#donor atom

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Therefore, there is a significant probability that the 'dangling' donor atom can reattach to the metal ion before the other end of the ligand detaches (figure 13.23); from this, it is apparent that it should be more difficult to lose a bidentate ligand than a monodentate ligand.

"Chemistry" 2e - Blackman, A., Bottle, S., Schmid, S., Mocerino, M., Wille, U.

[yeyinde]

i've been reading a lot about mind uploading, body autonomy, and the human soul, and this happened.

CYBERNOIR AU. JOHN PRICE/READER.

You are grievously injured in an accident. Your body damaged beyond repair, but you're still alive. At the same time, in the same hospital, someone else is in the process of dying. Their body is fine, but their brain was legally declared dead when your accident happened.

Both of you are "organ donors" with the exception being that the other person has declined life extension. You have not.

Your brain is uploaded into the healthy body. A second chance at life.

But there's a problem: this body is legally married to a man named John Price, who is overseas on a mission and set to come home soon.

However, you are not his wife. You just have her body. The lawyers you hire to look over the case find a clause buried deep inside the docket—an added caveat that explicitly states this body belongs to John Price. Every cell, every molecule, every atom. From the skin covering this body, to the organs inside. It's all his.

And John comes to collect what he owns.

(Maybe if you can convince him you're not his wife, he'll let you go. After all, why would he want to stay married to a stranger?)

[etirabys]

abiogenesis & endosymbiosis timeline

I put this together after reading Nick Lane's The Vital Question. The proposed timeline:

3.8bya: The earliest evidence for life is isotopic fractionation. The carbon (and iron, sulfur, nitrogen) atoms in graphite in Greenland are non-randomly sorted, which indicates the presence of cells whose enzymes have a slight preference for the lighter forms of each. However, geological processes can also produce non-random sorting, so this evidence is ambiguous.

3.5bya: Less ambiguously, we have microfossils that look like cells, again with isotopic signatures.

We think bacteria and archaea split off really early, close to the beginning of life (abiogenesis) itself. This is because their cell walls and membranes are so different it's hard to see how one could have evolved from the other. They probably emerged in parallel when they became independent at all. (Quick sketch of abiogenesis, and bacteria/archaea divergences.)

3.2bya: We see bacterial activity in rust bands in rocks. When bacteria strip electrons from iron dissolved in the oceans, the oxidated iron precipitates out into rust and sinks down to the ocean floor.

All bacteria and archaea respire (strip electrons from a donor 'fuel' to generate ATP, which fuels cellular activity). Many donors are possible – common ones are Fe2+, H2S, or H2O (which respectively become Fe3+, S, and O2 after the electron is stripped). Water is the last to be cracked as a donor.

2.4bya: It's cracked now, by some bacteria (archaea never manage it), which leads to The Great Oxidation Event. The oxygen is first absorbed by the oceans, the seabed, and land surfaces. It'll take over a billion years before the oxygen 'sinks' are exhausted, and oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere for real.

1.8bya: A bacterium somehow ends up inside an archaeon cell, and somehow they don't die about it. The bacterium becomes a specialized energy-producing unit, allowing the host cell to grow larger and more complex. They become the first eukaryote, invent sex, and spawn all complex life. (You can read my RPF about it btw.)

1bya: This engulfment – endosymbiosis – happens one more time, to produce chloroplasts in plants.

0.5-6bya: Atmospheric oxygen levels are rising for real now. We see large complex eukaryotes for the first time. These creatures have specialized tissues whose failure threatens the entire organism, and it becomes advantageous to separate out the germline (the part of eukaryotes that divide forever, e.g. sperm and eggs) and make the rest of the body just durable enough to last as long as the most failure-prone tissues. Death by design has entered the world.

[nightprompts]

&. 𝐧𝐨 𝐩𝐮𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝: 𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬.

(  inspired from the pun book from the last of us, here are some dialogue prompts of various puns. feel free to edit and change as you seem fit. )

❛ for a fungi to grow you must give it as mushroom as possible. ❜

❛ it doesn't matter how much you push the envelope. it'll still be stationary. ❜

❛ what did the mermaid wear to her math class? an algae bra. ❜

❛ people are making apocalypse jokes like there's no tomorrow. ❜

❛ why did the scarecrow get an award? he was outstanding in his field. ❜

❛ what did the triangle say to the circle? you're so pointless. ❜

❛ a book just fell on my head, i only have my shelf to blame. ❜

❛ i tried to catch some fog earlier. i mist. ❜

❛ i stayed up all night wondering where the sun went. then it dawned on me. ❜

❛ diarrhea is hereditary... it runs in your genes. ❜

❛ what did the green grape say to the purple grape? breathe, you idiot! ❜

❛ i'm reading a book on anti-gravity, and it's impossible to put down. ❜

❛ what is a pirate's favorite letter? tis' the c. ❜

❛ i wasn’t originally going to get a brain transplant, but then i changed my mind. ❜

❛ what washes up on tiny beaches? microwaves. ❜

❛ why are frogs so happy? they eat whatever bugs them. ❜

❛ i don't trust trees. they're shady. ❜

❛ i was going to tell you a pizza joke, but it's too cheesy. ❜

❛ i want to be cremated as it is my last hope for a smoking hot body. ❜

❛ there’s a new type of broom out. it’s sweeping the nation. ❜

❛ did you hear about the man who lost his left side? he’s all right now. ❜

❛ what do you call a bee that can't make up its mind? a maybe. ❜

❛ i tried to make a belt out of watches. it was a waist of time. ❜

❛ i got fired from the calendar factory, just for taking a day off. ❜

❛ did you hear about the guy who got hit in the head with a can of soda? he was lucky it was a soft drink. ❜

❛ tequila may not fix your life but its worth a shot. ❜

❛ why are there fences around cemeteries? because people are dying to get in! ❜

❛ thanks for explaining the word 'many' to me, it means alot. ❜

❛ i once ate a watch. it was time consuming. ❜

❛ why are teddy bears never hungry? they are always stuffed! ❜

❛ i don’t trust stairs because they’re always up to something. ❜

❛ never trust an atom, they make up everything! ❜

❛ i couldn't figure out how to put my seatbelt on, but then it clicked. ❜

❛ how do construction workers party? they raise the roof. ❜

❛ what do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? a thesaurus. ❜

❛ when a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds. ❜

❛ i made a pun about the wind but it blows. ❜

❛ it's hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally. ❜

❛ what did the ocean say to the beach? nothing, it just waved. ❜

❛ i have a joke about chemistry, but i don't think it will get a reaction. ❜

❛ i'm on a seafood diet. i see food and i eat it. ❜

❛ why did the restaurant on the moon get bad reviews? it has no atmosphere.❜

❛ how do you organize a space party? you planet. ❜

❛ i once heard a joke about amnesia... but i forget how it goes. ❜

❛ the frustrated cannibal threw up his hands. ❜

❛ it takes guts to be an organ donor. ❜

❛ why is the mushroom always invited to parties? he's a fungi. ❜

❛ a guy walks into a bar... he was disqualified from the limbo contest. ❜

❛ jokes with punch lines can be painfully funny. ❜

❛ so what if i don’t know what apocalypse means? it’s not the end of the world! ❜

[tanadrin]

Trying to fix all media or all social media is a two order; on the other hand, spending Democratic Party money on socially useful bribery and trying to build up mass politics again in an age of social atomization seems difficult but doable. And it has the advantages, I think, to playing to traditional left of center political strengths, in the same way insular media ecosystems that use fear and paranoia to tickle the lambic system play to the strengths of right-wing politics. You are never going to motivate people toward humanistic solidarity with the same media tools that convince them to fear the other; those are just fundamentally asymmetric goals. But “here’s a cheap daycare, would you like a flyer on political issues relevant to families like yours?” might work.

The question is, are donors really gonna pay for that? The US doesn’t have big political machines anymore, and even the unions that used to support the Democrats are weak and fickle now. Seems like much of politics funding now relies on individual big-name donors, and they want to pay for candidates and campaigns, not far future strategic shifts that may or may not pay off. But hey, Harris raised like a billion dollars in a matter of months; maybe you can make it work with the right leadership!

[i-am-church-the-cat]

you want 917 words on clones and Logan Sargeant? yes you do, keep reading

--

Athletes are freaks of nature. Not everyone can be an athlete, even if they have the drive, passion, and opportunity. You can be too tall for a sport, too short, you shoulders could be too wide, your legs too long. There are a hundred and one genetic variations that can keep someone in competing professionally within the rules of athletics.

So why waste your time on chance? Why put all that money and time in if you can't be completely sure that it's going to be worth it? Wouldn't it be easier to just remove the unknown variable altogether? That way we can truly test how far the human body is able to go.

But when does it stop being human? When you can hand-select the color of a baby's eyes? When you pump the fetus full of drugs? How about when you grow it in a lab? Is it still human then?

Logan Hunter Sargeant was made for fighting. Sargeant Trading payed billions of dollars to create the perfect All-American soldier, the kind you'd find on posters. He was bred for speed, for strength, for durability. He was programmed to follow orders even if it limited his ability to think strategically. Logan was made to be the perfect weapon for the U.S. Government, and in exchange, gain Sargeant Trading back a hundred-fold what they shelled out for him.

But something when wrong in that lab, is what Logan's been told. That while the scientists could make his body perfect for fighting, they couldn't make Logan a perfect fighter. Because the problem with clones, at the end of the day, is that they're still fucking people. And people have feelings.

Weapons aren't supposed to have feelings.

So Logan was a failure. Is a failure, as his uncle likes to remind him. No, not his uncle, Harry Sargeant III has no relation to Logan, whose DNA was cultivated from a variety of donors. Just because Daniel Sargeant took a failed experiment in and raised him alongside his own son, doesn't mean Logan is a Sargeant where it matters.

But what does a weapon that isn't capable of being a weapon supposed to do? Logan can't escape the urge to push his body to its limits, can't ignore the pull towards things that get his adrenaline pumping. His body craves the thrill like an addict, not because of any choices that he made, but because his creators put him together that way.

Racing is the only thing he's ever done that soothed that itch. That kept him from unleashing all his pent up energy as violent outbursts that made him hate himself and scared of his own body. Being in a plane, in a boat, in a four-wheel kart spinning around the edges of a racetrack kept all his atoms soundly inside his body.

Logan couldn't be a soldier, but his body was made for being pushed to his limits. Racing was the only thing that met his threshold for physical activity. Unlike the other kids who had to train their bodies for the pull of gravity, Logan's body was made for it.

Sometimes it felt a little too perfect. Like someone had messed up and made him a racing clone instead of a fighting one. And other times - usually when he was slamming into some barriers and getting the wind knocked out of him - he knew it was all just a happy accident.

The FIA doesn't have any rules restricting clones from competing. Logan's pretty sure that's because no one really knows they exist. They're something from science fiction, maybe some abstract future concept, not a fledgling industry for the rich and ethically defunct. Logan can't imagine ever telling anyone what he is. The thought that someone might think he's a dangerous freak is second to the possibility that someone might think he was cheating, that he wasn't working just as hard as everyone else. Yeah, he lucked out by having a hand-coded body type and rich pseudo-parents, but that can be said for most of the kids on the Formula track.

When Logan wins the World Karting Championship, he knows this is more than just science, nothing like destiny. This was his choice from start to finish.

And he was certainly going to finish it now. He thinks about the sprouts of conversations surroundings clones in professional sports and has to laugh at the thought. If anyone wants to argue that being made for athleticism gave an inherent advantage to a person, they can just point them Logan's way. Billions of dollars went into him. He might have the speed and the strength and the dexterity, but he's a shit fighter and now, a shit racer, too.

Being made in a lab didn't help him when his car was fighting him every step of the way. It didn't help him retain information faster or track the most efficient route around the track. It just made him strong enough to take a hit. And the last two years have proved it. If there's anyone that could be kicked while they were down, it was Logan Sargeant.

He isn't sure what he would do with himself if he doesn't have racing. His body was made to fight but his heart couldn't handle it. His heart yearned to race but his brain couldn't handle it.

He was a twice-failed epitome of human strength. He was made in a lab somewhere. And it didn't fucking matter at all.

[beggars-opera]

Jesus talking to rich people is an adventure

Just had to sprint across the room to take a late call when I realized it was a super rich potential donor on caller id (it's 4:30 on a Friday and I'm dead inside so in a screening mode). Guy lives in Beverly Hills so obviously time zones. He asked for one of the other staff who works in a different building and when I indicated who he needed he said "Oh, [blank] Hilton? Is she of the Hilton Hiltons?" and reader, it took every atom of my being not to reply "No, the Chippewa Falls Hiltons, actually"

[suzukiblu]

Ko-fi thank-you sentences for Sam; further progress in "Match is technically also a Luthor".

The thing parked outside is . . . theoretically a towncar. Theoretically. 

Match doesn’t actually think towncars are typically equipped with obvious armor and subtly “concealed” weaponry as accents, though. At least not the kind that’s clearly designed to handle open warfare, anyway. There are tanks he’s seen that were less prepared for open warfare.

“Right on schedule, Mr. Luthor,” the chauffeur says, then holds the car door open for Luthor as the bodyguard slips into the front passenger seat. Match . . . doesn’t actually know what he’s expected to do here. Obviously the chauffeur’s going to be the one driving, but he’s never ridden in a car; only the kind of transport vehicles the Agenda uses, most of which are military-issue or at least militarized designs. 

The chauffeur raises a pointed eyebrow at him, still holding the door open. Luthor’s already settled into the back of the towncar and seems to be occupied with skimming the contents of a tablet that was left on one of the seats. 

Match . . . doesn’t have any orders. Or even instructions. Or–anything. 

He’s supposed to get in the car, he thinks. It’s the logical deduction, that he’s supposed to do that. 

But no one’s told him to do that. 

Technically, he could still kill any one of them. Kill all three of them, if he’s careful about it. Luthor isn’t going to be able to pull out any kryptonite if he’s having a TTK-induced massive stroke. Technically, he could kill them all and just go back into the facility and–

“‘Joseph’ seems appropriate, but also implies I’m willing to share,” Luthor muses idly, not looking up from his tablet. “But ‘Alexander’ is just too on the nose, and doesn’t account for your brother anyway.” 

. . . “share”, Match wonders? Share what? 

“Superboy isn’t my brother,” he repeats. Luthor spares him a dry look. 

“I’m your father,” he says. “I’m perfectly aware of who your siblings are.” 

. . . Match cannot process a damn word that the man just said, so just gets in the towncar and sits stiffly on the opposite side of the backseat. Luthor returns his attention to his tablet and the chauffeur shuts the door. Match feels an odd sense of–he’d call it “panic”, almost, if he was the kind of thing that could feel anything like that. 

“I suppose one of you could be ‘Alex’ and the other could be ‘Xander’, of course,” Luthor says, tone back to musing as the chauffeur gets in the driver’s seat and starts up the car. “But that also doesn’t seem like much effort, which seems a bit hypocritical of me after I was just judging your respective manufacturers’ lack of it.” 

Match doesn’t know how or even if he’s supposed to respond to any of that. Some of the staff at the Agenda just talked to hear themselves talk; some of them expected him to function as a sounding board. A . . . “rubber duck”, one of the engineers had called him once, laughingly patronizing, though he hadn’t understood the apparent reference. 

“I don’t have a father,” he says. Luthor spares him another dubious look. 

“Oh, don’t you?” he says. “I designed your DNA myself. You’re a masterpiece, by the way, so you’re welcome for that. A perfect blend of Kryptonian and human. Sublimely arranged and maximized.” 

“Biologically, that wouldn’t make you a parent,” Match says. “Superman and Paul Westfield were the only DNA donors to the initial design.” 

“It’d actually make me more of one, in my opinion. But I said a perfect blend,” Luthor snorts dismissively, rolling his eyes. “Paul Westfield’s DNA was anything but ‘perfect’.” 

Match . . . pauses. What does that mean? Who else’s DNA would . . . ?

Oh, Match thinks. 

“The tactile telekinesis is much more effective with Luthor brainpower behind it,” Luthor informs him. “Just for the record. Westfield’s DNA wouldn’t have you capable of crushing cities or splitting atoms.” 

. . . oh, Match thinks again. 

“Splitting atoms?” he asks slowly. 

“I told you,” Luthor says, pointing the tablet pen at him and tapping it against his chest. “You’re a masterpiece. The radiance of a thousand suns. And I am Death, destroyer of worlds.” 

Match doesn’t know how he feels about being called a . . . “masterpiece”. He’s an improvement on Superboy, the Agenda’s told him, but it’s not as if Superboy’s all that impressive a baseline to start from, so . . . 

So he doesn’t know. He’s still a clone either way; a copy of someone else. A copy of a copy, in fact. 

And apparently, he’s also an atomic bomb.

[bacteriashowdown]

Aerobic vs. Anaerobic bacteria

In my last metabolism post, I tried not to get too weighed down in the weeds of cellular respiration. But now I want to talk about it.

I've mentioned before that aerobic bacteria are those that "breathe" oxygen, while anaerobic bacteria are those that don't. But what does it even mean for a bacteria to breathe?

If you read that last post, I think it's quickest to explain like this:

But this process of respiration, that all known lifeforms partake in, deserves a more detailed explanation.

Cellular respiration happens when a cell oxidizes a chemical (called the "electron donor") by transferring an electron from it over to an "electron acceptor". For aerobic bacteria, the acceptor is oxygen. For anaerobic bacteria, it could be any number of things. The electron acceptor is also known as the oxidizing agent.

To clarify some terminology: in chemistry, "oxidation" can be thought of as the process of adding charge to an atom (More precisely, it is increasing the atom's oxidation state, which can also be done by sharing an electron though a covalent bond). The opposite is "reduction", or the process of reducing charge. Since electrons are negatively charged, this translates to oxidation being the removal of an electron, while reduction is the addition of an electron. Thus, for example, an "iron-reducing bacteria" is a species who uses iron as an electron acceptor, and an "iron-oxidizing bacteria" is a species who uses iron as an electron donor.

Let's do an example to tie all the elements of metabolism together: plants. We can pick up from where I left off in the last post, but a bit more accurately. Plants use light for energy (phototrophy), and they are lithotrophic because their electrons are sourced from an inorganic source: water. They are autotrophs because they use carbon dioxide as a carbon source. The aerobic/anaerobic part of respiration happens after all of this, when the energy is extracted from those carbohydrates. Plants use aerobic respiration: the carbohydrate molecules react with oxygen, where they convert back into water, carbon dioxide, and energy in the form of a molecule called ATP (adenosine triphosphate).

This is why my chart clarifies that the respiration is about the final electron acceptor: plants do not use oxygen in the initial reaction, during photosynthesis. It is only when the plant extracts energy from the carbohydrates produced via photosynthesis that oxygen plays an important role.

The reason why we care about whether or not organisms use oxygen in cellular respiration is because, among other things, oxygen is an extremely efficient oxidizing agent. Perhaps that's not very surprising, given the name, but I'm talking on the order of aerobic bacteria being some 15 times more efficient in synthesizing ATP than their anaerobic counterparts.

...okay, I really should talk about ATP. I'm no biochemist, so just know that it is a molecule that can be thought of as the energy "currency" of cells. Fun fact: all cellular respiration, aerobic or anaerobic, is for the purpose of creating ATP. Literally every living thing on the planet makes and uses it.

But if ATP is so good, and it's easier to make with oxygen, then why do we have anaerobic bacteria? Well, the ability of anaerobic bacteria to use electron acceptors other than oxygen makes them remarkably adaptable as organisms. This flexibility allows them to thrive in diverse environments. Also, Earth was not born with the oxygen-rich atmosphere it has today, and so the earliest lifeforms were anaerobic. Only when the cyanobacteria invented oxygenic photosynthesis, and filled the atmosphere with oxygen, was aerobic life able to develop.

Some more common molecules for anaerobic bacteria to use as final electron acceptors are nitrite, nitrate, sulfur, and sulfate. Some bacteria use metals, including iron, manganese, cobalt, and even uranium. Other metals are used in oxidized forms, such as selenium (as selenate) and arsenic (as arsenate), which is toxic to nearly all other life. I think that's pretty neat.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

A first look inside radium's solid-state chemistry

For the first time in history, scientists have measured radium's bonding interactions with oxygen atoms in an organic molecule. Scientists have not measured this bonding before because radium-226 is available only in small amounts and it is highly radioactive (radium is one million times more radioactive than the same mass of uranium), making it challenging to work with. The findings are published in the journal Nature Chemistry. Using oxygen as the donor atom, the researchers developed a way to synthesize and crystallize the radium complex rapidly and on a small scale. Next, they measured the X-ray diffraction pattern of the complex. This pattern is created by the complex's crystal structure and reveals its structure and bonding characteristics.

Read more.

[tsundere-isopods]

Please help me save my cat ~ Ko-fi link included

Edit: Thank every single one of you. I can't express how grateful I am to everyone who donated and reblogged.

Continued edit: Sebastian passed away on March 18th. The money that didn't go to vet bills has gone to his end of life care.

I genuinely think this might be the hardest post I will ever have to write. I have been trying to stay positive and keep hoping for the best, but I can't pretend like my cat isn't sick after this last week. And I am so scared. He's my best friend in the whole wide world. (As I tell him often "My sweetheart, my darling, my love, the light of my life, the wind beneath my winds and in my sails, I love you more than there are stars in the sky, fish in the sea, and atoms in the universe. I have never loved or will love anything more than I love you." Followed usually by "You absolute pest." or "Get up!")

I am apparently incapable of writing this in one go because I can't stop crying. Christ.

For the moment, there is an estimate of $1200 to do the biopsy on his liver (they need to confirm whether it is liver cancer before anything else). This includes ultrasound, x-rays, medications, and having it sent off to the lab. And I can't afford it. Plain and simple. So, I come asking for help. Because I don't want to lose my cat for being poor. It's not fair to him. He's 10, and I promised him that he'd be a fat cat in his late teens before we had to worry.

I don't want to make one of those donation posts where I can't give anything in return. Because I feel like I should show my gratitude somehow. I don't have the ability to draw or paint or anything like that. I have decent sewing skills, and I can write. It isn't much in terms of repayment, but it's all I can offer along with my eternal gratitude and a little bit longer with my best friend.

I have so many pictures of him (even some old ones from when I started this blog, if you can believe it. x x x x)

I am going to link my new Kofi page, and if you would like to donate through PayPal, please just message me. (I'm not comfortable sharing that because of dead naming.) I'm hoping I can offer 250-500 word stories for donors. (Possibly more. We can talk about details.)

For now, enjoy more recent picture of the Light of my Life, Sebastian.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

To do this, a covalent index is plotted versus an ionic index (Fig. 13.2).

Overall, considering a natural sample containing a variety of ligands with different donor atoms (e.g. humic material), the tendency to exist in complexed down might be expected to follow an angled trend, as shown in Fig. 13.2.

"Environmental Chemistry: A Global Perspective", 4e - Gary W. VanLoon & Stephen J. Duffy

[stark-d]

⚠️ CHARITABLE DRAW ⚠️

U$899.00 in Plugins, read carefully, see how to win and do good!

NOMMAD Media in partnership with Vintage Music Label and with the support of BABY Audio jointly promote a charitable action to help Rio Grande do Sul.

2 Synths and 9 Plugins, approximately valued at U$899.00, will be raffled off, and to win, simply pay attention to the following rules.

🔸 Make a minimum donation of R$25.00 to vakinha.org.br/sos-enchentes-2024

🔸 Send the donation receipt and your Instagram handle to info@vintagemusiclabel.com

🔸 There will be 11 different winners, each winning 1 plugin or 1 synth to be randomly drawn

🔸 The same person cannot win more than once

🔸 Donors’ names will be added to a spreadsheet

🔸 For R$ 25, your name will be included once.

🔸 For R$ 50, your name will be included twice.

🔸 For R$ 75, three times.

🔸 The results will be broadcast live on June 3rd at 10:00 PM Brazilian Time.

🔸 Synths and Plugins from Baby Audio to be raffled:

🔥 ATOMS (Physical Modeling Synthesizer)

🔥 BA-1 (Analog-Modeled Synth)

🔥 TRANSIT (Transition Designer)

🔥 CRYSTALLINE (Reverb Plugin)

🔥 SMOOTH OPERATOR (Signal Balancer)

🔥 SPACED OUT (Delay-Reverb Hybrid FX)

🔥 IHNY-2 (Compressor)

🔥 TAIP (AI-Powered Tape Saturator)

🔥 SUPER VHS (80s Nostalgic Channel Strip)

🔥 COMEBACK KID (Delay Plugin)

🔥 PARALLEL AGGRESSOR (Processing Suite)

DONATE.

YOUR HELP CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

R$25.00 IS EQUIVALENT TO U$4.87.

IT MAY NOT SEEM LIKE MUCH, BUT IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

[seafoamreadings]

~hello to you from my monastery of hydrogen atom perturbations~

taking a lil study break to let yall know i am *100%* caught up on paid readings, my ask box, this week's horoscopes, and patreon posts. i will not be putting my etsy shop into vacation mode just yet but i do have an exam (on said perturbations), a big advising appointment, a final project (on other, related perturbations), a flight and a familial visit, a birthday, and then a flight back, much dreaded grading to catch up on, a vote to stand in line for, and some fancy dinner with a scholarship donor coming up, so *i will still be slow to get things done around here sorry*. i may go ahead and put the etsy on vacation mode at some point if it gets too overwhelming but meanwhile for the patient among you i *could* really use your support and would love the excuse to like, not grade, so please do not hesitate to place orders if you want one. if the shop closes for a bit, i will still work diligently on any purchases made before that point of course.

yours in all perturbed-ness,

happy jupiter-uranus conjunction,

seafoam~

[thefirsthogokage]

Posted elsewhere too:

I heard he did more conflating between Judaism and z**nism today or last night, but let me grab a few paragraphs from this article (not, could the news outlets want to run this story somewhat as prop*ganda to help Biden? Yes, but this change in language is important):

WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that Israel is losing support over its "indiscriminate" b*mbing of G*z* and that [BeNe] should change, exposing a new rift in relations with the Israeli prime minister.

Biden's remarks, made to donors to his 2024 re-election campaign, were his most critical to date of [N's] handling of Israel's war in G*z*. They are a stark contrast to his literal and political embrace of the Israeli leader days after H*m*s militants' Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel.

...

"Israel's security can rest on the United States, but right now it has more than the United States. It has the European Union, it has Europe, it has most of the world ... But they're starting to lose that support by indiscriminate b*mbing that takes place," Biden said.

...

Biden alluded to a private conversation in which the Israeli leader said: "'You carpet b*mbed Germany, you dropped the atom b*mb, a lot of civilians died.'"

Biden said he responded: "Yeah, that's why all these institutions were set up after World War Two to see to it that it didn't happen again ... don't make the same mistakes we made in 9/11. There's no reason why we had to be in a war in Afghanistan." "

Now, has Biden lied in statements before about things he's said and misremembered them? Yes. However, he's making these comments publicly - to some degree - and that's an important shift.

What we're doing is working. Keep going!

[proletnous]

The Burning Question

A Marxist-Leninist analysis of the Communist movement in North America and what needs be done for historic progress.

This work is to be a fourth installment in a sort of series I and some comrades have collaborated on, beginning with “Why Democrats Lose”, “A Lame Donkey and a Rattlesnake” and “In Promise of Bread and Roses”. In the second of these, we had called for communists to move away from federalist politics and into regional and local politics exclusively. I have been asked by comrades in Proletnous, but also outside it, to expand on that point and give a full articulation of the thought. Particularly, to explain how it is beneficial for a mass movement – which we must remember, aims to progress not just the U.S. but all of North America – to remove itself from federal politics. “Why focus on smaller concerns when conservatives and fascists have seized The Government?” a few have even asked. Much could be said to such a question, not limited to “‘Seized’ is a funny way to say ‘were politely handed’,” “The Government?” “The previous ruling coalition weren’t conservatives and fascists?” but these would be superficial responses. The better reply is that the paradigm of the question is wrong in three important ways.

Firstly: there is the importance of the local and regional scale. If we must speak of smaller concerns, the progressive struggle within an individual country amounts to a local front at most. At the local level, we must choose where we spend ourselves and where we retreat. For the overarching struggle, the theater encompasses every nation, every country and every state; at that scale the front is universal. The whole of the proletarian class faces off against the combined forces of reaction, stagnation and entropy; the proletarian class as a whole is united by opposition to a common enemy in the global system of imperial-Capitalism; the proletarian class as a whole is united by a shared material interest in the destiny of universal communism. The universal struggle above is reproduced in local struggle below in accordance with local conditions, and local struggles determine the universal struggle. So, for communists and proletarians, struggle on any local front is struggle on the worldwide front. But we must consider the choice of local front. Vanguard formations must organize the movement on the most applicable scale relative to their political reality. In North America’s economic, bioregional and cultural patchwork, the most applicable scale will never be “The United States” (or “Canada”). Above the most local scales, regions like Cascadia or the North Atlantic coast have more economic and cultural commonality within themselves than they have with other regions. Among what those regions do have in common is antagonistic contradiction to the oppressive and atomizing bourgeois states which carve them up and pit them against each other.

Secondly: our objective is historic progress, not to occupy the Throne of Washington and Jefferson “communistly”. But opportunists do not really even want to do that; they concern themselves with federal politics over building a local or regional base or even a parliamentary coalition because they do not expect to achieve power. To them, the most visible federal contest is the supreme tool for marketing, fundraising and recruiting. One must think of the Sanders campaign, PSL and the Green Party (but also Trump’s 2016 campaign and Harris’ 2024 campaign). The only “base” these need is an anemic, top-down network of small donors and volunteers who become ever more isolated, atomized cells alienated from the workers and society generally. (Sending fresh-faced volunteers out with vests and clipboards is one of many methods for effecting social self-alienation, let alone forcing them to knock on the same door repeatedly as the Harris campaign did...) To be most impactful we must forget about empty solicitation and direct our activity to directly tackling the material concerns of the proletariat one by one. We must work up the chain from the micro scale, where the vitality of the masses is most intense and where they experience class contradictions most directly and obviously in their daily life, to the macro level of the abstracted logic of imperial-capitalism, money, stagnation, etc. We begin with addressing local concerns like housing, wages, food insecurity, debt, union struggle, etc., one by one and work up to dismantling the capitalist system. Beginning where proletarians are most physically concentrated (for example low-income urban neighborhoods and apartment blocks, rather than the corner outside the organic supermarket). We begin one by one and work up to the district scale, the city scale, the regional scale, one by one upwards until the continental scale. Starting at the lowest scale we have the ability to build real faith and trust within workers for our movement, and also develop the capability to address larger issues. By solving problems directly and immediately experienced by workers we construct a nexus, a real magnetic core to draw in the progressive masses and unmake the fractal atomiziation of North America.

Thirdly; our movement is concerned with the progression of all the masses in North America, not the progression of the states of North America. It is indisputable that the administration of imperial rule across the states in North America is turning rightward, but that is not a sign for communists to struggle harder for the liberalization of those states. It is a sign that the progressive masses must be organized to better come in contradiction with them. “Liberal” or “illiberal”, these states are alien and antagonistically opposed to communists and the workers as a whole. The North American states are imperial-capitalist states which are wholly of, by and for the monopolist syndicates, united as an anti-proletarian federation. Their right-wing turn is caused by their growing instability, anticipating the need for more aggressive repression of the proletariat, and more antagonistic relations with each other. United as they are against the proletariat, they are also rivals. A secondary map of real borders exists, one which delineates the fiefs of corporations and monopolies and is shaped by trade routes, biomes, and mineral deposits. The states are a layer on top which have long ago became obsolete, drawn up opportunistically in the colonial scramble with open disregard for life and economic reality. Their stubborn clinging to wheezing, coughing existence creates the conditions for further exploitation and atomization. To counteract them the proletariat must become a power unto itself, with our own economic life conforming to the economic reality underneath the imperial states to invert the system from bourgeois plutocracy to proletarian democracy.

From these critiques we can see working locally is the big picture. Working locally is the means to affect not just the “country” scale, but the whole world. It is the means to construct a real continental system for everyone. To accomplish this, there is little for us to gain from the rotten, gutted carcasses of liberal states already processed for their profitable meat by Democrat and Republican butchers, the marrow already sucked dry by lifestylist liberals and conservatives and “democratic socialists,” the opportunist carrion feeders on a sunsetting imperial state. Because we see the reality that all of North America exists in a shared continental market divided into regional markets, we can see the seams in the rock, we can see where to sunder the whole rusted substructure of the old order. But the means to do that, to sunder the whole world order of imperial-capitalism, is a radical departure from what the communists in North America are accustomed to. We must directly interface with the proletariat across North America, going into established proletarian enclaves and speaking with workers directly for the sake of accurate social diagnostics. We must put an end to leftist middlemen “interpreting the will” of the masses, most especially those smokey incense-wreathed economist divinators with edited theory texts preaching that “the people” want this rhetoric or that slogan but never ever any action! To direct our action we must work, using scientific diagnostics and experiment, critique, repeat to make ourselves useful to real workers.

Unlike the insurrectionaries, anarchists and Maoists who hate the proletariat and not so secretly dream of retreating to rural compounds and becoming small landholders, we do not seek to escape the world, relevancy or accountability. We embrace work and workers. We look forward to an urban, industrial future where technology enables everyone to be a worker, which is to be an active participant in the collective and conscious shaping of the material world. Instead of getting lost in romantic fantasies about subsistence living, we must build collectives across every city, throughout the urban and industrial infrastructure of the continent. Collectives for self-defense, collectives for distributing essentials, collectives for securing housing, collectives for queer healthcare and for keeping families of oppressed nations together, collectives for art and politics, collectives for peace and prosperity; all combined together by unbroken, unbreakable bonds of blazing steel! One great vanguard encompassing every nation, its burning soul an industrial furnace. Though the soot and smoke a radiant spear is forged, brighter then sunlight rays, risen up to pierce history.

Blossom of the Hundred Flowers∴

Illustration by Psy-1917∴