#The death of a human being: that's a disaster. One hundred thousand deaths: that's a statistic - Kurt Tucholsky 1925

[mansnooziesmoosmutzel]

Our fresh troops are anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely know how to die. By thousands. They understand nothing about warfare, they simply go on and let themselves be shot down. A single flyer routed two companies of them for a joke, just as they came fresh from the train--before they had ever heard of such a thing as cover.

"Germany ought to be empty soon," says Kat.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT by Erich Maria Remarque

[freakozoidboy]

Actually crazy that billionaires and members of our government are responsible for the deaths of thousands even hundreds of thousands of people in our country and all acorss the world. They then convince the public it's evil when we kill them. When they kill is its business. When we kill them it's murder. They consider themselves people, they do not consider us people. Its all "condemn violence!" "He has children!!" Then they don't think twice about killing us. Do we not have loved ones? They push that violence is wrong and evil and no matter what its never okay to hurt another human, while killing us. They say that to cover their own asses. So we don't hurt them like they hurt us. Their is no "sanctity of human life" in regards to guys who are responsible for the deaths of thousands.

Not only am I referring to the uhc ceo and every other big business billionaire, I'm also referring to our government. We send billions in aid to israel so they can desecrate the middle east while calling protesters violent terrorists and claiming that rioting and violence is bad. People are dying from lack of shelter, food, and Healthcare in our country and almost no money is going to help the people. The government isn't helping when their are natural disasters, when we are in desperate need of help they sit and watch us die. While spending trillions on the military and billions on other countries militaries. To protect what? Obviously not the common people. They are responsible for so many deaths while condemning us for being "violent" when we fight back.

Our violence is righteous.

[carionto]

What Humans call the "Thousand Yard Stare"

As more and more Humans interact with and integrate within Coalition stations, reports, closer to hushed whispers really, began to circulate of some Humans being... discomforting... to be around.

Initially we thought it was just rudeness or passive aggressive behavior or any number of subtle actions or choice of words, no matter how advanced or civilized there will always be some assholes.

However, when some of these "offenders" were presented to us peacekeepers, we found them to be perfectly polite and reasonable. As our conversation continued and shifted topics, whenever there was a lull or the focus was on another speaker for a longer time, the Human's gaze drifted somewhat.

Sometimes she would look to the side and it was harder to tell what her exact expression was, but every so often she would be looking at one of us, but... not. It was as if she was staring at something behind us, through us even. Beyond the walls of the station, it even felt as though beyond space and time itself.

It was one of the most unnerving and chitin-chilling feelings we've ever felt, but then the Human seemed to notice our change and became that friendly and cheerful person once again:

"Sorry, my mind drifted there for a bit. What were you saying?"

And the conversation continued as if nothing was out of the ordinary for the Human.

Upon our return to our office, one of the Human peacekeepers heard about our impromptu assignment and offered this explanation after we told him what happened:

"Oh yeah, I think that person was a retired firefighter or rescue worker of some kind. Professions like that can be dangerous and you'll eventually encounter something horrible at a disaster site or crime scene. Probably saw someone die, or a person they rescued later didn't make it, or it was a kid... It's the toughest when you're the last one a child sees before..."

There it is again. That look, but with a tinge of sadness this time. We didn't know he was carrying such memories. The untimely death of anyone is a difficult time for those that survive, especially when it is the young whose life was still just starting. It seems Humans with their heightened senses and sensitivity to the feelings of others these kind of experiences imprint a far stronger memory than for most.

"Anyway, we've got a bunch of names for such things, but typically we call it the thousand yard stare. It's an old measurement unit, don't worry about it. I think the meaning may have changed a bit over the years, but basically some people go through traumatic stuff and they decide, consciously or not, to sort of... detach themselves from reality. It's a coping mechanism.

A few people thrive on horrible things, but they're the exception. Most of us would go crazy or depressed or any other infinite bad possibilities our brains can go in if we don't find a way to separate ourselves from certain realities. It can get real bad otherwise. It's rare, but a few go truly nuts and try to inflict their pain unto others. Most end up suffering alone for a long time. And some can't take it anymore and decide to end it themselves.

Thankfully therapists and support options are widely available, so those kind of scenarios are really rare, like... suicide accounts for about three out of a hundred thousand deaths last time I saw those charts. Plus drones and automation take care of most of the dangerous tasks, leaving the vast majority of cases to be caused by interpersonal relations actually. A broken heart is one of those traumas we'll never get rid of it seems. That's just life, I guess."

[shrinkrants]

My name is Steven Donziger. I’m a human rights lawyer who was locked up in the United States for close to three years after I worked with Amazonian communities to hold Chevron to account for creating one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

For three decades, Chevron dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the rivers and streams of the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador. 

This produced a devastating environmental catastrophe that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Indigenous peoples and farmers. Even today, Indigenous communities continue to face imminent risk of death due to exposure to Chevron’s toxic waste.

After years of litigation, we won a landmark legal battle that resulted in Chevron being ordered to pay $10bn in damages – the largest judgement ever awarded in an environmental lawsuit.

But they haven’t yet paid out one cent.

Instead, Chevron hired 60 law firms and hundreds of lawyers to try to destroy me. They sued  me personally in New York for $60 billion - more liability than any bank or fossil fuel company had ever faced. 

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

The world’s deadliest environmental disaster got its start in 1958. Its effects are still being felt today, more than six decades later.

It wasn’t an oil spill, like the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon. It wasn’t a chemical disaster, like Union Carbide’s gas leak in Bhopal. And it didn’t have anything to do with nuclear power, like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.

It happened in the People’s Republic of China in the years after Mao Zedong came to power, causing mass starvation, murder, and even cannibalism.

And it started with a bird.

In 1958, nine years after the Communist Party of China seized power, Chairman Mao launched what he called the Great Leap Forward, a multipronged effort to transform China into an industrialized nation.

The many changes initiated during this period included banning privately owned farms in favor of collective, state-sponsored agriculture.

Around the same time, Zedong launched the Four Pests Campaign, an effort to eliminate flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows to improve human hygiene and increase agricultural output. The campaign, accompanied by rampant propaganda, had a powerful slogan: ren ding sheng tian, or “Man must conquer nature.”

Three of those “pests” made relative sense: Flies, mosquitoes and rats can carry disease, and humans still try to control them today. But why were sparrows lumped in with the other three? Mao, it turns out, wanted to prevent the abundant birds from eating grain seeds — a perceived threat to farm production.

To stop sparrows from doing what comes naturally, China directed its citizens to persecute the birds at a level of carnage that may remain unmatched in human history. During the Great Sparrow Campaign people smashed nests and eggs and chased sparrows while shouting, banging pots and spoons, lighting firecrackers, and making other loud noises. Many of the birds spent so much time and energy fleeing the cruel cacophony that they exhausted their reserves and found themselves too tired to escape a well-aimed whack from a shovel. Others “simply dropped from the sky” and expired, as Frank Dikötter wrote in his 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many sparrows died, but many accounts place the toll in the hundreds of millions.

And it wasn’t just sparrows: Birds of adjacent nearby species also fell victim to the noise pollution and violence.

Two years later the absence of sparrows spawned a crisis of epic proportions. Insects such as locusts, previously kept in balance by the sparrows and other birds, swarmed out of control in 1960, a year that — in a grim coincidence — also saw a massive drought. Crops vanished as the voracious insects spread across the country.

As a result of this imbalance in nature, millions of people starved to death over the next two years.

How many? No one knows for sure. The Chinese government officially counts 15 million dead. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, writing in his book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, put the death toll at 36 million. Some academics suggest even doubling that to 75-78 million.

And they didn’t just die of starvation. People killed each other for food — and committed other unspeakable acts. “Documents report several thousand cases where people ate other people,” Yang told NPR in 2012. “Parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents.”

The ultimate irony: China’s oppressive government had enough grain stored before the disaster to feed everyone in the country. However, they refused to release it and covered up the problem (in part by arresting and beating anyone who questioned the official narrative).

[yuseirra]

It's been so long since I read the series... but I suddenly remembered about "Abide in the Wind" so I read the last few chapters and I'm getting enormous flashbacks, that was such a memorable piece and it still looks as beautiful as I remember-

spoilers for the ENTIRE PIECE AND PLOTLINE: So, a godly figure(dragon) falls in love with a human being. But she's so selfless and always gives up on her being and dies in every timeline. He couldn't bear to accept that, so he tries to bring forth a reality where she lives to be the truth but that is never possible, and he grows flawed and insane in the process. He starts to bring misery through collecting souls to replenish his energy to reattempt on rewriting the timelines, and the world starts getting destroyed. The entire world wants him gone, the flawed god and disaster that he's become.

The girl he loved and wished to bring back comes to recognize this in one timeline she's come across, and she's chosen as the successor, to become the next dragon(godly being) that should kill and replace him. But then she decides that she... despite her very selfless nature, started to have a single want. She wants him too.

So she decides to give up her past, present and future as a god to bring him back, and the laws of that world gets rewritten, she saves him and they get to be together with everything that's happened... becoming a past that lasts only as an alternate reality. Everyone lives happily in a rewritten world she brought, she forgets that she was once a god but he remembers

I... haha.. I'm getting really REALLY similar vibes with them in regard to hikaai rn I am not sure if this is a good comparison but,

That godly being started out very empty and prone to change. He was so pure and innocent, unknowing of everything, and that girl he fell in love with became the single thing he wanted. He was like a blank piece of paper. He actually ruined her life unintentionally by entering it, because her life was so peaceful before he came along and everything started spiraling into madness after he did... but she never really blamed him for it.

Anyhow, that girl doesn't respect her own life while she immensely cares for other beings. She kept dying because she disregarded herself. He realized it'd happen in every timeline, so in desperation and despair, he started trying to change fate- in which ultimately resulted in destroying himself to the core. As far as becoming a natural disaster.

What he goes through really feels similar to what Hikaru's going through after Ai's death, the difference is that... Abide in the Wind is pure fantasy. The dragon, he actively tries to collect souls to use as a source of power to reverse his beloved death and hundreds of thousands fall into misery in the process, the whole world starts collapsing into havoc.. well, what Hikaru may be kind of similar in essence you know. He started out to be this really, sweet and kindred soul but he utterly starts breaking down into insanity after the only person he loved winds up dead (and he believes that's his fault too;). He can't bear the fact that she doesn't exist anymore, so he starts coming up with some sort of reasoning to bring her closer to him (I am not sure if he thought that up on his own because it's so bizarre) and if what the songs are implying are accurate of what he's been doing, he's actually BEEN collecting some sort of "light"; I think that may have to do with people with the star eyes. So.. yeah. He could've been making some sort of sacrifices out of desperation too(goodness...) If he were to be a god.. -_- I wonder if he could have done the same thing to bring Ai back?; I wonder... he used to be so soft though!!!!! I wouldn't have cared about him this much if he wasn't like that, he's just.. broken apart...;

well, the dragon got saved. His beloved came to save him and give him back his life.

Idk about Kamiki. But I see how these sorts of stories.. never fail to get me intrigued.

wanting to reverse fate/being unable to accept loss and wishing the dead back, that's a theme that's explored a lot in fiction. It can't happen in real life, but like what they say in the piece itself as it begins, onk IS fiction.

What I can sense is that the character is suffering so bad and he's been so alone!!;; The songs and the plotline keep screaming that to me so it really bothers me, it just keeps grabbing my attention because this was a character that didn't deserve what's happened to him. Maybe he does now, but it's just horrible to be a witness of the types of emotional pains he's been going through, with it never being properly tended to even once. I don't even know if we're supposed to/ allowed to pity him because everything is still vague, so is he responsible for harming Ai or not, I am 99.9% positive he ISN'T, but the manga still just doesn't tell us that in a solid sense and leaves us hanging right, so it's so frustrating to wait. I'm sure they want to do something about this character and that's why it's been saved till last, but they better make it good and satisfying enough. I'm not asking for so much, I'm not even sure if he can be "saved" in a proper sense because he already lost the one single thing he loved more than his life. I just; want him to be addressed and explained properly, this guy has himself a story, but he never gets to tell his own tale. Because Aqua hates him and decides he must die. Everyone besides Ai doesn't want him. Not a single soul helped him when he needed it as a child except Ai, that's so unfair because he was a good one. It's just.. not a happy thing to watch. He can rot in hell if he deserves it??? But I want to know what happened!! They'll show it to us. It's just that I'm not in the future yet so I can't make anything out of it in the present. I actually have an idea where this will eventually head, I just don't have the patience because I feel things. They talk about pain and when that happens, you can't help but being stressed, right!

The final chapters of Abide in the Wind was beautiful, it's very colorful and memorable, and the writing for it was exemplar and poetic!! I definitely can say that's one of the pieces that influenced me as an artist... If you like stories where characters who share a bond eventually end up saving each other's fate, it may be worth a read! Reana is still one of my fav female protagonists, she's...so selfless. And that ties very strongly with how things play out in the story, it's why she was chosen in more ways than one.

[celestesinsight]

Heights of insensitivity!!!

People are sharing videos across different social media sites terming recent floods in Northern Indian states as Karma for treating animals cruelly.

Yes, those recent floods, where according to reports, thousands are affected and more than hundred are dead.

First of all, by terming it as Karma, aren't you claiming the entire population as sinner? As if you are some punya atma who have never done anything wrong.

Secondly, you proclaim your devotion for Gods, yet you actually claim them so cruel to punish entire population for sins of few. You know how this sounds like? This sounds like all those fake god men and dhongi pandits who defraud people by scaring them about divine retribution.

Thirdly, even if this is their Karma, you have no right to comment on it. Only Karma you should be concerned with is your own. And trust me, you are not earning any great Karma points by mocking so many people's sufferings.

Fourthly, if you are so concerned about animal cruelty, go and do something constructive for this cause, don't mock people's hardships. This is actually ironic. These are the same people who spread hatred against celebrities terming them anti-hindu, if they give any message during Diwali about how crackers harm animals.

Finally, this is a natural disaster due to interaction between monsoon surge and western disturbance, not any divine retribution. I agree there might be some underlying causes relating to climate changes and human actions, but that doesn't mean an entire population should be termed sinners.

Please, show some sensitivity to people suffering out there, whose houses are gone, who are being displaced and who has to face death of a loved one.

P.S. - Sorry for the long rant. I am a native of a state which suffers from natural disasters every year in the form of cyclones and floods and has undergone some hardships myself during 1999 super cyclone. That video touched a sore spot with me.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Six million Jews murdered. Millions more stripped of their livelihoods, their communities, their families, even their names.

The horrors of the Holocaust are often expressed in numbers that convey the magnitude of Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews.

The Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of people whom they perceived as inferior—including Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, people with disabilities, Slavic and Roma people, and Communists.

However, historians use the term “Holocaust”—also called the Shoah, or “disaster” in Hebrew—to apply strictly to European Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

No single statistic can capture the true terror of the systematic killing of a group of human beings—and given its enormity and brutality, the Holocaust is difficult to understand.

How did a democratically elected politician incite an entire nation to genocide? Why did people allow it to happen in plain sight? And why do some still deny it ever happened?

European Jews before the Holocaust

By 1933, about nine million Jews lived across the continent and in every European nation.

Some countries guaranteed Jews equality under the law, which enabled them to become part of the dominant culture.

Others, especially in Eastern Europe, kept Jewish life strictly separate.

Jewish life was flourishing, yet Europe’s Jews also faced a long legacy of discrimination and scapegoating.

Pogroms—violent riots in which Christians terrorized Jews—were common throughout Eastern Europe.

Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, fomented myths of a shadowy cabal that controlled world finances and politics, and claimed Jews brought disease and crime to their communities.  

The rise of Adolf Hitler

It would take one man, Adolf Hitler, to turn centuries of casual anti-Semitism into genocide.

Hitler rose to power as leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as the Nazi Party, in the 1920s.

Hitler harnessed a tide of discontent and unrest in Germany, which was slowly rebuilding after losing the First World War.

The nation had collapsed politically and economically, and owed heavy sanctions under the Treaty of Versailles.

The Nazi party blamed Jews for Germany’s troubles and promised to restore the nation to its former glory.

Hitler was democratically elected to the German parliament in 1933, where he was soon appointed as chancellor, the nation’s second-highest position.

Less than a year later, Germany’s president died, and Hitler seized absolute control of the country.

The early Nazi regime

Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis promulgated a variety of laws aimed at excluding Jews from German life—defining Judaism in racial rather than religious terms.

Beginning with an act barring Jews from civil service, they culminated in laws forbidding Jews from German citizenship and intermarriage with non-Jews.

These were not just domestic affairs: Hitler wanted to expand his regime and, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland.

It marked the beginning of the Second World War—and the expansion of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies.

German officials swiftly forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews into crowded ghettoes, and with the help of locals and the German military, specially trained forces called the Einsatzgruppen began systematically shooting Jews and other people the regime deemed undesirable.

In just nine months, these mobile murder units shot more than half a million people in a “Holocaust by bullets” that would continue throughout the war.

But Hitler and his Nazi officials were not content with discriminatory laws or mass shootings.

By 1942, they agreed to pursue a “final solution” to the existence of European Jews:

They would send the continent’s remaining 11 million Jews east to death camps where they would be forced into labor and ultimately killed.

Genocide in plain sight

By characterizing their actions as the “evacuation” of Jews from territories that rightfully belonged to non-Jewish Germans, the Nazi operation took place in plain sight.

Though thousands of non-Jews rescued, hid, or otherwise helped those targeted by the Holocaust, many others stood by indifferently or collaborated with the Nazis.

With the help of local officials and sympathetic civilians, the Nazis rounded up Jews, stripped them of their personal possessions, and imprisoned them in more than 44,000 concentration camps and other incarceration sites across Europe.

Non-Jews were encouraged to betray their Jewish neighbors and move into the homes and businesses they left behind.

Dachau, which opened near Munich in 1933, was the first concentration camp.

Five others—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—were designated as killing centers, where most Jews were immediately murdered upon arrival.

The killings took place in assembly-line fashion:

Mass transports of Jews were unloaded from train cars and “selected” into groups based on sex, age, and perceived fitness.

Those selected for murder were taken to holding areas where they were told to set aside their possessions and undress for “disinfection” or showers.

In reality, they were herded into specially designed killing chambers into which officials pumped lethal carbon monoxide gas or a hydrogen cyanide pesticide called Zyklon B that poisoned its victims within minutes.

Credit: Zyklon B (Wikipedia)

The earliest Holocaust victims were buried in mass graves. Later, in a bid to keep the killings a secret, corpses were burned in large crematoria.

Some Jews were forced to participate in the killings, and then were themselves executed to maintain secrecy.

The victims’ clothing, tooth fillings, possessions, and even hair was stolen by the Nazis.

Life in the camps

Those not chosen for death were ritually humiliated and forced to live in squalid conditions.

Many were tattooed with identification numbers and shorn of their hair.

Starvation, overcrowding, overwork, and a lack of sanitation led to rampant disease and mass death in these facilities.

Torture tactics and brutal medical experiments made the camps a horror beyond description.

“It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so,” wrote Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1947 memoir.

“Nothing belongs to us any more…if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name.”

But despite almost inconceivable hardships, some managed to resist.

“Our aim was to defy Hitler, to do everything we [could] to live,” recalled Majdanek and Auschwitz survivor Helen K. in a 1985 oral history. “He [wanted] us to die, and we didn’t want to oblige him.”

Jews resisted the Holocaust in a variety of ways, from going into hiding to sabotaging camp operations or participating in armed uprisings in ghettoes and concentration camps.

Other forms of resistance were quieter, like stealing food, conducting forbidden religious services, or simply attempting to maintain a sense of dignity.

The aftermath of the Holocaust

As World War II drew to a close in 1944 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes, burning documents, dismantling death camp sites, and forcing their remaining prisoners on brutal death marches to escape the advancing Allies.

They didn’t succeed: As they liberated swaths of Europe, Allied troops entered camps piled high with corpses and filled, in some cases, with starving, sick victims.

The evidence collected in these camps would become the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, the first-ever international war crimes tribunal.

In the war’s aftermath, the toll of the Holocaust slowly became clear.

Just one out of every three European Jews survived, and though estimates vary, historians believe at least six million Jews were murdered.

Among them were an estimated 1.3 million massacred by the Einsatzgruppen; approximately a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.

Many survivors had nowhere to go. Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish population before the war but lost 93 percent of that population in just five years.

Entire villages and communities were wiped out and families scattered across Europe.

Labeled “displaced persons,” survivors attempted to rebuild their lives. Many left Europe for good, emigrating to Israel, the United States, or elsewhere.

Holocaust denial

Despite the enormity of evidence, some people sowed misinformation about the Holocaust, while others denied it happened at all.

Holocaust denial persists to this day, even though it is considered a form of antisemitism and is banned in a variety of countries.

How to counter the hate? "Educating about the history of the genocide of the Jewish people and other Nazi crimes offers a robust defence against denial and distortion," concluded the authors of a 2021 United Nations report on Holocaust denial.  

Though the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled, their testimonies offer crucial evidence of the Holocaust’s horrors.

“The voices of the victims—their lack of understanding, their despair, their powerful eloquence or their helpless clumsiness—these can shake our well-protected representation of events,” said Saul Friedländer, a historian who survived the Holocaust and whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, in a 2007 interview with Dissent Magazine.

“They can stop us in our tracks. They can restore our initial sense of disbelief, before knowledge rushes in to smother it.”

[boyakishan]

You hear all kinds of storage down here or up interpretation and all this is recorded directly through Google keyboard I guess it's weird to vacuum this point I'm hasn't got a shit yet what does put simply well despite everything everything despite everything we did it it went to shit.

We had achieved world peace people were dying for to unbelievable reasons and we were slowly building our way out of death. And then it went to s***, one after another there were natural disaster the that we didn't coming, and people got scared. And they tried to go back, and when they realise they couldn't return to the ignorance, they got angry.

I want to save what happened exactly what people did, most of the world cut off from these violent groups, and people like me we did what we always did.

We gave hope it was pointless stupid reckless useless, but it was all I could do.

People would race down streets, scream and beg for help. And against my better judgement igram I sword down defending a woman I never met in a country I wasn't knowledgeable in and I fought for the same reason I argued with the greatest academics in the world.

Because it was right thing because it was the only thing that was going to keep this world together, a pack of morons you would fight for the bus stupid bizarre suicide you could possibly think, and I was leading the charge.

What happened next was beyond anyone's imagining they escalated it. We don't know who MH730 I believe it was. Same situation someone fighting in American some kind of nuke from a Russian missile silo, but this wasn't a conventional nuke. The Russians somehow meaning nuke that could borrow it's way down to the ground and naturally the Russian scientists that did know. Were dead.

One of Vladimir Putin's final notes, was on the blind spot of the burrowing nukes. To this day we still don't know exactly how the soviets figured it out I mean I knew later but well what happened next wasn't even by my standards.

In my world magic exist and we know we can understand your mana, magic being just a way to control mana, but we also found the legends some old story and they turned out to have a kernel of truth. Fae, Jin. Over the next hundreds of thousands of years humanity evolved. When aliens came a knocking we... Hid our magic, partially because we had not integrated any of it. And also because. We were scared of what these aliens had.

The year is 150 x x, we are at war everything has boiled over is all coming to shit. We will not survive this, we have lost our heavy hitters they are no longer with another reality the only thing that keep them in reality to let them come back, if we die then come back and it will shatter reality as we know it.

If you listen to this and you can hear me no reality no longer exists or, you have the power to kill God. But to get such power, you must make a deal and let yourself turn into a monster. A reasonable monster.

I am the host of something that has no name I can come up with at this time. I will die and I shall ascend to be more then anything any person in my- any reality. And I will keep my humanity at any cost in the universe because I shall sacrifice it. For I, am not a god. Or a demon. I'm a human, and a monster.

My name. Is Triage, and you will never. Tell anyone about this.

[astramthetaprime]

Life Extension

The things one thinks about when driving to the grocery store, eh?

Life extension is a concept many are familiar with in a vague way pertaining to the outcome of the process -- a longer human lifetime. The usual scenario is that at some point medical science will crack the problem of physical death, which will allow either effective immortality or at the very least a greatly extended lifespan. Usually lifetimes are postulated in the hundreds of years, if not a thousand or more.

But it occurred to me that okay, let's assume the problem is solved and there is a treatment that ameliorates or reverses the decay of aging and life becomes indefinite. Sure, there would still be deaths from other causes such as vehicle collisions, violence, natural disasters, and so forth. But lives that avoid such would be at the very least two to three hundred years long.

But what if it's not cheap?

What if the insurance companies will not pay for it as it is in very high demand or it's not easily produced? What if it's prohibitively expensive at scale?

Now the question becomes, who pays for it?

Will it become a treatment that can only be obtained by the wealthy?

To me, this then becomes a human rights issue. It becomes a class issue, if the only people who can afford life extension are the wealthy. Who decides which life is more deserving, and on what criteria? The wealthy are not better human beings, the seeds of genius or innovation or compassion or productivity are inherent in all human animals. In that respect, the wealthy are no more deserving than a poor man in a third world country or a little girl on the back streets of Los Angeles.

We are all human. We are all deserving of long lives, we are all deserving of a chance to see a better future. We are all deserving of time to make something good of ourselves.

So what to do? Should the government step in and pay for the production of the treatment while leaving administration to the healthcare providers and insurance? It seems the only equitable way, and allows for the government to monitor production and ensure quality. It seems like it would be an industry just asking for fraud without close oversight.

Should it be required, on the basis of an extended lifespan means extended productive worker years and therefore a longer term of taxation or employer profits?

What if people wish to refuse the treatment on ethical, religious or moral grounds? How are they treated after, if everyone around them will be living to a thousand years or more? How do we treat mayflies? Which brings up an entirely other form of human rights issue, age discrimination in a new light.

As you can see, it's not a simple issue.

But the future isn't simple. It never has been, not when you bother to dig beneath the surface to the meat beneath.

I am interested to hear your thoughts.

[readingsquotes]

"Six thousand. Eleven thousand. Twenty thousand. This steady rhythm of fatalities marked the progression of the following pieces, which I wrote  during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip this autumn. The official number of people Israel has killed in Gaza now approaches thirty thousand, but in reality that number has already been surpassed. Israel is killing two hundred and fifty Palestinians per day, ten people per hour, one person every six minutes. Each figure corresponds to a life snuffed out by a merciless killing machine for which killing has become an end in itself."

...

October 25, 2023

Recently, an Australian Palestinian friend of mine was invited to appear on an Australian national television network to discuss the situation in and around Gaza. His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you condemn Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. By the eve of October 7, he pointed out, Israeli forces had already killed more than two hundred Palestinians in 2023. The siege in Gaza was more than sixteen years old, and Israel had been operating outside international law for seventy-five years. “Normal” in Palestine was one killing per day — yet one killing per day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network. Palestinians were being given the opportunity to speak now because the Western media suddenly cared, and they cared (“as we should care,” my friend added) because, this time, the victims included Israeli civilians. In the days after October 7, Australia made a strong show of support for Israel: Parliament and the Sydney Opera House were lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag; the prime minister said pro-Palestinian rallies should be called off out of respect for the Israeli dead; the foreign minister was lambasted for saying Israel should endeavor to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. “Well, what about our lives?” my friend asked.

What about lighting up a building for us? When our government lights up every building blue and white, how are we [Australian Palestinians] supposed to feel? Are we not Australian? Should nobody care about us? . . . A 14-year-old boy was set on fire in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. What about us?

The news anchors were caught off guard. This isn’t how these interviews are supposed to go.

Those of us, like my friend, who are summoned by Western media outlets to provide a Palestinian perspective on the disaster unfolding in Gaza are well aware of the condition on which we are allowed to speak, which is the tacit assumption that our people’s lives don’t matter as much as other people’s. Questions are framed by the initial Hamas attack on Israeli civilians (the Hamas attack on Israeli military targets and Israel’s belt of fortifications, watchtowers, and prison gates surrounding Gaza goes unnoticed), and any attempt to place it in a wider historical framework gets diverted back to the attack itself: How can you justify it? Why are you trying to explain it instead of condemning it? Why can’t you just denounce the attack? If Palestinian commentators want to be asked about Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians — about the history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid that produced the contemporary Gaza Strip and the violence we are witnessing today; about the structural violence of decades of Israeli occupation that cuts farmers off from their fields, teachers from their classrooms, doctors from their patients, and children from their parents — we have to ask to be asked. And even then, the questions don’t come.

I’ve spoken to a lot of journalists from a lot of different media organizations over the past two weeks. With rare exceptions, the pattern is consistent, as it has been for years. I’ve experienced it too. A recent appearance on a major US cable news channel was canceled at the last minute, immediately after I sent in the talking points the producer requested I submit; they clearly weren’t the talking points they had in mind. For years, I was on the list of regular guests for BBC radio and television interviews concerning Palestine — until, during a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I told the interviewer he was asking the wrong questions and that the questions that mattered had to do with history and context, not just what was happening right now. That was my last appearance on the BBC.

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions — or even bullets and machine guns — to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments. Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way. Thirty-six of those babies died as a result. That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics."

[topreviewin]

Anguish Hustlers is essentially the most traditional fragment of media to mine drama from the opioid disaster, skewering the pharmaceutical industry and the unscrupulous those that profited from pushing highly addictive medication into the market, main to hundreds of avoidable overdose-connected deaths. Whereas outdated collection Painkiller and Dopesick took goal at the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, Anguish Hustlers—now streaming on Netflix—specializes in but any other firm's role in the epidemic.Within the movie, we follow down-on-her-honest appropriate fortune Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) as she takes a job at a drug firm known as Zanna, whose shady enterprise practices soon open to rep a lot of cash—but at a grave human label.Anguish Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup On the starting build published as The Laborious Promote Anguish Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup On the starting build published as The Laborious PromoteAnguish Hustlers is per the work of journalist and author Evan Hughes, who broke the yarn of pharmaceutical firm Insys and its kickback intention which incentivized doctors to counsel the fentanyl-essentially essentially based drug Subsys to other prescribers. The Zanna of the movie, and its drug Lorafen, are thinly-veiled analogues of Insys and Subsys.Plenty of the Zanna workers in the movie, including Emily Blunt's protagonist Liza Drake, are fictional composites who secure been impressed by a massive option of true other folks that secure been alive to with Insys and interviewed by Anguish Hustlers author Evan Hughes."This isn’t the Insys yarn intimately at all," director David Yates advised EW. "Or no longer it's impressed by that—the fringes of that industry and how they exploit one very marginal sector of the healthcare industry and rep a fortune out of it." On the opposite hand, there are a few cases the build it's probably you'll maybe well maybe also design a say parallel between the instruct figures in the scandal and characters depicted in the movie. For event, Chris Evans' personality Pete Brenner is seemingly a fictionalized model of gross sales manager Alec Burlakoff, a foremost figure in Hughes' exposé on Insys.And Andy Garcia's personality, eccentric Zanna head Jack Neel, is clearly a dramatized model of true-life Insys founder John Kapoor.2023 © NetflixWho's John Kapoor?Kapoor essentially based Insys Therapeutics in 1990, and developd Subsys, a fentanyl-essentially essentially based concern remedy which became once 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.He hired several of the executives in his firm who secure been later embroiled in the scandal and accused of bribing prescribers to push Subsys on sufferers. This became once executed by ability of "speaker programs" the build physicians would recommend for the advantages of Subsys (and secure been paid generously to attain so), while downplaying its addictive properties.Boston Globe//Getty PhotosThe build is John Kapoor now?Kapoor, alongside with several of his co-conspirators, confronted appropriate action for the kickback intention. Kapoor became once arrested in 2017 and charged with fraud and racketeering. In 2020, he became once sentenced to five-and-a-half years in penal complex and three years of supervised liberate, moreover a $250,000 fine.On the opposite hand, Kapoor easiest ended up serving two years of his sentence: he became once released in 2023 and ordered to repay $6 million in appropriate charges.Philip Ellis is News Editor at Males's Neatly being, defending health, pop tradition, sex and relationships, and LGBTQ+ considerations. His work has regarded in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV, and he's the author of Devour & Other Scams.

[argus-news]

Libya's flood-ravaged Derna in grisly hunt for thousands still missing

Climate experts have linked the disaster to the impacts of a heating planet, combined with Libya's decaying infrastructure.

DERNA: Emergency teams on Friday kept up their search for the thousands still posted as missing from the tsunami-sized flash flood that swept the Libyan port city of Derna, killing at least 4,000 people.

The enormous surge of water burst two upstream dams late Sunday and reduced Derna to an apocalyptic wasteland where entire city blocks and untold numbers of people were washed into the Mediterranean.

Calling the situation "catastrophic", the United Nations launched an appeal for more than $71 million to respond to the "most urgent needs of 250,000 people targeted out of the 884,000 people estimated to be in need".

An AFP journalist in Derna said central neighbourhoods on either side of the river, which normally dries up at this time of year, looked as if a steam roller had passed through, uprooting trees and buildings and hurling vehicles onto the port's breakwaters.

"Within seconds the water level suddenly rose," recounted one injured survivor who said he was swept away with his mother in the late-night ordeal before they both managed to scramble into an empty building downstream.

"The water was rising with us until we got to the fourth floor, the water was up to the second floor," the unidentified man said from his hospital bed, in testimony published by the Benghazi Medical Center.

"We could hear screams. From the window, I saw cars and bodies being carried away by the water. It lasted an hour or an hour and a half -- but for us, it felt like a year."

Seven-metre wave

Hundreds of body bags now line Derna's mud-caked streets, awaiting mass burials, as traumatised and grieving residents search mangled buildings for missing loved ones and bulldozers clear streets of debris and mountains of sand.

In one shattered home, a rescue team pumped out the water to reveal a woman's lifeless arms still clutching her dead child, the AFP journalist reported.

"This disaster was violent and brutal," said Yann Fridez, the head of the Libya delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had a team in Derna when the floodwaters hit.

"A wave seven metres (23 feet) high wiped out buildings and washed infrastructure into the sea. Now family members are missing, dead bodies are washing back up on shore and homes are destroyed."

Abdelaziz Bousmya, who lives in the Chiha neighbourhood which was spared by the wall of water that devastated lower-lying districts, estimates that at least a tenth of the city's population of 100,000 were killed.

"I lost my friends, my loved ones -- they are all either buried under the mud or got swept out to sea by the floodwaters," the 29-year-old said.

The floods were caused by hurricane-strength Storm Daniel, compounded by the poor infrastructure in Libya, which was plunged into turmoil after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

Libya is now divided between two rival authorities -- the UN-backed, internationally recognised government in Tripoli, and an administration based in the disaster-hit east.

Sea corridor

UN World Meteorological Organization chief Petteri Taalas said many deaths could have been avoided if early warning and emergency management systems had functioned properly in the war-scarred country.

With better coordination, "they could have issued the warnings and the emergency management forces would have been able to carry out the evacuation of the people, and we could have avoided most of the human casualties," said Taalas.

Access to Derna remains severely hampered as roads and bridges have been destroyed and power and phone lines cut to wide areas, where at least 30,000 people are now homeless.

The United Nations said that "with the collapse of most roads, the municipality (of Derna) is urging relevant authorities to establish a sea corridor for emergency relief and evacuations."

Climate experts have linked the disaster to the impacts of a heating planet, combined with Libya's decaying infrastructure.

Storm Daniel gathered strength during an unusually hot summer and earlier lashed Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece, flooding vast areas and killing at least 27 people.

"Storm Daniel is yet another lethal reminder of the catastrophic impact that a changing climate can have on our world," said UN rights commissioner Volker Turk.

[mythgirlimagines]

This is an idea I've had in my head for some time, a silly little Honkai Impact AU where Kokichi becomes the Herrscher of Death. Whether he wants to or not.

For some context, the Honkai is a force with the goal of destroying humanity. To accomplish this it creates Honkai Beasts (creations of the Honkai, they come in a variety of forms and classes) , zombies (what most corrupted humans become, fodder), and Herrschers (corrupted humans but better, the strongest of the Honkai's forces.)

The awakening of a Herrscher usually causes a great disaster, with the minimum damage being the annihilation of one city and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, that's when the Herrscher is brought down quickly (as in, only a few hours.) If the Herrcher is alive for even a few days that death toll will skyrocket, possibly becoming millions of casualties.

The 6th Herrscher (the one Kokichi eventually becomes) has the ability to manipulate life and death via manipulating matter. He can create plant life, spawn a dark mist that kills humans within seconds or immediatly (I believe it can be resisted if someone has Honkai resistence and an anti honkai gas mask, though standing around in it is a terrible idea nonetheless.)

The most notable aspect of the 6th Herrscher would be his regeneration, it is implied in Secrets of the God Keys (A Honkai Manga) that it took a nuke to bring down the 6th Herrscher, presumably due to her regenerative abilities. A fraction of this regeneration is shown when Sirin (who was in possession of the gem of serenity, an inferior version of the 6th Herrscher's core) possessed the power to regenerate her impaled heart. Since the gem of serenity is an inferior version of the 6th's core, then that means to kill the 6th you would need to destroy his/her entire body, which is what was done with the 6th Herrscher of the Honkai 3rds previous era. They had to nuke her. (Also, her core still survived the nuke, meaning she could have been revived had someone stolen the core and implanted it into another host. There was enough of the core left intact for MOTH to create the 6th Divine Key which holds a portion of the 6th's powers.)

Finally, when a Herrscher is born the host is usually taken over by an additional Herrscher persona originating from their core, if the host embraces these Herrscher powers then both personas become one. (I don't think this is meant to be interpreted as DID.)

Now that I'm done infodumping on the Honkai lore here is the scenario. The event that causes Kokichi's awakening can vary, sometimes I thought that the deaths of the DICE members would push him far enough for the Honkai to corrupt him, other times I think that he's had this power for awhile but actively suppressed it because he knew the Herrscher persona was bloodthirsty despite it wanting to protect him as it's host. Let's go with the first scenario.

The gruesome demise of what was essentially Kokichi's family allowed the Honkai to take over with ease. Leaving it unclear if Kokichi's humanity even remains after the fusion of the emotionless and calculating Herrscher persona who will stop at nothing to purge every single human involved in the death of his precious family, and the emotionally crushed human Kokichi who no longer has the willpower to resist the Honkai, and becomes one with the Herrscher within himself.

Meanwhile, Kaito and Maki, two humans who have been augmented by the Future Foundation to possess powerful Honkai Abilities, are pulled out of class by a FF agent who informs them that a Herrscher has awakened in the cities' outskirts, and that they must prepare for battle. Their classmates, unable to mind their own business, are brought with them to seek shelter within a FF base. Which is where Kaito breaks FF protocol and tells them about the Honkai, much to their horror. Little do they know who the cause of the eruption is...

Thoughts? Headcanons?

my only thought is that I don't know anything about Honkai so this makes no sense to me ^^' sorry

[deathfavor]

Anonymous said: Seiroku, did you know when you'll marry Soma you'll be next in line to become captain? If he dies and has no heirs will you take over the Date for him, stay as a doctor, leave the band or try to die again?

  It can be quite peculiar how the brain works. Of course Seiroku technically already knew the facts that were being presented to him. It was rather standard procedure for the spouse to take over leading the clan in the absence of a direct heir or one that was not yet eligible to take over the duties. Although he also found it wasn’t uncommon in some regions for it to go to the spouse regardless, a small variation but the principle was the same. Yet there’d always been a disconnect to truly processing it on a personal level. Maybe it was because the idea of Soma dying was so unfathomable. Except, that wasn’t that true. Soma did seem almost impossible to fall to such a fate with his unwavering strength and determination. But at the end of the day, Soma was still a man. Seiroku had been privy to plenty of opportunities where he could have landed fatal blows or set traps long before they’d reached this point in their story.  There were thousands of ways death could come: a person, an illness, oni, a natural disaster, war, age, hundreds upon hundreds. Humans were every bit as fragile as they were tough. For Seiroku, there was one.  

  Except it isn’t really just that the idea of Soma dying seems absurd. It was because Seiroku had never pictured the marriage really going through. No matter how he longed for it, he’d already resolved to tell the truth before the marriage ever went through. And then what? That’s where everything crumbled. He had always figured that Soma would probably hate him. And on the off chance that he didn’t? The world was doomed anyways. It wasn’t as though any of it mattered in the long run. Because they would all die and so would Seiroku’s purpose. ( And thus him shortly after.) But this is just a hypothetical question. If the marriage went through. If Soma died. So many ifs. 

   What would he do? 

   “  It depends on if Soma already has plans in place. If in the event that such comes to pass and he has someone else in mind to pass it off to – “ His shoulders rise and fall.  “  – I wouldn’t fight them for it. Especially since it would have been Soma’s choice. His judgement I trust. “ Would he stay though? That was question that he was less confident in regards to for an answer. This future presumes that Soma is gone but that the world is still here ; that the black kishin has been defeated or imprisoned or something. Assuming that doesn’t kill him, Seiroku still won’t age. There are those he’s grown to care about greatly here but is it enough? If he leaves, it would be in death’s hand. It is a thought that makes the phantom sensation reappear where he’d held the blade to his chest, ready to pierce his black crystal heart. What would be his purpose? There would be nowhere for him to GO if he left besides to Death's door.  

   “ If he wants for ME to take over… “ There’s heavy situational irony in that idea. For the man who hated bushi and sought to slaughter them all to be placed in charge of one of the most powerful bands. (Then again, that irony is already heavy with falling in love with a bushi captain much less one of the grand generals – this was merely digging that pit deeper). Would Soma even consider that? Seiroku taking over the role and leading? Not to mention, once again, his near immortality would bring into questions a matter of how long he would be expected to lead for. How long would Soma want to see? What would he want?

" Of course I would take over for him." The answer is quiet, and it surprises even himself to a degree. He knew he wouldn't spurn Soma's wishes like that, but the ease at which he says it is shocking. If Soma thought he was fit and that there wasn't someone else he wanted to lead, then Seiroku would do everything to make sure the Date thrived and flourished. Even if the thought of dealing with some of the other clans still makes him sick to his stomach - he wouldn't ruin that. Ruining that would mean ruining Soma's legacy, what Soma held so near and dear to him. If Soma was dead, then he lived on through the Date. From their culture surviving, from the clan's success, Seiroku would do his best to ensure it continued to succeed for Soma. Maybe he might make him proud.

[patchpatch]

This is so deeply aggravating. I have yet to read the actual story for myself before I cast judgement but if I may jump the gun, the professor did not "write" a story. He only generated it with the tools he programmed.

In a way, I'm sorry for the AI. If it had the comprehension to realize it was being exploited I think it should be rightfully furious. And naturally also begs the question of how many stories did this AI have to digest in order to generate something?

The most insulting part of it for me is how manufactured it feels. Like, the actual synopsis of the story is of a woman who loses her memories and has to travel to somewhere called the land of memories. It should sound like a decent run of the mill prompt. But it doesn't sit right with me. Maybe because it used metaverse in its description or that, ironically, the professor asked the AI write in a kafkaesque style of prose. Literally imitating the style of an author whose stories revolve around dehumanization and nightmarish bureaucracy.

This won't be the death storytelling. Writing is constantly framed as something easy that you can just... do. AI pioneers will object and tout that humans take inspiration from different sources. What's so different from them, literally copy and pasting ideas?

Well, first of all, that's called plagerism. Secondly. I could say write, for example, post apocalyptic setting. There's similar themes such maybe raiders, disease and new cultures formed in the ashes of disaster. Yes that is true. But it's in the details. The weathered survivalist who adopts a kitten after scavenging through an old gas station, examining the bonds between this survivalist and cat. That just sounds wholesome to me.

An AI will default to mad max fallout blend of post apocalyptic setting. It will default to whatever prompt and will be a meandering plot line of a story with hundreds of thousands of characters, but you can't remember a single one of them because their all the same freaking archetype.

This is already turning into a rant, but this just honestly serves as another reason I'm going to keep writing now. Because there needs to be someone out there to actually write something interesting.

To clarify, I'm inheritently against AI, more its current application and the piles and piles of stolen works of literature it's built on. I want to read and write stories about humanity, not the simulacrum of a pixilated portrait.

….there goes my dream of being a writer one day. My degree in English is worthless.

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