graffiti only as a one-directional form of protest or speech more broadly, the graffitied discussions during the pandemic have served as forums for people occupying the same space at different times to argue over how to weigh concerns about animal rights and human rights and racialized and culturally specific approaches to food. With restrictions on public space, graffiti served as a mode for people to discuss some of the most fundamental issues about how Covid-19 impacted all of us yet impacted us differently.

Works Cited

Boisseron, Bénédicte. 2018. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cortázar, Julio. 1983. “Graffiti.” In We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 33–38. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Kim, Claire Jean. 2015. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

King, Michelle T. 2020. “Say No to Bat Fried Rice: Changing the Narrative of Coronavirus and Chinese Food.” Food and Foodways 28 (3): 237–49.

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