#crisis 1950

[fuddlyduddly]

obsessed with how many Cary Grant movies have him doing a proto-Dreamworks face on the posters

[queer-cinephile]

30 Days of Classic Queer Hollywood

Day 14: Anthony "Tony" Perkins (1932 - 1992)

"This was the fifties, a public person could not go public, even if he wanted to. And Tony didn’t want to." - Past lover of Perkins

Anthony Perkins is one of the most recognizable stars from the 20th century, specifically for his performance as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Perkins was a gay man who had relationships with men such as actor Tab Hunter, artist Christopher Makos, dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, and French songwriter Patrick Loiseau.

Rumors about Perkins's sexuality started at the beginning of his career, as he made his Broadway debut in Tea and Sympathy playing a gay character.

He was aware of, and unhappy with, his homosexuality from a young age. In 1971, he broke up with long-term boyfriend Grover Dale and started conversion therapy with controversial psychoanalyst Mildred Newman. (Perkins's friend Stephen Sondheim later described Newman and her practices "completely unethical and a danger to humanity.")

At age 39, Perkins began experimenting with heterosexuality, and had soon impregnated Berry Berenson, who was engaged to someone else at the time. Berenson's fiancé left her, so Perkins married her, shocking his friends.

"It was a big shock when I heard he got married. I went, 'Not Tony.' He was very gay, totally gay." - Venetia Stevenson on Tony Perkins's marriage

Perkins and Berenson stayed together until Perkins died from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992.

[todaysdocument]

James Thaber, born in Lebanon, of Mount Clemens, Missouri, listens to President Eisenhower's broadcast of his decision to send troops to Lebanon on July 15, 1958. His son, a recent high school graduate, is in the U.S. Army.

Record Group 306: Records of the U.S. Information Agency

Series: Photographs Used in Picture Stories

Image description: A man leans on a large radio with his head in one hand. He is holding a newspaper with the headline “MARINES IN LEBANON!” On the radio is a framed photo of a young man in a cap and gown. 

[wayward-sherlock]

exciting news: the first eleven pages of my screenplay have been written !!

[keeri-vents]

I’m confused

So recently I got into a relationship With the most amazing person ever. They take me on dates, they’re constantly getting me flowers, opening my doors, carrying my things etc. they’re amazing.

I wouldn’t trade them for anything they’re my world.

Lately I’ve been having thoughts of my ex. Just hear me out.

So I had a very abusive ex they were mentally and physically abusive. They’re in prison now for killing someone. I spent 5 years of my life with this person, a trauma bond was made. I have a lot of ptsd from this relationship. I’d forgotten them almost, but lately I’ve been having memories pop up a lot again.

I’m sure it has something to do with my new found relationship, my mind is digging up bones to remind me to be cautious maybe? Or certain things are triggering my fight or flight? I’m not sure. I feel so guilty for remembering these things, but it’s not like I’m doing this on purpose. It really bothers me.

I miss my ex. Not that I would ever go back to them, or cheat on my current partner. I miss the memories I guess? Or the friendship that we had? The closest relationship I’ve ever had even though it was abusive. I guess it’s hard to let go of the person that knows all your dirty secrets, that knows your body, that knows your mind, your bad side and your good side? I’m not sure, I know I don’t love them anymore, I don’t miss them in a “I want you back” kind of way, I don’t care for them like I use to, but there is a part of me that misses that friendship dearly?

Am I a bad person for feeling this way? Does anyone know what this could mean? Or have any opinions or advice to give me?

[tuttle-did-it]

Here's my thing. When someone, say in their 70s or 80s, can go off and be horrible- racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic or queerphobic in general, fascist, islamophobic, anti-Semitic, etc. Just generally horrible.

All I think of when I meet these horrible people is,

'You saw Kennedy and MLKs assassinations. You did not change.'

'you went through the entire Civil Rights movement, and you didn't change.'

'You saw the space race, you did not change.'

'You sat through the Stonewall Riots, and you didn't change.'

'You saw Women's Lib and Second Wave feminism. You did not change.'

'You went through the anti-Vietnam war era, and you didn't change.'

'You went through the AIDs era, and you didn't change.'

'You saw Rodney King beat to death, and you didn't change.'

'You saw the IRA Troubles era, and you didn't change.'

'You saw the Berlin Wall fall, and the collapse of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and you still didn't change.'

'You saw 11 September attacks, you saw all the terrorist attacks on London. The constant global climate change resulting in hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and more. The horrors in Darfur. You did not change.'

'You lived through the global economic crisis, The Boston Marathon, Occupy Wall Street, The Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, the constant fires and floods due to climate change, Brexshit, constant school shootings, constant shootings everywhere and a fucking pendemic. and you have not changed.'

My only conclusion to all of this?

You CHOOSE NOT TO CHANGE. How can ANYONE go through all of this and NOT change?? Not become MORE concerned about the people around you, whatever their colour, disability, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, religion, politics? How can you NOT become more concerned about the world around you? How can you go through all of this and still have the same attitudes and opinions you did in 1954??

When someone says to me, 'oh, he's an old man, he's got old-fashioned ideas.' What that says to me is that that person went through at least 7 decades without learning a single thing.

Age is never an excuse. Norman Lear was 101 when he died just a few days ago. He was fighting for decades to try to bring attention to the struggles of women, people of colour, disabled people, and queer people. He is responsible for some of the most groundbreaking television in history-- including the first uncloseted gay characters, drag queens and Black trans women. At 101, just a few months ago, he was trying to get at least two shows about being queer greenlit for production. He continued to learn and grow and adapt and change with time. He allowed time to touch him. He allowed time to change him. He chose to change and keep growing and learning.

So if Norman Lear, at a 101, can understand pronouns, neopronouns, gender dysphoria, poverty, PTSD, struggles ofr people of colour, sexuality-- if he can understand all of that?? and these idiots are still ranting about the ~woke~? You know what? I've just got nothing to say to them.

The next time someone tells you to be patient because 'that person is in their 70s,' Think of all of this that they have refused to change with the times. This is their choice. Because I don't know about you, but the stuff on this list that I have lived through? Has changed me a lot. And it should.

It's very possible that the only way to ensure you don't become a conservative old person is to keep checking whether you're wrong. Every time. Genuinely mull over the opposing viewpoint even and especially when it's uncomfortable. You absolutely cannot a) consider yourself safely incapable of terrible principles because you're a good person, or b) treat a your disgust reaction to something as a moral truth. You can't get comfortable. Tiring! But you'd rather be tired and choose the right path, you know?

[pebblegalaxy]

The Nehru-Liaquat Pact: A Comprehensive Analysis of Successes, Failures, and its Impact on India-Pakistan Relations

The Nehru-Liaquat Pact: Origins, Objectives, Successes, and Failures Over the Decades The Nehru-Liaquat Pact, also known as the Delhi Agreement, stands as a critical moment in the turbulent post-Partition era of South Asia. Signed on April 8, 1950, by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, this agreement was an attempt to address the communal…

[scottguy]

Article: New Report Reveals Big Oil’s Playbook to Silence Climate Protest

Billionaires have the power now to silence free speech and protests.

Solution:

1. Vote out Republicans.

2. Impeach corrupt Supreme Court members.

3. Reverse Citizens United.

4. Tax the shit out of MULTI millionaires and billionaires to discourage greed and pay for transitions to clean energy.

[vintageterror]

[alastaircarstairsdefenselawyer]

this is your daily reminder that it's been over 65 years since cuba overthrew batista's US-backed fascist dictatorship and the US is STILL keeping cuba in extreme poverty using an "embargo."

back in the 1950s, using US funds and US-trained soldiers, batista (not castro) removed most of cubans' rights, including the right to strike, censored all media, and used secret police to torture and publicly excute anyone who protested his dictatorship. In a document released by the CIA in 2005, it stated as many as 20,000 people were killed. In return, batista gave control of most of the arable land to the US. during the revolution, this land was reclaimed and redistributed, which means that USAmericans can now sue anyone who "traffics" in this "confiscated" property.

Despite US sanctions being an "embargo," the US also fines foreign companies for doing business in Cuba, meaning it's effectively a blockade. Despite Obama lightening some of these restrictions, Biden has done little to undo the tightened policies from Trump's administration.

In November, the UN called for the 31st time (!!!) for the US blockade to end, supported by 187 countries and opposed only by the US and its bestest buddy (I'll let you guess who).

Cuba has been in economic crisis for years. Monthly income in Cuba is $30-60. There is very little food and it is hard to purchase anything like toiletries, clothes, and over-the-counter medicines. Domestic production is down because they don't have the resources to sustain them. The US has been intentionally impoverishing and starving Cuba for decades, and they continue to make it clear that it is not going to stop.

So, yeah. US democracy is a joke, end the US blockade on Cuba, and fuck genocide joe.

[casualtydept]

i love the zeroskull age gap and i love skull face being young and cringe but i refuse to acknowledge canon's suggested timeframe for when he was born. i do not see it.

just. slap a few more years on there. this man was not 25 in snake eater. i know it's debatable whether he murdered stalin or whether we are misinterpreting what ocelot says but if he did then he sure as hell wasn't 13. he's not younger than literally everyone else in cipher who isn't ocelot or paz. you can't make me believe it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fuck is a PBM?

TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.

The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."

MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.

If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.

As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.

That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.

On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.

PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma

Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.

But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!

Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.

The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.

No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.

So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.

Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.

That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.

Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.

The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.

But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.

One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.

OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.

But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.

Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.

Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?

Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.

Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.

It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."

But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.

That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.

But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."

The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.

Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).

Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).

The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report

So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

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/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

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

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

[greater-than-the-sword]

The real environmental crisis is total ignorance of basic ecology and agriculture facts that used to be common knowledge to literally every generation before the 1950's

[unteriors]

With all due love and respect, most of the interiors you're showing from Piedmont are old (1950s-60s) country houses. Not exactly what I'd think of in terms of real estate neocapitalist dystopia hell. Many of those houses would be absolutely fine with a bit of work. It's definitely a tragic consequence of capitalism that nobody is buying them tho, for sure.

I understand where you're coming from. There are a few things here that irk me a little though - occasionally I'll receive some feedback that touches on similar themes. To start, I'm not really that motivated by titles when it comes to creative projects. There are things in the world, in my own life, in what I see around me, that I find interesting or disturbing or which I have anxieties about, and I put time into exploring them. Almost by accident I've amassed an enormous amount of imagery culled from real estate listings on my PC. I can explain the motivations and ideas behind it, but I'm not very good at wrapping everything up in a neat bow. I've come across a similar thing for another blog I've had for much longer, where people in its audience (or friends and family) would often message me saying that this particular image isn't really an Unplace, and the ambiguity of the title ends up narrowing their perception of the scope of the project (and makes it seem much more superficial - for a similar reason I'm not keen on the concept of liminal spaces, or the word liminal generally). With this blog, I made a conscious decision to use a title that would be broad enough to ward off attempts to pigeonhole it into specific, surface-level interpretations, which would sort of work against and challenge itself (and the viewer).

When I was in art school I was keen on the idea of antimarketing, which extends to branding. Advertising (increasingly over the past half-century) has a way of corroding depth and reducing substance to easily-accessible content guided by broadly-accepted conventions around social norms. I feel like it should only be a thing you deal with yourself as much as you have to, and I try to deadvertise the things I do as much as I can. I feel like these images deadvertise places. I look for real estate imagery which, on the direct, immediate level of their intended purpose, fail miserably (i.e., I do not want to buy this house. I sense lead paint, asbestos. This house may contain a corpse. Stay away). On a secondary level, in addition to selling a product, advertising often sells an idea about the world. With real estate imagery, the idea is much like the one this ask represents these houses as - a way of looking at housing that reduces it to an investment, which views older houses in a state of disrepair as something to be renovated and resold for a profit. This feels particularly myopic and inappropriate when it comes to Italy, a part of the world I've spent time in (though not Piedmont), which has layers and layers of history and human misery in every lived (and abandoned) surface, and which was hit hard by the twentieth century and still seems to be falling apart in many ways. As you pointed out, it's a consequence of the economic system that's currently oppressing Italy (involving years of austerity forced upon it by waves of neoliberal administrations, including within the country and in EU economic policy, against a backdrop of corruption and aggressive anticommunism that the US played a role in) that it has an issue with housing vacancy sitting comfortably alongside the same housing crisis most of us are experiencing (this article goes into a lot of detail about it).

There's the more technical question of how much work would be needed to rehabilitate these places and make them livable - I know in Australia houses that are only fifty or sixty years old often require specialised work by contractors (which our propaganda system that promotes DIY culture and house flipping tends to gloss over). And then, who would put the effort into renovating these places and then living in them? There are parts of Italy with very high unemployment rates, particularly among young people, where people have been leaving for generations. I guess, if someone from a richer country uses the exchange rate to buy and do up a rundown house in a village somewhere and pumps money into the local economy, there are some good sides to that. But I can't get away from the idea that, in our current system, renovating an older house - fixing it up - has the cumulative effect of pricing more people out of housing. I felt bad even about buying a house in my own country - more mortgages mean higher house prices, ultimately. The rot in the economic superstructure feeds into our artistic and conceptual understanding of housing. That creates tensions, between the real, deeper, historically and culturally rich, lived experience of a house, and the fake, greige, airbrushed, negatively-geared, embalmed home-as-investment that's sold to us, and I find those cracks in the surface (peeling paint, if you will) interesting.

This may be getting close to paranoia, but there's also a phenomenon where, if you say anything too negative and controversial, you come to expect that some people will instinctively react by mocking it. This is something I feel instinctively (again, maybe the answer to this lies more in therapy than in looking at the outside world). Often without evidence of their own to demonstrate why what you have said is wrong. It reminds me of a reddit post I saw floating around on tumblr a few years ago, about how the attitude to the world you see in South Park is that, if you complain too much about something (i.e. if you point out that something is wrong), and you demonstrate that you care about that without hiding behind irony, that makes you the problem. You find this all through pop culture from a certain time period (the Simpsons could be just as bad, I also come across this attitude in contemporary art - the laugh react on Facebook feels like its late-stage distillation). It's hard to tell how much people are encoded by it, or if it provides a framework for seeing the world and handling moral issues for people who already held these attitudes. I named this blog Neoliberal Capitalist Real Estate Dystopia Hellscape to weed out those those attitudes and make the people who would ordinarily express them self-conscious. It's getting harder and harder for people to deny that it's not an accurate description, the middle-class psychological bubble has been getting harder to keep insulated for some time now.

[that-hazbin]

Media Demon AU

The Hotel needs a new animal Mascot, There is decidedly zero backbone to be found in this trio, and much bad math is performed by me. Feel free to correct it. Or not. Headcannoning Vox died in the 1950's between age 20-30, feel free to ignore. Alastor giving off parental vibes.

Vox looked at the moving package Alastor had given him, Anthony had lit up with a grin recognising what Alastor was doing, "Ah Smiles, you're such a sweetie sometimes" Alastor turned away flustered. "I have no idea what your talking about" Alastor was blushing near unnoticeably in that familiar tsundere way his close friends could spot a mile away.

It was the same expression from back then, Angel Dust thought wryly, way back when Alastor had gifted him with a small emotional support hell piglet for his recovery in therapy.

The box kept wriggling "Are you going to open it?" asked Alastor the television sinner.

Vox looked at the trembling box and gently removed the neon blue ribbon with trembling hands.

He didn't remember the last time someone, anyone really, had given him a gift. Carefully lifting the lid Vox felt his heart squeeze in his chest as a soft cold face pressed against his hand and licked his fingers.

"Oh you are adorable" a tiny gunmetal blue hammerhead hellshark pup with four incredibly stubby little legs was doing it's level best to get out of the box so Vox could pet it. The box tipped with the movement and the sharkpup pressed itself into Vox's body happily with strange little happy whines as its new owner coed over it with burning eyes.

Alastor leaned down meeting Vox's gaze and petted the hellshark pup who lapped up the attention with glee. "The hotel has a tank room for aquatic sinners, I thought a manner of responsibility might help you... Focus a bit more.", and if Alastor had also arranged a number of hellshark pet care books on Vox’s desk in his room that was merely coincidence.

Vox gave a watery laugh at the deer sinner who evidently didn't hate him as much as he thought, "Thank you for this".

And he meant it, it was the first time anyone had ever gotten him a such a thoughtful gift or any gift at all really.

It was also the first time Vox had ever thanked anyone for anything, it felt good.

"What ya gonna name the little fishdoggo?" Asked Velvette who was relentlessly booping the sharkdog pup between it's eyes to it's unending glee.

Vox had never been creative, certainty never good enough at being original but this was.. important, Vox looked up at Alastor "Why don't you name him for me?" Alastor tilted his head confused.

"I had assumed you would name him, he is your pet?"

"I'm.. not good at names", Vox grimaced, or much else he thought glumly.

Alastor was looking at him with a look Vox found impossible to decipher "...Vark"

"Vark", Vox tested the name on his tongue, "I like it!" Vox smiled like a small child receiving a gift.

Alastor realised his own age at that moment, he and the picture box were no longer separated by a gulf of scant few decades but much longer than that.

Alastor born in 1900, died in 1933, then died again in 2020 at 120 and being sent back to 1933 living a further 87 years until the present day... Alastor was even older than Charlie who was 200, by, ironically seven years minimum if his rather sketchy math was right give or take a few months.

Angel Dust offered a toast, he and the others oblivious to the former Radio Demon's inner midlife crisis, "To Vox, Velvette and Vark of the Hazbin Hotel! The Three Vees!"

Alastor huffed a laugh pushing down his internal panic and vowing to hunt down a calculator to figure out the exact numbers joined in the toast.

Don't you DARE make me ship this timeline's radio static I already have enough on my plate with hellradio 😭 fuck Vox and Vark are SOOOOOO CUTE!!!!

I really love the detail you put about this being the first time Vox sincerely thanked someone. A little show of his development under the Hazbin Hotel. That, AND Alastor being a little tsundere who's in COMPLETE denial about caring about this TV head? This is excellent. EXCELLENT!

And it's good to note Alastor's age, because I didn't even THINK that he could possibly be older than Charlie. That's insane to think about. He really did just relive an ENTIRE CENTURY. I don't know why that didn't actually hit me as hard as before, but like, that is a LOT of time, which means he could have gone through a LOT of his own personal development in that time period. Wow.

(And yet, he couldn't kick his habit of adopting the sad and pathetic into his fold. Even against his will.)

[flowerishness]

Solidago canadensis (Canada goldenrod) and Bombus impatiens (common eastern bumblebee)

Ah, Canada goldenrod in full bloom. What a wonderful sight! Canada goldenrod is not a native plant on the west coast being originally from the eastern and central parts of North America. Come to think of it, this common eastern bumblebee is also non-native being an escapee from local commercial greenhouse operations. Canada goldenrod is now considered an invasive weed (and an agricultural pest) throughout Europe and Asia. What a shame.

However, Canada goldenrod is obviously not to blame for the recent (and radical) worldwide decline in bumblebee populations. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion humans on Earth and now there's 8 billion. That's a lot of extra hungry mouths to feed. Twenty species of plants supply 90% of our food and just three - wheat, corn and rice - constitute about half. Unfortunately, all three of these plants are wind-pollinated. The hundreds of millions of acres sown in monocrops (550 million acres for wheat alone) are virtual deserts for bumblebees.

Grass is also wind-pollinated and in addition to all the land needed to graze cattle and sheep, we have another culprit: the suburban lawn. In the US for example, there are forty million acres of lawn. Twenty percent of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut are covered in lawns. True, grass seed often contains clover (which bumblebees love) but most gardeners fire up the lawnmower as soon as clover flowers appear. I know it can be hard to face unpleasant facts but if you're looking for someone to blame for the bumblebee crisis, just go look in your bathroom mirror.