#Profit Of Term Life Insurance

[thehigherseekerastro]

Random Astrology Observations (Alternative Meanings Love Edition) 🤨❤️🤔

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way, shape or form a professional astrologer, modern or traditional.

I HAVE been studying astrology for a while now, and analysing charts available to me, as well as my own, and noticed a lot of the info you find online doesn't make sense in real life, because it is too reductive, stereotypical or lacks broader context. So I thought I'd share some of my personal observations to see if it resonates with anyone.

This is NOT the end all, be all. Apply it as it makes sense to you.

PS: I don't know how to edit posts, and this is my first Tumblr post, so it's not gonna look pretty.

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The 10th House 🕰️

The 10H gets reduced to "career and work", but it goes much further than that. The 10th house represents your highest honors, which, in a capitalist modern world, will often be directly linked to your career success, but it's not the success that's built around the career. It's the other way around. It talks about the career that leads you to success. The main point is NOT working itself, but success. 10H will also describe your public image, your reputation, your public persona, your long-term goals, your social influence, your social status, your legacy and the image you wanna project.

(e.g.: your biggest legacy could have nothing to do with something that made you money in this life. It could have been starting a non-profit that changed lots of lives. Or you could become prestigious in your social circle for your personality, which presents you with opportunities in life that aren't directly connected to acquiring material things [because the 2H is the house of materials and possessions])

Going off of the first topic – 10H synastry, specially house overlays – does NOT mean workplace romance. In fact, your significant other may not even work or, if they do, may not even work in the same field as you, let alone be co-workers. Like I said, the 10H is much larger than "career", but also, career and work are not exactly the same thing. If they do happen to be involved in your career, it may have nothing to do with your workplace directly, but with your career in a general sense. So, instead of meeting at WORK, being co-workers, and all the reductive things people claim, you could meet them through your CAREER.

(e.g.: You work at an insurance company, but are studying to become a lawyer, and you happen to attend a conference related to the lawyer part of your ambitions, not your actual job, and there you meet your significant other./You work as a waitress, but your dream of becoming a model. So you attend an event to network with people in the modeling industry, and there you meet your significant other, but they just happen to be somebody's friend who got invited to go to the event, even though they themselves are not in the industry at all).

Since the 10H also rules your highest self, your "best case scenario", and your status and legacy, having 10H synastry with someone could simply mean they will change your life significantly, either positively or negatively. They will shift the foundations of how you are perceived and perceive yourself, and may even change your status in life. In that sense, the person who eventually becomes your spouse and the parent of your children could have 10H synastry with you. They will have changed your public status, as well as your legacy. Broaden your perspectives without thinking of keywords.

The 9th House 📖

A lot of astro observations are very Americanized/Euro-centric, and lack perspective and social and cultural context. The 9H is much broader than "foreign things". In fact, it's the most expansive house of all 12, so to reduce that "expansiveness" to foreign travel because it's big and wide is too simplistic, and doesn't take into account people whose realities simply do not include access or contact to foreign cultures and places. It COULD indicate foreign travel and cultures, but it will most likely be "foreign" in the context of abstract things, such as beliefs, philosophy and worldview. The "traveling" of the 9H also does NOT have to be literal, and could very often mean intellectual and moral, such as "traveling" through the acquiring of knowledge, or "traveling" through exploring new spiritual practices and teachings.

(e.g.: The 9H will talk of higher education, but that's not a reality for a large portion of the world. So, instead of thinking in terms of university, think more of "higher education" in terms of evolving studying of concepts and notions. In that regard, life experience is ALSO included in the 9H)

Going off of the previous topic – 9H placements do NOT immediately mean you will marry a foreigner, or somebody from a different race/ethnicity/culture, or even that you will definitely travel abroad and meet somebody there. Not only is the idea of just up and moving to another country like it's nothing wildly unrealistic, it centers itself in the easy access Americans and Europeans have to foreign travel. Most of the world outside of those places will either not have the financial means to make foreign travel that easily, nor will they have political access to it (such as a passport that allows them to travel to other countries with no restrictions). Most people will not ever even leave their country by the time they've reached life milestones like marriage, job and children. Not only that – but the extreme racial divide seen in the United States is a very particular and individual experience, only seen also in major European countries (so very Caucasian-centric). Most people will not be making huge deals about marrying somebody who's from Korea, or Africa, or Brazil, or India, as if they were a totally different type of species.

(So the whole ordeal about "you will marry someone from a different race/culture is bogus. Countries like Brazil have a VERY diverse population, yet, they are very seamlessly integrated, so being of black, white, asian, Arab descent is not relevant, as they will see themselves as "just Brazilians" living the same Brazilian experience over all, regardless of their ethnicity.)

Having 9H love placements (such as Venus, Mars or Jupiter, and Juno) or having 9H synastry with someone very likely will not indicate a foreigner or finding love/starting a relationship abroad. It will 9 times out of 10 indicate somebody who expands your horizons, somebody who makes you question things and seek deeper understanding of the world around you, somebody who challenges your mind and spirit, somebody who will expose you to new and inventive ways of seeing, understanding and interacting with the world. That COULD mean they do that because they come from a different country or cultural background. But it could also mean they just think and act very fundamentally different from YOUR personal culture, and will bring up topics that teach you new ways to approach life. Not to mention that it could just describe accessing different cultures THROUGH them.

(e.g.: You and your spouse may be from the very same country and very same race, but upon getting together, you two end up moving to an area that has a lot of foreigners in it, a large population of foreigners, or through your partner you become acquainted with mutual friends who come from a vastly different cultural background than your own, and that, in turn, expands your worldview as if you yourself had traveled to another country or learned about another culture directly./ Or, to put it in more plain terms, your partner may just be a very freaking smart and knowledgeable person who teaches you things you would only learn in college.)

Still, with that said, the basic repeated meanings you see online COULD also still apply here, for anyone, but specially if you are white and from a country from the Northern hemisphere, as those descriptions apply more to their individual realities.

The 6th House 🧹

The 6H deals with daily, repetitive, routine things, which is why it deals with work, health and caretaking, because those are repetitive, orderly, constant tasks.

(Just like 10H is a "career" house, but it is not necessarily a "money house", the 6H is a "work" house, but not necessarily a money house. The money houses are the 2H (which deals with money you earn yourself), the 8H (which deals with money your manage for or earn from other people's possessions, such as an inheritance or your spouse's money), and – to an extent – the 11H (since it deals with "struck of luck" moments and could indicate coming into unexpected money).

You are more likely to date a co-worker having 6H love placements or 6H synastry than you are with the 10H, because the 10H deals with CAREER, which is not necessarily your workplace itself (could be a side business you're trying to take off), while the 6H deals with WORK itself. Since the 6H deals with daily routines, and a co-worker is someone you see on a daily basis at work.

(Not to be confused with the business-related side of the 7H, which will talk of business partners or having a business with your partner. It's like: the 10H will have your partner RELATED to your career somehow, but maybe not directly. The 6H will have your partner be a co-worker, but not necessarily share your career goals and plans. The 7H MAY describe starting a business with your partner eventually.)

Health is another thing that may or may not be a key factor in your relationship, or even for a long time. You might have 6H synastry and health never becomes a theme of your connection. You might be dating for 5 years and health is never a theme, and then you get married and for most of your marriage health is still not a thing. But then, by the time you two are old, one of you may develop a condition and the other one becomes your caretaker. Or another aspect of the 6H that is not talked about is daily life with your children together. The 6H is not the house of children, but the routine of taking care of a child together night be influenced by the 6H synastry, depending on the sign its happening in.

The 11th House 🫂

The 11H is VERY underrated for romance, because it doesn't manifest as quickly as people think romance and passion should. But it is, in fact, an extremely powerful house for synastry, when combined with other romance-inducing aspects. The 11H deals with, amongst other things, friendship. You'll often find that having 11H overlays/synastry means a platonic relationship or, at the very best, one-sided, but that only happens if there are no other aspects pointing towards romance – HEALTHY romance.

(It's also important to note that 11H synastry is deeper than people think. Just because it's a social house doesn't mean it's a detached house. Houses and signs are not the same thing. Aquarius ruling the 11H and Aquarius being stereotypically described as emotionally detached does not mean 11H synastry is detached. On the contrary, the 11H is very deep because it is the house of hopes, life dreams and aspirations, so it will describe things we idealize in a very pure and hopeful way.)

With 11H synastry, specially moon, Venus, Mars and – sometimes, Sun, if it's a water sign –, there will be a very strong bond of friendship, regardless of other layers to that relationship. And who do we trust more, if not our friends? Those are people we are not related to by blood or law, who do not share our immediate environment, whom we have no obligation to whatsoever, but we choose to give them unopposed access to our private world. So with 11H synastry between lovers, there is a deep foundation of friendship, which means that if it ends badly, it will have a very painful effect on the psyche and heart, because it will feel like losing a lover AND a best friend.

(That means that 11H includes a very important component of TRUST, an aspect that is only talked about with the 4th and 8th houses, but is also present in the 11th. Both for comfortability and feeling of betrayal. Also, that intensity also comes from the fact that with 11H synastry people tend to project their hopes and dreams onto each other. Like thinking they are the best person ever, all-in-one, ticking all the boxes, lover AND friend... So if that breaks at some point, it can make people feel really stupid and embarrassed.)

Like I said, 11H synastry in romance doesn't play out as quickly as people think love should be, so it gets dismissed in the romance department. But the 11H is a Saturn house. It takes time, and it needs structure. It means that friendship will ALWAYS come before romance. Now, does that mean that people will always be friends-to-lovers? No. They might start off as lovers, but they won't reach the potential of their intimacy until there's a well-established foundation of camaraderie and friendship, and once they do, that bond becomes very unbreakable, because they become partners in crime and each other's favorite person. IF IT'S IN A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER ROMANCE ASPECTS.

General Things ✨

ASTROLOGY is NOT MAGIC. It will not cause anything to happen in your life. Don't just rely on placements and aspects. It means absolutely NOTHING if you got 4H synastry with the one you love, but you yourself have problematic 4H/moon aspects in your natal chart that you do nothing to work on (and vice versa). That 4H synastry could turn toxic at the snap of a finger, and no amount of "comfort" is gonna prevent it. If you can't process your emotions well, you could date all the Cancers you want, or you could be a cancer yourself, you WILL NOT engage emotionally in a healthy way. You can't give nor receive something you don't have or don't understand. So, instead, learn about the makeup of your charts, but then use it as a study to improve yourselves, not just to think you will magically live in a Disney movie happily ever after just because his Venus falls in your 4H.

Astrology is not a hurricane. Not all things are happening at the same time all the time at all times, as of they were things flying around in a chaotic hurricane. The energies of your individual natal charts, as well as the energies of your synastry will play out in their own time, and may play out slowly, over time. Like house overlays, for example. One particular aspect of the 2H may play out at the beginning of the relationship, but if you eventually get married, another side of the 2H synastry may be unlocked. Or your husband could have an specific placement for his love life that will not be activated until he gets married, which means that for the entire time you are just dating, those things will not be happening. As with all things in life, astrology follows its natural course, and develops and changes over time.

Astrology does not bless or doom a relationship. It won't tell you whether you can/should or not be with someone. It doesn't MAKE YOU do anything. However, for the relationships that end in catastrophe, you can always go back and check the synastry/composite, and it will probably be obvious there, you just couldn't see it before. With that I don't mean to go out planing your life and connections around astrology, because that's very impractical, unrealistic and low-key immature, as people are ALWAYS growing and maturing. But I AM saying that if you are in a relationship that feels draining, toxic, abusive, unstable 24/7... trust the synastry, because you're probably trying to force something that is very clearly laid out for you, and that ONE or two nice aspects or placements are not gonna save you from obvious ruin. BE RATIONAL.

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That's it! Thank you if you've read it this far!

I might have come off a bit harsh (I hope I haven't), but I promise I'm nice lol.

Hopefully this resonates, as well as helps somebody understand a bit more. This was my first post, so it's a bit clumsy, but do let me know if you'd like me to share some more thoughts on astrology, and I might do another round.

MASTER LIST

[argumate]

One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that in order for it to function the people in charge of huge multi-national corporations are expected to act in the corp's best interests, but are incentivized to instead prioritize any short term gains over long term ones.

Capitalism does not seek out good design, good products, happy customers, satisfied users, or sustainable environments. It seeks only short-term profits.

Everyone's lives and quality of life for some short-term unsustainable capitalism

As opposed to capitalism which is burning the planet to the ground with climate collapse for short term profits for billionaires

Healthcare Insurance (not healthcare delivery) Insurance is one sector of the economy where capitalism does not work very well because the short term incentive to cheat is too strong.

Reality - this is 20 years too late. Many of us knew this back in the 2000s. Wall St, traders, investors put short term profits above US jobs and technological lead.

Marx was right about capitalism inherently leading to crisis. Short term cost-cutting through wage reduction benefits companies, but over a long period it shrinks the economy by reducing the spending power of workers. The post-WW2 boom masked this for a while, but no more.

Capitalism prioritizes profit, which can result in the exploitation of workers through low wages, poor working conditions, and limited job security. Companies operating with a wellbeing economic lens prioritize long-term investments in their employees over short-term gains.

Western capitalism outsourced itself to death to chase short term profits (throwing our industrial working class under the bus). On the other hand China can plan for the long term and exploited this shortsightedness to build up its industrial capacity and know-how.

@raginrayguns looking for people talking about capitalism and short-term profits on twitter gets a lot of hits but it's noteworthy that many of these conceptions of "short-term" range from 5 to 10-20 or even 50 years, and just mean "not sustainable indefinitely" or "cause long-term damage", they are not literally talking about the figures for the next quarter.

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.5.15 What attitude do anarchists take to the welfare state?

The period of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has seen a rollback of the state within society by the right-wing in the name of “freedom,” “individual responsibility” and “efficiency.” The position of anarchists to this process is mixed. On the one hand, we are all in favour of reducing the size of the state and increasing individual responsibility and freedom but, on the other, we are well aware that this rollback is part of an attack on the working class and tends to increase the power of the capitalists over us as the state’s (direct) influence is reduced. Thus anarchists appear to be on the horns of a dilemma — or, at least, apparently.

So what attitude do anarchists take to the welfare state and attacks on it?

First we must note that this attack on “welfare” is somewhat selective. While using the rhetoric of “self-reliance” and “individualism,” the practitioners of these “tough love” programmes have made sure that the major corporations continue to get state hand-outs and aid while attacking social welfare. In other words, the current attack on the welfare state is an attempt to impose market discipline on the working class while increasing state protection for the ruling class. Therefore, most anarchists have no problem defending social welfare programmes as these can be considered as only fair considering the aid the capitalist class has always received from the state (both direct subsidies and protection and indirect support via laws that protect property and so on). And, for all their talk of increasing individual choice, the right-wing remain silent about the lack of choice and individual freedom during working hours within capitalism.

Secondly, most of the right-wing inspired attacks on the welfare state are inaccurate. For example, Noam Chomsky notes that the “correlation between welfare payments and family life is real, though it is the reverse of what is claimed [by the right]. As support for the poor has declined, unwed birth-rates, which had risen steadily from the 1940s through the mid-1970s, markedly increased. ‘Over the last three decades, the rate of poverty among children almost perfectly correlates with the birth-rates among teenage mothers a decade later,’ Mike Males points out: ‘That is, child poverty seems to lead to teenage childbearing, not the other way around.’” [“Rollback III”, Z Magazine, April, 1995] The same charge of inaccurate scare-mongering can be laid at the claims about the evil effects of welfare which the rich and large corporations wish to save others (but not themselves) from. Such altruism is truly heart warming. For those in the United States or familiar with it, the same can be said of the hysterical attacks on “socialised medicine” and health-care reform funded by insurance companies and parroted by right-wing ideologues and politicians.

Thirdly, anarchists are just as opposed to capitalism as they are the state. This means that privatising state functions is no more libertarian than nationalising them. In fact, less so as such a process reduces the limited public say state control implies in favour of more private tyranny and wage-labour. As such, attempts to erode the welfare state without other, pro-working class, social reforms violates the anti-capitalist part of anarchism. Similarly, the introduction of a state supported welfare system rather than a for-profit capitalist run system (as in America) would hardly be considered any more a violation of libertarian principles as the reverse happening. In terms of reducing human suffering, though, most anarchists would oppose the latter and be in favour of the former while aiming to create a third (self-managed) alternative.

Fourthly, we must note that while most anarchists are in favour of collective self-help and welfare, we are opposed to the state. Part of the alternatives anarchists try and create are self-managed and community welfare projects (see next section). Moreover, in the past, anarchists and syndicalists were at the forefront in opposing state welfare schemes. This was because they were introduced not by socialists but by liberals and other supporters of capitalism to undercut support for radical alternatives and to aid long term economic development by creating the educated and healthy population required to use advanced technology and fight wars. Thus we find that:

“Liberal social welfare legislation … were seen by many [British syndicalists] not as genuine welfare reforms, but as mechanisms of social control. Syndicalists took a leading part in resisting such legislation on the grounds that it would increase capitalist discipline over labour, thereby undermining working class independence and self-reliance.” [Bob Holton, British Syndicalism: 1900–1914, p. 137]

Anarchists view the welfare state much as some feminists do. While they note, to quote Carole Pateman, the “patriarchal structure of the welfare state” they are also aware that it has “also brought challenges to patriarchal power and helped provide a basis for women’s autonomous citizenship.” She goes on to note that “for women to look at the welfare state is merely to exchange dependence on individual men for dependence on the state. The power and capriciousness of husbands is replaced by the arbitrariness, bureaucracy and power of the state, the very state that has upheld patriarchal power.” This “will not in itself do anything to challenge patriarchal power relations.” [The Disorder of Women, p. 195 and p. 200]

Thus while the welfare state does give working people more options than having to take any job or put up with any conditions, this relative independence from the market and individual capitalists has came at the price of dependence on the state — the very institution that protects and supports capitalism in the first place. And has we have became painfully aware in recent years, it is the ruling class who has most influence in the state — and so, when it comes to deciding what state budgets to cut, social welfare ones are first in line. Given that such programmes are controlled by the state, not working class people, such an outcome is hardly surprising. Not only this, we also find that state control reproduces the same hierarchical structures that the capitalist firm creates.

Unsurprisingly, anarchists have no great love of such state welfare schemes and desire their replacement by self-managed alternatives. For example, taking municipal housing, Colin Ward writes:

“The municipal tenant is trapped in a syndrome of dependence and resentment, which is an accurate reflection of his housing situation. People care about what is theirs, what they can modify, alter, adapt to changing needs and improve themselves. They must have a direct responsibility for it … The tenant take-over of the municipal estate is one of those obviously sensible ideas which is dormant because our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the groves of nineteenth-century paternalism.” [Anarchy in Action, p. 73]

Looking at state supported education, Ward argues that the “universal education system turns out to be yet another way in which the poor subsidise the rich.” Which is the least of its problems, for “it is in the nature of public authorities to run coercive and hierarchical institutions whose ultimate function is to perpetuate social inequality and to brainwash the young into the acceptance of their particular slot in the organised system.” [Op. Cit., p. 83 and p. 81] The role of state education as a means of systematically indoctrinating the working class is reflected in William Lazonick words:

“The Education Act of 1870 … [gave the] state … the facilities … to make education compulsory for all children from the age of five to the age of ten. It had also erected a powerful system of ideological control over the next generation of workers … [It] was to function as a prime ideological mechanism in the attempt by the capitalist class through the medium of the state, to continually reproduce a labour force which would passively accept [the] subjection [of labour to the domination of capital]. At the same time it had set up a public institution which could potentially be used by the working class for just the contrary purpose.” [“The Subjection of Labour to Capital: The rise of the Capitalist System”, Radical Political Economy Vol. 2, p. 363]

Lazonick, as did Pateman, indicates the contradictory nature of welfare provisions within capitalism. On the one hand, they are introduced to help control the working class (and to improve long term economic development). On the other hand, these provisions can be used by working class people as weapons against capitalism and give themselves more options than “work or starve” (the fact that the attacks on welfare in the UK during the 1990s — called, ironically enough, welfare to work — involves losing benefits if you refuse a job is not a surprising development). Thus we find that welfare acts as a kind of floor under wages. In the US, the two have followed a common trajectory (rising together and falling together). And it is this, the potential benefits welfare can have for working people, that is the real cause for the current capitalist attacks upon it. As Noam Chomsky summarises:

“State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs.” [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 193]

Because of this contradictory nature of welfare, we find anarchists like Noam Chomsky arguing that (using an expression popularised by South American rural workers unions) “we should ‘expand the floor of the cage.’ We know we’re in a cage. We know we’re trapped. We’re going to expand the floor, meaning we will extend to the limits what the cage will allow. And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking the cage when we’re vulnerable, so they’ll murder us … You have to protect the cage when it’s under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage, recognising that it’s a cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it. Unless people are willing to tolerate that level of complexity, they’re going to be of no use to people who are suffering and who need help, or, for that matter, to themselves.” [Expanding the Floor of the Cage]

Thus, even though we know the welfare state is a cage and part of an instrument of class power, we have to defend it from a worse possibility — namely, the state as “pure” defender of capitalism with working people with few or no rights. At least the welfare state does have a contradictory nature, the tensions of which can be used to increase our options. And one of these options is its abolition from below!

For example, with regards to municipal housing, anarchists will be the first to agree that it is paternalistic, bureaucratic and hardly a wonderful living experience. However, in stark contrast with the right who desire to privatise such estates, anarchists think that “tenants control” is the best solution as it gives us the benefits of individual ownership along with community (and so without the negative points of property, such as social atomisation). The demand for “tenant control” must come from below, by the “collective resistance” of the tenants themselves, perhaps as a result of struggles against “continuous rent increases” leading to “the demand … for a change in the status of the tenant.” Such a “tenant take-over of the municipal estate is one of those sensible ideas which is dormant because our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the grooves of nineteenth century paternalism.” [Ward, Op. Cit., p. 73]

And it is here that we find the ultimate irony of the right-wing, “free market” attempts to abolish the welfare state — neo-liberalism wants to end welfare from above, by means of the state (which is the instigator of this individualistic “reform”). It does not seek the end of dependency by self-liberation, but the shifting of dependency from state to charity and the market. In contrast, anarchists desire to abolish welfare from below. This the libertarian attitude to those government policies which actually do help people. While anarchists would “hesitate to condemn those measures taken by governments which obviously benefited the people, unless we saw the immediate possibility of people carrying them out for themselves. This would not inhibit us from declaring at the same time that what initiatives governments take would be more successfully taken by the people themselves if they put their minds to the same problems … to build up a hospital service or a transport system, for instance, from local needs into a national organisation, by agreement and consent at all levels is surely more economical as well as efficient than one which is conceived at top level [by the state] … where Treasury, political and other pressures, not necessarily connected with what we would describe as needs, influence the shaping of policies.” So “as long as we have capitalism and government the job of anarchists is to fight both, and at the same time encourage people to take what steps they can to run their own lives.” [“Anarchists and Voting”, pp. 176–87, The Raven, No. 14, p. 179]

Ultimately, unlike the state socialist/liberal left, anarchists reject the idea that the cause of socialism, of a free society, can be helped by using the state. Like the right, the left see political action in terms of the state. All its favourite policies have been statist — state intervention in the economy, nationalisation, state welfare, state education and so on. Whatever the problem, the left see the solution as lying in the extension of the power of the state. They continually push people in relying on others to solve their problems for them. Moreover, such state-based “aid” does not get to the core of the problem. All it does is fight the symptoms of capitalism and statism without attacking their root causes — the system itself.

Invariably, this support for the state is a move away from working class people, from trusting and empowering them to sort out their own problems. Indeed, the left seem to forget that the state exists to defend the collective interests of the ruling class and so could hardly be considered a neutral body. And, worst of all, they have presented the right with the opportunity of stating that freedom from the state means the same thing as the freedom of the market (so ignoring the awkward fact that capitalism is based upon domination — wage labour — and needs many repressive measures in order to exist and survive). Anarchists are of the opinion that changing the boss for the state (or vice versa) is only a step sideways, not forward! After all, it is not working people who control how the welfare state is run, it is politicians, “experts”, bureaucrats and managers who do so (“Welfare is administered by a top-heavy governmental machine which ensures that when economies in public expenditure are imposed by its political masters, they are made in reducing the service to the public, not by reducing the cost of administration.” [Ward, Op. Cit. p. 10]). Little wonder we have seen elements of the welfare state used as a weapon in the class war against those in struggle (for example, in Britain during the miners strike in 1980s the Conservative Government made it illegal to claim benefits while on strike, so reducing the funds available to workers in struggle and helping bosses force strikers back to work faster).

Anarchists consider it far better to encourage those who suffer injustice to organise themselves and in that way they can change what they think is actually wrong, as opposed to what politicians and “experts” claim is wrong. If sometimes part of this struggle involves protecting aspects of the welfare state (“expanding the floor of the cage”) so be it — but we will never stop there and will use such struggles as a stepping stone in abolishing the welfare state from below by creating self-managed, working class, alternatives. As part of this process anarchists also seek to transform those aspects of the welfare state they may be trying to “protect”. They do not defend an institution which is paternalistic, bureaucratic and unresponsive. For example, if we are involved in trying to stop a local state-run hospital or school from closing, anarchists would try to raise the issue of self-management and local community control into the struggle in the hope of going beyond the status quo.

In this, we follow the suggestion made by Proudhon that rather than “fatten certain contractors,” libertarians should be aiming to create “a new kind of property” by “granting the privilege of running” public utilities, industries and services, “under fixed conditions, to responsible companies, not of capitalists, but of workmen.” Municipalities would take the initiative in setting up public works but actual control would rest with workers’ co-operatives for “it becomes necessary for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism.” [General Idea of the Revolution, p. 151 and p. 276–7] Thus, for example, rather than nationalise or privatise railways, they should be handed over workers’ co-operatives to run. The same with welfare services and such like: “the abolition of the State is the last term of a series, which consists of an incessant diminution, by political and administrative simplification the number of public functionaries and to put into the care of responsible workers societies the works and services confided to the state.” [Proudhon, Carnets, vol. 3, p. 293]

Not only does this mean that we can get accustomed to managing our own affairs collectively, it also means that we can ensure that whatever “safety-nets” we have do what we want and not what capital wants. In the end, what we create and run by ourselves will be more responsive to our needs, and the needs of the class struggle, than reformist aspects of the capitalist state. This much, we think, is obvious. And it is ironic to see elements of the “radical” and “revolutionary” left argue against this working class self-help (and so ignore the long tradition of such activity in working class movements) and instead select for the agent of their protection a state run by and for capitalists!

There are two traditions of welfare within society, one of “fraternal and autonomous associations springing from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above.” [Ward, Op. Cit., p. 123] While sometimes anarchists are forced to defend the latter against the greater evil of “free market” capitalism, we never forget the importance of creating and strengthening the former. As Chomsky suggests, libertarians have to “defend some state institutions from the attack against them [by private power], while trying at the same time to pry them open to meaningful public participation — and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.” [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 194] A point we will discuss more in the next section when we highlight the historical examples of self-managed communal welfare and self-help organisations.

[tittyinfinity]

Yes, it is going to be hard whenever capitalism comes to an end.

But the reality is that it's already collapsing in on itself and will only get worse from here on out.

Whenever people say they're done with the US government, it's not because they don't care about how people will be negatively affected – it's because it will be so much harder to fight later on down the line.

Capitalists have already been working together to make sure everyone is broke and exhausted. A good portion of our life is controlled by the corporate world & land-owners. Our bosses, landlords, and cops can control just about anything we do. Our phones spy on us and can send our info to the cops.

Capitalism is enforced through violence. There is public information about politicians taking money from corporations like health insurance & oil companies. There's public information about the US committing coups in communist and socialist countries to install fascist leaders. It has come out several times that our military is used to secure oil and other resources through terrorism. It's well-known that prisons are used to draft as many people for slave labor as they can. These companies that both pay off and install politicians to enforce policies that make them richer rely on this violence for their profit.

No capitalist candidate will never have your best interest at heart. Anyone willing to sacrifice lives for the sake of money will sacrifice your life the moment it's most convenient – all while saying that they're Helping The Country Get Better, Actually. And if our main goal is "less people dying," thinking short-term is not gonna save us. Especially when so many are already dying right now. Today.

If you're scared about the bad things that will happen when capitalism falls.....how do you think the people suffering & dying under the current system feel?

The people who have lost their homes and families? The people forced into slavery? Indigenous people who continue to lose more and more land?

All for the gas in your car, the lithium in your batteries, the land you live on, the job you work, and hell, most of the products we use.

You're worried about what might happen.... it's already happening, just not to you. And relying on the government to save you from the government isn't realistic.

Either you want imperialism, colonization, and genocide to end, or you don't. Stand up and fight while you have the chance.

Get your friends and neighbors together for direct action groups. Print out posters and put them all over the town. Don't just join protests, START them. Strike. Join the IWW. Get your coworkers together to start a union. Tell your boss to pay you more or you're all walking out. Stealing shit isn't even stealing shit – corporations & capitalists are already stealing tax money & the money produced by the labor of their workers. They take and take while they give us crumbs. We don't have to put up with this shit

[jkl-fff]

You are ruler of your country for a day! You can enact one law and it will still be in effect after you leave. What do you do?

Only one? Well, in typical USA fashion, I'm going to get around that by drafting one law (a bill) with a fuck ton of riders that are considered part of that one law (yep, even if they have nothing to do with the primary purpose of the bill and are actually something many legislators would oppose) (yet one more thing that's fucked up about this government). AND I'm going to go a step above that to guarantee these all remian in effect by declaring their enactment is as Constitutional Amendments.

Henceforth, all elected positions (presidents, governors, mayors, senators, representatives, etc.) are to be held for a term of four years, with a strict limit of two terms per person. Anyone who will turn 75 during the coming term will be deemed ineligible for office.

ALL judicial positions will be subject to a strict code of ethics (ESPECIALLY the fucking SUPREME COURT gods above, how is this already not a thing), and those who are accused of violating it will be subject to a trial with a jury of 12 judges. If found guilty of violating this code by at least 7 of the 12, they will be cast out of office ... and into prison. Also, judges can only serve at a given level for 16 years (no more of this lifetime terms bullshit).

No elected official may be reimbursed for their service at a rate higher than their state's minimum wage. Nor may they receive government benefits (like health insurance) above what the average citizen is entitled to receive. If they want more, they'd better improve the lives of their poorest citizens.

Their is a wealth cap at $500 million in private or corporate assets. Everything after that is confiscated for the public good. Anyone found guilty of trying to dodge that will lose everything and go to jail for the rest of their life (anyone with more than $10 million must be audited annually to ensure no tax fraud is being committed).

Corporate personhood will be acknowledged, but so will a corporate death penalty. If a company is found to have violated laws protecting the environment or public to a degree greater than $10 million in damages, then the company will be disbanded, and *all* assets of the executives will be seized while *half* of all middle management will be seized. (This way, rank and file workers will be incentivized to keep their company honest so they don't lose a job, management and executives will be incentivized because they stand to lose 50% or 100% of their wealth).

In a similar vein, all punitive fines are to be scaled according to the wealth of the offender. Like, a speeding ticket is $250 for a poor person, $25,000 for a millionaire.

The military can only receive as much funding as the Department of Education, which will disperse its funds to the poorest schools in a district first. But charter and religious schools are prohibited from receiving federal and state funds (if they want to be private, that's fine ... but they gotta pay for everything themselves while still being subject to federal regulations).

Business subsidies can not surpass welfare funding throughout a state. Also, if a business makes a profit one year, they are ineligible to receive subsidies the next.

Election Day is now on a Sunday, and all non essential services are to close so people can go vote. Tiered voting is to be instituted, too.

Convicted felons cannot be president even after serving their time (c'mon, people, seriously). Though they can vote again once released.

I could add others, but this has gone on long enough, and these already would be huge improvements. Thanks!

[sabaramonds]

if anyone is wondering if im going to do an analysis of double & mikoto i uhhh need to find more stuff to read in english about psychiatric care and dissociative disorder patients in japan but given what ive found so far im like. well this is what i expected from milgram ill be honest having read the voice drama tl and watched the mv 8573485 times (omg hanae natsukis vocals) i do have a few thoughts. mentions of CSA and childhood abuse below as well as medical abuse - mikoto2 ("john" LMFAOOOO) claims he was born from mikotos workplace stress and implies that mikoto did not have DID prior to that; DID is only developed in childhood, but its common to live your life without knowing about it until adulthood (the average age at diagnosis is 29-35 years as of a 2007 paper on sciencedirect i just double checked; according to a 2009 piece from the national library of medicine, the average patient for a diagnosis is a woman of about 30 years old and a retroactive view of the patients medical history and symptoms tend to reveal a lifetime of DID symptoms) so basically im saying that its equally possible deco and yamanaka are unaware of this or mikoto2 is lying his ass off because why would he want to tell some amnesiac teenage prison warden btw the reason i exist is because mikoto was abused as a child. why do you think our mom divorced our dad. even if es likely researched it themself and is probably aware of the statistical likelihood that mikoto experienced long term childhood abuse, why would mikoto2 say it...especially if that abuse was sexual in nature - according to this video recorded by a japanese man (a recovering hikkikomori who experienced forced hospitalization in the past), the 2017 statistics for mental hospital inpatients was that there were 280,000 patients at the time, and 170,000 of those were hospitalized for over a year. 90,000 had been in hospital care for more than 5 years and 26,000 had been in care for 20 years. he also references that most psychiatric care facilities are private in nature, not government-run, so they prioritize the amount of patients they receive in a short period of time because it earns them more profits (another video i watched compared this practice to a mcdonalds burger vs a proper restaurant; make more at a cheaper cost). likewise, long term care facilities dont want to let their patients go easily, because even if families or the patient cant afford to cover the cost, insurance or the government social security system will cover it. a combination of the psychiatric business as its run and the broader cultural attitude towards mental health (in some cases, families do not want their shame to be public, and actively do not want their mentally ill relative to be released from the hospital; if this is the case, its more likely for a patient to be forcibly hospitalized long term without anyone outside to advocate for their release) so im kind of like. hm. (see saw motion with my hand) as far as rep goes i think its kinda middling, especially because mikoto2 is the Alter Who Kills People For Some Reason trope, which always sucks and basically every journal, article, or vlog ive looked into from people with DID has said "god please stop with the murder alter trope please please", but considering the source material i think its...well, its honestly better than what i was expecting. but milgram is designed to be abstract to a certain extent and were still missing information, so who knows. maybe yamanaka and deco have something else up their sleeve regarding mikoto. but yeah i couldnt find anything specifically regarding patients with DID (or related disorders) but i did only poke around for like 2 hours in the middle of the night soooo ill come back to it and that concludes my findings on this topic for today. stay tuned for my next mikoto fic installment or whatever

[theculturedmarxist]

What would the world look like if the pandemic never ended, if Covid was causing widespread, long-term illness, and if all this was being covered up by the government?

You might expect to see record levels of sickness and disability. You might expect to see hard evidence that the ‘herd immunity’ plan failed, with children continuing to die at staggering rates. You might expect record numbers of absences in schools and workplaces, tons of canceled concerts and airline flights, more sudden/unexplained deaths in all age groups, and a rise in opportunistic infections (caused by damaged immune systems), like fungal infections or strep A. There would be a coordinated effort to hide data from the public to obscure the truth of the threat. Hospitalizations, cases, and transmission numbers would all be hidden or manipulated. The government probably wouldn’t try to hide the data all at once, because it would be easier to dismantle reporting over the course of several months or years.

Eventually, updates might cease altogether (despite rising cases). The CDC would likely have to hide death data as well. Powerful people with vested interests in keeping the economy running would probably engage in astroturfing online, spreading misinformation to convince the public the threat has passed (to get people back to work and boost corporate profits). The rich and powerful would continue to take precautions, while telling you everything’s fine. This would take a lot of effort, and there would have to be a pretty carefully-coordinated campaign to confuse (and wear down) the public. They might tell you repeatedly how much you shouldn’t be panicking. Hospitals might prioritize a sense of “normalcy” over infection control, so as not to be held (legally and financially) responsible for their role in the unfolding disaster.

The ruling class (who would have access to the truth of the situation) would use their knowledge of what’s coming to invest in long-term care facilities, nursing homes, disability services, and hospices. Some people would obviously figure out what’s going on (like scientists, for example) and start shouting about it from the rooftops. So you’d probably see extreme censorship measures happening on social media sites. As conditions worsen, government officials might start preparing the public to accept mass death, reassuring us that it will only happen to the ‘vulnerable.' Life insurance companies would take note and move accordingly, denying coverage to people suffering from Long Covid. Meanwhile, the scientific evidence would keep mounting.

We are still in a pandemic.

The pandemic is not over. Basically everything you have been led to believe about the virus is a lie. Covid is more dangerous, more transmissible, and more out of control than everyone in power is telling you. We are not back to normal. We are in freefall.

We were lied to at every step of the way. First we were told not to panic and to stay six feet apart. We were told not to panic, ordered by the surgeon general not to buy up face masks, which we were assured we wouldn’t need. Then, we were told to only wear masks if sick or caring for someone with symptoms. When we were all finally told to wear masks in April 2020, we were given bad information about which masks could keep us safe. Cloth and surgical masks do not protect against aerosols (respirators do). And we were told by the people in power these flimsy masks would keep us safe. This was a lie.

The lies that killed us

Documents show that the World Health Organization knew from the start that SARS-Cov-2 was airborne.  They knew that “[a]irflow and ventilation were identified as important factors influencing efficient spread in hospitals,” but did not provide ventilation guidance to the public for years. Instead, this information was withheld from the public; they told the world that Covid spread through droplet transmission and repeatedly insisted Covid was not airborne. Because WHO withheld this crucial information, people around the world did not take necessary airborne precautions, like wearing respirators instead of baggy surgical masks.

Images from the World Health Organization’s publications acknowledging airborne transmission of SARS, juxtaposed with their guidance to the public in 2020. Compiled by Maarten De Cock (@mdc_martinus) on Twitter.

When the vaccines were first made available in late 2020, many leaders and prominent experts told people that the shots would prevent transmission entirely. This was never true; vaccines provide some protection, but don’t stop transmission (and only slightly reduce your risk of Long Covid). Americans were told by the president that they had a choice: “vaxxed or masked,” leading many vaccinated people to stop masking.

Throughout 2021, Americans were told repeatedly that Covid was only a threat to the unvaccinated. The CDC confidently asserted through December 2021 that “Cases of reinfection with COVID-19 have been reported, but remain rare.” While they were pushing this claim, the CDC was conveniently no longer reporting vaccination status alongside information on Covid deaths. (That information would remain hidden until April of 2022).

Once vaccinated people were getting sick with Covid in large numbers and the data could no longer be fully suppressed, the government told everyone that a vaccine plus a breakthrough infection would give you hybrid immunity. Experts declared that this form of ‘immunity’ would be the ticket to ending the pandemic. Then Omicron happened and cases skyrocketed.

The lies continued from there. We were told Omicron was somehow ‘milder,’ we were told that because nearly everyone got it, that we would finally reach population-level ‘immunity.’

But viruses do not automatically evolve to become milder. And Covid did not become milder; it became more insidious, more contagious, and more immune evasive. We now know it is neuroinvasive (even in cases with ‘mild’ acute symptoms), vascular, mass disabling, and far deadlier than what official totals have led us to believe. We know now that most transmission happens asymptomatically, and that reinfections are even more dangerous than initial infections. We know that at least one in ten infections leads to Long Covid, a debilitating neurological disease with no cure. We know this virus dysregulates immune systems, destroys T cells, and directly infects arteries in the heart. And as a result of all of this, we’re seeing unprecedented levels of sickness on a global scale.

We are living through an ongoing democide, being covered up in real time.

Hiding the bodies

The people in power have used every tool at their disposal to downplay, lie about, and cover up the truth of this pandemic. As the cases continued to rise (despite their assurances that things were under control), the US government took even greater steps to keep the public calm and unaware. They changed the way they calculated and shared information about community transmission, changing the scary-looking red map from a comforting green one overnight. The number of cases didn’t go down. But the green map gave people a false sense of belief that things were improving. The CDC called the new map system the Community Levels map. Most people mistakenly thought low Community Levels meant low community transmission, but this confusing system relied on hospitalizations, a lagging indicator.

After, and before. The mostly-green map on the left is dated March 10, 2022 and the map on the right is dated March 9, 2022.

In addition to changing the map, the CDC also made major changes to the ways that Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were tracked. The changes always served to ensure that totals were undercounted. The CDC was manipulating the data, sweeping bodies under the rug. But these changes were made gradually and largely without the public’s awareness. In January 2022, they moved to end daily Covid death reporting by hospitals; by February, they had officially done so. By March 2022, some US states started shutting down daily Covid death reporting altogether.

What the public did eventually hear via the news was that the numbers were trending down. ‘Hospitalizations are down,’ the news told everyone—neglecting to inform all of us of the changes the CDC made to its reporting that artificially deflated these totals in multiple ways.

Hiding the data was not enough to get everyone to accept continued, repeated infections. The government wanted all of us to believe that catching Covid repeatedly was unavoidable and the acceptable cost of keeping everything running. If people were able to avoid becoming repeatedly infected, this lie wouldn’t hold. So they changed the guidance for schools, saying that there was no longer a need for masks, testing, or quarantines. They changed the isolation guidelines so that infectious people were sent back to work after just five days (down from ten)—at the request of the CEO of Delta Airlines. They ended the mask mandates in healthcare and transportation. Allowing people longer absences from work would set a precedent for workers demanding regular sick leave; it was crucial to not let ten-day absences become the norm or the expectation.

Testing moved to the private market, and fewer and fewer people retained the ability to test themselves regularly. And the people who are testing are largely relying on at-home rapid tests—whose results are not being reported anywhere.

On top of all of this, the CDC director called masks the “scarlet letter” of the pandemic. Over and over, the messaging from leadership stated that masks were a burden, masks marked you as an outsider, masks were outdated. They created immense social pressure for people to stop masking. As long as people continued to wear masks in public spaces, the threat remained visible and on others’ minds. Pushing everyone to drop their masks was big business’s way of ensuring people believed the pandemic was over so that they would resume traveling, spending money, and stimulating the economy without reservations.

In August of this year, just three months after ending the global public health emergency, the World Health Organization went as far as to stop sharing Covid-19 Epidemiological Updates. When announcing this change, they stated that “reported cases do not accurately represent infection rates due to the reduction in testing and reporting globally.”

Now, wastewater data is the only accurate data we have left. This data shows the concentration of Covid in sewage wastewater samples from across the country (the virus is shed in our poop when we get sick). And this crucial data is also under threat. Biobot Analytics, the company that provided much of the US wastewater data, lost its contract with CDC NWSS this month. The new contract went to Verily, a company owned by Alphabet (Google’s parent company). The switch is leading to data gaps, as well as changes in sample processing and analysis that will make data from some sites no longer directly comparable with the sites covered by Biobot. Others have noted that, unlike Biobot, Verily offers “little in terms of comprehensible data in regional or national terms.”

Without accurate data on current cases, transmission rates, hospitalizations, and deaths, we have no way of knowing the full scope of the current crisis. Our house is on fire; alarms removed, the public sleeps.

Government mitigations

The government knows that the pandemic is not over. The US Department of Defense is investing in state-of-the-art wearables that can predict if wearers are getting sick. The devices use biometrics and predictive algorithms (trained on hospital-acquired data) to detect infectious diseases up to 48 hours before any symptoms appear. The wearables are part of the Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure (RATE) project, which recently got $10 million worth of additional funds.  

Everyone who meets with President Joe Biden is PCR tested beforehand.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre recently confirmed that strict COVID-19 testing protocols remain in place, saying, "Anybody who meets with the president does indeed get tested." White House interns still have to agree to wear masks when asked.

When Biden gave a maskless speech last year at Richard Montgomery High School during a period of high Covid transmission, gym windows were removed to rig a temporary high-end ventilation setup. Parents at the school were outraged, and teachers took to Twitter to share photos of the air handling units. NALTIC Industrials called the setup “unprecedented.” Meanwhile, the US government continued to insist on the safety of America’s schools, telling parents to send their kids maskless to poorly-ventilated classrooms.

[fatehbaz]

Traditional scholarship in the history of science associates the quantifiable, universal human body with the European Enlightenment or ‘new science’. This measurable, universal body, it is argued, came to define modern medicine. Behind it lay the driving forces of political economy, [...] life insurance, and modern industrial [profit] [...]. But this widely accepted history of the universalisation and systemisation of human corporeality [...] [involves] an earlier global history of enslaving and measuring bodies in the Indies, born of the Iberian slave trade between Africa and colonial Iberian America. It was in the violent and profitable world of this slave trade that universal concepts and calculations of health risks, disease and bodily characteristics [...] emerged. Indeed, the scale of data production about bodies in the early modern world of Iberian slave trading far outpaced all contemporary systems of production of knowledge about the human body.

The key concept in this early modern quantification of the body was the pieza de Indias (Spanish) or peça da India (Portuguese). [...]

The appearance of this new measure and epistemology was intimately linked to the unprecedented rise in the size and complexity of the transatlantic commerce in human bodies during the first decades of the 17th century. The new, universal measure of man was the result of the slave trade’s need to quantify the risks of investing in human corporeality and its modern afflictions. By the late 16th century, Iberian slave traders, governments, corporations and financiers from around Europe (particularly from Genoa, Florence and the Netherlands) were already thinking of the transportation of slave bodies as units of risk.

---

The original licences for slaves transacted in Iberia were contractual concepts that did not refer to bodily characteristics [...] [and] were of limited help [...] for calculating the productivity [of a slave's body] [...]. Consequently, slave traders and slave-trading organisations, including the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) in Seville, developed methodologies that allowed them to translate slave bodies into numbers and calculate the inherent value [...] as it related to an increasingly normalised, constant unit called the pieza. The concept of the pieza (the piece) allowed for the creation of contracts where investors, providers and the state could prospectively calculate tariff, gains and risk using quantifiable notions of bodies [...].

The historical record makes clear that the concept of ‘the piece of the Indies’ itself was already firmly established across the Atlantic basin by the early 1600s. [...] In addition to peça, Portuguese slave traders [in West Africa] used several other terms to refer to slaves who were not adult [...], reflecting an increasingly rich taxonomy [...]. Muleque or muleca [...]. Slave traders began using these terms to refer to young bodies that they discounted at rates [...]. Calculating the value of cañengues, muleques and mulecas by converting them into standard adult [...] piezas was a common practice [...]. Portuguese officials in Sao Paulo da Assumpcao de Loanda deployed the concept when they tallied ‘the dispatch’, or fees due to the Portuguese crown, for the embarkment of African slaves bound for the Americas. Such methods to appraise slave bodies became normative in Spanish America for determining the tariffs that traders had to pay to introduce slaves in the New World.

By the late 1530s, crown officials were counting the ‘pieces of slaves’ (piezas de esclavos) disembarking in Santo Domingo and selling them to miners [...] [and] hacienda owners [...] to work in the mines and estates of the island. [...] [A] concept of an ideal body for transportation and labour [...] had emerged across the Atlantic, and during the first decades of the 17th century it was disseminated across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, being widely used in Dutch trading records. [...] [S]lave traders and government officials used the term pieza to talk about other captive bodies from the Indies, most notably native or 'Indian' bodies in the Caribbean.

---

The concept of the piece of the Indies appears in full form in the 1660s as part of negotiations of the terms of the asiento de negros or slave monopoly between the Spanish crown and the Genoese financiers Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelín. The contract with the Grillos established that they would ‘bring 24,500 blacks, piezas de Indias, over the course of seven years and starting in 1662’. The monopoly established as one of its conditions that ‘the said quantity of blacks should be piezas de Indias, each one seven cuartas of height and up’. [...] Slave traders used height as a proxy for life histories of health and nutrition and as a predictor of the slave’s potential productivity [...] [and] created a complex system around the marker of height [...].

[H]aving grey hair, for instance, translated into a reduction in value of one cuarta or one-seventh of the standard pieza. The conditions of 'cloud in one eye [cataracts]' signified a reduction of two cuartas; scurvy, two cuartas; phlegm, one and one-half cuartas; a 'benign hernia', one cuarta [...]. Being older than 35 years merited a one-cuarta deduction [...]. The presence of lobanillos (small tumours) was worth one and one-half cuartas’ reduction; small fingers, one-half cuarta; incapacitating scars (burns), one and one-half cuarta; [...] localised ulcers, one-sixth of a cuarta; generalised ulcers, one cuarta; [...] short-sightednesss, two cuartas; [...] missing molars, one cuarta [...].

---

The contractual articulation of the concept of the piece of the Indies [...] formalised slave-based knowledge production about human bodies. The contract assembled a vast storehouse of knowledge, much of it held in the House of Trade in Seville, obtained from thousands of records of bodily characteristics and diseases for hundreds of thousands of bodies [...]. The Grillos’ contract set a precedent for the 1679 contract between Spanish and Portuguese merchants and the Dutch West India Company. The 1696 asiento between Spanish crown and [financier F.M.] and [financier N/P.], for example, agreed they would transport 10,000 tonnes of freight including 30,000 piezas de Indias of the ‘regular measure of seven cuartas’. Similarly, a 1709 contract between the French Compagnie de Guinée and Dutch slave traders, settled in Amsterdam, specified that the French would pay 110 pièces de huit (pieces of eight) ‘for each black piece of Indies’ delivered in the Caribbean.

As the ‘new science’ of the European Enlightenment dawned in Europe, the piece of the Indies was well established as the most disseminated universal measure of the human body.

---

All text above by: Pablo F. Gomez. "Pieza de Indias: Slave Trade and the Quantification of Human Bodies". A chapter in New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities (edited by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel), pp. 47-50. Published 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[thissugarcane]

again, write before anything else in the morning MIGHT = me getting something posted this year. augh.

anyway, there are two scenes in 4x02 I want to keep almost the same; one is the moment where Brian tells the headhunter a shitty job isn't worth it and Justin's all "you're just taking an awfully big risk [not taking the job], you could wind up destitute" and Brian's like, "well. what's one more?" as if he's like, accepted Justin, accepted he's working for himself, etc., what IS one more risk??

and then the other is brian telling ted, "you've hit bottom with a resounding thud. of course, there's only one way to go from there... rhymes with...?" "up"? Which is clearly like, Brian empathizing [to a certain degree] with Ted, staring down his life from the vantage point of having clawed his way one step away from rock-bottom, but knowing just how much farther he has to go. just like brian.

now picture that brian terrified of cancer.

~

Justin got out of the shower to find Brian laying naked on the bed and clenching his fist while he charmed someone on the phone. "Two thirds my previous salary and no profit sharing for the first five years?" he asked. "That's an interesting way to negotiate."

An unintelligible mumble came from Brian's cel phone. Justin couldn't help but grin as Brian pulled him down and flipped him onto his back. Justin squirmed as Brian stroked his face and neck, down to his shoulder, and then pinched his ribs.

"Times are tough," Brian agreed. "Which leads me to wonder what other kinds of benefits they've decided junior--" and he put a little more emphasis on 'junior' (oh, great, his ego was rearing its head)-- "associates don't get? Let me guess, stock options come at the same time as profit sharing? Medical and dental have six month waiting periods? Oh, I know. Travel reimbursements after a year-long probationary period!"

Another unintelligible mumble; Brian had stopped moving altogether, staring at the wall instead of Justin as he listened. Justin watched his face, moving a hand slowly along the nape of Brian's neck as Brian's face slowly collapsed in infintessimally small increments.

So. That was a resounding yes to the medical waiting list (and probably no expenses or stock too).

Then Brian pulled his mask back on, even smiled (vaguely Justin remembered his [etiquette teacher] once saying 'if you have to sound pleasant, smile, even if its fake; it comes out in your voice!'). He moved his hips just enough to stroke his semi-hard cock along Justin's balls and told whoever it was on the phone, "You can inform them I've taken a new position; one with more impressive returns."

Another unintelligible murmur. Brian ran his fingers through Justin's hair with his free hand, twisting it, as he started frowning. "I suppose there's no harm in keeping my resume out there. But if this is your best efforts, I doubt it."

Justin distinctly heard the woman on the phone saying, "then best of luck to you, Mr. Kinney," before Brian snapped his phone closed and tossed it off the bed (where Justin heard it skitter across the bedroom floor).

"So, no expense account?" Justin asked, trying to be cheerful.

Both of Brian's hands were in Justin's hair, and Brian dropped his forehead to rest against Justin's collarbone. "Six month waiting period, like all the rest." He snorted. "I bet it's the same fucking insurer as Vangard, honestly."

"Shit." Justin bit his lip. "Still, it didn't sound like a bad salary. And as long as I'm at Starbucks--"

"You need to go back to school, Sunshine."

Now was not the time to get into that argument; Justin still had [a few weeks] before winter term registration closed. Justin bit Brian's neck gently. "So what are you gonna do?"

Brian collapsed his weight onto Justin, letting his body sink until they were touching all over, Justin's legs cradling Brian and Brian's face tucked into Justin's neck. "Fuck if I know. You heard her. That was 'the best offer she'd seen in weeks, and I'd be lucky to get it'."

"Shit."

Brian nodded against Justin's neck, not that Justin could see his face.

"Was it a good idea to tell her to fuck off?"

Brian shrugged against him; Justin felt his cock twitch. "She won't give a shit if something else comes along that she wants me to interview for." All of a sudden, Brian shifted up so he could stare into Justin's eyes. "Fuck it," he declared. "I can do better working for myself."

["I thought you'd contacted your clients and they weren't ready to jump ship."]

"Not yet they aren't," Brian told him. "Give me a few months and they'll be begging to take me back. Besides, I can get others. Ones who aren't pathetic."

Justin thought about it. He, above everyone else, knew that at least half of Brian's confidence was carefully hidden bravado; sometimes a lot more than half. But down in the core of Brian was a healthy chunk of (well-deserved) self-confidence too, and determination, and faith, even, in his own ability to survive and thrive. The fuck'em mentality, brought to life.

Justin didn't disagree, but Brian had had so many fucking upsets, so many shocks, in the last few weeks, he just didn't... want him to be reacting because of that. "What if you can't get the clients?" Justin asked. "You'll be destitute."

And then Brian said the thing that made Justin realize why he was really doing this -- why he was truly ready. "And I'm not now, Sunshine?" Brian countered. It was said matter-of-factly, Brian's eyes clear, and Justin realized that Brian had finally accepted his current state of affairs, at least about the job, had internalized it and started thinking four steps ahead again. Brian continued, "No job, no money, maybe [four months'] worth of expenses in the bank, and [an MRI] to find out if I'll have to shell out [a hundred thousand bucks] to pay for fucking cancer treatment?"

"It's still an awfully big risk."

Brian looked right at him, before replying seriously, "Well, what's one more? At least I'll get to pick the fucking insurance package." Justin blinked, and Brian continued quietly, like a confession, "Besides. If I don't do this now, I never will."

Brian raised his eyebrow, Justin nodded, a little movement of his head, as Brian twined his fingers into Justin's hair absently. There was nothing else that needed to be said.

[gay-sin]

Severance, flip phones, far from home: the impossibility of opting out 

I finished Severance by Ling Ma about a week ago. I loved it so much. I am not in school anymore and I am having a hard time trying to fulfill my desire for intellectual conversation. It’s not like I’m not learning anymore. I’m learning so much. These days, I am filling in the gaps of my learning in the sections of life that I chose to put off while prioritizing academia. I’m learning to take care of myself, complete tasks, hold myself accountable, and generally survive. It is hard and I miss the conversations I would have in school that felt like they truly challenged and deepened my worldview. Reading has been a great solace to me in that way but it often feels lonely to read something and not get to discuss it with others. I can never simply read or watch something without wanting to dig in and discuss the implications. I like to use fiction to interrogate real things. I have so many thoughts about Severance and what it had me thinking about in my own life as I read it. I decided to write it down to at least converse with myself as I did so. I'm posting it online to see if anyone would want to engage in conversation with me as well. It is not in MLA or whatever. I’m not in school. I can write how I want. 

I think that the title of Severance is very layered. On the surface, it references the phenomenon of severance checks (payments given to terminated employees that are fired due to layoffs or retirement). The payments are based on the amount of time that an employee has worked for the company. Effectively, it aims to take care of the people that have taken care of the company until they can find new work. Severance describes how companies have cut long-term employees and these checks in order to maximize profits at the cost of minimizing quality. This seems to echo a larger trend that the novel revolves around: a cutting off (or severance) from our interconnectivity under our current systems of hetero-patriarchal white supremacist colonial capitalism. What a mouthful. But basically… Society is severing us from the things that make living meaningful, and for many, possible. 

The characters of the book all seem to be struggling with the desire to opt out of this system (who wouldn't want that?) The narrator, Candace, immigrated to Salt Lake City from Fuzhou as a child. This severance from her ancestry, culture, and family was done in aims of giving her a better life in the United States. In many ways, it was an action done by her parents in order to attempt to opt out of the struggles of life in Fuzhou, made increasingly difficult under global capitalism. Even so, the choice was really just opting into a new set of struggles. The book describes the complex effects of this immigration on Candace and her family. In addition, it describes the guilt of leaving and the burden of feeling as if you are in a country that despises you while you must constantly prove yourself to it.

Candace’s ex-boyfriend felt dehumanized by the working in corporate America and therefore lives on the fringes of the system, skimping by. He believes himself to be opting out of the system. In this quote, Candace interrogates his lifestyle.

“I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice” (205).

The illusion of opting out is a privilege. Jonathan, unlike Candance, is American. This gives him the ability to exist in America without questioning or proving his belonging. He does not carry the weight of supporting his family or really anyone but himself. Even so, he barely manages that. Candace, not afforded many of Jonathan's privileges, works for in a corporate office. Jonathan, idealistic and blind to his own advantages, is consistently criticizing this choice.

I have always had dreams of opting out. I've spent much of my life dreaming of this. I think that part of why I went to college was to opt out of joining the workforce for four more years. I studied art because it seemed like that would be opting out of the monotony of having a Real Job. I bought a flip phone to opt out of smartphone addiction. I moved across the country to opt out of my family. 

Severance depicts a world-ending incurable pandemic. The illness is called Shen Fever and it is somewhat akin to a zombie apocalypse without the eating of humans. The sickness comes for everyone, even if it does demolish the areas with the least privileges first. In the end, everyone is susceptible. You cannot opt out. You cannot buy your way out of an incurable disease. 

You cannot buy your way out of climate change, even if you can avoid its consequences for longer. Sure, you may be privileged enough to be given the illusion of opting out but this planet is deeply, densely interconnected. You are not opting out. You are delaying the inevitable. 

Over the summer, I went to an anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia and bought a book called Meaningful Flesh: Reflections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet. I would read the essays on my breaks from work, trying to see if I could be someone that reads academic theory in my free time. It ended up being very dense and difficult to get through but it was incredibly interesting to me. I was reminded of the second essay of the text when reading Severance. It is called, “Irreverent Theology: On the Queer Ecology of Creation” by Jacob J. Erikson. The essay aims to queer our ideas of nature and matter with a theological lens. That is a massive oversimplification of the text but I don’t want to stray too much from my original point here. I just wanted to include a quote from the essay to gesture to how these concepts in Severance have resonances in so many areas of life.

 “For this particular nature-cultural moment, we must be irreverent of old stories and ideas in our constructive creativity. Ideas of pristine nature, untouched wilderness, essential selves, essential genders, and uncomplicated assumptions of desire and sexuality, deaden and violate the messy and embodied realities of creativity, embodied ecology, and enfleshed divinity” (74).

Collectively, we have attempted to sever ourselves from the environment that we are interwoven with, dependent on, and constantly in conversation with. The consequences are far-reaching and the effort is inevitably futile. You cannot sever yourself from the environment that sustains you. You are the environment.

On Saturday, I took an Uber home from my friend’s house and chatted with the driver. We talked about daylight savings and how stupid it is. Why make the sun go down sooner? I wish I could opt out of it, but then I’d be an hour early to every event from now until spring. I told him that I thought that the government was supposed to get rid of this system but apparently they were too busy committing genocides. We talked about Palestine and how clear it is that what is happening is devastating but how some people still blindly support Israel. We agreed that people have lost a fundamental part of their humanity: a severance from the part of themselves that sees innocent people dying and is devastated and outraged. In America, we have the choice to participate in these colonial ideologies,  push against them, or to not have an opinion (to “opt out"). It is an American privilege, the illusion of opting out of mass murder. None of us are separate from this conflict. Our tax dollars are being spent on the weapons that do the killing.

I am a white American. I have a large array of privileges that give me the illusions of choice. But at the end of the day, none of my choices have truly opted me out. At the end of the day, these severances have only handicapped me in other ways. I have gotten lost and missed appointments that I could have simply typed into Google Maps on a smartphone. I walked to urgent care by myself when I could have called my mom to pick me up if I didn’t move so far away. I carry the debt of my art degree and I will be making monthly payments from now until forever. I don’t have enough money to get out of an unhealthy living situation.  How free am I? How much have I opted out? You can opt out and be crushed by the weight of what it means to be alone, still dependent and existent within the system you’ve supposedly broken out of. But if you opt in, do you get sucked in? What choice is there?

“To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” (290).

In Severance, the fevered mindlessly repeat patterns. Their condition is an identifiable sickness. Yet, at the same time, Ma also gestures to the fact that it is not too different from the condition that we all share. Our daily repetition, often mindless, trying to find pleasure. The condition one must adopt to survive in this world. The sickness is not individual, it is collective. The cure is not individual, it is collective.

My coworker is moving home across the country after moving away from his family many years ago. He told me about how stressful the process has been for him. I could relate a lot to what he had said. The unsustainability of not having family closeby. The feeling of - what am I proving? The unsustainable nature of being alone and the sometimes equally unsustainable nature of family. Every choice seems to be a choice to sever yourself from one thing or sever yourself from another. Either way, the choice is rarely to come together. The deeper we just get into becoming a mess of severed pieces. 

I got a flip phone back in 2021 when I took a year off from college. At the time, I had fallen headfirst into a lot of the crushing realities that I had never really wanted to face. I was back home living with my family. I was coming to terms with my health, my sexuality, my lack of funds, my place in the world. I was cut off from my illusions of Making it Big and was faced with what Making it Small would entail. I was trying to shoulder the weight of the world that seemed to slowly be collapsing. I got a flip phone as an experiment, to see if I could do it, to see what it would feel like.  I wanted to know what it would be like to have to figure things out on my own, to be in silence, to be present in the moment that I was in. I wanted to stop opting out of being alive. 

About a month ago, I switched back to my smartphone on a whim. To see if I could, to see what it would feel like. It hasn’t solved anything. It hasn’t cured me. It has made my life easier in a lot of ways but harder in others. I miss the way I could walk around with a built-in excuse as to why I had not seen your email. I liked not having the pressure of every piece of knowledge at my constant disposal. I miss the way I felt I could walk around the world without trying to sever myself from it. I would walk in silence instead of trying to impose some soundtrack onto my reality, the soundtrack of the life I’d rather live.

[lol-jackles]

I love your insights and agree that Jensen’s deal with Amazon seems to fit more like a actor’s holding deal. If I understand how those work, it’s where the studio pays the actor a salary for a year to hold them to try and find a role for him/her in a tv show or movie. Is that correct?

You’ve said Amazon doesn’t pay actors very well, so what is your guess to Jensen’s salary that Amazon is paying him? (Is that how he was able to afford a $10million mansion in Connecticut?)

Do those work like typical salaries (weekly/monthly) or because it was also tied to his production company, was that annual salary paid to him in an upfront sum with hopes the ackles would use the money to develop a project?

given the strike, the ackles cannot develop anything, do they have to refund any money back to amazon?

Thank you and yes, in typical holding deals the actor will receive a salary for at least one year while the studio finds a suitable project for them. Similarly, Jensen would get paid X amount of dollars for the term no matter what. He would get a check every month that comes out of the millions in his deal, this will go to pay for overhead of running Chaos Machine, including employee salaries., office space, etc. So any advanced money the Ackles received is their's to keep even if there are no project(s) for Amazon's original programming.

With that said, I highly doubt that the CMP received the typical starter $10 million for production overheads as the deal was to hire Jensen for his acting (and his fandom). Jensen may have received $1 million in retainer fee instead.

As for the Ackles' ~ investment in Connecticut, he's going to sell that house in a year or two to an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust, then use the “sale” and the equity in the CT house to buy another house, just like he did with the Colorado house that was brought when he sold the Austin lake house (at half the market value) to the same trust. For example, if the Ackles put down at least 20% for the lake house, when the property’s value goes up by 20% (and it will), the Ackles have now made a 100% ROI and that’s before considering rents and tax write offs. Then when the houses like the lake house is sold for real in 10, 15, or 20 years, it will be sold at it's actual market price. It's a classic use of these types of trusts to make money by reaping the actual profit from the real sale and on top of the previous profit when the house was first sold into the trust. 

Jensen can easily never work again in his life just by living off his net worth, which I’ve speculated to be 20-25 million dollars and if he invest conservatively his net worth will double in ten years. While he's ~investing in real estates, I suspect his main source of passive income comes from investing in target-date funds, they’re a mix of stocks, bonds, and alternative assets and probably in a collection of mutual funds. If Jensen keeps to the common rule of withdrawal limit of 4%, he’ll have at least $1 million fuck-you money every year, more than enough to cover property tax and he and his family will be comfortably wealthy for the rest of their lives without working. But men need to work, hence why he pitched to WB the ideal of continuing SPN after Jared leaves.

@supernaturalconvert techically the trusts own the houses, and the people currently living at the lake house are paying rent to the "beneficiaries", which are the Ackles.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

As a Floridian, let me just say something about water.

It is not an ornament. It is not a playground. It is a soup of fish poop and lawn fertilizer runoff and sometimes reptilian carnivores that preceded and outlived the dinosaurs. It wants you to gawk at it and forget about inconvenient details like "flood plains" "storm surge" and "evacuation zones." But water is patient and given half a chance or 140 mile an hour winds blowing out from the sea against the coastline, it will take back that mangrove swamp that developers half a century ago drained off and sold to unsuspecting dupes as "paradise."

I personally didn't lose anything in Helene or Ian or Charley, but I've known people who did, and I have had the experience of trying to estimate how screwed I was based on the water level against the mailbox.

What is happening in Florida ironically fits a model that has been discussed in many places but especially Robert Evans et al's "It Could Happen Here" with is term "the crumbles." Less of a sudden, sharp societal collapse and more of a slow but steady erosion. There are people along the Florida coastline, especially in Big Bend (that's the curve between the peninsula and the Panhandle for those not in the know) and the Fort Myers metro area that have experienced devastating flooding two or three times in two years now. The insurance market is a mess because not only is a bad for profit business model to insure coastal Florida areas, its turning into something that's simply not feasible. The money just isn't there.

So what does that mean longterm? Well for the near term, probably an acceleration of existing trends. People who already were being priced out by property taxes and the uninsurability of their homes and business calling a quits and leaving for other areas. If you leave in a rapidly overheating housing market in the Sunbelt, you may very well already be familiar with refugees from Florida's insane politics and crazier housing costs turning up.

The properties they sold off or abandoned will likely be acquired by deep pocketed interests who will redevelop them into some mix of more resilient or something more disposable: expensive timeshares and vacation rentals for instance. Itinerant residents tend to have no loyalty to the community, resent paying into schools and infrastructure, and care little if the area is ecologically ruined and denuded of native wildlife and plant life because for them the carefully manicured and managed illusion of nature will be assumed to be reality.

As a Floridian is my deep seated conviction that having your economic driver be tourism and planned communities breeds reactionary politics. Hospitality doesn't really care if its workers are well educated as long as it has workers. If it has to import those workers and have them live dormitory style, then that's what it will do. Hospitality has no vested interest in infrastructure beyond the walls of its carefully curated experiences, although too much crime and poverty in the news might be a problem.

This is much the same for planned communities that market heavily to remote workers and retirees out of state. Thus there's money for law enforcement but not public infrastructure, public green spaces, education, healthcare etc. because there are amenities to be provided at a premium and on a for profit basis by the owner, not entitlements for people outside the walls of the planned community.

And it almost assuredly breeds contempt. The maintenance department, the check in clerk, the ride share driver: these are not your neighbors. They're from another country, if not literally, then proverbially. They're from the outside. The outside where it is dirty and people are presumed uneducated, coarse, and unruly.

And of course, savvy politicians lean into this. Watch the political ads. The real Floridians are identified as retired or upper middle class suburbanites. No one is for the farm hands picking the ever declining citrus monocultures, the crops falling prey to disease and the land itself becoming more valuable for housing than it is commercial use. If you have a lawn care or pool cleaning business, you can imagine they're talking to you when they talk about small business owners, but there again its not as your employees or perhaps even you get to live in the same neighborhoods as your clients and increasing its not clear you get to live anywhere.

There is some small, dark satisfaction to be gained from the knowledge that, much like the next wave of construction that will happen along the coasts, the pastures, wilderness, and farmland being paved over has been left green for good reasons and the bill for fraudulent impact assessments and security theater flood mitigation will come due. But the developers will have long ago fled town with suitcases full of cash, leaving their tenants waist deep in sewage and hungry reptiles after substandard seawalls and pumps failed.

It would be easy to hate the ignorant who didn't look beyond the walls of their gated communities. In the end they will be suckers and I pity them because many of them will lose family photos and home equity, only to have their insurance company declare insolvency and fight their claims tooth and nail. Many of them will not be the uber rich, many will be the petite bourgeois whose extravagant (by our standards) lifestyle was always far more perilous than they or we could have possibly imagined.

Because water is patient and it will have its swamp back.

[tj-crochets]

Hey y'all! I am once again in health insurance hell, and could really use some help. I have a specific US health insurance question, but it might get long so it's below a read more

My employer offers two health plan options, and they are both absolutely terrible. I want to get my own health insurance, but the insurance broker lady I used when I worked part time says I can't, because I can get health insurance through my employer, even if I opt out. I spoke to another health insurance person today, and she said if I get a letter on company letterhead saying I'll lose health insurance on [date], as long as it's 60 days or less from now, it counts as a qualifying event and I can buy my own health insurance. She said opting out counted as losing health insurance. Do you know anything about this? How do I get health insurance as an individual NOT through my employer even though my employer offers it? The plans my employer is offering are Aetna, and Aetna is the absolute worst and I despise them as a company so much one of my long term goals is to warn people against them. They suck! They refused to pay for my inhaler until I got my doctor to fill out a form like three times, and also I had to email them A LOT and fill out a LOT of surveys with an emphasis on how horrifying I found it that they as a company clearly valued profit over their customer's lives, and would in fact prefer their customers die before they could reach the ER in case of an emergency, as evidenced by their refusing to pay for my rescue inhaler, a necessary life-saving medication. They also require I fill that form out every year, just in case I magically stop being in the small minority of people who get severe adverse reactions to albuterol and levalbuterol

[horce-divorce]

i'm so over this delta 8 shit. like yeah it's better than not having anything but it's not weed and it's not doing the same thing. i miss weed so much. d8 makes me cough so bad, it's weak as hell even when it's really good stuff, and it seemingly has 0 cbd compounds unless you buy the more expensive, cbd added/"live resin" type stuff. it doesn't help my pain at all, and its so much more expensive than weed no matter how you slice it. plus we always need more of it bc it's so weak. those 1g carts from Michigan were lasting Bel and I about 3 days each between the two of us. we go through a whole 2g cart of d8 in that amount of time or less. it's ridiculous.

and the thing is, when i lived here before, yeah, i had like 3 or 4 weedguys i could rotate between to get real stuff anyway. not so anymore. i've been gone for almost 4 years and they've really been cracking down on drugs around here in the interim. it's given the d8 market a massive foothold, but it's seriously been impossible to find a regular weedguy. every time we've almost found a lead, we start hearing about raids or the guy goes MIA. we'd basically either have to drive to the border ourselves at this point, or just cave and use the d8 that's available locally. and we're broke, so we've been doing the latter, obviously lol

weed has been keeping me off a feeding tube for years. my doctors in michigan told me outright to keep using it because they didn't want to prescribe me opioids. and then i move back to the only state in this whole area where weed is still illegal lmao. d8 has been keeping me off a tube lately, but tbqh i don't think it will continue to. my MALS attacks have been getting more frequent (which makes my POTS a lot worse), I'm eating less again, and even when i do manage to eat, it takes so much out of me and is still so painful, I usually end up having to sleep afterwards. i'm losing so much of my day just for having the audacity to feed myself and it's making me depressed again. i'm even on an antidepressant this time!!! it's also helping a little bit with the pain, but not enough to matter in the long run. i'm still gonna end up on a tube at this rate.

i'm also just sick of living in wisconsin so that makes me cranky, too. i love who i live with, being with my boyfriend and my roommate is great, but i've spent like 16 years living in wisconsin against my will already and somehow I KEEP fucking ending up back here, always against my will, and it's always pissed me off, but now it ALSO has the audacity to be the one (1) state in the whole area that won't let me have the one medication all my doctors have agreed is saving my life. every other state touching us, on every single side, has weed. canada has weed. 24 fucking states have legalized it. but no, wisconsin has to stick it's heels in the mud and keep that boot on our necks at ANY cost, especially over a change that would benefit literally everyone and increase revenue overall. i fucking hate it here.

america as a whole needs to get it's head out of it's ass about pain management. not just cannabis, but opioids and any other alternatives, too. but of course, the cruelty is the point. they want us to be suffering. they want to torture us. they want us to be stuck in ineffective health management loops until we die. more profit for insurance companies and hospitals, less "handouts" needed back, less conscientious objectors and protestors and political dissidents to be bothersome, less noisy disabled voices calling for justice in the world.

i am determined to keep trying to manage my MALS for as long as I can without getting surgery and, hopefully, without being on opioids (not because I buy into the fearmongering, but because of how strict the rules are about being prescribed them, about the lists you end up on, the random piss tests, and all the other bureaucratic crap that comes along with it). and if we end up staying here long-term, then yeah I will be doing everything i can to try and get weed legalized here to.

but i'm just pissed. and tired. i'm sick of having to fight for my stupid little life from every single facet, like, i'm fighting for my life and kicking screaming throwing up etc and it barely even amounts to a squeak in the grand scheme of things.

welp. too bad. i'm surviving out of spite. oh, i don't matter? cool, then it won't matter if I stay alive a bit longer and keep taking those pithy handouts, i guess! thanks! 🤪

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

General Motors (GM.N) on Thursday made a counterproposal to the union representing its U.S. hourly workers in a bid to avoid a costly strike, but United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called the offer "insulting."

The largest U.S. automaker said it offered workers a 10% wage hike and two additional 3% annual lump sum payments over four years in its offer to the union ahead of the Sept. 14 contract expiration.

Last week, Ford said it had offered a 9% wage increase through 2027 and 6% lump sump payments, much less than the 46% wage hike being sought by the union. The UAW has said 97% of members voted in favor of authorizing a strike if agreement is not reached.

Fain, who represents 146,000 workers at the Detroit Three, said GM's offer was "an insulting proposal that doesn’t come close to an equitable agreement for America’s autoworkers.... The clock is ticking. Stop wasting our members’ time. Tick tock."

GM shares were down 1.3% in mid-day trading.

GM said the wage hike is the largest proposed since 1999. It is also offering a $6,000 one-time inflation-related payment and $5,000 in inflation-protection bonuses over the life of the agreement, along with a $5,500 ratification bonus.

Chrysler-parent Stellantis said Wednesday it planned to make a counteroffer to the UAW this week.

GM said that under its offer, current temporary employees will receive a 20% increase to $20 per hour wage and it would shorten the time it takes to get to the maximum wage rate for permanent employees - mirroring proposals from Ford.

GM President Mark Reuss said in a video posted on Thursday "we need a fair contract that both rewards our employees and protects the long-term health of our business."

A UAW strike that shuts the Detroit Three manufacturers could cost carmakers, suppliers and workers over $5 billion, Michigan-based Anderson Economic Group estimated.

With new car inventories tight, consumer experts have said that could translate into higher car prices - an important component of inflation.

Last week, the UAW filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board against GM and Stellantis saying they refused to bargain in good faith.

The union's demands include a 20% immediate wage increase followed by four 5% annual wage hikes, defined-benefit pensions for all workers, 32-hour work weeks and additional cost of living hikes. GM is proposing to give employees an additional paid holiday.

The UAW also wants all temporary workers at U.S. automakers to be made permanent, seeks enhanced profit sharing and the restoration of retiree health-care benefits and cost-of-living adjustments.

The UAW said Ford's profit-sharing formula change would have cut payouts by 21% over the last two years.

J.P.Morgan on Thursday said supply chain disruptions from a potential UAW strike would cut new vehicle production, drive up used car prices and put pressure on margins in the personal auto insurance business.

[swarajfinpro236]

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