#corruption marks

[everdistantstars]

Corruption

[reality-detective]

Mark Zuckerberg, an outspoken critic of "man-made climate change", shows off his new $300 million, 287-foot mega yacht, powered by four gigantic diesel engines.

Yet another stark reminder that Net Zero is only for the peasants. The mega-wealthy and powerful will continue to enjoy lives of excess and opulence, while you subsist on bugs in your 15 minute eco-prison. 🤔

[pervylittlebrother]

who wanna go creep4creep? sickfuck4sickfuck? stalker4stalker?? perv4perv????

[kaionyx]

I get so fucking possessive over small things like delayed gazes or too long conversations with other men. Groping and pulling them to me to dig my teeth into their pretty neck to plant another lovebite or hickey for whoever to see, pressing against it with my thumb every time I pull them into a kiss just to send a reminder down to their cunt of their place.

Even almost hate fucking them into the bed while huffing over and over about how they’re mine and only mine once we get home. Making sure they’re nothing but a braindead babbling mess who’s looking up to me like i’m god himself by the time i’m done with them, and happily reminding them again each time I see that devotion wavering even in slightest.

[brunette-crisis]

Hypothetically, if I cum inside you, can I leave it dripping down to your ass so I can use it as lube and take both your perfect holes? Respectfully.

[bathroomtrapped]

my sister told me to caption this 'two lovely men' without any context so heres two lovely christian saw men 👍🏻

[illalwaysbealoserforlove]

You should be sitting on my cock right now.

Your body laying back against me, trying not to move but so desperately wanting to.

You wanted my cock and I'm gaming, so I gave you what you wanted.

But you're not allowed to move, you have to wait until I'm ready to fuck you.

I can feel you dripping down my shaft, I'm trying to keep focused but I can't with your squirming and tiny whimpers against my ear.

I bet it feels like torture, being so filled with my cock and yet not being able to do anything about it.

Aw my poor baby, if you weren't such a desperate fucking slut we wouldn't be like this right now hm?

Oh look you're getting wetter, of course you are.. Your dumb little cunt can't help but gush at my patronising tone, you fucking love it don't you?

I'm losing control now, you can feel me twitching inside of you and you just keep trying to grind against me, I'm not even trying to stop you at this point.

I toss the controller beside us and push my hand between your legs, using my thumb to rub over the hood of your clit to tease you, immediately I feel your legs squeeze my hand, you whimper loudly and I grin, kissing your neck softly.

Oh what? You can't handle it now?

I'll spread your legs and spank your clit gently.

Don't fucking move bitch.

Now you're getting tighter fuck, I start to rub directly over your clit gently as I wrap my other arm around your waist and start to thrust up, slow and deep just to tease you.

God you feel so fucking good around me... And I know you're close, I can fucking feel it.

I want you to cum for me... I really do...

I want to feel your cunt tighten as you gush all that cum onto my cock, I want to feel it drip down my balls and I want you to clean it up afterward like a good cum slut.

But you're practically begging me to fuck you at this point, and I'll give you that.

I'll stop rubbing your clit and grip your waist, I'll lift you a little before I start to fuck up into you as hard and fast as I can, my balls smacking your clit, your moans are so immediate and high pitched and I'm groaning out before fucking hell you're cumming already

But I'm not exactly gonna stop, you fucking asked for this.

You're the one who wants- no needs, to constantly be filled with cock, or my tongue. You're so fucking needy for your daddy hm?

You're shaking and unable to control your movements, so I tighten my grip on you.

What are you trying to say love?

You- you can't what??

Can't handle it?

Seriously?

.... Tough luck.

I bend you over, your hands hitting the coffee table as I slip back inside and get back to my hard and rough pounding, smacking your ass and making you cum a second time.

Because deep down we both know you can take it, all your no's and stops are just fake aren't they? You're a fucking hole, you know your only use is to be filled with my cock.

I don't stop until I'm about to cum, your hands lose balance and you fall against the table, I laugh at you and it just makes you wetter, you cum one more time before I pull out completely and pull you back by your hair.

Shoving you down to your knees.

Fucking lick my cock, clean it up and make you cum.

Good girl... Fuck...

It doesn't take long until I'm cumming all over your pretty face, smacking your face with my heavy cock and making you thank me for making you cum, for using you.

[fragile-little-dolll]

it's always better to feel than think

[kaionyx]

Ever since tumblr made me into a dog dom, marking someone with my scent without them knowing it has been heavy on my mind.

Stalking and sneaking through a pretty bunny’s window when they so stupidity left it open for someone like me to come in and violate their pretty holes. Covering their precious body with bruises and bites as a reminder for the next day while rutting load after load into whichever little hole I mold around my cock first. Their face held down in their pillows the whole time so the only thing they have to hold onto is my smell when they’re fighting to get any type of air.

This happens night and night again, each time making them more desperate and eager to feel my weight against them when night comes until I just stop showing up one day. They try to forget and play it off as nothing as time passes until they happen to catch my scent walking one day. It would be so cute to see how fast their little body would turn and follow me into some alley without second thought. Watching how easily their dumb mind switches off when I pull them by their hair and pin them to the wall with my scent surrounding them again, eyes all dazed and not a single thought behind them.

Seeing them almost stupidly finding comfort in it while begging so pathetically to be used again, I just have to throw them over my shoulder and take them home with me as my personal little breeding bitch to break in.

[brunette-crisis]

Respectfully.

��——————————————————————

No princess I still love you. It’s just a little weird how when you beg me to stop hurting you, your pretty c*nt keeps dripping and you can’t stop humping me. I think you’re happy right where you are. Turn off your brain and be my dumb cock sleeve like you know you should be.

[fatedroses]

More than just the Demon.

[cemeterydolll]

oh look it’s biting and sucking on each others necks o’clock

[thekittyokat]

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah

[hedgehog-moss]

In other news, this week a French publisher on his way to the London Book Fair was arrested by British counter-terrorist police to be questioned about his participation in protests in France.

A French publisher has been arrested on terror charges in London after being questioned by UK police about participating in anti-government protests in France.

Moret arrived at St Pancras [...] with his colleague Stella Magliani-Belkacem, the editorial director at the Paris-based publishing house, to be confronted by the two officers. [...] He was questioned for six hours and then arrested for alleged obstruction in refusing to disclose the passcodes to his phone and computer. [...] He was transferred to a police station in Islington, north London, where he remained in custody on Tuesday. He was later released on bail.

Éditions la Fabrique is known for publishing radical left authors. Moret also represents the French science fiction novelist Alain Damasio and had arranged more than 40 appointments at the London book fair. [...]

[Quoting publishing house’s press release] “The police officers claimed that Ernest had participated in demonstrations in France as a justification for this act – a quite remarkably inappropriate statement for a British police officer to make, and which seems to clearly indicate complicity between French and British authorities on this matter.” [...] “There’s been an increasingly repressive approach by the French government to the demonstrations, both in terms of police violence, but also in terms of a security clampdown.”

(Guardian link - BBC link) (article in French)

The publishing house (here’s their latest statement in French) and the publisher’s lawyer mention that the British police asked him “Do you support Emmanuel Macron? Did you attend protests against the pension reform?” and he was also asked to name the authors with anti-government views that his employer has published. They add, “Asking the representative of a publishing house, in the framework of counter-terrorism, about the opinions of his authors, is pushing even further the logic of political censorship and repression of dissenting thought. In a context of social protests and authoritarian escalation on the part of the French government, this aspect [of the questioning] is chilling.”

Being an accomplice to thoughtcrime by publishing dissident authors gets you treated like an international terrorist now... The publisher’s lawyer suggests that French authorities asked the UK to help them get their hands on the publisher’s contacts in the radical left sphere. But on the face of it, we’ve got: Exercise your right to protest your government in France -> get arrested by counter-terrorist UK police in London. That’s literally the reason he was given for being greeted by police at the train station...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Monopolies are intrinsically destabilizing and inevitably implode…eventually. Guessing which of the loathesome monopolies that make us all miserable will be the first domino is a hard call, but Ticketmaster is definitely high on my list.

It's not that event tickets are the most consequential aspect of our lives. The monopolies over pharma, fuel, finance, tech, and even beer are all more important to our day-to-day. But while Ticketmaster – and its many ramified tentacles, like Live Nation – may not be the most destructive monopoly in our world, but it pisses off people with giant megaphones and armies of rabid fans.

It's been a minute since Ticketmaster was last in the news, so let's recap. Ticketmaster bought out most of its ticketing rivals, then merged with Live Nation, the country's largest concert promoter, and bought out many of the country's largest music, stage and sports venues. They used this iron grip on the entire supply chain for performances and events to pile innumerable junk fees on every ticket sold, while drastically eroding the wages of the creative workers they nominally represented. They created a secret secondary market for tickets and worked with ticket-touts to help them run bots that bought every ticket within an instant of the opening of ticket sales, then ran an auction marketplace that made them gigantic fees on every re-sold ticket – fees the performers were not entitled to share in.

The Ticketmaster/Live Nation/venue octopus is nearly impossible to escape. Independent venues can't book Live Nation acts unless they use Ticketmaster for their tickets. Acts can't get into the large venues owned by Ticketmaster unless they sign up to have Live Nation book their tour. And when Ticketmaster buys a venue, it creams off the most successful acts, starving competing venues of blockbuster shows. They also illegally colluded with their vendors to jack up the price of concerts across the board:

https://pascrell.house.gov/uploadedfiles/ful.pdf

When Rebecca Giblin and I were writing Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about how tech and entertainment monopolies impoverish all kinds of creative workers, we were able to get insiders to go on record about every kind of monopoly, from the labels to Spotify, Kindle to the Big Five publishers and the Google-Meta ad-tech duopoly. The only exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation: everyone involved in live performance – performers, bookers, club owners – was palpably terrified about speaking out on the record about the conglomerate:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

No wonder. The company has a long and notorious history of using its market power to ruin anyone who challenges it. Remember Pearl Jam?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Not only is Ticketmaster a rapacious, vindictive monopolist – it's also an incompetent monopolist, whose IT systems are optimized for rent-extraction first, with ticket sales as a distant afterthought. This is bad no matter which artist it effects, but when Ticketmaster totally, utterly fucked up Taylor Swift's first post-lockdown tour, they incurred the wrath of the Swifties:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/11/21/23471763/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-monopoly

All of which explains why I've always given good odds that Ticketmaster would be first up against the wall come the antitrust revolution. It may not be the most destructive monopolist, but it is absurdly evil, and the people who hate it most are the most famous and beloved artists in the country.

For a while, it looked like I was right. Ticketmaster's colossal Taylor Swift fuckup prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar – a leading antitrust crusader – to hold hearings on the company's conduct, and led to the introduction of a raft of bills to rein in predatory ticketing practices. But as David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is spreading a fortune around on the Hill, hiring a deep bench of ex-Congressmen and ex-senior staffers (including Klobuchar's former chief of staff) and they've found a way to create the appearance of justice without having to suffer any consequences for their decades-long campaign of fraud and abuse:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-30-live-nation-strikes-up-band-washington/

Dayen opens his article with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is always bracketed by a week's worth of lavish parties for Congress and hill staffers. One of the fanciest of these parties was thrown by Axios – and sponsored by Live Nation, with a performance by Jelly Roll (whose touring contract is owned by Live Nation). Attendees at the Axios/Live Nation event were bombarded with messages about the essential goodness of Live Nation (they were even printed on the cocktail napkins) and exhortations to support the Fans First Act, co-sponsored by Klobuchar and Sen John Cornyn (R-TX):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/arts/music/fans-first-act-ticket-bill.html

Ticketmaster/Live Nation loves the Fans First Act, because – unlike other bills – it focuses primarily on the secondary market for tickets, and its main measure is a requirement for ticketing companies to disclose their junk fees upfront. Neither of these represents a major challenge to Ticketmaster/Live Nation's control over the market, which gives it the ability to slash performers' wages while jacking up prices for fans.

Fans First represents the triumph of Ticketmaster/Live Nation's media strategy, which is to blame the entire problem on bottom-feeding ticket-touts (who are mostly scum!) instead of on the single monopoly that controls the entire industry and can't stop committing financial crimes.

Axios isn't Live Nation's only partner in selling this distraction tactic. Over the past five years, the company has flushed gigantic sums of money through Washington. Its lobbying spend rose from $240k in 2018 to $1.1m in 2022, and $2.38m in 2023:

https://thehill.com/business/4431886-live-nation-doubled-lobbying-spending-to-2-4m-in-2023-amid-antitrust-threat/

The company has 37 paid lobbyists selling Congress on its behalf. 25 of them are former congressional staffers. Two are former Congressmen: Ed Whitfield (R-KY), a 21 year veteran of the House, and Mark Pryor (D-AR), a two-term senator:

https://www.bhfs.com/people/attorneys/p-s/mark-pryor

But perhaps the most galling celebrant in this lavish hymn to Citizen United is Jonathan Becker, Amy Klobuchar's former chief of staff, who jumped ship to lobby Congress on behalf of monopolists like Live Nation, who paid him $120k last year to sell their story to the Hill:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2023&id=D000053134

Not everyone hates Fans First: it's been endorsed by the Nix the Tix coalition, largely on the strength of its regulation of secondary ticket sales. But the largest secondary seller in America by far is Live Nation itself, with a $4.5b market in reselling the tickets it sold in the first place. Fans First shifts focus from this sleazy self-dealing to competitors like Stubhub.

Fans First can be seen as an opening salvo in the long war against Ticketmaster/Live Nation. But compared to more muscular bills – like Klobuchar's stalled-out Unlock Ticketing Markets Act, it's pretty weaksauce. The Unlocking act will "prevent exclusive contracts between ticketing services and venues" – hitting Ticketmaster/Live Nation where it hurts, right in the bank-account:

https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/4/following-senate-judiciary-committee-hearing-klobuchar-blumenthal-introduce-legislation-to-increase-competition-in-live-event-ticketing-markets

It's not all gloom. Dayen reports that Ticketmaster's active lobbying in favor of Fans First has made many in Congress more skeptical of the bill, not less. And Congress isn't the only – or even the best – way to smash Ticketmaster's criminal empire. That's something the DoJ's antitrust division could power through with a lot less exposure to the legalized bribery that dominates Congress.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

Image: Matt Biddulph (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/13904063945/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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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

[shaadowmilkcookie]

pretty boy… pushes up nerd glasses

it’s hard to see, but the mark on his forehead isn’t an actual eye. it’s a marking he applied himself as a monument of respect to integrity, knowledge, and all the scholars who came before him. his wisdom is a blessing from the world around him, and the mark honours it, reminds him of it.

once he falls from grace, he never bothers to apply it again 😋