#Rally of the Giants 2023

[renaultphile]

Ralph's Dream car?

I was looking around for the car that Ralph might dream of owning (or even just driving) when he's in his 40s, and I found this:

It's a 1957 Chevrolet Corvette with Fuel Injection. Optional extras included 'heavy-duty brakes' and rear axle positraction. What an absolute beauty!

[abirddogmoment]

CKC finally confirmed today that Mav was the top rally brittany in 2022 😭

[gimmick-blog-bracket]

@foxeseveryhour

“It need not be said how much of a public service this blog provides, to even insinuate this blog requires a rallying of the solidery is to deny nature itself.”

@hasgavlebockenburneddownyet

“What's more happy holiday cheer than cheering on the destruction of a giant straw goat?”

“The birds may have won 2023, but I believe in humanity's capability for arson for 2024 <3”

[reasonsforhope]

— Recent giant anteater sightings in Rio Grande do Sul state indicate the species has returned to southern Brazil, where it had been considered extinct for more than a century.

— Experts concluded that the giant anteater ventured across the border from the Iberá Park in northeastern Argentina where a rewilding project has released around 110 individuals back into the habitat.

— The sightings emphasize the importance of rewilding projects, both to restore animal populations in specific regions and help ecosystems farther afield.

— Organizations across Brazil are working to protect and maintain current giant anteater populations, including rallying for safer highways to prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions that cause local extinctions.

Playing back hours of footage from a camera trap set in Espinilho State Park in the south of Brazil in August 2023, Fábio Mazim and his team banked on possible sightings of the maned wolf or the Pantanal deer and had their fingers crossed for a glimpse of a Pampas cat (Leopardus pajeros), one of the most threatened felines in the world.

What they didn’t expect to see was an animal long presumed extinct in the region. To their surprise, the unmistakable long snout and bushy tail of a giant anteater ambled into shot.

"We shouted and cried when we saw it,” the ecologist from the nonprofit Pró-Carnívoros Institute told Mongabay. “It took a few days to grasp the importance of this record. A sighting of a giant anteater was never, ever expected.”

Last seen alive in the southwest of the Rio Grande do Sul state in 1890, the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) has since been spotted 11 times since August 2023, although the scientists are unsure whether it’s the same one or different individuals. However, the sightings confirm one clear fact: The giant anteater is back.

It's a huge win for the environment. Giant anteaters play an important role in their ecosystems, helping to control insect numbers, create watering holes through digging and are prey for big cats such as jaguars and pumas.

The habitat of the giant anteater stretches from Central America toward the south cone of Latin America.

Its conservation status is “vulnerable,” although it is considered extinct in several countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala and Uruguay, as well as specific regions such as the states of Rio de Janeiro, Espirito Santo, Santa Catarina and (until now) Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and the Cordoba and Entre Rios regions in Argentina.

‍In the last six months, the giant anteater was spotted on camera 11 times in the Espinilho State Park in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. It was the first time in 130 years that the species has been seen alive there.

Yet not only is it a triumph for conservationists to see these animals returning to Brazilian biomes, it’s also a surprising mark of success for a rewilding program about 150 kilometers (93 miles) away in neighboring Argentina.

‍Rewilding Argentina’s biomes

‍Iberá National Park in Corrientes province in northeastern Argentina is a 758,000-hectare (1.9 million-acre) expanse of protected land comprising a part of the Iberá wetlands with its swaths of grasslands, marshes, lagoons and forests. The region was once home to just a handful of giant anteaters after habitat loss, hunting and vehicle collisions decimated the population.

Since 2007, the NGO Rewilding Argentina, an offspring of the nonprofit Tompkins Conservation, has been reintroducing the species back to the area, most individuals being orphaned pups rescued from vehicle collisions or poaching.

So far, they have released 110 giant anteaters back into the wild. Nowadays, several generations inhabit the park, transforming it from “a place of massive defaunation to abundance,” Sebastián Di Martino, director of conservation for Rewilding Argentina, was quoted as saying in an official statement.

The project has been so successful that the giant anteaters appear to be venturing farther afield and moving to new territories beyond national borders, such as Espinilho State Park in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul region...

Experts now hope that a giant anteater population can reestablish itself naturally in Espinilho State Park without the need for human intervention.

“The giant anteater returning to Rio Grande do Sul shows the success of the work done in Argentina and how it’s viable, possible and important to do rewilding and fauna reintroduction projects,” Mazim said. “It is also an indication that the management of conservation units and also the agricultural areas of the ecosystems are working,” he added. “Because if large mammals are coming from one region and settling in another, it is because there is a support capacity for them. It is an indication of the health of the environment.”

-via GoodGoodGood, via May 25, 2024

[ao3topshipsbracket]

honestly I'm kinda disappointed all the popular/well known ships are gone/eliminated

the semis look kinda boring now tbh

(ps: I don't mean to hate on the ships winning. I'm sure they're winning for a reason. it's just they're all kinda unknown/not mainstream)

We're definitely surprised to see some of the highly seeded ships go down early, but personally, I think that makes the remaining matches more exciting, not less! Who doesn't love an upset, after all? But of course, with Bubbline in one half and Destiel in the other, there are definitely some significant heavy hitters still in the running!

That being said, we know we have some underdog semifinalists that people are less familiar with, so here's a brief primer on each of them!

Hualian comes from the Chinese novel Tian Guan Ci Fu, or Heaven Official's Blessing. If you've heard of Wangxian of Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed fame, TGCF comes from the same author. It is a xianxia love story about ghost kings and fallen gods. Here's the plot synopsis from IMDB:

Eight hundred years ago, Xie Lian was the Crown Prince of the Xian Le kingdom. He was loved by his citizens and was considered the darling of the world. He ascended to the Heavens at a young age; however, due to unfortunate circumstances, was quickly banished back to the mortal realm. Years later, he ascends again, only to be banished again a few minutes after his ascension. Now, eight hundred years later, Xie Lian ascends to the Heavens for the third time as the laughing stock among all three realms. On his first task as a god thrice ascended, he meets a mysterious demon who rules the ghosts and terrifies the Heavens, yet, unbeknownst to Xie Lian, this demon king has been paying attention to him for a very, very long time.

At #58 in the Tumblr 2023 top ship list, they're solidly middle of the pack in terms of seeding, but they did take down Buddie at #10, and Davekat of Homestuck infamy: a very impressive showing!

Sulemio hails from the latest installment in the Mobile Suit Gundam anime franchise, The Witch from Mercury; as with all Gundam series, it is a sci-fi military drama featuring giant robots and space warfare. This one happens to also feature heavy inspiration from Revolutionary Girl Utena. Official synopses seem a bit lacking, and I unfortunately don't know enough about the series to summarize it myself, but I'll link this very helpful guide that someone left in our notes!

They're the lowest seeded of our semifinalists, ranking #59 on Tumblr's 2023 top ship list, so the fact that they've taken out the top seed is truly a feat; having a rallying force with @demilypyro has certainly helped their cause (and our very busy activity feed 😅) a great deal!

Regardless of who wins the next rounds, there are very fun underdog journeys present on both sides of the bracket. Plus, it's always good to remember that polls like these are not meant to be indicators of popularity, but of passion.

[matan4il]

Memo to the 'Experts': Stop Comparing Israel's War in Gaza to Anything. It Has No Precedent | by John Spencer

Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza has inevitably drawn comparisons to other battles or wars, both modern and from the past. These comparisons are mostly used to make the case that Israel's operations in Gaza are the most destructive in history, or the deadliest in history.

Yet while the use of historical analogy may be tempting for armchair pundits, in the case of Israel's current war, the comparisons are often poorly cited, the data used inaccurate, and crucial context left out. Given the scale and context of an enemy purposely entrenched in densely populated urban areas, as well as the presence of tunnels, hostages, rockets, attackers that follow the laws of war while defenders purposely do not, and proximity between the frontlines and the home front, there is basically no historical comparison for this war.

Let's start with the context: After Hamas crossed into Israel on Oct. 7, murdering over 1,200 Israelis in brutal ways that included mutilation and sexual assaults as well as taking over 200 hostages back into Gaza, Israel formally declared a defensive war against Hamas in Gaza in accordance with international law and the United Nations charter. Since, the IDF estimates it has killed 10,000 Hamas operatives, while Hamas claims that the total number of casualties is 24,000 (Hamas does not distinguish civilian deaths from militant deaths).

Hamas' strategy is to use Palestinian civilians as human shields, because their goal is not to defeat Israel's military or to hold terrain; it is far more sinister and medieval—to use the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians to rally international support to their cause and demand that Israel halt their war.

Meanwhile, Israel's war aims were more traditional: returning Israeli hostages, dismantling Hamas military capability, and securing their border to prevent another October 7 attack.

These goals required not one major urban battle but multiple. While Gaza is not the densest populated urban region on earth as many claim, it features over 20 densely-populated cities. And while the Israeli Defense Forces are engaged in fighting, Hamas has continued to launch over 12,000 rockets on nearly every day of the war from the combat area toward civilian-populated areas in Israel, literally over the heads of the attacking IDF, who it bears mentioning are fighting just a few miles from their homeland and the homes of their soldiers.

Put all of this together, this war is simply without precedent. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the host of other wars that have been used for comparison sake to paint Israel in an unflattering light.

Some have compared Israel to Russia, yet there is simply no comparison. In the 2022 Battle of Mariupol, estimates of the number of civilians killed range up to 25,000, including 600 civilians killed in a single bombing of a theater with the word "children" written in giant letters around it. This is the same Russia that killed over 50,000 civilians (5 percent) of a 1.1 million pre-war population of Chechnya in 20 months of combat in the late 1990s in multiple major urban battles such as Grozny.

Or take Syria. Over 300,00 civilians have been killed in the Syrian war; an average of 84 civilians were killed every day from 2013 to 2023.

Others have compared the battles in Gaza to World War II air campaigns like the UK bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945 that killed an estimated 25,000 civilians. But here, too, memory is selective: These same people discount air campaign cases such as the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo the same year that killed over 300,000 civilians, to include 80,000 to 100,000 civilians in a single night, causing more death and destruction than Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagaski.

A battle that does bear a resemblance to Israel's war against Hamas is the 1945 Battle of Manila—the largest urban struggle of World War II, with more civilian casualties incurred than even the Battle of Stalingrad. The city had a population of 1.1 million residents as well as over 1,000 American prisoners of war being held in the city. It took the U.S. military 35,000 forces and a whole month to defeat 17,000 Japanese Navy defenders in and around the city.

Like in Gaza, the defenders used the city's sewer and tunnel systems for offensive and defensive purposes. And there were over 100,000 civilian deaths from the battle—one of the major factors of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which stipulated the laws of armed conflict to further protect civilians and prevent civilian deaths.

Most experts compare the Gaza war to the recent urban battles against ISIS involving United States forces, including the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul. In that battle, over 100,000 Iraqi Security Forces, backed by American advisors and U.S. and coalition air power, took nine months to clear a city of 3,000 to 5,000 lightly armed ISIS fighters. The battle resulted in over 10,000 civilian deaths, 138,000 houses destroyed or damaged and 58,000 damaged with 40,000 homes destroyed outright in just Western Mosul. Iraqi Security Forces suffered 10,000 casualties. There were very limited, shallow, house-to-house tunnels, but no tunnel networks, no hostages, no rockets.

In April of 2004, the U.S. military was directed to arrest the perpetrators of an attack that caused the death of four American civilians and deny insurgents sanctuary in the densely populated city of Fallujah, Iraq, a city of 300,000 residents. The battle that ensued was later dubbed the First Battle of Fallujah. Because of international condemnation and political instability fueled by international media over a perceived indiscriminate use of force and civilian casualties, the U.S. forces were ordered by the U.S. Central Command Commander to stop the battle six days into it.

Estimates of the total civilian deaths from the battle range from 220 to 600. Six months later, in November 2004, the U.S. military initiated the Second Battle of Fallujah. It took 13,000-15,000 U.S., UK, and Iraqi forces six weeks to clear the city of 3,000 insurgents. There were some 800 civilian deaths even though the city's residents had largely evacuated before the battle. Over sixty percent the city's buildings were damaged or destroyed. But there, too, the enemy defenders did not have access to tunnels.

Ultimately, comparisons with both past and modern cases highlight the fact that there is almost no way to defeat an entrenched enemy defender without destruction, even while implementing all feasible precautions and limits on the use of force required by the laws of war.

Let's put away our military history books. There is no comparison to what Israel has faced in Gaza—certainly none by which Israel comes out looking the worse.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI's Urban Warfare Project and host of the "Urban Warfare Project Podcast." He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War and co-author of Understanding Urban Warfare.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Capitalists hate capitalism

As the Marxist agitator Adam Smith once said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Smith understood that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, “competition is for losers,” or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with “wide, sustainable moats.”

These anti-capitalist capitalists love big government. They love no-bid military contracts, they love ACA subsidies for health insurance companies, they love Farm Bill cash for Cargill and Monsanto. What they don’t love is markets.

Case in point: pharma giant Merck. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes a provision that allows Medicare to (finally) start (weakly) negotiating the prices it pays for (a tiny handful of) drugs. If you’re scratching your head and wondering if you understood that correctly, let me assure you, you did: the US government is currently prohibited from negotiating drug prices when it bargains with pharma companies.

In other words: Medicare simply pays a pharma companies — whose products build on billions in publicly funded basic research, whose taxes are reduced by billions in research credits, whose patents are backstopped by billions in enforcement — whatever it demands.

To do otherwise, you see, would be socialism. Markets are “efficient” because they “discover prices” through bidding and selling. In the case of publicly purchased drugs, the price that Uncle Sucker “discovers” is inevitably “a titanic sum” or possibly “add a couple more zeroes, wouldya?”

Enter the IRA. Starting in 2026, Medicare will be permitted to negotiate the price of ten (10) drugs. The negotiations will use the prices of other drugs from the dysfunctional, monopolized market as a starting point and go up from there. The negotiations go on for three years, and there are multiple stages where pharma companies can hit pause with court challenges:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-05-11-regulators-bungling-drug-price-reform/

The system will not consider the prices that Medicaid or the VA (which are allowed to bargain on prices) pay. Nor will it consider the prices that other governments pay — the US is alone in the wealthy world in offering the anticapitalist price-taking posture when dickering with the pharma companies.

But this isn’t enough for Merck. They are suing the Biden administration over the IRA’s drug pricing plan, arguing that it is an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/06/merck-sues-biden-administration-over-medicare-drug-price-negotiations.html

Merck is represented by Big Law firm Jones Day, who made their bones by representing the RJ Reynolds from smokers with lung-cancer, arguing that the smoking/cancer link wasn’t scientifically sound. That’s not the only fanciful argument they put before a judge: Jones Day also represented Trump in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election (they also hired Trump’s counsel Don McGahn as he exited the White House’s revolving door).

As Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect, Merck’s argument is that the “fair market” value of its drugs can only be discovered if its single largest customer — Medicare — simply pays whatever Merck demands of it:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-06-08-merck-negotiating-drug-prices-unconstitutional/

They explicitly denounce the idea that a powerful buyer should use its market power to extract price concessions from sellers like Merck: “leveraging all federal insurance benefits (amounting to over half of the prescription drug market) to coerce companies to abandon their First and Fifth Amendment rights is a quintessential unconstitutional condition.”

Rebutting this argument, Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said, “negotiating for the best price is as American as apple pie. Since when is competition in this American system a bad thing? Why should we be the patsies around the world and pay the highest prices for medicines?”

The irony here is that Merck itself is a very powerful buyer. Whether negotiating commercial leases, raw materials or wages, Merck is ruthless in extracting the lowest prices it can from its suppliers. The company attained its massive scale the old fashioned way: buying it. By drawing on its nearly limitless access to the capital markets, Merck bought out dozens of its competitors:

https://mergr.com/merck-acquisitions

Anticapitalist investors funded these acquisitions in the expectation that Merck would be able to use its market dominance to pay suppliers less, charge customers more, and use some of the resulting windfall to corrupt and bully its regulators so that it could buy still more companies, charge still higher prices, and impose crushingly low prices on still more suppliers.

The IRA’s drug-bargaining provisions are extraordinarily weak. When they were first mooted in 2021, I talked about how Democrats were caving on muscular drug price controls that would benefit every American (except a handful of pharma shareholders):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/18/bipartisan-consensus/#corruption

They did so despite wild, bipartisan support for imposing price discipline on Big Pharma, and ending the 300% premium Americans pay for their drugs relative to their cousins abroad. 95% of Democrats support strong price controls; so do 82% of independents — and 71% of Republicans:

https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2021/11/healthcare-affordability--majority-of-adults-support-significant-changes-to-the-health-system.html

No one believes Big Pharma’s scare stories about how this would kill R&D: 93% of Americans reject this idea, including 90% of Republicans. They’re right — nearly all US basic pharma R&D is directly funded by the federal government, with pharma companies privatizing the gains:

https://khn.org/news/article/public-opinion-prescription-drug-prices-democratic-plan/

Despite the fact that really whipping the shit out of Big Pharma would be both popular and good for America, the Dems’ final version of pharma bargaining is a barely-there nothingburger where ten drugs will become slightly cheaper, after the next federal election. This is called “political realism” and it’s a fantasy.

The idea that limiting drug controls to the faintest, most modest measures would make them easier to attain was obvious nonsense from the start, and Merck’s anticapitalist lawsuit proves it. Merck will settle for nothing less than total central planning — by Merck. For Merck, the role of the federal government is to wave through a stream of mergers culminating in Merck’s ownership of every major drug; patent extensions for these drugs to carry them into the 25th century and beyond, and unlimited sums paid for these drugs on Medicare.

Given all that, there would have been no downside to the Dems passing an IRA that subjected the drug companies the same modest, commensense, market-based discipline we see in Canada, or the UK, or France, or Germany, or Switzerland.

But that’s not the IRA we got. Instead of defending a big, visionary program in court, the Biden admin is facing down Jones Day and Merck to defend the most yawn-inducing, incrementalist half-measure. What a wasted opportunity.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck#price-giver

[Image ID: A caricature of a businessman with a money-bag for a head and a stickpin bearing the Merck logo, standing atop a pile of bundled $100 bills. At the bottom of the pile, a frowning, disheveled Uncle Sam offers up a $100 bill.]

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[corporationsarepeople]

“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, they will do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

—Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate, Nov 12, 2023

Since the fascists, authoritarians always want to do two things — they want to change the way that people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous, and they want to change the way people see their targets.

And so they use dehumanizing language. And former President Trump is doing both. He's been using his rallies since 2015 to shift the idea of violence into something positive. And now he's starting to use dehumanizing rhetoric, all these groups who live like vermin. And this is what the original fascists did. Hitler started talking about Jews as parasites in 1920.

So by the time he got in, in 1933, Germans had been exposed to this dehumanizing rhetoric for 13 years. And Mussolini literally talked about rats. After he had become dictator in 1927, he said, we need to kill rats who are bringing infectious diseases and Bolshevism from the east.

This matches up with Trump talking about immigrants bringing disease and other such things. So this is very dangerous rhetoric with a very precise fascist history.

…

There's a two-part thing that authoritarians do.

First, they change the view of violence. And Mr. Trump, since 2015, he started saying at his rallies, using his rallies and campaign events for radicalizing people. And he started saying, oh, in the old days, you used to hurt people. The problem is, Americans don't hurt each other anymore.

Now he's going into a new phase of openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future. And we see that, in 2025, he's got plans for mass deportations, mass imprisonments and giant camps. So you need people to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it themselves or tolerating it.

And I see that as the reason he's using this dehumanizing rhetoric now, to prepare people.

…

This (being a proud election denier) is part of being much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy, because the endgame of election denial is actually to convince Americans that elections shouldn't be the way they choose their leaders, they're too unreliable.

And we're beginning to see this with his allies. Michael Flynn said we shouldn't — elections, we might not even have one. Tommy Tuberville, the senator, said let's not even have elections, or the talk about America is never — pure democracy doesn't work. All of this is part of a campaign of, you could call it mass reeducation of Americans to want forms of authoritarian rule that Trump will give.

…

In all cases of history that I have studied in my book "Strongmen," people did not take the various Hitlers and Mussolinis seriously until it was too late.

—Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Nov 13, 2023

[al-perthe]

Want to Help Punish Ron DeSantis?

Boycott some of these Florida-based businesses!

Some notable examples:

Tourism (Disney World, Universal Orlando, Busch Gardens, etc)

Bealls Outlet Stores

Bloomin' Brands Restaurants (Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba's Italian Grill, others)

Checkers/Rally's

Chewy Inc. (online pet retailer)

Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, others)

Hertz (Car rentals)

National Beverage (soft drink producer - notably La Croix and Faygo)

Office Depot (office supply store)

Publix (grocery store chain)

Restaurant Brands International (the American restaurants - Burger King, Firehouse Subs, Popeyes)

Winn-Dixie (grocery store chain)

There are others, and some of these are more common in the southeastern USA (notably Publix & Winn Dixie), but if you can avoid buying from these brands, please consider doing so!

DISCLAIMER: The key words are IF you CAN avoid. Please don't feel guilty if there are necessities that you can only get from certain businesses, like pet medications through Chewy, or the only grocery store in reasonable distance happens to be Publix.

EDIT 06/02/2023:

Back in 2015, the Tampa Bay Rays were one of three pro sports teams (the others being the San Francisco Giants and New England Patriots) to sign an amicus brief in support of same-sex marriage.

If you want to support a FL sports team, that's your go-to!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

Just three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris has already secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. The speed with which the party came together around her is inspiring. Harris has been endorsed by almost everyone who matters in Democratic politics — senators, governors, key organizations, unions. She’s also raised some $100 million and counting from more than 880,000 small donors, more than 60 percent of whom hadn’t contributed before this cycle. If anyone was on the fence about whether Biden stepping aside was the right move, they probably aren’t now.

The past three days have been a remarkable display of Democratic consensus and unity after a bitter intra-party argument over whether Biden should be the nominee. The rush to support Harris also indicates that the party believes she can beat the Republican candidate — giant orange fascist blight Donald Trump. New Harris-Trump polling started trickling out yesterday, and it contained good news for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken entirely after Biden announced his decision to step aside showed Harris up two points nationally (and up four points when RFK Jr. is included). Another poll showed Harris and Trump tied. Given that Harris just had her first rally as the presumptive candidate yesterday, we’ll need more time to figure out exactly how the race has changed. But there are already a number of reasons to be hopeful about her prospects of winning this November.

Unifying looked easy. It’s not.

The first indication of Harris’s strength is … well, pretty much everything that’s happened since Sunday. Harris has been pilloried over the last four years as a middling politician, largely on the grounds that she suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before Iowa. The reliably confused Pamela Paul at the New York Times, for example, argued this week that “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate” who “fizzled out” in the presidential race. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, though, Harris’s candidacy didn’t fizzle out. She had solid endorsements and decent polling — but she figured out that Biden was too far ahead to beat in a very crowded field and dropped out early. That allowed her to stay on good terms with party actors and put her in a position to get the vice presidency. That’s not losing. It’s winning.

[...]

Harris and abortion rights

Harris is also well positioned to run on some of the central issues of the election. In particular, she’s a good voice for the party on abortion, which has been an especially energizing issue since the Supreme Court gutted abortion rights in its Dobbs decision in 2022. The Dobbs decision was hugely unpopular and remains so, even in Republican strongholds — anti-abortion measures in deep red states like Ohio and Kentucky have gone down to defeat. Democratic strength in the 2022 and 2023 off-year elections have been attributed by most analysts to the electorate’s support for abortion rights. Democrats are fighting to get abortion referendums on the ballot in November in states like including Arizona, Nebraska, and Florida. Despite Democratic successes under his watch, Biden has always been an imperfect messenger on abortion rights. A devout Catholic, he started his career by arguing that the Roe decision protecting abortion rights “went too far.”

Biden is now solidly pro-choice, and his administration has of course defended abortion rights, most recently winning a Supreme Court case defending abortion pills. But his ambivalence lingers. Even in 2023, after Dobbs, Biden was careful to note his own personal discomfort with abortion procedures, stating in one speech, “I happen to be a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion.” Immediately following the Dobbs ruling, Biden’s administration struggled to come up with a strong rhetorical or policy response. He’s also been weirdly reluctant to even say the word “abortion” in speeches. Harris has no such reticence. She visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in March; she’s believed to be the first president or vice president to ever visit a clinic providing abortion services.

[...]

Harris the prosecutor

On Monday, in her first big speech after Biden’s endorsement, Harris emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and said it put her in a strong position to make the case against Trump. “I was a courtroom prosecutor,” she said. “In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.” She hit the same theme yesterday during her first campaign rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee. It was so well received by her audience in suburban Milwaukee that the crowd broke out in “KA-MA-LA! KA-MA-LA!” chants.

The contrast here is glaring. A jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting writer and journalist E. Jean Carroll; he’s been accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous other women. He was convicted of fraud for misvaluing assets in New York. A jury convicted him of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments before the 2016 election. He also faces charges involving mishandling of classified documents and illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

Harris got her start in politics, as she says, as a prosecutor. As San Francisco’s DA and California’s AG, she went after fraudsters engaged in Trump-like scams. She obtained a $1.1 billion judgment against for-profit Corinthian College for fraud (Trump, for his part, agreed to a $25 million settlement after his so-called Trump University was sued for deceptive practices). She also won an $18 billion settlement against large banks for foreclosure misconduct. (Trump is promising massive deregulation of Wall Street.) Parts of Harris’s record in California are controversial with progressives. She threatened to prosecute parents of chronically absent children. No one was actually sent to jail, but as a policy, using prisons to threaten struggling parents is not a great precedent. Her record has also been criticized by sex workers and by drug law reformers (she prosecuted 1,900 people for marijuana violations). But Harris’s background as a prosecutor isn’t as much of a problem for her today as it was when she was running for president in 2019 — before covid, the George Floyd murder, and the ensuing spike in crime across the country. She’s also no longer running against Democrats — she’s running against Trump, whose criminal justice policies are nightmarish.

Project 2025, the Heritage Project blueprint for a Trump second term, is rabidly anti-sex worker; it proposes criminalizing porn as a step towards criminalizing trans and LGBT people (whose very existence the right considers pornographic). And Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a massive undertaking that evokes histories of police states and concentration camps.

Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice about how Kamala Harris has united Democrats in her short time as the presumptive nominee.

Harris’s robust defense of abortion rights and her prosecutor record are her biggest assets this election.

[dandylovesturtles]

a headcanon no one asked for

Leo: went for the Turtle Sliders at first because, obviously, but once he learned more about it he realized his Mistake and jumped to the Thunderbolts. But after the 'bolts didn't qualify he jumped again to the Savage Speeders - they may not be blue but they are fast and he likes winning. Everyone constantly gives him grief about being a dirty fair weather fan.

Mikey: O'rangers ride or die. Best color and it means he gets to yell "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH" at the top of his lungs whenever anything happens.

Raph: the Rojo Rollers are gonna qualify this year guys he knows it he just knows it

Donnie: Has a giant stat chart with every team's data on it. Knows the name of every marble. Takes part in underground betting rings. Claims he doesn't have a favorite team because none of them are purple enough (the Purple Rockets are new enough that he isn't throwing his loyalty behind them yet).

April: Mellow Yellow fan till the end. They're rallying in 2023, guys. Odd years are Fruit Circuit years.

Splinter: it's no Scorpion Treadmill but Greg Woods' silky commentary is smooth enough for him to fall asleep to. Two thumbs up.

[renaultphile]

Bunny's dream car?

And what is Bunny going to be driving in middle age, I wonder?

1956 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, I reckon. Nice and spacious with a beautiful white interior.

[nando161mando]

Ανάρτηση γιγαντοπανό στην πεζογέφυρα της Κατεχάκη από την Ταξική Αντεπίθεση

Ένα χρόνο μετά την 7η Οκτώβρη 2023: Η παλαιστινιακή αντίσταση είναι δίκαιη, λαϊκή επαναστατική και θα νικήσει! Συγκέντρωση και πορεία προς τις πρεσβείες ΗΠΑ - Ισραήλ τη Δευτέρα 7/10. Μέγαρο Μουσικής, 19:00

Posting of a giant banner on the Katehaki pedestrian bridge by the Class Counterattack

One year after October 7, 2023: The Palestinian resistance is just, popular revolutionary and will win! Rally and march to the US - Israel embassies on Monday 7/10. Concert Hall, 19:00

[gorogues]

Fictober 2023

Prompt number #30 Fanfiction Fandom: Flash Rogues Rating: G – General audiences Warnings: None. Notes: This diverges from canon somewhat, and is very stupid.

Day Thirty: “Are you with me?”

“This time we’re gonna get him first! Are you with me?” “Like bacon with eggs! Like toast with jelly! Like bagels with lox! Like cheese with burger! Like—” “Uh, Piper?” “Yeah, Tricks?” “Do we need to stop and get you something to eat first?”

The blatt tooted sadly, bereft without its special human.  How could the musician have left it behind?  Surely that was an error in need of rectifying, so it redoubled its efforts to break out of the room it’d been locked in.

It rammed its flag against the door a few more times, and tooted in triumph when the door came loose on its hinges.  The blatt needed to crouch down to get through the doorway, but happily began bouncing through the hall in search of its human.

“Who the hell is making that racket?!” demanded an irascible neighbour, peeking out to check if the Pied Piper was up to no good again.  Only to see…a gigantic eighth note bounding towards the staircase.

“You young hooligan, I’m callin’ the cops!” he shouted, ducking back into his apartment.  “Dressing up in polka dots and tights, and dressing like music notes…kids these days, no damn respect.”

The blatt hopped down the stairs and squeezed out the front door, discovering there was a whole outdoor world it’d never been aware of.  There were lots of people!  And cars!  And other sources of sound!  But its human was nowhere to be seen, so it began following his trail via the slight harmonic frequencies he’d left behind in his footsteps.  It could ‘hear’ where he’d been and where he was now, and its flag perked up with joy.

**

“These eggs are so good, you should try some,” Hartley said cheerfully as James tapped his fingers and nibbled on a bagel with obvious impatience.

“We’ve really gotta get moving, Hart.  The others are waiting for us.”

“In a minute.  A maestro can’t perform on an empty stomach,” Hartley sniffed, but then frowned as he listened to faint sounds only he could hear.  “There’s some kind of commotion outside; what’s going on?”

James stood up and looked out the window for a few moments as his friend continued eating.  “Oh, so it turns out that your blatt got loose.”

“And people are screaming and running away?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“It’s not, like, hurting anyone, is it?”

“No, it’s just hopping down the street.”

Hartley took a few more bites to finish the eggs, then jumped to his feet and tossed all the loose change in his pockets onto the table as a tip.

“Let’s go stop a giant blatt!” the young musician declared as he charged out of the diner with James in hot pursuit. 

“Hart, we’ve talked about this: you leave the rallying cries to me.”

“Sorry, sorry, I just got caught up in the moment,” Hartley said sheepishly as they stopped in front of the huge eighth note and it reacted joyfully to see the musician.

James looked thoughtfully at the blatt, which was bouncing up and down in front of its human and tooting excitedly.  “Could we maybe turn this thing against Grodd?  That might solve both our problems!”

“It’s an innocent music note,” Hartley replied, hurt.  It leaned over and he patted its flag fondly as the creature bounced higher and trumpeted at him.

“And we’re innocent Rogues up against an evil monkey with telepathy!  We need to use every tool in our arsenal, Piper.”

Hartley thought about things for a few moments, then pulled out his pipe.  He flexed his fingers in preparation to play, and cracked his neck a bit.  “All right, I guess it does seem immune to whatever we throw at it.  Let’s go in search of Grodd!”

James took to the air, and Hartley started to play his flute as he began walking.  The blatt followed, and thus began a leisurely stroll through the city streets with a giant music note travelling behind.  People stopped and stared, confused by the spectacle.

“What’s going on..?” one stranger asked another.

“They must be advertising something fun -- look at that weird thing and their funky clothes!”

“I bet it’s a parade,” a third person suggested, and that was all it took.  Soon a few people were walking behind the Rogues, and that attracted even more followers.  Some were staring at the giant blatt as it bounced, while others jammed along appreciatively to Hartley’s music.

“You’re a real Pied Piper!” James exclaimed, taking a few photos from the air with his phone.  Hartley just smiled and kept playing, choosing a few jaunty tunes to keep the crowd entertained.

The blatt would occasionally get distracted by other music sources as the group travelled, but always continued following its human as he moved forward.  No coaxing was needed.

And it wasn’t long before James and Hartley could hear the scuffle between Grodd and the other Rogues despite the ambient noise around them.  James came down to the ground to manage the assembled crowd and keep them out of harm’s way, while Hartley ushered the blatt to the scene of the battle. 

Neither the Rogues nor Grodd seemed to notice the newcomer or the strangely huge music note, absorbed as they were in their fight.

“Okay, buddy,” Hartley said carefully as he scratched its flag and pointed at the angry gorilla.  “Help your pal and go get `im!”

The giant creature tensed and leapt, striking Grodd’s back and instantly knocking the wind out of him.  The gorilla fell to the ground, dazed, and the Rogues whooped with joy even though most of them had no idea why the large blatt was there.

“You did it!  Great job, buddy!” Hartley cheered, patting the note’s flag appreciatively when it came over for praise, and it cooed happily at him.  But Paul Gambi approached the group as they celebrated, looking quite serious despite their happy mood.  He wanted the Rogues away from the scene for reasons of his own.

“Now you gotta go!  Some of you are still wanted men!” he urged, and they couldn’t argue with that logic.  They all began running before the cops inevitably arrived to investigate the brawl.

“So what are you going to do about that big note?” James asked as they headed for their current safehouse, the blatt at their heels.

Hartley thought about the matter as they ran, turning back to look at the strange creature bouncing enthusiastically behind him.  “You know what, I think it could be a pretty good pet.”

[theghostlycoyote]

a flood of blood (blossoms) to the heart

by me :) aka @coyotecrackers

NOW COMPLETED!

Summary:

Danny Fenton is tasked with investigating a warehouse full of blood blossoms. Jake Long is also tasked with investigating a warehouse full of blood blossoms. What happens when fate (and a warehouse full of blood blossoms) brings these young heroes together?

Tags: crossover, minor injuries, minor violence

WC: 16,453

Chapters: 4/4 (Ch 4 out now!)

———

This is a Danny Phantom and American Dragon: Jake Long crossover fic, all born from the amazing art created by @ryd3rthest4r for Ecto-Implosion 2023

Find their art here:

Tumblr || Instagram || Ch 2 of the fic on AO3

———

Chapter 4 Sneak Peak:

Jake feels like he really knocked it out of the park with this one. By destroying all these flowers, he gets to do his job as the guardian of magical creatures and thwart the Huntsclan all in one fell swoop. He’s still not really sure what they wanted all of this for, but they were obviously hurting Danny, so if he can at least stop them from doing that, he’ll call it a win.

His satisfaction, however, is currently completely overcast with the worry and fear he feels for Spud’s safety. He feels guilty for not keeping track of his friend. Who is he to call himself a protector when he can’t even protect those close to him? Spud could be anywhere, and they’ve already searched a lot of the warehouse.

As he ignites another small pile of the seemingly endless red blossoms — and seriously, Jake’s never seen this many flowers in his whole life — he glances back at the ghost behind him. Danny seems to be doing slightly better. He’s starting to favor his injured side less often, and he even looks like he’s gained some color.

That surprises Jake. He didn’t remember Shackles Jack being this… lively. Danny did say he was different from other ghosts. Jake would have to remember what that meant when this is all over.

Ready to start gathering another pile of flowers, Jake continues forward, taking a sharp turn around a giant stack of boxes. He jumps back immediately, shushing Trixie as she tries to ask a question. Danny just raises an eyebrow at him.

“Huntsclan,” he whispers as quietly as he can. Around the corner are just under a dozen Huntsclan members, all carrying mean looking weapons and looking like they were on the prowl for something. Jake would bet money that he knows what they’re looking for.

His skin tingles at the promise of a fight, but he still feels uneasy about where Spud might be. He wants to find his friend and make sure he’s safe before he gets into an all out brawl with the Huntsclan. With all his friends in one place, including Danny, he’ll be able to keep an eye on all of them easier, and protect them if the Huntsclan tries to start something.

Luckily, it doesn’t seem like the hunters spotted him. He’ll avoid them for now, and come back after he’s found Spud. He at least knows where they are. He motions silently at Trixie and Danny to start moving in the other direction, and they follow his lead in sneaking quietly away.

Jake’s plan goes up in smoke when, in front of them, from around another corner, three more Huntsclan members appear. There’s no time for them to hide or get out of the way, and there’s a brief moment where both groups are frozen, just staring at each other.

Then, unfortunately, the Huntsclan makes the first move. One of them points at Jake and shouts loudly, “It’s the American Dragon! He’s with the ghost!”

“Crud,” Danny groans.

“Aw, man,” Jake says, hearing the larger Huntsclan group behind them rally themselves. They’re surrounded.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula Irks Investors in Bid to Spur Brazil Growth, Boost Approval

Inside Brazil’s presidential palace, angst is mounting as the economy sputters along, churning out tepid growth figures month after month. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is ratcheting up the pressure on his top aides to boost spending, gin up faster growth and turn around his sinking approval ratings.

This, people close to him say, helps explain the decision this month to order state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA to withhold a $9 billion dividend to investors. And it explains the push to oust the head of mining giant Vale SA. The government can have Petrobras pump that $9 billion into priority energy projects instead, the thinking goes, and it can slide in a new leader at Vale who’s more focused on creating jobs and less on shareholder returns.

The moves have shocked investors. In 2023, Lula’s first year in office since he left power a decade earlier, they had gotten used to a measured, even cautious president who resisted temptations to swell the budget.

So when word on the Petrobras dividend got out, they pushed the stock down 11% in a matter of hours. The bigger question being asked on Sao Paulo trading desks now is whether these moves augur a new, riskier policy approach or whether Finance Minister Fernando Haddad will manage to convince Lula to stick to the more cautious stance that stoked rallies in Brazilian stocks, bonds and currencies in 2023. 

Continue reading.