#institute trains people

[gwensy]

i cant do this today

[mostly-natm]

Can you imagine choosing not to attend a college because there are Star Trek fans there?

[secondhand-lions]

as i've been playing through fo4 i've been having a fun time imaging what a very post-fnv ulysses and sirenity would be doing/thinking during the course of the game and truely so much of it is just. this

bethany esda what were you THINKING.

[narryffdreaming]

what happened at the Olympics this year only proves to me that the internet and social media are going to take all the fun out of these events. people might come at me with a sense of justice and argue about who deserves this or that, but the thing is that what makes sport SO intense and SO good is that it involves countless emotions as it is happening. while you are watching it / living it / experiencing it. when you can't celebrate a victory or the score of a point bc you're afraid that the internet will tell you hours or days later that it wasn't, in fact, a victory/a point or whatever, you're taking the entire emotion out of it and therefore ruining the whole thing.

yes, it sucks when injustice happens. and yes, athletes go through unfair results a lot of times. but once the game/match/competition is over it should be over. and thats it.

[chispas-and-broken-bindings]

[tovaicas]

speaking of estinien I’m cautiously excited to see what they do with him bc I really wasn’t suuper impressed with how he was handled in HW

[medicinemane]

You know, I'm never letting those fucking cops who parked their car with a lady in it on the train tracks and it got hit by a train live that down (thankfully she lived)

Anytime I see train tracks I tell whoever's with me that they need to pull over to the perfect parking spot, that they need to think like a cop

I will never stop making fun of them for it, not even because it's funny, but because fuck them, they were so stupid they nearly killed someone and it's only good fortune that saved her from them. I legitimately don't know how they manage to remember to breath while being that stupid

[rosieposiepie]

Watching the new Percy Jackson episode, and while by no means is the show perfect, I do love how they updated the blending of Greek mythology and the American Gothic for social commentary.

What I mean is Echidna, the mother of monsters, is some respectable-looking vaguely southern white woman who is able to convince the police on the train that three kids shattered a train window and used those institutions to isolate the kids so she can target them and scare them for the chimera's hunt. The way that the police especially treat Annabeth. Now, as a young black girl, she has to know how to ask if they're getting arrested, and gets called out by the police for her tone.

And then, at the St. Louis Arch, we see Grover upset because of the museum, which is basically a monument to Manifest Destiny (literally, there's a shot where the words are in full display in the background). And while they say, "Grover is upset because he doesn't like it when people hurt animals," they explicitly depict America's colonization and destruction of indigenous communities as The Bad Thing. It adds another layer of flavor for the whole "Pan is missing" - it's not just about Climate Change. It's about the extermination of indigenous groups (the centaurs they saw on the train, the reminder that there used to be more of them until humans started killing them). They say "humans" are bad, but they're showing us Western/American colonizers.

Also, a rare yet interesting moment of conflict between Annabeth as a daughter of Athena and Grover as a Satyr. Annabeth insists that the museum's commodifying and glorifying of American colonization is "not what the arch is actually about, it's about architecture and math," but Athena is the goddess who protects social institutions and a patron goddess of the state, law, order, industry, and war. The Industrial Revolution and Western social institutions definitely contributed to colonialism; just saying. We also see in this episode that Athena can be arrogant and cruel - letting a monster go after her own daughter because she was embarrassed.

Anyway, idk. Maybe I'm overthinking this but these were the things that popped out to me on first watch, and now that I think about them more, I would love a continuation of these kinds of themes and tropes in future seasons, if we get them.

[jytan2018]

I read the comic in one sitting less than an hour after finishing the movie, and wow I have many Thoughts™.

- It's very obvious the two versions were meant to cater to different audiences AND tell different messages. I don't get why people are going "But the comic was better! It had more nuance!" just because Nimona was easier to root for in the movie.

- The comic was written back when ND Stevenson was still trying to process a lot of stuff, so all the characters are morally grey/straight up evil and the climactic battle is between a Ballister who regrets turning against Nimona, even if it was to save others vs. a Nimona who's too hurt to care if her lashing out was going to hurt innocent people.

- By the time Nimona got a movie adaptation, ND was a lot more secure in his sexuality, so the climactic battle was Nimona vs. the Director, the symbol of religious oppression and bigotry. It's not just about your friends turning on you because you're "too much" for them anymore, it's also about a society that would rather bring itself to the brink of ruin than coexist with you.

- (I totally get why people were upset about Ballister's surname change, though. Like come on, the media dubbing him Blackheart just to be mean was RIGHT THERE).

- Nimona's metaphor for not shifting is such a neurodivergent thing. Even in the comic, Nimona's parents insisting she's a monster who replaced their daughter is reminiscent of the changeling myth, which is what many parents thought their neurodivergent kids were—changelings who replaced their "real" children.

- Ambrosius being trained to cut off HIS BOYFRIEND'S WHOLE FUCKING ARM instead of merely disarming him is a very cop thing to do. As much as cops claim they're trained to de-escalate situations, their training still teaches them to treat everyone as a potential threat, and that level of constant vigilance can turn anyone into a trigger-happy/arm-choppy bastard. Even the Director, who can use a sword but probably hasn't actually fought someone in ages, STILL can't see Ballister reaching for the squire's phone without assuming he has a weapon.

- And on that note, the Queen getting killed simply because she was trying to reform the Institution and allow commoners to become knights? That's the best "no such thing as a good cop" metaphor I've seen. Because even if there ARE good cops and they ARE in leadership positions, the system will crush them before they make any meaningful change. It's not a good institution that turned rotten, it's an institution that only exists to spread its rot and refuses to be good.

- That's why Ballister's characterisation is so different in the movie vs. the comic. Comic Ballister had 15 years to come to terms with his trauma and the Institution's evildoing, while Movie Ballister is still freshly traumatised and hasn't found a way to define himself beyond the role he was assigned by the Institution.

- Not to mention Comic Ambrosius was not very noble to begin with and genuinely believed Ballister was better suited to villainy than heroism, while Movie Ambrosius never wanted the glory that came with his lineage in the first place and only antagonised Ballister because of indoctrination he needed to unlearn (which he did, all by himself, after witnessing the lengths the Director will go to just to kill Nimona).

- It really shows how important it is to surround yourself with loved ones who are open to change. Comic Ambrosius can love Ballister all he wants, but he'll still blast his arm off because he thinks Ballister deserved it anyway. Movie Ambrosius will stop to question what "the right thing" even means, even if he didn't love Ballister enough to defend him unconditionally.

I have so many more thoughts bubbling beneath the surface, but I'll probably address them some other day. In conclusion:

[ID: A pink-haired Nimona grinning evilly while holding up a knife.]

Watch Nimona. This is not a request.

Edit: Added more thoughts!

[communistkenobi]

what an artful form of apartheid apologia. people are lapping this shit up in the notes. Even if we set aside the titanic amount of weaponry and equipment created and built by engineers and chemists, all the mapping software that guides missiles and drones and planes created by computer scientists and geographers for a second (science that the state is very much interested in!), zionist apartheid policy, administrative policies, planning and logistics, urban planning documents, you name it - that all apparently just popped into existence one day. for someone claiming to be concerned about social science academics you sure are dismissing all of their hard work! but if you just frame every academic in Israel as a poor little individual victim being randomly attacked for no reason then it’s easy to hide what’s actually going on, which is academics as a group experiencing the harsh end of a boycott. they are being targeted specifically because they are an intellectual class of a colonial state whose genocide is being live-streamed to the world, but if you obfuscate the academy’s role in training, educating, and providing intellectual architecture for the bureaucratic classes and institutions that make up state governments, then you can frame a principled pro-Palestinian position (boycotting Israel) as misguided, stupid, overzealous, ineffectual, and most importantly, detrimental to the cause of freeing Palestine, all of which is of course so obvious to everyone but Palestinian activists. this is naked concern-trolling for the zionist project of annihilating Palestine and it is no less disgusting than any other zionist cheering on the mass murder of children

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer. Or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts, the "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

---

"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

---

"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to mass poverty and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion", as agricultural "revolutions" of monoculture/cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroads and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, during the "Tacoma riot" or "expulsion", a mob of hundreds of white residents rounded up all of the city's Chinese residents, marched them to the train station, kicked them out of the city, and burned down the Chinese neighborhood, introducing what is called "the Tacoma method".

Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad in British Kenya. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

---

"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.) or carrying a small backpack, you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave.

"Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app. "Vagrancy", since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place (de facto confinement), extracting their wealth/labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[xtruss]

US Should Clear-up Bombs It Left in Laos 🇱🇦 Before Questioning China's Influence There

— Ding Gang | July 26, 2023

Illustration: Liu Rui/Global Times

During Henry Kissinger's visit to Beijing last week, I was traveling in Laos. In conversations with Lao political and academic friends, I could always detect the presence of a shadow, that is, the influence of the US on Southeast Asia.

The US has a powerful presence in the region's economic, trade, political, and diplomacy spheres, even though the US and the region are separated by a vast ocean.

In Laos, looking around you feel like everything is from the past, like an old photo that has turned yellow but it's still clear. Older people will talk to you about the "secret wars" that the CIA orchestrated in Laos in the 1960s, and outside some houses, you will see American bomb casings erected. US warplanes dropped them on Laos decades ago, and sometimes they explode, injuring people nearby.

More than anything else, reality exists. When we talk about the Belt and Road Initiative, the cooperation in the Greater Mekong Region, there is always a mention of how the Americans see it, how the American media report it, and how they hype the so-called debt issue.

When a Hong Kong-funded company built a civilian airport in the Bokeo Province of Laos, US officials immediately came up to "visit" the region. It seems they were interested in more than just helping Laos remove the bombs.

A few days ago, the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a Singaporean think tank, released a survey titled "Changing Perceptions in Laos Toward China," which said that more and more Laotian respondents are worried about China's economic influence. I wonder if the scholars who conducted the survey asked any Laotian farmers who benefited from eliminating bombs left by the US military by the Chinese companies or any Laotian employees who work for Chinese companies how much they earn per month.

In a recent report from the Chinese edition of the Voice of America, one scholar took the opportunity to call on Washington to commit to seizing the opportunity as a breaking point to check Beijing's expansion in Southeast Asia.

“US 🇺🇸 Dropped Bombs 💣 in Laos 🇱🇦, China 🇨🇳 Builds Railways 🚃”

"Check and balance" immediately makes me think of Henry Kissinger. It is the primary tool of the strategy of equilibrium that Kissinger "created" and utilized. The US has used such a tool to balance the challenges and maintain its hegemonic position.

Looking back over the past sixty years of China-US relations, it is easy to see that China is no longer a force that the US needs to utilize to counterbalance a main adversary.

Now, China is a friend of the US' enemy and even its foremost and long-term rival. That is why it is the first target of the US to check and balance.

This concept of checks and balances has profoundly affected the geopolitical understanding of China's neighboring countries, which have come to a juncture where they must draw a line in the sand.

When I took the high-speed train from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, I saw that all the compartments were almost full of passengers, most of them were Laotians. I observed them getting on and off the train with big bags, and I suddenly had a feeling that the US was tired. Suppose the China-Laos high-speed rail is seen as the rising China's economic energy spillover, reflecting the common pursuit of the development of China and Southeast Asian countries. In that case, who will the US checks and balances favor? And, can the US be checked and balanced?

China is not the Soviet Union in the Cold War era. China's rise is all-encompassing and multi-layered, a wide-ranging engagement and intermingling with its neighbors and the world, including the US, in almost all fields of industry, education, finance, culture, etc., and likewise a process in which 1.4 billion people are running towards affluence through peaceful development.

After I visit Bokeo Airport, I would like to say one thing: Americans are welcome to Southeast Asia to participate in the development. The infrastructure China is helping to build there will surely be a boon to American investment.

However, the best way for Americans to gain the trust of the Laotians is to first clean up the bombs they left behind.

It's time for the Americans and those who follow them to jump out of the loop of the equilibrium theory that has gone out of fashion.

— The Author is a Senior Editor with People's Daily, and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.

[reasonsforhope]

"A clinical trial studying severe allergic reactions in the U.K. is being called “life-transforming.”

Five United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) hospitals are participating in the £2.5 million ($3.2 million) trial to help patients live with their food allergies.

The study is being funded by the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, Sky News reported. The foundation was formed in the memory of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died in 2016 after eating a baguette that had sesame in it...

The trial is studying clinical oral immunotherapy treatments in which patients are given small doses of the food to which they are allergic to build up their tolerance. The food is given under medical supervision by trained staff, The Telegraph reported.

The study has 139 people participating who have allergies to peanuts or cow’s milk. They range in age from 2 to 23 years old, the BBC reported.

The Food Standards Agency said 2 million people in the U.K. have a diagnosed food allergy. In the U.S., about 5.5. million children have a food allergy, the National Institutes of Health reported.

One 11-year-old who was diagnosed with a severe peanut allergy when he was an infant can now eat six peanuts.

A 5-year-old with a milk allergy can drink 120 ml of milk every day and can enjoy a daily hot chocolate, the BBC reported.

“To have a patient who has had anaphylaxis [Note: Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction so severe that it's potentially fatal without immediate treatment. It is very common with peanut allergies in particular. x] to 4mls of milk to then tolerate 90mls within six to eight months is nothing less than a miracle,” Sibel Donmez-Ajtai, a pediatric allergy consultant and principal investigator at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said, according to Sky News.

The final results of the study are expected to be released in 2027.

Similar studies have been conducted in the U.S. To find one, visit FoodAllergy.org.

Earlier this year, the NIH released the findings of a study of an antibody treatment that would help children consume allergy triggers safely."

-via WHIO 7 Local News, May 8, 2024

[random-doctor-on-the-internet]

I'm french and like many people here, watched the ceremony out of pure spite. Was I surprised? No. Fucking annihilated.

It had EVERYTHING:

- Random kids carrying the flame

- Gays.

- French cancan't

- Furries

- Lady Gaga???

- Craftspeople and public workers

- Bloodshed, cannons and a metal band

- Masked genderless silhouette parkouring their way through the whole mess

- More gays

- Polyamory

- Non-binary dancers and actors

- POC dancers and actors

- Disabled dancers and actors

- Whatever the fuck was going on with those poles

- Lesbian kiss?

- France's most hated rapper singing a song written entirely in slang in front of THE FUCKING INSTITUTE DEDICATED TO THE FRENCH LANGUAGE?

- Her being accompanied by the National Guard orchestra.

- Gays. SO MANY gays.

- MINIONS???

- Hundreds of top quality instruments getting fucked up by the rain.

- Drag queens, opera dancers, fashion designers and...oh, yeah, Alsace.

- National icon Philippe Katherine but make it blue

- 100 years long horse ride

- Damn that armor's looking fine

- Giant balloon ascending to the sky and...just fucking staying there cause they had nowhere to put it

-Did I tell you about the gays?

Holy fuck.

I'm flabbergasted. I'm bamboozled. I'm lying dead on the ground, holding my last breath.

I mean yes, it was funny. Yes, it was strange. Yes, it gave France a super weird reputation.

BUT DO YOU REALISE THAT THE DESIGN COMMITTEE JUST SAW THE RISE OF OUR EXTREME CONSERVATIVE PARTY AND DECIDED TO THROW A MASSIVE "FUCK YOU" AT THEM???

I think I'm in love. Call me french in training.

[mahmoudalmasrifund]

Story

I am Mahmoud Al-Masri, I'm 21 years old, living at the Gaza Strip, an academic student majoring in Graphic Design.

I am here to ask for your support to complete my university education outside my city of Gaza after the Israeli occupation destroyed universities and colleges in the Gaza Strip and destroyed education facilities, youth support institutions and training spaces that aim to provide training for all disciplines and then provide job opportunities for young people, most of which were destroyed.

We used to have a beautiful life, despite the siege on Gaza and the wars on it. We used to have a house and now we live in a tent "displaced", we used to have dreams and we pursued them and still do, we used to go to the sea which is the only breathing space for the people of the Gaza Strip, we used to live peacefully despite all the siege. We here in Gaza have brilliant and innovative minds that learn medicine, technology, professional specialties, agriculture, industry, trade and all specialties, we just need someone to support us, appreciate what we do and motivate us to keep going.

Help me

October 7, 2023 is a date that I will never forget, we were displaced about 8 times and lived through terror and destruction and are still living it, we saw death with our own eyes and survived death several times, our features changed, we became young people instead of worrying about our future, we became tired of securing water and food for our family and carrying water from a distant place to the tent is very tiring, our bodies are tired of the weights we carry daily and the diseases that spread and we don't know what's next.

I decided to pay back my knowledge and the information I gained from study, search, and workshops by share it on social media. I will answer on everyone's questions, and make webinars as my teachers do with us.

These ideas will help educational community to grows.

My goal in launching my campaign is to raise funds to complete my university studies outside my city, to cover the costs of travel, housing, food, the costs of the university I will attend, and I am currently looking for a distinguished university in the field of graphic design. I asked my friends who attended universities in Europe to suggest some universities, and among my goals after studying is to provide a safe and stable place to live with my family.

I would be very grateful for your support for me and my educational journey.

I wish you a life full of happiness and prosperity

@el-shab-hussein @ibtisams @nabulsi @90-ghost @tamamita @apollos-olives

[jambone]

microdosing therapy by watching a trusted marriage & relationship counselor letsplay