#We can communicate our decision to the prisoner but we can't force them to accept it.

[weather-cluddy]

I support an inno verdict for Mahiru, but I also think a lot of people are operating under the same misconception they did in Muu's first trial. A character being sad is not the same as that character regretting what they did. Mahiru spends her voice drama defending her old relationship, and her saying that she forgives Kotoko and Es is in context of thinking that what they're doing (killing somebody in order to express their feelings) is the same as what she was doing, and therefore a good thing. If anything, it seems like her character development since the first trial has been going from "Maybe my love is a bad thing" to "I can't bear the possibility of my love being a bad thing, so I'll just keep going on like this even if it literally kills me or others".

[makingspiritualityreal]

Numerology Life Path 6 - Your Birth Card and its Ruling Planet

Numerology Life Path Numbers and their assigned Tarot Card Meaning Series

This is a post in my new astrology/numerology/tarot series, that only concerns you, if you are a Life Path 6. Posts on consecutive Life Path Numbers will follow. Originally, I wanted to do them all in one post, but my writing turned out to be so long, I decided to split the post and seperate the Life Path Numbers. The introduction part of the post will be the same for all Life Path Numbers, in case you only read a post about your own Life Path Number, and nothing else.

Introduction

The concept of a Birth Card links Tarot and Numerology together, in order to deepen our understanding of a vibration of a Life Path Number we are born with. The Birth Card, or rather Birth Cards, are Major Arcana Tarot Cards with assigned numbers, which correlate with Life Path Numbers. Understanding the meaning of tarot cards, mixed with the knowledge of Numerology Vibrations, helps create a more unique vision of your life experience.

A person with any given Life Path Number, having several Major Arcana energies present in their lives, usually struggles with one of the energies more than the other. As a result, life will probably force them to focus on mastering one of these energies. In general, however, any Life Path describes both your biggest downfall and ultimate triumph - just like with an Astrology Chart, the highlighted numbers/astrology houses point to your biggest strengths and weaknesses. For a better understanding of this concept, visit my article “Natal Chart - A map of your issues?”

Remember, that everyone, besides their Life Path Number and Birth Card also has a unique astrology chart. Thus, for some people embracing the higher expression of their energy is easier, for others it’s harder and it takes more time to master, and some energies become easier to deal with than others. Most human beings are somewhere in between, working on their path and having some achievements while struggling with difficulties at the same time.

In the spiritual community, there are differences in opinion on linking Astrological Planets and positions to specific numerology numbers energies. My take is a result of my own personal experience, conversations with other people in my field and research, in order to give you the widest possible spectrum of ideas and increase the understanding of every Life Path Number.

If you are a Master Number 11, 22 or 33, there will be a seperate post on how the Birth Cards apply to you as well.

Even If you have only a basic understanding of Astrology, Tarot or Numerology, this post will still be helpful to you, because it describes the unique vibrational mix that comes from the expression of both these spiritual sciences mixed together. To calculate which Tarot Cards and what Life Path correspond to your birthday, click here.

Life Path 6 - The Lovers and The Devil

Life Path 6 is ruled by the mirroring, balancing energies of Venus. There can be a lot of confusion due to that number being associated with the Devil Tarot Card, having such a scary sounding name, and with Venus and Lovers being mixed into all this at the same time. However, this comes from lack of understanding of the actual nature of Venus as a planet and its dualistic energy.

In life path 6, we cross the barrier between the self and the other. 6 comes after 5, and in 5 we have reached the apex of accumulating what we have within and we went to the final stage of sharing all that we have and all that we are outside. In 6, we take it a step further, as our energetic centers open up to the outside world in new ways due to the continuous exchange that occurred in the 5, as we freely share all our energetic material with others.

This conflict leads to the death of the ego. Venus represents surrendering of our egotism, but it is not an easy process, since we associate our sense of "self" with survival and security. This is the source of The Devil Tarot card ruling this number. The Devil is the unknown, the control that the ego has over us, keeping us prisoner, as per the graphic representation in the traditional Tarot Deck. Thus, in number 6 we experience the scariest illusion-shattering and confrontation through other parties, which exposes our weaknesses and shows how easily we are manipulated by external influences.

There can be no passage to the harmonious, balancing stage in The Lovers before passing the test of surrender in The Devil. That surrender is the only thing, that frees us from his grasp. The Devil controls the material realm and Venus is materialistic in nature as well. Venus relishes in surface-level, materialistic pleasure, and The Devil reminds us how easily we can become a slave to it, if we don't hold the consciousness of the illusory nature of the satisfaction these pleasures give us.

As a Life Path 6, your task is to be able to enjoy the pleasures in your life and relationships, while holding the truth close to your heart. The purpose of all connections in this Universe is true harmony and symbiosis. This Life Path is a testing point, that reveals your true colors and can force you to make some uncomfortable decisions. The Shadow Aspect of this Life Path is being blinded to the bliss of intimate union and staying at a surface level. Venus is also prone to conforming to others' opinions on a shallow level without really listening to them or being deeply invested, for the sake of smoothing the waters. This difficult aspect of Life Path 6 once again leads to The Devil - being controlled through illusions, because of the reciprocal, malleable nature of Venus. However, an experienced Life Path 6 embraces the scary process of setting themselves free from their ego and learns to truly surrender to the other, which is rewarded in the harmony that we experience in The Lovers.

Through the associated Tarot Cards, we learn how to navigate the energies of Life Path 6.

The Devil - The task here is to be in control of material illusions and not let them blind you, as you experience the pleasure. Realise their temporary, superficial nature. You may be reaping some karmic rewards in this incarnation, but you are also being put to the test, and thus you need to preserve the necessary balance. Venus is easily influenced and swayed by others, so the need for rationality is even more pronounced in face of greater temptation. However, you can't truly prove yourself without having a testing experience to use as a measuring stick, so thank this card for being the ultimate tool of spiritual progress for you.

The Lovers - This is the easier aspect of Venus, that we experience as a response to passing the ardorous spiritual tests of temptation in the previous stage. The Lovers give us the gift of balance, harmony, unity, compromise and merging between opposites through pronounced tolerance. In The Lovers, we know how to abandon selfishness, coming from a place of true compassion, and thus we achieve the state of Cosmic perfection in blissful union with another. The key difference between conformism and love is authentic connection, coming from an open heart space, as opposed to creating an illusion for the sake of gaining approval.

The key word for a Life Path 6 is honesty. If you stay true to yourself and to others, and you express it from a vulnerable place inside yourself, the scales will automatically tip towards the balancing energy you possess inside. Remember, that you have the power not only to be swayed by illusions, but also to create them in front of others. Use this power responsibly, not for your own benefit but for the sake of creating an intimate, mutual experience of complete acceptance and harmony. Don't let the pleasures of worldly experiences sway you from your spiritual mission, which is as real as for any other Life Path Number. There is depth to be found in the expression of every Number, and you are the spiritual gateway between One and Oneness. You have the key power to make heavy cosmic decisions as a ritual of passage, and with this power comes responsibility.

[yassakool]

Back in the day, I ran a tabletop/LARP Star Wars game using the WotC d20 system, the one from before AotC came out. A clunky system, but I adored it, because Star Wars and it was my first game. I tried to run it pretty classic with some moments of deeper moral questions for my Jedi players. Overall, I got some pretty positive feedback and I have players still remind me how much they enjoyed it over 15 years later.

Except for one player.

He was playing what he called an Obi-Wan clone character called Renn, which is a fine tool for new players, but this guy was a lot more experienced than me. Later, I'd go on to actively discourageb experienced players from just playing thinly-veiled clone characters because of a few... incidents like what followed.

The game ran long enough that we all went and saw AotC in theaters and decided it was time to advance our game into that timeline. Now, I didn't want my group to go through unit combat stuff, so I kept their adventures more independent from the armed forces and did more in the sidelines of the war. Thus, we came to a point of the story where they're hunting down a contact in a den of thieves.

Renn doesn't bother trying to be undercover during this arc, unlike the other Jedi or players in the group, staying in his Jedi robes and openly displaying his lightsaber. We had a new player in the group who I set up as the contact so he could weave into the group. Due to a botch in a few rolls (not the least of which was due to the obvious Jedi), the group ends up in an opposing fire fight with the contact and some unfriendlies.

Now, to the new player's credit, he recognizes an opportunity and sabotages the unfriendlies without giving himself away and surrenders, putting down his blasters. I was THOROUGHLY impressed and glad for the turn around. So, Renn proceeds to cuff the survivors, because he thinks he can act like a cop on a planet not in the Republic? Anyway, once he's done, the player informs me that Renn then activates his lightsaber and begins severing the tendons in all their legs, including the new player, so they can't run away.

You know that jubilation that usually follows a combat encounter? Yeah, that all stopped immediately and I'm standing there aghast. I'm in enough shock that I can't even speak for several seconds before I finally tell the player to mark down a level of Corruption on his character.

To say the player disagreed with my decision would be an understatement. The session effectively ended right there as we go through an hour of having to explain to this grown man that mutilating defenseless prisoners is a Dark Side action. Like, we can't even argue basic morality to this action, we have to frame it in the universe's morality. Even in a setting of super-science and magic healing, this was not okay. This was the major point of the player divesting from cooperative play and becoming actively hostile and disruptive. Again, the first game I ever ran, so I didn't know how to handle a player like this.

Fast-forward some years and guess what this man's stance is on BLM and police misconduct. Go on, go ahead and fucking guess.

People who want to keep politics out of games always seem to be the ones who miss the big moral lessons the games bake into their setting and mechanics. Star Wars has one of the most basic black & white morality systems out there, and even then, someone will say brutalizing unarmed people is morally gray or totally justified, and will fight you if you say otherwise. These are not innocuous acts and gives you an idea how they morally frame their world, not just their fiction.

Every hobby will have some toxic people. I accept that, but we have to address it as a community before it can get better. Simply asking people to keep politics out of the hobby ignores the problem, it gives a shelter for this toxicity to grow. Don't give these people a haven and don't let them warp/steal it away from the rest of us.

We can and should do better.

[takebackthedream]

America Can't Afford Another Gorsuch in Government by Lois Gibbs

Anne Gorsuch, the mother of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, was my worst nightmare. In 1982, when I first confronted her about toxic contamination in Times Beach, Missouri, she led the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Ronald Reagan.

Anne stepped down a few months later after she refused to hand over documents that would have revealed the EPA’s mishandling of the $1.6 billion Superfund for toxic cleanups. She said she would rather go to jail than release these documents. In doing so, she broke the law, and became the first U.S. agency director in history to be cited for contempt of Congress.

When his mother resigned, Neil was a 15-year-old sophomore and star debater at Washington, D.C.’s elite, Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep.

Neil was upset with his mother, she later wrote, saying, “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the President ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

As a mother of four children, I know how much my actions influence my children’s behavior, values and principles. I can only wonder what impact Anne Gorsuch’s actions had on her son.

Even at age fifteen, Neil Gorsuch should have understood the difference between right and wrong. Why wasn’t his reaction, “Gee mom, at least the people living around landfills will now receive some attention?”

Or “If the President was making you do wrong, you should have stood your ground, and said no to him, and that you’d go to jail before hurting American families?”

Did Neil truly think his mother was above the law, because her boss told her to do something that was wrong? Or that she was right to withhold the truth from the American people?

A deep understanding of right and wrong is fundamental to ruling on cases in any level of court. Anne Gorsuch’s 22-month tenure at the EPA was one of the most scandalous of the early Reagan administration. She was a firm believer that EPA was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, and cut the agency’s budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the volume of clean-water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.

I was the leader at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY, where a toxic waste dump leaked 20,000 tons of chemicals into our neighborhood. As a result, 56 percent of our children were born with birth defects. In 1980, all eight hundred families from Love Canal were evacuated, and the federal Superfund program was established to provide funds to clean up other similar hazardous wastes sites. A polluter’s pay provision was the funding mechanism.

At the EPA, Anne Gorsuch supervised her assistant, Rita Lavelle in administration of the Superfund. Lavelle was later indicted on federal perjury charges after an investigation demonstrated she was involved in the misuse of these funds and in irregularities at the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a major hazardous waste site in Riverside, California. Lavelle was later convicted of lying to Congress and served three months in prison.

As EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch tried to ignore some of the worst toxic waste disasters in American history including Woburn, Massachusetts, the site of water contamination that caused a childhood leukemia cluster and became the subject of the book and movie A Civil Action. The Stringfellow Acid Pits were site created by Gorsuch’s former employer, Aerojet-General Corp., which turned out to be even more toxic than Love Canal. Times Beach was contaminated with dioxin, the most toxic chemical known to man. Fortunately for victims, Congress forced Gorsuch to act.

I can’t help but wonder what was going the mind of Neil, the young debater, as he observed all of this.

Did he think poisoning innocent people was fine? Did he truly believe that his mother didn’t have a legal and moral obligation to act to protect children, women or men from serious and irreversible harm, disease and death?

Was he comfortable when his mother ordered the evacuation of Times Beach from inside a local school with the media and elected representatives, but not a single impacted family? All of the local residents were locked out of the building because she didn’t want to face them and their tears and to see the effects of the toxic poisons eating way at their skin.

Almost daily at that time, national newspapers carried front-page stories about American families that were sick, terrified, and in need of action to reduce pollution in their communities. How did his mother’s role in these events shape Neil Gorsuch’s values as a young man?

For Neil Gorsuch to condone her behavior, saying she did nothing wrong, reveals a real flaw in his character. Would Justice Gorsuch advocate the same in a Supreme Court decision? If someone orders another person to do harm, will Justice Gorsuch somehow justify it because they were just following orders? Would Justice Gorsuch believe that someone’s loyalty to a President places his or her actions above the law?

I was devastated when I first arrived in Washington, 36 years ago, to work with communities faced with toxic pollution that couldn’t use this new Superfund program. My family and neighborhood’s suffering was the impetus for the program. Superfund had so much potential. I planned on using every piece of the program to assist communities to obtain clean water, air and land. Neil Gorsuch’s mother crippled the program, so much so that it has never fully recovered.

It’s clear to me that most children by 15 years of age know right from wrong. Neil Gorsuch watched as his mother allowed the poisoning of innocent American families, and allowed corporate polluters to escape responsibility. Then he condoned, and justified, her actions.

These are not attitudes that we want, or can accept, in a Supreme Court Justice.